Putin Opponent Slain

When I read about the shooting death of Boris Nemtsov, a critic of Putin, on the streets of Moscow, it reminded me of the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov.

Kirov was a rising star in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, playing a significant role at the 17th Party Congress in 1934.

Since 1926, Kirov had headed the Leningrad Communist Party. At the 1934 Congress, Kirov received more positive votes than Stalin. That may have been his downfall. Stalin asked Kirov, who was becoming increasingly popular within the party, to come work for him in Moscow. But Stalin kept Kirov in Leningrad for 9 more months.

On December 1, 1934, an expelled party member named Leonid Nikolayev entered the Party headquarters at the Smolny Institute, waited in the hall for Kirov, and shot him down.

Stalin led that investigation, just as Putin is leading this one.

Stalin used the assassination as an excuse to round up all of his own opponents within the party. Few of them survived the subsequent purges.

A word to the wise for Nemtsov suppoters - it might be well to go into hiding.

Cox v Town Of Oriental

Quick update. Last week, I sent a letter to the Town Commissioners explaining my view of the law that applies and where things stand. I also outlined a possible resolution. I sent a more detailed letter to the Town's attorney. I expect they will go into closed session tonight to discuss it.

On Changing One's Mind

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

John Maynard Keynes

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi often changed his mind publicly. An aide once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week. The great man replied that it was because this week he knew better.

Lamentations Of A Staff Officer (With Apologies To T.S. Eliot)

"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,	115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool."

Vive La France

For the past couple of hours I have watched hordes of French citizens - Christians, Moslems and Jews, marching from Place de la Republique to Place de la Nacion, demonstrating national solidarity. It was a grand spectacle, more than a million, perhaps two million, demonstrators showing the best and most inspiring face of France.

Vladimir Lenin once observed, "it is the role of terrorists to terrorize!" If it was the purpose of the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the slaughter of journalists and cartoonists to terrorize France, they utterly failed.

The French president did not hide in a bunker waiting for the dust to settle. Neither did the French people.

Last Thursday, while the killers were still at large, the French public held their first rallies, displaying signs proclaiming "I am Charlie Hebdo."

Some random thoughts and observations:

1. One French journalist was amazed that, not even when France won the World Cup in 1998 were there such large demonstrations in Paris. I was more amazed to consider that the demonstration was more massive than those celebrating the liberation of Paris in 1944. I suppose it is a generational thing;

2. A TV reporter asked a French rabbi about Benjamin Netanyahu's invitation for French jews to emigrate to Israel. "We are jews, he replied,"but we are French. We live here. We will stay here. Today we have marched together with French Christians and French Muslims, marched for Liberty and for Unity. This is our country."

3. A handful of disgruntled terrorists, no matter how thorough their planning, can't intimidate a country that refuses to be intimidated. They can't take away the liberties of a people who refuse to give them up.

Vive la France!

The Last Man Killed (In the Great War)

When we lived in Belgium and traveled in northern France, we soon learned that Frenchmen had little to say about World War II. After all, we finally understood, to France, WWII consisted of two brief periods: one from the German invasion until Dunkirk and surrender, and eleven months between Normandy and the German surrender. The rest was German occupation.

The war of vivid French and Belgian memory was the "war of 14-18" as they call it. In 1980, we attended a wedding feast in Belgium, sitting across from an octagenerian who had been a young woman of twenty when the Germans (les Boches, she called them) invaded.  Her memory of those four years was as clear as if the events had happened yesterday. And she had no use for "les Boches."

Today's New York Times  has an article by Richard Rubin (author of The Doughboys) describing his search in the Argonne forest region for a monument he had seen years earlier. Finally, with the help of a local woman, he found it:

"It’s an unassuming marker, a stone just a few feet high. Someone had placed a bench next to it since the last time I’d visited, but [my guide] didn’t sit; perhaps she felt that would be irreverent. This, after all, was the very spot where the very last man was killed in the Great War: Pvt. Henry Nicholas Gunther of Baltimore, 23 years old, shot through the head at 10:59 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918."

There is surely a story here. The Armistice was to begin at 11:00 a.m. November 11, 1918. Surly the Sergeants told their soldiers to keep their heads down. Why did Gunther stick his head up? What was the German shooter thinking? What was the point of pulling the trigger?

Rubin's article is worth reading for many reasons. He tours the battlefields and is impressed with the formidable and technologically advanced German installations. "How could Germany have lost?" He asks repeatedly.

Historians still grapple with that question. But when Rubin asks local Frenchmen how the Germans lost, their answer is succinct: "Les Americains."

It is worth reading Rubin's other New York Times articles touching on the same subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/travel/in-france-vestiges-of-the-great-wars-bloody-end.html?hpw&rref=travel&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/travel/100-years-of-gratitude.html?action=click&contentCollection=Travel&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/travel/in-france-artifacts-of-americas-role-in-world-war-i.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/travel/where-americans-turned-the-tide-in-world-war-i.html?action=click&contentCollection=Travel&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

I'm Thinking It Over

From the March 24, 1948 broadcast of THE JACK BENNY PROGRAM.

--Hey, bud. Bud.
--Huh?
--Got a match?
--Match? Yes, I have one right here--
--Don't make a move, this is a stick-up.
--What?
--You heard me.
--Mister. Mister, put down that gun!
--Shaddup. Now, come on--your money or your life.
(Pause.)
(Laughter.)
--Look, bud! I said your money or your life!
--I'm thinking it over!
(Laughter.)

 Friends ask me what I am going to do about Judge Alford's dismissal of my complaint against the Town about the closing of South Avenue.

On top of that, there's the Town Attorney's threat to file a motion for sanctions and Judge Alford's e-mail declaring that he would be receptive. (The mugging).

Right now, I can only offer Jack Benny's reply.

More to follow.

Are You A Real American Or Are You Jewish?

Years ago, I read a magazine article by an American journalist who had travelled to South Africa, then under apartheid. He described being asked by an Afrikaner "are you a real American or are you Jewish?"

I don't recall knowing how the writer answered the question. I don't remember the writer's name, either, but that would do me little good. I mostly can't tell a Jewish name from any other.

Growing up in Oklahoma, I knew about the Trail of Tears. When I went to the movies, I often rooted for the Indians defending their homeland and way of life against thise who would take it from them. They were "real Americans," I knew, not the white guys.

But in a real sense, everyone whose ancestors made it here, whether decades or millenia in the past, is a "real American."

Soon after Columbus stole a hemisphere from its rightful owners, the interlopers decided that only white Europeans could be "real Americans" and ruled by divine right. That was the "white man's burden," as Kipling put it.

So what if you were a Ukrainian Jew relocating with your family to the US in the 1980's? Would you feel suddenly free to assert your Jewishness?

Apparently not so much.

In a new book, “A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka,” Lev Golivkin, a Ukrainian jew, relates the hilarious and heartbreaking story of a Jewish family’s escape from oppression. As it turns out, as a nine-year old refugee, he knew little about Jewishness and had little interest in finding out more.

One paragraph in the New York Times review took my breath away. Lev asked his mother why she had been so insistent about leaving the Soviet Unionfor the US, where she had only been able to work as a security guard instead of the intellectual occupation she had been trained for.

“I didn’t want to be afraid of the government anymore, to live in fear of them going to my home,” she told him. “I didn’t want to watch my daughter suffer and be denied from school because she was Jewish. I didn’t want to stand on the schoolhouse steps and worry to death about explaining to my 9-year-old son why being a Jew was bad, and why he should prepare for a long and painful life.”

What do you suppose Michael Brown's mother would say about fear, suffering and denial - or Trayvon Martin's mother?

We must think on these things.