Veteran of four wars, four enlistments, four branches: Air Force, Army, Army Reserve, Army National Guard. I am both an AF (Air Force) veteran and as Veteran AF (As Fuck)
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Monday, September 15, 2025
August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A Novel of History and Conscience
At its core, August 1914 is a work of historical fiction that dramatizes the disastrous Russian campaign against Germany at the Battle of Tannenberg. Solzhenitsyn follows generals, ministers, and foot soldiers alike, weaving together their perspectives into a portrait of a society ill-prepared for war. The novel does not simply reconstruct events; it interrogates them. Why did Russia, a nation of immense size and resources, crumble so quickly? How did the incompetence of leaders and the blindness of institutions.
Solzhenitsyn’s method is almost documentary. He inserts archival material, official memos, and real speeches into his narrative, refusing to let the reader forget that these characters were not mere inventions but participants in a real historical collapse. The result is a hybrid form—part novel, part chronicle—that demands the reader confront history not as distant fact but as lived human tragedy.
The Figure of General Samsonov
One of the most haunting figures in August 1914 is General Aleksandr Samsonov, commander of the Russian Second Army. Samsonov is portrayed with compassion, not as a villain but as a man crushed by the weight of command, undone by poor communications, a divided staff, and his own hesitations. His tragic suicide after the defeat becomes emblematic of Russia’s humiliation.
Through Samsonov, Solzhenitsyn explores the tension between personal responsibility and systemic failure. Was Samsonov a poor general, or was he doomed by a larger structure of incompetence and corruption? Solzhenitsyn leaves the question open but insists that individuals matter—that decisions, mistakes, and moral weaknesses ripple outward into history.
The Theme of National Blindness
Just as In the First Circle exposes how Stalin’s Soviet Union normalized terror, August 1914 shows how Tsarist Russia normalized complacency. Bureaucrats ignored warnings, generals distrusted one another, and ministers jockeyed for power while soldiers starved at the front. The blindness was not merely strategic but moral: leaders refused to acknowledge the rot at the heart of their system.
Solzhenitsyn suggests that the seeds of 1917 were already present in 1914. The Revolution did not come from nowhere; it germinated in the failures of war, in the gap between the Russian people’s sacrifices and the state’s corruption. August 1914 is thus not only about a battle but about the unraveling of legitimacy.
Style and Structure
The novel is sprawling and demanding. Solzhenitsyn shifts rapidly from the trenches to the salons of St. Petersburg, from the thoughts of peasants to the intrigues of ministers. At times, the sheer detail can overwhelm; he includes staff orders, reports, and digressions that feel closer to history than fiction. Yet the density is deliberate. Solzhenitsyn is building an argument: history is not shaped by a few grand figures alone but by a swarm of documents, conversations, and decisions, each carrying its weight.
Amid this density, however, moments of piercing clarity emerge. A soldier’s death in a muddy field, a general’s paralyzing doubt, a politician’s cynical calculation—these scenes crystallize the human cost of institutional failure. Solzhenitsyn writes with the authority of someone who has lived through national disaster, and he insists that history must be understood not only through archives but through moral imagination.
Solzhenitsyn’s Vision
Although set decades before Stalin, August 1914 belongs to the same moral universe as In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. All share the conviction that falsehood and cowardice corrode societies from within. The First World War becomes, in Solzhenitsyn’s vision, a kind of prelude to the greater horrors of the twentieth century. The blindness of 1914 paved the way for the brutality of 1917 and beyond.
What unites Solzhenitsyn’s works is the belief that truth, however painful, must be faced. Just as he stripped the illusions from the Soviet present, here he strips the myths from the Russian past. August 1914 refuses the easy consolations of patriotism or nostalgia. It shows instead a society collapsing under its own deceptions.
August 1914 is dense, sprawling, and often closer to a historical investigation than to traditional fiction. Solzhenitsyn compels the reader to see history as lived tragedy and to recognize how human weakness, bureaucratic inertia, and moral blindness can shape the destiny of nations.
If In the First Circle is a descent into Hell, August 1914 is the map of the road that led there. Both works are united by a single purpose: to bear witness, to insist on truth, and to remind us that history is not fate but the accumulation of choices. In confronting the disaster of 1914, Solzhenitsyn demands that we confront the disasters we inherit—and the ones we may yet create.
Appendix One: A Personal Turning Point
I first read August 1914 in 2006. At the time, I was long removed from my earlier service in the U.S. Army during the 1970s and 80s, nearly a quarter century gone. Yet in Solzhenitsyn’s Vorotyntsev, the thoughtful officer who searches for truth amid confusion, I found something that spoke directly to my own life. Vorotyntsev embodied courage not as bravado, but as clarity—the ability to see through illusions, to recognize responsibility, and to act even when the path was uncertain.
That encounter with the novel stayed with me. The following year, at the age of 54, I re-enlisted in the Army. In 2009, I deployed to Iraq for a year. Many people thought such a choice was reckless, even impossible after so many years away. But Solzhenitsyn had shown me in August 1914 that history, whether of nations or individuals, is not fate. It is made by choices, by the willingness to take responsibility, and by the courage to step forward even when the odds are long.
Vorotyntsev helped me believe that it was not too late, that a return to service was not only possible but meaningful. In that sense, August 1914 was not just a novel I read; it was a turning point, a book that helped set the course of my life in a new direction. Like all of Solzhenitsyn’s work, it insists on truth, responsibility, and action. For me, it became more than literature—it became a call answered in the real world.
Appendix Two: My Family in August 1914
The date that is the title of Solzhenitsyn's book has huge significance in the history of my family. In that month my paternal grandfather, Hyman Gussman, began a year-long escape from service and certain death in the Russian army. The story of his escape is here.
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Review of In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sharpens the vast world of his Gulag Archipelago into the story of one vile aspect of a horrible system. The title refers to the First Circle of Hell from Dante’s Inferno: the outer ring of damnation where virtuous pagans reside. They are spared the flames and the grotesque punishments of deeper circles, but they are still in eternal Hell—and there is no hope of leaving it. Solzhenitsyn takes that metaphor shows it is the reality of the Soviet Union’s Gulag system, showing how intellectual prisoners, though treated better than the starving multitudes in labor camps, still inhabit an eternal inferno.
The First Circle as Metaphor
The sharashka—the special prison where engineers, linguists, and scientists work for the Soviet state—stands in for Dante’s First Circle. The inmates are granted privileges: they have beds, books, and food, and they are spared the freezing forests and death quotas of Kolyma or Vorkuta. Yet, as Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this is still Hell. They cannot see their families, their lives are suspended indefinitely, and they are harnessed to serve the same tyrannical system that destroyed them.
Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor is glaringly accurate when prisoners face the prospect of being transferred out of the sharashka into the “real” Gulag. Instead of relief, they feel terror—but also a strange certainty. In the harsher camps, stripped of privileges, there is no illusion: one knows beyond doubt that he is in Hell. In the First Circle, by contrast, the comforts deceive; they risk lulling the prisoner into thinking survival is enough. Solzhenitsyn exposes the cruelty of a system that even in its “mercies” is an instrument of damnation.
Humor and Torment
The inmates of the first circle can be very funny. Solzhenitsyn does not present unrelieved misery; he shows how men, even in bondage, share laughter as a means of survival. The dialogues among prisoners sparkle with irony and wit. They mock the absurdities of bureaucrats, trade jokes about Stalinist slogans, and puncture the pomposity of the officials who guard them. The gallows humor is often bitter, but it underscores how the human spirit resists even in chains.
At the same time, the novel is suffused with torment. The small humiliations—the inability to visit a wife, the forced participation in projects that strengthen the secret police, the betrayal of colleagues—create a steady rhythm of despair. Solzhenitsyn captures not only physical imprisonment but also moral torment. Many prisoners wrestle with the temptation to collaborate, to use their talents to build the machinery of repression. The novel insists that the Gulag was not just a site of suffering but also a test of conscience, where the stakes were one’s soul as much as one’s body.
The Portrait of Stalin’s Soviet Union
Beyond the prison walls, Solzhenitsyn paints a vivid picture of Soviet life under Stalin. The novel opens with an NKVD officer wrestling with whether to denounce a diplomat who confided doubts about the regime. That single act of conscience—or cowardice—carries life-or-death consequences. The arbitrariness of power, the climate of fear, and the suffocating surveillance of everyday life are all laid bare. The state is shown not as a distant apparatus but as an intimate presence in every household, every phone call, every whisper among friends.
What makes In the First Circle throb with pain is that it reveals how a society can normalize terror. Families live under the constant threat of arrest; neighbors inform on one another; bureaucrats follow orders without question. The prison is only the most visible symbol of a larger cage enclosing the entire nation. Solzhenitsyn’s mastery is in showing the continuum of oppression—from the First Circle to the labor camps to the ordinary citizen’s apartment block—each a cog in Stalin’s vast machinery of repression and death.
The End of Illusion
The novel’s conclusion brings the metaphor full circle. When some of the First Circle prisoners are slated to leave the sharashka, they realize with bitter clarity what awaits them: the true Gulag. Their dread is mingled with certainty. They will no longer be cushioned by privileges; they will no longer risk mistaking survival for freedom. In the harsher camps, the truth of Hell will be undeniable. Solzhenitsyn drives home the paradox: the First Circle is in some ways the best place in Hell, but because it is still Hell, its false mercies are the cruelest torment of all.
In the First Circle is a novel of moral witness. Solzhenitsyn fuses humor and torment, narrative sweep and personal testimony, to create a vision of Stalin’s Soviet Union as an infernal landscape. The metaphor of the First Circle resonates because it captures the essential cruelty of the regime: even its kindnesses were poisoned, even its privileges a form of damnation. To read this novel is to descend into Hell—but with eyes opened by a writer who refused to let truth be extinguished.
In the end, Solzhenitsyn reminds us that there is no such thing as a humane Hell. The First Circle may offer bread, books, and laughter, but it is still eternal confinement, a parody of life under a system that devoured its own people. That is why In the First Circle is a clear, sad, and piercing indictment of totalitarianism. Like his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this novel illustrates what Gulag Archipelago documents.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025
The Remains of the Day – Two Readings, Two Shadows
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is, on the surface, a beautifully restrained novel about a butler looking back on his life. Its prose is measured, elegant, and deceptively calm—much like Stevens himself, the narrator whose voice guides us through decades of service at Darlington Hall. On my first reading a decade ago, I was delighted with the irony of Stevens’s life: his unwavering devotion to a flawed master, his refusal to acknowledge love when it stood before him, his self-delusion disguised as dignity. The book struck me as quietly comic and deeply human. Ishiguro’s sentences glided, and Stevens’s missteps felt both tragic and oddly endearing.
When I returned to the book recently, however, I found it much darker. In the intervening years I have visited ten Nazi death camps in Poland, Germany, France, and Czechia. That experience pressed new weight onto Ishiguro’s novel, which is, among other things, a story about collaboration, denial, and the moral cost of misplaced loyalty. What once seemed like a sad but somewhat abstract tale of professional blindness now read as a chilling study in the ordinary mechanisms of evil.
Lord Darlington’s Shadow
On the earlier reading, Lord Darlington registered to me mainly as an aristocrat duped by history, a man too naïve to see through German diplomacy in the 1930s. His Nazi sympathies were embarrassing, even foolish, but I read them with a degree of detachment. This time, they chilled me. Darlington did not simply invite Herr von Ribbentrop for tea; he opened his estate to treasonous meetings where appeasement and collaboration were dressed in the garb of “gentlemanly understanding.” Knowing, now, what Auschwitz looks like, or Majdanek, or Ravensbrück, I could not skim past these episodes. They stood out like black stains across the otherwise polished wood of Ishiguro’s setting.
Ishiguro is too subtle to sermonize. Instead, he lets the horror seep through by contrast. The novel’s silences—its evasions, its unspoken acknowledgments—become thunderous. Darlington’s name, disgraced after the war, is defended by Stevens with painful loyalty, and each defense now reads like complicity. “Lord Darlington was a gentleman of great moral stature,” Stevens insists, and one feels the lie tightening like a noose.
The Choices Stevens Made
This darker emphasis recast Stevens for me as well. Before, I pitied him primarily for his personal failures: his inability to accept Miss Kenton’s affection, his cold dismissal of his father’s dying hours, his blindness to the possibility of a life beyond service. Those ironies still sting, but now they seem less like the gentle sadness of a missed romance and more like evidence of a man who gave away his humanity to serve a cause unworthy of him. Stevens’s professional pride, his endless rationalizations about “dignity,” become mechanisms of denial.
One moment that haunts me is Stevens’s absence at his father’s deathbed. He tells himself that duty requires him to attend to Lord Darlington’s important guests. Those guests, we later understand, include Nazi envoys. His choice is not only between filial love and professional duty; it is between human compassion and participation, however indirect, in the machinery of evil. On my first reading, I saw this as tragic misjudgment. Now it looks like moral blindness of the gravest kind.
The Machinery of Rationalization
Stevens’s narration, with its pauses and hedged justifications, is itself a case study in self-deception. Ishiguro crafts a voice that reveals by what it hides. Stevens insists, for instance, that “it is not my place” to question Lord Darlington’s political views, and in that deferential phrase lies the whole tragedy: the abdication of moral responsibility under cover of professionalism. He repeatedly reframes his life’s choices as minor sacrifices for the sake of dignity, yet the cumulative effect is devastating. The more he rationalizes, the more hollow his life becomes.
This rationalization felt poignant before; now it feels terrifyingly familiar. The history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is full of men and women who “just did their jobs,” who persuaded themselves that loyalty excused silence. Stevens, in his small way, becomes their mirror.
Beauty and Darkness
And yet, the book remains beautiful. Ishiguro’s prose is spare, controlled, almost like chamber music. The road trip frame, with Stevens driving through the English countryside, provides moments of pastoral calm that contrast with the storms beneath the surface. The understated style amplifies the darkness because it refuses melodrama. By the time Stevens realizes—too late—that he has given his life to a cause both ignoble and loveless, the quietness of the revelation is more devastating than any outburst could be.
The irony that first delighted me is still there, but now it feels less like a gentle smile and more like a knife’s edge. Stevens is both comic and tragic, both absurd and horrifying. Ishiguro allows us to see how an ordinary man, clinging to ideals of service and dignity, can waste his life in the service of betrayal.
Reading The Remains of the Day twice, ten years apart, shows how literature deepens with us. The book I first encountered was about lost love and misguided loyalty. The book I read now, after walking through Auschwitz and Dachau, is about moral blindness, the banality of evil, and the human cost of devotion to the wrong master. Both readings are true; the difference is in the shadow that history casts.
Ishiguro’s genius lies in writing a novel supple enough to contain both. Stevens remains one of the great unreliable narrators of modern fiction, and The Remains of the Day remains, for me, a masterpiece that only grows darker—and more necessary—with time.
Also, The Movie
A postscript: I have not and will not see the movie version of The Remains of the Day. My habit is not to see movie versions of novels I love. But in this case, I heard Ishiguro speak at the Philadelphia Free Library in 2015. He was talking about his just-released book (my second favorite of his novels) The Buried Giant. As soon as the host asked for questions, everyone wanted to talk about The Remains of the Day.
One of the first questions was about the movie. In answering the questions, Ishiguro talked about being a young novelist and all the excitement of having his novel made into a movie. He said, "I would not have chosen Anthony Hopkins as Stevens."
The man who could play a convincing Hannibal Lecter, Odin, Nixon and C.S. Lewis could not also be the sort of shallow martinet that is Stevens.
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Friday, August 16, 2024
Buy or Rent? I Bought a Bike Right Next to the Panama Canal
My second day in Panama, I bought a Giant SCR 16-speed aluminum road bike. I bought the bike for $500 at a used bike shop in a residential neighborhood near the canal called ReCyclingPTY. They had road and mountain bikes of many vintages. They also rent bikes for $50 per day or $200 per week so $500 to buy for 6 to 9 months is a much better deal for me.
Andre, the owner, will also sell the bike on consignment when I leave.
Right after I bought the bike I rode to the first lock on the Panama Canal. Soon I hope to ride the length of the canal continuing on the same road.
Sunday, June 30, 2024
In Terror of Ducatis on Sestriere: My First Climb in the Italian Alps
In 2000, I made the first several climbs up to the Sestriere ski resort. It was a beautiful September day as I toiled the seven-mile climb. At several point on the way up, I was riding through avalanche tunnels--they are a roof over the road, open on the cliff side.
It's dark inside the tunnels, not totally but dark compared to ride in bright sun. As I rode through first tunnel I could hear the roar of Ducati race-replica motorcycles climbing between the turns, then the odd silence as they coast through the hairpins and roar to life again out of the turns.
I have this experience before on Mount Palomar in San Diego county. But there are no tunnels on Mount Palomar. As the bikes got closer I pedaled faster, not that it would make any difference, but I wanted to get out of the tunnel. I had a sudden vision of the bike at the back of the group moving right to pass one of his mates then slamming into me.
The roar went from deep rumble to deafening howl as the pack swung out of a hairpin and accelerated into the tunnel. The tunnel had about a six percent grade so the roar swelled as they approached, throttles wide open. I put my head down and kept pedaling. I could see the end of the tunnel. I hoped the roaring bikes could see me.
Then it was over. The bikes flew past me in a line. Clearly they had passed many bicyclists on this mountain. They shot from the tunnel into the light and disappeared. I continued to pedal, a little more slowly.
Mount Palomar has many more motorcycles than any alpine climb I have ridden, but they are almost always single or in pairs. They also are mostly four-cylinder high-revving Hondas, Kawasakis and Suzikis. When they were near me in a turn, I could hear the best riders dragging the hockey-puck pad on their knee as they leaned into the turn at 45 degrees or more.
Only on Sestriere did I have packs of motorcycles fly past. In 2005, three different packs flew past me on my way up.
Usually, the excitement on these rides is descending and feeling the rush of speeding around the hairpin turns. On this ride, the biggest rush was the pack of Ducati race-replica motorcycles that shot past me on the way to the summit.
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On Tuesday, July 2, 2024, the Tour de France will climb to Sestriere then to Col de Montgenevre, through Briancon, up to Col du Lauteret on the way to Col du Galibier then downhill to the finish in Valloire.
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
How to Tell If You're a Left Anti-Semite: A Checklist by Ben Wittes of Lawfare
The last few weeks have been rough. Your Jewish friends have been extra needy. It’s not enough that you support their right to own land and enter the professions, that you don’t keep them out of clubs and universities, that you accept their citizenship, and that you don’t describe them as “rootless cosmopolitans” or “international banking conspirators.”
Now it feels like you’re walking on eggshells around them every time you comment on the news. They have you suddenly wondering: Am I actually an anti-Semite? It’s a painful question. You want to be a good person. You believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion—including of Jews.
And we all know that antisemitism is not a thing that good people do. And it’s not inclusive. And yet you keep saying things that create what seems to be a stricken look on the faces of Jews of your acquaintance. But then when you ask them whether it was okay to say that thing you just said, they all sound reassuring. But you’re not sure. Is that because it was innocuous? Or is it because they are just being polite and are secretly judging you? It can be hard to tell.
So as a public service, I thought I would create an “Am I a Left Anti-Semite?” checklist. The checklist consists of ten probing yes-or-no questions, each with an assigned point value of associated with the anti-Semitism of the left. Go through the checklist, add up your score, and see where you rank on the scale of 0 to Pogrom. I have added explanatory notes as needed to each question. By the way, this is an official publication of the entire Jewish community, for which I speak.
Question #1: Have you ever referred to Hamas fighters as “our martyrs”? If so, give yourself ten points. If not, have you ever referred to Palestinians killed in the Israeli fight against Hamas as “our martyrs” in a context in which a reasonable person might understand you as referring to Hamas fighters as martyrs? If so, give yourself two points.
Question #2: Have you ever expressed the sentiment that Palestine must be free “from the river to the sea” or any similar slogan that calls for the destruction of any Jewish sovereign presence in Israel proper and that might reasonably be construed as a call to remove or kill Jews from that region? If so, give yourself ten points. Deduct two points if you cannot identify the river in the slogan. Deduct another three if you can’t identify the sea in question. If either or both of these two conditions are met, you might be less of an anti-Semite than an ignorant idiot who has no idea what you’re saying.
Question #3: Do you find yourself radically more engaged by the plight of Palestinians displaced, injured, or killed in Gaza in response to a massacre of Israeli civilians than by the millions of Syrians displaced, wounded or killed in the murderous war by the Syrian government against its own people; by the millions of Ukrainians who have been killed or made refugees by Russia; or by the brutality of the Taliban? If so, give yourself ten points.
Question #4: Do you have an urge to shout at or harass Orthodox Jews or others who are visibly Jewish—or to protest at Jewish or kosher institutions—because of your objections to Israeli policy? Give yourself ten points if you have this urge. Give yourself 50 points if you have ever acted on it.
Question #5: More generally, do you believe the rise in antisemitic incidents, on college campuses and elsewhere, around the country is understandable under the circumstances? Give yourself five to fifteen points depending on how understandable you think it is.
Question #6: When 1,400 Israeli civilians were massacred, did you have a strong urge to add a “but” to any statement of condemnation you may have issued on social media or elsewhere? Give yourself three points if you had the instinct. Give yourself five points if you, in fact, qualified whatever public statement you made.
Question #7: Have you ever secretly wondered whether there is such a thing as an Israeli civilian? If so, give yourself ten points; that’s some dark shit. Give yourself an extra ten points if you’ve had this thought about Israelis but never had a similar thought about the nationals of any other country.
Questions #8: Was any part of you secretly relieved by the speed and ferocity of the Israeli response to the October 7 massacre, as it allowed you to stop talking about the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and instead talk about Israeli policies and actions you could condemn? If so, give yourself five points. Give yourself an extra five if you never seriously contemplated what realistic alternative options Israel might have to protect its people than the course it is taking. Give yourself an extra five still if the first statement you made or protest you attended took place in response to Israeli action, rather than the Hamas action.
Question #9: When you heard about the riot that broke out in an airport in Dagestan the other day, in which rioters looked to attack passengers on a flight from Tel Aviv, did you instinctively want more “context” or to understand the rioters’ point of view? If so, give yourself five points.
Question #10: Do you interpret the Biden administration’s support for Israel principally as evidence of Jewish political power in the United States? Give yourself five points for a soft yes, ten points for a more emphatic yes.
Scorecard
0-to-10 points: Not an anti-semite. I absolve you of sin.
11-to-30 points: You have been infected with left antisemitism, but it’s nothing a little reading on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of the left won’t cure.
31-to-50 points: You’re dabbling in some serious antisemitic ideation. You clearly don’t mind violence against Jews very much.
51-to-75 points: You’ve got a serious problem.
76-and above: You’re a member of the Raging Bigot Club.
Friday, May 26, 2023
Hannah Arendt Center Summer Social: Preview of Fall Conference on Friendship and Politics
This week I went to the Summer Social at the Hannah Arendt Center on the campus of Bard College. The campus is set in rolling wooded hills on the east bank of the Hudson River between Albany and New York City. I arrived just after a short downpour so the weather was cool and cloudy. Tables had been set up for dinner outside, but the wet tables meant the event was indoors.
As soon as I entered the large old dwelling that houses the HAC I was greeted by Christine Gonzalez Stanton, Executive Director of the HAC and the kind of enthusiastic person every organization would love to have in charge of operations. She signed me up for the book raffle and pointed me toward the appetizers and drinks in the kitchen.
As soon as I entered the kitchen I met Ken Landauer in person. We had been in one of the smaller Zoom groups discussing Hannah Arendt's lectures on Kant. Ken makes zero-waste furniture in a nearby town. The website of his company FN Furniture lists Ken as "Chairperson" of the business noted for making things to sit on. In person he is even more dryly funny as he is on Zoom.
I have been a member of the HAC for several years and attended three annual conferences in person. Since 2018, I have joined weekly meetings of the Virtual Reading Group of the HAC. As many as 200 people participate in these 90-minute calls on Friday afternoons year-round with seasonal breaks. At the the Summer Social and the Annual Conference I have met many people who were only faces on Zoom.
The VRG format is a 20-30 minute introduction of the reading followed by a discussion. The discussion leader is the Founder and Academic Director of the HAC Roger Berkowitz. I sometimes stay on line for the discussions, but I always listen to Roger's introductions of the reading. Here is a short clip of Roger welcoming us to the social:
After the introduction, we walked through the woods up a small hill to the Bard College Cemetery. Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blucher are buried there and have small markers next to each other.
We all placed stones on Arendt's grave. As with so many things in Arendt's life and work, her death was controversial. She wanted to be cremated, not a usual practice in 1975 for Jews. Her wishes were carried despite resistance from a relative. Her ashes are interred in the Bard Cemetery.
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After the walk to the cemetery, we went to the library. Arendt's personal library is in a special collection in the Bard Library. Four scholars connected to the Bard and the HAC made short presentations about their work.
First was Jana Mader, Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard. She will present at the HAC fall conference on the friendship between Arendt and the poet W.H. Auden. Arendt credits Auden with teaching her English and helping to edit the works she wrote in English. The poet Robert Lowell was also a friend of Arendt. Mader put books with inscriptions to greetings to her by the poets on display.
Born in Germany, Mader teaches literature at Bard and is a writer and artist. She just had a book published that made me wish (again) that I could read German fluently. Her book Natur und Nation cooperatively analyzes 19th century literature inspired by the Hudson River with texts inspired by the Rhine River. In October her curated walks to women's history in New York City will be published, this one in English.
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Next Nicholas Dunn spoke about Hannah Arendt's lectures and writing about Emmauel Kant. He talked about a conference he is hosting on June 20 with the author of the book Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, Ronald Beiner.Dunn talked about the way unique Arendt looked at Kant's thought and some of the response to her views. Dunn is the Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. He will also teach courses in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Studies and for the Bard Prison Initiative.
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Jana Bacevic is a visiting scholar at the HAC. She led a conference at the HAC earlier this month on the Social Life of the Mind. She explained Arendt's reading of and view of the The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System by Milovan Dilas, a Yugoslav intellectual. As with the Kant volume, Arendt had a unique perspective on Dilas and his work. Dilas was jailed when the book was published in 1958 because he sent it to western countries for review. Foreign Affairs magazine published a one-paragraph review of the book in 1958 that said:
The manuscript of this book was sent abroad for publication and the author is now in prison as a consequence. It is important both for the quality of its thought and for the fact that it is a root-and-branch criticism of Communism, including Titoism, from within the Party itself. Since he was formerly one of the ranking Party leaders in Jugoslavia, his picture of the Communist monopoly of power is particularly telling, and the indictment is made with a typically Montenegrin lack of restraint.
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Thomas Bartscherer, the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in Humanities, was the final speaker. He announced that his volume in the series Hannah Arendt--Complete Works. Critical Edition will be published this year. He was so happy about the firm publication date that he had the audience chant a call and response of
"When?"
"This year!"
He told us each volume of the critical edition includes images of works in Arendt's library that she used for reference in her works. Underlines, notes, starred items, are all included in the published book along with the text itself. His volume is on Arendt's The Life of the Mind, her last and uncompleted work. She died on the week she was to begin the third volume on judgement.
Bartscherer talked about some of the complexities of finding and compiling annotations. Arendt had five copies of Aristotles Nichomachean Ethics: two in Greek, two in English, one in German. She made notes and underlined passages in all of them, on different passages in each book.
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After the library we went back to the HAC building and ate dinner together, a buffet meal set up in the kitchen. During the dinner I met more people who read and admire Hannah Arendt. I am very much looking forward to returning for the conference on Friendship and Politics in the fall and possibly the event on Kants lectures next month.
Monday, July 11, 2022
Tank Museum Designed as a Warning: Panzer Museum East, Denmark
Most military museums, particularly tank museums, display the best and most lethal weapons of their country. Part of the intent of these museums is to say,
"Look at the awesome firepower our soldiers had."
When I visited the Deutsche Panzermuseum, one hundred years of German innovation and technology was clearly on display. The Armored Corps Museum at Latrun, Israel, displays tanks Israel fought with right up to the Merkava (chariot) developed and built in Israel.
So I was quite surprised when I toured the many exhibits of Panzermuseum East in Denmark. All of the exhibits are of Cold War Soviet weapons and equipment. The museum was designed and built as a warning to what could have happened to Denmark if the Soviet Union had invaded. Their official intent:
At Panzermuseum East we tell the story of the Cold War and our focus since its inception has been to show visitors from around the world what would have been seen on the streets and in the air if the Warsaw Pact, led by Russia, (The Soviet Union), had attacked Denmark during the tense and heated period leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We also document what would have happened if nuclear weapons had been used, and the terrible consequences of this, namely that there would have been a total Ragnarok throughout Europe, with millions of dead and destroyed.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the museum has been tagging displayed vehicles, like the BMP and T-72, that are being used by the Russian invaders of Ukraine.
Regarding the horrific and heinous attack on Ukraine.
Ukraine is being brutally attacked right now, with a lot of material that the Panzer Museum East has on display, which the heroic Ukrainians are also using to defend themselves. Unfortunately, the brutal superpower also has far more modern equipment than the Ukrainians, so it's an unequal battle. That is why it is so important that we all support and help the Ukrainians in their fantastic fight for freedom and democracy.On 28 February, Tank Museum East asked the Danish army for a donation of 1,200 boxes of field rations for the brave soldiers of Ukraine. If they are donated, we will immediately drive to one of the major border crossings between Poland and Ukraine and hand them over to all those who enter Ukraine to fight for freedom and democracy and a happy future. Right now, as you read this, what I myself was terribly and cruelly afraid of when I was young is becoming a harsh reality. I myself, together with my wife, visited Chernobyl and experienced Kyiv, and we had only positive experiences and great respect for the people in their struggle to build a healthy democracy and live as free people.Out of my pacifist ideology and to point out that war and enmity can and will never lead to anything good for humanity, I have founded my very own private tank museum East. That is why spreading the word about history is so important, even if it seems that at the moment no one cares about the atrocities of the past. Of course I have deep contempt for the cruel and blunt attack on Ukraine.Best regardsOwner of the Panzermuseum EastAllan Pedersen and staff
Sunday, June 19, 2022
Deutsche Panzer Museum--World War II Tanks
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