Posted
6/12/2004 01:45:22 PM
by Edward Driscoll
VIDEOTARIANS: Mudville Gazette looks at an unusually idiotic USA Today article on the eeeeeevils of military-themed videogames. "Usually we must wait 'til near Christmas for assaults on the fun toys", Mudville's Greyhawk writes, "but fortunately for ignorant, impressionable, and gullible young men everywhere USA Today reporter Mike Snyder is on a mission to save them".
Posted
6/12/2004 12:43:27 PM
by Edward Driscoll
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER: Check out how AP described President Reagan's liberation of Grenada this past week.
Posted
6/12/2004 12:40:55 PM
by Edward Driscoll
GOOD QUESTION: Jeff Goldstein wants to know why this story isn't the news story in the press today. And he has some thoughts why.
Posted
6/12/2004 12:34:32 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR MICHELLE MALKIN has own Weblog. All I can say to this post is...heh.
Posted
6/12/2004 12:31:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
IS THE INTIFADA OVER? Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on Israel and the Palestinians.
Posted
6/12/2004 12:07:45 AM
by Edward Driscoll
A SNEAK PREVIEW: The opening of Steven Hayward's The Age of Reagan: Lion at the Gate is online here. The book, the second and concluding volume in Hayward's magisterial series is scheduled to be published in the fall of 2005, according to Scott W. Johnson. We reviewed volume one here.
Posted
6/11/2004 11:51:31 AM
by Edward Driscoll
GODWIN'S LAW* forces The Chicago Sun-Times to cease publication after this article. More here and here.
Posted
6/11/2004 11:44:37 AM
by Edward Driscoll
THEY ARE LARGE, THEY CONTAIN MULTITUDES: Stephen Green notes a self-contradictory article in The Hollywood Reporter on the amount of coverage President Reagan received this week and concludes, "when you read stories like this and feel disdain for the press, remember that the feeling is mutual."
Posted
6/11/2004 11:34:14 AM
by Edward Driscoll
IT WAS THE CONTENT: "I won a nickname, 'The Great Communicator.' But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation — from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense."
Posted
6/11/2004 11:32:09 AM
by Edward Driscoll
FAREWELL: John Derbyshire has a nice recap of the funeral. "The British, in fact, used to boast that they did this kind of thing -- pomp and circumstance -- better than anyone. I don't see how that boast can any longer be maintained. This was done as well as it possibly could have been."
Posted
6/11/2004 10:52:22 AM
by Edward Driscoll
PROTEIN WISDOM HAS A TRANSCRIPT of today's episode of the ABC talk fest The View, starring Barbara Walters, Star Jones, Joy Behar and other women lower on the daytime TV foodchain.
[ED NOTE: Dude--it's a parody.] It is?? Because it's not very difficult to picture everyone of them saying what Jeff's written. [Trust me, it is.] Hey, you're speaking in italics. How can I not trust you!
Posted
6/11/2004 10:35:25 AM
by Edward Driscoll
GROUP CAPTAIN MANDRAKE: "Isn't it odd how some 'all hail diversity!' liberal types want to see acts of violence done to people who don't agree with them?"
Initially it seems that way, but you get used to it after you've seen it for the first thousand times.
Posted
6/11/2004 10:31:14 AM
by Edward Driscoll
NEVILLE AGAIN: The Arthur Schlesinger-Neville Chamberlain connection, revealed.
Posted
6/11/2004 10:26:51 AM
by Edward Driscoll
WHEN IT COMES TO THE NEWS, Roger L. Simon turns one of the Gipper's most famous slogans on its head: "Don't Trust; Verify".
Posted
6/11/2004 10:21:45 AM
by Edward Driscoll
SOLIDARITY: "When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty."--Lech Walesa
Posted
6/11/2004 01:37:10 AM
by Edward Driscoll
THE SCORPION: Looks like Col. Qaddafi isn't quite the pussycat he's been pretending to be lately. H.D. Miller has a novel way to bring him back to his senses.
Posted
6/11/2004 01:06:20 AM
by Edward Driscoll
"NICE AIM": Not surprisingly, there's too much good stuff in James Lileks' syndicated column for me to single out. It asks a simple question: "When did we start hating presidents? Openly, that is". So...RTWT, already.
(Found via John Hawkins, who did not have the best of days today...)
Posted
6/10/2004 11:24:09 PM
by Edward Driscoll
IMAGINE IF THE GIPPER OR GWB DID THIS: Betsy Newmark looks at how John Kerry asked his aides what behavior they thought would look appropriate when he visited President Reagan's casket at the Reagan Library on Tuesday.
A commenter says that Kerry had all of the regular visitors of the library wait outside. "He then went in with his photographers and cameramen and about a dozen shills".
He lacks the common touch, as my dad would say.
Posted
6/10/2004 05:36:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SUMMERTIME, AND THE AUTOMATION IS EASY: My latest monthly "Ideas For Every Room" newsletter for Electronic House magazine is on outdoor automation.
Posted
6/10/2004 01:00:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
REAGANOMICS: Stephen Moore writes:
In 1982 the Dow Jones industrial average hit a low of 800. After the final pieces of the Reagan tax cuts were installed, the market rocketed upward for 18 consecutive years. From 800, the Dow rose to 10,000 — creating between $15 trillion and $20 trillion in new wealth and industries. The Dow would have to climb to 100,000 by 2020 to match this Herculean performance. By clearing away the wealth destroyers of high tax rates and high inflation, U.S. companies became far more productive, profitable, and valuable. The economy also created 15 million new jobs under Reagan and grew in real terms by 40 percent. Some have likened this to adding a new California to the U.S. economy. By the end of the 1980s, in what was a fitting tribute to the Reagan program, almost all industrialized nations had sharply lowered tax rates to regain a competitive position lost to the U.S. in the decade. Reagan would note that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." In this way, Reaganomics saved not just the U.S. economy from worldwide depression, but the entire global economy as well. The Reagan way was spurned throughout the 1980s as "voodoo economics" (one of George Bush Sr.'s few memorable comments.) Many college textbooks to this day even argue that Reagan's economic policies were flawed because they created record budget deficits. But the textbooks don't mention that as the national debt rose by $2 trillion, national wealth rose by $8 trillion. They also don't mention that the Laffer curve worked: Lower tax rates did generate more tax revenues at the federal, state, and local levels. Federal tax collections rose from $500 billion in 1980 to $1 trillion in 1990.Moore quotes Arthur Laffer, who says that at Reagan's first cabinet meeting as president, "Reagan, the seasoned actor, waited for silence in the Cabinet Room. He then stood and said, 'Gentlemen and ladies, I hate inflation, I hate taxes, and I hate Communism. Do something about it.'" They did. UPDATE: Get a load of this quote by Tom Brokaw, from a 1983 interview with far-left magazine Mother Jones:
“I thought from the outset that his ‘supply side’ [theory] was just a disaster. I knew of no one who felt that it was going to work, outside of a small collection of zealots in Washington and at USC – Arthur Laffer, Jack Kemp. What I thought quite outrageous was the business community, which for years carped and complained that it could never get a President sympathetic to its needs, finally got its champion, Ronald Reagan. Then, to its horror, it discovered that he was actually going to press ahead with supply side – a theory whose disastrous consequences businesspeople began desperately to prepare for, but did not publicly warn the rest of the country about. They knew it simply could not work. But what they did was look to their own little life raft and not to anyone else’s.”Lots more quotes in a similar vein via that same link.
Posted
6/10/2004 11:46:01 AM
by Edward Driscoll
CONGRATS to Mr. And Mrs. Jeff Goldstein and their son on their fourth wedding anniversary. "The fourth year being the fruit (traditional) or flower / appliance (modern) anniversary. So we'll be having sushi".
Works for me. (No, really!) I only hope Jeff has gotten his pants back if he's going out.
Posted
6/10/2004 10:44:42 AM
by Edward Driscoll
THE BERKELEY INTIFADA: Michael J. Totten writes that "A city that prides itself on tolerance and diversity is fast-becoming an epicenter of hate".
Totten adds, "Political Correctness is finished. What started out as intolerance of hate has become hatred's enabler. It fails to live up to its own standard and can't possibly become more absurd than it already is. It slid all the way down the slippery slope and annihilated itself."
PC kills people. It's driven a wedge between the news media and the customers it's supposed to serve. It's driven a wedge between the blue and red states. It's driven a wedge between the hard left and more moderate liberals. It's shrunk Hollywood and the music industry's audiences. It's driven a wedge between universities and the people and communities they serve. But while Roger L. Simon says that Totten has written its epitaph, PC is actually far from dead.
Posted
6/10/2004 09:32:41 AM
by Edward Driscoll
WOW, AND I WAS CONCERNED ABOUT SLOPPY REPORTING IN AMERICA: Germany's Der Spiegel mentions former "US president Kissinger" in an article about President Reagan.
Posted
6/10/2004 09:23:40 AM
by Edward Driscoll
CHRIS COX ON PRESIDENT REAGAN: "Today, the Soviet Union sits on the ash heap of history, and the Reagan legacy can be measured in lives liberated and dreams fulfilled. Before Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, there were 56 electoral democracies on earth. Today, there are 117. Today, more than a billion more people are living in freedom than on the day that he took office. "
Posted
6/10/2004 12:38:48 AM
by Edward Driscoll
Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders could hit the Internet. He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when (well, eventually) the only conservative regular on the big networks was ABC's George Will, and at that time Will was still fashionably fussing about Americans being "taxophobic" and spurning Reagan's "Morning in America goo." In the prologue to his book on Reagan Dinesh D'Souza captured the flavor of how Reagan was greeted by the Washington establishment. Everything Reagan sought to accomplish seemed ludicrous and uneducated to the long-standing liberal consensus. Tax cuts would be wildly inflationary. A foreign policy based on the radical notion that Communism should be put on the ash heap of history was dismissed as a bellicose fantasy too dangerous for the nuclear age. At the end of it all, Reagan was the wise man, and all his detractors — Democrats and ersatz Republicans, political scientists and economists, "Sovietologists" and journalists — were the dummies.Graham adds, "We should welcome any reevaluation by the reigning pundits of the Reagan era as the truth winning out. We should welcome the warm glow of nostalgia from all Americans who share it. Reagan won over many adversaries by his magnanimity under rhetorical assault. Bitterness at this time wouldn't be Reaganesque." ONE MORE UPDATE: "Were we fools then, or are we dishonest now?" And here's one more for the road. OK, ONE MORE, ONE MORE UPDATE: Virginia Postrel notes the slanted polling questions in this week's MediaBistro poll. "The survey is unscientific, but the dominance of answer five certainly doesn't exactly make the participating journalists look, uh, fair and balanced." Answer five reads, "He was a vacuous ideologue and his death was not unexpected. Enough already". THE RETURN OF THE SON OF ONE MORE UPDATE: "Rest in peace, Mr President. And know that after all these years, you were right - and all these people were clearly, emphatically, embarrassingly, wrong".
Posted
6/10/2004 12:34:40 AM
by Edward Driscoll
GOTTA GIVE HIM CREDIT FOR BEING HONEST: H.D. Miller spots someone who's gone on the record and actually said that he wishes Saddam Hussein were still in power.
Posted
6/9/2004 04:35:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
GOT A FEW HUNDRED MILLION UNDER THE MATTRESS? Fender Musical Instruments is for sale.
In other guitar-related news, this man turned 89 today--and he's still going strong.
UPDATE: Fender denies it's for sale.
Posted
6/9/2004 04:22:29 PM
by Edward Driscoll
A DEMOCRATIC NICARAGUA honors President Reagan.
I wonder what these three men have to say about that.
Posted
6/9/2004 04:11:13 PM
by Edward Driscoll
LILEKS ON MR. MISTY, BRAIN FREEZES and chocolate-dipped cones.
Like Salieri and Mozart, how I envy this man's talent with a keyboard.
Posted
6/9/2004 03:07:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
BABY GOT BURQA: Charles Johnson looks at "Hip-Hop, Islamofascist Style".
Posted
6/9/2004 01:04:28 PM
by Edward Driscoll
LOS ATHEISTS UPDATE: L.A. Country Board of Supervisors affirms its decision to remove cross from county seal.
Posted
6/9/2004 11:17:48 AM
by Edward Driscoll
DENIAL: While Stephen Green is busy demolishing his basement, Will Collier, his partner-in-blogging, demolishes the press's reaction to the Pew study we linked to yesterday:
Expect to see a lot of chatter today and tomorrow over the just-released Pew study of news audience attitudes. Howie Kurtz has a rundown in today's Washington Post, including some crowing from various network/newspaper PR flacks about the results. One of those, from CNN's Matthew Furman, struck me in particular:Daaaaamn right, as Isaac Hayes would say. While part of the reason for this lack of trust is that viewers and readers now have more options available to them, there's another reason why. While Bernard Goldberg did yeoman work in Bias and Arrogance to expose many of the medias' follies, William McGowan's Coloring The News is in some ways more impressive. Goldberg showed the rest of the world that bias in journalism exists, something that conservatives have been railing about since the days of the "nattering nabobs of negativism" speech by Spiro Agnew (and written by Bill Safire). And for that, he should be commended. What McGowan (a self-professed liberal like Goldberg, incidentally) did is a bit more subtle, which is why his book has gotten less attention that Goldberg's two titles. The title of his book is somewhat of a misnomer. While it does talk extensively of how the press covers (and in many cases avoids) racial issues, what it's really about is how, by drinking the politically correct Kool-Aide (and gallons of it) in the late '80s, the press took a hard left turn, and went from doing straight reporting to frequently turning routine stories into activist journalism. And this was after the majority of the country elected a conservative president, and the man who campaigned as his successor, in three blow-out victories. (And don't forget, Bill Clinton ran as a "New Democrat", and frequently governed as such--voting for such conservative issues as NAFTA and welfare reform, and was far more fiscally restrained--after the Hillarycare debacle of course--than most previous Democratic presidents had been.) What the press didn't count on was that by the late '90s, there'd be so many choices available via the Internet and cable TV. And as the late Robert Bartley said only a couple of years ago:"We're obviously pleased -- once again we've been voted the most trusted news organization in America."Man, you talk about burying the lede. That's like being ranked "the most successful professional football team in Atlanta." According to the Pew survey, less than one-third of those "able to rate" CNN said that they believe "all or most of what they see" on the network. Memo to Matthew Furman: When 68% of your potential audience doesn't trust you, you don't have any reason to brag.
"If it finds the mainstream press lacking, the public will simply find its own sources of information--as declining readership and network news ratings suggest is already happening."So I'm not surprised to see, as Will Collier wrote:
For all intents and purposes, more than half of the populace (everybody except partisan Democrats, and even their numbers for credibility are nothing for most of the press to brag about) has written off the vast majority of the national press. And they're doing so because they believe that the press has written them off. Things have gotten to the point where the President of the United States sees no reason not to ignore the networks and the New York Times. If the coin of your realm is trust, and influence is what you buy with that coin, what do today's viewership realities say about the state of the realm?That a lot of people have their head in sand. And it's going to years for them to come up for air (and that doesn't even take into consideration CNN's own enormous credibility problem with Iraq). In the meantime, as Bernard Goldberg told me:
I'll give you a quote from paragraph one of Arrogance:It has.If the media elites don't start to listen to reasonable criticism about them, they're going to become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit: harmless enough, but hopelessly out of date.The reason why I called that book Arrogance is that these people don't listen to anybody. They don't listen to any criticism! If you point something out to them, they say, "this proves that you're the one with the bias problem". If they continue that, they will be less relevant next year then they are this year, and less relevant two years from now than they will be next year. They're becoming less and less relevant. And proof of this is that once upon a time, not ten thousand years ago, but just in the recent past, the most trusted man in America was Walter Cronkite. Does anybody, no matter what his or her politics are, does anybody think that Americans would pick one of the three network anchors as one of the most trusted men in America today? I don't think so. I don't think so. So they're losing their clout, they're losing their influence, they're losing their relevance, and they continue to fiddle while Rome is burning. They are so arrogant that they can't see straight, and I think it's going to cost them.
Posted
6/9/2004 10:55:42 AM
by Edward Driscoll
JONAH ON REAGAN: "To summarize why I admired the Gipper: He was put on earth to do two things: kick butt and chew gum, and he ran out of gum around 1962. The rest is commentary."
Posted
6/8/2004 10:38:48 PM
by Edward Driscoll
LET'S FACE IT: It's Bill's world; we just live in it. Even if you're the grieving widow of a recently deceased president.
As Mark Levin wrote:
What matters is not what Bill Clinton wants, but what the Reagan family wants. And somehow, here we are again, discussing Bill Clinton when he has absolutely nothing to do with this event. And once again, we witness the spectacle of Bill Clinton's lack of class and graciousness.And as P.J. O'Rourke wrote...
Posted
6/8/2004 05:44:21 PM
by Edward Driscoll
"STASISTS* ARE DULL", says Roger L. Simon. Read the whole thing.
*Click here and here for our takes on the book that that word came from.
Posted
6/8/2004 04:36:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
ADVANTAGE ED! A Pew Research Center's survey finds that news audiences are increasingly politicized.
Heck, we could have told them that.
Posted
6/8/2004 02:27:01 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THERE'S A RECORDING STUDIO HIDDEN IN YOUR PC: My latest Electronic House newsletter looks as the basics of getting started with home recording.
Posted
6/8/2004 01:16:19 PM
by Edward Driscoll
INSTITUTIONALIZING OUR DEMISE: Roger Kimball looks at America vs. multiculturalism.
Posted
6/8/2004 12:42:40 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THE INTERNET PRESIDENT: James Pinkerton writes:
Reagan invented the Internet. Well, OK, that's not exactly right, but his administration made the key decision that opened the Internet up to commercial utilization. But wait just a doggone nano-second, you might be saying, didn't Al Gore invent the Net? Or didn't he at least try to take credit for it in 1999, when he told CNN, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"? Of course, what started out as Arpanet reaches back to the late 60s, when Gore was still in school. But as for "creating the Internet" as THE Internet, one might turn to a 2000 book written by Reed Hundt, who declares himself to be one of Gore's biggest fans. Hundt's memoir of his tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993-1997, You Say You Want a Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics, was written, in part, to help Gore's presidential prospects; in a talk four years ago to the New America Foundation, he described himself as "Al's lieutenant," sent to the FCC to "implement his agenda." Yet even so, the author's basic honesty got in the way of his political advocacy. On page 133 of his book, Hundt noted that a "far-sighted, or accidentally smart" ruling by the Reagan-era FCC prohibited phone companies from levying "access charges" on data, as distinct from voice transmissions. "In the absence of the FCC's decision," Hundt writes, "the Internet would have been so expensive that [founder Marc] Andreesen's Netscape would not have been a hiccup, much less one of the first bubble stocks of the Internet." Let's pause over this for a moment. Even a pro-Gore Democrat concedes that the biggest pro-Internet inflection point dates back to the early 80s. In fact, if one looks up the case -- MTS and WATS Market Structure Order, 97 FCC 2d 682 (1983) -- one sees that the FCC was then chaired by Mark Fowler, a Reagan appointee. And so Gore looks less like a prime mover, and more like a free rider. And Reagan, meanwhile, gets credit -- or should get credit -- for picking free-market heroes such as Fowler. Did the Gipper ever know about the Net? Maybe not, but it hardly matters; even through lean times, such as the 70s, he never lost his faith in the genius of the American people and in the almost-magical powers of the free market. So if someone had told him that American enterprise had created a Next Big Thing that was adding trillions of economic output, he would probably have said, "Well, of course."Pinkerton adds, "A quarter-century after my first contact with Ronald Reagan, I now see that he was right: our best days as Americans are still ahead of us, as they are always ahead of us -- because there are no natural limits on the capacity of free minds. Reagan knew it then; I finally know it now."
Posted
6/8/2004 12:37:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
L.A. SEAL UPDATE: CNSNews reports, "Removal of Cross from County Seal Brings Lawsuit"
I don't know if anything will come of this, but I'm happy to see people fighting back from what was presented to the public as a fait accompli between the county and the ACLU.
UPDATE: AP reports (registration may be required, but this is the bulk of the article):
The County Board of Supervisors plans to reconsider the deal it reached last week to remove a cross from the county seal. The supervisors voted 3-2 to remove the symbol from the seal after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened a lawsuit, saying it was an improper endorsement of Christianity. Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe said their offices have been bombarded with phone calls and e-mails since the decision was made, including from a conservative legal group offering to represent the county for free in a legal battle against the ACLU. The county would probably win such a lawsuit, those groups said, because there have been similar instances were crosses were permitted because they were historical rather than religious symbols. Antonovich estimated it could cost millions of dollars for the county to remove the tiny cross from all its letterhead, officials vehicles, uniforms and buildings.OK, so it could cost millions to update the seal, and the County would probably win a suit against the ACLU. But that didn't prevent the supervisors for being so quick to roll over. UPDATE: Oh, That Liberal Media looks at how the L.A. Times has been covering the story, siding with the ACLU "while pretending not to side with the ACLU".
Posted
6/7/2004 06:01:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
CUBA'S REACTION TO PRESIDENT REAGAN'S DEATH: Jonah Goldberg writes that the Gipper wouldn't have it any other way.
UPDATE: This quote about the left's reaction sounds almost like something Reagan would have said himself.
Posted
6/7/2004 05:45:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
NOT ANTI-WAR--JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE: Reading this nifty piece of original reporting by Citizen Smash, I have to ask: why aren't I reading about Gillian in the L.A. Times?
Think the editor of the Times will ask his reporters the same question?
Nahh--me neither.
Posted
6/7/2004 12:43:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THE OMBUDSGOD LOOKS at the difference between a militant and a terrorist at the BBC.
Posted
6/7/2004 11:33:00 AM
by Edward Driscoll
THE PIVOT POINT: David Cohen looks at the decision that made Reagan's presidency great, and signaled victory in the Cold War.
Posted
6/7/2004 02:26:38 AM
by Edward Driscoll
IRAN-CONTRA: As Paul Harvey would say, "And now, the rest of the story..."
Posted
6/7/2004 12:01:14 AM
by Edward Driscoll
BATMAN HAS BEEN MY FAVORITE COMIC BOOK CHARACTER ever since I was a wee youngin'. But--honest!--I don't wear a black cape or utility belt.
(Sheesh--the stuff I have to put up with whenever I leave Gotham City...)
UPDATE: On the other hand, just what was Jeff Goldstein doing with Philip Michael Thomas??
Posted
6/6/2004 08:00:47 PM
by Edward Driscoll
KERRY PLAYS POLITICS...by not playing politics with President Reagan's death, writes Charles Johnson.
UPDATE: More on Kerry and President Reagan, here.
UPDATE: The more I think about this, the more I do feel that Kerry's in a can't win situation, as some of Charles' readers commented. If he did politicize Reagan's death, he'd be reviled for it, as I did with the shot Kerry inserted into his statement on Saturday. Sitting out the week seems to be the most sensible approach for him--and I'll give him credit for that.
Posted
6/6/2004 11:32:55 AM
by Edward Driscoll
REWRITING HISTORY: Stephen Green looks at a major bit of revisionism going on by the Germans at D-Day today:
if Germany wants to rewrite history to show that Hitler and the Nazis were some sort of occupying power in Germany, then they risk forgetting the lesson taught to them at the cost of millions of Allied lives. "Never again" becomes "Never what again?" becomes "It's happening again." We can't afford to let Germany forget what happened, and who was to blame.Ironically, Germany's efforts at revisionism come at a time when historians are finally starting to recognize just how welcome and accepted the Nazis were in Germany. And this is in marked contrast to the themes of previous tomes, such as William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As Orrin Judd noted:
A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, [Shirer's] book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now. In recent years however at least one book has come along to directly challenge this view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's excellent Hitler's Willing Executioners. But to my knowledge, British historian Michael Burleigh's Third Reich is the first major one volume history to rival Shirer's work and it is an invaluable corrective, precisely the kind of big idea contrarian history that we could use more of and which, even if the author's claims are ultimately rejected, can serve to clarify the thinking of us all on the issues he broaches. Burleigh apparently draws on some academic work (for instance that by Saul Freidlander) with which I'm unfamiliar, but his central argument will ring a bell with anyone who's ever read Eric Hoffer's great book The True Believer. Burleigh considers the Third Reich to have been the product of a political religion, replete with symbols, hymns, liturgy, martyrs and a Messiah. From this perspective, the German people, defeated in WWI and impoverished by reparations and Depression, emerge, not as unwitting dupes, but as desperate believers in a new state religion propounded by Hitler, a true totalitarianism, suffused with racially motivated criminality, which sought to infiltrate every aspect of their lives.As Orrin said, we needed to maintain the fiction that the Nazis were a strange alien virus imposed on innocent Germans, to resuscitate them into a worthy Cold War ally. But as Steve notes, the Germans themselves are returning to that fiction, just as she and France are returning to their shared anti-Semitic roots.
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