Hacks Who Have Lost Rational Perspective

Being Fired by Trump Does Not A Holocaust Victim Make

By David Harsanyi
National Review Online

Get a grip: The president’s critics are not being rounded up and sent to death camps. They’re landing book deals and TV gigs.

Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes, one of the media’s favorite Donald Trump antagonists, took to Twitter this weekend to pen a transcendently nonsensical thread comparing the firing of a handful of bureaucrats to the rounding up of political undesirables in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

It’s wouldn’t be a huge deal, except that this kind of hysterical reaction has now been normalized in American discourse, illustrating that once-rational people have either lost all sense of history or are willing to belittle the past for short-term political gain. My bet is on the latter.

Here’s how Wittes begins his updated version of Martin Niemöller’s famous poem:

Benjamin Wittes
✔
@benjaminwittes
First he came for @comey, and I said nothing because I was mad at @comey because of the Clinton email investigation and I blamed him for Trump’s election.

When fellow Hungarians came for my grandfather — he was one of the first to be deported from the country — they sent him to sweep mines on the Eastern Front before handing him over to the Germans at Mauthausen and then Gunskirchen.

At some point he perished, no doubt, in a vile and undignified manner, perhaps succumbing to starvation or typhoid or dysentery, or maybe he was shot in the head and left in a shallow unmarked grave. We don’t know.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About Banal Facilitators of Evil)

The Root of the Disease

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 8, 2014

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt writes this:

“Without Jewish help in administrative and police work — the final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was, as I have mentioned, done entirely by Jewish police — there would have been either complete chaos or an impossibly severe drain on German manpower” (p. 117).

She goes on to quote someone who observed that it was scarcely possible for a few thousand people, most of whom worked in offices, to liquidate many hundreds of thousands of other people without the cooperation of the victims. Moreover, that cooperation frequently consisted of participation in the bureaucratic processing. Before being gassed in the camps, they had to stand in line and fill out numerous forms.

The subtitle of Arendt’s book is telling: “A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

Or, to look at the threat another way, we also have to remember the banality of bureaucracy. At root it is the same banality.

Here is Lewis in the Preface of Screwtape:

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

Jumping the Gun

Lest We Forget

Some folk are just far too ready to pull the trigger, it seems.  We have heard that a copy of Mein Kampf, personally signed by the author, Adolf Hitler is coming up for sale at auction.  Apparently,  if one had spare change of around NZ$24k one might succeed in purchasing it.

Some doughty warriors are winding themselves up into a hissy fit.

Letter From America (About Concentration Camps)

Much More Than Thought

We all know about the Nazi death and concentration camps.  It seems, however, that it was much more pervasive than we knew.  Recent research is showing that Germany and the occupied territories were riddled with them.  This, from the New York Times

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Collection of Eugenia Hochberg Lanceter

A group of Jewish women at the entrance to the Brody ghetto in Eastern Galicia, 1942. The sign is written in German, Ukrainian and Polish.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945. 

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington. “The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”