Comments Elsewhere

The following statements are counterhistorical outrages.

The Holocaust did not happen to the European Left. At best, they are neutral observers of it, … – Glenn

In fact the first victims of Hitler’s round-ups, summary executions, and concentration camps (beginning with Dachau in 1933) were German leftists, particularly Communists and Social Democrats. The European Left had extensive, first-person, decidedly non-neutral experience of Hitler’s terror and mass murder.

If you mean “the Holocaust” to refer to the specific campaign of terror, slavery, and extermination that he directed against European Jews, then it’s certainly true that non-Jewish European Leftists were not victims of that (by definition). But so what? I rather expect that the Jewish Leftists in Europe weren’t “neutral observers” of that, and the claim that non-Jewish Leftists were “at best, … neutral observers” at the time is demonstrably false.

The reason that Europeans are against the death penalty is that their governments use it to exterminate rival ethnic groups. The reason we Americans support the death penalty is that we have a different and superior history. – Tantor

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of the death penalty in the United States (whether formally approved by a court or executed, with more or less open police complicity, under lynch law), as it applies to Black people in the South and immigrants in the North and West, ought to find this claim laughable, if the facts being blanked out were not so terrible.

N.B.: the fact that whites in America have an ugly history of using the death penalty as a tool of racial terror does not make the use of the death penalty as a tool of ethnic terror in Europe O.K., or any less bad. If you are going to argue from history, however, you do have a responsibility to begin from actual history and not your mythistorical fantasies.

The following statements involve elementary errors of fact.

PS As far as I understand, governors are only supposed to give clemency if they have doubts about the case, i.e. not their opinion re. the death penalty. But why let minor details get in the way of a good antiUS story? – blubi101

This is not true. The Governor of California holds the authority to grant reprieve, pardon, or commutation of sentence, under Article 5 Section 8 of the California Constitution, as a discretionary power that he or she can exercise “on conditions the Governor deems proper.” There is no constitutional or statutory limitation on the reasons that he or she can give for clemency, and they certainly include doubts about the death penalty in general and doubts about the justice of inflicting it in a particular case.

The European left says nothing about the thousands of political prisoners executed in China. Zero, zip, nada. Until they generate at least the same amount of faux moral outrage over the true evil regimes in the world, their phony protests mean nothing to me. – Lou Minatti

Lou Minatti could have disabused himself of this error by doing elementary research on European left groups. For example: “Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by a British lawyer named Peter Benenson. Benenson was reading his newspaper and was shocked and angered to come across the story of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison — for the crime of raising their glasses in a toast to freedom. Benenson wrote to David Astor, editor of The Observer newspaper, who, on May 28, published Benenson’s article entitled The Forgotten Prisoners [1] that asked readers to write letters showing support for the students. The response was so overwhelming that within a year groups of letter writers had formed in more than a dozen countries, writing to defend victims of injustice wherever they might be. By mid-1962, Amnesty had groups working or forming in West Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Ireland, Canada, Ceylon, Greece, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Ghana, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica, Malaya, Congo (Brazzaville), Ethiopia, Nigeria, Burma, and India. Later in that year, a member of one of these groups, Diana Redhouse, designed Amnesty’s Candle and Barbed-Wire logo.” (Source: WikiPedia: Amnesty International.) By any reasonable standard, the British-founded, London-based Amnesty is an example of the European Left. Amnesty also says a lot about human rights abuses, including the torture and murder of political prisoners, in China. I conclude that Lou Minatti has not done the basic background research needed to make himself less than ignorant about the European left. That only leaves the question of why he insists on talking about it.

The following statements involve grave conceptual confusions.

Whatever else it may be, Williams’ execution is not murder. To call it so is to erase the distinction between killing the innocent and killing the guilty. – Anonymous

2. Legal execution is not murder, which is illegal by definition. Every death is not murder, look it up. – Jabba the Tutt

Legally authorized premeditated killing is often rightly considered murder. For example, the Nazi Einsatzgruppen were acting well within the limits of German law and under direct orders from their government when they rounded up and summarily slaughtered about 1,200,000 Jews in Soviet territory. But so what? That was an act of mass murder, and the law has nothing at all to do with that fact.

You might claim that there are relevant differences between wanton mass slaughter and the execution of convicted criminals after the appeals process has been exhausted and clemency denied, that make the former murder and the latter some other kind of premeditated deliberate killing. That’s fine, but you have to give some argument for that position. Pointing at statute-books and trying to avoid the discussion by way of conceptual gerrymanderings will not do.

If Europe has learned so much from the Holocaust, why did they create new death camps in the Balkans in the 1990s? – Anonymous

“Europe” created new death camps in the Balkans in the 1990s? All of them at once, or one at a time?

If “anti-American” means anything, I’d say it means an inclination to blame America for every world problem, and to vigilantly search for America’s guilt while downplaying, ignoring, or excusing the guilt of its enemies. – Glenn

This is sheer obscurantism. If “anti-American” means anything, it means “against America;” if you want to coin some new term to discuss people who have “an inclination to blame America for every world problem, and to vigilantly search for America’s guilt while downplaying, ignoring, or excusing the guilt of its enemies,” you’re free to do so, but I have no idea why you think that this psychologistic reading has anything to do with the way that the word “anti-American” (as in: anti-Americanism, anti-American sentiment, anti-American activism, anti-American protests, anti-American politics, etc.) has thus far been used in political discussion.

The following statements commit overt logical fallacies.

If the death penalty is so barbaric, why is a significant proportion of Europe’s population in favour of it? – blubi101

This is a fallacy of appeal to the people. The number of Europeans who favor the death penalty has no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not the death penalty is barbaric.

You self-righteous Europeans who have committed horrifying atrocities throughout history, … you self-righteous assh-les are absolutely in NO POSITION to lecture the United States about human rights and imperialism! – Anonymous

This is a textbook case of the argumentum ad hominem. The fact that Europeans have committed atrocities in the past has absolutely no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not charges of imperialism and human rights violations by the United States are or aren’t accurate.

While there is an argument to be made that things like the Holocaust (not to mention the two world wars spawned by European countries in Europe) should no longer be used to suggest that the Europeans have an inherent propensity towards violence and savagery, those historical events certainly cannot be used, as Europeans and their worshipers try to do, to prove the opposite — namely, that Europe is somehow now the central repository for moral wisdom and universal human rights such that they have some unique ability to decree what is and is not just. – Glenn

This is quite likely a strawman. I think the claim involved in these kind of appeals is that they’ve learned from (horrific) historical experience.

Maybe you think they haven’t, or haven’t learned the right lessons, but this rhetorical assault on the supposed claims of superior “moral wisdom” and “some unique ability to decree what is or is not just” doesn’t seem to make any contact at all with a reasonable reading of what real human beings are claiming.