Yeah, what the heck. The Berne Convention, which we have signed along with 164 other countries, certainly prohibits precisely what the professor wants Congress to do. It clearly states that protection isn’t dependent on an author registering or (by implication) making his contact information perpetually available to his government, to Google, or to anyone else. That’s what he’d have to do to prevent his books from being labeled orphans and stolen by the forced opt-in provisions of this settlement.

The all too obvious conclusion of what Berne says is this: You can’t treat orphan books any differently from any other books. For the full term of copyright and without exception, you need an author’s permission to publish, online or anywhere else. No permission, no publication. It is that simple. I might add, Congress can no more overrule a treaty obligation than it can override the Constitution.

Yet the learned professor, in his quite lengthy article, makes no mention of Berne or, indeed of any international treaty at all. Why is that? Is he ignorant of what they say or merely unwilling to raise any issue that upsets the agenda he wants to promote? Does he not know that Congress can’t, by a mere act of legislation overwrite treaty obligations? Perhaps he simply doesn’t care.

As a historian, Darnton ought to recognize the class to which he belongs, a group you might call the Unreflectively Selfish. All their thoughts revolved around themselves. They lack what G. K. Chesterton called the “moral imagination” to recognize evil when that evil doesn’t impact themselves and particularly so when they see some advantage to be derived from justifying the evil and providing it with a sham legal cover.

It’s why we had slavery and why it took a brutal war to bring slavery to an end. Historians such as himself were fond of pointing out that all great civilizations were built on the labor of slaves. Why should we be different? It’s why his historian colleagues in Germany, nationalistic liberals eager to glorify and justify a united Germany based on Darwinian concepts about superior races (Teutonism), laid the foundation for Nazism.

You can see the same foulness lurking behind legalized abortion, denying the humanity of an unborn child being the equivalent of ignoring the existence of our obligations under Berne. One very liberal English professor justified abortion to me by pointing to a young black man nearby and whispering, “That’s why we need abortion.” Aborting the children of the poor is a logical outcome of pro-welfare-state thinking as getting rid of severely disabled children and the chronically sick elderly is the logical outcome the so-called ‘health care reform’ that we’re now debating, You can find those ideas in the writings of one of its architects, Ezekiel Emanuel. Wikipedia bluntly describes him as: “a leading opponent of legalized euthanasia, sometimes called state-assisted suicide, and a proponent of a Guaranteed Healthcare Access Plan.”

Of course Prof. Darnton’s ambitions are much milder and the harm that will result mere peanuts in comparison. He merely wants lots of books for his research, which happens to be into the history of books. He wants digital books that don’t demand from him the bother of paying money or going to a physical library. And as a Harvard professor, he is well paid. Unlike those who be ripped off by his scheme, little known authors, he doesn’t need income from his books. Lacking moral imagination, he can’t put himself in their shoes. That’s why, in the quote I began with, he doesn’t say “lawsuits by outraged authors.” Doing that would humanize the victims he wants to render invisible. They have become blacks; they have become Jews; they have become fetuses; they become the dying elderly who can no longer contribute to our economy.

When you read history, keep in mind that its evils typically have two sources. The first is obvious: genuinely evil people such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao. The second is less obvious but equally important, the Unreflectively Selfish who lack the moral imagination to grasp the harm being done to others. It is they who provide critical support for that evil. (Stalin called them “useful idiots.”) It’s why Nazism had so little opposition from German academia. Tossing out Jewish professors meant lots of “Herr Professor’ promotions for those with the proper Aryan credentials. Most of the opposition came, as Einstein noted, from churches, both Catholic and Protestant.

In the case of the Google settlement, it’s the Unreflectively Selfish who, if they have a problem with the Google settlement, see in it a fear that it might become a Google monopoly and, as such, allow Google to charge more than they want to pay for access to the uncompensated labors of others. They have nothing against stealing. They just don’t want it to cost them much.

Inside their heads, one refrain continually echoes, “Me, me, me, me, me….” Their great dreams of the future, digital libraries or whatever, always revolve around themselves and neglect the rights of others.

–Michael W. Perry, Seattle, Editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II.