Month: December 2018

GoodReads meta-data is 402 pages, rated 3.9 by 827 raters.
Genre: Non-fiction

Verdict: Could not put it down.
The book reads like one of Harris’s historical novels with a cast of characters and skulduggery galore, but it is too incredible to be fiction. Only reality could combine such colossal stupidity, egotistical incompetence, and venomous hypocrisy. In short, it seems like a typical episode of Fox News.
The basics, for those born yesterday, are these. In 1983 there came to light the personal diaries kept for thirty years by one Adolf Hitler. Look him up. It was a sensation and a flock of carrion eaters landed on it to exploit the find.
It all started with an inveterate liar and forger who had eked out a living selling Nazi relics on the black market, since trade in such things was illegal in West Germany. When he could not get the real thing he learned to make replicas. His clients did not seem to notice, or mind if they did notice, so he kept at it. Since trading and possessing such items was illegal the clients did not seek expert opinion or dare to compare notes. Forger also discovered that the objects that commanded the highest prices were those connected personally to Hitler.
He followed the marks, and forged Hitler signatures, early letters, and paintings, a lot of paintings, hundreds. When asked he always said he got the goods from a contact in East Germany, whose name he had to protect because there the penalty for trading in Nazi relics in the DDR was capital.
One day a lowly reporter from the Stern magazine came along. He was a Nazi obsessive, and he bought a few items. Note, though Stern was at the time aligned with the Socialist Party, this reporter was a dreamy fantasist way down the pecking order.
He kept buying from Forger, no questions asked. Then Forger, on the look out for new ways to add value to his small business, broached the prospect of diaries. This was perfect for Fantasist. He tried to interest the editors of Stern in buying the diaries but they rejected them as preposterous and irrelevant. There were many previous examples of forged material from that era, and to their minds this was another pathetic example of that. They knew Fantastist for what he was and left it at that.
Fantastist did not give up easily. In time he by-passed the editors and made contact with the management of Stern. Stern was owned by a holding company which in turn was a subsidiary of the leviathan Bertelsmann corporation. Fantastist convinced Herr Decisivie, the chairman of the board, that this was the scoop of the century. To make it a scoop everything had to be kept secret. So Decisive consulted no one and gave Fantastist a blank cheque to get the diaries: No questions asked.
Fantastist went back to Forger and created a demand for diaries. Forger set to work at his usual standard. He bought ruled A4 school books and used the public records of Hitler’s day-to-day activities to add jottings in Gothic script as diary entries. Over two years he produced 50,000 words spread over fifty A4 booklets. Fantastist spent the blank cheque on them, though he skimmed off as much as 75% for himself of millions. (When Forger later learned of this surtax he readily spilled beans on Fantastist.)
At Stern secrecy remained the watchword. To get some verification very limited graphology tests were done but they were so constrained as to prove nothing, or everything to those who wanted to believe. The Fantastist believed. Herr Decisive was sure of this own genius.
Negotiations with international buyers like News Limited in the UK and Newsweek in the USA brought more people into the secret and doubts were expressed, but dismissed by Fantastist and Decisive as petty jealousies. Decisive had no interest in disproof.
Then Decisive ordered the Stern editors, who had to this point known nothing about this matter, to prepare a special issue. They objected, asking for checks to be made (which would perforce reveal the secret), but were overruled. The international buyers wanted verification but were stalled. They, too, were blinded by the scoop and did not press the matter. At each stage everyone seems to have assumed someone else had verified the diaries. Or so they said in hindsight.
Even as the presses rolled out 75,000 copies of a special, large issue of Stern, a press conference announced the find to the world. It was a fiasco. Faced with a roomful of skeptical journalists some of whom brought along historians from all over the world, the house of cards collapsed. Hugh Trevor-Roper who had authenticated the diaries made a fool of himself, and spent years afterward trying to rewrite this history at least to his own satisfaction. The utterly cynical David Irving played both sides against his bank overdraft and won the lottery that night.
News Limited and Newsweek sold unprecedented numbers of their publications and counted that a commercial success, even while switching to reporting on the hoax that they had generated.
In West Germany there was a police investigation that laid it all bare, sending the little fry: Forger and Fantastist to the slammer – they were held for a time in the same prison specially built for members of the murdering Red Army Faction.
Stern, the Sunday Times, and Newsweek had to show that they took it seriously and scapegoats had to be sacrificed to maintain public confidence in the integrity of the mastheads. [Pause to smell the hypocrisy.]
In each case management, circling the wagons, agreed the scapegoats had to come from down the food chain. Where better than the editors who at each publication had resisted the story until ordered by management to run it. Yet they were the ones fired. ‘They had not resisted enough,’ declared management!
Herr Decisive went on to become the CEO of Dornier Aircraft Corporation. Never ride in a Dornier product is one conclusion to reach from this story. Rupert Murdoch who gave the order to the editor of Sunday Times of London to publish it, over the editor’s objections, was only too happy to fire the editor and blame him for everything while basking in his own genius for the brief circulation increase. The longterm damage to the integrity of journalism bothered no one.
Not even Scott Adams in Dilbert could have concocted a better example of McKinsey management. Credit flows up the corporate chain, and blame flows down.
Harris’s telling is absolutely deadpan. The story is so unbelievable it does not need embellishment.

Good Reads meta-data is 269 pages rated 3.9 by 16 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction.

Verdict: A golden oldie.
A charming memoir of meetings with the lions of the British academic establishment at a time when the BBC gave them air time, parliamentarians asked them for audiences, and newspapers welcomed their words. The charm is in Mehta and not his interlocutors.
The subtitle is ‘Encounters with British Intellectuals,’ however all but two of his respondents were ensconced in academia. Few seemed troubled by teaching duties.
The book divides, more or less, into two parts. The first is a series of interviews with British philosophers like A. J. Ayer, Peter Strawson, and their ilk. The second is a parallel series of interviews with British historians, like Arnold Toynbee, A. J. P. Taylor, and the egregious Hugh Trevor-Roper (who went from strength to strength on ever so little), though he is rivalled by E.H. Carr for hubris.
It was indeed a small world since three-quarters of the beasts were in the Oxford zoo, with the remainder, bar a couple, in its Cambridge annex. Small, yes, and all the more venomous for it. The back-biting, the undermining swim beneath surface of the scathing public reviews of each others’ works and days. The pages of ‘Encounter,’ the ‘Listener,’ and the ‘Times’ positively bristled with their poisoned barbs.
It was all so monumentally unimportant that today it is all but forgotten, and a good thing, too. Yet the Platonic dialogues that they despised are still studied.
I loved the story of Hughie writing a long and venomous review of one of Taylor’s books and publishing it with much fanfare in ‘Encounter,’ and then sitting back in the expectation of a rejoinder from Taylor that he could reply to in another vituperative essay in ‘Encounter.’ Taylor did not bother to reply. What a deflation that much have been, like not making Richard Nixon’s Enemies List, despite all efforts!
Among the philosophers the major issue of interest to the laity is the conundrum of free will versus determinism, or in social sciencese: structure versus agency. Among the historians the parallel divide is between meaningful and accidental events.
Amid the nonsense and petty bickering made out to be something much more, there are many telling shafts. I liked historian Herbert Butterfield’s conviction that in teaching history (and political science) one is teaching future officials, diplomats, traders, tariff managers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, and so one must equip them to respond to the challenges they will face outside the classroom. Predictably when he uttered this view of academic responsibility in a public lecture he called down the wraith of the gowned gods upon his head who went on about their art for their art’s sake. As if. Few were troubled by teaching duties since they had very few.
Mehta’s ever so oblique and sly digs at his prestigious prey are desiccated. While much of their posturing is, well, posturing, it is well to remember that R. M. Hare’s arid ‘The Language of Morals’ (1951) was drafted while he was in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Malaya. However, few of his contemporaries can lay claim to such courageous conviction.
The title is one of the bon mots Ludwig Wittgenstein tossed off, namely, that the task of philosophy was to lead the fly (us) out of the fly bottle (?). Every remark by this sage is totemic to acolytes, so there are many disputed interpretations of this aside, which Ludi no doubt forgot as soon as he said it.
Here is a sampler of the dross and the ore.
Richard Hare dismissed Continental philosophy holus-bolus opining that philosophy can only be taught by the tutorial method (51). Since that method was only used at Oxford and Cambridge it followed only graduates of those universities can be philosophers. He seemed to accept that conclusion when Mehta put it back to him. Since it has only been used there for a short time, there were no philosophers before that. Got it? Ergo Plato, Hegel, Sartre, Schlick, Rawls, and so on are not philosophers.
Wittgenstein thought of himself as a living philosophical problem (82). Amen. Wittgenstein thought only of himself full stop.
J. L. Austin’s linguistic philosophy spread throughout the dominions and America, but not in England because Austin admitted too students from those places (85) [not on its merits], said one don in a huff. It is certainly true that it dominated the curriculum in my undergraduate and graduate education.
Mehta asked E. H. Carr to name historians he admired. ‘None’ was his reply (133). Well, one might suppose there was one, ‘E. H. Carr’ by name.
Taylor wrote, with prescience, of a world where emotions have replaced reason and hysteria has become meritorious (177). He foretold Fox News and President Tiny.
Another bon mot from Taylor: Perfection is always sterile (184). That might be the motto of utopia.
This traipsing through the groves comes to an abrupt stop. But then how could it end. Mehta adds a page and half at the end, drawing no conclusions. These essays were commissioned by the New Yorker and do not quite make a book. What Mehta does not tell the reader is that he became blind in India at four years old. There are a dozen or so of his titles on Amazon.
I read this on paper in the Forgotten Books reprint as picture above. That edition is not recommended because of missing text and omitted pages. I think I may have read some of it in graduate school as relief from analytic and linguistic philosophy.
By coincidence I started to read Robert Harris’s ‘Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries’ where Hugh Trevor-Roper again figures. Egregious to the last. The excuses are many and the facts are immutable.