What Blinken's Stepfather Knew About Dictators

The Secretary of State would do well to listen to his stepfather about Hitler when thinking about Netanyahu and Putin

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Samuel Pisar, Blinken’s stepfather

It’s always a very dangerous thing to do Holocaust research. But to borrow from Obama quoting from Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” So we must go there, albeit a bit more carefully than I might have in my autodidactic and misspent twenties. The past is a foreign country and if you don’t have the right papers —or come to the right conclusions upon inspection — you might just get shot or deported or worse.

No, I don’t think it’s possible to understand Secretary of State Antony Blinken without first understanding his stepfather, Samuel Pisar. It takes a special kind of man to be a stepfather and as we shall see Pisar was an intriguing figure, who counted presidents and writers among his associates. Oh, and he was the last soul to talk to Robert Maxwell before he died, according to Pisar’s own obituary.

Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991.

“[Maxwell] had dined onshore in Santa Cruz (Tenerife), seemed his normal, confident self and discussed plans and appointments,” Pisar said. “He had planned to travel to London the following day and told his son Ian on the phone that he would see him tomorrow.”

Pisar also served as a lawyer to Soviet Jewish spy Armand Hammer.

Totally normal stuff.

We’ve already discussed Blinken’s relationship with Kissinger and his prescient college thesis on oil and the Soviet Union, more of which you might find here.

I have immersed myself totally in Pisar’s life, of which, in the small hours I have made a quiet study. Pisar, a survivor of the concentration camps, wrote a memoir, at nearly 50 years old, and it’s a rather beautiful thing though I suspect that Of Blood and Hope is not exactly a work of historical accuracy. Autobiography having always been the highest form of fiction. Still there’s always the question of what Pisar did to survive as there is with any Holocaust survivor. This is a distasteful thing to say but it’s an important to note all the same.

Here’s The Baltimore Sun in July 1980:

Samuel Pisar is well aware that he has lived a life of such extremes that it offers no contradiction to describe it as having been hopeless, triumphant, tragic, fulfilling, despairing, radiant.

“Yes, he said, “now I live in conditions that could not be farther away from the barracks of Auschwitz. Now I live at the summit. But life takes over — you can’t help that. Even Solzhenitsyn, that man of no compromise, lives comfortably now on an estate. I don’t know if I could ever go back and survive the conditions in the camps, but I like to delude myself that I could.”

He pauses, seems distant, introspective. Then, with something approaching regret in his voice, he says, “I have become, perhaps, too successful, survived too well. I have lost my way many times, but now I have pulled myself back. I realize today that my camp experiences may be more valuable, more unique than all the rest.

“International lawyer? Adviser to presidents? There are others who have had that experience. If I have anything to say, it is really not on economics or politics; what I have to say of value has to be linked to that past voice, that testimony which comes from the blood of the Holocaust. Not, you understand, to reanimate guilt. I don’t want to assess guilt, I don’t want to dabble in that. But I want people to hear what a survivor from another time can tell them about conditions today. It is through the prism of that peculiar life that I am trying to look at the Eighties and what may be ahead.

….

“Hitler,” Pisar reminds you. “was not an accident, not an aberration. That’s a marvelously convenient alibi. It’s so easy to live with. ‘A monster, this could never happens [sic] again.’ It’s not true. Hitler was voted into power through the democratic process. I’m not certain the German people knew what they are getting; I don’t think they wanted a monster. But the normal politicians, the economists, the diplomats couldn’t cope with Germany’s rampant inflation, deep unemployment, social unrest, beginnings of terrorism. The society was falling apart.

“But there have been and will be scapegoats in every age, whenever demagogic leaders need alibis to explain away their failures or to hold on to their power. Jews, religious minorities, political dissidents, intellectuals, artists, all those who think differently, who refuse to ‘follow the leader’ blindly and automatically, these are the people who become victims, targets.

“I have seen it in my own life, in my own past. I know that it exists in certain places today, and I believe it to be the natural order of things to come when chaos, fear, impotence, terror and, finally madness take over.” [Emphasis added]

Yes, it does exist.

Here’s hoping that Blinken, who has been meeting with our Turkish allies who are fast unraveling Mossad operations and detailing how other nations might as well, understands the score.

His stepfather did.

Pisar’s love of America was, at times, a bit over the top. But it’s no doubt sincerely felt. He did, after all, became an American citizen through a special act of Congress, and he stood against repression around the world.

The test for Blinken and Biden is if they can stand up to the transnational repression here.

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