'"

Lest We Forget #624 DATE:1/11/92 AGAIN THE UGLY AMERICAN It was embarrassing to have the President of the United States throw up at a state dinner and collapse on the floor. He was in the midst of what was supposed to be an important mission to get from our Japanese superiors in economic management a boost for the American economy. The "hero" of the embarrassing moment was Barbara Bush. In fact, she was the only saving feature of the Japanese stop on the trip. Iacocca of Chrysler boasted on his return that the corporate executives with the Bush team had really given the Japanese "something to look at." Iacocca was wrong again: the Japanese executives have long since taken the measure of the American executives. The heads of Chrysler, GM and Ford didn't surprise the Japanese statesmen and business executives at all. The Japanese had already looked at them and understood what they were looking at: over-paid and under-brained corporate executives, taking care of their personal interests while their employees and their country suffered. Barbara Bush was something guite strange for them, however: a woman in command of a crisis, responding with calm presence, being an active and useful stand-in for her indisposed spouse, even speaking with a touch of humor. And TV gave us "the whole story." We saw the exhibitionist Iacocca in Detroit as we had earlier seen the sick Bush in Tokyo. TV took us there when Gorbachev came out of the jaws of death at the end of the failed coup d'etat in the collapsed USSR, and we remember that he looked a lot healthier than Bush leaving Japan. TV is really a rogue cannon on the deck of the ship of state! - not just reporting on events but actually creating political decisions... and doing it without being responsible to any legitimate sovereign, king or Congress. TV is accountable neither by appointment nor by election. The political person who wants to be a survivor and not a victim has to be fast on his feet indeed. It is interesting to read the rumor that the Japanese, who have a sensibility about the role of the host, are threatening to punish the TV people who embarrassed the American President by catching him vomiting and collapsing. They can't do anything, of course, about those who embarrassed President Bush and his mission most of all: the corporate free-loaders he took along with him. What are the brute facts that these "giants" of the economy reminded the Japanese of? The mother of all facts is this: in 1980 the United States of America was the chief creditor nation in the world. Today it is the chief debtor nation. If they hadn't already figured out what was wrong with the American economy, the Japanese had it vividly presented to them in the person of Lee Iacocca and his less noisy associates on this mission of supplication. Lee Iacocca, in case you've forgotten, is the head of the Chrysler Corporation - Iacocca the great entrepeneur, the champion of "private enterprise" and "free trade," Iacocca who

Again the Ualy American 2 just a few years ago had to be bailed out by the tax-payers to the tune of three billion dollars. His was one of the first of a series of business raids on the national treasury - all the banditry, of course, carried out in the name of "free trade" and "private enterprise" and "conservativism", not to forget "down with the socialist professors" and "up from liberalism" and "down with the welfare cheats." Iacocca, who obviously has populist political ambitions, rushed home, leaving behind his ailing President and host on Air Force One. He couldn't stay with his host and miss his chance to pre-empt the President's report to the nation. He couldn't wait to get back to the Detroit Economic Club and the media. Iacocca was determined to get maximum coverage for his coarse, jingoistic tirade against Japan. In evocative slogans punctuated by pauses calculated to allow some applause and laughter, he even managed to throw in Pearl Harbor and crocodile tears for the thousands of unemployed in Detroit!

(Some of his words were bleeped in the TV studio, although guite a few "hells," "damns" and other "me big boy, tough, treat- 'em-rough" posturing words and phrases got through. Who does he think he is - Nixon!?)

It is a painful thought, hopefully born dead, that the

American voters possibly might fall for 1300003's vulgar, chauvinist, demagogic, isolationist, protectionist, ranting rot.

After all, 55% of the white voters gave David Duke their mandates in Louisiana, and the ACLU is trying to get him on the ballot in

Again the Ugly American 3 Georgia and other states... The psychologists tell us that most people have a memory span of no more than six weeks. To appreciate how America became an economic basket-case you have to think back over nearly twelve years of de-regulation, junk bonds, insider trading, S & L scams, swash-buckling speculation, and politics by attention to appearances rather than facing up to reality. Is that more remembering than American voters are capable of? Lest we forget, to submit David Duke to appraisal you have to be able to remember Nazism and the "solutions" to political and economic anguish that Hitler promised German voters all of six decades ago. But to put Lee Iacocca in context you only have to think back over a long decade - hardly longer than a "lost week-end" - in the span of American history.

- Franklin H Littell

Again the Ugly American Lest We Forget #625 DATE:l/16/92 TRUE OR FALSE? I would like to think that if a correspondent sent in a sermonette to the "Letters" Editor of The New York Times based upon a false identification of Socrates and Peter, someone would catch it. "Athenians, I hold you in the highest regard and love, But I will obey God rather than you." That was Socrates. "We ought to obey God rather than man." Thus "Peter and the others" are cited in Christian's book "The New Testament" (Acts 5:29). It is guite possible, these days, that the hypothetical confused citation would pass without being detected - since during the last two generations the public schools have been gutted of any teaching of basic religious facts. Although newspapers are very careful to have experts reporting on commercialized baseball and football, hockey and tennis, even the good newspapers are notoriously weak in the the area of religious journalism. Also, one must admit, the two guotations sound alike to an outsider, to one unfamiliar with what the Greeks were about and what the Hebrew were about. Martin Niemoeller's most famous saying has produced even more grievous confusion than one between Socrates and Peter, and almost always for obviously political purposes. A few months ago the Church Relations Director of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Ms. Margaret Obrecht, put out a beutifully printed pamphlet on the work of the Council. This time, a bowdlerized version of the saying begins with "the Jews," goes on to "the Communist," mentions "the trade unionists," and omits the socialists altogether. The corrupted text not only lacks accuracy: it lacks the aesthetic touch of Niemoeller's actual saying, as well as lacking his respect for the facts. On January 14th of this year, to pick another example, The New York Times printed a Letter to the Editor which ran as follows: "Pastor Martin Niemoeller comes to mind, that German Lutheran who said, during World War II: "When they came for the Catholics, I did not speak up, because I was not a Catholic. When they came for the trade unionists...the gypsies...the homosexuals...the Jews, I did not speak up, because I was none of these. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up.'"^- Then she rushed on to write what was really on her mind: "Unless we all speak up for Salman Rushdie..." There is a good deal to be said for the moral lesson the correspoondent wants to impart, but none for passing a rank misguotation that The New York Times could have corrected from its own files - had someone taken the trouble. The writer got it half right that Martin Niemoeller considered himself a Lutheran: as a pastor in the Church of the Old Prussian Union, fraternally related to the former Evangelical and Reformed Church in this country, he was theologically a Lutheran and a presbyterian in church order. However, he did not "speak up during World War II:" he spent eight and a half years in concentration camp, two years of them before the war in Europe True or False 2 even began, and three of them in solitary. He wasn't producing guotables then, even for his ecumenical friends, although I can remember participating in intercessory services where readings were taken from some of his earlier published sermons against Nazism. What he actually said, he said during his post-war trip through the United States in 194 6 - a trip that was organized under the auspices of Church World Service and planned by Marlene Maertens, a lifelong friend who lived her latter years in Philadelphia. He used the same formula dozens of times before church audiences:

"They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a communist; "They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist; "They came for the union leaders .Gewerkschaftler), and I did not speak up because I wasn't a union leader; "They came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a Jew. "Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me." That is the factual historical seguence - communists, socialists, union leaders, Jews, and that purging process had been carried out in the Third Reich before Pastor Niemoeller was himself sent off. He was imprisoned on the personal order of Hitler - after a court had refused to impose a penalty on him. When they came for the gypsies and the homosexuals, Niemoeller already had been in KZ for four and a half years. Finally, so far as the Catholics were concerned, the Nazis never "came for them" any more than they "came for" the Protestants.

True or False 3 As Martin Niemoeller once said in response to a direct guestion about a published inclusion of "the Catholics," when the oral tradition was already beginning to be corrupted: "I never said that!" In the fraudulent sayings rather freguently attributed to Niemoeller, profane hands are being laid on a modern sacred oral tradition. Those of us who honor the word, texts, and primary sources, should speak up vigorously now - before the spring is permanently polluted by individuals piggy-backing their own small interests upon a majestic moral witness. - Franklin H. Littell

True or False Lest We Forget #628 DATE:2/7/92 MORE ON AN IMPORTANT RELIGIOUS LIBERTY CASE

Every now and then a letter writer challenges my views in the commentary "Lest We Forget," and sometimes I get telephone calls from people who want to argue a point. That's fine: that's what the public forum is about. I have not previously answered in print because chewing back and forth on some bone of contention where either party might be right - or even a third party not yet presenting a point of view - is seldom edifying. However, a recent letter signed "Adam Boonin" (Jewish Times, February 6th) so misconstrues the facts and the conseguences of a major Religious Liberty case (Oregon v. Smith), to which I called readers' attention in my column of January 9th, that some correction is necessary. The Smith Case was not about peyote, although it incidentally reversed an earlier Supreme Court decision that had (properly) made exception for the sacramental use of the cactus beads in the rites of the Native American Church of North America. Peyote, and the refusal of two members to refuse to swear not to use it in the church's rites, was the excuse the Rehnguist Court used to assert the primary power of government over churches and religious practices.

Until Smith, the First Amendment had sheltered the free exercise of religion as a right prior to the political contract and superior to it. No curtailment of Religious Liberty could be undertaken by the state except on proof that such curtailment was essential to the general welfare. In a century when the arrogance of government power has been the most serious problem for human persons, when basic human rights have been disregarded in most countries and abused in many, until Smith we have as Americans been blessed with a shield of conscience that confirmed limited government and the sanctity of the free exercise of religion. The Smith decision is clearly pre-totalitarian, and it has already led to a series of cases bringing reversals of the protections long provided religious bodies in the USA. I have in my files a discussion dated last September, with no less than 26 cases where lower courts have been compelled by Smith to reverse long-standing rules governing the free exercise of religion. Talk about "judicial activism!" One of them, United States v. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends is a Philadelphia case, in which Judge Norma Shapiro was compelled by the Supreme Court's Smith decision to find against the Quaker defendants. Affirming her belief in the traditional American position on Religious Liberty, Judge Shapiro commented that "it is ironic that here in Pennsylvania, the woods to which Penn led the Religious Society of Friends to enjoy the blessings of religious liberty, neither the Constitution not its Bill of Rights protects the policy of that Society not to coerce or violate the consciences of its employees and members or to act as an agent for our government in doing so." Amen! The Smith Case is such bad law for an American court that the director of the major inter-faith Religious Liberty commission has said, "we have seldom been more unanimous than we are now in the judgment that the court has deliberately and definitively damaged the fabric of the rights guaranteed to the people by the First Amendment. We do not make this assertion lightly, and we are prepared to defend it in depth." The protest is supported by leading officials of the Episcopal Church (whose House of Bishops recently condemned the Smith decision), the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the U. S. Catholic Conference, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Jewish Committee, the Christian Legal Society and the National Council of Churches. Boonin trivializes the issue. For some time the law has glanced aside when citizens, including children, partook of wine in sacramental communion. The concluding remark of Boonin about a few people who "get high on illegal drugs" has the intellectual level of a remark about people who "get high on sacramental wine." I do not know who Boonin is, nor do I know what his gualifications are to discuss a case that the leading inter-faith Commission on Religious Liberty has called a nullification of years of settled law on the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. I do know that he has misconstrued both the facts and the ultimate conseguences of the Smith decision, a decision which - if allowed to stand - will further damage the liberties and rights of American citizens. Fortunately a bipartisan initiative led by Rep. Solarz (D- NY), and supported by more than 50 religious organizations - from Agudath Israel to the United Methodist Church - has brought forward H. R. 2797 to overturn the Rehnguist Court's highhanded assertion of prior government authority in religious exercise matters. H.R. 2797 is called "the Religious Freedom Restoration Act." Who would have believed a few years ago that - in the season of the bicentenary of the Bill of Rights! - we Americans would have to defend our basic liberties with such an enactment?

- Franklin H. Littell Lest We Forget #626 DATE:2/7/92 JUSTICE FOR JEFFRIES

The newspapers are full of rumors and scant details of the impending ouster of Leonard Jeffries, Jr. as chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at CCNY. Jeffries, in case you've forgotten, is the black professor who has distinguished himself by racist remarks against Jews and others. If he has other distinctions, they escaped public notice until recently. Now he has another: he was a featured speaker at the annual convention of "Holocaust revisionists" a few days ago. The antisemitism of the "Holocaust revisionists," which is allied with oldline die-hard Nazi apologists and newline anti- intellectual "skinheads," now has a new component: a highly verbal black antisemite. We may be sure that Louis Farrakhan and others of that ilk will defend Jeffries' new alliance as an expression of "academic freedom," "freedom of speech" and anything else diversionary that comes to the tops of their heads and the ends of their tongues ("the kitchen sink," as folks say). The reason the newspapers are filled with rumors of Jeffries' dismissal - apart from the fact that the American media seldom spend the energy to work up the kind of in-depth studies you can get in the Swiss Neue Zurcher Zeituno, the Hamburg Die Zeit and other good European newspapers - is that the New York politicians are jostling for position. They don't want to appear "racist" to the large black population, and they are trapped by the growing volume of protests against Jeffries' vicious antisemitism. Such is the life of a politician... What is going on among the professors, Jeffries' peer group? How is it they aren't handling the discipline of one of their own colleagues? For one thing, the general powerlessness of the professors now extends rather generally to problems of academic discipline. The professors have little or nothing to do with making the policies that govern most universities: they are the "employees" of the corporation, and treated as such by the boards of directors. The boards of directors consist of trustees, many of whom serve on half a dozen or more corporate boards, and give little time to thinking about their campus posts unless some problem arises. The university is the one aggregate of assets that they haven't figured out how to use as collateral in buying the next bank, construction firm, candy or bread factory. But when trouble arises, they want action by their employees. The administrators, who have first to think about public relations, then find themselves trapped in the crossfire with the (other) politicians... The professors, left irresponsible in their general powerlessness, split between those who feel some residual pride in their profession and those who despise "the politicians" and want to give the administrators a "hot foot." The latter caucus usually defends the errant colleague by squidlike spewing forth of pious phrases like "academic freedom," "freedom of speech"- plus the kitchen sink.

Justice for Jeffries 2 According to the newspaper, "the president of City College, Dr. Bernard W. Harleston, has told the trustees of the City University of New York that he will seek to replace Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr. as chairman of the college's Afro-American Studiest Department by June." (The New York Times. January 29th) To assuage some of the wrath from other directions, assurance is also given that his removal as head of the department will "not affect his tenure as a full professor." What is going on here? If Jeffries is guilty of the kinds of racist, antisemitic utterances that have been charged, if he has allied himself with the "Holocaust revisionists," he is unworthy of holding an academic post altogether. But you must understand that the "employees," having been reduced in many American universities to the status of workers on the assembly line, are hanging on desperately to what tattered remains of professional dignity still remain to them. One such fragment is "tenure." It is being systematically eroded by the growing employment of graduate students and part-timers, so that administrators and trustees don't have to worry much any more about major confrontations with the teaching corps. In most metropolitan and commuter schools the professors have long since given up the pretence of being senior "citizens" of a Republic of Learning. They commute to a job, compete with the students and part-timers for parking space and supplies, do what is required and leave. If a challenge arises, they hang on to what is left of the tattered flag of "academic freedom," never

Justice for Jeffries 3 willingly allowing themselves to be trapped into counterpart commitments to "academic discipline." In fact we have reached the point where many of the teachers, except when a Jeffries Case arises, give no more thought to the Universitas. its essential nature, and its individual reputation, than do the frustrated Trustees.

- Franklin H. Littell

Justice for Jeffries Lest We Forget #627 FHL:2/19/92 OWNER SAVAGED BY PIT BULLS Pat Buchanan has run away with 40% of the Republican Party vote in New Hampshire. David Duke ran away with 40% in Louisiana, and took 55% of the white voters with him. What is going on here? The Union Leader, the most widely read newspaper in New Hampshire, has been an extremist rag for many years. They have touted every rightwing cause since before Joe McCarthy, followed the line of the John Birch Society since the conspiracy came into being (f. 1958), and done everything possible to polarize public opinion. Obviously they were programmed to support Buchanan with unrestrained zeal. The polarizing tactic is one of the fifteen characteristic marks of totalitarian politics. Hitler capitalized on it in destroying the moderation and compromise that kept the Social Democrats and the Center Party in uneasy alliance during the brief life of the Weimar Republic. The American Communists in their heighday poured abuse upon the "bourgeois liberals" and "reformists" who supported orderly change and refused to pull the levers of internal subversion. In recent years the polarizing in the United States has been cultivated by the rightwing and their pseudo-conservative fellow- travelers. The term "pseudo-conservative" is appropriate: it was precisely the shallow opportunism of many German "conservatives" that strengthened Hitler's hand. The genuine German conservatives despised Hitler and his Nazis, tried several times to kill him, and on 20 July 1944 nearly succeeded. Hitler was highly vocal in his attacks on "liberals" and "cosmopolitans," etc. - the people that Nixon and his partner Agnew attacked as "liberals" and "consymps." Unhappily, in America as once in a Germany sliding toward disaster, we too have politicians who are by no means loyal to the Constitution and defenders of fair play in the public forum. A deceiver like Nixon and a crook like Agnew were unfortunately not the end of it. On the contrary, the breed has flourished under Reagan and Bush. Back of the fellow-travelers are, of course, planners who know very well what they are about when they destroy the middle ground of political dialogue, orderly change and sound progress. Robert Welch, who founded the John Birch Society, wrote books on how his followers should follow the model of the Communist Party - with cells of discipline, secret membership, penetration of the power centers of the economic and political order. We now have in America, after a third of a century of guiet enlistment and organization, Birchers at the highest levels in the executive, leghislative and judiciary branches of government. Under Nixon, Reagan and Bush the extremists of the right have had ready access to the White House - including individuals with direct ties to Nazi and neo-Nazi organizations. Some of them are careless of showing their colors. Gordon Liddy, one of the several Nixon aides who got so far offbase that he landed in prison, wrote a characteristic autobiography entitled WILL. In it he relates (p. 400) how he faced down a gang that threatened danger to him in the prison, an encounter in the course of which he sang at the top of his voice "Die Fahne hoch"!

Usually these characters have kept guiet about having memorized

Owner Savaged by Pit Bulls 2 such idiom as the Horst Wessel Song (with its lines about daggers dipped in Jewish blood) - not because they have a different spirit so much as for fear of bad public relations. Nothing can be worse for the politically ambitious, in this age of intrusive media, than bad public relations! Never mind principles and values... But the major problem, unless the likes of Liddy, Erlichman and Haldeman, Duke and Buchanan should get power, is not the Nazi sympathizers or Silent Brotherhood or Aryan Nations or KKK or "Holocaust revisionists" as such. The major problem at this stage of political degeneracy is the so-called conservatives who have held hands with them and given them respectability. Hitler would never have been accepted into the parlors of decent people (made salonfahig., had not other supposedly decent people been opportunists. George Bush has been an opportunist. He let the unscrupulous hatchet-men use the Willie Horton attack on Dukakis. He undermined the progress of the Civil Rights movement quietly, making the useful court appointments, feeding the time-servers into administrative posts - and let the noisy and unabashed reactionaries attack the minority citizens straight on. He did his best to make "Liberalism" a bad word - as though honest conservatives shouldn't work with liberals to strengthen the middle ground against both the fascist and communist extremists. Now Bush's opportunism has caught up with him. The macho keeper of pit-bulls, whose animals were a terror to his neighbors, has in an unguarded moment been mangled by those he fed and thought to see in action only against others. - Franklin H. Littell

Owner Savaged by Pit Bulls 3 Lest We Forget #629 DATE:2/27/92 PUTTING RACIST POLITICS IN PERSPECTIVE

We shall be troubled by the populist rightwingers until the honest conservatives in the Republican Party begin to deal tough- mindedly and patriotically with the pseudo-conservatives. A generation ago the leadership of the Democratic Party was slovenly about drawing a line to distinguish honest social concern from the sloganizing and posturing of Communists and their fellow-travelers. Today the leadership of the Republican Party is making the same mistake in failing to purge the Party ranks of native fascists and neo-Nazis. We would like to think that David Duke, although somehow he got 55% of the white vote in Louisiana, is a minor disturbance in the otherwise smooth road of American progress toward brotherhood "from sea to shining sea." As a matter of fact, unhappily he represents a not inconsiderable populist force that has been resistnt to progress since before the Civil War. As late as 1945 a full length book was published and widely circulated from a base in New Orleans that maintained the following theses:

1. that the doctrine of racial eguality is fallacious. 2. that such a doctrine if practiced means harm to the white race. 3. that races can be graded according to superiority. 4. that history proves the superiority of the Caucasian race. 5. that nations and peoples that have interbred with inferior races do not progress. 6. that countries controlled by Negroes do not progress. 7. that there are physical and menteal differences between Caucasians and Negroes which indicate the former to be superior. 8. that, in fact, the race problem will not be solved by the doctrine of Eguality which leads to the doctrine of amalgamation. The amalgamation of all racial elements means the wiping out of the superior Caucasian race and the decline of civilization." Although distributed from an American city, the doctrine was the same as that of Hitler and his followers. A Nazi school primer wrote of the Germans, purest of the Nordic race, as follows: "...tallest of any among the races of Europe...slender...he has limbs which are large in proportion to the body. That suits our sense of beauty... The shape of the face is striking... The skin is light, rosy-white, and delicate... The hair is...wavy, golden blond...light colored eyes... Distinctions also apply in the case of the internal organs... Mental and spiritual differences are naturally related thereto... Now what distinguishes the Nordic race from all others? It is uncommonly gifted mentally. It is outstanding for truthfulness and energy. Nordic men...possess...a great power of judgment. They incline to be taciturn and cautious. They feel instantly that too much loud talking is undignified. They are persistent and stick to a purpose when once they have set themselves to it. Their energy is displayed not only in warfare but also in technology and in scientific research. They are predisposed to Leadership."

We would like to think of this racist prattle, this "social Darwinism, " as a sin limited to Germans and consummated in the racial politics and genocide of the Third Reich. Yet not very long ago some of the ablest and most prestigeous American writers elaborated the same racist theories that later flowered in the

Third Reich. One of them was Madison Grant, Chairman of the New

Putting Racist Politics in Perspective 2 York Zoological Society, Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, Councilor to the American Geographical Society. The Preface to Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race, which went through several editions, was written by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn of Columbia University. A few guotations will make the point. "The church assumes a serious responsibility toward the future of the race whenever it steps in and preserves a defective strain. The marriage of deaf mutes was hailed a generation ago as a triumph of humanity. Now it is recognized as an absolute crime against the race. A great injury is done the community by the perpetuation of worthless types. "In mankind it would not be a matter of great difficulty to secure a general consensus of public opinion as to the least desirable, let us say, ten per cent of the community. When this unemployed and unemployable human residuum has been eliminated..." In his Preface to Grant's book, Professor Osborn had already paid glowing tribute to the blond, blue-eyed Nordics whose America was being mongrelized. The views of Grant and Osborn were shared by Lothrop Stoddard, whose book - The Rising Tide of Color - was also beautifully published by Scribner's. According to Stoddard, on four separate occasions "the Nordic race and it alone saved modern civilization:" in 376 - with the defeat of Attila and the Huns at Chalons, in 732 - with the defeat of the Arabs at Tours, in 1241 - with the defeat of the Tatars at Wohlstatt in Silesia, in 1683 - with the defeat of the Turks at Vienna.^ Now, Stoddard wrote, Asia had fallen to Bolshevism, "with Semitic leadership and Chinese executioners," and "idealists and philanthropic

Putting Racist Politics in Perspective 3 doctrinaires" were opening America up to Orientals, south and east Europeans. Stoddard concluded that "In this country we must look to such of our people - our farmers and artisans - as are still of American blood to recognize and meet this danger." To his mind, the First World War was in reality "the first White Civil War," presaging the downfall of the master race. Politically it gives some small comfort to say it, looking at the latterday racism of a Duke or a Buchanan: they represent the dregs at the bottom of the barrel. Seventy-five years ago there were brainy Americans talking that way openly, but the individuals of culture and education in America have learned better and moved on to other frontlines. Even in the political underbrush and spiritual underworld, where such views are now enjoying a seasonal upsurge, the Dukes and Buchanans have to use the code words and secret signals that progress has forced upon the white nativist, populist, racist demagogues. (The black demagogues, Farakhan and Jeffries and the like, operate in a culture where they can still get away with an overt racism.)

The comfort of knowing that the white racists come from the bottom of the barrel will remain small, however, as long as those who know better and should act better continue to flirt with them and think to use them to polarize the political forum and extract from that polarization a crude political advantage.

- Franklin H. Littell Hw gtiMhiarr.., Tiabhropr --T-i_—Tho FaLoAng Tide*

Putting Racist Politics in Perspective Lest We Forget #630 DATE:3/5/92 THE IMPUDENCE OF "THE REVISIONISTS" A number of student newspapers have received advertisements, accompanied with handsome financial bids, from a Holocaust denier, Bradley Smith. Bradley Smith is one of the latest faces to be shown by the "Institute of Historical Review." The Institute functions out of a suburb of Los Angeles, and is the same one that dodged paying a $50,000 sum to Mel Mermelstein, survivor. Mel Mermelstein, a survivor, took up a challenge thrown down by the deniers that the Holocaust happened. They advertised an "award" of $50,000 to anyone who could prove the Holocaust happened. Against the advice of those friends who said such views were unworthy of the attention of decent people, and who said that paying attention to the deniers gave them the publicity they were running after, Mel Mermelstein took up the gauntlet. Having lost family in the Holocaust, the obscenity of the "revisionists'" posture was too much for him to bear. He won his case in court, and then by a series of legal dodges and organizational sleights of hand they avoided paying. Snjith's special field of cultivation is the campus, and he is beginning to make some headway. The ploy presently being used is to offer student newspapers an advertisement, along with a substantial financial enticement, to publish a prepared text that denies that the Holocaust happened. Student newspapers at Cornell Unviersity and Duke have succumbed; at Yale, Harvard, Brown, Penn and Wisconsin they have rejected the proposition.

During the 23rd Annual Scholars' Conference last weekend at the

University of Washington (Seattle), Bradley Smith and his fellow- deniers made a typical approach to the student Daily. They offered $750.00 to the students if they would publish a prepared text of denial of the Holocaust during the Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. Even on the surface their aim was political rather than scholarly! The student editors at the University of Washington Daily showed more political acumen than some of their peers on other campuses. They published an editorial as a group, refusing to fall into the trap. They promised to discuss discuss at a later date what the deniers represent, asserting thereby their editorial responsibility. They said, "We will retain control over the timing and play the argument is given, and the context in which it is presented." Bravo! Even at the University of Washington, however, some faculty and students started babbling about "First Amendment rights." As usual, those who operate outside the political covenant, who are not in good faith in the public forum, are able to count on the assistance of the muddle-headed in getting maximum exposure. There is no First Amendment right involved in the case, since Bradley Smith and Co. have not been denied the right to stand on the street corner and preach their opinions. The decision of editors on what shall be published in a newspaper, like the decision of radio or TV station owners as to what shall be given prime time, in principle does not rest with a government agency.

Sometimes this constitutional rule is painful to see observed, as for instance when the editorial and news pages are controlled by fascist or communist interests. This degenerate condition has been a

The Impudence of "the Revisionists" 2 characteristic of the largest newspaper of New Hampshire for years, for instance, and of course it supported Pat Buchanan. But in the American view of things for two centuries, it is better to risk freedom than to put more power in the hands of government agencies (courts as well as executives or legislatures). The activity of Bradley Smith and his allies has nothing to do with education, historical verity, academic research or scientific fact. The money back of it comes from a source that has been for three decades the strongest center of antisemitic and Nazi propaganda in North America. The student editors at Cornell and Duke have the right, in sum, to play along with Bradley Smith and his allies. But they are very foolish to do so. Even with a handsome chegue to go with it, the Holocaust deniers' statement is a table spoon of poison in the well of public opinion. As the time of the eye-witnesses passes, and survivors and liberators and rescuers and repentent spectators are no longer with us to tell what they saw with their own eyes, the integrity of the oral and printed record becomes critical. The work of the deniers has but one goal: to corrupt the truth, to blur its impact upon instable and unformed minds, to spread antisemitism, and to rehabilitate the politics of the Nazis and their fellow-travelers. This is no program for an American to make a weak response to, or to play around with.

- Franklin H Littell

The Impudence of "the Revisionists" 3 Lest We Forget #631 DATE:3/10/92 22ND INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARS' CONFERENCE Last week educators from five countries and 32 states met at the University of Washington, Seattle to report and discuss their studies of Nazism and the German Third Reich. Eight of those present had been at the founding conference in 1970, and three of them had been at every one held. The dual foci, as the programs have concentrated since the beginning, was on the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people and the role of the churches. Many church leaders were collaborators, a few were resisters. The truth of this time is at least as important in Christian memory as it is in Jewish recollection. The lessons for both Jews and Christians are beginning to be discussed more and more widely in both academic and religious circles. At the same time the resistance to the theme of the Holocaust is increasing - not only on the political front, but also in circles where one expects a livelier memory and a more active conscience. The chief center of resistance to teaching the Holocaust on the campuses still comes from New Leftists, Black Muslims and PLO fellow-travelers. As elsewhere in our society, an endemic antisemitism - both "gentlemanly" and vulgar - lies back of much of the opposition to teaching the Holocaust. Telling the story of the Holocaust and applying its lessons to the general problems of genocide, racism, dictatorship, ideological politics, decadent universities and debased religion remains profoundly threatening to many leaders in the political, religious and educational establishments. Nevertheless Professor Hubert G. Locke - conference host and next year's designee for the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Holocaust Studies, Stockton State College - pulled together an impressive set of sponsors. The co-sponsors of this year's conference included the Lilly Endowment (Indianapolis), the Christian Century Foundation (Chicago), the Stroum Foundation (Seattle), Seattle University (Jesuit, sister school to St. Joseph's U of Philadelphia), the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, the Seattle Council of Churches, the State of Washington Council of Churches, the Seattle Jewish Federation, the regional offices of the American Jewish Committee and the Anti- Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, and the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights. Naming names is important, pedestrian as it may be. We have just seen reports that during 1992 there were more antisemitic incidents in the United States than in many years. One is inclined to feel discouraged. But some of us can remember when Rev. Gerald Winrod and Father Charles Coughlin has tens of millions of listeners for their viciously antisemitic broadcasts, and they had dozens of imitators both Protestant and Roman Catholic. In those years it was extremely difficult to get Jews and Protestants to work together, and (until Vatican II, 1961-65) impossible to get Roman Catholic cooperation. Today there is still evil in America (!). but on some battlefronts great progress has been made in enlisting men and women of good will to march against it shoulder to shoulder. The history of the Annual Scholars' Conference demonstrates the truth of that assertion.

There were over fifty presentations and discussions at the conference. Major presentations were made by Sybil Niemoeller - widow of the famous Nazi resister, Dr. Elisabeth Maxwell - founder and

22nd Annual Scholars' Conference 2 chairman of the movement "Remembering for the Future" and Bishop Albrecht Schdnherr - friend and associate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller in the Confessing Church's resistance to Nazism. Christopher Niebuhr, son of the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, spoke in a special program about his father's writing and work against Nazism and to enlist American support for the founding of a Jewish state in the British mandate of Palestine. Bishop Schdnherr was especially impressive. In his student days he was involved with illegal centers of Christian opposition to Nazism. In his decades of ministry he was involved, finally as Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg, in the struggle to keep Christian liberty alive and to protect human rights in the Communist section of Germany. Standing erect at 82 years of age, he told his story simply and forcefully, and strongly endorsed the work of a minority of German churchmen who have been working to effect a reform of Christian theology and to get a public commitment of the churches to support for Israel. Another impressive participant was Charles Fishman of the State University of New York (Farmingdale), editor of a splendid new anthology: Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, who gave a poetry reading Monday afternoon. Other new publications were the report of the 1991 conference - The Netherlands and Nazi Genocide, edited by Jan Colijn and Marcia Littell, and a new edition of my The German Phoenix - the volume which in 1960 introduced the German Church Struggle to American readers.

Another keynote speaker Elisabeth Maxwell, who spoke as Vice- President of the International Council of Christian and Jews of her

22nd Annual Scholars' Conference 3 concern that the gains recently made in interfaith cooperation in the West not be cancelled out by reactionary church politics in the newly freed countries of Eastern Europe. In several of them the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leadership, again vocally political, is pressing to reestablish preferred religions, with political and tax support. Students of Religious Liberty know well what that might again mean for the favorite victims of persecution by state churches: "Jews and heretics." Participants from the greater Philadelphia area included Gail Rosenthal of Stockton State, William Meeds of Rider College, Richard Libowitz of St. Joseph's University and Katherina von Kellenbach - a recent Ph.D. from Temple University's Religion Department who now teaches at St. Mary's College in Maryland, and Dr. Marcia S. Littell- Director of the Philadelphia Center. The longest trip was made by Professor Haim Genizi of Bar-Ilan University, who came in from Tel-Aviv. Author of American Apathy, a study of the failure of Americans both Jews and Christians to respond at the time to the desperate plight of European Jewry, Dr. Genizi presented at the conference his findings on the churches' record in post-war relief. Like most of those present, he returned home immediately to continue the semester's teaching.

- Franklin H. Littell

22nd Annual Scholars' Conference Lest We Forget #632 DATE:3/20/92 THE DEMOCRATIC COVENANT AND THE UNIVERSITY In a recent essay, Professor Daniel Elazar of Jerusalem and Philadelphia (Temple University) has pointed out that across the centuries there have been three major models of government. His discussion is as brilliant as it is comprehensive, and his words point toward a richer and deeper understanding of the extra­ ordinary treasure which is ours as free men and women in an open society. One of the most ancient is the "angelic" model, in which a government came into existence when a god descended upon the earth and established his rule. This was the source of the government of the ancient Pharaohs, and it was the origin of the government of Japan until the Emperor divested himself of his divinity at the end of World War II. A chief characteristic of governments of divine origin is that they cannot effectively be criticized - let alone influenced - by obedient and humble subjects. They are anti-democratic by definition. Another is the "organic" model, in which different cities or peoples grow from level to level of administration and control by unreflecting, natural, almost accidental steps. Without any necessary reference to supernatural origin, the regime comes by tradition to exercise a power over members of the clan or tribe or city-state that none can successfully challenge or defy. The best-known incident of conscientious conflict in this situation was the trial and death of Socrates. Athens had laws that had emerged over generations, and a pantheon of gods that sanctioned or punished one or another human passion or action. Even though Socrates felt that he was doing right to ask questions that irritated and enraged the leaders of the establishment, he could not conceive of denying the authority of the city to use his life and death as it saw fit. The third major model of government, and the only one that empowers democratic self-government, is "covenant." In its most ancient form it appears in the Hebrew Scriptures, starting with the gift to Noah and his family following the Flood (Genesis 9). Across the generations, the form of government that began with an understanding between God and the people became the pattern of a bond between free persons upon which they invoked God's blessing. The Constitution of the United States of America with its Amendments embodies such a covenant, and its backdrop is a Declaration of Independence in which the rights of free persons are clearly set forth. Moreover it is plainly stated that in case a government - a human invention, although the blessing of divine Providence be invoked upon it - "becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." This model of government, in its American manifestation, has succeeded so well that ours is the oldest democratic government on the face of the earth. In the open society, all sectors are responsible for maintaining the atmosphere and teaching the methods by which free citizens keep the civil covenant alive and well. Citizens have, in sum, a foremost duty: to keep the political dialogue so

The Covenant and the University 2 lively, to practice self-discipline so rigorously, and to exercise political initiative so vigorously, that a government of limited powers and deference to individual rights can function satisfactorily. Amendments may be necessary from time to time, but constitutional conventions are not to be called lightly. One of the most important sectors of the strengthening or weakening of the free society is the university. On the campus, in a setting where humane and spiritual values are supposedly central, each generation of younger leaders learns well, poorly, or not at all how free citizens function within the civil covenant. "Not at all" has unfortunately become the norm, for the students learn what is practiced (life under an oligarchy) not what is professed in the front of the school catalogues (life in a democracy). Unhappily, as the record of the German universities demonstrated before and during Hitler's Third Reich, the campuses in the 20th century have often failed to keep the faith. Some universities have failed to maintain standards because they took money from corrupt sources, sources that turned them from republics of learning into propaganda conduits. Other universities have failed to maintain standards because of weakness in those responsible for decision-making.

In the universities of pre-Hitler Germany considerable power rested with the professors. Speaking bluntly, they flunked their exams - and not only in their flaccid response to Nazi antisemitism. In the American universities today, the professors

The Covenant and the University 3 are as powerless as the students, and the trustees rule. The corporate model fits poorly to the covenant of free and democratic citizens, and nowhere more poorly than in the operation of a "republic of learning." As many, many incidents in recent years show, the ignorance or indifference of the trustees, combined with the powerlessness of the professors and students, is destroying the function of the university as a training ground for citizenship within the civil covenant. If the downward direction is to be changed on the campuses, something more than an expanded devotion to commercialized athletics will be reguired of those running the institutions of "higher education." - Franklin H. Littell

The Covenant and the University Lest We Forget #633 DATE:3/20/92 A UNIVERSITY FLUNKS ITS EXAMS In a prior column we discussed the relationship of the political covenant and the campus. If the political covenant is to remain vital, the younger generations on the campuses must be trained not only as technical specialits but as convinced and experienced free citizens. The situation in America is bad for students, and not just economically. Students are not only finding it difficult to afford an education of any kind, but they are being educated in many of the wrong things. Virtually every issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on one or more cases of the collapse of self-discipline and civility on a campus. West Chester University just a month ago provided the spectacle of a breach of the American covenant. The incident that occurred, on which several persons have urged my comment, was at a level worthy of being placed in the same bracket with the worst of Nazi terrorist activities in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In sum, a demagogue of the Black Muslims was provided a handsome honorarium and university sponsorship to indulge in a most vile anti- white, antisemitic and intimidating diatribe. Not long ago some of us risked bodily harm, and some of our friends and classmates died, to clamp down on this kind of intimidation and violence against black American citizens. It does not sit well with us to hear the voice and language of a John Rankin and a Theodore Bilbo and a James Eastland and a "Bull" Conner coming this time from a black throat, any more than it did the first time around.

Worse than that, however, is the disloyalty to the American covenant. The assembly at which Farrakhan's lieutenant preached his inflammatory harangue was intimidated - on the floor of the meeting (!) - by the presence of a trained terrorist troop of "bodyguards." The style of the civil covenant calls for open, informed and unhampered exchange of ideas. In this case no open, informed and unintimidated discussion of issues was permitted. Questions and questioners were silenced, and one of the latter was thrown out of the meeting. Worst of all, the administration of West Chester University, as spokesman for the trustees, completely failed in its responsibility to maintain the open forum of informed and unintimidated debate which is the oxygen of the free society. With the rise of terrorist movements on both left and right, the time is at hand in America when we shall have to start at the ground level in restoring some of the basics of democratic self-government. When government by discussion and consensus first began to emerge, in England during the 17th century, one of the key figures was the marshal. Today we seldom see him on campus, except when he leads an academic procession at Commencement or convocation. But the marshals had a critical function: standing at the portals of the meeting, they saw to it that all persons present were there in good faith. If any tried to subvert the purpose for which the meeting was called, the moderator noted the fact and the trouble-makers were expelled. Certainly the marshalls would never have permitted terrorist forces hostile to democracy itself to enter an open assembly of citizens.

A University Flunks 2 There are other principles at kindergarten level that must again be re-asserted. One of these is the fact that it is one thing to assert opinions that may be unpopular with others, but which are intended for the common good. And it is another thing to indulge in sloganizing phrases with the obvious intent to do spiritual damage, invade psychological privacy, and threaten violence. Another principle is the truth that positions may be asserted with impunity on the street corner, under the civil constitutions, which have no place on a campus or in a congregation. There are bubble- headed individuals, also among academics, who think apparently that "First Amendment rights" entitle individuals to practice intimidation on campus and preach Shinto in a Methodist congregation. They too must be called to order. Another principle is the truth that tax-payers have a right to a voice as to how their money is to be spent, and that tax-supported institutions have obligations to the commonwealth that are different from those of private colleges. Although our intrusive courts have invaded many areas of traditional American liberty, in principle - for example - a Jewish school has the right to employ only Jewish teachers, have an all-Jewish board of trustees, and admit only children from Jewish families. State institutions must have an open door to all qualified citizens and children of citizens, an admission policy with evenhandedness. And, whereas religious institutions may have ecumenical or worldwide priorities, state institutions have a more direct and prior duty to pay attention to the obligation to sustain the American covenant.

A University Flunks 3 Especially, in communities such as the colleges and universities, where the next generations should be learning to practice the good faith and style of democratic citizens, administrations and faculty must be egually empowered and held responsible to the rules of civility and informed dialogue. The present powerlessness of the professors and students creates an area where people are learning to live in a dictatorship, not to practice the life of free men and women united in a civil covenant. It is time to talk seriously about our pitiful slide into the jungle, also on our campuses. Under a civil covenant kept in good faith, the following actions should now be taken. First, the resignation of the Acting President is accepted by the trustees of West Chester University. Second, the state authorities proceed with criminal prosecution against the Black Muslim demagogue and his "bodyguards," for ethnic intimidation. Third, the students (and any faculty members) who gave local accreditation to the meeting are penalized for conduct unworthy of a member of the university. Fourth, the charter of any local sponsoring group is cancelled. There is little likelihood, perhaps, that any of this will happen. The level of political literacy on our American campuses today is certainly no higher than it was during the Weimar Republic in the German universities. But those who care deeply about the offense, and even more deeply about the American political covenant, have the obligation to speak up for self-government and self-discipline whether few or many listen. - Franklin H. Littell

A University Flunks 4 Lest We Forget #634 DATE:4/6/92 CONFUSING YOM HASHOAH AND KRISTALLNACHT

It took "forty years in the wilderness" before the survivors began to speak of what they had seen and experienced. The sheer mass of the Holocaust was so awesome, so overpowering, so terrifying in recollection! Getting on with the building of a "second life," they buried for a time the terror of the attack and the loneliness of abandonment. This is the classic response of the human person to an event of such conseguence, an event at the level of what Emil Fackenheim calls "epoch-making." This is the way the people responded to the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. It took "forty years in the wilderness" before they came to understand what had happened to them. In the case of the Holocaust, when the survivors began to speak and to record their eye-witness accounts, others spoke up. Among them were liberators, men in the armies that over-ran the Death Camps and freed the few inmates still alive. A few were rescuers, identified by Yad Vashem and responding - some of them reluctantly - to the pleas that they tell what they had seen and heard and done. Many of the first to come forward did so with strong words of condemnation for the deniers who were beginning to crawl out from under the rocks. For as the eye-witnesses began to fall away, as time was running out on the first generation, the neo-Nazis and "historical revisionists" began with ever greater boldness to claim that the Holocaust never happened. In the meantime, at the initiative of persons of strong conscience and an eye to the educational, a movement was under way in America and Israel to fix a calendar day of memorial. It was understood that a few would read, fewer yet would think and write, but all could join in an annual Yom Hashoah. At first introduced at an interfaith chapel service in Charlotte, North Carolina, obervance of Yom Hashoah was picked up by Christian and Jewish congregations across the country. A decade later, after the founding of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Yom Hashoah was made a calendar day for all Americans. Every governor, the mayor of every large city, the heads of hundreds of villages and townships and schools now join annually in remembering the victims of the Holocaust. Yom Hashoah is set, of course, by the Jewish calendar. But choosing the date was hotly debated. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg of CLAL has described the debate - in a lecture he gave under our auspices here in Philadelphia, later published as a chapter in The Jewish Way, many of the survivors wanted the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Others wanted it on April 20th (Hitler's birthday), to signalize the triumph of the people over the 20th century Haman. Still others wanted to subsume the tragedy under the Ninth of Av - along with the traditional date of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. All were sure that it could not come too close to Pesach, a time of rejoicing. So the compromise was struck: the 27th day of Nissan, the 5th day after the 8th day of Passover (unless it comes on a Sabbath).

Yom Hashoah is a day of memory, meditation and prayer.

More recently, Holocaust educators have realized that a time is needed for reminding the public of the importance of studying the

Confusing Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht 2 lessons of the Holocaust. Under the chairmanship of Dr. Hubert G. Locke, the leading Afro-American scholar of the Holocaust, the first major observance of Kristallnacht was held at the University of Washington (Seattle). The year was 1978 (the 40th anniversary), and the papers have been published in an important volume: Western Society After the Holocaust. In 1989, when on November 9th the wall came down in Germany, the leaders of the re-united country decided to preserve the symbol of Kristallnacht: they chose another date to celebrate national reunion, so that the public might always remember the shame of the 1938 pogrom. Last fall an International Conference was held in Berlin on that date, with Americans and Germans and Israelis reading papers and discussing the lessons of the Holocaust. The first lesson of the Holcoaust, taught on Kristallnacht, is the fact that it didn't have to happen. Vigorous debates on political and economic and religious and educational failures can be carried out which are guite inappropriate on Yom Hashoah. Persons of sensitivity and conscience know that there is a difference between prayer and debate. They also know that there is a difference between a Day of Remembrance in the spring (Yom Hashoah. and a time in November for Teaching the Lessons (Kristallnacht). And above all, whether in religious service on Yom Hashoah or in teaching the lessons on Kristallnacht, they know that the Holocaust - in all of its dimensions - is too sacred a memory for any individual to be allowed to make personal profit on it. - Franklin H. Littell

Confusing Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht 3 Lest We Forget #635 DATE:4/9/92 GIVING AID AND COMFORT TO THE ENEMY

Democratic governments generally have shown themselves weak in dealing with internal enemies. Dictatorships and despotic regimes have no such problem, for they treat their own subjects (sometimes mistakenly called "citizens") with brutality. Even those who scrape and bow to show their servility are not safe from arbitrary violence. Any who show signs of stepping out of line are crushed with ruthless force, and sometimes their families, clans and associates with them. Hitler and Stalin in their time showed how even dissenters and dissidents are treated under dictatorship, and Assad of Syria and Saddam of Irag continue the brutal methods today. By contrast, democratic governments tend to err in the other direction: they commonly treat dissenters and dissidents as a fact of life (as they should), and then mistakenly extend to disloyalists the same protection they maintain for loyal oppositions. Democratic government rests to a considerable extent on mutual trust, rather than on the brute force of despotisms and dictatorships. Identifying those who have stepped outside the golden circle of good faith, who are no longer operating within the political covenant of free men and women, is a skill we must learn.

There are excellent analyses of terrorism available, and an Early Warning System on terrorist movements has been widely disseminated - but chiefly in academic circles. Since every terrorist movement is potentially genocidal, information on how an Early Warning System works is important to all citizens of free countries - and not only professors. And where some modest beginnings have been made to damp down the barely subdued violence of organized disloyalty, those responsible for giving leadership in the democratic society when it cronfronts internal enemies must show both brains and moral courage. As the recent fiasco at West Chester University - where the "leadership" caved in before a terrorist demonstration of force- clearly shows, it is much easier to hide behind sloganizing and banner-waving than it is to stand up for the American covenant of good faith in the political forum. We have much larger and more important examples of the problem, however, in recent developments in Europe. Take the situation in Germany. Chancellor Helmut Kohl has much to be proud of as the leader of a democratic government. By and large his record is good. He has been loyal to the goals of European Community. He has demonstrated dependability in the indispensable alliances with Israel and the United States. His diplomacy toward the East (Ostpolitik. has been crowned with a peace treaty with Poland, a reunification of Germany, and a collapse of the terror system of Communist dictatorships in the former USSR and its satellites.

Then, we may assume in the euphoria of huge successes, he over-reached himself and defied the Furies. He added his name and presence to the attempt to rehabilitate his fellow-Roman

Giving Aid and Comfort 2 Catholic, Kurt Waldheim of Austria. When cries of outrage sounded around the world, and not from Israeli and Jewish agencies alone, he jumped back and petulently waved the nationalist flag and mouthed nationalist slogans. Of course Helmut Kohl "had the right" as German chief to welcome the infamous Waldheim, head of a neighboring state. But of course it was an irresponsible act, an irresponsible affront to the dignity and trust of peoples loyal to the democratic covenantin a post-German Third Reich world. Recompense began coming in just a week later. For the first time since the War, neo-Nazi elements made significant gains in the German state elections. In the south, in the state of Baden- Wurttemberg, they placed 15 deputies in the legislature. In the north, in the Schleswig-Holstein that Bismarck tore away from Denmark in 1864-65, they placed 5 deputies in the legislature. They had been greatly encouraged by Kohl's joining the effort, which the Pope launched in publicly receiving Waldheim months ago, to rehabilitate the notorious Waldheim. Chancellor Kohl once blundered in speaking publicly of a "time limit" on carrying the "guilt" of the Third Reich, pointing out that he himself was a boy when the war ended. (Waldheim and Wojtyla were then young men, not boys.) President Richard von Weizsacker and others in his own CDU party corrected the error and put the German ship of state back on course. He also blundered again, in bringing President Reagan to Bitburg (abetted by the poor staffing of White House aides).

Giving Aid and Comfort 3 Now Chancellor Kohl has blundered in meeting Waldheim in Munich, with press and photographers, in connection with Waldheim's receiving an award from a "conservative" Bavarian Foundation.

Such pseudo-conservatives, and we have them in America too, are actually Right Wing radicals - enemies of liberty and self- government. Helmut Kohl and George Bush would both do well to look to their stewardship of office, and to avoid giving aid and comfort to dictators and terrorists - and their flunkies. Neither they, nor the Waldheims, nor the emboldened neo-Nazis, have a rightful place in the public forum with those who love liberty and reverence the civil covenant of free men and women. - Franklin H. Littell

Giving Aid and Comfort Lest We Forget #636 DATE:4/15/92 THE ARYAN JESUS

From time to time we are reminded that victory in a long, difficult campaign is made up of small gains. This is especially true of the battle to purge the Christians of their endemic anti-semitism. Among Christian believers, there are two ways of self- definition. The affirmative way is to take seriously the teachings of Jesus. He summarized the Teaching by repeating a well-known formula of "the Scriptures," by which he always meant the Hebrew Scriptures. The First Commandment is love of God, and the Second Commandment is "like unto it," namely, love of one's neighbor. When the baptized gentiles, followers of Jesus of Nazareth, know who they are, they act to define themselves affirmatively. They can then walk with the Jews as brethren. When they define themselves negatively, unwilling to pay the price of the two great commandments, they invariably turn antisemitic. In the extreme forms of antisemitism, the defiant "Christians" simply deny the Jewishness of Jesus altogether. Professor Walter Grundmann, one of the most influential teachers of Theology in Germany before, during and after the Nazi Third Reich, was just one of dozens who asserted Jesus was of "Aryan" birth. Today we are getting some of the same heretical teaching from antisemitic "Christian" circles among the "Palestinians." Canon Nairn Ateek of the Episcopalian St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem is one who e&eesmm writes that "the Church was born in Palestine as the early disciples and followers of Jesus were Palestinians... Palestinian Christians of today are the descendants of those early Christians." The early Christians were, of course, as the Christian Scriptures plainly relate at length, a Jewish sect. Their turf and their place-names were Judea, Samaria and Galilee. Only the Roman overlords used "Palestine" as the name of the restless province. Hanan Ashwari, the spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East Peace Conference, was educated in the United States and certainly knows better. But she engaged in the same sleight of hand trick when she said in Madrid last October: "I am a Palestinian Christian. I am descendent of the first Christians in the world, and Jesus Christ was born in my country, my land." The political issue has yet to be decided, but the ethnic assertion must seem strange even to lovers of Arafat: Ashwari descended from Jews?! The inflection in her use of "Palestinian Christian" reminds one sadly of those German collaborators and guislings who fifty years ago sung of their identity as Deutsche Christen. In opening this discussion, I mentioned that the difficult campaign is won by small gains. In the week before Pesach and Easter, I received word of a dramatic gain, which I delight to pass on to my readers. The story is this: the Detroit Ecumenical Institute for Jewish-Christian Studies is celebrating its tenth anniversary on May 11th. The Director - Dr. James Lyons - is a fine man, a Protestant minister who was earlier for some years on the staff of Wayne State University as a specialist in interfaith affairs.

Dr. Lyons was one of the founding members (1970) of the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches. He is also a member of the Board of the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel. He has built the Detroit Ecumenical Institute into a major force for good. But now hear the signal gain within the big story of a decade of slow, hard, sacrificial work: the celebration is being held at the Shrine of the Little Flower, and the host of the event is the pastor of the Shrine: Monsignor Alex Brunett. When I came out of seminary before World War II, and went to the Central Methodist Church in Detroit as an Associate for Youth and Young Adult Work, the Shrine of the Little Flower was one of the major centers of antisemitic and pro-fascist propaganda in the United States. Father Charles Coughlin, then its priest, had a following of millions for his radio broadcasts. He was a major force in Democratic Party politics, and even FDR had to circle his turf warily. For many centuries it has been true that it was the Christians that gave Jesus a bad name among his own people. Only the Christians can by their actions change that sorry scene. If the Shrine of the Little Flower can make it, why not some day Ateek and Ashwari and their friends who find the Aryan Jesus so attractive? In this season, when Pesach and Easter have come so close together, it is a good thing to be able to celebrate the fact that the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan is now a base of operations for Christians who define themselves affirmatively, and no longer an encampment for the darker forces of the spirit. - Franklin H. Littell Lest We Forget #637 DATE:4/23/92 SAVING THE AMERICAN COVENANT In an earlier column (The Jewish Times, March 26), this writer discussed the three prevalent forms of government in human civilizations. The one under which we live in America, when we are at our best, is the covenant. It is easy to misunderstand the covenant, with its reference to responsibilities and its list of reserved liberties, as a strict definition of what citizens may do and what they may not be permitted to do. This is the kind of legalese into which we have been slipping under the Rehnguist Supreme Court, where more and individual liberties are being circumscribed or cut off. For centuries after the Greeks had declined into a rule of imperial brutality and Byzantine intrigue they still thought of themselves as sons of democratic Pericles and the glorious Athenian Polis. I am sure that if, God forbid, the present trend toward statist controls in American should end in a thoroughly consistent despotism, the Americans will still be quoting Jefferson and Lincoln as they trudge their weary way from one political compulsion to another. The covenant of free men and women cannot rest on technicalities, not even the technicalities that still protect some of our traditional freedoms. It is true that under present laws obscenity runs wild in the media, exhibits itself boldly in our living rooms, parades itself shamelessly on our public streets, and in and out of season screams for a place in museums and libraries.

Mailings are coming every few days now, calling for the abolition of "the radical National Endowment for the Arts." There is a bill in Congress, put forward by a pseudo-conservative (long associated with the radical John Birch Society), behind which the extremists are uniting their campaigns. It would be a pity if the very slender support given the arts, and the relatively shortlived NEA itself, should fall victim to the power-drive of the Radical Right in Washington, D.C. But if it should happen, is there any question but that several smart-aleck artists have invited the disaster by their deliberate flaunting of common decency - by their reckless disregard of the truth that the price of liberty is self-discipline (instead of external control)? When questions of decency and civility are raised, the sloganizers inject the soporifics of 19th century legal fundamentalism: "free speech," "free press," "free symbolic speech," etc. Thus the inner things of the spirit, matters such as good will and good faith, are boiled down to the level of a brute guestion: "How much can I get away with before I'm thrown in jail?" In our neighborhood recently, at West Chester University (see The Jewish Times for April 2, and a lead story in The Philadelphia Inquirer for April 20), a similar demonstration of contempt for the American covenant on the part of a black bullyboy and his private police was compounded by irresponsibility on the part of others concerned.

The Jewish community agencies (JCRC and ADL, especially) handed the victory in the confrontation to the Black Muslim, by themselves treating it as "a Jewish issue" rather than an American issue. The

Acting President of West Chester University surrendered the field to the black demagogue by meeting the challenge with sloganizing rather

Saving the American Covenant 2 than dialogue and thinking. Once again, and this time in the political arena, the issue was reduced to the brute question: "What are the rules that I can break with impunity? How much bad behavior can I get away with? Where can I successfully push hard against the outer limits of threats and terrorism without being called to account?" And once again the offence was shared between the abuser of freedom and those who failed in their responsibility to uphold the rules of the American covenant: good faith, fair play, respect to those of other opinions, unintimidated and informed dialogue. There is a fine Hebrew word that carries the truth that must accompany the covenant if it is to succeed. The word is Hesed. If the civilized society is to hold together, the covenant must be infused with the spirit of Hesed. When the issue has fallen down to the brute question - "How much can I get away with without being punished?" - the civil covenant is already betrayed. The American covenant cannot survive for more than a generation or two when more and more pressure groups are simply testing what they can get away with, rather than asking what they can do for their country and for the common good. Nor can it indefinitely survive the moral weakness of "leaders" who posture rather than lead. - Franklin H. Littell

Saving the American Covenant JUC-eyfey'l*

Lest We Forget #638 DATE:4/29/92 THE PRICE OF BIGOTRY Most of us are aware of the danger that bigotry poses to democratic life and republican institutions in a free society. Those who makes sorties against others from the sanctuary of a religious or ethnic or cultural bloc are despised, even by those who don't go public in criticism and resistance. David Duke's whimper as he disappeared from the Presidential lineup in the Republican Party shows that we have made some progress in accepting fair play and toleration as accepted norms of political behavior. Forty years ago Duke could have followed the example of George Wallace and led an effective defection from the two major political parties.

Some other countries, especially those without any tradition of democratic liberty and self-government, still have a long march to make before they acguire the spirit of compromise and the affirmation of pluralism that diversity-in-freedom reguires. The rending and tearing going on in the ruins of Yugoslavia suffice to illustrate a generalization that applies to the former U.S.S.R. and also the area some scholars predict soon will be the former Czechoslovakia.

Take the religious and ethnic bigotry that dominates the ignorant armies clashing by night in the mountains around Sarajevo. Back of the current tragedy in Yugoslavia may be pointed out two major contributions to disaster made by religious arrogance and persecution. The first negative contribution was made long ago, when the people of the area now Bosnia and Herzegovina were targetted for internal crusades by the Roman Pope. They were devoted followers of a Christian school of thought deemed "heretical." It is difficult now, even for scholars of good will, to discover what the so-called heretics really believed. Their books were burned as well as the bodies of their leaders. If books are extant in the Vatican archives, they are not made available - any more than the records of the "ratline" through which hundreds of Nazi criminals escaped after World War II are opened to scholars. For the better part of the 13th and 14th centuries, the same popes who launched a succession of external crusades against Islam encouraged internal crusades against Christians who preferred to remain independent of Roman control. The Bogomili, Patarines, Albigenses and Waldensians were among the more prominent European victims of the military actions and the Inguisition. Rather than submit, the Bogomili or Patarines - who at one time could claim the rulers and the majority of the peoples in the areas now Bosnia and Herzegovina, put themselves under the protection of the Golden Porte and embraced Islam. (At the time, the Islam of Asia Minor, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula was considerably more enlightened and tolerant than the Christianity of the Latin Church.) The quarrelings of the theologians and the arrogance of the ecclesiasts helped lose the ancient centers of Christianity to Islam in the 8th and 9th centuries. A similar spirit and

The Cost of Bigotry 2 politics sacrificed Constantinople (1453), lost the Balkans, and brought the Turks clear to the gates of Vienna (1683). A leading historian of the history of Christianity in the Balkans wrote of this tragedy: "Thus Bosnia proved in a more dramatic fashion than even the rest of the Serbian and Bulgarian lands have done that the religious factor plays a most important role in the history of mankind. ...Bosnia 'is perhaps the best and saddest example of what boundless mischief religious persecution can accomplish.'"

The first negative contribution fed into the second, for during

World War II the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem - one of Hitler's most fervent allies in the genocide of the Jews - was able to raise a volunteer army in Bosnia and Herzegovina to fight alongside the German forces in Russia.

The Muslim antisemites were natural allies of the Roman Catholic antisemites, and they were helped by the Nazis to set up a puppet government led by Ante Pavelic and dominated by the terrorist Ustashi in a "Greater Croatia" consisting of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Serbia itself, traditionally in communion with the Eastern Orthodox churches, was under direct Nazi occupation. In the four years before Yugoslavia was freed from the Axis and set up as a federal union (1946) under Communist control, several hundred thousand Serbs were subjected to a planned genocide - along with tens of thousands of Jews.

Unforgetting and unforgiving, the last President of Serbia (Slobodan Milosevic) as the Communist dictatorship collapsed dreamt of the re-birth of a Greater Serbia, dominating the

The Cost of Bigotry 3 lesser peoples. Civil war ensued. How many fragments of Yugoslavia will be left, in an economic and political graveyard filled with stones and monuments to bigotry? John Paul II and Helmut Kohl hastened to give Croatia diplomatic recognition, Milosevic himself is now head of a rump "Yugoslavia" consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, and irregulars are fighting over which way Bosnia and Herzegovina shall go. The Secretary-General of the UN withholds an international peace-keeping force. But the spirits of old hatreds brazenly walk the streets.

- Franklin H. Littell

The Cost of Bigotry Lest We Forget #639 DATE:4/29/92 THE APPEALS OF NAZISM This is the season of remembrance, when all across America Yom Hashoah observances remind us of the losses suffered by the Jewish people and other victims of Nazi genocide. Thirty years ago the first inter-faith Yom Hashoah service was held in this country (1962). Today, proclamations and special meetings have become almost universal. Some of the memorials have become so casual, so superficial in some places, that the trivialization against which some of us warned years ago is now an acute danger. This creates an added challenge as we look toward November, when Kristallnacht provides the appropriate season for serious study of the lessons to be learned. There are many things the mind wants to suppress. For instance, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party) was a populist movement. It swung the people - especially the young people - to it by popular slogans and appeals. These slogans were always reeking of contempt for "bureaucrats," "politicians," "party politics," "parliamentarianism," and the like. The Nazi Party was always vociferous against "corruption" in government. In sum, the Nazis "ran against City Hall."

We Jews and Christians, unlike most gentiles, instantly remember the Nazi movement and the German Third Reich for the

Holocaust. But we should never forget that the Nazis committed other crimes against humanity besides genocide. There were some who opposed the Nazi movement and ideology before the program for liguidation of the Jews became explicit and well-organized, and there were some who would have fought the Nazis even if they hadn't assaulted the Jews. We should never allow the impression to arise that our only objection to the Nazi adventure was the murder of the Jews or the breaking of promises to the heads of churches! Dictatorship, of course, is almost always dangerous for the Jewish people and also for those Christians who are more than mere baptized heathen. But it is a vile system of government besides, exploitative and de-humanizing - morally and spiritually corrupt to its very marrow. What, then, were the appeals of Nazism during the time of its rise to influence and power? Are we strong enough to deal with those lessons? The NSDAP Party Platform was adopted in 1920 and - like the PLO Covenant - it never changed. Of course for pragmatic reasons from time to time one point or another would be played up or muted, but it never changed. The best known section today, the one which solicited the good will of so many leaders of "Christendom," was Article 24: "We demand freedom for all religious denominations, provided that they do not endanger the existence of the State or offend the concepts of decency and morality of the Germanic race. The Party as such stands for positive Christianity, without associating itself with any particular denomination. It fights against the Jewish- materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a permanent revival of our Nation can be achieved only from within, on the basis of: Public Interest before Private Interest."

Today we know the fatal character defects in "Christendom."

The Appeals of Nazism 2 But consider some of the other points of appeal, seldom mentioned but explicit in the Nazi Party Platform of 1920: Art. 6 - end the party patronage system on appointments to government positions; Art. 11 - "the abolition of all income obtained without labor or effort;" Art. 12 - "the total confiscation of all war profits;" Art. 15 - develop old age pensions; Art. 16 - maintain a sound middle class; Art. 18 - death penalty for usurers, profiteers, etc. who harm the common good; Art. 20 - restoration of the public education system, with scholarships for poor youth of talent; Art. 21 - a national health program; Art. 22 - end making use of military mercenaries, to be replaced by a national army (based on conscription); Art. 23 - "We demand laws to fight against deliberate political lies and their dissemination by the press;" suppression of newspapers violating the public interest, and of performances and trends in art and literature that offend decency.

Although we can see the record today, and sense how popular appeals were used by the Nazis - some of them never to be realized, but the most wicked of them (Article 24, with racist footnotes also in Articles 4 and 7) relentlessly implemented.

The Appeals of Nazism 3 Nevertheless, doesn't the guestion arise why popular appeals were left to be identified in the people's mind with the Nazis? What's wrong with "opportunites for employment," old-age pensions, scholarships for the talented poor (even if they don't play football or basketball!), a national health program...?

With the wretched Creed of Greed now dominant in Washington, with an economic theory worthy of Louis XIV being expounded in high places ("trickle down," "apres Moi le Deluge., must Americans also wait until a vicious ideological movement eguipped with seductive slogans comes along to press programs of public and common concern? - Franklin H. Littell

The Appeals of Nazism A''H/^**iV

Lest We Forget #640 DATE:5/5/92 Paris, France. We are attending an International Religious Conference on Peace, with academics from all over the world. The flames of Los Angeles are visible from here. Delegates from Asia and Africa and Eastern Europe look courteously and listen sceptically to Americans talking about the conditions for peace. We are again reminded of how small the world has become. When Napoleon was leading his armies through East Europe to the gates of Moscow, he organized a kind of "pony express" to get letters back to Empress Marie Louise in Paris. With swift horses, tireless riders, and spaced military posts with stables he was able to give his instructions in a little over a week. America was more isolated then, with a vast Atlantic Ocean that took fast sailing ships anything from 3 to 4 weeks to carry mail from Liverpool to Boston. When Andrew Jackson won his famous victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans (8 January 1815), the war had been over for six weeks. The peace terms were already negotiated and signed. Today, with CNN and other media reaching into livings rooms in France and Germany, Nigeria and Singapore, the peoples of other nations - most of them dark-skinned - saw Rodney King brutalized just as clearly as anyone in Philadelphia and suburbs. And, especially in the government-controlled media of the Arab League countries where they are propagandized to expect the worst of "the Great Satan," our enemies were delighted and our friends were shamed along with us. They compare the fires of civil strife in Los Angeles, accompanied by smaller battles in other American cities, to the fires flaring in the ruins of Yugoslavia, the black townships of South Africa, the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast in Azerbaijan. Of course, envy of the more prosperous and more secure is always accompanied by a barely hidden delight (Schadenfreude. when the privileged stumble and fall. Themselves accustomed to semi-independent militia, private armies serving sectarian interests and out of national control, how are they to know that Americans feel such breakdowns of law and order are temporary glitches rather than revealing a permanent malaise in the society. Or do they have a clearer picture of ourselves than we do? One thing is clear: America cannot stand credibly for liberty and democracy around the world when the most basic standards of truth and justice are neglected, ignored, and finally trampled under foot. Foreign affairs and influence are intertwined inextricably with internal events. For all the claims of our greatest President that this is to be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" - a form of government far superior to despots and dictators and even kings and emperors, we have seen again what the costs of a weak and ineffectual leadership can be in a crisis situation. We are skating on thin ice, and underneath the dark waters are deep.

The Rodney King case fiasco shows how close we are to the jungle, where direct retributive justice obtains. When the

Is LA Burning? 2 structures and technical procedures fail to produce truth and justice, there is always the possibility that a people will go berserk for a time. Most are blaming the jury, and of course they deserve it, because that's the way the media presented the issue. The media turned the whole thing into a prize fight, with attention focussed on the two "sides." The worst side of the American courtroom system of adversarial process was displayed in full color TV to the peoples around the world. Little attention has been given even yet to the judge who arranged for the change of venue to Simi valley, or to the prosecuting attorney who was complicit in permitting a stacked deck. The Chief of Police, Gates, was slow and incompetent. President Bush was slow, and still doesn't appreciate apparently that his lack of leadership in protecting the Constitutional rights of citizens contributed substantially to the lack of trust that ignited the explosion. There was one saving dimension: the leadership and the laity of the black churches has been admirable, of a guality to make all American patriots proud. Even Rodney King himself, with his counselor beside him, made a better statement than we yet have heard coming out of Washington.

So far as one can read or see, the leadership of the white churches and synagogues has not been visible - certainly not to those watching overseas. When shall we learn "the things of our peace?" - Franklin H. Littell

Is LA Burning? 3 Lest We Forget #641 DATE:5/20/92 "NONE OF THE ABOVE" The candidacy of Ross Perot, who has gained more publicity by being coy than his opponents have gained by spending tens of millions, appears certain. At 3.3 billion dollars worth of holdings, he will be - if he runs - the wealthiest man ever to run for the White House. He controls more money and power than many nations represented in the United Nations Assembly. The thought is sobering that a man who during recent months studiously has avoided taking any significant position on any important public issue can win public polls ahead of Bush, Clinton and Brown. There is only one reading possible. The reading is one that has been getting more plain for a number of years, as more and more American voters have stayed away from the polls in each election. For a large majority of voters, the response to the candidates the political machines cough up is a vigorous "None of the Above!" To say that American politics is in crisis is now accepted as a truism by informed observers. The crisis cuts across both the executive branch - where it proves increasingly difficult to get a leader of integrity who has the strength to lead, and the legislative branch - where both challengers and incumbents, with few exceptions, are owned by those with money and special interests to promote. The question "What has happened to patriotism?" now rings both archaic and naive.

Ross Perot has not been known in the past as a high-profile political figure. His newspaper coverage in the past, apart from adventures and misadventures on Wall Street, has been confined to times when as a private citizen he tried to make American foreign policy. One case was when he launched a free-booter effort to spring American hostages in Iran. The other was when he made a public splash about American PoWs in Vietnam. Neither action yielded any practical results. The details are relatively unimportant. Both actions were Quixotic, irregular and romantic. Both, like his present political campaign, attracted popular sympathy and support. His style of politics is individualistic and populist, the kind of politics that appeals to the bored and the reckless. In a season when so many people are sick and tired of politics as usual, this style can be a great asset. Populist politics have a dangerous track record, however. One should never forget that Adolf Hitler was a populist candidate, appealing repeatedly - while seeking power and while later wielding power - to popular frustrations and frenzies. In American history, Tom Watson of Georgia, Governor and Senator - the racist who more than any other man was responsible for the lynching of Leo Frank - was a populist.

The populist politicians, instead of giving the upright, strong and courageous leadership a society needs, play to the emotions of crowds and mobs. They are "leaders" in the sense that they are swift to run at the head of the pack.

The true test of a leader in a free society is not how fast he can run, whether he can run faster than the mob, but rather how clearly he can lead an intelligible discussion of public policy. We have had very

"None of the Above" 2 little informed public discussion of public policy in America in recent years. Much of our politics has been based on manipulation of the resentment of controls, bureaucracies and collective purposes. Ronald Reagan ran credibly against the government, and he was believed when he acted like an outsider. George Bush ran against the government, and is doing it again, even while he empties the wealth of the nation into a few well-placed pockets. In his response to the question "Who is tending the shop?" he certainly acts like an outsider, so far as the American commonwealth and the general welfare are concerned. Perot made one of the more recent American fortunes, capitalizing on the transition of the economy to high-tech and investing his gains heavily in real estate. The money came to him in the first place in very large part through government contracts. It is very hard to trust a man who is running "against City Hall" when you know that his largest success has been the result of his skill in getting "City Hall" to work for him. Are Americans so fed up with the game of mirrors, with the art of media hype and political double-speak, that they are now ready to buy "a pig in a poke?" It's a bad year for incumbents... Can Ross Perot open up and make us think realistically about our options? Can he lead a national debate on policy, and bring it to conclusive action that is good for America? Perot knows the game of "Socialism for the rich" all right. He knows how to open the government sluicegates that make the rich richer. But George Bush knows that, and he's already in place. - Franklin H. Littell

"None of the Above" 3 Lest We Forget #642 DATE:5/21/92 "FOREIGN AID" FOR AMERICA? Maxine Waters is a very intelligent and lively younger member of the U. S. House of Representatives. An Afro-American, she serves in the House from a South Central Los Angeles district that was devastated during the mob protests that followed on the miscarriage of justice in the Rodney King beating case. Representative Waters, a Democrat, is not one of the many politicians endangered by the "None of the Above!" psychology that is running through the electorate. Representative Waters was one of those who addressed the huge crowd that gathered at the Washington monument in Washington D.C. a few vi days ago, pleading the needs of the cities. The Bush administration has just de-railed the long anticipated "peace bonus" following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. by getting an appropriation of 293 billion dollars for continuance of military projects of astronomical cost. Pentagon specialists are now looking around eagerly for a credible new enemy. Bashing Israel makes high marks in the State Department, and apparently also with Secretary Baker, but it won't wash this year as an excuse for $293,000,000,000. Representative Waters, like other black legislators, can't tackle the so-called defense budget head-on, for the military establishment is today the one sector of American life where many black men and women can make a decent living. Decent pay on a non-discriminatory basis is there for those who make it a career. In the socialist economy of the American military establishment, Afro-Americans fill a very high percentage of the Table of Organization. For the servicemen and women, adeguate housing is provided; schools for their children are better than the civilian schools in the black ghettos; inexpensive but good food in the PX and inexpensive standard products in the Commissary are available; good "perks" include medical care and adeguate retirement. For the ambitious serviceman, additional schooling or training is provided. No Afro-American politician is going to make a frontal attack on the military establishment. At most he will make a slanting attack when he feels American ventures overseas are pointed toward the wrong foe. He will leave pacifist crusading to idealistic and rather naive whites. But Representative Waters found a path less threatening politically: the attack on "foreign aid." Here she joined the chorus of Pat Buchanan and other isolationists who have been drumming for some time against "sending our money to foreigners." Her appeal was stirring: "Our children are hurting, our mothers are tired, and our young men are angry... I want some foreign aid for Washington D.C.... for Watts... for Chicago... for the Bronx..." The crowd, estimated at 150,000 cheered lustily. The only problem is, it doesn't work that way. Nations are not like you and me: when we give some money to someone, we don't have it any more. But when governments give "foreign aid," 80% or more is taken up in purchases that help the home economy. A substantial part of Germany's sensational economic recovery after the World War was directly due to the compensation, including restitution, the Federal Republic "paid out" to other countries. Take Israel. The reason why every taxi in Israel is a Mercedes from Germany is because the restitution (Wiedergutmachung. went chiefly into the purchase of German products. Israel was helped, German industry thrived, and most of the "foreign aid" was a book-keeping exercise. The same is true of American "aid" to Israel. For the last six years approximately 80% of U. S. aid to Israel was spent on American products. Every billion dollars of assistance generates 60,000 jobs here in America. Among the states that in the fiscal year 1989-90 received orders paid by "aid" to Israel, the following were at the top: California: $110,559,004; Florida: $58,170,218; Maryland: $49,365,734; Massachusetts: $80,248,576; Mississippi: $58,592,085; New York: $255,913,352; Pennsylvania: $54,949,654; Texas: $121,617,534. Unlike the moneys that go into NATO or SEATO, very little of "aid" to Israel leaves the country at all. So I can only wish that Pat Buchanan would check his statistics and economic flow chart. (By the way, what has happened to Buchanan now that the Texas populist Perot is coyly attracting the spotlights?) And, thanking Representative Waters for the stirring oratory, let me insist that the choice does not lie between either rebuilding the decayed cities or "foreign aid." A sound economic program for America will involve both, and well managed they can bring as much good to Afro-Americans and other Americans as presently is provided - in a way most ironical - by the still intact military establishment. - Franklin H. Littell Lest We Forget #643 DATE:6/l/92 BENNO SCHMIDT JUMPS SHIP My Yale alma mater is in deep trouble. Right after Commencement the President, Benno Schmidt, announced that he was leaving to head up "the Edison Project." Yale, once a flagship university, representing the highest standards of scholarship and religion, character and public service, just a few years ago lost another President to professional baseball. Schmidt, brought in as a hard-driving administrator from a technical field: Law, had downplayed the Liberal Arts and Humanistic studies. A few weeks before his own resignation, the Dean of Yale College and the Provost of the University had resigned. Yale's problems have developed over several decades, and they are not unlike the problems of American higher education generally. While committing itself to the maintenance of traditional professional standards, Yale has done little imaginative. In the critical areas of Religious Studies, for instance - Christian/Jewish relations and Religious Liberty - its faculty and student activity has been conventional and minimal. This is true even though some of its alumni have been major forces in those fields of study and praxis - including Everett Clinchy - founder of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and A. Roy Eckardt - one of a half dozen most important Christian theologians re-thinking Christianity after Auschwitz. "The Edison Project" is a brainchild of the entrepeneur Christopher Whittle, the man who pulls in $600,000 a day by selling advertising aimed at school children. He reaches the captive audience of school children through "Channel One," tacking advertising onto a news show now in c. 10,000 schools across the country. The new project, for which $60,000,000 seed money has been pledged, is to result in the establishment of a national private schools system to achieve a "revolution" in elementary and secondary education. Annual tuition is presently estimated at $5,500 per year per student, with a profit schedule planned to expand nicely through the founding of several hundred K-12 schools. Major corporate investors are being solicited, with the assumption that the cartel already in partnership - Time Warner, Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and Associated Newspapers of Britain - will help substantially in putting together the 2.5 billion dollars needed for the first 100 schools. The men and women whose faith and sacrifice established and developed Yale believed in education. They created the religious and intellectual culture that produced those who were later in the front lines of establishing the common schools, so that every American boy and girl could become a literate citizen. Later still their spiritual progeny helped to push through the acts that founded public universities and set forth the goal of "free public higher education" in America. There was a time when the successful American entrepeneur was a man who made money by producing something needed or doing something useful, and who then gave generously to important

Benno Schmidt Jumps Ship 2 social services through philanthropy. We are seeing the development of a new kind of entrepeneurship: the exploitation of non-profits and essential public services - built and paid for by the tax-payers - for private profit. Such things sometimes happened in earlier generations, of course, but it was then a matter of embarrassment when someone took personal advantage of a position of stewardship of the public interest. The provision of free public higher education, which along with the Homestead Act and the Emancipation Act was one of the three greatest American public achievements of the 19th century, has now been abandoned. The California universities and the units of the City University of New York were the last to go down the drain. During the Decade of Greed, the common school system has been seriously neglected and allowed to disintegrate. With the exception of a very few elite districts in the United States, the real salaries (and standards of living) of teachers have gone down every year since 1980. The modest raises in salaries, bitterly fought over and occasionally won, have never matched the cost of living index. For those who could afford it, private schools have greatly increased in number and enrollment across the country. For public schools the outlook is bleak. Money is short and the tax-payers are nervous and the needed financing of the public schools - let alone any upgrading along the splendid technological lines Schmidt and Whittle are enthusiastic about-

Benno Schmidt Jumps Ship 3 is hard to come by. As a country we have lost literally hundreds of billions of dollars to the thieves of the S & L scams, to the thieves who are still pillaging the National Forests at tax­ payers' expense, to the thieves who are draining off the national oil reserves with only a tiny percentage paid back into the public treasuries. To save time we will not mention other gouging of the American commonwealth, for instance through reckless splurges such as the tens of billions wasted on the inconclusive Gulf War. "The Edison Project" will contribute heavily to the final relegation of the public schools to the status of a residual service for the children of the poor. It may very well strengthen the political pressure for the voucher system, by which parents can take tax moneys and spend them for schools of choice. This will further shrink support for the public schools and provide largesse to the private schools. I am sorry for what has happened to Yale, with its conventional high standards, struggle with maintenance unions, decomposing old buildings and genteel decadence. I am even sorrier to think that a President of Yale should jump ship at a critical time - a time when higher education desperately needs to be turned around - to give his brains and energies to a project so far from what Yale once represented in religion, philanthropy and concern for the public good. - Franklin H. Littell (Yale Ph.D. 1946)

Benno Schmidt Jumps Ship 4 Lest We Forget #644 DATE:6/1/92 OUR HERO, THE SPOTTED OWL For many months the spotted owl held the great clear-cutting corporations at bay, but he has now gone down in a flurry of feathers. In a series of decisions recommended out of the "President's Council on Competitiveness," the White House has suspended laws and regulations in order to permit additional draining of wetlands, further strip- mining on public lands, further looting of the National Forests. Vice President Quayle is Chairman of the so-called Council on Competitiveness. The public image the Council is to give is that laws on pollution and protection of the environment must be weakened in order to compete with Japan and other powerful economies. The real purpose is to open up tax-payers' moneys and public properties to exploitation by a selected few individuals. The several agencies for protection of the public lands and forests have used whatever weapon lay to hand to fight the spoliation. In the case of the National Forests, which are now being ravaged wholesale, the preservation of the northern spotted owl - an endangered species - was the only ready ammunition available. Scientists were agreed that the owl faced extinction, and the clear-cutters didn't challenge the fact. The argument of the spoilers is that jobs are at stake and those who have the work are more important than owls. Putting the argument at that level ends debate, of course. People are more important than owls. That is the gist of a letter published recently in The Philadelphia Inguirer (May 30), a letter ascribed to Manuel Lujan Jr., Secretary of the Interior. Manuel Lujan has distinguished himself as the Secretary of the Interior most subservient to special interests in many decades, outdoing even James Watts in his hurry to make the National Forests and National Preserves available for "harvesting" by well-connected corporations. Lujan writes of "our [Bush administration] announcement of a proposed preservation plan for the northern spotted owl." This is double-speak worthy of George Orwell, since the "preservation plan" is nothing of the kind. The letter then goes on to present the argument which crushed the opposition, however, the argument that was used to enlist marches and other public demonstrations by working men and their families in the timber industry. Lujan claims that the administration plan "would save 17,000 jobs vital to families and communities in the Pacific Northwest."

The argument that jobs can be preserved by permitting an immoral act - in this case stealing from the public property - can be made in many directions. Closing down the drug traffic "robs" someone of his employment. The same thing is true of clamping down on prostitution.

The real issue is whether the protection of National Parks and National Lands that began a century ago, for the sake of generations to come, shall now be sacrificed to settle this generation's overdraughts. In a broad sense, it is the same issue as whether we shall pay as we go - or borrow from unborn generations.

During the Reagan-Bush administrations, while the USA moved from being the chief lender nation to being the chief debtor nation in the world, public policy has been controlled by elements determined to grab while the grabbing was good. And we who haven't sat at the high-

Spotted Owl 2 rollers' table have still been willing to be seduced by a parasitic philosophy and a "trickle down" economic theory worthy of Louis XIV. We are still robbing our great, great, great-grandchildren so our generation won't have to pay its own bills. Hundreds of millions of Americans yet unborn are the victims - and the spotted owl is a footnote to the tale of pillage. What are the facts? At the rate of spoliation now going on, and in whole sections of the Northwest already completed, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of virgin growth big trees are being cut by the big timber corporations and sent to Japan. Every tree costs the tax-payers an average of $2 6.00 to cut and ship out. Of the vast moneys involved, not counting the expense to the tax-payers, the working men receive good seasonal wages and that is all. On a straight book-keeping basis, it would be cheap to make a cash grant of $200,000 to every one of te 17,000 working stiffs that Lujan claims to have compassion for. The 3.4 billion dollars would amount to no more than a small per cent of the gross profit given to the corporations by the Bush administration. We know what the pillagers are after. But why have the wilderness protection agencies let the spotted owl fight and lose the battle for us and those who come after us? Is there any thinking person who believes that the spotted owl is the real issue? The basic issue, heaven pity us for what we have come to, is the integrity of democratic government - the government that is supposed to look after the interests of all the people, including generations yet unborn. -Franklin H. Littell

Spotted Owl 3 I'AK

Lest We Forget #645 DATE:6/8/92 FREE SPEECH! HOW FREE?

During the immediate post-war period, when American Military Government was attempting to remove Nazis from positions of power and influence and to replace them with democrats who had managed to survive, the question of how to deal with the churches and the schools was especially ticklish. Both had traditions of "freedom" which, although badly undermined, had strong appeal to those who were trying to restore German institutions to their pre-Third Reich condition. As Americans, we did not believe government agents should interfere in church affairs: the Germans should voluntarily remove their own stained and corrupt officials. By and large, they did so. The impulse to purge and purify in the churches was strengthened by the fact that the churches, as Albert Einstein once commented, were the only German social structures to produce a modicum of resistance to Nazi ideology and actions. Martin Niemoeller came out of eight and a half years in concentration camp, Otto Dibelius and Theophil Wurm and other key people emerged from a decade of passive resistance, to release the justly famous Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (19 October 1945). Collaborators with Hitlerism were removed from their episcopal or pastoral offices, and even the theological faculties were purged of most of those who had adjusted their teachings to suit the Fuhrer. The situation in the universities was more difficult than that in the churches. Almost all of the professors the Nazis considered undependable had been expelled from their posts, driven out of Germany, or killed. Unlike the churches, the universities had no significant residual core of passive resisters upon which new democratic iniatives could be built. A few exiles came back to help, but the Military Government had to settle for purging only the most objectionable teachers. As was the case in the common schools, thousands upon thousands of youngsters were entering each year: there was no time to do a thorough job of longrange planning, of training a whole new crowd of democratically-minded instructors, of creating democratic structures within the lower schools and the Universities. Basic logistical problems had to be solved: rooms for classes, housing for students. For school children, decent texts had to be issued in the hundreds of thousands to replace those tainted and twisted with Hitlerism. For university students, German technical texts had to be vetted; much was accomplished too by translating texts into German from American, British and French authors. There was no hesitation in introducing fundamental reforms in the elementary and secondary schools. But at university level a fundamental question arose, not unlike that which Military Government faced in dealing with the churches. The professors had a long tradition of academic freedom. Most of those remaining in position had betrayed that tradition, of course, by allowing the Nazis to infiltrate and politicize the faculty and student life. But now they claimed to have learned their lesson, and they denied the American Military Government any right to limit their "freedom of teaching."

Free Speech Their arguments, in retrospect, sound much like the arguments of "liberal" lawyers and self-styled "intellectuals" who defend public vulgarity, exhibitionist sacrilege and offensive pornography by waving the banner of "freedom of expression." The mindless repetition d£ old slogans that have lost their time and place is not unique to German academics. And Americans sometimes stumbled too, mis-reading the meaning of basic democratic principles - and forgetting that "common sense" has a place in the American cultural heritage too. A case of failure, to illustrate the point, was the American decision to allow a vicious German academic to continue his unrepentant racist propaganda after the war, while American Military Government was still in charge. The American Military Governor of Bavaria ruled that a Nazi lawyer- Reinhard Maurach -need not be removed from the University of Munich faculty because of "the principle of free speech." A possible default of "the principle of free speech" did not first arise in Bavaria in 1949. It had arisen years before, even before the NSDAP came to power, when those responsible for the intellectual and spiritual integrity of Academe let ideologically corrupt professors into their ranks. It had arisen when black-booted and black-uniformed student bullyboys were allowed to hold violent rallies within the portals of the university, to terrorize classrooms and to break up democratic student meetings. The wrong question was taken up, and it was taken up 25 years too late. The question was not whether Professor Maurach should be retained: the important question was why he had ever been admitted to

Free Speech 3 the teaching corps in the first place. This is the issue the babblers - with their "symbolic speech" for Nazi terrorists at Skokie, Illinois, with their "freedom of speech" for Jeffries at CCNY, with their "freedom of speech" for the Black Muslim demagogue at West Chester University, with their "freedom of expression" for 2 Live Crew and Mapplethorpe, with their propaganda platform for PLO apologists at Villanova University - have yet to confront. Let it be said again, lest we forget. Freedom means anarchy and the jungle - unless it is balanced by voluntary self-discipline. The tragedy of Germany was not alone the rise of a terrorist movement to power: the tragedy was made possible by the failure of decent people to stand up in time for civility; for the dignity, the liberty and the integrity of the human person; for patriotic loyalty to the political covenant. The alternative to state-imposed order and discipline is not the jungle: the alternative is the self-government of free men and women. No free society can long survive the collapse of self-discipline within its sub-political associations - churches and synagogues, colleges and universities, trade unions and professional societies. The German universities - professors and student councils alike- flunked their exams in the time of temptation and testing. Are the American academics and intellectuals, for all their sloganizing, showing any more common sense in dealing with terrorists and disloyalists? - Franklin H. Littell

Free Speech 4 Lest We Forget #646 DATE:6/22/92 DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION IN A UNITED GERMANY Berlin. To visit the House of the Wannsee Conference on June 17th was to experience a remarkable coincidence of dates important to lovers of liberty. From 1953 to 1989, June 17th was observed in public in West Germany and in private in East Germany as "the Day of German Unity." On that day in 1953 hundreds of thousands of Germans in the Russian Zone of occupation closed down their schools and factories, marched on their city halls, and gathered in great crowds to hear excited orators ring the changes on Communist dictatorship. In 1953 it took only a few days for the notoriously brutal East German police, backed by two Russian tank divisions, to suppress what looked for the moment like a people's revolution. Yet the day of the uprising remained the symbolic day of German unity and freedom. In 1942 the house was in the hands of the Gestapo, stolen from a Jewish family. Today, rehabilitated and staffed as a center for Holocaust education, Haus Wannsee serves the cause of Jewish survival. The staff provides education in seminars and confeences, educational materials for the schools, support for Israel, active concern for the growing Berlin Jewish community, active opposition to the antisemitism endemic in "Christendom." The Director of Haus Wannsee is Gerhard Schoenberner, author of one of the early classics on the Jewish experience in the German Third Reich: The Yellow Star. He was for a number of years Director of the German Cultural Center in Jerusalem. The Chairman of the Board is Professor Dietrich Goldschmidt of the Max Planck Institute, a well- known leader in Christian/Jewish affairs since the 1961 Berlin Kirchentag, author of several books and editor of one of the most important books to help change Christian preaching and teaching: The Unbroken Covenant. The Education Director is Annegret Ehmann, a longtime worker in Aktion Sohnezeichen - the volunteer service agency for German youth which since 1960 has directed thousands in atonement and reconciliation work in Israel, the Netherlands, France, Poland and other countries. Annegret Ehmann also participated in the Berlin Kristallnacht Conference last November (see Jewish Times for November 21, 1991). On January 20 of this year - the 50th anniversary of the famous conference - the Wannsee villa had been dedicated by the reunited City of Berlin as a permanent monument and education center on the Holocaust. It was at the beautiful villa on the lake in a suburb of Berlin-West that Reinhard Heydrich called his inter-departmental meeting to coordinate the Nazi program to kill the Jews of Europe. Following the collapse of the Communist regime in East Germany (DDR), the tearing down of the symbolic Berlin walll, and the achievement of the political integration of the East German states into the Federal Republic, the June 17th date lost some of its high profile. Nevertheless, it remained a constant reminder that the spirit of liberty had not died out - neither under 12 years of Nazi dictatorship nor under more than forty years of Communist dictatorship. The East German security forces ("Stasi") remained ever nervous that the people might rise again against them. The East German partner

Berlin 2 of the Russian KGB, the equally infamous "Stasi," had been harshly criticized by the Communist (SED) officials for mismanagement of the June 17th uprising. From 1953 to 1989, every means was used to nip in the bud dangerous expressions of dissenting opinion and action. The volume of dossier files on leaders of churches, students, workers, etc. was exponentially expanded. The number of secret police and informants was multiplied. If a demonstration or a strike nevertheless broke out, those involved - or reported to be involved - ended up in "re­ education centers" and those held responsible for the "provocations" were sent off to labor camps or simply disappeared. Shortly before the successful uprising in 1989, a meeting of top "Stasi" was called. All wanted to imply that they had their districts under control. But one had to report that the Protestant churches had applied for the right to have public demonstrations for world peace. Another nervously reported that people were restless because of the number who had gone West "to visit relatives" and hadn't returned. The documents recently made public include a report of the meeting. We read how the Stasi chief Mielke nervously interrupted: "Does this mean that tomorrow we may face another 'June 17'?" June 17th remains a day on the new calendar of a united Germany, symbolizing the triumph of the spirit of liberty over tyranny. From January 20 to June 17, 1992, Haus Wannsee received 32,840 visitors. Once the scene of a strategic consultation of "desk-top killers," it is now a memorial of warning, education, and a German commitment to study and teach the lessons of the Holocaust. - Franklin H. Littell

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Lest We Forget #647 DATE:6/30/92 THE COURT SPLITS ON ABORTION LEGISLATION The 5-4 decision of the U. S. Supreme Court left Roe v. Wade in place. The famous 1973 decision affirming a woman's privacy and control of her own body against the grasp of government has been diminished by the decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, but the principled heart of it still stands. In the intense legal struggle which preceeded the decision, during which the religious and political Radical Right used every pressure to politicize the decision, the genuine conservatives were separated from the pseudo-conservatives on the Court. In spite of the determined effort of the Reagan and Bush administrations to create a judiciary willing to increase state control over individual citizens and relax governmental supervision of corporations, three Associate Justices - O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter - showed their commitment to American liberties and to the importance of precedents in the rule of law. Roe y. Wade was let stand. Mr. Justice Souter's words are classics in the conservative tradition. He perceived that a verdict to overturn, for which the rightwing ideologues have been driving through the media and public demonstrations, would be "at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court's legitimacy, and to the Nation's commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe's original decision, and we do so today." The line between the honest conservatives and the ideological hacks on the Court has been drawn clearly. Justice O'Connor added her own word of clarity to the defense of individual rights: "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code." It is that guality of restraint that has been lacking on many fronts in the Rehnguist Era, driven as some members of the Supreme Court have been by ideological motors, with politicized lower courts responding with alacrity in many cases to the pressures of political clagues, religious cabals and corporate combines. Rehnquist - who came to Washington from rightwing circles in Arizona, and Scalia - the disaster America got when the Senate exhausted itself in interrogating a reactionary of guality: Robert Bork, were joined by White - "Whizzer, " who was at his best 50 years ago as an Ail-American football star at Colorado U, and Thomas - of whom the less said the better. These four comprised the bitter minority who fought unsuccessfully to overturn precedent, expand the State control over citizens, and approve the invasion of a woman's privacy. A good deal has been written in reactionary journals in denial of the "right to privacy," which was first articulated in precise language by Mr. Justice Douglas in Griswold y. Connecticut (1965). In that case, too - a decision built around the right of a married couple to use contraception without intrusion of government power, the assertion of the right of privacy was primary. Mr. Justice Douglas pointed out that until then the argument had never had standing that only those individual rights specifically enumerated in the Constitution are given its protection.

Honest Conservativism 2 Mr. Justice Douglas was attacked as a "liberal" because he argued the "right to privacy." It was said that he created the idea. The truth is guite to the contrary: the Ninth Amendment specifically states that "the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The "right to privacy," sometimes simply stated as "the right to be let alone," did not have to be stated explicitly until the press of a burgeoning population brought people into each other's back yards, and the aggressions of expanding government began to threaten individual rights and liberties in many areas. In "the good old days," to which the right-wingers in their ignorance of history like to refer, anyone who had as little respect for the individual liberties and personal privacy of Americans as they show today would have been chastened with a horse-whip if not subdued with a musket. The Roman Catholic zealots with their children's crusade in Milwaukee and the Protestant Fundamentalists shouting on the street corner in Beaufort, South Carolina need to learn something basic about the American covenant. Every loyal citizen is free to argue for legislation he or she believes important for the good of the society, provided that argument is presented with civility and in the language of the public forum. No one has the bona fide to shout and scream in a pluralistic America "in the Name of Jesus, Lord over Christian America," and no one has the bona fide to parade in clerical costume in public to make a political statement as a Prince of Christendom.

Honest Conservativism 3 The United States is not a Christian nation. Neither is it a continuation of 13th century European Christendom. [Let the heathen rage, and the peoples of the Covenant rejoice!] Unhappily, a considerable sector of the Supreme Court has been so politicized and ideologized, so conditioned to accept a role as the highest legislative organ rather than to exercise its function as the objective custodian of the rule of law rather than men, that its proper constitutional role and status are put in jeopardy. Holding together the Court itself has become an heroic task. Mr. Justice Souter sensed this and stated the point well. Lest we forget, liberty is easily lost when the citizens let the noisy fringes usurp center stage. Since the flood of revilement and ignorant invective from the fanatics is preditable, let those who love America and the dignity, integrity and liberty of the human person speak up now in praise of honest conservatives. And let them remember too that quiet and devout Christian layman, Mr. Justice Blackmun, who wrote Roe y. Wade and for 27 years has suffered the calumny and vituperation of extremists both pseudo-pious and pseudo-conservative. Those citizens who remember that privacy is the greatest political blessing that a civilized person can enjoy will again bless our two-hundred-year-old Constitution - and bless also those men and a woman who again set limits to the arrogant over-reach of the modern State.

- Franklin H. Littell

Honest Conservativism ^^y

Lest We Forget #648 DATE:7/3/92 LIBERTY OR ANARCHY, DIALOGUE OR VIOLENCE? The decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in the St. Paul MN cross- burning case has loosed the usual flood of trite phrases and hand- wringing about freedom and its problems. The decision written by Justice Scalia, which overthrew the decision of the Minnesota Supreme Court, freed from penalty a terrorist act the St. Paul city fathers were trying to suppress. As usual with masters of speculation, abstraction, and hide­ bound ideology, Scalia showed no awareness of the practical problem. His eye was on the distant goal of keeping his ideological ducks in line. The practical problem of holding a pluralistic America together, where some individuals and minorities haven't learned the first rule of the game, is ignored. At stake is the future of that delicate balance, that creative tension, between civil liberties and popular sovereignty. How can government truly represent the interest of all citizens? How can the liberties of all loyal individuals and groups be secured? How can the right to privacy of all be defended - against the brutalities of mobs, the assaults of terrorists, and the arrogance of government bureaucrats (including those sitting on the bench)? The City Council of St. Paul made a common sense decision about dealing with a real threat to the liberties of citizens. That decision was re-affirmed by the Minnesota Supreme Court. By the time it was carried to Cloud Nine, the summer residence of the present Supreme Court, the majority was talking pure theory. Neither precedents nor common sense counted for anything. The standard of measure cannot be, if the civil covenant is to hold, "How much insolence and aggression can someone get away with without being jailed?" This is the question that so fascinates the American Civil Liberties Union and other well-meaning "liberals" that they forget that other citizens have rights too - and not only the aggressor. There is an unwritten rule of civility, even of Hesed, without which no consensual government can stand. The first rule, simply stated, is this: my right to shake my fist ends at the point of my neighbor's nose. With nuance, it ends at the imaginery line where my neighbor's privacy and sense of security are threatened by my aggressive threats. How can we get some hard-headed and practical thinking about problem-solving, instead of this frightening addiction to ideological abstractions? We would be helped in the discussion if there were some basic knowledge about how "freedom of speech" and the other four basic liberties came to be written into the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution. Until the 17th century, there was no effort by any society to assert the rights of citizens to such a radical notion as "freedom of speech," "freedom of press," "freedom of religion." Authoritarian rulers ruled "by divine right," used state churches to enforce their control over subjects (there were no "citizens"), permitted only those books and papers that had passed the royal censor, and imprisoned or killed anyone who presumed to speak ill of the ruler or his favorites. "Freedom of speech," when it first began to appear as a political

Freedom or Anarchy 2 right, meant one simple thing: the right of a free man to discuss public issues and decisions openly with his neighbors, without fear of penalty or loss of life. At the same time the structures were emerging - such as the Town Meeting - by which his discussions with his neighbors might be put into law. This is precisely the way individual liberties and democratic decision interacted creatively in the first decades when popular sovereignty began to replace absolute monarchy among civilized nations. Face to face encounter between eguals is the essence of the matter. "Free speech" does not cover the faceless, hooded broadcasts of KKK terrorists. "Free speech" does not cover the intimidating marches of neo-Nazi terrorists: their "symbolic speech" is an invention of clever legal technicians, who have forgotten what law and justice are all about. "Free speech" does not protect the rowdyism of Protestant Fundamentalists or Roman Catholic zealots or homosexual exhibitionists who assault the privacy and invade the psychic space of citizens of civility to dominate the public forum. "Free speech" does not cover the assault of a Black Muslim terrorist upon the rights of others in a university forum. "Free speech" does not protect the "right" of a priest or minister to preach anti-Christian doctrine from the pulpit. "Free speech" does not cover the "right" of a professor to teach lies - not the "revisionist" lies of deniers of the Holocaust and not the lies of free-wheeling inventors of new racist myths. "Free speech" means precisely what it meant until clever legal technicians twisted it out of shape: that is, the protected

Freedom or Anarchy 3 participation of all loyal citizens in face-to-face political dialogue. But in the follow-up to the St. Paul case there is again revealed, naked to the world, the ignorance of presumably educated men and women. The inability to distinguish between freedom and anarchy, between free speech and violence, discloses an intellectual flaw that can be fatal for America. If you want to know why our society and its universities are in trouble, read the statement by Robert M. O'Neil, director of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression: "As much as hateful speech represents an idea, however abhorrent, the university community is not a place where we should suppress ideas." Charles R. Lawrence, a professor of law at Stanford University, put his finger on the central flaw in Scalia's Supreme Court opinion: "He has no sense that there is a real injury involved." Precisely! To the ideologues - on the bench and on the campus, whether self-styled "conservative" or "liberal" - the whole thing is a matter of opinion. Lest we forget, to the person who faces real assault in the real world, the barely suppressed violence of racist and/or ideological terrorism is personally threatening and anxiety-producing. And he is entitled to be protected from it. - Franklin H. Littell

Freedom or Anarchy Lest We Forget #649 DATE:7/16/92 THE LAST REFUGE OF A SCOUNDREL "Patriotism," said Mr. Johnson, "is the last refuge of a scoundrel." We have seen this adage proven a number of times in recent decades. Peoples may be misled into fratricidal, even suicidal wars by scoundrels who seek to turn the spotlight from their own wrong-doing. Great armadas of expensive technical eguipment may be called up to rally for battle the ranks of the conscripts and the cheers of the Mob, and not incidentally to divert attention from skullduggery in the back yard at home.

Similarly, politicians involved in shady deals or hidden conspiracies against the common good are often the noisiest of "patriots." They wrap the American flag around themselves to take the attention of anyone who might be watching, while their fingers carry out the unnoticed scam. All too often what the fingers are doing is to lift money from the public till.

A case in point is the activity of three "conservatives," two of them Colorado associates of the beer baron Joseph Coors, who have recently been exposed as agents of a foreign government. Their scam was, in the name of super-patriotism, to influence the White House to take a bellicose line in the Persian Gulf. For this they received, according to a Federal indictment unsealed a few days ago, 7.7 million dollars.

One of the three, Sam H. Zakhem, had been able to use Coors' influence with Ronald Reagan to get an ambassadorship to one of the Arab sheikdoms in the Gulf. Another, William R. Kennedy Jr. bankrolled The Conservative Digest. The third, Scott Stanley Jr., was the Digest's Editor. Stanley has admitted having been a member of the highly secretive John Birch Society. The relationship of the others to the conspiracy is not known. Apparently they neither reported to the U. S. government their employment as agents of a foreign government, nor did they report to the Internal Revenue Service the substantial income they derived from it. Their high profile "patriotism" evidently was supposed to provide the screen behind which no one would look. These three expose a much deeper hazardous contamination of American politics. The John Birch Society, about which most citizens know precious little, was founded in Indianapolis in 1958. Populist anti-Communism of the Joe McCarthy type had proved ineffectual. In fact, as Harry Truman astutely observed, McCarthy's reckless approach did the Communists great service: McCarthy discredited any and all attempts to bring the problem of the Communist Fifth Column to the fore among thinking people. The John Birch Society now proposed to meet the Communists on their own ground and in their own style. According to the founder, a candy manufacturer named Robert Welch, the way to meet the Communists was to fight them with their own methods of organization and political action. In his bibles of the movement, The Politician and The Blue Book, Welch advocated organization in disciplined cells, secrecy of membership, propaganda through "fronts" and letterhead agencies, the Patriotism of Scoundrels 2 and infiltration into civic initiative groups to capture and use them for Birch Society purposes. Since then, specialists in studies of extremism have noted that the Birchers - like the Communists - typically aim at two key power centers in a society: infiltration and control of the police, and infiltration and control of school boards. To justify an approach so radically opposed to American ideals of fair play and open-faced public discussion, Welch had to portray America as the victim of a vast conspiracy from which he and his associates would save her. In their surreptitious recruitment, the Birchers said that things were not what they seem. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was - either witting or unwitting - a tool of the Communists and a traitor (The Politician, page 6). General George Marshall, whom most statesmen in Europe and scholars in America credit with saving the continent from succumbing to Communism after World War II, was in the bible of the John Birch Society "since at least some time in the 1930s... a conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent of the Soviet conspiracy" (page 15). The Communist conspiracy, which according to Welch's Diktat had to be fought by a Birch conspiracy operating in the same way, had spread its tentacles into colleges and congregations and unions and other lower social circles. Key American leaders like Eisenhower and Marshall were "deliberately and consciously serving the interests of Russia rather than their own country" (page 25), while "pink" professors and "liberal" intellectuals the Patriotism of Scoundrels 3 were all part of the vast network of subversion and treason at lower levels. Whereas Joe McCarthy made it impossible in campus and congregation circles to talk intelligently about a very real danger - namely, that the CP was in fact in its high tide nothing but an arm of the Soviet Empire, Robert Welch and his associates started a backfire that has in time grown to be a far more destructive force than the CP ever came to be in America. One has only to listen to supposedly decent and responsible conservatives fling around the slogans about "liberals," "effete intellectuals" and "cultural elites" to realize how deeply the Birchers' fascist counter-conspiracy has since 1958 affected the climate of American politics. Lest we forget, the organizational, educational and propaganda line of the German Nazi Party was precisely that which the John Birch Society represents in the U.S.A. Once in a while the hypocrisy, dissimulation and mendacity endemic to this kind of "patriotism" rises to the surface - as in the recent indictments of Zakhem, Kennedy and Stanley - and becomes visible to him who runs. But underneath the surface there is a great deal of political sewage to be cleaned out and disposed of before open-faced, policy-oriented, problem-solving and frank political dialogue replaces negative ideological sloganizing in the American political forum.

- Franklin H. Littell the Patriotism of Scoundrels 4 Lest We Forget #650 DATE:7/17/92 DEALING WITH THE DENIERS Jim Keegstra, about whom neo-Nazis and deniers of the Holocaust have rallied since 1985, has been convicted for the second time. His criminal offense: wilfully promoting hatred against Jews. A jury of ordinary citizens in Red Deer, Alberta has again made the just decision: a teacher who pushes propaganda of contempt and violence - even if it's not yet physical violence- against a specific minority is guilty of criminal action. This development in legal thinking and definition is in line with the International Genocide Convention, which also deals with targetting religious, ethnic or cultural minorities for destructive action. In fact, there has been a significant growth in the sensitivity of civilized peoples to the truth that assault upon such minority - whether murderous or at first "merely" intimidating - is to be inhibited from occurring and punished when it does. Keegstra taught that a small, elite Jewish cabal had planned every major war since the French Revolution. He taught the inventive concept disseminated in the hoary antisemitic classic: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that a shadowy Jewish conspiracy held many if not most of the key power centers in Western civilization. In 1982 he was dismissed by the school board, a group of ordinary citizens governed by common sense, who were startled and horrified when what he was doing in the classroom was brought to their attention by pupils and parents. Following Keegstra's conviction in 1985, the lawyers went to work on the technicalities and in 1991 the verdict was overturned. For six years, in sum, the technicians succeeded in delaying justice. Whether common sense or technicalities will prevail this round remains to be seen. All over Europe and North America, wherever there are little nests of illegal immigrants who have yet to be identified and exposed as Nazi war criminals, wherever there are young skinheads who express their alienation from society by flaunting symbols of violence, wherever there are marginal academics who make money by churning out antisemitic and neo-Nazi tracts, money is being solicited to help the "martyr"- Jim Keegstra - in his battle with the Jewish conspiracy. Money will also be raised again, presumably, by "useful idiots" who cannot distinguish between the liberties of loyal citizens arguing unpopular opinions and the aggressions of terrorists who are outside the political covenant. Among those who have made a serious study of totalitarianism and totalitarian movements, it is now taken for granted that those who say that they are outside the democratic process, and who give every indication of it in their aggressive actions, mean what they say. But the lessons of the Early Warning System on potentially genocidal individuals and movements have not yet become current on the campuses. The judges are alert enough to restrain threatening language and behavior when they are themselves the objects of it, when it explodes on their own turf. Most of them have not yet been

Dealing with Deniers 2 sensitized to the seriousness of barely subdued violence when someone else is targetted - Afro-Americans, Koreans, Jews... The intellectuals suffer from the same numbness. Nat Hentoff, a basically decent writer who publishes often in journals like The Village Voice and The Progressive, has recently discussed the challenge of the deniers' revived offensive on the campuses. Student papers are being offered $750.00 to publish an advertisement denying the facts of the Holocaust in the name of "Open Debate." Hentoff calls it "an ad that offends." That of course lightens the weight of the offense and makes it possible for Hentoff to conclude that after all, all kinds of opinions belong on the university campus. The point that well-meaning libertarians like Hentoff miss is the brute fact that the advertisement, along with other threatening activities by deniers of the terrorist network, is meant to hurt. They miss the point, like the judges, because they are not themselves hurt - and can view such opinions as semi-humorous absurdities. But absurdities they are not, no more than were the egually absurd propaganda of the German Nazi Party when most of the Intellektuellen were laughing at them in the 1920s. Keegstra and his friends and allies represent violence. The words they use are intended to shorten the life expectancy of their targets. For the terrorists outside the covenant, propaganda is one half of the program of undermining the trust which is the foundation of the democratic society. The other half of their

Dealing with Deniers 3 program is the hidden part: organization in cells, training of secret armies, infiltration and control of civic associations, etc. A jury at Red Deer, Alberta has again shown that ordinary citizens - operating on common sense, a basic love of justice, and a sense of fair play toward vulnerable minorities in a pluralistic society - can be trusted to make a sound decision about the matters of our political health. The only guestion now is whether a decision that is sound in morals, ethics and justice can survive the trial by fire, the test by ordeal - at the hands of the legal technicians.

- Franklin H. Littell

Dealing with Deniers 'ft*

Lest We Forget #651 DATE:7/25/92 A KINDLY WORD FOR ROSS PEROT Now that the misanthropes of the media - having built him up with their enthusiasm for something new and different - are tearing Ross Perot down, the time has come to consider what he has accomplished. The important negative points about Perot's campaign were published in this column several weeks ago (May 28th). Perot was a populist, ostensibly running against "City Hall;" but in fact he had made his fortune as a Nixon crony, through contracts with the government. Before the present scenario, his record of public action was Quixotic: unpredictable and freguently ineffective. Nothing in his behavior during the last six months changes that image, least of all his precipitous change of signals.

No one is quite sure what will happen now. The hard cases, both journalists and politicos, take pleasure in sneering at anyone naive enough to think a President might be elected without spending a hundred million dollars or more. The good-hearted volunteers - Ross Perot himself one of them, if we give him the benefit of the doubt - like to think it still might be possible to run a Harry Truman-1948 kind of campaign: just keep pounding at the basics, and the voters will respond in spite of the large number of cynical hackers in the media nests and political clubs.

If Perot means what he says, and if most of his volunteers still trust their own idealism, we perhaps shall learn whether significant political influence can be gained any more by a mix of energy and patriotism - or whether it now has to be purchased. Policy and program may be influenced, they say, even if the Presidential post is no longer their specific target. In any case, even if he did wrong to change signals, and even if his volunteer campaign peters out (neither of which is a certain case), Ross Perot has already made a genuinely positive contribution to American politics. In the first place, Ross Perot purified the political atmosphere. Extremists - whether external like the PLO or internal like the Birchers and racists in the Republican Party right wing - depend upon the sensation-loving media to build them up. Without the media the terrorists and extremists don't have a chance. Perot took the attention of the media, and he knocked David Duke and Pat Buchanan off the stage. In the second place, Ross Perot jump-started the Presidential campaign. Where would the campaign be - as we enter the August doldrums - if the options all along had been only Bush and Clinton? The answer is obvious: the campaign would be dead in the water. Most of those not giving up altogether would be watching the antics and listening to the siren songs of the marginals among the Republicans and Democrats, just to keep from dying of boredom. As it is, we have one of the most exciting campaigns in decades shaping up, and it is doubtful that even the most desperate negative million dollar ads will be able totally to derail attention from some basic issues. Finally, Ross Perot - both by entering the picture and by

Ross Perot 2 changing the signals - has called attention to a fatal defect in our present political process. That defect is not some simple technical matter, to be mended by - for instance - changing or eliminating the Electoral College. The Electoral College serves us very well, and the tinkerers are wrong on that and on other proposed mechanical alterations to the Constitution. Challenges to the traditions that have grown up around the political party process are also superficial. No, the Perot phenomenon puts to America a profound moral guestion, a guestion as fundamental as the future of the republic itself. That question arose when Perot refused to pay the first 25 million dollar tab his PR technicians came up with. The question was this: how could he pay, when his whole campaign was supposed to be for the purpose of bringing the White House back on the side of ordinary Americans?! There was corruption, to be sure, before TV became a force both dominating and making political history. But TV, unless its power is checked, puts the nails in the coffin of enlightened self-government. We are at the level today of England before the Second Reform Bill, when the British put a cap on what could be spent to elect a candidate. The mean little man with a mop on his head, Newt Gingrich, recently spent over one million dollars to win (barely) a primary contest! We see in stark outline that influential Federal positions cost immense sums of money as things now are run. We can only guess what the interests backing Gingrich will

Ross Perot 3 spent to buy him his seat in November. But we are beginning to awaken to the corrupting influence of commercialized TV in the present political market place. Perot's withdrawal puts a question America must deal with if liberty and popular sovereignty are to survive. The second basic guestion has come to be how much it costs to buy the Presidency, a post in the Senate, a seat in the House of Representatives. The first basic question is this: who is putting up the money and what are they getting for it? Many people supported Ross Perot because they thought he had enough money of his own so he wouldn't have to sell out to any special interests. Is that a fair thing to ask of any candidate? Has affluence now become the fundamental gualification for an American candidate? Ross Perot's change of signals may irritate cynical news commentators, who think Perot and the rest of us should take for granted that there's a cash price tag on high office. But just suppose candidates had to run on the merits of their case - instead of running on the depth of the pockets of people who count on becoming "insiders," on the largesse of people who think they are buying the "right" to gouge the tax-payers and defeat the common good for the sake of some special interest! (Look at the record of Quayle's so-called Competitiveness Council.) Wittingly or by accident, Ross Perot already has made several contributions for which all Americans should be grateful to him. - Franklin H. Littell

Ross Perot 4 Lest We Forget #652 DATE:8/7/92 IDEOLOGICAL POLITICS

For more than a century and a half, the curse of that lies heavy on the politics of European countries has been ideology. By ideology we mean a closed system of political thought, within which the adherents deliberately shut themselves off from dialogue with those who come from another sector of the body politic. Ideological politics is a noxious product of the shift from absolute rulers to popular sovereignty. In the generations before there was any thought of allowing ordinary people to have a say about how they were governed, there was no such thing as ideological politics. Rulers "by divine right" would have thought it beneath their status and dignity to defer to the opinion of Herr Omnes, the mob, the laity, the lower classes.

Absolute rulers, whether old-fashioned despots or modern dictators, have always worried about what their expoited subjects thought, of course: all of them maintained large and expensive internal spy networks. But no ruler of the ages before democracy paid deferred to his subjects opinions or wishes in deciding policy. It was in the 19th century, and especially in America, that the "common man" (as Abraham Lincoln called him) became politically important.

The government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," before President Lincoln ever put it into words in the Gettysburg Address, was an idea against which the heads of Christendom - the Pope, the King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, the Tsar of All Russia, and a host of lesser kings and princes - inveighed in the name of God and common sense. Democratic government appears today in three forms: simple democracy - in a few small states like Iceland; constitutional monarchy - in several countries like Sweden, Britain, the Netherlands, post-Franco Spain; republics - for example, the United States of America, the German Federal Republic. Popular government has become one of the fetishes of the modern period, so that every dictator in the 20th century has made pretense of speaking for his subjects (not "citizens:" they are subjects!). As Stalin and Hitler demonstrated in their time, and Saddam and Assad are demonstrating in theirs, the pretense to speak "for the people" can hold up for quite a time - especially if most people (and their governments) are too intellectually lazy and spiritually flaccid to look behind the facade and act accordingly. Popular government has developed its own fevers and distempers, too. Ideological politics is one of the worst- whether Marxist or Nazi or Muslim or "Christian." Among the surviving regimes in 1992, parties and regimes claiming to represent unadulterated Islam and pure Christianity are the most unhealthy - and in some cases most dangerous. There is a good deal written about the dangers of "Muslim Fundamentalism," with good cause. But the dangers are simply those that exist elsewhere if and when ideologically twisted

Ideological Politics 2 Christians, Jews, Hindus, Shintoists, Buddhists or other come to control the power-centers in an area. Their political and religious twistedness develops from the fact that they have embraced some closed system of thought, and adopted some discipline of extremist action, that closes them to neighborly discourse and civil behavior. Just as the oxygen of democratic politics is open-faced dialogue in the forums of the republic, so the deadly fumes are those that arise stinking from the enclosed reservations of closed minds. Ideological politics provide the marching formations of the self-righteous, whether in uniform or not, that are meant to shout down and terrify those of other opinions. Ideological politics afford the demagogues - those who trick with phrases rather than inspire good discussion - their breeding ground. Ideological politics often are linked to one issue, for which every other public need or concern is sacrificed. The church caucus that voted the other day to erect a "Monument to the Unborn" in every local community in the country represents ideological politics. The zealot who tried to embarrass Governor Clinton in New York by confronting him with a naked foetus is an arrogant and obscene spokesman for ideological politics. Unfortunately, the exponents of extremist politics sometimes come to power before they are identified and checked in their rise. Every student of Communism and Nazism knows this story. Fortunately, when the "common man" realizes that he is being put

Ideological Politics 3 upon, that his right to an open and informed discussion is in jeopardy, he turns strongly against the exponents of ideological politics. Barry Goldwater, an honest conservative who ran for President in 1964, has recently warned his political party, the Republicans, of the dangers inherent in the politics of ideology and unreason. He told them that if George Bush's sloganizing on abortion legislation were sustained by the Houston Convention they would ruin the party and lose the election. Good politics is the politics of dialogue and the search for a consensus on sound public policy. Bad politics is ideological politics, which shouts down informed discussion of the alternatives. - Franklin H. Littell

Ideological Politics Lest We Forget #653 DATE:8/ll/92 FRAUDULENT RELIGIOUS STATISTICS

Of the various frauds perpetrated in the name of religion, none is more disgraceful and far-reaching in its negative impact than the publication of grossly inflated religious statistics. In terms of the things of the spirit, an arrogant inflation of numbers by publicity specialists is an obvious attempt to impress or intimidate by physical means. Sincere members may seriously misunderstand the actual condition of the religion or denomination falsely reported, and hence take the wrong actions to improve the situation. Outsiders may be frightened. The political conseguences of false figures are egually horrendous, for today politicians are inclined to kowtow to masses of people - and to defer to those who claim to represent the masses. This is just as true of religions as it is of chambers of commerce, labor unions, political parties and professional societies. During the centuries when the masses of people didn't have a political voice, and when their fate wasn't considered when wars were declared or other dynastic actions were launched, the established churches didn't think twice about numbers either. Today, part of the underside of democratic progress, numbers are important. Thus we read that "the Grand Ayatollah Abul Qassim al-Khoei, 95, spiritual leader of the world's 200 million Shiite Muslims, died in Kufa, Iraq, following recent surgery." The notice looks impressive, and it is meant to be that. Reading the notice, which appeared in newspapers all over the world including The Wall Street Journal, we can believe some of the details. For instance, he probably was a Shiite, and he probably did die in Kufa, Iraq. Also, he probably did die during an operation: if he had survived to an advanced age, possibly ninety-five years, in 20th century Iraq, he had mastered survival tactics; it is doubtful in his case that poison or jailhouse brutality caused his death. But "200 million Shiite Muslims"?! The figure of "200 million Shiite Muslims" grossly exaggerates the number of Shiites in the world. Most people in areas the Shiites traditionally claim, in spite of the upsurge of Islamic extremism in recent decades pay little attention to either ayatollahs (including the "Grand Ayatollah") or mullahs (local religious leaders). The figure of 200 million is arrived at by taking population figures for a list of countries rumored to have strong Shiite establishments or communities. The statistics have little to do with either spiritual realities or political facts. They are fraudulent. The tendency to inflate religious figures grossly, obviously to impress politicians and intimidate the rest of us, shows in another recently published item. The National Council on Islamic Affairs, headed by Mohammed Mehdi, now claims - according to the North America Interfaith Directory - "to provide a link for the American Muslims, by now some eight million faithful, representing the second largest religion in America."

Fraudulent Religious Statistics 2 "Faithful?!" Muslims, when they get out from under the iron fist of the mullahs, ayatollahs and dictators, generally register about the same religious temperature as circumcized Jews and baptized Christians. Even by brute statistics alone, the number is mendacious. Counting Black Muslims, a special case, there may be more than a million Muslims in the USA. Mohammed Mehdi, if you haven't recognized the name, is the Muslim agitator (an immigrant) who has shared with Jim Zogby the distinction of being a chief spokesmen for anti-Jewish and anti- Israel publicity releases for two decades. Mehdi justified the murder of Robert Kennedy because Kennedy was friendly to the "Zionists," and has organized pressure for the release of Sirhan Sirhan. Within recent weeks Mehdi was dismissed from his appointment to a sinecure in New York City when Mayor Dinkins discovered that one of his ideologically tainted assistants had put Mehdi in an important public post. When removed, Mehdi of course blamed "the Jews." Mehdi is a fraud and his statistics are fraudulent. Do not suppose, however, that inflated statistics are a Muslim monopoly. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians indulge freely in the pompous exercise in self-deception. The Roman Catholic Church is commonly reported to be the largest denomination in the USA, at statistics over 50,000,000. To get these statistics the demographers count percentages of the populations of great cities, children - and ignore conversions

Fraudulent Religious Statistics 3 out, although the bishops' recent report frankly discussed major losses to Pentecostal and other evangelical Protestant "sects." In Brazil, at 153,000,000 population commonly called "the largest Roman Catholic country," the most rapidly growing church and the one with the largest attendance in Sunday morning services is a spiritist church based on the teachings of a Frenchman, Alan Kardec. In Sweden, officially Lutheran since the Reformation of the 16th century, the largest congregation - and the one with the greatest attendance on a Sunday morning - is the Philadelphia Church (Pentecostal) in Stockholm. Lest we forget, the Germany that embraced Hitler claimed to be Christian (Roman Catholic and Protestant), when in fact only a small minority of the population was actively related to either major church. Hitler was able to parade as a "bulwark of Christendom, defending Europe from Bolshevism. " In that confrontation, just as in the confrontation of Orthodox Christianity with the Marxist cadres in Russia, the bishops heading the great masses of church members listed in the statistical tables were leading armies of "paper tigers." Inflated religious statistics - whether Muslim or Christian - are not frauds merely worthy of humorous contempt: they are dangerous to clear-headed discussion and reasonable fashioning of public policy. - Franklin H. Littell

Fraudulent Religious Statistics Lest We Forget #655 8/27/92 IN THE CASE OF MICHAEL MILKEN During the trial of Michael Milken in the media, this writer published commentaries pointing out two serious defects in the guest for justice. The first was the trial of Michael Milken by ordeal, in his case not the medieval trial by fire or water but a typically modern form of torture: trial by media. The second serious defect was that although a large staff of ambitious young lawyers and investigators had set out to prove Milken's guilt, they came up with only a few minor technicalities typical of most high­ speed participants in the feeding frenzy of Wall Street at that time. Nevertheless, the public had been made amazed and anxious by the slow unravelling of the S & L scam. In spite of smoke­ screens, it was becoming evident that the minor disorders that the White House said might cost as much as fifty million dollars to repair would in fact cost at least 500 billion dollars simply to plug the hole in the dike. It was difficult for the public to comprehend how so many boards of directors of banks could have been so foolish and irresponsible in handling other people's money. The thought that something might be fundamentally wrong with the Reagan-Bush prescription for prosperity - de-regulation - was then too awful to contemplate. Individuals - preferably only a few individuals - had to be at fault.

The stock market actions that had been going on, although egually expensive to the public, were at least easier to understand. Millions played the stock market, just as millions played the lotteries and slot machines, and they resented it when some individual won by unfair means - inside information or a fixed machine, for instance. Besides, you didn't have to think about whether playing the stock market and other forms of gambling were immoral and corrupting for all concerned - systemic rather than purely individual sins. Some individual had to be found to blame. Michael Milken, whose associate on the fast track turned against him to "cop a plea," was a good deal easier to nail than Kenneth Keating, who had five U. S. Senators in his stable. Besides, an ambitious Federal prosecutor, Rudolph Giuliana, went after Milken with all the PR and media propaganda an upward mobile politician could mobilize, whereas the Keating Case - so dangerous to persons in high position - has been dragged out by clever lawyers to this very day. In any case, the public wanted to be re-assured that nothing was wrong in general: there were just a few "rotten apples" to worry about. This superficial view pleased those in the centers of power who wanted nothing so little as a return to public regulation of the recently de-regulated banking and securities industries. The commentaries which I published two years ago were based on an instinct for due process of law and basic justice: I did not have a staff, specialists in the technicalities of the law and in the operation of the stock market, to fill in with a large

Milken Case 2 body of details and footnotes. It simply seemed clear to me that lynch-law, whether by rope or by media, was outside the parameters of civilized behavior. Now a careful study has been published of the whole episode - Jesse Kornbluth's Highly Confident - which documents how Michael Milken was guilty of little except being a workaholic, being fast on his feet, and being better at playing the Wall Street speculative game than most of his envious competitors. The "friend" whose fortune he made, who reported him for "insider trading," had in fact brought to the court nothing except the ability to play an important role in the Federal prosecutor's political dramatics. It also seemed evident to me that Michael Milken made an attractive scapegoat for several reasons - one of them fairly obvious to students of "Christendom" and its illnesses. We may ask: where were the Jewish "defense" agencies during the use of Michael Milken as a scapegoat? The answer is simple. The answer is the same as it was when Jonathan Pollard, after improper intervention by a cabinet member, received a sentence all out of proportion to the offense committed: they were busy protesting antisemitism in the Soviet Union. - Franklin H. Littell

Milken Case Lest We Forget #656 DATE:8/28/92 THE TRIUMPH OF THE RADICAL RIGHT "Platforms" at the Republican and Democratic conventions no longer mean very much. With the massive intrusion of TV, even the conventions themselves have become redundant. Nevertheless, the party Platform - especially if it is hammered out by pressure groups with their eyes resolutely set on the past - tells a significant story of where the Party is moving. According to the Houston Convention of the Republican Party, the Grand Old Party is moving resolutely backwards and to the right. We are told that the moderates in the Party, foreseeing what the convention was going to be like, stayed away in droves. About one third of the Republican members of the House of Representatives and the Senate simply failed to turn up at all. It was a field day for the mean little man with a mop on his head: Newt Gingrich, for Phyllis Schlafly - the Amazon of the John Birch Society who years ago campaigned against Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Kennedy brothers as "Communists," and for Pat Buchanan - who had worked so vigorously to twist the GOP to an extremist line that even the champagne salesman of the Radical Right, Billy Buckley, was compelled to condemn him for antisemitism. The newspapers and TV, which commonly employ experts to report on commercialized football and basketball but use the self-educated to discuss constitutional and religious issues, called the Houston Republican Platform more "conservative" than George Bush. When will the media learn to distinguish between conservatives, reactionaries, extremist idealogues and populist right-wingers (fascists)? When will it occur to them that Adolf Hitler was not a conservative, that those abandon the forum of free debate on issues of public policy in favor of frozen ideologies and polarization tactics are neither republicans nor democrats, true Republicans or true Democrats? George Bush is a "hostage," to be sure, and Dan Quayle is his anchor in the Right Wing camp. There was never any chance that Bush would try to change Vice President Quayle for someone more competent to fill the job of "President-in-waiting:" in such case, the Radical Right would have savaged Bush as ruthlessly as they destroyed politically Birch Bayh, John Culver, Frank Church and any others who have confronted their machine in recent decades.

There was never any chance that George Bush would try to establish effective working relations with the Congress: his entire political tactic for three and a half years has been to be seen running against "City Hall." Ronald Reagan could carry it off with a certain measure of integrity, because he was in fact an outsider. George Bush, the very epitome of the insider, the organizational backroom boy, has tried to strike the same note- but it always somehow sounds off key.

Looking at the coalition that since 1958 has pushed American politics away from discussion and compromise into the morass of ideological polarization provides a textbook case in extremist

Radical Right 2 politics of the fascist type.

We can begin with the hardline Fundamentalist Protestant populist rally that was held in Houston right after the Republican Party convention. There Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the rest of the evangelists for American Kultur- religion (a blending of religion and the cultural values of the present age) identified the Christian Gospel with the cause of the Republican Party.

To the sectarian thrust of major Protestant Fundamentalists we can add the political ambitions of a large part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Two causes reflect this political power play: 1) the effort to get strict anti-abortion legislation, so that the state controls at least that aspect of family planning; 2) the campaign to get public moneys flowing into parochial schools.

A third major concentration of power is economic, and it has two foci. The first is the "defense establishment," which suffers from the lack of an "evil empire" to give logic to astronomical budgets and cost over-runs, but has still managed to get public largesse while social services for the poor, the elderly and the disadvantaged have been cut. The last bill for "defense" was for only 273 billion dollars.

The second focus of economic special interest relates to the body of special legislation and executive orders that have made the rich richer and the poor poorer - and sgueezed the middle class - since 1980. One of the code words has been "de-

Radical Right 3 regulation," and this abandonment of supervision in the public interest opened the road to wholesale looting in the S & Ls, in the banks and other centers of the finance industry, in the National Forests and national oil preserves, and in other corners of the national economy that only specialists can discern and define. In twelve years of Reagan and Bush we have moved from being the chief lending nation of the world to being the chief debtor nation. Most Americans don't feel it much in their everyday life, because a game of mirrors has been used to protect us from the economic conseguences of our folly - conseguences that our great grandchildren and other generations yet unborn will have to face.

We have the distinction of being the first generation in two centuries that has left American children with the certainty that they will have a lower standard of living than those that went before them. Those Americans who travel abroad, and see what this kind of recklessness has done to the value of the American dollar - against the Japanese yen and against the German mark, too! - get for the moment some sense of what has happened to America economically. But most of the time we let the looters ship our trees to Japan at American tax-payers' expense, fashion giant cartels to exploit the people's need for food and drugs and transportation, celebrate a North American economic union to open up cheap Mexican labor and vast Canadian natural resources to exploitation by U. S. corporations, break the public trust by

Radical Right 4 pillaging the Social Security funds to paper over deficit financing, pay greatly reduced income taxes in the name of a "trickle down" economic theory worthy of Louis XIV, and otherwise exhibit man's lowest and most predatory nature with impunity. Which brings us to the final point: some people, a tiny part of one per cent of the total population, are making a financial killing on policies that hurt badly the great majority - the living and the yet unborn. From them may come the tens of millions of dollars to buy TV "bites" and run a negative campaign of polarization and character assassination. Whether it will work again is yet uncertain. But its inevitability was declared when the extremists boldly rode roughshod, with bugles blowing, over all tendencies toward reason and moderation in the GOP Platform at Houston, Texas. - Franklin H. Littell

Radical Right Lest We Forget #657 DATE:9/ll/92 GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER One of the most exciting batches of documents in years has been released by the British. The material consists of transcripts of taped recordings of discussions among ten of the German Third Reich's leading atomic scientists. Interned in England during the summer and fall of 1945, their rooms were "bugged." We are now, nearly half a century later, able to listen in on what the men who might have built the bomb thought about the project. Probably the two captives best known to Americans, whose opinions are especially interesting to us, were Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker (brother of the- Richard von Weizsacker, President of the Federal Republic of Germany) and Werner Heisenberg (winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics at the age of 31, best known for the Principle of Indeterminacy) . Heisenberg is dead, but Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker after the war left Physics for Philosophy, unwilling to work further on nuclear weaponry. A standing mystery since the war has been the answer to the guestion why Germany, far ahead of other countries in the beginning, failed to develop the atom bomb. In part, of course, it was because the Nazi's fanatical racism drove some of the most brilliant physicists / out of Europe: Albert Einstein, Lis€ ftfeitner, Hans Bethe... In part, it becomes evident from the Farm Hall documents that it was because- apparently with one exception, Walter Gerlach, the coordinator of the team - those who remained and supposedly were working on the "miracle weapon" didn't want to succeed. True, they were not given the priority in materials and staff that would have brought the Germans in first. But the record shows that Heisenberg, who also sent warnings to the Allies in 1941, 1942 and 1944 through foreign scientists that German scientists were at work on the project, in his conferences with Nazi officials discouraged the notion that such a bomb could be built. The British analysts, studying the transcripts, have pointed out that Heisenberg revealed a very sophisticated understanding of bomb physics which he had kept to himself during the war.

Weizsacker sums up the group's feelings in one of the surveilled discussions: "I don't think we ought to make excuses now because we did not succeed, but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed..." A colleague comments that if they had had the bomb they "would have obliterated London but would still not have conguered the world, and then they would have dropped them on us." Weizsacker again: "One can say it might have been a much greater tragedy for the world if Germany had the uranium bomb." "If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded." Another colleague responds: "I don't believe that but I am thankful we didn't succeed..."

During the heat of the battle, it was impossible for the Allied leaders to contemplate the possibility that there might be a residual resistance to Nazism left in Germany. The extent of resistance in the German churches was discounted, even though vouched for by one of the greatest of modern British churchmen: George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and a member of the House of Lords. Bell was in touch with couriers from Germany, who at risk of torture and death brought out word of church resistance and of the several attempts to assassinate

German Resistance 2 Hitler. On 30 July 1944 they almost succeeded. There are several reasons why the extent of German resistance, active and passive, has been depreciated. One of the most important reasons is technical: CIA and the State Department, FBI and the academic specialists have all come up woefully short in their ideas and actions vis-a-vis totalitarian ideologies and dictatorships. Remember yesterday, when the hard-liners were assuring us that the USSR was a terrible "evil empire," monstrously powerful in its threat to the free world, and the appeasers were assuring us that in spite of some difficulties the USSR still expressed the dreams and hopes of the Russian people? As we now know, both schools of thought were hopelessly out of touch with reality. The longings of the peoples are without a chance, as long as there is a dictator in place with the brutal ruthlessness of a Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler to keep them bowed under. v So it was with the German Third Reich. In spite of the use of an internal spy system that reached into every ward and city block, every village and countryside, in spite of a system of state terrorism that murdered millions and drove others into "inner emigration," in spite of vast mob scenes with pep talks and liturgies of acclamation of the Leader, there were nuclei of brave dissenters and opponents who kept their heads down and did what they could - when they could - in the words of the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "to throw a hammer into the spokes of the wheel." - Franklin H. Littell

German Resistance Lest We Forget #662 DATE:10/15/92 VIOLENCE AGAINST LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE Two recent incidents in Greater Philadelphia show how difficult it is to maintain liberty of conscience today, even in the "Penn's Woods" which were set aside as an asylum three hundred years ago. William Penn received from the King of England this vast stretch of land- which made him the largest landholder in the world of that day - to pay off a debt the King had owed his father, Admiral Thomas Penn. Penn, far in advance of the "Christendom" of his day, opened the land to a motley array of individuals and groups who were persecuted because of their convictions.

Most of the early settlers came to "Pennsylvania" from persecution in Europe. Quite a few moved from other American colonies which still practiced persecution in the European style, maintained churches and church institutions at tax-payers' expense, and persecuted non-conformists and dissenters. Some of the "cults and sects" that infested Penn's lands before the Revolution were so out of the ordinary that leaders in the more conventional colonies called Pennsylvania the Latrina of the English colonies.

Today many people are amazed to think that in "olden times" some people could be so intolerant that other people would sell everything and leave the homes of their fathers and mothers, risk the long and dangerous trip across the Atlantic by sailing ship, and brave the natives in a new world just to get away from them. Perhaps some American Jews are recent enough arrivals not to be as amazed at intolerance as some of their gentile neighbors, since the substitute- religions into which Europe fell in this century - Marxism and Nazism- have been as addicted to persecution as the old "Christian" tsars, emperors and kings before them.

But most of us think of persecution as something that belongs to the past. We wonder why the Serbs and Croatians and Bosnians turn to such "medieval" tools of excessive violence in hatreds exacerbated by their centuries of hostility as Serbian Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholic Christians, Muslims. We share the astonishment of the media that Europeam political leaders are so slow to do something to stop the slaughter, even if it did arise from real or imagined grievances of the past. Yet the same bigotry and the same contempt for "soul liberty" inspires violence in our own midst. So far that violence directed against individuals and groups has been limited to kidnappings and de- programmings. But it arises from precisely the same spiritual arrogance toward the rights of others, the same willingness to break the law in the name of some perceived truth, the same failure to understand that when others' souls and consciences are assaulted our own are at risk.

It is of more than incidental significance that Reinhard Heydrick received the portfolio to liguidate "dangerous cults and sects" in the Nazi Third Reich two and a half years before he was given the portfolio to liquidate the Jewish people. The organization presently working in Greater Philadelphia that is chiefly responsible for raising money, recruiting personnel, identifying targets, kidnapping them and subjecting them to high- pressure "de-programming" is called the "Cult Awareness Network."

CAN 2 CAN preys on the anxieties and despairs of parents, and exploits also the resources of a much larger network of the parents' friends, who view with horror a scenario where the "child" leaves the inherited creed and culture for another. The "child" may be 36 years old, but the immature "adults" just won't let go.

In the Christendom of former times, as in the world of Islam today, such things didn't happen: missionaries for other belief systems were put to death, imprisoned for life or (if they had luck) merely harried out of the land. Adult converts were put to death (under the Justinian Code, which governed religious laws in some European lands until recently). If it can be called progress, and perhaps it may be called progress considering some of the alternatives, converts to unwelcome creeds are not put to death in Greater Philadelphia today: instead, the assault troops of "de-programmers" may be called in to launch the ancient ritual of exorcism. To the bigoted and violent, strange and unwelcome beliefs are so many "devils" inhabiting the unwilling victim.

The point is, however, that the "victim" is no victim at all, unless the kidnappers and de-programmers succeed in breaking his spirit. He or she is simply a citizen whose rights to liberty of conscience have been violently violated.

The two recent cases that have attracted media attention in Greater Philadelphia involved individuals who converted to the Buddhist religion as interpreted by Rama and the philosophy of Lyndon LaRouche, respectively. The story of the young woman, Jennifer Jacobs, who was kidnapped, terrorized and abused by misguided parents assisted

CAN 3 by CAN appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer a month ago. The story of the young man, Lewis DuPont Smith, who barely escaped the same kind of violence plotted by his father and CAN has been related in the Philadelphia media for days.

CAN is un-American. Such activities, which freguently employ persons with criminal records to perform criminal acts against young adults whose parents won't let them grow up and make their own mistakes, are an affront to the Religious Liberty guaranteed by the Federal Constitution and to basic human rights. CAN certainly has no place in the world of those who remember William Penn, rejoice in the founding of Pennsylvania, and cherish the "soul liberty" with which he three centuries ago replaced the coercive orthodoxy of European-style state churches. CAN exudes the spirit of "Saint" Torquemada toward "Jews and heretics," Martin Luther toward Jews and Mennonites, and John Calvin toward Unitarians and Baptists. CAN, even though it has as apologists some church and synagogue people who should know better, is also a racket on which a few individuals - kidnappers, "de=programmers" and marginal psychologists- have made a great deal of money.

CAN and its staffers encourage distraught parents to take actions that further alienate their young people. CAN conspires to destroy the liberties of individuals and groups of that have religions or world- views different from the rest of us. It deserves to be put in the dock with the individuals that the FBI has exposed and the courts are now trying for criminal activity.

- Franklin H. Littell, President of the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights CAN 4 Lest We Forget #663 DATE:10/16/92 GERMANY, THE CORNERSTONE OF A UNITED EUROPE The thing that Charles DeGaulle feared, that led him forty years ago to torpedo the European Defense Community (EDC), has now come to pass: a re-united Germany is again the center- indeed the cornerstone - of a united Europe. German re-unification came with a rush when the Communist dictatorships began to topple. The Communist facade, "the German Democratic Republic" that ruled over seven east German states, had been the most brutal Stalinist-style regime of all. For years, the only place little committees of citizen dissenters could function was in the Protestant local churches. All other life-space was coordinated (gleichgeschaltet. by the Stalinist state (1948-89), just as it had been synchronized by the Nazi state (1933-45). But once the dictatorship in the USSR, the master state, was shaken, once Gorbachev and the rulers of the East had allowed the peoples' voices to be heard (Glasnost., the satellite dictatorships began to fall. At that point the watershed decision was made that allowed the will of the people to triumph: the Russian and satellite dictators, no longer as ruthless as Stalin or the Chinese despots, refused to order the troops to put down the revolution. The dictatorships had claimed to speak "for" the people, to be governments of "the people," but when the people had a chance to speak openly the rulers were shown to be illegitimate regimes. The dictatorships had shown no respect for human rights; now they lacked even the show of a popular mandate. In East Germany, the people streamed out of the churches into the streets - to tear down the infamous Wall (9-10 November 1989) and, again, to celebrate national unity (3 October 1990). On 23 September 1992, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs- Klaus Kinkel - suggested in his first address to the General Assembly of the United Nations that a seat might be found for Germany on the Security Council of the UN. How dependable is the new Germany? Nervousness outside increases with every report of skinhead and Nazi mob attacks on foreigners who have come seeking asylum. Nervousness grows at the reports of vandalism aimed at Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials. Is it possible that after four decades of enlightened leadership Germany is again, evoking the mysticism of Volk and Teutonic myth, returning to a racist self-definition? Mobs are one thing, but a strong democratic government need not succumb to the passions of the moment. However, participation by members of internal terrorist movements in the centers of power - in the legislatures, in the councils and cabinets, in radio and TV - is another level of the problem. The task of a legitimate government is to put the assassins and arsonists and terrorizers of the streets in prison. The task of a legitimate government is to defend the liberties of loyal citizens, and to defend its own constitution, against those who will destroy the political covenant when and where they can. This is not simple: new political inventions are needed.

Germany, the Cornerstone 2 Especially poignant is the thought that extremist political parties are again drawing votes far above the threshold limit in Germany, for West Germany once had one of the most intelligent and effective and just systems for putting extremists out of business. (The "threshold" law defines the percentage requirement for a party to have members of a legislature. For instance, Israel's democracy needs nothing so much as a tighter threshold law.) In Germany, the "National Republicans" (neo-Nazis) are now triumphantly placing their people in several state governments and city councils. How did this happen, when for many years the Federal Office for Defense of the Constitution (Bundeszentrale fur Verfassungsschutz) successfully had excluded dozens of leftwing and rightwing extremist movements from the political forum and from government agencies? Here we come upon one of the tragedies of recent political history, a tragedy that can now have far-reaching conseguences for Germany, for a unifying Europe, and for efforts everywhere to maintain and defend democratic government against its declared enemies. About four years ago, in a badly mistaken show of "liberalism," the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruke emasculated the Federal government's power to put internal terrorist movements out of business. The court said, in effect, what the U. S. Supreme Court has said in ruling against the St. Paul ordinance and other bits of democratic defense legislation here in America: the right of "free speech" includes the right

Germany, the Cornerstone 3 to terrorize, threaten, and display barely leashed violence against others. Up until the recent Karlsruhe decision, Germany was one of the countries leading in the effort to clarify the difference between "free speech" that is presented in good faith in the public forum, speech that helps to create an informed and wise public opinion - and utterance intended to damage the security and shorten the life expectancy of other citizens. If Germany, increasingly powerful and important in Europe and in the world, is now a government in danger of flunking its exams in protecting the liberties of loyal citizens and the rights of minorities without a voice, if Germany is in danger of losing major political initiative to internal terrorists, it is not only a triumph for those who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing: it is also a victory for the sloganizing legal fundamentalism of ideologues. In this case the ideologues were self-styled "liberals," who sometimes - in the wrong place in the wrong time - are just as dangerous to liberty and self-government as reactionary ideologues who are self-styled "conservatives." - Franklin H. Littell

Germany, the Cornerstone Lest We Forget #664 DATE:10/23/92 THE HOLOCAUST AND THE UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS AND ALUMNI Six hundred and sixty-three "Lest We Forget" commentaries ago, on November 23, 1978, I wrote my first column for THE JEWISH TIMES. The first column dealt with a moral and ethical guestion highlighted by the headline THE JEWISH TIMES then gave it: "Universities Produced 'Technicians' for the Third Reich." The guestion, which has sometimes been put under the phrase "the treason of the intellectuals," concerns the way in which the best trained and - in the formal sense - the best educated individuals in Western societies have so many times been civilization's grave-diggers.

The question has exercised me for more than fifty years. In fact, the first lecture I ever gave to a Jewish audience - in 1942 at the Hillel Foundation in Ann Arbor (University of Michigan) - addressed the same painful question: How could the lawyers and jurists, doctors and medics, theologians and churchmen, business leaders and corporate executives, high school teachers and professors - all of them - have betrayed the professed standards of their vocation and/or profession? The facts are beyond dispute: in every important area of specialization, the technical experts and specialists who operate an advanced industrialized society like the German Third Reich made their necessary contribution to the Holocaust.

Nor is that all. The genocide of the Jews was, to be sure, the most singular of the crimes of the Nazi state. But it was not the only one. The first million of Germans who were thrown into concentration camps without due process and justice were not brutalized as Jews - although there were individual Jews among them. The first victims were liberals, pacifists, Utopian socialists, communists, "cosmopolitans," labor leaders, members of "dangerous cults and sects," and others whose organizational activity threatened the Nazi movement's monopoly of the public forum. Contemptuous and brutal disregard for the dignity and integrity of the human person - of the dissenter who would not just go along - was also a Nazi crime.

The destruction of the Weimar Republic and its structures of democratic self-government and protection of individual liberties was also a major crime. The taking over of the high schools (Gymnasien,, with the expulsion of Jewish teachers and pupils and others thought ideologically unreliable, was also a major crime. So was the same process when carried through in the medical societies, the bar associations, the universities and the other organized sectors of society. Before the coming of the world war created the conditions in which the Nazi dictatorship could carry out the logic of its murderous hatred of the Jewish people, the German Third Reich had ceased to be a legitimate government.

Yet the professors who retained their jobs, the teachers who pumped up the youth with Party propaganda, the lawyers and jurists who worked out the "precedents" and bureaucratic procedures so that monstrous crimes could be committed under the popular slogan of "law and order," continued to do their work right through to the collapse (Zusammenbruch) of the Nazi

"The Treason of the Intellectuals" 2 government in 1945. What was lacking in the education of these university products (Intellektuellen) that they remained faithful and sometimes enthusiastic retainers of the likes of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler? What was the defect in their catechetical instruction as Roman Catholics and Protestants? What was the dereliction in duty of the bishops and priests and pastors that so few of the ordained kept their ordination vows, rebuked the violent men and defied the violent system? This is the complex of questions that our universities to this day have refused to face. Very few among the educated will today deny that the Holocaust story must be told and lessons drawn from it. (There will always be "revisionists" who deny the evidence, just as there will always be a Flat Earth Society, but they do not count in literate and leadership circles.) But how many realize that what is involved is a credibility crisis in Christendom? How many understand that there is a credibility crisis for the modern university? How is it that when the topic "Holocaust" comes up, the matter is treated as a "Jewish issue?" Why, when university administrators get the chance, do they slough Holocaust courses off into "Jewish Studies?" Why, when two of America's greatest universities recently received 20 million dollar and 22 million dollar grants for programs in professional ethics, have they totally ignored confrontation with the Holocaust and its lessons? The answer is, of course, that both Jewish and Christian

"The Treason of the Intellectuals" 3 establishments - along with the majority of gentiles - have allowed the Holocaust to be isolated and rendered antiseptic. In 1942 in Ann Arbor, the bright young students and instructors insisted that my word about the Nazi attack on the Jews and on those baptized gentiles who remained Christians and resisted Nazism and all its works was "too pessimistic." Today the complacent have another form of denial: the professions (medicine, business administration, law, theology, etc.) aren't really in such bad shape. If for some odd reason people want to study the story and lessons of the Holocaust, let them enroll in "Judaica" or "Jewish Studies" - a subject suitable for those few students (mostly Jewish) who also study Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Second Temple Jerusalem. Decades ago I predicted that the campuses would prove to be even stonier ground than the Christian congregations when it came to confronting the implications of the Holocaust, and such has proven to be the case. - Franklin H. Littell

"The Treason of the Intellectuals" Lest We Forget #665 DATE:11/6/92 ON 'JUDGING' ISRAEL

A few Sundays ago I was attending services at a church that will not be identified. The guest preacher was a professional friend with whom I did committee work, spoke and marched during the early days of the civil rights movement. Another "old- timer" also showed up, visiting that Sunday morning. We had lived and worked in different parts of the country, and none of the three has had a chance for a real visit with the others for fifteen to twenty years. We met at the end of the service, two of us coming forward to thank the third "old-timer" for a fine sermon. We recognized each other instantly, in spite of the additional face-lines and grey hair. After shaking hands with the preacher and thanking him, I turned to the third party. As he shook hands in a friendly fashion, his first words were, "We have to judge Israel for mistreating the Palestinians." He was immediately seconded by the guest preacher, so that two of them turned on me. To read the significance of what was said and at what point in our life histories it was said, getting the overtones and undertones as well as the plain meaning of the words, you have to let your imagination float over the scenario. Three "old friends" are meeting for the first time in years, and the first word said - a motion that gains an immediate 'second' - is a hostile word about Israel. I take some pride in the fact that at least they knew where I stand and what I have been doing much of the time since we last visited: working with Christians concerned for Israel. But, speaking at the purely personal level, there was the pain of severance and alienation. Perhaps this comes with the years: "from love's golden circle, the gems drop away." Some are lost by death, others are lost by indifference, and some are sacrificed to ideology. In this case, the ideology was the antisemitism that is endemic in Christian culture. What is the non-ideological, human response in such an encounter? The first word is, of course, "How are your children?" OR "How do you like retirement?" OR "Is your health as good as you look?" (This last phrase is a subtle way of asking an elderly friend if he is dying of anything malignant. I pass it on free of charge. Use it only in a crowd or a fast- moving situation, however: if he's cozying a sickness, and your line of retreat is cut off, he may bend your ear for an hour or two.) But no, that was not the first word that sprung to their lips. The first word, a word that came out in a rush, was this: "We must judge Israel" (!). Two things need to be said. First, neither of the "old- timers" was ever well known for strong condemnation of dictatorships and despotisms, excepting of course the now virtuallty universal condemnation of Hitler's Third Reich. They had in more active years done yeoman service in helping to make the American republic live up to its principles. But did they know the qualitative difference between life in a free society, governed as a democracy or a republic or a constitutional

On 'Judging' Israel 2 monarchy, and life under an old-fashioned despot or a 20th century dictator? I'm afraid not. I'm afraid that like so many church people they are simply unable to distinguish qualitatively between Israel and the surrounding despotisms and dictatorships. It probably has never occurred to them that the establishment of an Advisory Council to the crown in Saudi Arabia, about which the media and the State Department recently made so much fuss as a "step toward democracy," was a step that England took early in the 13th century. Do we have six centuries to wait for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others like them to be governed by authentically legitimate governments? Countries like Israel (and the USA) make mistakes, but through popular sovereignty those mistakes get corrected and the ship of state put back on course. Dictatorships pursue their brutal ways until the pressure is more than human beings can bear, whether they be rulers or subjects. When that happens you have the tragedy in what was once Yugoslavia, or the terrible dangers that are mounting in the former U.S.S.R. There is a basic qualitative difference between Israel, for example, and Syria or Iraq. The former deserves our good will, and fraternal concern when mistakes are made. The dictatorships deserve only our fervent prayers that the Lord may speedily lift their burdensome weight from their poor exploited subjects. There is a second point: Why is it always Israel that's to be "judged?" The global landmap is half covered by regimes with human rights records for generations that are vastly worse than

On 'Judging' Israel 3 anything of which Israel has been guilty for a single day! Why Israel - instantly, spontaneously, reflexively, with knee-jerk dependability? When that guestion is probed with honesty and vigor, it will be discovered that the evil of antisemitism reaches levels far more persistent and dangerous than the rowdyism of gangs of young punks in Rostock or Dresden. The appropriate response to such roughnecks - to the internal terrorists - is a stern use of the police power. But what is to be done with the "typhoid Marys" of the churches and the campuses, who reflexively forget even ordinary civility when a nerve-end of hostility to the Jews is exposed?

- Franklin H. Littell

On 'Judging' Israel Lest We Forget #666 DATE:11/13/92 ON TINKERING WITH THE CONSTITUTION During the last year, as the presidential election heated up, several bright young political scientists published articles critical of the Electoral College. It was called everything from a "vermiform appendix" to a "major obstacle to real democracy." The Electoral College, to remind the forgetful, is a procedure based on Article II, Paragraph 2 of the Federal Constitution, as modified by the 12th Amendment. Basically, the President and Vice President are not elected directly by the voters: the voters elect representatives ("Electors") committed to certain candidates, who then cast their ballots. As can be seen by the way the electoral votes are counted in the wrap-up of the election, everyone assumes that the Electors are a mere formality. In constitutional law, however, an Elector can cast his ballot according to his own conscience. On rare occasions in the last two hundred years, a few Electors have done the unexpected. The existence of the Electoral College is another evidence that the "Founding Fathers" mistrusted political decisions based upon instant response to the voters. On several occasions it has served America well. A good case would be the election of Abraham Lincoln, who got only 40% of the popular vote in a 4-way race for the Presidency, but scored a smashing victory in the Electoral College. He was given by the Electoral College a mandate to serve the Union. Even Senators, sitting in what is now the most powerful legislative body in the world, were indirectly elected until the 17th Amendment was certified in 1913. When we saw during the recent Senate election in Pennsylvania how much of the confrontation between candidates depended upon low level "imaging" rather than discussion of the real issues, when we think about how much depended upon the expenditure of vast sums of money, we come to see that the populist approach to self- government involves a trade-off. In return for managed direct contact between the candidates and the crowds, we get a large increase of irrelevance and demagoguery - if not outright corruption. Our forefathers did not have the power of TV to contend with. Candidates could take their arguments into the public forum and strive to win election on the merits of their case. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates have long served as the high model of responsible candidacies. We may devoutly pray that the new Congress will take immediate steps to promote the discussion of real issues through Public Broadcasting, and to reduce the buying of seats in the Senate and House of Representatives. It does not take a mathematician to figure out that if 80% of the money in a country is in the hands of less than 5% of the people, political posts that can be bought by money are not normally going to be filled by individuals passing laws to serve the well-being of the community as a whole. The "level playing field" that we hear about is now sharply tilted politically as well as economically.

Electoral College 2 The "Founding Fathers" of the Constitution resented monarchy, and they had good reason for their resentment. They also mistrusted populist democracy, with good reason. Although the House of Commons still had restricted franchise two centuries ago, there were already many of the signs of aggressive demagoguery and responsive emotionalism that the framers of our national Constitution thought almost as bad as a bad king. What would our situation be if we had direct election of the President and Vice President, without the buffer of the Electoral College? Quite simply, we would be immobilized while the wheelers and dealers attempted to make up a parliamentary coalition. Imagine what the national situation would be like if the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate, Bob Dole of Kansas, were in a position to have his mean-spirited response to Clinton's election poison the process of forming a government! Where would we be if there were a flow into the main stream of the wicked spirit of Pat Robertson's "Christian Coalition," where bitter-end hot gospellers distributed tens of millions of fliers before the election denouncing Democratic candidates "in the Name of Christ," where one religious demagogue of the pulpit (with an 8,000 member congregation in Ft. Lauderdale) evoked the Judgment of God upon the nation for electing Clinton?! And, in truth, the electioneering maneuvers of a considerable proportion of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and priesthood were no more loyal to American standards of fairplay and consensus than the tactics of the Protestant Fundamentalists.

Electoral College 3 Ross Perot, with his populist campaign, won over 20% of the popular votes in 27 states, with 19% over all. Bill Clinton took 43% and George Bush 38%. Think what the splinter parties of the neo-Nazis were able to do in the German Federal Republic in 1950- 53, playing the middle between the CDU and SPD. Think what the tiny extremist religious parties in Israel are able to do in securing financial privileges by playing the middle between Likud and Labor. Lest we forget, think what the Nazi populist movement and the splintering parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic meant for the German people and all of Europe's peoples. The civil war in the ruins of Yugoslavia today show what armed mobs made berserk by unrestrained popular causes can mean for women, children and other helpless victims of all tribes and religions.

Without the Electoral College, which gives an over-all understanding that - regardless of mere popular percentages- Clinton and Gore scored a smashing victory over the incumbents, the United States of America would be utterly unable to show strength in foreign affairs and move forward to deal with internal problems. - Franklin H. Littell

Electoral College Lest We Forget #667 DATE:11/17/92 CLERICAL POLITICS Although there seems to be a good deal of nervousness about mentioning the subject, the role of the churches in politics deserves more candid discussion. A good deal has been written about Pat Robertson's "Christian Coalition" and its militance in the recent election. But George Bush did not make the pilgrimage to Virginia Beach just before November 3: he came to Philadelphia to receive media coverage for his meeting with Archbishop Bevilacqua. The truth is that the election efforts of the Protestant Fundamentalists and the Roman Catholic hierarchy converged dramatically during the recent election. The former were more noisy about it, and they are now claiming that but for their efforts the Bush/Quayle ticket would have been defeated even more dramatically. The latter were hard at work, however, in more guiet ways. The issues that brought about this convergence of clerical politics were two: first, the drive to get more restrictive state control of abortion; second, the drive to get tax support for private (church) schools. Trying to get a rational discussion of abortion legislation as a wise public policy has become almost hopeless. The air is filled with sighs and shrieks about "another Holocaust of 6,000,000," "mass murder," "killing unborn persons," etc. - with little regard for civil discourse and no respect for biology. Although neither Confucius (c. 551-479 B.C.E.) nor St. Thomas Aguinas (1225?-1274 C.E.) knew how conception occurs, nor understood how the foetus repeats the history of the race in its development from primal life form into a human being, their biological ignorance still governs the dogmas of some late 20th century men and women.

Most vicious of all, so far as achieving a reasonable public policy is concerned - and here the media contribute their share to the confusion, is the polarization of the discussion between two parties called "anti-abortion" and "pro-abortion." NO ONE - I repeat, NO ONE is "pro-abortion." To hold otherwise is to lie, and it is usually done for propagandistic reasons. At the outer extremes, the argument actually lies between those who want state control of women's bodies and those who take a totally anarchistic approach to individual choice.

In between these extremes are the rest of us, the vast majority of concerned persons who want to hammer out a public policy that minimizes government control and maximizes the "sacred condominium" of decision, with woman, spouse, minister and doctor working out a consensus of conscientious decision.

Lest we forget, Adolf Hitler was a fanatic against abortion and for government control of family planning and state control of women's reproductive activities.

The second issue - tax money for church schools - is usually presented as a fair trade-off. In truth, however, in America the public school has been for a century and a half the single most important common experience of the members of each young generation. In democratic countries (viz, Switzerland and Holland) that have given up on such a universal shared school experience by the youth of sundry ethnic and religious communities, the alternative has been universal military service. If the public schools are destroyed in America,

Clerics in Politics 2 being first bled white, we shall have to turn to some form of conscripted National Service. Back of the sgueeze play on the public schools, however, is another - hidden and only whispered about - force: the race issue. Unmentioned and unnamed, but at visceral level in the upsurge of political Fundamentalism in the last generation is a fundamental disenchantment with the public schools since Brown y. Topeka. All across the hills and valleys and plains, in the villages and little cities that are Protestant Fundamentalism's strongholds, private white "Christian" academies and home-teaching programs have mushroomed. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has been committed officially to parochial schools since the Baltimore Provincial Council of 1883. The program for a school in every parish was launched, however, when there was an ample supply of cheap labor - nuns and brothers - to teach the classes. Now that there is what is called "a shortage of vocations," and lay teachers (some with families) have to be paid decent wages, the economic pressure is tremendous. The traditional principle that any denomination is free to found its own schools for its children if it is willing to pay for them is coming under heavy artillery attack - from both the Protestant Fundamentalists and the Roman Catholic bishops. Lest we forget, it was the prospect of continued tax support of church institutions that led Pacelli (later Pius XII) to seek the Concordat agreement with the Nazi dictatorship that gave Hitler in July, 1933 his first diplomatic victory, that rendered him salonfahig (socially acceptable) in decent German social circles. As on the abortion legislation issue, so on the issue of tax

Clerics in Politics 3 support of church schools there is a growing number of so-called conservative politicians ready to come out for radically changing the American tradition - if the votes are there. The results can be very damaging to our country. On Election Day, as we entered the voting precincts, we found sitting behind the table and writing down names a Roman Catholic priest in full clerical garb. On inquiry, we learned that the law that campaigners must stay outside the polling place applies also to persons in police or military uniform - but not the uniform of the religious. Nevertheless, it was obvious that he was there in uniform to intimidate. The Judge of Elections said he was a "volunteer," but of course since Vatican II he could have come as a "volunteer" in civilian clothes. With several of the important candidates "pro-choice," there is little question what he was there in uniform to represent. One of our neighbors also protested to the Judge of Elections, who responded irritably, "Somebody else protested. But if it had been somebody in a yamulka, you wouldn't protest!" Our neighbor, being a lady as well as a Jew, said "I beg your pardon," and left. As I said, clerical politics can be very destructive of American values of civility, fair play and shared concern for the wellbeing of all citizens. - Franklin H. Littell

Clerics in Politics Lest We Forget #668 DATE:11/25/92 "SUPPORT YOUR POLICE!" A few years ago there was a rash of bumper stickers: "Support Your Police!" The campaign was started by the John Birch Society in the 1960s, at the time of the student demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and it has ebbed and flowed ever since. The purpose of the slogan is ostensibly sound. As a matter of fact, all tax-payers support the police. And every good citizen supports them in their legitimate custodianship of force and violence. To put it simply, they hold back the jungle. Voluntary self-discipline - even among elite groups where it should be expected, like doctors, lawyers, churchmen, business executives and professors - is inadequate under the best of circumstances. And in the worst of circumstances, as we have seen on a large screen in recent years, even high public officials need policing. In spite of obvious danger from criminal elements, and in spite of the psychological strain on the individual policeman and even more his family, physical danger is not the chief burden a uniformed policeman carries. The chief burden is the feeling of isolation, the sense that he is shut off from a public that appreciates him too little. Moreover, he sees humanity at its worst, and is tempted to settle for a very low estimate of human kind. Having served for two years as an MP, this writer can testify personally that the psychological pressures are great, and that they easily lead to a sense of being "in the society but not of it" - a sense of alienation from the general society. When this happens to the whole group, and when it becomes more than a passing moment of despond, the situation is dangerous. No society can afford to allow its uniformed police to be infiltrated and led astray by internal terrorists, or to slide into alienation through neglect and lack of moral and financial support. The Birchers' slogan was intended to polarize, to drive a greater wedge between the police and the public. Like their spiritual kin, the Nazis and the Communists, the American extremists have understood that there are two important "choke points" in an open society: the police departments and the boards of education. The police are custodians of the violence, hopefully minimal most of the time, that holds back the jungle. The educators are the custodians of the formation of young minds. A wise citizenry will see to it that those in both power centers are well trained, well compensated, and loyal to democratic principles. Lest we forget, the German Third Reich was a place where those who are supposed to be the protectors became the tormentors. In religious myth, the place where the protectors become the tormentors is called Hell. When the police live up to their important service to the society, they are entitled to the support and the prayers of fellow-citizens. In a classical Christian prayer, the petition is that the police may "restrain the wicked, protect the good, and keep their hands from innocent blood." We have seen some very striking reports in recent months to indicate that tensions between the police and the public are not limited to dictatorships, where the tension is encouraged by the

"Support Your Police!" 2 rulers and built into the system itself. Think of the Crown Heights tragedy, where public expression of lack of confidence in the police was met with the New York Police Chief's protest against "police-bashing." Think of the Rodney King case in Los Angeles, where public fury against perceived police brutality resulted in a vast destruction from which recovery will take years of hard work. Think of the Malice Green case in Detroit, where a murder by police sent terror through a whole population. Detroit was saved from disaster by a responsible Chief of Police and a Mayor with a cool head and steady hand, assets which were lacking in Los Angeles. To keep one's hands from innocent blood is a mark of a worthy and competent policeman. So is respect for the rights of citizens, even though some radicals are still trying to capitalize on police brutality and incompetence. The beating of Rodney King was seen all over the world, just as soon as we saw it in Philadelphia or Detroit. The cost of rogue police violence disgraced us in the eyes of the world. People are not surprised when a Saddam Hussein sends forces to murder 20,000 of his own subjects: they know he is that kind of a dictator and that his police are schooled in brutality and depravity. But they are disheartened when they see that even a free society, a society with respect for human rights, can have police who behave so badly. Think of what happened a few days ago in Berlin, in this case due to police incompetence rather than malfeasance. 350,000 people rallied to affirm with their democratic statesmen that they were

"Support Your Police!" 3 done with antisemitism and foreigner-bashing, to take the oath again that this time Germany intended to stay on the track. The police were so stupid as to allow 300 to 350 skinheads and leftist terrorists to crowd the front rows and - at the moment when TV cameras with global coverage were trained on them - to pelt with eggs and tomatoes Richard von Weizsacker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher and other German statesmen of world rank.

A democratic society is entitled to a police force that is resistant to extremists and internal terrorists, that is obedient to law, that is well trained and well compensated. The police, in turn, are entitled to the moral and financial and spiritual support of all loyal citizens. The trust between the police and the public remains one of the primary signs of the health or sickness of a society. - Franklin H. Littell

"Support Your Police!" •

Lest We Forget #669 DATE:12/2/92 WHAT IS ANTISEMITISM? According to a recent report issued by the Anti-Defamation League, one out of every five Americans holds strongly antisemitic views. On two key guestions, a marked rise in negative judgment since 1964 was noted. In 1964 "only" 11% thought "Jews have too much power in the US;" today it stands at 31%. In 1964, 30% thought "Jews are more loyal to Israel than America;" the figure today is 35%. In the Jewish weeklies, several headlines read "40 million Americans Seen As Anti-Semitic." We are reminded of the problem when newspapers report that the Governor of Mississippi, Kirk Fordice, related the decline of morality in America to a lessening emphasis on the Christian religion. The setting was the Republican Governors' Conference, and apparently the mood was that of a wake. "The United States is a Christian nation," he said. When the Governor of another state tried to save the day by adding a reference to America's "Judeo- Christian heritage," Governor Fordice said testily: "If I wanted to do that, I would have done it." Far more serious in immediate practical terms has been the fall-out from the killing of a black boy by a Lubavitcher limousine, followed by the killing of Yankel Rosenbaum during a black mob scene. So far, none of the best efforts of leaders in both Jewish and African-American communities has been able to end the polarization and put to rest the widespread feeling that justice has not been done and racism is the reason for it. The police force, a thermometer of public trust or mistrust, Antisemitism has found itself confronted by massive suspicion on the part of both Jewish Americans and African-Americans. Although despotisms and dictatorships can function by repression, brutality and terror, no free society can long survive a major erosion of public trust in the police - those who wield power and authorized violence. That is why Citizen Review Boards are useful to protect the police in the legitimate exercise of their authority, against the defamation of demagogues and threat of mobs, as well as to rein in any police tendency to abuse their office or operate it incompetently. The report from Germany, which has been getting so much bad press lately for foreigner-bashing and antisemitism, indicates that the police power is now being used there very vigorously against internal terrorists. After weeks of sporadic violence against foreigners, with occasional antisemitic defacements and graffiti, the government of the German republic has ordered the police to raid dozens of homes of extremists. Large guantities of neo-Nazi propaganda, explosives and anti-personnel weapons have been confiscated. One of the major conspiracies, the Nationalist Front, has been declared illegal and its properties sequestered. Yet public opinion polls continue to show a high percentage - as much as 33% - of the German populace still responding with answers judged antisemitic. We are brought to a very important distinction, one that is often forgotten in discussions of antisemitism. In both America and Germany, as well as in other democratic societies, antisemitic Antisemitism cabals are operating outside the civil covenant and have no right place in the public forum. Unlike societies ruled by authoritarian regimes, where antisemitism may be an important part of the official ideology, in free societies any movement or action that threatens the liberty, dignity, privacy or integrity of loyal citizens is an affront to all. The appropriate rejoinder to racist or antisemitic incitement or violence is vigorous use of the police power of the government. In Germany this has been slow in coming, and in some parts of the United States it hasn't arrived at all. If the members of government are unwilling or unable to protect the liberties of loyal citizens, which is the other face of government by the people, they must be cast out of office. They have taken oaths to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and should be held to their word. If members of the police are unwilling, through corrupt influence or ideological infiltration, to move with speed and competence against racists and antisemites, they should be replaced by officers loyal to the republic. The more difficult task then begins, once third level problems have been dealt with. What about the other two levels of antisemitism, for example? It is easy enough to identify overt (third-level) antisemitic actions, especially if they are threatening. But what of the second level, below the overt actions, the level which has been a substantive part of Western culture for centuries. What of the first level, the Christian (and Antisemitism Muslim) theological level below the third and the second - the substratum from which issues the total religious rejection of Jewish survival? In short, dealing with the third-level violent people is easy. Those who function as internal terrorists, violating the privacy and security of loyal citizens, belong in prison. But what do we do with a Roman Catholic woman, professor in a seminary for training the clergy, who has published in The Wrath of Jonah one of the most viciously antisemitic theological tracts to appear in years? What do we do with a retired Arabist diplomat, Undersecretary of State in the 1960s, who has just published one of the most viciously antisemitic tracts - The Passionate Attachment - to attract the applause of the cultured despisers of the Jewish people in recent decades? Neither one of them is an antisemite in the third-level, activist sense, but one poisons the wells of highgrade religion and the other corrupts cultural politics. To return to the polls: most of the 20% plus of Americans and 30% plus of Germans who register "antisemitic" aren't third-level antisemitic activists either. They are the second-level (cultural) and first-level (theological) antisemites who tend the nourishing, fertile great lake within which the political piranhas of third- level antisemitism can swim and breed. - Franklin H. Littell Lest We Forget #670 DATE:12/5/92 DISHONOURING THE PRESIDENCY The ghouls in the media are enjoying a Satanic midnight dance around a new book: J.F.K.: Reckless Youth. The author is a Brit who acquired a book contract on the basis of his biography of Field Marshal Montgomery. His book on John F. Kennedy, promising to be the first of a three volume biography, is more low-level journalism than scholarly biography. One "quotation" alone should settle the matter of the book's reliability, for anyone who respects facts rather than fiction. In the book the author prints a "quotation" from a 5-year old Jack Kennedy when - so the story runs - his mother was going for another six-week vacation: "Gee, you're a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone!"

Inventing guotes about 5-year olds' hostile remarks about Mother, while ignoring oft-repeated, classical family sayings that Mother is "the glue that held our family together, " is contemptible - to give it a better description than it deserves. In a long life that took her past the century mark, Rose Kennedy has deserved better even of muck-raking journalists.

Of course, in response to my criticism of author and publisher the babblers are going to raise the guestion of "First Amendment Rights" and "free speech." This is their knee-jerk response as soon as such questions are asked, even though neither the First Amendment nor free speech is involved. That was the immediate escape route taken by the head of Time-Warner when public circulation of Ice-T's "Kill a Cop" was guestioned. He postured as a patriot and defender of the Constitution, when obviously his only interest was the almighty dollar. The police force of Upper Darby, bless them, has given these irresponsibles of the entertainment world an appropriate answer. No one is suggesting, least of all this columnist, that the book be suppressed. But is the only guestion in social conduct what you can get away with? Does the police power, backed by jailing, set the only limits to conduct? Have authors no responsibility but to pursue the cash return? Have publishers no obligation to the public, only solicitude for their investors? What is the future of a society where culture has been abandoned, civility junked, and ordinary truth-telling repl'aced by half-truths and innuendoes? Under a despotism or dictatorship, a semblance of right behavior and respect can be maintained by brute force; in a democracy, the self-discipline of citizens provides the core of law and order. What is the future of a democracy if the core is rotted out? This is the question that the touters of public freedom and bashers of public self-discipline won't face. They dodge the issue in cheering for the "freedom" of pornography stores to invade residential districts. They dodge the issue when they cheer the exhibitionist parades of homosexuals. They dodge the issue when they giggle and simper at laudatory reviews of a book like J.F.K.: Reckless Youth. Lest we forget, much of the appeal of the demagogues and the strutting, disciplined formations of Nazism was the Nazi Party's

JFK 2 apparent vigorous rejection of exhibitionist immorality and pornography in the cities and public life of the Weimar Republic. That Republic wasn't destroyed alone by the brute force of internal terrorists: it was undermined and corrupted by moral weaklings who cheered "freedom" and ran away from the civic duties of self- discipline. The assault on America's memory of John F. Kennedy, made by a biased selection of partial evidence and rumor, is issued in defiance of the Biblical rule to speak no ill of the dead. The pain caused the family, a pain evident in the response of JFK's siblings in a letter to The New York Times published December 3rd, is in itself a disgrace. As though they haven't suffered enough! The assault, by a Brit who would do well to consider what such yellow journalism is also doing to one of the most important institutions in the free world - the British crown, is also an assault on the dignity of the office of American Chief Executive.

As Chairman Ronald H. Brown, speaking for President-Elect Clinton, put it: "We want to respect the dignity of the office." Governor Clinton showed his own innate sense of propriety immediately after his election, stressing in a public setting that George Bush was still the President of the United States and entitled to recognition and respect as such until the inauguration of a new President. The theme of the Inaugural is significant: "An American Reunion - New Beginnings, New Hope." Perhaps America will never

JFK 3 again reach the level of euphoria - an euphoria felt in America and all over the free world - which greeted the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, a young and idealistic leader. But if it does not reach so high again, it will not be the fault of Bill Clinton and AI Gore, of the generation of the "Baby Boomers." Today the lifted spirit among young people and students is palpable.

Regrettable indeed is the shift of mud-slinging from the political campaign to the sale of books. - Franklin H. Littell

JFK Lest We Forget #671 DATE:12/12/92 GERMAN MISERY Bonn, Germany. We were seated at a large table, at the other end of which a young German couple was already settled in. Courtesies were exchanged, and each group continued its conversation. The Germans left first, and as they went out the young woman said in accented English: "We wish you a good Christmas. We hope you won't hate Germany." The pathos in her voice, so representative of the feelings of ordinary Germans today, made the moment unforgettable. She didn't say "we hope you don't hate Germany." The time was forty years later. She said "we hope you won't hate Germany," because - like so many Germans, from President Richard von Weizsacker to the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on the streets - she was in anguish because of the fear that people in other countries might think the "Nazi-kids" and skinheads speak for her country. She watches TV too, and she knows that the vulture-like instinct of the media has led to the sensational portrayal of a country torn by civil war between democratic forces and a rising tide of mobs and demagogues who want a Fourth Reich.

Between hours of consultation in Bonn, Germany's government headguarters, I have telephoned a number of acguaintances around the country. One, a retired officer of Siemens Electric Company, I have known for more than forty years. After a minute or two to catch up on the children and grandchildren, he started up - and went on passionately for fifteen minutes. He was terribly ashamed of the attacks on foreigners and vandalism in old Jewish cemeteries. Germany has been repairing and maintaining synagogues and cemeteries since 1975, but the media only report the sensational and destructive. The "Nazi-kids" don't represent one-tenth of one percent of the Germans. Although a conservative himself, he agrees with the Social Democrat leader who said the rowdies belong in prison. He hopes Americans and people in other countries will see behind the bad picture they are getting of the German republic. And so on... Like the woman in the restaurant, he sees the TV shorts that are shown also in Des Moines and Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Marseilles and Tel- Aviv, and he knows that people abroad are beginning to feel that Germany is going bad again. He sense too that the media are no longer reporting events: by their selectivity, they are making politics. And - unlike the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government - the media are not part of the checks-and-balances of constitutional politics. For them, the only question is what sensationalism is most likely to attract a public with itching ears, to increase the audience, to add to the guantity of paid advertising, to maximize the cash return in the business. The only stories on the front pages competitive with the German crisis are pictures of police beating up black citizens in Los Angeles and Detroit or pictures of Israeli soldiers chasing or shooting Arab children. Seventy per cent of the German Nazis, called "Nazi-kids" by the Germans, are between 16 and 20 years of age, and their outrageous conduct "makes a good story." What are the loyally democratic Germans doing? Through civil initiative, urged on by the churches, student organizations, major political parties, labor unions, women's organizations and other civic groups, rallies have been held week after week in dozens of German cities and towns: Berlin: 350,000, Bonn: 90,000 one week and 90,000 the following week, Munich: 400,000 according to the organizers and 300,000 according to the police... At every rally the message of the banners German Misery 2 and the speakers is the same: "This time we will not lie down before internal terrorists. This time it's not 'Juden 'raus' but 'Antisemiten 'raus. This time we affirm human dignity, not racism." Even the National German Soccer League has issued a statement against racism, and athlete idols of the public are seen in sweat shirts emblazoned "Mein Freund ist Auslander!" ("My friend is a foreigner.) For the first time in its 30 years of life the Soccer League has "gone public" on an issue some still call "political;" but the spokesman for the players said it is a moral issue, and everybody must stand up and be counted. This week a court sent two internal terrorists to prison, one for eight years, the accomplice for two years. In spite of protests from "liberal" civil libertarians, the Minister of the Interior (Rudolf Seiters) has proceeded against two of the most vociferous young rightwing agitators: Heinz Reisz of Hesse and Thomas Dienel of Thuringia. In public agitation, both had called openly for attacks on foreign laborers, and blamed unemployment and other politico-economic problems on "the Jews." Their groups have been declared illegal, and the cabinet in Bonn has decided to remove their civil rights to use the press, to organize, to hold public meetings, and to vote.

As this is written in Bonn, a conference is being concluded at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Sponsored by the Adenauer Foundation of Germany and the Jewish communal organizations of Los Angeles, the conference addressed the theme, "Is It Five Minutes to 1933?" The parallel of the 1992 "German crisis" to the last moments before the Nazi dictatorship was obvious, and perhaps many Americans fear the parallel is soundly drawn. It is not. Ernst Cramer of Berlin, longtime adviser German Misery 3. to the Axel Springer Foundation and publishing empire, stated boldly in LA: "My answer is a clear, emphatic No. Germany will not go back to the prejudices and errors of a half century ago..." Cramer, whom I have known for more than three decades, is a longtime friend of America and of Israel. His appraisal of the situation is as reliable as any that can be made about the Germans, or about any other people in "Christendom." The unpredictable factor with any such people - whether German or Polish, French or American - is a theological and cultural worldview which for nearly two thousand years has cultivated the idea that the survival of the Jewish people is a barrier across the highway to the millenium. As long as the hot lava of such hateful teaching is propagated in uncorrected form in pulpits, Sunday Schools, catechetical classes, cartoons and common vulgarisms, from time to time it will break through the crust of civilized society with murderous results. Until the underground reservoirs of antisemitism and racism are cooled and controlled, decent citizens will have to carry the pain and shame and democratic statesmen will have to use severe measures to reduce the damage done. - Franklin H. Littell

German Misery Lest We Forget #672 DATE:12/23/92

CONTAINING INTERNAL TERRORISTS

Although at first glance the problems seem very different, Israel and Germany are confronting the same challenge to a legitimate government. The challenge is one that all countries honoring liberty and self-government still find most troublesome: how to contain the assault of internal terrorists without infringing on the liberties of loyal citizens.

Related to the substantive issue is one that all governments and politicians have to be aware of today: how will the media portray the actions taken? The reason why the problems confronting

Israel and Germany seem so different, the reason why the idea that they are alike is so startling, is that Israel and the Bundesrepublik are treated so differently in the media.

Concretely, Israel has the problem of containing Islamic Fundamentalists to whom the assassination of public officials, murder of civilians, terrorizing of super-markets and bus stops are

Holy actions. Germany has the problem of containing "Nazi-kids" and other rightwingers whose rejuvenated Nazi ideology calls forth a pseudo-religious response in attacks on foreigners and threats to the privacy and security of a tiny Jewish remnant of a once great Ashkenazi fatherland.

Containing dissidents, whether peaceful or violent, is no problem for old-fashioned despots or 20th century dictators. And the media are usually no problem for them either. Contrast the comparative silence of the media on the genocide of tens of thousands of Christians and animists

in southern Sudan with the day-after-day front page treatment given Israel when a handful of

terrorists are deported. Contrast the comparative silence of the media on the hundreds of soldiers

and millions of dollars worth of military equipment being poured into Bosnia to reinforce a Muslim

crusade against "Christendom" with the front page treatment given the fighting between the Berlin

police and 350 neo-Nazi terrorists.

Let the media tell the story, and Israel is brutally suppressing the legitimate protest of

persecuted and suppressed "Palestinians." Let the media tell the story, and The Federal Republic of Germany is tottering on the brink of civil war.

Beneath the surface of the shallow portrayals that TV, radio talk-shows and the newspapers think sensational enough perhaps to get higher ratings, there lurks a major unsolved problem for the countries with republican principles and democratic ideals. No country has, at this juncture, worked out a satisfactory set of principles and line of legal procedures for containing internal terrorists. Neither do we have any consensus in the application of an Early Warning System to such potentially genocidal groups and movements.

Except under emergency rules, internal terrorists are still being handled under old laws that treat terrorist groups as privileged political sects or parties, and their members as persons exercising individual choice and individually responsible for their actions. When a democratic government acts decisively under emergency circumstances, balcony-sitters in America and other countries of the free world may join the regimes that sponsor the terrorists in a condemnatory resolution at the United Nations Assembly. Matching this hypocrisy, in dozens of cases where some illegitimate government has murdered large numbers of its own subjects - i.e., Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in decimating Kurds and Shi'ites unfortunate enough to live in Iraq - the response of the "forum of world opinion" is sporadic and half-hearted.

The right, indeed the responsibility of a democratic government to defend its own integrity and the security of loyal citizens against internal terrorists should be a cornerstone to any political discussion. If that were the case, however, there would not be the popular appeal now accorded criticism of the measures undertaken by the Israelis and the Germans to contain terrorism.

The government of Israel, in contrast to the surrounding regimes, is a legitimate government. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany is a legitimate government, in

contrast to the governments of the former U.S.S.R. and its satrapies (which included until three

years ago the regime controlling seven states in the eastern part of the Bundesrepublik). As

legitimate governments. Israel and Germany are entitled to take measures necessary to secure their own stability and to protect loyal citizens in their privacy and in the exercise of their liberties.

There is no legitimate right to overthrow a legitimate government, and no moral right on the part of outsiders vehemently to criticize and undercut a legitimate government's efforts to maintain law and order.

Until a peace treaty is negotiated and signed, until the Arab League and the PLO and the

Iranian-sponsored terrorists leave off their efforts to destroy the Jewish state, Israel has both the legal right and the moral responsibility for law and order in the occupied territories. And the

German republic has the right and the duty to contain and suppress internal terrorist movements, with our good will and blessing.

- Franklin H. Littell

Nota bene: Please have the type-setters be sure to pick up the underlining: if they don't it will alter the meanings.

Containing Internal Terrorism f

Lest We Forget #673 DATE:12/24/92 COMBATTING ANTISEMITISM Even though antisemitism seems to pervade every corner of "Christendom" or "Western civilization," it is not a fog or miasma. Neither is it - in its most complete manifestation, the Holocaust - an avalanche, an earthguake or a flood. These are false metaphors, even though used by some Jewish teachers as well as some gentile writers. Antisemitism is carried by antisemites, some of them knowingly malicious and most of them unaware that they are "typhoid Marys." One of antisemitism's most mean-spirited manifestations is a result of pathological self-hate in a tiny percentage of Jews. Is there anything more pitiful than to watch a self-hating Jew seek the applause of a pro-PLO audience by attacking Israel and sneering at Christians prominent as lovers of Israel? Renegades, apostates and traitors are never attractive; in this case, they turn the stomach. Of course the antisemitism of the "heathen" is more threatening in the immediate - and there are many more of them. For unbelieving gentiles antisemitism is usually a particularly nasty type of racism. For believing Christians, antisemitism is a particularly dangerous type of blasphemy. In both cases, antisemitism is a plague carried by human persons, a plague that has destroyed millions of lives in the past - and may do so again. An atheist like Jean-Paul Sartre came to the same conclusion as our still small but steadily growing group of post-Holocaust Christian theologians: violent hatred of the Jews is simply the facade of a deeper hatred. That deeper hatred of the Christian antisemites is hatred of, and rebellion against the god who is God. The god against whom the Christian antisemites are rebelling is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - the "Jewish" god, whose Torah ("Way of Life") the baptized gentiles would like to cast off in order to enjoy their own tribal or clannish culture. Even the Noachite Code, which the Bible records as a kindly gift to all the non-Hebrew tribes after the Flood, sets limits and conditions. (The Rainbow Covenant, Genesis chapter 9.) Certainly the Ten Commandments set limits to human behavior (Exodus 20:3-17, Deuteronomy 5:7-21). Those to whom "freedom" is the "right" to do anything, the "right" to seek instantaneous pleasure, the "right" to swing the ego freely against the security and privacy of others, inevitably come into conflict with the Torah. Such an individual will rebel against the "particularism," the "parochialism" of the God of the Bible - and go forth in soulful quest of a Universal Deity before whose countenance anything goes. Those tribes and clans to whom the law of the jungle seems natural, who arrogantly pursue aggrandizement at the cost of the Other, who "lay house to house and field to field and grind the faces of the poor" (Isaiah 5:8), who love the chaos of violence rather than seek the consensus of true order, inevitably resent the Message and the Model in the Scriptures. Item: One of the lead pamphleteers for those German churchmen who collaborated with Hitler wrote: "Why should the German man today submit to the rules

Combatting Antisemitism 2 of a Jewish story, when he has his own Myth of the Twentieth Century?!" Item: One section of the Arab Christians of the Middle East has just announced that they are founding a new denomination, one that will cast off the bondage of the Hebrew Scriptures ("Old Testament"). (If you're going to seethe in a wicked hatred of your neighbors, if you're going to swing along with a terrorist politics, if your politics is suicidal and your religion heretical, why not go the whole way and tear off 80% of your Bible?!) Yes indeed, if you want to be a whole-hearted, muscular animal of the jungle, if you want to be freed of the inhibitions and complexes and restraints of true Humanity and high culture, hatred of the God whose Word includes "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" comes naturally. A recent educational film produced for BBC and shown several times in England, Israel and at some locales in the United States - "The Shadow on the Cross" - shows vividly how deep are the roots of antisemitism in "Christendom." How simple the problem would be if it were only a guestion of "educating against prejudice!" To use an expression of the Danish writer S0ren Kierkegaard, rooting out antisemitism at its cultural and theological levels is like learning to play a musical composition - backwards. To root out antisemitism at all levels reguires a confrontation with it in all of its manifestations. So far, the counter-attack has concentrated on its overt manifestations: graffiti on synagogues, overturned gravestones, rowdy rallies by roughnecks, sneak attacks in pamphlets and throw-aways. Here, at

Combatting Antisemitism 3 least, standing up against overt political antisemitism is more vigorous than it was fifty years ago. Both the Jewish defense agencies and the Christian social action organizations can raise money and add to their staffs by pointing the finger at obvious viciousness. When will the much more difficult work begin - the correction of Christian preaching and teaching in the congregations, the re­ alignment of seminary curricula, the joint editorial projects by Christian and Jewish scholars? When will we have work with Jewish scholars a reguirement for graduation into the Christian ministry or priesthood? When will we have an asterisk Bible for the churches, one that notes those passages where special care must be taken to excise the antisemitic applications that are not in the text but have been tacke on to it across the centuries? When will the Jewish weeklies give as much attention and encouragement to Christians supporting Israel as they do to the antisemitic vulgarians of the streets and alleys? When will the Jewish seminaries and training schools for communal leaders reguire seminars in inter-faith cooperation for graduation? In that day, which we still await, the counter-offensive against antisemitism will have become serious.

- Franklin H. Littell

Combatting Antisemitism Lest We Forget #657 DATE:9/ll/92 GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER One of the most exciting batches of documents in years has been released by the British. The material consists of transcripts of taped recordings of discussions among ten of the German Third Reich's leading atomic scientists. Interned in England during the summer and fall of 1945, their rooms were "bugged." We are now, nearly half a century later, able to listen in on what the men who might have built the bomb thought about the project.

Probably the two captives best known to Americans, whose opinions are especially interesting to us, were Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker (brother of Richard von Weizsacker, President of the Federal Republic of Germany) and Werner Heisenberg (winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics at the age of 31, best known for the Principle of Indeterminacy). Heisenberg is dead, but Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker after the war left Physics for Philosophy, unwilling to work further on nuclear weaponry.

A standing mystery since the war has been the answer to the guestion why Germany, far ahead of other countries in the beginning, failed to develop the atom bomb. In part, of course, it was because the Nazi's fanatical racism drove some of the most brilliant physicists out of Europe: Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Hans Bethe... In part, it becomes evident from the Farm Hall documents that it was because- apparently with one exception, Walter Gerlach, the coordinator of the team - those who remained and supposedly were working on the "miracle weapon" didn't want to succeed.

True, they were not given the priority in materials and staff that would have brought the Germans in first. But the record shows that Heisenberg, who also sent warnings to the Allies in 1941, 1942 and 1944 through foreign scientists that German scientists were at work on the project, in his conferences with Nazi officials discouraged the notion that such a bomb could be built. The British analysts, studying the transcripts, have pointed out that Heisenberg revealed a very sophisticated understanding of bomb physics which he had kept to himself during the war. Weizsacker sums up the group's feelings in one of the surveilled discussions: "I don't think we ought to make excuses now because we did not succeed, but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed..." A colleague comments that if they had had the bomb they "would have obliterated London but would still not have conguered the world, and then they would have dropped them on us." Weizsacker again: "One can say it might have been a much greater tragedy for the world if Germany had the uranium bomb." "If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded." Another colleague responds: "I don't believe that but I am thankful we didn't succeed..." During the heat of the battle, it was impossible for the Allied leaders to contemplate the possibility that there might be a residual resistance to Nazism left in Germany. The extent of resistance in the German churches was discounted, even though vouched for by one of the greatest of modern British churchmen: George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and a member of the House of Lords. Bell was in touch with couriers from Germany, who at risk of torture and death brought out word of church resistance and of the several attempts to assassinate

German Resistance 2 Hitler. On 30 July 1944 they almost succeeded. There are several reasons why the extent of German resistance, active and passive, has been depreciated. One of the most important reasons is technical: CIA and the State Department, FBI and the academic specialists have all come up woefully short in their ideas and actions vis-a-vis totalitarian ideologies and dictatorships. Remember yesterday, when the hard-liners were assuring us that the USSR was a terrible "evil empire," monstrously powerful in its threat to the free world, and the appeasers were assuring us that in spite of some difficulties the USSR still expressed the dreams and hopes of the Russian people? As we now know, both schools of thought were hopelessly out of touch with reality. The longings of the peoples are without a chance, as long as there is a dictator in place with the brutal ruthlessness of a Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler to keep them bowed under. But those longings do not die out, and on occasion they find a voice. So it was with the German Third Reich. There was an internal spy system that reached into every ward and city block, every village and countryside. There was a system of state terrorism that murdered millions and drove others into "inner emigration." There were organized vast mob scenes with pep talks and liturgies of acclamation of the Leader. In spite of it all, there were nuclei of brave dissenters and opponents who kept their heads down and did what they could - when they could - in the words of the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "to throw a hammer into the spokes of the wheel." Franklin H. Littell

German Resistance 3 Lest We Forget #658 DATE:9/17/92

Is it fair play to raise the guestion of a candidate's church membership? What about "the separation of church and state?" Lynn Yeakel's longtime membership in the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church has become an election issue - if not so much in the media, certainly in the telephone calls and Kaffeeklatsch sessions where candidates and their positions are dissected. Is the candidate of the Democratic Party for the U. S. Senate anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and (implicitly, if unconsciously) antisemitic? She vigorously denies it. She has publicly made a pledge to Israel's security, publicly expressed support for the loan guarantees; she has gone even further to affirm Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Where then, is the problem? The problem lies in part with people with long memories: George McGovern pledged support for Israel when he was a candidate, and he is now a retainer for one of the best-financed anti-Israel Arab lobbies in Washington. And the problem lies in the present too: her membership in the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, from which has issued some of the most partisan pro-PLO propaganda in Greater Philadelphia. Back to square one. Is it fair play to raise the church membership question in politics? Some one who isn't a Presbyterian has emphasized that Lynn Yeakel is "not just a member, she's Vice Chairman." The fact is she is Vice Chairman of the Trustees, the body that holds the property and is responsible for the business operation. It's the Session that sets policy. But is it realistic to expect non- Presbyterians to be able to make such distinctions? To the public, she is associated with the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church and its leaders' hostility to Israel's past, present and future. This questioning of Lynn Yeakel is not at all comparable to the effort of some vicious Republican right-wingers to blacken Hillary Clinton's excellent pro-Israel record by imputing to her a role in a humanitarian foundation program of assistance to neighborhood groups in the "Third World," a small part of which went to a "Palestinian" organization in "the West Bank." In their smear reminiscent of Joe McCarthy, the extremists not only imputed to Hillary Clinton a decision which was not hers to make, but also charged the "Palestinian" organization with a PLO connection for which there was no evidence. The false imputation of a connection between Hillary Clinton and the PLO could not have been more mendacious. Lynn Yeakel's relationship to the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church is a matter of record, however, and she has been rather defensive about it. And the hostility of the leadership of the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church to Israel and Zionism is a matter of record too. This column discussed one anti-Israel and pro-PLO program there - in the March 29, 1990 issue of The Jewish Times -more than two years before this writer knew Lynn Yeakel was a member. The Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church has claimed it is simply following the line of the national denomination in advocating the establishment of a Palestinian state. This, however, is false. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has taken no such position. In fact, more than one official in the denomination has expressed to the present

Specter vs. Yeakel 2 writer their embarrassment at the extreme partisanship into which the Bryn Mawr congregation has been led by its clergy and lay leader. Perhaps the most disgraceful and malicious statement was likening Israel's conduct of the areas under Military Government to the Nazis' prosecution of the Holocaust. One does not have to be a Jew to smell the obscene comparison. Along from this and other extremist and offensive statements of \| hostility to the Jewish state, the most un-Christian aspect of the situation has been the unwillingness of the church leadership to maintain a genuine dialogue. Only one side is allowed a hearing: the anti-Israel and pro-PLO side. Christians of other views are not invited to speak; , tire" Jewis=h- speaker invited., and featured on one

f>rc!n«Tj_m^_itfaja—nn -A^rigTnjfft notorious for ]] i fi £a1 1 nw-r.rava ling with Israel's enemies. That this is no honest approach to inter-faith dialogue is obvious; obvious too is its bad faith in terms of the ecumenical dialogue. A congregation is, of course, legally entitled to push whatever line its leaders think good public policy. But does it have the moral right to push such partisanship, potentially damaging to the only democracy in the Middle East and certainly damaging to Christian/Jewish relations here at home? And if it acts this way can one of its prominent members escape being complicit in what is done? That is the difficult guestion that is haunting Lynn Yeakel's candidacy. - Franklin H. Littell

Specter vs. Yeakel Lest We Forget #659 DATE:9/23/92 SPECTER FOR SENATOR? When Arlen Specter was elected to "the most powerful club in the world" - and one of the wealthiest - he was well known in Pennsylvania for his work as a District Attorney in Philadelphia (1966-74). On the national scene, he earlier had attracted some attention as a keen legal mind who helped shape the Warren Commission's report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy - including the conclusion that the killer was a loner. When he began his service as a U. S. Senator, Specter started with Ronald Reagan - a Republican Senator under a Republican President. A year later there were 13 billionaires and 475,500 millionaires. A decade later, Forbes magazine counts 101 American billionaires and 2,310,000 millionaires. The economic down side is that the percentage of the American people below the poverty level has also increased dramatically. The national debt has grown exponentially. And the United States, the chief lending nation in 1980, has become the chief debtor nation.

Politically, the Republican Party has been captured by the extreme right wing - the hardliners of the John Birch Society, plus the constituents of the two evangelist Pats (Robertson and Buchanan, with their appeals for return to a "Christian America"), plus a miscellaneous congerie of special interests ("single issue" crusades). The situation in the "Grand Old Party" is so bad that a third or more of the Republican national and state officials simply stayed away from the Houston Convention altogether.

How much a Senator can be blamed for the triumph of the death wish in his own Party is open for debate. However, by virtue of the power of his office, as well as his oath to serve the country and the people as a whole, he is complicit. Even if he is a reasonable and moderate man, one of a declining minority in a Party increasingly dominated by extremist ideologues, he shares the responsibility as long as he wears the Party colors and does the Party's bidding. Arlen Specter has not, until the current campaign heated up, tried to distance himself from the extremists. On the contrary, during the fight to seat Clarence Thomas on the U. S. Supreme Court he showed a flash of the same meanness and bitter partisanship that consistently has characterized the field officers under Reagan and Bush - Donald Regan, Edwin Meese, James Watt, Manuel Lujan, John Sununu... The occasion that brought out the meanness and unfairness was the testimony of Anita Hill, who became during her courageous witness at the hearing a heroine to untold numbers of harrassed and abused women. (Professor Hill also received a special award from the American Bar Association at its recent convention.) Since the U. S. Senate, polarized by partisan politics and neglectful of the national good, allowed the whole tawdry scene to be played out over the prurient TV channels, this columnist does not need to repeat the details. The issues of significance to the current campaign, however, might be missed during a recollection of the steamy melodrama. First, the members of the committee knew of the charges in advance; when Party partisans tried unsuccessfully to suppress the information, the details were exposed in public hearings instead of

Specter for Senator? 2 being dealt with decently and privately in the first stages of the "advise and consent" the Constitution mandates. Second, the badgering of Anita Hill did not succeed in rattling her or muffling her testimony. The threat of charging Anita Hill for perjury, made by Senator Specter, was brutal - and not followed through on. Clarence Thomas had his place won for him on the Supreme Court by a fight that was a raw display of hardline rightwing ideology jazzed up by an obscenity committed in full public view. The scenario that gave us a cull on the Supreme Court - where he will perhaps sit for the next 40 years - is plain enough. The leadership of the Afro-American defense agencies read its meaning without difficulty. George Bush, having alienated much of the black vote by undermining the gains made in civil rights, didn't dare not to nominate an Afro-American. So he reached clear down to the bottom of the barrel, found an ideologically pure reactionary ("politically correct") who was a Negro, and tossed him to the Senate. The contempt for the American people, all of us in our many minorities, was patent. The point man in the effort to discredit Anita Hill was Senator Specter. Some say his opponent in the current campaign is "running on the Anita Hill ticket." Others might say that there are worse things, one of them being to put tawdry Party interest ahead of principle.

- Franklin H. Littell

Specter for Senator? '

Lest We Forget #660 DATE:9/24/92 TENSIONS IN GERMANY Stories keep coming out of the reunited Germany about native terrorist attacks on communities of foreigners, especially those in the former Communist section. The problem roots in the initial German desire - after the war - to expunge the shame of the Third Reich. The Federal Republic of Germany adopted a Constitution providing a generous provision of the right of asylum to political refugees. Germany is now being flooded with refugees from the civil war in a disintegrated Yugoslavia. Germany has in fact given asylum to twice as many refugees from the former Yugoslavia as all other European countries combined. Are they "political refugees" within the terms of the Federal Constitution (Grundgesetz), which Bonn publishes together with the United Nations Convention on Human Rights? Before the tragedy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany had been flooded by tens of thousands of refugees from the collapse of the U. S. S. R. and its totalitarian satellites. Were they "political refugees?" Strong voices arose, in both East and West, challenging the extension of "political refugee" status to persons who were obviously economic refugees. There had been little debate earlier in West Germany about receiving political refugees who managed to escape from the Communist dictatorships. But people now ask: Who are these tens of thousands who ask asylum now that the road to liberty is open at home? Bureaucracies - anywhere - should always be viewed with suspicion when a guestion of the security, liberty and dignity of the human person is involved. But obviously there is a real issue here: What is a "political refugee?" The guestion is as slippery as a parallel question that arises constantly even in this country: What is a "political prisoner?" The thought that a nation may hold "political prisoners" is as repulsive to most citizens of sensibility as the thought of rejecting persons who face imprisonment or death if they return home. But where is the line to be drawn? Even some responsible Afro-American politicians have been heard to say, in public addresses, that America's prisons are filled with "political prisoners." The argument is that large numbers of black citizens, unable to afford quality legal defense, go to prison where white citizens would be given probation or "community service." The backup argument is that race prejudice so grievously poisons the court system in the USA that many Afro-Americans in effect are judged "guilty" before they come to trial. Does this make them "political prisoners," justifying the use of a term that described shameful extra­ legal practices like those in Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Third Reich? The problem in free Germany arose in dramatic form when the wall went down, the East German dictatorship collapsed, and at the same time the USSR fell apart. For instance, some 50,000 Russian soldiers stationed in the former D. D. R. asked for "political asylum." Are they really political refugees? There was no housing for them back home. Some of the early units were re-settled, with their families, in the empty houses around Chernobyl. Their jobs had become redundant in East Germany. Even though the fragments of the former USSR have been as slow to dismantle their military establishments as the Americans, where would they and their families live if they went home? What about a living

Tensions in Germany 2 wage, with the ruble so drastically devalued - and the pay no longer in German coins? In asking for asylum did they come under the rule of the law extending the hand to "political refugees?" With the economy shaking down, Germany had already found itself with a super-abundance of foreign laborers who had come for jobs during the boom years. Many of them have children, entitled to claim German citizenship at 18 years, and some of them have grandchildren. The older Gastarbeiter still dream of returning rich to the homeland. The younger generations have no such intention. There remain, for instance, 2.4 million Turks among the early wave of non-Germans to settle in Germany. In this first wave there were also hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Yugoslavs and Italians. Germany has become, with the early millions of foreign laborers who have settled in, and added to them the economic and political refugees of the last decade, a pluralistic society - religiously, culturally and ethnically. But since the 16th century, before there even was a Germany - Germany became one nation in 1871 - the concept of Volk (one nation, one folk, one race) has been central to German self- definition. Volkstheologie, Volksphilosophie, Volkspolitik - even Volksliteratur - have been at center stage. After two hundred years of liberty and self-government at the heart of our American Constitution, we still have the two Pats (Buchanan and Robertson) able to gain a following of tens of millions by peddling the dream of return to a monochromatic, monolithic concept of "Christian America." We have the terrorist rightwing trying to build a "Christian Aryan Empire" in the Northwest - robbing banks,

Tensions in Germany 3 killing media critics, and shooting it out with the FBI and National Guard. Should we be surprised that the Germans - with their few years of democracy - are blundering from time to time? The problem posed by the extremists in the two republics is the same: to pass and enforce the laws that protect the political covenant and make secure the lives and liberties of loyal citizens. The native terrorists belong in prison along with those who jeopardize our peace from foreign bases. The more difficult problem of longer range is to identify and repudiate - at every level of culture and politics - those who still long for the womb of the past, who fear the adventure of a healthy interaction between cultures, faiths and races. And, lest we forget, note that the key phrase in the last sentence is "healthy interaction" and not blending (Gleichschaltung). Uniformity is dead as a political theme ("Christian state," "Muslim state," "Marxist state"), even if thousands must yet die in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Croatia, Serbia before men wielding machine guns against civilians are hauled kicking into the post-Holocaust world, even if we are only at a glacial pace gaining the international conscience and power to bring their commanders to trial as war criminals. - Franklin H. Littell

Tensions in Germany

• • Lest We Forget #661 DATE:10/9/92 ROSS PEROT, POPULIST Ross Perot, having dropped out last July, has re-entered the race for the position of President of the United States of America. Both Bush and Clinton camps are trying to figure out whether the Republican or the Democratic candidate will be hurt most. Perot said when he guit that he didn't want to disturb the democratic process. He has now become a major disturbance. Although the polls show him stuck at half the percentage he had when he dropped out, he may yet swing enough voters to throw the election into the due process provided by the Constitution for emergencies. Populist candidates, operating outside the tried and true channels of political development and decision, are always a nuisance- and sometimes a danger. In America, a good example of the populist candidate would be Tom Watson, whose statue still stands before the capitol building in Georgia. Tom Watson won a following as a champion of poor white farmers, ground down by the banks, railroads and other corporate centers of power that ran the defeated Confederate states as colonies after the American Civil War. Tom Watson assured the poor whites that the black ex-slaves were their real enemy. By playing constantly on their anxieties, he got the poor whites to vote the lilywhite ticket, enforce "Jim Crow" laws, and use terrorist lynchings when all other measures failed. By manipulating the fears of the crowd, he earned a cash flow from the corporations. He was then easily elected to the Senate of the USA and to the Governor's post in Georgia. A consistent manipulator of popular anxieties, Tom Watson not only sang the racist siren song against the blacks: he was also an antisemite. More than any other single person he was responsible for the trumped up charges against Leo Frank, a Jew who was lynched after popular hysteria had "convicted" him of rape. The consummate populist of this century was Adolf Hitler, who shared with Josef Goebbels the dubious distinction of being a master piano player on the emotional strings of the Germans. No one who heard Hitler orate, even in a foreign language, could doubt that the intellectual content of the message was irrelevant. What poured forth was sheer emotion, a primal force that appealed to the frustrations, resentments and self-destructive capacities of the crowd. The populist politician must accomplish a few specific things. First, he must appeal to the frustrations and resentments of the crowd - in Perot's case, the widespread feeling (stronger in July) summarized in "none of the above!" He must appear to stand apart from "dirty politics" (Schmutzenpolitik). Second, he must project an image of decision and competence - contrasting with the "deals," "compromises" and adjustments of ordinary political life. Third, he must deal in generalities; he must avoid being pinned down to specifics that might bring his heavenly candidacy down to earth. The populist candidate is a danger to democratic principles and republican government, because no one really knows him. When a man has come up through the church and education like Woodrow Wilson, guite a few people "know" him. There are enough situations in which elements worthy of trust have learned to trust him. When a man has come through the channels of a regular military career (Dwight D. Eisenhower), he

Ross Perot, Populist 2 has proved himself in the presence of numbers of citizens capable of judgment. Candidates who come through the channels of Federal and state government (Bush, Clinton), having served years in the presence of alert peers, have an identity. Public figures that arise to claim power without such identification are like the Man in the Iron Mask. Tom Watson was known only in the role he played in public, as the highly vocal champion of frightened poor whites. Adolf Hitler was known as the leader of a terrorist movement, as the swayer of huge public assemblies. He was aided by the emergence of the movies and radio as political forces. Reading the diaries and other documents, we now realize that no one - not even the inner circle - really knew Hitler. Today TV has become an even more dangerous tool in the hands of the unscrupulous than radio and movies. Worse than that, TV is so powerful that it even seduces otherwise decent candidates to misuse the tool in dis-information campaigns, negative sound-bytes against their opponents. The public is thereby deprived of the opportunity to hear informed discussion of the real issues, which the elections of a free society reguire. Who is Ross Perot? We know that he is a man wealthy enough to spend millions to project a certain image, again and again, up to November 3. What will we know after all those PR shorts? We will not know Ross Perot, and we will not know anyone who does know him. What we will know is that he has been more or less successful in exploiting the frustrations, resentments and alienations of a larger or lesser percentage of the voting public. - Franklin H. Littell

Ross Perot, Populist 3 Lest We Forget #634 DATE:4/6/92 CONFUSING YOM HASHOAH AND KRISTALLNACHT

It took "forty years in the wilderness" before the survivors began to speak of what they had seen and experienced. The sheer mass of the Holocaust was so awesome, so overpowering, so terrifying in recollection! Getting on with the building of a "second life," they buried for a time the terror of the attack and the loneliness of abandonment. This is the classic response of the human person to an event of such consequence, an event at the level of what Emil Fackenheim calls "epoch-making." This is the way the people responded to the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. It took "forty years in the wilderness" before they came to understand what had happened to them. In the case of the Holocaust, when the survivors began to speak and to record their eye-witness accounts, others spoke up. Among them were liberators, men in the armies that over-ran the Death Camps and freed the few inmates still alive. A few were rescuers, identified by Yad Vashem and responding - some of them reluctantly - to the pleas that they tell what they had seen and heard and done. Many of the first to come forward did so with strong words of condemnation for the deniers who were beginning to crawl out from under the rocks. For as the eye-witnesses began to fall away, as time was running out on the first generation, the neo-Nazis and "historical revisionists" began with ever greater boldness to claim that the Holocaust never happened. In the meantime, at the initiative of persons of strong conscience and an eye to the educational, a movement was under way in America and Israel to fix a calendar day of memorial. It was understood that a few would read, fewer yet would think and write, but all could join in an annual Yom Hashoah. At first introduced at an interfaith chapel service in Charlotte, North Carolina, obervance of Yom Hashoah was picked up by Christian and Jewish congregations across the country. A decade later, after the founding of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Yom Hashoah was made a calendar day for all Americans. Every governor, the mayor of every large city, the heads of hundreds of villages and townships and schools now join annually in remembering the victims of the Holocaust. Yom Hashoah is set, of course, by the Jewish calendar. But choosing the date was hotly debated. As Rabbi Irving Greenberg of CLAL has described the debate - in a lecture he gave under our auspices here in Philadelphia, later published as a chapter in The Jewish Way, many of the survivors wanted the date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Others wanted it on April 20th (Hitler's birthday), to signalize the triumph of the people over the 20th century Haman. Still others wanted to subsume the tragedy under the Ninth of Av - along with the traditional date of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. All were sure that it could not come too close to Pesach, a time of rejoicing. So the compromise was struck: the 27th day of Nissan, the 5th day after the 8th day of Passover (unless it comes on a Sabbath).

Yom Hashoah is a day of memory, meditation and prayer. More recently, Holocaust educators have realized that a time is needed for reminding the public of the importance of studying the

Confusing Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht 2 lessons of the Holocaust. Under the chairmanship of Dr. Hubert G. Locke, the leading Afro-American scholar of the Holocaust, the first major observance of Kristallnacht was held at the University of Washington (Seattle). The year was 1978 (the 40th anniversary), and the papers have been published in an important volume: Western Society After the Holocaust. In 1989, when on November 9th the wall came down in Germany, the leaders of the re-united country decided to preserve the symbol of Kristallnacht: they chose another date to celebrate national reunion, so that the public might always remember the shame of the 1938 pogrom. Last fall an International Conference was held in Berlin on that date, with Americans and Germans and Israelis reading papers and discussing the lessons of the Holocaust. The first lesson of the Holcoaust, taught on Kristallnacht, is the fact that it didn't have to happen. Vigorous debates on political and economic and religious and educational failures can be carried out which are guite inappropriate on Yom Hashoah. Persons of sensitivity and conscience know that there is a difference between prayer and debate. They also know that there is a difference between a Day of Remembrance (Yom Hashoah. and a Day of Teaching the Lessons (Kristallnacht. . And above all, whether in religious service on Yom Hashoah or in teaching the lessons on Kristallnacht, they know that the Holocaust - in all of its dimensions

- is too sacred a memory for any individual to be allowed to make personal profit on it. - Franklin H. Littell

Confusing Yom Hashoah and Kristallnacht 3