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www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeMOlug3Azk&t=2h5m

It ain't poetry, but it's....something

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz6gbubE5IE&t=39m

In contrast to Christianity, which labeled pagan gods as false idols or demons, early Islam was comfortable with accepting the pagan gods as angels. Muslims were only upset at the concept of female goddesses.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKeik-I1_wU
stream-media.loc.gov/webcasts/captions/2015/150722klu1600.txt

Britain's refugees in the 20th century - from Hitler to Vietnam and the victims of decolonization

The plan for this new book, which is called Unsettled, is to look at resettlement and reception camps that were set up all over England and Scotland and wales. They were set up for Jewish and Basque refugees in the 1930s, for Polish refugees in the 1940s, Hungarians and Anglo-Egyptians in the '50s, Ugandan Asians in the '70s, and refugees from Vietnam in the 1980s.

So altogether I'm looking at around 60 camps, and they range from the heart of London, all the way to the most remote corners of North Wales. These camps served tens of thousands of refugees. They engaged thousands of civil servants, and they hosted a fractious mix of volunteers, ex-army officers and colonial servants. Middle-class matrons and also young radicals.

People could be encamped for just a few days, or for decades...when the Ugandan Asians arrived in the 1970s, they found Poles in some of their camps who were still encamped from three decades earlier.

Also, and this was perhaps one of the biggest surprises to me so far in my research, I learned that refugees almost always shared their camps with Britons who were displaced by war and poverty. Some were there officially, but many camps were also invaded by Britain squatters.

Two sets of refugees who were created specifically by the end of empire. That is the Anglo-Egyptians, Britain subjects who were expelled from Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956, and Ugandan Asians. Also Britain subjects who were expelled by Idi Amin's Africanization policies in 1972.

With British military intervention in Egypt underway by November of 1956, many British subjects were evacuated with the troops from Port Said. More were then evicted by the Egyptian government.

The Anglo-Egyptians were British subjects, but mostly not English-speaking. The majority spoke French, Greek, Italian, or Arabic. Of the seven or eight thousand who arrived in Britain, about half were Maltese, and most had never been to Britain before.

The Anglo-Egyptian Resettlement Board was created in February of 1957. By August, the Board was spending 200,000 pounds per month to keep the Anglo-Egyptians housed and fed. The Prime Minister was cheered when he called their expulsion an illegal act, for which Anglo-Egyptians must be compensated. But what does that mean, to compensate them?

The idea of compensation had appeared nowhere else in British refugee work since loyalist grants after the American Revolution. Welfare for Anglo-Egyptians was constructed not so much in terms of economic need, but through this idea of restoring people to their former position.

When the Anglo-Egyptians arrived in Britain, they registered their assets with the Foreign Office. In July of 1957, the government announced a four million pound scheme of loans against those registered assets, plus another two million pounds in direct payments for relief and rehabilitation. These grants included personal allowances for clothing, housing, furnishing, and grants to establish new businesses.

So clearly this is much more than emergency aid. One of the most striking points was that the emerging structures of Britain welfare were deemed wholly inadequate to the Anglo-Egyptian cause. Anglo-Egyptians were to be kept distinct from poor Britons. The Anglo-Egyptian Aid Society argued that refugees could not live on national assistance, because they were "unaccustomed to life in England, which does permit poor natives to live on those rates."

Anglo-Egyptians were assisted not only as if they deserved more than other refugees, but also as if they were worthy of higher payments than impoverished Britons. Some pleaded that Anglo-Egyptians should "never fall upon the normal machinery for the relief of hardship," especially if they enjoyed a formerly high standard of living.

The Home Office said, "Although we are instructed to pay according to need, the needs of these people, the Anglo-Egyptians, may be greater than those of long-term residents here who have fallen into distress."

The truth was that within this diverse population of the Anglo-Egyptians, only some of them were targeted for aid. The Anglo-Egyptian Aid Society focused on those who, if they had remained in Egypt, would have enjoyed prosperous careers and retirements. The loan scheme sought to preserve the position of older, affluent Anglo-Egyptian men.

Poor subjects of Maltese origin were actually seen as better off in Britain than if they had remained in Egypt, and they received significantly less assistance...Now in watching cases like this, the Maltese, many of whom were Sephardic Jews, were deeply embittered by the inequities of the aid process.

Within this very capacious category of Anglo-Egyptian, those defined as Maltese could receive emergency resettlement aid, but not compensation. Compensation was reserved for those of white English descent.

Victor Leniardo, who was a spokesman for the Maltese residents at the Eastwood camp, said he felt in his heart that the government should "compensate morally as well as materially all refugees from Egypt with a lump sum of cash." Regarding the chance of national assistance, which he was offered, Leniardo replied, "We would rather like to have our own money, lost in Egypt, than to live in charity. Not forgetting that our hostel is more like a concentration camp than anything else."

Now most scholars begin the story of the Ugandan Asian crisis on a particular date, which is August 5th, 1972. So this is the day that the Ugandan leader Idi Amin announced that all Asian holders of British passports would be repatriated. That's the term he used. So they would be repatriated to Britain, and they would be expelled from Uganda within 90 days.

So it was over the next three months that 28,000 Ugandan Asians landed in Britain. It seems like a very rapid process. What I want to point out is that the prospect that this would happen, and that newly-independent African countries might expel their Asian populations, that is a fear we can see in British documents as early as the 1950s.

The expulsion of the Ugandan Asians was not a sudden revelation born of the incoherent ravings of Idi Amin, though that's very much what the contemporary British press suggested. Instead, it was a long, anticipated, and very much dreaded consequence of decolonization - British awareness of which had developed over several decades, not several months.

Atul Patel, who I interviewed last summer, experienced a grim stay at Honiton camp, but then was happily moved to an American Air Force base in Faldingworth.

At Faldingworth, luxury was evident everywhere, from the comfortably padded chairs, to the high-quality crockery and central heating, like a hotel, he said.

Patel recalled, of course, them being Americans, this was posh. "We were living in wooden huts in Honiton, and here was concrete and cement. Fantastic colors," and he talked about how every room at Faldingworth was painted a different color, which was very different from Honiton, which was all grey, basically. With a little green.

So fantastic colors, fantastic facilities, bars, canteens - that we hadn't seen before. Snooker tables. So you can imagine what Faldingworth was like. It was a Butlins holiday, he said.

Now at the other end of the spectrum was Tonfanau camp. Located in a bleak corner of Welsh-speaking North Wales. Miles from any industrial center, with a high rate of unemployment, squeezed between mountains and the stormy Irish Sea, the camp was marked by a barbed-wire fence and a sign that said "Beware of the Firing Range." Most job interviews were six hours away by train. Hundreds of Ugandan Asians huddled here over heaters amid wartime wooden sheds. All of which had been deserted by the army three years earlier.

Now one reason these camps were so oddly placed was to try to encourage settlement out of so-called "red areas" - that was cities with large immigrant populations, or cities that were perceived to have excessively large immigrant populations. And the effort was supposed to direct camp residents into "green areas" of so-called low immigrant population. This strategy was remarkably and completely unsuccessful.

This project is about camps in Britain, but it's also about the erasure of camps from public consciousness. And this is one aspect of the project that I found fascinating, is that the memory of all of these camps is completely absent in Britain today. British participation in European camps is well-known, and I think regarded with a lot of pride...but camps are understood as something that happened elsewhere. What's been totally forgotten is the fact that there were dozens of camps operating in Britain itself.

The Anglo-Egyptians in the documents I've looked at refer to themselves as evacuees rather than refugees. And I think that is a very meaningful distinction. It's not a distinction that the State is making about them, but it's a distinction that they make about themselves.

It's really with the Ugandan Asian influx in 1972 that the term "refugee camp" is dropped, and they get renamed resettlement centers. Precisely because spokespeople for the Ugandan Asian community make it clear that they find the term refugee very offensive...People have said to me, "You can call it a refugee camp, but you know we weren't really refugees. The people in it weren't really refugees."

...

There are ways in which staying in a camp can be very beneficial, so for the Ugandan Asians, their children get school places if they're in camp in a way that they can't if they move directly into a community, where they would be much more hampered by a local authority.

So there are - there are certain kinds of benefits, but there are enormous struggles that take place around which kind of housing someone is put into - I had mentioned this thing about the Poles won't leave and the Basques won't stay.

The Ugandan Asians are very interesting in this way of refusing and deferring housing assignments much longer than expected. So this expectation that, oh, they'll just be here for a couple of days, which is based on the British media's - and to some extent the State's - assumption that there's such a big Asian community everyone will stick together and houses will be offered immediately to these people as soon as they arrive.

There's sort of a British, like - well they're all related anyway, right? The family units are so big, and so with this one family coming in, you know, someone will come to the camp and get them in a couple of days. And that doesn't happen, and what happens instead is a much more complicated negotiation often between an individual family and the Uganda Resettlement Board, with people saying, "I won't go to this area; I won't go to that area."

What happens a lot is people saying, "I won't take housing that's intended for a single person, because I'm not single and my family is coming soon from Uganda," or from India. It's a very successful kind of manipulation of you know a housing offer that many other people are not able to pull off. And it's a very gendered one. I think that the most vivid example I've seen is women who enter Britain while their husbands are stateless, and their husbands have to stay in European transit camps, which are very much like prisons.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3jz15a5XRw

The Framers Coup regarding the constitution. Many interesting points to be found here, on the ways antifederalists were undermined.

Madison played a large role because he was the best prepared man in the room. One of the delegates who did character sketches of the others in Philadelphia, that's what he said about Madison. Always the best prepared person in any debate. Madison was the only one who had spent the months before the Philadelphia Convention systematically analyzing the history of ancient and modern confederacies, diagnosing the problems that they tended to suffer from, and proposing solutions. So Madison did that. Then he came up with his ideas for the convention. He coordinated among his Virginia co-delegates telling them to show up early in Philadelphia. They did arrive early. And they spent a couple hours every day talking through their ideas for the new government. They coordinated with the Pennsylvania delegates, conveniently all of whom lived in Philadelphia, so they were already there. And together these two large states, the three largest states at the time were Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, so Pennsylvania and Virginia they're there early. They're the two largest states. They're coordinating on a fairly nationalist antipopulist agenda. And it gets introduced the first day of the convention. It's called the Virginia Plan in honor of the Virginia delegates.

Now Madison didn't win on everything he wanted in Philadelphia. Indeed he lost on a lot of things he cared a lot about. But obviously where you end up depends on where you start.

some appointed delegates, about eight or ten of them, decided to turn down their appointments. Now some of them intriguingly, like Patrick Henry of Virginia, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, Samuel Chase of Maryland, they actually became leading antifederalists. They were appointed to the Philadelphia Convention. They didn't go. And then they became leading opponents of ratification...people like Robert Yates and John Lansing of New York. That when they left that deprived the New York delegation of its vote, because it left only Alexander Hamilton, who was the most nationalizing antipopulist of them all. But under the rules one delegate couldn't vote for his state. So once Yates and Lansing went, that nullified New York's vote. Luther Martin was another one of these who left the convention early. And then became one of the leading antifederalists in Maryland. Now you can understand why they left. Their point was the Philadelphia Convention was ignoring its instructions. It was doing something illegitimate. And they didn't want to confer legitimacy on it by staying.

One possibility is these people didn't go because they had very little sympathy for the mildly nationalizing project they thought was under way. They didn't have any interest in it. But they also didn't have any reason to rally against it. But they didn't know what was really going on in Philadelphia was a fairly revolutionary reform project. And if they'd known about that, they might have gone to fight against it. But they didn't know that was what was going to happen.

the delegates made the critical decision to close the doors of the Philadelphia Convention. Now they had good reasons for doing so. Madison said later, and I think this is probably right, if they hadn't done this, they might not have been able to come up with any Constitution at all. But one effect of closing the doors was it liberated delegates to take very extreme antipopulist and nationalist positions. Positions that might have endangered their subsequent political careers if they were making these statements with the press in the galleries. And in addition, and maybe more importantly, closing the convention meant that the antifederalists, the people who were going to oppose the Constitution, actually were deprived of about four months of rallying opposition. The convention was meeting from about May 25th to September 17th. And if the antifederalists had known what was going on, they could have started immediately organizing their opposition. But in fact they didn't know until the convention unlocked its doors and issued its report on September 17th.

You shouldn't assume this was inevitable. In fact it was a highly contingent series of events that enabled the Constitution to be approved. It almost failed. Two states rejected ratification before later changing their minds. That's Rhode Island and North Carolina. New Hampshire, at its first convention, probably was inclined to vote "no," but the federalists, the supporters of the Constitution, had deftly arranged for the convention to be adjourned when they saw they were going to lose, and they could come back several months later and fight again. And in addition in three of the five largest states, the vote was so close that it's obvious it could have come out the other way. So in Virginia the vote was 89 to 79 in favor. In New York it was 30 to 27 in favor. And in Massachusetts it was 187 to 168 in favor. Those are three of the five largest states. If one or two of them had rejected the Constitution, it's doubtful that the Constitution could have successfully gone into operation, even if nine states, which was the number specified in the Constitution to make it effective, even if nine states had ratified, you couldn't do without Virginia and Massachusetts.

So how did the federalists manage to win this battle? And the answer is, first of all, they actually had a bunch of built-in advantages. This is not a rigged system. It's not scam. But it just turns out for reasons that I'll elaborate on it, wasn't entirely a fair fight. It wasn't entirely an even playing field. First, the federalists' advantage were advantaged by malapportionment in some state conventions, especially South Carolina. In South Carolina 20% of the white population, and remember obviously only the white male population, and only those who own a significant amount of land are voting, although I don't want to make it sound like it's as exclusionary as it would have been in Britain at the time, probably 50 or 60% of adult males in South Carolina could participate in the voting for the Ratifying Convention. Twenty percent of the population lives in coastal areas along the Atlantic seaboard. Support for the Constitution is very strong in those areas. And that 20% elects 60% of the delegates at the Ratifying Convention, because of malapportionment. Basically as the population moved from east to west, the legislature didn't reapportionment, because people who have political power tend not to be altruistic in sharing it, so this has been a story throughout American history.

So a majority of the population in South Carolina, according to most historians, oppose the Constitution. But because of severe malapportionment, two-thirds of the delegates at the South Carolina Convention voted in favor. Second, the press overwhelmingly favored ratification. Ninety percent of Americans lived outside of cities in 1787, 1788. But newspapers, for obvious economic reasons, were published almost exclusively in cities where subscribers and advertisers, the two economic engines of the newspaper industry, tended to be overwhelmingly supportive of the Constitution...opponents, had a hard time even getting their essays reprinted in many states. Aedanus Burke, who was a leading antifederalist in South Carolina, complained that, quote, the whole weight and influence of the press was on the side of the Constitution. Only about 12 of the 90 newspapers then in circulation in the country published any significant amount of antifederalist literature.

Third, several conventions were held in coastal cities where support for the Constitution tended to be almost universal across class lines. So, for example, in New York we know 19 out of every 20 voters who was participating in electing delegates to the New York Convention, 19 out of every 20 voted for a federalist delegate. This had an effect, this overwhelming support for ratification, in these cities where many of the conventions were held, had an effect both inside and outside of the state ratifying conventions. All of the ratifying conventions were open to the public, unlike the Philadelphia Convention, which was closed. That means that the galleries tended to be dominated by spectators. And, because these were cities, they tended to be dominated by federalist speakers, federalists spectators, who were not shy about voicing their opinions. So when antifederalists would get up to speak in the Connecticut Convention, they would be (harassed), they would be booed, people would stomp their feet, making it difficult for any federalist even to get their opinions voiced. Outside of conventions, for example, in South Carolina the local planter elite, which overwhelmingly supported the Constitution, which tells you something about their perception of the Constitution, strong support for slavery, they would hold open houses at their homes during the duration of the South Carolina Convention. They would adjourn to their homes after the day's deliberations were over. And you can be sure that they were whispering into the ears of the delegates positive things, glowing praise for the Constitution.

Fourth point, fourth federalist advantage, federalists just had an easier time organizing their supporters. People in cities tended to be federalists. People close to the Atlantic seaboard tended to be federalists. This is an era of very rudimentary transportation and communication. People on the western frontier tended to oppose the Constitution. People in backwoods' areas that were removed from commercial connection, remote from roads, they tended to oppose the Constitution. Even if you assume that federalists and antifederalists were about equal in number, which might be about accurate to assume, the federalists would simply have an easier time organizing their supporters than the antifederalists would.

Fifth point, the "better sort" as they called them, the well-educated, reasonably affluent elite, overwhelmingly supported ratification everywhere but in the state of Virginia. In Virginia the elite was actually split down the middle. But in other states the elite overwhelmingly supported the Constitution. That was a big advantage for federalists in those ratifying conventions where delegates were actually open to having their minds changed, which was some of the conventions and not others. Backwoods' farmers could not quote Cicero in the original Latin. They were often intimidated by their oratorically more gifted, better-educated opponents. For example, at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention leading antifederalist, Amos Singletary, complained of, quote, these lawyers and men of learning and moneyed men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill. Right? Anti-elitism 225 years ago.

The last of the advantages of the federalists, and then I'll mention a couple other points and I'll be done, and I'm happy to take some questions, the genius of Article VII of the Constitution was a huge advantage for the federalists. Nine states under Article VII could put the Constitution into operation...the other four states would be free to do as they like. They couldn't be bound without their consent. But they also wouldn't be part of the country unless they ratified. Now that was important, because it might sound like it's preserving every state's independent right to go its own way. In fact the pressure on states ten through 13 was enormous. Once nine states had ratified, the other states could be, because they're not in the country, you would have a new country, they're not being guaranteed military protection. They could be subjected to foreign trade discrimination, because they're not part of the country. So you could set up tariffs against Rhode Island the same way you're setting up tariffs against British goods. And, finally, they would be cut out of any important decisions that were made by the first new Congress. Once the new Congress met, it was going to have incredibly important decisions to make, like where to place the permanent national capital, whether to adopt amendments to the Constitution. And if you were not part of the nation, you wouldn't be participating. So as a practical matter once nine states ratified, the other four states wouldn't have much choice. That turned out to be critically important. And they just made it up at the Philadelphia Convention. Heading into the convention everybody had thought, because Congress had said it and so had the call for the Philadelphia Convention said it, that anything proposed in Philadelphia will have to be approved first by Congress, and then by all 13 state legislatures. And they just changed the rules, and saw whether they could get away with it. And the answer was they could.

Now the federalists also benefited from some antifederalist miscalculations, especially in New York and Virginia, where antifederalists agreed to late conventions. The New York Convention, New York and Virginia conventions didn't meet until June of 1788, which is nine months after the Philadelphia Convention had ended. I think they were calculating that that would give them more time to rally their supporters in opposition to the Constitution. But what they ultimately did was they made themselves irrelevant. By the time the New York Convention was underway in late June, New Hampshire had become the ninth state to ratify.

Last important point I want to emphasize, the federalists managed to do one other thing that I think was incredibly important. And this is something I learned while working on the book. This wasn't something I knew going into it. It was critically important to their success to keep intermediate options off the table. They wanted to force a choice between the Articles of Confederation, which most people agreed were deeply flawed, and the Constitution, which at least half the country also thought was significantly flawed. They wanted to deny people a choice on the spectrum somewhere in the middle...

Now the two most likely ways to have arrived at an intermediate solution were the following procedural mechanisms. One was a demand for antecedent amendments, meaning let's amend the Constitution before it gets ratified, rather than afterwards. And the other procedural mechanism would have been let's hold a second convention after the first. Now the antifederalists, the opponents, made pretty good arguments for why these were sensible procedural paths to follow. The argument for antecedent amendments was pretty straightforward. "Who in their right mind," Patrick Henry said this at the Virginia Convention, "You'd have to be a lunatic to sign a contract with another party when that party then gets to change the terms that you've already agreed to."

He said, "That's like agreeing to a Constitution with a vague promise of subsequent amendments to come. You should insist on seeing the amendments in advance." Which sounds pretty reasonable. The argument for a second convention was the country just had a big debate on a Constitution that was unveiled after a secret convention and did not map on to what most people expected. We've now had a big national debate. People have told you about their concerns. Now let's go ahead and vote for more delegates who can gather up all this information, go to Philadelphia, and write a Constitution closer to the intermediate position, which is where most Americans were at. Federalists made legal arguments against those procedural paths, and they made practical political arguments. But I think the actual reason why they opposed these alternatives is because they understood there's no way that a second convention, or antecedent amendments, would allow them to preserve the core of what they had done in Philadelphia.

consider the proposal that Randolph had made to Madison before the convention. Randolph, the governor of Virginia, and Madison are corresponding before the convention. Madison is playing with his ideas. And Randolph says in response, "Whatever we write in Philadelphia, we should submit it to the country in a kind of detachable form so people can approve what they like, and disapprove what they don't like." Madison was horrified by that idea. And he ridiculed the notion that ordinary Americans could have informed opinions on something as important as designing a system of government to govern them. This is what Madison said to Jefferson later that year, towards the end of 1787, quote, in Virginia where the mass of people have been so accustomed to be guided by their rulers on all new and intricate questions, the matter of whether to ratify the Constitution certainly surpasses the judgment of the greater part of them. Another good platform to run for office on some time that most people are too ill-informed, or not bright enough to actually participate meaningfully in deciding what governing structure should exist at the national level...

The Framers took advantage of the element of surprise to get it drafted. Then they barely got it ratified, benefiting from some circumstances that proved advantageous, some miscalculations by their political adversaries, and some luck, portions of which they helped to create for themselves. Whether you agree with what they did in Philadelphia, whether you think it's legitimate or illegitimate, I think you have to stand back, and express some admiration for what they accomplished, because the Constitution genuinely was a kind of coup against public opinion.

...

the antifederalists did pretty quickly give up their legitimacy complaints. Those were a prominent form of their objections to the Constitution during the ratifying debate. This is illegitimate. There was no prep. There's nothing under the Articles allowing a convention. You've circumvented the state legislatures. You've created special ratifying conventions. You changed the rule for a ratification from 13 to nine. They argued it was illegitimate. After they lost, they largely gave up that argument. There are a couple possibilities. One possibility is the economy was booming in the early 1790s.

And the federalists and Hamilton would have claimed it's actually because of the Constitution. People who are more dubious might say it's because of the wars in Europe between France and Great Britain that opened up a lot of demand for American agricultural products, and the United States remained neutral in the law. Whatever the reason is though, in times of a booming economy, people are maybe not as interested in objecting to the political arrangements which exist. So that might be one possibility.

The other possibility is the Constitution, and I'm fond of this one, this is the one I'm drawn to, the Constitution quickly proves sufficiently indeterminate that the antifederalist types could make the same arguments they had made against the Constitution within the Constitution. Right? So one of the first debates is over whether Congress can charter a national bank. And Madison, who has now become one of the leaders of the opposition, says, "Congress doesn't have authority to charter a bank. There's nothing in Congress' powers. It can raise taxes. It can regulate commerce. It can fund armies. There's nothing about a bank." But Alexander Hamilton says, on the other hand, "Well, Congress can borrow money. Wouldn't it be convenient to have a bank that could lend you money? Congress can raise taxes and isn't it convenient if the bank has notes that circulate that people can pay their taxes in?" And, so, they just disagree about what the Constitution means. And that's happening from the very beginning. One of the first debates in Congress is can the president remove the secretary of state, or whether the same Senate that confirmed the secretary of state has to play a role in removing the secretary of state.

1793, George Washington issues a Neutrality Proclamation. Alexander Hamilton defends that in the newspapers. James Madison attacks it saying only Congress can declare war. So if Congress can declare war, why can the president declare peace? The Constitution turns out to be sufficiently indeterminate that the anti-federalist types can go on making their same states' rights' populist arguments under the Constitution. And indeed for much of the period until the Civil War, those people dominate the national government, first under the guise of Jeffersonians, then under the guise of Jacksonians. So what's the point of attacking the legitimacy of a Constitution when you can...control its interpretation?

On Madison, you know, Madison there is a real problem. Madison seemed like a huge nationalist since 1787. He wanted national government to be able to veto state laws. That's about as nationalist as you can get. By 1798 Madison is arguing for the power of a state legislature to nullify a federal law, as you know, in the context of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison's writing resolutions for the Virginia legislature saying that a state audit be able to nullify a federal law that it thinks is unconstitutional. What happened to James Madison? Historians have offered lots of different interpretations. The one that I'm most drawn to is that Madison was only a nationalist when he had in mind the state debtor relief laws of the 1780s. If states are going to be redistributing wealth from creditors to debtors, Madison's a nationalist, he wants to put a stop to that. Madison never signed on to Hamilton's Mercantilist Program, which Hamilton is going to execute as secretary of the treasury. Madison doesn't think there should be a national Bank. Madison doesn't think the national government should assume the state debts. Madison doesn't think the national government should subsidize manufacturing. That's exactly what Hamilton's trying to put in place. Madison is a Virginia aristocrat. The south literally doesn't have any banks. And now Hamilton's trying to create a national bank? Virginia has already paid off its debts. Why should it support the national government assuming state debts? So Madison is representing his constituents. He's representing the state of Virginia. And I think genuinely he'd never signed on to exactly what it is that Hamilton wanted to do with national power.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8vhPQ2ItRs

Lessons from Ancient Rome

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWOo8WamLvI

The Kaiser Wilson banner, used in suffragist protests after Woodrow Wilson refused to meet with any of them (a mob would later rush the women and tear the banner apart)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu7U1i2YS28

Women's satisfaction with marriage hasn't budged in 50 years despite massive changes and it's still lower than men.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6TQEoDS-fQ&t=17m39s
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6TQEoDS-fQ&t=25m

The 1939 World's Fair - WHAT ABOUT OUR GENERATION OF KIDS LOSING JOBS TO ROBOTS???

Also this: "No system can make up for bad citizenship"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_DiZ4R9ZxI

Look, it's water on the big screen!

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4CZpqA911Y

The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries & the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

it was a couple of things that got me interested in this subject. First of all, when you looked into the organizations that organized the looting, they didn't go after the art first, they went after the books, especially in France and it was quite particular. And another thing was the scale of it.

The looting of books, the operation to loot, sort and transport books was much, much larger than the looting of art. Art was, if you compare it, a small operation. But the last and maybe most important issue was that the organizations that were responsible for the looting of cultural items, they weren't really interested in the art...But what they were interested in was the books and not just books but also archives. And this was interesting because these organizations were also the central intellectual organizations in Germany. It was to, first of all Heinrich Himmler's SS and Alfred Rosenberg's organization, ERR.

The common picture we have of the book, the Nazis' relations to literature is this, the book burnings on the 10th of May, 1933. And it's a very strong picture and I think this image of the Nazis, it's still powerful today. And it's so powerful because we want to believe that the Nazis didn't read books, they destroyed books but the truth isn't that. And I think the truth is more horrific actually.

The book burning in May 1933 wasn't done immense destruction of books, actually quite few books was destroyed. Already in 1933 the Nazis started looting books all over Germany. The book burning was more a ritual, a symbolic display where they burned books in a kind of ritual that a lot of Germans at that time understood. This was something that went deep in German history.

A hundred years earlier German students had burned French literature of the Napoleon Wars. But the most important reference was to Martin Luther and his burning of the Papal Bull. Because, in the Nazi perspective the burning of the Papal Bull wasn't an act of religious freedom, it was a nationalistic act. It was the moment when the German people freed themselves from the Catholic Church, the power of the Catholic Church.

In Berlin 42,000 people came together on this night and the speaker here was the new Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels and he said "Here, the intellectual foundations of the November Republic sinks to the ground. But from the debris, a new spirit will raise triumphantly like the Phoenix".

The interesting part here is the new spirit. What was this new kind of spirit? The Nazis didn't distance themselves from intellectuals, from poets, from librarians, writers, researchers, actually they recruited them and very actively because they needed them to create the image of a new human being.

A couple of years later a new institute was opened in Germany, a historical institute. And one of the historians here described the role of the historian in the new Nazi Germany and this description I think is valuable also for other kinds of academics, writers, poets.

He said "The purpose of research is not to fight directly for power. But they can forge their weapons, it can provide us with the shields, it can train the warriors and awaken the fire within them, hardening them against the trials that lie ahead. The goal of this Institute is to develop weapons for the struggle of thought, one of the most important challenges of all".

The Freemasons were one of the first organizations that were attacked in Germany in the 1930s. And, why did the Nazis attack the Freemasons? For one instance they were a secret society but they were also an international organization and both didn't work very well in a totalitarian state.

But the Nazis also had a special interest for the Freemasons' libraries and especially the libraries on the occult, libraries on witches, black magic, alchemy. And this interest was especially large in the SS.

The SS was one of the big looters of books and during the war they started to build a big collection in Berlin, a big library that they called the Library of the Enemies of the Reich. And it was a library with different departments for Jews, Communists, Freemasons, and Catholics, everyone that they perceived as an enemy.

And at this library they planned to study their enemy, but not only to destroy them in the physical sense but also to fight their ideas, their thoughts. Here they're going to fight the idea, the intellectual war. But the SS also did another kind of research and especially research on the occult. There were some authors on popular descriptions of the Nazi interest in the occult. It was an interest that went through the whole Nazi movement but it was strong especially in SS.

And maybe the most, the strangest research that they did was the witch project.

It went on for almost ten years. And in this project they collected material on thousands of witches that had been burned from the Middle Ages and forward. And they collected this to archive that was called Himmler's Hexenkarrochek. Why did they do this?

You could say that the Nazi, that Nazi Germany was probably the only regime in history that was positive to witches. They loved witches and they often described them like Nordic amazons. The Nazi interest in witches is that, especially the SS, they saw the witch hunts and the burnings of witches as part of a larger war between civilizations. The witches were victims in a war between the Catholic, Semitic Church and the true Nordic faith and myths. It was a way for the Catholic Church to destroy the true Nordic religions and ideas in the SS perspective.

The other person that was responsible for the looting and maybe the most serious collector is the man in the hat here, Alfred Rosenberg. He's one of the lesser-known persons in the Nazi elite but I think some of the most important. In the early 1930s Hitler appointed him the role as the Party's spiritual leader, the chief ideologist.

And Rosenberg's mission was to purify, develop and protect the Nazi ideology. And Rosenberg realized one thing, that the Nazi movement wasn't held together by its ideology but by something else. It was held together by the cult surrounding the man in the middle, the cult, the Hitler cult and the Fuhrer cult. Rosenberg believed that if the man in the center disappeared, everything would come crashing down.

But, how would you build an empire that would last 1000 years if you have only, if it all depends on just one man? Rosenberg meant that they needed something else, of course they needed an idea but an idea can't exist without institutions and he especially looked at the Catholic Church. He meant that what would Christianity be without the Catholic Church, the power of this institution? Would the Christian faith even exist today without this institution?

Rosenberg meant to create such new Nazi institutions and he believed the two most important areas were education and science. Already during the 1930s the Nazis started to experiment on special elite schools.

They created the Adolf Hitler Schools for young, gifted boys. Then they went to the Ordensburgen Schools. It was like a military academy where a boy should read Goethe and shoot the machine gun. You should be what the Nazis would describe as poetic warriors.

We can only wonder if Hitler would be an "austere poet" in the obituaries today.

And they would finish their education at Rosenberg's crown jewel, the University of the Nazi Party. This was a school that was planned to be built in the south of Germany after the war. And here the Nazis would create the future leadership of Nazi Germany and secure it, the future. But these institutions would also be the head of the other pillar, research and science.

Connected with university Alfred Rosenberg planned several institutions, spread out over Germany that would study some of the Nazis' favorite questions, Indo-German, German history, folk history, Celts, Eastern research for example. And it was for, mainly for this kind, these institutions, the institutes that the Nazis, that the Rosenberg organization looted.

But there was only one of these that was officially open during the war, the last one, the Institute of the Jewish Question. And this was an institute and a question that Rosenberg meant couldn't be, had to be dealt right now. And it was actually opened in 1941 when the Holocaust started and its projects and its operation was connected to the Holocaust.

At this institute Nazi researchers studied Jewish history, language, culture and to this institute some of the most important Jewish collections were sent. Why was it so important to study Jewish history and culture? When Alfred Rosenberg inaugurated the institute he said that it may come a day when our grandchildren grow up in a world freed from Jews where maybe they can't really understand the threat the Jews proposed for our time, therefore the goal of this institute is to remind them.

And he said the human memory is very short. What Alfred Rosenberg was afraid of was of course, that future generations in a world without Jews, would judge them for their actions and that they wouldn't understand why they had to do this horrible thing.

I think one of the most important lessons about the looting is that it wasn't done to eradicate the history or culture of their enemies but to take control over it. Because, if you own your enemies' libraries, if you own their books, their archives, you also have the power to write their history, that was the main goal with the looting.

As Alon Confino puts it in his book "A World Without Jews", "Remembering the Jews after a victorious war would have been important precisely because total liquidation of the Jews could not have been achieved by physical annihilation alone, it required as well the overcoming of Jewish history, memory and history. The Nazis struggle against the Jews was never principally about the political and the economical influence. It was about their identity waged by the means of Nazi appropriation of Jewish history, memory and books".

The Nazis wanted a future with generations to remember, remember what happened but only by taking control of Jewish history and culture. Could the Nazis also take control over the memory of the Jews in a world where they didn't exist anymore? In the Nazi world view the Jew would become the devil and incarnation of evil that would scare the children long after they were dead.

After the war these books, libraries and archives were found all over Europe and their fate was very different depending on who found them and where they were found.

Early in 1945 Stalin in a secret operation created so-called Soviet Trophy Brigades. And the goal of these brigades was to take as much as they could from Germany but also from Central Europe. And the Soviet Trophy Brigades took over 11 million books to the Soviet Union that were looted and many, many more from German libraries and universities.

Many of these collections were scattered, separated and most of these books have never been returned.

Some more examples of Nazi sadism:

But of course the most affected were Jewish libraries. The oldest and most important Jewish libraries in Europe were looted. One of them was in Rome, the library that belonged to the Jewish community in Rome and this library had a fantastic history because it belonged to a community with a fantastic history.

The Jewish community of Rome was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe. Some of the first Jews came here as slaves during the Roman age. And this library had, went through, down through the ages and it was saved from the Inquisition in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1943 this library was put on a German train and the train headed somewhere into Central Europe and then it disappeared.

This library has never been found. The Italian government had tried to find it for ten years but practically it failed. And the author, Robert Katz had described what this library included, the only copies of books and manuscripts from before Jesus' birth, from the time of the Roman emperors and the early popes. There were engravings from medieval times, books from the first printing presses and documents that had been passed from hand to hand through history.

The other great Euro-center of culture and learning was Thessaloniki. And to Thessaloniki or Thessalonica as it was called at the time, isn't as famous today as Vilnius and it's because its history is almost gone. Here the Nazis succeeded. This was once one of the biggest Jewish cities in Europe, like a center for a very special Jewish community and one of the few European cities when the Jewish population dominated. And this city had been founded by Jews that left Spain in 1492 after the Reconquista, when they were forced to leave Spain.

And when the Nazis came here almost 400 years later people still spoke Ladino, the ancient Spanish-Jewish language. This was a society a culture, a whole civilization that perished during the Holocaust, not only the people disappeared but also their history and their culture. The libraries and archives of this culture were looted and scattered.

Today when you walk around in Thessaloniki you see few traces from this civilization that existed here for less than 100 years. But there are some traces, outside the city walls where there today is the Aristotle University, was once one of Europe's largest Jewish cemeteries, a half a million graves.

During the war this cemetery was blown up, destroyed and then they used the stones as building material. The SS used it to build a swimming pool at the SS villa.

...

(After WWII) Many of these books were later sent out to Jewish communities, to institutions around the world. But still despite both the efforts to loot books after war and return them, there were millions and millions of books left in German libraries and in other European libraries. And, when I travelled around Europe I found them everywhere.

In my book I especially focused on a library in Berlin, the Zentral und Landesbibliothek. Today there are estimates that there could be around a quarter million looted books just in this library. And most of the looted books at this library aren't valuable books, aren't important books, it's just books that belonged to ordinary people because the Nazis didn't just loot books from important libraries and archives, they looted from everyone.

In 1942 Alfred Rosenberg initiated the so-called M-Aktion, Mobel Aktion. It was an operation where 70,000 homes in France, The Netherlands and Belgium were emptied of everything, furniture, toys (inaudible) and of course books. And, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of these books were brought to Germany and often sold to German libraries.

And today a small team of librarians sort through a collection of 7 million books by hand and they have worked for almost a decade. And they have returned 600 books, so you understand that this is something that's going to go on for decades or maybe for generations.

One question I asked when I came to this library was, why hasn't this been brought up earlier? The libraries started doing this research ten years ago. And one important reason was that it wasn't librarians that were held responsible for the crimes after the war.

The same librarians ought to be, that had taken part of the looting, held that position after the war and often tried to hide this history. They hid the traces and today you can find a lot of books that look like this, when you have tried to destroy Jewish bookplates.

In other cases you have, they have tried to falsify catalogues. During the war there wasn't a problem to put the 'J' in the books for Jewish books. It didn't look as good after the war so they tried to make it a donation from someone with 'J' (in their name)

And, you can also ask, why is it important to return these books? They aren't valuable and ten years' of work for 600 books, and it's 600 books to around, a little more than 100 people. And in my book I wanted to do, follow one of these single books because I understood that every one of these books also carried a history. And, as one of the librarians here said it's often a history that ends at Auschwitz.

And I came in contact with this book, and this book was a book that belonged to just an ordinary German Jewish man that was called Richjart (phonetic) Kobrak and he was a lawyer in Berlin and lived there with his wife and three children.

And he didn't really have a Jewish identity. The family was Christian and he had been awarded the Iron Cross of the (inaudible) in the First World War. So, when Hitler came to power he refused to leave Germany. He meant that he was more German than that Austrian Hitler.

And that was a mistake of course. After the Kristallnacht they understood that they'd found a big mistake. And they tried to get out and they succeeded sending out the three children but Richjart Kobrak and his wife died in Auschwitz.

I took this book and followed it to Richjart Kobrak's son, Helmet (phonetic) Kobrak. Helmet Kobrak was 15 years old when he came to Great Britain in 1939. The problem was that the British didn't see him as a Jewish refugee so they arrested him and deported him on a ship with prisoners to Australia.

It took almost 10 years for him to get back to his sisters in England. I took this book and returned it to Helmet's daughter, a woman living in a small village outside Birmingham.

And this book was the first thing the family ever got back from Richjart Kobrak. This was a man that had left almost nothing. They didn't have any photographs. They didn't have a grave of course and in some ways this book was the only proof that he ever existed. I think this tells something important about restitution because with the focus on art, restitution has been a lot about the value of artworks and money. But I mean the moral center, the moral quest of the restitution isn't economical compensation, that's important but it's not the moral center. It's to get back. It's to give back something of the lives and worlds that were destroyed.

...

Q: Has Anders seen any of the books that were at Vilnius?

A: No, I'm sorry I haven't actually because they aren't there anymore and as I think some people here know, a lot of the books from Vilnius especially the books that were found at the Frankfurt Institute, were actually sent to New York...it was a question at that time that they wanted to send the books back to Lithuania but of course at that time it wasn't possible for YIVO to exist there because as you know in the Soviet Union it wasn't allowed to have alternative identities, not officially.

...

The Nazis, I mean they wanted to own Jewish memory and history and some of the Jewish writers, scholars understood this especially in Vilnius, and especially one of the librarians. The librarian of the ghetto of Vilnius, Herman Kruk and all, let me just find the section here.

Yeah, during all the time the ghetto existed he put on a diary. He wrote everything down, what kind of books people borrowed, what happened. And they also created at the library a secret organization that collected all the German orders and material from the (inaudible) because they understood if the Germans want to control our memory, we must protect our history and get it out somewhere, somehow.

Yeah, and after the, their ghetto in Vilnius was destroyed Herman Kruk was sent to a labor camp in Estonia. Herman Kruk was deported to a forced labor camp in Lagedi, Estonia. He would continue to keep a journal to the very end.

On September 17, 1944 he wrote his final notes. I'm burying the manuscripts in Lagedi, in Herr Schulma's barrack, opposite the guardhouse, six people are present for the funeral. He buried all of his diaries to save them because he sensed that something was wrong. Kruk had a sense of what awaited him.

The next day, he and 2000 other prisoners were forced to carry wooden logs to a forest outside the camp. The logs were put down in long rows where upon the prisoners were forced to lie down on top of them. They had built their own funeral pyres. After the Nazi guards had shot the prisoners in the head, another layer of logs and prisoners were added on top, and thereafter, another, and another.

When the Red Army reached the scene a few days later, unburned bodies still lay in the pyres. But one of the witnesses of Herman Kruk's funeral managed to flee and went back to dig up his diaries.

[Tails82]

So this is just one example of POW camps, which were really more like slave camps in Japan and these guys were as bad or worse than the Nazis in some ways.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvEjyfkry5c&t=25m

"His only interest in Americans were those who were dead, and the number who had died. Also, that we were his captives and we would be treated as such. Japan is now establishing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Americans are soft and cowards. President Roosevelt and General MacArthur will be hanged as war criminals whenever Hirohito rules the United States from the White House in Washington DC. You are enemies of the Japanese empire and we will fight you for 100 years. You are not honorable prisoners of war, you are captives. Forget you have names. Forget you have parents, wives, and children. Your loved ones no longer care for you and have forgotten you, just as Roosevelt and your generals have forgotten you. Anyone trying to escape will be shot.

"That was our welcome speech."

40m: A plan to execute all prisoners in the Pacific - whether the POWs are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates. In any case, it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single POW. Issued in January 1944 and the mass execution of his camp was set for August, just 2 weeks before they were liberated.

Oh, but it was mean to drop the bomb on Japan. We should've prolonged the war and let them kill way more people. 🙄

[Tails82]

I'm up to 2017 - don't let the Trump era fool you. These events have always been angry race fests.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsSDQVFU0JI&t=25m10s

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsSDQVFU0JI&t=35m10s

Are these guys always like this, or do they pick their outfits when the traveling circus comes to town?

No really, is this the dressed-up version we're seeing? Is this what they look like when they make an effort? And what do they look like at home? You know what, I don't wanna know.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsSDQVFU0JI&t=39m10s

This one should really get some help.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsSDQVFU0JI&t=1h20s

Similar disturbing content, slightly better written. This one must've had a thesaurus.

I have quite a few thoughts on this thing overall. The concept of 'imaginary pain' is heavy on my mind here - having known no actual hardship in one's life, but clinging to some trauma (real or fictional) that happened to somebody else 400 years ago. Hogwarts was here, Handmaid's Tale is also a narrative they latch onto. Doesn't even have to be real, but you cling to that imaginary pain - usually the worst among angsty teens, but in practice is on the rise among leftist adults who never grew up.

Poetry is not a substitute for therapy. But watching this I think I'm looking at something that goes beyond that. From the intros and the comments made - we need poetry right now, we've needed poetry for 400 years, drop us dead and send us up to whatever's next - I really think we're looking at a perverse sort of pagan prayer. Looking at the hate that goes into many of these so-called poems, compared to the way children are indoctrinated by Hamas it's not that much different...it's why these circles have frequent crossover and sympathize with each other. But there's also the aspect where it's almost like an old-school superstition of blessings and curses (mostly curses) placed on other people.

Growing up I remember people in the news who said things like Harry Potter's evil, Pokemon is bad and so on, I never really got it because they were just stories. But today I kinda see what they were getting at, because there are some really screwed-up people in the world who took these things way out of proportion, obsessive fanhood or whatever it is, maybe the characters in stories were the substitute for missing parents, who knows. But something messed 'em up and they're running around in halloween outfits in their 30s, casting spells in protests and thinking witchcraft is real.

Some of these guys were right to say that their schools have failed them, but probably not in the way they're thinking.

[Tails82]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sftDlxPfkAw

Some of the Capitol statues - 23m why justice is not blind

[Tails82]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPs7f7kYHA&t=32m

A Conversation with the Justice Clarence Thomas

GREGORY MAGGS: Life didn't start out too easy...you grew up in Pinpoint, and then in a home that didn't have water, didn't have electricity. When the house burned down you moved to Savannah and conditions got worse...1955, you were hungry without knowing when you would eat and cold without knowing when you would be warm.

CLARENCE THOMAS: That's a horrible feeling.

But, you know, today we kind of -- I just get worn down. I was with a young woman who happened to be black in Kansas recently, and she said something really interesting. She said, I'm really tired of having to play the role of being black. I just want to go to school. And I think we -- at some point we're going to be fatigued with everybody being a victim.

When I was a kid, there were tons of people who were in really bad circumstances. My grandfather would not let us wallow in that. And as you could tell throughout this book, he's my hero. He is the single greatest human being I have ever met. Nine months of education, but he never saw himself as a victim. He used to say he was a motherless child. He never knew his father. His mother died when he was seven or eight years old. Of course, they didn't have birth certificates then, so he never knew quite how old he was. And then he was raised by his grandmother, who was a freed slave. Then she dies and then he lives with an uncle who has 12 or 13 kids and who was a hard man. And yet he never complained.

And he always said -- he would have this saying "When you want to whine or something...you know, you have to play the hand you're dealt." This those days blacks played big Whigs a lot. You have to play the hand you're dealt. If you're dealt a bad hand, you still have to play it. When we whine about things -- if you look at the bust in my office, my wonderful wife had made for me when I went on the court, his favorite quote was "old man" can't "is dead, I helped bury him.

My mother (was a maid for) $10 a week, $5 more if you had car fare. My grandmother had been a maid. Cousin Bea was a maid. Cousin Doshier was a maid. All of them were maids. And they were the help. And yet they never ever complained. And life was hard. I mean, the things that we consider hard today -- I had some college students ask me a few years back how would I explain, you know, talk to them now that the economy had taken a down turn? And I said... how many of you don't have cell phones? Of course, they all had cell phones. How many of you don't have a computer? They all had computers. How many of you don't have a car? I think all but one had a car. I said, you're so far above the poverty line, and when I was in school, you were at the poverty line. You're making 90 cents an hour, you had no money, no shoes. You had like boots and things like that. And you didn't worry about it. Because virtually everybody was there. And so when the economy took a down turn, when you're on the floor, there isn't a whole lot further you can go.

I didn't have a radio. I didn't have a telephone. And they're complaining. And I certainly didn't have a car. But it wasn't a problem. Because you had your dreams. You had your energy. You had more than the people you grew up around.

I grew up around a world of total illiteracy. That's the beauty. I'm in the Library of Congress. Total illiteracy. But the thing they had was hope that the next generation would learn how to read. They knew how important it was for me.

We worked on the oil truck or on the farm. But if it had to do with the library, you could do it. So at night he would let me go to the Carnegie Library where I started going in the summer of 1955 for the noble reason that summer of '55, I was seven years old and we just moved into this little tenement on the east side, and on Saturday, they gave you cookies and juice. So I went for the very high-minded reason of getting cookies and juice. And when you live in these neighborhoods, cookies and juice are a real treat.

But it gave me this image of the library as this place to learn, and it became a haven. So I
walked in here. I said, look where I am! I come from a world of illiteracy, treasured learning, and I get to be in a place of learning with all the books and people who are literate. So that's a long way of saying I was very fortunate to grow up around people who saw beyond their circumstances and who refused to be limited by those circumstances or to wallow in the sort of victim status of their circumstances.

GREGORY MAGGS: Tell me more about your grandfather. He was a very strict man. Was he unfair?

CLARENCE THOMAS: Oh, God no, no, no. People ask sometimes about the nuns and my grandfather. Because in those days you had corporeal punishment. They said, did you get beatings? Yeah, but not as many as I deserved. And my grandfather, whenever he gave you one that he found out was unfair, that you didn't deserve at that time, he said, that's (for) what you got away with. And then you couldn't -- what do you say? Because you knew you got away with stuff. And every one of us knew... oh, boy, I'm glad he didn't get me on that one. But, no, my grandfather was a hard man but not a harsh man.

Life was hard. I mean, anybody in this room who grew up in that environment, that is a hard life. Where you have to figure out how you're going to put a meal on the table, where you -- there's a very fine line between the -- between you not being able to eat today and being able to eat. And the gratitude -- we always said grace before and after meal.. We're Catholic.

I loved the library...we take it for granted now because we have all these computers now and all that stuff, but just think of yourself coming from a house with no books and you get to walk into this world and have encyclopedia Americana, encyclopedia Britanica, it had Wagner and all sorts of fiction, you know, it had magazines Life, Time, all the newspapers. It was a smorgasbord every time you walked in. And you had the reference library and it would introduce you to new things. Then they introduce you to National Geographic, so you were all over the world. This is all in Savannah, Georgia. This is a world of segregation, so it gave you this window to everything else. It gave you a window beyond Georgia. And the nuns encouraged it, the librarians encouraged it...You have to cross in those days a lot of lines, but going to the library was worth doing then. Anyway, that's the library.

GREGORY MAGGS: Tell me more about your Catholic education. And your decision to go to seminary.

CLARENCE THOMAS: You know, I look back -- I used to ask Justice Scalia about that. He thought it was interesting we were so similar. He would say, Clarence...he said, my parents, my father was a romance literature professor, my mother was a teacher, so I know how I got here. How did you get here? And why are we at the same place? Why do we have the same set of beliefs? And I think the beauty of having gone to parochial schools was they taught us how to -- there was a right way to think about things, that we have to be honest with ourselves, honest about math, honest about physics, honest about chemistry, that you couldn't cheat when you did your Latin translations or German or French, because I had all those in high school. And so I was talking recently with someone and he said, it was your formation, that there was always a right way to do things. There was an honest way to do things.

And the progression is, I became Catholic when I went to the second grade in 1955, sister Rosa, a wonderful person. At any rate, I became an altar boy and the progression is you become an altar boy and if you progress as an altar boy you consider whether or not you have a vocation. In those days you went to a minor seminary. In 1964 I decided I thought I had a vocation, so I was 15 and then following year when I was 16 I went to seminary. The difficulty was, again, things hadn't been desegregated yet. So you were, again, crossing racial barriers, -- crossing racial barriers, so you had that challenge. Even that was not nearly as difficult as going to school in New England. No one -- there were a few jerks. We all have those. But beyond that, the school was excellent. The people were fair to me. It was very, very challenging academically. And also I got to -- I like to say I finished in the top ten of my high school class, but because there were only nine of us...(Laughter) You have to take these things when you get them.

GREGORY MAGGS: What about your decision to leave seminary?

CLARENCE THOMAS: That was 1968...The wheels were coming off the wagons in a lot of ways. And the little Catholic kid from the rather insular world of Savannah suddenly was reading and it was a long, hot -- Dr. King was assassinated and we became quite race conscious, which problematic sides and has good sides. And like a lot of us, went from being nice Catholic kid to the angry black kid. And that was 1968.

So then I returned home and was greeted with my grandfather, who told me that if I'm going to do that, then I need to find another place to live. So he kicked me out of the house and I was on my own.

I was 19 years old. May 1968.

...

I had been accepted to Holy Cross, so got on the train and went to Holy Cross. You can see the planning I did. I say to people, my whole life has been providential because I certainly didn't know what was going on.

GREGORY MAGGS: In your book, Justice, you talk about being a radical at Holy Cross, about being angry. Did you feel you were treated unfairly?


CLARENCE THOMAS: At Holy Cross? No, no, I was just mad at the world. It was 1968. I was angry. I really didn't need a logical reason to be angry. I was angry about things that happened in the past. I was angry about things that were going to happen in future. If you said "good morning" to me I was angry. If you didn't say "good morning," I was angry. And people sort of exploited that.

I remember going to Harvard Square in April of 19 -- April 15, 1970, and we were pretty upset. You know, I couldn't explain to myself why I just did that. All night we were rioting. And I got back home, got back to Holy Cross and that's when I made a promise to God that I would never -- that if he took anger out of my heart, I would never do that again. I would never let anger control my life.

...

I went to law school to return to Savannah. If you noticed, I never really worked at a law firm. I worked at a small firm in Savannah, Georgia, in the summer between second and third year of law school because I wanted to return to Savannah. For reasons that I'm not going to get into, that job did not live up to my expectations. Now I've got a wife -- today is my son's 45th birthday, so he was a little kid. And I had a wife and child and student loans. And now I need a job, because I'm not going back to the situation that I don't think is right in Savannah.

And I couldn't get a job in Savannah, Georgia. That's literally it. I couldn't get a job in Atlanta, Georgia. I couldn't get a job in Washington, D.C. I couldn't get a job in New York. And I couldn't get a job in LA. I struck out every place I could. So I wound up in Jefferson City, Missouri. And because they didn't give me a job in Atlanta is the reason I wound up on the court. So it's their fault. (Laughter) Otherwise I would be comfortably a tax lawyer or something.

...

GREGORY MAGGS: Talking about the work, I notice the Supreme Court statistics that for the last two years you have written about twice as many opinions as any of the other justices.

CLARENCE THOMAS: That's because I really don't talk, so I get to write a lot. (Laughter)

GREGORY MAGGS: Why so many opinions?

CLARENCE THOMAS: Who knows? Justice Scalia said I was solisistic. I said, I have no idea what that means, but I like the ring of it. So I think that means I like my own opinions. He said once, Clarence, you don't care for other people's opinions, do you? No, I do care, but I prefer my own. I don't know.

I think it is really important that when you vote for these things that you explain why, and that if it doesn't make sense -- my granddaddy -- I'm not going to use the words he used exactly, but he would say... "Boy, if it don't make no sense, it don't make no sense." He would spice it up a little bit. And, you know, things have to make sense to me. When you come from the lower levels of society, when you -- poverty, things have to make sense. My granddaddy, either you fed the hogs or you didn't feed the hogs. You greased the tractor or didn't grease the tractor. You either planted the corn or you didn't plant the corn. It was binary. It was clear. And I think when we do these cases, we owe it to our fellow citizens to explain in plain language what we are doing.

[Tails82]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7axLlxDBt9M

Keep your house clean so when an atom bomb hits it and you're all irradiated, you only have to put out a small fire!

[Tails82]

This is a selection from the notes to the film Roma

"If you were born in Mexico City in the second half of the twentieth century, you grew up feeling that everything could come tumbling down in a matter of minutes...You probably also grew into the feeling that maybe it should, indeed, all tumble down. You grew up knowing that, despite the tight grip of the seventy-plus-year rule of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and its production line of authoritarian statesmen and petty politicos, there was a fundamental unsistainability to it all: the student massacres, the legalized crime of seizing native land, the electoral frauds, the programs, and then the programs to make up for the programs that fucked up...the foreground mediocrity and corruption.

"in 1968, the regime of the PRI, which had governed the country since 1929, had committed a crime that would never be erased from the collective memory. As in other parts of the world then, the young had rebelled peacefully against the established order. Mexico was growing economically...but political participation and civil liberties remained severely restricted. I was a part of this rebellious youth, and I marched in the streets. On October 2, 1968, ten days before the opening of the Olympic Games, the government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-70) brutally suppressed a student rally in the old Hispanic square of Tlatelolco. The celebration of freedom was bathed in blood. Octavio Paz, Mexico's foremost poet, who would later win a Nobel prize in Literature, saw in this massacre an echo of the human sacrifices that were practiced in Aztec times on this very same site.

"Luis Echeverria, secretary of the interior under Ordaz, became the next president and "tried to disassociate himself from these events by a feigned attitude of openness toward criticism and democracy." One of his first acts was to free students who had been jailed, and students soon decided to put the new regime's sincerity to the test. June 10, 1971, Corpus Christi Thursday, the march took place.

"Suddenly, we spotted a group of young people armed with long canes (typical of what you'd find in the martial art kendo), who surged forward toward the peaceful march, striking and seizing students...'They are shouting 'Long Live Che Guevara.' They are walking right in front of us, carrying yellow sticks in one hand and stones in the other. They arrive in front of the anti-riot tanks that have been parked at the top of the road...and there they resume their shouts of 'Che Guevara' all while throwing stones at the windows of a store.'

"No one knows how many people died - possibly dozens - that afternoon at the hands of the Falcons, the band trained by Echeverria's government to suppress this resurgance of the student movement. Their tactics were crude enough: pretend to be students, shout slogans, infiltrate the demonstration to beat up the students, get them into private vehicles and camouflaged police cars, take them to some unknown destination, and eliminate them."

[Tails82]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-vi3vobBs

Have the Mountains Fallen? Two Journeys of Loss & Redemption in the Cold War

Two Kyrgyz men who whose lives were adversely affected and forever changed by the biggest tragedies of the 20th Century -- Chingiz Aitmatov and Azamat Altay. Two people whose lives reflect all the political and moral lessons of the century.

Chingiz Aitmatov, the most famous Kyrgyz writer, lost his father to Stalin's repressive regime in 1938 and only found where his father had been executed and buried 53 years after it occurred. Not only his father, a promising young Kyrgyz leader, but several of his uncles also fell victim to the soviet dictatorship. Aitmatov hid his deep inner sadness after losing his father at the age of nine and dedicated his life to educating himself and his three younger siblings. He became an internationally known whose books, which have been translated into more than 160 languages describe the national character, lifestyle, and existential philosophy of the nomadic Kyrgyz people. In every book Aitmatov created a hero who in whatever difficult circumstances he or she was forced to live would choose to live freely, happily, and fully.

The Kyrgyz author was a supporter of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and advised him on the implementation of the very first political reforms in the final years of the USSR. He was later appointed Soviet Ambassador to Luxembourg and then was Kyrgyzstan's Ambassador to the Benelux Countries spending the last 18 years of his life in Europe, mostly Brussels. Even after his death, Aitmatov's books and their heroes continued to introduce Kyrgyzstan as a beautiful mountainous country and its people rich character and values to the entire world.

Azamat Altay, a young and educated Kyrgyz man decided to stay in the west after World War II after realizing that he would be punished in the USSR since serving as a POW in a Nazi Camp. That decision cut him off from his homeland, from his father, and other relatives for 55 years. Eager to make a connection with his homeland, Altay made contacts with other Russian and Soviet dissidents living in Europe and attended several gatherings of Central Asian, and Soviet dissident, even writing articles for dissident publications. He was later appointed an editor of the (inaudible) magazine published by Central Asian dissidents in Europe. Through those connections Azamat Altay became radio for Europe, Radio Liberties very first Kyrgyz broadcaster in March 1953. It his work, Altay had to cover many taboo topics in Soviet Kyrgyzstan such as victims of Stalin's repression, young Kyrgyz writers, intellectuals, poets and politicians whose names let alone their works were forbidden in the Kyrgyz media at the time. Alta, and later his new Kyrgyz colleagues at RFE/RL covered issues regarding the Kyrgyz diaspora living in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Pakistan. RFE/RLs Kyrgyz service also paid a lot of attention in the early years to Kyrgyz language, customs, and history issues in the ever increasingly Russified Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Azamat Altay collected some 6,000 books and magazines on Kyrgyz and Central Asian topics at his home and had helped some prominent western academics to conduct their research on Kyrgyzstan behind the iron curtain. He reported for RFE/RL Kyrgyz service for some 40 years. Attacked regularly by the Soviet Kyrgyz media as a traitor and enemy of the people, Azamat Altay still had his secret supporters and admirers in Kyrgyzstan. Intellectuals, writers, and scholars would listen to RFE/RL Kyrgyz programs at their dachas often built atop hills with better reception and they would discuss Altay himself and RFE/RL Kyrgyz service programs among themselves. Some of the topics were related to the Soviet Communist Leadership and political corruption issues. That's why in 1995 when Altay, a retired veteran journalist and former RFE/RL Kyrgyz Service Director was finally invited to independent Kyrgyzstan and arrived in the Capital Bishkek, he was greeted as a national hero as a Kyrgyz American who had devoted his life to the struggle for his people's freedom and independence. For Kyrgyz language, culture, and history.

Chingiz Aitmatov and Azamat Altay were born in Kyrgyzstan but spend most of their lives on two different sides of the Cold War. Yet they were still able to meet several times during the Soviet Era and again later in independent Kyrgyzstan. They had some important common goals in life -- to find their lost fathers, to fight for their people's freedom, to preserve their national history, culture, and language and to find justice and freedom in ordinary people's lives.

...

"Have the Mountains Fallen?" is a story of the Cold War from the other side with roots in the 1920s and '30s when Soviet power was establishing itself across the Eurasian landmass.

It tells the parallel stories of Aitmatov and Altay, two men who travel separately though life until they meet and find common cause, in of all places New York City in 1975. Their life stories are testaments to the human spirit's quest for freedom...and that the search for a meaningful life is based on individual freedom.

Like so many other citizens at that time, Azamat Altay and Chingiz Aitmatov's father pictured here, believed in Soviet power which had brought literacy, electricity, hospitals and schools to the Kyrgyz people. They served it loyally until Stalin's terror started to wreak havoc across the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

The purges swept up Torekul Aitmatov in 1938. Train station, there's a vivid scene in the book where Chingiz Aitmatov says goodbye to his father and not even knowing that he'll never see him again on the train station in Moscow. Those purges made a disbeliever out of Azamat Altay and they shape Chingiz Aitmatov's life. World War II was a crucible for both Altay and Chingiz Aitmatov. They were eight years separated, the men. Altay was born in 1920. Chingiz Aitmatov was born in 1928. So by the time World War II happened in the Soviet Union, they were both young men. As a 14-year-old in a village bereft of men because they had all been called to the front, Chingiz Aitmatov delivered death notices to families whose fathers, sons, or uncles had died in the war.

Meanwhile Soviet conscript Altay was scrambling for his life after being overrun by the German Blitzkrieg in June 1941. He was serving in Soviet occupied Lithuania at that point. Altay escaped from Nazi POW camps not once, not twice, but three times. Eventually joining French Freedom Fighters on the march to liberate Paris. He dreamed of returning to his home village on Issyk-Kul, you saw that, but Soviet Leader Stalin's perverse logic considered Soviet POWs as traitors just because they had the misfortune to be captured alive. That meant prison camp in Siberia for someone like Altay, even though he had crisscrossed Europe fighting for his own survival and always opposing the Nazis. It was absurd.

Altay ended up making a decision which irrevocably change his life. After midnight on -- this is from the book -- After midnight on January 1st, 1946 Altay was serving as a Soviet border guard then -- as revelers and cities around Europe were raising their glasses to the end of World War II, Soviet border guard Azamat Altay tossed aside his rifle, threw off his military overcoat and stole across the boarder into the English zone of recently liberated Germany. Altay headed south from the English zone in Germany, he was determined to get to France, the only country that had welcomed him and where he had friends from his partisan days. Using a smattering of French, German, and Russian he begged a ticket off an elderly station worker at the Saarbrucken Train Station.

Lacking permission to cross the still-militarized German-French border, he stowed away, hiding in the first-class bathroom. Altay arrived in Paris, a free but penniless man, with not a French franc to his name. A passerby gave him two francs to ride on the subway. It was a bumble start to a new life, but with each mile he traveled on foot by train or subway -- he was leaving behind the tragedies of the past. In Europe after the war, Altay scrambled to make a living. He did manual labor in small towns in France. It was a lonely time with few friends among the rural French who had no idea where he came from.

Altay eventually educated himself anew, immersing himself in European philosophy in the struggle for independence of Soviet Central Asia. in 1953, as we saw in that wonderful film, he became the voice of Radio Liberty broadcasting back into Soviet Kyrgyzsia.

Meanwhile...So scarred by the disappearance of his father in 1937, Aitmatov was keeping his head down and as the eldest male in the family, nine years old, trying to help his family survive, he was considered the son of an enemy of the people, denied his scholarship, refused his stipend, and denied entrance into graduate school despite stellar grades. He took to writing instead...How Aitmatov did this under Soviet censorship is one of the most fascinating parts of this story. He contorted himself, hid behind the Kyrgyz language, which sensors didn't understand, and compromised where and when necessary.

fearful that Soviet spies would try to assassinate him for his radio work, Altay immigrated to the U.S. and he was one of the first Kyrgyz ever to do so. He settled in New York City as Kadyr knows, in Flushing Meadows, right? A melting pot of nationalities and Cold War intrigues. And he started a 20-year career working in the New York public libraries -- a New York public library and Columbia University Library. I think Altay would feel very at home at the Library of Congress...So far from home, cut off from his family and culture, Altay suffered immensely. He was a persona non grata having been declared a traitor after jumping lines and sentenced to 25 years in jail should he ever return to the Soviet Union. His name was blackened by propaganda campaigns in Soviet Kyrgyzia. His solace was music of his homeland. Lilting melodies played on the Kyrgyz three-string guitar, the komuz and Aitmatov's stories, which formed part of his collection of 5,000, 6,000 books on Central Asia in his personal library in Queens New York.

So about that meeting in 1975, in the 1970s when the two men's lives intersected for the first time. Now this is the Cold War. Alta is persona non grata in the Soviet Union. The KGB is alive and strong and here's a picture of these two men meeting in Altay's apartment in Queen's New York. So that's the American angle to the book. During a period of warming and U.S. Soviet relations in the 1970s when Space cooperation between the countries started and cultural exchanges took place, we all call that detente, we called it detente. Aitmatov got invited to the U.S. for the performance of a play he had written about Stalinism and the scars it had left on the Kyrgyz people. As a big fan of Aitmatov's works, Altay played an instrumental role in Aitmatov getting invited by the U.S. State Department. He was very helpful in getting the visa. The two men met in Aitmatov's New York hotel room on the very day that Soviet and American astronauts shook hands in space during the Apollo-Soyuz hookup.

The impromptu gathering of Kyrgyz in New York, though unpublicized had as much significance for the Kyrgyz people as did the Apollo-Soyuz handshake, maybe even more. It represented a coming together of the disparate parts of the Kyrgyz elite. Two leading cultural lights of Soviet Kyrgyzia in the same room with the founding voice of the Kyrgyz service of American's Radio Liberty. A Kyrgyz Hall of Fame, if you will. What unified then was blood, and the simple joy of connection that stood as an affirmation that the Kyrgyz people were living, existing, and staying together, even across ideological divides that seemed insurmountable to so many -- the day's events not withstanding. In 1979, Altay returned to Radio Liberty in Munich and headed the Kyrgyz service. He arrived in time to chronicle the demise of his archenemy the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Union stumbled into Afghanistan in the 1980s, Aitmatov's pros got stronger. Aitmatov was widely published in the USSR and around the world in 160 languages. But his public statements often sang the praises of the Soviet system. That was the price of Aitmatov's inner freedom to write his mind, to write his conscience. Freedom inside had to be purchased with compromise from the outside.

With the advent of perestroika the two men, Azamat Altay and Chingiz Aitmatov met more frequently with Aitmatov brushing aside the increasingly (powerless) KGB. Aitmatov was appointed a member of Gorbachev's reform team and spoke openly about failures of the Soviet system during perestroika and the importance of restoring the place of language, history, and culture for the Kyrgyz and other constituent Republics of the USSR.

This photo, likely from 1989 shows a relaxed gathering in Munich, Kyrgyz style, with Aitmatov, the honored guest getting the head of the lamb. Altay, the oldest at the table is seated to Aitmatov's left. But one meeting in particular symbolized the new era. A time of hope and ultimately redemption . Aitmatov was in Munich presenting his latest book. Unbeknownst to him, Altay and other Kyrgyz working at Radio Liberty were in the audience. The KGB in an effort to avoid a meeting between the two men hustled Aitmatov and his wife Maria out of the hall and into a waiting car. A James Bond like car chase ensued. So this is from the book. When the car carrying the Aimatov's arrived at their hotel a white van pulled up right behind. Outstepped Azamat Altay with several Kyrgyz adults and children. The wary KGB agent rushed to block their approach but Aitmatov halted them. "These are my people. Let me speak with them." He said.

And with his command to the two KGB officers fear and silence engrained in the Kyrgyz people for decades and carried by Aitmatov himself started to recede. It was as if Aitmatov were saying it was time to learn how to live in a normal society. No more keeping silent, no more fear, and no more tragedies. Yes, the fatherless Aitmatov seemed to be saying, "Let the next generation of Kyrgyz grow up with their fathers and let the KGB learn another way to carry out its work. So this is a fun picture. Altay returned to Kyrgyzstan in 1995 after a 55-year absence. His criminal sentence was abolished and he was greeted like a hero in independent Kyrgyzstan. When he stepped off the plane onto the tarmac he kissed the ground. There to meet him was Chingiz Aitmatov.

So what are the lessons from their lives? The individual accounts. Freedom of thought, speech, and religion are the foundations of a democratic society. And take nothing for granted. Nothing is guaranteed. Dedicate yourself to what you believe in, structure your life to achieve it, base decisions upon it and yes, be ready to make compromises to achieve the larger goal, and in the case of Azamat Altay, be ready to lose precious things along the way. "The moral arc of history bends towards justice." Martin Luther King said. Both men, Azamat Altay and Chingiz Aitmatov found justice in their lifetimes and that's the redemption in the title.

Altay himself after decades of looking found his father, Torekul Aitmatov was at the bottom of a grave with 137 other skeletons piled on top, all victims of Stalin's purges. Dry conditions in the mass grave, which had been a brick kiln, had preserved the written order sentencing Torekul Aitmatov, his father, Chingiz's, to death. The excavation of the mass grave captivated Soviet Kyrgyzia during the Summer of 1991. And I'm going to show you a little bit of a video here.

So this is a video that was taken by the people who were excavating the grave and pulling out these skulls, 137. Pulling out personal objects that were preserved in the climate, this warm climate. These are shoes...Here are other artifacts. This all happened in July of 1991, six months before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So here you can see in his kalpak the worker is digging. And here they're pulling out the letters. These are the sentencing documents that preserved that had the names of the people who were executed and then they were able to match the bodies to the people and they were able to tell relatives who had waited 53 years that they had found the remains of their fathers, brothers, husbands. So that gives you a sense. Aitmatov himself gave voice to the miracle -- so this is from the book -- this is a quote e from Chingiz Aitmatov -- "Everything disappeared, disintegrated, the bodies of the unfortunate people, their shoes, clothes," Aitmatov would say a few weeks later, "except this paper, this document from that era, with the name of Torekul Aitmatov, which remained intact enough to read." Dry conditions had preserved the documents, but the Aitmatov family know that something else was at work in solving the gruesome mystery. And so did many other Kyrgyz. "There is in the world some higher justice. "There is in the world some higher justice, timeless, and absolute." Aitmatov said, "something maybe beyond our everyday existence." Loss, redemption, and hope, a true story of the Cold War from Central Asia.

[Tails82]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ycdVRPcCFY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3M5LwOCAQ0

John Cena does presentations for kids surprisingly well

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY82gTvIQtg

and if I'm bringing up Cena, psh, of course I'm gonna bring up RL STINE BABY! YEAH!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlx1Z8zzSMs

Required viewing