When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, refugees, and lessons for Western Governments today

Most of the time when WWII atrocities are brought up (usually by American politicians) it’s to talk about the terrible acts the Nazi committed against the Jews and how we must position ourselves to fight the next Hitler.  But more needs to be discussed about how Western governments failed to help ordinary people they were meant to protect, especially refugees. One of my favorite children’s author/illustrors is Judith Kerr, best known for When the Tiger Came to Tea and series of picture books on Mog the Cat. She also wrote a trilogy (based on the style of Wilder’s Little House series) about her life growing up as a refugee fleeing Nazi Germany.  

In When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, she talks about first fleeing to Switzerland, then to France and finally to England because her father, a secular Jew and famous writer had written against the Nazi party, prior to their coming to power.  In the second book of the series Bombs on Aunt Dainty, she talks about living in England and how because of their German nationality, her brother (along with thousands of others) was picked up and then interned on the Isle of Wight for serval months.  There were three classes that foreign nationals in any way related to Germany were categorized into: “Aliens”, “Enemy Aliens” and “Friendly Enemy Aliens.”  Most Friendly Enemy Aliens were German Jews.  

The thought that Jews would betray English or French to Hitler is ludicrous today (the French interned them as well and when the Nazis marched into Paris it made the job of rounding up Jews easier), but the “security of the general public” and that “Nazis can hide among the German Jews,” was what justified these actions.  

Any security program that tries to round up/black list people that is not based on actual evidence against individuals themselves, but based on a broad set of categories like “nationality” or “religion” or “race”, is stupid. It is also counter- productive.  Instead of actually looking for people who cause trouble, resources have to be wasted on people who are not a threat but just “look” like one.

Post script: After her brother was released from the internment camp, he went to fight the Nazis as an RAF (Royal Air Force) fighter pilot.  

The Elephant House, Edinburgh

I've been in Edinburgh the past two weeks doing research. This evening (my last in Edinburgh) I decided to do something touristy, so I went the the Elephant House for a lovely slice of cake and a hot chocolate with a touch of Baileys Irish cream.  The Elephant House's tag line is the "Birthplace of the first Harry Potter Novel," since this is where JK Rowling, while a single mother on welfare with her first baby in-tow, used to sit and write.  I ended up at a table next to a Canadian flight attendant, named Jake, and we talked about Harry Potter.  The table where we were sitting had drawers full of Harry Potter fan mail.

So here is my yummy food and drink, and some of the lovely letters.  I don't envy the person who's job it will be to archive this latter. : )  But considering all the letters and journals and financial records I've been going through at the W. & R. Chambers archive, these letters were such a treat to read.

Transcript of this letter:

Dear JK Rowling: 
Thank you for my childhood, for my happiness, & for making a shy and quiet 8-year old feel like she could be a Hermione.  The impact your words have had on my life are inexplicable.  You've united the world through the love of your imagination.  There truly are no worlds to explain what an effect Harry Potter has had on me.  I cannot thank you enough for bringing magic into my life.

Thank you (One last time in writing), 
Courtney Smith
Sunberry Austraila
28/10/2014

When my new flight attendant friend took off, I sat quietly and read more from my book on the history of the OED.  It's background reading for my PhD, you know, 19th century stuff.

A drawing of Harry's Owl Hedwig kept me company, and looked on in approval.

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

Just saw this film last night.  It's a very good documentary, and like everything that Arron worked for and valued, is free on the Internet. It's available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXr-2hwTk58

Arron was a child prodigy, and most definitely in his short life, showed that he was a genius. At 3 years old, Arron taught himself to read.  When he was only 14 years old, Aaron co-authored RSS, the specification used for updating news and blogs on the Web.  While still a teenager, he helped create the Creative Commons.  Before he was 20 he founded a company that would become Reddit.  When he was 20 he created the Open Library for the Internet Archive.  I found out about this film after looking at Howard Besser's website (my former advisor at UCLA).  Howard writes that:                                      
                                                                             
"Most of Aaron's work was driven by his passionate belief that society would be a better place if people had access to original material that shaped their lives and environment.  He sometimes employed direct action tactics to shame governmental and non-profit organizations into releasing works that they kept behind economic walls. And he was one of the major architects of the campaign to defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the co-founder of Demand Progress, an activist organization fighting against Internet censorship.                                                                   
                                                                              
In 2009 he downloaded millions of documents from a pay-per-view database of Federal Court decisions (PACER) and made these publicly available on a website dedicated to making government information freely available to the public. (we all know that government information can't be copyrighted, right?)                                                                       
                                                                              
The troubles that likely led to his death began about 18 months ago, when he brought a laptop to MIT and downloaded a massive number of journal articles from the library journal archive service JSTOR.  The US Department of Justice prosecuted him for this even though the alleged "victim", JSTOR, declined to press charges.  And recently, JSTOR announced that it would make more than 4.5 million of its articles freely available, likely a result of Aaron's action.  But the US Attorney continued to vindictively prosecute him on charges that might have resulted in 35 years jail time and $1 million fine."

I love the fact that Arron loved libraries, so much so that he advocated for them and for what they stood my previous post on Oranges and Peaches.  I also like it when people I've met get interviewed for documentaries.  Brewster Kahle speaks about Arron.  Of course listening to his parents and siblings and the people who know him is very moving.  Although the film is about his life and death, it's hopeful and fascinating and very much worth watching.

New Years resolutions: Reading Pulitzer Prize winners

Okay, I know, why am I doing a New Years resolution involving reading when I have so much already to read for my PhD?  Maybe I want to read these books and I just need an excuse.  So here it is: I will read 12 books (roughly one a month) this year that have won the Pulitzer Prize.  Whether I have time to blog about them, is an entirely different matter.

I've finished my book for January which is The Swerve.  I had time to read this when I was in Normandy staying with friends between Christmas and New Years Eve.  The Swerve jumps around quite a bit between the middle ages, the late Roman Empire, and the beginning of what historians would call the early Renaissance.  You follow a scholar (formerly attached to the Papal court) trying to locate a manuscript by the poet and philosopher, Lucretius, which summarises the philosophy of Democritus, in work called On the Nature of Things [translated].  It worked that I was in Normandy and visited Mont Saint-Michel, because I was thinking about being an early humanist, going to remote abbeys like Mont Saint-Michel... and freezing my butt off, especially in winter.

Before the age of printing monks used to copy out manuscripts by hand, and their production depended on whether their hands would get stiff from the cold or if their ink would freeze.  (Then they'd have to take it outside and thaw it, I guess, since no fires were allowed near the books or them when they worked in the scriptorium copying and copying). They used to write little notes on the margins, I guess I would too if I had to follow a vow of silence, with laments like "This parchment is too hairy!" (meaning the person who was supposed to have prepared the skin did a bad job preparing it) or "Thank God darkness is coming, so I don't need to write more today."  In a way, these whinging monks were doing graffiti on the manuscripts, but it's the kind of graffiti that wouldn't be see for years (or centuries later). 

I took an Ancient Philosophy course at USF.  I'm a bit outraged in retrospect that we didn't study Democritus... but as the course what taught by conservative Catholics, so conservative that the President of USF had to close down the program and restart it again years later, they wouldn't have taught it since Democritus doesn't sit well with neo-Platonism.  (Democritus never said God didn't exist, he just said that if deities did, they had better things to do than be concerned with what humans wanted or did. They would be outside of Nature and Nature, itself, was governed by certain laws.)  I knew that he theorized the existence of atoms, but not that Epicureanism philosophy (derived from Democritus's teachings) was actually about.  I remember being taught at USF that it meant pleasure seeking was a good thing and they were about seeking pleasure in the extreme.  In this book, Greenblatt actually shows that it was early Christian groups that distorted the original meaning of this philosophy. Epicureanism advised followers to live modestly, and in that way they would get pleasure from life, which was all there was.

Anyway, I did enjoy the book, although a few chapters dragged a bit.