The core group interviewed consists of childhood buddies Walter Hess, now a fellow film-maker, Louis Kampf, now an activist and MIT professor, and Max Frankel, now in charge of the editorial page at the NY Times; relatives – notably his father Bert and Aunt Annie; and others in concentric rings of closeness – the rabbi’s widow Sary Lieber, Mrs. Krakow from down the hall, Walter’s mother Mrs. Moletta Hess, and the imperious Ilse Marcus. Editor Hans Steinitz and Yonkers housewife Edith Eisenmann fill out the cast.

(* Throughout, I use the present-tense “now” from the perspective of the film – I have not tracked these people down to the real present. In parentheses are the approximate time into the film, in hours:minutes.)

Most of these jews regarded themselves as Germans, and draw a sharp us-them distinction between themselves and jews from Poland or Russia. They claim to be descended from jews that followed the Roman legions up the Rhine, and stayed. There are signs of Aryan admixture: the rabbi’s widow has blue eyes, and several of them lack the characteristic “jewish whine” in their tone of voice. The claim that they thought of themselves as “Germans of a different religion” has surface (though deceptive) plausibility. Indeed Kampf’s father would have joined Hitler’s army (1:57) and Frankel confesses he would have marched with the Hitler Youth if only they would have had him (35, 2:03).

Not only did they think of themselves as Germans, they believed they were so regarded. The title comes from Bert Kirchheimer’s remark that the Germans felt bad about the new regime “because we were so beloved.” Mrs. Hess continues to correspond with her German friends from back home right up to the present (1:46) (as does Mrs. Krakow also [1:57]) and blames the problems that did occur not on something Germanic but on “the human.”

The German jews looked down their noses at the Polish jews, who, they claim, were tricky in business, dishonest, and they cheated — “not like us.” In 1938 the Polish jews in Germany began to be sent back, getting dumped in fields in Poland. Mrs. Lieber says that the attitude of the German jews was to “let them go back” (31). Frankel’s family was “first generation German” and was sent back. They walked back to Germany — so desperate were jews to get to and stay in Germany then — but were threatened with concentration camp if they came back again. (Later his mother with classic chutzpah stormed into the Gestapo office and demanded, and got, exit visas to America.) Kampf adds that the German jews blamed Polish jews for Nazi hostility toward jews, and on the ship to America there was a virtual ongoing war between the German jews and “Ostjuden” (34).

Thus, when Hitler started to make noises, many assumed it was a transient difficulty that would soon fix itself. Yet they did start to move out, and “by 1950″ – an odd year to anchor the statistic on, as if the emigration continued blithely along during and after the war – “more than 20,000 jews had settled in Washington Heights, setting up thirteen synagogues.”

The theme of ethnic and even infra-ethnic resentments is explored. Frankel admits that in New York, he was reviled even by other jews who had been there twenty years longer. “Why don’t you go back where you came from?” they asked (1:09). Frankel wonders if the “hysterical, grieving, deep pessimism” of earlier waves of East European jewry is due to their peasant stock, or perhaps something more deeply cultural in the Russian soul (1:11). Some of the jews in the film tut-tut the arrogance of new immigrants, including Russian jews, while others defend them.

A basic leftist orientation is presumed with these jews. A simplistic “Nazis=capitalists,” “good people=socialists” is taken for granted. Hitler “used the concentration camps to destroy the socialist, communist and trade union opposition, which had the support of the majority.” (49) Uh… right.

Interesting facts come to light to prove that Hitler’s intent was not the genocide of jews, but their removal from Germany.
•    Jewish men could “buy” their freedom from concentration camps for the pledge to leave Germany (40)
•    In 1936 jews could leave with all their money, while Germans could only take 10 Reichsmark with them if they left (29). (Later, the restriction to 10 was evidently extended to jews as well.)
•    Mr. Hess (already deceased at the time of the documentary) spent time in Dachau, after which he took the family on a cruise ship vacation, riding first class (51).
•    As mentioned above, the Polish jews that had emigrated to Germany were “dumped” into Poland, and were often desperate to get back into Germany.

The strident Mrs. Marcuse (1:40) shares the view of the narrator (1:44) that Germany deserved to be bombed into rubble. The indignities that justify that conclusion are sprinkled throughout the film and I list them here:

1. 1936 Nuremberg law said they could not call themselves German any more
2. kosher slaughter was banned (21)
3. stores were boycotted
4. German nurses could not work on jewish men
5. some of Walter’s classmates threw dirt clods at him
6. Frau Schumacher at one point stopped inviting Walter to the annual Easter-egg hunt (59)
7. in general, the Germans made Walter hate himself (58)
8. the Germans threw the jews out of a pool in Mannheim, and as a result, one of the girls was afraid to swim for the rest of her life (24)
9. Mrs. Eisenmann says, for punishment for misbehavior in one of the camps, women’s heads were shaved funny
10. Mr. Hess at one point was made to enter his place of work through the rear door (28)
11. in one camp, Mrs. Marcuse had to use a pail as latrine (1:19)
12. in another camp, underground editor Steinitz had to use a typewriter with a broken A-key (1:18)

I will limit my commentary on this list to just the first four items. (1) Not being able to call oneself “German” is a reasonable thing applied to a tribe that refuses to assimilate, that is, a tribe that is in fact not German as to tribal identity. (2) Kosher slaughter should in fact be banned from any civilized country, and those that continue to perform it should be exiled or executed. This is deliberate cruelty to animals that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up: more will need to be said about this in the future. (3) As I showed elsewhere, boycotting minority-owned stores is actually entirely reasonable if in effect that minority is boycotting the stores of the majority — whether they are doing so as intentional program or by natural ethnic loyalty. (4) is just common sense.

Finally, I mark those items in the film that can serve as evidence that can be gleaned on the question of the “holocaust.”

1. A couple of the interviewees mention how many of their “family” were lost to the holocaust. Mrs. Krakow “lost more than twenty.” (Exactly how many; can we get some names and places?) Bert Kirchheimer says, “they always told me 46 people from my family were murdered… Of course, I counted them, a long time ago” (11). There is something a bit flippant about this statement. “They” always told him. He counted, but a long time ago – don’t ask for specific details now. Above all, if 46 people can be identified as “my family,” then “family” is a very extended family indeed. (Extend the concept sufficiently, and most Germans can probably say they “lost 46 people” in the war, too.) Names and dates and places, please.

2. Steinitz admits that the German camps were not extermination camps (1:17). This is a relief to hear: many Americans are still unaware of this fact due to the post-war propaganda. It is an amazing coincidence that all the “death camps” turn out to have been in regions “liberated” by the Red Army.

3. The narrator makes the preposterous statement, “Exterminations were carried on up to the last day [of the war]” (1:37). Meanwhile, the real Germans in Auschwitz were nursing Elie Wiesel back to health, and asking him if he wanted to be left behind to be rescued by the arriving liberators, the Red Army. Wiesel opted to return to Germany with his captors.

4. The grating Mrs. Marcuse reviles a young soldier that did not know of the existence of the nearby concentration camp – by which she must have meant “death camp.” She says “he should have been killed.” (1:43) Of course the liberating soldier would have known about the camps as such. Apparently, he had not yet discovered that they were actually death camps. Any eye-witness that does not support the story should be killed, Mrs. Marcuse evidently thinks.

5. In general, we still don’t get the names of individuals executed at named dates and places. The closest we get is Edith Eisenmann who claims to have found a letter indicating that her father was told that mother had been sent to a gas chamber. (1:39). But this is still hearsay three-times removed.

Twice, something rather odd is said in reference to gas chambers:

6. Mrs. Marcuse says that the SS women threatened that saboteurs would be “sent to the gas chambers” if it happened again (1:34). It did happen again, but instead of being sent there, the girls responsible were executed in the sight of their shifts to make an example. So, was “send to the gas chambers” a vacuous threat, like Scarlet threatening Prissy to “sell her south”? or is Mrs. Marcuse filling out the drama based on what she heard later?

7. Similarly, consider the statements by Mrs. Eisenmann that when her family arrived at Auschwitz, she was directed to the one side, the others to the other side. (But her father was a baker, presumably a healthy man in the prime of life. Why would he be rejected for work and a young girl kept?) Later, people in the camp said “see that? that’s the gas chamber” and most odd of all, consider this: “they told us when the gas was turned on” (1:29).

Apparently Mrs. Eisenmann heard the stories later about “gas chambers,” and she assumed that they would work like the gas oven in her kitchen. No one ever told her, or it did not sink in, that the “gas chamber” was supposed to work by Zyklon-B tablets being dropped through a slot in the roof; not by “the gas being turned on”!

The film could have had a half-hour edited out without loss, but nevertheless I recommend a couple viewings (HIx 2). It opens up new vistas on the German situation in the 1930s and the intra-tribal hostilities within jewry. Especially, it drives home unmistakably what the real German goal vis-à-vis jews was in the 30′s and it clearly was not extermination. Finally, several odd statements give further matter to ponder regarding the “holocaust” question.

The narration is in French, but the poetic tone is universal. “Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Belsen, Ravensbrück, Dachau… The blood has dried, the tongues have fallen silent. The only visitor to the blocks now is the camera,” intones the mesmerizing voice.

The structure is to approach from outside and gradually burrow in to the depths of the camps. On first approach to the camps, the architecture of the guard towers is compared: Alpine, Japanese, “garage,” none. Aspects of construction are alluded to sarcastically: “Bids, businessmen, bribes.”

Boxcars loaded with people are shown. “Nudity strips the inmates of all pride in one stroke. Shaved. Tattooed. Numbered.” The problem of ungenerous food rations is discussed; the role of the latrine as place for discussion; the ill-supplied clinics, where “the same ointment is used for every wound.” Indeed, “chemical companies send poisons to be tested.” Finally, the gas chambers, including the “shower rooms.” Fingernail scratchings on the concrete ceiling are shown. Pyres are shown “where crematoriums fell short.” Pictures of half-burned bodied lying everywhere. “But the ovens can handle thousands of bodies a day.”

“Everything was saved.” There are pictures of huge heaps of eyeglasses, combs, shaving brushes, bowls and plates, shoes, and hair, each in its own pile.

Soap is asserted to have been made from the bodies. What is done with the skin is not stated, but “shown.”

At 28:00, the Allies are shown opening the gates. There are corpses everywhere, placed in intertwined, dramatic poses. There is the famous bulldozer shot. Then, the deliberate placing of skulls in a field of skulls [but why?] is shown.

It concludes, ever poetic, that nine million dead haunt this countryside [which countryside?]. The threat still surrounds us all, and is closing in. We ignore the cries of humanity. The capos and informants and reinstated officers are still at large. “There are those that refused to believe, or believed only for brief moments.”

In evaluation, we must observe that mere video is quite unsuitable to “document” this kind of thing, for a variety of reasons. There is the problem of identification and authentication. You see a movie clip of people in a boxcar for example. Then, you see a clip of a boxcar door open, and a heap of bodies. In an age long before ubiquitous home movies, who took the picture? Where? When? Given the absence of documentation, how do we know it wasn’t staged for a fictional movie? Likewise, at 22:13 some pictures “were taken moments before a mass killing.” Nothing is really shown. How do they know that’s what it is? Where was it? When? We are never told. At 21:45, “deportation from every city.” But the city looks bombed out; maybe the citizens are being evacuated from the destruction wrought by the Allies? And so forth.

As to the heaps of material, we need to examine each one from two perspectives: (1) is the story rational? does it make sense? does it match human nature? (2) is the footage credible in itself?

As an example of (1), consider the heap of eyeglasses. The motive, of course, would be to provide spare eyeglasses in a time of national shortages such as are common in wartime. But what good would the massive, jumbled heap of glasses accomplish? Why would they not be sorted in famous Germanic manner — by strength, size, sex, and style, and shipped off to a distribution point?

Both criteria can be examined in connection with the mountain of hair. (1) The motive is alleged to be this: “at 50 Pfennig a kilo, it’s used to make cloth,” and reams of cloth, like rolls of carpet are shown. (Other accounts of the hair claim it was for mattresses.) And indeed, a google search turns up a picture of an invoice for “250 kilos of hair” from some company or other. But is this credible?

a. If you were trying to start a program of recycling human hair, would you not start with the ordinary civilian barbers? First, their customers are a gift that keeps giving. Second, the cleanness of the hair would naturally be much higher — hair would typically be washed, and above all, lice-free. Yet I have never heard a claim of a civilian barber hair-recapturing program.

b. If you were to start such a camp-program, why would you heap the hair up like a mountain, outdoors, where wind, sun, and rain would continue to dirty and spoil it (beyond the existing filth and lice that would have been there to begin with)?

(2) Now, freeze the frame at 25:42. The hair looks suspiciously like wigs — i.e. clusters of hair that belong together, like a wig — overlaid with some kind of glittery tinsel. What is the chance of hair shavings staying together like that after being swept up and carted? (But if they were wigs used as stage-props…) Then, as the camera pans back, it is a literal mountain. And some of the mountain just looks like sod.

The pile of combs — why? Why not distribute them or burn and bury them with the victims? Same with the mountain of shaving brushes — as if the men would have brought such an extensive shaving kit with them. The bowls and plates — where did they come from? and why?

Again, the place, time, and photographers are not identified for us. Are these films from the Soviet film-making machine? We really need to know.

The macabre rack of five decapitated bodies next to the basket of heads is particularly odd. As to criterion (1) — If the point of the gas-chambers was mass-production (itself a dubious thesis — why not use the Jewish-Bolshevik method of a bullet to the back of the head? Bullets at such a high rate of efficiency are quite cheap), then why single out five for the guillotine? Why line their naked bodies up in a display rack? with a wooden baffle to conveniently disguise the neck hole?

Likewise, why the basket of heads? If they are for study, would they not be separated out and put on a shelf, not jumbled on top of each other? If for public desecration, would they not be pilloried or spindled in public?

As to criterion (2), stop the film at 26:50. Several of the heads have normal musculature, as if still attached to a body. The closest one’s neck is snipped neatly off, like one might do with a photo; the same with one furthest away: it’s chin is fully intact. Some of the heads seem almost to be floating. A few seconds later, the camera pans back again — but the heads are clearly not the same as in the first shot. They are made up differently.

The tendentious nature of the film is revealed in vicious little phrases thrown in gratuitously. At 7:50, with the flames of the crematorium in the distance, the voice explains, “one of those night scenes so dear to a Nazi’s heart.”

The allusion to soap and tattooed lamp shades endure in the popular mind, but apparently are quietly disappearing from serious studies. And of the list of camps that opens the film, at least some are now known to have had no gas chambers. Did the producers know that in 1955? If not, then what was the evidentiary basis for their insinuations?

Finally, the interview with director Alain Resnais gives further proof of the propagandistic nature of this film.They worked fast, Resnais says, and “without much documentation.”

Obviously; but documentation should be the heart of a documentary.

Apparently, the scenes in the French relocation camp in Pithiviers (a town about 40 mi S of Paris) showed the complicity of a French policeman in the deportation. So, the French censors refused to approve the film at first. It is unclear whether this obstacle was cleared up by deliberately painting in a beam to obscure the French cap, or if by luck the editing “just happened” to obscure it. But in either case, think about it:

Any made-up vicious insinuation can be made about your enemy and historical continental rival, but nothing negative, even something indisputably factual, may be shown about your own people.

I think that recipe is known as propaganda.

We are assured by good men like Steve Schlissel and Carl Trueman that the “holocaust” is the most thoroughly documented event in history. So much so that only loony-tunes or men filled with malice could conclude otherwise. It is obvious to even an amateur like myself, however, that documentation such as this film hardly counts at all — indeed, it can only raise suspicions.

You might have thought documentation would be better the closer in time it was produced to the event.

The title, in German Nacht und Nebel, allegedly referring to the way some inmates were categorized, is also appropriate to the obscurantism of the film itself.

The team on the outs consists of advocates of “Intelligent Design” (ID), not creationists. The distinction between these two is spelled out: creationists presuppose the Bible, and try to retrofit science into the biblical view, while ID’ers presuppose nothing, but make arguments from evidence that certain features of living organisms imply design, and cannot be accounted for by chance.

The complaint of the film is with respect to freedom, not truth. Intelligent Design deserves a place at the table, not because it is true, but because it is plausible. On the other hand, Stein makes it crystal clear that he is not about bringing Christ into the classroom. Far from it. Indeed, he strongly implies that he would oppose that just as much as the Darwinists do. There should not be freedom to bring Christ into the classroom, any more than the freedom to teach that the earth is flat, or to deny the holocaust. But apart from such absurdities as those, freedom should reign, and thus the Darwinist hegemony is not just.

Stein rests his case for the academic plausibility of the ID thesis on two points: (1) the lack of explanatory power of Darwinism to account for the origin of life, and (2) that Darwinism leads to the abuses of Nazism, especially eugenics.

For (1), the complexity of the living cell is explained. The cell is the smallest unit of life; and it is indeed a universe onto itself that no sane man could believe was brought about by a lightning flash in the primordial ooze. Stein gets the Darwinists a-stammering on this question. More than one actually speculate that aliens may have seeded the earth with the cell from which everything else then evolved.

For (2), Stein travels to a sanitarium in Germany where eugenics was practiced for a time during National Socialism. He argues that killing people unworthy of life was a consequence of the Darwinist world view.

In evaluating the theme of the movie, it must be observed that anyone versed in the history of philosophical theology will instantly recognize that the “intelligent design” position is simply the classic teleological argument updated in terms of modern biology. It is not new; it is as compelling, or uncompelling as it ever was.

On this, there is plenty of confusion on both sides. Despite Stein’s dismissive gesticulations when the Darwinists appeal to aliens, for example, the notion of aliens planting the seeds from which subsequent life evolved is, upon a little bit of reflection, one possible form agnostic “intelligent design” could take. The aliens would be the “intelligence” who “designed.”

Stein would say that this begs the question: where did the aliens come from? But note that this move shifts the argument from the teleological to something more like the cosmological argument.

But the ID’ers cannot shift to the cosmological argument; that is violating their professed terms. If they are honest, they must admit that (1) the intelligent design could have come from aliens, and (2) they cannot refute this by claiming question-begging, for they cannot, on the basis of evidence, demonstrate that such aliens could not have evolved Darwinianly. They cannot do that, for they have no such evidence to examine, and their whole claim is allegedly based on examination of “the evidence.”

The teleological argument is indeed compelling, as even Immanuel Kant admitted; but what even that great man failed to realize was that the argument is compelling in view of the Christian intuition of rightness that can only be accounted for on the basis of divine revelation. Strip that away, try to base your outlook on ultimate brute fact and the autonomous mind of man, and an appeal to aliens cannot be defeated any more than an appeal to the living and true God.

The Darwinists are therefore quite right to suspect a hidden agenda, despite the protestations of the ID’ers. Either the Darwinist can appeal to the hypothesis of alien seed-planters, or the ID’er has a hidden agenda that he is not being forthright about.

The eugenics argument is also weak. The form is basically this:

if (atheistic Darwinism)
then (no basis for an ethic that would rule out eugenics).

First, he did not have to go to the Third Reich to find examples of eugenic exploitation. He could have gone to, say, various states in the USA that practiced sterilization, starting a few years before the Third Reich. (Oddly enough, German protest of the practice led to its abandonment more quickly during the Third Reich than here, though in fairness one could also add that sterilization was less extreme than euthanasia.)

Second, the Darwinist could answer that eugenics misses the whole point of Darwinism, namely: progress by chance, i.e. unguided, selection. Indeed, it is at least as plausible to suppose that agnostic “intelligent design” would lead to eugenics, since obviously the “design plan” intended healthy, productive lives.

Finally, this entire line of thinking is basically ad populum. Most people probably voice opposition to eugenics mainly because it is currently politically incorrect to say otherwise. Even if it is a genuine intuition, however, on what basis does Stein oppose one intuition with, simply, another intuition? (Remember, a specific God that reveals himself is not allowed in the discussion.)

Occasionally, other little zingers are thrown in. At one point, Stein asks Dawkins an extended series of questions: does he reject Jehovah? (Yes.) All the Hindu gods? (Yes.) Allah? (Yes.) And so forth. Finally Dawkins becomes frustrated, and rightly so. What Stein is doing apparently is a “judo argument.” The Enlightenment argued that the probability is small, given the plethora of conflicting claims about the deity, that any particular claim is valid. Stein is apparently trying to turn that argument around, as if to ask, what is the probably of all these deities being false? But Stein’s question presupposes the Enlightenment foundation: given that man’s mind is independent and seeking ultimate answers in the flux of darkness and contingency, my probability of the set union is better than your small probability of the particular set member. Stein’s approach is indeed hopeless obscurantism; on the ultimate foundation that he shares with Dawkins — of legislative man that cannot hear any god clearly –, Dawkins’ position is indeed the slightly less irrational.

The main appeal of the film — an ode to “freedom” — is historically untenable.

Academic freedom has never existed, really. Historically, universities were originally founded by Christians for specific theological purposes, and excluded those that would teach something destructive to that purpose. Where the “enemies” took over, whether it should be Protestants in Saxony after Luther, or “liberals” at Harvard then Yale then Princeton, the new regime was always just as jealous to guard their monopoly as the old.

“Free speech” was a ruse used as a siege-work, first by Communists, then, half a century later, by 60′s radicals; once in power, there was less free speech than before the coup.

It is amazing to me how conservatives have adopted the rhetoric of the Communist method of sedition, as if it were ever the case. The university was simply never founded to “hire the smartest people that exist” and “let them debate the issues to a resolution.” Academic debate is, and always has been in terms of a carefully circumscribed framework that is presupposed and acted in terms of.

Along with this, Benny should ask himself why it is, that only Christendom has produced great universities.

Darwinists won their position of unassailable power, not by free speech and debate, but “fair and square” in terms of their worldview — by stealth, back-stabbing, intrigue, and pluck.

We should not beg for a place in the far corner of the banquet table they have set.

The caricature of “creationism” must also be challenged. A true, vantillian creationism, argued for elsewhere on this site, challenges the very possibility of science itself apart from God’s self-revelation. Thus,

no creationism -> no science

This is why we can say that agnostic science is ultimately impossible, and rests on borrowed capital. The real pith of the matter is no more welcome in Stein’s little exploitative universe than it is in the Darwinist’s. Let’s fight it out honestly, and not whine that everyone should have a place at the table. The issue is quite a bit more subtle, more foundational and all-encompassing than any concept the Ben-Jew shows evidence of having contemplated.

The organizing principle is to make an analogy between linguistics and music to try to discover how music conveys “meaning.”

Lecture 1 addresses “phonemes.” Just as every spoken language on earth utilizes a subset of a finite set of basic sounds (the various vowels and consonants producible by the human vocal tract), so all the musical systems in the world, however they might sound different superficially, are based on a set of tone relationships that are universal because based on the underlying Physics of how vibrations are set up with frequencies that combine in relations of proportionality.

Lecture 2 continues the analogy with the topic of “syntax.” He discusses various ways one might try to map the elements of music to those of sentences: e.g. note ~ letter, scale ~ alphabet — and rejects each in turn until lighting on Norm Chomsky’s “transformational grammar,” which he finds to be more adequate to the task. Just as pronoun substitution and elision occurs to make language more energetic and penetrating, the same techniques (mutatis mutandis) are used by the great composers. He describes Chomsky’s view of “surface” versus “deep” structure. Music leaps to the equivalent of the poetic “super-surface” immediately in its “surface structure.”

In Lecture 3, the discussion proceeds to “semantics.” The musical analog of figures of speech is explored: metaphor, ambiguity, simile, antonym, anaphora, chiasmus, asyndeton, “this is like that.” The lessons are illustrated by an actual rendition of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

Lecture 4 explores the “delights and dangers of ambiguity.” The intentional moves toward ambiguity in poetry of the late Romantic period (e.g. Gerard Manley Hopkins) is reflected in the move to chromaticism in music. Tristan and Isolde, the “pinnacle of the 19th century,” reflected this move, which culminated in Debussy’s Afternoon of the Faun based on the ultimate tonal ambiguity, the tritone. Performance demonstrations of these pieces are given.

Lecture 5 moves into the 20th century. The “crisis” of the twentieth century was the sense that the stretching of tonal ambiguity had nowhere further to develop. Parallel developments of culture, including Marx, Freud, and Einstein are integrated. The 12-tone method of Schoenberg is explained, and sections of true beauty using this method are illustrated, as Berg’s Violin Concerto. “Ours is a century of death,” Bernstein explains, and this was revealed prophetically by Mahler, especially in the 9th Symphony, which is performed by way of illustration.

Lecture 6 is a tour de force survey of the twentieth century in art, literature and music. The themes of sincerity and ambiguity are emphasized. Various forms of ambiguity were used to rescue tonality, such as polytonality, whereby simultaneous chords in different keys are played, giving rise to a new sound still rooted in the old. Polyrhythm is also explored. Stravinsky was the eclectic rescuer of tonality: he was both a copy-cat and “consummately original.” T. S. Eliot and e e cummings are tied in. The principles are illustrated with a full production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. In conclusion, Bernstein declares that there is primal “poetry of the earth” that runs through music and that vindicates his thesis of a universal deep structure in music analogous to that of language.

The series can serve as a layman’s introduction to music appreciation. Though at times Bernstein annoys with ostentatious displays of erudition and name-dropping (leading besides its annoyance to occasional faux pas in the detail, for example — Berkeley didn’t believe in mind?!), I can recommend the series. There was much that was new and thought-provoking, which will lead to further study and reflection; and he did open the way for me to appreciate some modern music previously opaque to me. I would be interested to hear from someone if viewing the series opens up a previously obstructed access to classical music as such — I suppose it might. The unifying structures of a wide range of music are worthy of contemplation, even if the exact correspondence to Chomsky’s linguistic theory, or the theory itself, is ultimately overthrown.

Background

Though Hitler is often made the scapegoat for the German defeats from late 1942 onwards, he does deserve a good deal of blame for the Stalingrad disaster. It was his decision to split Army Group South in two (Army Group A and Army Group B). The original plan was to envelop Stalingrad from the north and south, but Hitler decided to capture the Caucuses first in order to take control of the oil fields there. Group B made a rapid advance early on, but eventually slowed to a crawl due primarily to fuel shortages. Soviet resistance eventually stiffened and the German army was unable to clear the region. With Group B bogged down, Army Group A was left to capture Stalingrad without aid. As it turned out, Hitler wanted to do too much with too little.

Another tactical mistake was Hitler’s decision to take Stalingrad by a coup de main. But the Red Army was too well entrenched within the city for the over-extended German army to accomplish this. This having failed, the German 6th Army, the main force of Army Group A, become enmeshed in brutal street fighting for the next six months. The Russian soldiers were well adapted for this style of combat, but the Germans were best at mobile operations in open terrain. The result was that the German forces were bled white. (Although the kill ratio was still about 3:1 in Germany’s favor.)

Hitler also erred in relying on an untried staff officer, Friedrich Paulus, to lead the attack. Paulus, a Hessian of plebeian birth, had a modest demeanor that endeared him to Hitler (Hitler, himself of low birth, never trusted the aristocratic officer corps.) After the campaign he was slated to replace Alfred Jodl as Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht). Though a competent staff officer, Paulus lacked both the toughness of character and the imagination necessary to make a first rate commander. He proved to be indecisive at critical moments with the result that the Germans lost the initiative. But in fairness to Paulus, even a great general such as von Manstein or Model would probably have had been hard-pressed to lead the army to victory under the conditions that came to characterize the Stalingrad battle.

Paulus was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal just a few days before 6th Army surrendered. Since no German Field Marshal had ever been taken prisoner, Hitler’s promotion meant that he expected Paulus to take his life rather than surrender. Hitler was deeply hurt when he found out that Paulus had been made a prisoner and vowed that no more officers would be given the Field Marshal’s baton until after the successful completion of the war.

Perhaps the biggest blunder Hitler made was to rely on Axis formations (Rumanian, Hungarian and Italian) to protect his extended flanks. These armies were severely lacking in tanks and anti-tank weapons and were not able to withstand the Soviet armor thrust when they launched their envelopment attack. With little resistance, the Red Army broke through the Axis lines and the spearheads of the two pincers met just four days after the beginning of the attack. The German 6th Army was trapped.

Though the encirclement ended any possibility of a German victory in Stalingrad, 6th Army still had enough firepower to break out of the kessel. Both his staff and field officers advised Hitler to give such an order. But Hitler refused. He believed that a relief army could reestablish contact and that in the meantime, the Luftwaffe would keep the 6th Army supplied. (The latter belief was based upon empty assurances from Reichsmarschall Herman Göring, the head of the German Air Force.) Both were wishful thinking. By the time a breakout was seriously contemplated, the Army was incapable of mobile action.

In the end, the entire Army was destroyed. Of the 200,000 soldiers of 6th Army, 90,000 went into captivity. Most of the other 100,000 were killed, but a few (those “lucky” enough to be wounded) were flown out before the end. Only 6,000 of the prisoners made it back to Germany after the war.

Apart from the great loss of men and equipment, the German Army lost the strategic initiative on the Eastern Front. And though they were able to make a few powerful counter thrusts over the next two years, the German Army was in constant retreat. Stalingrad is considered by most military historians the turning point of World War II’s European theater. This is no exaggeration, despite that fact that myopic Americans and British believe that the decisive event was not to take place until the Normandie landings almost two years later.

The Documentary

The film itself combines a narrative of the Stalingrad campaign interspersed with personal recollections from survivors of the battle. The survivors — now, of course, quite elderly — tell what things were like on the front lines. And it was horrible.

All war is hell, we are told, but the soldiers at Stalingrad went through a particularly gruesome hell. The battle took place through the frigid Russian winter. The temperature was constantly below freezing. Without adequate shelter, many of the soldiers froze to death. Since supplies had to be flown in, food became scarce and the troops were often left to forage. Near the end the soldiers ate horse meat and even cats. One Russian civilian even claims that German soldiers eventually turned to cannibalizing the unburied dead.

Then there was the combat. Every street corner, bombed-out building and even sewer became a battleground. Tanks and artillery were almost useless in such close fighting. Skirmishes were fought with the enemy only a few yards away. Sometimes the combat was hand to hand. And even during lulls the sniper was always a danger.

After months of fighting and deprivation, the German soldiers grew apathetic. They were lousy, cold and hungry. But worse than this, there was no hope of getting out alive. Near the end, the dead were not buried and the wounded were not given food rations. Most died alone, unheeded and ungrieved.

One Prussian woman recalls hiding a telegram for her husband ordering him to report back to his panzer division. She believed that when he left, she would never see him again. When a second telegraph came she reluctantly handed it to him. He left the next day and never returned. Sixty years later she told the interviewer, “we both died in Stalingrad.”

The film is open to a few criticisms. While the producers did not pin any moral responsibility of the conflict on the German soldiers, an underlying theme is that the German high command, and in particular Hitler, were not only the aggressors, but were brutal in the prosecution of the war. As to the former, we now know, due to Soviet archives being opened, that Stalin was preparing to attack the Reich –- just as Hitler thought. Stalin was just beaten to the punch. And as for brutality, both sides were guilty of atrocities. On the whole, though, the Germans comported themselves better than the Russians. In fact, with the exception of a few of the SS security detachments (not to be confused with front line SS divisions such as Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Totenkopf, Das Reich and Wiking), the common portrayal of the German soldier as a merciless barbarian is a gross calumny. The Waffen SS did tend to take no quarter, but this was due mainly to the general savagery of the eastern front and to the fact that Soviet commissars were ordered to execute all captured SS soldiers.

No film on World War II is complete without at least one account of atrocities against Jews or Jewish heroism. In this case a Jewish physician is put forward as a heroine. She, against orders, treated wounded German soldiers after the battle was over and probably saved a few of their lives. Not to take anything away from anyone who acts with humanity during a war, but there were plenty of other examples that the producers could have chosen. Why must every account of World War II make special reference to Jews?

Despite these minor irritants, the film is well worth watching. I am glad that a number of participants in the Stalingrad battle have their stories preserved for posterity. In ten more years it would have been too late.

Hitler ordered Göring to deliver the funeral oration for Sixth Army. Though this was mainly an exercise in pomposity and the soldiers in the northern pocket of Stalingrad had not yet capitulated, one line does ring true. “In 1000 years every German shall speak with a holy shiver and reverence of the heroic fight.” Though now almost forgotten, one day the soldiers who fought and died in Stalingrad will be remembered with honor and pride.

Actually, Mark Twain was wrong. Witch doctors, shamans, and mystery priests have always done something about the weather. Of course, so have pious Christians on their knees in prayer. But now, for the first time in history, Al Gore is part of a movement that wants to do something about the weather by international politicking. This movie is his story.

Summary of An Inconvenient Truth

The movie is largely a video of a slide show he gives around the world, but it is interspersed with documentary-like footage of his world travels through airports and in limos, along with nostalgic glimpses of his idyllic agrarian boyhood, and even a few swipes at his political opponents both current and past that border on the vicious. Apart from those occasional lapses, however, most of it is in that “aw-shucks ahm jus’ a good ole boy too” kind of tone that all successful politicians at the national level since 1976 (excepting only HW) seem to have adopted as the persona best suited for political success.

The part of the slide show to which we should pay the most attention is the graphs and numbers, although the human-interest bits, especially the cataclysmic ones, may be part of a hidden agenda that I will discuss anon. Here and there I will put the approximate minute-count from the beginning in parentheses.

The numbers include graphs of CO2 levels that one of his college professors began recording in 1958. These number zigzag up and down in little undulations corresponding to the summer/winter seasons (16); but the trend of the wiggly line is decidedly upwards.

Then, after explaining how scientists claim that both temperatures and CO2 levels can be inferred from ice drills from Antarctica (including the intuitively-absurd claim that “you can see the year Congress passed the ‘Clean Air Act’”) the time scale moves out to 1000 years (20). He shows the “Medieval Warming Period” but claims it was trivial “compared to what’s going on now.”

Then, zooming out even farther, he shows an alleged 650,000 year chart of CO2 and temperature (21). Many ups and downs can be observed, corresponding to “seven ice ages.” At the right-hand end, the curves zoom up into the stratosphere.

Another graph (30) shows ocean temperatures starting in 1940, overlaid on computer models that “long ago” predicted this range of temperature increases.

Hurricane Katrina and (music fades in) the botched governmental response to it are somehow, and ominously, linked to global warming (32) — “the consequences were horrendous; there are no words to describe it.” The political heat is turned up higher as even the N-word is implied of opponents to the global warming agenda, via a 1936 quote (34) from Churchill (I mean of course “Nazi”). A pastiche of images (35) from Gore’s 2000 defeat (or pseudo-defeat) are stitched in.

All kinds of catastrophes are rehearsed throughout the world “like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations [sic]” (37). Studies project that the Arctic ice cap will be gone within 70 years or less (44). The arrival of birds and caterpillars in the Netherlands is already out of sync (51). The rising thaw line means more mosquitoes, and thus more diseases are in the offing (53). The oceans are rising and this has already caused refugees from Pacific Islands to seek refuge in New Zealand (57). Think about the impact of 100 million or more refugees when they are displaced (1:00).

Charts of the culprits are shown (1’8″): the USA contributes 30%, Europe 28%, Asia 14%. The per capita in tons and total per nation in billion of tons is given in this chart:

But though the US is the worst culprit, we have a record of successes that should make us optimistic of our ability to change: the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and going to the moon (1’25″). Indeed, we even have a notch in our belt environmentally — the ozone hole has been fixed due to actions we took (1’26″).

Oh yes, the ozone hole. When they stopped talking about that, I forgot all about it. Never even knew it was fixed.

Evaluation

Let me preface my critique of Gore by saying, I don’t want to be understood to favor the profligate use of resources. On the contrary, a case for the stingy use of resources can indeed by made, but from a perspective quite contrary to that presented by Gore. I will make suggestions along this line in due time in the future; now is the place to address Al Gore.

In evaluating Gore’s arguments, it is convenient to divide the subject between the science, the ethics, and the politics. This will segue naturally into some general observations including predictions of future politics.

1. The Science

In the first “bouncy” curve, it appears as if the CO2 has tripled or quadrupled since 1958. However, this is because the axes are not labeled at all. By chance, the very week I watched this there was an NPR interview on the subject which claimed only about 40%. Gore’s graph is therefore quite deceptive. The problem is where the “zero” reference axis is. It is just like the stock market. If you drew the base line at 12,000, then a move from 12,500 to 13,000 would look like doubling, but it is actually only 4%; likewise, here. Gore has “plausible deniability” in that he simply doesn’t show the reference line at all. But that is not good science.

The second curve, covering the “Medieval warming” (or is it “Medieval cooling”? both phenomena seem to be on the graph), you can finally observe that the CO2 scale goes from 280 to 360; the temperature chart corresponding to it goes from 0 degrees to a little over a half degree. The wiggles span a 1000 year period, with most of the upsurge indicated in the last 100 years.

The vertical scale appears to be labeled incorrectly, showing negatives in the upward direction. Also, there are simultaneous reds and blues (hots and colds) covering the same years in the last-few-years section, but nowhere else. This is very confusing. In any case, we are talking no more than 0.5 degrees C of change from the main axis.

In the third curve set, now covering “650,000 years,” the chart bounces between about 180 and 280 ppm of CO2. At the right extremity (“now”) the dramatic upsurge of the CO2 curve (red) is not matched by a surge in the temperature (blue)—the latter seems to be on a new plateau. So are they really correlated or not? Also, going from 180 to 280 is only a rise of 56%, which is order-of-magnitude consistent with what I heard on NPR.

The biggest punch line (complete with Gore going up in a cherry-picker) is a 50 year extrapolation. But extrapolations are always dangerous if not absurd. Mark Twain already observed that extrapolations based on the build-up of the Mississippi delta observed in his day would imply that the entire Gulf of Mexico would soon be filled up. Nature doesn’t work that way: that is, nature’s Creator has not made it so.

Watch for the same sleight-of-hand tricks that I have outlined above, in the other charts.

Apart from the inconsistent and deceptively-presented data about weather, another serious concern is the part that allocates responsibility. Look at the chart above. In tonnage, the US contributes nearly double Europe, yet the US is shown as 30% which is only 7% more than Europe’s alleged 28%. So either there is more going on than tonnage of CO2 — please explain what, then — or the numbers are erroneous somewhere.

Let’s dig even deeper. According to internet sources, populations of the regions Gore displays are, for Europe, 724,722,000; for America, 301,226,012; for Russia, 145,166,731; for Japan, 125,000,000; and for China, 1,313,973,713. But multiplying the per capita figures that Gore gives by the respective populations gives

Based on taking the per capita as solid, these numbers show that the USA and Europe contribute equally, which is more consistent with the culpability percentages, but Japan + China is then 1.0, which even neglecting the rest of Asia, should imply 18% if the US is 30%, not the 14% indicated.

Even apart from the correlation to the culpability percentages, why do none of the totals match up at all?! Some are off by a factor of four, others by only a factor of two.

Gore’s numbers are obviously bogus somewhere. Did no one check?

One thing that would be helpful would be to show where these numbers come from to begin with. Presumably, the total tonnage of petroleum and coal that is produced and consumed is known — is it a simple proportionality? Is there no efficiency factor? If not, then what good do auto emissions controls do, at least for this problem?

2. Ethics

Gore ups the ante very clearly: to oppose him is to be immoral. The implication of the N-word was mentioned above. He drives it home: “ultimately this is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue; if we allow that to happen it is deeply unethical.” (24).

An interesting ethical deliverance by Gore would be this: suppose (contrary to current belief) the warming is completely due to nature, and the CO2 is actually slowing it down. Would he then advocate emitting even more CO2 to maintain the status quo, or would we still need to shut down to allow nature to take its course? In other words, what is the basic environmental ethic that is supposed to frame the discussion? Is nature=good and manmade=bad the basic set of ethical equations? If so, why?

This is especially so given the evolutionary viewpoint that Gore seems to endorse, not to mention that he twice references atheist Carl Sagan, who was “his friend” (8). But on an atheistic/evolutionary world-view, what possible basis does he have for his ethical pitch?

Moreover, on that viewpoint, “man-made” is itself merely “part of nature.” There is no ontological and thus no ethical difference, since man and his behavior is then just “what it is,” just like that of apes and lions.

3. Politics

A serious concern is the mingling of political vindictiveness into the play. This means the great god Science is being marshaled into service of Gore’s Party (and which Party is which hardly matters to me here). At 1’14″ there is the cloak and dagger of a phone call: “what’d you find out? working for who? Chief of Staff? That’s the White House Environment Office. American Petroleum Institute — it’s fair to say that’s the oil and gas lobby– is that fair? Totally fair.” A little later he shows a late-80s clip of himself screaming at a scientist that allowed his testimony to be changed by politicos that “that is like the Soviet Union does it.”

But Gore’s use of manipulative images that are political makes him subject to the same accusation.

When “science” becomes charged in this manner, with its “objective results” a matter to be screamed and shouted, and not subjected to principial falsification, then it is no longer science. This is not to mention that environmental science is not really a hard science to begin with– and computer simulation programs are hardly at the level of science at all.

The scary thing about Gore and Science is that Science is now being treated as a secret priesthood whose deliverances are to be accepted on authority, not argument. And if you demur, you are unethical if not a closet “N.”

Millions of Americans are not part of the Guild yet have the kind of training that would permit them to follow the detailed arguments if presented. For example: let’s have a publicly-accessible database of the temperature data that statisticians from all walks of life can analyze with regressions. This is a process that has a great deal of “noise” on it. What is the probability that the physical trend is actually in the opposite direction? (It is a non-zero probability.) Let’s see the data.

Let’s hear how the numbers, especially the fault-finding numbers are derived.

For starters, let’s fix the obvious numerical mistakes that wreck the credibility of his charts.

Conclusion

I want to suggest that the purpose of this show is actually quite different than it purports to be. Here are two of the reasons I think so:

1. He drops a bombshell but let’s it pass, namely this: 30% of the emissions that go into the atmosphere come from forest fires (1’04″).

Think about it. This means that stopping the forest fires (many of which are intentional, and others burn due to politics that prevents harvesting the forests, with the result that a natural process holds them in check with fires) would alone just about undo the entirety of the excess CO2 that allegedly is being emitted. Unlike what he actually proposes, this seems like a doable agenda. Yet, he passes by that inference without even a mention.

2. Let it be that America is responsible for 30% (though for several reasons I have given above, this has not been established by the play). If America reduced its part to zero, there would still be 70%– and that chunk is the part that is growing the most rapidly. That other part only needs to grow by half to cancel our elimination. So without getting the Third World under control, anything that America did would be purely symbolic anyway. But the Third World is not going to be brought under control, at least by mere force of conviction.

In other words, something like a world-wide integrated control structure, like a gigantic police state, would be necessary to bring about the changes that Gore advocates.

However, that does not seem feasible right now, though I have no doubt our rulers would want it if it were feasible.

The fact that (1) he ignores an easily-addressed and massive contributor to CO2 emissions (forest fires), (2) uses deceptive labeling, inconsistent numbers, and absurd extrapolations; (3) that removing America’s contribution would not by itself change the man-made situation, along with (4) the use of apocalyptic imagery (including “Revelations” [sic]) clearly meant to excite emotions, all lead me to suggest that the real agenda actually lies elsewhere.

I suggest, the actual purpose of this movie is to plant ideas having latent and infectious power into the American political psyche. Mosquitoes, dread plagues and diseases, and the displacement of tens of millions of refugees are to set the stage for the upcoming years of politics.

Do you oppose reverting back to the pre-Industrial Revolution? Then you’re going to have to pay for disease control all around the world, and don’t object if in addition tens of millions of new immigrants need to be given refuge in our land. We should also pay the Third World to compensate them for producing less CO2. TO OPPOSE THESE MEASURES WILL MARK YOU AS IMMORAL IF NOT A NAZI.

This, I predict, is the real agenda. The tricky charts and bogus numbers are like a magician’s twirl of the baton to distract from how he pulls a rabbit out of the hat. Keep your eyes on other issues that our magician-politicians will be bringing forth as side shows to the global warming rhetoric.

The thesis is that the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt indeed took place as described in the Bible, and there are (a) documentary evidences of the Israelite’s presence in Egypt, and (b) scientific explanations for the plagues and parting of the sea.

The documentary evidence includes an etched stone from around 1500 BC talking about a terrible storm and darkness attributed to a (singular) god. The Pharaoh Achmose (Hebrew for brother of Moses) expelled a people from Egypt around that time. Other evidence talks about the Hyksos people in Egypt from 1700 to 1500 BC. In a tomb at Beni Hassan, wall paintings indicate a mass migration of figures with Semitic features and colored tunics, identified as ‘amo. Also at the urban center of Avaris, royal rings etched with Jacob have been discovered. In a slave hovel at Serabit is an inscription “El save me” and El is the Hebrew name for God. The “Ipuwer Plague” papyrus speaks of a strange hailstorm. Finally, an inscription at El Arish seems to describe a parting of sea and exodus of “the evil ones.”

The scientific evidence is a narrative surrounding the huge volcanic explosion of the island of Santorini, which around 1500 destroyed the Minoan civilization that flourished there. Supposing that this was connected to a shift in the continental plates, Jacobovici surmises that gas leaks set lose under the Nile could cause Plague #1: the river turning red. Such apparently happened in recent memory to two lakes in Cameroon. The iron oxide that caused the redness would kill the fish, but the frogs would jump out (plague #2). Then, the dirty water would lead to an increase in lice, flies, and epidemic (#3, 4, and 5). Boils and blisters (#6) also occured in connection with the Cameroon lake incidents. Hail (#7) was caused by “accretionary lapilli,” or something like hail that can form around volcanic ash; the resulting coldness would lead to swarms of locusts from the general region landing here (#8). The “palpable darkness” (#9) was an ash cloud that arrived from the Santini explosion. The climactic miracle, the death of the first-born sons, was due to the CO2 gas rising up and killing people lying close to the ground. Sociologically, this would have been the case for the royal first born sons, while others would have slept on rooftops. In confirmation of the latter, a mass grave of only males has been discovered, and we know that Achmose’s son Sapair died at age 12. The parting of the sea (which is identified as other than the traditional site from linguistic evidence) was due to the plate shift, followed by a tsunami that wiped out the Egyptians.

Evaluation

I find the documentary evidence far more important and convincing than the “scientific.” And indeed, the “fact” that the quite strong correlation of evidences (including others not mentioned in this film, such as the destruction of Jericho) is “off” by a hundred years, and therefore the Bible is written off, rather than the dating scheme being readjusted, seems like proof of the stubborn bias of the scholarly community.

Jacobovici’s claim that “according to the Bible God did not suspend, but manipulated the laws of nature” is something I have never read in my Bible. There are other claims that seem dubious as well. For example, he says the Hebrews would have been known as ‘amo (“his people”); and surprise, surprise, this term crops up on one of the documents. However, according to a brief surf I made on Bible Works, that term is only used with respect to a human’s “people,” as in Gen 25:8, 25:17, 35:29, 49:33, Num 20:24, Deut 32:50, and Ezek 18:18. Did I miss something?

This may be an example of a rhetorical trick that Jacobovici uses to prime the listener for what would count as decisive evidence as each new document is “discovered.” Another example is “if we would find the Hebrew word for God, ‘El,’ this would count as proof, blah blah.” But of course Jacobovici knows in advance what each document actually does contain, so this type of preface is a bit manipulative.

The entire narrative has a Jewish spin to it, starting with the pronounced accent of the narrator (he was raised in Montreal: where did he get that accent?), and including the Christ-denying dating scheme of “BCE.” Think about it: he had to expalin what it meant, whereas if he had said “BC” he would not have had to explain. Yet, in a one-episode documentary, he has to go out of his way to do it. As if to say, “the Bible is true, but Jesus Christ is not.”

He does get sound-bite clips of various goyim to chime in. James Hoffmeier of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School says regarding the Exodus, “Something must have happened. I can’t explain what happened, but it shaped ancient Israel’s identity, and therefore I can’t dismiss it as a fairytale.”

Note well what he is saying: he doesn’t believe what the biblical narrative says, but only that “something” must have happened. And, he doesn’t believe even that “something” because it is the word of God; he believes it because of Israel’s identity.

(Many people don’t realize it, but this is the type of attitude that many OT professors have even at “conservative” reformed seminaries. It is all about Israel, not the word of God.)

Christians have made documentaries of equal quality over the years, dealing with, say, Noah’s ark. But I don’t expect History Channel to be showing those. Only those that deny Christ need apply.

In any case, the subtle message (or perhaps not so subtle) is similar whether done by Jew or evidentialist Christian, namely this: science (or history, or whatever) shows X, therefore maybe the Bible is true with respect to X. But a “faith” that emerges from this is only going to have as much longevity as the ephemeral findings it was based on.

Instead, we need to keep driving home that neither science nor human thought itself could exist without the Christ that upholds all things by the word of his power. Without Christ, even the “pious” Jew speculating about how Israel’s story is really true is just as lost as any other God-hater.