"'Night' by Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Night, Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil”

August 31, 2023

 

“Nobody had any strength left. And the night seemed endless.”

                                                                                                                                              Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

                                                                                                                                              Night, 1958

 

Unlike other soldiers who returned home from World War II, my father did speak of his experiences – at least some of them, and to me, his oldest son. I remember his admonishment – we should never forget what the Nazis did to the Jewish people over the dozen years they held power. And I never have.

 

Re-reading Elie Wiesel’s book every few years is a worthy habit. In the 2006 edition, translated by his wife Marion, he wrote in the introduction: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” He is right. Those who grew up like me in the 1940s and ‘50s, in comfortable post-War America amid loving families, and with only the distant, vague threat of the bomb, can never understand the fear of those threatened with abandonment, imprisonment, torture, and death by the Third Reich.

 

Yet, as I read this book for the third or fourth time, I found myself thinking in broader terms – beyond just Europe, the Jewish people, and Nazis. While true goodness is rare, evil is ubiquitous across all classes, races, religions, and nationalities. It comes in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It infects individuals. But it is political/universal evil that concerns this essay. The human capacity to inflict harm is global. It knows no borders. Consider: Approximately forty percent of the ten to fifteen million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1900 died, either in Africa or aboard ships. Many of the survivors died in captivity. It is estimated that up to twelve million indigenous people were killed between 1492 and 1900, in South, Central, and North America. 

 

Things were worse in the 20^th Century. The Nazis killed an estimated sixteen million soldiers and civilians. An estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed by Turks between 1915 and 1923. Approximately ten million Russians were killed between 1917 and 1923, during their revolution. Between six and twenty million Russians and others were killed by Stalin, including about four and a half million Ukrainians during the Holodomor (1932-1933). Forty percent of U.S. prisoners held in Japanese POW camps are estimated to have died. Estimates are that up two million Muslims and Hindus were killed in post-independence India.  It is estimated that between forty and eighty million Chinese were killed by Mao Zedong, including the famine (1959-1961) and the cultural revolution (1966-1976). Between 1975 and 1979, the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, led by communist dictator Pol Pot, killed between one and a half million and three million of their seven million population. Today, Iran supports Muslim terrorists around the world, and sub-Saharan African Islamists kill about twenty-five thousand Christians every year. Man’s capacity for evil is untold. 

 

Why? There is no answer. How did Austro-Germany, countries that produced Johannes Gutenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Albrecht Dürer produce an Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler? Why do people have so little regard for the sanctity of life that they will torture, mutilate and kill? Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (the SS) established twenty-five main concentration camps, with over a thousand satellite camps. While still confined to the ghetto, Wiesel wrote: “There no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate...” 

 

Once at Auschwitz, death was omnipresent: “Death was settling in all around me, silently, gently. It would seize upon a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit.” As the Soviets advanced westward in late 1944, surviving prisoners from Auschwitz were force-walked most of the four hundred and twenty-five miles west to Buchenwald. More than half died on the way. Shortly after their arrival, Wiesel’s father died in January 1945. Three months later, on April 10, Americans arrived. Survivors were saved, but at what cost: “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”

 

This is a short but powerful book. It is still read in some high schools, as it should be, for its message is one we should never forget. But it should also be a reminder that evil lurks everywhere. It is why we need religion and their moral codes of conduct. Evil infested Tailei Qi, the shooter this week on the UNC campus. It is with us today in many parts of China (the treatment of Uyghurs in China’s northwest); in Russia (Prigozhin’s death was no accident). It is visible in Islamic terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We ask again, ‘Why?’. Remembering his own time in the World War I trenches, J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Fellowship of the Ring, has Frodo say to Gandalf: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” “So do I,” replied Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the life that is given us.” Life is not fair. It never has been and never will be. We must play with the cards we are dealt.

 

We cannot deny evil’s existence. In recent years, we in the West have been fortunate. Democracy and free market capitalism give power to the people, not the state. Evil nations reflect excessive powers granted to, or usurped by, governmental workers. Our Founders, rejecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief that man was inherently good, recognized man’s capacity for evil, so they gave us a federal government with limited powers, with separate but equal branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – separate entities that make, execute, and interpret laws. Nevertheless, the desire by individuals to garner power persists; it is gradual and subtle and has become common in Washington. Evil takes root with a promise to do good, which justifies whatever insidious means are necessary to achieve a desired end. And the silence of good people abets its advance. 

 

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was directed at the rise of Fascism and was a warning that no nation or civilization is immune from authoritarianism. Today, while we must remain vigilant of right-wing extremists, we should not ignore the fact that most of the Twentieth Century’s murderous regimes emanated from the left – from communist governments that control the media, along with the educational, cultural, economic, and personal lives of their people. 

 

A re-reading of Elie Wiesel’s classic tale Night is a reminder that evil is real, it is pervasive, and it is contagious. It must be confronted, from whichever direction it comes and in whatever guise it appears.

"The Book of Charlie," David Von Drehle - A Review

 A joyful read before summer ends…

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

The Book of Charlie, David Von Drehle

August 27, 2023

 

“Throughout his life, Charlie never imagined things to be any worse – or any better – than they really were,

for he had learned at an early age that life is never as sure as we might think, nor as hopeless as it might appear.”

                                                                                                                                The Book of Charlie, 2023

                                                                                                                                David Von Drehle (1961-)   

 

This is not about Charles I, II, or III. It is not about Charles Martel, or John Steinbeck’s Poodle. It is about an ordinary man and his extraordinary life. It is also a history of the changes that transformed people’s lives during the Twentieth Century, told through the life of Dr. Charles Herbert White. If you get an adrenalin rush when your plane goes ‘wheels up,’ if you thrill to a train whistle in the night, or if you the open road says to you, adventure!, you will love the story of this man on his way to 109. 

 

Von Drehle begins by noting that his children once asked him to write a book just for them. He was stymied, felt incapable. The world had advanced so much from when he grew up. What lessons could he impart? Then one summer morning, in 2007, he opened the door of the house he and his family had just moved into in Kansas City. Across the road was an elderly man washing a car, his girlfriend’s car, a plum-colored Chrysler PT Cruiser. Charlie was bare-chested, dressed in old swimming trunks. He was 102.

 

He was a remarkable man, Charlie: “He had decided many years earlier how he would face the world…He understood that, whether we sail to a new continent or simply travel from one day to the next, we are always headed into the unknown. Charlie had learned to treat the unknown as a friend…”

 

Born in Galesburg, Illinois, Charlie grew up in Kansas City at a time of disruptive innovation. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 song “Kansas City,” originally sung by Gene Nelson in Oklahoma, was about that change. The show was based on Oklahoma becoming a state in 1907, two years after Charlie’s birth. The lyrics illustrate what his formative years witnessed:

 

“Everything’s up to date in Kansas City;

They’ve gone about as fer as they can go.

They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high,

About as high as a building ought to grow.”

 

When Charlie was eleven his father, a minister, was killed in a freak elevator accident in one of those buildings. His mother, to make ends meet, took in borders, some of whom were doctors, which decided Charlie on a career in medicine. Musical, as well as adventuresome – his trip to Los Angeles in a Model T Ford with two friends in 1923, and his return by hopping freight cars is worth the price of the book – he taught himself the Saxophone and played it to pay his way through Northwestern Medical School. As a doctor in World War II, he studied and then, in private practice, pioneered the field of anesthesiology.

 

As for his long life, Von Drehle writes: “Charlie accepted his fortune and lived in the moment.” “What began among the horses and wagons of Galesburg, Illinois,” the author writes, “more than a century earlier, came to a close in a world transformed.” His book is a beautiful rendition of a long life well lived.

"Republican Debate?"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com”

 

Thought of the Day

“Republican Debate?”

August 26, 2023

 

“The good news for the party is that this was a solid event, showcasing several

capable, qualified and at times inspiring contenders for the oval office.”

                                                                                                                                Kimberley Strassel

                                                                                                                                The Wall Street Journal

                                                                                                                                August 25, 2023

 

“It was like watching a junior high school debate, complete with cool kids asking stupid

questions and the geeks fighting on the stage. I hated every minute of it, thought it

was embarrassing for all involved and found it insulting to the American voters.

                                                                                                                                Andrea Widburg

                                                                                                                                American Thinker

                                                                                                                                August 24, 2023

 

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political

prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

                                                                                                                                George Washington

                                                                                                                                Washington’s Farewell Address

                                                                                                                                September 19, 1796

 

Wednesday evening’s debate generated different reactions, as can be seen in the rubrics from two respected, conservative commentators. And no one on the stage displayed the dignity and wisdom of our first President. In contradiction – which says more about me than the political contenders – I find myself in agreement with both Ms. Strassel and Ms. Widburg, but perhaps more with Ms. Widburg, and sad that we have strayed so far from the wisdom of George Washington.

 

Former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley showed a forceful command of the facts, yet her voice was, at times, shrill. Governor Doug Borghum displayed wisdom in emphasizing federalism in the handling of issues like abortion, yet people were left wondering who he was. Senator Tim Scott’s optimism and decency shone through, but he generated little excitement. Governor Ron DeSantis has done wonders in Florida and remained unflustered when challenged, but he came across like a robotic humanoid. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchison, appearing a kindly, elderly man, was the first to signal he would not support Mr. Trump were he nominated, but he resembled a resident of our retirement community. The bright, articulate Vivek Ramaswamy, failed to acknowledge the unintended consequences of his foreign policy prescriptions. He flashed his gleaming white choppers, as he combatted the combative former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and the Godly but wooden former Vice President Mike Pence. There were moments when the debate did remind one of junior high school.   

 

Each individual was asked to explain their views on a range of subjects: climate, abortion, education, energy, crime, the border, debt, and deficits to Ukraine and the Russia-China axis – too many subjects to be handled by eight people in two hours. The moderators gave each individual sixty seconds, with thirty seconds of rebuttal. Soundbites do not add to an understanding of issues and candidates. The effect was chaos, with interruptions by panelists and cheering and jeering from an unruly audience. If the purpose was to inform not entertain, Fox News would have better served their viewers had they limited the topics (or the candidates), taking advantage of future debates.

 

At least six of the eight participants mentioned that we are a nation in decline, an accusation with which it is hard to argue when one looks at the state of our schools, urban crime, a southern border that is no border, the division of people into victims and oppressors, and out-of-control debt and deficits. New leadership in Washington is needed, but that sense of decline was reflected in the mayhem on stage and among the spectators. The theme of decline has its genesis in the identity politics of Progressivism and is manifested in the Balkanization of two cultures – Woke vs. MAGA – each intolerant of the other. The consequence has been to remove the Unum from E Pluribus Unum, dividing us into warring camps. While I believe that extremists at both ends of the political spectrum represent only a small (but growing) fraction of the population, they have consumed all the media and cultural oxygen. 

 

A question that has bothered me in the past arose again during the debate: How do we recover a sense of pride in our nation and what it has accomplished over the past two and a half centuries, in terms of material gains and social progress? It is not that we have been – nor are we – perfect. We have blemishes, but anyone who has studied the history of people and societies around the world must recognize the uniqueness of America, that change is evolutionary, and that we live better lives than our parents and grandparents. We who are fortunate to be in the United States live freer and with less poverty than most any other people in the world. To that we owe thanks to the size of our country, its wealth of resources and people, its adherence to democracy and free-market capitalism, and to those who came before us – our ancestors and the millions of immigrants who have made this country home – and to the founders from whose wisdom came our Constitution.

 

Yet, on Wednesday night that sense of pride in the progress we have made over the decades and centuries was lost in the chaos of the moment. Democrats and enemies abroad must have experienced a sense of schadenfreude as they watched what was called a debate.

"'New Deal Rebels' by Amith Shlaes - Random Thoughts and Questions"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“New Deal Rebels by Amity Shlaes – Random Thoughts and Questions”

August 18, 2023

 

“…it is neither humanitarian nor Democratic nor American to indoctrinate the people

of the United States with the idea that it is the duty of the government to

support the citizen, rather than the duty of the citizen to support the government.”

Speech by John W. Davis, October 21, 1936

Democrat Presidential candidate 1924

 

Davis’ words in 1936 anticipated the penultimate sentence in President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address twenty-five years later: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

 

Davis’s and Kennedy’s words expressed a longing for a time when government was limited and the individual paramount, when Horatio Alger was honored, and when children were told success was up to them, that they could become whatever they wanted, as long as they were aspirant, focused, and diligent.

 

While the immediate aim of the policies and agencies created by FDR’s New Deal was to alleviate the suffering brought on by the Depression, the long-term consequence was to empower the State at the cost of personal freedom and choice. The result was the birth of the “nanny” State, where government is viewed as overprotective and interferes unduly with individual choice. Kennedy’s call in 1961 was for greater individual self-reliance. But his words went unheeded; LBJ’s “Great Society” boosted the role of government, offering more entitlements. The 1980s and ‘90s provided a respite in the rate of change, but the momentum toward bigger government persisted. Progressive candidate Barack Obama spoke in late October 2008: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Just as the stock market crash of 1929, provided the impetus for a more heavy-handed government response, the credit crisis of 2008 gave Mr. Obama the same excuse. As Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s future White House Chief of Staff, exclaimed after the election: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” 

 

When Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 3, 1933, the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. While the Dow Jones Industrial Averages were 30% higher than the summer of 1932, they were down 85% from their peak in 1929. Unemployment was close to 25% and real GDP was 26% lower than four years earlier. The Country was looking for a savior, and FDR appeared.

 

Once inaugurated in March 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took dramatic action. He declared a bank holiday, which shut down banks and the New York Stock Exchange for a week. In the interim, Congress passed a series of measures to ensure the integrity of the banks, including deposit insurance. When banks re-opened the immediate crisis passed. People re-deposited funds they had withdrawn, and the stock market opened higher. Over the next few years (like his successor seventy-six later with his “pen and phone”) FDR amassed power. In doing so, he created a plethora of agencies – “alphabet agencies,” as they were known. Among them: AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration), CCC (Civil Conservation Corporation), ERA (Emergency Relief Act), FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), NRA (National Recovery Act), PWA (Public Works Administration), REA (Rural Electrification Administration, TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), and the WPA (Works Progress Administration) – all reporting to the Executive. 

 

In 302 pages and over four dozen chapters, using material from dozens of politicians, economists, commentators, judges, and academics of the era, Amity Shlaes chronicles those who rebelled against Mr. Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression. While some of the programs then created are still with us, like the FDIC and Social Security, others like the NRA inhibited free market forces, so delayed a return to pre-crash growth. Thus in 1938, nine years after the stock market crash that ignited the Great Depression, unemployment still stood at 19%, with real GDP only 2% higher than in 1929. Escape from the Depression came with providing armaments to the Allies (and our own preparation for war). 

 

Quoting newspaper and magazine articles, texts of speeches, the Congressional Record, letters, Supreme Court concurrences and dissents, Amity Shlaes lets her New Deal rebels speak for themselves. Among the contributors are John W. Davis, Democrat New York Governor Al Smith (1923-1928), Associate Justice Benjamin Cardozo, Wendell Willkie (Republican nominee for President in 1940), Senators Joseph Bailey (R-NC) and Carter Glass (R-VA), John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, Friedrich Hayek, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Ms. Shlaes writes in the introduction: “To travel with these critics through their time is to understand first of all there was nothing inevitable about the duration of the Great Depression.” The key word is “duration,” by which she meant ten years.

 

In the afterword of New Deal Rebels, William P. Ruger, president of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) which published this book, quotes Edward Crosby Harwood (1900-1980), economist and founder of the AIER: “It is never too late to substitute a realistic viewpoint and wisdom for muddling good intentions, and it is surely in the interest of the Country that this be done at the earliest possible date.”

 

But is it too late for us? As a country, we have piled on debt with little concern as to how it will be repaid. In the interest of centralizing and justifying power, we manufacture or exaggerate crises: climate change, accusations of racism and homophobia, pandemics, and perceived inequities. In the meantime, we must ask ourselves: Do we have the means and, more important, do we have the will to confront our true existential threat: Communist China and its pursuit of global hegemony? Progressives market themselves as guardians of democracy and the common man. Yet they employ undemocratic methods, like kangaroo courts to legally tie up opponents, and they use (and have used) public office for private gain, i.e., the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Bidens. Questions arise: Will our debts force a devaluation of the dollar? Will increases in productivity offset declining fertility rates? Will tried and true moral standards ever return? For two centuries the United States, has stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to the world’s oppressed. Is that still possible, without the freedom to speak out and the tolerance embedded in a Judeo-Christian ethic? 

 

Appealing about the New Deal Rebels is its relevance, providing perspective for the optimist that past may be prologue, that we have been here before. But doubt remains: We have been divided into victims and oppressors. We are told our nation is inherently unfair, that racism dominates our history, and that answers lie with a benevolent government, run by Progressives who work to ensure fair and equitable outcomes.

 

Our Founders gave us a limited government, with three separate but equal branches, established of, by, and for the people – a government to serve the people, not the other way around. Yet today we have bureaucrats and lobbyists who move back and forth between the public and private sectors, so that three of the five wealthiest counties in the nation (Loudon, Falls Church, and Fairfax) are in the Washington metropolitan area. Harwood’s words, quoted above and published eighty-nine years ago in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (and re-printed in Ms. Shlaes book) are as relevant today as when written. If only someone is listening.

"Projection"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Projection”

August 11, 2023

 

“‘It reminds me of something you said to me that summer. How we accuse others of the sins we don’t

admit to ourselves.’ I smile. ‘projection. Remember? I had a psychologist friend explain it to me once.’”

                                                                                                                       Emilia speaking to Olive

                                                                                                                       The Beach at Summerly – page 245

                                                                                                                        Beatriz Williams

 

“Freud,” according to Wikipedia in a description of the term, “considered that, in projection, thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one’s own are dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else.”

 

Projectionism is an art practiced by many but mastered by politicians. Like bringing up UFOs to deflect uncomfortable news stories, vilifying those who disrupt the “accepted” narrative of the self-virtuous, or the “illusion of access” to conceal a business scam, projectionism is common among those who hide their true motivations. It is abetted by their cronies in the media.  Democrats, because they spend more time on offense, are more expert projectionists than Republicans, who too often find themselves playing defense.

 

The most egregious recent example of political projection was the Russian collusion narrative, manufactured by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which alleged that Vladimir Putin favored Trump in the 2016 election. While mainstream media, without investigating the facts, ran with the story that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, the facts suggest that any colluding was done by the Clinton campaign. Their law firm, Perkins Cole, arranged for the private investigative firm Fusion GPS to pay Christopher Steele, Britain’s former head of the Russia Desk at MI6 to prepare a fake dossier to support the collusion story. Steele hired Igor Danchenko, a Russian native based in the U.S. and known to the FBI, to provide source material for the dossier – with everything paid for by the Clinton campaign. While the collusion narrative has been disproven, the cost to the Trump Presidency, and to the country, was high. That there are still those who believe the Russian collusion story is proof of the axiom made famous by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels – that a lie repeated becomes truth. 

 

The claim that MAGA Republicans put “democracy at risk” is an example of projection – that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, desirous of personal power – that were he re-elected democracy would be at risk. Trump’s character is not to my liking, and I would rather he not return as President. However, despite his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, I do not see him as a risk to democracy. On January 6, 2021 – in spite of Trump and his followers – our government held. The riot and invasion of the Capital that day did not cause the election to be overturned. Democracy succeeded, which is why that barometer of financial and political events, the New York Stock Exchange, showed no concern that day or during the immediate days following. Authoritarians seek to strengthen their positions. As President, Mr. Trump shrank the number of regulations, giving more freedom to individuals. He has talked of moving agencies out of the Washington, D.C. orbit. He has never spoken of increasing the size of the Supreme Court, or of further neutering Congress by forging new bureaucracies or agencies, which report to the Executive.

 

Ask yourself: Which Party is most aggressive in adding regulations, agencies, and bureaucracies, looking to strengthen the Executive? Which Party has pushed the Administrative State with the most vigor? Which Party flouted convention with the desire to pack and expand the Supreme Court? Which Party has a supportive media? Which Party poses the bigger risk to democracy?

 

As the State grows more powerful, individual freedom diminishes. Since FDR’s New Deal, politicians have had to grapple with the growth of entitlements – how much should they consume, as a percent of GDP and as a percent of the federal budget? According to the website www.usgovernmentspending.com[1], combined Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare programs have grown from 5% of GDP in 1960 to 17% of GDP in 2022. Over that same time, entitlement spending, as a percent of all federal government spending rose from 20% in 1960 to 47.6% in 2022. It is obvious that the nation cannot continue on the same trajectory. But what are the right spending levels? Is democracy more at risk when government intrudes deeper into our lives, or when people assume more responsibility for their personal welfare?  How much individual freedom are you willing to forego to gain the security that a more intrusive, caring government provides?

 

Democracy is fragile; so vigilance is necessary. Charismatic leaders, with the right words, but with a socialistic or militaristic ideology and little or no scruples, can arise from either Party. Given mainstream media’s predilection for left-leaning politicians and policies, the real concern is authoritarianism coming in from the left, where the ramparts are less manned. The best example in my lifetime was Franklin Roosevelt who accumulated executive power behind comforting fireside chats, while arguing that unconstrained capitalism had tilted the Country into Depression. Another is the power behind President Biden – “you didn’t build that” Barack Obama, the only President in my lifetime to remain in the nation’s capital after his term in office ended. Why?

 

Democrats camouflage their craving for power and control by projecting the authoritarianism they practice onto their opponents. In Donald Trump, with his ego, demand for retribution, and verbal incoherence, they have an easy, polarizing target. However, he threatens the administrative edifice they have erected over many decades, which frightens them. If the people begin to see Washington’s bureaucracy as a swamp that houses employees loyal only to an ever-expanding government, they may revolt. That is something progressives cannot allow. Thus, ends justify means – deflections, deceptions, fabrications, and projections.

 

 

---

---

[1] You can copy the URL to your web browser or search engine. This website is prepared by a friend and is one of the most thorough of its kind.