Kennedy clarifies:

“What I mean is that the fall of the USSR was driven by economic reality not movements. That’s not to say that movements had no role it how things played out, but the USSR didn’t fall because it’s citizens wanted it to.”

There’s an important truth in this: the USSR and its sattelites had grinding through a state of internal economic collapse for decades when things finally fell apart. But it’s also important to remember that economics is a discipline that concerns what people choose to do no less than politics is. If it’s true (as it is) that individual people’s economic decisions under the conditions of Bolshevism made it so that the Eastern bloc suffered a long, steady, grinding economic collapse (as it did), to the point that people began to be forced by economic realities to decide that they could no longer get along by cooperating with the government, or (if they’re within the government), no longer sustain the institutions of the regime, then that’s just one convoluted way in which a regime can fall because its citizens want it to—or, at least, no longer want to commit the resources needed to sustain it. If John’s account of the fall of Moscow-line Communism is correct, then I think we have to be careful about where it is that we draw the distinction between that explanation and explanations in terms of coordinated political action by movements of people: the difference would not be that in one case people wanted the regime to fall and in the other case it just fell without them wanting it. It would be that in one case, the conditions that made people want the regime to fall were produced by an intentional, coordinated plan; in the other case, the conditions that made people want the regime to fall were unintentional consequences of other things that people wanted and acted to get.

Fair enough: it would be foolish to deny that unintended consequences are important, or to dismiss the importance of the economic situation that people were acting from when trying to explain the fall of the USSR and its sattelites. But while that may explain part of the context (not all of it—see, for example, North Korea) in which the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc was possible, I don’t know how well it explains how it came to fall apart when and how it did. (Did the economic realities in Poland explain why the Communist regime collapsed in 1989 rather than, say, 1987 or 1993? Do they explain why in Poland and in the Soviet Union, there was a soft crash rather than the worst happening? Wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that these facts—pretty important for giving an accurate causal account of the fall of Moscow-line Communism—had a lot to do with the widespread strikes, the organization of groups such as Solidarity, the weakened ability (both in terms of resources and in terms of political will) of the regimes to crush dissident movements, the effect in coordination and inspiration that this had for, e.g., turning crowds of ordinary Russians out to resist the attempted coup against Gorbachev, etc. (If it hadn’t been for popular movements, that coup would very likely have gone off without much of a hitch. And what would the collapse of the USSR have looked like then?)

(I should add that, as an anarchist, I regard all representative democracies, insofar as they are monopoly states, to be failures, and see very little reason to think that private defense associations on a free market would tend to be operated according to the constitutional structure of such elective oligarchies. But the democratic elements of representative democracy have, for all their faults, acted as important checks on the powers of tyrants in the past—which is worth acknowledging—and some cases are, though failures, much less intense failures than others.)

I’m not sure why Mike Schneider places such a high premium on brevity in replies; perhaps because longer analytic replies interfere with the sort of drive-by rhetorical sniping that he likes to claim as representative of “elementary logic.” I don’t want to tax his patience here; but then, I don’t care very much, either. So perhaps this reply will strike a sort of middle ground.

I’ve responded at length to why Mike’s literally false claim about Hitler in 1932 does not actually very strongly support the claims that he wants it to support about majoritarian democracy, if what he actually said (which was false) is replaced by some different claims about related people and related events (which are true). Here again Mike changes his claim; this time falsely claiming that “The Nazi Party, run by Hitler, *won* an election.” It did not; Parliamentary representation is not determined by winner-take-all votes, so there was nothing for the Nazi Party to “win.” What it did gain was about the same proportion of the vote that Hitler received when he did stand, personally, in a winner-take-all Presidential race in 1932—and lost badly. That said, most of the issue is best explored through the PageUp key. The main thing that worries me here is that Mike made a simple claim which was simply refuted by the historical record—Hitler did stand for election in 1932, but he lost by a very large margin, even in a three-way race. This has been pointed out several times and yet Mike is still unable to simply admit that he misspoke and move on. Why?

Mike also claims not only that I am mistaken, but that I am lying when I claim he diagnosed me as “a die-hard anti-Semite.” One wonders, then, what the hell he did mean when he dismissed my criticism of his uncritical reliance on the self-interested reports of Israeli intelligence by saying this:

“Perhaps if you weren’t in such fucking hell-ass rush to slam Da Jooz, you’d have backed up a couple paragraphs to King Abdullah (hint: not an Israeli).”

And then, when I responded to the charge and remarked that rather than replying to my substantive points “Instead, he decides to accuse someone he has never met of anti-Semitism”, Mike completely ignored the substantive comments and replied simply:

“If the shoe fits…”

If Mike did not intend to accuse me of being motivated by anti-Semitism, then he’s done a pretty poor job at whatever it was he was trying to convey. Which was…what?

(N.B.: for those who are interested, a “failure” of representative democracy would be a case where it produced an unacceptable political order, or where it failed to live up to the goals for which it was intended, or both. For example, Communist strongmen have been democratically elected, as in the case of Allende’s Chile; elected legislatures routinely feed at the trough of looted wealth all around the world. The Constitutional representative democracy of the United States was allegedly established to ensure that government would remain federalized, humble, and strictly limited in scope; but if those were the goals then it has clearly failed—although not so dramatically as it has failed in some other parts of the world today.)

Kennedy’s certainly right that the “crash” of the Soviet Union—for all its many problems—is a reason to take some hope in the possibility of a “soft crash”. (One needn’t imagine very hard to imagine how much worse it could have been—one just need look at the failed coup against Gorbachev.)

I’m not sure, though, what Kennedy means when he asks us to “Also note that the Soviet Union did not end because it’s citzens woke up.”

I think this is clearly true in one sense and clearly untrue in another sense. It’s not that the vast bulk of the people in the Soviet Union and its sattelites suddenly got the right pamphlet at the right time and realized, “Hey, this kinda sucks!” and thus fell the regime. An accurate assessment of Soviet cultural history (rather than the view from the pages of Pravda) would indicate that a lot of Soviet subjects were already awake to the nature of the regime for quite a while—some of them from the get-go. But while bare knowledge didn’t change, organization did—the dissident movement flourished across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and, once organized people began to realize the power they had available, people began to “wake up” in the sense of using the resources they now had in place to act on their knowledge. It would, I think, be really odd to marginalize the role played by the dissident movement and mass demonstrations by people inspired by it, in the implosion of, say, the Polish Communist regime, or the failure of the coup in the USSR.

I don’t know which (if either) of these two claims Kennedy is making here, or whether he’s making both. So I’d be interested to hear more about what he has to say on what citizens “waking up” means and why he takes it not to have been important to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

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.

C’mon Ben. This is not a meme. There are no such things as memes. This wasn’t some bit of information that magically spread itself through your passive mind. It’s an idea that you liked (because it’s silly fun) and that you chose to show other people.

Take some responsibility for your mind! Crush the anti-concept!

Mike Schneider’s response to my post is a bit strange. Strange, in part, because he doesn’t actually reply to much that I wrote. Instead, he decides to accuse someone he has never met of anti-Semitism:

“Perhaps if you weren’t in such fucking hell-ass rush to slam Da Jooz, you’d have backed up a couple paragraphs to King Abdullah (hint: not an Israeli).”

Apparently Mike Schneider thinks that the relevant part of my statement was that Israeli intelligence is mostly composed of Jews (which was not, in fact, actually a part of my statement as such, although I guess it can be taken as part of the known background context). That’s a rather odd bit of reasoning, though, since the main thrust of my claim had nothing to do with Jews, but rather with the conflicts of interest involved in uncritically swallowing “intelligence” leaked to the press by an intelligence agency that would just happen to support military action against one and possibly two of its three biggest military enemies.

Of course, his article does also mention claims by King Abdullah of Jordan. But what Schneider was apparently too busy to check in his own article is that King Abdullah didn’t claim that anyone in Syria got chemical weapons from Iraq. He claimed that a group of terrorists got chemical weapons from within Syria–a state which is believed to have already had chemical weapons without any help from Iraq. So it’s unclear, exactly, what additional evidence Abdullah’s claims (if true) are supposed to provide.

(N.B.: the mere fact that Israeli intelligence says something, or that United States officials say something, does not automatically make it false–even if what they are saying does serve their geopolitical interests. But you ought to know enough about governments and wars and geopolitics by this point in history to realize that uncritically citing government reports or intelligence “leaks” that transparently do serve the interests of the people offering them is not necessarily the best way to find the truth of the matter. The main point here is not an empirical one: I don’t think any morally interesting questions about the Iraq war hinge on whether or not Saddam Hussein’s government was keeping stockpiles of NBC weapons, and while I think there’s good reason to think that they did not, I would not be particularly surprised if it turned out they did. It’s an epistemological one.

In a similar vein, perhaps if Mike weren’t in “such fucking hell-ass rush” [sic] to slam my reply to his comments 26 minutes after they were posted, he might also have noticed that the following “reply”:

“Do you understand why “most people” was in quote-marks, “Rad”?

“ALL elections are won by pluralities, because “most people” actually stay home or are ineligible to vote.”

still relies on false premises, due to the fact that Hitler did not win by a plurality, but rather lost in the Presidential election of 1932. Badly. Because a supermajority of Germans who voted, voted against him.

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. But again he wouldn’t be talking about “most people” (since parliamentary government works by coalition, not by majoritarian vote), or, if scare-quoting “most” people somewhow actually makes it mean “a lot, though not even close to the majority” or “about 1/3 of the people who happened to vote”, he still wouldn’t be talking about Hitler; he would be talking about the Nazi Party. (Perhaps he should have put “Hitler” in scare-quotes too. Or at least done one of those Google fact-checking searches he seemed all fired up about earlier in the thread.)

You might wonder why harping on such facts as these is so important. After all, it’s still pretty alarming that about 1/3 of the Germans who voted in 1932, voted for Hitler for President, and for the NSDAP in Parliament. Fine, but if your goal is to argue that there are problems with representative democracy it hardly helps your argument to trot out cases in which a horrible regime arosein spite of the consistent outcome of majoritarian votes rather than because of them. If you did mistakenly think that the Nazis ever received any kind of majoritarian support in any national election whatsoever in 1932, then it seems like the thing to do would be to admit your error and, if you still think there is good evidence to support your claims, produce that instead of insulting people who bother themselves about such minor things as historical facts.

Well, I have trouble disliking the sentiment, but can’t help but think that part of the problem is the same fetishism of the (mostly ineffectual, then as well as now) white counterculture “movement” (you can think of the movement involved as sprawling down on the grass, rather than marching forward…) rather than some of the serious organizing and activism that occurred in flashpoints such as the mid-to-late 1960s.

Rather than learning “new rules” from scratch, I think that today’s organizers might be better served studying some actual history, rather than the television rockumentary form of “the 60s”–like, say, picking up a book and reading about what Black organizers were doing on the ground in Nashville and Montgomery, in towns in the backwoods of Mississippi and Alabama, through SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and so on. Or what women were doing through New York Radical Women, Jane, etc. You’ll come out with a very different picture of the era and how the people who lived in it won some incredible battles. (Hint: it wasn’t by getting a bunch of people together in one space to be rallied at. A gargantuan march was then, and is still now, at best a tool to be used in the middle of organizing–not the beginning, or the end, and certainly not both.)

This is retarded.

Those who contemptuously pride themselves on a superior grasp of history ought not to pass along, without any comment or cavil, comments like this:

“Israeli intelligence has long believed that after the U.S. delayed invasion plans to allow U.N. weapons inspectors time to search for Iraq’s WMDs, Saddam moved the banned weapons to Syria, the only other country where the Ba’ath Party ruled.”

… which of course neglects the obvious conflict of interest involved when Israeli intelligence is dishing alleged dirt to the United States on two of its three biggest military rivals; and mindlessly points out that Assad’s Syria and Hussein’s Iraq were both ruled by “the Ba’ath Party,” neglecting that the Ba’ath Parties in the two countries were not in direct contact with each other and were, in fact, ideologically opposed to one another–over roughly the same issues (Ba’athism in one country vs. Ba’athism in the whole Arab world) that divided Stalin and Trotsky (who were both particularly bloody-minded sorts of Bolshevik thugs–but who it would be foolish to place together as allies).

Not to mention this:

“Patrick, ‘most people’ voted for Hitler in ’32 — so I really don’t give a shit for the Ambiguous-Collective Mob.”

This is categorically false. Hitler lost the 1932 Presidential election to the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, by a margin of 30% to just under 50% in the four-candidate first round, and then again by a margin of 37% to 53% in the three-candidate runoff. The Nazi Party received 37% of the vote in the special Reichstag elections in May 1932, and then dropped to 33% in the November 1932 elections. (In fact the NDASP never achieved majority support in any national election ever held in the Weimar Republic. In March 1933, Hitler used the Reichstag fire to imprison or shoot most of his political opponents, to eliminate most of his (democratically elected) political opponents from voting in the Reichstag, and then to ram the Enabling Act through this rump Parliament. The rest, as they say, is history. Unfortunately.

Marcus Epstein complains of a guilt-by-association argument:

“I approving cite Jared Taylor, who publishes a newsletter that has an article by a man who wrote a book (which was not entirely sympathetic by the way) about a man who is a allegedly a neo-Nazi.”

Let’s get something straight. William Pierce was not “allegedly” a neo-Nazi. He was the founder and “Leader” of the “National Alliance”, a virulently anti-Semitic, racist, and explicitly fascist group whose members have made no bones about flying Nazi flags at rallies. Mr. Pierce himself was an explicit admirer of Adolf Hitler, who wrote several articles arguing the claim that civilizations without strong, dictatorial rulers inevitably degenerate; that Jewish culture is essentially parasitic and that Jews foster the decline of other civilizations wherever they go; and that Mr. Hitler’s policies towards the Jews (otherwise known as “the Holocaust”) were reasonable and defensible.

If Mr. Pierce is not, in fact, a neo-Nazi, then I don’t know who is. Obfuscating about his ideology does no-one any good.