Chicago Boyz

The city government of Hollywood, Florida, on behalf of residents who don’t like to have certain kinds of Jews as neighbors, is using zoning laws to harass the Jews while it leaves members of other religious groups alone.

The Jews voted with their dollars and their feet to live and worship in Hollywood. Their neighbors are free to leave if they don’t like the situation, but instead are using the city’s legal muscle to try and keep the newcomers out. (Religious Jews always live near their synagogues, so forbidding synagogues in residential areas makes it difficult for religious Jews to live in those areas.)

There would be an outcry and lawsuits if any American city tried such tactics against blacks or gays or members of other minority groups. What’s different here? Nothing, except that the Jews in question are a very small minority and Hollywood thinks it can get away with pushing them around. This is an appropriate occasion for an anti-discrimination suit against the City, and it’s nice to hear that the Chabad people are planning one.

The mayor of Hollywood is trying to protect herself and her cronies by vigorously supporting anti-religious zoning restrictions, but insisting, somewhat belatedly, that they be applied evenhandedly. No thanks. One of the main problems with such restrictions is that it’s easy for cities to get away with not applying them evenhandedly. That’s part of why they are useful to politicians. Hollywood is only vulnerable here because it applied its own rules in such a heavy handed and blatantly discriminatory way as to make its adversaries’ case for them; the City might well have gotten away with it if its officials had been a bit more subtle and tactful. And who is the mayor of Hollywood, an ex-social worker, to say that organized religious observance is inappropriate in residential neighborhoods? That kind of arrogance in government officials is a much bigger problem than are low-key Sabbath gatherings in people’s residences.

Bigwig of the Silflay Hraka blog posts photos and commentary about the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp in 1945. The photos came into his possession by accident and he thinks they may never have been published. They are gruesome reminders of why we fought but also of why we are fighting, and are worth looking at even if you have seen such things many times before. Bigwig’s comments add quite a lot, as do some of the comments left by his readers.

Bigwig is ambivalent about posting previously-unpublished historical images on his blog. I don’t think he should be. Blogs are perfect for this sort of thing. If he had given the photos straightaway to a museum or other institution they might have been filed away for years until someone got around to looking at them. Now he can scan them onto his blog and people will see them immediately, and he can still give them to an institution for preservation. This was a great idea on his part. The more people who use blogs to post historically significant photos and reminiscences, the better.

What was the American Revolution really all about? Modern cynics would have us believe that it was about something other than freedom. But examining the words and actions of the American rebels shows that they were struggling for freedom. And not just some abstract notion of freedom, but what they perceived as the “liberties of Englishmen” — specific, historically-grounded liberties.

David Hackett Fischer’s masterful book Paul Revere’s Ride makes this clear. Some of the New Englanders refused to flee as the redcoats came past on their retreat from Concord, on that greatest of days, April 19, 1775. One such was Jason Russell of Menotomy, Massachusetts.

One of these embattled householders was Jason Russell, fifty-eight years old and so lame that he could barely walk. Russell sent his family to safety, then made a breastwork from a pile of shingles at his front door. Friends urged him to flee. Russell answered simply, “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” Others rallied to him, and a fierce fight took place in the dooryard of the Russell house. A party of grenadiers was sent to storm the building. Most of the Americans retreated inside or ran away, but Jason Russell was too lame to run. He stayed and fought, until a grenadier killed him in his own doorway. His wife and children returned to find his body pierced with many bayonet wounds. Altogether eleven Americans were found dead at the Russell house.

One of the great dividing lines in American life is between those who have an emotional, pre-rational love for their country, similar to their love for their parents or children, and those who are repelled by this. I have a friend who is a liberal lawyer, an activist, a smart, hardworking, skillful, honest, dedicated man. On the anniversary of 9/11 I had lunch with him. I offered him an American flag pin. He recoiled. To people like him, even the best of them, American history is one of struggle and reform against injustice, a story of the failed effort to establish a more egalitarian society, a struggle which goes on, and any American greatness exists in a vision of what it might some day be. As Richard Rorty put it, liberals hope some day to “achieve their country”, a country which exists in their minds.

I’ll stick to my approach. America is not a project in the present requiring the bulldozing of the past. Nor, especially is it a mirage, an imaginary and pernicious utopia lodged somewhere in the future. It is a concrete reality of land and people and laws and customs. It is the gift bought with blood at Midway and Bastogne and Little Round Top and Yorktown. It is the work of countless hands that laid the bricks and railroad tracks and power lines, that dug the mines and dredged the harbors, that built the farmhouses and town squares, the skyscrapers and bungalows. It is the work of generations of jurors and schoolteachers and engineers and salesmen and mothers wiping muddy faces. It is the hard suffering of the Atlantic crossing, whether by slaves or free people. And back before all this, even before the rattling of musketry at Concord Bridge, before the pronouncements in the Declaration, the English liberties transplanted to these shores. And even farther, into the distant ages of the past, the slow growth of those liberties over the centuries. And progress, change, development for a conservative must take place with an awareness of this inheritance, and humility before it, in a spirit of custodianship, as part of the larger democracy, as Edmund Burke put it, which includes both the dead and those yet to be.

The universalist statements of the Declaration, “all men … ” were founded not on abstractions but on real institutions, legal norms and practical conduct which embodied and give substance to these rights. The Anglosphere countries have inherited all this. It is up to the rest of the world to come up with their own solutions to realizing in practice these universal rights. Merely pronouncing them won’t do it nor, most likely, will simply transplanting American methods into alien soil. The world presents many challenges and tasks, and the domain of liberty will expand only by hard effort, and then only by fits and starts, and the end of history remains far, far off.

God rest the soul of Jason Russell, American, who knew that an Englishman’s home is his castle, and died for it.

God bless America.

Libertarian Samizdata has this post about Cécile Philippe, director of the newly formed Molinari Institute, a “free market think-tank”. Lib Samiz goes on to say that she is ” both a fearless and uncompromising libertarian activist, and a thoroughly charming and civilised person, two things which don’t always go together. ” That is delicately put. Too many libertarians have a bucket of good ideas, zeal and energy — but such a dearth of social skills that they couldn’t sell a sandwich to a starving man. A wave of groovy French women pushing this sort of good idea will be way more effective. As Lib Samiz notes, that would be formidable indeed.

“bubba” in the comments forwards this photo: