Could the Jews have shot their way out of the Holocaust? Or, Ben Carson and self-caricature in politics.

When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer announced that he would give up singing satirical songs. In a world in which that could happen, he felt there was no longer any place for satire.

Well, it’s curious to discover that things could decline still further from that low point. The US is once again providing us with a wonderful new political spectacle.

The front runner for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party – that’s the party of Abraham Lincoln, mind – is a man who prides himself on having dragged himself up by the bootstraps from colossal wealth to even more colossal wealth. Donald Trump is one of those characters who like to throw the abusive comments out there, and then apologise for any offence they may have caused, but in such a way as to suggest that their targets (in Trump’s case, principally women) are themselves at fault for lack of a sense of humour.

Behind him, in second place for the nomination, is Ben Carson. It’s a commonplace to describe something as not being brain surgery, as a way of saying that there’s nothing more complex or requiring more intelligence. Carson gives the lie to that facile notion. He’s a neurosurgeon but seems to show that either you can operate on brains without having huge capacity in your own, or having used up so much of your brain for the surgery, you have too little left for politics.

Ben Carson: proof that even if you operate on brains,
you don't necessarily make great use of your own

I suppose the clue was provided by Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted about Carson “what about a real black president who can properly address the racial divide?” Ah, yes. Carson is a real black, unlike the present occupant of the White House.

Murdoch has since said he was sorry for the tweet, proving that Trump isn’t the only exponent of the late, empty apology. 

In any case, if Murdoch likes Carson, that’s probably enough to make his candidacy deeply suspect. Carson has helped us out, anyway, and put the question beyond all doubt. First of all, we had his comment that no Muslim should run for President because Islam is inconsistent with the US Constitution. The US Constitution was written by men such as Madison and Jefferson for whom few principles mattered as much as completely equal rights between religions. Perhaps Carson hadn’t found the time to work much on the Constitution, between reading the medical journals.

No comment went so far, however, in proving the nature of the man than his crass comment, that had there not been gun control in Germany, the Jews might have been able to prevent the Holocaust happening. This is linked to the strange reasoning that the huge numbers of guns available in the US keeps people safe, against all the evidence (for example in 45 school shootings this year alone) that they put huge numbers at serious risk.

Even without that illogic, the Carson comment is based on extraordinary ignorance. There was resistance by Jews during the Holocaust, even armed resistance, most notably in the Warsaw Ghetto. And how did that work out? Inevitably, civilians – even with guns – were no match for a trained army with heavy weapons. Had the Russians intervened to support them, they might have won, but the Red Army stood still and waited while the Wehrmacht polished off the Jewish resistance. The mere possession of guns is far from enough.

Still. One wouldn’t expect Carson to know that. He belongs to the Tom Lehrer school of politicians or institutions that satirise themselves. Except that in his case, he’s more of a caricature than a satire.

To clean up a mess, a pair of dirty hands may be what you need

There will be an anniversary later this year which few in the media and probably no-one in government will mark.

On 12 November, it will be forty years since then US President Richard Nixon told the world ‘there are no American combat troops in Cambodia. There are no American combat advisers in Cambodia. There will be no American combat troops or advisers in Cambodia.’ By then the US had been waging its covert war in Cambodia for eighteen months.

It actually caused me to laugh out loud when I saw four former US Presidents and the incumbent – Ford, Carter, Reagan, the elder Bush and Clinton – attending Nixon’s funeral with its orations in memory of a great statesman. Tricky Dicky set the bar so high when it comes to mendacity in public office that no-one has come near him since. Why, even Tony Blair, a byword in Britain for the crooked politician with his on-air ‘I’m a pretty straight sort of guy’ and his deceptions over the Iraq War, isn’t remotely in the same league as Nixon.

The President didn’t do it all on his own. He was ably assisted, in particular by his his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, another man who could look straight into a TV camera and come out with a string of bare-faced lies. Kissinger was untiring in his efforts to prevent any news of the Cambodia bombing getting out, so when there were some leaks he moved vigorously against their suspected source Morton Halpern, an adviser to the National Security Council. Kissinger persuaded the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, hardly a paragon of transparency himself, to put a wiretap on Halperin’s phone. An illegal wiretap.

Amusing, isn’t it? It was illegal bugging that spelled the end of the Nixon Presidency. But it was Kissinger who started the practice.

Now scroll forward through the decades to the present day.

An extraordinary amount of newsprint and air time has been devoted to the troubles of FIFA, the world governing body of football. I have ambivalent feelings about the organisation: some of its decisions strike me as completely reasonable. For example, although it put a lot of noses out of joint in England, denied the opportunity to host the world cup itself, I can’t help feeling that the decision to award the cup to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 was entirely right. Neither had ever previously hosted the competition. And there was something squalid about the cosy old arrangement whereby the honour alternated between a set of usual suspects in Europe and another set in Latin America.

However, even if the decisions are right, the process by which they’re reached is hardly edifying. It seems that the way is always littered with grubby little cash payments, and some that are far from little. Even the election of the organisation’s President, Sepp Blatter, to a fourth successive term of office this week was an ugly spectacle: he was unopposed, his nearest rival eliminated just days before as a result of an investigation into corruption. That investigation, run by Blatter loyalists, also exonerated the President from any suspicion of wrongdoing.

Not so much the Thomas Jefferson standard of democratic practice, more Robert Mugabe.

Blatter has promised to turn FIFA into an honest and transparent organisation. A ‘Solutions Committee’ will look into any shady dealings and propose means to prevent them happening again.

And here’s where that forty-year anniversary becomes so significant.

Blatter and Kissinger: made for each other?

Who’s been pencilled in to head that committee? Why, none other than Henry Kissinger.One day FIFA will get its house in order, I’m sure. But I suspect it may take a while yet.



P.S. A footnote on Morton Halperin. He once summed up NATO policy as follows:

‘The NATO doctrine is that we will fight with conventional forces until we are losing, then we will fight with tactical weapons until we are losing, and then we will blow up the world.’

No relevance to the stuff about Blatter. Just seemed worth quoting.