An American Jewish soldier’s letter to his wife about the Dachau “death train”

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

This is a very interesting site BTW...

http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/ ... ath-train/

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An American Jewish soldier's letter to his wife about the Dachau "death train"

Filed under: Dachau, Germany, World War II — Tags: Dachau death train, Dachau massacre, Hans Merbach — furtherglory @ 10:57 am

On May 1, 1945, a Jewish soldier in the American Army saw the "death train" outside the Dachau concentration camp; a few days later, he wrote home about it. Dachau had been liberated on April 29, 1945, but on May 1st, this soldier did not know whether the train, filled with dead bodies, had just arrived or if it was just leaving.

This is a quote from the letter written by 1st Lt. Fritz Schnaittacher to his wife; you can read the full text of the letter here.

... the most striking picture I saw was the "death train" — I say picture, no not picture, but carload and carload full of corpses, once upon a time people, who were alive, who were happy and people who had convictions or were Jews — then slowly but methodically they were killed. Death has an ugly face on these people — they were starved to death — the positions they were lying in show that they succumbed slowly — they made one move, fell, were too weak to make another move, and there are hundreds of such lifeless skeletons covered by some skin. I tried to find out the origin of this train. Some of the stories corresponded — whether this train was to leave Dachau or had just arrived is not essential — essential is that they were locked into these cattle cars without sanitation and without food. The SS had to take off in a hurry — we came too fast — it was too late to cover up their atrocities.  

Note that he "tried to find out the origin of this train,"  but it was of no importance to him whether the train was coming or going; the "essential" part of the story is that the prisoners were locked in the cars without food.

The infamous "death train" parked outside the Dachau camp

Young German boys forced to view the bodies on the Dachau "death train"

The photo above shows American soldiers forcing German boys in the Hitler Youth, some as young as 12 years old, to look at the dead bodies on the train.

The dead prisoners had been on the train for 19 days. Out of around 4,500 or 5,000 prisoners who had been put on the train, there were 1,300 survivors who had been able to walk the short distance from the railroad spur line into the Dachau prison compound, according to two of the survivors, as told to Sam Dann, who wrote "Dachau 29 April 1945."

Why didn't 1st Lt. Fritz Schnaittacher talk with some of the 1300 survivors?  He was fluent in German, having been born in Germany, and lived there until 1933.  Why didn't he talk with Martin Rosenfeld, a Jewish survivor, who testified before an American Military Tribunal that some of the prisoners had been killed by American planes which strafed the train? Why didn't he talk with some of the members of the International Committee of Dachau, a prisoners' organization that was in charge of the camp after the SS guards had left on April 28th?

Maybe he did talk with some of the survivors of the "death train," and he knew the truth about the train, but he could not write home about it because this information was being kept secret.

It is interesting that 1st Lt. Schnaittacher did mention the liberation of Dachau, but he left out the part about Waffen-SS soldiers being gunned down with their hands in the air, after they had surrendered the camp.

Here is a quote from his letter about the liberation of Dachau:

Our regiment took Dachau or should I say liberated the human wreckage which was left there. This I consider one of the most glorious pages in the history of our regiment, not because the fighting was tough, it wasn't, but because it finally opened the gates of one of the world's most hellish places.

According to Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, the commander of the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Thunderbird Division, he received orders at 10:15 a.m. on April 29, 1945 to liberate the Dachau camp, and the soldiers of I Company were the first to arrive at the camp around 11 a.m. that day.

Is this the "regiment" that 1st Lt. Schnaittacher was referring to in his letter?  If he was with the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division, then there is no way that he would not have known about the Dachau massacre when German soldiers were shot with their hands in the air.  Is that what he was referring to when he wrote about "one of the most glorious pages in the history of our regiment" and that the fighting wasn't "tough"?  He was right about that; it is not a tough fight when you shoot unarmed soldiers who have surrendered.  Of course, he was not allowed to tell his wife the truth about the Dachau massacre because the Army kept this violation of the Geneva Convention a secret for over 40 years.

Here is the back story on the "death train" which 1st Lt. Schnaittacher didn't tell his wife:

In April 1945, while the US Seventh Army was fighting its way across southern Germany, capturing one town after another with little resistance, the prisoners who had been evacuated from the abandoned Ohrdruf forced labor camp to the Buchenwald main camp were starting on the journey which would end on a railroad track just outside the Dachau concentration camp. On April 7th, the prisoners had been marched 5 kilometers from the Buchenwald camp to the city of Weimar. At 9 p.m. on April 8th, they were put onto a southbound train, headed to the Flossenbürg concentration camp.

The prisoners were guarded by 20 SS soldiers under the command of Hans Merbach. For their journey, which was expected to be relatively short, they were given "a handful of boiled potatoes, 500 grams of bread, 50 grams of sausage and 25 grams of margarine" according to Merbach, who was quoted by Hans-Günther Richardi in his book, "Dachau, A Guide to its Contemporary History." According to Richardi, the train which left Weimar on April 8th was filled with 4,500 prisoners who were French, Italian, Austrian, Polish, Russian and Jewish.

According to Dachau author Hans-Günther Richardi, five hours after the train departed from Weimar, Hans Merbach, the transport leader, was informed that the Flossenbürg concentration camp had already been liberated by the Americans. Before the Americans arrived, the prisoners at Flossenbürg had been evacuated and death marched to Dachau. The train from Buchenwald had to be rerouted to Dachau but it took almost three weeks to get there because of numerous delays caused by American planes bombing the railroad tracks.

The train had to take several very long detours through Leipzig, Dresden and finally through the town of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. In the village of Nammering in Upper Bavaria, the train was delayed for four days while the track was repaired, and the mayor of the town brought bread and potatoes for the prisoners, according to Harold Marcuse in his book "Legacies of Dachau." Continuing on via Pocking, the train was attacked by American planes because they thought it was a military transport, according to Richardi. Many of the prisoners were riding in open freight cars with no protection from the hail of bullets.

The final leg of the journey was another detour through Mühldorf and then Munich, arriving in Dachau early on the afternoon of April 26th, three days before the liberation of the camp. According to Gleb Rahr, one of the survivors, the prisoners were then taken to the Quarantine Barracks and given "hot oat soup," which he said was "the first food of any kind" that was given to them since the start of the trip. In his account of the trip, Rahr said that the only food the prisoners got for the whole trip was one loaf of bread on the first day. He mentioned the four-day stop in Nammering, but did not say that the prisoners were given any food, as claimed by the mayor of the town. Rahr told about the bodies from the train that were burned at Nammering. The burning was unsuccessful and the prisoners had to bury the bodies, according to Rahr.

By the time that the 45th Thunderbird Infantry Division soldiers arrived in the town of Dachau, the locomotive had been removed from the abandoned train and 39 cars, half of them with dead prisoners, had been left standing on a siding on Friedenstrasse, just outside the railroad gate into the SS Garrison. Inside the SS camp, another freight train stood on the tracks, but this one was empty.

Among the survivors on the Death Train was a Jewish prisoner named Martin Rosenfeld, who testified before an American Military Tribunal in the proceedings against Hans Merbach. Rosenfeld testified that there were 1,100 survivors out of 5,000 who had boarded the train. According to Rosenfeld's account, the train arrived at Dachau on April 26, 1945, although Gleb Rahr and Joseph Knoll told author Sam Dann that the date was April 27, 1945.

In his testimony before the American Military Tribunal in 1947, Hans Merbach said the train had arrived on April 26, 1945. The confusion about the date may have been caused by the fact that there were actually two trains that arrived at Dachau. One of them was parked inside the SS camp complex and it was empty.


Survivor of the "death train" at Dachau

The American liberators of Dachau never missed an opportunity to turn the tragedy of the "death train" into propaganda.  The photo above shows a prisoner being removed from the train by American soldiers.  This scene was re-enacted by the Americans with the claim that this was the one and only survivor of the "death train."




The alleged "lone survivor" of the Dachau "death train" poses for a publicity photo

The photograph directly above shows Lt. Col. Donald E. Downard on the right and Captain Roy Welbourn on the left, in a posed shot of the rescue of a survivor of the "death train." Lt. Col. Downard personally took the survivor to the Aid Station, but on the way there, his driver wrecked the jeep they were riding in and Downard suffered a concussion. Downard was then ordered to continue on to Munich while Col. "Mickey" Fellenz was ordered to take charge of the concentration camp.

Regarding the train outside the Dachau camp, Michael W. Perry wrote the following in his Editor's Preface to The Official Report by the U.S. Seventh Army:

For many of the soldiers who stumbled onto the camp that day, their first glimpse into its horrors came as they walked along a rail spur outside the camp. Crammed into railroad cars and scattered along the tracks were the bodies of men who had been alive when they had begun the long journey during which their captors fully expected them to die of thirst and starvation. At the end of that journey, Dachau's crematory stood eagerly waiting.

According to the US Army, there were 2,310 dead bodies on the "death train," although Red Cross representative Victor Maurer estimated that there were only 500 bodies. The train had taken almost three weeks to travel 220 miles from the Buchenwald camp to Dachau because the tracks had been bombed by American planes. Prisoners riding in open gondola cars had been killed when American planes strafed the train, according to Pvt. John Lee, a soldier with the 45th Division who saw the train.

The sight of the dead bodies on the train enraged the soldiers of I Company in the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division and it was understood that they would take no prisoners. The first four SS soldiers who came forward carrying a white flag of surrender were ordered into an empty box car by Lt. William Walsh and shot.

Then Lt. Walsh "segregated from surrendered prisoners of war those who were identified as SS Troops," according to a report by the Office of the Inspector General of the Seventh Army, dated June 8, 1945.

The following is a quote from the I.G. report:

"6. Such segregated prisoners of war were marched into a separate enclosure, lined up against the wall and shot down by American troops, who were acting under the orders of Lt. Walsh. A light machine gun, carbines, and either a pistol or a sub-machine gun were used. Seventeen of such prisoners of war were killed, and others were wounded."

These were Waffen-SS soldiers who had been sent from the battlefield to surrender the Dachau concentration camp. They had offered no resistance to the liberators. According to Ted Hibbard, who works at the 45th Division Museum, the freed inmates were given 45 caliber pistols by soldiers in the 45th Division and allowed to shoot and beat the SS men who had been sent to surrender the camp.

No Americans were ever put on trial for killing soldiers who had surrendered at Dachau, but Hans Merbach, the man who was in charge of the guards of the "death train," was prosecuted as a "war  criminal" by an American Military Tribunal.

The interrogation of Hans Merbach, by the Americans, took place at Freising on July 11, 1945 at which time Merbach later testified during his trial that "Officers were beaten with a piece of cable in the face. And that, I suppose, is why the most incredible stories came out, particularly concerning this transport."

Hans Merbach, the leader of the "death train"

(click on the photo to enlarge)

On August 14, 1947, Hans Merbach was convicted by the Tribunal at Dachau and sentenced to death. He was the last of the war criminals in the main Buchenwald trial to be hanged; the date of his execution was January 14, 1949.

It is commonly believed today by Holocaust experts that the prisoners on the death train were put onto the train in order to kill them by starving them as they rode around Germany and Czechoslovakia during the last days  of the war.  Some sources claim that dead bodies had been brought to Dachau to be burned, although the Dachau camp had run out of coal months ago.

In his testimony before the American Military Tribunal in 1947, Merbach explained that the purpose of evacuating these prisoners from the Buchenwald camp had been to keep them from being released by American troops who were nearing Buchenwald. After Buchenwald was liberated, the Americans did provide the liberated prisoners with guns and American jeeps and the prisoners went down to Weimar where they engaged in an orgy of raping, looting and killing innocent German civilians.  Elie Wiesel wrote about this in his original version of "Night," so it must be true.

In his defense, Merbach claimed that he had gone out of his way to get additional food for the prisoners after he realized that the train would be delayed because the tracks had been bombed by Allied planes. He said that when he tried to get more food, he was told that there was "barely any bread left" at Buchenwald.

When the train stopped at Dresden, the captain of the police there told Merbach that "it was impossible to get a piece of bread because the city was overrun with refugees." The refugees were German women and children who were trying to escape from the advancing Russian soldiers. Dresden had been fire bombed by American and British planes, only 8 week before, and thousands of civilians had been killed.

Merbach testified that at every stop, he sent four prisoners to the National Socialist Welfare Association to get buckets of water for the other prisoners. The photo below shows one of the box cars with a bucket in it.

A water bucket in one of the cars on the death train

In his defense, Merbach testified that the citizens of Pilsen in Czechoslovakia had not brought food to the train. The next stop was Namering, a town in Upper Bavaria. There the prisoners did receive rations from the people in the town, according to Merbach. This was confirmed by the mayor of Namering.

Merbach testified that some of the prisoners had escaped from the train, which sounds plausible since they were riding in open boxcars. Merbach's crime was that he had participated in the Nazi "common plan" to commit war crimes because he had prevented the escape of most of the prisoners from the train. Merbach said that he could not release the prisoners because "every time a prisoner escaped the most incredible things were happening among the civilian population."

It is now almost 66 years since the "death train" was discovered at Dachau, but the truth is still not being told.  Instead, the letter written by a Jewish soldier is published and the lies continue.

http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/ ... ath-train/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Harold Marcuse was the grandson of the German Jew/American Jew Social Corrupter -- Herbert Marcuse -- CSR



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Harold Marcuse

Harold Marcuse (born November 15, 1957 in Waterbury, Connecticut) is an American professor of modern and contemporary German history. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[1]

Education

He majored in physics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (B.A. 1979, magna cum laude). He earned an M.A. in Art History from the University of Hamburg in 1987, with a thesis about a 1949 memorial dedicated "to the Victims of National Socialist Persecution and the Resistance Struggle".

In 1985, Marcuse co-produced a photographic exhibition on monuments and memorials commemorating events of the Nazi and World War II periods. In 1986, he entered the Ph.D program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to write a dissertation about the post-1945 history of the (former) Dachau concentration camp that examined the legacies of Dachau.[1] Marcuse says that since the end of World War II, much art, literature and public debate in Germany have revolved around the issues of resistance, collaboration and complicity with the Third Reich.[1]

Career

Marcuse began teaching history at UC Santa Barbara in 1992. He became fascinated with the different ways Germans memorialized events under Hitler's rule. Marcuse's research seeks to answer what people get out of learning about historical events. He examines the ways historical events have been portrayed over time, and the meanings various groups of people have derived from those events and portrayals. Marcuse was instrumental in connecting a student, Collette Waddell, with a Polish Holocaust survivor, Nina Morecki, which led to a book about the Holocaust that discussed not just the era, but how survivors pursued their lives afterward.[2]

He is interested in the use of technology, such as videotaping[3] and the internet in history education; the use of oral history in social studies teaching; and questions of public conceptions of history, often referred to as "collective memory."

Personal

Harold married Annette Kubitza in 1987 and has two children, son Aaron (born 1988), and daughter Miriam (born 1993). He is the grandson of German critical theorist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse.[4]

Books and publications

    * Harold Marcuse (2001). Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55204-4.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Marcuse


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Herbert Marcuse  

Biography

Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin in 1898 to a Jewish family. He served in the German Army during the First World War, caring for horses in Berlin. Immediately following the war, he was a member of a soldiers' council that participated in the failed Spartacist uprising of January 1919.

After the war, he attended the University of Freiburg, where he studied Marxism and joined the Social Democratic Party, but avoided associating with the Communist movement. He completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1922, written on German literature, and he moved back to Berlin, where he worked in publishing. He returned to Freiburg in 1929 and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger. In addition to his Marxist leanings, he was greatly influenced by the existentialism of Heidegger. In order to qualify to become a professor in Germany, Marcuse wrote a habilitation entitled Hegel's Ontology and Theory of Historicity. Although it was published in 1932, Heidegger rejected the completed manuscript, and Marcuse's academic career was blocked.

In 1933, Marcuse was invited to join the Institute for Social Research, founded by the group of neo-Marxist philosophers known as the Frankfurt School. Soon after, when Adolf Hitler rose to power, he left Germany, following the members of the institute to Geneva and Paris before finally settling in New York, where he worked at the institute's Columbia University office. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1940 and remained in the United States for the rest of his life. In 1940, he published his first English work, Reason and Revolution, a dialectical work studying Hegel and Marx.

During World War II, Marcuse worked for the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects. In 1943, he transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) (a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency), where he did research on Nazi Germany and denazification. After the dissolution of the OSS in 1945, Marcuse was employed by the United States Department of State as head of the Central European section, retiring after the death of his first wife in 1951.

In 1952, Marcuse began a teaching career as a political theorist, teaching briefly at Columbia University and Harvard University and then at Brandeis University from 1958 to 1965, where he was a professor of philosophy and political science. During this time, he published his two most important works, Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). His last position, teaching at the University of California at San Diego from 1965 to 1970, gained him notoriety as the intellectual head of the nationwide radical student movement. He was a friend and collaborator of the historical sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. and of the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff.

Marcuse's critiques of capitalist society resonated with the concerns of the leftist    student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to speak at student protests, Marcuse soon became known as "the father of the New Left," a term he disliked and rejected. His work heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. He had many speaking engagements in the United States and Europe in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. He died on July 29, 1979 after suffering a stroke during a visit to Germany, where he was invited to give a speech.

Philosophy

Marcuse was a philosopher in the critical theory tradition of the    Frankfurt School and is known for his astute critique of post-war capitalist society. Although the Frankfurt School thinkers considered themselves dissidents of Marxism, they developed their critical views of society based upon the same atheistic and materialistic assumptions as Karl Marx and other Communist thinkers.

Like most of the Frankfurt school, Marcuse was greatly influenced by Georg Lukacs's theory of reification in his book History and Class Consciousness. Like Lukacs, Marcuse believed that the citizens of capitalist democracies were unwittingly enslaved and dehumanized by the economic and political system. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse describes these capitalist societies as "totally administered societies" whose economic affluence has not helped, but victimized, its participants (the working class) by generating a variety of "false needs" that need to continuously be satisfied by the very system which created them. In such an environment the working class remains ignorant of the nature of the system which controls them, and is unable to carry out its revolutionary role as prescribed by Karl Marx. Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School saw it as the role of Critical Theory to criticize and debunk these harmful societies.

However, Marcuse had a more optimistic outlook than other Frankfurt School thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who together wrote the Critical Theory treatise Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Marcuse hoped that, despite the existing capitalist system, "the outcasts and the outsiders," who were not enslaved by the society, would initiate a social revolution to overthrow capitalism.

In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse combines the ideas of Marx and Sigmund Freud to describe a peaceful society free from suffering and capitalist oppression. He sees the instinctual repression of sensuality described by Freud, not as a product of nature, but as a means used by capitalists to dominate the masses. Marcuse thus envisions a world in which, through the overturning of capitalism, people are allowed to exist in a state of natural freedom and self-gratification. In such a world, even work itself becomes a source of pleasure. He saw hope for the emergence of this "harmony of sensuousness and reason" in the beauty of modern art and the Counterculture of the 1960s, and he encouraged the radical student movement as a catalyst of revolution.

Although he greatly admired many aspects of Heidegger's philosophy, Marcuse criticized existentialism, especially Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, for projecting certain features, such as anxiety and meaninglessness, which really derive from the modern experience of living in an oppressive society, onto the nature of existence itself:

    In so far as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypothesizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory (Marcuse 1972).

Influence and criticism

Marcuse was the most explicitly political and left-wing member of the Frankfurt School in the post-war period, continuing to identify himself as a Marxist, a socialist, and a Hegelian, while Adorno and Horkheimer became increasingly conservative in their old age.

He is also known for his infamous 1965 essay, "Repressive Tolerance," in which he argues that genuine tolerance does not tolerate the repression of the left-wing agenda which he perceives as the objective of many people on the Right. Marcuse wanted to silence those who tried to preserve the status quo by ensuring that the more radical, marginalized voices would remain unheard, and he characterized tolerance of such repressive speech as "inauthentic." In other words, Marcuse condoned the repression of the more conservative voices in academia and the media for the sake of allowing more left-wing views to be heard. These radical views, which he often voiced at student rallies and protests, made him an extremely popular figure on college campuses.

Marcuse's influence on the student movement has sometimes been exaggerated, and he was often no more than a figurehead whose work few people had read. He did, however, have a notable influence on certain leading figures of the radical movement, including the Black Power activist Angela Davis and the anarchist author Abbie Hoffman. Both were his students at Brandeis who admired his philosophy, and Davis eventually followed him to San Diego in the 1960s.

The most outspoken critics of Marcuse's works have been conservatives who oppose the atheistic materialism of "Western Marxism," which was widely popular among students during the 1960s and 1970s. However, Marcuse's essay, "Repressive Tolerance," has received the sharpest criticism from the right. Many conservative critics, such as David Horowitz, lament the seemingly unjust policies of intolerance toward the right-wing agenda, especially on college campuses, and point to Marcuse's essay as one of the origins of this double standard.

Major works

    * The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State (1934)
    * Reason and Revolution (1941)
    * Eros and Civilization (1955)
    * Soviet Marxism (1958)
    * One-Dimensional Man (1964)
    * Repressive Tolerance (1965)
    * Negations (1968)
    * An Essay on Liberation (1969)
    * Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972)
    * The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/ent ... rt_Marcuse

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Bob should come full circle after hearing about the Jews lies here at TIU/WUFYS/etc. --- He should re-read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- CSR

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A CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE

By Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse
123 pages
Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Comments of Bob Corbett

November 2002

My childhood was lived in a heavily conservative, traditional Roman Catholic neighborhood with strong Irish roots in conservative St. Louis, Missouri. Since I was born just before World War II, my childhood was in the 1940s and 50s, a period of relatively settled life forms, especially in my neighborhood.

From my earliest years I sensed trouble at the heart of this fixed and seemingly absolute world order. My first concerns were theological, though they came long before I had any idea what that word meant. I had difficulties with things that appeared to me to be inconsistent with doctrines that I seemed to sincerely believe. I believed the catechism that told me there was a God and that he was all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing and hearing. Yet it seemed inconsistent to me that one would pray the rosary, a prayer delivered to God via Mary, when God would have known the thoughts of the prayer before they were even uttered or thought by us.

It wasn't that my thoughts were profound; in fact they were silly and any decent theologian could have carefully and tenderly explained them to my 8 year old person in a way that I might well have been convinced and my concerns disappeared. But I quickly learned that thoughts were not utterable. They were dangerous, even wicked and I had to learn to suppress them.

In my early teens I became deeply distressed at the U.S. foreign policy that led us into the Korean War, sensing that this was quite different from World War II, but that the differences didn't matter, one was supposed to shut up and support the war, but I was a bit older and learning that I couldn't just conform my acts to the "shoulds" of my society.

Soon too I had to confront a personal outrage that was more than I could bear. At high school in 1953 I met Harry Jones, the first black American whom I had ever "really" met. This was also the very first year in which there were integrated high schools in the Roman Catholic schools of St. Louis. (The public schools integrated later.) Harry was an excellent chess player and I was on fire with chess. I invited him over to my house to play chess and we traveled there by bus after class one day. I learned immediately that Harry was not welcomed in my neighborhood, and my loving and caring parents explained to me in very gentle language, that God had made people differently and that it was important that each person stay where he or she belonged. I didn't understand this at all.

My life of rebellion had begun. However, given that I lived in a very loving and supportive family, my early "rebellions" – my religious puzzles, my anti-war sentiment, my desire to integrate Harry and other black classmates into my world were not treated as horrors in my home. They were seen by my parents as egregious mistakes, and things they didn't share in the least, but they had respect for my person and tried to impress upon me the "truth" which they knew, but they tolerated my aberrations lovingly and caringly.

I came to rebellion and opposition to many social, political and personal patterns of our society within that milieu. In fact I developed a life form of a considerable "alternative" nature which within in few years left me at profound odds with the life and values of my parents and the neighborhood and religion in which I had grown up. Yet my lifestyle was accepted, though not approved by my family. I never asked or much cared about the views of anyone else.

In my own life I encountered many others with different views and ways of living from me. This was especially true with the political, racial, economic and personal lifestyle views of the majority of my society, and I ended up closely allied with the radical political left and the movement of the sixties we called the hippie way of life. Nonetheless, my FORMS of expression of my lifestyle were different from those others. While I did become rather antagonistic to capitalism, and vehemently opposed to U.S. foreign policy and the racism and sexism of our society, I didn't express myself in violence (though non-violent civil disobedience was a regular part of my life), and I choose not to express myself in the popular dissident forms of sexual experimentation and the world of drugs. I was rather traditional in some forms of my life, and radical in others.

But most of all I was tolerant of the views of others. I would vehemently attempt to convince people of arguments which I believed, but I avoided demonizing my opponents in the area of what we believed and expressed. In the political world I felt forced to favor and work for laws and social acts which were consistent with my views and did support the intolerance imposed by any law – a law by definition makes its violation intolerable.

I grew to think of this lived form of "toleration" as what tolerance was.

I'm not sure when my discomfort began, but I would imagine it must have been in the late 1970s or early 1980s when the concept of what we today call "political correctness" came to be more noticeable to me. For a long time I was simply aggravated by what seemed to me a terrible intolerance growing within the heart of the political left – for many years my comfortable home. After a number of years, and particularly in the past 8-10 years I became increasingly alarmed at what appeared to me the growing intolerance of difference, especially within the community of the political left where I had always expected the greatest amount of tolerance. It fact tolerance seemed to me no longer there in any significant manner.

For a long time I tried to mainly suppress these feelings, with the exception of expressing my concerns to those who would listen, condemning the increasing acts of intolerance in the name of political correctness which I witnessed. Finally, however, the levels of intolerance I was witnessing and experiencing have become such that I find I am so troubled I can not simply let things go. I have to deal with this festering discontent and see where I will stand and what I will, if anything.

Finally, in the last few days I returned to an old classic, A CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE, a relatively tolerant book that I knew from the mid-1960s to see if the discussions of three very different political philosophers – Kantian Robert Paul Wolff, scientist Barrington Moore Jr., and radical New Leftist Herbert Marcuse, could enlighten me on this issue and get me started in ways to deal with my present discontent.

The three essay are:

   1. Robert Paul Wolff "Beyond Tolerance" from which I learned a good deal of historical information, but didn't find the issues I was concerned with much addressed.
   2. Barrington Moore, Jr. "Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook." I enjoyed this essay, but learned little since he holds a position that I have long held and got from my Existentialist roots, not him. Moore argues that the fundamental values from which one views the question of tolerance cannot themselves come from science, but that reason is nonetheless a very important tool in discovering our values.
   3. Herbert Marcuse "Repressive Tolerance." I was appalled by Marcuse's defense of violence in the name of "progressive" tolerance, but still learned a lot from his argument since I was constantly challenged to develop counter-arguments to his own and was reminded of many of these issues which I lived out with the New Left in the 1960s.

I come away from this re-read of an old friend, with a much better understanding of the issues, but unresolved; more puzzled that ever, more sympathetic to my intuitive discontent, yet in many ways more confused and dissatisfied than before I re-read the three essays.
"Beyond Tolerance" by Robert Paul Wolff.

Wolff argues that tolerance is seen as the central virtue in the United States' pluralistic democracy and he will argue against this view. He argues that the problem was originally seen as an issue of the SELF vs the GOVERNMENT. But, this view gave way to a notion of the state as being made up not so much of discrete individuals, but of a wide variety of groups to which one belonged. Thus the notion of tolerance today, on his view, is to tolerate every GROUP which can muster any significant popular and political support. But, Wolff points out that while there is a great deal of tolerance of such groups in the U.S., there hasn't for a long period of history been as much tolerance for the maverick individual. The Amish, as a group might well be tolerated, but the individual beatnik is not.

He claims that there have been three dominant views toward tolerance in the U.S.

   1. Toleration is a necessary evil in a democracy, but the ideal would be full orthodoxy.
   2. Since the U.S. has a representative democracy as opposed to a classical democracy of everyone having his or her immediate voice, individuals must have their voice heard by membership in voluntary organizations which represent their interests.
   3. The human is seen as social by nature, and thus participation in small groups, the sum of which themselves constitute the nation state is the only way for the individuals to both get a voice for his or her particular view and yet remain true to the social ideal we each aspire to.

      Wolff sees the ideal of this version of tolerance as group membership within a larger state to be best exemplified by the nature of tolerance in some of the very large and relatively open cities of the world – New York, Paris or London. There is a huge variety of individuals, but each can find his or her niche in particular groups that serve their particular social way to be.

Wolff is at pains to show that there is an opposing view to this notion of tolerance in the more conservative views of Edmund Burke and Emile Durkheim. On their view human being is not by nature an individual seeking meaning in a social environment, but first and foremost a member of the social community and an individual only secondarily. It is within the social group, on Burke and Durkheim's view, that the human being becomes fully human. Manifestations of individualism are more pathological to the person.

Wolff raises three objections to his notion of pluralism as it exists in his society in the 1960s.

   1. There is a tendency for the strong to "legitimate" groups and the transition to "new groups" has a harder time gaining respectability.
   2. On the referee theory of government in which the federal government sets the conditions of competition and then groups form to compete, the government has great power to limit new groups in rising to power.
   3. Finally he argues that the abstract theory itself is weak. There are too many issues, on Wolff's view, which are not issues of particular groups, but the society as a whole and on this view of tolerance there is no place for them.

Wolff concludes that pluralist democracy with its view of tolerance via group membership was a beneficent and humane form of government at one time, but this time has gone. "There is need for a new philosophy of community, beyond pluralism and beyond tolerance."
"Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook" Barrington Moore, Jr.

Moore's argument is a rather common one. He makes a distinction between facts and values and argues that while science can do a great deal to bring us quite close to the rational necessity of holding certain factual claims, reason cannot do quite the same for values.

Thus, it follow for him that there will always be a gap in arguments for tolerance between the values which give rise to this state or that state, and reason cannot finally decide these issues. Nonetheless, for Moore, reason is still the best tool we have.

In his argument Moore is careful to point out that he collapses the general notion of "reason" as it is used in the intellectual and academic world with the notion of "science" more strictly used. For his purposes they are one and the same.

Within this frame he indicates that the GAP between certainty and the results of reason always exists – even strict science never yields certain knowledge, -- but, there is a wider gap in matters of value. But Moore is quite confident that if we rigorously examine social situations with the tools of reason there will be results strongly suggested by reason and allow us to plot a course.

One tool which immediately comes to mind in relation to tolerance is the harm principle: Avoid doing that which brings unnecessary harm to the person or property of another. And Moore embraces this.

However, he argues that harm alone (thus utilitarianism alone) cannot be give us a full account of tolerance. There is a second criterion which he calls an "aesthetic" criterion in which we come to recognize things as inherently having value. This will be more difficult to discover and define in any universal form.

In general I had few disagreements with Moore's views, but one assumption he made did trouble me a great deal. He allows on his argument that trusting in a person's views of the world and thus TOLERATING the person, assumed that people were capable of reasoned thought, and motivated to arrive at their values via that method. But, this is patently false on both counts, and thus we are left with some ideal notions about tolerance, but not much that can help us deal with tolerance in the society in which we live.
"Repressive Tolerance" Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse argues that there is no such thing as tolerance in the abstract. We tolerate this particular something, but that each act of tolerance assumes the non-tolerance of not tolerating the thing we tolerate. Thus in tolerance we choose the nature of our world. We make a necessary choice.

Marcuse then asserts what he calls the progressive notion of tolerance and explains that his argument will be to look at the question of tolerance which moves toward it. One must, on Marcuse's view, take a stand and he himself stands for tolerating a society which leads to greater freedom and to then oppose a "tolerance" of things that thwart that goal.

    "However, this tolerance cannot be indiscriminate and equal with respect to the contents of expression, neither in word nor in deed, it cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation. Such indiscriminate tolerance is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise, in private religion. But society cannot be indiscriminate where the pacification of existence, where freedom and happiness themselves are at state: here, certain things cannot be said, cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude."

[In passing I must note that this seems to me a good description of precisely what it is within contemporary political correctness that troubles me. It is the absolute vehemence about the truth of the values such that anything outside that world must and should be suppressed and not tolerated.]

The essence of Marcuse's whole position is revealed in this quote. He knows the ultimate truth, or rather he has taken a stand. One must, on his view take a stand, and having taken in then one applies a consequentialist analysis to that value and what supports the value is allowed (tolerated) and what doesn't is not allowed. Marcuse even builds a defense of necessary violence in defense of "progressive" tolerance since if one does not one is supporting "regressive" tolerance. We are required to choose, and having chosen actions follow from the choices.

However, there is a distinction to be made on his view, between the tolerance of the status quo and revolutionary, or visionary tolerance. Views of goodness grow up and people struggle toward them and create a status quo. But the status quo tends to get sloppy and loses its critical edge, its eye on the future and it stagnates and degenerates into various versions of privilege. What must be given the strong benefit of the doubt, what should almost always be tolerated is the heretic.

    "Tolerance is first and foremost for the sake of the heretics – the historical road toward 'humanitas' appears as heresy: targaret of persecution by the powers that be. Heresy by itself, however, is no token of truth"

This is a troubling notion. Note the tension that tolerance is to be given to the heretic and there is an implied benefit of the doubt to the heretic, but the heretic per se has no special relationship to the truth, so the heretic may thus be dead wrong. Yet we tolerate the heretic but not the status quo. This is because tolerance is never "pure" it is always rigged in favor of the status quo.

Getting much closer to the issues that have been on my own mind of late – the contemporary early 21st century notion of political correctness – Marcuse argues that language is never neutral. Language grows out of what post moderns call the "construction" of reality and there is no one to one correspondence between word and reference that is fully identical. "Colored," "Negro," "Black," African American" are four terms of the past 80 years which have referred to people of color in the United States. But those terms are not simply shifts of "preference," but each term is connected with a particular construction of reality, an understanding of reality. To someone who is conscious of the meanings of the constructions, the hints and reminders of the African origins (historically) of the culture in which most black Americas live, is important to constructing who these people are and how they are to be understood and treated.

Marcuse does recognize a tremendous difficulty, one which Moore announced but then ignored – namely that this view presupposes as a condition for democratic pluralism, that people have the intellectual skills and motivation to act with reflective consciousness. But, Marcuse knows this is not so and that building the body politic is done within that limitation. In some ways so does modern political correctness, but not clearly. There is the suggestion that if only we talk differenctly, then somehow, down the road, whether we understand it at all or a little bit or whatever, that positive ACTIONS will begin to follow on the heels of the linguistic changes.

Marcuse goes on to examine social change and regards it as progressive (toward greater liberty for the mass of citizens) or regressive, the opposite of progressive. Change, on his view is not neutral any more than language is, and thus violence itself must be seen as progressive or regressive and Marcuse defends the use of violence in the name of progressive good. "Suppression of the regressive one is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones."

"When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted."

And finally, coming to the central issue in tolerance for me – the individual, Marcuse, very much like the conservatives Edmund Burke and Emile Durkheim, argues to do away with individual liberty in the name of the good of his ideal of social good:

"The individual potential is first a negative one, a position of the potential of his society: of aggression, guilt, feeling, ignorance, resentment, cruelty which vitiates his life instincts. If the identity of the self is to be more than the immediate realization of this potential (undesirable for the individual as human being), then it requires repression and sublimation, conscious transformation."

Herbert Marcuse seems to come to virtually the same position the Inquisition did within Roman Catholic theology. Rome valued its notion of the immortal soul and sacrificed individuals to that ideal. Marcuse values his view of humanization and will sacrifice individuals to that ideal.

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I came away from my reading of A CRITIQUE OF PURE TOLERANCE rather disappointed. It was a good read for me and I learned a lot, but what I learned was more background information for my own current struggle.

None of these three authors talk about my problem. I am, on their view, a throw back to an earlier period. They see the issue mainly to be the state versus GROUPS of citizens with various goals and orientation. I am struggling with the INDIVIDUAL in opposition to the state. Of course I am not so naïve as to think the individual him or herself can oppose the state with much success; that's not my issue. Rather, I have always assumed that the body politic (government and civil society) did not nor should not control all of human existence, but only certain parts. The question is: which parts and how much? I have leaned strongly toward a view that the state and society should control the smallest portion possible and that then all other individual acts should be tolerated. But how much is that "smallest portion?" Of course that issue is extremely difficulty and will always be at issue.

In my own lifetime, as I indicated at the outset of these reflections, I saw myself as growing up in the 1940s and 50s in a quite repressive period, and then of being launched into a period of much greater INDIVIDUAL freedom in the 1960s and 70s, only to have that retrenched on very different grounds of repression in the 1990s and today. Today the enemy of tolerance seems to be political correctness, and like the 1940s and 50s, like Marcuse, like the Inquisition and like other dictators, the defenders of the new orthodoxy claim truth and goodness always on their side. I stand increasingly with the individual, in the plurality of various notions of contradictory goods in which I envision a world of a much greater realm of toleration, of where people accept that differences exist and learn to live with those differences.

I'll have to carry on my own inquiry. I got no answers in my retreat to this philosophical classic, but I think I did gain a better understanding of just how lonely is my own position of wanting a world of individuals living in maximal toleration of other individuals with different values and different constructions of the world. I just need to explore it all more fully and carefully.
Bob Corbett mailto:corbetre@webster.edu">corbetre@webster.edu