I recall those passages from Shirer and have always wondered when someone would raise a stink. Forty-five years ago the phrase “homosexual perverts” was uncontroversial.

I think (but am not certain) in that book he also talks about the bickering and chaos in an organization which has concentrations of such people.

Shirer also makes it clear that the reason Hitler felt compelled to purge his friends in the S.A. was that they were a 2.5 million man army that was demanding further revolution and that President Hindenburg was threatening to declare martial law if something was not done about them, which would have directly threatened Hitler’s hold on power. (It’s surprising to realize that Hitler was still vulnerable in May-June 1934.) So Hitler made a deal with the German army, whereby they would support his regime if he got rid of the S.A. This agreement sealed his power.

That is Shirer’s main emphasis. He several times refers in passing to the circle around Roehm as “perverts,” but it is not at all his central point. However, for the amazon reviewer I quoted, or for anyone who is a product of modern liberalism, it would seem that any negative description of homosexuality necessarily becomes of central importance.

Shirer was a life-long liberal. It is notable that liberals writing in 1960 and before, did not use today’s PC language.

The critic’s moral outrage should have been directed at one of America’s grotesquely fallen liberals: Stephen Jay Gould, also one of America’s most respected evolutionary biologists.

I have read and admired several of Professor Gould’s books, and my favorite is his book Wonderful Life, about the fossils found in Canada’s Burgess Shale. I knew he was a liberal, but he was a member of the faculty at an American university. Somehow no one ever informed me that Professor Gould died with Lenin’s photograph over his desk.

(The story can be found at last year’s FrontPage story with the following link: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4093.)

I don’t see what Stephen Jay Gould has to do with this discussion. And I don’t understand what it means to refer him as “grotesquely fallen liberal.” His Marxist leanings were well known for decades.

I am guilty of trying to spur discussion that seems to have fallen off this week. I was trying to make a point succinctly, but I see I was unsuccessful. I was trying to illustrate the double standard liberals use. Liberals did not dismiss Professor Gould and his books because he revered a murderous monster, yet they are dismissing a historian for having a nonmurderous view on homosexuality that does not fit the current liberal view. A professor that has a picture of Mussolini or Hitler (other murderous monsters) over his desk could not teach in an American university or sell scientific books. In addition, I see a distinction between having Marxist leanings and adoring a Marxist monster daily. Finally, that Gould’s Marxist leanings were well known has nothing to do with what those leanings make him. What I am also guilty of is pridefully responding to a peevish comment.

This discussion seems to have gone off-track in record time. The real issue, of course, is that any disapproval of homosexual practices, even if purely based on considerations of public health, is anathema among today’s liberals, including no doubt the NYT reviewer of Shirer’s book. AMaking things worse, the liberal comfort level is further reduced by the liberal dogma of an all-out Nazi persecution of the poor homosexuals, a notion which has given them semi-sainthood, or at least parity with Jewish Holocaust victims.
The real facts are rather different. The leadership of the S.A. was overhelmingly homosexual - remember the attractions of whips and leather boots - and on his way to power Hitler, a bohemian by nature, tolerated them as useful street brawlers; just like today’s liberals he didn’t care about “private” sexual behavior. Then, during the night of the long knives Roehm, Ernst and other S.A. leaders were summarily executed, and one of the reasons given to the public was that they had been sexually immoral. Instead, they were necessary political victims of Hitler’s quest for political acceptance by the German establishment, especially the Wehrmacht.
I find it necessary to dwell on this precisely because current liberal pieties about a homosexual holocaust have pretty much been exploded by Eric A. Johnson’s work “Nazi Terror” (1999, Basic Books), in which he documents that only a small fraction of German homosexuals were ever persecuted, one big reason being that “…a policy calling for the wholesale extermination of homosexuals would have devastated the entire Nazi movement, including not only the SA of Ernst Roehm but also the SS, the Hitler Youth and the Nazi party itself.” (p. 289). Thus a group like the Jehovah’s witnesses can far more plausibly claim Nazi persecution than the lavender lobby. But guess who squeals the loudest.

“But guess who squeals the loudest.” — Wim

Yes, but the squeals are aroused only in one moral direction. We didn’t hear those squeals when thirteen-year-old Jesse Durkhiser endured horrific homosexual torture by two pædophile fiends while bound and gagged and chained to a metal bedframe or something, in the course of which he died. We didn’t hear them either when that little boy in Boston — I forget his name — was (after being targeted days or weeks in advance because of his especially beautiful, angelic-looking face) set upon forcibly for sex by two homosexual fiends who used gasoline-soaked rags stuffed down his throat (I think the boy was something like nine or ten or eleven years old — imagine this being done to a boy like that) to knock him out as they dragged him into their car. His father noted proudly, in his spoken funeral tribute, that his son had fought hard for his life before being overcome by the gasoline-saturated rags, or so the perpetrators had recalled and the police confirmed from separate evidence. We didn’t hear those squeals then, any more than we’ll hear those squeals when your and my sons return, from their week-end boy scout camping trip in the woods, sexually-abused and AIDS-infected after the homosexuals and the ACLU will have brought about the changes they desire in the prudent policies of the Boy Scouts. Then, those squeals which are so ubiquitous now will be nowhere to be heard. There’ll be only deafening silence.

You’ll be able to hear a pin drop.