Keith Ellison (D-MN) Compares 9/11 to the Reichstag Fire Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Keith Ellison sees the Third Reich today; do you?

HAT TIP to Maryland Conservatarian (who blogged about it) and Greg Kline at the Conservative Refuge podcast (who commented about it late in his podcast on July 17th.) I am mildly surprised that both men held back as much as they did.

Keith Ellison speaking to an organization called "Atheists for Human Rights" a couple weeks ago, per the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 8, 2007:

On comparing Sept. 11 to the burning of the Reichstag building in Nazi Germany: "It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I'm not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box -- dismiss you."

It's pretty miserable when a group of atheists - presumably people with habits of skepticism and possessed of the pedantic but valuable habit of demanding strong evidence for strong propositions - applauds this foolishness.

For those who do not fully know the history of the Reichstag fire, it's pretty simple: a Dutch communist burned the German parliament building. The Nazi blamed the Weimar-era Communist movement for burning it and used the burning as a pretext for seizing broad emergency powers in Germany, banning the Communist Party (which held 17% of the seats in the Reichstag), and arresting and executing major Comintern leaders.

The Democratic Party was not only not banned but is thriving, holding both houses of Congress (the Senate by the hair of Joe Lieberman's chinny-chin-chin) and standing poised to win the Presidency in 16 months. Keith Ellison was elected in that take-over effort; maybe he forgot that he won and how he won. George Bush stands a small chance of getting impeached as do a few of his senior advisers, and Bush's popularity is somewhere between Nixon's low-water mark and gonorrhea's high-water mark. The Supreme Court is marginally more conservative than it was 6 years ago but any comparison between the Supreme Court and German "courts" under the Third Reich is offensive in the extreme. There are a large number of troubling civil liberties and corruption issues surrounding the President but we read and blog about them all the time. The PATRIOT ACT subpoenas are very offensive to me, particularly when issues against institutions like public libraries, but no comparison exists.

The Reichstag Fire was not part of a broad Communist plot, according to the evidence. It was one crank's act, not an act of the Comintern or German KPD or similar organizations. The best analogy would be if Timothy McVeigh had registered to vote as a Democrat or Republican and the sitting President assassinated, executed, jailed or placed into concentration camps every Democratic or Republican political operative in the country. The fact that you are reading this blog testifies to the difference; a post-Reichstag Fire chief executive would do to bloggers today what Hitler did to the "loud, obnoxious bloggers" of his day.

9/11 was the plot not of theocratic Baptists or Methodists but theocratic Muslims. Ellison's silence on this point is deafening. It's great that Ellison is willing to step for the civil rights of atheists - about time in the U.S. Congress - but not at the expense of entertaining this sort of historical malpractice.

I like the design of Atheists for Human Rights' website - soft green, light blue. There's a lot on the site that I like in terms of content, including some well-developed video presentations. But I would take a Goldwater-esque conservative skeptic of theocracy over any organization that entertains this sort of foolishness.

The worst part about what Ellison said? He actually took the matter beyond the Reichstag Fire analogy to accuse, then coyly deny accusing, the Bush Administration of executing the 9/11 attacks itself. Ellison's warning about being placed in the "nut-ball box" is too cute by half, and insulting to our intelligence. Deliver your evidence, Ellison, or go home to your nut-ball box unless you can show that Bush operatives, not Muslims from Saudi Arabia, hijacked four planes.

I stepped up hard for Keith Ellison when Dennis Prager lost his mind six months ago over Ellison taking a symbolic, non-functional photo-op oath in his own office on the central Islamic holy text, the Qu'r'an - not from a fear of theocracy creep, mind you. Rather, Prager (who is Jewish) wanted Ellison (who is Muslim) to take an oath on a Christian Bible, and feared for the integrity of the republic were Ellison to hold his own holy book during that photo op pose. I don't know that I called Prager's rants "sacroturf" by proxy; I would today. But I wish I had exerted less effort defending Ellison, now that I know he is both at peace with CAIR's theocrats and, perversely, beloved of some fact-free atheists.

William Grim of FrontPage: Modern German Antisemitism Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

William Grim, a free-lance writer based in Germany, wrote an essay six months ago about modern antisemitism in Germany. I am not an avid reader of FrontPage but anything involving either antisemitism or Germany, let alone both, is likely to catch my attention. Soccer Dad included a link to fellow Baltimore blogger Laz-a-fare's discussion of this article on SD's latest "If you haven't ... you must" list.

Grim starts off with two brief anecdotes about his experiences in Germany. The first is seeing kids on a bus ooh-ing over granddad's copy of Mein Kampf and a VCR tape of Goebbels' speeches, and the second is a businessman who repeats antisemitic canards about Jews and money at a table during a discussion of an apparently tense business negotiation with a Jewish American. From these two examples, and apparently other examples that Mr. Grim did not identify in detail, Mr. Grim has concluded that German antisemitism is extremely alive and well.

These examples do not give me much confidence in his thesis. Mr. Grim's bio is not available at WND, but I will assume that he is moderately fluent in German. Holding a job in Germany does not necessarily require full fluency in German; so many Germans speak English fluently, often without much of a noticeable accent, that survival in the medium term on assignment is entirely possible without fluency. But if one assumes that Mr. Grim knows a substantial amount of spoken German beyond the two German words that appear in his essay, including the Bavarian dialect which would likely permeate much of his environment in suburban Munich, then one should examine the thesis on its merits.

School kids looking at something forbidden with morbid fascination is nothing new. When I stayed in Germany as an exchange student 22 years ago, I had the occasion to visit a German swimming pool. Those who are familiar with German sunbathing habits will recall that nude and especially semi-nude sunbathing by German women is extremely common and is regarded generally with a colossal "yawn" by German teenage males. Why? It is not forbidden, so it is uninteresting or at least not interesting in any unusual way. I was not exactly stopped cold by the sight of 75-100 half-naked or naked young German women swimming in the local swimming pool, sunbathing, reading novels, arguing with their boyfriends, but it surprised the heck out of me at age 16; here in the States that is almost unheard of and certainly was in 1985. But Nazi propaganda is not only taboo in Germany but, with exceptions for a few things like postage stamps, strictly contraband and illegal to possess privately. Mein Kampf, on the other hand, is required reading in some high school history classes here (was in mine; my copy of Mein Kampf from 10th grade European history class probably could not have accompanied me to Germany.)

I have personally heard fellow attorneys, including colleagues in firms where I have worked with both Jewish and non-Jewish attorneys in Pikesville, repeat the same antisemitic canards about Jews and money. (How businessmen in any field ever came to regard a focus on money as somehow derogatory is beyond me - what, should businessmen focus instead on the secretary's figure or the weather? - but I digress.) Antisemitism is alive and well in Pikesville. And Parkville. And Reisterstown. Apparently also in at least one suburb of Munich.

What Mr. Grim fails to mention (leading me to suspect linguistic deficiency) is any mention of the reunification of Germany: the biggest event to occur in Germany in 40 years. The absence of any mention of this fact, any mention of the 40 years of Soviet domination of East German and the Berlin Wall, any mention of the failure of Communist Germany to come to any meaningful terms whatsoever with its own Nazi past in the same manner as did West Germany - these are glaring omissions. Much of the antisemitic violence, neo-Nazi marches, etc. has been in the economically devastated post-Communist and non-deNazified East. This fact weakens (although does not destroy) Mr. Grim's arguments about Germany as a whole; the part that exhibits the worst antisemitism is the part that has been least bathed in Western liberal values.

Where I think Mr. Grim is strongest is in his discussion of the centrality of antisemitism to German culture. To coin a phrase, if you have not read On the Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther (full-text or relevant excerpts), you must. Among the lesser offenses that Hitler committed was plagiarism of Luther's advice to seize Jewish-owned assets, burn synagogues, silence rabbis and bar Jews from travel. The Nazi Party really did the memory of Luther a disservice by failing to name Kristallnacht after Luther, though they did have the gratitude to execute Kristallnacht on his 455th birthday. The language that this former friar used to describe Jews in Germany and elsewhere was horrific; he remains in his horror a core figure, perhaps the core figure, of classical German culture, the equivalent of George Washington, King James and William Shakespeare combined for anglophone U.S. citizens. His German translation of the Bible remains standard for Protestant Germans and for some German Catholics.

I do not know that Grim's argument about the Free Democratic Party (small "kingmaker" liberal/libertarian party) using antisemitism as a campaign tool was accurate. For one thing, not many Muslims in Germany are actually voting citizens under Germany's blood-not-soil citizenship laws, though that is beginning to change. For another, I don't know from the reports I read that the FDP was actually engaged institutionally in the antisemitism attributed to one of its disgraced officials. Sort of like the Republican Party not being categorically racist everywhere because Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond's segregationist past once. On the other hand, neo-Nazi parties with varying-sized fig leaves are a real issue in Germany and would have been a good topic for Grim to cover.

It should be noted that while antisemitism is a core element of Germany's cultural development, the same can be said for most of Germany's neighbors. The rabid glee with which the many of the non-German conquered peoples of Eastern Europe frequently participated in the Final Solution - in Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia and elsewhere - should lead one to recognize European antisemitism as a European and Christian (Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox) problem which history's ultimate antisemitic state exploited across Europe to unspeakable murderous effect. Luther was not the only antisemitic Christian figure; the early Church figure St. John Chrysostom was murderously foul in his language against the Jewish communities of his day.

The arguments about Mr. Grim's colloquies re: historical revisionism with German acquaintances should be viewed as part of a general propensity for Germans to argue. Being blunt is considered a German virtue, as is stubbornness or steadfastness (the former when someone you don't like is doing it, the latter when you do it.) Germans, like their French neighbors, love a good argument and are not pushovers. They will try out arguments to gauge a person, to test his intelligence, to figure out what his true beliefs are. This business of never discussion sex, politics or religion doesn't hold over their for politics or sex (for religion, it definitely does.) It is possible that some of Mr. Grim's interlocutors were baiting him rather than spreading the Fourth Reich. On the other hand, claiming that "the Jews" [sic] were responsible for the Holocaust is simply beyond belief.

As for German knowledge of the Final Solution at the time, both the New York Times and the martyred anti-Nazi bloggers of their day, the Scholl siblings - mere broke students at the University of Munich down the street from Mr. Grim's current home - knew of the Final Solution. So yes, the claims that most Germans did not support Hitler or that the Final Solution was not known are lies. If you see the tapes of Germans interviewed post-war about what they knew and when they knew it, the face of deception is remarkably easy to see, even for someone not particularly gifted at reading people. The Scholl siblings in their leaflets regarding the concentration and death camps exclaimed "We are the White Rose - We are your guilty conscience!!!", but the guilty conscience is plainly visible in the old tapes I have seen of the late forties and early fifties.

As for today, Mr. Grim may be correct in his conclusion but I don't know that he has made his case. Munich is the most conservative big city in Germany by most measures; Bavaria has its own special conservative party because the regular conservative party for the rest of Germany is not conservative enough. Sort of like Texas, in a way, but I digress. Mr. Grim did not mention whether his definition of German extends beyond the infamously conservative suburbs of Munich, whether he has spent time in Berlin, in the left-leaning Ruhr-Gebiet reminiscent of industrial New Jersey, in liberal Hamburg. I don't know whether he has met the liberal and radical youth who make Cindy Sheehan look like a Chamber of Commerce parliamentarian, who cite Sophie Scholl as the most important woman of the entire 20th century in poll after poll, the Love Parade that outdoes San Francisco and Greenwich Village combined. Hitler got started in Munich and Grim lives there, but there's another 90 million people in the country to get to know. My verdict: fairly well-presented but not proven.

Thank you both to Soccer Dad (especially for an embarrassing error in my citing the wrong publication initially on the first draft) and to Laz-a-fare. I had cited initially to WorldNetDaily instead of FrontPageMag; somehow I got that signal crossed late in the evening.

Reuters: Sex Tax Imposed On Prostitutes In Cologne Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

From Reuters, December 15, 2006:

Cologne will earn a record 828,000 euros ($1.1 million) in "sex tax" revenues this year, a figure well above expectations when the levy was first introduced by Germany's fourth largest city in 2004.

...

Cologne, which introduced the tax two years ago to raise money after national reforms left the city woefully short of cash, has been charging prostitutes a flat 150-euro per month tax since 2004, replacing a voluntary reporting scheme.

...

Prostitution is legal in Germany and sex workers are required to pay tax on their income and a value-added tax.

Here's how it breaks down.

The prostitutes must pay a value added tax based on the increase of value of their goods and services that provide. Arguably this is a more rational form of tax than the typical state sales tax in the U.S., in that a business cannot recover the costs of inputs into manufacturing here. Example: you make steel, you need iron and coal. If you have to pay sales tax on the iron and coal, you don't get to subtract that tax from future taxes that you will have to collect and remit on your steel. (If you buy and resell iron or coal, you can usually get that initial purchase exempted from sales tax, but not if the purchase is for industrial inputs rather than for resale.) So presumably, a prostitute could recover the value added tax that she paid for, say, condoms, and subtract that from what she would actually have to remit to the German tax authorities for the value added for the sexual services provided.

Prostitutes must and do pay income taxes in Germany, same as any other independent contractor.

Now these businesswomen are being subjected to a about a $2400/year licensing fee for tricking in Cologne, a large, liberal and heavily Roman Catholic city on the Rhine. It is the home of the annual Fasching (Mardi Gras) festival; sort of like New Orleans in a lot of ways.

Here's my question. Does the imposition of a monthly levy, rather than a surcharge to the value added tax, distort the market for prostitution in inefficient ways? Does it discourage the marginal producer, allowing the more famous madams in the spirit of Lulu White to reap the benefit of reduced competition and charge oligopolistic rent? What about non-compliance and evasion; is the infamously picky German customer equally picky about paperwork in this area, and will heavy-handed German bureaucrats inflict their obsessive-compulsive Kantian ethic of the categorical imperative to prosecute the non-compliant? How would Borat's sister - the 4th most famous prostitute in Kazakhstan - adjust to these market conditions?

I think we need to get the Maryland liberal bloggers who are public policy grad students - Isaac? Matthew? - to weigh in on these policy matters - how well would Borat's sister be likely to produce in this market?