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If WWIII Begins the Same Way as WWII, Don’t Forget to Credit Lew Rockwell!

The Road to Nuclear Armageddon

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June 16, 2022

Ladies and gentlemen, we face a grave danger. The leader of a major European power wants to make territorial revisions. He is surrounded by hostile powers who threaten him. He does not seek war with other countries but if the hostile powers continue to encircle him, he will fight. A European war looms.

You probably think I’m talking about the current crisis between Russia and the Ukraine, but I’m not. I’m talking about Europe just before World War II began in September 1939. At that time, Hitler wanted small territorial revisions with its Polish neighbor. East Prussia was cut off from the rest of Poland by a band of territory called the Polish Corridor.

As the great British historian A.J. P. Taylor explains, “The losses of territory to Poland were, for most Germans, the indelible grievance against Versailles. Hitler undertook a daring operation over this grievance when he planned co-operation with Poland. But there was a way out. The actual Germans under Polish rule might be forgotten—or withdrawn; what could not be forgiven was the ‘Polish corridor’ which divided East Prussia from the Reich. Here, too, there was a possible compromise. Germany might be satisfied with a corridor across the corridor—a complicated idea for which there were however many precedents in German history. German feeling could be appeased by the recovery of Danzig. This seemed easy. Danzig was not part of Poland. It was a Free City, with its own autonomous administration under a High Commissioner, appointed by the League of Nations. The Poles themselves, in their false pride as a Great Power, had taken the lead in challenging the League’s authority. Surely, therefore, they would not object if Germany took the League’s place. Moreover, the problem had changed since 1919. Then the port of Danzig had been essential to Poland. Now, with the creation of Gdynia by the Poles, Danzig needed Poland more than the Poles needed Danzig. It should then be easy to arrange for the safeguarding of Poland’s economic interests, and yet to recover Danzig for the Reich.”

The British responded by guaranteeing Poland’s western boundary against Germany. They also issued a guarantee to Romania, even though there had been no threat to that country. As a result of the guarantee, Poland refused to negotiate with Germany. War broke out, and Poland was destroyed.  The great Murray Rothbard tells us what happened: “And as a direct result, Poland was destroyed. Hitler’s ‘demands’ on the Poles were almost non-existent; as Taylor points out, the Weimar Republic would have scorned the terms as a sell-out of vital German interests. Hitler at most wanted a ‘corridor through the Corridor’ and the return of heavily-German (and pro-German) Danzig; in return for which he would guarantee the rest. Poland resolutely refused to yield’ one inch of Polish soil,’ and refused even to negotiate with the Germans, and this down to the last minute.”

Murray draws an important lesson from what happened then. This lesson provides the key to keeping us out of a nuclear war today. And of course a nuclear war would destroy the world. Here is what Murray says: “[Polish Foreign Minister Józef] Beck clearly knew that Britain and France could not actually save Poland from attack. He relied to the end on those great shibboleths of all ‘hard-liners’ and other ‘crackpot realists’ everywhere: X is ‘bluffing’; X will back down if met by toughness, resolution, and the resolve not to give an inch. (Just as in the case of Finland, when the ‘X is bluffing’ line of the hard-liners is shown to be sheer absurdity, and X has already attacked, the ‘hard-liner’ turns, self-contradictorily, to the dictum that not ‘one inch of sacred soil’ will be given up, no peace while the enemy is on our soil, etc., which completes the ruin of the country by its ‘hard-line’ rulers. This is what Beck did to Poland.) As Taylor shows, Hitler had originally not the slightest intention to invade or conquer Poland; instead, Danzig and other minor rectifications would be gotten out of the way, and then Poland would be a comfortable ally, perhaps for an eventual invasion of Soviet Russia. But Beck’s irrational toughness blocked the path.”

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From LRC, here.

What’s So Great About the Cairo Genizah?

Text Treasures: Cairo Geniza

300,000 documents found in an attic storeroom

Marek Dospěl  June 01, 2022

The Cairo Geniza refers to the cache of about 300,000 documents found in the attic storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, located in Fustat (in Old Cairo), the capital city of Egypt during the seventh–tenth centuries C.E. The creation and preservation of the Cairo Geniza owes to the long-lived Jewish habit of consigning disused texts in Hebrew script to a slow decay in dignified limbo, safe from profanation, rather than casually destroying them through dumping. Not a curated collection or archive arranged for storage and retrieval, the Cairo Geniza is thus an accidental mass of dead writings piled up much like archaeological strata. The Hebrew word geniza signifies “hiding place.”

The storeroom—accessible only by ladder from the women’s balcony of the synagogue—was never really forgotten, so we are perhaps unjustified in talking about its discovery. Starting in the 1880s, however, scholars from Jerusalem, England, and elsewhere learned of the existence of the documents and thus began to empty the storeroom of some of its contents. Among the early visitors were the Scottish twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, who upon their return to Cambridge, in 1896, showed their documents to the great scholar of Jewish studies, Solomon Schechter. The documents included a page of the Hebrew original of the book of Ben Sira and inspired Schechter to travel to Cairo. With permission of the rabbi of the synagogue, Refael Aharon Ben-Shimon, himself an important scholar, Schechter was able to remove the remaining contents of the Cairo Geniza.a

Built between 1025 and 1041, the Ben Ezra Synagogue served the local community for more than 900 years—thus explaining the enormous volume of accumulated writings—until it was decommissioned during the 1960s. The survival of the documents owes to the fortunate confluence of multiple factors, including favorable climate with stable humidity levels; the omnipresent dust from local limestone containing high levels of calcium carbonate, which naturally aids the preservation of paper, parchment, and ink; and the fact that the storeroom was apparently large enough that it never needed to be emptied.

The text treasures of the Cairo Geniza cover more than a millennium of history. While the latest documents date from the 19th century, the earliest recovered writings predate the founding of the synagogue by centuries. This is due to the practice of repurposing old documents (often as palimpsests) and because sturdy parchment Torah scrolls may be used for centuries and, in the present instance, clearly were transferred from an older synagogue to the then newly built Ben Ezra. Dating as far back as the fifth or sixth century, the earliest writings in the geniza survived because they were reused as scrap paper to record new texts.

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From BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY SOCIETY, here.

I Agree. Death (‘Morbidity’) Is Unsettling!

Woke researchers call for term ‘morbidly’ obese to be banned because it’s offensive

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Calling the fattest category of people ‘morbidly’ obese is offensive, woke researchers said today.

And they urged doctors and scientists to stop referring to unsuccessful attempts to lose weight as ‘failures’.

Terms used moving forward should include ‘ineffective’ or ‘insufficient’ weight loss, or even ‘secondary weight regain’.

No specific suggestions were given to replace the phrase ‘morbid’, however severe is often used instead.

Critics today slammed the recommendation, published in a leading obesity journal, saying it was ‘odd’ given morbid obesity is a clinical term.

But industry experts agreed that ‘less stigmatising’ language was crucial in the battle against the bulge, saying ‘words truly do matter’.

Joe Nadglowski, president of the Obesity Action Coalition, said: ‘The old expression “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” doesn’t apply for those living with obesity.’

It comes after a separate team of researchers claimed the word obesity is racist and should be dropped in favor of ‘people in larger bodies’.

Calling the fattest category of people 'morbidly' obese is offensive, and so is saying their weight loss attempt was a 'failure'
From BSF QH, here.