Haiti the quintessential dysfunctional society

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In doing some reading of Tom Watson’s writing on the Leo Frank case I came across an interesting comment on Haiti from 1915. (Watson was the only media figure who argued for Frank’s guilt and for the justice of Frank’s lynching.) Watson quotes a passage from a New Republic article on Frank’s lynching that illustrates the common perception of Haiti at the time. Like the rest of the mainstream media of the time, The New Republic was condemning the lynching of Leo Frank, comparing Georgia with Haiti, which is pretty much the worst thing you could say about a society:

A people which cannot preserve its legal fabric from violence is unfit for self-government. It belongs in the category of communities like Haiti, comunities which have to be supervised and protected by more civilized powers. Georgia is in that humiliating position today. If the Frank case is evidence of Georgia’s political development, then Georgia deserves to be known as the black sheep of the American Union.

In short, nothing much has changed in Haiti in 100 years. The only exception is the attitudes of the liberal media: The New Republic‘s liberal politics didn’t prevent it from attributing Haiti’s troubles to its lack of civilization.

The US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see a de facto occupation again. Haiti is already on welfare — a “Republic of NGOs” where half the budget comes from foreign aid and 3000 NGOs operate most government services, including education and health care. (A search on Haiti and NGOs turns up lot of articles blaming Haiti’s problems on poorly managed charity or  as a modern form of imperialism! See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

The other thing that has changed in 100 years is that now there is a very real danger is that Haitians will now be allowed to immigrate in huge numbers to the US. VDARE.com’s blog is an indispensable source of information on this. As Rob Sanchez writes, Haiti is about to become our Camp of the Saints. There are sure to be hundreds of thousands of orphaned children and others pulling at America’s heart strings. And as Patrick Cleburne notes, their neighbors in the Dominican Republic are not so stupid, but already there are calls for mass airlifts of Haitian children to the US. Will the first Black president in American history stop it. I rather doubt it.

But if there is a huge influx of Haitians, I do think that the great majority of Whites (apart from the Angelina Jolie types and professors in the humanities and social sciences) will recoil against it. It would be a politically risky move for an administration that already has little support among White Americans.

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Hermann and the Death of German Studies

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In the U.S., German scholars are constrained to teach only the works of Germans of Jewish background, their courses dwelling on persecution and genocide. Indeed, it is not too far fetched to suppose that German culture as a culture of Germans has disappeared entirely, replaced by the culture of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has not only become a quasi religion capable of eradicating the remnants of German culture, Jews have become sanctified as a people. (Kevin MacDonald, Preface to the paperback edition, The Culture of Critique).

The city of New Ulm, Minnesota, founded in 1854 by a group of German immigrants, is home to an imposing statue of the Germanic chieftain, Hermann. In the year 9AD, a coalition of Germanic tribes under Hermann for the first time in the history of the Germanic tribes ambushed and defeated three invading Roman legions commanded by Quinctilius Varus. The defeat, in the Teutoburger Forest, caused Caesar Augustus and his successors to forego conquering north central Europe. A new imperial policy changed European history for the people of central Europe, who developed independently of Roman rule.

In 1897, the Sons of Hermann, an American national fraternal organization of German Americans, proud of its heritage and desiring to keep it alive for future generations, commissioned a monumental statue of Hermann to be erected in a New Ulm city park. The Hermann Monument is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On September 24, 2009, a two thousand year ethnic celebration commemorating the victory of Hermann the German against foreign aggression took place in New Ulm, MN.

The Hermann Monument, New Ulm, Minnesota

The Hermann celebration was an isolated example of German ethnic identification in this country, even though Germans represent the largest ancestry group in the US. California and Texas have the largest populations of German origin, while the states of the Midwest, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have the most concentrated German populations.

In spite of their numbers, however, the study of the language and literature of the German people has dropped drastically nationwide. In 2006, only 6% of students learning a foreign language nationwide were enrolled in German. Many schools no longer offer German as a subject of study. Some colleges have eliminated whole departments of German and replaced them with departments of non-European languages. The University of Southern California, for example, after dropping its doctoral program about a decade ago, recently eliminated its entire German department. Spanish, of course, continues to grow, though most of its speakers on this Continent are of non-European descent. The languages that are experiencing tremendous growth nationwide in numbers of learners include Mandarin, Japanese, Urdu, and Arabic.

What does this mean for people of European descent? Unfortunately, it means a serious loss of connection to their European heritage and culture. Language is intrinsically connected to ethnic identity and allegiance to the group with which one shares ancestral links. Even where modern day ethnic groups can claim no country of their own, as in the case of the Welsh, the Basques, and the Kurds, retaining their language has enabled these groups to remain viable.

The elimination of German from the curriculum is occurring even in those areas of the country which have a majority German-American population. Notwithstanding Garrison Keillor’s stereotype of Minnesota as majority Lutheran-Norwegian, Minnesota is actually home to 36.7% people of German ancestry. Those of Norwegian background total 17.3%, Irish 11.2%, Swedish 9.9%, and English 6.3% (US Census Bureau Report June, 2004).  A significant number of mestizos have taken residence in Minnesota since the last census, and the Federal Government has placed large numbers of Hmong, a South-east Asian people, and  Somalian Negroes into the Twin City area, no doubt altering the proportions somewhat. The largest faith group is Catholic. Jews comprise .9% of the population.

Suppressed during the two World Wars, German re-established its place as one of the two most popular languages after each War. Until recently, many of the students in German language courses were “heritage learners,” students who wanted to remain connected to the language of their forefathers. In addition, German, along with French, has always been considered a language of research and cultural refinement. Now, however, English has become the language of research, cultural refinement is passé, and economic interests have displaced cultural connections for Whites. Perhaps school districts are receiving directives to remove German. Possibly also the continuing revilement against Germans caused by the unceasing barrage of venomous anti-German Holocaust memoirs, films, and television programs has contributed to the decline in German language learning.

For whatever reasons, the result is that German has all but disappeared from public high schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Currently, of the seven public high schools in Minneapolis, all offer Spanish (multiple classes at each level), 6 offer French, 3 Mandarin, 2 Japanese, 1 Arabic, 1 Latin, 1 Ojibwe, (a Native American language), and 1 German. (See here.) The situation is similar in St. Paul. (See here.)

Like the public schools of the Twin Cities, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, is a tax-supported institution and many of its 51,000 students are residents of the State.  UM does not appear on the Hillel list of the 60 colleges and universities with the largest Jewish student enrollments. In the past, significant numbers of high school German teachers were trained at this campus. Students who obtained their Ph.D. were frequently offered positions on the faculties of smaller Midwest colleges.

As mentioned earlier, a number of colleges in the country have eliminated their German departments entirely. Others have rescued them from extinction by changing their concentration away from the traditional study of language and literature to the vocational study of “Business German.” UM retains a foreign language requirement and the University’s German Department (German, Scandinavian and Dutch) continues to offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in language and literature.

The focus of its teaching and research has shifted, however, from analyzing literary merit to promulgating politically correct social causes. The following is a comment not only on the state of German studies, but an excellent case study of what university departments in the humanities have become — bastions of the left influenced deeply by Jewish concerns and by Jewish intellectual movements, particularly the Frankfurt School. The following dissertation titles, course descriptions, and faculty publications all reflect the change in direction which the study of German literature has taken.

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Some recent representative dissertation titles include:

Toward a Multiculturalism for the 21st Century: German and Scandinavian Literary Perspectives, 1990–2005

Projecting Deviance/Seeing Queerly: Homosexual Representation and Queer Spectatorship in 1950’s Germany

Reading and Revising the Topography of German culture: Christina Reining on Gender and Sexuality

Representing the Afro-German in Early West German Cinema

The Space of Words: Diaspora and Exile in the Works of Nelly Sachs

Off the Road: Remapping the Shoah Representation from the Perspectives of Ordinary Jewish Women

Negotiating the German-Jewish: the Uncomfortable Writing of Karl Emil Franzos

Writing against Objectification: German Jewish Identity in the Works of Grete Weil and Ruth Klueger

Represented here are the favorite topics of “cultural criticism”: sexism, racism, homophobia, diversity, immigration, multiculturalism, and Jewish victimization. No work from the rich canon of German literature is the subject of a dissertation. Sadly, the literary criticism that grew out of the Frankfurt School and has monopolized the interpretation of literature in English and foreign language literature departments for the last thirty years will no doubt continue. Complacent non-Jewish graduate students are being recruited and trained to enshrine the politically correct ideology permanently into the American University system.

Banner for the University of Minnesota Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch, with Star of David

Below is a quick overview of some key faculty members — all graduates of elite Eastern universities, who publish, teach graduate courses, and advise grad students on dissertations. They also recommend students for grants and fellowships and future employment. Quotations are from the annual magazine of the German Department.

Professor Ruth-Ellen Joeres, Department of German

“She has a vision about how to open up the canon of German Literature and a determination to rewrite history to include women….In Nov. 2006 an interdisciplinary conference titled, ‘Gender, Genre, and Political Transformation’was held in her honor… (on teaching Goethe’s Faust) she has the students read through the lens of their choice: Bakhtian, Freud, gender theory, or queer theory’…. I don’t believe in objectivity.”

Courses include:

Women Writers in German Literature: Writings and Films of Minority Women. “In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”?

Topics in Literature and Diversity: Diversity Troubles. One of the required texts for this course is the novel, Der Vorleser, by the contemporary German novelist, essayist, and judge, Bernard Schlink. Published in English in 2008, as The Reader, it was recently made into an American film. The novel deals with the guilt of an illiterate German woman for her actions in a German concentration camp. In 2005, while filming The Reader, Kate Winslet, its star, stated, “I don’t think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we? … No, I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust (you’re) guaranteed an Oscar.” (She was right!)

Incidentally, in one of his essays, the author, Bernhard Schlink, son of a Protestant minister, makes the theologically astonishing claim that German guilt for the Holocaust is hereditary and will be carried by subsequent generations of Germans (Vergangenheitsschuld, Diogenes, Zürich, 2007). This inverts a fundamental teaching of Christianity. Christianity teaches that the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are the central events of history and that the Jews are forever responsible for the unforgivable crime of deicide. Schlink, however, suggests that Germans are and will be responsible for the Holocaust for all time, thus ostensibly substituting the Holocaust for the Crucifixion as history’s greatest crime and central event.

Professors Rembert Hueser and Richard McCormick, Department of German

These professors of German Film Studies specialize in feminism, Nazi Cinema, Weimar culture, and gender studies. Recent publications include, “Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity.

Courses include:

German Cinema of the Weimar Republic: Aesthetics and Politics, Gender, and Sexuality, Modernism and Modernity. “Of importance is the question of Weimar sexual ‘decadence;’ was it … something that facilitated the rise of the Nazis? Or was it about the emancipation from rigid gender and sexual identities, something that threatened the Nazis and their sympathizers? Something ‘postmodern’ — or even ‘queer’ in a positive sense?”

In addition to courses in the German Department, students of German are strongly encouraged to participate in classes of affiliated departments. Recommended faculty of affiliated departments include:

Prof. Gary C. Thomas, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

Specialties include: 17th– and 18th-century German literature, gender/sexuality studies, and cultural musicology

Publications include: Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology

Courses include: Queer Theory

Professor Richard Leppert, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

Publications include: Theodor Adorno – Essays in Music

Courses include: Adorno/Aesthetic Theory

It is indeed puzzling why so many non-Jewish faculty members have adopted the teachings of the Frankfurt School, promoting its agenda to degrade Western culture by glorifying deviancy, multiculturalism and Jewish victimization. One wonders whether they are actually adherents of a position totally inimical to their own White racial interests, or have chosen to be academic Uncle Toms for the sake of tenure and the dependable pay check. Some are clearly part of the homosexual-left culture that is so prominent at the university these days. Their identity as a homosexual victim of cultural oppression is far more important to them — and far more lucrative professionally — than identifying as a White person and having a sense of White interests.

Incidentally, the glorification of Jewish victimization has achieved official academic legitimacy in the rather new discipline of Jewish Studies. Begun only about thirty years ago at colleges with majority Jewish faculties and student bodies, Jewish Studies has quickly grown. The Association of Jewish Studies is now a large network of 1800 members with independent departments on most campuses across the country.

Two influential German Department professors specialize in Jewish Studies and are exceptional in the large number of works they have published, in the number of grants and fellowships they have been awarded, and in the range of affiliated departments to which they belong. Unlike the previously mentioned non-Jewish professors, who corrupt their own ethnic Western interests by adopting the tenets of the cultural revolution, these Jewish faculty members overtly and militantly employ the Frankfurt School’s ideology and methods to promote their specifically Jewish interests. The promotion of specifically Jewish interests was not shared by Jewish professors of the former generation. Until they were replaced by the individuals described below, three German-born Jewish professors, because of their vast knowledge and love of their subject, were highly regarded members of the German faculty. More German than Jewish they promoted German, not Jewish, culture.

Professor Jack Zipes, Department of German (recently retired)

At the present time Amazon is briskly selling an amazing 21 of Jack Zipes’ books about fairy tales, including several pricey compendia. Pertinent to the discussion here are two types of his works about fairy tales: the theoretical, dealing with Frankfurt School deconstruction of fairy tales, and the practical, the use of fairy tales in the public schools.

In Breaking the Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, Zipes provides a Marxist interpretation of folk and fairy tales through the filter of Frankfurt School criticism. His aim is to interpret the socio-historical forces that shaped the tales and to deconstruct and/or reconstruct them to influence and help form the society of the future.

An early chapter in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature is devoted to a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno about the Marxist utopian function of the fairy tale.

With the manual, Creative Storytelling: Building Community, Changing Lives, Zipes suggests practical ways to encourage children to deconstruct traditional tales. Co-founder of the theatrical method named, “The Neighborhood Bridges Project,” Zipes has introduced a technique of re-interpreting fairy tales. Used by Minneapolis Public Schools since 1997 it seeks to expose the sexism, racism, and classism in the traditional value system of the fairy tales and of society. For his outstanding contributions to the field of Children’s Literature, Zipes has won several significant awards plus an honorary degree from the University of Bologna!

Prof. Zipes specialties include: Critical Theory (i.e., Frankfurt School theory); Fairy Tales (or rather their deconstruction); Jewish Studies

Publications include

Political Plays for Children

Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion

Don’t bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales

Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution:

Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany

The Potential of Liberating Fairy Tales for Children

Don’t Bet on the Prince: Feminist Fairy Tales

Walter Benjamin and Children’s Literature, in The Germanic Review

Marx as Moralist

Negating History and Male Fantasies through Psychoanalytic Criticism

Adorno May Still be Right

Marx and Engels Without Frills

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis 1945-2000 (with Leslie Morris, below)

The Yale Companion of Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Antisemitism

Disparate Jewish Voices and the Dialectic of the “Shoah Business” in Germany

Holocaust Survivor as Literary Pope in Germany

Jewish Life as Stigma, in: Simon Wiesenthal Center Report

Germans and Jews since the Holocaust

Lessons of the Holocaust, in: New German Critique

The Operated German as Operated Jew, in New German Critique

The Negative German-Jewish Symbiosis

Contested Jews: The Image of Jewishness in Contemporary German Literature

The Holocaust and the Vicissitudes of Jewish Identity in New German Critique

Professor Leslie Morris, Department of German

While Prof. Morris holds a tenured position in German, she is also a member of four affiliated centers. Two of these affiliations are especially noteworthy. She is a member of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies, of which she was director from 2002–2009

Prof. Morris specializes in 20th and 21st (sic) German/Austrian Literature and in Jewish Studies.

According to her biography in the German Department Magazine: “She is interested in issues of exile and Diaspora that are central to the experience of Jews, especially since the 1930’s… to gain a deeper understanding of what ‘Jewishness’ means. (The name) Morris morphed out of Moskowitz.”

Publications include:

Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000 (with German Prof. Jack Zipes)

Berlin Elegies: Absence, Postmemory and Art after Auschwitz

How Jewish is it? The Question of Contemporary German-Jewish Writing

Der modifizierte Jude als Stigmatext

In her book, Unlikely History, the Changing German Jewish Symbiosis, Prof. Morris addresses the topic of holocaust memoirs. She has two concerns. Not only is there a problem with future supply since the last holocaust survivors are succumbing to old age, but Prof. Morris finds many of the memoirs to be intrinsically dull and of limited literary value. She compares the authentic memoirs to the many fraudulent “memoirs,” originally marketed as first person accounts, but later found to be fakes, much to the embarrassment of their publishers. She judges these fake “memoirs” to be more imaginative, moving, and of greater literary value than the genuine accounts. Disregarding standards of academic ethics she suggests that the fraudulent accounts ought to be redeemed and accepted into the body of holocaust literature as genuine memoirs. Not only are the fakes better than the genuine accounts, but their production is unlimited!

Courses include:

Approaches to Analysis: Required readings — “Archive Fever”: Derrida, “History of Sexuality: Foucault, “Moses and Monotheism”: Freud, “Three Case Histories”: Freud

Seminar in 20th Century German Literature and Culture: Listening to German Anxiety — “We will think about the specificity of German anxiety — anxiety about modernity, anxiety about the Jews…”

~Required readings — “We will start with Freud’s, ‘Problem with Anxiety,’ and move to works by Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Schoenberg…”

So close is the German Department to the Center for Jewish Studies, with which Prof. Morris is affiliated, that the two Departments recently jointly sponsored a University of Minnesota tour titled, “Jewish Life in Berlin and Prague.” The informational meeting for the trip was held at a community center in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. Affectionately known as “St. Jewish Park,” by both Jews and gentiles, this modern day Jewish ghetto has been the home of many successful Jews. These include Thomas Friedman, New York Times journalist, Al Franken, the junior senator from Minnesota, and the Coen Brothers, film makers. In fact, the newest Coen Brothers film, “The Serious Man,” is set in the St. Louis Park of the 60’s. Ari Hoptman, UM German instructor, plays a department head.

The nine day University of Minnesota tour to Berlin and Prague was jointly led by German Department, Prof. Leslie Morris and History Department, Prof. Gary Cohen. Prof. Cohen is also Director of the Center for Austrian Studies, and a faculty member of the Center for Jewish Studies. The UM-sponsored tour included visits with the chief rabbis of both Berlin and Prague, with members of the Israeli Council in Berlin, and Shabbat services and Shabbat dinner with Berlin congregations. Lunch was planned at kosher restaurants.

A Center for Catholic or Christian Studies does not exist at the University of Minnesota. Therefore, there will be no University-sponsored trip titled, “Christian Life in Europe,” with Mass at the Cologne Cathedral and an audience with the Pope.

The most recent issue of German Quarterly, from summer, 2009, explores the possible reciprocal effects of German and Jewish Studies. Responding to the title of this issue, “How Jewish is German Studies? How German is Jewish Studies?” Prof. Morris states in the introduction:

VERY….What I hoped to do with this special issue was to move the discussion about Germans and Jews beyond merely establishing affinities between historical expression and cultural expression. Part of the ‘thought experiment’ behind this special issue was to see what might happen if we were to slip within the hyphen separating ‘the German’ and ‘the Jewish’ and begin a ‘queering’ of German-Jewish Studies that would rupture the intact diacritical mark of the hyphen and destabilize the markers of ‘German’ and ‘Jew.’

Rethinking the links and the ruptures contained within the ‘German Jew’ also necessitates a new conceptualizing of Jewish and ‘queer’ identity; to pull apart the hyphen that sutures the ‘German Jew’ is at the same time to expand ‘queerness’ beyond sexual practice and ‘experience’ and to disrupt what R. block has termed a ‘geographic transversal’ that links Germany and Zion. My calling for a ‘queering’ of German Jewish Studies is a strategy to move us away from ‘constructions of the Jew or the German as either positive or negative, stereotyped or ‘authentic,’ and to consider an approach to German Jewish text that will push the very boundaries of the German and the Jewish. I propose instead that we consider German Jewish writing as inhabiting a new space of a trans-, or a newly imagined community that exists in a border zone of textual and historical memory, projection and fantasy, pathology and desire, and that will always exceed the geographic, linguistic, and ethnic/national markers in which they are enacted.

The next activity jointly sponsored by the University of Minnesota German Department and the Center for Jewish Studies is scheduled in the spring. On April, 13, 2010, Prof. Leslie Morris will present a public lecture titled, “Why Germany Loves the Jews.” The lecture will be delivered at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul.

HERMANN, BE THERE!

Trudie Pert is the pen name of a teacher.  Email her.

Unless otherwise noted all material is from the official University of Minnesota website.

Charles Dodgson: The New York Times Keeps on Page

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Charles Dodgson: The other day I came across a somewhat befuddled but nevertheless  interesting op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Protocol Society” (22 Dec. 2009). The idea is that nowadays industry not only makes physical things but packages sets of instructions. An obvious example is a piece of software. So is a car, most of the value of which is tied up with the knowledge that goes into its design. The steel and plastic are not worth much unshaped. There are important difference between physical and information-rich products. The former are costly to produce, the latter cheap once the design is there. Metal and glass are costly to produce and transport. But an idea, once formulated, can travel at the speed of light and be copied endlessly at essentially zero cost. The pharmaceutical industry is another example. The first pill can cost billions to develop but from there on producing copies costs less than a dime a dozen. 

My only objection at this stage of the article is that physical culture has always had elements of the protocol economy. The first sewn clothing must have been a creative act of genius but because imitation is easier than invention it could spread to the hoi polloi. The ingredients for simple tools are often readily available, but not the knowledge about how to make them. The Neolithic was an economic and lifestyle revolution driven by the spread of innovations. Population density rose 100 times with profound ramifications for human evolution, as argued by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending in their  recent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion.  My point is that the protocol economy is not new, just accelerated. 

Then the article veered off into the fascinating subject of social implications. It also became horribly befuddled where before it had been middling. 

Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too. First, a nation has to have a good operating system: laws, regulations and property rights.

Oh really! Ideas are intangible. Does it follow that the brains that produce them are intangible? What a remarkably silly thing to say. And how did nationhood enter the conversation? The author, whose name I had not yet noticed, was using the nation concept loosely to say the least. The term crops up 5 times, once in a book title. It seems that any state is a nation. The New York Times was making the same error as George W. Bush who throughout his presidency called anything with a government a “nation.” More of the distinction between state and nation in a future post. 

Then came the paragraph that made me look for the author’s name. 

A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another. 

The article does not hint at the possibility of tangible differences between societies. Consistent I suppose. What possible effect could genes and brain characteristics have on a population’s production of useful ideas? Or for that matter what could stable family life and general altruism have to do with,  say, hormone levels and evolutionary history? 

The thing is that this ignorance is willful. Someone who has been around as long as David Brooks knows the evidence or knows where to find it. In addition the NYT does not publish all the news fit to print on such matters. Such people together with such publications create synergies of lies and deception. 

The author is David Brooks. Here he is:

The rewards for towing the line are considerable. Mr. Brooks has an illustrious career providing Americans with an outlook designed to lead them away from their vital interests. Here is one career trail of this “conservative” and very well-connected columnist: 

     The New York Times Columnist (2003-)
    The Weekly Standard Senior Editor (1995-2003)
    The Wall Street Journal (1986-95)
    Atlantic Monthly Contributing Editor
    Newsweek Editor (former)
    National Review�
    The New Yorker�
    The Washington Post�
    The Washington Times  

He is currently a commentator on “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” He is the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (basically a portrait of people from his ethnic group — combining “the values of the countercultural sixties with those of the achieving eighties) and On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, both published by Simon & Schuster.

Christopher Donovan: If You Look Over to Your Right, You'll See a Dying Country

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Christopher Donovan: Who says you can’t make some money from the multiracial decay of California?

Only miles from the scenic vistas and celebrity mansions that draw sightseers from around the globe – but a world away from the glitz and glamour – a bus tour is rolling through the dark side of the city’s gang turf.

Passengers paying $65 a head Saturday signed waivers acknowledging they could be crime victims and put their fate in the hands of tattooed ex-gang members who say they have negotiated a cease-fire among rivals in the most violent gangland in America. …

“We ain’t going on no tour saying, ‘Look at them Crips, look at them Bloods, look at them crack heads,'” said Frederick “Scorpio” Smith, an ex-Crip helping narrate, who helped broker the cease-fire among the Grape Street Crips, 18th Street, F13 and the East Coast Crips.

Out of sensitivity to residents, passengers are banned from shooting photographs or video from the bus. The only place that is allowed is near the end of the trip, when they can step off the bus and film an outdoor area where graffiti is allowed. …

Gang crime has fallen in recent years, but groups continue to grow and gain influence. Over the past quarter century, officials in Los Angeles County have spent $25 billion fighting gangs only to see the number of gangsters double to as many as 90,000 and a six-fold increase in the number of gangs.

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Kevin MacDonald: Minnesota's German Studies Disaster

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Kevin MacDonald: My fate in life is to work at a university. What that means right now is to be completely immersed in the culture of the left. Trudie Pert’s current TOO article shows that in the humanities right now it’s all about queer theory and the Frankfurt School, with supporting roles for psychoanalysis and Marxism. Prof. Ruth Joeres describes her course:

In this course the contributions of ‘German’ women of ethnic heritage such as Afro-German, Turkish-German, Japanese-German women are studied. What does it mean to be called, ‘German”? 

We can guess that it has nothing to do with being ethnically German. In the eyes of these people, Germany too has doubtless become yet another proposition society.

And then there’s professor Morris (Moskowitz) and her idea that fraudulent Holocaust memoirs are to be preferred to the real thing because they are more moving. (Why does a Jewish activist in a department of Jewish/German Studies use a non-Jewish sounding name? I can understand why Jewish communists did it in the 1930s or post-WWII Eastern Europe, but why now?) And Prof. Zipes and his campaign to  the minds of young children. My favorite title: “Down with Heidi, Down with Struwelpeter: Three Cheers for the Revolution: Towards A New Socialist Children’s Literature in West Germany.” In other words, down with every vestige of traditional German culture. 

The academic food chain is starkly obvious here. Pert notes that the professors at Minnesota received their doctorates at elite Eastern universities, and their students will staff the second-level colleges, universities, and K-12 schools throughout the mid-West. It’s a top-down system, with zombie-like grad students emerging to carry on the revolution of the left at the lower levels of the educational system.

What’s striking is that Jews and other non-Europeans wear their ethnic identity and sense of victimhood proudly and explicitly. The Whites typically have their own sense of victimhood — as gays or as women. In my experience, the heterosexual White males become adept at effusive expressions of guilt in order to be accepted into the system. In this culture of victimhood, all the rewards go to those who make alliances with other victims.

It’s easy enough intellectually to point out that gays and women have ethnic interests too, and that White identity and interests are entirely legitimate. But getting academics to think and act on that basis means disrupting mutually reinforcing networks where all the rewards come from allying oneself with the culture of victimhood.

And it means that real change must start at the top of the academic food chain. In the social sciences, one clings to a hope that this could happen because there is still a scientific tradition with some power. But in the humanities, it’s a lost cause. The triumvirate of the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and Marxism is impervious to scientific findings and is intensely political; it will strenuously resist significant change. The revolution will have to happen without a very large part of the educational system.

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The Persian Jewish Community in Beverly Hills

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Ashkenazi Jews are the dominant group of Jews in the US and Europe, but I think it’s worthwhile to discuss other Jewish groups, particularly those from the Middle East because Middle Eastern Jewish groups  illustrate Judaism in its purest forms. Middle Eastern Jewish groups are quite similar to Ashkenazi groups as they existed in traditional Europe. Among contemporary Ashkenazim, they resemble the more Orthodox and fundamentalist segments of the community.

A good example are the Syrian Jews that were the subject of a previous blog. Despite living in the US for over 100 years, they remain hermetically sealed off from the rest of America, including other Jews. They aggressively police group boundaries, particularly intermarriage. Their business relationships are with other Syrian Jews, particularly family members. Recently, the Syrian Jewish community has been implicated in scandals involving money laundering, drug and organ trafficking, and tax evasion (See here and here). Reflecting practices in traditional Jewish communities, a community member who ratted out other Syrian Jews to the police was renounced by his own father.

A recent article, “The Persian Conquest” describes  a more recently arrived group of Oriental Jews who emigrated from Iran since the fall of the Shah and mostly settled in Southern California, particularly Beverly Hills. This is an elite group:

Although dispossessed, the thousands of Iranian Jews who flocked to Beverly Hills … had assets most immigrants lack: advanced education, business experience and, in the majority of cases, some cash in overseas accounts.

The following paragraph gets at the insular, clannish nature of these Jews.

A complaint sounded by Beverly Hills old-timers was that the Persians could be clannish, self-segregating and indifferent to the established norms of the community they were entering. … Thanks to their wealth and numbers, Persians didn’t need to adapt. Instead, they developed a self-sufficient Farsi-speaking enclave, complete with grocery stores, restaurants and even taxi services. And rather than courting the local social establishment, rich Persians stuck to their own social world, which revolved around lavish 1,000-person bar mitzvahs and weddings. “My mother really doesn’t need to speak English, although she does,” says Nazarian.

The comment on lack of concern for established norms recalls the behavior of Lubavitcher Jews in Postville, Iowa: No concern for even trivial things like mowing lawns or shoveling sidewalks.  More importantly, it reminds one of the lack of respect for Christian traditions that has been so characteristic of the mainstream Jewish community in the US, as recounted, for example, by Edmund Connelly (see here, here and here).

An informant goes on to say, “Cultural preservation is one part of the experience of being displaced, and as with any immigrant community, we naturally want to associate with one another. Middle Eastern countries also tend to be very tribal.”

This comment on the tribal nature of Middle Eastern societies is right on the mark — a critical difference between Jewish and Western cultural traditions. It’s no surprise then that marriage with another Persian Jew is the norm. In the following quote, notice that marriage is at least as much about fitting into the other person’s family as it is about finding someone who satisfies your psychological needs as an individual — a clear marker of the collectivist mindset:

Likewise, a majority in the younger generation choose to marry fellow Persians—much to their parents’ relief. “They don’t have to marry Persian,” says Jasmine Yadegar, in a tone suggesting that she hopes her two twentysomething daughters—both of whom still live at home—eventually will. “All I want for them is to be happy and find people with the same background.”

“For me,” says daughter Sabrina, an aspiring fashion designer, “I think it’s a lot easier to fall in love with someone who has the same ideas and experiences.”

“I need to love their family, and they need to love mine,” adds older sister Jessica, a documentary filmmaker. “Some of my American friends have told me that you’re not dating the parents. They say you don’t need to meet the parents on the first, second or third date. That’s not my view. I think the longer you postpone the introduction to the family, the longer it takes you to get to know if this is someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

If you married an outsider, you would be completely cut off from the intense social life of the community.

It will be interesting to see if this group is as able as the Syrian Jews to remain separate in the American context.

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In the Matter of Leo Frank

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In 1913 Mary Phagan, a 13-year old girl, was murdered. The absolutely barebones account of the fascinating story behind this event and all that followed is that Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who managed the factory in Atlanta where Mary worked, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death by hanging. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison by the governor of Georgia after several rounds of legal appeals failed to change the judgment of the trial court. While in prison, Frank’s throat was slit by another prisoner, and soon thereafter a group of Georgians broke into the prison and lynched Frank.

Leo Frank at his trial, 1913

The Leo Frank case is important if only because it continues to be the focus of Jewish activism. Recently a film on the events, The People vs. Leo Frank, was released, to much fanfare by the ADL, including special screenings and teacher guide books for use in classrooms. Leo Frank, therefore, has become an icon of all that was wrong with the old America and a morality tale with important lessons for the present— a miniature version of the Holocaust. Like the Holocaust, it is used as an indictment of the entire culture in which the events occurred — the trailer for the film begins ominously: “Set against the backdrop of an American South struggling to shed its legacy of bigotry and xenophobia …” More on that later.

In this series of articles, I review and discuss some of the writing about the Leo Frank affair, including especially Steve Oney’s very balanced and exhaustive account, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.

However, before embarking on that adventure, I should say that my first exposure to the Leo Frank affair was in reading Albert Lindemann’s important 1991 book,The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Incidents. Lindemann’s writings on Jewish history and anti-Semitism, most notably Esau’s Tears, are by far the most balanced and nuanced available from academic historians. In The Jew Accused, he takes the view that Jewish accounts of the Frank affair have virtually assumed anti-Jewish conspiracies: “People then and later have in some sense wanted to find anti-Semitism. They have not been entirely disappointed in their search, but they have also been inclined to dramatize inappropriately or exaggerate what they found of it” (p. 236).

LEO FRANK: THE TRIAL OF LEO FRANK IN 1913 WAS MOTIVATED BY THE RAMPANT ANTI-SEMITISM OF THE TIME. THE FOUNDING OF THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE THAT SAME YEAR WAS MOTIVATED BY A PASSION TO ERADICATE SUCH INJUSTICE AND BIGOTRY. DESPITE HIS INNOCENCE, FRANK WAS ABDUCTED FROM JAIL IN 1915 AND LYNCHED. ADL REMEMBERS THE VICTIM LEO FRANK AND REDEDICATES ITSELF TO ENSURING THERE WILL BE NO MORE VICTIMS OF INJUSTICE AND INTOLERANCE.

Whereas much of the writing on Mary Phagan’s murder makes it into a Jewish morality tale emphasizing Southern racism, bigotry and xenophobia — not to mention Jewish victimhood, Lindemann notes that Jews were better received in the South than in the rest of the country. There were relatively few Jews in the South, and those who did live there did not act as a “dissenting minority” (p. 224) — that is, they were not engaged in constructing a high profile culture of critique that has been the hallmark of Jewish intellectual activity since the Enlightenment. Jews participated in Southern culture like other Whites. Before the Civil War, they bought and sold slaves and they owned them. Southern attitudes toward Jews “tended toward philo-Semitism” (p. 227).

In Atlanta in 1910, Jews comprised around 2.5% of the population. Jewish businessmen “were respected, and Jewish enterprise was generally welcome.” The one fly in the ointment was the influx of a number of Russian Jews — often described as “barbaric and ignorant” by the established German Jewish community. These Jews often owned saloons and were accused of selling liquor to Blacks, thus contributing to public disorder. After the race riot of 1906, the liquor licenses of several Jewish-owned saloons were revoked.

Nevertheless, Jews had become well-integrated into the elite of Atlanta — far better than was the case in most areas of the North at this time. (Frank was part of the elite of Atlanta’s Jewish community — president of the local B’nai B’rith.) Although the Populist leader and newspaper publisher Tom Watson eventually blamed northern Jewish media and financial interests for the controversies following Frank’s trial and publically advocated Frank’s lynching, Watson eschewed the Jewish angle during the period leading up to the trial, even defending Jewish revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman, and despite the fact that Jewish business interests in Georgia and elsewhere were opposed to Populism and its issues, such as ending child labor — an issue near and dear to Tom Watson’s heart.

Given this background (and the reputation of Jews as not involved in violent crime), “Frank’s Jewishness weighed at least as much in his favor as against him” (p. 236). Indeed, “Frank’s lawyers and his other defenders, in order to strengthen their case, overstated the role of anti-Semitic prejudice in his arrest” (p. 237), thereby setting up later exaggerations of the role of anti-Jewish attitudes. The defense also appealed to anti-Black attitudes in their attempt to pin the crime on a Black man, describing the prime Black suspect (Jim Conley) as a “dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger” (p. 245).

Lindemann points out that the evidence at the time of Frank’s arrest was “of far greater substance and persuasiveness than that presented against [Alfred] Dreyfus” (p. 239), the French Jew accused of treason whose case became a cause célèbre for the forces combating anti-Jewish attitudes. In particular, Frank was one of very few people at the factory when the murder occurred. Several female employees testified at a Grand Jury hearing that he had made improper advances toward them and a male acquaintance of Mary testified that she had complained about Frank’s advances. Other stories alleging that Frank had engaged in perverse sexual behavior at local bordellos and had often used the factory as a place for sexual liaisons appeared in the newspapers. Lindemann writes that later this evidence was “demonstrably false or of uncertain validity” (p. 243), stating, for example, that at least some of the women’s evidence was “unreliable” (p. 243). (Based on Oney’s account to follow, the accusations of Frank’s history of sexual impropriety toward his employees are well-founded.) 

Lindemann also notes that Frank’s statements to the police (that he didn’t know Mary Phagan) conflicted with testimony of employees (that he often called her by name). He also gave “seriously conflicting” accounts of what happened when Mary came to his office to pick up her pay. That he seemed very nervous during questioning and had already hired a lawyer and a private investigator before he was arrested were also seen as pointing to his guilt. The “most incriminating evidence” was that Frank had stated that he was in his office for an hour after giving Mary her pay, but this account conflicted with the testimony of another employee who came to his office at this time. This employee, Monteen Stover,

was not suspected of harboring grudges against him; she testified that he was a kind man and in fact well liked by the women employees. Frank could not satisfactorily explain this episode except to speculate that he may have gone to the bathroom when Monteen came to his office. Frank, furthermore, was never able to provide a widely persuasive account of what he was doing during the hour … when it was believed, according to autopsy evidence, that Mary was murdered. In the evening following the murder he repeatedly called the factory, finally reaching the nightwatchman, Newt Lee, and asked if everything was all right (this was before Lee had found the body). Frank’s explanations for making these calls, that the nightwatchman was fairly new and that he was worried about a recently fired employee, were judged inadequate by many, especially since Frank had never made such calls before this. (p. 246)

Lindemann notes that one of these inconsistencies was noted by Governor John M. Slaton in his statement of commutation. He noted that “Frank had made an engagement on Friday to go to the Base Ball Game on Saturday afternoon with his brother-in-law, but broke the engagement, as he said in his statement, because of the financial statement he had to make up, while before the Coroner’s Jury, he said he broke the engagement because of the threatening weather.”

Lindemann also rejects the theory that Hugh Dorsey, the prosecutor, was “a ruthlessly ambitious man, one who harbored anti-Semitic beliefs and knew perfectly well that Frank was not guilty” (p. 250). This “morality tale”(p. 250) is contradicted by the lack of any indication of animosity toward Jews prior to the trial, his moderate views on Blacks, his Jewish law partner, his Jewish roommate in college, and his support from Jews in running for his office. His concluding summation at the trial included philo-Semitic statements.

Lindemann suggests that the best explanation of Dorsey’s actions is that he genuinely did believe in Frank’s guilt, “as did other astute observers” (p. 252).“In particular Dorsey seems to have been firmly persuaded of Frank’s bad moral character, of his perverse sexual escapades, about which he claimed to have an overwhelming mass of evidence, most of which he did not introduce at the trial” (p. 252).

Nevertheless, Lindemann asserts that “the best evidence now available indicates that the real murderer of Mary Phagan was Jim Conley” (p. 254), a person employed by Frank. Frank, “in spite of some strong evidence against him, was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, especially in light of the evidence that later emerged” (p. 254).

One gets the feeling, however, that Lindemann himself is far from convinced that Frank was innocent. What was this evidence that supposedly exonerated Frank? Rather than present any obviously exonerating facts, Lindemann instead continues to point to things that support the prosecution case. He notes that Conley’s testimony was “extraordinarily rich in details, sometimes of the most minute and graphic sort” (p. 255). “Many observers simply could not believe that a southern Black, a man with Conley’s supposedly limited mental powers, could make up such an intricate story or even repeat a story in which he had been coached by Dorsey, without tangling himself in contradictions” (p. 255), especially considering that he was cross-examined for 16 hours by lawyers who were “some of the most experienced and sharpest legal minds in the South” (p. 255).

Lindemann also notes that Dorsey would have been foolish to coach Conley on a false story: “It seems … unbelievable that … the prosecution could have been so reckless as to thus risk a humiliating collapse of their case against Frank” (p. 256). Indeed, the careers of the prosecutors would be in jeopardy if Conley had broken down in court and implicated the prosecution in coaching fraudulent testimony. Add to that the fact that before the trial Frank refused an offer to confront Conley. And, even more damningly, Frank refused to implicate two other Black employees, never mentioning Conley to the police, “as if he feared to have Conley interrogated.” Finally, Frank “knew perfectly well that Conley could write (a key point because of the notes left at the scene of the murder) but remained silent when Conley initially denied that he could” (p. 256).

Moreover, Lindemann accepts the idea that whether or not Frank murdered Phagan, there was a great deal of support for the claim that Frank was a sexual pervert. Besides the claims of the prosecution for a mass of evidence that hadn’t been introduced at the trial, the defense at times acknowledged that Frank “had not been perfect in the past” (p. 257). Indeed, Dorsey later stated that he would have brought charges against Frank for sexual perversion and criminal assault if he had been freed of murder charges.

Lindemann also questions the claim that the jury was intimidated by the crowd — the focus of an appeal that was rejected by the US Supreme Court. Such intimidation was not reported by any newspaper, the jury denied that they felt intimidated, and the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that pressure from the crowd “did not have a decisive impact on the jurors” (p. 258). Nevertheless, despite his own marshaling of facts on crowd influence and never citing even one source for the claim of undue influence, Lindemann writes that “these denials [of  pressure from the crowd] are puzzling and finally difficult to believe” (p. 258).

Lindemann pays special attention to the role of Tom Watson in inflaming passions after the trial. But even then, Watson the populist seemed much more motivated by his perception that a rich person was throwing around money in an effort to overturn a just verdict for a heinous crime against a poor southern girl —“that rich men escaped scot-free for doing things that brought down harsh punishment upon the poor” (p. 263). He warned about a “gigantic conspiracy of big money” aimed at undermining the judicial system to free a“rich Sodomite” (p. 263).

“Watson repeatedly observed that a non-Jewish convicted murderer, no matter how flagrantly unjust his trial, would never have benefited from such a massive infusion of money, nor would a non-Jew have benefited from such a network of men who had privileged access to those who formed public opinion in the United States” (p. 266), including especially Adolf Ochs, publisher of the New York Times.

Eventually the Atlanta newspapers got in line in asking for a new trial. Frank petitioned for a new trial some thirteen times, twice going all the way to the US Supreme Court, but failed each time. As Georgia governor John M. Slaton stated in his justification for commuting Frank’s sentence, “A court must have something more than an atmosphere with which to deal, and especially when that atmosphere has been created through the processes of evidence in disclosing a horrible crime” (a reference to the allegations of Frank’s sexual behavior that came up during the trial and in the newspapers).

Lindemann labels Governor Slaton a “heroic figure” for risking his reputation in commuting Frank’s sentence. Nevertheless, he also notes that Frank’s lead defense attorney was Slaton’s law partner and that Slaton had had a Jewish partner in the 1880s. In running for governor in 1916, prosecutor Dorsey alsopointed out that immediately after commuting Frank’s sentence, Slaton had met with Louis Marshall, Frank’s attorney before the US Supreme Court and doubtless the most prominent and visible leader of the American Jewish community at the time. Slaton controlled a very large “slush fund” — doubtless contributed by wealthy Jews — aimed at defeating Dorsey in his campaign for governor of Georgia. (Oney also describes the very warm reception Slaton received on his trip to New York after the commutation.) Dorsey won the election and Slaton never ran for office again in Georgia.

Lindemann points to a number of “minor inconsistencies” brought out by Slaton in his commutation order or at the trial, but none that in his judgment warranted discrediting Conley’s testimony. Rather, Lindemann places the entire weight of his judgment that Frank should not have been convicted on Slaton’s justification for his decision to commute Frank’s sentence. In particular, Slaton noted that during the trial Conley had testified that on the morning of the day of the murder he had deposited a pile of excrement where the elevator landed when it went to the basement (what became known as the “shit in the shaft” issue). He also testified that he and Frank had ridden the elevator to the basement to dispose of Mary’s body. However, the detectives testified that when they climbed down the elevator shaft to search the basement, the pile of excrement had not been crushed as it would have been if the elevator had been used by Conley and Frank to dispose of the body, as per Conley’s testimony. (Oney provides an explanation compatible with Frank’s guilt.)

In the end, Lindemann’s account of the Leo Frank affair is tantalizing, if not definitive. It certainly is a far cry from the account that continues to be disseminated by the ADL. Lindemann’s work is courageous given the previous mainstream scholarship and the continuing campaign by Jewish activist organizations to distort the events into a morality play of evil non-Jews martyring a heroic and upright Jew. Its strong suit is the foregrounding of the murder and trial, showing that anti-Jewish attitudes were not rampant before the trial. As discussed in the following articles in this series, the fact anti-Jewish attitudes developed in the course of the trial is hardly surprising given the course of events.

Kevin MacDonald is editor of The Occidental Observer and a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email him.