The kiss: "Stalin was feeling extremely gay"

Here at UR we absolutely adore simplicity. The truth is not always simple, it's true. But the lies are always complicated. And there are so many lies! Even in this historic golden age of bullshit, is it possible to oversimplify? To steal a line from Hunter Thompson, it's possible for a Hell's Angel to catch the clap, too. He doesn't waste much time worrying about it.

But America has so many problems! No, she doesn't. America has only one problem: America is a communist country.

And has been since before you were born. And probably before your mother was born. Earl Browder was right: communism is as American as apple pie. Russia didn't infect America. America infected Russia. After which the germ went back and forth a few times - as we'll see. It eventually died out in Russia, which is nice because that just leaves us. How simple!

Alas, this beautiful, simple, horrifying reality is simply too difficult for most Americans to grasp, let alone do something about. If you tell an American of any political persuasion that his is a communist country, the poor fscker will simply laugh in your face. Cancer, that's so funny. Of course I couldn't possibly have cancer. Yes, there's this thing - it's just a growth...

If you love your American, don't let him get away with it! Don't let him wallow in his denial! Hit him straight in the teeth with a fast overhand right. "Of course America is a communist country," you can say. "You just have to translate. For workers and peasants, read blacks and Hispanics."

Now this is a zinger, but it's just a zinger. One little zinger never cured anyone. It gives you something to work with, that's all. Your interlocutor, if there's any hope for him, may be a sharp fellow himself. He might punch back with a zinger of his own. For example, he could say: "oh, yeah? So tell me, smart guy, on what day did America become a communist country?"

Whereupon some might be stumped. But you, dear UR reader, have an answer. America became a communist country on December 20, 1933. Was there transmission of saliva? Oh, yes, there was transmission of saliva.

I say "at a bare minimum," because the published edition (1972) of William Bullitt's letters to FDR was edited by Bullitt's brother, Orville, with assistance from George Kennan. Orville's elisions (which I've marked OB) are frequent, especially at the juicy moments. Do they conceal even more... "intimate..." revelations? It's clear that nothing really juicy could remain, but even what's left is... remarkable. I've of course made my own cuts, which conceal nothing.

Personal and Confidential
On board steamship Washington - January 1, 1934

My dear Mr. President:

In addition to the report of my trip to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which I shall submit to the Secretary of State, I should like to set down for your own eye some of the more intimate episodes.
[...]
Berlin
[...]
I avoided seeing any officials of the German Government, but "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Hitler's intimate assistant, called on me and talked in his customary irrational manner, saying among other things, "Of course you and I know that the Jews make all wars and are the sole beneficiaries of all wars." I disagreed. The most fantastic thing which has happened in Germany lately is the christening of the new military academy "Ernst Roehm Kadetten Erziehungs Anstalt." In view of the revelations about Roehm, the English equivalent would be the renaming of Sandhurst "Oscar Wilde Institute."

U.S.S.R.
[...]
On Wednesday, December 13, at noon, I presented my credentials to Kalinin at the Kremlin.
[OB ...]
I had a delightful conversation with Kalinin after presenting my credentials. I had never met him and I had thought from all that I had read that he was a simple-minded old peasant, but he is far from simple-minded. He has a delightful shrewdness and sense of humor.

He asked me to say to you that he was following with the closest attention everything you were doing in America, and that he and everyone else in Russia considered you completely out of the class of the leaders of capitalist states; that it was clear to them all that you really cared about the welfare of the laboring men and the farmers and that you were not engaged in protecting the vested rights of property.
[...] [OB ...]
Even the party press of the Communist Party which hitherto has been uniformly hostile to Ambassadors unearthed various remarks of Lenin about me from his "Testament" and various speeches. Apparently he really liked me and expressed his liking many times. In view of Lenin's present position in Russia, which is not unlike that of Jesus Christ in the Christian church, this is a bit like having the personal endorsement of the Master recorded in St. Mark. Divilkovsky, for example, said to me, "You cannot understand it, but there is not one of us who would not gladly have his throat cut to have had such things said about him by Lenin."
[OB ...]
There was one [OB building site] which was not offered to us, but which we offered to ourselves: a bluff covered with beautiful woods containing a lake overlooking the river and the whole city of Moscow in the center of the great city park. It is a situation which suggests Monticello, and I can conceive of nothing more perfect for an American Embassy than a reproduction of Monticello in that setting with houses for the entire staff of both consulate and embassy arranged along the sides of the property. We were not modest in our demands, but asked for the entire bluff containing some fifteen acres of property. The Moscow Soviet continued to offer us other building sites, any one of which would be adequate but none of which compared in interest or beauty to this site.
[OB ...]
That night Litvinov, with whom I had previously had several meals in private, gave me a formal dinner to which nearly all the members of the Government were present. It was a superb banquet with food and wines of a quality that no one in America would dare to serve nowadays, and many toasts were drunk to you and to me and to the United States.
[OB ...] [...] [OB ...]
The men at the head of the Soviet Government today are really intelligent, sophisticated, vigorous human beings and they cannot be persuaded to waste their time with the ordinary conventional diplomatist. On the other hand, they are extremely eager to have contact with anyone who has first-rate intelligence and dimension as a human being. They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan who went in with me.
[...]
Litvinov said to me as I looked over the room, "This is the whole 'gang' that really runs things -- the inside directorate." I was introduced to Stalin after I had shaken hands with Kalinin and Molotov, but made no effort to continue conversing with him before dinner, considering it best to let him come to me in his own good time. He drifted to one side of the room and I to the other.
[OB ...]
The first impression Stalin made was surprising. I had thought from his pictures that he was a very big man with a face of iron and a booming voice. On the contrary, he is rather short, the top of his head coming to about my eye level, and of ordinary physique, wiry rather than powerful. He was dressed in a common soldier's uniform, with boots, black trousers and a gray-green coat without marks or decorations of any kind. Before dinner he smoked a long underslung pipe, which he continued to hold in his left hand throughout dinner, putting it on the table only when he needed to use both knife and fork. His eyes are curious, giving the impression of a dark brown filmed with dark blue. They are small, intensely shrewd and continuously smiling. The impression of shrewd humor is increased by the fact that the "crow's feet" which run out from them do not branch up and down in the usual manner, but all curve upward in long crescents. His hand is rather small with short fingers, wiry rather than strong. His mustache covers his mouth so that it is difficult to see just what it is like, but when he laughs his lips curl in a curiously canine manner. The only other notable feature about his face is the length of his nostrils. They are unusually long. With Lenin one felt at once that one was in the presence of a great man; with Stalin I felt I was talking to a wiry Gipsy with roots and emotions beyond my experience.
[...]
As soon as we had settled ourselves at the table Stalin rose, lifted his glass and proposed a toast "To President Roosevelt, who in spite of the mute growls of the Fishes dared to recognize the Soviet Union." Everyone drained his glass to the bottom and sat down again with considerable laughter at Stalin's reference to Ham Fish. I then proposed the health of President Kalinin and thereupon a series of toasts was begun which continued throughout the entire meal. The next one was Molotov's to me in which he proposed "The health of one who comes to us as a new Ambassador but an old friend."

After the tenth toast or so, I began to consider it discreet to take merely a sip rather than drain my glass, but Litvinov, who was next to me, told me that the gentleman who proposed the toast would be insulted if I did not drink to the bottom and that I must do so, whereupon I continued to drink bottoms-up. There were perhaps fifty toasts and I have never before so thanked God for the possession of a head impervious to any quantity of liquor. Everyone at the table got into the mood of a college fraternity banquet, and discretion was conspicuous by its absence. Litvinov whispered to me: "You told me that you wouldn't stay here if you were going to be treated as an outsider. Do you realize that everyone at this table has completely forgotten that anyone is here except the members of the inner gang?" That certainly seemed to be the case.

Stalin proposed my health several times and I did his once and we had considerable conversation across Madame Voroshilov. Toward the end of the dinner Stalin rose and proposed the health and continued prosperity of the American Army, the American Navy and the whole United States. In return, I proposed a toast "To the memory of Lenin and the continued success of the Soviet Union."
[...]
After dinner we adjourned to an adjoining drawing room and Stalin seized Piatakov by the arm, marched him to the piano, sat him down on the stool and ordered him to play. Piatakov launched into a number of wild Russian dances, Stalin standing behind him and from time to time putting his arm around Piatakov's neck and squeezing him affectionately.

When Piatakov had finished playing, Stalin came over and sat down beside me and we talked for some time. He said he hoped that I would feel myself completely at home in the Soviet Union, that he and all the members of the Government had felt that I was a friend for so long, that they had such admiration for yourself and the things you were trying to do in America that they felt we could cooperate with the greatest intimacy. I told him that you sincerely hoped that war might be prevented in the Far East and that the Soviet Government might work out its great experiment in peace. He said, "I know that that is what President Roosevelt wants and I hope you will tell him from me that he is today, in spite of being the leader of a capitalist nation, one of the most popular men in the Soviet Union."

Stalin was feeling extremely gay, as we all were, but he gave me the impression he was speaking honestly. He had by this time made the impression on me of a man not only of great shrewdness and inflexible will (Lenin, you know, said of him that he had enough will to equip the entire Communist Party), but also possessed of the quality of intuition in extraordinary measure. Moreover, like every real statesman I have known, he had the quality of being able to treat the most serious things with a joke and a twinkle in his eye. Lenin had that same quality. You have it.

As I got up to leave, Stalin said to me, "I want you to understand that if you want to see me at any time, day or night, you have only to let me know and I will see you at once." This was a most extraordinary gesture on his part as he has hitherto refused to see any Ambassador at any time.
[OB ...]
After I had said good-bye to Voroshilov and the others, Stalin went to the door of the apartment with me and said, "Is there anything at all in the Soviet Union that you want? Anything?" There was one thing I wanted, but I hesitated to ask for it, as Litvinov had told me that the Moscow Soviet had definitely decided it would not give us the building site in the center of the town's park, and that a map would be submitted to me showing that the new canal would run through the center of the property. Therefore I first said, "Everyone has been more than kind to me and I should hesitate to ask for anything in addition, except that the intimate relations we have begun tonight may continue."

Whereupon, Stalin said, "But I should really like to show you that we appreciate not only what the President has done, but also what you yourself have done. Please understand that we should have received politely any Ambassador that might have been sent us by the Government of the United States, but we should have received no one but yourself in this particular way." He seemed moved by a genuinely friendly emotion.

Therefore, I thanked him and said that there was one thing I should really like to have, that I could see in my mind's eye an American Embassy modeled on the home of the author of the Declaration of Independence on that particular bluff overlooking the Moscow River, and that I should be glad to know that that property might be given to the American Government as a site for an Embassy. Stalin replied, "You shall have it."

Thereupon, I held out my hand to shake hands with Stalin and, to my amazement, Stalin took my head in his two hands and gave me a large kiss! I swallowed my astonishment and, when he turned up his face for a return kiss, I delivered it.

This evening with Stalin and the inner circle of the Soviet Government seems almost unbelievable in retrospect, and I should have difficulty in convincing myself that it was a reality if I had not on returning to my hotel awakened my secretary and dictated the salient facts to him. Moreover, the next day shortly before my departure Litvinov told me that the property in the park should be ours if we wished to have it.

Alas, his astonishment wasn't the only thing Bullitt swallowed. When he kissed Stalin back, so did his boss. So did America. We've gotten over our Stalin crush - but not our FDR crush. What's one more degree of separation? To a virus? The virus is in us yet, albeit in its late, bureaucratic form.

No, America in 2012 is not crackling with revolutionary fire. Anything but! Neither was Russia in 1988, despite its rulers' best efforts. It's hard to start a fire when there's nothing left to burn. It's equally unfortunate that Monticello in Moscow was never built - it would have been the finest possible homage to America's founding Jacobin. Had enough revolution yet, America? Whose streets? Our streets!

But in some ways the worst part of the story is that the Bullitt letter records the highest level of "intimacy" ever achieved between US and USSR, and nor was it our choice to pull away. Au contraire! From day one, the Soviet tactic with their American patrons was like that of an alpha female with her hareem of beta males - constantly flirting but never actually putting out. The "inner gang" was quite conscious of their sovereignty and their need to retain it. They saw quite clearly that if they went down the Monticello in Moscow path, they would just be America's wife. America has never had any shortage of wives.

Naturally, each such rejection only stimulated the "wise men" of American diplomacy (all of whom spent the rest of the '30s pleading with Stalin to let them lick his balls again) to further efforts of contemptible affection. Only after WWII did it finally dawn on our best and brightest that no such marriage could ever never happen.

To our official historians, this breakup is called the "Cold War," and all those episodes of American progressivism serenading Russian progressivism with boombox held high are swept under the carpet as "naivete." (Or sometimes, with amusing consistency, as "realism.") Dear professors, the terms you're looking for are "Anglo-Soviet split" and "freshman homo crush."

Bullitt himself finally soured on Stalin's hawtness and, as a result, was pushed out of the New Deal's inner circle in the early '40s (but not before setting up World War II by, at least if we can believe Joe Kennedy, orchestrating the British guarantee to Poland). There was no shortage of Achesons, Hisses and Hopkinses to replace him. I have of course elided all the actual substantive details of Bullitt's intimate diplomacy with Stalin, which largely center around the New Dealers' desire to provide political, economic and military protection for their "Soviet experiment." This twisted, dysfunctional oyabun-kobun relationship did not begin in 1933, nor did it end in 1945. But I digress.

In any case, while no reminder should be necessary, I thought I'd pair the Bullitt letter with a story, probably but not certainly true, from the recently published memoir of one Fyodor Mochulsky, Gulag Boss - the title says it all:

The new boss was a lean man, somewhere around thirty years old, with combed-back light hair and energetic facial features. He had a long, skinny nose with a protuberance, and his thin lips were usually pursed together tightly. His movements were sharp, and his judgments were categorical.

His dugout was right next to mine, so there was nowhere to go to get away from him. And as soon as he began to drink, he would come to me, sit for hours and recount the details of how he had been sentenced to the death penalty. It almost drove me mad, but there was no way to get out of it. All around us, there was only the dark night and the tundra.

I would be glad to forget his stories, but you can't order away memories. Here are some of the things he told me.

To the question of how he had gotten himself into such unusual work, he told me that when he had been demobilized from the army, he had been given a security job at Butyrka prison in Moscow. One day, the prison's private vehicle arrived at the prison's courtyard with a contingent of arrested men. As it happened, the gates to the inner courtyard would not unlock, so they opened the doors of the vehicle in the outer courtyard and let the prisoners out. One of the prisoners noticed that the outer gates to the prison were still hanging open, and he took off running. As the security guard on duty, my unit boss at that moment had been standing next to the gates. When he saw what was happening, he did not hesitate. He drew out the sword that hung at his side and stabbed, right into the spine, the prisoner who was trying to escape.

The Butyrka guards who had carelessly left open the courtyard gates were punished. The security officer (our current unit boss) had prevented the prisoner's escape. For his decisive action, he was offered a transfer to a new job. At this new job, he would be carrying out "special commissions," that is, he would work as an executioner, shooting the enemies of Soviet power. He agreed to the transfer, and after some special training, he was sent with his new specialty to the ancient Russian city of Uglich.

For days at a time, he said, from mission to mission, he sat around doing nothing. He rested. Then, when the prison had accumulated a large number of condemned prisoners, the authorities would set an execution date. A specially trusted group from the security department of Uglich's prison was then sent out to carefully select a place in the woods and dig a pit. The pit was guarded until the executions took place. Starting at night and working until the morning, the prison officials would transport the condemned prisoners in a closed truck to this pit. Besides the security men and the person who would ensure that the executions took place, he said, there was always a doctor on hand. It was his duty to certify the death and write up the necessary documents.

One at a time, they led a condemned prisoner from the truck to the edge of the pit, and forced him to get on his knees with his face toward the pit. The executioner than shot him in the back of the head, and the dead man fell in. From the blow to the head, the executioner told me, the body would turn over facing up, and straighten up on the bottom of the pit. The doctor then went down into the pit and certified that the body was dead. Then they went to retrieve the next condemned prisoner.

He told me that from time to time, there was a prisoner who would not do what he was told and go submissively to the edge of the pit. In these cases, the security guys had to help out, and the job for the executioner would be more complicated.

When the mission was finished and the pit was filled, they covered it with soil and tried to make it look unobtrusive. After every mission, he told me, he got drunk and tried not to think about what he had done until the next time they called. For a long time, though, he was convinced that his job was important and honorable, because he was destroying the enemies of Soviet power. He believed that not everyone could be as trusted as he was with such a job.

But then one day, he had to shoot a fourteen-year-old girl. The executioner was told right before he had to kill her that not only was she the daughter of an "enemy of the people," she was also a "German spy." Suddenly and involuntarily, questions sprang to his mind. He was to kill a fourteen-year-old girl in an ancient Russian small town far from the front, in a place that had no classified establishments? Where had this adolescent girl done her spying, and for whom?

When they brought her to the execution place, she held herself up firmly and was silent. But when they led her to the pit, she spoke up. She said that she did not understand why they were depriving her of her life. "Even Stalin said that children do not answer for their parents, so why me?" she asked. She was unaware, he added, that she was also accused of being a "German spy."

In the words of my unit boss, after this execution he drank himself into a stupor so profound that he felt nothing. Soon he was sent to a hospital for crazy people.

National guilt - it's not just for Germans anymore.

Race relations in early New York

The only way to visit 19th-century America is with a European traveler. There have always been Americans who wrote of America - sometimes their spelling and grammar is quite strong. Toward the end of the century, some are almost trustworthy. Even the staples of the high-school reader - Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and so on - are not at all to be sneered at. And then, of course, there are the Confederates. I don't think it's possible to call a man informed if he's never read a book by a Confederate.

But broadly speaking, receiving America from the American pen is like receiving, say, Turkey, from the Turkish pen. The Turkish Turkey is an amazing country which ought to exist. For the real Turkey, one is better off with Paul Theroux. I'm becoming increasingly respectful of these national fantasies and could easily be convinced that, in some ways, they are more important than reality. Indeed, since the world has become America, we can only receive America from the Americans. Everyone educated in 2012 is educated as an American. There is certainly no Europe to shed external light on our epistemic struggles. Hence the daily grapple with narrative's morass. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone!

But that is now and this was then. Though Mrs. Trollope has her fans, I don't think it's disputed by any serious reactionary that the our two best sources in the early 19th century are Captain Hall and Captain Hamilton (Navy and Army respectively). So far as I know, neither was Jane Austen's boyfriend, but both would have fit perfectly in her drawing-room. If the millions of ordinary Americans who lost their hearts to Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility knew what that society made of theirs (never mind what it would have made of ours), faint ripples of doubt might shimmer lightly across their television pictures.

As now, in the early 19th century thinking men came in two schools of thought: enlightened racists and ignorant communists. Did I say that? I meant, of course, ignorant racists and enlightened progressives. This is Dr. King's day, so I feel it would be inappropriate to excerpt Captain Hall - who, alas, is a bit of a racist. He didn't know any better. I'm sure Stephen Jay Gould could have set him straight.

But Captain Hamilton comes to America and finds... credible evidence of human neurological uniformity! Which claims him at once as a believer. And who doesn't want to believe? Hey, a neighbor's gotta have faith in something.

It's true that Captain Hamilton's terminology is a little out of date, but we can ascribe this failing to the absence of Dr. King's redemptive powers - like forgiving Plato for not being a Christian. It would be difficult to describe our author as a politically correct progressive in the 20th-century sense (ie, as a communist), but there is a definite and delightful odor of mild, pre-Reform Bill Whiggery in his advanced opinions.

But - I describe too much. We'll let the Captain take it away. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 1833:

It has often happened to me, since my arrival in this country, to hear it gravely maintained by men of education and intelligence, that the Negroes were an inferior race, a link as it were between man and the brutes. Having enjoyed few opportunities of observation on people of colour in my own country, I was now glad to be enabled to enlarge my knowledge on a subject so interesting.

I therefore requested the master to inform me whether the results of his experience had led to the inference, that the aptitude of the Negro children for acquiring knowledge was inferior to that of the whites. In reply, he assured me they had not done so; and, on the contrary, declared, that, in sagacity, perseverance, and capacity for the acquisition and retention of knowledge, his poor despised scholars were equal to any boys he had ever known.

"But, alas, sir!" said he, "to what end are these poor creatures taught acquirement, from the exercise of which they are destined to be debarred, by the prejudices of society? It is, surely, but a cruel mockery to cultivate talents, when, in the present state of public feeling, there is no field open for their useful employment. Be his acquirements what they may, a Negro is still a Negro, or, in other words, a creature marked out for degradation, and exclusion from those objects which stimulate the hopes and powers of other men."

I observed, in reply, that I was not aware that, in those States in which slavery had been abolished, any such barrier existed as that to which he alluded. "In the State of New York, for instance," I asked, "are not all offices and professions open to the man of colour as well as to the white?"

"I see, sir," replied he, "that you are not a native of this country, or you would not have asked such a question." He then went on to inform me, that the exclusion in question did not arise from any legislative enactment, but from the tyranny of that prejudice, which, regarding the poor black as a being of inferior order, works its own fulfilment in making him so. There was no answering this, for it accorded too well with my own observations in society, not to carry my implicit belief.

The master then proceeded to explain the system of education adopted in the school, and subsequently afforded many gratifying proofs of the proficiency of his scholars. One class was employed in navigation, and worked several complicated problems with great accuracy and rapidity. A large proportion was perfectly conversant with arithmetic, and not a few with the lower mathematics. A long and rigid examination took place in geography, in the course of which questions were answered with facility, which I confess would have puzzled me exceedingly had they been addressed to myself.

I had become so much interested in the little party-coloured crowd before me, that I recurred to our former discourse, and inquired of the master, what would probably become of his scholars on their being sent out into the world? Some trades, some description of labour of course were open to them, and I expressed my desire to know what these were. He told me they were few. The class studying navigation, were destined to be sailors; but let their talents be what they might, it was impossible they could rise to be officers of the paltriest merchantman that entered the waters of the United States. The office of cook or steward was indeed within the scope of their ambition; but it was just as feasible for the poor creatures to expect to become Chancellor of the State, as mate of a ship.

In other pursuits it was the same. Some would become stonemasons, or bricklayers, and to the extent of carrying a hod, or handling a trowel, the course was clear before them; but the office of master-bricklayer was open to them in precisely the same sense as the Professorship of Natural Philosophy No white artificer would serve under a coloured master. The most degraded Irish emigrant would scout the idea with indignation.

As carpenters, shoemakers, or tailors, they were still arrested by the same barrier. In either of the latter capacities indeed they might work for people of their own complexion, but no gentleman would ever think of ordering garments of any sort from a schneider of cuticle less white than his own. Grocers they might be, but then who could perceive the possibility of a respectable household matron purchasing tea or spiceries from a vile "Nigger?" As barbers, they were more fortunate, and in that capacity might even enjoy the privilege of taking the President of the United States by the nose. Throughout the Union, the department of domestic service particularly belongs to them, though recently they are beginning to find rivals in the Irish emigrants, who come annually in swarms like locusts.

On the whole, I cannot help considering it a mistake to suppose that slavery has been abolished in the Northern States of the Union. It is true, indeed, that in these States the power of compulsory labour no longer exists; and that one human being within their limits, can no longer claim property in the thews and sinews of another. But is this all that is implied in the boon of freedom? If the word mean any thing, it must mean the enjoyment of equal rights, and the unfettered exercise in each individual of such powers and faculties as God has given him. In this true meaning of the word, it may be safely asserted, that this poor degraded caste are still slaves. They are subjected to the most grinding and humiliating of all slaveries, that of universal and unconquerable prejudice. The whip, indeed has been removed from the back of the Negro, but the chains are still on his limbs, and he bears the brand of degradation on his forehead. What is it but the mere abuse of language to call him free, who is tyrannically deprived of all the motives to exertion which animate other men? The law, in truth, has left him in that most pitiable of all conditions, a masterless slave.

It cannot be denied that the Negro population are still compelled, as a class, to be the hewers of wood, and drawers of water, to their fellow-citizens. Citizens! there is, indeed, something ludicrous in the application of the word to these miserable Pariahs. What privileges do they enjoy as such? Are they admissible upon a jury? Can they enrol themselves in the militia? Will a white man eat with them, or extend to them the hand of fellowship? Alas if these men, so irresistibly manacled to degradation, are to be called free, tell us, at least, what stuff are slaves made of?

But on this subject, perhaps, another tone of expression -- of thought, there can be no other -- may be more judicious. I have already seen abundant proofs, that the prejudices against the coloured portion of the population prevailed to an extent, of which an Englishman could have formed no idea. But many enlightened men I am convinced are above them. To these I would appeal They have already begun the work of raising this unfortunate race from the almost brutal state to which tyranny and injustice had condemned it. But let them not content themselves with such delusive benefits as the extension of the right of suffrage recently conferred by the Legislature of New York.*

[* - The Legislature of New York in 1829 extended the right of suffrage to men of colour, possessed of a clear freehold estate without encumbrance of the value of 250 dollars. A very safe concession, no doubt, since to balance the black interest, the same right of suffrage was granted to every white male of twenty-one years, who has been one year in the State. It might be curious to know how many coloured voters became qualified by this enactment. They must, indeed, have been rari nantes in gurgite vasto of the election.]

The opposition to be overcome, is not that of law, but of opinion. If, in unison with the ministers of religion, they will set their shoulders to the wheel, and combat prejudice with reason ignorance with knowledge, and pharisaical assumption with the mild tenets of Christianity, they must succeed in infusing a better tone into the minds and hearts of their countrymen. It is true, indeed, the victory will not be achieved in a day, nor probably in an age, but assuredly it will come at last. In achieving it they will become the benefactors, not only of the Negro population, but of their fellow-citizens. They will give freedom to both; for the man is really not more free, whose mind is shackled by degrading prejudice, than he who is its victim.

As illustrative of the matter in hand, I am tempted here to relate an anecdote, though somewhat out of place, as it did not occur till my return to New York the following spring. Chancing one day at the Ordinary at Bunker's to sit next an English merchant from St. Domingo, in the course of conversation, he mentioned the following circumstances. The son of a Haytian general, high in the favour of Boyer, recently accompanied him to New York, which he came to visit for pleasure and instruction. This young man, though a mulatto, was pleasing in manner, and with more intelligence than is usually to be met with in a country in which education is so defective. At home, he had been accustomed to receive all the deference due to his rank, and when he arrived in New York, it was with high anticipations of the pleasure that awaited him in a city so opulent and enlightened.

On landing, he inquired for the best hotel, and directed his baggage to be conveyed there. He was rudely refused admittance, and tried several others with similar result. At length he was forced to take up his abode in a miserable lodging-house kept by a Negro woman. The pride of the young Haytian (who, sooth to say, was something of a dandy, and made imposing display of gold chains and brooches,) was sadly galled by this, and the experience of every hour tended farther to confirm the conviction, that, in this country, he was regarded as a degraded being, with whom the meanest white man would hold it disgraceful to associate. In the evening, he went to the theatre, and tendered his money to the box-keeper. It was tossed back to him, with a disdainful intimation, that the place for persons of his colour was the upper gallery.

On the following morning, my countryman, who had frequently been a guest at the table of his father, paid him a visit. He found the young Haytian in despair. All his dreams of pleasure were gone, and he returned to his native island by the first conveyance, to visit the United States no more.

This young man should have gone to Europe. Should he visit England, he may feel quite secure, that if he have money in his pocket, he will offer himself at no hotel, from Land's End to John O' Groat's house, where he will not meet with a very cordial reception. Churches, theatres, operas, concerts, coaches, chariots, cabs, vans, wagons, steam-boats, railway-carriages and air-balloons, will all be open to him as the daylight. He may repose on cushions of down or of air, he may charm his ear with music, and his palate with luxuries of all sorts. He may travel en prince, or en roturier, precisely as his fancy dictates, and may enjoy even the honours of a crowned head, if he will only pay like one. In short, so long, as he carries certain golden ballast about with him, all will go well.

But when that is done, his case is pitiable. He will then become familiar with the provisions of the vagrant act, and Mr Roe or Mr Ballantine will recommend exercise on the treadmill, for the benefit of his constitution. Let him but show his nose abroad, and a whole host of parish overseers will take alarm. The new police will bait him like a bull; and should he dare approach even the lowest eating-house, the master will shut the door in his face. If he ask charity, he will be told to work. If he beg work, he will be told to get about his business. If he steal, he will be found a free passage to Botany Bay, and be dressed gratis on his arrival, in an elegant suit of yellow. If he rob, he will be found a free passage to another world, in which, as there is no paying or receiving in payment, we may hope that his troubles will be at an end for ever.

Ah, England! You've come a long way, baby.

Three poems of Weldon Kees

June 1940 (1943):

It is summer, and treachery blurs with the sounds of midnight,
The lights blink off at the closing of a door,
And I am alone in a warn-out time in wartime,
Thinking of those who were trapped by hysteria before.

Flaubert and Henry James and Owen,
Bourne with his crooked back, Rilke and Lawrence, Joyce --
Gun-shy, annoyers, sick of the kill, the watchers,
Suffered the same attack till it broke them or left its scars.

Now the heroes of March are the sorriest fools of April:
The beaters of drums, the flag-kissing men, whose eyes
Once saw the murder, are washing it clean, accusing:
"You are the cowards! All that we told you before was lies!"

It is summer again, the evening is warm and silent.
The windows are dark and the mountains are miles away.
And the men who were haters of war are mounting the platform.
An idiot wind blows; the conscience dies.

Obituary (1943):

Boris is dead. The fatalist parrot
No longer screams warnings to Avenue A.
He died last week on a rainy day.
He is sadly missed. His spirit was rare.

The cage is empty. The unhooked chain,
His pitiful droppings, the sunflower seeds,
The brass sign, "Boris," are all that remain.
His irritable body is under the weeds.

Like Eliot's world, he went out with a whimper;
Silent for days, with his appetite gone,
He watched the traffic flow by, unheeding,
His universe crumbling, his heart a stone.

No longer will Boris cry, "Out, brief candle!"
Or "Down with tyranny, hate and war!"
To astonished churchgoers and businessmen.
Boris is dead. The porch is a tomb.
And a black wreath decorates the door.

The Bell From Europe (1947):

The tower bell in the Tenth Street Church
Rang out nostalgia for the refugee
Who knew the source of bells by sound.
We liked it, but in ignorance.
One meets authorities on bells infrequently.

Europe alone made bells with such a tone,
Herr Mannheim said. The bell
Struck midnight, and it shook the room.
He had heard bells in Leipzig, Chartres, and Berlin,
Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Rome.
He was a white-faced man with sad enormous eyes.

Reader, for me that bell marked nights
Of restless tossing in this narrow bed,
The quarrels, the slamming of a door,
The kind words, friends for drinks, the books we read,
Breakfasts with streets in rain.
It rang from Europe all the time.
That was what Mannheim said.

It is good to know, now that the bell strikes noon.
In this day's sun, the hedges are Episcopalian
As noon is marked by the twelve iron beats.
The rector moves ruminantly among the gravestones,
As the sound of a dead Europe hangs in the streets.

The Holocaust: a Nazi perspective

["Your best title yet," a friend of mine declared. Well, certainly my most attention-getting. I'm afraid this post plays a peculiarly nasty Jedi mind trick on you, especially if you're a neo-Nazi or other Holocaust denier. But maybe not only if. In any case, my sensors detected a particularly strong uptick in Moldbug-hating among the "ethnic genetic interests" crowd, whose ire for my Semitic roots runs strong. Always trust content from nizkor.org! It's always easy to tell who's right on these controversial questions - you just have to look at who's frothing at the mouth.]

Western intellectuals spent two thousand years wondering what would have happened if Athens had won the Peloponnesian War. Might modern civilization, iPhones and all, have sprung directly from the society that created science, mathematics, literature and democracy? Was it the victory of the icy, militaristic Spartans over the cultured, humanistic Athenians that left the West waiting until the 1830s for its industrial revolution? If not for the Sicilian Expedition - would Caesar have had an iPhone?

Then we had the 20th century. And we found out what happens when Athens beats Sparta. Reader, you see it all around you. At a certain point the Thirty Tyrants don't seem so bad after all.

The truth, I think, is that by the time the European virtues split into the Athenian and Spartan virtues, the tragedy has already happened. Should we judge a society by the resolution on its iPhones? If so, the task is without interest. Like all reactionaries, I feel we should judge a society by the quality of its men and women - and better yet, its best men and women. Every few centuries in our history sees some new Rome, which always rises because of the virtue of its elite, and always collapses when that virtue is lost. And when we see Athenian virtues without Spartan, or Spartan without Athenian, we know that the two will fight and both are doomed.

The curious quality of the Anglo-German wars of the 20th century is that, while the democrats are clearly Athenian and the fascists clearly Spartan, the 20th-century Athenians are far more Spartan than their grandchildren, and the 20th-century Spartans far more Athenian than their own pathetic remnants. Hitler loved opera. Show me a neo-Nazi who loves opera - I'll show you a neo-Nazi in the AARP. And it goes without saying that Churchill is basically a fascist, at least as compared to David Cameron.

The point was driven home for me at Wilde Lake High School in 1988, where I found myself in an auditorium listening to a long, bathetic string of student awards. "Student-athlete of the year," as I recall, was a 300-pound all-state offensive lineman who'd racked up an incredible 1150 on his SATs. Why couldn't I be competing for this position? Being actually not bad at ping-pong, I was about as much of an athlete as he was a student.

Whereas in the 1500s we see men like the Admirable Crichton or the Earl of Oxford - both of whom are outliers, of course, but not exceptionally anomalous outliers. Both of whom are as Spartan as Otto Skorzeny and as Athenian as Leo Szilard. But, of course - no iPhones.

We still have Spartans. So did Honorius. If anything, it was his Athenians that sucked balls, and indeed you can't throw a stone these days without hitting some 21st-century Symmachus. Not a good omen. What would it take to heal this Athenian-Spartan divide? Can it even be done, or should we just consign tomorrow to God's mercy or the Huns'? No shortage of Huns, either.

But I digress. I was talking about Nazis. Since the Nazis were the Spartans, it's hard to find an eloquent Nazi. We want to know the Nazi mind, because nothing human is foreign to us. The communist mind, the democratic mind (but I repeat myself), springs out at us in great torrents of loquacity. Athens is never lacking in logos - the problem is filtering.

But the Spartan speaks only with his sword. Books cannot really capture him, yet we have nothing else. Still, since even the Third Reich is surprisingly Athenian when you get to know it, the problem is not unsolvable. Most 21st-century intellectuals have a favorite eloquent Nazi: Albert Speer.

There is much to be said for Speer's memoir, though it is not without its disingenuous moments, but the problem with it is that we never get to meet the Nazi Speer - the author, by the time he writes, has completely submitted (with or without internal reservation) to conquering liberalism. So what we read in Speer is a liberal perspective on the Third Reich. We can get this from many other places, even as a primary source, for despite the hard work of Judge Freisler our record is not short of July 20 memoirs - nor was Nazi Germany short of secret liberals. Indeed the Third Reich we know from secondary sources is largely rendered through their eyes.

And without German, I'm restricted to the very limited supply of Nazi writing translated into English. Reinhard Spitzy is certainly worth a look, but I have a new candidate for this position: Hans Fritzsche.

Unless someone else wrote his Sword in the Scales (English edition, 1953), Fritszche - a radio journalist and Goebbels protege, who sat in the dock with Goering and Hess, but was acquitted - is a real writer. He's also, as we'll see, a real Nazi. So I have nothing to do but step aside and let him speak. Chapter 13, "Can Such Things Be?" - complete:

To me the most tremendous point in the whole indictment lay in the massacre of the Jews. This was not a question of conflicting interpretation as was the subject of war-guilt, but of plain indisputable fact.

At first the evidence that several million Jews had been killed in Germany and German-occupied territory was submerged in the general flood of accusations about mass murders at hundreds of different places in which the total number of dead claimed by the Prosecution varied from five to eighteen million. Moreover, a number of the place-names mentioned by interrogators and prison officials as the scenes of these killings were soon shown to be incorrect; they spoke for instance of gas-chambers at Dachau, where, according to unimpeachable evidence, there had never been any. As a result of this sort of testimony a number of prisoners formed the impression that the whole charge was simply an exaggerated description of the pogroms which had been reported in 1941 from several places in German-occupied eastern Europe.

I myself called to mind the principle enunciated by enemy publicists even before 1939 as the essence of war propaganda: the enemy must be portrayed as a monster without relieving features. And I could not help thinking of the legend of children's severed hands in the first World War, while at the same time I remembered the replies given by the German information centres to whom I had submitted all current reports of atrocities, and who had disputed their accuracy in no uncertain fashion.

Were then the present apparently overwhelming charges of mass murder only a continuation of Allied propaganda? The detailed verbal statements by prosecuting counsel of alleged crimes, which often displayed a surprising ignorance of German conditions, were not convincing; and many of the documents produced in their support seemed equally without foundation. Such documents often showed little more than that the same facts can be very differently described, and the same words very differently interpreted.

Then suddenly, surprisingly, came a change of tactics. We found ourselves watching a documentary film.

The hall was darkened and a row of little lamps on the edge of the dock lit up our faces from below so that Dr. Gilbert, the psychologist, who had planted himself in front, was in a good position to watch our reactions. In the face of these preparations many of the prisoners deliberately assumed blank expressions; some turned their backs on the screen, and Dr. Schacht remarked that he himself had been in a concentration camp and needed no film to tell him what it was like. Others however never took their eyes off the ghastly scenes now displayed before us.

One and all we were at first profoundly sceptical as to the authenticity of the pictures, though the rows upon rows of pitiful living skeletons reminded me of my fellow sufferers in the Lubianka. The bales of human hair aroused immediate doubts in our minds as to their origin, and those of us who were watching gazed searchingly at the successive heaps of corpses in an endeavour to light on a clue as to when and where these camera shots could have been taken.

In the end, however, all our resolve to be coolly critical gave way to sheer elementary pity for these tortured creatures. No matter where the pictures had been made, no one could doubt that they were pictures of human beings, men, women, children, who had once lived and breathed, loved and hoped, and had been foully done to death. Did it matter what language those lips had spoken before they were silenced for ever, what thoughts were housed in that brain before it was crushed to pieces? The poor body, so soon to be reduced to ashes, had once lain beneath a mother's heart.

The majority of us, who had looked for some cunning ulterior motive behind this film display, were shaken to the depths. But out of our very emotion there arose once more the persistent question: might not this documentary show more than anything else simply be a new aspect of the blind murderous frenzy of war, of those horrors which in a single generation have grown from the soldiers who fell in Flanders to the women and children done to death in Dresden? Are not these frightful forms of death the work of primitive forces which man himself has unleashed and which have passed beyond his control? Or are they the outcome of individual cruelty and a deliberate will to destroy? The film showed the most hideous defilement of God's image; was that defilement due to some power outside man, or to a brutal and cynical human purpose? Sickened though we were, this question tormented us as we marched back to our cells.

Almost immediately two of the psychologists came in. I begged them to leave me alone; they went away and returned with a doctor who offered me sedatives to help me sleep; I refused them. Confronted with such problems as this day had brought forth, it would have been impossible to take refuge in unconsciousness; I had to face them and come to terms with them.

Some of us did so to the best of our ability. Having no written information at our disposal, we argued among ourselves, basing our discussions on personal observations, conjecture, and posterior inferences. Finally, as a result of these discussions, we came to the conclusion that these harrowing pictures would probably not bear minute investigation; too many extraneous scenes, too many coincidences, appeared to have been incorporated in them so as to enhance their general effect. Moreover, even if the film as a whole did present an alarming image of what had really happened, it still did not constitute proof of any one of the particular mass murders which the Prosecution declared had taken place.

But this proof was furnished verbally by two witnesses, Ohlendorf and Höss, before whose testimony our scepticism (already shaken) about the accuracy of this part of the indictment gave way completely. They established beyond doubt that a systematic campaign of murder had been launched against the Jews. Ohlendorf described how tens of thousands in East Germany -- men, women, and children -- had been shot, one by one, by specially detailed squads; while Höss admitted having studied the arrangements made by the German Commissioner Wirth at Treblinka (a camp in Poland) so as to be able to reproduce them on a larger scale at Birkenau near Auschwitz, where by means of a vast industrially-organized human slaughter-house the number of slain ran into hundreds of thousands. There was nothing to indicate that either of these witnesses was telling anything but the stark, hideous truth; nothing that I heard at any time was calculated to shake their evidence.

Their statements naturally produced a tremendous effect in the dock. Nobody questioned the honesty of their evidence, but some of the most important details were called into question, and there were heated arguments both about the instigators of the massacres and the various circumstances attendant on them.

The Prosecution now furnished us with stacks of documentary material and produced whole groups of witnesses. There was evidence of atrocities committed on non-Jewish civilians in concentration camps, many of which were conclusively proved to have been carried out on lines similar to those established for the murders of Jews. Many of the witnesses of these events were obviously given to exaggeration and generalization, but there were those whom it was impossible to doubt, and their testimony was entirely sufficient.

These were followed by charges in connection with the treatment of foreign workers in Germany concerning which, in my opinion, the Prosecution were under a complete misapprehension; a point of view which was later justified by Sauckel's examination.

Next came the problem of war-guilt, and I am bound to say that the material submitted by the Prosecution under this head made a deep impression on me, for it contradicted my earlier impression about the aims of the German Government. All the evidence submitted, however, disclosed only the merest fraction of the many-sided developments which led up to the second World War.

The documents furnished by the Allies were barely sufficient for the demands of political propaganda, let alone all the manifold requirements of a trial which was admittedly of supreme historical importance. The historian will have to seek further information, and at present it is only in America that the raw material is to be found for a really unbiased study of the origins of the First World War and the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, a treaty which did not satisfy the victor, and caused the masses of the vanquished to plunge from one radical extreme to another. Moreover, such an investigation would be an essential preliminary for any analysis of the unrest that permeated central Europe in the '20s and '30s, and culminated in the second great conflagration.

The contention that, after a certain date, Hitler was bent on war with Poland, struck us as forced; unquestionably he did not want a simultaneous conflict with the West. Whether he would have provoked such a conflict later, or whether he simply would have put forward claims to more territory and a suzerainty over the western powers, remained one of the most hotly disputed points in the whole of the trial. Certainly none of the evidence showed any conclusive proof that he even entertained a wish to attack the American hemisphere.

But Hitler's determination to smash the Soviet Union was proved. There is no doubt that he aimed at making the Russo-Ukrainian region a political province of a greater Reich; but, on the other hand, the supremely important question as to when, and for what reason, he made up his mind to launch the colossal attack at the moment he did remains open.

Any comments that I was able to make from my own knowledge on the evidence furnished by the Prosecution I wrote down afterwards in the quietness of my cell. These notes [published but only in German - MM] were made without the help of any written material, which was of course in one way a disadvantage, but on the other hand enhanced their value as an unprompted personal account, devoid of the distorting influence that other testimony, constantly referred to, often exerts on such documents. First my own conscience, and then the Prosecution and the Bench, submitted these notes to a very careful scrutiny.

When, after a year in Nuremberg prison, I came to testify in my own defence, and found the searchlight of public opinion focused on me, I was able because of this preparation to answer every question put to me without hesitation. Certain journalists, observing that I showed no signs of being at a loss for the right word (as was usually, and very naturally, the case with prisoners), accused me of lack of feeling, and reported that I had profited by the total breakdown of my former world to adopt a coldly intellectual position, and so build up the best possible personal defence of myself. The truth was that nothing the Prosecution could do in the matter of cross-examination could compare with the gruelling self-questioning which had preceded it. All that I produced in court were the burnt-out ashes of what had once been red-hot lava.

Do you find this treatment enlightening, or self-serving, or a bit of both? It is certainly historically accurate, so far as the facts go. A few pages later, Fritzsche writes:

The Prosecution at Nuremberg had submitted to Bach [Bach-Zelewski] an alleged confession of Peiper's, according to which Himmler -- in the presence of Peiper and others, including Bach -- had drawn up a plan by which, under cover of the military campaign, forty million Slavs were to be slaughtered. At this point Bach -- as he now averred -- turned indignantly to the Prosecution's interrogator and declared that Himmler had spoken of killing "only" thirty millions. In conclusion Bach told my informant that after this admission, he could no longer deny the fact of the proposal, and had to give his evidence accordingly.

Now, at last, we were getting near to the heart of the matter, and the former S.S. Leader from Himmler's staff was able to put the whole story together. He remembered indeed the very occurrence on which it was founded. One evening early in 1941 Himmler and some of his cronies were sitting round the fire in the Wewelsburg; in addition to Bach and Peiper there were present Heydrich, Daluege, Obergrüppenführer Wolff, and Rauter, one of the Gestapo chiefs in Holland. Himmler spoke of an impending war in the east, which, he said, was unavoidable, the only question being when it would start and who would fire the first shot. He warned the company of the difficulty of the coming conflict and said in effect: "Germany is technically, Russia numerically, superior. The Soviet has unlimited power over its citizens and will sacrifice them without compunction: should Germany allow herself to be similarly tempted she will incur instead of strategical victory biological defeat." Later in the evening, Himmler computed the possible casualties on both sides, and estimated that in view of their determination to resist, and taking into account epidemics and famine, the Russians' losses might total anything up to thirty million.

What a revelation! Himmler's calculations of the enormous losses caused by military action and the general results of war were of course something very different from a deliberate and diabolical campaign of murder. I was reminded of Clemenceau's "vingt millions de trop" -- an expression which had been exploited by our German propaganda. But surely we had never distorted that remark beyond the bounds of reason, as this not dissimilar calculation of Himmler's had been distorted! I could see at last how, in the hands of a determined Prosecution, Himmler's thirty million hypothetical casualties had become metamorphosed into thirty million victims of a premeditated murder.

Bach was not the type of man to avoid this kind of thing. His was the sort of mind peculiarly susceptible to the latest impressions it had received, and his outlook, formerly imbued with Nazi ideas, now bore the clear impress of Allied propaganda. This example of a particular piece of testimony, with its background and its sequel, might be cited as how it is possible to shift the emphasis of evidence from one point to another, and so alter its whole bearing and significance.

Sometimes, however, this "shifted emphasis" resulted quite simply from the overwhelming pressure of current public opinion; and for this I was to some degree prepared by my interviews with various leading figures in Berlin and Moscow, and later at Nuremberg, which had made me realise how much a human being's point of view depends on the political climate he finds himself in.

It seems to me as though people can only manage to see things at all clearly when some political wind or other is blowing from behind them; if they turn against it, it blows directly into their eyes, and they become blinded. My first reaction to this discovery was a feeling of profound contempt for my fellows; a feeling which, on closer examination, turned out to be quite unjustified.

For our views about the world we live in are in truth like so many flags, kept flying by the prevailing current of opinion. If the wind is strong enough, they will continue to display their colours in the same direction -- until the weather changes. In the dock I used often to discuss with Speer and Schirach the question of maintaining a happy medium between a too inflexible and a too impressionable political outlook; and we came to the opinion that many of the sufferings of our nation could be traced back to this one question, in which politics, morals, intellect and character all play their separate parts.

Fritzsche, though acquitted at Nuremberg, was retried by a West German court and released in 1950 only to die of cancer. A page translated from German notes:

To his own surprise, it did manage Fritzsche to portray themselves as insignificant before the Nuremberg Tribunal and subject to instructions. He could not repeat this success in the subsequent denazification procedures. The German justice saw him as a leading propagandists, who had hidden at his career's sake, the criminal side of National Socialism. Although Fritzsche was not a fanatical Nazi, but was a loud both staunch supporters of the Nazi party and more efficient. According to tribunal he was a "deceiver" responsible for the prolongation of the war and was therefore sentenced to nine years in labor camp in 1947. For this he was dismissed in 1950. Had he not died shortly afterwards, he could have taken a similar role as a witness, as later, Albert Speer. He "would have it, perhaps even leave a nice impression," said Bonacker.

Indeed. And in case we haven't heard enough Nazi perspectives on the Holocaust, Fritzsche also links us to the very interesting testimony of SS Judge George Konrad Morgen (who came out with a clean enough sheet to later practice law in West Germany):

Q. Will you state your full name, please?

A. Georg Konrad Morgen.

Q. Will you repeat this oath after me:

I swear by God, the Almighty and Omniscient, that I will speak the pure truth and will withhold and add nothing.

(The witness repeated the oath.)

THE PRESIDENT: You may sit down.

DIRECT EXAMINATION BY DR. PELCKMANN:

Q. Witness, because of the significance of your testimony, I will first ask you in detail about yourself. Were you an SS judge of the Reserve?

A. Yes.

Q. Please speak slowly and wait a little after every question.

What training did you have?

A. I studied law at the Universities of Frankfurt on the Main, Rome, Berlin f at the "Academie de Droit International" at the Hague and the "Institute for World Economy and Ocean Traffic" in Kiel. I passed the first, the senior law examination. Before the war I was a judge at the Landgericht in Stettin.

Q. Were you a specialist in criminology and in criminal law?

A. No, I had specialized in International Law, but later, during the war, when I had to deal with criminal matters and penal law, I did special work in that field.

Q. How did you come to the SS?

A. I was drafted compulsorily into the General SS. In 1933, I belonged to the Reich Board for Youth Training, whose group of students was taken over as a body. I was drafted at the beginning of the war into the Waffen SS.

Q. What rank did you have there?

A. In the General SS I was Staffelanwarter and SS Rottenfuehrer. In the Waffen SS I was latterly Sturmbannfuehrer of the Reserve.

Q. What example can you give that you did not believe you were joining conspiracy when you joined the SS. Very briefly, please.

A. In 1936 I published a book on War Propaganda and the Prevention of War. This book, at a time when war was threatening, showed ways and means to prevent war and the incitement of nation against nation. The book was examined by the Party and published. Therefore, I could not suppose that the SS and the policy of the Reich Government were directed towards war.

Q. How did you come to the investigations in the concentration camps?

A. At the order of the Reichsfuehrer SS, because of my special abilities in criminology, I was detailed by the SS Judicial Department to the Reich Criminal Police Office in Berlin, which was equivalent to a transfer. Shortly after I arrived there, I was given an assignment to investigate a case of corruption in Weimar. The accused was a member of the concentration camp of Weimar-Buchenwald. The investigations soon led to the person of the former commandant, Koch, and many of his subordinates, and in addition affected a number of other concentration camps. As those investigations became more extensive, I received full authority from the Reichsfuehrer SS to engage generally in such investigations in concentration camps.

Q. Why was a special power of attorney from the Reichsfuehrer necessary?

A. For the guards of the concentration camps, the SS and Police Courts were competent; that is, in each case the local Court in whose district the concentration camp was located. For that reason, because of the limited jurisdiction of its judge, the Court was not able to act outside its own district. In these investigations and their extensive ramifications it was important to be able to work in various districts. In addition, it was necessary to use specialists in criminal investigation, in other words, the criminal police. The criminal police, however, could not carry on any investigation directly among the troops, and only by combining juridical and criminal police activities was it possible to clear this up, and for this purpose I was given this special power of attorney by the Reichsfuehrer.

Q. Now, how extensive did these investigations become? You can be brief because the witness Reinecke answered this point in part.

A. I investigated Weimar-Buchenwald, Lublin, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Herzogenbosch, Cracow, Plaschow, Warsaw, and the concentration camp at Dachau. And others were investigated after my time.

Q. How many cases did you investigate? How many sentences were passed? How many death sentences?

A. I investigated about 800 cases, or rather, about 800 documents, and one document would affect several cases. About 200 were tried during my activity. Five concentration camp commandants were arrested by me personally. Two were shot after being tried.

Q. You caused them to be shot?

A. Yes. Apart from the commandants, there were numerous other death sentences against Fuehrers and Unterfuehrers.

Q. Did you have any opportunity of visiting and seeing for yourself the conditions inside concentration camps?

A. Yes, because I had authority to visit concentration camps myself. Only a very few persons had this permission. Before beginning an investigation, I examined the concentration camp in question in all its details, seeing especially those arrangements which seemed particularly important to me. I visited them repeatedly and thoroughly. I paid surprise visits. I was working mostly in Buchenwald itself for eight months. I lived there. I was in Dachau for one or two months.

Q. As so many visitors to concentration camps say they were deceived, do you consider it possible that you, too, were a victim of such deception?

A. As I have already pointed out, I was not a mere visitor to a concentration camp. I had settled down there for a long residence, I might almost say I established myself there. It is really impossible to be deceived for such a long time. In addition, the commissions from the Reich Department of Criminal Police worked under my instructions, and I placed them directly in the concentration camps themselves. I do not mean to say that, in spite of these very intensive efforts, I was able to learn of all the crimes, but I believe that there was no deception in regard to what I did learn.

Q. Did you gain the impression, and at what time, that the concentration camps were places for the extermination of human beings?

A. I did not gain this impression. A concentration camp is not a place for the extermination of human beings. I must say that my first visit to a concentration camp, namely Weimar-Buchenwald, was a great surprise to me. The camp was on wooded heights, with a wonderful view. The installations were clean and freshly painted. There were grass and flowers. The prisoners were healthy, normally fed, sun-tanned, working -

THE PRESIDENT: When are you speaking of? When are you speaking of?

A. I am speaking of the beginning of my investigations in July, 1943.

Q. What crimes - you may continue - please, be more brief.

A. The installations of the camp were in good order, especially the hospital. The camp authorities, under the Commandant Diester, aimed at providing the prisoners with an existence worthy: of human beings. They had regular mail service. They had a large camp library, even with foreign books. They had variety shows, motion pictures, sporting events. They even had a brothel. Nearly all the other concentration camps were similar to Buchenwald.

THE PRESIDENT: What was it they even had?

A. A brothel.

Q. What crimes did you learn about?

A. As I said before, the investigations were based on a suspicion of corrupt practices. In time, however, I was obliged to come to the conclusion that besides those crimes, killings had also occurred.

Q. How did you reach the suspicion that killings had occurred?

A. I learned that the starting-point was the assignment of Jews to the camps after "Action 38." I had to learn all possible facts about this action, and in doing so I was obliged to notice that the majority of prisoners of whom it could be assumed that they might know something about these cases, had died.

This peculiar frequency of killings was noticeable - I noticed it - because other prisoners who were not in any key positions remained in Buchenwald for years in the best of health, and were still there, so that it was rather remarkable that it was just certain prisoners who could have been witnesses who had died. I thereupon examined the files concerning these deceased prisoners.

The files themselves did not then give cause to suspect illegal killings. The dates of the deaths were years apart, and the different causes of death were always given. But I noticed that the majority of these deceased prisoners, shortly before their death, had been put into the camp hospital or were in the detention quarters.

This first aroused my suspicion that in these two places murders of prisoners might possibly have occurred. Thereupon I appointed a special official, whose sole task was to investigate the suspicious circumstances, and rumours which were circulating in the detention quarters, the so-called "Bunker," regarding the killing of prisoners. He was a very zealous and able criminal official, but he had to report again and again that he had not found the least confirmation of this suspicion of mine.

After two weeks of completely unsuccessful activity, the criminal official refused to continue his task and asked me ironically whether I myself believed that such, rumours of illegal killing of prisoners could be true. Only by accident, much later, was I put on the trail. I noticed that in the case of certain prisoners, in the books of the Kommandantur prison, and in the hospital books, they had been recorded in both books at the same time. In the prison book, for example, it said, "Date of release, 9th May, 12 o'clock." In the hospital register, "Patient died 9th May, 9.15 a.m."

I said to myself, this prisoner cannot be in the Kommandantur Prison and at the same time a patient in the hospital. False entries must have been made here. I therefore concentrated my efforts on this and I succeeded in finding out about this system, for it was a system under Kommandant Koch.

The prisoners were taken to a secret place and were killed there, mostly in a cell of the Kommandantur prison, and sick reports and death certificates were prepared for the files. They were made out so cleverly that any unsuspecting reader of the documents would get the impression that the prisoner concerned had actually been treated and had died of the serious illness which was indicated.

Q. Then what did you do after learning of these facts?

A. I found out that the medical officer at Buchenwald, SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Dr. Hoven, was principally responsible and I had him arrested. I informed my investigating commission of these cunning forgeries and directed their particular attention to investigate systematically the concentration camps which we visited and to ascertain whether such murders had also been committed in other concentration camps. We satisfied ourselves at the time of the investigation, and I am speaking of the second half of 1942, that in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau no such killings occurred, as far as it was humanly possible to judge. In the other concentration camps, however, such cases were found. The persons believed to be guilty were accused, arrested and charged.

Q. Why was this not done earlier?

A. I have already said that these deceptive measures were so cunningly contrived that it was not possible to discover them earlier. Above all, there, was no possibility of clearing up the matter, besides these things were always done without witnesses. These cases had to be investigated by the SS Courts and they were investigated, for every unnatural death of a prisoner was reported by teletype to the central agency. In addition, the specially sworn-in Court officer who was in the camp had to go immediately to the place of the occurrences to question the witnesses; sketches and photographs had to be made of the scene and it was a regulation that an autopsy had to take place in every such case of unnatural death.

Those reports of unnatural deaths, or of deaths suspected of being unnatural, were sent regularly to the SS and Police Court; but as I have already said, these reports were so cunningly contrived and the files were in such good order that even an expert could not have suspected an illegal killing. Of course, frequently proceedings were taken against members of the concentration camp, some followed by sentences, even death sentences. But these deaths appeared to occur at quite a normal rate.

If nothing at all had been reported to the SS Courts from the concentration camps, it would of course have seemed suspicious, just as it would also have been suspicious if too many such reports had been made to us. But it was a normal average and one could have no suspicion that the concentration camps were a hotbed of such dangerous crimes. It was through my investigation, which as I said was caused by accident, that we received our first insight into the true state of affairs.

Q. How did you come on to the track of mass killings? You have just spoken of individual killings.

A. I found traces of mass killings also by accident. At the end of 1943, I discovered two trails at the same time, one leading to Lublin and the other to Auschwitz.

Q. Please describe the Lublin trail first.

A. One day I received a report from the Commandant of the Security Police in Lublin. He reported that in a Jewish labour camp in his district a Jewish wedding had taken place. There had been 1,100 invited guests at this wedding.

As I said, 1,100 guests participated in this Jewish wedding. What followed was described as quite extraordinary owing to the gluttonous consumption of food and alcoholic drinks. With these Jews were members of the camp guard, that is to say some SS men or other, who took part in this function. This report only came into my hands in a roundabout way, some months later, as the Commandant of the Security Police suspected that the circumstances indicated that some criminal acts had occurred.

This was my impression as well, and I thought that this report would give me an indication of another big case of criminal corruption. With this intention, I went to Lublin and I went to the Security Police there, but all they would tell me was that the events were supposed to have happened at a camp of the "Deutsche Ausrustungswerke." But nothing was known there. I was told it might possibly be a rather peculiar and "opaque" (this was the actual term used) camp in the vicinity of Lublin. I found out the camp and the commandant, who was Kriminalkommissar Wirth.

I asked Wirth whether this report was true and what it meant. To my great astonishment, Wirth admitted it. I asked him why he permitted members of his command to do such things and Wirth then revealed to me that on the Fuehrer's order he had to carry out the extermination of Jews.

Q. Please go on, witness, with what you did.

A. I asked Wirth what this had to do with the Jewish wedding. Then, Wirth described the method by which he carried out the extermination of Jews and he said something like this: "One has to fight the Jews with their own weapons, and one has to cheat them."

Wirth built up an enormous deceptive manoeuvre. He first selected Jews who would, he thought, serve as column leaders, then these Jews brought along other Jews, who worked under them. With those smaller or medium-sized detachments of Jews, he began to build up the extermination camps. He extended this staff, and with them, Wirth himself carried out the extermination.

Wirth said that he had four extermination camps, and that about 5,000 Jews were working at the extermination of Jews and the seizure of Jewish property. In order to win Jews for this business of extermination and plundering of their brethren of race and creed, Wirth gave them every freedom and, so to speak, gave them a financial interest in the spoliation of the dead victims. As a result of this attitude, this extraordinary Jewish wedding had come about.

Then I asked Wirth how he killed Jews with these Jewish agents of his. Wirth described the whole procedure that went off like a film every time. The extermination camps were in the East of the Government General, in big forests or uninhabited waste lands. They were built up like a Potemkin village. The people arriving there had the impression of entering a city or a township. The train drove into what looked like a railroad station. The escorts and the train personnel then left the area. Then the cars were opened and the Jews got out.

They were surrounded by these Jewish labour detachments, and Kriminalkommissar Wirth or one of his representatives made a speech. He said: "Jews, you were brought here to be resettled, but before we organize this future Jewish State, you must of course learn how to work. You must learn a new occupation. You will be taught that here. Our routine here is, first, everyone must take off his clothes so that your clothing can be disinfected and you can have a bath so that no epidemics will be brought into the camp."

After he had found such calming words for his victims, they started on the road to death. Men and women were separated. At the first place, one had to give his hat; at the next one, his coat, collar, shirt, down to his shoes and socks. These places were set up like check-rooms, and the person was given a check at each one so that the people believed that they would get their things back. The other Jews had to receive the things and hurry up the new arrivals so that they would not have time to think. The whole thing was like an assembly line. At the last stop they reached a big room, and were told that this was the bath. When the last one was in, the doors were shut and the gas was let into the room.

As soon as death taken place in, the ventilators were started. When the air could be breathed again, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel.

Q. Was Wirth a member of the SS?

A. No, he was a Kriminalkommissar in Stuttgart.

Q. Did you ask Wirth how he arrived at this devilish system?

A. When Wirth took over the extermination of the Jews, he was already specialist in mass destruction of human beings. He had previously carried out the task of getting rid of the incurably insane. On behalf of the Fuehrer himself, whose order was transmitted through the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, he had, at the beginning of the war, set up a detachment for this purpose, probably composed of a few officials of his, I believe, the remainder being agents and spies of the criminal police.

Wirth very vividly described how he went about carrying out this assignment. He received no aid, no instructions, but had to do it all by himself. He was only given an old, empty institution in Brandenburg. There he undertook his first experiments. After much consideration and many individual experiments, he evolved his later system, and then this system was used on a large scale to exterminate the insane.

A commission of doctors previously investigated the files, and those insane who were considered to be incurable were put on a separate list. Then the institution one day was told to send these patients to another institution. From this institution the patient was transferred again, often more than once. Finally he came to Wirth's institution. There he was killed by gas and cremated.

This system which deceived the institutions and made them unknowing accomplices, this system which enabled him with very few assistants to exterminate large numbers of people, this system Wirth now employed with a few alterations and improvements for the extermination of Jews. He was also given the assignment by the Fuehrer's Chancellery to exterminate the Jews.

Q. The statements which Wirth made to you must have surpassed human imagination. Did you immediately believe Wirth?

A. At first Wirth's description seemed completely fantastic to me, but in Lublin I saw one of his camps. It was a camp which collected the property or part of the property of his victims. From the quantity - there were an enormous number of watches piled up - I had to realize that something frightful was going on here. I was shown the valuables. I can say that I never saw so much money at one time, especially foreign money - all kinds of coins, from all over the world. In addition, there were a gold-smelting furnace and really prodigious bars of gold.

I also saw that the headquarters from which Wirth directed his operations was very small and inconspicuous. He had only three or four people working there for him. I spoke to them too.

I saw and watched his couriers arrive. They actually came from Berlin, Tiergarten Strasse, the Fuehrer's Chancellery, and went back there. I investigated Wirth's mail, and I found in it confirmation of all this.

Of course, I could not do or see all this on this first visit. I was there frequently. I pursued Wirth up to his death...

"Q: You caused them to be shot? A: Yes." I mean, the man is a playa. Who, in 2011, causes anyone to be shot? At best we execute them with a joystick. We came, we saw, he died!



It's really not entirely clear to me that the rest of human history will, like Judge Morgen, find the 20th century even credible. But this indeed is how it was. I hope I've done my part to make the Holocaust seem a little more like the real event it was, not the screenplay legend it's become. Perhaps the Elders of Zion will be pleased.

Personal cloud computing in 2020 (or not)

I know it's rare that we have a technical discussion here at UR. But every once in a while the urge prevails. If nothing else, it attracts the right people to the rest of the cult.

(For readers of that Wolfram Alpha post, it seems almost superfluous to remotely diagnose today's tech-media darling, Siri, as yet another tragic case of the hubristic user interface (HUI). Then again, if anyone can pull off hubris and exceed the gods themselves... but in my much-refurbished crystal ball, here is what I see: Siri works beautifully 98% of the time. The other 2%, it screws up. Half of these screwups are hilarious. 1% of the hilarious screwups are blogged about. And that's enough bad PR, fairly or not, to restrict usage to a fringe. As with all previous attempts at voice-controlled computing. Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

No tool can achieve the natural "bicycle for the mind" status of a mere mental peripheral, unless the mind has an internal model of it and knows when it will work and when it won't. This cannot be achieved unless either the mind is genuinely human and thus understood by empathy, or the actual algorithm inside the tool is so simple that the user can understand it as a predictable machine. Between these maxima lies the uncanny valley - in which multitudes perish.

The only exemption from this iron law of expensive failure, a voracious money-shark that has devoured billions of venture dollars in the last decade, is a set of devices best described, albeit pejoratively, as "toys" - applications such as search, whose output is inherently unpredictable. Ie, inherent in the concept of search is that your search results are generated by an insane robot. This is not inherent in the concept of a personal assistant, however. Also, while search results are inherently heuristic - search queries are inherently rigorous.)

In any case - computers. When I went to grad school to lurn computers, it was way back in 1992. I was pretty sure that, in the future, we would have cool shit. Instead, twenty years in the future, I find myself typing on... the same old shit. Yo! Yo nigga, this bullshit, yo.

It would be one thing if all the bullshit actually worked. Or at least if it didn't suck. At the very least, it would be better if our entire system software architecture - from the '70s database at the ass end of the server room, to the '90s Flash player playing ugly-ass Flash in your face - though it sucked giant tubes of ass like Hoover Dam in reverse, at least this was a secret. At least no one knew it was ass.

But alas. It's even worse than that. Everyone knows the whole Internet is ass.

It's the 21st century. We should be soaring like eagles above the 20th-century legacy bullshit, expressing only the purest of functions in the pure language of mathematics. But somehow it hasn't happened. The technology just isn't there, or at least it isn't deployed. All we have is the same old assware, and no alternative but to live in its crack. Brendan Eich took what, two weeks, to build Javascript? And it has no long integers - just floating point. Millions of brown hours, deep in Brendan Eich's valley. To be fair, the fellow appears to be sorry. Not that this helps.

So - we're just going to assume that God won't tolerate this shit. Not that he spares the rod. But there's always a limit. So we're just going to pick an arbitrary year, 2020, by which the 20th-century assware will all be gone, all of it. And software will instead be great. From top to bottom, server to client, cloud to mobile, end to end and ass to elbow. (Note that 2020 is two years before the famous HTML 5 deadline.)

The question then becomes: with this great new software infrastructure, scheduled for 2020, what the heck will we be doing? How will we be living our wondrous 2020 digital lives?

I actually have an answer to the question. The answer is: personal cloud computing. I mean, duh. Yes, I know it sounds like yet another Palo Alto buzzword. Blander, in fact, than most. Google even finds it, a little bit, in reference to various BS.

Actually, I think the transition from 2011 computing to 2020 computing - if 2020 computing is personal cloud computing, as per my buzzword, which I claim in the name of Spain - should be at least as radical a disruptive break as any previously experienced in the seismically unstable Valley of Heart's Delight.

Consider a classic San Andreas tech-quake: the transition from minis to PCs. Cloud computing in 2011 is a lot like all computing in 1971. Why? Because industrial and consumer computing products are entirely disjoint. In 1971, you can buy a PDP-11 or you can buy a solar calculator. The PDP-11 is industrial equipment - a major capital expenditure. The solar calculator is a toy - an information appliance. The PC? The concept is barely imaginable.

In 1971, you already exist as a database row in various billing and banking systems. (I lived in Palo Alto in 1976 when I was 3. My parents apparently had Kaiser. When an employer in the late '90s put me on Kaiser, I was amazed to be asked if I still lived on Alma Street.)

Is this Kaiser miracle personal cloud computing? No, it's consumer cloud computing. It's exactly the same kind of consumer cloud computing we have today. It's your data, on someone else's computer, running someone else's code - an information appliance. Care for another helping of ass, Mr. Chumbolone?

What's an information appliance? Any fixed-function device, physical or virtual, whose computing semantics the user does not control. An IA is anything that processes data, but is not a general-purpose computer. (A non-jailbroken smartphone is about half an IA and half a computer, because the user controls the apps but not the OS, and the interface is app-centric rather than document or task-centric - the OS as a whole is little more than an app virtualizer, ie, a browser.)

To generalize slightly, we can say that in 1971, there was a market for industrial computing, and there was a market for information appliances. Not only was the connection between these two product lines roughly nil, it was more than a decade before the PC emerged to replace "smart typewriters," and the early 2000s before Linux effectively merged the PC and workstation markets.

Today, in the cloud, you can go anywhere and rent a virtual Linux box. That's industrial computing. You also have to cower in your closet, like me, to avoid having a Facebook profile. That's a virtual information appliance. So is just about any other consumer cloud service. Therefore, we have industrial cloud computing that isn't personal, and we have personal cloud computing that isn't computing.

In fact, if you use the cloud at all seriously, you probably have 10 or 20 virtual information appliances - each one different and special. If you are especially well-organized, you may have only two or three identities for this whole motley flock, along with seven or eight passwords - at most four of which are secure. Welcome to the wonderful new world of Web 2.0. Would you like some angel funding? Ha, ha.

In the future, in 2020, you don't have all these custom information appliances, because you have something much better: an actual computer in the sky. Instead of using Web services that run on someone else's computer, you use your own apps running on your own (virtual) computer.

I realize - it's completely wild, unprecedented and groundbreaking. But let's look at an example.

Let's imagine 2011 software is 2020 software, so we can see how this works. In 2020, of course, you use Facebook just like you do now. Facebook still rules the world. Its product is a completely different one, however - personal cloud computing.

This started in 2012, when Facebook introduced a new widget - Facebook Terminal, your personal Ubuntu install in the cloud. Everyone's Facebook state profile now includes a virtual Linux image - a perfect simulation of an imaginary 80486. Users administer these VMs themselves, of course. In the beginning was the command line - in the end, also, is the command line. Moreover, just because it's run from the command line on a remote server - doesn't mean it can't open a window in your face. If you're still reading this, you've probably heard of "xterm."

Terminal will simply bemuse Joe Sixpack at first - Facebook's user base having come a long way from Harvard CS. But Joe learned DOS in the '80s, so he'll just have to get used to bash. At least it's not sh. It has history and completion and stuff.

Furthermore, Joe has a remarkable pleasure awaiting - he can host his own apps. All the cloud apps Joe uses, he hosts himself on his own virtual computer. Yes, I know - utterly crazed.

Today, for instance, Joe might use a Web 2.0 service like mint.com. Beautifully crafted personal finance software on teh Internets. Delivered in the comfort and safety of your very own browser, which has a 1.5GB resident set and contains lines of code first checked in in 1992. Your moneys is most certainly safe with our advanced generational garbage collector. Admire its pretty twirling pinwheel as merrily your coffee steeps. Mozilla: making Emacs look tight and snappy, since the early Clinton administration.

But I digress. Where is Joe's financial data in mint.com? In, well, mint.com. Suppose Joe wants to move his financial data to taxbrain.com? Suppose Joe decides he doesn't like taxbrain.com, and wants to go back to mint.com? With all his data perfectly intact?

Well, in 2011, Joe could always do some yoga. He's got an ass right there to suck. It's just a matter of how far he can bend.

Imagine the restfulness of 2020 Joe when he finds that he can have just one computer in the sky, and he is the one who controls all its data and all of its code. Joe remembers when King Zuckerberg used to switch the UI on him, making his whole morning weird, automatically sharing his candid underwear shots with Madeleine Albright.

Now, with Facebook Terminal, Joe himself is King Customer. His Facebook UI is just a shell - starting with a login screen. Joe can put anything in his .profile or even fire it off directly from /etc/rc. He changes this shell when he damn well pleases. And where is his personal data? It's all in his home directory. Jesus Mary Mother of God! It can't possibly be this easy. But it is. So if he wants to switch from one personal finance app to another - same data, standard data, different app. He's a free man.

Suppose Joe wants to go shopping on teh Internets? He doesn't fire up his browser and go to amazon.com. He stays right there on Facebook Terminal and runs his own shopping application on his own virtual Linux box. Heck, he probably downloaded it from source and tweaked the termcap handling and/or optimization flags. (It's a general principle that anything written for termcap won't work on terminfo, even if it says it will.) Through an ASCII curses telnet in his Facebook Terminal - or, better yet, a Javascript X server in a Mozilla tab - he executes his shopping application (in C++ with OSF/Motif - that ultra-modern 3D look).

How does Joe's shopping application, which he hosts himself on Facebook Terminal, communicate with Amazon and other providers? Of course, book distributors in 2020 no longer write their own UIs. They just offer REST APIs - to price a book, to search for books, to buy a book. All of online shopping works this way. The UI is separate from the service. The entire concept of a "web store" is so 2011. Because Joe controls his own server, he can use classic '90s B2B protocols when he wants to replenish his inventory. I wouldn't at all rule out the use of SOAP or at least XML-RPC.

So. We have a problem here, of course, because Facebook Terminal is a joke. If Facebook users were a group of 750 million "original neckbeards," the system above would be the perfect product. Also the world would be a very different place in quite a number of ways. But let's continue the thought-experiment and stick with this spherical cow.

Consider the difference between the imaginary Facebook Terminal and the real Facebook Connect. The former is a platform - the latter is a "platform." There is a sort of logical pretence, at the user-interface layer, that a third-party site which uses Facebook authentication to commit, of course with your full cryptographic approval, unnatural acts upon your private data, is "your" app in just the same sense that an app on your iPhone is "your" app.

But you control one of these things, and not the other. When you host an app, you own the app. When you give your keys to a remote app, the app owns you. Or at least a chunk of you.

It's almost impossible for a Web user of 2011 to imagine an environment in which he actually controls his own computing. An illustrative problem is that chestnut of OS designers, cross-application communication. Look at fancy latest-generation aggregators like Greplin or ifttt. These apps work their tails off to get their hooks into all your data, which is spread around the cloud like the Columbia over Texas, and reconstruct it in one place as if it was actually a single data structure. Which of course, if you had a personal cloud computer - it actually would be. And "if" and "grep" would not seem like gigantic achievements requiring multiple rounds of angel funding, now, would they?

The Facebook of 2011 - and more broadly, the Web application ecosystem of 2011 - is not a personal cloud computer, because it's not a computer. Generalizing across your state in Facebook itself, plus all the external apps that use your Facebook identity, we see a collection of virtual information appliances, mutually unaware and utterly incompatible.

Even if Facebook becomes the universal authentication standard of the Web, a feat it would surely like to achieve, and surely a great advance at least in usability over the status quo, its users' lives in the cloud would not be anything but a disconnected salad of cloud information appliances. They would not have a personal cloud computer, or anything like one. Moreover, if one of these information appliances somehow evolved into a general-purpose computer, its users would realize that they no longer needed all the other information appliances.

Comparing the consumer cloud computing of 2011 to the personal cloud computing of 2020 is like comparing the online-services world of 1991 to the Web world of 2000. It's easy to forget that in 1991, Prodigy was still a big player. Prodigy: the Facebook of 1991. In 1991, you could use your 2400-baud modem to call any of a number of fine online services and other BBSes. By 2000, your 56K modem called only one thing: the Internet. The Internet, seen from the perspective of the Bell System, was the killer online service that killed all the other services.

Another difference between 2011 and 2020 is the business model. The Web 2.0 business model is first and foremost an advertising model. Or so at least has this present boom been built. Yo, bitches, I've seen a few of these booms.

Advertising is a payment model for information appliances. Your TV is an appliance. You see ads on your TV. Your PC is not an appliance. You'd find it shocking, disgraceful and pathetic if the new version of Windows Vista tried to make money by showing you ads. In fact, there have been attempts at ads on the PC - in every case, heinous, tacky and unsuccessful.

Advertising ceases to exist where an efficient payment channel arises. Why does TV show ads? Because the technical medium does not facilitate direct payment for content. It would be much more efficient for the producers of a new show to charge you fifty cents an hour, and most people would easily pay fifty cents per hour to never have to even skip past ads. Or to put it differently, fairly few people would choose to watch ads for fifty cents per hour.

Thus, if payment is straightforward, the whole inefficient pseudo-channel of advertising evaporates and the digital Mad Men are out on their asses. Taste the pain, algo-bitches! (There's only one thing I hate more than algorithms: the pencil-necked geeks who are good at algorithms.)

In 2020, how does Joe pay for computing? He pays for three things: content, code (ie, content), and computing resources. Probably his ISP is his host, so that's a very straightforward billing channel for resources, easily extended to code/content. Joe would never even dream of installing an app which showed him ads. So there's no use in figuring out what his buying patterns are, is there? Sorry, Mad Men. Go back to the math department.

Consider search in 2020. In search, too, PCC (not to be confused with proof-carrying code) separates the UI and the service. Joe uses one search app, which can be connected to any number of remote back-ends. If he doesn't like Google's results, he can Bing and decide, without changing his user experience at all. Result: brutal commoditization pressure in the search market, which has to bill at micropennies per query and has no channel for displaying ads - except in the results, which sucks and won't happen. Consider Mexican bikers, cooking meth in a burned-out Googleplex.

Alas! All that is great passes rapidly away. In this imaginary 2020, we see nothing left of Silicon Valley's existing corporate giants, except possibly a Facebook on steroids, whose information-appliance profiles have morphed into virtual Linux instances. Death by commoditization. Hey, it wouldn't be the first time.

But wait! Can this actually happen? Is it really possible to turn everyone's Facebook profile into a general-purpose computer? Frankly, I doubt it. If I worked at Facebook, which of course I don't, I would be extremely skeptical of Facebook Terminal, for reasons I think are quite obvious.

In real life, this apocalypse just isn't going to happen. In real life, 2020 will be pretty much just like 2011. And why? Because we just don't have the software technology to build 2020. And we're probably not about to get it, either.

Let's look at this issue in a little more detail. But the point is obvious. Hosting mint.com is pretty much a full-time job for the guys at mint.com. Expecting Joe Sixpack to download their code, for free or for pay, and set up his own server, is just absurd.

Of course, Joe is unlikely to have a serious load issue on his private server - because he's the only user. But still, Joe is not an Ubuntu administrator, he doesn't want to be an Ubuntu administrator, and frankly he probably doesn't have the raw neurological capacity to be an Ubuntu administrator. Scratching his balls, booting MS-DOS and typing "copy a:*.txt b:" is about the limit of Joe's computational ambitions and abilities. You could put a visual interface on his console, but frankly, this would probably only confuse him more. I want to serve Joe's needs, but I won't let myself overestimate his qualities.

We're starting to answer the essential question here: why hasn't personal cloud computing already happened? Why doesn't it work this way already? Because frankly, the idea is obvious. It's just the actual code that isn't there. (Here is the closest thing I've seen. Let's hope Joe Sixpack is a good node.js sysadmin.)

Let's go back to 1971. The idea of a personal computer was also obvious to people in 1971. Moore's Law was reasonably well understood in 1971. So it was clear that, if in 1971 you could build a PDP-11 the size of a refrigerator and sell it for $20,000, in 1981 it would be possible to build a PDP-11 that fit under a desk and cost $2000.

But this irresistible logic ran into an immovable object. Who wants a PDP-11 on their desk? The PDP-11 evolved into the mighty VAX. Who wants a VAX on their desk? Even if you can build a VAX that fits on a desk and cost $2000, in what way is this a viable consumer product? It's not, of course. Similarly, turning 700 million Facebook profiles into virtual Ubuntu images is not, in any way, a viable product strategy - or even a sane one.

The "Facebook Terminal" example is ridiculous not because the idea of personal cloud computing is ridiculous, but because "Facebook Terminal" is a ridiculous product. Specifically, the idea that, to build a virtual computer in 2011, we should design a virtual emulation of a physical computer first produced in 1981, running an OS that dates to 1971, cannot fail to excite the mirth of the 2020 epoch. (And I say this as one who still owns a copy of the seminal BSD filesystem paper, autographed by Keith Bostic.)

Again: who wants a PDP-11 on their desk? Here we encounter Gall's law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

If you want an Apple II, you don't start by shrinking a PDP-11. You have to build an Apple II. If you want not an Apple II but rather an electronic typewriter, there's a market for that. I recall that market. In the long run I'm afraid it didn't compete too well with the PC.

But why was the Apple II simple? Because its inventors understood Gall's law, or at least its Zen? Well... possibly. But also, simply due to the limitations of the hardware, it had to be. Early microcomputers simply did not have the computational power to run a PDP-11 OS. Thus, there was no choice but to build a new software infrastructure from very simple roots.

This is of course a notable contrast from our present age, in which your Ubuntu image, carried on the back of a sturdy Xeon, smiles cheerfully from under its seven gigabytes of crap. The Xeon can run seven gigabytes of crap - but Joe Sixpack cannot manage seven gigabytes of crap. Amazing things, of course, are done with this assware. Amazing things were also done with VMS. Amazing things were done with Windows. Don't take it personally.

So: we've identified one existential obstacle to personal cloud computing. We don't have a cloud operating system, or anything like it, which could be remotely described as simple enough to be "personal" - assuming said person is Joe Sixpack and not Dennis Ritchie. No OS, no computer, no product, no business. The thing simply cannot be done. And Gall's law says we can't get there from here.

But actually it's not the only such obstacle. If we somehow surmounted this obstacle, we would face another insurmountable obstacle. It's not just that we need a new OS to replace Unix - we also need a new network to replace the Internet.

Managing a personal server in the sky is much harder than managing a phone in your pocket. Both run apps - but the personal cloud computer is a server, and the phone is a client. The Internet is already a bit of a warzone for clients, but it's digital Armageddon for servers. You might as well send Joe Sixpack, armed with a spoon, into the Battle of Kursk.

An Internet server is, above all, a massive fortified castle in alien zombie territory. The men who man these castles are men indeed, quick in emacs and hairy of neck. The zombies are strong, but the admins are stronger. They are well paid because they need to be, and their phones ring often in the night. Joe is a real-estate agent. No one calls him at 3 in the morning because Pakistani hackers have gotten into the main chemical supply database.

So long as this is true, it really doesn't matter what software you're running. If network administration alone - and if on a real computer, user-installed apps talk to foreign servers directly, and vice versa - is a job for professionals, no cloud computer on this network can conceivably be personal. It is an industrial cloud computer, not a personal one.

So: serious problem here. By 2020 - two years before the apotheosis of HTML 5 - we're going to need (a) a completely new OS infrastructure, and (b) a completely new network. Or we can also, of course, remain in our present state of lame.

Can it be done? Why, sure it can be done. If anything, we have too much time. The simple fact is that our present global software infrastructure, ass though it be, is almost perfectly constructed for the job of hosting and developing the upgrade that replaces it. All we have to do is make sure there is an entirely impermeable membrane between assware and the future. Otherwise, the new infrastructure becomes fatally entangled with the old. The result: more ass.

Assware has one great virtue: ass is easy to glue. All useful software today is at least 37% pure glue. You can just count the spaces between the letters. For instance, when we see a LAMP stack, we see four letters and three gallons of glue.

It is perfectly possible to create and even deploy an entirely new system software stack, so long as it entirely eschews the charms of Unix. If your new thingy calls Unix, it is doomed. Unix is like heroin. Call Unix once - even a library, even your own library - and you will never be portable again. But a Unix program can call a pure function, and indeed loves nothing better. You can't use ass, but ass can use you.

When people created the first simple operating systems from scratch, they had only simple computers to build them on. This enforced an essential engineering discipline and made the personal computer possible. No forces enforces this discipline now, so there is no economic motivation for creating simple system software stacks from scratch.

As for new networks - phooey. Layering a new peer-to-peer packet network over the Internet is simply what the Internet is designed for. UDP is broken in a few ways, but not that can't be fixed. It's simply a matter of time before a new virtual packet layer is deployed - probably one in which authentication and encryption are inherent.

Putting our virtual computer on a virtual overlay network changes the game of the network administrator, because it splits his job into two convenient halves. One, the node must protect itself against attacks on the underlying network by attackers without legitimate credentials for the overlay network. Two, the node must protect itself from attacks by legitimate but abusive overlay users.

Job one is a generic task - DOS defense of the most crude, packety sort - and can be handled by Joe's ISP or host, not Joe himself. Attacking an overlay node at the Internet level is a lot like trying to hack an '80s BBS by calling up the modem and whistling at it. Job two is a matter for the network administrators, not Joe himself. All of the difficulty in securing the Internet against its own users is a consequence of its original design as a globally self-trusting system. So again, we solve the problem by washing our hands completely of any and all legacy assware.

Let's review the basic requirements for a personal cloud OS - in case you care to build one. I see only three:

First, that motherfucker needs to be simple. If there's more than 10,000 lines of code anywhere in your solution, or the compressed source distribution exceeds 50K, Gall's law says you lose. Various kinds of virtual Lisp machines, for instance, can easily hit this objective. But, if it's Lisp, it had better be a simple Lisp.

What is a simple cloud computer, when introduced, version 1.0? Can it be a personal cloud computer? It cannot. The Apple II cannot exist without the Altair. With 10,000 lines of code or less, you cannot compete with Ruby on Rails for hosting the newest, greatest Twitter ripoff, just as the Altair cannot compete with the VAX - at the job of being a VAX. But the VAX also makes a pretty crappy Altair.

If history repeats itself, the 2012 ancestor of the 2020 personal cloud computer is neither the 2012 cloud information appliance, nor the 2012 industrial cloud computer. If it exists at all, it can only exist as a hobby computer - like the Altair.

A hobby computer doesn't try to serve the needs of any existing user base. It is its own need. It exists to be played with. As it is played with, it will naturally mature and learn to serve needs. But at first, it is much more important to remain simple, than to solve any specific problem.

Second, your virtual OS needs to be semantically isolated from the host OS. Anything that can call Unix, is Unix. That's why the Javascript/browser ecology, for all its stank, succeeds: it can't call Unix. It could invent its own compatibility disasters, but at least it didn't import Posix's. If Netscape had cut a hole into Unix, it would have died without a trace - as perhaps it deserved.

The natural consequence of this restriction is that Joe's virtual computer is, or at least should be, portable across hosts. This is a delightful service which can of course be implemented by assware with yet another layer of complexity, but should emerge naturally from any really simple system.

Third, your virtual computer needs to be a computer, ie, capable of arbitrary general-purpose Turingy goodness. It can compute, it can store data, it can communicate with other computers - it can even talk to the old legacy Internet, albeit via a gateway. Think of any Web app you use. If Joe's computer can't implement this app, at least logically, it is not in some sense a computer. For example, can it virtualize itself? If not...

So my view is: not only is personal cloud computing solvable, but it's simple by definition. So it can't even be hard. Some nigga should just do it. He's got eight years.