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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I understand what you're saying, and I think we're at a point where my issue is no longer that I don't understand, but that I disagree. I don't mean that I disagree with what you're saying, but rather, that I disagree that this is acceptable behavior for public intellectuals. If Prager doesn't care to understand why people might question aspects of the Holocaust or how his behavior may do more to encourage Holocaust denial than discourage it, then he shouldn't write a column above the subject for both ethical and pragmatic reasons.

Also, the reasoning you've given for why people hate Nazis and the Nazi-adjacent certainly applies Prager, but I don't think it actually applies to most people, because if it did, they would hate communists as much as Nazis and respond to any attempt to rehabilitate Marx's image with the same anger they have towards anyone who they believe is trying to rehabilitate Hitler's image. Instead, Chapo Trap House has a best-selling book that was prominently displayed at my local library for over a year, with a favorable blurb by Tim Heidecker, the same person who thought Sam Hyde was too chummy with Nazis.

Communists are excepted not because of history, not quite, but because of the present.

Nazis are people nobody really personally knows. Insofar these are people you do know, they're skinhead degenerates and terrible people altogether - again, evil losers. Everything I said applies to Nazis because that's just who they are.

Communists aren't so rare. They appear in your library, you went to school with some, your child goes through a stupid phase, what have you. These people are, mostly, losers.. But not that evil about it. It's tough to be so viscerally hateful of communists when the median commie isn't a skinhead hooligan, but more of a weirdo who thinks society would be great if we'd just, like, learn to share, man.

Crucially, the people most likely to hate and revile communists as much as they do Nazis don't meet any in their regular lives - rural Americans. The median communist is irredeemably evil to them, because nobody close to them would ever think of adhering to such an evil ideology, much as with Nazis and anyone else.

You make a very good point, and I hate this because it should be a cause for people to recognize their own hypocrisy.

Why? They're not even really wrong. There are communists who are basically decent people. Nazis, not so much. A normal person might let a seventeen-year-old communist babysit their kids - a Nazi? Not a chance.

That sounds like prejudice on your part. Using pure logic, there is no reason for me to trust a communist other than Nazi, other than that because communism is more acceptable (even though it shouldn't be), it attracts people who are less psychologically deviant than white supremacy/fascism/National Socialism/etc.

Communism attracting people who aren't as evil and hateful is exactly why you should trust them more. Not to run the country sure, but to paint your fence or mind your pets? Not a big deal.

They are just as evil and hateful. They just don't seem that way because they're polite to you in-person. That's how people are in the real world. They get along to get along until there's a war or something. Most of the Neo-Nazis I've spoken to have been polite, and so have most of the communists, though I have a much higher sample of the latter.

I have to say, the line from Hitler to Holocaust is much shorter than from Marx to the Holodomor. On that alone I think it’s more reasonable for people to want to rehabilitate Marx in broader society.

I think most Westerners would look askance about rehabilitating Stalin, though, and tankies who try are generally seen as lunatics.

I have to say, the line from Hitler to Holocaust is much shorter than from Marx to the Holodomor. On that alone I think it’s more reasonable for people to want to rehabilitate Marx in broader society.

You are wrong. Extermination of undesirables was one of Marx's explicit prescriptions.

I don't think the line from Marx to the Holodomor is pretty short. Seizing the means of production and having the government (euphemistically referred to as "the people") make all economic decisions inevitably leads to mass deaths. In my view, the only different between a socialist (in the original Marxist sense of the term) and a tankie is that a socialist believes if Snowball wasn't exiled, then Animal Farm would've worked, while a tankie believes Napoleon did nothing wrong. I think that Napoleon just accelerated an inevitable decay.

Even granting that Marxist rhetoric is violent in this way (which I’m hesitant to grant without significant qualifiers) surely you can see there is a difference between:

  1. A likely explicit order to exterminate a group of people when in paramount power, and

  2. A discussion of mass murder visited upon one’s political opponents, written not in any sort of office, which then was reinterpreted by various organisations decades after the death of the author, and in one case was perpetuated against a separate ethnic population, which was really not quite the point of the original texts (even if it was justified on those terms at the time).

In any case, it’s undeniable that Marx advocated for violent revolution, but I think there’s a qualitative difference between that and the sort of industrial murder machine created by the Nazis and the Japanese during WW2, as well as between advocacy and, well, actually doing the thing.

Okay, I'll agree with you that Marx isn't equivalent to Hitler, because he didn't actually do anything and only wrote about wanting other people to do things. But he's at least equivalent to.. oh, Richard Spencer.

I think we can agree on that, at least in the sense of “these are people fomenting violent ideologies”.

I do think that Marxist theory probably has more historical relevance even beyond the dictatorships and mass famines, though, in that quite a lot of economic theory was written in response to and in refutation of it, and ideas like dialectical materialism had pretty substantial influence. In that practical sense it makes sense to rehabilitate Marx somewhat, if only to understand why he was wrong (e.g. on labour theory of value) in economic (or other discipline-specific) terms rather than on moral terms.

Even given all that, I do flinch a bit when people openly declare themselves to be Marxist.

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