AIFF2025: The Nazi's Massive Thefts Of Art During WW II

[Note:  This is an AIFF2025 (Anchorage International Film Festival) post because I will discuss below Plunderer:  The Life And Times Of A Nazi Art Thief, a film shown at the festival.]

[Note 2:  This post has taken on a life of its own as I've been writing it.  It now seems to be about the role of art as a commodity in the Holocaust, but on a higher level, as what one of the interviewees in Plunderer said:  Art is one of the three major unregulated industries in the world:  art, arms, and drugs.  As I write this, I keep uncovering new twists and turns.  It's taking me a while to post this because I'm trying to articulate the most important of the twists and turns clearly.  I'm sure I'm muddling some and missing others.  But there is a lot to learn from studying how the Nazis systematically stole art during their rule over Germany and how the world has, for the most part, let it slide.  There are also lessons for today.]

The Beginning - Let's just assume there is no beginning.  We simply have to jump in somewhere and start discovering things.  And if we're observant, remember enough details,  and are lucky, we'll start to see how everything is connected.  If not, we'll end up with random facts and impressions which are too vague and disconnected for us to take any lessons from.

• I knew that the Nazis stole art.  What I didn't realize until recently, as I'm reading Susan Ronald's Hitler's Art Thief, is

how massive this undertaking was.  This was not simply incidental, opportunistic looting.  It was a highly organized, preplanned effort to scoop up all the great art held by European museums and by private collectors, particularly Jewish families with art collections.  

Organized at the highest level, under the auspices of the RBK (Reichskammer den Bildenen Kunst - or Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts), art dealers were sent across Europe to compile an inventory of artwork in museums but also in the private collections of wealthy Jews - paintings, sculptures, drawings - and other valuables including jewelry, tapestries, and even church altars.  And once the Germans occupied a country, these agents of Hitler and Göring went out like art vacuum cleaners to suck up the best items and send them back to several repositories. - for the private collections of people like Göring and Hitler and for great German museum Hitler was planning for his thousand year Reich. 

Art had already been on the German leaders' menu during in WW I.  After his victory, Hitler planned to open a museum in Linz, Austria, his home town, that would have the world's most spectacular collection of art.  But some was also for Hitler's private collection and also for Göring's.  And much was also used to raise needed foreign currency to fund Hitler's war.  There were elaborate work-arounds set up to overcome the Allies' official bans on looted art.  Some pieces were sent directly to dealers in England and the US, but much, maybe most, went through auction houses in neutral Switzerland.  

There were also issues with currency - the German Mark not being worth much in the Allied countries.  And conflicts with Hitler's edicts condemning degenerate art - modern, abstract works which included artists like Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall.  But the work of these artists commanded high prices and, as I mentioned above, one of the objectives of this art looting was to raise foreign currency.  So while there were symbolic burnings of such art, most of it was diverted and sold.  I'd note that author Susan Ronald questions how many pictures of value were actually burned.

But as organized as this all was, the art historians/dealers who located and confiscated the art, arranged to get all the paperwork to remove the art from occupied countries, to transport it, and to get paid, found  lots of ways to divert art works to either their own private stashes or to export and sell overseas.  

There were so many items - thousands and thousands - and various destinations within the Reich hierarchy that keeping track of every item was difficult.  

Again,  because this is key: from what I can tell, there were two main objectives of the Reich's art project.  First was to gather the greatest collection of art anywhere to display when the Germans conquered the world.  (Hitler did start out as an artist.)  Second, was to raise foreign currency reserves to purchase armaments.  

There were four officially designated art dealers - Hildebrand Gurlitt (the main subject of Ronald's book); Karl Buchholz; Ferdinand Möller; and Bernhard A. Böhmer - who worked, nominally, under the RBK.  And they worked with many other art dealers and art historians to locate, confiscate, and fence art.

Pause to take a breath and figure out where we are

I'm telling you all this because until I started reading Hitler's Art Thief I didn't realize how organized and all encompassing this Nazi art theft was.  I probably should have.  Basically, I'd known that various heirs (generally Jews, or the heirs of Jews who had been send to death camps or forced to flee) had sued to get back individual works of art after (I believe) the piece showed up somewhere - generally in an auction catalogue or a museum.  

The Reich  had designated huge warehouses to store work.  And they even used salt mines toward the end of the war to store art works to keep the winning Allies from finding them.  And individuals involved often stored their plunder in Swiss bank vaults, protected by the super strict Swiss secrecy laws. 

Most notably among movies about getting back stolen art, there was Woman in Gold about the Beverly Hills dress shop owner who sues Austria to get back a painting stolen by the Nazis from her family in Vienna.  I've written about this film and personal connections to the main character.  Woman in Gold, as I recall it, focused mainly on the legal and political battle to get back that one painting.  I certainly did not get from that film a sense of the level of art plundering the Nazis did.  It may have been there, but it wasn't the focus of the film.  I did get a sense of how difficult it was to fight to recover family property after the war.  How expensive the fight was and how long it took,  And how difficult it is to prove your family owned something when all your possessions were confiscated or you are forced to flee with just what you can carry.  

Another hint of this was in Anthony Doerr's book, and then the Netflix series, All The Light We Cannot See - includes

"A sergeant major in the German army who certifies and evaluates art, jewelry, and gems, Reinhold Von Rumpel is major figure in the novel."  (From Fandom)

The movie is about a museum worker who takes a famous diamond to keep it safe from Nazi plunderers and Von Rumpel's persistent pursuit.   

We even watched The Monuments Men, though I really don't remember much about it.  This was about the American art historians who came as government officials right at the end of WWII to find the art looted by the Nazis.  Ronald discusses this group and the limits on their investigations and abrupt cancellation of the project.  One of them is featured (not positively) in Plunderer - Theodore Rousseau, a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of art.

The Anchorage International Film Festival in December of last year (it's January 1, 2026 as I write, 'last year' for the first time referring to 2025 [It's January 4 as I continue to review and revise this post]) showed the film  Plunderer:  The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.   This film focused on one particular art dealer, Bruno Lohse, who does appear in Susan Ronald's book, but plays a much lesser role.  While Plunderer shows us at the end the seven or eight pieces Lohse had hidden in a Swiss bank vault worth perhaps $100 million, the focus is on Lohse,  who was not one of the four official Nazi art thieves, and not on the bureaucratic machine the Nazis created to steal the greatest artworks in Europe.  

[NOTE:  The movie PLUNDERER IS AVAILABLE ON PBS PASSPORT in two parts as part of the Secrets of the Dead series.] 

Plunder  came about, it appears, because the historian - Jonathan Petropoulus - who is both the narrator and a key figure in the documentary - learned the Lohse was still alive and tracked him down and interviewed several times.  He concludes that Lohse was using him to find out what he (and others presumably) knew about Lohse.  He also concluded that Lohse lied to him regularly and with great charm. The film is probably an important piece of evidence that others can use as they paint the whole picture of this operation.  I doubt this movie would have been made if Petropoulus had not had his conversations with Lohse.  

Similarly, Hitler's Art Thief got written, according to the author, by accident.  

"I was an investment banker specializing almost exclusively in the restoration of historic buildings and landscapes and their conversion to alternative use." (p. xv)   

As an investment banker she took a trip to Zurich to meet a

"prospective investor and his personal bank manager . . .it was necessary to go to the bank's vault to verify the share certificates, certificates of deposit, jewels, and art." 

While in the vault, 

"I noticed that a sliding wall was slightly ajar.  I saw the fringes of what I believed was a nineteenth-century landscape painting and the letters "RLITT" labeled beneath the frame.  Rlitt?  Gurlitt? Could that be a painting by Louis Gurlitt, the nineteenth-century landscape painter?  I wondered aloud without realizing it.  The bank manager swiveled around suddenly and glowered at me, pushing the wall shut.  "No, That's the twentieth century Nazi art dealer," he huffed. (p.2) [Louis was the grandfather of the Nazi art thief Hildebrand Gurlitt.]]

The manager realizes he's committed a serious blunder in the super secretive world of Swiss banking and blames Ronald for looking where she shouldn't be looking.  But at lunch, where the bank manager had a bit too much wine, he apologizes profusely for how he had behaved.

"The bank manager's groveling became so overwhelming that I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.  It's not often a Swiss bank manager makes such a faux pas. 

So, I was mischievous and played on his sudden change of heart helped along by his nervous drinking.  I popped the searing question, mustering my best innocent voice, and asked if there was a twentieth century dealer called Gurlitt.  Was there ever! the bank manager exclaimed.  He wasn't just any art dealer - he was Hitler's art dealer.  Hildebrand Gurlitt was his name."

That's how the author, a woman specializing in appraising art, learned about Gurlitt.   There was another trigger for her - she inherited several items of looted Nazi art as well. 

I'd note, before moving on, that I find the title, Hitler's Art Thief, a bit misleading, because there were, as I mentioned above, four officially designated Nazi art thieves and many, many others who worked with or for those four. Bruno Lohse was one of the others.  

Another pause, to catch up on details to get a sense of the magnitude. 

It says 'Massive Thefts' in the title of this post.  How massive are we talking about?

Let's just look at the value of the stash of looted paintings the heir of Hildebrand Gurlitt still had in 2013, almost 70 years after the end of WWII.  

But first a bit about Hildebrand Gurlitt's family so this makes a bit more sense..

Hildebrand Gurlitt had two children, Cornelius (born 1932) and Benita (born 1935).  They both were children during WWII while their father was traveling Europe collecting paintings and they grew up with great art.  They both were told a story about their father that made him a hero saving art from the Nazis.  Ronald paints Cornelius, who was his father's heir, as a bright, but odd child and adult. Possibly on the autism spectrum. Hildebrand died in a car crash in 1956 without having passed on to his wife or his children his secrets for how to liquidate the paintings when they needed to. Cornelius lived in his mother's Munich apartment  for 40 years after her death in 1968 with the paintings stacked in the apartment.  He never changed the name on the ownership, never paid income taxes, and never had a computer or used the internet.  And he paid everything in cash, 

The magnitude.  Ronald writes:

"There were the original 1,407 artworks found in Cornelius's Munich flat, followed by some twenty-two further paintings in the possession of his brother-in-law, followed by another sixty-odd in Austria that burgeoned to over 250 fifty [sic] artworks.  Then, belatedly, there was the Monet found in Cornelius's hospital bag after his death.  By anyone's reckoning, the looted portion of the find must be worth somewhere around a billion dollars." (pp. 319-320) (emphasis mine)

This does not include other works that Gurlitt had stashed away in Swiss bank vaults like the one that Ronald stumbled upon accidentally that got her started writing this book.  

Nor does this count what the other three official Nazi art thieves managed to run off with. Or the other art dealers who worked with them. Nor the art work in Göring's and Hitler's collections or the works.  Nor the works they managed to export and were sold in auction houses or directly to collectors.  

Ronald suggests that getting valuable paintings was an underlying motive to send Jews to death camps

I hadn't thought about this.  Probably it went well beyond the paintings.  In the book and movie Lady In Gold, if I recall correctly, we see the Nazis take over not just the art, but everything including the apartment itself.  This is mentioned also in Plunderer.  

The belongings of Jews were confiscated, in many cases, well before they were carted off to concentration camps.  Jews were forced to sell their household goods at very low prices.  I knew this in part because letters from my grandfather in Germany in the early 1940s to my father who had gotten to Chicago told of having to sell their furniture at pennies to the dollar.  In other cases, as with my step-mother, when she got out of work camps after the war and returned to her family home in Bratislava, neighbors were living in her family home and other neighbors had different pieces of furniture and silverware. They said they thought everyone was dead.  In fact my stepmother was the only survivor in her family, but it also shows that people of Bratislava had a good idea of what happened at the camps.   

It was then my stepmother decided she needed to make her way to England.  And eventually the US.

This is some of the background I already knew when I read the following in Hitler's Art Thief:

"I want to impress on the reader that it is a gross misapprehension to believe that looted art is somehow a lesser crime of the Nazi era.  Attached to each artwork is at least one human tragedy and death.  Art is intended to unite people of disparate backgrounds in a combined cultural heritage that transcends national boundaries.  It takes many forms, as literature, music, fine art, film, and more.  It connects our souls.  The wholesale theft of art from museums, private individuals, libraries, and archives was highly calculated and well organized by the criminal regime of the Third Reich." (p.5)

She comes so close to articulating that the loss is not merely the personal loss of the owners, but the loss of cultural heritage of all humans.  She continues:

"Many Jews, Christians, atheists, and political opponents lost their lives because of their collections.  Those who somehow survived never recovered the bulk of their possessions - be they artworks, real estate, stocks, jewels, cash, or gold - giving rise to new laws, restitution departments at auction houses, and an entire insurance industry." (p.5)

Again, on a personal note, my mother, after filling out extensive paper work, eventually received Wiedergutmachung  payments.  The closest English word is reparations.  The German word literally means "make good again".  I didn't know anything about this when I was young and believe that there was some token compensation for the loss of the family house and business (a mens clothing store) and I understand there was something to compensate my mother for the loss of opportunity when she was no longer allowed to go to school and the further education she would have gotten.  She did get monthly checks until she died.  

I include this because unlike most countries that have committed heinous crimes against humanity, the German government did make attempts to acknowledge what had been done, to include the Holocaust in school curricula, and in some way to compensate those who had everything taken from them.  But, of course, the millions who died in concentration camps never had the chance to apply for any compensation.  

I include this also to point out that I had personal family experiences that gave me more awareness of the holocaust than most people might have had, but I had never put so many of the pieces together to begin to understand the role that confiscating art and other property played in the Third Reich.  

Ronald goes on:

"Some artworks now reside as ill-gotten gains in museums across the world - perhaps in a museum in your hometown or where you live.  Much lingers beneath Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich [the street that holds Swiss banks with vaults protected by secrecy laws including the one vault where she first encountered the name of Hildebrand Gurwitt] and elsewhere in Switzerland.  Those who salvaged some of their heirlooms or riches remained deeply scarred, afraid, and guilty that they'd somehow survived.  Few returned to Germany, some returned to France.  They often passed on this guilt and shame to their children.  The looting of art deprived these families of a crucial link to their personal histories;  memories that remain dear beyond the value of the paintings - often mental pictures of the last time the dispossessed saw their loved ones alive." (p.5)

Other lingering issues raised:

Lack of accountability - most of the art dealers had few to no negative consequences.  Some, like Gurwitt spent time in detention while his case was examined.  But the American interrogators had various obstacles in Ronald's telling -  poor translators, no access to critical files, limited time, and the State Department's loss of interest. They had way too many cases to handle each well.   Gurliff was eventually let go. and as was made clear above, he retained an enormous fortune in stolen art.  Ronald writes that that is also true of the other art dealers.  It was also true of Bruno Lohse (from Plunderer).  The focus went to Nuremberg and those involved in killing Jews (and others) in the concentration camps.  But even that tended to be focused on the top tier.  In a footnote on page 299, Ronald writes:

"Karl Wolff was rearrested in 1962 when the trial of Adolf Eichmann presented evidence that he was responsible for the deportation of Italian Jews to concentration camps.  In 1964, he was found guilty of the deportation of Jews to Treblinka and Auschwitz and the massacre of Italian partisans.  He was released in 1969."

Getaway drivers get longer sentences than that. 

US museums and art dealers, including the biggest ones, and including Jewish dealers,  knew who they were dealing with, looked the other way, and profited from the trade of illicit art

In the movie Plunderer there's a segment on the Ivy League educated curator of the Metropolitan Museum of art, Theodore Rousseau.  

 "Rousseau began his World War II service as an assistant United States naval attaché to the American embassies in Lisbon and Madrid, Spain. At war’s end he began service with the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) and was assigned to the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU). Responsible for uncovering information regarding Nazi looting, the ALIU was formed in 1944 to function as the intelligence component of the MFAA. Also assigned to the unit were Monuments Men Lt. James S. Plaut and Lt. Cdr. S. Lane Faison, Jr. After months of interrogating hundreds of Nazi officials and collaborators on the whereabouts of looted works of art, each of the three officers submitted in-depth reports regarding the three most important Nazi looting programs: the activities of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in France (Plaut), the collection of Adolf Hitler intended for his massive Führermuseum in Linz, Austria (Faison), and the collection of Hermann Goering (Rousseau)." (From the Monuments Men and Women website)

Lohse, according to Plunderer, got out of prison in 1950.  Then he contacted the three ALIU investigators who had interrogated him.  He gained traction with Rousseau who was by then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The link goes to a PDF - which you need to download to see - of two eulogies for Ted Rousseau on his death by Thomas Hoving, the director of the Met, and a curator, Margaretta Salinger.     

Paul Lohse (the art dealer subject of Plunderer) wrote to Rousseau after the war proposing to sell him art.  Jonathan Petropoulus, in the film, pages through a thick folder of correspondence between Lohse and Rousseau.  Petropoulus quotes Met director Hoving calling the period of the 50s and 60s "the age of piracy."  As one of the ALIU investigators  who interrogated Lohse  - who spent time in prison for his Nazi era art wheeling and dealing - Rousseau knew that the art he got from Lohse was, at best questionable and at worst stolen.  Petropoulous asserts Rousseau knew he was buying stolen art.  Lohse's name was never or rarely in the paperwork of paintings he sold, but the film makes it clear that he was skilled at hiding behind middlemen. 

Petropoulus mentions  two top art dealers in New York - Rosenberg and Stiebel and Wildestein and Company - who dealt with Lohse. They assert that the Met has 44 rooms that have at least one painting purchased from the Wildesteins.   Looted paintings were scrubbed clean on the back so the ownership couldn't be found.  

Everyone stalled, for decades and even forever, the return of artworks to their original owners

This is clear if you follow any story of a family trying to retrieve stolen art.  The film Lady in Gold is a good example.  

NOTE:  I've reread lot's of Hitler's Art Thief several times.  And watched the Plunderer again.  Each time more things fall into place.  So I don't expect too many folks to 'get' this post.  But at least maybe there will be a heads up note where you keep the Nazis and the Holocaust in your brain.  

And if you're a member of PBS - Watch Plunderer Parts 1 and 2.  

Why does this matter today?

Given that we now have a president, whose ex-wife said he kept a copy of Hitler's speeches next to his bed, and White Nationalists with swastikas rubbing elbows with the highest levels of government, we should pay attention.  Not necessarily about art.  Hitler was a would be artist.  Trump's career has been about putting up buildings with his name on them, and the schemes he uses to fund and build these edifices. He's also a master con artist and law avoider.  Characteristics he has in these conman skills in common with the Nazi art dealers who stole fortunes worth of art.  

But this is also about our inability to know everything and that's a big issue now.  Trump has broken so many norms, rules, laws, and articles of the constitution, it's hard to know where to begin.  Is there a hierarchy of sins?  

In this story there are so many issues and so many details to track down, that rumors and fantasies fill the spaces between the lines.  And often the truth, when we glimpse it, is worse than those rumors.  Where to begin?  Will only the most outrageous infractions get attention and the others slide?

For those who know little, read little, are not careful about their sources of information, it's easy to take a few stray facts and come to conclusions.  Conclusions that at best grossly simplify things.  At worst miss the truth by a wide margin.  

This whole exercise reminds me once again to be humble about what I know, to be careful about what I claim, and to let my readers know the sources of information I'm using.  

* For those who might question that statement, there's so much evidence you simply have to willfully disbelieve it. His biggest financial backer (to my knowledge) gleefully gave a Nazi salute on stage, and swastika adorned White Nationalists, regularly pledge their support for Trump.  

And a side note:  Two pages (that comes to four sides) were torn out of the index of the copy of Hitler's Art Thief I got from the library.  Who does that?  Did they want the info on those pages?  They have a camera on their phone.  Did they need paper for something?  There wasn't toilet paper in the library bathroom? I'm sure there was something else they could have used.  Is this a plot by someone named in the book to hide something?  Check the book in your library to see if pages 369-70 and 377-8 are missing.  Probably not, because then they would have taken out the pages referred to in the index.

I'm going to post this, but I may proof it one more time in the next week to edit errors and typos, and to make points more clearly.  [Tuesday January 6, 2026 - I've gone through this and made edits to make things clearer, to eliminate unnecessary duplications, fix commas.  I don't think I changed anything substantive.]

AIFF2025: Sunday Highlights And Monday Schedule

 The calendar has caught up with me.  I was ready for you all up through Sunday and would love to highlight today's offerings, but I also want to say something about two good films I saw yesterday. 

You're No Indian

I'd seen In the Wake of Justice Delayed and Remaining Native on Saturday.  Both are good films which tell important stories about being Native in the United States. They do an excellent job of conveying the emotional impacts of the abuses Native peoples have suffered and the lasting impacts. Their films mention court cases (in Justice)  and historic abuses of boarding schools  (in Remaining.)   Their both solid, important films.

I was wary about You're No Indian because it was about disenrollment.  I co-authored an academic article on Native American Law and I know that topic gets complicated quickly and that there is so

Ryan Flynn and Santana Rabang left

much that most people have no idea about.  How can someone make that into an interesting movie?

They managed to do it.  You're No Indian  powerfully highlights both the emotional and cultural impact of disenrollment and also collects a pile of evidence to show that the disenrollment process in many tribes - particularly those with lots of casino money - is aimed at reducing the number of people with whom they have to divide casino profits and at getting rid of opponents to their power in the tribes.  [Blogger doesn't recognize the term disenrollment and underlines it in red each time I type it.]

They offer shocking evidence of tribal leaders denying the validity of members' documented birth records, and in one case, where the tribal leader's ancestry includes the same ancestors as the people he disenrolled.  

They include those records. They include a historian of Indian records hired by the tribe to do research.  When the expert they hired gives them conclusions they don't want to hear, they reject it.  There's also a Native attorney who is banned from coming into the hearing to represent his client. 

The part that will leave most viewers who are not well-versed on Native American law still scratching their heads, is the lack of a way to appeal the disenrollment decisions.  Essentially, Native Americans have fought over the years to have sovereignty over their own affairs on Indian country.  There are rules about who has jurisdiction over different kinds of cases based on where the infraction occurred (Native land or not), who was involved (Native or non-Native), and the type of crime.  Natives have accomplished a certain amount of autonomy on Native land, which prevents the state from meddling in Native affairs, but this documentary shows how that victory has left holes that allow  tribes to commit serious offenses against fellow tribal members.  

The film and the discussion afterward mentioned that the film makers have received cease and desist orders to stop them from showing the film.  Film festivals have also received such threats (including the Anchorage International Film Festival).  Some festivals are wary of being sued and have not shown the film.  Fortunately AIFF showed the film.  My thought is that when you get such threats, it means you're hitting a nerve.  If they had legitimate legal claims, the opponents of the film would file those claims in court.  

This was the movie I said, yesterday morning, that I hadn't seen yet - the movie that works for me on all levels.  And as I say this, I also acknowledge my own bias for a strong rational argument, which this film presents.  They've simply made a very strong documentary on an important topic.  While some might say this is a pretty esoteric and small group, the film does a good job of pointing out the significance.  

They say 11,000 people have been disenrolled in tribes around the country.  They further point out that the living and future offspring of those 11,000 people have also been effectively disenrolled.  

Compounding this is the destruction of Native culture in the affected tribes.  Money, not cultural traditions, win out.  And the number of Native Americans dwindles.  They also point out that disenrollment was used by the US government to eliminate Native Americans as part of their campaign to assimilate (as in the Boarding schools), remove (from their land to reservations), or eliminate (kill) Native Americans.  In this case, it's Natives doing this work.

A powerful and well documented movie that keeps the audience's attention throughout.  The museum was packed and there were lots of questions and comments at the end.  

A Little Fellow:  The Legacy of A.P. Giannini.

The other movie I want to point out is A Little Fellow:  The Legacy of A.P. Giannini.  I don't have time now, but I will get back to this film which tells the story of the founder of the Bank of Italy in San Francisco, a bank focused on the small businesses and everyday people, who were excluded by most other banks.  There are many amazing stories about Giannini in this film, and about the bank that eventually became, under Giannini's leadership, The Bank of America.  (Though, since 1998, when Bank of America was bought out, no longer practices those principles Giannini set up for his bank.)

It's a generally unknown story, told well in this film.  More later I hope.  

I'm headed out to the Alaska Experience Theater for Uncensored Shorts at 10:30, then The Collaborator at 1pm and then for Female Filmmaker Showcase at 5:30 at the Bear Tooth and then Rosemead at 8:30.  

J took our guests to the 9am meetup and pitch session.  There's also a film maker pizza party later and their meeting the Austrian Honorary Consul General - Katrine is Austrian - and the Consul has been supportive of the film.  

Biden Left 3 Fed Prisoners On Death Row. Why?

 Of the 40 on death row, Biden commuted the death penalty of 37.  I was curious why he left three to wait for execution.  

First, who were the three?  According to the NYTimes they were:

• Robert D Bowers, 52, convicted for gunning down 11 worshippers in the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh
• Dylann Roof, 30, who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.  
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

Bowers was also convicted of hate crimes as was Dylan Roof.  Tsarnaev, according to Wikipedia, was inspired by Al Qaeda.  

The people whose sentences were commuted  - taken off of death row, but left in prison without the possibility of parole - do not seem to have had an ideological motive.  

I didn't want to post this until I found some other source that identified a reason for why these three were different.  MSN.com quotes Biden himself.  

". . . Biden drew a firm line when it came to mass killings driven by hate or terror.  In his statement, Biden underscored his belief that while the death penalty should generally be abolished, exceptions must be made for 'cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.'

"These three men represent the kinds of crimes Biden deemed beyond the scope of clemency, crimes that not only claimed innocent lives but also targeted entire communities with terror and hatred. "  [emphasis added]

According to City View, the four people in the military on death row were not pardoned.

Of course, there are also bigger issues of our whole justice system which convicts a certain percent of innocent people every year,   From the Innocence Project:

"Extrapolating from the 281 known DNA exonerations in the US since the late 1980s, a conservative estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted."

Then there are the differences in justice due to 

1. the ability of the wealthy to hire better lawyers, and the inherent racism in the US society as a whole which affects police, prosecutors, and judge.  
2. the economic and social causes of crime (huge gap between the rich an poor, poor education, poor access to physical and mental health care.  If these were addressed, fewer people would be led to crime by economic or social desperation.  

Innocence Project Ribs, Veggie Pickup, Steller Turns 50

Keeping busy these days.  I'm in the third grade class daily mostly helping one young man catch up on his English but also with other kids too.  Biking in the breaks in the rain.   

Also went to the Alaska Innocence Project's BBQ Rib Cook-off.  This year their invite also mentioned there'd be veggie options too.  The baked beens were great.  

Justice is one of my most cherished values, and the idea of innocent people be locked up, even executed, moves me greatly.  Right now the national Innocence Project is working to prevent an innocent man from being executed. 

"The Missouri Supreme Court has scheduled the execution of Mr. Williams on Sept. 24, for a crime he did not commit."

Even the prosecuting attorney involved has changed his mind.

"The St. Louis County prosecuting attorney reviewed these DNA results and filed a motion to vacate Mr. Williams’ conviction because he believed the DNA results proved by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Williams did not commit this crime."

Moving on to the execution, when there is serious question, even if not definite proof, of innocence, tells me these people are not serious about justice. 

The BBQ took place at the Alaskan Airmen's Association great building at Lake Hood float plane base.  It's a great location, but the steady rain and cloud cover that evening meant there were very few planes taking off or landing.  And one would hope they might consider a name change soon.  Airmen seems a lot sexist.  I suspect they could find reasonable synonyms, like pilots, flyers, etc.  

Picked up our Thursday veggies from Grow North Farms.  

And Friday afternoon went to the Community part of the Steller Secondary School 50th Anniversary celebration.  Here's one of the students who spoke to the crowd hold the Legislative Proclamation Rep. Alyse Galvin presented the school.  Alyse was involved with Steller a long time as a parent.  (As were we, but not for so long).  I saved this picture in fairly high resolution.  The story is pretty cool, but not sure you can read it.  Among the signatures is Sen. Jesse Kiehl of Juneau, who was a Steller student when my daughter was.  

Here's Rep. Galvin talking to the gathering before making the presentation of the Certificate.  To the side are the student speaker (whose name I didn't catch), the principal Maria Hernandez, and a parent who worked hard to organize the anniversary weekend.  

And here's Bob Reid, one of the original Steller teachers back in 1974, who came up from Texas to participate.  Bob talked about how the school got started and the ideals of creating a school where everyone participated in the decisions on courses, rules, etc.  Students, teachers, administrators, staff, and parents.  And how the vision was to bring the world into the school and involve the students out in the world.  

Bob was also a neighbor of ours before he moved to Texas, so it was great to see him again.  His major claim to fame for me was that he was the host of "Nothing but the Blues" on the then new public radio station KSKA.  

For those who can't read the Legislative Proclamation, here's part of it:

"The self-directed aspect of Steller Secondary School is a big part of what makes Steller so successful, and so unique.  With an emphasis on responsibility to self and to one's community, students, parents, and staff work together through a democratic process to set school policy and procedures.  The school ethic encourages self-advocacy and inquiry:  students are encouraged to participate in collaborative processes to determine what courses should be offered and which events will take place. 

With no bells to call students to class, no advanced placement classes, and no interscholastic sports, students who choose to attend Steller find themselves both appropriately challenged and personally engaged through the opportunity to co-create independent studies and intensives with their instructors and their peers, and to develop self-directive intensives ranging from foreign and domestic travel, sports, carpentry, drama, creative writing, sculpture, and batik, to fun with math and the chemistry of cosmetics.

As part of Stellar's commitment to their motto, "only the educated are free," and their recognition that education of the individual occurs in the context of an interdependent world, the school heavily emphasizes service to community, both through a sustained commitment to service intones community, region, and state, and through a commitment to one another within the school's peer mentoring and leadership opportunities."

I'd note, that while it says "no advanced placement classes, and no interscholastic sports," students are free to arrange those activities at other schools in the district.  My daughter took advanced placement classes at another high school and she took German at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) while she was in high school.  And NBA player Trajan Langdon played basketball for East High School while he was at Steller.  

The school was named after Georg Steller, (from Wikipedia):

"Georg Wilhelm Steller (10 March 1709 – 14 November 1746) was a German-born naturalist and explorer who contributed to the fields of biology, zoology, and ethnography. He participated in the Great Northern Expedition (1733–1743) and his observations of the natural world helped the exploration and documentation of the flora and fauna of the North Pacific region.

Steller pursued studies in theology and medicine before turning his attention to the natural sciences. In 1734, he joined the Russian Academy of Sciences as a physician, eventually being selected to accompany Bering's expedition to the uncharted waters between Siberia and North America. Steller kept detailed records of species and cultures encountered, as well as ocean currents during the journey. . ."

Among the regular visitors to our backyard, the Steller's Jay was named after Georg Steller.  (The photo is from a 2014 post and I wrote then that I did nothing to enhance the color. The light was just right.)

So connecting several threads here, I took Dr. Margritt Engel to the Steller anniversary celebration.  Dr. Engel was my daughter's UAA German teacher while my daughter was at Steller.  But more important, Dr. Engel translated Georg Steller's journals from the expeditions to Siberia and North America.  She brought two with her to give to the school for their library and to arrange for further interaction with the school and scholarship on its namesake.   

From Stolen Intellectual Policy To Heteropessimism To Climate Catastrophe Greeting Cards

A link to Capacious led me into a rabbit hole that didn't let go for several hours.  As an academic, I found the first story too real and too chilling a possibility. And also quite relevant to one of the presidential candidates. The other two I'll touch on here were much further outside my normal world.  The journal Capacious does have room for many things.

A Tweet sent me to Capaciousjournal to read an article ["How Intellectual Property Theft Feels"  Jordan Alexander Stein] by an English professor who submitted a book proposal on Cotton Mather to Yale University Press.  One reviewer gave it a green light.  The other said no.  Several years later, she gets an email about a new book from Yale University Press - on, you guessed it, Cotton Mather with a blurb that very closely copies her original proposal.  And then she finds out the author is the reviewer who nixed her proposal and the editor is the one she originally sent the proposal.  

She finds that her options are slim but minimally she wants an apology and an acknowledgement of the hurt this has caused her.  She gets neither. 

Her article covers a wide range of topics.  Money wasn't particularly an issue, because, as she says, books on Cotton Mather are aimed at a tiny niche audience. Aside from the deceit, a general despicableness of this sort of crime (I call it a crime, she says the law is fuzzy. The university classifies it under moral lapses) it caused real damage to the writer.  

"Having to look back at the past five years of my career, I suddenly saw that I’d mostly stopped researching and publishing on Puritan writers. Nor in that time had I attended even a single one of the field’s multiple annual conferences. All the Mather books in my office had been pushed into a corner where I now found them hibernating under five winters of dust. The humiliation I had felt years before as a response to the ad hominem nature of George’s reader report had knocked me off my professional course. It had happened by no means necessarily, and perhaps not on anyone’s part deliberately, but, I reluctantly found myself admitting, it had happened absolutely." (p. 103)

Essentially the reviewer/thief/author and the editor got away with it.  Nothing bad came of it for them (at least in the awareness of Jordan Alexander Stein.)  

And this seems emblematic of the age we live in.  Where the norms have broken down and the wheels of justice are too slow to keep up.  Trump perhaps will become the patron saint of sociopaths.  The Supreme Court has even awarded him with immunity that is probably broad and slippery enough for him to escape punishment for anything.  

Stein goes on to say this was not about money, but reputation.

"Universities meanwhile don’t operate at merely human levels; they have more abstract things like brands to protect. From their perspective, this kind of dust-up wouldn’t be about personal relationships, even when financial considerations are not involved. (Never mind that the university whose press Martha works for and which has published George’s edition of Mather is so incomprehensibly wealthy, and again the money at stake would be so little, that even the upper-limit damages from any hypothetical lawsuit of mine would be to them about as negligible as a rounding error). More typically, the issue is about the priceless thing called reputation. Universities do not want to be seen as having done something for which any liability must be assumed. What universities seek to protect is symbolic. And they protect it very well." (p. 106) (emphasis mine)

It's not like any of this is new.  Professors stealing the ideas of others is an age-old practice.  What is new is that there are many more platforms from which to call it out.  

 

While scrolling through the online copy of Capacious, I found several other articles that reminded me that people are thinking about and writing about things I have not given much attention to.  

[I'd note the links here.  The basic Capaciousjournal.com goes to a table of contents for the current edition - Vol. 3 No. 2  (2024).  This page has links to some of the articles in this edition - including the next one on Heteropessimism.  But the other articles can be found by clicking the PDF file for the whole edition.  Which I had to do to find the article above.  So for Stein article, you have to scroll down.  The Heteropessimism link takes you directly to that article.  The Greeting Card article you have to scroll down - it's right below the Stein article.]

"Heteropessimism and the Pleasure of Saying 'No.'”Samantha Pinson Wrisley

I have reactions to this article, but it's a discussion I have not been a party to (the article has 42 or 43 references) so I'll keep my thoughts to myself, just listen, and offer this quote from the author. 

 "I take the heteropessimistic connections between feminism and incel to their logical conclusion, showing that feminist heteropessimism’s inherent essentialism affectively cements the incongruous ideological positions of feminism to incel’s sexual nihilism. I conclude with an argument for the naturalization of negativity as part of a broader move toward accepting the ambiguities of heterosexual desire and the antagonism(s) that drive it."

After rereading this quote, I realize it most readers won't catch the drift of the article.  Basically, as I understood it, Wrisley argued that one area of feminism looks at heterosexual relations as difficult because they can't stand the men necessary to have heterol relationships.  She saw a similarity between this attitude and that of incels who are virgins because they can't attract women to have sex with them.  Both, thus being characterized as 'heteropessimistic.'

Finally:  "Greeting Cards For the Anthropocene"  Craig Campbell 

This one starts out with 

"In 1971 it cost only 50¢ for an eight page list of twenty-five Greeting Card companies in the USA and Canada that were buying greetings, captions, and ideas from hopeful writers."

He offers some examples of what the card makers wanted in people's pitches.  Using this idea, he moves closer to the present:

"In 2019, under the auspices of the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography, we launched the Greeting Cards for the Anthropocene project.2 We sought to understand climate feelings first by making cards for an invented category of ‘Climate Catastrophe’ in the greeting card aisle of the local pharmacy."

 The article includes some examples of related letters and such greeting cards. 

In many ways Capacious does what I set out to do in this blog long ago - look at things we often overlook, or look at what we see, but differently.  It rearranges the furniture of the brain.  And reminds me to do more of this sort of posts.  

Israel-Gaza VI: Finding Criteria For A Just Resolution

Thıs ıs a long post in which I try to link different ideas together.  Since I'm not posting every day nowadays, you can come back and finish this one over a few days. :) 


[OVERVIEW:  This post looks at the question:  What criteria would you use to determine the legitimacy of the Palestinian and Israel claims to Palestine?  Then it uses information from the previous five posts, as well as additional information, on Israel and Gaza to show why this is not the black and white issue both sides claim it to be.  Sounds pretty simple, but I started this back in early March and I've been trying to tease out the key points since.  Not sure it will get any better so posting it now. Have fun.]

Map from https://www.quora.com/What-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-mean

Parts I-IV of this series of posts briefly discussed a number of subjects to show how complicated the Israeli-Gaza war is and why ıt ıs hard to speak intelligently and knowledgeably about the topic. 

 Part V outlined a few observations I came to while researching and writing the first four posts.  

In this post, I want to give an example of how those complexities make simple answers to any of this an easy, perhaps, but uninformed response. I'll refer to a number of the issues I identified in the earlier posts. I get that people grasp for some easy answer, especially in response to the unconscionable killing of Palestinians in Gaza.  But as comforting as that might be, slogans based on ignorance lead to even more confusion and anger.   

Let's look at the question of who has the best claim to the land between the river and the sea.  This refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  On the map you can see that would cover all of modern day Israel as well as the Palestinian areas - Gaza and the West Bank.  

I include the map here because it's been said that many people shouting the motto "From the river to the sea" supposedly didn't know which river and which sea were meant.  [But are these claims true or just made to discredit demonstrators?  The link talks about hiring a polling company to ask students - but it didn't say that they were specifically students demonstrating and shouting the phrase.  There is so much spin going on over this topic we need to take everything with a grain of salt. We need to ask people what they mean before we attack them.]

While the Hamas declaration of 1988 (highlighted in Part IV) clearly says Hamas wants an Islamic state controlling all of historic Palestine (the British Mandate), this NPR article says many students chanting the slogan mean they want peace and freedom for all people living between the river and the sea. 

Hamas originally claimed all the land (see the section on the Hamas declaration in Part IV) which would mean the elimination of Israel, on the grounds that Palestinians have lived there for generations.  They claim that Israel is a colonial state taken from the local Palestinians by Europeans and Americans.   Israelis claim that Jews have lived there for thousands of years.  

That's very different from wanting peace and freedom for everyone living from the river to the sea.  

Basically, the current Israeli government led by Netanyahu wants Israel to exist and to have control over the Palestinian areas, because, as I understand it, they do not trust Arabs to peacefully live in their own country adjacent to Israel. 

And Hamas wants an Islamic State to control the whole area.  At least that's what the 1988 declaration says.  Yesterday (April 25, 2024) AP said.

"A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders."

But the AP article goes on to say:

"Over the years, Hamas has sometimes moderated its public position with respect to the possibility of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But its political program still officially “rejects any alternative to the full liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea” — referring to the area reaching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which includes lands that now make up Israel."

So one of the issues that both sides seem to totally disagree about is who has the right to live in this territory between the river and the sea.  Both groups?  One group? or the other?  How can this disagreement be resolved?  Let's just look at this one question to get a sense of how NOT easy this all is.  

Who has the most legitimate claims to the territory Israel occupies?

I would ask people to step back now and contemplate how one would evaluate those claims?  How should an impartial judge answer that question?  What criteria would such an objective observer use to determine who had the most legitimate claim to that land?  Must it be all or nothing?

Even coming up with criteria is fraught with problems.  Philosopher John Rawls has proposed a way to create rules for a just society - it would have to be done collectively, before anyone knows what role they will be assigned in that society.  Otherwise you give your role favorable conditions.  

",,,everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. This "veil" is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves so they cannot tailor principles to their own advantage:

"[N]o one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance."

The same problems are true about setting up the criteria for evaluating the claims to this land.  People will favor those criteria that they know will lead to the outcome they prefer.  But in the world we live in, that veil of ignorance is not possible.  

So which criteria to use?

1. Who's been there the longest?  
1. How would you measure this? 
1. Jews have lived in and around Jerusalem and other parts of Israel for about 3000 years.  
2. Christianity is 2000 years old, and 
3. Mohamed didn't found Islam until 610 AD.  
2. Whose traditions are connected to the land?     
1. Jerusalem holds major holy sites for all three religions. Plus others like Bahá'ì.
3. What group's culture has no other homeland where the majority of the population share their language, religion, and customs other than in this disputed land?  
4. What group has the most people?
5. Who will make the best use of the land? 
6. Flip a coin?

Below are some thoughts on intricacies of answering the questions above (particularly 1-3)

1.  National borders change constantly over time.  Hong Kong was under British rule from 1898- 1997.  India was a British colony for nearly two hundred years. After India became independent,  Pakistan split from India in 1947.  Bangladesh split from Pakistan in 1971. Russia colonized parts of Alaska from the 1830s until they sold all of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Though they only had colonized  relatively small portion of Alaska and the indigenous population had no say in any of this. Alaska became a US state in 1959.  Hawaii became an internationally recognized kingdom in 1808 but then was conquered by the US in 1898.  

Today's African nations' boundaries were dictated mostly by European colonial rulers, focused on exploiting natural resources, not which groups of people lived where.  

The Ottoman empire controlled Palestine for 400 years until the British took over and eventually, through the Balfour Declaration created Israel.  After the creation of Israel in 1948, the West Bank was basically controlled by Jordan and Gaza was controlled by Egypt until the 1967 war.  

2. Colonization

The Hamas Charter talks about Israel as a colonial power.  But let's look at that a little more carefully.  Here's a generally common definition much like this one from dictionary.com

"-a country or territory claimed and forcibly taken control of by a foreign power which sends its own people to settle there:

-a group of people who leave their native country to form a settlement in a territory that their own government has claimed and forcibly taken control of:"

European nations set up colonies in the Western Hemisphere, South America, Asia, Australia.  In all cases the colony was controlled by a mother country elsewhere.

Israel is a special case.  There is no mother country.  Instead we have a people scattered around in many other countries - always a small religious minority, often reviled and with fewer rights than other citizens.  And then, of course, there was the Holocaust.  

So Jews had no homeland where their religion and culture was protected and where they weren't a minority.  From Wikipedia:

"According to the Hebrew Bible, the First Temple was built in the 10th century BCE, during the reign of Solomon over the United Kingdom of Israel. It stood until c. 587 BCE, when it was destroyed during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem.[1] Almost a century later, the First Temple was replaced by the Second Temple, which was built after the Neo-Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire. While the Second Temple stood for a longer period of time than the First Temple, it was likewise destroyed during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE."

My sense is that Hamas knows there is no Jewish mother country (in the US where Jews have their largest population, they make up less than 3% of the total population.)  Hamas seems to be using 'colonial' to imply that Western nations, in some sense, are the 'White" mother nations of Israel.  And Britain was the last European nation to have control over Palestine and agreed to the creation of Israel.  

But if the State of Israel were to be dissolved, there really is no 'home' country for Jews to go to.  Though Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, in their 2005 book New Jews argue that the idea of diaspora may be out of date, that there are vibrant Jewish communities around the world where Jews feel rooted and do not long to return Israel.  They argue for exchanging fear - and Israel as the safe home for Jews - for hope based on all the new ways Jews are redefining themselves.  But this is a tiny minority opinion.

On the other hand, Palestinian Muslims speak Arabic and follow Islam.  There are many Islamic countries in the world, where Arabic is spoken.  Yet their argument that being Palestinian makes them different from other Arab cultures is partially confirmed by the fact that neither Egypt nor Jordan - both close neighbors of Israel - do not want a large influx of Palestinians.  

But the Islamic State that Hamas declares (in their declaration) is mandated for Palestine, would be radically different from the culture that Palestinians have developed in Palestine.  

"The Islamic Resistance Movement [firmly] believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Trust] upon all Muslim generations till the day of Resurrection." 

Such an Islamic state would be more different from current Palestinian culture than if Palestinians moved to most other Arab countries.  Or even non Arab countries. And how does this accommodate the Christian Arabs who live in Palestine?   

3.  Countries where Indigenous Populations regained control have been former colonies

Most former colonies that are now independent countries  are former European colonies.  The  borders imposed by the foreign conquerors often didn't match the local indigenous boundaries and led to countries that have different ethnic groups competing for power.  Israel and Palestine is such an example.  

So while it's accurate to say that England left behind the seeds of conflict in the former Palestine Mandate as it did in other former colonies, the Jews of Israel are different from the colonialists who exploited other European colonies.   While many, if not most, came from Europe, they can trace their historical connection to the land back 3000 years.  And others have come from Arabic countries in North Africa and the Middle East.  These are people who spoke Arabic as well as ancient biblical languages into the 20th Century.

In other cases - say the US and much of South America  - the European settlers simply attempted to Christianize the indigenous populations, move them,  and if that didn't work, annihilate them.  

When the Soviet Union collapsed, former member states, such as the Yugoslavia, broke up, not peacefully,  into smaller states based on ethnicity.  East Germany, more peacefully, joined West Germany.  

Is there a solution both sides would agree to?

To the extent that Hamas and Netanyahu's government are negotiating, probably not.   

The parties' demands are mutually exclusive 

The Israeli government under Netanyahu says elimination of Hamas and Israeli control of Gaza is what they will accept.  [But note, the wording changes regularly, but the basics seem to stay the same.] While Hamas has pulled back, at least on paper, from demanding that they will not be satisfied until the Jewish state no longer exists, they still believe that all of Palestine is rightfully an Islamic State whose laws should be based on the Koran.  

Could other nations get Hamas and and the current Israeli government to come to an agreement?

The world leaders have been trying since the creation of Israel with no lasting success.

What leverage do outside players have on Israel and Palestinians?

Both parties get their weapons from foreign countries, though Israel itself has a formidable arms industry of its own.  

The outside supporters could tell Israel and Hamas that they will cut off all weapons until there is a peace treaty.  Let's look at the key countries involved.

Middle East Eye says that while the US is by far the biggest arms supplier to Israel, they also get weapons from Germany, United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada, 

The American Friends Service Committee has put out a list of companies that profit from the Israeli attacks on Gaza.  Go to the link to see the list.  Besides major players like Boeing and Lockheed, there are many others.  

This AP article identifies sources of Palestinian weapons:

“'The majority of their arms are of Russian, Chinese or Iranian origin, but North Korean weapons and those produced in former Warsaw Pact countries are also present in the arsenal,' said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an expert in military arms who is director of the Australian-based Armament Research Services. "

 There are Israeli Jews and Palestinians who would like a two state solution with peace and cooperation between the two

My conclusion is that both parties have legitimate claims to independent states in the land between the river and the sea.  I don't see an easy path to that option.  In fact the only paths I see now are in people's imaginations.  Here are visions of peaceful coexistence, one Israeli, one Palestinian.  : 

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib     https://twitter.com/afalkhatib/status/1782241783843553568

Haggai Matar   https://www.972mag.com/lament-israelis-gaza-october-7/

Whether the voices of fear and anger will continue to dominate or whether some versions along the lines these two call for is possible, only time will tell.  

Finally, are students wrong to protest against the killings in Gaza?  Absolutely not.  Are they protesting perfectly?  Of course not.  Protest organizers often lose control of the protests they've organized.  Let's not get distracted from the issue they are protesting - the slaughter of almost 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children.  And administrators and police groups are reacting to them the same way administrators and police groups reacted to the anti-war demonstrations in the US in the 1960s and 70s.  Four students were shot by National Guard troops at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.  From the pictures I'm seeing of current demonstrations, Kent State might well be repeated soon.  Let's hope not.  

As Trump's Jury Gets Chosen, I Get Summons ForJury Duty

 It was an email from the Alaska Court System.

The time I've been summoned for is in June.  So I'm guessing the folks who ended up as potential jurors in the Trump case in New York were probably summoned much earlier as well.

I was wondering why it came to my email.  In the past it's always come via the post office.  In Alaska, people who have requested a Permanent Fund Check are on the list.  

Next I had to fill out an online questionnaire to insure I was eligible - an Alaska resident, a US citizen, over 18, etc.  

Here's a link to the instructions jurors get.  Most of it is routine FAQs - will I get paid?  how much?  what about food?  parking?  how long will I serve?  etc.  

But given the attention to picking the jury in New York, I thought the section picking jurors for a particular trial might be of interest to people.  Of course, these are Alaska rules not New York rules so there may be some differences.  This is the voir dir - the choosing and removing of jurors by the attorneys.  

How are jurors chosen to sit on a jury?

There are several methods a judge may use to select a jury. The following paragraphs describe the most common methods.

When a trial is ready to begin, a group of potential jurors will be called into the courtroom. The clerk will ask the potential jurors to swear or affirm that they will truthfully answer the questions about to be asked of them.

Trials begin with jury selection. Names are randomly selected from those on jury service to form a panel from which the trial jury will be selected. The judge excuses those on the panel whose knowledge of the people or the circumstances would affect their impartiality.

    J-180 (7/22) 10

You will be told the names of the parties and their attorneys and the nature of the case. You will be asked such things as whether you know or are related to anyone involved in the case, have any financial or other interest in the outcome of the case, have formed or expressed an opinion, or have any personal bias or prejudice that might affect how you decide the case.

Depending on your court location, one of two methods will be used to select the first group of potential jurors to take seats in the jury box:

Method #1: The names of all potential jurors will be placed on slips of paper in a small box. The clerk will then draw a certain number of names from the box and ask those persons to take seats in the jury box. Method #2: A computer will produce a list of potential jurors in random order and the clerk will ask the first group of persons on that list to take seats in the jury box.

The judge and the lawyers for each side will ask you some questions. If you are reluctant to answer a particular question in public, you may ask the judge to be examined privately on that topic.

The lawyers will be allowed to ask that certain potential jurors be excused “for cause." The lawyer must explain why the lawyer believes the juror would not be a fair and impartial juror in the case. The judge may or may not grant these requests. After all seated jurors have been “passed for cause," the lawyers will be allowed to “peremptorily disqualify” a certain number of jurors (this means to disqualify them without stating the reason why). The number of peremptory disqualifications allowed depends on the type of case.

After the required number of jurors has been accepted, the jurors take an oath swearing or affirming that they will hear the case and give a verdict based solely on the evidence introduced and the instructions of the court. The trial is then ready to begin.

I see jury duty as one of the responsibilities US citizens have in exchange for the freedom and opportunities we have.  It's a less frequent responsibility than voting, but maybe even more important.  I also know that jurors are required to be impartial and that many if not most jurors struggle to overcome biases they have that could lead them to an erroneous decision.   

"politically fraught with peril"

Sen. Lisa Murkowski said that it may be legal for state courts to disqualify former President Donald Trump from running in the 2024 election, but that doing so would be “politically fraught with peril.” https://t.co/1eLC8XvjAX

— Anchorage Daily News (@adndotcom) December 23, 2023

So imagine, Arnold Schwarzenegger decides to run for President and he's getting good polling results.  But someone sues to keep him off the ballot because he wasn't a natural born United States citizen.  

The Constitution says clearly:

"Article II, Section 1, Clause 5:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

Would Sen. Murkowski or any of the others talking about "fraught with political peril" say we shouldn't enforce the Constitution because it would be "fraught with political peril" to do so? 

Well that's exactly what is happening with Murkowski and others who want to keep Trump's name on the Colorado ballot.   As President, he, at the very least, gave aid and comforted those trying to overthrow the election of Joe Biden by storming Congress and stopping the ratification of the election. (And we don't even know who all he showed or sold secret documents to yet.)

Fourteenth Amendment  Equal Protection and Other Rights

Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Trump's denials are no different from the denials of any accused criminal who tries to twist words and find legal loopholes to avoid the legal consequences of their actions.  

Does he really have to be tried for insurrection?  We all watched it live.  We watched the Jan 6 committee reviews of video tape and listened to witnesses, many who were Trump appointees who were with him in the White House on January 6.  

We've heard the tape of Trump demanding of the Georgia officials: 

"All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have," Trump says, according to audio of the call. "There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you've recalculated."

He's a known liar and he knew he lost Georgia and was demanding the Georgia officials overturn the election by finding him the votes he needed.  

So what is this "political peril" everyone is so worried about?

First, I'd ask, when did we start inserting political consequences into court proceedings?  Yes, it's happened, but it isn't supposed to.  It's the rule of law, not the rule of the mob that courts are supposed to uphold.  

Second, what crystal ball does Murkowski have that tells her there will be political peril?  No one knows what will happen in the future.  So this is just conjecture of what might happen.  Sure, there are lots of Trump supporters who likely would be very angry.  

Propagandists on the Right will tell Trump's supporters that this was an illegal prevention of Trump's right to run for office.  Is that a reason to ignore the Constitution?  Absolutely not.  This is a phantom peril.  Of his most rabid supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 

"Approximately 723 federal defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on Jan. 6. Approximately 454 have been sentenced to periods of incarceration. Approximately 151 defendants have been sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 28 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration."  

"Approximately 714 individuals have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, many of whom faced or will face incarceration at sentencing."

(DOJ, December 2023)

I'm not saying Trump supporters won't make lots of noise, maybe do damage, and generally try to reenact another January 6.  They have already made death threats against the  judges on the Colorado Supreme Court.  Trump isn't calling on his backers to stand down.  But we have police.  We have the National Guard.  We have the military if we have to put down another insurrection.

Third, if Trump is on the ballot and loses again, we are just as likely to face political peril then as now, maybe more so.  If they successfully bully the courts into ignoring the Constitution now, Trump supporters will be even more emboldened to try to prevent a peaceful transition again.  

Surely it's a better option to uphold the Constitution now and  remove Trump from the ballot now and let his various court cases play out. Let's face this speculated political peril now rather than later.     

Fourth, if the court ignores the plain language of the US Constitution and allows Trump to be placed on the Colorado ballot (and in other states if Colorado is successful in this), then we are already in political peril, we've already stumbled out of democracy and the rule of law.  The fact that we are even debating this says we are already one or more steps into the fascist dictatorship Trump has already said he would head.  

Fifth, Gerald Ford, after he became president when Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, also feared political peril if Nixon were prosecuted.  So he pardoned Nixon.  While I think that decision was wrong - and set up a precedent for Trump to grasp at - it didn't violate the law or the Constitution.  The president has the power to pardon.  But when pardoning Nixon 

"Ford announced that he had pardoned Richard Nixon for all crimes he committed or "may have committed" while president" (Washington Post 2006)

which tells us he fully believed that an ex-president can be tried for acts committed while president - something Trump has said couldn't be done.   

Sixth, Murkowski and others have said that the people should have the final say by voting.  But no matter how much people would want to vote for Schwartzeneger or Trump, the two are constitutionally ineligible to be president.  We don't vote on whether to ignore the Constitution.  

"Political Peril" here is the bogey man the Right (and some on the Left) are using to justify ignoring the clear language of the Constitution.  Remember, this fight is for the man who spent years spreading the lies about Obama being born in Kenya and not being a natural born US citizen.  

Trump's whole strategy is to cause distrust of every US institution and then to say that "I alone can fix it."   The idea of "political peril" is part and parcel of his game plan.  Democracies don't make exceptions for bullies who threaten violence if they don't get their way.  

That is exactly what is happening here.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is NOT a natural born US citizen and is not qualified to run for president. 

Donald Trump supported an insurrection to overthrow the vote of the people and maintain his position as president even though he lost the popular and electoral college votes.  And he isn't qualified to run for president.  

Let's face whatever peril lies ahead now instead of next November when that peril might reappear if US voters vote for Biden over Trump once again.  Let's stop that peril now rather than let the Trump machine work to more effectively falsify the election results than they did in 2020.