A makeshift memorial at the mass grave of Kuropaty, whose victims were executed by the NKVD in Belarus, destroyed by pro-communist vandals. Photo by Charter97.
Generally, I don't like to discuss real-life topics on this blog, but I'm going to do three posts now on RL subjects that are certain to get some people mad. I usually refrain from RL subjects because I don't wish to debate them with anonymous people who may have very different levels of life experience and education than me. Still, I feel they are all important topics that need addressing, that help to explain my overall world view, and are good subjects to study.
I don't think I have the patience to go sifting back through this very long and contentious thread on ad-farms to find out how on earth they came to this age-old debate, but there it is -- Argent Stonecutter writing, and apparently later erasing, this comment:
"Only a Nazi would try to equate Communism with the Holocaust".
Evidently a 16 m2 advertiser, Uma Troell, who posted this very long densely-packed apologia for her ad farms, had the tastelessness to compare the problem faced by advertisers as ad farms are regulated are like the famous poem by Rev Niemöller, "First, they came for the Communists..." So that set off Argent's outrage. Argent's flippant comment -- that wound up calling a protesting ad-farmer a Nazi, set off the fellow named Holocluck (who you may recall from the railroad saga), who then angrily demanded:
"As someone whose parents survived the holocaust, I take offense of your flippantly referring to PLAYERS as Nazis short of an actual WWII role play. And with a smileface yet.
Please retract your statement with an apology promptly.
Any of you who fling around terms into an asinine and off topic discussion without knowing the significance of them and the true nature of their impact just to look clever ought to all be ashamed of themselves."
Whereupon Argent deleted his comment, not having learned in fact that yes, Nazism can and should be compared to Communism. And whereupon Holocluck unnecessarily made someone actually erase their comment and even demand a recantation, which he should not have done (and which is hard to do on the Internet, anyway, as we can see) -- even with his own tragic personal story. In fact, his anger, if you think of it as justified, should have been directed at Uma's original tasteless invocation of Godwin, rather than Argent's common politically-correct belief on the left.
I'm not going to get into the issue -- this time -- of whether any people or phenomena in a virtual world should ever be compared to historical mass murderers. I will point out, however, that it's usually more socially acceptable to call someone a Nazi -- something everyone can agree on as bad, even if misapplied to "a game" than it is to call them a Communist -- where either there will be laughter and derision at taking the ideology seriously as evil, or where the PC police will come and try to stamp out this latest insurrection against the Comrades. But...Here's the problem with all this: people are simply not sufficiently educated on why Communism can and should be compared and contrasted with Nazis (and of course even serious studies are made of this very comparison like Bullock's huge work) -- and why in fact how Communism, even just viewed from the Eurasian continent, is in many ways worse than Nazism, primarily for these factors:
o Communists stayed in power longer, and are still very much in power in some countries; their legacy is far more enduring
o Communists have never been tried for their mass atrocities and crimes against humanity, and where efforts have been made to "decommunize" in the same manner as "deNazification," the efforts have led to profound struggles over civil rights implications
o Communists killed many more people than Nazis.
These facts are really no longer disputed, except by those still busy apologizing for Communism on various sectarian hard left websites (and their hapless, memed victims, say, students in Marxist professors' courses), but they are worth thinking about, because of the peculiar haze around Communism to this day, that makes it impossible for people to take it seriously, and makes many forums busy-bodies hasten to tell you that you can never call anything and anyone "Communist" or never even discuss Communism, without being accused of being "a Cold Warrior" and "a McCarthyite".
Argent speaks specifically about whether you can compare the Holocaust with anything Communism produced. Yes, you can, if you are going to look at numbers, which is how the world measures the dimensions of these horrors. The deliberately-induced famine in the 1930s killed 6 million, for example; the Holodomor, the Famine in Ukraine, was the most devastating. The total death toll under the Communists for 75 years in the Soviet Union is variously estimated from 20-60 million or even more. Even if you take the very conservative side of this estimate, there is no dispute that the death tolls are many, many times greater than those of the Holocaust. It's a particularly grisly business to be trying to prove something is "worse" because "more people died" -- yet they did.
Someone inevitably says, "But the Soviets lost 20 million people in World War II" or, as someone in this very thread says, incorrectly, understating woefully, "2 million Russian soldiers died" -- as if the one offsets the other. It doesn't. In fact one of the key reasons so many Russians and other Soviet nationalities died in World War II is because of Stalin's policies. He had executed on paranoid suspicions some of his chief military generals like Tukachevsky. Essentially decapitating the army in the purges, reaching their height in many ways in 1937, he made the Soviet army terribly weak. He had practices like ordering soldiers to shoot anyone retreating from the fight -- to follow soldiers into battle and shoot anyone turning back. Anyone caught as a POW would face execution for that mere fact alone, if they were unlucky enough to be returned -- and that applied to the many thousands put into slave labour in German-occupied territories as well.
It's no longer disputed that in sheer numbers, nothing outdoes Communism's devastation around the world. Here's one of the sites dealing with this contentious topic -- there are many. That is, someone is sure to try to terribly minimize the numbers (I've seen false figures like "130,000" or "700,000" put out in disputes about the Soviet death total, for example). Yet I've been to conferences of historians and seen their pictures and careful forensic studies of mass graves, and the numbers are staggering. The KGB itself became involved in studying the executions of its own members, as internal purges were a huge factor in its life, and there are tens of thousands executed just from the KGB, just from Moscow, just in some years. There are huge lists of names -- entire books -- meticulously put together by relatives and historians and volunteers; the numbers are real, they simply aren't known in the West; the books aren't in English or in any Western language. Often the figure of "3 million" is given for those sent to the GULAG. But of course, many died from forced labour or illness.
My children's great grandfather was one of those who disappeared and died in the GULAG; miraculously, after his first arrest, he was released due to an honest judge, and the need for able-bodied men at the front, but after his second arrest, which occurred because he a small icon was found in his home, he was taken away, and never seen again. His daughter, my mother-in-law, at the age of 12, saw her father in the camp through a chink in the fence, and tried to throw him a note telling of their appeals on his behalf -- dangerously, the note slipped when she tried to hurl it over the fence and landed on the ground nearby, where it could worsen his situation if a guard found it. Frightened, she ran home to get a stove poker and came back to try to retrieve the incriminating missive -- but failed. She never saw her father again, and her family were then punished as "enemies of the people" -- sent off to work camps as teenagers.
There were certainly more than 3 million, as continuing studies of historians and teachers have uncovered more and more people with relatives who went through "the repressions", as they are called in Russian.
Yet even Russians who have lost their whole family to the GULAG will tell you that Nazism is worse than Communism. They can properly make many comparisons -- Lenin introduced the idea of concentration camps and forced labour. But for them, emotionally, as for many, Nazism is worse in its deadly logic. This isn't just a function of Soviet propagandistic education, where the Soviets drilled into them that the only horror of the 20th Century was Nazism, and even lied about some of the mass graves, saying there were created by Nazis, not Soviets. The Soviets made an entire death cult around The Great Patriotic War, and understandably -- the 20 million deaths, which they used as a staple of their propaganda for years, in fact were revised upwards after the fall of the Soviet Union.
No, for many people, not just the products of Soviet patriotic education, Nazism is worse because it singled out an entire people -- the Jews -- for extermination, and used deliberate and ruthless ends to achieve this goal, as part of a vicious racist philosophy about a supposedly superior nation. Communism, on the other hand, is redeemed for many because it was ostensibly about equality and unity of people, and ostensibly removed racism and inequality.
For many, Communism "needs" to be retained as "not as bad" and certainly "not equal" to Nazism because it's an ideology that they want to remain ideal. The fact is, the ideology itself, not merely its poor execution, led to mass murder. By design. Deliberately. As part of its essential nature. You would think by now people would grasp that the ideology itself is wrong -- and that's why it led to mass murder everywhere. Once you begin to study the effects around the world, such as in Mao's China or in Pol Pot's Cambodia, you begin to see the dimensions of the horror of the ideology that achieved equality only by killing people who were different. Yet, for so many, Communism is something they will hasten to tell you -- especially on an Internet forum! -- was "a good idea" that was just never "done properly".
The problem essentially is illustrated by the story my father-in-law told of the "dekulakification". The problem is basically this: how do you define inequality, and who is to blame? The kulaks were denounced as being wealthy peasants who exploited others. How could this father-in-law of mine be such a person, when he described such a dirt-poor childhood? Answer: his father had somehow gotten a bucket of red paint, and painted the tin roof of their shack red, to keep it from rusting. Wasn't that patriotic? Apparently not. A commissar decided that if someone's roof stuck out, and if furthermore, they had somehow gotten ahold of some paint, they must be "kulaks", unfairly hoarding wealth to the disadvantage of others. They were driven into exile like the rest in Ukraine, and yet my father-in-law went on to fight the Nazis, to reach Kiev, and to be decorated with many medals, some with Stalin's visage, which we displayed at his funeral, as is the custom, despite the responsibility of that despot for the murder of his own and his wife's relatives. That's the Soviet for you...
Is Communism, then, with its equality that turned always to uravnilovka [levelling] just a great idea with a bad execution? No, it's a bad idea. You cannot forcibly make people equal, and you cannot coerce them into distributive justice. So, then, if you just take the coercion out of Communism, does that redeem it? No, because people inevitably are compelled to use force to make it work, because people won't go along...
Still don't think that's the case? Well, how many more countries would you need to experiment on, with the inevitable mass murders, before you might accept that the ideology itself is inherently evil? It is not "like the Christian ideal". Communism is not "emulating Christianity." Jesus said to give your shift off your back to a naked man -- but voluntarily, as an act of selflessness. Communism forcibly takes your shirt and gives it to someone else -- and they are not necessarily more needy, and you don't do it voluntarily, and sometimes your shirt goes to the commissar. Get the difference?
Why is it, then, that the story of Nazism and Communism remains so fixed in the minds of many people as ideologies "never" to be compared, especially young people learning only from the Internet, and forums riddled with cries of "Godwin!"? How can this be?
Well, one problem is that the victims of the Nazis, even allowing for some awful things our country did by turning back boats with Jewish refugees, and taking its time to get in the war, came to this country or Western Europe in large numbers, were rescued, and were able to tell their story. They didn't tell it right away -- some threw themselves into surviving in the new world or were still in shock or preferred not to dwell on the tragedy -- but eventually, the story was told.
Not so the stories of Communism to any similar degree -- because the victims were generally unable to leave the countries, as the Soviets did not allow free travel. As I discovered on my own visits to the Soviet Union, even recognized experts on Nazism weren't even allowed to fully tell the story of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, because Stalin of course waged his own war against the Jews. And of course they could not tell the story of the suffering they experienced under Communism until the late 1980s with the advent of Gorbachev -- and even here, there were "blank pages" and "the Special File" -- whether about Katyn or Wallenberg or may other chapters of the atrocities of Communism.
The mass graves of Kuropaty, for example, and of Katyn, were buried under the shadow of Nazi mass graves like Khatyn in Belarus, in order to distract from the stories still leaking out about Communist atrocities. Kuropaty had an estimated 400,000 bodies. I visited the site a number of times -- a vast forest with many shallow depressions among the trees holding the bodies. For some years, scientists and historians were able to investigate the graves; Lukashenka began to close off this study and tried to distract from it once again starting in 1996.
And these graves of course speak another truth about the nature of Nazism versus the nature of Communism. A reason why Nazism is recognized as "worse than" Communism is because of the utter single-minded coldbloodedness and ruthlessness of the Nazis. They stripped their victims and sold their gold teeth and their clothes. They used gas chambers, deceiving people and leading them to their deaths.
Meanwhile, the Soviets were more casual, disorganized, and haphazard. They didn't strip their victims, so that later forensic investigators could see that Poles, for example, in the graves in Kuropaty, still had newspaper-wrapped chicken sandwiches in their pockets, with the date of the newspaper "1937" (belying the regime's claim that these were Nazis graves), and with train ticket stubs -- as if they had been brought right from the station. The Soviets didn't have enough bullets to go around to fill their Natan guns, so they would line up their victims and shoot a group of them at once. The last person in the line might not get a bullet through the brain, but be missed, or only wounded; nevertheless, he would be thrown into the grave and buried, which is why some of the shallow depressions yielded contorted skeletons with their jaws frozen wide open in screams -- one of the most horrifying sights I've seen in my life.
The Soviets killed people for "class reasons" -- but they were often absurd about this. There is the famous line of the woman political prisoner in Ginsburg's "Into the Whirlwind" who, when asked what she was in for, said she was a "traktorist" (a tractor driver) and some commissar had misheard this as "Trotskyist".
Puzzled why some people wound up in the GULAG "for nothing," later scholars would find out incidents like a secretary of a commissar needed somebody's apartment to expand her own communal room, and she ratted on her neighbour to the secret police to make sure they were hauled away.
Stalin would send out telegrams telling his minions to kill by quotas. For example, they would need "7,000 in this district" or "3,000 in this district" shot "as an example to the others". That's how someone who in fact seemed like a loyal partisan who had fought the Nazis, like my children's great grandfather, could be arrested on a trifle -- somebody needed to fulfill their quota. These are established facts -- the lists and lists of quotas are now well-known.
That suggests a kind of absurdity, a paranoia, a whim -- not conscious, deliberate extermination, as the Nazis did to the Jews, as well as to Roma, gays, and various dissidents. Yet if you are killed because your roof was painted red, or you were a "traktorist" or you were part of a quota, it would be faint comfort to your family that no actual racist ideology was involved.
In fact, the Soviets did have a discriminatory ideology, and did have an enemy to eradicate -- the rich, the dissenting. This class warfare of course did not have clear boundaries, and yet in the Nuremberg trial, the Soviets made sure, mindful of their own possible fate, that race and nationality were recognized as categories for genocide, but not political beliefs. Entire swathes of political parties, movements, and their relatives were "liquidated". Yet it is not called a genocide because it was not defined as such. The victims are as dead, however.
A major reason we know so much about the Holocaust is that the languages of the victims belonged to the West, became part of literature, were taught in schools. But the language of the Great Terror is Russian, and that is not part of the Western canon, and not a language generally studied. There isn't an "Anne Frank" known from the Great Terror in the West, although there are figures who are known in the East for this type of writing.
Another factor for why the Holocaust stands out and the Gulag is far less distinct is because the victors in World War II made sure that the actual camps were preserved as a memorial, and as a lesson, "Never Again". A great deal of effort was made to keep the physical plant of the memory alive, as a kind of deterrent.
Not so the GULAG, where the grass grows over the stones and the bones, as historians increasingly find when they go out on field trips to try to document the sites. The Soviets had ever reason to remove the traces. Sometimes they would face embarassment, like Yegor Ligachev wrote about, when the bodies from a mass grave flooded into a river during a thaw.
Still another major factor why Nazism is universally condemned and Communism still has its fellow-travellers through the ages is that Nuremberg tried Nazism as an ideology, recorded the victims' suffering, validated it, and tried at least a symbolic number of perpetrators, and heard about their machinery of death. There has never been a Nuremberg of Communism; when Yeltsin began to grapple with the problem of having to remove people actually guilty of crimes against humanity under Stalin, or later in the Soviet period, he found that it would cut too wide a swathe through society -- too many members of parliament, too many respectable citizens -- too many people who had informed on their neighbour.
So...Would only a Nazi equate the Holocaust with Communism? No, victims of Communism would easily equate it; even concerned and thinking people trying to grasp the dimensions of these horrors would say they have similarities, even with certain differences. Ultimately, you cannot place people's suffering on a scale of justice; if your parents survived the Holocaust, you simply aren't going to care that somebody else's grandfather died in the GULAG -- it isn't in your equation, and can't be.
And that's part of the unfortunate sensitivity and even violent anger around this topic for some people: they feel as if to validate and recognize the victims of Communism somehow undermines or disqualifies or minimizes the Nazis genocide of the Holocaust. It surely does not. It cannot. Both stories have to be told, and indeed both stories are very much intertwined. In fact it's their intimate connection that makes some work especially hard never to equate them.
Not everyone knows that "pogrom" is a Russian word, meaning "to destroy" and ultimately it came to mean "to beat up severely" and "to kill". There are villages and towns all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were pogroms took place, first of Slavs against Jews, under the tsar, and then -- and this part is what is not often acknowledged -- of some Jews against Slavs, under the Communists. Is there a balance sheet here? Likely the Slavs are the far worse offenders but it's not a topic often discussed, or studied without intensive anger.
Remember the scene in "Fiddler on the Roof" where the pogrom occurred, and the tsar's soldiers expelled the Jewish family? One of the sons, Perchik, dons a leather jacket and goes off to become a Bolshevik -- to join the revolution. And what do you think he did next? He was arrested and sent to exile in Siberia. And then what...Did he not seek revenge? Wouldn't you? That's the next play, the play that was never written...."The Roof Fiddler's Son"...A significant number of commissars were Jews -- and they were highly motivated, coming from their experience as victims. They joined the Communist movement because it promised them equality, after generations of inequality. And some of them were responsible for atrocities themselves -- not as "Jews" -- they were secular, and Sovietized -- but as people with pogroms very much in their living memory, with victimized families. It was a bloody and awful war through many decades of the century. These stories are acknowledged and discussed openly by the very Jewish historians who write in Russian on these topics today, and are openly discussed in books by figures even known in the West, like Sharansky, who tells of his communist relatives. But for many, the topic is absolutely out of bounds, so important is it to keep a special and unique prominence to the Holocaust and never to be seen as diminishing it in any way. And that may well be as it should be.
Still, the stories from the other side must be told. And I will go on being one of the people who tells them. These two horrors of the Twentieth Century are related, can and should be compared, and have something to teach us in this next century.
"In fact, the Soviets did have a discriminatory ideology, and did have an enemy to eradicate -- the rich, the dissenting"
Something is wrong with me lately - i'm agreeing with your statements.
Generally i'd agree with you that communism is a horrible ideology, perhaps worse in some ways than the nazis - I don't have the historical knowledge to make a judgement on this.
But, this sticks out quite a bit:
"Jesus said to give your shift off your back to a naked man -- but voluntarily, as an act of selflessness. Communism forcibly takes your shirt and gives it to someone else -- and they are not necessarily more needy, and you don't do it voluntarily, and sometimes your shirt goes to the commissar"
Christianity DOES force believers, by the threat of eternal damnation for selfish acts. If you don't follow the rules, you burn in hell. Even though this is a threat rather than actual force, the effects can still be devestating and i've met quite a few people laden with guilt for innocent actions.
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | 10/11/2008 at 01:32 PM
Oh come off it. Nazism intrinsically leads to the elimination of certain ubermensch by its very nature; that is part of the point of it, that is how it is distinguished from other corporatists/fascist-small-f ideologies.
There have been plenty of avowedly Communist regimes which have conducted appalling massacres, but it is really just accepting their propaganda to say that the concept was responsible for that. The British Empire caused the deaths of millions but I wouldn't ascribe that to its capitalist and monarchist agenda.
While I am quite happy to laugh at and provoke Stalinists and other surviving sects - "tankies" is a common term, referring to their approval of tanks rolling into Eastern Europe - the fact is that when you talk to an avowed Communist vs an avowed Nazi, you will find, these days, that the former is far less likely to be a hateful racist bigot, and the latter is assured to be one. The Communists don't want to establish a racially pure state or beat up immigrants.
You lot in the States might be relatively free from the influence of actual real-world neo-Nazis - I don't know - but dammit, we aren't. They're still around and they cause real, identifiable, physical trouble, people being hit and stabbed and killed.
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | 10/11/2008 at 01:54 PM
That should have been untermensch of course.
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | 10/11/2008 at 01:55 PM
Ordinal,
Sorry, but your ideology really needs to be strenuously argued with -- and really, as a matter of urgency, because you are so wrong, and because your belief lies at the back of so much British socialism, which is so destructive to your country -- and to the world.
Nazism may intrinsically lead to the death of the untermensch, but Communism has its untermensch, too -- and that's why it kills. It's not an accident; it, too is intrinsic. Class warfare is class warfare. Some have to die. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and so on, as Lenin and the other sayd. A "great good" justifies the crime -- again and again.
"There have been plenty of avowedly Communist regimes which have conducted appalling massacres, but it is really just accepting their propaganda to say that the concept was responsible for that."
Actually, it's accepting their propaganda to say that their concept was NOT responsible. It most certainly is -- and we see the results. They excuse killing in revolutionary legality and revolutionary morality and all the other revolutionary qualifications -- and they kill. Again and again.
"The British Empire caused the deaths of millions but I wouldn't ascribe that to its capitalist and monarchist agenda."
The British Empire's millions are dwarfed by the sheer massive tens of millions of the Communist empires. In fact, Marxists *would* ascribe it to capitalism; they always cite King Leopold in these discussions and his ledger of mass murder. You could argue that imperialism of this murderous type isn't coterminous with capitalism, which generally doesn't try to murder so many of its investors and customers.
Communist does commit mass murder by design -- I don't expect you at your age to change your thinking about this, but I can keep bringing forth the evidence -- the deaths, over and over.
The Communists don't wish to establish a racially-pure state or beat up immigrants? Then how is it that the Soviet system led to precisely such people everywhere, and precisely with Communist beliefs? Have you never looked at the racism of Russia? Do you imagine that Communist regimes were just a thin veil over people's "natural" fascism -- or perhaps they are more similar and more related than you think?
A Communist in a British setting doesn't wish to hate an immigrant? Great! But he'll hate an American, hate a capitalist, seethe with outrage. Class, wealth, status, ideology -- those draw hate, even if he won't technically hate an immigrant -- until, of course he's a Communist in, oh, Indonesia, where he hates and kills the Chinese because they do better than the others...
Yes, you're willing to laugh at Stalinists; you wouldn't laugh at Nazis. Writers like Amis have written of this strange problem...
I hardly think we are somehow devoid of Nazis in the U.S. -- they are caught now and then and tried, after all. Not everyone who wishes to kill or beat up minorities is a Nazi -- they can simply be racist, without the elaborate ideology.
I forgot to mention the Punished Peoples in my essay. Imagine, on one day, February 23, the entire Chechen nation was loaded on to cattle cars and forcibly sent into frozen exile in Kazakhstan and elsewhere -- half of them died on the way. The same happened to the Crimean Tatars and other minorities that Stalin needed to eliminate, and who were sometimes charged as "Nazi collaborators" because they fought the Soviets. Such collective punishment *is* racism, and it was perpetrated by these supposed egalitarians, the non-racist Communists, those who fashioned "the friendship of peoples".
The U.S. and the UK have their share of violent, racist incidents. BTW, since 9/11, it's not realized that in fact more hate attacks have been perpetrated against Jews than against Muslims; attacks on Muslims is a newer and more publicized phenomenon and there aren't the mechanisms to cope with it.
Yet this is utterly dwarfed by the hate attacks -- often murders -- of ethnic and religious minorities in Russia. Absolutely dwarfed. And how did this happen, how were these haters and killers created out of this supposed communist and egalitarian system? Neo-fascist movements abound in Russia and the other former Soviet states on *your* continent. Why doesn't this trouble you? Why does nothing about the East *ever* trouble you, Ordinal? Why must you cast your fatigued and cynical eyes 3,000 miles over the seas at America, when *right there next door to you* there are unspeakable outrages. Chechnya? Tajkistan? Georgia -- on both sides of the conflict? And you think this has nothing to do with communism? And it's all the West's fault?
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 10/11/2008 at 03:53 PM
As usual, Gareth, your ignorance, your lack of education, and your dependence on Internet memes are all freshly on display here and you really aren't worth bothering with as a result -- you're a particularly bad case of broken Internet child.
For the sake of the other weak young minds on the Internet:
When Christ teaches that you should give the shirt off your back, He doesn't say -- and churches do not say, later -- "Do this or you perish in eternal hellfire." Nothing of the sort. You have a free will, you are given advice how to live the Christian life, and given a teaching about how to behave to your fellow man -- selflessly, and voluntarily.
Those who, in this belief system, are castigated to hell aren't people who were selfish and didn't give the shirt off their backs. It is not a sin among the 10 commandments to refuse to turn over everything to another, or refuse to give your life for another, or suffer anything for another.
No, sin -- and hellfire -- are for acts that are *against* people -- like killing, adultery, theft, lying. That's a whole different category of actions and agency than the list of selfless actions.
So it's stealing the shirt, not failing to give the shirt off your back that might consign you to hellfire. Does that mean the Communist, who confiscates forcibly and gives to himself, and redistributes a bit is on his way to burning eternity? Only God can judge! But let's be clear on it -- Christians aren't scared by hell into doing good acts; they are scared by hell into not doing bad acts.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 10/11/2008 at 04:00 PM
Argent's comment was made in jest, after I'd asked whether there was an equivalent of Godwin for those who throw communism into a thread, the word has been creeping up way too often in the ad farm debates and without any justification, Argent included a smiley to indicate that he was jesting.
Communism has never really been achieved anywhere, you'd think that would give those who still espouse its virtues a bit of a clue into human nature and why it will never work. Forcing ideologies on people is something humans have done throughout history, and it more often than not turns ugly, the reformation for example, they all have the human trait of violently quashing opposition.
People have a tendency to see Nazism as purely evil from the outset, which is true, whereas Communism offers some mythical concept of a world where everyone is rich, without people considering the cause and effect that has been exemplified whenever people have tried to introduce Communism.
Human nature is simply not compatible with Communism.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | 10/11/2008 at 04:03 PM
Ciaran, I fear that the ressentiment that fuels communism makes it entirely too compatible with human nature. Sorry for sounding so over-dramatically bleak, it's been a melancholy day.
As for the unter/uber distinction, a society that revels in the burning of books doesn't have much love for the superman either, even if they elevated poor old Nietzsche to the position of cultural hero. And, yes, I do call him poor old Nietzsche because I have a lingering student affection for him even though he is a primary progenitor of much of what is awful in contemporary theory.
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | 10/11/2008 at 04:36 PM
The term "communist" was injected into the debates by people who themselves are communist if not fascist in their thinking. They wish to restrict the ability of others' land to retain value, and they wish to parasite forcibly off their business and traffic -- and finally, through criminal action, to extort them. All of these crimes and ills are in fact part and parcel of the thuggish nature that makes up any communist or fascist movement.
Meanwhile, the ad farmers put up giant signs accusing anyone who wishes to regulate them of being land nazis or land commies. They think that restraint upon destruction and crime is "abusing their freedom". Freedom to do what? Devalue others, grab value from them, even extort them? That's not freedom, that's crime.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 10/11/2008 at 05:26 PM
You lot in the States might be relatively free from the influence of actual real-world neo-Nazis - I don't know - but dammit, we aren't. They're still around and they cause real, identifiable, physical trouble, people being hit and stabbed and killed.
Meanwhile, in continental Europe, the neo-nazis get drunk and go to concerts, maybe committing thought-crimes but generally being law-abiding citizens. While it's the antifas and communists that beat up people and commit general crimes against those of us trying to live a normal life by working.
Posted by: Daman Tenk | 10/11/2008 at 06:53 PM
Sorry, the first part of my post was a quote from Ordinal, I used HTML to differentiate it from my writing but it seems that isn't allowed. Just clarifying that part so people don't think those are my words.
Posted by: Daman Tenk | 10/11/2008 at 06:54 PM
Daman you go to festivals with a tie in with bands like Skrewdriver, it's absolute bullshit to claim that's innocent.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | 10/11/2008 at 07:05 PM
It doesn't matter if it's Skrewdriver or Britney Spears playing. Either way the audience is just enjoying music and beer. Neither of those two things is a crime where I live.
Posted by: Daman Tenk | 10/11/2008 at 11:14 PM
"Christians aren't scared by hell into doing good acts; they are scared by hell into not doing bad acts."
7 deadly sins, look them up. Gluttony for example is the act of consuming more food than you need to survive - something that nearly everyone in western society is guilty of. Lust is a primitive function of the mammalian brain: sexual arousal generated when one sees a member of the opposite (or in some cases same) sex that is deemed attractive. Need I go on?
Matthew 5:20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.
What's the alternative in christian mythology to entering heaven upon death exactly? Remind me.....
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | 10/12/2008 at 08:52 AM
"Ciaran, I fear that the ressentiment that fuels communism makes it entirely too compatible with human nature. Sorry for sounding so over-dramatically bleak, it's been a melancholy day."
It isn't human nature to want to surrender every possible advantage you may have over others to the collective, it's deeply unnatural and the reason why practical attempts at implementing communism pretty much always fail or resort to the use of force.
"As for the unter/uber distinction, a society that revels in the burning of books doesn't have much love for the superman either, even if they elevated poor old Nietzsche to the position of cultural hero. And, yes, I do call him poor old Nietzsche because I have a lingering student affection for him even though he is a primary progenitor of much of what is awful in contemporary theory."
The nazis utterly perverted Nietzsche's work - the ubermensche would NOT require the destruction of the weak, nor can you judge someone as weak using the criteria the nazis used. Hitler used Nietzsche's powerful and poetic imagery to his own ends, even the term "aryan".
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | 10/12/2008 at 08:58 AM
Thanks for the lesson, Gareth. I would have thought a Nietzsche scholar such as yourself would have understood what I meant when I said ressentiment has much to do with communism. You are familiar with his use of that term, yes? It being central to his conception of morality.
Joking aside, you really didn't follow what I was trying to say at all. It's ok, though, because my post was inconsequential and your failure to grasp its meaning was even more so.
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | 10/12/2008 at 12:22 PM
It doesn't matter if it's [Adolph Hitler] or [Mahatma Gandhi]... Either way the audience is just enjoying [some guy talking] and beer.
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | 10/12/2008 at 01:57 PM
Look, I apologize but this has stuck in my craw. Gareth, if the Nazis had to "utterly pervert" Nietzsche in order to lend some philosophical gravity to their racist-mystical ideology then would not any other figure in intellectual history have been an equally good choice?
If it needed "utter perversion" then why not utterly pervert the Sermon on the Mount? In other words, there is much in Nietzsche that lends itself to the kind of specific misuse that the Nazis put it to. His use of "powerful and poetic imagery" is one of those elements.
People who are only able to appreciate the "imagery" and not penetrate through to the underlying concepts will only ever be able to misunderstand poor old Nietzsche. It's a very common problem in studying him. Just remember, Gareth, that that which does not kill us, makes us stronger. Feel free to consider yourself stronger.
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | 10/12/2008 at 02:25 PM
Ichabod - Nietzsche did hold fairly elitist views, in much the same way as the nazis, but the perversion was in the way hitler perceived whole groups as weak for irrational reasons and then proceeded to state that Germany's strength as a nation depended upon their elimination. This can be seen in the references to the "jewish problem" and other propoganda used by the nazis.
To me, it looks a lot like hitler tried to link the jewish people and other persecuted groups to "the last man" in many ways. The switch is from Nietzsche talking about self-overcoming as a path to the uber-mensche, to hitler talking about genocide of the perceived inferior races as a path to the uber-mensche (though the nazis preferred to just call their whole vision of the aryan race as a whole the superior beings).
Another key aspect of course is that Nietzsche was a german, and so it would make sense that the nazis would use a german's writings rather than another figure.
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | 10/12/2008 at 03:52 PM
Gareth, I don't know what to say. You are correct enough that I can't really fault you but you are only correct in a Boy's Own Edition of 20th Century History sort of way. I doubt your understanding of Nietzsche derives from an extended and deep familiarity with his work - it certainly doesn't sound it. If it were, I don't think you would have taken issue with what I actually said in my original post. Anyway, we have hijacked this thread long enough; time to quit the field.
Posted by: ichabod Antfarm | 10/12/2008 at 04:26 PM
Well, I guess we'll see more division once your candidate is elected.
"Change". I thought racial and social inequalities were improving since the "Dark Ages". Well, they were.
Enter a whole new class of inequality, as THIS is the BEST the democrats can nominate? A pompous self-serving socialist that will screw up the economy (thats actually hard to do unless you want to do it on purpose) and blame everything HE does wrong on "8 years of Bush".
LAME.
EPIC FAIL.
I voted democrat my whole life until I was invited to a $5000-per-plate dinner in 1999 with a free ticket. The arrogance of EVERYONE there, and none of the small talk was about how their programs would help anyone, just how GREAT the programs ITSELF was and how good it made them feel! Self-serving asshats.
Communism is great for small countries with no infrastructure. Naziism is great for small developed countries with no capital or money, but with resources.
I dont want EITHER of them in America, and hate to vote this election - obama has 0 reasons to vote for, a vote for Paul is wasted, a vote for McCain is telling the republicans that non-party-believing candidates like him are OK...
Is it a great country when you have to vote AGAINST someone rather than FOR someone?
I wonder if America had a taste of Naziism/Communism if we'd rethink how we do things here finally.
Then again, we have no attention span. candidates run on the same issues every 4 years, the issues that are NEVER solved, rarely dealt with.
Posted by: Vissy Adamczyk | 10/12/2008 at 05:10 PM
Keep the faith... a good post. Some thoughts.
Equality of people means nothing more than wealth redistribution. Now, which kind of wealth redistribution do you prefer? One that is governed mainly by individual choice or one that is by governmental choice? Personally I prefer the former to the latter. Give the people back their opiate.
I've always noted that ideologies where they insist on the central planner do the most damage, not just to people but also to the environment. We do not want equality. We want diversity.
Posted by: Hypatia Callisto | 10/15/2008 at 08:39 PM
"Equality of people means nothing more than wealth redistribution"
Then of course you have equal rights and opportunities for all, without making the rest equal (as doing so requires force).
Posted by: Gareth Nelson | 10/15/2008 at 10:37 PM
exactly, Gareth.
Posted by: Hypatia Callisto | 10/16/2008 at 11:24 AM
incredible, obviously prok, you're so dumb.
Posted by: rudi dutschke | 11/08/2008 at 05:49 PM