THE SUMTER ITEM N.G. Osteen 1843-1936 The Watchman and Southron
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2014 H.G. Osteen 1870-1955 Founder, The Item
H.D. Osteen 1904-1987 The Item
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Margaret W. Osteen 1908-1996 The Item Hubert D. Osteen Jr. Chairman & Editor-in-Chief Graham Osteen Co-President Kyle Osteen Co-President Jack Osteen Editor and Publisher Larry Miller CEO Braden Bunch Senior News Editor
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COMMENTARY
Decent folk make terror a possibility “E
ngineering Evil” is a documentary recently shown on the Military History channel. It’s a story of Nazi Germany’s murder campaign before and during World War II. According to some estimates, 16 million Jews and other people died at the hands of Nazis (http://tinyurl.com/6duny9). Though the Holocaust ranks high among the great human tragedies, most people never consider the most important question: How did Adolf Hitler and the Nazis gain the power that they needed to commit such horror? Focusing solely on the evil of the Holocaust won’t get us very far toward the goal of the Jewish slogan “Never Again.” When Hitler came to power, he inherited decades of political consolidation by Otto von Bismarck and later the Weimar Republic that had weakened the political power of local jurisdictions. Through the Enabling Act (1933), whose formal name was “A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich,” Hitler gained the power to enact laws with neither the involvement nor the approval Walter of the Reichstag, Germany’s Williams parliament. The Enabling Act destroyed any remaining local autonomy. The bottom line is that it was decent Germans who made Hitler’s terror possible — Germans who would have never supported his territorial designs and atrocities. The 20th century turned out to be mankind’s most barbaric. Roughly 50 million to 60 million people died in international and civil wars. As tragic as that number is, it pales in comparison with the number of people who were killed at the hands of their own government. Recently deceased Rudolph J. Rummel, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii and author of “Death by Government,” estimated that since the beginning of the 20th century, governments have killed 170 million of their own citizens. Top government killers were the Soviet Union, which, between 1917 and 1987, killed 62 million of its own citizens, and the People’s Republic of China, which, between 1949 and 1987, was responsible for the deaths of 35 million to 40 million of its citizens. In a distant third place were the Nazis, who murdered about 16 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others deemed misfits, such as homosexuals and the mentally ill. We might ask why the 20th century was so barbaric. Surely, there were barbarians during earlier ages. Part of the answer is that during earlier times, there wasn’t the kind of concentration of power that emerged during the 20th century. Had Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Hitler been around in earlier times, they could not have engineered the slaughter of tens of millions of people. They wouldn’t have had the authority. There was considerable dispersion of jealously guarded political power in the forms of heads of provincial governments and principalities and nobility and church leaders whose political power within their spheres was often just as strong as the monarch’s. Professor Rummel explained in the very first sentence of “Death by Government” that “Power kills; absolute Power kills absolutely. ... The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.” That’s the long, tragic, ugly story of government: the elite’s use of government to dupe and forcibly impose its will on the masses. The masses are always duped by wellintentioned phrases. After all, what German could have been against “A Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich”? It’s not just Germans who have fallen prey to well-intentioned phrases. After all, who can be against the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”? We Americans ought to keep the fact in mind that Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have had more success in their reign of terror if they had the kind of control and information about their citizens that agencies such as the NSA, the IRS and the ATF have about us. You might ask, “What are you saying, Williams?” Just put it this way: No German who died before 1930 would have believed the Holocaust possible. Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. © 2014 creators.com
LETTER TO THE EDITOR Electoral College not necessary anymore A few weeks ago I started thinking about why we as voters go to the polls. We read and hear about how it’s so important to go out and vote. I have been reading a lot of information on the Electoral College, including things like how many presidents won the popular vote but lost the election because of the Electoral College. Look it up yourself, it’s on the Internet. Here are a few little known or forgotten facts:
• 1787 — Electoral College established; • 1912 — A form of radio was first adopted by the United States Navy; and • 1925 — Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gave the first demonstration of a television image in motion. Back in 1787, the Electoral College was necessary because that was the only way the voting wishes of the people back home could be counted (one representing many). Members of the college traveled by horse and buggy to Washington to get the voting
wishes of the folks back home counted. It’s sickening to know in the era of television, radio and computers, some people still believe we are back in the horse-andbuggy days. Sounds to me like these folks need to get out and actually earn a paycheck for a change. Once an election is over, what do these folks do for four years until the next cluster clunker comes along? Maybe another shovelready program. LILLIE KALIE Sumter
COMMENTARY
Changing the way Southerners are portrayed
W
ASHINGTON — After writing close to 3,000 columns, I’ve learned that people sometimes read what they’re looking for, often as a result of a headline, rather than what I wrote. Same words, different prisms. The same is true of the spoken word. What did she just say? Listener 1: “She said all Southerners are stupid.” Listener 2: “No, she didn’t. She was saying that whenever political operatives or the media need to show someone who is confused or clueless, they always find somebody with a Southern accent. Parker’s been writing about this for years. Besides, she is a Southerner.” Let’s hear it for Listener No. 2! This exchange might have taken place after I recently appeared on “Meet the Press,” where I made a comment about Southerners and an ad attacking the Affordable Care Act. Apparently, at least one person with a laptop was offended and social media took it from there. Think Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” To recap, NBC host David Gregory showed a clip I hadn’t seen before in which a fellow expresses how confusing he found Obamacare. He said he felt like he was in a “haze.” The clip followed my comment that the greatest challenge to Democrats in the midterm elections is the broad understanding that those who passed Obamacare had no idea what they were doing. Rather than continuing this thread, I reacted to something that has irked me for years — the media stereotype of the Southerner as a befuddled hayseed — and that has been a theme throughout my body of work. In the moment, my gut got the
better of my brain. I said surely they could have found someone without a Southern accent to express confusion about Obamacare. My follow-up was that there are plenty of other people (who might be considered smarter and more sophisticated by certain folks) who were also perplexed by the law. Alas, people unfamiliar with my work had no context for the remark and took offense. Herewith, the rest of the story. First, I would never intentionally insult Southerners or the South. Although I was born in Florida, owing in part to Kathleen my mother’s Parker poor health (she needed a mild climate but died young anyway), South Carolina has been home to my maternal family since 1670. In fact, my mother was the only family member to leave the state up to that point, except for the men who left, some for eternity, to fight in various wars. Her other reason for leaving was because she committed the unpardonable sin of marrying a Yankee pilot during World War II. My father said he couldn’t have found work in South Carolina back then. My Southern résumé otherwise includes the fact that my permanent address is still South Carolina, my first job was at The Charleston Evening Post, and I’m married to a native son whose bona fides are not in question. To those angry emailers who pointed out that I’m no smarter than people with Southern accents, I would add only, “Amen,
sister.” I have one of those accents myself, but I adapt as circumstances require. Catch me on NBC, and I probably sound like the Midwesterner my father was. Catch me on S.C. 97, and you won’t know me from any other local. My grandfather was one of those authentic Southerners whom reporters always hope to find — a farmer who plucked food from the ground a couple of hours before we sat down to say grace, told ghost stories from a rocking chair on the front porch and took us to Turkey Creek to fish and to scavenge for arrowheads. There was nothing dumb about Mr. John B, as everyone called him. If there were a way to capture the smell of him — a combination of leather, tobacco, soil and Old Spice — I’d give it away as tonic to help city children fall asleep at night. My own yearning for the smells and sounds of the motherland brought me back to South Carolina after years of roaming and writing for several newspapers here and there. The reporter in me began to notice the way Southerners were portrayed by the media as ignorant yokels. The Scots-Irish Southerner in me burned with ancient rage. It was with this mindset that I watched the ad and commented. I sure meant no offense and do wish I had chosen my words more carefully. Even so, knowing Southerners as I do, I also know they’re as quick to forgive as to convict if treated respectfully, which was my intent all along. Kathleen Parker’s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com. © 2014, Washington Post Writers Group
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