Thursday, March 15, 2018

Remembering Professor David Wyman, by Rafael Medoff


The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

News Release:  March 15, 2018

For more information, contact:
info@wymaninstitute.org / 301-593-8429



PROF. DAVID S. WYMAN, AUTHOR OF GROUNDBREAKING STUDY OF
AMERICA’S RESPONSE TO THE HOLOCAUST, PASSES AWAY AT 89


Professor David S. Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews, the groundbreaking and definitive study of America’s response to the Holocaust, passed away on March 14, in his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, after a lengthy illness. He was 89.
A private memorial ceremony will be held by his family. A public event commemorating Prof. Wyman’s life and legacy will be held by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in New York City, at a date to be announced.

Dr. Rafael Medoff, founding director of the Wyman Institute, said: “David was a brilliant scholar, a gifted speaker, an exceptional teacher, and a devoted friend. But above all, he was a person of extraordinarily fine character—a true ‘mensch’.”

Prof. Deborah Lipstadt once wrote: "I am convinced that had there been more Christians like David Wyman in the 1930s and 1940s, the history of this period would have been very different. He strikes me as one of the tzadikei umot ha'olam [righteous of the nations]."

Dr. Medoff added: “It is testimony to David’s greatness that the achievement of which he was proudest was not any of the numerous awards he received for his pioneering scholarship, or the many laudatory reviews of his books, but the fact that The Abandonment of the Jews contributed directly to the rescue of more than 800 Ethiopian Jewish refugees.”

The refugees were left stranded and starving along the Ethiopian-Sudanese border in early 1985, when an Israeli airlift operation was interrupted. Jewish activists, together with Congressman John Miller, gave copies of The Abandonment of the Jews to Vice President George H.W. Bush and his aides, pleading with them to “do now what we didn't do then." As a result, the U.S. sent a fleet of C-130 Hercules transport planes to rescue the refugees and bring them to Israel.

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, a research and education institute based in Washington, D.C. and chaired by the noted businessman and philanthropist Sigmund A. Rolat, was established by Prof. Wyman's colleagues in 2003.

* * *

David S. Wyman, the grandson of two Protestant ministers, was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1929, and raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in history, and from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in history. 

From 1966 until his retirement in 1991, Prof. Wyman taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was the Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. Professor of History and twice served as chairman of the Judaic studies program. DuBois was a Treasury Department official who, in 1943, played a key role in exposing the State Department’s sabotage of opportunities to rescue Jews from the Nazis. When the university honored Prof. Wyman by allowing him to select the name of his professorship, he chose Josiah DuBois.

Prof. Wyman’s first book was the critically-acclaimed Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1968). He spent the next fifteen years researching and writing the sequel, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 (Pantheon, 1984). 

Prof. Wyman often spoke about how difficult it was for him, as a Christian, to be confronted with the evidence of the meager response by American Christians to news of the Holocaust; sometimes he “cried for days” and had to take a break from his research. As he explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education, he "had been brought up wth the belief that at the heart of Christianity is the precept that, when people need help, you should provide it."  

Prior to the publication of The Abandonment of the Jews, the widespread assumption among the American public was that there was little or nothing the Roosevelt administration could have done to save Jews from the Holocaust. Prof. Wyman’s meticulous research demonstrated that there were, in fact, many ways the U.S. could have aided European Jewish refugees, without interfering with the war effort or undermining America’s immigration laws. He documented how President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his State Department suppressed news about the Holocaust and ignored opportunities to rescue refugees.
The Abandonment of the Jews quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list, and reviewers were nearly unanimous in their acclaim. "We will not see a better book on this subject in our lifetime," Prof. Leonard Dinnerstein concluded. Prof. Hasia Diner wrote that Abandonment "systematically demolishes often repeated excuses for inaction.” Thirty-four years later, The Abandonment of the Jews is still the gold standard in its field.

The Abandonment of the Jews won the Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Saloutos Award of the Immigration History Society, the Ansfield-Wolf Award, and the National Jewish Book Award, among other accolades. It went through seven hardcover printings and multiple paperback editions, as well as editions in German, French, Hebrew, and Polish, selling a total of more than 150,000 copies worldwide.  

The book attracted considerable interest on Capitol Hill, as well. Twice in 1985, Prof. Wyman was invited to address groups of members of Congress. U.S. Senator Paul Simon (D-Illinois) devoted an installment of his weekly syndicated column to The Abandonment of the Jews, which he characterized as "one of the most powerful books I have ever read."  

During the decade following the book’s publication, Prof. Wyman was a featured guest on numerous major radio and television shows, including Nightline with Ted Koppel, the Today Show with Jane Pauley, and the Larry King Show. He delivered more than 400 lectures to synagogues, churches, civic organizations, and educational institutions, and even those represented only the fraction of the invitations that his teaching load enabled him to accept. In his lectures, Prof. Wyman often would unfurl, accordion-like, the four foot-long government form that a would-be immigrant was required to fill out in order to be considered for a visa to enter the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. 
Prof. Wyman was deeply proud that his book not only educated Americans about their country’s response to the Holocaust, but helped ensure that another persecuted Jewish community would not be abandoned. The role that The Abandonment of the Jews played in the 1985 U.S. airlift of more than 800 Ethiopian Jews was widely acknowledged in the news media at the time. Wolf Blitzer, who was the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, wrote: "Today's direct and very active cooperation by the U.S. government in helping to rescue Ethiopian Jews is in marked contrast to the documented abandonment of European Jewish refugees before and during World War II ... [which has been] well-documented in David S. Wyman's recently published book, The Abandonment of the Jews.”

Vice President Bush subsequently sent Prof. Wyman a handwritten note of thanks for inspiring the rescue mission. The note is proudly displayed in the Wyman family home in Massachusetts.

During a visit to Israel in 1988, Prof. Wyman's hosts took him to an orphanage to meet some of the children who had been rescued in the airlift; he described it as one of the most moving experiences in his life. In 2008, Prof. Wyman visited an Israeli air force base, together with Dr. Rebecca Kook, Astra Temko, and Nili Kook, the daughters and widow, respectively, of Holocaust rescue activist Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson). There they met Major-General Amir Eshel, who was involved in the 1985 airlift operation, and Moshe Gadaf and Ami Farradah, who, as eight year-olds, were among the Ethiopian Jewish children who were rescued. The poignant ‘reunion’ of the former child refugees, the Israeli general who helped save them, and the American historian whose book made the rescue possible, was truly unforgettable.

Prof. Wyman was also the coauthor, with Rafael Medoff, of A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (The New Press, 2000); editor of America and the Holocaust (thirteen volumes of the documents used in The Abandonment of the Jews, published by Garland in 1990); and editor of The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Most recently, he contributed a chapter to Dr. Medoff’s 2018 book, Too Little and Almost Too Late: The War Refugee Board and America’s Response to the Holocaust.

Prof. Wyman’s wife, Midge, who assisted him in his scholarly work, passed away in 2003. The Wyman Institute joins with their children, Teresa and Jim, and the other members of their family, in mourning his passing.




Thursday, February 08, 2018

Newseum Panel Details Silicon Valley Censorship


A fascinating video with Jim Hoft, Pamela Geller, Michelle Malkin, James O'Keefe and others, detailing the current censorship problem:



Friday, January 19, 2018

Jack Dorsey and Twitter Why Are You Harrassing Me?

I received this unsolicited email from Twitter today—and took it as malicious:
  
  
Twitter
  
Dear Laurence Jarvik, 
  
As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency. 
  
Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period. This is purely for your own information purposes, and is not related to a security concern for your account. 
  
We are sharing this information so that you can learn more about these accounts and the nature of the Russian propaganda effort. You can see examples of content from these suspended accounts on our blog if you're interested. 
  
People look to Twitter for useful, timely, and appropriate information. We are taking active steps to stop malicious accounts and Tweets from spreading, and we are determined to keep ahead of the tactics of bad actors. For example, in recent months we have developed new techniques to identify accounts manipulating our platform, have improved our process for challenging suspicious accounts, and have introduced new measures designed to identify and take action on coordinated malicious activity. In 2018, we are building on these improvements. Our blog also contains more information about these efforts. 
  
People come to Twitter to see what's happening in the world. We are committed to making it the best place to do that and to being transparent with the people who use and trust our platform. 
  
Twitter 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

More:

Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore)
In late Friday (EST) announcement, Twitter says it has now identified a total of 50,258 Russian-linked automated accounts -- and notified 677,775 people exposed to Russian propaganda. blog.twitter.com/official/en_us…

Thursday, November 30, 2017

GOP Saves the NEH -- to Attack America

Today's Washington Times ran an op-ed by Professor Allen C. Guelzo  urging the GOP to save the National Endowment for the Humanities, despite the agency's proven track record of enabling anti-American "scholarship" over the years. I was so outraged that I commented on their website:

Absurd self-serving piffle from a self-interested beneficiary of a corrupt system. Thanks to the work of NEH councils ("Soviet" is the Russian word for council, Professor) people in the USA respect our history so much they are now tearing down historical monuments, banning the Confederate battle flag, removing George Washington's plaque from his church, and kneeling for the Star Spangled Banner. "Heck of a job, Guelzo," as Pres. George W. Bush might have said. Somehow before the crypto-Communists and fellow travelers of the NEH took over, Americans respected our history, honored our flag, and learned patriotism instead of anti-Americanism in schools. I think the Princeton History Department worked pretty well teaching history prior to 1965, something Professor Guelzo apparently doesn't know--another indictment of the baneful influence of this corrupt and corrupting Great Society program.

This is the second pro-Endowment lobbying item I've seen the supposedly Conservative/Republican Washington Times, the first being a pro-National Endowment for the Arts oped by Governor Mike Huckabee, father of President Trump's spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders!

With GOP outlets running commentary like this, one wonders how President Trump will be able to make any serious changes in Washington. Eliminating the NEA and NEH are not only no-brainers--they would deprive the left of cash used to pay anti-GOP--and anti-American--operatives.

Hello, Republicans! How about taking your assailants off your payroll, for starters?

Sunday, October 08, 2017

Filmstruck Now Streaming "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?"

Glad to see that Filmstruck is now streaming my 1981 documentary, Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? with a nice introduction by Columbia University Professor Annette Insdorf...click here to watch: https://www.filmstruck.com/us/watch/detail/1300010061.

Thursday, October 05, 2017

Pamela Geller's CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS?



Pamela Geller's new documentary, CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? THE ISLAMIC JIHAD AGAINST FREE SPEECH couldn't come at a more appropriate moment, as Americans are experiencing the silencing not only of dissent on college campuses, but also the decline of the "public's right to know"as evidenced by the scarcity of public information about the recent massacre in Las Vegas. 

Instead of talking about the attack, its targets, the possible motivations of the gunman, or the glee with which ISIS and leftists have greeted the bloody deed, the media and political leadership have focused laser-like on the issue of gun-control...which, if this were a terrorist attack, would be supremely irrelevant as terrorists have used every weapon imaginable: guns, bombs, cars, trucks, knives, acid, and sabotage. And they have used these weapons to terrorize Western societies precisely in order to prevent discussion of...Islamic terror!

Geller's superb documentary shows how the inability to talk about Islamic terror since 9/11 has guaranteed defeat in the "war of ideas" currently taking place between the West and the Islamic world. For while Islamic terrorists spread their ideas with "propaganda of the deed," the West doesn't talk about its own ideas in response. It is a form of unilateral intellectual disarmament in a global ideological struggle...

In fact, as the film shows, Western authorities attempt to suppress Western ideas in the face of a Leftist-Islamic alliance against them, attacking critics of Islamic terror like Geller and her all-star cast of witnesses: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Douglas Murray, Ezra Levant, Lars Vilks, Robert Spencer, Garland Muhammad cartoon contest winner Bosch Fawstin, and Geller herself.

This is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Establishment's response to Communism following the Kennedy assassination. Until JFK's murder in Dallas by Communist assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, American media, colleges, schools, and publications were free to discuss Communist aggression against the West. Afterwards, supposedly Cold-War liberals changed sides, and mention of Communism became taboo in respectable society. Those who worried about the "Red Menace" were mocked, ostracized, and shunned...portrayed as crazy, paranoid, delusional believers in "Reds under the bed" or advocates of "McCarthyism."

Until Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States and defeated the Soviet Union, the collapse of which opened Russian archives that revealed the Comintern had indeed been active to promote worldwide Revolution, the Rosenbergs had been spies, Alger Hiss had been a Russian Agent, and that the USSR had been active in Vietnam and Central America...just as the "crazy" anti-Communists had charged. 

Reagan had succeeded because he refused to adopt the Establishment consensus and avoid the issue of Communism. Rather he called the USSR an "Evil Empire" and confronted it head-on.

Yet, after the fall of Communism, a messianic age of peace and love and understanding did not arrive, despite Clinton administration promotion promotion of Francis Fukuyama's fatuous "The End of History." Rather, what took place was what Fukuyama's teacher, Samuel Huntington, described in his own book, "The Clash of Civilizations." Instead of a "unipolar world," ancient tensions that had been subsumed under the East-West conflict once again bubbled to the surface--a "return of the repressed."

Chief among these was the rise of Islam as a competitive and adversarial ideology opposed to bourgeoise Western democracy, most dramatically in the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001. As damaging as the Kennedy assassination had been to the US, apparently nothing had been learned. Once again, ideological underpinnings were willfully ignored. Just as it had become a career-ender to call someone a Communist in the latter half of the 20th Century, it became a career-ender to call someone an Islamist in the first half of the 21st.

And just as in the Post-Vietnam era, the West began to lose its mojo. Afghanistan and Iraq became costly, futile quagmires instead of quick, decisive victories. Americans saw the social fabric fray under domestic attacks reminiscent of the 1960s.

All this is either discussed or implied in Geller's brilliant film. The West defeated Communism only when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan allied to directly confront it ideologically as well as military and economically.

The takeaway from CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? is perfectly clear: Until Americans are free to confront Islamic terror directly, it cannot be defeated. To silence criticism of Islam is to surrender to the enemies of America and Western Civilization.

The next step to Making America Great Again is to talk openly about Islam. And the best way to do that, in my opinion, would be for President Trump to broadcast CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT THIS? on Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and PBS--just as President Reagan sponsored the broadcast of LET POLAND BE POLAND, a film that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Evil Empire.

Broadcasting Pamela Geller's film on US-Government sponsored channels as soon as possible would be a signal to the world that the Islamic fundamentalists and their supporters no longer had America running scared.








Friday, September 15, 2017

Milo Announces Berkeley Free Speech Week Speakers

Sept. 24: “Feminism Awareness Day”
  • Miss Elaine
  • Lucian Wintrich
  • Lisa DePasquale
  • Chadwick Moore
  • Milo Yiannopoulos
Sept. 25: “Zuck 2020”
  • Heather Mac Donald
  • Monica Crowley
  • SABO
  • Professor Jordan Peterson
  • James Damore
Sept. 26: “Islamic Peace and Tolerance Day”
  • Michael Malice
  • Raheem Kassam
  • Katie Hopkins
  • Erik Prince
  • Pamela Geller
  • David Horowitz
  • Milo Yiannopoulos
Sept. 27: “Mario Savio is Dead”
  • Mike Cernovich
  • Charles Murray
  • Ariana Rowlands
  • Stelion Onufrei
  • Alex Marlow
  • Milo Yiannopoulos
  • Steve Bannon
  • Ann Coulter

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

The Political Limitations of the Private Sector

 Kenneth Frazier, CEO, Merck; Brian Krzanich, CEO, Intel; Kevin Plank, CEO, Under Armour
resigned from Pres. Trump's Manufacturing Council in protest.


Recent news reports about Silicon Valley mega-corporations such as Pay Pal, Google, Facebook and Twitter banning conservatives from their services should give pause to GOP "thought leaders" who have argued that privatization is a panacea.


In fact, in the Trump Era, the time has come for a change of course by those fighting Political Correctness, to recognize that "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people" cannot be permitted to fall under the control of one political party indefinitely--and that GOP policies which enabled Democratic hegemony over the "permanent government" may have contributed to the current crisis of legitimacy.


If 50% of the population is not represented in the government workforce, then it cannot be said to be a representative government. Indeed, it is by definition unrepresentative--no matter that the elected officials sitting on top of the pyramid may differ. When Democratic Party civil servants openly announce their intention to "resist," then a constitutional crisis is inevitable.


Quite simply, no country can afford to have a political party which has been defeated at the ballot box in a position to determine the allocation of government goods and services to its opponents. It is not only undemocratic, it is a recipe for political corruption, chaos and abuses of the highest order.


However, in order to effectively combat this dangerous situation, the GOP must abandon its fetishistic commitment to "privatization" as the sole tool in their toolkit to deal with government issues.


It is quite clear that the Democratic party has corrupted a willing private sector to the point where American businesses now are more than happy to sacrifice markets, customers, and profits for Political Correctness--whether Merck, Intel, UnderArmour, Target, Apple, Google, Facebook, or Camping World, or dozens of others. 


This represents a fundamental and problematic change in prior business norms.


In the recent past--I taught in a business school for some 15 years--it was axiomatic that businesses should steer clear of politics to the maximum extent possible.


While individual business people were free to be political in their private lives, companies should try avoid political controversy--on the understanding that large numbers of customers disagreed about politics, so why risk losing sales?


However, this prior consensus obviously no longer applies.


Today, companies seemingly go out of their way to adopt controversial positions which alienate and even insult considerable segments of their customer base, with ostentatious "grandstanding" such as Merck's resignation from the President's Manufacturing Council, or Apple's $1 million donation to the SPLC. 


One should note that Steve Jobs did not believe in making any charitable donations, so Tim Cook's action is in direct contradiction to the business legacy of the company's founder, which I discussed in Corporate Social Responsibility and Its Discontents: Contradictions in ISO 26000: 2010 (August 15, 2014).

 1.   Steve Jobs & Apple—an anti-­‐CSR CEO of an anti-­‐CSR company. 

Walter Isaacson’s magisterial biography of Steve Jobs (2011) does not contain a single entry in the index under “Charity,” “CSR,” “Corporate Social Responsibility,” “Social,” or “Responsibility.” This is not surprising. Jobs did not believe in spending company money on charity. He was so Scrooge-­like that he did not pay dividends to stockholders. Job’s control-­freak style of management at Apple, and what Isaacson characterizes as his “nasty” and “mean” personality, enabled him take the company from one-­twentieth the value of Microsoft in 2000, to parity in 2010, to being worth 70% more than Microsoft in 2011—a year in which Mac’s market share grew by 28% as Microsoft’s shrank 1%. Yet no one can deny that Apple products have in fact added value to society.

Their user-­friendly, easy-­to-­use, and simple design made computing accessible to a wide range of people alienated by Microsoft’s difficult interface…and helped move computing from the corporate office to the individual home and pocket. This, in turn revived an endangered American electronics industry through the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook computers. Indeed, Isaacson called Jobs “the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now." 

One reason for Jobs’ success at Apple, is that rather than diverting attention and resources to CSR initiatives, Apple remained focused on its core business, and in Jobs’ own words, put “humanity into innovation.” Isaacson concluded Jobs’ focus was “to a create a company to last, not just to make money.” 

In putting his company first—above employees, customers, or society—Jobs exemplified [Milton] Friedman’s theory of the responsibility of the business executive. Did it lead to a successful business? Yes.

In other words, as Steve Jobs knew but Tim Cook does not, the proper business of business...is business.


That said, it would be remarkable if one could rely upon business to counter a determined political movement, especially as many of America's CEOs currently seem to follow the Chinese model, with the Democratic Party as the Communist Party, as explained in Bruce Dickson's Wealth into Power: The Communist Party's Embrace of China's Private Sector.


This would indicate that the traditional model that the GOP represents the private sector while the Democratic Party the public sector is in need of revision.


Indeed, with the government sector (federal, state & local) accounting for more than half of all jobs in the USA--more if one includes contracts and grants--the time has come for the Trump Administration to force pushback in the public sector.


Quite simply, the principle of representation and diversity must be expanded to promote inclusion of Republicans and Independents on the public payroll in proportion to the American population. What would that mean?


It would mean that the government workforce profile should be adjusted through goals, timetables and affirmative action programs to match Gallup survey results on political affiliation of the American public, the latest presented below:


In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?








RepublicansIndependentsDemocrats
%%%
2017 Aug 2-6284128


Some things to note: (1) survey results do not match Congressional or Senate ratios, due to the systematic exclusion of independents from the political process; (2) Independents are the largest political group in the United States; (3) Pres. Trump owes his victory to Independents, many of them former Democrats; (4) the GOP does not have sufficient public support to govern without Independents--however, for the past 16 years they have been in a coalition with the Democrats instead, marginalizing the largest voting block in the country.


The explanation for this is probably simple greed. Making deals with Democrats--political opposites--allows for a roughly 50-50 split of the spoils, and permits a "coalition of the extremes against the middle" with a maximum return of investment. Were the GOP to ally with the middle-class ordinary American Independents, they would be a minority partner in the business.


This dynamic may explain establishment GOP politicians like Cong. Ryan's and Sen. McConnell's strange support for Antifa and other Democratic interests. One can assume that Pres. Trump is aware of his middle-class backing, but to share the wealth with Trump supporters, the GOP would have to become a junior partner to the more numerous Americans who support the President.


In other words, two minority parties--Democrats and the GOP--can rule over a larger population of Independents simply by horse-trading with one another and ignoring the excluded middle-class.


This could be countered by President Trump, if he manages to reduce popular support for both the establishment GOP and Democrats by 5% each in the next few years.


Such a strategy could call for running a large number of 3rd-party candidates in selected liberal districts, as well as primarying "Never Trumpers" in GOP strongholds. The goal would be to either bring the Independents into the GOP as "Trump Republicans" (like "Reagan Democrats"), making the party more representative, or laying the groundwork for a Third Party such as the one which replaced the Whigs, or Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party.


At a minimum, this means that the current GOP marriage to the private sector--especially now openly hostile corporate CEOs--must be dissolved and replaced with a marriage with the broad majority of American people, a marriage which would include government jobs as part of the pre-nup...something Pres. Trump could probably negotiate.







Monday, August 07, 2017

Two, Three, Many Galileos...

Aug. 10, 2017 UPDATE: James Damore was indeed fired by the Google Inquisition, subsequent to publication of this post on August 7th:

  I could recount what I have seen and heard in other Countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their lernedmen, for that honor I had, and bin counted happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic freedom, as they suppos'd England was, while themselvs did nothing but bemoan the servil condition into which lerning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had dampt the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had bin there writt'n now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisnerto the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought. And though I knew that England then was groaning loudest under the Prelaticall yoakneverthelesse I took it as a pledge of future happines, that other Nations were so perswaded of her liberty. 
                                                            --Milton, Areopagitica (1644)
Recently, I saw a production of James Reston, Jr.'s play Galileo's Torch at late Maestro Lorin Maazel's Castleton Theatre, directed by Maazel's widow, Dietelinde. 

In writing his earlier biography of the Italian astronomer and physicist persecuted by the Inquisition, Reston had discovered actual Vatican Library transcripts of Galileo's interrogation by the Grand Inquisitor. These documents were so powerful that the playwright, son of the namesake New York Times columnist and Washington Bureau Chief, felt compelled to dramatize the confrontation between reason and faith on stage.  

Reston's play has been performed sporadically since its premiere in 2014, and although not quite Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo, it offers much food for thought today, as Political Correctness has come to dominate so much of contemporary institutional discourse in the arts, humanities, and sciences.  A new Inquisition can be found among diversity and compliance officers ready to sanction the slightest offense against the Catechism of Diversity, which has come to dominate, destroy, and suppress free inquiry much as the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which also was central to Brecht's 1943 play.  

This is the dilemma at the heart of both dramas: What happens when a person makes a discovery that undermines the established order? 

Does he persist, confront authority, and possibly perish...or does he recant, apologize, and survive?  

Reston's play brought to mind some contemporary high-profile heresy cases, where to be fair the issue was losing a job rather than losing a life, but still shocking--such as the firing of Lawrence Summers from his post as Harvard University President, for saying that women have lower math scores than men; the ousting of Nobel-prize winning scientist Tim Hunt, for making a joke about women in the lab (he had married one); the forced resignation of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, after he was outed for opposition to same-sex marriage, among others. Not to mention violent riots on American campuses when outspoken outsiders like Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, or Milo Yiannopolous attempt to speak.

Reston's play seemed old-fashioned in its commitment to the rights of the truth-teller, rather than the duties of the Inquisitor.

Life imitating art came the case of James Damore, a Google employee who sent out an anonymous memo--headlined "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" and known as #GoogleManifesto among opponents, or #googlememo among defenders--questioning the rationale for diversity hires in the high-tech company, arguing that group sex differences in engineering aptitude were primarily due to biology and so impervious to social remediation. The resulting firestorm was immediate.

Damore was denounced by the company's Diversity and Compliance officer, he was outed although he wished to remain anonymous (itself damning evidence of a climate of fear within the company), and online commenters inside and outside the company not only called for firing, but also for physical violence to be perpetrated against him.

It turned out that the author of the Google Memo is a scientist who knows a great deal about biology, because studied for a Ph.D. at Harvard University and has published scientific research papers in his field. By any normal standard, that alone would entitle his stated position to respectful consideration and discussion--especially in a company of scientists and engineers, dedicated to "Search," where the company motto still is "Don't Be Evil."

Instead, the response has been positively medieval. Google VP Danielle Brown officially condemned Damore's expression of his views, in a memo quoting another Google VP, Ari Balogh. The statement essentially declares company policy to be Holy Writ not subject to doubt or refutation (by definition an unscientific position under Karl Popper's "falsifiability" hypothesis, as stated in Science and Falsification): 

Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, “Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. ‘Nuff said.”

Thus, an official statement of Google puts the issue of Diversity beyond the scope of scientific inquiry--which makes it into religious dogma, in a philosophical sense. So has a company founded by skeptical scientists and engineers, heirs to Galileo, been converted into a Church of Political Correctness by a corporate commitment to unscientific concepts such as "Diversity and inclusion."

Whether James Damore will eventually lose his job and fall victim to Danielle Brown's Google Inquisition has yet to be determined. But it is obvious from the Google Memo affair that today's corporate management is no less evil than the Grand Inquisitor was in the time of Galileo, suppressing scientific truth to preserve religious dogma...for, as Brecht and Reston show, the Catholic Church, like Google management, also thought God was on their side.

































Friday, July 28, 2017

Nice Review of THE TRUMP EFFECT: DEPROGRAMMING THE AMERICAN MIND in Frontpagemag.com...

Just had to share this review with my readers...

MARK TAPSON, FrontpageMag.com, July 28, 2017

Six months into the Trump presidency, it seems safe to say that America has never had a political experience like the one he has brought to the White House. He has sparked a stark raving mad #resistance from the left that makes Bush Derangement Syndrome look fair and balanced. The news media hang on his every tweet. Hollywood is practically self-combusting in panic and disbelief. Climate change Cassandras are melting down. Illegal aliens are feeling the heat as well. He has even thrown his own party into turmoil. All of this hysterical disarray has resulted from the impact not of a movement or a Party, but of one man, Donald Trump.
Now a new documentary offers some thoughtful commentary on President Trump’s agitating arrival on the political scene. Produced, directed and edited by Agustin Blazquez, The Trump Effect: Deprogramming the American Mind features author and filmmaker Laurence Jarvik musing upon the rise of Trump and how this iconoclastic President is changing the way Americans think about ourselves and the world. Over the course of an hour of discussion, Jarvik’s primary thesis is that Trump is dismantling the politically correct ideology that has dominated American political discourse since 9/11, which will lead the way to a newfound freedom and unification of a country on its way to becoming great again....

Saturday, July 22, 2017

I'm interviewed in Agustin Blazquez's new unauthorized feature documentary about President Donald J. Trump...


Watch THE TRUMP EFFECT: Deprogramming the American Mind, A Film by Agustin Blazquez on YouTube. Click here for full movie: https://youtu.be/FmhfRi5j8aA.