Observation About Left And Right
Dean
In the late 20th century, the right was forced to confront Mussolini and Franco and, ultimately, Hitler. They had their noses rubbed in those men and the movements they represented. As reluctant as most of them were, most of them were honest enough--sooner or later--to confront all that full in the face.
Still to this day, the left has refused to allow itself to be confronted full in the face with Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Instead, most of them still make excuses, or bloviate and act offended and change the subject when someone brings it up.
This may ultimately be the most important difference between left and right today.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that the socialist regimes of the twentieth century committed great evil. But I'm getting really tired of posts from aggreived conservatives complaining about how liberals won't recant and abandon socialism. No liberal of my generation ever adhered to it in the first place.
And just how many Che shirt have you seen in the last year? By your admition, no liberal of your generation (and mine, since I too was born in 1970) have learn history.
The right constantly and unendingly has the specter of fascism thrown in its face. Yet when you compare the left to Leninism, Stalinism, or just say "communist," people laugh and smirk and act like you're an idiot.
Don't play with me. It's 2005 and I still see it every day. Call someone a Nazi and they think you're really angry and calling someone the worst possible epithet. Call someone a communist and you think they're joking, or are a stupid buffoon.
Come on, Robert. Can you name any conservative of your generation who ever adhered to fascism? Can you even tell me exactly what fascism is besides snappy uniforms and hating minorities?
Don't lie to me: if I called you a Nazi you'd get all huffy, but if I called you a Commie you'd snort and laugh in derision.
No? Am I wrong?
No, I can't name an American conservative of my generation who adhered or adheres to fascism.
As for defining fascism - it's difficult to define, as there are very few tenets which seem to hold true for all of the political entities which are usually described as fascist (nazi germany, fascist italy, and francoist spain having quite different political systems). The way *I* use the word is roughly as follows: a political and economic system which attempts to treat society as a single corporate whole, in which individual political and economic rights are submerged into the rights of "society", and in which political rhetoric and debate is informed by a paranoid view of the threat to society by outsiders. Other people seem to use it differently.
I'm not playing with you. I see far more angry conservatives and libertarians denouncing moderate leftism as socialism than I see angry liberals denouncing moderate conservatism as fascism. (Mostly, I see angry liberals denouncing conservatism as the first step towards a theocratic state; but that's a different form of condemnation altogether than calling conservatives fascists).
... And how do you explain ANSWER? And the fact that ANSWER and various ancillary groups have proved vital to the "liberal" anti-war movement?
If you haven't seen many folks calling conservative or pro-war people facists you haven't been looking very hard.
Beyond all that, you have changed the subject. Dean never said that the left has to repudiate socialism/communism because they used to follow said ideology; Dean said that the left never repudiated socialism/communism at all. No "this was a bad idea," no "socialist/communist ideas are morally bankrupt," nothing.
Ok, fine. You admit that "the socialist regimes of the twentieth century committed great evil." Are you willing to admit that said regimes were, in fact, evil? There's a difference you know.
BTW, you are way off on one remark. You claimed that "[the communist] philosophy ... was dying during my childhood." Since you were born "in the 1970s" (when, exactly?) that means you were born before Reagan took office. Now go back and try reading the contemporary commentaries, political speeches, and military forecasts. Communism was hardly "dying" at that time. In fact, the sudden changes in 1989 took the vast majority of the world by surprise.
Perhaps your memories are tainted by the fact that -by the time you became aware of the world outside the US- Reagan had already killed the monster... ;)
We can all watch those old WW2 movies with John Wayne in them, and maybe even forget ourselves to such an extent that we worry about who will win. But we already know the answer today.
It wasn't so obvious back in 1941, or even in 1943.
And when the cultural and political leaders of the left actually start condeming socialism and communism on a publicly regular basis... then you might have occasion for objection. Not until then.
Marxist college professors are hardly relevant to my point, given that very few people of my generation have yet achieved that rank.
But I find it an interesting question nonetheless, mostly because my experience on this score seems to have been quite different from everyone else's. I graduated with a degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz - theoretically a bastion of political corectness in a stunningly liberal town. My coursework was primarily in political science and history, with some classes in computer science and economics. The foreign policy specialists on faculty at that time were all realists; the other politics faculty members were, broadly speaking, neoliberals; the economics faculty I interacted with adhered largely to the Chicago school; the computer science faculty, at least the ones who would talk politics, were all libertarians. The only places I encountered socialist faculty were in sociology, (possibly) cultural anthropology, and a visiting history professor who came from Brazil.
I've gathered from talking to people about other universities that my experience is exceptional; that the faculty at my university, in the areas I studied, were unusual. But those stories contradict my experience, and I have a hard time taking them seriously without statistical data to back them up.
As for ANSWER - I can't explain them. I know that my friends who protested against the war had no clue who was organizing the protests; it was an anti-war protest, and it was axiomatic to my friends that, if they believed the war was bad, they had a duty to go to the protests. I'm not aware that any of them enquired further into the organization running them; they just assumed that the people running the show were there out of motivations similar to theirs. Which is a quite common human failing.
You are correct that Dean never said the left has to repudiate communism because it used to follow that ideology. I think it was quite clearly implied by the words he used, and I think that it would be a valid argument to say that much of the interwar and post-war left were, in the best of cases, fellow travellers on the road to socialism; but Dean did not say that in this post.
Of course I'm willing to admit that Lenin and Stalin were evil, and that their regimes were as well. (I'm not going to say that with respect to Mao, because I know next to nothing about Chinese history and am therefore reluctant to say anything on the subject) Stalin, in particular, was responsible for more deaths than Hitler was, and the Gulag Archipelago was one of the great evils of the modern era. The system that allowed him to come to power and stay in power was fundamentally broken, and the governments which adopted that system represented a string of economic, political, environmental, and social catastrophes.
There's no controversy here that i'm aware of. I've rarely held a conversation about politics with anyone who would not admit this. (I know one person who doesn't, who basically thinks the stories of the gulag are conservative propoganda; I don't understand what he is thinking).
I was born in 1973. While it is the case that people in western Europe and the United States did not understand that commuism was dying, it is also quite clear that significant portions of the the people of the Soviet Union, and of its eastern European satellites, knew it to be dying. There's a terrible joke that they used to tell, in the Soviet Union:
Stalin, Khruschev, and Brezhnev were travelling on a train that had stopped. "I will see to it!" said Stalin, leaving the compartment. On his return, he declared "we are ready to go, I have shot the engineer." Nothing happened. Khruschev got up and went to the front of the train. When he came back, he smiled, and said "I have rehabilitated the engineer." Still, the train did not move. Suddenly Brezhnev stood up and pulled down the blinds plunging the compartment into total darkness. "There! Now the train is moving."
The point to the joke is that the people living under communism understood it to be a farce, its promises to be meaningless, its economy stagnant, its politics morally bankrupt, even in the 70s. The system was dying. That we could not see it, that we were not aware of it because the leaders of the Soviet Union put on a great face and bluffed their way through, did not make it any less on its deathbed.
It is possible that my memories are tainted by the fact that I first became politically aware in 1986-1987, and that by then communism was on its last legs. But, if so, that simply makes my point stronger: communism has never in my mind, or in the mind of my contemporaries, been seen as a workable system, let alone an admirable one. Why are we being asked to confront it? It was a miserable failure; its leaders so profoundly misunderstood human nature that it could not have been anything but a miserable failure. Everyone knows this. Why are we still talking about it? :)
Well, we're still talking about it because we've got an endless supply of people of the left still lauding Castro...heck, I understand that Angela Davis is a tenured professor somewhere (in case you're unaware, Davis is a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool communist who had terrorist affiliations in the 1960's); in short, communists are still considered persona grata on the left side of the aisle. It should be borne in mind that to the average conservative, there really isn't any fundamental difference between a communist, Nazi or fascist - they might use different slogans, but their aims and means are essentially the same; and all of them piled up corpses at an amazing rate in the late, unlamented 20th century. We just don't understand why a person on the left would consider Nazism horrific and not feel exactly the same about communism - and we are left to assume that to the left, communism is ok; ergo, 100 million murders were ok, because it was communism doing it.
There is a heavy communist/socialist influence in the American liberal/left - in fact, to a large degree the communists have hijacked the term liberal to the point where in the minds of a large swath of the American people there is no difference between a liberal and a communist - and this is why the far left must be rejected...and not just by saying "I disagree"; they have to be hounded out of political/social/economic/intellectual life just as any fascist or Nazi would be. Everyone has a right to believe as they wish, of course - but some ideals are just not consonant with American ideals and have to be driven out of proper society. Worn out communists like Davis shouldn't be given tenure - they shouldn't even be given the time of day.
On the far right are anarchists. Just to the left of them are libertarians. Next Paleocons. Then other various kinds of conservatives. All believe in a smaller state, and there are strong populist movements all over the right, including anti-corporatist agenda. Dean Esmay here is no big fan of corporations; neither am I. I don't know any conservatives who want to have a cabal of state and business running the country -- but that's what can happen if you're not careful and everyone from anarchists to left-liberals should oppose it.
So I ignore the Nazi appellation.
Besides, there are very few actual fascists in this country. We're not Europe, and we haven't have a serious fascist movement in this country since the 30s. Fascism is a European thing.
Also, left and right refer to the French Revolution, not to America's political parties. We use the terms to describe how much state intervention we'll permit.
The vast majority of Americans are moderate and pretty much want to be left alone by the government, but want the government to watch out corporations don't ship all the jobs overseas or kill all the fish in the Great Lakes.
FWIW.
It is perhaps a Bad Thing that communism, and for that matter socialism, have not yet been discredited enough that it's almost universally considered as a horrific thing to call someone.
Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky.
Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky."
(Martin Amis, "Koba The Dread -- Laughter And The Twenty Million", 2002, p. 257)
IB Bill's spectrum is excellent: from total government, under any label, on the Far Left to no government at all, anarchy, on the Far Right. I'm on the Right, for limited Constitutional government and individual freedom with corresponding responsibility.
Mark Noonan is right. Castro and Angela Davis are still lionized by the left. I have heard so-called "liberals" praise Castro many times for giving his slaves "free" health care. Mao is still lionized by the left. Pol Pot, well, not quite, but we are also not reminded that the Chinese Communists were backing him. Mao was an unreconstructed Stalinist who condemned Kruschev as a heretic. Mao murdered at least as many millions as did Hitler.
About the double standard: I was at a Comdex (computer and software convenstion) in Las Vegas some years ago where exhibiters from around the world were displaying their wares. One exhibit featured a program from Russia, and the exhibiters were wearing Soviet Army uniforms. There was also a programmer from Germany, but I didn't see him in a German Army uniform. Remember what happened when England's Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform at a party? Would we have seen the same kind of controversy if he had worn a Mao uniform or a KGB uniform? Hmmm....
One way you can tell if somebody is a villain in today's media is if they show him with his mouth open in angry speech of some kind. You've seen countless pictures of Hitler with his mouth open, screaming, ranting, and raving. You've also seen innmerable pictures of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy with his mouth open that way, too, snarling hysterically about "Commies in our midst".
By contrast, pictures of Stalin still show him as beaming, benevolent "Uncle Joe", and pictures of Mao show him calm as the Buddha, too, full of Oriental wisdom. His book, "The Little Red Book" or "Quotations from Chairman Mao", was very popular when I was growing up in the early 1970s. All the "cool", "liberal" kids carried copies of it with them. Only the evil, naughty boys would ever think of carrying a copy of "Mein Kampf". In fact, the Mao book was so popular that even conservatives copied its title. I have "Quotations from Chairman Jesus", "Quotations from Chairman San [Ervin]", and even "Quotations from Chairman Bill [Buckley]." Mao was cute and cuddly. By contrast, nobody named a book of theirs "Mein ____", even as a joke.
Senator McCarthy was made for Hollywood, the perfect villaim. The way he looked, his raspy voice, his evil laugh. The perfect villain. The Left can't get enough of him. Ask any college student or professor, or anybody in the media, who was worse, Joe McCarthy or Joe Stalin, and 9 out of 10 times, you can bet it will be McCarthy, or at least a draw. McCarthy is right up there with Hitler as the arch-villain of the 20th century, the man everybody loves to hate, the symbol of the Right as Evil. And, Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and all the others he exposed, were just his innocent victims. Anti-Communism = McCarthyism = Evil.
Any admission that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were mass murderers, that Communism was not so idyllic to live under after all, that Hiss or the Rosenbergs were agents of Stalin, will be grudging, "well, yeah, OK", as if you're spoiling everybody's party by bringing it up, and "now let's get back to denouncing McCarthy, Reagan, Bush, etc..."
Nazism is dead. Communism will be dead when we finally see "Total Eclipse" on the big screen.
Another "double standard": I am sure that there are stores catering to neo-Nazis (all that memorabilia and literature must be sold somewhere), but has anyone seen such a place a block from a major university? Yet Berkeley's Revolution Books was still there, last I checked, tucked under a parking garage roughly between a coffee shop and a copy place, as you'd expect close to campus. I think the people behind RB are Maoists — that is, much enthusiasm evident in the posters and articles in the windows for such as Sendero Luminoso, rather less for North Korea. Not that it makes a lot of difference, honestly.
Where would you put an anarchist on that spectrum? Or a libertarian or an Objectivist or a conservative or anybody else who believes in limited government, individual freedom, and free enterprise? To get away from socialism we need another spectrum!
For starters at least, a much more logical spectrum is that described above which has total government, socialism, under any label on the Far Left, no government at all, anarchy, on the Far Right, and limited Constitutional government and individual freedom and responsibility in the middle or.... ....slightly to the Right.
And here are the Pournelle Axes, as spectrum which reverses those definitions somewhat and also adds a dimension of Rationalism-Irrationalism.
Here is the Wikipedia article on ideological spectra.
Strictly speaking, Monarchy is the furthest of the far right - with the understanding of monarchy as Burke understood it in the late 18th century; constitutional and subservient to a parlaiment. Neither anarchy, nor Nazism, nor facsism has any actual affinity with the right - the complete conservative would be someone who would like to see a Hapsburg crowned in Vienna as Holy Roman Emperor (though, in a pinch, a Wittelsbach or Guelph would do), with the Pope ensconced in Rome looking after theological affairs.
I kid you not, the sales pitch says "A CPUSA travel mug, for fellow travelers (and members)."
Totally weird.