Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Yellow Wind. David Grossman. Farrar, Straus, Giroux $17.95. It is a measure of the gulf separating Palestinians and Israelis that David Grossman's mission in The...
...They took me back in 1981, 40 years after they let me out," Stone says...
...Sometimes you can gain in this way—for a split second—real mountain air...
...The man's joys are not all intellectual— he loves ballroom dancing, ships, the ocean, sunrise, sunset, and Lord knows what all else...
...Still, it boggles the mind that until now there has been no full-scale history of conscription in America...
...We seem to have returned to a system of purchase substitutes in all but name...
...What do I have to do with it...
...Speech that caused a "clear and present danger," he ruled, could be suppressed by the authorities...
...The World War I draft, with its mixture of localism and nationalism set the pattern for the future...
...The short answer is that from the beginning the NMI United States has embraced two kinds of armies—large, volunteer, citizen-armies in times of war and small professional forces in times of peace...
...Another man, the son of an S.S...
...After a chance meeting on a train, Holmes and federal Judge Learned Hand began a fruitful correspondence...
...Holmes's groundbreaking argument was that the law shouldn't suppress arguments, pamphleteering, or any other forms of speech exchanged between "fighting faiths...
...You can be a pet and a sucker for the Establishment...
...We should not forget that the peacetime draft of the mid-1950s to early 1960s was widely accepted precisely because it was deemed fair...
...This book is a study of how ideologies can collide—tragically, at times—to yield guiding principles for society...
...Stone reads widely in French, Hebrew, German, Greek, Latin, Yiddish, and, apparently, some Japanese...
...Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge (He's one of the greatest moral figures of the age...
...Given what people are," the artist says, historians should ask, " 'Why doesn't it happen more often?' " This question looms throughout Born Guilty, a collection of interviews with 14 Austrians and Germans whose fathers were accused of Nazi war crimes...
...Many of us agree in principle but still yearn for recognition and acceptance...
...The faiths lined up as follows: the U.S...
...He dislikes ideologues and is above all a reporter who argues from evidence, not from theory...
...Nonetheless, the 34-year-old writer remains an endearing guide...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Yellow Wind...
...The town was filled with such cowards then ." In a lifetime of asking questions, easily the one Stone has asked most is, "Have you read...
...Supreme Court upheld their convictions, with Holmes and Justice Louis Brandeis dissenting...
...Stone has never minded pissing off the Left...
...I think so," the man says...
...Basic Books, $17.95...
...I need to confess up front that I.F...
...Fortunately, John Whiteclay Chambers II has given us a superb history of the draft and more...
...Not much, except that maybe your father killed my grandmother...
...Andrew Patner...
...The conversation takes an unexpected turn midway, when the Nazi's son accuses Sichrovsky of playing games with guilt...
...Earlier he had written the majority opinions that affirmed three similar cases, offering in one of them his analogy of shouting "fire...
...He loved being a movie star when Jerry Bruck's 1974 documentary, I.F...
...Military history occupies a bottom rung in the academic prestige ladder...
...So if you want objectivity, call the Associated Press...
...The awesome demonstration of bureaucratic efficiency contributed in no small way, Chambers argues, to today's keeping of birth and life records and other kinds of demographic statistics...
...While many journalists and leftists profess to admire Stone, very few of us are willing to heed his injunctions about remaining an outsider...
...Polenberg uses the correspondence between Holmes and his intellectual pen pals to explore how he arrived at this historic, almost mysterious, shift of thinking...
...Weber for institutional forces...
...If the draft did come back, it would almost surely allow for a range of civilian options in a manner much broader than past experience...
...They threw him out in 1941 for bringing a black judge to lunch there...
...One possibility is some form of national service whereby all men (and perhaps women) would be required to perform military or civilian duty for the government...
...Congress had passed the Sedition Act, restricting opposition by word or deed to the war effort...
...His resentment is so strong that on the night after his father's funeral he urinates on his grave...
...At the same time the national elite no longer sees military service as a civic obligation...
...But you cannot get intimate with officials and maintain your independence...
...On June 5, 1917, one of the most remarkable days in American history, ten million young men were registered...
...Learning from the Civil War experience, the World War I draft did not allow conscripts to purchase substitutes...
...On August 22, 1918, the anarchists (average age: mid-20s...
...He once described a dream book on the State Department as "a combination of Pearson and Allen of the old 'Washington Merry-Go-Round' for the inside dope...
...But his sensitive treatment of the human casualties behind these legal battles makes Fighting Faiths not only good history but high constitutional drama...
...It distinguished between dangers that were merely "present" and those that were immediate and likely, or "imminent ." A half-century later, the majority adopted this reasoning in expanding the free speech protections accorded Klansmen, Nazis, and others who advocated breaking the law...
...That Sichrovsky is a Jew seems to have induced in his subjects a confessional tone...
...The low regard in which most professors hold military people probably has something to do with this...
...When a Palestinian woman tells of her longing for a village the Israelis seized in 1948, Grossman discovers "with some bafflement, I admit, that she reminds me of my grandmother and her stories of Poland, from which she was expelled ." At another point, when a woman describes how, as a child, Israeli soldiers blindfolded her father and shot him 30 times, Grossman reexamines Jews' vision of themselves as "cleanhanded types...
...In Jerusalem, soldiers tell of a hate-filled colleague biting off pieces of Arab prisoners' ears...
...I began to think of that kidney-shaped expanse of land, the West Bank, as an organ transplanted into my body against my wishes," he writes of the period before his journey...
...All this changed dur ing the Vietnam war with the upper-middle class and rich largely avoiding military service...
...As he wrote when he finally closed the Weekly, "To give a little comfort to the oppressed, to write the truth exactly as I saw it, to make no compromises other than those imposed by my own inadequacies, to be free to follow no master other than my own idealized image of what a true newspaperman should be, and still be able to make a living for my family—what more could a man ask...
...As the country became embroiled in Vietnam— an involvement that stemmed in large part from the ignorance of the American government— Stone was able to read French sources on Indochina...
...religion: Jewish...
...Most of the conscriptionists were actually advocates of universal military training, a plan whereby all young men would receive basic training followed by an extended term in the reserves...
...the U.S...
...The beauty of what Stone did by himself all those years was that he was free...
...Four were eventually released to Russia where they found no more justice than they had received here...
...Chambers takes us quickly through the colonial period, the War of Independence, and the first half of the nineteenth century...
...People can't live without symbols and leaders...
...Michael Willrich I.F...
...A watershed was crossed with the introduction of the first national draft during the Civil War when the supremacy of the federal government over the states in raising armies was settled forever...
...He used Jean Lacouture, Bernard Fall, and others as background for his own reporting years before campus "teach-ins" made the names familiar here...
...For anyone who has visited the West Bank during the current uprising, Grossman's grim portrait is both credible and depressingly familiar...
...The most powerful chapter is the transcript of a telephone interview between Sichrovsky and the son of a Treblinka guard: "What did he tell you...
...He's a great artist...
...Holmes heard him out...
...No matter whether they are good guys or bad guys...
...Almost all the places he visited lie within an hour's drive of his home in Jerusalem...
...What Chambers doesn't stress enough is that local draft boards have been staffed by volunteers, a unique example of how the federal government can perform a gigantic task without a large, paid bureaucracy...
...Grossman, an Israeli journalist and novelist, set off last year on a seven-week tour of the towns, villages, and refugee camps of the occupied West Bank...
...Workers, our reply to the barbaric intervention has to be a general strike...
...Stone is one of my greatest heroes...
...the six anarchists were protesting the deployment of U.S...
...The denouement of To Raise an Army is the establishment of the modern draft in World War I, pushed by industrialists, financiers, corporation lawyers, and university presidents, particularly from the eastern seaboard...
...As an Israeli, Grossman is constantly forced to match what he sees against his own life long fears and stereotypes...
...Grossman is also, at times, too much the man of letters, injecting gratuitous references to Orwell and other literary figures...
...The book's title is taken from a line in Oliver Wendell Holmes's famous dissent in the 1919 case...
...Charles C. Moskos Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court and Free Speech...
...Molly Ivins...
...Pantheon, $15.95...
...had joined the fight against the Axis powers...
...In contrast to today, the South (along with the Midwest) was the region most resistant to military conscription...
...But at the end of the conversation, having taken turns playing victor and victim, accuser and accused, the two men reach a weird but cathartic understanding and wish each other luck in life...
...As odd as it sounds, there is integrity in this conversation...
...One son has recurring nightmares of being gassed to death...
...The title isn't enough to warn you that about all you've got here are some tape-recorded conversations with Izzy...
...Sichrovsky is "desperate, like a dog who barks and nobody hears him," the son says...
...In the office...
...The difference is that we have never had a peacetime force based on volunteers approaching the size of the one we have today...
...Tony Horwitz To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America...
...Are you surprised...
...In Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, a depressed artist complains that historians studying the Holocaust waste their time dwelling on the question, "How could it possibly happen...
...It is a measure of the gulf separating Palestinians and Israelis that David Grossman's mission in The Yellow Wind seems so extraordinary...
...We want a solution by force...
...And in the end, the author pleads with his countrymen to confront the occupation as "a personal crossroads demanding action and thought...
...After all, this moment of truth is what Sichrovsky is trying to achieve for all of Germany...
...Free Press, $24.95...
...troops in the new Soviet Union...
...He wasn't in the gas chambers ." "Where was he...
...Stone, A Portrait...
...On finally quitting the Weekly to write longer pieces and books...
...read one of the leaflets...
...A selfdescribed "nebbish," he avoids the pompous pontifications that ring so loudly around this issue...
...We are against Arafat," one of the teachers says, "because Arafat wants peace...
...Chambers notes that America has yet to come up with a durable system of raising military manpower...
...Stone on the Washington press corps: "You can sit on your rear end in the Press Club and write from press releases...
...He was not persuaded by one single argument for more tolerance of speech, but his dedication to inquiry "made Holmes more sensitive to the importance of experimentation and to the need to treat dissenters mercifully...
...When the opinion was issued on November 10, 1919, Holmes wrote in dissent that since "time has upset many fighting faiths...the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas „ .." After thoroughly tracing the origins of these thoughts, Polenberg fails to examine adequately their meaning or future impact...
...the vast majority of his countrymen, had rarely ventured into his neighbor's communities, except in an Army uniform...
...Elf Jahren in Sovietische Gefangniss (A terrific book, it's an expose— boy...
...Marx for class forces...
...Seeing is believing: that Israelis do hit old women with truncheons...
...This book starts out as a big disappointment because it looks like it's going to be a biography of I.F...
...Hand thoughtfully criticized Holmes's decisions in the early free speech cases...
...But as one reads along, the charm of Stone's conversation steals into the heart...
...Would I have acted the same way...
...I wanted to go to the places that haunted me most" Everywhere, Grossman records the toll of the past 20 years on both occupier and occupied...
...Jonathan Rosenblum Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families...
...doctor, now belongs to a rightwing political group in Germany...
...Peter Sichrovsky...
...At random from the Patner book, "Have you read ...Ernst Cassirer's The Apology of Socrates (It is beautiful...
...People will call damn near anything a book," grumps I, making ready to slash this Patner pup to ribbons...
...By forcing the children to acknowledge the sins of their fathers, Sichrovsky hopes they will never repeat them...
...Richard Polenberg...
...that gun-toting settlers do threaten and kill their Arab neighbors...
...The group was arrested by New York's bomb squad, convicted, and given sentences ranging up to 20 years...
...Stone's Weekly, was the hit of Cannes...
...In the 1930s he was part of Popular Front politics and is still proud of it...
...Henry James for social nuances and subtleties ." Politically, Stone is an independent, pragmatic leftist...
...John Whiteclay Chambers II...
...His work on the Rosenberg case has been cited by, among others, Ronald Radosh, a darling of the Right...
...Don't be so aggressive...
...A system came into being that blended some 4,500 local draft boards with a centralized Selective Service in Washington...
...A woman discusses how fascism ruled her home, with her father doling out ritual beatings and naming her "Sybille" so that her initials would be "S.S...
...Viking $24.95...
...Yet during 20 years of Israeli occupation, Grossman, like...
...I pondered then about how much one must be suspicious of people who testify about themselves morning and night that they are merciful" Unfortunately, Grossman's book, originally printed in a Hebrew newsweekly, is aimed at an Israeli audience and assumes a good deal of knowledge about the occupation...
...Holmes's giant intellect led him in other directions as well—reading Locke, perusing Civil War history, even sitting with a book of Goya's paintings...
...By a 7-2 vote, the U.S...
...Stone was never in much danger of sitting around the Press Club...
...Holmes consulted with scholars such as Ernst Freund, Zechariah Chafee and Harold Laski...
...Chambers sees only the possibility of mandatory service, but the greater likelihood is some form of large-scale but voluntary service covering both citizen soldiers and civilian servers...
...in a crowded theater...
...Holmes's dissent was stunning...
...the Russians had allied themselves with Germany...
...To his credit, Grossman also finds room in his narrative for the occasional glimpse of humanity, such as the state censor who writes an admiring note to the Palestinian author whose work he has banned...
...Stone...
...Chambers sees the end of the draft in 1973 and the move toward a volunteer format as a return to the more usual peacetime pattern of manning our military...
...his teachers watch proudly...
...Stone said, "I feel as though I've been practicing my scales all these years and now I'm going to get to play my music...
...In Abrams, he revised the line by substituting "imminent" for "present ." This seeming bit of legal esoterica had profound consequences for American constitutional freedom...
...citizenship: none) floated leaflets off the roof of an East Side building...
...In English and Yiddish, they rallied workers to oppose President Wilson's deployment of 7,500 troops against the Bolshevik regime...
...With the Supreme Court expanding the definition of conscience to include secular motives and with the standby draft system allowing great latitude in alternative service for conscientious objectors, we will back into a national service program without ever having quite legislated one...
...And that's where he guarded the Jews...
...Several of the men and women said they had never before discussed their fathers' deeds with anyone—including their parents...
...He addresses the question of how conscription came into being in a country that traditionally values individual liberty...
...Peter Sichrovsky, an Austrian journalist, found that almost every child believed the same horrific events could reoccur...
...To Stone the tragedy is not just that young people are boneignorant and dangerous but that they're going to miss out on all this fabulous stuff Stone's reading has made him a better, not to mention more readable, journalist...
...In a Palestinian classroom, a tiny boy aims a plastic stick at a Jewish visitor and shoots...
...that the homes of the accused may be bulldozed with 15 minutes' warning...
Vol. 20 • May 1988 • No. 4
