Book Review: ‘The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers and Guerrillas’ by Max Hastings

By Joseph C. Goulden

http://www.washingtontimes.com/

May 16, 2016

Writing in the New York Review of Books in March, British historian Max Hastings noted (with an author’s undisguised pleasure) that “seventy years after the conclusion of World War II, works about the conflict enjoy a popularity second only to cookbooks.”

Such is due in large part to writers such as Sir Max, whose hard-eyed objectivity about war is a far cry from the “feel good” books from Stephen Ambrose and others. Mr. Hastings‘ 2011 work “Inferno” dealt with the brutality of war, and it is easily the best one-volume history of the war.

Now I must award Mr. Hastings another “best.” In a quarter-century of reviewing books on intelligence in these pages and elsewhere, “The Secret War” ranks foremost.

His massive overview is a fascinating look at the dark world of espionage and dirty tricks that are a part of warfare, with terse and readable looks at spies, communications intercepts and guerrillas. He postulates some rules that should be heeded by modern masters of the dark arts: report what you find, not what you expect that superiors would like to hear. Further, in the end, intelligence is a sideshow to war — essential, to be sure, but in the end, battles are won by “great armies, fleets, air forces.” In other words, by brave persons who face the enemy directly.

Further, expect political leaders to view intelligence with suspicion. As Joseph Stalin put it, “A spy should be like the devil: no one can trust him, not even himself.”

Thus an anomaly: Although the Soviet Union ran the most extensive espionage network of the 20th century, relying heavily upon fellow-travelers, Moscow frequently ignored their reports — including a forewarning of the German invasion of 1941.

Here Mr. Hastings has a jibe for American leftists who continue to ignore the likes of, say, an Alger Hiss. He feels that espionage writers “dwell obsessively on the treachery of Britain’s Cambridge Five, but relatively few recognize what we might call the Washington and Berkeley five hundred — a small army of American leftists who served as informants for Soviet intelligence.” Although he says Sen. Joseph McCarthy “stigmatized many individuals unjustly,” he was correct in charging that there was a vast number of persons, in government and elsewhere, “whose first loyalty was not to their own flag.”

Signal intelligence, he writes, achieved “an unprecedented importance in operational planning;” nonetheless, it provided no “magic keys to victory on the ground, in the air and at sea. The Germans, Italians and Japanese always had to be fought.” Battlefield victories did not come until Allied forces achieved military superiority.

Mr. Hastings gives the Office of Strategic Services and its British counterpart, the Special Operations Executive, high marks for boosting the morale of persons who resisted German occupation of their countries. But he takes a dim view of the “supposed military achievements of guerrillas,” especially in connection with D-Day. He writes, “the story that the Resistance ‘liberated’ parts of France in August 1944 is a fairy tale — the German army retreated because it had suffered defeat in Normandy.”

Nor, save in rare instances, could signals intelligence reveal enemy intentions. A notable exception was British intercepts of messages sent to Tokyo by Baron Hiroshi Oshima, Japanese ambassador to Germany. Some 2,000 of his cables were decrypted between 1940 and 1945 and distributed in London and Washington. Although he got poor marks for “assessments and predictions,” his conversations with top Nazis proved valuable, as were exchanges between Berlin and Tokyo.

As Mr. Hastings writes, “Never in history had belligerents been empowered to eavesdrop on the conversation of their enemies’ policy-makers, as now they were.” Gen. George C. Marshall, the U.S. chief of staff, commented that Oshima was “our main basis of information concerning Hitler’s intentions in Europe.”

Many historians have treated British intercepts of German signals as a “war-winner” in its own right, but as Mr. Hastings notes, intercepts were “always patchy.” Further, knowing enemy intentions rarely diminished its strength.

Nonetheless, Mr. Hastings credits signal intelligence for a feat that essentially changed the course of war in the Pacific. Naval officer Joseph Rochefort was not star; indeed he barely escaped being cashiered for poor seamanship and was shunted off to code-breaking duties.

But he had a stroke of genius which Mr. Hastings details. Studying Japanese intercepts in June 1942, Rochefort concluded the next attack target would be Midway. He was correct, and carrier fighter planes sank four Japanese carriers. “It was arguably the most influential single intelligence achievement of the global conflict,” Mr. Hastings writes. (Nonetheless, Navy superiors denied him a contemporary decoration; he received a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal in 1985.)

Ten cloaks, 10 daggers.

• Joseph Goulden is the author of 18 nonfiction books.

Today's Tune: The War On Drugs - Down The Rabbit Hole Festival, The Netherlands 2015 (Complete Show)

From 1970s-Era Academic ‘High Theory’ to Transgender Bathrooms on Campus

by HEATHER MAC DONALD

http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 16, 2016

Source: iStock

One take-away from the transgender-bathroom wars is that the public ignores arcane academic theory at its peril. For two decades, a growing constellation of gender-studies, queer-studies, and women’s-studies departments have been beavering away at propositions that would strike many people outside academia as surprising — such as that biological sex and “gender” are mere ideological constructs imposed by a Eurocentric, heteronormative power structure. Even though skeptical journalists have regularly dived into the murky swamp of academic theory and returned bearing nuggets of impenetrable jargon and even stranger ideas, the public and most politicians have shrugged off such academic abominations, if they have taken note at all. 

(Senator Marco Rubio’s deplorable jab at “philosophy majors” during his presidential run demonstrated how clueless your typical politician is about the real problems in academia.)

Now gender theory has leapt from the academy to the real world with the demand by the Obama administration that public schools allow biological boys, bearing their full complement of male genitals, to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms if those boys declare themselves female. 

How did this happen? A pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media. The products of the narcissistic academy graduate and bring their high theory indoctrination with them into the federal and state bureaucracies and into newsrooms. Even the judiciary is affected. The opinion of the federal district court striking down California’s Proposition 8 (declaring that marriage was an institution uniting men and women), for example, was steeped in the women’s-studies notion that marriage originated as a way to impose a subordinate “gender” role on females.

The most notable aspect of this latest public eruption of academic theory is how quickly the new academically driven moral consensus was formed. The current wave of non-academic transgender activism began last summer, when the New York Times ran a full-page editorial declaring that the oppression of the transgendered by the biologically obsessed heteronormative majority was our most pressing civil-rights struggle. TheTimes then followed up with a series of news stories documenting the alleged oppression and plight of the “trans community.” Now, less than a year later, any parent with qualms about having his twelve-year-old daughter share a locker room with a 14-year-old boy is branded as the equivalent of someone advocating a return to whites-only water fountains. An issue that didn’t even exist a year ago is now completely settled in the minds of the cultural elite; anyone who opposes the new regime is simply an atavistic, benighted bigot.

How short are the memories of the politically righteous! In the 1970s, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg pooh-poohed as sheer demagoguery the idea that the Equal Rights Amendment would require co-ed bathrooms, her implicit assumption being that such an arrangement would of course be preposterous. In 1991, the Michigan Women’s Festival expelled a transsexual woman on the ground that she was in biological fact a male. The First International Conference on Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender at California State University, Northridge, in 1995 maintained separate bathroom facilities for males and females, causing a protest by trans activists. Gay-rights activist and historian Martin Duberman stormed out of a gender-theory presentation. Now those early advocates for gay and women’s rights would be lumped into the same category as segregationists.

There are several corollary take-aways to the present moment. First, we have learned that the trans movement trumps feminism, just as Europe’s reaction to the mass Muslim sexual assaults this New Year’s Eve revealed that multiculturalism trumps feminism. Given the constant caterwauling about “rape culture” by campus feminists, one would have thought that feminists would have opposed allowing males’ use of facilities frequented by unclothed or otherwise vulnerable females. But apparently the claim that college campuses are awash in serial “rapists” waxes and wanes in salience depending on context. It now becomes merely another sign of redneck bigotry to suggest that a heterosexual male (i.e., a rapist in waiting) or a sexual pervert may take advantage of the new trans rules. Wellesley and Smith colleges have twisted themselves into knots deciding whether the “trans” category trumps the favored status of females. They concluded that being trans cancels the disability of being male and in fact elevates the trans “female” to the highest rank on the victim totem pole.

Second, we have learned that all academic High Theory bears watching. The conceptual roots of gender theory lie in 1970s-era deconstruction and post-structuralism, with their pretense to having obliterated the traditional categories of Western epistemology and metaphysics. From Jacques Derrida’s purported “deconstruction” of the privileging of the spoken word over the written sign, and of presence over absence, it turned out to be not so big a step to the alleged dismantling of the biological difference between male and female.

Third, we notice that all colleges matter when it comes to the generation of corrosive High Theory — not just the Ivy League. The University of Iowa, for example, jumpstarted the field of queer studies in 1994 with a conference on queerness.

Finally, we see that narcissistic students are now co-equal drivers with their professors when it comes to rapidly evolving victim theory. By one count, there are now some 60 categories of gender identity, many of those developed by students desperate to find some last way to be transgressive in an environment where their every self-involved claim of victimhood is met by fawning attention and apologies from the campus diversity bureaucracy. How those 60 categories will play out for public policy remains to be seen.

The ultimate agenda here, however, is to destroy any last shred of female modesty that might stand in the way of the total normalization of casual promiscuity, in obedience to the sexual-liberation movement of the 1960s. Many girls are embarrassed to be seen naked by other girls. Now, however, they are being told to swallow their inhibitions if a boy is in their bathroom or locker room. This can be achieved only by adopting a stance of utter indifference to the powerful, primal taboos around nakedness and sex — in other words, to adopt the sad sexual crudeness of the stars of Sex and the City or of Lena Dunham. And according to the Obama administration, any parent or school official who disagrees is standing in the way of moral progress. One shrinks to contemplate what the academy is cooking up next.

— Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the forthcoming The War on Cops (June 2016). 

On 'Clinton Cash', Or, It’s Always Worse Than You Think

BY ROGER KIMBALL MAY 13, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/

In his column for PJ Media, my friend Ron Radosh, the distinguished historian, outlines the case for believing that Hillary Clinton is the “lesser of two evils” compared to Donald Trump. Ron says that he is “fully aware” of Hillary’s liabilities, yet concludes:

On foreign policy, there is more hope that [she] will take a course that asserts American leadership abroad.

Ron is not alone in asserting this. Several prominent conservatives have, with varying degrees of hesitation (not to say repugnance), embraced Hillary Clinton as the less bad alternative to Donald Trump.

A new film, which will debut Monday at Cannes, may force them to reconsider that judgment.

Clinton Cash, the documentary film which I watched in previews yesterday, is based on the best-selling exposé of the same name by Peter Schweizer, the tireless investigative journalist who has devoted himself to confronting political corruption and crony capitalism regardless of the political affiliation of the perpetrators. Produced by Breitbart’s Stephen K. Bannon and directed by M. A. Taylor, Clinton Cash is crisply narrated by Schweizer and provides a relentless and devastating portrait of brazen financial venality in exchange for political favors.

I read through Clinton Cash quickly when it came out last May. This was no right-wing hit job (as the Clinton campaign asserted) but rather a methodical and exhaustively sourced chronicle of how the Clintons parlayed Bill’s celebrity, Hillary’s position as secretary of State, and her possible future tenure as president of the United States into a veritable Niagara of cash.

Eye-popping speaking fees for Bill -- $250,000, $500,000, even $750,000 a pop -- and millions upon millions directed to the Clinton Foundation and its offshoots. Where was the money coming from? Did they actually find his "wisdom" that valuable?

No. The money came from multinational corporations that needed a favor. Shady foreign financiers. Dubious state entities in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Russia, South America, and elsewhere.

Are you worried about “money in politics”? Stop the car, get an extended-stay room, and take a long hard look at the Clintons’ operation for the last sixteen years.

The Associated Press estimated that their net worth when they left the White House in 2000 was zero (really, minus $500K). Now they are worth about $200 million.

How did they do it? By “reading The Wall Street Journal” (classical reference)?

Not quite. The Clintons have perfected pay-to-play political influence peddling on a breathtaking scale. Reading Clinton Cash is a nauseating experience.

At the center of the book is not just a tale of private greed and venality. That is just business as usual in Washington (and elsewhere). No, what is downright scary is way the Clintons have been willing to trade away legitimate environmental concerns and even our national security for the sake of filthy lucre.

Do you doubt the authority of Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution? How about The New York Times, then?

Last year, following up with independent investigative research based on revelations in Clinton Cash, the Times published a long and devastating story about the how the Clintons sold out some twenty percent of American uranium assets to a Russian company controlled by Vladimir Putin. “At the heart of the tale,” the Times reported:

... are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One. 

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Worried yet? It gets worse:

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well. 

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

It gets still worse, much worse. Read the book. But then watch the documentary, coming to a television screen near you much sooner than the announced release date of July 24.

It gives a detailed analysis of how the Clintons hypocritically mouth progressive pieties while selling out those values to multinational corporate interests on the one hand, and some of world’s creepiest political actors on the other.

Clinton Cash should outrage not only conservatives but also supporters of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders. Despite its thriller-like scenarios, this brilliant documentary is not a partisan melodrama. It is a public service.

This should be watched by anyone who cares about restoring basic trust and accountability to our political life. The sad truth is, I conclude, Hillary Clinton is ostentatiously unfit to be President of the United States. We do not, pace my friend Ron Radosh, possess instruments delicate enough to determine that she is the "lesser of two evils."

What we do know, however -- what this documentary demonstrates beyond cavil -- is that Bill and Hillary Clinton are as corrupt as they are hypocritical, lining their pockets by selling out the values they pretend to cherish. It makes for a repellent spectacle.

Obama, Truman and Hiroshima

There’s zero reason to apologize for the atomic bombing, which forestalled invasion and saved lives.

By Wilson D. Miscamble

http://www.wsj.com/

May 11, 2016

President Obama speaks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in March during their meeting at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

The White House announcement Tuesday that President Obama plans to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park during his trip to Japan later this month undoubtedly will prompt much debate over President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons in August 1945.

Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, wrote online Tuesday that the president will reflect on the site’s significance but “will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II.” That claim is disingenuous. To be the first U.S. president to visit Hiroshima is to spark re-evaluations of Truman’s action and invite speculation that Mr. Obama will apologize, at least implicitly.

One can only hope that Mr. Obama grounds anything he might say on a sound historical knowledge of the situation Truman confronted and the basis for his decision. The president certainly should distance himself completely from the specious interpretation of the “atomic diplomacy” historians, who disgracefully allege that Truman, hoping to intimidate the Soviet Union in the already-developing Cold War, dropped two atomic bombs on a Japan that he knew was on the verge of surrender.

Mr. Obama, as well as his Japanese hosts, should appreciate that Truman authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both major military-industrial targets, to help win the gruesome Pacific War as quickly as possible and with the loss of the fewest American lives—and, as it turned out, the loss of the fewest Japanese lives.

His goal was to avoid an invasion of Japan’s home islands, which Truman knew would mean, in his words, “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.” For those who need reminding, the battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest, most ferocious engagements of World War II, with Allied forces—most of them American—suffering more than 65,000 casualties, including 14,000 dead. Truman’s intentions and assumptions were legitimate.

Despite the damage inflicted on Japan by mid-1945 from conventional air attacks and a naval blockade, its leaders, and especially its military, clung fiercely to a plan called Ketsu-Go, or decisive battle. The aim was to inflict such punishment on invaders that they would sue for peace. The Japanese government had mobilized a large part of the population into a national militia to defend the home islands. The twisted samurai-types who led the Japanese military geared up with true banzai spirit to use their people in a kind of national kamikaze campaign.

Even after the atomic bombs were dropped, and following the Soviet attack in Manchuria on Aug. 8, 1945, the Japanese military leadership wanted to fight on. Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Emperor Hirohito to understand clearly that defending the homeland was hopeless. It took his unprecedented intervention to break the impasse in the Japanese government and finally to order surrender.

Mr. Obama should appreciate well that all the viable alternative scenarios to secure American victory—continued conventional bombing of Japanese cities and infrastructure, a choking and lengthy naval blockade, the likely terrible invasions involving massive firepower—would have meant significantly greater casualties on both sides. They would have included thousands of Allied prisoners of war whom the Japanese planned to execute in the event of invasion.

American military estimates at the time were for over half a million U.S. casualties alone. And hard as it may be to accept when one sees the terrible destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese losses would have been far greater without the bombs.

Using these weapons also freed innocent peoples throughout Asia from Japanese oppression. Japan’s murderous rampage from Manchuria to New Guinea killed 17 million to 24 million. Estimates are that for each month of 1945 the war continued, upward of 250,000 innocents died. These facts surely shouldn’t be forgotten when President Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lay their wreaths.

Truman’s authorization to use the A-bombs should be seen as his choosing the least awful of the options available. He didn’t turn his back on some obvious and feasible “moral” course of action that would have secured a Japanese surrender. Even in retrospect, far removed from the pressures that Truman faced in 1945, his critics can offer no serious and persuasive alternatives.

Harry Truman of Independence, Mo., tried to live by a moral code grounded in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Yet he also knew that statesmen must make difficult decisions in the fog of war. Perhaps Truman had the A-bomb in mind when he wrote 15 years later that “sometimes you have a choice of evils, in which case you try to take the course that is likely to bring the least harm.”

One suspects that Mr. Obama will have regular recourse to Truman’s defense when responding to the critics who blame him for the costly failure of his policy in the Syrian civil war, in which 400,000 lives have been lost, or his inability to halt the terrible genocide of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

However that may be, when Mr. Obama visits Hiroshima on May 27 he should place no distance between himself and Harry Truman. Rather he should pay tribute to the president whose actions brought a terrible war to an end.

Father Miscamble is a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and the author of “The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs and the Defeat of Japan” (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Millennials Embrace Socialism, but Do They Know What It Is?

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

May 13, 2016

Supporters cheer as Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a rally Monday, March 21, 2016, in Salt Lake City.

 (John Locher, AP)

Socialism is having a moment.

I’m not just referring to Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the Democratic primaries. Various polls show that Millennials have a more favorable view of socialism than of capitalism. And Millennials generally are the only age group that views socialism more favorably than unfavorably.

Some conservatives aren’t surprised. Schools have been force-feeding left-wing propaganda to kids like it was feed for geese at a foie gras factory.

On the other hand, what are we to make of the fact that only a fraction of the young people who say they like socialism can explain what it is? If left-wing indoctrination is so effective at getting kids to like socialism, you’d think it would have more success at getting kids to at least parrot back a serviceable definition.

Regardless, this is a familiar tale. Young people have a well-documented tendency of skipping facts and arguments and going straight to conclusions.

Writing in The Federalist, Emily Ekins and Joy Pullmann note that many of these young people think socialism is federally mandated niceness. A 2014 Reason-Rupe survey asked Millennials to define socialism. They had in mind a more generous safety net, more kindness and, as one put it, more “being together.”

But when asked if they agreed with a more technically accurate definition of socialism — government control of the economy — support dropped considerably (though not nearly enough). Given a choice between a government-managed economy and a free-market economy, Millennials overwhelmingly chose the latter. It seems young people realize that putting bureaucrats in charge of Uber wouldn’t work too well.

Still, it boggles the mind that anyone can see the folly of having the government take over Amazon or Facebook but be blind to the problems of having the government run health care.

More intriguing to me is the fact that kids who don’t know what textbook socialism is actually have a better understanding of what drives socialism in the first place.

Karl Marx was one of the worst things to ever happen to socialism, and not just because he set the world on a path to the murder, oppression, and enslavement of millions upon millions of people. It was Marx and his confreres who persuaded the intellectual classes that socialism was a strictly “scientific” doctrine. For generations, economists — real and so-called — worked on the assumption that the economy could be run like a machine. Just as engineers had mastered the steam engine and the transistor, they could do likewise with supply and demand.

For generations, intellectuals — real and so-called — argued that economics was best left to “planners.” Time and again, reality — specifically, the reality dictated by human desires — refused to be bent to neatly arrayed columns of numbers and well-stacked slips of paper. The philosopher-economist Friedrich Hayek long ago explained that planners suffer from what he called “the knowledge problem.” Even the best bureaucrat couldn’t know what customers, suppliers, and managers on the ground wanted or needed.

And each time the planners insisted that if they just had a little bit more power, a bit more data, a few more resources, they could make planning work. When all you have is a hammer, you’re inclined to believe that there’s no problem a few more nails won’t fix.

The Soviet Union and its various cousins did much to discredit “scientific socialism,” what with all the killing and totalitarianism. The fact that it didn’t seem to make people richer also undermined its appeal. “Scientifically,” people didn’t want to be bullied, oppressed, or impoverished.

The unrealism of socialism spelled its undoing — for a time.

The dilemma is that there is a reality underneath the fraud of scientific socialism. The first socialists were not economists or technocrats. They were romantics and nostalgists. They loathed the relentless logic of the market and its reward of merit and efficiency as judged by the marketplace.

They wanted to return to the imagined Eden of the noble savage and the state of nature. They wanted to live in a world of tribal brotherhood and mutual love. Long before the math of “scientific socialism” there were the emotions of socialism, both light and dark: egalitarianism and envy.

Young people understandably are drawn by the promise of “being together.” But they think the federal government can make it happen. If government planners can’t even provide goods and services efficiently, how will they ever provide togetherness?

— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review​. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

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Kardashians Do Cuba: The World's Coolest Place

Shooting the next show at a Stalinist death-camp.

Humberto Fontova

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

May 12, 2016

Kourtney, Khloé and Kim smoke cigars with pal Malika.

Photo: Khloé Kardashian / Instagram

Thanks largely to Obama’s recent “engagement,” Stalinist Cuba has quickly become the absolute coolest place on earth.

Close on the heels of Katy Perry, The Rolling Stones and the Obama family itself, this week Karl Lagerfeld showcased his Chanel “cruise line” with a fashion-show extravaganza where Havana’s Prado Street served as the catwalk/runway for the world’s coolest models. Gisele Bundchen, Tilda Swinton and Vin Diesel monkey-shined for the paparazzi on the sidelines.

Not to be outdone, the Kardashians just arrived in Havana to shoot their next show.   

Attaining such status for coolness among the world’s coolest people is not easy. Such coolness does not just land haphazardly in the lap of any random society. It must be worked on. So let us briefly peruse the societal and political characteristics that the cool and beautiful people (all liberals, needless to add) make a big media show of denouncing.

With this list in hand, we shall scan the world looking for the places where the political authorities most scrupulously eschew such wickedness and thus escape the vilification from cool people that befell such places as Apartheid South Africa; Pinochet’s Chile; Baltimore, Maryland; Ferguson, Missouri or —please give me a second to reach for the smelling salts here--the state of North Carolina. 

Firstly, do not mistreat blacks. For heaven’s sake! Do not even jail blacks if they are convicted (by an independent jury during an internationally monitored trail) of being communist terrorists. South Africa learned this bitter lesson with Nelson Mandela.

In fact, the strictures of cool people stipulate that governmental authorities must not kill blacks even in self defense.Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland recently had this valuable lesson driven home by many cool people. 

Given the above guidelines, you would certainly not want the distinction of having jailed and tortured-- without even rudimentary due process-- the most and longest suffering black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere; many more political prisoners than were jailed by Apartheid South Africa, in fact. 

And you certainly do not want videos going viral that show veritable lynchings by your white firing squads of untried black men who were tumbled into a mass grave by the volley and buried with bulldozers.

And don’t let word get out that your KGB-trained police make a weekly habit of savagely attacking -- with truncheons, tire irons and machetes -- helpless black women who are carrying flowers and reciting the words of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks.

Whoops! Sorry!  Above I just described Castro’s Cuba, the world’s coolest place.  

Another area where cool people are very sensitive is the issue of “gay rights.” And as we’ve recently learned in the cases of Indiana and North Carolina, in the view of cool people, the very definition of “gay rights” can be pretty broad.

So you do not want the distinction of being the only regime in the history of the Western hemisphere to have herded tens of thousands of men and boys into forced labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point for the crime of being gay, genuine or suspected. You especially do not want the International Court of Justice in The Hague to have this on file: “Castro’s Cuba is responsible for the persecution, imprisonment in forced labor concentration camps, torture, banishment, and death of thousands of gays, transvestites and lesbians."  This was filed only a few years ago by one of the world’s biggest gay rights groups, Brazil’s “Grupo Gay da Bahía.”

Whoops! Sorry again! Seems I just described Castro’s Cuba, the world’s coolest place.  

“Women’s rights” are also important for cool people. These “rights”—we’ve recently been given to understand by the ultra-cool Sandra Fluke –are extremely far-reaching and should include taxpayer-subsidized contraceptives for women. 

So you do not want the distinction of having jailed and tortured 35,150 women and girls for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown in the Western Hemisphere until Gisele Bundchen’s fashion icon co-founded a regime with Karl Lagerfeld’s gracious host this week.

The prison conditions for these poor women and girls were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo thusly: "The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rats come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high."

Whoops! Sorry.  Above I again described Castro’s Cuba, the world’s coolest place.

Cool people also make a big show of promoting “peace.” To hear them babble, armed conflict between nations has always been a historical abomination. So you definitely do not want to be on record as being modern history’s most crazed warmongers, to the point of wantonly bringing the world to the very precipice of nuclear war.

We reject any peaceful approach! Violence is inevitable! To establish socialism rivers of blood must flow! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims! Hatred is the central element of our struggle!

And you certainly do not want to make an icon of the racist, mass-murdering warmonger responsible for the hate speech quoted above by plastering his image all over your fiefdom.  Cool people might get the wrong idea and start mimicking the fashion sense of modern history’s most crazed nuclear warmonger by adopting his berets as the coolest fashion item for the coolest fashion show in the world.

And if anyone should expose the atrocities above with thorough documentation in a series of internationally-acclaimed books your KGB-founded and mentored media should denounce him as a “scoundrel and traitor.”

 Tags: Castro, Cuba, Hollywood

Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme

by  Paul McHugh
within Bioethics, Culture, Science, Sexuality
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/
June 10, 2015

Photograph: FRF/Getty

For forty years as the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School—twenty-six of which were also spent as Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital—I’ve been studying people who claim to be transgender. Over that time, I’ve watched the phenomenon change and expand in remarkable ways.

A rare issue of a few men—both homosexual and heterosexual men, including some who sought sex-change surgery because they were erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women—has spread to include women as well as men. Even young boys and girls have begun to present themselves as of the opposite sex. Over the last ten or fifteen years, this phenomenon has increased in prevalence, seemingly exponentially. Now, almost everyone has heard of or met such a person.

Publicity, especially from early examples such as “Christine” Jorgenson, “Jan” Morris, and “Renee” Richards, has promoted the idea that one’s biological sex is a choice, leading to widespread cultural acceptance of the concept. And, that idea, quickly accepted in the 1980s, has since run through the American public like a revelation or “meme” affecting much of our thought about sex.

The champions of this meme, encouraged by their alliance with the broader LGBT movement, claim that whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, is more of a disposition or feeling about yourself than a fact of nature. And, much like any other feeling, it can change at any time, and for all sorts of reasons. Therefore, no one could predict who would swap this fact of their makeup, nor could one justifiably criticize such a decision.

At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of “transgendered” among young and old.

Olympic Athlete Turned "Pin-Up" Girl

This history may clarify some aspects of the latest high-profile transgender claimant. Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion, is turning away from his titular identity as one of the “world’s greatest male athletes.” Jenner announced recently that he “identifies as a woman” and, with medical and surgical help, is busy reconstructing his physique.

I have not met or examined Jenner, but his behavior resembles that of some of the transgender males we have studied over the years. These men wanted to display themselves in sexy ways, wearing provocative female garb. More often than not, while claiming to be a woman in a man’s body, they declared themselves to be “lesbians” (attracted to other women). The photograph of the posed, corseted, breast-boosted Bruce Jenner (a man in his mid-sixties, but flaunting himself as if a “pin-up” girl in her twenties or thirties) on the cover of Vanity Fair suggests that he may fit the behavioral mold that Ray Blanchard has dubbed an expression of “autogynephilia”—from gynephilia (attracted to women) and auto (in the form of oneself).

The Emperor’s New Clothes

But the meme—that your sex is a feeling, not a biological fact, and can change at any time—marches on through our society. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In that tale, the Emperor, believing that he wore an outfit of special beauty imperceptible to the rude or uncultured, paraded naked through his town to the huzzahs of courtiers and citizens anxious about their reputations. Many onlookers to the contemporary transgender parade, knowing that a disfavored opinion is worse than bad taste today, similarly fear to identify it as a misapprehension.

I am ever trying to be the boy among the bystanders who points to what’s real. I do so not only because truth matters, but also because overlooked amid the hoopla—enhanced now by Bruce Jenner’s celebrity and Annie Leibovitz’s photography—stand many victims. Think, for example, of the parents whom no one—not doctors, schools, nor even churches—will help to rescue their children from these strange notions of being transgendered and the problematic lives these notions herald. These youngsters now far outnumber the Bruce Jenner type of transgender. Although they may be encouraged by his public reception, these children generally come to their ideas about their sex not through erotic interests but through a variety of youthful psychosocial conflicts and concerns.

First, though, let us address the basic assumption of the contemporary parade: the idea that exchange of one’s sex is possible. It, like the storied Emperor, is starkly, nakedly false. Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.” In that lies their problematic future.

When “the tumult and shouting dies,” it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers.

How to Treat Gender Dysphoria

So how should we make sense of this matter today? As with any mental phenomenon, what’s crucial is noting its fundamental characteristic and then identifying the many ways in which that characteristic can manifest itself.

The central issue with all transgender subjects is one of assumption—the assumption that one’s sexual nature is misaligned with one’s biological sex. This problematic assumption comes about in several different ways, and these distinctions in its generation determine how to manage and treat it.

Based on the photographic evidence one might guess Bruce Jenner falls into the group of men who come to their disordered assumption through being sexually aroused by the image of themselves as women. He could have been treated for this misaligned arousal with psychotherapy and medication. Instead, he found his way to surgeons who worked him over as he wished. Others have already commented on his stereotypic caricature of women as decorative “babes” (“I look forward to wearing nail polish until it chips off,” he said to Diane Sawyer)—a view that understandably infuriates feminists—and his odd sense that only feelings, not facts, matter here.

For his sake, however, I do hope that he receives regular, attentive follow-up care, as his psychological serenity in the future is doubtful. Future men with similar feelings and intentions should be treated for those feelings rather than being encouraged to undergo bodily changes. Group therapies are now available for them.

Most young boys and girls who come seeking sex-reassignment are utterly different from Jenner. They have no erotic interest driving their quest. Rather, they come with psychosocial issues—conflicts over the prospects, expectations, and roles that they sense are attached to their given sex—and presume that sex-reassignment will ease or resolve them.

The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only “gender counselors” who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions.

Those with Gender Dysphoria Need Evidence-Based Care

There are several reasons for this absence of coherence in our mental health system. Important among them is the fact that both the state and federal governments are actively seeking to block any treatments that can be construed as challenging the assumptions and choices of transgendered youngsters. “As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Obama.

In two states, a doctor who would look into the psychological history of a transgendered boy or girl in search of a resolvable conflict could lose his or her license to practice medicine. By contrast, such a physician would not be penalized if he or she started such a patient on hormones that would block puberty and might stunt growth.

What is needed now is public clamor for coherent science—biological and therapeutic science—examining the real effects of these efforts to “support” transgendering. Although much is made of a rare “intersex” individual, no evidence supports the claim that people such as Bruce Jenner have a biological source for their transgender assumptions. Plenty of evidence demonstrates that with him and most others, transgendering is a psychological rather than a biological matter.

In fact, gender dysphoria—the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.

The larger issue is the meme itself. The idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics. It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.

But gird your loins if you would confront this matter. Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.

Paul McHugh, MD, is University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is the author of The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry.