Although the Third Reich famously suppressed what it labeled “degenerate art,” it gave a fair amount of leeway to actors, architects, artists, musicians, and filmmakers—provided they had no Jewish ancestry, weren’t socialists, and were willing to keep any questionable political opinions to themselves. In a new book, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the careers of such artists and the moral compromises they made.  Mark Falcoff writes in his review:

The Nazis welcomed the accommodations [of these artists] because they had settled on no hard-and-fast aesthetic of their own. From the late 1920s, the Nazi-party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg attempted to separate “good” and “bad” art through his Fighting League for German Culture, calling for a kind of “blood and soil” folklorism in the plastic arts and literature. But his efforts came largely to naught, partly because while the Nazis knew what they didn’t like, they weren’t so certain about what they did. Even Expressionism, the quintessential art form of the Weimar Republic, was not ruled out of bounds during the National Socialist period. . . .

[Joseph] Goebbels’s control of German culture operated through a series of “chambers” (literature, film, music, etc.) and also through preexisting “academies,” which he immediately purged of Jews and leftists. But a surprising number of creative people looked past this detail and were happy to work with a regime that, unlike its predecessor, was generous with funding for the arts. The poet Gottfried Benn, a modernist, served for a time as head of the Prussian Academy. Moreover, as Petropoulos writes, “among non-Jewish writers a relatively large number with stronger-than-average talent were accepted by the regime.”

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.