The USSR’s pet “ex-“Nazi Secretary General of the United Abominations

Isabella Tabarovsky in The Tablet reveals what I wasn’t aware of, but does not surprise me in the least. Not only had UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim much more of a Nazi past than he ever admitted to (that’s public knowledge by know) but the USSR and its intelligence services leveraged what they did know to the hilt to turn him into… a Soviet asset.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/moscow-man-united-nations

Read the whole thing — but here is a taste.

Few stories better capture the moral bankruptcy of an institution born from the ruins of World War II and the Holocaust than the Soviet quid-pro-quo relationship with Waldheim as its head. Years after his decade as the United Nations’ chief ended, the world learned that Waldheim had lied about his wartime past. A little later, it would emerge that Moscow had likely known all along.

Waldheim always claimed that his service in the Wehrmacht was brief and had ended when he was wounded on the Eastern Front in late 1941, after which he returned home, pursued legal studies, and got married. In fact, he had returned to the front in 1942 and served out the rest of the war as an intelligence officer in the Balkans: first in Yugoslavia during brutal Nazi massacres and anti-partisan reprisals, then in Salonica during the deportations of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz. It also turned out that before the war, in Vienna, Waldheim was a member of the National Socialist German Students’ League and the Sturmabteilung—the infamous Brownshirts. A later commission concluded that he did not personally take part in the atrocities in the Balkans, but his lack of embarrassment at being exposed as a liar and his insistence that he had seen and known nothing beggared belief—all the more so because his immediate superior, Gen. Alexander Löhr, was a convicted war criminal executed by the Yugoslavs in 1947.

From the moment he moved into his office on the 38th floor of the Glass Building—the U.N. headquarters housing its administrative arm, the Secretariat—Waldheim proved unmistakably subservient to Moscow. With him at the helm, the Soviets expanded their intelligence footprint at the Secretariat, planting hundreds of additional KGB agents under diplomatic and bureaucratic covers. Under his watch, they completed a mission they had begun years earlier: turning the United Nations into a weapon in their long-running campaign to pit the world against Israel—America’s main ally in the Middle East—and Zionism, which, especially after 1967, the Soviets regarded as a major ideological threat. Observers took note of Waldheim’s spinelessness. By 1978, French intelligence had concluded that Waldheim was “an agent of influence under Soviet control.”

For the Soviets, eventual revelations about Waldheim’s Nazi past were, in all likelihood, old news. For them, he had been a known quantity since 1947, when he spent a month in Moscow as part of the Austrian delegation negotiating the country’s sovereignty, as the World Jewish Congress’s Eli Rosenbaum—a former federal prosecutor who would later lead the Department of Justice’s Nazi-hunting unit and who revealed Waldheim’s Nazi past in 1986—detailed in his book Betrayal. Stalin’s intelligence services would have pored over every detail of his biography in search of compromising information, both as a matter of their invariable practice and because a Nazi past was a dream piece of leverage to have over upwardly mobile Europeans.

Decades later, former Yugoslav intelligence officers told The Washington Post that they had marked Waldheim as a potential recruit for Moscow in 1947, the same year he traveled there, while his former wartime commanding officer faced a firing squad in Yugoslavia. They were certain the Soviets had followed through—a suspicion indirectly reinforced two decades later, during the Prague Spring, when Waldheim, now Austria’s foreign minister, ordered the country’s Prague embassy to bar entry to Czechs who were being hunted by Soviet security forces. The ambassador disobeyed, but the gesture would not have gone unappreciated in Moscow.

[…]

The most vivid account of how the Soviets weaponized the United Nations against the West comes from Arkady Shevchenko’s memoir, Breaking With Moscow. Shevchenko was the ultimate Soviet insider; he was a protégé of Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and his big break came at the age of 29, when he accompanied Premier Nikita Khrushchev on his visit to the United Nations (a journey complete with 10 drunken days aboard the decrepit, storm-tossed passenger liner Baltika sailing from Kaliningrad to New York). In 1973, after several tours of duty at the United Nations, Moscow recommended him to Waldheim for the post of undersecretary-general for political and Security Council affairs. The appointment placed Shevchenko in a position second in power only to the secretary-general himself. Disillusioned with the corrupt and oppressive Soviet system, he began cooperating with American intelligence and in 1978 defected to the United States—the highest-ranking Soviet diplomat to do so up to that point.

For Moscow, Shevchenko wrote, the United Nations was the “best watchtower on the West.” It was a great place to collect political and technical intelligence—but that was only part of the story. As Waldheim’s undersecretary, Shevchenko was responsible for using the Secretariat “to widen the scope of Soviet ideological and propaganda warfare” within the organization. That meant ensuring that nothing “detrimental to Soviet interests” ever appeared on the United Nations’ agenda or in its studies or reports.

The converse was true as well: He was to make sure that favorable information was included, whether it was true or not. His other duties included promoting KGB undercover agents to more influential posts, protecting them if the CIA or FBI got on to them, and “indoctrinating” non-Soviet staff into a pro-Soviet point of view. He was also tasked with working with newly independent, postcolonial member states to make sure they didn’t fall under the influence of Western “bourgeois ideology” but aligned themselves with Moscow and its “progressive ideas.”

The KGB had penetrated the United Nations long before Waldheim rose to the top. Shevchenko recalled that out of 28 men who worked in his section of the Soviet mission in 1968, 21 were KGB or GRU (military intelligence) officers. Other nations planted spies at the United Nations as well, he noted, “but the Soviet Union had the largest contingent and the most thorough penetration of the organization.”

The KGB installed countless agents in influential positions across the Secretariat. One served as a trusted personal assistant to the secretary-general, often traveling to American universities in his U.N. capacity on KGB assignments. Another held the key strategic post of director of external relations, crafting United Nations’ communications strategy and press releases and mingling with American intellectuals and financiers at prestigious conferences. KGB officers in the personnel office scanned job applications for “exploitable weaknesses” and rerouted “promising” candidates to a senior KGB recruiter, also implanted at the United Nations, Shevchenko wrote. After 13 years on the job in New York, the recruiter was transferred “to an equally strategic personnel post in Geneva, overseeing hiring and promotion in the U.N.’s European headquarters.” Western protests failed to put an end to this.

Again, read the whole thing — it[‘s well worth your time. One more quote:

Why didn’t the Americans go to bat for [opposing candidate] Jakobson? In Rosenbaum’s view, they might have fallen victim to a lack of imagination. In Washington’s eyes, the organization was useless and ineffectual, so it didn’t ultimately matter who headed it. What they failed to appreciate, he noted, was how “even a politically powerless head of an impotent international organization could provide important intelligence assistance” to America’s foreign adversaries.

One person who did grasp the broader implications of Soviet ideological subversion of the United Nations was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served as the U.S. ambassador when the “Zionism is racism” resolution was adopted (and was privy to Shevchenko’s collaboration with U.S. intelligence). In a 1977 essay for Commentary titled “The Politics of Human Rights,” Moynihan explained how the Soviet-led process of isolating Israel at the United Nations was a proxy for “a more generalized effort to deprive the democratic nations of their legitimacy as democracies.” The anti-Zionist venom that the USSR and its client states normalized at the United Nations went hand in hand with the tactic of turning the tables on the democratic West in matters of human rights. “The charge could range from genocide to unemployment,” Moynihan wrote, “but it always followed the Orwellian principle: hit the democracies in the one area where they have the strongest case to make against the dictatorships.”

Tonight is Yom Kippur. Gmar chatima tova — may you be sealed in the Book of Life.

And now for something completely different: The broader context of Henry VIII’s “great matter”

Too much craziness in the world right now to keep track of.

So something different for a change. We were taught in school that Henry VIII tore away from Rome because, basically, he wanted to boink Anne Boleyn. Of course. this was what in Dutch one calls a “monkey sandwich story” (broodje aap verhaal). Henry lusting after Anne, as the video correctly points out, was maybe 5% of the story.

I knew pretty much everything in the video (aside from the annoying AI imagery) but it is a good quick recap. Let me give my own crack at it:

1. Protestantism, as we call it today, was not new to England. There had been the Lollards, the followers of John Wycliffe, over a century earlier.
2. In post-Roman Britain, there had never been an uncontested female monarch, leaving aside the dubious example of Matilda. Thus, fathering a male heir was essential, especially considering:
3. England had just come out of decades of civil war known as the War of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster (one of the two inspirations, incidentally, for the Game of Thrones series). The Tudor dynasty, with tenuous links to Lancaster, then married into York, was not on secure footing.
4. If all Henry wanted was some variation in the bedroom, this was already his. He openly had mistresses and this was expected from somebody of his rank. One of the said mistresses had been no other than Anne’s sister Mary Boleyn. 
5. By all accounts, the marriage with Catherine of Aragon, dynastic as it blatantly was, was comparatively happy. Unfortunately, her only surviving child was a girl, the future Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary. (Several sons were stillborn or died in infancy. Mary herself was sickly all her life.)
6. Henry did, in fact, father a son with one of his mistresses — and acknowledged him, under the name Henry Fitzroy ]from French fils du roi = son of the king]. He even considered legitimizing him (i.e., placing him in the line of succession), but in the end Fitzroy died at age 17, some historians suspecting with some human assistance.
7. Henry, in fact, remained what today we would call an Anglo-Catholic all his life and was eager for a solution to “The King’s Great Matter” within the church. He had in fact written (or put his name to) an essay condemning the “Lutheran heresies” for which the Pope granted him the title “Defender of the Faith” borne by British monarchs to the present day.
8. However, the Pope was a virtual prisoner of Catherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His rogue troops had in fact sacked Rome — and the Pope himself had escaped by the skin of his teeth and the courage of the Swiss guards who sacrificed their lives for him, as memorably told in the Sabaton song “The Last Stand”. The Pope was in no position to defy the will of Charles V.
9. There was a pre-existing legal tradition in England that limited the temporal power of Rome (or any other foreign polity) within the King’s realm. Google “Premunire”.
10. Finally, but not least, Henry VIII had incurred huge war debts fighting the French and needed a solution for that.

So it was in this context, after cardinal Wolsey repeated attempts to secure an annulment for the marriage came to nothing. that his former assistant Thomas Cromwell and the new Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer came up with the formula of separating the English church from Rome and making it subject to the sovereign. The way I look at it is more a repeat of the Great Schism that split the Eastern Orthodox Church from the Catholic one — then over time, Protestant theology becoming more influential. 

The latter happened despite Henry more than because of him. And the major developments in this direction happened after Henry’s death, with the short reign of the very Protestant young Edward VI, being followed by Mary the first attempt to reunite with Rome — and finally, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I, working out a pragmatic compromise under which all would recognize the authority of the Church of England, but all were free to believe in private as they saw fit. “I have no desire to make windows into people’s souls” as she herself put it.

As for the fiscal problems: The Dissolution of the Monasteries which ensued in two stages allowed Henry VIII both to fill refill the dangerously depleted treasury and to buy the loyalty of new aristocrats through outright grants, or sales at sweetheart prices, of former monastic holdings.

The rest, as they say,is history.

Shabbat Shalom

HRG places the reckless and arguably libelous NAZ”A [=collateral damage] movie in context

Buried under too much stuff, and too much craziness in the world to comment on. But the intrepid Haviv Rettig Gur does a much better job than I ever could of treating one story: the pathetic NAZ”A movie. [The name is from the Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, collateral damage.] He also keeps a cooler head than I can, because personally I regard Jews who make common cause with our enemies as literally the lowest life-form on Earth, even below pig virus and [but I repeat myself] card-carrying fascists [be they brown=National Socialists, red=Communists, or green=Islamosupremacists].

Listen to the whole thing — you won’t be disappointed. Note he specifically disavows the claim that no mistakes were made, no strikes were carried out using recklessly loose targeting criteria, etc. — given the sheer intensity of the conflict, that was almost unavoidable. Instead he takes the filmmakers to task for both reckless extrapolation from incomplete unverifiable statements of low-level military intelligence personnel and a complete lack of context. [The use of AI for target prioritizations and success/collateral damage predictions is almost certainly true, but is mainstream military technology at this point. ] In particular, he notes that one senior general was so convinced Israel was facing an imminent invasion from Lebanon (which might have imperiled the country’s very existence) that he considered thousands of IDF casualties in a preemptive attack an acceptable price to pay. (This is public knowledge, and it was in fact the much-maligned Netanyahu who vetoed the step, correctly gambling that the Party of Goat was not planning a ground operation.)

He said he would actually have preferred concrete info on specific missteps, but like me, does not believe this was the actual agenda of the filmmakers. (Look, anybody who cooperates with al-Guardian for something like that is either dangerously naive or malicious.) He also quotes a review by Raviv Drucker in what would be the friendliest possible medium, the far-left Haaretz (or as I call it, HaEres= The Venom) — a review almost as critical as Haviv’s own.

And near the end, Haviv actually comes to the same conclusion as Shalom Yerushalmi did yesterday in the Times of Israel: that the movie is an [unintentional, one assumes] in-kind donation to the Netanyahu campaign, who can now paint the entire opposition with the brush of being in the same camp as those who want to put our soldiers in the International Clown Court.

But if these filmmakers are the malignant moral narcissists that I reckon them to be, they won’t even care if what they are doing ensures re-electing the disastrous outgoing coalition — Kachsuckers, Khomeinists, and all. They have their 25 minutes of standing ovation in Venice. Let them have it and be damned.

---

[*] Culture Minister Miki Zohar actually called for stripping the filmmakers of their Israeli citizenship: while I have heard several neighbors and support personnel at work call for the same thing, this is legally essentially impossible and Miki Zohar knows this — this is just a gratuitous cheap shot.

NC statehouse candidate visits KL Dachau, muses would be great to put all Trump supporters there

It’s come to this (via Instapundit). Erik Svane at “No pasarán” highlight the story of a “Democrat” candidate visiting Dachau and musing this is where Trump supporters belong.

https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2026/09/if-someone-suggests-using-nazi.html

[blockquote]
North Carolina Democrat state legislative candidate Shelly Headen posted a Facebook story from a vacation showing her in front of ovens in a German concentration camp memorial, saying, 

“Visiting Dauchau [sic] Concentration Camp in Germany… This is where Trump supporters belong.” 

 … In social media photos, Headen is seen smiling as she stands in front of what appears to be crematorium ovens, which were used by the Nazi SS to burn the bodies of Jews and other prisoners who died or were murdered at the camp. 

Headen faces incumbent Republican state Rep. John Blust in a suburban Guilford County district. On her Facebook page, Headen says she is a CPA and business owner “running to restore human decency,” an ironic statement after saying political opponents should be in concentration camps while posing and smiling in front of ovens at a Holocaust memorial site.

Indeed. Doesn’t this raise the question: if someone is a Nazi, or a neo-Nazi, isn’t the logical conclusion that it is the ones suggesting using (ahem) a… Nazi concentration camp for their opponents?! Wouldn’t they be the prime candidates?! Has it occurred to any leftist that it might be time for an Are we the baddies moment?

The rhetoric expressed by Headen is growing among Democrat candidates and left-wing agitators across the nation. 

 … The apparent call to burn Trump supporters isn’t her only expression of support for violence. In another Facebook post, Headen appears to call for an unspecified terrorist attack against America, writing,

“I think our only hope is an attack on US soil… preferably Alabama, Louisiana… where the stupid people are.”

It transpires that after after inflammatory social media posts she made resurfaced, the Guilford County Democratic Party is withdrawing its support for the statehouse candidate.

[…]

(And liberals, leftists, and statists wonder why, and think we are exaggerating when, some of us issue warnings about socialism and when we warn about it being a path to tyranny?!)

[/blockquote]

I mean, this is parody-proof. It’s not like she was drunk in a bar, ranting b*llocks at 3am — even then it would be gross, but she could at least claim it was drunken hyperbole. No, that dog won’t hunt now.

And good on the party for pulling support from her, you’d say… Though Insty snarks “And/or she’s saying out loud what far too many on the left believe:” https://instapundit.com/822536/

To be fair, other material listed there (such as comparing herself to Jesus) suggests that she is more than one bit short of a valid checksum.

9/11 a quarter century later; out with the old year’s curses, in with the new

25 years ago.. “masgramondou” shares his memories of another day that shall live in infamy .

https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/25-years-on?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

This is the song that always comes to my mind when I think of that day..

By a bizarre coincidence, tonight is also the Jewish New Year (which also falls on a Shabbat this time).

Out with the old year’s curses

In with the new year’s blessings

Never forget

Shabbat shalom

Shana tova umetuka umevorekhet vekol tuv!

A wonderful sweet and blessed New Year

… and eternal defeat to the forces of barbarism against civilization

Who is Gadi Eisenkot? “Teddy bear with a spine of iron”

Just quickly, as we’re traveling: the Times of Israel has a fairly detailed profile of Bibi’s primary challenger for the Prime Ministership, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot [idiosyncratic transliteration of the typical Moroccan-Jewish surname Azencot = “deer” in Berber].

https://www.timesofisrael.com/teddy-bear-with-a-spine-of-iron-how-gadi-eisenkot-has-emerged-as-netanyahus-chief-election-rival

There are many reasons why his candidacy resonates, despite or because of him being a political novice: strong security background, religiously traditional, non-Ashkenazi, unassuming personality that contrasts with Bibi’s polished but somewhat haughty public image, political centrist… and of course, plain fatigue with the longest-serving PM of any democratic country since the UK’s Robert Walpole in the early 18th Century.

Personally I’m more of a Bennett guy, but I’m willing to give this guy a chance. Bibi has alienated even reluctant supporters like myself. (I am not a ‘never-Bibi’ guy, and yes, I have voted for his ticket in the past, particularly in 2015 when clumsy 0bamunists tried the out-of-touch “V15” campaign.)

Dafuq did I just read?

Are they really this dumb and ignorant… or is this an elaborate trolling operation? Who can tell anymore?

Tucker Carlson asks why algebra puts letters into numbers.

Jess Elofson explains: "I think just to fuck with you."

They discuss how they've never met anyone in their life who uses algebra, which is "fake math" for people "in the matrix."

They conclude that caring about algebra… pic.twitter.com/p6VKLrgrLd

— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) September 7, 2026

If these clowns really don’t know anybody who uses algebra, they need to get out more. And “this is only something that good little goy slaves do” — seriously? I can’t even get worked up over this — this is Occasional Cortex-grade dumbassery.

When is TC going to do the big reveal: “I don’t believe any of this BS, this was just a parody of how stupid judeophobes and the alt-right can be”?

But to me, the sure hallmark of a deranged fanatic is when you can’t distinguish them from satire anymore. It’s been that way with the woke left for many years now, and sadly the ‘woke right’ is increasingly veering into that territory.

“Dafuq did I just read?” Dafuq ba-rosh (knocked in the head, whacked on the head) in Hebrew…

ADDENDUM (via Powerline): even the Babylon Bee’s publisher says one can’t satirize this

You can't satirize this. https://t.co/9VzDj0QzUA

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) September 8, 2026

AfD scores stunning win in Saxony-Anhalt but falls short of majority

A few quick comments about the explosive results of regional elections in the German member state Saxony-Anhalt [Sachsen-Anhalt].

This is not the same as the Saxony [Sachsen] where Leipzig and Dresden are situated, but borders on it. Saxony-Anhalt’s state capital is Magdeburg (as in medieval “Magdeburg City Rights” and “The Sack of Magdeburg” during the Thirty-Years War); other important cities include Halle [in full: Halle an der Saale, or Halle on the Saale river] the birthplace of the composer Händel, and more infamously, of Reinhard Heydrich y”sh; Dessau, of Bauhaus fame but also the birthplace of Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn; and of course Wittenberg of Martin Luther fame.

The member state was part of the [East-]German “Democratic” Republic from the aftermath of WW II until reunification.

According to Die Welt https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article6a9d66da181cb962d488587a/wahl-in-sachsen-anhalt-afd-gewinnt-landtagswahl-klar-verpasst-aber-absolute-mehrheit.html

the elections led to an explosive gain (nearly doubling previous results) for the hard-right AfD [“Alternative for Germany”] but leave it just short of an outright majority.

[from link above, Section 27 Fair Use]. The graph shows today’s results compared with 2021. Voter turnout was 77.8%. CDU=Christian Democratic Union [of Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz]; SPD=Social-Democratic Party of Germany; Grüne=Greens; Die Linke=The Leftists, heirs to the former East-German Communist Party; BSW=Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance [1st-time result for this alt-left party]; Sonst[iges]=Others.

Preliminary distribution in the state parliament [again, Section 27 Fair Use]:

So given the “firewall” the other parties have thrown up, will the AfD try to recruit 3 “defectors”, as the Die Welt article speculates?

In the USA, the wages of globalist and woke overreach were Trump — love or hate him, but his personal views are closer to a populist Democrat of old than to anything hard-right.

In Europe, after the problems were left to fester longer, and disastrous energy policies proved even more dismal after Put[a]in’s invasion of Ukraine (and the subsequent cutoff of natural gas), the wages of globalist and woke overreach are something rather more sinister. Something that, if it came to power in the US, would leave many TDS cases positively nostalgic for Trump.

ADDENDUM: (via Powerline) a long but very worthwhile origin story of the AfD, from its beginnings as a geekish Euroskeptic group to its growth into a populist mass movement — not shying away from some of the unsavory elements. https://firstthings.com/why-the-afd-wins/

“Right, gentlemen, this means war”

Those were the reported words of Neville Chamberlain on September 3, 1939, after the UK’s ultimatum to the Third Reich to cease and desist from its invasion of Poland expired. #todayInHistory

Meanwhile, it turns out that my first hunch about the Ceuta “migrant” invasion — that it was orchestrated by an irredentist Morocco to “redeem” the centuries-long Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla — was correct. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/09/ceuta-was-an-invasion.php

An explosive new report by Spain’s National Police suggests that what happened a month ago in Ceuta, and still continues, was an invasion organized by the government of Morocco:

The National Police has informed Judge María Tardón — who is investigating the crossing of approximately 80,000 people from Morocco into Spain through the Ceuta border on July 30 and 31 — that the operation was planned and carried out by agents of Morocco’s security forces, in stark contrast with the position maintained by the Spanish government: President Pedro Sánchez, although he initially described it as an “attack on Spain’s territorial integrity” … has maintained that Morocco neither conceived nor executed the action, instead blaming “mafias” engaged in human trafficking and countries such as Russia and Israel. […]

According to CENIF, the body responsible for analyzing this type of situation, the assault was a carefully planned operation designed to collapse Spain’s border control system and eliminate Spain’s capacity to respond. The Spanish agents even assure the judge that their Moroccan counterparts may have monitored the execution of the operation on the ground. El Mundo reported from the outset that Moroccan agents had been detected among the alleged migrants who overran the border.
***
CENIF also states in the report that the alleged migratory purpose of the incident was nothing more than a formal cover for the operation, which was commanded on the ground by Moroccan agents — some in uniform, others in plain clothes — and points out that numerous images prove this during the mass arrival itself.

And Spaniards are saying “enough”.

Tens of Thousands are FLOODING The Streets In Protest Against Mass-Immigration Across Spain.

Protesters are demanding Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Interior Minister Marleska resign after Ceuta was invaded by Muslims from Morocco.

This is how patriots take back their… pic.twitter.com/DEKI7jK5vC

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 2, 2026

In other news, CBS agitprop “journalists” are having a toddler tantrum because new editor Bari Weiss is actually making the paper commit journalism.

Toddler Mode: Journalists Fume, Pout Over Accurate Headline That Makes Democrat Look Bad

Also, with headline “Al-Jazeera on the Hudson vs. reality”:

I’ve spoken to Euros who say they’re afraid to visit the US because they posted criticism of “mad dictator” [sigh] Trump on their social media. I pointed out to them what sort of filth is really being screened for.

ADDENDUM: boo hoo hoo https://www.thecollegefix.com/u-maryland-lab-begs-students-to-sign-up-for-class-on-indigenous-feminism-and-monsters/

“Sciolistic and treadless”; Winter is coming for Bibi?

No, I’m not dead yet — hardly had a moment to myself in the last week or so of work travel, and when I did, I was overwhelmed by all the stuff worth commenting on.

(a) This is a brilliant column by Roger Kimball. https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/30/sciolistic-and-treadless-the-democrats-rough-2026/ “Treadless” refers to the Dhimmicrats not getting any traction on anything, and now Trump’s Venezuela oil deal taking away even expensive gasoline prices. The somewhat rare word “sciolistic” (freely: “having only superficial knowledge about a subject yet loudly pretending to be an expert”) was used by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent when schooling Senator Fauxcahontas Lieawatha about foreign currency.

President Trump just announced the Mother of All Oil Deals with Venezuela, the country he liberated from its narco Chinese puppet Nicolás Maduro at the beginning of 2026. […] This is good—nay, great, which is to say GREAT—news for America and ordinary Americans (if any Americans can be said to be “ordinary”). It is bad news for Democrats. Why? Hearken to what President Trump said. The deal not only “greatly increases our Oil Supply,” it will also “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future.” […] Suffering from an acute, and possibly terminal, case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Democrats have been assiduous in shredding their credibility since the 2024 election. To an extraordinary extent, they have thrown their lot in with all the many varieties of America haters, from the so-called Democratic Socialists of America to the mouth-frothing, Sharia-law-spouting lunatics who want to turn the United States into another Muslim hellhole.

The Trump administration has been on a tear since noon on January 20, 2025. The border. Energy. Foreign policy. The economy. The toxin of so-called “DEI”—i.e., invidious discrimination masquerading as higher virtue. The weaponization of “gender dysphoria.” The administrative state and its chief export: stifling over-regulation whose only real purpose is to employ regulators and stymie innovation. Anti-semitism on college campuses and sundry municipalities. On all those fronts and more, Trump 2.0 has been like a whirlwind, aiding the good, hindering the bad. It has made the Democrats punch drunk. Their tires are treadless. Wherever they touch reality, they spin out. They can’t get traction. President Trump revitalizes American manufacturing. How can the Democrats be against that? Because—turn the amp up to 11—TRUMP! President Trump tackles rising anti-Semitism at elite universities. What can the Democrats say about that? The best they have come up with is Rep. Jamie Raskin’s pathetic effort to say that the Trump administration is using anti-semitism as a “pretext” to punish or “retaliate” against those noble repositories of “progressive” fatuousness, elite universities.

No, the Democrats open their cupboards and find them nearly bare. Just about the only issue they managed to salvage was “affordability.” The United States has pulverized the Iranian military and is in the process of strangling it economically. A temporary side effect is slightly higher gas prices, which means higher prices for many consumer items. “Please, please, please let the prices stay high,” the Democrats beg as the midterm elections heave into view.

As I write, most polls say that the Democrats are likely to win back the House and possibly the Senate in November. I have never thought that likely. As for the polls, remember what those fake partisan megaphones said about Francesca Hong and Karen Bass. But now that President Trump has put the United States in charge of Venezuela’s huge petroleum reserves, gas prices will plummet and the Democrats will wave their magic wand of “affordability” only to discover that the magic is gone.

Read the whole thing. And don’t miss Bessent’s letter quoted there:

“I am in receipt of your August 13 letter, which unfortunately reveals that you know even less about foreign exchange markets than you do about banking. Terrifyingly, the opening paragraph is wrong about where the money came, what the transaction was, and whether there was even a borrower. What is equally shocking, but not surprising: not a single member of your media mob has a rudimentary-enough level of financial market literacy to spot your remedial error.

Treasury exchanged existing Exchange Stabilization Fund foreign-currency assets for yen. No new congressional appropriation was involved, and no credit was extended to Japan. Japan owes Treasury nothing. There is therefore no risk that Japan will fail to repay a debt that does not exist.

You state that it is “not clear” how preventing disorder in Japan benefits the United States. As your letter notes, Japan is a major holder of U.S. Treasuries. It is also a critical trading partner and a treaty ally. Disorderly yen markets can trigger forced unwinds, which could destabilize global markets and ultimately raise borrowing costs for American families and businesses. For a fuller explanation, I recommend any entry-level course in international finance for you and your staff, or I can give you a tutorial on Foreign Exchange for Dummies.

(b) A small detail about Prohibition that I learned from the Markets of the Past channel (which contains loads of AI imagery but is quite well scripted): prior to 1913, taxes on alcohol represented almost 40% of federal revenue, the remainder being mostly import duties. Only because the 16th Amendment (1913) created a federal income tax for the first time did Prohibition even become a viable preposition, and an motley coalition of Christian temperance activists, women’s rights groups (when this actually meant something), Progressives (when they actually stood for progress), industrialists like Henry Ford worried about absenteeism and accidents caused by drunkenness on the shop floor, and even ghouls like the KKK were able to advance their cause. Anti-German sentiment during WW I, and the mostly German-American ownership of the major breweries, did the rest.

Of course, as is well known, the unintended consequences of the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) soon proved disastrous, and ultimately it became the only constitutional Amendment in US history to be undone by, of course, another Amendment (the 21st).

(c) What can I say about “feminist icon” Kathy Hochul appearing in a hijab? (Other than Arbel’s Law, of course: “the trouble with fighting stereotypes is that some are hell-bent on affirming them”.) Ironically, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, which so many fauxminists love cosplaying, was actually directly inspired by the Khomeinist revolution in Iran — just transposed to a more western context.

THERE’S SOME SORT OF WEIRD PSYCHOSEXUAL DYNAMIC HERE: https://twitter.com/geiger_capital/status/2

(d) the Game of Thrones tagline of course just writes itself. Bibi now seems to be seriously worried by a new political challenge, this time from the hard right: Major-General Ofer Winter and his new Amkha Yisrael (literally: “your people, Israel”, idiomatically: “the common people of Israel”) party, which is polled to win six seats, mostly from disaffected Likud and Religious Zionism voters. Winter makes no secret of wanting to see Bibi gone (to be fair, Bibi is the longest-serving Prime Minister of any democracy since the UK’s Robert Walpole in the 18th century!)[*] and is willing to sit in a cabinet with the anti-Netanyahu coalition around former IDF Chief-Of-Staff Gadi Eisenkot — and this would push it over the magical 61-MKs threshold without including any Arab or chareidi [“Ultra-Orthodox”] parties.

ADDENDUM: via Sarah Hoyt: “red diaper babies” remember their Communist upbringing as “all the worst features of Church, without any of the redeeming ones” https://markatwood.substack.com/p/all-the-worst-features-of-church A really good read.

And:

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ADDENDUM 2: Arab party Ra`am (acronym for United Arab List) joined by Jewish top cop, makes fighting rampant violent crime in the Arab sector is top priority. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/in-historic-step-segalovitz-to-run-with-arab-raam-party/ This move is widely seen as an attempt to make the moderate Islamist party koalitionsfähig (it already was part of Naftali Bnnett’s COVID-era cabinet, thought that was prior to the October 7 pogrom) and giving Eisenkot additional options for assembling an anti-Bibi coalition.

[*] if one includes quasi-democracies, Otto von Bismarck‘s almost-30 year tenure as Kanzler Prussia, then the North German Confederation, then the 2nd German Reich, would be the longest.

Cambridge soft subjects: raging, raging against the dying of the light?

Via Instapundit, here is an intriguing essay by a Cambridge emeritus professor named David Runciman. I am somewhat surprised that soft-commie rag The New Statesman would publish something this contrarian in 2026, but there you go. If you don’t want to give them traffic, here is an archived copy. https://archive.fo/g1Pvu

In a nutshell, Runciman argues that the “soft subjects” at Cambridge are “raging, raging against the dying of the relevance” [with apologies to Dylan Thomas] — all the money, new buildings, and impact are going to the STEM subject where Cambridge is of course playing in the Superleague. And they engage in “performative” politics, as he sees it, in a futile attempt to remain part of the conversation. As he puts it in the subtitle: “[Cambridge U]niversity’s place in the public imagination is as illusory as Jason Arday’s academic credentials”.

Go read the whole thing — I can’t do it justice by selective quoting. There are, of course, a few sops to the readership thrown in, but they read to me as syrup to make the bitter medicine go down.

[PS: I am on the road for work, with limited Internet access and even more limited “downtime”.]

Academentia amped up to 11: academic suspended for exposing academic fraud

The rector of Ghent University in Belgium, a former leader of the Green Party [p*ss be upon it], has now suspended philosopher Nathan Cofnas — previously at Cambridge University — in the wake of Jason Arday taking his own life after his being an all-around academic fraud became too blatant to ignore.

It would be giving Dr. Cofnas a bit too much credit to say he “unmasked” Arday, since even a casual inspection of the guy’s claims about himself makes it clear many of them couldn’t be true, and that those who made the decision to hire him were so blinded by the idea of appointing the youngest-ever multi-DEI case to the top professorial rank, that they completely took leave of their senses.

Rather, Cofnas was the little boy who dared yell: “the emperor is naked — and fapping too!” He had himself come to Cambridge on a hyper-competitive fellowship, which the university let lapse after grudgingly clearing him of wrong-doing. Subsequently he had taken up a position at Ghent University, which in Belgium is [or at least, used to be] regarded as the place to be for philosophy. (Interestingly, they hired him despite his highly controversial position on the “nature vs. nurture” debate.[*])

But oh, how the mighty have fallen. Ghent U. appears to be in the grip of full-on “Woke 2” academentia.

And you’d better do your homework — instead of outsourcing it to ChatGPT — especially if you have an inveterate gadfly like Cofnas in your backyard. [Article from January 2026.] https://www.brusselstimes.com/1909581/ugent-chancellor-petra-de-sutter-caught-using-ai-in-opening-speech

What’s striking is that De Sutter herself referred to the dangers of AI in her speech. She warned that we should “not blindly trust” the output of AI tools and that AI-generated texts “are not always easy to distinguish from original works.”

She also said that “it is the user of an AI tool who is responsible for the output, even when it generates incorrect or misleading information.”

This is also evident, for example, in the examination regulations of Ghent University: students who are caught using AI when it is not permitted risk severe sanctions. These can range from a 0 on the course component in question to a ban on participating in resits and even, in serious cases, expulsion from the university.

Cue up Testament’s “Practice What You Preach”.

Shabbat shalom!

ADDENDUM: https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/08/20/in-wake-of-arday-scandal-european-elite-institutions-free-speech/ Thank G-d both countries I live in take free speech much more seriously.

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[*] There is an interesting wrinkle to this story. Much of the criticism of Cofnas’s own work centers on him stating statistical evidence that performance distributions on certain intellectual performance metrics clearly differ between human population groups. People like Cofnas take a radical “nature” position, whereas the great Thomas Sowell — whom you’ve seen me refer to countless times on these pages — takes an almost full-on “nurture” position. Personally, I think it’s a mixture of both — somebody can be born with great athletic genes and waste them by being a couch potato. Moreover, IQ tests, SATs, and the like are not measurements but proxies — the way GDP per capita, human development index,… are measurable proxies for elusive “human well-being”. Not to mention that “the distribution isn’t the person”. (I drill “a proxy is not a measurement” into my students in a very different academic field.)

But at heart I think there is an unacknowledged reason why a position like Cofnas’s is so explosive in certain circles. Much of the secular-humanist intellectual class’s sense of self-worth is tied up in how “smart” and “well-educated” (read, increasingly: “well-credentialed”) they are. Those of us bound to religious traditions that teach every human is created in the image of G-d are less likely to make this kind of calculus. And, methinks, we are less likely to make the leap from “some population groups outperform other on metric X” to “some population groups are more valuable” than our secular-humanist peers…

Dave Freer’s acceptance speech for the Prometheus Award for Young Adult Fiction

The Prometheus Award is an award given to libertarian-themed (in the broadest sense) fantastic fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, and adjacent genres). This year they had a special award for Young Adult fiction, and the winner was — let’s hear it for my online friend — “Storm Dragon” by Dave Freer. Here is his acceptance speech in full:

Prometheus YA Special Award Acceptance Speech

My favorite bit:

Neil Postman – talking about BRAVE NEW WORLD — put it thus: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

We are already going there. If the younger generation doesn’t read, their children won’t.

I believe this with the passion of a crusader. Everyone who can read, should. And the only way to make sure it does happen is to make it a pleasurable experience, you can’t wait to try again – unlike my experience of [a particularly daunting Icelandic dish named] Hakarl. The problem – and the reason for my writing this book, and Raconteur starting this line – is that we have a real situation where young boys aren’t reading. Young girls – in opinion — aren’t reading enough… and they’re reading twice what boys read. Fiction in particular suffers.

But why is this even relevant? Everything is video, these days, right? And fiction? Bah.

I believe it is vital – to civilization, to liberty, to everything we wish for our species, especially for our young. Reading shapes the way we think. Not the content (that too, but it is near irrelevant). It shapes the way we CAN think, which opens our capacity to think. It requires translating and assembling symbols into words, words into concepts, images -things in themselves far bigger than the little word. It’s a process the brain uses to process and store information, but more importantly, to create from. Reading is training this, the younger a child starts, the easier it becomes and more building blocks they have. It is also compound interest for there on in.

It is a genie repressed in illiterate societies. It is a genie that, once freed, cannot ever be put back. Those who champion freedom, must champion reading, and particularly reading fiction, because that trains the mind in taking symbolic logic into creating what is not. Into building something far beyond the mere literal meaning of words, transforming them. That is what drives us, makes us human, gives us dreams. That will give us the stars.

Without that we’re little more than sheep.

With it, we have a key to being far more.

Putin wanted to gobble up Ukraine, will end up making Russia a Chinese vassal state?

I’ve been wondering about that one for a while, as I’ve voiced on this blog. At least economically, Xi the Turtle-“Lover” seems to have Puti[a]n thoroughly by the beitzim. Josh Faulks counts the ways:

Xi Dofek-Tzabbim knows China has a captive market in Russia, and that Russia needs him a lot more than it needs Russia. Yes, China has a thirst for oil and gas that is difficult to slake — but still manages to squeeze Russia to deliver to them at prices that eseentially leave no profit margin over exploitation and logistical costs.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day China gives Putain a loan with Vladivostok (or a similar North Pacific port) as collateral, and once debt service becomes unbearable, China will end up either owning the port outright or getting a sweetheart 99-year lease on it…

Putain is quite an overachiever, but not in the way he wants. Without his grandiose invasion, Ukraine would not have been teaching the military world how to extract maximum pain from an opponent with massive fleets of low-cost drones…

Surprise, surprise! China is funding pro-HamaSS marches in the UK

See more here:

https://jakewallissimons.substack.com/p/the-evidence-is-coming-in-china-is?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

As well as in this exposé in the Telegraph (paywalled; cached copy here: https://archive.md/RhlUy).

And yes, the Marxist billionaire, buddy of Xi JinKing [of Underage Turtle Molestation], and husband of Code Stink leader is behind it.

No, I’m not silly enough to believe this is somehow a reflection of widespread Chinese judeophobia (that’s really not a thing in the CJK countries). This is a classic example of Ruth Wisse‘s “antisemitism as power play”.

Shabbat shalom!

A little musical blast from the past: the solo in “In That Quiet Earth” by Genesis: a study in exotic modal scales

A remark about Liszt loving modulations by minor thirds or major thirds (and Tony Banks of Genesis having picked this up through piano lessons from his mother): the proper music theory term for this type of modulation is a chromatic mediant.

Shabbat shalom!

The solo in “In That Quiet Earth” by Genesis: a study in exotic modal scales

Ruth Wisse on antisemitism as a power tactic

In this latest podcast, Haviv Rettig Gur interview Professor Emeritus Ruth Wisse[**] from Harvard, who at age 90 is still sharp as a tack.

The interview is great stuff — my favorite moment was when Ruth said she has the most beautiful bat mitzvah gift she could imagine, as the State of Israel was proclaimed right after her 12th birthday.[*]

But let me focus on one somewhat startling point: Wisse basically rejects the concept that antisemitism is an expression of religious or ethnic prejudice (aside from the superficial level). Instead, she considers it a power tactic to gather multiple grievance groups into a coalition — and in order to do so successfully, you need a small group — a medium-sized or big one would be too risky — but that has a societal profile well above its numbers. She compares it to the tactic of the magician, look at my finger while his other hand is doing something else. Focusing on “the Jews did this” or “Israel did that” makes it possible to deflect from socio-economic problems, from governmental incompetence, but also to avoid dealing with the internal contradictions of the coalition. (Think of LGBTQWERTY activists and radical Muslims in the same coalition.) The same applies, as Haviv points out, to Arab governments after the establishment of Israel. Hatred of that small country was the only thing they could organize around, and even that doesn’t work all too well.

Now, let me contrast this with Haviv’s own theory, which I’ve been repeating to all and sundry — namely that anti-Semitism is “the recurrent delusion that utopia is at hand —,be it a socio-economic one, a racial one, a religious one, or whatever — and that only that small pesky people stands in the way of the Garden of Eden.

I would, however, venture to say that both can be true at once. Harking back to George Orwell’s “1984”, Haviv Rettig Gur’s explanation fits the Outer Party. Ruth Wisse’s explanation fits the Inner Party. The Outer Party thinks it’s about Jews being the cause of everything bad, and of standing in the way of the dawn of universal “social” “justice”. The Inner Party encourages the Outer Party to believe this bollocks, but it has its own deeper agenda.

As Inner Party member O’Brien, while interrogating protagonist Winston Smith, tells him: “the object of power is power”.

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[*] Bar/bat mitzvah technically means: “subject to the Commandments” (i.e., [a rite of passage for] reaching religious majority). The age is 13 for boys and 12 for girls.

[**] I know she pronounces it “Weiss” (“white” in German) but I cannot help seeing German “Wissen” (knowing, knowledge)

“Masgramondou” on “The Racists Who Enabled Jason Arday”; Insty’s 25th blogiversary

Busy as heck at work: just two quick takes.

(a) “Masgramondou”, being an Old Cantabrigian (i.e. a Cambridge alumnus), shares his thoughts on an affair that would have defied the satirical talents of the late lamented Tom Sharpe. His header image speaks for itself:

https://open.substack.com/pub/ombreolivier/p/the-racists-who-enabled-jason-arday?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

Once upon a time I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Back in the day when men were real men, women were real women and Cambridge’s contribution to the national sense of humour were people like John Cleese, Tom Sharpe and Douglas Adams. Cambridge students were well aware that we were at the top of the intellectual tree and generally proud of the fact. In fact for many of us (e.g. your humble correspondent) coming to Cambridge was where we discovered that there were people far far smarter than we were for pretty much the first time in our lives. It was humbling. And once we got over that, exhilarating. You could have discussions about quantum mechanics or code optimizations or whatever with people who understood the concepts at least as well as you did. You could be lectured by professors who had Fields Medals or Nobel Prizes; often they had literally written the standard text book in the field. […]

Some forty years later it seems that Cambridge no longer aspires to such intellectual heights – at least not for some areas of study. It is true that back then we generally held the Education Department and the associated students of Homerton College to be at a slightly lower level of intellect[…] However I doubt that even the ladies studying education back then would have put up with the quality of tuition offered today by professors such as J Arday, PhD.

However it isn’t just that the quality has gone down, what has also happened is that the racism, sexism and disableism has gone up at the same time as a deliberate part of the process. What do I mean by the racism etc. has risen?

Read the whole thing. As I never tire of repeating, the answer to electrocution is not reversing the polarity of the current, but to shut off the current.

(b) Insty is celebrating his 25th blogiversary, and looking back on his beginnings. “25 years of solitude blogitude” Heh 🙂

https://open.substack.com/pub/instapundit/p/25-years-of-blogitude?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

AAUP: a disgrace to the profession

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE minces no words: https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/what-happened-to-the-aaup-and-why

On July 30, the American Association of University Professors did something it has never done in its 111-year history: It endorsed a candidate for political office.

And this was not a general-election endorsement against some uniquely terrible enemy of academic freedom. No, the national AAUP waded into a contested Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat and backed Abdul El-Sayed, the unmistakable candidate of the party’s left. He had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ran on Medicare for All, rejected corporate PAC money, and called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel.

He was also the more controversial choice, especially because of his position that Israel’s war in Gaza constitutes genocide and his appearances with Hasan Piker. Academic freedom, by contrast, was not a defining issue of his campaign, although El-Sayed had been an AAUP member and was strongly backed by organized labor. The AAUP proudly advertised the decision as its “First-Ever National Political Endorsement.” Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president, said roughly 80 percent of the Michigan members who voted supported making an endorsement and 97 percent favored El-Sayed.

Then came the less majestic denominator.

Inside Higher Ed reported that about 40 Michigan AAUP members attended the consultation call where the informal poll occurred, out of roughly 4,000 members statewide. Fewer still were on the call when the vote happened. One Michigan member said his “jaw dropped” when he saw Wolfson cite the percentages without the raw numbers.

That is not exactly a sweeping mandate, and yet here we are.

Given his surname Wolfson, Toad [sic] is likely a nominal coreligionist of mine.[*] But he also purports to represent the profession I have belonged to for half my life (in the USA and abroad). For that reason, I am even more outraged than Greg Lukianoff. And I thank G-d with all my heart that I was able to leave the US for academically freer pastures.

But more from Lukianoff:

Wolfson has been unusually explicit about what changed. At a debate in June, he said that for its first 50 years the AAUP was “a professional association representing the profession,” when neutrality made sense. Over the last 50 years, he said, it “has pivoted to being mostly a union.” Then came the key sentence: “Unions are political organizations,” and the AAUP has “shifted the organization to reflect that.”

So there it is. The AAUP’s president is saying openly that his organization has been remade into a political union. Not only that, but it has formed a political action committee and signaled that more endorsements are coming.

That may be coherent, but choices have costs.

I’ve written about the AAUP’s increasing partisanship and rejection of its founding principles before, and I didn’t do it to score points or make new enemies. I did it because this is a real loss. For most of its history, the AAUP occupied a uniquely important place in American higher education. Its 1940 Statement became part of the operating system of the modern university, and FIRE treated its best reports as models of principled analysis.

That authority depended on the belief that its standards applied across political lines. A professor did not have to vote correctly to deserve academic freedom. Once the AAUP becomes an electoral organization allied with one coalition, professors outside it have reason to wonder whether the association sees them as people to protect or opponents to defeat. And why wouldn’t they?

This past spring, I gave a presentation to FIRE’s staff about the importance of cultivating and maintaining viewpoint diversity across our ranks. Unfortunately, the AAUP has become an almost perfect case study in what happens to an organization that does not share — or worse, is outwardly hostile to — that value. What strikes me most is not simply that its leaders made a bad strategic choice. It is that they seem unable to understand why anyone could see the choice as a problem.

I understand Lukianoff is not a big fan of recent Trump administration initiatives imposing certain regulations on academia. For myself, I am ambivalent: even as I am no fan of government micromanaging academia, that industry has completely lost the plot and (as illustrated by the AAUP’s antics) has so thoroughly put all its political eggs in one basket that this sort of thing became inevitable. My mother tongue has the expression: where wood is being chopped, splinters will fly (waar gehakt wordt, vallen spaanders). And the rot sorely needs to be chopped lest it corrupt the whole tree.

But with every passing day, I am a little less convinced that academia can still be reformed — and a little more that it is beyond help. It genuinely breaks my heart.

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[*] His phenomenon is nothing new. Our Shmone Esre (“Eighteen [Benedictions]”) of the weekday Amidah (“Standing Prayers”) actually contain nineteen benedictions — after a new one was inserted at #12, beginning with the words: “And for informers let there be no hope.” (Ulamalshinim lo tihye tikva.)

Albrecht of Brandenburg: the cleric who unintentionally triggered the Reformation?

Shavua tov/have a good week!

There is a new channel on YouTube (with, alas, a lot of AI imagery) called “Markets of the Past”. Its latest video was devoted to the Reformation, or why Martin Luther succeeded where John Wycliffe in England, and Jan Hus in Bohemia [presently the central part of the Czech Republic] had failed.

In possibly the best phrase of the video, the difference with “neither courage nor conviction, but context”. Three major factors in the context were different:

(a) Gutenberg’s invention of movable type 80 years earlier made it possible for Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (and other material) to be quickly reproduced and disseminated across an entire country

(b) About one-third of all land in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation[*] was owned by the Church, and a number of local nobility and gentry were attracted to Luther’s ideas in part because they wanted to expropriate these holdings. (Cf. also Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries.)

(c) Is the subject of today’s blog post.

Albert or Albrecht of Brandenburg, the younger brother of Margrave/Marquis (Markgraf) and Prince-Elector (Kurfürst) Joachim I of Brandenburg, had already become the Archbishop of Magdeburg at age 23 (!), besides acting as Apostolic Administrator for the vacant Bishopric of Halberstadt.

He had, however, set his eyes on the Archbishopric of Mainz — which would also make him a Kurfürst like his brother, one of a college of only seven Prince-Electors who decided on the succession of the Holy Roman Emperor. At the time there were three spiritual Kurfürsten (the Prince-Archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier) and four temporal ones (the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine/Pfalzgraf by the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg.

But there were multiple obstacles. He did not have a university degree, A Papal dispensation was possible… But a modest “processing fee” was required (with or without dispensation?) amounting to some 20,000 German guilders (about $6-7 million in bullion value today, and about 1,000-2,000 times the annual income of a master craftsman — looking at it this way, more like $50-$100 million today). And then, after the Archbishop of Salzburg leveled objection against “pluralism” (in the sense of holding two such offices at once), the fee was raised further.

Already having bled his personal treasury white to buy his way into the Magdeburg office[**], he had no choice but to turn to the richest banker in the world (and possibly history): a devout Catholic from Augsburg named Jakob Fugger. The video claims Fugger charged 20% percent interest, but that is likely an exaggeration — Fugger is on record as typically charging 5% on loans of this magnitude, with apparently additional fees for physically conveying such an amount of money to Rome on short notice. (Remember: this was centuries before wire transfers — there was a significant risk that any money transport this juicy would fall into the hands of highwaymen, which required either enough security to deter this or disguising the transfers very carefully, all of which cost money. Not to speak of compensation for the risk — it wasn’t [yet] like Fugger could take out insurance for the transfer risk and pass the premium on to his client.)

At the behest of his advisors, Albrecht proposed a special sale of general indulgences, with half the proceeds going to Rome for the building fund of the Sistine Chapel, and the other half towards servicing the Fugger loan. A Dominican monk named Johannes Tetzel became the face of the operation, and its fame (or infamy, depending on one’s point of view) spread wide.

Including to one Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk who was both a theology professor at the University of Wittenberg and a preacher at the main church there, the St. Mary’s / Marienkirche, where he also heard confession. There he encountered congregants who told him they need not come to confession as they had just bought plenary indulgences in nearby Jüterbog from Johannes Tetzel. Luther became increasingly outraged at what he regarded as what in today’s language we might call “spiritual malpractice”, and ultimately drafted a list of 95 objections.

The rest is history…

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[*] “not Holy, not Roman, and not an empire”, as Voltaire quipped.

[**] I don’t know whether through overt simony [the sale of church benefices or favors for profit] or through the thinly disguised kind of “making the appropriate customary donation”. I note with some amusement that simoniaque has survived as an insult in Québecois French, even if the word is quite unfamiliar to most people today.