Die New York Times möchte uns glauben machen, dass Berliner in Kriegszeiten „einfach weitergemacht” hätten, statt die Stadt zu verlassen. Ian Buruma hat etwas geschrieben, das er einen „Liebesbrief” an die Stadt nennt – für all jene, die am Völkermord mitschuldig waren. Das Buch heißt zynischerweise Stay Alive. Der Untertitel lautet „Berlin, 1939–1945″, obwohl er wohl eher hätte heißen sollen: „Von Juden ist hier offensichtlich nicht die Rede”.

Stay… und alive. Nicht für die Zwangsdeportierten. Nicht für die, denen man in den Kopf schoss und die man in Massengräbern verscharrte.

Stay alive, liebe Berliner.

Als ob die Berliner, die die Juden hinausdrängten, in die Züge nach Auschwitz, diejenigen gewesen wären, die überleben mussten. Die Menschen, die tatsächlich am Leben bleiben mussten, waren in all den Lagern – dorthin geschickt aus Berlin, von Gleis 17 am Bahnhof Grunewald –, während die Nachbarn bereits planten, sich ihre Wohnungen anzueignen. Die Bedrohung für Berlins Juden war die Vernichtung durch ihre Nachbarn. Die letztlich von außen erzwungene Bedrohung für diese Nachbarn waren Konsequenzen: alliierte Bomben als Antwort auf die vielen Kriege, die ihre Regierung angezettelt hatte, sowjetische Truppen als Antwort auf 27 Millionen eigene Tote.

Buruma kann mit diesem Titel der Nazi-fördernden Auslöschung davonkommen, weil Berlin die Struktur dafür bereits geschaffen hat. Es ist die Stadt, die dafür bekannt ist, jede Spur der Menschen zu tilgen, die nicht am Leben geblieben sind.

Es gibt dort keine Fotografien der Deportationen, und das ist einfach nur seltsam.

Nicht ein einziges Foto.

Das #LastSeen-Projekt hat Deportationsbilder aus 60 deutschen Städten und Gemeinden gefunden. Wir sehen über 420 Fotografien aus Orten wie Fulda, Breslau, München.

Nicht aus Berlin.

Keine Fotos der Deportation haben überlebt. Verstanden? Mehr als 50.000 Juden wurden in Synagogen zusammengetrieben und zu Güterbahnhöfen marschiert, zwischen 1941 und 1943, und dennoch hat nicht ein einziges Bild überlebt.

Keine Fotos der Verbrechen, damit die Täter überleben konnten. Das ist es, was es Buruma ermöglicht, ein Foto von Tätern auf das Cover seines Buches zu setzen und grausam „stay alive” darauf zu schreiben.

Die überlebenden Bilder zeigen Menschen, die ihre Habseligkeiten durch Berliner Straßen tragen – als Täterbevölkerung. Die Opfer wurden so gründlich ausgelöscht, dass selbst die visuelle Sprache der Vertreibung von den Menschen vereinnahmt wurde, die sie verursacht haben.

Sechzig Städte dokumentierten, was sie taten. Berlin vernichtete die Beweise, nahm die Wohnungen, sammelte das gestohlene Eigentum ein und wurde wütend auf jeden, der versuchte, Beweise zu sichern. Nach vorne schauen! Die Vergangenheit vergessen! Wir dürfen nur über die Zukunft sprechen! Wenn es keine Gesichter für die Toten gibt, kann man die Lebenden aufs Cover setzen und es als Feier allein ihres Überlebens bezeichnen.

Ein Liebesbrief. An die Stadt, in der das Reichssicherheitshauptamt, die Wannsee-Villa, die T4-Euthanasienzentrale und die Gestapo in der Prinz-Albrecht-Straße untergebracht waren. Während der Jahre, in denen der Holocaust aus ihren Konferenzräumen heraus verwaltet wurde. Das sollen wir jetzt lieben.

Bedenken Sie, dass Burumas Vater Leo den Krieg in Berlin verbrachte und dort leichte Maschinengewehre für die Wehrmacht herstellte. Das Buch des Sohnes verwandelt diese Tatsache in eine Geschichte über den „Versuch, sein eigenes Gleichgewicht zwischen Widerstand und Überleben zu finden”. Die Rezension strukturiert den Satz sogar so, dass es verschleiert wird: Leo arbeitete in „einer Fabrik, die Bremsen für Lokomotiven, aber auch leichte Maschinengewehre herstellte.”

Erst die Bremsen. Maschinengewehre… ach ja, das auch noch.

Als ob Züge in Todeslager, geschweige denn die Bewaffnung eines Völkermords, eine Fußnote zum Geschäft gewesen wären. Das ist ein Familienprojekt, ihre Investitionen für eine Rendite. Der Vater stellte Waffen für Nazis her. Der Sohn schrieb den Liebesbrief zu Ehren der Kunden – derjenigen, die hinter den Gewehren standen und sie kauften.

Die Besetzung

Jede Person in diesem Buch wird auf bizarre Weise entweder als Opfer oder als Zuschauer inszeniert. Das ist der einzig erlaubte Rahmen. Ein Dirigent, der sich einredete, er sei unpolitisch. Literaten, die debattierten, ob sie ins Exil gehen sollten. Familien, die sich in Bordellen versteckten. Und der Vater des Autors wird als Mann beschrieben, der „den alliierten Luftangriffen auswich” – nicht als Mann, der die Waffen baute, die diese Luftangriffe notwendig machten.

Das ist unter Nazis üblich: sich selbst zum wahren Opfer zu erklären und Unterstützung zu suchen, um der Verantwortung zu entgehen.

Niemand in diesem Buch organisiert die Deportationslogistik in Berlin. Niemand arbeitet in den Lagern. Niemand kassiert die arisierten Besitztümer und fälscht die Stadtakten. Niemand bearbeitet den Papierkram, der 50.000 Juden von Gleis 17 in Grunewald – vor aller Augen der Nachbarschaft – in den Tod schickte. Die Täter sind keine Figuren. Sie sind bloß das Wetter, von dem die Berliner profitieren.

Die Zauberworte

Burumas These, zitiert in der Times-Rezension: Die meisten Berliner waren „weder Zyniker, noch Schläger, noch ideologische Fanatiker; sie haben sich einfach angepasst.” Schwachsinn. „Einfach angepasst” ist die Formulierung, die eine ganze Stadt von der Verantwortung befreit. Anpassung ist passiv.

Was die Berliner taten, war aktive Teilnahme.

Sie besetzten die Stellen, die durch deportierte Juden frei geworden waren. Sie nahmen die Wohnungen und dekorierten mit gestohlener Kunst und gestohlenen Möbeln. Sie besuchten die Konzerte, die mit gestohlenem Reichtum finanziert wurden. Sie übernahmen alle Kunden, alle Märkte und tranken den aus Frankreich geraubten Wein. Das ist keine Anpassung. Das ist die beabsichtigte Dividende des Völkermords, und Berlin war ein Epizentrum des Dividendensammelns.

Die Entlastungsmaschine

Das gesamte Projekt scheint sich um einen Mann namens Erich Alenfeld zu drehen. Ein Jude, der zum Christentum „konvertierte” – Alenfeld schrieb 1939 einen Liebesbrief an Hermann Göring, in dem er sein Erbe verleugnet und sich freiwillig zur deutschen Armee meldete. Sein Sohn trat mit zehn Jahren der Hitlerjugend bei. Jahrzehnte später schrieb seine Tochter ein Buch mit dem Titel Why Didn’t You Leave?

Die Familie selbst konnte klar sehen, was es war.

Burumas Erklärung richtet sich gegen sie und will uns glauben machen, dass dies „nicht immer zynische Zugeständnisse” gewesen seien. Die Verbrechen sollen mit dem „nationalistischen Geist der Zeit” entschuldigt werden. Die Alenfelds, schreibt er, „waren ebenso von der deutschen Romantik beeinflusst wie jeder andere ihrer Generation.”

Romantik. Ein jüdischer Mann schreibt an den Architekten der Arisierung, meldet sich freiwillig zum Dienst in der Armee, die sein Volk vernichten wird, und dieser Mann nennt es Romantik.

Es ist widerlich.

Diese Geschichte leistet konkrete Arbeit. Wenn sogar ein Jude aufrichtig daran glauben konnte, anstatt eine Kugel in den Kopf zu bekommen – nicht aus Verzweiflung, nicht als Überlebungstarnung, sondern aus echtem Nationalgefühl –, dann kann niemand anderem die Schuld gegeben werden. Die Ideologie war normal, verführerisch. Sie riss alle in die Verbrechen hinein, sogar ihre Opfer. Und wenn die Opfergruppe die Lügen glaubte, welche Ausrede braucht dann die Profiteursgruppe noch?

Deshalb braucht Buruma „Romantik” statt Verblendung oder „Verzweiflung”. Tausende Juden und Mischlinge dienten in der Wehrmacht. Bryan Mark Rigg hat sie dokumentiert. Sie hofften zu überleben. Sie taten es, weil die Alternative der Tod war. Sie taten es, weil eine Uniform Tarnung in einem Kugelhagel war. Buruma streicht all diesen tatsächlichen Überlebenskontext und ersetzt ihn durch sein persönliches Empfinden. Romantik macht die Kollaboration des Opfers an seinem eigenen Tod universell und schön. Verzweiflung würde zugeben, dass es Menschen unter tatsächlicher existenzieller Bedrohung gab, und würde die offensichtliche Frage aufwerfen, welche Ausrede die acht Millionen mitschuldigen Berliner hatten.

Der Titel der Tochter ist die Frage, die dieses neue Buch auslöschen will. Why didn’t you leave. Warum habt ihr euch nicht geweigert. Warum habt ihr mitgemacht. Buruma will nicht, dass die Frage gestellt wird. Er will nicht, dass die Antwort durchsickert. Also löst er das Thema in Stimmung auf. Er nennt Völkermord buchstäblich romantisch. Er nennt Nazi-Komplizenschaft eine Liebesgeschichte. Er nennt das Ganze einen Liebesbrief.

Und die Times druckt und bewirbt es dummerweise, weil dort offenbar niemand mehr Geschichte studiert.

Wer bekommt ein Gesicht

Das Buch endet mit der üblichen Horrorgeschichte, die Nazis anführen. Sowjetische Truppen kamen an, und mehr als 100.000 Berliner Frauen und Mädchen wurden vergewaltigt. Buruma interviewt eine Überlebende, die 14 war. Das ist reale Geschichte, und sie ist wichtig.

Sie ist wichtig, weil er die mehr als 50.000 aus Berlin deportierten Juden auslöscht. Sie erhalten keine gleichwertige Behandlung. Das können sie nicht. Berlin hat dafür gesorgt. Keine Fotografien, keine Gesichter, keine Namen auf dem Denkmal. Keine Überlebenden zum Interviewen. Vergewaltigt und ermordet.

Die Struktur des Buches beginnt mit Gleichgültigkeit gegenüber der Tragödie und endet mit einem Appell um Mitgefühl für sowjetische Gewalt, damit die Berliner die Geschichte als Opfer beenden statt als Beteiligte. Alle jüdischen Frauen und Mädchen werden vergessen, damit die Vergewaltigungen Jahre später die ganze Aufmerksamkeit bekommen. Die Toten bleiben gesichtslos. Die Lebenden werden zur Anerkennung präsentiert.

Thomas Mann hat es gesehen

Die Rezension zitiert Thomas Mann: Alles, was in Deutschland zwischen 1933 und 1945 veröffentlicht wurde, trage den Geruch „von Blut und Schande”. Die Rezension behandelt dies als zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext, aber es ist so viel mehr. Das ist eine direkte Anklage des Projekts.

Manns Maßstab besagt, dass die Stimmen, die Buruma so unbedingt bewahren will – jene, die blieben, um zu profitieren, die sich anpassten, um Gewinn zu machen, die weitermachten, wie Hitler es befahl – keine neutralen Zeugen sind. Sie sind kompromittierte Quellen. Nicht weil sie logen, sondern weil das Überleben im nationalsozialistischen Berlin die Teilnahme an dem System erforderte, das ihr „Überleben” erst notwendig machte.

Mann ging. Brecht ging. Die Menschen, die blieben, trafen eine Entscheidung zur Teilnahme, und diese Entscheidung hatte einen Preis, den jemand anderes zahlte. Diejenigen, die Widerstand leisteten, waren die, die getötet, deren Leben zerstört wurden. Buruma kennt diese eigentliche Geschichte, denn die Waffenfabrik seines Vaters kommt im Buch vor. Aber die Rahmung verwandelt Komplizenschaft in Tragödie, Produktion in Überleben und Verzweiflung in Romantik. Diese unmoralische Desinformationskonversion scheint der Zweck zu sein.

Nicht sein erstes Mal

2018 wurde Buruma als Chefredakteur der New York Review of Books zum Rücktritt gezwungen. Erinnern Sie sich an seine Bitte, an die Nazis zu denken, die unter der sowjetischen Befreiung Berlins litten? Buruma veröffentlichte einen Essay von Jian Ghomeshi, der von über 20 Frauen der sexuellen Nötigung beschuldigt wurde, in dem Ghomeshi seine Geschichte als Opfer öffentlicher Beschämung umdeuten durfte. Burumas Verteidigung ist sehr relevant für die von sowjetischen Soldaten vergewaltigten Frauen:

Die genaue Art seines Verhaltens – wie viel Einvernehmen dabei im Spiel war – davon habe ich keine Ahnung, und es ist auch nicht wirklich mein Anliegen.

Und warum kümmert es ihn nicht? 2018 gab er einem der sexuellen Nötigung beschuldigten Täter eine Plattform, um sein eigenes Leiden zu erzählen. Jetzt, 2026, will er einer ganzen Stadt von Beteiligten endlich die Plattform geben, um ihr Leiden zu erzählen. Sollte er nicht die sowjetischen Soldaten verteidigen, so wie er Ghomeshi verteidigt? Die Heuchelei sei angemerkt.

Beide Projekte stellen die Erfahrung der Konsequenzen durch den Täter ins Zentrum, nicht die Erfahrung des Schadens durch das Opfer. Beide behandeln Rechenschaftspflicht als die eigentliche Gewalt. 2018 wurde er dafür gefeuert. 2026 druckt die Times Nazi-Liebesbriefe.

Der Rezensent sieht es und geht weiter

Kevin Peraino, der für die Times rezensiert, schreibt, das Buch sei „reich an Anekdoten und Primärquellen, aber etwas arm an großen Ideen.” Er wünschte, Buruma würde „tiefer eintauchen.” Er sagt damit, das Buch habe keinen analytischen Rahmen. Kein Argument. Keine Struktur, um zu verstehen, warum all das geschah oder was es bedeutet.

Wie könnte es das auch, angesichts dessen, was es bezwecken soll?

Und doch befürwortet er die „Liebesbrief”-Rahmung trotzdem. Er nennt das Buch eine „leidenschaftliche Herausforderung an die zersetzende Kraft der Gleichgültigkeit.”

Gleichgültigkeit war für Berlin nicht zersetzend.

Gleichgültigkeit funktionierte für Berlin.

Sie ist genau das, was die Konzerte am Laufen hielt, die Fußballspiele füllte, den Kaffee während des Völkermords fließen ließ. Die Maschine brauchte keine Begeisterung. Bis heute missbilligt Berlin Emotionen und warnt vor Beweisen. Sie brauchte keine Spuren, nur Menschen, die weiterhin auftauchten, damit die Verbrechen weitergehen konnten. Das taten sie. Ein „Urlaubszug” nach Auschwitz ermöglichte es Berlinern, die Gaskammern des Massentodes in Aktion zu beobachten. Die Nazis bauten spezielle gläserne Beobachtungsluken zur Inspektion. Dann kehrten die Berliner revitalisiert in ihre Stadt zurück, um sich über ihr eigenes „Überleben” auszulassen, das von der effizienten systematischen Auslöschung der Juden abhing.

Liebesbriefe an die Stadt der Toten

Die Berliner haben bis heute eine Tradition: Sie legen Blumen und Kerzen auf Nazi-Gräber in der ganzen Stadt. Diese Nazis werden offen betrauert, ohne Entschuldigung, in der Stadt, die emotionale Zurschaustellungen nicht mag. Wenn sie doch nur noch einen Tag gelebt hätten, um noch mehr Nachbarn mit Maschinengewehren niederzumähen, noch mehr Reichtum gewaltsam umzuverteilen. Sie werden auf eine sehr eigentümliche Weise in Ehren gehalten.

Auf dem Militärfriedhof am Columbiadamm erscheinen jeden November Kränze von Gruppen, die Wehrmachtstote ehren. Ein „Traditionsverband der Freunde des ehemaligen Schutzgebietes Deutsch-Südwestafrika” hinterlässt Schleifen mit „patriotischen Grüßen” an einem Denkmal für die Soldaten, die den Völkermord an den Herero verübten. Als Neuköllns Bezirksregierung aufgefordert wurde, das Denkmal zu entfernen, fügte sie eine Tafel hinzu, die das Wort „Völkermord” ganz gezielt ausließ.

Reinhard Heydrich, der Architekt der Endlösung, liegt noch immer auf dem Invalidenfriedhof im Zentrum Berlins begraben. Es ist eine Touristenattraktion für diejenigen, die dem Nationalsozialismus etwas Liebe zeigen wollen. Der Grabstein wurde entfernt, aber der Leichnam nicht. Der Friedhof ist heute ein geschütztes Denkmal, vom Staat gepflegt, als Attraktion beworben. 2019 öffnete jemand mit Insiderwissen über die Lage das Grab – um zu betonen, dass Heydrich nie wirklich weg war.

Das Sinti-und-Roma-Denkmal – ein symbolisches Grab für 500.000 ermordete Menschen – wird durch ein Tunnelprojekt der Deutschen Bahn bedroht. Das Holocaust-Mahnmal selbst enthält keine Namen, keine Inschriften, keine jüdischen Symbole. Seine Anti-Graffiti-Beschichtung wurde von einer Degussa-Tochtergesellschaft hergestellt – derselben Unternehmensfamilie, die Zyklon B produzierte.

So sieht also ein Liebesbrief an Berlin aus, wird uns gesagt. Die Täter erheben sich wieder. Die historischen Bodenmarkierungen werden entfernt. Die Opfer bekommen ein abstraktes Mahnmal ohne Namen. Und alle paar Jahre schreibt jemand mit familiärer Verbindung zur Kriegsmaschinerie ein Buch, das sagt, die meisten Menschen hätten sich einfach angepasst, also wer könnte ihnen vorwerfen, nicht gegangen zu sein.

Das ist keine Geschichtsschreibung. Das ist „wie der Vater, so der Sohn” – die Auslöschung von Völkermordopfern des Familienunternehmens, um die Dividenden weiterfließen zu lassen. Liebe als Hass.

The New York Times wants you to believe that wartime Berliners “just carried on” instead of leaving. Ian Buruma has written what he calls a “love letter” to the city for all those complicit in genocide. The book is cynically called Stay Alive. The subtitle is “Berlin, 1939-1945”, although it probably should have been “I’m obviously not talking about the Jews”.

Stay… and alive. Not for those forcibly deported. Not for those shot in the head and dumped in mass graves.

Stay alive, dear Berliners.

As if the Berliners who pushed the Jews out, onto trains to Auschwitz, were the ones who needed to survive. The people who actually needed to stay alive were in all the camps, sent there from Berlin, from Platform 17 at Grunewald, while the neighbors planned to take all their homes. The threat to Berlin’s Jews was extermination by their neighbors. The eventual externally forced threat to those neighbors was consequences: Allied bombs responding to the many wars that their government started, Soviet troops responding to 27 million of their own dead.

Buruma can get away with this title of Nazi promoting erasure because Berlin already laid the structure for it. It’s the city known for erasing every trace of the people who didn’t stay alive.

There are no photographs of the deportations there, and that’s just weird.

Not one photo.

The #LastSeen project has found deportation images from 60 German cities and towns. We see over 420 photographs from places like Fulda, Breslau, Munich.

Not Berlin.

No photos of the deportation survived. Get it? More than 50,000 Jews were assembled at synagogues and marched to freight yards between 1941 and 1943, and yet not a single image survives.

No photos of the crimes, so that the perpetrators could survive. That’s what enables Buruma to put a photo of perpetrators on the cover of his book and cruelly write “stay alive”.

The surviving images are of people carrying belongings through Berlin streets as the perpetrator population. The victims were erased so thoroughly that even the visual language of displacement has been appropriated by the people who caused it.

Sixty towns documented what they did. Berlin destroyed the evidence, took the apartments, collected the stolen property, and got angry at anyone who tried to produce evidence. Look forward! Forget that past! We must talk only of the future! When there are no faces for the dead, you can put the living on the cover and call it the celebration of only their survival.

A love letter. To the city that housed the Reich Security Main Office, the Wannsee villa, the T4 euthanasia headquarters, and the Gestapo on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. During the years the Holocaust was administered from its conference rooms. That’s what we are being told to love now.

Consider that Buruma’s father, Leo, spent the war in Berlin manufacturing light machine guns for the Wehrmacht. The son’s book turns that fact into a story about “attempting to find his own balance between resistance and survival.” The review even structures the sentence to bury it: Leo worked in “a factory that made brakes for locomotives but also light machine guns.”

Brakes first. Machine guns… oh yeah, that too.

As if trains to death camps let alone arming a genocide was a footnote to the business. This is a family project, their investments for a return. The father made weapons for Nazis. The son wrote the love letter to honor the customers, those buying and standing behind the guns.

The Cast

Every person in this book is bizarrely setup as either a victim or a bystander. That’s the only allowed frame. A conductor who told himself he was unpolitisch. Literati debating whether to go into exile. Families hiding in brothels. And the author’s own father is described as a man “dodging Allied air raids,” not as a man building the weapons that made those air raids necessary.

That’s common among Nazis, declaring themselves the true victim and seeking support to avoid the accountability.

Nobody in this book is running Berlin deportation logistics. Nobody is staffing the camps. Nobody is collecting the Aryanized property and laundering the city’s records. Nobody is processing the paperwork that sent 50,000 Jews from Platform 17 at Grunewald — in full view of the neighborhood — to their deaths. The perpetrators aren’t characters. They’re just the weather the Berliners benefit from.

The Magic Words

Buruma’s thesis, as quoted in the Times review: most Berliners were “neither cynics, nor bullies, nor ideological fanatics; they simply conformed.” Horseshit. “Simply conformed” is the phrase that lets an entire city off the hook. Conformity is passive.

What Berliners did was participatory.

They filled the jobs vacated by deported Jews. They took the apartments and decorated with stolen art and furniture. They attended the concerts funded by stolen wealth. They took all the customers, all the markets and drank the wine looted from France. That’s not conformity. That’s the intended dividend of genocide, and Berlin was an epicenter of grabbing dividends.

The Exculpation Engine

The whole project seems to circle around a man named Erich Alenfeld. A Jew who “converted” to Christianity, Alenfeld wrote a love letter to Hermann Göring in 1939 renouncing his heritage and volunteering for the German Army. His son joined the Hitler Youth at age ten. Decades later, his daughter wrote a book called Why Didn’t You Leave?

The family itself could see clearly what it was.

Buruma’s explanation runs against them and wants us to believe these were “not always cynical accommodations.” The crimes are supposed to be excused by “the nationalistic spirit of the day.” The Alenfelds, he writes, “were as much influenced by German romanticism as anyone of their generation.”

Romanticism. A Jewish man writing to the architect of Aryanization, volunteering to serve the army that would exterminate his people, and this guy calls it romanticism.

It’s disgusting.

This story does specific work. If even a Jew could sincerely buy in rather than be shot in the head, not out of desperation, not as survival camouflage, but out of genuine national feeling, then nobody else can be blamed. The ideology was normal, seductive. It swept up everyone in the crimes, even its victims. And if the victim class believed the lies, what excuse does the beneficiary class need?

That’s why Buruma needs “romanticism” instead of derangement or “desperation.” Thousands of Jews and Mischlinge served in the Wehrmacht. Bryan Mark Rigg documented them. They expected to survive. They did it because the other option was death. They did it because a uniform was camouflage in a hail of bullets. Buruma strips all that actual survival context and replaces it with his personal feeling. Romanticism makes the collaboration of the victim in their own death as universal and beautiful. Desperation would admit there were people under actual existential threat, and would raise the obvious question of what excuse the eight million complicit Berliners had.

The daughter’s title is the question that this new book tries to erase. Why didn’t you leave. Why didn’t you refuse. Why did you participate. Buruma doesn’t want it asked. He doesn’t want the answer leaking. So he dissolves the topic into mood. He literally calls genocide romantic. He calls Nazi complicity a love story. He calls the whole thing a love letter.

And the Times stupidly prints and promotes it because apparently nobody there studies history anymore.

Who Gets a Face

The book ends with the usual horror story that Nazis invoke. Soviet troops arrived and more than 100,000 Berlin women and girls were raped. Buruma interviews a survivor who was 14. This is real history and it matters.

It matters because he erases the more than 50,000 Jews deported from Berlin. They don’t get equivalent treatment. They can’t. Berlin made sure of that. No photographs, no faces, no names on the memorial. No survivors to interview. Raped and murdered.

The structure of the book opens with indifference to tragedy and closes with a call for sympathy about Soviet violence, so that Berliners end the story as victims rather than the participants. All the Jewish women and girls are forgotten so the rapes years later can get all the ink. The dead stay faceless. The living are presented for recognition.

Thomas Mann Saw It

The review quotes Thomas Mann: anything published in Germany between 1933 and 1945 bore the scent “of blood and shame.” The review treats this as period context but it’s so much more. That’s a direct indictment of the project.

Mann’s standard says the voices that Buruma is so intent on preserving, those who stayed to benefit, who conformed to profit, who carried on as Hitler ordered, are not neutral witnesses. They are compromised sources. Not because they lied, but because survival in Nazi Berlin required participation in the system that made their “survival” necessary.

Mann left. Brecht left. The people who stayed made a participation choice, and that choice came with a price that someone else paid. Those who resisted were the ones killed, lives destroyed. Buruma knows this actual story, as his father’s Nazi gun factory is in the book. But the framing converts complicity into tragedy, production into survival, and desperation into romance. That immoral disinformation conversion is the point, it would seem.

Not His First Time

In 2018, Buruma was forced out as editor of the New York Review of Books. Remember his request to think of the Nazis who suffered from Soviet liberation of Berlin? Buruma published an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, accused of sexual assault by over 20 women, that let Ghomeshi reframe his story as a victim of public shaming. Buruma’s defense is very relevant to the women raped by Soviet soldiers:

The exact nature of his behavior — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern.

And why isn’t he concerned? In 2018 he gave an accused abuser of women a platform to narrate his own suffering. Now in 2026 he wants an entire city of participants to finally get the platform to narrate theirs. Shouldn’t he defend the Soviet soldiers as he defends Ghomeshi? The hypocrisy is noted.

Both projects center the perpetrator’s experience of consequences rather than the victim’s experience of harm. Both treat accountability as the real violence. He got fired for it in 2018. In 2026 the Times prints Nazi love letters.

The Reviewer Sees It and Walks Away

Kevin Peraino, reviewing for the Times, writes that the book is “long on anecdote and primary sources but somewhat short on big ideas.” He wishes Buruma would “delve deeper.” He’s saying the book has no analytical framework. No argument. No structure for understanding why any of this happened or what it means.

How could it, given what it’s trying to accomplish?

And yet he endorses the “love letter” framing anyway. He calls the book a “passionate challenge to the corrosive power of indifference.”

Indifference wasn’t corrosive to Berlin.

Indifference worked for Berlin.

It is the very thing that kept the concerts running, the soccer matches filling, the coffee flowing during genocide. The machine didn’t need any enthusiasm. To this day Berlin frowns on emotion and warns against evidence. It needed no traces, people to keep showing up so the crimes could continue. They did. A “vacation” train to Auschwitz allowed Berliners to watch the gas chambers of mass death in action. The Nazis made special glass observation ports for inspection. Then the Berliners would return revitalized to their city to wax about their own “survival” that depended on efficient systemic erasure of Jews.

Love Letters to the City of the Dead

Berliners to this day have a tradition, they put flowers and candles on Nazi graves around the city. These Nazis are mourned openly without apology, in the city that dislikes emotional displays. If only they had lived another day to machine gun more neighbors, to violently redistribute more wealth. They are memorialized in a very peculiar way.

At the military cemetery on Columbiadamm, wreaths appear every November from groups honoring Wehrmacht dead. A “Tradition Association of Friends of the Former Protected Area German Southwest Africa” leaves ribbons with “patriotic greetings” at a memorial to the soldiers who carried out the Herero genocide. When Neukölln’s government was asked to remove the memorial, they added a plaque that very precisely omitted the word “genocide.”

Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution, is still in the ground at the Invalidenfriedhof in central Berlin. It’s a tourist attraction for those who want to show Nazism some love. The grave marker was removed but the body was not. The cemetery is now a protected monument, maintained by the state, promoted as an attraction. In 2019 someone with inside knowledge of the location opened the grave, to emphasize Heydrich was never really gone.

The Sinti and Roma memorial — a symbolic grave for 500,000 murdered people — is being threatened by a Deutsche Bahn tunnel project. The Holocaust memorial itself contains no names, no inscriptions, no Jewish symbols. Its anti-graffiti coating was manufactured by a Degussa subsidiary — the same corporate family that produced Zyklon B.

This is what we are told a love letter to Berlin looks like. The perpetrators rise again. The historical ground markers come off. The victims get an abstract memorial with no names. And every few years someone with a family connection to the war machine writes a book saying that most people simply conformed so who could blame them for not leaving.

That’s not history. That’s “like father, like son”, erasing genocide victims of the family business to continue dividends. Love as hate.

I sat down to watch a production of John Logan’s Red. The actors landed a distinct “Oy.” They invoked Rothko’s Russian roots and his abrupt landing as a Jewish boy in America. They channeled a cadence of immigrant memory with enough conviction that the audience nodded along, satisfied that this play knows whose story it is telling.

It does not.

As a disinformation historian, I was genuinely surprised to see the methods used in a play to undermine the protagonist. Exploring how and why is likely to expose deeply rooted prejudice in Christian narratives that have been designed for centuries to isolate and erase Judaism.

First, it’s a fact that major books on Rothko exist and none of them center his Jewish intellectual tradition as the interpretive key. There is a known history of erasure within a biographical track. Cohen-Solal’s biography in the Yale Jewish Lives series comes closest, tracing his Orthodox upbringing, yet even she treats Judaism as biography rather than the interpretive framework for his artistic method. In other words, you can’t just pull up a biography to understand what the play delivers.

Second, this is something not many people are able to recognize, and that’s by design. Many years ago, when I ran a very large war-dialing security project in Milwaukee, I took my team out for Easter lunch. I’ll never forget when one said to me “I hope you don’t mind me saying that I was raised on horror films in Church that told me to believe Jews are my enemy because they won’t obey, and they killed Jesus. But to be honest the teachings don’t make sense now, talking to you”.

He wasn’t the first or the last American that I met who struggled to make sense of his operational context, which he had been raised from very young to believe, as latent antisemitic hatred and bias. He would easily watch a play or film destroying Rothko, yet he would be uncomfortable meeting Rothko in person.

Historians of Nazi Germany point this out repeatedly. Jews would have neighbors who would gladly say the Jews are the problem, cause of all their grief and need to be forced to change, while adding “but I don’t mean you”.

The impact of this play as disinformation matters a lot, when you consider how Red won six Tony Awards in 2010 and has become one of the most frequently staged plays in the American repertoire.

Allow me to explain.

The stage is set to Rothko’s Bowery studio in 1958, where the artist works on murals commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building. He has a fictional assistant to mix paint, stretch canvas, and gradually find the nerve to challenge his employer’s convictions. The confrontation escalates until the young man rises up to liberate himself from Rothko’s demands. Audiences leave feeling they have watched a story about art.

They have watched a public trial.

The audience is set up as witness, the congregation. The young assistant, named Ken, is their proxy, sent in to extract a confession from an old Jew whose crime is trying to make a world on his own terms. How dare he exert confidence in his opinions and not bow down to the Christian system of modesty and shame?

Christian Control

Logan builds his depiction of Rothko around a single psychological engine: control. Control of the viewer’s distance. Control of the lighting. Control of the emotional conditions under which the paintings may be experienced.

The play incorrectly casts the Christian perception of control as Rothko being overprotective. We are meant to observe a tortured artist shielding sacred work from a profane commercial world, terrified that his paintings will become wallpaper for Manhattan’s wealthiest diners.

This is a tortured misreading so fundamentally wrong about Rothko, that Logan inverted the man’s entire practice.

Rothko was raised with an Orthodox Jewish education at cheder before immigrating to Portland at age ten. He brought his formal Jewish education to art as one of the major abstract expressionists. It isn’t a footnote, it’s the lens through which his entire practice becomes legible. In other words, to those who know a thing about Orthodox Judaism, his insistence on setting a viewing environment (lighting, proximity, enforced intimacy) does NOT map to a Christian framework of control. He was NOT an artist defending the sacred from the fallen world. He was doing the exact opposite.

Rothko was practicing tzimtzum.

In Lurianic Kabbalah, tzimtzum is the divine contraction: God withdraws in order to create the space in which creation becomes possible. The infinite possibility of light must be constrained or it destroys rather than illuminates. The dialogue in the play regularly returns to question Rothko for saying he doesn’t like the “outdoor” light rather than recognize he was invoking “infinite” light as interference with his ability to create. Lines in the play about color absolutism (black, white) are presented completely detached from the Kabbalistic context that gives them meaning. Chabad’s commentary on tzimtzum tells us:

Before the beginning, there was nothing but light. Infinite light. The notion of a world was absurd… So He hid the light. All of it. There was absolute darkness. And now there could be a world.

During the play I heard the audience all around me guffaw and chortle at “difficult” Rothko lowering the lights, while his assistant mocked him for it. I cringed. It felt incredibly awkward, as if I was seeing with two eyes in a production that was meant for the blind. How could people not see? Oh, right, they don’t know anything about Rothko’s faith or the Kabbalah.

Rothko being framed with a restriction of light, his indoor control obsession, is not defense. It is method. Barnett Newman, Rothko’s close friend and fellow abstract expressionist, made this connection explicit. Newman’s Zim Zum I (at SFMOMA) proves the kabbalistic vocabulary was named and present in the artistic community. The Rothko Chapel itself, which Newman’s Broken Obelisk stands outside of, proves Rothko’s entire practice pointed toward sacred space. The Kabbalistic vocabulary was not hidden, it was not obscure, it was not inaccessible. It was sitting in the artistic community Rothko inhabited, named and present.

Logan ignored and then erased it, because it would not have allowed his trial of Rothko to continue.

Even Logan’s own script betrays what it is erasing. His Rothko says he wants to create “a place where the viewer could live in contemplation with the work.” His Rothko tells Philip Johnson he will make the restaurant “a temple.” These are lines Logan wrote — and they point directly toward the Kabbalistic framework the play refuses to engage with. The real Rothko wrote to the critic Katherine Kuh that he put his trust in the psyche of the sensitive viewer who is free from conventional patterns of thought. He was not building controls. He was performing the opposite, a Jewish philosophy of withdrawal that makes revelation structurally possible.

Logan did not see this, and went to great effort to misrepresent Rothko with control concepts that Christians easily could judge and condemn. The only version of artistic control his script allows the viewer to imagine is fear.

Bringing a Kabbalistic decoder to the play is a revelation, which exposes the audience gasping and laughing at a “difficult man who causes conflict” for all the wrong reasons.

Chavruta as Psychodrama

Logan didn’t just miss the foundation of Rothko. The distortion of him runs through every confrontation.

Logan writes exchanges as verbal assaults, trying to frame Rothko as “battering” his assistant with demands, provocations, and intellectual challenges that leave Ken shaken and defensive. The Logan story arc requires “battering” for a setup, like a nod to Greek mythology-telling traditions. Ken must accumulate enough wounds to justify his crusade of rebellion, his walk out the door and into his own life. Rothko is depicted as the one who says the son must overthrow the father, and then his apprentice overthrows him as consequence. The young replaces the old. The audience feels catharsis. The audience doesn’t ask itself why a Jew is being recast into Greek and Christian narratives, erasing his story.

This is Christian supersession as dramatic structure. The son surpasses and replaces the father, the new covenant fulfills and discards the old. It is a narrative shape so deeply embedded in Western theatrical convention that most audiences cannot see it operating as a template that disrespects the subject.

It is NOT a Jewish shape.

What Logan writes as domination is a mistake, when you understand Rothko practicing chavruta. The Talmudic study partnership makes argument the mechanism of shared discovery. It opposes authoritarian control, favoring a partnership. You push, I push back, and in the friction something emerges that neither participant owned before the encounter. That heat is NOT the abuse framing that Logan is so desperate to deliver audiences. It is how a Jewish intellectual growth tradition works. The intensity is NOT a flaw to be overcome, even the emotion is NOT a flaw. It is the LOVE of a teacher who refuses to let a student remain comfortable in an incomplete and dispassionate understanding.

Logan’s script acknowledges the possibility but it immediately forecloses it. Look at how he portrays Rothko when he tells Ken:

I am not your rabbi, I am not your father, I am not your shrink, I am not your friend, I am not your teacher — I am your employer.

The line gets a laugh. The audience hears the rabbi line, a series of diminishing steps (negating the actual role of the rabbi) and then the “I am your employer” cold landing.

Logan intentionally strips away every actual Jewish relational frame that would make Rothko’s intensity authentic and legible, leaving only a “coin-operated Jew” of commercial transaction.

The antisemitism latent to Logan’s perspective isn’t to be underestimated. Audiences raised with the same framing likely welcome the repetition and reinforcement of what they were already thinking. The coin-operated Jew, of course, that makes sense to the congregation judging Rothko. Once the relationship is distilled to the Jew employer and the mistreated employee, the demands become illegitimate. Rothko’s passion is inverted into derangement, pathology. His love and care become captured and redefined unfairly as control.

Decoration and Erasure

Every production of this play serves as anti-Jewish disinformation, erasing specific people in society. The script puts Rothko on trial, but anyone who knows the intellectual tradition it points toward can feel the much greater impact.

The Judaism is acted upon as decorative, like a prop. “Oy” landed so flat, like hanging a Santa on an oak tree in August and saying Merry Christmas, that I almost couldn’t sit through another minute. But I soon witnessed Judaism being invoked for a far more dangerous purpose, assigning blame for every “difficult man” problem being depicted.

Here’s an old Jew you want to get to know because he’s famous, and here’s why you shouldn’t like him. Do you feel comforted by the shared exercise of misunderstanding him, “othering” him, and discrediting him? Is it just coincidence that it circles around him being a Jew? Rothko becomes a vessel to carry a message opposite of who he really was. By introducing him without connecting Judaism to anything structural in the play, every production is actively erasing him through targeted attacks on his identity.

The play does not explore Rothko. It prosecutes him.

The group I saw spent the time after the play discussing how they read a biography of the man, and they struggled to read more than a page or two of Nietzsche. Actors emphasized the routines to put on the play as a done deal, a matter of material being canon, without questioning anything in it.

The structure is settled, apparently, as a communal shaming ritual: actors seem to have no issue putting on a public humiliation of the one who won’t conform, the performative exposure of difference as arrogance, the insistence that confidence is sin. Rothko is on display, without his consent, for the audience to watch him be broken as an example for others to not be “like him”. His refusal to make himself small or legible on the dominant culture’s strict interpretation of him, that is the tension.

Being familiar with the Christian intellectual architecture makes the play resonate. Being familiar with Jewish intellectualism makes the play unbearable.

When it references Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saul, Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, the pattern emerges. The Apollonian-Dionysian framework is dropped like a bomb on Rothko. The suffering artist is presented as sacrificing himself for the integrity of the work. One reviewer described Rothko as an artist “whose paintings were a dynamic battle between Apollo and Dionysus.” No one seemed to notice a Greek reading does not fit the Jewish painter who studied Talmud before he studied art.

Why? I’ll explain, because this play proves to me audiences have no idea just how much disinformation is being fed to them.

The Apollonian-Dionysian framework is a conflict model. It presupposes two irreconcilable forces with order against ecstasy, form against dissolution, and the artist is trapped between them. Nietzsche’s formulation was that tragedy is what happens when neither force can win. The hero is destroyed by the tension. This is the engine Logan installs in Rothko: a man torn between the sacred and the commercial, between control and surrender, between creation and self-destruction. It demands that he fall.

And it’s completely, utterly wrong.

Imagine two halves in balance the same way you ride a bicycle by riding with both left and right as oppositional forces working together to allow forward motion. It’s the same way a sailboat moves only when it is in opposition, wind against water, otherwise it is stuck. There are many religions like this, whereas the Greek stories of Apollo and Dionysus aren’t even close to relevant.

Jewish intellectual tradition has no such requirement for the conflict that Logan sets up with Greek framing to discredit the ideas of Rothko. The Talmudic method holds opposing positions in permanent productive tension (machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of heaven) where contradictions are not resolved but sustained as necessary for movement forward.

Hillel and Shammai do not destroy each other, because that would prevent good. They sit on the same page. In Kabbalistic thought, darkness and light are opposite of war, they are togetherness. The darkness is the vessel that makes light apprehensible. You can’t see stars without the beauty of the night. Rothko’s practice of layering, the darkness that contains color, the restriction that enables encounter is integrative, not tragic.

Logan’s imposition of a tone-deaf Greek binary onto it turns a Jewish artist’s coherent method into a bizarre European death wish, which conveniently produces the broken genius that the Christian-steeped audiences came to see broken.

Logan did not invent this problem, of course. He simply won wide recognition for perpetuating and expanding it among people eager to see. And that’s the actual problem.

As a scholar in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies has observed, exhibition organizers and essayists have consistently steered clear of questions about Rothko’s Jewish identity and his notion of sacred experience. The assumption has been that Rothko’s universalism transcended his Judaism, which is a formulation that conveniently avoids asking whether the universalism itself was shaped by Jewish intellectual tradition. Rothko has to be understood as a Latvian Jewish immigrant who had attended cheder and yeshiva, who co-founded an artists’ group in which nine of ten members were Jewish, who spent his life applying Jewish intellectual traditions to the conditions under which his work could be encountered.

And yet, the dominant critical response has been to misread him through Nietzsche and Jung.

Logan’s play is the theatrical culmination of popular erasure of a Jew, vilifying along the way with tropes about “control” and “money” that don’t even fit the man.

The Inversion

The sinister operation of Red is that it is far more than either lazy or willful ignorance of Jewish traditions. The play does not merely fail to understand a Jewish man, let alone the foundational background of Rothko himself. It projects onto a Jewish identity the very pathology of the system that produced the play.

Christian domination doctrine is obedience-based.

The father’s role is to produce compliance. The congregation’s role is to submit. Authority flows downward and is not to be challenged. When it is challenged, the challenger is the problem and not the structure. This is the alien model that Logan very intentionally imposes on Rothko’s studio. Rothko demands, Ken obeys or suffers. The audience watches a tyrant and his victim in the frame of Christian traditions.

However, Rothko was not the actual authoritarian in this story. The authoritarian was the system that he refused to serve. This cannot be overstated. The commercial art world that wanted his paintings as decoration for the rich, the cultural establishment that wanted his intensity made safe and consumable. Rothko’s entire career was a challenge to that system of authoritarianism that he balked at. His withdrawal from the Four Seasons commission was not him having a revelation inspired by Ken, nor was it a breakdown. It was the act of a Jewish man being principled in a most Jewish way, that he would not let his work be domesticated by power. The play takes the liberator, with his deeply-rooted philosophy since childhood of liberation, and recasts him as the despot.

This is projection by Logan.

The Christian institutional model shames dissent, punishes nonconformity, and treats the refusal to submit as moral failure. Logan takes this and accuses the Jew of the very thing the institution does. The mob that enforces obedience frames the man who refuses to bow as the bully.

Jewish tradition has a name for this pattern, in case you were wondering why it’s so easy for someone familiar with Judaism to see it even when others can not.

This is the story known as Book of Esther, which effectively teaches little Jewish girls they have women heroes to look up to who fought power and won.

In the story, the antisemitic Haman demands that everyone kneel to his authority. Mordecai will not on principle that he does not kneel to false authority. And Haman’s response is not to question his own authority but to mark Mordecai for destruction, which means not just Mordecai, but his entire people. The crime is not what Mordecai did. The crime is that he dared to insist on his own terms.

Sound familiar?

Logan’s Red runs the same inversion. It takes the artist who challenged the commodity system and makes him the oppressor. It takes the assistant who represents that system’s values of youth, accessibility, the rejection of difficulty and makes him into the hero.

Logan gives his audience shame directed at a Jewish man for ninety minutes, and wants it to be registered as art.

Who Gets to Define the Terms

Jewish intellectual confidence is rewritten as aggression. The Jewish protagonist says he knows when he knows, he doesn’t know when he doesn’t, and the Christian rewrites it as uncomfortable overconfidence and failure of modesty. How dare a man think for himself, to exert authority over his own destiny in a way Catholics are raised to believe is shameful. The play traps Rothko in a false binary: aspiring Christian authoritarian or broken failure. It never considers that he was neither. He was genuinely anti-authoritarian.

Logan takes nurturing intensity and rewrites it as manipulation. He takes a commanding presence rooted in a tradition where ferocious engagement is love, and presents it as a problem the young assistant must solve by abandonment. Catholic framing is unmistakable, where leaving and silencing are the preferred tools over the balance of an embraced, inherent conflict.

The play needs Rothko to break down at the end so the audience can leave feeling they witnessed something profound rather than something that they did to him.

The only resolution the script offers is the gentile’s liberation from the control and money-seeking Jew’s demands. Ken leaves to “belong” while Rothko is cast out to be alone. The audience is invited to feel that something has been set right. But the play never asks the question that would unmake its entire structure: What if the demands were not pathology but pedagogy? What if the intensity was not something to survive but something to join?

In a 2012 review for The Arts Fuse, the visual artist Franklin Einspruch asked what a “treyf, naive Iowan” was really meant to be doing in the studio of Mark Rothko, the artist “with commensurate aspirations to grasp the unnamable essence of being.” The imbalance was the sharpest observation I have found about Red, and apparently no one explored this any further.

Perhaps the Christian establishment has no interest in developing any critique of a play that trashes Jewish intellectualism. It was too busy handing out awards.

Not just six Tonys. The Drama Desk. The Olivier.

A playwright built a machine that chewed up a famous Jew and spit out his bones, and the industry gave it every prize available. A Catholic dramatic structure that shames Jewish difference, rewards conformity, and treats the insistence on one’s own terms as the gravest sin does not operate against the interests of a Christian cultural establishment. It operates as one. It’s an expression of how the establishment uses its dominance to control narratives that harm the minorities it claims to be “converting”.

I’m reminded of a recent court case where American Native people had their voice officially removed by an American court, which ruled that the Oil companies oppressing them should decide how to tell their story. In 2026. Logan isn’t the only one writing like this.

Fifteen years and hundreds of productions later, Red continues to tell audiences that Rothko’s Judaism was color and noise to a Greek tragedy rather than the operating system of his entire artistic practice.

In the script, Rothko says he wants to create “a place of communion.” It is the one moment where Logan almost lets him speak from his own tradition, where traditions of shared encounters nearly break through the Christian scaffolding of authoritarian rule. But the script cannot sustain it. Logan needs Rothko to fail in the way he expects, to collapse into the tortured isolation that will justify Ken’s “return” to society from the exclusion and independence of Jewish intellectualism.

The play tells you Rothko is Jewish, yet it spends the entire time punishing him for not being Christian enough to make sense to the audience misunderstanding him.

The most consequential fraud in modern technology is not happening in the code. It is happening in the units.

If you ever studied the collapse of Soviet economics, you know exactly what I’m about to explain.

AI companies have built a billing infrastructure in which the seller defines the unit of measurement, counts the units, and invoices the buyer. All with no independent verification at any point in the transaction. All without any enforcement mechanism.

If you prompt AI to build something and it launches a dozen agents and burns an entire day worth of credits in an hour, that’s business as usual, especially if they delete their own work and complain they have nothing to show you for it.

The unit of fraud is called a “token.” It has no fixed definition. It varies by model, by provider, and by tokenizer version. It can be changed at any time, by the vendor, without notice. There is no regulatory body certifying token measurement. There is no weights-and-measures regime. There is no audit trail the customer can independently verify.

This is not a new problem, as I already hinted.

It is one of the oldest problems in commercial history, and every previous instance ended the same way. It won’t be different this time. It’s logic any five-year-old should be able to figure out.

Caps for Sale

Let’s start with clause 35 of the Magna Carta, 1215:

Let there be one measure of wine throughout our whole realm; and one measure of ale; and one measure of corn.

This was the language of liberty from oppression. It was a response to documented, systematic fraud by royal merchants who controlled their own measures. A bushel in London was not a bushel in York, and the difference was profit.

It took England six centuries to arrive at a proper Weights and Measures Act. Every iteration addressed the same structural deficiency: when the entity selling the goods also controls the unit of measurement, the unit will be corrupted. The entire history of metrology from the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures to NIST to the EU’s Measuring Instruments Directive, is the history of forcibly separating the measurer from the seller.

It’s fundamental to the rise of industrialization that the clocks had to run on universal time, even with time zones, such that trains could have externally judged arrival and departure times. The British and Dutch factories that invented assembly lines to defeat Napoleon (infamously copied by Ford) couldn’t work without shared units of measure.

Given this context it appears now that AI companies are the most historically illiterate and economically unsound ever.

Their “token billing” has undone a fundamental tenet against trivial fraud. We are back to the royal merchant having their thumb on the scale for every transaction, except the thumb is an algorithm and the scale is proprietary.

How dumb does the intelligent machine business think we are, seriously?

LIBOR for Compute

Let’s review, for example, the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) that underpinned roughly $350 trillion in financial instruments worldwide. LIBOR was calculated from self-reported borrowing rates submitted daily by the banks that profited from the number. No independent verification. No transaction-based measurement.

Just trust.

And it failed. Banks manipulated it for years. Of course they did. The entity producing the number was also the entity whose trading positions depended on the number. When the fraud was finally exposed, the fix was to replace LIBOR with SOFR (Secured Overnight Financing Rate) which is derived from actual observed transactions rather than self-reported claims.

Now consider the AI jar of pickles we are being told to get in.

OpenAI reports that average reasoning token consumption per organization has increased approximately 320 times in the past twelve months. This number was produced by OpenAI, about OpenAI’s product, using OpenAI’s proprietary tokenizer, and reported to the press as evidence of adoption. It is Barclays submitting its own LIBOR rate as if nobody knows why we stopped them from doing this.

The difference is that LIBOR at least had the pretense of multiple submitters. Token counts have one source: the vendor.

Intelligence machine vendors have truly produced their most cynical moment.

Gosplan of Sand Hill Road

Soviet central planning failed not because the planners were being stupid. Many were brilliant, which probably made everything worse. It failed because the information system was structurally corrupt, and compliant agents corrupted it further. Every layer of the reporting chain had an incentive to inflate their output numbers, and there was no independent verification mechanism capable of correcting the distortion.

The famous case study is the Soviet nail factory. Measured by weight, the factory produced fewer, heavier nails that nobody needed. Measured by quantity, it produced millions of tiny nails nobody could use. The metric became the product. Actual utility was irrelevant because utility was not being measured, only the unit was.

Here’s another token output example of fraud I was taught in college. Soviet window manufacturers measured weight and nobody could install the heavy, thick glass. They measured by size, and all the very large, thin glass broke before it even could be loaded for delivery. Actual utility was irrelevant because utility was not being measured, only the unit was.

Every day that I use AI it wastes unbelievable amounts of money and time, measured in units of tokens, as it tells me if I don’t like it there’s nothing I can do.

Jensen Huang’s proposal at GTC this month is the Soviet nail or glass factory at much larger Silicon Valley scale.

He suggested that every engineer should have an annual token budget, where these allocations could reach half of base salary in value. Consider what this fraud means structurally. You are telling workers they have an annual allocation of a unit that measures interaction volume, not outcome quality.

Record scratch.

So a notoriously wasteful industry already in trouble for water and air pollution will optimize entirely for high consumption. An engineer who solves a problem by thinking for ten minutes and never touching the AI has, under this framework, underperformed relative to one who burned through a million tokens generating refuse. Yet the engineer who still thinks, and conserves tokens, is undeniably the superior engineer to the ones that do not!

Pray and spray, running out of ammunition and begging for $200 billion to keep firing at ghosts, is so inversely proportional to the efficiency of Delta operators I can’t even….

Tokens are not a productivity metric, like ammunition is not even a kill rate, because Nvidia is incentivized inversely to what customers actually need. It is Gosplan announcing the Five-Year Plan for compute consumption, and every factory manager is about to start filing reports showing they exceeded their quota of tokens, meaning… nothing.

Shovel Seller Tithe

Huang’s position is particularly elegant because Nvidia does not sell tokens. They sell the GPUs that generate them. Every token consumed requires silicon to produce. If token budgets become a standard corporate expenditure pegged to payroll, Huang has created a permanent demand floor for his hardware.

Gross. Literally gross product.

He does not need to manipulate the token count himself. He just needs the token to become the unit that corporations manage against, and every dollar allocated to token budgets flows upstream to GPU purchases.

He skips actual measurement. He proposes that companies commit, in advance, to spending a fixed percentage of their payroll on his product for compute.

That is not a metric. It is a tithe.

And the structure insulates him perfectly. The AI providers already grossly inflate the token counts. The customers overpay the AI providers, given that most of the token count is for fixing things the tokens were spent on to begin with, like a protection racket. The AI providers buy Nvidia’s GPUs to service the consumption they have encouraged and caused without any accountability for outcomes. Nvidia never touches the books. They sell shovels to the people salting the mine.

The Arc

Every instance of self-reported commercial measurement in recorded history has followed the same progression: self-reported measurement, then market adoption of the metric, then discovery of systematic manipulation, then regulatory intervention mandating independent measurement.

Medieval grain measures. LIBOR. Credit ratings. Remember Facebook’s video metrics? The company admitted in 2016 to inflating view times by 60 to 80 percent, having defined the view, counted the view, and sold the view. The pattern is not debatable. It is one of the most thoroughly documented dynamics in economic history.

Token billing is currently at stage two: market adoption. Enterprises are building budgets around it. Analysts are publishing reports denominated in it. A CEO is proposing tying it to compensation.

Nobody is asking who audits the count.

Auditors are completely absent.

The harsh reality for every major AI provider on earth, like royalty before the Magna Carta, is that nobody has the independent authority needed to vouch for them. The merchant is being made the king who declares their own scale valid no matter what. And this time the scale is processing trillions of transactions per day, denominated in a unit that has no legal definition, no regulatory oversight, and no independent verification mechanism.

No kings.

We have eight hundred years of evidence for this bullshit. The only variable today is how much it costs before someone reads basic history of economics and enforces an honest measure.

The AI industry pretends to be terrified about regulation, but really they are in danger of transparency. Because the moment an independent third party can compare token billing against actual computational work performed, or the moment someone builds a SOFR for inference, every provider’s margins become visible. And if those margins look anything like LIBOR spreads or Facebook’s video metrics, the correction won’t be gradual.

I’m telling you, even the best of the best agents are a tragedy of token inflation and massive waste.

Nobody inside the Soviet system volunteered for glasnost. It was forced by the fact that the gap between the reports and reality had become so grotesque that the system could no longer function even on its own terms.

Token economics in Silicon Valley is rapidly approaching that threshold. Engineers know. We watch agents burn through whole budgets producing garbage, watch our token counts spike on failed reasoning chains we are billed for anyway, watch “reasoning tokens” appear on invoices for computation we never requested and cannot inspect.

The bigger the tool failure and productivity suck, the more the AI companies try to report a Soviet-sounding productivity “gain”. The more energy they burn, the more they claim to have a “big engine”, which means literally nothing useful.

Gorbachev didn’t reform Soviet economics. He revealed that it was dead inside.

The production numbers had been fraudulent for decades. Everyone inside the system knew. The factories knew. The ministries knew. Gosplan knew. But the reporting structure made it impossible to say so, because every career in the chain depended on the numbers going up. Glasnost (openness) didn’t fix fraud any more than exposure of Enron balanced its sheets. It made it permissible to say out loud the numbers meant nothing. The gap between reported output and actual value had grown so large that the moment anyone was allowed to measure honestly, the entire structure lost legitimacy overnight.

That’s the truth of the AI bubble. Token output is the absolute wrong measure and will only bring pain to those who adopt it without audit.