Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
Mussolini, in “Cassius’s” book, after calling his witnesses, enters the box himself. He sticks to his Machiavellian creed: Might is Right, vae victis! He is guilty of the only crime that matters, the crime of failure, and he admits that his adversaries have a right to kill him — but not, he insists, a right to blame him. Their conduct has been similar to his own, and their moral condemnations are all hypocrisy. But thereafter come the other three witnesses, the Abyssinian, the Spaniard and the Italian, who are morally upon a different plane, since they have never temporized with Fascism nor had a chance to play at power politics; and all three of them demand the death penalty.
Would they demand it in real life? Will any such thing ever happen? It is not very likely, even if the people who have a real right to try Mussolini should somehow get him into their hands. The Tories, of course, though they would shrink from a real inquest into the origins of the war, are not sorry to have the chance of pushing the whole blame onto a few notorious individuals like Mussolini and Hitler. In this way the Darlan-Badoglio manoeuvre is made easier. Mussolini is a good scapegoat while he is at large, though he would be an awkward one in captivity. But how about the common people? Would they kill their tyrants, in cold blood and with the forms of law if they had the chance?
It is a fact that there have been very few such executions in history. At the end of the last war an election was won partly on the slogan “Hang the Kaiser”, and yet if any such thing had been attempted the conscience of the nation would probably have revolted. When tyrants are put to death, it should be by their own subjects; those who are punished by a foreign authority, like Napoleon, are simply made into martyrs and legends.
What is important is not that these political gangsters should be made to suffer, but that they should be made to discredit themselves. Fortunately they do do so in many cases, for to a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous. Napoleon surrendered to the English in order to get protection from the Prussians, the Empress Eugénie fled in a hansom cab with an American dentist, Ludendorff resorted to blue spectacles, one of the more unprintable Roman emperors tried to escape assassination by locking himself in the lavatory, and during the early days of the Spanish Civil War one leading Fascist made his escape from Barcelona, with exquisite fitness, through a sewer.
It is some such exit that one would wish for Mussolini, and if he is left to himself perhaps he will achieve it. Possibly Hitler also. It used to be said of Hitler that when his time came he would never fly or surrender, but would perish in some operatic manner, by suicide at the very least. But that was when Hitler was successful; during the last year, since things began to go wrong, it is difficult to feel that he has behaved with dignity or courage. “Cassius” ends his book with the judge’s summing-up, and leaves the verdict open, seeming to invite a decision from his readers. Well, if it were left to me, my verdict on both Hitler and Mussolini would be: not death, unless in is inflicted in some hurried unspectacular way. If the Germans and Italians feel like giving them a summary court-martial and then a firing-squad, let them do it. Or better still, let the pair of them escape with a suitcaseful of bearer securities and settle down as the accredited bores of some Swiss pension. But no martyrizing, no St Helena business. And, above all, no solemn hypocritical “trial of war criminals”, with all the slow cruel pageantry of the law, which after a lapse of time has so strange a way of focusing a romantic light on the accused and turning a scoundrel into a hero.
George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.
July 31, 2019
QotD: Foreshadowing Nuremberg
July 30, 2019
Moira Greyland discusses how she came to write The Last Closet
Tamara Wilhite discusses some of the events that prompted Moira Greyland to write about her mother, Marion Zimmer Bradley and some of the reactions from readers of the book:
The Last Closet was written by Moira Greyland. She’s the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of The Mists of Avalon and Walter Breen. It is Marion Bradley’s book from which the book title is drawn. “The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon” is equal parts autobiography and true-crime thriller with a tragic sprinkling of the history of science fiction fandom mixed in.
Moira’s book includes large sections of horrifying personal stories, but she has gone to great length to document what happened. For example, her father’s repeated arrests on pedophilia charges (he died in prison) and her mother’s testimony during such trials are public record. She’s backed up everything she can from external sources.
I had the opportunity to interview Moira, and the transcript is below.
Tamara: Some of the events in the book go back forty years. What prompted you to write the book in 2017?
Moira: In 2014, a blogger named Deirdre Saoirse Moen contacted me. She was protesting Tor book’s publication of a puff piece lauding my mother, which did not mention either my father’s conviction or her court-documented collusion with him.
I only knew Deirdre as a woman from science fiction fandom who had hired me for a harp concert, and I did not realize how famous she was. My responses to her email consisted of a brief assent that my father had indeed done all that he was accused of and convicted for and more, but it also included the new for her information that my mother had been a great deal worse than my father. I also included my two poems “Mother’s Hands” and “They Did Their Best.”
Deirdre was horrified, and reported that she had lost her lunch upon reading my reply. Her blog posts about my mother and my responses were reblogged to 92 countries all over the world. There was furious controversy, mostly consisting of everyone who tried to defend my mother getting shouted down. Some people read my mother’s appallingly callous court testimony and pronounced her guilty from her own words. Other people saw themselves in my poetry, in the flatness and horror so familiar to the trauma patient. Still others recognized things in my mother’s books about incest and sexual abuse which had never quite seemed right to them.
I was astonished at the volume of response, and at the many, many, MANY letters addressed directly to me. Most of the letters included both sympathy for me and my brother, but nearly all contained reports of the letter writer’s own abuse, many containing the words “I never told anyone this before.”
I was asked to fill in the rest of my story, and I did so, in a blog post called “The Story of Moira Greyland,” hosted on the blog of Katy Faust, another child of gays and lesbians as I am. My blog post was nominated for a Hugo in 2015, and I was offered a book contract by Vox Day of Castalia House.
The only concern I had about writing my book was that my late brother Mark was having a very hard time with the unplanned public exposure. He was having flashbacks about our father, and beginning to have a lot more trouble managing his health. The reason that was so problematic for him was that we both identified our mother as being the scary, dangerous one, where our father was comparatively gentle and loving. Having to deal with his history meant that there was no even remotely good parent left for him, even as a matter of memory.
His distress predated the book, though, and I did not think that it would be relieved by my silence.
I was given a year to complete the book, and I beat my deadline. It would do no good to mention the particular kind of hell it was to tell the story, and I credit my beloved late husband with sticking by my side through the entire process. Anyone with a trauma history can imagine that all of my trauma symptoms from flashbacks to ataxia got worse. It became very clear to me while writing exactly why it was that so few people talk about their injuries.
July 24, 2019
Wait, you mean there might be a downside to cannabis legalization?
As a libertarian of long standing, I’m on the record as being in favour of legalizing cannabis since long before it was cool (geeky and perpetually uncool libertarians probably helped keep it from being cool for at least a few years longer). I’m not enthused to hear that we may have been undersold on the risks of cannabis use … not that the government didn’t try telling is it was deadly, deadly poison (they did, repeatedly, and at great length), but they institutionalized the role of the boy who cried wolf, and every illegal narcotic got basically the same description. I’m actually not kidding here: the first health class I got in middle school included a lecture and a pamphlet on the dangers of pot; the second class covered the dangers of cocaine; the third warned against LSD; and so on … but they used a copy/paste to discuss the physical and mental risks of the different drugs, and they all read the same way. All those evil drugs are evil, bad, and rot your brain. Knowing that the pothead (“Hi, Gary!”) at the back of the class hadn’t suddenly had a psychotic break and tried to fly off the top of the school was the first hint that we were being oversold on the real world risks of (some) illegal drug use. The declared fact that some illegal narcotics actually are deadly, deadly poison ran up against the observed fact that a significant majority of people over the age of fifteen had tried cannabis and found it somewhat less scary than advertised.
Along with the beginnings of doubt that the government was being honest with us, and the clear understanding that even if using drugs wasn’t as dangerous as we were told, we shared a growing awareness that being caught with drugs by the police was significantly more dangerous and possibly deadly. Officer Friendly would shoot you down like a mad dog if he thought you were one’o’them drug-crazed hippies. It certainly changed the social dynamics of any interaction with Officer Friendly’s fellow heavily armed co-workers…
In the National Post, Barbara Kay suggests that not all the dangers of cannabis use were mere government propaganda:
Some years ago, in conversation with his wife, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in mentally ill criminals, former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson observed that the perpetrator of a recent violent crime had been high at the time, and had smoked pot regularly all his life. Her response — “Yeah, they all do” — jolted him. The result was his book, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence.
Much of the referenced material in Berenson’s book had not yet been published a decade ago. But more recent studies only confirm what a few intrepid researchers were already warning about then.
Indeed, as I noted in a 2008 column, the head of the Medical research Council in the U.K., Professor Colin Blakemore, who in 1997 had been the moral authority behind a pot-legalization campaign, unequivocally reversed his pot-friendly stance in 2007, stating: “The link between cannabis and psychosis is quite clear now; it wasn’t 10 years ago.”
If you haven’t energy for a whole book, but would invest in 16 pages on the subject, you will be well rewarded by Steven Malanga’s in-depth article, “The Marijuana Delusion,” in City Journal‘s June issue. Here you will find debunked the blithe claim, still received as gospel by progressives and libertarians, that pot is virtually harmless and even therapeutic.
Unlike marijuana, real medications are deeply researched before coming on the market, and may attest to proven benefits, but are obligated to admit potential harms. Is pot a medicinal drug or a placebo? Nobody really knows. One may argue “who cares, as long as it works” (anecdotally I hear that pot works, and also that it doesn’t work), but that isn’t the point, since the legalization movement made medical claims for pot in order to bring the public onside politically. There was no will on the movement’s side to discover even radically fortified pot’s downsides.
The knowledge was out there for those interested. In 1987 a study of nearly 50,000 Swedish military conscripts followed for drug use over 15 years found that frequent pot use in teenhood was linked to a six-fold risk of schizophrenia as compared with non-usage. A 2004 meta-analysis of studies on pot use came to a similar conclusion. These studies, and others, are suggestive that heavy marijuana consumption, particularly in youth, may cause serious mental health problems. Yes, it is possible that the link isn’t entirely causal; people with mental health issues may be more likely to use marijuana heavily. But at the very least, this ought to be an issue of ongoing concern, particularly now that marijuana is legal in Canada and in an increasing number of U.S. states.
July 17, 2019
QotD: “The United States government [became] the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century”
For most of the history of the United States, drugs were legal. People could buy opiates and cocaine-based products from their local pharmacy. An opiate-laced brew called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, was particularly popular with housewives. One person who viewed this legal system with skepticism was a Los Angeles doctor named Henry Smith Williams. When a small number of his patients became addicted, he was disgusted, and he came to see them as despicable “weaklings.” So when opiates and cocaine were banned in 1914, he welcomed this first birth-pang of the drug war with glee.
But then he noticed what happened to his addicted patients. They didn’t stop using. Instead, “here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure,” he wrote in one of his books. “They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost.”
At the same time, Smith Williams realized that the drug war was “in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.” Because pharmacists could no longer sell these drugs, the Mafia and other criminal organizations stepped in, selling a vastly inferior product at extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain, but the criminal gangs charged a dollar.
The death rate among addicts rose, and those who survived began to behave very differently. An official government study had found that, before the drug war kicked in, three-quarters of self-described addicts had steady and respectable jobs: some 22% were wealthy, while only 6% were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, but they were rarely out of control or criminal. Yet faced with the need to meet these extortionate new prices, many of the men started to commit property crimes, and many of the women started to steal or prostitute themselves.
So Smith Williams watched as the drug war created two waves of crime: first a wave of violent criminal drug-dealers, and then a wave of criminality among addicts. “The United States government,” Henry wrote in shock, had become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”
Johann Hari, “A 1930s California story shows why the war on drugs is a failure”, Los Angeles Times, 2017-06-16.
July 14, 2019
The Epstein scandal is another example of the importance of accurate names
ESR has some concerns about the Epstein case, specifically on the correct terminology to use:
The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less confused.
Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.And that brings us to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In particular, the widespread tagging of Epstein as a pedophile.
No, Richard Epstein is not a pedophile. This is important. If conservatives keep misidentifying him as one, I fear some unfortunate consequences.
Pedophiles desire pre-pubertal children. This is not Epstein’s kink; he quite obviously likes his girls to be as young as possible but fully nubile. The correct term for this is “ephebophile”, and being clear about the distinction matters. I’ll explain why.
The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”). It also has a strong internal contingent that would like to normalize pedophilia. I mean the real thing, not Epstein’s creepy ephebophilia.
Homosexual pedophiles have been biding their time in order to get adult-on-adult homosexuality fully normalized as battlespace prep, but you see a few trial balloons go up occasionally in places like Salon. The last round of this was interrupted by the need to take down Milo Yiannopolous, but the internal logic of left-wing sexual liberationism always demands new ways to freak out the normals, and the pedophiles are more than willing to be next up in satisfying that perpetual demand.
Liberals have proven themselves utterly useless at resisting the liberationist ratchet, so I’m not even bothering to address them. Conservatives, if you want to prevent the next turn, don’t give the pedophilia-normalizers maneuvering room. Rectify the names; make the distinctions that matter.
Epstein’s behavior is repulsive because we judge young postpubertal humans to be too psychologically immature to give adult consent, but it’s nowhere near the evil that is the sexual abuse of prepubertal children.
July 13, 2019
Piling on the charges to encourage plea bargaining – modern policing at work
A recent local crime story included the following laundry list of charges for one of the accused:
Shaquille Lovell, 21, of Ritson Road South in Oshawa is charged with careless carry of a prohibited firearm, contravention of storage regulations, unauthorized possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized, possession of a loaded prohibited firearm, and possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking (cocaine).
He was found to be carrying a prohibited weapon (a handgun) and a controlled substance (cocaine). Those two offences should be more than enough to prosecute with strong chance of conviction. All the rest of the bafflegab charges appear to be piled on to encourage plea bargaining, because they’re literally peripheral to the main criminal activity the accused has been charged with.
Lawyers, especially legal aid lawyers, will encourage the accused to “bargain down” the charges — one of the reasons for so many separate charges being applied — to avoid the cost and delay of a full trial … and the risk of facing the full potential sentence. Even relatively well-to-do middle class people will be more likely to want to avoid a long, drawn-out legal battle because it might well cost them everything they own. Poor people don’t even have that much of an option.
Canadian law enforcement is continuing to follow down the path of the United States, where a 90% conviction rate is considered low. According to Statistics Canada, “In 2013/2014, 63% of all cases completed in adult criminal court resulted in a finding of guilt”, but also “The extent to which plea negotiations are utilized in Canada currently remains unknown.”
July 12, 2019
Mark Steyn urges caution when considering the Epstein case
It may make sense to avoid a rush to judgement, as the way the federal justice system works these days does not encourage a belief in its impartiality or, for that matter, its dedication to the concept of “justice”:
I am wary of saying anything too definitive re the Jeffrey Epstein case, because so much of the reporting is way too trusting of the federal prosecutors’ official narrative. Don’t get me wrong: I take it as read that he’s an industrial-scale pedophile, if only because it seems to be the only thing anybody knows about him – including how he made his billion dollars. He apparently requires three “massages” a day by underage girls. So, upon being informed that Mr Epstein was flying his “Lolita Express” around Africa with Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and a softcore porn actress called Chauntae Davies on board, I’m disinclined to accept the official explanation that this was an Aids-relief “humanitarian” mission.
Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.That said, as longtime readers know, I regard federal justice as appallingly corrupt, and so the sudden revival of Epstein’s prosecution is somewhat more than intriguing. First, and as often with prominent American cases, the details make no sense:
In a memo filed to the court, prosecutors outlined the scope of Epstein’s vast wealth to argue that he has the means to flee the country and escape prosecution, noting that he not only has homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico and Paris — with his Upper East Side townhouse, of which prosecutors are seeking the forfeiture, alone worth $77 million — but also owns a private island in the US Virgin Islands.
He also has three US passports, owns at least 15 vehicles and has access to two private jets, according to the memo.
I can understand how a rich man comes to have fifteen cars, but how pray, does one individual citizen acquire three US passports? And from a government supposedly on “orange alert” these last eighteen years.
Second, Epstein was the beneficiary of a ludicrously lenient federal plea deal a decade ago for exactly the same charges. So this would appear to be “double jeopardy”. Not so fast, say the feds:
It is well-settled in the Second Circuit [appellate court] that a plea agreement in one US Attorney’s office does not bind another unless otherwise stated.
Is that so? Thanks to that litigious loser Cary Katz, I’m more familiar with Second Circuit jurisprudence than I might otherwise wish. But I had no idea of the above. So apparently, when you enter into a plea deal with “the United States” that says things like “the United States, in consultation with and subject to the good faith and approval of Epstein’s counsel, shall select an attorney representative for…” and “if Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against…”, the words “the United States” only apply to the United States that resides at 27 Ocean View Parkway, Miami Beach and not the United States that resides at 32b Rotting Wharf Lane, The Bronx. So forget double jeopardy; you could have demicentuple jeopardy. Who knew?
One more thing: it seems fairly obvious that Epstein is also a procurer for those whose appetites likewise run to schoolgirls. This is where the manifests of his airplane are at least somewhat inferential. Yet the new indictment is concerned only with “the New York Residence” and “the Palm Beach Residence” — and not the Lolita Express jetting well-heeled buddies to Paedo Island. Is this some cozy arrangement to ensure that Bill Clinton et al are excluded from the case?
July 10, 2019
Fake news, whacky conspiracy theories, and the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein
In The Week, Matthew Walther uses the Epstein case to illustrate why many so-called “low information voters” tend to believe all sorts of odd things like Pizzagate:
The arrest of the apparent billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein at a New Jersey airport on Saturday on federal charges for crimes he was accused of during the Bush administration should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the news carefully. He may have escaped in 2008 with a ludicrous one-year stint in a county jail that he was allowed to leave six days a week, but his name has never quite been out of the headlines. Between 2008 and 2015 Epstein reportedly settled more than a dozen lawsuits from Jane Does alleging sexual assault; the youngest of his alleged victims was 14 years old.
Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.The only question is why did it take this long? Why was the ludicrous deal that gave Epstein and his fellow conspirators immunity in exchange for a slap-on-the-wrist jail sentence ever allowed to go through in the first place?
[…]
We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.
Among other things, the Epstein case forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “fake” news. There is, or should be, more to being informed than fact-checking formalism. If you have spent the last few years earnestly consuming mainstream left-of-center media in this country you will be under the impression that the United States has fallen under the control of a spray-tanned Mussolini clone who is never more than five minutes away from making birth control illegal. If you watch Fox News and read conservative publications, you no doubt bemoan the fact that Ronald Reagan’s heir is being hamstrung by a bunch of avocado toast-eating feminist witches. Meanwhile, Alex Jones’s audience will tell you that America, like the rest of the world, is ruled by a depraved internationalist elite whose ultimate allegiance is not to countries or political parties or ideologies but to one another. These people believe in nothing. They will safeguard their wealth and privilege at any cost. They will never break rank. And they will commit unspeakable crimes with impunity, while anyone who dares to speculate openly is sued or hounded out of public life as a kook.
July 2, 2019
Antifa strikes back against the White Patriarchy … by assaulting a gay, visible minority journalist
Andy Ngo suffered potentially serious injuries in an assault by Antifa “activists” during a Portland demonstration:
Andy Ngo, a photojournalist and editor at Quillette, landed in the emergency room after a mob of antifa activists attacked him on the streets of Portland during a Saturday afternoon demonstration.
The assailants wore black clothing and masks, and were engaged in a counter-protest against several right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys. Ngo is a well-known chronicler of antifa activity, and has criticized their illiberal tactics on Fox News. He attended the protest in this capacity — as a journalist, covering a notable public event.
According to Ngo, his attacker stole his camera equipment. But video footage recorded by another journalist, The Oregonian‘s Jim Ryan, clearly shows an antifa activist punching Ngo in the face. Others throw milkshakes at him:
First skirmish I’ve seen. Didn’t see how this started, but @MrAndyNgo got roughed up. pic.twitter.com/hDkfQchRhG
— Jim Ryan (@Jimryan015) June 29, 2019
Quillette posted their reaction to the attack:
All revolutionary movements seek to sanctify their lawless behaviour as a spontaneous eruption of righteous fury. In some cases, such as the Euromaidan movement in Ukraine, this conceit is justified. But usually their violence is a pre-meditated tactic to intimidate adversaries. Or as Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin put it, “In revolution, he will be victorious who cracks the other’s skull.”
The Antifa thugs who attacked Quillette editor and photojournalist Andy Ngo in Portland yesterday did not quite manage to crack his skull. But they did manage to induce a brain hemorrhage that required Ngo’s overnight hospitalization. (For those seeking to support Ngo financially as he recovers, there is a third-party fundraising campaign.) […]
Andy Ngo is an elfin, soft-spoken man. He also happens to be the gay son of Vietnamese immigrants — salient details, given Antifa’s absurd slogans about smashing the heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy. Like schoolboy characters out of Lord of the Flies, these cosplay revolutionaries stomp around, imagining themselves to be heroes stalking the great beast of fascism. But when the beast proves elusive, they gladly settle for beating up journalists, harassing the elderly or engaging in random physical destruction.
Antifa’s first prominent appearance was in 2017, when black-clad protestors at Berkeley used violence to shut down an appearance by provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. This set a pattern whereby their rallies have been presented as counter-demonstrations aimed at “taking back the streets” from right-wing groups. But more and more, this conceit has dissolved into farce — as in Washington last year, when Antifa gangs showed up to protest largely non-existent conservative protestors. “Again and again, small groups of Antifa members harassed, threatened and occasionally jostled reporters,” the Washington Post reported. “The activists demanded not to be photographed as they marched down public streets — even as many of them hoisted their own phone cameras and staged their own photo ops.”
Update: I’m told that this is the lawyer who will be acting on Mr. Ngo’s behalf:
Goodnight everyone except Antifa criminals who I plan to sue into oblivion and then sow salt into their yoga studios and avocado toast stands until nothing grows there, not even the glimmer of a violent criminal conspiracy aided by the effete impotence of a cowed city government.
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) July 1, 2019
June 30, 2019
Chipping away at Martin Luther King’s reputation with new FBI surveillance revelations
Stephen Smith discusses the struggle of scholars specializing in the life and works of Martin Luther King, Jr. to cope with new revelations about the civil rights leader:
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room, 18 March 1966.
Photo by Yoichi Okamoto via Wikimedia Commons.
These are difficult days for students of Martin Luther King, Jr. The man many of us have dedicated long months and years to researching, often out of a profound sense of respect, is facing an allegation of laughing and even offering advice while a fellow Baptist minister raped a woman in a Washington, D.C. hotel room in January 1964.
The source of this explosive claim is a trove of newly released FBI surveillance documents unearthed by the dean of MLK historians himself, David J. Garrow, author of The FBI and Martin Luther King: From “Solo” to Memphis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on King, Bearing the Cross.
Since the article detailing Garrow’s new findings came out at the end of May in the British magazine Standpoint, Garrow has taken more of a pounding in the press than King. No surprises there, perhaps. Like those now criticizing Garrow, I desperately want to believe that the 55-year-old allegation is a trumped-up product of the FBI’s “viciously negative attitude” toward King, as Garrow described it in “Solo” to Memphis — a book that earned him the Bureau’s enmity prior to its publication in 1981.
The record, however, is also pretty clear that King relieved the crushing stress of daily death threats and the insatiable demands of the civil rights movement with women and liquor. To his credit, King was the first to admit he was far from perfect as America’s “moral leader” — but this far?
Much of the criticism that Garrow is now facing over the article is focused on the validity of FBI evidence concerning King’s sexual activities, namely the bombshell assertion made by FBI agents spying on King in 1964 that he “looked on, laughed and offered advice” during the reported sexual assault (which, as Garrow has since underscored, the agents listening in did nothing to stop). This allegedly took place in two Washington, D.C. hotel rooms rented to King and four other Baptist ministers, although the controversial claim is made in a handwritten note appended to a summary of the FBI’s microphone surveillance.
Garrow argues that “without question” the handwritten annotation would have been added with both the original surveillance recording and a full transcript of the recording at hand. He adds that Justice Department investigators who reviewed both the tapes and transcripts in 1977 confirmed the accuracy of the FBI’s claims. The tapes and transcripts, along with the rest of the fruits of the FBI’s intensive electronic surveillance of King, were subsequently sealed by a court order until Jan. 31, 2027.
I know Garrow and I know his respect for the man he calls “Doc” runs deep, and this is not an allegation he would carelessly report. Some of his detractors have called him “irresponsible” for running with it without access to the original tapes and transcripts, but Garrow has at least 40 years of experience working with primary sources produced by the FBI’s intensive surveillance of King. If anyone can tell what smells off and what doesn’t, it’s him.
June 29, 2019
Canada’s inability to deal with Chinese hard ball tactics
The Canadian government complied with a request from the United States government to detain a Chinese national for possible extradition to the US. But this was no ordinary Chinese citizen: it was Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer for Huawei, a very big and very well-connected Chinese conglomerate. Ms. Wanzhou is not just a high-ranking executive, but also the daughter of the founder of the company. The Chinese government is more than miffed at Canada’s legal presumption and has been piling on the means of persuasion to get Canada’s notoriously pliable government to just pretend this never happened and to let Ms. Wanzhou proceed on her way. Under normal circumstances, this might well happen, but the US government is now under the control of a man who reputedly makes our Prime Minister lose control of his bladder, so we can’t just be seen to knuckle under to the bullying of the Bad Orange Man, nor can we be seen to knuckle under to the bullying of the PRC, leaving poor Justin Trudeau looking weak and powerless (and, to be fair, he is weak and powerless).
Andrew Coyne suggests that the best way to help a couple of poor Canadians who have been caught up in the inter-governmental shenanigans is to stop talking about some sort of “deal”:
U.S. Department of Justice among others announced 23 criminal charges (Financial Fraud, Money Laundering, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Theft of Trade Secret Technology and Sanctions Violations, etc.) against Huawei & its CFO Wanzhou Meng
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
I don’t doubt that behind the scenes government officials are doing everything they can, or think they are. But the pressure to bring the Canadians home is surely less for the conspicuous failure of other Canadians to give a damn.
Indeed, what is striking throughout this standoff is that most of the pressure has come from the other side. It is China, not Canada, that has used trade as a weapon, blocking imports of Canadian meat and canola. It was the Chinese air force that buzzed a Canadian warship in the East China Sea.
It is the departing Chinese ambassador to Canada who has launched one incendiary attack after another on this country, while Canada’s now-former ambassador to China was floating trial balloons about getting the Americans to drop the charges against Meng. It is China’s leaders who refuse to meet ours.
And yet for all of China’s lawlessness, for all its bestial mistreatment of our citizens and baseless attacks on our interests, the most common response in this country is not to demand that China repair its relationship with Canada, but to ask how Canada can mollify China.
June 21, 2019
Lies, damned lies, and hate crime statistics
Fraser Myers explains why the much-remarked-upon British crime statistics showing huge increases in hate crimes are much more a statistical artifact than a true reflection of the state of British society:
Allegedly, England and Wales are in the grip of a “surge” in homophobic and transphobic hate crime. “The rate of LGBT hate crime per capita rose by 144 per cent between 2013-14 and 2017-18”, it reports. Hate-crime hotspots like South Yorkshire and Hampshire experienced even larger surges, it claims, with police-recorded crimes rising by 376 per cent and 189 per cent in the same period, respectively.
To make matters worse, according to LBGT campaigners, this rise in hate crime doesn’t even capture the true extent of the hatred out there. Taz Edwards-White, alliance manager at equalities and diversity organisation Metro, told the Guardian that the hate-crime figures were likely to be “the tip of the iceberg”. She and other campaigners say this rise could be down to the rise of right-wing populism.
The truth is rather different. Every year for the past five years, the release of police-recorded data on hate crime has been accompanied by panicked media reports of a hate-crime surge. But as last year’s Home Office report made abundantly clear, large increases “are due to the improvements made by the police in their identification and recording of hate-crime offences and more people coming forward to report these crimes rather than a genuine increase” (emphasis mine).
What’s more, there is a good reason why the “surge” identified by the Guardian takes off in 2013-2014. 2014 was the year the College of Policing released its Hate Crime Operational Guidance [PDF], which is still used to this day. This guidance actually demands that the numbers increase. “Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate”, it says. As part of the drive to record more crime, there has been a slew of public-information campaigns and regular exhortations from police for the public to report hateful incidents, particularly in the wake of major political events like the EU referendum and the 2017 terror attacks.
Police-recorded data has other problems, too. Police are obliged to record not only criminal actions but also all non-crime hate incidents. A non-crime hate incident is literally any event that is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility towards a so-called protected characteristic. The key word here is perceived. As the Operational Guidance makes clear: “The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of the hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incidents.”
June 17, 2019
“We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks”
Brendan O’Neill follows up on the disturbing story of two lesbians who were physically assaulted on a London bus:
Talk about ungrateful. Brits, and people around the world, offered empathy and solidarity to the two gay women who were battered by thugs on a London bus. And yet now one of the women has turned around and told us we only care about them because they are white. It’s only because they are “two attractive, white, cisgender women” that so many people and organisations gave a damn about them and tweeted about them, apparently. Thanks a bunch. We offer our human concern for your wellbeing and you tell us we’re being racist. We’ve reached peak identitarian bollocks.
The woman in question, who goes only by the name “Chris”, has written a piece for the Guardian. Natch. The intro lets us know what we’re in for: “The photo of me and my date went viral – but only as we’re white, feminine and cisgender.” Translation: you racist, transphobic idiots wouldn’t have cared half as much if this had been two bloodied and bruised black women or trans women. The “commodification” of “my face” came at the “expense of other victims whose constant persecution apparently does not warrant similar moral outrage”, says Chris.
What is most striking about her piece is that she flagellates herself for her privilege. Yes, this woman who last month was badly beaten allegedly on account of her sexuality is now beating herself up in the national press over her privileged identity. She says she has “evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white-supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation”. What a strange, self-hating mindset it must take to be victimised for your sexuality and then to say: “God, I’m SO privileged.”
Chris even does us the service of providing a list of people who are far less privileged than her and who us phoney empathisers should finally start noticing. It is “open season”, she says, on “people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants”. This is classic virtue-signalling. She is engaging in the Oppression Olympics while making it clear she doesn’t deserve any gold medals in said Olympics because she is white, educated, cisgender, etc. A masterclass in identitarian showboating.
June 5, 2019
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
In the National Post, Chris Selley points out some odd blindspots in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls:
“The violence the National Inquiry heard amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people,” the report declares. Among the first headlines was one noting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “avoided” using the G-word in his remarks on its findings, settling for “shameful” and “unacceptable.”
The inquiry’s legal analysis concedes it is a novel deployment of the term. It seems far more comfortable alleging a historical genocide against “Indigenous Peoples” that involved specific targeting of women — for example through forced sterilization, which is acknowledged as a genocidal technique in the 1948 UN convention — than it does a genocide against Indigenous women and girls specifically. But the insistence upon the term speaks volumes about this peculiar inquiry’s tortured birth, and about some of its more perplexing recommendations.
Indigenous women have certainly been targets for violence and discrimination in particular ways throughout Canada’s history. Today they suffer disproportionately from violent crime, relative to Indigenous men, in a way that non-Indigenous women do not. The rate of self-reported sexual assault among Indigenous women in the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) was more than triple that of non-Indigenous women. An astonishing 61 per cent of Indigenous women aged 15-25 reported violent victimization in the previous 12 months — nearly six times the rate for Indigenous men the same age.
But if Indigenous victims of violence even today can be said to be casualties of colonialist genocide, then the subset who are by far the most “especially targeted” — which is to say dead — are men. Between 2014 and 2017, Statistics Canada reports there were 139 Indigenous female homicide victims, and 428 Indigenous male victims — three times as many. (Similarly, non-Indigenous men were murdered two-and-a-half times more often than non-Indigenous women.)
[…]
But the obsession with half the Indigenous population leads to some bewildering recommendations, especially on the justice file. On the one hand the report inveighs against mandatory minimum sentences as a cause of Indigenous overrepresentation in the prison system, and calls for more robust applications of Gladue principles for all Indigenous offenders, which is to say more alternatives to incarceration; on the other hand it supports legislation that would require judges to punish violent offences more harshly if the victim is an Indigenous woman, and to automatically classify homicides occurring after “a pattern of intimate partner violence and abuse” as first-degree murder. This would almost certainly have the effect of increasing the incarceration rates of Indigenous men and women alike.
June 2, 2019
QotD: Explaining modern female sexuality
I have a theory that for many women, sex, or rather agreeing to have sex is difficult, and especially so for the first time with a new partner. How else to explain the fact that so many women admitted that their first time with a new man was generally experienced in an alcoholic haze? (For those who haven’t been keeping up, the source data is here.) So if confronting herself about her “slutty” behavior (even if the sluttiness is only in her own mind), a woman would like to have an excuse like “Oh, but I was drunk…” and thus can excuse away or justify the indiscretion. Or else, as the original study showed, women can even explain away the drunkenness as just a regular part of the dating process, so therefore it’s okay.
I also believe that this is why so many women have rape fantasies, because “Oh, he forced me to do it…” is likewise an expression that denies the woman’s [shameful] complicity in the act. (Of course, now that it’s become okay to accuse a previous partner with actual rape as part of the excuse, the whole thing has become considerably more sinister, especially as such accusations can take place months or years afterwards and still be considered valid by law enforcement. But for the sake of argument, let’s treat this scenario as but a blip on societal consciousness which will disappear at some point when women regain their sanity. We can only hope.) Certainly, this explains female submissiveness (outside a natural submissive personality anyway), which can be regarded (by women) as a kind of watered-down rape fantasy.
The only time, I think, when self-delusion disappears is when a woman encounters a universal object of female desire, such as a hunky actor or popular musician. Even then, there is a “safety in numbers” excuse — “OMG everybody is crazy about him!” — which makes it okay, or at least, provides a figleaf of an excuse for irresponsibility and sexual licentiousness. You only need a sliver of an excuse, and it will be acceptable, in other words.
Kim du Toit, “Seeking Excuses”, Splendid Isolation, 2017-04-24.
