Quotulatiousness

January 24, 2020

How Left/Right Partisanship Starts a Civil War in Spain | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1936 Part 2 of 4

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 23 Jan 2020

Spain in the early 1930’s was practically Europe in Microcosm, with numerous political and ideological movements clashing in debate and open battles on the streets of Spain. All of this worsened in 1936 as Spain slowly descends into Civil War.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Francis van Berkel and Naman Habtom
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kaminski

Colorizations by:
– Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– CNT_Emblem Source Heralder
– Kutxa Photograph Library
– photo from Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundiko Kultura eta Euskara Departamentua

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Dawn Of Civilization” – Jo Wandrini
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “Deflection” – Reynard Seidel
– “Death And Glory 2” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 day ago (edited)
Vote on what we’re doing after B2W! -> https://www.patreon.com/posts/33300161

We originally planned to just do one episode on the Spanish Civil War, but the more I researched it the more I realized how complicated everything was even before the real fighting even breaks out. To understand the battle-lines of the conflict you have to understand how they were drawn in the turbulent years of the Second Spanish Republic. In the space of just 5 years it sees numerous insurrections, revolutions, and a coup. In an era of political radicalism across the world, Spain really stands out as the most defined by it, and by 1936 is already in a state of quasi-civil war. This episode gives you a detailed insight into that. We’ll be covering the course of the war itself in a later episode.
Cheers, Francis.

January 23, 2020

QotD: The “great” modern architects

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The widely accepted narrative of modernism à la Gropius is that it was some kind of logical or ineluctable development from the Arts and Crafts movement. This seems to me utterly fantastic: it is like saying that Mickey Spillane is a logical or ineluctable outgrowth of Montesquieu. It is true that in the work of certain artists, for example Mondrian, one can see a gradual change which might be considered logical, starting from figurative landscapes and ending, via ever greater abstraction, to purely geometric shapes. But even where there is such a development, it is ultimately beside the point: it does not prove that what came later was better. Each artistic product has to be assessed aesthetically on its own merits (which in architecture includes its harmony with an existing townscape), and only someone who sees with an ideology rather than with eyes could conclude anything other than that modernism has been overwhelmingly a disaster.

Moreover, claiming respectable ancestors is somewhat at variance with equal claims to be starting from zero (as Gropius put it), but such a contradiction is hardly noticed by the grand narrative history of modernism that Professor Curl attacks and destroys.

He is not unable or unwilling to praise where it is due, though it is due rarely enough; and he is particularly effective in tracing the opportunistic ideological divagations of the modernists, whose one constant predilection was for absolute power over others. Mies, for example, was attracted to socialist totalitarianism, and his only objection to Nazism was that the Nazis eventually rejected his desire to have everything built according to his prescriptions. He left Nazi Germany because he feared his previous pro-leftism made him permanently suspect in its eyes, not because he was appalled by its brutality. If only they’d let him build! But contrary to apologists for Mies, and to a legend constantly repeated, it was not the Nazis who closed the Bauhaus but Mies himself, and he left Germany only four years after their assumption of power.

Finding refuge in America, Mies quickly perceived that the power of patronage of megalomaniac building lay with giant corporations rather than with fascists or communists and persuaded many of them to build his preternaturally inhuman and uninspired monstrosities. By a strange quirk of history, and because of mankind’s perpetual propensity to make logical errors, Mies was able to pose dishonestly as anti-totalitarian and even as a friend of freedom precisely because he had fled Nazi Germany where they hadn’t patronised him. He was fortunate that soon afterwards the United States had another totalitarian enemy, the Soviet Union. Mies and his allies were thus able to claim that his totalitarian modernism was actually a manifestation of western freedom. There are many such ironies pointed up in this book that would be delicious had they not had such appalling consequences.

Corbusier was a fascist in the most literal sense of the word, and early during the Occupation advocated the removal by force of the majority of Paris’ population because it had no business to be living there. Can one wonder that a man with thoughts like that built monstrosities?

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.

January 17, 2020

Labour’s underlying problem

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, James Bloodworth explains why the Labour Party will have to change to get back into power in Britain:

Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a Rally in Hayfield, Peak District, UK on 25th July 2018.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.

George Orwell was famously contemptuous of much of the left intelligentsia. “England is perhaps the only great country where intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,” he wrote in his 1941 essay “England, Your England“. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

There has always been a healthy suspicion of jingoism and flag-waving on the Left. However it wasn’t this that Orwell was referring to. Few wrote more damning screeds about the British empire than the former colonial policeman, who was always willing to give the “blimps” who ran Britain a good kicking. Rather, Orwell was referring to a more generalised contempt many on the Left felt towards Britain and — by extension — their fellow countrymen.

Socialism to Orwell meant bread and butter issues of higher wages and more freedom — freedom itself depending to a large extent on how much money one has. Yet the movement attracted its fair share of cranks. It was this penumbra of crankishness that prevented socialism from developing a mass following. A major hallmark of it was its anti-Britishness.

Jeremy Corbyn has been compared plenty of times over the past five years to the “vegetarian, fruit-juice drinking, Nature Cure quack, pacifist” oddballs Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier. In Orwell’s time these types seemed to gravitate towards the socialist movement “like bluebottles to a dead cat”, as he put it. Since Corbyn became leader in 2015 something similar has occurred: the Labour Party has been flooded with conspiracy theorists, antisemites and various other subliterate fools. Uniting almost all of them is a profound contempt for Britain and in particular British foreign policy.

This is arguably a major reason Labour lost the recent election. “Such was the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn,” wrote the Labour MP Liam Byrne, “that hundreds of voters I met thought Labour’s leader was a ­communist terrorist sympathiser who wouldn’t push the nuclear button or sing the national anthem.”

This isn’t so much the “demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn” as an accurate summation of the Labour leader’s views. Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, two of Corbyn’s first appointments as advisers, are communists. Corbyn called members of Hamas and Hezbollah “honoured friends”. He fraternised with the IRA and argued for the abolition of Nato. He has obfuscated shamefully over acts of aggression directed against Britain, such as during the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury. It is not demonising someone to accurately list the things they have said and done.

December 12, 2019

“Socialism” and “Capitalism” in the United States

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan look at the supposed conflict between sharing, caring socialism and raw, heartless capitalism in the context of the American political theatre:

These terms were once very clearly defined. Socialism is state control of the means of production. The intent is that these means are to be used for the public good. By contrast, capitalism is simply private ownership of the means of production. The intent is that these means are to be used to advance the interests of those who own them, which will in turn create conditions of general prosperity that can be enjoyed by all.

When polled, Americans express relatively well-defined views on both. And while nowhere near a majority of the American electorate favors a completely socialist system, a recent Gallup poll indicates that more than four in ten Americans think “some form of socialism” is a good thing. But what is “some form of socialism?” A society is either socialist or it isn’t. The state either owns the means of production or it doesn’t. There is no middle ground. Even our openly socialist politicians rarely advocate anything near as drastic as government control of the means of production.

[…]

And just as transferism is not actually socialism, the system against which transferists rail isn’t capitalism, either. When they think of “capitalism,” transferists imagine a monied class that defrauds customers, pollutes the environment, and maintains monopoly power, all because the monied class is in bed with government. But capitalism is simply the private ownership of the means of production. What people are actually describing is something more appropriately called “cronyism,” which can manifest in a socialist system as easily as in a capitalist one. Cronyism isn’t a byproduct of the economic system at all; it is a byproduct of politics.

For current examples, one need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Socialists say these aren’t examples of “real socialism,” and they’re not. There was a time when these countries were indeed socialist, just as there was a time when the United States was capitalist. But cronyism has overtaken these countries’ economic systems, just as it did in humanity’s grandest socialist experiment: the Soviet Union. Life was simply different for inner-party members than it was for workers. This is the real danger that all countries face, regardless of the animating principles of their economic and political structures.

[…]

We need to answer the core question: how much transferism do we want?

In order to figure this out, we need to come to terms with the fact that any transfer is a confiscation of wealth from the people who created it. That confiscation will decrease wealth creation in the long term by decreasing an important incentive to take the risks necessary for creating wealth. Second, we have to recognize that transferism is addictive. No matter how much we transfer, people will always want more. The United States’ $23 trillion debt, the largest debt the world has ever seen, has come about because of American voters’ voracious appetite for transfers combined with politicians’ obvious incentive to provide them.

The solution politicians have found is to pass off the cost of the transfers to taxpayers who haven’t yet been born by borrowing the money, thereby leaving to the next generation the problem of repaying the debt or enduring unending interest payments. It’s a house of cards to be sure, but from their perspective, it will be someone else’s house of cards.

In the end, we have polluted our political discourse with two words that no longer have much meaning: socialism and capitalism. In the process, we don’t call the animating principle of modern American politics what it actually is: transferism. The only winners have been the politicians who manage to gather votes by keeping the electorate in a near-constant state of friction. And they keep winning if people keep thinking in categories that ceased to have any real meaning years ago.

November 26, 2019

Communal farming nearly killed off the Plymouth Colony

Filed under: Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

What saved them was abandoning the “common property” communalism and adopting private ownership of the farms:

The Plymouth Colony 1620-1691.
Map by Hoodinski via Wikimedia Commons.

The first few years of the settlement were fraught with hardship and hunger. Four centuries later, they also provide us with one of history’s most decisive verdicts on the critical importance of private property. We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan but saved itself when it embraced something very different.

In the diary of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford, we can read about the settlers’ initial arrangement: Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia?

Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. It’s called “human nature.”

The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely.

Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous. The “people over profits” mentality produced fewer people until profit — earned as a result of one’s care for his own property and his desire for improvement — saved the people.

Over the centuries, socialism has crash-landed into lamentable bits and pieces too many times to keep count — no matter what shade of it you pick: central planning, welfare statism, or government ownership of the means of production. Then some measure of free markets and private property turned the wreckage into progress. I know of no instance in history when the reverse was true — that is, when free markets and private property produced a disaster that was cured by socialism. None.

A few of the many examples that echo the Pilgrims’ experience include Germany after World War II, Hong Kong after Japanese occupation, New Zealand in the 1980s, Scandinavia in recent decades, and even Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

November 17, 2019

QotD: Socialist beliefs about “capitalism”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The poor understanding of economic and political institution that Marx did so much to promote remains widespread today. “Progressive” and hard-left opponents of markets hold mistaken – or, at the very least, questionable – presumptions about reality, which include:

  • Wealth is either fixed in amount, or, while it might be destroyed or diminished by certain human activities (such as war), if wealth grows this growth occurs largely independently of human ideas, choices, actions, and institutions;
  • trade and commerce, therefore, are largely zero-sum – that is, each exchange situation pits a party who will win against one who will lose;
  • trade and commerce, in turn, involve activities are thus, at best, suspect; trade and commerce too often reward greediness and duplicity while penalizing generosity and honesty;
  • the “distribution” of wealth – whether conceived as financial flows or assets, or as access to real goods and services – is determined largely by power;
  • prices set on markets are largely arbitrary; prices seldom play any role beyond determining how much one party “wins” from trade and how much the other party “loses.”
  • each of a handful of large groups of people, mostly as conceptualized by intellectuals with no understanding of economics, has its own “interests” – interests that are shared by all members of the group and that are at odds with the interests of other groups; for example, “labor” has interests that are are shared by all workers and that are at odds with the interests of “employers”;
  • while the state can be captured by ill-intentioned people, the state – especially under unlimited majoritarian rule – is also the only possible savior of the powerless against the predations and frauds of the powerful;
  • absent vigorous state intervention, ordinary people – people whose main asset is the value of their own labor – lack both the power to get their fair share of society’s wealth and the intelligence or self-discipline to use wisely whatever share of wealth they do manage to secure;
  • social progress is achieved by the powerless grabbing power under the leadership of men and women of singular vision, intelligence, and courage; “the People” will be led to the Promised Land – can be led to the Promised Land – only if they faithfully follow their caring messiahs;
  • those who argue in favor of free markets are either soulless mercenary cronies for the powerful propertied class or they are ideologically blinded dupes for this class; no intelligent and decent person could possibly deny the enormous benefits available to “the People” when the state is empowered to work on their behalf against the propertied few.

Don Boudreaux, “Some Links”, Café Hayek, 2017-10-08.

November 13, 2019

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Albion Noise
Published 27 Dec 2015

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures is a 2003 BBC Television docudrama telling the life story of the British author George Orwell. Chris Langham plays the part of Orwell. No surviving sound recordings or video of the real George Orwell have been found.

Awards:
International Emmy 2004 for Best Arts Programme
Grierson Award 2004 for Best Documentary on the Arts

October 26, 2019

The Frankfurt School and you

Filed under: History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian suggests we consider the origins of a large part of modern progressive thoughts:

Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.

It occurs to me that Our Thing ought to take a long, hard look at the Frankfurt School.

Those were the guys, of course, who pioneered the notion that their political opponents must be mentally ill. Given that

  • all sane people are good; and
  • good people only want good things; and
  • Socialism is a good thing;

then

  • anyone who doesn’t want Socialism wants a bad thing;
  • therefore is a bad person;
  • therefore is insane.

Anyone with the common sense God gave little catfish recognizes this as begging the question. And not particularly subtle question-begging, either, which is why it took over 1,000 pages (!) of ponderous Teutonic prose to disguise it. It’s science, comrades. Only Socialism, or a .38 to the back of the neck, will cure us …

… assuming, of course, that we want to be cured.

The Frankfurt Schoolers assumed this, of course, as did all those freelance critical theorists running the NKVD’s torture chambers. But that was then. The Frankfurt Schoolers were shockingly bourgeois on so many things. They thought homosexuality was a mental illness, if you can believe it, and I doubt even Herbert Marcuse would’ve signed off on “drag queen story hour,” let alone the state-mandated chemical castration of 6 year old boys. Only the peerless enlightenment of the Current Year recognizes this, comrades.

October 4, 2019

Rise of Evil – From Populism to Fascism | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1932 Part 4 of 4

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 3 Oct 2019

Democracy finds itself in a crisis as the 1930s take off. On a global scale, Fascist or otherwise authoritarian and repressive movements and governments seek to destroy the pillars of liberal society.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Subscribe to our World War Two series: https://www.youtube.com/c/worldwartwo…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Joram Appel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Sources icons: Graphic Enginer, Luis Prado
Colorizations: Daniel Weiss, Cassowary Colorizations, Klimbim

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 hour ago (edited)
This episode might be a little more academic than our other episodes, but we wanted to cover the global Fascist surge AND that it’s just too simple to refer to all totalitarian states and authoritarian and repressive movements as “Fascist”. Fascism is a very complicated concept that is still today being debated by political scientists and historians, as well as politicians and journalists. We try to give some insight to what Fascism is, what it isn’t and what all those movements and countries were, if not Fascist. We appreciate that you might have a different opinion as to what Fascism was or is, and we’re interested to hear your opinion. Just keep it civil and try to stay away from modern political debates, as that is not what we’re here for. EDIT: As for comments claiming that Fascism was left-wing/socialist, watch the video again. Don’t bother commenting if you can’t bring a proper argument to the table.
Cheers,
Joram

August 30, 2019

Communist Revolution in America? – The Red Scare 1919 I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published on 29 Aug 2019

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The American intervention in the Russian Civil War, the economic hardships of workers and returning veterans and the strikes all over the US in 1919 created a hysteria that we know as Red Scare today. But how realistic was the idea of a Bolshevist revolution in America really?

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» SOURCES
US Congress. Senate. Bolshevik Propaganda: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary. 65th Cong., 3rd sess., February 11, 1919, to March 10, 1919
Brecher, Jeremy. Strike! Revised edition. South End Press, 1997.
Hanson, Ole. Americanism versus Bolshevism. New York and London: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1920.
United States Department of Justice. Red Radicalism as Described by Its Own Leaders, Exhibits Collected by A. Mitchell Palmer, Including Various Communist Manifestos, Constitutions, Plans, and Purposes of the Proletariat Revolution, and Its Seditious Propaganda. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1920.
Cocks, Catherine, Peter C. Holloran, Alan Lessloff. The A to Z of the Progressive Era. Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.
Dick, William M. Labor and Socialism in America. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Gould, Lewis L. The Progressive Era. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1974.
Hagedorn, Ann. Hope and Fear in America: 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Jaffe, Julian F. Crusade Against Radicalism: New York During the Red Scare, 1914-1924. New York: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Kornweibel, Jr., Theodore. “Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Indianapolis: Indiana Press University, 1998.
Hawley, Ellis W. The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933. New York St Martin’s Press, 1979.
Murray, Robert K. Red Scare: A Study of National Hysteria, 1919-1920. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. Yale University Press, 1998.

»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
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July 31, 2019

All Art Is Propaganda: Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell – George Packer Interview (2009)

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Film Archives
Published on 27 Jan 2014

George Packer (born August 13, 1960) is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright.

He is perhaps best known for his writings for The New Yorker about U.S. foreign policy and for his related book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq.

Packer was born in Santa Clara, California. Packer’s parents, Nancy (née Huddleston) and Herbert Packer, were both academics at Stanford University; his maternal grandfather was George Huddleston, a congressman from Alabama. His sister, Ann Packer, is also a writer. His father was Jewish and his mother was from a Christian background. Packer graduated from Yale College, where he lived in Calhoun College, in 1982, and served in the Peace Corps in Togo. His essays and articles have appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, World Affairs, Harper’s, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Packer was a columnist for Mother Jones and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since May 2003.

Packer was a Holtzbrinck Fellow Class of Fall 2009 at the American Academy in Berlin.

His book The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in that country, largely based on interviews with ordinary Iraqis. He was a supporter of the Iraq war. He was a finalist for the 2004 Michael Kelly Award.

He is married to Laura Secor and was previously married to Michele Millon.

Books

The Village of Waiting (1988). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1st Farrar edition, 2001). Pb. ISBN 0-374-52780-6
The Half Man (1991). Random House ISBN 0-394-58192-X
Central Square (1998). Graywolf Press ISBN 1-55597-277-2
Blood of the Liberals (2000). Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-374-25142-8
The Fight is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (2003, as editor). Harper Perennial. Pb. ISBN 0-06-053249-1
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005) Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005 ISBN 0-374-29963-3
Betrayed: A Play (2008) Faber & Faber
Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009). ISBN 978-0-374-17572-6
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013). ISBN 978-0-374-10241-8

Articles

Packer, George (28 September 2009). “A Reporter at Large: The Last Mission”. The New Yorker 85 (30): 38-55. [Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan].
Packer, George (15 March 2010). “A Reporter at Large: Obama’s Lost Year”. The New Yorker 86 (4): 40-51.
Packer, George (12 September 2011). “A Reporter at Large: Coming Apart”. The New Yorker. [An assessment of the post 9/11 decade]
Packer, George (27 May 2013). “A Reporter at Large: Change the World”. The New Yorker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P…

July 16, 2019

Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Daniel Pipes reviews a recent translation (from Polish) by Teresa Adelson:

Legutko does not claim liberalism resembles communism in its monstrosity, much less that the two ideologies are identical; he fully acknowledges that the first is democratic and the second brutally tyrannical. After recognizing this contrast, however, he gets down to the more pungent topic of what the two have in common.

He first perceived those commonalities in the 1970s when visiting the West, where he saw how its liberals preferred communists to anti-communists; later, with the overthrow of the Soviet Bloc, he watched liberals warmly welcome communists, but not their anti-communist opponents. Why so?

Because, he argues, liberalism shares with communism a powerful faith in rational minds finding solutions which translates into a drive to improve the citizen, modernize him, and mold him into a superior being. Accordingly, both ideologies politicize, and thereby debase, every aspect of life, including sexuality, the family, religion, sports, entertainment, and the arts. (Here’s a mischievous but deadly serious question: which is the more awful art, the communist or the liberal, Stalin’s or the Venice Biennale’s?) [see below]

Both engage in social engineering to create a society whose members are “indistinguishable, in words, thoughts, and deeds ” from one another, aiming for a largely interchangeable population with no dissidents making trouble. Each sublimely assumes its specific vision constitutes the greatest hope for mankind and represents the end of history, the final stage of mankind’s evolution.

Trouble is, such grand schemes for improving mankind inevitably lead to severe disappointment; human beings, it turns out, are far more stubborn and less malleable then dreamers would like. When things go badly (say, food production for communists, unfettered immigration for liberals), two nasty consequences follow.

QotD: Wartime atrocities

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our “atrocity campaign” was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, “What would have happened if Germany had won?” even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them.

But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism — that the same horror stories come up in war after war — merely makes it rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the “whites” commit far more and worse atrocities than the “reds”. There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the German press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.

George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”, New Road, 1943 (republished in England, Your England and Other Essays, 1953).

July 12, 2019

QotD: Warmongers, propaganda, and the intelligentsia

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

Our memories are short nowadays, but look back a bit, dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker, and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left-wingers were spilling at that time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! Here I am not bothering about the counter-propagandists of the Right […]; they go without saying. But here were the very people who for twenty years had hooted and jeered at the “glory” of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. If there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from “War is hell” to “War is glorious” not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. Later the bulk of them were to make other transitions equally violent. There must be a quite large number of people, a sort of central core of the intelligentsia, who approved the “King and Country” declaration in 1935, shouted for a “firm line against Germany” in 1937, supported the People’s Convention in 1940, and are demanding a Second Front now.

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be “pro-war” or “anti-war”, but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds. When they enthused over the Spanish war they knew, of course, that people were being killed and that to be killed is unpleasant, but they did feel that for a soldier in the Spanish Republican army the experience of war was somehow not degrading. Somehow the latrines stank less, discipline was less irksome. You have only to glance at the New Statesman to see that they believed that; exactly similar blah is being written about the Red Army at this moment. We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of rentier capitalism have done to us.

George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”, New Road, 1943 (republished in England, Your England and Other Essays, 1953).

July 8, 2019

QotD: Orwell on capitalism versus socialism

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

No one can question the dirtiness of international politics from 1870 onwards: it does not follow that it would have been a good thing to allow the German army to rule Europe. It is just possible that some rather sordid transactions are going on behind the scenes now, and that current propaganda “against Nazism” (cf. “against Prussian militarism”) will look pretty thin in 1970, but Europe will certainly be a better place if Hitler and his followers are removed from it. Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.

Both of these writers are aware of this, more or less; but since they can show no practicable way of bringing it about the combined effect of their books is a depressing one.

George Orwell, “The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek / The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus”, Observer, 1944-04-09.

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