The Info Underground

Related material that is excerpted from this article:
President McKinley's Assassination
https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/03/30/president-mckinleys-assassination/

QuoteWilliam McKinley's assassination in 1901 and the attempted assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick by the Jewish anarchist Alexander Berkman in 1892 during the Homestead Strike could be properly classified as Chapter 1 in a book on the Jewish Question in the United States.

As I have already explained, Jews had lived in America for centuries as a tiny minority and for the most part had assimilated, especially in the South. There is a qualitative difference between Jews like Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and Jewish revolutionaries like, say, Emma Goldman or Alexander Berkman. The former had assimilated into the American mainstream. Benjamin was part of the antebellum Southern establishment. The latter were radicals trying to topple the social order.

Leon Czolgosz was the son of Polish immigrants, but he had been radicalized by Emma Goldman. President McKinley's life was cut short as a direct result of our loose Gilded Age immigration policy which later caused us so many problems in the 20th century. Along with the thoughtless emancipation of millions of slaves and Reconstruction, it was the Original Sin of the victorious North.


[...]

One more thing.

If we zoom out from the focus on McKinley, Goldman and Czolgosz, we can see a larger problem. President James Garfield had been assassinated in 1881 by the crank Charles Guiteau. President Theodore Roosevelt had his own brush with death in 1912 when was nearly assassinated by the crank John Schrank. The term "crank" itself was popularized in the Gilded Age. It was an age of violent cranks.

Several generations earlier, George Fitzhugh had written at length in the 1850s about what he saw as this tendency of "Free Society" in the North and Europe to produce violent fanatics. Fitzhugh believed that the South had been spared this fate and was culturally conservative because of slavery. He saw Europe and our Northern states as being full of radicals. He lived to see the Paris Commune of 1871. There was no equivalent of this subculture of leftwing radicalism in the American South.

WARNING!! These fuckers are dangerous.   

Techbro Theories Of Everything

Read it here to connecvt to the link:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/03/30/techbro-theories-of-everything/

The Trump mob has a bunch of crackpot theories. One of these, beloved of techbros with Ketamine-plasticized brains, comes from Guillaume Verdon, a 32 year physicist. This Wired article is primarily about Verdon's alternative to quantum computing, but it gives an introduction to Verdon's big theory of "effective acceleration", or e/acc.

Will Knight, the author of the Wired article, gives this bit of background:

By the 1990s, a British philosopher named Nick Land was advocating for a real accelerationist movement that would unshackle capitalism from the restraints imposed by politicians and welcome the technological and social destruction and renewal this would bring. Accelerationist ideas are echoed by other alt-right thinkers, including the influential blogger Curtis Yarvin, who argues that Western democracy is a bust and ought to be replaced.

Let's take a look at Verdon's manifesto.

The thermodynamics of the origin of life

Verdon starts by asserting that life emerges as "matter reconfigures itself such as to extract energy and utility from its environment such as to serve towards the preservation and replication of its unique phase of matter." He links to this article by Katherine Taylor  about a theory created by John England.

Current views of the origins of life begin with a primordial soup of raw chemicals in bodies of water with external sources of energy like sunshine and lightening, and constant motion. England's theory explains how that system can lead to early organized forms of matter. The article explains England's theory, starting with the words "At the heart of England's idea....."

At the risk of oversimplification, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy increases over time. In certain systems, entropy can decrease in clumps of matter that absorb and use energy and emit energy in a less concentrated form, which is to say at higher levels of entropy. Entropy increases in the overall system, but decreases in a small part of the system.

A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Taylor's article suggests that this process, called dissipative-driven adaptation of matter, lies at the heart of all evolution, which may or may not be England's view. Either way, the article acknowledges there are countless other factors that influence the outcomes.

Verdon calls this process dissipative adaptation. He says it "...tells us that the universe exponentially favors (in terms of probability of existence/occurrence) futures where matter has adapted itself to capture more free energy and convert it to more entropy."

First Interlude

Notice that Verdon uses phrases like "matter reconfigures itself" and "the universe favors". These phrases could be read to suggest that the universe and the matter it contains have some sort of drive or even a purpose. In this setting, words are used metaphorically, to describe England's equations. We don't use the words to reason about the implications of mathematical language, because you can't safely reason from a metaphor.

Here's an example. When I was a kid, we had an encyclopedia with a representation of the Bohr model of an atom. It was a map of the US, with a basketball in the center of the country and a couple of ping-pong balls on the coasts of California and Virginia. Someone asked why if there was so much space between the nucleus and the electrons you couldn't squash the atom into a tighter space. That's an example of reasoning with a metaphor. Don't do that.

Also note that Verdon claims that this theory is about extracting "utility" as well as energy. No it isn't.

Accelerating Evolution

So, the first part of Verdon's manifesto is consistent with current evolutionary theory, apart from the utility thing. Then Verdon tells us:

Intelligence emerges as a smaller timescale specialization of this adaptation principle; it allows life to identify patterns in the environment which have utility towards acquiring more resources to procreate and/or maintain said intelligent life form.

We've gone from absorbing free energy to, I suppose, catching prey. But this view of intelligence isn't consistent with Darwinian theory in its current form. The range of evolutionary pressures is much broader than simple identifying patterns that represent energy.

Verdon goes on to say that consciousness is the natural limit of intelligence in the individual. So much for people. Then there's meta-consciousness in the form of organized groups of humans, like corporations and governments and states. In a capitalist system, these "compete for resources" with other meta-organizations.

Second Interlude

Well, that's nonsense. Elon Musk isn't competing for resources. He took control of the government and is using it to grab resources from all of us to use as he sees fit, without regard to the impact on other people. Other capitalist organizations do the same thing, though usually with less law-breaking.

As an example, consider renewable energy. In Verdon's theory, everyone should be grabbing the free energy of renewable sources like the sun. It's now mostly cheaper than fossil fuels, and is more sustainable. But the giant oil companies have fought it, lied about it, and pushed for more pollution, with the aid of complicit politicians. So if the universe favors free energy, why does this happen?

Or consider the LED bulb. These marvels use far less energy than incandescent bulbs. But the shriekers on the right wing erupted in an apoplectic fit  when the government began to insist on their use. Why? It has nothing to do with free energy and dissipative adaptation, that's certain.

Capitalism is a form of intelligence

Verdon writes:

Hierarchies of information propagation and control are part of the civilizational intelligence; these should be dynamically adapting at all organisational scales and on various time scales, in order to be optimal at identifying and capturing civilizational utility.

Has this guy never heard of intellectual property? That's part of the capitalist system, and it works against this bullet point, if the bullet point has any meaning outside Verdon's head. And who gets to decide what "civilizational utility" is?

Verdon says that capitalism is a form of intelligence. The explanation is that it "dynamically morphs" civilization to grab all the utility/energy out there. In his telling making the world safe for profits is a marker for intelligence.

E/ACC has a goal

The goal of e/acc is to recognize this "multi-scale adaptive principle" and accelerate it. That is accomplished by "... letting the intelligent meta-organism system dynamically adapt by itself to new environmental variables whenever they present themselves."Apparently the universe favors profits.

We already do that. We let corporations, those paragons of intelligent meta-organisms, dump tens of thousands of chemicals into our environment. Turns out a bunch of them are poisons that interfere with our endocrine systems, kill bees and pollute the Gulf of Mexico. That doesn't seem at all intelligent.

He says that e/acc wants to follow the will of the universe, presumably referring to that free energy/utility/resource/(profit?) thing that keeps morphing in this screed. In other words, he wands to accelerate the transition from the current state of entropy to a higher state of entropy. But why? He doesn't say.

How do we accelerate?

Deregulation. Low taxes. Freedom for the Techbros. There is no price too high to pay for these goals, including human lives.

Discussion

1. I rarely read the writings of the people Trumpians call intellectuals, mostly because it's dumb and badly written. Sadly these yahoos have have power now, so it seems like someone should.

2. Verdon doesn't explain how e/acc will help us be better humans, or live better lives. He's not interested in this world or the lives of people who live in it. He only cares about the next world he's trying to imagine.

3. Hannah Arendt says that the Nazis and the Communists claimed to be following and accelerating a scientific program. For the Nazis, it was the laws of nature, and for the Communists it was the laws of history as discovered by Marx. Both programs were said to lead inexorably to the perfection of human beings and human society.

Verdon wants to do the same thing with his very scientific program.

When a group of students at Columbia University in New York launch a movement protesting the war in Gaza, they spark a nationwide uprising in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Encampments spring up at hundreds of other campuses as students object to their own university's investment in the US and Israeli arms industry. Featuring detained student activist Mahmoud Khalil, The Encampments takes viewers inside America's student uprising with incredible intimacy and urgency. Professors, whistleblowers, and student activists shed light on a moment that captivated the nation's attention and continues to make headlines today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjS_FdTUkFE

How a Jewish State Planted In The Heart of the Arab World Came To Be Seen as a Solution To European anti-Semitism
https://legalienate.blogspot.com/2025/03/how-jewish-state-planted-in-heart-of.html

"An atmosphere was created in which it was only natural for the American, with his reverence for the underdog, to accept Zionist propaganda as gospel."
 -----Alfred Lilienthal, The Other Side of the Coin, p. 93

"About this little Mediterranean country (Israel) more fables have been written than are contained in Scheherazade and Mother Goose together."
 -----Alfred Lilienthal, ibid.

The Irish Question
https://occidentaldissent.com/2025/03/27/the-irish-question/

Why wasn't there a "Jewish Question" in the South?

Why do White Southerners struggle so hard to understand this issue? I would say that to ask such a question is to answer it. Historically speaking, there wasn't a "Judenfrage" in the South because the American South was really nothing like the places Jews came from in Europe.

The American South was a slave society with a caste system that was based on race. This had the strange side effect of being "good for the Jews." It was also good for other European minorities. In the South, a Jewish merchant or an Irish Catholic planter was a White man. They were coded as belonging to the master caste and were automatically granted citizenship and higher social status than non-Whites. Jews always had all the same rights and liberties as other White people in the Southern states.

By the time of the Confederacy, Jews were getting elected to Congress in the South and had become part of the Southern establishment like Judah Benjamin. The same was true of other minorities. Sen. Pierre Soulé, for example, who represented Louisiana in the Senate was born in France. There were too many Scots-Irish Presbyterians to count who held elected office in the South alongside Southerners of English ancestry. Slavery gave all of them a stake in preserving the social and economic order.

Think of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind growing up on her bucolic plantation Tara on the outskirts of Atlanta in the Old South. Scarlett's character was of Irish Catholic and French Huguenot ancestry and her plantation was plopped smack in the middle of a vast sea of White people descended from Irish Protestants who came to this country from Ulster. The same was true of my ancestors from Dublin in Laurens County, GA who were Irish on one side and Scots-Irish on the other side. Those Old World hatreds faded away and became less relevant in the social context of the Georgia countryside.

The first English plantations were in Ireland. Ulster is a gigantic plantation. The Irish had been dispossessed of their land and sovereignty for generations by the English. Protestantism had been forced on Ireland. The great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852 was within living memory, but here the Irish had been cut into and integrated into our social order. The Irish and Jews were treated as settlers like the Huguenots and Scots-Irish and were granted the rank of White. This is why neither group was problematic for us.

Slavery was a great integrationist. The most troublesome and disaffected parts of the South were the mountains of Appalachia and parts of Texas that were thinly enslaved. There was no need for antisemitism in the South because the Jews that came here easily assimilated into our social system and became invested in slavery. White supremacy was "good for the Jews" for centuries. That's why the ones who lived here and who were born here never attempted to overthrow that system.

In Ireland, there was an Irish Question because the people who lived there were sharply divided over ethnicity and religion. They identified as English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic. They didn't see themselves as White. Ireland is still divided. Similarly, a Jew in Germany or in the ghettoes of Poland, Ukraine and Russia was first and foremost a Jew. The Jewish Question existed because social conditions in southern, central and eastern Europe were totally different than they were here. Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century was a boiling cauldron of radical leftwing politics.

The same was true of our Free States.

By the time of the Civil War, it was becoming a problem there too due to the absence of slavery. The Irish never rioted against us in the South. The Irish also enthusiastically supported the Confederacy. The North has always been far more ethnically and religiously divided than the South. It has always been more of a hotbed of radical and revolutionary politics. It has a weaker sectional identity. Northerners just don't love their states and section like White Southerners of all backgrounds seem to do. https://www.amazon.com/Green-Gray-Confederate-States-America/dp/1469607565/ref=pd_lpo_d_sccl_1/134-1631273-0554033?pd_rd_w=mwANs&content-id=amzn1.sym.4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_p=4c8c52db-06f8-4e42-8e56-912796f2ea6c&pf_rd_r=GWMDRWCXSQB68X180MPX&pd_rd_wg=vmjyq&pd_rd_r=1002c369-a430-455c-a81b-1c942d0af5a8&pd_rd_i=1469607565&psc=1

Eventually, we *did* get saddled with a Jewish Question, not the South, but America at large ... which thoughtlessly imported millions of Jews from the ghettos of southern, central and eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1920s, and millions of other people from all sorts of European backgrounds. Those people who came here fresh off the boat from Poland and Ukraine didn't stop nursing grudges that go back a thousand years after stepping foot on American soil. World War II made it worse. There was nothing like slavery to integrate them which was successful in integrating earlier waves of immigrants.

We talk about the "Jewish Question" or Judenfrage because the NS fandom prefers to use that ideological frame to understand our problems in early 21st century America. I think it is misleading for a number of reasons. It is a poor way of understanding education polarization. The elites aren't simply Jews. They come from all racial and ethnic backgrounds. Jews are smart and overrepresented among this class of college graduates, but they all share the same worldview and preferences. Jews are also melting into this generic secular urbanite bugman class. A huge percentage of them already have mixed ancestry or children. I don't see it as being much like the problem facing the Nazis in mid-20th century Germany.

Trying to understand the American past through the lens of the Jewish Question is even more highly misleading. It is trying to force a round peg into a square hole. There was no Irish Question here either because we don't live in Ireland, but in a society that was fundamentally different.

Note: This tendency to strip out the historical context seems essential to "NS." If you can dispense with German ethnicity and culture, you can mislead yourself about anything

Toward a New World Order: The Future of NATO
by
by George Soros
29 November 1993
https://silview.media/2025/03/27/soros-the-less-known-nato-ideologue-and-the-romanian-coup/

pdf available here: https://silview.media/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/toward-a-new-world-order-by-george-soros.pdf

The Coming World Disorder
It is clear that the world order that prevailed since the end of the Second World War has come to an end. It had been based on two superpowers vying for world domination. They stood for diametrically opposed principles of social organization and they considered each other mortal enemies. The global conflict between them governed all the local conflicts. Occasionally it came to actual fighting, but both sides avoided an all-out confrontation because each side had the capacity to annihilate the other. It was possible to score local victories but they had to fall short of threatening the survival of the other side, because it might have endangered one's own survival. The prevailing order was called the Cold War. The name was apt because both sides were mobilized for war, battle lines were drawn throughout the world, and internal conflicts within each camp were kept frozen by the external threat.

The collapse of the Soviet empire was an internal development. Undoubtedly external pressure played a role but was not directly responsible for the collapse; otherwise, it would have been resisted. But that internally-generated revolutionary event has also changed the prevailing world order.

All this is clear now, but it was far from clear at the time it occurred. It caught most of the participants unaware. This is true of the leadership within the Soviet Union, but even more true of the leadership in the West. Gorbachev and his team were conscious that their internal reforms would change the world order; indeed, they were looking to a fundamental change

in the relationship between the superpowers as the key to making the internal transformation successful. It should be remembered that the Foreign Ministry was the only part of the Soviet bureaucracy that was squarely behind perestroika, and foreign policy was the only part of the so-called "new thinking" that was properly elaborated.

Gorbachev's concept was to forge an alliance between the two superpowers which would dominate the United Nations and make it a workable institution. It will be recalled that one of the first acts of the new regime was to pay up its arrears to the United Nations. Behind this concept lurked the hope that Western aid, and Western investment, would help to reform the Soviet economy. But there was no plan, indeed no conception, how to accomplish it.

I know this from personal experience because I set up an international task force for creating an open sector in the Soviet economy under the authority of Prime Minister Ryzhkhov in 1988, and I was appalled by the lack of clarity and the inability to implement anything that characterized the proceedings.

Even so, events could have taken a different course if the Western leadership had any comprehension of what was going on in the Soviet Union. It would not have been so difficult to assist Gorbachev to produce some positive results so as to show that perestroika could work. But the idea that Gorbachev was genuinely seeking both assistance and alliance simply did not penetrate into the minds of a leadership that was bent on waging the Cold War; by the time it did, it was too late—or at least it could be argued that it was too late.

Even today, the collapse of the Soviet empire is not properly understood. This is not just the normal delay in registering change. There is a fundamental lack of understanding which comes from working with false premises. The State Department is concerned with the relationship between states. That was appropriate during the Cold War, when the world map was well defined and kept in place by the rivalry between the two superpowers. But it is not appropriate today, when existing states and empires are breaking down and new states are brought into existence, many of which do not really qualify as states. We need a totally different conceptual framework for dealing with this situation, because it involves not only relationships between states but also relationships within states, or what used to be states.

It is the characteristic of revolutions that people do not fully understand what is going on; that is why events spin out of control and the prevailing order breaks down. There is no doubt that the collapse of the Soviet system amounts to a revolution, and this fact is now generally recognized. But the collapse of the Soviet empire has also brought about a revolutionary change in the prevailing world order and this fact is not properly recognized. Indeed, it is widely ignored. People in the former Soviet empire cannot help being aware of the revolution, but people in the Western world have not been so directly affected. The Foreign Ministry of the former Soviet Union did produce some new thinking, even if it was rendered irrelevant by subsequent events; but our State Department has done practically no new thinking at all. Unless we develop a new frame of reference, the world order that prevailed since the Second World War is likely to be followed by world disorder.

A Conceptual Framework
I should like to put before you a conceptual framework in terms of which the present situation can be understood. It has two major components: one is a theory of history, with particular reference to revolutionary change, and the other is a distinction between open and closed societies. The two elements are interconnected—they share the same philosophical foundations—but the connection is not very strong. It is possible to distinguish between open  and closed societies, as Karl Popper did, without any insight into the process of revolutionary change; and it is possible to use my theory of history without introducing the concepts of open and closed societies as I myself have done in my dealings in financial markets. But, at the present moment in history, I find the combination of the two elements particularly revealing.

I put forward my conceptual framework with some trepidation. For one thing, it is not fully developed. For another, it would take more than a few minutes to propound it properly. But I must make the attempt because I have used it and it works—and I have been repeatedly surprised at how different it is from the way most people think.

A Theory of Revolutionary Change
My theory of history is based on the recognition that our understanding of the world in which we live is inherently imperfect. We have to act without full knowledge of the facts because the facts are created by our decisions. There can be no correspondence between our view of the world and the actual state of affairs, because the actual state of affairs is not independently given and our view of the world has nothing definite to correspond to. Therefore, there must always be a discrepancy between the participants' thinking and the actual state of affairs and that discrepancy provides the key to understanding the course of history.

There are times when the discrepancy is relatively minor, and there is a tendency towards convergence between people's views and the actual state of affairs. That is the case when prevailing institutions are flexible enough, so that they can be adjusted to meet people's desires, and there are critical processes at work which bring people's thinking in line with practical possibilities. In these near-equilibrium conditions, the discrepancy does not influence the course of events to any great extent and it can be safely neglected. It is in these conditions that the timelessly valid generalizations of economic theory, perfect competition, efficient markets, the discounting of future expectations, are relevant.

But there are times when the discrepancy between perception and reality is very wide and shows no tendency towards convergence. On these occasions, the course of events follows a totally different pattern and the normal rules do not apply. These far-from-equilibrium conditions arise at the two extremes of changelessness or rigidity on the one hand, and changeability or instability on the other.

The Soviet system under Stalin was a good example of the first kind of extreme, where the Bolshevik dogma was extremely rigid and incapable of modification. Society itself was highly regulated and frozen into inactivity. Yet there was an enormous gap between the prevailing dogma and reality, with absolutely no tendency for the two of them to come closer together. If anything, they drifted further apart as the outside world continued to evolve.

The progressive collapse of the Soviet system after 1987 is a very good example of the second kind of extreme, where the participants' thinking failed to keep up with the changes that were occurring in the real world and, because of the large divergence at a time of rapid change, events spun out of control. There was a catastrophic acceleration in the pace of events and a breakdown and disintegration which has perhaps not yet reached its climax. It is impossible to foretell how far it may go. I have been speaking of a "black hole" and there can be little doubt that we came close to it on Sunday night, October 3rd. Indeed, it was only the prospect of that "black hole" that finally convinced the army to intervene at 2:00a.m. Monday morning. It is possible that, in retrospect, this may have proved to be the turning point in the process of disintegration; but it is also possible that it was only a temporary resistance point in a trend that has not yet run its course.

I have made a special study of these conditions of dynamic disequilibrium, both in the financial markets and in other settings. I find the boom/bust pattern that is common in financial markets also very helpful in understanding the rise and fall of the Soviet system. But, of course, one must not apply the pattern uncritically.

I shall not go into the details of my theory. The most important point I want to make about the boom/bust pattern is that it is a time-bound, one-directional process but it is open-ended and also characterized by discontinuities. That is to say, a prevailing trend can be reversed at any time; indeed, an eventual trend reversal is an integral part of the boom/bust pattern and the point at which the trend is reversed is not determined in advance. Indeed, in the financial markets, for every boom/bust pattern that becomes fully developed, a great many are aborted in the early stages.

Another important feature of the boom/bust pattern is that it is asymmetrical. The boom is drawn out, the bust is condensed. It is the lack of time that makes the bust so violent. Events happen so fast that it is very difficult to adjust one's thinking and behavior to changing circumstances. Policies which would have been appropriate in the early stages are ineffective or counterproductive at another. This can be very disorienting, especially when people do not recognize a distinction between near-equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium conditions .

Open and Closed Societies
This brings me to the second part of my conceptual framework. To understand the current situation, I contend that it is very useful to draw a distinction between open and closed societies. The distinction is based on the same philosophical foundations as my theory of history, namely, that participants act on the basis of imperfect understanding. Open society is based on the recognition of this principle and closed society on its denial. In a closed society, there is an authority which is the dispenser of the ultimate truth; open society does not recognize such authority even if it recognizes the rule of law and the sovereignty of the state. The state is not based on a dogma and society is not dominated by the state. The government is elected by the people and it can be changed. Above all, there is respect for minorities and minority opinions.

I think the distinction between open and closed societies is more revealing in the present situation than the Cold War distinction between communism and the free world, because it allows us to see the Soviet system as just one particular form of closed society. The important thing to recognize is that an open society is a more advanced, more sophisticated form of social organization than a closed society. In a closed society, one particular point of view prevails; but in an open society, every citizen is both allowed and required to have his own point of view. This means that an open society is both more desirable and more vulnerable. While a closed society may expend practically all its energies on maintaining the existing order, an open society takes a state of law for granted and builds a complex structure of institutions on top of it capable of producing wealth, prosperity and progress. The structure cannot evolve if the proper foundations are missing, and it can collapse if the foundations are disturbed.

A Diagnosis of the Present Situation
The Soviet system was a universal closed society because communism was a universal dogma. But the system has broken down and communism as a dogma is well and truly dead. There was a chance, at the early stages of the breakdown, to make the transition to a universal open society; but that would have required a major effort on the part of the free world and the effort was not forthcoming. Therefore, that option is no longer open. The universal closed society held together by communist dogma has broken down into its territorial components. Some parts, like Poland and Hungary, are making progress towards a more open society; but even these countries tend to fall back on what prevailed before the communist regime. Other parts are reconstituting themselves as more or less closed societies, or they just continue to disintegrate.

To constitute a closed society, you need to mobilize society behind the state. Since communism is dead and universal ideologies are generally discredited, a closed society needs to be based on a national or ethnic principle. To establish such a principle, you need an enemy; if you don't have one, you need to invent it. In the post-communist world, you don't need to go very far to find an enemy because communism generally neglected or oppressed national aspirations.

Milosevic has provided the new paradigm: as head of the Communist Party in Serbia, he decided to change horses, and he discovered that nationalism is a much more vigorous animal than communism. He became popular when he asserted Serbian supremacy over Kosovo in a speech he delivered April 24, 1987 at Kosovo Polje. Events might have taken a different course if the economic reforms introduced by the Federal Prime Minister, Ante Markovic, on January 1, 1990 (the same date as the "big bang" in Poland), had born fruit. At first, the stabilization program was even more successful than in Poland, but in the course of the Serbian elections, Milosevic raided the Federal treasury and destroyed the stability of the currency. From then on, he set the agenda. The Western powers and the international community committed a number of egregious errors in dealing with the Yugoslav situation but, in retrospect, it is clear that the disintegration of Yugoslavia would have been difficult to prevent even if the Western powers had done everything right. The ease with which Milosevic destroyed the economic reforms instituted by Markovic proves the point: open society is a delicate construct which it is easier to destroy than to develop.

This conceptual framework seems to provide a fairly accurate diagnosis of the situation. The trend is set in the direction of nationalist dictatorships and/ or economic collapse, with the rise of nationalism hastening the economic breakdown and the breakdown eventually leading to the rise of a military strongman espousing nationalist principles. This sequence of events is not inevitable but it would require resolute action to avoid it.

Milosevic, on his own, does not constitute a security threat to Europe or to the rest of the world; but nationalist dictatorships do. That is the point that European statesmen who are set on appeasing Milosevic fail to understand. Already Serbia has a worthy counterpart in Croatia. Croatian forces recently committed a massacre in a Bosnian village, provoking retaliation by Bosnian Muslim forces; the effect is to force Bosnian Croats to flee from areas where they are in a minority to areas held by Croat forces, thereby constituting a majority there.

It is very tempting to appeal to nationalist emotions in order to divert attention from economic failure. Meciar is doing it right now in Slovakia. Iliescu in Romania relies on extreme nationalists for his parliamentary majority, and Antall in Hungary flirted with doing so. But, paradoxically, when economic disintegration is too advanced, it may be too late to mobilize society behind a national cause. That was certainly the case in Ukraine, where Kravchuk tried to play the nationalist card in connection with the Black Sea Fleet but failed, and it may also be true of Russia. If that is so, the danger of a nationalist dictatorship emerging in Russia—which is, after all, the most important country from a security point of view—will be the greatest after the economy has stabilized.

It is still possible to avert the danger, but who is going to make the effort? That is where my conceptual framework fails to provide an answer. The so-called free world failed to rise to the challenge when it would have been possible to set in motion a trend towards an open society. Why should it do anything now, when events are clearly going in the wrong direction and the free world has increasing problems of its own?

The Need for Collective Security
We did not oppose the Soviet Union because it was a closed society, but because it posed a threat to our existence. That threat has now disappeared and it is difficult to justify any kind of intervention—whether it is political, economic or military—on the grounds of national self- interest. It is true that the danger of some kind of nuclear disaster remains, but it concerns the rest of the world at least as much as it concerns us. Therefore, the only basis for action is collective security. And that is where the problem lies. The collapse of the Soviet empire has created a collective security problem of the utmost gravity. Without a new world order, there will be disorder; that much is clear. But who will act as the world's policeman? That is the question that needs to be answered.

The United States, as the remaining superpower, is weighed down by domestic difficulties which derive, at least partially, from the burdens of being a superpower. We are not like England in the nineteenth century which, as the main beneficiary of the world trading system, could afford to maintain a fleet in being that could be sent to distant trouble spots. There is a discrepancy between the needs of the world for a new world order and the national self-interest of the United States. The United States cannot be expected to act on its own. Can it act in concert with others?

Let us take a look at Europe. Europe has responded to the Soviet collapse and the reunification of Germany by accelerating the integration of the European Community. But the reunification of Germany created a dynamic disequilibrium in the European Monetary System and the attempt to establish a common European foreign policy came a cropper in Yugoslavia. As I have explained on a different occasion,2 the Maastricht Treaty turned into a boom/bust sequence which is now self-reinforcing in the negative direction. How far the process of disintegration will go is impossible to say, but it may go much further than currently anticipated unless resolute action is taken to reverse it.

George Soros, Prospects for European Disintegration, The Soros Foundations, New York, 29 September
The United Nations might have become an effective organization if it were under the leadership of two superpowers cooperating with each other. As it is, the United Nations has already failed as an institution which could be put in charge of U.S. troops. This leaves NATO as the only institution of collective security that has not failed, because it has not been tried. NATO has the potential of serving as the basis of a new world order in that part of the world which is most in need of order and stability. But it can do so only if its mission is redefined. There is an urgent need for some profound new thinking with regard to NATO.

The Future of NATO
The original mission was to defend the free world against the Soviet empire. That mission is obsolete; but the collapse of the Soviet empire has left a security vacuum which has the potential of turning into a "black hole." This presents a different kind of threat than the Soviet empire did. There is no direct threat from the region to the NATO countries; the danger is within the region, and it concerns conditions within states as much as relationships between states. Therefore, if NATO has any mission at all, it is to project its power and influence into the region, and the mission is best defined in terms of open and closed societies.

Closed societies based on nationalist principles constitute a threat to security because they need an enemy, either outside or within. But the threat is very different in character from the one NATO was constructed to confront, and a very different approach is required to combat this threat. It involves the building of democratic states and open societies and embedding them in a structure which precludes certain kinds of behavior. Only in case of failure does the prospect of military intervention arise. The constructive, open society building part of the mission is all the more important because the prospect of NATO members intervening militarily in this troubled part of the world is very remote. Bosnia is ample proof.

Partnership For Peace-As Proposed
Unfortunately, the American proposal for the forthcoming NATO summit, the so-called Partnership For Peace, does not deal with this issue at all. It is a very narrow, technical proposal for holding common exercises and otherwise preparing for possible future cooperation with member countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The scope of possible future cooperation is described as peace-keeping, crisis management, search-and-rescue missions, and disaster relief. While useful as far as it goes, it fails to address the conflicting security needs of the countries concerned.

The countries of Central Europe are clamoring for full membership of NATO as soon as possible, preferably before Russia recovers. Russia objects, not because it harbors any designs on its former empire but because it sees no advantage in consenting. Its national pride has been hurt and it is sick and tired of making concessions without corresponding benefits.

The Partnership For Peace, far from being the product of profound new thinking, is a rather superficial attempt to paper over the differences by making an overture to all the former members of the Warsaw Pact indiscriminately, while leaving the prospect of some countries joining NATO deliberately vague. It may end up engendering more conflicts than it resolves.

This is a great pity because the conflicts could be easily avoided if the real needs of the region were addressed. The primary need is for constructive engagement in the transition to democratic, market-oriented, open societies. This requires an association or alliance which goes far beyond military matters and contains a significant element of economic assistance. Both the military and the economic aspects of the alliance have to relate to internal political developments within states as much as to relationships between states, because peace and security in the region depend first and foremost on a successful transition to open society.

A Real Partnership for Peace
The mission of this new kind of alliance is so radically different from the original mission of NATO that it cannot be entrusted to NATO itself. If it were, it would change NATO out of all recognition. A different kind of organization is needed, and the proposed Partnership For Peace could be that organization.

The Partnership for Peace would not contain any of the automatic guarantees which have given NATO its clout. In the current unstable conditions, that would be unthinkable. Its main task would be to help with the process of transformation into open societies. For that purpose it must lay the emphasis on the political and economic aspects of the transformation.

In order to have any clout at all, the Partnership for Peace must have a structure and a budget. That is what NATO could bring to the table.

NATO has a unified command structure which brings together the United States and Western Europe. There are great advantages in having such a strong Western pillar: it leads to a lopsided structure firmly rooted in the West. This is as it should be since the goal is to reinforce and gratify the desire of the region for joining the open society of the West.

It would be an express condition of membership in the Partnership for Peace that NATO is free to invite any member country to join NATO. This would avoid any conflict that could arise either from the enlargement of NATO against the wishes of Russia or from giving Russia veto over NATO membership. The specter of the past looms large: one must avoid the suspicion of either a new "cordon sanitaire" or a new Yalta. A Partnership for Peace along the lines outlined here would avoid both suspicions. It must be attractive enough to induce Russia to subscribe. It if does, there is nothing to prevent countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary from being admitted to some form of membership in NATO, the character of which would depend on their internal development.

The budget of the Partnership for Peace must come out of the NATO budget. There may be some elements in the military-industrial complex that may object to such a reallocation of resources, and they have a strong argument in their favor: if nothing is done on the economic and political front, defense budgets will soon have to be increased rather than reduced; but if the Partnership for Peace is successful, a more than proportional reduction in defense budgets could be sustained. It is on this issue that political leadership must be brought to bear.

There is a clear and present danger to our collective security. The Yugoslav experience has shown that military intervention is not a viable option. Therefore the only way to deal with it is by constructive engagement, including economic aid. But economic aid does cost money and the money can only be found in the defense budgets. It should still produce a net reduction in defense expenditures.

The countries of Europe must bear a larger share of the cost and have a correspondingly larger say in NATO. Economic aid to Eastern Europe would provide a much needed stimulus to the depressed European economies. The fact that the present command structure of NATO is too lopsided in favor of the United States is well recognized by all parties; making NATO the pillar of the Partnership for Peace would hasten the process of adjustment. Specifically, it should induce France to reenter as a full member. That would serve as the test of the success of its internal reorganization.

There is only one deficiency in this design: it leaves Japan out of account. Japan should be asked to join NATO. Then we would have the beginnings of an architecture for a new world order. It is based on the United States as the remaining superpower and on open society as the organizing principle. It consists of a series of alliances, the most important of which is NATO and, through NATO, the Partnership for Peace which girds the Northern Hemisphere. The United States would not be called upon to act as the policeman of the world. When it acts, it would act in conjunction with others. Incidentally, the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act. This is a viable alternative to the looming world disorder.

Problems of Economic Assistance
It should be recognized that providing economic assistance to the former Soviet Union has been an unmitigated failure. I like to divide the history of Western assistance into three phases: first, when Western assistance should have been promised but was not; second, when it was promised but it was not delivered; and third, when it is delivered but it does not work. We are now entering the third phase.

One of the reasons for the failure is that each donor country is acting on its own and is guided by its own interests and not that of the recipients. In my foundation, we describe Western assistance to the formerly communist countries as the "last bastion of the command economy." That may be unavoidable, but at least there ought to be a unified command. In this respect, NATO offers a better culture than the European Commission which has been put in charge of coordinating economic assistance. The G-7 ought to have developed a command structure for dealing with economic aid to the former Soviet Union, but did not. There is much to be gained from giving the task to the Partnership for Peace. For one thing, it would put the emphasis on conflict prevention rather than intervention; for another, it would put the economic cost in the context of the gain in security. Incidentally, it would focus attention on the constituency in the former Soviet Union which is the most important from a security point of view, namely the military. In current economic conditions, even very small expenditures benefiting the military would have a major effect in their attitude and behavior.

A strong case can be made that economic assistance to Russia and the other newly independent states is justified only in the context of a Partnership for Peace. If my earlier analysis is correct, the danger of nationalist dictatorships arising is the greatest after the economy has stabilized. It is imperative to create a structure that obviates the danger.

Economic Cooperation
The multilateral structure of the Partnership would be particularly useful in reestablishing economic ties among the member countries of the former Soviet Union. There is an urgent need for some kind of economic union because the Soviet economy was totally centralized with very little redundancy built into the system and if the lifelines are cut, individual countries bleed to death, as the example of Ukraine demonstrates. But the newly independent states justly fear the prospect of renewed domination by Moscow and Western participation could allay their fears.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Marshall Plan was that it fostered European cooperation. The need for cooperation among the formerly communist countries is even greater than it was in post-war Europe and it is in this field that the Partnership for Peace could make its greatest contribution to security. But the reform and reconstruction of economic ties among the formerly communist countries should not be pursued at the expense of their integration into the European economy. Countries like Hungary have almost completely broken their dependence on the Soviet market; they need better access to European markets more than any other form of economic assistance. By allowing differentiated treatment, including membership in the European Union and NATO, the Partnership for Peace should help fulfill their aspirations.

Conclusion
I realize that the mood in the NATO member countries is not favorable for the kind of radical new departure I advocate. But at least the need for it is recognized; otherwise, the paltry measures offered by the U.S. administration would not have been named "Partnership For Peace."

I am convinced that the kind of Partnership for Peace I outlined here is feasible. It would be welcomed by both Russia and the other newly independent states, as well as the countries of Central Europe. It would be far cheaper than allowing the incipient world disorder to develop unhindered. It would change the course of history for the better.

There is little time left before the January NATO summit and President Clinton's visit to Moscow. Nevertheless, I hope that my proposal will receive serious consideration.

Quote...This was the first book I read about Hitler's Germany's crimes against the Jews.

Others followed, all of them convincing me, in my childish ignorance, that no people had suffered as much persecution, atrocities, or crimes as the European Jews had endured. I hated murderers, and my little being would breathe a sigh of relief when I learned that a murderous Nazi had been captured, I don't know where. It was also around that time that I read "The Assassins Among Us," written by Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter-searcher. I remember that Wiesenthal had an office in Vienna and was tirelessly searching for Martin Borman, Joseph Mengele, Klaus Barbie, etc. Of course, the little I knew, I had learned from books, not from school. Its "teachers" knew absolutely nothing, apart from a so-called, ridiculous, well-fed bookishness. They liked to think they were the navel of the earth, especially when they took the catalog under their arm. Their cultural semi-doctrinalism was chronic, and it remained so in the school I attended for eight years – if not more so – until these days....

[...]

I believed that what is evident is, if not known, at least accepted. So, at around 23 years old, a few months after graduating from college, I talked to a much older teaching colleague (he died, the poor guy). I was surprised, quite indignant, after I had found out that that colleague blamed Jewish propaganda for the Nazi genocide.

"Eichmann in Jerusalem" – Lying as a profession

Prof. Dr. Gică Manole February 20, 2012
Eichmann in Jerusalem, cover of
"Report on the Banality of Evil"
- Lying as a profession - Hannah Arendt[1]
https://ioncoja.ro/eichmann-la-ierusalim-minciuna-ca-profesie/

I heard about Adolf Eichmann when I was 12. How could that be? How could a sixth-grade child from a village in the extreme northeast of Romania, which had become a Socialist Republic, know who Adolf Eichmann was? Here's how. In a corner at the back of my classroom, as you looked from the desk, on the left, there was a banal cupboard, made of wood and without windows. Two hooks and a padlock guarded it from our curiosity. Rarely, very rarely, did a teacher go to the cupboard, from where he would take out a book. So, there were books there! At 12, books meant nothing to me. The ones given by the school were enough for me. Some, really interesting ones, such as those on geography, history and Romanian. Playing, just playing with my classmates in the schoolyard, bathing in the pond, walking on the hills with the cattle or strange and mysterious visits to Nicu Rosetti's Court were the main preoccupation of me and the children around me. At home, apart from the Bible and school books, there were no other books. Then, driven by curiosity, I forced open the doors of the bookcase and, through the gap that appeared, I looked inside. There were books with red and blue covers. I can still feel the silence, the peace that emanated from them. I scrutinized them with a greedy look. I suspected that great secrets, great adventures were hidden in them. I put my hand up to my shoulder in the cabinet and that's how I realized I could reach them. I took a few, which I took home. Among them, a completely unusual one: "SS in Action", with black covers and a large swastika on the front cover. I had no idea what the swastika meant. I knew nothing about the Nazis. I had heard, not from school, but from my father, talking about the war, Stalin, Antonescu, Hitler, etc. In that book with many photos, "SS in action", I came across the face of Eichmann, who I had learned had planned the murder of many people. Jews. The book presented interrogations of German murderers, statements from prisoners and names of places that sounded strange to my childish mind: Maidanek, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Bückhenwald, Birkenau, etc. Documentary photos from German concentration camps, with piles of corpses, crematoriums, naked human beings walking to the place of execution, human skeletons behind barbed wire, all of them remained forever imprinted in my memory. I did not understand at all why the Jews were killed by the Germans. What did they do to the poor people? Now, when I write these lines, I see again a photograph (which, years later, I understood was taken in the Warsaw ghetto) of many people crowded on a street, and among them stood a little boy of about three or four years old, at whom a German soldier had pointed his gun, killing him, I understood. At that time, in my ignorance, I believed that the only ones who suffered and were killed were the Jews. Since reading that book, my childhood was different from that of my classmates. I knew what they did not know, and over time, what I knew deepened, opening an unbridgeable chasm between me and the others.This was the first book I read about Hitler's Germany's crimes against the Jews.

Others followed, all of them convincing me, in my childish ignorance, that no people had suffered as much persecution, atrocities, or crimes as the European Jews had endured. I hated murderers, and my little being would breathe a sigh of relief when I learned that a murderous Nazi had been captured, I don't know where. It was also around that time that I read "The Assassins Among Us," written by Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter-searcher. I remember that Wiesenthal had an office in Vienna and was tirelessly searching for Martin Borman, Joseph Mengele, Klaus Barbie, etc. Of course, the little I knew, I had learned from books, not from school. Its "teachers" knew absolutely nothing, apart from a so-called, ridiculous, well-fed bookishness. They liked to think they were the navel of the earth, especially when they took the catalog under their arm. Their cultural semi-doctrinalism was chronic, and it remained so in the school I attended for eight years – if not more so – until these days. The only positive aspect, after the "great intellectuals" of the school in Tătărăşeni decided, not without reservations, to make me a UTC member, was the forced subscription to "Scînteia tineretului", a publication that broadened my horizons. I remember from it all sorts of materials about the Vietnam War, about the increase in the number of American planes shot down by the North Vietnamese, about the capture and killing of Che Guevara, about the Vietcong, about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, etc. The years passed, and the number of books I read became impressive, the result confirming Miron Costin over the centuries. My patience and curiosity were rewarded far beyond my expectations. One aspect puzzled me – now I smile with understanding – namely, as a child, I used to say to myself: "If I read these and those books, I will surely find out the great secrets of the world"! I mean, I will know everything! If after reading I found out that, in fact, I did not find out any secrets and that the world was not revealing its secrets to me, I was not disappointed. I had still found out something. Although the ignorance of those around me was observable, their chronic lack of knowledge regarding any event, era, time, I believed that what is evident is, if not known, at least accepted. So, at around 23 years old, a few months after graduating from college, I talked to a much older teaching colleague (he died, the poor guy). I was surprised, quite indignant, after I had found out that that colleague blamed Jewish propaganda for the Nazi genocide. I gave him many details, dozens of cases, figures, book titles, names of perpetrators, regarding the great crime committed by the Third Reich against human civilization. Although our discussion lasted several hours, I failed to convince him with my arguments. I note that, in order to convince him of "my truth", I lent him several books about the Jewish genocide: "The Scourge of the Swastika", "History of the Gestapo", "I was a doctor at Auschwitz", "Reportage with the Noose"..., that's all I remember.

Hannah Arendt wrote a book document

Hannah Arendt was and remains a notorious personality of the cultural world after the last world war. She gained fame through the publication of "The Origins of Totalitarianism", New York, 1951 and its translation into most of the major languages. She also wrote other studies, books, with an exegesis character: "The Human Condition" (1958), "On the Violence of Our World" (1970), "Revolution, in History" (1962), "The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her book about the trial of "Adolf Eichmann, from Jerusalem" in 1962, a book translated and published in Romanian by Humanitas Publishing House, in 2008, also contributed to spreading her name in the world. Hannah Arendt was also known for her unusual, strange love story with the author of the book "Being and Time", Martin Heidegger, whose Nazi sympathies in his youth were known. "Eichmann in Jerusalem" is a book-documentary on aspects related to Nazi Germany's implementation of the "final solution". The book presents Eichmann's personality, his position in the Nazi administration, the concentration camps, the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, the deportations of Jews from Europe to extermination centers in the East, Eichmann's sentence and execution, to which are added two consistent positions of the author towards the end, through a postscript and an epilogue.

When writing about the fate of Jews under the government of Ion Antonescu,
Hannah Arendt shamelessly lies and misinforms

Hannah Arendt reserved over four pages in her book for the Jews of Antonescu's Romania[2], but could Hannah Arendt encounter in so few pages so many historical inaccuracies, exaggerations, deliberate lies, illogical phrases, historically abstruse, historical "judgments" of a crass subjectivism. Of course, all this was written not because Hannah Arendt did not know the real situation of the Jews of Ion Antonescu's Romania, but they are the manifest expression of the author's visceral anti-Romanianism. Although in the 1960s of the 20th century the hundreds of custom-made "titles" that followed towards the end of the last century regarding the Romanian "Holocaust" had not yet appeared, I encountered incredible statements in Hannah Arendt, totally outside of any historical reality. Thus, in the book's eleventh chapter, entitled "Deportations to the Balkans: Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania", the case of the Jews in Romania is also addressed. Hannah Arendt begins with some historical considerations, as general as they are false. The author, a professor at Princeton University, notes: "the existence, in the interwar period, between the Baltic Sea and the Adriatic Sea, of some 'mixed populations', where there were 'the so-called Successor States, established by the victorious powers after the end of the First World War'".[3] It is easy to see that Hannah Arendt judges, from a historical point of view, the situation of this geographical area, where ancient peoples had lived for millennia, from a deliberately distorted American-centric perspective. Here there were peoples with an ancient historical past, some of whom had created, despite harsh historical conditions, national states: the Baltic peoples, Albanians, Romanians, Czechs, Poles, Bulgarians, not to mention the Greeks, all together, in the 20th century, represented ancient nations. Moreover, these peoples had created states with an ethnic character since the beginning of the Middle Ages, preceding the empires that later annexed them, partially or totally. Thus, the Serbs, Czechs, Poles, formed their states since the 10th century, the Bulgarians, in the 9th century, the Croats, too, and the Romanians, after having founded the first Romanian state in history, a state with an imperial character (Asănești, end of the 12th century), on both sides of the Danube, founded two powerful medieval states (14th century), whose political existence, in time, exceeds that of the other states taken together. Moreover, to speak of "established states" between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea means gross historical ignorance or deliberate bad faith, unacceptable. In this area of ��Europe, once the multinational Empires (Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German) collapsed, the nations in the area liberated their old ethnic territories, reconstituting their state (the cases of Poland and Czechoslovakia), or perfecting their statehood by liberating historical provinces that belonged to them, ethnically speaking,since the beginning of history in Europe (the case of Romania and the Serbo-Croatian-Slovenian Kingdom, Yugoslavia since 1929). Through what she writes, Hannah Arendt proves that she has a typically colonial, racist vision and mentality, when she writes that the so-called "successor states" established were created by the Great Powers after the First World War and are not the result of the self-determination of the respective peoples.

Proving complete bad faith, Hannah Arendt speaks of "mixed populations" in such an ethnically well-defined area. The Princeton "scholar" continues to prove her history book "science" by writing about the "successor states": "In none of them was there anything resembling the ethnic homogeneity of the old European nations." With the exception of interwar Czechoslovakia, all the states in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, also during that period, were nation states, with overwhelming ethnic majorities.[4] The author continues with illogical statements, and the same deliberate bad faith: "In the successor states, large ethnic groups lived whose national aspirations had been frustrated in favor of their somewhat more numerous neighbors."[5] According to Hannah Arendt, in Eastern Europe there were "population fluctuations"[6] and for this reason, "there were no historical or ethnic borders." One can observe the obstinate use of the term "populations", not peoples, populations, in Europe, in the middle of the 20th century! If Hannah Arendt writes only about populations, of course the borders established by the "Treaties of Trianon and Saint-Germain, were practically arbitrary" (ibidem). An incredible statement for the 1960s of the 20th century. As if these enormities were not enough, she continues with a sentence that any Romanian should jump up as if they were burned with a red-hot iron upon reading: "Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria could have been won as partners of the Axis through generous expansions of their territories..."[7]. Look, from being a major victim of the Berlin-Moscow-Rome-Budapest Axis, Romania, according to Hannah Arendt, became a beneficiary! Indeed, Romania was the "beneficiary" of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (signed on August 23, 1939), under which the USSR, after threatening it with war in June 1940, annexed its eastern part, Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, Herţa (over 51,000 km2) so that on August 30, 1940, in Vienna, through a dictate, Germany and Italy, threatening it, in turn, with aggression, would cede to Horthy's Hungary, the northeastern half of its ancient historical province, Transylvania. The Axis also forced Romania to cede the counties of Durostor and Caliacra, the so-called Cadrilater, to Bulgaria. Therefore, Romania, in the author's opinion, was a great "beneficiary" of "foreign territories following the alliance with the Axis". Yes, Romania "benefited" from the alliance with the Berlin-Moscow-Rome Axis in the sense that, under the threat of war, it ceded over 100,000 km2 of national territory, where 7 million ethnic Romanians had lived for centuries.

What could be more disqualifying, as a scientist, even for a "scholar" from Princeton, than presenting such historical aberrations, of mixing victims with executioners, of accusing the victim, attacked, martyred (the case of Romania in 1940) with Hungary, Bulgaria and the USSR (aggressor states). The ethnic Romanians who came under the criminal Soviet and/or Hungarian occupation, "benefited", from the occupiers, of a "privileged" treatment, becoming the object of a systematic regime of biological extermination, that is, of a Romanian genocide. Hannah Arend makes no mention of all this. However, she is not shy, in the four pages she reserves for the situation of Romanian Jews during the Antonescu government, to classify the Romanian people as the main author of the Jewish genocide, far above Nazi Germany. In those four pages, Hannah Arendt mixes isolated truths with outright lies and exaggerations of a clearly anti-Romanian nature. There is not a single sentence that does not contain untruths, so that quoting the entire four pages, if I were to do so, would spare me any comment on the problem of the Jews under the Antonescu regime. A few examples:
"In Romania, even the SS were taken by surprise, and sometimes horrified by the horrors of the large-scale pogroms..."[8], (committed by Romanians – no). The SS, horrified by "the Romanian pogroms [...] often intervened to save the Jews from slaughter."[9]. What slaughter? No evidence! No examples! Next, Hannah Arendt, in the note of all the scribes who have glossed over this topic, serenely, without cover, but sententiously, marches roughly: "It is not an exaggeration to say that Romania was the most anti-Semitic country in pre-war Europe". Moreover, "Romanian anti-Semitism was a well-established fact since the 19th century".[10]. And, blah/blah/blah, just like that, on and on. No examples of Romanian "pogroms", no cases of Romanian "massacres" with an anti-Jewish character, nothing concrete, but empty phrases, without content, tendentiously constructed from a historical perspective, false, in their entirety.

About Ion Antonescu, Hannah Arendt writes that he was "the head of the new dictatorship of the Iron Guard"[11], and that he "instituted anti-Jewish legislation that was the most severe in Europe." (of course, taking into account Germany – na) (ibidem). Nazi Germany, surpassed by Antonescu's Romania! The world-renowned "scientist" continues the aberrations: "The curious fact is that, from beginning to end, Antonescu was not more radical than the Nazis (as Hitler thought – na) but only permanently one step ahead of Germany's progress"[12] (p. 233). Sic!. "Antonescu too – notes Arendt – began the large-scale massacres (against the Jews na) openly and shamelessly"[13] (p. 233). What massacres is he talking about? Just empty words! That has been the fashion for about two decades. They are throwing mud at Romania, blaming it for countless historical crimes, accusing it of everything, because Romania will keep quiet. If it doesn't keep quiet, anyway, it will be "guilty" of everything it is accused of. Some native scribe, some "nobody", will take up the pen, kiss the hand of the alien scribes and write, not in his name, but in Romania's, of course: "Yes! The Romanians were murderers! Yes, they committed atrocities unique in world history, against the people of David, etc." Damnation!

"Against the USSR, starting with June 22, 1941 - in Hannah Arendt's opinion - it was not the Romanian Army that fought, but "the Romanian Legion... a military force worthy of consideration..." [14]. After which, she immediately notes, unrelated to the context: "In Odessa, Romanian soldiers were responsible for the massacre of 60,000 people" (Jews, not mentioned). The figure given by Arendt, if it were not ridiculous, would raise serious questions. Statistical data, documents of the time, as well as the more or less correct statements of some Jewish authors - such as Radu Ioanid, in the book "Jews under the Antonescu Regime" - speak accusingly about the military reprisals of the Romanian Army in October 1941, in response to the terrorist attack of October 22 of the same year. The attack was – the documents have proven – organized and executed by the Jewish-communists, following which the Romanian Army headquarters in Odessa was blown up (174 dead). The figure, unsubstantiated but circulated by them, is 5,000 victims. I leave you to judge for yourself the "objectivity" of the accusers, including the author, Hannah Arendt, with her 60,000 victims! Without her pen trembling, the author writes that in just a month and a half (July 1, 1941-August 15, 1941) "the Romanians had killed almost 300,000 of their Jews". page 232, Unbelievable! Ten thousand Jews killed daily by the Romanian Army, given that, after the war, no trace of the so-called massacres was discovered. No mass grave, no testimony, even oral. Absolutely nothing. On such "testimony" was built one of the great lies of the 20th century, the murder of 400,000 Jews by the Romanian state, during the last world war, a figure that has passed, to our eternal shame, and on the commemorative monument at the Choral Temple in Bucharest. Shameful! Our indifference is unforgivable. The absence of reaction to dismantle the fabrication, the inability to defend ourselves, not the innocence, but our truth, of our "legendarily tolerant" national community (Paul Goma, "Red Week. Bessarabia and the Jews"). All these horrors, in overwhelming proportion invented, except for some historical accidents justified by the genocide committed by the Jews of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina against Romanians, over a period of one year (June 1940-June 1941), are blamed on Antonescu's Romania. Disinformation, gross historical falsehood, mixed with insignificant, also historical truths, slander, premeditated lies, are used to prove a big propaganda dud: the "Romanian Holocaust".

There is no doubt that the absence of any reaction in the current Romanian cultural-scientific space, to the vile inventions and lies of Hannah Arendt against Romania, are explainable, both by a shameful general cowardice, and by the servile complicity of all Romanian state structures. Humiliatingly, the Romanian state accepted the imposition by foreigners (Jews from the USA), as an object of study in the school curriculum, of a so-called "Romanian Holocaust". Humiliation has serious consequences, and over time, the effects will be devastating: the indoctrination of generations of pupils and students with a gross historical falsehood, the culpability of the entire Romanian nation, as the author of an imaginary crime, unparalleled in history. A female specimen with a teaching degree (LB), a "great expert" on the Jewish question, faced with the countless documentary evidence attesting to the crimes of the Jews of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina against the Romanians (June 1940-June 1941), asked me between two cigarette puffs: "If the Romanians were also killed by the Jews, why don't they scream as loudly as the Jews?". I feel obliged, in a way, to agree with her, but eliminating the "if". I ask my colleagues everywhere, to have the courage to protest against the "studying" in schools of the so-called "Romanian Holocaust", to have the "Minima Moralia", the minimum professional dignity to correctly expose the tragedy of the 1940s, both of the Romanians and the Bessarabian Jews. I ask history teachers to read the 2004 Appeal, signed by 444 historians, called "Freedom for History", among whom I mention Alain Decaux, Pierre Milza, Marc Ferro, an appeal through which the world scientific historical community is invited not to accept the intrusion of the political factor (governments, parliaments) in giving verdicts regarding some historical events of the 20th century. If they do not have this courage and accept the interference of politics in history, especially for the years of the last world war, they will do so by ignoring the suffering, the death of over a million Romanians, innocent victims of racial hatred systematically practiced by those who "were and will always remain people without any God" (the Soviets and the Jews).[15] According to the encyclopedias Webster, Larousse, Oxford, etc., the definition of the Holocaust is as follows: "The Holocaust is understood to mean the mass extermination of the Jewish population of Europe, organized by the Nazi authorities, during the Second World War"[16]
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[1] Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover on 14 October 1906. In 1924 she enrolled at the University of Marburg. She received her doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg, after studying with Heidegger, Husserl and Jaspers. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, managed to escape and took refuge in France. In 1941 she arrived in the USA, where she initially wrote for the German-language newspaper Aufbau and worked at the publishing house Schocken Books. In 1962 she participated, as a journalist sent by The New Yorker magazine, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, after which she wrote "Eichmann in Jerusalem", an opportunity to formulate the thesis of the "banality of evil". She wrote for various newspapers and magazines: Review of Politics, Journal of Politics, The New Yorker, Social Research. His correspondence with Martin Heidegger was published in 1997. In the 1960s and 1970s he taught at universities in the USA: Berkeley, Princeton, Chicago and the New School for Social Research, New York.
[2] "Eichmann in Jerusalem", book translated and published in Romanian by Humanitas Publishing House, in 2008, pp. 230-234
[3] Ibidem, p.219
[4] Ibidem
[5] Ibidem
[6] Ibidem, p.220
[7] Ibidem [8] Ibidem
[9] Ibidem
[10] Ibidem
, p.231 [11] Ibidem, p.232
[12] Ibidem
, p.233 [
13] Ibidem
[14] Ibidem
[15] to General Nicolae Rădescu, February 1945
[16] apud Gh. Buzatu, Holocaust and holocaust, in "The Past Judged by History", Bucharest, Mica Valahie Publishing House, 2006, p. 216