As some of you may have noticed, I keep track of various anniversaries, since I’ve always thought that there are certain things that one should reflect on on a regular basis, and anniversaries are as good a time as any. Most of them are happy: the anniversary of the Bill of Rights, for instance. This one is not. Sixty three years ago today, on January 20, 1942, a group of high-ranking Nazi officials met in Wannsee to plan the extermination of Europe’s Jews. The final solution had been decided on about a month before; from Goebbels’ diary:
“In respect of the Jewish question, the Fuehrer has decided to make a clean sweep. The world war is here, the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary result. This question is to be regarded without sentimentalism. We are not here to have sympathy with the Jews, but rather with our German people. If the German people have sacrificed 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, so the authors of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.”
At the Wannsee Conference, this decision was revealed to many of the people who would be responsible for organizing and implementing the annihilation of Europe’s Jews. None of them dissented from conclusions like this:
“Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.
The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)”
Himmler and Goebbels, at least, seem to have thought that there was something heroic about their lack of “sentimentality” and their willingness to put aside their moral squeamishness in order to do “what had to be done.” Himmler, for instance, wrote:
“Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”
They also seem to have thought, as of 1942 at least, that history would thank them for the slaughter of millions. Thank God they were wrong.
***
Note: I deliberately posted this very late — late enough, I now see, that it’s no longer on the right day — because I didn’t want to drop this post into the middle of the inauguration. I can’t tell anyone what to say, obviously, but I would respectfully ask anyone who is tempted to make comparisons to any contemporary figure, on the right or the left, not to. Thanks.
The texts from Wannsee and Poznan are the two I read once year, any time I start feeling unduly optimistic about the course of humanity. Never forget.
Anarch: what’s Poznan? (said she, feeling ignorant.)
Himmler’s speech upon actually seeing what the Final Solution would entail. Sometimes known as the Posen speech.
Thanks, hilzoy. I hope comparisons to a modern day process are ok.
I think it is important to note that when the Einsatzgruppen began executing Jews, there were morale problems. So, the Germans turned to mobile killing vanss where the exhausts were pumped into where the Jews were held. This didn’t work either, because the soldiers had to dispose of the bodies, so the next step was to move the process further away from the soldiers, resulting in Jews having to do disposal work, which resulted in places like Auschwitz. I would note that this out of sight/out of mind approach is precisely the same when we use extraordinary rendition, simply moving the process away from us because participating in it harms not only the victims, but those who do it.
Two book recommendations for this anniversary, Richard Rubenstein’s _The Cunning of History_ (it was the inspiration for _Sophie’s Choice_) and Kurt Vonnegut’s _Mother Night_.
lj,
“I can’t tell anyone what to say, obviously, but I would respectfully ask anyone who is tempted to make comparisons to any contemporary figure, on the right or the left, not to.”
Maybe, next she’ll do a post about the process that Allied leaders went through that allowed the rise of Nazism in Germany which eventually lead to WW2, genocide and the death of millions.
Er . . . there’s actually a wealth — quite literally, hundreds and thousands of scholarly works — examining the punitive nature of the Versailles treaty on the Germans following WWI, and the hardline stance taken by the Allies after that war, and its effect in allowing Hitler and the Nazis to come to power. There’s quite a lot of “but for” arguments with legitimate historical weight behind them.
But if you want to continue to be ignorant — or at least pretend to be ignorant in a politically convenient way — and continue to posit the notion that there’s only one actor in every event who bears any responsibility for anything, ever . . . well, I can’t stop you.
Responsibility for actions lies with the actor. The fact that you can identify reasons that the actor did what they did is not in any way exonerating.
An overly punitive treaty does not bear responsibility for Nazism. If you insist that it does, you fail to recognize that most of those who suffered under punitive treaties somehow managed not to try to exterminate all Jews and take over the world.
Actually, Jonas, I argued in a longish comment a few days ago that responsibility is not zero-sum, so that saying that agents are responsible for their actions does not imply that no one else is. FWIW.
I think that’s rather hard position to take, given that the agent is the only one who has absolute control over whether or not an action takes place. And while the agent is subject to outside influence, I think it is a very difficult proposition to hold people morally liable for failing to anticipate the agents ultimate crime or wrongdoing.
Jonas: The agent is the one who has complete control over his actions, so of course I hold him responsible for them (absent e.g. innocent mistakes, etc.) But this doesn’t show that anyone else is not responsible unless responsibility is zero-sum, since otherwise I get to say: the agent is responsible, and someone else might be too. I think that whether or not it’s OK to hold people accountable for failing to predict something depends a lot on how clear it was that that something was likely to happen.
Hmmm. This is an interesting area. I agree sort-of and disagree–but in a way that I can’t really put my finger on.
Let me try to walk it through in my head with something a little less crazy than the whole NAZI era.
A) I defintely agree that there can be multiple responsibility. We don’t try to articulate a question like Is a suicide bomber responsible for the deaths of those eating in the coffee shop he bombs OR is his handler responsible. We mostly accept that both are responsible for directly planned actions that get carried out even though the suicide bomber could have chosen not to explode his bomb once he left the handler’s presence.
B) The problem of responsibility in cases where there are forseeable consequences is harder. If a hostage is taken, I will almost always blame the hostage taker for injury to the hostage even if the immediate cause of death ends up being a bullet from a police officer. Is the proper terminology that I hold the police officer responsible for his actions (in that if he had clear non-violent ways to resolve the issue he should try them, but I’m pretty strict on the ‘clear’ part) by not culpable?
C) The problem of responsibility is even harder when the problems are only partially forseeable and could be cut by many intentional acts on the part of more immediate wrong-doer. I think it may be very well possible that the punitive treaties are an important cause contributing to the rise of the NAZIs and are thus responsible in a long term chain-of-events kind of way. Were they intended that way? Clearly not. Was it forseeable that they would act that way? I’m not sure. I think they could have also provided an economic incentive to not make war again (see for example the lending discussion we had a few days ago). In retrospect they did not. From the point of view of the decision-makers at the time it certainly wasn’t as clear. This seems especially true considering that Germany was able to have a regime with similar war-making ambitions without such hugely punitive treaties against them in WWI. So if by ‘responsible’ we mean “culpably responsible” (did I invert the use/mention distinction here?) I don’t hold the treaties responsible because the NAZIs reacted so far out of expected bounds as to break the chain of responsiblity. Perhaps that is a question of forseeablity.
An overly punitive treaty does not bear responsibility for Nazism. If you insist that it does, you fail to recognize that most of those who suffered under punitive treaties somehow managed not to try to exterminate all Jews and take over the world.
When I insist that, I promise you’ll be the first to know. I’ll send a card and everything.
We can all sit around and pretend that Versailles did not result in a set of circumstances that allowed National Socialism to rise and flourish, when it otherwise might not have [NOTE: I’m clearly specifying “might” as we have no control group here] if we want to, I suppose. I don’t know what it accomplishes, but it will apparently make some people feel better about something.
Sebastian: My view is that: when the consequences are clearly foreseeable, even if not intended, the person who should have foreseen them (or did foresee them) is responsible for making the choice s/he did. Whether or not I go on to say that s/he is culpable depends on whether or not making that choice was justifiable. If the police officer unintentionally shoots the hostage, and had no better alternatives, and something worth risking that unintentional shooting for was at stake, I don’t blame the police officer. If, on the other hand, s/he was just playing Dirty Harry for the heck of it, despite the existence of non-violent options that should have been tried first, and someone else got killed, then I regard him/her as culpable, along with the hostage-taker.
(Or, the quick version: recall the extreme example from the last time I talked about this, about the commander who orders his/her troops to march unarmed and defenseless through Fallujah while wearing signs saying ‘unarmed American soldier’. If you ditch the idea that you have to choose between holding the killers responsible and holding the commander responsible, it seems clear (to me) that both are.)
In the case at hand, foreseeability would be key.
One more tangential note: I don’t think it matters whether you can foresee the exact consequences of what you do, or only that you’re risking some pretty bad ones. Drunk drivers never predict that they’re going to run over this specific person; that they could have predicted that they might run over someone is enough. If I decide to have fun by convincing a paranoid schizophrenic that you are out to get her, then I might not know exactly what bad consequences might ensue, but I can be pretty clear that some might, and that they might be very bad. If she then goes out gunning for you, I am (I think) responsible, even if I didn’t predict that in particular.
Think of it as sort of like negligence.
I agree that you don’t have to know the nature of the exact harm, I’ll go along with the current legal idea that in order to be culpable you are responsible for the expected type of harm even if the magnitude is off. The classic example is the “eggshell skull plaintiff”. If you throw a pebble down at someone from a tall building knowing that it would bruise (cause harm) to someones head if it hit them, you are culpable if you hit someone with an extra-thin skull and kill them because you knew that head injury was likely from your action, you just didn’t know the magnitude and trying to bruise someone’s head is a tortious (culpable) action. I’m not sure how the punitive treaties work into that kind of categorization.
I guess to sum up my view is that while I would hold the “Dirty Harry” cop responsible for recklessness, my moral disapproval of the hostage-taker is above and beyond the Police Officer given that it was the agency of the hostage-taker that directly caused the whole mess to begin with.
In terms of the foreseeing consequences complication, I think I’m going to sit on the fence about that one, mostly because my gut tells me you can’t foresee consequences.
Jonas: Clearly some consequences are unforeseeable, but I really hope, for your sake, that you are able to foresee some of the likely consequences of your actions, if only because if you’re not, your life must be really, really difficult. (“If I get on this bus, will it take me to work, or turn into an enormous swan and fly away? Who knows?”, etc.)
Jonas, the logical extension of your argument is total abrogation of responsibility. We would not depose Hussein because we could not foresee that he would murder people. We certainly wouldn’t have stopped the rise of Hitler, because we couldn’t foresee WWII and the genocide. We wouldn’t educate our children because we couldn’t foresee that it would make them better people. Ad infinitum.
Of course we foresee things. Causes have effects and part of human responsibility is generating causes that have positive effects. Sometimes we screw it up. The proper response to that is to learn, not to say ‘oh well, don’t bother’.
Moral responsibility is a side issue here. Not everyone whose actions helped make outcome X possible need be morally culpable for outcome X.
The Versailles treaty, for example, may be seen as an extremely costly *mistake*, one whose costs included facilitating the rise of Nazism, without in any way calling the treaty’s drafters accomplices with Nazi crimes. For another example, there have been numerous anti-crime policies pursued in various times and places that have turned out to be dumb mistakes that actually increased crime rates; and we can castigate the drafters of those policies for making bad decisions without implying that they are partially culpable for criminal acts.
It’s not a question of culpability. No one has suggested that the drafters of Versailles should have been indicted at the Nuremberg trials. It’s an appreciation that some actions create fertile soil for other actions and it is physically and socially possible to choose other actions based on that appreciation. And that if possible, one should.
Jonas’ contention seems to be that that the only possible levels of responsibility are ‘direct genocidal’ and ‘none’ and we therefore must select ‘none’ for those who make indirect and unknowing contributions. That is, I would argue, unnecessary, oversimple, amoral, and eventually disastrous.
I think a lot of it is a function of context [ed–brilliant want any more near tautologies]. If you are discussing the horrors of NAZI genocide, talking about the responsibility of the Versailles drafters seems like you are deflecting responsibility. If you are talking about how to respond to a country after it is defeated in a war, talking about responsibility of the Versailles drafters in adding to an atmosphere which made the rise of the NAZIs more likely, it makes more sense.
If you are discussing the horrors of NAZI genocide, talking about the responsibility of the Versailles drafters seems like you are deflecting responsibility.
Looking at the 8:41 post, yeah, I’d say someone is trying to deflect something.
And Seb, what’s with the caps for Nazi. I know it’s an acronym, but the all caps looks really jarring.
But not as jarring as yon bolding.
I think it is a function of context, but it’s also a function of being too aggressive in assigning motives to people. If I say ‘the Versailles treaty is partially responsible for the rize of Nazism’ you don’t have to decide whether or not I’m trying to excuse Nazis to debate the assertion. Way too much of that going around.
Whoops. Them blog gods. Thanks sidereal.
Sebastian–the eggshell skull rule seems sorta relevant but while we’ve got our legal dork hats on: what seems central to this discussion is the distinction between but for cause and proximate cause. Liberals tend to be arguing that the U.S.’s (or whoever) actions are a but-for cause of something, and be misunderstood by conservatives as arguing that the U.S. (or whoever) is the proximate cause.
I always mean to explain that in non-legalese–in general I find tort and especially criminal law very useful in trying to think through the knotty foreign policy issues. (Have I ever given my grand theory about the parallel between domestic violence cases and pre-emptive/preventive war doctrine?) But I can never get around to a coherent explanation.
I know it’s an acronym, but the all caps looks really jarring.
It’s not an acronym either. The proper acronym, such as it is, would be NSDAP, Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. “Nazi” is just a nickname, apparently adopted as an abbreviation of the first word of the actual title of the NSDAP.
Legal Theory Lexicon has a good explanation of causation (at least in my layman’s opinion).
The HBO film “Conspiracy”, which is based largely on the reporter’s transcript of the Wannsee meeting, is a highly recommended film for those interested in Wannsee(if you ever get a chance to see it — I doubt its available anywhere).
* * *
Regading the notion that the Versaille treaty was too punitive, thereby conributing to Nazism, I would offer another historical view.
First, the Versaille experience resulted in the “unconditional surrender” Allied terms of WWII. These were clearly much more “punitive” peace terms, but it turns out that more punitive was actually better. It insured complete devastation of the enemy regimes and complete post-war control. It also insured that WWII would end only after turning the world into a charnel house (inlcuding dropping the A-Bomb to break Japan’s unwillingness to surrender unconditionally).
Second, it is common in history for a series of wars to be fought for very similar reasons, and that the second war is in some ways simply a continuation of the first (which failed to resolve the underlying tensions for war). A classic example is the American Revolution and the War of 1812 — sometimes referred to by historians as the “Second American Revolution.”
WWI and WWII is clearly another instance of that.
Nazis probably got more of a boost from the unresolved bitterness of defeat from WWI, which feeling would have existed without regard to the punitive nature of the Versaille treaty. It is important to recognize the extent to which the German people were misled in 1918 by their leadership (particularly the Kaiser and the German general staff) concerning the direness of the military situation.
I am reminded of the discussions in “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” of the “stab in the back” theory and the bitterness over the military defeat, and the Nazis’ success in exploiting that. Versaille may have rubbed salt in the wounds, but a similar level of bitterness would have been lurking for Nazis to exploit even if the treaty had not been as punitive.
Also, what was viewed by Germans as most “punitive” were the Versaille provisions preventing Germany from re-arming — Reich is clear about the Nazis’ political use of that issue.
So which came first — bitterness about Versaille or bitterness about losing the war (and deceit as to the fact that Germany was utterly beaten in 1918)? That bitterness is then fueled by focusing on Versaille’s disarmament provisions that impeded re-arming to start the conflict anew.
The Versaille treaty was a horrible “stab in the back” of Wilson’s idealistic 14 points (and was therefore evil in that regard), which were a major inducement for the German’s agreeing to the Armistice in the first instance. But the Germans were spoiling for round two without regard to Versaille, and the Nazis exploited that in spades. Versaille’s role in provoking that feeling and Nazi success is overblown.
It’s not an acronym either. The proper acronym, such as it is, would be NSDAP, Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
Good point. I’m trying to find a word for a term that takes the first syllables of the words that make it up. Anyone got an idea what that is called?
Um, nickname?
Also, dmbeaster: I am really, really not an expert on Weimar Germany, but had someone held a gun to my head and asked me why I thought the Versailles Treaty contributed to the rise of the Nazis, I would have said it was less about the resentment, which I agree would have been there in any case, but its role in the inflation of the 20s, which I would have suspected was both a bad thing in its own right and destructive of general stability and of people’s confidence in their new government.
A ha! A syllabic acronym.
Cool links, LJ. I still disagree that it’s an acronym, though; if it were a syllabic acronym, it would have been “Naso”.* I think it’s just a straight up abbreviation: Nati… -> Nazi.
Re the rise of Nazi power: don’t forget the payment of war reparations and, perhaps just as importantly, the French seizure of the Ruhr and the other place I always forget in lieu of those reparations, as well as the loss of Danzig and a few other Polish-German cities and Alsace-Lorraine (again) at Versailles proper. Hitler derived a lot of mileage from the breakdown of Altdeutchsland and the subsequent outrage of German nationalists.** The requirement to “voluntarily” adopt the blame for the whole of WWI — WWI, for crying out loud! — didn’t help either.
Of course, this would all probably be moot had Streseman not died a month before the Crash in 1929, but those were the kind of actions that the Allies could have (and should have) foreseen resulting in some pretty dire consequences down the road.
* There’s a story, now believed to be apocryphal, that that was the original nickname adopted by the now-Nazis and that “Nazi” was the invention of a German journalist — the “H L Mencken of his day”, the version I learned goes — who decided to mess with them by altering the name to its present form, which just happened to mean something vaguely naughty in Bavarian slang.
** Which, ironically, was itself a fairly new phenomenon. There wasn’t really a notion of “German” as a national category — distinct here from “German” as a cultural or, by about 1855(?), a racial category — let alone “German nationalism”, until Bismarck gets his sticky little fingers all over Middle Europe c. 1870.
Hmmm, wondering why ti goes to zi, and more googling turns up this
link
1930, from Ger. Nazi, abbreviation of Ger. pronunciation of Nationalsozialist (based on earlier Ger. sozi, popular abbreviaton of “socialist”), from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei “National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” led by Hitler from 1920. The 24th edition of Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (2002) says the word Nazi was favored in southern Germany (supposedly from c.1924) among opponents of National Socialism because the nickname Nazi (from the masc. proper name Ignatz, Ger. form of Ignatius) was used colloquially to mean “a foolish person, clumsy or awkward person.” Ignatz was a popular name in Catholic Austria, and according to one source in WWI Nazi was a generic name in the German Empire for the soldiers of Austria-Hungary. An older use of Nazi for national-sozial is attested in Ger. from 1903, but EWdS does not think it contributed to the word as applied to Hitler and his followers. The NSDAP for a time attempted to adopt the Nazi designation as what the Germans call a “despite-word,” but they gave this up, and the NSDAP is said to have generally avoided the term. Before 1930, party members had been called in Eng. National Socialists, which dates from 1923. The use of Nazi Germany, Nazi regime, etc., was popularized by German exiles abroad. From them, it spread into other languages, and eventually brought back to Germany, after the war. In the USSR, the terms national socialist and Nazi were said to have been forbidden after 1932, presumably to avoid any taint to the good word socialist. Soviet literature refers to fascists.
Re the rise of Nazi power: don’t forget the payment of war reparations
The thing that gets me about the payment of the war reparations is that the German government in the ’20s deliberately trashed its own economy in an attempt to pay them back in devalued currency (which is, I think, what hilzoy was getting at). It’s kind of sad that, when people talk about amazingly stupid governmental decisions, they talk almost exclusively about military and diplomatic decisions; the mismanagement of the German economy in the ’20s has to have a place in the pantheon.
I think the ti->zi is simply a consequence of German pronunciation – “National” is spoken “na-tsi-on-al”, while “ti” is otherwise “ti”, and since “zi” sounds like “tsi” the spoken “Nati” souncds like “Nazi”.
lj,
Hilzoy,
“I can’t tell anyone what to say, obviously, but I would respectfully ask anyone who is tempted to make comparisons to any contemporary figure, on the right or the left, not to.”
Smlook:
Maybe, next she’ll do a post about the process that Allied leaders went through that allowed the rise of Nazism in Germany which eventually lead to WW2, genocide and the death of millions.
All the word games after that post was pretty funny. Let’s be honest. Hilzoy was trying to take a swipe at the Bush administration, but didn’t want to come right out and do it. Although, LJ stepped right up and filled in for her.
“Himmler and Goebbels, at least, seem to have thought that there was something heroic about their lack of “sentimentality” and their willingness to put aside their moral squeamishness in order to do “what had to be done.”
“They also seem to have thought, as of 1942 at least, that history would thank them for the slaughter of millions. Thank God they were wrong.”
“Note: I deliberately posted this very late — late enough, I now see, that it’s no longer on the right day — because I didn’t want to drop this post into the middle of the inauguration. I can’t tell anyone what to say, obviously, but I would respectfully ask anyone who is tempted to make comparisons to any contemporary figure, on the right or the left, not to. Thanks.”
You really should have just said, “Let’s talk about the Bush administration, but let’s act like we are not.”
And then you let LJ jump right in and start talking about Bush administration policies. Let’s atleast be more honest next time.
Yes, they thought they were doing the world a favor. But, so did Neville Chamberlain and look what that cost us.
Let’s be honest. Hilzoy was trying to take a swipe at the Bush administration, but didn’t want to come right out and do it.
Mind-reading. Fifteen yards.
dmbeaster: “ The HBO film “Conspiracy”, which is based largely on the reporter’s transcript of the Wannsee meeting, is a highly recommended film for those interested in Wannsee(if you ever get a chance to see it — I doubt its available anywhere).”
I have seen two reconstructions of Wannsee, both of which are worth watching. If anything, the German one is more convincing. Both are disturbing, in the sense that Heydrich and Eichmann display just the sort of people-management skills that HR departments cry out for. The links below may help you locate DVDs.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6302919789/102-6961227-6296155?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005YUO1/102-6961227-6296155?v=glance
The thing that gets me about the payment of the war reparations is that the German government in the ’20s deliberately trashed its own economy in an attempt to pay them back in devalued currency (which is, I think, what hilzoy was getting at).
Is that right? I know that the German government made use of the collapsing mark to pay back the reparations in devalued currency (to which the French vehemently objected) and I know that some of that devaluing was of their own volition. My understanding, though, was that the depression of the early 1920s was a result of the ravages of WWI and the beginnings of decolonialization — hence the simultaneous collapse of the British, French and German economies — and that the German economy was pretty much in ruins no matter what. Hyperinflation was bound to set in sooner or later.
That said, the German governments of 1919-1922 were not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed, and it may well be the case that, in hastening what they perceived as the inevitable, they actually worsened it.
Hilzoy:
This is a late response, but you are entirely right to stress the economic importance of the rise of the Nazis. The Depression also had a huge role in creating economic destabilization in addition to the Versaille effects.
Still, my point was to point out the importance of ideology in responding to the deprivations of Versaille; a variation on the old causation question of what causes bad behavior — economic conditions or mind set. I put a lot of stock in ideology — after all, violence was not an inevitable consequence. And that a lot of the Nazi power derived from resentment by a lot of Germans who were, in their own minds, not truly beaten in WWI; ironically, “punitive” peace terms are not always bad. But Versaille was certainly an evil.
Another interesting point is that the Nazis never obtained majority support in Germany, so we are not even talking about the mind set of the majority of Germans but just the fanatic minority that took control via the Nazi party. These issues were played out politically in fervent elections in 1932, and the Nazis failed to poll more than 37% — a distant second. They ultimately obtained power through intrigue.
These issues were played out politically in fervent elections in 1932, and the Nazis failed to poll more than 37% — a distant second.
Hrm? The Nazis won the July 1932 election handily, ending up with 230 seats. A plurality, of course — no-one was getting majorities in Weimar Germany AFAIR — but still the largest party in the Reichstag by far. They lost some seats in November but I think they were still in the lead.* What I think you’re talking about was Hitler’s bid for the Presidency, which was a convincing loss to Hindenburg… but given that Hindenburg was all but unassailable, the Nazi showing there was astonishingly impressive.
* It was the Nazi’s loss of momentum that convinced von Papen et al. that Hitler would accept a position in the Hindenburg government, at which time they — the gilded elite — would be able to control “that horrid little colonel” and bend him and his constituents to their will. Needless to say, this plan was eventually** found to contain a slight flaw.
** Two months later.
smlook: ” Hilzoy was trying to take a swipe at the Bush administration, but didn’t want to come right out and do it.”
Sorry, but you’re completely wrong. Completely. If I had wanted to take a swipe at the Bush administration, I would have taken it directly; I wouldn’t have had the unbelievably poor taste to hide behind the Holocaust. And whereas most of the time when people misconstrue me i don’t mind — I figure it goes with the territory — this one is actually quite offensive to me.
Hilzoy was trying to take a swipe at the Bush administration, but didn’t want to come right out and do it.
Huh? There absolutely nothing in the post to suggest this, and hilzoy has not been shy about attacking Bush when she felt like it.
And then you let LJ jump right in and start talking about Bush administration policies.
LJ discussed one policy – not “policies” – and a particularly loathsome one at that. And I don’t believe he sought hilzoy’s permission before doing so.
Ah well, Bernard, it’s an easy mistake to make, what with me being normally so tentative and hesitant all the time. Not to mention my incredible reluctance to come right out and criticize the Bush administration directly.
And then you let LJ jump right in and start talking about Bush administration policies.
Someone needs a clue concerning how the internet works, I think. My point is that the historical processes that were at work then, haven’t been suspended. That may be too subtle for some, I’m afraid.