(no subject)

[fpb]

Anyone who thinks that I was too harsh about Jonah Goldberg's repulsive and politically motivated rewriting of my own country's history ought to read today's Thomas Sowell column, where it is taken entirely at its own valuation and highly recommended as summer reading for the children of conservatives. This unhistorical, culturally imperialistic propaganda, that distorts my country's and my continent's history in the service of provincial American concerns, is going to enter the bloodstream of a whole American party, If it has not already done so. This will increase further the mutual incomprehension between USA and Europe, because you cannot stand on your two hind legs and inform anyone who knows anything of continental history - France, Italy, Germany, etc. - that Nazism and Fascism were "left wing". This sort of rubbish, especially if spoken with the arrogance of Goldberg and Sowell, will increase European contempt for American viewpoints and culture. Do we really need this sort of trash further complicating our already difficult relationship, and all for the sake of a few Republican votes in the next election?

Comments

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

I re-read those articles so I know what you're talking about .. but

I'll echo superversive left and right don't mean what they mean in Europe.

Maybe we need a Babel Fish to translate Continental political cant into American and visa-versa.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Maybe we need an edict against ignorant American journalists rewriting European history to suit themselves. But more important, we need loud and steadfast protests to avoid this sort of uncomprehending cultural imperialism from messing up intercontinental relationships even further.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Oh, get off your high horse. Sowell and Goldberg are not writing for the benefit of Europeans; they are writing polemics for an American audience, and it is both right and necessary that they should use political terminology in its American acceptation.

You want to forbid Americans from talking about politics to other Americans in the American language. That’s a much worse form of ‘uncomprehending cultural imperialism’ than anything you’re accusing Sowell and Goldberg of.

Maybe the edict we need is against people convicting others of ignorance because the others fail to obey their prescriptions regarding terminology.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

When it is European politics, yes, I bloody well do. Since you insist that there is no difference between Communism and Fascism, I can see the need for it even more. Have the goodness to remember that you are speaking about MY COUNTRY AND MY PAST.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

No difference between Communism and Fascism? I have not said any such thing. I have said that they are both forms of totalitarianism, which is unquestionably true, and that if you are not a member of any of the particular groups they prefer on ideological grounds to oppress, it makes small odds which system you live under; which is supported by abundant eyewitness evidence — I have read a fair bellyful, and have furthermore known people who lived and suffered under totalitarian rule of various kinds, and in some cases risked their lives to escape.

Your second point does not even deserve an answer, but I am in sufficient dudgeon to give one anyway: If I am not allowed to say anything about YOUR country and YOUR past, then you should shut the hell up about the Americans.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The viciousness and cruelty of Communism in terms of economic suppression is unique. There is a difference between State intervention in the economy and total State possession of everything, and that can be certified in a dozen different ways. I read, for instance, a book that described the brief impact of Soviet Communism on the parts of Romania, Poland and the Baltic countries that the Russians occupied in 1939 and from which they were driven in 1941. The difference that two years of Communism made to the daily lives of everyone, and to the societal leadership (this was the period of the Katyn pits) was immense. Statalization of everything began on day one, and within a few weeks British diplomatic personnel were reporting empty shops, devastated properties and a general air of sullen despair. And all of these people had come to Communism from various kinds of tyranny, which, especially in Romania and the Balts, had strong Fascist connotations. And what about the Cuban experience? Are you telling me that the Cubans never felt a difference between the tyrannies of Batista and of Castro? The difference between Fascism and Communism is exactly in the far more profound and annihilating penetration of the latter. And Communism begins with the murder of capitalists (or landowners), just as Fascism begins with the murder of Socialists. In places like China, the public slaughter of identified local land or business owner was the rite of introduction of Communist power to the local peasantry. If this does not seem to you to make any difference....

[superversive.livejournal.com]

I do not deny for a moment that there is a difference of degree between Communism and Fascism. The difference in kind has been greatly exaggerated. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were both brutal, tyrannous, aggressively militaristic police states. The principal difference between them, as I have already tried to point out, is that in Germany economic collectivization was aborted in the interests of military efficiency, whereas in Russia it was pursued above all else (and the state was almost destroyed by invasion as a result). If Nazi rule had lasted for seventy years, as Soviet Communism did, I doubt you would be able to speak so glibly of the ‘freedom’ of German industrialists.

I could quote Hitler himself on his reasoning and intentions, and why he considered himself a genuine Socialist — a thing, please note, that I do not grant, except in the sense that he had as much right to call himself a Socialist as Stalin and his thugs. But I have not time; I have an appointment across the city in less than an hour.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Is that why you have not made the least effort to understand what I was trying to say? If so, I would ask you, next time, to take more time and actually read.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Suuurrrrre Hitler was a true Socialist. He also was a true Christian and a true Pacifist - and I could quote you long and eloquent passages on both from his own speeches. To quote CS Lewis, I did not realize that I would have to deal with the disarming naivety of critics who quote as gospel things said by the master of lies to his army during war speeches. In all your readings about Hitler, did you never come across anything that suggested that truth was not exactly sacred to him? Have you never realized that he was always using words as weapons, and primarily to displace his enemies, deprive them of the ground to criticize him, and possess this ground himself - however unsuited he may have been to it? Hitler was out to destroy Christianity, but also to claim its mantle for himself. Hitler was out to create a militarized world, but he repeatedly made the most ardent, the most touching confessions of love for peace, and never stopped trying to pretend that he had simply been forced into going to war. And if you think that your way of taking Hitler seriously in his claim to Socialism is any different from that of anyone who would take his claim of pacifism seriously, compare your attitude to that of NIcholson Baker - a writer who has recently published an anthology (!) of contemporary texts trying to prove that Britain and Churchill were the warmongers and that Hitler was left with no choice but to react to their aggression.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What does not seem to penetrate here is that the degenerative process of mutual ignorance and contempt is already so advanced that it is hard to even explain to the average European that the average American is not in fact a knuckle-dragging gun-worshipping lynch-mobbing six-day-creationist moron. If you do not like this kind of stereotyping, do not encourage it by having "Americans talking to Americans" about Europeans in terms that are not only uncomprehending but arrogant, not only arrogant but with a clear subtext of superiority (since the movements in question are not only given a common identity which they did not have, but also opposed to American values in terms that make it clear that they must be regarded as European and typical). Besides, if you imagine for one minute that what is said in English in the United States has no impact in the rest of the world and is not noticed there, you are living, not in Canada, but on the Moon.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

This is sheer nonsense from beginning to end. I hardly know whether to ignore it completely or take it apart clause by clause, but I shall at any rate attempt to do the latter, because you have mortally insulted both my intelligence and my intellectual honour.

What does not seem to penetrate here

You are habitually very quick to assume that anyone who disagrees with you does so out of intellectual incapacity. This is a foolish and demonstrably false assumption, and unspeakably rude besides. I advise you to stop.

is that the degenerative process of mutual ignorance and contempt

Which you seem to regard yourself as immune to, in spite of the fact that you reveal your ignorance and contempt of American politics, history, and culture, almost as often as you mention them.

t is hard to even explain to the average European that the average American is not in fact a knuckle-dragging gun-worshipping lynch-mobbing six-day-creationist moron.

For this idiotic belief you blame the Americans? The same logic, rigorously applied, would cause you to blame the Jews for pogroms. If ‘the average European’ chooses to be an uninformed and knee-jerk bigot, that is not the fault of the people whom he is bigoted against

If you do not like this kind of stereotyping, do not encourage it

Isn’t it fun to blame the target of prejudice instead of the perpetrator? if Europeans are as culturally and intellectually superior to Americans as so many of them like to let on (and as the bigots you speak of genuinely believe), they ought to be sufficiently rational to be immune to this kind of idiocy. If they are not immune, whose fault is that?

by having "Americans talking to Americans" about Europeans in terms that are not only uncomprehending but arrogant,

It happens that I have read a great deal of writing by both Thomas Sowell and Jonah Goldberg. You can accuse them of arrogance if you wish, but I find very little to fault in their comprehension either of history or of present-day international politics. That they disagree with you in their conclusions does not prove that they are idiots; it proves that they are working from axioms different to yours. I don’t always agree with them myself — Goldberg, particularly, strikes me as a person of narrow views and straitened sympathies — and, like all human beings, they are apt to make errors of logic, but I have not found cause to complain about the quality of their comprehension.

not only arrogant but with a clear subtext of superiority

As John D. Macdonald has said: ‘Subtext is the false and erroneous claim that the critic can know anything about the personality, beliefs, or moral state of the author based on the work — sometimes as little as a paragraph or a sentence.’ Subtext, he goes on to say, does not exist. I happen to agree with him. In cases where I know by first-hand evidence what a writer’s intent was, and compare it with the intent that critics have claimed to find in the so-called subtext, I find no useful correlation between the two. As a means of divining the author’s mind, subtext is no better than reading tea-leaves.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What JOhn D.Macdonald says is evidence of nothing, and if you are telling me that subtext cannot be read in a text, I can tell you that the subtext of your own boiling anger - reducing your usually formidable intellect to a mere tool in the service of prejudice, dragging red herrings across every track, and, God have mercy on us, taking Adolf Hitler's word as credible - can be read all too clearly here. And yes, I am angry too. I am angry because my country (who has more claim to speak about Fascism and Communism than Italy?), my history, my personal as well as collective past, have been seized upon by an ignorant alien and reshaped into the shape that pleased him in order to serve for his own party political battles. This is something that I can talk about from 45 years of life experience, and of which, frankly, you have no idea whatever. Goldberg is crassly, contemptibly, abysmally wrong; wrong on the basics, wrong on ABC, wrong as CS Lewis' Scotsman who thought that the Greek royal guard must be sound Presbyterians because they wore kilts. And nothing you say or do can change that - although it can, alas, do something to change our friendship.

Who said that Americans have to do anything? What I am asking for is an improvement of the level of debate. In other words, if someone talks trash, for the love of Heaven and of all the saints in Paradise do not allow him to go unchallenged; and do not approve his thesis only because it flatters your local concerns. There is another case going around right now, that of Ben Stein's documentary. It is essentially a stupid documentary, done by someone who has no notion of science or of argument, and as such it damages in any impartial eye the very side it claims to take. Let me just give one instance: someone discovers that two human species, which had been thought to be successive to each other, may in fact have overlapped in time. Stein claims that this means that "evolution has something to answer". Is he out of his mind? Does he seriously, as he seems to imply, think that evolution plays like chess, with a limited number of slots, and that when one of them is filled by one player, there is no place for another? Does he realize that species of vastly different ages cohabit the world today? That is the sort of reason why Expelled has been treated with contempt by the scientific community, and has thrown into despair those of us who hope for a more intelligent attitude than that of Richard Dawkins. But among conservatives, because it flattered their position, it has been taken up uncritically. The result is that the negative view of Christians among the scientific community is reinforced. That is what I was trying to say. Of course, if passing party politics and wholly inadequate systems of explanation are so precious to you that you prefer being despised by those whose minds you ought to be trying to convert, that is your business. I tried to warn you.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

(since the movements in question are not only given a common identity which they did not have,

Mussolini was a left-wing Socialist until the outbreak of the Great War, at which time he took the bait of nationalism; Hitler was an open admirer of Stalin’s methods of government. It is a pity that the left-wing orthodoxy concerning Fascism and Nazism has never been fundamentally re-examined since 1945, when it ceased to be a current issue. The Communist Party line, for instance, was nearer the truth from 1939 to 1941, when it viewed Hitler as a fellow-socialist and Germany as an ally against the decadent imperialist West, than later, when it drew a largely phony diametric opposition between Nazism and Communism based purely on the fact that the two countries ruled by these systems happened to be at war. Orwell has written a great deal of sense on this topic, but I don’t suppose you have much time for Orwell, as he does not confirm your own biases.

but also opposed to American values in terms that make it clear that they must be regarded as European and typical).

There’s been a lot of this going on since the ‘typical’ Europeans nearly destroyed themselves by two gigantic fratricidal wars; and not just among Americans. It is certainly true that the U.S.A. has never succumbed to anything resembling a totalitarian form of government. Woodrow Wilson imposed a centrally-planned police state, not terribly unlike Ludendorff’s ‘War Socialism’, in 1917-18, but it was promptly dismantled as soon as the emergency of war ended — a thing no other country ever managed without outside intervention, and a sufficient testament to the resilience of the American political system and the democratic habits of the American people.

I do not say that American values are superior to European values; such a statement would be meaningless in any case, unless I specified some third standard of values by which I proposed to judge the first two — for which this is not the time or place.


Besides, if you imagine for one minute that what is said in English in the United States has no impact in the rest of the world and is not noticed there, you are living, not in Canada, but on the Moon.

Given that political cartoons printed in an unimportant newspaper in an unimportant Scandinavian country can cause rioting and bloodshed all round the world, I do not imagine any such thing. But I do deny indignantly that the Americans, or anyone else, have an obligation to censor their own political discourse to assuage the tender feelings of foreigners.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Who is "demonstraby wrong" here? First, have the goodness not to lecture me about my own country's history, with which you are evidently less than perfectly acquainted. Second, read what I have already written on the subject. This note is a brief continuation of the protest against Goldberg's disgusting thesis, which I started here http://fpb.livejournal.com/286650.html and continued here http://fpb.livejournal.com/290645.html. YOu repeat arguments to which I already gave answers, which is something I do not enjoy.

Second: what you say about the American administration is wrong twice over. Wilson's wartime administration morphed into the ugly "red scare" phenomenon, which was only ended by his incapacitation. Far, however, from being shut down, it left the country the double-edged heritage of the FBI, led by the man Wilson had placed there, the young former lawyer Edgar Hoover, who continued his fight against reds, and later against the mobs, with the illegal methods he had learned in 1919. By comparison, France, the leader of the Alliance and the country that had given most to the defeat of the Boche, dismissed its war dictator, Clemenceau, almost as soon as the guns had ceased firing, and reverted immediately to its pre-war constitutional arrangements. (In this, in fact, it acted very much like Britain in 1945 with respect to Churchill.) So I know nothing about America? I know at least enough to know that Wilson never went back to constitutional ways, as you wrongly imply.