Smuggling happens whenever the government decides that something -- and it really does matter what that something is -- is "not allowed" to the people. What invariably happens is that someone -- and it really doesn't matter who that someone is -- will procure that forbidden something at great personal risk, even braving death, so that the people can have that something they crave.
At around the the time of the War of 1812, the something was manufactured goods from abroad and illegal slaves. That someone was Jean Laffite, together with his Baratarian associates. Later they moved to Galveston, and kept doing the same. When they were eventually run off, do you imagine the smuggling stopped? No, it continued, only it was Beverly Chew of US Customs who profited from this "illicit" trade. And he charged more than the Laffites did.
You can read more about it in this groundbreaking new article by Pam Keyes on Historia Obscura:
At the Weihsien Internment Camp for Enemy Aliens, the forbidden item was eggs, and the smugglers were local Chinese farmers. When the Commandant of the camp cracked down on smuggling by shooting the farmers he caught smuggling, do you imagine that the smuggling ended?
I have the utmost respect for all who served their country in military positions and especially for those who faced death for the cause of liberty. I honor combat veterans and America's fallen heroes. However, up until now, I assumed that on Veterans' Day we celebrate the lives and great deeds of all the patriots who fought for our country. Yet yesterday, my daughter asked me what a veteran is, and today I looked it up. I found an insidious link between the term "veteran" and the idea of somebody exclusively employed by the government at public expense to make war. And a "war veteran" is somebody employed by any branch of the government military to make war on other countries on foreign soil. That would leave George Washington and Jean Laffite entirely out of the running for "war veteran".
A military veteran is any person who served for Any length of time in Any military service branch.
A war veteran is any GI (Government Issue) ordered to foreign soil or waters to participate in direct or support activity against an enemy.
But is that true? If you defend your own country on American soil not wearing a uniform and not deployed by any branch of the service or ordered to do so by the government, are you not a veteran?
If that is true, then Veterans' Day is not a holiday celebrating America's patriots, but one glorifying the government's power to use public funds to deploy military overseas.
Should you let sleeping dogs lie? If there is a family secret hiding in plain view in your grandmother's apartment in Tel Aviv, should you just let it be? Or should you follow the clues to wherever they may lead?
As I also had a grandmother who lived in Tel Aviv and died during the new millenium, it was interesting to me to compare the contents of the two apartments.
My grandmother was not a hoarder like Gerda Tuchler. In fact, she liked to throw things away. So there was no collection of gloves or cigars or shoes to discard. The only hoarder in the family was my grandfather, but he had died over thirty years before. He hoarded figurines, art and books. Especially books.
Even though my grandfather had had a considerable collection of books in German, my grandmother gave it away to a library years ago. My grandparents came from Poland, but they were both fluent in German. However, my grandmother was angry with the Germans, so she symbolically got rid of all the Germans books, even when she knew at the time that I was studying German and might like to have some of them. I did inherit the bulk of the remaining books, which were in a variety of languages, including Hebrew, English, French, Persian, Latin, Greek, Polish and Spanish. My grandfather was a philologist, after all, and he translated ancient Greek, Persian and Latin texts into Hebrew.
However, there was no Nazi propaganda among my grandmother's personal effects in her apartment in Tel Aviv, and that is where the stories of Gerda Tuchler and of Klara Katz are not at all the same. The Tuchler story in this respect is much more interesting.
Gerda and Kurt Tuchler
Photo Courtesy of IFC
The story is about a seeming collaboration between Zionist activisits and Nazis, who shared at least this small common goal: to get Jews out of Germany. To the Zionists, this was in order to found a Zionist state in Israel, where these Jews would be members of the ruling majority. For the Nazis, it was so that Germany could get rid of an ethnic minority. In one sense, these are completely different goals. But in another sense, there was a lot of commonality of interest, in that if many Jews left for Palestine, there would be fewer Jews left in Germany. Acting on this common interest, Kurt Tuchler, Arnon's grandfather, and Leopold von Mildenstein took their wives on a tour of Palestine, and von Mildenstein wrote about this sight seeing tour in the Nazi paper, the Angriff.
I have written about the historical context of this story here:
But this documentary is not about the historical context. It is deeply personal. And what Arnon Goldfinger uncovers is that even after the war, the Tuchlers and the von Mildenstein's continued their friendship, meeting and exchanging gifts, and ignoring the fact that Gerda Tuchler's mother was deported from Germany to meet her death at Theresienstadt, a Nazi run camp, while von Mildenstein continued to serve under Goebbels, as a propagandist.
Arnon Goldfinger relies on his mother, Hannah, the daughter of Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, to translate documents for him, because she is fluent in German, while he is not, but he is astonished when none of this supposedly new information about her parents seems to phase her.
Arnon Goldfinger shows Edda von Mildenstein evidence that her father was a Nazi
Photo Credit: ZeroOne Film
They go to visit Edda Milz von Mildenstein, the Mildensteins' daughter, and she, too, seems very cooperative, but while denying that her father was a Nazi, she shows a remarkable lack of surprise when presented with evidence that he was one after all.
The spin that is put on these apathetic reactions to shocking new information about the past is that this is an example of "second generation repression." But I think the answer is really much simpler. Both Hannah Tuchler and Edda von Mildenstein already knew all of the story. It was not new information for them at all. Children hear parents talking. They learn about events as they unfold. Later, they only talk about those things that they think will be helpful to their own children. They do not volunteer messy information. But that does not mean they do not know.
Hannah and Edda saw no benefit in airing all the embarrassing facts with Arnon. But when he insisted, they went along with it. They were gracious, but it was no shock to them, as they had lived with these open secrets all their lives. They were just children then. What were they supposed to do about it?
I think it is interesting how similar the reactions of both daughters actually are. They may not have met before the documentary, but they shared a common past. And the collaborators were, after all, their parents. They were only innocent children at the time.
More and more as I review history, I see how people who are supposedly on opposite sides of crucial historical battles were actually collaborating with each other, because they shared common interests. The British and the Americans were collaborating against the Baratarian privateers during the War of 1812. They were more interested in taxing citizens to pay for their fleets than they were in the rights of the people to import and export goods across the ocean tax free. The legitimacy of their governments, in the eyes of both the British and the American career military, trumped any rights of citizens to free trade.
The prisoners at Weihsien were collaborating with their Japanese captors, and they turned a blind eye when the Japanese executed Chinese farmers who had risked their lives to bring them eggs to eat. Later, it was the Japanese guards who sold prisoners contraband eggs at prices marked up to line their own pockets. But did the prisoners refuse to buy those eggs from people who had killed the farmers who sold them?
Today, citizens collaborate with their governments every day in stripping themselves and other citizens of their rights. And yet we get in trouble with our neighbors if we talk about it openly.
A breach of etiquette occurs every time someone mentions an atrocity. If I were to write: "And you, reading this right now, if you are an American who was of age in 1993: You didn't know that children were being killed by the ATF at Mt. Carmel in your name? I don't believe you, because it was shown to the whole nation on TV. The siege lasted for over a month. Why did you not rise up in arms and prevent this from happening? You didn't know, or you just didn't care?" -- People would think I was just being rude. Clearly most individuals are not responsible for the acts of their governments, even though we give lip service to the notion of "democracy". But that whole "by the consent of the people" thing is a sham. If there were a social contract, and if we were tacitly giving our sanction to it by doing nothing, then all of us would be guilty right now every time a Federal agent killed an innocent citizen.
What's really interesting to me about this documentary by Arnon Goldfinger is how it deals with the etiquette of discussing past atrocities. There's a scene in the movie where Arnon is asking his mother how to bring up the Nazi issue. They both agree that using the word "Nazi" is really gauche. It's too stigmatizing. So they decide to use other words to discuss the matter. In the end, Arnon asks Edda's husband: "What was Leopold's job?" "His job?" "I mean, what did he do during the war?" The answer: It was mostly paperwork.
Well, of course it was paperwork. Von Mildenstein was a propagandist, not an executioner.
Do the children of ATF agents also get asked that question sometimes. do you think? What was your father's job in Waco in 1993? How do Janet Reno's grandchildren, if she has any, regard her job as Attorney General? Was it mostly paperwork?
The real problem is not, in my opinion, that people under unjust regimes are repressed, in the psychological sense of not knowing what is going on, because they bury it deep in their subconscious. The real problem is that it's not polite to talk about it, and many believe that by looking on the rosy side of the picture, they are actually making life better for everybody else.
Today, most of my friends on Facebook respond positively to pretty pictures of puppies, kittens, flowers and sunsets. They post memes that say that reality is what you make of it -- not by fighting on the field of battle for your rights and the rights of others less powerful than yourself -- but by showing loving kindness toward every person you meet.
I believe that von Mildentsein and the Tuchlers were always kind to everyone they met. They lived and died by that motto.
"I don't wish them any harm. They just don't belong here. They should go back to their natural habitat." I hear this a lot about chimpanzees. But did you know that the same arguments have been made in the past by seemingly well meaning people, about other human beings?
One example is Henry Clay, and his organization, The American Colonization Society that was instrumental in setting up American freed blacks in Liberia. I have written about this before on one of my blogs, here:
It is all very well and good to set up a State where a group of people can live in freedom and be the majority in power. But it is quite another thing to insist that all members of an ethnic minority leave for that safe haven, and that those who don't leave should be sent to camps where they will be exterminated. That is what happened when the Nazis came to power in Germany. On the one hand, they supported Zionism as the solution to the "Jewish problem". On the other hand, they sent everyone who did not choose to become a Zionist to death camps. These were two sides of the same coin, and in fact a medallion was printed with a star of David on one side and a swastika on the other, to illustrate the point.
Leopold von Mildenstein was a member of the German nobility, who while working as a leader of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, showed great support for Zionism, as a mutually beneficial solution to what he saw as the problem of the presence of Jews in Germany. Von Mildenstein showed a genuine interest in Zionism and even attended Zionist Conferences in order to learn more about the movement. In 1933 Mildenstein and his wife toured Palestine, accompanied by Kurt Tuchler, of the Zionist Federation of Germany, and his wife. They became lifelong friends.
On his return, Mildenstein's suggestion that the solution to the Jewish problem lay in mass migration to Palestine was accepted by his superiors within the SS. From August 1934 to June 1936 Mildenstein was put in charge of the Jewish Desk with the title of Judenreferent (Jewish Affairs Officer) in the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Security service of the SS, Section II/112; his title meaning that he was responsible for reporting on "Jewish Affairs," under the overall command of Reinhard Heydrich.[8] During those years Mildenstein favoured a policy of encouraging Germany's Jewish population to emigrate to Palestine, and in pursuit of this policy he developed positive contacts with Zionist organizations. SS officials were even instructed to encourage the activities of the Zionists within the Jewish community, who were to be favoured over the assimilationists, said to be the real danger to National Socialism. Even the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 had a special Zionist provision, allowing the Jews to fly their own flag.[2][6]Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Mildenstein
When Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine turned out to be proceeding too slowly for the Nazis, von Mildenstein's milder methods gave way to those of Eichmann, his replacement as an expert on the :"Jewish problem". After the war, when millions of German Jews had been exterminated, the von Mildensteins, then living in West Germany, and the Tuchlers, who now lived in Tel Aviv, continued to correspond. Their relationship remained cordial until the very end.
When we think about Jane Goodall and her expertise on chimpanzees, we should keep the example of Leopold von Mildenstein in mind. One does not need to be filled with hatred for a minority in order to do great damage, and a few images of grateful chimpanzees hugging Jane Goodall for her kindness to them should not blind us to the fact that the Jane Goodall Foundation has as its goal the return of all chimpanzees to Africa, and the elimination of all chimpanzees not in the wild. In pursuit of this goal, they plan to have any chimpanzees living in private homes or research facilities sent to camps called sanctuaries, from which they will never emerge, and where they will never be allowed to reproduce. That is their final solution to the chimpanzee problem.
How we feel about Leopold von Mildenstein should ultimately determine our attitude towards the Jane Goodall Foundation and its efforts on behalf of chimpanzee repatriation in Africa and their elimination outside of their native habitat.
Sometimes, at the very moment when a leaf falls off a tree in autumn, a great gust of wind sweeps it up, and it appears to fall upward, instead of down. This is the same way we seem to be uplifted when we fall in love. Only later do we realize that we are falling, sinking into the ground.
When I think of that aspect of falling in love, Luna Tsai, a character in Our Lady of Kaifeng , reminds me of the song "A Fallen Leaf".
What seems like the warm affection of an autumn breeze can be the cruel blow of inevitable death and decay.
But you would never know this watching the leaves as they fall by ones and twos from the sky, far above the tree from which they sprang.
They seem to be flying so high, they could never touch the ground again.
"Just before winter sets in, the butterflies are most active."
"Can anyone deny the beauty of a butterfly? Or of the flowers on which it depends?"
Those are the words of Commandant Izu, a character in my work in progress, Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way.
Does observing the beauty of the seasons help diminish suffering in the present? Do governments nudge those under their power by giving them things or taking things away? Should we be thankful for what we have, and if we are very full of gratitude for the little we have, will this ensure that we are compliant and do not rebel?
Of course, inflation is a massive government engineered nudge to force people to spend, rather than save money. But is that merely a psychological manipulation? Can a single, isolated consumer resist the need to spend more on staple goods once the currency is inflated? Does scarcity cause prices to go up? Can rationing keep prices down? Is the price of food higher because of inflation, or do we cause inflation ourselves when we spend more and more on the same foods? If we tried hard enough, could we just refuse to spend the money?
If the intended effect of food rationing is a fixed price on goods, can this intended effect ever be achieved, given that for every forbidden fruit, there exists a black market, where it can be purchased, if the price is right?
It introduces two new characters to the tale of Jean Laffite: George Poindexter and Fulwar Skipwith. As I am a bit of a name fancier, I am fascinated by the name "Fulwar Skipwith", and I have every expectation of learning more about him in future installments.
But for now, here is what it is good to know about pardons:
Pardons are not usually issued after someone has done a good turn. In many cases, they have to be issued in advance, so that a person under arrest or in prison can go forth and do good. This was the case for the Baratarian privateers.
Sometimes a pardon is just a roundabout way of admitting that what you accused or convicted someone of is not true. The Baratarians were smugglers and privateers, not pirates.
The great value of the pardon to the person issuing it is that he may now resume a regular relationship with the person pardoned.
We do not pardon people and then banish them. We do not pardon people and then execute them. Pardoning is not in order to calm the anxiety of the person who felt wronged -- it is so that the person pardoned can become part of regular society, and can contribute and serve.
George Poindexter did not appear to understand these elementary facts about how pardons work, because he tried to get the government to retroactively take back pardons that were already issued. If the Baratarians had not been pardoned, they could not have served in the Battle of New Orleans. It may have been that the anticipated service was necessary to take full advantage of the pardon, but no service could have been rendered had the presidential pardon not already existed.
Today, we hear people say things like: "I do not forgive for the other person's sake. I do it for my own sake, so that I can know inner peace. I forgive, but I do not forget, and I don't ever need to see them again." Forgiveness is a spontaneous emotion, but like all emotions it serves a function: to rehabilitate people, so that we can work with them. To forgive people, and then to refuse to have anything to do with them again is not forgiveness.
