The following is the first of three posts published directly to the legacy site over the last two months. (That is a bad habit that I need to get away from once again.) This one was from November 10, 2023:
Much has been said here already this week about our times and the relevant event eighty-five years ago but, as usual, I have my own agenda to address…
The references in the title above come from one of (at least) three recent Powerline posts regarding how certain institutions are handling the breakouts of overt anti-Semitism on display within their halls:
From that second link I direct your attention here:
the MIT administration passed a letter to all students, threatening their suspension if the crowds did not disperse from Lobby 7. Only the Jewish students left immediately. The CAA protesters did not cooperate. Indeed, the CAA proceeded to invite more students and non-MIT protestors to join them in calling for a violent uprising (“Intifada”) and justifying the terror attacks of Hamas on Israeli civilians.
At 5 pm, all students on campus were warned through MIT’s emergency notification system to “avoid Lobby 7” –– officially recognizing the danger present to students as a result of this violent protest. No Jewish or Israeli students were present at this point.
As of 10:30 tonight MIT has officially decided not to academically suspend CAA students who repeatedly violated the administration’s guidelines and threats. They have shown that actions against Jews at MIT do not have consequences.
[Emphasis added]
So , dear reader: ‘merely useless’ or ‘actually harmful’? Of course, those willing to see already know that this has already crossed into the ‘actually harmful” category…the message sent to the irrationally evil will have unfortunate consequences. Worse, at least some of the executive leadership management at such institutions and elsewhere will eventually act and – odds are – a great percentage of them will do so badly, likely a full 180 degrees off the proper aim point. Incompetence will be to blame for some but for many we are seeing into their true nature. And those administrative actions will send even clearer signals to where this is all headed…
With that I will refer you back to the post recreated below from four years ago today and ask you to pay special attention to the three quoted passages in the middle from the article that is the subject of the piece. It is the echoes of these absurd and evil actions that we will likely start to see in Powerline posts in the not too distant future.
___ ___ ___
Another Historical Marker This Weekend: Kristallnacht + 81 Years
November 10, 2019
Yet again, as an alternative to bickering with our insipid local stoolies, buffoons, and/or fake swing voters with the exact same comments, cut ‘n’ paste materials, dutiful passing on of assigned talking points, and blatant advertising for rival sites yet again, I thought I would offer up some notes from my non-Ricochet online reading this week. Who knows, maybe a conversation will break out?
A very short entry passed by the Instapundit roll yesterday that reminded (or in most cases, taught) some important history but, given our proper focus on our own Veterans this time of year, seemed to slip by almost unnoticed…and un-discussed. That story was: Kristallnacht- Nov. 9-10, 1938; The Night The Holocaust Began.
As a product of the American public school system of the 1980s variety, I admit to a cursory education on WWII between Pearl Harbor and the dropping of the two big ones…and between those dates, Hitler was a very evil man. Of course, I saw the original Midway on cable TV and, somewhere along the way, saw Patton there too. But, even in my many readings since then, my knowledge base of the detailed history on the rise of Hitler and Germany of the time is, admittedly, greatly lacking.
A couple of years ago I did listen to In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson. “Listened to” means I have no notes and I tend to retain only about 75% of the material versus a much higher number when I read it. But is was a very enlightening 12 hours of material. Three years hence and I remember the detailed telling of the Night of the Long Knives (1934) but not anything about the Night of Broken Glass covered in the article linked above. The article is not long and not really all that deep on history but enough to spark my interest. Well worth the read.
For some reason this paragraph about the post-massacre dealings really jumped out at me:
The Nazi government made an immediate pronouncement that “the Jews” themselves were to blame for the pogrom and imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmark (some 400 million US dollars at 1938 rates) on the German Jewish community. The Reich government confiscated all insurance payouts to Jews whose businesses and homes were looted or destroyed, leaving the Jewish owners personally responsible for the cost of all repairs.
Confiscatory policies and, wait for it, yes, gun control:
Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews
Oh, and there was this during the massacre:
Local police and fire departments were told not to interfere.
Sound familiar?
It probably goes without saying but I also appreciated this little bit of clarity in the commentary geared toward more modern events:
Barack Obama the former President of the United States is an anti-Semite. However, no one dared to call him out for is hatred.
And, as long as we are talking about little men, I will turn back to Hitler and a passage from Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge that I have been looking to use for a long time:
On 9 November Adolf Hitler, the puny agitator from a tiny party that is stirring up trouble in Bavaria, opens his absurd coup in Munich. The result: one gunshot in the ceiling above the beer mugs, fourteen dead in the street, and the Führer-to-be flat on his stomach on the pavement and a very comfortable prison waiting for him. See now, the Left and the Right are both absolutely useless! – Page 203
Contribute as you wish.
Have a nice day.
[END]
___ ___ ___
The rancid fruits of electing undefined Hope and Change are all around us…and the world has now been broken for quite some time. Buckle up America, into the abyss…
the philo t. custis institute 