More Goldberg
After listening to the interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds, I'd have to say that the Sadly, No gang's fisking is not illuminating (the Crooked Timber takes are even less useful, since they are literally judging the book by its cover). Take this exchange, keeping in mind that one of Goldberg's themes is that the proto-fascist socialists were pro-military:
Sadly, No then goes on to provide a link which yielded the following quote:
This next tidbit is a common problem in any analysis of the Nazi relationship to socialism, broadly understood. The standard reaction to any mention of Hitler's obsession with health is that Goldberg -- or anyone else pointing this out -- is using this syllogism:
Since they have dropped almost all of the context, it's hard to say where Goldberg was going with his discussion, but it seems much more likely that he's developing a line of argument that has to do with connecting certain lifestyles with morality, and morality with the state, and thus the idea that the state can and should strictly regulate diet, exercise, and other habits (smoking). As Russell Wardlow and others point out on Steve Sailer's site (excellent comments), some people are unable to refrain from going to that simple strawman syllogism and therefore overlook the bigger point. The bigger point is that the Nazis wanted to regulate health habits because they thought it was every citizen's duty to provide the state with fit workers. [1]
Then we have this line from another post:
Speaking of Hannah Arendt, the same post contains a floating quotation (no context again) about the relationship of Wilson and FDR to the French Revolution, which Goldberg identifies as fascist. The commenters are mystified, but they wouldn't be had they ever pulled themselves through a copy of Arendt's On Revolution. It's actually quite funny, since the commenters point out that the Jacobins were radicals, i.e. proto-progressives. Indeed they were. And the result? The Committee on Public Safety, under the leadership of Robespierre, commenced the Reign of Terror. I'd like to know in what way they find that significantly different from fascism.
In another post, they attempt this argument, which the uncritical commenters accept:
It is surely funny that the Sadly, No writer lampoons some of Goldberg's sources but then relies on The History Channel's National Socialism archives. Still, I wonder if he would consider it fair game if portions of that worked against him?
George Bernard Shaw's Nietzche's Superman, and you have the National Socialist German Worker's Party philosophical stew made almost exclusively from the same philosophers who influenced the era's leading progressives, Fabians, and socialists.
Consider what Richard Pipes has to say:
In the interview, Goldberg says something to the effect of, "I bet that if you were to remove the war and antisemitism from the Nazi program, most of these modern progressives would endorse their policies." That does seem to occur among the commenters in the form of "if free education was all that nazism did, I would be in favor of it," as if you could separate things so easily -- what part of "totalitarian" don't they understand? Via Matt Zeitlin, I did come across something that approached a thoughtful critique at Spencer Ackerman's TooHotforTNR (worth reading), in which he asserts that "a government that makes a lot of poor and invidious policy choices, many of dubious constitutionality, but still leaves power following a democratic election isn't fascist." Does that mean that the NSDAP was not fascist until the Reichstag fire? Or that they wouldn't have been fascist had Hitler counterfactually stepped down in elections in 1940? Does it mean that Lenin and Stalin were fascist?
This debate hinges on the definition of fascism. Most common definitions start from the standpoint informed by the post-WWII propaganda effort that painted Nazis, Italian fascists, and other groups into the right by way of contrasting them to the Communists, socialists, and Democrats. [3] As usual, I'm no fan of the overly simple, one-dimensional, left-right model of politics. Anything that pretends to pit Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless. If I find the time, perhaps I may make an attempt at developing a definition of fascism.
Most critics of Goldberg's book seem to think that he is making the definition so broad that it would encompass every country and political movement in history. Possibly: I don't have the book and the Amazon version isn't searchable, so I don't have Goldberg's definition. It seems likely, based on the little I have seen, that they are being intentionally obtuse. They are preferring to argue on the differences in degree in the components and refusing to see the difference in kind in the system taken as a whole. Take Ackerman's response to one passage in the book:
Is this a deliberate misrepresentation of both Goldberg's claim and of fascism? He skips past the "religion of the state" part and the definition of totalitarian, going right for a minor point about regulation and social pressure. And on that point, he is wrong. Fascist states famously used social pressure as leverage to get people to report their neighbors. It is so well known that it has entered our language in the form of phrases like "little Eichmans" and "Good Germans"; it has been famously studied in the Milgram, Stanford prison, and Asch conformity experiments.
----------------------
[1] Today, the primary argument for state intervention in these matters has not been our own health or the state's right to our labor, but rather the cost which unhealthy citizens are placing on state healthcare programs. Which is absurd when you think about it - the state creates a program to shield people from risk and then is shocked to find people using it? The rejoinder to this from the left is most likely to be a moral argument, i.e., individuals should sacrifice their personal pleasure (smoke, consumption of transfats) for the common good. Sounds like ... ?
[2] First, Nazi Germany did not start a war to demonstrate their national power, they started it because they felt they had an obligation to look after the welfare of "ethnic Germans". Thus, they reclaimed the Rhineland, pulled the Austrian and Sudetenland Germans back into the fold, and then started expanding east (Poland) in order to start realizing his goals of autarky, a closed economic system which could provide its own food , manufactured goods, and markets for both. They did this because they perceived the lesson of WWI was that imperialism did not work. Hitler went to war with France and England as a pre-emptive measure, and against Russia because he felt he also needed some of the land which the Soviets had grabbed for farm production.
Another reason for qualifying war as only "arguably" more fascist is that England, France, and Kaiser-era Germany were all basically fighting over their imperialist aspirations in WWI, and the Soviet Union and China also started a few wars. Were they fascist? Using this aspect of the Sadly, No author's definition of fascism, it might be difficult to find a country which would not qualify. Can anyone state the significance of the United States, Mexico, and 1848 in this context? Anyone? Bueller?
[3] These are over-represented in the Wiki articles thanks to the efforts of Chip Berlet and a few self-identified Marxist editors. I found that if I attempted to mitigate some of their more eggregious errors, my edits were promptly removed without explanation. When I started a wholly new section, they moved it to someplace completely unrelated and then watered it down. They view their sources as unassailable while claiming that the Austrian school of economics is too marginalized to be taken seriously. Wikipedia is like politics: a small special interest group or a majority can introduce and enforce errors.
JG: There is confusion over Nazi attitudes about homosexuality.
S,N: No there isn't. They wanted to kill them.
JG: Some Nazis were gay.
S,N: Duh, of course; good help is hard to find. [EH: What happened to wanting to kill them?]
JG: They killed Rohm not because he was gay but rather because he was more radical, desiring a second revolution.
S,N: Aha! By radical, you mean more socialist! [EH: Perhaps homosexuality is not the only reason the Nazis killed?]
S,N: No there isn't. They wanted to kill them.
JG: Some Nazis were gay.
S,N: Duh, of course; good help is hard to find. [EH: What happened to wanting to kill them?]
JG: They killed Rohm not because he was gay but rather because he was more radical, desiring a second revolution.
S,N: Aha! By radical, you mean more socialist! [EH: Perhaps homosexuality is not the only reason the Nazis killed?]
Sadly, No then goes on to provide a link which yielded the following quote:
The SA, led by Ernst Rohm, included control of the Reichswehr (the army) in the program of the second revolution.The more radical/socialist members of the NSDAP wanted to control the military? It's hard to see how this doesn't support Goldberg's thesis. Instead, we get lots of side track comments from the Sadly, No author that are self-contradictory.
This next tidbit is a common problem in any analysis of the Nazi relationship to socialism, broadly understood. The standard reaction to any mention of Hitler's obsession with health is that Goldberg -- or anyone else pointing this out -- is using this syllogism:
Hitler was a vegetarian.
Vegetarians are leftists.
Therefore, Hitler was a leftist.
Vegetarians are leftists.
Therefore, Hitler was a leftist.
Since they have dropped almost all of the context, it's hard to say where Goldberg was going with his discussion, but it seems much more likely that he's developing a line of argument that has to do with connecting certain lifestyles with morality, and morality with the state, and thus the idea that the state can and should strictly regulate diet, exercise, and other habits (smoking). As Russell Wardlow and others point out on Steve Sailer's site (excellent comments), some people are unable to refrain from going to that simple strawman syllogism and therefore overlook the bigger point. The bigger point is that the Nazis wanted to regulate health habits because they thought it was every citizen's duty to provide the state with fit workers. [1]
Then we have this line from another post:
Starting wars simply to demonstrate national strength is about a billion times more fascist than some namby-pamby bureaucrat telling you not to super-size your fries.By comparing nanny-state bureaucracy to something that arguably more fascist [2] and declaring that it pales in comparison, the author concludes that it can't be fascist. I'm sure that's a named fallacy. But even if I can't be bothered to look up the name of that fallacy, I recognize the attitude: it's the Banality of Evil.
Speaking of Hannah Arendt, the same post contains a floating quotation (no context again) about the relationship of Wilson and FDR to the French Revolution, which Goldberg identifies as fascist. The commenters are mystified, but they wouldn't be had they ever pulled themselves through a copy of Arendt's On Revolution. It's actually quite funny, since the commenters point out that the Jacobins were radicals, i.e. proto-progressives. Indeed they were. And the result? The Committee on Public Safety, under the leadership of Robespierre, commenced the Reign of Terror. I'd like to know in what way they find that significantly different from fascism.
In another post, they attempt this argument, which the uncritical commenters accept:
In fact, we must stare in awe as Jonah accuses Margaret Sanger of "nasty racism" for her era-appropriate belief in eugenicsI asked, in response,
I wonder if you'd also characterize the antisemitism of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named as "era-appropriate"? Surely, if such ideas are bad, they are bad in any era, regardless of the identity of the person who thinks those thoughts?Nobody has answered. If those ideas were so era-appropriate, how does one explain people like G. K. Chesterton who were opposed to eugenics? Could it be that the era-appropriateness hinged on the acceptance of the idea among H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson, and other progressives?
It is surely funny that the Sadly, No writer lampoons some of Goldberg's sources but then relies on The History Channel's National Socialism archives. Still, I wonder if he would consider it fair game if portions of that worked against him?
The roots of National Socialism, however, were peculiarly German, grounded, for example, in the Prussian tradition of military authoritarianism and expansion; in the German romantic tradition of hostility to rationalism, liberalism, and democracy; in various racist doctrines according to which the Nordic peoples, as so-called pure Aryans, were not only physically superior to other races, but were the carriers of a superior morality and culture; and in certain philosophical traditions that idealized the state or exalted the superior individual and exempted such a person from conventional restraints.The Prussian thing, the Romantic thing, and the Aryan thing are tied together in Fichte, Herder, and several others who also influenced Hegel and through him, Marx. Stir in some Plenge, Spengler, and Chamberlain, add a dash of
Consider what Richard Pipes has to say:
The idea that fascism as a far-right ideology was a creation of the Comintern is something Goldberg makes reference to in the interview linked above. And if you doubt the extent to which the Comintern would go to paint their fellow-traveller rivals as reactionary, I'd recommend that you pick up a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.Was the Fascist Party a "right-wing" party?
Mussolini's party was a right-wing party but only to some extent, just as the Nazi party. These were not conservative parties. They were radical, radical nationalist parties, which in the programs very much maintained the socialist ideals [emphasis added]. For example, Mussolini's corporate state workers participated in the decision making in the business enterprises. They had as much say in some respects, as did the owners of factories.Mussolini did shift to the right gradually because I think he was afraid of the power of the communist and the socialists, and since he was a dictator and wanted dictatorial power he felt that one has to suppress these parties and they were suppressed.
...
Are Communism and Fascism totally different things, completely opposed to one another?
Well, the notion that Communism and fascism are diametrically opposed is something that was fostered by the Communist party, by the Communist International. In the 1920s, basically the International defined fascism as any anti-communist movement. If you were anti-communist, it doesn't matter what platform, you were automatically fascist. So that even the western democracies were called fascist. This is a meaningless term. I use the term Fascism concretely, to apply only to the Italian fascist party and the Nazi to the Nazi party.
In the interview, Goldberg says something to the effect of, "I bet that if you were to remove the war and antisemitism from the Nazi program, most of these modern progressives would endorse their policies." That does seem to occur among the commenters in the form of "if free education was all that nazism did, I would be in favor of it," as if you could separate things so easily -- what part of "totalitarian" don't they understand? Via Matt Zeitlin, I did come across something that approached a thoughtful critique at Spencer Ackerman's TooHotforTNR (worth reading), in which he asserts that "a government that makes a lot of poor and invidious policy choices, many of dubious constitutionality, but still leaves power following a democratic election isn't fascist." Does that mean that the NSDAP was not fascist until the Reichstag fire? Or that they wouldn't have been fascist had Hitler counterfactually stepped down in elections in 1940? Does it mean that Lenin and Stalin were fascist?
This debate hinges on the definition of fascism. Most common definitions start from the standpoint informed by the post-WWII propaganda effort that painted Nazis, Italian fascists, and other groups into the right by way of contrasting them to the Communists, socialists, and Democrats. [3] As usual, I'm no fan of the overly simple, one-dimensional, left-right model of politics. Anything that pretends to pit Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless. If I find the time, perhaps I may make an attempt at developing a definition of fascism.
Most critics of Goldberg's book seem to think that he is making the definition so broad that it would encompass every country and political movement in history. Possibly: I don't have the book and the Amazon version isn't searchable, so I don't have Goldberg's definition. It seems likely, based on the little I have seen, that they are being intentionally obtuse. They are preferring to argue on the differences in degree in the components and refusing to see the difference in kind in the system taken as a whole. Take Ackerman's response to one passage in the book:
JG: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve that common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy.
SA: Fascist regimes do not impose their wills by force "or" through regulation and social pressure. They systematize violence.
SA: Fascist regimes do not impose their wills by force "or" through regulation and social pressure. They systematize violence.
Is this a deliberate misrepresentation of both Goldberg's claim and of fascism? He skips past the "religion of the state" part and the definition of totalitarian, going right for a minor point about regulation and social pressure. And on that point, he is wrong. Fascist states famously used social pressure as leverage to get people to report their neighbors. It is so well known that it has entered our language in the form of phrases like "little Eichmans" and "Good Germans"; it has been famously studied in the Milgram, Stanford prison, and Asch conformity experiments.
----------------------
[1] Today, the primary argument for state intervention in these matters has not been our own health or the state's right to our labor, but rather the cost which unhealthy citizens are placing on state healthcare programs. Which is absurd when you think about it - the state creates a program to shield people from risk and then is shocked to find people using it? The rejoinder to this from the left is most likely to be a moral argument, i.e., individuals should sacrifice their personal pleasure (smoke, consumption of transfats) for the common good. Sounds like ... ?
[2] First, Nazi Germany did not start a war to demonstrate their national power, they started it because they felt they had an obligation to look after the welfare of "ethnic Germans". Thus, they reclaimed the Rhineland, pulled the Austrian and Sudetenland Germans back into the fold, and then started expanding east (Poland) in order to start realizing his goals of autarky, a closed economic system which could provide its own food , manufactured goods, and markets for both. They did this because they perceived the lesson of WWI was that imperialism did not work. Hitler went to war with France and England as a pre-emptive measure, and against Russia because he felt he also needed some of the land which the Soviets had grabbed for farm production.
Another reason for qualifying war as only "arguably" more fascist is that England, France, and Kaiser-era Germany were all basically fighting over their imperialist aspirations in WWI, and the Soviet Union and China also started a few wars. Were they fascist? Using this aspect of the Sadly, No author's definition of fascism, it might be difficult to find a country which would not qualify. Can anyone state the significance of the United States, Mexico, and 1848 in this context? Anyone? Bueller?
[3] These are over-represented in the Wiki articles thanks to the efforts of Chip Berlet and a few self-identified Marxist editors. I found that if I attempted to mitigate some of their more eggregious errors, my edits were promptly removed without explanation. When I started a wholly new section, they moved it to someplace completely unrelated and then watered it down. They view their sources as unassailable while claiming that the Austrian school of economics is too marginalized to be taken seriously. Wikipedia is like politics: a small special interest group or a majority can introduce and enforce errors.
Labels: culture, police-state, politics, socialism
<< Home