tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51228682024-03-06T22:35:49.571-05:00Lead and GoldMostly Politics and Businesscraighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.comBlogger4518125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-26017284547723340002024-01-28T11:06:00.001-05:002024-01-28T11:06:44.556-05:00McCarthyism: The competence canard<br />
McCarthy's most effective enemies went to great pains to paint themselves as committed anti-communists. They claimed that McCarthy was an unserious, perhaps dishonest, crusader, while they were serious, competent opponents of Stalin and his machinations.
<br /><br />
In his famous CBS News program “See It Now” Edward R. Murrow put it this way:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
When the record is finally written, as it will be one day, it will answer the question, Who has helped the Communist cause and who has served his country better, Senator McCarthy or I? I would like to be remembered by the answer to that question.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Murrow and Co. won that battle. The were the smart anti-communists and could be trusted while McCarthy was a menace and a useful idiot for Stalin.
<br /><br />
But was he right? Were he and his allies more competent and dedicated to the American cause than the senator? Were they really more effective adversaries of the communists?
<br /><br />
The evidence suggests that they were not. The critics, like almost all later historians obfuscated about the issue at hand and asked us to judge McCarthy by the wrong standard (“he never found a spy”). If the senator often was too quick to lump fellow travelers with actual spies, his most famous opponents were stubbornly blind to the evidence against actual spies and potential mSoviet assets.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">II</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div>
We can easily dismiss McCarthy's most persistent critic – <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-wilderness-of-mirrors-and-games.html" target="_blank">Drew Pearson</a>. His anti-communist stance was purely for show. Any man who employes two Soviet assets as reporters is hardly an astute investigator of Soviet subversion.
<br /><br />
Pearson was also consistently wrong about the public spy cases. He defended Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Laurence Duggan when they were named by ex-operatives like Elizabeth Bently and Whittaker Chambers as Soviet agents.
<br /><br />
The VENONA files confirm the guilt of all three.
<br /><br />
Murrows record is not much better. He denounced the accusers of Laurence Duggan – a friend and former colleague – "A dead man's character is being destroyed." At CBS he hired <a href="https://amzn.to/3Sjr8dH%20" target="_blank">Stephen E. Fleischman to work on the award-winning "CBS Reports"</a>. Fleischman was a member of CPUSA throughout the 1950s.
<br /><br />
Murrow promoted the Democrat canard that Annie Lee Moss was a victim of mistaken identity. She wasn't: she was a CPUSA member which made her a risky emplyee for the Army's code office. If Murrow had admitted that then he would have had to concede that McCarthy had a point in questioning the existing security procedures.
<br /><br />
Murrow's campaign was not just against McCarthy. He was also an intense critic of most internal security procedures in the federal bureasucracy. Take the case of Milo Radulovich. As Murrow framed the issue, the Army's security program was so irrational that they were punishing Radulovich because his sister and immigrant father subscribed to some publications from their home country of Ukraine, According to Murrow this was anti-communist paranoia in which unfounded suspicions merged with guilt by association to deny a man his dream of becoming a meteorologist.
<br /><br />
Years later, Radulovich's brother-in-law admitted that he was a member of the CPUSA as was his wife (Radulovich's sister.) They remained loyal party members even after Khrushchev's speech and the brutal occupation of Eastern Europe.
<br /><br />
The case of Milo Radulovich, then, is much more complex than Murrow and other enemies of McCarthy led us to believe.
<br /><br />
Elmer Davis was anti-McCarthy long before Murrow took up his cudgels. During WWII he headed up the Office of War Information. Based on VENONA decrypts, <a href="https://amzn.to/42nFxtW%20" target="_blank">the OWI may rank as the #1 agency for spies per capita</a>. Under Davis <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-katyn-massacre-conspiracies-and_27.html" target="_blank">the OWI worked to suppress the truth about the Katyn massacre</a> and the Soviet's plan to Stalinize Poland. After the war he defended Alger Hiss and denounced witnesses like Whittaker Chambers as “fake patriots” and “professional anti-communists.”
<br /><br />
At a minimum Davies's counterintelligence skills are somewhat suspect. Moreover, when he attacked McCarthy and other congressional investigators, he was, in essence, working to suppress the truth about his own failings at OWI.
<br /><br />
Histories of this era never acknowledge this last point. Like the <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2024/01/mccarthyism-no-sauce-for-gander-part-2.html" target="_blank">Tydings committee</a>, the motivations of McCarthy's critics are always treated as pure.
<br /><br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-54569656312129641112024-01-17T12:10:00.003-05:002024-01-17T12:16:32.166-05:00Coaching and Cowpens
<br />
At the beginning of the American Revolution, the Continental armies lost more battles than they won.
<br /><br />
No surprise. The British army was one of the best in the world. Washington's army was in the process of creation. On the day of battle colonial militia often made up a large portion of his forces. These men frequently broke ranks and fled when faced with British bayonets.
<br /><br />
Nonetheless, colonial officers still treated these poorly trained and equipped troops as if they were well-drilled professionals. Then, when their line broke and the battle was lost, they filled their reports and letters with complaints about the militia and their cowardice and refusal to stand and fight.
<br /><br />
The Revolution was won when Americans found generals who were willing to adjust their tactics and strategy instead of insisting that their soldiers carry out conventional orders that were beyond their training and ability.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">II</div><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Morgan" target="_blank">Daniel Morgan</a> was such a leader. At Saratoga he understood that his company of Virginia riflemen could have a decisive role. The key was to take advantage of their long range accuracy to disrupt and destroy British command and control. At Bemis Heights and Freeman's Farm his tactics denied Gen. John Burgoyne the decisive victory he needed to save his army.
<br /><br />
In the Southern Campaign he first wore down British forces by avoiding battle. (His commander, Nathaniel Greene, understood as Mao did, “that there is in guerrilla warfare no such thing
as a decisive battle.”
<br /><br />
At <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cowpens" target="_blank">Cowpens</a> (17 January 1781) Morgan chose to stand and fight against the pursuing forces led by Banastre Tarleton. The ground was favorable (with the Broad river at their backs, retreat was not an option for the militia) and British troops were tired and frustrated after chasing Morgan across South Carolina.
<br /><br />
What sets Morgan's battle plan apart is his handling of the militia which made up half or more of his army. He did not include them in his main battle line nor did he expect them to stand up to a British bayonet charge. Instead, he placed them forward of his regulars and asked them to fire two volleys. Then, they would withdraw behind his regulars.
<br /><br />
Historian <a href="https://amzn.to/3S5UcXd%20" target="_blank">Robert Wright notes</a> that part of Morgan's tactical genius was that he did not “ask a man to do more than he was physically capable of doing." He did not pretend that militia could stand up to the experienced troops at close quarters. At the same time he did not ignore what capabilities they did possess nor did he treat them with contempt.
<br /><br />
The other key to the victory was that Morgan made sure that his Continentals understood that the militia's withdrawal was planned rather than evidence of an impending rout. He went from campfire to campfire the night before the battle – encouraging the men and explaining his plans.
<br /><br />
Morgan's leadership and insight won a signal victory. In less than an hour he had routed Tarleton (over 80% casualties) and sent the remnants racing back to Cornwallis. He had shaped his tactics to fit the forces he had at hand in a rare feat of flexibility combined with insight.
<br /><br />
It is remarkable that it was the poorly educated backwoodsman, not the better educated generals who had the insight and intelligence to get the most out of the militia.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">III</div><br />
When it comes to football coaches, there are few men with that capacity and courage. Instead, the prevailing ethos is “losses are acceptable if they can be blamed on injuries or a weak roster or dumb players.
<br /><br />
From Ron Jaworski, <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3NY0XYF%20" target="_blank">Games That Changed the Game</a></i>:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
With some teams, the difference between their first-string and back-up quarterback isn't that much, but if your number one guy is a superstar, its an entirely different story. One time, Jon Gruden and I were attending a Colts practice before one of our ESPN games, and we were standing next to their offensive coordinator, Tom Moore. Tom is 'old school' in every sense of the word. He's been in the NFL for over thirty years and has signaled in every play call of Peyton Manning's career. As we watched, we were surprised to see Manning taking virtually all the reps in the session. Jon asked Tom why he wasn't giving some snaps to Peyton's backups. Moore is a man of few words, but when he talks, those words carry weight. He looked us both in the eye, paused for a moment, then said in that gravelly voice of his, 'Fellas, if "18" goes down, we're fucked. And we don't practice fucked.'
</span><br /></blockquote>
Old school coaches like Don Shula built their teams for resilience when things went badly. Shula twice took teams to the Super Bowl when forced to play most of the season with his back-up quarterback. In his undefeated 1972 season, Earl Morrall, not Bob Griese, started a majority of Miami's 17 victories.
<br /><br />
Owners and fans now accept the idea that without a healthy franchise QB a team is doomed to mediocrity or worse. No one remembers that Joe Gibbs won three Super Bowls with 3 different Qbs (two of them castoffs from other teams).
<br /><br />
Bill Walsh created the West Coast Offense out of necessity when he coached in Cinncinnati. Lacking both a strong-armed QB and a powerful running game, he developed his offensive system which revolutionized the pro passing game.
<br /><br />
Now coaches and coordinators are often given a pass of a year or more because “it takes time for players to learn a new system”. In a league with a salary cap, free agency, and short playing careers, why do journalists accept that a coach should insist that players adapt to his system instead of adapting the system to the players he has? To accept this excuse we have to admit that coaches are calling plays that they know their players are unlikely to execute.
<br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-72933158254282617242024-01-15T01:00:00.027-05:002024-01-31T12:33:17.340-05:00McCarthyism: No sauce for the gander (part 2)
<br />
One McCarthy opponent deserves special consideration. Sen. Millward Tydings (D-MD) tried to put an end to McCarthy's career right at the beginning of his crusade. He chaired the committee which investigated the Wheeling speech and the veracity of Joe's charges (Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees ).
Its report is still routinely cited as proof that McCarthy lied and had no basis for accusing the Truman administration of being soft on subversion.
<br /><br />
Tydings was a segregationist Democrat who voted with the Southern bloc that obstructed civil rights legislation for decades. In defense of the fillibuster Tydings declared that “It was cloture that crucified Christ on the cross.” All this is rarely mentioned by those who portray his campaign against McCarthy as a battle for civil liberties.
<br /><br />
The Tydings committee also set the template for many of the “McCarthy hearings”. The Senator was the one called to face accusations, not the one making them. Far from having unchallenged power, he was challenged at every turn.
<br /><br />
Tydings is specifically interesting for his peronal connections to the pro-Stalin elements in the FDR administration.
<br /><br />
Tydings married the daughter of Joseph E. Davies, who FDR appointed ambassador to Moscow. While there he vouched for the fairness of the purge trials during Stalin's <a href="https://amzn.to/3NXaNcX" target="_blank">Great Terror</a>.
<br /><br />
After he returned he wrote a memoir, <i>Mission to Moscow</i> that even Soviet propagandists thought overdid it in its praise of Stalin. He was part of the clique which tried to purge long-time Russia experts like Loy Henderson and George Kennan from the State Department because they were insufficiently pro-Stalin. He also sought to deny asylum to Soviets agents who defected to the US.
<br /><br />
Davies and his wife (Marjorie Merriweather Post) became great collectors of Russian art. They were able to acquire plenty of first rate pieces thanks to their friends in the Kremlin who had looted Russia (and Russians) on behalf of the Revolution and the Party.
<br /><br />
After the Wheeling speech Tydings saw the danger that the “soft on communism” charge represented to the Democratic party in the upcoming election. He wrote Truman to warn him:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
I strongly recommend for your own welfare, for the welfare of the country and lastly for the Welfare of the Democratic party that the present Communist inquiry not be allowed to worsen, but that you take bold, forthright and courageous action which I presume to say will do as much as anything I can think of to give you and your administration and party a tremendous advantage in the coming elections.
</span><br /></blockquote>
As <a href="https://amzn.to/42lmUqo" target="_blank">Klehr and Radosh</a> noted:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Senator McCarthy cynically used the <i>Amerasia</i> affair even though he was indifferent to the facts of the case. But so too did Senator Tydings, who preferred to find convenient scapegoats rather than be embarrassed by the truth.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Tydings, as chairman of the committee tasked with investigating communist infiltration of the State Department, instead used the committee to attack and discredit McCarthy. Its report was nakedly partisan. Tydings himself had strong personal and political reasons to see that the anti-communist issue was dead and buried before the 1950 election.
<br /><br />
Yet the Tydings committee report is still used as conclusive evidence that McCarthy never had evidence for his charges. Hence, he was just a drunken demagogue stoking populst paranoia.
<br /><br />
Note the legerdemain at work to maintain the narrative. McCarthy's crusade must be viewed through the lense of his political opportunism, personal faults, and tactical missteps. The political motives, personal interests, and repellant beliefs of his opponents are carefully excluded from the analysis.
<br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-57259170136862215802023-12-29T18:10:00.007-05:002024-01-02T15:20:47.098-05:00McCarthy and his critics: No sauce for the gander<br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/02/mccarthyism-historiography-frozen-in.html" target="_blank">I've noted before</a> that Joseph McCarthy's negative image has remained unchanged despite the flood of revelations about Soviet intelligence activities in the US. Further, that much of the damaging material on McCarthy focuses on his personal behavior and that of his staff, his pre-Senate career, and his aptitude as a television performer. Finally, that much of the “evidence” used to disparage the senator is of dubious value-- unsourced gossip, innuendo, and partisan hype.
<br /><br />
Which supposedly adds up to something like this: The investigations were partisan exercises, not serious fact-finding. McCarthy was a Republican cat's-paw and a tool for the China Lobby. His popularity was fueled by bigotry and populist resentment. McCarthy, a lifelong liar and braggart, was not to be trusted. The messenger and the message could be rightly dismissed. Red scare. Witchhunt. Paranoid style. Anti-intellectualism. Case closed.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.
</span><br />― Warren Buffett
<br /></blockquote>
But what if McCarthy was approximately right while his critics were wrong on both the big questions and exact details? That is one question that is studiously avoided in the mire of the journalism of personal destruction.
<br /><br />
Another question this time relating to the narrative: What happens if we applied the “scrutinize the messengers; don't trust liars” rule to McCarthy's critics?
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">II</div><br />
If McCarthy is untrustworthy because he exaggerated his war record, then what of his nemesis Edward R. Murrow? The doyen of CBS News and secular saint to journalists everywhere lied his education and experience as he scrambled for a toehold in the world of eastern media and NGOs.
<br /><br />
Take the worst things said and written about McCarthy and he still looks angelic compared to his most persistent critic--<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-wilderness-of-mirrors-and-games.html" target="_blank"> Drew Pearson</a>. The discovery that he employed not one, but two Soviet assets should have prompted at least some rethinking about the Narrative. Then there is his collusion with Moscow to protect his brand and their operations. Surely Pearson's unfounded and libelous attacks on the anti-communist Secretary of Defense James Forrestal deserve examination. (Forrestal and McCarthy were polar opposites in nearly every respect. Practically the only things they had in common was a fierce opposition to Joe Stalin and sustained calumny at the hands of Drew Pearson.
<br /><br />
Pearson cheated on his wives and cheated his business partner who helped launch “Washington Merry-Go-Round”. Pearson, a Quaker, took advantage of his patriotic partner who joined the army after Pearl Harbor. Robert Allen lost an arm; Drew Pearson gained a business.
<br /><br />
Pearson's legman Jack Anderson admitted that he committed perjury to cover up his and Pearson's crimes in their Get McCarthy crusade. Yet Anderson's gossip-filled “biography” of the senator is still cited by writers today.
<br /><br />
As is Richard Rovere's biography. What is not often mentioned is that Rovere – who covered McCarthy as the New Yorker's Washington correspondent – wrote for the CPUSA's New Masses during the 1930s. The Narrative demands that we trust this one-time Stalinist stooge to properly assess the extent of communist subversion and the possibilities of liberal cover-ups.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">III</div><br />
If McCarthy's critics were held to the same standard that they apply to the senator, then the <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2020/11/pearl-harbor-history-and-problems-of.html" target="_blank">melodramatic Good vs. Evil framing</a> falls apart. And we cannot have that.
<br /><br />
McCarthy must be portrayed as evil because he represented a threat to the newly empowered experts and the mediators of democracy.
<br /><br />
For all the moral posturing and journalistic justifications, the treatment of McCarthy was simply liberals, left-wingers, and communists following the Munzenberg template.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Don't argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror.
</span><br /></blockquote>
While claiming to uphold American values, McCarthy's enemies often resorted to Stalinist tactics.
<blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><br />
During the 1950s the friends and supporters of McCarthy complained bitterly about the 'double-standard' employed by his liberal critics. In particular, they charged that the righteous people who condemned his name-callng were the same people who called him a Nazi, a jackal, and a thug; that the people who yelled loudest at his 'dirty' tactics were the same people who spread rumors of his alleged homosexuality and hired spies to infiltrate his office and dredge up material about the personal habits of his aides. Needless to say, the liberal press ignored these shameful and frequently illegal acts; they were too busy portraying the senator as an enemy of democractic institutions and free society.
<br /><br />
There is a good bit of truth to this contention. McCarthy's critics could be hypocritical and cruel. Many viewed him as the new Hitler, a man to be stopped quickly and at all costs. The means were often irreleva</span>nt.
<br /><br />
David M. Oshinsky,<i> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conspiracy-So-Immense-World-McCarthy/dp/1982124040?crid=BNHURJ9DPQQ0&keywords=david+oshinsky&qid=1704226387&s=digital-text&sprefix=david+oshinsky%2Cdigital-text%2C1932&sr=1-3-catcorr&linkCode=ll1&tag=leadandgold-20&linkId=70e3026dde8b2839c51d153142609251&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy</a></i>
<br /></blockquote>
Related:
<blockquote><br /><a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/10/mediated-democracy-and-temptations-of.html" target="_blank">Mediated democracy and the temptations of Leninism</a>
<br /><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2020/07/on-utility-of-fascist.html" target="_blank">On the utility of “Fascist”</a>
<br /><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-essence-of-mccarthyism.html" target="_blank">The essence of “McCarthyism”: The Administrative State strikes back</a>
<br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-75851428044054809872023-11-17T15:02:00.002-05:002023-11-17T15:04:38.865-05:00McCarthyism: More Philby parallels <br />
All of the Cambridge spies worked to minimize and conceal their communist activity at university. For Maclean and Blunt it was as simple as brushing it off as youthful exuberance and naïve idealism. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess went so far as joining fascist and pro-Nazi organizations at the behest of their Soviet masters.
<br /><br />
To be a good conspirator one had to be a chameleon.
<br /><br />
As <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-wilderness-of-mirrors-and-games.html%20" target="_blank">the case of Drew Pearson</a> illustrates, Moscow was always willing to help a useful asset hide their true colors.
<br /><br />
The Cambridge spies were successful, in large measure, because the British establishment was happy to trust them as they were “the right sort of people.” Their “explanations” were accepted without question and their past was never scrutinized.
<br /><br />
Antony Percy:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
The fatal misconception that leading officers in MI5 harboured, namely that communism in well-educated Britons was a mere affectation of no consequence, encouraged them to ignore the warning signs and trust such characters because of their obvious intelligence and savoir-faire.
</span><br /></blockquote>
As historian and some time intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper put it:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
I hasten to add that, although I myself knew of Philby’s communist past, it would never have occurred to me, at that time, to hold it against him. Indeed, I was rather cheered than depressed by this unusual recruitment. My own view, like that of most of my contemporaries, was that our superiors were lunatic in their anti-communism. Many of our friends had been, or had thought themselves, communists in the 1930s; and we were shocked that such persons should be debarred from public service on account of mere juvenile illusions which anyway they had now shed: for such illusions could not survive the shattering impact of Stalin’s Pact with Hitler in 1939.
</span><br /></blockquote>
The same thing happened in the US where Soviet agents like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White never lacked for establishment defenders.
<br /><br />
Just something to keep in mind when reading anti-McCarthy polemics today.
<br /><br />
For instance, this is Ronald Radosh attacking M. Stanton Evans for his pro-McCarthy Blacklisted by History:*
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Consider his treatment of liberal editor James Wechsler. Evans acknowledges that calling Wechsler to testify was a “dubious move,” and that McCarthy “should never have had the editor before the committee.” But Wechsler was called and questioned, and McCarthy’s treatment of him reflects why so many regarded him as a bully and a demagogue. All one has to do is read the transcripts. You will not find them quoted in Evans’s book. What you will find is that McCarthy told the fierce anti-Communist editor that he had not really broken with the Communists, and was “serving them very, very actively.” This was preposterous, since the Communist Daily Worker regularly attacked Wechsler for being anti-Communist. McCarthy thought that was all a big ruse so that Wechsler’s New York Post readers would believe him when he attacked McCarthy in his own paper.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Note how Radosh accepts at face value (“fierce anti-Communist”) Wechsler's claim that he broke with the communists in the mid-1930s and became their committed opponent. No mention of the fact that the editor somehow managed to find it within himself to work along side outright Stalinists at The Nation and PM. Nor that the anti-McCarthy anti-communist worked side by side with communists and fellow travelers to bring down Martin Dies when his HUAC was uncovering Stalin's network in the 1940s.
<br /><br />
As for the attacks by the communist press – please see <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/07/the-wilderness-of-mirrors-and-games.html%20" target="_blank">the strange case of Drew Pearson</a>.
<br /><br />
Radosh, a Red Diaper baby and former leftist, shares much in common with the useful idiots who protected and promoted Philby, Burgess, and the other Soviet spies. There is the quick acceptance of the of claim to have broken with the Stalinists with no interest to see if it is really true. There is the same fear that the wrong sort of people are using the spy issue and are attacking the right kind (our kind) of people. There is, finally, the rather bizarre belief that the best people to root out communists are people who were once duped by the communists.
<br /><br />
Antony Percy:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
The voices and influence of those who recognised the starkness of the Communist threat best (Knight, Archer, Curry, and even Kell) were being drowned by those with leftist sympathies or who were too indulgent to the socialist cause.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Daniel J. Flynn cut to the heart of the issue:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
While Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, and James Burnham gained a level of respect as anticommunists, those anticommunists never foolish enough to have supported the Communists are almost uniformly portrayed as clumsy oafs whose zeal clouded their judgment. Another criterion that helps determine whether intellectuals’ anoint anti-Communists as heroes or goats involved the dichotomy between men of action and men of ideas. Intellectuals, naturally, favor the latter. From the sidelines, the anticommunist intellectuals were free from the mud and grime. But on the field, Pat McCarran, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joe McCarthy got dirty. The opposition’s game plan remained the same regardless of the adversary: declare a witch hunt, focus on inaccuracies, smear the accuser, and hubristically portray Communists as defenders of civil liberties.
</span><br /></blockquote>
* In the pages of National Review no less.
<br /><br />
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craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-72738406023815392642023-10-25T10:52:00.004-04:002023-12-27T13:08:57.985-05:00McCarthyism: A Philby footnote
<br />
Interesting talk by the biographer of Soviet spy Guy Burgess.
<blockquote><br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sn6yRbOXios?si=p_njAbCpRIdBAFP8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>
<br /></blockquote>
Near the end of the video he addresses a key question about the fall of the Cambridge Ring: Why did they use Burgess to save Maclean when that meant Philby would be caught in the blowback?
<br /><br />
Lownie put that question to a former KGB man who answered that it did not matter because the Soviet Union "had so many spies" in the west that Philby and Burgess were expendable.
<br /><br />
Maybe that was just braggadocio from an old guy who worked for the side that lost. There is, however, no getting around the fact that the KGB seemed to toss away two valuable spies for no good reason.
<br /><br />
As Verne Newton put it: "Moscow did not gamble with Philby's future. They did not even sacrifice it. They threw it away."
<blockquote><br />
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<br /></blockquote>
The key point, it seems to me, is that Philby, Burgess, and Maclean were British spies with access to American secrets. That should have made them especially valuable. Yet, there is no denying that Moscow treated them with a carelessness bordering on contempt.<div><br /></div><div>
<br /><br />
Something else to ponder:
<br /><br />
Robert Lamphere, the FBI agent who was central to exploiting the VENONA breakthrough, wrote this in his memoirs:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
I must admit that I initially doubted that Philby was an active Soviet spy. I reasoned that a real Soviet agent would have worked harder at establushning closer relations with me and other key people; I understood that Philby had concentrated on the CIA, which was certainly a KGB target, but why hadn't he taken the opportunity to penetrate the FBI as well? Since Philby hadn't spent much time on us, I temporarily concluded that he must not have been an active spy.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Philby's indifference is particularly notable because he arrived in Washington a few months after Moscow lost a well-placed source within the DOJ who fed them valuable information about FBI counterintelligence (Judith Coplon).
<br /><br />
One possibility is that they were not seen as valuable at Dzerzhinsky Square. Perhaps the paranoid Stalinists who ran the spy agencies deemed the Cambridge Ring too good to be true, i.e. double agents.
<br /><br />
Another possibility is that the KGB and GRU actually did have many active sources in London and Washington-- so many that they could afford to lose Philby and Burgess just to help Maclean avoid interrogation.
<br /><br />
If this is true it requires a radical revision of the McCarthy narrative.
<br /><br />
The first draft of history declared that there was never a communist underground in Washington; the senator was a demagogue who launched a witch-hunt. The revised (current) narrative holds that there were communist agents but Harry S. Truman and John E. Hoover had smashed the spy rings. McCarthy is still a demagogue who launched a witch-hunt.
<br /><br />
If Lownie's source is correct, then that narrative is wrong. Soviet intelligence still had assets in place and the government was not doing enough to root them out.
<blockquote><br />
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<br /></blockquote></div>craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-91957575170449643452023-07-27T12:48:00.012-04:002024-01-27T17:38:47.747-05:00The wilderness of mirrors and games journalists play<br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
One easy trick to turn a partisan into an honest reporter
<br /><br />
When collussion is part of building a brand
</span><br /><br />
Winston Churchill called columnist Drew Pearson “the most colossal liar in the United States”. He was, for a time, <a href="https://amzn.to/3tZ697S" target="_blank">the most influential journalist in America</a>. He was an early and persistent critic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Pearson and his “leg man” Jack Anderson wrote much of the <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/02/mccarthyism-historiography-frozen-in.html" target="_blank">first draft of the history of McCarthyism</a>.
<br /><br />
Churchill had a point. Pearson lied about the targets of his muckraking (these also included Richard Nixon, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Whittaker Chambers, and James Forrestal.) <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/05/mccarthy-and-history-tainted-sources.html" target="_blank">He lied about the Soviet spy on his staff.</a>
<br /><br />
Most intriguingly, he lied about his method and his relations with powerful politicins.
<br /><br />
Pearson posed as an honest muckraker: the dauntless investigator rooting out corruption and wrong-doing. He was attacked by all sides because he did not play favorites. Joe McCarthy hated him, but so did Harry Truman.
<br /><br />
It was only a pose – a carefully cultivated pose designed to fool the rubes.
<br /><br />
Early in the Kennedy administration, Pearson explained to Pierre Salinger how he wanted to play the game:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
I suggested that when the going got tough and I got too much hell from Republican editors, I would ask Kennedy a favor—namely, that he do to me what Harry Truman did: blast me. This would really set me up with the press. Salinger said that when the time was desperate to call on him.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Salinger was happy to play the game because he knew Pearson was on his team. The reporter was perfectly willing to let JFK know what question he woulld as at a news conference so the President could prepare a response.
<br /><br />
In <a href="https://amzn.to/3vPsTHY" target="_blank">his diary</a>, Pearson recorded a similar agreement with Khrushchev's son-in-law. T<i>he brave scourge of Joe McCarthy and James Forrestal needed to collude with Soviet apparatchiks to bolster his anti-communist credentials.</i>
<br /><br />
Did the Soviets play along with Pearson because they thought he was on their team? That the Soviets agreed to play the game shows that they viewed Pearson as a useful asset.
<br /><br />
His value went beyond his attacks on anti-communists and cold warriors. The <a href="https://amzn.to/3HzmAKX" target="_blank">Mitrokhin archives</a> show that the KGB saw Pearson as an effective conduit for disinformation.
<br /><br />
The Soviets must surely have been pleased with Pearson in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. He did yeoman's work to divert attention from one inconvenient fact: the assassin was a committed communist. Initially he led the “Blame Dallas” chorus which tried to tie the murder to conservatives and anti-communists. Later he promoted baseless conspiracy theories about anti-Castro Cubans and Mafia hit men. In between he attacked the Secret Service and the FBI.
<br /><br />
There is an intersting footnote to Pearson's machinations. In <a href="http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/46544.html" target="_blank">his scathing review</a> of M. Stanton Evans's <i>Blacklisted by History</i>, Ronald Radosh brought up the case of James Wechsler to illustrate McCarthy's perfidity:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">Consider his treatment of liberal editor James Wechsler. Evans acknowledges that calling Wechsler to testify was a “dubious move,” and that McCarthy “should never have had the editor before the committee.” But Wechsler was called and questioned, and McCarthy’s treatment of him reflects why so many regarded him as a bully and a demagogue. All one has to do is read the transcripts. You will not find them quoted in Evans’s book. What you will find is that McCarthy told the fierce anti-Communist editor that he had not really broken with the Communists, and was “serving them very, very actively.” This was preposterous, since the Communist Daily Worker regularly attacked Wechsler for being anti-Communist. McCarthy thought that was all a big ruse so that Wechsler’s New York Post readers would believe him when he attacked McCarthy in his own paper.</span><br /></blockquote>
In light of the Soviet's entente with Pearson, McCarthy's charge was hardly perposterous. A regime capable of running <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2009/04/troubling-thought-one-point-tennent.html" target="_blank">the Trust and dozens of other deception operations</a> is more than capable of attacking an asset in order to make said asset appear independent. Stephen Koch notes that the Munzenbeg propaganda machine was happy to make use of non-communists and "innocuous" anti-communists "to provide it with the necessary air of independence."
<br /><br />
McCarthy may have been wrong. He was certainly too undisciplined and impetuous to present the question effectively. But it was hardly a "preposterous" idea.
<br /><br /><br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-36981926908526672522023-06-28T17:34:00.012-04:002024-01-14T12:23:20.714-05:00Harry Gold, McCarthy and the “Pink Dentist”
<br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/06/an-unlikely-hero.html" target="_blank">Harry Gold's career as a Soviet spy</a> offers a vital but little understood insight into the Army-McCarthy hearings and the fake narratives that surround it.
<br /><br />
The approved narrative from the <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2017/04/reconsidering-anti-intellectualism-in.html" target="_blank">patron saint of experty intellectuals</a>:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Real Communists were usually too insignificant to warrant lengthy pursuit; McCarthy did not trouble himself much over an obscure radical dentist promoted by the army when he could use the case to strike at the army itself, and beyond the army at the Eisenhower administration.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Decades later, the song remains the same. From <a href="https://amzn.to/3tVIm8H" target="_blank">Sam Tannenhaus</a>:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
The best McCarthy could do was dredge up a 'pink' dentist at a military base in New Jersey.
</span><br /></blockquote>
We are supposed to understand that a pink dentist like Irving Peress could never be a spy because he had no access to secrets. Therefore, his promotion was no reflection on Army security procedures.
<br /><br />
That “understanding” relies on a profound ignorance of how the Soviets operated. Gold's career shows that a successful spy ring requires a whole network of operatives who themselves have no connection to vital secrets.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Soviet espionage networks in the United States would not have been able to function without the assistance of a number of dedicated support personnel whose role was as essential as that of the sources who actually took documents from the government offices in which they worked or communicated secrets to which they were privy.</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3vseJMv" target="_blank">Spies</a></i></div></blockquote>
Further, Peress's profession made him especially attractive to the Soviets.
<br /><br />
According to NKVD defector Alexander Orlov “the Soviets favored particularly the use of the surgeries of 'trusted dentists and physicians', which were the preferred sites for really important meetings.” They offered privacy and a convenient place to photograph documents. They were the perfect covert hub for communications and support. <a href="https://amzn.to/420kxZN" target="_blank">M. Stanton Evans notes</a> that both the Bentley and Chambers spy rings included dentists as central figures. A dentist was also key player among the agents who surrounded Robert Oppenheimer in California.
<br /><span style="font-family: arial;"> <blockquote>
Weinstein, Abraham: New York dentist who provided dental services for many CPUSA officials involved in its clandestine work as well as for many government employees who spied for the Soviets. The FBI concluded that Winstein acted as a communications intermediary; that many of the dental visits were a cover for passing of information to Weinstein, who then passed the information on to another party. Elizabeth Bentley identified a contact of Jacob Golos's who was a dentist and whom she knew only as Charlie. From her description, the FBI concluded that Weinstein was Charlie.
<br />*** <br />
Philip Rosenblitt, a Communist dentist in New York, was part of the courier system for delivering Soviet money to Soviet intelligence networks in the United States.
</blockquote></span><blockquote style="text-align: center;">Haynes and Kleher, <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3U0SBTM" target="_blank">Venona</a></i></blockquote><i></i><div>
<i><br /></i>
Peress the man was never the real issue. His promotion, however, was an important matter for investigation. It suggested that the US Army was still lacksadaisical or worse when it came to security and counter-intelligence. This point was lost in the theatrics and agit-prop surrounding the Army-McCarthy hearings.
<br /><br />
It remains absent in most of the histories of McCarthyism. In order to demonize McCarthy the Narrative must obscure that one key point: The Senator was broadly correct about the failures of the Administrative State to combat Soviet spying and infiltration.
<br /><br />
As Nicholas von Hoffman put it back in the 1990s:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Point by point, Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.
</span><br /><br /></blockquote>
Related:
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-katyn-massacre-conspiracies-and.html" target="_blank">The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups</a></blockquote><p> </p>
</div>craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-63939884288711938492023-06-14T23:02:00.003-04:002024-01-14T12:15:27.658-05:00An unlikely hero<br />
Harry Gold was a Philly chemist who worked as a courier and spy for Soviet intelligence for over a decade. He was central to the operations that sent atomic secrets from Los Alamos to Moscow.
<br /><br />
He was a diligent and effective agent, yet he possessed neither the ideological fervor of the Rosenbergs nor the greed of Aldrich Ames.
<br /><br />
Allen Hornblum notes in his <a href="https://amzn.to/3SjES9w" target="_blank">biography of Gold</a> that he was "one of the most denounced, slandered, and demonized figures in twentieth-century America."
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
The calumny heaped upon Gold during his life and long after his death was only partially due to his disloyalty and criminal acts. It had far more to do with his confession to those acts and his naming of others who had similarly served the Soviet Union. Harry Gold was the human tripwire that brought down a host of Americans who had spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s.
</span><br /></blockquote><br />
<br />
When confronted by the FBI, Gold quickly confessed and revealed everything he knew about the Soviet spy apparatus in America.
<br /><br />
Much of the American Left despised Gold for that confession. For decades they portrayed him as a liar and neurotic fabulist as they sought to exonerate their sainted Rosenbergs.
<br /><br />
Hornblum's biography corrects those slanders. The Harry Gold in this book comes across as decent and generous. What most impresses is his stoicism in the face of adversity. He owned up to his crimes, did his time without whining, and then did his best to rebuild his life after his parole.
<br />craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-69676320836111051942023-05-01T12:41:00.004-04:002023-07-02T16:48:54.520-04:00McCarthy and History: Tainted sources and rotten fruit<span style="font-family: arial;">
The first draft of the history of McCarthyism was written by people whose own history has been ignored and covered-up.
</span><br /><br />
Historian David Greenberg makes an interesting point about Watergate and the resurgence of anti-anti-communism in the 1970s:<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Nixon's mendacity in Watergate and kindred crimes had the perverse effect of making all his previous victims seem virtuous -- even the scoundrels.
</span><br /></blockquote>
While Watergate helped rehabilitate Stalinists and traitors like Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Lillian Hellman, VENONA and the Soviet archives did nothing change the image of Joseph McCarthy.
<br /><br />
The <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/02/mccarthyism-historiography-frozen-in.html" target="_blank">calcified narratives of McCarthyism</a> are especially puzzling given the weak and corrupt sources which created it. The anti-McCarthy movement embraced lock-step Stalinists and actual Soviet spies. It then turned them into martyrs and victims of a “Red Scare”.
<br /><br />
This smacks of desperation. But then the anti-McCarthy crusaders had good reason to be desperate.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">II</div><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Can you smear a real spy?
</span><br /><br />
A striking aspect of our ossified “history” of McCarthyism is that the declassified documents do not just shed light on the senator and his targets. Perhaps even more interesting (and important) is what we have learned about the journalists and pundits who shaped the first draft of that history.
<br /><br />
The one-time owner of the New Republic, Michael Straight, wrote a book about the Army-McCarthy hearings. <i>Trial by Television</i> appeared in the bibliographies of all the best and most fashionable books on the Red Scare and McCarthyism.
<br /><br />
The book had a special piquancy because McCarthy had attacked Straight during the senator's investigation into Gustavo Duran who had married Straight's sister.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Duran entered the final and decisive confrontation. Members of the American embassy in London questioned his British friends, including the military historian Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart, and Henry Walston, whose wife was a sister of Duran's wife. (So, too, was Michael Straight's wife-- McCarthy did not let pass the opportunity to smear the proprietor and editor of the New Republic .)</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">David Caute, <i>The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower</i></div></blockquote>
Then, in 1983, Michael Straight admitted that he had been a member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring.
<br /><br />
That is, by any standard, quite the plot twist. Yet it made no discernible difference to the narrative.
<br /><br />
Old habits die hard and much of journalism is little more than habitual pronouncements affirming the conventional wisdom.
<br /><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2011/05/insider-explains-narrative.html" target="_blank">The narrative, after all, “is controlled in the retelling of the story.”</a>
<br /><br />
BTW, McCarty was right about Duran as well.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Gustavo Duran "was a firmly committed Stalinist operative, serving the apparatus so flawlessly that he soon graduated to secret police work, in which, he quickly became a favored protege of the Soviet NKVD chief in Spain, Alexander Orlov, the man who, on Stalin's direct personal order, murdered Nin."
</span><br />
Stephen Koch, <i>The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passons, and the Murder of Jose Robles</i></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;"><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" sandbox="allow-popups allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-same-origin" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=as_ss_li_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=leadandgold-20&language=en_US&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0306814285&asins=0306814285&linkId=77a6cbc1d84d72bb52318aebf90c3818&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" sandbox="allow-popups allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-same-origin" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=as_ss_li_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=leadandgold-20&language=en_US&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=158243798X&asins=158243798X&linkId=0a24955ffc9e974c51b63fc7500d2311&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe> </div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Cedric Belfrage was another self-proclaimed “victim” of McCarthyism.</div>
<blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">
But the case which most forcefully demonstrated the government's refusal to tolerate criticism from the far Left was that of Cedric Belfrage, cofounder of the ALP's National Guardian, a resident alien of British nationality who had served briefly as an Allied press officer in Germany and had been named by Elizabeth Bentley as a wartime Soviet 'courier'. In 1950 Belfrage had been summoned to Immigration Service headquarters, where he refused to answer questions concerning his writings, views and associations.</span><br />
David Caute, <i>The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower</i>
<br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
McCarthy ordered an immigration officer to be present when an alien of long standing took the Fifth Amendment. The alien was Cedric Belfrage, an author who wrote for Hollywood fan magazines, had been Sam Goldwyn's press agent, and who had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936. After taking the Fifth, Belfrage was arrested on a deportation warrant, held at Ellis Island, and then deported to Great Britain.</span><br />
Haynes Johnson, <i>The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism</i>
<br /></blockquote>
Belfrage later wrote a book about his ordeal at the hands of paranoid Americans. When VENONA and Soviet documents revealed that he did, in fact, pass secrets to Moscow, it changed nothing in the minds of journalists and popular historians.
<br /><br />
The Belfrage case also illustrates how government secrecy often puts traitors and bureaucrats in a tacit alliance. MI5 and MI6 were not keen to pursue Belfrage because it would have revealed clandestine British activities before Pearl Harbor.
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34012395" target="_blank">Cedric Belfrage, the WW2 spy Britain was embarrassed to pursue</a>
<br /></blockquote>
Further, after the embarrassment of Burgess and Maclean's escape, the intelligence bureaucrats were not anxious to air additional dirty laundry.
<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.coldspur.com/enigma-variations-dennistons-reward/" target="_blank">Coldspur</a>: <blockquote><br />
<span style="font-family: arial;">Nigel West describes, in his study of MI6 chiefs At Her Majesty’s Secret Service, how senior MI6 officers were concerned that the pursuit of moles might harm the chances of getting their gongs.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Drew Pearson's syndicated column was a mish-mash of political gossip, official leaks masquerading as investigative journalism, and wild invective aimed at his long list of enemies. He cut corners, relied on bribery and blackmail, and was rarely troubled by the need to verify or fact-check a juicy and useful “scoop”. Yet, in the Red Scare narrative, he is a hero because he attacked McCarthy early and often.
<br /><br />
Anti-McCarthyism is the left-wing's St. Crispin day. Bashing Joe gentled their condition “be they ne'er so vile”.
<br /><br />
The Senator struck back by pointing out Pearson employed as a “leg man” one David Karr who had formerly worked for the New Masses-- the newspaper of the CPUSA. Pearson dismissed this as a youthful indiscretion of a kid who was eager to gain experience as a sportwriter.
<br /><br />
Historians and journalists trusted the muckraker and chalked up another example of slander by McCarthy.
<br /><br />
We now know that not only was Karr literally a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, but that he also had a history of contacts with Soviet intelligence. Those contacts went on for decades after Pearson vouched for his probity and loyalty.
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<br />
Drew Pearson also represents a key faction of the anti-McCarthy cabal. Most of the Senator's opponents took great pains to present themselves as dedicated anti-communists. They maintained that they were opposed McCarthy because he was reckless, crude, and attacked innocent people. They insisted that people like themselves were better anti-communists because they were wiser and more thoughtful than the bumptious senator from Appleton, Wisconsin.
<br /><br />
Historians have accepted their self-appraisal with little skepticism. It is probably worth re-evaluating their assessment.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">TBC</div>craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-42490814524894563322023-04-09T09:33:00.000-04:002023-04-09T09:33:17.040-04:00Rejoice! He is risen!<blockquote>
<br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">And they remembered his words,
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.
</span><br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.
</span><br />
<br />
Luke 24: 1-12
</blockquote>
<br />
<br />craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-91345630107579937652023-04-07T09:36:00.001-04:002023-04-07T09:37:54.193-04:00"Wood, and nails, and colored eggs"<br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJgNl-ZiWvJ8jGFc3O6gNI5RpCxUiRmLBMxqOSMp0bUap4ui_dyQKDo8gaALMGdWocByc-8KoqOfxT7xaXrLKO3HtMBmD0-a8hQxJScU2LKHgRtemhhmYlg_Xn-YtqSMv9vdhRz805VKY6wXVpi2rqcZdjvhQUR7sG8PUfdkZPQST0Tl6grNw/s4160/IMG_20220402_134716655.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="3120" data-original-width="4160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJgNl-ZiWvJ8jGFc3O6gNI5RpCxUiRmLBMxqOSMp0bUap4ui_dyQKDo8gaALMGdWocByc-8KoqOfxT7xaXrLKO3HtMBmD0-a8hQxJScU2LKHgRtemhhmYlg_Xn-YtqSMv9vdhRz805VKY6wXVpi2rqcZdjvhQUR7sG8PUfdkZPQST0Tl6grNw/s320/IMG_20220402_134716655.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">First Posted 22 March 2005
</span><br />
<br />
This passage from Martin Bell's remarkable little book The <em>Way of the Wolf: The Gospel in New Images</em> seems especially timely this Easter season.<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "arial";">God raised Jesus from the dead to the end that we should be clear-once and for all-that there is nothing more important than being human. Our lives have eternal significance. And no one-absolutely no one-is expendable.<br /><br /><b>Colored Eggs</b><br /><br />Some human beings are fortunate enough to be able to color eggs on Easter. If you have a pair of hands to hold the eggs, or if you are fortunate enough to be able to see the brilliant colors, then you are twice blessed.<br /><br />This Easter some of us cannot hold the eggs, others of us cannot see the colors, many of us are unable to move at all-and so it will be necessary to color the eggs in our hearts.<br /><br />This Easter there is a hydrocephalic child lying very still in a hospital bed nearby with a head the size of his pillow and vacant, unmoving eyes, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs, and he will not be able to color Easter eggs in his heart, and so God will have to color eggs for him.<br /><br />And God will color eggs for him. You can bet your life and the life of the created universe on that.<br /><br />At the cross of Calvary God reconsecrated and sanctified wood and nails and absurdity and helplessness to be continuing vehicles of his love. And then he simply raised Jesus from the dead. And they both went home and colored eggs</span>.</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
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craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-55150322425820927652023-02-18T15:47:00.007-05:002023-08-09T10:31:44.443-04:00McCarthyism: Historiography frozen in time <br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>
When Facts cannot overcome the narrative
</b></span><br /><br />
In his (very good) biography of Sen. McCarthy (1982), Thomas C. Reeves summed up the verdict of history:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Perhaps no other figure has been portrayed so consistently as the essence of evil. He is our King John.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Forty years later this remains largely true. Despite all the revelations about Soviet espionage and subversion, McCarthy remains a litmus test for historians and journalists alike. Even scholars who explore the communist's secret war against America usually conclude with a ritualistic declaration that these disclosures do not prove that McCarthy was right or mitigate the evil that was McCarthyism.
<br /><br />
To be anti-McCarthy is part of the catechism of faith that one must proclaim in order to be accepted in academia or “prestige journalism”.
<br /><br />
Ann Coulter:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
McCarthyism is one of the markers on the left's Via Dolorossa. It is their slavery, their gulag, their potato famine. Otherwise, liberals would just be geeks from Manhattan and Hollywood.
</span><br /></blockquote>
And what great evils did McCarthy perpetrate to become this linchpin of liberal faith?
<br /><br />
Did he imprison thousands of American citizens who had committed no crime?
<br /><br />
No – that was FDR and he remains a liberal saint in good standing.
<br /><br />
Did he enforce segregation in federal employment and do nothing during the rise of the second KKK?
<br /><br />
That was Woodrow Wilson. Again-- a liberal icon.
<br /><br />
After all the moaning and wailing, the verdict ends up being anti-climatic:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
He was not a would-be dictator. He did not threaten our constitutional system, but he did hurt many who lived under it.
</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">David Oshinsky, <i>A Conspiracy So Immense</i></div></blockquote>
How did the senator hurt them? He questioned their loyalty, honesty, and/or competence.
<br /><br />
Oddly enough, that standard was never applied to Adam Schiff and the other Russian hoaxers.
<br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">Historical black holes: When Facts cannot overcome the narrative
</span><br /><br />
Only a handful of historical figures get the McCarthy treatment. Usually, historians want to present a measured, nuanced view of any prominent figure. Only a few receive unalloyed opprobrium.
<br /><br />
Like McCarthy, Gen. Douglas MacArthur has wound up in that category. He is routinely included on lists of the “worst generals” of WWII or the “most over-rated generals” American history.
<br /><br />
Both men's historical standing is impervious to revision. Other figures, Ulysses Grant, for example, see their image rise or fall with changing mores and unsealed archives. For the two Macs reappraisal is treated as heresy.
<br /><br />
Another similarity is that the enduring reputation is heavily based on their personality flaws as conveyed by journalists and enemies. Real accomplishments are treated almost as an afterthought while warmed-over gossip takes center stage. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea becomes less a smashing victory and, instead, is an example of MacArthur's PR mania. Soviet spies in the White House and the Manhattan Project are less important than the denigration of Adlai Stevenson.
<br /><br />
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craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-41153803449164496282023-02-01T13:28:00.001-05:002023-02-01T13:28:06.214-05:00McCarthy and the intellectuals: Not that innocent<br />
In the Standard Received Narrative of McCarthyism, the junior senator from Wisconsin did incalculable damage to American civil liberties. His wild charges, we are informed, cast a pall over our intellectual life. The best minds of a generation were hounded and blacklisted for uttering unpopular truths, for their youthful idealism, for their naivety in choosing friends and associates.
<br /><br />
And it was all for nothing. True Communists were rare and even they were never a real threat to America.
<br /><br />
Except that is not the way it was.
<br /><br />
Robert Warshow:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
For the intellectual, however, the Communist movement was the fact of central importance; the New Deal remained an external phenomenon, part of that 'larger' world of American public life from which he had long seperated himself-- he might 'support' the New Deal (as later on, perhaps, he 'supported' the war), but he never identified himself with it. One way or another, he did identify himself with the Communist movement.
</span><br /></blockquote>
The 30s intellectuals were anything but naïve.
<br /><br />
Robert Conquest:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
One of the things that gave even Stalinism its prestige in the west, even (or especially) among those who recognized that its methods were immensely ruthless, was the abstract, utoptian notion that there was a certain horrible grandeur in what was going on. Men of ideas, who had profoundly considered the laws of history, were creating a new society and taking upon themselves the guilt of the necessary merciless action.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Nor were they drawn into the Stalinist orbit because they were pacific do-gooders.
<br /><br />
Tony Judt:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Western intellectual enthusiasm for communism peaked not in the time of 'goulash communism' or 'socialism with a human face,' but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935-1939 and 1944-1956. Writers and professors and teachers and trade unionists admired and loved Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Communism at its most theatrically macabre, that men and women were most seduced by the man and his cult. Likewise the cult of Mao in the West.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Noel Annan:
<blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">The poets of the thirties were intoxicated with the idea of violence. You could not be sincere unless you were prepared to have blood on your hands. For Day Lewis it was the hour of the knife, for Spender light was to be brought to life by bringing death to the age-long exploiters. 'We're much ruder,' boasted Day Lewis writing to his scavenger press baron, 'and we're learning to shoot.'
</span><br /></blockquote>
Donald Rayfield
<blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">Chekisty and poets were drawn to each other like stoats and rabbits-- often with fatal consequences for the latter. They found common ground: the need for fame, an image of themselves as crusaders, creative frustration, membership of a vanguard, scorn for the bourgeoisie, an inability to discuss their work with common mortals. There was an easily bridged gap between between the symbolist poet who aimed to <i>epater le bourgeois</i> and the checkist who stood the bourgeois up against the wall.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Owen Lattimore, one of McCarthy's first “victims” – he was, really, he wrote a book about it – was so concerned about civil liberties that he defended the Moscow show trials and praised conditions in the Soviet Gulags.
<br /><br />
Hemingway did not become the darling of the intellectual Left until he went to Spain and befriended one of Stalin's willing executioners. When he told Dos Passos in Madrid, “Civil liberties, shit. Are you with us or against us” he spoke for the large numbers of American intellectuals.
<br /><br />
Dos Passos, who really did care about liberty and the dignity of man, saw his literary reputation destroyed and his character maligned because he preferred to think for himself rather than let Stalin do it for him.
<br /><br />
He was the exception.
<br /><br />
In the 1930s to be an intellectual was to be on the Left, and to be on the Left it was necessary to be Stalin-friendly if not an outright Stalinist. One might not support the party line in public, but one never opposed it publicly. Dos Passos dared to do it, and paid the price.
<br /><br />
Many of the journals that wailed about McCarthy in the 1950s joined in the politically motivated “literary execution” of Dos Passos in the 1930s.
<br /><br />
Intellectual life, for the intellectuals shaped by the 1930s was defined by willful blindness.
<br /><br />
Richard Wright:
<blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;">They denounced books they had never read, people they had never known, ideas they could never understand, and doctrines they could not pronounce.</span><br /></blockquote>
Edward Dmytryk:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
I found out that I couldn't read a book by Koestler because he was an ex-Communist. I remember saying to Adrian [Scott] 'I've been reading a very good book.' He said 'What?' I said, 'Koestler's Darknes at Noon.' He said, 'Oh my God! Don't tell anybody that!' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'He's an ex-Communist-- you're not supposed to read him!
</span><br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />
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craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-86469930009437501842023-01-19T17:34:00.002-05:002023-01-19T17:34:40.306-05:00McCarthy and the New Deal: Target-rich environment
<br />
In his <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-essence-of-mccarthyism.html" target="_blank">essay</a>, Irving Kristol chides Sen. Joseph McCarthy for erasing the distinction between liberals and Soviet agents – of treating every “New Dealer as being by nature an embryonic Communist.” McCarthy and other anti-communists deserve to be called to account for their recklessness when they fail to distinguish between their political opponents and communist traitors. But we must also note that in the years since the “Red Scare” an equally wrong-headed idea has taken hold: that McCarthy, et. al. had no reason to criticize the FDR/HST administrations and had no evidence to back any of their charges.
<br /><br />
In 1940, FDR himself told Martin Dies of the newly reconstituted House Committee on UnAmerican Activities:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
I do not agree with you. I do not regard the Communists as any present or future threat to our country. In fact, I look upon Russia as our strongest ally in the years to come. As I told you when you began your investigation, you should confine yourself to Nazis and Fascists. While I do not believe in Communism, Russia is far better off and the world is safer with Russia under Communism than under the tsars. Stalin is a great leader, and although I deplore some of his methods, it is the only way he can safeguard his government.
</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Gary Kerr, <i>A Death in Washington</i></div></blockquote>
This attitude permeated his administration and even his family. Eleanor, for example, intervened in 1944 to prevent the deportation of Raissa Browder – the Russian-born wife of the head of the CPUSA and a Stalinist operative in her own right. Son James happily rubbed shoulders with communists in Hollywood and China.
<br /><br />
FDR and his administration actively covered up the <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-katyn-massacre-conspiracies-and.html" target="_blank">Soviet's responsibility for the Katyn Massacre</a>. The president himself <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-katyn-massacre-conspiracies-and_27.html" target="_blank">colluded with Stalin to hide from the voters that the dictator was to have a free hand in post-war Poland</a>.
<br /><br />
It must be said that when McCarthy accused the New Dealers of being “soft on communism” he did not know the half of it. The VENONA files were still top secret. The soviet documents were still locked away in Moscow.
<br /><br />
That's the thing that is often overlooked in the historiography of McCarthyism. The senator may have selected the wrong targets, but he was addressing a real problem. His critics, on the other hand, often defended the wrong targets and denied that there was or ever had been a real problem.
<br /><br /><br />
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craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-57660762862136089512023-01-14T12:57:00.004-05:002023-01-16T18:05:42.695-05:00The essence of “McCarthyism”: The Administrative State strikes back<br />
In the March, 1952 issue of Commentary magazine, Irving Kristol gave the best explanation for the continued appeal of Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist investigations.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.</span><br /></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;">
“'Civil Liberties,' 1952—A Study in Confusion”
<br /></blockquote><br />
The American people had good reason to distrust the spokespeople for American liberalism. By 1952 there was plenty of evidence that communists agents had operated in the heart of government for two decades. The testimony of Krivitsky, Chambers, Gitlow, Gouzenko, and Bentley had laid it all bare. Yet liberal leaders and ex-New Dealers continued to stridently deny this manifest truth.
<br /><br />
Kristol pointed out that by denying the obvious, those leaders were helping to make McCarthy's case for him.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Mr. Biddle, like Mr. Barth, refuses to admit what is now apparent: that a generation of earnest reformers who helped give this country a New Deal should find themselves in retrospect stained with the guilt of having lent aid and comfort to Stalinist tyranny. This is, to be sure, a truth of hindsight, an easy truth. But it is the truth nonetheless, and might as well be owned up to. If American liberalism is not willing to discriminate between its achievements and its sins, it only disarms itself before Senator McCarthy, who is eager to have it appear that its achievements are its sins.
</span><br /></blockquote>
The rise of Joe McCarthy was propelled, in large part, by the refusal of progressives and New Dealers to admit to any mistakes. <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2022/12/worth-noting.html" target="_blank">Having claimed that social scientists and academic experts were better guides than the Founding Fathers</a>, they were now revealed to be inept at the most important obligations of government.
<br /><br />
In short, McCarthy and other congressional investigators were an existential threat to their public standing and newly acquired power.
<br /><br />
Stephen Koch:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Any very public housecleaning of the Washington penetrations would have handed the populist right an all-too-powerful blunt instrument for attacking Yalta, containment, and their own position in power.</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Double Lives</i></div>
</blockquote>
Related:
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2020/12/why-bureaucracies-fail-ii-can-experts.html" target="_blank">Why bureaucracies fail (II): Can experts admit to mistakes?</a>
<br /><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2022/12/hoover-mccarthyism-and-fbi.html" target="_blank"> Hoover, McCarthyism, and the FBI</a>
<br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-24375528022997671542022-12-30T14:14:00.011-05:002024-02-17T11:37:11.083-05:00Hoover, McCarthyism, and the FBI<br />
When we understand that <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2022/11/serial-killer-chic-and-lies-of.html" target="_blank">J. Edgar Hoover was an OG of the Administrative State</a>, it opens up new avenues of interest into the history of McCarthyism and the red-hunting senator from Wisconsin.
<br /><br />
Hoover and his FBI are usually anathema to the Left. The three exceptions are telling. Hoover is praised for stiff-arming the Nixon White House which wanted aggressive investigations into leaks like the Pentagon Papers. ((This is the genesis of Watergate). His deputy Mark Felt is lionized for <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2013/02/an-inconvenient-book-part-two.html" target="_blank">leaking (and lying) about the Watergate investigation</a>. Finally, Hoover is cited as the good type of red-hunter in order to portray McCarthy as reckless, unscrupulous, and demagogic.
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Hoover-dismayed-by-McCarthy-s-methods-As-2539585.php" target="_blank">Hoover dismayed by McCarthy's methods </a><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>
As serious an anti-communist as FBI director was, he felt name-calling senator damaged the cause </b><br /><br />
Surprisingly, someone who came to grips with McCarthy's detrimental effect early on was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, then perhaps the most prominent anti-communist in the country. Hoover's own personal experience with McCarthy led him to doubt the senator's claims and eventually realize that McCarthy's approach had the potential to do incalculable damage to principled anti-communism.
</span><br /></blockquote>
What if I told you that Hoover's opposition to McCarthy was not simply a matter of protecting progressives from wild charges of subversion?
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has observed in his book <i><a href="https://amzn.to/4bKqgrp" target="_blank">Secrecy</a></i>, the FBI has consistently maintained a cult of secrecy, obstructing concerned citizens, scholars and even government policymakers with a tight-fisted retention of all levels of information, from the trivial to the vital, under imperiously interpreted rubrics of national security and protection of personal privacy.</span><br />
Gary Kern, <i>A Death in Washington</i>
<br />
</blockquote>
McCarthy biographer Arthur Herman makes <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-redhunter/" target="_blank">the key point that the senator was not primarily concerned with finding spies and subversives</a>. His main focus was exposing the lax way the bureaucrats tasked with security carried out their duties.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
The 200 or so Soviet espionage agents working in the government had been captured, expelled, or neutralized. That included the most dangerous of them all, the State Department’s Alger Hiss. But McCarthy understood that those who had allowed this disgraceful and dangerous situation to develop had to be held accountable. That meant, above all, the political party that had been in power during the years leading up to and during World War II: the New Deal Democrats.
</span><br /></blockquote>
McCarthy, then, presented a clear and present danger to Hoover, his bureau, and the progressive ideal of bureaucratic supremacy. Moreover, Hoover had a great deal to lose: the spycatcher had failed repeatedly catch Stalin's agents. The Rosenberg ring, the spies at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, the agents of influence throughout government – all of these carried out their plots under the nose of the original G-Man. (And then there is <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/12/pearl-harbor-real-conspiracies-and.html" target="_blank">the little matter of Pearl Harbor</a>.)
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
For years Hoover had boasted that foreign spies posed no threat to America, because none could possibly penetrate the Bureau's steel nets. But Krivitsky described Soviet agents effortlessly entering the United States on forged passports, spending large rolls of counterfeit money, and using assassinations to keep American communists in line. The idea that Moscow-dispatched assassins could gun down Americans in their homes -- even if they were communists -- was a public relations debacle for the FBI.</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Verne Newton, <i><a href="https://amzn.to/42LNQQ8" target="_blank">The Cambridge Spies</a></i></div></blockquote>
<br />
Journalist<a href="https://amzn.to/4bFzwwQ" target="_blank"> Edward Jay Epstein</a> had a chance to discuss the Hiss case with Richard Nixon long after his resignation. He asked the former president why Hoover and the FBI were so lax about Soviet subversion in the 1930s and 1940s. Nixon's explanation was succinct and on-point:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">"Hoover had a pretty good nose for which way the wind was blowing,” Nixon replied. “He was more interested in preserving his power than catching spies."</span><br />
</blockquote>
<br /><br /><br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-9677991841209740202022-12-29T14:29:00.003-05:002022-12-29T14:29:37.241-05:00Worth noting<br />
The essence of the administrative state.
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/11/the-trouble-with-tyranny" target="_blank">The trouble with tyranny</a>
<br /><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Frank Goodnow, a leading Progressive and the first president of the American Political Science Association, explained to an audience of leading Boston citizens in 1916 that science had delivered up the fully rational state. Empirical knowledge about the historical process had rendered the people’s “superstitious” attachment to the Constitution an impediment to competent administration. The founders’ outmoded theories about checks and balances and separation of powers had been adopted “at a time when expert service could not be obtained, when the expert as we now understand him did not exist.” Abetted by new and objective insights from sociology and other empirical disciplines, “social expediency, rather than natural right,” would now guide bureaucratic government, freed from constitutional inhibitions.
</span><br /></blockquote>craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-64448425633160893152022-12-25T05:00:00.001-05:002022-12-25T05:00:00.248-05:00Merry Christmas<br />
<br />
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.<br />
<br />
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.<br />
<br />
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.<br />
<br />
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.<br />
<br />
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.<br />
<br />
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,<br />
<br />
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.<br />
<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
<i>Luke 2:8-14</i> <br />
<br /></blockquote>craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-71848845128108841142022-12-24T12:54:00.005-05:002022-12-24T12:58:16.393-05:00A real life George Bailey<br />
Not really a Christmas story, but it is history in the spirit of <i>It's a Wonderful Life</i>.
<br /><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Ashley-Cooper,_7th_Earl_of_Shaftesbury" target="_blank">Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury</a> was the greatest reformer of the nineteenth century and one greatest men England has ever produced. At his death the great preacher CH Spurgeon was moved to say:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
During the past week the church of God, and the world at large, have sustained a very serious loss. In the taking home to Himself by our gracious Lord of the Earl of Shaftesbury, we have, in my judgment, lost the best man of the age. I do not know whom I should place second, but I certainly should put him first—far beyond all other servants of God within my knowledge—for usefulness and influence. ... Take him whichever way you please, he was admirable: he was faithful to God in all his house, fulfilling both the first and second commands of the law in fervent love to God, and hearty love to man. He occupied his high position with singleness of purpose and immovable steadfastness: where shall we find his equal?
</span><br /></blockquote>
But this post really isn't about Shaftesbury – even though <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c8s3" target="_blank">his story is remarkable and fascinating.</a> I'm more interested in Maria Millis, a simple servant in the household when Ashley-Cooper was a child.
<br /><br />
He received a fairly typical upbringing for an aristocrat of the Georgian/Regency period. His parents were distant, almost indifferent. The child was ignored when he was not being punished. The bright spot was Maria Millis, a simple, pious woman who showed the boy kindness and love and shared her Christian faith.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
What did touch him was the reality, and the homely practicality, of the love which her Christianity made her feel towards the unhappy child. She told him bible stories, she taught him a prayer.</span><br />
Geoffrey Best , <i>Shaftesbury</i>
<br /></blockquote>
A small thing at the time, and yet an important inflection point – for Shaftesbury, for Britain, for millions of the most miserable subjects of Queen Victoria. As he matured, the future earl eschewed the Regency amusements of gambling, drunkenness, and fornication: he was drawn to the Evangelical movement. Instead of the arrogance of privilege, from an early age he possessed a deep empathy for those not of his class.
<br /><br />
He went into politics and worked for reform-- of working conditions, of child labor, and end to the opium trade, the treatment of the insane, the education of the poor. He did not always accomplish his goals and success rarely came easily. Nevertheless, he persisted.
<br /><br />
One biographer argues that “"No man has in fact ever done more to lessen the extent of human misery or to add to the sum total of human happiness". His was, without a doubt, a great and consequential life and career.
<br /><br />
And it began, in a very real sense, with the faith and charity of a nearly unknown servant.
<br /><br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-19193699285770761042022-12-21T22:53:00.001-05:002022-12-21T22:53:08.256-05:00Leadership and the limits of paternalism<br />
A fascinating talk by Dr. Gary Sheffield on military leadership in Britain's armies in two world wars. He hones in on the centrallity of paternalism in the British officer class.
<blockquote><br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jl7NFJ-F3h8" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>
<br /></blockquote>
As Americans we are reflexively antagonistic to “paternalism” in all its forms. Sheffield offers a thoughtful defense of paternalism and deference as well as its practical limits.
<br /><br />
In contrast to the “lions led by donkeys” myth, the paternalism of British officers led them to care about their soldiers well-being. Life for the Tommy in the trenches was vastly better than for the soldiers of egalitarian France.
<blockquote><br />
<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" sandbox="allow-popups allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-same-origin" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=as_ss_li_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=leadandgold-20&language=en_US&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B017XNH6VW&asins=B017XNH6VW&linkId=2a8c3be69b23e3aca856b72760b3d164&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>
<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" sandbox="allow-popups allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-same-origin" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=as_ss_li_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=leadandgold-20&language=en_US&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00GU32XSS&asins=B00GU32XSS&linkId=29d7ceaa60dbe2f7a36fff99f54ba32c&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>
<br /></blockquote>
The deference of the enlisted ranks was largely automatic given Britain's class system and the social mores of 1914. Deference, however, does not make an officer a leader. As Sheffield points out, soldiers had certain expectations of those in command. Officers were supposed to be fair, to be courageous, and to be competent.
<br /><br />
Those three qualities make a pretty good basis for effective leadership in any context.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">ii</div><br />
Winston Churchill involved himself deeply in military matters as Prime Minister – much more than did Asquith or Lloyd-George in the Great War. He understood he was breaking with precedent and <a href="http://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/military-commanders/" target="_blank">was not shy in explaining why</a>:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Norman Brook, secretary of the Cabinet under Churchill, wrote to Hastings Ismay, the former secretary to the Chiefs of Staff, a revealing observation: "Churchill has said to me, in private conversation, that this increased civilian authority was partly due to the extent to which the Generals had been discredited in the First War-which meant that, in the Second War, their successors could not pretend to be professionally infallible."
</span><br /></blockquote>
Call it irony or call it karma, but voters came to feel the same way about Churchill and his party. Sheffield believes that the unbroken litany of “defeats and retreats” from 1940 to 1942 undermined the culture of deference and helped doom Churchill's Tories. <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2021/06/may-1942-end-of-empire.html" target="_blank">Just as those defeats marked the death of the Empire</a>, they also undermined the foundations of conservative paternalism and popular deference.
<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">iii</div><br />
It is impossible not to notice that most of our political class and public health bureaucracy failed this leadership test during the covid times. They demanded unprecedented obedience at the beginning of the crisis and largely received it (“deference”). Yet, over time it became obvious that both groups lacked any concept of fairness or honesty, were shockingly devoid of courage, and were less competent than they claimed.
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2021/03/sheep-ruled-by-donkeys.html" target="_blank">Sheep ruled by donkeys?</a>
<br /></blockquote>
Any discussion of <a href="https://unherd.com/2022/11/the-tyranny-of-a-covid-amnesty/" target="_blank">“covid amnesty” must address this problem as a first step</a>.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
It may be optimistic of Oster, and others of the Virtual class, to try to restore public faith that Science Is Real. But it’s also understandable. First, for reasons of self-interest: those who drove Covid policy presented themselves not just as people doing their best, but as the sole bearers of rational truth and life-saving moral authority. Doubtless the laptop class would prefer that we judge Covid policy by intention, not results, lest too close an evaluation result in their fingers being prised from the baton of public righteousness.
</span><br /></blockquote>
A disaster becomes a catastrophe when social capital and communal trust is squandered. (“<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2020/10/when-do-disasters-become-catastrophes.html" target="_blank">When do disasters become catastrophes?</a>”). If the West is to avoid a near-term catastrophe, that trust needs to be restored. That cannot happen until we have an honest accounting and a reckoning.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
But the rot goes deeper still, for the very foundation of that moral authority is a shared trust in the integrity of scientific consensus. And Covid has left us in no doubt that there is a great deal of grey area between “science” and “moral groupthink”. Where “science” shades into the latter, British care workers and American soldiers and police officers dismissed for refusing a vaccination that doesn’t stop transmission can attest that science is sometimes “real” more in the sense of “institutionally powerful and self-righteous” than in the sense of “true”.
<br /><br />
This touches on another source of rage that many would doubtless like to forget: the asymmetry in whose shoulders bore the heaviest load. It wasn’t the lawn-sign people who bore the brunt of lockdowns — they could mostly work from home. Rather, lockdown shuttered countless small businesses permanently, or burned them to the ground in lawn-sign-endorsed riots that were justified on public-health grounds even as others were fined for attending Holy Communion in a car park.
</span><br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-17333847524231463772022-12-15T15:24:00.000-05:002022-12-15T15:24:00.289-05:00This may be a problem
<br />
MG Sir Vernon Kell, the first head of the British Security Service (MI5), had a clear idea of the attributes that made for a good security officer in a free nation:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Freedom from strong personal or political prejudices or interest; an accurate and sympathetic judgment of human character, motives and psychology, and of the relative significance, importance and urgency of current events and duties in their bearing on major British interests.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Clearly, the FBI opted for a different path.
<br /><br />
“Strong political and personal prejudices” seems to be a requirement for advancement in the National Security Division – as long as those opinions are suitably liberal and sufficiently woke. Now we see much evidence of “accurate and sympathetic judgment” when they deal with citizens who do not share those views.
<br /><br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-68245584199634899192022-12-08T07:54:00.003-05:002022-12-08T07:54:48.177-05:00Marlowe investigates the Hive Mind4 February 1953
<br /><br />
Raymond Chandler to Charles W. Morton of the <i>Atlantic</i>:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
If this is the thesis of big business management in our time, it is also the thesis of Soviet communism. There is hardly a hair between them. There is the same overdriving of the individual to get the utmost efficiency out of him for the benefit of the firm or the state or whatever you choose to call it, the same instantly ruthlessly discarding of him the moment he begins to weaken, the same contempt for the individual as a person, and reward and admiration of him only as a tool of some vague purpose which in our country seems to be making a lot of money for big corporations and their stockholders and in Soviet Russia for the protection of the State.
<br /><br />
As you know, I have always wondered why intelligent men occasionally become Communists, but it had never occurred to me before that the basic philosophy underlying big business and that underlying the Communist state were almost exactly the same.
</span><br /></blockquote>
There is some element of tragic humour in the fact that today the <i>Atlantic</i> is kept afloat with money from Apple, the world's most valuable company, whose profits are solely derived from the slave labor system of China, the world's largest Communist state.
<br /><br />
Related:
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-birth-of-hive-mind.html" target="_blank">The birth of the hive mind</a>
<br /></blockquote>
<br /><br />
<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" sandbox="allow-popups allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-same-origin" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=as_ss_li_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=leadandgold-20&language=en_US&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0520208358&asins=0520208358&linkId=0666cf51eace70e072239741282bcbfe&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>
#adcraighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-16626844954367247602022-11-30T11:08:00.011-05:002024-02-17T11:45:53.955-05:00Serial killer chic and the lies of the administrative state (UPDATED)<br />
It is one of the perverse ironies of our age that the popular interest in serial killers was driven, in part, by the FBI. The Bureau, in a real sense, served as a press agent for these perverse monsters.
<br /><br />
The serial killer “menace” was hyped by the FBI at a time when its mission was shrinking and its reputation was in tatters. At just that moment, the FBI discovered a new threat to America and its children.
<br /><br />
As the FBI told it, dozens, maybe over a hundred, relentless killers roamed our highways and stalked our neighborhoods. They crossed state lines which made it almost impossible for local police to stop them. They were smart amd could evade conventional police work.
<br /><br />
Fortunately, America had an organization that was ready, willing, and able to take on this scourge. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could operate nationally, their labs were cutting edge, their computers would make linkage blindness a thing of the past.
<br /><br />
Best of all, they even had an elite cadre – the Behavioral Science Unit – that had made a special study of this type of criminal. The Bureau, it seemed, was the only law enforcement agency in the country with serial killer experts.
<br /><br />
How fortuitous.
<br /><br />
As Phillip Jenkins noted in <i><a href="https://amzn.to/3SYienf" target="_blank">Using Murder</a></i> “the FBI was in effect making a power grab, claiming jurisdiction over crimes which were beyond its legal scope, and this could only be achieved by presenting the offenders as itinerant, and therefore violating state boundaries.” In doing so they were doing what they had always done. In the 1930s it was <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2006/09/book-review-public-enemies-bryan.html" target="_blank">“automobile bandits” and kidnappers</a>. Then Nazi spies, then Russian spies.
<br /><br />
Times changed but the song remained the same. The FBI was always ready to hype any menace and jump on any bandwagon if that led to bigger budgets and more power for the Bureau.
<br /><br />
Quite literally the FBI wrote the template for the growth of the administrative state. Hoover and the DOJ saw the war on John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd as a means of promoting the New Deal and the benefits of federal power.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
The War on Crime would become a centerpiece of Roosevelt's push to centralize many facets of American government. It would be a focal point of his State of the Union Address in January. Thus a little known bureau of the Justice Department became a cutting edge of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. If Hoover and his neophyte agents could defeat "name brand" gangsters, it would be immediate and tangible evidence of the new Deal's worth</span>.
<br /></blockquote>
<br />
The image of the serial killer that the Feds crafted in the 1980s was adopted by fiction writers and journalists alike. This is not surprising; public relations and image management have always been a core competence of the FBI. It may be the thing it does best.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
"A typical reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day."</span><br />--<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2020/11/pearl-harbor-history-and-problems-of.html" target="_blank">Scott Shane (New York Times reporter)</a>
<br /></blockquote>
Journalists writing against deadline needed experts and statistics to write their stories. The FBI had a near monopoly on both. In the 1980s and 1990s there were almost no outside experts who could challenge the official orthodoxy.
<br /><br />
For novelists and screenwriters like Thomas Harris (<i>Silence of the Lambs</i>), the Bureau offered access, a chance to add verisimilitude to stories, the opportunity to suggest that a work of the imagination was laden with inside dope and closely-held secrets. Most importantly, the “mindhunters” of the BSU had already crafted their histories in a fiction-friendly form.
<br /><br />
Philip Jenkins:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
The experts who gained the widest acceptance did so not because of their academic credentials, but because of their personal narratives of traveling to the heart of darkness that is the mind of the 'monster among us'. This is the language of shamanism rather than psychology</span>.
<br /></blockquote>
This created an odd, even perverse dynamic. The BSU could make itself look good by exaggerating the skill, cunning, and intelligence of the criminal.<br /><br />
It takes a special kind of hero to catch catch genius criminals like Hannibal Lector....
<br /><br />
Only a few brave souls have dared to point out several obvious but often ignored facts.
<br /><br />
Like the fact that the FBI has an abysmal record catching actual serial killers. Or even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_James_DeAngelo" target="_blank">identifying that a serial killer is at work</a>. Or that most serial killers do not roam across state lines but instead operate close to home.<br /><br />
The killers, when finally caught, never live up to the FBI-created image. BTK was evil but no genius and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Little" target="_blank">Samuel Little was a small time criminal</a>.
<br /><br />
The press is rarely interested for more than a day when a <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2007/12/truth-about-criminal-profiling-malcolm.html" target="_blank">criminal profile turns out to be radically wrong</a>. (Remember the wild goose chase for <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/10/hunting-beltway-snipers.html" target="_blank">a white man in a white van during the DC sniper spree</a>?)
<br /><br />
A reporter on the FBI beat runs great risks delving into these sorts of questions. Life is easier if the FBI takes your calls.
<br /><br />
In 1992 Robert Ressler, one of the first of the FBI's “Mindhunters” warned America that the serial killer menace would turn our streets into a real life “Clockwork Orange”. When, instead, murder rates fell for over two decades, he was never asked to explain his failed prediction. It wasn't as if the press did not have the opportunity-- he gave interviews as he toured to promote his <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Robert-K-Ressler/e/B000AQ3YK2?qid=1669740846&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll2&tag=leadandgold-20&linkId=e75cf2629320ae6c417851647a491db3&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">string of books on his heroic fight against human monsters</a>.
<br /><br />
FBI profilers are still treated as uniquely skilled experts even though their record in catching actual serial killers is weak. Luck still plays a larger role than FBI expertise. DNA has been the game changer not the pseudoscience of the BSU.
<br /><br />
Thus, the press becomes an enabler of the bureaucracy. It eagerly hypes the panics that lead to large budget and more laws. It is much less interested in assessing the performance of the agencies on an on-going basis. The watchdog can be turned into a lap dog with a little access and a good narrative.
<br /><br />
Hoover blazed a trail, not just for the FBI but for all the ambitious federal bureaucrats who came after him.
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UPDATE (12/5/22):
There is <a href="https://amzn.to/3OONG50" target="_blank">a new biography of Hoover</a> out. Eli Lake interviewed the autho for his podcast.
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The author highlights that Hoover's FBI was the avatar for the ideal of progressivism: power in the hands of dispassionate experts who were beyond the control of politicians.<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Hoover believed in the administrative state—in the power of independent bureaucrats.
</span><br /></blockquote>
<div><br /></div><div><i>The New Criterion</i> has a lengthy and insightful review of the book:
<blockquote><br />
<a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/1/federal-foes" target="_blank">Federal foes</a>
<br /></blockquote>
</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br />
craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04406916480207918404noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5122868.post-83545942345819023462022-11-29T09:21:00.002-05:002023-07-29T06:24:53.817-04:00The trouble with True Crime: Assassins and serial killers<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
While history ignores the assassin, justice at least has it that no assassin can become more famous than his victim. By way of proof, who can recall, off-hand, the identities of those who killed Thomas à Becket, or Mahatma Gandhi? </span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Brian McConnell, <i>The History of Assassination</i></div></blockquote>
It is good that this is so. We should remember and celebrate builders , not destroyers. That seems to be a very basic requirement for a healthy society.
<br /><br />
David Gelernter:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
What matters is our communal response to the crime. Evil is easy, good is hard, temptation is a given; therefore, a healthy society talks to itself.<br /><br />
Such ritual denunciations strengthen our good inclinations and help us suppress our bad ones. We need to hear them, and hear good acts praised, too. We need to hear the crowd (hear ourselves) praising good and denouncing evil.
</span><br /></blockquote>
So what should we make of popular true crime? Here, the victims are almost forgotten and nearly nameless. The killer is the star, often gifted with a headline-grabbing nom de guerre which adds a touch of unearned glamour to their infamy.
<br /><br />
Simone Weil:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
</span><br /></blockquote>
Popular true crime follows popular fiction. <i>Mindhunter</i> is <i>Silence of the Lambs</i> with a patina of history and a large dose of truthiness.
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
We draw so many of our ideas about the world from what we see in the mass media and mass culture. One of the most disturbing aspects of this is the manner in which serial killers are often glorified and glamorized--through a process in which they are depicted as Super Males, even Supermen....Dr. Hannibal Lecter bears no resemblance to the defective, limited, unfeeling, and ungifted persons who are the overwhelming majority of multiple killers.</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Elliott Leyton, <i>Hunting Humans</i></div></blockquote>
Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are dead and yet they are the stars of movies and streaming documentaries. They are celebrities in the truest sense of the word.
<br /><br />
<a href="https://blog.aaronhaspel.com/2003/12/well-knownness/" target="_blank">Aaron Haspel</a>:
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
In an age of almost unimaginable abundance, celebrity is the last scarce good. Is it any wonder that people pursue it, and proximity to it, so assiduously?
</span><br /></blockquote>
We know that for some killers posthumous celebrity is something they think about (<a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2007/04/medias-vile-calculus-if-it-bleeds-it.html" target="_blank">The media's vile calculus: If it bleeds, it leads and leads to more blood</a> .) More than one serial killer was willing to risk capture in order to <a href="https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2005/08/how-many-people-do-i-have-to-kill.html" target="_blank">grab press attention and notoriety</a>.
<br /><br />
Is this good for society? Or does it suppress the social immune system Gelernter writes about?
<blockquote><br /><span style="font-family: arial;">
A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.
</span><br /><div style="text-align: center;">Theodore Dalrymple, <i>Our Culture, What's Left of It</i></div></blockquote>
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