Nearly a month ago John Tudor Jones complained that no one in his organization, investments for the rich, could write. Their memos were horrible. He wanted his employees to take journalism classes. Journalism can teach someone to write, but it is a laborious slow process.

John Tudor Jones has been around investments since the early Eighties. He was linked with various and sundry supermodels and society beautifies. Did he marry one of them, or the girl next door? Hiding in Connecticut he hasn’t been in the press much recently until this complaint.

I wrote Mr. Jones a letter giving seven rules and a brief way of improving writing:

1. The American language is one of verbs. Center each sentence around the verb.
2. Eliminate all adjectives and adverbs. Writers spend more time how to modify a noun (using adjectives) or a verb ( using adverbs) than is needed. The modifications are unnecessary.
3. Logic dictates the word order in all American sentences. [This is unlike languages which have a system of declensions and complicated conjugations, and word order is haphazard.]
4. The verb “to be” in all its forms and tenses means “equals.” If employing the verb to be does not produce an equation, the math is wrong.
5. PUNCTUATION:   a. Do not use commas to distinguish prepositional phrases.  b. Do not use commas followed by a participle or a preposition to add 25-50 words to the end of a sentence.  c. Use periods not semi-colons, commas or colons (otherwise known as up-yours – not in the letter).
6. Know the difference between “they are going” (present perfect) and “they go” (present continuous) [according to new nomenclature]. Know when to use each.  The present continuous is found in written language because it is direct. If the present perfect prevails, it is because the writing is an unedited first draft.
7. User the Germanic/Ango-Saxon vocabulary of English as much as possible. I paraphrase Mark Twain, At a dime a word I always use city rather than metropolis.

Continue reading →

This very readable book presents an excellent survey of art and performance in Paris during the German occupation, June 1940 to August, 1944.

Who were the artists? Who stayed and who left? What did they do, produce or perform? What were the contacts with the Germans, and the resistance? Who was arrested and had to be released through appeals to the Germans?

The book eventually breaks into specific medium, and each art is discussed. Of course of all the artists writers proved the most problematic. Painting and sculpture may be too avant-guards but what does it mean? Poetry can mean nothing, even to the poet. Music can be dissonant or advanced twelve-tone stuff, but what’s its meaning? Dance retained it classical roots; opera of the fantasy kind always drew German crowds; drama was widely performed but suffered by the departure of the best playwrights. But writing has to mean something.

The Germans were onto writers, and after the War writers were as harshly treated as anyone except politicians – more than Renault who made money assembling tanks for the Germans. Mostly the French were civilized. Afterwar declamations and stinks seemed not to last long. There was disgrace and discomfort but by 1950 most recriminations had fallen but the way side.

Two problems arise from this survey. First there are references to parody, analogy and metaphor within specific art forms revealing disapproval, nasty anti-German messages. Admittedly a more complete exposition of these points would lengthen the book. The bibliography and few end notes may help – they are arranged by chapter. [An example of this criticism: The American broadcaster William L. Shirer reported from completely censored reports from Berlin. The Germans were happy until they learned Shirer had changing the meaning with intonation, inflection and inference inherent in English but not German. Shirer was close to arrest when he left Germany in December 1940.]

Second, there is no exposition of the mindset of the French people to culture especially before the War – what the French considered and what they disregarded. An understanding of a nation’s acceptance of culture and entertainment goes a long way to explaining how the French survived and why the Germans failed in their attempts to reduce French culture. E.g. An example of a cultural expectancy in the United States today a primary component of culture and entertainment is expediency.

One misstatement of fact, p. 313, Chapter 15, the American Army was in Paris a day before the French Army marched in in August 1944. See Andy Rooney who wrote about it for Stars and Stripes, and discussed the fact on Sixty Minutes.

NO RESCUE FOR THIS FILM. Adrian Brody. When this actor has good material to act in, he is excellent.

HOWEVER, Wrecked starts with Adrian in a car wreck in a forest. He does not leave the car for 30 minutes. There are two dead people in the car.

Adrian does not leave the vicinity of the car for 45 minutes (in an 83 minute movie). There are no scenes with other actors, just glimpses. He does not crawl uphill to the road, presumably where the car came from. He does nothing (except put a splint on his injured leg). He goes downhill to a stream, purported is befriended by a dog, has hallucinations which don’t appear much different from the rest of the forest film. At minute 75 he crawls to the road where he finds a dead person.

Supposedly Adrian has amnesia. Next comes a mountain lion which is satisfied by dragging the road kill (dead person) into the bushes. (Minute 80) The sunset looks nice (minute 81). Adrian is rescued by a passing motorist (minute 82). Perhaps that is a hallucination. The movie ends at minute 83.

This volume is an intelligent, well-presented, well-written survey of the Jewish peoples in Europe (Urals to the Atlantic) from the early eighteenth century into the twentieth century.

Because Jews were isolated by Europeans, they have a separate history and society on that continent, less so in North America. Yet author-Sacher gives details in historical settings, by group, nationality and time. He presents the significant personages, their ideas and influences. There are anomalies: The Russians persecuted their Jews, driving them off the lands and away from cities (no where to live), yet the Russians did not want the Jews to leave Russia because there would be shortfalls in conscription for the Russian Army. There are explanatory facts: Breaking of the glass at Jewish wedding represents the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, not penetrating the hymen. There is a difference between the (a) Temple (Second Temple) in Jerusalem and a synagogue. Historically, there has been a difference between synagogues in America and those in Germany and elsewhere.

This book was first published in 1967. As most text of history approaches the present day, it tends to be interpretative. However, Sacher is careful, “The Birth of Israel:”

By the war’s end there were two groups of Arab political leaders in Palestine: those allied with the Palestine

Arab Party and those allied with the Arab National Fund, headed by the spokesman of the old Istiqlal party. The

Mufti was still the official leader of the Arab community; but as a war criminal he was unacceptable to the British.

The Arabs found it impossible to agree upon a new executive for the national movement. In the absence of

political leadership at home, they tended to look to near-by countries for guidance and support …After 1945…

all major decisions on the organization of Arab anti-Zionist resistance was made not in Jerusalem but Cario;

for it was in 1945 that the League of Arab States came into existence…The British themselves had originally

sponsored this league as an anti-Soviet and indeed, an anti-French federation…(463)

It is appalling that the Palestinians had no single body to negotiate for its people. Keeping the Mufti after World War Two was stupid. The guy spent years in Berlin until the Russians overran the city. He was buddies with all the big Nazis; he broadcast for them. They used his name and authority far and wide.

When looking at Nazi Germany what every Semite must ask is, can anyone believe that Hitler and the Nazis would have stopped after killing only Jews? NO. Hitler and the Nazis happily would have slaughtered countless other peoples, if given the chance, as the Nazi record demonstrates: Millions of Russians, Czechs, Slovakians and Poles. They killed French, despite the fact that the Franks of the Sixth Century were a true Germanic people who moved west; the Normans of Normandy were a Nordic people; they killed Italians in Northern Italy despite the fact that the Lombards of the Sixth Century were a Germanic people who moved south. The Germans did not kill many Scandinavians because those people were truly Nordic. But the Germans freely killed Russians, Poles and others who were more more Nordic in appearance than the Semite-appearing Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels.

If the Germans had defeated into British in Egypt in 1942, the Germans would have gone east and killed millions of Semites, until nature’s only defense, skin cancer, took out the murdering Nordic conquerors.

All human beings should read of Nazi atrocities and realize and appreciate the evil. The reaction of the Jews to record and write about those years is a great contribution to human beings and their history. That knowledge and learning tells us in part the human race can do better. During that war the Semitic peoples, not in Europe, were not immune; they were not protected. Indeed, the Semitic peoples should read this book and others, study and embrace the Holocaust as an attack on their ethnicity. They will learn from that knowledge they have much in common with fellow Semites, whatever the religion.