I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
GUNTER GRASS, WAFFEN SS MAN. Interesting, indeed, given his position in Germany, and as one of those who might be said to have participated in mediating for other Germans what being a Nazi meant, and what German guilt was and was not thought to be.
But I can't say that I'm impressed by his coming forward now, in the year 2006, at the age of 78, to finally confess.
His whole life as a writer has been a lie.
About being in the Waffen SS.
Not a small thing.
Not something to be redeemed by finally coming forward. Now. In 2006. At the age of 78.
He feels guilty?
Good. But not good enough.
And explain this to me:
Its members initially volunteered, but after 1944, as Germany's military strength was weakening, members were drafted at random from the male population. Grass, who had volunteered for the submarine forces at the age of 15 to "get away from the family" but had been rejected, was recruited into the SS in the winter of 1944-45.
Asked when he had first realised that he was in the SS, Grass replied: "I'm not sure how it was. Did the draft order give it away, or on the letterhead? The rank of the signatory? Or did I first notice it when I arrived in Dresden?"
WTF? How do you get drafted into the Waffen SS (and at this point, given his lifetime of lying about this, I don't automatically assume he's telling the truth about being drafted, and not volunteering, either, but setting that aside) and not notice?
I'm a tad skeptical of this story. He didn't notice?
Yeah, pull my other one.
He said at the time that there was nothing "repulsive" about the SS to him.
That, I find perfectly plausible.
He did not give any details as to whether he knew whether his division, the 10th Tank Division Fundsberg was involved in any atrocities, but claimed that he never fired a single shot. He stressed his youthful naivety, and his desperation to get out of the corps because he found it gruelling.
"It was very hard. It was all there was. The only question you asked was: 'How do I get out of it?' So I infected myself with jaundice, but that only helped for a few weeks. Then the grind began again and an inadequate training with ageing equipment. In any case, I had to write about it."
How does someone "infect [themself] with jaundice"?
Maybe it's a translation error. Maybe he ate a ton of carrots, or took something, to give himself the appearance of jaundice, and that's what he meant. I don't know.
He said his feelings of guilt developed only in later years. "It was always combined with the question: 'Could you not have realised at that point what was happening to you?'"
Yes, I think so.
Grass said in the interview that he wanted to dispel the notion that Germans were unwilling victims of Hitler. Germans, he said, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi regime. "Of course they were seduced as well, but many were involved with enthusiasm.["]
At least he's being truthful there.
He said his writing was a way for him to deal with his personal guilt.
Yeah, you got away all these decades, for 60-plus years, being thought of as innocent in a way that you were not.
I wish I knew what the proper and adequate punishment for that should be, but it should be a lot worse than having felt guilty, but not guilty enough to do a goddamn thing about it for more than 60 years.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5. Idiot Jews and idiot ex-Waffen SS members: no wonder I have misanthropic tendencies.
Did he miss the right opportunity to discuss his SS membership? "I don't know," says the author and poet. "It's certainly the case that I believed that what I did as a writer was enough. After all, I went through my learning process and reached my own conclusions. But there was still this lingering blemish."
See, when you volunteer for military service with the Nazis, and wind up in the Waffen SS, being a writer in future decades does not actually mean you're being moral by lying about it all these years.
After looking around the blogosphere a bit, and seeing a distressing number of responses to this that consist of apologetics and/or being "amused," I think I may have more to say about this after I've gotten some sleep.
"Grass's confession right before the publication of his autobiography leaves behind a bad taste of book promotion," wrote Bild am Sonntag newspaper columnist Helmut Boeger.
Yes, there's that, too.
"Even after his admission, Grass remains Germany's most important living author. But he has lost his standing as a moral authority. He cannot be castigated for being a member of the SS ... But he can be for lying about it for 60 years."
Exact-a-mundo! Precisely.
Other salient facts (I was going to pull this out of web pages, but it's here):
Grass now admitted he volunteered for submarine duty at 15 but was rejected. He was later called up to the SS at 17.
Grass had previously said he was drafted in 1944 as a flak helper and held as a prisoner of war until 1946.
So he also eagerly volunteered to fight for Hitler, and he's lied about that all his life, too. This is no small thing. If he'd tried to emigrate to America, and been caught making that lie, for instance, he'd not have been admitted, and rightfully so.
"The fact he was in the SS at 17 is by itself a misdemeanor -- had Grass not been one to throw his weight around as a moral authority so much since then," Karasek told German radio.
"If I were cynical, I would say he did not reveal it sooner at the risk of not winning a Nobel prize. ["]
I don't think it takes all that much cynicism to observe that this is also true.
"After 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late," Joachim Fest, a leading historian, told Der Spiegel magazine. "I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off."
“The only reason I rehearse here these anecdotes of a petty bourgeois childhood after painting them with epic strokes decades ago in works peopled by fictitious characters is to help me answer the question “What made you become a writer?” The ability to daydream at length, the job of punning and playing with language in general, the addiction to lying for its own sake rather than for mine because sticking to the truth would have been a bore – in short, what is loosely known as talent was certainly a factor, but it was the abrupt intrusion of politics into the family idyll that turned the all too flighty category of talent into a ballast with a certain permanence and depth.”
Lastly, let me observe that we now -- finally -- know that Grass was in the 10th SS Panzer Division; moreover, according to this, he fought in a battle in 1945, and was wounded. So the claim to have never fought was also, unsurprisingly, a lie. (It would be difficult to have been in the 10th SS Panzer Division and never have fought; it's not as if Hitler kept them in reserve).
Here is a day-by-day chronology of their actions. They fought until the last day of the war. Grass says he was part of the Division "the winter of 1944-45"; during that time, they fought a vast number of battles. The idea that Grass twiddled his thumbs and hummed pacifist hymms -- and yet somehow ended up wounded -- he, a man who eagerly volunteered to fight Hitler, and who now admits that "there was nothing 'repulsive' about the SS to him," -- well, clearly he's not yet quite finished with the lying.
ADDENDUM, 8/14/06, 1:12 p.m.: Since this is getting a lot of hits, welcome, visitors. I hope you won't think it crass if I note that I'm poor and in poor straits, and health, and only get by with the aid of the kindness of donors who support my 'umble blogging efforts, and that I've got ~$30 to get through to the end of the month with; any donations, via the PayPal link at the top, however small or large, are much appreciated. Thanks to anyone who makes with the additional wuv, but otherwise thanks just for stopping by.
ADDENDUM, 8/14/06, 10:00 p.m.: A comment from the Sunday Times of London.
[...] It was Grass first and foremost who insisted the Germans “come clean” about their history and that his own generation should not try to pose as “victims” of Hitler’s National Socialist ideology.
Now the great advocate of facing unpalatable truths has lived up to his own standards, but a little late. The revelation came in an interview with Germany’s respected conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and while it is certain to boost interest in his forthcoming autobiography it has done immeasurable harm to the writer’s squeaky-clean reputation.
Grass now says that, although he had told the truth to his wife, those he deceived included his own children and his biographer Michael Jürgs, with whom he spent countless hours apparently going over the minutiae of his life in the latter years of the Third Reich. Jürgs told The Sunday Times yesterday: “I’m deeply disappointed. If he had come clean earlier and said he was in the SS at 17 no one would have cared, but now it puts in doubt from a moral point of view anything he has ever told us.”
Grass also "...admitted that he believed in Hitler right up until the Nuremberg war crimes trials."
Here is a useful look at the Waffen SS. And a quote:
In November 1943 the commander of the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg demanded that ‘every man should be trained to be a fanatical hater. It does not matter on which front the division is engaged, the unyielding hate towards every opponent, Englishmen, Jew, Bolshevik, must make every one of our men capable of the highest deeds’.
The 10th, "Frundsberg" Division was one of the handful of "elite" Waffen SS Divisions that received the best equipment, food, and so forth, and was most imbued with racist Nazi propaganda. I recommend reading this piece if you're not already intimately familiar with the history and nature of the Waffen SS; it was certainly not just another "purely military" organization.
ADDENDUM, 8/14/06, 11:21: Here is a lovely little photo:
Heinz Harmel, commandant of the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg, being congratulated by Adolf Hitler on the receipt of his Oakleaves to his Knight's Cross. At the right looking on is Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Autographed by Harmel! Alas, it's been sold. But fear not! You can find more here for only $58! Who doesn't want autographed pictures of SS Generals?!
In fairness, I'll point out that Harmel was praised for his treatment of prisoners at Arnhem.
ADDENDUM, 8/15/06: Last comment for now: lots of good German commentary and debate here. (Tip from reader jaywalker.) Here is one quite good critical take. Here is more. And many salient reactions here.
And to be clear: I'm not in any way accusing Grass of being a war criminal, nor am I advising anyone to not read his books; I long ago concluded that few artists or writers are without fault, often including moral fault, and that if one were to be strict about not appreciating their work at all, one would ultimately be left with little or no art of interest to enrich one's life with. And I've pretty much said what I had to say about Grass for now.
8/13/2006 12:08:00 AM |permanent link | Main Page | Tweet |
9 comments
9 Comments:
I was shocked and disappointed by this news, and have much the same reaction as yours, Gary. But one of the first things I thought of after learning of Grass's revelation was my father (who taught German language and literature). He was a great fan of Heinrich Boll, and not so much of Grass.
We talked about it a few times, and once he said that he couldn't put his finger on it, but that Boll seemed to be speaking much more from the heart, where Grass's talent was for invention. Remarkably on-target, now that we know what we know.
"Asked when he had first realised that he was in the SS, Grass replied...."
"Regardless of the record of individual combat units within the Waffen-SS, the entire organisation was declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg Trials, except conscripts, who were exempted from that judgement due to being forcibly mobilised."
Yes, I've been quite aware of this since I was about 14.
Some good commentary on this, Gary, but he may in fact have been truthful about not firing his weapon. I believe that studies after the end of WW II indicated that even in the most furious combat, only about 10% of soldiers will fire their weapons at the enemy, the rest being reluctant to either risk their lives to do so, so terrified that they cannot take any action, or are simply unwilling to take another's life. Studies of discarded weapons after battles in the American Civil War show the same figures, and there are many reports of soldiers who did fire, but intentionally high in order to miss their opponents.
Fortunately, modern training has improved the figures for most well trained armies, and now about 50%, I believe, fire their weapons in combat.
At any rate, what he says is now suspect anyway. I just wanted to mention that participating in battles and not fighting is entirely plausable.
How is it that someone so well-known could get away with this lie for so long? Are the records of military service not available (or only available to the servicemembers themselves)?
Another question that occurs, after reading the updates and further comments, is: If you're in a tank division, is there any other role than being in a tank? Such as, driving a fuel truck, or...? What I know about WWII military logistics would fit into a comment box with many lines to spare.
Nell: "How is it that someone so well-known could get away with this lie for so long? Are the records of military service not available (or only available to the servicemembers themselves)?"
I'm sure lots of records were destroyed in the war.
"Another question that occurs, after reading the updates and further comments, is: If you're in a tank division, is there any other role than being in a tank? Such as, driving a fuel truck, or...?"
Sure, there were cooks and truck drivers and such, although in the hardest fighting, when it got desperate, which is to say, pretty much all the fights in the last months of the war, as well as many before that against the Russians, pretty much everyone would likely have had occasion to pick up a rifle or other weapon.
Rudersdorf: " It is interesting that neither his audience, or perhaps the author himself, could tell the difference from being a socialist and being a national socialist."
Relvig - pretty sad that members of the Waffen-SS don't receive pensions from the German government!! This was a criminal organization - why should the present German government, which is trying to distance itself from the Nazi past, pay those who committed war crimes? I'm not saying that Grass himself did so - we have no information on that point - but that it does not strike me as at all sad that men in such a force do not receive pensions.
Gary - thanks for this blog posting, it was very informative.
"The Waffen-SS was not all that different than the Wehrmacht"
I, like most historians, take a different view.
The Waffen SS was created as a racist construct by Himmler, intended originally to consist only of exemplar Aryans; although in later days it also had foreign volunteer units, and conscripts, its war crimes and atrocities were innumerable.
Moreover, the Frundsberg division was one of the few "elite" SS divisions.
Incidentally, SS personnel got pensions from the German government. See here, for instance, for the bio of Generalmajor Heinz Harmel, commander of the 10th SS Panzers, including about his pension.
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