Lower the flag South Carolina

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Away down South in Dixie, the Confederate flag is in the thick of battle once again.

Last week, South Carolina's Governor David Beasley plunged his state into controversy with a televised call to lower the rebel flag from above the statehouse and move it to a nearby Confederate memorial.

Four minutes after making his proposal, Beasley heard himself compared by state Senator Glenn McConnell — also on statewide television — to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sought to appease Adolf Hitler. Attorney General Charlie Condon called Beasley's speech "a victory for the extremist groups." He declared that those who have "criticized the Confederate flag should be ashamed of themselves."

The state where the Civil War began is the only one that still flies the Confederate flag from its seat of government. The South Carolina Legislature ordered the banner flown over the Capitol dome in March 1962, a symbol of defiance as the civil rights movement was reaching flood tide. (Officially, the flag was raised to commemorate the Civil War's centennial.) It has waved over the statehouse ever since, a revered emblem of Southern "heritage" to some, a detested reminder of oppression and bigotry to others.

South Carolina has changed since 1962. For one thing, Beasley, McConnell, and Condon are all Republicans, along with most of the state's congressional delegation and about half of the legislators in Columbia. Not too long ago, Republican officeholders were among the state's rarest fauna. The grand old man of South Carolina politics, US Senator (and former Governor) Strom Thurmond, was a Democrat until 1964, and when he ran for president on a segregationist platform in 1948, the Confederate flag was his standard. But Thurmond was with Beasley last week, seconding the governor's motion to remove the flag from the Capitol.

Yet some South Carolinians, their heartstrings tangled around the 1860s, still revere the Confederacy and all its trappings. McConnell, the state senator, howls that moving the Confederate flag "will amount to cultural genocide." Condon, the attorney general, warns that if the flag is moved, "before long, our history will be rewritten. The children of South Carolina will be taught, in the name of political correctness, to be ashamed of their state's history."

As if there were nothing in their state's history to be ashamed of.

The Confederacy has been extinct for 131 years. Its brief life was the cause of unspeakable sorrow, pain, and death. To insist that its battle flag deserves a place of pride above the statehouse is worse than mossbacked, it is reactionary. It is morally tone-deaf. And it is, to anyone dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, appalling.

The men and boys who followed the Confederate colors into battle may have been honorable and decent, but there was neither honor nor decency in the cause for which they fought. The Civil War was about many things, but it was first and foremost about slavery. South Carolina and the Confederacy went to war to perpetuate the freedom of white Americans to buy and sell black Americans. To be sure, most Confederate soldiers weren't slave owners, and many believed they were fighting in self-defense. But there would have been no war had the South not seceded, and the South seceded to protect chattel slavery.

Conservatives incline to tradition, and this conservative adheres to the credo that that which it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. But the tradition of flying the Confederate flag over Columbia's skyline is a horrid one. To the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the flag may recollect the bravery of Stonewall Jackson and the cannons at Fort Sumter. To tens of millions of others, it evokes the agony of the Middle Passage and the long nightmare of Jim Crow.

It is not by chance that white supremacist hate groups have adopted the Confederate flag. It is flown at Ku Klux Klan rallies. It is the emblem of punks on the racist fringe. It has been taken up by neo-Nazis in Germany, where the swastika is outlawed. Does that mean that anyone who admires the rebel flag is tainted with bigotry and hate? Of course not. But the bigots and the haters embrace that flag for a reason: It was first raised in defense of the proposition that some men are no better than property.

South Carolina's governor, whose great-great-great grandfather Reuben Beasley fought for the South, has waded into an issue he could have avoided and made a lot of enemies he could have done without. He has also done the right thing. "Any banner we choose to fly over the Capitol," he said, "should be one that everyone can claim as their own." That is manifestly not true of the Confederate flag.

Americans of every color have reason to revile that banner. Three hundred sixty thousand Union soldiers, most of them white, lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands more were wounded, crippled, and shellshocked, in a war started by armies flying that flag.

It is an ongoing affront to the Union dead, as it is to the memory of 10 million enslaved and murdered African innocents, when the flag of the Confederacy whips in the breeze.

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

A case for Israel: Rooted in more than security

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Tzipi Hotovely, Israel's new deputy foreign minister: "It is
important to say that this country is ours, all of it. We didn't
come here to apologize for that."

Noses went out of joint and knickers got in a twist when Israel's new deputy foreign minister delivered her inaugural speech to the Jewish state's diplomatic corps.

"We need to get back to the basic truth of our right to this land," said Tzipi Hotovely, who is running the foreign ministry's day-to-day operations, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retains the title of foreign minister.

The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, she declared, and their claim to it is as old as the Bible. "It's important to say this" when making Israel's case before the world, and not to focus solely on Israel's security interests.

Of course security is a profound concern, Hotovely observed, but arguments grounded in justice, morality, and deep historical rights are stronger. She even quoted the medieval Jewish sage Rashi, who wrote that Genesis opens with God's creation of the world to preempt any subsequent charge that the Jewish claim to the land was without merit.

Needless to say, Hotovely's message was scorned on the left as primitive zealotry. "Her remarks raised eyebrows among many in the audience," the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported. One diplomat said his colleagues "were in shock" at the suggestion that they should cite the Torah when advocating for Israel abroad.

Diplomacy is not Bible class. Yet why should Israel and its envoys shrink from making the fullest defense of Jewish rights in what was always the Jewish homeland? Though modern Zionism didn't arise as a political movement until the 1800s, the land of Israel has always been at the core of Jews' national consciousness.

Even during 19 centuries of exile, Jewish life in Israel (renamed "Palestine" by the Romans) never ceased. In all those years, no other people ever claimed the land as their country, or built it into their own nation-state.

Jewish sovereignty wasn't regained by downplaying the historical and religious bonds linking the Jews to the land. World leaders and opinion-makers didn't regard those links with patronizing disdain; many found them intensely compelling.

In 1891, alarmed by reports of Jews being massacred in Russia, hundreds of prominent Americans signed a petition urging the restoration of Palestine to Jewish rule.

"According to God's distribution of nations it is their home, an inalienable possession from which they were expelled by force," declared the petition, among whose signatories were the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the speaker of the House of Representatives, future President William McKinley, and scores of influential industrialists, bankers, educators, and journalists. (One of them was Charles H. Taylor, the first publisher of the Boston Globe).

Twenty-five years later, when Britain famously committed itself to "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," its motives were not only strategic and pragmatic, but religious. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour spoke feelingly of Jewish history. "I could tell you all the kings of Israel," Lloyd George said, recalling his school days, "but I doubt whether I could have named half a dozen of the kings of England."

President Woodrow Wilson, whose father was a Presbyterian minister, also endorsed the Zionist cause. "To think," he later exclaimed, "that I, the son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people!" Still more enchanted with the revival of Jewish governance in the Jewish homeland was Harry Truman, whose lifelong study of the Bible strengthened his conviction that the Jews had a legitimate historical right to Palestine.

When the League of Nations set the terms of the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, it
unanimously recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with
Palestine" and the justice of "reconstituting their national home in that country."

The immemorial Jewish bond with the land is even enshrined in international law. When the League of Nations set the terms of the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, it unanimously recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and the justice of "reconstituting their national home in that country."

It was essential, wrote Winston Churchill at the time, to stress that the Jews were "in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance," and that the Jewish national home there "be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection."

Israel has gained nothing from its unwillingness to vigorously assert the Jewish claim to the land as a matter of historical justice and biblical legitimacy. It has only made it easier for its enemies to promote a false narrative of Zionist aggression and illegal occupation.

Hotovely may have "raised eyebrows" in exhorting Israel's diplomats to focus unapologetically on Jewish rights and history, but the record is clear: Those are the arguments that have always gained the most traction.

To repeat: Diplomacy isn't Bible class. But the strongest case for Israel is rooted in something more transcendent than security. Even now, according to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of American adults — and 55 percent of American Christians — believe that Jews have a God-given right to the land of Israel.

A backward superstition? On the contrary. The Jewish nation's ties to its homeland are an enduring element of the human story, and an asset that Israel underrates at its peril.

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

Iraq and the White House time machine

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

In an interview, Jeb Bush was asked whether, "knowing what we know now,"
he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Everyone had a field day with Jeb Bush's mishandling of the Iraq question Megyn Kelly posed during a TV interview last week: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?" Over the course of several days, Bush's answer switched from a firm yes ("I would have") to a firm no ("I would not have gone into Iraq").

Other GOP presidential hopefuls, quick to exploit Bush's fumble, quickly declared that in hindsight they wouldn't have gone to war.

Obviously there will be no do-over of the Iraq war authorization; the next president can't hop a time machine back to 2003. But even as a theoretical exercise, it's impossible to answer Kelly's question without clarifying the meaning of "knowing what we know now."

Was Bush being asked whether he would have invaded Iraq, knowing how the invasion was destined to play out over the next 12 years? Or was he being asked whether he would have invaded Iraq, had he known what mistakes to avoid in order to achieve the most successful outcome? If the former, then the question was whether the war on balance was worth its costs.

If the latter, it was whether, in retrospect, the war and its aftermath could have been managed more successfully. Those are very different queries, to which a thoughtful candidate might well give very different answers.

But why revisit only 2003? As long as we're asking presidential contenders what lessons they draw from George W. Bush's decision — widely supported at the time, remember — to topple Saddam Hussein, why not ask whether, "knowing what we know now," they would repeat other historical presidential decisions.

For example:

Would the men and women campaigning for president today have signed the Iraq Liberation Act, as President Clinton did in 1998, thereby making Saddam's removal from power a matter of explicit US policy?

With 20/20 hindsight, would they have ended the Gulf War after just 100 hours, as President George H. W. Bush did in 1991? Would they, like the first President Bush, have explicitly encouraged the Iraqi people to overthrow Saddam — but then, when Kurds and Shi'ites heeded his call, done nothing to stop the dictator from savagely crushing the uprising?

Or take the more recent decision, by President Obama in 2011, to pull all American troops from Iraq, rather than negotiate a new Status of Forces agreement to maintain a substantial US military presence. That wholesale withdrawal — which was also widely supported at the time — created a vacuum that ISIS and Iran have filled with blood and terror. Knowing what we know now, would the candidates have brought those troops home?

President George H. W. Bush rides an armored jeep with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
during the 1991 Gulf War. Bush urged Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein,
then allowed Saddam to savagely suppress the uprising and cement
his hold on power for another 12 years.

History is always messy, especially the history of wars and their aftermath. Intelligence failures, battlefield misjudgments, diplomatic fiascoes, wavering public opinion — these have played a role in nearly every conflict, including those we recall with approbation. Rarely does the decision to fight proceed as expected. The same is true of the decision not to fight.

World War II, the "good war," the war to liberate Europe from Adolf Hitler, ended with America acquiescing in the enslavement of Eastern Europe by Joseph Stalin. The Civil War was envisioned as a quick and decisive Northern campaign to put down a Southern rebellion; it turned into grinding, appalling four-year bloodbath.

President Reagan chose to withdraw rather than retaliate after US Marines on a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon were killed by Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsor. That was a signal of weakness that helped convince Osama bin Laden to regard America as a vulnerable "paper tiger," with awful results.

By all means, let's grill presidential candidates on what lessons they've learned from history, and how it informs their approach to national security today.

Let's also remember that politicians always find it easy to tell us how blunders could have been avoided in the past. They're not nearly so adept at avoiding them in the present.

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

When U.S. troops leave too soon

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Desperate civilians try to board an American plane out of Saigon, April 1975.
Millions of victims would lose their lives or their freedom after South Vietnam
 and Cambodia fell to the communists.

Last month marked the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a moment vividly encapsulated by the frenzied scene of South Vietnamese desperately trying to reach the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy. April was also the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, when Robert E. Lee capitulated to Ulysses S. Grant, bringing the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War to an end.

The two episodes seemingly have little to do with each other. But each, in its way, illustrates one of the bleakly recurring themes of US military history: When America's armed forces prematurely abandon the field, the results are usually heartbreaking for the people they leave behind.

The Vietnam experience makes the point with aching sorrow. By 1972, the US war against the North Vietnamese communists was being won on the ground; it was lost in Congress and at the Paris peace talks under the political pressure of the antiwar movement.

The United States pulled its fighting troops from Vietnam in 1973, then refused to provide its South Vietnamese allies with the economic and military aid they needed to resist Hanoi's onslaught. As disaster loomed, President Ford implored Congress not to turn a blind eye to the "vast human tragedy" about to engulf "our friends in Vietnam and Cambodia."

But hostile lawmakers refused to heed Ford's pleas, and 40 years ago this spring the communists swept to power. What ensued was horrific. "Millions of people lost their lives and tens of millions lost any chance at freedom," Robert F. Turner, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, recalled in a recent essay.

In Cambodia, the fanatical Khmer Rouge slaughtered an estimated 1.7 million men, women, and children. In neighboring South Vietnam, there were hundreds of thousands of additional victims — frantic "boat people" trying to escape by sea, inmates tortured in re-education camps, innumerable others summarily executed or "disappeared."

To the shock of at least some former antiwar activists, more people died in the first two years of Indochina's communist peace than had lost their lives in the 13 years of America's war. Even now Vietnam remains a communist dictatorship, one of the least free places on earth.

When US forces settle in for a long peace after fighting a difficult war — as in (West) Germany and Japan following World War II, or South Korea since the 1950s — their presence has generally nurtured stability, prosperity, and democratic freedoms. When they retreat precipitately — as in Lebanon or Iraq — renewed cruelty and violence predictably fill the vacuum.

And it isn't only overseas that the pattern has been manifested.

In a striking new book, After Appomattox, historian Gregory Downs chronicles the years of military occupation that followed Lee's surrender to Grant in 1865 — a military occupation that was indispensable to the uprooting of slavery and the political empowerment of freed slaves.

In the face of Southern white supremacist hostility, it was only the continuing presence of federal troops in the South that could break up remaining pockets of rebellion, establish the right of blacks to vote and seek election, void discriminatory laws, and unilaterally remove disloyal or racist sheriffs and judges from office.

But there were far too few troops to do the job properly. With the end of battlefield fighting, pressure to "bring the boys home" was intense. By the end of 1866, fewer than 25,000 troops remained in the South — down from nearly 1 million at the time Lee surrendered. Meanwhile, a violent white insurgency was spreading, led by a Democratic Party terror group called the Ku Klux Klan. These insurgents "spread across the South," Downs writes, "assassinating Republican leaders and intimidating black voters."

Contrary to popular belief, Gen. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House didn't end the
 Civil War. Though battlefield clashes ceased, several years of military
occupation were to follow.

Where the US military held sway, Reconstruction legislatures made remarkable gains — funding schools and hospitals, reforming property and marriage laws, making possible the election to office of more than 1,500 black candidates. But those gains were swept away as it became clear that Washington would not deploy the troops necessary to crush the Klan terror.

Public support for continuing the occupation evaporated. By the late 1870s, the troops were effectively gone. Southern Democrats moved ruthlessly to roll back the astonishing progress in black civil rights; in its place they imposed poll taxes, literacy tests, and racial segregation. "Without the fear of federal [military] power," recounts Downs, "a new and bleak era of Jim Crow was dawning."

Military occupation and the prolonged exercise of war powers go against the American grain. The urge to "declare peace and get out" is only too understandable. This season of anniversaries is a reminder that yielding to that urge can come at a terrible price, above all to those who remain after the US military is gone.

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

The Armenian genocide was also a jihad

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Pope Francis embraces Catholicos Karekin II, the spiritual leader of the Armenian
Apostolic Church, during a mass in St. Peter's Basilica marking the
100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide.

Unlike some of Pope Francis's other headline-generating pronouncements, his description of Turkey's mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I as "genocide" was anything but inadvertent.

Speaking at the Vatican during a Sunday mass to mark the centenary of the slaughter, the pope said it is "widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century" — a quote from Pope John Paul II, who used nearly the same words in 2001. But Francis went further, equating the destruction of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet bloodbaths under Stalin.

And he linked the genocidal Ottoman assault on Armenia, the world's oldest Christian nation, with the epidemic of violence against Christians today, especially by such radical Islamist terror groups as ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Shabaab.

Turkey reacted angrily, recalling its ambassador to the Vatican and accusing Francis of distorting history and spreading prejudice. On Twitter, the Turkish foreign minister denounced the pope for fueling "hatred and animosity" with his "unfounded allegations."

That was no surprise, given the government's vehement history of denialism on the subject. To this day, the use of the word "genocide" to describe the killing of the Armenians is a criminal offense in Turkey, and Turkish diplomats labor mightily to defeat genocide-recognition efforts worldwide.

The journalist Thomas de Waal wrote recently in Foreign Affairs that "no other historical issue causes such anguish in Washington." The political debate over "the G-Word" has consumed countless hours, even as the historical debate — as the pope suggested — has been largely resolved. As de Waal explains, Turkey is so adamant for reasons both material and psychological.

Some Turkish politicians fear that acknowledging the Ottoman-perpetrated genocide could trigger claims for financial reparations or territorial concessions. But beyond that is "the emotive power of the word," which was coined in the wake of the Holocaust and is indelibly linked in the public mind with the absolute evil of the Final Solution.

"No one willingly admits to committing genocide," writes de Waal, and many Turks seethe at "being invited to compare their grandparents to the Nazis."

Yet Turkish authorities weren't always so reluctant to accurately label the genocidal evil unleashed against the Armenians a century ago.

Talaat Pasha, the powerful Ottoman interior minister during World War I, certainly didn't disguise his objective. "The Government … has decided to destroy completely all the indicated [Armenians] persons living in Turkey," he brusquely reminded officials in Aleppo in a September 1915 dispatch. "An end must be put to their existence … and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to conscientious scruples."

Read the Jacoby Column

US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, flooded with accounts of the torture, death marches, and butchery being inflicted on the Armenians, remonstrated with Talaat to no avail. "It is no use for you to argue," Morgenthau was told. "We have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians…. The hatred between the Turks and Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish them. If we don't, they will plan their revenge…. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia."

If some of them survived, it wasn't for lack of effort by the killers. Of the roughly 2 million Armenians living in the country in 1914, 90 percent were gone by 1918.

The death toll was well over one million; innumerable others fled for their lives. To read eyewitness descriptions of the ghastly cruelties the Armenian Christians were made to suffer a century ago is to be reminded that the jihadist savagery of ISIS and al-Qaeda is not an innovation.

That key fact is one the pope, to his credit, refuses to downplay: Armenians were victims not only of genocide, but also of jihad. In imploring his listeners on Sunday to hear the "muffled and forgotten cry" of endangered Christians who today are "ruthlessly put to death — decapitated, crucified, burned alive — or forced to leave their homeland," Francis was reminding the world that the price of irresolution in the face of determined Islamist violence is as steep as ever.

The jihadists of 1915 murdered "bishops and priests, religious women and men, the elderly, and even defenseless children and the infirm." The world knew what was happening; the grisly details were extensively reported at the time. Just as they are now, and with as little effect.

______________________________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

House of Tudor did not get the last word

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

For generations, Richard III was vilified as a murderous
usurper, devoid of conscience. But history's verdict has
turned out to be more generous.

It is remarkable what five centuries can do for a guy's reputation.

When Richard III, the last Plantaganet king of England, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, his corpse was stripped and hauled in disgrace through the streets of Leicester, "all besprinkled with mire and blood … a miserable spectacle," as Holinshed's Chronicle recounted.

Then it was stuffed into a crude grave, naked and coffinless, while "few lamented and many rejoiced."

This week, the medieval king, whose bones were found under a parking lot in 2012, will be reburied in Leicester Cathedral with full reverence and honor. For generations Richard was vilified as a cold-blooded usurper who had his young nephews, rivals to the throne, murdered in the Tower of London — a reputation cemented by Shakespeare's venomous depiction of the king as "that bottled spider, that foul bunchback'd toad."

But the remains of the long-lost monarch, whose death marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, have been welcomed back with extraordinary dignity and emotion, befitting a ruler now extolled by many as an enlightened reformer who reigned with courage and integrity.

It may have taken 530 years, but history's verdict on Richard III turned out to be very different from the malignant reputation ascribed to him by the Tudor loyalists of his era. There is a lesson in that, and not only for medievalists.

It is a mistake to imagine that the judgments of history are inevitable and predictable, or to assume that today's adamant consensus will win tomorrow's approval.

"History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes," ruefully conceded the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., after the collapse of the Soviet Union — a Cold War denouement that academic elites had dismissed as a pipe dream. Time and again, those certitudes fall by the wayside.

Yet the appetite for making such pronouncements with categorical certainty never seems to go out of fashion.

In the closing passage of his 2010 memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush writes that he believes that some of the choices he made were right and that others were wrong. But, he admits, "it's too early to say how most of my decisions will turn out."

Bush points to President Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon — "once regarded as one of the worst mistakes in presidential history, [but] now viewed as a selfless act of leadership."

The realization that scholars are still debating George Washington's presidency, Bush has remarked more than once, made it easier for him to tune out opinion polls and headlines.

Avidly read history, and you're constantly being amazed at how frequently informed opinion turns out to be dead wrong. At the start of the Civil War, notes David Herbert Donald in his best-selling biography of Abraham Lincoln, the smart money said it would be over and done with in a matter of weeks.

The coffin containing the remains of King Richard III is carried in procession
for interment at Leicester Cathedral in England.

Secretary of State William Seward thought the rebellion could be suppressed in 90 days; the New York Times predicted victory within a month. It consumed four years, and 750,000 American lives.

On a rug in the Oval Office is woven a quote favored by President Obama: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Only it isn't always clear which way the arc is bending, or what history will make of it all.

When Whittaker Chambers broke with the Communist Party and became one of its most implacable foes, he assumed that he was moving from the winning side to the losing side, but thought he owed it to his children to at least make the effort.

In politics and economics, in statecraft and social activism, it is never a foregone conclusion that history will endorse our choices. That isn't an argument against doing the right thing, as best we can judge the right.

It is a caution against forgetting that the future has a way of embarrassing the present, and that a pinch of self-doubt is never more needful than at just the moment when any doubt is deemed heretical. To err is human, to be human is to err.

Don't be too sure that history, or the moral arc of the universe, will approve of your preferences and convictions.

Richard III lost his throne and his life and his reputation. But history's verdict wasn't final, and the Tudors didn't get the last word. We won't either.

______________________________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

I see parchment burning but letters soar free

'I see parchment burning, but the letters are soaring free' by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

One day after the reports of the book-burnings in Mosul, jihadists released a ghastly video
exulting in the murder of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh,
who was burned alive in a metal cage.

Book burning is as old as books, and as current as this week's news.

The Associated Press reported on Monday that Islamic State fanatics have ravaged the Central Library of Mosul, the largest repository of learning in that ancient city. Militants smashed the library's locks and overran its collections, removing thousands of volumes on philosophy, science, and law, along with books of poetry and children's stories. Only Islamic texts were left behind.

"These books promote infidelity and call for disobeying Allah," one of the ISIS jihadists announced as the library's holdings were emptied into sacks and loaded onto pickup trucks. "So they will be burned."

There was more book-burning soon afterward, when Islamic State vandals sacked the library at the University of Mosul. "They made a bonfire out of hundreds of books on science and culture, destroying them in front of students," AP reported. Lost in the libricide were newspapers, maps, and texts dating back to the Ottoman Empire. UNESCO, the UN's educational and cultural agency, decried the libraries' torching as "one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history."

Perhaps the most chilling words ever written about book-burning were penned in 1821 by the great German poet Heinrich Heine: Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen — "Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people." Today that axiom is etched on a plaque in Berlin's Bebelplatz, the public square where more than 20,000 books deemed "un-German" and "decadent" were destroyed in a vast Nazi bonfire on the night of May 10, 1933.

Though Heine's words are indelibly associated now with the Holocaust, they have lost none of their grim prescience. Just one day after news emerged of the book-burnings in the Islamic State's so-called "caliphate," the jihadists released a video exulting in the horrific murder of Jordanian pilot, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, who was burned alive in a metal cage.

There is something uniquely diabolical about setting books on fire, a lust to obliterate that almost ineluctably leads to even more dreadful evils. It is no coincidence that those obsessed with annihilating the physical expression of dangerous thoughts or teachings so often move on to annihilating the people who think or teach them.

"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it," orders Captain Beatty, the book-hating fire chief in Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's dystopian classic. "Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?"

Yet if the long and heartbreaking history of book-burning teaches anything, it is that books cannot be killed by fire. Pages can be burned, libraries can be reduced to ash, treatises can be found guilty of heresy or sedition and set ablaze. But ideas are not so easily extirpated.

Heine's books were among those the Nazis flung on the bonfires in 1933; so were the books of more than 2,000 other authors, including Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy, and Franz Kafka. Josef Goebbels assured the enthusiastic crowd that they would "commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past." The books, however, are still alive. It was the Third Reich that went down in flames.

A World War II-era poster printed by the US
government shows Nazis burning books.

The story of books is the story of books being suppressed — a story of staggering cruelty, and of equally staggering futility. The destruction of Mosul's libraries prompted one Iraqi parliamentarian, Hakim al-Zamili, to compare ISIS to the Mongols who conquered Baghdad in 1258.

Then, too, prized works of learning — on history, medicine, astronomy — were demolished. "The only difference is that Mongols threw the books in the Tigris River, while now [ISIS] is burning them," al-Zamili said. "Different method, but same mentality."

Indeed, in their bloodlust and zealotry, the book-burners of ISIS have many antecedents — Crusaders, Mongols, Nazis, Wahhabis, Khmer Rouge. But ISIS too will find that it is easier to slaughter human beings than to destroy ideas.

The Talmud records the death of Chanina ben Teradion, a 2d-century Jewish sage killed by the Romans for violating a ban on teaching Torah. It was a terrible death:

He was wrapped in the scroll from which he had been teaching and set on fire, with wet wool placed on his chest to prolong the agony. His horrified disciples, forced to witness his death, cried out: "Rabbi, what do you see?" He replied: "I see parchment burning, but the letters are soaring free."

Any brute can burn parchment, or ransack a library, or blow up a mosque, or bulldoze cultural treasures. But not even mighty armies can destroy the ideas they embody. The Roman Empire couldn't keep the letters from soaring free. ISIS can't either.

_____________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

The antisemitic derangement

The antisemitic derangement by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Even before last week's terrorist attacks in Paris, the French prime minister was concerned about the continued viability of Jewish life in France. In an interview with The Atlantic prior to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket massacres, Manuel Valls made a grim prediction:

"If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure."

His misgivings were far from groundless. An exodus of French Jews is already underway and accelerating rapidly. In 2012, there were just over 1,900 immigrants to Israel from France. The following year nearly 3,400 French Jews emigrated; in 2014 approximately 7,000 left.

For the first time ever, France heads the list of countries of origin for immigrants to Israel, and the ministry of immigration absorption expects another 10,000 French Jews to arrive in 2015.

That would mean more than 22,000 Jews fleeing France for Israel in the space of just four years, nearly 4.5 percent of the country's Jewish population. The departure of 100,000 French Jews might once have been inconceivable. No longer. In a survey last spring of France's Jewish community, the largest in Europe, three out of four respondents said they were considering emigrating.

These are staggering numbers — all the more so in a "Jewish community that has been in place for centuries and feels itself deeply attached to being French," as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has written. But what is driving so many Jews to leave "is not Israel's pull…. It is France's push."

Over the past 15 years, that "push" — violent eruptions of French antisemitism — has grown relentless. The murder of four Jews by jihadists at the Hyper Cacher market on Friday was only the most recent on a long list of ominous events, including mob attacks on synagogues in Paris last summer, and the targeting of Jewish teens with Tasers, tear gas, and pepper spray.

To his credit, the French prime minister has been forthright in his condemnation of Islamist anti-Semitism. Over the weekend he declared that France was at war "against terrorism and radical Islam," a war in which "journalists were killed for drawing" and "Jews were killed because they were Jewish." But strong words from a prime minister will not halt the antisemitic derangement, and Valls is right to fear what that derangement would mean to France's future well-being.

Anti-Semitism is commonly regarded as a variety of racism, but the prolific English historian Paul Johnson suggests that it should be seen as a kind of intellectual disease, fundamentally irrational and highly infectious. It exerts great self-destructive force, Johnson wrote in a notable 2005 essay, severely harming countries and societies that engage in it. In a pattern that has recurred so predictably that he dubbed it a "historical law," nations that make Jewish life untenable condemn themselves to decline and weakness.

At a shop in a Jewish section of Paris, a notice says the business has been compelled
 "by recent events" to close temporarily. (AP Photo)

For example, Spain's expulsion of the Jews in the 1490s, and its subsequent witchhunt of the converted "New Christians" who remained behind, meant a loss of Spanish financial and managerial talent at the very moment the New World was being opened up to lucrative colonization.

That had "a profoundly deleterious impact," Johnson argued, "plunging the hitherto vigorous Spanish economy into inflation and long-term decline, and the government into repeated bankruptcy." More than 500 years later, Spain — where, incidentally, Valls was born and lived until his teens — still regrets that self-inflicted wound, and has looked for ways to rectify it.

Johnson pointed out other prominent examples of the phenomenon. Czarist Russia's persecution of Jews, reinforced by the encouragement of brutal pogroms, fueled a massive migration of Jews to the West, especially to Britain and the United States; those countries' cultural and entrepreneurial gain was Russia's debilitating loss. Germany's descent into demonic Jew-hatred under the Nazis ended in devastating military defeat, followed by a decades-long Cold War rupture and the end of German renown as Europe's intellectual center.

The Arab world, steeped in antisemitism and obsessed with the Jewish state, squandered vast oil riches "on weapons of war and propaganda," wrote Johnson. "In their flight from reason, they have failed to modernize or civilize their societies, to introduce democracy, or to consolidate the rule of law." Arab culture once led the world in learning, innovation, and pluralism. Today it is a world leader in almost nothing, save fratricidal violence and Islamist fanaticism.

France's Jews are leaving, and that never bodes well for the society driving them out. The prime minister puts his finger on it: If there is no Jewish future in France, if the antisemitic cancer has metastasized so alarmingly that tens of thousands of French Jews are ready to flee, then France will indeed no longer be France. It will be something darker and more deformed, wrecked by an injury it inflicted on itself.

______________________________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now

Be less romantic about the past

Be less romantic about the past from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Read Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

For many people, Christmas and New Year's feel like anything but the most wonderful time of the year. Some find the long winter nights depressing. Others can't muster much merriment in the face of what can seem like an endless procession of bleak headlines.

Still others yearn for the sweetness of auld lang syne, when life moved at a more humane pace, and concerns that generate such angst today — global warming, identity theft, Islamist terror, campaign finance — troubled no one's sleep.

Well, for anyone who could do with some extra cheer, a book published 40 years ago — "The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible!" — brims with reminders of all the blessings we have to count.

Its author was Otto L. Bettmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany who created the Bettmann Archive, one of the world's most important and extensive collections of historical images. In 1974 he set out to dispel the notion that life in America two or three generations earlier had been an idyll of freshness and simplicity, the benign and picturesque era of Currier & Ives prints and classic Christmas carols.

Bettmann acknowledged that his famous archive had helped create that impression of a lost golden age. Many of its most popular pictures "do indeed exude an aura of charm and well-being," he wrote. But there were countless others, less sought-after, that told a far more realistic tale.

It was dangerous to romanticize the past, Bettmann argued. For one thing, it was an assault on the truth: Living conditions in America on the eve of the 20th century were frequently poor, nasty, and brutish. Bettmann filled his book with images refuting the idea that the "good old days" were a paradise from which we have sadly fallen.

Like its title, "The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible!" is unflinching yet confident. To read it is to be liberated from unhealthy nostalgia, and to be buoyed by a powerful reminder of our potential for human progress.

We are endlessly hectored these days about the evils of the automobile and "carbon pollution," to take a single example of a contemporary boon all too often condemned by those nostalgic for an illusory past. Bettmann supplies invaluable perspective, recalling how befouled American streets and cities were before the "timely arrival" of the internal-combustion engine.

At the turn of the last century, he recounts, transportation in US cities required about 3 million horses, each producing 20 to 25 pounds of manure per day. "These dumplings were numerous on every street, attracting swarms of flies and radiating a powerful stench.

The ambiance was further debased by the presence on almost every block of stables with urine-saturated hay." In one modest-sized city — Rochester, NY — 15,000 horses "produced enough manure in 1900 to cover an acre of ground with a layer 175 feet high."

The ubiquitous pollution didn't come only from horses. All the "wastes of daily life, including kitchen slops, cinders, coal dust, horse manure, broken cobblestones, and dumped merchandise, were piled high on the sidewalks. There was hardly a block in downtown Manhattan that a pedestrian could negotiate without climbing over a heap of trash or, in rain, wading through a bed of slime."

Parking hassles in our era can be maddening, but who wouldn't prefer them to the foul congestion of the Gilded Age? Bettmann describes "sidewalks . . . lined with unharnessed trucks, beneath and between which dirtier citizens threw their filth."

At times New York reeked like a vast stable, one visitor commented — and what was true of the nation's largest municipality was true of smaller cities as well: "Pioneers trekked westward to breathe what they expected would be the fresh air of small frontier towns. What they often encountered was air like that of a malarial swamp."

A photograph of Helena, Mont., illustrates the point, depicting a busy street clogged with wagons, where hitching places for horses regularly turned into cesspools.

When You Say "Good Old Days" Do You Mean Wading
Through Horse Manure?

But at least roads were safer before the advent of car accidents, right? Wrong. Runaway horses were a serious danger, creating "havoc [that] killed thousands of people," Bettmann writes. "According to the National Safety Council, the horse-associated fatality rate was 10 times the car-associated rate of modern times."

From housing to education, street crime to medical care, urban sweatshops to rural despair — on topic after topic, Bettmann's pictorial history strips away the idealized sheen of wholesomeness from America's "good old days."

Neither paean to laissez-faire capitalism nor endorsement of vigorous government regulation, it is instead a frank reality check into the past that makes clear how blessed we are to be alive in the present.

The cynic's definition of optimist is a man who never had much experience. Bettmann knew better, and was happier for it. He relished being "a man of experience who remains a confirmed optimist."

Forty years on, his book is still in print — and more than ever an antidote to the blues, holiday or otherwise.

____________________________________

Become a Truth Serum Partner Now