Civil Society

The Nature of Dictatorships

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Last June, I linked an article by Mario Vargas Llosa about dictatorship and what it does to the human spirit. In the current National Review (4/7), Jay Nordlinger has an article which touches on the same theme.

Nordlinger’s piece is about Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, maker of the film The Lives of Others. (If you haven’t yet seen it, you should.) Florian himself spent his early childhood in the U.S., with his family returning to Germany (West Berlin) when he was eight. His personal knowledge of Communism was based on family visits to East Germany and to his two-year visit to Russia in the early 1990s.

The leading actor in the film, on the other hand, had a very personal knowledge of Communist totalitarianism. Ulrich Muehe was an East German, and, while still in high school, he had already been identified as a promising actor.

From the NR article:

Muehe had the fate of being an East German, and the Stasi had its eye on him from the moment he left high school: They knew he would be a big star. During his military service (obligatory), they made him serve as a sniper at the Berlin Wall. He was under orders to shoot whoever tried to cross from east to west. If he failed, he would never be allowed to work as an actor. He would have to be a manual laborer to the end of his days.

So there was Muehe, 18 years old, sitting in the towers, with this incredible burden on his shoulders. The only thing worse than not being an actor would be shooting someone. Muehe developed stomach ulcers, and one day he collapsed on duty, bleeding from the mouth. Doctors had to take out three-quarters of his stomach. But, fortunately, no one tried to cross. Still, the Stasi never stopped warning him to toe the political line, through all the years of his acting. He kept his counsel–until just before the Wall came down, when he gave a big, pro-freedom speech in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz.

(cross-posted at Photon Courier)

Turning the Sow’s Ear into a Silk Purse

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Lately I’ve been struggling with the concept of “educated beyond one’s intelligence”. Testing and education is supposed to separate the meritorious from the masses. Unfortunately, education serves only to cut off the very bottom, obviously inept cohort, but seems to have less ability to separate truly good people from mediocre intellects and fakers. This has direct implications beyond Academia, as David Foster pointed out when he noted the reliance of businesses on paper trail rather than accomplishments as a means of filtering potential new hires.

I’m now starting to construct a mental model for why education seems to be failing at this central task, and a few terms spring immediately to mind.

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The War on Drugs… From a Different Angle

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Recently Rolling Stone magazine had an article titled “War On Drugs” or “How America Lost the War on Drugs”. The article went through the usual statistics showing how our tactics aren’t working and that we have “lost” this war. As proof, they cite that the number of Americans behind bars on drug charges has increased from 41,000 in 1980 to 493,800 in 2003 (and presumably more in 2007).

The point of this post isn’t whether or not you are “for” or “against” the war on drugs – that is done to death at a million other places. The purpose is to look at the situation from an entirely different angle…

Out of these 493,800 offenders behind bars, how many were “casual users” caught in a net of enforcement (run a red light, get stopped for having drug paraphernalia, go to jail) and how many were gang members selling or transporting drugs for resale? Um… while Rolling Stone is definitely catering to the casual user and happily points out those (relatively) few individuals caught in the dragnet I would estimate that the vast, vast majority of these almost 500,000 in jail are actually gang members trafficking or selling drugs.

To Rolling Stone magazine, these offenders are “lost souls” who took some sort of wrong turn and are just languishing in prison due to our society’s rigid and unrealistic moralistic stance. But for our “drug wars”, these would be fine, upstanding individuals presumably designing rockets somewhere and volunteering in schools.

Not so. The key elements are KNOWLEDGE and INTENT. Everyone of these individuals in jail, whether they thought they’d be convicted or not, knew that selling drugs was against the law. Even on the talk shows no one ever says “but I didn’t know it was against the law…”. The second element is intent – they consciously went down the criminal path to make money, choosing this route instead of some legitimate path (i.e. getting a job).

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The American Gift of Forgetfulness

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Presuming the residual antipathies Lex quoted in I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot to be characteristic of UK media figures, we have one more reason to regard tasteless American ahistoricity as a feature rather than a bug, because endocrine-system reactions to “Roman Catholic” are, I believe, just about inconceivable here, and certainly not because we’ve all translated into a higher plane of flawlessly nontheistic rationality.

I was going to make this a comment on Lex’s post but then realized that I wanted to pile on the links, which would choke the comment-spam filter faster than a Greenpeace activist on a tour of a nuclear power plant. So away I go with a barrage of autobiographical details, which is the price of a post written by me that’s anything other than hopelessly abstract. Gosh, you’re thinking, I can’t wait to see this!

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Goon Squad

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A speech by David Horowitz at Emory University was shut down by rowdy “protesters.” He was scarcely able to finish a single sentence, and had to leave after only half an hour. More here.

Credit where credit is due: After the event disintegrated into a shambles, the president of the Muslim Students Association came over to Horowitz at Starbucks and expressed her regret at what had happened. Horowitz opines that most of the disrupters were leftist non-students over the age of 30.

Maybe so. But this kind of thing happens far too frequently at American universities. There are few other venues in which one could get away with this kind of disruptive behavior. Try it at your local Rotary club and I bet you will find yourself spending the night in jail. Too many American universities have promulgated that idea that no one should ever be exposed to speech that makes them feel “uncomfortable” and have winked at actions like stealing and destroying newspapers with content someone dislikes. The wimp’s veto, the heckler’s veto, and the thug’s veto have all become common in academia. Indeed, there was virtually no old-media coverage of the Emory incident. Apparently, the shutting down of free speech in academia has become so common that it isn’t even news.

See my Goon Squad thread for many examples of thuggish behavior, especially in academia.

Following an incident at San Francisco State University, a campus Jewish leader named Laurie Zoloth summed up the situation there iin these words: “This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control.”

If thuggish political behavior is allowed to become the norm in academia, it is only a matter of time until such behavior becomes the norm in the larger society as well.