My Review of Batya Ungar-Sargon's "The Jews and the Left"

 Jews and Democrats: Time for a Divorce?

Last November I wrote that Jews were between a rock and a hard place in that both Democrats and Republicans have become more hostile to Jews. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2025/11/american-jews-between-rock-and-hard.html ) Here polemicist Batya Ungar-Sargon argues that it is time for the Jews to divorce from the Democratic Party. Simply put the Left in America has become increasingly hostile to Jews; witness the Michigan senate primary win of Abdul El-Sayed, the near gubernatorial primary win of Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, and Peggy Flanagan’s win the Minnesota Senate primary. However, Ungar-Sargon does not suggest that Jews marry the Republican Party, but rather to vote strategically. As my late father of blessed memory constantly reminded me the criterion for a vote is whether or not a candidate would be good for the Jews.

 

Ungar-Sargon presents a brief history of the relationship of Jews and politics in America starting in colonial times. She notes that with George Washington’s letter to the Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island in 1790 that Jews in America would be free to practice their religion. Aside from Grant’s Civil War order which was cancelled by President Lincoln there hasn’t been official discrimination against the Jews. Thus, in her mind Jews should not consider themselves a persecuted minority. This is especially true because Jews as a group have achieved huge success in “The Golden Land.”

 

A problem with the book is that she ignores the entire 19^th Century history and the whole history of private discrimination against Jews (restictions on club membership and property covenants) that existed from the beginning. She also ignores the rabid antisemitism of the Klan in the 1920’s and Father Coughlin in the 1930’s. She also ignores that in Europe and especially in Russia it was the Left that led the charge against the antisemitism of the Right.

 

To her the source of the bond between the Jews and the Democratic Party is a result of the labor movement in the early 20^th Century where Jewish immigrants were in the vanguard of the growing movement, especially after the Triangle Fire in 1911. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-amazon-review-of-terry-golways-frank.html )  The deal was closed with the very pro-Labor Roosevelt Administration and Roosevelt’s opposition to Hitler.

 

It was an easy step from labor activism to civil rights activism in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Here Jews were in lockstep with the northern Democratic Party. However, once the civil rights movement moved away from equal opportunity to equal results and later to the DEI mentality of oppressor versus the oppressed Jews began to have second thoughts about the Democrats. This is especially because DEI treats Jews as oppressors, not the persecuted minority of old. In a nutshell, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class in favor of identity politics.

 

All of this has come to a boil with the virulent anti-Zionism of the Left after October 7^th. Here the Left is calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and thus condemning half the Jews in the world who happen to live in Israel to death. That is exactly what “from the river to the sea” means.

 

Although I have outlined several issues with Ungar-Sargon’s book, she makes a convincing case that the Democratic Party as it exists today is far from the best political home for Jews today. That said, Trump and the Republican Party do not make for a comfortable home. However, given current trends, in a post-Trump world the Republicans could very well offer a better option than Democrats. In the meantime, a trial separation from the Democrats is in order.

 

My Review of Per Hansen's "There Will be the Devil to Pay"

 The Mother of all Financial Crises

This is a book for economic history nerds, not for the typical lay reader. Danish business school professor Per Hansen takes us deep into the financial crisis of 1931 starting in May when the Credit Anstalt Bank of Vienna collapsed and ending in October in the aftermath of England going off the gold standard. Although the crisis has been covered before by Barry Eichengreen, Peter Temin, Liaquat Ahamed and Tobias Straumann (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Tobias Straumann's "1931:Debt, Crisis and the Rise of Hitler" ), Hansen’s account is the most detailed.

 

Instead of writing history after the fact, Hansen takes us into the minds of four key players in the crisis as they try to make sense of the enveloping collapse. His four players are Montague Norman, Governor of the Bank of England; George Harrison, President of the New York Fed; Francis Rodd, bank of England official on loan to the newly formed Bank for International Settlements; and Harry Siepmann, Advisor to Norman. They all, especially Rodd, took detailed notes. Hansen records many of them in full and he had access to the numerous telegrams that lit up the wires of Europe.

 

For all four of them the maintenance of the gold standard was the highest priority and as Eichengreen, Temin, and yes Keynes noted, it was the fetters of the gold standard that worsened the crisis. Hansen calls out the fact that the United States and France did not play by the rules of the gold standard by failing to ease credit sufficiently to staunch the inflow of gold coming from Germany and England. It was the gold outflow from Germany and England that forced upon them a deflationary spiral from which there was no recovery.

 

All four of them were operating under the lender of last resort rules proposed by Walter Bagehot in 1873. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of James Grant's "Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian" )  Bagehot’s crisis rule called for central banks to lend freely, against good collateral at a penalty rate. That works if there is sufficient good collateral to lend against. In the case of Credit Anstalt, there was none. Indeed, Credit Anstalt was more a private equity fund controlling about 70% of Austrian industry, than a commercial bank. Simply put, it was funding long term equity with short term deposits. When the market recognized the bank’s assets were worth far less than was thought, a bank run ensued. What exacerbated the crisis was that Credit Anstalt was a highly prestigious Rothschild bank with a blue-ribbon board of directors. If it could happen to them, it could happen to any bank.

 

The crisis then moves to Germany in July when the Danat Bank failed triggering an internal and external drain on deposits. In an effort to maintain the gold standard, the Bruening government yet again adopts further austerity policies as a condition to receiving aid from the Bank of England, the Bank of

France and the New York Fed. Yes, George Harrison of the New York Fed was in up to his eyeballs in the European crisis. Although he formally needed approval from the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington, that was a mere formality. As part of the crisis management a standstill agreement on withdrawing international deposits from Germany was put in place.

 

That standstill agreement kept England from withdrawing gold from Germany exacerbating a gold outflow that was already in train. To staunch the gold outflow the Bank of England recommended an austerity budget which triggered a naval mutiny over pay cuts. It was then only a matter of time before England left the gold standard and let the pound float.

 

The German crisis put such a strain on Montague Norman that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was out of action from mid-August to late September. However, there was not much he could have done. Hansen highlights the fact that origin of the European crisis was the after affects of World War I that left a legacy of inflation along with German reparations payments and an inter-allied debt to the United States. In June of 1930 President Hoover called for a one-year moratorium on all debt repayments, but that was scuttled by France. While England would have benefited because it received less reparations payments than what was owed the United States; for France it was the reverse.  

 

Thus, reparations and the inter-allied debts hung over Europe like a dark cloud until the June 1932 Lausanne Conference which suspended all payments. By then the depression was in full force and Hitler was well on the way to power.

 

As someone who read the front page of every New York Times from August 1929 to March 1933 I have to sympathize with the four bankers and others who Hansen portrays. They were living day-to-day in a continual crisis doing the best they can under the circumstances. Hansen takes us into the weeds, which at times makes it difficult for the reader, it is well worth it. They did not know how the movie would end and were forced to make sense out of the situation as they went along. I had the same feeling about the Great Financial Crisis and the COVID crisis. In case of the latter, the Fed threw out the Bagehot playbook, by lending on questionable collateral. It worked, but along with a too aggressive fiscal policy it left a great inflation in its wake.

 

 

History Rhyming with Trump and Greenland

Mark Twain noted that history doesn't necessarily repeat, but it rhymes. This is exactly what is happing with Donald Trump's proposal to seize Greenland. Before Hitler took the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938 he threatened to invade. Similarly, Putin made noises about taking Crimea in 2014 before invading that part of Ukraine. It seems that Trump is giving new life to my "Reliving the 1930's series. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2023/11/reliving-1930s-part-5.html ) The difference here is that instead of acting like a leader, Trump is acting like a three year-old toddler. He neeeeds Greenland. Unfortunately, his tantrum is breaking up NATO and like the previous episodes I noted, it will make the world a far more dangerous place.

My Review of Volker Ullrich's "Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933"

The Slow Descent into an Abyss

German historian and Hitler biographer Volker Ullrich ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 , Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939", and Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Germany 1923: Hyper Inflation, Hitler's Putsch and...." ) has chronicled the rise and then the slow collapse of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Frank McDonough's "The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933" and  Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Benjamin Carter Hett's "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic"   )  Like others Ullrich does not believe that the collapse was inevitable and neither was the rise of Hitler. There was much human agency involved as well as three untimely deaths.

The first and most dramatic was the political assignation of foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922. Rathenau had just shocked Europe with the Rapallo Treaty with the Soviet Union and was working on solving the reparations crisis. He was perhaps the only German statesman that the Allies trusted enough to make a deal on reparations. With his death the road was open to the reparations crisis of 1923 which brought on the occupation of the Ruhr and the hyper-inflation of 1923, a shock that Germany would not really recover from.

The second two would die of natural causes. President Friedrich Ebert died in 1925 paving the way for Paul von Hindenburg and  former prime minister and foreign minister Gustav Stresemann in 1929.  Although Stresemann was the leader of the right wing German National People's Party, he firmly supported the Weimar Constitution and he showed his mettle in Ruhr/inflation crisis of 1923. He was, perhaps, the only politician in Germany who could have taken on Hitler. 

Ullrich believes that, at the outset, Weimar did not do enough to reform German society, especially after the general strike of 1920 put down the Kapp putsch. Whether the Social Democrats had the will and the power to do it is an open question. Indeed, they relied on the Frei Corps to put down a communist revolt in 1919. Of course, had they succeeded, history would have taken a different turn.

To Ullrich the election of the authoritarian Hindenburg represented the hinge of German history. It was Hindenburg along with the machinations of prime ministers Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher that enabled Hitler to come to power in 1933. They though Hitler could be controlled, but they were immediately disabused of that notion.

In my mind Ullrich doesn’t spend enough time on the socialist/communist split. Had those two leftwing parties held together they had the votes to stop Hitler. Instead, the communists went to bed with the Nazi’s in 1931-32 helping to bring down the Bruning government. They did this just when Heinrich Bruning’s policies were on the brink of success at the Lausanne Conference, which suspended reparations payments.

To sum up, Weimar was dealt with a bad hand that it played well for a while, but at the end of the day it wasn’t quite enough. Ullrich warns that today in the West we have a far better hand, but it remains to be seen whether the forces of the populist Right will be contained. We ignore his warning at our peril. 

My Review of George Selgin's "False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947"

The Recovery that Failed

Libertarian economist George Selgin has written an intriguing history of the New Deal and role Keynesian thought played in it. The book is largely a critique of Eric Rauchway’s “The Moneymakers.” (See:   https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2015/12/my-amazon-review-of-eric-rauchways.html ) In the main I agree with Selgin. Simply put, many policies attributed to Roosevelt weren’t really his and by and large Roosevelt was wary of deficits as a macroeconomic policy tool. In Selgin’s framework the New Deal consisted of three R’s: recovery, relief, and reform. Selgin focuses on the recovery aspects and notes that Roosevelt’s deficits came from funding relief.

To begin with the ideas behind the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 which closed and then reopened the banks came from Hoover’s treasury department, namely Secretary Ogden Reed and Under-Secretary Arthur Ballentine. Further Roosevelt opposed the deposit insurance provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act because of the moral hazards associated with it. That issue would come to the fore in the 1980’s. A criticism of Selgin is that he does not give credit for how successful deposit insurance was during the 1937-38 downturn. The bank runs of the early depression were over.

 

As to deficit financing, the biggest deficit took place in 1936 when the World War I veterans’ bonus was paid out. Roosevelt opposed it and his veto was over-ridden. The payout provided a short-term boost to the economy and played a significant role in his re-election. However, in 1937 the lack of such stimulus played a role in that year’s downturn.

 

In the Spring of 1938 Roosevelt and his advisors finally took Keynes’ advice and embarked on the first true Keynesian stimulus of his administration. However, in the light of the World War II spending that was to come, it was far too little.

 

Selgin credits the massive gold inflows of the 1930’s for the modest recovery that took place. The gold came from Stalin’s stepping up gold production in the Soviet Union and European flight capital fearing Hitler. It was the gold inflow that enabled the Fed to embark on a policy of monetary easing, a policy that was halted in late 1936 as the treasury sterilized the gold inflows out of fear of inflation.

Roosevelt did take the U.S. off the gold standard in 1933 and raised the price of gold, a stratagem that Keynes advised. To Keynes it would be path to monetary ease. However, according to Selgin the increase in price of gold came from the ideas of George Warren who thought that a rise in the price of gold would automatically increase commodity prices. It did not.

 

Along the way Selgin notes how Roosevelt’s reforms stalled the economy, and the anti-business nature of his policies greatly weakened private investment. That would not turn until World War II ended and the feared depression did not take hold. Selgin observed a rise in business optimism in the aftermath of the war; however, this sentiment was not reflected in stock prices, as Wall Street experienced a three-year bear market from 1946 to 1949.  Stock market investors at the time were clearly worried. As a result, it would have helped to have some discussion of stock prices during his 1933-1947 history.

 

 

 

My Review of Tom Arnold-Forster's "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography"

 The Evolution of Walter Lippmann from Socialist to Conservative-Liberal

 

I previously reviewed Craufurd Goodwin’s book on Walter Lippman as an economist. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/11/my-amazon-review-of-craufurd-goodwins.html ) Here we have Tom Arnold-Forster’s work as a complete intellectual biography of Lippmann’s thought. Lippmann, born in 1889 from a wealthy Jewish family, would over the next seven decades would become one of America’s great pundits. He would ignore his Jewish heritage throughout his life.

 

Lippmann advised presidents, worked on Wilson’s 14 Points, was present at the Versailles Conference and with his 1922 “Public Opinion” became a leading political scientist. To Lippmann social psychology was the driving force behind the formation of public opinion.

 

After graduating from Harvard Lippmann hung out in the socialist milieu of the Greenwich Village and the New Republic crowd of the 1910’s. He became good buddies with the soon to be communist, John Reed. However, he never lived there and retreated to his upper-eastside family home.

 

From his perch as a syndicated columnist, first with the New York World and then with the Herald Tribune, through his "Today and Tomorrow" column he became widely known and very influential. He fully supported the urban liberalism of Al Smith. He was extraordinarily prescient in 1931 about the enormity of the crisis caused by the Great Depression and again in 1938 he fully understood Hitler’s motives to conquer Europe.

 

However, once the immediate emergency of the depression was over, Lippmann moved to the Right. So much so that a group of European conservative economists, including Hayek, sponsored a 1938 colloquium in his honor. Simply put Lippmann’s opposition to state planning put him in good stead with that group and it was there he coined the term “neo-liberal.”

 

He went all out to support the U.S. military build-up from 1939-41 and after the war he became an advocate of military-Keynesianism. Early on he understood the danger coming from the Soviet Union and he popularized the term, “Cold War.” His Eurocentricity made him a critic of the Vietnam war.

 

Lippmann was a great believer in the role of newspapers in forming public opinion. Afterall, he wrote “Public Opinion” just prior to the advent of radio. I wonder what he would think now of the collapse of newspapers and panoply of information sources that the public now has available?

 

My concern about the book is that Arnold-Forster largely presents criticisms of Lippmann from the Left about his economics and his belief in a strong America. Criticism from the Right comes very late in the book and is minimal. My guess is that the author unfortunately sides with the Left.

Trump and the New Hitler-Stalin Pact

In the early morning hours of August 24th,1939 Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop entered into a pact that would ratify the division of Poland and the ceding of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia to the Soviets. The press would soon call it the Hitler-Stalin Pact that enabled Germany to invade Poland on September 1st and Soviet Russia to invade three weeks later. 

Today President Trump, echoing Russian propaganda, called Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky a "dictator" and accused him of starting the war in Ukraine, a complete lie. Put bluntly, Trump has thrown Ukraine under the bus. My guess is that Putin called in all his cronies and broke out the vodka in celebration of a new Hitler-Stalin Pact. And to put icing on the cake for Putin, Defense Secretary Hegseth announced substantial budget cuts for the Pentagon.  Instead of dividing Poland, Trump and Putin are setting the predicate for the division of Ukraine. The result in 1939 was a World War. I fear a Trump-Putin condominium will lead to a similar result. 

For previous posts on Ukraine, see for example: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-ukraine-what-is-to-be-done.html and https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2022/03/mr-zelinskyy-goes-to-washington-via-zoom.html.

My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Germany 1923: Hyper Inflation, Hitler's Putsch and...."

 Weimar’s Trial by Fire

I previously reviewed Volker Ullrich’s two volume biography of Adolf Hitler. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939" and Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 )                                      Here the distinguished German historian focuses in on the critical year of 1923 which almost brought with it the premature death of the then five-year year-old Weimar Republic. His hero is the grand coalition prime minister, Gustav Stresemann, who manages to hold it together long enough so that the nascent republic survives its first trial by fire. It won’t be so lucky the next time.

 

What Stresemann faces is a hyper inflation that brings the Mark’s valuation down to 4.2 trillion to the dollar, the French occupation of the Ruhr for nonpayment of reparations, the Hitler Putsch in Munich, and a communist rising ordered by the Comintern in Moscow in Saxony, Thuringia, and Hamburg.  If this weren’t enough a separatist movement arose in the Rhine Valley where one of the leading figures was Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauer. As Keynes noted in his “Economic Consequences of the Peace,”  

       “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

 

Indeed, it was this inflation that destroyed the relationship between debtors and creditors, wiped out middle-class savings and immiserated huge swaths of the hitherto prosperous middle-class. Although not fatal at the time, when hard times returned to Germany in 1930, it happened with a vengeance.

 

Yet through it all, with all of its inherent faults, parliamentary democracy survived in Germany. By the end of the year the introduction of the Rentenmark, stabilized the currency which created the precondition for a substantial economic recovery in the late 1920’s. Working very effectively behind the scenes was U.S. Ambassador Alanson Houghton who worked tirelessly with Stresemann to get German acceptance of what was to become the Dawes Plan that enabled American loans to Germany. Later when American credit dried up, the roof fell in.

 

All the while Germany was in political and economic crisis the arts were flourishing. Germany became the second largest producer of motion pictures with such luminaries as Emil Jennings, Fritz Lang, and Conrad Veidt. Veidt would go on to play Major Heinrich Strasser in “Casablanca.” There was also the artist George Grosz, the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius.

 

Underneath it was a far right that never accepted democracy, industrialists who sought to undo the labor reforms of 1918, a judicial system that punished the Left far mor more severely than the Right.  Through it all Stresemann, originally a man of the Right, ended up being one of Weimar’s biggest supporters and by 1925, as foreign minister, he negotiated the Locarno Treaty with France confirming Germany’s western borders.

 

After reading this book I became more optimistic about the future of America. If the fledgling Weimar democracy could survive the challenges discussed above, certainly the 250-year-old democracy of the United States can survive our current dyspepsia. Germany faced far worse and came through it.

For the full Amazon URL see: Weimar's Trial by Fire (amazon.com)

Israel, Iran and the Nazi Gaza War Protesters

Last night Iran launched a massive air attack on Israel that was thwarted by the integrated Israeli air defenses along with help from the United States and regional allies. It was a credit to Israeli diplomacy that Jordan and Saudi Arabia aided Israel. Iran's dastardly attack will deservedly be met with a stern Israeli response, that hopefully will give the ayatollahs second thoughts about resuming their aggressive actions.

Meantime in the United States the Gaza war protestors were cheering Iran on with the slogans "hands off Iran" and "death to America." I guess they really love how well Iran treats its female and gay populations. Indeed, the Gaza War protesters have become the new Nazis in their unceasing efforts to shut down Israeli and Jewish artists and political figures at  numerous venues. Their behavior is very reminiscent of what the Nazis did in pre-Hitler Germany. Simply put we have to put and end to the hecklers' veto. I recently noted in a book review where the Nazis prevented the Berlin opening in December 1930 of the antiwar film "All Quiet on the Western Front." (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Frank McDonough's "The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933" )

In response Congress should immediately pass the supplemental appropriation for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan that has been held up by the Republican wrecker caucus in the House. (See: Shulmaven: Crunch Time for Ukraine, Israel and the Border ) Further voters should vote out of office the Hamas caucus within the Democratic Party that voted against supporting Israel's Iron Dome system and the sending of F-35 jets. I close to note that the Iranian attack is further evidence that we are living in a prewar period with its attendant dangers. ( Shulmaven: Shulmaven Anticipates Hal Brands Foreign Affairs Article on Pre-WW II and Today )

My Amazon Review of Frank McDonough's "The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933"

 On the Road to Perdition

 

Third Reich historian Frank McDonough has written a year-by-year tick tock history of the Weimar Republic from its founding in 1918 to its demise on January 30, 1933. It is largely a political history where he sometimes goes into excruciating detail about the various cabinet changes over the years. His hero is Gustav Stresemann, prime minister and for many years foreign minister. He was perhaps Germany’s most influential politician from 1925 -1929 where he negotiated a détente with the West though the Locarno Treaty. Unfortunately, deliberate, or not there was not Locarno for the East where Stresemann had designs on the eastern territories taken away from Germany at Versailles.

 

McDonough rightly notes that the premature deaths of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau by assassination in 1922 and the deaths by disease of President Friedrich Ebert and Stresemann severely eroded the talent of the regime. I have written elsewhere that Stresemann’s death in 1929 removed the last politician of stature who could have stood up to Hitler.

 

Weimar was plagued from the beginning by a flawed constitution and its lack of legitimacy among the German Right. The two fundamental flaws in the constitution were proportional representation that allowed for the smallest of parties to have a voice in Reichstag and Article 48 which enabled the president to rule by decree. That would haunt the government as the economic crisis of the 1930’s hit.

 

Further, it was this government that signed the Versailles Treaty that established Germany’s sole guilt in starting World War I and placed a severe reparations burden on the economy. It was a tough start and that along with crippling inflation almost brought the government down. However, as Robert Gerwath noted in “November 1918: The Great Revolution” Weimar survived and with Dawes Plan loans in 1925 actually prospered.

 

So why did Weimar collapse? To McDonough the faults lie with the lack of responsible parties on the Right and with President Paul von Hindenburg, the hero of World War I, who in the late 1920’s was supportive of the government, returned to his monarchal roots as a Prussian land baron. It was he, along with the intrigues of Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher who brought down the hapless Heinrich Bruning government in 1932. Bruning’s government was imposed on the Reichstag by Hindenburg. He never had a parliamentary majority and with the lack of foreign currency reserves he was forced to impose a draconian austerity policy on an economy already in depression. To me Bruning did not have much of a choice. By the way, the best tick-tock on the end of Weimar is in Rudiger Barth’s and Hauke Friedrichs’ “The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic.”

 

Indeed, the decay was evident in December 1930 when Nazi goons disrupted the German premier of the anti-war film, “All Quiet on the Western Front.” So great were their disruptions that the film was banned a week after the failed premier. This has a familiar ring today in America where pro-Palestine mobs are canceling Jewish performers and Israeli officials.

 

 

Away from politics McDonough discusses the flowering of culture in art (abstract expressionism), architecture (Bauhaus), and film (Metropolis). Indeed, Berlin was second only to Hollywood in film production in the 1920’s. There was also the very free and licentious culture of Berlin’s nightclub scene. It was not for nothing that the recent German TV series was called “Babylon Berlin.” What McDonough does not mention is that this Avant Garde culture just might have turned off small city and rural Germany who overwhelmingly voted for Hitler in 1932.

 

However, my two primary concerns with McDonough’s otherwise excellent work is that he down plays economics. He should have taken seriously the works of Frederick Taylor’s “The Downfall of Money,” and Tobias Straumann’s “1931: Debt Crisis and the Rise of Hitler.” Simply put, Weimar was not up to the task. However, to his credit, McDonough does not that Hitler’s opposition to the Young Plan in 1930 made him respectable.

 

My second concern is that he failed to emphasize the long-standing division in the Left between the Socialists and the Communists. The split started during World War I and was exacerbated by the Socialist government with the support of the Army and the Free Corps in putting down the communist Spartacist Revolt in early 1920. Later in 1929 a different socialist government put down the “Bloody May” communist demonstration in 1929. McDonough doesn’t even mention this and with the communists calling the socialists “social fascists” it less of a surprise seeing them join forces with the Nazis in bringing down the Bruning government and in supporting a transit strike in Berlin in late 1932. Thus, part of the blame for the rise of Hitler has to fall on the disunity of the Left. As I have written previously the global impact of the Russian Revolution was to split the Left and harden the Right. It certainly played out in 1930 Germany.

 

With my concerns aside, McDonough’s book is important. I learned much from it and there are certainly lessons for today.

For the full amazon URL see: On the Road to Perdition (amazon.com)

President Biden's State of the Union: Strong on Form Weak on Substance

Very reminiscent of Harry Truman's "give'em hell" 1948 campaign, President Biden came out swinging against his nameless predecessor and the Republican House of Representatives in his state of union address. ( See: Shulmaven: New Yorker Follows Shulmaven on Biden Election Strategy. ) He was confident, strong, and relaxed and at least for the time being silenced the "bedwetters" in the Democratic Party concerned about his re-election prospects. Further I wouldn't be surprised to see a meaningful bounce in his poll numbers in the coming week.

In terms of substance there was much to be desired. He opened his speech citing Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 state of the union (see below):

" In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. He said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.” Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment. 

Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to both wake up this Congress, and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either."

President Roosevelt's speech which has become to be known as his "Four Freedoms Speech" was delivered on January 6, 1941. Only a week before Roosevelt gave fireside chat where he declared the United States to be "an arsenal of democracy." The difference today is that President Biden is nowhere near declaring America as an arsenal of democracy. Indeed his proposed defense budget will show a meager 1% increase. Given the tone of his speech and the prewar environment we are now living in, he should have called for a massive increase in defense spending. (See: Shulmaven: Shulmaven Anticipates Hal Brands Foreign Affairs Article on Pre-WW II and Today) Thus his rhetoric is way ahead of his actions.

The other troubling parts of his speech is that he revived all of the old Democratic Party tropes about taxing the rich, going after big Pharma, and spending program upon spending program. He fails to understand that middle-of-the-road voters in 2020 thought they were voting for a Bill Clinton and instead got a Lyndon Johnson. This could come back to haunt Biden as his rhetoric could very well scare away the Nikki Haley voters he will need in November.

My Amazon Review of Alan Philps' "The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, The Metropol Hotel......."

A Failure of Journalism 

We last ran into the Metropol Hotel in Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow.” (See:        My Amazon Review of Amor Towles' "A Gentleman in Moscow")  Here we revisit the hotel as the home of foreign journalists covering the Eastern Front during World War II. We meet such stalwarts Quentin Reynolds, Margaret Bourke-White, Walter Kerr, Cyrus Sulzberger, and Edgar Snow among others. They are all there to cover the war under the very strict hands of Soviet censorship. Hence, for the most part, they have become organs of Soviet Propaganda.

 

The journalists are aided by a corps of female interpreters who in addition to there nominal duties are there to spy, influence and sometimes perform sexual services for mostly male reporters. One of those interpreters was Nadya Ulanovskaya who with her husband Alex are the true protagonists of the book. Both Nadya and Alex as teenagers were revolutionaries in 1917 and, in fact, they met Stalin. After the revolution both move up in nomenklatura and by 1926 they are working as GRU agents in China under the legendary master spy, Richard Sorge. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Owen Matthews' "An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent )

 

By 1932 Alex had moved over to the NKVD and worked as its rezident in New York. In that capacity he recruited Whitaker Chambers who years later would blow the whistle on the Soviet spy ring in the United States. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Calder Walten's "Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West" )

However, by the late 1930’s both are disillusioned with communism and are initially saved from the purges by an old friend from the NKVD. Nadya worked for Australian journalist Godfrey Blunden. She travels with the journalistic crew to see what the Soviets want them to see at the front. The journalists live high on the hog while all of Russia is starving. Author Alan Philps gives us a great sense of the fear in Moscow as Hitler’s armies approached as the journalist were evacuated further east.

 

Nadya’s luck runs out in 1948 when she is arrested. It seems the KGB figured out that she was the protagonist in a novel Blunden wrote. She spends time in Lubyanka, Lefortovo and the Gulag and serves eight years. She is released early under Khrushchev's general amnesty. I didn’t realize what a big deal that was. Also released were her husband and daughter.

 

She immediately acts as a rebel by being a leader in “samizdat” movement which published previously forbidden tracts. Ultimately, she and her daughter move to Israel.

 

What we learn from Philp’s book is that journalists working under dictatorships cannot really do an honest job. In this case the journalists in Russia lived on their expense accounts, paid no taxes and eagerly awaited writing books that would bring them a royalty stream. To write out of line would mean having their visas revoked. Thus, in no way could they be considered independent. This is a lesson for a reader of reports emanating from Russia, Iran, China, and Palestine. Take all of them with more than a few grains of salt. Witness what happened to Evan Gershkovich now imprisoned in Russia.

 

Alan Philps has done a great service to the memory of Nadya Ulanovskaya and has written a work of history that today’s journalists should not forget.

For the full Amazon URL see: A Failure of Journalism (amazon.com)

 

The Night of the Long Knives Comes to Russia

 On the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler launched what was to be called the night of the long knives against Ernst Rohm the leader of the paramilitary SA brownshirts and other opponents of his regime.  In what appears to be happening in reverse in Russia is that Yevgeny Prigozhin the leader of the private army Wagner Group is launching a coup against Vladimir Putin.

 

Although the situation remains fluid, Prigozhin has seized Russian Army headquarters in Rostov on the Don and a convoy is barreling north to Moscow facing little or no opposition. The Wagner Group is the most battle-hardened military force in Russia, and it remains to be seen whether or not they will be opposed by regular troops in the Russian Army. However, the force will likely face opposition from the air and the troops under the control of the FSB security service.

 

In the meantime, Ukrainian forces will likely take advantage of Russia’s lack of command and control and the absence of Wagner Group soldiers to step up their offensive to retake their lost territories.  It is very possible that the Russian Army in Ukraine will soon collapse.

 

Outside of the Ukraine theatre Wagner is very active in Syria, Mali, and Venezuela.  What happens to Russian influence in those places is now an open question. As Lenin once remarked “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

My Amazon Review of Robert Kagan's "The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse................."

 America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts

 

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has written a sequel to his “Dangerous Nation” Japan to cover American foreign policy from 1900-1941. In 1900 fresh after defeating Spain in 1898 the U.S. had the largest economy in the world and was viewed as a non-entity as far as the great powers of Europe were concerned. Domestically there was a strong anti-imperialist lobby against the American occupation of the Philippines, but Kagan reminds us that the freeing Cuba from Spanish colonialism was highly popular across the political spectrum. Using terms of today, it was viewed as a “humanitarian intervention.” Further the takeover of the Philippines was accidental in that Admiral George Dewey was following a decade old plan to steam to Manila to engage the Spanish fleet where he won a resounding victory. Kagan argues that absent the U.S. intervention, sooner or later the Philippines would have been taken over by either Germany or Japan.

 

Kagan covers the Platt Amendment to the Monroe Doctrine which unilaterally granted the U.S. the right to intervene in Latin America which it does many times. Initially to keep the Europeans out and to maintain the peace, but later with less than benign motives. He spends less than time than he should have around the politics of building the Panama Canal and President Roosevelt’s arbitration of the Russo-Japanese War. By 1914 the U.S. has no army to speak of and has modern, but small Navy.

 

When the war in Europe broke out the U.S. position was to stay out of it, despite strong support from banking interests to weigh in on the side of the allies. There was great support for the Central Powers coming from Irish, German and Jewish Americans for their own unique reasons. Despite the sinking of the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson, though indirectly supporting the allies, struggles to keep the U.S. out of the war. The pressure for U.S. entry  is led by former president Theodore Roosevelt. Ultimately as Germany resorts to unrestricted submarine warfare the U.S. enters the war as an associated power with an inflated sense of morality coming from “peace without victory” and his Fourteen Points.

 

Wilson enters the Versailles negotiations as a giant. American power is supreme, yet he gets sucked into the vortex of European power politics doing whatever he can to bring forth the League of Nations. However, while in Paris, the once internationalist Republican Party, does a 180-degree shift. The party once lead by Elihu Root, Henry Stimson and Charles Evans Hughes is now lead by the anti-league Theodore Roosevelt and Senate foreign relations chair Henry Cabot Lodge. They are backed up by “the irreconcilables” led by Senator’s William Borah and Hiram Johnson. When Wilson fails to seek a compromise, the League fails and the U.S. returns to its pre-war isolation. In a footnote three young idealist, William Bullitt, John Maynard Keynes, and Walter Lippmann become disillusioned on the shoals of European reality.

 

It is here where Kagan argues that the U.S. should have stayed in the game. Without U.S. backing both France and Britain became paranoid about future German power and therefore were less willing to compromise on reparations, something that would plague the continent for a decade. In the terms of the British diplomat Harold Nicholson, the U.S. became “the ghost at the feast.” To be sure the U.S. was present financially with both the Dawes and Young Plans, it was not really in the game.

 

With the onset of the Great Depression the world order begins to collapse, first economically and the politically. Japan invades Manchuria making a mockery of the League. Further, its naval build-up threatens the American presence in the Pacific and we have the rise of Hitler.

 

What is the newly elected President Roosevelt’s response to the deteriorating international situation? More isolation. Kagan, in my opinion underplays Roosevelt’s blowing up the July 1933 World Economic Conference where it is understood in no uncertain terms the U.S. will focus on domestic recovery. This did not go unnoticed by Mussolini and Hitler. To me one failing of the book is that is lacks an economic context, particularly on the role of the gold standard and the collapse in world trade.

 

Later in the decade Roosevelt has to fight off the isolationists to deal with the growing challenges coming from Japan and Germany. He highlights the trigger for the change as the September 1938 Munich Conference and the November 1938 Kristallnacht explosion in Germany. Kagan reasons, correctly in my opinion, that the reason France and Germany caved into Hitler is that they rightfully believed that the U.S. did not have their backs. Thus had the U.S. been more involved with Europe in the 1930’s the horrors to come might just have been avoided. And if the war in Europe did not start, Japan might not have embarked on its aggression in Southeast Asia.

 

Kagan’s conclusion is that there is a straight line from America’s holiday from international affairs in the 1920’s and 1930’s to the agony of the 1940’s. It is a lesson that should be remembered by those today who see few reasons for America’s involvement on the world stage.

For the full Amazon URL see: America Comes of Age in Fits and Starts (amazon.com)