Book Reviews

276 A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK Israel's Dilemma by John Chamberlain I srael's Dilemma: Why Israel is Falling Apart and How to Put it Back Together by Ezra Sohar (Shapolsky Publishers, 136 W. 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, 263 pages, $15.95)tells the same sort of story about the stran gulation of industry in Israel by socialist monopo lies that made Alvin Rabushka's and Steve Han ke's Toward Growth: A Blueprint for Economic Rebirth in Israel one of the notable books of 1988. The lesson of the two books is what any believer in the free market might expect: you,can'tget compe tition, with its attendant plenty, in a system that offers nothing but subsidies and jobs on the State payroll. Sohar makes his points dramatically by compar ing Israel to Taiwan. Both countries were estab lished in the late 1940s."Both," says Sohar, "were founded by immigrants who put ashore at a small, resource-poor new home. Both have to bear oner ous defense burdens." But Taiwan cut loose at an early date from dependence on government grants from abroad. It made landholding easy for accom plished farmers, and it learned much about the ins and outs of international trade. Israel followed a different course: it socialized practically every thing.

The result is apparent to even the most casual observer. The Israeli government now owns the country's railroad, the El Al airline, the telephone company, the radio networks, two TV channels, several oil refineries, and the largest department store chain. It controls access to the land through regulation of the water supply, and it drives even the sons of landowners into kibbutzim. Sohar doesn't feel comfortable with the fact that the average Israeli, to pay his incredible taxes and the bill for monopolized goods, has to cheat in var ious ways. His tone differs from that of Sam Lehman-Wilzig of Bar-Han University, who con tributed a remarkable article on "Israel's Grass roots Libertarian Revolution" to the April 1990 issue of The Freeman. Lehman-Wilzig accepts the Israeli black market as a fortunate thing. It may be evidence of what he calls "quasi-criminal behav ior," but there seems no way of avoiding it.

Where Sohar's book does some "tut-tutting," Lehman-Wilzig glories in the ingenuity used by Israelis to engage in "pirate" cable television, to find doctors willing to take on patients out of hours, to hire teachers for afternoon "enrichment" education. Socialism is being "dismantled" in Israel according to Lehman-Wilzig, and "there is all the chance in the world that the new system tak ing its place will be successful and stable, once the not-inconsiderable transitional difficulties are overcome." I could wish that our various authors-Rabush ka, Hanke, Sohar, Lehman-Wilzig-had done a more specific study of the role played in Israel by the organization called the Histadrut. This seems to be a state within a state. Says Sohar: "The His tadrut became the de facto government of Pales tine's Jewish workers, embracing a wide variety of functions in its bearhug. Such a complex task required it to assemble a massive bureaucracy."

We could stand more information about the work ings of this bureaucracy. It sounds truly formidable. The complaint voiced by Norbert Yasharoff in the quarterly magazine Lincoln Review is that there is an "Israel We Rarely Read About." Yasharoff was surprised by accounts of growing grassroots cooperation between Jews and Arabs within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel. He made visits to two of the better known cooperative pro jects. There was the Friendship's Way Center in Jaffa, with its all-volunteer staff of 50 that includes Israeli university students, Arab and Jewish high school pupils, as well as young students from the United States, England, and West Germany. Friendship's Way was the brainchild of Motti Golan, a Jewish public accountantwho decided six years ago that "somebody's got to do something to improve the miserable lot of the Arab residents of Jaffa, especially their children."

The second project visited by Yasharoff was the Neve Shalom, or Oasis of Peace, founded by Father Bruno Hussar of the Dominican Order in Israel. Neve Shalom has evolved into a coopera tive village of some 60 Arabs and Jews. The Western press and TV coverage of Israeli affairs impresses Yasharoff as "one-dimensional" and "all-negative." "What," he asks, "can be done to correct the lopsided reporting. . . . The obvi ous remedy would be for American newspaper editors to encourage, and demand, the kind of cov erage that goes beyond depiction and analysis of violent or other negative events. . . ." The next best thing, of course, would be to depend less on the big press and more on the little magazines such as Lincoln Review and, yes, The Freeman. D THE DIARYOF H. L. MENCKEN Edited by Charles A. Fecher Alfred A. Knopf,400 Hahn Road, Westminster,MD 21157 • 1989 476 pages • $30.00cloth Reviewedby DavidM. Brown H L. Mencken was an American phe nomenon.

• His was a gaudy and gorgeous career, propelled by a divine afflatus. Born Henry Louis Mencken in 1880, he began his literary life as a workaday journalist in turn-of-the-century Baltimore. In 1914,having conquered the world of newspapers, he joined theater critic and fellow booboisie-slayer George Jean Nathan as co-editor of The Smart Set. From this makeshift perch Mencken alternately terrorized and bemused the culture as the most daring social critic of his time; 277 he was to reach the zenith of his influence in the 1920sas editor of The AmericanMercury. In addition to being a prolific essayist, reporter, and book reviewer, he found the time to publish books on literary and political matters, and in his later years became known as a formidable scholar of the "American" language, a field of study he pioneered. He also prepared two bulky, as yet unavailable accounts of his experiences in the newspaper and magazine business, and wrote a 2,100-page diary, a third of which has now been selected for public consumption. And all this with out a word processor!

Mencken, ever the beleaguered champion of civilizationfending off the invading hordes, was an archenemy of all things banal, mediocre, and hyp ocritical. His forte was a devastating (albeit usually venomless) satirical wit that blended a stupefying erudition with a kind of disingenuous barnyard raillery. The style that was the product of these attributes was, and remains, utterly unique. Though he certainly favored being on the attack, Mencken's work is more fundamentally preoccupied with the promotion of positive values than with the demolition of bad ones. He was a tireless defender of men of ability and originality, as well as of the individualist creed and political freedom that made the achievements of such men possible. As the premier literary arbiter of his day, Mencken prodded and promoted the careers of many writers whose work is now regarded as clas sic. He was, as Murray Rothbard calls him, the "joyous libertarian"; and, in his total indepen dence and indifference to opposition, the spiritual archetype of the "free man."

With his myriad critical judgments Mencken conveyed a fortitude that was tough and inspiring. But whatever his lambasting of "morons" and "mountebanks" in public, in his personal life he was not at all the ogre that his boisterous ferocity in print might suggest. Typically, he was genial, polite, and civilto a fault. This is no contradiction. As a polemicist, Mencken was brilliant and unsparing, but this needn't imply a zealot bereft of courtesy, or blind to all perspectives save his own. There are plenty of examples of such dogmatism in any age, and they are always disheartening. Instead, what we have in Mencken's case is a man who saw with both eyes, was ruthlessly honest about what he saw, but who could also be compassionate. In the often 278 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1990 affecting entries of The Diary of H. L. Mencken, we see personal sympathy intermingled with an often harsh realism; but the judgments rarely seem unfair.

This observation leads us, however, to the media hubbub that greeted the publication of this journal, which was sealed, by Mencken's request, from public view for 25 years after his death in 1956, and which for several years past has been available only to scholars and the rumor mill. No one who reads H. L. Mencken closely can doubt his individualism, his Jeffersonian belief in an "aristocracy of talent," and his sweeping rejec tion of egalitarian and collectivist notions. Yet, it is precisely Mencken's individualist social and polit ical views which led to his popular downfall with the advent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, as social planning along with its philo sophical underpinnings began to spread with an ever-increasing virulence. Today,we are beset with an egalitarian ethos that often transmogrifies observation of plain facts into a mortal sin. (As witness the attacks on Thomas Sowell for his anal yses of differences among racial and ethnic groups in defiance of collectivist presumptions, for instance.) This kind of blind egalitarianism seems to have infected much of the public reaction to the Diary.

At issue are Mencken's occasional dubious ref erences to friends and acquaintances by their eth nic or religious background, which in the minds of many commentators demonstrate his "racism." Throw in Mencken's antagonism to the welfare programs of the New Deal, his hostility to U.S. entry into World War II, and his failure to explicitly condemn Hitler as evil in the pages of this journal, and no further proof of his Nazi sympathizing is required. (To his credit, the diary's editor, Charles Fecher, does not himself jump to this last conclu sion; he merely supplies the requisite premises and evaluations. ) But racism, if the concept has any meaning at all, does not mean mere referenceto a person's race, even in an inappropriate context, but rather judging and treating an individual based on his race as opposed to "the content of his character." Perhaps Mencken may be justly accused of a mild racial prejudice or stereotyping, but there is ample evidence even in this journal that he was hardly a racist per se in his attitudes and behavior-for example, his praise of black journalist George H. L. Mencken Schuyler, or his general support as editor and critic of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, documented by Charles Scruggs in The Sage in Harlem.As for the charge of anti-Semitism, Sheldon Richman reminds us that Mencken expressed private con cern for the situation of German Jews as early as 1922, and in early 1939 attacked U.S. policy mak ers for failing to admit German refugees into the country. "[The initiative] should be taken by the political mountebanks who fill the air with hollow denunciations of Hitler, and yet never lift a hand to help an actual Jew," he wrote in the Sun.

Editor Fecher and his uncritical media parrots, however, grab at a few offhand characterizations in Mencken's private journal in order to brand him as a bigot at the expense of the example of his whole life. Even the "Communist presidium" of the Progressive Party's 1948 Presidential conven tion (attended by "all the worst idiots in the United States") refused to entertain a Maryland resolution "denouncing me as anti-Semitic and anti-Negro," as Mencken ironically notes in his entry of July 26, 1948,one of the last. The Sage of Baltimore would no doubt have chuckled over the current uproar, given the serene amusement with which he tolerated even the most vituperative abuse in his own day (he even anthol ogized some of it just for fun, in a little book called Menckeniana:A Schimpflexikon).In any case, the controversy cannot obscure the tremendous value of his journal, valuable especially for the light it sheds on how Mencken dealt with the adversity of his later years.

Mencken began his diary in 1930, at the age of 50,and as his influence was beginning to wane. Dis cussed in it are his brief marriage with his beloved Sara, her death from meningitis in 1935,the physi cal and sometimes mental decline of many of his friends and associates, his own ailments and physi cal deterioration, and the wartime censorship that prevented him from airing his political views in print. But despite many opportunities for bitter ness, Mencken possessed a genuine equanimity and peace of mind that sustained him through the worst of times and the saddest memories. Writing a decade after Sara's death, he notes that "I shall not forget her. My days with her made a beautiful episode in my life,perhaps the only one that deserves to be called romantic. It seems to me to be vain and even a bit silly to resist the irreme diable, but I think of her with tenderness and a kind of longing." There is a wistfulness here, but also acceptance, and dignity. In other entries, Mencken weighs the good and the bad in his life and concludes that despite his problems, the scale is tipped in his favor, with reasonable prospects for achievement in the years remaining to him. His public skepticism and cynicism notwithstanding, he was not only a realist but an optimist as well.

The journal is also of interest for Mencken's political gripes, mostly familiar; for its account of the author's work habits; and for his pungent assessments of everyone from his next-door neigh bor (a "complete moron" who led a life of "utter vacuity") to Sinclair Lewis and other literary nota bles, to his publisher Alfred Knopf, his colleagues at the Sunpapers,and his cohorts of the Saturday Night Club, where the sine qua non was music, beer, and conviviality. The Diary of H. L. Mencken is not the first Mencken book to read-his Menck en Chrestomathyis probably that-but it is an impor tant supplement to his other work, revealing intriguing facets of his personality not manifested elsewhere. Last but not least, and certainly not to be missed, is his perspicacious endorsement of "the OTHER BOOKS 279 Chinese maxim that it is foolish to do anything standing up that can be done sitting,or anything sit ting that can be done stretched out." How true.

The Diary'sfinal entry is dated November 15, 1948, eight days before the stroke that ended Mencken's productive career, though not his life. That end would not come until seven weary years later. Mencken's legacy,of course, is timeless. D DavidM. Brownis themanagingeditorofthe Laissez Faire Books catalogand a free-lancewriter. THE HOLOCAUST CONSPIRACY: AN INTERNATIONAL POLICY OF GENOCIDE by William R. Perl Shapolsky Publishers, 136 W. 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 1989 • 261 pages • $19.95cloth Reviewedby JorgeAmador O ne morning last December, Hong Kong police entered a camp for Vietnamese exiles and herded 51 of them onto a char tered flight to Hanoi. The nations of the world protested this treatment, but none has offered to take in the exiles, and so the British government pledges to continue the deportation program in order to "deter" more people from leaving Viet nam. The story is nothing new. Half a century ago, as Jews clamored to escape Nazi persecution and Hitler threw open the gates for their exodus, the West lamented the fate of the Jews-and shut its doors tighter.

It is well known that the Nazis corralled Jews into concentration camps, where unspeakable suf fering awaited them. But the "civilized" world's role in keeping them there has been overlooked. History is written by the winners, but a history that consists of half-truths enables us to avoid repeating only half the mistakes of the past. Here then is a most unusual work: a book by one of the winners exposing the whole, ugly truth. Perl, himself a Jewish refugee and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Intelligence Service dur ing World War II, examines the immigration poli cies of dozens of nations, tracing their history up to and during the war. While previous studies have focused on the policies of this or that country, Perl's is the first to put the facts on each all in one volume and to show how together they precipitat ed the Holocaust.

280 THE FREEMAN • JULY 1990 Be ready for some shocks. Contrary to popular belief, the National Socialistsdid not-at least ini tially-intend to exterminate the Jews: They would have been perfectly happy to see them all emigrate from Germany. However, "Except for the very last years of the Nazi regime," notes Perl, "the question was not at all how to get out, but rather where to go." As late as April 1944, SS leader Heinrich Himmler offered to empty the concentration camps in exchange for increasingly scarce basic goods. He proposed to barter one millionJews for two million bars of soap, 800 tons of coffee, 200 tons of tea, and 10,000trucks which, he pledged, would not be used against the Western Allies. The Allies rejected the offer out of hand. British authorities arrested the Jewish agent who served as go-between. "Save one million Jews?" fussily demanded the United Kingdom's colonial secre tary."What shallwe do with them? Where shall we put them?"

Canadian authorities admitted an average of 385 Jews per year from 1933to 1945."None is too many," quipped one official. Lest we think that they simply didn't want the burden of refugees, even Jews with capital to invest were rejected. As one businessman complained, "Canada should have sent trade missionaries to beg such people to come and not to wait for them to seek and beg us." Certainly many nations simultaneously dis played a practical indifference, even hostility, to the worst victims of National Socialism. At the Evian Conference on refugees in 1938,diplomats took turns at bemoaning the Jews' predicament, but only the Dominican Republic offered to let more immigrate. However, did all this amount to a "conspiracy," as Perl charges? We don't need conspiracy theory to explain what happened. Domestic political dynamics sufficeto explain the Western nations' prewar and wartime immigration policies. For instance, Americans' opposition during that period to immi gration generally,and to Jews specifically,has been amply documented. In an Opinion Research sur vey in March 1938,75 percent of Americans inter viewed opposed admitting "a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany." Given the over whelming public sentiment against immigration, it isn't surprising that most politicians were reluctant to liberalize admission quotas, or that the efforts of those who tried went nowhere.

Despite poor editing and proofreading, The HolocaustConspiracyis an important volume. It shows in the starkest terms what can happen when nations curtail the freedom to migrate. The answer to Perl's anxious question, "Could it happen again?" is that it is happening now. The lesson has yet to be learned. It barely has been heard. D Jorge Amador is a freelance columnist and editor of The Pragmatist, a current-affairs bimonthly (Box 387, Forest Grove, PA 18922-0387).