Paul Krugman has a column "Sad Alan's Lament" in today's Times (available online only to the well-heeled subscribers to TimesSelect).

In it he excoriates Alan Greenspan for claiming in his new book that he was opposed to the Bush tax cuts. Krugman contends that Greenspan never distanced himself from the tax cuts in his testimony before Congress, even when explicitly given the opportunity to do so.

The close of the article sees Greenspan's inaction as a sadder sign of the times:

In retrospect, Mr. Greenspan's moral collapse in 2001 was a portent. It foreshadowed the way many people in the foreign policy community would put their critical faculties on hold and support the invasion of Iraq, despite ample evidence that it was a really bad idea.

This last reminded me of an address I recently read by the Israeli novelist, David Grossman. Grossman, who grew up in Israel in the shadow of the Shoah, has tried imaginatively to enter into the world of both the victims and the perpetrators.

In his address at, the opening of the Berlin Festival of Literature, he warns of the tendency to surrender individual responsibility to the mass mind, a tendency more and more abetted by the mass media. It is available free here for those who can manage the Italian.

Perhaps Commonweal can obtain the rights to Grossman's address before it is snatched up by The NewYork Review or (orrore!) First Things.