Category: Violence

Shabbos Reading

This morning, in shul, we read Leviticus 24, where, building up to the famous eye for an eye passage, the text says: “And he that kills any man shall surely be put to death. And he that kills a beast [belonging to another man] shall make it good; beast for beast.” This afternoon, at home, I read the story of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, killed in 1942. Schultz, who lived in the Polish city of Drohobych, had come under the protection of Felix Landau, an officer in the SS. Schultz painted murals on the bedroom walls of Landau’s little boy. Landau liked to go on Jew-killing sprees in the Drohobych ghetto. On one such expedition, he murdered a Jewish dentist […]

Noah and Shoah: Purification by Violence from the Flood to the Final Solution

In shul this morning, I was musing on this passage from Genesis 8:21, which was in the parsha, or Torah portion, we read for the week: …the Lord said to Himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.” This statement comes just after the Flood has ended. God commands Noah to leave the ark, to take all the animals with him. Noah does that and then makes an offering to God. God is pleased by the offering, and suddenly—out of nowhere—makes this resolution: I won’t do this again. I won’t drown the world, destroy its […]

If you don’t think that some day you’ll be looking back fondly on Trump, think again: That day has already come.

Back in March 2016, I made a prediction: If, God forbid, Trump is elected, some day, assuming we’re all still alive, we’ll be having a conversation in which we look back fondly, as we survey the even more desultory state of political play, on the impish character of Donald Trump. As Andrew March said to me on Facebook, we’ll say something like: What a jokester he was. Didn’t mean it at all. But, boy, could he cut a deal. When I wrote that, I was thinking of all the ways in which George W. Bush, a man vilified by liberals for years, was being rehabilitated, particularly in the wake of Trump’s rise. Yesterday’s speech, in which Bush obliquely took on Trump, was merely […]

When Political Scientists Legitimate Torturers

The American Political Science Association, which will be meeting next week in San Francisco, will be featuring John Yoo on two panels. Many political scientists are protesting this decision, and will be protesting Yoo at his panels. I am not attending the conference this year, but I wrote the following letter to the two program chairs of the conference. Dear Professors Jamal and Hyde: In his celebrated diary of daily life in the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer writes: If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not […]

Norm Erosion: The President Addresses the Nation about Afghanistan

Tonight, Trump gives an address about Afghanistan. The tone/style will be either trademark bombast (fire and fury) or “presidential” or both. Regardless of the style, it’ll entail a commitment, according to the latest reports, of roughly four thousand US troops, a fraction of the number of troops committed to Afghanistan under Obama, with no mention of private contractors. In the grand scheme of things, it’ll be a status quo operation packaged in high-octane rhetoric. Social media will focus entirely on the rhetoric. The theme of the commentary will be something like: Trump consolidating his shaky presidency with imperial violence abroad! Media falls for new Trump presidency grounded in imperial violence abroad! And then by Wednesday, it’ll all be forgotten. The […]

When Kant Was Late

The day he learned of the fall of Bastille, the ever-punctual Kant was late for his morning walk. That’s what the frenzied pace of the French Revolution did to people’s experience of time. It’s now been almost a week since we were on the brink of nuclear annihilation with North Korea. I wonder how cultural historians of the future will record or register the changed sense of felt time in this era.

On Marcel Ophuls’ The Memory of Justice

I’m about 2/3 of the way through Marcel Ophuls’s long-lost documentary The Memory of Justice, which is now playing on HBO. I had been alerted to it by this mostly appreciative review from Ian Buruma. If I can be permitted an opinion without having quite finished the film (that comes tonight), part of me is disappointed with what I’ve seen. The first half covers fairly well trodden ground, without unearthing much that’s new. Much of it feels like a director being put through his paces, or a director putting his subjects through their paces. Despite his reputation as an interviewer, Ophuls doesn’t extricate a lot from Telford Taylor that you wouldn’t know from reading Taylor’s articles and books. Or from Albert Speer, for that matter, that you didn’t know […]

In America, who’s more likely to win an election: a scam artist or a war hero?

This campaign commercial for Amy McGrath, who is running for Congress in Kentucky, has got the Twitterati excited.   The campaign of McGrath seems in line with a decision, leaked last June, by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to field candidates who had seen combat, along with “job creators” and “business owners.” The question is: does it work? In the last ten presidential elections, only one candidate who actually fought in a war has won: George HW Bush. All the rest either served their country by shooting flicks (Reagan) or manipulating family connections or deferments to avoid combat (Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump) or simply weren’t eligible for a draft (Obama). Meanwhile, enlistees, soldiers, and war heroes, Republican and Democrat alike, […]

Why, when it comes to the Right, do we ignore events, contingency, and high politics?: What Arno Mayer Taught Me

One of the many reasons I resist the Trump-as-fascist argument is that it often leads to (or accompanies) an inattention to or eclipse of matters of high politics and elite action: the jockeying for position at the highest levels of state, the coalitions and fractures within the dominant regime, the day-to-day events in which policy gets formed and unformed. There’s no intrinsic reason that an invocation of fascism should require that inattention; the best historical studies of fascism don’t ignore these questions at all. In the American context, however, the invocation of that parallel—whether to McCarthyism or now to Trump—often does. The reason for that, I suspect, is that most people tend to think of fascism as primarily a form of mass politics, that […]

3 Ways Forward For Trump

Looking beyond Flynn, it seems like there are three ways forward. First, status quo: we have four years of this stand-still, in which a dysfunctional presidency keeps the entire nation in a permanent state of high drama and anxious alert, punctuated by the occasional act of brutality without a lot getting done. Second, someone takes charge: either a James Baker-type fixer is brought in to stabilize the White House and regularize its operations so that Trump has the semblance if not reality of a functional presidency OR the Republican leadership steps in and figures out a way to sideline Trump either through resignation or impeachment. Third, war. I don’t see any other options. Am I missing anything?

On the Yahrzeit of Talia Goldenberg, 1991-2014

Ever since I became a parent, I’ve found it impossible to read, watch, or hear about children dying or being killed. But this is the story of my friend Rachel Kirtner’s niece, Talia Goldenberg, whose life was cut short by an extraordinarily arrogant doctor, a Dr. Johnny Delashaw at one of Seattle’s top hospitals (Swedish Cherry Hill), who didn’t listen to his patient and whose team didn’t listen to his patient’s family. I seldom if ever ask for this kind of thing, but I ask you to do this today, to read this whole article through to the end. As a kind of lighting of the yahrzeit candle: Talia went into a coma three years ago today; she died, after […]

What if Trump Turns Out To Be…

If… —Donald Trump continues to get major pushback—both judicial and popular—on his immigration bans, such that they can’t move forward; —parts of the GOP continue to refuse to pay for his wall; —the Republicans continue to tie themselves in knots over Obamacare; —the Supreme Court, even with Gorsuch, continues to uphold Roe v. Wade (overturning it will take at least one more Trump appointment, after Gorsuch); If in the end all Trump really delivers, when you get rid of the bells and whistles, is tax cuts and deregulation, race-baiting and saber-rattling*… …what will that mean? That Trump is pretty much like every other Republican in office we’ve ever had. Which is the one thing he cannot afford to be. *The wild […]

Morbid Thoughts in Time of Trump

Trigger-warning: some morbid thoughts here, wrought by the day’s events. The one thing that’s made me super-nervous since the election, the major thing that has given me the kind of anxiety a lot of folks have been feeling nonstop since election night, is the possibility of him leading us into war. Not a 9/11-type event but the more old-fashioned escalation to battle, where reckless rhetoric leads nations to stumble or bumble into war. If I’ve had any precedents in my mind for the worst that may lie ahead, it’s not been Hitler, Mussolini, Berlusconi, and all the rest. It’s been World War I. It’s been senseless murder on a grand scale, of the sort the United States is more than capable […]

The American Terrible

Someone recently asked me: if you don’t think Trump is a fascist, what do you think is going to happen? I answered her as truthfully as I could: I don’t know. The fact is: none of us knows. Not even, I suspect, Trump or Steve Bannon. In the course of several argumens and conversations over the last few days—about Trump, what he’s up to, and so on—I’ve sometimes found myself, against my better judgment, drifting into predictions. I start out trying to think about what this current moment means, and I wind up making claims about where we’re going. That’s not a place I want to be. Not simply because my prediction about the election was so completely wrong, not simply because I’m […]

Share the Earth

Donald Trump thinks it’s appropriate to leave out any mention of the Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. So what happens when we remove any mention of the Jews from Hannah Arendt’s final statement in Eichmann in Jerusalem? And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with…the people of a number of other nations…we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. We get an apt description of Donald Trump’s executive order regarding immigrants and refugees—and of our revulsion for it, and for him.

January Journal

As some of you know, more and more of my commentary now appears on Facebook rather than on this blog. If you’re not averse to joining Facebook, you can catch it there; I encourage you to do so, as the conversations can be quite lively and good, involving lots of different folks. I’m maxed out on friends, but you can follow me. But since a lot of readers don’t want to join Facebook, I’m going to try to make it a regular feature—monthly or semi-monthly—to catch you up to speed on what I’ve been saying there. I’m going to collect various Facebook posts and post them here as a kind of regular journal or diary. Some will be out of date […]

Sam Tanenhaus on William Styron on Nat Turner: Have we moved on from the Sixties? The Nineties?

Last night, I had a bout of insomnia. So I picked up the latest issue of Vanity Fair, and after reading a rather desultory piece by Robert Gottlieb on his experiences editing Lauren Bacall (who I’m distantly related to), Irene Selznick, and Katharine Hepburn (boy, did he not like Hepburn!), I settled down with a long piece by Sam Tanenhaus on William Styron and his Confessions of Nat Turner. A confession of my own first: I read Confessions sometime in graduate school. I loved it. Probably my favorite work by Styron, much more so than Sophie’s Choice or even Darkness Visible. I say “confession” because it’s a book that has had an enormously controversial afterlife, which Tanenhaus discusses with great sensitivity, even poignancy. Anyway, […]

What’s Going On? Thoughts on the Murder of the Police

On Friday, in an email to a journalist with whom I had been discussing the murder of five policemen in Dallas, I repeated a point I had been making since Dallas to various friends in private conversations and on Facebook: We’re going to be seeing more [anti-police] violence. The combination of returning military vets, with real training (and in some, perhaps many, cases, PTSD); the widespread availability of firearms; and the persistence of the fundamental grievance at the heart of all of this: it’s a witches’ brew. On top of that, I just have to believe there are some groups out there — less the lone wolves, more little groups — who are asking themselves these very questions [about the legitimacy […]

We can get rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but not the Speers

1. A king who enjoins inhuman deeds Will find enough retainers, who for grace and payment Avidly accept half the anathema. —Goethe, Iphigenia in Taurus 2. In 1942, Albert Speer drafted a decree that made it a crime, punishable by death, to provide false information about raw materials, labor, machinery or products. Himmler thought it was too harsh. 3. So contemptuous of bureaucracy and paperwork was Speer that he welcomed the Allied bombing raids on Berlin in November 1943, which partially destroyed his ministry’s offices. In a memo, he wrote: I believe that thanks to this [raid] the question of the bureaucratic treatment of problems that should best be dealt with in a manner free from administrative restraints, is automatically resolved. In a speech, […]

It Has Begun

Reading the news of the latest police murders of African Americans in this country, I’ve been wondering how much state violence American elites believe African Americans are supposed to tolerate before they take matters into their own hands. I suspect most officials, intellectuals, and journalists don’t think much, if at all, about that question. Back in the 1960s, they did. From the Kerner Commission to Hugh Graham’s and Ted Gurr’s lengthy two-volume study Violence in America, which was a report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Michael Walzer’s essay, “The Obligations of Oppressed Minorities,” which first appeared in Commentary in 1970, is an interesting document in this regard. For two reasons. First, Walzer’s description of African Americans as an oppressed […]