The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution
By Barry Friedman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 614 pp., $35)
 

Ajami
Kino International

The Last New Yorker
Brink Films

North Face
Music Box Films

Europe is a mess. Greece is the country on the continent closest to utter wreck. (And, if not for statements yesterday by Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, there would literally be no hope for a life raft anywhere near Athens soon. This morning's FT smothers even those wan hopes.) Spain, Portugal and Ireland are not far behind ... or under.

Each of these countries has views on how Israel deals with the Palestinians, and they don't like it at all. Neither do the past and present "foreign ministers"—so to speak, but not exactly—of the European Union. The previous one also a past foreign minister of Spain, Javier Solana, whose main claim to distinction is that he is the grand nephew of Salvador de Madariaga, historian, politician and chief of the ill-fated League of Nations mission for world disarmament. It's a shame, neither Hitler nor Mussolini (nor Tojo) wanted to cooperate. So Solana's blood runs thick with hope and thin with achievement. He did spend his six years as a physics graduate student at the University of Virginia, with a good deal of his energy there siphoned off to march against the Vietnam war. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ha. Ha.

Solana's successor, the Baroness Ashton of Upholland (neé Catherine Ashton), was Labor leader of the House of Lords, testimony to the diminishing stature of the peers. In the eighties, she was treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); this was long after nutty but brilliant Bertie Russell was dead but in the midst of the deepest financial machinations of the Soviet Union in the atomic or anti-American atomic effort. Of course, she didn't know about that—although it is estimated that nearly 40 percent of the campaign's money came from Moscow. And, if she didn't know that, she is capable of knowing nothing.

Not long ago, Andrew Sullivan had ultra-hawkish views on Israel and the Middle East. The problem as he saw it, was very simple: The Muslim world was anti-Semitic and wanted to kill all the Jews. Naive Western governments pushed innocent Israelis to make peace, when the only answer was force. Here are some excerpts from an August 2001 column he wrote:

The White Ribbon
Sony Pictures Classics
Creation
Newmarket Films
 

And Showtime is about to present, in a ten-part miniseries, Oliver Stone’s “Secret History of America.” Don’t you wonder why, if Stone (and Michael Moore, for that matter) is right about the evils of capitalism, an enormous capitalist corporation has produced--and will now show--what is, almost by self-advertisement, a nutcase reconstruction of the American past, focusing on its enemies, who he seems to think have been traduced by historians?

The lines most cited in Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech were those about evil: “Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism--it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

... even when it comes to listening to himself talk. Here's part of Dobbs' entertaining rant against the Washington Post's Ezra Klein:

The Sun

Lorber Films

The Wedding Song

Strand Releasing

Act of God

Zeitgeist Films

The pace is adagio, the temper contemplative, so it is all the more surprising that the subject is Emperor Hirohito of Japan during the brief period between Hiroshima and surrender. The Sun was made by the Russian director Alexander Sokurov, who is noted, among other reasons, for the slow tempo of his films. Except for his feature-length careering through the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (Russian Ark), he has often chosen to meditate on shots, making that meditation part of the picture’s progress. The Sun is quite different. This film never consciously pauses in the former Sokurov style, yet the atmosphere in which the action occurs seems contrapuntally thoughtful.

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity

Museum of Modern Art

Kandinsky

Guggenheim Museum

This is an autumn of anniversaries in two of New York’s most important museums. At the Museum of Modern Art, “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity,” the exhibition saluting the ninetieth anniversary of the opening of the legendary German school of art, architecture, and design, also marks the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Modern. Up north and to the east, the Guggenheim is capping the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s still astonishingly audacious building, now freshly restored, with a stirring retrospective of paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, whose work was at the core of the Guggenheim’s mission when it opened its doors as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting on East 54th Street seventy years ago. The year 1939 was also highly significant in the history of the Museum of Modern Art: it was in November of that year, mere months after mounting a pioneering Bauhaus show late in 1938, that the museum unveiled its very own new building on West 53rd Street, a structure whose spare lines were closely related to the vision of a new architecture that had been promoted at the Bauhaus.

I’m not a big fan of political speeches in general, but I thought President Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech today was unusually good. (If I were a speech-y kind of writer, like Rick Hertzberg, I’d have used a better adjective in the last sentence than “good.”)

A new Washington Post poll of Republicans records the remarkable extent to which today's rank-and-file GOPers can't identify much in the way of any clear-cut Republican leaders.

In our collective memory of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht occupies a central but ambiguous place. If you look simply at the statistics, there is little reason why the events of November 9-10, 1938, should loom so large. According to the Nazis themselves, 91 Jews were killed in the nationwide pogrom that became known as the “Night of Broken Glass.” That figure, as Alan Steinweis points out in his illuminating new study Kristallnacht 1938, “included neither Jewish suicides nor the significantly larger number of Jews who were arrested in connection with the pogrom and would die in concentration camps in the following weeks and months.” But even when we remember that 30,000 Jewish men were arrested--about 10 percent of the entire Jewish population of Germany--Kristallnacht pales in comparison with later Nazi crimes. Why do Jews--and, as Steinweis points out, Germans--continue to remember Kristallnacht as a uniquely terrible event, even though the broken glass was followed, within a few years, by gas chambers and death camps?

German philosopher Martin Heidegger gets a lot of bad press. And for good reason. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis, he did and said and wrote some nasty things before and after serving as the rector of Freiburg University from 1933-1934, and though he eventually distanced himself from his earlier enthusiasm for Hitler, he seems never to have ceased believing that there was an "inner truth and greatness" (those are Heidegger's own words, spoken in a lecture from 1935) to the National Socialist movement. That sounds bad, and it is.

Michael Crowley expresses shock over a new Pew poll finding that 61% of Americans would favor military action to prevent Iranian development of nuclear weapons if other options fail. 

I'm less shocked.  In the run-up to the Iraq War, the belief that Saddam Hussein had developed or was rapidly developing WMD, including nuclear weapons, was a pretty important factor in the robust majorities that favored military action.  And the discovery that he actually didn't have WMD helped turn Americans against the war once his regime had been toppled.  Since evidence of an Iranian nuclear program is far better established, it's not that shocking that Americans would react now as they did in 2002 and 2003. 

But the other big thing that obviously turned Americans against the Iraq War was the immense cost and difficulty of consolidating the initial military victory.  In the Pew poll, respondents are asked if they favor "military action."  It's entirely possible that many of those answering "yes" are thinking in terms of some "surgical strike" that will destroy the nuclear program without a wider war.  Should negotiations and/or sanctions fail and we are actually contemplating military conflict with Iran, it will more than likely become apparent that eliminating Iran's nuclear program will require an actual ground war aimed at regime change.  It's at that point when the lessons of Iraq will truly begin to sink in, and support for "military action" will go down.  But we haven't had that debate yet.

Maurice Bowra: A Life

By Leslie Mitchell

(Oxford University Press, 385 pp., $50)

As warden of Wadham College in Oxford, president of the British Academy, the author of well-known books on ancient Greek literature, and a conversationalist of legendary brilliance, Maurice Bowra seemed, in the middle of the last century, the very embodiment of Oxford life. Enjoying a huge international reputation as a scholar, a wit, and an administrator, he was duly elected into prestigious academies and awarded honorary degrees in both Europe and America. George VI knighted him in 1951. Yet few who were not alive at that time know his name today. For those of the younger generation who are aware of him at all, his career conjures up the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited, and it has been said that he was the model for Mr. Samgrass. A few of his bright remarks linger on among the chattering classes: "Buggers can’t be choosers," or "Where there’s death there’s hope," or "He is a man who has no public virtues and no private parts." But for the most part Bowra has sunk into oblivion, to emerge from time to time in an obituary or in the voluminous correspondence of Isaiah Berlin.

Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery

By Steve Nicholls

(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Edited by Bill McKibben

(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)

Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant

By Jonathan Peter Spiro

(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)

A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir

By Donald Worster

(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)

A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature

By James William Gibson

(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)

Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet

By Edward Humes

(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)

I.

In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.

I don't know whether Roger Cohen of The New York Times is doing penance over Yom Kippur or not, and I certainly don't care. But, if he does, he has a lot for which to atone, as I have written here several times. Basically, he has been an apologist for the Ahmadinejad tyranny that is openly intent on obliterating Israel. Not that he especially likes the swarthy waif of a man with the open collar; Dr. A'jad is too crude for an old Balliol man like Cohen. Still, he does make excuses for the regime and is eager to look away the sinister interpretations of its behavior. You know, like Pat Buchanan about Hitler.

As it happens, however, I agree with one point in his International Herald Tribune column today. "Sanctions won't work." And he quotes Ray Takeya, a realistic fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as saying that "sanctions are the feel-good option."

Well, actually, since I also know they won't work, they don't make me feel good at all.

In 1949, a year after the state of Israel was created, its Chief Rabbi visited President Harry Truman in Washington. Isaac Halevi Herzog told Truman that his role in helping the Jewish state achieve its independence was not just a matter of politics and diplomacy; it was a divine mission. "When the President was still in his mother’s womb," Herzog said, "the Lord had bestowed upon him the mission of helping his Chosen People at a time of despair and aiding in the fulfillment of His promise of Return to the Holy Land." Truman was a 20th-century version of King Cyrus of Persia, who had permitted the Israelites to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C.E.: "he had been given the task once fulfilled by the mighty king of Persia, and that he too, like Cyrus, would occupy a place of honor in the annals of the Jewish people."

Pat Buchanan's most recent column has landed him in a whole mess of trouble.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Frankfurt School in recent American thought. Philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists like Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Max Horkheimer—to name just the best-known members of the group—helped to develop a subtle and powerful way of thinking about the problems of modern society. Critical Theory, as it is usually capitalized, adapted the revolutionary impulse of Marxism to 20th century conditions, in which mass culture and totalitarianism seemed to shut off any real possibility of social transformation. Especially appealing to academics is the way Critical Theory makes the analysis of culture feel like a revolutionary act in and of itself. Reading Adorno on modern music, or Benjamin on literature, it is momentarily possible to believe that criticism is a weapon of liberation, rather than simply a hermetic exercise for intellectuals.

Jeffrey Herf is one of the pre-eminent intellectual historians of totalitarianism. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic. See, for example, his last few contributions here, here, and here. You can also find a TNR review of one of his books, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, here.

In the current issue of The American Interest, Herf makes a highly convincing argument that radical Islam today is in fact a totalitarian movement with totalitarian ideology and totalitarian methods. No, it is not Nazism or Communism. And, though its ideas are rather more primitive (my word, not his) than either of the reigning doctrines of the twentieth century and though its weapons are also more primitive, it partakes of contemporary methods--and, increasingly, technological methods--in the mobilization of masses of people.

Please read this essay and read it carefully...

"I mean, in a way, Obama's standing above the country, above--above the world, he's sort of God." These drug-addicted words come from Evan Thomas, a longtime editor at Newsweek. He uttered them on Chris Matthews's MSNBC show. Such words would wreak havoc on any person's ego, even Barack Obama's. It also would enrage his enemies.

After all, the president has told us that he is a mere student of history, and that he is.

From “Album of My Germany”

While it's not explicitly pegged to the Beijing Olympics, the Holocaust Museum's special exhibition on the 1936 Nazi Olympics--running until August 24--is timed evocatively enough that's impossible to avoid comparison. From the online exhibition: