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February 27, 2006
The Definition of "Futile"
Posted by Eric at 7:47 PM | Comments (2)
February 26, 2006
Right Genocide, Wrong Victim
Below is my translation. (Note that the Rambla del Raval is a street in Barcelona with many immigrant Arabs and Muslims, and that Leganés is the Madrid suburb where suspects in the 11 March 2004 terror attacks blew themselves up.
Europe Died at AuschwitzI have now read this passage many, many times, and I believe it is saying, "We murdered the wrong people."
Published November 21, 2004 12:08
by Sebastian Vivar RodriguezI was walking along the Rambla del Raval (Barcelona) and I saw it clearly: "The truth marries no one." (Spanish proverb)
We murdered 6 million Jews, only to end up importing 20 million mostly fundamentalist Muslims.
You say that it's impossible to generalize? Well, given how things have gone I think it is possible to generalize. You say that there are exceptions? Agreed … but they are exceptions.
For the rest, you know, in general it has to be said that at Auschwitz we burned culture, intelligence, and the ability to create riches; we burned the people who proclaimed themselves God's chosen people. Because this is the people that has given to humanity the best minds, capable of changing the course of history (Christ, Marx, Einstein, Freud), as well as great moments of progress and wellbeing.
And it also has to be said that as a result of relaxed borders and of cultural and moral relativism, under the absurd pretext of tolerance, we have allowed these 20 million often illiterate and fanatical Muslims to enter, people who are, in the best of cases, as I said, in this Rambla del Raval, the highest expression of the third world and of the ghetto, and who, in the worst of cases, are preparing attacks like those in Manhattan and Madrid, in the subsidized housing that we give them day by day.
We exchanged culture for fanatacism, the capacity to create wealth for the desire to destroy it. Intelligence for superstition.
We exchanged the instinct for improvement of the Jews – who never, even in the worst conditions imaginable, tired of hoping for a better, more peaceful world—for the suicidal drive of Leganés. The diamonds—portable wealth for the next time they would have to flee—for the stones of the Palestinians, which negate any intention for peace.
We exchanged the pride of survival for the fanatical obsession to die, and perhaps to kill us and our children.
What a mistake we made!
That is the only reading that makes sense. One might think that instead the author is saying, "Had we not murdered the Jews, we'd be well off here in Europe, but because we did, we now have all of these Muslims to deal with." But that doesn't really make sense. Muslims immigration to Western Europe is not a consequence of the Holocaust. And, unless the author is endorsing some variant of the Nazi idea of "Lebensraum," he cannot mean that the murder of the Jews created room for the Muslims--that there wouldn't have been space for the Muslims if the Jews had not been annihilated.
No, I think he is arguing that when Western Europe went looking for a people to exterminate, it picked the wrong one: it chose a worthwhile and inspiring people rather than a worthless and frightening one.
God help us.
Posted by Eric at 8:28 PM | Comments (17)
February 24, 2006
Danny and Annie.
My wife, whom I love more than anything, is traveling today to visit a dear friend of ours, a contemporary with kids our childrens' ages, who is battling cancer. At the moment the battle is not going too terribly well. Perhaps this, in part, explains my tears.
Or maybe it's just a lovely, lovely story.
Give it a listen.
Posted by Eric at 9:03 AM | Comments (2)
February 23, 2006
More Metro Nonsense
Of course, he's got his usual to-the-right-of-Michael-Savage rantings:
The "mess" in New Orleans is the fault of "enviro-nazis."But in this issue, there's more!"The AIDS epidemic everyone is so worked up about in Africa" may not be "real," but instead evidence that "[s]cience is too often the political tool for the advancement of bogus causes."
"The Episcopal Church of America, now in its final days as a credible religious institution," makes Reeves's "Notes from La La Land" for "considering consecrating former US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall a saint."
The issue includes a story (scroll down) on the background of the Communist Workers Party, five of whose members were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina in November of 1979. At two criminal trials, all-white juries acquitted the gunmen.
In introducing the story, Reeves says this of the criminal trials: they "found that the CWP purposefully set up the confrontation as a group suicide in order to martyr themselves to the cause of world socialism."
A complete fabrication. No such thing was "found."
Posted by Eric at 5:22 PM | Comments (2)
"The Idea of Doing Nothing"
The ... bill-collector, Herr Simon, was greatly interested in the mass deportation of Americans of Japanese ancestry from our West Coast in 1942. He had not heard of it before, and, when I told him of the West Coast Army Commander's statement that "a Jap is a Jap," he hit the table with his fist and said, "Right you are. A Jap is a Jap, a Jew is a Jew." "A German is a German," I said. "Of course," said the German proudly. "It's a matter of blood."Something to think about.He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation. When I said "no," he asked me what I had done about it. When I said "Nothing," he said, triumphantly, "There. You learned about all these things openly, through your government and your press. We did not learn through ours. As in your case, nothing was required of us--in our case, not even knowledge. You knew about things you thought were wrong -- you did think it was wrong, didn't you, Herr Professor?" "Yes." "So. You did nothing. So it is everywhere." When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, "And if they had been -- what then? Do you not se that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?"
(From "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (Univ. of Chicago Press 1955).)
Posted by Eric at 1:47 PM | Comments (7)
Watching Our Language on the Ports Question
But that doesn't mean that these groups are wrong: The rhetoric from everywhere on the political spectrum has seethed with suspicion of all Arabs. (One very small example: a caller to a local middle-of-the-road talk morning talk radio program yesterday went on at length about "the camel jockeys" who are taking over our ports, and the middle-of-the-road hosts said ... not a word, except to agree with the caller's concerns.)
Quite frightening -- and I'm not even Arab. I can't even imagine what it must feel like to be an Arab American right about now.
UPDATE: Commenter marietta makes the following point, which I think is not only right, but so right it's worth quoting here:
Bush/Cheney/Rove are now reaping the harvest of the reflexively scarred American psyche they've worked so hard to sow since 9/11. They've so hyped the terror threat against America, what the hell did they expect. Bush and Cheney toss around mushrooom-cloud images like popcorn at a kid's movie. And Rove stands up a month ago to say, "terror, terror, terror . . . we can win another election if we just scare the daylights out of America by saying terrorists are everywhere and only George Bush can save us." It seems this administration has justified almost all of their absolutely awful policy decisions by tying them clearly to terror. (The Medicare Drug program is an exception; they just lied about the cost to get that through.) Now, these folks get to see how successful they've been at so weakening America's will.
Posted by Eric at 12:25 PM | Comments (9)
February 22, 2006
Playing With The Fire of Segregation in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools
All [the teacher originating the idea] knew was that she intended to retire next year after 31 years and was running out of time to test her theory [that 7th graders would learn better without the "daily drama" of interaction between the sexes].Excuse me? Teachers at a middle school decide to run a controversial and potentially unconstitutional experiment in student segregation without notifying the school board or the district's administration?But she and her colleagues didn't tell the superintendent or the school board, choosing to notify parents of the experiment in letters sent home Jan. 6, a Friday. They assured parents that the experiment would last a few months at most.
"We didn't want to run the risk of someone saying, 'No, no, no,' " Works said.
And now it's 6 weeks later and the administration and the board have just let the "experiment" move forward?
This is how "experiments"--indeed, potentially illegal ones--happen in the Chapel Hill public schools?
What is the design of this "experiment?' What is its hypothesis? Is there a control group? What procedures are in place to test whether it's working? What would "working" even mean?
Is this the way this school district investigates major changes in policy?
The Chapel Hill-Carrboro district should stop this experiment immediately--if for none of the good and valid reasons, then at least to avoid a lawsuit.
Posted by Eric at 9:07 AM | Comments (16)
February 21, 2006
Fewer Than Six Degrees of Separation
Posted by Eric at 11:18 PM
An Apt Description.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it ... unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic person' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head."
The book I read is "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer (U. of Chicago Press 1955).
It is truly a remarkable book. The chapter from which I quoted (with a slight alteration) is available in its entirety at the website of the University of Chicago Press.
Very heartily recommended.
Posted by Eric at 7:03 PM | Comments (8)
"Not Every Arab-Owned Company Is A Terrorist Front"
"I don't know much about the underlying facts here [relating to the operation of U.S. ports by an Arab-owned company], and it's certainly true that not every Arab-owned company is a terrorist front, but I'm guessing that the politics of this, with criticism coming from both Democrats and Republicans now, are likely to scuttle the deal".Well, yes, probably.
But let's back up for a second. "... it's certainly true that not every Arab-owned company is a terrorist front..."
I'm not picking specifically on Glenn here, because his phrasing reflects a very broadly held view of Arabs in the United States.
But what scary phrasing it is, if only in its off-handedness.
We really are quite a few steps further down the road toward out-and-out demonization of an "enemy race" than I realized.
Posted by Eric at 1:11 PM | Comments (6)
Update on Cartoon Controversy at UNC - Chapel Hill
Posted by Eric at 9:02 AM | Comments (1)
February 18, 2006
Terminal Degree
Posted by Eric at 11:29 PM | Comments (3)
Executive Order 9066, 64 Years Later.
I spoke about the importance of remembering not just the legal cases from that era that the government won, most notably the Korematsu case, but also the much larger number of cases that the government lost. Here's a little piece of it:
Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist who in his own life experienced the excesses of both Nazism and Stalinism, put it this way: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Notice the word "struggle." Memory is a struggle, and it's a struggle because powerful forces want us to forget. The power of government thrives in a culture of forgetting.If you're interested, you can download the whole talk by clicking here. (It's a pdf file.)And what a moment this is for government power. We are living in a time when the executive branch of our government is claiming truly unlimited and unreviewable power. Unlimited and unreviewable power to run secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Unlimited and unreviewable power to incarcerate people indefinitely at Guantanamo. Unlimited and unreviewable power to use torture in interrogations. Unlimited and unreviewable power to eavesdrop on American citizens.
So on this Day of Remembrance, I want to challenge you to think about the words of Milan Kundera. If the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, what does power want us to forget?
Being a legal historian, I want to challenge you to think about this question in a specific way: What part of the legal history of the internment does power want us to forget? What part of the legal history of the internment might stand in the way of these new claims of unlimited and unreviewable executive power?
My talk was followed by a fascinating panel discussion (in which I did not participate) that explored some of the parallels between the government's wartime treatment of Japanese Americans and the experiences of Arabs and Muslims in the United States since September 11, 2001. Especially harrowing were stories about the FBI's incredibly heavy-handed investigation into allegations of terrorists in the Muslim community of Lodi, California.
Posted by Eric at 10:47 PM | Comments (2)
February 16, 2006
Our Virile Leaders.
He goes on television to "take responsibility" for having done it.
And the words that the President chooses to describe the Vice President's explanation? "Powerful." And "strong." Even "very strong."
Strong. Powerful. Taking responsibility. Very strong.
Brought to you by Karl Rove, Minister of Semiotics.
Posted by Eric at 9:21 PM | Comments (5)
February 15, 2006
Priorities.
Q How far away from you was he?"I TAKE IT, YOU MISSED THE BIRD?!?!"THE VICE PRESIDENT: I'm guessing about 30 yards, which was a good thing. If he'd been closer, obviously, the damage from the shot would have been greater.
Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.
Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I have no idea. I mean, you focused on the bird, but as soon as I fired and saw Harry there, everything else went out of my mind. I don't know whether the bird went down, or didn't.
What the hell kind of question is that?
(Admittedly, it would have been even worse if the Vice President had responded, "Oh, Harry's wife wasn't even out there with us that afternoon.")
Posted by Eric at 9:37 PM | Comments (3)
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better ...
Along those lines--well, kind of--an Isareli website, seeking to prove that no Arab can hate a Jew as well as a Jew can, is sponsoring an Israeli anti-semitic cartoon contest. (This in response to the Iranian newspaper that's sponsoring a best-cartoon-of-the-Holocaust contest.)
“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” says the creator of the contest. “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”
Now that's funny.
Posted by Eric at 5:15 PM
February 13, 2006
When You "Assume" the Risk, You Make an "Ass" Out Of ... Well, You Get the Idea.
We are being told that the sort of accident in which a quail hunter shoots another happens "often" and "goes with the turf" of the sport.
So Harry Whittington (or one of the 5 other hunters in the hunting party) could just as easily have shot the Vice President?
Why, exactly, does the Vice President of the United States routinely endanger himself in this way?
Posted by Eric at 10:45 AM | Comments (15)
February 11, 2006
Cartoon Controversy Arrives At UNC - Chapel Hill
The UNC Muslim Students Association wrote a letter of protest, saying that the newspaper's intent in publishing the cartoon was bigoted.
The editor of the newspaper is defending the decision to publish.
I hope that the discussion of this episode in the days to come does not turn toward criticism of the UNC Muslim Students Association for protesting, in their letter to the editor, the newspaper's decision to publish the cartoon. Nobody is burning any embassies or flags here. The Muslim Student Association's letter is an appropriate and responsible expression of criticism and dissent--precisely the sort of invitation to discussion and debate that a university should cultivate.
Posted by Eric at 11:57 AM | Comments (6)
February 10, 2006
Northern California Time of Remembrance -- February 18, 2006
The Time of Remembrance program is a community-wide commemoration of FDR's Executive Order 9066, which gave the military the authority to evict more than 110,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry and Japanese aliens from their homes in World War II and force them behind barbed wire.
The event, sponsored by the Japanese American Citizens League chapters of Florin, Lodi, Marysville, Placer County, Sacramento, and Stockton, will take place at 12:30 p.m. at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts, which is located at 1020 ”O” Street, at the corner of 10th and “O” Streets, in downtown Sacramento.
Posted by Eric at 1:13 PM | Comments (1)
February 9, 2006
Symposium on Executive Power
I am writing on behalf of The Yale Law Journal to tell you about an event
that I think will interest you and your readers.From March 24-26, The Yale Law Journal will be hosting a symposium on executive power titled The Most Dangerous Branch? Mayors, Governors, Presidents, and The Rule of Law. It will cover a wide range of topics, from the scope of the President's war-conducting powers to mechanisms for limiting the reach of state attorneys general to mayoral attempts to act as independent constitutional interpreters. Through a comparison of executives at multiple levels of government, the symposium will attempt to better understand the nature of the executive role.
Participants will include: Professor John Yoo, the influential (and controversial) former Bush Administration attorney; Professor Neal Katyal, who will be arguing Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, this term's most anticipated Supreme Court case; Dean Elena Kagan of the Harvard Law School; and Dean Harold Koh of the Yale Law School.
The discussions should be lively and timely, given the increasing public interest in the limits of executive power and the wisdom of the unitary executive.
We hope that you will help us spread the word by announcing the symposium on your website....
How 'bout that! The Yale Law Journal ... asking ME to publish something!
I thought briefly about writing back thanking them for their excellent submission, emphasizing that I receive far more than I can possibly publish, wishing them luck, and encouraging them to send me notices about their future symposia.
But then I decided that that would be childish, so instead I decided to announce the symposium.
Seriously, it looks to be outstanding. If you're in the region, think about attending!
Posted by Eric at 3:39 PM | Comments (2)
Lawmaking, Seen Clearly
The opticians argued that the requirement of a prescription was irrational, denied them their fundamental right to ply their trade, and illegally discriminated between opticians, on the one hand, and optometrists and ophtalmologists, on the other. The Court was not sympathetic. "Tough luck," the Court reasoned. "The legislature may have had all sorts of good reasons for insisting on prescriptions and preferring ophthalmologists and optometrists over opticians. It's not our job to second-guess the legislature."
In class, I invite students to think about a customer who gets a new pair of glasses from an optician (after dutifully getting a prescription) and then drops and breaks the glasses in the optician's parking lot. If the customer were to walk back into the optician's office and say, "These broke. I need new lenses," the optician would have to say, "sorry, no can do. You need to get a new prescription first from an ophthalmologist or an optometrist. Then I can grind you some new lenses." What, I ask, could the sense possibly be in that? Students are usually left seeing pretty clearly that what was likely behind the law was not some elaborate reasoning about ocular health, but the lobbying power of ophthalmologists and optometrists compared to opticians.
Why do I mention this? Because North Carolina is playing out this behind-the-scenes drama right now. Jim Black, an optometrist who is also the powerful Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, is under scrutiny after the legislature passed a law requiring every child in the state to have an eye exam before entering kindergarten. Yesterday, hearings disclosed that optometrists in the state were sending in blank checks as political contributions to the Speaker and his political allies.
It's Williamson v. Lee Optical all over again, right here in 2006 in our own backyards.
Posted by Eric at 9:31 AM | Comments (17)
February 8, 2006
"Just Go Away Quietly"
Posted by Eric at 2:30 PM
February 7, 2006
Stop the "Wellstone Funeral" Meme In Its Tracks!
It is just horrifying ...
to see...
how the left-wing moonbats ... 
went and put politics ...
into the celebration ... 
of the apolitical life ...
of this apolitical woman. 
Posted by Eric at 7:57 PM | Comments (62)
February 6, 2006
Not Just the Good Holocaust Cartoons ... Only the Very Best!
Posted by Eric at 8:17 PM | Comments (10)
What Does "Integrity" Mean Again? I Can Never Remember!
Posted by Eric at 3:19 PM | Comments (1)
Back to My Future
On Saturday evening, I rented "Back to the Future II" and watched it with my daughters. (We saw the first one a year or so ago.) About halfway through, my older daughter Abby--who looks a lot like me--told me to pause the film, and then she turned to me and exuberantly began trying to figure out the story, chattering and waving her hands in front of her as if trying to put the timeline in place in the air in front of her.
It was a delicious moment, an Escher drawing come to life: Here I was, watching a movie about older and younger versions of the self, and the continuity of self across the generations, and in that very moment catching a glimpse of an earlier version of myself, captivated by a story about younger and older versions of the self.
I know it sounds very literary and very cosmic, but in reality it wasn't: it was just touching, and warm, and sweet.
Posted by Eric at 9:07 AM | Comments (9)
February 5, 2006
Triangulation in the Cartoon Wars
Posted by Eric at 4:27 PM
February 3, 2006
The Japanese American Cases -- A Bigger Disaster Than We Realized
You can download and read it by clicking here.
This is the abstract:
"Sixty-one years ago, Eugene V. Rostow published the first major academic article on the Japanese American internment of World War II. The article's title left little doubt about Rostow's view of the Supreme Court's decisions in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944): "The Japanese American Cases – A Disaster." Rostow's claim was that these two cases were a substantive disaster of constitutional doctrine—a fundamentally mistaken endorsement of a repressive military program.Rostow's conceptualization of the "disaster" of the "Japanese American cases" continues to define—and, in a sense, to confine—our view of the legal history of this wartime period. There are, in fact, many more wartime "Japanese American cases" to remember than Korematsu and Hirabayashi. These two cases were really just one small part of a much broader program of litigation in which the government sought both to capitalize on and to reinforce the image of Japanese Americans as disloyal subversives.
This Article broadens Rostow's assessment of the "Japanese American cases" as a "disaster" by recasting both of those terms. It widens the focus of the term "Japanese American cases" to include stories of the many wartime Japanese American cases that the literature has slighted or forgotten. This broader view reveals that the Japanese American cases of World War II were a disaster of a different sort: a litigative debacle, in which an astonishing number of cases ended in acquittals, dismissals, stern judicial rebukes, and other repudiations of the government's legal and factual positions. The Article concludes that the overall litigative project was a misadventure in using the law—especially the criminal law—to tar a racial group with the badges of disloyalty during wartime."
Posted by Eric at 2:36 PM | Comments (3)
February 2, 2006
When the Moon ... Is In The Seventh House ... And Jupiter ... Aligns with Greenville ...
Posted by Eric at 7:47 PM | Comments (9)
February 1, 2006
What I Want To Know Is ...
. . . when do they come for the caricatures?
Posted by Eric at 1:17 PM | Comments (5)
Cuts Like A Teacup ...
(You'll get it if you read the linked article and ever listened to the radio in 1983.)
Posted by Eric at 9:42 AM | Comments (4)