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NY Times reports on a French priest who is working in Ukraine locating graves of Jews murdered in the “bullet holocaust” before the Germans developed the gas chambers in mid 1942. There have been other similar efforts. In 1994, Nina Tumarkin, Wellesley history prof, wrote The Living and the Dead; The Rise and Fall of the Cult of WWII in Russia and reported on the movements to give proper burials to the millions who fell in the Great Patriotic War. However, this is the first time the dead from the Einsatzgruppen, the paramilitary charged with slaughter of “jews, gypsies and commissars” have been carefully researched. It is a very sensitive subject because many locals helped. And the Ukraine is hardly the only placed they operated. Germans were to claim in late 1941 that Lithuania was “judenfrei” after the killing of 400,000 souls there.
His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.
He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.
The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold. …
Max Boot reminds how often our country has used mercenaries. Like Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.”
Since I have been defending, in recent days, the general idea of using mercenaries—even while calling for greater oversight of what they are actually doing in Iraq—I have often heard from skeptics that it is somehow “un-American†to rely on hired hands to do your fighting. Often cited is the fact that Americans have long hated the Hessians (actually, they came from all over Germany, not just from Hesse-Kassel) hired by the British to fight the American rebellion that began in 1776.
Well, of course, any nation will hate foreign troops who fight particularly hard and even viciously, as the “Hessians†did. But that’s hardly an argument against employing them. Quite the contrary. In fact, the U.S. has a long tradition of celebrated mercenaries. Here is a partial list: …
Melanie Phillips notes problems for Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Jonah Goldberg gives us the skinny on Media Matters, the Soros funded, Hillary inspired group that brought down Don Imus and hopes to do the same to Rush and O’Reilly.
… Nearly every day, I get e-mail spam from this alleged “media watchdog” group. It’s slightly less formal than the usual son of a Nigerian oil minister with erectile dysfunction and a great stock tip giving me a head’s-up about a problem with my eBay account. This spam comes from some earnest p.r. flack letting me know that I might be interested in the latest Very Serious Finding by Media Matters for America. When you actually check out the item, it’s usually very stupid or silly or, sometimes, slanderous.
For example, on Sept. 25, Media Matters sent out a note announcing “Fox News panelist Mort Kondracke recently made several racist comments regarding the Jena 6.
Here are some examples of racism on Fox News.” What were the racist comments? Simply this: Kondracke said in reference to the racial turmoil then brewing in Louisiana, “It looks as though the people of Jena can solve this on their own.” It’s a wonder Kondracke even bothered to take his Klan hood off while on camera.
You don’t hear about most of this stuff because journalists on the receiving end of Media Matter’s junk mail have this rare skill, highly prized in the profession: They can read. And so, most of what Media Matters does is ignored except by the echo chamber of the left-wing blogs and sympathetic pundits. But occasionally, either through luck or distortion, Media Matters hits paydirt. …
Orin Kerr, criminal law prof and Volokh blogger, does a number on the latest smear by Frank Rich.
Frank Rich has a rather nasty essay that purports to catch Justice Thomas misrepresenting his past. The specific example is Justice Thomas’s first job out of law school in the Missouri Attorney General’s Office. As Justice Thomas tells the story, he couldn’t get a job from any law firm despite graduating in the middle of his class from Yale Law School. Law firms assumed he was enrolled in law school only because of affirmative action, so Thomas had to struggle to find a job; he ended up getting only one offer in the Missouri government, thanks to Jack Danforth.
Corner post on the annals of government.
Michael Barone suggests maybe the Ivory Tower is becoming a dangerous parasite.
I am old enough to remember when America’s colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America’s colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society. …
… This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals. It explains why Hofstra’s law school invites to speak on legal ethics Lynn Stewart, a lawyer convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist client and sentenced to 28 months in jail.
What it doesn’t explain is why the rest of society is willing to support such institutions by paying huge tuitions, providing tax exemptions and making generous gifts. Suppression of campus speech has been admirably documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The promotion of bogus scholarship and idea-free propagandizing has been admirably documented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It’s too bad the rest of America is not paying more attention.
Bjorn Lomborg with a WaPo op-ed.
All eyes are on Greenland‘s melting glaciers as alarm about global warming spreads. This year, delegations of U.S. and European politicians have made pilgrimages to the fastest-moving glacier at Ilulissat, where they declare that they see climate change unfolding before their eyes.
Curiously, something that’s rarely mentioned is that temperatures in Greenland were higher in 1941 than they are today. Or that melt rates around Ilulissat were faster in the early part of the past century, according to a new study. And while the delegations first fly into Kangerlussuaq, about 100 miles to the south, they all change planes to go straight to Ilulissat — perhaps because the Kangerlussuaq glacier is inconveniently growing.
I point this out not to challenge the reality of global warming or the fact that it’s caused in large part by humans, but because the discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we’re headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it’s all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It’s wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we’re causing it. But that’s not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don’t stack up.
We have to rediscover the middle ground, where we can have a sensible conversation. We shouldn’t ignore climate change or the policies that could attack it. But we should be honest about the shortcomings and costs of those policies, as well as the benefits.
The Economist surveys the PND industry. That would be portable navigation devices or hand held GPS receivers.