I've read three other books about the current president: one was entitled The Obama Nation, by Jerome Corsi. The second was The Roots of Obama's Rage, by Dinesh D'Souza. Whereas Corsi locates Obama's primary commitments in his family's close friend Frank Marshall Davis, and to a certain extent in his Kenyan father's Marxism, D'Souza locates Obama's deepest affiliation in his father's post-colonialism, and the mother's discipleship with the dad. The third book was Obama's book Audacity. I couldn't find any locus of values in it. He seemed to waffle on every issue. Kloppenberg locates Obama's values in his schooling first at Occidental College and later at Harvard University.
James Kloppenberg is a Harvard University historian.
Where are your truest affiliations born? In your family, or in your schooling?
I think family, and church. In school you learn technical things, but you don't learn beliefs. Those are things your mom and dad teach you, and your church teaches you. I don't think I ever learned anything in school about beliefs, and yet that's Kloppenberg's basic supposition: that Obama learned his beliefs in college.
Reading Obama (Princeton UP 2011) is a history of new left thought at Harvard University (and to a certain extent at the U. of Chicago) over the last hundred years. That part of the book is worth the price of admission. How well this actually applies to Obama is anybody's guess. Obama did go to Harvard, but how deeply did he drink of the poisons on offer?
Kloppenberg writes, "Obama ... learned ... that a culture's only home is to be found in its often tortured history" (263).
Christians would say on the other hand,
"For we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come." -- Hebrews 13:14
Kloppenberg claims that Obama is also a Protestant, but if his only home is in history, I doubt it. History is not our home.
Likewise, our principles are found not in history, but outside of history, in the tablet handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Ten Commandments are eternal.
When Obama began to attend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, he was able to "shed SOME of my skepticism" (quote from Kloppenberg 143, originally found in Obama's Audacity of Hope, my emphasis). That "SOME" means he was never fully immersed in the Holy Spirit, but remains someone who dipped SOME aspect of himself there (possibly his pinkie), and instead of being a true believer, "Obama had to contend with persistent ambivalence" (149).
Kloppenberg avers on multiple occasions, "Obama was a man of the left" (51, 221). Can you serve two masters? Leftists are not necessarily Marxists, but most of them think highly of Marx. Many of Obama's professors were Marxists, and he himself says in Audacity that he sought out Marxist professors. His early mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, a black poet and longterm member of the CPUSA. While Davis is a building block of Jerome Corsi's monograph on Obama, here he receives scant mention, but when Davis IS mentioned Kloppenberg indicates his centrality to Obama:
"How he intends to translate the endorsements of progressive and New Deal policies in The Audacity of Hope into a new set of Democratic policies remains murky. Has he considered the bold vision he encountered in his courses with Roberto Unger, a radically decentralized economy in which public funding of private initiatives empowers the creative potential of ordinary citizens? Or have the economic advisers Obama has brought into his administration fulfilled the prophesy of Frank Davis? Having been 'trained,' in other words, has he now been yanked by the chain of power back from the commitment to economic democracy proclaimed in The Audacity of Hope to the tepid economic centrism of Democratic Party insiders since the 1980s?" (190).
Obama worshipped inside a liberation theology church, he had substantive experience with Marxist professors, and his high school mentor was a communist. So is Obama a Christian, or a communist? Christians look to the ten commandments. Marxists look to economics, often using power to affect their means. Redistribution is a form of theft, and is not something that Christians could countenance. For Marxists, it's the basis of their system. Christians are supposed to revere their family, and especially their elders. Obama threw his grandmother and his pastor under the bus when they were no longer of use to him. Christians are supposed to turn the other cheek, but Obama describes Republicans as his "enemies" and says if they bring a knife to the fight, "we'll bring a gun." I see Obama as a Marxist, because for Marxists, power comes from the end of a gun.
But is he instead some tertium quid? There are the hardcore Marxists who want a one-party system and to destroy all others, and there are left liberals. The two groups generally despise one another. Kloppenberg locates Obama among the left liberals, because, like James Madison, he wants a representative democracy (Kloppenberg disses the prevalent notion that America is a constitutional republic instead of a true democracy). He writes that Obama likes the House of Representatives because it is proportional to the population, but dislikes the Senate since it is not proportionate (165). (Why then was he a member of the Senate? Is that pragmatism?) Also, although Obama has stated his opposition to Fox News, he has allowed senators and representatives of other parties to be seated, and has made no move to make himself into a Czar, or dictator. He apparently still believes in the electoral process and has made no move to undermine it.
John Dewey and William James thought certainty was impossible. This is where Obama stands, according to Kloppenberg. One does have the sense in the autobiographies that Obama is willing to shift with the wind. One might say that this is opportunism. One might argue that it is pragmatism. One might say that it is a lack of principle. Or one could say it's open-mindedness. This last is Kloppenberg's theory.
There are some things in the book I thought sucked: Kloppenberg's treatment of the Sotomayor nomination is too brief and dismissive of critical attention to the "wise Latina" crack; and his discussion of Crowley-Gates focuses on the fact that he knows Gates, and likes the man, and could never see him as a dangerous individual. (I'm sure Crowley's friends like him too. But that's hardly the point. Crowley and Gates met in a charged scenario in which Crowley was on the scene of a possible break-in -- it wasn't a friendly encounter in the faculty club over tea and crumpets. Gates was unruly and disruptive, and not respectful toward authority.)
Some things I liked. Obama's least favorite professor at Harvard was Edward Said.
Obama likes a few people I like: Augustine, Madison, Locke (apparently a fervent Calvinist, according to Kloppenberg). Rawls had a Protestant taproot. Obama reveres Lincoln. Dewey and James are not impossible for me.
On the other hand Obama likes some people I don't: Richard Rorty, Frank Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky, Howard Zinn, Barack Obama Sr., himself.
We both hate Edward Said. Hatred is often a sign of where people's values stand. I mostly hate Edward Said because I see no sense of humor (a lack of humor tends toward zealotry). Said's almost as big an agelast as Michel Foucault.
There are some in-between figures such as Reinhold Niebuhr. I like the later Niebuhr after he becomes a hawk. I see war as governed by a competent authority to be a charitable thing, especially in the case of World War Two. We could not allow the Jews to be mown down and gassed. They are our truest neighbors, and we must stand with them until the end of time. I don't like the earlier socialist Niebuhr much. I think Obama likes both Niebuhrs, but sides toward the earlier Niebuhr. The very fact that Obama has heard of Niebuhr is somewhat neighborly. Niebuhr had a great sense of humor. He has an essay on humor and its relationship to the Gospel in his Essential Writings.
So, is Obama my neighbor? Corsi and D'Souza reject him outright and paint him as a kind of alien monster in our midst that threatens the very foundation of the neighborhood. Kloppenberg likes Obama but wishes he was a bit more of a programmatic leftist at times so as to improve the neighborhood by leveling the incomes of the uber-wealthy. (I don't hate this idea, but it has to be voluntary, rather than forced fleecing by a Cyclopsean state: Luther said that no one in a business should make more than ten times what the poorest person in the business makes.) Yes, Obama is my neighbor in spite of his faults many of which are not his fault. He is the product of a broken home. His mother was a flighty woman who did manage to write a Ph.D. His dad was a bigamist and Marxist who he only saw twice. Obama smokes cigarettes. But he is still my neighbor. He is a father with two small girls. I wish him the best in that role, and in his role as president. He doesn't have a very good background. His parents were communists. His high school mentor was a communist. In college he sought out communists. In later life, he worked with communists, and palled around with terrorists.
But yes he's my neighbor and a loving father and husband and unfortunately he's also the president.
This is a good book and I recommend it even though the writer's viewpoint is very different from my own. You get a very strong intellectual history of Harvard (worth the price of admission), a new take on our president (Obama can be friendly toward conservatives so there's no reason we can't be friendly toward him), and you get a bibliography toward the end for further reading. The main criterion of a book for me is: did I learn a lot? Yes, I did, and it was a very easy read. I read the whole book (270 pages or so) in three hours. Buy it. Read it. Otherwise, you're missing out.
72 comments:
World War II (on the Allied side) had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
Please get any other thinking out of your mind.
This is like saying the Civil War was not about the slaves.
Of course, for a great number, it was.
Many soldiers were moved by the plight of the Jewish people. It was a tipping point when the camps were discovered.
It is still the greatest sorrow of World War Two.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948, is almost entirely a document in which people around the world came to unity around the notion that genocide should never be tolerated, and thus it is in fact the real truth of the war. Not, perhaps, for Stalin, but everyone who has a heart of any kind.
You persist as well in thinking that people were not moved by the plight of the slaves during the Civil War. They were moved, and are still moved by it. Nothing else can explain the tragic sorrow in a song like Amazing Grace. People all over were waking up. This is something that goes back into history -- we have had these awakenings over and over, but the singer here is still moved by that dimension, as are the musicians, and the audience as well:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5381766/14179726
Poetry is not only possible after Auschwitz, it's as crucial as faith itself.
You get some of the same music in Paul's prose. He was hit with something of the same light on the road to Damascus. People had believed in power politics in Rome. But Christ showed there was something else that had so much more power that Rome was nothing beside it.
There are some who aren't moved by poetry, and who have stone hearts in listening to music like this, but this kind of music, and Paul's words, and the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg have changed the world, and will go on doing so forever.
Not so sure about whatever Obama is up to.
That business about bringing a gun just strikes the wrong chord with me. This is so much better:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5381766/14179726
Please provide for me anything resembling a critical mass of soldiers who wrote about the plight of the Jewish people as a reason for their fighting.
Certainly it was not only not a reason for official Allied behavior, the Jews were actively persecuted.
And no, Kirby, sympathy for neither the American slaves nor the German Jews entered in to the minds or hearts of most soldiers during the Civil War and WWII. It's sad--I wish it were untrue, but it simply is true.
The average Union soldier suited up "to protect the Union" and the average Allied soldier suited up to "defend their homeland" or "to get the Jerries/Japs." And by "average" I mean "overwhelming mass of."
GM, how many soldiers' books. Let's see there were three million soldiers in WWII. You want me to go through at least 1.5 million soldiers' letters and highlight these, and have them on your desk by tomorrow morning?
What sort of standard of proof are you holding me to, here?
First off, most soldiers don't write books.
Few people have the time or the interest.
You're making an unreasonably high standard of proof to protect your nutty notion. Why are you so attached to the idea that soldiers are heartless?
Of course they cried when they saw the camps. Do you ever watch WWII documentaries?
This is almost like holocaust denial itself.
Red Dawm has been remade and will be released in theaters later this year. I'm watching the original at this very moment. It's the story of Kirby's politics.
Kirby,
I'm with GM on this one. The allies knew that there were persecutions of the Jews, after all, Mein Kampf was written long before the war, and Krystalnacht was also war. But the holocaust in the full-blown sense of industrial murder (as opposed to the occasional pogram) dates 1942, after we were in.
If you look at US propaganda efforts directed to its soldiers (I'm thinking here specifically of Frank Capra's "Why we fight"), I'm confident you won't find a reference to the holocaust. The wiki article doesn't even contain the word "Jew." Instead, there's a focus on the Axis nations as military aggressors, as dictators over their own people, and oppressors of conquered nations. And there's a real focus on treachery, grounded in the Pearl Harbor attack, but reinforced through many other events.
What I do remember are reports/letters that came back from the first US Army units that overran concentration camps in eastern germany, and the shock and anger they contained. Again, the argues against the thesis that the soldiers knew, although here there is a distinction between Jewish and Christian soldiers within the Allied armies. The Jewish soldiers would have known of what their co-religionists had reported back, and they'd have believed it. But again, they'd have been very aware of persecution, but probably not aware of the scale of industrial murder.
I'm not sure exactly what point in the war the Allied high commands came to understand of the scale of Nazi genocide. Most likely about the time the soviets started rolling up death camps in Poland, and this is late '44 IIRC.
Crying when they saw the camps is not the same thing as going to war because of the camps, which is what you imply:
I see war as governed by a competent authority to be a charitable thing, especially in the case of World War Two. We could not allow the Jews to be mown down and gassed.
We did not engage in World War Two in order to prevent "the Jews" from being "mown down and gassed."
Moreover, it is an insult to the 6 million other folks who died (Roma, homosexuals, the mentally disabled, etc.) to just refer to Jews dying in concentration camps.
Yes, our soldiers were moved when they discovered the camps. Yes conditions were horrible. How much Roosevelt and Churchill knew about the camps is up for debate--but how much they cared is not--they didn't care at all.
While you might be able to argue that slavery was a part of starting the Civil War (it certainly was in the mind of the Boston Abolitionists) or part of soldiers signing up for war (again those Boston folks), though I would say you were wrong if you called it a primary or major cause for most Union folks, you cannot argue that care for Jewish folk, Roma, homosexuals, or the mentally handicapped entered at all into the plans of the Allied leadership or entered the thoughts of most, if not all, soldiers (perhaps the Jewish soldiers were aware/cared prior to the discovery of the camps but they would have been the only ones).
Now, after the discovery of the camps, there was a massive propaganda push to make ending the horror of Nazi concentration camps an integral part of the war effort (like, hey, look at what we did! we saved these people!) but that was propaganda, not reality.
GM,
While you might be able to argue that slavery was a part of starting the Civil War (it certainly was in the mind of the Boston Abolitionists) or part of soldiers signing up for war (again those Boston folks), though I would say you were wrong if you called it a primary or major cause for most Union folks
Your skirting some tricky issues here.
First and foremost, it is very well established that the south went to war to protect slavery, and for no other reason. Incontrovertible evidence lives in their speeches and writings, e.g., the secession ordinances of the confederate states, the constitution of the Confederacy itself. The notion that the war was fought over "states rights" is an after-war effort to create a plausible rationale for southern secession broader than slavery alone.
That said, by referring specifically to Union soldiers, you are on safer, if not entirely safe ground. The north did not begin the war as undivided abolitionists, but instead was divided much as we are now: between republicans, democrats, and with enough independents to swing the question one way or the other. Early in the war, democratic union soldiers fought for union, while republican union soldiers fought for union and abolition. But as you get deeper and deeper into the war, northern hostility to the south and its institutions increased. The confederacy came to be understood as a military dictatorship, and as an expression of an aristocratic culture that was profoundly incompatible with a more egalitarian north. Slavery was just the most obvious and odious manifestation of that culture, but this meant that abolition became a more broadly held war aim as the war continued.
I'm certainly aware of no credible voices in the north post-Gettysburg who would have argued for the readmission of a reconstructed state with slavery intact. And it's a historical fact that in the deeply contested '64 election, it was the union army votes that swung the election away from the copperheads and to the republicans.
The Nazis took their cues from Henry Ford.
It's reported Carl Schurz told Lincoln the German immigrants were unlikely to enlist without an emancipation proclamation. Many of the German immigrants came to America to get out from under petty aristocrats. When news of the war broke in Wisconsin it caused a panic. The homesteaders assumed they were under attack by Ojibwas on the warpath. Faux aristocrats a thousand miles away weren't seen as a serious threat.
My mother's people were in Ohio when the war began. They belonged to the Brethren so were pacifist. My mother's great grandfather had five brothers. Only one of them enlisted. Abraham Steele participated in two battles. He was taken prisoner at the Battle of Corinth in 1862 and was exchanged a year later. He returned to his unit, the 80th Ohio, and a month later was taken prisoner again at Missionary Ridge. If he ever fired his gun it was into the air to demonstrate to his prospective captors that it was no longer loaded. He died at Andersonville four months later.
This seems wrong -- the Hitler elections were not won fairly as James points out. Kindertransport was taking Jewish kids out of Nazi territory after Kristalnacht -- 1938 -- British and Dutch were taking these kids in.
I don't want to get into a huge war because I didn't get all details about WWII into my post -- including the gypsies, including the intellectuals, and others that the Nazis targeted (including artists).
WWII is a big topic -- and my post wasn't really about that. We may just have to disagree about who knew what. Philippe Soupault wrote in 1931, "Hitler, c'est la Guerre!" Warning the French that there would be a second world war. He knew this in 1931.
It didn't take a genius to notice that the Jews inparticular had been targeted by the brownshits.
Oops!
I'll call that a typo, and it was, but I'll leave, I guess.
It was a small part of my post on Kloppenberg's book.
I still think Kloppy's book is worth reading. It's probably an important book. It just came out, and was published in 2011.
So it's very current. There are some review copies floating before that, but now there should be piles of this in your local B & N.
Henry Wallace, who was Vice-President under Roosevelt, gave a speech called "The Century of the Common Man" in 1942. This speech articulated to the nation what we were fighting for. You guys have been watching too many liberal documentaries about how we went to war only for economic reasons, and we were 100% selfish, and had no notion of the good and the decent, because we are such a monstrous and erratic nation and should be taken over by their moral heinouses. Here's Wallace. As the Vice-President (under Roosevelt), this was his JUSTIFICATION for the war. Read it carefully please, and retract your self-imposed liberal retardation, please.
"Through the leaders of the Nazi revolution, Satan now is trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and darkness. For the stark truth is that the violence preached by the Nazis is the devil’s own religion of darkness. So also is the doctrine that one race or one class is by heredity superior and that all other races or classes are supposed to be slaves"
Clear enough?
Clear as mud, Kirby.
We "knew" the Jews (and every non-Aryan) was getting the short end of the stick in Nazi Germany.
What we didn't know was how far down the rabbit hole that went. Moreover, we went to war to stop "Nazism" in general, not the persecution of the Jews in particular.
And calling me liberal is laughable.
GM I didn't call you a liberal. I said you got this idea from watching a liberal's documentary about WWII. If not, where did you get it?
The liberals have been out to destroy any notion that war could be good, and have been at it for at least fifty years. A steady pipeline of their dismal dismissal of war has been in place on almost every station for as long as I can recall.
One of the things I liked about Kloppenberg's book is he says that although we're told relentlessly that the Cvil War was economic in origin, we all really know it was about the slaves.
He has a lot of moments like that in the book which I thought were refreshing.
Himply bimply bing bong,
Sing a little song.
Kirby,
Again, I'm with GM.
We "knew" the Jews (and every non-Aryan) was getting the short end of the stick in Nazi Germany.
What we didn't know was how far down the rabbit hole that went.
Exactly right. I never claimed that we went to war "only for economic reasons." I'm not aware of anyone who believes this. Indeed, if economics were our only incentive, it's arguable that we'd have allied with the Germans in '40 (after all, they had trade) instead of offering lend-lease to the British and Russians. And while there were certainly economic aspects to the war with Japan, it's more than a little bit arguable that the juxtaposition of "the good earth" with reports of Japanese atrocities (c.f., Nanking) steeled the opinion of the US electorate against the Japanese prior to Pearl Harbor than is currently realized. And of course, Pearl Harbor was seen as the basest treachery, and this defined Japanese character in US eyes pretty much through the MacArthur trusteeship.
In any event, I'm glad your not mouthing the old republican line that FDR had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor, etc., or that he provoked the war (and implicitly that US interests would have been better served had he not).
In the meantime, regarding "brownshits," I often refer to their modern successors as "brownpants." Same joke, really.
I know this is a little bit like asking too much, but I showed you fellows some evidence for my claim that Americans (including the Vice-President) were well-aware of Nazi persecutions, saw it as Satanic, linked it to the Civil War, and said, we can't allow people around the world to be held as slaves (which was already happening under the Nazi high command under Arbeit Macht Frei type situations.
Ok, it's just a paragraph, but it's a paragraph in a highly placed speech that Wallace had made to turn Americans on in terms of why we needed to fight the war.
You guys on the other simply say no.
Now, none of the three of us are experts in this area, nor can we be expected to have the exact timeline. I asked GM for some kind of citation as to where he got his inklings, but he simply reiterated them, and now Stu reiterates their reiteration.
Don't you want to show me some kind of factual evidence that nobody knew anything about what the Jews were having done to them, and if they did, they didn't care?
Don't you want to at least attempt to do this?
Otherwise, it just strikes me as Holocaust Revisionism. No one really cared, and why would they, since they didn't know.
On the contrary, people did know, as early as 1931, what Hitler meant to do, just as everybody knew what South Carolina meant to do when Lincoln was elected.
They immediately hit Fort Sumter.
Certainly the Jews of Germany knew. They were getting their kids out on Kindertransport after 1938. Are you telling me that this was just fortune telling or something, and that the Jews couldn't communicate to others their concerns, and if they could, nobody cared about them?
This is an extraordinary claim about Americans, and seems to rise from leftist sources who are always trying to demean the decency of ordinary Americans. Americans are only motivated by economic concerns. They have no other interests, is their argument.
Now that argument has been largely put on Republicans. Republicans are just greed meisters, blah blah blah.
These same Republicans are the ones who fought the Civil War, and who elected Lincoln?
Just a little tiny bit of proof would help me here. A document. A documentary. Something.
In the same way, prove to me that Obama ISN'T a Marxist, has never had anything to do with Marxism, knows nothing about it, and is simply a free market entrepreneurial type who is totally pro-business.
You guys just argue by fiat.
Try to give me some proof instead.
When I wrote about Kloppenberger, I quoted his text.
I quoted Obama's texts.
When you guys argue you have these notions that float free of proof:
Loughner was aware of Angle's second-amendment warning, and used it to shoot a crowd of people outside a Safeway in Tucson.
Ok, prove it, buster.
You can't just argue by fiat, or using the force of your person, or your Karl Madden type enthusiasm.
A little proof can build a consensus or at least move us in that direction, guys.
My own proof -- just a tiny passage -- but from a famous speech by an important figure in the American government. The speech was made in the summer of 1942, long before the air raid on Pearl, which took placein December of that year.
Even the three bears looked to the actually eaten soup of Goldilocks before they indicted her.
You guys can certainly argue better than the average bear.
Kirby - the proof that Obama isn't a Marxist is in the pudding - the health care proposal that went through congress was a Bob-Dole style middle-of-the-road bill.
The individual mandate was a Republican idea, back in the day when they argued that it was about personal responsibility and free-market solutions.
The auto buyout was extremely successful, and extremely limited, and in no way appears to be anything other than an emergency measure that saved millions of jobs.
He wanted to raise taxes back to clintonian levels, but compromised and kept them as they were (actually, lowered them) until 2012, when he hopes that the upper bracket will pay 39 instead of 36 percent.
In the 50s, this number was at 90. Kennedy lowered it to 70.
Your problem, Kirby, is that you judge Obama's worldview by taking a few examples from throughout his entire life and use those guilt-by-association ideas to judge his character, while dismissing anything that goes against our preconceived notion.
I tend to think that the policies he supports and passes currently are a much better gauge of where his worldview is, and there is no evidence of 'Marxism.'
The stimulus package was largely tax-cuts, and in no way included government takeover of the production of commodities.
He's a bit more liberal than you are, Kirby, but being a bit more liberal than someone who's center-right doesn't make you Marxist. It makes you center-left, and a compromising, pragmatic center-left at that.
Prove to me that he Isn't a pragmatic center-left politician..."He sought out Marxist professors in college and had a dad with Marxist viewpoints" is in no logical way proof that he's a Marxist. He chills with Warren Buffet (an incredibly successful capitalist) and hearts Steve Jobs (ditto).
I sought out UFO conspiracy theorists and anti-government crusaders and my dad is anti-political. I'm not that person now. (and wasn't even then, just found the stuff interestin').
You were a lefty anarchist or something weird...You're not that person now, are you?
That being said, I think you're simply being a bit too specific with your claim wrt the holocaust - As your quote makes clear, a big part of the reason we engaged in war was moral. It came from a recognition of Nazism as evil (Satanic, even). Whether or not the specific events of the holocaust were known, the trajectory of the Nazi worldview Was, and that's a big part of what we were fighting against.
Your quote doesn't prove that we went to war to protect Jews from the holocaust.
It does prove that we went to war to protect the world from evil and to protect the persecuted.
So just broaden your argument a tad - the idea that we went to war to stop evil generally is the important thing - the holocaust as a specific manifestation of that evil is not central to your claim, (and in a timeline, what did we know and when did we know it way, is technically false). so don't make it.
Kirby,
You're really not getting it.
Yes, of course the US knew of Nazi persecution of the Jews. But persecution is not the same as Holocaust. Slavery is bad, because it steals the present; but murder is worse, because it steals the future too. It is reasonable to say that we entered the war because we opposed slavery, oppression, and military aggression (especially if you date US entry into the war with the beginnings of Lend Lease, or at some similiar commitment point prior to Pearl Harbor). But we didn't enter the war because of genocide, because that would have required the ability to see into the future. What we knew was bad enough to get us in. What was true was almost unimaginably worse.
Wallace, for all of his eloquence, did not cite murder. Again, "slavery and darkness" does not equal genocide. The Wallace quote simply does not prove what you think it does. And I cited "Why We Fight," which carries the same argument a good deal further. [Let me note that you're really forgetting the significance of Wallace's speech—which had everything to do with convincing skeptical isolationist republicans that the war was being fought for appropriate reasons.]
The Jews were trying to get out of Germany because they didn't want to be slaves, they didn't want to be trapped in ghettos, they didn't want to be robbed, the didn't want to be beaten. That would certainly have been reason enough for me. Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were in the future, not the present, when they decided they'd had enough.
Please read, and understand. We're not making the argument you think we are.
But persecution is not the same as Holocaust.
Precisely.
You can say there are folks who went to war to save the Jews from Nazi oppression (though it would be disingenuous to say America went to war for the same reason)
but you cannot say that we (or anyone) went to war to save the Jews from murder and, more specifically, the concentration camps.
It had been well-known that the Germans were after the Jews from the moment they took over in 1933. Read the original post again. I didn't say holocaust, although it is from 1933 to 1945, typically -- that's the period the term covers.
http://history1900s.about.com/od/holocaust/a/holocaustfacts.htm
Right from the beginning Jews were targeted. By 1938 the camps had begun, with 30,000 Jews arrested on Kristallnacht.
This is still four years before we entered the war.
Americans have always rallied for people who have been targeted for extermination irregardless of their religious orientation. We saved the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. We saved the Muslims in Afghanistan when the Soviets were trying to wipe them out.
We are still there trying to help their women become educated.
It's what we do. It's what we've always done, and always will do. It's part of our DNA.
The left denies this. They argue we are a selfish people, and any evidence of any kind of altruism on the part of Americans they try to redefine. Well, you were really trying to open markets inSaigon, they argue, and you had no intention of standing with the Buddhists and Christians of South Asia against their south Asian oppressors.
You felt nothing when the JApanese raped Nanking.
This is their argument.
The reality is completely different. We do care. IT's what makes us Americans.
Without that, we're nothing, which is how the left wants us.
At any rate, you continually reiterate your nonsense but still haven't managed to martial any proof.
Read the little piece about the holocaust I sent and see if you can realize that from 1933 on it was apparent what the Nazis were going to do to the Jews. They were producing propaganda films calling the Jews vermin. Did you think they weren't going to exterminate them, after calling them vermin?
Everybody who read the news in the thirties knew what was going on. Marianne Moore wrote several poems in the period, and she knew. She stood with the Jews.
Her brother was a naval chaplain. They all knew. It was the great and defining idea behind WWII, as getting rid of slavery once and for all was the great and defining idea of the Civil War.
We could not allow the Jews to be mown down and gassed.
What is this if not a reference to the Holocaust, Kirby?
Kirby,
The left denies this. They argue we are a selfish people, and any evidence of any kind of altruism on the part of Americans they try to redefine. Well, you were really trying to open markets inSaigon, they argue, and you had no intention of standing with the Buddhists and Christians of South Asia against their south Asian oppressors.
You felt nothing when the JApanese raped Nanking.
This is their argument.
The reality is completely different. We do care. IT's what makes us Americans.
For the most part, when you say that you were once a leftist I roll my eyes. But they you say something like this, not even realizing what you're saying, and I think there might be some merit to your claim after all.
Let me take this in a somewhat different direction. I see the left as being focussed on our potential: where there is injustice, there can be justice; where there is hunger, there can be food; where there is ignorance, there can be knowledge; where there is sickness, there can be health; where there is despair, there can be hope. We see a gap between who and what we are, and what we can aspire to be. You see in this a terrible criticism of who we are, and I won't deny that sometimes that's there. But the leftist hears a call to responsibility ... to owning the fact that we're not who and what we can be, and in making it our responsibility to close that gap.
Conversely, I see the right as being focussed more on independence, and to a certain extent more on our limitations: there is injustice, but we can't fix the world, so I'll focus on justice for myself and my family; there is hunger, which ought to be an incentive for all to work; etc. I don't want it to be thought that I'm viewing these values negatively: I value independence, hard-work, responsible management, etc., and I see these as values that the right has often emphasized more than the left.
So I see these kinds of interventions that you refer to as reflecting a leftist agenda. We do care. We do take responsibility. We need to be there. And as an American people, we often do and are. Perhaps not as soon as the committed leftist would wish, and sooner than the committed member of the right would. We are most effective when we move by consensus, and this often means that no one gets exactly what they want. And so the leftist complains that the country is slow, and that it only moves when other issues (such as commerce) align with more fundamental moral imperatives. But the fact that the nation moved at all was under the impetous of that leftist agenda. And our effectiveness once we do decide to move should be (and usually is) a source of pride, whatever the regrets for how me might have acted soon/more decisively. While the rightist laments that we involved ourselves, and that his tax dollars are being used to solve someone else's problem, while taking the position that interventions in the past are proof of American exceptionalism, and no more proof need ever be given.
So, however peculiar this may sound to you, you're actually taking a leftist's philosophical stance here, and you're counting it as a virtue of the American people when they respond in accord with a leftist agenda.
Mown down had already happened, I suppose that gassed was ahistorical, but it was in the offing. When did the gas get turned on?
Certainly before the end of the war we knew what was going on, although the worst camps were in Poland, I think -- not a place that many Americans had been.
How soon did we know?
At what point did the majority of Americans know?
Certainly we knew that there were groups of people being mistreated as early as 1933. By the time we entered the war nearly ten years later, surely the whole country knew what was happening in Europe. There were some leftists like AJ Muste and perhaps the Waldport artists camp in Oregon who didn't care, or thought they shouldn't dirty their hands in doing anything about the situation.
But certainly Marianne Moore knew what was going on by 1943 when she published In Distrust of Merits, which stipulates "We are fighting so that where there was death there may be life."
I may have misquoted that line slightly.
Certainly this is the rationale given for our war in Vietnam by our top general -- Westmoreland.
We were, in every case, extending the rules of pluralist freedom, on which this nation was founded, and which we are bound as a people to protect not only within our own borders but worldwide.
I'm still getting any details by which I might check facts. I'm only getting the summary emission of knowledge by fiat.
Here's a timeline of the concentration camps -- many of which were opened in 1933. The first exterminations were by shooting -- about a million and a half Poles went this way. Jews lost the biggest percentage of their population, although others: homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, artists, intellectuals, journalists, were also murdered.
In 1941 the gassing begins, primarily because German soldiers can't handle shooting so many unarmed civilians. In many cases they would make a Jewish prisoner turn on the gas to spare themselves the emotional problems of killing so many people.
http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/timeline/camps.htm
But they were certainly being mown down. The gassing is going on by 1941. We enter the war in December 1941, is that correct?
And you guys perservere in the argument that no single allied soldier signed up to help put a stop to this, and that no government figure ever cared about this problem, in spite of what I showed you in the quote from Henry Wallace?
The other document is Henry Wallace's speech given on May 8, 1942 for what were to be the goals of the war. This speech OUTLINES from the American government's viewpoint, why we were going to war. It isn't as if this is a document that someone produced and then put in a drawer. This was the speech given by the American government to the American people as to why we were going to war. It's a Christian statement that we were going to fight for the universal rights of all of humankind.
Please read it, it's almost very important:
http://www.winrock.org/wallace/wallacecenter/wallace/CCM.htm
According to the Wikipedia page the Holocaust was first discovered by Soviets in 1944 and Americans in 1945. I've no idea (as in, I haven't looked) if the Soviets told the Americans or not.
Kirby, I've read the speech by Wallace and so far as his juxtaposition of what America represented in comparison with the menacing Axis Powers, I'd agree. Wallace's political career after WWII is quite a different story.
Kirby,
You need to understand that there is a distinction between concentration camps and death camps. There is a tendency to use these terms as if they're interchangeable, but they're not.
Concentration camps were presented as a kind of artificial ghetto, or political prison. They often demanded slave labor of their inmates, and were dehumanizing in pretty much every way. But they were not death camps, although certainly people did die in them from injury, neglect, inadequate medical care, and as the war progressed, starvation and disease. But the purpose of concentration camps was not to murder their inmates, it was to (1) remove them from the population at large, and (2) to extract as much labor as possible from them in the meantime. Obviously, killing them is incompatible with (2).
These kind of camps certainly existed pre-war, and their existence was known to the west. Indeed, German propaganda efforts included the construction of "model" concentration camps, which included recreational facilities, adequate kitchens and family living spaces, etc., both as a way of mitigating criticism from the west, and in the attempt of making the camps seems more acceptable to their intended inmates.
The US certainly knew of these. There were also murders of Jews, individually and in small groups. These happened outside of the concentration camps, and were clearly part of a german state-sponsored terror campaign against the Jews. But this is not the Holocaust, essentially because the numbers were small. For example, according to Wiki, 91 Jews were murdered as a part of Krystallnacht (11/9-10/38), with over 1,000 dying in concentration camps over the next few months. This was widely reported at the time, although the reports would not have known about concentration camp fatalities. These events and policies certainly informed US attitudes pre-war, and had much to do with US support of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union during the lend-lease and phony war periods the preceded US entry into the war as an active combatant.
But although these events are now included as a part of Holocaust history, it is certainly a stretch to believe that the full blown "Final Solution" was a necessary, or even probable, extrapolation of what the US knew when it entered the war.
As I said, what we knew was bad enough to get us in; what we didn't know was worse. For not only were there concentration camps, there were death camps. A death camp was a facility for murdering people on an industrial scale. These were almost exclusively in the east (mostly Poland), although by mid-war, even western concentration camps often had a limited capability (typically used to murder children, who were not immediately cost-effective as slaves). There were reports from Poland about the real function of the death camps, but they were viewed as exaggerations.
Let me suggest a simple thought experiment here. The western allies certainly knew where the concentration camps were in western germany through aerial reconnisance. We certainly had a major strategic bombing capability, and were by no means reticent about its use. If the western allies believed that the concentration camps were essentially prison camps of slave laborers, bombing them would have made no sense -- we'd simply be murdering innocents ourselves. If, on the other hand, we believed that these were death camps, then we would certainly have bombed them -- the loss of innocent life due to the bombings would have been negligible compared to the number of lives saved. And given that the real target of the US strategic bombing campaign was the fighter force of the Luftwaffe, one target was pretty much as good as another. So what actually happened? We didn't bomb the camps.
Wallace was an ultra-liberal lefty, and yet still went this way on the war. Therefore I thought that Stu might consider taking his words to heart. Even Roosevelt found him to be a dead weight in his third election try and bounced him because he was thought to be borderline communist by a great number.
But yet he still stood for America in its hour of crisis. And he stood for human rights worldwide.
This is what he said we were fighting for.
What higher authority could I find?
Even Roosevelt himself had the four freedoms.
They were the basis of what the very top leaders in the government thought we were fighting for.
I'm not certain why Stu and GM find this so controversial.
I'm exasperated.
The concentration camps were holding pens and they became deathcamps -- it's a question of timing, and degree, but one became the other, as the war deepened.
I'm not sure what all this hair-splitting is about.
I guess it's fun.
Kirby,
I'm not sure what all this hair-splitting is about.
Look, I think we agree on enough here to call it a day.
No one here things that the US got involved in the European Theater of WW II (where "got involved in" is intended to cover lend-lease, the phony war, etc.) for primarily economic grounds. You attribute this to the left, but I don't see how you get there. After all, the real weight of the European Theater was borne by the Soviets. We helped things along, of course, but the German OB, even post June '44, makes it clear where the real threat was. And Soviet casualties were horrific.
No, the leftists will generally claim that we got in for the right reasons, and most leftists buy the argument that we couldn't have gotten in much earlier.
The Nazis were horrible folks, and while your use of "gassed" and with it an implicit invocation of the full blown Holocaust is an overreach, we knew that they were indeed horrible folks. The war was seen as democracy against totalitarianism, our Soviet allies notwithstanding.
I'm not sure you can argue that concentration camps evolved into death camps. Most sources do distinguish between the two. If they really were death camps, there'd have been no starving survivors to liberate -- only bodies.
James, I wanted to thank you for reading the speech by Wallace. I can't get Stu or GM to even examine the evidence I'm putting forward. I'm just wrong, and they're just right.
They're karma karma karma karma karma chameleons.
Read Tom Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again. He visited Germany in 1933 and wrote about it, though it wasn't released for general consumption until 1940, shortly after he died. He knew what the Nazis were all about.
Kirby,
I read the Wallace quote.
Mass slavery does not equal mass murder.
Wallace was citing mass enslavement, which was reason enough to go to war, but it is not genocide, it is not the Holocaust.
It's funny that you complain about some signs made by the TP, and argue that it is leading to some massive outbreak of violence, but the Nazis' holding people as slaves, and calling the Jews vermin, and actually rounding them up and forcing them to work, is just that, and could not possibly have led to the death camps! No way!
The Nazis were actually never going to go down that slippery path!
Why, they were completely different things. It's one thing to call someone a vermin and make them wear a yellow star, deprive them of rights, and argue that no German could fall in love with one, or marry one, and actually killing them. The two are totally separate things!
Will you just argue anything?
Tom Wolfe is fun to read. Why don't you cite a passage for us, Craig?
Kirby,
It's funny that you complain about some signs made by the TP, and argue that it is leading to some massive outbreak of violence, but the Nazis' holding people as slaves, and calling the Jews vermin, and actually rounding them up and forcing them to work, is just that, and could not possibly have led to the death camps! No way!
Sigh. Hindsight is always 20/20. Lots of nations have at one time or another decided to round up some group, and place them in concentration camps, without taking the next step to genocide. I just know that this will drive you over the top, but the US put citizens of Japanese descent who happened to live on the west coast into concentration camps too. The Soviets, even by this time, put plenty of people into gulags. But we didn't descend to mass murder. It's arguable (more than arguable) that the Soviets did, but even they didn't descent to genocide. If you do a bit of historical digging, you'll find that the Canadians (!) had concentration camps for the foreign-born during WW I, the British used concentration camps during the Boer war. I'm certainly not equating any of these things, but I am saying that there's no necessary path that takes a nation from sequestering a minority to killing them wholesale.
And I don't get what you're trying to establish here. What we knew (even though it wasn't the holocaust) was outrageous enough to get us involved. When we heard (from polish sources, during the war) of death camps in '43, we thought the reports were exaggerated. Unfortunately, we were wrong.
The Nazis were actually never going to go down that slippery path!
Go complain to Neville Chamberlin. Lots of things are clearer after the fact.
Why, they were completely different things. It's one thing to call someone a vermin and make them wear a yellow star, deprive them of rights, and argue that no German could fall in love with one, or marry one, and actually killing them. The two are totally separate things!
Yes, the are. This isn't to say that one is right and the other wrong, but we do routinely distinguish murder from lesser crimes.
Will you just argue anything?
Oh, and I suppose you're not arguing. The difference is that I'm trying to stick with facts. Please note that GM and I are not natural allies. We disagree on practically everything. So if he and I agree that you've got it wrong, it might just be worth considering that you do.
I'm not sure what hidden agenda you think I'm on here. But I'm pretty sure you have it wrong.
Well, I don't think you and GM actually agree on this issue except perhaps on the timeline of the camps themselves, and when the gassing began (1942), but some argue that this was kept secret until after the war so that nobody found out.
But GM argues:
"And no, Kirby, sympathy for neither the American slaves nor the German Jews entered in to the minds or hearts of most soldiers during the Civil War and WWII. It's sad--I wish it were untrue, but it simply is true.
The average Union soldier suited up "to protect the Union" and the average Allied soldier suited up to "defend their homeland" or "to get the Jerries/Japs." And by "average" I mean "overwhelming mass of."
That's his argument, right? Yours is a disagreement on the timeline, but do you agree with the "suited up" business -- that it was like playing a sport, and they had to go in and do this dumb thing "to get the Jerries/Japs" and he argues by extension, "confederates."
The agreement if there is anything like that is that we didn't know about the "death camps."
But I think you are arguing that we did fight the Civil War out of principles, and also WWII out of principles (you read the quote by Wallace, but did you read his entire speech?)
GM is arguing that the GIs would only fight for their homeland, and not for a larger principle.
You argue on the other hand that they would have fought for a larger picture, but they just didn't know the extent of the death camps at the time, so that my usage of it was an anachronism.
Or do you also think the American military was incapable of thinking about the larger picture, and that the vast majority of GIs didn't care about what was happening in Europe?
At any rate, my understanding is that the two of you agreed on a detail about the timeline, but you had different ideas about the motivations of both wars.
Is that wrong? When you wrote
"That would certainly have been reason enough for me."
At 10:59 pm I thought you meant that hearing of the slavery for theJews it would have been enough for you to go to war.
I think the great difference between GM and the rest of us is that GM will never accept war on any basis, as he thinks it's always a bad thing.
I didn't think you agreed with that position, but perhaps I'm wrong.
GM has equated Lincoln with Hitler, and has equated the death camps with Wal-Mart.
I did think that that was further than you were willing to go, but perhaps I'm wrong.
Kirby - I think if you were to admit that you were wrong about the detail (specific knowledge of deathcamps/theholocaust came later) but were right about the principle (that we went to war to fight against oppression and evil) then you'd be in the clear.
This sort of confusion sometimes comes from arguing with two people 'at once' over the internet...it can get confusing. You are right to make the distinctions between the argument you're having with Stu (somewhat-trivial semantic/timeline argument) and the argument you're having with G.M. (whether or not we went to war to fight oppression and evil), but I think you could do a better job of both admitting fault wrt the former and de-emphasizing it (your disagreement with Stu is factual, and therefore to some degree trivial. With G.M., it's seemingly much deeper).
Kirby:
Please read the following article, written by a Major in the Army on Small Unit Cohesion in Battle.
It states plainly that:
five factors kindle and sustain a fighting spirit: group
cohesion, unit allegiance and pride, ideology and
patriotism, lack of alternatives, self-preservation and
leadership. However, all these motivating factors
tend to deteriorate after prolonged exposure to com-
bat except one: small unit cohesion
Earlier it states that at the beginning of a war in regards to new troops first experiencing combat.
For them combat is an adventure.
I know that you want soldiers to be idealistic. In the main it is simply not true. How many friends who are active military do you have?
You do realize I live (and grew up in) a military town, yes?
For attitudes regarding the common Union soldier and slavery, I would suggest this book.
In my research regarding the attitudes, speech, and mannerisms of Union soliders (in preparation for a poem like 1779 that I have been planning), the one expressed by Sergeant Turner is not the exception, but the rule.
"War is Hell."
That's not a position of the Church of the Brethren but of General Sherman--someone who knew a bit about war (reading his opinion of the Union cause is also telling).
Kirby,
Your note is a good one. Let's reset this discussion and try again.
As a general rule, the average soldier fought for (and so as not be embarrassed in front of) his fellow soldiers. I hope JADL will speak to this point from his experience, even though as an enlistee, he'd have been atypically enthusiastic. I've already given my analysis of the Union soldiers earlier in the thread.
In terms of WWII, the US used both enlisted and drafted soldiers, sailors, and marines. The big motivations at the start came from Pearl Harbor, set against the background of unrestricted submarine warfare, the sinking of the Athenia and Reuben Jones, news films of the bombings of Rotterdam, London, and Coventry, reports of Nanking, and the like. Americans were aware and horrified by what was happening in Europe, but the general sense was that these were Europe's problems, and we had problems enough of our own here. Oddly enough, Japanese atrocities resonated more, a consequence of twenty years of pushing for support of Christian missionary work in China, hence my remark about "The Good Earth."
There are lots of reasons why we fought, Axis evil did not restrict itself to how Nazis treated the Jews. They gave us lots of reasons.
Your analysis forgets the deep and ubiquitous anti-semitism of the time. It was certainly different in the US than in German/Poland/Russia, but it was as real as nativist anti-Catholicism of the 1890's, or racism in 1970's Detroit. In a real sense, it was the Holocaust itself that the put anti-semitism out of style -- seeing uncontrovertible proof of where these attitudes and beliefs might lead. But that was very much in the future in '41.
I'll tell you a story. In 1986, I belonged to a Lutheran congregation in Chicago Heights (not my current congregation). It was and is a great church. Like many Lutheran congregations of the era, it had former US soldiers, former German soldiers, and German-Americans who left German during the pre-war Nazi years. A book had just come out, "The Jesus Connection," by Leonard Yaseen, a Jew who had grown up in the Heights, and who was well known to the older members of the congregation who had gone to school with him. It was a time of very honest conversations. One of the guys who joined up spoke about his first days as a recruit, and his introduction to the "Jewish problem." The political and military leadership was well aware of Nazi pograms, and this lead to a certain amount of specialized handling of Jewish soldiers. Anyway, there was a division of the soldiers one day into Christians and Jews, and there were a lot of Christian soldiers who didn't know who or what the Jews were. The answer from their fellow recruits, "They're the guys who killed Jesus." I don't claim this event as a universal, but I do think it is illustrative.
Again, although it's longer than Wallace's speech, it would be a good thing if you were to take a look at Capra's "Why We Fight," which is an important film at a lot of levels, but remember its intent. This was propaganda aimed at our soldiers to strengthen their sense that the war was really about something and that the sacrifices they were being asked to make were worth it. I don't mean to imply in this that the soldiers were unenthusiastic or morally wanting, only that the propaganda was intended to heighten and sharpen attitudes and beliefs that they already held.
But there was a strong sense, especially early in the war, that the Japanese were our primary enemies, and many of the folks who enlisted in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor were focussed on fighting them and not the Germans. "Why We Fight" was intended to create the same sort of enthusiasm and purpose for fighting the Nazis that was popularly held w.r.t. the Japanese.
"So the weeks, the months, the summer passed, and everywhere about him George saw the evidences of this dissolution, this shipwreck of a great spirit. The poisonous emanations of suppression, persecution, and fear permeated the air like miasmic and pestilential vapors, tainting, sickening, and blighting the lives of everyone he met. It was a plague of the spirit--invisible, but as unmistakable as death. Little by little it sank in on him through all the golden singing of that summer, until at last he felt it, breathed it, lived it, and knew it for the thing it was."
Thomas Wolfe, describing Berlin in the summer of 1936, where he attended the Olympic Games. His first visit to Germany was in 1923, when he went to Oktoberfest in Munich and was hospitalized for his unwitting participation in the Beer Hall Putsch.
I suppose there are always lunkheads who are completely unaware of what's going on around them -- I spoke with a grocery clerk yesterday who was apparently completely unaware of the events in Tucson -- and didn't seem to care. I had said, pretty horrible week, huh? And he said, no it was a good week. I had a good week. What about Tucson? I said. Tucson? He asked.
The people who had gone to fight in Spain against Franco in 1936 would have already known what was coming. IT was a premonition of the war to come and how the anarchists were going to be destroyed by their Marxist comrades in arms.
And what that would mean about freedom.
If freedom was a big variable or large value for you you had to always go against the Marxists.
This meant you coiuldn't go with the anarchists you had to move to the center, even if it meant freedom for everyone, including neo-Nazis in Skokie, because once one group was suppressed they all could be suppressed. So only law could be that which held us together.
Those who want Tucson to mean that we have to tamp down on freedom to speak and freedom to arm ourselves want other freedoms out the window, too, and the Constitution itself, and pretty soon we are sliding toward a Marxist state.
Or at least we are closer to it.
I see freedom and law as what animates all the wars since the ancient Jewish wars in OT.
Victor Davis Hanson -- not a Christian, argues in his books that the reason we beat the Germans and the Japanese were that they were authoritarian societies that didn't grant enough individual decision making to the soldiers on the ground.
His argument begins with the Spartans against the PErsians, but runs this theme throughout history. I think this is in 8 great battles. I had a signed copy I found in Annapolis, MD, but gave it to a friend of mine who's a big fan of VD Hanson.
Brett, thanks for your words. I think I have already said that the timeline wasn't right, but as you see, the argument seemingly isn't over.
GM persists in seeing very cynical motives amongst soldiers.
Stu is now trying to link American concentration camps to German concentration camps. More of the attempt to see America as a dark and evil place that desperately needs to be redone from the ground up.
What I see GM and Stu coming together on is a cynical stance with regard to soldiers. This is where right and left touch, in a strange Moebius strip moment.
The center is willing to grant ideals to all, and to see in both Sarah Palin and B Obama great ideals.
The only question for me is whether these lead to sustainable governmental structures. Obama is quite idealistically leading us toward huge government structures that can tell us all kinds of things we have to do -- buy insurance, no longer say what we want to say, but only what he approves, and from there, we must believe in global warming, or else face reeducation, and so on.
Obama isn't an evil man. Stalin was, but only because he was more certain of his own ideals and willing to completely terrorize everyone.
But American law and the Constitution, unfortunately for them, are still in their way.
GM's position is more mysterious yet.
Kirby:
It's not cynical, it's realistic.
Is, not ought.
Kirby,
The people who had gone to fight in Spain against Franco in 1936 would have already known what was coming.
Sure. But keeping in mind that the Spanish Civil War was in large part a proxy-war between Germany and the USSR, it's important to remember that the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were overwhelmingly US Communists fighting in support of their Soviet allies. They might have known what was going on, but the fact that they were communists meant that their warnings typically fell on deaf ears.
Indeed, I recall an episode from one of the WEB Griffin novels that indicated that there was an effort to identify men in the WW II armed forces who had served in the ALB as communists, and therefore suspect. Griffin tends to stick reasonably close to history on this kind of thing, so I expect that this story has a factual basis.
This meant you coiuldn't go with the anarchists you had to move to the center, even if it meant freedom for everyone, including neo-Nazis in Skokie, because once one group was suppressed they all could be suppressed. So only law could be that which held us together.
I'd expect that the survivors of the ALB would have left that war far more confirmed in their anti-Fascist/pro-collectivist views than anything else.
I see freedom and law as what animates all the wars since the ancient Jewish wars in OT.
Then you are blind. This is not to say that it didn't animate many wars, but to aim for "all" is way too far. You're forgetting about national pride, revenge, the opportunity to engage in honorable conflict, contention for resources, etc. It is as if you believe that in every war, there's a right side and a wrong side. This is naive—all too often there are two wrong sides. Again, I don't claim this pessimistic view as a universal, but I certainly claim it as a common case.
Stu is now trying to link American concentration camps to German concentration camps. More of the attempt to see America as a dark and evil place that desperately needs to be redone from the ground up.
This is lie, Kirby. I request that you re-read what I wrote, and retract this accusation.
Stu, I am liable to misreading but not toward lying. I don't knowingly lie.
Brett has accused me of this, too.
I wouldn't lie to win an argument. I'm not interested in winning arguments -- simply in advancing my understanding.
You are probably right that my somewhat Hegelian thesis that wars always advanced freedom is -- in the factual side of things -- inaccurate, esp. if we look at non-Christian wars (wars in which neither side was Christian or Jewish).
There's a whole range of issues going on here now.
What drove me in the Spanish Civil War was the anarchist side, and what I know of it is best seen through the eyes of Orwell (and a few surrealists such as Benjamin Peret) who fought in it.
Orwell came to see the Nazis and the Stalinists as more or less identical, and that they wanted a closed society -- they used the other as their excuse.
Nazis and communists, or far right and far left if you will, are often binary thinkers. It's us or them. And they use the atrocities of the other in order to push their own hegemony. I we can only oust the other side their argument goes, then we will be safe.
I see this thinking even in the way the shootings last week were used by the left to try once more to knock out the legitimacy of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
It's a dangerous move.
The center on the other hand can only exist if there are two large forces battling one another. I don't particularly relish a world in which Fox News types wuold run the country and the left was crushed, nor would I like it if MSNBC was the new voice of reality.
I want them to battle one another. but unlike Obama who apparently scorns both agents, I see them as a necessary part of the rabble. There's no doing away with far right or far left. They exist, but they are best when they balance one another oiut.
Through the middle of these clashing cliffs can come the dove of the individual thought of someone like Orwell -- or better yet, the surrealists, or Lutheran surrealists.
At any rate, that's where I am on this.
GM -- I didn't realize you were from a military town. Which one? And, were your parents military? Relatives? What incident in that life pushed you toward pacifism?
I think I am beginning to understand your itinerary.
GM, thanks for directing me to the 500 page book from Fordham U Press on northern experience in the war. I may find time to read it over the summer.
I have a week of break left before school starts and am reading Gotham, a 1200 page history of NYC. I'm only on p. 100 and the print is rather small, unfortunately.
So I am tied up. I can read a link of about five pages, but not 500 at this point.
Thanks for letting me see the link, though.
My parents were military. Many of my friends are military. War is senseless.
And I'm in Jacksonville.
Regarding Franco--the anarchists were just as murderous and horrible as the Communists and the Fascists. It was bad all around. At least Franco stood for order (though, admittedly, quite a brutal order).
Kirby,
I am liable to misreading but not toward lying. I don't knowingly lie.
1.. 2.. 3.. 4.. 5.. 6.. 7.. 8.. 9.. 10.. deep breath... pause... deeper breath...
There is a kind of misreading that you are extraordinarily likely to make. I'll say "A," and you, believing that all liberals (based on your own idiosyncratic models of same) believe "B," which bears some superficial similarity to "A", will jump up and down saying "B!, B!, he said B!!" And we'll spend the next 17 comments trying to get it straighted out.
It's to the point where I'm often writing defensively, trying to anticipate whatever off-the-wall, extremely prejudicial misreading I think you're apt to make, and trying to forestall it. That's why I wrote, “I'm certainly not equating any of these things, but I am saying that there's no necessary path that takes a nation from sequestering a minority to killing them wholesale.” So understand my extreme exasperation when you write, “Stu is now trying to link American concentration camps to German concentration camps. More of the attempt to see America as a dark and evil place that desperately needs to be redone from the ground up.” This is so unfair, so contrary to what I wrote and meant, so absolutely unsupported and unsupportable. There comes a point where carelessness and prejudice amount to dishonesty.
What drove me in the Spanish Civil War was the anarchist side, and what I know of it is best seen through the eyes of Orwell (and a few surrealists such as Benjamin Peret) who fought in it.
Orwell came to see the Nazis and the Stalinists as more or less identical, and that they wanted a closed society -- they used the other as their excuse.
Fair enough, but I don't believe that anarchists were a major component of the ALB. But this is certainly a reasonable trajectory for an anarchist to have taken.
Nazis and communists, or far right and far left if you will, are often binary thinkers. It's us or them. And they use the atrocities of the other in order to push their own hegemony. I we can only oust the other side their argument goes, then we will be safe.
I see this thinking even in the way the shootings last week were used by the left to try once more to knock out the legitimacy of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.
Let's just say that both sides are actively involved in accusing the other of this, and see if we can move on.
The center on the other hand can only exist if there are two large forces battling one another. I don't particularly relish a world in which Fox News types wuold run the country and the left was crushed, nor would I like it if MSNBC was the new voice of reality.
Here, I believe you're wrong. What we're seeing now is a period of strong polarization, which has come at the expense of the center. Far from building it up, the left and right are both demanding that everyone in the center chose sides; and moreover, once you've chosed a side, you're committed to all of the issues that define that side. That's why we've seen nothing but a succession of near-perfect party-line votes on a broad set of issues. It is this kind of all-but civil war thinking that has to break down on both sides.
Stu, the last notion of yours that we are now getting disciplines partyline votes on almost every topic as a result of our polarization, is good.
GM notes that the anarchists were just as brutal as the other groups.
Ok, fair enough.
But, all I'm trying to show you is that my own viewpoint is on the side of the anarchists because they believed in freedom.
When I look at societies I do so from a kind of modified Rawlsian viewpoint.
Rawls, as you know, said that we had to look at societies from a position-blind viewpoint, and think about how it would be to be among the lowest and least powerful members of such a society.
What would it be like to be born a girl under the Taliban, for instance?
How would it be to be born an untouchable in India, ca. 1890?
But I modify the Rawlsian viewpoint and ask instead, what would it look to be a writer (of any particular persuasion) in a given society?
Obviously, in Marxist societies, it would be intolerable if you didn't side with the government. And remember, I'm doing a position-blind assessment. Among the Khmer Rouge, it would be impossible to be a writer, so they represent a limit point for me of absolutely horrible. Nazis, horrible. Stalinists, horrible. Among the Arabic nations: intolerable.
Among feminists: intolerable.
Most of what's driving me is a kind of Rawlsian thinking having to do with the position of writing.
One of the things that worries me most about Stu's ravings (I'm sorry, but they come across to me as ravings!), over the last week is the notion of "civility" which strikes me as pure and simple censorship under doublespeak terms. Basically, he doesn't want the Tea Party or Sarah Palin to speak, and if they do, it comes over to him as intolerably violent toward his ideals, which he wishes to subject the rest of us to.
This probably sounds violent to his ears, but that's how I'm hearing him. Picklesworth, James, and all the others who lean toward the right here are also hearing him in that way, I believe. It's almost intolerable.
We give him leeway to go on only because we like him, and have seen in him other characteristics over the past two years or so that he's been with us, and for which we largely feel very grateful.
The left and right (but especially the left) see individuals as a threat to be managed. Foucault and Barthes and others said we should only think about positions, and institutions that manage those positions, because there is no such thing as an individual writer.
Feminists have largely jumped on that bandwagon, and many now argue that if someone even brings up the notion of the individual they are to be reeducated with all the resources of the state behind them.
I grant that the contours of a person's ideology holds their mental world together, and there are some parts of that which are simply incongruous with the viewpoint another person holds.
the notion that someone could hold a slave was intolerable to the Baptists. And so they weren't having it.
The notion that Sarah Palin could exist is intolerable to many: she's everything that they are fighting against, or so they think, so they will attempt to banish her by any means necessary.
I think everyone has such a mental world, and that their ability to hold this is crucial to freedom of conscience, which I see as the very basis of the Lutheran revolution, which is being eaten into by crypto-Marxists, and others, who work against it, and to me they are intolerable. To me, the Khmer Rouge is intolerable, as is the Taliban.
Sometimes people who strike me as around the bend can unite on some bizarre point or another, as their rigid binaries touch. One of the weird things about black and white separatists that I've seen on prison documentaries is that they often get along quite well because they both agree that their races should be absolutely separated.
Just because they agree though doesn't make them right, it just means they are feeding into each other's intolerance on one given point.
I suppose I see many of the struggles for freedom over the last five hundred years (beginning with Luther) as a struggle for freedom of conscience. I see Orwell's trajectory in that light.
I see even Tolkien's books in that light, and am happy about their popularity. It's a big war book in a sense. but it is also a book about freedom, and justice, and that even though we are fallen, we still have the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and can fight for what's right.
and that writing can help us in this regard.
If we ask that writing be bowdlerized, or that speech become "civil," we have to look into that word, and how it might actually be an attempt to muzzle another group.
It's already happened on campuses across the nation. It's not a paranoid fantasy. If you subscribe to FIRE, as I do, you see how dangerous this movement toward "civility" is.
what it really means is that the conservatives' newspapers will be trashed, and their writers will be thrown out of school as "uncivil," and that Fox News will be closed down, along with Talk Radio.
The Spanish Civil War anarchists believed in the same "freedom" Satan believed--freedom to maim and kill.
Kirby,
A few remarks.
1. We had a discussion a little while ago in the context of WCW, Ginsberg, et. al., about the notion that many poets have that an extreme lifestyle that rejects pedestrian social conventions is somehow a precondition to great poetry. And I think this is a view that both of us reject. But without recanting this rejection, perhaps there is some merit to the notion that the best literature we have comes out of deeply heartfelt reactions to shocking circumstances. I could give a very long list, ranging from the prophetic books of the old testament and the entirety of the new testament, through "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "All's Quiet on the Western Front," "With the Old Breed," and even to cite one of your favorite authors, "The Caged Virgin."
It is peculiar that some of the best and most lasting expressions of human spirit come out of the worst and most intolerable circumstances. And this is perhaps where Ginsberg et. al. lost their way. Synthetic horrors, the dark experiences we inflict upon our own souls, are no substitute for finding in ourselves the strength of character to retain our individuality, our honor, and our decency in the face of horrific circumstances that are inflicted upon us.
2. Regarding "ravings." Well, you're certainly free to take whatever signal you like from the fact that many of the right-wing contributors to this blog have evidently decided that I've gone around the bend, and am now intent on political censorship. Mighty convenient, though. What I'm hearing from you guys is that it's ok for the tea party to promulgate vile lies such as "death panels," but it's not ok to offend the delicate sensibilities of tea partiers by suggesting that their party is in any way responsible for the degredation in civil discourse. I guess we each hear what we want to hear.
Let me suggest that in the long run, we'll all be judged by the standards we set for ourselves. If "death panels" and the ilk are the way you want to be judged, if you insist that general calls for civility in discourse are attacks on you personally, then that's the way it will be. Neither side seems prepared at this point to heed advice from the other that they are accountable for their own behavior. Certainly I'll admit that I'm in no way inclined to listen to advice to pluck the mote from my eye from those who have grown fond of optical logs like these. I may well do so of my own accord, but it's only because I prefer to see the world more clearly.
3. Oddly enough, I don't spend much time thinking about Sarah Palin. She's got charisma, but her ideas are so extreme that I don't expect them to attract a following outside of tea party circles. I don't see her as someone who has the desire—let alone the base—to govern, but rather as someone who is addicted to the public spotlight, and who feels entitled to be able to cash in on the attention she's getting. It doesn't bother me that you guys get all excited about her. Heck, from a political/tactical point of view, the more the tea party invests in Palin, the less influence it has on the rest of the country. I do, however, find that some of what Palin says is particularly hateful and unjustified, c.f., the death panels meme, and to the extent that these memes receive attention in the broader political conversation, they have to be dealt with.
4. Tolkien's books are clearly metaphors for war, a working out of his experiences in WWI and WWII. Did you know that Tolkein was one of the translators of the Jerusalem Bible? I'd long held the conceit that he'd translated 2nd Isaiah based on perceived stylistic similarities with LOTR, but recently heard that his real contribution was something less singular -- 2nd Chronicles or some such. Too bad, it was such a beautiful theory.
I'm glad that she, like Fox, exist. I wouldn't want her to be the only voice that exists.
I want law to allow the likes of her to co-exist with the likes of sharpton and his Tawana Brawley business.
I see her as a kind of Cassandra. She's hysterical, perhaps, but remember that Cassandra was judged mad -- even when she correctly identified the Trojan horse.
Palin has correctly seen the Trojan horse of the left's stealthcare as a Trojan Horse with which they hope to massacre the free market.
Please note how far GM is beginning to veer from your own trajectory.
Underneath apparent similarity is a radically different viewpoint.
Let's get him going on Wal-Mart and slavery again!
Kirby,
Palin has correctly seen the Trojan horse of the left's stealthcare as a Trojan Horse with which they hope to massacre the free market.
I guess that's why we adopted Romney's model, because when it comes to screwing up the markets, there's nothing quite like republican ideas to do it.
I think GM is not willing to consider violence even as self-defense, and yet he is willing to protect his own children. He said so!
I agree that you can't go gunning down a small nation for fun.
But you can go into Kuwait and protect them, by God.
You can go into another nation when the Muslims in Herzobobina or whatever it's called or getting genocidal treatment: and I don't care who genocided who first, by God.
If self-defense is good, or charitable doings are good: for instance, saving slave children from a life of slavery, then I think it's good.
If GM thinks he should then go liberate all the workers at a Wal-Mart with a shotgun, well, then, I would testify in his defense that in most areas he seems rational!
Something happened in Jacksonville (oh, Jackson, you wonder!), that set off GM on a lifelong quest to unravel the military spirit.
One day the primal scene will come up, and we will understand the rest of this as symptoms. Meanwhile, there's a meanwhile.
In which we read about Obama, and hope this goofy Gus doesn't drop the ball and turn us into slaves like the North Koreans.
Just keep the economy open, doofus!
that's all I'm asking!
Kirby--
I didn't have "something come up" in Jacksonville that made me realize that war is pointless.
Simply the existence of war demonstrates that war is pointless.
My problem with GM's assertion is that since people are fallen and we can't expect them not to want to take things that aren't theirs to take: goods, people, ideas are not safe unless you have an army that is willing to fight for them.
Most Americans are on the side of having some kind of military. There is a small group arising from Anabaptist thinking -- Amish, and perhaps the Brethren, and a few other sects that don't believe in open violence, but most of them have ways of policing those in their midst. Shunning for instance is pretty deadly and often will drive those who've been on the other end of it to suicide.
So in a sense it is a kind of murder, although they never lay a hand on their victim.
Non-violent forms of resistance such as those that Gandhi and MLK practiced can do some good -- especially in working within a government or against a government that has a lively media that is willing to take up the pen on your behalf.
The pen is mightier than the sword, but only if you're permitted to use it.
The left wants to tamp down not only on who can say what, but also on who can produce what, and then they want to determine the price, too.
And also disarm the population.
This is a recipe for disaster since (as in North Korea) there is no longer any means of dissent whatsoever, and any and all dissenters end up dead or in terrible prisons.
War is certainly a dilemma. I grant that it is never pretty. But it is often necessary.
Shunning for instance is pretty deadly and often will drive those who've been on the other end of it to suicide.
So in a sense it is a kind of murder, although they never lay a hand on their victim.
I disagree with you with every fiber of my being.
Shunning is certainly an extreme choice, but to equate it with murder belies a willingness on your part to relieve people of their own responsibility to self.
Suicide is always a pathetic and selfish choice--and its choice always lies with the suicide (note: there are some instances wherein psychotropic drugs might play a role [notably some prescription drugs] but the choice to take such drugs still lies with the person).
"The left wants to tamp down not only on who can say what, but also on who can produce what, and then they want to determine the price, too."
This is what the extreme left wants - the evidence, however, shows that this statement and Obama have nothing to do with each other.
The right also wants to tamp down who can say what and who can build things where...remember ye ol' mosque controversy?
Since Obama's taken office, the number of private sector jobs has grown...the number of public sector jobs has dropped.
Brett, you got the sauce on that?
this feller disagrees with you.
G.M. - I am so confused.
That chart shows the number of private sector jobs growin' betta under Obama than Bush...
And doesn't say much about public sector, except that there was that blip up during the census time.
What are you talking about?
I'm just back from Canada and still meditating the recent and premature death of an old artist friend, but a few comments:
Soldiers have myths to live by, some of which turn out to be true (as mine of rendering what the Army valued as honourable wartime service and of surviving the war). While "small unit cohesion" is important, I shouldn't want to discount the other aspects GM's source mentions, including unit pride and patriotism. While our unit experienced a few dicey moments (mostly from "incoming" and snipers), I served in a signal unit rather than a regular combat unit. While I respect true pacifists in their sincere convictions, that respect doesn't extend to the vast majority of wartime draft-dodgers and Vietnam-era "anti-war" activists, most of whom were acting out of personal cowardice and of aversion to the inconvenience, necessary subordination, and economic disadvantage of serving, or worse, of ideological sympathy with our enemies.
The Spanish Civil War was considerably more that just a Nazi-Soviet proxy war. And while horrible atrocities were committed on both sides (and within the Loyalist camp as well, as George Orwell et al chronicled), the war being a given, I'd have supported the Nationalists and Franco to be sure.
One of the best fictional treatments of this period, inter alia, is that of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's expansive and autobiographical "Gilles" (1939), which covered the interwar period in France and Spain and to my knowledge has not yet been translated into English. In it the young protagonist is undecided which side to support in the bolshevik-fascist ideological war, but like so many WWI vets, he's sure one or the other will ultimately prevail over impotent and corrupt democracies. I'm thankful the Drieu-protagonist was wrong in the case of the fascists, but the communist snake has yet to be scotched altogether.
I'll agree with stu that the term "death panels" is a more incendiary term than the euphemism "end-of-life-decisions" (i.e., government-funded and mandated "end-of-life" counseling by Medicare functionaries, preferred by most HRC supporters, including the reprehensible mouthpiece for euthanasia and physician-aided suicide, Congressman Earl Blumenauer), but I'm thankful the campaign against it so far has succeeded, both legislatively and more recently, administratively.
The VA pamphlet I obtained some time ago with its cloying "do-you-really-want-to-be-a-burden?" language suggests that what cannot be legislated in Congress can be attempted by bureaucrats tucked away in circumlocution offices. Sometimes euphemisms can be more dangerous to life than incendiary terms.
One must be blind and deaf not to have read or heard of the numerous death threats made to Sarah Palin and to the Pima County Tea Party spokesman, one ("You're dead!")against the latter at a town hall meeting a few days ago by a Democratic activist and victim of the Tucson shootings.
Newsmax keeps saying that there is going to be a vote, possibly this week, against Deathcare. Is it true?
Kirby, from what I've seen, the debate on repeal begins Tuesday with the vote perhaps Thursday and replacement bills to be offerred soon afterwards.
The house is voting to repeal - such a vote won't pass the senate, and Obama of course won't sign it.
Political posturing and little else.
So be it.
More than posturing, Brett; it sets up this issue for the next election. And anticipates the selective House defunding of parts of the mostly unread-upon-passing bill. And emphasises the necessity of Congress and the President to stick to its enumerated powers, not some bloated unconstitutional delusion of the Commerce Clause's omnipotence.
"it sets up this issue for the next election."
Am I wrong, or is that the definition of 'posturing.'
It's a dance of civility that features knees to the groin, eye scratching, toe stomping, and bows to the audience.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_01/027423.php
Those are the numbers for all types of jobs -
If you compare it to the graph you gave me, it becomes obvious that the private sector has done better than private sector + public sector.
Which can only mean that private sector jobs have done a better job of increasing than public sector ones.
(and apologies for my previous wrong-thread-posting. )
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