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Letter to a Progressive Young Relation
Dear Pepsi,
I think I told you about a book I’ve read by Melita Maschmann called Account Rendered; a dossier on my former self. Maschmann grew up in Germany and joined the BDM (the girls’ version of the Hitler Youth) eventually becoming one of its lead propagandists. She traveled around the Third Reich, working to organize the resettlement of “ethnic Germans” on expropriated Polish farms.
After the war, she realized what she had taken part in—though it took her longer than one might imagine–and
this memoir was the result. It takes the form of a letter, addressed to her best school friend, a Jewish girl.
Maschmann wishes to explain ( not excuse) herself. She wants her friend to understand how an ordinary, normal German girl came to be a full and active member of a movement for social justice (that was the term they used), one that would eventually force her Jewish friend to emigrate from Germany to escape the Holocaust that murdered millions.
What is striking about Maschmann’s account — what I want to emphasize to you, my beloved Pepsi — is how sincerely she believed herself and the movement she was part of to be motivated by love. She thought she was helping the poor, and seeking justice for the oppressed.
She even tried to get her Jewish friend to join the BDM, in the honest belief that Nazi anti-Semitism was about “The Jews,” an abstract, malevolent force responsible for the miseries of her countrymen and the world, and yet somehow not directed at actual Jews–her best friend, or the nice neighbors in the apartment downstairs.
Maschmann imagined that the “excesses” of Kristallnacht, “provoked” by the murder of German by a Jew, was an aberration, the result of excess zeal on the part of a few. The Night of Broken Glass revealed nothing to her about the core values of National Socialism. She was offended at the thought that people might believe it should.
I hasten to point out that this young woman did not conform to Nazism because she was afraid to do otherwise. Throughout the war and beyond, she confidently counted herself a patriot, an independent and philosophical thinker, and anything but a mindless zombie. She openly criticized her peers when she thought they were letting the side down, worked incredibly hard, and sacrificed much and even bravely for what she believed to be an honorable and–yes!–ultimately loving and humane cause.
Though she claims not to have known about the gas chambers, she certainly knew about the ghettos in Poland because she saw them herself. She looked right at suffering people on the other side of the wire, and found ways to translate them into something other than human beings. On the occasions when she felt uneasy, she gave herself a “rational” talking-to.
It is unnerving to read the book, because she is so completely recognizable. She could be any of us.
Just how easy is it for an honest, intelligent, unusually idealistic person to get seduced by a movement that harnesses idealism to cruelty, and teaches nice men and women to rationalize the demonic?
UNSPECIFIED: Pedestrians glance at the broken windows of a Jewish owned shop in Berlin after the attacks of Kristallnacht, November 1938 (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
There are, obviously, limits to comparisons between the pre-war Jews of Europe and American police officers and of course, there are big differences between the American socialist left of 2020 and the National Socialists of Germany circa 1938.
Still, I think it is worth looking at those photographs and doing a gut check. If some “extreme” elements of your movement are smashing shop windows, burning houses of worship, looting businesses, throwing bricks and bottles of urine at police officers and attacking innocent people (and, if it comes to that, specifically targeting Jews) might all this ‘fringe” activity, in fact, be more closely related to the core values of the movement than you might want to admit?
“The tree is known by its fruit.” So maybe it is you, rather than I, who misunderstands what this is about?
And how much responsibility will you be willing to accept should the result of all this protest and turmoil turn out to be other than a racism-free, peaceful paradise?
Unlike Jews, police officers, if they are tired enough (and they are very, very tired) can, with some personal and financial sacrifice, quit. Many are quitting. “In droves” is the phrase being used most often.
And do you say to that, “good riddance?”
A total of nine (9) unarmed black people were killed by American police officers in the whole of 2019. Twice that many died in a single night this week in Chicago, when the police were stretched so thin that they could not provide even the inadequate level of protection their diminished and demoralized numbers had managed before the riots began.
Minneapolis was already short four hundred cops—and the city council refused to fund new hires, claiming to wish to spend its money on other priorities. So when the riots started, Minneapolis police officers were already over-stretched, overworked, over-tired, and burned out.
The upshot is that we already know what it looks like when you “dismantle” or “defund” the police. It looks like this:
Thanks to a mendacious and ill-conceived “movement,” signed onto by far too many Democratic politicians (I notice that both Biden and Bernie are expressing, at last, some sense in all this) it is already getting harder and harder for any agency to find and hire any warm body to be a police officer, let alone to attract the kind of thoughtful, discerning and self-disciplined people we want and need to do the job.
Nationwide, police recruiting is already down 63%, and yes, I think you should understand that the “F*** the Police” chants of the “peaceful” protesters create the context in which violence against police takes place, and violence suffered by the police is interpreted. Thus, it is getting harder to persuade people to apply for law enforcement jobs. Even the Portland, Maine Police Department had to offer signing bonuses for new hires last year.
And it is getting harder to convince them to stay.
Who on earth would want to be a police officer in Minneapolis? In Chicago? The NYPD has been running on history and the fumes of the Giuliani years; how long will it be before the once-proud NYPD will be unable to fill vacancies, or be forced to drastically lower its hiring standards in order to do so?
And how are they going to pay these guys, or the unarmed social workers and restorative justice teams they imagine substituting for law enforcement? Already, businesses are pulling out of the looted cities, and with them go jobs and the income and profits that can be taxed to pay for services. Why would Target re-build stores in a city that not only failed to protect their property and the lives and well-being of their employees, but now plans to reduce police protection or withdraw it all together?
If Target doesn’t rebuild, and if Walmart, Walgreens and all the rest decide it’s simply not worth the effort to invest in cities that appear to be enthusiastically embracing dysfunction in the name of “justice” the result will be fewer city services, more and wider food deserts, more black and brown people who have nowhere to go to buy food, get their prescriptions filled, buy diapers and school supplies or apply for entry-level jobs.
On the plus side, our state, like other purple and red states, may actually benefit by the exodus of qualified law enforcement from blue states, and blue cities. We may also benefit from the need of businesses for safer working environments. So we can look forward to seeing yet more “white flight” from Democrat-controlled cities—though to the extent that most black Americans are middle-class, the outflow will be more diverse than the term suggests.
Already, my sister and brother and (black) nephew, who left DC and San Francisco respectively to flee the Coronavirus are thinking maybe they’ll just remain in Maine…though not, of course, because Maine is mostly-white. They support the protests 100%…but do find they like living in a place that is safe, friendly, clean and orderly…and they like having grocery stores and drugstores nearby, and well-trained, professional law enforcement to protect them, their property and the order of their lives.
Welfare-dependent white people in this state, unburdened by the tender solicitude of progressive “allies,” will be able to share in these goods, and their lives will be better and more hopeful as a result. But the lives of inner-city black Americans will be immeasurably worse. Thanks to the protests. Thanks to you.
Published in Domestic Policy
People on both the left and the right are blaming the destruction on the other tribe’s fringe groups. No lessons to learn, no need to review my priors, not my fault. It’s the other guys.
“Systemic” racism is beginning to resemble the Nazi notions of ‘Jewishness.’ An all-purpose explanation of failures. Once accused, there is no cure, no redemption, no right to humane treatment, only eternal exclusion and punishment. Hatred of the enemy is fundamental to membership in the party of the righteous to whom the future belongs.
This is crucial. Even if these rioters do not represent the core values of your movement, they sure as heck are making the rest of us think they do.
Although I’m vehemently opposed to the removal of Confederate statues, I won’t go to pro-statue protests because if any white supremacists also show up, they hijack the legitimate peaceful protest and turn it into a freak show for the MSM. I don’t want to be associated with them in any shape, fashion, or form.
Likewise, the brick throwers, rioters, and arsonists do the same thing for the peaceful protesters. Actually, they make me question if there are any peaceful protesters within the ranks of the marchers. Pepsi needs to think about that if she marches, because one day the police (or National Guard, or US Military) will take action if any march turns violent. Hopefully all they’ll do is round everyone up and arrest them. However, the thought of another Kent State is in the back of my mind, and I wonder if these youngin’s even know of that piece of ancient history.
Very timely post, @GrannyDude, and it ranks up there as one of your best!
What lessons did the European Jews need to learn, and what priors did they need to review, when they started blaming the other tribe’s fringe groups for the violence? Did they not abase and surrender enough in order to ‘de-escalate’ things?
There is no sharing of blame on this.
GrannyDude, do you ever look back and think, “How did I get here instead of there?”
As well as the ACAB signs and graffiti seen everywhere.
Portland, OR, was already experiencing recruiting problems, and about a year ago lowered its recruiting standards. Now they will have to go lower still.
That was an amazing letter.
Any chance she’ll listen? At all?
Meh. What could go wrong?
This is an amazing, brilliant letter.
I think we all have times in our lives when we feel compelled to speak the truth, to honor our values and beliefs, whether they are appreciated or not. You never know what will get through, and when it might make a difference. Thank you.
Profound.
I was chatting with some friends about this earlier today, and one friend suggested that those excusing the rioters and ginning up racial rhetoric ought to have their own words thrown back at them, but with “whiteness” and such replaced throughout with “Jew”.
This would be fruitless, and you can hear it in the rhetoric. Moreover, I have tried.
I said to my friend,
In short, they either justify the Holocaust because (when pressed) they will go right to including Jews as oppressors, or they excuse it by claiming it merely had the wrong victims – they cannot morally condemn the sheer brutality on its own merits. They cannot say “The Holocaust was wrong, flat out, from top to bottom,” they can only weasel out because to condemn that monstrosity would be to also condemn themselves.
Moreover, this has been brewing for a long time across industries, and it now pervades academia. Rod Dreher has been covering this for a long time. This is but the latest warning:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/wokeness-endarkenment-lysenkoism-cult-of-social-justice-science/
I think there is:
The benefit will be short-lived as I see no evidence that those on the left that flee Blue states learn the lessons of those blue states. They just turn red states purple and blue.
I hope this piece is reprinted in a publication of wider circulation. It is easily the equal of anything I’ve read in the Wall Street Journal or any other popular website in terms of sincere emotional impact, depth of thought and feeling, and literary quality.
What do police and corrections officers have to do with far-right extremist groups?
Cherry-picking.
The far-Left (which is now the mainstream Left) controls the media, corporate, tech, payment processing, bureaucratic, and educational institutions of the country. The far-Right controls a couple of message boards on 4Chan. The brownshirts on the Left have destroyed dozens of City centers (practically all of which were controlled for decades by the Left), and made almost every rich and powerful entity bend the knee in appeasement. The foot soldiers of the far-Right consisted of about 300 tiki-torch morons in one city.
The Right (fringe or otherwise) is no more responsible for this than were the German Jews for Kristallnacht.
Or perhaps we could say “than were the Communists or the Social Democrats” at the time. It’s not as if the Nazis were the only group in Germany capable of doing ugly things—well, by 1938 they were, but a decade earlier, the others had not yet been crushed. By the time of Kristallnacht, you might say that hate crimes had to be more or less manufactured so the violence could be justified.
Because there is always bad behavior that can be pointed to, I think it is worth, again, looking at those pictures. A New Jersey corrections officer may have said something horrible to protesters (was it the equivalent of “What do we want, dead cops?”) but he didn’t smash the windows at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. U.S. police may have “attacked” journalists, but not the way #BLM militants have attacked cops.
Not to mention the way these same protesters attacked at least one clearly-credentialed journalist: Andy Ng
o.
Humanity is a thin Veneer.
Like others, I am skeptical. Read the first detailed report of a reporter being “attacked” by police.
An independent journalist (meaning not obviously a journalist) was out after the city curfew. A police officer asked to see his press pass. The reporter offered to show credentials on his phone.
Is that normal? We don’t know. For all we know, this is a legal technicality the reporter should have been aware of. Or the cop was under orders to accept only a formal press pass. We don’t know.
Arguably, the police officer should not have detained the reporter before viewing the supposed document on his phone. But upon finding credentials the policeman considered more trustworthy in the reporter’s wallet, while checking ID per procedure, he let the reporter go.
The reporter was probably detained for 10-15 minutes total because of an apparent misunderstanding and quickly resumed his job.
Maybe if journalists were less commonly sensationalist and fanatical leftists then I would be more willing to trust such claims before reviewing the particulars.
This whole Floyd hysteria began with edited videos and unfactual claims by journalists in common effort to fuel anger and profitable slogans.
As I continue to listen to a reading of Shirer’s famous Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, one point that stands out is Shirer’s admission that Nazi propaganda sometimes overwhelmed even him as an outsider and journalist working in Germany.
The German civilians he dined and visited with would often say incredible, ridiculous things. But hearing the statements repeated by so many and with such firm belief made the absurd claims difficult to disregard.
There are two impulses involved, I think. The first is the innate social pull of human nature; an eagerness to trust any similar or personally likeable speaker. The second is the desire to know while deprived of knowledge; an eagerness to be capable of informed conclusions or reasonable discussion.
Certainly, we all must resist the temptation to comfortably rely on a single source or group of exactly aligned sources for information. But only a fool always looks for truth in the middle of opposing positions. There is evil in the world. There is madness and confusion. Some sources prove generally trustworthy or not.
The insidious power of the Big Lie, and exactly what we’re facing now. It is for this reason that attempting to appease or validate the Black Lives Matter narrative is so supremely misguided (to put it kindly).
It might be that immediate and forceful declaration that the narrative is a Big Lie by national politicians would be unwise at this juncture (for the sake of argument) but many politicians have, for whatever reason, already made the wrong choice, which will be difficult to walk back later:
https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/08/riots-expose-important-divide-among-potential-trump-successors/
And so the Big Lie grows in power.
I am not optimistic it will have much effect. (a) it is like way more than 280 characters and even like two pages; (b) there is no YouTube version; (c) there are mentions of like history and stuff; and (d) all kinds of stuff about politics and stuff and it is hard to tell how Trump and racism fit in. So, dude, seriously.
;-)
This reads pretty much as most of what passes for conversation on Facebook.
Well, maybe the higher level exchanges.
Another smile. Old, you are a smile thief with a rap sheet a mile long.
This is a quote from one of links on journalists that have been hit.
As you can imagine the local TV crews in Portland, Oregon have a lot of experience covering civil unrest. They hire a minder that tells them you need to move over here, or it’s time get over there. Portland is called Lil’ Beirut for a good reason.
Once the police declare an unlawful assembly, and issue the warning the crowd will be subject to impact munitions, and chemical agents if they fail to disperse, that includes the human shields protecting the bottle and rock throwers in the fifth row behind their human shields. Everybody must disperse, and that includes TV crews. Being clearly identifiable is not like a VIP Pass to stand on the sidelines at the Super Bowl.
I have worn the helmet in two violent protests, and several that did not become violent. I didn’t care what the cause of the month was. Non violence is perfect, but once the violence begins nothing else matters regardless of the cause.
Unfortunately, there’s the rub. How long until they start trying to change Maine to be a bit more like DC and San Francisco as far as having “woke” and “compassionate” policies and practices? Will they be content to leave Maine as Maine or will they try to change it?
Ricochet without Doug, in these troubled times, would no longer quite be Ricochet. We’ve doctors, combat vets, and lawyers, plural, to fill in our understanding of history unfolding, but he’s pretty much singular.