Liberal Terror

...But the impression the reader will gather is that doom is nigh—the Nazis are coming...

...The effort to present it as something new is false propaganda...

...Installing the oil burner in the tenement house was a one-time capital expense—but to buy oil, to service the radiators, pipes, and boiler, to check the bills from the oil company, and to pay the electricity bill for driving the The American Spectator October 1978 21...

...They included Hans-Joachim Klein who, on December 21, 1975, took part in the kidnapping of OPEC officials in Vienna...

...In a military emergency, an engine-driver or an army cook could play a sinister role...

...Millions watched this suave aristocrat, complete with castle and wolfhound, exude the charisma of a Harold Stassen...

...Anyone who understands the economics of housing would expect that lower real property taxes will inevitably produce lower rents because of their stimulation of construction and rehabilitation and ensuing competition...

...Six months later Dr...

...it even, and perhaps more dangerously, offers the satisfaction of high morality to the legislators who support it...

...Miami Beach has it...

...Like the searching of air passengers, it is a symptom of our times in which the old axioms no longer obtain, having been successfully demolished by the consenting liberals of Mr...

...Never again, the Germans say, remembering the dictum of Raymond Aron that a loyal democrat cannot but be an anti-Communist...

...Despite the ban, over the years a number of West German universities have fallen into Marxist hands, and only a few months ago I heard depressing reports from German professors describing how such universities function: The "collective" that comprises janitors, clerks, technicians as well as teaching staff decides on tenure, on the hiring of new teachers, on courses to be taught...

...The verdict was a clarion call at the sound of which all the born-again Raglans sprang to attention...

...Have times changed so much that we should now think otherwise...

...There are times—as was recognized in the republican constitution of ancient Rome, rei gerundae causa—when the security of democracy against subversion, and the security of the citizen against terror, must take precedence over a false liberalism that places freedom and tyranny, terror and law, on the same level...

...The immediate peril of the rent control fallacy is that it seems to be spreading...

...Naumann's conspiracy to overthrow the Bonn governmeni and become the "Fihrer of the future...

...oil heat...

...Wilfried Bose, one of the terrorists killed at Entebbe...

...THE PUBLIC POLICY by Roger Starr Controlling Rents, Razing Cities Everybody hates to pay rent...

...The students preached class war, saying socialism was not a democracy for the monopolists, the press czars, and the reactionary parties...

...F.S...

...Scary headlines appeared all over the world, protest meetings against the new Nazi peril were held, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose management always has considered itself the locomotive of history, was right there out front with a one-hour documentary on this new leader of future Nazi Germany...

...The term Berufsverbot, which translates as a ban to exercise one's profession, is a mendacious slogan cleverly invented by the Left, and more likely than not being of East Berlin provenance...

...In the late 1920s and early 1930s Figures published on April 13, 1976, by the German federal ministry of the interior...

...Unfortunately, a responsible attitude that should be the mark of an editor conscious of his duty to the community always seems to provoke a knee-jerk cry of censorship from those for whom the stealing of their own country's secrets is among the greatest achievements of investigative journalism...

...this latest Adolf could hardly keep a Salvation Army meeting awake, let alone set a Nuremberg rally on fire...

...If no one likes to pay rent, why shouldn't it he regulated by law so that politicians can take credit for the largesse...

...But it could never penetrate Lord Raglan's mind that an enemy could be anybody but the French...

...It equates a respectable newspaper such as Die Welt, which has taken a courageous stand against the fashionable but self-destructive views of the left-wing intelligentsia, with the murderous gangs of terrorists who mow down innocent bystanders and brutally murder public figures...

...The tribunal—judge, jury,and hangman all in one—solemnly "sat" in Frankfurt to accuse and convict democratic Germany of crass political discrimination: The German government does not allow Communists (or Nazis, for that matter, but the Russellites somehow overlooked this) to join the civil service...

...True enough, only a few lawyers have been guilty of violating their professional ethics...

...Part of this burden is their vivid memory of the Weimar bureaucracy that did not consider loyalty to a democratic state its overriding objective...

...Nonetheless, proportionately their number is far greater than that of hijackers among the millions of air travellers...

...Both of Professor Merritt's criticisms, of the so-called Berufsverbot, that is, the exclusion of extremists from public service, and of the treatment of terrorist suspects and their lawyers, show strange indifference towards the two dangers that assail democracies everywhere...

...All this is presented blandly, with many question marks and in a somewhat peculiar syntax, in an effort—to paraphrase George Ball on Israel—to save Germany despite itself...

...13611 against Mathias Walden, chief political commentator of Radio Free Berlin...

...For years, New York was alone among big cities with rent control...

...The reduction in real property taxes will inspire a demand that government ensure that the tax savings be passed on to the tenant...

...but no one ever wants to wait for natural processes when there's a laxative handy for landlords...

...Oh, yes, he Roger Starr is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times...

...Yet Professor Merritt defines such extremists as those "whose views diverge from the 'official' line...

...The constitutional clause bars all members of the Communist Party and of other extremist organizations on the Left and Right from public service...

...and since September 1977 the Western world has again been treated to word pictures of the Germans rushing in a lemming-like panic headless into the embrace of a new right-wing tyranny...

...This provided an unexpected boon for the self-styled Stockholm Tribunal—that misbegotten, scurrilous offspring of Bertrand Russell...

...In the Crimean War, Lord Raglan, who commanded the British troops sent against Russia, always referred to the Russian enemy as "the French...

...a new piece of meat to chew on...

...In the same way, there is nothing degrading or demeaning in searching lawyers who enter prisons or courtrooms...

...We are living in such times and no country is immune from the plague of international terrorism...

...new window frames—didn't he like all this...

...The Naumann episode, however, failed to discourage the Nazi watchers...

...Despite these measures, at the end of 1975 there were employed in German public services 611 extremists of the Right and 1,789 extremists of the Left...

...They believe they are fighting inflation, and helping poor tenants against rich landlords, although, ironically, rent control is never—to my knowledge—based on the tenant's ability to pay (far too complicated even for the hungriest bureaucracy to administer...

...The ban ("the prohibition against the exercise of one's profession by one whose views diverge from the 'official' line," is Professor Merritt's definition) became part of the German Constitution The American Spectator October 1978 19 largely upon the urging of the Allies—in September 1950...

...Boll's ilk...

...Manor is the chief editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...

...I pointed to the improvements we had made in his apartment: a bathroom, for the first time...

...As a result, rent control appears to be not only a supremely popular government activity where there are large numbers of tenants...

...One reason only...

...Unfortunately, the apparent immediate benefits of rent control are obvious to a large number of people, while its destructiveness takes longer to notice...

...Los Angeles held an unofficial "Town Hall" meeting to discuss rent control in December of last year...

...A favorite target, Professor Merritt goes on, "has been the Nobel Laureate Heinrich Boll...

...and it is still going on...

...This distinction is now shared by Washington and Boston...

...In these circumstances the new liberal assault on democratic Germany leaves a had taste in the mouths of those who had suffered from Nazism, fought against Hitler's armies, and now see a new enemy—one with the same concentration camps, the same anti-Semitic trials, and the same suppression of human rights—being abetted by these contemporary Raglans who, imprisoned in their past, do not seem to realize whose dirty work they are doing...

...Manor Liberal Terror A reply to Richard Merritt's article on German terrorism ("From Munich to Mogadishu," June /July 1978...

...A tenant complained about the increase that brought his rent to $60 a month...

...The stories propagated by the left wing about the hardships caused by the ban—the railroad engine-driver, the hospital nurse, and the army cook who were deprived of their livelihood because of their Communist affiliation—sound plausible enough until one considers the vast array of Soviet forces massed a few miles from the German borders...

...Is it something on par with Proposition 13, medicare, or busing...

...Such indeed is the sway held by the tyranny of history: the British generals of World War I—the "donkeys" as they were called—still fighting the Boer War...

...Of the latter, 551 taught in elementary and high schools and 209 at universities...

...Newark has rent control...

...the interest in rent control in California will surely be stimulated by the passage of Proposition 13...

...Most of us forget that the new costs of a home last as long as it does...

...Here are a few samples: The state has persecuted the terrorists by mercilessly hunting them down ("der Staat hat die Terroristen in gnadenloser Jagd verfolgt...

...Professor Merritt is correct when he writes that the Germans are still carrying the burden of their Nazi past...

...and England's hereditary foes, the French, became Queen Victoria's gallant allies fighting side by side with Lord Raglan's forces...

...Walden's comments were justified...

...The latest campaign was triggered by the anti-terrorist measures voted in the German Bundestag last fall...

...Later, these police suspicions proved all too justified as the suspects, left at large, went about their 20 The American Spectator October 1978 murderous business...

...Will of contributing to the climate of violence by expressing (in statements such as those quoted above) his sympathy for the terrorists...

...It is pernicious nonsense, either malicious or unbelievably naive...

...It doesn't work...

...No matter how absurd inflated prices seem to someone who must buy clothes, food, or any of the other necessities or pleasures of life, he can assuage his pain with the prospect of getting something he never had before: a new suit, shining on the rack...

...Is Germany then to provide freedom for these enemies of freedom...

...He preferred to assume that the cost of fixing his apartment was somehow "over" when the reconstruction was complete and the last painter had rolled up his dropcloths and gone home...

...It is a story that is either tragic or hilarious, depending on one's viewpoint, and some of it bears repeating...

...I have struggled all these years to find a pithy answer...

...The one solid European democracy within the steadily shrinking ranks of free nations has again become the Hun, the main target of left-wing doomsayers...

...And what, pray, is wrong with that...

...Years ago, on behalf of a non-profit group interested in proving that decent housing could be provided in old tenements by an owner content with moderate profits, I supervised the rehabilitation of such a tenement...

...Yet few, if any, travellers object to the strict personal searches when boarding an aircraft...

...Werner Naumann, whereupon the British government announced to the astonished world that it had smashed Dr...

...von Thadden as a home movie, thus recouping some of the tens of thousands of dollars the Canadian taxpayers were forced to spend on this venture—the CBC being a tax-supported public corporation...

...and here we go again, waiting for the FiThrer...

...Despite the hullabaloo, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer remained skeptical, and his skepticism proved justified when it transpired that the entire conspiracy consisted of seven people...

...This is a strange controversion of values...

...A. mong the chorus we also find the voice of Professor Richard Merritt tut-tutting in the pages of the June/ July issue of The American Spectator, repeating the tired left-wing cliches and shopworn charges that in Germany security may be placed above personal freedom, that nonconformists may be persecuted (my italics in deference to Andy Young's thousands of political prisoners), that a climate of uncertainty persists...

...He began his journalistic career in 1930 as a political reporter in Central Europe...

...Gunter Sonnenberg, Knut Folkerts, and Christian Klar, the assassins of the federal prosecutor-general, Siegfried Buback...

...His latest book is America's Housing Challenge...

...Their next big show came in 1967 when they saw the real Fiihrer in the elegant personage of Adolf von Thadden...

...Today, with a dearth of suitable Fibrer candidates, even poor Helmut Schmidt will do...

...a modern kitchen...

...Even the owner of a house, making a mortgage payment on the home he has been living in for years, derives some satisfaction from the knowledge that he has reduced his debt and increased what he calls his "equity" in the house...

...We raised rents barely enough to pay back the cost of improvements over a 20-year period...

...Indeed, one wonders whether we would have heard about the Berufsverbot if the figures had been reversed and the majority hit by the ban were neo-Nazis...

...some newspapers have been guilty of] a merciless baiting of Ulrike Meinhof ("gnadenlose Hetze gegen Ulrike Meinhof"—the word Hetze being customarily employed in relation to pogroms, such as in Judenhetze...

...a new trip...

...Such conditions, as well as the growing terrorism, caused Willy Brandt—another unlikely candidate for Fithrer—in a 1972 government decree to set down guidelines for the application of the constitutional provisions of 1950...

...Thus, protected tenants may be richer than the owners of the buildings in which they rent...

...In an equally strange formulation, Professor Merritt writes that the conservative press "has been conducting its own journalistic terror campaign against left-wing intellectuals some of whom have on occasion taken stances that make them appear to be sympathizers of the RAF and similar groups...

...On May 30, 1978, the Federal Court (Bundesgerichtshof)—a federal court of appeal—dismissed a libel suit launched by Mr...

...In the school system there were 85 neoNazis and 760 leftist extremists...

...The court ruled that Mr...

...To have titillated viewers with sensational films (I presume by "police shows" Professor Merritt means thrillers) at a time when human lives were at stake, or to have screened videotapes that propagated the murderers' cause, would have been the peak of irresponsibility...

...in our day, the politicians and the "trained observers"—to borrow a term from Evelyn Waugh—in the media and the universities who, like Lord Raglan of yore, can conceive of one enemy only: the Germans...

...It began in 1949, but the big scare burst upon the world in January 1953 when, in an operation worthy of the Israelis at Entebbe, British security swooped upon the Dusseldorf home of one Dr...

...The rent-payer has none...

...Why should he pay for it...

...No other expenditure—except perhaps alimony—returns so little satisfaction to the spender...

...said, he liked it, but, after all, the apartment didn't belong to him, it belonged to me...

...German judges, police officers, and other civil servants often thought—and acted upon this conviction—that the Nazi boys were a somewhat rough bunch, but their hearts were in the right place...

...Indeed, one can see that a Nobel Prize for fiction hardly bestows upon the recipient a mantle of political infallibility, or even of political nous...

...Is democracy then nothing more than a party line...

...The New Jersey legislature is now debating a statewide bill establishing rent control standards to guide localities—which in many cases have leaped ahead toinstall their own versions...

...Boll's statements, these sound somewhat more conclusive than he allows...

...Professor Merritt devotes much space to the laws passed in September 1977 that provide for the isolation of detained terrorists during an emergency, and aim at putting an end to the abuse of privilege by left-wing lawyers who have acted as the terrorists' go-betweens and arms-suppliers...

...This suspicion of democratic Germany, the rising expectation of a new Hitler and his Fourth Reich, has lasted for almost 30 years...

...To be a Communist (of whatever hue) or a Nazi is to be actively engaged in efforts to introduce a regime that would supplant free democracy and abolish human rights...

...Over the ensuing four decades, the geopolitical landscape of Europe had undergone drastic changes: Wellington's Russian allies became Britain's new enemies...

...His National Party (NPD) polled all of seven percent of the votes cast in the Bavarian state election, and the same percentage in Lower Saxony...

...But every month the rent-payers of the world find themselves forced to pay once again for what they already have...

...Walden had accused Mr...

...The noble lord had fought with Wellington and lost his right arm at Waterloo...

...No wonder then that the Left is howling: The figures show all too clearly whose ox is being gored by the government's 1972 legislation...

...a new broom...

...These provisions, though far milder than those applied by the British in Northern Ireland, or by the French in any criminal case, were enough to take the scare headlines out of mothballs...

...The universities have produced a plethora of Marxist professors whose teachings have taken their toll: Young people have been educated to hold democracy in contempt, as may be seen from some of the definitions of socialism published by the Socialist Union of High School Students in 1973...

...I do not know what stances Nobel Laureates take, other than on golf courses, but if Professor Merritt is referring to some of Mr...

...Thus, my tenant who didn't want to pay for improvements to the apartment he merely lived in, did not want to be told that it would take years for the owner to recoup what had been put into rehabilitation, without which the house would .soon have crumbled completely...

...Naumann was freed and nothing more has been heard of him...

...When introducing the clause, Chancellor Adenauer told the Bundestag, "Public officials should serve and further the democratic order...

...Professor Merritt's use of the term "journalistic terror campaign" is intolerably offensive...

...The German authorities had been so scrupulous that they had abstained from arresting known terrorists since, at the time police suspicions were aroused, the evidence against them would not have stood up in a court of law...

...Equally disturbing are the professor's worries over "the self-censorship exercised during the recent crisis by the media, which cancelled police shows that seemed too provocative and accepted government requests not to air videotapes provided by the terrorists...

...And why the quotes around "official" ? Is German democracy considered to be the line of the officials rather than of the people...

...When the NPD folded in 1971, I suggested to the CBC that they sell the documentary to Mr...

...or, the German state represents a remnant of a putrefying power-structure( "Reste verfaulender Macht' ). Nothing ambiguous in these colorful statements...

...But this was enough for the alarm bells to ring in a frightening crescendo...