The Nazi who returned to Harvard

Jewsweek ^ | 11-23-04 | Jeff Jacoby

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

A lesson here in the context of our many jihadist academics.

[7.62 x 51mm]

Academia, the refuge for liberals, demokkkRATs, commies, nazis, fascists and other subhuman filth. Time to drain the swamp.

[Taggart_D]

["I am identified with a government that represents something new and different from the established order. . . . I doubt whether those who clamor against my coming represent real Americanism."]

Spoken like a true liberal!

[Grampa Dave]

Is James Bryant Conant any relation to Joe Conant?

[weenie]

Spoken like a true liberal!It sounds liberal but it is extreme right wing...fascism.

[FreedomPoster]

I am currently finishing Natan Sharansky's new book. One of the main themes is "Moral Clarity". This theme explains much that is wrong in the world, especially with Liberal elites.

Here is my favorite passage on that theme:

"Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil."

[Redbob]

Hmm, and if you were to change "Nazi" to "Palestinian," and "Hitler" to "Arabfat", you see that nothing really changes amongst the liberal elites, does it?

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Why would Harvard have embraced such a man?

Maybe for the same reasons that Yale grads helped finance his boss. [?] Their support now for cloning and slaughtering for stem cells is just as ugly. Some things never change.

[AReaganGirl]

This article needs to be re-printed in the Harvard Crimson. It will serve as a reminder of where Harvard was back then and where it is now. Too bad that Harvard has left its spiritual and moral foundation and is open to anything going (progressive, they would called it).

[JFK_Lib]

"Academia, the refuge for liberals, demokkkRATs, commies, nazis, fascists and other subhuman filth. Time to drain the swamp."


Way past time.

[js1138]

Nothing ever changes. MIT harbors Noam Chomsky.

[weenie]

The secular left has a blind spot when it comes to evil. They think the entire concept of "evil" is mere superstition.

That's why Kerry and his crowd thought terrorism was a nuisance. They don't see the evil thread that runs through and connects fascism, Islam, communism, and secular humanism (atheism).

[AndyMeyers]

The author cites US Rep Samuel Dickstein as condemning the Nazis. Perhaps the author should do some investigative work on Rep. Dickstein. According to Soviet archives opened in 1991 Dickstein was a paid agent of Stalin, throughout Dickstein's term in public office. Dickstein created the House Un-American Activites Committee, probably on Stalin's orders to blunt any and all efforts by the Nazis to ally with the US. It is somewhat ironic that some twenty years after Dickstein created the HUAC it would be used in an effort to expose Communist like Dickstein.

[FreedomPoster]

Hayek said it best on that score:

The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

On this issue, at least, Hayek had moral clarity.

[skeeter]

Why would Harvard have embraced such a man? With everything that was known about the Nazis in 1934 -- their violent antisemitism, their public book-burning, the concentration camps into which they were already herding their enemies -- why would Harvard have treated a Nazi official like Hanfstaengl with such courtesy?

Talk about begging the question...

[Tacis]

"Harvard became staunchly anti-Nazi."

Think it much likely that Harvard, like the media and the rest of the anti-Americans, actually became staunchly pro-communist.

True, the communists may have appeared to be the only strong alternative to the Nazis, but the NYT was paid to hype the Soviets and print their propaganda.

To this day, lefties revere the Spanish Civil War and their communist ties to it. Hard core commies claimed for years that they didn't relly want to destroy capitalsm and the US, they were just fighting the Nazis. barbra streisand!!!

If you can come up with any reasonable story about how great the American commies (the Lincoln Brigade) who went to Spain you are guaranteed a space on the front page of the NYT (at the bottom edge, in the center). Of course, the relations of Harvard and every other US leftie with the Nazis improved dramtically when Stalin signed his non-agression treaty with Hitler and they split up Poland.

[Spirochete]

Nothing ever changes. MIT harbors Noam Chomsky.

What exactly does a linguist do at MIT?

[js1138]

I understand that Chomsky has made contributions to the theory of computer languages and artificial intelligence. My problem, aside from his politics, is that he has stifled research into human language for the last 40 years.

I would compare him to the Soviet Union's Lysenko.

[jboot]

It is important to note that Hanfstaengl came back to the States as a disillusioned and frightened ex-Nazi. He narrowly escaped being purged (i.e. sent to rot in a concentration camp or suffering a 7.62mm brain hemmorage) during the power struggles that followed Hitler's ascension to power. After his departure, his young adult son-whom Hitler had doted on as a toddler (if you can imagine Adolph Hitler playing "horsie" with a child on his back as Toland reports)-was also targeted and was forced to flee via Switzerland.

None of this really bears on the issue of whether or not Harvard should have hired him, of course. The man had been, at least for a time, a true beleiver in Adolph Hitler.