- Hey, have you noticed I don’t post much on weekends? That’s because I’m usually at work all weekend. (Have I mentioned I’m a wedding coordinator?)
- There have been a few replies to my recent posts on the RIAA; check out Will Baude and Bitch Has “Word”, who disagree with me, and I Protest, who thinks I don’t go far enough.
- Hopefully I’ll be a homeowner by a week from now. You can view some photos of my I-hope-house-to-be here.
- Sappho’s Breathing has many good posts – I liked Politics and the petty sexism of progressive men, in particular.
- I’ve always thought the Bush family – Nazi connections story was too boring to be worth paying attention to, because it was the sort of thing only folks who babbled about black helicopters and the like care about. I was mistaken. Orcinus has a very sensible four posts on the subject – start here.
- Speaking of Orcinus, it was a question from Orcinus which led Shock and Awe to research this excellent history of the phrase “identity politics.”
- Not content to attack UNFPA, some pro-lifers are now launching an attack on UNICEF. Their basic goal, I think, is to attack and destroy any organization that actually does any good for women and children anywhere in the world.
- Paul Krugman has written an attack on anti-tax politics which you’ll probably find wonderful and enlightening if you’re a lefty, annoying and simplistic if yo’re a righty. I enjoyed it a lot. (via blueheron)
Have a nice weekend, folks..
Cleis’ post (and subsequent comment) sums up what we should always keep in mind: no matter what we say or how convincingly we say it, one’s ideas find their definitive expression in, and have to be evaluated through, one’s actions. Such behaviour is all-too common among self-proclaimed progressive men, at least those I am familiar with (talking about Greece and France). Not so long ago, a Greek “revolutionary” activist told a female friend of mine who happened to disagree on a particular point to “shut up!”, because he was not going to “let a woman contradict him”. Alas, this is only one out of too many occurrences. Progressives really wanting to reach their practical goals should not hesitate to denounce it whenever it happens before their opposition does.
On another topic, but still about good readings, I was glad to find an online English version of this Edward Said article (I had read the French translation in Le Monde diplomatique). I know Said’s views are controversial, but even people who usually disagree with him might appreciate this updated definition of Humanism (an inner-links free version is also available at The Guardian).
I sent the Orcinus Prescott Bush review to most of my email list, and to the LA Times, the Post, the NYT, the Globe, and the Guardian. I feel unable to send it my Jewish family. Half are GOP, and the other half hate Bush but this is just too sensitive. But I feel that voters have a moral right to know, as they did in 1988 and 2000.
amp, i love it when you assemble these lists. i’ve added so many of the people that you reference to my blogroll that i can hardly keep up with it.
thanks, both amp and the people he links, for the intellectual stimulation.
It always astounds me the number of so-called progressives who are sexist and/or homophobic. It was one of the things that I used to hate so much about progressivism, in fact, that I avoided progressivism as though it were a plague. Then I realised that those people were hypocritical and wrong, and then I was okay.
I liked David Neiwert’s piece on the Bush/Nazi connection because it was well thought-out, well researched, and actually seemed to go out of its way to distance itself from the whole “Bush is a Nazi” thing so popular with some of the leftish blogsphere. This was something I noticed and appreciated in his (highly recommended) “Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism” pieces.
One thing, though: what is a wedding coordinator?
Best of luck on the house. That can really be a nerve-wracking process.
I still have a hard time seeing the Bush/Nazi story as anything more than cross-generational character assassination, of which Orcinus’ series is a particularly nasty and irresponsible example. If someone has a case to make that either President Bush espouses the ideals of the Nazi party, let them make it, but I haven’t heard them yet. The Kennedy fortune was likely built on liquor-related crime, and Joseph Kennedy was a consistent Nazi appeaser who offered a great deal more comfort and sympathy to the Nazis than the Bush family was ever in a position to do, but rightly no one questions the patriotism and public service of later generations, and no one tries to build a case that later generations are somehow “tainted” by the patriarch’s alleged misdeeds. Orcinus suggests that the Harrimans were tainted by Nazi connections as well, but the Harrimans were generally Democratic financiers. Between them and the Kennedys, are we to avoid the Democratic party as inevitably soiled?
As for the allegations against Prescott Bush, the fact that Orcinus has to rely upon a couple of Larouchites to make his case severely diminishes his credibility, in my view. Also, it seems to me that Orcinus’ crucial two sentences, quoted below, are contradictory.
The point was that George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, had the assets of the family business seized by the U.S. Government under the Trading With The Enemy Act of 1941. Much of the Bush family fortune was made by dealing with Nazi Germany — both before and during World War II.
If those assets were seized, then the family fortune could not have been built on them.
Moreover, Orcinus points out that Prescott Bush did considerable work in support of the US war effort:
Bush volunteered to be chairman of United Service Organizations, putting himself on the national stage for the first time. He traveled the country raising millions of dollars to help boost the morale of US troops during World War II.
The fact that Orcinus dismisses this fact as unimportant does not mean that the rest of us should ignore it. Also, of course, George H.W. Bush was the youngest naval aviator in WWII, nearly losing his life in combat. Orcinus is happy to publicize the ugly notion that this action was motivated by irrational racial hatred of the Japanese, but even he has to admit that this scurrilous assertion is baseless.
Finally, Orcinus flies off the handle when he tries to tie corporate America in general to fascism. First, his definition of fascism is sufficiently elastic to include Stalin’s USSR, which is hardly ever thought of as fascist and which certainly was not dominated by private corporations. Moreover, an argument that corporate America financed Nazi Germany is fatally attenuated, it seems to me, by the fact that corporate America was never able to finance a fascist regime in America itself (they could build the Nazi war machine but they couldn’t defeat the creation of the NLRB?).
Orcinus clearly hates the Bushes and disdains large corporations, and he or she is entitled to his opinions. Trying to tie his targets to the Nazis, however, is baseless and simply makes him/her look silly.
Tom T.: I believe Orcinus points out that the Bush assets were returned after the war. You just read the piece, so you should know this.
“who offered a great deal more comfort and sympathy to the Nazis than the Bush family was ever in a position to do.”
Did you read the piece? Yes, Irish-American Joseph Kennedy was a Nazi-lover, and IIRC advised FDR as UK Ambassador to ally with Hitler. His advice was rejected, nor did he finance the Nazis for 20 years. Your claim is false.
Orcinus does not dismiss Bush’s USO work as unimportant, and he debunks the “why GHWB went to the Pacific” charge. He is reviewing the various charges, you idiot.
“Moreover, an argument that corporate America financed Nazi Germany is fatally attenuated, it seems to me, by the fact that corporate America was never able to finance a fascist regime in America itself.”
No. Orcinus’s central point is that sometimes corporations ally with fascist goups, and sometimes they do not. I don’t mean to be rude, but what is fatally attenuated here is your credibility as a reader.
These seem to be your central beefs with the review. In conclusion: “Trying to tie his targets to the Nazis, however, is baseless and simply makes him/her look silly.”
Prescott Bush helped finance the Nazis for almost 20 years. Tying – not “trying to tie” – the Bushes to the Nazis is not baseless. Look up “baseless” in a dictionary, please.
However, your responses to Orcinus ARE largely baseless, as I think I’ve established. I also suspect that some of them are not in good faith. Which revolts me.
Both Bushes visited Auschwitz as President. Neither said a word about Prescott, or a hint of personal regret. I remember that, and they should have been turned away at the gate: “Arbeit macht frei.” They had plenty of other death camps to visit, why not Theresienstadt?
Nice house. Send me the addy when you move in. And do you need help moving? Cawll me. I’ll be glad to chip in.
John, I didn’t mean to make you so angry. I may have been a bit intemperate in taking on Orcinus, and I apologize if I offended you personally.
I suppose we’ll have to disagree about Orcinus’ motive for including the GHWB/Japan point, but I do continue to believe that, in raising it to knock it down, his net effect is to raise the visibility of the charge more than the rebuttal. Perhaps that makes me an idiot.
I will try to clarify one point, though. My larger point about Joe Kennedy is that (rightly)no one tries to tie the later Kennedy generations to the patriarch’s attitudes about the Nazis or his connections to organized crime. No one, to my knowledge, has ever seriously called upon Ted Kennedy to apologize to the victims of the death camps for his father’s advice to FDR. And that’s how it should be, it seems to me. The current Bushes, like the current Kennedys, have lived sufficiently public lives that there is plenty to like or dislike about them based on their own conduct, without having to blame them for the conduct of their forebears.
You’re right that the facts have tied Prescott Bush to dealings with the Nazis (although I don’t buy the slave-labor point, and I think Orcinus is simply wrong in stating that the Vesting Order corroborates continuing dealings with the Nazis), and I should have said so. I can’t help but read Orcinus, though, despite his faint assurances that the Bushes are not “literally” Nazis, as “trying to tie” the two Presidents Bush to the Nazis through Prescott Bush, and suggesting that the current President’s ties to corporate conservatism are morally equivalent to fomenting Nazism. And I still think that’s silly.
Tom T., thank you for your polite and temperate reply, which I largely agree with. I was planning to stop at that, but I’d like to take up just one or two points.
I have absolved the Kennedys of blame for their Nazi-loving father, and done the opposite with the Bushes. Your second comment (not your first, interestingly, which I took as partisan pleading) has caused me to ask whether I am blind. My default framework says that Hitler was fascist: the Kennedy children rejected that philosophy in their activist politics, whereas the Bushes, GWB in particular, have not shown this clear repudiation of that worldview. This is unfair of me. If freedom means anything, it means that children can choose any politics they want, regardless of their parents’ sins (Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson, for instance). In fact, Gibson is relevant: if he put daylight between himself and his father’s Holocaust denial, I’d let it go. But he won’t. Similarly, AFAIK the Bushes have never repudiated Prescott’s ties to Nazism, making their Auschwitz photo-ops especially painful (to me). The question then is: has any Kennedy ever disowned Joseph’s call to ally with Hitler? I’m going to have to google that. If not, I am compelled to put Bushes and Kennedys in the same boat, sadly. If either family repudiates that past, then I see no link between them and it. The only link is their tacit endorsement. I speak as the descendant of slave-owners, whose worldview I spit on (sorry).
Like you, I find attempts to call any Bush, including Prescott, a Nazi, ridiculous and an offensive exploitation of the Holocaust. Things have meanings. If my banker is Republican that doesn’t make me one. It is a business relationship. I think David Niewert at Orcinus feels the same: this is the problem with reviewing charges and debunking them, since as you say that can give them undeserved prominence.
Joseph Kennedy also was not a Nazi: I think his support for Hitler was born of the kind of hatred of England you can find among Irish-Americans, all the more so 20 years after Irish independence. FDR should not have sent him to London. So I put Joseph Kennedy and Prescott Bush in the same boat, but I distinguish between them. Prescott Bush looked abroad for a place to make a buck, around 1923, and found a German party that was small but notable for its brutality. He stuck with them for 20 years, past the occupation of France and Poland, past Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war by Germany, until finally he was stopped (not he stopped) when the government seized his bank under the Trading With the Enemy Act in Fall 1942. Fall 1942. Then he worked to redeeem himself, but that’s a good idea after explicit treason. I haven’t read Joseph Kennedy’s dispatches, I know he spent some time pushing his idea, but I think he stopped earlier, and he didn’t spend 20 years making money in this business. With what I know, I do then distinguish Bush and Kennedy, who I’m pretty sure did not commit treason (bizarre to commit treason and have your next two generations become president). But I should know more about the latter. It’s also freakish to have three, and almost four (RFK), post-war presidents with Nazi ties. Ugh.
John,
You know, I had completely blanked on the fact that Joseph Kennedy’s views of Great Britain would be informed by the Irish experience. That makes a great deal of sense and perhaps helps to put his views in an anti-English, rather than a pro-Hitler, context. Enemy-of-my-enemy may still be more of an expedient than a moral principle, but that aspect does add some complexity.
I was a little drunk when I wrote that first post, so it was probably a bit too bitchy. I don’t believe that the Kennedys have any obligations at this point to exorcise the past, and I really don’t believe that the current Bushes do either. Someone once said “Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” and I suppose that eventually one can only ask whether that fortune is being put to a good use today.
My view on that question as to the Bushes may reflect a partisan tilt on my part, I suppose. It would be a mistake to assume that I was a Bush voter in 2000, but I have been brought around to the pro-war cause, and I still see the war as Bush risking his presidency to put a finger in fascism’s eye. Certainly, I recognize that this view provokes strong disagreement on various levels, and I’m just raising it to inform your interpretation of where I’m coming from, and not as an attempt to influence anyone who holds views to the contrary.
That’s interesting that you note that you are descended from slave-owners; you may find it ironically amusing that my grandparents on one side were committed socialists.
Hmm. I just visited a bunch of sites, including a site devoted to hating Ted Kennedy which has a long Joseph Kennedy bio. It says he got Hearst to praise Hitler, and that he was a “Jews own the media” anti-Semite, claims confirmed elsewhere with quotes. I didn’t know that. It doesn’t mention him advising FDR to ally with Hitler, and in fact doesn’t contradict this enyclopedia overview: “In 1938, Kennedy reached the peak of his power when Roosevelt appointed him Ambassador to Britain, the first Irish-Catholic ever to hold the post. Kennedy felt sure that he was on the road to the presidency, but problems soon arose.
A staunch isolationist, Kennedy argued for the appeasement of Hitler and wanted the United States to stay out of any conflict that might occur between Britain and Germany. Needless to say, this line was not a big hit with the English people or with conservative leaders such as future Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Kennedy resigned under pressure in 1940, when war became inevitable.”
I’ve spent some time now googling for some disavowal by JFK or Teddy, and have found nothing. That changes my opinion of them. Their dad did something awful.
O’Reilly had a show on Joseph Kennedy and Hitler, but he seems to have neglected Prescott Bush.
I feel honor-bound to present this picture. Make of it what you will.
Hi Tom,
We kind of cross-posted. I guess forefathers are the theme of this debate. It’s good to have our different views on that here.
I understand this view: “Someone once said “Behind every great fortune there is a crime,” and I suppose that eventually one can only ask whether that fortune is being put to a good use today.” And yet I disagree. To illustrate my point: my first reply was quite rude to you. We both haven’t mentioned it since, though you’ve twice excused your own rudeness, which in cultures around the world is a polite hint to the other person. But my own logic says I am wrong not to apologize for my rudeness, since a wrong was done and my silence tacitly endorses it. I apologize.
I feel that the Bushes and the Kennedys, in their silence compounded with their running our country, tacitly endorse Nazi family ties as appropriate for this country’s leaders. A word from them would end that. Schwarzenegger took this view in asking the Simon Wiesenthal Center to investigate his father (and giving them $1 million). I think the Bush family money raises a separate question.
Quickly, and only because I mentioned earlier an article by Edward Said: it has just been announced today that he died aged 67 (Guardian report).
By the way, I forgot to specify that aforementioned article is in fact the Preface he wrote for this years reprint of his groundbreaking and deeply influential Orientalism (first published 1978), which explains why it has appeared under at least three different titles.
Once again, I realise how controversial are some of Said’s claims, especially on the IsraPal issue (I myself would tend to disagree with some opinions he expressed on this matter). However, that’s not the point. And sorry for the rather off-topic comment(s).
That should’ve been: “how controversial some of Said’s claims are“.
For the record:
Is John Kerry the most liberal senator?
John Kerry is NOT the most liberal senator.
http://mostliberalsenator.blogspot.com/
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