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Scumbag studies

Scumbag studies: Arajs Kommando Deputy Commander Herberts Cukurs

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Here’s a real prize I hadn’t learned about until recently: Latvian aviator Herberts Cukurs (pronounced “ZU-kurs,” I think–my Latvian is nonexistent). He is a reminder that one can’t carry out efficient monstrosities against other peoples without collaborators.

Cukurs was born in 1900 at Liepaja, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. Easy math: that would have made him just too young for World War I, old enough to see his native Latvia become independent for the first time in recent history. A bright and energetic young man, his primary talents led him to a career designing and piloting aircraft. It’s fair to say he was to Latvian aviation what Lindbergh was to that of the United States.

Latvian independence did not last. In 1939, by which time Cukurs was a little old to be a grunt, the Soviet Union absorbed Latvia without open warfare. Given Soviet treatment of perceived nationalist leaders, before long plenty of Latvians were ready to pay Stalin’s NKVD back in cold coin. While nothing excuses Latvian collaboration with Nazi genocide, there is a difference between excusing an action and seeing it in context. In spite of the Soviet Union’s own persecution of Jews, historic reality is that Jews were slightly over-represented in Communist leadership; considering their treatment under the Tsars, one can understand that. In fact there is zero reason to imagine that Lenin and Stalin would have led any differently even had their governments included no Jewish people at all–but a fair number of Latvians didn’t see it that way. Those opposing the Soviet régime and already motivated toward anti-Semitism might seek reasons to discern an association that Nazi propaganda would inflame with everything in its power. Scapegoating is both awful and effective.

This dynamic explains without excusing a fair number of Western Nazi collaborators’ motivations: Some were religious and saw communism as the ultimate threat to faith. Some had personal reasons to loathe communism. Certainly the conduct of the young Soviet Union with its mass incarcerations, executions, and the brutal starvation its policies inflicted on Ukraine, would be enough to make at least some people see it as the greater evil when Latvia and the other two Baltic states receded behind the day’s Iron Curtain.

Many Latvians despised their new occupiers and would jump into bed with any force that might drive them out. The fact that two Waffen-SS divisions (the 15th and 19th) would later form from Latvian recruits tells us something. That driving-out occurred in fall 1941, when German fire and steel cleared Soviet occupiers from all three Baltic states.

For Latvia, having the Nazis drive out the Russians meant mixed emotions. Many Latvians chose the invaders’ side. Cukurs joined a Latvian auxiliary police unit in German service, the Arajs Kommando, named for its commander. Of roughly battalion strength, Arajs’s men did the Nazis’ dirty work of eradicating Latvian Jewry. Herberts Cukurs was responsible for much of that death, personally or through orders given. He became known as the Hangman of Riga.

As we know, Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union didn’t work out well for Nazi Germany and most of its henchcountries. The Arajs Kommando didn’t stick around, sensibly reasoning that the Soviet Union probably wasn’t going to start coddling turncoats. Its members retreated westward with German forces, Cukurs included. He survived that retreat and the war, and evaded Allied justice long enough to escape to Brazil. There he lived openly, operating a prosperous aviation business.

In 1965 the Mossad, of hunting-down-Adolf-Eichmann fame, came up with a plan to get at Cukurs by luring him to Uruguay on pretext of a business opportunity. It was an ambush–but one that didn’t go so well.

Cukurs was a big, powerful man in good physical condition, and he fought back with everything he had. His fury impressed the Mossad agents, but he eventually lost the battle. They shot him to death, left him in a trunk, and notified the media. Had the original plan been to bring him back to Israel for trial, as with Eichmann? I’m not sure. What I’m sure of is that Cukurs fought back, was subdued and then executed.

There is notable revisionism surrounding Cukurs in Latvia and (mostly) in world Holocaust denial circles. The most common complaint seems to be that he didn’t get a fair trial. Considering the number and percentage of Latvian Jews that died without a fair trial, that argument can cry me a river. Simply collaborating with the Nazis was bad enough, but the deeds of the Arajs Kommando were as bad as those of the Einsatzgruppen. If Cukurs hadn’t wanted to be associated with and complicit in Arajs’s deeds, I doubt he would have become Arajs’s deputy. Herberts Cukurs wasn’t stupid. He didn’t book on out to Brazil because he expected that an Allied trial would acquit him, or because he supposed the Soviets might forgive him.

If you want to know how modern Russian propaganda got the idea to try and paint its former fellow Soviet republics as havens for modern Nazis, here’s the genesis of that. At one time, former Soviet minority citizens had in large numbers embraced the Nazi invaders and did indeed help to carry out Nazi atrocities. Eighty years later, Russian leadership continues to make a meal of that reality, “confirmed” every time an actual far-right movement becomes visible (unless, of course, that far-right movement is working in Russian geopolitical interests). The way all Soviet people suffered at Nazi hands makes all such movements (that are beyond their control, at any rate) naturally concerning to Russia, even when this amounts to projecting. Right now the Russian leadership is making former SSRs’ neo-fascist movements look pretty tame.

As for Cukurs, we might be impressed by his ferocity; as far as feeling badly for him, not me. Had the Allies gotten hold of him he would have hanged. His flight bought him far more security and prosperity than he offered any of the Arajs Kommando’s victims. I’ll save my sorrows for the latter.

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Scumbag studies

Scumbag studies: myths and realities of Nazi society and its war machine

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Kind of the ultimate modern-day scumbag study, no?

When it comes to Nazi Germany, perception and reputation are a fog clouding reality. Here are some realities you might not know, with pro forma apologies for wandering a little afield here and there:

German industry wasn’t very efficient. As a practical reality, it couldn’t be. There were multiple reasons: slave labor, materials shortages, rushed designs that had to be tweaked, and perhaps most importantly…

German industry did not go onto a full war footing until mid-war. Oh, it got a great head start on the Allies, who began re-armament late in the pre-war picture. Doubt that? In 1939 Germany produced 247 tanks and self-propelled guns. That’s all. 1940? 1,643. Ah, but surely a sixfold increase is a big deal? In 1941 they made 3,790. 1942, 6,180; in 1943, 12,063. Another example? Sure. Combat aircraft: 1939, 8,295. 1944, 39,807. One wonders what might have happened had German industry geared up sooner to its full potential.

Germany wanted to take Gibraltar. Why couldn’t they, with Spain friendly enough to rank as a non-belligerent Axis supporter? Because Franco’s Spain, still bleeding from its internal Spanish Civil War wounds, had no intention of getting into the war unless/until victory was certain. At one point, Hitler went so far as to meet Franco along the Franco-Spanish border. Adolf reckoned that the Spanish dictator owed his victory to Germany and would be thankful. First, Franco made long professions of fraternity, gratitude, and sympathy. Then he began a long litany of the equipment Spain would need from German industry, punctuated with frequent expressions of Spanish poverty and suffering. He then pointed out that of course it would be a matter of national pride for Spanish troops to carry out any such assault (one suspects Franco doubted that Hitler would hand Gibraltar over if German troops were once allowed to occupy it). Adolf went home pissed off and frustrated, thinking dark thoughts about ingratitude.

Malta and El Alamein were indeed great sticking points for the Nazi war machine, but most people don’t realize why. Neither do most realize how much the free world owes to the people of Malta and the motley Commonwealth/Allied (British, Free French, Polish, South African, New Zealander, and Australian) forces defending Egypt. Had the Axis captured Malta–and with a determined effort, they might have done so–Allied movement through the Mediterranean would have become a problem, whereas Axis resupply of northern Africa would have become far easier. Everyone has heard of Afrika Korps supreme commander Erwin Rommel and his genius, but not everyone realizes that his biggest problem was running out of everything (fuel in particular). That’s partly because so much of it got sunk on the way across the drink. So imagine Malta were captured, and a renewed Axis force stormed into the Nile delta (fanning the flames of Arab resentment at Allied control, and running off the disliked colonial powers). The Allied position in the eastern Mediterranean would be compromised. The Soviet positions in the Caucasus could have been flanked, perhaps with Turkish entry on the Axis side. Axis forces could have reached the Middle Eastern oilfields. Doesn’t that sound pretty catastrophic? It could have been.

Germany had high hopes for the Irish Republic to remain neutral, but there might be a united Ireland today if Éamon de Valera had answered Churchill’s note. The Republic of Ireland remained neutral during the war, famously denying the UK aero-naval basing access that made Atlantic convoy protection far more difficult.  When the United States entered the Atlantic war, as a former First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill saw the strategic opportunity and sought to pounce. He sent Taoiseach de Valera a simple note: “Now is your chance. Now or never. A nation once again. Am very ready to meet you  at any time.” Dev didn’t answer. Did Churchill really mean that if the Irish joined the Allies immediately, the six Ulster counties of Northern Ireland would be handed over to the Republic? At least one British leader hastened to advise the envoy to Ireland, John Maffey, that Churchill’s intent was metaphorical rather than literal.

I don’t know what exactly would have happened, but one can hardly doubt that was Ireland’s strongest bargaining moment from a risk/reward standpoint. With Americans in the war to defend the Republic, it might have been bombed but it would not have been invaded; the unpalatable concept of British troops on the ground in the Republic would be avoided; it might have done great work against the U-boat menace without its own military firing a single shot; the Allies would have constructed updated facilities the Irish would inherit. All that, potentially, for letting people use some air and naval bases. I lean to the side that Churchill at least meant to dangle Northern Ireland as a negotiable possibility. He gets bad press nowadays, some of it deserved, but he was a visionary who dared to try things, and he knew the Irish well enough. “A nation once again” remains a very loaded phrase even today, and Churchill was not one for idle words. If Hitler had seen that note, he might well have ordered the Republic added to Northern Ireland as a bombing target.

Myths you might believe, and why you shouldn’t:

Pearl Harbor did the United States terrible harm. This one doesn’t relate directly to Germany, but it always needs repeating because its pervasive inaccuracy had a major impact on German warfare and plans. While the deaths and injuries can never be discounted, in the grand scheme of war one could argue that Pearl was a very lucky beginning from a US perspective. Of the weaponry it damaged, the part that would take years to repair or replace (battleships) was mainly obsolete. None of our carriers were present, and the Japanese use of their own carrier strikes told us much about the wave of the future. Then Hitler decided to throw into war against the US, bringing us into that conflict without putting us in the unpleasant position of having to leave the British and Soviets hanging. As painful a memory as Pearl is, it was about like shooting a sow grizzly in the butt with an arrow. The attack didn’t cripple American naval power, but did piss off an industrial powerhouse.

Germany always had the best tanks and planes. For one thing, early versions were often hurried into the field with serious problems; for another, the opposition often had better gear. The Soviet T-34 series might be the best example: a weapon that, for a time, Germany had no tank cannon that could penetrate at any range (and which could outrun every German tank of the war). While the Messerschmitt Bf-109 was a great early war fighter plane, it met its match in the RAF’s Spitfires. The later Focke-Wolf FW-190 more than met its match in the American P-51 Mustang. Ah, but surely the post-D-Day German tanks were far superior to the Sherman M4 series? They had lower profiles and better gunnery, but there are other factors to consider. First, during that time, Allied ground support aircraft had free rein to terrorize all German armor. Second, German crews were generally more experienced and better led, at least until the end of 1944, so they got more out of their vehicles. Third, German vehicles were more prone to trouble. Say this for the Sherman: for its flaws, it was a reliable tank. The engine tended to start and the gun tended to fire. I wouldn’t take it over a Panther–it was slower, higher profile, and earlier models were undergunned–but I’d take a running Sherman over a non-running Panther.

It was an issue even during the potential invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had better tanks than the Germans. Even with the captured Czechoslovak tank models, the French in turn had better (and more) tanks than Germany. In North Africa, Commonwealth/Allied armor was more than a match for the German models. It should have been unsurprising for the Wehrmacht to arrive on Soviet soil and find that Soviet tanks were also better. It must have been refreshing indeed to face the Americans–finally an opponent with inferior armor!

The Nazis were close to developing nuclear-armed missiles. German rocket science was very advanced, leading to the first primitive cruise missiles (V-1) and surface-to-surface missiles (V-2), as well as a rocket interceptor aircraft. Their nuclear science was far less so, partly because nuclear research was very expensive with no known certainty of ultimate success. The Nazi nuke cause certainly took harm from the large number of scientists who did not stay to work for Nazi ends (or would not have survived had they stayed).

The United States ultimately destroyed the German war machine. No, no, no. The Anglo-Americans, assisted by many allies, did great damage to the Luftwaffe–but they never put onto the Western Front anywhere near the ground numbers that the USSR did on the Eastern Front. In fact, the Germans had more divisions tied up watching occupied areas than they had facing the western Allies. The vast majority of the Nazi forces that were not deployed against partisan activity were occupied in a futile effort to hold back the Soviet avalanche. The main reason D-Day wasn’t thrown back into the Channel was that so much of the Wehrmacht was somewhere else, typically fighting Soviets. If you want to give the United States credit for something major that caused the Nazi war machine enormous damage, let it be the thousands of Studebaker trucks we sent to the Soviet Union. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were still driving some of them in the Russian countryside. Every weapon and vehicle we and the British sent them probably saved Allied lives simply by shortening the war.

The Stuka was the deadliest ground support aircraft of the war. No; it was the deadliest of its early-war heyday. Later on, the Soviet Il-2 Sturmovik, US P-47 ground attack configuration, and the British Typhoon were among the more versatile and deadlier strike craft. By that time, the Stukas didn’t have the survivability to risk precious pilots and fuel in the teeth of Allied air dominance.

American strategic bombing devastated Germany’s ability to produce war materiel. This is one of those areas where there are two polarized sides, neither listening the other, and the truth is somewhere in between. First, of course, it wasn’t just American. The British had begun some strategic bombing very early in the war. They hosted much of the US campaign and joined in it with their own significant numbers. We see from the rise in German production over most of the war that it didn’t decline until the full occupation and collapse process began in early 1945. However, that doesn’t mean the campaign wasn’t a massive pain in Albert Speer’s ass. It conveyed to the people of Germany, who had once been promised by their leaders that they would never be bombed, that the end could not be in doubt and it would not be to their liking. It required the deployment of much of the German interceptor force on the home front, burning scarce avgas and taking grave losses. It certainly tied up resources, hampered transportation, and made Speer’s armaments ministries scramble. Did it devastate German war production? The evidence says not, though it didn’t make production easier. Did it wreck the civilian urban economy and chew up scarce resources, wearing down homefront morale? I think the case for that is strong. Might the war have taken longer without it? I don’t think it’s possible to say. In any case, the Soviet onslaught was about to render the whole thing moot.

The SS were an excellent fighting force. In reality they were mixed. Early in the war, and at first recruitment in most cases, they were brave and enthusiastic but somewhat inept.  Experience makes the difference, and the survivors would gain it. Some units were led by fanatics, and some committed atrocities–in some cases making that a higher priority than fighting the armed enemy. The history-glancing public often does not realize that only about a quarter of the Waffen-SS came from metropolitan Greater Germany. Another quarter or so were Volksdeutsche, hailing from the established German-speaking diaspora in territories Hitler conquered; their record was mixed. Another quarter-odd hailed from variably Germanic peoples of northern and western Europe, generally proving effective in combat, and the last quarter came from all over the southern and eastern territories: Italy, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, Yugoslavia, and so forth. This portion ranged from good to awful.

The U-Boats were the deadliest subs of the war. Well, not so much. Germany bet most of its strategic warfare resources on submarine warfare, and it had a strong tradition of sub seamanship. When the Allies couldn’t or wouldn’t protect their shipping properly, the U-Boats went to town–but even then, the torpedoes didn’t always work. Surviving U-Boat skippers, a rather small population greatly respected by our own naval community as worthy opponents, have described the frustration of dud torpedoes. Americans should understand this very well because our own early torpedoes also included a high percentage of duds. Evidently the art of torpedo design is a very sensitive one where most laypeople’s assumptions don’t hold true. Best fish of the war? Arguably the Japanese, who invested great effort in torpedo development.

If our precious History Channel wants to do some good, it can stop leaning into pawn shops and ancient extra-terrestrial theories, and start doing a better job of exploring what people think they know and do not.

Scumbag studies

Scumbag studies: Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube

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It’s high time for another of these, for there are so very many scumbags yet to review. This one you might not have heard about. Wilhelm Kube was from Glogau in Silesia, and was an early adopter of Nazi philosophy. (Interesting bit: he attended college in Berlin on a Moses Mendelssohn Scholarship.) In 1933 he joined the SS as an Oberführer (senior colonel), and soon received promotion to Gruppenführer (major general).

An active Christian–what to make of his devotion, in light of his conduct, is up to the reader–Kube was also a corrupt intriguer. By 1935 he was a Gauleiter (regional Nazi party boss), and managed to get himself investigated by no less than Martin Bormann’s father-in-law on suspicion of adultery and corruption. Based upon his general character, it seems credible that he was guilty as all hell. Guilty or not, he was a bit dense. He retaliated for the resulting reprimand by sending an anonymous letter accusing Bormann of being part Jewish. Oops. The Gestapo discovered that Kube was the author, and he was canned from all positions. He also managed to get crosswise with Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most dangerous Nazi leaders. That got him booted from the SS.

By 1941, Kube was back to work in the Nazi machinery. Hitler planned to make him Nazi boss in Moscow, but the Soviet military did not cooperate. Instead he received  an appointment as Generalkommissar for Belarus (then referred to as Weissruthenien). Here he becomes very difficult to figure; he behaved as if he had a personality disorder. Weird as it sounds given his demonstrated anti-Semitism, he spoke out against massacres of Jews and non-Jews by the Einsatzgruppen (essentially, death battalions). He was loud enough to trigger an in-person ass-chewing from his old pal Heydrich, who flew out to Minsk for the task. And yet he participated in massacres, including one in which SS thugs threw a number of children into a sandy pit to die.

One theory, suggested by Christopher Ailsby, is that Kube was trying to take it easy on the populace with one hand while being mean enough with his other to make the Nazi leadership stay off his back, and that the goal here was to increase his own gain. I consider it possible. Kube does seem to have always been above all about Kube.

After Heydrich said whatever he said–and we may safely assume there were dire threats involved–Kube straightened up and flew wrong. By mid-July 1942, he was directing the atrocities that would earn him the title “Butcher of Belarus.” The Nazi occupation committed numerous well-documented atrocities on his watch, and for them he was therefore responsible. Despite his moments of semi-decency, he deserves his place in scumbag studies. Had he survived the war, it is impossible to imagine him ending any way but at the end of a rope.

Thankfully for history and decency, if he would not restrain himself the Soviet partisan movement was prepared to restrain Kube. A Belarusian woman, Yelena Mazanik, got a job as his maid. On September 21, 1943, Mazanik emplaced a time bomb under Kube’s bed. It detonated early in the morning of September 22, killing Kube and triggering a wave of reprisal murders. Also thankfully, Mazanik managed to escape and continue the war as a partisan. I drafted this during Women’s History Month, making it perfect time to honor her and her closest accomplices. Their names were Nadyezhda Troyan and Maria Osipova, and all three earned the highest honor the Soviet Union could bestow: the title of Heroine of the Soviet Union (in Russian, Geroniya Sovietskovo Soyuza). Mazanik passed away in 1996, Troyan in 2011, and Osipova in 1999.

Scumbag studies

Scumbag studies: Reichsleiter Martin Bormann

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Hardly anyone in Germany knew his name, but everyone near the top feared, respected, and/or hated him in varying mixtures. He was Hitler’s secretary, head of the Nazi Party chancellery, and so much the political tapeworm that he has become a slang term in my own world.

Of middle-class stock, Bormann served in the German military during the last days of World War I without seeing action. In the 1920s he joined the paramilitary Freikorps, then the Nazi Party. His work ethic and organizational skills had few equals, but Bormann did not attain a position of importance until the Nazi takeover in 1933. He became chief of staff to Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, a muddled man whose disinterest and disorientation cried out for a functional assistant. It interests me because I have seen this phenomenon over and over: a weak or distracted leader gets that one employee or volunteer who makes all the troubles go away, and comes to depend on that person in all things.

Of course, Hess flew to the United Kingdom in 1941 in a controversial attempt to make peace. (Let’s here and now dismiss the conspiracy theories about him dying in captivity and replaced by a double. In the first place, the supposed double would have had to fool not only the senior Nazis locked up with Hess in Spandau, but Hess’s own wife and son. I think not. In the second, who a) happens to be a dead ringer for the odd-looking Hess, and b) signs on to spend his life in jail? That’s a nope.) With Hess’s departure, Bormann became the head of the Party Chancellery–the effective head of the Nazi Party’s day-to-day workings.

People rarely think about this, but Germany had several competing organizations running its affairs. While the National Socialist German Workers’ Party had no rival parties, its organization was not exactly synonymous with the government. Neither was the SS in its varying branches and functions. To get a good sense of how Nazi Germany worked, one should understand that Adolf Hitler always had his subordinates and their organizations competing with one another. Bormann’s power emanated from the fact that he was one of the only people who had daily personal contact with Hitler. This meant that a word from him had the power to bind and to loose. A tenacious, ruthless political infighter, he naturally used this power to strengthen his own authority, reward those who cooperated, and marginalize or destroy those who did not.

He was certainly complicit in the Holocaust because he was complicit in just about every action by the Nazi-led German state from 1933 to 1945. The most loyal of Nazis, he was expecting to retain some form of power even as he sought to escape the Soviet Union’s Berlin encirclement.

What kind of a person was Bormann? To some degree he was a living German caricature, the sort that a bad parody writer (and a committed Germanophobe) might devise. He was at your throat or at your feet, sullen in defeat and unbearable in victory, to borrow phrases from writers past. A tireless worker loyal to the chain of command–there being only one link above him–his meticulous ability to organize and maneuver could move mountains. An obsequious toady to Hitler and a bellowing tyrant to his staff, he loved his wife but made a habit of cheating on her. Bull-necked, squat, thick around the middle, and unpromising in appearance, his only serious limiter was the lack of any public speaking ability.

While there are always those seeking answers in conspiracy, in this case there isn’t much room for a reasonable person to believe that Martin Bormann survived World War II. He died on May 2, 1945, six days before the Third Reich surrendered to the Allies, probably from poison to avoid imminent capture. Forensics (1973) and eventually DNA testing (1998) leave no room for doubt.

In addition to his legacy of complicity in one of the most evil regimes of the modern day, Martin Bormann left me the perfect term for the political infighter, the tapeworm in the body politic, the ass-kisser who slithers into a position of great power. I saw Bormanns (Bormenn?) in most offices I worked in, and have seen them in several of my wife’s past employments. I have seen female and male Bormanns, ugly and attractive, thick and thin, smart and dumb (but with powerful animal cunning).

Any time there is a leader who punishes those who tell him or her what s/he needs but does not wish to hear, a Bormann scents opportunity and enters the body politic through the contaminated nourishment of zealous volunteerism and fawning humility. Once established, everything that passes through the body politic must pass the Bormann. After s/he destroys enough challengers, the rest learn not to provoke the tapeworm whose choice to bite in just the right spot can be fatal to a career.

Bormanns thrive in non-profits and for-profits alike, in government and business, even in social clubs.

If you can remember any Bormanns from your own experience, feel free to tell stories about them.

Scumbag studies

Scumbag studies: Waffen-Brigadeführer der SS Bronislav Kaminski

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When one sets out to find the worst unit attached to the Waffen-SS during World War II, it usually comes down to Dirlewanger’s or Kaminski’s. As evil as were the units that culminated in the 36th Waffen-Grenadier Division der SS “Dirlewanger,” there were at least moments where portions of those units delivered some credible military competency.

Not so the Kaminski Brigade, a.k.a. SS-Sturmbrigade RONA (stood for Russian National Liberation Army in Latin-transliterated Russian; in Cyrillic it looked like POHA). It had little function but atrocity, few tactics save thievery and murder, no use but evil. In that, it was a reflection of its founder.

Of Polish and German descent, Kaminski had done time in the USSR’s infamous gulags during Stalin’s paranoid 1930s. Seems he had been a vocal critic of farm collectivization, which–fair’s fair–was a disastrous policy. In this case, Stalin made an enemy that would have terrible consequences for his own people; not that Stalin was notorious for empathy. When the German Army took over the Bryansk area where Kaminski lived, he signed up with the local German collaborationist anti-partisan unit. When partisans killed its commander, Kaminski stepped in.

Soon Kaminski’s force was keeping the Bryansk region relatively clear of partisan attacks, and the occupiers took notice. By mid-1943 he commanded a brigade known to his overlords as the Kaminski Brigade, but titled by him the Russian Army of National Liberation. At about that time, the Germans begin to sick their collaborating attack dogs on partisans in and around the region. The tactics were brutal and the troops undisciplined. SS-Sturmbrigade RONA, as it became known, killed tens of thousands of its own countrypeople, exceeding even the considerable ruthlessness of partisan reprisals against collaborators.

Having lost its locality to the Soviet advance, the SS-Sturmbrigade RONA fell back toward Poland. Whatever else may have been true of Kaminski, he wasn’t suicidally stupid enough to stick around long enough to explain his recent past to the NKGB. By 1944 Kaminski held the rank of Waffen-Brigadeführer der SS, a rank held by no one else and equivalent to a brigadier general.

The German high command had two competitors for the mantle of chief Russian collaborator: General Vlasov, who had defected in captivity, and Kaminski. Hitler didn’t trust Vlasov even a little bit, probably because Vlasov seemed intelligent and rational enough to develop a significant military force if permitted. Kaminski was a thug leading thugs, and useful enough from a Nazi standpoint in that limited context. It was not reasonable to suppose Kaminski might ever raise and lead a force large enough to give the Nazi regime trouble.

Before it was all over, Kaminski’s men perpetrated one last atrocity. In July 1944, the Polish Home Army (underground) used its long-husbanded weapons to revolt against Nazi occupation and take back Warsaw. The logic was that the Soviet Army would press forward to liberate the city. Nothing doing; Stalin was delighted to let the Nazis kill off tens of thousands of potential nationalist rebels, and if that meant the deaths of over a hundred thousand civilians along with the flattening of their city, to Stalin that was no great loss. A rogues’ gallery of SS and anti-partisan units moved to crush the rising, including a detachment from Kaminski’s RONA, which was in the process of being raised to SS divisional status.

The surface version of what happened was that Kaminski’s men exceeded even Nazi boundaries for atrocity. While this was true–they cut a swath of indiscriminate rape, arson, torture, and murder through any area they visited–there’s no good reason to believe that his fall came as a result of Himmler clutching his pearls. Another story was that Kaminski’s troops mistakenly killed a couple of German girls; probably true, but unlikely to result in his downfall. Yet another goes that he was accused of disobedience and theft; again likely true but unlikely to lead to a wall. So why did the SS liquidate Kaminski?

It seems that by mid-1944, the Nazis were rethinking the value of Vlasov relative to Kaminski. To me it seems like a day late and a dollar short, with most former Soviet territory now in Soviet hands once again. Whatever the reason or reasons, on 19 August 1944 the local SS chief, von dem Bach-Zelewski, summoned Kaminski and his staff to a meeting. Some say that they were put on trial, then shot; others that the SS simply lined them up against a wall and shot them. Kaminski’s men were told that he had died in a Polish partisan attack.

However it happened, everyone at least agrees that this was the violent end of Waffen-Brigadeführer der SS Bronislav Kaminski. The Nazis sent his demoralized unit north to dig trenches, then assigned the remainder to Vlasov’s command. One supposes that they tried very hard not to surrender to the Soviet Union. Of whatever RONA prisoners Soviet forces might have taken, one supposes they experienced bad outcomes.

As bad as Dirlewanger was, one could make the argument that Kaminski was worse. Unfortunately, in this realm of scumbag studies, comparisons are elusive and creepy. Which is worse, pulmonary anthrax or pneumonic plague? Most people would respond that neither one sounds very pleasant.

In fact, the Nazi regime spawned many little Kaminskis. Every ethnicity that had once felt like (and perhaps been in fact) an oppressed minority had its collaborators, and many were all too ready to vent their rage as tools of the occupation regime. Some became more infamous than others. In fact, if all the truth were known, one could probably write a book just detailing all the deeds of Nazi collaborators. For all I know, someone has.

A complete reference would be elusive, but any such book would be an incomplete joke without a section on Kaminski. He was one of the very worst.

Scumbag studies

Scumbag studies: Reichsleiter Rudolf Hess

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This story is weird because its subject is weird.

Hess, a WWI veteran, was one of Adolf Hitler’s earliest kool-aid drinkers. You might say that he was even a kool-aid taster, helping develop Hitler’s kool-aid vintages and varietals. Hess would have swallowed fishing sinkers and jumped into the Rhine if Hitler jumped first. While Hitler did time for the Beer Hall Putsch, Hess typed up the manuscript that became Mein Kampf. Call him whatever else you will, with just cause, but Hitler was very loyal to those whose loyalty to him never flinched. Hess rose to the position of Deputy Führer.

Hess’s brain wiring was unlike that of others. He was definitely an anti-Semite and instrumental in the rise of the Nazi party as well as the persecution of Jews, so he fits my definition of scumbag. He had a streak of hypochondria. Today, he would probably be an anti-vaccine activist. It seems reasonable to suppose that he was prone to mental illness. But for a plane trip, he would have stayed in Hitler’s shadow throughout the war. He would have continued to lose influence due to Martin Bormann’s machinations, and would not have cared, so long as he retained Hitler’s personal affection. As one of the few men Hitler addressed in the familiar form ‘du’ and called “Hessrl” (‘Hessie’), Hess could do whatever he wanted provided it never ran counter to Nazi aims. By war’s end, surely he would have accumulated enough wrongdoing to hang. I am not alone in believing it a poor form of justice that he did not.

He would eventually correct that injustice himself, if indeed he did hang himself in Spandau all those many years later.

The official version is that on 12 May 1941, in defiance of Hitler’s orders and perhaps due to a decline in sanity, Hess jumped in his Bf-110 aircraft and flew to Scotland. He behaved as though he expected to be able to return. His goal was to broker peace between Germany (which he knew would soon be at close quarters with the Soviet Union) and Britain. The British heard him out, but did not find his proposals compelling. (Short version: “Herr Hitler never wanted to destroy you and still does not. If you get out of the war and give him back our African colonies, he will let you live.”) They debriefed him, but kept him under comfortable yet strict confinement for the duration of hostilities. At one point he attempted suicide and failed. The British made sure that didn’t happen again.

Came war’s end, Hess was among the high-profile Nuremberg defendants. He had behaved strangely in captivity, and put on a convincing display of missing marbles in court. Despite this infirmity or act, the tribunal sentenced him to life imprisonment. He would be the final prisoner held in Spandau Prison, West Berlin, purportedly hanging himself on 17 August 1987. My own weird connection to the situation is that my college days ended just one year before that, and I happened to know a young woman (I delivered mail to her dorm and she would chat with me while I stuffed the boxes) who was a distant relation of Hess. I once tactlessly asked, “Any relation?” Best I can describe it is that a shadow passed over her eyes as she said, simply, sadly, “Yes.” Perhaps that is why the case has interested me.

Anyway, not everyone swallows the official version. Did you really think they would? When have they ever? All right, let’s consider Team Tinfoil’s claims. It may surprise you that I believe they at least have a couple of valid insights.

The real Hess died in a flying boat crash in Scotland during the war. This story goes that a double replaced him, acting the fool at Nuremberg, then spending decades in Spandau. Far as I’m concerned, this is stupid. Who would agree to do this? Where would they find such a person who also resembled the very distinctive-looking Hess? When Hess finally agreed to start seeing his wife and son again in the late 1960s, they seemed to think he was the real deal; in what universe could a double have manufactured the shared memories to fool them? What on earth could they gain from being in on some cover-up?

And those questions don’t even touch on why the British might cover up Hess’s death in such an accident. It’s not a war crime to fly prisoners around, especially important ones. This theory is so goofy it impairs the credibility of anyone who advances it.

Hess had Hitler’s permission and encouragement to go. In the past, I thought this was likely because of the problematic nature of stealing an escort fighter in the notoriously fascist Third Reich, but I have learned that Hess had his own Bf-110 on permanent assignment and knew how to fly it. There are reliable reports that Adolf chucked a trademark Hitlertantrum when he heard the news, which at least suggests the flight was unauthorized. A better reason to doubt Adolfian approval is that the odds were high of an outcome involving propaganda adverse to Nazi interests. How would it look to the Italians, at grips with the British in North Africa, if Nazi Germany seemed likely to make a deal with the Allies? What if Italy were to react by abandoning a war in which they had so far gained little and lost much? Nah, I don’t think Adolf sent him. It does, however, look very weird that Hess flew his mission on the very day after the Blitz ended. Whether or not the British knew that the concentrated raids were over, the Nazis did.

The British expected him. I strongly doubt that the Churchill government in power expected a visit from Hess. That some members of the upper classes might have been defeatist, and hoping for a substantive peace proposal…I am distrustful enough of ruling elites to imagine that possible. I can easily see where, after months of bombing and lost shipping, with no evident end in sight and no Americans riding to the rescue, wealthy elites might seek to act so as to save themselves and their riches above all.

We aren’t supposed to believe that. We’re supposed to believe that the wealthy deliberately stepped up for the noble sacrifices. Experience suggests I shouldn’t accept that comforting assumption so readily. Certainly our own wealthy elites in the modern USA would sell out Mom, country, Constitution, and people if it meant saving their own butts. Hell, they’d do it for a tax break. I do suspect that at least some in the British aristocracy were ready to see a way out of the war. Did Hess travel there in answer to back-channel communications of such nature? I don’t know. What one conspiracy book says, and not unconvincingly, is that an unspecified source got a look at the file folders still being held back from public release, and that each contains a single sheet stating that the material is on permanent loan to the Windsor Archives. If so, that puts it in a place beyond any force in British law save one: the personal command of the reigning monarch.

If that’s where the actual material has gone, why put it there? If isn’t true, why invent that story? My suspicion is that there was indeed some evidence that at least some of the aristocracy weren’t as committed to the ultimate victory as public morale demanded that the public believe. If that were true, wouldn’t it suck for them to have that become public knowledge? Where could such an multi-generational embarrassment be stashed where it could never come back to haunt anyone? That would be the place.

I am reminded of a passage from John T. Molloy’s Live for Success, in which the author talked about a study his company did regarding chief executives’ résumés and potential fiction therein. Short version: so many of the résumés were so loaded with bullshit that Molloy ordered the report destroyed. Inexact quote: “It wouldn’t kill them; it would kill us.” I have little difficulty imagining a highly placed peer in the British intelligence community saying to an underling: “Give me that. Understand that you never worked on it, for it never existed.” And then taking it to Churchill, and it then being passed along to the King, who would have had the power to sequester it. But I do not know.

Hess was murdered, and thus did not hang himself. Possible. The usual reasoning advanced is that it was to prevent him from revealing WWII secrets. If so, I wonder what secrets he had not yet found a way to share with his now-adult son and aging wife, but it’s possible. I consider “they would never stoop to such a thing” as a terribly naive statement to make about any intelligence agency when it comes to perceived national interests. Some of the claims on both sides are facile, though it would not shock me if he were murdered to prevent any possibility of his being released if the Soviets finally relented on their longtime commitment to make sure he would die behind bars.

Hess didn’t expect to become a POW. To me, this is obvious. Toward his family, before departure he behaved as though he would be back within a few days. He expected that the British would grasp at any chance to make peace. To grasp this, we need to try and view the world from Hess’s rather muddled perspective.

Suppose you’re Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s BFF. Hitler = bae. The Adolf Hitler you know–and you believe, with cause, that you know him as well as any living man–is all-powerful, yet a kinder and more merciful man than the cruel, intolerant, blinded world can be allowed to see. You have often heard him say that he never wanted to crush the British. As things stand, obviously he will destroy them because obviously no one can stand against the obviously insurmountable Third Reich when led by such an incredible mind. However, the Führer is planning to invade the USSR soon. You fought in a two-front war just a generation ago; you were wounded there. You know that the Blitz is about to end, but the British don’t; all they will know is that a day will soon come when they aren’t being bombed.

Your BFF might lose face if he approaches the British now, but you can see he urgently needs a loyal friend to help him out by getting Churchill’s stubborn Spitfires and enormous Royal Navy out of the war. You’ve gotten word that the British aristocrats are beginning to see reason, thanks to the fierce might of the German Blitzkrieg and a good pounding by the Luftwaffe. Of course they do. Neither you nor Hitler ever imagined the British stupid or cowardly. In a sane world, of course, they would have sided with their Aryan brethren to begin with. Only after a pummeling could the British consider honorable terms, and they have had a rough lesson in German dominance. They’ve been softened up nicely.

Is not now your moment to be your BFF’s hero, by doing that which he can not? You can ensure that there will be no two-front war, win peace without giving up anything Germany has taken, get the hated obstinate wiseass Churchill pushed aside, avoid the need for a potentially disastrous cross-Channel invasion, and be the Fatherland’s man of the hour. Since it is obvious Germany will triumph, surely it is impossible that the British will be so suicidally stupid as to do anything like throw you in a POW camp. After all, you are a very important person, high in the favor of the Führer. You are responsible for the spilling of pages of adverbs. You are no one to trifle with. The British may have been foolish enough to be drawn into the Jewish conflict, but surely they would not show indignity to an important plenipotentiary entrusting his life and future to them as a sign of the Führer’s good faith. They are misguided, but they aren’t animals. Surely they have manners and are still sane. They will fall all over themselves in haste to do the only logical thing, and in gratitude for the magnanimity that lets them retain empire and honor.

If you were Rudolf Hess, with Hess’s experiences and his years in the Nazi rabbit hole of fascism, egotism, and delusion, might your thought process have worked that way?

We don’t know, but I have heard far less plausible scenarios that do far less to explain the known facts.

So no, I don’t believe it was a fake Hess at any time. I strongly doubt his Baedolf encouraged him to go, or knew about it. I think he saw his chance to be the big hero, and misjudged British resolve based on hints about Lord Fothersail or the Duke of Flatbroke having some doubts about the war effort. I don’t think he realized that the Allies already considered his people brutal barbarians led by a serial liar and bigot with whom the only peace could be had at the point of an Enfield barrel–or an air-dropped avalanche of fire and steel.

Summed up, I believe that the best way to understand more about this situation is to toss away idealistic wishful thinking about our side, and overtly myopic assumptions about the subject himself, and ask ourselves why each event might happen. Then dismiss those that are too stupid to dignify.

What remains is at least possible until we have trustworthy reason to reject it.

Scumbag studies

Scumbag studies: what’s wrong with “Hunting Hitler”

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You may have seen this series on the so-called “History Channel,” if you could spot it in your program guide against the wall-to-wall junk about ancient aliens and auctioning off abandoned storage units. Hunting Hitler purports to gather a dream team of ex-military, intelligence, and police operatives in order to prove that Adolf Hitler did not die in the bunker in Berlin, but escaped to South America.

The show jumps around between Europe, the U.S., and South America as teams of investigators look into various possibilities of Adolfian escape. Its first hurdle: why shouldn’t we believe the official version–that Adolf and Eva Hitler (née Braun) committed suicide in the Führerbunker on April 30, 1945? The airy dismissal: evidently the bone fragments in Russian possession have been tested and found not to be Adolf Hitler’s, but of a woman under forty years old. What’s wrong with that? Well, assuming the fragments in Moscow do come from the Hitler burial/cremation site just outside the bunker (not proven, and probably not provable), there would seem to be the chance the tested portions belonged to Eva Hitler. She turned 33 in February 1945. There are more questions one should ask and the show does not: so what if the Russians have the wrong bones? All that would prove is the Russians are not showing Adolf Hitler’s bones; it does not prove they do not have them. They might not have them, but that’s a negative beyond our power to prove. But even if they don’t have Adolf’s bones, that doesn’t prove he survived the war. It only means we are not supplied physical proof of his death.

The Russian version, released after the fall of the USSR, is that the NKVD conducted an extensive examination of the bunker’s surrounds. They found the charred remains of the Hitlers, two dogs, and the Goebbels family (children murdered by parents, who then committed suicide). To identify Adolf, they hunted up his dentist and checked his extensive dental work against the records. They gathered up all of it and buried it at an airbase near Magdeburg, in what would become East Germany, without any special preservation efforts. There the remains lay decaying until the late 1960s, when the Soviet Air Force prepared to hand the base over to the East Germans. Someone realized, Oh scheisse, we buried Hitler and Goebbels and all the other bones at that base. You nincompoops! Go dig it up, all of it, incinerate it, pulverize it, and dump it in a river! This was done, say the Russians. In the mood to evaluate the presentation for yourself? Good. Think and research for yourself, rather than just taking me at face value. Hitler’s Death, by Vinogradov, Pogonyi, and Teptzov, presents the evidence. Decide for yourself whether this is all an elaborate hoax. I don’t think it is.

Until the fall of the USSR, we might have dismissed the Soviet version as unreliable for all sorts of reasons. Had they offered it, we might have asked: why then? What would they gain? One thing Soviet leaders did not historically do was reveal hidden truths simply to clear up misunderstandings, especially as Stalin’s stance in the postwar period had shifted to hinting that the Americans had helped Hitler escape. (We didn’t exactly get a lick amiss, as Aunt Polly said to Tom Sawyer, considering that we did cover up for some German and Japanese war criminals where we felt it suited our interests.) Post-Soviet leaders revealed a number of hidden truths, though; logical motives might include improving relations, a spirit of new beginnings, and just to put the matter fully to bed. What is more, the Soviet version makes a fair bit of sense. They had much on their minds in the postwar period, what with half a dozen new satellites to absorb and control, a vast military to stand down in an orderly way, plus the growing tension with their former allies. In order to believe these Hunting Hitler people, we first must dismiss the Russian version. I do not see why we should.

Then there are the real Nazi hunters: Simon Wiesenthal, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, and Israel’s famous intelligence agency we know as the Mossad (failing that, the Holocaust Center at Yad Vashem). Wiesenthal has passed on, but he left behind the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Surely all of the above have at least considered the possibilities behind hunting down every unaccounted-for Nazi of noteworthy infamy, even just to learn what became of him or her. If you and I decided to go chasing Hitler, kind reader, I’d probably say: “All right. My first idea is let’s get in touch with the Wiesenthal Center, the Klarsfelds, and if they will talk to us, the Mossad. If you can think of anyone else, great, let’s contact them too. I speak some Hebrew, which may or may not help. If Mossad ignores us, Yad Vashem probably won’t. Let’s ask all of them what they think happened to Hitler, without agenda, and why they believe what they believe. Then let’s examine their reasoning and see if we’ve got a sound basis to think that all these highly intelligent, sophisticated, focused, and very personally motivated people and institutions have somehow given up too quickly.” Then I’d listen to what you thought of my idea, but I’ll take a guess you’d consider that a sound start. The show doesn’t even bring this idea up. Why not?

Even if we do reject the Russians’ version and others’ conclusions–for without doing so, the producers have no show; thus we proceed from here on a “for the sake of argument, let’s assume” basis–we then have to figure out how this frail, decrepit drug addict managed to escape the Soviet encirclement of Berlin. This encirclement was neither lazy nor casual, not with over two million Soviet and Soviet-allied troops ringing Berlin and thousands of Soviet aircraft blanketing an airspace perhaps ten miles in diameter. The show spent much time on one escape bolthole that would have provided a route to Tempelhof Airport, south and east of the bunker. It spent another batch of time on a long street that perhaps could have served as a runway for something like a Fieseler Storch (the Germans’ marvelous scout aircraft). This does not withstand scrutiny. The valid questions: all right, which was it? And why did you spend all this time on one route, then stop talking about it and develop a theory of another route? Unless the researchers answer that question, they’re just trying to establish the possibility. That is not the same thing as demonstrating proof; the most it can do is sow reasonable doubt, which I do not believe it does. Then there’s the question of the long odds against any German aircraft having the good luck (and avgas, in minimal supply) to take off from anywhere in encircled Berlin and escape Soviet combat air patrols. And then, to go where?

Again the show can’t make up its mind, and thus puts forth a couple of theories. Both lead to the southern cone of South America. One departs from northern Germany and then takes a U-boat from northern Norway to South America. The other escapes first to Bavaria, then Austria, to a Spanish U-boat base, then to South America. They can’t decide between these, either, but they find plenty of evidence that could more plausibly be explained by submarine warfare (a staple of the Nazi war effort) and postwar escapes under the aegis of ODESSA, the SS organization that certainly did help numerous war criminals flee the long arm of justice.

All along, the show salts in evidence of weapons manufacture, with dark hints that it could be nuclear. It refers to Hitler’s pipe dream ‘Amerika bomber,’ a series of prototype aircraft culminating in the Junkers Ju-390. Did Hitler want to bomb the U.S.? Of course he did. He also wanted non-Aryans to submit peacefully to slave labor and extermination, and he wasn’t going to get that either. Does that have any relevance to his supposed escape? Not unless one is positing that he somehow had a clandestine way to make these bombers in Argentina, or that he used one to escape–which the show doesn’t do. In any case, if he were to attempt escape by air, it would seem more sensible to use the proven, reliable aircraft used throughout the war for diplomatic missions to South America: the Focke-Wulf Fw-200 Condor, which existed in modest numbers, and could make it to and from Buenos Aires with suitable refueling stops. So that’s a nothingburger. Another such is when the team finds a supposed small arms manufacture plant in Argentina or Chile (I forget which). It drops the inference that this is where Hitler must have been planning his Fourth Reich. Yeah, makes a lot of sense: at most a few hundred guys and some homebrew weapons are going to Make Adolf Great Again. The host government surely won’t mind its territory used this way, right?

Case in point about weapons hints: the team ‘discovers’ that the Nazis were using the facilities at the Norsk Hydro plant near Rjukan, Norway, to manufacture heavy water. This substance can play a role in the manufacture of nuclear fuel. This is not terribly far, they discover, from an obsolete four-gun coastal defense battery near Kristiansand, which they have decided must be Very Special and perhaps part of Adolf’s bugout route. There must be a connection, and this must have been part of Hitler’s Fourth Reich plans! The actors’ eyes grow very wide. Those of their Norwegian guides do not.

Wait, why not? Doesn’t that sound at least a little suspicious? In 1943, Norwegian commandos with balls the size of watermelons sabotaged the heavy water production at Rjukan, generally accepted as the knockout blow to any remote possibility of a Nazi “nucular” weapon, as one of the cast members persists in calling it. This may hint at the educational level to which the show expects to appeal. The Nazis tried to ship out the remaining D2O, and got it as far as a boat in a fjord, which the Norwegians sank. That’s it. That’s the story of Norway and the Nazi atomic bomb, and everyone who knows much of anything about World War II understands this. The fact that the Nazis had a coastal defense battery in south Norway means nothing by 1945, because as a 15.5″ gun battery, it was outgunned more than double by a single Iowa-class US battleship. In an age of air power, the only reason not to bomb such a battery flat is that it was too useless to bother plastering.

So the battery means nothing, the heavy water plant activity is well documented and seriously impaired by 1945, and yet out of this the ‘investigators’ act as if they might find an elderly, disheveled Hitler alive in some hidden hole. In fact, they spend a fair bit of effort trying to find the basement of a long-demolished building which they opine will produce Big Revelations. What big revelations? That the Nazis used the hydroelectric plant to produce heavy water? I hate to think what Knut Haukelid, the senior Norwegian commando on the raid, would make of this garbage.

There is stuff like that in every episode. Found a Nazi coin? Proof of Hitler! Found some discarded Nazi decorations? Hitler Wuz Hear! A Nazi slogan or graffiti? This must surely be part of Hitler’s escape route! We’re onto Something Big!

This is a bad version of what we call historiography: the methods of researching, studying, and presenting history. Its key component is critical thinking. “OMG this fortress-like compound was armed and making weapons right here in Argentina! Proof of Hitler!” Oh, really. Yeah, looks like there was some weapons manufacture going on, but if anyone thinks such a location needed to be heavily fortified to protect itself from the Argentine government, ask yourself who could prevent the Argentines from sending a rifle division to surround and reduce this place as a field training exercise. Then ask yourself who else could do so without Argentine consent to the deed. Short of dropping an airborne regiment (which would be an act of war against Argentina), no one. There is no way such a compound could have existed without the assent, silent or otherwise, of the Argentine government. Then why build it?

Here is one reasonable speculation: Argentina was known for sporadic military coups in which the losing side’s leaders might well need a place to hide out for a while. Might some such leader work out a deal for such a hideout to be built for him with expatriated Nazi gold, and have it harbor a small private army loyal to this coronel (or whatever rank), useful in case of sudden security needs? Perhaps. There are many possible speculations as to why a few Nazi coins might be found in an abandoned jungle fortress, beginning with “Some SS cutthroat did indeed escape with a crapton of money, and did this because it made him feel better and he could afford it; the Argentines were glad to receive their regular payments for looking the other way.” That I could imagine. “That it was built to hide an escaped Hitler” is among the farthest-fetched. Historiography works out this reasoning, asks why people would or could do this or that, and seeks plausible explanations that fit the existing evidence and common sense. This show counts upon an audience with no grasp of historiography. It produces various little bits of interesting detail, then skips the whole reasoning process and leaps directly to the desired conclusion.

And what of local witnesses who seem to confirm rumors, or make statements? Don’t underestimate the motion picture industry. There is a term: the ‘frankenbite.’ A frankenbite is a manufactured speech clip, and the short version is this: if Hollywood wants to make you answer “yes” to “Did you have sex with ourangoutangs?”, that isn’t even a challenge for them. It’s a little more work to put a completely false sentence in your mouth, but they can do it. This is how reality shows work. It’s very interesting to talk to people off the record who have signed all those enormous NDAs (sorry, no names; I’m not Hollywood).

Those aren’t my only examples. I have a very close friend who appeared on a documentary as a subject matter expert, and they manipulated his footage so as to make him appear to confirm material he knew to be without substance. So just because some old Argentine granny seems to say in translated Spanish, “Yes, we saw Hitler every day; he liked gardening and hanging captured rats”, that doesn’t mean she actually said that. It means that the show needed her to say that. Hollywood lies. It’s in the lying business, and that’s not a slam; it is just what Hollywood does. It does it very well after many years of refined practice. When Hollywood wants someone to say something, it makes him or her say it. Never cooperate with Hollywood if you have any expectation that you will be presented with integrity. Hollywood does not do integrity.

Ah, but the scanned documents we see the investigators excerpting? Certainly look like the real thing, do they not? I expect they are real–but look what the producers do. Splatters of blocked-out text all over the document, hinting at classification (which is ludicrous in context)–and then the blacking peeled away to show you the five or six context-deprived words that seem to support whatever the show is pitching. Without the context, of course, the words are meaningless, even potentially distortive. For an imaginary example:

“Arcega claimed to have seen copies of Hitler‘s book on many occasions. He reported seeing a number of suspicious German-speaking Argentine nationals around town.”

Does the show go so far as to warp the meaning that badly? We do not know. If not, why do they not want us to see? We are given more than ample grounds to suspect any level of imaginable deception, and the sleight-of-hand here is the hint that the viewer is learning Very Big Secrets. The viewer is not supposed to ask: why are you hiding the majority of the text? Why not just show it all and color-highlight the relevant portion? Are you afraid that viewers will pause the DVR and read the whole document, discovering that it really doesn’t say what you imply it does? This one is so obvious I don’t see how anyone gets past it. It would insult a child’s intelligence.

While the show offers regular insults to the intellect, some of them are beyond the pale. One of the cast members is “Special Forces Tim Kennedy.” I have no reason to doubt that Tim was in SF. However, if he was in SF, he would know that this is not the way they say this. He would say he was ex-SF. He would not say he was “a Special Forces.” He might say he was Special Forces-qualified, or a Special Forces veteran, etc, but if he used it alone as a noun it would refer to SF as a whole. He would use it adjectivally to refer to a member, tactic, facility, or something else owned by SF. But that isn’t the comical part. Another ‘investigator’ is introduced, and we are told he is a ‘Green Beret.’ This term, of course, refers to Special Forces. Yes. I am serious. The show introduces one guy as ‘a Special Forces,’ one as ‘a Green Beret,’ and counts upon us not asking why they used two different terms for the exact same thing. Because it sounds cooler to the audience, is my guess.

I guess they figured that anyone who understands anything at all about World War II, military history, or even the modern military is not part of their audience. This one is aimed at the “too ignorant to know any better, too uneducated to think” demographic easily lured toward a TV by a whiff of Hitler.

Or, these days, perhaps they figure Hitler has enough closet fans (and nearly all of those are too dumb to think much, or they wouldn’t be closet Dolphies) to make a pretty big market for the demographic that would love to hear of Hitler’s escape.

I suspect the first. I don’t rule out the second.

Scumbag studies, Social comment

The Depression Americans who went to the USSR

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Back in the early 1930s, several thousand Americans packed up and went to work in the Soviet Union. Few ever returned. Few survived to the Cold War era.

When we look back on an historical decision that might seem nuts to us, we should subtract our hindsight and seek to understand what was known at the time before making judgments. In this case:

  • While there was some information about the large-scale suffering and death of the Holodomor and the liquidation of private agriculture, few Americans understood how bad it truly was, and few cared. We’re ass-ignorant of the world today, even though a network connects us with the news sources of our choice via devices held in our hands. Who would expect us to be less ass-ignorant back when the information was pre-selected by a newspaper publisher?
  • In 1933, the USSR was just sixteen years old. It presented itself as the fiery champion of working-class interests. In those days, working-class people were willing to strike, fight, and die for better conditions. It wasn’t insane for a typical American worker to wonder whether those Russians might not have come up with something good, even if at first they’d had a messy civil war. The more educated Americans realized that, to a large degree, our own revolution was a civil war with foreign intervention as much as it was a revolt against a foreign power. If our independence came with a civil war, why not that of other countries?
  • 1933 could be described as the heart of the Great Depression. Unemployment was the norm. Homelessness was commonplace. Workers with skills, such as laid-off Ford automotive employees, wanted only a place to use what they knew. The USSR was playing industrial catch-up, and that made them very receptive to Ford technology and those who understood it.
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had not yet written The Gulag Archipelago. There was no way to foresee the purges of the late 1930s, still less the long-term pathology of penology as an economic and social control mechanism lasting into the 1960s. No one knew, either, that a wildly gesticulating little World War I Austrian corporal would, within six years, launch a war of genocidal conquest, much less who would be on which side. Americans were more concerned about ending Prohibition so that those who could afford to do so could legally escape into alcohol, long a very American habit. Hoover had failed, new leadership was in place, and it was hard to imagine anything worse.
  • There were no nuclear weapons; there was no Cold War; there was only one avowedly communist country in the world; the United States professed non-alignment. Eastern Europe had not been handed off to Stalin, who was relatively new to power. Mao Zedong was holed up in the mountains of northern China figuring out how to get into power against a powerful foe like Chiang Kai-Shek.
  • This country seems always to have had, and even to require, a designated enemy. Sometimes it’s a race, sometimes it’s an ideology, sometimes it’s a country–but this country has rarely if ever not had an enemy and I’m not sure it would know what to do without one. (Some of us think that if it doesn’t have one, one is designated for us, just to keep us marching along, but that’s a personal view.) The specter of world communism was an easy demonization, because: it tied into our own social dissent, it promised to run absolutely counter to the ruling interests, and it had already been seen–at least by those in the know–to bring on convulsion, shortage, repression, and state-sponsored murder. (That not everyone believed those tales is also a factor, but in this case the stories were if anything an understatement.)
  • With any designated enemy, there are two sides, usually both about half wrong. One side will always be making that enemy out to be less than human, meritless, the ultimate enemy of all that is decent, unworthy of the least sympathy. The other side will always be looking for mitigating factors, exceptions, reasons to believe otherwise. It’s still with us today. There are still people, for example, who will try to deny or minimize the Holocaust. But there are also still people who will make any excuse necessary for any people or nation that opposed the Holocaust. In 1930s US society, the side demonizing the USSR was obvious enough, though it also went so far as to view the average Russian (or other Soviet citizen; barely half were Russian) as a half-civilized Asiatic. The side mitigating for the USSR was not too ignorant to realize that the side demonizing the USSR and its constituent peoples had a vested economic interest in avoiding state-planned economics, in breaking organized labor, and in continuing to sit on its pile of inherited wealth. Reality: while some of the Soviet government’s actions were barbaric, a people who produce the cultural landmarks of Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, and many more, are certainly not barbarians. And while a massive slave labor camp system and a period of mass starvation almost defying comprehension may fairly be said to overshadow any social advances, social advances there still were; they just were not sufficient for a balanced mind to consider them worth enduring mass starvation. I’m not sure what could be, since the dead are no longer around to enjoy social advances.

Our view of past times will always be more balanced when we remember what the people of the times did not know.

In this timeframe, in this economic situation, several thousand working-class Americans, mostly out-of-work automotive laborers, accepted the Soviets’ open invitation to come and work. A few were communist ideologues who had bought into one extreme of the pro-Soviet narrative, but most were more interested in a better way to provide for their families. The USSR was buying one of Ford’s old plants, and it would need workers familiar with auto manufacture. (The Soviet weakness in this area would persist for many years. During WWII, they considered our Lend-Lease tanks and fighter planes mostly substandard, but without our humble trucks, the Soviet Army would have had a far harder logistical time.)

The US government and industrial leadership generally did not care if a bunch of laid-off laborers wanted to move overseas. If they didn’t want to be at home, great; they were no longer our problem. If they represented useful propaganda for the USSR, oh well; there weren’t very many, and with or without them, domestic conditions were such that it was best not to draw the competing propaganda sword with a country lacking a free press. (Even into the 1970s, the USSR would use old Depression breadline photos and footage as anti-US propaganda. Then again, in the 1970s, I very well remember that we were still talking of the USSR as if the Stalin purges had never abated.)

What most of those Americans did not realize was that the Soviet government automatically granted most Soviet citizenship upon landing, whether or not they applied for it. According to US law, accepting a foreign citizenship meant renunciation of US citizenship. Ah, but what if they never accepted Soviet citizenship? If they were in prison, and the State Department asked about them, and the USSR said “They have become Soviet citizens and are no longer your concern,” there wasn’t much State could do about it unless permitted into prison to verify the situation.

In order to do that, the State Department–seen from its perspective of the time–would have to care about a bunch of lousy commie sympathizers who actually thought it was better to have a job with the commies than to be at home starving in the land of apple pie and baseball. (The Americans in the USSR in fact missed baseball enough to establish a league.) While the USA has rarely done much to prevent anyone from expatriating, it also rarely continues to care about anyone who does so. That went double for anyone who expatriated to a society whose ideology proclaimed capitalism an evil to be torn down, and most Americans felt likewise. They don’t want to be at home? Hope the door hit them in the ass, and they don’t come back.

Americans have never taken especially well to the notion that anyone would voluntarily choose to be anywhere but the United States, given a choice in the matter, because Americans have never taken too well to the notion that there could ever be any better place. Thus, in a case like that of these American expatriates, there would neither be government interest in their cause, nor any public groundswell to pressure it. Just a few isolated relatives writing to the State Department to beg its intervention on behalf of people it fundamentally did not want to assist, let alone get back.

Stalin’s purges began in 1937. They decapitated the Soviet Army, leaving corporals leading platoons (normally led by junior lieutenants) and majors commanding brigades (normally led by brigadier generals). They ripped through every ethnicity and social class, a concept the USSR had done nothing to eliminate. The pattern was arrest, beatings and torture, confession and implication of others, a show trial, and a sentence either of death or a quarter century at labor intended to cause death. Many were shipped to the Kolyma gold fields in eastern Siberia, where they died by the thousands. A good many were sent to mine uranium, with predictable outcomes. They came in waves, and it continued into World War II and after.

Against a sum of arrests reaching mid-eight figures, and eventual deaths estimated around twenty million, a few thousand Americans didn’t even count as an arrest wave. Many of the arrests were by quota in any case, with people picked up simply because this or that region had been estimated to contain 200 Enemies of the People, thus that many must be arrested. Any NKVD officer declining to do this was guaranteed arrest. Anyone who did comply would probably be arrested in turn later. It wasn’t genocidal in that it wasn’t specific or discriminate enough to target a particular class, ethnicity, faith, or whatever. Just because it doesn’t meet the definition of a genocide does not lessen its enormous brutality.

What of the American embassy? There was no help there. Ambassador Davies, a political appointee who had married into a fortune, said and did nothing to upset Stalin or his Soviet hosts. He did spend a lot of time collecting artworks, but he and his staff generally ignored or dismissed the representations of family members concerned for relatives who had vanished. While the record indicates that Davies was a nest-feathering toady and complete invertebrate, we should remember that there was limited effective pressure at our disposal, as there would always be. Americans have the tendency to think of their country as all-powerful, that if we do not do something, it’s because we choose not to rather than we cannot. Let’s imagine an interview with the shade of Ambassador Davies, in which I come ready to blister his bureaucratic ass and have an accounting:

“Ambassador, the charge is simple. Americans went to the Gulag, most died, and you flitted about collecting art. Every one of those Americans deserved less than you to be in a Gulag.”

“That’s a very harsh charge, young man. Would you have had me go to Stalin and demand the handover of Soviet citizens?”

“They were not Soviet citizens by choice. It had been assigned to them.”

“So you say. You may well be correct. The only way for us to know that would be to interview the captives in a setting where it was safe for them to speak the truth, and you can say all you wish that we should have demanded that, but the demand would have been refused. And angrily; we would have been accused of calling them liars. Again, probably they were–but if they were, what then would you have had us do?”

“You’re telling me we had no economic pressure to bring to bear?”

“Not without harming our own country. Our ability to guide the economy through the late Depression depended in part on our ability to buy gold, and the Soviets were selling.”

“Gold often mined by your countrymen until their deaths from starvation, disease, and protracted abuse.”

“My former countrymen, all of whom on some level chose to live under the Communists rather than stay home. Just to put this in perspective.”

“All right; I’ll accept that you had no practical leverage to verify their changes in citizenship. You were appointed a diplomat. Could you not have made at least some representations on behalf of people?”

“I could have done more of that, at the risk of being expelled and the Russians completely cutting off all communication. They weren’t in a very forthcoming mood. As you may recall, they were killing their own people by the millions. But very well; let’s say we did that, and they told us to butt out of their internal affairs. What then? You cannot seriously be proposing that the United States should have gone to war over it. We had little economic leverage. Furthermore, there was the risk of driving them into Hitler’s camp, and with the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 it looked as though that had happened. Do you, my inquisitor from the lands of lumberjacks and cowboys, in your hindsight, believe that US interests would have been well served by forcing a longer and more enduring cooperation between a resource-rich USSR and a resource-poor but technologically advanced Nazi Germany?”

I would not be able to help seeing the old bastard’s points. That is why we put our history in the context of its times, so that we subtract our modern hindsight in the effort to make a reasonably informed evaluation of the past.

Few of the Americans ever saw home again, and those who did typically didn’t get home until the Khrushchyov era (beginning mid-fifties, ending mid-sixties). While the Gulags didn’t go away by magic when Khrushchyov admitted they’d gone way too far, they gradually became less brutal, less prevalent, and less indiscriminate. Make no mistake; a Soviet citizen still had to watch his or her words, and the Lubyanka and Lefortovo would remain dreaded into the 1990s. But there’s no evidence the repression maintained the Stalinist level. As a practical matter, it could not have; lest they run out of people to kill, or to guard those on their way to die.

And what of later inquiries into the fates of Americans, during and after Khrushchyov? In the first place, admitting an embarrassing truth with comfortable ease is not naturally a human trait, and it is especially not a Russian cultural trait. Where records had been kept in full, many had been destroyed by people seeking to cover their own culpability. Many were falsified, as in “died of stomach cancer” could mean “died during gang rape when thrown to criminals” or “starved and fell dead on the spot while mining gold.” Sometimes it helps to ask nicely, rather than make demands; the one making demands may puff up with his or her Great Moral Rightness, but s/he doesn’t get what is desired. A lot of French nationals all went missing, and the evidence indicates that many of their fates were eventually learned. Many of ours’ fates still remain unknown or obscure. It may be that the French weren’t as pushy and rude as our people.

But even then, in the second place, here’s the question that can’t be evaded. Suppose we had become insistent, from the 1950s even to today. Fine; and what if they just said “go to hell”? Would we then move closer to a potential nuclear exchange? Invade? Stop selling them grain (hardly good news for our farming industry)? In the end, if the Soviets or their successors didn’t or don’t want to answer, nothing realistic could compel them. And there’s more, one of the most uncomfortable realities to face, one with implications hard to face even today.

To wit: let’s imagine you are a foreign leader aware of an embarrassing number of carefully sequestered American prisoners your country holds. If proof were released of their survival–that your country had held them all this time just because letting them go would be to release a thousand accounts condemning your country’s deceit and inhumanity–what would you do? At some point, acting in brutal self-interest and national interest, what is there to stop you from doing the most logical but brutal thing? I think it very likely that this occurred in Vietnam, for example, that some of our POWs remained in captivity into the 1980s, and that when it came time for relations to thaw, the Vietnamese government most likely made all traces of them disappear. How much easier would this be in a country whose territory includes the vast expanse of Siberia?

It follows that, if that had occurred, there will never be an admission of it. If proof even exists, it may always be beyond our reach.

So yes: several thousand Americans disappeared into the Gulag system. Most may safely be presumed to have died before Stalin, based upon those fates we do know. A few eventually found their ways home during political thaws. Yes, they were naïve to buy into the bright future offered by Stalin’s USSR, but very few ever renounced US citizenship in a conscious way, nor ever meant harm to the country most still considered theirs. And they were fools indeed if they imagined that FDR would aggravate Stalin by lifting one finger on their behalf, especially (as we now know) with presidential advisor Harry Hopkins either a Soviet agent or near enough to render the difference unimportant. I find it very uncomfortable to face, but some truths are uncomfortable: as much as my evidence about Davies makes me loathe everything the man stood for, I don’t have an answer for the ultimate question in any era: “Okay, smart guy. Tell us how we do that without blowing up the world and screwing our whole country. I’ll wait.”

It doesn’t make Davies a fundamentally decent man who wanted to do the right thing. He wasn’t and didn’t; he didn’t want to do anything for anyone but himself, as it looks to me.

Perhaps you know you are getting near to some historical understanding when you uncover enough nuances to destroy any clear-cut feelgood angels-vs-demons outcome.

Even if you uncover demons, their enemies are not always angels.

Human relations, Scumbag studies, Social comment

My Archie Bunker experience

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Everyone over forty knows exactly what I mean by that. Many under forty may not.

In 1971, the nation was divided and distressed. The Middle East would probably boil over again. We were losing in Vietnam, trying to tell ourselves it wasn’t really losing if we simply quit and abandoned the RVN government to its fate. Back in those days, there was a left wing, including on the world stage where the Soviet Union worked hard to export its authoritarian-left perspective. It seemed to make inroads everywhere. For our part, we talked big about exporting democracy, but the truth was that we’d throw money and support at any dictator who supported us over the Soviets. We lived in daily fear of global thermonuclear war.

At home, the civil rights movement had won its war but would find that winning the peace was much like the difference between de jure and de facto. The women’s movement was still called ‘Women’s Liberation,’ and it was nowhere near winning its war. Men who had fought in World War II did not understand why their sons not only refused to fight in Vietnam, but did anything possible to avoid it. Cowboys and hippies exchanged insults, and at times punches. In the previous year, Ohio National Guardsmen had opened fire on protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. The year before that, the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers by a platoon of the Americal Division at My Lai had gone far to shake our sense of ourselves as the good guys.

The Pirates won the World Series in 1971, and I turned eight. That year, the sitcom All in the Family first aired. The show depicted a crabby, selfish, bigoted, working-class, staunchly right-wing World War II veteran, Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor). Jean Stapleton played his wife Edith with great comic genius, keeping a straight face when it was hard imagining anyone could; she was far more tolerant than her husband, but just as old-fashioned. With the Bunkers lived their daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), a somewhat dimwitted partner to her husband Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner). Mike, whom Archie typically addressed as ‘Meathead,’ was attending college while he and Gloria lived with the Bunkers to save money. As Archie was a parody of the day’s right wing and social conservatism, Mike parodied the left wing and social liberalism of the day. He was sexist, condescending, self-righteous, and inconsiderate.

I don’t remember Archie ever saying “nigger”–by 1971, that was the first (and only) racial slur that had become unacceptable on a broad social basis–but I’ve been watching old episodes, and I did hear him say “chink,” “spic,” “Hebe,” “gook,” “bohunk,” “fag,” and “Dago.” In nearly every episode, he called Mike a “Polack.” It must be quite jolting to the younger ear; it jolts mine, and I remember when such talk was just starting to go underground, throughout the seventies. (Some of us thought it had been eradicated, but that was wishful thinking. One can prevent a person from articulating bigotry, but that will not change that person’s beliefs.)

The show was so popular because it held up a mirror to the culture of the day, with nuanced characters and some good comedy. It may have been the catalyst for some self-awareness growth. We all knew at least one Archie Bunker. All in the Family ran for nine years, with a couple of middling spinoffs.

The reasons all this matter, at least to me, are:

  1. If I don’t help to tell the history of my times, people will make up fictitious purpose-driven versions.
  2. It touches my life because I came moderately close to being the son-in-law of an Archie Bunker.

Back in my twenties, I got involved with a young lady–we’ll call her Katie–who was in a mode of post-collegiate-but-still-living-at-home rebellion against her parents. The father, who worked construction, might well have been somewhat grateful that this time his daughter had brought home someone of similar ethnic background to herself. The previous one had not been, and you can imagine what Archie (I think I’ll just call him that) had on his mind about that. He was an ugly flat-faced SOB who looked like he could eat wallpaper off a wall, and not without virtues; unfortunately, among his virtues was not multicultural tolerance and acceptance. He was also a troll, and knew that his racism offended me, so he made the most of that: he’d turn the channel to a boxing match, for example, and talk about how much fun it was to watch a couple of “niggers” beat each other up.

Unlike TV’s Archie Bunker, whose wife Edith had a heart of gold, Katie’s mother was as mean and bigoted as her husband, and considerably more vindictive. On some level, her husband was human; the mother was not. In fact, Katie did not have one single relative I could bear: a brother and cousin, clones of the father; an absurdly dumb sister; a stereotypical drunk, deaf uncle. The price of dating Katie, and of later being engaged to her, was to be required to endure these people most weekends.

Can you believe I tried for five years to make this relationship work? Good lord. I had my flaws, and I contributed my share of mistakes, but in the end it was time to bow to reality. Significantly poorer, I moved on in relationships. We still have a few friends in common, but Katie moved on and married (this time, to a Hispanic man; Archie must have just loved that). We haven’t spoken in nearly a quarter century; both her parents are gone, but I’ll be glad just never to have any reminder too direct of that experience.

I guess the point of this tale is that if you’re young, and you happen to be watching old TVLand reruns of All in the Family, and you simply cannot believe they could get away with talking like that on TV (except maybe on premium movie channels), much less that such views were commonplace, believe it. And they are by no means all gone even today.

I hope your generation sees the final die-off of those attitudes, because with their current remalnaissance*, mine will not live to see it.

==

*For those of you who are not French speakers, this is my neologism for ‘re-misbegotten.’ ‘Renaissance’ means ‘rebirth’ and ‘mal’ means ‘bad.’ It is not meant to be correct French, but to modify the English term to indicate that the original birth was no good either.

Scumbag studies, Social comment

It is nonsensical to expect shame from those who have none

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Spanish has a beautiful word: sinvergüenza. It means “shameless,” but is culturally loaded. (Don’t make the mistake of thinking it changes by gender; it is a compound word, “sin vergüenza,” or ‘without shame’; thus as an adjective it retains the same form regardless of the noun it modifies, and if a noun, is the same whether describing a shameless man or woman.) To articulate it correctly, remember that the trema (two dots) over the U means to pronounce each vowel: seen-vair-hu-en-za.

In most Spanish-speaking cultures, one’s personal honor is an important thing, which may require actions or non-actions for the sake of preservation. A sinvergüenza is a person whom dishonor would not restrain, a person who has placed him or herself outside shared cultural values and ethics. It occurs to me that this useful word can help nice people to understand some of the assholes we deal with.

I began to think about this while reading a thread on my local Nextdoor. A salesperson or scammer came to lady’s door and knocked. While waiting for an answer, he muttered profanities. We know this because her video camera recorded him in full glory. Several responded to say they had seen him, or that he had come to their doors and behaved with anger and rudeness. Everyone was surprised and outraged.

My theory as to why they were surprised: they had ignored the most obvious clue. The guy was sinvergüenza. How did we know this? Because he was knocking on doors, even those with NO SOLICITING signs, intruding on people’s private property in order to bother them. It’s the same mentality that sends spam, or makes scam phone calls. All those who do these things, which a decent human being would be ashamed to do, are lacking in shame. If one is impervious to shame, a key moral restraint is not in place, and thus all behaviors are permissible (in that person’s mind) and all other persons are required and expected to tolerate them. If other persons do not tolerate the bad behaviors, those said other persons are intolerant, mean, wrong, bad. It all comes back to the statement of policy: “I may be an asshole, and you may not object. If you do, of course, I single you out for extended assholery.”

I recall one time back in Kennewick, I happened to see a guy snooping around our vehicles in our driveway. I went outside with the sjambok (not brandishing it) and asked him just what the hell he was up to. He was handing out flyers for a hypermiler event sponsored by a Toyota dealership in Yakima. He then proceeded to evangelize me on hypermiling. I told him frankly that he was being creepy and had better get the hell out of there. The verbal altercation deteriorated to the point where I had to advance with the sjambok. I laughed when he talked about ‘threatening me with that stick.’ (He’s lucky he didn’t turn around and put me in a situation where I worried for my safety. That thing feels like boiling water hosed onto the skin.) Here’s the point: to him, it was perfectly fine to pull into my driveway, start snooping around one of our cars unannounced, then behave as an asshole when told to stop. A normal person would be embarrassed to behave this way.

We see it in email spam. A friend of mine wrote, this very day, about an email exchange with a marketer. After his third email, she told him her firm wasn’t interested, and to stop mailing her. His response was that she could have said so the first time. Point being: to him, as a shameless person, sending repeated emails was just fine. Thus, it was her fault she got them, because she did not opt out. Every couple weeks or so, I find myself on some unwanted mailing list. If it persists, I reply telling them to remove me. They often tell me to use their unsubscribe link. See what they did there? They intruded upon me unasked for. If I wish it to stop, I am expected to do work. Asking them to do work to correct their own wrong work, that makes me a very mean person, and unkind. They assume that their initial contact was perfectly legitimate, and it was not.

The area where this is most punishable is U.S. Junk Mail, because most days someone sends a business reply envelope that gets to hold all the day’s junk. It’s still wrong, because I’m still asked to dispose of it in some way, but at least I can dispose of it by sending it to a junk mailer for disposal.

I realize that most of you are fundamentally nice, decent people. You get surprised when bad things happen, because you do not do such bad things, and you wonder how anyone could. Thank you for being as you are; you are appreciated. I’m here to help you. And it’s simple:

THEY ARE SINVERGÜENZA. They have no shame.

They don’t play by nor care for your rules of courteous conduct. Because you impose those rules upon yourself in dealing with the shameless for longer than they deserve, they bother you longer and behave more rudely to you when you voice objection. They may go away when threatened, but they will not act as you would. If you had done what they did, you would walk away wondering what had become of you. They will not do this. They are already on to the next mark. Nothing you said hurt them or caused them to reconsider their actions. They are not like you. They lack shame.

You did not have to allow this. If you were to realize that a sinvergüenza action is the marker of a shameless person, you would not make nice with him. You would respond in the beginning as if this person were unworthy of courtesy. In most cases that might mean not answering the door; it might mean toying with telemarketers; it could mean refusing to answer nosey questions; etc. But you already have the person’s personality marker.

Because only a shameless person does in such a way.