Agora

Copying a Charles Bargue Lithograph

2011-12-22T18:52:00.014-07:00

Charles Bargue was a French artist and lithographer who created a series of “models” for training according to the academic style of art education. I have admired his work
for years, bought a copy of the Charles Bargue Drawing Course by Gerald M. Ackerman, and have fussed around in some effort to learn from it; I was not overly successful. However, this past fall, I determined to make an attempt to actually follow Bargue’s system.

A visit to the internet revealed several examples of artists actually doing the Bargue drawings, and I also found a video tape, The Bargue Drawing Companion, offered by the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto. Although rather pricey, I bought it. Fernando Freitas gives the lecture. I have watched it several times, gathered the tools he recommends (along with some others suggested elsewhere in my studies), and set up a modified training program.

I have also made extensive notes of the excellent material covered by Mr. Freitas, and have determined to study those notes every day as well. I am now launched on, at least, a two-year
study of the Charles Bargue drawing course.

Here is a drawing produced according to Freitas recommendations, applied to a Bargue plate from the Charles Bargue Drawing Course by Gerald M. Ackerman. This post is mostly for my own study, although I hope is will be of some interest to those who enjoy the study of art, and that it might also serve as an example of how determined effort can produce some level of success in all aspects of life.

Plate I, 27. Leg of Germanicus, front view:

Copying the Schema

I divided the plate into the schema and the finished model, enlarging them via my photo shop program to fill an 8 ½ X 11 inch sheet of paper, and started the process.

Tape down the image in a vertical placement; use a T square or measure equal distance from ends of the board to establish a vertical line, and then line up the paper on this “plumb line”.

Construction – block in the Bargue schema, the construction outline. Make sure the outline contains sound structures of the object to be blocked in. Start with large proportions, widths and heights indicated by points.

Frame the vertical plumb line to get distance to right and left and use the horizontal plumb lines to mark high points top to bottom.

Mark “high points” with a tiny cross (+) with the high point established at the center. Measure how tall and how wide; strive for perfection – to see as accurately as possible.

Once the schematic of the horizontal and vertical is set up – actually measure the “widths” of the parts of the drawing. Example: 1) full width – many times in many places, 2) full height – in many places, many times.

Use the needle as a moving plumb line, line up the needle on various highpoints and follow down the drawing to see if it matches the “model”. Keep parallel to vertical plumb line on the model and the drawing. Measure the high points on the schema and check them on the drawing. Check
the horizontal relationship as well.

Once the dots are connected, closely examine the Bargue schema and carefully copy it.

This will produce a copy of Bargue’s “schema”.

Articulation – separation of light and dark: Place finished (fully rendered) Bargue lithograph
in the exact placement – make vertical and horizontal plumb lines on the backing. To do this overlay to trace center and horizontal plumb lines onto the copy of the fully rendered Bargue lithograph.

Measuring contours: Layer info on top – erase underneath. Find edges of shadow. Also – outline
overlapping forms. Map out details of contour and of shadow edges.

Massing in: Divide light and dark with line, then color in up to the edges. Make it uniform – highest contrast of light and dark, (light and dark families). Use soft pencil to fill in shadow shapes – to discover character of shape – as accurately as possible. Go up to the edge of uniform value.

As one Masses in shapes try to see them as some “abstract” or literal shape – such as a dogs head or a snarling wolf, an egg, bull’s horns, or a bear. Check one shape at a time – both positive and negative shapes. Use a mental image of a clock to gage positions. One should flip one’s eyes back and forth to check for differences. Make adjustments with either the pencil or the eraser. Tap the eraser gently to lift off dark marks.

At this point, A two tone drawing has been produced, the white o the paper and a single, flat, standard tone to represent the dark.

Freitas recommends tracing a copy of the “cheep white paper” drawing onto a sheet of Stonehenge paper for producing the final drawing. For the drawing I am showing here, I do not do this. Rather, I go on to follow his “modeling” and “rendering” instructions
directly on top of the “silhouette” shown above.

For this drawing, I have continued to work on the “cheep white” paper. At present my study
entails doing the selected Bargue copies in a wire bound Strathmore sketch pad. So I applied the finish work directly to the “silhouette” which Freitas calls the “carton”.

A. Massing in the Shadows. (*These steps were already done in the production of the “cartoon”.)

1. Start by shading around the contours of the shadow shapes. Make sure the pencil is sharp! Use a 2B.

2. Proceed to shade in the interior of the shadow pattern.

3. In the first “lay in”, make the tone as uniform as possible.

* The tonal value should be the predominant value that permeates the shadow. (1 – 9)

4. The second pass at “laying in” continues to perfect the overall uniformity of the value by filling in gaps in the tone.

* Remember, you are only after the one dominate value, do not attempt light or dark tones in the shadow during this stage.

5. In your third, final pass at filling in the shadow, move over to a harder pencil to fill in even tighter, making the tone even and the shape flat.

6. Use the soft kneaded eraser to lift any dark specks from the shape.

a. The pressure that is applied to the eraser can bemodified to lift either more or less graphite.

b.The eraser is a very flexible drawing tool. It can be shaped as a wedge to shape and
clean edges.

* To insure one can erase all marks cleanly, DO NOT press hard in the making of outlines.

7. Light pressure is applied to the pencil as it fills voids in the tone.

8. Establish unique abstract, light and dark shapes. Flip eyes back and forth to see differences
in these “abstract” shapes.

B. Modeling the Darks

Once shapes are in place and the dominate value has been applied, begin to work values inside the shadows to model the darks = rendering the darks.

What is inside the shadows?

Reflected light

Darkening along the edge of the shadow.

Contained shadow.

Cast shadow.

Edges – between tonal values

Hard
Soft
Blended
Lost

These have shapes produced by tones and the blending between tones.

D. Rendering the Shadows

1. Using a 2B, begin to establish the darker values in the shadow.

a. Begin to establish the harder edges on the shape.
b. Using the kneaded eraser, clean the edges.
c. Blend the darkness into the interior shadow.
d. Soften the bed bug line and establish a slightly darker value.
e. As you are establishing the range of values, continue to perfect the shape.
f. Using a sharp tip on the kneaded eraser, gently tap out tone to establish the lighter values in the shadow.
g. Keep pushing and pulling the value until they sit correctly.

2. Cast Shadows within a shadow:

a. Using a 2B, begin to establish the darker values in the shadow.
b. Begin to establish the harder edges on the shape.
(1). By establishing the darkest dark, we are separating the
cast shadow from the contained shadow.
(2). Soften the bed bug line and establish a slightly darker value.

The Light - Rendering the Lights

Half tones help create the illusion of the three dimensionality of the form. They allow the artist to wrap the form. They follow the surface of the form and help us know how much it turns, (how full, round, or blocky) the form is. The geometric forms – cube, cone, cylinder, and sphere – are all found on the surface of the face and figure.

The longer the
transition the shallower the form; the quicker the change in value the quicker the form will turn. Start at the inside of the value and grow out to shape it. Mainly use HB and 2H pencils for lighter tonal values. The darker pencil will overstate the tonal value. Also, work with the eraser.

Modeling the Lights

See the forms to be modeled. Search the entire form and isolate the shapes of shading.

1. Begin to shape the form. Be aware of the spaces of light between the sections of any shadow.

2. Establish darker half tones to suggest the form.

3. Using the pencil’s point, soften the values into each other.

4. Be aware of how the values of the form turn from darks to lights.

Rendering the Lights

1. Values to be considered on the “light side” are lighter, mid tone, and darker half tones.

2. Look at areas of value: how dark, how light, how the edges blend. *Note – the lightest area
is often just under the shadow area or somewhere to the center of a sphere.

3. Consider the direction of light: Value moves from light to dark, or from dark to light; turning the form equals the turning of the light. Half tones change in relation to the change of direction in the form.

A. Modeling the Lights

See the forms to be modeled. Search the entire form and isolate the shapes of shading.

1. Begin to shape the form. Be aware of the spaces of light between the sections of any shadow.

2. Establish darker half tones to suggest the form.

3. Using the pencil’s point, soften the values into each other.

4. Be aware of how the values of the form turn from darks to lights.

B. Rendering the Lights

1. Values to be considered on the “light side” are lighter, mid tone, and darker half tones.

2. Look at areas of value: how dark, how light, how the edges blend. *Note – the lightest area
is often just under the shadow area or somewhere to the center of a sphere.

3. Consider the direction of light: Value moves from light to dark, or from dark to light; turning the form equals the turning of the light. Half tones change in relation to the change of direction in the form.

Finishing the Drawing

After dealing with all of the dark “family” and all of the “light” family, going around piecemeal and dealing with all values in both families, one has produced an illusion of a three dimensional form. It has a sculptural appearance and looks finished.

However, having dealt piece meal one has lost sight of the “big picture”. So step back and review
all areas and see if there has been a loss of contrast. In other words, are some values too close
together or too soft? Consider punching the darkest darks; examine the hard edges. Is there a need to lighten the highlights with the eraser?

This tweaking will give the drawing punch and oomph!

First comes “line work”. Look at how thick or thin the lines on the model (the Bargue lithographs) are and make sure they are faithfully reproduced on the drawing. Examine the edges of the contours of the main form and of all inner forms.

Check value relationships between lines; some will be light, some mid-tone, some very dark.

Second, accenting and highlighting. Carve hard dark lines with the 2B pencil. Also, form a “chiseled eraser” and clean any fussiness or softness next to the darkest darks and the lines that form their edges next to the “paper”, which is the lightest value. *Don’t change the shape of the drawing. Razored edges will pop forms off the background.

Go all around the contours and check the lines for thickness, value, and length. Some will be thin, some thick, some short, some medium, some long.

This produces the finished drawing.

The Bargue Drawing Companion

Notes on the lectures by Fernando Freitas of the Academy of Realist Art,
Toronto.

The Purpose of this Drawing Course:
Learning How to See

Notes by Delose Conner

The Process –Step by Step

1. Progress form simple to more elaborate Bargue drawings.

2. One needs tools, ability, and skill.

3. Tape down the image in a vertical placement.

4. Use a T square or measure equal distance from ends of the board to establish a vertical line, and then line up the paper on this “plumb line”.

5. Horizontal plumb lines – show anatomical horizontal relationships.

6. Reproduce a “first” copy on “cheep” white paper.

7. Use the knitting needle to extend the horizontal plumb.

8. Work from the center.

9. Start with the 2B – the darkest and safest pencil.

10. Hold the back of pencil to prevent making hard, dark, and hard to remove, ridge cutting marks.

11. Do not scratch along with little marks – Commit – sweep gently back and forth. Make a ghostly mark – very light, although visible to the eye. Hard, dark lines will come later.

*Don’t scratch, don’t press down!

12. Do everything in smooth, human circular motions. Use the pencil as an extension of the wrist, elbow, or shoulder; depending on the size of the arc desired.

13. Straight lines must be drawn in small forced line segments.

Measuring the drawing:

14. Construction – block in the Bargue schema, the construction outline. Make sure the
outline contains sound structures of the object to be blocked in. Start with large proportions, widths and heights indicated by points.

15. Frame the vertical plumb line to get distance to right and left and use the horizontal plumb lines to mark high points top to bottom.

16. Measure the high points.

17. Use the tip of the needle and the thumb and fingernails. Hand positions: Horizontal – thumb on plumb line – tip to end. Vertical – two hand motion, moving the needle up and down.

*The measurements do not need to be 100% perfect – do not use a ruler. A little bit of error
allows one to use the eye to correct the drawing.

18. One must learn to train observation skills by measuring how well one can see (check the work). Measurement and correction strengthens one’s observation of nature. Aim to train an accurate eye that can read value, color, shape, and gesture.

19. Like a weight lifter – slowly build “power” by repetition. After building strength for
a year or two, one can wean off the measurement with the knitting needle.

20. Mark “high points” with a tiny cross (+) with the high point established at the center. Measure how tall and how wide; strive for perfection – to see as accurately as possible.

21. Once the schematic of the horizontal and vertical is set up – actually measure the “widths” of the parts of the drawing. Example: 1) full width – many times in many places. 2) full height – in many places, many times. 3) many pieces, for example, the height of the nose, hair, ear, ect.
(the inner forms of the object).

22. Use the needle as a moving plumb line, line up the needle on various highpoints and follow down the drawing to see if it matches the “model”. Keep parallel to the vertical plumb line on the model and the drawing. Measure the high points on the schema and check them on the drawing.

23. Check the horizontal relationship in the way described for the vertical in 22.

24. Turn the images upside down – this fresh appearance of an abstraction will allow one to see flat shapes. Flip eyes back and forth between the Bargue etching and the drawing.

25. Simple Geometric Shapes:

a) Look at isolated shapes – this uses one’s natural ability and strengthens one’s observation skills. Use the needle to examine – don’t erase errors at once.
b) Mistakes are our friends – they teach us.

26. Articulation – separation of light and dark:

a) Place finished (fully rendered) Bargue lithograph in the exact placement – make
vertical and horizontal plumb lines on the backing.
b) Overlay to trace center and horizontal plumb lines onto the copy of the fully rendered Bargue lithograph.

27. Measuring contours:
a) Layer info on top – erase underneath.
b) Find edges of shadow.
c) Also – outline overlapping forms.
d) Map out details of contour and of shadow edges.

*Check by scrutinizing for accuracy.

28. Massing in:

a) Divide light and dark with line, then color in up to the edges.
b) Make it uniform – highest contrast of light and dark, (light and dark families)
c) Use soft pencil to fill in shadow shapes – to discover character of shape – as accurately as possible.
d) Go up to the edge of uniform value.

*In nature there is no such thing as line – only the edges of shapes; this includes those of light and dark shapes.

** Be as neat and uniform as possible.

29. Mass in the shapes as some “abstract” or literal shape – such as a dogs head or a snarling wolf, an egg, bull’s horns, or a bear.

a) Check one shape at a time – both positive and negative shapes.
b) Use a mental image of a clock to gage positions.
c) One should flip one’s eyes back and forth to check for differences.
d) Make adjustments with either the pencil or the eraser. Tap the eraser gently to lift off dark marks.

AT THIS POINT, A TWO TONE DRAWING HAS BEEN PRODUCED, THE
WHITE OF THE PAPER AND A SINGLE, FLAT, STANDARD TONE TO REPRESENT THE DARK.

30. Transferring the drawing to the “good” paper:

a) Cover the image’s back with 2B graphite. Put on a lot.
b) Place the “smooth” or less toothed side of the Stonehenge
paper facing up.
c) Secure the “cartoon” just at the top so it can be lifted to check if the marks are transferring.
d) Use the HB, the harder pencil, to retrace the outline. Don’t push too hard or it will bruise the paper, but one should push hard enough to leave a mark – be sure to be accurate.
e) Lift the pencil at each change of direction – at each high point – so as not to weaken the drawing.

Rules of Light Logic

I. Lorenzo de Medici’s academy:

A. Drawing cubes, cylinders, and spheres illuminated by a single candle.

B. Chiaroscuro – pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without
regard to color . . . the interplay of light and shadow on or “as if on” a surface.

II. Nature uses light to reveal the geometry of objects in two ways:

1. By the way light falls over the form and changes the amount of light and darkness (know as value) on the different parts of the object.

2. By the hardness and/or softness of the edges of the shadow.

*One can accurately represent these changes by properly using the Rules of Light Logic.

III. The Nine Point Value Scale: Segmenting the scale into nine increments from 100% light at a 1 to 100% dark at a 9.

IV. Light Logic – The examination of the effects of light on a three-dimensional form.

A. The simple/basic forms are spheres, cubes, and cylinders.

B. The artiest reduces all natural forms into these components or parts of them.

V. Two common lighting effects exist in nature:

A. Crest lit – the lighting configuration when the lightest light is found somewhere
within the form. *The light, medium, and dark halftones turn away from the lightest highlight in all directions.

B. Rim-lit is the lighting configuration when the lightest light is found on one side of
the form. *The light, medium, and dark half-tones, from the lightest in one direction, move away from the light, turning into the dark.

VI. Direct light produces the following nine value scale:

1. Bright spot (highlight) – where the light is perpendicular to the surface of the form.
2. Crest or rim light – around the “rim’ of the highlight.
3. Light halftone – local value = normal value of the object.
4. Light medium halftone
5. Medium halftone
6. Dark halftone
7. Reflected light – light reflected from a surface onto the form.
8. Bedbug line – the edge where light and dark sides meet. Where the light
falls off the form = core shadow.
9. Cast shadow – a shadow cast on a surface by a form.

VII. The Silhouette – The division of light and dark (shadow).

The massing in of the dark (shadow/negative) giving the artist a light (positive) is fundamentally the most important statement in representational drawing and painting.

A. The artist achieves a likeness of their subject in a flat statement. This = the “graphic” appearance.

B. The bedbug line (shadow edge, core shadow, or terminator line) is the edge that tells the
artiest when the direct light has fallen off the form.

C. The bedbug line weaves over every surface-change on an object. *The purpose of the bedbug line is to describe the form.

VIII. Contained Shadow:

*Note there are two types of shadow; the form shadow (contained shadow) and the cast shadow.

A. Contained Shadow is the shadow pattern found within the form.

B. The cast shadow is a shadow thrown by the form.

C. All shadows read darkest at their edges.

D. Contained and cast shadows can be broken down into: lighter darks, medium darks, and darkest darks.

1. Lightest darks – value found in the contained shadow and called reflected light.

a. *Reflected light is light that travels past the form and is reflected into the shadow.
b. * How light or dark reflected light is depends on how far the reflected light has traveled: greater = darker / shorter = lighter.

2. The value of the bedbug line will register lighter or darker depending on how “fast” or “slow” the direct light falls off the form.

a. Faster / darker = harder edge of value shape.
b. Slower / lighter = softer edge to the value shape.
Note:

* The squarer or sharper the form the darker and harder the edge.
** The rounder or more blunt, the softer and lighter the edge.
3. The darkness and hardness of the edge is dictated by the planes or facets of the form, and the direction of the light.

IX. Cast Shadow (Thrown Shadow) – Does not have a even value throughout.

A. Harder and darker as the shadows approach the form.

B. Softer and lighter as the shadows move away from the form.

C. The interior of the cast shadow is illuminated by indirect light.

D. Again, the values within the cast shadow will darken closest to the form – getting
lighter away from the form.

E. The Penumbra = partially shaded outer region of cast shadow. It’s length gets longer or shorter as it moves toward or away from the form.

X. The Light = The area of the form illuminated by direct light.

*In “the light” one finds: highest-lights, medium-lights, and dark-lights.

A. Highest light = Highlight

B. Medium-lights and dark-lights are determined by the surface of the form falling
away from the direct light.

1. Change of direction of the facets or planes of the surface causes a change in value.

2. The hardness or softness of the edges of values is determined by how fast the form falls away from the light.

a. The squarer or sharper the planes, the harder the edges.
b. The softer or rounder the planes, the softer the edges.
c. Planes facing the direct light are lighter.
d. Planes turned away from the direct light are darker.
e. Darker half-tones are commonly found closest to the bedbug line.

* Note: In essence, the artist must feel with their eyes how light caresses the
form. This feeling is duplicated in the rendering of the forms.

XI. Rules:

1. The light and dark must be separated – the silhouette (the likeness).

2. The bedbug line must describe the form.

3. The darkest light must be lighter than the lightest dark and the lightest dark must be darker than the darkest light.

4. All shadows must be darker at the edges.

5. Shadow edges on the form must be hard or soft depending on how fast the form curves from
the light. Values along the edge must change – darker if harder edged and lighter if softer edged.

6. Half-tones must wrap or vale the form.

* Bedbug line: “A bedbug walking across the surface of a sphere, steps boldly from the light to the shadow. That’s it.” R. H. Ives Gammell

** “Our tiny bug is either in the light, or he is in the shadow . . . The two worlds are totally
separate and no value occurs in both.” Stapleton Kearns

Materials List
Graphite Pencils: 2B, HB, 2H

Erasers: kneaded and white

Paper: tracing paper, drawing paper, and Stonehenge
paper (light gray or pearl gray)

Drawing Board: 18 X 24 inch plywood or Masonite.

Drawing Tools: utility knife, sand paper block, masking
tape, pencil extenders, 2.25 MM knitting needle, eraser shield, and mall stick
or protection sheet.

The Drawing Process

I. The Dark Side - Massing in the Silhouette

A. Massing in the Shadows.

1. Start by shading around the contours of the shadow shapes. Make sure the pencil is sharp! Use a 2B.

2. Proceed to shade in the interior of the shadow pattern.

3. In the first “lay in”, make the tone as uniform as possible.

* The tonal value should be the predominant value that permeates the shadow. (1 – 9)

4. The second pass at “laying in” continues to perfect the overall uniformity of the value by filling in gaps in the tone.

* Remember, you are only after the one dominate value, do not attempt light or dark tones in the shadow during this stage.

5. In your third, final pass at filling in the shadow, move over to a harder pencil to fill in even tighter, making the tone even and the shape flat.

6. Use the soft kneaded eraser to lift any dark specks from the shape.

a. The pressure that is applied to the eraser can be
modified to lift either more or less graphite.
b. The eraser is a very flexible drawing tool. It can be shaped as a wedge to shape and
clean edges.

* To insure one can erase all marks cleanly, DO NOT press hard in the making of outlines.

7. Light pressure is applied to the pencil as it fills voids in the tone.

8. Establish unique abstract, light and dark shapes. Flip eyes back and forth to see differences
in these “abstract” shapes.

B. Modeling the Darks

Once shapes are in place and the dominate value has been applied, begin to work values inside the shadows to model the darks = rendering the darks.

What is inside the shadows?

Reflected light

Darkening along the edge of the shadow.

Contained shadow.

Cast shadow.

Edges – between tonal values

Hard
Soft
Blended
Lost

These have shapes produced by tones and the blending between tones.

C. Edges

1. Hard edges do not require softening. They remain sharp.

2. Soft edge:

a. Using a tapered eraser point, break up the hardness of the edge by gently taping.
b. Using the point of the pencil, feather the tip across the edge, lifting the point as it enters the lighter area. *This will darken the value along the bed bug line and soften the edge of the shadow simultaneously.
c. Using the point of the pencil gently soften (blend) the bed bug line into the lighter shadow area.
d. Using the hardest pencil, the 2H, soften the transition between the shadow and the light.

3. Blended Edge:

a. Using the tapered point of a kneaded eraser, break up the hardness of the edge, travelling further into the dark tone.
b. Using the HB pencil, travel across the transition, using light long strokes to defuse the edge.
c. Using the HB pencil, use small circular strokes to fill in voids at the appropriate value. *The
circular filling will neaten the transition.
d. Using the 2H, blend the subtle shading.

4. Lost Edge:

a. Using the tapered point of the eraser, break up the hardness of the edge and move even further back into the tone. *The tip of the tapered eraser can be stroked as a pencil to subtly lighten the tone over a broader area.
b. With the HB, use the tip of the pencil to build the tone on the lighter side.
c. Using the tip of the pencil, fill in voids in the darker areas.

D. Rendering the Shadows

1. Using a 2B, begin to establish the darker values in the shadow.

a. Begin to establish the harder edges on the shape.
b. Using the kneaded eraser, clean the edges.
c. Blend the darkness into the interior shadow.
d. Soften the bed bug line and establish a slightly darker value.
e. As you are establishing the range of values, continue to perfect the shape.
f. Using a sharp tip on the kneaded eraser, gently tap out tone to establish the lighter values in the shadow.
g. Keep pushing and pulling the value until they sit correctly.

2. Cast Shadows within a shadow:

a. Using a 2B, begin to establish the darker values in the shadow.
b. Begin to establish the harder edges on the shape.
(1). By establishing the darkest dark, we are separating the cast shadow from the contained shadow.
(2). Soften the bed bug line and establish a slightly darker value.

E. Summery – Massing in the silhouette – rendering the shadows, reviewing the shadow pattern.

Examine the completed rendering – observe light, dark, and medium shadow range – work with 6 – 7 – 8 – 9.

Use 2B and HB pencils to achieve the values in the darker range.

*Note – As a beginner – do only darks first, then the lights. Later one may choose to work on dark and light at the same time.

1. Copy the plate from the Bargue book as exactly as possible.

*To familiarize: Observe the contained shadow, the shadow that actually exists on the form and cast shadows that move off the form to the background. These two fuse together to form one large shadow pattern.

* Cast shadows get harder and darker as they get closer to the source. They get softer and lighter
as they pull away from the source.

* In the contained shadow, there is a lighter (whiter) reflected light close to the supporting form.

* Bed bug line is away from the light of the form – softened depending on how quickly the form is turning.

2. Rendering: Blending shadows so one cannot tell where one value ends and another begins.

Hints:

1. Keep the pencil as sharp as possible.

2. Keep looking at the model – to copy exactly the value shapes – copy the character of the edges.

3. Keep working with the eraser.

4. Work as uniformly and as neatly as possible.

5. Repetition is the way to master these skills sets.

6. It is OK to be continually improving – repetition improves technique.

II. The Light - Rendering the Lights

1. Half tones help create the illusion of the three dimensionality of the form. They allow the artist to wrap the form. They follow the surface of the form and help us know how much it turns, (how full, round, or blocky) the form is. The geometric forms – cube, cone, cylinder, and sphere – are all found on the surface of the face and figure.

2. The longer the transition the shallower the form; the quicker the change in value the quicker
the form will turn.

Notes:

*The most important thing is the illusion of three dimensionality.

** When placing the tonal values in the “light” never outline.

*** Half tones don’t have an outline – they have an edge, some are softer than others.

3. Start at the inside of the value and grow out to shape it.

4. Mainly use HB and 2H pencils for lighter tonal values. The darker pencil will overstate the tonal value.

5. Also, work with the eraser.

A. Modeling the Lights

See the forms to be modeled. Search the entire form and isolate the shapes of shading.

1. Begin to shape the form. Be aware of the spaces of light between the sections of any shadow.

2. Establish darker half tones to suggest the form.

3. Using the pencil’s point, soften the values into each other.

4. Be aware of how the values of the form turn from darks to lights.

B. Rendering the Lights

1. Values to be considered on the “light side” are lighter, mid tone, and darker half tones.

2. Look at areas of value: how dark, how light, how the edges blend. *Note – the lightest area
is often just under the shadow area or somewhere to the center of a sphere.
3. Consider the direction of light: Value moves from light to dark, or from dark to light; turning the form equals the turning of the light. Half tones change in relation to the change of direction in the form.

Notes:

* Directions on the picture plane follow those on a map: north, south, east, west.

** Edges of half tones can be soft and defused – even lost.

*** Lightest tone = the paper.

**** As the form turns away, it gets darker.

C. Summery:

1. Observe all half tones in the light side.

2. Never outline.

3. Start rendering the forms from their center.

4. Use HB and 2H pencils.

Accenting and Highlighting – Finishing the Drawing

I. The general review and accenting of the drawing.

After dealing with all of the dark “family” and all of the “light” family, going around piecemeal and dealing with all values in both families, one has produced an illusion of a three dimensional form. It has a sculptural appearance and looks finished.

However, having dealt piece meal one has lost sight of the “big picture”. So step back and review
all areas and see if there has been a loss of contrast. In other words, are some values too close
together or too soft? Consider punching the darkest darks; examine the hard edges.
Is there a need to lighten the highlights with the eraser?

This tweaking will give the drawing punch and oomph!

II. Line work

Look at how thick or thin the lines on the model (the Bargue lithographs) are and make sure they are faithfully reproduced on the drawing. Examine the edges of the contours of the main form and of all inner forms.

Check value relationships between lines; some will be light, some mid-tone, some very dark.

III. Accenting and Highlighting

Carve hard dark lines with the 2B pencil.

Form a “chiseled eraser” and clean any fussiness or softness next to the darkest darks and the lines that form their edges next to the “paper”, which is the lightest value.

*Don’t change the shape of the drawing.

Razored edges will pop forms off the background.

Go all around the contours and check the lines for thickness, value, and length. Some will
be thin, some thick, some short, some medium, some long.

Summary

What is one trying to learn?

1. Learn to see. Drawing is seeing”!

a) Try to master simple geometric shapes; seeing them and drawing them.
b) Learn to see flat shapes. *master this
c) The eye must become more accurate.
d) Look for the iconic shapes of the light or dark patterns.

Ask – what do these shapes look like? How accurate are their size, proportion, and location? Check the accuracy of the different angles that appear in the shape. (angles – short, long, medium, more vertical or more horizontal)

e) Learn to see the light and dark side – keep the two families separate. Learn values
and value relationships, nine values – from white paper to pure black.

2. Learn to read the values. On the dark side: a) lightest b) medium c) darkest dark.

a) Edges are darker than the interior.
b) Cast shadows move from harder, darker edges closest to the source and move away to lighter or softer shadows.
c) Shadow edge is the bedbug line. Softness of the edge depends on how round or square the form is at the bedbug line. The rounder the form is the softer and lighter
the value of the edge is. Square edges are harder and darker.

3. Learn to look into the value of the lights: lightest light, med-tone light, and darkest light.

*Remember – The lightest dark cannot be lighter than the darkest light, the darkest light cannot be darker than the lightest dark.

4. Lean to see and reproduce the EDGES: hard, soft, blended, or lost.

5. The goal is a representational three-dimensional drawing.

6. Copy the Bargue etchings over and over again to reach a high standard in all skill sets.

Appesement

2011-12-11T16:10:00.006-07:00

In 1989, Paul Smith, the Principal of Layton High, asked me if I would put on a Patriotic Assembly for the student body. As a Boy Scout camp staffer and camp director, I had participated in hundreds of patriotic assemblies, so I agreed, on condition that Mr. Smith ask the entire faculty to attend and disperse themselves throughout the auditorium. They would be there. The assembly would start, as all our assemblies do, with a flag ceremony. I had noticed that the students were not quiet or respectful during the presentation of the colors or the pledge. I had and idea of how to fix that. My son Bryon was a Cub Scout, and I arranged for his den to come to the high school to present the colors. I warned him that the students would be talking while he was trying to preset the colors, and told him to stop, lean into the microphone and say, “Would you please be quiet and show respect to the flag of our country.” I was just as I predicted, the student body was all achatter, Bryon paused, leaned over to bring his lips close to the mike, and clearly and forcefully deliver the rebuke. Believe me, nothing shuts up sixteen year olds like getting scolded by an eight year old; you could have heard a pin drop for the rest of the ceremony. As Debate Coach, I enlisted the help of my team. I wrote a little skit though which our Team President, Trent Warner, was able to relate Rulion Skinner’s story of about seeing the flag upside down out of his high school window in the early days of WWII. Telling how within a year all three of the teachers who set it right had died fighting for our freedom. I had three veterans, from the Layton High faculty and staff, talk about their service. Our Agriculture Teacher put together a slide show which flashed pictures of America as the music played “I’m Proud to Be an America”. I had printed out the words to “God Bless America” and the first verse of the National Anthem. Every one got a hand out, and when it was time to sing they all had the words. After the slide show, we sang the national anthem. Then the Captain of the Football Team, Chris Trijieo, stood to tell his class mates how he felt about his country. As he spoke, his voice broke with emotion. Someone in the crowd jeered. “Shut up,” Chris demanded; once again – absolute silence. At the end of the assembly, we all stood to sing God Bless America. There were many tears and the room was filled with a beautiful emotion, joy and pride in our country.

I walked back to my room feeling quite the success. In the hall across from my classroom I was accosted by a colleague. She flatly stated that what I had done reminded her of Hitler. I had manipulated the emotions of the students; she went on to remind me of the murder of the Indians and the evils of Vietnam, then marched off to her class room. There were other complaints, and it would be after 9/11 before we had another patriotic assembly.

It is my belief that Western greatness go back to Achilles, and to every Western man’s desire to be Achilles. Achilles chose a life of Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom, he choose to voyage home to his grandchildren, yet unborn. But when Justice demanded it, he stayed and died fighting for the truly good.

I have long contemplated the “fall of Rome” and long ago came to the conclusion that Rome fell because the Romans were no longer willing to fight for it, that they valued other things more than Roman. I have just finished a book by Bruce S. Thornton called The Wages of Appeasement. Of the many themes he presents, the one that most struck me reinforces this opinion. Thornton’s three chapters, together with his introduction and conclusion, map the fate of those who fail to do their duty. Thornton begins with a discussion of the accession to power over the Greek States of accomplished by Philip of Macedon, he then reviews the disaster of Britain’s attempt to appease Hitler, and ends with an examination of the danger the United States faces from Islamic Terrorism.

As Americans, as the latest incarnation of Rome, as the heirs to Achilles, we value Peace, Prosperity, and Freedom, but we are making two mistakes. First, that Americans are entitled to and can always have these treasures without sacrifice. Second, that all other peoples want these things as well, and can be appeased, bribed out of their goals, by promising them what we have. I wonder if we will survive our errors.

I wish you, who ever you are, would read Thornton’s book, but I know time is short, so I have reduced his 283 pages into something less than twenty.

The Temptation of Hector (Introduction)

In May of 2008, President Bush ignited a political firestorm when in a speech to the Israeli parliament he compared some Democratic politicians to England’s Neville Chamberlain and his disastrous policy of appeasing Hitler: “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American Senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.” (pg xi)

. . . the Roman historian Livy defined as history’s important function: to offer from the past models of “base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.” (pg xiii)

The fear of death and violence inherent in human nature is a constant across time and space, as Homer shows us. Hector’s fear, however, is justified, as he knows he can never defeat Achilles in battle and that his own death means the destruction of Troy. (pg xiv)

Hector’s decision to await Achilles, his refusal to give in to the temptation of appeasement, and his last valiant charge at Achilles even as he know he is doomed are all fueled by honor and its corollary, shame at dishonor. (pg xvii)

Athens and Philip II (Chapter One)

Demosthenes calls on the Athenians to throw aside their “disinclination to do our duty” and instead to act, rather than indulging their “insolence,” “indifference and carelessness,” and “outrageous and incurable slothfulness.” He exhorts them to stop taking thought first for private “pleasure” and allowing self-serving politicians to weaken their civic courage by exploiting their apathy: “The politicians hold the purse-strings and manage everything, while you, the people, robbed of nerve and sinew, stripped of wealth and allies, have sunk to the level of lackeys and hangers-on, content if the politicians gratify you with a dole from the Theoric Fund or a [religious] procession.” (56)

We must make provision for defense, I mean with war-galleys,, funds, and men; for even if all other states succumb to slavery, we surely must fight the battle of liberty.” (58)

Demosthenes repeatedly emphasizes throughout this period that the Athenians are more concerned with their domestic entitlements and pleasures then with protecting their interests and freedom through the provision of funds for defense and through personal service. In his first speech addressing the threat of Philip, the first Phillippic of 351, he scolded the Athenians for efficiently organizing and funding their festivals, with enthusiastic participation of all the citizens, while their military expeditions are mismanaged and starved of resources. These misplaced priorities reflect the decay of political virtue that hamstrung Athens in its confrontation with an aggressive autocrat. (59)

Finally, the decay of political virtue is the most important factor in the loss of Greek freedom. That is, the failure of an important ideal – rather than the attempt to implement some utopian program, such as pacifism in the 1920’s destroyed the foundations of virtue and character upon which political freedom rests and left the Greeks venerable to the aggressor. Citizens who see the state as a source of largess rather than as their own “common thing” in whose defense they must sacrifice their lives and treasure, will be loath to take up the duties and make the scarifies required to protect freedom against those who would destroy it. (pgs 62-63)

England and Germany (Chapter Two)

Once again, throughout this period economic self-interest and political constraints were an important factor in England’s behavior. At the time of the Washington Naval Conference in 1921 and 1922, England’s economy was ailing, suffering from foreign competition and high unemployment. In addition, interest payment on the national debt, which by 1927 was 172 percent of gross domestic product, reached 40 percent of government spending by the late Twenties. At the same time, demands for increasing spending on social welfare programs were increasing. Many politicians agreed with Prime Minister Lloyd George, who “defended spending on social programs both as part of his program to make England ‘a land fit for heroes,’ and as part of a more urgent plan to placate a restless and increasingly unhappy populace. He was, therefore, much less likely to accept cuts in government programs in housing, for instance, than to cut the military.” (pg 86)

This utopian ideal, abetted by a growing pacifism and faith in collective security . . . was enshrined in Article 8 of the Versailles Treaty, regarding the functions of the League of Nations: “The Members of the League recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations. . . . The Members of the League agree that the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections. The Council shall advise how the evil effects attendant upon such manufacture can be prevented. . . . And of course, as we today continue to experience in international attempts to disarm a nuclear North Korea or prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, international agreements or monitors, absent the threat of force, will not deter states eager to possess weapons. (pg 87)

Hitler correctly calculated that he could now blatantly rearm and so no longer needed negotiation and multinational treaties to achieve his goals and camouflage his activities. The failure of the Disarmament Conference illustrates once again that a reliance on diplomatic talk is vitaited (polluted) by the simple fact that any sovereign nation can just stop talking when talk no longer serves its interest. (88)

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, then, the ground for German expansion had already been prepared by over a decade of appeasement fueled by fear, shortsighted national interests, and delusional idealism. (90)

. . . Japan resigned from the League in protest. Any shrewd aggressor could see that the League was nothing but a mechanism for dressing inaction in the rhetorical robes of utopian internationalism, and became even more obvious during the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), when Italy and Germany blatantly provided men and arms to the Nationalists while the League remained neutral. (92)

Here is an important danger of failing to resist hostile actions: any act of appeasement empowers not just one, but any number of other aggressors who may be watching from the sidelines and calculating chances. (pg 98)

. . . “ Mussolini,” Churchill wrote, “like Hitler, regarded Britannia as a frightened, flabby old woman, who at the worst would only bluster, and was anyhow incapable of making war.” (98)

The left was particularly pusillanimous, one newspaper writing, “Hitler has torn up a treaty, he has broken all his promises, but at the same time he speaks of peace and Geneva [i.e., disarmament]. We must take him at his word.” (101)

However, as Churchill later wrote, “Virtuous montages, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war.” (101)

“Only a few hours away by air there dwells a nation of nearly seventy millions of the most educated, industrious, scientific, disciplined people in the world, who are being taught from childhood to think of war and conquest as a glorious exercise, and death in battle as the noblest fate of man. There is a nation which abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective might. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtues, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by Parliament or by public opinion. . . Now they are rearming with the utmost speed and ready to their hands is this new lamentable weapon of the air, against which our Navy is no defense, before which women and children, the weak and the frail, the pacifist and the jingo, the warrior and the civilian, the front line trench and the cottage home, lie in equal and impartial peril.” Churchill ( pgs 108-109)

Chamberlain was horrified by the possibility of war, however, and still deluded about the ability of diplomatic negotiation to defuse a crisis, as well a nursing a vain faith in the power of his personality and negotiating skills. . . . Chamberlain’s delusional assumption that Hitler was a man like himself, interested in peace and amenable to reasoned negotiation, coupled to his personal vanity and the culture-wide fear of war, all found in diplomatic discussion and convenient excuse for avoiding hard facts and making hard decisions. (pgs 114-115)

Fear, misguided idealism, and shortsighted national interests had paved the way for the most destructive war in history, one whose victory ultimately rested as much with luck and Hitler’s mistakes as with the heroic efforts and sacrifices of the Allies. Hard upon this struggle, moreover, came the Cold War and the confrontation with an expansionary, nuclear-armed Soviet Union that the war had turned into a superpower, a conflict that risked human civilization itself. Political freedom was indeed saved from fascism, but at the cost of horrors the effects of which still shape our world today. (pg 119)

The Pacifist Delusion

Also important were organization such as the London Peace Society, which like Tolstoy, whom it called “the foremost and most uncompromising Peace advocate in the world,” believed in societal transformation to abolish not just war but social ills such as alcoholism, slavery, prostitution, and brutal imprisonment. Significantly for the interwar period we are examining, these organizations focused on establishing international organizations and laws that used arbitration codified in treaties to diffuse conflict, at the same time that they agitated for disarmament. Finally equally important for the social and political mood that facilitated policies of appeasement in the Thirties were the socialist and labor movements . . . these movements saw war between states as a violation of their universalistic ideal of human brotherhood and an expression of capitalism’s inherent corruption. “Only when countries adopt a Socialist form of government,” said British Labour [sic.] Party leader George Lansbury in1937, “will the world be finally secure for peace.” . . . George Orwell commented on the pacifism and antimilitarism pervasive in the postwar (WWI) period, particularly among those who were too young to have fought: “Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies. For years after the war, to have any knowledge of or interest in military matters, even to know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, was suspect in ‘enlightened’. 1914 – 1918 was written off as meaningless slaughter, and even the men who had been slaughtered were held to be in some way to blame.” . . . [and there was] famed physicist Albert Einstein, who in 1928 advised people not to participate in any war, for any reason.” (pgs 128-130)

Here we see concentrated all the false knowledge and received wisdom of the previous decades, also evident in the ideas of Nevile Chamberlain and other appeasers: the demonization of the Versailles Treaty as an act of irrational revenge against Germany; faith in unilateral disarmament as the way to create peace; and the delusional view of human nature—even for dictators clear about their aggressive aims—as essentially rational, peace-loving, and fair-minded, and thus amenable to the negotiated settlement of conflict and appeasement of grievances. (pg 131)

Winston Churchill made the connection between pacifism and this malaise in 1936: “We view with the strongest reprehension activities like those of [Labor Party leader] Mr. Lansbury and Canon [Dick] Sheppad, who are ceaselessly trying to dissuade the youth of this country from joining its defensive forces, and seek to impede and discourage the military preparations which the state of the world forces upon us.” (pg 131)

They assumed that people universally were reasonable and capable ration all of determining their true interests, these being a peace and prosperity generated by global free trade. Norman Anbgell, in his influential The Great Illusion (1910), argued that in a world united by trade, finance, and industry, nationalism and the pursuit of national interests through war were irrational because they were unprofitable. This argument took for granted, however, that all people were able to cultivate their reason and recognize their true interests, which turned out to be those of liberal-democratic Europeans. . . . Yet the whole history of mankind demonstrated that war was not a distortion of a pacific, rational human nature, and anomaly reflecting the temporary ascendancy of their rational or a cabal of evil rulers, but rather an instrument by which states pursued their various perceived interests, whether these be rational or irrational, interests moreover shard by a critical mass of people who did the fighting and dying. In short, history demonstrates that, as Plato’s Cleinias put it in the Laws, peace is “only a name; in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other.” (pgs 134-135)

International idealism, in short, fails because the primary objective of a sovereign nation is to pursue its interests, not to adhere to some abstract, universal ideal of right or justice. As George Washington said, “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation can be trusted farther than it is bounded by its interests.” (pg 137)

The climate was the increasing estrangement, if not active dislike, that many in England, particularly among the political and cultural elite, felt toward their own country and its institutions, a loss of faith in the goodness of their own way of life that made it more difficult for many to find the will to fight, kill, and die for those beliefs until it was nearly too late. . . (pg140)

The rise of communism and socialism, which opposed the democratic liberalism and free-market capitalism defining England by the late nineteenth century, attracted many and perforce turned them to some degree against their own country and its institutions. Socialism, moreover, was an internationalist, antinationalist creed, and so reinforced the internationalist idealism. . . H. G. Wells, for example, protested against “the teaching of patriotic histories that sustain and carry on the poisonous war-making tradition of the past and novelist J. B. Priestly considered patriotism “as a might force, chiefly used for evil.” (pg 141)

. . . George Orwell noted in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941): “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality, In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” (pg 143)

Winston Churchill had said. . . “Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come form the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?” . . . “Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told. If, while on all sides foreign nation are every day asserting a more aggressive and militant nationalism by arms and trade, we remain paralyzed by our own theoretical doctrines or plunged into the stupor of after-war exhaustion, then indeed all that the croakers predict will come true, and our ruin will be swift and final.” (pg 144)

And when a civilization that has lost its faith in its country as something worth killing and dying for, is confronted with one that has a powerful belief in the righteousness and superiority of its way of life, then no amount of material power, whether economic or military, can compensate for that loss. (pg 145)

America and Jihad (Chapter Three)

The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich is dominant in the twentieth century. The intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of a suddenly resurgent fan-baring barbarism, except concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a disease of the will of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given themselves over to a craving for prosperity in every way, to material well-being as the chief goal of life on earth. Such people—and there are many of them in the world today—choose passivity and retreat, anything if only the life to which they are accustomed might go on, anything so as not to have to cross over to rough terrain today, because tomorrow, see, everything will be all right. (But it never will! The reckoning for cowardice will only be more cruel. Courage and the power to overcome will be ours only when we dare to make sacrifices.) Alexander Solzhenitsyn (pg 147)

Vietnam Syndrome

It should be remembered that the debacle in Southeast Asia was not a consequence of military defeat, but of a political failure of nerve. (pg 149)

. . . South Vietnamese were in a position to hold their own as long as they continued to have American air support and military resources. When in August 1973 the Democratic-controlled Congress cut off that support and drastically reduced military aid, a North Vietnam armed and backed by the Soviet Union and China overran the South. The cost of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory was of course most grievous for the South Vietnamese: In addition to the 750,000 killed during the war, a million “boat people” fled their so-called liberators, 65,000 political enemies were executed, and another 250,000 died in “reeducation” camps. (pg 150)

“Vietnam syndrome”— doubt about America’s goodness and power, and fear of casualties and foreign “quagmires”— that made the U.S. hesitant to act abroad in support of its national interests and international commitments, just as memories of the Great War’s carnage had had a “paralyzing effect on British generals in the decades before World War II. (pg 151)

The election of Jimmy Carter as President in 1976 put into the White House this new vision of America’s place in the world as less reliant on military power and clandestine activities in order to protect the national interest. And more committed to open diplomacy, negotiating, and a moralizing posture in international affairs. . . Carter believed in the power of principled example to affect the behavior of other nations, even those bent on our destruction and utterly contemptuous of our political principles. Thus defending and promoting human rights, acting abroad in accord with the principles of the U. S. Constitution, and disarmament became the foundations of his foreign policy, all predicated on an acceptance of American limitations and guilt seemingly validated by the fiasco of Vietnam and the depredations of the CIA, both at home and abroad. (pg 154)

These were the ideas Carter laid out in his inaugural address, where he acknowledged the nation’s “recent mistakes,” counseled Americans not to “dwell on remembered glory,” and reminded his fellow citizens that “even our great nation has it recognized limits” and can only “simply do its best.” . . . a few years later in the infamous “crisis of confidence” or “malaise” speech—Carter stressed that “our commitment to human rights must be absolute,” promised that “we will not behave in foreign places so as to violate our rules and standards here at home,” and pledged “perseverance and wisdom in our efforts to limit the world’s armaments to those necessary for each nation’s own domestic safety.” . . . Left unexplained was how these lofty goals and the acceptance of America’s limits could be squared with international disarmament or advancing human rights, ideals that required some level of interference in the business of other nations; or with keeping America safe in a world were a nuclear-armed aggressive enemy pursued its aims with none of America’s inhibitions and with complete indifference to the persuasive power of what we saw as our superior “moral principles.” (pgs 154-155)

Regimes now were to be supported not because they served American interests in countering Soviet aggression, but rather on the basis of their “progressive” posture and anti-colonialist, liberationist rhetoric. The international face of this policy was Carter’s United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, “whose frequent ideological sorties on behalf of radical Third World regimes were sometimes indistinguishable form the pronouncements of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.”. . . More dangerously, he (Carter) pursued arms control treaties with the Soviet Union at the same time he ordered unilateral cutbacks in American weapons development in hopes the Soviets would reciprocate. . . Carter’s delays and cancellations of weapons such as the B1 bomber were met with a Soviet military buildup rather than reciprocal reductions. (pg 156)

Finally, Carter’s focus on human rights created the perception that the United States had abandoned the policy of containment regarding the Soviet Union, and so smaller countries faced with communist aggression could no longer depend on American support unless they conformed to American moral standards no matter how dangerous or inappropriate those might be for any particular country’s security—or for America’s own security and interests. (pg 157)

Thus the Shah was presented as another such oppressor, whose depredations had awakened a justified attempt at liberation and nationalist self-determination, a bit of leftist received wisdom that Teddy Kennedy exploited in his brief run against Carter in 1980 presidential primaries. “The shah ran one of the most violent regimes in the history of mankind,” the historically challenged Senator said at a press conference, decrying the “umpteen billion dollars stolen from Iran” and calling for an “open debate” to examine America’s support of the Shah’s regime. (pg 160)

. . . Carter’s advisers continued to underestimate the impact of religious fervor on events. . . Evident in this assessment are the priority given to material, secular interests, such as running a government and delivering material boons and personal freedom to the people, and the naïve belief that because the Islamists were “religious,” they shared the same moral values as the West and the same view of “social justice, “and that this would provide the foundation for mutually beneficial dialogue. . .” (pg 162)

. . . Khomeini heaped scorn on Western notions of freedom, a “freedom that will corrupt our youth, freedom that will pave the way to the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom. This is the freedom you [secular intellectuals] want; and this is a dictate for abroad that you have imposed. You do not believe in any limits to freedom. You deem license to be freedom.” . . . Khomeini particularly condemned the trappings of this corrupt freedom introduced by the Shah’s liberalizing programs: mixed-sex education and recreation, bars, discos, television, movies, popular music, Western fashion, divorce for women, secular law and government—all were symptoms of “Westoxification.” (pg 165)

Even more troubling than the U. S. dismissal of the religious origins of the revolution was the failure to understand the role of violent jihad in Kohmeini’s program to battle the forces of Western idolatry and materialism and restore the global greatness of Islam. In 1942, Khomeini had written, “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.” Khomeini explicitly identifies this process as a violent one: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam councils against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you! . . . Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!” After he took power, Khomeini reiterated his jihadist program: “The great prophet of Islam carried in one hand the Koran and in the other a sword; the sword for crushing the traitors and the Koran for guidance. . . . Islam is a religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people.” The goal of this jihad, moreover, was the global triumph of Islam: “We shall export our revolution,” Khomeini promised, “to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no God but God’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.” (pg 166)

Carter’s belief that rational negotiations and compromise could establish peaceful relations with the infant Islamic Republic was as delusional as Chamberlain’s notion that Hitler’s grand aims for the German empire based on racial purity would be satisfied by the negotiated sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. (pg 167)

Comes Clinton

. . . under President Clinton, restrictions on the CIA were tightened. . . . Equally harmful to our ability to uncover terrorist plots was Attorney General Janet Reno’s 1995 interpretation of the FISA Act, which led to regulations creating an artificial divide between national security and criminal investigations out of the fear that criminal prosecutions would be contaminated by the illegal use of intelligence gathered by the CIA. This interpretation created difficulties for those investigating terrorist who have committed crimes and thus are of interest both to national security agencies and criminal prosecutors. (pgs 176-177)

Moreover, bin Laden perceived that since the abandonment of Vietnam, the United States was spiritually impoverished and hence vulnerable to terrorist intimidation. “The Americans did not get out of Vietnam,” bin Laden preached, “until after they suffered great losses. Over sixty thousand [sic] American soldiers were killed until there were demonstrations by the American people. The Americans won’t stop their support of Jews in Palestine until be give them a lot of blows. They won’t stop until we do jihad against them.” . . . Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags,” Wright summarizes bin Laden’s theme, “Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. For all its wealth and resources, America lacks conviction. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death.” In bin Laden’s view, American fear, bred of spiritual poverty, would in turn produce American appeasement. (pgs 184-185)

The Bush Doctrine

After the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the murder of 2,973 Americans on 9/11, the United States under President George Bush seemingly had cast off the appeasing delusions of the previous 30 years. The President’s address to Congress on September 20 was a vigorous repudiation of the appeasing policies that had allowed al Qaeda and bin Laden to confirm their estimation of American weakness and fear: “Tonight, we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” The President also put on notice the nations, most obviously Afghanistan, that had harbored the terrorists: “And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” In this same speech, Bush put the ultimatum to the Taliban that Clinton should have after the Cole bombing. And when the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, in October the war began. By December, the Taliban and al Qaeda were routed, through not definitively destroyed. (pgs 198-199)

. . . attacks on the efforts to end the 20-year-long failures and dysfunction that led to 9/11 were nothing compared to the firestorm of criticism that met President Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The wisdom of heeding Demosthenes’s advice to the Athenians not to wait for blows like a bad boxer but to anticipate and preempt them became all too clear in the aftermath of 9/11 and the failure of those entrusted with our safety to connect the dots” and take action against the terrorists. In the case of Iraq, there were many “dots” to connect: Hussein’s past record of aggression against his neighbors and brutal oppression of his own people, as many as 300,000 of whom were executed and buried in mass graves; his violation of 16 U. N. resolutions and the terms of the ceasefire ending the first Gulf War; his continuing evasion of his responsibility to reveal his weapons of mass destruction programs, culminating in the ejection of U. N. weapons inspectors form Iraq in 1998; his past record of using chemical weapons against the Iranians and Kurds; the public relations nightmare of the U. N. sanctions, which even bin Laden mentioned as evidence of American hostility to Muslims, claiming “one million innocent children have been killed”; the corruption of the U. N. food-for-oil program, which provided billions for Hussein to finance the reconstitution of his weapons programs; the weakening resolve of U. N. Security Council members France and Russia for maintaining the sanctions; the cost and dangers to U. S Air Force personnel of enforcing the northern and southern “no fly” zones created to protect the Kurds and Shiites, Hussein’s political enemies and victims; and Hussein’s record of giving aid and succor to numerous terrorists, including the vicious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal and future bin Laden Lieutenant abu Musab al-Zarquwi. (pg 201)

For all these reasons, removing Hussein had been official U. S. foreign policy since 1998, when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Law, which stated “that it should be the policy of the United States to seek to remove the Saddam Hussein regime from power in Iraq and to replace it with a democratic government.” (pgs 201-202)

However, to a left mired in its ancient narratives of American global oppression, the war was like Vietnam, just another episode in a fascist power’s imperialist adventurism in the service of capitalist profits and exploitation of Third World resources. Even before the war started, the left had added the coming conflict in Iraq to its roster of anti-globalization and anti-Israel protest. In October 2002, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators had appeared at rallies across the country. At them, David Horowitz writes, “Spokesmen denounced America as a ‘rogue state’ and a ‘terrorist state,’ likened the president to Adolf Hitler, equated the CIA with al Qaeda, described America’s purpose as ‘blood for oil’ and called for “revolution.’” . . . The rallies and protests displayed the reflexive anti-Americanism of the international left, with its Marxist clichés about “imperialism” and “colonialism” and the evils of capitalism. Worse yet were the expressions of support for the enemy and disregard for the lives of the protesters’ fellow citizens who would soon be fighting in Iraq. At a teach-in at Columbia University in March, an anthropology professor hoped for America’s defeat and “a million Mogadishus,” evoking the 1993 killing of 18 American Servicemen in Somalia. Bin Laden could not have said it better. (pg 203)

The Democrats Politicize the War

. . . in June of 2003 Dean announced his candidacy for the nomination with another repudiation of the Iraq War: “But there is a fundamental difference between the defense of our nation and the doctrine of preemptive war espoused by this administration. The President’s group of narrow-minded ideological advisors are undermining our nations greatness in the world. They have embraced a form of unilateralism that is even more dangerous than isolationism. . . . Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, both of whom had voted for the war and soon were decrying the very conflict they had publicly supported. . . Democrats justified this politically convenient shift usually by indulging the magical thinking that “diplomacy,” no matter how often it had failed in the past, could have definitively neutralized the threat from Hussein: “I’m saddened,” senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle had said days before the war began, “saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.” The Democratic candidates, in the words of the New York Times, now “offered a near-unified assault . . . on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq war.” Alleging “unsubstantiated evidence” in the President’s argument for going to war, lamenting the casualties in Iraq, and predictably complaining about his “failure to enlist the help of the United Nations in conducting the war,” even though Bush had spent several months attempting to get the U. N. to lend a hand in restoring its own tarnished credibility as a force for global order. (pg 204)

This was the beginning, Horowitz writes, of “a Democratic offensive against the war’s commander in chief, which would be pursued relentlessly and without letup for the next year, becoming the focus of the presidential campaign.” The media colluded in this assault, emphasizing casualties, civilian dead, military mistakes, and all the other unfortunately typical by products of modern warfare. When the war started, CNN reporter Pet Arnett let the media bias cat out of the bag when he was caught telling Iraqi television that “our reports of civilian casualties here are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war.” Perhaps the most conspicuous example of the Democrats’ relapse into the pre-9/11 posture of American self-loathing and retreat was the enthusiastic presence of Democratic leaders such as Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle at the premier of Michael Moore’s anti-American cinematic libel Fahrenheit 9-11 in June 2004. Moore’s myopic, far-left ideology is obvious in a comment he made that same month about the terrorists who were murdering Americans and their fellow Iraqis: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow—and they will win.” Such rooting for the enemy killing American soldiers did not hinder former President Jimmy Carter, who along with former Vice-President Al Gore was leading the partisan attack on Bush, from inviting Moore to sit next to him at the Democratic National convention in 2004. Factional political interest abetted by the liberal media thus facilitated a return to the Vietnam-era Democratic Party’s aversion to military force and hostility to its own country, along with its naïve faith, evidenced by Democrats’ complaints about Bush’s “unilateralism” and “failed diplomacy,” in the same diplomatic agreements and transnational organizations that had failed to contain Saddam Hussein for 12 years, let alone keep American safe from terrorists. (pg 205)

Senator Barack Obama called the surge “a mistake” and a “reckless escalation,” and introduced legislation to remove all U. S. combat forces from Iraq by March 31, 2008. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Bush calling the surge “a serious mistake,” while Democrats in both houses introduced non-binding resolutions rejecting the surge. Worst of all was Senator Reid’s announcements in April 2007 that “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” A few months later Joseph Biden concurred: “We need to stop the surge and start to get our troops out.” (pg 208)

Obama Nation

In short, Obama’s foreign policy represented a return to the Carter philosophy that had helped put in power as Islamist regime in Iran and ignited the Soviet global expansion in Afghanistan, Latin America, and central Africa. As Arthur Herman wrote in January 2009, Obama came into office “trailing clouds of Carterite rhetoric and Carteresque ideas about the inutility of military force, the sovereign worth of ‘aggressive diplomacy’ (an incoherent and meaningless phrase), and the need to accommodate ourselves to a world in which we are no longer even an economic superpower, let alone an example to mankind. . . In September 2009, Obama said . . . “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group or people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” Obama is unclear, however, about what to do when a people or nation does elevate itself over others and tries to dominate them through force. . . Obama has indeed attempted to engage repressive regimes that do not share our “interests” and do not “respect” us. He has shaken hands with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, backed Chavez’s disciple in Honduras against that country’s legal removal of him from power, hounded Israel over the construction of apartment buildings in East Jerusalem in order to curry favor with the Palestinians, canceled the missile defense agreement with Poland and Czech republic as part of his attempt to push the “reset button” with Russia, made several overtures to Cuba, and sent diplomatic officials on six trips to Syria, a country that hosts, supports, and arms terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, assassinated Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and facilitates the transit of insurgents into Iraq—during one period, over 90% of jihadists traveling to Iraq, according to the U. S. military. Syrian autocrat Bashar al Assad has reciprocated Obama’s outreach by hosting a confab in February 2010 with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrllah and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And, of course, Obama has, as he himself put it, “bent over backwards” in his attempts to reach out to Iran. (pg 216 -217)

Obama’s “renewal of diplomacy” has been another much touted and praised dimension of his presidency so far, meeting with approval from our European allies and a Nobel Peace Prize bestowed not for the President’s deeds but for his rhetoric. Europeans and American liberals are pleased with this shift from Bush’s alleged unilateral arrogance back to Jimmy Carter’s multilateral humility, just as Obama had pledged to do when he accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination: “But I will also renew the tough, direct diplomacy that can prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and curb Russian aggression. I will build new partnerships to defeat the threats of the 21^st century: terrorism and nuclear proliferation; poverty and genocide; climate change and disease.” In Obama’s inaugural address, this outreach was specifically directed at Muslim nations, many of which provided the foot soldiers of jihad: “to the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” and he pledged that “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Obama has delivered on this promise, predicating his outreach, as did Jimmy Carter, on the recognition of our own “culpabilities and shortcomings” (pg 220)

Sometime in May 2009, Obama sent a personal letter to Khamenei calling for “co-operation in regional and bilateral relations,” a missive no more successful than Jimmy Carter’s letter to Khomeini during the hostage crisis. In response, the regime initiated a brutal crackdown on the protests against the rigged June 12 presidential election, protests Khamenei attributed to American “agents” and their provocations. Not even Obama’s delay in speaking out against the attacks on protesters mollified the ayatollah. Indeed, during the height of the mullahs’ crack down on the protesters, the State Department welcomed Iranian diplomats to Fourth of July celebration in honor of the freedoms the Iranians were denying to their people. (pg 224)

Given the solicitous timidity of Obama’s appeasing responses to Iran’s serial hostile behavior—arming and training the killers of American troops, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, nurturing terrorist organizations, threatening to destroy our ally Israel, and imprisoning three U. S. citizens on the pretext they are “spies”—it is no wonder that the two deadlines (in September and December 2009) Obama set for Iran to come clean on its nuclear program, and the accompanying empty threats that have attended these deadlines, have been contemptuously ignored. (pg 224)

The Power of Terrorism

. . . as bin Laden puts it, “two separate camps—one of faith, where there is no hypocrisy, and one of infidelity. . . The infidels are full a of doubt, fear, and self-loathing, and so are unwilling not just to die and kill for their beliefs, but even to discomfort the enemy or endure the mendacious , self-interested calumny of other nations. In this fight, the material and economic superiority of the infidel is great, but the spiritual power of the believer is greater: “Do not let your strength and modern arms fool you,” bin Laden has warned Americans, “For they but win a few battles yet lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are greater, and the end result is the most important thing.” Whether this Islamist estimation of America is accurate or a fatal misjudgment—as it briefly appeared to be in the aftermath of 9/11—will become clear in the coming years. (pg 227)

Modern terror attacks derive their power precisely from being unexpected and seemingly random, occurring not during war but in peace—in the case of 9/11, literally coming out of the clear blue sky. Such attacks intrude into our daily lives and the spaces in which we travel and work, puncturing the cocoon of security from violence that we think our wealth and technology and progress have provided. Hence terrorist violence creates a chronic anxiety that, unlike attacks during war, has no imaginable end brought by the victory or surrender that ends conventional wars, and so is even more demoralizing and conducive to appeasing policies. (pg 232)

. . . violence or the threat of violence has been frequently directed against those in the West who “insult” Allah, Islam, or the Prophet . . . The 2004 brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam by a second-generation Moroccan immigrant angered over the film Submission, which criticizes Islam’s subordination of women; the riots, death threats, and at least 139 dead following a Danish newspaper’s publication in 2005 of innocuous cartoons that used depictions of Mohammed not to insult Islam but to defend free speech. The violence that followed Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg address, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor criticizing Mohammed for theologizing violence, an estimation confirmed by the subsequent riots, vandalizing of Christian churches, murder of a nun in Somalia, and kidnapping and beheading of a priest in Iraq—these are the more famous recent instances of Muslim violence striking directly at the heart of Western freedom. (pg 234)

In America, Yale University Press in 2009 decided not to reprint the cartoons and other images of Mohammed in a book about the controversy, citing “an appreciable chance of violence occurring if either the cartoons or other depictions of the Prophet Muhammad were printed . . . a few months later the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art pulled from public view its artworks depicting Mohammed. After the Pope’s Regensburg speech, the New York Times opined, “It is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain,” and advised the Pope “to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating the words can also heal.” Whether what the Pope quoted was true or no not didn’t matter to the Times. Rather than defend a central right of Western political freedom against those who would use force to limit it, many in the West instead capitulate to Muslim violence, masking their fear with the therapeutic “sensitivity” and “respect” seldom granted to any other faith. (pg 236)

Supping with the Jihadist Devils

This jihadist indictment of America . . . has helped to forge what David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance,” despite the homophobia, misogyny, intolerance, and religious obscurantism that should make the jihadists the mortal enemies of liberal and leftists. This alliance, first created inteh1960s by the left’s tactical embrace of the terrorist PLO, quickly manifested itself in the aftermath of 9/11, when leftist commentators engaged in irrational, unfounded, ignorant, irrelevant, and at times bizarre criticism of the United States that in effect rationalize and confirmed al Qaeda’s own justifications for murder. The dean of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School advised us to “think about our own history, what we did in World War II to Japanese citizens by interning them”. . . A journalist at the University of North Carolina teach-in wanted the President to apologize to “all the millions of victims of American imperialism” . . . Another professor . . . opined that the “ultimate cause [of 9/11] is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades”. . . The premier practitioner of this species of fantastic complaint is MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who when the war in Afghanistan started accused the U.S. of intentionally starving three to four million Afghans in a “silent genocide”; like Hamas, interpreted the 9/11 attacks as justified payback for American “depredations” against the Third World and American Indians; and while on tour in Islamabad, echoed the Islamist charge that the U.S. is the “world’s biggest terrorist state” and the war in Afghanistan the “worse kind of terrorism.” (pgs 249-250)

Statements such as these reflect the post-Vietnam narrative of American evil and culpability, a self-loathing brew of historical ignorance, juvenile utopianism, specious moral equivalence, and reflexive anti-American condemnation that for over three decades has constituted the received wisdom of liberal intellectuals in the universities and the media. As such, it has been a powerful political and cultural force for appeasement by eroding our will to fight and by undermining our confidence that the fight is just and so worth the cost in blood and treasure. And it confirmed the jihadists’ estimation that we are weak and corrupt, our civilization resting on “foundations of straw.” As bin Laden said . . . “every Westerner is presumed guilty until proven innocent,” as French social critic Pascal Bruckner puts it. As a result, Bruckner continues, “We Europeans have been raised to detest ourselves, certain that within our world, there is a certain essential evil that must be relentlessly atoned for. This evil is known by two terms—colonialism and imperialism.” (pg 251)

If bin Laden and the Islamists have “hijacked” and “distorted” Islam, where is the mainstream Muslim protest against such a desecration of their faith? “Nowhere in [the Islamic world],” Robert Spencer writes, “is there a significant anti-jihad, anti-al Qaeda, or anti-bin Laden movement; while Muslims worldwide rioted over cartoons in a Danish newspaper and remarks by Pope Benedict XVI, they have never rioted over Osama bin Laden’s supposed hijacking of their faith.” (pg 260)

Sniggering at Patriotism

. . . American appeasement reflects the decline of Patriotism, the loyalty to and affection for one’s country and its beliefs, and the willingness to fight, kill, and die to protect the homeland that has made us what we are. Yet for many American who no longer believe in their country’s goodness, such “patriotic pride is morally dangerous,” as philosopher Martha Nussbaum claims, for we should give allegiance to “the moral community made up of all human beings.” Believing in this non-existent “world community,” such people are quick to attribute all the world’s ills to the freest and most benign global power in all of history. Thus, ever since the Vietnam War we have witnessed American Citizens who benefit from the freedom and prosperity of their homeland actively supporting and encouraging an enemy who is killing their fellow citizens, an enemy who despises all the freedoms and human rights America’s critic enjoy and claim to cherish. Such corrosive attitudes are dangerous . . . Indeed, this disdain of patriotism which Orwell in the 1940s thought was limited to many English intellectuals, has become received wisdom in the United States and is considered a sign of cosmopolitan sophistication even by many outside the intellectual class. (pgs 266-267)

Volunteer Dhimmi

All these appeasing behaviors—born of fear, self-flagellating guilt over presumed historical crimes, multicultural fantasies about non-Western “other,” deprecation of religion and spiritual motives, disdain for America, and delusional ideals about some international “harmony of interests” and the transnational institutions that through diplomatic negotiation can resolve disputes better than force—such behaviors conform to the traditional Islamic notion of the dhimmi, the “subjugated, non-Muslim individuals or people that accept there restrictive and humiliating subordination to the ascendant Islamic power to avoid enslavement or death,”. . . [These submissions], to many traditional Muslims, are signs of fear born of spiritual weakness and a lack of confidence in our beliefs as something worth killing and dying for. Rather than signs of our superiority, they are instead interpreted as acknowledgments of Islam’s; superiority. . . (pg 269)

The appeasement of jihad, then, ultimately reflects failure of imagination akin to that of many English writers and leaders in the 1930s, who could not imagine a leader possessing the murderous fanaticism of an Adolf Hitler. This strange sort of ethnocentrism assumes that the whole world believes as we do and desires the same goods and ends. (pg 269)

“So whoever has realized,” bin Laden told Al Jazeera, “that the rewards of this world are few and that the next world is better and more permanent, he is the one who responds to the commands of God almighty” to wage jihad, thereby “showing that this life, this world, is an illusory pleasure.” (pg 269)

In short, as bin Laden and other Islamists continually remind us, because they have this conviction, they love death more than we love life, echoing the words of Khalid ibn al-Walid in 636 [AD] before the battle of Qadisiyya against the Persians: “I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.” For men such as these, negotiation, compromise, tolerance, protestations of respect, promises of democratic freedom, and materialist bribes will have little effect. Only a demonstrated, relentless willingness to take them at their word and give them what they love will end their aggression. (pg 270)

The Hamlet of Nations (Conclusion)

We cannot allow ourselves to become the Hamlet of Nations, worrying endlessly over whether and how to respond. A great nation with global responsibilities cannot afford tobe hamstrung by confusion and indecisiveness. George P. Shultz (pg 271)

For all their strengths, democracies are plagued by the pressure of factional or other self-interests on the political decisions made in response to a threat. . . by allowing broad participation in government, gives greater scope to the people’s shortsighted passions and interests at the expense of long-term calculation, and allows impatience with sacrifice and suffering to affect policy. . . The people are more apt to feel than to reason; and if their present sufferings are great, it is to be feared that the still greater sufferings attendant upon defeat will be forgotten.” (pgs 271-272)

More broadly, this failure of imagination lies behind an ideal peculiar to modernity, the “moralizing internationalism” predicted on an imagined “harmony of interests,” such that, as John Stuart Mill wrote, “The good of no country can be obtained by any means but such as tend to that of all countries, nor ought to be sought otherwise, even if obtainable.” This view is based on the assumption that all men are for the most part rational and that global civilization is progressing away from violence and irrational aims toward the goods Westerners prize and desire. . . These assumptions lay behind the creation for first the League of Nations and then the United Nations, still the premier global exemplar of these views, despite its serial failures over the last 60 years. And it still informs much of our own foreign policy, which assumes that all peoples are “just like us”, and so they desire the political freedom and material prosperity we prize, and prefer peace to war, deliberation to violence, material goods to spiritual, and getting along with other states to dominating them. (pgs 274-275)

The United nations has become what Churchill feared, a “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” in which those states without the courage of their convictions substitute talk for action and those pursuing their own malignant aims, like the jihadist regime in Iran and its supporters, find the procedural camouflage and global respectability that further their designs. (pg 276)

These weaknesses of democracy, however, are an acceptable trade-off for the many benefits of democratic government. For all its risks of selfish or shortsighted policies, the political freedom that extends participation in government to all the citizens makes the state their “common thing,” as the Greeks put it, their own possession, hence giving them a powerful interest in the state’s flourishing and survival. Moreover, from the plains of Marathon and the waters of Salamis, to the beaches of Normandy and the alleys of Falllujah, this sense of ownership in turn has made the citizen-soldiers of democracies lethal fighters once they have been roused to “a sudden effort of remarkable vigor.” This vital strength of democracy, however, is in turn dependent upon the continuing commitment of the people to the way of life, political ideas, and shared beliefs that bind them into a nation. (pg 276)

Perhaps Pericles, leader of the world’s first democracy, put it best in his funeral oration: Any one can discourse to you forever about the advantages of a brave defense, which you know already. But instead of listening to him I would have you day by day fix your eyes up the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always present to them, and who, if ever they failed in an enterprise, would not all their virtues to be lost to their country, but freely gave their live to her as the fairest offering which they could present at her feast. (pg 277)

. . . when that passionate attachment to the state as the citizens’ own possession and expression of their identity is eroded, when the political virtues expressing that attachment—courage, self-sacrifice, duty—are weakened, when the sate is viewed as a mere dispenser of entitlements and the umpire of conflicting centrifugal interests, democracies are vulnerable to the temptations of appeasement and its sacrifice of long-term security for short-term comfort. (pg 277)

Only the West Can Save the World

In 1947, T. S. Eliot recognized the dangers of modernity’s mistaken assumption about religion’s irrelevance: “The Liberal still thinks in terms of political differences which can be settled by negotiation, and of religious differences which have ceased to matter; he assumes further that the cultural conflict is one which can, like political conflict, be adjusted by compromise, or, like religious conflict, be resolved by tolerance. But the culture conflict is a religious conflict on its deepest level: it is one whole pattern of life against another.” (pg 280)

George Weigel writes, “A West that sees in its past nothing but pathology—racism, colonialism, religious wars and persecutions, sexism, and all the rest—is a West that cannot, and almost certainly will not defend its present.” For the United States, the stakes of failure are high not just for us but for the whole world. Like it of not, intended or not, America has assumed the mantle of keeper of global order once possessed by the British [Roman] empire. If prosperity, freedom, and peace are to have a chance of becoming a possibility for the rest of the world rather than remaining the increasingly beleaguered privilege of the West, then the world needs what Niall Ferguson calls a “liberal empire,” for there are “parts of the world were legal and political institutions are in a condition of such collapse or corruption that their inhabitants are effectively cut off from any hope of prosperity. And there are states that, though weakness or malice, encourage terrorists organizations committed to wrecking a liberal world order.” (pg 281)

The United States is the only country that can perform the task of maintaining global order, if only because it is the only state with the military power and reach to do so. But it won’t if America’s traditional fear of “entangling alliances” and what Ferguson calls “imperial denial” are worsened by a collapse in the confidents that the U.S. is indeed worthy of that role and is better than any alternative. (pg 281)

Both the Roman and British empires declined for many reasons, but one they both share is the loss of pride and faith in what it meant to be a Roman or a Briton, and the breakdown in the passionate belief in their own unique national excellence, inspiring them with the confidence that they deserved their empires and justifying the sacrifices of blood and treasure necessary to defend them. (pg 282)

Why Go to Camp - Final Cut

2011-10-20T21:30:00.007-06:00

Here is the cut and polished version I actually gave. Thanks for all the advice and support.

Why go to the Trapper Trails Council BSA Summer Camps

1. One day a mother marched into Scout Executive Rulon Skinner’s office, slapped her hand down on his desk and demanded, “What can my son possibly get out of a week of scout camp that is worth $25?” Kind of dates my story doesn’t it. Rulon replied, “Why madam, Scouting develops character.” “My son’s already a character,” she said, “he doesn’t need developing.”

2. I have been asked to speak for 9 minutes. I could not give you all the reasons to go to a Council Camp in 9 hours, it will take six days. If you truly want to know, come to camp and see.

3. How many of you have been to Camp Loll? Here are my witnesses, ask them.

4. One Saturday morning I sat at my desk in the lonely quiet time before the breakfast bell. A big, strong man walked into the camp office. “Who was responsible for retiring that flag last night?” he demanded. I figured someone was in trouble. I said, “I guess that would be me.” “I just wanted to thank you,” he said. He went on to tell me he was a Captain in the Marines. I told him that it would mean a lot to the staff to hear what he had to say. At breakfast he stood to speak to us. He explained that that past year he had lead his men up the Valley of the Euphrates during the liberation of Bagdad. His sergeant had been killed, and several of his men wounded, a terrible cost. They did this to keep America free, to ensure that we could enjoy the wonders of Yellowstone. He then told another story. In 1986, he swam a mile in Lake of the Woods. He told us how difficult it was to be a Marine in training, to be a Marine. “And yet,” he said, “through all those trials I kept reminding myself, that as hard as this is, it isn’t as hard as swimming a mile in Lake of the Woods.”

Trapper Trails Council Camps can be that important in the lives of the scouts they serve, the scouts you love.

5. Scout Masters, Coaches, Advisors, go to camp for you. Camps and Camp Staffs are there to serve you, to make you a better leader, to help you practice the methods of Scouting, to improve your troop, team, or crew.

There is training in Safe Swim Defense, Safety Afloat, Climb on Safely, No Trace Camping, Trek on Safely, and certification in BSA Lifeguard. Most importantly Camp offers the magic of Scouting, a spirit that will fill your soul and motivate your service.

6. Go to Camp because of the Camp Staff:

a. I went to Camp Bartlett as a scout in 1967. There I met Sam Young. He was my Forestry Merit Badge teacher, more importantly he was a hero to my whole troop. When Sam walked into our camp our delight was remarkable. Every one wanted to grow up to be Sam.

b. It has been many years since any scout wanted to be me – 11, 12, & 13 year old boys want to be 14 or 15; 14 & 15 year olds want to be 16 or 17; 16 & 17 year olds want to be 18, and your 18 year olds want to be returned missionaries. Trapper Trails Council Camps have all these heroes to serve you!!!

c. The staff models Scouting, they proudly wear the uniform so that every boy will know that the most fun he every had came while participating in a program that swears to do duty to God and country, to serve others, and to keep oneself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Your staff will live the scout law; they will model its slogan, and be its motto. They will be with you from the moment you arrive in camp and stay with you for the rest of your lives. Up before first light; they will serve you through the night, keep your boys safe, teach their classes, guide their hikes, and be the role models you want them to be.

Our camp staffs are bound by tradition and practice to the founders of Scouting, to Seton, Powell, and Beard. Camp traditions reach back to the great men of our community who made camps possible, from Dilworth Young and Vern Dunn, Jed Stringham and Bob Wade, to Bill Wangsgard, Dave Rich, and Dave Wadman. In our camps, scouts sing the songs, hear the stories, hike the trails, see the wonders, and live the legends of their fathers.

7. There are many practical advantages in attending an organized Council Camp.

a. Safety rules, learned, modeled, and enforced.

b. Trained Staff – hike guides, life guards, archery and rifle range instructors and insurers of safety, climbing and rappelling experts, merit badge instructors and councilors (all with equipment and materials ready to use), flag ceremonies, camp fire programs, skits, and fun.

c. Equipment – bear boxes, water systems and KYBO’s, garbage disposal, and dining halls, guns and bows, climbing ropes – harnesses - and hardware, (thousands of dollars of the finest equipment), sailboats, rowboats, canoes, complete with life jackets, and safe swimming area and defense program, a camp site, food storage and “delivery”, menus with preparation instruction included, health and safety officers, first aid lodges, emergency communications, and rapid response systems in place.

Yes it does cost money – but, as the Lord said, “Cast your bread upon the water and it will return one hundred fold!!”

8. You get each other; the worldwide brotherhood of Scouting. Scouts sponsored by varying groups and denominations, from all over the country and the world, all striving toward the same values. We will sing together, work and play together; we will share inspiration and face difficult challenges together. We will rejoice in our diversity and in our unity. We will share answers to questions and the solutions to problems. We will draw strength from our ever growing friendship. We will play the games everyone wins: learn sportsmanship and teamwork, sharpen skills and build health that will last a life time.

9. The most important things to be gained at a Council Scout Camp are the values of Scouting. Our Council Camps will fill the lives of scouts and leaders with God and Country, service to others, and duty to self. Council Camps provide real experiences that teach the scouts as they live the adventure. No watching fantasy lives in movies or on TV, no computer generated escapade. Camp is the real thing. There are no false highs from drugs or fake friends in hate driven gangs. We know the battle you are fighting for their futures; we want to give you a week long weapon to defend them for the rest of their lives.

They will meet God as they live in the wilderness that is His art, and learn to love and protect it, to be the stewards of the earth He has told them to be. They will share with their friends the truth of beauty, where a flower or the star-filled sky equally proclaim God’s glory, where service and love are revealed in the person of a Scoutmaster, a staff friend, a SPL, or a scout; where brotherhood speaks of the God in man.

They will feel the joy of freedom that is America as they live, work, and play in wild lands that belong to them. They are richer than kings, because they are American Citizens. All day, every day, they will lead and follow and share. They will thrill with joy as they pledge allegiance to the flag that stands for freedom in ceremonies where their heroes model respect for their country. They will shed tears of gratitude as a ragged old flag is committed to the sacred fire, symbolic of the respect of a grateful nation.

They will be there for each other; serve each other as they gather firewood, cook meals, wash dishes, dispose of garbage, clean KYBOs and scrub the showers. They will participate in meaningful service projects that will beautify their National Forests and their Camps, service that will teach them to care. They will learn to lead as Patrol or Senior Patrol Leaders, and they will learn to follow their peers as well as their adult leaders and camp staff councilors. They will come to know that they can trust leaders who are their friends and learn to be worthy of the trust of those they love.

They will face and overcome physical challenges they would never dare were not you and the camp staff there. They will swim in mountain lakes, climb to mountain tops, and earn the pleasure that comes from pain.

A Council Camp or High Adventure activity will be the crowning event of a boy’s or young man’s scouting experience. He will only have a chance or two to last him forever. I promise you that this great Trapper Trails Council and the 450 plus summer camp staffers, who are now working hard, who have worked for years, to prepare the summer of a lifetime for your boys and develop character will deliver.

"Why Go to Camp" in Nine Minutes

2011-10-16T20:02:00.008-06:00

I have been asked to give a speech next Thursday night. I was asked to explain why one should take their scouts to organized Scout Camp or to a Council sponsored High Adventure activity, and do it in nine minutes. Here is my effort to date. I would welcome critique before Thursday.

Why go to the Trapper Trails Council BSA Summer Camps

1. When Rulon Skinner was Scout Executive in Utah National Parks Council he dreamed of a Scout Camp high in the Uintah Mountains. He worked hard to make it real, building facilities and staff, and advertising to the scouts of his council. One day a mother marched into his office, slapped her hand down on his desk and demanded, “What can my son possibly get out of a week of scout camp that is worth $25?” Kind of dates my story doesn’t it. Rulon replied, “Why madam, Scouting develops character.” “My son’s already a character,” she said, “he doesn’t need developing.” Let me assure you that no matter how good your scout is – attending Council Summer Camp will make him better.

2. I have been asked to speak for 8 to 9 minutes. I could not tell you all the reasons to go to camp in 9 hours, it will take six days. If you truly want to know, come to camp and see.

3. How many of you have been to Camp Loll – can I ask you to stand. Here are my witnesses, ask them.

4. To contemplate your greatness reminds me of an early Saturday morning some summers ago. I was sitting at my desk in the lonely quiet time before the breakfast bell when a great big, strong man walked into my office. “Who was responsible for the retiring of that flag last night?” he demanded. I figured someone was in trouble, so I said, I guess that would be me. “I just wanted to thank you”, he said. He went on to tell me he was a Captain in the Marines. I told him that it would mean a lot to my crew to hear what he had to say about their efforts. He was at breakfast, and stood to speak to us. He explained that that past year he had lead his men up the Valley of the Euphrates during the liberation of Bagdad. His sergeant had been killed, and several of his men wounded, a terrible cost. They did this to keep America free, to ensure that we could enjoy the wonders of Yellowstone. He then told another story. He explained that in 1986, he swam a mile in Lake of the Woods. He told us how difficult it was to be a Marine in training, to be a Marine. “And yet,” he said, “through all those trials he kept reminding himself, that as hard as it was, it wasn’t as hard as swimming a mile in Lake of the Woods.”

Trapper Trails Council Camps can be that important in the lives of the scouts we serve, the scouts you love.

5. Before I go any father, let me say to every Scout Master, V S Coach, or Venture Advisor, go to camp for yourself. Camps and Camp Staffs are there to serve you, to make you a better leader, to teach you the methods of Scouting, to improve your troop, team, or crew.

We offer training in Safe Swim Defense, and Safety Afloat, Climb on Safely, No Trace Camping, Trek On Safely, and certification in BSA Lifeguard. But most importantly we offer the magic of Scouting, it is a mystic spirit that will fill your soul and motivate your service.

6. Go to Camp because of the Camp Staff:

a. I went to Camp Bartlett as a scout in 1967. There I met Sam Young. He was my Forestry Merit Badge teacher, more importantly he was my whole troop’s hero. When Sam walked into our camp our delight was awesome. Every one of us wanted to grow up to be Sam. It would be two years before I learned he was no older than I was.

b. It has been many years since any scout wanted to be me – 11, 12, & 13 year olds want to be 14 and 15; 14 and 15 year olds want to be 16 or 17; 16 & 17 year olds want to be 18, and your 18 year olds want to be returned missionaries. Trapper Trails Council Camps will have them all for you!!!

c. The staff models scouting, they proudly wear the uniform so that every boy will know that the most fun he every had in his life came while participating in a program that swears to do its duty to God and country, to serve each other, and to keep himself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight. Your staff will live the scout law; they will model its slogan and be its motto. They will be with you from the moment you arrive in camp and stay with you for the rest of your lives. Up before first light they will serve you through the night, keeping your boys safe, teach their classes, guide their hikes, and be the role models you want them to be.

Our camp staffs are bound by tradition and practice to the founders of scouting, to Seton, Powell and Beard. Our camp traditions reach back to the great men of our community who made them possible, from Vern Dunn, Jed Stringham and Bob Wade, to Bill Wangsgard and Dave Wadman. In our camps, scouts will sing the songs, hear the stories, hike the trails, see the wonders, and live the legends of their fathers.

7. There are many practical advantages in attending an organized Council Camp. I will list a few.

a. Safety rules, learned, enforced, and modeled.

b. Trained Staff – hike guides, life guards, archery and rifle range instructors and

insurers of safety, climbing and rappelling experts, merit badge instructors and councilors (all with equipment and materials ready to use), flag ceremonies, camp fire programs, skits and fun.

c. Equipment – bear boxes, water systems, boats, guns, climbing ropes – harnesses - and hardware, (thousands of dollars of the finest equipment), sailboats, rowboats, canoes, complete with life jackets, and safe swimming area and defense program, a camp site, food storage and “delivery”, menus and preparation instruction included, health and safety officer, first aid lodge, emergency communications and rapid response systems in place.

Yes it does cost money – but, like the Lord said, “Cast your bread upon the water and it will return 100 fold!!”

8. You get each other. The worldwide brotherhood of scouting, scouts sponsored by varying groups and denominations, from all over the country and the world, all striving toward the same values and goals. We will sing together, work and play together; we will share in inspiration and face difficult challenges together. We will rejoice in our diversity and in our unity. We will share answers to questions and the solutions to problems. We will draw strength from our ever growing friendship. We will play the games everyone wins as they learn sportsmanship and teamwork as they sharpen skills and build health that will last them a life time.

9. The most important things to be gained at a Council Scout Camp are the values of Scouting.

Our Council Camps will fill the lives of scouts and leaders with God and Country, Service to others and duty to self. Council Camps provide real experiences that will teach the scouts as they live the adventure. There is no watching other’s fantasy lives at the movies or on TV, no computer generated adventures. Camp will give boys the real thing. There are no false highs from drugs or false friends in hate driven gangs. We know the battle you are fighting for their futures; we want to give you a week long weapon to defend them for the rest of their lives.

They will meet God as they live in the pristine wilderness that is His art, and learn to love and protect it, to be the stewards of the earth He has told them to be. They will share with their friends the truth of the beauty, where a flower or the star-filled sky of a summer night equally proclaim God’s glory, where service and love are revealed in the persons of a Scoutmaster, a staff friend, a SPL and a scout, where brotherhood speaks of the God in man.

They will feel the joy of freedom that is America as they live, work, and play in the wonders of nature that belong to them. They are richer than the kings of old, because they are American Citizens. All day, every day, they will lead and follow and share. They will thrill with joy as they pledge allegiance to the flag that stands for freedom in ceremonies where their heroes model respect for their country. They will shed tears of gratitude as a ragged old flag is committed to the sacred fire symbolic of the respect of a grateful nation.

They will serve each other as they gather firewood, cook meals, wash dishes, dispose of garbage, clean KYBOs and scrub the showers. They will participate in meaningful service projects that will beautify the National Forest and the Camp, service that will teach them to care for the land. They will learn to lead as Patrol or Senior Patrol Leaders, and they will learn to follow their peers as well as their adult leaders and camp staff councilors. They will come to know that they can trust leaders who are their friends and learn to be worthy of the trust of those they love.

They will face and overcome physical challenges they would never have dared were not you and their camp staff friend there to buoy them up. They will swim in the mountain lakes, climb to the mountain tops, and discover the secrets of nature.

A Council Camp or High Adventure activity will be the crowning experience of a boy’s or young man’s scouting experience. He may well only have a chance or two to last him forever. I promise you that this great Trapper Trails Council and the 450 plus summer camp staffers, who are already working hard, who have already worked for years, to prepare the summer of a lifetime for your boys, will deliver.

Scrutinizing China

2011-10-01T21:22:00.004-06:00

When I was young, the world’s most successful economy was that of the Soviet Union, NOT! But that is what we were told. Then the light of truth shown through the cracks in the wall, and the USSR revealed a GDP less than that of South Korea and the whole rotten mess crumbled into pitiable bits.

“But actually, he thought as he readjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over fulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boot had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.” (George Orwell, 1984, Pgs. 125, 126)

Realize:

1. China’s wealth is a lie. There is no point is referencing statistics on Chinese wealth, their economy, or productivity, all the numbers are as phony as those pumped out by the Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

2. The “competitive low prices” of slave labor produced products from China are only made possible by cheating through currency manipulation.

3. The supposedly “rich” Chinese live, as did the people of the USSR and those of “Oceania” in squalor and poverty.

4. To keep from starving to death, they must murder millions of their own children, especially girls, through forced abortion and infanticide.

5. Chinese produced products are junk, barely good enough for Wal-Mart.

6. And most tellingly – China has no food, as with the USSR and now Russia, China can not produce enough food for its own people. In spite of the systematic genocide of Tibet, the Chinese can neither acquire the land or the motivation to produce enough food to feed themselves. Contrast this with India, a nation of nearly the same population, no forced abortion, and a growing, young and vibrant population. India has even less land than China, but, without murdering its neighbors or its own people, it is a net exporter of food. Also consider that the United States, the world’s third most populous country, not only feeds itself, but the world, including China, Russia, and Africa. By the way, we feed Africa for free. The U. S. produces this gigantic surplus of food despite the fact that our taxpayers actually pay our farmers not to raise all the food they can. Also realize that in this country we are now forced to face two rather unique health problems, obesity and longevity; fat people who live too long. Go figure!

So much for the inscrutable Chinese.

Barack and the Bean Stalk

2011-09-11T19:55:00.006-06:00

Thursday night I listened to President Obama's "Jobs" speech. As I watched, I found myself thinking, "I've heard this story before." Then it came to me; Jack and the Beanstalk. You know, Jack and his mom are down to their last cow, it's sell the critter, eat the profits, and then die. But, instead of trading the cow for the price of a few day's food, Jack trades Bessy for some magic beans and ends up King of the World!!!

Friday, I asked my students how many had watched the speech. I had attempted to bribe them with extra points - but out of three classes and over 100 kids there weren't more than 5. I had met one of my colleges on the stairs and asked them what they thought. An energetic Democrat she replied she thought it was a great speech. Since my students could provide no argument to my position - I went to visit this teacher during lunch, hoping for a foil to sharpen my arguments against - come to find out she hadn't actually watched the speech. I went down the hall to another Social Studies teacher - same thing. By the end of the day I had spoken with most of my department - none had listened to Obama. Apart from my few bribed students and my wife, I haven't found an adult who watch the performance before the joint session of Congress yet. Perhaps it was the 5:00 PM Mountain Standard Time slot that jinxed the speech - or perhaps it's that they have all heard the story before.

I will give a couple of observations: First, on Obama's plan to pay for his $447 billion Jobs Bill by cuts in the budget over the next ten years. What if a friend came to you, one you care for and have helped out before -perhaps you let them live in your basement and fed them for a couple of years, they have not however proven to be particularly reliable. They ask to borrow $10,000.00 "RIGHT NOW". They promise they will pay you back at $1,000.00 a year over the next ten years. You ask where they will get the money and they reply that they will reduce the amount they take from you each year by $1,000.00 so you can save that much each year. So, by the end of 10 years you will have saved the $10,000.00 and you'll be even. Would you, who have a family to feed and bills of your own to pay, agree to the deal? If so, I'll be over real soon!

Second, on the Free Trade Agreements, which, by the way, Republicans have been trying to get through over the protests of Harry Reid and Obama himself, Obama promises that if Congress passes the Bill, or is it throw the beans out the window, Koreans will be buying Fords, Chevys, and Chryslers. Bogus! They can buy better cars for less money made in their own country. And why can't the "big three" make better and less expensive cars? Because of Unions which won't let American car makers pay a fair wage that encourages productivity and rewards excellence. But wait a minute!!! the best cars in the world are already made in America, and sell very well all over Asia! What car is that? Toyota - made in America in non-Union shops that allow workers to be rewarded more for working harder and better. The solution is right under Obama's nose, but he would rather put his hope in magic beans.

Third, though paying tertiary lip service to domestic production of energy, Obama and his minions do everything possible to prevent the US from taking advantage of its vast reserves of domestic fuel. Instead, wealth flows out of America into foreign coffers and we are forced to buy the fuel that "pollutes our air" from people who want us dead. It seems we can't even sell our cow - we must trade our hopes for fairy tails.

The fairy tail went on and on - I listened, and I read, although I've heard it all before; a nice story but I have never believed it to be true.

Labor Day of Love

2011-09-04T15:39:00.029-06:00

The Camp Loll Committee Chairman, Lynn Hinrichs, put out the call for a crew to come to camp for service projects over Labor Day weekend. I must admit, as the weekend approached, I was surprised at the number of people who reported their intention to attend. Janice, Francisco, Dan Mauchley, and I headed for camp at 5:00 AM Friday, Sept. 2. The Ormes and Jon Hollingshead and Bryce Jones had arrived at Loll late the night before. We stopped in Rexburg to load up on food supplies and were in Camp by 11:00. A steady stream of helping hands poured in through out the afternoon.

This is the crew we ended up with. What a wonderful group of highly talented and dedicated people.

Lynn and Scott Hinrich arrived shortly after Janice and I did, and we sat down for a planning session. I must admit, as Lynn went over the list of "To Do's" they seemed awfully ambitious: shore up the roof, fix the floor in the Rifle Range, paint the trim on the new roof of the "Old Office", store the bear boxes, and level the KYBO in Gros Venture.

By mid afternoon our wonderful and wonder working crew had assembled. In the posts that follow this, you will be able to follow the accomplishments of the Love inspired team, as they completed all this and more.

Here are a few pictures of some of our miracle workers:

Bryce and Kara Jones take a well deserved break between their acts of service. Bryce was up Thursday night and working from Friday morning. Kara didn't get into camp until about 1:00 AM on Saturday, now that's dedication.

Here are a few of our Camp Staffers warming up in the early morning. This crew arrived late Friday night, but went on to work the rest of the weekend. Nelsen Riches, Stephanie Dansie, Jake Dansie, and Taylor Pulver.

Dave Kirkham also showed up close to midnight on Friday, but he and his boys hit the ground running at day break on Saturday. This is Christopher and Nicholas.

On the trail between jobs. Kevin Hansen, Mike Bronson, and Jody Orme, across the back - Caleb Bronson down front.

NOTE: Check out the posts which will appear below to see each of the individual work projects.

Roof

2011-09-04T15:39:00.028-06:00

On Midsummer's Eve, June 20, 2011 we hiked six miles over snow to check out Camp Loll. This is a shot of the Parade Ground that day. One can see the piece of the roof broken off and lying on the snow, also the way the edge of the roof of the "over lap" between the two halves of the building has broken.

I knew this wasn't good, and we worried all summer about how to fix the damage. As Camp came to a close for the summer, and nothing had been done, I began to worry that another winter would come and bring a real disaster.

In this picture, taken last July, one can see how the roof has buckled. Underneath the I shaped truss has broken and the plywood also cracked. The permanent fix will require the sheeting to be removed, a new and stronger truss installed and new plywood sheeting, tar paper, and steel installed.

It would not be possible with our time and resources to affect the total repair, but Lynn was determined to make it ready for winter. I must admit I was skeptical, but I had no idea what the Hinrichs boys could do with a jack. Over the next day I would begin to understand.

Lynn's view of the damage. I like the sun burst.

First, Lynn lifted the broken section back into place with a bottle jack.

A cool cat on a hot tin roof.

Down below Francisco Martinez cut the boards for the "knee braces" that Lynn would install. Scott would trim them to exact specifications and hand them up to his brother.

Up above, Lynn would measure and fit and nail into place.

The two brothers at work.

Braces in place. This job, which, quite frankly, I thought would not be do-able was finished before most of our crew even got into camp.

Bridge

2011-09-04T15:38:00.025-06:00

Last fall the "After Camp Work Crew" put in a beautiful bridge between Crow and Piute Campsites. When we visited the camp on Midsummer's Eve, we discovered the west side had settled, twisting the bridge and loosening the planking. I felt like the old man in The Old Man and the Sea when the shark bit the chunk out of his fish. I couldn't bring myself to look at the bridge the rest of the summer. I can't even find another picture of it.

This shot shows the the three to four inch drop of the west end of the bridge. The scouts used it akimbo all summer. We removed some shims and leveled it a little, but I had pretty much abandoned hope of ever seeing it set right.

Minutes after finishing on the roof - Scott and Lynn were at the bridge. I did find them a bigger jack. They worked so fast they had it almost set right before I could get any pictures or anyone else showed up to help. They left it for the night looking promising. They would be back on Saturday to bring it up to their standards.

The big problem was figuring out a way to lift the bridge without burying the jack in the mud. The swamp was still full, especially to the west of the bridge. The pallet is sitting in four inches or more of water and mud. Lynn used the stone pile itself as sure foundation for the heavy lifting.

By Saturday, Dave Kirkham had shown up with tools, know how, and determination to boot. They soon had things ship shape.

I did help them find some rocks. There were a lot of others helping out as well, but the work went so quickly I didn't get many pictures.

It was some hours more of lifting, stuffing, and adjusting, but soon the whole thing was better than new.

Scott, Lynn, and David pose for my picture. As the historian, I felt I had an important role to play as well.

We await the winter's verdict - but the bridge is level and looking fine, and we are ready for whatever bites might come!

Showers

2011-09-04T15:38:00.024-06:00

One of the most persistent problems at Loll is that the lodge showers leak. The "handicap" shower on the main floor drips almost every time it is used, not only soaking anything stored in the basement but discoloring and damaging the floor and the supporting timbers. We had pretty much decided that there was no protective "pan" or membrane beneath the shower.

Jon Hollingshead and Bryce Jones set out to find the problem and start the process of repair. We had decided that if there was no pan we would rip up the shower tiles and reveal the extent of the problem. Then next spring we would have to fix it. Jon and Bryce began a complicated process of checking for the cause of the leak. Much to our relief we found that there was a pan - the problem was that the pipes in the wall were leaking.

Bryce and Jon determined this only after much effort. Running buckets of water and running up and down the stairs to check the leaks.

By removing the housing around the valve Jon revealed the leak running down. The lumber behind the wall is black with water stains. In this close up you can see the blackened two by four behind the nob.

There was some concern that the tile would have to be removed to discover the problem, but there was no rush to judgement.

After a lot of checking it was found that the shower head was loose and cross threaded. Once removed, properly wrapped and re-installed, the leak disappeared. Thus with know how and perseverance, Jon and Bryce ended a problem which has plagued us for years.

They next turned their attention to the showers upstairs. The one in the center room seems fine, but both showers on the west end rooms leak. This is obvious to anyone who looks at the tiles above the kitchen door or the door to the restroom hall. After much investigation it was discovered that it is these upper showers that have pan problems. The theory is that the shifting of the logs has broken the seal around the pans and thus, when a certain amount of water builds up in the shower floor, they leak. This is why the showers do not leak every time, but do leak when someone takes a longer shower. Jon and Bryce are developing plans to remedy these problems.

They are also developing plans to finally put ceilings into the spaces above the showers. This photo shows the gaping hole that is the ceiling of the handy cap shower.

This is the situation above the north room shower.

This above the south. By next spring we hope to have the materials lined up to make necessary repairs and finally finish the showers.

KYBO

2011-09-04T15:37:00.013-06:00

Once we (I was involved) had gotten the bridge about as far as we could on Friday, Lynn and Scott turned their attention to the Gros Venture KYBO. The support beam running under the bottom log was cut by Jed Stringham back in the seventies (I was involved then too). It has finally rotted out and the building was on a precarious angle.

Here, Scott and Lynn make their plans. A word about the jack in the wheelbarrow. Jody bought it several years ago because we are constantly having to help scout leaders change their tires. It payed for itself this weekend - believe me.

This is a view of the collapsing wall. The under lying support runner - cut by a chain saw hand-mill Jed bought, is literally crushed by the weight of the KYBO and the winter snow.

You can see here how it is rotting out.

The building has smashed the rotting bottom log and pushed the wall down into it.

Jack goes to work. We lifted the building to the level.

While Jack held the KYBO we stuffed in boards.

This is only a temporary fix - hopefully enough to get the building through the winter, while we make plans and gather materials for a permanent fix next spring.

Wooden shims held things temporarily while we dug up something more substantial.

This cinder block rests on the concrete slab that holds the vent pipe. It will be seen if it can hold the tons of winter snow that will soon be on its way to Loll. I couldn't help but quote my dad, well more or less. He would have assessed the project with this witticism, "Like an ox with its butt sewed up with a logging chain. Not much for looks, but hell for stout."

Jed would be proud!

Range

2011-09-04T15:36:00.021-06:00

When we hiked into camp on June 20th we found the rifle range still under snow.

It became obvious that there had been a lot of snow on this roof. Note the huge chunks of snow lying off the north slope of the building.

These blocks of ice are only the remnant of the mountain of snow which stood on the roof throughout the winter. The fact that the building runs east - west puts enormous stress on the structure when the south facing face is clear while the north is still buried.

These blocks of snow must weigh tons. The firing line must face north - it is the only hill that will work as a back for the targets - still it presents a great problem.

Looking down from the drift to the deck of the range.

Throughout the summer the damage so much snow did to our Rifle Range became obvious. The floor joist at the west end of the building broke under the pounding weight of the ice and snow.

Lynn used our friend Jack to lift the break. Once the floor was level - he built a platform to hold the damage in place. A permanent fix which replaces the end beam with something more substantial must wait for next summer.

Lynn placed a chunk of four by four on a platform of trex.

Lynn also assessed that the storage room at the end of the range deck was a problem. Loaded with heavy materials during the summer it puts enormous stress on the flooring.

Mike Bronson, my Dentist, found an unused glue/lam beam in the wood pile and hauled it down to the Range. The boy in the background is the son of Kevin and Amber.

Here Mike and his helpers dig out the drain area to find a place for the beam.

Meanwhile Kevin and company open up the floor above. Russell Stevens carried the cement, two bags at a time, to lay the foundation for the Range. "I was here when this place came into the world," he joked, "I'll be with it to the end." Russell and several others are already under the floor putting the beam into place.

Here is a shot of the beam as it will support the storage room, and the entire floor.

Jack was at work again - lifting the floor to put the beam in place.

Here Jon Hollingshead adds his support to the project.

Other damage caused by the snow is evident. This picture shows the steel roofing bent and broken by the ice.

One can see the twisting of the steel frame that holds up the roof. The steel is bent and off plum; the fear was that another heavy winter would bring the akimbo structure down.

Dave Kirkham and Lynn engineered a fix. They borrowed the come-along from the Lodge to straighten the building. Pulling it straight was like putting up a pyramid - at least according to Dave. I missed the picture of the effort, which involved most of our crew, but did get this picture of a few of our workers and the cables straightening the structure.

To secure the building for the winter required a bolt which in turn required a hole drilled into the steel post. We needed a power drill, but how to run the drill clear out at the Rifle Range. The solution was to pull out the generator Karlo Mustonen gave to the camp years ago. I know it hasn't been started in at least two years; the gas must be three years old, but Scott got it started right up. It was like having Karlo with us once again.

Painting

2011-09-04T15:34:00.006-06:00

Painting the buildings at Loll is a never ending task. Fortunately for Loll, we have a painter's son on staff. Jody painted the entire lodge this summer, and on Labor Day Weekend took on the painting of the "new roof" on the Old Office, the Shower House and as many KYBOs as there was paint to cover.

The first thing was to put on a primer coat on the eves of the Old Cabin. This is how Jody spent Friday afternoon. By Saturday morning it would be ready for the finish coat.

Next came the beautiful coat of Kelly Green that is our "Camp Color".

When I asked for someone to go and help Jody, it was Justin Hansen who volunteered. The two spent the rest of the day painting. First they finished the trim on the Old Office.

Then put a new coat of Super Deck on the shower house. Before any paint could be applied the entire building had to be dusted, every inch swept and wiped.

The Jody and Justin spray on the cedar stain that will protect the structure for years to come.

Jody and Justin went on to use up the rest of the stain on the old Kybos. Next summer - all the other building in camp will be painted.

"Midsummer's Night" 2011

2011-07-30T22:49:00.017-06:00

The Dance begins, two weeks late, with the call to the fire by our resident expert in all thing ancent and Celtic, High King Aaronious.

We sing around the fire. "Hey Ho" and "Green Grow the Rushes Oh", also "Myra Myra" and any other song we know that has that stomping, heart pound beat.

Lots of woad and "blood".

"Two, two lilly white boys, clothen all in green oh, the King and his Tanus. This year we had plenty of fir tops, scores had come down in the snow. The forest was ready to call in the summer.

"They dance round the fire singing songs with their friends."

"I'll ever be with them again."

"Here was a royal fellowship."

The King is carried round the "sacrifical fire".

His Tanus follows, like the fall the summer.

Fire and the light of the moon and stars.

The King and his Tanus place their crowns on the flames.

The dance leader places the ashes of past Kings on the sacrificial fire.

Gods and Heroes of Midsummer Night fill the Great Hall for the feast.

They also pose for pictures.

And, of course, no Midsummer's festival would be complete without a visit from "the Mother".

"And with Them Came the Spring"

2011-07-28T08:34:00.024-06:00

On July 2nd, 2011, the Camp Loll Staff had had enough. We had been kept out of Camp for three weeks by snow, and were determined to get in "no matter what". It had been several days since we had checked the road. We had no idea what lay ahead.

Hopeful and determined we arrived in Ashton, Id just after noon. We had our lunch at the City Park and headed up the road.

The sign at the Forest boundry was rather omonius. We pressed on anyway. The Loll Staff in no mear vehicle.

We made it, cargo van and all to the top of Calf Creek divide, but there, like Gandalf and the Fellowship, we found our path barred by snow. With no mines to pass through we began our battle with the snow. Bill Wangsgard was there to give support.

We only had a hand full of shovels, so the Loll Staff began to clear the half mile snow bank with their bare hands.

After hours of digging we headed back to Ashton. Our heads were bloody but unbowed. We sought help from our long time friends in Ashton, and found a farm house willing to share their yard with sixty Boy Scouts. Of course all the bedding was in the front of the van, so everything had to be unloaded, then loaded back on before we could get dinner and get to bed.

Tanner Johnson, early in the morning and ready for the fight. He would not be alone.

Here we pose with the Spencers, who generously shared their home with us.

Our "big boys" hiked into camp and brought out a lot more shovels. We faced miles of snow, but we dug and fought our way in.

The first vehicles made it in by 2:30 or so that afternoon. The staff and all their gear were in by dark. The winter had not been kind to our Lodge.

The fun had just begun. This is the snow bank just below the Lodge, facing the parking lot.

A view of the drive way from the porch.

We dug the spring out on the 4th of July. We had to make the water test and get the lines purged and hooked up. We were living out of buckets brought down from the hill.

Our Spring on the 4th of July.

On the way back from the Spring, we stopped off at the Apache gate. Our whole camp was full of snow, and the scouts were coming in a week.

We could not even pitch our tents. For most of a week we all slept together in the Jed Stringham Memorial Hall.

When we did get the water hooked up, we found we had a big leak.

Bill and Kent came to our rescue.

We didn't have much water, but we had a great training from the forest service. Ranger Bill Davis gave us the facts, including a session on how to use bear spray. Every staff guide now carries a bottle into the backcountry.

Most of our daylight hours were spent digging snow, opening up the drifts in the camp sites so our campers would have some place to pitch their tents. The crew worked very hard - they worked a miracle. I remember the "spring scene" from Fantasia, where Demeter magically paints away the snow and brings the spring, the Loll Staff was not as quick but just as effective.

We dug and dug and dug. In Oscar Wilde's story "The Selfish Giant" it is the return of the children that ends the winter and brings the spring. Our Legion of "manchilds" fought to do the same. It worked.

It wasn't easy, but what doesn't kill us makes us strong. On July 11th the scouts came, and with them came the summer of 2011.

June 27th, 2011 - One Last Look and the Folks from Texas

2011-06-28T07:17:00.033-06:00

Once more the Loll Staff was on its way to Camp. This time a group of the Staff were headed to Colter Bay in Grand Teton National Park, to meet troop 17 from Austin Texas. The Texas troop had signed up for our cancelled first week at Loll and spent many thousands of dollars on un-transferable airline tickets. The plan, for Texas, give them a week of Scouting in Wyoming, even with the best part of Loll, our Staff.
We also sent off ten of our Staff to Camp Hunt to help them with some clean up projects for a couple of days. It's not being in camp, but it's good to be at work.

In route, we stopped at Hopper Springs in Soda Springs Idaho. Left to right: Leonard Hawkes, Paul Parker, Christian Lippert, Ian Crookston, Jed Powell, Tanner Johnson, and Aaron Bott.

Tanner takes his first taste of Hooper water, he will crave it for the rest of his life.

Aaron gets ready to take another drink.

I didn't take any pictures of the Texans or of John Darrington who met us in Teton Park. I am confident we will have many pictures of them all by the end of the week.

We kept Ian with us and Paul, Leonard, and I headed for Loll over Teton Pass. Here we stop for a pose before the snow covered Teton Range.

Many miles later we were once again passing Indian Lake. The lily pads are coming.

We made it about 3/4th of a mile beyond where we got to last Monday, but this time there was a lot less snow. It was 985 Conner strides from truck to snow pole. Most of these strides were over wet, but hard ground.

The snow at the pole read less than a foot - but it was even better a few feet away, where the road was bare.

The trouble began on the other side of the summit of Calf Creek. Here Ian stands on the beginning of the drift that leads down the shaded hill. There was little open road, and plenty of snow down to the bottom.

The look down the long drift.

From the bottom of the hill, right by the bridge over Calf Creek, looking back up the hill toward the Calf Creek drift. Pretty discouraging - but a look the other way was more helpful.

This is the view looking toward camp. A week ago this was under several feet of snow.

We headed back to the top of the hill. Here is the speed limit sign which was conpletely buried on the 11th.

Here we are headed back to the truck. You can see the downed tree, and the truck in the distance. One can also see how fast the snow is melting.

The drift that stopped our drive. However, the temperature promises to be even higher over the next two days, with warm winds on Wednesday, and more sun, and temperatures in the 80's promised for Friday and into next week.

One last view of Gibson Meadow. No bear this time, although there were two at Ox Bow Lake in Teton Park. There were the first buds of Camas Lily.

The Camp Loll Staff will be headed to Camp Saturday July 1st. Three weeks late, surely the latest opening in my memory, but we are full of promise for the best, if the shortest summer ever.

The Road to Loll - June 24th 2011

2011-06-24T20:53:00.012-06:00

Here are some pictures e-mailed to us by John Darrington this morning.

John lables this picture: "Place where we stopped. "

This is several hundred yards past where we got on Monday. John says the snow is broken by patches for about 3/4 of a mile beyond this point.

The snow is solid but much reduced on the road.

More evidence of melting.

The road up the west side of Calf Creek.

This is a shot of the place we were stoped by snow on Monday.

This is looking back down the road for our Monday stopping place.

I also got a call from Ranger Davis. He says the snow is melting at Grassy Lake at about four inches a day. It was at two feet when he called this morning. It was a warm day in Ashton and we have hope that things will move faster as the depth of the snow drops.

Mid Summer's Eve 2011 #2

2011-06-21T08:48:00.055-06:00

We got about three miles further up the road than we had on the 11th, and were very hopeful that with some shoveling we would soon be bringing our staff to Loll.

Jody, Emily, and Ben at the point were got to in the truck, we are about six and a half miles from camp.

For a short while the road as only blocked by drifts that looked like we could easily push through, but we were soon, with in half a mile, walking on snow.

At the snow pole we found the snow level down two feet from the 11th, but still at about three feet.

The crew at the snow pole. We were determined to make it to camp, stay over night if we had to, and see what Loll was really like.

This is the view down the east side of Calf Creek.

This is the point of the Calf Creek Divide were we usually meet the deepest and longest lasting drifts.

Still on the east side of Calf Creek. At this time I was hoping that we would hit open road as we started up the next west facing slope. It was not to be; we would never see a stretch of open road.

Just over the bridge we ran into a set of grizzly tracks. He was headed west, we were going east. Thank goodness never did we meet.

I would call this a big bear. I remembered how E. T. Seton wrote that the exciting thing about a set of tracks is that the maker is always at the other end of the string.

At one place a stream of run-off cut across the road. This shows quite clearly the depth of the snow on the road.

We stopped for lunch at noon - a few hundred yards below the turn off. We looked up into Yellowstone, just across the week.

Looking up the turn off road.

There was a lot of "water mellon" snow.

The upper lot - not so hot or so dusty.

This is the road down from the parking lot into Loll.

Our first view of Lake of the Woods. As always, my heart skiped a beat - but perhaps for reasons other than joy this time.

The lodge at Loll.

The parade ground and the lodge under snow. You can see some minor damage along the overhang between the two halfs of the building.

Some more minor damage on the lodge. One can only imagin the forces these building face through the long winter months.

The north portch.

The east porch.

Off the south porch. This bank of snow is as high as the porch and blocks the entrance to the basement.

View inside the lodge; looks good to me.

The view from my beadroom wondow of the parking lot. Note the broken pine on the trail to the lake.

Emily in the kitchen. All we need is a staff to feed; well some food and fule would be nice too.

West door.

This tree went down on the north end of the parking lot.

The new roof on the old office. You can see the broken tree and where it hit the edge of the roof when it fell.

The danger lodge - in danger. This picture was taken from the parking lot.

Looking down from the snow drift to the door of the Danger Lodge.

Jody on a "hot" tin roof.

The new bridge. This picture also shows how much snow is in the camp sites.

The Nes Pierce KYBO.

The Rifle Range.

Jody at the Rifle Range. Some slight damage can be seen along the ridge line.

This is a snow drift in camp Nez Pierce.

This broken tree just missed the Staff KYBO, one chunk fell to each side.

Very big moose tracks on the trail to the landing.

At the landing.

Just some proof I actually made it.

Lake on ice.

The waterfront.

Ben easly reached up to top of the Pioneering Area bear pool.

The hike crew and the lodge on Mid Summers Eve. To quote from Through the Looking Glass:

From "The Walrus and the Carpenter:"

If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

The view of Yellowstone from the road out of Loll. I didn't take many pictures on the hike back. My left knee was hurting so badly I was beginging to wonder if I was going to make it. I farmed my pack and camara off on the "young ones" about three miles from the truck. It was carry my camara or carry me.

Once more at Indian Lake . . . like summer, the lilly pads are just peeking out.

At Indian Lake, Jody bagged the first mosquito of the summer.

On the way out, a black bear posed for us in the middle of the road. By time I got the camera out, the bear was on the run.

Enlarge the picture with a click and see that this bear is really running very fast.

Our big adventure passes through Big Jud's. The "Big Jud" will also pass, thanks to Ben.

Midsummer's Eve 2011

2011-06-21T00:12:00.015-06:00

Some pictuers for our friends from Texas. I'll put up some more and some text after I sleep.

Why Wait for Superman?

2011-06-16T14:42:00.008-06:00

At the insistence of a friend, I watched the film Waiting for Superman directed etc. by David Guggenheim. In his voice-over, Guggenheim describes his realization that Superman would not come to save his childhood self. He comes to the realization that a science fiction hero cannot save anyone in the real world. As I watched the “docudrama” I came to the same conclusion about this film fiction.

As I watched, I waited for some reasoned explanation for the failures of America students alluded to by the movie, none was given, I waited for some solution to the problems with American education inferred by the commentator, none came.

I guess one would class the adventures of Superman as Science Fiction; Mr. Guggenheim’s film is Science Fiction too.

Here are fallacies which doom Waiting for Superman to the pile of failed Smallville episodes:

1. False Generalization: The idea that education in Finland or China is better than education in America because of comparisons of some standardized test administered to students in these different countries. This fallacy glosses over the uniqueness of each of the educational systems and concentrates on the measuring tool commonly applied. It is like saying this pile of gold is worth the same as this pile of dung, because it weighs the same, or more aptly, this pile of dung is worth more than this pile of gold because it weighs more. Guggenheim makes no effort to compare the variables which would inevitably skew any assessment of the educational systems he compares. Consider these: what is the racial and socio economic composition of the students tested? What is the language ability, how many Finns were brought up in Spanish speaking homes and taught in a second language at school as many are in America? How many American students were banished from school after the 6^th grade to work in the fields and factories, as 90% are in China, before they could take the tests rather than encouraged to continue despite their disables and challenges, as they are in America? Thus contrasting standardized test scores concocts the science fiction commonly referred to as “comparing apples to oranges.”

One other thought on this misleading assessment of the students from different countries: what is the standardized international test which is given to all the students in all the nations to justly and reasonable compare them? I have never seen such an international test. We may well be measuring in inches what others are measuring in centimeters or in cubits.

2. False Cause, (post hoc ergo propter hoc, after that therefore caused by it). The film presents four schools which all have purportedly excellent teachers and which in spite of socio-economic conditions, racial and ethnic mixture produce excellent students who do well on tests and get into college. The conclusion drawn is that if you can have such excellent teachers you can make any students into successes, rescue them from the degraded state of public education. But this is false cause. The schools: Kipp Academy, Summit Prep, Harlem Success Academy, and Seed all seem to have excellent programs, but what they do not have are the same students that the public schools they deride are required to serve. The success of these programs is far more reasonably ascribed to the admissions process. The schools claim that their students are randomly selected by lottery – this is a lie. Only those students whose parents are eagerly seeking better education for their children take the trouble and face the frustrations requisite to get their children into such programs are involved. In Bad Students, Not Bad Schools by Robert Weissberg which I quoted extensively in an earlier post, Professor Weissberg sights as one of the only reliable indicators of student success: parents’ support and the value they place in education. Thus, uniform parental support and family values centered on education are far more reasonable causes for the success of the banner schools Guggenheim touts than the false cause of teacher enthusiasm he pushes. The heart rending understory of the documentary which traces the dreams of four students is ample proof that Guggenheim and Bill Gates, also featured in docudrama, are fixated on the wrong cause. David Leven and Mike Finberg’s Kipp school offers 10 opening to the 135 desperate applicants. The fact that the winners are chosen by lot does not counter the fact that all the students applying are exceptional. It is the same for the 455 students who endure the lottery for the 110 openings at Todd Dickerson’s Summit Prep, or the 767 who vie for a chance at the 35 openings at Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Success Academy, or the 61 who clamored for the 24 openings at Charles Adams’ Seed school in Washington D C. None of these schools has to accept the legitimate cross section of society that is forced on public schools in every community in our country. To pretend, that any comparisons between them and the real trenches of American Education, is science fiction indeed.

I have nothing against super schools or the super parents that move their children into them. I would do the same if my children were forced into classrooms filled with delinquents and dullards. But this migration of the select not only raises the effectiveness of these bastions to learning, it undermines the efforts of those teachers, even the best of them, left in the public schools which are hemorrhaging good students, the only demonstrable foundation of good schools, while being required to “educate” the dross which remains. Deserted by the students which could save them, public schools face declining scores and declining quality of teachers.

Satisfied with their miscalculation, the tale spinners leap to all sorts of unfounded conclusions:

1. American students are falling behind in the competitive world of modern education.

2. Teachers are motivated by money.

3. All students are willing to work hard, given the opportunity to do so.

4. All people value the goals of liberal education and college entrance.

5. The purpose of education is to prepare workers and money earners, hence tax payers.

6. The only obstacle to universal student excellence in America is the lack of good teachers.

7. That tenure is a universal privilege granted to all American teachers.

8. That the purpose of unions is to protect the jobs of bad teachers.

9. Good teahcers can motivate bad students.

These and many other false assumptions are set out without support, critiques, or counter. We are to blithely accept that Superman is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. That if properly inspired, the man of steel can fly so fast that he can reverse the spin of the earth on its axis and turn back time.

On this rotten foundation of pseudo science Guggenheim and Gates then presume to offer a solution to the problem they have totally failed to understand or describe. The only answer to the supposed failure of American Education is to improve teachers by ending tenure and the establishment of merit pay. To hear Bill Gates, who threw millions of dollars down the rabbit hole of Small Learning Communities; a program which damaged the very educational institutions he pretended to repair; speak of this latest cure for all of American’s ills, is a comedy of errors worthy of a comic book.

I know a few things about education. I know that when teachers do better, good students do better. I also know that bad teachers can do little to harm good students.

What I do not know is how to make bad students good, or by what criteria one can measure the quality of every teacher in relation to every student. Real science cannot pretend to deal with these challenges with some blanket cure-all, superhero solution.

After watching Waiting for Superman I asked my friend for a criterion by which to measure teacher excellence. The success of the AMA and the BAR association in improving the quality of teachers was suggested. I wondered by what criteria the AMA judges doctors. When a doctor’s patient dies – that seems like a failure to me – should all doctors who lose patients be fired? Does losing a case in court constitute a failure for a lawyer, and should all lawyers who lose in court be disbarred?

I asked my friend what motivated other professionals to do their best – and it was suggested that money was the answer. I have long maintained that increasing teacher pay would improve teachers, not by motivating the ones already in service to greater excellence but by stimulating more and higher quality people to enter that field. Though admittedly, some of the finest people I know are already teachers. I would like to see the science.

The fact remains, that even if we get better teachers, which would surely benefit good students everywhere and probably inspire some mediocre ones as well, the sea of under- motivated and even antagonistic students, who lack desire from within or support from without, would still drag down scores on standardized tests and leave those who rely on science fiction waiting for Superman.

Camp Loll and the Abominable Snow

2011-06-12T16:10:00.054-06:00

Only a tribe called the Sacae would neither assist nor be conscripted, 'for they have never been reduced to subjection . . . living in high mountain country, well-wooded and covered with snow. They are also formidable warriors.' Thermopylae, Ernle Mradford (quoting Herodotus)

June 4th, 2011 had long been the date set for the first visit to Loll. A few summers ago I drove into camp on the 5th. The last few summers there have been challenges, but this first weekend in June has always enabled us to gage the date to bring in the staff and start the summer. So, early Saturday the 4th, five of us headed for Loll. Myself, Jody, Quinn, and my grandson Rowan and Jody's son Charlie. The snow has never stopped us before the east base of the Calf Creek divide. This spring we ran into the first snow bank while we were still on the pavement.

We drove through a lot of drifts, here we look back on some we broke through just before the road crosses the creek and narrows. While I brought the truck through, the rest of the guys explored along the road. Just past the bridge they found a long run of grizzly bear tracks.

Note the straight line of the toes and the long claw marks.

We drove on to Indian Lake; not a lily pad to be seen.

Gibson Meadow, which we reached by breaking through a few more drifts, was barely out from under the snow. There was a flock of sandhill cranes.

The were busy with their own spring time duties.

The snow stopped us at the east end of Gibbon Meadows. This is Rowan standing by the snow bank that stopped us. There would be a lot of clear road ahead, but I was not in the mood to dig; we walked up the road a mile or so.

There was not a leaf on the willows.

Charlie and Rowan stand in front of the fast melting snow.

The road was a river in some places.

We reached the limit of any hope of digging through a mile or so before we got to the Loon Lake turn off.

I got to carry Rowan back to the truck. We determined to give it another try in a week. I have to admit I was fairly hopeful.

Before first light on the morning of June 11th, the day we had planned to take our entire staff in for "work week", six of us headed back toward Loll. I was determined to hike into the camp or bust.

We stopped to get our tire fixed at St. Anthony and crossed the highway from Les Schwabs to check out the park. It was under water.

Here are (left to right) Christian Lippert, John Mortensen, and Aaron Bott. They accompanied, Leonard, Jody, and me this trip. I figured I might use some snow shovelers.

We drove past Indian Lake without seeing a snow bank on the road. Where we crossed the bridge at the narrowing of the road we were flagged down by a family who had pulled off the road the day before and got their SUV and camp trailer stuck in the mud. When they asked for help I just said, "we're Boy Scouts".

It took the Toyota and all six of us to get the truck out of the mud. Here is the filled-in mud hole where the truck was stuck.

Leonard with the truck safe on the road.

Not long afterward we pulled out of the trees to see a grizzly on Gibson Meadows. He was grazing on Spring Beauties, and was not at all interested in us.

I suggested one of the younger guys run out and get him coming our way. No one seemed willing to play bear bait.

He was a very big bear.

Within two miles we met some snow banks I decided not to try, unless we could find clear driving beyond. While the diggers worked us old men walked up the road; it didn't look promising so we pulled the truck over and started the hike.

We soon passed Loon Lake turn off, this is looking back on it from the end of a long clear run.

But, the other direction the snow covered the road for most of the rest of our hike.

We were soon in deep snow and knew our hopes of getting into camp the next week were gone, we can only hope that two weeks will make a difference.

This is the road up the west side of Calf Creek divide. Here we got the big truck stuck last summer, and had to rebuild the road in 2008.

It was not just the road that was covered with snow. The unbroken drifts filled the forest to the mountain tops.

In every direction, snow everywhere.

"The winter! the brightness that blinds you,

The white land locked tight as a drum,

The cold fear that follows and finds you,

The silence that bludgeons you dumb.

The snows that are older than history,

The woods where the weird shadows slant;

The stillness, the moonlight, the mustery,

I've bade 'em good-by -- But I can't"

The Spell of the Yukon, Robert Service

After one hour and fifty minutes of hiking, mostly over snow, we reached the top of Calf Creek Divide.

The snow pole showed five feet.

The Crew checks it out.

Aaron Bott and I take a rest.

This is the view down the Calf Creek hill, always the last place to melt off in the spring.

We decided we would not make Loll. We had our lunch at the snow pole. Arron eats his sandwich.

John with his peanut butter and apricot jam sandwich. I made them all myself.

Christian and Jody

Then we headed down. It is so much easier to walk down hill.

Here is a sign that the water can get high when the sun gets hot.

Jody's hand by a moose track.

The guys started picking up beer cans, work in leiu.

Fifty yards before we reach the truck we found a truck which had gone a snow bank too far. We got to do our second good turn of the day. The driver, Alden Dehlin, was 94 years old and all alone in the woods. I hope I can make 94 so well. He had been stuck for two hours.

Once we got him out he gave me his card. Pretty classy isn't it.

Pee Wee posed with us beside our litter collection, then headed down the road; we followed.

As I trudged the miles of snow I thought of the Legend of Bpah Oh Quaidt: "For miles they crossed the rotting snow, but at last the drifts ended. As their tired feet first touched the wet earth they raised a cry of joy. . . where the flowing waters came from the edge of the melting snow, grew tiny white flowers white stripes as red as blood."

The miles of rotting snow.

The wet earth.

The tiny white flowers.

The stripes as red as blood.

Every Thing You Ever Needed to Know about Hitler but Were Afraid to Ask

2011-05-07T07:57:00.018-06:00

In my World History Class, I teach a section on the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. Invariably I will have a student who has heard Marx praised, who has been told the old lie that: “if done right Communism would work, that it would have saved the world.” I wait for this challenge; then I ask the student if he has ever read Marx. When he admits he has not, I introduce the Manifesto and read Ch. 2 with my students. By the end of the reading, the truth, that Marx – like the Devil, was a liar from the beginning, becomes obvious.

It was not long after the Lesson on Marx that, in the same class, the discussion turned to Adolph Hitler. I proceeded to give my opinion of the man, at which point one of the class members asked to know if I had ever read Hitler’s book. When I admitted I had not, the student demanded to know “how I could possible comment on the man if I had never read his book?” He had me. That is how I embarked on this project.

To date, I have read the first volume ( 379 pgs) of Hitler’s book, published by the Houghton Mifflin Company in 1971 and translated by Ralph Manheim and Abraham Foxman, a book of 687 pages. I now feel justified in speaking my mind on him, but more importantly, I feel I can condense the essence of Mein Kampf and spare others the “struggle”. I have selected 125 quotes that reveal Hitler’s thinking on the issues listed in the index below. It would be best to read them without too much critique. I intentionally did not read the introduction to my copy of the copy of the book from which all quotes were selected.

I will preface your reading with a simple observation:

To pretend that the man was stupid cheapens the sacrifice of those who he destroyed and tarnishes the virtue of the heroes who undid him and his wickedness. He displays brilliance and a cognizance of truth, but all is polluted by a mindless hate which misdirects his efforts and damns his goals.

Written in 1924, long before Hitler had amassed any real power, these quotes, nonetheless, reveal his latent power as well as the malignant perversion that will turn it all to not and cause so much misery.

I have placed the quotes in order and I suggest reading them all. This will be a small price to pay for insight into the mind of the monster; a relatively minor investment that will provide an inoculation from deception. One could pick and choose topics of specific interest; this too will be helpful for those seeking to know what they are talking about. Either way, the best way to know what Hitler believed is to read his own words, to examine his own thoughts, and to draw your own conclusions.

Mein Kampf – Volume One – A Reckoning

Index to Quotes

Art: 16, 76, 77

Books: 5

Capitalism: 57

Class: 116

Culture: 109

Debate: 14

Democracy: 17, 28, 33, 64, 99, 122

Education: 6, 24, 61, 73

Ends: 59, 71, 72, 120

England: 34, 35

Force: 39, 40

Free Trade: 33

Genius: 88

Idealism: 90, 91, 92, 93

Interests: 2

Jews: 12. 13, 63, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 105

Lies: 62, 124

Land: 28, 29, 30, 31

Leader: 121

Marxism: 15, 37, 68, 101, 107

Military Service: 36

Moral: 56

Nationalism: 3, 112

Pacifism: 23

Politics: 21, 58, 108

Pornography: 75, 76, 79, 80

Propaganda: 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 119

Press: 19, 20, 38, 42, 65, 66, 67, 104

Race: 25, 70, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 106, 111, 114, 115

Reason: 41, 113

Relativism: 84

Religion: 78, 110, 123

Social Darwinism: 26, 27, 69, 82, 85

Social Security: 100

Socialism: 7, 11

Speaking: 60, 118, 125

Teacher: 4

Unions: 8, 9, 10, 102, 103

War: 1, 32, 35, 43, 44

Workers: 117

Quotes:

1. [War] Only when the Reich borders include the very last German, but can no longer guarantee his daily bread, will moral right to acquire foreign soil arise from the distress of our own people. Their sword will become our plow, and from tears of war the daily bred of future generations will grow. (pg – 3)

2. [Interests] By far my best accomplishments were in geography and even more so in history. These were my favorite subject, in which I led the class. (pg – 10)

3. [Nationalism] In a short time I had become a fanatical ‘German Nationalist,’ though the term was not identical with our present party concept. (pg – 13)

4. [Teacher] Perhaps it affected my whole later life that good fortune sent me a history teacher who was one of the few to observe this principle in teaching and examining. D. Leopold Potsch, my professor at the Realschule in Linz, embodied this requirement to an ideal degree. This old gentleman’s manner was as kind as it was determined, his dazzling eloquence not only held us spellbound but actually carried us away. Even today I think back with gentle emotion on this gray-haired man who, by the fire of his narratives, sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by enchantment, carried us into past times and , out of the millennial veils of mist, molded dry historical memories into living reality. On such occasions we sat there, often aflame with enthusiasm, and sometimes even moved to tears.

What made our good fortune all the greater was that his teacher knew how to illuminate the past by examples from the present, and how from the past to draw inferences for the present. (pg – 14)

5. [Books] Aside from my architecture and my rare visits to the Opera, paid for in hunger, I had but one pleasure: my books.

At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the free time my work left me was employed in my studies. In this way I forged in a few years’ time the foundations of a knowledge form which I still draw nourishment today. (pg – 23)

6. [Education] Morally poisoned, physically undernourished, his poor little head full of lice, the young ‘citizen’ goes off to public school. After a great struggle he may learn to read and write, but that is about all. His doing any homework is out of the question. On the contrary, the very mother and father, even in the presence of the children, talk about his teacher and school in terms which are not fit to be repeated, and are more inclined to curse the latter to their face than to take their little offspring across their knees and teach them some sense. All the other things that the little fellow hears at home do not tend to increase his respect for his dear fellow men. Nothing good remains of humanity, no institution remains unassailed; beginning with his teacher and up to the head of the government, whether it is a question of religion or of morality as such, of the state or society, it is all the same, everything is reviled in the most obscene terms and dragged into the filth of the basest possible outlook. When at the age of fourteen the young man is discharged form school, it is hard to decide what is stronger in him; his incredible stupidity as far as any real knowledge and ability are concerned, or the corrosive insolence of his behavior, combined with the immorality, even at this age, which would make your hair stand on end. (pgs – 32-33)

7. [Socialism] This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty unless the opposing side learns to combat poison gas with poison gas.

It is our duty to inform all weaklings that this is a question of to be or not to be.

I achieved an equal understanding of the imporrtance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses. Here, too, the psychological effect can be calculated with precision.

Terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations will always be successful unless opposed by equal terror. [pgs – 43-44)

8. [Unions] By my twentieth year I had learned to distinguish between a union as a means of defending the general social rights of the wage-earner, and obtaining better living conditions for him as an individual, and the trade union as an instrument of the party in the political class struggle.

The fact that Social Democracy understood the enormous importance of the trade-union movement assured it of this instrument and hence of success; the fact that the bourgeoisie were not aware of this cost them their political position. They thought they could stop a logical development by means of an impertinent ‘rejection,’ but in reality they only forced it into illogical channels. For to call the trade-union movement in itself unpatriotic is nonsense and untrue to boot. Rather the contrary is true. If trade-union activity strives and succeeds in bettering the lot of a class which is one of the basic supports of the nation, its work is not only not anti-patriotic or seditious, but ‘national’ in the truest sense of the word. For in this way it helps to create the social premises without which a general national education is unthinkable. It wins the highest merit by eliminating social cankers, attacking intellectual as well as physical infections, and thus helping to contribute to the general health of the body politic. (pg – 46)

9. [Unions] Thus, trade-unions organization can lead to a strengthening of the social idea in its practical effects on daily life, and thereby to an elimination of irritants which are constantly giving cause to dissatisfaction and complaints. (pg – 48)

10 [Unions] In this way the intrinsic purpose was gradually submerged, making place for new aims.

It never occurred to the Social Democrats to limit the movement they had thus captured to its original task.

No, that was far from their intention.

In a few decades the weapon for defending the social rights of man had, in their experienced hands, become an instrument for the destruction of the national economy. And they did not let themselves be hindered in the least by the interests of the workers. For in politics, as in other fields, the use of economic pressure always permits blackmail, as long as the necessary unscrupulousness is present on the one side, and sufficient sheep-like patience on the other.

Something which in this case was true of both sides.

By the turn of the century, the trade-union movement had ceased to serve its former function. From year to year it had entered more and more into the sphere of Social Democratic politics and finally had no use except as a battering-ram in the class struggle. (pg – 48)

11. [Social Democrats] The official party literature was not much use for this purpose. In so far as it deals with economic questions, its assertions and proofs are false; in so far as it treats of political aims, it lies. Moreover, I was inwardly repelled by the new-fangled pettifogging phraseology and the style in which it was written. With an enormous expenditure of words, unclear in content or incomprehensible as to meaning, they stammer an endless hodgepodge of phrases purportedly as witty as in reality they are meaningless. Only our decedent metropolitan bohemians can feel at home in this maze of reasoning and cull an ‘inner experience’ form this dung-heap of literary Dadaism, supported by the proverbial modesty of a section of our people who always detect profound wisdom in what is most incomprehensible to them personally. However, by balancing the theoretical untruth and nonsense of this doctrine with the reality of the phenomenon, I gradually obtained a clear picture of its intrinsic will.

12. [Jews] There were few Jews in Linz. In the course of the centuries their outward appearance had become Europeanized and had taken on a human look; in fact, I even took them for Germans. The absurdity of this idea did not dawn on me because I saw no distinguishing feature but the strange religion. The fact that they had, as I believed, been persecuted on this account sometimes almost turned my distaste at unfavorable remarks about them into horror.

Thus far I did not so much as suspect the existence of an organized opposition to the Jews.

Then I came to Vienna. (pg – 52)

13. [Jews] In a short time I was made more thoughtful than ever by my slowly rising insight into the type of activity carried on by the Jews in certain fields.

Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?

If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light – a kike! (pg – 57)

14. [Debate] The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic. First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this didn’t help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they changed the subject in a hurry spouted platitudes which, if you accepted them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand closed on a jelly-like slime which divide up and poured through your fingers, but in the next moment collected again. (pg – 62)

15. [Marxism] The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of all recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet.

If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.

Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator” by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. (pg – 65)

16. [Art] Aside from the trash of the more modern artistic development, which a nation of Negroes might just as well have produced, the German alone possessed a disseminated a truly artistic attitude. (pg – 70)

17. [Democracy] The Western Democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. . . .

The parliament arrives at some decision whose consequences may be ever so ruinous – nobody bears any responsibility for this, no one can be taken to account. For can it be called an acceptance of responsibility if, after an unparalleled catastrophe, the guilty government resigns? Or if the coalition changes, or even if parliament is itself dissolved?

Can a fluctuating majority of people ever be made responsible in any case? (pgs – 78-79)

18. [Democracy] Does anyone believe that the progress of this world springs from the mind of majorities and not from the brains of individuals?

Or does anyone expect that the future will be able to dispense with this premise of human culture? (pg – 80)

19. [Press] The thing we designate by the word ‘public opinion’ rests only in the smallest part on the experience or knowledge which the individual has acquired by himself, but rather on the idea which is inspired by so-called ‘enlightenment,’ often of a highly persistent and obtrusive type.

Just as a man’s denominational orientation is the result of upbringing, and only the religious need as such slumbers in his soul, the political opinion of the masses represents nothing but the final result of an incredibly tenacious and thorough manipulation of their mind and soul.

By far the greatest share in their political ‘education,’ which in this case is most aptly designated by the word ‘propaganda,’ fall to the account of the press. It is foremost in performing this ‘work of enlightenment’ and thus represents a sort of school for grown-ups. This instruction, however, is not in the hands of the state. But in the claws of forces which are in part very inferior. In Vienna as a very young man I had the best opportunity to becoming acquainted with the owners and spiritual manufacturers of this machine for educating the masses. At first I could not help but be amazed at how short a time it took this great evil power within the state to create a certain opinion even where it meant totally falsifying profound desires and views which surely existed among the public. In a few days a ridiculous episode had become a significant state action while, conversely, at the same time, vital problems fell a pray to public oblivion, or rather were simply filched from the memory and consciousness of the masses. (pg – 85)

20. [Press] There is absolutely nothing one of these spiritual robber barons will not do to achieve his savory aims.

He will poke into the most secret family affairs and not rest until his truffle-searching instinct digs up some miserable incident which is calculated to finish off the unfortunate victim. But if, after the most careful sniffing, absolutely nothing is found, either in the man’s public or private life, one of these scoundrels simply seizes on slander, in the firm conviction that despite a thousand refutations something always sticks and , moreover, through the immediate and hundredfold repetition of his defamations by all his accomplices, any resist and on the part of the victim is in most cases utterly impossible; and it must be borne in mind that this rabble never acts out of motives which might seem credible or even understandable to the rest of humanity. God forbid! While one of the scum is attacking his beloved fellow men in the most contemptible fashion, the octopus covers himself with a veritable cloud of respectability and unctuous phrases, prates about ‘journalistic duty’ and such-like lies . . . (pg – 86)

21. [Politics] Never will one of these representative of the people honor a superior truth of his own accord, and place himself in its service.

No, this is something that not a single one of them will do unless he has reason to hope that by such a shift he may save his mandate for one more session. (pg – 104)

22. [ Democracy] Thus, for example, they would indignantly oppose any attempt at a dictatorship, even if it was represented by a Frederick the Great and the momentary political comedians of a parliamentary majority were incapable dwarfs or really inferior characters, just because the law of democracy seems holier to such a principle-monger that the welfare of a nation. The one will therefore defend the worst tyranny, a tyranny which is ruining the people, since at the moment it embodies ‘state authority’ while the other rejects even the most beneficial government as soon as it fails to satisfy his conception of ‘democracy.’

23. [Pacifism] In exactly the same way, our German pacifist will accept in silence the bloodiest rape of our nation at the hands of the most vicious military power if a change in the state of affairs can be achieved only by resistance – that is, force – for this would be contrary to the spirit of his peace society. (pgs 111-112)

24. [Education] Education in democracy, in socialism of the international variety, in pacifism, etc., is a thing so rigid and exclusive, so purely subjective from these points of view, that the general picture of the remaining world is colored by this dogmatic conception, while the attitude toward Germanism has remained exceedingly objective from early youth. (pg 112)

25. [Race] I was repelled by the conglomeration of races which the capital showed me, repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere, the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews.

To me the giant city [Vienna] seemed the embodiment of racial desecration.

. . . The longer I lived in this city, the more my hatred grew for the foreign mixture of peoples which had begun to corrode this old site of German culture. (pg – 123)

26. [Social Darwinism] While Nature, by making procreation free, yet submitting survival to a hard trial, chooses from an excess number of individuals the best as worthy of living, thus preserving them alone and in them conserving their species, man limits procreation, but is hysterically concerned that once a being is born it should be preserved at any price. . . . the natural struggle for existence which leaves only the strongest and healthiest alive is obviously replaced by the obvious desire to ‘save’ even the weakest and most sickly at any price, and this plants the seed of a future generation which must inevitably grow more and more deplorable the longer this mockery of Nature and his will continues.

. . . A stronger race will drive out the weak, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will, time and again, burst all the absurd fetters of the so-called humanity of individuals, in order to replace it by the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give his place to the strong. (pg – 132)

27. [Social Darwinism] Then, though in a perhaps very distant future, there will be but two possibilities either the world will be governed according to the ideas of our modern democracy, and then the weight of any decision will result in favor of the numerically stronger race, or the world will be dominated in accordance with the laws of natural order of force, and then it is the peoples of brutal will who will conquer, and consequently once again not the nation of self-restriction.

No one can doubt that this world will some day be exposed to the severest struggles for the existence of mankind. In the end, only the urge for self-preservation can conquer. Beneath it so-called humanity, the expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice, and know-it-all conceit, will melt like snow in the March sun. Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish. (pg – 134)

28. [Land] It cannot be emphasized sharply enough that any German internal colonization must serve to eliminate social abuses particularly to withdraw the soil from side spread speculation, but can never suffice to secure the future of the nation without the acquisition of new soil.

The size of the area inhabited by a people constitutes in itself an essential factor for determining its outward security. The greater the quantity of space at the disposal of the people, the greater its natural protection; for military decision against peoples living in a small restricted area have always been obtained more quickly and hence more easily, and in particular more effectively and completely, than can, conversely, be possible against territorially extensive states. (pgs – 136-137)

29. [Land] We must, therefore, coolly and objectively adopt the standpoint that it can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another. In this case we must not let political boundaries obscure for us the boundaries of eternal justice. (pg – 138)

30. [Land – U.S.] Today many European states are like pyramids stood on their heads. Their European area is absurdly small in comparison to their weight of colonies, foreign trade, etc. We may say: summit in Europe, base in the whole world; contrasting with the American Union which possesses its base in its own continent and touches the rest of the earth only with its summit. And from this comes the immense inner strength of this state and the weakness of most European colonial powers. (pg – 139)

31. [Land – German Conquests] For Germany, consequently, the only possibility for carrying out a healthy territorial policy lay in the acquisition of new land in Europe itself. Colonies cannot serve this purpose unless they seem in large part suited for settlement by Europeans. But in the nineteenth century such colonial territories were no longer obtainable by peaceful means. Consequently, such a colonial policy could only have been carried out by means of a hard struggle which, however, would have been carried on to much better purpose, not for territories outside of Europe, but for land on the home continent itself. (pg – 139)

32. [War] It was indispensable to see clearly that this aim could be achieved only by struggle, and consequently to face the contest of arms with calm and composure.

. . . If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bred for the nation.

33. [Free Trade] Only children could have thought that they could get their bananas in the ‘peaceful contest of nations,’ by friendly and moral conduct and constant emphasis on their peaceful intentions, as they so high-soundingly and unctuously babbled, in other words, without ever having to take up arms.

. . . To talk about the ‘peaceful economic’ conquest of the world was possibly the greatest nonsense which has ever been exalted to be a guiding principle of state policy. (pgs – 142-143)

34. [England] England, in particular, should have been recognized as the striking refutation of this theory; for no people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword, and later ruthlessly defended them, than the English nation. Is it not positively the distinguishing feature of British statesmanship to draw economic acquisitions form political strength, and at once to recast every gain in economic strength into political power? And what an error to believe that England is personally too much of a coward to stake her own blood for her economic policy! The fact that the English people possessed no ‘people’s army’ in no way proved the contrary; for what matters is not the momentary military form of the fighting forces, but rather the will and determination to risk those which do exist. England has always possessed whatever armament she happened to need. She always fought with the weapons which success demanded. She fought with mercenaries as long as mercenaries sufficed; but she reached down into the precious blood of the whole nation when only such a sacrifice could bring victory; but the determination for victory, the tenacity and ruthless pursuit of the struggle, remained unchanged. (pg – 144)

35. [War] If, however, we consider the question, what , in reality, are the state-forming or even state-preserving forces, we can sum them up under one single head: the ability and will of the individual to sacrifice himself for the totality. That these virtues have nothing at all to do with economics can be seen from the simple realization that man never sacrifices himself for the latter, or, in other words: a man does not die for business, but only for ideals. Nothing proved the Englishman’s superior psychological knowledge of the popular soul better than the motivation which he gave to his struggle. While we fought for bread, England fought for ‘freedom’; and not even for her own, no, for that of the small nations, In our country we laughed at this effrontery, or were enraged at it, and thus only demonstrated how empty-headed and stupid the so-called statesmen of Germany had become even before the War. We no longer had the slightest idea concerning the essence of the force which can lead men to their death of their own free will and decision. (pgs – 152-153

36. [Military service] As a boy and young man I had so often felt the desire to prove at least once by deeds that for me notional enthusiasm was no empty whim. It often seemed to me almost a sin to shout hurrah perhaps without having the inner right to do so; for who had the right to use this word without having proved it in the place where all playing is at an end and the inexorable hand of the Goddess of Destiny begins to weigh peoples and men according to the truth and steadfastness of their convictions? (pg – 163)

37. [Marxism] The authorities, however, were stupid enough to believe that Marxism had now become ‘national’; a flash of genius which only shows that in these long years none of the official guides of the state had even taken the trouble to study the essence of this doctrine, for if they had, such an absurdity could scarcely have crept in. (pg – 168)

38. [Press] After the very first news of victories, a certain section of the press, slowly, and in a way which at first was perhaps unrecognizable to many began to pour a few drops of wormwood into the general enthusiasm. This was done beneath the mask of a certain benevolence and well-meaning, even of a certain solicitude. They had misgivings about an excess of exuberance in the celebration of the victories. (pg – 166)

39. [Force] One question came to the fore, however: can spiritual ideas be exterminated by the sword? Can ‘philosophies’ be combated by the use of brute force?

. . . The application of force alone, without the impetus of a basic spiritual idea as a starting point, can never lead to the destruction of an idea and its dissemination, except in the form of a complete extermination of even the last exponent of the idea and the destruction of the last tradition. This, however, usually means the disappearance of such a state from the sphere of political importance, often for an indefinite time and sometimes forever; for experience shows that such a blood sacrifice strikes the best part of the people, since every persecution which occurs without a spiritual basis seems morally unjustified and whips up precisely the more valuable parts of the people, in protest, which results in an adoption of the spiritual content of the unjustly persecuted movement. In many this occurs simply through a feeling of opposition against the attempt to bludgeon down an idea by brute force.

As a result, the number of inward supporters grows in proportion as the persecution increases. Consequently, the complete annihilation of the new doctrine can be carried out only through a process of extermination so great and constantly increasing that in the end all the truly valuable blood is drawn out of the people or state in question.

. . . Indeed, nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine and its organizational expression, by force without spiritual foundation, are doomed to failure, and not seldom end with the exact opposite of the desired result. . .

. . . Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. (pgs – 170-171)

40. [Force] Thus, in summing up, we can establish the following:

Any attempt to combat a philosophy with methods of violence will fail in the end, unless the fight takes the form of attack for a new spiritual attitude. Only in the struggle between two philosophies can the weapon of brutal force, persistently and ruthlessly applied, lead to a decision for the side it supports.

This remained the reason for the failure of the struggle against Marxism. (pg – 172)

41. [Reason] In political matters felling often decides more correctly than reason. (pg – 173)

42. [Press] As long as millions of the bourgeoisie still piously worship their Jewish democratic press every morning, it very ill become these gentlemen to make jokes about thestupidity of the ‘comrade’ who, in the last analysis, only swallows down the same garbage in a different form. In both cases the manufacture is one and the same Jew. (pg – 174)

43. [War] The aim for which we were fighting the War was the loftiest, the most overpowering, that man can conceive: it was the freedom and independence of our nation, the security of our future food supply, and – our national honor; a thing which, despite all contrary opinions prevailing today, nevertheless exists, or rather should exist, since peoples without honor have sooner or later lost their freedom and independence, which in turn is only the result of a higher justice, since generations of rabble without honor deserve no freedom. (pg – 177)

44. [War] As for humanitarianism, Moltke [chief of the Prussian General Staff in 1859) said years ago that in war it lies in the brevity of the operation, and that means that the most aggressive fighting technique is the most humane. (pg – 178)

45. [Propaganda] The second really decisive question was this: To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?

It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.

When the intelligentsia – or those who today unfortunately often go by the name – what they need is not propaganda but scientific instruction. The content of propaganda is not science any more than the objet represented in a poster is art. (pg – 179)

46. [Propaganda] The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision. (pg – 179)

47. [Propaganda] All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. (pg – 180)

48. [Propaganda] Once we understand how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results:

It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, there intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out. (pgs – 180-181)

49. [Propaganda] Its [propaganda’s] task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly. [pg – 182]

50. [Propaganda] The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or even professors of political law, or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. The masses are then in no position to distinguish where foreign injustice ends and our own begins. (pg – 183)

51. [Propaganda] The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.

And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing. (pg – 183)

52. [Propaganda] It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success. (pg – 184)

53. [Propaganda] The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince, and what I mean is to convince the masses. (pg- 185)

54. [Propaganda] . . . a slogan must be presented from different angles, but the end of all remarks must always and immutably be the slogan itself. (pg – 185)

55. [Propaganda] All advertising, whether in the field of business or politics, achieves success through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application. (pg – 185)

56. [Moral] Just as before, the front was flooded with this poison dished up by thoughtless women at home, who, of course, did not suspect that this was the way to raise the enemy’s confidence in victory to the highest pitch, thus consequently to prolong and sharpen the sufferings of their men at the fighting front. In the time that followed, the senseless letters of German women cost hundreds of thousands of men their lives. (pg – 190)

57. [Capitalism] Thus, the task of the state toward capital was comparatively simple and clear: it only had to make certain that capital remained the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation.

. . . Previously I had been unable to recognize with the desire clarity the difference between this pure capital as the end result of productive labor and a capital whose existence and essence rests exclusively on speculation. (pg – 209)

58. [Politics] The enormous difference between the tasks of the theoretician and the politician is also the reason why a union of both in one person is almost never found. . . . The work of such politicians, by the large, is unimportant for posterity, since their successes in the present are based solely on keeping at a distance all really great and profound problems and ideas, which as such would only have been of value for later generations.

The execution of such aims, which have value and significance for the most distant times, usually bring little reward to the man who champions them and rarely finds understanding among the great masses, who for the moment have more understanding for beer and milk regulations than for farsighted plans for the future, whose realization can only occur far hence, and whose benefits will be reaped only by posterity.

Thus, from a certain vanity, which is always a cousin of stupidity, the great mass of politicians will keep far removed from all really weight plans for the future, in order not to lose the momentary sympathy of the great mob. The success and significance of such a politician lie then exclusively in the present, and do not exist for posterity. But small minds are little troubled by this; they are content. (pgs – 211-212)

59. [Ends] For me and all true National Socialists there is but one doctrine: people and fatherland.

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.

Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. (pg – 214)

60. [Speaking] . . . I was offered an opportunity of speaking before a large audience; and the thing that I had always presumed from pure feeling without knowing it was now corroborated: I could ‘speak. (pgs – 215-216)

61. [Education] The so-called ‘intelligentsia’ always look down with a really limitless condescension on anyone who has not been dragged through the obligatory schools and had the necessary knowledge pumped into him. The question has never been: What are the man’s abilities? But: What has he learned? To these ‘educated’ people the biggest empty-head, if he is wrapped in enough diplomas, is worth more that the brightest boy who happens to lack the costly envelopes. (pg – 224)

62. [Lie] In this they [Jews and Marxists] proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big line than to a little one , since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. (pg- 231)

63. [Jews] The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities of the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews; for after all, their whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race – and what a race! (pg – 232)

64. [Democracy] One of the worst symptoms of decay was the increasing cowardice in the face of responsibility, as well as the resultant half-heartedness in all things.

To be sure, the starting point of this plague in our country lies in large part in the parliamentary institution in which irresponsibility of the purest breed is cultivated. Unfortunately, this plague slowly spread to all other domains of life, most strongly to state life. Everywhere responsibility was evaded and inadequate half-measures were preferred as a result; for in the use of such measures personal responsibility seems reduced to the smallest dimensions. (pg – 240)

65. [Press] Journalistic circles in particular like to describe the press as a ‘great power’ in the state. As a matter of fact, its importance really is immense. It cannot be overestimated, for the press really continues education in adulthood.

Its readers, by and large, can be divided into three groups:

First, into those who believe everything they read; second, into those who have ceased to believe anything; third, into the minds which critically examine what they read, and judge accordingly.

Numerically, the first group is by far the largest. It consists of the great mass of the people and consequently represents the simplest-minded part of the nation. It cannot be listed in terms of professions, but t most in general degrees of intelligence. To it belong all those who have neither been born nor trained to think independently, and who partly from incapacity and partly from incompetence believe everything that is set before them in black and white. To them also belongs the type of lazybones who could perfectly well think, gut from sheer mental laziness seizes gratefully on everything that someone else has thought, with the modest assumption that someone else has exerted himself considerably. Now, with all these types, who constitute the great masses, the influence of the press will be enormous. They are not able or willing themselves to examine what is set before them, and as a result their whole attitude toward all the problems of the day can be reduced almost exclusively to the outside influence of others. This can be advantageous when their enlightenment is provided by a serious and truth-loving party, but it is catastrophic when scoundrels and liars provide it. (pgs – 240-241)

66. [Press] The state, therefore, has the duty of watching over their education and preventing any mischief. It must particularly exercise strict control over the press; for its influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating, since it is applied, not once in a while, but over and over again. In the uniformity and constant repetition of this instruction lies its tremendous power. If anywhere, therefore, it is here that the state must not forget that all means must serve an end; it must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-caled ‘freedom of the press’ and let itself be talked into neglecting its duty and denying the nation the food which it needs and which is good for it; with ruthless determination it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state and the nation. (pg – 242)

67. [Press] What food did the German press of the pre-War period dish out to the people? Was it not the worst poison that can even be imagined? Wasn’t the worst kind of pacifism injected into the heart of our people at a time when the rest of the world was preparing to throttle Germany, slowly but surely? Even in peacetime didn’t the press inspire the minds of the people with doubt in the right of their own state, thus from the outset limiting them in the choice of means for its defense? Was it not the German press which knew how to make the absurdity of “western democracy’ palatable to our people until finally, ensnared by all the enthusiastic tirades, they thought they could entrust their future to a League of Nations? Did it not help to teach our people a miserable immorality? Did it not ridicule morality and ethics a backward and petty-bourgeois, until our people finally became ‘modern’? Did it not with its constant attacks undermine the foundations of the state’s authority until a single thrust sufficed to make the edifice collapse? Did it not fight with all possible means against every effort to give unto the state that which is the state’s? Did it not belittle the army with constant criticism, sabotage universal conscription, demand the refusal of military credits, etc., until the result became inevitable? (pgs – 242-243)

68. [Marxism] The so-called liberal press was actively engaged in digging the grave of the German people in the German Rich. We can pass by the lying Marxist sheets in silence’ to them lying is just a vitally necessary as catching mace for a cat; their functions only to break the people’s national and patriotic backbone and make them ripe for the slave’s yoke of international capital and its masters the Jews. (pg – 243)

69. [Social Darwinism] The ultimate wisdom is always the understanding of the instinct – that is: a man must never fall into the lunacy of believing that he ha s really risen to be lord and master of Nature – which is so easily induced by the conceit of half-education; he must understand the fundamental necessity of Nature’s rule, and realize how much his existence is subjected to these laws of eternal fight and upward struggle. Then he will eel that in a universe where planets revolve around suns, and moons turn about planets, where force alone forever master weakness, compelling it to be an obedient slave or else crushing it, there can be no special laws for man. For him, too, the eternal principles of this ultimate wisdom hold sway. He can try to comprehend them; but escape them, never. (pgs – 244-245)

70. [Race] Here again we have a touchstone of a race’s value – the race which cannot stand the test will simply die out, making place for healthier or tougher and more resisting races. For since this question primarily regards the offspring, it is one of those concerning which it is said with such terrible justice that the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation. But this applies only to profanation of the blood and the race.

Blood sin and desiccation of the race are the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it. (pgs – 248-249)

71. [Ends] What we need most was the conviction that first of all the whole attention of the nation had to be concentrated upon this terrible danger [infection and mammonization of our love life], so that every single individual could become inwardly conscious of the importance of this struggle.

. . . In all cases where the fulfillment of apparently impossible demands or tasks is involved, the whole attention of a people must be focused and concentrated on this one question, as though live and death actually depended on its solution. Only in this way will a people be made willing and able to perform great tasks and exertions. (pg – 249)

72. [Ends] Anyone who does not so divide that road to be conquered into separate stages and does not try to conquer these one by one, systematically with the sharpest concentration of all his forces, will never be able to reach the ultimate goal, but will be left lying somewhere along the road, or perhaps even off it. This gradual working up to a goal is an art, and to conquer the road step by step is this way you must throw in your last ounce of energy. (pg 250)

73. [Education] . . . education and training must eradicate a number of evils about which today no one bothers at all. Above all, in our present education a balance must be created between mental instruction and physical training. The institution that is called a Gymnasium today is a mockery of the Greek model. In our educational system it has been utterly forgotten that in the long run a healthy mind can dwell only in a healthy body. Especially if we bear in mind the mass of the people, aside form a few exceptions this statement becomes absolutely valid. (pg – 253)

74. [Pornography] There is no freedom to sin at the cost of posterity and hence of the race.

Parallel to the training of the body, a struggle against the poison of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and stimulation. Just look at the bil of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth. In shop windows and billboards the vilest means are used to attract the attention of the crowd. Anyone who has not lost the ability to think himself into their soul must realize that this must cause great damage in youth. This sensual, sultry atmosphere leads to ideas and stimulations at a time when the boy should have no understanding of such things. The result of this kind of education can be studied in present-day youth, and it is not exactly gratifying. (pg – 254)

75. [Pornography] Anyone who refuses to see these things supports them, and thereby makes himself an accomplice in the slow prostitution of our future which, whether we like it or not, lies in the coming generation. This cleansing of our culture must be extended to nearly all fields. Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestation of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea. (pg – 255)

76. [Art] Even before the turn of the century an element began to intrude into our art which up to that time could be regarded as entirely foreign and unknown. To be sure, even in earlier times there were occasional aberrations of taste, built such cases were rather artistic derailments, to which posterity could attribute at least a certain historical value, than products no longer of an artistic degeneration, but of a spiritual degeneration that had reached the point of destroying the spirit. In them the political collapse, which later became more visible, was culturally indicated.

Art Bolshevism is the only possible cultural form and spiritual expression of Bolshevism as a whole.

Anyone to who this seems strange need only subject the art of the happily Bolshevized states to an examination, and, to his horror, he will be confronted by the morbid excrescences (blots) of insane and degenerate men, with which, since the turn of the century, we have become familiar under the collective concept of cubism and Dadaism, as the official and recognized art of those states. Even in the short period of eh Bavarian Republic of Councils, this phenomenon appeared. Even here it could be seen that all the official posters, propagandist drawings in the newspapers, ect., bore the imprint, not only of political but of cultural decay.

No more than a political collapse of the present magnitude would have been conceivable sixty years ago was a cultural collapse such as began to manifest itself in futurist and cubist works since 1900 thinkable. Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called Dadaistic ‘experiences’ would have seemed simply impossible and its organizers would have ended you in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at the time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state calmly looked on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. (pgs – 258 - 259)

77. [Art] The baser and more contemptible the products of the time and its people, the more it hates the witnesses to the greater nobility and dignity of a former day. In such times the people would best like to efface every possibility of comparison they could pass off their own trash as ‘art’. Hence every new institution, the more wretched and miserable it is, will try all the harder to extinguish the last traces of the past time, whereas every true renascence of humanity can start with an easy mind from the good achievements of past generation; in fact. Can often make them truly appreciated for the first time. . . Only those who can give nothing valuable to the world, but try to act as if they were going to give it God know what, will hate everything that was previously given and would best like to negate or even destroy it. . .

Therefore, if any new idea, a doctrine, a new philosophy, or even a political or economic movement tries to deny the entire past, tries to make it bad or worthless, for this reason alone we must be extremely cautious and suspicious. As a rule the reason for such hatred is either its own inferiority or even an evil intention as such. . .

Thus, the saddest thing about the state of our whole culture of the pre-War period was not only the total impotence of artistic and cultural creative power in general but the hatred with which the memory of the greater past was besmirched and effaced. In nearly every field of art, especially in the theater and literature, we began around the turn of the century to produce less that was new and significant, but to disparage the best of the old work and represent it as inferior and surpassed; as though this epoch of the most humiliating inferiority could surpass anything at all. And form this effort to remove the past from the eyes of the present, the evil intent of the apostles of the future could clearly and distinctly be seen. But this it should have been recognized that these were no new, even if false, cultural conceptions, but a process of destroying all culture, paving the way for a stultification of healthy artistic feeling: the spiritual preparation of political Bolshevism. For if the age of Pericles seems embodied in the Parthenon, the Bolshevistic present is embodied in a cubist monstrosity.

In this connection we must also point to the cowardice which here again was manifest in the section of our people which on the basis of its education and position should have been obligated to resist this cultural disgrace. But from pure fear of the clamor raised by the apostles of Bolshevistic art, who furiously attacked anyone who didn’t want to recognize the crown of creation in them and pilloried him as a backward philistine, they renounced all serious resistance and reconciled themselves to what seemed after al inevitable. They were positively scared stiff that these half-wits or scoundrels would accuse them of lack of understanding’ as though it were a disgrace not to understand the products of spiritual degenerates of slimy swindlers. These cultural disciples, it is true, possessed a very simple means of passing off their nonsense as something God knows how important” they passed off all sorts of incomprehensible and obviously crazy stuff on their amazed fellow men as a so-called inner experience. A cheap way of taking any word of opposition out of the mouths of most people in advance. For beyond a doubt this could be an inner experience; the doubtful part was whether it is permissible to dish up the hallucinations of lunatics or criminals to the healthy world. The works of a Moritz von Schwind, or of a Bocklin, were also an inner experience, but of artists graced by God and not of clowns.

Here was a good occasion to study the pitiful cowardice of our so-called intelligentsia, which dodged any serious resistance to this poioning of the healthy instinct of our people and left it to the people themselves to deal with this insolent nonsense. In order not to be considered lacking in artistic understanding, people stood for every mockery of art and ended up by becoming really undrtainin the judgment of good and bad.

All in all, these were tokens of time that were getting very bad. (pgs – 260-262)

78. [Religion] Not the smallest blame for the not too delectable religious conditions must be borne by those who encumber the religious idea with too many things of a purely earthly nature and thus often bring it into a totally unnecessary conflict with so-called exact science. In this victory will almost always fall to the latter, though perhaps after a hard struggle, and religion will suffer serious damage in the eyes of all those who are unable to raise themselves above the purely superficial knowledge.

Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. (pg – 268)

79. [Propaganda] The fact that by clever and persevering use of propaganda even heaven can be represented as hell to the people, and conversely the most wretched life as paradise, was know only to the Jew, who acted accordingly; the German, or rather his government hadn’t the faintest idea of this. (pg – 276)

80. [Military Service] In the morass of a universally spreading softening and effeminization, each year three hundred and fifty thousand vigorous young men sprang from the ranks of the army, men who in their two year’s training had lost the softness of youth and achieved bodies hard as steel. The young man who practiced obedience during this time could then learn to command. By his very step you could recognize the soldier who had done his service. (pg – 281)

81. [Race] The deepest and ultimate reason for the decline of the old Reich lay in its failure to recognize the racial problem and its importance for the historical development of peoples. For events in the lives of people are not expressions of chance, but processes related to the self-preservation and propagation of the species and the race and subject to the laws of Nature, even if people are not conscious of the inner reason for their actions. (pg – 283)

82. [Social Darwinism] Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggled for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species’ health and power of resistance and, therefore, a case of its higher development. (pg – 285)

83. [Race] North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be masters of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim of defilement of the blood.

The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:

(a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;

(b) Physical in intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.

To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator. (pg – 286)

84. [Relativism] Without human beings there is no human idea in the world, therefore, the idea as such is always conditioned by the presence of human beings and hence of all the laws which created the precondition for their existence. (pr – 287)

85. [Social Darwinism] Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live. (pg – 289)

86. [Race] It is idle to argue which race or races were the original representative of human culture and hence the real founders of all that we sum up under the world ‘humanity.’ It is simpler to raise this question with regard to the present, and here an easy, clear answer results. All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. (pg – 290)

87. [Race] Approximately the following picture of their development always results:

Aryan races – often absurdly small numerically – subject foreign peoples, and then, stimulated by the special living conditions of the new territory (fertility, climatic conditions, etc.) and assisted by the multitude of lower-type beings standing at their disposal as helpers, develop the intellectual and organizational capacities dormant within them. Often in a few millenniums or even centuries they create cultures which originally bear all the inner characteristics of their nature, adapted to the above-indicated special qualities of the soil and subjected beings. In the end, however, the conquerors transgress against the principle of blood purity, to which they had first adhered; they begin to mix with the subjugated inhabitants and thus end their own existence; for the fall of man in paradise has always been followed by his expulsion. (pg – 292)

88. [Genius] Though an inventor, for example, establishes his fame only on the day of his invention, it is a mistake to think that genius as such entered into the man only at this hour – the spark of genius exists in the brain of the truly creative man from the hour of his birth. True genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned. (pg – 293)

89. [Race] Hence it is no accident that the first cultures arose in places where the Aryan, in his encounters with lower peoples, subjugated them and bent them to his will. They then became the first technical instrument in the service of a developing culture.

Thus, the road which the Aryan had to take was clearly marked out. As a conqueror he subjected the lower beings and regulated their practical activity under his command, according to his will and for his aims. But in directing them to a useful, though arduous activity, he not only spared the life of those he subjected; perhaps he gave them a fate that was better than their previous so-called ‘freedom.’ As long as he ruthlessly upheld the master attitude, not only did he really remain master, but also the preserver and increaser of culture. For culture was based exclusively on his abilities and hence on his actual survival. As soon as the subjected peoples began to raise themselves up and probably approached the conqueror in language, the sharp dividing wall between master and servant fell. The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he had made for himself. He became submerged in the racial mixture, and gradually, more and more, lost his cultural capacity, until at last, not only mentally but also physically, he began to resemble the subjected aborigines more than his own ancestors. For a time he could live on the existing cultural benefits, but then petrifaction set in and he fell pray to oblivion. (pgs – 295-296)

90. [Idealism] The state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture. From it alone can arise all the great works of mankind, which bring the founder little reward, but the richest blessings to posterity. (pg – 298)

91. [Idealism] The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call – the distinguish it from egoism and selfishness – idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.

How necessary it is to keep realizing that idealism does not represent a superfluous expression of emotion, but that in truth it has been, is, and will be, the premise for what we designate as human culture, yes, that it alone created the concept of ‘man’! It is to this inner attitude that the Aryan owes his position in the world, and to it the world owes man; for it alone formed from pure spirit the creative force which, by a unique pairing of brutal fist and the intellectual genius, created the monuments of human culture. (pgs – 298-299)

92. [Idealism] But, since true idealism is nothing but the subordination of the interests and life of the individual to the community, and this in turn is the precondition for the creation of organizational forms of all kinds, it corresponds in its innermost depths to the ultimate will of Nature. It alone leads men to voluntary recognition of the privilege of force and strength, and thus makes them into a dust particle of that order which shapes and forms the whole universe. (pg – 299)

93. [Idealism] Especially, therefore, at times when the ideal attitude threatens to disappear, we can at once recognize a diminution of that force which forms the community and thus creates the premise of culture. As soon as egoism becomes the ruler of a people, the bands of order are loosened and in the chase after their own happiness men fall from heaven into a real hell.

Yes, even posterity forgets the men who have only served their own advantage and praises the heroes who have renounced their own happiness. (pg 300)

94. [Jews] The Jew is only united when a common danger forces him to be or a common booty entices him; if these two grounds are lacking, the qualities of the crassest egoism come into their own, and in the twinkling of an eye the united people turns into a horde of rats, fighting bloodily among themselves. (pg – 302)

95. [Jews] Hence the Jewish people, despite all apparent intellectual qualities, is without any true culture, and especially without any culture of its own. For what sham culture the Jew today possesses is the property of other peoples, and for the most part it is ruined in his hands.

. . . What they do accomplish in the field of art is either patchwork or intellectual theft. Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed.

To what an extent the Jew takes over foreign culture, imitating or rather ruining it, can be seen from the fact that he is mostly found in the art which seems to require least original invention, the art of acting. (pgs – 302-303)

95. [Jews] No, the Jew possesses no culture-crating force of any sort, since the idealism, without which there is no true higher development of man, is not present in him and never was present. (pg – 303)

97. [Jews] If we consider how greatly he [Jews] has sinned against the masses in the course of the centuries, how he has squeezed and sucked their blood again and again; if furthermore, we consider how the people gradually learned to hate him for this, and ended up by regarding his existence as nothing but a punishment of Heaven for the other peoples, we can understand how hard this shift must be for the Jew. Yes, it is an arduous task suddenly to present himself to his flayed victims as a ‘friend of mankind.’ (pg 313)

98. [Jews] And this nationality he [Jews] guards as never before, While he seems to overflow with ‘enlightenment,’ ‘progress,’ freedom,’ humanity,’ etc., he himself practices the severest segregation of his race. To be sure, he sometimes palms off his women on influential Christians, but as a matter of principle he always keeps his male line pure. He poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is a Christian who marries a Jewess. The bastards, however, take after the Jewish side. . . In order to mask his activity and lull his victims, however, he talks more and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools begin to believe him. (pgs – 315 -316)

99. [Democracy] His [Jews] ultimate goal in this stag is the victory of ‘democracy,’ or, as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism. It is most compatible with his requirements; for it excludes the personality – and puts in its place the majority characterized by stupidity, incompetency, and last but not least, cowardice. (pg – 316)

100. [Social Security] The state finally found a way out of this unhealthy condition by assuming the care of the state employee who could not himself provide for his old age; it introduced the pension. Slowly, more and more enterprises followed this example, so that nearly every regularly employed brain-worker draws a pension in later life, provided the concern he works in has achieved or surpassed a certain size. (pg -317)

101. [Marxism] Thus there arises a pure movement entirely of manual workers under Jewish leadership apparently aimed to improve the situation of the worker, but in truth planning the enslavement and with it the destruction of all non-Jewish peoples. (pg – 320)

102. [Unions] In keeping with all his inner rapacious brutality, he [Jews] at once teaches the trade-union movement the most brutal use of violence. If anyone by his intelligence resists the Jewish lures, his defiance and understanding are broken by terror. The success of such an activity is enormous.

Actually the Jew by means of the trade union, which could be a blessing for the nation, shatters the foundations of the national economy. (pgs – 322-323)

103. [Unions] Parallel with this, the political organization advances.

It plays hand in glove with the trade-union movement, for the latter prepares the masses for political organization, in fact, lashes them into it with violence and coercion Furthermore, it is the permanent financial source from which the political organization feeds its enormous apparatus. It is the organ controlling the political activity of the individual and does the pandering in all big demonstrations of a political nature. In the end it no longer comes out for political interests at all, but places its chief instrument of struggle, the cessation of work in the form of a mass and general strike, in the service of the political idea. (pgs – 322-323)

104. [Press] By the creation of a press whose content is adapted to the intellectual horizon of the least educated people, the political and trade-union organization finally obtains the agitational institution by which the lowest strata of the nation are made ripe for the most reckless acts. Its function is not to lead people out of the swamp of a base mentality to a higher state, but to cater to their lowest instincts. Since the masses are as mentally lazy as they are sometimes presumptuous, this is a business as speculative as it is profitable.

It is this press, above all, which wags a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation. (pg – 323)

105. [Jews] It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university of budding crooks. (pg – 325)

106. [Race] With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with this blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of he people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale, it was and it is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master. (pg – 325)

107. [Marxism] And in politics he [Jews] begins to replace the idea of democracy by the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In the organized mass of Marxism he has found the weapon which lets him dispense with democracy and in its stead allows him to subjugate and govern the peoples with a dictatorial and brutal fist. (pgs – 325-326)

108. [Politics] In the political field he [Jews] refuses the state the means for its self-preservation, destroys the foundations of all national self-maintenance and defense, destroy faith in the leadership, scoffs at its history and past, and drags everything that is truly great into the gutter. (pg – 326)

109. [Culture] Culturally he [Jews] contaminates art, literature, the theater, makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity, of the noble and the good and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature. (pg – 326)

110. [Religion] Religion is ridiculed, ethics and morality represented as outmoded, until the last props of a nation in its struggle for existence in the world have fallen.] (pg – 326)

111. [Race] If we pass all the causes of the Germans collapse in review, the ultimate and most decisive remains the failure to recognize the racial problem and especially the Jewish menace. . . Peoples which bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence, and when their ruin is encompassed by a stronger enemy it is not an injustice done to them, but only the restoration of justice. . . The lost purity of the blood alone destroys inner happiness forever, plunges man into the abyss for all time, and the consequences can never more be eliminated from body and spirit. (pg – 327)

112. [Nationalism] Thus, by 1919 we clearly realized that, as its highest aim, the new movement must first accomplish the nationalization of the masses. (pg 336)

113. [Reason] Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring that aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on the earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. (pgs – 337-338)

114. [Race] In the blood alone resides the strength as well as the weakness of man. As long as peoples do not recognize and give heed to the importance of their racial foundation, they are like men who would like to teach poodles the qualities of greyhounds, failing to realize that the speed of the greyhound like the docility of the poodle are not learned, but are qualities inherent in the race. Peoples which renounce the preservation of their racial purity renounce with it the unity of their soul in all its expressions. The divided state of their nature is the natural consequence of the divided state of their blood, and the change in their intellectual and creative force is only the effect of the change in their racial foundations. (pg – 338)

115. [Race] Without the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and hence of the Jewish problem there will never be resurrection of the German nation. (pg – 339)

116. [Class] Organizing the broad masses of our people which are today in the international camp into a national people’s community does not mean renouncing the defense of justified class interests. Divergent class and professional interests are not synonymous with class cleavage, but are natural consequences of our economic life. Professional grouping is in no way opposed to a true national community, for the latter consists in the unity of a nation in all those questions which affect this nation as such.

The integration of an occupational group which has become a class with the national community, or merely with the state, is not accomplished by the lowering of higher classes but by uplifting the lower classes. (pg – 339)

117. [Workers] Just as surely as a worker sins against the spirit of a real national community when, without regard for the common welfare and the survival of the national economy, he uses his power to raise extortionate demands, an employer breaks this community to the same extent when he conducts his business in an inhuman, exploiting way, misuses the national labor force and makes millions out of its sweat. He then has no right to designate himself as national, no right to speak of a national community; no, he is a selfish scoundrel who induces social unrest and provokes future conflicts which whatever happens must end in harming the nation. (pg – 340)

118. [Speaking] Among a hundred so-called speakers there are hardly ten capable of speaking with equal effect today before a public consisting of street-sweepers, locksmiths, sewer-cleaners, etc., and tomorrow holding a lecture with necessarily the same thought content in an auditorium full of university professors and students. But among a thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who can manage to speak to locksmiths and university professors at the same time, in a form which not only is suitable to the receptivity of both parties but also influences both parties with equal effect or actually lashes them into a wild storm of applause. We must always bear in mind that even the most beautiful idea of a sublime theory in most cases can be disseminated only through the small and smallest minds. The important thing is not what the genius who has created an idea has in mine, but what, in what form, and with what success the prophets of this idea transmit it to the broad mass. (pg – 342)

119. [Propaganda] Propaganda must be adjusted to the broad masses in content and in form, and its soundness is to be measured exclusively by its effective result.

In a mass meeting of all classes it is not the speaker who is mentally closest to the intellectuals present who speak best, but the one who conquers the hearts of the masses. (pg – 342)

120. [Ends] Success is the one earthly judge concerning the right or wrong of such an effort, and under success we must not understand, as in the year 1918, the achievement of power in itself, but an exercise of that power that will benefit the nation. (pg – 343)

121. [Leader] . . . The young movement is in its nature and inner organization anti-parliamentarian; that is, it rejects, in general and in its own inner structure, a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of a mere executant of other people’s will and opinion. In little as well as big things, the movement advocates the principle of a Germanic democracy: the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.

. . . The leader is always elected, but there by he is vested with unlimited powers and authority. (pg – 344)

122. [Democracy] The progress and culture of humanity are not a product of the majority, but rest exclusively on the genius and energy of the personality.

To cultivate the personality and establish it in its right is one of the prerequisites for recovering the greatness and power of our nationality.

Hence the movement is anti-parliamentarian, and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the graves symptoms of mankind’s decay. (pg – 345)

123. [Religion] Its task is not a religious reformation, but a political reorganization of our people. In both religious denomination it sees equally valuable pillars for the existence of our people and therefore combats those parties which want to degrade this foundation of an ethical, moral, and religious consolidation of our national body to the level of an instrument of their party interests. (pgs – 345-346)

124. [Lies] It must, over and over again, be pointed out to the adherents of the movement and in a broader sense to the whole people that the Jew and his newspapers always lie and that even an occasional truth is only intended to cover a bigger falsification and is therefore itself in turn a deliberate untruth. The Jew is the great master in lying, and lies and deception are his weapons in struggle. (pgs – 351-352)

125. [Speaking] I spoke for thirty minutes, and what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak! After thirty minutes the people in the small room were electrified and the enthusiasm was first expressed by the fact that my appeal to the self-sacrifice of those present led to the donation of three hundred marks. (pg – 355)