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tv   David Marwell Mengele  CSPAN  May 27, 2020 7:16am-8:14am EDT

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they are organized by their ranking, noted historians, from best to worst and features perspective of the nation's chief executive and leadership style. c-span.org/thepresidents for each historian and president featured and order your copy today wherever books and e-books are sold. >> welcome to this live broadcast, sorry we had a little bit of a delay. we are doing a little improvisation and work, will happen just on audio. we hope you can hear well
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enough if we do it this way. let us know in the chat box. a warm hello, happy to see so many of you. i want to start by thanking david goldman, to switch, for me very new for all of us in the region of live stream. we are presenting that in partnership with our good friends at the public library. we are all gripped by the precarious and frightening reality of this moment. so many books conserve as antidotes and only one of those antidotes and we are sharing
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the next 45 minutes or our tonight and before introduce speakers in detail, and step aside or minimize or whatever it is we do, i want to say quickly, this fabulous book "mengele: unmasking the angel of death" is available here at labyrinth or whichever is your nearest and dearest local bookstore. all of us in the independent bookselling world are trying to find a way through to the other side of this crisis. if you want to buy this book at labyrinth it will ship for free, place the order over the phone we will post to the chat box that are also on our
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website. that will be the easiest way to get through that book. we want to ask a question, the best way is to ask a question at the bottom of your screen, better than putting them in the chat box. a cumulative interest in the question and focus on those a little bit. let's turn to what critics are considering a definitive account. it is a biography and detective story, they are prepared to
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tell his story. an american historian, and at the document center, and the investigation were together and through the 1980s. for that side of the story, they are friends and deeply
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shared interests in helping us learn from the past and not repeat the worst atrocities. david goldman is a distinguished lawyer and founder and chairman of the fellowship of auschwitz for the study of potential ethics. this is a special nonprofit organization, and brought to auschwitz. moral and ethical issues, the fundamental premise is, i will quote some of the materials, and breakdown or with devastating consequences, with
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this principle and insight we are squarely inside the story of joseph minghella -- mengele. i will let david and david take it from here. i am disappointed that is impossible to see me. >> i should say david and i have known each other for many years, one note of warning is if david answers a question i have not yet asked that could happen or i could skip the questions i have in mind but i heard david answer. the q and a session will be important.
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i want to say by way of preface that i am fascinated by the perpetrators. the organization i work with is an ethical leadership program where we begin by studying the perpetrators and nazi germany asking what we can learn from them. prefacing my question to david that my focus will be on mengele as perpetrator and who he was. i will start in a different place than many would and ask who he was. who was joseph mengele? we could merely say he was born with horns on his head and he was evil incarnate but we know is not what your book is saying. i would like to learn a little
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bit more about him. what kind of child was he? what was he like as a kid? >> i don't really know what he was like as a kid. there are not dramatically good sources on that. the best source is his own writings about himself. mengele wrote an autobiography for his family, written in the 60s and finished in the 1970s, he wrote it as a novel, as a fiction, believing if you were freed from the rigorous telling of facts, something more illustrative and important as a means of teaching an important lesson and when he talks about his childhood, he spends 100
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pages which says something about how important he thought he was. there is nothing in his childhood that gives any hint of the murderer mengele was to become, nothing in his childhood fulfills our notion of an incubator for what that future would have been. there are no stories of him murdering pets in the back yard or a bully or unkind. he grew up in a prosperous family, loving family with household help, parents who cared for him and two younger brothers but nothing in his childhood that suggests, points to the politics he was later to adopt. >> what kind of students, what did he study, what kind of
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student was he? >> he went the academic route in germany, he was a middling student. i have his report cards. he was not outstanding in the classroom. part of that is he had a serious illness as a child which played a role later on. he became a passionate student and he had an elite education, studied that munich bond. he not only had a medical degree but a phd in anthropology, he studied with nobel prize winners, laureates
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or those who would become prizewinners in the future. he was considered an extremely able student and had extremely -- he writes in his autobiography about the impact -- he's quite passionate about how he was moved by not only their skill but their devotion to the science of medicine. >> anything political? anything that gives a hint to his politics when he was in university? >> his university career coincided precisely with the nazi party and its ascension to power. he began studies in april of
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1930, the summer semester of 1930. he came from a home that was conservative, catholic, probably an element of anti-semitism, but not anything that would set him on the course he eventually took. >> tell us more about his studying. what was he studying, the medicine he was focused on. >> mengele's interest in medicine, racial hygiene and anthropology came at a time when these disciplines took on a new and important meaning for the state. hitler believed physicians were
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extremely important in terms of carrying out his worldview and himmler said national socialism was biology and acted. the fact that mengele began studying these scientists when they take on new status is important. what does the new status mean? these scientists had what one scholar called symbiotic relationship with the state, nazi science provided fundamental support for the nazi worldview and also benefited from the things science benefits from, funding, elevation of its status. that is extremely important and effective mengele --
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>> was it rogue medicine? >> the science was mainstream for germany at the time. en garde, but not rogue, not unconventional but he certainly, i describe him as the product and the promise of german science. and to lead to support, for a forced sterilization,
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anthropology, extremely famous anthropologist, and the head of the, at the university of frankfurt. promising young scientist, and academic career in front of things. and things happened differently. >> i want to get to the war in a minute but with him married, children? >> he married a woman he met in my state right before the beginning of the war. they had no real married life together since the war came and he had other things to do.
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they had one son who was born on mengele's birthday on march 16th, 1943. >> do we know anything about his faith? how religious he was? >> his mother was a very devout catholic. he writes about that in his memoir. he chose to have a church wedding which was unusual for an ss officer. in a nostalgic sense in the catholic church but he was not regularly observant although it had an impact, he writes about what when his mother dies, reflects on his catholic upbringing. >> let me jump around a little
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bit, thanks for that background. when did mengele become part of your life? how did you become involved with him? >> i was with the department of justice in washington as a historian at the office of special investigation and was involved in the normal work of the office which was investigating or identifying or prosecuting nazi war criminals working in the united states but also responsible for special projects in the office. in 1983 when it was alleged house barbie had worked for us intelligence and indeed found that was in true -- that was true and published in summer of 1983. in 1985 for reasons too
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complicated to go into, mengele became the subject of public interest and to investigate certain allegations that mengele had been interned by the americans and used by the americans like barbie had. we were asked to investigate those allegations, that became an international manhunt when we were joined by another office, the us marshals service and the german prosecuted in frankfurt at the justice ministry. >> he is joseph mengele. how did he get out of germany? how did that happen? >> mengele left auschwitz in january of 1945 and was
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assigned to another camp. when that camp was liberated by the soviets, he came upon a field hospital in the area in czechoslovakia, one of the people in the field hospital was a former colleague of his, he asked if he could join the field hospital. he took of the ss uniform which marked him as someone of intense interest for anyone who captured him, he don the uniform, this human internet being in an area between the
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advancing red army and western allies in the area - in eastern, southern southeastern germany, an arrow that was unoccupied for six weeks between the beginning of may in the middle of june. unoccupied because the front lines, had frozen. mangalore -- mengele had a chance to build a convincing cover story, no longer clad in ss uniform. the steel hospital started wisely, to surrender, they decided not to surrender to the soviets which would have been unwise, and drove to the
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american lines in bavaria and taken into custody. mengele was in two different pow camps. likely under his own name at the end, released under his own name there are three reasons he was released by the americans even though he was on wanted lists created by them. the first were very inefficiently distributed, mengele had not seen the wanted lists. the second, mengele was part of a unit that was well integrated in the unit but the most important reason is mengele didn't have the ss tattoo under his left arm, the blood type a soldiers so if they were wounded, medics would know what
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kind of blood to use for transmission. mengele did not have the blood type tattoo which removed the most common mark of someone in the ss. he passed through an extremely effective litmus test which was to have interned soldiers, mengele was released by the us without any further interrogation. he then secured false identity papers under another man's name and live four years on a farm doing manual labor in a small farm outside reagansville in bavaria and made his way with the help of his prosperous family, overland into italy. and to argentina where he arrived in summer of 1949.
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>> is there any evidence of complicity with the americans, any of the allies to get him out? >> know. no evidence of any contact with american forces and the reason for that is the family had choreographed a ruse that mengele had died. if you look at the files, there is a card file and in that cardfile indication that mengele had died and was able to maintain that ruse. with their prosperous -- with the means they had they were able to help mengele out of germany without any official help.
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they were able to purchase services of experienced guides were very practiced in getting people over the border and were able to purchase effective false identities. >> the book tells a detective story, thought we had discovered what happened to him, what his life was like in south america. i would like to come back to that and spend time at auschwitz. your entry into this, we talked as you were writing the book and said to me that you were quite anxious how it might be
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received and how people might take the book. tell us why you felt that and that might help us understand how you feel about his work at auschwitz. >> i should say when i worked in a case in the 80s i believe the common picture of mengele is some kind of mad scientist motivated by grotesque interest, sadistic interest, interested in twins and another case where he sent the head of a 12-year-old boy to the lab for fixing, having spies made
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or placed in formaldehyde. i didn't have a great deal of curiosity about exactly what his science was about and a caricature which came along with tremendous support from popular culture. i had seen the boys from brazil, the marathon man, read time's arrow, and a number of these films and books that portray him as a prototype of evil. i also know that we didn't know all that much about what he did at auschwitz. there are no records of his, very few that illustrate the
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exact nature of his experiment. the goals of his experience, the procedures that he used. all we had was the testimony of his victim which by and larger young traumatized children at the time of their encounter with mengele. we also have the testimony of physicians who had been recruited by mengele, recruited making - his scientific work. mengele established at auschwitz the research institute in the pattern of those he had been associated with in berlin. great medical talent from all over europe, he made sure he kept an eye out for talented
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physicians and pediatricians and medical illustrators and nurses so he could assemble a team that could assist him in his work. we have a testimony of inmate physicians operating with mengele, assisting him not because they were interested in the work he did, and they offered a different future for him. there are testimony by and large, some of the things mengele did did not describe the intent of his experiment with the nature of the experiments with a couple exceptions. we have a few reports on the german research foundation
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which funded the research and we have a very careful work of german historians, in the last 10 to 15 years so i sat down and i read all this stuff and a picture emerged that was at odds with the testimony that had become kind of trope about mengele's work, it wasn't clear the testimony that came from survivors which alleged a particular goal for an expanded, they didn't match up with mengele's career, his training and his own personal ambition and goals which was to
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impress his mentors and pursue his economic work. i was concerned, the testimony of people who had the tragic and traumatic encounter, that i might be apologizing or trying to make less horrific what mengele was involved in but i come up with a different answer which is it is somehow easier to describe mengele as a monster than to recognize the monster us things that people are the product and promise of enshrined institutions. to me it is more unsettling
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picture than some renegade monster working on his own and fulfilling base and primitive motives. >> we don't want to paint too pretty of a picture. he was doing experiments. >> no question about it. the other thing about mengele's work at auschwitz, there is no question of criminality. in terms of the scale and extent of his crimes and these are crimes that although he didn't believe they were crimes that he admitted to in his own discussions, his role in selections at auschwitz, those who were arriving at the camp and those who were called from
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the camp, where he made this binary decision about whether they should die immediately or be exploited for slave labor. >> i understand the crimes of selection where he was choosing to murder people, if we go back to the experiment for which he is so known, what was motivating him? what excited him? what got him up every day? >> part of it was he found himself in a situation with no moral or ethical boundaries. let's talk about his twin search. one of the inmate physicians, exception of people who claim
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to know the purpose of the experiment said that mengele was wanting to discover the secret of twin births so that he could use that knowledge to apply to the german population and secure in rian future by increasing the birth rate. this is not true, the proposition that of mangler was interested in the secret of twin births, he would be interested in the parent says he should be? and he showed no interest, parents were twins, the parents were often sent a just, twins were sent of the balance where they were used as unwilling subjects of the experiment. and ignores the long tradition of twin experiment within germany. there were 200 dissertations based on twin research during
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the nazi period. twin research was the gold standard of genetic research, has to do with comparing incidence of disease between fraternal twins and identical twins to tease out what was the result of nature and what was the result of nurture and environment. mengele's work at auschwitz was an extension of the work he was doing in germany before the war. at that time he didn't have the same supply of research material. and they diverge in their lives, most removed to the
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countryside, the holocaust of the war, and they got auschwitz. and twin subjects. and it was a kind of, to continue his twin research, and any safeguards that were present in germany for research on human beings. it would be a crime against science, to carry on these
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experiments. >> i know you can't answer this but if he had been asked, the admonition to do no harm, what do you think he would have said? >> i talk in the book about how the medical profession, a kind of moral ethical intellectual sleight-of-hand consistent with their own view and carrying on the kind of racial hygienic work required in nazi germany. they simply substituted the patient. no longer was the individual
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patient who deserved their care but rather the racial community. the racial community, the patient, you had to do no harm to the racial community so that if there's a cancerous cell in the body destroy the cell to save the body and for mengele, harming jews was not an issue because he didn't consider them to be worthy of consideration. >> was he motivated by anti-semitism? >> a kind of racial anti-semitism.
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some deserve to live in some don't. >> what comes on screen here. i'm keeping an eye on the time, in this particular moment, if you have an important question of that aspect, get to some of these, on the question of self-deception that you started to talk about. asking also both before and after 45, the question of his remorseless nests.
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. >> the epilogue talks about the confrontation mengele had the had not been available to his victims, to prosecute him. it was a competition with his son who was born in 1944. mengele site once as an infant and once as a toddler or maybe a few times as a toddler but once again when mengele visited switzerland, ross was 12 years old. he only knew mengele as his
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uncle, mengele's name came to be known during the auschwitz trial being conducted, mangler's name and been known in germany, mangalore's stepfather decided to let him know what his real father was, began an awkward and from his point of view forceful exponent of his father in brazil. didn't really understand each other. he was a child of the 60s, radical progressive politics and didn't have any that had a kind of connection to his father but intellectual battle and he decided he would confront the father rather than
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continue a kind of labored convention of correspondence so he went to brazil under some security profession. and, i don't want to spoil the whole thing but mengele essentially gets quite emotional, even weeping saying it is so hurtful his own son would believe what was written in the papers about him that the people who arrived at auschwitz were already did when he got there and he was simply helping some people live a bit longer and eventually this very
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emotional and bitter conversation just ends and they both decide it is not useful to keep it up. mengele write a letter to rolf near the end of his life, i am glad i was able to meet you but it is a long letter and in the end he says i don't need to justify myself to your anyone else to explain what i did in clear terms and my patience has a limited that limit is where i feel a threat to my family and to use a nazi term my racial community which is the same language he might have used in the summer of 1944 so there is no remorse on the part of mengele blue cheese frozen in time in a sense in the way he looks at the world.
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>> which connects to a question other people are having about other aspects of his life in argentina, whether he continued his medical experiments at all in any way or any ultimate form. >> i say the following about his life in argentina. four years on a farm with hard physical labor and when he got argentina had a rich cultural life going to libraries and bookstores and became involved with a german immigrant community some of which were right-wing and some nazis. he did publish an article, good evidence were, on genetics in a german language journal published in what is areas in 1963.
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even later invested in a pharmaceutical company in what is areas which produced medicine for tuberculosis. that was a short-lived enterprise because at the time it got going he had to leave argentina. .. to questions that concern the question of iceman and one thing that his capture hurt efforts to also capture mengele. what relationship there might
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be. a question of whether mengele knew him in south america or whether there's anything you can say about what he thought of him? >> they met apparently three times. they were really came from different social backgrounds. there's an interesting contest, when mengele was waiting to take a ship to argentina he stayed in the hotel. when eichmann at a given type it under similar circumstances he stayed in a monster because he didn't have money to stay in hotel and that illustrates their differences. also mengele was intellectual in the sense, and eichmann was not. they really didn't get along very well. they were not friends.
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it's a common misconception that mengele was still in buenos aires when eichmann was captured it turns out mengele left argentina at the end of the summer of 1958, he got word that the german justice authorities were interested in him. and at that moment he began to find a new place to live, and he sold his interest in the pharmaceutical company. he gave his wife is power of attorney, and he went to paraguay in probably the late fall of 1958. 1958. he then moved to paraguay for good in 1959 in the spring. so by 1960 when eichmann was captured in buenos aires, mengele was long gone. now, the capture team that captured eichmann believed that mengele was still in buenos
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aires, and they made an attempt after eichmann was safely in the safest and interrogated him about in part about mengele, they went to former addresses they knew of for mengele and couldn't find him, but he could not of been captured because he wasn't there. >> i wish with time for all the questions. i don't think we will. there's another one here that asked a little bit of, about his legacy, whether there is a scientific legacy in terms of the experiments that he did, or his research or his writings having had, having been taken up by any country in any way in the scientific community, whether there's an afterlife of the l? >> we don't know, , we don't hae any of his medical files so we don't know what is experiments really were.
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we do no one series of experiments that he did -- we do know. there was an oral cancer, his face is eaten away by a kind of gangrene. that had been kind of disappeared in the developing world -- developed world. we still found in the developing world and among some people with immune systems that were jeopardized. but this disease came back with great force in the gypsy camp at auschwitz in 1943. mengele sought to find a cure for this disease, and he found world-famous czech jewish physician was in another part of the auschwitz complex and epstein begin a series of experiments and new treatment protocols, and found a treatment
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that cured the disease. this was written up by inmate physician who worked with doctor epstein in london in 1946 when who an inmate physician, she wrote about what epstein had done and the treatments that were used a successful treatments for noma. the irony of this is, grotesque irony is noma was a product of the camp itself for conditions of poor sanitary conditions. the second grotesque irony is none of the children who were cured of the disease survived the cancer because they were murdered. so that's one part of the experiments in mengele's work that that did find its way out through the writings of one of many physician. >> interesting. >> david, if i i could speak osha's going to give you the
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last question, david goldman. >> that's a lot of pressure. >> no, no, no. >> so david, why did mengele become mengele? why did he become the trope, as you say? why did we -- what speed is why did he become the kind assemble of the holocaust of auschwitz? >> yes. >> i don't know. i think a lot of it has to do with the way the fact that he became such an attractive figure for people who create popular culture. i think that's -- i have a google alert on my phone which gives me a message, several times a day, every time mengele is mentioned in the world press or on any tv show. i got one this morning that one of the great german actress who portrayed him in some crazy film
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died yesterday. every single day mengele is promoted as either, either in a historical sense, sometimes mostly inaccurately, but he's invoked, or lately with the coronavirus there's lots of metaphors or comparisons to mengele, whether we need mengele there to help us find a solution or whether trump will replace dr. fauci with a mengele like advisor. what more often than not also has the kind of benchmark for evil, if there's a bad manager in a bank that he's the mengele of that bank or something. he certainly has, as one scholar has said, been separated, his name has been separated from his person, and part of what i tried do in this book was explain who
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that person really was. i hope i've done that. >> you most definitely have, david. it is, it has this double mess of a biography and a detective story, but it's also such a thoroughly researched history book, and so it's an amazing book. i encourage all of you to get a hold of it. let me just thank david and david. i'm so sorry, david goldman, that we couldn't have you on screen, but i'm very happy that this somehow was improvisation worked anyways. thank you very much. >> i admire your column, dorothea. you are a good guide to all of this. >> i believe it was everybody's good fortune come so worked out
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perfectly. >> yeah, it did. and all good conversations of one's that could continue on, and i feel that way about this one. maybe i can just say a couple more practical things in wrapping up, which is just remind you that this is one of many events that labyrinth is hosting in this new medium, both together and with the public library. we do separate events, we do joint events so you can find those either by signing up for our respective newsletters on our websites or following us through facebook, whichever way. you can also follow us on this broadcast platform and get notifications will have a next thing. i also want to take a second to mention something that david goldman organization office,
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whether topics are very much what to tonight conversation you can find out more about those and register for those on the faspe website, which is faspe faspe-ethics.org. so these are really webinars that will explore in particular the ways in which professional ethics and ethical leadership also in the current pandemic are relevant and an important questions to consider. so don't forget to buy david's book from an independent bookstore -- >> labyrinth books. >> labyrinth books ideally, but any independent bookstore. if you want you can get it from labyrinth. the best way is to give us a call. the phone number is on our website at our hours are tuesdays through saturdays 11 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
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maybe i will end by saying we have been so moved and heartened by the response from so many right now who are really recognizing, i think, that their local businesses are businesses that the value in their lives and to supporting them, and labyrinth has been no exception. i am enclosing by thanking all of you and by thinking once again most particularly david and david. so goodbye, be well, be healthy until next time. >> thank you. >> thank you. [background sounds] >> today watch live coverage of the launch of space x commercial crew test flight marking the first launch of astronauts on american soil and spacecraft since 2011. 2011.
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our live coverage of the spacex crew dragon lunch begins at 12:15 p.m. eastern on c-span2 with liftoff at 4:30 p.m. as nasa astronaut launch to the international space station. then a post-launch lunch briefing with nasa administrator jim bridenstine at 6 p.m. eastern. thursday at 11:15 a.m. eastern on c-span2, all day live coverage of the spacex crew dragon as it docked with the international space station. the opening of the hatch between the two mex bicycles and event between the spacex crew dragon and i is as crew. watch live on c-span2, online the c-span on the free c-span radio app. >> having lived through a -- i wave of cynicism that left is unable to trust what we are told by anyone who calls himself an
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expert, it becomes very difficult for us to rise to a challenge like this. our first reaction is to say no, they are lying to us, the only for themselves and a lot of our national institutions have got to take on the challenge of persuading people again that the exits for us, that they're here for the country. >> sunday june 7 at noon eastern on "in depth" come alive conversation with author and american enterprise institute scholar yuval levin come his most recent book is a time to build. other titles include the great debate and the fractured republic. join the conversation with your phone calls, tweets, texts and facebook messages. watch "in depth" with yuval levin on booktv on c-span2. >> i would like to start by thanking all of our supporters, -- [inaudible] and everyone was outpouring of love for our bookstore. especially now we are hoping to or

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