Here is the concluding paragraph of Mr. Bromwich’s wan, almost apology, for Mrs. Clinton, he seems torn. Trump is such an easy target, he is always the Ringmaster of television fame. But Bromwich is a writer of the school of Murray Kempton, who married his talent as a political moralist, with a writing style that sometimes was hard to decipher, as to meaning, although it resembled a kind of poetry, at least to my younger self. Bromwich is easier to understand, his is a self-consciously literary style: sometimes arresting, at other times expressing superfluous garnish. But he seems to descend, in this last paragraph, into the demotic, that is surprising for such a practiced stylist.
The domestic state of the nation is so unpropitious in October 2016 that one may pity the winner of this election as much as the loser. We are living in a country under recurrent siege by the actions of crowds. There is the Tea Party crowd with their belief that global climate disruption is a scientific hoax; there is the Black Lives Matter crowd with their ambiguous slogan “No Justice, No Peace”; and there are more ominous developments, such as the acts of serial defiance of the federal government by the Bundy family in Nevada and Oregon. Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution—the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it.
Post-election, the liberal argument veered away from Trump and turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more popular and reliable target was Vladimir Putin, the preferred ‘enemy on the horizon’ for neoconservatives, adepts of humanitarian war and the national security state as far back as the Sochi Olympics. It is possible that Trump’s defiance of this multifarious establishment actually helped his popularity with non-political voters. Damage more telling than any emanation from the FBI or Russia probably came from Hillary Clinton’s remark that half of Trump’s supporters were ‘a basket of deplorables’ – an unforced error that was rightly read as an expression of contempt, addressed to her audience at the LGBT for Hillary Gala held at Cipriani Wall Street, and overheard by undecided voters in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Bromwich style is very readable in this instance, I don’t know that Bromwich has modeled his style on that of Murray Kempton, but it sometimes reads if it were. The essay seems quite straight forward, except that the shifting roles of hero and villain in The American Political Melodrama begins to fatigue the reader. Although the claim of Hillary Clinton as ‘victim’ is one of the comic aspects of this debacle.
We are supposed to take the word of Edward Snowden that Comey deserves our support. Quite frankly I admire Mr. Snowden, but he did not live through the Dark Age of J.Edgar Hoover! A closeted paranoid hysteric who had unquestioned power from 1935 to 1972. The FBI is his creation, and its culture of political oppression allied to its claim to be self-righteous upholders of The Law. It even qualified for a long running television show, that was Hollywood’s contribution to the FBI Myth.
The FBI over its history has shown itself to be criminally incompetent and utterly mendacious: its targeting of dissidents, and ‘fellow travelers’ of the McCarthy/Nixon era, the JFK assassination, the Black Panthers in the 60’s , the notorious letter to Martin Luther King, and its ‘Crime Lab‘ this is jut to name a few of the FBI’s many crimes!:
Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”
The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.
This history of the FBI is utterly relevant to the construction of Comey as Hero. How can one be that hero, if one heads an institution so riddled with corruption , not to speak of covered with lies and an impasto of Public Relations. The rise of The American National Security State asphyxiated the the Republic, and the FBI one of the nascent institutional strongholds of autocracy in the person of J. Edgar Hoover, now succeeded by Comey’s replacement. Aided by Trump’s jurisprudential catamite Rod Rosenstein.
Mr. Bromwich’s style is very readable in this instance, I don’t know that Bromwich has modeled his style on that of Murray Kempton, but it sometimes reads as if it were. The essay seems quite straight forward, except that the shifting roles of hero and villain in The American Political Melodrama begins to fatigue the reader. Although the claim of Hillary Clinton as ‘victim’ is one of the comic aspects of this debacle.
We are supposed to take the word of Edward Snowden that Comey deserves our support. Quite frankly I admire Mr. Snowden, but he did not live through the Dark Age of J.Edgar Hoover! A closeted paranoid hysteric who had unquestioned power from 1935 to 1972. The FBI is his creation, and its culture of political oppression allied to its claim to be self-righteous upholders of The Law. It even qualified for a long running television show, that was Hollywood’s contribution to the FBI Myth.
‘The FBI over its history has shown itself to be criminally incompetent and utterly mendacious: its targeting of dissidents, and ‘fellow travelers’ of the McCarthy/Nixon era, the JFK assassination, the Black Panthers in the 60’s , the notorious letter to Martin Luther King, and its ‘Crime Lab‘ this is jut to name a few of the FBI’s many crimes!:
Forty years ago, Bob Dylan reacted to the conviction of an innocent man by singing that he couldn’t help but feel ashamed “to live in a land where justice is a game.” Over the ensuing decades, the criminal-justice system has improved in many significant ways. But shame is still an appropriate response to it, as the Washington Post made clear Saturday in an article that begins with a punch to the gut: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” the newspaper reported, adding that “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.”
The article notes that the admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques—like hair and bite-mark comparisons—that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.
This history of the FBI is utterly relevant to the construction of Comey as Hero. How can one be that hero, if one heads an institution so riddled with corruption , not to speak of covered with lies and an impasto of Public Relations. The rise of The American National Security State asphyxiated the the Republic, and the FBI one of the nascent institutional strongholds of autocracy in the person of J. Edgar Hoover, now succeeded by Comey’s replacement. Aided by Trump’s jurisprudential catamite Rod Rosenstein. StephenKMackSD
‘Had this been a normal criminal investigation, and had Comey been a special agent in the field, the memo he would have written would have been known, in the FBI’s parlance, as an FD-302. The FBI does not record conversations with subjects related to criminal investigations. Instead, FBI agents, using their memory and sometimes handwritten notes, draft memos that summarize the conversations and include purportedly verbatim quotes. Federal judges and juries have consistently viewed these memos as indisputable fact. For this reason, Comey’s memo is no normal government memo. It could do lasting damage to Trump’s presidency, if not contribute to costing him the nation’s highest office altogether.’
The recollections of FBI agents are treated as fact! Its not Law but Political Theology! StephenKMackSD
Comey’s memoir has now surpassed the combined sales of Michael Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, and Hillary Clintons’s election elegy What Happened. The book, written in an idiom identical to the one he uses in interviews and press briefings, is clearly the work of an un-ghosted author, and it contains passages most unusual for an official memoir:
There is a place I have visited on the coast of North Carolina where two barrier islands come close together. In the narrow passageway between them, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the waters of the huge and shallow sound that lies behind the islands. There is turbulence in that place and waves appear to break even though no land is visible. I imagine that the leaders of the Department of Justice stand at that spot, between the turbulent waters of the political world and the placid waters of the apolitical sound. Their job is to respond to the political imperatives of the president and the voters who elected him, while also protecting the apolitical work of the thousands of agents, prosecutors, and staff who make up the bulk of the institution. So long as the leaders understand the turbulence, they can find their footing. If they stumble, the ocean water overruns the sound and the department has become just another political organ. Its independent role in American life has been lost and the guardians of justice have drowned.
This depth of formal piety cannot be faked; the passage shows the burden (as Comey sees it) of maintaining constitutional and legal restraints on Donald Trump.
All the loose talk of the mainstream media about Mueller and Russia may have hidden the gravity of the contest between Trump and legality. And it is by no means certain that legality will win. The larger question is therefore whether law-abidingness will remain the pattern of American society. No doubt, the election of Trump was the efficient cause of the crisis, but it is worth considering the likely state of the nation had Hillary Clinton won. Depending on the appetite for mayhem that Trump himself chose to unleash, the country might easily have become as ungovernable as it is today; and that prospect was in Comey’s mind when he wrote about the necessity of keeping one’s footing in the turbulence.
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Headline: After Catalans, Italian regions step up autonomy call
Sub-headline:Northern League uses Lombardy and Veneto referendums to push for special status
Its not just the European Project that is under threat from the dreaded Populist Monster , but the Nation State, the very foundation of Monnet’s Coal and Steel cartel, that suffers from the pretensions of Democracy, as it has evolved. First the long historical evolution of Catalan, and now the lukewarm votes in Lombardy and Veneto for ‘more autonomy’, approved by the Italian Constitutional Court.
This ambiguous position is reflected in Sunday’s referendums, which are consultative and non-binding. They are carefully phrased to ask voters if they want more “autonomy” without threatening “national unity”. Unlike the Catalan vote they have been approved by the Italian constitutional court.
As informative as this news story by Rachel Sanderson is, as to the political actors in the Italian politics of the present, should the reader look to Daniel T. Rogers’ book ‘Age of Fracture‘, written in an American political/historical/economic context, for a telling simile/metaphor for the evolving European crisis? That describes both the EU and the Nation State, caught in the rip tide of history, exacerbated by the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dispensation?
I write today about an epidemic. It’s not biological. It’s an epidemic of cowardly, immoral and unprincipled decisions by leaders across the political spectrum
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Three examples preoccupy me personally: The Republican Party today has a neo-Nazi problem that it refuses to confront. The progressive left today has a pro-Hamas problem that it refuses to confront. And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
Editor: Where can and when will the reader confront the vexing question of The Gaza Genocide? Mr. Friedman presents this carefully taylored descriptor.
And the Jewish people and Israel have a radical Jewish settler problem that they refuse to confront.
Editor: It’s not ‘a radical Jewish settler problem’ itsa problem with the very question of what the Zionist Project is, was and remaines! This quote from Maximilien Robespierre is bound is bound to raise the hackles of respectable bourgeois opinionators like Friedman and his followers !
“To defend the oppressed against their oppressors, to plead the cause of the weak against the strong who exploit and crush them, this is the duty of all hearts that have not been spoiled by egoism and corruption… It is so sweet to devote oneself to one’s fellows that I do not know how there can be so many unfortunates still without support or defenders. As for me, my life’s task will be to help those who suffer and to pursue through my avenging speech those who take pleasure in the pain of others. How happy I will be if my feeble efforts are crowned with success and if, at the price of my devotion and sacrifices, my reputation is not tarnished by the crimes of the oppressors I will fight.”
Editor: Reader let me focus my attention to Mr Friedman’s recapitulation of the actors in his self-apologeic exercise in historical revisionism, wedded to mendacity, and the cultivation of an audience habituated to his partucular brand of ‘story telling’ !
Of course, President Trump also didn’t even whisper a hint of condemnation. Just as he had no problem with the recent love-fest/interview between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, promoting Fuentes’s white nationalist neo-Nazi sympathies.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s defense of Carlson centered mainly on his own ego. He’s “said good things about me over the years,” the president said of Carlson. So nothing else should matter?
Trump could have said that Carlson has a right to interview anyone he wants, something that should never be suppressed, but that he was very troubled by the open contempt being directed by Fuentes at Jewish Americans. But neither Trump nor Vance said that — because they undoubtedly know that a not insignificant minority of their voters hold these racist, antisemitic views and they don’t want to alienate them before the midterms, which are expected to be very close.
How far we have fallen. We’ve had political movements in the past use antisemitism to try to get to the White House — for example, those who wanted the well-known antisemite Charles Lindbergh to run for president in 1940 — but until Vance and Trump we have not seen it being normalized to try to stay in power. We have seen Jewish supremacists, like Rabbi Meir Kahane, get elected to the Israeli Knesset, but we have never seen them setting Israeli defense policy, until Bibi gave them the keys. We have seen pro-Palestinian demonstrations aplenty over the years, but never ones, that I recall, which gave such a complete pass to Hamas after its mass murder of Israeli civilians.
This is how norms collapse — and take their societies down with them.
So, to Trump, Vance, Netanyahu and the pro-Hamas protesters, I have one message. It’s the one offered by Liz Cheney to her fellow G.O.P. House members who gave Trump a pass for stoking the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Editor: Liz Cheney is the eventual measure that Friedman offers his readers as exemplary!
The opening of Edward Carr essay relies on History
N JUNE 10TH 2026 the fighting between Russia and Ukraine will have lasted longer than the first world war. That conflict, too, was supposed to have been over in a few weeks. As in Ukraine, fighting became bogged down and the high command squandered men’s lives in one doomed assault after another. In August 1918 the allies used new tactics to break the German lines. Today, by contrast, Ukraine will not surrender and Russia does not know how to win.
Even in a dictatorship, a leader who has no theory of victory is storing up trouble. As Tsar Nicholas II learnt to his cost in the first world war, sooner or later there will be a reckoning.
Editor : Should I check my copy of August 1914 THE RED WHEEL 1? Though I am moored on page 573 ‘66’ ? I’ll quote Mr.Carr’s paragraph on the Russian casualties without acompaning data about the five Russian soldiers are dying for every Ukrainian.
The numbers tell this terrible story. In the year to mid-October, Russian casualties grew by almost 60%, to somewhere between 984,000 and 1,438,000. The dead now number between 190,000 and 480,000. Perhaps five Russian soldiers are dying for every Ukrainian. And yet over the summer Mr Putin’s armies failed to take a single large city. Russia is advancing, but to occupy the four oblasts it claims as its own would require five more years. If the killing continues at 2025’s rate, total Russian casualties will reach almost 4m.
Editor: Mr. Carr is a Neo-Conservative like Zanny Menton Beddoes, his editor:
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Edward Carr is a highly-respected writer and commentator on global strategic affairs and business and is based in London with the leading weekly international newspaper, The Economist. He currently provides the editorial leadership for The Economist on international affairs, and is uniquely placed to relate these topics to reflect the implications for international business – he has the wealth of experience of previously being Foreign Editor, Business Affairs Editor (covering science, technology, industry and finance and various other portfolios. He was also previously the Editorial Director with oversight of the quarterly magazine Intelligent Life, published by The Economist Group.
Edward speaks and moderates on a wide range of issues including international strategic affairs, business, industry and trade as well as energy, climate change and the environment.
He has carried out numerous live and recorded radio and television appearances over the years and is occasionally invited to co-host CNBC’s Squawk Box, once hosting with guests Jack Welch and Charles Elson featuring a discussion about executive pay. He regularly chairs seminars and debates for Economist Conferences and other top level events.
He also engages in client events, where he presents or moderates at customer forums – e.g. McKinsey Global Leadership Conference, or for organisations’ internal strategy sessions.
As Deputy Editor of The Economist, has editorial responsibility across the entire print side of the newspaper. During his journalist career, which saw him first join The Economist as science correspondent in 1987 and then go to Paris to write on European business, he briefly left The Economist in 2000 to write for the Financial Times where he worked as foreign news editor, and then as the news editor overseeing the front page and the newspaper’s news operation.
Edward studied Science at Cambridge University, winning The Bronowski Prize for his work on 18th Century French Chemistry.
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Mr Putin also had hopes that America’s president, Donald Trump, would tip the balance in his favour. By withdrawing vital American support—in particular, on intelligence and for air-defence—Mr Trump could indeed impose a bad peace on Ukraine. Early in 2025, he briefly tried to do so.
Yet those tactics no longer look likely. The peacemaker in the White House continues to blow hot and cold with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom he dislikes. But Europe is now paying Ukraine’s bills, neutralising MAGA’s main gripe that America was being exploited. And Mr Trump seems to have concluded that throwing Ukraine to the bears would ruin his aspiration to become a Nobel prize-winning statesman. In October he even imposed sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, two Russian oil companies.
Lastly, Mr Putin may hope European resolve will crumble. The money Ukraine needs to keep on fighting will run out in February. The prospect of populist governments that are less hostile to the Kremlin already hangs over the continent. A divided and dysfunctional Europe will struggle to give Ukraine the long-term backing it needs to thrive once the fighting stops.
But that is not the same as abandoning Ukraine in the heat of battle. The case that Ukraine is the key to European security is iron-clad. If Kyiv falls, Mr Putin will have control over Europe’s biggest army and a formidable arms industry. Work is afoot to set up a credible multi-year financing mechanism that goes beyond seizing Russian assets. If it succeeds, Mr Putin will know that Ukraine’s economy can outlast Russia’s.
Some people think the Russian president must believe time is on his side, or he would have already sued for peace. Yet the lesson of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq is that leaders cling on in the hope that something—anything—will turn up. So the chances are that Mr Putin will continue to fight in 2026, waiting for his generals to find a new way of waging war, for Ukraine to run out of men, for Mr Zelensky’s government to collapse, or for Mr Trump or Europe to lose patience.
But if none of these things happen, Mr Putin will be storing up a terrible reckoning. Russia has mortgaged its economy, harried Finland and Sweden into joining NATO, subordinated itself to China and scythed through a generation of young men. And for what? The moment this question forms on Russian lips, the world will face a new danger. Mr Putin could accept defeat abroad and impose terror at home. Or he could escalate.
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Editor: The reader has to wonder at this Call To Arms in The Economist?
Why funding Ukraine is a giant opportunity for Europe
The bill will be huge. It is also a historic bargain
Political Observer marvels at the ever bumptious Neo-Con Zanny Menton Beddoes, who has never fought in a War. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920) provides a fractured but usable model?
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Editor: Beddoes and her minions have refined the call to battle, as a necessay imperative for Europe. The very thought of an Oxbridger, or its equiveilent, serving in any Army, offers a certain puerile potential? ‘Europe’ seems to have reached an Age of Fracture: Macrons wayward politics is the paradigm?
Question: What will Macron, Merz, Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen do in the face of the coming defeat? Not to speak of the Billions spent on proping up Zelenskyy, and the political toxin of the Azov Battalion and Azov International?
In 1984, homelessness became a presidential campaign issue. In a televised interview aired in January of that year, a reporter asked President Reagan about criticism that his policies favored the rich. He responded by referring to “the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”10(italics added) Meanwhile, mayors and governors reported that homelessness was surging around the country even as economic indicators pointed to a strong recovery from the 1981 recession.88(pA3) This situation provided an opportunity for the Democrats to strike the president at a vulnerable spot. In January 1984, the Democratic-led House Committee on Government Operations began a series of hearings on the federal response to homelessness, some of which were held at Washington, DC, homeless shelters. Many Democrats seized the opportunity to highlight the administration’s inattention to the issue.14
In reaction to these moves, the Reagan administration publicly questioned the need for any federal response to homelessness, even the one that had already been launched. In October 1983, HHS had established the Federal Interagency Task Force on Food and Shelter for the Homeless to coordinate its efforts in this area with those of 14 other agencies. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which had been assigned to coordinate the emergency food and shelter program with the United Way and other voluntary groups, along with the Department of Defense, ADAMHA, and other agencies, participated actively in the project.14(pp1-2)Although the HHS task force programs used existing budgetary resources and relied on private organizations to distribute surplus government material, John A. Svahn, the commissioner of Social Security who had earlier defended the administration’s inaction on homelessness in his reply to a constituent, reportedly expressed concern that HHS was “hyping” the homelessness issue in organizing the task force.89 In a February 23 memo echoing Svahn’s concerns, presidential aide Donald Clarey underlined the administration’s view that homelessness was the fault of negligent states and individuals:
The whole question of the homeless, in my opinion, should be addressed from a different angle, namely, that well over 50 percent of these people are released mental patients and victims of terrible neglect by states (New York is by far the worst). Most of the others are alcoholics and drug abusers. Very few are there as a result of unemployment alone. These states have found it expedient to let them roam the streets with no supervision or support mechanisms because it is cheaper to put them on SSI (federal disability benefits). Most of the people who sleep on grates are eligible for SSI but probably don’t want to participate.90,91
This memo, along with President Reagan’s comment about homelessness “by choice,” reflected the long-standing tendency to blame individuals for homelessness that had permeated social science and popular opinion from the days of tramps and hobos through the era of urban renewal. This deep-rooted belief, together with the assumption that closing the state hospitals had caused contemporary homelessness among people with mental illness, served to justify the administration’s inaction on the issue.
In April 1984, President Reagan seemed to depart from this stance by holding a meeting with an administration official to discuss homelessness.92,93(p23),94(pA23) In this meeting, with HHS Secretary Margaret Heckler, he requested that she prepare a report for him on the subject.92 In mid-August, Heckler delivered the report, which suggested addressing homelessness through public and private partnerships and better coordination among existing agencies.95 But presidential aides explicitly ordered that her report not be transmitted to Congress.96Perhaps this was because it indicated that “the Federal government can do more to make sure the homeless receive the benefits to which they are entitled and to provide technical and other assistance to local groups which provide direct services.”92(italics added)
HHS officials, however, either did not receive or simply did not obey the directive from the president’s aides to keep the report away from Congress, suggesting a possible split within the administration on the issue. When Ted Weiss, the liberal New York City congressman leading the House hearings, requested the report in September, the assistant HHS secretary for legislation sent it to him.97 Weiss’s committee quickly released it to the public on October 3.14(p19) The HHS officials subsequently backpedaled, sending the committee a second document, which committee reports described as “a quickly written analysis which refutes and rebuts every major recommendation contained in the document.” When HHS official Harvey Vieth, who chaired the task force that drafted the original HHS report to the president recommending more action on homelessness, later testified during the hearings, he denied ever having read it.14(p17)
During the hearings, Democratic congressmen lambasted HHS for this mixed message and for failing to direct sufficient resources toward homelessness. But they reserved their worst criticism for HUD.14(p22) The agency, which had sharply curtailed its budget requests for and expenditures on low-income housing during the first years of the Reagan administration, had not explicitly addressed homelessness until releasing its first report on the issue in May 1984.98(pG1),99 This report estimated the homeless population of the United States at between 250,000 and 350,000. After its release, the acting assistant housing secretary, Benjamin F. Bobo, was publicly quoted as saying that the report indicated homelessness “is not as widespread a problem as previously had been thought.”100(pC6) These comments and the report’s findings sparked outraged responses by Mitch Snyder’s CCNV and other activist groups.101(p12) The CCNV’s leaders, who were not trained researchers, had conducted a telephone survey of homeless shelter providers in 1980 and estimated based on this survey that the United States had a homeless population of 2.2 million to 3 million.13 Snyder repeatedly cited this figure in interviews with the news media, and after HUD released its report, he filed a lawsuit against the agency demanding a retraction of the report.100(pC6)Meanwhile, congressional Democrats held a hearing at which they alleged that the HUD report represented the Reagan administration’s attempt to evade responsibility for addressing homelessness.102(pA15) News reporters meanwhile continued to report CCNV rather than HUD estimates or reported both estimates as the upper and lower boundaries of the US homeless population.45(p107)
A Changed Climate
After President Reagan’s 1984 landslide reelection victory, partisan battles over homelessness cooled somewhat. Some Republicans began to publicly acknowledge that homelessness, especially among people with severe mental illness, was a national problem.103(pC6)But after the 1986 midterm elections, the Reagan administration was seriously weakened: Democrats now controlled the House and Senate, and an embarrassing scandal surfaced over the administration’s secret arms dealings with Iran and payments to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels (Iran-Contra), thereby undermining the administration’s credibility even with some Republicans.104(pA9) In this changed climate, a comprehensive bipartisan proposal to address homelessness began to take shape, despite the administration’s lack of support for it.105,106(pA6) The substance abuse treatment and prevention sector also worked to secure funding in the bill for new NIAAA- and NIDA-sponsored research on substance abuse among homeless populations (interview with Lubran). The NIMH found allies from both parties to support the expansion of its research on homelessness and mental illness. Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, whose daughter had been diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 17, and Senator Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, who was becoming an outspoken advocate on homelessness and for the humane treatment of mental illness, became key allies of the NIMH program.107,108(pA10) Levine met with Domenici’s wife, Nancy, at teas hosted by Mrs. Gore in downtown Washington, and they began collaborating with an active network of congressional wives to ensure that the seedling programs Mrs. Domenici had nurtured could receive enough funding to grow into larger research efforts (interview with Levine; interview with Loretta Haggard, November 23, 2010).
Others involved in early efforts to develop health care programs for homeless populations also strongly influenced this legislation. The Health Care for the Homeless Program (HCHP), funded with $25 million by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, had begun establishing clinics in 1984 as demonstration programs in 19 cities.69 Run by Philip Brickner, a New York City community physician who had been serving SRO and shelter populations since the late 1960s, the HCHP was collecting data on 100,000 people who attended the program’s clinics.109 Even though the program evaluation and data collection were not complete in 1987, HCHP advocates were able to convince congressional leaders to include in the legislation a federally funded expansion of the program.110(p173)
In July 1987, a lame-duck President Reagan reluctantly signed the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act (McKinney Act), the first landmark piece of federal homelessness legislation. Although pushed through by a Democratic Congress, it was named for its chief Republican sponsor, Representative Stewart B. McKinney of Connecticut, who had died of AIDS that May.111,112(pB4),113 This legislation included more than $1 billion in funds to dramatically expand an emergency shelter grant program administered by HUD; to create housing demonstration programs; and to fund health care, education, and job training for people experiencing homelessness.114(pA1) The HCHP, administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), was awarded $44.5 million for 109 projects in 43 states to fund mental health, substance abuse, and physical health care services, and served more than 230,000 people in 1988 alone.115 The NIMH, NIAAA, and NIDA also were awarded funds for research demonstration projects on programs addressing mental illness, alcoholism, and drug abuse among homeless populations (interviews with Levine and Lubran). Subsequently, the NIAAA and NIDA demonstration projects implemented and evaluated alcohol and drug treatment programs for these populations.116(p1) The NIMH demonstration programs included 9 local efforts to administer mental health services to adults experiencing homelessness and 3 to serve the needs of homeless children with “emotional disturbance.”67(p45) The McKinney Act also tasked NIMH with administering block grants to states for homeless mentally ill populations. For this legislation, the total funding for NIMH, NIAAA, and NIDA programs related to homelessness grew to $74 million by 1990.117(p39)
Today and yesterday saw the homeless, in fact I see them most days! I gave my dollars to a young man by the Bank, yesterday, and another young man today by Vons’ market, feeding his cat! Today it is raining in California! What happend to the Party of FDR? The utterly Bankrupt New Democrats and the Republican Party of Trump all owned by AIPAC!
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.
Drawing on a wealth of rare archival evidence, Dagmar Herzog sheds light on how Germany became the only modern state to implement a plan to eradicate cognitive impairment from the entire body politic. She traces how eugenics emerged from the flawed premise that intellectual deficiency was biologically hereditary, and how this crude explanatory framework diverted attention from the actual economic and clinical causes of disability. Herzog describes how the vilification of the disabled was dressed up as the latest science and reveals how Christian leaders and prominent educators were complicit in amplifying and legitimizing Nazi policies.
Exposing the driving forces behind the Third Reich’s first genocide and its persistent legacy today, The Question of Unworthy Life recovers the stories of the unsung advocates for disability rights who challenged the aggressive victimization of the disabled and developed alternative approaches to cognitive impairment based on ideals of equality, mutuality, and human possibility.
The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s 20th Century by Dagmar Herzog. Princeton, 312 pp., £30, November 2024, 978 0 691 26170 6
At ten past ten on the morning of 2 June 1948, Karl Brandt climbed on the black gallows in the courtyard of Landsberg Prison in Bavaria. An American military tribunal had sentenced him to death for crimes including ‘planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatised as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed and so on, by gas, lethal injections and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums during the Euthanasia Programme and participating in the mass murder of concentration camp inmates’.
As the executioner and his assistants completed their preparations, Brandt delivered an impassioned speech to the handful of journalists and officials standing in the courtyard. He had done nothing wrong, he declared. He had only done his best to help humanity – above all, German humanity. His death was an act of political murder. The Americans had no right to condemn him, least of all after they had killed nearly a quarter of a million people by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As he ranted on, the executioner, who had warned Brandt to keep his remarks short, lost patience, placed a hood over his head, took a step back and pulled the trapdoor lever, sending him plunging to his death.
Tall, good-looking and married to a glamorous swimming champion, Brandt had been appointed Hitler’s escort physician in 1934 after he had used the surgical skills honed on victims of mining accidents in the Ruhr to treat a Nazi official injured while driving in the Führer’s motorcade. A member of Hitler’s inner circle from then on, Brandt was in 1939 ordered by him to investigate a petition by the parents of a severely disabled child asking for the infant to be killed. Brandt approved the murder and supervised it himself. This led to his being appointed to run what was termed a ‘euthanasia’ programme, Aktion T4, carried out with Hitler’s authorisation under the cloak of the war. On Brandt’s advice, first children, then adults were rounded up from their homes and from institutions, taken to killing centres in mental hospitals and gassed with carbon monoxide.
In the summer of 1941, after Clemens von Galen, a Catholic bishop, condemned the murders in a series of public sermons, copies of which he distributed across the country, the gassing teams were transferred to new sites in Eastern Europe, where they set up the gas chambers in which millions of Jews were killed. But the ‘euthanasia’ programme continued in secret, by means of lethal injection, starvation and the denial of medical treatment. Up to three hundred thousand victims, most though not all of them German, had been killed by the end of the war.
The ‘euthanasia’ programme was preceded by an even more widespread programme of compulsory sterilisation. After attaining power Hitler lost no time in issuing a Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring: it came into effect on 1 January 1934. Four hundred thousand people were subjected to forcible sterilisation – a practice common in countries from Sweden to the US, and used in some places well after the end of the Second World War, but nowhere so widely as in Germany. Behind the programme lay a belief that the quality of the German race had been badly affected by the First World War, in which more than two million soldiers, thought to be the best and bravest of their generation, had lost their lives. It was urgently necessary to replenish and rebalance the race, a goal that for the Nazis involved not only encouraging the ‘fit’ and healthy to have more children but also preventing the ‘unfit’ and unhealthy from reproducing. In Hitler’s mind, this was part of Germany’s long-term preparation for victory in the struggle between races. The effects of Nazi eugenic policies would not be immediate, but no matter: he was planning the ‘thousand-year Reich’. Medical opinion in Germany was overwhelmingly in support of what doctors deemed to be a scientifically informed policy aimed at improving the quality of the population.
Editor: The final paragraphs of self-congratlatory dreck!
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I got to meet Halik this week at a conference sponsored by the Faith Angle Forum, which brings theologians together with journalists. I attended because I’m looking for a form of Christianity that is more attractive and compelling than Christian nationalism and which we can use to pry people away from that nationalism.
Led by these wise people like Halik and Williams, I now see glimmers of a better way to be faithful in the world. St. Augustine advised us to follow what seems delightful, and in this pilgrim’s way of living I see the delight of pluralism. The world is too complicated to have all its truth encompassed by any single tradition — by Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Enlightenment. You can plant yourself in one and learn from them all.
I see the delight of self-forgetting. As so many sages have told us, if you dive down to the deepest realms of yourself, you find there a desire for self-transcendence that leads you to a highway straight out of self — toward loved ones and friends, toward God. You’re no longer trapped in your small, insecure, self-absorbed self; you’re outward facing, maybe not thinking about yourself much at all.
I see delight in humility. I love Rowan Williams’s definition of humility as a “capacity to be a place where others find rest.” Williams adds that the people Jesus calls blessed “are those who live in welcoming stillness yet are at the same time on fire with longing for the well-being of the neighbor and the healing of the world’s hurts.”
I see, finally, a glimpse of the America I thought I knew. For centuries we have been a hopeful people, a people on the move, defined more by our future than our pasts. Sometimes this relentless passion for growth has led toward gaudy materialism and even exploitation. But American history has been at its best when the passion for spiritual and moral growth has been just as strong. When people have said: I want my heart constantly enlarged, my nation constantly moving toward fairness.
Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward. I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually Americans, restless as any people on earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.
Editor: David Brooks’s political evolution from War Monger, to an ersatz theological fellow traveler of Tomas Halik, offers the reader an opportunity to view an evolution, of a kind, built on the erasure of a toxic past! Because April 28, 2003 is about self-forgeting, wedded to political opportuism?
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