Notes on Paul Feyerabend’s Conquest of Abundance, A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being

Notes on Killing Time by Paul Feyerabend

Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend

I was surprised by the amount of detail spent on reviewing films, theatres, musicians, and restaurants in contrast to the brevity given seemingly more important matters. A great book overall.

I especially liked the story on pages 18/19/20.

Notes below:

Page 4

We [Paul & his father] were friends, sort of, but not very close; I was much too self-centered and much too involved in my own affairs. I had already moved to California when I heard of his final illness; I did not return and I did not attend his funeral.

Page 5/6

Aunt Pepi was married to Konrad Hampapa, a railwayman and a heavy drinker himself. They had two children - Konrad junior, who was retarded, and Josephine. The family visited us on Sundays, and Junior played he accordion. He was an excellent musician and could improvise on any melody he heard. When is father remarried, he tried to make love to his stepmother, Maria. This, he thought, was was the normal function of a mother, for Aunt Pepi, apparently, had made love to him. Maria was a kind but determined woman. She stopped her husband's drinking; but she failed with Konrad junior. He left home, roamed the streets, hid in garbage containers (which at the time were large enough to hold ten people), played his instrument, and raped the women who came to listen. He died in an insane asylum at the age of thirty-six -- at least this is what I heard later, after my return from London. For me (at age ten), Cousin Konrad was just another relative with a great gift for music. I noticed that he was a little peculiar - but so were many people. My attitude changed when the peculiarity received a name, "retardation," and when casual and unintended hints informed me of its social implications. Fear and revulsion were the result.

Page 12/13

Between the ages of three and six I spent most of my time in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Mama moved a bench up to the window and tied me to the window frame. The I hung like a spider and watched the world: major street repairs, colorful steamrollers, the green electric buses that transported the mail, the street performers, and now and then a private car. Once a week a bunch of pigs was delivered to the butcher's shop in the house opposite. On Friday the workers received their paychecks, went to the local pub, and got drunk. Between two and three in the morning - I was in bed at the time, but the noise woke us all up -- their wives went looking for them and brought them home. It was an impressive sight: huge women lifting tiny men up by their collars and shouting with thunderous voices: "You heap of shit! You bum! You asshole! Where's the money? ... " Even the mailman ended up in the gutter with letters, checks, bills scattered all around him.

Inside, wives beat their husbands (and vice versa), parents beat their children (and vice versa), neighbors beat each other. Every morning the ladies of the house assembled at the bassena, the only water outlet on each floor. They exchanged gossip, commiserated, complained about their men, pets, relatives. Most of the time that was that. Once in a while the gossip increased in volume, changed character, and turned into a row. Endearments such as "You whore! You bitch!" filled the corridors. Weapons (brooms and so forth) might be added, but dragging the opponent around by her hair seemed to suffice. Turds on the stairway meant that the janitor had managed to make an enemy or two. It would be wrong to infer that our house was an extreme case, however. The nuns at a well-known Catholic hospital where I had my appendix removed used the same language and treated each other in almost the same way.

Page 16/17

I started school when I was six. It was a strange experience. Having been kept off the streets, I had no idea how other people lived or what to do with them. Papa gave me his military knapsack instead of the customary briefcase. "People will envy you," he explained. I was laughed at. "Defend yourself!" said mama. Next day I did just that. School was over and I started for home. I saw mama at the window, remembered her advice, turned to the main offender, and broke his arm. Gradually things settled down and instruction began. Now I could not understand why I should sit still while the teacher was wandering around; so I wandered around with him. He ordered me back to my place. There I remained, but I began to throw up as soon as the first letters appeared on the blackboard. ...

Page 18/19/20

Once a year, on December 10, my father dressed up (at a neighbor's) in a bishop's outfit, put on a mask, and entered our place as Saint Nicholas. Mama and I waited in the kitchen. There was a knock. "It must be Saint Nicholas," said mama. I trembled with fear and excitement. Mama opened the door and Saint Nicholas came in. I knelt down. Papa asked in a deep voice: "Have you been a good boy? Have you done your homework? Did you obey your parents?" And I had to admit, alas, that I had sinned here and been negligent there and that my behavior had been far from exemplary. Saint Nick came closer, looked at me with a penetrating glance, hit me (gently, of course), and said: "Next time you won't get away that easily"; and then he departed. Outside the door he left a basket with fruit, chocolate, and various sweets. When my father returned, he looked exhausted; he had a leather strap in his hand and explained how he had caught, tied, and gagged the devil while Saint Nick was giving me the third degree. "You know," he said, "you were lucky; this time the devil almost got away and he surely would have beaten you up. He might even have taken you with him!" I believed the story, especially as the neighbors were moving around in the corridor in demonic costumes. "Poor papa," I said. I gave him some of my presents and was proud of the strength that had enabled him to restrain the Evil One himself.

...

The door opened. Here was the old familiar figure: the long white dress, the golden embroider, the staff, the pointed hat, the deep voice. But I also saw my father's shoes, which I had not noticed before, I saw the eyes behind the mask, which I had never separated from the mask, and I heard him, not Saint Nicholas. It was my father; clearly it was my father, yet equally clearly it was not my father but the Saint.

...

I was sad, not for myself but for my father, who, having been a mighty Saint, was now a vulnerable human being.

Page 37

He [Hitler] would begin slowly, hesitantly, in a low but resonant voice: "Volksgenossen und Voksgenossinnen!" -- "Fellow nationals, men and women!" Many people, young and old, male and female, my mother among them, were hypnotized by his voice. Listening to the mere sound they became transfixed. "I loved Hitler, " Ingmar Bergman writes in his autobiography, reporting his impressions as an adolescent exchange student. "The only face among faceless men," was Heidegger's reaction. "He is a phenomenon - too bad I am a Jew and he is an anti-Semite," said Joseph von Sternberg, inventor of Marlene Dietrich, director of The Blue Angel and many Hollywood movies afterward. Hitler mentioned local problems and achievements; he made jokes, some of them rather good. Gradually his delivery changed; in approaching obstacles and setbacks, Hitler increased both his speed and his volume. The outbursts, which are the only parts of his speeches known the world over, were carefully prepared, well staged, and exploited in a calmer vein once they had passed. They were the result of control, not of anger, hatred, or despair, at least while Hitler was still in good physical shape and in command of events. "Here is a man who knows how to speak," said papa, who had been looking forward to the takeover, "not like Schuschnigg" (the Austrian chancellor, an intellectual without temperament or popular appeal.)

Page 42

Later on I met soldiers who wore the Gefrierfleischorden, the frozen meat medal, which they received for having survived without winter clothes.

Page 51/52

Our destination was Poland, the area near Czestochowa. There I was put in command of a bicycle company. I was hardly thrilled - I had never ridden a bicycle, and I fell of when I tried. The soldiers stood around looking puzzled: this is supposed to be our leader? The problem was solved the Russians; in one day the bicycles were already in their hands. And then came two weeks of absolute chaos. Run, rest, build a bridge, cross the bridge, blow up the bridge, remove mines, lay mines, rest, run again. I remember sitting in a house, reading a book, with anxious peasants around me; soaking my feet in warm water when the Russians entered by the back door - I still don't know how I escaped; sleeping in a barn and seeing the Russians through a small crack when I opened my eyes in the morning; running across a field to escape gunfire, with people dropping like flies around me.

...

Then, one evening, in the midst of shooting from right, left, front, back, the horizon aflame with burning houses, my carelessness finally caught up with me. Playing the operatic hero once again, I placed myself at a crossroad and started directing traffic. Suddenly my face was burning. I touched my cheek. Blood. Next, an impact on my right hand. I looked at it. There was a large hole in my glove. I didn't like that at all. The gloves were made of excellent leather and lined with fur; I would have liked them to remain intact. I turned slightly to the left - things were getting dangerous. I slipped and fell. I tried to get up but I couldn't. I felt no pain, but I was convinced that my legs had been shattered. For a moment I saw myself in a wheelchair, moving along endless shelves of books - I was almost happy. Soldiers eager to get out of trouble gathered around me, lifted me onto a sledge, and dragged me away. The war was over as far as I was concerned.

Page 54

I soon recovered but remained paralyzed form the waste down. I was not unduly concerned. I even got alarmed when one of my toes started moving; "Not now, please," I said; "can't you wait until the war's over?" I didn't mind being a cripple - I was content; talked to my neighbors; read novels, poems, crime stories, essays of all kinds.

Page 63

I had not joined the party and I had not been involved in any criminal activities. I can't take credit for that - the occasion simply didn't arise. I don't know what I would have done had I been asked to become a Parteigenosse or ordered to kill civilians.

Page 68

All of us, men and women, were "scientists" and thus superior by far to students of history, sociology, literature, and similar trash.

Page 89/90

Falsificationism now seemed a real option, and I fell for it.

...

Today I regard this episode as an excellent illustration of the dangers of abstract reasoning. There are lots of dangerous philosophies around. Why are they dangerous? Because they contain elements that paralyze our judgement. Rationalism, whether dogmatic or critical, is no exception. Even worse - the inner coherence of its products, the apparent reasonableness of its principles, the promise of a method that enables individuals to free themselves from prejudice, and the success of the sciences, which seem to be rationalism's main achievements, provide it with an almost superhuman authority. Popper not only used these elements, he added paralyzing ingredient of his own - simplicity.

Page 117/118

Paul Meehl was interested in the mind-body problem and in the relation between theory and experiment. The positivists favored an "upward seepage" of meaning, as Meehl called it: observation statements (which we put at the bottom of our diagrams) are meaningful; theoretical statements, taken by themselves, are not but receive meaning via the logical links that tie them to observation statements. Continuing the drift of my 1958 paper I argued then that meaning travels in the opposite direction. Sense-data in and for themselves have no meaning; they just are. A person who is given sense-data and nothing else is completely disoriented. Meaning comes from ideas. Meaning, therefore, "trickles down" from the theoretical level toward the level of observation. Today I would say that both positions are rather naive. Meaning is not located anywhere. It does not guide our actions (thoughts, observations) but aries in their course. Meaning may stabilize to such an extent that the assumption of a location starts making sense. This, however, is a disease and not a foundation.

Page 119

Later, at a monster debate epistemology, I compared Aristotle's philosophy with that of the Vienna Circle. Aristotle's philosophy, I said, was fruitful - it had helped him to found some sciences and to enrich others. Ernst Mach was still making contributions to the sciences themselves, not only to the rhetoric about them. TheVienna Circle, however, merely commented on work already done. It was barren, from a scientific point of view. Or, as Ernst Bloch had colorfully put it, "Die Philosophie ist aus einer Fackeltragerin der Wissenschaft zu ihrer Schleppentragerin geworden" ("Having been the torchbearer of science, philosophy is now carrying its train"). Carnap did not object, but he emphasized the advantages of clarity. ...

Page 124/125

My friend Joan McKenna, a bigmouth with a heart of gold and a certified witch, tied an experiment. Having been introduced as a guest lecturer she talked for about twenty minutes; then she stopped and invited questions. Her answers were unfair, sarcastic, authoritarian. Nobody intervened. On the contrary, people next to her victims moved away a little - we don't want to have anything to do with a loser like you, they seemed to say. Now Joan explained the setup and its purpose. "Loo at what you are doing!" she exclaimed. "I give ridiculous, authoritarian answers. You not only swallow them but treat the only students brave enough to resist like outcasts. No wonder a professor can et away with anything!" After that we discussed how to deal with the bastards of the profession. Assume one such superior being says thins that sound silly or incomprehensible. What do you do? You get up and ask for clarification. Assume you are silenced by an authoritarian gesture. Well, somebody else gets up and repeats the question: "I didn't understand either." More anger, more sarcasm. A third student gets up: "You are supposed to teach, not to make fun of us; so please explain." "Don't be insolent!" "He wasn't being insolent," a fourth student says. "He was asking for information, and you wouldn't give it." -- and so on. Sooner or later, I said, there will be a more accommodating response. "We can't do that," some students replied; "we'll get bad grades." "We won't do it " was the reaction of others. "It's not worth the effort."

Page 126

I didn't always accept the advice of the student leaders. For example, I didn't participate in the strike they declared. On the contrary, I cut fewer lectures during the strike than either before or after. "Didn't you feel any solidarity?" Grazia asked when I told her. "With the students, yes; with the organizers of the strike, no. They presumed to speak for all students just as Johnson presumed to act for all Americans - the old authoritarianism again." Besides, I thought a student strike was rather silly. Industrial strikes cause a shortage of goods. Student strikes are a nuisance, nothing more. (I have changed my mind since then. Professors without students are as useless as screwdrivers without screws - and they feel it.) I would have stopped lecturing if my students had demanded it, but when I asked them, some said yes, some said no - and we spent the rest of the time debating the issue. Eventually I moved off campus, first into students' quarters, then into a church. Now the administration got on m back: teachers were supposed to remain in assigned lecture halls. Consulting the regulations I found no such rule, and continued as before. For some of my colleagues,John Searle especially, this was the last straw; they wanted to have me fired. When they realized how much paperwork was involved, they gave up. Red tape does have its advantages.

Page 128

"Science has many holes," I said in passing. "A Popperian triviality," shouted Imre Lakatos, who came to every lecture. That shut me up; but I soon smiled at the incident. Lakatos had used a familiar trick: assuming that your audience does not know too much history, you can increase the stature of a modern midget by burdening him with age-old discoveries. In the present case the ancestors were clear - they were the ancient skeptics. Unfortunately this only occurred to me hours after the lecture.

Page 134

"It's your own fault," said my friends. "First you denigrate reason, then you expect people to say something interesting." I saw things differently. I never "denigrated reason," whatever that is, only some petrified and tyrannical versions of it. Nor did I assume that my critique was the end of the matter. It was the beginning, a very difficult beginning - of what? Of a better understanding of the sciences, better societal arrangements, better relations between individuals, a better theater, better movies, and so on.

Page 142/2143

Today I am convinced that there is more to this "anarchism" than rhetoric. The world, including the world of science, is complex and scattered entity that cannot be captured by theories and simple rules. Even as a student I had mocked the intellectual tumors grown by philosophers. I had lost patience when a debate about scientific achievements was interrupted by an attempt to "clarify," where clarification meant translation into some form of pidgin logic. "You are like medieval scholars," I had objected; "they didn't understand anything unless it was translated into Latin." My doubts increased when a reference to logic was used not just to clarify but to evade scientific problems. "We are making a logical point," the philosophers would say when the distance between their principles and the real world became rather obvious. Compared with such doubletalk, Quine's "Two Dogma's of Empiricism" was like a breadth of fresh air. J.L. Austin, whom I heard invited Berkeley, dissolved "philosophy" in a different way. His lectures (later published as Sense and Sensibilia) were simple, but quite effective. Using Ayer's Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Austin invited us to read the test literally, to really pay attention t o the printed words. This we did. And statements that had seemed obvious and even profound suddenly ceased to make sense. We also realized that ordinary ways of talking were more flexible and more subtle than their philosophical replacements. So there were now two types of tumors to be removed - philosophy of science and general philosophy (ethics, epistemology, etc.) - and two areas of human activity that could survive without them - science and common sense.

...

Nor is there one way of knowing, science; there are many such ways, and before they were ruined by Western civilization they were effective in the sense that they kept people alive and make their existence comprehensible. Science itself has conflicting parts with different strategies, results, metaphysical embroideries. It is a collage, not a system. Moreover, both historical experience and democratic principles suggest that science be kept under public control. Scientific institutions are not "objective"; neither they nor their products confront people like a rock, or a star. They often merge with other traditions, are affected by them, affect them in turn. Decisive scientific movements were inspired by philosophical and religious (or theological) sentiments. The material benefits of science are not at all obvious. There are great benefits, true. But there are also great disadvantages. And the role of the abstract entity "science" in the production of the benefits is anything but clear.

Page 145

Most critics accused me of inconsistency: I am an anarchist, they said, but I still argue. I was astonished by this objection. A person addressing rationalists certainly can argue with them. It doesn't mean he believes that arguments settle a matter, they do. So if the arguments are valid (in their terms), they must accept the result. It was almost as if rationalists regarded argument as a sacred ritual that loses its power when used by a nonbeliever. "He says A," the critics exclaimed when I formulated a premise they accepted to produce a result they did not, "but he obviously opposes A; therefore he is inconsistent." Were philosophers really that unaware of the function of reductio ad absurdum? ...

Page 151/152

What do I think of AM today? Well, scientists have always acted in a loose and rather opportunist way when doing research, though they have often spoken differently when pontificating about it. By now this has become a commonplace among historians of science. In analyzing Galileo's telescopic observations, I indicated how Galileo, without much theorizing, achieved authoritative reports. More recently, historians have suggested that observational levels form entire cultures, whose criteria and rules differ considerably from those of the theoreticians. And in analyzing Galileo's theoretical achievements (in connection with defense of Copernicus - the Two New Sciences are a different matter), I suggested that they involved a deceptive restructuring of the fundamental ideas and relations. Today such processes are being examined in considerable detail. I am far from claiming that the historians engaged in these new types of research have necessarily read AM and were educated by it - nothing would be further from the truth. But it is pleasant to see that some armchair view of mine are being held by scholars working in close contact with scientific practice.

Other armchair views did not fare so well. I am referring to my "relativism," to the idea that cultures are more or less closed entities with their own criteria and procedures, that they are intrinsically valuable and should not be interfered with. To a certain extent this view coincided with the views of anthropologists who, trying to understand the confusing complexity of human existence, divided it into (mostly) non-overlapping, self-contained and self-maintaining domains. But cultures interact, they change, they have resources that go beyond their stable and objective ingredients or, rather, beyond those ingredients which at least some anthropologists have condensed into inexorable cultural rules and laws. Considering how much cultures have learned from each other and how ingeniously they have transformed the material thus assembled, I have come to the conclusion that every culture is potentially all cultures and that special cultural features are changeable manifestations of a single human nature.

Page 164

People, intellectuals especially, seem unable to be content with a little more freedom, a little more happiness, a little more light. Perceiving a small advantage, they seize it, circumscribe it, nail it down, and in this way prepare a New Age of ignorance, darkness, and slavery. It is rather surprising that there are still people who want to help others for personal reasons, because they are kindhearted and not because they have been intimidated by principles. It is even more surprising that some of these people can work in institutions despite the greed, the incompetence, the power struggles that seem to surround the noblest cause. But there are such people, and my wife, Grazia, is one of them.

Page 172/173

I felt that writing papers and giving lectures was on thing, and living was another, and I advised students to seek their center of gravity outside whatever proession they might choose. It was in this connection that I ridiculed the notion of intellectual poperty and the standards that force a writer to refer the most insignificant intellectual fart to its proper source. I knew that refusing to define my life in terms of a profession or a specific actions did not yet give it content, but at least I was aware that there was such a content apart form this or that particular activity. I was aware, but I was not particularly concerned. At any rate, I felt no urge to pursue the matter.

Today it seems to me that love and friendship play a central role and that without them even the noblest of achievements and the most fundamental principles remain pale, empty, and dangerous. And when speaking of love, I don't mean an abstract commitment such as a "love of truth" or a "love of humanity," which taken by themselves, have often encouraged narrow-mindedness and cruelty. Nor do I mean emotional fireworks that soon exhaust themselves. I can't really say what I mean, for that would delimit a phenomenon that is a constantly changing mixture of concern and illumination. Loe lures people out of their limited "individuality," it expands horizons, and it changes every object in their way. Yet there is no merit in this kind of love. It is subjected neither to the intellect no to the will; it is the result of a fortunate constellation of circumstances. It is a gift, not an achievement.

Page 174/175

Looking back at this episode, I conclude that a moral character cannot be created by argument, "education," or an act of will. It cannot be created by any kind of planned action, whether scientific, political, moral, or religious. Like a true love, it is a gift, not an achievement. It depends on accidents such as parental affection, some kind of stability, friendship , and - following therefrom - on a delicate balance between self-confidence and a concern for others. We can create conditions that favor the balance; we cannot create the balance itself. Guilt, responsibility, obligation - these ideas make sense when the balance is given. They are empty words, even obstacles, when it is lacking.

But what can we do in an age like ours that has not yet achieved that balance? What can we do while our criminals, their judges, and henchmen, while the philosophers, poets, prophets who try to force us into their patterns, and while we, who are collaborators or victims or simply bystanders, are still in a barbaric state? The answer is obvious: with a few exceptions we shall act in a barbaric way. We shall punish, kill, meet violence with violence, pit teachers against students, set "intellectual leaders" against the public and against each other; we shall speak about transgressions in resounding moral terms and demand that violations of the law be prevented by force. But while continuing our own lives in this manner, we should at least try to give our children a chance. We should offer them love and security, not principles, and under no circumstances should we burden them with the crimes of the past. They may have to deal for generations with the physical, juridical, and financial consequences of our actions and with the chaos we leave behind; but they are free of any moral, historical, national guilt. As for myself - I certainly cannot undo my wavering and unconcern during the Nazi period. Nor do I think that I can be blamed or held responsible for my behavior. Responsibility assumes that we know the alternatives, that we know how to choose from among them, and that we use this knowledge to push them aside through cowardice, opportunism, or ideological fervor. But I can report what I thought and did, what I think about these and did, what I think about these thoughts and actions today, and why I changed.

Page 180

I urge all writers to who want to inform their fellow citizens to stay away from philosophy, or at least to stop being intimidated and influenced by obfuscators such as Derrida and, instead, to read Schopenhauer or Kant's popular essays.

Notes on Against Method (3rd Ed) by Paul Feyerabend

My favorite quotation:

An Anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice, and so on). Against Method, 23

Some quick references:
PAGE 124 American Medical Association!
PAGE 156 Good Diagram
PAGE 205, 211 -> Incommensurable
Page 218 -> Quite Excellent

On page 25, I drew a connection between consistency theory and the network science concept of preferential attachment.

"Consistency theory is path dependent; exhibits scale free behavior we economize by choosing it."

Here are the passages I found most interesting, challenging, or enlightening:

Page 7

The results obtained so far suggest abolishing the distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification, norms and facts, observational terms and theoretical terms. None of these distinctions plays a role in scientific practice. Attempts to enforce them would have disastrous consequences. Popper's critical rationalism fails for the same reason.

Page 9

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

Page 10

'The external conditions', writes Einstein, 'which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the constriction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist...'

Page 12

The attempt to increase liberty, to lead a full and rewarding life, and the corresponding attempt to discover the secrets of nature and of man, entails, therefore, the rejection of all universal standards and of all rigid traditions.

Page 15, Footnote 1

One of the few thinkers to understand this feature of the development of knowledge was Niels Bohr: '... he would never try to outline any finished picture, but would patiently go through all the phases of the development of a problem, starting from some apparent paradox, and gradually leading to its elucidation. In fact, he regarded achieved results in any other light than as starting points for further exploration. In speculating about the prospects of some line of investigation, he would dismiss the usual consideration of simplicity, elegance, or even consistency with the remark that such qualities can only be properly judged after the event...' Now science is never a completed process, therefor it is always 'before' the event. Hence simplicity, elegance or consistency are never necessary conditions of (scientific) practice.

Page 22/23 *

Now - how can we possibly examine something we are using all the time? How can we analyse the terms in which we habitually express our most simple and straightforward observations, and reveal their presuppositions? How can we discover the kind of world we presuppose when proceeding as we do?

The answer is clear: we cannot discover it from the inside. We need an external standard of criticism, we need an external standard of criticism, we need a set of alternative assumptions or, as these assumptions will be quite general, constituting, as it were, an entire alternative world, we need to a dreamworld in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit (and which may actually be just another dream-world). The first step in our criticism of familiar concepts and procedures, the first step in our of 'facts', must therefore be an attempt to break the circle. We must invent a new conceptual system that suspends, or clashes with, the most carefully established observational results, confounds the most plausible theoretical principles, and introduces perceptions that cannot form part of the existing perceptual world. This step is again counterinductive. Counterinduction is, therefore, always reasonable and it has always a chance of success.

...

One might therefore get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is , rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.

...

An Anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice, and so on).

Footnote 3:

'Dada', says Hans Richter in Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 'not only had no programme, it was against all programmes.' This doe s not execlude the skilful defence of programmes to show the chimerical character of any defence, however 'rational'. (In the same way an actor or a playwright could produce all the outer manifestations of 'deep love' in order to debunk the idea of 'deep love' itself. Example: Pirandello.)

Page 24

They will start with a criticism of the demand that new hypotheses must be consistent with such theories. This demand will be called the consistency condition.

...

To speak more abstractly:consider a theory T' that successfully describes the situation inside domain D'. T' agrees with a finite number of observations (let their class be F) and it agrees with these observations inside a margin M of error. Any alternative that contradicts T' outside F and inside M is supported by exactly the same observations and is therefore acceptable if T' was acceptable (I shall assume that F are the only observations made). The consistency condition is much less tolerant. It eliminates a theory or a hypothesis not because it disagrees with the facts; it eliminates it because it disagrees with another theory, with a theory, moreover, whose confirming instances it shares. It thereby makes the as yet untested part of that theory a measure of validity. The only difference between such a measure and a more recent theory is age and familiarity. Had the younger theory been there first, then consistency condition would have worked in its favour. 'The first adequate theory has the right of priority over equally adequate aftercomers.' (emphasis added - danny) In this respect the effect of the consistency condition is rather similar to the effect of the more traditional methods of transcendental deduction, analysis of essences, phenomenological analysis, linguistic analysis. It contributes to the preservation of the old and familiar not because of any inherent advantage in it but because it is old and familiar. (emphasis added - danny) This is not the only instance where on closer inspection a rather surprising similarity emerges between modern empiricism and some of the school philosophies it attacks.

Page 25/29 *

... Hence the invention of alternatives to the view at the centre of discussion constitutes an essential part of the empirical method. Conversely the fact that the consistency condition eliminates alternatives now shows it to be in disagreement not only with scientific practice but with empiricism as well. By excluding valuable tests it decreases the empirical content of the theories that are permitted to remain (and these, as I have indicated above, will usually be the theories which were there first) ...

Page 29/30

John Stuart Mill has given a fascinating account of the gradual transformation of revolutionary ideas into obstacles to thought. When a new view proposed it faces a hostile audience and excellent reasons are needed to gain for it an even moderately fair hearing. The reasons are produced, but they are often disregarded or laughed out of court, and unhappiness is the fate of the bold inventors. But new generations, being interested in new things, become curious; they consider the reasons, pursue them further and groups of researchers initiate detailed studies. The studies may lead to surprising successes (they also raise lots of difficulties). Now nothing succeeds like success, even if it is success surrounded by difficulties. The theory becomes acceptable as a topic for discussion; it is presented at meetings and large conferences. The diehards of the status quo feel an obligation to study one paper or another, to make a few grumbling comments, and perhaps to join in its exploration. There comes then a moment when the theory is no longer an esoteric discussion topic for advanced seminars and conferences, but enters the public domain. There are introductory texts, popularizations; examination questions start dealing with problems to be solved in its terms. Scientists from distant fields and philosophers, trying to show off, drop a hint here and there, and this often quite uninformed desire to be on the right side is taken as a further sign of the importance of the theory.

Unfortunately, this increase in importance is not accompanied by better understanding; the very opposite is the case. Problematic aspects which were originally introduced with the help of carefully constructed arguments now become basic principles; doubtful points turn into slogans; debates with opponents become standardized and also quite unrealistic, for the opponents, having to express themselves in terms which presuppose what they contest, seem to raise quibbles, or to misuse words. Alternatives are still employed but they no longer contain realistic counter-proposals; they only serve as a background for the splendour of the new theory. Thus we do have success - but it is the success of a manoeuvre carried out in a void, overcoming difficulties that were set up in advance for easy solution. An empirical theory such as quantum mechanics or a pseudo-empirical practice such as modern scientific medicine with its materialistic background can of course point to numerous achievements but any view and any practice that has been around for some time has achievements. The question is whose achievements are better or more important and this question cannot be answered for there are no realistic alternatives to provide a point of comparison. A wonderful invention has turned into a fossil.

Page 31/32

Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a rigid church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a mehtod that encourages variety is also the only method that is compatible with a humanitarian outlook.

Page 49

Ad hoc approximations abound in modern mathematical physics. They play a very important part in the quantum theory of fields and they are an essential ingredient of the correspondence principle. At the moment we are not concerned with the reasons for this fact, we are only concerned with its consequences: ad hoc approximations conceal, and even eliminate, qualitative difficulties. They create a false impression of the excellence of our science. It follows that a philosopher who wants to study the adequacy of science as a picture of the world, or who wants to build up a realistic scientific methodology, must look at modern science with special care. In most cases modern science is more opaque, and more deceptive, than its 16th- and 17th-century ancestors have ever been.

...
To sum up this brief and very incomplete list: wherever we look, whenever we have a little patience and select our evidence in an unprejudiced manner, we find that theories fail adequately to reproduce certain quantitative results, and that they are qualitatively incompetent to a surprising degree. Science gives us theories of great beauty and sophistication. Modern science has developed mathematical structures which exceed anything that has existed so far in coherence generality and empirical success. But in order to achieve this miracle all the existing troubles had to be pushed into the relation between theory and fact, and had to be concealed, by ad hoc hypotheses, ad hoc approximations and other procedures.

Page 51/52

... Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be. Methodological rules speak of 'theories', 'observations' and experimental results' as if these were well--defined objects who's properties are easy to evaluate and which are understood in the same way by all scientists.

However, the material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background. It is contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test. Questionable views on cognition, such as the view that our senses, used in normal circumstances, give reliable information about the world, may invade the observation language itself, constituting the observational terms as well as the distinction between veridical and illusory appearance. As a result, observation language itself, constituting the observational terms as well as the distinction between veridical and illusory appearance. As a result, observation language itself, constituting the observational terms as well as the distinction between veridical and illusory appearance. As a result, observation languages may become tied to older layers of speculation which affect, in this roundabout fashion, even the most progressive methodology. (Example: the absolute space-time frame of classical physics which was codified and consecrated by Kant.) The sensory impression, however simple, contains a component that expresses the physiological reaction of the perceiving organism and has no objective correlate. This 'subjective' component often merges with the rest, and forms an unstructured whole which must be subdivided from the outside with the help of counterinductive procedures. (An example is the appearance of a fixed star to the naked eye, which contains the effects of irradiation diffraction, diffusion, restricted by the lateral inhibition of adjacent elements of the retina and is further modified in the brain.)

...

Consideration of all these circumstances, of observation terms, sensory core, auxiliary science, background speculation, suggest that a theory may be inconsistent with the evidence, not because it is incorrect, but because the evidence is contaminated. The theory is threatened because the evidence either contains unanalysed sensations which only partly correspond to external processes, or because it is presented in terms of antiquated views, or because it is evaluated with the help of backward auxiliary subjects. The Copernican theory was in trouble for all these reasons.

...

(Note that the experimental results are supposed to have been obtained with the greatest possible care. Hence 'taking observations, etc. for granted' means 'taking them for granted after the most careful examination of their reliability': for even the most careful examination of an observation statement does not interfere with the concepts in which it is expressed, or with the structure of the sensory image.)

Page 58

In the history of thought, natural interpretations have been regarded either as a priori presuppositions of science, or else as prejudices which must be removed before any serious examination can begin. The first view is that of Kant, and, in a very different manner and on the basis of very different talents, that of some contemporary linguistic philosophers. The second view is due to Bacon (who had predecessors, however, such as the Greek sceptics).

Galileo is one of those rare thinkers who wants neither forever to retain natural interpretations nor altogether to eliminate them.

...

The senses alone, without the help of reason, cannot give us a true account of nature. What is needed for arrive at such a true account are 'the ... senses, accompanied by reasoning.'

Page 61/62/63

Perceptions must be identified, and the identifying mechanism will contain some of the very same elements which govern the use of the concept to be investigated. We never penetrate this concept completely, for we always use part of it in the attempt to find its constituents. There is only one way to get out of this circle, and it consists in using an external measure of comparison, including new ways of relating concepts and percepts.

...

Theories are tested, and possibly refuted, by facts. Facts contain ideological components, older views which have vanished from sight or were perhaps never formulated in an explicit manner. Such components are highly suspicious. First, because of their age and obscure origin: we do not know why and how they were introduced; secondly, because their very nature protects them, and always has protected them, from critical examination. In the event of a contradiction between a new and interesting theory and a collection of firmly established facts, the best procedure, therefore, is not abandon the theory but to use it to discover the hidden principles responsible for the contradiction. Counterinduction is an essential part of such a process of discovery. (Excellent historical example: the arguments against motion and atomicity of Parmenides and Zeno. Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic, took the simple course that would be taken by many contemporary scientists and all contemporary philosophers: he refuted the arguments by rising and walking up and down. The opposite course, recommended here, has led to much more interesting results, as is witnessed by the history of the case. One should not be too hard on Diogenes, however, for it is also reported that he beat up a pupil who was content with his refutation, exclaiming that he had given reasons which the pupil should not accept without additional reasons of his own.)

Having discovered a particular natural interpretation, how can we examine it and test it? Obviously, we cannot proceed in the usual way, i.e. derive predictions and compare them with 'results of observation'. These results are no longer available. The idea that the senses, employed under normal circumstances, produce correct reports of real events, for example reports of the real motion of physical bodies, has been removed from all observational statements. (Remember that this notion was found to be an essential part of the anti-Copernican argument.) But without it our sensory reactions cease to be relevant for tests. This conclusion was generalized by some older rationalists, who decided to build their science on reason only and ascribed to observation a quite insignificant auxiliary function. Galileo does not adopt this procedure.

If one natural interpretation causes trouble for an attractive view, and if its elimination removes the view from the domain of observation, then the only acceptable procedure is to use other interpretations and to see what happens. The interpretation which Galileo uses restores the senses to their position as instruments of exploration, but only with respect to the reality of relative motion. Motion 'among things which share it in common' is 'non-operative', that is, 'it remains insensible, imperceptible, and without any effect whatever'. Galileo's first step, in his joint examination of the Copernican doctrine and of a familiar but hidden natural interpretation, consists therefore in replacing the latter by a different interpretation. In other words, he introduces a new observation language.

...

Extraordinary cases which might create difficulties are defused with the help of 'adjustor words', such as 'like' or 'analogous', which diver them so that the basic ontology remains unchallenged.

Page 88/89

... I tested the instrument of Galileo's in a thousand ways, both on things here below and on those above. Below it works wonderfully; in the heavens it deceives one, as some fixed stars [Spica Virginis, for example, is mentioned, as well as a terrestrial flame] are seen double. I have as witnesses most excellent men and noble doctors ... and all have admitted the instrument to deceive ... This silenced Galileo and on the 26th he sadly left quite early in the morning .. not even thanking Magini for his splendid meal ... ' Magini wrote to Kepler on 26 May: 'He has achieved nothing, for more than twenty learned men were present; yet nobody has seen the new planets distinctly (new perfecte vidit); he will hardly be able to keep them.' A few months later (in a letter signed by Ruffini) he repeats: 'Only some with sharp vision were convinced to some extent.' After these and other negative reports had reached Kepler from all sides, like a paper avalanche, he asked Galileo for witnesses: 'I do not want to hide it from you that quite a few Italians have sent letters to Prague asserting that they could not see those stars [the moons of Jupiter] with your own telescope. I ask myself how it can e that so many deny the phenomenon, including those who use a telescope. Now, if I consider what occasionally happens to me then I do not at all regard it as impossible that a single person may see what thousands are unable to see ...Yet I regret that the confirmation by others should take so long in turning up ... Therefore, I beseech you, Galileo, give me witnesses as soon as possible ... ' Galileo, in his reply of 19 August, refers to himself, to the Duke of Toscana, and Giuliano de Medici 'as well as many others in Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Padua, who, however, remain silent and hesitate. Most of them are entirely unable to distinguish Jupiter, or Mars, or even the Moon as a planet ...' - not a very reassuring state of affairs, to say the least.

Page 99/101

Galileo was only slightly acquainted with contemporary optical theory. His telescope gave surprising results on the earth, and these results were duly praised. Trouble was to be expected in the sky, as we know now. Trouble promptly arose: the telescope produced spurious and contradictory phenomena and some its results could be refuted by a simple look with the unaided eye. Only a new theory of telescopic vision could bring order into the chaos (which may have been sill larger, due to the different phenomena seen at the time even with the naked eye) and could separate appearance from reality. Such a theory was developed by Kepler, first in 1604 and then again in 1611.

...

This, then, was the actual situation in 1610 when Galileo published his telescoping findings. How did Galileo react to it? The answer has already been given: he raised the telescope to the state of a 'superior and better sense'.

Page 106

... almost everyone takes it for granted that precise observations, clear principles and well-confirmed theories are already decisive, that they can and must be used here and now to either eliminate the suggested hypothesis, or to make it acceptable, or perhaps even to prove it.

Such a procedure makes sense only if we an assume that the elements of our knowledge - the theories , the observations, the principles of our arguments - are timeless entities which share the same degree of perfection, are al equally accessible, and are related to each other in a way that is independent of the events that produced them. This is, of course, an extremely common assumption. It is taken for granted by most logicians; it underlies the familiar distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification; and it is often expressed by saying that science deals with propositions and not with statements or sentences.

Page 110/112/113/114/116/117

In the case of Copernicus we need a new meteorology (in the good old sense of the word, as dealing with things below the moon), a new science of physiological optics that deals with the subjective (mind) and the objective (light, medium, lenses, structure of the eye) aspects of vision as well as a new dynamics stating the manner in which the motion of the earth might influence the physical processes at its surface. Obesrvations become relevant only after the processes described by these new subjects have been inserted between the world and the eye. The language in which we express our observations may have to be revised as well so that the new cosmpology receives a fair chance and is not endangered by an unnoticed collaboration of sensations and olde rideas. In sum : what is needed for a test of Copernicus is an entirely new world-view containing a new view of man and of his capacities of knowing.

...

This need to wait, and to ignore large masses of critical observations and measurements, is hardly ever discussed in our methodologies. Disregarding the possibility that a new physics or a new astronomy might have to be judged by a new theory of knowledge and might require entirely new tests, empirically inclined scientists at once confront it with the status quo and announce triumphantly that 'it is not in agreement with facts and received principles'. They are of course right, and even trivially so, but not in the sense intended by them. For at an early stage of development the contradiction only indicates that the old and the new are different and out of phase. It does not show which view is the better one. A judgement of this kind presupposes that the competitors confront each other on equal terms.

....

Thus the new view is arbitrarily separated from data that supported its predecessor and is made more 'metaphysical': a new period in the history of science commences with a backward movement that returns us to an earlier stage where theories were more vague and had smaller empirical content. This backward movement is not just an accident; it has a definite function; it is essential if we want to overtake the status quo, for it gives us the time and the freedom that are needed for developing the main view in detail, and for finding the necessary auxiliary sciences.

...

How can we convince them that the success of the status quo is only apparent and is bound to be shown as such in 500 years or more, when there is not a single argument on our side (and remember that the illustrations I used to paragraphs earlier derive their force from the successes of classical physics and were not available to Copernicans). It is clear that the allegiance to the new ideas will have to be brought about by means other than arguments. It will have to brought about by irrational means such as propaganda, emotion, ad hoc hypotheses, and appeal to prejudices of all kinds. We need these 'irrational means' such as propaganda, emotion, ad hoc hypotheses, and appeal to prejudices of all kinds. We need these 'irrational means' in order to uphold what is nothing but a blind faith until we have found the auxiliary sciences, the facts, the arguments that turn the faith into sound 'knowledge'.

...

The ideas survived and they now are said to be in agreement with reason. They survived because prejudice, passion, conceit, errors, sheer pigheadedness, in short because all the elements that characterize the context of discovery, opposed the dictates of reason and because these irrational elements were permitted to have their way. To express it differently: Copernicanism and other 'rational' views exist today only because reason was overruled at some time in their past. (The opposite is also true: witchcraft and other 'irrational' views have ceased to be influential only because reason was overruled at some time in their past.)

...

The first step on the way to a new cosmology, I have said, is a step back: apparently relevant evidence is pushed aside, new data are brought in by ad hoc connections, the empirical content of science is drastically reduced.

Page 119

'There is no independent interpretation, ' says Carnap and yet an idea such as the idea of the motion of the earth, which was inconsistent with the contemporary evidence to be irrelevant and which was therefore cut from the most important facts of contemporary astronomy managed to become a nucleus, a crystallization point for the aggregation of other inadequate views which gradually increased in articulation and finally fused into a new cosmology including new kinds of evidence. There is no better account of this process than the description which John Stuart Mill has left us of the vicissitudes of his education. Referring to the explanations which his father gave him on logical maters he writes: 'The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time; but they were not therefore useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallize upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my notice afterwards. In exactly the same manner the Copernican view, though devoid of cognitive content from the point of view of a strict empiricism or else refuted, was needed in the construction of the supplementary sciences even before it became testable with their help and even before it, in turn, provided them with supporting evidence of the most forceful kind.

Page 120/121/122

When the 'Pythagorean idea' of the motion of the earth was revived by Copernicus it met with difficulties which exceeded the difficulties encountered by contemporary Ptolemaic astronomy. Strictly speaking, one had to regard it as refuted. Galileo, who was convinced of the truth of the Copernican view and who did not share the quite common, though by no means universal, belief in a stable experience, looked for new kinds of fact which might support Copernicus and still be acceptable to all. Such facts he obtained in two different ways. First, by the invention of his telescope, which changed the sensory core of everyday experience and replaced it by puzzling and unexplained phenomena; and by his principle of relativity and his dynamics, which changed its conceptual components. Neither the telescopic phenomena nor the new ideas of motion were acceptable to common sense (or to the Aristotelians). Besides, the associated theories could be easily shown to be false. Yet these false theories, these unacceptable phenomena, were transformed by Galileo and converted into strong support of Copernicus. The whole rich reservoir of the everyday experience and of the intuition of his readers is utilized in the argument, but the facts which they are invited to recall are arranged in a new way, approximations are made, known effects are omitted, different conceptual lines are drawn, so that a new kind of experience arises, manufactured almost out of thin air. This new experience is then solidified by insinuating that the reader has been familiar with it all the time. It is solidified and soon accepted as gospel truth, despite the fact that its conceptual components are vastly more speculative than are the conceptual components of common sense. Following positivistic usage we may therefore say that Galileo's science rests on an illustrated metaphysics. The distortion permits Galileo to advance but it prevents almost everyone else from making his effort the basis of a critical philosophy (for a long time emphasis was put either on his mathematics, or on his alleged experiments, or on his frequent appeal to the 'truth', and his propagandistic moves were altogether neglected). I suggest that what Galileo did was to let refuted theories support each other, that he built in this way a new world-view which was only loosely (if at all!) connected with the preceding cosmology (everyday experience included), that he established fake connections with the perceptual elements of this cosmology which are only now being replaced by genuine theories (physiological optics, theory of continua), and that whenever possible he replaced old facts by a new type of experience which he simply invented for the purpose of supporting Copernicus. Remember, incidentally, that Galileo's procedure drastically reduces the content of dynamics: Aristotelian dynamics was a general theory of change comprising locomotion, qualitative change, generation and corruption. Galileo's dynamics and its successors deal with locomotion only, other kinds of motion being pushed aside with the promissory note (due to Democritos) that locomotion will eventually be capable of comprehending all motion. Thus, a comprehensive empirical theory of motion is replaced by a much narrower theory plus a metaphysics of motion, just as an 'empirical' experience is replaced by an experience that contains speculative elements. This, I suggest, was the actual procedure followed by Galileo. Proceeding in this way he exhibited a style, a sense of humour, an elasticity and elegance, and an awareness of the valuable weaknesses of human thinking, which has never been equalled in the history of science. Here is an almost inexhaustible source of material for methodological speculation and, much more importantly, for the recovery of those features of knowledge which not only inform, but which also delight us.

Page 124

So far the argument was purely intellectual. I tried to show that neither logic nor experience can limit speculation and that outstanding researchers often transgressed widely accepted limits. But concepts have not only a logical content; they also have associations, they give rise to emotions, they are connected with images. These associations, emotions and images are essential for the way in which we relate to our fellow human beings. Removing them or changing them in a fundamental way may perhaps make our concepts more 'objective', but it often violates important social constraints.

Page 130

The attitude of the American Medical Association towards lay practitioners is as rigid as the attitude of the Church was toward lay interpreters - and it has the blessing of the law. Experts, or ignoramuses having acquired the formal insignia of expertise, always tried and often succeeded in securing for themselves exclusive rights in special domains. Any criticism of the rigidity of the Roman Church applies also to its modern scientific and science-connected successors.

Page 148/149

The activities which according to Feigl belong to the context of discovery are, therefore, not just different from what philosophers say about justification, they are in conflict with it. Scientific practice does not contain two contexts moving side by side, it is complicated mixture of procedures and we are faced by the question if this mixture should be left as it is, or if it should be replaced by a more 'orderly' arrangement. This is part one of the argument. Now we have seen that science as we know it today could not exist without a frequent overruling of the context of justification. This is part two of the argument. The conclusion is clear. Part one shows that we do not have a difference, but a mixture. Part two shows that replacing the mixture by an order that contains discovery on one side and justification on the other would have ruined science ...

Page 149/150

Finally, we have discovered that learning does not go from observation to theory but always involves both elements. Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience: eliminate part of the theoretical knowledge of a sensing subject and you have a person who is completely disoriented and incapable of carrying out the simplest action. Eliminate further knowledge and his sensory world (his 'observation language') will start disintegrating, colours and other simple sensations will disappear until he is in a stage even more primitive than a small child. ...

Page 157/158

To sum up: wherever we look, whatever examples we consider, we see that the principles of critical rationalism (take falsifications seriously, increase content; avoid ad hoc hypotheses; 'be honest' - whatever that means; and so on) and, a fortiori, the principles of logical empiricism (be precise; base your theories on measurements; avoid vague and untestable ideas; and so on), though practiced in special areas, give an inadequate account of the past development of science as a whole and are liable to hinder it in the future. They give an inadequate account of science because science is much more 'sloppy' and 'irrational' than its methodological image. And they are liable to hinder it because the attempt to make science more 'rational' and more precise is bound to wipe it out, as we have seen. The difference between science and methodology which is such an obvious fact of history, therefore, indicates a weakness of the latter, and perhaps of the 'laws of reason' as well. For what appears as 'sloppiness', 'chaos', or 'opportunism' when compared with such laws has a most important function in the development of those very theories which we today regard as essential parts of our knowledge of nature. These 'deviations', these 'errors', are preconditions of progress. They permit knowledge to survive in the complex and difficult world which we inhabit, they permit us to remain free and happy agents. Without 'chaos', no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of reason, no progress. Ideas which today form the very basis of science exist only because there were such things as prejudice, conceit, passion; because these things opposed reason; and because they were permitted to have their way. We have to conclude, then, that even within science reason cannot and should not be allowed to be comprehensive and that it must often be overruled, or eliminated, in favour of other agencies. There is not a single rule that remains valid under all circumstances and not a single agency to which appeal can always be made.

Page 159

Science needs people who are adaptable and inventive, not rigid imitators of 'established' behavioral patterns.

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In this case one class of standards is set against another such class - and this is quite legitimate: each organization, each party, each religious group has a right to defend its particular form of life and all the standards it contains. But scientists go much further. Like the defenders of The One True Religion before them they insinuate that their standards are essential for arriving at the Truth, or for getting Results and they deny such authority to the demands of the politician. They oppose all political interference, and they fall over each other trying to remind the listener, or the reader, of the disastrous outcome of the Lysenko affair.

...

Science is only one of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, to practical aim rationalists want to realize with the help of their methodology.

...

Rationalists are concerned about intellectual pollution. I share this concern. Illiterate and incompetent books flood the market, empty verbiage full of strange and esoteric terms claims to express profound insights, 'experts' without brains, character, and without even a modicum of intellectual, stylistic, emotional temperament tell us about our 'condition' and the means for improving it, and they do not only preach to us who might be able to look through them, they are let loose on our children and permitted to drag them down into their own intellectual squalor. 'Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed. This is a disastrous situation, and one not easily mended. But I do not see how a rationalistic methodology can help. As far as I am concerned the first and the most pressing problem is to get education out of the hands of the 'professional educators'. The constraints of grades, competition, regular examination must be removed and we must also separate the process of learning from the preparation for a particular trade. (Emphasis Added - Danny) I grant that business, religions, special professions such as science or prostitution, have a right to demand that their participants and/or practitioners conform to standards they regard as important, and that they should be able to ascertain their competence. I also admit that this implies the need for special types of education that prepare a man or a woman for the corresponding 'examinations'. The standards taught need to be 'rational' or 'reasonable' in any sense, though they will be usually presented as such; it suffices that they are accepted by the groups one wants to join, be it now Science, or Big Business, or The One True Religion. After all, in a democracy 'reason' has just as much right to be heard and to be expressed as 'unreason' especially in view of the fact that one man's 'reason' is the other man's insanity. But one thing must be avoided at all costs: the special standards which define special subjects and special professions must not be allowed to permeate general education and they must not be made the defining property of a 'well-educated person'. General education should prepare citizens to choose between the standards, or to find their way in a society that contains groups committed to various standards, but it must under no condition bend their minds so that they conform to the standards of one particular group. The standards will be considered, they will be discussed, children will be encouraged to get proficiency in the more important subjects, but only as one gets proficiency in a game, that is, without serious commitment and without robbing the mind of its ability to play other games as well. Having been prepared in this way a young person may decide to devote the rest of his life to a particular profession and he may start taking it seriously forthwith. This 'commitment' should be the result of a conscious decision, on the basis of a fairly complete knowledge of alternatives, and not a foregone conclusion.

...

It seems to me that such a change in education and, as a result, in perspective will remove a great deal of the intellectual pollution rationalists deplore. The change of perspective makes it clear that there are many ways of ordering the world that surrounds us, that the hated constraints of one set of standards may be broken by freely accepting standards of a different kind, and that there is no need to reject all order and to allow oneself to be reduced to a whining stream of consciousness. A society that is based on a set of well-defined and restrictive rules, so that being human becomes synonymous with obeying these rules, forces the dissenter into a no-man's-land of no rules at all and thus robs him of his reason and his humanity. It is the paradox of modern irrationalism that its proponents silently identify rationalism with order and articulate speech and thus see themselves forced to promote stammering and absurdity - many forms of 'mysticism' and 'existentialism' are impossible without a firm but unrealized commitment to some principles of the despised ideology (just remember the 'theory' that poetry is nothing but emotions colourfully expressed). Remove the principles, admit the possibility of many different forms of life, and such phenomena will disappear like a bad dream.

Page 163

Charlatans have existed at all times and in the most tightly-knit professions. Some of the examples which Lakatos mentions seem to indicate that the problem is created by too much control and not by too little. This is especially true of the new 'revolutionaries' and their 'reform' of the universities. Their fault is that they are Puritans and not that they are libertines. Besides, who would expect that cowards will improve the intellectual climate more readily than will libertines? (Einstein saw this problem and he therefore advised people not to connect their research with their profession: research has to be free from the pressures which professions are likely to impose.) We must also remember that those rare cases where liberal methodologies do encourage empty verbiage and loose thinking ('loose' from one point of view, though perhaps not from another) may be inevitable in the sense that the guilty liberalism is also a precondition of a free and human life.

Page 164

I have much sympathy with the view, formulated clearly and elegantly by Whorf (and anticipated by Bacon), that languages and the reaction patterns they involve are not merely instruments for describing events (facts, states of affair), but that they are also shapers of events (facts, states of affairs), that their 'grammar' contains a cosmology, a comprehensive view of the world, of society, of the situation of man which influences thought, behaviour, perception.

Footnote 1:

According to Whorf 'the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing system for voicing ideas, but rather is itself a shaper of ideas, the programme and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade.'

Page 171/172

We also find that realism often precedes more schematic forms of presentation. This is true of the Old Stone Age, of Egyptian Art, of Attic Geometric Art. In all these cases the 'archaic style' is the result of a conscious effort (which may of course be aided, or hindered, by unconscious tendencies and physiological laws) rather than a natural reaction to internal deposits of external stimuli. Instead of looking for the psychological causes of a 'style' we should therefore rather try to discover its elements, analyse their function, compare them with other phenomena of the same culture (literary style, sentence construction, grammar, ideology) and thus arrive at an outline of the underlying world-view including an account of the way in which this world-view influences perception, thought, argument, and of the limits it imposes on the roaming about of the imagination. We shall see that such an analysis of outlines provides a better understanding of the process of conceptual change than either a naturalistic account which recognizes only one 'reality' and orders artworks by their closeness to it, or trite slogans such as 'a critical discussion and and a comparison of ... various frameworks is always possible.' Of course, some kind of comparison is always possible (for example, one physical theory may sound more melodious when read aloud to the accompaniment of a guitar than another physical theory). But lay down specific rules for the process of comparison, such as the rules of logic as applied to the relation of content classes, or some simple rules of perspective and you will find exceptions, undue restrictions, and you will be forced to talk your way out of trouble at every turn. It is much more interesting and instructive to examine what kinds of things can be said (represented) and what kinds of things cannot be said (represented) if the comparison has to take place within a certain specified and historically well-entrenched framework. For such an examination we must go beyond generalities and study frameworks in detail. I start with an account of some examples of the archaic style.

Page 173/174/175

... (We have what is called a paratactic aggregate: the elements of such an aggregate are all given equal importance, the only relation between them is sequential, there is no hierarchy, no part is presented as being subordinate to and determined by others.) The picture reads: ferocious lion, peaceful kid, swallowing of kid by lion.

The need to show every essential part of a situation often leads to a separation of parts which are actually in contact. The picture becomes a list. Thus a charioteer standing in a carriage is shown as standing above the floor (which is presented in its fullest view) and unencumbered by the rails so that his feet, the floor, the rails can all be clearly seen. No trouble arises if we regard the painting as a visual catalogue of the parts of an event rather than as an illusory rendering of the event itself (no trouble arises when we say: his feet touched the floor which is rectangular, and he was surrounded by a railing...) But such an interpretation must be learned, it cannot be simply read off the picture.

...

(Being able to 'read' a certain style also includes knowledge of what features are irrelevant Not every feature of an archaic list has representational value just as not every feature of a written sentence plays a role in articulating its content. This was overlooked by the Greeks who started inquiring into the reasons for the 'dignified postures' of Egyptian statues (already Plato commented on this). Such a question 'might have struck an Egyptian artist as it would strike us if someone inquired about the age or the mood of the king on the chessboard'.)

...

Archaic pictures are paratactic aggregates, not hypotactic systems. The elements of the aggregate may be physical parts such as heads, arms, wheels, they may be states of affair such as the fact that a body is dead, they may be actions, such as the action of swallowing.

Page 176

Such a realistic interpretation of styles would be in line with Whorf's thesis that in addition to being instruments for describing events (which may have other features, not covered by any description) languages are also shapers of events (so that there is a linguistic limit to what can be said in a given language, and this limit coincides with the limits of the thing itself) but it would go beyond it by including non-linguistic means of representation.

Page 184/185/186

Similar remarks apply to the 'theory of knowledge' that is implicit in this early world view. The Muses in Iliad, 2.284ff, have knowledge because they are close to things - they do not have to rely on rumours - and because they know all the many things that are of interest to the writer, one after the other. 'Quantity, not intensity is Homer's standard of judgement' and of knowledge as becomes clear from such words as ... 'much pondering' and 'much thinking', as well as from later criticisms such as 'Learning of many things does not teach intelligence'. An interest in, and a wish to understand, many amazing things (such as earthquakes, eclipses of the sun and the moon, the paradoxical rising and falling of the Nile), each of them explained in its own particular way and without the use of universal principles, persists in the coastal descriptions of the 8th and 7th (and later) centuries (which simply enumerate the tribes, tribal habits, and coastal formations that are successively met during the journey), and even a thinker such as Thales is satisfied with making many interesting observations and providing many explanations without trying to tie them together in a system. (The first thinker to construct a 'system' was Anaximander, who followed Hesiod.) Knowledge so conceived is not obtained by trying to grasp an essence behind the reports of the senses, but by (1) putting the observer in the right position relative to the object (process, aggregate), by inserting him into the appropriate place in the complex pattern that constitutes the world, and (2) by adding up the elements which are noted under these circumstances. It is the result of a complex survey carried out from suitable vantage points. One may doubt a vague report, or a fifth-hand account, but it is not possible to doubt what one can clearly see with one's own eyes. The object depicted or described is the proper arrangements of the elements which may include foreshortenings and other perspectoid phenomena. The fact that an oar looks broken in water lacks here the skeptical force it assumes in another ideology. Just as Achilles sitting does not make us doubt that he is swift-footed - as a matter of fact, we would start doubting his swiftness if it turned out that he is in principle incapable of sitting - in the very same way the bent oar does not make us doubt that it is perfectly straight in air - as a matter of fact, we would start doubting its straightness if it did not look bent in water. The bent oar is not an aspect that denies what another aspect says about the nature of the oar, it is a particular part (situation) of the real oar that is not only compatible with its straightness, but that demands it: the objects of knowledge are as additive as the visible lists of the archaic artist and the situations described by the archaic poet.

Page 193/194

8. Logicians and philosophers of science do not see the situation in this way. Being both unwilling and unable to carry out an informal discussion, they demand that the main terms of the discussion be 'clarified'. And to 'clarify' the terms of a discussion does not mean to study the additional and as yet unknown properties of the domain in question which one needs to make them fully understood, it means to fill them with existing notions from the entirely different domain of logic and common sense, preferably observational ideas, until they sound common themselves, and to take care that the process of filling obeys the accepted laws of logic. The discussion is permitted to proceed only after its initial steps have been modified in this manner. So the course of an investigation is deflected into the narrow channels of things already understood and the possibility of fundamental conceptual discovery (or of fundamental conceptual change) is considerably reduced. Fundamental conceptual change, on the other hand, presupposes new world-views and new languages capable of expressing them Now, building a new world-view, and a corresponding new language, is a process that takes time, in science as well as in meta-science. The terms of the new language become clear only when the process is fairly advanced, so that each single word is the centre of numerous lines connecting it with other words, sentences, bits of reasoning, gestures which sound absurd at first but which become perfectly reasonable once the connections are made. Arguments, theories, terms, points of view and debates can therefore be clarified in at least two different ways: (a) in the manner already described, which leads back to the familiar ideas and treats the new as a special case of things already understood, and (b) by incorporation into a language of the future, which means that one must learn to argue with unexplained terms and to use sentences for which no clear rules of usage are yet available. Just as a child who starts using words without yet understanding them, who adds more and more uncomprehended linguistic fragments to his playful activity, discovers the sense-giving linguistic fragments to his playful activity, discovers the sense-giving principle only after he has been active in this way for a long time - activity being a necessary presupposition of the final blossoming forth of sense - in the very same way the inventor of a new world-view (and the philosopher of science who tries to understand his procedure) must be able to talk nonsense until the amount of nonsense crated by him and his friends is big enough to give sense to all its parts. There is again to better account of this process than the description which John Stuart Mill has left us of the vicissitudes of his education. Referring to the explanations which his father gave him on logical matters, he wrote: 'The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time, but they were not therefor useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallise upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my notice afterwards.' Building a new language (for understanding the world, or knowledge) is a process of exactly the same kind except that the initial 'nuclei' are not given, but must be invented. We see here how essential it is to learn talking in riddles, and how disastrous an effect the drive for instant clarity must have on our understanding. (In addition, such a drive betrays a rather narrow and barbaric mentality: 'To use words and phrases in an easy going way without scrutinizing them too curiously is not, in general, a mark of ill breading; on the contrary, there is something low bred in being too precise...')

Page 198

The archaic cosmology (which from no on I shall call cosmology A) contains things, events, their parts; it does not contain appearances. Complete knowledge of an object is complete enumeration of its parts and peculiarities. Humans cannot have complete knowledge. There are too many things, too many events, too many situations (Iliad, 2.488), and they can be close to only a few of them (Iliad, 2.485) But although humans cannot have complete knowledge, they can have a sizable amount of it. The wider their experience, the great the number of adventures, of things seen, heard, read, the greater their knowledge.

The new cosmology (cosmology B) that arises in the 7th to 5th centuries BC distinguishes between much-knowing and true knowledge, and it warns against trusting 'custom born of manifold experience'. Such a distinction and such a warning makes sense only in a world whose structure differs from the structure of A. In one version which played a large role in the development of Western civilization and which underlies such problems as the problem of the existence of theoretical entities and the problem of alienation other new events form what one might call a True World, while the events of everyday life are no appearances that are but its dim and misleading reflection. The True World is simple and coherent, and it can be described in a uniform way. So can every act by which its elements are comprehended: a few abstract notions replace the numerous concepts that were used in cosmology A for describing how humans might be 'inserted' into their surroundings and for expressing the equally numerous types of information thus gained. From now on there is only one important type of information, and that is: knowledge.

Page 199

In painting this leads to the development of what one can only call systematic methods for deceiving the eye: the archaic artist treats the surface on which he paints as a writer might treat a piece of papyrus; it is> a real surface, it is supposed to be seen as a real surface (though attention is not always directed to it) and the marks he draws on it are comparable to the lines of a blueprint or the letters of a word. They are symbols that inform the reader of the structure of the object, of its parts, of the way in which the parts are related to each other. The simple drawing overleaf, for example, may represent thee paths meeting at a point. The artist using perspective on the other hand, regards the surface and the marks he puts on it as stimuli that trigger the illusion of an arrangement of three-dimensional objects. The illusion occurs because the human mind is capable of producing illusory experiences when properly stimulated.

Page 200/201

Just as a trraveller explores all parts of a strange country and describes them in a 'periegesis' that enumerates its peculaiarities, one by one, in the same way the student of simple objects such as oars, boats, horses, people inserts himself into the 'major oar-situaitons', apprehends them in the appropriate way, and reports them in a list of properties, events, relations. And just as detailed periegesis exhausts what can be said about a country, in the same way a detailed list exhausts what can be said about an object. 'Broken in water' belongs to the oar as does 'straight to the hand'; it is 'equally real'. In cosmology B, however, 'broken in water' is a 'semblance' that contradicts what is suggested by the 'semblance' of straightness and thus shows the basic untrustworthiness of all semblances. The concept of an object has changed from the concept of an aggregate of equi-important perceptible parts to the concept of an imperceptible essence underlying a multitude of deceptive phenomena. (We may guess that the appearance of an object has changed in a similar way, that objects now look less 'flat' than before.)

...

The elements of A are relatively independent parts of objects which enter into external relations. They participate in aggregates without changing their intrinsic properties. The 'nature' of a particular aggregate is determined by its parts and by the way in which the parts are related to each other. Enumerate the parts in the proper order, and you have the object. This applies to physical aggregates, to humans (minds and bodies), to animals, but it also applies to social aggregates such as the honour of a warrior.

The elements of B fall into two classes: essences (objects) and appearances (of objects - what follows is true only of some rather streamlined versions of B). Objects (events, etc.) may again combine. They may form harmonious totalities where each part gives meaning to the whole and receives meaning from it (an extreme case is Parmenides where isolated parts are not only unrecognizable, but altogether unthinkable). Aspects properly combined do not produce objects, but psychological conditions for the apprehension of phantoms which are but other aspects, and particularly misleading ones at that (they look so convincing). No enumeration of aspects is identical with the object (problem of induction). (Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 202 *

Now one might be inclined to explain the transition as follows: archaic man has a limited cosmology; he discovered some things, he missed others. His universe lacks important objects, his language lacks important concept, his perception lacks important structures. Add the missing elements to cosmos A, the missing terms to language A, the missing structures to the perceptual world of A, and you obtain cosmos B, language B, perception B.

Some time ago I called the theory underlying such an explanation the 'hole theory' or the 'Swiss cheese theory' of language (and other means of representation). According to the whole theory every cosmology (every language, every mode of perception) has sizable lacunae which can be filled, leaving everything else unchanged. The hole theory is beset by numerous difficulties. In the present case there is the difficulty that cosmos B does not contain a single element of cosmos A. Neither common-sense terms, nor philosophical theories; neither painting and statuary, nor artistic conceptions; neither religion, nor theological speculation contain a single element of A once the transition to B has been completed. This is a historical fact.

Footnote 111:

This fact is not easy to establish. May presentations of A, including some very detailed and sophisticated ones, are infected by B-concepts. An example is quoted in footnote 97 to the present chapter. Here as elsewhere only the anthropological method can lean to knowledge that is more than a reflection of wishful thinking. ...

Footnote 97 (198):
... (referring to Homer), speaks of a 'knowledge that proceeds from appearances and draws their multitude together in a unit which is then posited as their true essence'. This may apply to the Presocratics, it does not apply to Homer. In the case of Homer 'the world is comprehended ass the sum of things, visible in space, and not as reason acting intensively'

Page 203/204

Precisely the same remarks apply to the 'discovery' of an individual I that is different from faces, behavior, objective 'mental states' of the type that occur in A, to the 'discovery' of a substance behind 'appearances' (formerly elements of A), or to the 'discovery' that honour may be lacking despite the presence of all its outer manifestations. A statement such as Heraclitus' 'you could not find the limits of the soul though you are travelling every way, so deep is its logos (Diels, B 45) does not just add to cosmos A, it undercuts the principles which are needed in the construction of A-type 'mental states' while Heraclitus' rejection of ... and Parmenides' rejection of an ... undercuts rules that govern the construction of every single fact of A. An entire world-view, an entire universe of thought, speech, perception was dissolved.

It is interesting to see how this process of dissolving manifests itself in particular cases. In his long speech in Iliad, 9.308ff, Achilles wants to say that honour may be absent even though all its outer manifestations are present. The terms of the language he uses are so intimately tied to definite social situations that he 'has no language to express his disillusionment. Yet he expresses it, and in a remarkable way. He does it by misusing the language he disposes of. He asks questions that cannot be answered and makes demands that cannot be met. He acts in a most 'irrational' way.

Page 205 *

Remember the circumstancews which are responsible for this situation. EWe have a point of view (theory, framework, cosmos mode of representaiton) whose elements (concepts, 'facts', pictures) are built up in accordance with certain principles of construction. The principles involve something like a 'clsoure': there are things that cannot be said, or 'discovered', without violating the principles (which does not> mean contradicting them). Say the things, make the discovery, and the principles are suspended. Now take those constructive principles that underlie every element of the cosmos (of the theory), every fact (every concept). Let us call such principles universal principles of the theory in question. Suspending universal principles means suspending all facts and all concepts. Finally, let us call a discovery, or a statement, or an attitude incommensurable with the cosmos (the theory, the framework) if it suspends some of its universal principles. Heraclitus B 45 is incommensurable with psychological part of A: it suspends the rules that are needed for constituting individuals and puts an end to all A-facts about individuals (phenomena corresponding to such facts may of course persist for a considerable time as not all conceptual changes lead to changes in perception and as there exist conceptual changes that never leave a trace in the appearances; however, such phenomena can no longer be described in the customary way and cannot therefore count as observations of the customary 'objective facts')

Page 206

How is the 'irrationality' of the transition period overcome? It is overcome in the usual way (cf. item 8 above), i.e. by the determined production of nonsense until the material produced is rich enough to permit the rebels to reveal, and everyone else to recognize, new universal principles. (Such revealing need not consist in writing the principles down in the form of clear and precise statements.) Madness turns into sanity provided it is sufficiently rich and sufficiently regular to function as the basis of a new world-view. And when that happens, then we have a new problem: how can the old view be compared with the new view?

Page 207

Now it seems to me that the relation between, say, classical mechanics (interpreted realistically) and quantum mechanics (interpreted in a ccordance with the views of Niels Bohr), or between Newtonian mechanics (interpreted realistically) and the general theory of relativity (also interpreted realistically) is in many respects similar to the relation between cosmology A and cosmology B. Thus every fact of Newton's mechanics presumes that shapes, masses, periods are changed only by physical interactions and this presumption is suspended by the theory of relativity. Similarly the quantum theory constitutes facts in accordance with the uncertainty relations which are suspended by the classical approach.

Page 209

Whorf ... says that 'time, velocity, and matter are not essential to the construction of a consistent picture of the universe, and he asserts that 'we cut up nature, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are partial to an agreement to organize it in this way', which would seem to imply widely different languages posit not just different ideas for the ordering of the same facts, but that they posit also different facts.

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Page 216/217/218 *

I think that incommensurability turns up when we sharpen our concepts in the manner demanded by the logical positivists and their offspring and that it undermines their ideas on explanation, reduction and progress. Incommensurability disappears when we use concepts as scientists use them, in an open, ambiguous and often counter intuitive manner. Incommensurability is a problem for philosophers not for scientists, though the latter may become psychologically. confused by unusual things. I arrived at the phenomenon while studying the early literature on the basic statements and by considering the possibility of perceptions radically different from our own. In my thesis I examined the meaning of observational statements. I considered the idea that such statements describe 'what is given' and tried to identify this 'given' Phenomenologically this did not seem to be possible; we notice objects, their properties, their relations, not 'the given'. It is of course true that we can give quick reports on the properties of everyday objects but this does not change them into non-objects but only shows that we have a special relation to them. Phenomenologically what is given consists of the same things which can also exist unobserved - it is not a new kind of object. Special arrangements such as the reduction screen introduce new conditions, they do not reveal ingredients in objects we already know. ResultL the given cannot be isolated by observation.

The second possibility was to isolate it by logical means: what is given can be ascertained with certainty, hence I obtain the the given contained in the table before me by removing from the statement 'there is a table' all the consequence that make future corrections possible. This shows that the given is the result of an unreasonable decision: untestable statements cannot serve as a basis for science.

Following this argument I introduced the assumption that the meaning of observation statements depends on the nature of the objects described and, as this nature depends on the most advanced theories, on the content of these theories. Or as I formulated in my first English paper on the topic: the interpretation of an observation language is determined by the theories which we use to explain what we observe, and it changes as soon as these theories change. In a word: observation statements are not just theory-laden (the views of Toulmin, Hanson and apparently also Khun) but fully theoretical and the distinction between observation statements ('protocol statements' in the terminology of the Vienna Circle) and theoretical statements is a pragmatic distinction, not a semantic distinction' there are no special 'observational meanings'. Thus in the same year as Hanson (Hanson's Patterns of Discovery appeared in 1958) and four years before Khun I formulated a thesis a weaker form of which became very popular later on. Moreover, my thesis not only was stronger than the thesis of theory-ladenness, it also came from a different source. For while Toulmin and Hanson were inspired by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations I I started from and returned to ideas that had been developed in the Vienna Circle - and I said so. Quine, whose philosophy shows close connections to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, also used a criterion of observability that is rather similar to mine.

...

Now considering any interaction of traditions we may ask tow kinds of questions which I shall call observer questions and participant questions respectively.

Observer questions are concerned with the details of an interaction. They want to give a historical account of the interaction and, perhaps, formulate laws, or rules of thumb, that apply to all interactions. Hegel's triad: position, negation, synthesis (negation of the negation) is such a rule.

Participant questions deal with the attitude the members of a practice or a tradition are supposed to take towards the (possible) intrusion of another. The observer asks: what happens and what is going to happen? the participant asks: what shall I doShall I support the interaction? Shall I oppose it? Or shall I simply forget about it?

In the case of the Copernican Revolution, for example, the observer asks: what impact did Copernicus have on Wittenberg astronomers at about 1560? how did they react to his work? Did they change some of their beliefs and if so, why? Did their change of opinion have an effect on other astronomers, or were they an isolated group, not taken seriously by the rest of the profession?

The question of a participant are: this is a strange book indeed - should I take it seriously? Should I study it in detail or only superficially or should I simply continue as before? The main theses seem absurd at first sight - but, maybe, there is something in them? How shall I find out? And so on.

It is clear that observer questions must take the questions of the participants into account and participants will also listen most carefully (if they are inclined that way, that is) to what observers have to say on the matter - but the intention is different in both cases. Observers want to know what is going on, participants what to do. An observer describes a life he does not lead (except accidentally), a participant wants to arrange his own life and asks himself what attitude to take towards the things that may influence it.

Participants can be opportunists and act in a straightforward and practical way. In the late 16th century many princes became Protestants because this furthered their interests and some of their subjects became Protestants in order to be left in peace. When British colonial official replaced the laws and habits of foreign tribes and cultures by their own 'civilized' laws the latter were often accepted because they were the laws of the king, or because one had no way to oppose them, and not because of any intrinsic excellence. The source of their power and 'validity' was clearly understood, both by the officials and by the more astute of their unfortunate subjects. In the sciences and especially in pure mathematics one often pursues a particular line of research not because it is regard as intrinsically perfect, but because one wants to see where it leads. I shall call the philosophy underlying such an attitude of a participant a pragmatic philosophy.

A pragmatic philosophy can flourish only if the traditions to be judged and the developments to be influenced are seen as temporary makeshifts and not as lasting constituents of thoughts and action. A participant with a pragmatic philosophy views practices and traditions much as traveller views foreign countries. Each country has features he likes and things he abhors. In deciding to settle down a traveller will have to compare climate, landscape, language, temperament of the inhabitants, possibilities of change, privacy, looks of male and female population, theatre, opportunities for advancement, quality of vices and so on. He will also remember that his initial demands and expectations may not be very sensible and so permit the process of choice to affect and change his 'nature' as well which, after all is just another (and minor) practice or tradition entering the process (Emphasis Added -Danny) So a pragmatist must be both a participant and an observer even in those extreme cases where he decides to live in accordance with his momentary whims entirely.

Few individuals and groups are pragmatists in the sense just described band one can see why: it is very difficult to see one's own most cherished ideas in perspective, as parts of a changing and, perhaps, absurd tradition. Moreover this inability not only exists, it is also encouraged as an attitude proper to those engaged in the study and the improvement of man, society, knowledge. Hardly any religion has ever presented itself just as something worth trying. The claim is much stronger: the religion is the truth, everything else is error and those who know it, understand it but still reject it are rotten to the core (or hopeless idiots).(Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 222/223/230/231 *

After this preparation let us now look at what has been called 'the relation between reason and practice'.

Simplifying matters somewhat we can say that there exists three views on the matter.

A. Reason guides practice its authority is independent of the authority of practices and traditions and it shapes the practice in accordance with its demands. This we may call the idealistic version of the relation.

B. Reason receives both its content and its authority from practice. It describes the way in which practice works and formulates its underlying principles. This version has been called naturalism and it has occasionally been attributed to Hegel (though erroneously so)..

Both idealism and naturalism have difficulties.

The difficulties of idealism are that the idealist does not only want to 'act rationally' he also wants his rational actions to have results. And he wants these results to occur not only among the idealizations he uses but in the real world he inhabits.

...

The difficulties of naturalism and idealism have certain elements in common. The inadequacy of standards often becomes clear from the barrenness of the practice the engender, the shortcomings of practices often are very obvious when practices based on different standards flourish. This suggest that reason and practice are not two different kinds of entities but parts of a single dialectical process.

The suggestion can be illustrated by the relation between a map and the adventures of a person using it or by the relation between an artisan and his instruments. Originally maps were constructed as images of and guides to reality and so, presumably, was reason. But maps like reason contain idealizations (Hecataeus of Miletus, for example, imposed the general outlines of Anaximander's cosmology on his account of the occupied world and represented continents by geometrical figures). The wanderer uses the map to find his way but he also corrects it as he proceeds, removing old idealizations and introducing new ones. Using the map no matter what will soon get him into trouble. But it is better to have maps than to proceed without them. In the same way, the example says, reason without the guidance of a practice will lead us astray while practice is vastly improved by the addition of reason.

...

I shall discuss the answers given by idealism, naturalism and by a third position, not yet mentioned, which I shall call naive anarchism.

According to idealismit is rational (proper, in accordance with the will of the gods - or whatever other encouraging words are being used to befuddle the natives) to do certain things - come what may. It is rational (proper, etc) to kill the enemies of the faith, to avoid ad hoc hypotheses, to despise the desires of the body, to remove inconsistencies, to support progressive research programmes and so on. Rationality (justice, the Divine Law) are universal, independent of mood, context, historical circumstances and give rise to equally universal rules and standards.

There is a version of idealism that seems to be somewhat more sophisticated but actually is not. Rationality (the law, etc) is no longer said to be universal, but there are universally valid conditional statements asserting what is rational in what context and there are corresponding conditional rules.

jSome reviewers have classified me as an idealist in the sense just described with the proviso that I try to replace familiar rules and standards by more 'revolutionary' rules such as proliferation and counterinduction and almost everyone ha ascribed to me a 'methodology' with 'anything goes' as its one 'basic principle'. But in Chapter 2 I say quite explicitly that 'my intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that, all methodologies, event the most obvious ones have their limits' or, to express it in terms just explained, my intention is to show that idealism, whether of the simple or of the context-dependent kind is the wrong solution for the problems of scientific rationality. These problems are not solved by a change of standards but by taking a different view of standards altogether.

...

The limitation of all rules and standards is recognized by naive anarchism. A naive anarchist says (a) that both absolute rules and context-dependent rules have their limits and infers (b) that all rules and standards are worthless and should be given up. Most reviewers regard me as a naive anarchist in this sense, overlooking the many passages where I show how certain procedures aided scientists in their research. For i my studies of Galileo, of Brownian motion, of the Presocratics I not only demonstrate the failures of familiar standards, I also try to show what not so familiar procedures did actually succeed . thus while I agree with (a) I do not agree with (b). I argue that all rules have their limits and that there is no comprehensive 'rationality', I do not argue that we should proceed without rules and standards. I also argue for a contextual account but again the contextual rules are not to replace the absolute rules, they are to supplement them. Moreover, I suggest a new relation between rules and practices. It is this relation and not any particular rule-content that characterizes the position I wish to defend.
(Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 225/226/227/228/229 *

i. Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are. ...

ii. A tradition assumes desirable or undesirable properties only when compared with some tradition ...

iii. i. and ii. imply a relativism of precisely the kind that seems to have been defended by Protagoras...

iv. Every tradition has special ways of gaining followers...

v. ... judging a historical process one may use an as yet unspecified and unspecifiable practice....

vi. There are therefore at least two different ways of collectively deciding an issue which I shall call a guided exchange and an open exchange respectively. ... An open exchange, on the other hand, is guided by a pragmatic philosophy. The tradition adopted by the parties is unspecified in the beginning and develops as the exchange proceeds. The participants get immersed into each other's way of thiking, feeling, perceiving to such an extent that their ideas, perceptions, world-views may be entirely changed - they become different people partipating in a new and different tradition . An open exchange respects the partner whether he is an individual or an entire culture, hwile a rational exchange promises respect only within the framework of a rational debate. An open exchange establishes connections between different traditions and transcends the relativism of points ii and iv. However, it transcends it in a way that cannot be made objective but depends in an unforeseeable manner on the (historical, psychological, material) conditions in which it occurs (Cf. also the last paragraph of Chapter 16).

vii. A free society is a society in which all traditions are given equal rights, equal access to education and other positions of power. ... A free society thus cannot be based on any particular creed; for example, it cannot be based on rationalism or on humanitarian considerations. The basic structure of a free society is a protective structure, not an ideology, it functionslike an iron railing not like a conviction. But how is this structure to be conceived? Is it not necessary to debate the matter or should the structure be simplyimposed? And if it is necessary to debate the matter then should this debate not be kept free from subjective influences and based on 'objective' considerations only? This is how intellectuals try to convience their fellow citizens that the money paid to them is well spent and that their ideology should continue to assume the central position it now has. I have already exposed the errors-cum-deceptions behind the phrase of the 'objectivity of a rational debate': the standards of such a debate are not 'objective' they only appear to be 'objective' because reference to the group that profits from their use has been omitted. They are like the invitations of a clever tyrant who instead of saying 'I want you to do ...' or 'I and my wife want you to to do ...' says 'What all of us want is ...' or 'what the gods want of us is ... ' or, even better, 'it is rational to do ...' and so seems to leave out his own person entirely. It is somewhat depressing to see how many intelligent people have fallen for such a shallow trick. (Emphasis Added - Danny) We remove it by observing:

vii. that a free society will not be imposed but will emerge only where people engaging in an open exchange (cf. vi above) introduce protecteive structures of the kind alluded to...

ix. The debates settling the structure of a free society are open debates not guided debates ..

x. A free society insists on the separation of science and society ... (Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 248

The idea of a world machine and the related idea that nature is material to be shaped by man should not be blamed on modern, i.e. post-Cartesian, science. It is older and stronger than a purely philosophical doctrine could ever be. The expression 'world machine' is found Pseudo Dionysius Areopagita, a mystic of unknown identity who wrote about 500 AD and had tremendous influence.

Page 253

The playwright (and his colleague, the teacher) must try not to anticipate the decision of the audience (of the pupils) or replace it by a decision of his own should they turn out to be incapable of making up their own minds. Under no circumstances must he try to be a 'moral force'. A moral force, whether for good or for evil, turns people into slaves and slavery, even slavery in the service of The Good, or of God Himself, is the most abject condition of all. This is how I see the situation today. However, it took me a long time before I arrived at this view.(Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 262

Two events made me realize the futility of such attempts. One was a discussion with Professor C.F. von Weizsacker in Hamburg (1965) on the foundations of the quantum theory. Von Weizsacker showed how quantum mechanics arose from concrete research while I complained, on general methodological grounds, that important alternatives had been omitted. The arguments supporting my complain were quite good - they are the arguments summarized in Chapter 3 - but it was suddenly clear to me that imposed without regard to circumstances they were a hindrance rather than a help: a person trying to solve a problem whether in science or elsewhere must be given complete freedom and cannot be restricted by any demands, norms, however plausible they may seem to the logician or the philosopher who has thought them out in the privacy of his study. Norms and demands must be checked by research, not by appeal to theories of rationality. In a lengthy article I explained how Bohr had used his philosophy and how it differs from more abstract procedures. Thus Professor von Weizsacker has prime responsibility fro my change to 'anarchism' - though he was not all pleased when I told him so in 1977.

Page 265/266/267

I envisaged a new kind of education that would live from a rich reservoir of different points of view permitting the choice of traditions most advantageous to the individual. The teacher's task would consist in facilitating the choice, not in replacing it by some 'truth' of his own. Such a reservoir, I thought, would have been much in common with a theatre of ideas as imagined by Piscator and Brecht and it would be lead to the development of a great variety of means of presentation. The 'objective' scientific account would be one way of presenting a case, a play another way (remember that for Aristotle tragedy is 'more philosophical' than history because it reveals the structure of historical process and not only its accidental details), a novel still another way. Why should knowledge be shown in the garment of academic prose and reasoning? Had no Plato observed that written sentences in a book are but transitory stages of a complex process of growth that contains gestures, jokes, asides, emotions and had he not tried to catch this process by means of the dialogue? And were there not different forms of knowledge, some much more detailed and realistic than what arose as 'rationalism' in the 7th and 6th century in Greece? Then there was Dadism. I had studied Dadaism after the Second World War. What attracted me to this movement was the style its inventors used when not engaged in Dadaistic activities. It was clear, luminous, simple without being banal, precise without being narrow; it was a style adapted to the expression of thought as well as of emotion. I connected this style with the Dadaistic exercises themselves. Assume you tear language apart, you live for days and weeks in a world of cacophonic sounds, jumbled words, nonsensical events. Then, after this preparation, you sit down and write: 'the cat is on the ma'. This simple sentence which we usually utter without thought, like talking machines (and much of our talk is indeed routine)j, no seems like the creation of an entire world: God said let there be light and there was light. Nobody in modern times has understood the miracle of language and thought as well as the Dadaists for nobody has been able to imagine, let alone create, a world in which they play no role.Having discovered the nature of a living order, of a reason that is not merely mechanical, the Dadaists soon noticed the deterioration of such an order into routine. They diagnosed the deterioration of language that preceded the First World War and created the mentality that made it possible. AFter the diagnosis their exercises assumed another, more sinister meaning. The revealed the frightening similarity between the language of the foremost commercial travelers in 'importance', the language of philosophers, politicians, theologians, and brute inarticulation. The praise of honour, patriotism, truth, rationality, honesty that fills our schools, pulpits, political meetings imperceptibly merges into inarticulation no matter how much it has been wrapped into literary language and no matter how hard its authors try to copy the style of the classics and the authors themselves are in the end hardly distinguishable from a pack of grunting pigs. Is there a way to prevent such deterioration? I thought there was. I thought that regarding all achievements as transitory, restricted and personal and every truth as created by our love for it and not as 'found' would prevent the deterioration of once promising fairy-tales and I also thought that it was necessary to develop a new philosophy or a new religion to give substance to this unsystematic conjecture.

I now realize that these considerations were just another example of intellectualistic conceit and folly. It is conceited to assume that one has solutions for people whose lives one does not share and whose problems one does not know. It is foolish to assume that such an exercise in distant humanitarianism will have effects pleasing to the people concerned. From the very beginning of Western Rationalism intellectuals have regarded themselves as teachers, the world as a school and 'people' as obedient pupils. In Plato this is very clear. The same phenomenon occurs among Christians, Rationalists, Fascists, Marxists. Marxists did not try to learn from those they wanted to liberate; they attacked each other about interpretations, viewpoints, evidence and took it for granted that the resulting intellectual hash would make fine food for the natives (Bakunin was aware of the doctrinarian tendencies of contemporary Marxism and he intended to return all power - power over ideas included - to the people immediately concerned). My own view differed from those just mentioned but it was still a view, an abstract fancy I had invented and now tried to sell without having shared even an ounce of the lives of the receivers. This I now regard as insufferable conceit. So - what remains?

Two things remain. I could follow my own advice to address and try to influence only those people whom I think I understand on a personal basis. This includes some of my friends,; it may include philosophers I have not met but who seem to be interested in similar problems and who are not too upset by my style and my general approach. It may also include people from different cultures who are attracted, even fascinated by Wester science and Western intellectual life, who have started participating in it but who still remember, in thought as well as in feeling the life of the culture they left behind. My account might lessen the emotional tension they liable to feel and make them see a way of uniting, rather than opposing to each other, the various stages of their lives.

Page 269

A guided exchange adopts 'a well-specified tradition and accept[s] only those responses that correspond to its standards. If one party has not yet become a participant ... he will be badgered, persuaded, 'educated' until he does - and then the exchange begins.' 'A rational debate', I continue, 'is a special case of a guided exchange.' In the case of open exchange 'the participants get immersed into each other's ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving to such an extent that their ideas, perceptions, world-views may be entirely changed - they become different people participating in a new and different tradition. An open exchange respects the partner whether he is an individual or an entire culture, while a rational exchange promises respect only within the framework of a rational debate. An open exchange has no organon though it may invent one; there is no logic though new forms of logic may emerge in its course.' In sum, an open exchange is part of an as yet unspecified and unspecifiable practice.

Notes on Certain To Win by Chet Richards

Certain To Win by Chet Richards

Notes on Certain To Win, The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards

In this text, Richards -- the essence of boyds mannuever strategy, and TPS

Page 10

After considerable research, Boyd concluded that a small set of principles formed the foundation for the German victory and that they wer primarily cultural, that is, they dealt with the behavior of people in groups. These "principles of the Blitzkrieg" do not give instructions on how to deploy tanks on the battlefield. Rather they aim to attack the ability of the other side to make effective decisions under conditions of danger, fear, and uncertainty and to increase our ability to function well under these same conditions. There was, in other words, little exclusively military about Boyd's philosophy of conflict.

Page 22

... somehow the Germans had evolved a way to cope with the chaos. Since they could cope with it, it was in their best interest to create it, and they designed the strategy of the Blitzkrieg to do just that. As for the French, panic and confusion seemed to snowball as the battle progressed.

...

It was a powerful force and should have been able to throw a roadblock in front of the fast-moving Germans. As the French force stopped to refuel, however, Major General Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division, joined by the 5th Panzers, ambushed them and destroyed all but 17 out of the original 175 French tanks. Now Rommel did something that characterizes Blitzkrieg warfare. Rather than dig in and "consolidate his position," or otherwise savor the fruits of victory, he proceeded to use his advantage in time to neutralize his opponents' forces and weapons. Battle-weary as they must have been, rommel's troops remounted their vehicles, pressed on to the west, and actually reached the new French defensive line before the French.

Page 23/24

... British military historian Basil Liddel hart had to say:

The issue turned on the time factor at stage after stage. French countermovements were repeatedly thrown out of gear because their timing was too slow to catch up with the changing situation ... The french, trained in the slow-motion methods of World War I, were mentally unfit to cope with the new tempo, and it caused a spreading paralysis among them.

Or from the British general whom the Germans credit as one of the sources of the Blitzkrieg, J. F. C. Fuller:

It was to employ mobility as a psychological weapon: not to kill but to move, not to move to kill but to move to terrify, to bewilder, to perplex, to cause consternation, doubt and confusion in the rear of the enemy...

In other words, the purpose of the Blitzkrieg strategy was not so much to cope with chaos, but to cause and then exploit it, and it is this cascading of panic and chaos that accounts for the German's "string of luck."

Page 25

Our view of the world, our "orientation," as Boyd called it, depends heavily on things happening close in time to when we expect them to happen. Mismatches in time - such as when things don't appear to be happening in a continuous and predictable (even if very rapid) manner - can be disorienting. Under stress, disoriented people become demoralized, frustrated, and panicked. Once in this condition, they can easily be defeated, regardless of the weapons that remain in their possession.

Page 29/30

... a concept known as agility, another word that has lost its original meaning through careless application. Boyd, however, used the term in a specific sense, to mean the ability to rapidly change one's orientation - roughly, worldview - in response to what is happening in the external world.

...

The essence of agility and of applying Boyd's ideas to any form of competition is to keep one's orientation well matched to the real world during times of ambiguity, confusion, and rapid change, when the natural tendency is to become disoriented.

Page 39

There is a saying that the battle is not always to the strong, but that's the way to bet. If by stronger, you mean bigger, or more advanced technologically, you are going to lose your bet fairly often even you're wagering (or investing in ) business.

....

There have always been strategists down through history, in the East in particular, who have held the "bigger is better"notion in special contempt. The noted Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (c. 5th century B.C.), who is still widely studied today, dismissed the fascination with size thusly: "Numbers alone confer no advantage." Japans favorite strategist, the 17th Century samurai warrior-philosopher, Miyamoto Musashi, wrote with blunt contempt that "it does not matter who is stronger or who is faster."

Page 42

Forrest put his arm around him and uttered those immortal words of strategy, "Ah Colonel, all is fair in love and war, you know."

• "All warfare is based upon deception" - Sun Tzu
• "War is trickery." - Muhammad, Prophet of Islam
• "Mystify, mislead and surprise" - Stonewall Jackson
• "I put the scare on them, and I keep it on. " - Nathan Bedford Forrest

Page 43

Table I - What Wins
Things We Want To Have On Our Side:

• Sense of Mission
• Morale
• Leadership
• Harmony
• Teamwork

Which Allows Us To:

• Appear Ambiguous
• Be Deceptive
• Generate Surprise & Panic
• Seize & Keep The Initiative
• Create and Exploit Opportunities

Which Cause These In The Enemy:

• Bickering
• Scapegoating
• Confusion
• Panic
• Rout
• Mass Defections & Surrender

Page 44/45/46

So there might be a set of equations that tie the inflation rate to stock prices, and another set that relates unemployment to housing starts, and so on. The idea is that once all these equations are joined together, you can raise the discount by one-half point and the model will tell you the effect on unemployment (or whatever).

...

So you think that by now, somone would have invented a model of the economy that works. Then, at least in theory, economic policymaking would be simple: Play with the model until you et a result you like (or can live with) and then implement the policy (the model inputs) that produced it.

...

... Perhaps the problem is, as I have suggested for strategy, that modeling by it's very nature cannot address the underlying basis of economics.

Nobel Laureate Frederick Hayek eloquently makes this case in his book, The Fatal Conceit. Hayek inveighed against the notion of ever being able to plan a productive economy. he argues that formal planning methodologies -- which are models of how an economy works -- do not capture what really drives a competitive economy, in particular the information processed through decisions made daily by millions of buyers and sellers. Conversely, countries try to run their economies through a central state planning mechanism cannot process information nearly as well as the multitude of players in a decentralized system. Hayek's theories were validated in the last half of the 20th century, when countries that relied on Soviet style planning collapsed in competition with those that evolved decentralized, capitalist economies.

Another reason economies are impossible to model involves the messy presence of human beings. Financially massive organizations warp the environment they inhabit much like the way gravitationally massive bodies warp space-time in physics: Normal rules do not apply to them. Giant companies influence Congress, the executive branch, and local governing bodies to pass legislation they want - granting them subsidies, protection, environmental relief, favorable tax status, and so on - and otherwise treat them in way that are perfectly legal, but outside what the equations of economics predict.

These favors can range from protective tariffs to outright grants (often inserted by pet Congressional representatives into obscure sections of appropriation bills) to program that continue to bleed tax dollars long after any need for them has disappeared. As an aside, this last effect - often called "pork" - is well known to those in defense, and former President Eisenhower warned of it in the Farewell Address (January 1961):

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

These are the soft, political, impossible-to-model but critical aspects of the economy. Any company that attempted to ignore them, to predict in a step-by-step fashion the results of its moves, creates a form of macroeconomic model because it is also predicting effects on at least part of the larger economy. So it will fall victim to the limitations of any such model - including Hayek's information processing arguments and political activities that change the rules. The upshot will be a strategy that works no better for business than did its counterparts for war: A company using such a model would make itself vulnerable to competitors who better understand the real economy.

Page 48

Boyd was famous for browbeating his audiences with the mantra, "People, ideas, and hardware - in that order!" What we have seen so far reinforces Boyd's conclusion. In all the battles and business examples noted in chapter II, as well as in the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, groups of dedicated people found and exploited weaknesses in their larger and better-financed adversaries.

..

The reason for this reversal, in business and in war, appears to be that these smaller organizations were able to avoid or negate the larger's advantages in size and strength. Somehow they had managed not to become systems in the eyes of their larger opponents. This might lead one to suspect that in any competitive endeavor, if you can be modeled ("sand-tabled, " as Boyd referred to it) you aren't using strategy at all and you can be defeated.

Page 51

After the war, American strategists did get the opportunity to talk at length with many of the practitioners of the Blitzkrieg. Amidst all the war stories, a pattern became clear: The roots of success in 1940 lay in the German system for dealing with people; it was cultural, rather than technical. Here, I am using "cultural" in the sense of "business culture," not as a national trait. From his conversations with the German generals and his study of their experiences and doctrine, Boyd extracted the four concepts shown below as the primary reason for the Germans' success: You don't have to be a tank commander in central Europe to exploit these cultural properties. Boyd called them "an organizational climate for operational success," and the organization can be a business, a political campaign, or, of course, an army.

Key Attributes of the Blitkrieg

• Einehit: Mutual trust, unity, and cohesion
• Fingerspitzengefuhl:Intuitive feel, especially for complex and potentially chaotic situations
• Auftragstaktik:Mission, generally considered as a contract between superior and subbordinate
• Schwerpunkt:Any concept that provides focus and direction to the operation

Page 53/54

Boyd's Maneuver Warfare Handbook :

Both leadership and monitoring are values without trust. The "contracts" . . . of intent and mission express that trust . . . that his subordinates will understand and carry out his desires and trust by his subordinates that they will be supported when exercising their initiative.

If there is a universally accepted truth in the military science, the fundamental role played by cohesion, unity, and trust may be it. Twenty-four hundred years before Fuller, Sun Tzu had concluded that, "He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious." The Arab historian ibn Khaldun, who is generally credited with writings the first modern analysis of history, echoed this theme in 1377 A.D., "What is in fact proven to make for superiority is the situation with regard to group feeling." The rule is simple: The side with the stronger group feeling has a great advantage.

...

Such an anvil of shared experience appears to be necessary ingredient in forging a bond of trust.

Page 57

This brings us to Schwerpunkt, which is any device or concept that gives focus and direction to our efforts. The world literally translates as "hard/difficult point," but its real meaning is more like center of gravity, focal point, or main focus. It can also mean "emphasis."

The distinguishing characteristic of an effective focus is that all other activities of the organization must support it and that the people conducting these activities understand what the main effort is and know that they must support it. Conversely, subordinates are expected to use their own initiatives to exploit opportunities, even if it means setting aside a previously issued order, whenever they can further the accomplishment of the focusing-and-directing mission (communicating this change back to the commander, of course). As you can see, this is a powerful concept for motivating subordinates, while at the same time harmonizing their energy to accomplish the commander's intent.

...

This notion of "setting-up" activities followed by a knockout punch is as old a concept as mutual trust. Its known roots go back thousands of years, and the ancient Chinese even had expressions for this type of strategy, calling the setting-up, "cheng maneuvers," to be followed at the decisive moment by the "ch'i" knockout punch.

Page 58

The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one's efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements. Lind notes, and this is especially relevant to business, that the focus is often a concept rather than a unit, and so shifting it requires a mental as well as a physical change.

Page 60/61

... Boyd decided that the F-86 won because it could generate something he called "asymmetric fast transients." A "transient" is a shift from one state to another, "fast" refers to the time it takes to make the shift (not, as is often thought, the velocity of the aircraft itself), and "asymmetric" means that one side is better at it than the other.

An "asymmetric fast transient," though, is not a traditional maneuver done more quickly, even much more quickly. In business, it should not conjure up an image of doing what you're doing now, just doing it faster. The "transient" is the change between maneuvers. In Boyd's concept, the ideal asymmetric fast transient is an abrupt, unexpected, jerky, disorienting change that causes at least a hesitation and preferably plants the seeds of panic in the other side. It's a "what-the f__k!" change in circumstances, and in the interval when the opponent is trying to comprehend what the f__k is, Boyd would strike. What this described vis-a-vis the MiG and the F-86 is that the American fighter could setup novel and unexpected conditions and exploit them before the Russian could react with his sometimes superior EM capability.

Page 62

After examining many wars, battles, and engagements, Boyd synthesized his no well-known "OODA Loop." A participant in a conflict, any conflict, may be thought of as engaging in four distinctive although not distinct activities:

• He must observe the environment, which includes himself, his opponent, the physical, mental, and moral situation, and potential allies and opponents.
• he must orient himself to decide what it all means. Boyd calls orientation a "many-sided, implicit cross-referencing" process involving the information observed, one's genetic heritage, social environment, and prior experiences, and the results of analyses one conducts and synthesis that one forms.
• He must reach some type of decision.
• He must attempt to carry out that decision. That is, he must act.

Page 63

Since what you're looking for is mismatches, a general rule is that bad news is the only kind that will do you any good.

Page 65

[GOOD OODA DIAGRAM]

Page 66

... Boyd defined "agility" in these terms: A side in a conflict or competition is more agilethan its opponent if it can execute its OODA loops more quickly.

Page 67

Ambiguityis a terrible thing, much more effective as a strategy than deception, with which it is often confused. Deception is correctly described as a tactic: If you are deceived, you will be surprised when you discover the truth, and it is possible that you will be led to do some things, perhaps even fatal things, that you would not have done if you had realized the truth earlier. It can be extremely effective tactic, even though your ability to function as a thinking human being is not at risk. This s exactly what you can attack and destroy using ambiguity.

...

If something vital, such as life itself, is at stake, losing track of deadly threat in the fog of ambiguity can quickly lead to confusion, panic, and terror ...

Page 69/70/71/72

The Army was the first to put the concept of agility into formal written doctrine. In their Field Manual 3-0, Operations the Army tells its soldiers that:

Agility is the ability to move and adjust quickly and easily. It springs form trained and disciplined forces. Agility requires that subordinates act to achieve the commander's intent and fight through any obstacle to accomplish the mission.

Operational agility stems from the capability to deploy and employ forces across the range of Army operations. Army forces and commanders shift among offensive, defensive, stability, and support operations as circumstances and missions require. This capability is not merely physical; it requires conceptual sophistication and intellectual flexibility.

Tactical agility is the ability of a friendly force to react faster than the enemy. It is essential to seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative. Agility is mental and physical. Agile commanders quickly comprehend unfamiliar situations, creatively apply doctrine, and make timely decisions.

...

Note the Army omits the time element from operational agility, making it more like "flexibility" than Boyd's concept of agility.

...

[The Air Force's] 1984 Basic Doctrine Manual made it clear what they expected to accomplish:

Timing and tempo allow friendly forces to "dominate the action, remain unpredictable, and create uncertainty in the mind of the enemy."

...

Naval Command and Control (NDP 6), they state that:

However, the essential lesson of the decision and execution cycle is the absolute importance of generating tempo. Maintaining rapid decision and execution cycles-and thus a rapid tempo of operations - requires that seniors and subordinates alike have an accurate image of the battlespace and a shared vision of what needs to be done. With this common perspective, commanders are able to experience superior situational awareness and make more effective decisions, enabling them to exercise initiative during combat.

...

MCDP1, Warfighting, lays out a concept of maneuver warfare entirely consistent with the ideas of agility that we have been exploring:

By our actions, we seek to impose menacing dilemmas in which events happen unexpectedly and faster than the enemy can keep up with them ... The ultiamte goal is panic and paralysis, an enemy who has lost the will to resist.

Page 75

When discussing the notions of grand strategy, Boyd concluded that: What is needed is a vision rooted in human nature so noble, so attractive that it not only attracts the uncommitted and magnifies the spirit and strength of its adherents, but also undermines the dedication and determination of any competitors or adversaries. Moreover, such a unifying notion should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve those qualities that permit a collective entity or organic whole to improve its stature int he scheme of things.

Page 77/78

[Strategy Definitions]

From War:

The art and science of employing the armed forces of a nation or alliance to secure policy objectives by the application of that of military force. US Army Field Manual 100-5, Operations, 1986

Victory is achieved in the way of conflict by ascertaining the rhythm of each opponent, by attacking with a rhythm not anticipated by the opponent, and by the use of knowledge of the rhythm of the abstract. Miyamoto Musashi, samurai strategist, 17th century Japan, Nihon Services Group trans.

From business:

Strategy is a deliberate search for a plan of action that will develop a business's competitive advantage and compound it. Bruce Hnderson, Founder, the Boston Consulting Group.

Strategy isn't beating the competition, it's serving the customer's real needs. Kenich Ohmae, Managing Director, McKinsey & Co, Tokyo Office

From everyday life:

The art of the possible in a world where constraints force us to choose between unpleasant or imperfect alternatives. Retired Pentagon official and long-time Boyd associate Franklin C. Spinney, author of Defense Facts of Life

Page 79

A plan is an intention about how to get from where we are now to where we want to be in the future.

...

The term strategy will be used for higher-order devices for creating and managing plans.

Page 84

Boyd's Definition:

Strategy is a mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.

Page 87 *

... then break the enemy formation into meaningless chunks that didn't know what they were doing .. the way they fought seemed like the only intellegent way ... the only possible way. Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

Page 89

A Simple Example of Agility

Go find the best chess player you can and offer to play for $1,000 under the following conditions:

• Your opponent moves first.
• You move twice for every move of his or hers.

In fact, you can even offer to give up some pieces, to make it more fair. You will find that, unless you are playing somebody at the grandmaster level, you can give up practically everything and still win. Keep the knights and maybe a rook.

This is a graphic illustration of how the smaller side, using agility, can overcome a large disadvantage in numbers. Does it strike you as farfetched and removed from what happens in the real world? Consider that Honda and Toyota can bring out a new model in roughly 2 years, with superb quality, while it still takes Detroit at least a year longer.

Page 91

How to tell you strategy is working in business

• Your competitor's new products are consistently late and lack your features or quality.
• He starts blaming the customer, or insisting that his sales force "educate the customer."
• Personnel turnover is high.
• He becomes even more "Theory X," instituting rigid, explicit controls, frequently in the name of containing costs.
• He launches witch hunts and other ever-intensifying internal searches for "the cause of the problem."

Page 93

To think that you can predict what needs to be done a year from now is sheer arrogance.

Page 94

In this case [LEAN], competitive advantage comes not from better ways to handle inventory, but from fundamental changes that enable a goal of abolishing altogether. This is an exact analogy to the military case, in which conventional strategy glossed over the factors that actually produce victory, like cohesion/trust, and instead considered only numbers and weapon effectiveness.

Page 96

There is nothing wrong with conducting post-mortem investigations into your success and failures and you should do this as a matter of course. Problems arise when you change strategies after every one. Management theorists call this tendency to chase the last data point the "Nelson Funnel."

Page 114

Communications is the bottoms-up aspect of command and control, and the Marines define "control," to be this stream of information:

Control takes the form of feedback = the continuous flow of information about the unfolding situation returning to the command - which allows the commander to adjust and modify command action as needed.

Page 121

Futurist James Ogilvy simply denouned managing through goal setting as "bunk." Instead, he recommend that:

Organizations should tread near the edge of the future, making it up as they go along, with as much sensitivity, awareness, knowledge, compassion, feeling and beauty as they can muster.

Page 124/125

[Boyd]

Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.

Page 129/120

[GOOD DIAGRAM - how the core concepts integrate/example]

Page 132

... the use of time as a shaping and exploiting mechanism, and the emphasis on a culture/organizational climate that makes this possible - apply equally well to both.

Page 133

To Read - Boyd Briefing: Organic Design for Command and Control. Google Power Point

Page 149

The key to understanding cheng and ch'i in looking carefully at the nature of the terms themselves rather at their specific applications in war. One of the main themes of this book has been that the essence of Boyd's strategy in buisness competition is ot shape ourselves and the marketplace to improve our capacity for independent action - to survive on our terms - generally at the expense of our competitors. The nature of war is to shape the enemy. Detect a connection? The nature of cheng / ch'i, in both cases as it will turn out is not "frontal versus flank" but something more fundamental: "shaping" using orthodox (expected) in conjunction with the unorthodox (surprising). Engage with the cheng and win with the ch'i, in business as in war.

Page 154/155

Musashi is clear at many places in his book that although such expected excellence is essential, it is not the key to victory. You cannot become so technically proficient that you are asured of winning every fight: If you achieved a 97% chance of winning a fight, which would be spectacular against people who train just as hard as you do, you odds of surviving 25 fights is less than 50%. Musashi won 60 duels, so clearly he was not thinking of taking that kind of risk. He wanted no risk at all.

For that, one needs to develop an ability to do the unexpected and then exploit its results quickly. The key to this strategy is a different type of training, where students practice generating ch'i and using it with cheng as instinctively as they previously practiced manipulating the sword.

...

Boyd insisted that "ch'i" and "Schwerpunkt" are essentially the same, that is finding an exploiting the magical element should be what gives your enterprise focus and direction.

...

In warfare, one purpose of using cheng/ch'i is to generate the jerky, abrupt, unexpected and disorienting changes that Boyd called "asymmetric fast transients."

Page 162/163

What You Really Do With OODA LOOPS

...

• Uncover, create, and exploit many vulnerabilities and weaknesses, hence many opportunities, to pull adversary apart and isolate remnants for mop-up or absorption
• Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos ... to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse
• Destroy the moral bonds (of the enemy) that permit an organic whole to exist
• Create moral bonds that permit us, as organic whole, to shape and adapt to change

With a strategy this powerful, your aim is not to respond to but to create the market conditions that you want.

Page 166

The need for a change in underlying assumptions is what distinguishes maneuver conflict in all its forms from activities like "business process reengineering." As a result of implementing maneuver conflict, many of the existing processes and the relationships between them are going to disappear, and so it would be a waste of time and money to "improve" them. This breaking of relationships ("shattering of domains," as Boyd referred to it) is a prerequisite to implementing maneuver conflict, which is one reason why all successful implementing have eliminated roughly 25-40% of management positions, since those reflect the existing processes and relationships.

Page 168

The weakness in the book is that there is no recognition that the TPS is based on a deeper set of principles that do apply to other human activities, like warfare. The index is devoid of such basic terms as trust, cohesion, initiative, or even "maneuver," which was adopted as official USMC doctrine seven years before Lean Thinking appeared so was hardly esoteric when that book was written. Without a climate like the one I have described in this book you will find it difficult to create a company capable of employing the ideas Womack and Jones present.

Notes on The Cunning of History

The Cunning of History

This essay presents an interesting and challenging account of power and its use. It’s exposition of the impact of law and statelessness on the actions taken by bureaucrats is enlightening. His Marxist and Religious dogma detract from the arguments presented, and in some way blind him to what I perceive the true ramifications of his essay. Below, I have sketched out seven key conclusions that I derived from the work.

1. Any government should treat all people as people, regardless of their status as a citizen – thus, even though noncitizens may not have the ability to participate in a governing structure, all rules and regulations must apply equally to them.

   A current example of where this is not the case, is the United States use of the term “Enemy Combatant” and the use of extrajudicial processes and locations, such as CIA blacksites and Guantanamo Bay.

   "Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end." — Kant

2. And perhaps more radically, that the use of force, is fundamentally immoral except in matters of self-defense. And those arbitrary regulations such as those used against the Jews were in effect an attack, and that they would have been justified in the use of force to protect themselves.

3. Power structures, especially those calcified in the form strict bureaucracies, can be easily co-opted - providing legitimacy, and disarming those upon which they operate. The co-option, of various Jewish organizations greatly increased the ease at which they were controlled and ultimately slaughtered. From this, it becomes apparent that those power structures should be severely limited, and their authority must be constantly challenged.

   As evidenced by Milgrim’s famous experiment, the removal of responsibility and the distancing of direct infliction facilitate individuals in carrying out acts of unspeakable horror. Thus, if we are serious about institutional reform, one would think that rotations that serve to remove the distance a bureaucrat has from their actions and the effect of those upon which they are inflicted would be considered the standard operating procedure.

4. Government bureaucracies, and others that rely upon force to maintain their funding and resources, provide a difficult challenge for those affected by their actions to alter the system. In a society in which individuals are free to interact, the market provides a means by which one can punish the remote bureaucrat. Resources can be removed to weaken, take down, and ultimately impact the bureaucrat that “sleeps easily.”
5. The discussion of the ethics involved in the Tuskegee experiments should provide insight into current discussions about the FDA and its approval of drugs. Individuals have no choice but to take part in double blind studies, thus they have no control of their lives. Though differing in key fundamental ways modern drug trials are functionally equivalent to the Tuskegee experiments – the patient is given or a placebo or not, and observed. Luckily in modern FDA trials the patient knows that they may be given a placebo, but the end results are the same – if the medicine would have saved them, then they are condemned to death for science. This is not to discount the benefits that accrue due to these trials or to argue about the system that should replace it, merely to highlight the current system has fundamental ethical issues that must be addressed – it’s hard to find a solution, if the problem isn’t articulated.
6. The attacks against corporations and the arguments against capitalism seem to be misguided. Sure there are evil corporations, and groups of people, but their ability to inflict pain and suffering on the general populace is significantly less than that of governments as shown throughout the history of the 20th century. It would seem foolish to trust a serial killer to keep tabs on a shoplifter.In the above thoughts, I tried to capture my thinking in response to the act of reading this essay. Premature, as they are, they perhaps provide a hint to ways in which I will continue to think about justice, ethics, power, power structures, and their impacts on the populace.

Notes:

Page 2

This power must also alter the texture of foreign relation. According to Max Weber, "The sate is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.” Auschwitz has enlarged our conception of the state’s capacity to do violence. A barrier has been overcome in what for millennia had been regarded as the permissible limits of political action. The Nazi period serves as a warning of what we can all too easily become were we faced with a political or an economic crisis of overwhelming proportions. The public may be fascinated by the Nazis; hopefully, it is also warned by them.

Page 14/15/16/17

As the stateless refugees entered the countries of the West, especially France, it was soon discovered that these were people who could neither be repatriated nor granted citizenship by the host country. The stateless were truly men without any political community. No country wanted them or cared about their fate.
…

In dealing with the apatride who could not be repatriated, the host country could either suffer his presence at liberty, subject at all times to police surveillance, or it could set up concentration camps in which to detain him. In either case, the apatride, although not a criminal, was for all practical purposes an outlaw. He was subject to the kind of police surveillance and control that was not in turn subject to judicial review. Stateless persons were thus among the first Europeans in the twentieth century to experience unrestricted police domination. Once the police tasted the freedom of dominating one class of men unhindered by judicial process or legal restraint, they sought to extend their power to others. This process reached its zenith in Nazi Germany towards the end of the war when the power of the Gestapo and the SS over the German people was almost completely unhindered by any competing institution.

While individual apatrides were permitted to pursue whatever manner of life they could find as refugees within the urban centers of the host countries, as soon as large numbers of apatrides, such as the veterans of the Spanish Republican army, entered a host country en masse, they were placed in detention camps which were in reality concentration camps.

Initially, the concentration camps were established to accommodate detainees who had been placed under “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) by the Nazi regime. Those arrested were people whom the regime wished to detain although there was no clear legal justification for so doing. Almost all of the original detainees were German communists, not Jews. Had the Nazi’s political prisoners been brought before a German court in the first year or two of Hitler’s regime, the judiciary would have been compelled to dismiss the case. This was not because the German judiciary was anti-Nazi, but because it was bureaucratic in structure. In the early stages of the Nazi regime, there was a no formula in law to cover all the political prisoners the Nazis wanted to arrest. This problem was solved by holding them under “protective custody” and setting up camps outside of the regular prison system to receive them. Incidentally, the American government did something very similar when it interned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. They had committed no crime. No Court would have convicted them.

…

Like the original political prisoners in the German camps, there was no legal basis for the detention of the apatrides. Yet, the host countries’ leaders were convinced that it was in their nation’s interest to hold them. Camps were established for those who had no status in law and for whom no law existed that could justify their being held. The unifying bond between the apatrides and the first prisoners in the German concentration camps was that both groups were outlaws.

Neither the apatrides nor the German political prisoners were outlaws because of any crime they had committed, but because their status had been altered by their country’s civil service or police bureaucracy. They had been deprived of all political status by bureaucratic definition. As such, they had become superfluous men. Those apatrides in the detention camps were among the living dead. Sooner or later, most of the living dead were destined to join that vast company Gil Eliot has called “the nation of the dead,” the millions who perished by large-scale human violence in this bloodiest of centuries.

…

Before World War II, the number of stateless persons increased with every passing year. Statesmen and police officials were agreed that a solution to the problem had to be found. The stateless could neither be assimilated nor, in most cases, expelled. International conferences on the “refugee problem” were held, but to no avail. There seemed to be no solution. In reality, there was a “solution” that was obvious to Hitler. When one has surplus livestock that are a drain on resources, one gets rid of them. Neither Hitler nor Stalin saw any reason why people ought to be treated differently. The “solution” had logic on its side, yet there remained a sentimental obstacle: In the prewar period, it was not yet possible to exterminate surplus people the way a farmer might kill off surplus cattle.

…

The British government was by no means averse to the “final solution” as long as the Germans did most of the dirty work.

Page 21

… we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. Given Britain’s imperial commitments, Europe’s Jews were as much a superfluous population for Great Britain as they were for Germany. In the moral universe of the twentieth century, the most “rational” and least costly “solution” of the problem of disposing of a surplus population is unfortunately extermination. Properly executed, extermination is the problem-solving strategy least likely to entail unanticipated feedback hazards for its planners. From a purely bureaucratic perspective, the extermination of the Jews of Europe was the “final solution” for the British as well as the Germans.

Page 24/25/26

Himmler does not seem to have been a sadist. During the war, he did not like to watch killing operations and became upset when he did. But, Himmler was the perfect bureaucrat. He did what he believed was his duty sin ira et studio, without bias or scorn.

…

One of the examples of Himmler’s organizing ability was his involvement in the concentration camp at Dachu which he founded in 1933. Originally, there was little to distinguish Dachu from any of the early “wild” Nazi camps. Under Himmler’s guidance, Dachu became a model for the systematically managed camps of World War II. Under his direction, the sporadic terror of the “wild” camps was replaced by impersonal, systemized terror.

…

The intent of Eicke’s regulations was to eliminate all arbitrary punishment by individual guards and to replace it with impersonal, anonymous punishment. The impersonal nature of the transaction was heightened by the fact that any guard could be called on to inflict punishment. Even if a guard was struck by a prisoner, he could not retaliate personally, at least insofar as the regulations were concerned. Like everything else at the camps, under Himmler punishment was bureaucratized and depersonalized. Bureaucratic mass murder reached its fullest development when gas chambers with a capacity for killing two thousand people at a time were installed at Auschwitz. As Hannah Arendt has observed, the very size of the chambers emphasized the complete depersonalization of the killing process.

Under Himmler, there was no objection to cruelty, provided it was disciplined and systematized. This preference was also shared by the German civil service bureaucracy. According to Hilberg, the measure that gave the civil service bureaucrats least difficulty in exterminating their victims was the imposition of a starvation diet. In a bureaucratically controlled society where every individual’s ration can be strictly determined, starvation is the ideal instrument of “clean” violence. A few numbers are manipulated on paper in an office hundred of miles away from the killing centers and millions can be condemned to a prolonged and painful death. In addition, both the death rate and the desired level of vitality of the inmates can easily be regulated by the same bureaucrats. As starvation proceeds, the victim’s appearance is so drastically altered that by the time death finally releases him, he hardly seems like a human being worth saving. The very manner of death confirms the rationalization with which the killing was justified in the first place. The Nazis assigned the paranthropoid identity of a tiermensch, a subhuman, to their victims. By the time of death that identity seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet, the bureaucrat need loose no sleep over his victims. He never confronts the results of his distinctive kind of homicidal violence.

Page 27

It was only possible to overcome the moral barrier that had in the past prevented the systematic riddance of surplus populations when the project was taken out of the hands of bullies and hoodlums and delegated to bureaucrats.

Page 31/32/33

In order to understand more fully the connection between bureaucracy and mass death, it will be necessary to return to the apatrides. They were the first modern Europeans who had become politically and legally superfluous and for whom the most “rational” way of dealing with them was ultimately murder. A majority of the apatrides had lost their political status by a process of bureaucratic definition, denationalization. Miss Ardent lists a World War I measure of the French (1915) as the first such measure.

…

At the time of the denationalization decrees were first promulgated, few people dreamed of the ultimate jeopardy to which stateless persons had been condemned by the paper violence of the bureaucrats.

…

Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law.

Page 52/53

As we have noted, had the Germans won the war, mass sterilization would have been an important aspect of their program for the subject peoples. It must be remembered that with both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, victory inevitably led to an intensification rather than a diminution of terror. Mass sterilization of Poles, Russians and, in the more distant future, the French and the Italians, would have permitted the Germans to exploit the vanquished at their own convenience in the certain knowledge that the subject peoples’ national existence was at an end. Whether extermination or killing was the means of securing absolute dominance or whether a certain number of the vanquished might be permitted to reproduce in exactly calculable quantities would have depended solely on the requirements of the German masters. The victims would have had as little control over their own destiny as cattle in a stockyard. In a society of total domination, helots could be killed, bred, or sterilized at will.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see the medical experiments as the outcome of some special viciousness of which only German doctors are capable. The Germans have no monopoly on the kind of mentality that would utilize powerless human beings as unwilling or unsuspecting subjects of such experiments. Recently, it became known that a group of black prisoners suffering from syphilis in an American prison were divided into two groups, one of which was given medication to cure or control the disease, the other was given a placebo. The object of the experiment was to compare the effects of medication with that of letting the disease run its course. The organizers of the experiment had cold-bloodedly condemned the prisoners who received the placebo to the mutilating effects of disease and/or death in the name of scientific rationality. The experiment that did come to light was different from the Nazi experiments only in that the American prisoners were completely unaware of what was being done to them. Most of the Nazi victims had some idea of what was happening. The same “modern” mentality that gives a higher priority to solving an administratively defined problem than to its effect on human beings characterized both the American and the German experiments.

Furthermore, the practice of using prisoner “volunteers” for medical experiments is currently very widespread in the United States. According to Jessica Mitford, on e reputable American scientist was reputed to have said, “Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material – and much cheaper than chimpanzees.” According to the Food and Drug Administration, as of 1973, such experiments were being carried on in about fifty prisons in twenty-four states. Prisoners are usually “paid” one dollar a day for their participation. Unfortunately, there is much permanent damage to the “volunteers” and even loss of life. During World War II, the great German pharmaceutical corporation, Bayer A. G. of Leverkusen, made extensive use of death-camp inmates for their experiments on human beings. Today, Bayer’s American corporate counterparts, such as Lederle, Bristol-Myers, Squibb, Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Upjohn, have found a plentiful supply of subjects (objects?) in America’s prisons for their “voluntary” experiments on human beings. The experiments in American prisons have the cooperation and the approval of such federal bureaucracies as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Food and Drug Administration. Ms. Mitford quotes Dr. Sheldon Margen, a physician opposed to the experiments, as saying,

If the researchers really believe these experiments are safe for humans, why do they go to the prisons for the subjects? Why don’t they try them out in their own labs on students? … Because they know the university would never permit this … They make a distinction between people they think of as social equals or colleagues and men behind bars, whom they regard as less than human.

Page 55/56

Bayer’s experiments were relatively innocent. This was not true of most of I.G. Farben’s corporate activities at Auschwitz. I.G. Farben was the most important German corporate employer of slave labor at Auschwitz. The corporation’s activities are at Auschwitz are an important part of the story of the camp as a society of total domination. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had observed that the economic triumph of the bourgeoisie, the class of modern capitalists that owned the “means of production”, had “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.” Marx and Engels were pointing to the same process of “dehumanized” rationalization as had Weber, who regarded the large corporation as a type of bureaucratic organization that rivaled the state bureaucracy in achieving rational efficiency and calculated results. According to Marx, the bourgeoisie had reduced industrial labor to a commodity “like every other article of commerce.” Marx claimed that in capitalist enterprise the cost of labor was restricted to the “means of subsistence” required by the laborer “for his maintenance and the propagation of the race.” In view of the conditions of the working class in England, Europe’s most industrialized nation in the 1840s, the observations were more than justified. As uprooted men and women were forced to move from the countryside to the cities, they had little choice but to accept the subsistence wages offered to them in the mills and factories. The alternative was starvation. There was an abundant labor supply and its cost was kept at a minimum. Unlike the old feudal order, the relations between the mill and mine workers and their employers were totally impersonal. The workers were unsentimentally regarded as a necessary component in the production mechanism, but each worker was seen as an interchangeable, easily replaceable unit in a depersonalized mechanism that was calculated solely in terms of minimum costs and maximum profits.

…

In Victorian Egnald, the wage slaves had become servo-mechanism of the machines they tended. As Marx has observed, “as machines become more human, men become more like machines.”

Page 58/59

I.G Farben’s decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves: wherever possible costs, especially labor costs, must be minimized and profits maximized.

…

According to the affidavit of Dr. Raymon van den Straaten, a slave at Auschwitz, on one occasion, five of I. G. Farben’s top directors made an inspection tour of I. G. Auschwitz. As one of the directors passed a slave scientist, Dr. Fritz Lohner-Beda, the Director remarked, “The Jewish swine could work a little faster.” Another I. G. Farben director responded, “If they don’t work, let them perish in the gas chamber.” Dr. Lohner-Beda was then pulled out of his group and kicked to death.

Page 60

My point in stressing Dr. Ter Meer’s American corporate connections is not to suggest that corporate executives are possessed of some distinctive quality of villainy. It is to emphasize the extent to which the same attitude of impersonal rationality is required to run successfully a large corporation, a death camp slave labor factory and an extermination center. All three are part of the same world. At least in Germany, the top executives of all three enterprises often felt at home with each other.

Page 61

Only one incentive was necessary to keep the slaves working at maximum capacity, terror. The workers knew that the moment they were no longer capable of meeting work schedules, they would be sent tot the gas chambers. No other incentive was required. None was given. If the slaves did not keep up with the schedule, they were gassed; if they did keep up with it, the work itself killed them within a few months. Their only hope of remaining alive was to maintain a schedule that was calculated finally to kill them.

Page 67

To repeat, no laws were broken and no crimes were committed at Auschwitz. Those who were condemned to the society of total domination were stripped of all protection of the law before they entered. Finally, no credible punishment was meted out. Truly, the twentieth century has been the century par excellence that is beyond good an devil.

As time passes, it becomes apparent that the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in their society of total domination, such as mutilating and homicidal medical experiments on human beings and corporate utilization of death-camp slave labor, merely carried to a logical conclusion operational attitudes and procedures that are every predominant in the workings of bureaucracy and modern corporate enterprise.

Page 70/72/73/74

On May 3, 1994, at the height of the savage deportation process, the Central Jewish Council of Hungary wrote a letter seeking an audience with Andor Jarosz, the puppet minister of the interior who had been hand-picked by the Germans to facilitate the deportation of almost 1,000,000 Jews: “We emphatically declare that we do not seek the audience to lodge complaints about the merit of the measures adopted, but merely to ask that they be carried out in a humane spirit.” (Italics added.) There was to be no protest about mass extermination, only discussion of how to make the deaths easier for the victims. It was actually easier for the Germans to exterminate the Hungarian Jews than it had been for them to kill those who had previously been exterminated. The Hungarian Jewish response is significant because it demonstrates that it made no difference whether a Jewish community knew of the fate that awaited them or not.

….

In addition to the cultural conditioning that affected even the most assimilated Jews, the organized Jewish community was a major factor in preventing effective resistance. Wherever the extermination process was put into effect, the Germans utilized the existing leadership and organizations of the Jewish community to assist them. It was not necessary to find traitors or collaborators to do their work. The compliance reaction was automatic. It was only necessary to delegate to the existing Jewish communal leaders the responsibility for transmitting and executing German orders.

The process of taking over the Jewish communal bureaucracies and transforming them into components in the extermination process was one of the organizational triumphs of the Nazis. In the face of the German determination to murder all Jews, most Jews instinctively relied on their own communal organizations to defend their interests whenever possible. Unfortunately, these very organizations were transformed into subsidiaries of the German police and state bureaucracies.

…

At first, the Reichsvereinigung performed the bureaucratic preliminary work necessary for the later stages of the destruction process. Jewish statisticians informed the SS of births, deaths, and other demographic changes. The communal newspaper (Judisches Nachrichtenblatt) kept people informed of German decrees. Jewish bureaucrats sat at their desks and performed the tasks assigned to them by German bureaucrats further up the chain of authority. According to Weber, “The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of super- and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by higher ones.” One of the most important reasons for the system of graded authority in a bureaucracy, according to Weber is that the subordinate must fulfill assigned tasks “without any will of his own.” As subordinates, the Jewish bureaucrats had no effective will of their own.

…

Thus, the official agency of German Jews led by the most distinguished German rabbi of the twentieth century, a man in whose memory an important rabbinical seminary has been named (London’s Leo Baeck College), undertook such tasks as selecting those who were to be deported, notifying the families and, finally, of sending the Jewish police to round up the victims. In the Warsaw Ghetto and in Lodz, Poland, the Jewish council, or Judenrat, did not resist German directives even when the Germans demanded the “selection” of 10,000 Jews a day for deportation. Jewish bureaucrats made the selection; Jewish police rounded up the victims.

Page 79

As we know, the twentieth century has witnessed extraordinary “progress” in the unlimited intensification of human destructiveness and the radicalization of the forms of human domination. Nevertheless, it was the organizational skill of the Nazis rather than their new weapons that made the society of total domination a reality. And, most of the organizational tools with which such a society can be set up have been greatly improved since World War II. Of supreme importance as a weapon of bureaucratic domination is the modern computer. Few weapons were as indispensable to the Gestapo as its files. When one compares the laborious task of maintaining comprehensive files as short a time back as World War II with the instantaneous retrieval of data about anyone the police or any other governmental agency might be interested in today, we see how greatly the problem of keeping tabs on people has been simplified.

Page 80/81/82/83

One of the gravest threats to constitutional government posed by foreign ventures is the possibility that government leaders might ignore constitutional restraints and employ the kind of “dirty” tactics they customarily use against foreigners in dealing with domestic opposition. That is why any domestic use of the CIA is so great a threat to American freedom. The domestic spying activities and the raid on the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, by members of the extralegal White House “plumbers” unit are examples of the use of CIA trained personnel and the CIA itself, in domestic political conflicts. And, it is hardly likely that we will ever know the whole story of those episodes. (c ) Nixon sought to secure consent to his program, if not by physical terror, then certainly by the beginnings of bureaucratic terror. Perhaps this was best seen in his attempts to utilize the Internal Revenue Service to harass political opponents as well as public personalities whose style of life or political commitments were distasteful to him. In addition to tax harassment, there were other attempts at bureaucratic harassment such as the threat to revoke the licenses of television stations owned by the Washington Post. The intent of the threatened punitive action was clear: opponents were warned that there were heavy penalties involved in opposing Richard Nixon. Such use of power was an important initial step in the direction of government by terror. Fortunately, the administrators of the most important government agency involved, the Internal Revenue Service, were seldom willing to go along. In this respect the federal bureaucracy, whatever its faults, still retained a measure of independence from the chief executive, something the German bureaucracy felt honor bound not to do after Hitler’s accession to power.
It may seem a long way from the improper use of the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the CIA and other federal agencies to harass opponents to a society of total domination, but Nixon had taken several important steps in that direction. He attempted to replace the give and take of the normal American political process by bureaucratic harassment. Fear was to replace debate and persuasion. In addition, h had established a category of citizens, the so-called “enemies’ lists”, who were to be subject to punitive government action, although they had broken no law and for whom there was no legal justification for any kind of government hostility. Those who had opposed him had, in fact, done nothing more than exercise their normal right to take a stand on political issues.

…

It would be comforting to think that the abuses of power that occurred in the Nixon administration were due solely to his moral and political shortcomings. Unfortunately, the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon. The abuses occurred because the structure of government put the capacity to act as did Nixon in the hands of any president willing to employ it and clever enough to get away with such behavior.

…

The overwhelming power of modern government is bound to increase no matter who is president. And not every President will be as clumsy or as noncharismatic as Nixon.

Page 88/89

The unlimited character of the state’s sovereignty even in the extermination of its own citizens was recognized by Justice Robert Jackson the presiding American judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Jackson expressed the opinion that the Nazies involved in the extermination of the Jews could not be prosecuted for murdering Jews of German nationality. He argued that no state can sit in judgment of another’s treatment of its minorities. Jackson felt compelled to assert the ultimacy of national sovereignty over all conflicting claims, even the right to life itself. He did not, of course, approve of the Nazi actions. He sought to include the extermination project in the catalogue of war crimes, but only because the project was pursued as part of a war of unjustified aggression, not because the extermination was a crime in itself. The right of a state to define the conditions under which capital punishment will be inflicted has not been impaired by the Holocaust.

…
The Nuremburg trials were not a giant step forward in international law. They were in all likelihood an elaborate exercise in national vengeance. In ancient times it was not considered the function of the state to punish private injury. The greatest deterrent against the would-be aggressor was his calculation of the victim’s ability to avenge a wrong, either alone or in concert with members of his family or tribe. The ancient law of tribal vengeance may have been primitive but, in the absence of any impartial public institution for meting out punishment, it did serve to contain violence. The need for the Nuremberg trials arose out of a similar situation: there was no disinterested supranational institution that could enact and enforce laws binding on sovereign states. The situation between sovereign states is not unlike that which in ancient times led to the law of tribal vengeance. The power to injure remains the most credible deterrent to a would –be aggressor’s violence. At Nuremberg the Allies avenged wrongs done to themselves and their clients. Those who had the power could avenge. The Jews had no power and the interest of the Allies in acting on their behalf diminished radically as West German military cooperation against the Soviet bloc assumed importance.

…

Some may claim vengeance is indefensible in a world of evolving, higher moral sensibilities, yet it is difficult to see what other deterrent can exist in a world in which a legal system is binding within a state but never between political communities.

Page 91/92

Similarly, if it is no crime for a state to exterminate its citizens or subject peoples, it is also no crime to inflict upon them the kind of slavery the Nazis inflicted upon the camp inmates. This fact was as clearly understood by the Bolsheviks as by the Nazis. Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks under Stalin have demonstrated that a properly organized modern state can inflict total domination upon any segment of its population it chooses. Unfortunately, there are no categories arising out of traditional political, religious, or ethical norms with which such problems can realistically be confronted. It is, of course, possible to reiterate traditional affirmations about the innate dignity of human beings, but the existence of bureaucratically administered societies of total domination is the most compelling empirical refutation of all such claims. In the face of the new forms of domination, assertions about innate human dignity are either false or meaningless.

Page 94/95/96

Auschwitz was perhaps the terminal expression of an urban culture that first arose when an ancient protobourgeoisie liberated its work life from the haphazard, unpredictable, and seasonable character of agriculture and sustained itself by work which was, in the words Max Weber, “continuous and rational.”

….

There is no private right or privilege that ought to be permitted to subvert the right of every person to a place of dignity and social utility within his or her community.

Notes on The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn

The introduction provides an excellent critique of the concept of war crimes. Particularly of the first two indictments. For instance, how were Stalin and other Russian leaders not indicted for crimes against peace since they were just as guilty as Germany was for the start of the war.

Page ix

Over dinner on November 29, Stalin suggested in passing that if at the end of the war about fifty thousand leaders of the German armed forced were rounded up and liquidated, then Germany's military might would be ended once and for all. Churchill was taken aback by the scale of the liquidations envisioned by Stalin. He said simply that the British Parliament and public would never accept such mass executions. But Roosevelt responded to Stalin more warmly, and when Churchill became upset (or so Churchill recalled), FDR said that the Allies should execute not fifty thousand, but "only 49,000. " Elliott Roosevelt, the president's son, who happened to be present, chimed in to say he was sure the United States Army "would support it."

Page xxiii

The defendants generally tried to get away with everything they could, and as one of them suggested, they sometimes succeeded. That claim was made by Hitler's architect Speer, often regarded as the shrewdest observer among the defendants. He was not pleased at the end of the trial when he saw that Fritzsche, Papen, and Schacht got off, while he was given twenty years. He noted in his diary that their "lies, smokescreens, and dissembling statements had paid off after all." Speer resented not being exonerated by the court, but it was certainly not because he had failed to lie or to cover up the truth. Speer and no doubt other defendants resented people like Goldensohn and Gilbert. So far as we can tell, Speer gave Goldensohn no more than a brief and tersely worded statement (included in this volume). He accused Gilbert of being "always eager to add to his psychological knowledge." In answer to Gilbert's question about his sentence, speer lied when he said the twenty years he got "was fair enough. They couldn't have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can't complain." By his own later admission, Speer was not telling the truth, for in fact he felt unjustly traded by the court.

Page 29/30

[Hans Frank] "I met my wife in 1924. The relationship was one of a chance happening and was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I certainly don't want to say anything against the character of my wife, but she is too old - five years older than I am -- and I am of the opinion that it's just to bad.

Page 43

[Wilhelm Frick] Asked if he had any comment to offer on the Reichstag fire, Frick replied: "It can be argued both ways. At the trial some Communists were convicted. There is the rumor that Goering and the SA started it. But I don't know." What is your own opinion? "The only thing I can say is based on the viewpoint of gained what. If the Communists had done it, they were stupid because they were prohibited thereafter. If Goering and the SA did it, I'm unable to say. So far it has not come up in this trial." At the time, what was your opinion? "I had no reason to be suspicious, though rumors, of course, existed at that time, too."

Page 59/60/61/67

[Hans Fritzsche] Propaganda is always done by bringing the attention of the people to one side and taking the attention from the other side. Thus, propaganda is always one-sided, be it for good or for bad. Now during the past year and a half I have been thinking of the propaganda I broadcasted. I can say that I did not try to bring the attention of people to something bad, but to something one-sided - and I did that during all those ten years of my activity. I painted only in black-and-white - no in-between colors. Your country and other Allies did the same thing."

...

"Speaking for myself, I did not believe what the Allies said, though I had opportunity to always listen to Allied stations. The reasons for my not believing it was that it had been drummed into us that the Allies were telling lies in the form of propaganda. The tragedy of it all is that what these Allied broadcasting stations said was literally true. I must have said at least a hundred times during the war, whenever the Allied broadcasting stations talked about cruelties and atrocities, that the same type of Allied propaganda went on in the last war. I would say to my friends that in the last war the Allies talked about Germans chopping off the hands of Belgian children and that after the First World War it was admitted by the Allies that such allegations were false and merely propagandistic. I will say even today, that at the beginning of this war, hundreds of lies about Nazism were spread over the Allied stations. They even broadcast things about me personally -- things that could be proven false. Therefore, that is what I mean by saying that the guilt lies on both sides, because propaganda, whether it be evil or good, tends to make one doubt it. If one refers to the many false statements made by Allied broadcasters at the beginning of the war, then one's belief in foreign broadcasts would necessarily be minimized.

...

This is the satanic triumph of propaganda. It simply closes one's ears to what is right or what is wrong.

....

The only reason for my not believing these statements was that I had heard so much false propaganda and lies from the very same broadcasting stations.

Page ~68 - ~123

[Some good stuff on propaganda]

Page 124

[Hermann Goering] I said that Schirach also told me that Hess was said to have had a pendulum in his office, which he used to detect whether the letters he received were worthy of answering or not - whether the writer was a friend or enemy. If the pendulum swung in one direction, the letter was all right; if it swung another way, the letter was a bad one. Did Goering know anything as the validity of this tale?

"Sure. I saw Hess's pendulum and he used it. I never paid any attention to his strange ideas. he was quiet and bother nobody. I knew a great surgeon who believed in a similar pendulum, using it the same way Hess did. Apparently it's a common superstition." Goering went on to say that obviously it was not Hitler's idea that Hess fly to England, because it was too stupid. "There were many other means to negotiate a peace with England if Hitler wanted that. We could use our representatives in Sweden or Switzerland."

Page 131

I asked him to give me further reflections or impressions about the trials as far as his opinion was concerned. Goering seemed wary and not too inclined to speak at length. he did say, however, "Frankly, it is my intention to make this trial a mockery. I feel that a foreign country has no right tot try the government of a sovereign state. I have desisted from making any critical remarks about my codefendants. Yet they are a mixed-up, unrepresentative group. Some of them are so unimportant, I never even heard of them. I'll admit they are right in including me among the big Nazis who ran Germany. But why include Fritzsche? He was one of many section chiefs in the Propaganda Ministry. And then they try a man like Funk, who is guilty of nothing. He followed orders, and they were my orders. And then they try a fellow like Keitel, who, although he was called a field marshal, was a small person who did whatever Hitler instructed. Of all the defendants, the only ones who are big enough to merit being tried are me, Schacht, Ribbentrop perhaps, although he was a weak echo of Hitler, Frick, who proposed the Nuremberg Laws, and maybe a few others, like Rosenberg and Seyss-Inquart. The rest of them were followers and showed little initiative.

"Then there is the farce of the case against the general staff. These military men were not a part of any conspiracy to wage war but simply accepted orders and obeyed them as any German soldier or officer would do. If there was a conspiracy, it lay among those who are dead or missing - i mean Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, and naturally, Hitler. I always felt that Bormann was a primitive criminal type and I never trusted Himmler. I would have dismissed them." Goering smiled knowingly and added, "You know, you can get rid of a man in many subtle ways. For example, you can dismiss a man suddenly, but that is less effective if that individual has some power and backing than by slowly diminishing his power by giving him more and more meaningless titles. In the case of Himmler, I would have promoted him on paper and made him chief of this and chief of that, but in the end his power would be gone. I would have taken away from him the police power first, and later I would have assumed control of the SS myself. In this way there would have been no such thing as mass murders. For all that Hitler was a genius and a strong character, he nevertheless was suggestible, and Himmler and Goebbels or both must have influenced him to go ahead with such an idiotic scheme as gas chambers and crematoriums to eliminate millions of people.

Page 132

I don't believe in the Bible or in a lot of things which religious people think. But I revere women and I think it unsportsmanlike to kill children.

...

For myself I feel quite free of responsibility for the mass murders. Certainly as second man in the state under Hitler, I heard rumors about mass killings of Jews, but I could do nothing about it and I knew that it was useless to investigate these rumors and to find out about them accurately, which would not have been too hard, but I was busy with other things, and if I had found out what was going on regarding the mass murders , it would simply have made me feel bad and I could do very little to prevent it anyway."

Page 136

On his desk Hess had written certain words in German, which seemed to be rules for keeping in good health whih he had probably jotted down in order to facilitate his memory. Mr Triest took down notes, which in translation are as follows:

Eat little. Don't take any sleeping pills. They will only lose the effect in case that you should really need them. Also take little other medicine [analgesics]. Instead of egg, ask for marmalade and bread. Don't eat or drink in the morning in order not to get tired. Ask the doctor for orange or lemon juice once in a while. Don't eat salty food. Otherwise the cramps may become more frequent.

Page 147

[Earnst Kaltenbrunner]
"Hitler had an excellent memory for numbers and he knew exactly the tonnage of each warship any nation possessed. He knew this even better than the naval and finance experts. Hitler believed that America had to find a place to get rid of its investments in lend-lease, armaments, et cetera, and that it had to realize the money it had invested over her. That was Hitler's idea. Any attempt to talk peacefully or negotiate a peace with America was unsuccessful because Hitler felt that Germany could not offer America this financial settlement which it desired. Thus Hitler thought that the war with the United States was not an ideological war but one that stemmed purely from economic reasons.

Page 151

Earnst Kaltenbrunner]
"The Hague Convention does not mention a preventive war because owing to modern weapons, preventive war had not yet existed. The quicker humanity advances, the more important it is to be the one who deals the first blow. It was still possible in times of old-fashioned warfare to put up an ultimatum, but with all the new and modern weapons, tanks, and especially the atom bomb, this is impossible."

Page 155/156

The neutrality of Turkey was guaranteed by several countries so that it could perform that job. Any historian will recognize that this is the same as the capture of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. In other words, the English-Russian route through the Mediterranean is not being endangered by Russian boats. Therefore , the neutrality of Turkey, as seen by England, is only an armed neutrality which favors the British Empire.

On the other hand, German foreign policy in Turkey was, of course, conditioned by these things. Turkey only in the first line had to be afraid of Russia. for its neutrality Turkey was paid by England, with money and armaments; and at the same time Turkey was paid by Germany through commercial treaties and armaments. At the very moment when Germany was weakest, Turkey turned to England. As long as Germany was strong, Turkish neutrality was tremendously friendly to Germany. Those are the basic principles of Turkish policy.

One has to add that the Russian interests were exactly the opposite because Russia wanted free access to the Mediterranean either by having possession of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles or by having hem opened by international agreement. Secondly, Turkey is the thinnest-populated country in Europe and western Asia, with only twelve inhabitants to the square kilometer. Therefore, it is an open invitation for southern Russia to spread and place its population. this can be seen y two demands of Russia for Turkish lands: one, Russia demanded souther Turkey, the Black Sea, which would mean the destruction of the whole Turkish commerce, and , two , Russia demanded Armenian territories, very cleverly using long-standing, bitter fights between Armenians and Turks.

...

From the time of Bismark, Germany always kept away from Turkey and gave many assurances to England that it should not be afraid, that it was English territory and would remain as such. The same neutrality was always promised by Hitler and respected by him constantly.

Page 198/199

[Alfred Rosenberg]
The Jewish question was one which required a knowledge of history, philosophy, the Greeks, a study of races, music, art, and so forth. This is not literal but a summation of the generalities and quasi-learned arguments he propounded. The cause of the Jewish question was, of course, the Jews themselves. The Jews are a nation, and like very nation, have a nationalistic spirit. That's all very well, but they should be in their own homeland. Now there were several places for Jews proposed in 1936 by the English (I believe he said the French and Germans, too - implying that a joint proposal was made that the Jews turned down). These places were Alaska, Guiana (didn't say which of the islands), Madagascar, and Uganda.

Why couldn't the Jews be allowed to remain where they were, in other lands? That would have been all right if they didn't do bad things, but they did. What did the Jew do? They spat at German culture. How? They controlled the theater, publishing, the stores, and so on. Of course, Jews have a two-thousand-year-old culture, too, but it is not the German culture, which is so different.

...

Every doctor knows that there are different types of blood, various classes, Rosenberg said at one point, in discussing the differences between races. Would, for example, a blood transfusion from a Negro cause any character differences to ensue if given to an Aryan? Rosenberg said quite seriously, with his "philosophic" smile, he didn't know. That would be a brutal experiment such as was done in the concentration camps. He smiled as if he had scored a triumph of reasoning. We pressed the point though for his opinion; suppose a Nazi soldier were injured and given some Jewish blood, or Negro blood. Would character changes occur? It wasn't proven, he said. Negroes beget Negroes, Jews Jews, so it must be that blood will tell.

...

What was Rosenberg's main objection to Bolshevism? He seemed surprised at that question, as if it were a subject which needed no explanation. After a few moments he said vehemently, "Bolshevism wants to destroy by power a very sensitive state culture without any consideration for the history of the nation. Secondly, Bolshevism wants to do this for the benefit of a single class of the population. Thirdly, Bolshevism fights principally against private property. It creates a collectives among the farmers and destroys the agricultural system. it works against the principles upon which more or less all states are based.

"The Communist Party is under the control of a central office. This central office is in Moscow. Therefor, Communism in various countries is in the making of the individual state or an expression of nationalism. This international Communistic Bolshevism gathers its support from a strong state - Russia. Communism not only makes its policy in Russia but it prescribes the policy of Bolsheviks all over the world."

Page 201

I can mention men like Averell Harriman and Curle, the may of Boston. [who were against the Versailles treaty]

Page 204/205

[Fritz Sauckel]
the main stream of thought which he presented today consisted of the following currents:

• National Socialism did a good job in Germany until the latter years of the war, when too many enemies of Germany banded against her.
• The excesses, atrocities, exterminations within and without the concentration camps were unknown to honorable men like himself, and could be attributed to Himmler, who apparently was not a good man.
• The causes of the war lay in the Versailles Treaty and the economic depression within Germany ever since the end of the last war, augmented by the failure of other countries to buy German products in exchange for wheat, without which Germany would starve. There was a virtual boycott of Germany.
• Anti-Semitism was not Sauckel's department, and the specialists in that were Streicher and Rosenberg, who had devoted almost their entire lives to the subject; but he, Sauckel, believed it was brought on because there was too high a percentage of Jews in positions of prominence in Germany, in state offices, professions, the stage, radio, and so forth. Sauckel stated that the Jews were not really persecuted until late in the war, 1942 perhaps, and then it was part of the general "war psychology" and not really known to him or other Germans, but again the work of Himmler. Sauckel's conscience was clear, and he would do anything he had done over again because it all had been honorable.

Page 209

I asked him what he knew of the reports of the mistreatment of slave labor, of families being cruelly separated in occupied countries and the able ones brought as workers to Germany, and of people having been seized in theaters and public places and shipped without notice as workers to Germany. His reply was evasive. "What would you do if your country's welfare depend on labor? When a ship is in a storm it requires one captain."

Page 218

[Hjalmar Schact]
Schact repeated his indignation "that a man who has never been associated with anything but high finance for forty years, and who was never a soldier and never did anything to hurt anyone, should be locked up and tried as a common war criminal." Again he repeated that he did nothing but live on his farm since 1939 , and besides, he was a party to the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.

It becomes obvious in talking to Schact that he is attempting to devise two distinctly paradoxical pictures of himself: the one , that he was a harmless old man who had been inactive since 1939; the other, a picture of a great national German patriot who worked ceaselessly for Hitler's downfall and frustration, and was actively a participant in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. Clinically, it is obvious that Schact has tremendous energy and vitality for a man of his years.

Page 222/223

"Now what did the Treaty of Versailles do to us? It took away from Germany all of the private assets of Germans. do you realize what this means, Dr. Goldensohn? It liquidated the private assets of German citizens, a thing which has not been done since medieval times. By this, they destroyed one of the foundations of our life. For example, if we had an import or export house in Rio de Janeiro or new York, they took away our license and put us out of business. Such losses amounted to $11 billion, aside from reparations. By doing this the Allies destroyed not only a half-billion-dollar income, but also spoiled our whole sales organization. Then, furthermore, after Versailles, they imposed reparation payments on Germany, and as we had no foreign assets anymore, we could only pay by new exports. How could we pay the Allies otherwise? Therefore, the need for export trade became more urgent since we needed foreign money in order to pay for food and raw material, as well as reparations. The reparations amounted to $50 billion in cash! Can you imagine that? That means fifty thousand million dollars.

"Now, of course, Germany could not do that. An annual amount of money and reparation payment was fixed at about a billion dollars a year, and we could not afford that. And then, you must recall that after the First World War we had for the most part socialist governments, and these socialists followed a very lighthearted policy. they borrowed money from the outside, and with that money they paid for reparations. mostly, the money came from America, and so Germany contracted many foreign debts. During the six years 1924-29, our foreign debts were not less than 8 billion. That is exactly as much as the United States borrowed before the First world war over a period of four decades. And then came the movement when foreign creditors said that they couldn't go on, and not only stopped lending but withdrew all short credits at maturity. This led to a financial crash of frightful proportions in the summer of 1931.

"Immediately after these credits were stopped, the economic situation of Germany became worse and worse. the Bruening government of the middle-class parties, the so-called bourgeois government, followed a deflationary policy. They cut wages and salaries so much that many industries collapsed; and at the same time, the Allied countries had raised customs tariffs. Finally, we arrived at a situation of more than 6 million unemployed. Now if you take into consideration the fact that the farmer is never unemployed, but that only industrial folk are, it means that every third family suffered from unemployment. Therefore, people lost confidence in the socialists as well as in the middle-class parties and wen to the extremes.

"There was only the choice between Communism and Hitler, and I will tell you why Hitler won. People will not give up religion, rights, freedom of personality, the opportunity to develop by individual effort - which includes private property. And the other reason for Hitlers' winning is that if a whole people is treated as the Germans were, everyone will say, 'Are we worse people than others? Are we of a minor race?' Just as every single individual needs and must have self-respect, just as every family is proud of decent traditions s, so every nation want s to maintain her individual manner, culture, language, and customs.

Page 232

I was never a soldier. I detest uniforms because they make one unfree. There is an old quotation that goes something like this: 'Your mind will be trained will, but confined to Spanish boots.' That quotation is very apt. It signifies how narrow the military mind becomes."

Page 245

[Baldur von Schirach]
But in retrospect, and realizing where we have come to, I am absolutely sure that a real system of government must prevent one man or twenty or thirty men from getting all the power of the state into their hands. Power is what spoils people. Yes, it seems to me that the seeking after power is the great danger and the great corrupter of mankind.

"Some of the defendant say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil."

Page 255

[Julius Streicher]
As usual, Streicher had no rational explanation for what he called this devilish procedure, but made some inconsequential remarks about how, if circumcision was Jewish, it should not be inflicted on non-Jews. It was clear that he considered circumcision as something which had no medical or surgical import, but merely a racial custom.

...

Pinning Streicher down to any particular subject was most difficult because his ability to discuss anything logically was quite limited.

Page 258

For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress.

Page 295

[Rudolf Hoess]
Why didn't you give yourself up before? I queried. "I thought I could get away with it."

Page 296

The general Government of Poland was under my supervision, bu concentration camps farther on in Russia itself came under the aegis of SS generals.

"I was commandant at Auschwitz for four years, from May 1940 until the first of December, 1943." I asked how many people were executed at Auschwitz during his time. "The exact umber cannot be determined. I estimate about 2.5 million Jews." Only Jews? "Yes." Women and children as well? "Yes."

What do you think of it? Hoess looked blank and apathetic. I repeated my question and asked him whether he approved of what went on at Auschwitz. "I had my personal orders from Himmler." Did you ever protest? "I couldn't do that The reasons Himmler gave me Ii had to accept." In other words, you think it was justified to kill 2.5 million men, women, and children? "Not justified - but Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews."

How could the Jews exterminate the Germans? "I don't know, that is what Himmler said. Himmler didn't explain." Don't you have a mind or opinion of your own? "Yes, but when Himmler told us something, it was so correct and so natural we just blindly obeyed it." Do you have any feelings of guilt for this? "Yes, now naturally it makes me think that it was not right."

Page 298

Hoess said that while he was commandant of Auschwitz, soap was not manufactured from human fat. "We cut the hair from women after they had been exterminated in the gas chambers. The hair was then sent to factories, where it was woven into special fittings for gaskets." Was this hair also from men and children? "No, in 1943 I received the first orders to do it. We cut the hair only from women and only after they were dead." Did you supervise gas chamber murders? "Yes, I had the whole supervision of that business. I was often, but not always, present when the gas chambers were being used." You must be a hard man. "You become hard when you carry out such orders." It seems to me you must be hard to begin with. "Well, you certainly can't have soft feelings, whether it is shooting of people or killing them in gas chambers."

People were shot at Auschwitz also? "Not Jews, but Poles of the resistance movement were shot. This was done under orders of Rudolf Mildner." Were you a friend of Mildner? "He often came to Auschwitz." Did he have his court at Auschwitz? "After the Poles were sentenced, after the party district administrator signed the death sentences, then they came to Auschwitz to Mildner's court and were told that they were sentenced to death. This amounted to about sixty or seventy men per month." How many months was Mildner there? "Mildner came in 1941 and left in 1943. I would estimate about 1,500 men were sentenced to death by Mildner's court."

Page 300

"In the summer of 1941, I was called to Berlin to see Himmler. I was given the order to erect extermination camps. I can almost give you Himmler's actual words, which were to the effect: 'The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution to the Jewish problem. Those of us in the SS must execute these plans. This is a hard job, but if the act is not carried out at once, instead of us exterminating the Jews, the Jews will exterminate the Germans at a later date.'

"That was Himmler's explanation. Then he explained to me why he selected Auschwitz. There were extermination camps already in the East bu they were incapable of carrying out a large-scale action of extermination. Himmler could not give me the exact number, but he said that at the proper time Eichmann would get in touch with me and tell me more about it. He would keep me informed about incoming transports and like matters.

"I was ordered by Himmler to submit precise plans as to my ideas on how the extermination program should be executed in Auschwitz. I was supposed to inspect a camp in the East, namely Treblinka, and to learn from the mistakes committed there.

"A few weeks later, Eichmann visited me in Auschwitz and told me that the first transports from the General Government and Slovakia were to be expected. he added that this action should not be delayed in any way so that no technical difficulties would arise and that the schedules of transports should be maintained at all costs.

Page 301/302/303

How many people at a time were exterminated in each farmhouse? Hoess stared at the floor and thought for several moments. He shifted his eyes from me to the floor to Mr. Triest, and finally after about thirty seconds of silence, said: "In each farmhouse eighteen hundred to two thousand persons could be gassed at one time. The two farmhouses were separated by a distance of six hundred to eight hundred meters. They were completely closed off from the outside by woods and fences."

How often were these buildings used? "Well, it was like this. These transports didn't come daily; sometimes two or three trains arrived on a single day, every train containing two thousand people, but there were periods when no transports arrived for three to six weeks." How long were these people kept at Auschwitz? "No time at all. A side track went to Birkenau and unloaded, and there the selection was made. Those who were able to work were sifted from those unable to work." What criteria for selection were used? "Well, we had two SS doctors and they sat at tables, and the people from the transports got off the train and walked by these doctors. These people were fully clothed; they just walked by and the doctors judged by their looks, age, and strength."

Out of the transport of two thousand, approximately how many were saved for work? "In all of those years, I figured an average of twenty to thirty percent of the people were able to work." And then what happened? "Those not able to work were marched to the farmhouses. These were a good kilometer from the side track. There they were made to undress. At first they had to undress in he open, where we had erected walls made of straw and branches of trees that kept them from onlookers. After a while we built barracks. We had big signs, all of which read 'To Disinfection' or 'Baths.' That was in order to give the people the impression that they would merely receive a bath or be disinfected, in order to not have any technical difficulty in the extermination process.

"And the internees whom we used as interpreters and general helpers in those stations instructed the people that they should take care of their clothing when they laid it on the ground in neat piles so that they should be able to find their clothe when the came out of the bath or disinfecting room. These internees helped quiet all of the people by answering their questions in a reassuring manner and telling them they would only be bathed in those houses.

" Then the people were brought to the chambers and the internees who accompanied them went along with the people into the extermination chambers so that the people would be quiet, since they saw the attendants go inside themselves It was so done that all of the chambers were filled up at the same time. At the last moment, when the chambers were filled, the internees who worked for us slipped out, the doors were jammed shut, and the Zyklon B gas was thrown through small openings." Was there any panic among the people prior to their murder? "Yes, sometimes, but we worked it smoothly, more smoothly as time went on. The men were always exterminated in a separate chamber, and the women an children together in the same chamber." At what age for example, did you distinguish between a child and a grown-up, that is between a boy and a man? "I can't say. We judged by the looks of the boys - you know, some are grown-up at fifteen years, others at seventeen. We judged mainly by stature."

Page 306/307

From the time you left Auschwitz until the end of the war, how many people were exterminated there? "The figure 2.5 million takes care of 1944" Were there any exterminated in 1945? "No, at the end of 1944 the whole thing stopped. It was forbidden by Himmler." What happened to the transports that arrive in 1945? "Hardly any transports arrived in 1945, and the only people who came were those able to work." Why did the exterminations stop? Was it because there were no more Jews to exterminate? "In November 1944 I was with Eichmann in Budapest and he told me that there were negotiations going on between Himmler and representatives of the Jews in Switzerland through various middlemen and that from then on exterminations would have to stop immediately."

Page 309

Who invented the gas chambers? "They developed out of the situation. the courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I aways objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootins, so we used gas chambers instead."

How many concentration camps in Germany or outside of it had gas chambers? "Mauthausen, Dachau, Auschwitz, and in the east, Treblinka; in Russia, they used gas wagons." What about Majdanek? "They had temporary gas chambers but that camp came under the Security Polic - the Einsatzkommando and Security Police. In Lublin there was a concentration camp which came under our inspection and supervision but it was not an extermination camp. Majdanek was near the city of Lublin and was an extermination camp under the direction of Lieutenant General Globocnik, who was the SS and political leader of Lublin.

Page 314/315

I asked him whether he subscribed to any religious belief. "I left the church in 1922 and my wife left it in 1935." Why did you leave the church? "During my experiences at the front in Iraq and Palestine I thought that there was a lot of humbug connected with the so-called holy places and that things were not done right, especially by the Catholic Church, of which I was a member. And that diverted me from my formerly rigid, strict Catholicism. Just what humbug did you did you see and what in particular was wrong with Catholic religion as you found it in Palestine and Iraq? "I don't know, it is a long time ago and I was so busy since then I have had no time for thinking about religion, but all of this money that wen to the church, well, it seemed to me that it was humbug."

...

Does the fact that you put the phenomenal number of 2. 5 million men, women, and children to death, not to mention your supervision of exterminations and excursions in all of the other camps that you supervised since 1943 - does that fact not upset you a little at times? "I thought I was doing the right thing, I was obeying orders, and now, of course, I see that it was unnecessary and wrong. But I don't know what you mean by being upset about these things because I didn't personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination program in Auschwitz. I twas Hitler who ordered it through Himmler and it was Eichmann who gave me the order regarding transports." Do you ever have any thoughts of these executions, gassings, or burning of corpses - in other words, do such thoughts come upon you at times and in any way haunt you? "No. I have not such fantasies."

...

That's an interesting observation: you murdered 2.5 million Jews but you disapprove of Der Sturmer. "Oh yes, all people with any sense disapproved of Der Sturmer."

Page 323

[Albert Kesselring]
Do you think your father would approve of National Socialism? "I think that as a Freemason, he would have opposed it. But aside from his own Freemasonry, everyone to his own liking, I don't think he would have opposed it. Father was an absolute German man, and his belonging to the Freemasons was not against that." What was Hitler's objection to Freemasonry? "Because it was international. A cousin of mine was a member of a lodge in Bayreuth and was looked on askance. Understanding of other nations does no mean a feeling against your own country. That's the whole trouble with Germans. They can see only their own country, the local church steeples only. If only German youth could go abroad, and youth from other countries come to Germany. You always have to have criticism if you with sot become better."

Page 326/327

[Keitel's order of December 16, 1942 to Kesselring]

The furher has ordered that the enemy employs in partisan warfare Communist-trained fanatics who do not hesitate to commit any atrocity. It is more than ever a question of life and death. This fight has nothing to do with soldierly gallantry or principles of the Geneva Convention. If the fight against the partisans in the East, as well as in the Balkans, is not waged with the most brutal means, we will shortly reach the point where the available forces are insufficient to control the area. It is therefore not only justified, but is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as it ensures success. Any consideration for the partisans is a crime against the German people.

Kesselring remembered the order. He was then confronted with his own order of June 17, 1944, which read:

The partisan situation in the Italian theater, particularly central Italy, had deteriorated to such an extent that it constitutes a serious danger to troops, supply lines, war industry and economic potential. The fight against the partisans must be carried out with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. i will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice of severity of methods he adopts against partisans. In this connection the older principle applies that a mistake in the choice of methods in executing one's orders is better than failure or neglect to act.

Kesselring admitted having issued that order. Furthermore, three days later he issued another "top secret" order saying:

It is the duty of all troops and police in my command to adopt the severest measures. Every act of violence committed by partisans must be punished immediately. Reports submitted must also give details of countermeasures taken. Wherever there is evidence of a considerable number of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence being committed these men will be shot.

Kesselring was reminded of two instances of how his words were carried out. A Colonel von Gablentz was captured by bandits. The entire male populate of the villages on the stretch of road concerned were arrested. As reprisal for the capture of this colonel, 660 persons, including 250 men, were arrested. Maxwell Fyfe asked him if taking 410 women and children into custody was what was meant by his order of "steps necessary to deal with partisan warfare." Kesselring answered equivocally that it was unnecessary.

Page 342/343

[Ewald von Kleist]
he then led a panzer army corps, which consisted of about two divisions and attached troops, in the blitz against Poland. "I was very successful in this operation because I able to use cavalry tactics. I was in Poland for only sixteen days in all. Then I left Poland and got together with the Russians for the first time, on friendly terms. That was the time of the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact, and there was a division of Poland between Germany and Russia. My impression of the Russians then was that they were exceedingly good troops, advanced in military technique, motorized to a surprising extent, and very correct in their behavior."

He then assumed command of three panzer corps which were known to as Kleist groups. "This was in may 1940, and I began organizing this small army, which bore my name, in the territory behind Dusseldor. We then went to the West and if I say so myself, it was my army which is largely responsible for the rapid victory in France. I broke through the Sedan and Maginot Lines and I reached the coast of France within seven days near Abbeville. In the course of my victories I took the towns of Bastogne and Calais and it was the Kleist groups that attacked Dunkirk from the west. This was during the tremendous British disaster which occurred there.

"I must say that the English managed to escape that trap in Dunkirk, which I had so carefully laid, only with the personal help of Hitler. There was a channel from Arras to Dunkirk. I had already crossed this channel and my troops occupied the heights which jutted out over Flanders. Therefore, my panzer group had complete control of Dunkirk and the area in which the British were trapped. The fact of the matter is that the English would have been unable to get into Dunkirk because I had them covered. then Hitler personally ordered that I should withdraw my troops from these heights."

Why had Hitler ordered this? "Hitler thought tit was too risky. It was nonsense - those orders of Hitler's in those days. We could have wiped out the British army completely or taken the whole army as captive if weren't for the stupid order of Hitler. The proof of it is that three days later the English occupied the heights and I was obliged to attack them again to take them back. The masses of English troops, however, had already reached Dunkirk and were escaping in small boats. The sad part of it is that I could have captured the whole English army, or such a great part of it, at any rate, that an invasion of England would have been a simple affair. I did capture man French soldiers, including General Henri Giraud.

"Altogether I captured 1 million prisoners of war on all fronts. I think I did pretty well. Giraud's capture was very amusing. An intelligence officer conveyed an English radio message that the French front had been torn open through tank attacks. My intelligence officer said that the English radio had broadcasted, 'The French general, the beloved General Giraud, would take over command of the French front and restore the situation.' Now the amusing thing about it is that as I was reading this intelligence report, the door opened and in walked a good looking French general who turned out to be Giraud. He had been very brave but was a little mistaken about the situation. He had taken a reconnaissance car and driven into our territory searching for his troops but instead he found mine, and had been taken prisoner by a couple of enlisted men." Kleist chuckled.

Page 346

I asked Kleist what occasioned his retirement at that time. "Well, on December 1, 1943, I told Hitler to give up his supreme command. On March 29, 1944, I again had a very severe argument with Hitler and I had the impression that it was more the people around Hitler than Hitler himself who said that I was an inconvenient subordinate. Hitler himself told me when I said good-bye to him that he could find no fault with me as a soldier. Hitler said many friendly things to me. He said that he had very few people who were capable of leading an operational war. He advised me to take a rest because I had worked so hard and he implied that I would be asked to serve again. I really think that the reason for my going home at that time was that I always told Hitler my frank opinions."

* Page 350 *

"Planned economy is used in Germany at present by he occupying powers. It is done in all countries with the exception of the United States, and sooner or later your country will get around to it. For example, there are the questions of wheat, gold, silver. If the U.S.A wants to sell two hundred pounds of wheat for five marks, and Russia will sell the same amount of wheat for three marks, then you can easily see that free economies cannot exist. It would take only a few such instances and the entire stock exchange would break down."

Page 365

[Erhard Milch]
I also asked him about his statements obtained from records of minutes of meetings of the Central Planning Board, of which he was a member, that Russian labor should be supplied to work the mines and that Russian women should be enlisted in agricultural work. Milch was as evasive as he was in court. He looked more uncomfortable than he had managed to appear in court two days ago, however, and said that "many things were said in the heat of a war, and not all were calculated to be read back to you later."

...

I inquired: What about the statement you are reported to have made regarding the draining off of French young men to work in Germany, so that in the event of an attack of the mainland by the Allies, these Frenchman could not act as partisans? Milch said he gathered that the interpretation put on his words regarding clearing France, and Italy for that matter, of partisans or possible partisans was that he was in favor of forced labor. "Nothing could be further from the truth! But our Fatherland was threatened by defeat from these bands of Maquis and other wild groups, and what else could be done by a loyal German anxious to achieve a victory for his Fatherland?"

Page 366

But Milch looked worried and harried. It was the first time I had seen this little compact man, who looks younger than his fifty-six years, in any way ruffled. I said in parting that his testimony for Goering had incriminated him, in my opinion. he replied, "No. Let them try me. I shall have plenty to say about the Allies. I have some very good friends among the Americans and English, and the French industrialists, too. i have done nothing of which I am ashamed."

It was true enough, he did not appear ashamed - merely worried about his own immunity from trial as a war criminal.

Page 375/376/377

[Rudolf Mildner]
"On September 17, 1943, I got to Denmark. I carried an oder with me from Mueller, to arrest Niels Bohr, a famous atomic physicist. He was a Jew or half Jew. That was the reason for the order." Mildner said he imagined his work was to be different because he had known many Danes in the past fifteen years, including Danish girls. he didn't know actual Danish conditions, he said. "I knew there might be some resistance but I didn't want to mix into Danish affairs any more than I had to. Bohr was a Danish citizen and I didn't like the order Mueller gave me. I was not in Denmark long, but during that time I received an order from Himmler through Best. I had already established a central office of the Security Police in Denmark in the five larger cities. The telegram said that "the evacuation of Danish Jews was to start at once. There were six thousand Jews in Denmark."

These Jews, said Mildner, were people who had fled Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and lived in Denmark for hundreds of years. "I was very distressed. I went to Best and asked why the Jews should be evacuated. They kept quiet and did no harm. They were Danish citizens and Denmark was a sovereign state. Best explained that Ribbentrop had spoken to Hitler and said he thought it was best to have the Jews evacuated from Denmark. Ribbentrop was afraid he might be called on the carpet for not having taken any action against the Jews in Denmark." in other words, Ribbentrop anticipated Hitler's wishes in this regard. "Yes. That was what Best said. I can say that the reason for the deportation of Jews from Denmark is Ribbentrop. Whether it would have been ordered later by Hitler, I don't know." Do you know of any documents int hat regard? "No. Best told me. All of us were distressed, Best as well as my coworkers."

"I immediately sent a telegram to Mueller with recommendations that deportation of Jews of Denmark would cause many misgivings. First because the Jews were quiet politically, and did not appear in any way disturbing. Second, the deportation would have serious consequences for the German-Danish relationship, because Danish agriculture sent food to Germany and Danish industry also worked for Germany. Then there were the repercussions it would have on the Scandinavians and in North America. I added that all the Danish people object to it. i said in the telegram, too, that it would result in more sabotage and unrest. I requested that the order for deportation be canceled."

In a few days the order came from Himmler to best, informing him to proceed with the given order. "Desperate about it, I wen tot the airport and flew to Berlin. I wanted to see Kaltenbrunner. I actually saw Mueller. I again told Mueller all the misgivings, although I had to omit the humane reasons - I had to use other arguments." Mueller called his secretary, in Mildner's presence, and dictated a telegram to Himmler. He wrote all that Mildner told him. "I flew back although Mueller said the cable wouldn't do much good. I still had some hope. Paul Kanstein was assigned for liaison between Best and the Danish government. Kanstein knew Denmark well. He was very friendly with all the Danish ministers. A meeting was called with Kanstein, Best, and myself present and we decided that all Jews should be warned. If the order had to be carried out, I had no interest that any Jews should fall into our hands. A few days later another cable came from Himmler - to deport the Jews at once. A representative of Eichmann came with two ships and a detachment from Oslo consisting of a battalion of Ordinary Police. One night, October 1, I think, the action began. I spent that evening with Kanstein. In all they seized four to five hundred Jews. They were put on a ship, and I believe went via Oslo to Stettin to Theresiensadt [Czechoslovakia]. The other Jews, who were warned, were hidden by Danes and by night fled to Sweden. There was very lively traffic. One could
go by rowboat - the distance was only three kilometers. That was the whole action.

...

"In addition, I didn't arrest Niels Bohr because I didn't want to arrest Danish scientists. Bohr fled to Sweden. That was long after the Jewish deportation. From Sweden Bohr went to England, was received by Churchill, and Radio London announced that Bohr decided to his work to the Allies.

Page 378

"I told Mueller that it would be useless to use countersabotage - that it was just murder." What did countersabotage mean? "That I shall explain in a moment. It's very interesting. Whenever a Danish or German businessman who did business with the Germans was murdered, an important Dane should be murdered - at first unofficially; later it became quite official. Or if a Danish factory working for Germany was blown up by sabotage, another factory working only for the Danes should be destroyed." A crazy idea. "Yes. It was Hitler's idea, not Himmler's, I can prove it. And if such was the case, the work of the Security Police in Denmark was finished because there would be continuous murderous activity, blowing up of businesses, and giving the Reich a bad name.

Page 387/388/389/390/391/392

[Otto Ohlendorf]
There were a large number of Jews who held more favorable positions than they should have, according to their percentage of the population. Germans should have held those positions. This accounted for the 1938 action of Goebbels against the Jews." Therefore, all Jews were dispossessed? "No that was the November 1938 action of Goebbels against the Jews without the consent of Hitler. That was in reprisal for the murder of a Paris Nazi official by the Jew Herschel Grynszpan." Do you believe that? "No. Goebbels was just looking for an excuse." did you know Goebbels personally? "Yes." What sort of person was he? "I met him several times. He was clever, fanatic, having a clubfoot he might have suffered a minority inferiority complex, knowing that because of his physical appearance, he knew he never could reach leadership. he was unscrupulous in his propaganda. I always oppose Goebbels. I always tried to have people educated on a broad basis, while Goebbels tried to supply them with knowledge for the moment. Goebbels considered humans as objects to be used for political purposes - for the moment."

Did you do anything concretely against Goebbels? "My reports in the SD always referred to these facts." Anything else about Goebbels? "I always had the feeling that Goebbels didn't respect people as a whole. He was reckless in his contacts in his own office. He had no consideration for anyone. He was only concerned about governing. He took his way of governing from the Catholic hierarchy. As far as I know, Goebbels attended a Catholic school and was brought up in a cloister." He seems to have turned against the Catholics. "Yes. But it did not hinder him from agreeing with authoritarian methods of governing. Goebbels kept faith only with himself."

...

He spent one year in Italy and studied fascism - in 1931. It was an academic exchange service. "I returned as a fanatic antifascist."

...

Were you still in the NSDAP? "Yes." How could you be in a fascist party and be a fanatic antifascist? "It's regrettable that you think they are the same. There is much difference. Fascism is a purely stately principle. Mussolini said in 1932, 'The first thing is the state - and from the state are derived the rights and fate of the people. Humans come second.' In National Socialism, it was the opposite. People and humans come first, and the state is secondary."

Do you believe that? "I did. The bad thing was that Hitler hated the state so much, the government never functioned." Do you think Hitler really liked people? "Oh, yes. The fault I see in Hitler is that he left his original base, his liking of the people, and sought the recognition of other nations by waging wars." Do you think Hitler really liked people if he ordered millions of Jews destroyed? "In this was Hitler's downfall." But do you think Hitler liked people? "In 1933 - 1939, Hitler did tremendous things for the German people." Do you think Hitler liked people in general, or only a concept known as the Volk? "I can't answer it generally." Be as specific as you care to be. "Well, he liked the German people." Any other people? "I don't know." Do you think Hitler liked people when he ordered men, women, and children killed regardless of race, color, or creed, in cold blood, not in battle against a town, or air raids, but in files near ditches, as you know the process better than I do? "I can't answer the questions generally or specifically. I don't know the psychological reasons which brought Hitler to do this."

What do you think of it yourself? "One can't generalize, looking at it from a German point of view. Just how many people were shot because of race or creed, I don't know. not many Germans were shot. Hitler believed in having it done for the good of the German people." How could Hitler love people and shot others? "Hitler did it for his people. Hitler didn't believe it would end this way." What do you think? "Hitler didn't expect world war." The whole world seemed to expect war. "I don' think such questions can be answered simply." What is your own idea? "I didn't say he was a wonderful man - we started out with a discussion on the definition of fascism and Nazism." As it worked out, was there any difference? "The chief of state in Germany adopted imperialistic beliefs. The extermination of the Jews goes back to the campaigns of Streicher, Goebbels, and Ley, who continually stressed the fact that Jews were enemies of the German people." how did you figure a six-month-old Jewish infant must be killed - was it an enemy? "In the child we see the grown-up. I see the problem differently." How? "I saw the Jewish question in 1933-34 in this way: Give the Jews a region where they would have a base and they could have minorities in other countries. Nothing particular happened - and then came the Goebbels action in 1938. Until 1938 there was no plan to exclude Jews from economic life. the econoic experts never agreed with it."

What was you testimony in court? "I described how an Einsatzgruppe received an order to liquidate Jews in Russia. This was not an anti-Semitc order; rather the Jews in Russia were said to be the main carrier of Bolshevism there. It was against my will that I was ordered to an Einsatzgruppe in Russia. There were five hundred men. Mostly Ordinary Police and armed SS. The region included Odessa and from Nikolaiev to Rostov and Crimea." Did you know what your function was to be? "Yes. I knew the orders. Einsatzkommandos in the charge of colonels general executed the orders." And you were a lieutenant general in charge of the Einsatzgruppe? "No. I was only a brigadier general at the time. It was 1941-42." What did your Einsatzgruppe do/ "The Jews were shot in a military manner in a cordon. There were fifteen-men firing squads. One bullet per Jew. In other words, one firing squad of fifteen executed fifteen Jews at a time." Did you supervise or witness? "O was there twice, for short periods. " Were the victims men, women, and children? "Yes." Were the children shot? "Yes." Was Uman in your territory? "No. Uman is in Ukraine." How many Jews were killed by your group? "Ninety thousand reported. I figure actually only sixty to seventy thousand were shot." Any records kept? "Not individual names." Where did these Jews who were shot come from? "From Russian towns."

Did you fell that you were doing the right thing? "I myself didn't have to do it." Didn't you direct it? "Yes. But orders were given to the Einsatzkommandos leaders. All I had to do was see to it that it was done as humanely as possible." Would you do it again? "I didn't do anything." Would you direct it again or obey such an order again? "I don't think such a question is right. I think you can save that question. I suffered enough for years. Many people had to carry out orders they disapproved of. I rejected the order twice, but had to obey it the third time. The order came from Heydrich." Was your appetite or sleep disturbed? "Of course. And I had to relieve people who had nervous breakdowns." Many? "A few." Any sadists among the executioners or on your staff? "No. These people were ordered to do i - they were not selected. They were ordered to do it , and so they did it."

At this point, Ohlendorf is glumly reminiscent. He has shifted the burden of the mass murder onto Heydrich. He feels no remorse now except nominally. he looks like a burned-out ghoul, and his conscience, if t can be called such, is clean as a whistle and empty. There is a dearth of affect, but nothing clinically remarkable. His attitude is "Why blame me? I didn't do anything"

...

Then why did you shoot ninety thousand Jews? "First, I didn't shoot them. Firing squads did that. Secondly, I didn't approve of it."

Then why did you go through with it? "What else could I do?" If you disapproved of it, you could have protested and refused, it seems to me. "Where could I desert to? I was under oath to Hitler." Under oath to commit mass murder? "Under oath." For what? What did the oath state? "I could not have prevented it if I had killed myself. It would still have gone off according to schedule. These orders were given to the Einsatzkommandos in Berlin before they joined my group." Does the commando leader have more power than the group leader - is that what you mean? "No. I too received orders from Berlin."

...

"I told you how I spent sleepless nights, how it upset my inner self." But you went right on working for the Nazis and reached the rank of lieutenant general? Ohlendorf does not answer this, just sits tight-lipped and rather hostile. None of the questions were expressed in a hostile manner.

Did your wife know of this business of the Einsatzgruppe? "No." Have you seen her since 1941-42? "I saw her, but never talked to her about those things. I didn't think it was good conversation for a woman."

But it's all right to shoot women, not all right to talk to them about shootings? "In the first place, I didn't shoot women. I merely supervised."

...

Who is responsible for these crimes? "The Fuhrer and Himmler."

Page 407

[Oswald Pohl]
I asked Pohl if he considered himself in any way responsible or guilty, as an accomplice or a direct participant, in the murder of the 5 million Jews in the concentration camps, and he the countless other thousands of internees who perished through disease, neglect, starvation, beatings, hangings, and shootings. By this time, Pohl looked anxious and no longer the composed practical businessman talking about stocks and bond. That he could still not visualize his own importance in the criminal world of the Nazis was clear, but he was beginning to get an inkling at least of one individual's view of his activities. He replied, "In no way am I responsible or guilty for the murder of the 5 million Jews or the deaths of others in the concentration camps. About the murder of the 5 million Jews, I had nothing whatever to do with it. The fact that I was in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany from 1942 until the end is beside the point. I have explained and explained again that I sent Gluecks, one of my subordinates, to take charge of this program, and that I stayed out of it. Now, as far as the others who died in concentration camps or who were punished because of bad behavior or who might have been executed because of the hostage system - the reprisal system - that too is not my responsibility, but was ordered by the local party district administrator, or police functionary, or Himmler and the Gestapo, and it was a bad policy. I was just an administrator.

Page 420/421

[Walter Schellenberg]
"Himmler hated Russia but I had him convinced that Russia could not be defeated." Was Himmler convinced? "At first Himmler hated me for it but then he began to think about it because of my documentary evidence." It's fantastic. "Yes, but I did it. In 1943 I began to astrology with Himmler. I needed it as an instrument to get more influence with Himmler because he believed in astrology. In my horoscope of Hitler I predicted the Attentat against Hitler in February 1944; as you know it actually took place on July 20, 1944. When the Attentat began, Himmler was very much convinced. Although Himmler himself played a small part in the Attentat, he was convinced. I also predicted Hitler would not survive April 1945. When Hitler did kill himself, Himmler was more than ever convinced."

That was rather late in the game, was it not? "But not too late. I purposely told Himmler that he was supposed to be the successor to Hitler - to be a reformer, and that then he himself must step down."

Himmler a reformer, the man who ordered 5 million Jews murdered, and who according to Bach-Zeleski wanted 3 million Slavs exterminated? "Himmler believed there would be chaos, and I strengthened in him that belief - I used him as a political tool for my own political purposes. i told him that he had to make good all the bad things - that he had to release all political prisoners. Jews were to be released." What Jews? Hoettl said that in August 1944 Eichmann told him between 4 and 5 million of them had been killed to that time. " I didn't know that. In October 1944 I had a conference with jean-Marie Musy, former president of Switzerland, with Himmler present, and later Himmler and Musy had a conference alone. I learned at a later date that Himmler gave positive orders on the treatment of the Jews, showing that my ideas had taken root in him."

Peculiar, because when Allied troops moved into Germany, concentration camps were burned and the inmates burned alive or shot. "I know. I was allowed to take 1,200 Jews into Switzerland. That began in January 1945. Every two weeks a train with 1,200 Jews could leave Germany for Switzerland. It only happened once because Kaltenbrunner went up to Hitler and had the whole ting stopped.

Was Kaltenbrunner then, in your opinion, worse than Himmler? "Yes. Especially during the last phase of the war. Kaltenbrunner had more influence with Hitler - in practice Kalentbrunner was worse than Himmler.

Page 440

[Paul O. Schmidt]
"Therefore, I was opposed to these treaty-breaking methods. I was in opposition both privately and personally. I had a taste of the darker aspects of militarism when I was a corporal in the First World War. I don't believe in the educational value of military training. I felt that military training as practiced in Germany or elsewhere was bad. I disliked the caste system, and bullies. From this general point of view, I was against the reintroduction of compulsory military service. Compulsory military service began again in Germany in 1936. It was a decision taken by Germany in violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty."

Page 442/443

"In September 1938, there was a meeting at Berchtesgarden between Hitler and Chamberlain. Hitler put forth Germany's claim to the Sudeten territories. Chamberlain did not agree. There were no Czech representatives. The Czechs were not even invited and were hardly informed. One ally quietly signed away territory belonging to another ally. It was a terrible encouragement to Hitler, who saw the weakness of the Allied situation. France was an ally of Czechoslovakia but also ceded Czech territory through the French prime minister, Daladier.

"There was a meeting at Bad Godesberg seven to ten days after the one at Berchtesgaden. Chaberlain and Hitler met without any other parties present, except myself. The famous Munich Conference of September 29-30, 1938, took place two week after Bad Godesberg. The parties met on the basis of the proposition put forth by Mussolini to the French. Mussolini made the initial Munich draft. he saw things more realistically than my own people. That was always so. The Mediterraneans are always greater realists than the people of the north. The fact that war was avoided in 1938 was as much due to Mussolini as to Chamberlain. We Germans had no part in it. Hitler was quite prepared to to go war.

"At Berchtesgaden feelings were strained. The atmosphere improved a little at the Godesberg meeting. At Munich the personal relationships were again strained. But once the agreement had been reached and the famous 'no more war' agreement was arranged between Britain and Germany, the atmosphere was better. I though Chamberlain was very happy to have Hitler sin the paper he had typed and brought along with him from England. Chamberlain was warmly welcomed at Munich. He was the hero of the German people in Munich - not Hitler. the German masses gave flowers to Chamberlain. One could see on their faces that they thanked Chamberlain for saving the peace of Europe despite Hitler.

"Hitler didn't like this show at all. He feared that it would give the impression that the German people were pacifists, which, of course, would be unpardonable in the eyes of the Nazis. Therefore, the Nazis didn't like this Munich show at all."

Page 444

[October 1940]
Franco and Hitler talked together for a long time. Between the lines of the conversation Gibraltar was discussed. It was our idea to conquer Gibraltar. Special troops were being trained in fortress warfare. Specialists in taking fortified places were trained near Liege in Belgium. There were new methods of approach and attack, studied with a view to an assault on Gibraltar. Of course, it was necessary to obtain Franco's consent. As I said, this was one of the subjects of discussion between the lines. The meeting didn't go well at all.

"In the first place, Franco was hesitating, uncertain; he is of weak character. He obviously played for time. WE wanted to precipitate matters as usual. We thought that getting Franco's consent for the attack on Gibraltar would be a matter of one afternoon and that would be enough - but it wasn't. Hitler and Franco separated without achieving anything. Hitler was disappointed and so was Franco.

Page 447

Had Schmidt any impression of Sauckel? "That man who is responsible for slave labor in Germany does not have my sympathy. I did not like the whole idea of what he did. After ll, there are limits to what one can do with foreign populations in the forced labor business. In the first place, the whole idea is completely unproductive. One needs three or four men to watch one compulsory worker. Sauckel deserves the severest punishment. You can see that there were no strong characters surrounding Hitler. There were only weaklings like Ribbentrop, Funk, and so forth. Hitler wanted a silent audience. Even Goering, who superficially gives the appearance of a strong man, was in reality childlike, weak character who was known as a dope addict in the inner circles."

Notes on Our Enemy, The State by Albert Jay Nock

Our Enemy, The State

A PDF of the book is available: http://mises.org/etexts/ourenemy.pdf

Page 1

There's only one way to improve society, he used to say; present it with one improved unit -- yourself.

Page 4/5

Old Whig and Classical Liberal philosophy would schematize competing political theories in the form of answers to three questions:

1. The first question put by non-Whig theorists is: Who shall wield power? Answers range from Monarch backed by divine right to Democracy based on "majority rule."
2. The second question is: For whose benefit shall this power be wilded? Power is a heady thing in itself, but beyond power for its own sake power is invariable sought and used for the economic advantage power bestows. The royal family lived rather well, and so did their aristocratic friends. These two sets of people, in virtue of their privileged position, got something for nothing; the goods and services they enjoyed were not obtained from the goods and services they had produced and offered in voluntary exchanges; they lived on the fruits of others' toil. This was "the good old rule, the simple plan, that they should take who have the power , and they should keep who can."
3. And so there is a third question: At whose expense shall this power be wielded? It follows from the answers given to the first two questions that a society structured along the lines they lay down must have its victims. The victims are people whose interests are deliberately sacrificed in order to prosper those who hold public office and their friends - who comprise The State.

Page 6

If robbery is the first labor saving device, the State is surely the second, and it si by far the safer way to live without working.

...

Homo sapiens will do almost anything to avoid work, so he naturally gravitates to the employment of the political means for the satisfaction of his economic wants and needs -- which is the state.

Page 13

Its [The State] legitimate concern is with but two matters: first, freedom; second, justice.

Page 17/18

Putting the case in plain language, the individual was living in a condition of servitude to the state. The fact that he "furnished the means by which he suffered" - that he was a member of a nominally sovereign body - made his condition none the less one of servitude. Slavery is slavery whether it be voluntary or involuntary, nor is its character at all altered by the nature of the agency that exercises it. A man is in slavery when all his rights lie at the arbitrary discretion of some agency other than himself; when his life, liberty, property, and the whole direction of his activities are liable to arbitrary and irresponsible confiscation at any time - and this appeared to be the exact relation that I saw obtaining between the individual and the state.

...

Mussolini sums up this doctrine very handsomely in a single phrase, "Everything for the state; nothing outside the state; nothing against the state," ...

Page 25

If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely:
a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the
student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing,
wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, “agricultural adjustment,” and similar items of State policy
that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run
up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they
monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State
power and a corresponding decrease of social power.

...

Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

Page 26

Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called "the old trick of fuming every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government;" and the passage of time has proved that they were right.

Page 27

We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own disposition when approached by a
beggar. Two years ago we might have been moved to give him something; today we are moved to
refer him to the State’s relief-agency. The State has said to society, You are either not exercising
enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way,
so I shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself.

Page 33

When, therefore, the inquiring student of civilization has occasion to observe this or any other
apparent recession upon any point of our present regime, he may content himself with asking the
one question, What effect has this upon the sum-total of State power? The answer he gives
himself will show conclusively whether the recession is actual or apparent, and this is all he is
concerned to know.

Page 35

Indeed, it is by this means that the aim of the collectivists seems likeliest to be attained in this
country; this aim being the complete extinction of social power through absorption by the State.
Their fundamental doctrine was formulated and invested with a quasi-religious sanction by the
idealist philosophers of the last century; and among peoples who have accepted it in terms as well
as in fact, it is expressed in formulas almost identical with theirs. Thus, for example, when Hitler
says that “the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it,” he is only putting into
loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that “the State is the general substance, whereof
individuals are but accidents.” Or, again, when Mussolini says, “Everything for the State; nothing
outside the State; nothing against the State,” he is merely vulgarizing the doctrine of Fichte, that
“the State is the superior power, ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely independent.”

Page 36/37

Mr. Jefferson wrote in 1823 that there was no danger he dreaded so much as "the consolidation [i.e. centralization] of our government by the noiseless and therefor unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court.

...

Even the coup d'Etat of 1932 was noiseless and unalarming. In Russia, Italy, Germany, the coup d'Etat was violent and spectacular; it had to be; but here it was neither. Under cover of a nation-wide, State-managed mobilization of inane buffoonery and aimless commotion, it took place in so unspectacular a way that its true nature escaped notice, and even now is not generally understood. The mehtod of consolidating the ensuing regime, moreover, was also noiseless and un-alarming

...

The force of phrase and name distorts the identification of our own actual acceptances and acquiescences.

Page 40

There appears to be a curious difficulty about exercising reflective thought upon the actual nature
of an institution into which one was born and one’s ancestors were born. One accepts it as one
does the atmosphere; one’s practical adjustments to it are made by a kind of reflex. One seldom
thinks about the air until one notices some change, favourable or unfavourable, and then one’s
thought about it is special; one thinks about purer air, lighter air, heavier air, not about air. So it is
with certain human institutions. We know that they exist, that they affect us in various ways, but
we do not ask how they came to exist, or what their original intention was, or what primary
function it is that they are actually fulfilling; and when they affect us so unfavourably that we rebel
against them, we contemplate substituting nothing beyond some modification or variant of the
same institution. Thus colonial America, oppressed by the monarchical State, brings in the
republican State; Germany gives up the republican State for the Hitlerian State; Russia exchanges
the monocratic State for the collectivist State; Italy exchanges the constitutionalist State for the
“totalitarian” State.

Page 45/48

As far back as one can follow the run of civilization, it presents two fundamentally different types of
political organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the
one type as merely marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher; they are commonly
so taken, but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus – to
classify both under the generic name of “government,” though this also, until very lately, has been
done, and has always led to confusion and misunderstanding.

...

They are so different in theory that drawing a sharp distinction between them is now probably the most important duty that civilization owes to its own safety. Hence it is by no means either an arbitrary or academic proceeding to give the one type the name of government, and to call the second type simple the State .

Page 50

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and
confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. On the negative
side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any
other origin. Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation
of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer
defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution “forced on a defeated group by a
conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the
conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This
domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by
the victorious group.”

...

"Nations in general," he [John Jay] said, "will go to war whenever there is a prospect of getting something by it."

Page 53

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention,
is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual
has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice
costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality
whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

So far from encouraging a wholesome development of social power, it has invariably, as Madison
said, turned every contingency into a resource for depleting social power and enhancing State
power. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever
shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime. In
Russia and Germany, for example, we have lately seen the State moving with great alacrity against
infringement of its private monopoly by private persons, while at the same time exercising that
monopoly with unconscionable ruthlessness. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its
history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators
and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class

Page 57

Spencer does not discuss what he calls “the perennial faith of mankind” in State action, but
contents himself with elaborating the sententious observations of Guizot, that “a belief in the
sovereign power of political machinery” is nothing less than “a gross delusion.” This faith is chiefly
an effect of the immense prestige which the State has diligently built up for itself in the century or
more since the doctrine of jure divino rulership gave way. We need not consider the various
instruments that the State employs in building up its prestige; most of them are well known, and
their uses well understood. There is one, however, which is in a sense peculiar to the republican
State. Republicanism permits the individual to persuade himself that the State is his creation, that
State action is his action, that when it expresses itself it expresses him, and when it is glorified he
is glorified. The republican State encourages this persuasion with all its power, aware that it is the
most efficient instrument for enhancing its own prestige. Lincoln’s phrase, “of the people, by the
people, for the people” was probably the most effective single stroke of propaganda ever made in
behalf of republican State prestige.

Page 58/59

There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be
satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means.17 The other
is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. The
primitive exercise of the political means was, as we have seen, by conquest, confiscation,
expropriation, and the introduction of a slave-economy. The conqueror parcelled out the conquered
territory among beneficiaries, who thenceforth satisfied their needs and desires by exploiting the
labour of the enslaved inhabitants.

Page 73

Thus the merchant-polity amounted to an attempt, more or less disingenuous, at reconciling
matters which in their nature can not be reconciled. The ideas of natural rights and popular
sovereignty were, as we have seen, highly acceptable and highly animating to all the forces allied
against the feudal idea; but while these ideas might be easily reconcilable with a system of simple
government, such a system would not answer the purpose. Only the State-system would do that.
The problem therefore was, how to keep these ideas well in the forefront of political theory, and at
the same time prevent their practical application from undermining the organization of the political
means. It was a difficult problem. The best that could be done with it was by making certain
structural alterations in the State, which would give it the appearance of expressing these ideas,
without the reality. The most important of these structural changes was that of bringing in the socalled
representative or parliamentary system, which Puritanism introduced into the modern world,
and which has received a great deal of praise as an advance towards democracy. This praise,
however, is exaggerated. The change was one of form only, and its bearing on democracy has been
inconsiderable.

Page 76/77/78/79/83

Thus "- and here is the important observation, so important that I venture to italicize it - "every essential element long afterward found in the government of the American State appeared in the chartered corporation that started English civilization in America." Generally speaking, the system of civil order established in America was the State-system of the "mother countries" operating over a considerable body of water; the only thing that distinguished it was that the exploited and dependent class was situated at an unusual distance from the owning and exploiting class. The headquarters of the autonomous State were on one side of the Atlantic, and its subjects on the other.

...

A point of greatest importance to remember is that the merchant-State is the only form of the State that ever existed in America. Whether under the rule of a trading0company or a provincial governor or a republican representative legislature, Americans have never known any other form of the State.

...

Their remarkable success in these pursuits is well known; it is worth mention here in order to account for many of the complications and collisions of interest subsequently ensuing upon the merchant-State's fundamental doctrine that the primary function of government is not to maintain freedom and security, but to "help business."

...

By way of summing up, it is enough to say that nowhere in the American colonial civil order was
there ever the trace of a democracy. The political structure was always that of the merchant-State;
Americans have never known any other. Furthermore, the philosophy of natural rights and popular
sovereignty was never once exhibited anywhere in American political practice during the colonial
period, from the first settlement in 1607 down to the revolution of 1776.

Page 85

After conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set up, its first concern is with
the land. The State assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis, whereby every
landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State
distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms.

Page 94

Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of land lying beyond the dead-line set by
the British State; later he was heavily involved in the affairs of one of the notorious Yazoo
companies, operating in Georgia. He seems to have been most unscrupulous. His company’s
holdings in Georgia, amounting to more than ten million acres, were to be paid for in Georgia scrip,
which was much depreciated. Henry bought up all these certificates that he could get his hands on,
at ten cents on the dollar, and made a great profit on them by their rise in value when Hamilton put
through his measure for having the central government assume the debts they represented.
Undoubtedly it was this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned him the dislike of Mr. Jefferson,
who said, rather contemptuously, that he was “insatiable in money.”

Page 98/99

The main conclusion, however, towards which these observations tend, is that one general frame of
mind existed among the colonists with reference to the nature and primary function of the State.
This frame of mind was not peculiar to them; they shared it with the beneficiaries of the merchant-
State in England, and with those of the feudal State as far back as the State’s history can be
traced. Voltaire, surveying the debris of the feudal State, said that in essence the State is “a device
for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting it into another.” The beneficiaries of the
feudal State had precisely this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged and unmodified to the
actual and potential beneficiaries of the merchant-State. The colonists regarded the State primarily
as an instrument whereby one might help oneself and hurt others; that is to say, first and foremost
they regarded it as the organization of the political means. No other view of the State was ever
held in colonial America. Romance and poetry were brought to bear on the subject in the
customary way; glamorous myths about it were propagated with the customary intent; but when
all came to all, nowhere in colonial America were actual practical relations with the State ever
determined by any other view than this.

Page 101/102/103

There was complete unanimity also regarding the nature of the new and independent political
institution which the Declaration contemplated as within “the right of the people” to set up. There
was a great and memorable dissension about its form, but none about its nature. It should be in
essence the mere continuator of the merchant-State already existing. There was no idea of setting
up government, the purely social institution which should have no other object than, as the
Declaration put it, to secure the natural rights of the individual; or as Paine put it, which should
contemplate nothing beyond the maintenance of freedom and security – the institution which
should make no positive interventions of any kind upon the individual, but should confine itself
exclusively to such negative interventions as the maintenance of freedom might indicate. The idea
was to perpetuate an institution of another character entirely, the State, the organization of the
political means; and this was accordingly done.

There is no disparagement implied in this observation; for, all questions of motive aside, nothing
else was to be expected. No one knew any other kind of political organization. The causes of
American complaint were conceived of as due only to interested and culpable mal-administration,
not to the essentially anti-social nature of the institution administered. Dissatisfaction was directed
against administrators, not against the institution itself. Violent dislike of the form of the institution
– the monarchical form – was engendered, but no distrust or suspicion of its nature. The character
of the State had never been subjected to scrutiny; the cooperation of the Zeitgeist was needed for
that, and it was not yet to be had.

One may see here a parallel with the revolutionary movements against the Church in the sixteenth
century – and indeed with revolutionary movements in general. They are incited by abuses and
misfeasances, more or less specific and always secondary, and are carried on with no idea beyond
getting them rectified or avenged, usually by the sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats. The
philosophy of the institution that gives play to these misfeasances is never examined, and hence
they recur promptly under another form or other auspices, or else their place is taken by others
which are in character precisely like them. Thus the notorious failure of reforming and revolutionary
movements in the long-run may as a rule be found due to their incorrigible superficiality.

One mind, indeed, came within reaching distance of the fundamentals of the matter, not by
employing the historical method, but by a homespun kind of reasoning, aided by a sound and
sensitive instinct. The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle
of “states’ rights” is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states’ rights, assuredly, but
he went much farther; states’ rights were only an incident in his general system of political
organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository and source of political
authority and initiative, should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit,
but the township, or, as he called it, the “ward.” The township, and the township only, should
determine the delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His
system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment’s examination,
because if the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable that
the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly in that form.

There is probably no need to say that the consideration of such a displacement involves a long look
ahead, and over a field of view that is cluttered with the debris of a most discouraging number, not
of nations alone, but of whole civilizations. Nevertheless it is interesting to remind ourselves that
more than a hundred and fifty years ago, one American succeeded in getting below the surface of
things, and that he probably to some degree anticipated the judgment of an immeasurably distant
future.

Page 105

Thus while the American architects assented “in principle” to the philosophy of natural rights and
popular sovereignty, and found it in a general way highly congenial as a sort of voucher for their
self-esteem, their practical interpretation of it left it pretty well hamstrung. They were not
especially concerned with consistency; their practical interest in this philosophy stopped short at
the point which we have already noted, of its presumptive justification of a ruthless economic
pseudo-individualism, and an exercise of political self-expression by the general electorate which
should be so managed as to be, in all essential respects, futile. In this they took precise pattern by
the English Whig exponents and practitioners of this philosophy. Locke himself, whom we have seen
putting the natural rights of property so high above those of life and liberty, was equally
discriminating in his view of popular sovereignty. He was no believer in what he called “a numerous
democracy,” and did not contemplate a political organization that should countenance anything of
the kind.

Page 106/107

The sum of the matter is that while the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty
afforded a set of principles upon which all interests could unite, and practically all did unite, with
the aim of securing political independence, it did not afford a satisfactory set of principles on which
to found the new American State. When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of
the Declaration went into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving.
The rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to
eviscerating interpretations, or, where these were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple
executive disregard; and all consideration of the rights attending “the pursuit of happiness” was
narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke’s doctrine of the preeminent rights of property,
with law-made property on an equal footing with labour-made property. As for popular sovereignty,
the new State had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the general temper of the
people; and hence its peculiar task was to preserve the appearance of actual republicanism without
the reality.

....

... the device of judicial review and interpretation, which, as we have already observed, is a process whereby anything may be made to mean anything ...

Page 108

No
one spoke of natural rights and popular sovereignty; it would seem actually that no one had ever
heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the pressing need of a strong central
coercive authority, able to check the incursions which “the democratic spirit” was likely to incite
upon “the men of principle and property.” Mr. Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this with the sort of thing he had been
hearing in the France which he had just left “in the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of
natural rights and zeal for reformation.” In the process of possessing himself anew of the spirit and
ideas of his countrymen, he said, “I can not describe the wonder and mortification with which
the table conversations filled me.” Clearly, though the Declaration might have been the charter for
American independence, it was in no sense the charter of the new American State.

Page 112/113

A direct drive at effecting these changes comes as a
rule to nothing, or more often than not turns out to be retarding. They are so largely the work of
those unimpassioned and imperturbable agencies for which Prince de Bismarck had such vast
respect – he called them the imponderabilia – that any effort which disregards them, or thrusts
them violently aside, will in the long run find them stepping in to abort its fruit.

....

Instead of recognizing the State as “the common enemy of all well-disposed,
industrious and decent men,” the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a
final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its
history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is
willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its
administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State’s progressive absorption of
social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the
activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the
belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its
indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share – he is, pro tanto,
aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The
mass- man, he says, confronting the phenomenon of the State, “sees it, admires it, knows that
there it is.... Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling
himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the
public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend
to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense
and unassailable resources.... When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong
appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without
effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in
motion.”

Page 114

Footnote 3

It seems to be very imperfectly understood that the cost of State intervention must be paid out of production, this being the only source from which any payment for anything can be derived. Intervention retards production; then resulting stringency and inconvenience enable further intervention, which in turn still further retards production; and this process goes on until, as in Rome, in the third century, production ceases entirely, and the source of payment dries up.

Page 118/119/120/121/122

The situation, in a word, was that American economic interests had fallen into two grand divisions,
the special interests in each having made common cause with a view to capturing control of the
political means.One division comprised the speculating, industrial-commercial and creditor
interests, with their natural allies of the bar and bench, the pulpit and the press. The other
comprised chiefly the farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally. From the first, these two
grand divisions were colliding briskly here and there in the several units, the most serious collision
occurring over the terms of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780. The State in each of the thirteen units was a class-State, as every State known to history has
been; and the work of manoeuvring it in its function of enabling the economic exploitation of one
class by another went steadily on.

...

Mr. Jefferson's idea of a political organization which should be national in foreign affairs and non-national in domestic affairs might be found continuously practicable.

...

But the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to the interests grouped in the first
grand division. The grounds of their dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in mind
the vast prospect of the continent, one need use but little imagination to perceive that the national
scheme was by far the more congenial to those interests, because it enabled an ever-closer
centralization of control over the political means. For instance, leaving aside the advantage of
having but one central tariff-making body to chaffer with, instead of twelve, any industrialist could
see the great primary advantage of being able to extend his exploiting operations over a nationwide
free-trade area walled-in by a general tariff; the closer the centralization, the larger the
exploitable area. Any speculator in rental-values would be quick to see the advantage of bringing
this form of opportunity under unified control. Any speculator in depreciated public securities would be strongly for a system that could offer him
the use of the political means to bring back their face-value. Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see that his bread was buttered on the side of a
national State which, if properly approached, might lend him the use of the political means by way
of a subsidy, or would be able to back up some profitable but dubious freebooting enterprise with
“diplomatic representations” or with reprisals.

The farmers and the debtor class in general, on the other hand, were not interested in those
considerations, but were strongly for letting things stay, for the most part, as they stood.

...

They had an impressive object-lesson in the immediate shift that took place in Massachusetts after the adoption of John Adams's local constitution of 1780. They naturally did not care to see this sort of
thing put into operation on a nation-wide scale, and they therefore looked with extreme disfavour upon any bait put forth for amending the Articles out of existence.

...

Finally, however, a constitutional convention was assembled, on the distinct understanding that it
should do no more than revise the Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased it, as to
make them “adequate to the exigencies of the nation,” and on the further understanding that all
the thirteen units should assent to the amendments before they went into effect; in short, that the
method of amendment provided by the Articles themselves should be followed. Neither
understanding was fulfilled. The convention was made up wholly of men representing the economic
interests of the first division. The great majority of them, possibly as many as four-fifths, were
public creditors; one-third were land- speculators; some were money-lenders; one-fifth were
industrialists, traders, shippers; and many of them were lawyers. They planned and executed a
coup d’Etat, simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the waste-basket, and drafting a
constitution de novo, with the audacious provision that it should go into effect when ratified by nine
units instead of by all thirteen. Moreover, with like audacity, they provided that the document
should not be submitted either to the Congress or to the local legislatures, but that it should go
direct to a popular vote!

...

We
therefore go on to observe that in order to secure ratification by even the nine necessary units, the
document had to conform to certain very exacting and difficult requirements. The political structure
which is contemplated had to be republican in form, yet capable of resisting what Gerry unctuously
called “the excess of democracy,” and what Randolph termed its “turbulence and follies.” The task
of the delegates was precisely analogous to that of the earlier architects who had designed the
structure of the British merchant-State, with its system of economics, politics and judicial control;
they had to contrive something that could pass muster as showing a good semblance of popular
sovereignty, without the reality. Madison defined their task explicitly in saying that the convention’s
purpose was “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction [i.e.,
a democratic faction], and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government.”

Page 124/125/126

Of all the legislative measures enacted to implement the new constitution, the one best calculated
to ensure a rapid and steady progress in the centralization of political power was the Judiciary Act
of 1789.15 This measure created a federal supreme court of six members (subsequently enlarged
to nine) and a federal district court in each state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete
apparatus for enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal oversight of state legislation by the
familiar device of “interpretation,” whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state legislative or
judicial action which for any reason it saw fit to regard as unconstitutional. One feature of the Act
which for our purposes is most noteworthy is that it made the tenure of all these federal judgeships
appointive, not elective, and for life; thus marking almost the farthest conceivable departure from
the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

...

We may now see from this necessarily brief survey, which anyone may amplify and particularize at
his pleasure, what the circumstances were which rooted a certain definite idea of the State still
deeper in the general consciousness. That idea was precisely the same in the constitutional period
as that which we have seen prevailing in the two periods already examined – the colonial period,
and the eight- year period following the revolution. Nowhere in the history of the constitutional
period do we find the faintest suggestion of the Declaration’s doctrine of natural rights; and we find
its doctrine of popular sovereignty not only continuing in abeyance, but constitutionally estopped
from ever reappearing. Nowhere do we find a trace of the Declaration’s theory of government; on
the contrary, we find it expressly repudiated. The new political mechanism was a faithful replica of
the old disestablished British model, but so far improved and strengthened as to be incomparably
more close-working and efficient, and hence presenting incomparably more attractive possibilities
of capture and control. By consequence, therefore, we find more firmly implanted than ever the
same general idea of the State that we have observed as prevailing hitherto – the idea of an
organization of the political means, an irresponsible and all-powerful agency standing always ready
to be put into use for the service of one set of economic interests as against another.

Footnote: 16

The authority of the Supreme Court was disregarded by Jackson, and overruled by Lincoln,
thus converting the mode of the State temporarily from an oligarchy to an autocracy. It is
interesting to observe that just such a contingency was foreseen by the framers of the constitution,
in particular by Hamilton. They were apparently well aware of the ease with which, in any period of
crisis, a quasi-republican mode of the State slips off into executive tyranny. Oddly enough, Mr.
Jefferson at one time considered nullifying the Alien and Sedition Acts by executive action, but did
not do so. Lincoln overruled the opinion of Chief Justice Taney that suspension of the habeas corpus
was unconstitutional, and in consequence the mode of the State was, until 1865, a monocratic
military despotism. In fact, from the date of his proclamation of blockade, Lincoln ruled
unconstitutionally throughout his term. The doctrine of “reserved powers” was knaved up ex post
facto as a justification of his acts, but as far as the intent of the constitution is concerned, it was
obviously a pure invention. In fact, a very good case could be made out for the assertion that
Lincoln’s acts resulted in a permanent radical change in the entire system of constitutional
“interpretation” – that since his time “interpretations” have not been interpretations of the
constitution, but merely of public policy; or, as our most acute and profound critic put it, “th’
Supreme Court follows th’ iliction rayturns.” A strict constitutionalist might indeed say that the
constitution died in 1861, and one would have to scratch one’s head pretty diligently to refute him.

Footnote: 17

17. Marshall was appointed by John Adams at the end of his Presidential term, when the interests
grouped in the first division were becoming very anxious about the opposition developing against
them among the exploited interests. A letter written by Oliver Wolcott to Fisher Ames gives a good
idea of where the doctrine of popular sovereignty stood; his reference to military measures is
particularly striking. He says, “The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the judicial
department, and I hope that their measures will be very decided. It is impossible in this country to
render an army an engine of government; and there is no way to combat the state opposition but
by an efficient and extended organization of judges, magistrates, and other civil officers.” Marshall’s
appointment followed, and also the creation of twenty-three new federal judgeships. Marshall’s
cardinal decisions were made in the cases of Marbury, of Fletcher, of McCulloch, of Dartmouth
College, and of Cohens. It is perhaps not generally understood that as a result of Marshall’s efforts,
the Supreme Court became not only the highest law-interpreting body, but the highest law-making
body as well; the precedents established by its decisions have the force of constitutional law. Since
1800, therefore, the actual mode of the State in America is normally that of a small and
irresponsible oligarchy! Mr. Jefferson, regarding Marshall quite justly as “a crafty chief judge who
sophisticates the law to his mind by the turn of his own reasoning,” made in 1821 the very
remarkable prophecy that “our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what
road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary
consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the other two branches the
corrupting and corrupted instruments.” Another prophetic comment on the effect of centralization
was his remark that “when we must wait for Washington to tell us when to sow and when to reap,
we shall soon want bread.” A survey of our present political circumstances makes comment on
these prophecies superfluous.

Page 127

In his second term Mr. Jefferson discovered the tendency towards
bipartisanship, and was both dismayed and puzzled by it. I have elsewhere remarked his
curious inability to understand how the cohesive power of public plunder works straight towards
political bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some who called themselves Republicans favouring the
Federalist policy of centralization, he spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as “pseudo-
Republicans, but real Federalists.” But most naturally any Republican who saw a chance of profiting
by the political means would retain the name, and at the same time resist any tendency within the
party to impair the general system which held out such a prospect. In this way bipartisanship arises. Party designations become purely nominal, and the stated issues
between parties become progressively trivial; and both are more and more openly kept up with no
other object than to cover from scrutiny the essential identity of purpose in both parties.

Page 128

The anti-Federalist party took office in 1800 as the party of strict construction; yet,
once in office, it played ducks and drakes with the constitution, in behalf of the special interests
that it represented. The Federalists were nominally for loose construction, yet they fought bitterly every one of the
opposing party’s loose-constructionist measures – the embargo, the protective tariff and the
national bank. They were the constitutional nationalists of the deepest dye, as we have seen; yet in
their centre and stronghold, New England, they held the threat of secession over the country
throughout the period of what they harshly called “Mr. Madison’s war,” the War of 1812, which was
in fact a purely imperialist adventure after annexation of Floridian and Canadian territory, in behalf
of stiffening agrarian control of the political means; but when the planting interests of the South
made the same threat in 1861, they became fervid nationalists again

Page 130

In fact, such popular terms of electioneering appeal are uniformly and notoriously what Jeremy
Bentham called impostor-terms, and their use invariably marks one thing and one only; it marks a
state of apprehension, either fearful or expectant, as the case may be, concerning access to the
political means. As we are seeing at the moment, once let this access come under threat of
straitening or stoppage, the menaced interests immediately trot out the spavined, glandered hobby
of “state rights” or “a return to the constitution,” and put it through its galvanic movements. Let
the incidence of exploitation show the first sign of shifting, and we hear at once from one source of
“interested clamours and sophistry” that “democracy” is in danger, and that the unparalleled
excellences of our civilization have come about solely through a policy of “rugged individualism,”
carried out under terms of “free competition”; while from another source we hear that the
enormities of laissez-faire have ground the faces of the poor, and obstructed entrance into the More
Abundant Life.

Page 137

The State is not, as he would have it, a social institution administered in an anti-social
way. It is an anti-social institution administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be
administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such
service.

Page 134/135/136

Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in turn another, and so on indefinitely;
and the State stands ever ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often again
wangling plausibility for them through the specious suggestion of interested persons. Sometimes
the matter at issue is in its nature simple, socially necessary, and devoid of any character that
would bring it into the purview of politics. For convenience, however, complications are erected on it; then presently someone sees that these
complications are exploitable, and proceeds to exploit them; then another, and another, until the
rivalries and collisions of interest thus generated issue in a more or less general disorder. When this
takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede, and let the disorder be settled in the slower
and more troublesome way, through the operation of natural laws. But in such circumstances
recession is never for a moment thought of; the suggestion would be put down as sheer lunacy.
Instead, the interests unfavourably affected – little aware, perhaps, how much worse the cure is
than the disease, or at any rate little caring – immediately call on the State to cut in arbitrarily
between cause and effect, and clear up the disorder out of hand. The State then intervenes by imposing another set of complications upon the first; these in turn
are found exploitable, another demand arises, another set of complications, still more intricate, is
erected upon the first two;6 and the same sequence is gone through again and again until the
recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a sharking political adventurer to
come forward and, always alleging “necessity, the tyrant’s plea,” to organize a coup d’Etat.

Page 138/139

Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning the nature of the State combine with extreme
moral debility and myopic self-interest – what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de l’homme
interesse – to enable the steadily accelerated conversion of social power into State power that has
gone on from the beginning of our political independence. It is a curious anomaly. State power has
an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or
honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of
the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage
banking-practice in this-or-that special instance – then let the State, which never has shown itself
able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness
and corruption, intervene to “supervise” or “regulate” the whole body of banking-practice, or even
take it over entire. Does social power, in this-or-that case, bungle the business of railwaymanagement
– then let the State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken,
intervene and put its hand to the business of “regulating” railway- operation. Does social power
now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster – then let the State, which inspected and
passed the Morro Castle, be given a freer swing at controlling the routine of the shipping trade.
Does social power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation and
distribution of electric current – then let the State, which allots and maintains monopoly, come in
and intervene with a general scheme of price-fixing which works more unforeseen hardships than it
heals, or else let it go into direct competition; or, as the collectivists urge, let it take over the
monopoly bodily. “Ever since society has existed,” says Herbert Spencer, “disappointment has been
preaching, ‘Put not your trust in legislation’; and yet the trust in legislation seems hardly
diminished.”

Page 141

It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter through, that under a regime of
natural order, that is to say under government, which makes no positive interventions whatever on
the individual, but only negative interventions in behalf of simple justice – not law, but justice –
misuses of social power would be effectively corrected; whereas we know by interminable
experience that the State’s positive interventions do not correct them. Under a regime of actual
individualism, actually free competition, actual laissez-faire – a regime which, as we have seen, can
not possibly coexist with the State – a serious or continuous misuse of social power would be
virtually impracticable.

Footnote 14:

... Their miser and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith's economics are not the economics of individualism, they are the economics of land-owners and mill-owners.

Page 144/145

But there is no need to dwell lugubriously upon the probable circumstances of a future so far
distant. What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in
collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily
growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power and faith in
social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national
income; production languishing, the State in consequence taking over one “essential industry” after
another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally
resorting to a system of forced labour. Then at some point in this progress, a collision of State
interests, at least as general as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and
financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will
be left to “the rusty death of machinery,” and the casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be
supreme.

Page 146

[The remnant]

The special reason has to do with the fact that in every civilization, however generally prosaic,
however addicted to the short-time point of view on human affairs, there are always certain alien
spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of the civilization around them, still
keep a disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things, irrespective of any practical end.
They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order
of nature; they are impressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they
can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly unfavourable to their best
hopes and wishes. For these, a work like this, however in the current sense impractical, is not quite
useless; and those of them it reaches will be aware that for such as themselves, and such only, it
was written.

Albert Speer: The End of a Myth

This is a follow up to my post: Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs by Albert Speer

Throughout his memoirs he paints himself in the most positive light, and I felt that I needed an outside reference to even out his portrayal.  To that end, I purchased a copy of Albert Speer: The End of a Myth. The book thoroughly addresses many of the claims made by Speer an shows how he went out of his way to distort the truth to present the best image of himself. There was; however, no smoking gun presented in this book -- his involvement in forced labor and relocation of the jews in Berlin is highlighted, but his involvement in the most egregious crimes is only hinted at. The main claim that is debunked is that Speer was a politically naive technician. Throughout my reading of the memoir, I too thought that this claim seemed to be a grand deception of an adept politician.

The New York Times, sums it up best in it's review: THE NAZI WHO MADE A COMEBACK

By demolishing Speer's carefully tailored image of himself, Matthias Schmidt has contributed to setting the record straight, even though he overestimates the extent to which historians have been misled by that image. One wishes only that Mr. Schmidt had driven home with even greater force the lasting lesson of Speer's role in the Third Reich. While his was without question a political role, it was not that of a fanatical Nazi, a true believer in that pernicious creed. Instead, Speer's politics were those of an opportunist, ever ready to advance his own interests by whatever methods he found would serve that purpose. His career serves to remind us that fanatics such as Adolf Hitler and his disciples can cope with the complexities of the modern world only if they can call upon the talents of unscrupulous, self-serving men like Albert Speer.

I'd recommend this book to balance out the memoirs -- but it doesn't add too much if the memoirs are read with a critical eye and with the knowledge that he is trying to portray himself in the best possible light.

In conclusion, to shed a little more light on this master politician, I'll end with a quote from: The Nuremberg Interviews

The defendants generally tried to get away with everything they could, and as one of them suggested, they sometimes succeeded. That claim was made by Hitler's architect Speer, often regarded as the shrewdest observer among the defendants. He was not pleased at the end of the trial when he saw that Fritzsche, Papen, and Schact got off while he was given twenty years. He noted in his diary that their "likes, smokescreens, and dissembling statements had paid off after all." Speer resented not being exonerated by the court, but it was certainly not because he had failed to like or cover up the truth. Speer and no doubt other defendants resented people like Goldensohn and Gilbert. So far as we can tell, Speer gave Goldensohn no more than a brief and tersely worded statement (included in this volume). He accused Gilbert of being "always eager to add to his psychological knowledge." In answer to Gilbert's question about his sentence, Speer lied when he said the twenty years he got "was fair enough. They couldn't have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can't complain." By his own later admission, Speer was not telling the truth, for in fact he felt unjustly treated by the court.

Page 7

During 1953 -54 Speer wrote detailed memoirs covering thousands of pages - pages of all kinds and sizes, even toilet paper. The material was smuggled out, little by little, from the Alliked prison for war criminals in Spandau, Berlin. It wound up in Coesfeld, where Wolters had once again become a successful architect. One of his employees typed up the material and the final typescript came to eleven hundred pages. Nevertheless, as the prisoner Speer stated when this work was completed, it was "only a first draft."

....
[he was] now designated Prisoner Number 5

Page 89

According to Speer's memoirs, mysterious things occurred during his medical crisis. the surgeon Gebhardt supposedly asked the internist Koch to operate. But Koch refused, because such an operation would have threatened the patient's life. The specter of a "medical assassination" by the SS-physician Gebhardt haunts Speer's description of the episode. however, toward the end of the wa, Koch could tell his ex-patient only that he, Koch, had had an angry dispute with Gebhardt about how to treat Speer's illness. Even in 1947, when Koch could have testified openly against the head SS-physician, all he remembered was that there had been "in the course of treatment differences between Gebhardt and me." Koch did not mention any life-threatening operation suggested by Gebhardt.

Page 13

By 1943, the wider German public sensed that Germany could not hold out against the mass of Allied arms potential.. now, non of Speer's talks lacked some variation of the statement that "the sheer quantity of Allied wapons could be not only balanced but outdone by higher quality." That year, according to the judgment of the historian Karl-Heinz Ludwig, the slogan "qualitative superiority" introduced "a new phase of lying to the German people - a phase the culminated in the myth of miracle weapons.

Page 116

Speer saw all this from the viewpoint of a sportsman. In fact, he told his fellow minister Schwerin von Krosigk "that the race between destruction and reconstruction was the most exciting contest in the history of the world."

Page 121

in 1944 -- the year of the stick-it-out and retaliation propaganda, the year that Speer had proclaimed the year of technological surprises in all areas - the Minister of Armaments made use of Hitler's edict. That Februrary, he asked Otto Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice, to institute prelminary proceedings against August Pagels, manager of the Linden Iron and Steel Works. "According to the documents in my possession, " said Speer, "there seems to be an especially flagrant case of sabotage of our war effort." In March of that same year, Speer asked the Minister of Justice to bring criminal action against Walter Kamaryt, a Viennese, who, according to Speer, had supplied false figuers on the need for, and available supplies of material crucial to the armaments industry.

Page 122

Looking back thirty-five years later, Speer offers an entirely different account of the Egger case in his last book Infiltration (Der Sklavenstaat). He uses it as an object lesson to depict his jurisdictional squabbles with the SS. He also tries to prove that the SS kept attacking him and his industrial managers for political reasons. Speer reprints the first part of a letter that indicates his annoyance at not being informed of Egger's arrest; Speer then doesn't forget to quote the last sentence: "I must protest against linking such proceedings with interventions by political offices based on political grounds." In his book, however, Speer conscientiously hides the fact that he wrote this letter in order to make three requests for a harsher punishment. Indeed, his distortion of the facts goes even further when he concludes his description of the case: "Egger was instantly released from custody. The accusations against him had proved to be unfounded." What reader would not conclude that Bussing's general manager had been set free only because of Speer's speedy intervention!.

Page 126

Hermann Giesler, Speer's adversary then and now, can only poke mordant fun at the "assassination plan" supposedly hatched by Hitler's one time minion: "The second most powerful man in the state lacked a ladder."

Page 191

There is no telling what negative consequences the more primitive constructions would have had for the prisoners. In any event, Speer issued an edict in March 1943, ordering that no more permanent structures were to be put up. The inmate house had to be makeshift. The outer and inner walls were to be lightweight, and there was to be no plastering inside or outside.

However, Speer changed his mind when he read the report on Auschwitz by his two assistants, who must have found catastrophic sanitary conditions there. Speer quickly wrote to Himmler and made building material available -- iron, cast-iron pipes, water pipes, and round bar steel -- especially for construction at Auschwitz. however, conditions in other concentration camps must have been presented to him a more favorable light. For in a handwritten addendum to his letter to Himmler, Speer remarked: "I am delighted that the inspection of the other concentration camps resulted in a highly positive picture."

Page 195

Nevertheless, Speer realized that the foundation of his honorableness as a contrite and converted national Socialist was his ignorance of "what was really beginning on November 9, 1938, and what ended in Auschwitz and Majadanek" (Speer). Consequently, the ex-Minister of Armaments never once accused himself of anything without simultaneously asseverating that he had that he had ultimately known nothing.

Page 201

Speer's favorite role -- as hitler's master builder -- comes across somewhat differently in the sources, documents, and eyewitness accounts than in Inside the Third Reich. Nothing could be further from the truth than the image of Speer as an architect with purely artistic ambitions, absorbed in his work, wearing a white smock, perched at the drawing board, designing one project after another for his supreme client. On the contrary: Speer very quickly realized that his position as Hitler's special architect involved practicable power as well, and Speer quickly learned how to wiled it. Everyone who tried to curb his ambitions learned about Speer's power the hard way. They had to experience his methods first-hand: his skillful use of intrigues and machinations to make his way to the top. Speer's position as hitler's premier architect was his novitiate for higher orders, and ultimately the highest orders in the Nazi hierarchy.

Inside The Third Reich, Memoirs by Albert Speer

So I just finished Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs by Albert Speer and was impressed by how great a book it is. I still need to read from another perspective to more fully develop a portrait of Speer, which I dutifully intend to do. To this end, I purchased Albert Speer: The End of a Myth, to get a slightly less rose colored depiction.  During my reading, certain passages jumped out at me; I have decided to preserve them below:

Page 18

Quite often even the most important step in a man's life, his choice of vocation, is taken quite frivolously. He does not bother to find out enough about the basis and the various aspects of that vocation. Once he has chosen it, he is inclined to switch off his critical awareness and to fit himself wholly into the predetermined career.

Page 19

For had I only wanted to, I could have found out even then that Hitler was proclaiming expansion of the Reich to the east; that he was a rank anti-Semite; that he was committed to a system of authoritarian rule; that after attaining power he intended to eliminated democratic procedures and would thereafter yield only to force. Not to have worked that out for myself; not, given my education, to have read books, magazines, and newspapers of various viewpoints; not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification - was already criminal. At this initial stage my guilt was as grave as, at the end, my work for Hitler. For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences - from the very beginning. (emphasis added)

Page 112

I felt myself to be Hitler's architect. Political events did not concern me. My job was merely to provide impressive backdrops for such events. And this view was reinforced daily, for Hitler consulted me almost exclusively on architectural questions. Moreover, it would have been regarded as self-importance on the part of a man who was pretty much of a latecomer in the party had I attempted to participate in the political discussions. I felt that there was no need for me to take any political positions at all. Nazi education, furthermore, aimed at separatist thinking; I was expected to confine myself to the job of building. The grotesque extent to which I clung to this illusion is indicated by a memorandum of mine to Hitler as late as 1944: "The task I have to fulfill is an unpolitical one. I have felt at ease in my work only so long as my person and my work were evaluated solely by the standard of practical accomplishments."

Page 113

But in the final analysis I myself determined the degree of my isolation, the extremity of my evasions, and the extent of ignorance.
...
Those who ask me are fundamentally expecting me to offer justifications. But I have none. No apologies are possible.

Page 165

He stuck unswervingly to his opinion that the West was too feeble, too worn out, and too decadent to begin the war seriously. Probably it was also embarrassing for him to admit to his entourage and above all to himself that he had made so crucial a mistake. I still remember his consternation when the news came that Churchill was going to enter the British War Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. With this ill omened press report in his hand, Goering stepped out of the door of Hitler's salon. He dropped into the nearest chair and said wearily: "Churchill in the Cabinet. That means that the war is really on. Now we shall have war with England." From these and other observations I deduced that this initiation of real war was not what Hitler had projected.

Page 204

I prepared a plan of organization whose vertical lines represented individual items, such as tanks, planes, or submarines. In other words, the armaments for the three branches of the service were included. These vertical columns were enclosed in numerous rings, each of which was to stand for a group of components needed for all guns, tanks, planes, and other armaments. Within these rings I considered, for example, the production of forgings or ball bearings or electrical equipment as a whole. Accustomed as an architect to three-dimensional thinking, I drew this new organizational scheme in perspective.

Page 212

Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician's often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without any scruples about their activities. The more technicial the world imposed on us by the war, the more dangerous was the indifference of the technician to the direct consequences of his anonymous activities.

...

The nonparty members of my Ministry enjoyed a legal protection highly unusual in Hitler's state. For over the objections of the Minister of Justice I had established the principle, right at the beginning of my job, that there would be no indictments for sabotage of armaments except on my motion. This proviso protected my associates even after July 20, 1944. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the Gestapo chief, wanted to indict three general managers, Bucher of the AEG electrical company, Vogler of the United Steel Works, and Reusch of the Gutehoffnungshutte (the mining combine), for "defeatist" conversations. He came to me for authorization. I pointed out that the nature of our work compelled us to speak candidly about the situation and thus fended off the Gestapo. On the other hand, I applied severe penalties for abuse of our honor system - if, for example, someone furnished false data in order to hoard important raw materials. For actions of this sort would result in the withholdings of arms from the front.

Page 213

There were times when I actually regarded theses raids as helpful - witness my ironic reaction to the destruction of the Ministry in the air raid of November 22, 1943: "Although we have been fortunate in that large parts of the current files of the Ministry have burned and so relieved us for a time of useless ballast, we cannot really expect that such events will continually introduce the necessary fresh air into our work."

Page 250, 2nd footnote

Hitler could not have blocked delivery of these letters without causing wild rumors. But when the Soviet Army allowed German prisoners to send home postcards, Hitler ordered the cards destroyed. Because they were a sign of life from the relatives, they might have mitigated the Russophobia that was being so carefully cultivated by Hitler's propaganda apparatus. Fritzsche told me about this at Nuremberg.

Page 259

This was the first time I emerged from my reserve as a specialist to plunge into political maneuvering. I had always carefully avoided such a step; but the fact that I took it now had a certain logic. I had decided that it was wrong to imagine I could concentrate exclusively upon my specialized work. In an authoritarian system anyone who wants to remain part of the leadership inevitably stumbles into fields of force where political battles are in progress.

Page 269

I was thunderstruck.

Page 282

Whereas the gradual industrial growth of the West had resulted in many middle-sized power plants connected in a grid, in the Soviet Union large power plants of gigantic dimensions had been built, usually in the heart of extensive industrial areas. For example, a single huge power plant on the upper Volga supplied most of the energy consumption of Moscow. We had information, in fact, that 60 percent of the manufacturing of essential optical parts and electrical equipment was concentrated in the Soviet capital. Moreover, the destruction of a few gigantic power plants in the Urals would have put a halt to much of Soviet steel production as well as to tank and munitions manufacture. A direct hit on the turbines or their conduits would have released masses of water a destructiveness greater than that of many bombs. Since many of the major Soviet power plants had been built with the assistance of German companies, we were able to obtain very good data on them.

Page 288

From the flak tower the air raids on Berlin were an unforgettable sight, and I had constantly to remind myself of the cruel reality in order not to be completely entranced by the scene: the illumination of the parachute flares, which the Berliners called "Christmas trees," followed by flashes of explosions which were caught by the clouds of smoke, the innumerable probing searchlights, the excitement when a plan was caught and tried to escape the cone of light, the brief flaming torch when it was hit. No doubt about it, this apocalypse provided a magnificent spectacle.

Page 289

In this way Hitler, too, learned of the blaze, and without making any further inquiries ordered all the fire departments in the vicinity of Berlin to report to the burning tank plant.
...
Since a direct order from the Fuehrer had been issued, I could not persuade the chiefs to go on to other urgent fies. Early that morning the streets in a wide area around the tank factory were jammed with fire engines standing around doing nothing - while the fires spread unchecked in other parts of the city.

Page 290

Goering was embarking for Rominten Heath on his special train when Galland came along to bid him good-by. "What's the idea of telling the Fuehrer that American fighters have penetrated into the territory of the Reich?" Goering snapped at him.

"Herr rechsmarschall," Galland replied with imperturbable calm, "they soon will be flying even deeper."

Goering Spoke even more vehemently: "That's nonsense, Galland, what gives you such fantasies? That's pure bluff!"

Galland shook his head. "Those are the facts, Herr Reichsmarschall!" As he spoke he deliberately remained in a casual posture, his cap somewhat askew, a long cigar clamped between his teeth. "American fighters have been shot down over Aachen. There is no doubt about it!

Goering obstinately held his ground: "That is simply not true, Galland. It's impossible."

Galland reacted with a touch of mockery: "You might go and check it yourself, sir; the downed planes are there at Aachen. "

Goering tried to smooth matters over: "Come now, Galland, let me tell you something. I'm an experienced fighter pilot myself. I know what is possible. But I know what isn't, too. Admit you made a mistake."

Galland only shook his head, until Goering finally declared: " What must have happened is that they were shot down much farther to the west. I mean, if they were very high when they were shot down they could have glided quite a distance farther before they crashed."

Not a muscle moved in Galland's face. "Glided to the east, sir? If my plane were shot up ..."

"Now then, Herr Galland," Goering fulminated, trying to put an end to the debate, "I officially assert that the American fighter planes did not reach Aachen."

The General ventured a last statement: "But, sir, they were there!"

At this point Goering's self-control gave way. "I herewith give you an official order that they weren't there! Do you understand? The American fighters were not there! Get that! I intend to report that to the Fuehrer. "

Goering simply let General Galland stand there. But as he stalked off he turned once more and called out threateningly: "You have my official order!"

With an unforgettable smile the General replied: "Orders are orders, sir!"

Page 291

The departure from reality, which was visibly spreading like a contagion, was no peculiarity of the National Socialist regime. But in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there was no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over. No external factors disturbed the uniformity of the hundreds of unchanging faces, all mine.

Page 312

You will please take note of this: The manner in which the various districts [Gaue] have hitherto obstructed the shutdown of consumer goods production can and will no longer be tolerated. Henceforth, if the districts do not respond to my requests within two weeks I shall myself order the shutdowns. And I can assure that I am prepared to apply the authority of the Reich government at any cost! I have spoken with Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler, and from now on I shall deal firmly with the districts that do not carry out these measures.

Page 339

So far as I recollect, this was the first time that the specter of "scorched earth" loomed before me. For Rohland went on to speak of the fear that a desperate top leadership might order wholesale destruction. Then and there, on that day, I felt something stirring within me that was quite apart from Hitler: a sense of responsibility toward the country and the people to save as much as possible of our industrial potential, so that the nation could survive the period after a lost war. But for the present it was still a vague and shadowy sense.

Page 342

When I analyzed the complex of motives which so surprisingly led me back to this intimate circle, I realized that the desire to retain the position of power I had achieved was unquestionably a major factor. Even though I was only shining in the reflected light of Hitler's power - and I don't think I ever deceived myself on that score - I still found it worth striving for. I wanted, as part of his following, to gather some of his popularity, his glory, his greatness, around myself. Up to 1942, I still felt that my vocation as an architected allowed me a measure of pride that was independent of Hitler. But since then I had been bribed and intoxicated by the desire to wield pure power, to assign people to this and that, to say the final word on important questions, to deal with expenditures in the billions. I thought I was prepared to resign, but I would have sorely missed the heady stimulus that comes wither leadership. The deep misgivings I had been having lately were, moreover, put to rout by the appeal from the industrialists, as well as by Hitler's magnetic power, which he could still radiate with virtually undiminished force. To be sure, our relationship had developed a crack; my loyalty had become shaky, and I sensed that it would never again be what it had been. But for the resent I was back in Hitler's circle - and content.

Page 375

I realize that the sight of suffering people influenced only my emotions, but not my conduct. On the plane of feelings only sentimentality emerged; in the realm of decisions, on the other hand, I continued to be ruled by the principles of utility. In the nuremberg Trial the indictment against me was based on the use of prisoners in the armaments factories.

...

For in either case I was moving within the system. What disturbs me more is that I failed to read the physiognomy of the regime mirrored in the faces of those prisoners - the regime whose existence I was so obsessively trying to prolong during those weeks and months. I did not see any moral ground outside the system where I should have taken my stand. And sometimes I ask myself who this young man really was, this young man who has now become so alien to me, who walked through the workshops of the Linz steelworks or descended into the caverns of the Central Works twenty-five years ago.

Page 375/376

This time, sitting in the green leather easy chair in my office, he seemed confused and spoke falteringly, with man breaks. He advised me never to accept an invitation to inspect a concentration campe in Upper Silesia. Never, under any circumstances. He had seen something there which he was not permitted to describe and moreover could not describe.

I did not query him, I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler, I did not speak with personal friends. I did not investigate - for I did not want to know what was happening there. Hanke must have been speaking of Auschwitz. During those few seconds, while Hanke was warning me, the whole responsibility had become a reality again. Those seconds were uppermost in my mind when I stated to the international court at the Nuremberg Trial that as an important member of the leadership of the Reich, I had to share the total responsibility for all that had happened. For from that moment on, I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes. This deliberate blindness outweighs whatever good I may have done or tried to do in the last period of the war. Those activities shrink to nothing in the face of it. Because I failed at that time, I still feel, to this day, responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense.

Page 411

During the closing months of the war a growing band of desperate people began pinning their hopes on the astrological sheets. Since these were dependent on the Propaganda Ministry, for a variety of reasons they were, as I learned from Fritzsche at Nuremberg, used as a tool for influencing public opinion. Fake horoscopes spoke of valleys of darkness which had to be passed through, foretold imminent surprises, intimated happy outcomes. Only in the astrological sheets did the regime still have a future.

Page 440

I was relieved when I at last sat at the wheel of my car in the fresh night air, Hitler's chauffeur at my side and Lieutenant Colonel von Poser, my liaison officer to the General Staff, on the rear seat. Kemptka had agreed that we would take turns driving. By this time it was about half past one in the morning, and speed was of the essence if we were to cover the three hundred odd miles of autobahn to the headquarters of the Command in Chief, West, near Nauheim, before daybreak - for then the enemy hedgehopping fighters appeared. We had the radio tuned to the broadcaster for the night fighters and kept the grid map on our knees: "Night fighters in grid Number - ... Sever Mosquitoes in grid - ... Night fighters in grid ..." This way we knew exactly where the enemy was. If a formation were approaching us, we would switch to our parking lights and feel our way slowly along the edge of the road. As soon as our square on the grid map was free of the enemy, we switched to high beam and fog lights, turned on the big jacklight, and with our supercharger howling, roared down the autobahn. By morning we were still on the road, but low-lying clouds had brought air activity to a standstill. At headquarters, I first of all lay down for a few hours sleep.

Page 489

Two weeks later, staggered by the revelations of the crimes in the concentration camps, I wrote to the chairman of the ministerial cabinet, Schwerin-Krosigk: "The previous leadership of the German nation bears a collective guilt for the fate that now hangs over the German people. Each member of that leadership must personally assume his responsibility in such a way that the guilt which might otherwise descend upon the German people is expiated. "

With that, there began a segment of my life which has not ended to this day.

Page 500

... General Anderson paid me the most curious and flattering compliment of my career: "Had I known what this man was achieving, I would have sent out the entire American Eighth Air Force merely to put him underground." That air force had at its disposal more than two thousand heavy daylight bombers. It was luck General Anderson found out too late.

...

Early in the morning two days later my adjutant came rushing into my bedroom. The British had surrounded Glucksburg. A sergeant entered my room and announced that I was prisoner. He unbuckled his belt with its pistol, laid it casually on my table, and left the room to give me an opportunity to pack my things.

...

Page 520/521

Hitler's dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship which employed to perfection the instruments of technology to dominate its own people ... By means of such instruments of technology as the radio and public-address systems, eighty million persons could be made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone, teletype, and radio made it possible to transmit the commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest organs where because of their high authority they were executed uncritically. Thus many offices and squads received their evil commands in this direct manner. The instruments of technology made it possible to maintain a close watch over all citizens and to keep criminal operations shrouded in a high degree of secrecy. To the outsider this state apparatus may look like the seemingly wild tangle of cables in a telephone exchange; but like such an exchange it could be directed by a single will. Dictatorships of the past needed assistants of high quality in the lower ranks of the leadership also - men who could think and act independently. The authoritarian system in the age of technology can do without such men. The means of communication alone enable it to mechanize the work of the lower leadership. Thus the type of uncritical receiver of orders is created.

Page 523

Today, a quater of a century after these events, it is not only specific faults that burden my conscience, great as these may have been. My moral failure is not a matter of this item and that; it resides in my active association with the whole course of events. I had participated in a war which, as we of the intimate circle should never have doubted, was aimed at world dominion. What is more, by my abilities and my energies I had prolonged that war by many months. I had assented to having the globe of the world crown that domed hall which was to be the symbol of new Berlin. Nor was it only symbolically that Hitler dreamed of possessing the globe. It was part of his dream to subjugate the other nations. France, I had heard him say many times, was to be reduced to the status of a small nation. Belgium, Holland, even Burgundy, wer to be incorporated into his Reich. The national life of the Poles and the Soviet Russians was to be extinguished; they were to be made into helot peoples. Nor, for one who wanted to listen, had Hitler ever concealed his intention to exterminated the Jewish people. In his speech of January 30, 1939, he openly stated as much. Although I never actually agreed with Hitler on these questions, I had nevertheless designed the buildings and produced the weapons which served his ends.

Page 524

"The catastrophe of this war," I wrote in my cell in 1947, "has proved the sensitivity of the system of modern civilization evolved in the course of centuries. Now we know that we do not live in an earthquake-proof structure. The build-up of negative impulses, each reinforcing the other, can inexorably shake to pieces the complicated apparatus of the modern world. There is no halting this process by will alone. The danger is that the automatism of progress will depersonalize man further and withdraw more and moe of his self-responsibility."

Dazzled by the possibilities of technology, I devoted crucial years of my life to serving it. But in the end my feelings about it are highly skeptical.

Dee Hock on Governance & Tyranny

I've been reading a lot about chaordic systems and chaordic organizations. Here is an excellent excerpt on governance:

True governance is based on understanding that even simple societies are far too complex to expect agreement in the particular. Systems of self-governance, in the individual and at every scale beyond, are based on understanding that ordinances, orders, and enforcement deal with an absence of true governance. They are an attempt to compel the kind of behavior that organizations fail to educe. Ordinances, orders, and enforcement are simply different words for control, command, and tyranny. Force is the ultimate tool of tyranny. Those who rise in a tyrannical world are those least capable of self-governance, whether of themselves, or inducement of it in others, else they would not engage in tyranny. When they rise, it is axiomatic that self-governance will decline and government will gradually be for the benefit of the few and the subjugation of the many. It will inexorably become destructive. Ultimately, there will be no limit to that destruction, for there appears to be no limit to the ability of science and the rational mind to create devices to alter or destroy all life forms and all aspects of the physical world.

Quote from Page 67 in One From Many, Visa and the Rise of Chaordic Organization, by Dee Hock