Comments Elsewhere

Mike Schneider, who (as far as I know) learned everything that he knows about my opinions, attitudes, and character from a total of two posts to this weblog, seems to think that he can accurately diagnose me as a die-hard anti-Semite on the basis of a single comment disputing the reliability of uncritically relying on transparently self-interested “revelations” from Israeli intelligence. Of course, I would (and did) say exactly the same thing about uncritically relying on transparently self-interested “revelations” from American intelligence agencies, Bush administration flacks, Clinton administration flacks, the British government, the Iraqi government, the Iranian government, the Chinese government, and the agency formerly known as the KGB (now known as “the Russian government”). But never mind that; and never mind that explained at some length why the source that Mike cited for a clear example of my anti-Semitism (because I didn’t address every single source cited in every one of his articles?) didn’t even have anything to say about the issue that I was commenting on. Nor does he offer any argument either for or against the claim that uncritically relying on such claims might not be the best way of discovering the truth; that is, apparently, not an argument to be engaged with but rather just my weak attempt to hide my true colors. The “shoe fits”, apparently, and I am to wear it. Anything other than Mike’s opinion from a two-second reading of my first post would be to “backpeddle [sic] furiously”. Backpedal from what? I’m not sure, since the position Mike apparently attributes to me is one that I never held, but so it goes.

Meanwhile, on the subject of backpedalling furiously, Mike has, in the course of three posts, gone from this statement:

“… ‘most people’ voted for Hitler in ’32”

to the claim that what he meant was that Hitler won by a plurality of the vote from those people who showed up and voted in ’32. When it was pointed out that Hitler actually lost the election he stood in, and lost it badly, he further modifies his claim to say that he meant was that the Nazi Party received a plurality of the vote in the Parliamentary elections in 1932 (there were two, incidentally, and once it became clear what sort of hardball the Nazis were playing to gain further power their support declined)–to be understood along with the caveat that in multiparty elections it’s rare for a single party to receive a clear majority of the vote. Of course, I’m hardly trying to “escape” that (which you might glean from my saying (“Maybe he meant to refer to one of the two Parliamentary elections in which the NSDAP gained about the same percentage of the vote (37%) as Hitler won in the Presidential election in the first Parliamentary election of 1933, and then dropped to 33% in the November election, but (because of the different landscape in Parliamentary elections) became the largest party in the Reichstag …). What I am trying to point out is (1) that that is not the claim that Mike made above in either the post I responded to or in his critique of my response; and (2) the statement, once revised to match the historical facts, does not support the conclusion Mike wants it to support with anywhere near the strength that his (false) original claim did. For all the failures of representative democracy, this is a case where it did not commit the crime it’s accused of: it was precisely because the outcomes of democratic elections in 1932 defeated Hitler badly and blocked the Nazi Party from a political stranglehold, with only 1/3 of the Reichstag seats in their hands after two elections, that they resorted to street violence, police harassment, and simply removing their opponents from the Reichstag, and imprisoning or sometimes shooting them, in order to pass the Enabling Act–shutting down all democratic accountability for a Chancellor-cum-Fuehrer who was never elected by “most people” to any position at all.

Why in the world Mike won’t just admit that he made a mistake, and either should have spoken more clearly, or–better–picked a different case (it’s not like there aren’t a lot of cases of the failures of representative “democracy” lying around), but instead chooses to accuse *me* of trying to escape historical facts when it was he who made a demonstrably false claim, and his attempt at a revision of what he said merely repeats what *I* already said above, I don’t know. I can’t say, though, that for someone trying to position himself as a truth-teller, this kind of bellicose macho swagger isn’t particularly convincing.