Outstanding guitar work by Fogerty along with a scorching vocal guaranteed to peel the paint off your walls (honest, just play it loud enough). The guy bashing the drums so hard is Kenny Aronoff, long-time member of John Mellencamp's band.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's letter of August 26 to the House Judiciary Committee has gained a lot of attention and prompted much discussion about its contents, intent, and posturing, which you can read elsewhere. Other than noting the letter is very carefully drafted, there are two less discussed aspects I want to discuss, both contained in the fourth paragraph.
"In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and, in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again - for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers."
The first point is that, unlike the prior paragraphs, which refer to efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to get Facebook to censor information, the information in this paragraph refers to events occurring during the Trump administration. This paragraph refers to the Hunter Biden laptop story and, as we now know, both the laptop and its contents were really Hunter's. And not just now - the FBI had the laptop for over a year and knew its provenance and contents; the 51 former members of the Intelligence Community who wrote the letter denouncing those promoting its legitimacy knew it was actually legitimate. The media who reported it, the media who censored any mention of it (like NPR), and Twitter and Facebook which throttled the distribution of the story simply didn't care if it was true or false; their only concern was to ensure Trump's defeat and Biden's election. You can read more about how it was accomplished in The Robust Alliance.
The second point is the reference to fact-checkers as though they provide an objective evaluation of information. They don't. The fact-checking industrial complex is simply another layer of progressive control over the media. All of the leading fact-checking organizations enforce a progressive narrative, using a number of techniques developed over the past decade, including:
Fact check Right-coded statements, but ignore Left coded-statements
Subtly mischaracterize accurate Right-coded statements so they can be declared False, and inaccurate Left coded statements so they can be declared True.
If a Right-coded statement is literally true, but there is additional context casting doubt, reference the context and declare statement False.
If a Left-coded statement is literally true, but there is additional context casting doubt, do not reference the context and declare statement True.
If the Right-coded statement is accurate in all respects, cite to a Left-coded "expert" to declare it False.
Note: Giving credit when it is due, it took Snopes only seven years to declare the claims about Trump's "fine people on both sides" to be false.
The fact-checker web is even more rigged. For instance, if you Google something, usually the first reference is to Wikipedia, which is on the Left and is adept at changing its entries to meet progressive needs. Both Google and Wikipedia use as trusted references, reliably Left publications like the New York Times. The result is a virtuous circle in which the institutions of the Left continually reinforce the validity of their viewpoints.
This is just another example of the control of the institutions by progressives and another reason why, despite the hysteria and hyperventilating by Democrats over the supposed threat to democracy by anyone not following the party line, it is only the Democrats who pose a threat. They have become what they denounce. They are the only ones with the power to effectively end our democracy, and they've made no secret of their intent to crack down on dissent.
In November 2021, Margaret Hoover of PBS interviewed the Chinese dissident and exile Ai Weiwei. Based on his past writings critical of President Trump, Hoover asked Ai if he saw Donald Trump as an authoritarian, clearly expecting an answer in the affirmative. She was surprised at the response: (the relevant part starts at about 15:45):
If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself.
Trump had, and has, no supporting institutional system.(1) Ai went on to say that in today's conditions you could easily have an authoritarian regime and that, in many ways, the U.S. is already in that state, pointing to political correctness and its similarities to the Cultural Revolution of Mao. Hoover quickly moved on to another topic.
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(1) In contrast, Kamala Harris is not just supported by a system, she is a system. Between Biden and Harris, what we've learned is it does not matter who the Democrats run as a candidate; the system will support whomever is that candidate, because the system is running things, not the candidate.
In the midst of this dismal and ridiculous election season, let's take a moment to remember a dark horse candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1844 who became an enormously successful one-term president. I give you James K Polk, immortalized by They Might Be Giants in their song of the same name.
What were his successes?
In four short years he met his every goalHe seized the whole southwest from MexicoMade sure the tariffs fellAnd made the English sell the Oregon territoryHe built an independent treasuryHaving done all this he sought no second term
Three months after leaving office James Polk was dead from cholera. Perhaps the most consequential of our 19th century presidents other than Lincoln.
Time for some baseball stats, old and new.
The new: Aaron Judge is not chopped liver.
On May 2, thirty three games into the season, Aaron Judge was batting .197 with a slugging percentage under .400.
In 94 games since, Judge is hitting .384, slugging .852, with an on-base percentage of .504. He has 68 extra base hits, of which 43 are home runs and has driven in 101, more than an RBI per game. He's been on base 207 times in those 94 games.
According to OpStats, which compiles esoteric statistical information, Judge is the first player in major league history to, over a 100 game period, bat above .375 with at least 45 homers and 100 RBIs.(1)
And he's a likeable guy, which is terrible for a Red Sox fan.
The old: Lefty Grove was pretty good.
Well, we already knew that. Lefty had a lifetime 300-141 record, leading the American League a record nine times in ERA.
But let me tell you about the time when Lefty was really good.
From July 1, 1930 through September 24, 1931, Grove pitched in 69 games for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics. Those seasons were in the midst of the greatest offensive explosion of the 20th century in baseball. The A's won the pennant both years, and their record during the 69 games Lefty appeared was 62-7, with his personal won-loss record 49-5 with eleven saves, because Grove both started and relieved. During this same period, the A's were 99-64 in games in which Lefty did not make an appearance.
Lefty completed 40 of the 45 games he started, while picking up the eleven saves and seven wins in 24 relief appearances, including one relief stint of 9 innings and another of 8 innings. Grove appeared in 30% of the games played by the A's in this period.
Of his five losses, two were in relief and three as a starter. The losses as a starter: 1-0, 2-1, and 3-2 (in this game only one of the 3 runs against Grove were earned). The 1-0 loss was quite memorable. Lefty had tied the American League record with 16 straight wins, when on August 23 he faced the weak St Louis Browns lineup. In the 3rd inning rookie Jimmie Moore, playing in left field in place of the injured Al Simmons, misplayed a fly ball into a double scoring the only run of the game, a miscue not charged as an error. Grove, highly competitive and with a fiery temper, exploded in the clubhouse after the game, going on a long rant against Simmons and, according to his SABR biography, trying to "tear off the clubhouse door, shredding the wooden partition between lockers, banged up the lockers, broke chairs and ripped off his shirt, buttons flying. 'Threw everything I could get my hands on — bats, balls, shoes, gloves, benches, water buckets, whatever was handy,' he told author Donald Honig"
Over 447 innings Grove's ERA was 2.07. During this same period the league ERA was about 4.50.
In the middle of this streak, Grove appeared in three games during the 1930 World Series against the St Louis Cardinals. On October 1, starting Game One, Grove won 5-2. Four days later, he started and lost Game Four, 3-1, despite tossing a 5-hitter and giving up only one earned run. The next day, he pitched two innings in relief, picking up the win 2-0.
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(1) These composite stats are fun but can be misleading. If you change the .375/45/100 line to .375/40/100 you get other streaks that are as, or more impressive. Take Babe Ruth, for instance:
That's an old Soviet-era joke, based on the Communist penchant for deleting party members, determined not be aligned with current ideology, from Soviet encyclopedias or erasing them from photos, and disappearing inconvenient events or simply rewriting them in accordance with the current line of the revolutionary vanguard.
We have an increasing number of examples in the U.S. over the past decade. Here's a recent one. On March 13 of this year, the Minnesota Star-Tribune, the state's leading newspaper and house organ for the Democratic Party (the editor was in Walz's cabinet) ran this headline:
"Gov. Walz shares his family's IVF journey as Democrats look to guarantee access to treatments."
Within the past few days, the paper went back and edited, without any editorial note, the headline to read;
"Gov. Walz shares his family's fertility journey as Democrats look to guarantee access to treatments".
The stealth change was necessitated because Walz has wanted to emphasize IVF because it aligned with yet another misinformation attack from Democrats that Trump wants to ban it. It turns out that once his wife admitted IVF was not involved it became an embarrassment for the VP candidate.
It reminds me of USA Today's treatment of an op-ed by election denier Stacey Abrams. Remember when Georgia amended its election laws to make it easier for its citizens to vote compared to those racist restrictions in states like New York and Connecticut?(1) Remember when the Democrats and the media called the new Georgia law "Jim Crow 2.0"?
At the peak of the media frenzy over the law, Abrams published a piece in which she urged businesses to boycott Georgia until the law was changed. As the frenzy died down and the impacts of the boycott, including the ridiculous MLB decision not to hold the All-Star game in Atlanta, which had been designed to honor Hank Aaron, became more and more unpopular, a conservative wrote a piece pointing out how bad Abrams advice was, referring to the USA Today article. Abrams' people responded that she had never advocated for boycotts and, sure enough, the current version of the USA Today article did not mention it. Fortunately, someone had saved an archived version of the op-ed which did urge boycotts. Turns out that once boycotts became unpopular, Abrams, then running against Brian Kemp for governor, was allowed by USA Today to stealth edit her piece!
We constantly see this happen with Wikipedia, an organization run by the Left, where, within 48 hours of any controversy arising, entries have been rewritten to align with the new Democratic party line. It is why Wikipedia is completely untrustworthy as a source for anything with even a slight political or ideological connection.
It's even happening with on-line dictionaries. During Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett's confirmation hearing, Webster's changed its definition of "preference" within 24 hours to conform with the new definition used by Democrats to attack Barrett.
Lately, it's happening at a dizzying pace. Six weeks ago we were told Joe Biden was fine, and attempts by the GOP to "pounce" on his physical and mental health were misinformation, while Kamala Harris was clearly not capable of stepping up to replace him. Today, we are told by the same people that, of course, Biden was in a diminished state, did the noble thing by stepping down (as candidate, not as president which, of course, where is he perfectly capable of performing his duties), while Kamala is the perfect candidate to embody the politics of joy, while running against her own administration, or more accurately to run as if Trump is the incumbent. They don't even try to make any sense of it all. With her incoherence, Kamala is Trump, except the press and the institutions love her.
When we talk about the capture of the institutions by the Left, and why trust in those institutions has diminished so much in recent years, this is why.
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(1) I voted in CT from 2000 to 2106. No one mailed me a ballot, and obtaining an absentee ballot was restricted to a limited set of circumstances. I also had to show ID to vote. One time, the person I checked in with at the polling place was my next door neighbor. She made me show ID!
Another one from Billy Strings from earlier in his career in 2017. The lyrics reflect on his childhood filled with family drug problems; his father died of a heroin overdose, while his mother and stepfather became meth addicts (both now recovered). This version is six minutes, but in concerts more recently he stretches Turmoil and Tinfoil into 15 to 20 minutes filled with improvisations and snippets of other tunes.
Through the turmoil and the tinfoilI could wait my early lifeI can see you in the darknessAnd I'm running through the nightI recall a silver morningWhen your face had turned to grayYou were standing right before meBut I missed you every dayThough you never said you're sorryI forgave you even thenBut I feel inconsequentialIn the current state I'm in
I'd read The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco's first novel, when it was published in English in 1983, and have since reread it. Over the years, I've read interviews with, and some pieces by, the professor and semiotician, but not any of his subsequent novels.
Last night, we watched a charming, imaginative, and provocative movie done as a tribute to Eco, who passed in 2016, Umberto Eco: A Library Of The World; trailer below, and you can find the whole thing on YouTube. It starts in Eco's home library, consisting of more than 31,000 volumes, including many rare books, arranged in his idiosyncratic classification system. Along the way we are introduced to other libraries, various characters and colleagues, and clips of interviews with the professor who, it is clear, knows his role is also to be an entertainer. It is also a visually creative film, an asset that Eco would appreciate.
The theme can be stated with a couple of quotes from Eco in the film; "Libraries are mankind's common memory" and that, "without memory it is impossible to build a future". From Eco and the other characters we get thoughts of the transition from the print era to the digital world; how in the print world there was a limited amount of information one could be exposed to, while the digital world presents the opposite situation. In contrast to the print world, one has to be selective in what to be absorb in the digital. Eco did not ignore technology; after all, he carried a cellphone - he just did not turn it on.
There is a lot more, including explanations of what Eco believes about knowledge and reality, and always done in a fun way, which the professor would have wanted.
We learn that Eco, and many others in the movie, are obsessed with Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), a German polymath and Jesuit who wrote many lengthy, and profusely illustrated books, on a range of subjects, including hieroglyphics, religion, geology, sinology, medicine, biology, technology, and the Bible. He's described as incredibly interesting and, often incredibly wrong.
Umberto Eco enjoyed his life and he invites you to enjoy this tribute to him.
Reading Quentin Tarantino's book, Cinema Speculation, made me want to watch two 70s flicks, The Outfit and Rolling Thunder, finally getting around to viewing both over the past week. Both are lower-budget films with high-powered casts and are quite good, quite gritty, and quite violent, with a distinctively 70s look. Both directed by John Flynn.
The Outfit (1973) is one of eight films based on the Parker character, a hard-boiled criminal, in a series of novels written under by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym. Others include Point Blank with Lee Marvin as the Parker character (1967), The Split with Jim Brown (1968), Slayground with Peter Coyote (1983), Payback with Mel Gibson (1999), and Parker with Jason Statham (2013).
Flynn's version stars Robert Duvall as Earl Macklin (Parker) and Joe Don Baker as Earl's partner Cody. Both are terrific. Karen Black plays The Girl (there's always The Girl in a Parker film). Macklin, recently released from prison seeks revenge against his brother's killers. The problem is the killers were sent by The Outfit, the powerful Mob organization. The great Robert Ryan, in one of his last roles, players Mailer, head of The Outfit.
The Outfit is better than the two other Parker movies I've seen, Point Blank and Payback and is far superior as a genre film to the much more praised Michael Mann film Thief (1981)(1), which I viewed last year.
Flynn's next film was Rolling Thunder (1977), one of the early returning Vietnam vet films, which became a trend later in the 70s. The title is taken from the code name for the American bombing campaign in North Vietnam. Major Charles Rane has just returned to Texas from seven years as a POW in a North Vietnamese prison where he was tortured. Accompanying him is Rane's companion from that prison, Master Sergeant Johnny Vohden. Both are psychologically damaged from their experience, both have difficulty adjusting to civilian life, and both seem placid on the outside. After a calm beginning, this becomes a revenge film as Rane tracks down the murderers of his wife and son.
As Rane, William Devane, in his first lead role, plays the troubled character to perfection. In one of his first roles, Tommy Lee Jones as Vohden is good in his more limited screen time, and has the best line in the film. Linda Haynes plays The Girl and she is very good, better than Black in The Outfit.
I doubt whether, if these movies were remade today, they would have the same endings.
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(1) Mann's highly overrated 1995 film, Heat, with Pacino and De Niro, also has elements of the Parker character and stylized storyline.
We recently watched an excellent three part series on PBS about new discoveries at Pompeii. About a third of the city buried by the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius remains unexcavated. Recently, a new section of the city has been the site of a new archaeological dig and the PBS series reveals the interesting findings, as well as provided the current interpretation of the sequence of events around the eruption.
The dig found several striking mosiacs in a combined bakery and residential residential of a wealthy Pompeii resident and does a fine job of explaining the findings.
This article contains more background, along with brief trailers for the episodes. Recommended.
Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading scholars of colonial America was 89 when The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 was published in 2012. He would pass in 2020 at the age of 97.
Why "The Barbarous Years"? Here's Bailyn's explanation in the introduction:
"All the people involved - native Americans, Europeans, latterly Africans - struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured in what mattered. All . . . felt themselves dragged down or threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. All sought to restore the civility they once had known."
"Later generations, reading back into the past the outcome they knew, would gentrify this early passage in the peopling of British North America; but there was nothing genteel about it. It was a brutal encounter - brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples . . . and between European and Africans, but among the Europeans themselves . . ."
It is, indeed, a tale filled with violence, famine, harsh weather, crop failures, dangerous voyages, exploitation, constant infighting and outbreaks of violence within each settler group, along with daring, courage, sacrifice, and occasional attempts at understanding across the divides.
The natives were not a peaceable lot at the time. Baily describes the Iroquois, the leading northern confederacy in these terms:
"Fierce warriors perpetually organized for war, whose savage treatment of captives created terror wherever it was known, the Iroquois were the scourge of their neighbors and rivals. The Western Abenakis' panic fear of the Iroquois tribe closest to them, the Mohawks, has been described as 'almost psychotic'; the Hurons might realistically have anticipated that one day the neighboring Iroquois would utterly destroy them."
"They were at war with a succession of Algonquian, Montagnais, and Huron peoples . . . and at the same time they were driving the Susquehannocks . . . farther and farther to the south . . . they mounted lesser campaigns for similar reasons against the Western Abenakis in Vermont . . . and in scattered forays far to the south, across some of the backcountry tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas.
To the south, in Virginia, the leading chief was Powhatan who created a "brutally expansive empire", turning on a neighboring tribe, the Chesapeakes "with fury and obliterated the entire community", even as the Jamestown fleet set sail from Britain.
In advance of the arrival of European settlers, many of the tribes, particularly along the coast, were already suffering from the devastating onslaught of diseases brought by the early Atlantic traders, so that on occasion, the earliest settlers found the land almost deserted.
Bailyn discusses the Pilgrim and Puritan founders of New England, the Dutch in the New Netherlands, and the small Swedish and Finnish(1) colonies along the lower Delaware River, but spends the most time on the Virginia and Maryland settlements, and its on those colonies, and particularly on the risks faced by the earlier settlers, the introduction of indentured servitude, and slavery that I'll focus on.
It's often forgotten that for 17th century Englishmen, their primary reference point for colonialization and attitudes towards indigenous peoples was Ireland and the Irish. Ireland had been England's fastest growing colony for a century. And what did the English think of the "wild" Irish?
Bailyn provides quotes from leading Irish colonizers, many of whom later journeyed to the New World.
"They 'blaspheme, thei murder, commit whoredom, hold no wedlocke, ravish, steal, and commit all abomination without scruple . . . matrimonie emongs them is no more regarded . . . than conjunction between unreasonable beasts, perjurie, robberie and murder counted alloweable'"
". . . more uncivil, more uncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish in their customs . . . then in any other part of the world"
This attitude carried over to the natives in the New World. One of the first governors of Jamestown, Sir James Dale, who launched the first war against native tribes in Virginia, is described in these terms:
"a participant in the ruthless slaughter of noncombatants in Ireland on the ground that 'terror . . . made short Warrs'"
Bailyn cites the leading historian of that English-Indian war regarding the tactics of that struggle:
"translated England's ad terrorem tactics from the Irish wars of the late sixteenth century - specifically the use of deception, ambush, and surprise, the random slaughter of both sexes and all ages, the calculated murder of innocent captives, and the destruction of entire villages . . ."
Whether in peace or war, the mortality toll on the Virginia settlers is astonishing. Malnutrition, disease, the heat and humidity, along with Indian attacks was unceasing. The original settlers landed in Jamestown in May 1607. By September only 58 of the 104 were still alive, and of that group only six were able-bodied men capable of labor. By January 1608, twenty more had died.
By May 1610, after the arrival of more settlers, only about 60 of 400 were still alive after a starvation winter, the survivors "so leane that they looked lyke [skeleton], cryeinge owtt, We are starved."
Eight hundred more arrived later in 1610, but six months later more than a third "had sickened and died or were killed by the Indians."
By the end of 1611 more than 1,500 settlers had arrived since 1607 but only 450 were alive. By 1616 more than 2,000 had reached the Virginia colony but the population was only 351, of whom more than 350 were killed in Indian encounters.
After the first decade, large and more isolated plantations were established but the deadly toll continued to mount. Half of the 280 sent to Martin's Hundred were dead by the end of 1621. A year after 34 men arrived at Berkeley Hundred, 31 were dead. Of 120 men and boys sent to Bennett's Welcome in 1621 only 10 were alive by the end of 1623.
And just getting to Virginia involved a perilous voyage taking two to three months, during which waves of sickness would pass through the passengers in their crowded quarters. In one instance, the colony lost valuable skills and workers when "Most of the carefully recruited ironworkers were lost on a single voyage".
In a notorious incident, of a shipload of 180 religious dissenters, only 50 survived the voyage; "they had been 'packed together', it was reported, 'like herrings; they had amongst them the flux, and also want of fresh water".
Following the early conflicts, English policy changed regarding the natives. In 1621, Governor Yeardley was told that "no injurie or oppression bee wrought by the English against any of the natives of that countrie wereby the present peace may be disturbed" and "to converse" and "labor amongst them . . . that therby they may growe to a likeing and love of civillty and finallie bee brought to the knowledge and love of God and true religion." Yardley was instructed to set 10,000 acres aside for the building of schools and living quarters for the Indians.
But Yardley's attempts to improve relations were too late, as the local tribes had already begun planning for a surprise assault on the colonists. On March 22, 1622 more than 300 English men, women, and children were killed. Over the next few months the colonists were to prevail and the surviving natives driven into the interior, but because of the inability to plant crops, perhaps another 1,000 settlers died on malnutrition and disease in 1622 and 1623.
In total, about 8,000 settlers arrived in Virginia between 1607 and 1624. A census the following year found only 1,218 still alive.
Many of those 1,218 were indentured servants, bonded for a set period of years, usually seven, to their masters. Bailyn reports that during the 17th century at least 70%, and perhaps up to 85%, of migrants to Virginia's tobacco coast were indentured servants.
Those servants were not just adults. Many were vagrant and orphaned children rounded up by the authorities and sent to Virginia. For instance, between 1618 and 1620, from Bridewell Hospital in London, a detention center and jail for vagrant children, "idle wastrels, petty theives, and dissolute women" sent at least 337 to Virginia as apprentices; by 1624 more than 4,000 vagrants were transported to the colony.
As the decades progressed, Bailyn tells us:
"Increasingly there were Irish among them, despite the fact that in the West Indies, where Irish laborers had been recruited in large numbers, they had proved to be difficult, unreliable, and often rebellious, largely as a consequence of their resistance to the vicious treatment they received from the English planters, who despised them."
Until freed, servants were under the absolute control of their masters being, "bought and sold, pledged as security on debts, even risked in gambling . . . [T]heir worth was closely calculated, upon sale or in estate inventories".
Even later in the century, the excessive settler mortality continued for both planters and servants.
"Between 15 and 30 percent of male immigrants to Maryland at midcentury died within the first 'seasoning' year of their residence."
In Virginia's Middlesex County "only a minority lived to the end of their service and joined the ranks of the free", while among landowning families the mortality rate was such that households were "complex, jumbled, unstable, at times bizarre."
The 1625 census counted 23 Africans "of indeterminate legal status", among the 1,218 inhabitants. For the first half-century of the colony that indeterminate status continued with a number of Africans acquiring freedom. That was to change.
By the 1670s decreasing immigration from Europe, and the cost of those immigrants, was becoming an increasing problem for the small group of plantation planters, who were expanding acreage and facing an growing need for labor. In 1670, Africans comprised about 9% of Maryland's population and there were 2,000 in Virginia, but there was not yet wholesale importation. At the time most Africans came from British owned Barbados, the Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, or from Spanish settlements on the American mainland, not directly from Africa.
It was towards the end of the period covered by Bailyn that the legal structure began to be put in place to clearly define and manage Africans, and planned importation directly from across the Atlanta became large scale. The change was also prompted by broader societal changes:
"By 1675 the stress lines in Chesapeake society had become clear. A restive, footloose, unsettled population of land-hungry former servants exposed to Indian assaults pressed against an established population of small-scale planters and farmers active in the local courts and, through their deputies, in the Burgesses. They in turn were sensitive to pressure from increasingly aggressive gentry families intent on creating great estates that required demanding personal management. . . And feverish land speculation was driving up land values, to the spectacular benefit of some but for many a keen sense of real and relative deprivation."
With regards to slavery we can see the stress lines statistically. Two of every three officeholders in Virginia and Maryland owned slaves, while only one of every 16 non-officeholders were slaveowners. The majority of tobacco farmers did not own slaves. The result, according to Bailyn was that:
"The record of the growth and distribution in the ownership of slaves reflects the emergence of a racist, patriarchal culture. But in the 1670s it was newly formed, strange, uncertain, and taut with inner tensions."
For the politically powerful planters:
"The question was not what the moral limits of slavery might be but how it might best be elaborated and defined in law for maximum use in the Chesapeake, and how it might related to differences in race".
It's Bailyn's reminder that from the planter perspective, slavery had always existed in one form or another; the default mode of societal organization. What is the exception, is the abolition movement that arose in the second half of the 18th century in Britain and its colonies in America, as discussed in Christopher Leslie Brown's history of the abolition movement in Britain, Moral Capital.
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(1) The author believes the Finnish settlers were the most compatible with the natives, as their lifestyle and culture was the most similar of all the Europeans.
With its unusual sound for 1963 and enigmatic lyrics, Sally Go Round The Roses rose to #2 on the Billboard charts in the fall of that year. Like many hits of that era, the singers comprising the Jaynetts were assembled for that one record.
Sally don't you go, don't you go downtown
Sally don't you go, don't you go downtown
Saddest thing in the whole wide world
Is to see your baby with another girl
Sally go round the roses (Sally go round the roses)
Sally go round the roses (Sally go round the pretty roses)
They won't tell your secret (they won't tell your secret)
They won't tell your secret (no, the roses won't tell your secret)
Two days ago, a Federal District Court judge(1) issued a preliminary injunction against the University of California ordering the university from "knowingly allowing or facilitating the exclusion of Jewish students from ordinarily available portions of UCLA’s programs, activities, and campus areas."
Here's the opening paragraph of the Court's ruling:
In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, in the City of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.
While the University of California argued, in effect, that there were fine people on both sides(2) of this issue, that is not really what the university thinks and teaches. It teaches that Jews, or at least Jews who refuse to publicly disavow Israel, are oppressors, and therefore bad. Here's how you can tell - how do you think the University of California would react to a protest encampment that blocked access to campus buildings to blacks, Muslims, or gay people? Yeah, we all know, don't we? Yet, since last fall, so many universities have acted just like UCLA.
I wrote last October that all of this was predictable:
It is the natural outcome of the ideology preached by many of our leading institutions, not just some small cadre of crazed Leftists. Whether called Woke, Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, Equity, Systemic Racism, DIE (Division, Intolerance & Exclusion), Intersectionality, Anti-Fascism etc, or justifying the murder of Israelis because they are "Zionist settler-colonialists", it all springs from the same set of ideas designed to divide us and deny our common humanity
In that piece I wrote of my disappointment in mainstream Jewish groups for their failure to take on directly this racist ideology. Unfortunately, not much has changed on that front.
Those Jewish organizations who had been collaborating with the DEI crowd seem to have decided to maintain that course of action. In an interview with the Jewish Insider, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt once again tells us he sees nothing wrong with DEI, other than Jews not being included:
We’re going to judge these institutions based on not what they say but what they do. And so whether it’s how they update and expand their DEI programming, whether it’s how they apply consequences to student organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine, that seriously violate their codes of conduct and target and intimidate and threaten Jewish students, whether it’s ensuring that those Jewish kids or Israeli kids don’t experience discrimination.
And so, DEI is here, and, you know, at ADL we believe that diversity education is really important. We live in the most heterodox, multicultural society in the world. Understanding your peers, your colleagues, your employees — understanding them, knowing their histories, ensuring that you can approach the issues from a more informed perspective, I think that makes you a better peer or a better manager or a better leader. You are able to demonstrate empathy. But if DEI perpetuates not diversity, equity, inclusion, but the exclusion of Jews and Israelis, we have a problem. So my hope would be that we will see the change that will ensure that Jewish people are going to be treated it with decency that are treated fairly and that are treated in the same manner as all others.
The problem of Greenblatt's position can be best seen in this tweet:
It's critical for any push for diversity in any industry to be inclusive of Jews. If your project of inclusion perpetuates the exclusion of Jews, you are failing. So, we applaud the many celebrities for their courage in standing up, speaking out and writing to @TheAcademy to… pic.twitter.com/lbOPuP9TrQ
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 10, 2024
The tweet links to this article,
in which well-off Jews demand inclusion in the Academy of Motion
Pictures Arts & Sciences Representation & Inclusion Standards
promulgated in 2020 in the midst of the George Floyd hysteria.
Here's another example that occurred in September 2023, predating the October 7 attack. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) joined a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District because it inserted antisemitic material into its mandated Ethnic Studies course. So far, so good. But the article goes on to quote the AJC Chief Legal Officer saying:
"Done right, ethnic studies prepare students to live in an increasingly diverse society. Done wrong, they can be divisive and discriminatory."
The futility of this is evidenced by how Harvard defanged its antisemitism advisory task force by naming Professor Derek Penslar as co-chair, ensuring it would be a puppet of the administration. While much attention has focused on Penslar's issues with Israel, the real problem is that he is a hard-core DEI advocate. His role is to provide some window-dressing designed to do the minimum possible to address antisemitism and keep Jewish donors happy while failing to address the core issue of DEI, from which the campus hostility to Jews springs from. Little noticed is that at the same time Harvard announced formation of a task force on Islamophobia. The idea is to create an equivalence between a virulent outbreak of antisemitism with a non-outbreak of Islamophobia. These things are not alike but Harvard will do its best to play its Jewish donors for fools.
DEI, or whatever you want to call this radical and incoherent ideology that seeks the destruction of an American society based on equality and respect for the rights of individuals under the law, is incompatible with the existence of the Jewish community in the United States. It can't be "done right" by including Jews. By definition, DEI divides society into the Oppressed and the Oppressors. Being, in most fields, the most disproportionately successful group in America, means that, in the eyes of DEI proponents, that Jews must be part of the conspiracy to maintain White Supremacy and, are therefore, Oppressors. Jews cannot be successful because of their efforts or merit because, according to DEI, there is no such thing as objective merit and the only explanation for the success of an Oppressor is systemic racism.
DEI is a threat to America, its citizens, and its future, and it on that basis that Jewish groups should be opposing its existence on behalf of every American. By trying to gain admission to the ranks of the Oppressed, Jewish organizations are abandoning tens of millions of their fellow citizens to the real oppressors, the proponents of DEI. It will also be a failed strategy, as whatever lip service is given to inclusion, the reality will be far different, as we've seen at Harvard. What is needed is a non-partisan Jewish organization focused solely on the elimination of DEI concepts from American life.
This is the reality of DEI and what settler-colonialism means. It is not limited to Israel. As the professor below states, "the goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States" because "the U.S. is the greatest predator empire that has ever existed". A few years ago, I would have dismissed such talk as just crazy campus stuff, but since 2020 we've discovered the incredible power this set of beliefs holds, not just in academia, but across most of our elite institutions and within the Biden administration, which has issued two detailed Executive Orders requiring DEI concepts to be embedded throughout the federal bureaucracy and into all rulemaking processes and regulations.
The speaker is Professor Melanie Yazzie of the University of Minnesota, whose biography states:
She writes and teaches about a range of topics, including Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; biopolitics; water; media; Marxism; and theories of policing and the state. (3)— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) December 21, 2023
Yazzie has been helped along the way by the academic and foundation networks backing the effort to instill race essentialism into our society. She was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship; Andrew W Mellon Dissertation Fellowship; and University of California Postdoctoral Fellowship. Yazzie's career path does not happen by accident; these institutions are deliberately fomenting hatred and divisiveness. These people mean what they say and must be taken seriously. Don't believe it? In April 2022, a communist, anti-colonialist, black activist attempted to assassinate a Jewish mayoral candidate in Louisville, Kentucky. Though he fired four shots, he fortunately did not succeed. Didn't hear about it? No surprise, even in the media outlets that bothered to report it as a one-day story, most avoided mention of the background of the shooter. No need to start a national conversation about that!
I highly recommend reading this recent essay, "DEI and Antisemitism: Bred in the Bone", by Suzanna Sherry of Vanderbilt Law School on the clear and present danger presented by DEI:
DEI’s inherent antisemitism thus rests in part on its inability to explain Jewish success without resorting to antisemitic stereotypes. But DEI beliefs also have an even more direct link to antisemitism. In short, to attack meritocracy and to attribute disparities entirely to racism – as the DEI movement does – is to argue that Jewish success is undeserved, a patently antisemitic conclusion. And if Jewish success is undeserved, Jews are fair game for attacks. So it is not a coincidence that antisemitism and antisemitic violence were rising sharply among those on the far left even before the Hamas massacre.
None of this should be surprising. DEI and critical race theory are essentially a rejection of, and attack on, the principles of rationality, objectivity, and individualism (as opposed to tribalism, now called identity politics) that underlay the European Enlightenment and, ultimately, formed the backbone of American democracy. And historically, antiliberal attacks on the Enlightenment and on the norms of objectivity have long been associated with antisemitism. French counter-revolutionists in the eighteenth century, German antiliberals in nineteenth, and Nazi theorists in the twentieth rejected rationality in favor of orthodoxy, and blamed Jews for undermining or resisting that orthodoxy.
The takeover of universities by DEI is also the most dangerous aspect of progressivism. As one historian notes, German academic support for antisemitism and Nazism was pervasive and effective in the years leading up to Hitler’s final solution: “Non-Jewish German academia did not just follow Hitler down the path to hell. It led the way.”
Regarding the lack of responsiveness from many Jewish organizations, Sherry quotes from a 2020 article written by Bari Weiss:
[W]hen I try to discuss [progressive antisemitism] with many Jews in leadership
positions, what I face is either boomer-esque entitlement—a sense that the way the world
worked for them must be the way it will always work—or outright resistance. Oh please,
wokeness isn’t important anywhere but in silly Twitter microclimates. When you explain
that no, in fact, this ideology has taken over universities, publishing houses, the media,
museums and is now making quick work of corporate America, you hit another
roadblock: Isn’t this just righting some historical injustices? What could go wrong? You
then have to explain what could go wrong—what is already going wrong—is that it is
ruining the lives of regular, good people, and the more institutions and companies fall
prey to it, the more lives it will ruin.
Too many of these organizations and Jewish, and many other, liberals still see DEI as just a bit more aggressive type of social justice initiative, like the Civil Rights Movement, and fail to understand that DEI is a repudiation of the tenets of the Civil Rights Movement, and of liberalism itself. Liberalism was able to resist anti-liberalism from the Right, but has succumbed to anti-liberalism from the Left. If liberalism is to be salvaged, it is necessary to face into the reality of what is happening in America.
Twenty seven years ago, Professor Sherry, along with fellow professor Dan Farber, wrote Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law, which I read several years ago, warning of the dangers of critical race theory and its inherent antisemitism. She concludes her recent essay with these words, referring to that book, "Nobody listened. I hope Jews are listening now."
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(1) Mark Scarsi was appointed by President Trump and will also be the judge hearing the Hunter Biden criminal tax case.
(2) "Fine people on both sides" is, of course, a reference to President Trump's 2017 remarks at a press conference held after the violence at Charlottesville. In media mythology it is described as Trump's refusal to condemn neo-nazis and white nationalists. It's also a staple of Democratic campaigns; in May 2024 I watched it used in a Biden-Harris campaign commercial in Arizona and, even within the past few days, the Harris campaign has tweeted the claim. The problem is that the claim is false, as I discovered upon seeing a transcript of Trump's remarks two years later. Even as cynical as I had become about the press, I assumed the frequently reported words and their context was accurate. Instead, it was a carefully constructed lie. The transcript revealed that after making the "fine people" remark, Trump twice added he has not referring to neo-nazis and white nationalists, adding after the second reference that "they are bad people". It's clear from the transcript that his remark about fine people was regarding the arguments over whether the statute should be removed, and that is an accurate (and fine) statement.
(3) Most of these are not even real things.
The image is unsettling, contrasting a sunlight bright sky with the darkness below, in turn illuminated by the light standing next next to the house with its upper windows lit. By Rene Magritte (1954). We appear to be observing from a lawn with a tree between us and the house.
Regarding the kerfuffle about Tim Walz's military service, we've seen defenders of Walz claim he is being "Swiftboated", an allusion to attacks on John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. A recent example is from PBS News Hour Anchor Amna Nawaz who asserts:
“This is so reminiscent of that swiftboating attack on John Kerry back in 2004 . . . Why run with these attacks when there’s no evidence for what they’re saying right now?”
She goes on to say that the attacks on Kerry were “discredited". If Nawaz was drawing a comparison with the attacks on Kerry, the accurate one would be that the allegations against Kerry and Walz were similar, in that both are correct. However, I doubt that is what she meant.
Walz did not have the rank claimed as of his retirement and, on multiple occasions, stated, or left the impression, he had served with his unit in combat in Iraq, rather than resigning once he learned the unit would be going to Iraq. The governor's immediate superior, battalion commander, and unit chaplain, all confirm the allegation. Attempts to defend Walz have relied upon mischaracterizing the allegations.
As for Kerry and Swiftboating, I wrote in 2016 (and updated in 2020) about the true story:
For those of you who may not remember, the "Swift Boat Incident" or Swiftboating as Democrats liked to call it, was in their version the slandering of Presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War record during the 2004 campaign. If you notice, Baquet refers to it as an "allegation". In the preferred liberal summary, the Incident was about mischaracterization of Kerry's record as a Swiftboat commander during the war and the awarding of his combat medals. In reality, the television ads by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth focused primarily on Kerry's alleged treasonous actions in carrying out secret negotiations with the communist government of North Vietnam and in denouncing his fellow soldiers for atrocities in front of the U.S. Congress, a denunciation used by the communists as justification for torturing American POWs. All of this is completely true.
A secondary theme was an attack on Kerry's claim, made on the floor of the Senate, that he spent Christmas on his Swift Boat in Cambodia, in what would have been an illegal incursion at the time, a demonstrably false claim. The final claim was that his actions in combat were not deserving of his medals and that he had manipulated the system to obtain them. This claim is controversial and the only one by the Veteran's group which may not be accurate (unfortunately the Wikipedia entry on this topic focuses almost exclusively on this last point and is very one-sided).
When YouTube first became available several years ago, I went back and found the original Swiftboat ads. Unfortunately, they are not all still available but my fragmentary notes indicate that six of them focused on Kerry's post service actions - negotiating with the enemy, his Congressional testimony and throwing the ribbons from his medals away in a protest. Two others and part of a third dealt with his Christmas in Cambodia fabrication and one part of one raised the question of the validity of his medals. I view all except the last as fair game.
The Swift Boat Veterans were a coalition of two groups. The first were POWs, held in North Vietnam under brutal conditions, who deeply resented John Kerry's support for the enemy. The second were members of the Swift Boat unit who had served with, before or after Kerry. The leader of the second group was John E O'Neill, who had debated Kerry on the Vietnam War back in 1971 on the Dick Cavett show. I happened to see O'Neill on C-Span during the 2004 campaign. In response to a question he referred to President Bush as "an empty suit". This was always about John Kerry, not Bush.
By mischaracterizing the substance of the Swiftboat attacks and turning them into merely a dirty political tactic, Democrats and their media accomplices sought to avoid dealing with the substance raised by the ads; Kerry's statements after his service disparaging the U.S and his fellow servicemen and the question of why so many people disliked the man. I was still reading the Times back then and the Swift Boat ads were out there for weeks before it wrote a word about them. It was as if it was awaiting instructions from the Kerry campaign about what to do. Finally, the Kerry campaign responded and the Times printed a front page story but as it was mostly an attack by Kerry without a full explanation of what the controversy was about it must have been very baffling for most readers. In any event, Baquet appears to have fallen for this hook, line and sinker.
If what Nawaz meant to reference were inaccurate and discredited allegations there is an example from the 2004 campaign that fits the bill - the attacks on George W Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG). In fact, the better term for unjustified and false allegations about a candidate's military service is being "TANGed", not "Swiftboated".
In the case of the TANG controversy, Dan Rather of 60 Minutes used the vice-chair of the Kerry election campaign as his primary source for the allegations against Bush, a man whose claims had been denounced by his own daughter (a fact not disclosed on the broadcast)! Rather himself, a native Texan and partisan Democrat, also had a son who was running fundraisers for the Texas Democratic Party. 60 Minutes ignored the substantial evidence contradicting its thesis (no one who served with Bush confirmed the story) and, most famously, used a document to seal its case, allegedly from 1973, that turned out to have been composed using Microsoft software not invented until the late 1990s!! Oh, and Rather's producer gave a heads up to the Kerry campaign before the broadcast, so they were in position to release campaign ends as soon as the segment broadcast.
Whether it is New York Times editor Dean Baquet in 2016 or Aman Nawaz in 2024, they exist in a enclosed universe in which their crowd just repeats the same lies to each other over and over again, until they become accepted truth. This is the same crowd claiming to be so alarmed about misinformation, by which they mean information they disagree with. The press has beclowned itself in recent years. Yesterday, the White House correspondent for the Washington Post pleaded with the White House to do something to shut down Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump.
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On that day, General Grant sent a letter to President Lincoln, telling him "Whatever happens, there will be no turning back."
Grant was pledging that he war in 1864 would be much different from 1861, 1862, and 1863. In the prior three years most battles were one or two days, with an occasional three days of combat (Gettysburg, Chancellorsville). And, in Virginia, each time the Army of the Potomac was defeated or stalemated, it would turn back. That is what Grant was referring to in his letter to the president.
And so, it proved. From May 6, when Robert E Lee's Army of Northern Virginia attacked the federal forces in the Wilderness, until June 12, the Army of the Potomac and Lee's army were in constant contact, in full battle or skirmishing. And each time the Army of the Potomac encountered a stalemate it continued to advance. By the end of that period more than 4 of every 10 soldiers in each army as of May 5 were killed or wounded. The survivors were exhausted.
Grant then moved his army across the James River, laying siege to Petersburg for nine months.
The year of 1864 was the topic of the Annual Symposium of Emerging Civil War, held August 2-4 at Stevenson Ridge in Spotsylvania which I attended. It was the 10th annual ECW symposium but my first.
I was able to speak directly with General Grant as you can see from the photo above. That is Curt Fields who has played Grant with impeccable accuracy, both in speech and appearance, since 2010 and, I can assure you, Curt IS Grant. Curt appeared via Zoom for our Roundtable in 2020 and will be coming in person in early 2026 to help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States; appropriate since Grant was president during the centennial of the country. The conference was kicked off with Curt talking about the upcoming 1864 campaign at Massaponax Church which existed during the Civil War and still contains graffiti from soldiers of both armies.
For the next two days we heard from speakers on various aspects of 1864. Some of the highlights:
George McClellan's controversial West Point speech in June 1864 was the subject of a talk by Zachery Fry on the presidential election of that year. McClellan was the Democratic nominee that year and I'd not previously been aware of the speech which was implicitly partisan. McClellan's ideas of a suitable settlement of the war were mired in 1862, when it was still solely a war of Union, rather than of 1864 when emancipation was an additional war aim. He seemed to think the country could return to its pre-war form, something that Senator Reverdy Johnson, Democrat from Maryland, realized was impossible two months prior.
More are familiar with Andersonville, the Confederate POW camp in Georgia, and the deadliest of the war, than with Elmira, New York, the location of the deadliest Union POW camp. Derek Maxfield walked us through the history of the camp and why it proved so fatal for so many.
Jonathan Noyalas explained how and why Phil Sheridan came to command the army charged with finally eliminating the threat from Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Vally, how he succeeded, and its importance to the re-election prospects of President Lincoln.
"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" Did Union Admiral David Farragut really say that? Well, not exactly, according to Neil Chatelain but he did have himself tied to the mast to better observe. Neil provided both a clear explanation of the attack on Mobile Bay while dispelling some of the myths that have grown around it and its significance.
Tim Talbott told the tale of the attack of United States Colored Troops at the Battle of New Market Heights, near Richmond in September 1864. Another example of valiant efforts of Union soldiers, undermined by poor leadership and coordination.
The Army of the Tennessee missed a great opportunity to bag a Union Army at Spring Hill in November 1864. Instead, the next day it launched its great frontal assault at Franklin, losing 7,000 men and 6 generals, including Pat Cleburne. Joe Ricci explained how it all happened.
The meeting concluded on Sunday with a tour of Mule Shoe salient and of the portion of that line now known as The Bloody Angle, the scene of the most sustained hand to hand combat of the war, lasting twenty hours. The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House lasted thirteen days, but it was the Union assault on the Mule Shoe Salient on May 12 that remains its most memorable day. Ten years ago I wrote of that day and the memoirs of two survivors, one Union and one Confederate.
Our tour guide was Chris Mackowski, founder of ECW and moderator of the symposium. Chris was a masterful guide, mixing the details of the events with well-chosen stories while keeping us oriented in the often confusing topography of the area. He's the guy in the white shirt in the photo below.
I particularly liked that Chris took us off the beaten path and into the woods to visit a little known and visited (and neglected) monument, pictured below.
I plan on returning for the 11th symposium next year.
I posted a version of this song in 2021 when first discovering Billy Strings. Since then, I've listened to 15 or 20 live versions of Away From The Mire and seen Billy and his band perform their dynamite live set. It remains my favorite with its strong melody, lyrics, and other-worldly guitar solo. This version is from Lollapolozza 2022.
Let go of the pain and hold onto the rhythmIt's consciously held back in youYou're drowning a sorrow that's long been at restThe past is a hell, it can creep up inside youSo let me remind you of thisIt's the reason your troubles exist
On this date in 1914, the British light cruiser HMS Birmingham rammed and sunk the U-15, the first German submarine to be lost in World War One. The armies of the continent were mobilizing, about to plunge Europe into the disaster that set the course for the rest of the century.
Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary (AH), and his wife Sophie, in Sarajevo on June 28, by the teenage Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip, the Austrians delivered an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23, and then declared war on the Serbs five days later. Serbia's ally Russia, began mobilizing its military against AH on July 31. In response, AH's ally Germany, declared war on Russia the following day and then on Belgium and Russia's ally France on August 3. The following day, the United Kingdom made its declaration against Germany. Two days later AH went to war against Russia, and Serbia issued its declaration against Germany.
As with the American Civil War, none of the parties, to quote Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, "expected for the war the magnitude or the duration", while "Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding".
In preparation for a visit to Western Front battlefields next month, I've been doing some reading. While some has focused on the military aspects like The First World War by Hew Strachan and The Western Front by Nick Lloyd, I've also been delving into the origins of the war. A few years ago I read Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Over the last month I read July Crisis by TG Otte and listened to a series on podcasts on The Rest Is History, the outstanding podcast by British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the failed diplomatic efforts of the following five weeks that gave the world its war.
The period from the morning of June 28 to July 31 leaves one with the same feeling as watching a "by the numbers" horror movie where find yourself thinking "don't open that door!", "don't go in that room!!", and "splitting up is a really bad strategy!!!", yet the characters proceed to go ahead, nonetheless.
What is striking is how much the actions of the major actors in those weeks, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany was driven by fear, not expansionism or militarism. Austria-Hungary saw itself as a weakening power, threatened by the demands of multiple nationalities within the empire, and particularly by its Slav population incited, as they saw it, by the Serbs. Without action to finally end the Serb threat, the Hapsburg faced a dire future, a view shared by a Germany, increasingly concerned about its main ally's slow decline. The Russians felt humiliated by recent diplomatic setbacks and worried about the lose of reputation and status if it failed to respond in defense of its ally Serbia. The Germans feared the rapid growth of the Russian economy and its military strength which might surpass theirs within a decade, as well as the growing strength of France, leading to threats on two fronts. As for the French, they mostly played an inciting role in this period, encouraging strong action by their Russian ally, while seeing an opportunity to liberate Alsace-Lorraine.
Though AH was seeking to militarily punish Serbia, none of the countries sought a general European war, yet they achieved that result, due to miscalculation, negligence and inattentiveness early in the crisis, and the irresponsibility of diplomats in AH, Russia, Germany, and France, along with the disengagement of Britain for much of July.
The Serbian government did not plan, nor desire the assassination, and made some ineffective efforts to stop the team of assassins once learning something was afoot. But it was organized by Serbs of the secretive Black Hand organization, led by Dragutin Dimitrijevic, known more widely by his alias of Apis, who was also chief of Serbian Military Intelligence. Through intermediaries a group of young and reckless Slav idealists, including the Bosnian Serb Princip, were easily manipulated into carrying out the attack on the Archduke.
Franz Ferdinand was selected as a target because as heir to the ailing 83 year old monarch Franz Joseph, he was seen as the leading AH proponent for war against Serbia, and was also advocating for a larger role for Slavs within the empire as a counterbalance to the Hungarians, a policy which, if successful, would undermine Serbian goals of establishing a larger Slav state to be run by Serbs. On the latter issue, the Serbs made the correct assessment, but on the former, not only was Franz Ferdinand not an advocate of war against Serbia, he was the leading figure opposing a war on that nation.
On the morning of June 28 it took a series of individual decisions by officials and a lack of communication to bring about that moment when, by chance, after the driver took a wrong turn, the car carrying Franz Ferdinand and his wife stopped directly in front of the dejected Princip, who had seen one of his fellow plotters toss a bomb at the car earlier with little impact, and believed their attempt had failed completely. Princip took advantage, acted quickly, firing two shots, and killing Ferdinand and Sophie. If any one of those decisions or actions had gone differently Princip would never have had the opportunity.
In the aftermath most AH political and military figures saw an opportunity to attack and dismantle Serbia and designed an ultimatum they knew would be unacceptable to the Serb government. Heedless of the larger implications of its plans it plunged ahead. Astonishingly it was not until just before issuing its ultimatum, premised on a fast followup attack on Serbia, that the civilian government was informed by its military that it would not be prepared to attack until mid-August! Nor did anyone give any much thought to what would happen if Russia intervened. To the extent Russia was considered the Austrians figured that since they had been diplomatically humiliated when AH annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 and in Balkan War maneuvering it would react the same in 1914. But Russia, looking at those same two events when it backed down, was determined not have it happen again.
While efforts were made in Germany, Russia, and near the end of July by Britain, to prevent a wider war, they proved at cross-purposes and ineffectual. Perhaps if Europe still had statesman with the skill and vision of Metternich, Bismarck, and Disraeli, there would have been a faster and more effective attempt to find a solution short of war but statesmen were in short supply in July 1914.
What followed cost more than ten million lives, ended the monarchies in Russia, AH, Germany, completed the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, gave birth to fascism and communism, and planted the seeds for the next European war.
Austria-Hungary, the country most responsible for the war, proved inept militarily, setting the stage for its self-destruction. In a giant humiliation for the empire, its first three attempted invasions of the small nation of Serbia were easily repulsed. It was only with the help of Bulgaria and Germany that it finally succeeded in late 1915. Indeed, Austria's only military successes in the war occurred with German help and under its direction; the offensive against Russia in 1915, the attack on Romania in 1916, and the offensive against Italy in 1917.
As for Serbia, whose unstable and faction ridden political scene lit the fire leading to the war, a quarter of its population died. Though Serbia emerged from the war as the leading power in the new Yugoslavia, it was also unstable and violence prone. In 1934, the Yugoslav king was murdered by Croatian nationalists. In World War Two, the Germans occupied Yugoslavia, triggering a partisan war of resistance in which 10% of the population died and a fascist Croatian puppet state killed somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Serbs. After the war, under the rule of the Communist Tito, a unified Yugoslavia existed for four decades, but after his death the nation fell apart, going through a series of bloody civil wars, finally splitting into six different nations. No one dreams anymore of a greater Slav nation.
Gavrilo Princip was immediately captured after the assassination, admitted his guilt but, at 19, was too young to be executed under the law of Austria-Hungary. Sentenced to life imprisonment he died from tuberculosis on April 28, 1918, six months before the end of the war.
In 1917, the Serbian government-in-exile convicted the inveterate plotter Apis in a conspiracy to assassinate Prince Regent Alexander. Apis, the individual most responsible for the war, was executed in June of that year.
There is a school of history which believes the World War was inevitable, given the military buildup in the early 20th century, and the rivalry of the Great Powers. I'm not an adherent of that school of thought because I lived through the Cold War. Growing up in that period, it was difficult to see a peaceful ending, yet the Cold War ended unexpectedly and peacefully. People and contingency play a large part in how events turn out.
In the case of pre-war Europe, the great naval buildup by Germany which caused tension with Britain had ceased. In 1912, France extended its term of military service from two to three years which allowed it to significantly increase its army, leading Germany to divert funds from its navy to army. The result was an easing of tension between Germany and Britain and the beginnings of productive discussion between the two countries. Sir Edward Grey, Britain's secretary of state, was a firm advocate of better relations and meetings between foreign ministers of the two countries might have occurred later in 1914, if war had not intervened. Improved relations between the two great powers would have lessened the chances of war.
Without a war, Franz Ferdinand would have become emperor when his uncle died in 1916. Could he have succeeded in his plan to grant autonomy to a Slav entity within the empire? If so, could that have eased tensions?
Without a war could Russia, the fastest growing economy in Europe, continue its rapid industrial expansion? Could it deal with its rising class tensions and could the Romanovs have transformed into a more constitutional monarchy? Well, perhaps that last one is a bit much as it would have required brains. Without a war, does Lenin (the horrible, but indispensable man) ever return to Russia?
It was Italy's participation in the war, and the disappointment with its share of the spoils afterwards, that emboldened Mussolini and led to the rise of fascism. Without a war in 1914, does fascism still emerge?
And then, we have Germany without a losing war. Enough said.
If you'd forgotten how young Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver once looked, The Year of Living Dangerously is the movie for you. It also happens to be a fine movie. Saw it when it was first released in 1982 but not since. This reminds me to watch it again.
Director Peter Weir was on a role at the time. His prior film was Gallipoli and next up was Witness with Harrison Ford. Weir's best films have a distinct haunting and tense atmosphere about them.
The movie is set during the lead up to, and during, the Indonesian military coup in 1965 that removed President Sukarno. Gibson plays a newly arrived and naive reporter for an Australian TV network while Weaver portrays an employee at the British embassy. In an Academy Award winning performance Linda Hunt is Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian man.
The film was banned in Indonesia until 2000.
This video of L'Enfant by Vangelis from the film, triggered memories prompting this post.
THC graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976. In retrospect I now realize that BC Law was near the end of its transition from a trade school, where one went to learn the practice of law, to a law school aspiring to the upper ranks of academia. BC was successful and is now ranked around #20 among American law schools.
THC didn't enjoy law school. He was a poor student, more focused on getting out to a job than in studying. With the help of Dean Huber, with whom he did an independent study, THC was able to work full time during his third year and just show up to exams for the two courses he was enrolled in. Working did prove much more fulfilling than school.
Over the years, THC has witnessed the further transition of BC Law into an advocacy focused institution, like many of the other top law schools. In its faculty, course selections, and in BC Law Magazine it is uniformly progressive. It is about teaching students what the law ought to be in order to advance an ideological agenda, rather than what the law is. The magazine is its periodical celebration of those who best advance the cause.
An example can be found in the most recent issue of the magazine, an article on a new book by constitutional law professor Aziz Rana, titled The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them, which calls for "significant changes to our system of government" in order to deal with the "overlapping pathologies . . . of our governing arrangements." The core problem, according to Rana is:
"the existing order makes it especially difficult for today's multiracial and largely urban majority coalition to implement widely backed policies in response to significant social problems".
According to the article, Rana is gleeful that "creedal constitutionalism has begun to lose its hold on the American imagination", because progressives have been disappointed in recent elections and Supreme Court decisions.
Apparently the author is disappointed by the failure of FDR's court packing scheme in the 1930s, and admires "a little-remembered convention sponsored by the radical Black Panther movement and attended by a broad swath of the activist left, with the goal of replacing the Constitution with a more democratic document".
Professor Rana's views are representative of those of legal academia in the leading schools. He has the right pedigree; Harvard undergraduate; Yale Law School; member Council of Foreign Relations; and Fellow at the Quincy Institute think tank which is aligned with the Iran-China-Russia axis. And his views have been enthusiastically endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, according to the BC Law article.
The legal academy is part of the broader progressive movement which has tortured the meaning of democracy, so that its definition is now simply "anything progressives favor", while anything opposed to progressivism is "anti-democracy".
It is from the ranks of the students in these top law schools that the next generation of lawyers and judges will be drawn from. They come from a post-constitutional legal world where the only thing that counts is the result and furthering the progressive agenda. In this world, for a judge to decide a case in a way consistent with the law but not supportive of the progressive agenda would be unthinkable. The courts are essentially just another legislative branch.(1)
The purpose of the original constitution that progressive seek to overthrow was to establish a federal
government with defined and limited powers that allowed for individual
and regional diversity in beliefs and politics, and which did not impact most of the everyday life of its citizens.
The new constitution sought by those like Rana seeks to ensure a permanent entrenched federal regime in order to impose a defined set of beliefs and to punish dissent, while controlling the everyday life of its citizens. Implementing the "widely backed policies in response to significant social problems" is merely the excuse for repression and crackdowns on freedom of speech.
If you want to see the difference between those who believe in the "creedal constitution" and those who believe in "whatever gets it done", watch this exchange between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris during a 2020 campaign debate.(2)
In response to Joe Biden's criticism of her proposed executive actions on guns, Kamala Harris references Barack Obama's slogan: "Hey Joe—instead of saying, 'No we can't' let's say, 'Yes we can."
— The View (@TheView) September 13, 2019
"Let's be constitutional," Biden responds.https://t.co/qpCouATwrg #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/f9AlLKlgpc
UPDATE: Sept 27, 2025. Read this recent column by Jonathan Turley, The Counter-Constitutional Movement: The Assault on America's Defining Principles, being led by law professors disappointed about not getting the political results they desire because the existing document leads to too much "rights talk" and identifying free speech as America's "Achilles' heel".
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(1) To illustrate the transformation from liberal jurisprudence to progressive legislative jurisprudence, we can look at Roe v Wade. At the time, the 1973 decision received a great deal of criticism from legal scholars who supported liberalizing state abortion laws legislatively but felt Roe was bad constitutional law. As liberal constitutional scholar John Hart Ely wrote in a 1973 article responding to the decision,"Were I a legislator I would vote for a statute very much like the one the [Supreme] Court ends up drafting", but, as a constitutional matter, he concludes:
It [Roe v Wade] is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.
In 1970, Judge Henry Friendly of the Federal 2nd Circuit wrote a draft opinion regarding a challenge to New York's abortion law. Because the state modified its abortion statute prior to the opinion being issued, the draft was never released, and Friendly passed in 1986. However, the draft remained in one of his clerk's possession for thirty years before he spoke of it publicly and released the text. Friendly was one of the most highly regarded Federal judges of the time and supported the passage of more permissive abortion laws by state legislatures. However, Friendly's draft upheld the constitutionality of the New York law, despite his personal beliefs. This article, describing the draft opinion, was written by his clerk. Unfortunately, I have been unable to relocate the text of the draft though I read it online 15 or so years ago.
The analytical approach of Ely and Friendly is inconceivable for someone like Rana and, for that matter, most of today's progressives who see their role of using the judicial system to enact their legislative preferences. I should note that there are still occasional progressive holdouts in legal academia for the more traditional view; see, for instance, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School, regarding abortion, but their numbers are fast dwindling.
It is also why, in recent decades, when any politically sensitive issue is in front of the Supreme Court, the question is always whether one of the conservative justices will break ranks because everyone knows the opinions of the liberal justices will always conform to their policy preferences.
(2) After his election, President Biden adopted Harris' suggested approach to the Constitution.