Horrific Doctrines: Being a Cartoon Libertarian and Accepting Jesus as My Savior

Let me first state that I think Markets Without Limits by Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski is a fantastic book. Their argument that anything you can do for free you should also be allowed to do for money offers a useful means of talking about market morality within the general society. The price that they pay for this argument is that this is not a libertarian book. The authors, to their credit, make a point in avoiding the argument that anything consensual should be considered moral or legal. For example, they would morally oppose me posting nude pictures of my children on the internet regardless of whether we were paid for them. This has the virtue of not only being intellectually honest but also avoids allowing their argument to become confused with the non-aggression principle and rejected by the people who do not accept it. 

That being said, I was bothered by a passage that stated: "we did not write that book because neither of us agree with libertarian political morality. We have classical liberal sympathies, but we are not cartoon libertarians." (23) Obviously, Brennan and Jaworski do not have to accept libertarian political morality and, as I will argue later on, there are good reasons to reject it. My problem is that they seem to equate libertarian political morality with being a cartoon libertarian as if that was a bad thing. It is almost as if they are saying that it is ok to be a libertarian as long as you do not take libertarianism too seriously to the extent that it defines your political morality. Anyone who does that is a cartoon and not to be taken seriously. In that spirit, I wish to defend being a "cartoon libertarian;" you know that person who seems to reduce all politics to government is force and taxation is theft.  

I readily acknowledge that there are some serious limitations to running around saying "taxation is theft" a lot. For one thing, that is not enough to be a libertarian. One cannot theorize a full libertarian philosophy, let alone any kind of well-thought-out public policy proposals, merely by trying to proceed logically from that one premise. Furthermore, saying "taxation is theft" is likely to alienate people, including many libertarians. It is a horrific doctrine. Most people in government really mean well and some of them even honestly do good things. It is monstrous to truly believe that a politician standing up and saying that he has a plan to help sick children and the elderly get badly needed medical care is really the moral equivalent of a masked gunman who robs a hospital. Is it morally ok to shoot the politician? (In principle yes, even if it is unlikely to ever be practical.) If you are not bothered by this claim, you have either not properly thought it through or you are a sociopath, not someone who can be accepted as a member of the liberty family in good standing. That being said, I do defend the notion that taxation is theft and that it is important to be very open about it, even if it will forever banish us to the political margins. The reason for this is that, without the belief that taxation is theft, no libertarian movement will survive long in a meaningful sense as libertarians will all too easily be co-opted by other movements.

To understand this, it might be useful to consider the example of Christianity. At the heart of Orthodox Christianity is the belief that Jesus is the savior of the world. As I think even most Christians would agree, this is a horrific doctrine. (In its Calvinist form, it descends to Lovecraftian levels of horror.) I like to think of myself as a good person. I try really hard and I usually do the right thing. I need Jesus, because without him, no matter how hard I try and no matter my good intentions, I will never make myself right with God. No matter how many good deeds I might perform, I am not truly better than Hitler. Both Hitler and I are depraved sinners and deserve to burn in Hell. The only thing that might save me, in the end, is that Christ died on the cross as atonement. Even if no honestly decent person were sent to Hell, this would still be a horrific doctrine as it denies the possibility of personal righteousness so critical to how most people live their lives.   

Now, as a Jew, I might be tempted to look down on Christians for their "unenlightened" views and I think there is something to be said for how Jewish parochialism, in practice, is far more universalistic than Christianity. (The fact that Judaism is about God's relationship with a particular group of people opens the door to recognizing that God has all kinds of relationships with people that have nothing to do with Judaism. The fact that Judaism was never designed as a universalistic religion allows it not to be and for us to respect other people for being the righteous non-Jews, who are still right with God, that they are.) I suspect that even most practicing Christians would agree with me. (Please do not write to me to tell me that you are a Christian, but do not believe that I need to accept Jesus to avoid burning in Hell. You may be right, but that is beside the point.) That being said, Christianity would not be better off if only it took a more "ecumenical" view. On the contrary, such a Christianity would not long survive. It would simply be too easy for such a Christianity to be chopped up for parts. If you are on the political left, "love thy neighbor" is really a Jewish concept and it is likely that Buddhists might fulfill this commandment better than either religion. If you are on the right, you can be a Republican and still be a hypocrite about family values. None of these things require Jesus. It might serve the interests of those on either the left or right to continue to use the label "Christianity," but Christianity would cease as its own ideology, incapable of influencing Christians let alone the world. 

In a similar vein, C. S. Lewis argued that Christianity was the one religion that needed its miracle no matter how much that might trouble the modern scientific mind. If the life of Jesus was not some earth-shattering miracle of God becoming flesh, there would be no point to the religion. Jesus as a wise rabbinic teacher is useless for Christianity (hence Lewis' famous trilemma). You might as well be a Jew or practice some other ethical monotheistic religion, perhaps be a stoic philosopher. Just as Christianity needs its miracle as embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity needs its horrific doctrine that this miracle was necessary in the first place.   

Over the past few decades, it has been a strength precisely of Evangelical Christians that they have been willing to insist on the necessity of accepting Jesus as your savior despite the fact that it turns so many people off. Perhaps it has been their tragedy that they have not insisted hard enough and allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Republican Party to the extent of Evangelical leaders being willing to endorse Trump despite him being the most blatantly non-Christian major candidate in our country's history. They will pay a steep price for this as millions of Evangelical kids will turn around and ask their parents how they could endorse Trump for president and not endorse them for their lapses in Christian living such as pursuing an openly gay lifestyle. (One thinks of Shelby Steele's argument that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was fueled, in part, by white parents lacking the moral authority to denounce their children's sexual behavior on account that they had, at least passively, been complacent in the much greater evils of segregation and racism.)

Insisting that Jesus is the savior may sound simplistic, but there is an advantage to simplicity. Consider the example of the slave Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin. First, it is important to recognize that, contrary to what the name has come to imply, there is nothing weak about Tom. A person who allows himself to be beaten to death rather than give up information is anything but weak. The key to understanding Tom is that he is simple. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's hand, what sounds like a negative stereotype is turned on its head as Tom is fashioned into a model Christian. Tom knows one truth that his soul was bought and paid for on Calvary with the blood of Jesus. There are two corollaries to this claim. First, it is Christ's will that Tom is sent into slavery in order that he preach this Gospel truth to everyone, black and white. Second, while Tom might be obligated to obey orders, the white man is not his real owner. This is Tom's truth and he never allows himself to become distracted by other issues. If Tom were a more gifted theologian, read Augustine and learned to separate the political from the spiritual realm, he likely would have fallen either into despair at his circumstance or into flattering his masters. If Jesus did not send me to save the soul of even a wicked man like Simon Legree, I should probably do the world a favor and kill him while he lies drunk at my feet. Alternatively, maybe, if I speak nicely to the white man and tone down the plain truth that to own slaves is to deny Jesus, he will be good to me and might even set me free. Tom's last breath is to reject young George Shelby's attempt to buy his freedom. Shelby might want, in today's language, to be a "good white ally" of slaves, but if he were a better Christian, he would have realized that just as he never really had the power to enslave anyone, it is not within his power to make anyone free, Jesus already accomplished that. 

To bring this back to libertarianism, the claim "taxation is theft," like "Jesus is the savior," maybe a horrific doctrine that alienates most people, including libertarians, but it protects the movement from being captured by outside interests. In a sense, the very alienation created by saying that taxation is theft is valuable as a signaling device. Anyone with an outside agenda would be kept away precisely by a doctrine so abhorrent to anyone who is not a libertarian today. 

All libertarians have other allegiances, whether we come from the left or the right. A thick libertarianism that allowed itself to become distracted from "taxation is theft" would quickly lose its relevance. Left-libertarians can support civil liberties and right-libertarians can support property rights, while each side ignores the other part. Furthermore, one can always defend distinctly unlibertarian policies on libertarian grounds. Forcing Christians to bake gay wedding cakes or banning Muslim immigrants might, in the long run, serve to create a society more open to libertarian ideals. Thus, libertarianism can easily be infiltrated and used to support other ends. By insisting that "taxation is theft" be placed front and center of the movement we force everyone, left and right, to surrender any claim of using the government to advance even explicitly libertarian causes. Left or right-libertarian, I will find a way to work with you. You are allowed to accept the reality that we have government and, certainly for the near future, there may not be a better option. That being said, if you are not deeply troubled by the very concept of government action, you need to leave the movement.   

All ideologies have their horrific elements in that one is going to have to accept the equivalent of a pile of dead children. This is simply a matter of consistency. If you have not figured out how your beliefs lead to dead children or worse, you have not thought them out properly. There is a practical value to being open and honest about one's horrific doctrines. It allows you to keep out those who are merely trying to use you for their own ends. If they reject your horrific doctrines, you can assume that they have rejected other parts as well. So here is to the cartoon libertarians with their simple faith that taxation is theft. Your doctrine is horrific and you will never be more than a despised minority. You are also the reason why the libertarian movement will survive another generation and you are the reason why it is worth having a libertarian, movement, even one that is a despised minority, to begin with.  

A Helpful Message to Finish My Dissertation

Today I was reading up on John of Rupescissa. He was a fourteenth-century Franciscan apocalyptic visionary. He believed that the Jews would convert and be saved in the end. He also, like seemingly every self-respecting Franciscan of the period, got into trouble with the Church and spent the last years of his life in prison, (something to do with having very "un-Christian" ideas about Church poverty) from where he did most of his writings, ranging from the end of the world to alchemy. Tommaso Campanella, another Christian apocalyptic visionary I am studying, also spent over twenty years in prison for his part in a failed political revolution in Naples. (This was after he managed to convince the Inquisition he was insane by being tortured for two days straight.) He also used his time in prison to write productively and was released to spend the last few years of his life as a European court celebrity. Then there is the example of St. John of the Cross; my spiritual guide through depression. His inspiring poetry on life in a spiritual abyss, The Dark Night of the Soul, benefited from a year spent locked away against his will. (I could, of course, also mention Adolf Hitler, who managed to produce Mein Kempf during a year spent in prison, but he does not fit under medieval and early modern Christian thinkers.)  

I cannot help but feel that I am being sent a message, one that I would rather not hear. That the best place to write is not the office, the library, or even on a couch with the TV on, but in prison doing hard time for treason and heresy. So I need to go to federal prison as a violent religious apocalyptic revolutionary. To do that I am going to need to start a violent religious apocalyptic movement. (All violent religious apocalyptic actions will of course be carried out by erring disciples who have distorted my teachings.) In order to learn how to start such a movement, I will need to finish writing my dissertation. But of course, I cannot hope to finish my dissertation unless I go to prison.       

Why Israel Needs to Earn a Spot at the 2022 World Cup

Israel may not be a major soccer power in the world having only been to the World Cup once in 1970. But now the World Cup in 2022 is going to be held in the Arab country of Qatar. What might happen if Israel were to earn a spot? Would Qatar even allow the Israeli team to enter the country? One way or another having Israel take part should be enough to put egg in the faces of the entire Arab world much as Jesse Owens winning gold at the Berlin Olympic of 1936 was a slap at Hitler. Israelis love soccer so why not make it a national drive to get that spot. Young Israeli soccer fans can now dream of growing up and representing their country in a way that the world will not soon forget.  

C. S. Lewis On the Implications of the Nazi Holocaust

In his essay "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State," C. S. Lewis took a view that most people would associate with Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, as to the modern shift in regarding criminal punishment as no longer a debt paid to society as a matter of justice, but as a means of curing the patient of his pathological tendencies toward crime. Like Foucault, Lewis saw this shift in very negative terms as a direct assault on personal freedom, one that granted governments the power not only to enforce laws but to reshape man in whatever image best suited to the interests of the State. Lewis goes further, by arguing that the modern view of crime was a necessary component in allowing the Holocaust to happen:

I will mention the trainloads of Jews delivered at the German gas-chambers. It seems shocking to suggest a common element, but I think one exists. On the humanitarian view all crime is pathological; it demands not retributive punishment but cure. This separates the criminal's treatment from the concepts of justice and desert; a 'just cure' is meaningless.

On the old view public opinion might protest against a punishment (it protested against our old penal code) as excessive, more than the man 'deserved'; an ethical question on which anyone might have an opinion. But a remedial treatment can be judged only by the probability of its success; a technical question on which only experts can speak.

Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners. Observe how the 'humane' attitude to crime could operate. If crimes are diseases, why should diseases be treated differently from crimes? And who but the experts can define disease? One school of psychology regards my religion as a neurosis. If this neurosis ever becomes inconvenient to Government, what is to prevent my being subjected to a compulsory 'cure'? It may be painful; treatments sometimes are. But it will be no use asking, 'What have I done to deserve this?' The Straightener will reply: 'But, my dear fellow, no one's blaming you. We no longer believe in retributive justice. We're healing you.'

I take a similar attitude when teaching about the Nazis. The popular view of the Nazis as people motivated by hate, with the obvious liberal lesson of tolerance, misses the point. The Nazi leadership, by and large, particularly those directly involved in the Final Solution, was dominated by perfectly sane, reasonable, and rational people. They simply believed that the world would be a better place without any Jews in it. The Jew was suffering from a disease; since the disease, in practice, could not be cured, Jews themselves would have to go. From their perspective, those who planned the Final Solution were humanitarians, taking upon themselves the morally difficult task that other people would be too squeamish to carry out themselves. Reading up on Adolf Eichmann for example, I never got the sense that he hated Jews in any conventional sense. Can anyone conceive of Eichmann losing control and going on a Hitler-like rant about the evils of the Jews? Eichmann was a highly intelligent, rational person, committed to duty, whose reading of the modern situation, Kant, and Jewish literature led him to the conclusion that Jews needed to be removed, nothing personal.

Michael Oren: An Ambassador for Historians

I have been reading Michael Oren's Six Days of War about the Six Day War. One wonders if the people who protested his speech at UC of Irvine had read it. It probably would not have made much of a difference if they did. What struck me about Ambassador Oren, from reading his work, was the extent to which he goes to putting a human face to the Arab side. Oren uses a variety of sources to tell the story from multiple perspectives. Since he is not just using Israeli sources he is not forced into just telling the Israeli side to things. He uses American sources to bring the American government into the story, Soviet sources to bring the Soviet Union in and Arabic sources to bring the various Arab countries in. This very act of bringing Arab sources and seeking to come to terms with their narrative in of itself goes a long toward giving a balanced story. By doing this Oren, from the beginning, concedes to Arabs that they have a perspective and are not merely the satanic other. As such the story is no longer "you Arabs are the villains who must simply repent your wrongdoing and accept the judgment of the world against you." This sentiment is summarized by Oren in his introduction:

My purpose is not to prove the justness of one party or another in the war, or to assign culpability for starting it. I want, simply, to understand how an event as immensely influential as this war came about – to show the context from which it sprang and the catalysts that precipitated it.

I would describe Oren's narrative as a counter to the Leon Uris narrative of Zionism, for example in his novel Exodus. The world that Oren describes is distinctively not one in which it is simply heroic Israelis, outnumbered and outgunned, fending off hordes of Arabs intent on finishing what Hitler started. This is a drama moving from political to military leaders to diplomats. The actors are motivated by various things. Probably the most interesting thing about the book is Oren's argument that war was not inevitable. Diplomacy was something that could have worked if it were not for chance and the haphazard’s of Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian foreign policy between themselves and the Soviet Union and the power of the Arab street.

Michael Oren, while writing a pro-Israel book, manages to use his skill as a historian to offer a narrative that all sides could accept as a basis for a peace agreement. The fact that Oren would be a target of anti-Israel protestors demonstrates to what extent opponents of Israel are distant from ever coming to a meaningful peace. Not only do they reject Israel in practice, but they even reject the right of supporters of Israel to have any narrative of their own. There can be no negotiation, but simply the surrender of Israel as it confesses to being the villains and begs the pardon of the Arab world.

Email From Scott Lively: The Protocols are a George Bernard Shaw Conspiracy

Last night I received an email response to my post on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

At the Library of Congress is an obscure book by Samuel Igra which makes the case that "The Protocols...Zion" was actually written by George Bernard Shaw.  I don't remember the title, but I read a portion in DC when I was researching another book by Igra and I remember thinking at the time that his case seemed quite plausible, though I don't remember the details now.

It is common knowledge that Shaw was a close friend of the homosexual poet Bruce Douglas, the "translator" of the Protocols.  
Regards,
  
Dr. Scott Lively

Scott Lively (I am willing to assume this email is genuine and really does come from him.) is the head of Abiding Truths Ministry and Defend the Family. He has a doctorate in theology from the School of Bible Theology Seminary and University (Take a look at the website for yourself and decide for yourselves if you feel comfortable with referring to Lively as a doctor. He has a law degree from Trinity Law School and apparently is licensed to practice law in California. Finally he has a Certificate from the Institute of International Human Rights in Strasbourg France. (I always wondered how one becames an official human rights activist.) It is in his capacity as human rights activist that Lively has taken his most important role recently with his involvement with the Uganda gay laws. Lively seems to have managed to get the Ugandan government to abandon the death penalty for homosexuals and to opt for treatment.

Doing a bit of background research on Lively certainly clarified this email a bit, explaining who he was and why he would be interested in making the connection between homosexuality and anti-Semitism. Lively is even the author of a book, the Pink Swastika, which argues that the Nazis were a homosexual movement.

Samuel Igra, Lively's source, seems to have been one of the main originators of this Nazism and homosexuality link with his 1945 book, Germany's National Vice. According to Igra, Hitler was a homosexual prostitute in Vienna and then in Munich from 1907-1914. (See Gregory Woods A History of Gay Literature: the Male Tradition pg. 251-53.) Obviously, there were Nazis who were homosexuals. The most famous example was Ernst Rohm of the SD. While an early member of the party, Rohm was killed off in the infamous "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934. Considering the very real persecution of homosexuals under the Nazi regime, saying that Nazism was a homosexual movement (as opposed to individual Nazis being homosexual) strikes me as the height of perversity.

Bruce Douglas was the young lover of Oscar Wilde's, whose father got into a libel suit with Wilde, which eventually brought about the downfall of Wilde in English society. Douglas did do one of the first English translations of the Protocols in 1919, nearly twenty years after it was first written. The Protocols came out of Russia, and while it was plagiarized from many sources, including one French anti-Semitic tract, it is clearly a product of reactionary Russian circles. Personally I find the idea that George Bernard Shaw would have written the Protocols to be offensive. I would have no problem accepting Shaw as an anti-Semite along the lines of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But to think that Shaw would have written such a piece of garbage as the Protocols, boggles the mind. If Shaw had wanted to write a book about Jews plotting to rule the world, this book would have been a model of wit and would have me convinced to become an Elder.

I guess I should be grateful that Christians like Lively are concerned about anti-Semitism. All I can say is that with friends like these who needs enemies.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller and the Neturei Karta

One of the issues that have come up with this discussion on Authentic Judaism is that of Rabbi Avigdor Miller and his role in influencing some of the more radical Haredi bloggers. I brought it up in passing and Parshablog has dealt with it in more detail. Whatever problems one may have with the late Rabbi Miller (and believe me I do) Rabbi Miller is of little value in of himself as a target. He is no longer alive and the Haredi world has by and large rejected his more radical views. Rabbi Miller is still useful for going after Haredim because, despite the fact that most would say that they disagree with him on specific points, they still revere him as a scholar. I see this as an intellectual dodge and a moral failure to treat certain issues with due responsibility. This was brought home to me when discussing the issue of Rabbi Miller with Not Brisk, who, while not wishing to defend Rabbi Miller outright, did not hesitate to try to interest me in some of Rabbi Miller’s less polemical work. According to Not Brisk, even I “who obviously can't swallow his [Rabbi Miller’s] world opinions, can still take the ‘good’”. I do not question Rabbi Miller’s intelligence and I have no problem acknowledging that he has written things that are better than his tapes and his books Rejoice O Youth and Awake My Glory. That being said, these things are the Rabbi Miller that I know and apparently this is the Rabbi Miller that bloggers like Authentic Judaism and Jewish Philosopher know. Nothing that Rabbi Miller said could change this.

Not Brisk would have me bifurcate between the populist Rabbi Miller and the scholarly Rabbi Miller. Do not get me wrong, I have no problem with having a disagreement with someone and taking what I like about them and discarding what I do not. There are two different types of opposition; there is the opposition where the opponent is still viewed as legitimate and then there is the opposition where the opponent is cast aside as something satanic without any legitimacy. For example, I accept that different people are going to have different views on the State of Israel. You may disagree with me about the army or about settlements but we can agree that we are all good Jews here. I will still give you an aliya in shul and agree to eat in your home. That being said, a Neturei Karta person, who believes that Israel should be destroyed, would not be legitimate. (The Neturei Karta are a small but highly visible group. You can often see them at Israel rallies in Hasidic garb and waving Palestinian flags. They also gained a lot of attention when members of their group attended the infamous Holocaust denial conference in Iran.) A member of the Neturei Karta could study Torah sixteen hours a day and be the nicest person you have ever met. All of that would mean nothing against the fact that this person has plotted with and aided those who wish to murder Jews. It is a moral stance for me precisely to not bifurcate between a Neturei Karta member’s actions as a member of the Neturei Karta and his actions when off duty. (Similarly, I would not say that someone is in the Ku Klux Klan but he is nice to his mother. A member of the Klan is a member of the Klan, no ands ifs or buts.) Anyone who simply says that they do not personally agree with the Neturei Karta but still wish to accept them as another Jewish opinion is taking a stance and is morally culpable in the continued existence of the Neturei Karta. (To their credit the Haredi community has been pretty good at expelling the Neturei Karta.)

Among the many repulsive things in Rabbi Miller’s writing, Rabbi Miller took certain Neturei Karta type stances in regards to Israel. For example, Rabbi Miller has this to say about Zionism:

346. Let us see what they [the Zionists] have accomplished. They have succeeded in gaining for Jews the hostility of the entire Arab world and of most of the “Third World” nations. They have fomented bad relations with Russ and to some extent with France and Mexico. They have created animosity in the United States and elsewhere.
347. These achievements are of small benefit to Jews, but the Israelis and their Zionist proponents are persistent, because they hope to make all lands untenable for Jews (as they did in all Moslem countries) so that Jews be forced to settle in the State of Israel which is losing the population race against the local Arabs (one million Jewish babies have been slain by abortion in the State of Israel from 1948 to 1976, equal to the number of Jewish children slain by Hitler). (Awake My Glory pg. 104)

So according to Rabbi Miller, it is the fault of Zionism, not Arab anti-Semitism, for Arab hostility. It is Israel’s fault and not the Arabs that Sephardic and Yemenite Jews had to flee their homes. This is the classic Jews are responsible for anti-Semitism line. Finally, because Israel has legal abortion, the Israeli government is as bad as Hitler. Not surprisingly the Neturei Karta has made use of Rabbi Miller. Because of this, Rabbi Miller should be about as kosher as a bacon sandwich; not just some of the things that he said but everything. It is not good enough that the Haredi world accepts some things of his and ignores others.

When I was in the Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, one of the rabbis there recommended to me that I read Rabbi Miller as a good source on Jewish thought. (Little did he know that I was already a fan of listening to his tapes and yelling at them.) I am willing to give this rabbi the benefit of the doubt and imagine that if I were to show him the above passage he would be quick to say that he did not agree with it. That being said, the fact that, of all the people he could have told me to read, he sent me to Rabbi Miller raises certain questions. In a more liberal environment, where one comes expecting to be exposed to many different ideas, this would not have been such a problem. For example, someone coming to this blog has to understand that I love and value ideas for their own sake. They should not assume that just because I link to something and say that it is worthwhile to read that I agree with it. The yeshiva system, though, prides itself on the tight control it maintains on its students. These rabbis were, in essence, guaranteeing my father that they would not expose me to any questionable material. As such they cannot play innocent in exposing me to radical anti-Zionism. (This is why you never want to operate an authoritarian system. No one can live up to the implicit responsibility.) So what does it mean when this Haredi rabbi showed significantly less diligence in not exposing me to radical anti-Zionism than he did in not exposing me to say the writings of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook? (I am still waiting for it to be a common Haredi position to say that Rav Kook was a great Jewish thinker who everyone should read even though we may not accept some of his political positions.) I can only conclude that people like this Haredi rabbi do not really oppose Rabbi Miller’s position on Zionism, not in a meaningful way. Of course, when engaging in apologetics with outsiders it is important to deny this position. But, when in private, it can be tossed around as a perfectly legitimate option; something to keep in the bag for when the situation calls for some selective self-serving outrage against the Israeli government.

My Tisha B’Av Speech to the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation

Today is the fast day of Tisha B’Av (the ninth of Av) when traditional Jews mourn the destruction of the two Temples and the many subsequent tragedies of Jewish history. In honor of the event, every year the Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation, a Haredi organization, sponsors a video presentation shown to thousands of Jews across the world. The video usually features prominent Haredi speakers such as Rabbi Paysach Krohn (apparently he is not on for this year), Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky, Rabbi Yissocher Frand and Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon. (For some strange reason when I played the ad for the event on their website they had music playing in the background. Music is certainly not something permitted today.) Usually, when I try to go, I find that the combination of my empty stomach and the rancid theology on screen proves too much for me and I end up having to walk out before the end. For all those with similar theological-gastronomical dispositions, I offer you the speech that I am confident you will not be hearing this year from the Chofetz Chaim Foundation; it is, though, what I would say if I were given the chance to speak as part of their lineup.

A good churban to all of you gathered here today from across the globe. The fact that all of you are here in the afternoon on a fast day is remarkable. I say this because I do not wish to come across as completely negative in my comments, as someone who ignores the good in our community. Now that we have gotten past that I would like to move on to business. I am not much of a storyteller nor am I the sort who likes throwing around little vertlach on midrashim, with no purpose other than to entertain and offer pithy moral value statements. I am afraid that if you are looking for someone to make you feel good about yourself you have come to the wrong speaker. By my nature, I possess a skeptical view of human virtue along the lines of Augustine and John Calvin. (You can look those people up later.)

By training, I am a historian and a contemplator of human politics and society. From this, I have become a strong believer in the importance of a bottom-up understanding of human affairs. Major changes happen in society because the vast majority of society agreed to go along with them. As Leo Tolstoy (You can look him up later as well.) understood, those at the top, those supposed “great men,” are not the ones controlling events but are being controlled by them. For example, in the case of Nazi Germany, if you ask me who was responsible for the murder of six million Jews I would not say Hitler or those who ran the camps. Every society has its insane murderous people; they should be mercifully placed in mental hospitals, protected from harm or from harming others. The people really responsible were those regular sane German people who allowed Hitler to come to power and go to war. Without millions of regular Germans agreeing to serve in the German army and run German factories there is no World War II and no Holocaust. These were sane rational people who came to the sane and rational conclusion that the removal of Jews and other undesirables and the expropriation of their property would benefit them. Going along with the Lebensraum policy, had the sanity and rationality necessary for an act of first-degree murder. If it were up to me, I would have put the entire German population above the age of eighteen on trial at Nuremberg and those who could not prove that they actively tried to stop Hitler would have received a sentence of death. (Whether or not it would have been feasible to carry out such a sentence is another issue. Most probably this death sentence would have needed to remain something symbolic.)

Similarly, with the problem of Islamic terrorism, the people responsible for Islamic terrorism are not the terrorists, such as suicide bombers and the hijackers of September 11. The real people responsible are those Muslim and liberals who act as apologists for Islamic terrorism, blaming the West and Israel for bringing trouble upon themselves. I see such people on a regular basis on the college campus where I work. These people get to pursue their vendetta against the West and they hypocritically Pontius Pilate their hands of the affair. (Look it up.) They correctly claim to not be terrorists and make a big show of taking offense at any implication that they are. In truth, they are something worse, moral scoundrels, who lack the courage to pay the true price of their beliefs.

The past few weeks have seen numerous scandals erupt from our community; whether it is youngsters from our community burning trash cans and smashing traffic lights or the arrest of rabbanim in New Jersey. The common refrain is that these are the sins of just a small minority and have nothing to do with the overwhelming majority of us who are good righteous people. My response is that these are precisely the sins not of the few but of all of us in the community for they happen because we, as a community, are making the sane rational, and immoral choices that allow for it. And let us not play innocent here, we benefit from these things. The least we can do is have the decency to openly endorse what was done.

Why do we have a population of youngsters with time on their hands and a lack of any concern for secular authority to riot? Should young men in their teens and early twenties not be in school, learning a useful trade, or in the workplace practicing a trade? No, because we created a system in Israel in which young men must sit and study Gemara and are discouraged from pursuing any other option. Most people, including people with high levels of intelligence and talent as it pertains to other fields, are not suited for Gemara. Such people might be well suited for other fields of endeavor, but they are trapped by the system they are in; the system we have created. People in such a situation might be tempted to leave the community to pursue other options, but refrain from doing so, in large part, because we have taught them to hate, fear and despise the outside world. Make no mistake about it, we did it with intent; we taught them this precisely because we knew that by doing so we could stop them from leaving, joining the ranks of the off the derech and becoming an embarrassing statistic. So we reap what we have sown in the riots. We can no more say that we did not want or endorse the riots than Arabs can denounce the state of Israel as a Nazi occupier and not support the terrorism used to destroy it.

Jewish life is expensive with tuition and large families. It does not help matters if you are less than enthusiastic about advanced secular education. (A necessary platform for many of the sorts of jobs that allow one to pay for such a lifestyle.) We can try giving tuition breaks to needy families, but that simply spreads the cost somewhere else. At the end of the day we, as a community, have to be able to come up with the funds to support ourselves. You are shocked and horrified that members of our community, even leaders in our community, turned to defrauding people of their kidneys? I am talking to the real criminals right now. No one here can play innocent. We just thought it would be best to look the other way and hoped that if we did not notice no one else would. And some Germans innocently thought that the Jews could all just be shipped off to the East and everyone would be the better for it.

For all of you so-called “Modern Orthodox” Jews sitting in this audience, feeling pretty good about yourselves right now; I mean you too. You have allowed yourselves the luxury of using systems built by others. Why are you sitting here listening to this lineup of speakers; why do you not have your own speakers, who actually believe in the sorts of things you claim to believe in? It is sheer laziness. You abandon the running of Torah-true Judaism to people who support an ideology you oppose. Do you think it actually matters that, when this ideology fails, you can claim that you did not support it; for all intents and purposes you did support it.

In conclusion, let us resolve ourselves to taking some moral responsibility for what goes on in our world. There is a churban going on right now. If you are one of those people who looked at articles in the press about Haredi rioting and complained that we are being picked on then you are responsible for our churban. If you are one of those people making comments on websites like the one run by Rabbi Yakov Horowitz, telling him that he needs to stop talking about what is wrong with our community and do more to tell us how wonderful we are, then you are part of the churban. My bracha to you all is that, if we take it upon ourselves to clean up our own mess, Hashem should bless us so that next year we will have the luxury of only having to mourn the burning of a building in the year 70 C. E.

My Flight to England or How British Airways Lost my Suit Bag

After a hearty goodbye from Dallas Blumenfield, I headed off to JFK airport to catch my flight to England on British Airways. Upon boarding the plane I found myself seated in the middle between a secular Israeli girl in a tube top on one side and a Yeshiva student in a hat and jacket on the other side. Sounds like a good set up for a comedy sketch. I am not sure how three Jews ended up seated together, maybe someone at the airlines had a sense of humor. The girl was going back to Israel after spending a year in the States, studying theater. The guy was studying the Talmudic tractate of Sukkah. I think it says something to my credit that I was capable of engaging both of them in an intelligent conversation on their field of choice.

The special kosher dinner was quite good. I had chicken and rice with my favorite vegetable, eggplant, and chocolate mousse for desert. There was also humus, but I do not eat that so I left it to the side. The economy seat I was in, I am sure, does not compare to the first class seats I drooled over on my way through the plane, but were comfortable enough for this devotee of self imposed poverty. Most importantly there was a decent collection of movies to watch to distract me from my usual claustrophobia.

The first film I watched was Gran Torino. I must say there is something to Clint Eastwood at almost eighty years old beating the tar out of guys young enough to be his great grandchildren and it being believable. Eastwood seems to have a knack for making films that seem to be simple feel good films until the end where they take a disturbing turn, leaving a film that is truly provocative, with no easy answers. Million Dollar Baby, for example, was Rocky meets My Fair Lady up until the last half hour where it got really dark and interesting. Grano Torino on the surface seems to be about a bigoted old man learning to tolerate his Hmong neighbors. Fortunately it is actually much more interesting than that.

I was not so fortunate with the other two films I watched. Taken was Twenty-Four Season One with Liam Nielson in the starring role. Nielson’s character, like Jack Bauer, has several hours to save his kidnapped daughter and single mindedly pursues this goal without even a break to eat, sleep or use the restroom. Coincidently the film had Xander Berkeley, who played George Mason on Twenty-Four. Unfortunately Taken lacks that addictive quality that made Twenty-Four so much more than fun stupidity, leaving us with simple stupidity.

The final film I watched was Valkyrie, which was about the plot by members of the German army to assassinate Hitler in June 1944. As someone who teaches the events of the film, I had been meaning to see the film. The film crashes on Tom Cruise being very American surrounded by a cast of distinctively British actors or German actors who come across as very British. For a story whose plot centers on the psychological motivations of World War II German army officers, this is a problem. If you want to see a truly brilliant film about Hitler, see the German film Downfall. Coincidently Valkyrie had two actors who appeared in Downfall, Thomas Kretschmann and Christian Berkel.

Upon arriving at Heathrow airport, I was held up at immigration. I would have taken this as a badge of honor if it had been because I was transporting a WMD or if someone had read my blog and decided that I was a national security risk or at least a basic level hate monger like Michael Savage. The problem was that the last time I had used my passport, back when I traveled to Israel in 2000-01, I overstayed my three months without bothering to get my passport stamped again. If my memory serves me correctly, my yeshiva was supposed to send all the passports in to get them stamped, but there was a problem at the time with the government office being on strike (that happens a lot in Israel). So in the end it was never done and when I left the country I got lectured by the lady checking my passport. I never thought that my teenage laziness and unconcern for bureaucracy in one country would come back to trouble me nearly a decade later in another one. The people at immigration eventually asked me to produce evidence that I had a ticket out of England in three weeks time like I said. I was given leave to enter for six months with “no work or recourse to public funds.” This is a good example why we need libertarian governments around the world. A libertarian government would have no need to worry about immigration and border control, beyond checking for WMDs; a libertarian government would have no government services for illegal immigrants to take advantage of. Anyone, therefore, would be allowed to just come and compete for jobs on an open market and after a few years, if they did not break any laws, they could apply for citizenship.

This holdup at immigration for over an hour had further repercussions beyond wasting my time. By the time I reached baggage reclamation, my suit bag had gone missing. I had to wait around several more hours (keep in mind that I had not slept the previous night) while the people at baggage decided that my bag was really missing and sent me on my way. I was debating whether I would want them to find the bag or not. On the balance was my dream of being able to go shopping to replace my two suits and almost all of my good shirts on their pound with my nightmare of going clothes shopping and of making my way through the inevitable paperwork. In the end British Airways found the suit bag a day later and sent it to me. I was hoping that they would give me something for my trouble like an upgrade to those first class suits I was drooling over, but no such luck.

History 112: World War II

1. The Soviet Union seems to be largely ignored and get away with all that they did during WWII in the end being one of the allies defeating Germany and keeping largely what they had won. Despite the fact that this led to the Cold War between the US and USSR, overall it seems as if the USSR got away with a lot because Germany was once again set as the major instigator of the conflicts. So, I guess the question is why that is?

Once the Soviet Union was attacked it became our good ally. Watch the Frank Capra films “Why We Fight World War II.” These were American propaganda films made for the army during the war. Soviet atrocities are completely ignored. Capra even ignores the existence of Ribbentrop-Molotov. You will hear nothing about how the Soviets were co-conspirators in this.


2. In the text it mentions a friendship pact between Hitler and Stalin. I was slightly confused by this section having never learned this throughout my schooling. So did USSR have concentration camps that they sent Polish people too? Did USSR invade countries also before the war started?

Yes the Soviet Union had concentration camps. They were called Gulags. Yes the Soviet Union engaged in genocidal activities to destroy the cultures of subjugated peoples like the Poles and the Ukrainians. The Soviet Union engaged in acts of aggression, just like the Nazis, against nations such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania. Unlike the Nazis, Soviet oppression did not end with 1945. It continued all the way up to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. The fact that your teacher did not see fit to pass this information on to you means that either you were not paying attention or that your teacher was some liberal with an ideological interest in ignoring Communist crimes. This is different from Nazi crimes which have the implicit lesson on the inherent evils of Fascism. Some people have a problem with unapologetically saying that Communism is an inherent evil.


3. American children learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust at an early age. Yet some may never learn about the genocide in the Ukraine we discussed last week. I was wondering if in other places, this is reversed. Do we learn more about the Holocaust because it was more terrible or because we have a large and powerful Jewish population? I find it bothersome that so many other instances of genocide, both past and current, remain largely unknown among the general American population. I'd like to know how you feel about this subject, especially since you are Jewish and you are more closely tied to these events than me.

“The Jewish lobby” plays a major role in putting the Holocaust front and center in American culture. I do not see anything sinister in this. There are many Jews in positions of cultural influence and they use it to their advantage. It helps if you can have Steven Spielberg to make movies for you. I am sure the Armenians and the Ukrainians would love to have him. That being said there is something special about the Holocaust. This was not a case of millions of people dying due to extreme government negligence nor is this a case of a breakdown in government order with armed soldiers or mobs going out of control and massacring people. The Holocaust happened because some very smart people in suits, ties and with college degrees sat down and planned it. They wished to annihilate a specific group of people and, armed with the full resources of a modern state, they pursued that goal with remarkable efficiency.


4. Davies said "The Poles thought that their task was to hold off the German advance for fifteen days until the French crossed the German frontier in the West; in fact, they faced the impossible task of holding off both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army on their own. The French launched no offensive; the British limited their assistance to dropping leaflets over Berlin," (1000-1001). Davies doesn't really go into any further detail about this, but has any other historian explored this? Was it another instance of miscommunication--as was seen in WWI with the telegraph system? Or can the British and French be partially blamed for the devastation that engulfed Poland? It seems like perhaps England and France's disregard for their Polish ally has been buried underneath their eventual victory. Why didn't they help Poland as the Polish were expecting?

Neither the British nor the French were prepared for any serious military action. This was one of the reasons why Hitler decided to make his move against Poland in September of 1939 instead of waiting. There was a French “invasion” which I am familiar with from reading William Shirer. He was an American correspondent, who worked in Germany into the war. He reports how the French made a big deal about their actions. He then went and talked to some of his contacts in the German army and find out in great detail how little the French were doing. Shirer would later go on to write the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.


5. Wouldn't it have been obvious to the German's that turning against the Soviet Union was a bad idea? I mean, it caused them to be land locked between enemies on the East and West, plus the Soviet Union, from what we read, seemed to be a world power. Why didn't Germany try to formulate a peaceful position with the Soviet Union?

You have to keep in mind that Germany was at war with England and it was a reasonable assumption that the United States would eventually come into the war on the side of England. You have to admit that there is a certain logic to trying to take out the Soviet Union while the situation in the West was still relatively quiet. This plan almost succeeded; the Soviet army was almost completely annihilated in a matter of months. You would be hard pressed to find a country that ever suffered a military disaster like what the Soviet Union did. You are not going to find a country that ever managed to come back from such a disaster.


6. This questions isn't really about the reading but over the weekend I watched the movie "Valkyrie." I was just curious to know how historically accurate the movie is? Also I am curious to know if you think the plan to overthrow Hitler ever had a good chance of success?

I have not seen the movie so I will refrain from commenting on it. The case of Valkyrie is a good litmus test as to ones views on the power of individuals. Let us imagine that everything had gone according to plan and the bomb had eliminated Hitler. Now what? The German staff officers, who planned this, put a lot of thought into how to get Hitler and they planned that part well. It failed for reasons outside of their control. They made an utter mess out of trying to seize power in the hours after the bomb went off. That was the important part, not their ability to assassinate one man. I imagine that if Hitler had died in the blast then Goebbels, Himmler and Goering would have stepped in and the Third Reich would have continued.


7. Do you believe Germany planted spies within the French/British governments?

It is not a question if they did or did not. We know for a fact that the Nazis did. The British counter-intelligence services were quite effective, though, in capturing German spies and forcing them to pass on false intelligence.


8. How did Switzerland manage to maintain its neutrality during WW2?

The official reason, at the times, was that Switzerland possessed a well trained army and an advantageous defensive position. What we now know is that the Swiss government was actively cooperating with Hitler. They helped launder gold plundered by the Nazis, some of it even from the teeth of dead concentration camp inmates.

History 112: The Rise of Nazi Germany (Q&A and Quiz)

1. In the reading it briefly mentions how the Nazis did not identify with mainstream religions. I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel a while ago about the Nazi's "occult conspiracy," which talked about Hitler's dependence on astrological predictions, even leading him to have a person astrologer. How much truth is there in this? What's your opinion?

The interest by Hitler and many of the leading Nazis in the occult is quite real. For example it is believed that Hitler held back from counterattacking after the Normandy invasion on the advice of his astrologer who told him that the real allied attack would come at Calais. In what is probably the most bizarre incident of the war, Rudolph Hess grabbed a plane and crashed-landed in Scotland because his astrologer told him that he was destined to bring about a peace treaty between Germany and England. Himmler set up his own neo-pagan religion for the SS. This issue of Nazi beliefs has gained public interest, at least within the realms of internet polemics, in recent years because of the rise of the new atheism of Richard Dawkins, which argues that organized religion leads to mass murder. Opponents of Dawkins have been very quick to point to Hitler and Stalin and argue that the two most blood soaked regimes in history were militantly secular.


2. In the Davies text it mentions that Mussolini prided himself on being separate from Hitler until 1939, did the two men get along, or did they have plans to conquer each other?

The fact that Mussolini eventually joined with Hitler was never inevitable and in fact the two were quite hostile to each other into the late 1930s. It is important to keep in mind that Fascism is not a movement. It is simply a convenient label that we use in order to group certain movements together.


3. From what I gathered from the Davies reading, it seems that Hitler had the SS blackshirts and brownshirts as his "stormtroopers" or militia. What exactly were these entities and how were they different?

A major part of the early Nazi rise to power, from when they began until shortly after they took power, was their ability to use street gangs in order to beat up opponents, particularly Communists and Jews. Keep in mind that up until that later part of the 1930s there is still a meaningful distinction between Germany and the Nazi party. The Nazi party at this early stage did not have direct access to the police and military arms of the state so they needed some form of military power of their own to enforce their totalitarian agenda. One can see this with the use of the SA and SS. The SA was the armed force of the early Nazi period. These were common street thugs, not that different from our modern Crypts and Bloods. The SA are eliminated in 1934 in the “Night of the Long Knives.” The group that comes to replace the SA is the SS led by Himmler. The SS operates with the full power of the state. They are a lot more sophisticated and a whole lot more ruthless.

4. If Hitler would have died in WWI do you think there still would have been a second world war? Secondly, since I haven't asked questions for all the classes, why is it do you think that the Nazis were able to scare everyone into their party. What i have gathered about the situation was that most people were forced to be a part of the Nazi German Army.

This question is a classic example of the great man issue in history; to what extent do “great” individuals affect the course of history? Popular history tends to focus heavily on individuals because it makes a better narrative. Professional historians tend to be more weary of such a claim. Hitler was certainly a talented speaker and a forceful personality, but he was not the only person capable of doing the sorts of things that he did. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that Nazi history could have proceeded without Hitler, but with someone else at the helm. Earlier this year I had a discussion with Dr. Stephen Kern about this issue. He actually came out quite strongly on the side of no Hitler no Holocaust.

Personally I think this whole notion of saying that the German people were scared lets ordinary Germans off the hook. Hitler could not have waged World War II and the Holocaust without active willing cooperation of the vast majority of Germans. You want to know who to blame for World War II and the Holocaust? Forget about Hitler, he was just a man standing in front of a microphone. The real culprits were the millions of German citizens who went along with it. I would recommend Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. It has often been criticized for humanizing Adolph Eichmann, one of the central figures behind the Holocaust, who was kidnapped by the State of Israel, put on trial and executed. For me humanizing Eichmann turns him into every ordinary German who went along with the flow and by extension turns every ordinary German into Eichmann. On share moral grounds I would have had no moral objection to, in 1945, lining up every German man and woman over the age of eighteen who could not prove that they actively worked against the Nazi regime and shooting them. On practical grounds this could never be carried through, but there is no doubt in my mind that every one of them deserved to die.

5. How does Hitler get enough political coverage to get 96% of the German vote? Did class differences play into the voter turnout, as I am sure that it would be common people who supported him, as he was, in some limited sense, a collectivist?

When a leader is a getting 90% of the vote you know that this is not a fair election. Think how difficult it is to get 60% of Americans to agree on something. In real societies people have dissenting opinions. If you are not seeing large amounts of dissent than what you are seeing is a mirage.

6. Was Hitler only racist against Jews? Or did he just dislike everyone else other than his own people?

Nazi ideology held numerous groups to be subhuman, Slavs, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals and Jehovah Witnesses are some of the groups that come to mind. In addition to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the Nazis killed another four to six million people from other undesirable groups. Anti Semitism, though, clearly had a special place in Nazi ideology. For the Nazis, Jews were not just a group of undesirables; they were the undesirable group par excellence. Jews were the great enemy behind both Capitalism and Communism, which Germany would have to defeat.


For the quiz I asked the following questions:


1. What were the “Three Estates” in Old Regime France and how did their existence contribute to the breakout of the French Revolution? (2 pts)

2. What did “Liberalism” and “Conservatism” mean in the nineteenth century? How are these terms different from how we use them today? (3 pts)

3. According Karl Marx: “All hitherto history is the history of … (1 pt)

4. How did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lead to the start of World War I? (2 pts)

5. What were the two Russian revolutions of 1917? (2pts.)


Bonus: What peace treaty did Hitler blame Germany’s woes on? (1 pts)

History 112: The Russian Revolution (Q&A)

In class today we did the Russian Revolution, going from Russia’s participation in World War I, the February and October revolutions, the Russian Civil War through the rise of Stalin. Like last quarter I assigned a section from John Scott’s Beyond the Urals. Scott was an American who worked in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.


1. In your opinion, do you think the revolution was brought about by Russia's involvement in WW1, or was it an inevitable occurrence?
2. Some of the readings suggested that the Russian government was already in anarchy before being overtaken by the Bolsheviks. What caused the anarchy other than the war?

The Czarist government had serious problems and World War I was a major crisis. All governments have their moments of crisis. Crises, though, have a way a bringing to light the depth or lack of which of any government. A more able government could have survived a crisis like World War I. As with the financial crisis in France which highlighted the failures of the Monarchy, World War I put the Czarist government in all of its disfunctionality on display and they did not survive.

3. For class today, I cannot help but remember how closed off I thought the Soviet Union was immediately after its revolution. How is it that this American worker was able to so easily get work and a visa into Russia at this time?
4. At which point did the Soviet Union become an enemy of the US?

The funny thing about the Soviet Union between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War II is the extent they remained in contact with the West. This is not the Cold War. At this point the Soviet Union still believed that it could win the ideological struggle with the West on economic grounds. Considering that the Great Depression was going on, this was not as implausible as it might seem. Post World War II America is an unchallengeable economic superpower. Also both sides are facing off with nuclear weapons. This makes for a far tenser situation. The post World War II Soviet Union is not a place where an American citizen would be very welcome.

5. Was this a common thing for young people to leave the US to find work in other countries?

I certainly would not view this as something common. It is a theme that shows up in a number of writers during this period. For example Ernest Hemmingway was this traveling American, doing different jobs in different countries. This formed the basis for many of his novels.

6. The whole Davies text is about the cruelties performed by Stalin. Why did the people of Russia and the politicians not over throw him if he was so crazy and killing millions of innocent people? Why was he ever allowed to get into that kind of power?

The question you have to ask yourself is who was supporting Stalin. Stalin by himself was just one man. He needed an entire bureaucratic apparatus to carry out his plans and kill millions of people for him. One of the things that I like so much about Scott is that he gives you a picture of Russian society where people are willing to go along with Stalinism because they believed that, despite the hardships, Stalin’s push to industrialism would benefit them.

7. Usually when learning about World War II you hear more about Hitler than you do Stalin, in terms of war crimes who was considered to be the worst?

I would respond by saying that it is not obvious to me that Hitler was worse. Stalin has benefited from a number of things. While most Americans see Nazi ideology as inherently evil, Communism manages to get away with at least having good intentions. People are therefore willing to “forgive” Communism for its crimes. Americans feel guilty over the persecution of Communists in this country. I guess you can say that Americans are lucky that they have never faced a homegrown Communist movement that posed a serious political threat. Jews have done an effective job at keeping the Holocaust in the public eye through Holocaust movies and school curriculums. I suspect that things would be different if you regularly had movies and lesson plans on the Ukrainian “Holocaust.”

8. I notice a lot of dictators in the past had good public speaking skills (Hitler for example). Was Stalin also one? Would you say his speeches were more about scaring people, or more about encouraging people to do what he wanted?

One of the interesting things about Stalin was that, unlike Lenin or Trotsky, he was that he was never much of an orator. He stayed isolated in the Kremlin and sent out orders from there. He was the hidden deity of the Soviet Union.