by hilzoy
This is too funny: Matt Yglesias quotes a surreal moment from the Republican debates:
“Giuliani said the only thing worse than an American-led military offensive against Iran would be Iran having nuclear weapons, which he called “the worst nightmare” of the Cold War. The way to stop Iran, he said, was resolute American leadership facing down the Iranian president.
“He has to look at an American president, and he has to see Ronald Reagan,” Giuliani said.”
Matt adds:
“Is that the version of Ronald Reagan who sold the Iranians weapons, or it is the version that sought to check Iranian power by sending Don Rumsfeld to Baghdad to assure Saddam Hussein that the United States didn’t really mind if he used poison gas to attack the Kurdish civilian population?”
But why stop there? Why not ask whether the Iranians still cherish the memory of Reagan’s National Security advisor arriving in Tehran carrying a chocolate cake and a Bible inscribed by Reagan himself? (A Bible: just what every Islamic Republic wants!) Or, to describe this episode differently: is the Reagan we want to Iranians to remember the one who was willing to negotiate for hostages?
Maybe, instead, Giuliani thinks that when the Iranians see a US President, they should see the Ronald Reagan whose administration failed to respond at all when terrorists bombed our embassies in Beirut and Kuwait, and who did not fire his Secretary of Defense when he countermanded the President’s order to strike terrorist training facilities after 241 of our troops anjd 64 other people were killed. Or perhaps he has in mind instead the Reagan who, when the marine barracks were bombed, swore that we would stay in Lebanon and then, four months later, began pulling our troops out.
Maybe Giuliani is in favor of repeating these lessons from Reagan’s policy towards terrorists:
Bill Cowan, retired Marine Lt. Col. who, as a military intelligence officer, weas sent to Beirut to find out who was responsible for the embassy bombing”
“Every time somebody has struck at us, we’ve threatened, we’ve stood up, we’ve pounded our chest, we’ve blown fire out of our mouths, smoke out of our ears, and then within a couple of weeks we’ve sat back down and gone back to business as usual. So we’ve sent a message over the years that we weren’t quite serious.”
Robert Oakley, U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism during the 1980s:
“Well, the terrorists learned, and others who oppose us have learned that in some circumstances a few casualties can cause us to retreat into our own shell, to give up whatever objective we were seeking, to abandon those with whom we’ve been working.”
Robert MacFarlane, National Security Advisor 1983-5 (speaking about the failure to strike back after the barracks bombing):
“A big mistake. If you have the means and the good intelligence and an accurate location to go back and destroy a center of terrorism, which we knew this to be, [it] was the right thing to do, and we should have done it. Not to do it showed a division in our government, a lack of resolve, and paralysis.”
“What’s interesting when you lay out the history of the Reagan administration, each time there was a terrorist incident, they had a different response. It was never the same response.
In Beirut, we just essentially left when, in fact, we knew that Syria and Iran were behind it. In the Achille Lauro we captured the people who did it. In Libya, eventually we bombed their intelligence agency and their leader Muammar Qaddafi. In the case of the hostages being taken, we went and traded arms secretly to get the hostages back. It was very piecemeal, it was incoherent. It was born of a failure to understand the other side and the enemy. And we just hopped from one problem to the next to the next. And never sat down.
There were commissions — Vice President Bush, when he was Reagan’s vice president, headed a commission studying terrorism and came to the conclusion we should never negotiate with terrorists. And it turned out, with top secret orders, President Reagan had ordered the negotiation and trading of arms with terrorists and those who took our hostages.”
Ronald Reagan talked like the kind of leader you’d want to have confronting terrorists. Unfortunately, he didn’t act that way. Which, now that I think of it, sounds a lot like Giuliani.
Of course, Giuliani has a few special quirks all his own. Whatever you might think about Ronald Reagan, he would never have informed Nancy that he was divorcing her by announcing it at a press conference. He didn’t try to grant himself an emergency extension of his Presidency. And he wasn’t nearly as bizarre on the subject of ferrets:
“It’s always worth recapping Giuliani’s famous riposte to a ferret owner who called in to the mayor’s weekly radio show to protest the city’s ban on them as pets: “There is something deranged about you.… The excessive concern you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist.… There is something really, really very sad about you.… This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.… You should go consult a psychologist.… Your compulsion about—your excessive concern with it is a sign that there is something wrong in your personality.… You have a sickness, and I know it’s hard for you to accept that.… You need help.””
Or was it the Ronald Reagan who used a backchannel to Tehran to have them hold off releasing their hostages just until Jimmy Carter was out of the White House? Most.cynical.and.petty.stunt.ever.
Mitt Romney is quite upset at Guiliani’s anti-weasel stance.
Ronald Reagan’s reality has generally long since ceased to exist. Largely only a myth is left.
To be sure, there was never all that much more otherwise.
The real Ronald Reagan made an endless number of decisions that were, well, very bad. The mythical Reagan, though, is wonderful.
The only way the real Reagan can catch up, nowadays, to the myth, is through tireless effort.
In that, I have to say, Guiliani resembles him. Ignorance has served both most well.
But hilzoy’s examples have the advantage of being true.
For all their talk about North Korea, if you let Republicans guided by Norquist have their way entirely, we’d see the same venerations to the Gipper-god-king, totally irrelevant to the actual facts of his presidency.
Maybe that stuff I dumped in every major metropolitan water supply will help people remember my steely former employer and all-around demigod more favorably!
I am not sure any of our former Presidents has as many myths around their personna as Reagan does.
He was called the Great Communicator because that was the one, and maybe only, thing he did well. There was substance behind the words.
From “ending the Cold War”, (which I think the Pope had more to do with) to showing how one could cut taxes and have a good economy (forgetting the 7 tax increases during his terms) to the wonderful anti-terrorist (which hilzoy shreds) there is that 1% fact and the 99% unreality.
From “ending the Cold War”, (which I think the Pope had more to do with)
Or seem to remember Gorbachev’s decisions to unilaterally reduce military deployments, pull out of Third World conflicts and leave Eastern Europe having a pretty central role in the end of the Cold War.
“Ronald Reagan” in these sorts of remarks is just the politically acceptable way to pronounce “George W. Bush”.
Thank you! It would have been lovely to hear that sort of retort in a debate (not that it would happen in a Republican primary). I really get sick of the reverence for St. Ronnie. Emotional attachment is one thing, but revisionism or ignoring facts is another.
byrningman, you are right. Plus there was a thing called Solidarity in Poland which had some influence.
The myth on Reagan has two parts. The first is that he forced the Soviet Union to overspend on armanents, whcih ahs been pretty musch debunked, I believe. The second is his famous “Tear down this wall”
speech.
Like I said, words but little substance.
I have never quite understood the Reagan-worship. Even setting aside the ways in which conservatives might agree with his decisions where I would find them monstrous, the ways in which Reagan’s record is completely at odds with conservative principles are many and varied.
The best guess I’ve been able to come up with is that Reagan was the incarnation of the Republican fantasy need to “stick it to the liberals”. He was openly and unapologetically hostile to liberalism, and signified the beginning of the Republican party’s marriage to their theocratic fringe.
nonetheless, i predict that Rudy will win it all.
The first is that he forced the Soviet Union to overspend on armanents, whcih ahs been pretty musch debunked, I believe.
possibly, but that won’t kill the myths.
cleek, despite my misspellings, you were able to capture the gist ot it all.
And you are correct (as usual), myths tend to have a self-generating quality and reach the point where reality and truth no longer matters.
Reagan mythology falls into that category.
HE also ended the Carter wheat embargo, which was beginning to cause real strain on the USSR.
Gary wrote “Guiliani”? I’d have expected that misspelling to have the same effect on him as “Ghandi”.
It’s “Giuliani”, of course. Starts with “Joo”, as in “Giuseppe” (though people misspell that all the time too), not “Gwee”, as in “Guido”.
despite my misspellings
if it wasn’t for FireFox’s automatic spellchecker (which thinks “spellchecker” is not a word, b.t.w.), i wouldn’t have even noticed.
ain’t Elngsh teh bset ?
Plus there was a thing called Solidarity in Poland which had some influence.
Meh, sideshow. I don’t like the desperate need to overstate the relevance of any phenomenon in order to draw attention away from the fact that a Russian communist atheist happens to be the moral giant of the late twentieth century. Plus Mandela, natch.
“Gary wrote “Guiliani”?”
This is truly a moment to cherish.
Finally, I’m a bad influence on Gary. 😉
Maybe the presidential libraries are all this way, but the Reagan Library is a trivial place stocked primarily with the cheesy gifts received over the years while in office. There is a fun display of the old version of Air Force One, though again a carnival-ride-like photo op as you board.
It is surprising how little there is about the actual events of his presidency, which given the myths would not be hard to glorify. But it is largely without substance — maybe that is how a place of worship to a false god should be.
I will say this for Reagan, he generally spoke in complete sentences, which is an improvement over our current front-man.
As for myths, while I can’t pull out specifics, I think Truman gets pretty overblown in retrospect. JFK has quite a few diamond barnacles as well. The Ike years, portrayed as a really wholesome time, get a nice glossy coat.
Not many people beat Clinton for negative mythology, though. From the death of Vince Foster to children he fathered across the country, that man was a myth magnet.
Reagan was a popular president. When you hit a 70% approval rating I assume that means approximately 20% of Democrats approve. He tied Clinton’s overall average approval rating and in 2001 66% remembered his presidency favorably.
He turned the economy around (yes at the cost of a huge deficit). And he certainly was at least as influential in ending the cold war as Gorbachev and the pope. Gorbachev and Reagan were the two right men at the right time in history to be able to do it. It never would have happened without both of them.
Certainly he also screwed some stuff up; I’m not going to claim he was perfect, far from it. His (non) response to terrorism was my biggest disappointment with him. Iran-Contra was mind boggling. Tax increases, inaction on AIDS, etc. etc.
But all in all most of the country still thinks he was a good president. And with the cast of characters we’re fielding now it’s no wonder some on the right yearn for a new Reagan.
I see Mitt Romney is running for President of Stepford. Was this even better delivered than the transcript?
Couldn’t he at least complain about our activist judges, or something? He doesn’t have this problem talking about Massachusetts.
But all in all most of the country still thinks he was a good president
i’m reminded of the scene in the movie Crazy People:
Kathy: Who here wants to be an advertising executive?
[several hands go up]
Emory Leeson: Who here wants to be a fire truck?
[everyone raises their hands, with several standing and commenting things like “Ooh, I do!” and “Me! Pick me!”]
i’m too young to have paid much attention to politics during the Reagan years, but i was paying attention to music, and Reagan certainly had a positive effect there. everybody was afraid of him and of what he might do. he inspired a lot of good music 🙂
OCSteve, a serious question. Just how do you think Reagan contributed to the ending of the Cold War?
And how do you think he turned the economy around? By tax cuts? Not really when he also had to raise taxes 7 times.
I realize that he remains popular in this country, but I don’t think it is because of his policies, I think it is because as an actor, he knew how to charm the populace.
The US Navy was shelling our enemies (whoever they were) in Lebanon before the attack on the Marines. It’s not clear to me that people in other countries accept the principle that American forces have the right to come into their neighborhood, take sides in their civil war, and lob explosives at them.
I read Hilzoy’s link to an interview with Robert McFarlane. It’s funny how vague and fuzzy things get when it is the US that supported a terrorist attack–in this case, a car bomb that killed 80 Lebanese in an attempt to assassinate a Lebanese cleric. Except to hear McFarlane tell it, we don’t know if Casey was trying to assassinate Fadlallah, because gosh, assassination is illegal and it wouldn’t have been presented that way to Reagan. No, it was presented as an action against a Lebanese terrorist group. Maybe Reagan thought they were delivering cakes and bibles.
Who, btw, should the Lebanese have targeted in retaliation, since I gather many here are all in agreement that terrorist attacks should not go unanswered?
It wasn’t directed at me, but I think Reagan contributed to the end of the Cold War by recognizing that Gorbachev was a sincere reformer who wanted to end the Cold War. Reagan went against most of his political allies in thinking this–they were convinced glasnost and perestroika were all devious Commie plots to get us to lower our guard. This is one time when Reagan’s gut feelings about a person were right and his supposedly more intellectual critics (on the right) were wrong.
This is the only good thing I’d say about Reagan, but it was pretty important to have someone in office who can transcend his rightwing background and actually give peace a chance when the opportunity presented itself.
In other respects Reagan was a vile man who supported death squads and butchers on several continents while proclaiming his opposition to terrorism. A fairly typical American politician, in other words. Nobody’s perfect.
Donald Johnson, fair enough. IOW, by not being negative he allowed Gorbachev an opportunity.
More by not doing something rather than by doing. It could have been worse, so I will give a little on that point. Not to the point of equal influence however.
Americans like to feel good. Reagan made us feel good. Would you stop hammering on all those facts that show that Reagan hardly ever did what he said he was going to do and get me a beer?
I always thought Phil Donohue, Elvis, and Levi jeans had orders-of-magnitude more to do with ending the cold war than Ronald Reagan and his B-1 Bombers and Pershing Missiles and exorbitantly priced Star War pie-in-the-sky.
In the mid-1980s when Donohue and Vladimir Posner hosted joint TV programs via satellite, hooking-up average Russian and American citizens, it was amazing how ‘middle-class normal the Russians seemed; no shoe-thumping, gold tooth war mongers among them. Like us, they were worried about being nuked into a cauldron of bubbling borsht. They didn’t seem like citizens from an ‘Evil Empire’ as Reagan described them; more like ordinary family people who didn’t want their kids growing up to glow radioactively in the dark.
About that time I was visiting friends in Brooklyn. They lived in a building filled with recent Russian émigrés (think Robin Williams, in Moscow on the Hudson). In conversations they eloquently reminisced about listening to smuggled rock-&-roll records as teenagers, and drooling over American magazines (no, not Playboy) with ads for ‘cool’ tight-fitting blue-jeans and pastille colored pull-overs.
Western-culture had seeped under the Berlin Wall and across all the other no-so-hermetically sealed borders of the Soviet Union, and created a generation with a savage case of consumer-envy. Gorbachev boogie-boarded in on that wave of discontent. Reagan had as much to do with Gorbachev getting elected as he had to do with who won the World Series those years – meaning not much. To Reagan’s credit, after Gorby got in and reforms were underway, Reagan supported them by reducing negative rhetoric and negotiating to reduce the arms race. Of course, he could have accomplished all that five years earlier if he had air-lifted the Russians twenty or thirty tons of Credence Clearwater and Simon-and-Garfunkle and Bob Dylan records plus shipped them containers filled with Donna Karan camisoles, hoop-earrings, berets, stretch-leotards, and wide belts. It would have made the Russians more amenable to discussions in a shorter time, and saved us about twenty or thirty billion in wasted Star War R&D.
how do you think Reagan contributed to the ending of the Cold War?
The arms race was one factor. When Gorbachev took over a quarter of the Soviets GNP was going to their military. Gorbachev’s best hope of reforming the Soviet economy was in ending the arms race with the US.
I give the most authority on this topic to career Foreign Service Officer Jack Matlock. He is a specialist in Soviet affairs. His first posting to Russia was in 61. He was stationed in the Moscow embassy during the Cuban missile crisis. He was Director of Soviet Affairs in the State Department during Nixon’s time.
Matlock participated in the negotiation of arms control treaties and other bilateral agreements.[10] In fact, he attended every one of the U.S.-Soviet summits for the 20 year period 1972-1991, with the exception of the 1979 Carter – Brezhnev summit.[11]
He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Moscow. He was Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Reagan appointed him as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of European and Soviet Affairs in the NSC. He was our ambassador to Moscow through the end of the cold war and the fall of the Soviet Union. He is a Republican, but he endorsed Kerry for president.
In his book Reagan and Gorbachev : How the Cold War Ended he offers a first-hand account. He contends that Reagan made it clear to Gorbachev at Reykjavik that reform (human rights, end to imperialism) was going to be the cost of an arms reduction agreement. And I think that SDI was the final straw, Reagan would not put SDI on the table at Reykjavik. The Soviets simply could not keep up given what they were already spending.
He also says that the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union are separate events. The cold war essentially ended in December 1988 and was due to Reagan and Gorbachev. The end of the Soviet Union was strictly an internal event and all credit for that is Gorbachev’s:
Reagan and Gorbachev were the two central players in this, and the absence of one or both would have dramatically changed the process. The end of Communist rule in the Soviet Union was a much different matter from the end of the Cold War. Maybe it would not have happened without the end of the Cold War, Matlock pondered, but it did not predispose it. Western policy, he continued, certainly did not have that goal in mind. In the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to internal factors, not western policy. Gorbachev’s reforms, which the West encouraged, together with the end of the Cold War, removed the lid from the simmering pot of the Soviet Union. Reagan himself never thought in terms of a zero sum game with the Soviets—irrespective of what some of the members of his administration thought. Rather, he believed that democracy won against totalitarianism, and US policy sought to achieve its goals without doing undue harm to a peaceful Soviet Union.
The book describes the process as it occurred, sometimes at a very fast pace, and, in Matlock’s opinion, driven by essentially two people: Reagan and Gorbachev. Was it not for them, the Cold War would not have ended when it did, nor as peacefully as it did.
Matlock also says in the book that Reagan privately pursued improved relations with the Soviets right from the start of his term, at the same time he was building up the US military. He worked to establish a relationship with Gorbachev, sometimes writing to him directly, in his own hand.
And how do you think he turned the economy around? By tax cuts? Not really when he also had to raise taxes 7 times.
Way too much detail here.
OCSteve, thank you.
I appreciate the thoroughness and the cite. I have several problems with the cited article which I won’t go into here for two reasons. Number one, I am nnot an economist so a lot of this goes over my head. Secondly, I have read, with somewhat the same degree of confusion, rebuttals by economists of almost everything listed in that article.
Being an economic moron, I will let it be somewhat unsettled. I guess what bothers me is the way Reagan is talked about and almost worshipped for his great big tax cut, when most of it he had to take back.
Looking at the whole 8 years is somewhat misleading as a result.
Regarding the first point. It is interesting to note, from what you write, that Reagan spoke one thing for domestic consumption “evil empire” while working with them in a positive way.
Actually though, I don’t think that the arms race, per se, had mu8ch to do with it. Gorbachev knew his economy couldn’t handle the strain any more, and was already headed in that direction. I think for his own domestic consumption he put on a show of working with the US, but it really didn’t matter. My opinion only.
Again, both yours and Donald Johnson’s comments have helped me rethink my thoughts on Reagan a little, but I don’t consider him worthy of the current idol worship.
OCSsteve: the matlock account is interesting, naturally, but you don’t seem to be considering the fact that he is a directly interested party.
This comments are particularly telling IMHO:
And I think that SDI was the final straw, Reagan would not put SDI on the table at Reykjavik. The Soviets simply could not keep up given what they were already spending.
You might want to think about the fact that the Soviets dropped the SDI issue because their own scientists told them what American taxpayers learnt at their expense: SDI was BS. Why fight over a delusion?
But this is more irksome to me, to be honest:
He contends that Reagan made it clear to Gorbachev at Reykjavik that reform (human rights, end to imperialism) was going to be the cost of an arms reduction agreement
Jesus f’ing christ, are the reagan admin guys now claiming credit for gorby’s historically-proportioned humanity? this man single-handedly ended a continent-sized dictatorship because of his own commitment to democratic and liberal principles, please do not deprive him of the credit for that epic achievement. he is already loathed in his own country, let’s not do this legitimately great man the injustice of forgetting why.
You might sense this is an ax of mine. With good reason; only in the bizarre post-factual realm of post-reagan america is the astounding achievement of gorbachev negated with such insistence. what does a person need to do?
OCSteve, I think it’s fair to say that Reagan played a part in ending the cold war, but not in the way his belligerent admirers would want to mythologize nowadays, but rather by acting against the advice of the hawks surrounding him back then.
Still, he listened to them when rejecting Gorbachev’s proposal regarding Afghanistan and in doing helped create the cesspool that would bring forth the Taleban and Osama Bin Laden. But then the policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan has been a total disaster from the Carter administration on right up through to Bush 2, so Reagan was only following a trend there.
sorry about the strange grammar, it’s late
I think it’s fair to say that Reagan played a part in ending the cold war,
Honestly, I have yet to see anybody’s claim for reagan’s contribution extend beyond crediting him with belatedly acknowledging the face-slappingly unavoidable reality of gorbachev’s politics. to my mind, this places the bar of cold-war-endingness pathetically low.
OT (or is it?): Via Josh Marshall -> a YouTube to call their very own…behold QubeTV. Take that Al-Gor!
OCSteve:
Reagan is constantly oversold as the “winner” of the Cold War. Another myth tied to this story (but not in your comment) is that we were allegedly “losing” pre-1980, and Reagan somehow turned it around.
It is not really credible to separate the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. If the 1991 coup had been successful, would the Cold War have still been over? Of course not. It was the death of the Soviet regime that ultimately ended the Cold War, though it was circling the drain right up to the unsuccessful coup. Gorbachev had a lot to do with ratcheting down the heat in the years prior to 1991, but it took the unsuccessful coup against him by hardliners to really end it.
The primary factor in the Soviet collapse was that the Soviet regime was not economically viable — it had been rotting for years. Reagan did not spend it into oblivion — the Soviets did it to themselves. They were the ultimate military-industrial complex and state-run economy, and a testament to how none of that is economically sound.
As for SDI being the alleged tipping point, 20 years and multiple billions later, and SDI has still not been implemented because it still does not work (imagine trying to make it work with 1980s computer technology). The Soviets knew this in the 1980s. So they allegedly quaked in their boots and caved because of a non-functional military program?
Reagan did make a significant contribution to the 40 year history of fighting the Cold War. He provided strong moral leadership and rhetoric to match that was an inspiration to oppressed peoples in Eastern Europe and Russia. The Soviets were an evil empire.
But Reagan also supported murderous right wing dictators because they were anti-communists (which has a funny way of strengthening communism), so his record in fighting the Cold War was mixed. Reagan was not the only one to do so, of course, and to what extent did that type of policy prolong the Cold War?
My version of Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War comes from Francis Fitzgerald’s “Way Out There in the Blue”, which is a history of Reagan and SDI. I read the book a few years ago, but as I remember it, as byrningman said, Gorbachev’s own scientists told him Star Wars wouldn’t work. I’m not sure if that settled the matter–presumably the Soviet Union had its own version of the military industrial complex and they might have felt like they had to keep up with SDI even if they didn’t think it would work. I can’t remember if that last point was in the Fitzgerald book or if my memory is playing tricks on me.
What I definitely remember in the book is what I said before (and for that matter, remember from living at the time)–Reagan believed Gorby was sincere, his rightwing allies thought he was wrong, and Reagan turned out to be right. I think it’s fair to give him credit for this, just as I think it’s fair to hold him partly responsible for the various atrocities committed by people he supported as “freedom fighters”.
john miller: I am nnot an economist so a lot of this goes over my head
Neither am I and me too. Concerning rebuttals – you would think that numbers are numbers and that is that. Not so, I know. If you know of a similar study that rebuts that one I would love to put the two side by side.
I don’t consider him worthy of the current idol worship.
Understood. And you won’t catch me saying “RR won the cold war single handedly”. OTOH I have to argue if someone says he deserves no credit at all.
Byrningman: please do not deprive him of the credit for that epic achievement
Not at all. Matlock makes it clear that the end of the cold war and the end of communist control and the fall of the Soviet Union are two distinct events. He gives Reagan and Gorby credit for the former, but only credits Gorby for the latter. He explicitly says:
”It was Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush, who ended communist rule in the Soviet Union.”
But human rights were always a topic. Reagan’s “Four-Part Agenda” included Human Rights, Regional Issues, Arms Control, and Bilateral Issues. All 4 were topics for each summit.
dmbeaster: It is not really credible to separate the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War
They were always synonymous in my mind as well. So it’s really Matlock you are disagreeing with. I think he’s got you on the authority angle though 🙂
Reagans and Bush 41’s great accomplishment was winning freedom and independence for Eastern European countries, something that is somewhat apart of the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union.
The Cold War could have gone very differently. The US could have abandoned claims that Eastern Europe should be free, in an oblique way, to further detente, similar to the way the Carter administration no longer recognized Taiwan as China in order to gain favor with Beijing.
It’s odd how differently people see things.
Of course when the Baltic states made serious moves toward independence, the US did refuse to act in any meaningful way on their behalf.
OC Steve and Donald Johnson are to be complimented.
1. When Rudy said the Iranians need to see “Ronald Reagan” in January 2009, he meant Reagan as the Iranians thought of him the day RR himself took office (and that very hour, the 52 US embassy hostages were released and left Iranian air space). That’s what Rudy was talking about, that was his analogy.
Duh.
2. I voted for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, the only major party POTUS nominee I EVER voted for, though I’ve voted in every Presidential election since and including 1976. Two of my current political examplars, Wesley Clark and James Webb, also voted for RR.
2a. Reason #1: “Reagan won the cold war.” Kissinger, a jealous man, said that. GHWB peevishly acknowledged that. From London, the Economist wrote recently that the west probably would have won the cold war, anyway, but it would have taken another 20 years. That’s about right.
The hysterical negative mythology on this blog about Reagan actually makes me greedy. Folks, I want to sit down and play a board game for money with you — “Risk, the Continental game of world power.” I’m a shark at Risk and need your money.
I’ve studied military strategy and tactics all my life. I grew up reading the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute every money throughout my teenage years. When it is said ‘Reagan won the Cold War’ that is a kind of shorthand, ok? “Reagan was the TEAM CAPTAIN and COMMUNICATOR of the secret club that won the Cold War” is a lot more descriptive. The Polish labor movement and John Paul II was only one instance. The central team needed to modernize intermediate range missiles in the “Low Countries” of NATO in 1983 and buffalo the geriatric Politburo into a self-bankrupting program of modernization — and — sooner rather than later — a younger, more flexible dictator.
As nearly as I can tell, the gaming and theorizing and nudging of the Politburo was brainstormed and planned by Sandhurst graduates reporting to MARGARET THATCHER, who herself was almost entirely responsible for getting the BeneLux/Netherlands to accept updated missiles (making them prime targets for Soviet missiles!).
The result of this 1983 game victory was a new Soviet leader in 1985 — Gorbachev. Gorby met RR in Rekyavik — and the rest is history.
Just as Churchill stalemated fascist expansion and then the US/UK team won the war, decades of US-led nuclear-umbrella M.A.D. was replaced by a Reagan/Thatcher team that bankrupted the Soviet Union.
Since you don’t want to like Reagan, you certainly aren’t going to give him credit for correctly wargaming that M.A.D. was dangerous and would ultimately lead to a nuclear exchange. All you need is one trigger-happy sociopath like Stalin. Or adrenaline freak Jack Kennedy. Or an angry cripple like Bob Dole (watch his old Vice Presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1976 and tell me the Dole should ever have the nuclear football). Or “W” (example: brandishing nukes at Iran in early 2006 until the ENTIRE JCS threatened to resign! So said Seymour Hersh).
So it’s a damned good thing RR and Thatcher won the cold war 20 years ahead of M.A.D.’s timetable.
Another damned good reason is that even after being bankrupted, the oldline military commies in the Soviet Union changed tactics and were working HARD and SUCCESSFULLY on (far cheaper but still devastating) biological agents until 1991, when Yeltsin shut off the money and took the program public to demonstrate that the bad old days were over. Good thing Reagan and Thatcher won the cold war early, wasn’t it?
2b. Unemployment and inflation climbed at the end of the Carter administration. By 1982, Reagan’s first full year in office, unemployment, nationally, was over 10 percent, as high as 1941, the last year of the depression. Reagan took his medicine from Paul Volker, then head of the fed, and turned that around — killing high inflation and halving unemployment. That’s something FDR was ONLY able to do with GENERAL WORLDWIDE WARFARE in 1942. Quite an accomplishment for a peacetime President like Reagan.
2c. In 1987, Reagan successfully selected Alan Greenspan for the Fed, who would serve nearly 18 years. Kudos. Kudos. Kudos. Kudos.
Reagan was elected in 1980 because Americans thought the economy was in trouble — RR was under order to fix it. He did and, blocked by Tip O’Neil from his domestic programs, made a stunning mark in foreign policy (as a TEAM CAPTAIN of a mostly UK team). This is why Reagan was given an honorary knighthood after he left office.
And then. There’s Iran-Contra… ye Gods… I was so enraged by this scandal I wanted to vote third party in 1984 and barely talked myself into another vote for RR — why? “We haven’t had a full two-term president since Eisenhower — and I think we’ve got the Politburo on the run…” I wrote my best friend.
I want to think that RR knew his Presidency was about the superpower confrontation and waging peace. I want to suppose that in that rubric, the Middle East was a backwater, one he didn’t mind subcontracting to ambitious subordinates like Bush Sr. and the Navy Academy Iran-Contra plumbers.
But I’m still uneasy about Iran-Contra and I don’t think the whole story has been written even to this day. And I think the sheer incompetence of it lead to KUWAIT in 1991 and IRAQ in 2003. And the center of the incompetence was a rotten-ripe intelligence community (see Bob Woodward’s book “Veil”). That still hasn’t been fixed.
Great men make great mistakes. IN RR’s case, I don’t think that overshadows the accomplishment of replacing M.A.D. with a more peaceful world and ending a serious stagflationary cycle in the USA.
It impresses me that RR and Thatcher were a masterful team at something most bloggers here don’t understand at all — game theory. Reagan was cold and stagy, an actor? YES, and he was good enough to fool those who didn’t like him. And, best of all, he didn’t take it personally if people mocked him or opposed him — can you say that about “W”? Bush Sr.? Nixon? LBJ?!
“You’re not going to figure him out!” Ron Reagan, the Presdident’s son, smiling and looking right into the camera for Ken Burns’ film biography of RR.
One more poison dart.
In 1980, EUGENE McCARTHY endorsed Ronald Reagan for President, saying, “He’s the first man since Truman to understand the difference between the office and the man.”
urban c,
I wonder how much credit you would give to Gorby. You seem to be suggesting that the goal of the game theory that Reagan and Thatcher were doing was to bring Gorby to power, but if they had that kind of control, I’m wondering why did they only do that?
Also, where would you put Solidarność, Walesa, and Pope John Paul II in.
“You’re not going to figure him out!” Ron Reagan, the Presdident’s son, smiling and looking right into the camera for Ken Burns’ film biography of RR.
Reagan was suffering early-stage Alzsheimers. He was pleasant and agreeable and he agreed with whoever had talked to him last. When he said he didn’t remember about iran/contra he was probably telling the literal truth.
So how do I attribute his success at PR? He was pretty good at acting the role of president. He could do it in his sleep.
Compare with the longterm situation in britain. They’ve had a very long series of kings and prime ministers. Some of their leaders were brilliant and some stupid. Some sane and some downright crazy. And how does that correlate with britain’s success? Not at all.
The Fitzgerald book as I remember it (I’m thinking of rereading it now) was critical of Reagan and SDI and his hardline policies, so that wouldn’t fit in with urban coyote’s view.
But I couldn’t help feeling some respect for Reagan’s visceral rejection of mutual assured destruction–like it or not, he had something in common here with Jonathan Schell and other leftwing critics who realized that MAD was insane. Yeah, it worked for a few decades, but there were a few close calls during that period and if there was (pulling a number out of the air that I think reasonable) a 1 percent chance in any given year of a nuclear war breaking out through miscalculation or mistake, you’d expect a few decades of success before the inevitable catastrophe that destroyed civilization. MAD had to change.
Where Reagan was crazy was in thinking that SDI could actually provide a defense against a thousand missiles with multiple warheads. Fortunately, Gorbachev came into power and Reagan recognized his sincerity (despite the paranoia of conservative intellectuals who thought he’d gone softheaded). So things ended well.
john miller: Regarding the first point. It is interesting to note, from what you write, that Reagan spoke one thing for domestic consumption “evil empire” while working with them in a positive way.
Meant to get back to this yesterday…
Matlock doesn’t see any inconsistency here. He says it was all there in Reagan’s very first presser as president and in his first speeches, piecemeal at first, but he wanted arms reductions from the start and never wavered from that throughout his time in office:
And I have to believe that our greatest goal must be peace.
—Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1981
I’ve always recognized that ultimately there’s got to be a settlement, a solution.
—Ronald Reagan, December 23, 1981
[A] Soviet leadership devoted to improving its people’s lives, rather than expanding its armed conquests, will find a sympathetic partner in the West.
—Ronald Reagan, May 9, 1982
And:
During his first press conference as president, on January 29, 1981, Reagan stated that he was in favor of negotiating to achieve “an actual reduction in the numbers of nuclear weapons” on a basis that would be verifiable. He also declared that during any negotiation one had to take into account “other things that are going on,” and for that reason he believed in “linkage.”
But he also confronted the Soviets directly on issues that we previously just kind of overlooked for the sake of détente. Those statements became the meme.
My point being that his public statements on the record make clear that he was for peace and arms reduction and was willing to negotiate from his first days in office.
From his first term inaugural address:
As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it—now or ever.
Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of never having to use that strength.
Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.
Nine days later:
Reagan stated that he was in favor of negotiating to achieve “an actual reduction in the numbers of nuclear weapons” on a basis that would be verifiable.
So I’ll have to strongly disagree with those who think that Reagan just sort of lucked out and fell into it all when Gorby came on the scene, or that Gorby was the main force and Reagan’s only role was in recognizing the opportunity and not screwing things up with Gorby. It takes two to tango and this was the biggest dance in the history of the country, perhaps the world.
I thought it wouldn’t get worse than Reagan, but then we got the current guy. Reagan’s written record can support all sorts of things, I guess, but the point above about Gorbachev is right on the money. It’s fine to quotye Reagan saying that he was in favor of verifiable arms reductions, until you realize that the conditions of verifiability weren’t acheivable.
And I’ll go one better: if we hadn’t had Bush — and not only Bush, but Baker in, and the true I-C believers out — in 1989 when the crisis point came in the East, it could very well have gone completely wrong. As far as bring the Cold War to a happy end, I’d put Bush’s contribution far ahead of Reagan’s.
The fact that the Reagan presidency, as imagined by many Republicans, was effectively over after the 1986 midterms — when he lost the Seante and as Iran Contra came out — is also a very important part of the story. (As I think about it, it seems to me that the trajectory of Reagan foreign policy is something like 1985 and 1986 spent walking back from the misstatements and overreactions of 1981 to 1984, with 1987 and 1988 spent figuring out that the Nixon-Ford-Carter 1973-1979 policy direction had been right after all.)
Or was it the Ronald Reagan who used a backchannel to Tehran to have them hold off releasing their hostages just until Jimmy Carter was out of the White House? Most.cynical.and.petty.stunt.ever.
Not really. RR learned from the master, Richard Nixon, who back in 1968 had used a backchannel (Anna Chennault) to persuade Saigon’s Nguyen Van Thieu to balk at opening the Paris peace talks until after the election, thus preventing LBJ (and the Humphrey candidacy) from getting credit for starting the peace process . . .
. . . and, arguably, costing 4 more years of war, the spread of the conflict into Cambodia, tens of thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian lives.
It’s remarkable how often later Republican cynicism and dirty tricks, right up to the present, can be traced back to the
old“new” Nixon.Responses to some comments:
Liberal Japonicus:
I wonder how much credit you would give to Gorby. You seem to be suggesting that the goal of the game theory that Reagan and Thatcher were doing was to bring Gorby to power, but if they had that kind of control, I’m wondering why did they only do that?
Also, where would you put Solidarność, Walesa, and Pope John Paul II in.
I give a lot of credit to Gorby. Thatcher and Reagan didn’t “groom” Gorby or foist him off on the Politburo — instead they manufactured a crisis for the Kremlin by modernizing the intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe, something the Low Countries didn’t want to do (because it made them the prime nuclear target) and something the geriatric Kremlin thought they had the political savvy to stop — and they didn’t. Eventually they had to pick a leader from the next generation.
When I say I give a lot of credit to Gorby, let me give you this anechdote from the “unsuccessful” conference in Iceland. Reagan was urging arms reductions (START), not just technological caps (SALT). Gorby said, “Why don’t we just eliminate all nuclear weapons?” Reagan replied, “That has always been my dream.” Now get this, this is the punchline: at that point, aides to both leaders PULLED THEM APART, demanded a break, and briefed them about the holy and sacred status quo of nuclear brinksmanship. Pulling them apart and demanding things stay the same is something that, say, CharleyCarp would have done.
Religious freedom was a major issue to Reagan. He lectured the Soviets about it. He worked with the Pope on it. His support of Welesa was genuine and sure, unlike that of, say, Jimmy Carter. Or, if you will, Reagan didn’t make the mistake Ike made in ignoring Hungarian protests in 1956. As recently as 1975, when Francisco Franco died in Spain, all Spanish-speaking nations were dictatorships. Only Cuba remained at the time John Paul II died — I think that makes JP2 the greatest Pope in many centuries. Reagan was the first of several important western partners in making that happen.
===========
J Thomas: Reagan was suffering early-stage Alzsheimers.
Oh, which state are you practicing medicine in, Dr. Thomas? Alzheimers is a progressive, disabling neurological disability. The average period between onset and death is 15 years — and that average gets a lot smaller if the onset is later in life. Reagan died at the age of 93 15 and 1/2 years after leaving the White House. Shrewd press conference sparring partner Helen Thomas said she thought Reagan “was compis mentis all the way through” his Presidency. You are almost certainly wrong in your diagnosis, doctor. The disease hit RR hard from 1991 to 1993 and knocked him flat for the rest of his days.
Dr. NGO – yes, 68 was a precedent, but personally I think the Iranian hostage situation was worse because, while 68 was treasonably cynical, it at least had an amoral logic to it. The other case was just petty. The election was won, there was no need to score such a low blow against Carter, who apparently lingered in the White House until the very last minute waiting for the news of the hostages’ release to come in.
Naturally politics is a dirty game, but I’m not aware of comparably cynical games with American lives being played by the ‘soft on defense’ party. Maybe that’s just blinkered of me though.
CharleyCarp wrote:
And I’ll go one better: if we hadn’t had Bush — and not only Bush, but Baker in, and the true I-C believers out — in 1989 when the crisis point came in the East, it could very well have gone completely wrong. As far as bring the Cold War to a happy end, I’d put Bush’s contribution far ahead of Reagan’s.
I’ve seen this worship of courtiers quite often. Bush and Baker met in 1962 when they were both selected to the board of the same country club in Houston. They immediately liked each other – after all, they acted the same way at meetings. Their guidebook for life is probably Stendhal’s “The Charterhouse of Parma.” If Amerca were a golf course, the two would have been the best executive team in American history. But it isn’t and they weren’t – nay, they are near the bottom of the Presidential barrel.
I don’t have the eloquence to explain to CharleyCarp that his idols Bush and Baker are made of mud and self-disqualify themselves for access to power. Bush never won an election bigger than a congressional district –and Baker never won one at all, though he wanted to be governor – until the booming economy of the Reagan administration (and gridlock with a Democratic congress, to be honest) made Bush seem better than Dukakis in 1988. Bush won because CALIFONIA thought he’d follow through on his environmental promises while keeping taxes low. Uh. California hasn’t voted Republican in a Presidential race since, and it won’t in 2008.
I don’t have the wordsmithing power to show CharleyCarp that his heros were dangerous dolts – but someone else did – someone who spotted and portrayed this kind of character before either Bush or Baker was born. Here is a poem about these two courtiers, drawn with an accuracy to the angstrom:
“A Servant when He Reigneth”
(For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear.
For a servant when he reigneth and a fool when he is filled with meat; for an
odious woman when she is married, and an handmaid that is heir to her mistress:
– Proverbs Chapter XXX v. 21-22-23.)
THREE things make earth unquiet
And four she cannot brook
The godly Agur counted them
And put them in a book—
Those Four Tremendous Curses
With which mankind is cursed
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Old Agur entered first.
An Handmaid that is Mistress
We need not call upon,
A Fool when he is full of Meat
Will fall asleep anon.
An Odious Woman Married
May bear a babe and mend,
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Is Confusion to the end.
His feet are swift to tumult*,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason**,
His lips are loud in broil.
He knows no use for power
Except to show his might***.
He gives no heed to judgment
Unless it prove him right****.
Because he served a master
Before his Kingship came,
And hid in all disaster
Behind his master’s name,
So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells#,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else##.
His vows are lightly spoken###,
His faith is hard to bind,
His trust is easy broken####,
He fears his fellow-kind.#####
The nearest mob will move him
To break the pledge he gave ^ —
Oh a Servant when He Reigneth
Is more than ever slave!
–Rudyard Kipling
Footnotes specifically supported by Bush’s actions:
* Swift to tumult –three, count ‘em!– unnecessary, strategically irrelevant wars in a single term as President—Panama, Kuwait and, after losing re-election — Somalia! I think this makes Bush the most warmongering president in American history, especially if you start with the “Kuwaiti liberation” war and keep the clock running through the “no fly zones” to Iraq II, which makes it 1991-2007 and counting. All of it for a strategically irrelevant purpose. His feet were swift to tumult, indeed.
*** no use for power except to show his might – Bush didn’t like Yeltsin, so there was no Marshall Plan for defeated Russia, no sympathy, no significant humanitarian aide. Bush stuck to the unelected Politburo and Gorbachev as long as he could.
**** no heed to judgment – remember his loyal ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie?!?! She vanished as an invisible woman for doing what she was told, it appears.
# the unnecessary hells – remember the cocaine bought across the street from the White House?
## someone else – his former intelligence crony, Manny Noriega!
### vows are lightly spoken – “Read my lips! I’m not going to raise your taxes!”
#### trust is easy broken – he raised taxes AND the deficit! His post-cold war deficits were HIGHER than any of Reagan’s Defense-modernization, “Star Wars” funding deficits!
##### fears his fellow kind –he FAINTED at an Imperial dinner in Tokyo. After raising the deficit, he was terrified of Alan Greenspan, and still blames Greenspan (not his 3 private little wars!) for losing in 1992.
^ breaking a pledge because of the nearest mob – to keep Pat Buchanan happy at his renominating convention in 1992 after Pat got 42% of the New Hampshire primary vote, Bush gave the Christian right control over the 1996 RULES COMMITTEE and CREDENTIALS COMMITTEE. In other words, fear of loudmouth Buchanan caused Bush to hand over CONTROL of the party of Lincoln to the fascists. This is your hero at his finest, Charley Carp.
Note: I didn’t include Reagan persuading the Iranians not to release the hostages before he took office because i was not aware that that had been substantiated. Has it?
urban c,
I think you are working a bit to hard at this, specifically, trying to make CharleyCarp out to be a Bush worshipper. If Reagan is such a hero, one shouldn’t need to cut down everyone else around him to make him seem taller.
I think, after the current administration, CC has (as I do) a renewed appreciation of the brand of realpolitik that Bush 1 favored, but ‘hero’ is far too strong. It’s not altogether clear that Reagan knew what he was doing (all those anecdotes about him not reading briefings, your own points about Iran Contra), which is precisely the question we have to deal with: Was Reagan the master of his own destiny? I don’t pretend to know, but those stories above, along with the inability of Edmund Morris to write a proper biography has me lean towards Reagan less as a cunning fox and more as a fabulist. What I do think Reagan had (which the current WH occupant does not) was a sense of self worth that let him continue to work towards his goals even after he lost Congress.
These guys seem to be giving tricky Dick a run for his money…
Harry Reid says:
And he also says…
Our future President says:
You got to give them credit. Moving to deauthorize the war was clever. Effectively the same thing and grossly misleading.
Tricky Dick would be proud. I guess the real connection between them is that they are dishonest and cowardly. They can end the war today, but choose not to. They are so craven that they want the political upper hand instead of doing what they believe is right.
But let’s not leave out the rest of the gang…
Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) :
“We’re not going to cut off funding to the troops … no one wants to do that.”
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) :
“I don’t know of any senator who would cut off funds for troops in the field.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN :
“I don’t think we should be pulling back any funds.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA):
“Yes, the congress could cut off the funds. But the congress will not do that because our men and women are in harm’s way.”
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) :
“U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson ( D-FL ) today made clear his intention to oppose measures he sees as possibly undermining U.S. troops, like cutting funds… […] Nelson said today he’ll oppose efforts to cut off funding.”
Not sure what comment thread to stick this in–it’s a link to an article about Iraq, specifically about Iraqis with a peace plan for their country. They allegedly represent what has been missing so far–a rational political program for the Iraqi resistance to the occupation. That’s important if you think, as I do, that there isn’t a military solution to this conflict. They claim to have ties to the resistance–the part of the resistance which is nationalistic and allegedly doesn’t attack civilians. (I have read that there are such groups, though my guess is that no such group has a perfect human rights record). Anyone have an idea how seriously to take this? I want to believe these people are serious, but don’t know.
link
Alzheimers is a progressive, disabling neurological disability. The average period between onset and death is 15 years — and that average gets a lot smaller if the onset is later in life. Reagan died at the age of 93 15 and 1/2 years after leaving the White House. …. The disease hit RR hard from 1991 to 1993 and knocked him flat for the rest of his days.
You’re welcome to your opinion. I personally would prefer to give Reagan the benefit of the doubt, but if you want to think it was on purpose then go right ahead.
Hilzoy: Note: I didn’t include Reagan persuading the Iranians not to release the hostages before he took office because i was not aware that that had been substantiated. Has it?
My further comment: Kinda, sorta, maybe. What happened was that while RR was President-elect, a reporter asked him about the hostage negotiations. The reporter speculated that maybe the Iranians felt they could dawdle and just wait, to start over again with a new President in a couple of weeks? Reagan waggled his head diagonally and said slowly to the reporter, “That would be very foolish.”
=============
Liberal japonicus: Was Reagan the master of his own destiny? ….What I do think Reagan had (which the current WH occupant does not) was a sense of self worth that let him continue to work towards his goals even after he lost Congress.
My further reply: I haven’t entirely figured Reagan out, either! I think he was master of his own destiny when it was ON HIS RADAR and he could DO SOMETHING. By this standard, a partnership with Thatcher to bankrupt the Soviet Union and roll the Politburo leadership forward to another generation was on his radar and he had the authority to act. His smaller-government agenda was not something he could get through the US House, so he just cut taxes hoping the House would cut spending (but correctly suspecting that they wouldn’t).
I suspect that, except for Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East was not on Reagan’s radar, so he left it to Bush, Sr., whom, I think, volunteered. If my speculation here is right, Bush flatout lied when he said he was “out of the loop” on Iran-Contra. I strongly suspect that the m.o. of Iran-Contra, based on “Iranian moderates,” was rooted in very bad intelligence – which has never been fixed – again inferring Bush senior’s participation. And then there was the idiotic “pro-Iraqi tilt” during the 1980’s Iran/Iraq war, an intelligence hallucination that again infers CIA and Bush participation. Bush knew about Saddam Hussein from back in his CIA days. According to the Kuwaiti ambassador, Bush was PERSONALLY angry at Saddam over the Kuwaiti invasion in 1990. “That little man,” Bush fumed, then personally promised the ambassador full USA support — immediately — without checking with anyone — before talking to anyone in Congress. So, yeah, I think Bush was the puppeteer in Iran Contra controlling North and Poindexter. (Poindexter was jailed but REHIRED by Bush’s son when Bush43 became President).
=== general further comment:===
I know RR and Nancy picked Bush for Veep as a bone to throw to the eastern banking interests, which always hated RR and Barry Goldwater. Reagan was trying to unite the party to win an election. But he should have picked Jack Kemp or Howard Baker himself as Veep. Having never won a statewide election, Ambassador Bush was no help to him in carrying any single state. I think picking Bush was RR’s biggest mistake as a politican. And I suspect putting Bush in charge of non-Israeli-related Middle East matters was his biggest management mistake in office.
Bush was so bad a President that in 1992 he only got 37% of the vote, worse than challenger Barry Goldwater against LBJ running on Jack Kennedy’s ghost in 1964. You have to go back to 1912 and the Taft incumbancy and party fratricide between Taft and Teddy Roosevelt to see such a dismal showing. I’ve left out of this discussion the thing I hate about Bush Sr. the most – the half-trillion-dollar S&L bailout, off-budget of course. It was the biggest white collar crime in USA history up to that point. I haven’t mentioned it because it is a subject of personal, professional rage on my part as a certified public accountant.
That Bush Sr was a courtier who just wanted the title and the executive desk is something mentioned shrewdly by Jack Germond of the Baltimore Sun. Germond was amazed Bush had no vision, no plan, no desire to establish an important change the country needed as his own legacy and trademark, he just wanted to be there, himself, in office. I laughed when Germond mentioned this on “Inside Washington” with Gordon Peterson, but I didn’t laugh when Bill Clinton brought this up stingingly in the 1992 campaign with a brilliant Bible quote aimed at Bush: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
I see that I’ve been outed!
CC: I see that I’ve been outed!
I have to say, you sure had me fooled…
OT: I left a comment on the latest post at your place and it seems to have broken things.
It’s a fact that on the mantle in my living room, amongst all the family pictures, there are only two people not members of my (or my wife’s) immediate family. One is GHWB.
I left a comment on the latest post at your place and it seems to have broken things.
Works for me. Maybe it was just a WordPress issue, and they’ve corrected it . . .
urban coyote: he [Reagan] just cut taxes hoping the House would cut spending (but correctly suspecting that they wouldn’t).
I’m fascinated by this Constitution of yours under which the President controls taxation but the Congress controls expenditures.
Is your country anywhere near the USA?
bril: A simple suggestion.
Start a blog of your own.
Post messages on it about whatever you think is important.
Quit trying to hijack threads here.
Have a nice life.
He didn’t try to grant himself an emergency extension of his Presidency.
Possibly because his Alzheimer’s was too advanced by then to allow him to plot effectively. I’m at least half convinced that Reagan was demented by his second term and that that alone saved us from a nuclear war during his presidency. The man was pure evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
The man was pure evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I don’t think that’s true. I think sometimes he played pure evil like a role, and sometimes he played Heidi’s Grandfather as a role, and sometimes he played the jester, etc. I have the strong impression he wsn’t anything in particular, he just knew how to play roles.
Dianne: pure evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever
That’s pretty far out there. Given the facts of what he did vs. what he could have done with all the power of the president, I’d be curious as to what specifically you have in mind.
Picking out a few things from a quick scan of his Wikipedia article that I speculate you might have to consider as redeeming qualities, or at least less than pure evil:
-Saved the lives of 77 people as a lifeguard over 7 years.
-He was originally a Democrat and a supporter of the New Deal.
-24 years of Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.
That’s 3 data points from his early life, his middle life, and his late life, from the personal to the political. Do you condemn those points?
Another thing I’m curious about: If the baseline is RR as “pure evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever” then what’s left on the scale for you to describe GWB? Which one is worse in your mind?
OCS, I’m not a member of the pure evil school, but will not forgive or forget either the steps RR took to further execute the Southern Strategy, or his whole reality-doesn’t-matter-nearly-as-much-as-the-pandering-cartoon-version-I-present business. He’s not unique in either respect, but was much more effective that anyone ever before, especially at the latter.
If one really wants to go down the road that the truth of things doesn’t matter at all, we’re going to end up in a pretty ugly place. And if you can’t sell your policies without lying or exaggerating, then doesn’t that say something about the policies?
Some snippets from B Movie:
Personal anecdote:
I probably have more reason to hate RR than most. In 1981 as he took office I was halfway through my freshman year of college at a state university. My future wife and I both had to work full time to survive and pay my college tuition and buy books (yes, we were living in sin) and the only way we made it work was something called the Pell Grant. There was no help from our families, who were barely surviving on their own rights. It was not an easy life but we felt that by working hard and judiciously watching every penny we would be able to get me my degree, then I could get a real job and she could go to school.
Enter RR and the 97th US Congress:
In the Pell grant program, S. 1108 would allow the Secretary of Education to establish a series of progressive assessment rates on discretionary income, subject to the congressional review process, which would offer greater equity to the lowest income students for whom the program was intended.
That didn’t sound too bad. After all I certainly felt that I was one of those “lowest income students for whom the program was intended”. In reality it meant that because I had been working full time I no longer qualified at all. The program was based more around a single mom at home raising 4 kids and trying to send one of them to college than around a student living on his own with no support from his family and working. I don’t think it had actually passed yet, and I’m not sure of the final impact on Pell Grants – but by early summer my college Financial Aid office informed me I was pretty much hosed. So plan A went out the window.
Ask anyone trying to enter the job market (find a real job rather than flipping burgers or pumping gas) in the last half of 81 through most of 82 how that worked out for them. It wasn’t just regional. We tried various parts of the country – anywhere we heard the job market was better.
“YES Drill Sergeant!”
I have no regrets (today) about going in the Army. In the end I finished my degree; my wife got hers (and then a couple more), and we got to see a lot of the world. But in the worst times I certainly blamed RR personally for setting my life on a much different course than I had intended.
OCSteve:
1. If he was a lifeguard then saving people was his job. Doing your job well is value neutral. One could argue that it was good of him to take that job, but only if he turned down better paid jobs in order to save lives when there was an acute shortage of lifeguards and some beaches might have gone without if he hadn’t done the job. Or some equivalent situation.
2. He was probably one of those frat-boy liberals who are “liberal” and even “feminist” because it makes it easier for them to get laid whose politics change on graduation.
3. That was an accident, like Nixon’s appointment of Warren or, indeed, Reagan’s appointment of Koop: he probably thought she’d be less fair and competent than she turned out to be. Plus she was part of the imposition of GWB on the country, making her career as a Supreme Court Justice neutral, not good.
And, yeah, there are/have been more evil people in the world than Reagan. Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, and Pol Pot spring to mind, along with any number of crusaders. As far as GWB goes, all I can say is that not even Dubya makes me nostalgic for the Reagan era. I don’t even want to think about what RR would have done with 9/11.
Guess I’ll take what I can get at your acknowledgement that he was not the most evil person to ever live 🙂
“Cheap steak tough.”
I just had to repeat it.
I learn so many things on the internets! 😉
Hmmm, on the Alzheimers onset issue with Ronald Reagan ….. who knows, but having watched an individual up close who suffered and died from Alzheimers, there was something about RR in press conferences late in the second term ……… fleeting moments of vacancy …… in which everything was in place, the mannerisms etc, but the eyes went inwardly blank.
Small points (the only kind I have):
If being “demented” saves the world from nuclear holocaust, then why waste time interviewing all of these rational people in suits every four years? There’s a guy standing on a streetcorner not too far from me who seems like presidential material.
“He was probably one of those frat-boy liberals who are “liberal” or even “feminist” because it makes it easier for them to get laid whose politics change on graduation.”
I used to hate it when the insincere ones were getting laid and the true liberals and feminists among us were still cooling our heels at last call. That’s it, we’d say to ourselves, tomorrow we’re taking up the guitar and signing up for ROTC.
Ask anyone trying to enter the job market (find a real job rather than flipping burgers or pumping gas) in the last half of 81 through most of 82 how that worked out for them.
Oh, that does indeed bring back memories. I couldn’t find a job, stayed with various friends for various lengths of time, and wound up having to move from Seattle back to Miami (“return to the nest”) for a few years. Dreadful, dreadful time.
RR did a lot of bad things. I’m not sure which one ranks as the worst. Letting the Christian Right set the agenda on AIDS policy is certainly up there. Ending Carter’s alternate energy programs probably had the worst long-term effects for the economy, the environment, and American foreign policy. Busting PATCO and ushering in an age of anti-labor practices had the worst long-term effects on working people, the gap between rich and poor, and upward mobility.
The one common denominator in RR’s various dark legacies is legitimizing the already-haves’ sense of entitlement. It moved the Overton Window way off to the Right, and we’re still stuck there.
Reagan was partly evil. Sentimental, really, with some good intentions, but like a lot of people he greatly overestimated his own goodness. So he ends up supporting mass murderers and excusing genocide (in Guatemala) because he takes for granted his own virtue and knowing in his heart what a fine upstanding well-intentioned person he is, it just isn’t possible that the people he supports might be responsible for children being impaled on stakes (Guatemala again). I suspect he was no different from a lot of foreign leaders that he and his followers would label evil without a second’s hesitation.
On RR and Alzheimer’s, there is an interesting essay in Oliver Sacks’ book ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’ about him seeing a room full of patients with severe aphasia, who can’t understand language, but are incredibly sensitive to gestures, laughing while watching an RR speech, because his gestures and facial expressions were like Marx brothers’ non-sequiturs.
It’s mentioned in Tom Carson’s Village Voice obituary of Reagan here, whose last line is
If you ask me, the best that can be said for Ronald Reagan is that, if George W. Bush gets re-elected, we may yet end up missing him.
RR continued the politizatioon of government agencies a la Nixon, which is now a hallmark not just of how the Bush administration operates but of how Republican politicians in general expect to operate.
For example: James Watt and Crowell and the woman he put in charge of the EPA. All were appoint to destroy the agencies they superrvised and to subvert the agencies to serve the interests special innterests groups and circumvent both laws and publicinteress regulations.
It has been characteristic of the way the Republican party functions tha the real policies are never discussed honestly during a campaign. Instead the appoinntment process is used to sabotage the functions of agencies so that unpopular and indeed unethical policies can be put through off the radar. As CC observed, what does that say about a party, when it’s policies are so toxic that they can’t be discussed openly and adopted on their merits? Also what does it say abouut the politicians of thhat party thhat thhey knowingly impliment policies the public doesn’t want through the undemocratic means of sabotage by appointment?
RR wasn’t the probelm and neither is Bush. The problem is that too many Republicans, like Thomas Sowell, have minority beliefs which they wish to impose on the majority and that they are willinng to resort to antidemocratic methods when democratic ones don’t work.
what does that say about a party, when it’s policies are so toxic that they can’t be discussed openly and adopted on their merits?
The problem is that too many Republicans, like Thomas Sowell, have minority beliefs which they wish to impose on the majority and that they are willinng to resort to antidemocratic methods when democratic ones don’t work.
Surely you realize that the first can apply equally to many liberal policies, and the second can be directly flipped. 😉
(Yeah OK, don’t call you Shirley.)
JT: The thing about Reagan and Alzheimer’s is that he wasn’t a rational person before it hit him. He was a crazed believer in Revalations as fact and was looking forward to the Apocalypse, possibly hoping to start it. That part had nothing to do with the Alzheimer’s. What AD did to him was take away his ability to plan and make major decisions (but, typically for the disease, his ability to do things that he had done for a long time–like make speeches and act–was unimpaired until quite late in the disease), which may have meant that he was unable to make any more progress on the Apocalypse after his first term. Or maybe it was just that the Ultimate Evil he was facing collapsed on him, leaving him with no one to nuke.
Sorry someone you were close to died of AD. The disease sucks major eggs and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, Reagan included. But I am glad that we never found out what he really had planned for his second term. This may be paranoia on my part, of course, but…well, I’m really just as happy not knowing.
I don’t think Reagan lacked any redeeming qualities whatsoever. It’s just that those qualities he had were vastly outweighed by the evils he wrought. If I were a believer in sin, I’d say that his rap sheet with God was pretty long.
Good riddance–the world’s better off without him, and the sooner historians expose the dark underbelly of the Reagan administration and set all the right-wing fairy tales about him to rest, the better. The irony is that under the Bush Doctrine, someone would have been morally obligated to invade the United States and topple the Reagan Administration, as it was a major state sponsor of terrorism.
But I guess IOKIYAR.
I want to thank Charley Carp for talking about the pictures on his mantle. That was a profound personal statement.
An emotional boil seems to have superated here in this thread. The Reagan haters that have surfaced are very comfortable in judges’ robes. RR’s son, Ron, was right: You’re not going to figure him out! By the way, does your condemnation extent to Wesley Clark? James Webb?
“Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver…”
–Jacques Ellul, Propaganda
Now, there’s a book worth reading.
The Reagan haters that have surfaced are very comfortable in judges’ robes.
…says the man who claims to know CharleyCarp’s mind.
“And, yeah, there are/have been more evil people in the world than Reagan. Hitler, Stalin, Pinochet, and Pol Pot spring to mind, along with any number of crusaders.”
“I don’t think Reagan lacked any redeeming qualities whatsoever. It’s just that those qualities he had were vastly outweighed by the evils he wrought.”
Wow! Reading all these comments about Reagan one can only wonder how ignorant, vicious and mean some of you guys must be. It’s not often I see people so blinded by their ideology.
I always thought you guys were far out, but I had no idea it was this bad. I hope this type of hatred, which appears to me as a form of evil in the world, is confined to the web.
My own perspective on Reagan is inevitably colored by growing up where I did, in a city that has a large Central American community. Too many of my friends were there in California because their families were fleeing the right-wing death squads and the regimes behind them. A lot of their families would in other circumstances have been prime Republican voters: devoutly Christian, vigorously anti-abortion, anti-communist, anti-drug, the list goes on. But they were instead mostly Democratic supporters, because the Democrats weren’t enthusiastic supporters of the people who raped their nuns and the women in their own families and chopped the hands of their priests and the men in their own families.
I’ve always been pretty thoroughly anti-communist myself. It’s just that I could never make myself believe that the global struggle against Soviet tyranny actually required anyone to throw acid in Mrs. Garcia’s face or rape the older Nunez girls while the young ones had to watch, or any of the other things done against people suspected of being complicit in left-wing rebellions.
(I note that I was therefore getting second-hand what Kos grew up seeing first-hand. This may have something to do with why I immediately sympathized with his remark about mercenaries. I can’t describe adequately the chill at the bone I got from seeing the damage done well after the fact by people Reagan was calling the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers, and that without having to live among them and their works.)
My own perspective on Reagan is inevitably colored by growing up where I did, in a city that has a large Central American community.
I had something of a similar experience in that I spent a year — a rather formative year, in retrospect — in Marcos’ Philippines and was in fact there for Ninoy’s assassination and the subsequent American denialism. It was the first time in my life that I saw the true disconnect between the rhetoric of the US and its practices (hey, I was only five) and it’s never been something I’ve been able, or willing, to unsee.
[Throw that together with being in Hong Kong during Tiananmen Square, and the subsequent American grovelling vis a vis Most Favored Nation status with China, and that pretty much explains my views on American foreign policy.]
By the way, OCSteve: Notice that the sort of thing Anarch and I are saying doesn’t un-say or innately falsify the intresting and worthwhile stuff you’ve been posting about Reagan administration dealings with the Soviet. If it did, someone would have a much simpler moral calculation than any of us do. It’s figuring out how to weight and balance this all that makes judgments hard.
My earlier praise for Reagan’s role in being Gorbachev’s peace partner was genuine. But he also embraced death squads and mass murderers. That’s simply a fact. He praised Jonas Savimbi, Rios Montt, and the contras, and there’s no moral distinction between doing that and praising Osama bin Laden. I suppose the fact that Reagan is an American and loved by many Americans means that somehow he is above mere moral considerations.
I’m a Christian, btw, and so the usual inaccurate stereotypes about lefty pseudo-intellectuals will need to be adjusted appropriately in order to dismiss my opinions of Reagan. Perhaps I’m a utopian religious fanatic who can’t face up to reality, or something like that. Anything rather than admit that it’s bad to support people who butcher children by the tens of thousands.
Bruce: Understood. I hope it’s clear that I never tried to make him out as flawless. I think every president does good things and bad things, and many of the bad things can indeed be very bad.
Bril:
“It’s not often I see people so blinded by their ideology.”
and
“I hope this type of hatred, which appears to me as a form of evil in the world, is confined to the web.”
Yes, think of it.
If Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton had access to the web, think of the awful things they might have said about each other.
Or better, sit at my grandmother’s supper table way back when and utter three words: “Franklin Delano Roosevelt”. Go ahead, I dare ya. Frost on the glassware, bile rising in her gorge, and no dessert for you.
A dear, sweet woman. But even now, that whirring sound you hear is her spinning in her grave, preparing to rise into the light of day and hover menacingly over you as she dismantles whatever poorly thought-out praise you might have for the New Deal, should you have any.
Do you need a napkin to wipe the spittle from your glasses?
Let me see… Dick Gregory entering Lester Maddox’s diner and being told they don’t serve Negros and him saying that’s O.K., he’d prefer the chicken, anyway.
Sure enough, Ronald Reagan shows up nearby (confederately speaking) years later to honor all the chickens that Lester saved from Dick Gregory’s hunger, as a way of kicking off his Presidential campaign in hearty demagogic fashion.
After all, that’s when Republicans discovered Southern Democrats had a pretty good handle on hate that could be useful to them. Off ran hate, and good riddance, to the new high bidder.
You know, back when hate ran loose through real life kicking up its heels, before it was tamed and confined to the Web.
When Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office stewing over the Jews, Rosemary Woods told him, “Someday, Mr. President, you will confine your hatred to a new medium called the Web, rather than getting it all over the White House carpet.”
Heck, this is a little amusing blowing off of excess political steam here at Obsidian Wings.
“And how did you like the play, Mr. Lincoln?”
“Well, if you leave aside the fatal gunshot wound, not to mention the rejoicing of most everyone below the Mason-Dixon Line, things could have been worse. I could have been criticized at Obsidian Wings.”
Bril, your outrage is either completely fake or very touching.
Full now?
“The Reagan haters that have surfaced are very comfortable in judges’ robes.”
…says the man who claims to know CharleyCarp’s mind.
–Posted by: Anarch
Yeah, thanks Anarch, I do know a lot about Charley Carp’s mind – for example I know he values gentility and civility. He thinks GHBW is a paragon in that area and I disagree with that, HIS judgment. That does not mean that I’m judging CC overall, especially, specifically, I do not deride his quest for civility and examplars of it.
==fasten your seatbelts==
All right, boys and girls, let’s take the gloves off and get down to the brass tacks. Let’s take the cabinet off the computer and see what’s busted – or what Pepsi was spilled and then seeped into the circuit boards. Reagan’s central America policy was abysmal –dare I mention the Naval Academy mafia of CIA director William Casey, Admiral Poindexter and LtCol Oliver North? The only defense I have for this (and it’s an irrational, so’s-your-old-man comparative-shopping excuse) is that RR was sighted and hunting for the big game – an end to the Soviet Empire by dusting off Eisenhower’s bankrupt-them-with-our-technology plan and working a tag team with Thatcher and her military planners.)
Why stop there with the Reagan White House as far as dancing with dictators and bungling invasions? JFK took us into Cuba, and when that failed, wanted to take us into Laos, and when General Douglas MacArthur scared him (in 9/61, by telling him after dinner, “Do not engage in a non-nuclear land war in mainland Asia,” a brilliant summary LBJ, GHWB and “W” forgot to heed), LBJ expanded Vietnam, invaded the Dominican Republic, and supported all the central and south American banana dictators. Nixon wanted to NUKE North Vietnam (and gave the order to Kissinger, who disobeyed him!), Gerry Ford wanted to go back into Vietnam as well as go into Angola (!), Carter was playing footsie with Arab terrorists including Arafat at his bloodthirsty-worst, Reagan tolerated gun-toting butchery in central America, Bush Sr got us into three irrelevant military conflicts and snubbed Yeltzin, Clinton and Albright THREW AWAY the Iraq I ceasefire in 8/98 — guaranteeing another Iraqi war for whosoever succeeded him, and “W” bragged he could get Osama, failed, and then led us into a permanent colonial under-occupation of Iraq on obviously false intelligence that has since been soundly repudiated.
Go back to Hilzoy’s original post and her quote of Bob Woodward, calling Reagan’s policies inconsistent: Woodward is right, but he’s being rhetorical there, asking a question he already knows the answer to – the policies were all based on bad, contradictory intelligence, of course the decisions sucked and weren’t coherent.
What has all this got in common? “Lousy, incompetent and unreliable covert intelligence.” So I say to Anarch and Bruce Baugh and Donald Johnson that Reagan winked at barbarity in central America because he respected and trusted his WW2 sterling OSS head of the CIA (and 1980 political campaign aide), William Casey. A superpower is going to support clumsy, brutal, barbaric people when its own intelligence is off-track. I can throw smoke bombs and say, “This isn’t as bad” as Nixon colluding with Allende’s murder and Pinochet’s rise, and it isn’t as bad as GHWB invading Panama on personal pique about a former friend, and it isn’t as bad as the entrenched, running civil war in Columbia that the USA has established over the last 18 years or so.
But all of this is bad and it’s getting worse, because our intelligence community is busted and still rotting. It’s a full garbage truck with no brakes, going downhill and picking up speed. So part of my respect for RR is that the war-gaming and scenerio probability-estimation Thatcher was doing with him as his partner was so professional and such good teamwork that, together, they won the cold war in spite of mediocre intelligence. Wow. Compare that with the spastic, preposterous WMD “evidence” that got us into Iraq in 2003, as we sucked in the UK as our partner!
Incredibly bad.
Let’s take a look at USA intelligence in 2007. The Democrats won Congress, Pelosi supports Jack Murtha for Majority Leader in the House, but the House mutinies and picks DC suburban hack Steny Hoyer. The House candidates have won a majority in 2006 campaigning on following the Iraq study panel advice. As soon as Hoyer is in charge, the #1 suggestion, FIXING THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, is abandoned. The democrats want the White House in January, 2009, but they apparently want their new leader to stumble into the Oval Office as blind as Oedipus, getting the same sh*tty morning briefings that have been getting us into trouble for decades. Does this party know how to build peace? “Hard flunk.”
And what are the Republicans doing – “W” kept Clinton’s CIA chief, Tenet, and then after getting us into Iraq on phony intelligence conclusions, Tenet gets a “Medal of Freedom” right after retirement. Torture continues (yes, folks, solitary confinement for an extended period for an individual who goes for years without being formally charged, alone, ipse dixit, is torture under the Geneva Conventions), “extraordinary rendition” continues, the US military is bombing and shooting sectarian enemies on the orders and spotting of MILITIAS in Iraq, Osama and other groups are pouring volunteers into Iraq, and in the Green Zone – almost no American can speak Arabic. Retired CIA employees are trying to bribe civilians into giving intelligence – and they are paying a lot of money for junk data, believe me. The overall game plan is obviously to keep the occupation, torture, tension and lack of resolution right where it is until inauguration day, 2009. “Hard flunk.”
You can’t make good superpower decisions without good intelligence. You don’t have good intelligence unless there are a few agents, invisible to the locals, on the ground and reporting from inside enemy headquarters (chapter 13, Art of War, written around 400BC). We didn’t have anyone like that in Iraq in 2002 as we ramped up to this conflict. I have checked with, uh, people that I know who are experts in this field. They tell me that the Pentagon GLOATS that it no longer needs humans on the ground in enemy territory. You don’t want to know what I said in response; it wasn’t polite. Our intelligence is broke and it isn’t being fixed. There doesn’t appear to be even a plan to fix it.
I refuse to “pick” the busted Democratic track or the barbaric ongoing Republican track here. Ugh.
PS: A lot of those banana republics are democracies now – but not thanks to USA intelligence –thanks to a lot of things like live global satellite television and to certain people, especially JP2, a courageous man himself jailed by the Nazis and then again by the Soviets. For example, the Pope’s visit to Cuba did more than many, many filthy CIA tricks from 1961 through 2000.
Urban Coyote, you are so far wrong in your character assessments that it’s getting well in the way of any substance you might have to say. In particular, some of us find it not just weird but actively offensive that you’d be putting this much effort into making a Bush-lover caricature out of a lawyer who is fighting for the legal rights of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, one of the best bets for ground zero of this administration’s contempt for human rights. He is out there doing the things that a lot of us sya someoen should but aren’t able to ourselves and you’re here pissing on him because of poor reading comprehension and a demonstrated fondness for leaping to ridiculous extremes of conclusions. In a better world you would be ashamed of this, but I’m not expecting that; it would be enough if you would at some point bother to read up on the history of CharleyCarp’s posts and feel like an apology or at least silence might be in order.
You are, in brief, a disgrace to the causes you see to defend, and end up reinforcing the self-righteous smug convictions of those who really are undermining liberty, justice, and peace.
I’m sorry, I will immediately apologize for one part of that.
I said “you”, and I lack any justification for doing that. I will defend an attack on “your posts”, which are what I have on hand to respond to, but I know nothing of Urban Coyote as a person, and retract any and all claims about the person beyond these texts.
You can’t make good superpower decisions without good intelligence.
You can’t make good superpower decisions period. There is no such thing as a good superpower or good colonial power and there never will be. Having that much power over another group of people is simply intrinsically evil. (Or is this getting off topic?)
Thesis: Urban Coyote is the anti-Farber. Discuss.
Good riddance–the world’s better off without him, and the sooner historians expose the dark underbelly of the Reagan administration and set all the right-wing fairy tales about him to rest, the better.
The problem is that those fairy tales are so solidly entrenched, and have been for a quarter-century now, that attempts at this point to expose it are simply shrugged off as liberal revisionism by the people most inclined to believe the myths. And those people still control our government, and much of our media.
Urban coyote–I agree with much of that. Reagan’s policy of suppporting murderous thugs didn’t arise in a vacuum and every American president has, to varying degrees, done what he did. But Reagan went further than most in embracing murderers and bad intelligence doesn’t even begin to excuse it. He was defending the Argentinian military in the late 70’s when he was a private citizen. His inclination was to leap to the side of anyone who called himself an anti-communist and to deny reported atrocities if they didn’t fit into his worldview.
I’d say the same about the current Bush Administration. It’s not an accident that Bush initially had widespread support for going into Iraq. But he’s taken our imperialistic, self-righteous tendencies to an extreme, and carried them out with a level of incompetence that is truly impressive (unless, as some think, the chaos is all part of the plan).
Phil: The problem is that those fairy tales are so solidly entrenched, and have been for a quarter-century now, that attempts at this point to expose it are simply shrugged off as liberal revisionism by the people most inclined to believe the myths.
The opposite is equally true IMO. As I said, I think every president does both good and bad. The good tends to be less well remembered. I (and most Reagan supporters I know) will freely confront the bad things he did. But as we have seen on this thread, there are those who will not concede in any way that he may have also done some good. That is equally “fairy tales and revisionism” in my mind. As I recall this thread, john miller was the only one to say he would rethink his initial position at least a little. A few others conceded that yes, OK, he did have at least some small part in ending the cold war. Others have their view of history set in concrete.
Whether the good outweighs the bad is where there is the most room for honest discussion IMO. Those that think he was the devil incarnate are just as wrong as those who would see him sainted.
OCSteve: But human rights were always a topic. Reagan’s “Four-Part Agenda” included Human Rights, Regional Issues, Arms Control, and Bilateral Issues. All 4 were topics for each summit.
OCSteve, Reagan’s indifference to AIDS so long as people who “didn’t matter” were the only ones dying of it, to my mind cuts him out of the picture completely as a president who cared about human rights. (I put “didn’t matter” in quotes not because Reagan ever said that was why he didn’t care, but because it seems fairly clear that was why no one could be brought to care, and why – when grassroots organizations were coming up with effective means of preventing HIV infection from spreading – they weren’t merely denied government funding, they were sometimes actively dumped on.) Of course Reagan’s not the only one – and the present Pope and the previous Pope bear even more guilt for their damaging attitude – but he is one of the world figures who could have taken a stand against AIDS, and chose not to, so long as it appeared that gay men and heroin addicts were the main groups who were dying of it.
Jes: On AIDS: agreed, with no qualifications. My May 04, 2007 at 03:41 PM:
Certainly he also screwed some stuff up; I’m not going to claim he was perfect, far from it. His (non) response to terrorism was my biggest disappointment with him. Iran-Contra was mind boggling. Tax increases, inaction on AIDS, etc. etc.
On human rights:
Ditto Central America.
None of that changes the fact that he championed human rights behind the iron curtain and made it a central topic in negotiations with the Soviets. Among those praising RR for his stand on human rights are Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa… I have to go with the authority figures here.
Good and Bad.
None of that changes the fact that he championed human rights behind the iron curtain and made it a central topic in negotiations with the Soviets.
It does, however, make clear that for Reagan, human rights were just a stick to beat the Soviets with, rather than a matter of personal conviction. Just as present-day misogynists who oppose women’s rights in their own countries use Islamic oppression of women as a stick to beat Muslim countries with. How many right-wing Americans who supported Solidarity in Poland were prepared to support trade unions in the US? (I can answer for it that right-wing Brits who championed Solidarity in the 1980s were staunch opponents of labor unions in the UK.)
I respect your belief that Reagan had an active part in ending the Cold War – I don’t agree with it, but I do see where you’re coming from.
Any notion that Reagan was a champion of human rights fails by any reasonable standard, though.
OCASteve, I have changed my opinion of Reagan, mostly due to your civil responses. Basically I give him a little more credit for the events leading up to the ending of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The question is primarily not whether or not he had much to do with it, but rather whether or not it would have happened anyway. My response is it would have, and it may have taken not much longer than it did.
But I do see him as, if not the central player, at least within the first couple of circles.
And I don’t see Reagan as evil, although I think evil things happened under his watch, and I think he was aware of them and did nothing to stop them, and possibly even encouraged them.
And for those who think this is just a typical bashing of a Republican by a Democrat, I am just as concerend and dismayed by previous Democratic administrations for their policies relating to many things, and thereby encouraging, if not aiding and abetting evil happenings.
My problem with Reagan worshipping, of which there is a lot of nowadays, is that it tends to dismiss the negatives almost as much, if not more than, the ignoring of positives by the other side. (Which, BTW, I am not accusing you of.)
As far as the economics during his reign, I have not have time to get you specific cites of the debunking of his impact. Agreed, one would think numbers don’t lie, but there is an old saying about statistics.
And I think this might be a case where your bias and my bias definitely color which use of the statistics we put more emphasis on.
A bridge we may never fully cross.
My biggest memory of the Reagan years, and one which has probably colore my view of him for all time, has nothing to do with the Cold War, Iran-Contra oranything about the foreign realm. Rather it is when he decided that ketchup should be considered a vegetable when it comes to federally funded school lunch programs. Simple, silly, perhaps not earth-shaking, but it told me a lot about the man (colored, of course, by my liberal bias.)
So while I do not put Reagan in the class of the worst 5 presidents of all time (a category the current one leads) nor do I put him in the category of even the top 15.
Jes: It does, however, make clear that for Reagan, human rights were just a stick to beat the Soviets with, rather than a matter of personal conviction.
Sure. I already agreed he was not consistent. His goal was defeating communism. Supporting and enabling dissent within those regimes was one tactic among others. See Cuba for instance. The question is, do you disavow his actions on human rights in their entirety because he was not 100% consistent, or do you give him credit where your view and his may have aligned? Should he not have pushed the Soviets on Sakharov unless he was also willing to confront abuses in El Salvador and Honduras? I don’t like it either, but making something like that an absolute means you accomplish nothing at all.
I disliked Clinton, yet I applauded him for dispatching troops to Somalia. Then I was very angry that he would do nothing about Rwanda. I got mad when he pulled troops out of Somalia. Then I praised him for his (eventual) action on Bosnia. By your reasoning, I can not credit him with helping end the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia because I think he should have also acted on Rwanda.
john miller: Thanks. That is all I could ask. I never expected to convert you 😉
I really appreciate and respect your intellectual honesty in being willing to at least consider my points.
when he pulled troops out of Somalia
Retraction – that was Republicans. I might say he did not fight hard enough, but it was not his decision.
OCSteve: The question is, do you disavow his actions on human rights in their entirety because he was not 100% consistent, or do you give him credit where your view and his may have aligned?
I’m not quite sure what you’re after here. If you mean, at the time, sure: when I campaign for human rights, I will take allies where I can get them unless they’ve put themselves out of serious consideration – and I certainly don’t subscribe to the “Reagan was 100% pure evil” view, that just strikes me as silly. The question is not now about a current campaign for human rights – Reagan is past supporting anyone.
The question is how is Reagan’s career as a President to be assessed, and what lessons can be drawn from it. And I think the answer is: he regarded human rights as less important than being anti-Communist, and that leaves it open to ask: What was the virtue in his being anti-Communist, if it had no connection with supporting human rights?
I’ve resisted getting into this, but what the heck:
Jes: I tend to think that Reagan was sincere in his way, but that he didn’t pay much attention to things he wasn’t interested in (even leaving aside what I think was early-stage Alzheimer’s.) So I don’t think it was that he wasn’t sincere about human rights; it was that he didn’t care enough about gays, Haitians, IV drug abusers, Central Americans, or intellectual consistency to notice that caring about human rights had implications beyond the Communist bloc. I think he had a basic story about Communists and human rights, and paid more attention to things that confirmed it than to things that didn’t.
My main problem with Reagan was always that I don’t think it’s OK for a President not to notice these things, any more than I think it’s OK for a CEO not to notice major financial risks, or for a parent not to notice that his or her kids are very sick. Noticing that is part of the job. And my problem with Reagan-the-phenomenon, as opposed to Reagan-the-actual-person, was that people seemed prepared to overlook a lot of performance-related stuff because — because of what, exactly? I don’t want to say something condescending like “because he made us feel good”, or “because he said it was morning in America”, but insert the something of your choice here.
I always think: being President is a job. Specifically, it’s a job that involves running a large and complicated organization. It’s nice when a President looks all Presidential, just as it’s nice when a general looks commanding. But choosing a Presidential-looking President over one who will actually competently run the organization is, to me, like choosing a general who looks good in the uniform over one who will actually do a good job of commanding the troops and winning the war.
One thing Reagan did have going for him, though: he had advisors with whom I disagreed a lot, but who were often basically competent. (I mean here to distinguish someone like James Baker, who often adopted policies I didn’t like but was nonetheless living in the same universe as I live in from someone like Donald Rumsfeld, who is not. Baker would never have not planned for the occupation of Iraq.)
When you elect a President who is not up to the job, there’s no guarantee that he will have sane advisors. Reagan made electing such Presidents seem a lot less risky than it actually was. GWBush, by contrast, has shown us exactly what those risks are.
Hilzoy – I don’t know why you resist, you bring clarity wherever you go!
The appeal of a politician to the electorate can really only be judged by the electorate. I can’t blame people who like Reagan and are not sure why: I like Blair – even after everything! – and would be hard put to say why, except something kind of muddled about how good it felt to wake up that May morning in 1997…
Jes: What was the virtue in his being anti-Communist, if it had no connection with supporting human rights?
Try here.
Seriously – I am mostly in agreement with your last comment. I don’t think we are far apart here. I agree that he was more anti-communist than pro-human rights. He was neither angel nor devil, but human. He did some good and some bad. He did not single handedly win the cold war but he had a part. We’ll leave the economy question for another day.
Hilzoy: I’ve resisted getting into this
Hey – that would be your byline on the post… 😉
I mostly agree with you as well. (Your last comment anyway.)
Introduce The Presidential Aptitude Test!
Every candidate for the office of POTUS has to undergo a public test similar to an assessment center to show that s(he) is able to cope. Failure should hurt, put them in the Milgram chair and fry the unprepared ;-).
OCS: I meant “this” to be such general questions as: what about Reagan as a whole? Was he in fact ‘pure evil’ (no), or ‘the most evil person ever’ (no again), or whatever got this started? (Personally, I think we should just define ‘pure evil’ for future reference — maybe we should put the embalmed corpse of Pol Pot in an airlock, with the Paris Standard Meter, for future reference.)
He was, I am told, personally charming, and for all I know in many ways a nice guy. But I don’t think he should have been President. (Bush, by contrast, doesn’t even seem to manage ‘nice guy’.) Being President involves things like knowing about Guatemalans being killed on your watch, being willing to fire Caspar Weinberger when he countermands your orders, not letting nutcases on your NSA staff break the laws, not handing over the entire Dept. of the Interior to industry and HUD to crooks, etc., etc., etc.
my problem with Reagan-the-phenomenon, as opposed to Reagan-the-actual-person, was that people seemed prepared to overlook a lot of performance-related stuff because — because of what, exactly?
It should be noted that for some voters, not viewing the Presidency as a job in which one must ‘do something‘ for every problem under the sun is a feature and not a bug.
Try here. [The Black Book Of Communism.]
If you can point to a Reagan-era policy of legitimately opposing Chinese Communism (save the protection of Taiwan), I’m all ears. I know of at least two major spheres in which he supported the Chinese:
* The alliance with the Chinese and Pol Pot against the Vietnamese after the loss in Vietnam. Staggeringly ironic given the nature of the regimes.
* The perpetual renewal of China’s MFN status through the entirety of his Presidential terms. And there’s the obsequious renewal of China’s MFN after Tiananmen; although it happened under Bush, I’d argue that it was a direct extension of Reagan’s foreign policy.
Reagan, like many of the Cold Warriors, was anti-Communist most of the time — but when the chips were down and money was to be made, his devotion became rather less sincere.
G’kar, there’s a huge difference between knowing that trouble exists, understanding it, and deciding that the solutions available to the state aren’t overall worth applying versus not ever grasping that there is a problem, or deliberately choosing to disregard suggestions of trouble, or refusing to look at the details.
G’Kar: I didn’t mean ‘performance-related stuff’ to imply that one should always be doing things, any more than being a good general (as opposed to looking like one) would imply that one should always be attacking someone. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Anarch: If you can point to a Reagan-era policy of legitimately opposing Chinese Communism (save the protection of Taiwan), I’m all ears.
Well China wasn’t exactly the topic, though it is fair to bring it up. But when you discount the “the protection of Taiwan” in your first statement, I’m not sure where to go with it. (Maybe “discount” is wrong, maybe you are saying well sure there is this, but tell me some other Reagan-era policy of legitimately opposing Chinese Communism.)
I do recall that the Chinese took it seriously enough that they were quite happy when Clinton reversed Reagan’s position.
I think I’ve conceded the lack of consistency already, but I’ll concede it again here if you like.
When he had the opportunity to speak directly to Chinese students and faculty at Fudan University in Shanghai he did not pull any punches:
I draw your special attention to what I’m about to say, because it’s so important to an understanding of my country.
We believe in the dignity of each man, woman, and child. Our entire system is genius of each individual and of his special right to make his own decisions and lead his own life.
We believe–and we believe it so deeply that Americans know these words by heart–we believe “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Take an American student or teacher aside later today and ask if he or she hasn’t committed those words to memory. They are from the document by which we created our nation, the Declaration of Independence.
We elect our government by the vote of the people. That is how we choose our Congress and our President. We say of our country, “Here the People Rule,” and it is so.
I do recall something about Reagan thinking that the Chinese “weren’t really communists” after his visit but I can only find oblique references to that. That may well have something to do with it. At the time, I didn’t really perceive China to be a strategic threat, certainly not in the same way the Soviet Union was. Perhaps, as others have noted he simply focused on the Soviets to the exclusion of other things.
I didn’t look up Charley Carp’s posts and personal background because I never meant to attack him personally.
But I’m not retracting my extensively footnoted criticism of Bush Sr as a courtier and a “Servant when He Reigneth.” Bush Sr was incompetent and the American people fired him. Perhaps the worst thing about him was that, having been CIA director, he didn’t ask any tough questions about the reliability of the intelligence briefings he recevied once he got to the Oval Office himself. So he started this Iraqi quagmire.
I completely agree with Hilzoy’s 12:12pm posting of May 7th. I offer only clarifying tidbits – that Rick Thomas, in “Fiasco,” reported that Rumsfeld stopped meetings to SHUT UP discussion of any post-war occupation plan for Iraq. Relatedly, Bob Woodward reported in “State of Denial” that the use of State Department personnel and their voluminous research for Iraqi occupation planning was frozen out and stopped cold by a cabal working in the office of the Vice President. I am now reading Ali A. Allawi’s “The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace” – and I personally don’t see how the surge or ongoing under-occupation can possibly work at this late date.
Thangs doan seem to be goin’ that gud in Afghanistan, either. And we’ve dragged NATO into that one!
Jesurgislac: “The question is how is Reagan’s career as a President to be assessed, and what lessons can be drawn from it. And I think the answer is: he regarded human rights as less important than being anti-Communist, and that leaves it open to ask: What was the virtue in his being anti-Communist, if it had no connection with supporting human rights?”
Yes, this time I can answer this question point-blank, as someone who voted for Reagan, admired Barry Goldwater, and myself, at the age of 20, received combat pay against Soviet client-state North Vietnam: Reagan knew a lot about the gulags. From writer Ayn Rand to composer Sergei Rachmaninoff to make-up genius Max Factor, Hollywood was full of Russians who had run away from Lenin. And they talked! Rachmaninoff’s 1931 letter to the New York Times was the central ex-patriot manifesto, I think, and the Kremlin responded by forbidding the performance of his music.
RR saw Communism as the overall greatest danger of the 20th century. It even affected his labor work as head of the screen actors guild in the 1940’s, where he received death threats. Reagan saw that Soviet communism could become a global success, and that such an event would bring an end to ALL human rights ANYWHERE. (I agree with that). Reagan, chairman of Truman’s California campaign in 1948, left the democratic party because he thought, nationally, as a party, the non-communist democrats had outmaneuvered the anti-communist democrats once Truman left office.
Jesurgislac: “Any notion that Reagan was a champion of human rights fails by any reasonable standard, though.”
Here I agree with OCSteve and disagree with Jesurgislac. My view is that communism was the central challenge to human rights in the 20th century. Thus opposing communism was a reasonable way to champion human rights. Opposing the PRC, now, in 2007, is a reasonable way to champion human rights.
I wrote, “You can’t make good superpower decisions without good intelligence” Diane quoted that and said this: “You can’t make good superpower decisions period. There is no such thing as a good superpower or good colonial power and there never will be. Having that much power over another group of people is simply intrinsically evil. (Or is this getting off topic?)”
Diane seems to have captured the mood of most Democrats in the US House, ie, leave the intelligence community busted. I disagree – and I emphatically disagree now, after Clinton tried to bribe North Korea about its nukes and now “W” has done the same, accepted the Indian nukes and connived at the Pakistani nukes. Because of those blundering dolts, I say that even if we had no other problems and were somewhat isolationist, we’d STILL HAVE TO DEVELOP GREAT WORLDWIDE INTELLIGENCE NOW THAT NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IS SNOWBALLING.
And that’s what’s happened to us, something neither the Reagan White House nor old Soviet Kremlin would have permitted 25 years ago – runaway nuclear proliferation. (the best map I’ve ever seen of this is the list of possible nuclear exchanges at the end of the Matthew Broderick “War Games” action movie of 1984). Every new member of the nuclear club created an exponential increase in possible exchanges.
Can we just say that we have too much power and don’t need to develop intelligence these days? We’re still nice people if the Pakis and Indians exchange nukes. So what if Tokyo gets vaporized because North Korea is jealous of the G7. It doesn’t matter to us if the Iranians smuggle a nuke into Tel Aviv and pickle it off. Right? Huh? Accurate intelligence is just an arrogant luxury of colonialist power-trippers…
Reagan saw that Soviet communism could become a global success,
In 1980? Let alone 1984? This doesn’t even make it to “n***a, please” territory.
My view is that communism was the central challenge to human rights in the 20th century. Thus opposing communism was a reasonable way to champion human rights.
Not in and of itself, it wasn’t. Not when you’ve got mass graves full of nuns.
Some numbers for Phil:
From 1917 to 1987, The Soviet Union only backed away from Austria (in 1955). The peak territory under control was 1979-87 with the occupation of Afghanistan.
The Chinese communists under Mao killed about 100 million of their own people.
Pol Pot, the Cambodia communist, killed about one in four Cambodians.
The Soviets killed at least 20 million of their own people in peacetime. Tens of millions were confined to work camps or hospitals. Andrei Sakaroff, father of the Russian atom bomb, wasn’t released from captivity until the late 1980’s (1989, I think).
That’s the equivalent of thousands upon thousands of mass graves of nuns.
In 1989, when Reagan left office, the Soviet Union still existed and still had 30,000 nuclear warheads. They also had the world’s most advanced biological weapons, which were only announced and destroyed after Yeltsin replaced Gorbachev and then survived a coup in 1991.
Pol Pot, the Cambodia communist, killed about one in four Cambodians.
Pol Pot, whom Regan supported during his presidency because Pol opposed the Communist Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government, killed about one in four Cambodians.
Gosh, UC, thanks for telling me a bunch of things I didn’t know! Oh, wait, you did the precise opposite of that.
So, is it accurate to say that you believe that the end of opposing Soviet communism was so important that any means at all were OK in doing so?
And a certain Austrian guy also caused more than 50 million surplus dead in less than a decade and had just started with his program. If left to his devices he probably would have topped 100 millions before reaching retirement.
Clarification: This is not intended to excuse the atrocities of either side of the political spectrum. The 20th century was just not a period of threat from the Left (or self-declared left) only.
I don’t hate Reagan. He was what he was. I’m disappointed in us, that we would prefer fiction to reality.
I think Hil’s point that canonizing Reagan isn’t exactly justified is fine, but I, for one, am not particularly troubled by the fact that the response to terrorism, for example, was varied. I think you have to take these things on the facts. For instance, we can lament all we want about the retreat from Lebanon, but it was the correct policy option at the time, and I’ve never heard anyone give a reality-based explanation of some alternative that would have worked better. 1983 wasn’t exactly the right time to touch off a World War, or whatever it is that people think we should have done.
I opposed promoting the Afghan muj at the time — it was self-evidently silly to speak of them as freedom fighters. On the other hand, the blow to the Soviet state from that bleeding wound was probably, at the end of the day, worth it.
The arms-for-hostages thing was poorly done. And no self-respecting republican should have any admiration at all for Col. North’s execution of the Latin American part of the scheme.
On my mantle pictures, I guess I sometimes forget how widely read these comments are, and how poorly tone of voice (and expression on face) come through. The other person not realted to us on the mantle is Helmut Kohl, who is in the same photo as GHWB, and they’re both flanking my wife. The picture is on the mantle because she likes it. She’s done work-related things with the both of them — together and separately — several times, and it’s fair to say that she’s found GHWB to be unfailingly polite. But it’s not like she’d have voted for him (were she allowed to vote).
I certainly never did, for any office.
In one, and only one, aspect, though, I think we lucked out having Bush, and neither Reagan nor Dukakis, in office in November 1989: he didn’t overreact, nor were there howls of treason from the rabid right for failing to overreact (as there would have been had Dukakis pursued the exact same policy). Instead, we had adult governance, and a generally good glide path on the end of communism in Eastern Europe. The policy didn’t work in Yugoslavia, but I’m not sure how much Bush could have done, especially given Kohl’s independent conduct.
OCSteve: Try [The Black Book of Communism]
Capitalism has killed more people than communism: shall we therefore argue that anyone who is an anti-capitalist is by definition a human rights hero? I don’t think so. Same applies to anyone else who puts a principle (if one can call being anti-Communist a principle) above the basics of human rights.
Jes: Link please…
OCSteve: Link please
To what?
I really, really do not want to get into an argument about comparative murderousness. So I’ll just say this instead:
I always thought that the problem with communism was a lot like the problem with Naziism: they were murderous, repressive systems. Unlike Naziism, communism had some sort of ultimate goal or motivation or something — concern for the poor — that I accepted, but that seemed to me of no consequence, given how far into the distance that goal had receded under Soviet communism (in my youth, we didn’t know much about the PRC, but you can add Chinese communism to this as of the late 70s.) I mean, I don’t think white women, or any women, should be raped, but accepting that goal doesn’t get me anywhere near the KKK, and the relation between the USSR and its concern for the poor struck me as similar.
Because I thought that the problem with (Soviet and Chinese) communism was that it was a murderous, repressive system, I couldn’t see the point of supporting other murderous, repressive governments on the grounds that they weren’t communist. And during the 80s, it seemed to me that that was exactly what we were doing.
Moreover, here’s the reason for the ‘Soviet and Chinese’ qualification: I thought that it was not at all obvious that communist regimes in the developing world were committed to communist ideology. Certainly one of the lessons of the Vietnam war, to me, was that things were more complicated than that. I thought: maybe they are committed communists, but maybe they’re nationalists who identify the US and capitalism with their oppressors (Central America), and maybe they’re just looking for protection in a dangerous neighborhood, and signing up with us or the USSR depending on who seems to offer it (parts of Africa.) There is every reason to think that signing up with the USSR will give the USSR access to that country, and also that it’s a dangerous road to travel. But there is very little reason to believe that the decision to ally oneself with them necessarily reflects a deep allegiance to communist principles, of the sort that would make those governments unalterably murderous (e.g., even if the USSR left the scene.)
So supporting a lot of the people we supported during the 80s — e.g., the Guatemalan government, let alone UNITA in Angola and so forth — just seemed to me completely wrong. A lot like supporting the Nazis because they were anti-communist would have been.
Capitalism has killed more people than communism:
Is this supposed to be a fact to be accepted without question? I’m not even sure what that means.
hairshirtdonist: Is this supposed to be a fact to be accepted without question?
Certainly not without question. You may begin by questioning why, if all murders committed by Communist regimes are to be counted against Communism, why are we not then counting all murders committed by capitalist regimes against capitalism? We may then move on to considering the millions of people who were killed for capitalism – for someone else’s profit: from the humans who were exported to slavery and killed en route or worked to death at their destination, to the workers who were killed (who are killed) in factories and other workplaces where safety measures were considered unprofitable, to the people who died – who still die – because the tobacco industry is allowed to market an addictive drug which, long-term, kills its habituees. Capitalism has killed more people than communism is not a fact to be accepted without question, because we should question why we find it acceptable that people die because it is profitable to business interests that they do so: but it is a fact.
Nevermind. Not going there today…
Thank you for your civil response. (More than slightly irrelevant to President Reagan, yes: just my reaction to people who unthinkingly cite The Black Book of Communism…)
Were the people who died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster were killed by communism? I’m not trying to be flip, but I think that illustrates parallel deaths under communism to the kinds of deaths being placed under capitalism. And attributing deaths caused by any regime that can be called “capitalist” to capitalism doesn’t make much sense. I suppose you could say the same thing about communist regimes and communism, unless the regime killed people for communism’s sake. Even if you kill for profit, you aren’t necessarily doing it for the sake of capitalism as a system (i.e. to preserve the system of capitalism). I forget who said this, but there’s a quote that goes something like “The problem with socialism is socialism. The problem with capitalism is capitalists.” Substitute communism for socialism, and you have something close to my point, if I actually have one.
Taking OCSteve as my role-model, hairshirthedonist: Never mind. Not going there today.
The difference may be that repressive political regimes kill on purpose while “capitalism” simply doesn’t care for its victims and does not profit directly from the death (apart from the victims of goon squads of course).
One of Lenins closest comrades (Sinovyev?) calculated that killing about 10% of all people in Russia would be necessary to persude the rest to submit (it’s in the Black Book somewhere). Except for killing union organizers “capitalism” does not regularly plan to kill a certain percentage of people to make itself work (though it could be tolerated as “unavoidable costs”).
The Nazis were a bit of a hybrid here. They used those intended to die for “capitalist” purposes by working them to death and thus getting a double benefit (the “enemies” dead and a healthy profit).
It all makes sense if you regard Capitalism as a kind of Thatcherite Communism: just privatize the means of execution!
Taking OCSteve as my role-model, hairshirthedonist: Never mind. Not going there today.
Just because it may be fruitless, or do you feel I’ve behaved uncivilly?
Seriously – it’s utter nonsense to say that no one has been killed by governments to advance capitalism as a system. Many millions have died as a result of campaigns (internal and international) against those who were seen to pose a threat to that system, from union organizers to “leftist” regimes overseas. The most you can say is that the executioners did not publicly announce “We’re Doing This For Capitalism,” but that’s purely a rhetorical distinction, made for understandable reasons of public relations.
Seriously – it’s utter nonsense to say that no one has been killed by governments to advance capitalism as a system.
I agree. But I don’t remember anyone saying that.
hairshirthedonist: Just because it may be fruitless, or do you feel I’ve behaved uncivilly?
To the latter: Not at all! And I hope I haven’t either.
To the former: I don’t know about fruitless, but certainly it would occupy a great deal of time, be thoroughly thread-drifty, and probably change no one’s mind on any of the many sides of the argument. It could be fun, but I have no more time for fun. Today.
To the latter: Not at all! And I hope I haven’t either.
Not at all.
To the former: I don’t know about fruitless, but certainly it would occupy a great deal of time, be thoroughly thread-drifty, and probably change no one’s mind on any of the many sides of the argument.
I agree. I don’t really remember what this thread was orignally about, so drifty to be sure.
Without trying to keep this going longer than necessary, are we talking about communism as a political system or as an economic system. Same with capitalism.
Unless you are putting both in the same type of system, the comparison is fruitless.
And I do think many observers would say that neither the Soviet Union nor PRC were totally true to the economic philosophy of communism.
I had the same thoughts, jm. If I were run over by a New Jersey Transit bus, was I killed by communism, since the bus was state-owned? If the Chinese pollute a river with the output of a capacitor factory, thus causing people downstream to die, were those people killed by capitalism, since capitalists will be buying those capacitors?
OCSteve: Well China wasn’t exactly the topic, though it is fair to bring it up.
Yeah, seeing the Black Book almost reflexively triggers that response in me 😉
But when you discount the “the protection of Taiwan” in your first statement, I’m not sure where to go with it. (Maybe “discount” is wrong, maybe you are saying well sure there is this, but tell me some other Reagan-era policy of legitimately opposing Chinese Communism.)
I didn’t include Taiwan for two primary reasons: one is that the protection of Taiwan’s independence — not necessarily as an autonomous state, but certainly one independent from the control of mainland China — has been US foreign policy since 1950 or thereabouts, and will probably continue to be so until China and Taiwan agree to peaceably merge. Reagan doesn’t IMO get any more credit for this than any other president.
[Clinton’s contribution to the Cold War* in the South China Sea is more complex than I feel like talking about right now, but the gist was that he didn’t do much more than flip a rhetorical bit in recognition of the reality of the situation there.]
The second reason is just a numbers game: Communism spreading to Taiwan would, as far as I can tell, do precisely nothing for the spread of Communism worldwide. There are no additional dominos there that weren’t available to China already. It would make it marginally easier to attack the Philippines, true, but since the Philippines is (or at least was) a US protectorate in all but name there was (and is) no way in hell that’s going to happen.
It would massively suck for the Taiwanese, of course — not to mention the US consumer — but there are only 23 million people there which, by Asian standards, is a pittance. [Hell, Mao killed more people than that in the Great Leap Forward alone.] I’m adamantly opposed to the CCP taking over any more territory — which is one reason I’m still angry about Tibet, about which Reagan did less than squat** — so in that sense I’m naturally overjoyed about our policy there, but considering it some kind of massive anti-Communist effort strikes me as overblown.
I do recall that the Chinese took it seriously enough that they were quite happy when Clinton reversed Reagan’s position.
The rhetoric changed, but that was it: nothing had changed militarily, which was sort of the point.
* Planescape used the term “kriegstanz” to describe the complex political maneuvering pursued in lieu of war, which I’ve always loved. Sort of a vertical expression of a desire to make someone else horizontal (and preferably six feet under). I’ve always preferred that term in re the South China Sea to “Cold War”, which implies a certain political and ideological rigidity, coupled with outright proxy wars between the immovable powers.
** He actually gave a speech in 1986 saying “The United States recognizes Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. I interpret Tibet’s inclusion as a separate country to be a technical oversight.” Way to stand up to Communism, Ron.
Debates featuring competing body counts between forms of government, economic systems, and religions seem dicey to me.
It’s like choosing a rental car company.
Mao and Stalin on one side and Hitler on the other are like Hertz and Avis back in the day, with the guy in second place always trying a little harder and regretting coming up short.
Then you have Hinduism, to pick one religion. All life is sacred you tell yourself, as you watch edible cows stepping over malnourished homeless vegetarians settling in for the night on block after block of the sidewalks of Calcutta.
Down the street, the Christian Mother Theresa seems to have a better idea, succoring the destitute and the dying as they face eternity. Wait … she’s not feeling too well late in the going and jets off to the clinic in Europe for her physical complaints. Apparently, there are few extra seats on the plane for her patients. Turns out staving off eternity is a personal issue, though she eventually made it along with the rest.
Peter Lawford, the late actor. What about him, you might be thinking? He pickled his liver in expensive vodka courtesy of capitalism which is happy to supply whatever addiction a person might fancy.
However, plunk him down as a Russian farmworker in the old Soviet Union and his first question is going to be “Who’s got the vodka.” The State does and its cheap stuff, comes the answer. Bring it on, cries Lawford, slamming the palm of his hand on the table.
I don’t know which side of the ledger to credit for Lawford’s early demise. Sinatra, maybe.
The Commies seem to provide pretty good, fundamental healthcare through rural clinics, etc, but they don’t come up with too much in the way of cures for the big stuff. The Cappies don’t seem to notice the chronic complaints of the poor too much, hoping they go away. Wave a little money around, though, and all of a sudden entrepreneurs throw on lab coats and offer the four-hour erection, if you can handle it.
Watch those Animal Planet wildlife shows in which herds of wildebeest saunter down to the watering hole on the veldt. There’s always a big croc cooling his heels somewhere close by.
The totalitarian wildebeest herds are ordered by a large, bossy wildebeest somewhere in the back to march single file into the crocodile’s mouth.
The free society wildebeest crowd up to the water’s edge in haphazard fashion and wait for a couple of their compatriots to take the plunge. The croc eats one of them, hooves kicking up bloody water all over everyone, and all the others kind of dance out of the way, but just a few steps, as if thinking to themselves, well, that looks pretty bad, but better him than me.
Either way, the crocodile dines.
People killed for profit under a capitalist system were killed by capitalism in a similar moral sense that people killed under communism for the sake of furthering the great proletariat revolution were killed for communism. Things like Chernobyl or TIM don’t necessarily count as a strike against either system, though I think one could argue that catastrophic nuclear accidents are more likely to occur under a dictatorial system than in a democracy, which might be why Chernobyl was much worse, but that’s a democracy vs. authoritarian thing.
And I do think many observers would say that neither the Soviet Union nor PRC were totally true to the economic philosophy of communism.
They were in the initial years, which is part of the reason so many people died. cf the kolkhoz’, the liquidation of the kulaks, the famine of 1921; collectivization and the Great Leap Forward; and so forth.
What bugs me about the Black Book and the Communist vs. Nazi thing is that it lets colonialism (aka capitalism) off the hook, when the British record on famines in India is comparable to that of Stalin or Mao. Just as an example. Then there’s Leopold II and so forth. And this isn’t entirely irrelevant (like pointing out how bad the Mongol conquests were), because certain people on the right end of the spectrum have made it their business to talk a lot about megadeaths under the two great totalitarian systems of the 20th century, while saying nothing but flattering things about Western colonialism and even holding up the British Empire as something to be emulated by the US if only we are up to the job. (I’m thinking of Niall Ferguson in particular, but back when I used to read Commentary they seemed to think that nobody ever died in really large numbers until Lenin came along.)
As for thread drift, the original topic, I think, was whether Reagan should have been tougher in Lebanon. I already answered, way, way above–hell no. I have no interest in bashing Ronnie from the right. We killed enough innocent bystanders as it was. The US Navy had already been shelling some factions in Lebanon before the truck bomb attack on the US ground forces and I for one have no idea who died in those bombardments. And later we were involved in a car bomb attack that killed 80 people, which makes American posturing about Lebanese terrorism a little hypocritical. But what else is new?
TMI, not TIM. In case Gary is reading.
DJ: I disagree. I think that after the barracks bombing, we should have bombed terrorist training camps in the Beka’a valley. There were a number of them, and their locations were fairly well known.
Anarch: Yeah, seeing the Black Book almost reflexively triggers that response in me
The funny thing is that I chose that as a source (debating Jes) because it was written by European leftists. Given the nature of partisanship, I usually now try to avoid sources such as rightwing think tanks as they are automatically discounted here, no matter how detailed and well sourced they seem to be.
So I source a leftwing, academic, European study – and that gets slammed.
I’m gonna just start making stuff up I think 😉
Hilzoy: I’m with you. That is exactly what I wanted to see happen.
“I’m gonna just start making stuff up I think ;)”
Why not. When politics are involved, fiction reigns supreme anyways. (On both sides.)
Of course, some would say you are going back to your Republican roots, but not me.
And I agree with both you and hilzoy re Lebanon.
Completely OT: reading about Bush’s little protocol faux pas with the queen reminds me of one of the time when dadzoy met the queen. It was during the bicentennial, and he wasn’t really prepared — a herald or someone appeared at his shoulder and bade him approach her majesty, and when he had done so, he realized, somewhat to his surprise, that she was just standing there, waiting to be conversed with. So, a bit flustered, he said:
Your majesty, I was in your country recently, and I was struck by the fact that although everyone said that the food was appalling, and the climate perennially rainy, and (insert here a rather long string of bad things one might say about the UK), nonetheless they all said they wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else.
Now: he had intended this as a compliment, but as he watched the Queen’s face change, by almost imperceptible steps, from a polite smile to — well, probably the sort of expression she gave Bush yesterday — he realized that it had not come out that way at all. Then he really didn’t know what to do.
Luckily, however, a French nutritionist who was at that time the President of Tufts University had also been brought over, and he piped up and said:
Your majesty, when I see you my mind goes back to the summer of 1942, when I was in ze Free french, and you — you were in ze Lorry Brigade!
And, according to dadzoy, her face got all soft, and he thought it seemed as though she was recalling one of the better moments of her life, and the situation was rescued.
Dadzoy is normally very gracious and very funny, but he’s also shy, though he does a pretty good job of disguising that fact, since shyness was not part of his job description. I have always been able to see, in my mind’s eye, the queen’s face going slowly but inexorably from this: 🙂 to this: 🙁 as his intended compliment goes from bad to worse to even worse than that, and it makes me laugh. Him too, now that he’s no longer there.
So I source a leftwing, academic, European study
Well, it’s certainly European, and as it was produced by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique it can be called academic. And left-wing is very much a matter of perspective: many Europeans who are right-wing in Europe are left-wing by the standards of American politics.
But I thought that you were just asserting that being anti-Communist was more important than being pro-human rights, by citing a famous source by a well-known anti-Communist which lists mass deaths under regimes identified as Communist. The accuracy of the Black Book of Communism has been widely challenged by people more qualified than me to argue the historical details. But, as capitalism has caused more deaths than communism, it makes as much sense (ie, none at all) to argue that you only have to show that someone is anti-capitalist to prove they care about human rights, as it does to argue that you only have to show that someone is anti-communist. I don’t have a lot of time for anyone who puts political principles – anti-capitalist, anti-communist, pro-life, animal rights, etc – above a basic committment to human rights for individuals.
Reagan was certainly anti-Communist, but he was only doubtfully pro-human rights – certainly, only for human rights when being so was useful to his appearing to be politically anti-Communist.
hilzoy,
Faux pas can frequently occur on royal visits. My favorite remains when a reporter asked the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) his impressions of Philadelphia, and was told, “I met a lot of nice people named Scrapple, and ate a lot of biddle.
Hitler was a left-winger, a progressive who brought “National Socialism” to Germany. He wasn’t right wing at all, in fact, for a considerable time he was an ally of Stalin. There was jubilation in Moscow when Paris fell to the Nazis.
Right-wingers don’t believe in deifying “the people.” The sole (typically God-ordained) authority owns everything. Tsarist Russia, the Empire of Japan (especially under Tojo) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are rather good examples of right-wing government. So was Salazar in Portugal. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Peron were all leftists, saying over and over and over that what they were doing was for the people.
What college teaches the logic that a citizen, walking into a store and buying tasty, addictive cigarettes that increase the likelihood of cancer, is the same thing as being sent to a gulag, mental hospital or death camp for having a counter-revolutionary attitude? An argument using the technique of “inference by analogy” is sound only when the analogy fits.
Apparently, merely having a large GDP is inherently evil?
“Can we just say that we have too much power and don’t need to develop intelligence these days? We’re still nice people if the Pakis and Indians exchange nukes. So what if Tokyo gets vaporized because North Korea is jealous of the G7. It doesn’t matter to us if the Iranians smuggle a nuke into Tel Aviv and pickle it off. Right? Huh? Accurate intelligence is just an arrogant luxury of colonialist power-trippers… “ I wrote this and got no answer from Jesurgislac.
Maybe we need better intelligence so we can make the RIGHT decisions. What do you think of that? Good intelligence would have kept us out of the Bay o Pigs, out of Vietnam, out of Beirut in the 1980’s, out of Iraq I i 1991, for example. Good intelligence could have gotten us INTO the Saarland in 1936 to stop Hitler when he was still a bluffing banty rooster and thus save 50 million lives. My contention that intelligence is a vital and civilized function has wholly and entirely unrebutted — silence implies acquiescence – so I win the discussion here on how to deal with our proliferating world, which is start by insisting on better intelligence.
Hilzoy doesn’t want to get into a discussion that rots into a comparative body count, but you’re almost stuck with that in dealing with a savage philosophy like communism. East German border guards had standing orders to shoot anyone trying to escape to the west. Anyone, including children. The border guards were posted together. If the other guard won’t shoot a child, the order was to shoot the guard who was too priggish to kill! Think about that mindset. In the late 1970’s, the Soviet’s deputy UN ambassador, Arkady Shevchenko, defected to the west and was placed in a safehouse in northern Virginia where he was debriefed. After a couple of days, he called the Soviet’s UN office in New York to find out what had happened to his family in Moscow. They’d been killed by “Security” to keep everyone else in line. A really good book about how this works is “Beyond All Hope” by Armando Valladares, a Cuban locked up for decades because of the nameplate on his desk.
Communism, being a strong form of dictatorship and constantly warring against the minds of its citizens, is inherently anathema to decency and human rights.
The moral torpor of the West is of an entirely different nature – a weakness for graft rather than systemic inhumanity. Every American president from Woodrow Wilson onward has colluded with central and South American dictators; only the democratization of the region in the last 20 years has dried up some of that swamp, finally. Nigeria got a lot of money selling oil in the 1960’s. They used that income to commit genocide on their minority Ebo population, a horror condoned by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and US President Lyndon Johnson. The Ebos were wiped out with US and UK weapons and planes. Hippies demonstrating for peace and love weren’t interested in this boring situation. Neither were American civil rights activists. A young congressman, “Buzz” Lukens (R-OH), came to my campus and tried to stir us up about this genocide. One thing he said particularly struck me. When he returned from his “tour” of Nigeria, he got off the plane near DC and was immediately mobbed by CIA people with notebooks. What was going on? What had he seen? They didn’t have anyone on the ground, they were blind to the situation.
That’s why Reagan signed off on those dirty tricks in central America. It was American foreign policy SOP. It’d been done for decades. People he respected, like Casey, urged it. It was part of “containing communism,” although that’s an absurd argument – it’s part of colluding with oppression, which is exactly how Castro came to power in Cuba! BTW, our intelligence was already so bad, even in the 1950’s, that Castro, educated in New York city at Columbia, was regarded initially as a potential USA ally, even into 1959 after he took power.
Graft like this continues today, but except for the intentionally interminable civil war in Columbia, it takes a different and less bloody form, largely thanks to the courage and integrity of Latin American themselves in improving their own forms of government. Bill Clinton wound up serving his donors from Indonesia and China (rather than the survivors of Tiennamen Square who were on the rostrum with him when he was nominated in 1992). Things haven’t gotten cleaner: the money behind “W” is a witches brew of gun runners, drug wholesalers, energy industry friends (remember Enron?) and a line of credit from the banker who also serves the bin Laden family.
In 2004, the Democrats reduced some of this corruption because, though a lot of money was needed to compete with the bankroll behind “W,” the spouse of the nominee inherited an on-going fortune in factories that produce pickled condiments as well as ketchup.
Ketchup has been classified as a vegetable, you know.
By Reagan, you know.
UC, nobody here has ever questioned the value of good intelligence gathering and the need for it in this world, so I don’t know what you think you have won since you weren’t competing with anybody.
Gathering intelligence is only part of the issue, however. A larger part, IMO, is how the intelligence is interpreted, and what action follows from that. You made a lot of assumptions about what would or would not have happened with adequate intelligence. But that is all they are, assumptions. Specially, since at best, a lot of intelligence gathering still requires guess work about the mindsets of those on the other side.
Also, nobody has stated at anytime that the oppressive regimes of Stalin, Mao and others have not killed a lot of people. Hilzoy and others have just chosen not to get into a debate about numbers, which is hardly a dismissal of the issue.
You have a lot of knowledge and you impart it, but sometimes with a very superior attitude and condescension. It would be nice if you just lowered the level a little.
What I see as being more problematic than superior attitude and condescension is the sense of mania I get when reading your writings, uc. I’m not trying to be insulting, just honest. It’s really not even problematic for me. It’s a little exhilarating, really, for me. I could see it being a problem for most other readers.
All I know is that I’m getting out of here before Gary wanders by 🙂
Hitler was a left-winger, a progressive who brought “National Socialism” to Germany. He wasn’t right wing at all, in fact, for a considerable time he was an ally of Stalin. There was jubilation in Moscow when Paris fell to the Nazis… Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Peron were all leftists, saying over and over and over that what they were doing was for the people.
Oh. My. God.
I can’t speak to your professional capacity, but for the love of God learn some history before you comment again.
Yeah, and Thatcher was an anarchist.
Keeh-rist.
Paging dr ngo…
The main authors of the Black Book were not just left but (former) communists themselves (and not in the way that neocons are ex-left).
There is also a black book of capitalism but to my knowledge it is several levels below in quality.
There is also now a second part of the BBoCom (I own it but have not read it yet)
Anarch owes me a Coke.
Hitler purged the left wing of his party in the Röhm Affair. Right wing dictators also usually claim to do what they do for the best of the country, nothing specifically leftish here.
Hitler was a left-winger, a progressive who brought “National Socialism” to Germany. He wasn’t right wing at all… .
If Jonah Goldberg would quit posting here under pseudonyms, he could get his stupid book finished faster.
Oddly enough, I didn’t say that Hitler was on the right, just that he was anti-Communist. I am aware that there is a sort of tenuous ancestral link between him and one school of earlier socialists. Similarly, links between him and a lot of reactionaries. I don’t see much value in trying to place him on a spectrum I don’t much care for anyways, but fwiw, I’d place him on the right.
And, speaking of genocide, Slacktivist linked to the Eight Stages of Genocide and pointed out that all eight have already begun in Iraq.
DJ: I disagree. I think that after the barracks bombing, we should have bombed terrorist training camps in the Beka’a valley. There were a number of them, and their locations were fairly well known.
Assuming one could hit those targets without killing civilians, fine. Though I think it was the US that took the first shots. We were taking sides in someone else’s civil war and that’s what triggered the attack on the US. That deserves a mention, I think.
More importantly, I think it’s odd that the car bomb attack mentioned in one of your links (“countermanded”) though not in your post seems to get so little attention. Your post is not the first time I’ve seen people on the left criticize Reagan for cutting and running from Lebanon and it has always annoyed me, because it plays to the national hypocrisy on terrorism (and also I can’t help thinking that Democrats like to talk tough and criticize Republicans for being wimps). The US was linked to a group that set off a car bomb that killed 80 people. Who gets to bomb whom as a result of that attack?
I think the answer to that question is supposed to be that nobody should be bombed, because we are a democracy and we can police ourselves, investigating the incident and putting people in jail if appropriate. No need to risk innocent lives being lost in a military strike . Except that nothing of the sort seems to have happened. McFarlane didn’t seem to know who was responsible, though he seemed inclined to blame the conveniently deceased Casey. It seems to have come as a shock that supporting a covert operation carrried out by a Lebanese faction might result in an act of terrorism . Fancy that, in the midst of a vicious civil war. And the interviewer lets him get away with this crap. Americans are either the dumbest effing people on the planet or the most weaselly.
Anyway if you are going to revisit Reagan’s Lebanon policy and criticize him for not blasting away at terrorists like a red-blooded American should, you should also mention the fact that his Administration was linked in some way to a car bomb attack.
matttbastard: I’m sorry, you never officially said “jinx”.
…which reminds me: jinx! You owe me Coke! 😀
My contention that intelligence is a vital and civilized function has wholly and entirely unrebutted — silence implies acquiescence – so I win the discussion
My contention is that silence is, not acquiescence, but the only reasonable way to deal with an obsessive autodidact flailing around beyond his depth. So, wholly and entirely unrebutted, *I* win.
OMG, I just broke silence. I lose.
But not to you.
He wasn’t right wing at all, in fact, for a considerable time he was an ally of Stalin.
Well, for that matter, so were we.
When the subjects under discussion are Hitler, Stalin, and their ilk, I’m not sure “left” and “right” are useful categories.
Are the operations of government transparent, are government actors and institutions accountable to the people governed, does the state use force or the threat of force to establish and preserve power. I think these are the important questions.
Transparency, accountability, respect for the integrity of the individual human person. Given that, “left” and “right” are, IMO, just a way of describing particular points within a generally acceptable continuum.
It may be true that Stalin and Mao killed millions more than Hitler, but I’m not sure what relevance that fact has for comparisons of “left” and “right”. There are more people in Russia and China than there are in Germany, or in Western Europe in general. Stalin and Mao had, unfortunately for the folks they governed, bigger sandboxes to play in.
On Reagan:
Reagan deserves credit for ignoring the advice of his advisors and pursuing, directly and personally, a rapprochement with Gorbachev.
Reagan deserves all of the criticism he receives for his policies in Central and South America, for Iran-Contra, and for his knee-jerk instinct for deregulation no matter what the consequences. I could probably think of some more stuff, but I’ll stop there.
He was an idealogue, with all of the downsides that come along with that. He was a nice guy, a generally decent guy, and as noted he didn’t take the many criticisms of his persona or policies personally. Compared to GW, he was a giant. But I’m not sure he was really that great of a President.
Wherever he is now, if anywhere, I wish him well, but to be honest I don’t miss him.
Thanks –
But not to you.
Nope. I’ve owned your ass for far too long for anyone else to claim it.
…metaphorically speaking.
Anarch: “…metaphorically speaking.”
— The thirteenth amendment breathes a sigh of relief…
I’d like to take this moment to apologize to DaveC, or rather to acknowlege one of his merits.
DaveC: I’m no more enthusiastic about your recent posts than the last time I commented on them. But Urban Coyote’s posts make me fresh appreciate your brevity. Thank you for being clear and focused. It makes the comments more enjoyable to read.
Anarch: “…metaphorically speaking.”
What happened to the War on Metaphor? Did I miss the memo?
Wasn’t that the war on methadon? 😉
More war on speed, I fear.
If we’re going to argue about the number of people killed by communism versus capitalism, consider that communist countries have usually made both contraception and abortion easily available, and in china both have been mandatory. So they have tended to have lower population growths. They have killed many millions of the unborn.
On the other hand, in capitalist south america contraception and abortion have been discouraged, and they have had high birth rates resulting in pathetic standards of living and a lot of premature death. Surely capitalism should be blamed for this too.
Maybe it doesn’t always make sense to blame ideologies for the things their followers do in their names. Certainly christians want to avoid blaming christianity for the various unchristian things that various self-proclaimed christians have done.
Perhaps mass death is sometimes a matter of logistics. We blame Pol Pot for the cambodian genocide, but remember that they simply did not have the food. And part of the reason they didn’t have food was our airstrikes etc. When it was obvious that cambodia was in trouble we tried to set up the Lon Nol government with the claim that we would feed cambodians who supported it. But we didn’t get the food shipments running in time — before the end they were feeding their soldiers half a cup of rice a day. We could have fed the Khmer rouge if they would only surrender, but they did not surrender. So we dumped a whole lot of rice in thailand etc for pennies to the pound, around 10% of the world market rate, because we’d been planning to send it to cambodia but we changed our minds.
When the choice is surrender versus impose careful rationing and maximise food production, is it any wonder they chose the latter?
Hitler’s genocide came at a time they didn’t have sufficient transportation to feed the loyal germans. They lacked the troops to guard the work camps they had. They hadn’t been nice people, slowly working people to death before, but the death camps came when their only better choice was to surrender and let us feed them. And we didn’t make surrender easy for them, we wanted it unconditional and we promised to hang the leaders at the very least.
Not that I’m excusing genocide. Just, given obviously awful alternatives sometimes it might seem like a good idea at the time.
If sometime in the future people are telling us that we should have known that our strategy in iraq was genocidal, and that we should have known the goal involved killing not hundreds of thousands but millions of people, we can of course respond “But I voted for Democrats. It wasn’t my fault.”.
It’s often unjustified to blame ideologies for things their proponents do. Individual blame for collective actions can come out pretty callous too.
Hitler’s genocide came at a time they didn’t have sufficient transportation to feed the loyal germans. They lacked the troops to guard the work camps they had.
JThomas, what are you talking about? The death camps began their work in early 1942, at the high-water mark of German conquest.
The Einsatzgruppen were committing genocide in the summer of 1941.
And some of the camps, e.g. Dachau, had been running since 1933. IIRC, Goebbels in particular used Mauthausen (built 1938) as his personal “cleaner”, sending his political enemies to be worked to death there. And that goal wasn’t born of accident or indifference; the simple, straightforward intent was that these people be squeezed of every last drop of their life before being killed by exhaustion.
[IIRC, Mauthausen was also the camp Goebbels used for the torture of his enemies before their death, but it’s been a while and I never really sourced that claim.]
And FWIW, the “death vans” were in circulation by late 41, euthanizing the mentally ill, certain kinds of undesirables and, most grotesquely of all, soldiers who were too sick or crippled to rejoin the war effort. The death camps were (at first) nothing but concentration camps with large-scale permanent death vans; it wasn’t until a bit later that the quantity of the dead became a quality all its own.
I’ve studied geopolitics all my life, and I’m not young anymore. If that sounds offensive and arrogant to you, I can live with that. I’m not trying to sell you anything here. My talents lie elsewhere. I had a long career in “unselling,” which is to say, auditing.
A lot of people who are politically on the left are sympathetic with socialism, the idea that government should own the “means of production.” They’ve come up with a myth that Hitler couldn’t possibly have been one of those people.
But “Nazi” = NASDAP = National German SOCIALIST Workers Party. That means nationalistic socialism. Some people understood exactly what this meant and left Germany right away — Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich, for example. I think they ran away even before the Reichstag fire.
Fascist = bundling together (of wheat).
The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist. That’s wrong. The second “S” in USSR stands for Socialism. In 1969, the USSR and PRC got into a furious fight over an island in the river that forms part of their border. They rattled nukes at each other. The Soviet press in Moscow started talking about the yellow hordes and their danger to civilization — etc — just like Goebbels.
Hitler had a propaganda advantage over the Soviets in that he was duly elected. So was Juan Peron in Argentina. The single most likely path to power for national socialism through an honest election is a financial crisis that leads to hyper-inflation. That kind of anarchy as a result of a government destabilizing its own currency (and therefore losing authority) is an environment where nationalistic socialism starts to sound reasonable.
So fascism is unlikely in America as long as the national budget is balanced and USA politicians don’t make promises that run up unfunded liabilities (which eventually get “paid” by running the printing press).
The great heros who stopped Hitler, really, were the Republicans back in the 1920’s. By paying down the national debt and keeping government small, the USA was so financially strong that it weathered a depression and still had the credibility to ramp up its borrowing, at low interest rates, to an amazing 200% of GDP to defeat national socialism in Europe and right-wing authoritarianism in imperial Japan — simultaneously.
Neither Hitler nor Tojo were good accountants. They lost.
The mistake we made was keeping the USSR as a partner after 1945. Patton was right about that. It led to an Orwellian cold war for decades that was ended, really, by the geomilitary genius of Thatcher (necessarily assisted by the materiel modernization and salesmanship of Reagan, her partner).
Since psychopathology is a naturally occurring phenomenon, the world is always incubating potential dictators. As civilized people, it behooves us to be at peace as much of the time as possible, to make sure government is a slowly sinking part of GDP in such good times (“The era of big government is over” –Bill Clinton, 1996), and to avoid long-term unfunded government obligations like poison they turn into.
That way we’ll have the financial stability and resources to kill the psychopathic beast when it next lurches out of the lagoon.
As for smaller military conflicts, we need to avoid them when possible. Unavoidable? Then rabbit-punch a blitzkreig victory immediately (like the Falklands by the UK in 1982 and Grenada by the USA in 1983). Threw away a cease-fire and had to go back, like Iraq? Rabbit-punch, partition, and leave. Our long-term, brutal under-occupation and garrisoning of Iraq is supporting the trend toward genocide. Like Jimmy Carter, I think it’s the biggest foreign policy mistake ever. I agree with Jesurgislac (!) that our badly planned Iraqi nation-building is, in fact, support of a trend toward sectarian genocide.
Neither Hitler nor Tojo were good accountants. They lost.
Could you explain what Tojo has to do with socialism?
“But “Nazi” = NASDAP = National German SOCIALIST Workers Party.”
And for his next trick, urban coyote will explain how the German Democratic Republic a/k/a East Germany was really democratic.
The great heros who stopped Hitler, really, were the Republicans back in the 1920’s.
Who not only had the good sense to pay down the debt, but helped create the climate conditions that allowed the River Volga to freeze each winter.
They were totally awesome.
Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.
“Patton was right about that.”
How far into the Russian steppes did Patton get in this Allied invasion of the Soviet Union that Patton was right about? Or was he bogged down in eastern Poland? I can’t remember.
Nuking Peking now will save us from doing it later. Mark my words. Especially if I’m right. If I’m not right … never mind.
I thought the USSR was Republican. It says so at the end.
The whole Nazis were really socialist thing is so boring anyway. There’s more than one way to reach an extreme totalitarian position and start murdering millions of people–in fact, you can bypass the totalitarian part and still murder millions of people. There are also lefties who say that the USSR was really a rightwing dictatorship. It’s just a way of pretending that nothing even vaguely close to one’s own political position could turn rancid.
And J Thomas, you seem to have dug yourself into a bit of a hole there. Just put the shovel down and climb back out.
The great heros who stopped Hitler, really, were the Republicans back in the 1920’s
Tell it to my uncle Cecil. His bones are bleaching away in a wheatfield in Belgium somewhere.
Or my old man, who spent four years belowdecks on troop transports in the Pacific. Or my father in law, who spent his war tramping around the Phillipines.
Or my mother in law, who spent the war bolting together Corsairs in Akron.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
And, for the record, fasces are a bundle of birch rods, not wheat. Mussolini’s appropriation of fasces as a symbol is an allusion to Rome, where they were a symbol of official authority.
Thanks –
Donald: And J Thomas, you seem to have dug yourself into a bit of a hole there. Just put the shovel down and climb back out.
To be fair, it was one comment followed by a pile-on of corrections: it’s entirely possible J Thomas (who hasn’t struck me as being an unreasonable person) is off somewhere having a stiff drink or a chocolate sundae or hugging his teddybear as he tries to cope with the ObWing equivalent of a hamster-pile, which is kind of spikier and less fun.
“A lot of people who are politically on the left are sympathetic with socialism, the idea that government should own the “means of production.”
Please provide names and cites of any that are leaders of the Democratic Party or have any semblance of power in this country at all. And remember, you said “a lot” which more than a few. I personally have never met anyone with that view.
The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Not to pile on for it’s own sake, but I can honestly say that I have never, ever, ever heard that assumption expressed, or even alluded to, by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in my entire life. And I’ve known some pretty wild-haired lefties over the years.
Not once.
You have some interesting things to say, but you really lose credibility when you come out with statements like this.
Thanks –
Donald, I don’t think I was out of line. Reagan was acting like early-stage alzheimers. What made it less than completely obvious was that as President mostly nobody got to hold him to account — he could hold *them* to account. When his attention wandered it was their responsibility to make their presentations in ways that would hold his attention. If he listened to them and agreed with everything and then 2 hours later he’d forgotten it all and was right back to the same old cliches, that was just Reagan being Reagan.
It isn’t exactly definitive — it’s still hard to accurately diagnose early-stage today, isn’t it? I don’t mind if some people disagree with me about it, particularly when they really really don’t want to believe it. It didn’t seem like a big pileup to me. Nothing to get upset about.
J Thomas, I was referring to the notion you seem to be expressing that the Nazis killed people in the camps largely because of wartime logistics. Ah, no. I also think you let Pol Pot off a little too easy, though it is true that Cambodia was on the brink of famine when the Khmer Rouge took over. But I gather they only made things worse. I’m perfectly willing to blame the US for enormous numbers of Cambodian deaths (no link handy, but Ben Kiernan recently published an article in the Canadian magazine called The Walrus where he says the bomb tonnage dropped was five times greater than previously known). But I don’t think more than a small fraction of the 1.7 million deaths under Pol Pot can be blamed primarily on the US. Kissinger and Nixon have quite enough blood on their hands as it is.
Not to forget that Reagan became president at almost 70. There are many people without Alzheimer that turn a bit senile at that age. In his second term he was not actually younger despite entering the second childhood 😉
And as mentioned above, the unused parts stop working properly first. The acting held, the thinking probably not. For comparision the German chancellor Adenauer (who took office with 73 years) quit, when he noticed that his short-term memory began to fail (he died at nearly the same age as Reagan).
J Thomas, I was referring to the notion you seem to be expressing that the Nazis killed people in the camps largely because of wartime logistics
That argument could be made a *little* more plausibly about the Russian POWs in 1941-42, but still, to the Germans, that was a feature, not a bug.
The Wannsee Conference was pretty explicit that the Jews would be worked/starved to death, with the survivors simply executed. Of course, even that turned out to be less horrible than the death camps.
Russell: The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Not to pile on for it’s own sake, but I can honestly say that I have never, ever, ever heard that assumption expressed, or even alluded to, by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in my entire life. And I’ve known some pretty wild-haired lefties over the years.
Not once.
You have some interesting things to say, but you really lose credibility when you come out with statements like this.
Response: Pravda was talking about the Chinese in a racist way in Moscow in 1969 when war clouds were gathering. I was in China itself in 2005 and a lot of good, well-connected party people have a furious and bitter hatred of the Japanese. It’s insulting to have to listen to such racism. And even the British Labor party was pretty nationalistic from May of 1940 to July of 1945. That’s why Clement Atlee won the parliamentary election in August of 1945. There’s a left-wing lawyer out in Honolulu who wants Hawaiian independence and is pretty nationalistic, as an atypical example, but, in general, nowadays, wild-haired lefties in the USA don’t talk that way unless they are rap singers.
Waving the flag or demonizing opponents is very common for politicians under stress, including leftists. If I were fluent in Spanish, I could probably get you some juicy, current quotes from Venezuela along these lines.
=====
John Miller: “A lot of people who are politically on the left are sympathetic with socialism, the idea that government should own the “means of production.”
Please provide names and cites of any that are leaders of the Democratic Party or have any semblance of power in this country at all. And remember, you said “a lot” which more than a few. I personally have never met anyone with that view.
Response: I didn’t say American leftists holding political office – they don’t use a poison word like “socialist” to describe themselves. I’ve paid strict attention to some of the things discussed in the Social Security and Medicare subcommittees on C-SPAN, and they are very careful about how their couch their questions and positions.
The French socialists just lost an election, but they got millions of votes. I believe they are still traditional socialists. The Russians still have a socialist party that wants to go back to owning the coal mines, railroad, electricity generation, etc. In China, the means of production are in fact all still owned entirely or in majority stock by the “people” or a government agency. And party officials sit on all corporate boards. Party officials also gossip about employees, and anyone seen as politically different gets fired.
I said a “lot of people” not “most liberal Americans today.” For a very long time, until the mid-90’s, owning the means of production was the central element of socialism. Tony Blair changed that in the UK. I think public ownership is still the test for the left in France, Italy and Germany. I know it is for Russian leftists and for the one-party PRC. The leaders of the American Democratic party all furiously support socialism in fact (Medicare and Social Security) and all 2008 democratic candidates support “universal health care,” a strictly socialist notion, but none of them label it with the inflammatory title, “socialist.”
So in response to Russell’s statement that he has never heard anyone assume socialists can’t be racist or nationalist, UC comes up with… examples of socialists being racist or nationalist. Unsurprising, one might conclude, because NO ONE ASSUMES THEY CAN’T BE.
Liberal Japonicus: And for his next trick, urban coyote will explain how the German Democratic Republic a/k/a East Germany was really democratic.
A “the people aka the proleteriat” owned everything –making it “democratic.”
========
Dantheman: Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.
A “the people aka the proleteriat” own everything, making it “democratic.”
==============
John Thullen: “Patton was right about that.”
How far into the Russian steppes did Patton get in this Allied invasion of the Soviet Union that Patton was right about? Or was he bogged down in eastern Poland? I can’t remember.
Nuking Peking now will save us from doing it later. Mark my words. Especially if I’m right. If I’m not right … never mind.
A: Patton died right after he said that, and he was right, war between the USSR and USA was inevitable. The conflict stayed “cold,” but lasted about 45 years.
Peking and the PRC seem to be the center of long-term Pentagon planning at this time. Looks like DoD is expecting a military conflict with them approximately in the 2020’s. Personally, I think it would be better if China and Japan got into a war, that way our biggest creditors would be fighting each other.
=======
Russell: The great heros who stopped Hitler, really, were the Republicans back in the 1920’s
Tell it to my uncle Cecil. His bones are bleaching away in a wheatfield in Belgium somewhere.
Or my old man, who spent four years belowdecks on troop transports in the Pacific. Or my father in law, who spent his war tramping around the Phillipines.
Or my mother in law, who spent the war bolting together Corsairs in Akron.
A: I’m sorry your uncle Cecil died in Belgium. That troop transport your father was on was easy to build fast because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920’s. Your mother in law’s salary and the money for Corsairs also was easy to get because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920’s.
When has a country with a sound currency lost a general war? I can’t think of one. Well, the USA lost Vietnam while we still had a balance of payments surplus – which is why the blunder didn’t damage us much geopolitically.
Be that as it may, the USA is now the world’s biggest debtor and engaged in a long occupation in Iraq. “Not wise,” speaking as an accountant. There’s a nasty, general war about every 60 to 80 years, so it is profoundly prudent to shrink government and pay off debt in the good times. That was smart management in the 1920’s. We’re not doing that now.
I’m sorry, but I didn’t say what you attribute to me. My question was how Tojo’s poor accountancy skills fit into any sort of model of socialism. If you believe that Tojo was some sort of mastermind for the Greater East Asian Co=Prosperity Sphere, please disabuse yourself of the notion.
Also, while I would be interested in hearing about your experiences in China, assigning the western notions or a western origin of ‘socialism’ to Chinese labor practices and social structures as if they were the root of the concept is incredibly ethnocentric and naive.
You seem to be getting confused about who is saying what, which is certainly not completely your fault, as the hits keep coming, but you might consider refocussing your points.
j thomas: As others have noted, you really need to update your Cambodian history and stop letting the Khmer Rouge off the hook for genocide.
Yes, things were terrible before 1975. Yes, there was an immediate food shortage that had to be dealt with. The view that these factors explained the death toll, even exonerated (to some extent) the KR, was found among many Asianists in the late 1970s, including Ben Kiernan (and, far less publicly, myself), and was picked up by others on the left, most famously Noam Chomsky.
From 1979 onward – if not before – we learned better. We learned about S-21 (Tuol Sleng), the Phnom Penh school where 14,000 prisoners entered and 7 (not 7,000 – seven) came out alive, and we know this because the KR, like the Nazis, kept meticulous records on file cards, with names, photographs, details of bogus “confessions,” and facts of death (usually crushed in the head with rifle butts, to save a bullet). And much much more.
No threat of starvation can come close to explaining this. No longer can we believe – as I once did – that things simply could not be as bad as they appeared, that some of the apparent “evil” must be due to unreliable evidence (refugee accounts) or deliberate distortions by enemies of the regime. It really was that horrible, and those of us who believed otherwise were forced to revise our opinions.
Ben Kiernan made his public recantation – rare for an academic, as you may know – soon after (in Journal of Contemporary Asia, IIRC) and went on to direct the Cambodian Genocide project at Yale, which is now a (global) Genocide Study Program. I had lunch with him not long ago. He’s the #1 source on this period, if you want to know what really happened, but others are also good, including my friend David Chandler.
There may be some apparent “genocides” that can be explained away, at least in part, by the terrible circumstances in which the perpetrators found themselves. Democratic Kampuchea is not one of them.
Democratic Kampuchea is not one of them.
Aha! Democracies can’t be trusted after all!
I was referring to the notion you seem to be expressing that the Nazis killed people in the camps largely because of wartime logistics.
I see. This is one of those nuanced things.
How much better were the russian camps than the early german concentration camps? They also worked a lot of people to death. One big difference was that they didn’t supervise prisoners as much, and so didn’t so actively prevent them from growing adequate food. In some cases.
Germany had a food shortage and had to reduce the ration in early 1941. They got a breather in 1942 by taking food from eastern countries, notably russia. The food they took came from others’ mouths, others who had to starve. It was official policy to starve unneeded people of all sorts, particularly of course their enemies — and I argue that this was necessary and not just ideological, that they had to take the food. Then they could rationalise however they wanted about the people who must die.
I claim a difference between the labor camps — where they worked people to death with inadequate food, rather as the russians did — versus the six death camps where they made an attempt to kill large numbers quickly. The former started early and provided implicit revenge for the work-starvation germany suffered soon after WWI. The latter did not start until there were already serious food shortages and stopped when germany could no longer afford the resources to run them.
With the starvation etc 20+ million civilians disappeared in eastern europe during the war. The nazis could not have fed those people without making some sort of arrangement to let them peacefully grow food and distribute it. I don’t know what that would have taken, but it didn’t happen. It took several years after the war for food production to be adequately restored.
I don’t consider this a justification for death camps, or for that matter for work-to-death camps. I’m saying that the nazis consciously realised they had a major food crisis to deal with and that responding to that crisis was a central part of what they were doing. They would have done better to negotiate a surrender. Except — negotiate a surrender with Stalin? It’s easy to imagine them thinking that would not have been better. And given the mindsets involved it would have been hard for them to negotiate a surrender with the USA until we at least had an invading army in the continent of europe. And we refused to negotiate a separate surrender, leaving them to face Stalin regardless.
I’m not saying they were justified in their bad choices when I note that all their alternatives were real bad too. Just — it must have really sucked to be them.
J: The Nazi policy of racial extermination was completely outlined and set in motion before any food shortages. This is the crucial thing. At no point in the proceedings leading up to the decision to begin implementing genocide is there any presence of concern about conserving scarce resources for the Aryans; it was about extermination as an end in itself.
It would have sucked much less to be them, most likely, if they hadn’t killed or driven off so many of their sharpest thinkers and hardest workers.
urban coyote: I’ve studied geopolitics all my life, and I’m not young anymore.
Congratulations. You’re still wrong.
But “Nazi” = NASDAP = National German SOCIALIST Workers Party.
First things first: if you’re going to try to lay an intellectual smackdown on someone, get your facts right. The party’s acronym was NSDAP, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, not NASDAP (which sounds like the predecessor to the NASDAQ).
[And yes, I knew the term without looking it up. Comes of, y’know, actually having studied them.]
That means nationalistic socialism.
No, it doesn’t: it means “national socialism”. If you want nationalistic socialism, modern China’s probably the closest example.
And the “socialism” in “national socialism” doesn’t mean what you think, anyway. Anton Drexler might or might not have agreed with your definition, but that’s not what the term meant under Hitler’s aegis, as any student of German history can tell you. Consider, for example, Hitler’s belief in the free market (suitably subject to his will, natch) versus Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks.
[As an aside, when the Nazis were campaigning in the 1920s they would deliberately exaggerate certain words/phrases in the title of their party at rallies. Thus, at a farmer’s rally they’d write “NATIONAL socialist GERMAN WORKERS party”, while at a factory in Berlin they’d write “national SOCIALIST german WORKERS party”, and in the hallowed halls of business they’d write “NATIONAL socialist GERMAN workers PARTY”. Goebbels may have been evil to the core, but he knew what he was doing.]
What communitarian/collectivist tendencies the Nazis had derived from their adherence to the Fuhrerprinzip and the notion of volk. [viz “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer”.] Ideologically, this has nothing whatsoever to with Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist or Maoist Communism; the closest you can come is Lenin’s notion of the vanguard party, and even then (in theory) it was intended as a means to inculcate revolutionary thought amongst the proletariat, not channel all existential power to the Chairman/Fuhrer. If you’re looking for a pat, one-sentence summation, the similarities between Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany derive from the fact that there are only so many ways power can accumulate in a totalitarian regime, not from any underlying ideological similarities.
[And citing the alliance of Hitler and Stalin as proof of their common socialism… give me a fnording break. Jesus.]
Some people understood exactly what this meant and left Germany right away — Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich, for example.
No, they understood what Nazi meant. I’ll be damn surprised if you can find a cite from either of them complaining specifically about the Nazi’s “socialist” aspects.
I think they ran away even before the Reichstag fire.
Checking Wikipedia, assuming that it can be trusted, Fritz Lang left in 1930-31 due in part to rising Nazi influence, while Marlene Dietrich left in 1930 to pursue a career in Hollywood. So yes, they left before the Reichstag fire — even before the greatest Nazi electoral successes — but it’s more complicated than you’re making it out to be.
The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Ok, I’ll call your bluff: name for me any person here who believes this. Citations are required.
At no point in the proceedings leading up to the decision to begin implementing genocide is there any presence of concern about conserving scarce resources for the Aryans; it was about extermination as an end in itself.
To add to what you said: this goes back to the late 30s with Mauthausen which had the specific purpose of working people to death, long before any German famine. It wasn’t technically part of the Holocaust proper but it prefigured the slaughter to come.
Dr. Ngo, I was not at all excusing the khmer rouge for their actions. However, I don’t see what 14,000 prisoners have to do with the mass starvation.
It still appears to me that they had an insoluble problem. The food wasn’t there and the gasoline wasn’t there. How could they feed cities without food or transportation? Any plan to minimise starvation would have required them either to surrender and hope we fed them, or move the urban populations out to grow food by hand labor and impose strict rationing. I don’t see a third alternative for them.
In practice they regarded the urban population as their enemies, and they did face a degree of resistance. Clamping down on that resistance left them killing lots of suspected insurgents. Then by the second year they appeared to not be particularly competent at managing mass agriculture, and then they got invaded….
Again, I’m not trying to justify what they did. My question is, suppose their goal had been to minimise the death rate without surrender. What do you suppose the death rate would have been? My guess is that if they had been very competent they could have avoided many of the deaths after the first year. If they could have avoided killing insurgents and running purges then after that time the excess deaths would come from inadequate medical care which they could not provide without foreign assistance.
So instead of maybe 1.7 million excess deaths, could it have been as low as 700,000? A million? The first year’s famine and the diseases that kill starving people surely had a big role. The 200,000+ killed for allegedly opposing the government might have been avoided, but how much of the rest? Maybe they could have gotten significant foreign assistance without a surrender. I don’t know.
Again, I’m not saying not to blame them. I’m saying they had hard choices where a lot of people were going to die whatever they chose. Maybe they’d have done better not to fight in the first place, but that would still have left them stuck with the vietnamese.
The Nazi policy of racial extermination was completely outlined and set in motion before any food shortages. This is the crucial thing. At no point in the proceedings leading up to the decision to begin implementing genocide is there any presence of concern about conserving scarce resources for the Aryans; it was about extermination as an end in itself.
Bruce, this is another of those nuanced things. The death camp implementation decision came after germany had a food crisis.
There’s a saying that in war, amateurs discuss tactics while professionals discuss logistics.
The german high command was reasonably good about logistics. You aren’t talking about tactics, you’re talking about ideology.
J: I’ll just drop this. I find the argument you’re making both poorly justified by history and awesomely dangerous morally.
Even the death camps had their attached factories. Auschwitz was a double camp with the working to death in one and the gassing in the other. Those who did not die in the “work” camp were transferred to the pure extermination section later. What made the death camps different was the “efficient” killing by cyanide gas after the older methods (shooting, carbon monoxide) turned out to be inefficient and too stressful for the perpetrators.
Actually the death camp logistics were more harmful to the war effort than the old ways. Although there is no unanimous consent between historians, the opinion that Hitler wanted to “finish the job” before the war situation would put a stop to it has quite a following. There are also hints that Hitler/Himmler believed/feared that it was a now or never situation and that the Holocaust could not be executed in peace time and would have to be stopped like the early euthanasia (that was then restarted in secret during the war).
The “useless eaters” argument was publicly leveled against allegedly deficient “Aryan” Germans, not typically against Jews (cf. e.g. German school textbooks of the time with arithmetic problme of the type “How many Aryan families can you feed with the money wasted for mental asylums?”).
J, what Bruce said.
Hartmut, this is a minor detail but there’s a lot of reason to think that not many people were killed by cyanide in german death camps. Cyanide is expensive and dangerous. It had been used to kill relatively small numbers of handicapped people etc. This is not particularly important — the people at the death camps winded up dead whether it was by cyanide or not.
I agree that the whole thing wasted resources the war effort needed. They had killed over a million jews and some very large number of other civilians on the eastern front simply by shooting them. They made a big deal of impressing concentration camp guards that the inmates were not worth a bullet, but the expense of collecting them and transporting them and guarding them was probably more — I suppose it would take a good accountant to total up the details, maybe UC will do that for us.
While the nazis had plans to systematically kill 30-50 million slaves, they didn’t get around to transporting them to camps. All they did was to confiscate as much of the food as they could find, which tended to serve the same purpose but gave them a large no-man’s-land they needed to convoy through toward the front. The surviving cannibals behind german lines would sometimes manage a force large enough to take out a german supply convoy.
urban coyote,
“Liberal Japonicus [actually Dantheman]: And for his next trick, urban coyote will explain how the German Democratic Republic a/k/a East Germany was really democratic.
A “the people aka the proleteriat” owned everything –making it “democratic.”
========
Dantheman: Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.
A “the people aka the proleteriat” own everything, making it “democratic.””
Thus proving that you have no clue what democracy means (hint — ownership of means of production has nothing to do with it, and forms of choosing leaders does), I am cutting off debate with you.
urban coyote, I now formally take back one of my earlier statements to you about your having a lot of knowledge. You may in some areas but since I find you either responding in non sequitors or responding with statements that are quickly refuted as being false, I think it more approrpiate you either do stick to your field of “expertise” or phrase your wording as expressing your opinions rather than facts.
J, I think you’ve phrased things very badly and you are taking one argument about what happened in Cambodia that I’d make myself and transforming it into something I don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to ask how many people might have continued to die in Cambodia in the immediate postwar period even if it had been run by Oxfam, but it’s the way you put yourself in the shoes of the Khmer Rouge leadership and talk about their tough choices that really grates on people (or me, anyway). These guys weren’t struggling with moral dilemmas. They took a situation where Cambodia was on the brink of starvation and imposed a deliberate policy of genocide on top of that. What’s driving me batty in your posts is stuff like the following–
“Again, I’m not saying not to blame them. I’m saying they had hard choices where a lot of people were going to die whatever they chose. Maybe they’d have done better not to fight in the first place, but that would still have left them stuck with the vietnamese.”
I started to parse that line by line, but deleted it, because I think you mean well and simply don’t know how obscene that sounds. Basically the problem here is that you acknowledge in a perfunctory way that yes, it was bad for the Khmer Rouge to deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of people, but gosh, they had tough choices and a lot of people would have died no matter what. Well, yes, but you do see that choosing to commit genocide in these circumstances means that many hundreds of thousands more died than would have died otherwise. You do see that, don’t you?
I’m guessing the point you are trying to make is that the US bears much of the blame for what happened to Cambodia. Our bombing campaign probably killed tens or hundreds of thousands directly and created a situation where Cambodia was on the brink of famine, with thousands dying of malnutrition every month during the closing phases of the war. The bombing also recruited for the Khmer Rouge. But you could make this point without sounding like someone sympathetic to the purely hypothetical dilemmas faced by the Khmer Rouge leadership, as though they were trying to minimize suffering after the war. This is both wrong and offensive and it gets in the way of any legitimate point you might be trying to make.
BTW, your figures for the number of Khmer Rouge executions is probably low. Vickery (whose numbers are low at 700,000 excess deaths) thinks the number of executions was 300,000 and I think Kiernan estimates it at about half or more of the total (which he says was 1.7 million).
Concerning the killing of Slaves (not slaves), that was not a first priority for Hitler. He even welcomed a permanent partisan problem (after the war) because it would keep the German settlers in Eastern Europe from becoming soft. Additionally the Ural was envisioned as a “bleeding border” where the German youth would learn the trade of war.
The true extermination camps were for the “final solution of the Jewish question” (add the Gypsies). The mass death of civilians in the East were indeed more a “we feed our own first and the natives can have what remains” than a “genocide now” measure.
The switch to cyanide was due to the mentioned problems of stress and inefficiency of killing by hand (and the low reliability of CO) as can be read in the internal discussions. Even the Einsatzgruppen showed signs of mental breakdown after a while (Himmler himself could not stomach the view of the mass executions by gun) and this was the main reason that the regular army usually tried to avoid participation (no moral objection but justified fear of undermining morale and discipline).
Btw, nice thread shift from McCains grin over Reagan to the details of Nazi atrocities we have made here.
I’ll get out of the discussion at this point but would be willing to participate in a thread devoted to this (i.e. I do not admit defeat by quitting).
J Thomas, kindly quit making stuff up, or provide us some actual authority for this “food shortages led to the death camps” Nazi-apologist crap.
Anarch said Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich left in 1930 or 1931. That may be right but I’ve read that they were back in Germany and both left for the last time in January of 1933. They were especially after Lang because of his movie, “The Last Testament of Dr. Mabuse.” Dietrich was offered stardom by Hitler’s propaganda industry and left the country instead! That’s what I’ve read.
Anarch:The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Ok, I’ll call your bluff: name for me any person here who believes this. Citations are required.
Response: I’m sorry, again, Hitler was a socialist and a nationalist. He left some bones and privitization to the corporate chieftains who backed him, yes. But the liberals and socialists went along with making his chancellor because their Party was full of socialist planks and concerns. And Hitler initially governed as a socialist, building the autobahns (which of course had military applications), and funding an unending stream of folk gatherings to celebrate German heritage. Ditto radio programs, especially featuring German classical music. He championed “the people’s car,” the Volkswagen (though he didn’t design nor build it, but then there came the military version, the kubelwagen). And urban planning, including a grand scheme for Berlin. Looks like socialism, acts like socialism, it’s in the title of the party.
I don’t argue that Hitler used socialism as a political prop and foil to himself become a dictator. The “real” socialists who were his political and party allies in the 1920’s were minimized or murdered early on.
Anarch said, “What communitarian/collectivist tendencies the Nazis had derived from their adherence to the Fuhrerprinzip and the notion of volk…” Response: Very cogent and thorough. But I think that’s enough right there to prove my point. The most telling similarity of all is that both Lenin and Hitler talked as collectivists in order to arrogate absolute power to themselves. I don’t think I’m climbing out on a limb to call that a “left-wing” power grab that calls itself socialism and differentiate that with a right-wing power grab, say, Salazar in Portugal or Tojo in Japan.
Common examples of flag-waving nationalistic “socialists” today frequently include Chavez in Venezuela talking about the USA, the PRC talking about Taiwan, Tibet or, very especially, Japan, and Cuba in general. Actual citation of a socialist talking about nationalism: There are BOOKS on this, such as: Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China
By Hung Yongnian Zheng. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
And articles such as this from The New Economy Information Service, “The Other Face Of Nationalism: Cuba and China” by Richard Wilson, September 28, 2000:
“The Cuban ruling class is also without the prop of Marxism. No longer justifying their position as defenders of workers, they “live in exclusive neighborhoods, drive late-model European cars, and often wear Guccis and Rolexes.” Instead, it is in national sovereignty, “the small besieged country” in the face of the colossus of the North where they find loyalty to the present regime. Democratic oppositionists are then tools of American imperialism.
“The rulers in China make a similar appeal. Every issue, for example, touching in any way on Taiwan or Tibet receives heavy play in the press — featured as still another attack on the territorial integrity of China. It is an appeal that finds a deep resonance for many, building on longheld resentments at foreign interference in China’s history. Unlike the Soviet Union in its day, neither China nor Cuba claims to be an international model for export. Any such dreams have long gone. Instead, it is quite the opposite–the ideological appeal is to national independence and self-reliance in an antagonistic world. “
For an hilarious racist rant by the COMMUNISTS against the bourgeois (?!) Chavez in Venezuela, take a look at http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/860/venezuela.html . Yes, the far left screams taunts at other leftists and those shouts devolve to racist arguments against the nationalistic stances of the impure middle class parvenues who are merely pretending socialism.
===============
And both the Soviets and Mao rattled nuclear sabres at each other over Dubrinksy Island in 1969. The party papers, especially Pravda, became not only nationalistic but racist in their rhetoric. A war between these dictatorships would have been to the advantage of the USA, but Nixon intervened on China’s side (!), which started the normalization of Sino-American relations. Doesn’t anyone remember this?!
==============
Dantheman: Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.
A “the people aka the proleteriat” own everything, making it “democratic.””
Thus proving that you have no clue what democracy means (hint — ownership of means of production has nothing to do with it, and forms of choosing leaders does), I am cutting off debate with you.
Response: Calm down, Dantheman. Communists really use language in this manner. The proletariat supposedly owns everything, there’s no property, so a one-party gathering of the propertyless party members is “democratic” and the rubber-stamp congress really is the people speaking, as opposed to the bourgeois corruption of multi-party western governments. Communists talk about one party rule and “dictatorship of the proletariat” as “true” democracy. And that’s what they mean when they title their country with the word, as is done in North Korea and was done in East Germany. That proves that they SUBVERT what democracy means, and that I honestly transcribed that jargon, not that I don’t know the definition.
I won’t even try to get an actual answer to the questions any more.
I have to reiterate my 12:29am comment, only with Anarch rather than Russell in the starring role. Seriously, I feel like we’re debating the crazy guy on the subway here.
Boy, you guys are slow. See mine of 9:18 PM on *Thursday*, above.
OMG, I broke silence again! Shooooot.
For “Thursday,” read “Tuesday.” Two days ago.
Please excuse me while I go out and quietly beat myself over the head with a calendar.
What does Urban Coyote have to do to disabuse you guys of the notion that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist? Man, you guys are thick!
What does Urban Coyote have to do to disabuse you guys of the notion that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist?
I’m thinking he needs to offer each of us a piece of delicious, delicious pie.
Wait, so building the Autobahn is governing like a socialist? By that standard Ike was a damned dirty Red also, what with his interstate highway system and collectivization of industry. Well, okay, he didn’t actually do that last part, but I’m sure he wanted to. After all, those highways show his true colors, don’t they?
I think it’s perfectly legitimate to ask how many people might have continued to die in Cambodia in the immediate postwar period even if it had been run by Oxfam, but it’s the way you put yourself in the shoes of the Khmer Rouge leadership and talk about their tough choices that really grates on people (or me, anyway).
It sounds like it’s a problem of tone. I’ve run into that brfore on this general topic, and I have no idea how to say these obvious things inoffensively. Would you help me? Could you show me howto say it innocuously?
I started to parse that line by line, but deleted it, because I think you mean well and simply don’t know how obscene that sounds. Basically the problem here is that you acknowledge in a perfunctory way that yes, it was bad for the Khmer Rouge to deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of people, but gosh, they had tough choices and a lot of people would have died no matter what. Well, yes, but you do see that choosing to commit genocide in these circumstances means that many hundreds of thousands more died than would have died otherwise. You do see that, don’t you?
No, I don’t. They needed strict rationing and they needed to increase food production. The rationing was far easier with the population in camps. The food production might have been easier that way, though a lot of private plots might have done better. Then they had the problem of staying in control, which at the time meant killing their opponents and potential opponents. Then the planning went wrong and they didn’t notice at first because their local people were falsifying reports –too afraid to tell the truth. And of course the leaders blamed it on saboteurs since they of course wouldn’t accept responsibility themselves. Then they had a purge to get rid of the saboteurs and morale went down even more. There’s nothing particularly novel there. No special choices for genocide, just a lot of people playing CYA and that’s the result.
But it starts with the food supply. They were going to have a famine regardless, and their initial choices were correct for the circumstance. And then each time they failed to produce enough food they had a choice of who would die, not a choice whether to kill people.
Okay, J Thomas, I was trying to offer you a way out, but you just took that shovel and dug yourself in so deep you’d need a firetruck ladder to climb out at this point.
Killing, I don’t know, conservatively 300,000 people (and I mean actual murders, not just excess deaths from starvation and the actual number of deaths from violence might be closer to 1 million), just to stay in power? Gee, who wouldn’t make that decision? A few purges here and there and all of a sudden, before you even know what’s happening, you’ve bludgeoned or shot or otherwise violently killed off the population equivalent of a major city. No choice at all. Gosh, one can only feel sorry for the poor people making the tough decisions.
Whatever. I thought maybe you were just very clumsy with your wording. Maybe not.
J Thomas, kindly quit making stuff up, or provide us some actual authority for this “food shortages led to the death camps” Nazi-apologist crap.
No apologies.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:nm9P1la86eIJ:www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/ZIF%2520Conference/Tanner.doc+1942+nazi+%22food+supply%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=59&gl=us&lr=lang_en
Look at chapter 3 particularly.
“Planning was not on a national but on a continental scale and where agricultural production did not suffice to meet the future needs of Greater Germany the solution was sought in a restructuring not of Germany’s but of Europe’s agriculture.”24 In this strategy, military occupation was directly linked with ecnomic exploitation and in the “Old Reich”, forced food imports were sufficient to avoid severe food shortages until 1944-45. [….] In Hitlers concept of foreign policy, food policy was not an aspect like any others, but the core-element. [….] To be sure, due to difficulties in the occupied countries, the rations had to be cut back already in spring 1941, which lead to annoyance among the german population. The aggression of the USRR in June 1941 brough a temporary relief, but already in 1942 new bottlenecks occured and the political authorities became nervous because they feard a progressive loss of conficence in the “Volk”.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:u7MVnaC3-G8J:www.yale.edu/gsp/publications/Annihila.doc+%22food+supply%22+nazi&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us&lr=lang_en
Plans for the economic exploitation of the occupied territories had been considered in some detail by German civilian and military experts in advance of the invasion. A statement of goals for the upcoming campaign from early May 1941 succinctly noted: “1. The war can only be continued if all armed forces are fed by Russia in the third year of war. 2. There is no doubt that as a result many millions of people will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things necessary for us.”
I don’t see that this is in any way controversial. It only starts to seem special if you interpret the facts in terms of claiming the nazis in some way were justified.
I don’t claim the nazis were in any way justified in what they did. I only claim that they saw no alternative to genocide except surrender. Nor do I see a third alternative they could have taken.
It isn’t a great big stretch to point to our current failing occupation of iraq, in which many of us argue that we must continue our inhumane policies because the only alternative is defeat. They’d far rather dish it out than take it.
urban coyote,
“Communists really use language in this manner.”
Clearly, non-communists do, too. “But “Nazi” = NASDAP = National German SOCIALIST Workers Party. That means nationalistic socialism.”. Again, you are proving to have no clue what you are saying.
Killing, I don’t know, conservatively 300,000 people (and I mean actual murders, not just excess deaths from starvation and the actual number of deaths from violence might be closer to 1 million), just to stay in power? Gee, who wouldn’t make that decision?
It’s a structural thing. In winner-take-all political systems, it isn’t like you lose an election and then put up with your mirror-image running the government for a few years until they lose too.
Lose the government, then you and your supporters can expect to be purged. Lots of deaths for the people you like best. It’s a big deal.
It seemed to happen a lot in communist nations. The nazis did it too. And of course indonesia.
And yet Bush hasn’t done anything like it, beyond early retirement for a handful of generals. When things go badly wrong like Katrina he doesn’t call for a purge to eliminate the saboteurs and wreckers, he says he has complete confidence in the incompetents and then after a long time he fires one person. By truly valuing loyalty he keeps his people loyal. Maybe it’s because we are still so rich.
So if the Jews had won the election, the Nazis would have been sent to camps? I’m not following.
I now have to share this Dutch political cartoon, drawn in Febrary 1983. It is about the upcoming G7 meeting, that has to deal with fighting the economical crisis (=”crisisbestrijding”).
Reagan says; “I don’t know who he is but he says…… build highways….. and…. especially….. arm”
Since I have the book out anyway: this is a cartoon from 1919, depicting the result of the peacetreaty of Versaille.
In those years there was a lot of discussion in the Dutch press about what might be the result of the harsh conditions and wether the Germans would end up seeking revenge.
One last one, because I can’t resist: The caption reads: “Germany’s Future” and in smaller caps: “Freedom: it is written that the woman will give birth to the child in pain”. Hmmmm… birthpangs…. where did I hear that recently?
So if the Jews had won the election, the Nazis would have been sent to camps? I’m not following.
Steve, “the jews” couldn’t have won an election.
The issue in cambodia was a coup or equivalent. If the leadership got the blame for failures, then somebody else might take over and not face a lot of resistance. And the old leadership would have to be kept from causing trouble, and the most reliable way to keep them from doing that is to kill them.
There was some of that in germany too, of course. Rommel was secretly killed partly because he couldn’t prove he hadn’t been in a plot to kill Hitler, but primarily because he was popular enough to lead an opposition.
I don’t justify any of this, and I want to point out that it’s a systemic problem more than an individual moral problem. It’s far easier to make monstrous moral choices when the alternative is that you will be killed and your extended family sent to a concentration camp. It’s easier to make decisions that will result in millions of foreigners dying when the clear alternative is that millions of your citizens will die.
And it’s easy to fall into the trap of valuing loyalty over competence. If you can’t afford to lose, then competent administrators who aren’t on your side are all likely enemies.
So for example, if Bush happened to believe that if there was a Democratic administration in 2008 he would wind up in Gitmo charged with treason, or at the World Court charged with war crimes, how far would you expect him to go to keep that from happening?
Not that he’d be “justified”, but where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?
A little long, but it’s hard to be brief when discussing fascist and socialist ideologies.
urban coyote: Anarch:The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Ok, I’ll call your bluff: name for me any person here who believes this. Citations are required.
Response: I’m sorry, again, Hitler was a socialist and a nationalist.
First, answer the question that was actually asked. This constant evasion is getting annoying.
Second, I’m sorry, again, that you’re wrong.
But the liberals and socialists went along with making his chancellor because their Party was full of socialist planks and concerns.
I don’t know what you mean by “liberal”, but Hitler had no measurable support amongst socialists whatsoever. They had their party — either the Social Democratic Party (the center-left party that ran Germany until the ’33 elections) or the KPD (formerly the Spartakists) — and they restricted their votes thereto. There were converts to Nazism (most notably Goebbels, who really was a socialist [and a nationalist] before his conversion) but the point is that they were converts, not socialists who held their nose and voted for Hitler. [IIRC, Goebbels regarded Hitler with something close to contempt before the late 20s.] Shortly after Hitler’s return, he squashed any and all notions of the Nazis as Communists or Socialists, arguing that Communism/Socialism/Bolshevism — he didn’t really distinguish — was a Jewish plot. That was the whole point of the Reichstag fire, of the assimilation of the Freikorps and the Nazi anti-labor attacks, and of the purges of the 30s (starting with the Night of the Long Knives and working on from there).
And Hitler initially governed as a socialist, building the autobahns (which of course had military applications)…
…which isn’t inherently socialist…
…and funding an unending stream of folk gatherings to celebrate German heritage. Ditto radio programs, especially featuring German classical music.
…which isn’t socialist either.
[You’re also missing the German national exchange program, whose name I don’t remember, that was designed to break down internal German divisions and give rise to a true pan-German nationalism. That’s the closest to a socialist policy the Nazis had.]
This is something that apparently confuses some people, so let me break this down as simply as I can: communitarian != socialist. Socialism is a very specific ideology; in its stronger forms, put simply, it asserts that those who produce should control the means of production, especially in the “heavy industries”. Ultimately the entire world should consist of a proletariat working communally towards a common good, freed of the “tyranny” of private property. Socialism argues that all people — or at least all laborers — are equal regardless of their origins, their race or their nationality. It permits elections as a means of self-organization; social democrats in fact require this, while other non-vanguard socialisms tend to assume that governmental organization will simply arise organically as those most capable of organization would inevitably move to a organizational positions.
This does not describe Nazism at all.
Nazism was a racist, nationalist ideology organized along the lines of the Fuhrerprinzip: all power derived from a strong leader, each of whom was subject to a still-higher leader, culminating in the Fuhrer. The Fuhrer’s whims are as law; his desires are the nation’s desires; there is, in fact, no distinction between the Fuhrer and the nation-state. It explicitly disallows all forms of democratic governance; no-one was elected Gauleiter, for example, after Hitler’s return in 1926, and even the mere notion of an elected Gauleiter would have been incomprehensible to a Nazi. And unlike socialism, it explicitly argues that people are not equal, that the Fuhrer is infinitely superior to the rest of the nation, that his subordinates are superior to everyone else, and so on down the line until one reaches the vast mass of German people who are inferior to the actual members of the Nazi party, but are superior in every respect to all other peoples… while certain races (specifically the Slavs and the Jews) are inherently inferior to all other peoples.
[Until the alliance with the Japanese, that is. Then the German people became the ubermenschen of the Aryan race, while the Japanese became the ubermenschen of the Asiatic race. I have no idea who the untermenschen of the Asiatic race were, and I doubt the Nazis thought it out that far.]
There were aspects of communitarianism in Nazism — specifically the notion of volk — but the Nazis never reorganized along communitarian lines, they never eliminated the free market, they never eliminated currency, they never nationalized the heavy industries, they never liquidated the kulaks/bourgeoisie, and they sure as hell never tried to eliminate the family. Socialism is explicitly a progressive ideology in the literal sense, i.e. its ideal world is the ultimate progression of history; Nazism is explicitly both a regressive and transformative ideology in the sense that it harkens back to an earlier idealized age which can only be realized through the force of the Fuhrer’s will.
That’s the theoretical difference between the two ideologies; in practice some of the distinctions I’m drawing here were blurred, as they are in any real-world situation. Part of the trouble is that there are uncounted variations on socialism, while only one form of Nazism; and even if you expand into the full panoply of fascisms, they’ll never really be comparable. Socialism is a universalist ideology deriving from a specific literary corpus (Marx, Lenin etc.) — as distinct from social democracy, which is a more mainstream, reformist ideology — while fascism is a regressive, localized ideology deriving at least in part from the specific cultural heritage of the particular culture in which it arises.
[Hence, for example, American socialism will pretty much look like socialism anywhere else; while American fascism, should such became widespread, will be unique to the United States.]
Looks like socialism, acts like socialism, it’s in the title of the party.
No, it doesn’t look like socialism. No, it didn’t act like socialism. Yes, it was in the title — but it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
I don’t argue that Hitler used socialism as a political prop and foil to himself become a dictator. The “real” socialists who were his political and party allies in the 1920’s were minimized or murdered early on.
Which is to say, they weren’t socialist at all. Well done.
The most telling similarity of all is that both Lenin and Hitler talked as collectivists in order to arrogate absolute power to themselves.
No they didn’t. Lenin talked of himself as a collectivist; Hitler talked about himself as Fuhrer. Compare, e.g., What Is To Be Done? with Mein Kampf; or Lenin’s rabble-rousing at the Duma with any of the Nuremberg rallies for that matter.
I don’t think I’m climbing out on a limb to call that a “left-wing” power grab that calls itself socialism and differentiate that with a right-wing power grab, say, Salazar in Portugal or Tojo in Japan.
Oh, you are. You’re out past the limb and onto the twigs, even. The only commonality was that Hitler and Lenin both headed an enormously popular mass movement instead of leading military coups, which has precisely zero to do with right-wing versus left-wing.
[And for the last time, the Nazis never referred to themselves as “socialist”. It was “national socialism” and Hitler, a staunch anti-socialist, never let anyone forget it.]
J Thomas: Not that he’d be “justified”, but where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?
A long f***ing way before genocide, that’s for damn sure.
Response: Pravda was talking about the Chinese in a racist way in Moscow…
I have no doubt that is true. That is because I find it quite believable that one can be both a socialist and a racist and/or nationalist.
I’ve never met anyone who argue the contrary. That was my point.
You’ve failed to address it.
I’m sorry your uncle Cecil died in Belgium.
Me too. He was my father’s closest and best friend when they were young.
That troop transport your father was on was easy to build fast because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920’s. Your mother in law’s salary and the money for Corsairs also was easy to get because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920’s.
There are lots and lots of reasons why the US was able to mobilize quickly for war. Maybe the “sound fiscal policies” of the 20’s were part of it, but anyone I know who lived through the 30’s would find the juxtaposition of the phrases “sound fiscal policy” and “the 20’s” to be kind of a cruel joke.
Personally, I think it had a lot more to do with everyone’s willingness to pitch in and do whatever was necessary. I’m sure my mother in law got paid, but I’m equally sure she would have worked double shifts building planes for three hots and a cot.
Things were different then.
I’m thinking he needs to offer each of us a piece of delicious, delicious pie.
Strawberry rhubarb for me. Yum!
Thanks –
“where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?”
A long f***ing way before genocide, that’s for damn sure.
You think? So if it turns out the reports are true that food distribution has been cancelled for Anbar, you figure that later Bush will say he didn’t know?
J Thomas,
I’ve lost track a bit of where the problem is, but you did say that you’ve gotten this reaction before. I suspect it is because, when discussion causation, people who are further away from the actual act are assumed to be less responsible, so most people would have a hard time claiming that the person who mined the ore that made the pistol that killed someone was in some ways responsible for the death. This tends to give heads of state a lot of wiggle room. However, in claiming that food shortages or other choices ‘forced’ people into genocide, you make that wiggle room into a 360 degree range of movement. When we talk about people be forced by circumstances, we think of Andean plane survivors turning to cannibalism, or homeowners shooting someone breaking and entering, direct consequences of particular situations. To claim that genocide is the direct consequence of a food shortage provides perpetrators far too much distance from their acts, which I think is why people don’t react too kindly to your argumentation.
You think? So if it turns out the reports are true that food distribution has been cancelled for Anbar, you figure that later Bush will say he didn’t know?
I actually have no idea what hypothetical you’re posing here. Mind rephrasing?
LP, I certainly don’t claim that any of these people were forced into genocide.
They had the alternative choice of unconditional surrender. In every case it’s possible that if they surrendered their enemies would fix their problems for them better than they could for themselves.
LP, I certainly don’t claim that any of these people were forced into genocide.
Really?
We blame Pol Pot for the cambodian genocide, but remember that they simply did not have the food.
You mention unconditional surrender, but my reading is that you are excusing Pol Pot because of food rationing. You did ask why people misread you, and with statements like this, no matter how carefully qualified, you leave the impression that Pol Pot is not to blame for the genocide.
Anarch, iraq does not grow nearly enough food to feed their people. Under Saddam large amounts of food were imported, mostly grains and beans, and rationed to the public. By early estimates 85% of the population depended on their ration cards to survive, though the ration was not considered sufficient. More recent estimates claim that only 75% of the population needs the distributed food to survive. Official US policy has been that this is socialist and should be stopped, but in the short run we found no way to switch to something closer to free enterprise. Saddam (and later Bremer) got a degree of marketing clout by buying in large quantities on the world market. In 2004 the CPA had the goal of increasing food stocks to have 6 months of food on hand so that temporary distribution glitches wouldn’t be such a concern, they had the problem that the port which handled food imports was damaged and couldn’t run at full capacity but fixing it involved temporarily reducing the capacity.
The general dependence on rationed food is the reason that votes have been done based on ration cards — they’re the nearest thing to a census.
There have been rather low-key reports that the unrest in sunni areas of the country has required the iraqi government to stop attempting to distribute food in those areas. There was an implication that the food shipments will start again when order is restored.
This is something that *could* turn genocidal. It is after all much easier to stop significant food smuggling across the western border of iraq than it is to stop arms smuggling. But it’s sort of hypothetical at this point. I have no data about how many sunnis are dependent on the rations. Possibly they are the 25% of the public that is claimed not to depend on them. Perhaps we wouldn’t stop food shipments from other sunni nations. Perhaps the sunnis would surrender easily, and their surrender would be accepted quickly.
There are various ways this could turn out that would kill less than 10% of the sunni population. And after all, how do we decide when it’s genocide? Does it have to kill 50% of a defined population? 10%? A million people?
Saddam said iraq was 35% sunni, the CIA estimated 20%. Call it 5 to 8 million people. So it couldn’t be a very big genocide. 10% of them is still less than a million.
And if it goes through like that, Bush can say he didn’t know. It wasn’t his choice, it was done entirely by the iraqi government with no advice from americans. It wasn’t even the iraqi government’s fault — they couldn’t ship in the food when there was so much violence. It was entirely the sunnis’ fault for being so violent. And when the US Army found out what was happening we did everything we could. We sent over 100,000 MREs to Anbar, and we set up refugee camps where we let the iraqi government feed people safely. A tragedy, but one that would have been infinitely worse if we weren’t there to help.
“where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?”
A long f***ing way before genocide, that’s for damn sure.
You think? I think it isn’t such a very long distance.
It’s an honest-to-goodness slippery slope. I could likely make the mistake of sliding into genocide rather than defeat, if it was my choice. I believe you might. I have no doubt whatsoever about Bush.
You mention unconditional surrender, but my reading is that you are excusing Pol Pot because of food rationing. You did ask why people misread you, and with statements like this, no matter how carefully qualified, you leave the impression that Pol Pot is not to blame for the genocide.
I’m not talking about blame. That might be the problem. You’re looking for someone to blame it on and I’m not.
I’m saying that anyone else in Pol Pot’s position, faced with his problems, might have made a plan rather similar to his plan. And then he faced the problem of the people he led, who considered the cityfolk their enemies.
The USA had food and gasoline we could theoretically have given them, enough of each to get food to cities. But what could get us to give those to Pol Pot? Without food and transportation, he had to mostly abandon the cities and put the urban people to work growing food. They’d have a very tight year until the crops were in. Strict rationing could minimise the losses until then.
And then as his organisation unraveled he’d have less and less chance to correct the errors. The first priority for a ruler is to stay on top — lose that and you lose the chance to do anything important.
Regardless of Pol Pot’s personal preferences, he was riding a tiger and he couldn’t get off or change course. That tends to happen after revolutions. We’re lucky it doesn’t happen more often.
What could he have done? He could have chosen not to get on that tiger in the first place. Somebody else would have, and we’d wind up talking about the other guy. Or he might have done something real creative to change the situation. It was a systemic problem and people who just looked at how to survive or prosper in it could do nothing more than play their parts. There’s some sort of chance he could have found a way to change the system. There’s always that hope.
“I’m saying that anyone else in Pol Pot’s position, faced with his problems, might have made a plan rather similar to his plan. And then he faced the problem of the people he led, who considered the cityfolk their enemies.”
This is just apologetics. I’m sorry to say this, because some of what you say I tend to agree with, but you’re determined to force everything to fit your theories and the result is pretty sickening.
Revolutions, to paraphrase Chomsky making a fairly obvious point, tend to spawn counter-revolutionary violence and this generally leads to a fairly ruthless element coming out on top no matter who wins. But that ruthless element does have choices to make. And the Khmer Rouge obviously chose to be ruthless on a scale that has few parallels and that can’t be justified as a rational (even if immoral) choice. Suppose we put aside any questions of morality and adopt the ruthless viewpoint. There was absolutely no rational reason to kill (actually murder, not just starve) anywhere from 300,000 to 1 million people. Communist and other dictatorships, God knows, have no regard for human rights, but most of them have managed to stay in power without actually murdering ten percent of the population, most of them posing no threat to them. The neighboring Vietnamese communists were perfectly capable of committing enormous atrocities, but they didn’t come close to killing the percentages the Khmer Rouge killed. It just isn’t “necessary” to do this, no matter how much pent up hatred there is in society. To be as cold-blooded about it as you are, the Khmer Rouge could have stayed in power by killing far fewer people, the way most other dictatorships manage it.
I tend to agree with those who say that Western leaders are as ruthless as most of the people they love to condemn as monsters. What LJ said about people giving heads of state lots of wiggle room certainly doesn’t apply to me–I think heads of state do get all sorts of completely undeserved wiggle room. As I see it, Bush is far more guilty than Lyndie England of torture, for example.
Unfortunately, what you are doing is giving Pol Pot enormous amounts of wiggle room. You seem to take some sort of misbegotten pride in what you perceive to be your analytical rigor, but all you end up doing is looking for reasons to excuse high-ranking officials from their guilt, because of your theory about how it’s all determined and unavoidable. Bulls***
I’m saying that anyone else in Pol Pot’s position, faced with his problems, might have made a plan rather similar to his plan.
Ah, this brings me back. When I was in high school, my German teacher (who was born in a part of Poland that became Germany, and then perhaps turned back into Poland again) told us all, completely seriously, that if we were in Hitler’s position we would have done what he did.
And I agreed: if we were completely stripped of all morality, had convinced ourselves that all acts done in the name of (forwarding the master race) or (securing personal power) were acceptable, and were able to Blame the Jews with a straight face, why, of course we’d be willing to corral Jews, homosexuals and various other undesirables into camps, systematically starve, work and torture them to death, and conduct an absolutely insane series of incursions into other countries.
Yep, it’s simple: if we were Hitler (or Pol Pot), we’d have done the same as he did.
As we aren’t, I’m going out on a limb and stating categorically that we wouldn’t.
That was one of those situations where I was so absolutely flabbergasted that I couldn’t speak. Fortunately, there was a young lady in my class who could speak, and did. It probably didn’t make it any easier on him that it was the same young lady who constantly corrected his grammar.
If you think any of us would do a Pol Pot, or a Hitler, I’m guessing that means you think you would as well, which gives me all manner of the creeps. At least we’ll not be wanting for lampshades.
nice. this thread shows a rare confluence of Godwin’s law and cleek’s law*. sweet way to end a week!
*: as the length of any internet discussion increases, the probability that it will turn into a discussion of the Vietnam War approaches one.
that can’t be justified as a rational (even if immoral) choice.
Look at the numbers.
Date cambodian population
1874 950,000
1921 2,400,000
1950 3,900,000
1962 5,700,000
1975 7,300,000
In 1975 they mostly could no longer import gasoline. They needed to support 7.3 million people with 1874 technology, or else get somebody to give them food and/or gasoline.
I suppose one possibility would have been to march their surplus population to the borders and force them into refugee status. But thailand wasn’t willing to take many refugees at all. Vietnam had already taken vietnamese refugees but didn’t want others. Laos?
In good times cambodia exported rice and rubber to get foreign exchange. They didn’t have enough rice and not much rubber to export.
Perhaps they could depend on foreign charity? I think maybe they didn’t try hard enough to find out what was available that way. However, the USA was very strongly against aid to cambodia by anyone that the USA could influence.
Perhaps they could sign long-term colonial contracts, and promise to sell their future exports at low cost to pay for today’s food? The exact arrangement they’d fought to avoid?
If they had 2 million people they couldn’t feed, why is it an issue if they killed some of them before they starved?
The floods of 1975 and 1978 hurt them a lot, of course. Worst floods in a century. Probably not expected.
Apparently the khmer rouge tried to stockpile food to prepare for a vietnamese invasion, and the stockpiled food could have saved some people. But then, the invasion came on schedule. Would they have done better to feed more people and arrange an orderly surrender? Would that have worked out well?
Their ideology may have played a part. They believed in being self-reliant and in depending strongly on agriculture with minimal industry. They believed in collective farming. We don’t believe that’s an efficient way to grow food. But everybody’s wrong beliefs bite them.
If you were in their place, what would you do?
Here’s another one. What if the time comes that the USA can’t get much oil? For awhile we can pump enough of our own for 40% or less of our domestic needs, supposing we don’t sell any for hard currency.
Our heavily mechanised agriculture lets 3% of our population grow more than enough for all of us. Our efficient diesel railways and diesel trucking system quickly brings that food across the country to urban centers.
If we had to revert to an 1870 economy or a 1910 economy, how ruthless would our government be about it? Say it had to be a short quick transition and not a slow smooth one….
Looking back I see I accidentally exaggerated. The floods of 1975 and 1979 were the worst in 70 years, not a century.
If they had 2 million people they couldn’t feed, why is it an issue if they killed some of them before they starved?
Honestly, if the answer isn’t obvious to you, I don’t know what to say. You really should put down the mouse and slowly step away from the blog. This is the worst sort of apologetics, and for one of the worst regimes in history. Do you really believe that there is no moral difference between having many of your citizens starve and simply preemptively smashing their heads in with rifle butts?
“f they had 2 million people they couldn’t feed, why is it an issue if they killed some of them before they starved?
The floods of 1975 and 1978 hurt them a lot, of course. Worst floods in a century. Probably not expected.
Apparently the khmer rouge tried to stockpile food to prepare for a vietnamese invasion, and the stockpiled food could have saved some people. But then, the invasion came on schedule. Would they have done better to feed more people and arrange an orderly surrender? Would that have worked out well?
Their ideology may have played a part. They believed in being self-reliant and in depending strongly on agriculture with minimal industry. They believed in collective farming. We don’t believe that’s an efficient way to grow food. But everybody’s wrong beliefs bite them.
If you were in their place, what would you do?”
Beg for help. Apparently you support genocide in those circumstances. Go to hell.
I was going to support J Thomas for a while, mainly in pointing out that he had never really condoned the genocide. But then, apparently he did. And like Donald, I would have gone wherever I had to and gotten down on my knees and begged.
Plus, I would like some evidence that supports his assumption that the genocide occured in a response to food shortages. Earlier in the thread he talked about Germany’s plans for food accumulation which pointed out that there may be starvation on a large scale. However, that was starvation in Russia of the Russians.
There was no concentrated genocide in order to avoid starvation.
The logical fallacy is that he/she is taking events that occured at the same time, and creatign a causality.
I don’t have the time to investigate, but I believe that we could find times of starvation without massive genocide.
John Miller, at the time the germans, french, danish, swiss etc were under rationing. None of them were particularly starving yet, but the possibility was there if the food supply got cut.
Germany and russia were not only in a war but they were continuing an arms race, which germany was losing. The germans couldn’t have put off their attack a lot longer and still had a decent chance to win, and their only chance to win involved capturing russian factories faster than the russians could move them east. They had to take a lot of russian food to continue the war — the alternative was defeat. They wouldn’t necessarily starve from not taking the russian food. But they starved the last time they were defeated. And to avoid defeat they needed to starve tens of millions of slavs.
After they took the 1942 food germany was the best nourished nation in europe, for awhile. But it didn’t last.
Germany did starve a little after 1945, though we had no intention of it. There just wasn’t enough food being produced for the survivors, and the germans were among the last in line to get it.
I believe that we could find times of starvation without massive genocide.
Probably so. Somalia could be an example. Or Rwanda. Biafra. Fukien province in china. (China had droughts and typhoons in 1960 and food production was down. Rather than cut rations across the country they apparently chose to let this disloyal province starve, they shipped food *out* of it and did not ship any in. No racial or political distinctions among the starvers or the starved, so no genocide.)
I believe you won’t find many examples of massive genocide without starvation, though.
This is the worst sort of apologetics, and for one of the worst regimes in history. Do you really believe that there is no moral difference between having many of your citizens starve and simply preemptively smashing their heads in with rifle butts?
I keep getting this sort of emotional reaction and I don’t understand it. It’s like you guys are still caught up in figuring out who to blame. I would have thought WWI would have taught you better.
Sometimes wars start out as stately minuets where generals play for position and the losers surrender with few casualties and life goes on pretty much as before. But sometimes things escalate out of control, and terrible things are done by all participants, and then some of the losers are singled out for war crimes trials. And what good does it do?
We would not have put up with the Treaty of Versailles except we agreed the germans were the bad guys who deserved it. And the result was they were driven crazy by their grievances and followed Hitler. Could the german population have begged for mercy from the soviets, after their previous experience with begging for mercy?
We wanted somebody to blame for our defeat in vietnam. We blamed the north vietnamese and the cambodians, and we did whatever we could to punish them. We used the cambodian genocide as proof that we were right to occupy vietnam and bomb cambodia etc.
What does all this righteousness get us? Is there any chance that our moral stands against badguys will get them to act nice?
Do we get anything out of pretending that the badguys are utterly morally inferior to us, beyond feeling superior?
When we pretend that their choices are something we ourselves would never do, what does it get us but the chance to do more blame? When you get right down to it, aren’t we all victims and the victims of victims recursively and reciprocally?
J: What would you expect someone to do in the situation as you’ve constructed it? Whatever it takes not to commit genocide. Change plans. Stretch rationing. Force elites to give up their special hoards. Abandon a war front. Surrender. Anything to avoid genocide. And I can’t see that any other response deserves any consideration at all. Those who will commit mass murder for the sake of their pet schemes are villains.
The reason you get this hostility is that your posts continue to sound like you regard genocide as a reasonable response to tough circumstances, and you keep ducking discussion of the extent to which tyrants create the conditions in the first place.
I’m astonished this thread is still going on.
The Germans *plan* to steal the Russians’ food and starve them to death, and J Thomas calls this a “food shortage”?
I guess the Jews in the gas chambers died of an “oxygen shortage.”
Could the german population have begged for mercy from the soviets
Well, had they NOT INVADED RUSSIA, then I daresay the necessity wouldn’t have arisen.
Somehow, arguing the necessity or inevitability of the freakin’ Holocaust is not something I would’ve imagined proving necessary at ObWi.
Germany did starve a little after 1945, though we had no intention of it. There just wasn’t enough food being produced for the survivors, and the germans were among the last in line to get it.
My MIL worked for the British intelligence and was in Germany after the war because she was fluent in German. She still tells stories about how it was strictly forbidden to give any food to the Germans, and how she whould try to bypass those laws to give cans of condensed milk to the mothers with children because she refused to be responsible for preventable deaths.
I’m astonished this thread is still going on.
Anyone know the record here? This is one full week of continuous non-spam comments ranging over a wide field. Is 7 days a record?
There are 259 comments on this thread, which is actually not that much methinks.
Not talking quantity – I’ve seen 200 comments in an afternoon then peter out to silence in a day.
7 days of ongoing debate/discussion.
OC Steve,
I suspect some of the Amnesty International threads from May/June 2005 went longer, but you’re right, a solid week of content is rare.
Yeah, but now this thread is spiraling down into metaness. Or meta-squaredness, since I brought that up. Or metacubedness. Or …
Anyway, this doesn’t bode well for its continued longevity.
Say, maybe we could discuss Tolkien? Okay, just kidding.
So I’ve been more or less absent — is it worth rereading it all?
imo, only if you are trying to get out of an unanesthesized root canal…
As a participant, I’d say no. I did tell someone to go someplace unpleasant (hell, actually) so you might want to issue me a warning about posting rules, which I’ll take to heart. Consider it done and don’t waste your time.
She still tells stories about how it was strictly forbidden to give any food to the Germans
Which is why we very sensibly incinerated so many German civilians — we anticipated the food shortage at the end of the war, thus we figured better to kill as many as possible *before* then so there would be fewer mouths to feed then.
[/J Thomas]
“Could the german population have begged for mercy from the soviets?”
Well, had they NOT INVADED RUSSIA, then I daresay the necessity wouldn’t have arisen.
You are assuming the russians wouldn’t have invaded germany. It’s possible they would not have — if the japanese had attacked siberia instead of striking at the USA then the eastern russian forces would have stayed east until the japanese threat was handled, and maybe they’d have felt the necessity to occupy china, and they might not have gotten around to taking western europe for decades. But what are the chances? Japan couldn’t really afford to strike at russia. Siberia didn’t have the resources they needed. They had to take the british and dutch colonies, and that meant they had to persuade the US Navy not to intervene so they had to take the philippines, and starting a war with russia too just wasn’t going to happen.
So it was inevitable that russia would attack by spring of 1943 at the latest, and germany couldn’t win a defensive war.
By taking the fight to the enemy with a surprise attack they captured well over a million russian soldiers, they destroyed a whole lot of russian factories and infrastructure, they denied lots of resources to the russian economy and they killed over 20 million russian civilians who would otherwise have aided the russian war effort. If they had managed to take the caucasus oilfields, or if they had taken enough russian industry — not far east of Moscow — they might have done much better than they did.
It’s easy to argue in hindsight that they couldn’t have won so they shouldn’t have tried. But that’s hindsight. They thought they had a fighting chance. You can argue that they were wrong to kill a whole lot of their enemies instead of surrendering — but what kind of person would surrender to *Stalin* when there was an alternative?
You say genocide is so evil — it wasn’t so many years later that we were sending our bombers right up near the soviet border and then at the last minute we’d give them the order to come home instead of nuking the russian cities their orders said to nuke. We were all set to do genocide by *accident*. And in our decades of nuclear “brinksmanship” we weren’t bluffing. Our people were carefully trained to follow their orderes even when it meant, well, genocide. In 1973 when we told the russians to back off from supplying egypt and syria enough for a stalemate, when we threatened to kill everybody in the world if they didn’t let israel have the victory, we weren’t bluffing. We’d have done it except the russians backed down.
You can say we were right or wrong, but our reasoning was the same as the nazis — we were not willing to surrender to the USSR, even if the alternative was hundreds of millions of their citizens and our citizens died in the first two weeks. We were not even willing to let russian client states get a stalemate in a war with israel, we’d kill everybody in the world first.
We risked killing everybody in the world — not a paltry 30 million people. And it would have been so easy to do it your way and just surrender to the USSR and let them occupy us. No chance at all that we’d do genocide then. But we didn’t have the gumption to do the right thing. Instead we fought the cold war, we spent over a trillion dollars that could have gone to the third world, or to research, or to improving the civilian economy, or any productive thing we might have imagined. We could have done wonderful things with that money instead of preparing for a genocidal war that luckily never came — provided the russians let us. But of course if we surrendered it wouldn’t be our choice what to do with the money we saved by not militarising. It would be their choice.
Rather than let the russians collectivize our agriculture and nationalise our industry, rather than let them give us socialised medicine and one-party government etc, our government chose to see us all dead if that’s what it took to stop them. And a lot of our public agreed.
You’re welcome to think that the people who actually got around to doing a little genocide were horrible monsters who thought in alien ways we can’t possibly understand. But it isn’t true.
You’re welcome to think that the people who actually got around to doing a little genocide were horrible monsters who thought in alien ways we can’t possibly understand.
Straw man. Who said that? They were “evil.” What’s hard about that concept?
You are assuming the russians wouldn’t have invaded germany.
Why, yes, I am — because Russia had no plans to invade Germany in the foreseeable future.
So it was inevitable that russia would attack by spring of 1943 at the latest
That word “so,” I don’t think it means what you think it means. Really, where are you getting this stuff?
May I suggest you lay off the internet nutjobbery for a while and go get some actual books? Pick up David Glantz for instance, who has forgotten more from the Soviet military archives than any of us will ever know.
and they killed over 20 million russian civilians who would otherwise have aided the russian war effort
Wow. Just “wow.” Here are pix of some of those 20 million. Don’t miss the 2-year-old girl in the middle pic.
we very sensibly incinerated so many German civilians — we anticipated the food shortage at the end of the war, thus we figured better to kill as many as possible *before* then so there would be fewer mouths to feed then.
Anderson, I strongly doubt that. I don’t think the people who were thinking about the future occupation had much if any input into the bombing missions.
What we said we were doing was going after industries that supplied the german military. But our bombing methods were mostly ineffective. I had an old math teacher who had been a tail gunner in the war and who knew a whole lot about it. He thought there were only a couple of bombing missions that mattered, apart from the oil. One was an attack that destroyed a dam in the Ruhr, where they used a special aiming method to get a single bomb at precisely the right place on the dam. The other was an attack on a ball bearing factory. The rest were mostly ineffective. They couldn’t hit the factories well enough. They couldn’t even hit the workers’ residences well enough. They mostly bombed random civilians and pastures by accident. But they tried to aim for vital war industries.
The few exceptions like Dresden they wanted to disperse the german antiaircraft effort. If the germans knew they were only going to go after specific targets, then the germans could concentrate their defenses around those targets. If they had to defend all their cities they couldn’t do it as well. And the USAAF hadn’t figured out how to make firestorms reliably, and they wanted to practice. But the germans saw they couldn’t protect everything so they protected their vital war industries, and we mostly didn’t keep going after the unprotected cities since it didn’t particularly help us win the war faster.
In hindsight we realised the strategic bombing campaign was mostly a waste. It was much easier to see that after we had nukes that the reasoning didn’t apply to.
There was some talk that terror bombing would reduce the enemy’s will to fight. But it didn’t seem to work that way. I think the way they thought of it was, if we’re willing to kill innocent women and children etc, what would we do after they surrender and mostly can’t stop us?
The same reasoning that tells us not to surrender to nazis or russians or for that matter muslim headchoppers, applies to them when we’re the ones doing atrocities.
“So it was inevitable that russia would attack by spring of 1943 at the latest”
That word “so,” I don’t think it means what you think it means. Really, where are you getting this stuff?
I see that I worded that poorly. The germans thought it was inevitable. They were losing the arms race, so each year the war was delayed was a year that made them weaker relative to the USSR.
I don’t say it was actually inevitable, since Stalin got to make choices and he could choose not to even if it looked like the obvious best alternative.
Russell: There are lots and lots of reasons why the US was able to mobilize quickly for war. Maybe the “sound fiscal policies” of the 20’s were part of it, but anyone I know who lived through the 30’s would find the juxtaposition of the phrases “sound fiscal policy” and “the 20’s” to be kind of a cruel joke.
Response: You’re clearly missing the point. Despite the length and depth of the depression, the dollar remained sound throughout the decade and interest rates, for example, stayed low. Compare that to the recessions of 1975 or 1982, for example, when deficits popped sharply upward during economic reversals. When WW2 came to the US in the early 40’s, most people remembered that the last time things were good (the 20’s), the debt was paid down. That was absolutely critical to winning the war, perhaps the single most important factor. I’m strongly suggesting that paying down the federal debt in good times is something we need to do at least once every 60 years for our own defense.
Anarch quoted me saying: I don’t argue that Hitler used socialism as a political prop and foil to himself become a dictator. The “real” socialists who were his political and party allies in the 1920’s were minimized or murdered early on.
Then added: Which is to say, they weren’t socialist at all. Well done.
Response. Terrible. Terrible. Anarch, there’s a professor at Northwestern named David Zarefsky. He teaches Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning. There are rules for evidence. The rules are there because argumentation is a CONTRACT between parties to arrive at the truth. That’s not what you’re doing. You’re cheating.
Does Stalin’s henchmen’s murder of Trotsky make Trotsky the real communist and Stalin the impostor? No, people struggling for power often get into blood feuds. The politburo in 1953 after Stalin’s death is an example.
That Hitler killed a doctrinaire socialist ally does not kick him out of the socialist club.
The socialist agenda you mention is a fair description of most of what Hitler was doing IN PEACETIME before things started heating up in 1939 – including winning honest elections in 1933 and 1938.
You say, “Nazism was a racist, nationalist ideology organized along the lines of the Fuhrerprinzip: all power derived from a strong leader, each of whom was subject to a still-higher leader, culminating in the Fuhrer. “ Wrong. Hitler would say, and did say, that the people are the Germanic god, and that he was their fairly elected Fuhrer dedicated to reclaiming their glory! He didn’t insult his base until the war was lost (“Germany is not worthy of me!” he bleated in February, 1945).
Like socialism in a crisis, Hitler was only, reluctantly, taking temporary powers until things were set right -that was the posture—and it worked to get him elected again. He was very deft and patient in establishing his classes of citizenship.
Like any country in a crisis, Hitler used nationalism in preparation for war and to spy on his own people. The Soviets did this constantly. The Chinese are still doing this. The satellite states all did it. I don’t think anyone has done it better than Castro, with an intelligence agent on every block. Specifically, this internal tyranny is an apt and appropriate application of the socialist notion that, “proletariat working communally towards a common good.’ There’s no property and no personal ambitions, so no one should be afraid of being spied on. The internal security apparatus of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China were nearly identical and based on this interpretation of the communal nature of life. In this sense, Hitler is in the mainstream and Venezuela, today, is lax and far from true socialism and courting the bourgeoisie.
Hitler added to socialism a specific definition of “the people” that was racist and exclusive (and self-contradictory) as well as a xenophobic explanation for Germany’s loss of the Great War (which ultimately would be corrected by “the people” being given more living space, as promised in Mien Kampf).
Anarch quoted me saying: The most telling similarity of all is that both Lenin and Hitler talked as collectivists in order to arrogate absolute power to themselves.
Then said: No they didn’t. Lenin talked of himself as a collectivist; Hitler talked about himself as Fuhrer.
Response: Hitler also talked about himself as completely on of the German people (“I am the German people!”) and in his speeches, he specifically identified himself with the audience in a personal, familial manner. This was, in fact his greatest strength, an ability to speak as one of them, to get the audience to identify with him, calling them and himself to destiny. The social programs and youth programs and educational radio programs were consistent with socialism. His concern with hearth and home, having enough butter, looking out for women and what they needed as mothers, as examples, was socialistic. He never did call them out of the home for the war.
He won a coalition chancellorship following honest elections and cooperated with the socialist factions – as long as they were supine.
Hitler grafted this socialistic concern for the people together with fascism. If you take your definition of socialism, make some exceptions for the industries that supported him in the twenties, redefine citizenship in a xenophobic manner, then add the distinguishing characteristics of fascism (Humberto Eco has a list of 14 of these, an excellent summary—from New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, reprinted in the Nov-Dec 1995 Utne Reader), then you’ve got Hitler through about 1938. And make no mistake, the German people loved Hitler, absolutely loved him.
It’s not pure socialism, it wasn’t the only German socialism, but it was in the arena and swallowing the other socialists and the liberals, through a special combination of intellectual amalgamation and naked fear tactics. He wasn’t a very good socialist? Well, he wasn’t perfectly doctrinaire. He wasn’t a very good fascist, either! Franco stayed I power in Spain from 1939 to his death from natural causes 1975.
Your defense of socialism as something entirely separate from Hitler fails the rules for logical argumentation. You wrongly say that socialism was only in the title of the party and not in the policies. You wrongly say that Hitler only talked about himself as a leader (when he could be very modest and pious, almost sexually offering himself to his audience). And you say that socialism has no intersection with nationalism, though any nation, including a socialist one, will bray nationalistically if it is in trouble (USSR, PRC, Cuba, modern Venezuela) or, in Hitler’s case, bray while asking for trouble.
I’m tempted to infer that socialism has, for some, religious overtones. Is it a sacred thing for some of you? No one that I know from the center, center-right or right has any difficulty at all seeing Hitler as an orator of great acting talent amalgamating socialism and fascism. Detached from ideological hypnotism about socialism, non-leftists have no magic reverence for the concept. Many of us see any form of overcentralization of power, including the ideal socialism Anarch describes, as a scheme with a needlessly high potential of devolving into tyranny, viz., “Power corrupts…” and textbook socialism concentrates power. Nazi Germany, the USSR Cuba and the PRC all developed gulags, the ultimate signature of a police state. My guess is that Hitler, though not a trained intellectual or administrator, guessed correctly about that concentration of power and adopted what he could; after all, he started out as a spy on the party for the German Army.
In this sense, yes, Hitler is different indeed, in that he didn’t worship socialism. He worshipped war (“…almost a religion of war” Kipling said I his last days). “Only Hitler is like Hitler,” to quote Jon Stewart.
I haven’t brought this up before – it’s a long, dull, boring story that is as absurd and tragicomic as a Pirandello play – I haven’t studied it thoroughly the way I have Shakespeare or non-profit-tax law – but I advise you to look at what the socialistic factions THEMSELVES were saying to each other while Hitler was gaining power in the 1930’s. Delving into that kinda proves my point. The rest of this post is a quote about it:
“….If it is possible to assign a date to the moment when European social democracy and European communism became lethal antagonists, then 14 July 1927 is a date worth bearing in mind. On that day the powerful social democrats of Vienna were confronted by an open challenge from the clerical right-wing regime. A contemptuously rigged jury had acquitted those who had openly lynched three social democrats in the town of Schattendorf. Furious workers’ leaders came to the offices of the Socialist Party, demanding action. They wanted to see the great Otto Bauer. They were told the protest should be verbal only. As Ernst Fischer, who was present at the meeting, records the argument in his book An Opposing Man, the militants from the power stations and the factories were instructed: ‘One can’t demonstrate against a verdict returned by a jury… Trial by jury is a great democratic achievement. Even if the jury is mistaken, you can’t come out into the streets.’ The next day, the workers of Vienna took to the streets anyway, and were fired on by the Austrian mounted police.
“The failure of social democracy to challenge authority and legality on this and many other occasions meant that the pre-fascist right, which was cynical about its ‘own’ legal norms, had an easy time crushing Vienna’s poor for good in the bloodbath of February, 1934. (It was these events, brilliantly chronicled by Fischer, that led Elias Canetti to start thinking about crowds and power, and also let Kim Philby to join the Communist Party.) Fischer and many like him were so disgusted by the failure of nerve shown by Austrian and German reformists that when they fled, they fled to Moscow. They based their newfound Communism on the idea –vividly illustrated by experience and reality – that ‘bourgeois’ freedom was a sham and a snare. This bifurcation of the European left –between those who cared for democratic properties no matter what and those who saw them as an ideological construct –led to disasters from which the Continent has never recovered. Even Fischer, by then a devout Stalinist, became a little upset after a talk he gave to the German and Austrian exiles in Moscow, defending the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The Nazis had invaded France, and he was in the room when ‘suddenly the door flew open and a German Communist rushed in: “We’ve taken Paris!”’ Dummkopf. How terrifying when the lessons of dogma are learned too well. One of the conformists at the meeting where Fischer spoke was Wilhelm Pieck, later President of the ‘German Democratic Republic.’ The German Communists managed to outlive Hitler, though not to live down their compromises with him, and when they came home it was as clients of the Red Army.”
–The Cunning of History, by Christopher Hitchens, ppg. 136-7
Terrible. Terrible. Anarch, there’s a professor at Northwestern named David Zarefsky. He teaches Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning.
And I’m a professional logician. I think I know what I’m doing here.
[BTW, unless you happen to be David Zarefsky, so fnording what? There are literally thousands of professors all over the world who teach similar things. Why on earth would you name-drop him only to drop him unceremoniously one sentence later?]
Does Stalin’s henchmen’s murder of Trotsky make Trotsky the real communist and Stalin the impostor?
No, but Stalin didn’t claim he was anti-Communist and that by killing Trotsky he was destroying Bolshevism. Unlike Hitler, which was the implied comparison.
Wrong. Hitler would say, and did say, that the people are the Germanic god, and that he was their fairly elected Fuhrer dedicated to reclaiming their glory!
Yes, he did say that. And as far as what he actually did, he followed the Fuhrerprinzip, unless you’re really trying to argue that the Nazi Party was internally run on some kind of electoral system.
What’s more, Hitler was very explicit about his adherence to the Fuhrerprinzip. Consider his execution of the Beer Hall Putsch; consider Mein Kampf; consider his discourse with Goebbels in 1926; consider his speech after the Night Of The Long Knives; hell, consider damn near everything he ever talked about. He personally was going to lead the glorious German people to victory. First among equals be damned, he was first — and foremost.
The socialist agenda you mention is a fair description of most of what Hitler was doing IN PEACETIME before things started heating up in 1939 – including winning honest elections in 1933 and 1938.
Since I never mentioned a socialist agenda, I’m at a loss. In fact, I explicitly said that Hitler did not have a socialist agenda, that his sole communitarian impulses sprang from his notion of volk. I explicitly said that your illustrations of “socialism” were nothing of the sort. Please do me the courtesy of responding to what I actually wrote.
As for the “honest” elections of 1933 and 1938… you might conceivably make a case for the 1933 election being honest — you’d be wrong, but you could make a case for it — but the 1938 one? Are you nuts? It was a plebiscite held in Austria after the Anschluss and, while I don’t doubt for a moment that the Nazis commanded a significant majority, a) they had just invaded invaded Austria two days before after a’) declaring the real plebiscite would not be accepted by Germany, b) their allies had spent months fomenting violence and subverting the authority of the Austrian Chancellory, c) the Austrian Nazis lied about pro-German riots to garner additional sympathy, yet d) you think that the 99.34% approval in the plebiscite was honest?
Oy.
[Although it does give me the opportunity to say one of my favorite names in all history: Seyss-Inquart, the head of the Austrian Nazi Party. It’s fun to say, try it!]
Like socialism in a crisis, Hitler was only, reluctantly, taking temporary powers until things were set right -that was the posture—and it worked to get him elected again. He was very deft and patient in establishing his classes of citizenship.
The hell? Hitler was never elected in any meaningful sense of the word, let alone twice. He was given backdoor access to the chancellory by Franz von Papen and Kurt Schleicher, who should by rights be keeping Brutus and Cassius company down in Cocytus. He was appointed by President Hindenburg — and he was appointed (after conniving by Schleicher and von Papen) because the Nazis had started to fail in the polls (having lost some 40-odd seats in the November 1932 election). It’s true that the Nazis did then command a significant plurality in 1933 — though not a majority, something Hitler never really forgave — but the Nazis had spent some two months terrorizing the crap out of their left-wing opposition and cajoling the centrist parties and leveraging the Reichstag Fire for all it was worth. After the Enabling Act, all bets were off.
On which note: Hitler didn’t “reluctantly tak[e] temporary powers”, he rammed the Enabling Act through the Reichstag within his first hundred days in office, seducing the Catholics with promises of recognition, seducing the middle class types with promises of civil liberties, and beating the crap out of the socialist/KPD opposition. There was nothing “reluctant” about it.
If you take your definition of socialism, make some exceptions for the industries that supported him in the twenties, redefine citizenship in a xenophobic manner, then add the distinguishing characteristics of fascism… then you’ve got Hitler through about 1938.
And if my Aunt Sally had balls, she’d be my Uncle Jake. Which is to say: if you change everything about Hitler then yes, he could end up a socialist. Or a ballerina. It’s hard to say.
Your defense of socialism as something entirely separate from Hitler fails the rules for logical argumentation.
Speaking as a professional logician: no, it doesn’t. It might be incorrect; it’s not invalid.
You wrongly say that socialism was only in the title of the party and not in the policies.
Speaking of argumentative fouls: declarative statements do not an argument make. You still haven’t offered a scrap of substantive evidence that he was a socialist by any conventional sense of the word. I’ve offered substantial evidence that he wasn’t. This is not a parity.
[I’m sure he was a socialist by the standards of the Right, but then I’m sure that damn near everyone would be a socialist if those standards were uniformly applied.]
You wrongly say that Hitler only talked about himself as a leader (when he could be very modest and pious, almost sexually offering himself to his audience).
Yes, he could, on occasion. And those occasions were almost invariably describing himself as a unifying figure — Christ-like at times, Wotan-like at others — the focus of all German history. The leader whom others should, and would, follow. There were certainly times when Hitler feigned reluctance towards his destiny — though not the passage of the Enabling Act, your claims above notwithstanding — but they were always, always, always presented in a context that required his audience to think of him as a leader. He never once allowed anyone to think otherwise, as the Strasser brothers (amongst others) found to their cost.
And you say that socialism has no intersection with nationalism, though any nation, including a socialist one, will bray nationalistically if it is in trouble (USSR, PRC, Cuba, modern Venezuela) or, in Hitler’s case, bray while asking for trouble.
I didn’t say that it has no intersection with nationalism. I said that socialism is explicitly universalist, which it is, although obviously any defined nation-state is going to have some nationalist elements within it. I also said that Nazism was explicitly anti-socialist, which it was, and that Nazism had no meaningful intersection with socialism. Once again, you’ve completely failed to answer our earlier questions while presuming (incorrectly again) us to have said something we have not.
I’ll add, since you raised the subject, that many dictatorships (regardless of ostensible political bent) end up appealing to a kind of de facto nationalism to hold their nation-state together, but adopting nationalism through expediency and believing in it from first principles are two completely different things.* Cults of Personality muddy the waters still further but — contrary to your implied assertion — these aren’t characteristic of socialism, they’re characteristics of dictatorships.
* Modern China is IMO a stand-out exception to this, with the double whammy of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre destroying what legitimacy the CCP had as a people’s movement, resulting in the hypernationalist Communist Party we know and love today.
Is it a sacred thing for some of you?
Is it an imperative that you sanctimoniously impugn people’s characters?
No one that I know from the center, center-right or right has any difficulty at all seeing Hitler as an orator of great acting talent amalgamating socialism and fascism.
Congratulations. They’re still wrong.
[And fwiw, AFAICT your definition of “center” is way to the right of most other people’s. Waaaaaay to the right.]
but I advise you to look at what the socialistic factions THEMSELVES were saying to each other while Hitler was gaining power in the 1930’s. Delving into that kinda proves my point.
You’d better have another quote, then, because AFAICT your quote proves the exact opposite.
But regardless: bored now. I have better things to do than argue with someone out of his depth. Drop me a line if you actually respond to the arguments I’m making, otherwise I’ll see you in the funny papers.
Since I didn’t, in the first 50 words, see UC come up with a single citation to support his assertion that “many” here deny that socialists can be nationalist or racist, I didn’t bother reading the rest of his latest missive; and judging by Anarch’s response, I did the right thing.
I had an old math teacher who had been a tail gunner in the war and who knew a whole lot about it. He thought there were only a couple of bombing missions that mattered, apart from the oil. One was an attack that destroyed a dam in the Ruhr, where they used a special aiming method to get a single bomb at precisely the right place on the dam.
If by “special aiming method” you mean “special bomb.” There was a rather famous movie about it and everything.
As far as the Nazism/socialism bit goes, it seems to me that Nazism was nearly the opposite of any sort of collectivist philosophy, while socialism is pretty far along the collectivist axis. Nazism was for state-controlled…well, everything, but there was no consensus as such.
I just reread it. I will never disregard LJ’s advice again. (Never? Well, hardly ever…)
What Anarch said. Even more, what dr ngo said.
Pie!
I admire Anarch’s patience, because there is a lot of incoherent rambling in UC’s comments.
But I think the discussion J. Thomas tries to have (if I interpret correctly) has worthy pieces. How do you distinguish between the strategies when killing is the goal and strategies when killing is an ‘unfortunate side effect’. Are both as bad?
Wasn’t part of Hannah Arends banality of evil that most evil isn’t the goal, but caused by the indifference to side effects? (has been years since I read that, so I might remember it all wrong)
Dutch,
I’m still basking in the warmth of hilzoy’s comment. A comment like that is a joy forever…
However, while the discussion of what strategies are appropriate in total war, the approach taken is rather disingenuous, imo, mixing the generalities of such a question to the particular case of Pol Pot or the Holocaust. The whole notion of what someone would do if they were Pol Pot is one that is meaningless because if someone were Pol Pot, they wouldn’t be themselves. Unless you want to explain precisely what attributes of Pol Pot that you have to take on, and which of your own attributes you get to keep, you’ve got a conversation that may look coherent, but really doesn’t explain anything. Yet the suggestion is continually made that we would do the same thing if we were Pol Pot, suggesting that we are hypocritical because we can’t admit it. Discussing a causality of blame is important, but the way it has been done in this thread is to simply invite confusion.
I admire Anarch’s patience, because there is a lot of incoherent rambling in UC’s comments.
Anarch has truly gone above and beyond the call on this thread.
Dutchmarbel–there was the potential for an interesting discussion over some of JThomas’s points, but it got derailed when he acted as if the total number of people who died in Cambodia 1975-1978 was a predetermined number, one that couldn’t be altered, so hey, why not murder them instead? He meant to challenge our moral complacency, which is a worthwhile thing to do, but starting out from a position where you defend genocide generally makes people uninterested in your other moral claims.
How do you distinguish between the strategies when killing is the goal and strategies when killing is an ‘unfortunate side effect’.
Well, it doesn’t help to be either ignorant or dishonest about the distinction, such as saying that the Nazis didn’t really *seek* the deaths of millions of Jews and Russians (incl. “Russian Jews”). That makes it much more difficult to take one seriously.
–Agreed that Anarch’s patience is a wonder; I had to simply ignore the Coyote’s comments, as Thomas’s were enough to set my snark boiling.
🙂
The whole notion of what someone would do if they were Pol Pot is one that is meaningless because if someone were Pol Pot, they wouldn’t be themselves.
Good point, LP. Let me try to state it better.
I claim that the fundamental choice in these cases is between doing the best you can, versus abdicating and letting somebody else handle it.
If you abdicate then there’s a reasonable chance the next guy in line wouldn’t do as well as you would. You ought to abdicate if you think he’d do better. Pol Pot had the choice to abdicate to whoever would run the khmer rouge after him (which I’m guessing would probably not be an improvement. And for all we know somebody looked it over and abdicated to him. If your contribution to improving the situation is only that they use a different name for the official mass murderer, what good is that?) Or he could have tried to arrange a khmer rouge surrender to the USA, on the assumption that we might then feed the nation. Could he have pulled that off? Or would it have just gotten him killed? What’s the chance it would have worked? If he got the offer to us soon enough, we’d still have the food we collected for Lon Nol. Did they have the communications to send us an offer? There were no such communicastion channels available by the time of the Mayaguez incident. Would we have responded? We were *looking* for a genocide to blame on our withdrawal.
Or he could have surrendered to their old enemies, the vietnamese. The ones who took cambodian rice when they needed it to fight their own war and left the cambodians to starve.
There might have been a chance somewhere like that, assuming he could get the khmer rouge turned around and ready to surrender so their cambodian enemies might be fed.
Barring that, the best he could do was to put those people to work growing food. That minimised the deaths. And of course he had to put down rebellions — what unpopular government doesn’t? Get a place without enough food and an active civil war going and it will be worse than a place without enough food. The war would keep people from growing crops, so more would starve — unless enough were violently killed that there was accidentally enough food for the survivors.
Barring a successful khmer rouge surrender to someone who’d actually feed cambodia, something along the lines of what happened was probably about the best they could do. I don’t say they couldn’t have done better. More effort making farming handtools quicker might have resulted in more crops the first year. Less us-and-them attitude might have gotten more cooperation from the victims. (But that’s hard to arrange. Even in UN refugee camps there’s a very clear distinction between the professional staff and their victims.) Perhaps there were incidents that could have been prevented that led to the vietnamese invasion — but more likely that invasion was pretty much inevitable. Neither vietnam nor thailand wanted cambodian refugees and both were ready for vigorous efforts to stop them. Invading cambodia was effective at getting the cambodians out of vietnam.
When the best you can do still results in maybe 1/7 of your population dying, it’s easy to get a little callous. Try to make sure that 1/7 is somebody other than the people you care about.
I don’t claim it isn’t evil. I claim it’s something that practicaly anybody can fall into, if they don’t give up entirely.
I recall the scene in The Killing Fields where the senior KR leader, after entrusting his son to Dith Pran, goes to confront the others, who immediately shoot him (I think he says something like ‘I must do what I can’ though I can’t find the script online). Perhaps he shouldn’t have ‘abdicated’ his life, as the next person was crueler and would do worse. But if enough people were to choose such a path, I think surely things would have changed.
You may claim Haing Ngor, who played Dith Pran, was, after having survived 3 years of torture by the Khmer Rouge and survived only because he denied his post KR identity of being a doctor (and in what universe would be doing the best that you could do involve trying to completely eliminate your country’s educated class?), was murdered by gang members not because of politics, but because they demanded a locket that contained a picture of his dead wife, a locket that he refused to give up. In your logic, Ngor was a fool, as he should have just given up the locket, in mine, there are certain things you don’t give up and certain lines you don’t cross, even if crossing those lines might mean a better situation. Because if enough people accept that line, then the power shifts to them.
When the subjects under discussion are Hitler, Stalin, and their ilk, I’m not sure “left” and “right” are useful categories.
As far as the Nazism/socialism bit goes, it seems to me that Nazism was nearly the opposite of any sort of collectivist philosophy, while socialism is pretty far along the collectivist axis. Nazism was for state-controlled…well, everything, but there was no consensus as such.
I tend to agree with both of these, particularly the first one.
The way my grade-school encyclopedia explained it, the nazis let people keep their property including factories etc, and they could even keep the profits, but the nazis decided what would be produced and how much it would cost. In principle just as much control as the communists, but they let capitalists keep collecting dividends etc rather than kill them.
I read the claim that the nazis didn’t actually mobilise for total war as well as a number of other countries did. Like, the claim was that they let a lot of lady’s maids stay lady’s maids when they could have put them to work in factories etc. Cultural factors. People may take official positions from ideology but the cultures they grew up with interfere in unexpected ways.
The nazis certainly weren’t socialists by socialist standards any more than New Deal democrats were socialist or dominicans were cathars. But in each case they tried to look enough like their enemies to defeat them while maintaining a different set of core values.
It looks to me like nazi core values involved nationalism and racism. They wanted revenge for the horrors germans had been dealt during and after WWI and they wanted to make sure it never happened again. They failed.
The Nazis didn’t mobilize for total war…
No, I really can’t contribute to this one.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have ‘abdicated’ his life, as the next person was crueler and would do worse. But if enough people were to choose such a path, I think surely things would have changed.
You change things by persuading survivors. Sometimes that might happen from dying fast, other times better to stick around and persuade them. It depends.
and in what universe would be doing the best that you could do involve trying to completely eliminate your country’s educated class?
That one seems suboptimal to me, too. I can see them feeling like those people betrayed them, but it doesn’t make sense to choose them as the ones to die. Better to let some peasants die and keep some of the elite.
In your logic, Ngor was a fool, as he should have just given up the locket, in mine, there are certain things you don’t give up and certain lines you don’t cross, even if crossing those lines might mean a better situation. Because if enough people accept that line, then the power shifts to them.
It’s hard to second-guess a mugging. Guys with weapons do whatever they choose, and there’s no sure way to get out alive. He could have given it to them and been killed anyway. Or given sufficient language skill he could have told the right joke and they’d wave him on. Whatever he did, it didn’t work out well for him that time. I don’t know what I’d do and I can’t claim it would work.
He *might* have been in a situation where his choices were to do something that led to one or more deaths, versus surrender. He chose not to surrender and it turned out he died. It would seem to me to be more an example of what I’m talking about than otherwise.
“How do you distinguish between the strategies when killing is the goal and strategies when killing is an ‘unfortunate side effect’.”
Well, it doesn’t help to be either ignorant or dishonest about the distinction, such as saying that the Nazis didn’t really *seek* the deaths of millions of Jews and Russians (incl. “Russian Jews”).
Who said that?
I claim that the nazis believed their choice was unconditional surrender or victory, and victory required that at minimum tens of millions of russians die. I certainly did not say that the germans chose not to kill them. They chose what they hoped was a chance for victory, instead of certain defeat. They chose not to depend on Stalin’s mercy.
And then the east germans had no choice but depend on that mercy, and a couple million of them disappeared before the occupation settled down enough to take a new census.
liberal Japonicus; Isn’t that basking the goal we all ultimately strive for 😉
Bask away I’d say
Donald J.: Yes, I agree that he tends to aim for provocation more than discourse but even a fool (and I don’t think he’s a fool) can bring up usefull points ;).
I like to be challenged in my thinking, in my automatic responses. Some of my beliefs are very dear and ultimately true for me (as in universal moral truths), but I cannot always describe why and I often find myself taking the easy way out. “But everybody knows X is bad, and you’d never do Y”.
I don’t think I could be Pol Pot. I am not polical or remorseless enough to even be a politician in our civil country ;). I do understand that there is a difference between the levels of evil, and those are not always expressed properly by the numbers of death caused.
IMHO you’re always responsible for the deaths you caused. But there may be mitigating circumstances. Most pro-Iraq war people justify the deaths caused by the US invasion by saying that the long term death toll under Saddam might have been higher. I disagree, but I understand their reasoning. Even here in ObWi we had people saying that the main reason to invade Iraq was oil, and as protection of American interests that was fine. Which means the 600.000 additional deaths were worth it. Is that more evil or less evil that people who say the Iraqi death toll is worth it because the aim was to protect them from worse fates? Or are those on par?
How ruthless can you be? How do you decide wether the cost in human life is worth it? Is there a difference in the worth of human life? Is an Iraqi worth less than an
American? Less than any American, no matter how rich they are? Why can Bush get away with New Orleans, if Americans are worth so much?
In my (Dutch) environment I see that the main ally evil has is indifference. People don’t care about the victims (‘They’are killed, not ‘us’), or don’t want to think about consequences. We have killed hugh numbers of Indonesians in the 60’s, and nobody cared overly much. Were human lifes worth less? Where ‘their’ human lifes worth less? Was the ultimate goal important enough for everybody’s wellbeing to be worth it?
I read my grandmothers diaries. She wrote less in WW2, but what she wrote was not really about the war en even less about the Jews. I think the “let’s get their stuff to burn in the stove, they won’t come back anyway’ covers it. Now, my grandmother was definately not the nicest person I know, but she was not evil. She just was indifferent to the faith of people she didn’t care about.
Alternative lives:
Pol Pot, cutting short his stint at the Engineering School of Information Technology and Management in Paris because he found the subject matter tedious, decides to enroll at the French Culinary Institute to pursue his authentic passion.
After graduation, he is accepted for an apprenticeship with a renowned three-star chef in Lyon and advances rapidly to sous chef. His mentor bankrolls Chef Pot in a new venture, a little establishment where he begins experimenting with a menu of classic French food infused with Asian ingredients –the first known example of French-Asian fusion cuisine.
He is awarded three stars and after becoming an institution in France, he accepts an offer to head up the staff of a new establishment in New York. He builds the restaurant’s reputation to three-star status in the high-pressure New York scene of the 1960s and early 1970s , but then has one star removed by the New York Times food critic at the time, and descends into a deep and embittered depression and eventually a breakdown.
He rarely ventures out of his small New York apartment, becoming a recluse, though his name remains legend in culinary circles. He spends his days plotting vengeance on those who have wronged him, concocting a complicated scheme to murder, one by one and by gruesome means, all of the major food critics in New York, starting with those who wear eyeglasses.
Catching himself before this plan could become reality, he disappears into foody oblivion, working at a succession of New Jersey truck stops as a short-order cook, finally ending up at a low-end ski resort in New England, where he once again prepares a menu combining Asian and French influences fused with the fresh produce of the New England region.
He is rediscovered in the mid-1990s, now a man over 70, by Emeril Lagasse, who invites him on to his show on the Food Channel. They part amicably after disagreeing on the amount of cayenne papper one should use in a Cambodian pot au feu, and he now has two shows on the Food Channel and writes a column for Bon Appetite Magazine as he relaxes into his chef emeritus days.
Tune in next week when we trace the life of Joseph Stalin, whose existence turned on a single incident as a 30-something revolutionary when he spots by accident the beautiful 12-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia, who drops one white glove in his path as she enters the St Petersburg Opera House after catching his eye.
Weary from frequent exiles to Siberia, and like Dante seeking Beatrice, he succumbs to hopeless longing and turns inward, writing some bad poetry and spending his days outside the palace trying to catch a glimpse of his beloved.
We’ll also pay a visit to the young Adolf Hitler in Austria, who early on takes a shine to dogs, and studies biology and tries to eliminate the genetic aggressiveness out of the Doberman and German Shepherd breeds, eventually succeeding and opening a successful guide-dog training school for blind Hasidim.
Who amongst us wouldn’t murder food critics if we were chefs? Really, what choice would we have? Surrender to harsh reviews? Feh. That’s what’s so unrealistic about your alternate history, John. I expect better from the author of “Shopping in Indiana–The Lonely Commando’s Guidebook”.
Despie my decision to exit this thread I have to say that JT is indeed right that Hitler (and Germany) was not prepared for total war in 1939 and made attempts in that direction (without fully succeeding) only after the Wehrmacht got stopped at the gates of Moscow.
Blitzkrieg was not just a matter of superior tactics but of necessity because the German industry was not ready for any war of attrition (at least before Speer took over).
Hitler wanted his war in 1938 and was furious that Chamberlain spoilt it by caving in in Munich (and thus unwittingly preventing a military coup against Hitler btw). As in WW1 nobody was actually fully prepared and in both cases the German leadership took an opportunity to go to war while there seemed to be a chance of winning (and expecting it to slip away soon otherwise).
This does not mean that either war was in any way justified as premptive/preventive/whatever (and it were those *#%&$! Austrians that got us into both wars and afterwards pretended to be the innocent victims of Prussia [they still do and you will find a good deal more avowed Nazis down there than up here]).
there was the potential for an interesting discussion over some of JThomas’s points, but it got derailed when he acted as if the total number of people who died in Cambodia 1975-1978 was a predetermined number, one that couldn’t be altered, so hey, why not murder them instead?
That wasn’t it.
But look at the limiting factor. Just then, the limiting factor for survival was food. Anything you did to increase the food supply meant more lives saved, provided the food got distributed. Anything you did that wasted food meant more deaths.
And when the maximum food they could make wasn’t enough, it meant people were going to die. More people than there’s food for means some of them have to die when the food runs out. And one person who causes trouble now and gets killed now doesn’t eat his half-cup of rice a day, and that food can go to somebody who would have died otherwise. If there are a million people who’re going to starve regardless, then in a certain sense the first million people you kill don’t really count. And anybody you kill who’s reducing food production is likely to result in more people living.
I don’t claim that the khmer rouge were maximally efficient at saving lives. They did some things that were obvious mistakes — they didn’t have enough productive land, and they had very little transportation. They couldn’t grow enough food on the best land so they had to put new land into production, and they put people to work digging irrigation systems that washed away in the unprecedented monsoons. And if they could have persuaded the vietnamese not to invade they wouldn’t have needed to stockpile for the war. And — as usually happens — they split into classes, and the khmer rouge class was far too repressive with the war-slave class.
I claim that even with the best will in the world things would have gone rather much the way they did. They could have done worse, they might have done somewhat better, but it would have looked to the outside world like a genocide regardless. Meanwhile the USA was standing by with lots of rice that we absolutely would not give them — Congress had cut off support to the Lon Nol government, and no way were we going to give that support to genocidal communists. For that matter after they got overthrown it was by vietnamese-backed communists and we still did a lot to keep anybody we influenced from giving any aid to people they controlled.
We’d predicted a bloodbath and we weren’t going to be satisfied until we got one.
I claim that if you want to do good, you can do the most good if you pay attention to what good you can do and do it. Time you spend deciding who to blame it on is not particularly useful.
But time spent getting people who’re in the way out of the way might be very useful.
[BTW, unless you happen to be David Zarefsky, so fnording what? There are literally thousands of professors all over the world who teach similar things. Why on earth would you name-drop him only to drop him unceremoniously one sentence later?]
Because the evidential matter you have presented is inadequate. It is impossible from your presentation to determine which governments do or not represent the idealistic definition of socialism you proposed. Because your defense is essential one for a religion rather than a search for truth. And because of the ad hominem nature of your chacaterizations of me. And because, thanks to Zarefsky et supra, we know now that the ancient Greek rhetoricians were right and that Plato and Descartes were wrong.
Remember that “socialism” from its inception through 1945 has been redefined since then, expecially by academia. You’re only going to listen to citations. So let’s go to the belly of beast and see what Hitler himself had to say:
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
–Adolf Hitler (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)
“THE COMMON INTEREST BEFORE SELF-INTEREST –
THAT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE PROGRAM. BREAKING OF THE THRALDOM OF INTEREST – THAT IS THE KERNEL OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM. “
–Chapter 5 of Mein Kampf
“7. We demand that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, foreign nationals (non-citizens) must be deported from the Reich.
13. We demand the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts).
14. We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.
15. We demand the extensive development of insurance for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class, the immediate communalizing of big department stores, and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders, and that the utmost consideration shall be shown to all small traders in the placing of State and municiple orders.
17. We demand a land reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land. *
18. We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.
20. The State must consider a thorough reconstruction of our national system of education (with the aim of opening up to every able and hard-working German the possibility of higher education and of thus obtaining advancement). The curricula of all educational establishments must be brought into line with the requirements of practical life. The aim of the school must be to give the pupil, beginning with the first sign of intelligence, a grasp of the nation of the State (through the study of civic affairs). We demand the education of gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class or occupation, at the expense of the State.
21. The State must ensure that the nation’s health standards are raised by protecting mothers and infants, by prohibiting child labor, by promoting physical strength through legislation providing for compulsory gymnastics and sports, and by the extensive support of clubs engaged in the physical training of youth.
22. We demand the abolition of the mercenary army and the foundation of a people’s army.
25. To put the whole of this programme into effect, we demand the creation of a strong central state power for the Reich; the unconditional authority of the political central Parliament over the entire Reich and its organizations; and the formation of Corporations based on estate and occupation for the purpose of carrying out the general legislation passed by the Reich in the various German states. “
— 11 of the 25 points of the NSDAP Program, composed by Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler. They were publically presented on 24 February 1920
Analysis of business in Germany under Hitler:
“….No enterprise was free to deviate in the conduct of its operations from the orders issued by the government. Price control was only a device in the complex of innumerable decrees and orders regulating the minutest details of every business activity and precisely fixing every individual’s tasks on the one hand and his income and standard of living on the other.
“What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from control. Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party. “
–Ludwig von Mises, writing in 1944
Two quotes from Hitler himself (Hitler Speaks, 1940, by Hermann Rauchning):
“There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will.”
Another quote from Hitler:
“Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”
————
Many of his findings are astonishing. Perhaps for readers today the most astonishing of all is that “In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels’ article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or independent did anything of the kind.” (The term “genocide” in Watson’s usage is not confined to the extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but embraces also the liquidation of such other complete human categories as “enemies of the people” and “the Kulaks as a class.”)
–Prof. Antony Flew’s review of historian George Watson’s The Lost Literature of Socialism
—————————-
“Fascism” was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini’s Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler’s Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism’s standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, “Nazi” was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of “capitalism.”
–Tom Wolfe {From the essay “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists” originally appearing in the June 2000 Harper’s Monthly and reprinted in Wolfe’s book Hooking Up}
Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian
A 1995 lecture at the Ludwig von Mises Institute By George Reisman [George Reisman, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics (Ret.) at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management in Los Angeles and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996)]
My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.
The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises.
When one remembers that the word “Nazi” was an abbreviation for “der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — Mises’s identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with “socialist” in its name to be but socialism?
Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed.
The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.
What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.
De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.
But what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.
The effect of the combination of inflation and price and wage controls is shortages, that is, a situation in which the quantities of goods people attempt to buy exceed the quantities available for sale.
Shortages, in turn, result in economic chaos. It’s not only that consumers who show up in stores early in the day are in a position to buy up all the stocks of goods and leave customers who arrive later, with nothing — a situation to which governments typically respond by imposing rationing. Shortages result in chaos throughout the economic system. They introduce randomness in the distribution of supplies between geographical areas, in the allocation of a factor of production among its different products, in the allocation of labor and capital among the different branches of the economic system.
In the face of the combination of price controls and shortages, the effect of a decrease in the supply of an item is not, as it would be in a free market, to raise its price and increase its profitability, thereby operating to stop the decrease in supply, or reverse it if it has gone too far. Price control prohibits the rise in price and thus the increase in profitability. At the same time, the shortages caused by price controls prevent increases in supply from reducing price and profitability. When there is a shortage, the effect of an increase in supply is merely a reduction in the severity of the shortage. Only when the shortage is totally eliminated does an increase in supply necessitate a decrease in price and bring about a decrease in profitability.
As a result, the combination of price controls and shortages makes possible random movements of supply without any effect on price and profitability. In this situation, the production of the most trivial and unimportant goods, even pet rocks, can be expanded at the expense of the production of the most urgently needed and important goods, such as life-saving medicines, with no effect on the price or profitability of either good. Price controls would prevent the production of the medicines from becoming more profitable as their supply decreased, while a shortage even of pet rocks prevented their production from becoming less profitable as their supply increased.
As Mises showed, to cope with such unintended effects of its price controls, the government must either abolish the price controls or add further measures, namely, precisely the control over what is produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it is distributed, which I referred to earlier. The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.
This was the socialism instituted by the Nazis. And Mises calls it socialism on the German or Nazi pattern, in contrast to the more obvious socialism of the Soviets, which he calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.
Of course, socialism does not end the chaos caused by the destruction of the price system. It perpetuates it. And if it is introduced without the prior existence of price controls, its effect is to inaugurate that very chaos. This is because socialism is not actually a positive economic system. It is merely the negation of capitalism and its price system. As such, the essential nature of socialism is one and the same as the economic chaos resulting from the destruction of the price system by price and wage controls. (I want to point out that Bolshevik-style socialism’s imposition of a system of production quotas, with incentives everywhere to exceed the quotas, is a sure formula for universal shortages, just as exist under all around price and wage controls.)
At most, socialism merely changes the direction of the chaos. The government’s control over production may make possible a greater production of some goods of special importance to itself, but it does so only at the expense of wreaking havoc throughout the rest of the economic system. This is because the government has no way of knowing the effects on the rest of the economic system of its securing the production of the goods to which it attaches special
importance.
The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism — most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well.
We can start with the fact that the financial self-interest of sellers operating under price controls is to evade the price controls and raise their prices. Buyers otherwise unable to obtain goods are willing, indeed, eager to pay these higher prices as the means of securing the goods they want. In these circumstances, what is to stop prices from rising and a massive black market from developing?
The answer is a combination of severe penalties combined with a great likelihood of being caught and then actually suffering those penalties. Mere fines are not likely to provide much of a deterrent. They will be regarded simply as an additional business expense. If the government is serious about its price controls, it is necessary for it to impose penalties comparable to those for a major felony.
But the mere existence of such penalties is not enough. The government has to make it actually dangerous to conduct black-market transactions. It has to make people fear that in conducting such a transaction they might somehow be discovered by the police, and actually end up in jail. In order to create such fear, the government must develop an army of spies and secret informers. For example, the government must make a storekeeper and his customer fearful that if they engage in a black-market transaction, some other customer in the store will report them.
Because of the privacy and secrecy in which many black-market transactions can be conducted, the government must also make anyone contemplating a black-market transaction fearful that the other party might turn out to be a police agent trying to entrap him. The government must make people fearful even of their long-time associates, even of their friends and relatives, lest even they turn out to be informers.
And, finally, in order to obtain convictions, the government must place the decision about innocence or guilt in the case of black-market transactions in the hands of an administrative tribunal or its police agents on the spot. It cannot rely on jury trials, because it is unlikely that many juries can be found willing to bring in guilty verdicts in cases in which a man might have to go to jail for several years for the crime of selling a few pounds of meat or a pair of shoes above the ceiling price.
In sum, therefore, the requirements merely of enforcing price-control regulations is the adoption of essential features of a totalitarian state, namely, the establishment of the category of “economic crimes,” in which the peaceful pursuit of material self-interest is treated as a criminal offense, and the establishment of a totalitarian police apparatus replete with spies and informers and the power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
Clearly, the enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people. If the government is unwilling to go to such lengths, then, to that extent, its price controls prove unenforceable and simply break down. The black market then assumes major proportions. (Incidentally, none of this is to suggest that price controls were the cause of the reign of terror instituted by the Nazis. The Nazis began their reign of terror well before the enactment of price controls. As a result, they enacted price controls in an environment ready made for their enforcement.)
Black market activity entails the commission of further crimes. Under de facto socialism, the production and sale of goods in the black market entails the defiance of the government’s regulations concerning production and distribution, as well as the defiance of its price controls. For example, the goods themselves that are sold in the black market are intended by the government to be distributed in accordance with its plan, and not in the black market. The factors of production used to produce those goods are likewise intended by the government to be used in accordance with its plan, and not for the purpose of supplying the black market.
Under a system of de jure socialism, such as existed in Soviet Russia, in which the legal code of the country openly and explicitly makes the government the owner of the means of production, all black-market activity necessarily entails the misappropriation or theft of state property. For example, the factory workers or managers in Soviet Russia who turned out products that they sold in the black market were considered as stealing the raw materials supplied by the state.
Furthermore, in any type of socialist state, Nazi or Communist, the government’s economic plan is part of the supreme law of the land. We all have a good idea of how chaotic the so-called planning process of socialism is. Its further disruption by workers and managers siphoning off materials and supplies to produce for the black market, is something which a socialist state is logically entitled to regard as an act of sabotage of its national economic plan. And sabotage is how the legal code of a socialist state does regard it. Consistent with this fact, black-market activity in a socialist country often carries the death penalty.
Now I think that a fundamental fact that explains the all-round reign of terror found under socialism is the incredible dilemma in which a socialist state places itself in relation to the masses of its citizens. On the one hand, it assumes full responsibility for the individual’s economic well-being. Russian or Bolshevik-style socialism openly avows this responsibility — this is the main source of its popular appeal. On the other hand, in all of the ways one can imagine, a socialist state makes an unbelievable botch of the job. It makes the individual’s life a nightmare.
Every day of his life, the citizen of a socialist state must spend time in endless waiting lines. For him, the problems Americans experienced in the gasoline shortages of the 1970s are normal; only he does not experience them in relation to gasoline — for he does not own a car and has no hope of ever owning one — but in relation to simple items of clothing, to vegetables, even to bread. Even worse he is frequently forced to work at a job that is not of his choice and which he therefore must certainly hate. (For under shortages, the government comes to decide the allocation of labor just as it does the allocation of the material factors of production.) And he lives in a condition of unbelievable overcrowding, with hardly ever a chance for privacy. (In the face of housing shortages, boarders are assigned to homes; families are compelled to share apartments. And a system of internal passports and visas is adopted to limit the severity of housing shortages in the more desirable areas of the country.) To put it mildly, a person forced to live in such conditions must seethe with resentment and hostility.
Now against whom would it be more logical for the citizens of a socialist state to direct their resentment and hostility than against that very socialist state itself? The same socialist state which has proclaimed its responsibility for their life, has promised them a life of bliss, and which in fact is responsible for giving them a life of hell. Indeed, the leaders of a socialist state live in a further dilemma, in that they daily encourage the people to believe that socialism is a perfect system whose bad results can only be the work of evil men. If that were true, who in reason could those evil men be but the rulers themselves, who have not only made life a hell, but have perverted an allegedly perfect system to do it?
It follows that the rulers of a socialist state must live in terror of the people. By the logic of their actions and their teachings, the boiling, seething resentment of the people should well up and swallow them in an orgy of bloody vengeance. The rulers sense this, even if they do not admit it openly; and thus their major concern is always to keep the lid on the citizenry.
Consequently, it is true but very inadequate merely to say such things as that socialism lacks freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Of course, it lacks these freedoms. If the government owns all the newspapers and publishing houses, if it decides for what purposes newsprint and paper are to be made available, then obviously nothing can be printed which the government does not want printed. If it owns all the meeting halls, no public speech or lecture can be delivered which the government does not want delivered. But socialism goes far beyond the mere lack of freedom of press and speech.
A socialist government totally annihilates these freedoms. It turns the press and every public forum into a vehicle of hysterical propaganda in its own behalf, and it engages in the relentless persecution of everyone who dares to deviate by so much as an inch from its official party line.
The reason for these facts is the socialist rulers’ terror of the people. To protect themselves, they must order the propaganda ministry and the secret police to work ’round the clock. The one, to constantly divert the people’s attention from the responsibility of socialism, and of the rulers of socialism, for the people’s misery. The other, to spirit away and silence anyone who might even remotely suggest the responsibility of socialism or its rulers — to spirit away anyone who begins to show signs of thinking for himself. It is because of the rulers’ terror, and their desperate need to find scapegoats for the failures of socialism, that the press of a socialist country is always full of stories about foreign plots and sabotage, and about corruption and mismanagement on the part of subordinate officials, and why, periodically, it is necessary to unmask large-scale domestic plots and to sacrifice major officials and entire factions in giant purges.
It is because of their terror, and their desperate need to crush every breath even of potential opposition, that the rulers of socialism do not dare to allow even purely cultural activities that are not under the control of the state. For if people so much as assemble for an art show or poetry reading that is not controlled by the state, the rulers must fear the dissemination of dangerous ideas. Any unauthorized ideas are dangerous ideas, because they can lead people to begin thinking for themselves and thus to begin thinking about the nature of socialism and its rulers. The rulers must fear the spontaneous assembly of a handful of people in a room, and use the secret police and its apparatus of spies, informers, and terror either to stop such meetings or to make sure that their content is entirely innocuous from the point of view of the state.
Socialism cannot be ruled for very long except by terror. As soon as the terror is relaxed, resentment and hostility logically begin to well up against the rulers. The stage is thus set for a revolution or civil war. In fact, in the absence of terror, or, more correctly, a sufficient degree of terror, socialism would be characterized by an endless series of revolutions and civil wars, as each new group of rulers proved as incapable of making socialism function successfully as its predecessors before it. The inescapable inference to be drawn is that the terror actually experienced in the socialist countries was not simply the work of evil men, such as Stalin, but springs from the nature of the socialist system. Stalin could come to the fore because his unusual willingness and cunning in the use of terror were the specific characteristics most required by a ruler of socialism in order to remain in power. He rose to the top by a process of socialist natural selection: the selection of the worst.
I need to anticipate a possible misunderstanding concerning my thesis that socialism is totalitarian by its nature. This concerns the allegedly socialist countries run by Social Democrats, such as Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, which are clearly not totalitarian dictatorships.
In such cases, it is necessary to realize that along with these countries not being totalitarian, they are also not socialist. Their governing parties may espouse socialism as their philosophy and their ultimate goal, but socialism is not what they have implemented as their economic system. Their actual economic system is that of a hampered market economy, as Mises termed it. While more hampered than our own in important respects, their economic system is essentially similar to our own, in that the characteristic driving force of production and economic activity is not government decree but the initiative of private owners motivated by the prospect of private profit.
The reason that Social Democrats do not establish socialism when they come to power, is that they are unwilling to do what would be required. The establishment of socialism as an economic system requires a massive act of theft — the means of production must be seized from their owners and turned over to the state. Such seizure is virtually certain to provoke substantial resistance on the part of the owners, resistance which can be overcome only by use of massive force.
The Communists were and are willing to apply such force, as evidenced in Soviet Russia. Their character is that of armed robbers prepared to commit murder if that is what is necessary to carry out their robbery. The character of the Social Democrats in contrast is more like that of pickpockets, who may talk of pulling the big job someday, but who in fact are unwilling to do the killing that would be required, and so give up at the slightest sign of serious resistance.
As for the Nazis, they generally did not have to kill in order to seize the property of Germans other than Jews. This was because, as we have seen, they established socialism by stealth, through price controls, which served to maintain the outward guise and appearance of private ownership. The private owners were thus deprived of their property without knowing it and thus felt no need to defend it by force.
I think I have shown that socialism — actual socialism — is totalitarian by its very nature.
Anarch has truly gone above and beyond the call on this thread.
I’ll second/third/fourth that.
I’m an innocent (!?!) bystander at this point. I have nothing else.
UC, now that you’ve finally given a big glob of citations, what does it mean?
You have established that the nazis got a lot of control of their economy, just as the communists did in russia.
And you have established that Hitler sometimes used rhetoric that was some ways similar to socialist rhetoric — he talked about the same claimed injustices and he talked about not tolerating them.
However, what you have not established is whether either the nazi system or the communist systems were actually socialist. Many socialists claim that neither were. Both of them used rhetoric of various sorts — sometimes the same rhetoric — to get power. And neither of them kept their socialist promises.
They used up the economic power they concentrated to build military-industrial juggernauts, just as we did as a capitalist society.
As you point out, we don’t have an agreed definition of socialism.
So why would we argue which systems were socialist? What good does it do us?
A 1995 lecture at the Ludwig von Mises Institute By George Reisman
George Reisman seems to have a bit of an ax to grind.
link
This is also enlightening
I would take the word of any Von Mises Institute lecturer on socialism in precisely the spirit I’d take a ’60s Soviet official lecture on capitalism, the Discovery Institute on the motives of evolutionary biologists, and the like.
The nationalisation (or threat thereof) of key industries (esp. related to the ability to fight wars) is not limited to “left-wing” systems but can also be found in the party programs of unmistakbly right-wing movements. The deification of the state and marginalization of the individual is a standard for most authoritarian philosophies on both the left and the right. The term “the people” is more often than not just a euphemism for the state (and its rulers).
It is as meaningless as “the American people” (or “Christians”) as used by US political (resp. religious) fringers.
To Hartmut:
It’s important to know when an argument is fallacious, when a label has been intentionally changed. This is especially true when the label is “socialism” attempting to redefine itself as something much more benign than it is.
European Marxists changed the definition of socialism after 1945 to repudiate Hitler. But Hitler’s party and Hitler’s reign was regarded as mainstream socialism until the Red Army was in Berlin.
Anarch’s argument is based on a “cunning” (to use Christopher Hitchens’ book title) revisionist history. Hitler was not outside mainstream socialism while he was in power — he ALONE got and obtained power both by thugs and by democracy, single-handedly satisfying the conditions that tore socialists into factions after the Vienna fiasco of 1927.
That Hitler was a mainstream socialist is supported by center-left (Hitchens), center (Wolfe) and center-right (von Mises and Reisman) citings of mine. Only the Hard Left itself insists on excluding Hitler.
This is vital because it displays the fallacy of Anarch’s argument, and, much more importantly, because socialism concentrates so much power in its government by its ideology that dictatorship is virtually inevitable (the lecture posting).
And you need to know it when you see it, not as its proponents have redefined it — because — it redefines human rightlessness.
Socialism doesn’t just lead to prison time for non-adherents. It can lead to a brutal nightmare society where only tattlers have status, a miserable nightmare worse than Kafka wrote about. An example of this is Cuba (read Armando Valladeres “Against All Hope” book to check this out).
And we need to remain clear-eyed and unconned about this. Hitler was a socialist, even his “retention” of private property for shopkeepers was a sham that was de facto socialism (says von Mises, who left Vienna hours before he would have been arrested by the Gestapo).
We need to know when political blarney can lead to tyranny. Without any filters. And without buying self-serving re-definitions.
Hitler was a socialist. And a nationalist. And an honestly electred democrat. And a prince of thugs And a psychopath. It doesn’t help to fuzz up the titles or to redefine an ideology for post propter hoc salesmanship of an inherently dictatorial idea.
That’s why I put all those citations in. Plus citations have magically killed off the ad hominem attacks on me, a kindly, sensitive and artistic individual as I am.