Celebrating America's Greatness

"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless." Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1862 

We hear far too much about why the United States of America is not perfect, but we do not hear enough about why the United States of America is great. President Abraham Lincoln understood and eloquently articulated the essence of American greatness: the American project is "the last best hope of earth" to ensure that people can be free and can live without fear of oppression.

Boxing promoter Don King used to proclaim, "Only in America!" Even though King was the king of hyperbole, that statement is far from hyperbolic. In the United States, it is possible for a person to rise from humble beginnings to achieve great things. Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and became perhaps the greatest U.S. President. LeBron James was raised by a poor teenage single mother in Akron, and became the first active NBA player to achieve billionaire status. 

The American Dream is founded on principles of equality, democracy and freedom: all people should have equal rights (which does not necessarily result in equitable outcomes), all people should have the opportunity to participate in the democratic process, and all people should have the freedom to pursue happiness as long as their pursuit of happiness does not interfere with the rights of other people. 

We fought a bitter Civil War to get our house in order, and ensure that all Americans would be free. Later, we defended freedom around the globe as the driving force for Allied victories in World War I and World War II. Without the courage and ingenuity of the United States of America, the world would be a much worse place--and it is important to remember that, particularly when some people focus intently on real or perceived shortcomings of the United States of America without acknowledging how much good the United States of America has done around the world.

Winston Churchill declared, "Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others that have been tried." Democracy is flawed because humans are flawed, but other systems of government are much worse because other systems of government deny equality and freedom to entire classes of people based on religion, race, and/or ethnicity. 

It is chic to criticize capitalism, but an economy based on capitalism is--much like a government based on democracy--the worst form of an economy apart from all the others that have been tried. As I noted almost a year ago, the embrace of socialism by an increasing number of people highlights the difference between being educated and being informed: 

There is a significant difference between being educated and being informed. To become educated, one merely has to fulfill the requirements of a specific degree-granting institution; upon doing so, one receives a doctoral degree--but it is a dangerous fallacy to confuse being educated with being informed, because education far too often involves being indoctrinated with false narratives. In contrast, being informed means thinking with an open mind, consuming information from objective sources while considering information from subjective sources with skepticism, and then synthesizing the acquired information to base opinions on facts and logic.

Our politics, our schools, and our media outlets have far too many educated people and far too few informed people. Educated people often spew ideas that Vladimir Nabokov would correctly dismiss as "poshlost." One such idea is that socialism is good. 

It is most likely that I would not be alive today without the United States. Members from both sides of my family immigrated to the United States more than 100 years ago from areas that Nazi Germany later occupied. During the Holocaust, the Nazis and their enthusiastic collaborators murdered six million of Europe's 9.5 million Jews, including the vast majority of Jews from where my family used to live. My maternal grandmother came to the United States from Kobryn (a small city then located in Russia, and now located in Belarus) in the early 1900s. Kobryn's Jewish population on the eve of World War II was around 6500, and the number of Jews from Kobryn who survived the Holocaust can be counted on one hand. My maternal grandfather and his family fled to the United States from Bialystok, Poland in the early 1900s; one of my relatives was among the 70 Jews killed in the 1906 Bialystok Pogrom. The Nazis murdered most of the 50,000 Jews remaining in Bialystok in the early 1940s.

My father's side of the family trekked from Kosice (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Slovakia) to Germany and then to the United States in the early 1900s. Not every member of my father's family chose to leave Europe or was able to leave Europe before the ascent of the Nazis, and it is horrifying to think about the fate of family members who stayed in Europe and were in countries occupied by the Nazis. A railway went directly from Kosice to Auschwitz.

Without the United States of America--and without my family's brave decision to start over in a new country--I would not be here to write these words. It would be worse than ungrateful for me to slander the United States of America, or to be silent while others slander the United States of America.

Happy 250th Birthday, United States of America! 

Why "Never Again" Must be a Rallying Cry, Not Just a Slogan

Holocaust denial often consists not only of denying that the Nazis murdered six million Jews, but also falsely accusing Israel of committing genocide. This breathtaking and perverse act of double historical revisionism during the living memory of the Holocaust is an outrage that defies description. The truth is that not only is the Holocaust the most well-documented genocide in history, but Adolf Hitler announced his murderous plans in advance, and the world was well aware of what the Nazis were doing; the information was available, but many media outlets downplayed what was known, and many governments--including the U.S. government--closed their borders to the few Jews who were fortunate enough to escape the Nazis; the sad saga of the S.S. St. Louis--a ship full of more than 900 Jewish refugees who were refused entry to the United States and sent back to Europe to meet their fate at the hands of the Nazis--is just one example of how the world turned its back on the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Canadian journalist Mattie Rotenberg delivered a detalied report on May 12, 1943 describing not only the murder of two million Jews by the Nazis, but the likelihood that the death toll would reach six million if the Nazis were not stopped. Her broadcast is heartbreaking, but it is important to realize just how much was known about the Holocaust when there was still time to rescue millions of Jews. The tragic fate of the Jewish people in Europe was well known, and not lamented, even in the United States where many Jews proudly displayed pictures of President Roosevelt while Roosevelt's policies sealed the fate of Europe's Jews.

Rotenberg declared:

These entirely innocent men, women, and children are taken to places which the Nazis are not ashamed to call extermination camps, where they are ruthlessly and mercilessly murdered by machine gun, poison gas, and electrocution. It is a systematic, cold-blooded slaughter which has no military objective of any kind. Premier Sikorski of Poland has stated that the total number of Jews killed has reached two million--old and young, men, women, and infants--and the number is daily rising, their only crime that they were born into the Jewish people...The Nazis are not ashamed of these deeds. They boast of how they are cleaning up the country. German men and women go on sightseeing tours through the ghetto to look on the misery of the people whose food they eat, whose clothes they wear, whose houses they live in. Could you bear to go with them, to see an anguished mother taking her baby in her arms and jumping out a fourth story window when she hears the trampling feet on the stairs, to see a German drag a young girl away from her weeping parents, to see an old man standing naked at the door of the electrocution chamber? Yes, naked, because the Germans want his clothes for themselves. Can you look into the darkness of that cattle car and see a little girl choking with the fumes of the quicklime with corpses pressed around her because there is no room to fall? Two million is too much, but see each one of these and then multiply them by a thousand, by 10,000, by 100,000. Some people say that other people are being tortured and murdered in Europe, too, but no matter how the Nazis treat other conquered people they are not trying to wipe them from the face of the Earth. They want the Poles and the Czechs and the Belgians to live on to serve the Master Race.

Rotenberg described Hitler Youth members hunting Jewish children for sport, and she mentioned other atrocities before concluding with these chilling words:

Don't turn away and say you don't believe these things! I've told you nothing that has not been vouched for by the State Department in Washington, the Polish government in London, or the United Nations Information Service. I could go on reading from the documents I have before me until you'd stop your ears in horror. The plain truth is that in Europe today Jews are being slaughtered as we don't slaughter animals in this country. I don't know which is the greatest tragedy: the fate of the victims, the indifference of the rest of the world to their suffering, or the terrible fact that the human race contains beings who are completely inhuman...We must win the war of course, but no Jews in Europe will be alive to see the day of victory. At the rate of 10,000 deaths a day, it's simple arithmetic. Figure out for yourself how much time is left if any of them are to be saved. Some action must be taken at once. If it is not, within a few months six million people will have been murdered, and the nations of the world will not be able to escape the charge of being accomplices in the blackest crime in history.

Far too many people do not know even the basic facts about what Rotenberg correctly called "the blackest crime in history." The phrase "Never Again" must not just be a slogan. It must be a multi-pronged rallying cry ensuring that (1) the world never forgets the Holocaust, (2) the Jewish people never allow themselves to be without a country and without a strong military, and (3) vigilant steps are taken in academia and the media to counteract the propaganda that simultaneously denies the horrors of the real Holocaust while falsely accusing Israel of committing genocide. 

Thomas Friedman once shamelessly dismissed Israel as "Yad Vashem with an air force." In one vile sentence he missed the point of both Yad Vashem--The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, based in Israel's eternal capital Jerusalem--and of the Israeli Air Force, which has defended the Jewish State against its genocide-minded neighbors for over 70 years. Yes, it is Israel's neighbors who are the spiritual heirs to the Nazis, and large portions of the Arab/Muslim world have longed expressed open admiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The world stood by and let Adolf Hitler's Nazis murder six million Jews, but as long as Israel exists that will never happen again; when the world did nothing after terrorists hijacked Air France Flight 139 and made a point of separating the Jews and the Israelis from the other passengers at Entebbe in 1976, the Israeli Air Force accomplished a daring rescue mission. What would have happened to those Jewish hostages had there not been a Jewish State with an air force? We already know the answer.

No person can answer the question of where was God during the Holocaust, but Nobel laureate/Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel declared "After the Holocaust I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind." Put another way, if it can be said that absolute power corrupts then it also must be said, in the words of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, that "powerlessness corrupts most of all."

Yad Vashem exists to remind the world what the Nazis did to the Jewish people during the Holocaust so that such an atrocity will never happen again, and the Israeli Air Force exists so that the Jewish people never again experience absolute powerlessness. Understood in those terms, it is not surprising that those who deny that the Holocaust happened also deny the Jewish State's right to exist: Iran seeks to both deny and repeat the Holocaust.

Insights From Epictetus' Manual for Living and Richard Bach's Illusions

For decades, I collected a large number of books--many more than I could read, though I did my best and read a lot of them. Recently, I have begun the process of pruning my book collection to a manageable size, reluctantly yet enthusiastically parting company with books that I realize I do not have the time and/or inclination to read. Yes, "reluctantly yet enthusiastically"--at some level I probably will always have a deep seated aversion to parting company with any book, yet I am enthusiastic about focusing my efforts on reading books as opposed to managing a book collection.

I have also made a determined effort to seek counsel, wisdom and comfort from brief yet meaningful books on days that I know will be challenging emotionally, mentally and/or physically (for example, long travel days involving my parenting time with my daughter Rachel). Last month, I read Epictetus’ Manual for Living on one such day (the specific edition is Sharon Lebell's "new interpretation" published by HarperCollins in 1994). Yesterday, I read Richard Bach’s Illusions. Both books have been in my collection for at least 20 years, yet I had never read either one before.

I wonder how my life would be different had I spent less time/effort buying books and more time/effort reading them, but that would have required me obtaining the realization that it is not possible to read EVERYTHING, which would have been a psychologically uncomfortable admission of defeat (or perceived defeat) that was inconceivable for me to make; only by reframing the issue more realistically (I can't read everything, so I better focus on reading that which is most significant/meaningful) was I able to achieve a more productive outlook. I do not completely regret my earlier mentality, as it is a worthy goal to try to gain as much knowledge as possible; I recall a reviewer noting that Norman Mailer's goal was to be the greatest novelist ever and, whether or not one believes that he achieved that distinction, it was a meaningful goal and he produced works of lasting value while pursuing that bold quest.

The Manual for Living contains several gems that resonate with me. Here are a few:

1) "Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: some things are within our control, and some things are not."

2) "From now on practice saying to everything that appears unpleasant: 'You are just an appearance and by no means what you appear to be.'" Epictetus then advises classifying the appearance as either something that one can control or something that one cannot control, and if one cannot control it then one should train oneself not to worry about it.

3) "Regardless of what others profess, they may not truly live by spiritual values. Be careful whom you associate with. It is human to imitate the habits of those with whom we interact. We inadvertently adopt their interests, their opinions, their values, and their habit of interpreting events. Though many people mean well, they can just the same have a deleterious influence on you because they are undisciplined about what is worthy and what isn't. Just because some people are nice to you doesn't mean you should spend time with them."

Three concepts from Illusions grabbed me:

1) "Like attracts like. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well."

2) "The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."

3) "Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that's all right. You don't tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds..."

I will let the reader ponder five of those quotes without further commentary but I will expound on the second quote from Illusions. That quote suggests a multi-part inquiry: Do you believe that evil exists and, if so, do you believe that good ultimately triumphs over evil, either in this world or in some form of afterlife? Or, do you believe, as the quote suggests, that things which seem unjust to us are in fact part of a larger scheme of things in which injustice does not exist? My strong inclination is to believe that evil is real and that we have an individual and collective responsibility to combat evil as forcefully as possible. Regarding whether or not there is a larger picture/higher truth that we are not able to perceive from our current vantage point, I am unsure both if that is true and if it is relevant; I certainly want to believe that this is true but I also tend to incline toward the view that the Holocaust rendered some philosophies/viewpoints irrelevant, if not obscene and disrespectful to the memory of the innocent victims. I struggle to perceive a larger picture in which throwing live babies into crematoria is somehow equivalent to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. I understand conceptually the argument that the Holocaust was a failure of man, not God, but it is hard to reconcile the idea of a Being who is all-knowing/all-powerful with a Being who permits such horrors to occur.

Reframing one's perspective is a useful exercise in many aspects of life, but much like the laws of physics collapse at a singularity, many philosophies/perspectives that have great utility nevertheless seem inadequate when applied to the Holocaust (and the same could be said of other evils, though the dimensions, scale and intent of the Holocaust are unprecedented).

In the Star Wars universe, Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker that truth depends on your point of view. Obi-Wan had told Luke that Darth Vader betrayed and killed Luke's father Anakin, when of course what had happened was that Anakin had become Darth Vader. When Luke learned the truth and confronted Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan replied that when Anakin became Darth Vader the good man that he had been no longer existed and therefore from a "certain point of view" what Obi-Wan had said was true.

Luke tended to think in terms of absolutes. When he used the Force to perceive that his friends were in danger, he cut short his training and essentially challenged Vader and Vader's forces all by himself, defying the advice of both Obi-Wan and Yoda, who believed that from the larger perspective the highest priority was that Luke complete his Jedi training, even if Luke's friends might be killed. Luke answered simply that he could help them and that after he helped them he would return to complete his training. Is Luke a hero, is he reckless or is he both? How you answer that question depends on whether you believe that the potential death of Luke's friends is an unjust tragedy or simply part of a bigger picture.

In the end, as Yoda later pointed out, Luke's friends rescued themselves and had to rescue Luke as well, which to Yoda's way of thinking rendered Luke's mission foolhardy. Yoda's perception is that Luke should have followed his training path and let events happen as they would, while Luke felt that he had the power and the responsibility to fight evil with all of his might.

During the Holocaust, the Bielski Partisans battled the Nazis with guerilla warfare while also rescuing thousands of civilians and sheltering them from the death camps. One faction of the Bielski Partisans leadership deemed the civilians who were too young, too old or too infirm to fight as "useless eaters" but the prevailing consensus was that rescuing the helpless gave meaning to the Bielski Partisans' efforts. What would it matter if they blew up a few more supply bridges at the cost of letting their children and elderly relatives perish?

Luke Skywalker thought like a Bielski Partisan; do your best to rescue anyone who you might be able to save and don't just focus on your own training/efforts/path.

Yoda (and Richard Bach) may be right conceptually but as a human being who is pained by the injustice and suffering that I perceive (however illusory it may supposedly turn out to be from some larger perspective), I identify with Luke and the Bielski Partisans.