The Cuban Compromise

From my new VDARE.com column:

The Cuban Compromise—A Sustainable Model for The Jewish Lobby

By Steve Sailer

Two quotable quotes:

"The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel."

Joe Klein, Time, June 24, 2008

"Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. … Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite [foreign nation] are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."

—George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

(Links helpfully added by VDARE.COM).

As survivors of one of the great historical crimes of the mid-20th Century, this American ethnic group has gained a veto power over American foreign policy toward their historical homeland—with seriously detrimental impact on America's reputation in that important part of the world.

Moreover, out of concern for their co-ethnics abroad, they have obtained strong influence over America's immigration and refugee policy.

I'm talking, of course, about … Cuban-Americans!

Who'd you think I was talking about?

The best thing about Cuban political power in America is that you're free to talk about it. (Well, at least outside of Miami.) Heck, Cubans want you to talk about how much clout they have. It makes them seem stronger than they may actually be.

Moreover, they are upfront about their motivations. If you say, "You want to extend the trade embargo on Cuba because Fidel stole your grandfather's sugar plantation," they'll reply, "Well, duh."

Do Cuban-Americans display "dual loyalty?"

Well, first, let's toss in all the caveats about the diversity within any ethnic group.

That said, the answer is, more or less: Sure.

(Cuban-Americans are seldom loyal to the present government of Cuba, of course. Instead, they tend to be loyal to their vision of the future government of Cuba.)

Is this pattern of Cubans promoting Cuban ethnic interests through our political system good for America as a whole? Probably not. But it has been so narrowly focused that it hasn't been a disaster for the country.

American policy toward Cuba has been knuckleheaded, but less so than Castro's policy toward Cuba. Only this year, for example, Fidel's brother Raul finally allowed microwave ovens to be sold in Cuba—three decades after they went on sale in the free world!

The relevant point: any single foreign country, even one as nearby as Cuba, isn't all that important to America's national interest.

What is important is that our political and intellectual life not be sapped by a single ethnic group's determination to promote its interests at any cost. The Cuban-Americans have played by the rules, at least on the national stage (as opposed to in Miami, where they've intimidated local critics). They've won on the trade embargo through reasonably open and transparent activism because they just care more about it than anybody else does.

Most importantly, Cubans don't inflict on the national debate their intellectual paranoia about slippery slopes. Lenin said: "He who says A, must say B." By this logic, nobody can be allowed to say A. Fortunately, Cubans aren't obsessive or powerful enough to impose this kind of reasoning on the rest of the country.

For example, you can write "The subprime mortgage meltdown shows the need for more government regulation of the financial industry," without fear of being shouted out of the Main Stream Media by all the Cubans in important positions in the business who worry that if anybody is allowed to say that in public, it will inevitably lead to the government expropriating the sugar plantations and banning the sale of microwave ovens.

Perhaps some anti-Castro Cubans would like to ban all criticism, no matter how tangential. But they don't have the mojo to impose their taboos on the rest of American society.

Similarly, on immigration, Cuban-American political muscle has mostly been exerted to get special treatment for Cubans, rather than to open our borders in general.

[More]

By the way, if you want to be able to keep reading articles on VDARE.com like this that you can't many other places, please help VDARE's summer fundraising drive.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

VDARE.com's Unique Selling Proposition restored!

The boys over at Slate.com are busy engaging in Maoist-style self-criticism, leaving VDARE.com as the only professional publication that writes abundantly and honestly about IQ.

From today's New York Times:

I.Q. Debate Adds a Chapter Online

By PATRICIA COHEN

Ever since the Nobel prize winner James D. Watson asserted six weeks ago that Africans have innately lower intelligence, fervid debates about race, genes and I.Q. have sprung up on the Web, in publications and in conference rooms.

But in recent days, along with long-simmering arguments over evidence, have come others about whether the topic is even worth studying, or whether it can be discussed openly without spurring charges of racism…

The risk of giving ammunition to racists or undercutting principles of equality hovers over such conversations like an uninvited dinner guest. That unwelcome visitor has been loitering at the online magazine Slate since last week, when it ran a three-part series arguing that hard science is showing that blacks’ I.Q. scores are lower than those of whites — and whites’ scores are lower than those of Asians — because of genetically based differences in intelligence.

Appearing on a site with a liberal bent and written by its generally liberal science and technology columnist, William Saletan, the articles drew particular attention — and particular scorn. “William Saletan and the Editors of Slate Demonstrate That They Are Not Members of the Genetic Elite” was the headline on the Web site of the economist Brad DeLong (delong.typepad.com). On his popular political Web site, talkingpointsmemo.com, Joshua Micah Marshall referred to it as “Will Saletan’s nauseating foray into black genetic ‘pseudo-science.’” …

On Wednesday, Mr. Saletan posted a fourth article labeled “Regrets,” confessing that he had not realized that J. Philippe Rushton, a researcher on whom he had heavily relied, is the president of an organization that has financed a segregationist group. He also amended his previous position, stating that it was too early to come to any firm conclusions about the causes of racial differences in intelligence.

“If I had to do it again, I would have been much more circumspect about judging” the evidence, Mr. Saletan said in an interview. He later added that he should have written about inequality and left race completely out of it.

Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, said that since Mr. Saletan is a senior writer, his posts went up without anyone there reading them. “Given the sensitivity of the subject, Will’s commentary should have been carefully edited in advance of publication, and it wasn’t,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Mr. Weisberg said he was disturbed by the casual “what if” thought experiment and some of the sources Mr. Saletan cited. “I wouldn’t have stopped Will from writing on this subject, but I would have challenged him on these and other issues,” he wrote.

He added that a rejoinder by another Slate writer, Stephen Metcalf, was scheduled to be posted Monday.

Metcalf, by the way, is a complete ignoramus on the topic, as I pointed out after reading his 2005 Slate article, "Moral Courage: Is defending The Bell Curve an example of intellectual honesty?"

Metcalf's denunciation of Charles Murray's Commentary magazine article "The Inequality Taboo" was full of howlers such as:

"Before I casually took up the cause of the race realists and assumed that only an overprogrammed PC hysteria had kept their work from gaining widespread legitimacy, I'd want to know a couple of things. I'd want to know why "the data" are always so selective and incomplete, if not hidden or misrepresented, and I'd want to know a whole lot more about the movement's two leading lights, J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. Rushton and Jensen came to my attention when Murray fingered them, along with Lawrence Summers, as the impetus for his new Commentary article."

Slate is paying Metcalf to write about the validity of IQ research, and yet Metcalf admits that he had never heard of Arthur Jensen until a few weeks ago! Jensen, who has published 435 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals, became a national figure in 1969 with the publication of his long meta-analysis "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" in the Harvard Educational Review. President Nixon even assigned his top domestic policy advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to keep him updated on Jensen's research.

You really have to read this article to believe the quality of screeds that can get published these days.

Metcalf's only qualification to write about this topic is that he's named "Steve."

Back to today's NYT:

Mr. Saletan said he was completely unprepared for the voluminous and vehement reaction. “I did not mean to start a wildfire.”

A subject as sensitive and complicated as this deserves to have a higher level of proof, he said, adding that he erred in treating it like any other topic.

“I don’t agree that it’s best not to discuss it,” he said, but “you have to do it in a responsible way and always with a constructive purpose.” Judging from his own experience, he said, the Internet is not a place where that can be done at the moment.

“I’m a little disappointed in myself,” he added.

So, the enemies of free speech win again, due to the cowardice of people with nice jobs who want to keep them.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The downfall of science in Italy

I was wondering what impact Galileo's conviction had on science in Italy, so I took a look at the database Charles Murray sent me of the 4002 eminent artists and scientists he compiled from leading reference books for his 2003 book Human Accomplishment.

From 1000 AD to Galileo's conviction in 1632, Italy furnished 34.7% of the world's scientific eminence. From then up through 1950, it only accounted for 3.46%. Now that's what I call an order of magnitude!

Italian contributions to science (measured at the scientist's 40th birthday) continued on fairly strong for the rest of the 17th Century, so the Galileo trial impact wasn't immediate. Of course, the 17th Century was like Andy Warhol's factory -- everybody was a genius! (Except, in the 17th Century there really were geniuses throughout Europe). But, in Italy slowly things sloooowed down, as they sped up elsewhere.

We're not used to things getting more boring and unproductive, but it has been a common tendency throughout history, and one we may get familiar with again.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Watson dumped permanently from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Expect a new round of gloating and putting the boot in:

Controversial DNA scientist retires

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer1 hour, 52 minutes ago

James Watson, famous for DNA research but widely condemned for recent comments about intelligence levels among blacks, retired Thursday from his post at a prestigious research institution.

Watson, 79, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York announced his departure a week after the lab suspended him. He was chancellor of the institution, and his retirement took effect immediately.

Watson shared a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for co-discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. He is one of America's most prominent scientists.

In his statement Thursday, Watson said that because of his age, his retirement was "more than overdue. The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired."

Watson, who has a long history of making provocative statements, ran into trouble last week for remarks he made in the Sunday Times Magazine of London. A profile quoted him as saying that he's "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really."

He said that while he hopes everyone is equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true." He also said people should not be discriminated against because of their color, adding that "there are many people of color who are very talented."

Watson later apologized. But by then, London's Science Museum had canceled a sold-out lecture Watson was to give there, and London's mayor had branded the comments "racist propaganda."

In the United States, the Federation of American Scientists said Watson was promoting "personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science." And the Cold Spring Harbor lab said its board and administration "vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments."

The lab suspended Watson's administrative duties last Thursday.

Watson had served at the lab for nearly 40 years, having been named director in 1968. He was its president from 1994 to 2003.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Gotcha!

Yet another famous figure, Presidential candidate Joe Biden, is caught being momentarily not oblivious to the obvious:

Biden Stumbles in Interview

In an interview with The Washington Post's editorial board, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) ... stumbled through a discourse on race and education, leaving the impression that he believes one reason that so many District of Columbia schools fail is the city's high minority population. His campaign quickly issued a statement saying he meant to indicate that the disadvantages were based on economic status, not race.

After a lengthy critique of Bush administration education policies, Biden attempted to explain why some schools perform better than others -- in Iowa, for instance, compared with the District. "There's less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with," Biden said. He went on to discuss the importance of parental involvement in reading to children and how "half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom."

The Biden campaign moved quickly to clarify the senator's remarks in a statement: "This was not a race-based distinction, but a discussion of the problems kids face who don't have the same socio-economic support system (and all that implies -- nutrition, pre K, etc.) entering grade school and the impact of those disadvantages on outcomes."

Obviously, nutrition is crucially important in the difference. Since all the Washington D.C. schoolkids grow up to be short and scrawny from lack of nutrition, that's why Georgetown U. has always been so bad at basketball, compared to the mighty U. of Iowa basketball team with its starting line up of corn-fed farmboys.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The League of Extremely Rich Donors for Free Speech"

One of the depressing things about the James Watson Witch Hunt is the enthusiasm with which so many people signed up to be voluntary auxiliaries for the Thought Police, how many people who imagine themselves to be freethinking nonconformists positively reveled in their chance to put the boot in when they found a great man down.

As far as I can tell at this point, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees are going to get away with their shameful suspension of the man who rebuilt their institution over the last 39 years.

What can be done for the future?

Money talks. What the world needs is an organization of major donors to academic and scientific institutions who have publicly pledged themselves to defend free speech and scientific inquiry by punishing institutions who punish heretics like Watson.

In 2006, billionaire Larry Ellison of Oracle withdrew his pledged gift of $115 million to Harvard after it forced out Larry Summers. But that was just 1/300th of Harvard's endowment, so even Ellison had little impact by himself. Some rich guys need to get together and throw their weight around.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who will defend James Watson?

I'm wondering which heavyweights will step up up to defend James Watson? Below is a list of big names who might have the courage to do it. I don't have time to Google them, but any commenters can feel free to paste in any statements about Watson by the following luminaries, and give them a grade. The rubric is:

+2 points for noting that what Watson said is not scientifically improbable

+2 for saying that, as Watson says, we'll soon know pretty much for sure, so we should get ready for whatever the results are

+1 points for defending free speech and open scientific inquiry

+ 1 for defending IQ testing

+ 1 for defending the existence of race

- 1 for saying race doesn't exist

- 1 for attacking the validity of IQ testing

- 1 for general weaseliness

- 2 for distorting or denying the testing results

- 3 for commending Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for punishing Watson

So, here are some big names from which positive scores are at least possible:

Edward O. Wilson
Steven Pinker
Thomas Sowell
Richard Posner
Richard Dawkins
Larry Summers
Charles Murray
James Q. Wilson
Jared Diamond (a loooong shot, but this would be his last chance to redeem his reputation in the eyes of history)

Anybody else you can think of?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James Watson -- my new VDARE.com column

Here's my new essay on James D. Watson.

I want to apologize to Dr. Watson for earlier accepting the media spin that he had completely capitulated. As my VDARE.com column says:

When Watson's own feet were held to the fire last week, however, he offered a semi-apology/semi-defense. This has been almost universally assumed to be a "complete retraction"—to quote a representatively obtuse article, The Mortification of James Watson. [Time Magazine, By Laura Blue, October 19, 2007]

But it’s not. As the headline of Watson’s response on Friday, October 19 in the UK Independent shows—"To question genetic intelligence is not racism"—his actual stance is closer to Galileo's, who is said to have muttered E pur si muove ("and yet it does move") after the Inquisition forced him to recant in public his heretical belief that the earth went around the sun.

Watson wrote on Friday:

"This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."

Watson didn't specify who the great musicians tend to be—as opposed to the great engineers. But you can fill in the blanks. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Watson suspended from job for crimethink

A press release:

Statement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees and President Bruce Stillman, Ph.D. Regarding Dr. Watson’s Comments in The Sunday Times on October 14, 2007

Earlier this evening, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees decided to suspend the administrative responsibilities of Chancellor James D. Watson, Ph.D., pending further deliberation by the Board.

This action follows the Board’s public statement yesterday disagreeing with the comments attributed to Dr. Watson in the October 14, 2007 edition of The Sunday Times U.K.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James D. Watson pleads temporary insanity

From The Daily Mail:

Yesterday, Dr Watson issued an apology.

"Science is no stranger to controversy and I am not one to shy away from tackling issues, however, difficult they might prove to be," he said.

"I have had my share of controversy, as many of you know. But I am mortified about what has happened.

"More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have.

"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly.

"That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief. "

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

James D. Watson being investigated for crimethink

From The Independent in the UK

Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer

Fury at James Watson's theory: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really"

By Cahal Milmo

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks "in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so." ...

Dr Watson arrives in Britain today for a speaking tour to publicise his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Among his first engagements is a speech to an audience at the Science Museum organised by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the history of scientific racism.

Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views across the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: "It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson's personal prejudices.

"These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels." ...

Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More proof that David Brooks was right about IQ being passe

David Brooks's recent NY Times op-ed on how IQ is passe was supported by a new development over the weekend.

You may vaguely recall that back in 2005, the President of Harvard, Larry Summers, the former Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary, made some uncontroversial remarks about how, although men and women have the same mean IQ, the male bell curves are fatter in the tails, which has implications for elite faculty gender balance. His speech was greeted with yawns since everybody in the public sphere in America had long before internalized all the implications of psychometric research, as symbolized by the 2001 appointment of the pseudonymous statistician La Griffe du Lion as Secretary of Education.

Now, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Lawrence Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, has been replaced as the planned speaker at a UC Board of Regents dinner next week after complaints from faculty members.

"(UC Regents) Chairman Richard Blum and Dr. Summers talked last Thursday and agreed that the regents would have a different speaker," Trey Davis, director of special projects for the UC system, said Saturday.

Davis was unable to say whether a protest letter signed by more than 300 people from the university system had any effect on the decision to find a different speaker for the regents' dinner in Sacramento on Wednesday. He referred those questions to Blum, who is out of the country.

Summers, who was Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, resigned from Harvard last year after a long-running clash with some faculty members over his questioning whether women might not have the same innate ability as men in disciplines such as science, math and engineering. He also had thorny relations with minority faculty members during his time at the university.

While Summers later apologized for his remarks, which he said were misinterpreted, it didn't slow the criticism, which continues to this day.

"I was appalled and stunned that someone like Summers would even be invited to speak to the regents," said UC Davis Professor Maureen Stanton, who helped put together the petition drive. "I think many of us who were involved in the protest believed that it wouldn't reflect well on the university that he even received the invitation."

The petition called Summers' invitation "not only misguided but inappropriate" at a time when the university is working to diversify its community.

"Inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the University community and to the people of California," the petition said.

The decision to dump Summers as the speaker at the dinner was abrupt. His name was on the dinner invitation that went out Aug. 31, along with other information about the three-day meeting at UC Davis, Davis said.

"The dinner is an informal, social occasion, with more of a conversation with the speaker than a formal talk," he added. Blum, who is the husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, made the original decision to invite Summers.

Susan Kennedy, chief of staff for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, will replace Summers as speaker at the dinner.

While delighted that the regents have decided to replace Summers, Stanton now hopes the dispute will be quickly forgotten.

"Frankly, we'd like to see the story just die at this point," she said.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Immigration Inanity, Cont.

Here's another excerpt from my new American Conservative article (not online yet) on why elite thinking about immigration is so vapid:

- It is unfashionable to admit publicly the existence of group statistical differences. The endless campaign in American society against stereotypes has reached the point that simple acts of pattern recognition are in disrepute and demand reflexive debunking by citation of whatever contrary example is available. "Any exception disproves the tendency" appears to be the rule.

- The media's dislike of reporting on averages is exacerbated by its love for man-bites-dog stories. The illegal immigrant who graduates from Cal Tech is news because it's new: it doesn't happen very often. In contrast, the consistently dismal performance of Latino students on average -- by twelfth grade, immigrants are five to six grade levels behind Anglo whites, while even American-born Hispanics trail by three to four grade levels -- isn't news because it's boring and depressing.

- Among the privileged, if a tree falls in the forest but it's not reported in the New York Times, it never happened. For example, the best estimate is that the Latino crime rate is roughly triple the Anglo white rate, which would not come as much of a surprise to anybody who doesn't live in a cave. Yet, because the major media won't note differences in mean crime rates by ethnicity, this fact is considered outside the limits of acceptable discussion of immigration. ...

- That the chief supporters of "comprehensive immigration reformer" -- the White House, corporate America, Democratic Party chieftains, the Catholic Church, race racketeers (such as the National Council of La Raza), the educartel, and big media -- represent more or less what a Sixties radical would have decried as The Establishment does not raise doubts in the minds of contemporary wordsmiths. God may not always be on the side of the big battalions, but public intellectuals are these days. ...

- Open borders enthusiasm often reflects covert hostility toward African-Americans. Hispanic illegal immigrants are slowly pushing African Americans out of the most expensive cities, such as New York, which has been losing American-born blacks since 1979. And, let's be frank, many affluent whites are happy to see African-Americans go. The Latino influx can create a temporary dip in the crime rate. Illegal immigrants generally arrive at too mature an age to get involved in youth street gangs -- but their sons, who grow up feeling territorial about their means streets, flock to gangs. ...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The origin of Rice's and Rumsfeld's "Werewolves" theory: Back in August 2003, National Security Advisor Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that we shouldn't worry about armed guerilla resistance in Iraq, because we had to deal with the same thing in Germany in 1945-47, and look how well that turned out. Condi told the VFW:

There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in post-War Germany and see only the successes. But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers -- called "werewolves" -- engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them -- much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.

And Rummy elaborated:

One group of those dead-enders was known as "werewolves." They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?

Well, the Aachen assassination took place more than a month before the German surrender, so it doesn't count. Otherwise, remarkably little happened after VE day. A bomb went off in Hamburg after the war was over, but it might have been one of the gazillion bombs the British and American air forces dropped on that city. And there were a few killings, but sex conflicts were a likely cause for a good number of them.

(There might have been more anti-American violence, but the Germans were grateful that we weren't raping and ethnic cleansing them, like the Russians were doing in Eastern Europe, with the post-VE Day German death total being two million or maybe higher.)

So, where did the speechwriters of the Bush Administration luminaries come up with this idea? Apparently, they misread a lame pro-war fictitious satire written on July 28, 2003 by Rand Simberg as being real! Simberg blogged:

Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire
August 12, 1945

WASHINGTON DC (Routers) President Truman, just a few months into his young presidency, is coming under increasing fire from some Congressional Republicans for what appears to be a deteriorating security situation in occupied Germany, with some calling for his removal from office.

Over three months after a formal declaration of an end to hostilities, the occupation is bogged down. Fanatical elements of the former Nazi regime who, in their zeal to liberate their nation from the foreign occupiers, call themselves members of the Werwolf (werewolves) continue to commit almost-daily acts of sabotage against Germany's already-ravaged infrastructure, and attack American troops. They have been laying road mines, poisoning food and water supplies, and setting various traps, often lethal, for the occupying forces ...

For many, marching in the streets with signs of "No Blood For Soviet Socialism," and "It's All About The Coal," this merely confirmed that the administration had other agendas than its stated one, and that the war was unjustified and unjustifiable.

It was then published by FoxNews.com on July 30, 2003.

Simberg later wrote:

To indicate clearly that it was satire, I attributed it, as usual, to the mythical WW II news agency, "Routers," and I incorporated my own 2003 copyright at the bottom. Subsequently, it was picked up by emailers, the copyright was stripped, "Routers" was misspelled to correspond to a more familiar (and actual) wire service, and it quickly found its way across cyberspace.

We don't know for sure that this influenced Rice and Rumsfeld, but it's the likeliest source I've heard of.

Now, Rice is supposed to be an academic expert on the Soviet Union, so the history of Central Europe in 1945-47 shouldn't be such terra incognita to her. (And Rumsfeld, who was born in 1932, is old enough to know better.) So, why were they so credulous (besides, of course, wanting this to be true to make their policy look less disastrous)?

As usual, I see an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities as a source of ignorance among decision-makers. One of the basic generalizations that anybody who looks around at the real world with open eyes quickly comes up with is the reverse correlation between organized violence and disorganized violence. Groups that are competent at organized violence in wartime, such as the Germans and Japanese, tend to be orderly during peacetime. And groups that tend to be anarchic during peacetime also tend to be incompetent at organized violence during wartime, with the Iraqis being perhaps the most notorious example of this.

There are many exceptions to this, but it's still one of the most obvious patterns in 20th Century history. However, if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as all the most respectable people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer