So Is Man Constituted

 The effect of the newly announced tariffs brought to mind a passage in Egon Friedell's The Cultural History of Modernity, about the relative effect of heavy taxation and religious persecution in motivating the Netherlands' revolt against Spain in the 16th Century:

 This is curious: but so is man constituted: he will suffer attacks on his freedom, his beliefs, indeed even his life sooner than on his income, his wealth, his business. In a similar way the Jacobins, whose administration remarkably resembles in its stupidity and barbarism the otherwise so different Spanish regime, brought on their own fall not through their suppression of all free opinion, their mockery of religion, and their mass executions, but through their attack on private property and their destructive effect on trade, industry, and the value of money. It was not their guillotines that brought them down, but their assignats

A Bit of Pedantry

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article--the cover article, "Where Do Nazi Bones Belong?", about the work of the Volksbund, a German group that locates, documents, and reburies the remains of  German soldiers of World War II originally buried where they fell, in haste and without markers. The article has much of interest to say of this work, and of the conflicts that have arisen within the Volksbund between the more moderate members and those whose nationalism does not necessarily stop with the AfD.

However, I was brought to a stop by an account of a futile search for bodies in France. The soldiers supposed to have been buried near Meymac were said in the article to have been captured by the Macquis on June 8, 1945, "in the last days of the war." But June 8, 1945 was after the last days of the war in Europe, almost exactly a month after.

The magazine gives a picture of the author, who appears to be in his mid-forties at the oldest. I do not suppose the memory of World War II would have been the presence in his childhood that was in those of the baby boomers. Still, I'd have expected the editorial structure of the Times to include somebody who could more nearly identify the date of V-E day.