Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 29

'War And Welfare Went Hand In Hand'

I'm still making my way through Postwar, slowly but surely. I told my Pops to get the audiobook (which is fantastic) and he's now gotten further ahead than me. But I booted up my own audiobook yesterday while doing some cooking for the week and made some progress.

The most striking thing about Judt's narrative is his essentially amoral view of history. That isn't to say Judt is amoral as a writer. He certainly is not. But he doesn't believe in history has  a necessary trajectory, nor does he much care about narratives of inevitable progress. Europe was wrecked after the War. French opinion polls in 1946 lists "food," "bread" and "meat" as the public's main concerns. In the East bad harvests and droughts brought back reports of cannibalism. Here's Judt quoting Hamilton Fish's dispatch from Europe:

There is too little of everything—too few trains, trams, buses and automobiles to transport people to work on time, let alone to take them on holidays; too little flour to make bread without adulterants, and even so not enough bread to provide energies for hard labor; too little paper for newspapers to report more than a fraction of the world’s news; too little seed for planting and too little fertilizer to nourish it; too few houses to live in and not enough glass to supply them with window panes; too little leather for shoes, wool for sweaters, gas for cooking, cotton for diapers, sugar for jam, fats for frying, milk for babies, soap for washing.

I am coming at this as a total amateur and a total American whose exposure to the post-war narrative was something like--"The Germans learned their lesson and everyone (in the West, because no one talks about the East) resumed their status as upstanding white people." Somewhere in there I knew something about the Marshall Plan. But whereas the narratives which nations tell themselves so often have a moral component, Judt is giving us something less flattering and more atheistic. Even Europe's great achievement--a broad strong social safety net--seems inseparable from the barbarism from which it had just been plunged.  A safety net (often means-tested) existed in Europe before the War, but there was not the same sense that a state should be a comprehensive guarantor of the health and happiness of its people:  

It was the war that changed all this. Just as World War One had precipitated legislation and social provisions in its wake—if only to deal with the widows, orphans, invalids and unemployed of the immediate post-war years—so the Second World War transformed both the role of the modern state and the expectations placed upon it.

The change was most marked in Britain, where Maynard Keynes correctly anticipated a post-war ‘craving for social and personal security’. But everywhere (in the words of the historian Michael Howard) ‘war and welfare went hand in hand’. In some countries nutrition and medical provision actually improved during the war: mobilizing men and women for total war meant finding out more about their condition and doing whatever was necessary to keep them productive...

Moreover, the War in some countries actually enhanced views of the State:

Obviously it would prove easier to achieve the ideals of the social state, ‘from cradle to grave’, in the small population of a wealthy, homogenous country like Sweden than in one like Italy. But faith in the state was at least as marked in poor lands as in rich ones—perhaps more so, since in such places only the state could offer hope or salvation to the mass of the population. And in the aftermath of depression, occupation and civil war, the state—as an agent of welfare, security and fairness—was a vital source of community and social cohesion.

Many commentators today are disposed to see state-ownership and state-dependency as the European problem, and salvation-from-above as the illusion of the age. But for the generation of 1945 some workable balance between political freedoms and the rational, equitable distributive function of the administrative state seemed the only sensible route out of the abyss.

To circle back to Judt's atheistic rendition of history, even this idea of the State as the ultimate salvation is not an unalloyed good:

the ‘welfare state’—social planning—was more than just a prophylactic against political upheaval. Our present discomfort with notions of race, eugenics, ‘degeneration’ and the like obscures the important part these played in European public thinking during the first half of the twentieth century: it wasn’t only the Nazis who took such matters seriously. By 1945 two generations of European doctors, anthropologists, public health officials and political commentators had contributed to widespread debates and polemics about ‘race health’. population growth, environmental and occupational well-being and the public policies through which these might be improved and secured. There was a broad consensus that the physical and moral condition of the citizenry was a matter of common interest and therefore part of the responsibility of the state.

You see a similar spate of reforms coming out of the Civil War--land grant colleges, the National Academy of Sciences, black male suffrage etc. But the Civil War was so very different. Ultimately, Black Southerners paid the greatest toll. And most of the battles were fought near the homes of white Southerners. People talk of Sherman and "total war," but this doesn't belong in the same conversation as the kind of "total war" you see in World War II. In much the same way that World War II is a more radical war, its reconstruction seems more radical also.

When I was younger it was popular for my leftie friends to ask "Why can't we be like Western Europe?" We probably can. A good first, it seems, would be fighting a genocidal war which results in massive relocations, more ethnic homogeneity, the near-extermination of one of our minorities (one guess at who that would be) and the reduction of our major cities to rubble.

       

On Telling President Obama to Go Back to Africa

Reuters

David Corn digs up some video from Ted Cruz's 2012 Senate campaign, with utterly unsurprising results (my emphasis):

In April, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), spoke to the tea party of Hood County, which is southwest of Fort Worth, and made a bold declaration: The United States is a "Christian nation." The septuagenarian businessman turned evangelical pastor did not choose to use the more inclusive formulation "Judeo-Christian nation." Insisting that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution "were signed on the knees of the framers" and were a "divine revelation from God," he went on to say, "yet our president has the gall to tell us that this is not a Christian nation…The United States of America was formed to honor the word of God." Seven months earlier, Rafael Cruz, speaking to the North Texas Tea Party on behalf of his son, who was then running for Senate, called President Barack Obama an "outright Marxist" who "seeks to destroy all concept of God," and he urged the crowd to send Obama "back to Kenya."

For what it's worth, Barack Obama's roots in this country go back through his ostensibly "white" mother all the way to an enslaved African in 1640. I point this out because Cruz is not the original author of his line of thinking. Black people are one of the oldest ethnic groups in America. Still, it is fairly normal in our history to find recent immigrants seeking to establish their nativist bonafides by accusing us of being anti-American, and insisting that we be sent back to Africa. 

       

On Telling President Obama To Go Back To Africa

David Corn digs up some video from Ted Cruz's 2012 Senate campaign, with utterly unsurprising results:

In April, Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), spoke to the tea party of Hood County, which is southwest of Fort Worth, and made a bold declaration: The United States is a "Christian nation." The septuagenarian businessman turned evangelical pastor did not choose to use the more inclusive formulation "Judeo-Christian nation." Insisting that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution "were signed on the knees of the framers" and were a "divine revelation from God," he went on to say, "yet our president has the gall to tell us that this is not a Christian nation…The United States of America was formed to honor the word of God." Seven months earlier, Rafael Cruz, speaking to the North Texas Tea Party on behalf of his son, who was then running for Senate, called President Barack Obama an "outright Marxist" who "seeks to destroy all concept of God," and he urged the crowd to send Obama "back to Kenya."

For what it's worth, Barack Obama's roots in this country go back through his ostensibly "white" mother all the way to an enslaved African in 1640.  I point this out because Cruz is not the original author of his line of thinking. Black people are one of the oldest ethnic groups in America. Still it is fairly normal in our history to find recent immigrants to establish their nativist bonafides by accusing us of being anti-American, and insisting that we be sent back to Africa. 

       

The Blast

I had a column today in the Times. I tried to use to convey the gravity of Homecoming at Howard University last weekend:

A group of us — black parents with ties to The Mecca, as we call it — returned for Homecoming weekend. The football game (versus Morgan State University) was sloppy. A great many of the best college football players are black, but since the fall of Jim Crow, schools like Howard have not been able to compete for them.

But at a black school, football is barely the point. The point is the bands that battle at halftime. The point is the affection in the stands, the warm banter between us, which we invented out on the margins of America.

Howard won. We cheered and walked out on the Yard where thousands of black college students and black college graduates assembled in reunion. Love was free-flowing. Cameras were passed. Memory cards were filled. I walked past Douglass Hall, and thought of my professors who put The Struggle in my heart and Consciousness in my head. There was tailgating just off campus. The entire community was there, from hustlers running card games to Kappas running steps.

I came to Howard as an insecure 17-year-old boy from Maryland, with none of the confidence that oozes out of my son. In my youth, doubting your own humanity, which is to say your own beauty, your own intelligence, your own history, came easy. Resisting the hatred in my heart could be accomplished only in a crowd, where 10,000 others like me, who sang a variant of that same blues, could lay on hands.

A sense of "peoplehood" was all over the campus last weekend. I don't know how to convey this except to tell you who I am and what I have become. For the first twenty years of my life I lived almost wholly within black America. My parents were black. Their friends were black. My friends were black. My girlfriends (when I had them) were black. White people were something that mostly happened on TV. 

The next twenty years of my life were spent very differently. I became a writer. I moved to New York. I had a son. I put him in school. I went to Paris. At each of these points I found myself in contact with people who were not black. If I was slowly moving out of the nationalism in my younger years, each of these steps pushed the process along until I basically became a lefty multi-culti humanist. But I was a reluctant cosmopolitan. My parents kicked me out of Baltimore. My wife wanted to come to New York. Then she wanted to go to Paris. I was fine before I knew. But then I knew and somehow felt I could never go back.

Except I could.

I spent Saturday in my native country. The old feeling came over me like a quilt. Brothers saw me walking on the Yard, gave pounds, knowledge, told me they were proud of me, then moved on. Sisters who I'd adored, but had not lately seen, enlisted their children, handed them cameras. You can find us somewhere on Facebook smiling as though it is 96, and we are young, black and can not die. 

I walked past Douglass Hall where I was throttled by history professors. I walked down Georgia Avenue where China Wonder tried to kill me. I was packed in, weaving  my way down the block. At even stops brothers were playing three card monte. Inside a large parking everyone was tailgating.  Everything was Parisian and bacchanal. Blunts and cognac were all around me. Women strolled, beautiful, inducing malfunction. The Alphas assembled on one side. The Qs a little ways down. The Kappas with their canes were working a step. 

That was when I felt The Blast--Everything warm. Everything close. Nothing translated.

We were given the one-drop--it was not our choice. But we took it. Flipped it. Until we were something broad but tight. By another's man hand we were made a race. But by our own, we became a people. That is The Blast--the understanding that you are more than what someone else did to you, that you are more than what socioeconomics makes of you, that you are more than the other side of a Marxist analogy. I have always known this.  But it is so easy to forget it out here in this new and necessary world. 

       

When Plunder Becomes a System of Governance

The painting, Jewish Woman Selling Oranges by Aleksander Gierymski, was looted from Poland by the Nazis. (Wikimedia Commons) In Postwar, Tony Judt evokes the chaos of living under the thumb of Nazi Germany: It is misleading to think of the German occupation of continental Europe as a time of pacification and order under the eye of an omniscient and ubiquitous power. Even in Poland, the most comprehensively policed and repressed of all the occupied territories, society continued to function in defiance of the new rulers: the Poles constituted for themselves a parallel underground world of newspapers, schools, cultural activities, welfare services, economic exchange and even an army—all of them forbidden by the Germans and carried on outside the law and at great personal risk. But that was precisely the point. To live normally in occupied Europe meant breaking the law: in the first place the laws of the occupiers (curfews, travel regulations, race laws, etc) but also conventional laws and norms as well. Most common people who did not have access to farm produce were obliged, for example, to resort to the black market or illegal barter just to feed their families. Theft—whether from the state, from a fellow citizen or from a looted Jewish store—was so widespread that in the eyes of many people it ceased to be a crime. Indeed, with gendarmes, policemen and local mayors representing and serving the occupier, and with the occupying forces themselves practicing organized criminality at the expense of selected civilian populations, common felonies were transmuted into acts of resistance (albeit often in post-liberation retrospect). Judt describes a descent into rule by the gun—not simply as a monopoly on violence. Legitimacy is rooted in "force alone, deployed without inhibition." No appeal to divine right. No appeal to blood or the vote. Here is Method Man Law #1080—"I got more Glocks and Tecs than you\I make it hot, neighbors won't even stand next to you" Violence bred cynicism. As occupying forces, both Nazis and Soviets precipitated a war of all against all. They discouraged not just allegiance to the defunct authority of the previous regime or state, but any sense of civility or bond between individuals, and on the whole they were successful. If the ruling power behaved brutally and lawlessly to your neighbour—because he was a Jew, or a member of an educated elite or ethnic minority, or had found disfavour in the eyes of the regime or for no obvious reason at all—then why should you show any more respect for him yourself? Judt is, I think, in speculative but interesting territory. There's nothing about a social contract that necessitates equality among shareholders. What happens when some shareholders pay in more, but get out less? What is the message that a Power sends to its subjects when it says to them "Some members of society enjoy the protection of the State, and others are outside of the law?" And what happens when a whole sector of society is effectively branded as the rightful field for plunder? For most Europeans in the years 1939-45 rights—civil, legal, political—no longer existed. The state ceased to be the repository of law and justice; on the contrary, under Hitler’s New Order government was itself the leading predator. The Nazis’ attitude to life and limb is justifiably notorious; but their treatment of property may actually have been their most important practical legacy to the shape of the post-war world. Under German occupation, the right to property was at best contingent. Europe’s Jews were simply stripped of money, goods, homes, shops and businesses. Their property was divided up among Nazis, collaborators and their friends, with the residue made available for looting and theft by the local community. But sequestration and confiscation went far beyond the Jews. The ‘right’ of possession was shown to be fragile, often meaningless, resting exclusively on the goodwill, interests or whim of those in power. There were winners as well as losers in this radical series of involuntary property transactions. With Jews and other ethnic victims gone, their shops and apartments could be occupied by local people; their tools, furniture and clothes were confiscated or stolen by new owners. This process went furthest in the ‘killing zone’ from Odessa to the Baltic, but it happened everywhere—returning concentration camp survivors in Paris or Prague in 1945 often found their home occupied by wartime ‘squatters’ who angrily asserted their own claim and refused to leave. In this way hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Dutch, French and others became complicit in the Nazi genocide, if only as its beneficiaries. It is important to remember the ordinary beneficiaries who do not always wear the swastika. It is important to remember that atrocity is not simply insanity, that it is often not insanity at all, but hard interest, that even in the Holocaust there were interests, that there were winners and that they saw themselves as such. In our own land, we have long observed this. To better avoid the painful fact that there were "winners" in a slave society, that those winners were not merely great planters, to avoid the fact that ordinary Americans are indicted in all that came from slave society, we discuss the "race problem" as though it were a problem of manners and civility. I am sure the average African-American in 1963 could empathize with the dream of little white boys and little black girls holding hands. But he likely would have settled for a day when white people would no longer see him and his family as a field for plunder. Judt is not wrong to focus on property. Theft is the essence of atrocity—if only the theft of dignity and life. Indeed, where I forced to to offer one word to sum up black people's historical relationship to the American state, "theft" is the first that would come to mind. Theft of labor and theft of family in slavery. Theft of life through lynching and pogrom. Theft of franchise in half the country. Theft through mortgages for some and contract loans for others. Theft through unemployment insurance for some, and debt-peonage for others. Theft of tax dollars which support "public" libraries that do not want you, "public" pools that will not have you, "public" schools that will not teach you, and "public" universities that will riot at the sight of you. Better to move along and go about your own private business. Better to forget this entire ugly everything. Better to focus on civility, your local diversity workshop, and the reduction of harsh and intemperate language. Better to forget that indigestible truth: behind every great atrocity stands some particular winner.

       

When Plunder Becomes A System Of Governance

In Postwar, Tony Judt evokes the chaos of living under the thumb of Nazi Germany: It is misleading to think of the German occupation of continental Europe as a time of pacification and order under the eye of an omniscient and ubiquitous power. Even in Poland, the most comprehensively policed and repressed of all the occupied territories, society continued to function in defiance of the new rulers: the Poles constituted for themselves a parallel underground world of newspapers, schools, cultural activities, welfare services, economic exchange and even an army—all of them forbidden by the Germans and carried on outside the law and at great personal risk. But that was precisely the point. To live normally in occupied Europe meant breaking the law: in the first place the laws of the occupiers (curfews, travel regulations, race laws, etc) but also conventional laws and norms as well. Most common people who did not have access to farm produce were obliged, for example, to resort to the black market or illegal barter just to feed their families. Theft—whether from the state, from a fellow citizen or from a looted Jewish store—was so widespread that in the eyes of many people it ceased to be a crime. Indeed, with gendarmes, policemen and local mayors representing and serving the occupier, and with the occupying forces themselves practicing organized criminality at the expense of selected civilian populations, common felonies were transmuted into acts of resistance (albeit often in post-liberation retrospect). Judt describes a descent into rule by the gun--not simply as a monopoly on violence. Legitimacy is rooted in "force alone, deployed without inhibition." No appeal to divine right. No appeal to blood or the vote. Here is Method Man Law #1080--"I got more Glocks and Tecs than you\I make it hot, neighbors won't even stand next to you" Violence bred cynicism. As occupying forces, both Nazis and Soviets precipitated a war of all against all. They discouraged not just allegiance to the defunct authority of the previous regime or state, but any sense of civility or bond between individuals, and on the whole they were successful. If the ruling power behaved brutally and lawlessly to your neighbour—because he was a Jew, or a member of an educated elite or ethnic minority, or had found disfavour in the eyes of the regime or for no obvious reason at all—then why should you show any more respect for him yourself? Judt is, I think, in speculative but interesting territory. There's nothing about a social contract that necessitates equality among shareholders. What happens when some shareholders pay in more, but get out less? What is the message that a Power sends to its subjects when it says to them "Some members of society enjoy the protection of the State, and others are outside of the law?" And what happens when a whole sector of society is effectively branded as the rightful field for plunder? For most Europeans in the years 1939-45 rights—civil, legal, political—no longer existed. The state ceased to be the repository of law and justice; on the contrary, under Hitler’s New Order government was itself the leading predator. The Nazis’ attitude to life and limb is justifiably notorious; but their treatment of property may actually have been their most important practical legacy to the shape of the post-war world. Under German occupation, the right to property was at best contingent. Europe’s Jews were simply stripped of money, goods, homes, shops and businesses. Their property was divided up among Nazis, collaborators and their friends, with the residue made available for looting and theft by the local community. But sequestration and confiscation went far beyond the Jews. The ‘right’ of possession was shown to be fragile, often meaningless, resting exclusively on the goodwill, interests or whim of those in power. There were winners as well as losers in this radical series of involuntary property transactions. With Jews and other ethnic victims gone, their shops and apartments could be occupied by local people; their tools, furniture and clothes were confiscated or stolen by new owners. This process went furthest in the ‘killing zone’ from Odessa to the Baltic, but it happened everywhere—returning concentration camp survivors in Paris or Prague in 1945 often found their home occupied by wartime ‘squatters’ who angrily asserted their own claim and refused to leave. In this way hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Dutch, French and others became complicit in the Nazi genocide, if only as its beneficiaries. It is important to remember the ordinary beneficiaries who do not always wear the swastika. It is important to remember that atrocity is not simply insanity, that it is often not insanity at all, but hard interest, that even in the Holocaust there were interests, that there were winners and that they saw themselves as such. In our own land, we have long observed this. To better avoid the painful fact that there were "winners" in a slave society, that those winners were not merely great planters, to avoid the fact that ordinary Americans are indicted in all that came from slave society, we discuss the "race problem" as though it were a problem of manners and civility. I am sure the average African-American in 1963 could empathize with the dream of little white boys and little black girls hold hands. But he likely would have settled for a day when white people would no longer see he and his family as a field for plunder. Judt is not wrong to focus on property. Theft is the essence of atrocity--if only the theft of dignity and life. Indeed, where I forced to to offer one word to sum up black people's historical relationship to the American state, "Theft" is the first that would come to mind. Theft of labor and theft of family in slavery. Theft of life through lynching and pogrom. Theft of franchise in half the country. Theft through mortgages for some and contract loans for others. Theft through unemployment insurance for some, and debt-peonage for others. Theft of tax dollars which support "public" libraries that do not want you, "public" pools that will not have you, "public" schools that will not teach you and "public" universities that will riot at the sight of you. Should we conclude that theft is the marker of the black human's interaction with his government, that she lives, not under the aegis of the state, but in its cross-hairs, we head into dangerous waters. No. They went that away. These are not the facts you're looking for. Better to move along and go about your own private business. Better to forget this entire ugly everything. Better to focus on civility, your local diversity workshop and the reduction of harsh and intemperate language. Better to forget that indigestible truth--behind every great atrocity, stands some particular winner.

       

The Auschwitz All Around Us

What follows is the last comment in a long thread on the limits of the state to bring itself to justice. Particular attention was paid to Austria in our conversation. I want to make sure this comment doesn't get ignored:

One of my grandfathers fought at the Russian front; his wife, my grandmother, still uses expressions like "like der ewige Jud" ("like he eternal Jew") - as an expression for a greedy, malicious person. Some time ago, a then-collegue of mine in highschool found documentation for a history project that Jews where transported through the village I have grown up in, and held captive in barns there. When I asked my grandmother about it, she told me that she'd never heard about it. Given the size of the village (about 1000 inhabitants), that's close to impossible. Apparently, nobody has ever heard about it.

My other grandfather was member of the NSDAP and (as we put it in Austria) "had to hide" after the war, i.e. he faced prosecution. Still today, one of my aunts shows me his Arierausweis (the document "proving" that he is "Arian") with apparent pride.

This is not to demonstrate how my family has an antisemitic background (though that's true), but rather to give an example of a really very common (if not near-universal) situation in Austria. It is sometimes said that the reintegration of Nazi officials after the war was inevitable to keep the country running. But this stinks a bit of rationalization. Rather, I think, it's a consequence of the sheer scale of shame. A whole generation of children and grandchildren would have had to admit that their (grand)fathers participated, implicitly or explicitly, in one of the most cruel abominations of mankind. This can perhaps be done if individual families are concerned - but a hole society will rationalize their deeds. And given that Austria could hide in the shadow of Germany, it was that much easier, I guess. Only in the nineties, then-chancelor Vranitzky officially recognized Austria's liability and complicity in the Holocaust (without naming it, he only talked about WW II), as an answer to the rising popularity of Jörg Haider who used antisemitic (and xenophobic, and racist... you get the picture) rhethoric to fish in the pond that are generations ashamed of their (grand)parents'. Eight years later, Haider's party was in a coalition forming the Austrian government. Haider is now dead, but not his political philosophy and party: a couple of weeks ago, the party got 21 percent in the general elections (note that Austria has currently six parties in the parliament, so that's a lot - the leading social democrats got 27 percent).

2008, Otto von Habsburg (yes, THAT von Habsburg, the old emperors' family, imagine that!) held a speech during a commemoration of Austria's "annexation" in front of representatives of the ÖVP, Austria's peoples party (in government for most of the time after WW II, as it is in the moment). He defended Austria's "role" as "Hitler's first victim" to standing ovations.

Here in France, when I walk through the city center, I often think how good it is that these old structures get diluted when I see how many "blacks" and "beurs" there are. Apart from my own underlying racism here, I then remember why there are so many "blacks" and "beurs" here compared to Austria (or Germany, for that matter). How France has still not managed to reconsider its past as a colonizer (and who would force them?), how Marine le Pen has phantastic poll numbers, etc. Or, how de Gaulle, THE founding savior/hero of the present République, had to say this:

"Vous savez, cela suffit comme cela avec vos nègres. Vous me gagnez à la main, alors on ne voit plus qu’eux : il y a des nègres à l’Élysée tous les jours, vous me les faites recevoir, vous me les faites inviter à déjeuner. Je suis entouré de nègres, ici. […] Et puis tout cela n’a aucune espèce d’intérêt ! Foutez-moi la paix avec vos nègres ; je ne veux plus en voir d’ici deux mois, vous entendez ? Plus une audience avant deux mois. Ce n’est pas tellement en raison du temps que cela me prend, bien que ce soit déjà fort ennuyeux, mais cela fait très mauvais effet à l’extérieur : on ne voit que des nègres, tous les jours, à l’Élysée. Et puis je vous assure que c’est sans intérêt."

Somehow it's all fascinating: that we can look at this history and wonder how we managed to get through it the whole time.

       

The Best Opinion Journalist in the Business

Next Tuesday  I will be in conversation with Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor at the New Yorker. The event will be at MIT in Building 32 (The Stata center) in room 123. It will begin at 7:00 PM and end at 8:30 PM. You should come. And if you can not come you should spend your weekend wishing you could. Here is why. From time to time, I have been lucky enough to pinch-hit over at the opinion page for The Times. This is always a special moment. When I was a young man trying to pursue poetry, an older poet once told me to try writing a sonnet every week, or a haiku every day. His point was the discipline of writing in confined space, makes us better when we are writing in free space. (You see the same principle at work in rap.) I always see opinion columns in a similar light. It is one thing to say something meaningful in the open water of a blog. It is another to say something meaningful within the cell-like confines of 800 words. To do so beautifully--which is to say to make your argument through a marriage of logic, rhythm,  and imagery--is another thing entirely. No one makes the case with more beauty--which is to say more effect--than Hendrik Hertzberg. Here is the kind of opening that I dream of writing in a column:  It was a chilly winter for Barack Obama, politically speaking. For six months, he and his party shivered under the avalanche that had buried them in November's midterm election while Republicans disported themselves on the partisan ski slopes, pausing only to throw snowballs, some of them dirty, and warm themselves with nice hot cups of tea. Lately, though, there's been a change in the weather. The close in this column then comes back around in a beautiful use of symmetry: The Abbottabad raid has, for the moment and perhaps for good, subdued any exploitable doubts about Obama's fitness to be Commander-in-Chief. But eighteen months down the road the "bounce" he has got from it will be as dead as bin Laden. Barring some unexpected foreign or terrorist enormity, the election will turn on domestic issues. The Republicans have done the Democrats a favor by proposing to phase out Medicare and Medicaid as we know them while demanding further tax cuts for the wealthy. But much depends on the economic weather. If the snow is any deeper than it is now, the President is going to need an awfully big shovel. One reason why I am excited about teaching writing at MIT is that I strongly believe that people with access to knowledge have a moral responsibility to learn how to communicate that knowledge clearly. But in the world of journalism, communicating beautifully has somehow fallen out of favor. I say "beauty" and people think of lavender cardstock with daffodils at the top, perfect penmanship or a stroll through the meadow. In fact beautiful writing is a show of strength and muscle. In the world of opinion, I believe that it is not enough to simply lay out your argument, you want people to feel it in their gut. Rick excels at making you "feel it." Come see how next week.

       

The Best Opinion Journalist In The Business

Next Tuesday I will be in conversation with Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor at the New Yorker. The event will be at MIT in Building 32 (The Stata center) in room 123. It will begin at 7:00 PM and end at 8:30 PM. You should come. And if you can not come you should spend your weekend wishing you could. Here is why. From time to time, I have been lucky enough to pinch-hit over at the opinion page for The Times. This is always a special moment. When I was a young man trying to pursue poetry, an older poet once told me to try writing a sonnet every week, or a haiku every day. His point was the discipline of writing in confined space, makes us better when we are writing in free space. (You see the same principle at work in rap.) I always see opinion columns in a similar light. It is one thing to say something meaningful in the open water of a blog. It is another to say something meaningful within the cell-like confines of 800 words. To do so beautifully--which is to say to make your argument through a marriage of logic, rhythm, and imagery--is another thing entirely. No one makes the case with more beauty--which is to say more effect--than Hendrik Hertzberg. Here is the kind of opening that I dream of writing in a column: It was a chilly winter for Barack Obama, politically speaking. For six months, he and his party shivered under the avalanche that had buried them in November’s midterm election while Republicans disported themselves on the partisan ski slopes, pausing only to throw snowballs, some of them dirty, and warm themselves with nice hot cups of tea. Lately, though, there’s been a change in the weather. The close in this column then comes back around in a beautiful use of symmetry: The Abbottabad raid has, for the moment and perhaps for good, subdued any exploitable doubts about Obama’s fitness to be Commander-in-Chief. But eighteen months down the road the “bounce” he has got from it will be as dead as bin Laden. Barring some unexpected foreign or terrorist enormity, the election will turn on domestic issues. The Republicans have done the Democrats a favor by proposing to phase out Medicare and Medicaid as we know them while demanding further tax cuts for the wealthy. But much depends on the economic weather. If the snow is any deeper than it is now, the President is going to need an awfully big shovel. One reason why I am excited about teaching writing at MIT is that I strongly believe that people with access to knowledge have a moral responsibility to learn how to communicate that knowledge clearly. But in the world of journalism, communicating beautifully has somehow fallen out of favor. I say "beauty" and people think of lavender cardstock with daffodils at the top, perfect penmanship or a stroll through the meadow. In fact beautiful writing is a show of strength and muscle. In the world of opinion, I believe that it is not enough to simply lay out your argument, you want people to feel it in their gut. Rick excels at making you "feel it." Come see how next week.

       

The Selective Amnesia of Postwar Europe

Klaus Barbie's 1948 mugshot (Gerda Henkel Foundation)

There's this idea among those of us who are disappointed with America's inability to deal with the repercussions of the Civil War that things were better during World War II. Perhaps they were. But the overwhelming sense one gets from Tony Judt's Postwar is that in the case of great atrocities, the pursuit of justice is often foreclosed by our want of stamina:

By the time the western Allies abandoned their denazification efforts with the coming of the Cold War, it was clear that these had had a decidedly limited impact. In Bavaria about half the secondary schoolteachers had been fired by 1946, only to be back in their jobs two years later. In 1949 the newly-established Federal Republic ended all investigations of the past behaviour of civil servants and army officers.

In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agriculture Ministry were ex-Nazis. By 1952 one in three of Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party. Of the newly-constituted West German Diplomatic Corps, 43 percent were former SS men and another 17 percent had served in the SD or Gestapo. Hans Globke, Chancellor Adenauer’s chief aide throughout the 1950s, was the man who had been responsible for the official commentary on Hitler’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The chief of police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Wilhelm Hauser, was the Obersturmführer responsible for wartime massacres in Byelorussia.

The same pattern held true outside the civil service. Universities and the legal profession were the least affected by denazification, despite their notorious sympathy for Hitler’s regime. Businessmen also got off lightly. Friedrich Flick, convicted as a war criminal in 1947, was released three years later by the Bonn authorities and restored to his former eminence as the leading shareholder in Daimler-Benz. Senior figures in the incriminated industrial combines of I.G. Farben and Krupp were all released early and re-entered public life little the worse for wear. By 1952 Fordwerke, the German branch of Ford Motor Company, had reassembled all its senior management from the Nazi years. Even the Nazi judges and concentration camp doctors convicted under American jurisdiction saw their sentences reduced or commuted (by the American administrator, John J McCloy).

Later, a myth would arise that the Nazis were, somehow, the kidnappers of the German nation, and that Hitler's atrocities said nothing about Germany itself. In Judt's postwar Europe, there's a constant fight for victim status. (Deeply  antisemitic Austria gets off lightly, for instance, by portraying itself as Hitler's "first victim.") But it's fairly clear that the hate that made the Shoah was neither an invention nor the magic of false-consciousness, but a reflection of the people themselves:

In the same poll of November 1946, one German in three agreed with the proposition that ‘Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race’. This is not especially surprising, given that respondents had just emerged from twelve years under an authoritarian government committed to this view. What does surprise is a poll taken six years later in which a slightly higher. percentage of West Germans—37 percent—affirmed that it was better for Germany to have no Jews on its territory. But then in that same year (1952) 25 percent of West Germans admitted to having a ‘good opinion’ of Hitler.

Attendant to all of this was something that any student of white supremacy in America will recognize—a strong propensity toward national amnesia:

 In Italy the daily newspaper of the new Christian Democrat Party put out a similar call to oblivion on the day of Hitler’s death: ‘We have the strength to forget!’, it proclaimed. ‘Forget as soon as possible!’ In the East the Communists’ strongest suit was their promise to make a revolutionary new beginning in countries where everyone had something to forget—things done to them or things they had done themselves. All over Europe there was a strong disposition to put the past away and start afresh, to follow Isocrates’ recommendation to the Athenians at the close of the Peloponnesian Wars: ‘Let us govern collectively as though nothing bad had taken place.’

It's worth taking a moment to think about this "strength to forget" notion. National forgetting is always a selective endeavor. Italy had no more intention of dismissing its Roman heritage as "the past," than Americans have of dismissing George Washington as "the past." "The past" is whatever contributes to a society's moral debts. "Heritage" is everything else. 

Judt is making a very disturbing argument—that postwar Europe was built on  a willingness to only push deNazification but so far. There is here something not wholly dissimilar to our own reunion accomplished on an agreement to "forget" what the War was over. So far does the myth advance that Judt finds president Eisenhower lauding the Wermacht—"The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland."

We are confronted with a series of awful questions: What are the actual limits of human justice? How much of human justice, ultimately, rests on the accumulation of guns? What is one to do when the people, themselves—not sinister hidden forces—are the engines of persecution? Of useful killing? Of genocide? 

I think of the villain Klaus Barbie who somehow seemed victorious even in capture:

Mr. Barbie remarked after his extradition that he had nothing to regret and that he remained proud of his service to Hitler's Third Reich.

Locked up in Montluc Prison, where the Gestapo had tortured its prey 40 years earlier, he promptly proved an embarrassment not only to the French, but to official Washington. It came to light that United States Army counterintelligence had used him as a paid informer after the war, shielding him from his French pursuers and then helping him escape to South America.

For the French, Mr. Barbie caused enduring agony. Back in their midst, behind bars at last, his presence weighed heavily on the national conscience. To contemplate Mr. Barbie was to face a chapter of history the French longed to forget: the Vichy France of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain.

Man. Such hate. What can men do against such reckless hate. Don't study history to boost your self-esteem. Study history to lose your religion. Or maybe in the end, to gain it. I am not religious at all. But seeing the limits of all of us, you start to understand why people might appeal to some higher, more certain, more fierce, invention.

More soon.