RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-adventures-of-commodore-levy-u-s-n

A sailor of great professional skill and courage, he was proud, arrogant, and self-righteous.

Born April 22, 1792 (Nissan 30, 5552), Uriah Phillips Levy was 10 years old when he ran away to sea. He returned two years later, as he’d promised his mother, to prepare for his bar mitzvah. Then he apprenticed to a Philadelphia ship owner. In our day of wooden men and iron ships, “learning the ropes” is a cliché. To Levy, it was life and death. A square-rigger has more than 200 ropes (called lines), each has a name and a function, and Levy had to know them all. To confuse a clew line with a halyard, or a lee brace with a weather backstay, could mean a dismasted ship and the endangerment of all aboard her.

Within nine years, as Levy wrote, “I passed through every grade of service—cabin boy, ordinary seaman, able-bodied seaman, boatswain, third mate, second mate, first mate, to that of captain…” In 1809, while on shore leave in Tortola, a British press gang seized him. He was carrying his papers. However, a Royal Marine sergeant sneered, “You don’t look like an American to me. You look like a Jew.” Levy replied, “I am an American and a Jew.” “If the Americans have Jew peddlers manning their ships, it’s no wonder they sail so badly,” the Royal Marine replied. Levy hit him full in the face. Hitting a Royal Marine in the face is almost invariably a mistake. When Levy came to in the brig of HMS Vermeer, the officer of the watch was shoving a New Testament at him and demanding he swear himself into the Royal Navy. Levy refused, saying, “I am an American and I cannot swear allegiance to your king. And I am a Jew, and do not swear on your testament, or with my head uncovered.” Somehow, he gained an audience with Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, who agreed that his papers were valid and ordered him released.

In 1811, at 19, he became master and part owner of the brig George Washington. He nailed a mezuzah outside his cabin door, a small box containing Biblical verses that signified his cabin was a Jewish home. When the United States declared war on Great Britain in 1812, Levy entered the U.S. Navy as a sailing master. Levy was captured when his ship was taken by a British warship. He was imprisoned at Dartmoor for 16 months, during a winter so cold the Thames froze solid to the bottom. He learned French and fencing; he failed only in organizing a congregation among the prisoners for want of a minyan, the traditional quorum of 10.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/legacy-christopher-columbus-bruce-thornton/

The recent attacks on historical monuments by the “woke” progressive Philistines, and the New York Times’s “1619 Project” aimed at rewriting America’s history as a racist plot, are just the latest in the left’s long assault on American history. Long before this current iconoclasm, Christopher Columbus has been the arch-villain in the left’s Orwellian revision of American history as peculiarly and irredeemably evil from its birth.

Attacking and demonizing American history predates the current frenzy of revisionism and virtue-signaling, for it is one of the progressive left’s favorite tools for undermining the patriotic solidarity that binds us together and undergirds our political order.

This long assault on America’s founding and exceptionalism has been a weapon of the left for weakening the US’s most successful and powerful enemy. The left can never forgive the US for achieving “prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions,” as Raymond Aron pointed out in 1957, “by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention” and the “revolutionary code.” The left has to discredit America’s foundations in order to show that its success has come at too great a price––the institutionalization of racist oppression and inequality that has created “white privilege” and “white supremacism.” What better place to start than with Christopher Columbus, who began the evil colonization of and genocide against the innocent American peoples? And Columbus’s most malign heir has been the United States.

Based on ancient Jewish sages, October 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/2OBJ3Nw 

1. US-Israel special ties are highlighted by Columbus Day (October 14, 2019), which is always celebrated around Sukkot (October 13-20, 2019). According to “Columbus Then and Now” (Miles Davidson, 1997, p. 268), Columbus landed in America on Friday afternoon, October 12, 1492, the 21st day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, in the Jewish year 5235, on the 7th day of Sukkot, Hosha’na’ Rabbah – a day of special universal deliverance and miracles.  Hosha’ (הושע) is “deliverance” in Hebrew; Na’ (נא) is the Hebrew word for “please” and Rabbah (רבה) is “The Sublime.”  The numerical value of Na’ in Hebrew is 51 (נ – 50, א – 1), and the celebration of Hoshaa’na’ Rabbah is on the 51stday following Moses’ ascent to Mt. Sinai.

2. the 3rd Jewish pilgrimage holiday (following Passover and Shavou’ot – Pentecost) has been celebrated for the last 3,300 years, commemorating the Exodus, the 40 years of wandering in the Sinai Desert, the construction of the Holy Tabernacle and the victories along the way into the Land of Israel. It reaffirms faith in God, reality-based optimism, gratitude for the Ingathering and the harvest. Sukkot reminds people of human limitations and (its humble structure) emphasizes the importance of humility. Humility is a central message of Sukkot, as demonstrated by the seven day relocation from one’s permanent residence to the temporary, humble, wooden Sukkah (booth).

3. Sukkot ( in Hebrew) is named after the first stop during the Exodus from Egypt, the town of Sukkota (סוכותה), as documented in Exodus 13:20-22 and Numbers 33:3-5.  Itcommemorates the transition from nomadic life in the desert to permanence in the Promised Land; from oblivion to deliverance; and from the spiritual state-of-mind during the High Holidays to the mundane of the rest of the year. 

https://quillette.com/category/politics/

When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.
~Erich Fromm

Since at least the advent of modernity and liberalism, tremendous emphasis has been placed on the importance of human freedom. For classical liberal thinkers like Immanuel Kant, freedom was the fundamental characteristic of human beings; at the center of all our practical moral action. The American and French Revolutionaries both invoked the infringement of liberty to justify the overthrow of existing tyrannical orders. And, today, political culture is saturated with references to the importance of making choices, living life as one see’s fit, and non-coercion by the state. Socialists in the Jacobin and conservatives at the National Review debate what is really necessary to secure freedom, but none disputes its importance.

Each of these positions relies upon the belief that human freedom is either basic to our nature, essential for the realization of our moral potential, or both. But if this is true, then what explains the appeal of totalitarianism? One of the great intellectual efforts undertaken in the aftermath of the Second World War was to try and figure out why so many people would willingly surrender their freedom, and even exult in submission, in order to commit murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Countless artists, philosophers, sociologists and economists have provided explanations. One of the deepest accounts come from the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, who had a dark and melancholic interpretation of what happened.

The Human Yearning for Submission

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-ghosts-of-world-war-ii/

World War II ended 74 years ago. But even in the 21st century, the lasting effects endure, both psychological and material. After all, the war took more than 60 million lives, redrew the map of Europe and ended with the Soviet Union and the United States locked in a Cold War of nuclear superpowers.

Japan and South Korea should logically remain natural allies. Both are booming capitalist constitutional states. Decades ago both nations emerged from devastating wars. And in pacifist fashion they vowed never to suffer such mass carnage again.

Both nations are staunch allies of the United States. They are likewise similarly suspicious of their neighbor, aggressive communist China, which threatens their economies and security. Yet Tokyo and Seoul are now more adversaries than democratic allies, and they are locked in a bitter fight. In their acrimony over trade and past war reparations, neither can forget World War II.

South Koreans continue to press for more reparations to atone for the horrific treatment of the Korean Peninsula by Japanese occupiers and imperialists. Imperial Japan stripped Korea’s natural resources and exported thousands of Korean women to war zones to be raped by Japanese troops.

A Bad Deal, 80 Years Ago

The wealthier that South Korea becomes, the more an ascendant Seoul begins to rival — and worry — Tokyo. And the more distant World War II becomes, the more Japan and South Korea relive their bitter shared wartime past.

The United States has had difficulty forming a Pacific alliance of containment against a bellicose China. Australia, the Philippines and Southeast Asian nations fear Chinese aggression. But they also share bitter memories of merciless Japanese imperialism that killed as many as 15 million Chinese — the vast majority of them civilians.

In their minds, our allies know China is the chief threat. But in their hearts, even now they can’t quite forget how their ally Japan once committed genocide throughout the region.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/five-things-they-dont-tell-you-about-slavery/

It didn’t begin or end in the United States.

The same people most obsessed with slavery seem to have little interest in the full scope of its history.

There has been an effort for decades now — although with new momentum lately, as exemplified by the New York Times’ 1619 project — to identify the United States and its founding with slavery.

To the extent that this campaign excavates uncomfortable truths about our history and underlines the central role of African Americans in our nation, it is welcome. But it is often intended to undermine the legitimacy of America itself by effacing what makes it distinctive and good.

Yes, slavery and racial prejudice were our great original sins. It would have been better if we had, like the British, been leaders against the slave trade and for abolition (the representation of slaveholders in Congress and the rise of King Cotton forestalled this). But we didn’t invent slavery, even in its race-based form.

Slavery didn’t make us unique, which is obvious if we consider its history in a little broader context. Critics of the American Founding don’t like to do this because it weakens their case and quickly brings them up against politically inconvenient facts that they’d prefer to pass over in silence.

Let’s dwell, then, on a few things they don’t tell us about slavery. None of these are secrets or are hard to find, but they are usually left out or minimized, since they don’t involve self-criticism and, worse, they entail a critical look at societies or cultures that the Left tends to favor vis-à-vis the West.

None of what follows is meant to excuse the practice of slavery in the United States, or its longevity. Nor is it to deny that the Atlantic slave trade was one of history’s great enormities, subjecting millions to mistreatment so horrifying that it is hard to fathom. But if we are to understand the history of slavery, it’s important to know what happened before 1619 and what happened elsewhere besides America.