In Case You Had to Ask, Yes it is Too Early for “Pressure Cooker Control” Jokes

Arguably the greatest benefit of living in a free society is freedom of speech, the freedom to share what’s on our mind, to criticize foolishness and corruption when we see it, to advocate for our point of view without fear of the prison cell or the unmarked grave all too common in other societies.  That said, one of the unspoken difficulties of living in a free society is learning to put up with the unfortunate ways people decide to use their freedom of speech.

As a case in point, allow me to address the recent spate of “pressure cooker-control” jokes that broke out in light of the recent Boston Marathon bombings.  As of yet we do not know whether or not these bombings had anything to do (though I somewhat doubt it) with the U.S. Senate’s consideration, and later rejection, of a bill considering stronger gun control measures in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre last December.  However, some poor souls, who can never seem to resist drawing a line between current events and their political hobby-horse of choice came out of the woodwork with the all-too predictable jokes about “bomb control” or “regulation of pressure cookers (the container in which the Boston bombs were housed)” as if such comments were the ultimate in clever political commentary.  Alas, had these puns actually been funny they might almost have been forgivable.  Sadly their tone-deaf humor mixed with a poor sense of timing (here’s a tip, wait for the bodies to be cold and buried before making cracks about the way they died) really just puts the whole thing in poor taste.

For example, let us consider for a moment the following gem, courtesy of Facebook:

  “Pressure Cookers MUST be regulated! Who really needs a pressure cooker in this day and age? Pressure cookers might have been important to the founders but they certainly are not necessary now! How many more children have to die just to protect your right to use something that you don’t even need to feed your family with any more??” 

  Ok, I will admit this is mildly clever, a cute turning of the language of the gun control crowd against themselves in an effort to make them look ridiculous through extreme overreaction (one of the many definitions of good satire) Nevertheless, at this moment there are 30+ people lying in Boston hospitals with at least one limb missing from this attack, including one 6-year-old girl whose 8-year-old brother is lying in a morgue nearby.  I would ask the author of this piece to put themselves in this girl’s shoe and soon-to-be-fitted prosthetic limb for a moment.  Consider her future, full of empty anniversaries commemorating a missing sibling,  a maimed mother and a lifetime of prosthetic legs to look forward to.  In light of this, does the joke still  seem all that funny?  But anyway, congratulations, you got your crack in at gun control, you must feel proud.

Look, I get that as Americans we have the right to make light of things we disagree with.  This is the same impulse that recently led a number of our British cousins to put “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead” at the top of the charts in commemoration of the death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (yet another proof that boorishness is bipartisan) but I am also a firm believer that there is a time and a place for everything, including satire and while we are still burying the bodies of Boston, and fighting to save the wounded I feel the time for these puns is not yet ripe.  The beauty of freedom of speech is that you can disagree, I can disagree with your disagreement, and so on…

Lest I be accused of advocating censorship, I have no such grandiose aspirations.  I fully recognize that the right that provides others with the ability to offend my sensibilities are the same rights that allow me to complain about them on my blog.  With that in mind I do not want for such individuals to be silenced (indeed, it is my hope that with continued practice some of these individuals might actually produce something funny), I just wish some people would think before they speak.

Running Toward the Blast: Defying Terror Through Love

Following the terrorist bombings of London on July 7th, 2005, then Prime Minister Tony Blair made a statement that at first glance might be considered the supreme apex of obviousness:

“The purpose of terrorism lies not just in the violent act itself. It is in producing terror.”

Depending on one’s political persuasion, one might either write that statement off as the effects of shock on a man profoundly moved by the destruction carried out in his capital city, or as evidence of the inherent vapidity of Mr. Blair’s character.  As I am not a member of the British electorate, (and therefore have no horse in that particular race) I make no such judgment.  However, I find in this statement, which is admittedly simplistic to the point of asininity, a peculiar sort of depth because, in a manner unlike most explanations of terrorism, it manages to get to the heart of the question that immediately strikes us all in the aftermath of atrocities such as the one that befell the Boston Marathon yesterday: why?

There are of course a million different reasons (none of which are justifiable) why a person might be motivated to place a bomb in the midst of a mass of people and set it off.  Yet ultimately none of these reasons alone explain the purpose of an attack like this, there are other ways to fulfill a political agenda, other ways to fulfill a vendetta, other ways of making a statement, so why an act of terror?  The answer sadly enough, is as simple as Mr. Blair’s makes it out to be, one commits an act of terror for the sake of terror itself.

Lest I be accused of engaging in a tautology, let me expand on that point.  When a terrorist sets a bomb, or engages in a mass shooting, or commits any number of other atrocities that have been done throughout the sad expanse of human history, the what is being sought is not so much the initial carnage from the first seconds of the attack, but a certain kind of reaction.  What is being sought for is panic, a reaction of mindless terror that transforms a community into a mob of terrified individuals who, having been set off into a stampede through an initial act of terror, proceed to tear their society apart, until they plunge themselves lemming-like over some sort of societal cliff and into an abyss of savagery and madness.  This is the goal of the terrorist, that through his singular act, he may drive his victims to cause infinitely more damage than he ever could on his own.  It’s a form of domination, the sense that I made you do this, I found the stimulus that made you lose control and do whatever I wanted.  There’s a sense of impunity here, the idea that one can strike whenever and wherever one desires, and that no one is safe from the next potential attack.  Thus the goal of an act of terror is to plant the seeds of fear into the minds of the survivors, driving them like cattle toward whatever goal you might have in mind for them.

But that’s not how it played out in Boston.  While doubtless many people did flee the blasts (this is a natural response) a considerable number of people, went running toward the blasts, into the jaws of danger to help those who had been maimed and mutilated by the bombs.  Some of these individuals were First Responders, Police and Firefighters, bound by oath and duty to run toward trouble in times of crisis, but for every first responder, there were some simple common folk, whose interest in this was no greater than the fact that their neighbors, their fellow-men and women, their brothers and sisters lay maimed and bleeding in the streets and needed help.  Instead of fleeing like a mob of cattle in a mindless stampede of destructive self-preservation, these people (who, doubtless, loved their lives as much as anyone else), suppressed the urge to save themselves in order to save others despite the threat (as evidenced by the second bomb) of further bombs designed to slaughter those who remained to assist the wounded.

Nor is Boston the only example of such heroism.  In every major tragedy we have witnessed in the past few years, be it 9/11, the Aurora Theatre Shooting, or the Sandy Hook Massacre (to name but a few) there have been instances in which ordinary men and women, faced with the worst case scenario, chose the path of self-sacrifice over the path of self-preservation, and saved many lives in the act, even if all-too-often they paid with their own lives in the process.  The fact that these individuals exist, and continue to rise up in the moment of crisis reveals the fundamental weakness of terrorism, the fact that while encountering terror may be unavoidable, being terrorized is a choice, and with any choice there is an alternative.  In the case of terrorism, this choice is to accept that ultimately, the only way to effectively oppose the designs of the malignantly nihilistic, is through the willing sacrifice of one’s own life, strength, will and well-being, for one’s fellow beings.  This is a choice that a terrorist cannot comprehend, and never seems to be able to prepare for.   Such a choice does not necessarily yield the Hollywood-style victory over evil that we seem to expect, (so many of these heroes are only remembered posthumously) but choosing not to be a heedless marionette filled with fear and driven by terror is a victory in and of itself.

Boston is a tough town, and has seen its fair share of troubles in the past.  If the responses of the Red Cross in Eastern Massachusetts are any indication, (they’ve had to turn away blood donors, they have more than enough) they’ll pull through this one too.  Our prayers go out to the victims, may they be comforted in these hours of horror and suffering, and may we keep ever fresh in our minds the images of those who, despite terror and carnage, chose to run toward the site of crisis, instead of fleeing in panic.

Thoughts and Lamentations on the Death of Rehtaeh Parsons

Have a look at that photo for a moment, and remember that face.  Her name was Rehtaeh Parsons and she was a person, a young woman and she is dead now, she was murdered.  I suppose some might take issue at that last statement as the Coroner’s final report will state her cause of death as suicide but her final, tragic act of ending her mortal existence was but a sad formality, for her peers had carried out the acts that took her life over a year before.

Miss Parsons was a rape victim.  According to her allegations, in 2011 she went to a friends house where, she was raped by four boys (calling such creatures young men abuses language beyond all civilized limits).  Were such an abominable act not sufficient traumatization, one of these indivduals decided that further entertainment could be had by photographing one of his comrades in the process of violating this then 15-year-old girl, and spreading the online, thus turning a night of abominable atrocity into an unending cycle of degradation and humiliation as Miss Parsons was forced to daily relive her violation through the lewd assertions and pettily cruel insults of peers, neighbors and strangers.  Finally, after 2 years in which she was treated for depression and self-harm, forced to move away from her hometown to escape a toxic atmosphere and finally subjected to the indignity of the police botching the investigation and leaving her attackers unpunished, she took her own life.  As her father stated, “she died from disappointment.”

Rehtaeh Parsons did not die of disappointment, she died from base, bestial, soulless and malignant cruelty.  She died after being mauled by a form of sadistic savagery largely unknown in the animal kingdom, but all too common among our own supposedly more “highly evolved” species.  Ultimately, Rehtaeh Parsons was murdered by individuals so deranged that they did not think it sufficient to stop at the violation of her body and the mutilation of her virtue, they desired the perpetual compounding of her misery until they achieved her absolute destruction.  The creatures who did this were not men, but monsters, and like all monsters they deserve little better than to be drug from the darkness where they do their work in anonymous malevolence, and exposed in the harsh light of justice for the wretched pieces of filth they are, and then dispatched forthwith, so that their ignominious fate might serve as a reminder to all who might secretly aspire to do likewise.

“Now Sidney,” you might say, “I think your rhetoric is getting away from you here.”  These are after all teenage boys.  Surely you can’t mean that you would have them summarily slaughtered to fulfill the bloodlust of a mob, no matter how heinous their crime.”

To which I freely respond that no, I don’t want them murdered by a mob.  However, what I do want is for real justice to be done here, and no simple slap on the wrist to be provided because of their youth or inexperience.  They thought themselves acting as men when they raped her, and they thought themselves men when they shamed her, so let them act as men now and face the full consequences of their actions.  Or have our conceptions of manhood been so degraded that they are limited now to the actions that any un-neutered stray dog can perform?  Let them come forth, be confronted with their crimes, and let them answer for them, if they conceive themselves to be men then no less can be asked of them.

As to those who found humor or entertainment in the carnavalesque cruelty of passing on the photos of that abominable night, or the similar disgraceful episode so recently passed in Steubenville, Ohio, I would like to show you another picture, one in which you (or at least people like you) are represented:

Yes that is a lynching, (my apologies to those of a delicate constitution, unvarnished history is often a horror show without parallel) can you guess where you would be standing?  That’s right, you would be part of that grinning, ghoulish crowd, for whom the destruction of an innocent soul was mere entertainment.  Those folks didn’t kill the victim in question, but they didn’t see anything wrong with it either, and certainly didn’t do anything to stop the horror unfurling before them.  In much the same way, those of you who passed along those photos of the unfortunate victims in these cases may not have committed rape or murder, but you certainly cheered the perpetrators along in their atrocities, and likewise have their blood on your hands.

Finally there is the brutal lesson here for all of the rest of us, for Rehtaeh Parsons was not just the daughter of a bereaved couple in Nova Scotia.  In a very real sense, this girl is my daughter, and your daughter, and indeed all of our daughters, not only because they all face the same circumstances of society and culture that destroyed this poor girl, but because (regardless of the assertions of the late Margaret Thatcher) we all form part of a community or society, even if we can only agree that society consists as a set of behaviors that we collectively agree are utterly unacceptable.  Do we really want to admit that the behavior of Ms. Parson’s attackers, or the Stubenville rapists, or the gang rapists in Delhi, is acceptable for human society?  Perhaps more importantly, do our daughters deserve the fate that awaits them in such a society?

May Miss Parsons, and her many (even one would be too many) sisters who have suffered from these malignant acts find peace and ultimately healing from their wounds.  And may we as a society make the changes in our own behaviors, and encourage a change in behavior in those around us that ends these atrocities forever.  Finally may we have the courage and fortitude to oppose and destroy these malignant evils when we encounter them, for to do otherwise is to consent to their being committed.

Nightmares on Camazotz: A Wrinkle in Time and Totalitarianism

Allow me to begin with a confession, I just finished reading Madeleine L’ Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time for the first time.  As I am 30 years old, this might seem a bit late, after all this is a classic of young adult fiction, which was likely read by most of my contemporaries some time in Junior High.  I will admit that had I read this wonderful book as a young adolescent I probably would have enjoyed it, though I doubt I would have appreciated it half as much as I did reading it from the other side of an education of 20th Century history.

For those of you who, like me have not yet had the opportunity to read this strange, yet lovely little book, it deals with the adventures of three children who are caught up in a rather unusual battle against a “dark force” they are befriended by immortal beings who transport them by “tesseract” (sorry “Avengers” fans, this is not a new idea) to various worlds to prepare them to rescue the father of two of the children (Meg and Charles Wallace) who is a scientist being held prisoner by IT, (no not the people who fix your computers, or the evil clown of Stephen King’s creation) the sinister force behind the darkness consuming world after world in our universe.

Up to this point it sounds like pretty standard YA/Sci-Fi/Fantasy novel right?  If it had been written recently, Meg would likely be a lovely, if somewhat awkward young woman with a hidden talent/power that made her crucial to the plot in some way (a la Bella Swan) and there would be considerably more sexual tension written in between her and the young man named Calvin who accompanies her and her brother on their adventure (there is indeed romance hinted at in the text, but it is subtle and secondary to the plot in general.)  However, the developments of the plot once the children arrived on the alien world of Camazotz, a world completely dominated by the dark powers of IT, were what I found most striking.

Camazotz would strike even the most casual observer as somewhat odd.  There is absolute uniformity in its citizens.  The women all wear dresses of approximately the same pattern, live in houses that look exactly the same, traffic on the streets is regulated to the point that in the period between the delivery of the paper and the delivery of the mail, no one is on the streets, and no one is supposed to be.  Heck, the children who bounce their balls at play, bounce them in an absolutely strict rhythm, and when one child accidentally gets off time, their mother swiftly grabs them and rushes them into the house immediately.  The reason for this haste becomes apparent later on, when Meg and her companions see this same child being tortured in the headquarters of “IT,” the poor child is bombarded with the “correct” rhythm for bouncing the ball in a chamber where every bounce causes the child unspeakable pain.  The uniformity of Camazotz is undergirded and enforced by terror.

Now, such images would have likely stayed with me as an adolescent, but I would not have drawn the conclusions at 13 that I did at 30.  The difference?  Other than 17 years of life experience, I read another book in the interim, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.   Those familiar with this tome of political theory will doubtless remember Arendt’s exhaustive, if somewhat strained attempt in Origins  to draw direct parallels between Nazism and Stalinism, basically reducing them to the two faces of an ideological Janus, that she referred to as totalitarianism.  I personally do not entirely agree with Arendt’s conclusions in regard to the direct link between Stalinism and Nazism, (there are as many striking contrasts as there are connections) I do see the existence of a totalitarian strain in human nature, a desire to exercise absolute authority over others, and destroy that which cannot be controlled.

To me, the most striking image in Arendt’s work was a description of a totalitarian society as one in which all space between individuals was eliminated.  The people were bound together by an “iron band” so tightly that they cannot move but as a single mass, to be driven wherever their masters see fit to send them.  There is no room for individual thought, action or choice, you move with the group because there is nothing else to do.  The iron band holding the mass together is Terror, in this case political terror.  Terror is an integral part of totalitarianism.  It destroys the dissenter and provides an example to those who might hover “on the fence.” Beyond this, the psychological effects of terror are even more potent.  Inside our minds, terror floods our minds with adrenaline, putting us in an unending state of anxiety.  This anxiety suppresses our ability to reason and makes us highly susceptible to command from above.  In the long run, a persistent state of anxiety warps our ability to think, killing brain cells and leaving a person forever twisted by the “iron band” of fear crushing  them into the same ideological space as their neighbors.

For one who has read Arendt, Camazotz stands out immediately as a totalitarian society.  The people have been driven by terror into a sense of absolute uniformity (down to the rhythm of ball-bounces in their children’s games!) and the application of terror maintains that uniformity.  There are no independent decisions, ideas or even conscious thoughts (IT is telepathic, so it would know) the people have been crushed together into one uniform mass, individualism is gone.  This is heady stuff for a YA novel, yet it is deftly and engagingly written.  My complements to Ms. L’ Engle, it took over 600 pages for Arendt to define, what she described in 60.

The Keystone XL Pipeline, and the End of Humanity (and Is That Such a Bad Thing?)

While stumbling in to work this morning, I noticed this message (or one similar to it) scrawled in various places across the UCR Campus:

For those of you unfamiliar with this hashtag, (as I was when my muddled, sleep-deprived brain came across it this morning) it is in reference to the Keystone XL pipeline, an oil pipeline planned to take oil extracted from the tar sands of Alberta, and carry it to ports along the Gulf of Mexico.  The U.S. State Department has only recently stated that it has no objections to the construction of the pipeline, and sees it as posing minimal environmental harm to the nation and the planet.  Such a position conflicts directly with the arguments of leading climate scientists, who have proclaimed that releasing the carbon stored in the tar sands into the atmosphere would effectively seal the fate of the planet in regards to climate change, the globe would be heated beyond any possibility of amelioration and mankind would be forced to face the awful consequences of its greed in the form of a permanent global state of catastrophe.

For the record I disagree with neither the author of this graffiti nor the climate scientists who have pronounced this prophecy of doom upon our fossil-fuel addled heads.  Indeed, I find it very hard to condemn someone who feels so strongly about an issue that they scrawl it in innumerable places across campus, yet have such concern for the environment that they make known their protest through the medium of sidewalk chalk, and thereby do not participate in the permanent defacement of the campus.  That said, I do find the furor surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline a little overblown, for two basic reasons:

First, killing the pipeline will not halt the development of the Alberta tar sands.  Indeed, the Canadian company involved in the development of the project has stated that should they be unable to use their pipeline route of choice, they would either consider a trans-Canadian pipeline, with an outlet on the Pacific Coast, or simply use trains to carry out the oil they refine.  The killer everyone is afraid of here is not a pipe, but the carbon currently locked in the tar sands, carbon that is going to be released pipeline or no pipeline, so killing Keystone XL doesn’t put a spanner in the works, it just mildly inconveniences the instrument of our own destruction.

Second, if we are stupid (or greedy, the term may be used interchangeably) enough to destroy our world, perhaps we deserve to be destroyed.  I know, I sound a bit like a raving religious zealot when I talk like this, but bear with me, for my argument here is both biblical and Darwinian in origin (bet you’ve never heard that before).

On the biblical end, I am not one of those individuals who believes that the sooner we utterly wreck our environment, the sooner Jesus will come and save us.  The Second Coming (which I do happen to believe in) is not an event that we get to either postpone, or accelerate through our own stupidity.  When the Lord comes, the miserable state that he will find us in will be wholly of our own doing.  As Adam and his posterity were given stewardship over the Earth in the Garden of Eden, so we will be called to account for the misuse of our stewardship through pollution, greed and the destruction of the world we have been given, part of that being called to account is our having to live with the consequences of the hell we make our world become through our own greed and heedless consumption.

On the Darwinian end, I stand by my previous statement, a species intelligent enough to perceive that its actions will lead to its extinction, and yet stupid enough to continue in these same actions anyway, deserves to become extinct, which is exactly what will befall us should we continue to throw nature out of balance.  The Darwinian system is (at least by my conception) amoral, so this will not be the vengeance of an aggreived Mother Earth, or some form of mystical karmic justice, but the simple fact that the balance necessary to maintain life on this Earth is a fragile thing, and anything that throws it off, results in cataclysmic changes, which tend to effect the most complex lifeforms on the planet far more harshly than the simple ones.  Hence we may be destroyed, while the humble Cockroach persists.  The only real difference between us and the Dinosaurs is that we are not lumbering blindly toward our own doom, we are willfully carreening toward it, and face all the greater condemnation for it.

A “Short” Explanation of the Anschluss (the Nazi Annexation of Austria) — For a Friend Who Asked

Recently, a dear friend of my wife’s on Facebook sent me a link to a picture/internet meme in which an elderly Austrian lady purported to be speaking of her nation’s plight in 1938, as it was forcibly annexed into the Third Reich. One of the key points in the discussion was that the Austrians were not invaded by the Nazis, but willingly gave up their independence to an opposing army, and then voted enthusiastically to be politically absorbed into one of the most evil regimes in history. My friend was curious as to the truth of this situation, did the Austrians really decide en masse to become Nazis? If so, why? As is often the case with internet memes (left and right) this view of history contains some highly oversimplified facts, with a fair amount of current political arguments in an attempt to create an equivalency between the political differences of our time and the horrors of the past.

The reality in this case is far more problematic. Austria’s unique case as either “first victim” of Nazism, or “willing accomplice” in the horrors of the Third Reich, is a complicated situation that continues to cause conflict among academic historians in the present day. Austria’s situation is particularly strange as Hitler himself, as well as a number of key Nazis made notorious by later atrocities were Austrian, either by birth or nationality. Hence, in attempting to answer this question, I am going to delve into a bit of a historical briar patch. I am taking my basic materials from William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which provides a much broader (and at times exhausting) account of the events leading up to the annexation of Austria. If, dear readers, you wish to delve further into this mess, you may start there profitably. For those of you who don’t fancy the extended version of history, I will provide you with this more digested version, though I warn you in advance, this will be a longish post, because you never ask a Historian for a short answer:

In 1938 Austria had been under a pseudo-fascist Authoritarian regime (not unusual for Europe in the 1930′s, East of France the only democracy in Europe in the late 30′s was Czechoslovakia) since 1933, when a man by the name of Engelbert Dolfuss, over threw the shaky constitutional government in Austria. The Dolfuss regime was different from Nazism as it was basically a highly authoritarian (anti-liberal/anti-socialist and anti-nazi) government rooted heavily in tradition and Catholicism (Austria is overwhelmingly Catholic).

The Dolfuss regime rejected Nazism mostly because they wished to preserve Austrian independence (The Nazis saw the unification of Austria with Germany as an integral part of creating a “Greater Germany”, an idea that first really popped up in 1919 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was divided at the end of World War I, as all that remained of “Austria” was a tiny area with a German-speaking majority.) Anyway, the idea of unification with Germany had been floated around since at least 1919 (it was formally forbidden in the Treaty of Versailles) and still had some popularity among a number of Austrians. The Dolfuss regime represented a different (and also significant) segment of Austrians who saw their nation’s culture and history as being distinct from their northern neighbor and did not want to be swallowed up in a Greater Germany. However, the Dolfuss regime was far from democratic, there were no free elections, parties in general were banned, and stepping out of line was a good way to end up in jail (but notably not in a concentration camp.)

As Dolfuss and his Fatherland Front vehemently opposed unification with Germany, they needed a powerful backer to ensure their continued independence (Austria was tiny, neutral and its army was nothing compared to the Wehrmacht.) Therefore they looked to their south, to Facsist Italy, where Mussolini was not yet friendly toward Hitler. Hence despite the Nazis coming to power in 1933 in Germany, and executing a number of expansionist moves prior to 1938, they made no open moves toward Austria, in order to stay on Mussolini’s good side. This did not stop them from covert acts of terrorism within Austria, including the assassination of Dolfuss by an underground Austrian Nazi in 1934. Dolfuss was succeeded in office by his deputy Kurt Schuschnigg.

Things took a turn for the worse for Austria in late 1937-early 1938 when Mussolini, angry at Britain and France for their censure of his invasion and conquest of Ethiopia (there were sanctions of some sort voted in the League of Nations, they were about as effective as you can imagine) turned to a sympathetic Hitler to form a new bloc against the western allies. All of the sudden support for an independent Austria became inconvenient for “Il Duce” who, following a few meetings with Hitler, gave his agreement to do nothing in the event of a Nazi annexation of Austria.

That said, the German Army was not quite ready for open war with the allies in 1938, and Hitler felt confident that annexation of Austria could be gained through bluster and fraud, instead of armed force (He read Chamberlain of Britain and Daladier of France all too well, and realized they had no stomach for a fight.) So, with Mussolini’s blessing, the Nazis set their underground cells in Austria into motion, spreading terror and disorder throughout the country, and making Austria generally ungovernable. Hitler claimed that the unrest in Austria was the work of Communists, and that it was intolerable for the Third Reich to accept such a situation on its borders. As such, if Schuschnigg and his government were unable to control the situation themselves, the Germans would step in and do it for them. Schuschnigg and his government were no fools, and realized that this was all a ruse, so they appealed to their former benefactor Mussolini for support. The found a frosty reception in Rome and realized that they would be forced to enter into discussions with Berlin.

As would be repeated in the next year in Czechoslovakia, negotiations with the Third Reich by an inferior power basically involved Hitler, Goring and other cronies berating and threatening Schuschnigg while casually observing how close the Wehrmacht’s Panzer divisions were to the Austro-German border, and how little time would be required to set them into motion. Exhausted and facing the all-too-clear situation of being abandoned to the Germans, Schussnigg capitulated, “inviting” the German forces to enter Austria and restore order, and appointing the head of the Austrian Nazi Party, Arthur Seyss-Inquart as his deputy. In short order, the Austrian Nazi Party was decriminalized, and Stormtroopers were on the streets enforcing the new political order (with all the tender brutality they were renowned for), as German soldiers patrolled the streets. Schuschnigg and his supporters were soon under house arrest, and Seyss-Inquart was pushing for annexation. In order for the whole thing to look legitimate and democratic, a plebescite (a general election) was called for, in which Austrians were invited to vote for or against annexation. Having been subjected to a taste of how Nazis did electoral politics (opposing parties get stomped to death while the police look on approvingly) the enthusiastic yes vote on the plebescite is not surprising (people tend to either stay home, or vote the “right way” when encouraged by literal jackbooted-thugs).

So, in short, yes Austrians did welcome in the Germans, and voted away their own independence, leading them into a future where they both participated in, and suffered from some of the worst that humanity has ever seen fit to inflict upon itself. That said, the Austrian case is of a rather specific nature, once one delves beyond the superficial, it bears little resemblance to current American partisan politics. We should be careful when attempting to demonize our opponents by likening them to absolute evil, it makes the processes of normal republican democracy impossible (for any deal is literally a “deal with the devil”) and cheapens the horrors and suffering of the past.

An Open Letter to Mr. Terry Deary, from an Aspiring Librarian

Dear Mr. Deary,

As the long-time employee of a library and an aspiring librarian, I feel compelled to call you to account regarding your recent comments in The Guardian regarding the irrelevance of libraries in the modern world.  While you sir may congratulate yourself on your seeming transgressive attitude, you need not pat yourself on the back too hard, the death of my chosen profession and the institutions it serves has repeatedly prophesied (in tones alternating between concern and glee) for decades, and by men and women far more knowledgeable on the subject than yourself.

But we will lay aside your dreadful ignorance of both my profession and the services provided by it for the moment, to focus on the source of your grievance against Libraries in general.  In your interview, to The Guardian Mr. Deary, you mention the system of remuneration provided by the British Government to authors whose works are purchased by Libraries and circulate.  It appears that you receive 6.2 pence per circulation of your works, up to a total of £6,000 (approximately $10,250 on my side of the pond).  You feel, that this current system of remuneration is unjust, and as Library Patrons are effectively reading your works for a highly discounted price (in comparison to the £30 you would be receiving if they bought your books outright) you are being deprived of over £180,000 (or $277,627) of your rightful income.  You furthermore claim sir, that the expectation of library patrons to “read books for free” is a sense of entitlement, that oppresses men like yourself, who earn their living by their pens.

While I have no desire whatsoever to deprive any man of his honest living, I find in your complaints regarding this matter an astonishing sense of entitlement as well.  If I understand things correctly sir, you receive a remuneration of up to £6,000 for every title of yours that circulates in the British Public Library system.  In essence, sir, you are paid after the purchase of your book by the library each time that your books circulate.  Do you realize sir that American authors receive no such compensation for their works which circulate in our public libraries?  Outside of the initial royalties that they receive from the library’s initial purchase of their work, they receive nothing.  They receive nothing if their work gathers dust on a shelf, and they receive nothing (unless the library decides to purchase extra copies to meet demand) if there is a year-long waiting list to read their work.  Either way, it appears to me that (as you are a best-selling author whose works are no doubt highly popular with library patrons in the UK) you are coming out of this around $10,000 better off than your American peers.

Nevertheless sir, were your complaints limited to the complexities of British intellectual rights law, I would have no real conflict with you.  Instead I take issue with the way in which you justify your avarice, by declaring the entire institution of libraries as an irrelevant relic of a bygone era, or in your own words:

“[Libraries] have been around too long…I’m not attacking libraries, I’m attacking the concept behind libraries, which is no longer relevant,…  Because it’s been 150 years, we’ve got this idea that we’ve got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers. This is not the Victorian age, when we wanted to allow the impoverished access to literature. We pay for compulsory schooling to do that,…”

Libraries are irrelevant Mr. Deary?  Indeed.  I suppose to a man as rich as you are, libraries are irrelevant.  However, if you have not yet noticed, the majority of mankind (even in your native Britain) are not wealthy bestselling authors, who have no need to worry about whether or not they can afford the resources to look something up, or buy a copy of the book they’ve been meaning to read.  But beyond these simple things, in defining libraries solely as warehouses for free books that the entitled may read at the poor, underprivileged author’s expense, you have failed to grasp the full value and mission of libraries around the world.

I wonder sir, whether the average library patron feels as you do about the relevance of the institution?  I wonder if the impoverished urban youth who uses the library as a place to study, because he or she needs a quiet place with reliable internet access finds the library irrelevant?  Or how about the unemployed in this time of economic difficulties, do you suppose, as they search or apply for jobs, or take one of the many professional development courses offered by local libraries here in the United States, that they feel the institution providing them with these resources is irrelevant?  And what of the current and future scholars of medieval Africa, who owe much of the future scholarship in their field to a few brave and resourceful Librarians who preserved 95% of the irreplaceable manuscripts of the city of Timbuktu from the torches of local fundamentalist insurgents?  Do you suppose that they find libraries to be irrelevant Mr. Deary?

It may well be, in the ultimate scheme of things, that it is not libraries who are irrelevant sir, but instead avaricious hack writers like yourself, who have somehow come to the conclusion that writing a best-seller gives you the right to pass judgment on society in general.  Were there any justice in the universe sir, Librarians across the English-speaking world would give you your fondest dream, and sell off their copies of your works, never again to buy a single book you wrote.  I fear though that were such a thing to happen, you might indeed notice a severe drop-off in those royalties you hold so sacred, for though you might be shocked to realize it sir, many library patrons (myself included) try a book out at their local library, to see if they like it.  Should the answer be yes, we then decide to spend our hard-earned money on a personal copy.  Can you suggest to us an alternative way of determining which books to buy sir?  One that is not entirely based on your self-interested desire to line your own pockets?

No Mr. Deary, Libraries are not irrelevant at all.  In fact, in a day where information is present everywhere and reliable nowhere at the same time, it is to the library we look to help us determine what information is useful, good and authoritative.  In an age where popular access to cultural resources is being mercilessly slashed in favor of low taxes and fiscal obligations, it is to the library we look in order to fulfill our needs for something of greater spiritual fulfillment than the Social Darwinism regurgitated by your average reality show.  In an age of high unemployment and low social mobility it is to the library we look to help those of us who were not born with all the potential advantages life has to offer, to help us get by.  And finally, in an age of increased social atomization and individual isolation, it is to the library we look to help bring us together as a community and hold us together as a society.  Perhaps sir, if you had ever frequented one, or spoken with an actual library patron, you would have appreciated this  Perhaps you will consider these things in the future before you make another foolish claim to justify your frustrated avarice.

May you learn the value of libraries before the Collection Development decision to buy your books ever falls into my hands,

Sidney Carton