Medicaid Expansion in New Hampshire: Acknowledging an Important Victory – posted 3/30/2014 and published in the Concord Monitor 4/6/2014
This piece appeared in the Concord Monitor on April 6, 2014 under the title “Impressive Political Maturity from Medicaid Expansion Activists”. Jon
The passage of the bill which expands Medicaid coverage to low-income citizens in New Hampshire is a historic accomplishment. Governor Maggie Hassan signed the bill on March 27 and the program becomes available for most people on July 1.
The Medicaid expansion will cover 50,000 poor New Hampshire residents who previously had no insurance coverage. Up til now, Medicaid had gaps in coverage for adults because eligibility was restricted to specific categories. If you were a single parent with dependent children, an adult with disabilities or a poor elderly person, you possibly could qualify. Now all adults earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty limit should be able to qualify. That translates into coverage for a single adult who is earning up to $15,856. The income limit rises based on family size.
There are many costs to being uninsured. Without insurance, people needing care often avoid it. Because people wait on getting medical care, chronic medical problems become acute, Medical bills become a disincentive to going to the doctor. In the worst cases, medical debt leads to bankruptcy, major depression and suicidal ideation. Medical providers have needed to raise rates on insured people to deal with the large numbers of uninsured so there is a big economic ripple effect. The Medicaid expansion will help to break this vicious cycle since those previously uninsured will now be paying through Medicaid.
Advocates deserve much credit for building a winning coalition around the Medicaid expansion. The political maturity of this effort was impressive. The coalition included, among others, business leaders, health care providers, seniors’ organizations and a wide array of advocates reflecting different interest groups.
Instead of posturing and making impossibly purist demands, advocates used creativity in adjusting a plan specific to New Hampshire. Under the bi-partisan bill, low-wage workers will be able to use federal Medicaid dollars to buy private health insurance. This is a bit unorthodox and requires a waiver from the federal government but it allowed moderate Republicans to jump on board.
Since the New Hampshire Senate is controlled by Republicans, getting the majority in the Senate to support the Medicaid expansion was no easy task. This is particularly true because many on the right have built their 2014 political platform on opposition to Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion is an essential element of Obamacare.
I do think there is much to learn from the success of advocates in this effort. As a long-time progressive and a reader particularly of the progressive and left-wing blogosphere, I am used to seeing the glass half empty perspective. Obamacare is not single payer national health insurance. So many gnash their teeth and bemoan that.
From my past experience, many of the bemoaners are removed from the legislative process. It is easy to rail from the sidelines when you are not in the game. In my earlier life when I previously worked as a legal aid lobbyist, I was always impressed by the persistence and determination of my typically more conservative opponents. Many of the business lobbyists practically seemed to live at the legislature 24/7. That was in stark contrast to progressives who were often MIA. I used to think my side could learn from the conservative forces who did not give up and go cry in their beer. You could always count on the conservatives to be there even when they were losing.
I think you can see the Medicaid expansion from the glass half full perspective. True, everyone is not covered but this is the biggest advance I have seen in many a moon. I think the reform sets the stage for further advances toward universal coverage.
I am hopeful that the New Hampshire example can influence other states to follow our lead. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2012 and affirmed the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the Court gave states an option of expanding Medicaid. With New Hampshire as the newest addition, 26 states have now signed on with the expansion.
However, that leaves 24 other states who have not opted for the Medicaid expansion. Six of the states, including Maine, are currently considering it. The New Hampshire example may offer a way forward for those states on the fence or currently balking.
An irony of the Medicaid expansion is that the states who are refusing expansion would benefit the most from it. The states include all the southern states as well as some heartland and Rocky Mountain states. We are talking five million poor uninsured adults who will lack coverage because their state did not opt for Medicaid expansion.
There is a gap in coverage between current Medicaid eligibility and the lower limit of those Obamacare recipients who would get subsidized insurance through the federal marketplace. Just to be more specific, of the five million people who live in states that have not opted to expand Medicaid, about 20% of that group reside in Texas, 16% in Florida, 8% in Georgia, and 7% in North Carolina.
A recent Gallup poll shows that the Southern states are where residents are struggling the most to afford health care. I guess the other side of Southern hospitality toward strangers is meanness toward your own citizens. You can be sure that the governors and legislators in the south who are blocking this advance have fine medical insurance coverage for themselves.
The Medicaid expansion will inject hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds into New Hampshire’s economy. The federal Medicaid money will allow low wage workers to spend money on other critical needs like housing, food and utilities. This should be a direct benefit for local businesses.
As more states like New Hampshire enact the Medicaid expansion, I think it will put more pressure on the states who had initially opted out to reverse course. Their citizens will see the benefit and will want it for themselves. The course of change is usually not a straight shot . It is more circuitous and Medicaid expansion is no exception.
Remembering Tony Benn by Norman Birnbaum – posted 3/23/2014
Tony Benn in 2008 (Regent’s University London/Flickr)
Ever since I learned that Tony Benn had passed away on March 14, I was looking for a good remembrance that would introduce the man and his life. The piece I am reprinting which was written by Norman Birnbaum was the best piece I found. It was on the website of the Nation Magazine. Benn who was described at the end of his life as a national treasure was one of England’s best known leftists.
My favorite Tony Benn story which is alluded to in the piece is about how Benn renounced his lordship. He had been a member of the House of Commons. When his father died in 1960, he became Viscount Stansgate. Benn then led a political struggle to change the British law so nobles could renounce their titles. He wanted to go back to serve in the House of Commons which he did. I liked his comment about the House of Lords: “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”
Gary Younge, who also wrote a fine piece about Benn, said that the two things that stood out about him were his optimism and his persistence. He was a long-time activist. Benn was also famous for his quotes. I will share one additional one I like:
“What is the final corruption in politics? Earlier, it was to get into cabinet, before that, to be popular, but, later on, the final corruption is this kindly, harmless old gentleman. I’m very aware of that. I take the praise as sceptically as I took the abuse. I asked myself some time ago: what do you do when you’re old? You don’t whinge, you don’t talk all the time about the past, you don’t try and manage anything, you try and encourage people.”
The piece by Norman Birnbaum is below:
Tony Benn’s wealthy family performed public service for generations. His father was a minister in the postwar reform Labour government of Clement Attlee. The father, Lord Stansgate, was a typical radical member of the educated gentry, of the same moral stuff as Bertrand Russell. The father made a familiar British journey from liberalism, with its concerns for the dignity and rights of ordinary citizens, its distrust of elite pretensions to superior knowledge and privilege, to Labour in company with many others. That gave Labour its very complex moral culture—a juxtaposition of near revolutionary vision, a perpetually outraged sense of justice and a resolve to construct piece by piece what the Labour hymn terms “a new Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.”
Tony Benn (Anthony Wedgwood Benn) died at age 88 last week—and was immediately and fulsomely praised by many well able to restrain their enthusiasm for him in his lifetime. He was a great parliamentary orator, an inspiring speaker at countless gatherings and meetings outside it, a tireless writer, and above all, a prophet who earned honor in his own country. Much in his background foretold a rather more conventional career, and he did indeed initially if ambivalently pursue one. He held senior cabinet posts in the Wilson and Callaghan governments of the sixties and seventies. He remained in Parliament, an increasingly acerbic and influential critic of both Thatcher and her successor John Major and of his own party’s supposed savior, Tony Blair, until 2001, when he retired “to devote more time to politics.”
British politics had changed immensely since Benn first entered Parliament in 1950. The class bound and locally rooted antagonists, Labour and Conservative, had to learn national media strategies in the television age. Imperial power was claimed, triumphantly, by the Americans, and the realistic British acknowledged, sorrowfully, that their nation was subordinate to its erstwhile cousins. The West Europeans (including old enemies Germany and Italy) had achieved more prosperity and successful welfare states administered by socialists and social Christians in alternation or alliance. Black and brown immigrants began to flow in from the Commonwealth. Harold Macmillan, a Tory Keynesian, won the 1959 general election with the slogan, “We are all workers now.” Labour argued endlessly about what a modern socialist project would entail.
Benn’s early career was chiefly conspicuous for his struggle to avoid having to move to the House of Lords after his father’s death in 1960. It took three years, but new legislation enabled him to renounce the Peerage. There were some signs of rebelliousness in a generally dutiful early political biography. He was one of the first parliamentarians to criticize South African apartheid, and—in opposition to the party leadership—voiced skepticism about Britain’s nuclear weaponry. Benn, unlike many of his Labour contemporaries, took seriously the more critical cultural and political currents in the larger society. These included, variously, the New Left, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and a systematic disrespect for inherited patterns of deference and sobriety. When the New Left thought of profoundly altering Great Britain, we took the revolutionary step of opening The Partisan Café in Soho, central London. My memory is of Benn coming from time to time with his American wife, Caroline, a remarkably intelligent person utterly unsympathetic to the belief of many Britons (some in Labour) that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
It was not a belief congenial to Benn. His familial political inheritance was a doctrine of the necessity of continuous reform. Great social movements in modern Britain had solid textual inspiration—the prophetic books of the King James Bible. Speaking to The Spectator journalist Mary Whitfield not long before he died, Benn said:
My mother and father were both Congregationalists and Congregationalism is interesting because everyone has a hot line to the Almighty, you don’t need a Bishop to help you. So no hierarchies, just trust the people. We used to read the Bible every night and my mother told me that the Bible is the story of the conflict between the Kings who had power and the Prophets who preached righteousness. She taught me to support the Prophets against the Kings.
Benn’s path to the prophetic status he occupied for years took him through cabinet posts, profound political conflict, and internal exile in his own party. As minister and contender for party leadership posts he insisted on using the state to modernize Britain’s industry. Wilson and his rather more robust successor Callaghan were unwilling to undertake a total confrontation with the masters and ideologies of British financial capitalism, the City and Blair proudly declared that New Labour was the best ally of new (and old) money. Labour actually split in the early phases of the argument, a group led by Roy Jenkins and David Owen forming a new party. Thatcher in 1979 exploited these divisions to win an election and proceeded to total war on the trade unions and local and regional self government. Benn’s open intention of reconstructing Labour doctrine and practice in its entirety discountenanced and frightened many of his contemporaries in Labour, and he was relegated to the back benches.
Actually, his failure to remain in the party leadership (he sought the Deputy Leadership but was defeated in 1981) was liberating. Sufficient numbers of parliamentary colleagues agreed with him, or sympathized with him, to preclude his being completely excluded. He spoke for himself, or rather, for groups and ideas disregarded as Labour’s leaders flailed desperately in the effort to construct a coherent response to Thatcherism.
In December of 1980 he came to Washington as guest of the United Auto Workers and the Congressional Progressive Caucus (with the Democratic Socialists of America) to participate in a conference on Eurosocialism. The other guests included Willy Brandt, Felipe Gonzales, François Mitterrand and Olaf Palme. I spent some time with Tony on the occasion, and we talked of the imminence of Reaganism, our fears of the intensification of the Cold War, and the precarious position of the parties of reform. Tony had seen some of the Protestant fundamentalist television spectacles, with their calls for war on Communism and secularism, pluralism and the welfare state. To think, he said, that the origins of much of American democracy were the same as our own in Britain—the thoroughgoing democracy preached in Cromwell’s seventeenth-century revolution. I could offer very little consolation: the spiritual energy that had infused the New Deal and the Great Society, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam protests, had drained away. In both English-speaking nations, we were about to experience the woeful compromises, the retreats depicted as realistic advances, of the Third Way—to be incorporated later in the policies of Clinton and Blair.
I visited Tony occasionally, thereafter, on trips to London. I was struck by the quality of the younger people working in his parliamentary office. One of them was later to become a Nation intern, Ed Miliband. Upon Tony’s death, he issued a fine tribute to him, speaking as Labour’s leader, as an embodiment of conviction. Looking at Tony’s persistence in the past decades, the astonishing thing about it was indeed his unfailing moral generosity, his belief that the creative and communal potential of human nature could become actual, his sense that in total opposition he was custodian of treasures of national memory which ought not be allowed to dissipate.
No doubt, there was a good deal of his religious inheritance in it. There was also something enduringly solid in British culture, hard common sense. (Recall the Parliamentary debate after which the House of Commons rejected Cameron’s plans to intervene in Syria.) I recollect a talk by Tony in the London suburbs. A few hundred people came, plenty of seniors with a fair presence of younger persons. Tony looked around, began by estimating the average age of his auditors, and raised a question. “There are about twenty thousand years of life experience in this hall. Do you think our nation has taken full advantage of what you have to give?” Of course, Tony campaigned against the Iraq war, against the monetarization of British existence brought about by the sovereignty of the City, against the arrogance of elites. He will be remembered for something deeper, his respect for his fellow citizens as an expression of his belief in a national mission.
My Perspective on the 50th Anniversary of the War on Poverty – posted 3/15/2014 and published in the Concord Monitor on 3/20/2014
This article appeared in the Concord Monitor on March 20, 2014 under the title “Pointed in the Right Direction”.
2014 marks the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. Since January, there have been many commemorations and retrospective pieces written about this anniversary. 50 years offers a good time to step back and take stock of both progress and shortcomings.
When President Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1964, it was a multi-pronged attack that featured a broad array of new government programs. These included such lasting accomplishments as Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, Community Action Program, Community Health Centers and Legal Services. President Johnson also greatly strengthened Social Security, extending benefits for retirees, widows and the disabled.
Johnson tried to reduce poverty by creating new services. Many of the services sought to promote opportunity and success in the job market. This approach ran contrary to most influential analyzes of poverty which emphasized the role of unemployment and the solution of job creation. While the new programs did not end poverty, I think it is hard to deny their great value. Collectively, they did contribute to a lessening of the economic divide between rich and poor.
Over the last 50 years, poverty and poverty-related conditions have declined. This is in large part due to the safety net. While there are many ways to look at this, I would cite the rise in average income among the poorest fifth of Americans, the drop in infant mortality, and the disappearance of severe child malnutrition as significant gains. Whatever its other virtues, private enterprise was unable to accomplish these outcomes. The War on Poverty government programs did.
America in the sleepy Eisenhower fifties hid poverty off the beaten track. While it sometimes may not seem that way, we have come a long way from a time when poverty was invisible and not talked about.
However, I would admit that the War on Poverty has been only a partial success.
The War on Poverty did mean an acknowledgement of harsh realities and it prevented things from getting worse. It did not banish poverty. I would never deny the distance we have to go as a society to eliminate poverty but I think it is an error to fail to acknowledge the positives.
It is not surprising that the 50th anniversary would evoke a wide range of responses across the political spectrum. On the political Right, I saw these words used to characterize the War on Poverty: “ineffective”, “failure”, and “catastrophic”.
On March 3rd, the Majority Staff of the Congressional House Budget Committee, presenting the view of Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, released a very long document entitled “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later”. The document attempted to review a large number of federal programs.
Among other programs reviewed, the piece included a section on federally funded Legal Services. Because during my legal career, I had worked in Legal Services for 25 years, I looked forward to seeing the critical evaluation.
I would have to describe the Budget Committee piece as an ideological document. It appears to be agenda-driven with the goal to debunk the War on Poverty. Rather than any evaluation of the substantive work of Legal Services, the relevant section focused on two examples of fraud where administrators stole money from their Legal Services’ programs. It then went on to criticize the Legal Services Corporation for poor grant oversight.
Fair is not the first word that comes to mind to describe this evaluation. Over the 40 plus years of Legal Services, Legal Aid programs have represented hundreds of thousands if not millions of poor people on their individual problems whether it was eviction defense, a public benefit denial, a consumer scam or protection from domestic violence abuse. Legal Aid advocates have won innumerable victories that directly resulted in tangible client benefit. Where was any mention of that?
How can it be that a document purporting to evaluate 50 years of the War on Poverty included no mention of the actual work of Legal Services? Evaluations like the Budget Committee report reflect the distance of the report’s writers from poor people and their actual experience. It would be generous to characterize reports of this nature as “academic”.
Poverty is tough to talk about because just the word itself has become a political football. There are no generally shared definitions of what poverty is. There is cynicism and defeatism about ever eliminating poverty. To his credit, President Johnson sought to evoke an empathetic understanding of the poor.
While the War on Poverty has been represented as a Democratic Party endeavor, that is not entirely true. President Richard Nixon also invested heavily in the War on Poverty. Nixon played a leading role in establishing the Food Stamp program, the Women”s, Infant and Children (WIC) food program, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). He also proposed a guaranteed national income that failed in the Senate after passing the House. I suppose this is forgotten history but it does show that the War on Poverty had more bi-partisan origins than people now would expect.
The War on Poverty pointed us as a society in the right direction. Without the goal of reducing and eliminating poverty , we will never get there. I submit it is unlikely we will make progress on eliminating poverty if that is not seen as an explicit societal goal.
The initial thrust of the War on Poverty did not last long because of the political reaction it engendered. Still, the programs I mentioned at the outset have become part of the accepted fabric of our society. Facile dismissals that ignore these programs lack balance. Since the Reagan era we have witnessed a sales job by the Hard Right on how government programs don’t work. While no program is beyond criticism, the sales job actually flies in the face of the programs I mentioned which are, in fact, very successful.
We currently lack politicians with the will, ability, drive and vision to move a new War on Poverty agenda forward. President Obama’s emphasis on economic inequality is timely but it appears he lacks the political strength to push this boulder uphill. We need poverty abolitionists who can make that happen.
Shady – posted 3/2/2014
It has been quite a few years since I have had a puppy. I recently made the plunge again.
48 hours later and I have to admit it is a struggle, albeit an enjoyable struggle, keeping up with puppy energy. My puppy Shady is a golden retriever, now 9 weeks old. He does not stop – he plays very hard and then crashes equally hard (you learn to appreciate the crash moments).
Damage control is a full-time mode. Puppy proofing is a necessity or it is bye-bye to any possessions in puppy proximity. For some reason Shady was attracted to two throw pillows on our living room sofa. He barked at the pillows, not sure why. They must be an attractive nuisance. How long the pillows will escape remains to be seen.
I think I had forgotten how oral puppies are. When I am at home, much of my time is consumed with making sure Shady is chewing on the right things. The dog likes to get into everything. Last night he tried to get inside my DVD player.
While I have not written about dogs before on this blog, I am a dog person. I grew up with dogs. Among others, I had a weimaraner named Duchess, a mutt named Honky, and a miniature schnauzer named Roman Gabriel. Also, when I first got together with my wife Debra, she had a beagle named Freckles.
Freckles was a real character. It would be easy to write a column about him alone. One day when we were at work, he ate the landlord’s couch. Debra told me a story about how he had been stolen once. (This happened before I knew her). She was living in Worcester Ma at the time and she put up missing signs all around her neighborhood. Two weeks went by with no sign of Freckles. Then Debra received a phone call. The guy on the other end (who had, in fact, stolen Freckles) said “You can come get your dog now”. When Debra went to pick up Freckles, it turned out that that very cute beagle had eaten the guy’s apartment.
Over the last 29 years or so, I have owned golden retrievers. There was the regal Rainbow (the first), placid and incredibly good-natured Tasha (an unbelievable swimmer), Toby ( golden mix we adopted), Rainbow (the second and not always the best behaved), Molly who lives to eat, and now Shady. Molly is 14. She is my longest lived golden and has totally outlived my expectations. The dog is in the heavyweight category. She keeps trucking although I would have to describe her response to the puppy as not unalloyed joy.
I had planned to write a more serious piece this weekend but Shady shot that plan to hell. Puppies require so much attention. On the other hand, I don’t think there is anything I would rather be doing. Shady is a great guy and a most entertaining and lovable companion. I am surprised how easy it has been for him to transition to our house.
My brother Rob said that puppies are harder than babies. Before Shady it has been a while since I have had either experience but I would have to agree. I did create a comfortable and secure fenced-in area to try and minimize destruction. Still, when Shady is up and about, you need NSA surveillance capability.
I am taking advantage of a lull in the action right now to write this. Not sure how long the lull will last. I do feel a bit ADHD-like in the puppy aftermath. My concentration is scattered tending to the puppy. I had told my wife that this is my dog so I did want to step up and be his primary caretaker.
For now, I will end with a quote I like from Milan Kundera:
“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace”.
Sent from my iPad
Book Review: “Nazis After Hitler: How Perpetrators of The Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth” by Donald McKale – posted 2/25/2014
I had not planned to review this book but I must say it surprised me. The book addressed important questions that, in my opinion, still evade adequate attention. Questions like: what happened to the perpetrators of the Holocaust? How much justice was done? Why did so many war criminals get away with their crimes? The great value of this book is that it goes right at those lingering questions and it provides clear, well-reasoned answers.
Without knowing that much about the period immediately after World War 2, I had held a relatively positive conception of the Allied effort to seek justice against Nazi war criminals. I suppose this was because of Nuremberg.
Professor Donald McKale’s book “Nazis After Hitler” paints a far darker picture. Contrary to my uninformed and probably widely shared assumptions, McKale shows how the postwar world felt little obligation to ferret out and bring perpetrators to justice. The sad truth is that there was no day of reckoning for most of the criminals who carried out the Holocaust.
I found the story perversely fascinating. It combines the worst acts committed by a motley collection of desk murderers, ideological fanatics and sadists and a world incapable of any commensurate response to the awful crimes committed. How the pitifully weak response happened cannot be easily reduced but I will try and synthesize some of the major threads that run through the book.
The extent of the Nazi crimes were not initially well understood by the outside world. Millions had been murdered by the Nazis but the Nazis went to considerable effort to try and cover up their crimes. The Holocaust as we know it now was not as clearly delineated then. The world did not yet have the benefit of memoirs by people like Primo Levi and Victor Klemperer, histories by Raul Hilberg, the movies Shoah and Schindler’s List, and the TV docudrama Holocaust.
There were disagreements among the Allies about how to address the Nazi war crimes. The British and Prime Minister Winston Churchill favored summary execution of Nazi leaders. President Roosevelt opposed summary executions and favored postwar trials. Surprisingly, Stalin agreed with FDR on this point. In June 1945, the Allies agreed to hold the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg to prosecute “major” war criminals.
A significant dilemma was the scope of the German war crimes. What do you do when massive numbers of citizens are engaged in a grossly criminal enterprise? How do you separate out those who deserve punishment from those who do not? What is appropriate punishment, particularly when so many are implicated? The Allies decided to concentrate on those they initially considered the worst of the worst. There were other trials but McKale shows how the Cold War lessened the focus on the Nazis.
The jurisdiction of the IMT was also a problem. The IMT tried crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and participation in a common plan or conspiracy to commit those crimes. There was no clear statement specifically addressing the Holocaust against the Jewish people. In retrospect, it is clear that the IMT’s jurisdiction reflected lack of awareness of the crime against the Jews.
The system of gas chambers and concentration camps engaged the efforts of many thousands of people. The Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, included 20,000,000 soldiers. The German Nazi party also included many millions. In assessing responsibility, where do you draw the line? Who is guilty and how far down the line do you go? In the best of all possible legal worlds, you would have had an individualized assessment of perpetrators wherever they were in the hierarchy if they had dirty hands. Nothing even remotely like that happened. Nothing ever happened to the overwhelming majority of perpetrators.
Immediately after the war, McKale wrote that, among the German people, the Third Reich was instantly forgotten. No one knew nothing. The typical stance was denial. Germans were not exactly stepping forward, acknowledging guilt. McKale tells an interesting story about a young German woman, Katharina von Kellenback, who sought to find out about her uncle’s role in the Holocaust. The 1979 TV broadcast of Holocaust prompted her curiosity.
von Kellenback ran into “a near perfect wall of silence”. Family members brushed off her questions and acted like they had been victims. von Kellenback described “a monumental vanishing act” that erased the consciousness of the perpetrators. She correctly characterized this evasion as a conspiracy of silence.
Through her own research and efforts, she found out her uncle, Alfred Ebner, had been an early and fanatical follower of Hitler. He had been deputy commissioner of the Pinsk region’s Nazi civilian administration, a role that included responsibility for the local Jewish inhabitants. It turned out he had been directly responsible for implementation of Nazi extermination policies. He had organized the ghettoization of Pinsk-area Jews, mostly women and children. He supervised the confiscation of Jewish property , the exploitation of Jewish labor and the starvation of the Jewish population. Under Himmler’s directive, between October 29-November 2, 1942, a Nazi battalion under his authority marched Pinsk’s remaining Jews from the ghetto and shot them in large trenches. A few managed to get away.
After the war Ebner disappeared back into the general population, started a business, and lived with his family in Stuttgart. In 1962, he was arrested but he was not indicted until March 1968. He and other members of the Nazi police battalion were charged for several hundred cases of malicious and cruel murder.
To obtain a murder conviction, the prosecution had to prove Ebner acted because of racial hatred. Ebner denied any personal hatred of Jews. He presented himself as a loyal civil servant who followed orders, following the Eichmann example. As witnesses could not verify that he personally did any shootings, some charges went away. Testimony did establish that in the summer of 1942 he ordered 40 sick and mentally retarded Jews be shot. He led those Jews to the trucks that transported them out of the ghetto to be shot.
However, the judges in his case dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. McKale reported that Ebner’s case never went to trial. The Court later suspended proceedings against him in 1971 for reasons of his alleged poor health. Later in 1978, the court dropped all charges. Ebner died peacefully in 1987 without acknowledging anything.
Unfortunately this type scenario was common. Years went by and victims died. Personal identification was difficult as peoples’ appearance changed; perpetrators changed their names; and they moved. So many victims had been murdered in the most anonymous fashion imagineable and they were not around to point any finger at a perpetrator. Politics changed and the Cold War struggle dominated all attention.
As I had said previously only a tiny minority of the estimated several hundred thousand Holocaust perpetrators were ever prosecuted. Ebner at least had been prosecuted even if he evaded punishment. According to McKale.from 1945 to 1992, the West Germans investigated 103,823 persons suspected of committing Nazi crimes. Courts convicted 6,487 (of which 5,513 were for non-lethal offenses). 13 people received the death sentence; 163 got life in prison; 6197 got temporary imprisonment and 114 got fines.
McKale says that nearly all of the convicted got light prison sentences.
As part of the denazification effort in West Germany, the Americans, the British and the French classified perpetrators into one of five categories: major offender (criminals), offender (active supporter of the Nazi Party), lesser offender (persons who collaborated in less serious ways), followers (persons who joined Nazi organizations but had not participated in their actions) and the exonerated. A typical category 1 criminal was looking at imprisonment in a labor camp from 2 to 10 years along with confiscation of property. McKale says classification was enormously difficult. He gives many examples and shows how hard it was even to prosecute big-time Nazis who committed major offenses.
I think it is fair to say that the West Germans lacked the political will to do justice. So many people were implicated and silence offered mutual protection.
I had previously mentioned the Cold War. The onset of the Cold War against the Soviets figured into the weak prosecution of Nazis. The Americans and the British quickly became far more interested in integrating West Germany into its anti-Soviet effort than in pursuing an agenda from the last war. The Americans moved to recruit Nazis – not prosecute them.
The East German response to the Holocaust was equally compromised for a different set of reasons. The East Germans could not acknowledge the Jewish specificity of the Holocaust. The party line, following the Soviets, would not recognize that any single group had been specially victimized by the Holocaust. All victims could only be seen as anti-fascists. The Soviets had their own anti-semitism and the inability to see the world, rather than ideology, was part of that. GDR statistics from 1945-1964 show that Soviet-dominated German courts convicted 12,807 persons of “Nazi and war crimes”. 118 received death sentences, 231 got life in prison, and 12,458 got varying terms of imprisonment.
McKale shows that the East Germans actually placed Bernhard Bechler, a former professional military officer in the Nazi army and a committed National Socialist, in charge of denazification in Soviet-occupied East Germany. Bechler was uninterested in uncovering and purging Nazis who had engaged the Holocaust. The East Germans decided against a blanket dismissal of former Nazis from government administration. They were fearful about public reaction so they did not take strong steps. Generally speaking, witnesses who testified before East German denazification boards claimed they had never supported mistreating Jews or any group. That, of course, leaves the question how the Holocaust ever could have happened.
Professor McKale explains how the arguments made by Nazis after the war reappeared later out of the mouths of Holocaust deniers. I found myself less interested in that later part of the book. I think Holocaust deniers are nutty and don’t deserve that much time because they lack all credibility even if some crazy people still make the arguments. I found myself dwelling more on the power of anti-semitism. Behind all the excuses about following orders lurks the anti-semitism. I think Professor McKale deserves credit for taking an unflinching look at the Holocaust perpetrators. His book is a necessary corrective to widely shared misconceptions.
Movie Review: “Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune” – posted 2/15/2014
I knew this documentary came out a couple years ago but I never had a chance to see it until recently. Made lovingly by Phil’s brother Michael Ochs and by Kenneth Bowker, “Phil Ochs” There But for Fortune” brought back many memories. As a Phil Ochs fan, I really enjoyed hearing the old music I have not heard for a long time.
Phil was a gifted songwriter. I will name some of my favorites: “Is There Anybody Here”, “I’m Gonna Say it Now”, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”, “Ringing of Revolution”, “Small Circle of Friends”, “There But for Fortune”, and “When I’m Gone”. I struggled with this list because I am leaving out some other songs I love too.
It is hard to define what Phil meant to my generation. He certainly never had the widespread popularity of a Dylan or Neil Young. Still, he spoke to many of us and his songs connected. He was an authentic 60’s voice. On old tape, Abbie Hoffman reminisces about how you could always count on Phil to perform for any benefit or demonstration. That was true.
In the movie, it was mentioned that “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” was the anthem of the anti-Vietnam war movement. I think that was also true. I remember I owned the album (see album cover above) with that song on the cover. Phil wrote the best anti-war songs of anybody. They were lively, had great lyrics and the message could not have been clearer. They still sound good.
There is nobody around like Phil now and we are far worse for that. Phil was a conscience and his songs were strong. He had an ability to write topically about headline news. Maybe I am not as tuned in to music now (okay I am not as tuned in now) but I do not see any young singer/songwriter out there like him with an equivalent Movement-type connection. Maybe there is a rapper somewhere. I just don’t know the artist. Music now seems so insular.
Getting back to the movie, it is chronological in tracing Phil’s life. He grew up in an incredibly screwed up family. His father, a physician, suffered from manic depression. It sounded like he was in mental hospitals a lot and he was not there for Phil, his brother Michael or his sister Sonny. Phil’s mother also sounded miserably unhappy and mean to her children. She had expected Phil’s father to be financially successful which he was not. The family moved around frequently as Phil’s dad could not establish a successful medical practice. Phil did have a loving brother and sister though.
Phil’s family was apolitical. His friend, Jim Glover, was a big early influence. Phil met Jim when they were students together at Ohio State. Glover’s father was left wing. Glover and his father introduced Phil to folk music including Pete Seeger and the Weavers. That music had a big impact.
After 3 years, Phil dropped out of Ohio State and moved to Greenwich Village. It was the early 60’s. His goal was to become a songwriter and not just any songwriter. He wanted to be the best. The movie shows how Phil was part of a group of artists who all descended on the Village at the same time. These artists included Judy Henske, Eric Anderson, David Blue, Dave Von Ronk, Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan. They used to hang out together at each other’s apartments and listen to each other perform.
Quite a few of Phil’s old friends talk about him in the movie. According to Ed Sanders, Phil was a very friendly guy and he attracted a wide circle of friends. Lucien Truscott IV described Phil as “liberal but not didactic”. He said he never was cool and he was not afraid to expose his feelings.
Phil had a difficult relationship with Bob Dylan. He always sought Dylan’s approval but Dylan apparently never gave it. It sounded competitive between them. According to the movie, Dylan criticized Phil’s political songs as not being about his deepest emotions. It is hard to evaluate the whole thing now. Phil’s desire for Dylan’s approval sounded almost pathological. (I wonder what he would think of Dylan selling Chryslers.) They had times when they were friends though.
Phil embodied the contradictions of the era. He could write “Love, love me, love me, I’m a liberal” but he admired JFK and he had a very hard time coping after JFK’s assassination. I always liked his song “That was the President”. Phil had a hard time with the wishywashiness of liberals.
As the Vietnam war dragged on and the Movement frayed, things headed in darker directions. The Village artists moved on and out. There was immense rage and bitterness about the failure of the political system to address both Vietnam and civil rights. Profound alienation welled up especially in the wake of all the assassinations and the never ending war. Ed Sanders said that the bullet that shot RFK went through a whole generation and I know what he meant.
From the movie, it looked like Phil was confused. By nature, he was not a compromiser. He really wanted to be famous. He made an album “Pleasures of the Harbor” which went in some new directions. The album was badly reviewed although the movie said it did sell some. Phil started drinking more heavily. He tried to do a makeover, dressing in gold lame, following Elvis who was one of his heroes. He joked he was trying to get Elvis to become Che Guevara. I think it is fair to say that this whole makeover was not well received by Phil’s fans who liked the folky Phil fine.
The decline of the Movement coincided with Phil’s decline. He had his own issues with manic depression and with alcoholism. The drinking especially became extreme.
Phil wanted to see the world and he did do some travelling in the early 70’s. He went to Chile during the Allende period and was very inspired by what he saw. He met the famous Chilean folksinger Victor Jara who knew about him and they became fast friends. Phil was later distraught after the military coup which among other things resulted in the brutal assault and murder of Victor Jara at the National Stadium. Phil organized a benefit for Chilean refugees after the coup and he got Dylan to come and perform. Even though he personally was in very bad shape, the event was a big success.
One thing I never knew before seeing the movie, Phil travelled to Africa. While in Dar Es Salaam, he was attacked and strangled. He was left for dead on a beach. He suffered permanent vocal cord damage. He complained he could not sing well after that. He also complained he was losing his creativity.
Phil spiralled down in 1975 before he took his own life by hanging himself. He felt defeated and he said stuff like Phil Ochs is useless and should be killed. The movie shows him acting psychotic. It was like he was a different person at the end. The movie does a good job in honestly conveying all of Phil, including his extremely depressing last days.
While it sounded like Phil had many regrets about his marriage as well as regrets for not being a good father, his daughter Meegan and his wife Alice both said sweet things about him. Phil bought Meegan a cat they named Rimbaud. He also bought her an encyclopedia. Meegan felt Phil wanted to introduce her to poetry. He did genuinely adore her although it sounded like he was an absent father.
Besides the tragedy of his out of control alcoholism and his mental illness, Phil’s life does show the difficulty for committed activists living through periods when social change is not on the agenda. Phil could not make that transition and he could not figure out a way to live that was personally fulfilling. I do think that Phil’s struggles were reflective of a much wider generational problem: how to live ethically and in a principled manner when the society is deeply morally compromised and its values are deeply problematic.
I always liked the words from Phil’s song “When I’m Gone” so I will end with that:
There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
And I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone
All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone
My pen won’t pour out a lyric line when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
And I won’t breathe the bracing air when I’m gone
And I can’t even worry ’bout my cares when I’m gone
Won’t be asked to do my share when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
And I won’t be running from the rain when I’m gone
And I can’t even suffer from the pain when I’m gone
Can’t say who’s to praise and who’s to blame when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone
And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I’m gone
Can’t be singing louder than the guns when I’m gone
So I guess I will have to do it while I’m here
All my days won’t be dances of delight when I’m gone
And the sands will be shifting from my sight when I’m gone
Can’t add my name into the fight while I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
And I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here
Book Review: “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields” by Wendy Lower – posted 2/5/2014
I did find this book a revelation. The subject of women’s role in the Holocaust has never gotten much attention. It was a black hole in Holocaust studies. Wendy Lower’s book goes far toward filling this gap.
The book provides a wealth of new information but more importantly, it critically examines the role of German women. Lower does not shy away from offering insight and making provocative generalizations. It is not boring history.
You might legitimately ask: why another book on the Holocaust? This book tells us stuff we do not know. Also, it shows how masses of women, just like men. can blindly engage in the most awful acts of evil over and over again.
While the Holocaust has always seemed to be a largely male endeavor, Lower shows women were very much integrated into the Nazi machinery and master plan. As she says, Hitler’s Furies were not marginal sociopaths. They were zealous administrators, nurses, teachers and secretaries as well as robbers, tormentors and murderers. To quote Lower:
“They believed that their violent deeds were justified acts of revenge meted out to enemies of the Reich; such deeds were, in their minds, expressive of loyalty.”
Lower shows how the decimation of the Jews was an essential part of the Nazi push into Eastern Europe. That was where there was the largest concentration of Jews. The Nazis believed the Jews had been dangerously “bolshevized”. Lower describes the various roles women played in the imperial conquest of Eastern Europe.
She says that one-third of the German female population, thirteen million women, were active in Nazi Party organizations. Lower destroys the myth of the innocent apolitical German woman. I found it surprising but she says female membership in the Nazi Party actually increased until the end of the war.
There were contradictions in the crazy Nazi world view. Hitler rejected equal rights for women as a Marxist demand. He very explicitly said women’s place was in the home, producing healthy Aryan babies. Hitler felt women were inferior outside the domestic sphere. Lower quotes Hitler in 1935 and 1936 saying to Nazi Party Women’s Organizations that a mother of five, six, or seven children who were healthy and well-raised accomplished more than a female lawyer.
The Nazis glorified efficient housekeeping as an expression of “cultural and biological Germanness”. They loved women in aprons and saw good housekeeping as reflecting German superiority.
Lower says women were expected “to fall in line, follow rules, sacrifice for the greater good, develop nerves of steel and suffer in silence”. The Nazis restricted women who sought degrees in higher education and in political office by instituting quotas.
At the same time, the Nazis needed women to colonize the East. The Nazi imperial fantasy, the eastern Lebensraum, was a frontier which included both massive death camps and utopian, German-only colonies. The Nazis needed women to populate their projected racist utopia.
In 1933, the Nazis called for abolition of the female vote. It would appear that elections were not a big item in the Nazi agenda after 1933. While I do not believe the female vote was ever officially abolished, the Nazis transformed Germany into a one party dictatorship as quickly as they could once Hitler was appointed chancellor. One month into Hitler’s rule in February 1933, the Nazis suspended civil rights. From that point on. elections became passe. They arrested, imprisoned and murdered their opponents. The Reichstag fire created the pretext for thousands of arrests and disappearances.
Lower follows the careers of a number of Nazi women who were secretaries, nurses, teachers, and wives. She points to their youth as a defining quality. She wrote that ‘” terror regimes feed on the idealism and energy of young people”. The average age of female concentration camp guards was 26.
In a manner reminiscent of Raul Hilberg, she categorizes German women as witnesses, accomplices, and perpetrators. She asks: why did they kill? Her chapter on this theme is not easily reduced. She cites the environment as a most important factor in whom will become a perpetrator of genocide. As she says,
“Without certain settings and experiences, individuals with a proclivity to commit crimes would not commit them.”
Lower argues that the Nazis mobilized a generation of German women and conditioned them to commit evil acts as an assertion of Germany’s superiority. She also mentions Theodor Adorno’s work on authoritarian personality. She says empathy results from an upbringing of moral socialization. Most German women of the Nazi era received regular beatings when they were growing up. Violence was the norm as far as disciplining children. Lower argues that harsh authoritarian violence does not lead to empathy and moral behavior.
Maybe what was most shocking to me was that so many perpetrators, both male and female, literally got away with murder. As Lower says, the record of justice against Nazi perpetrators has been poor. Even now I find it surprising how true that still is. The limited number of prosecutions compared to the extent of the mass murder is an absurdity. She says most German women who participated in the Holocaust quietly resumed their normal lives. She goes on:
“In the postwar investigations in Germany, Israel and Austria, Jewish survivors identified German women as perpetrators, not only as gleeful onlookers but also as violent tormentors. But, by and large these women could not be named by the survivors, or after the war the women married and took on different names and could not be found.”
After World War 2, the International Tribunal at Nuremberg decided to limit prosecution to several hundred of the worst Nazi war criminals. Lower writes that in a public way German women were overwhelmingly silent after the war about their war-time experiences. They were silent about what they did to the Jews. They knew nothing. They saw nothing. Very few were ever judged.
A German narrative that emerged after the war saw women as victims rather than as criminals. They were the “rubble women” who helped rebuild Germany from the ashes. They were beleagered martyrs in this characterization and their accusers lacked credibility. They would cry when questioned which typically evoked sympathy from the male prosecutors and jurists.
Lower quotes Annette Schucking, a Red Cross nurse with a law degree. In 1948, she became a founding member of the reconstituted German female lawyers league, The Nazis has disbanded the organization in 1933. Schucking was interested in pursuing war crimes investigations. She spoke to prosecutors to try and get them to pursue a Nazi policeman, who along with his SS unit and local army and indigenous auxiliaries, had shot 6000 Jews in the Ukraine. This policeman had shot the Jews because he thought it would get him a promotion. Schucking had personal knowledge of the case from extensive conversations with participants in the killing. She went to Novgorod Voynsk and explored the now ransacked Jewish quarter. She described her knowledge in great detail in the book. Because she was a lawyer by training, she wrote out precise details in letters she wrote her parents. Nothing resulted from her attempt to investigate. This is what Schucking told Lower when she was interviewed in 2010:
“It was impossible to talk openly in their court system with any colleagues who had been in the East. Former Nazis were everywhere.”
For the overwhelming majority of Germans and their European Nazi allies, there was never any reckoning. I say this as a disgruntled lawyer, judge, and Jew who did not see justice done. Maybe it is all too late now but the witnessing and the history are important. Lower’s book is an important corrective to the view that appropriate punishment was meted out to the Nazis. While some number did go down for their crimes, the overwhelming majority escaped any punishment. Who says you cannot get away with murder? Thousands did.
Shulamit Aloni – posted 2/2/2014
I wanted to acknowledge the passing of Shulamit Aloni. Although little known in the United States, Aloni was, for many years, a very important figure on the Israeli Left. I am reprinting a remembrance written by Gideon Levy that appeared in the Israeli paper, Haaretz. Jon
Shulamit Aloni: The great woman of the dreams
Remembering a brave, principled woman who fought ferociously for Israeli civil rights.
By Gideon Levy
Shulamit Aloni [ http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.570350 ] was the first lady of Israel, the first lady of the remains of its liberalism and openness. She took part in shaping the state, but was one of the few figures in its history to do so other than by means of rivers of blood. Not a celebrated general with a chestful of medals, not the “exterminator of terror,” neither conqueror nor settler, yet still an Israeli hero – a civilian hero, for a change.
She was controversial – Golda Meir despised her at the start of her career, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef at the end – but no one disputed her honesty, determination or courage. Here was a woman, an Israeli leader, the controversy around whom revolved not wars, but rather around civil rights, the separation of state and religion, minority rights and social justice, all of them rare issues in Israel.
Aloni was the founding mother of them all: She invented Israeli enlightenment. She was the first, inspiring others and pointing the way. She did not always succeed, knowing more than a few painful failures, and late in life she became more extreme, railing at many things that she herself had helped to create. I would needle her, “You built this all,” to which she would respond indignantly, “It didn’t turn out the way we planned.”
And still, many Israelis owe her their rights and their standing – consumers; gay, lesbian and transgender individuals; Arabs and Jews; men and, above all, women – and perhaps they are not aware of this.
We bonded over the occupation. We played tennis together at the Sonesta Hotel in occupied Taba, in the period when her husband, Reuven, was head of the Israeli occupation administration in Sinai. On the tennis court, a good place for discerning personal character, she was arrow-straight and devoid of the desire to win at any cost.
The Aloni I knew was not only a woman of principle, but also had a lust for life. One time, when we had a lunch date, she brought me to a Whitman ice-cream shop for “American waffles,” topped with mountains of ice cream, whipped cream and a Maraschino cherry. You only live once, she said at the time, and Aloni lived a full, rich life. She enjoyed art and culture, had a thing for designer clothing and drove a trendy red jeep – yet was still a warrior for justice.
Lacking any cynicism, Aloni quit government coalitions and positions when necessary and was one of the most humble, least egotistic politicians I have known. At a time when most of her colleagues – including the most righteous among them – worried about their reputations and receiving proper credit, Aloni cared only about the issues themselves.
She was the third angle of the triangle of Sonia and Shimon Peres at the Ben-Shemen Youth Village, sharing a tent with the couple – how their paths diverged since that time.
She was Israeli (and Zionist) to the bone, a great patriot. When we walked together one time through the alleys of Cairo, I begged her not to talk aloud in Hebrew – even then, it was dangerous for Israelis in Egypt – and she didn’t heed me, nearly shouting in Hebrew. When necessary, and even when not, Aloni always said what she thought, and thought what she said.
Now she has successors – one works for gay rights, another battles the occupation, while this one sees to women’s rights and that one to minority rights, one fights the religious establishment and another champions freedom of expression – but not one of them encompasses what she encompassed. One brave woman flying so very many flags. Perhaps that is the reason the Zionist left that remains is a weak, stuttering, apologetic left.
She was the great woman of the dreams, in the title of the Yehoshua Kenaz novel: the dream of an egalitarian, secular, democratic and just society.
She was the great woman of the disappointment: Most of her dreams did not come true. Israel became a worse place – racist, ultranationalist, occupying, theocratic and bullying, its democracy and equality in tatters.
Precisely the opposite of everything she preached. Was she ahead of her time? Absolutely not. She came at exactly the right time, but perhaps she left too soon. It’s Israel that drew back from her, and with horrifying steps.
The Poverty of Racialist Thinking – posted 1/26/2014 and published in the Concord Monitor 2/1/2014
I wrote this piece in response to a three part series the Concord Monitor recently ran about a white racist prison gang organizing inside New Hampshire prisons. The group is called the Brotherhood of White Warriors. This piece appeared in the Concord Monitor on February 1, 2014 with the title “Let’s not forget ideology behind white pride”. Jon
I read with interest the series the Monitor ran about the New Hampshire prison gang with a white supremacist ideology. Some readers objected that the Monitor should not have run the story because it gave the gang too much undeserved publicity.
I disagree. I think the Monitor performed a public service by exposing that a group like that exists and is organizing in New Hampshire. We should be vigilant and have no illusions about racist movements and their agenda. Better to know about them than to pretend they do not exist.
One thing missing in the series was much of an explanation of what these white supremacists believe. Clearly it is far more than alleged white pride and the whole picture should not be ignored. I suspect the white supremacists were deliberately fuzzy because their message is so offensive. Unfortunately, there is a wealth of depressing history which leaves no doubt about their beliefs.
The most fully realized example of white supremacy has to be Nazi Germany. There the beliefs were fully put into action. I suppose 19th century American slavery and South Africa under apartheid might also be considered contenders. All lived out a racist vision.
The Nazis sought unity of the German people through racism. Racism and anti-semitism were official state ideology. They obsessed about the racial purity of the German people and they constantly worried about mingling between races they considered higher and lower. They passed many laws to prevent that mingling.
The Nazis designated many categories of people as defective and subhuman. These groups included, among others, Jews, Blacks, Slavs, gays, gypsies and the physically and mentally disabled. As these groups were by definition enemies of the Reich, they needed to be eliminated.
Their plan was to create a world of Aryan perfection by removing all the groups considered defective. The six million Jews who died in Hitler’s concentration camps and ovens were no aberration. Those murders followed directly from a racist ideology and plan, as did the millions of other murders perpetrated by the Nazis.
The Hitler vision was based on hatred of all deemed “non-Aryan”. The Nazis created a pseudo-science to certify Aryan background, blood, and traits. They identified facial features and head shapes they felt were characteristic of subhumans. This would all be laughable except that it was in the service of their eliminationist agenda.
Nazi racist ideology desensitized the Germans to the plight of the Jews and others. There was a long incubation period prior to the Final Solution. The Nazis gradually escalated the level of public hatred. I would note that the Nazis saw hatred as noble and they coached Germans to feel no pity when they inflicted pain on those considered inferiors.
Dehumanization allowed the Nazis to categorize their opponents as “human trash” and “useless eaters”. That created justification for all the unspeakable acts of cruelty, including their sick medical experiments and the millions of premeditated murders.
When the white supremacists say they only support white pride, skepticism is more than called for. There was a direct line from Aryan pride to the the concentration camps and murder on a mass scale.
I do not know if New Hampshire white supremacists would object to my use of the Nazis as expressing their values. Not that I am listening that hard, but to this day, you do not hear white supremacists saying Hitler got it wrong. Some deny the Holocaust happened but you do not hear criticisms of Hitler from them. As far as I know, they still celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Also, there must be a reason so many racist prison gangs love their swastika tattoos.
White pride is an utterly false category. It is like having pride in green eyes, O + blood, or skinny legs. It is a wrong-headed basis for a group association. Why have pride in an accidental feature of your genetic make-up? Pride, in this instance, is not based on something good you did. It is based on an accident of your birth. Nobody has control over the skin color they get when they are born. It is the luck of the draw.
Having a group identity based on white pride is what Kurt Vonnegut called a granfalloon. A granfalloon is when a group of people affect a shared identity or purpose and the association is meaningless.
Human beings have plenty of differences, including genetic differences, but I believe all of us are fundamentally the same. We all have good and bad complicated baggage. We feel the same range of emotions. We are all struggling to find some meaning in this life and we are all going to suffer. What we have in common is far more profound than our differences.
Given the appalling history of the Nazis alone, white pride is a scary concept. In a place like New Hampshire where racial diversity is lacking, it is especially pernicious. I would submit that racism is more likely to flourish in places where people have less contact with minorities. There are always exceptions but it is easier to maintain false racial stereotypes when they remain unchallenged in daily life. I think personal contact generally challenges the stereotypes because that experience will show the falsity of racism and racial hatred.
I sincerely hope that white racist prison gangs and white racists generally can come to see the error of that kind of hateful thinking. The 21st century world so needs us to move beyond that outdated and viciously destructive mindset.
Eulogy for my sister, Lisa Baird – posted 1/17/2014
January is the month of my sister’s birthday. Lisa would have been 61 on January 29. To remember and honor Lisa’s memory, I did want to post something I wrote right around the time of her death. Here are remarks I delivered back in October 2009 at Lisa’s graveside service held in Roosevelt Memorial Park in Trevose, Pa. Jon
Not so long ago we were here at Roosevelt burying my dad. Lisa gave the eulogy. It is with both shock and some degree of disbelief that we are here again burying Lisa. I do not feel reconciled to this event. Lisa, her family and friends have been cheated. There is no fairness in this death.
I personally cannot imagine a world without Lisa. Her personality, warmth, inspiration and drive gave me hope and literally made the world a better, kinder place.
She has been at the core of my life and I have known her since the beginning. I spoke to Lisa everyday although there were days when she would say, “Boo-boo, now is not a good time to talk”. She knew pretty much everything about me and I knew the same about her. She definitely had a mother hen quality.
She had the audacity to tell me what to do and say in almost every situation. She was like a script writer. Her advice was invariably good.
To say that Lisa was caring does not do justice to that term. Lisa took caring to a whole new level. She redefined the possible as far as how many people one person could have as good friends. She was like an Olympic gold medalist in the category of friends. Friends of Lisa is probably a group that could rival Friends of Barack.
Her spirit of generosity is unrivaled. That outstanding quality defined both her personal and professional life. When it came to Molly and Lou, there is nothing she would not do for them. It is those daily, little things that Lisa attended to with persistence. Whether it was helping Lou with his homework or being on top of Molly’s financial aid, Lisa attended to those tasks with utmost devotion.
Professionally, Lisa was an accomplished immigration law attorney. A part of this tragedy is the loss of Lisa to the Bar and to her client population. She had expertise and knowledge which she used to the great benefit of a marginalized and often despised group. She took cases that others would not take. Her fee scale was off the charts – she redefined the cost of high quality legal work downward. If a client came in and said, “Ms. Lisa, I only have $250 but I’ll pay you when I get some money”, she would take the case. She appeared to have a hard time charging for her services.
At a time when lawyers are held in contempt as greedy bloodsuckers, Lisa carried on the most noble tradition of the advocate for the poor and oppressed. She did her part to rehabilitate lawyers and the Bar.
That big-hearted quality was who she was.
In rummaging through Lisa’s apartment yesterday, Molly brought back to my mom’s place a pillow case with numerous messages written all over it. The pillow case went back to Lisa’s days at Camp Red Wing when she was 16 years old. Some of the ink was hard to read but here are a couple of the quotes:
“Lisa – what an honor. I’m the first one to sign this thing – ample thanks for giving me the best thing in the world – a real friend – not just a friend for the summer but a friend for always. I mean it, Lisa, you’ve given me so much this summer, in all ways. Please let’s not let the distance between our homes break up the wonderful things we have. I mean it. Congratulations on winning. Keep in close touch. Love forvever, Nancy”
” Dear Lisa, It’s really been a fabulous summer. You’re the best captain the Winnies have ever had. You’ve got the most spirit of anyone I’ve met yet. When we won, I was sooo happy for you – you deserved it. Congratulations on your swimming. I knew you could do it. I’ll call you and maybe when I come to Ilene’s house, I’ll visit you. I’ll love you always, Lucy Trotter”
“Dear Lisa, You are one of the most amazing people I know. I have never seen anyone before who could have as many friends and be so all around as you. You’re really a great asset to camp and I’m really glad you could be part of my bunk. As far as Winnie-Tuskie goes, you were the best captain ever and don’t ever think differently. I really love you so much and hope to see you during the winter. Please write. Love ya, Nancy”
In Lisa’s pocketbook, I found a little trinket. It looked like a recent purchase. It was a piece of jewelry. There was an accompanying piece of paper. It read “creative gifts by your homeless neighbors.”
To Lisa’s friends, I want to say publicly “thank you”. Your support has been overwhelming. The whole Baird family appreciates all that you have done to help out. It has been above and beyond the call of duty.
Lisa, I do so wish we were not here today. This should not be happening. You deserve so much better. Please know that you are loved and will always be loved. I know i am speaking for the whole family in saying we will miss you forever.
Jonathan P. Baird 