Chester Burnette: 135 pounds of comfort and joy

toddler sleeping against huge dog

Chester Burnette arrived in my life as a gangly puppy that the kindly neighbors had found hiding under a car at a gas station. We lived in an area just far enough outside of Chapel Hill that assholes would consider it an appropriate area for dumping a puppy “in the country.” Do not get me started on those assholes.

The short version is that there are a lot of assholes whose whole approach to decision-making is: what course of action will cause me the least trouble in the short term, since I am a moral nihilist when it comes to thinking about how my actions affect anyone else?

They dump puppies “in the country.” They do a lot of asshole things.

Our neighbors brought us the gangly puppy, and I said we would take him while we found his home (I assumed he was lost). I noticed he had a hole in his thigh, so I decided to take him to the vet. The vet looked him over, removed the bb from his thigh, and started telling me about how to feed and raise a Great Dane. I kept saying, “Oh, we aren’t going to keep him,” and he’d say, “Yeah, so about protein….”

Reader, I kept him.

He wasn’t a pure Great Dane—there was almost certainly a fair amount of shepherd, but he was half to three-quarters Dane. He came into my life at a point that a marriage was imploding and I was getting denied tenure (short version: don’t piss off a Dean or that random asshole in another department with a lot of power in the college, and I did both). He was clearly going to be a big guy, and clearly a comfort to me, so I named him Chester Burnette (I was relying on an album that had the name misspelled) after Howlin’ Wolf, because of his song “300 Pounds of Comfort and Joy.”

Life got complicated, including my finding myself driving a 40 ft. manual transmission moving truck that only had an am radio and a intermittently failing a/c, having missed the crossing of the Mississippi, at some random rest stop in Tennessee, with Chester showing signs of lower intestine shenanigans, and a cat I hadn’t seen in hours in the cab. Their food was in the back of the truck that had a jammed door ever since some asshole had cut me off. I’d blown up a marriage, been denied tenure, and couldn’t even feed these beings dependent on me. I had no reason to think I would get tenure at my new job given how thoroughly I’d fucked up my previous job.

I was suicidal.

I could not imagine facing another day. But I couldn’t figure out a way to kill myself that wouldn’t endanger Chester and the invisible cat. So, I decided I would get through this drive, and if I still wanted to kill myself in four years I would do it. (I have no clue why I set on the number four, but I did.) Procrastination can be your friend.

I got a funny little place in Columbia with a huge backyard, picked up another cat that Chester loved. They chased each other inside and out of the house. It was a long and mild spring, so I kept the back door open. As I sat at my computer, trying to write the book that would save my career, the cat would come crashing into that room with Chester behind him. Then the cat would turn around and chase Chester into the yard. It was a huge backyard with beautiful huge trees. He had a red ball, that he was convinced the squirrels were trying to get, and he spent hours banging the ball around the yard, keeping it from the squirrels. I loved watching him.

He was obsessed with the red ball, an “unbreakable” ball I got at Petsmart or something. It was big, about 14” in diameter, and he loved to carry it around. He would show it to the cat he liked, who never seemed to want to play with it. But the squirrels. When he saw a squirrel, he’d run to the ball and knock it away from them. Sitting at my computer, staring out the window, I invented a fairly complicated narrative about Chester believing that there was a squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball, and he had to keep it from happening.

Of course, when he got excited, he’d run to the ball and knock it around. When he was bored, he’d run to the ball and knock it around. Basically, he was stimulus:: red ball. I would throw it for him, but it was big and I couldn’t throw it far. He was carefully polite (although clearly disappointed) in my lame throwing abilities.

Since I was broke, Chester and I spent a lot of time walking. Hours, especially nights. He almost literally walked me through one of the most difficult parts of my life.

One night, when I was walking along a very isolated trail, a guy stepped out of the bushes directly in front of me, took one look at Chester, and stepped back in. It was only days later that I realized what had happened.

While Chester had never grown to be 300 pounds of comfort and joy, he had grown to be 135 pounds of comfort and joy. And protection.

I took ten days to drive to LA to visit family, and Chester and I wandered through parks. When I thought I might stay in a park in Kansas, and it turned out to be meth heaven, it was Chester who let me know this was not an okay situation. He also scared the shit out of a guy who thought about harassing me. Another time in Texas (which has “parking areas” but not enough rest stops), I stopped at a parking area filled with trucks, and I needed to pee. So I went off toward the bushes, and was mildly puzzled by a rattling noise from the bushes. Chester simply stopped at some point and would not let me go further. This obedient dog was not letting me get near those bushes, and he remained on full alert. When I’d had more sleep, I realized why.

He hated little dogs. I don’t know why. With much work, I got him to think they were okay. Then there was the puppy with whom he was playing who rolled under his belly and bit the most prominent thing. After that, I never tried to persuade him to like little dogs. He also once got entangled in a painting because he was wearing one of those e-collar things, and I had to get a neighbor help me get him untangled.

I was broke, but had a nice chair I’d inherited from my grandmother. He was not allowed in that chair. Every day when I came home from work, I’d see him jump out of that chair as I approached the front door.

His dog food bag was open, and the cat food bowl was on the ground, but he never ate more of his food than he should, and he only ate cat food that fell out of the bowl. On the other hand, a raccoon attacked one of my cats, and he ran to the rescue, but she was badly beaten up, and was on appetite stimulant cat food. He got the nearly-empty can out of the trash, licked it clean, and then ate a bag of potatoes, a box of cereal, and various other things I no longer remember. Frantically, I called the vet to say what had happened, and she said, “How big is your dog?” I said, “135 pounds,” and she said, “Oh, he’s fine.”

If she had had to pick up the poop I had to pick up later I’m not sure she would have said “fine,” but certainly good enough.

I sometimes took him to meetings on campus for complicated reasons, and he was productively bored. When I started to date Jim, Chester would bring the red ball to him rather than me. Chester was a good judge of character. Also a good judge of who had a decent throwing arm.

While I was pregnant, we were told Chester had pancreatic cancer, so we let him get on the couch. He didn’t have pancreatic cancer. He had eaten something he shouldn’t have. After that, he was always allowed on the couch. In fact, after that, every dog has been allowed on the couch. We just get couches with washable covers. It was a dumb rule.

The only time he did something really bad was when my pregnancy got glitchy, and I went to the hospital. He was so upset that he stood on the dishwasher door and ate a plate of chocolate chip cookies off the counter. The next day, I came back and was restricted to bed rest. He would not leave my side unless he absolutely had to for the next ten days. But the cookies, although they didn’t have enough chocolate to do him any harm, gave him terrible gas. I thought I was going to get brain damage. Someone recommended I keep a candle lit, but all I could think was the image of this huge sheet of flame from time to time.

Chester loved Jacob. And sometimes when every other attempt to get Jacob to nap had failed, I would put Chester on the ground, and Jacob up against him. I still don’t understand why that wasn’t my first choice. It always worked. Jacob could pull Chester’s tongue, ears, paws, or poke him in the eye, and Chester didn’t care. Jacob loved books that had pictures of various trucks, and sometimes Jacob would “read” the books to Chester. Chester loved that boy so much.

One winter, we accidentally left the red ball on the back porch, and it froze. The house was, from the back, three stories (it was split-level), and when Chester rolled the ball off it, the ball hit the ground and shattered. So, we bought another “unbreakable” ball (that’s when we learned why it was in scare quotes), but it was blue. Dogs are color-blind, so it would be fine.

It was not.

I would throw it, he would run after it, and then get to it, and turn around and give me the most guilt-inducing look you can imagine. And my mother was Irish Catholic, so I have a pretty high standards for guilt-induing looks. We rubbed butter on it, we used excited voices, Jim scored it with a drill so it was like the one that broke. No go. We found a red one.

When things get serious with someone, you say, “Here is something that has to happen in our lives.” While we were dating, Jim had said, “If we have a child it has to have the middle name of Allison,” and I had said, “We have to have a Harlequin Dane named Hubert Sumlin.”

Later I found out that Harlequin Danes are often deaf, and they are wickedly over-bred in Texas, so we rescued a blue, named him Hubert Sumlin, and Chester had a buddy. They had so much fun. We lived in a place with a dog next door that they loved to hate, and they would run up and down the fence barking at that dog. If Hubert got hold of the red ball, Chester would run to the fence and bark as though the dog next door was out. Hubert would drop the ball and run to the fence.

The neighbor dog wasn’t there.

Chester lived much longer than Danes usually do—perhaps because the false diagnosis of pancreatic cancer meant his stomach was nailed down. But he also lived longer than he should have, in that I could not let that boy go. He was over twelve when we finally had to make the right decision, but we made it.

I love that dog, and so, when I need a name for someone, especially someone with whom I don’t have a lot of sympathy, I use his name. It keeps me honest about others.

He was a good dog. He is a good dog.




Deliberating about war: To honor the last full measure of devotion

Army Air Corps in front of a plane

My uncle, my mother’s brother, was killed in the North Africa campaign. He successfully bombed a Nazi supply train, but his plane blew up in the explosion–perhaps because he hadn’t been informed it had munitions, perhaps because he was unable to pull the plane up fast enough since he’d been injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. His death broke my mother–he was her lodestar in a very unhealthy family situation. The damage of his death reverberated into so many lives, including mine. And how I, a generation later, reacted to accurate information about the context of his death exemplifies how hard it is to deliberate about war.

He was injured in the Battle of the Kasserine Pass and awarded a medal. So, at some point, I looked into the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. The first thing I read said that it was a clusterfuck, especially in regard to how the Army Air Corps was unnecessarily exposed to risk because the person in charge of the campaign—–was an incompetent, indecisive, inexperienced coward. Fredenall so fucked up the situation that he was sent back to the US (a still controversial decision, since some think he should have been discharged).

When I read that Fredenall was incompetent, especially in regard to the Air Corps, I was in a rage.

I was immediately puzzled by my own rage. It would make sense for me to be outraged that Fredenhall was an over-promoted incompetent coward who put my uncle in such danger. But, to be honest, that wasn’t my first (or even third) reaction. I was outraged because someone was saying that my uncle’s death was the consequence of incompetence.

It took me a while to understand why I was more angry that someone suggesting his death was the consequence of incompetence than I was at the incompetent who might have caused his death.

What I learned from my rage about the criticism of the Kasserine Pass campaign is that it is tremendously difficult to say that a loved or ancestor has died for a bad cause, in a bad way, or because of bad leadership.

Eventually, of course, I worked around to realizing that some people are incompetent, some wars are the consequence of political figures bungling or blustering or trying to stabilize a wobbly base or just having painted themselves into a corner. Even in a just war (and I do think American intervention in WWII was completely just) there are unjust actions, and incompetence, and failures of leadership. But it still hurts.

What I learned from my own reaction is that deliberation about a war is constrained by considerations of honor. I want my uncle honored. And it was hard for me to understand that honoring him meant being willing to be critical about the conditions under which he died.

Our first impulse in honoring veterans, especially the dead, is to say that they died for an honorable cause and they died nobly. But they didn’t necessarily die for an honorable cause. A CSA soldier was not dying for an honorable cause–he died for slavery. But he died. And he left behind grieving people who wanted to believe his death was noble and meaningful. And it’s hard to say someone in our family died on the wrong side of history, or because of incompetence. We want our ancestors honored.

That we want them honored shouldn’t make us lie about how, or what for, they died. The more we lie about the past the more we poison our ability to deliberate about the present.

Alistair Horne’s compelling and painful Savage War of Peace suggests that France was irrationally and disastrously intransigent in regard to Algeria because of a feeling that they had to recoup the honor they’d lost in Vietnam and WWII. It seemed to me that the people most in favor of invading Iraq were people who believed that the US could have won Vietnam had it not been for a stab in the back by liberal media. They wanted to refight Vietnam. That, of course, was Hitler’s argument about the Great War and in favor of another one (a sadly effective argument). The whole “it wasn’t about slavery” argument is just as irrational as my wanting my uncle not to have died because of an incompetent leader—a CSA soldier dying for the cause of slavery died for a terrible cause; my uncle probably died because of a terrible leader.

Our inability to be critical of a war because it feels like dishonoring the dead means we can’t deliberate about war, we can’t be honest about our own history, and we try to prove ourselves honorable by engaging in more war (or violence to protect our narrative about a war, as in Charlottesvile).

My uncle was a hero. Fredenall was an incompetent, over-promoted putz who completely bungled the Battle of the Kasserine Pass and whose bungling might have contributed to my uncle’s death.

All of those things can be true at the same time.

We cannot let our desire for honoring the military dead preclude deliberation about how and why they died. Memorial Day should be so much about honoring the people who have died in war that we try to prevent future wars and future deaths. We have to live in a world in which we honor the military dead without thinking we are prohibited from being critical of the cause for which they fought, the people who led them, or the political discourse that caused them to go to war. We should honor their deaths by learning from them and making deaths like theirs unnecessary.



You aren’t trolling the libs–you’re the Black Knight with a hook in his small intestines

The black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail who has lost all his limbs
From here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmInkxbvlCs

For the last five years, I’ve intermittently argued with a kind of Trump supporter who is not accurately represented by polls or empirical research on politics (in communication and political science). Call this person Chester.

Chester completely supports the current GOP, and everything it does or says. But he thinks of himself who is critically and rationally supporting GOP policies. I’ve watched him abandon positions in favor of new ones when the politically correct position of supporting GOP changes. And, each time he flips, he denies that he’s flipped. Every time he loyally adopts the new politically correct GOP position he insists that his adoption of this position is an independent choice.

He likes to think of himself as an independent and objective thinker who has mental reservations about the GOP but supports them regardless of what they do or say or support. In fact, he’s just intellectually lazy af.

He likes to think of himself as a person—objective, independent, rational—yet he never does any of the things that an objective, independent, rational thinker would do. He never looks at sources that might trouble his beliefs, and all of his information is second (or third) hand. He repeats claims he never tests. He engages with what he thinks of as “liberals” in a lazy trolling way. He never reads any of the links they provide. He just relies on what his in-group sources tell him, all the time thinking that repeating those talking points makes him an independent thinker because he isn’t a “liberal.”

For Chester, “critical” or “independent” thinking isn’t about some kind of process (e.g., we consider the best sources from various positions, look at their data and methods). It’s just loyally repeating the talking points from the position we’ve decided is objective. And we haven’t decided it’s objective because we’ve looked at a lot of research from various points of view and concluded that this source is reliable and rational (for instance, it represents alternative points of view fairly—something we can only rationally determine if we’ve read those other points of view). Chester is engaged in identity politics in a really ugly (and demagogic) way: we can decide that what this person is saying is true because they are loyal to the in-group.

People like that might be capable of tremendously hard scholarly work. Being able to succeed in school and being intellectually lazy aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s a lot of scholarship showing that some people are drawn to closure and feel threatened by ambiguity.

What I’m saying is that there are people who adopt an identity of an “independent” who aren’t in their actions or thinking, but only in their sense of themselves.

Here’s what they are. First, they are fully willing to post in threads on the pages of people who have politics they abhor, and that action makes them feel that they are being tolerant, and open to new ideas. Their version of disagreement is to repeat the talking points they’ve gotten from elsewhere. They refuse to read sources that might complicate their viewpoint. [1]

Second, they can’t defend their positions in rational argumentation, and, when that’s pointed out (such as by pointing out that they’re repeating debunked, irrational, internally contradictory, and/or incoherent claims), at that point, they retreat to the claim that they like trolling the libs, and they don’t really care if what they’re saying is true or not.

Let’s pay attention to that second part, since it’s the only aspect of them that is consistent. They just don’t really care if what they’re saying is true, accurate, or logical, if their policies hurt others, or even those policies will hurt them in the long run. They wander around repeating talking points because they like the image of themselves as someone who is engaged in politics, but they aren’t engaged enough to think about what they’re saying or care about the long-term consequences of what they’re supporting. They’re moral nihilists and, as I said, intellectually lazy af.

They’re energetic about posting talking points, but not about thinking about what those talking points are.

As far as their justifying what they do as “trolling the libs,” if you throw out a line with bait, and their “taking the bait” means pointing out that your argument is wrong in ways you refuse to admit, and providing sources you refuse to consider, then you haven’t really trolled the libs. You’ve repped supporting Trump as irrational, incoherent, and stupid. You’re just the Black Knight claiming you aren’t dead yet. With a hook you’ve swallowed so hard it’s in your small intestines.


[1] Here is a point where English is weird. I used to say “they won’t engage with any…” and I was heard as I’m advocating that someone has to engage with every. Nope. Just the best.

Why did British so many political leaders and media argue for getting along with Hitler as soon as he took power?

Ourselves and Germany

In two earlier posts about the British ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, and several despatches he wrote back to the Foreign Office, I pointed out that he correctly understood and predicted Hitler’s goals and actions, and he did so on the basis of public and published statements on the part of Hitler and the Nazis. Anyone fluent in German could have drawn the same conclusions, and anyone not fluent in German just had to have a translator. It’s common for people to assume that Hitler was tolerated by Britain because British political leaders and media were misled about his goals and aims, or engaged in wishful thinking. But, actually, quite a few actively supported him and understood him pretty well. They tolerated (or supported) him because they sympathized with him more than they sympathized with his victims.

I emphasized Rumbold’s report on his May 11, 1933 meeting, and argued that Hitler relied on standard internet asshole moves, like deflection (especially through whaddaboutism), open embrace of an irrational argument, and blue lies. Being an internet asshole means, basically, discourse is about proving your commitment to your group rather than proving your case.

In the last part of his despatch, Rumbold describes Hitler’s reaction when Rumbold pointed out that Nazi persecution of the Jews had alienated a lot of people, just when Germany was beginning to get more sympathy. And the short version of this post is that, as in this meeting, Hitler was open in meetings about his antisemitism—he couldn’t stop himself–, so anyone who met with him had all the evidence they needed to know that he was completely committed to a judenfrei Germany. They just didn’t care.

In his dispatch, Rumbold says that he mentioned that the Nazi treatment of the Jews had resulted in a revulsion of sympathy for Germany, and

“The allusion to the treatment of the Jews resulted in the Chancellor working himself up into a state of great excitement […] as if he were addressing an open-air meeting. “There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from the high schools. There are not enough posts for pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with the rest. If the Jews engineer a boycott of German goods from abroad, I will take care that this hits the Jews in Germany. [….] Before leaving this subject the Chancellor added that the understood that Jews wishing to settle in Palestine must be in possession of the sum of £1,000. If the German Government had required the possession of a similar sum in the case of the Eastern Jews, who had entered Germany since the war, there would be no Jewish question in this country. As it was the Jews had brought every form of disease into Germany and made for the demoralization of the country generally.

[….] My comment on the foregoing is that Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy of the German Government and that it would be a mistake to believe that it is the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty in controlling. Anybody who had had the opportunity of listening to his remarks on the subject of Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realise that he is a fanatic on the subject. He is also convinced of his mission to fight Communism and destroy Marxism, which term embraces all his political adversaries.”

So, Hitler moves from an argument that is rhetorically framed as though it is an issue of fairness “the Jews must suffer with the rest” to an argument rhetorically framed as legitimate self-defense to whaddaboutism to rabid antisemitism of a kind socially acceptable to many Brits. Before I walk through that argument more slowly, I have to point out that the second paragraph of that long quote is the most important for understanding the real lesson of Hitler: how racism is always rhetorically reframed as concerns about dangerous political commitment, social hygiene, and/or reducing crime. What most people don’t know is how important the notion of “executing partisans” (that is, killing socialists) was for justifying mass killings of Jews in what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. Nazis’ political agenda of serial genocides was, in public, always rhetorically framed as exterminating communism.

But, let’s get back to the first paragraph.

We’re still talking about internet asshole. One of the most frustrating things about arguing with someone committed to arguing irrationally is that they appropriate the verbal cues of fairness and rationality, while they’re irrationally arguing for their in-group being entitled to better treatment. But they hide their argument within modifying phrases.

Like all internet assholes, Hitler buried his weakest claims in adjectival phrases—pure German stock, pure-bred Germans—so he has an argument for entitlement rhetorically framed as an argument for fairness. This isn’t fairness as equal treatment across groups, but fairness as an entitled and powerful group being allowed to hold onto its power. It’s “fairness” as “a system that preserves a hierarchy we think is right.” So, it’s “fairness” as “our group being dominant.”

As I said, his most problematic claims are buried.

Let’s be clear: there is and never was any such thing as “pure German stock.” Hitler was relying on Madison Grant’s completely incoherent argument about race. Grant’s argument was that there were three white races: Nordic (what Hitler called Aryan), Alpine, and Mediterranean (what Hitler would have considered non-German speakers in Central and Eastern Europe), and he argued that inter-mixing of these races led to the destruction of a civilization. In other words, like a toddler who can’t stand the peas to touch the mashed potatoes, Grant believed that inter-mixing of races was bad. Yet, by his own narrative, the races were intermixed at various points, since the “higher” race slowly arose from a mixing of the “lower,” and the best civilizations were ones created by intermixing. A longer explanation of how bad his argument was is here.

It’s interesting that Hitler was not “pure German stock” even by his own standards. “Pure German stock” was a blue lie that Hitler sincerely believed, and that he phenotypically violated. His followers didn’t care. Hitler, very clearly not an Aryan, became the political leader to make Aryanism triumph. This isn’t particular to Hitler or his followers. Suckers often join a cult of a person not a Christian because they think he’ll make Christianity triumph or a financially unsuccessful person whom they believe will lead them to thrive financially.

Setting that aside, what his argument assumes is that Jews can’t be pure Germans. And that is the argument that needed to be proven on his side, and he never did because he never could. If a non-Aryan Austrian like Hitler can be a leader of pure Germans, why can’t German citizens be German? Hitler could never make that argument coherently, so he never tried. He just made arguments that rested on the premise that Germans who were Jews didn’t count as German. And that is the first step in politicide, religicide, classicide, or genocide, and people all over the political spectrum engage in it: declare your critics not really German, or American, or Christian, or whatever. They are people who keep us from the goal of a pure community, and so should be eliminated.

We need to stop doing that.

But, back to the May 11 memo, since I really want to post this on May 11.

What Hitler assumes, which is what all racists assume, is a zero-sum contest among races, and that not being dominant means being subordinate—equality is being dominated. But, more important, he assumes that people only look out for their own group. Thus, he can’t even begin to imagine that any non-Jews are objecting to the treatment of Jews, so the protest must be “engineered by Jews.”

As in the other two topics mentioned in the previous posts, he initially denies, then admits, and then deflects the accusation against him.

He denies the accusation by pretending that he is concerned with fairness, but his next argument confirms exactly what he started out denying—discrimination against Jews (since he’s saying “pure German stock” should have preference), and then he threatens retaliation for action that would itself be the consequence of the persecution he denied and then confirmed. It then shifts into a particularly irrelevant piece of whaddaboutism, before he exposes himself as having exactly the views he is accused of having.

The swipe about Palestine is typical. Hitler often made a point to representatives of other countries that their nations often had restrictive immigration regarding Eastern Europeans, especially Eastern European Jews (such as the US 1924 Immigration Act). And Hitler would say that they would do the same thing he was, but they didn’t have to, since they’d never let the Jews in in the first place.

It’s another argument that looks as though it has a point, but it doesn’t have one that is relevant. Britain did have the restrictions he mentions regarding immigration to Palestine, but, as far as I can tell, they didn’t require money to immigrate to the UK itself.

But, Hitler probably often found himself talking to someone who wished Britain did have such restrictive immigration, and so they would sympathize with his desire. Anti-semitic and anti-Slavic prejudices were widespread in Europe generally, including Britain.. And, while these people, ranging from Lord Londonderry to Viscount Rothermere (owner of the Daily Mail), might bemoan the most excessive violence, they wouldn’t empathize with the victims. Like Hitler, they considered various “races” (such as Jews and Slavs) essentially criminal and communist. And, like Hitler, they used the term “Marxism” for all their political adversaries. Thus, like the argument about Germans being victimized because they weren’t allowed to dominate, Hitler’s argument about Jews—as incoherent as it was—would resonate with some people because they didn’t really need the argument to be made; they already agreed.








Hitler as internet a-hole

Eichmann on trial in Israel

In an earlier post, I talked about how Hitler appealed to the sense that some groups are entitled to dominate others—a sense shared by a lot of the major figures of his time, who were, therefore, willing to see him as someone with whom they could work. I mentioned that Hitler also relied heavily on deflection, especially whaddaboutism, that enabled him to normalize Nazi violence and persecution and to deflect his own personal responsibility, and I was using a despatch written by Horace Rumbold (British Ambassador to Germany) of a meeting May 11, 1933.

This is the second post about that meeting.

Rumbold reports

The Chancellor then went on to talk about the recent revolution in Germany, which, he said, had probably been unique, inasmuch as it had been accompanied with the minimum of violence and bloodshed. He maintained that not even a pane of glass had been broken in Berlin. Two printing-presses belonging to the Communist party had been destroyed, and perhaps some twenty people in all killed throughout the country. He seemed to remember that matters had been very different in Ireland in 1921, when the law courts had been burnt down and there had been much loss of life. He added very bitterly that between the years 1923 and 1932, 360 of his supporters had been treacherously murdered and some 40,000 injured.

Hitler insisted that the SS and SA “were in no sense military formations, and that he had forbidden them to indulge in military exercises of any kind.”

I’ve spent a lot of time arguing with jerks, and I find this kind of jerk the most frustrating. They’re frustrating because what they’re saying looks like an argument—it has claims, and it has data that are linguistically related to the claims. The data and claims are, however, not logically related to one another. Some of the data is true, or true enough, but not relevant, and the relevant data is false—a deliberate lie, in fact. And then we have claims that might be hyperbole, or they be lies (the idea that their revolution was unique, only two printing presses destroyed, the number of his supporters murdered or injured). The data looks precise (360 deaths, two printing presses) but the important terms are so vague that he actually has a lot of room for equivocation (why only mention Berlin, what does “much loss of life” mean, what exactly is “the revolution”). Hitler doesn’t care that his claims and data are false, and his overall argument illogical. He has no sense of being responsible for what he’s saying or doing. Arguing with him is like trying to play chess with someone who openly pockets pieces and refuses to admit to it. Violating the rules of argument is part of the pleasure.

So, what do you do?

It might be worth engaging with him simply for purposes of trying to undermine his rhetorical effectiveness with third parties—at Rumbold’s May 11 meeting, the only other person in the room is Hitler’s third-rate toady, Baron von Neurath, and Rumbold chooses not to argue. But, what if there are observers to whom you want to expose Hitler’s irrationality and dishonesty?

The rhetorical advantage of being a liar like Hitler is that he has nothing to lose by continuing to lie. If he gets caught in a lie, he can simply claim it was hyperbole—or what is called a “blue lie,” and so it will cost him nothing with his base. The whole point of the charismatic leadership relationship is that it is an irrational commitment to an irrational genius. It is a profoundly religious relationship, in which the leader is worshipped, and so the leader benefits from the kind of thinking common in religions—about claims not needing to be literally true, or empirical facts; they are “true” to the extent that they are consistent with the central beliefs of the religion.[1] The religion of which Hitler is the high priest is the religion of Nazism, and one of the central tenets of Nazism is that Germans are the victims of liberalism, socialism, alien races, and the Versailles Treaty. Because they are the real victims, they are justified in any action they take against the people who have tried to exterminate them. Or who criticize them.

When Rumbold said that there was discrimination against Jews (which Hitler had both denied and bragged about—that’s the next post) and “instanced the names of Professor Einstein and Herr Bruno Watler.” Hitler replied that “Professor Einstein had attacked his Government violently from American soil” and that any English scientist who did the same “would risk molestation in England.” In the first place, no. In the second place, Hitler is equating verbal criticism with attacking, and using that Einstein criticized Nazi Germany as evidence that their prior abuse of him was justified. When arguing with someone like Hitler, this weird warping of time is common—the question was whether Germany was discriminating against Jews, and Hitler said expelling Einstein was justified because Einstein criticized Nazi Germany after being expelled.

So, Hitler’s argument is: there isn’t discrimination against Jews; there is discrimination against Jews, but it’s justified; and, besides, England would do the same (so whaddaboutism based on a hypothetical). Rumbold takes the bait of disagreeing about the last point, making Hitler’s deflection rhetorically effective. They’re now on the issue of whether Britain persecutes people who criticize the government—a point that has nothing to do with whether Nazis do.

This shift is one of the major functions of whaddaboutism—to shift the burden of proof from the weaker case to the other. It’s more or less an admission that a position is indefensible.

Hitler’s earlier whaddaboutism is even more interesting rhetorically. Usually, the whaddaboutism is the kind he engages in about Einstein—it enables the rhetor with a weak case to go on the attack. So, it’s tu quoque—you do it too. He does some of that (the reminder of violence in Ireland in 1921), but his argument about the non-violence of the revolution ends up in whaddaboutism with anti-fascists.

It has the same structure as the argument about Einstein, but without Rumbold saying anything to dispute him:

Hitler makes a false claim (it was unique because it was accomplished with a minimum of bloodshed; there is no discrimination against Jews) that he then contradicts (there were at least 20 people killed; they expelled Einstein); and he justifies this new claim by saying that other people did just as much or worse and therefore this violence was justified. In this case, the violence was the number of Nazis killed and injured during the violence instigated by Nazi groups.

Just as Hitler isn’t responsible for anything he says, so Nazis aren’t responsible for anything bad. It’s never their fault because it is never purely their actions. When it comes to anything bad, then Hitler has a monocausal narrative, and any actors other than Nazis are responsible for the Nazi behavior. Even if deflecting responsibility this way requires some fairly strange time travelling responsibility.

It struck me as very strange when I was reading proslavery rhetors how much they deflected responsibility. They were patient, but about to lose control, and if they did, it would be the fault of abolitionists (or slaves) that they lost control. They genuinely seemed to see themselves as continually exerting heroic self-control that they were about to lose. And nothing was their fault—not slavery, not the conditions of slavery, not the slave codes, not slave rebellions, not even their losing their own tempers and beating slaves. It’s the rhetoric of an abuser.

It makes sense, in its own weird way, that the person who amounts to the idol of an ideology of irrational commitment to the will, violence, and domination would be incapable of making a rational argument. And I think internet a-holes who are similarly incapable of defending their beliefs rationally are similarly commitment to a kind of moral nihilism—there is no morality other than domination. The reason that it strikes me as weird is: why do people who admire domination so much, and who see an irrational argument that silences interlocutors because of how incoherently stupid it is as a victorious domination, whine so fucking much about being victims?







[1] This isn’t a criticism of religion. I consider myself a religious person, and I have beliefs that are not falsifiable or rationally defensible. But, when we start to use that kind of thinking for a political leader, we have created a second God. And I’m not a polytheist.


Why would people like us have supported appeasing Hitler?

nazi propaganda poster saying "death to marism"

This was going to be one post, but it turned into several. And it’s a set of posts, not about how appeasing Hitler was right (it wasn’t), but about how people like us actively supported Hitler, or actively supported appeasing him.

It’s common for people to express outraged bewilderment at British politicians and figures who appeased Hitler—we claim not to understand how they could have been duped by him, how they could not have seen him for who he really was. We like to explain appeasement either by saying that Hitler was a rhetorical magician, whose persuasive skills were overwhelming, or by saying that the people who didn’t take him seriously enough were fools engaged in wishful thinking. Neither is the case. In fact, many of us would have supported appeasing Hitler. If we try to tell a story of an irresistible rhetor or hopelessly gullible political leaders, then we are the gullible ones.

In other words, this isn’t about Hitler, and it isn’t about Chamberlain. It’s about us.

Hitler, like many manipulative people, didn’t persuade others, as much as he gave them the tools that enabled them to persuade themselves of something they already wanted to believe. Those strategies (and those people) allowed Hitler to normalize Nazi behavior and deflect his personal responsibility for what couldn’t be normalized.

On May 11, 1933, the British Ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, met with Hitler. Hitler had only been in the government since that January, and dictator since that March, but Rumbold already had him correctly sized up. Rumbold described the meeting in a dispatch back to the Foreign Office (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #139) and his description of it shows how Hitler’s rhetoric worked (and, in this case, didn’t work) and with whom.

The meeting was fairly typical of meetings with Hitler—he did most of the talking, got unhinged on the subject of Jews, deflected (especially through whaddaboutism), and lied or exaggerated when he couldn’t deflect. After the Reichstag Fire, the Nazi government arrested anyone considered communist, a category that included labor union activists. Nazi persecution of Jews was well known, as well as violence against communists.

Because he had read Mein Kampf and been listening to speeches by Hitler and other major Nazis, Rumbold knew exactly what Hitler planned. In a memo written not long before this meeting (Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-1939, Second Series, Volume V #36), Rumbold had summarized Hitler’s philosophy (long quotes from Rumbold are the full paragraphs in italics):

He starts with the assertion that man is a fighting animal: therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacificist and internationalist. Pacificism is the deadliest sin, for pacificism means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence [….] The race must fight: a race that rests must rust and perish. The German race, had it been united in time, would now be master of the globe today. The new Reich must gather within its folds all the scattered German elements in Europe [….] The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with the minimum of training into a soldier [….] Again and again he proclaims that fanatical conviction and uncompromising resolution are indispensable qualities in a leader [….] Germany needs peace until she has recovered such strength that no country can challenge her without serious and irksome preparations.

He was right, as we know. It’s important to point out that his correct interpretation of Hitler and the Nazis was grounded in evidence available to anyone fluent in German—the public and published statements of Hitler and the Nazis. It’s also important to point out that, while Hitler had very recently (around 1932) begun talking in terms of self-determination rather than conquest, shifted to dog whistles about his racist policies, and took to lying about violations of the Versailles Treaty, he never retracted, apologized for, or even qualified his previous very clear statements about German hegemony, the desire for a pure and militarized Germany, the need for violence, the equation of Jews and communism, and so on.

People do change their minds, of course, and so the notion that Hitler wasn’t the hothead he had been in the twenties isn’t obviously wrong. But he only stopped making all those arguments two or three years before becoming Chancellor, and he never retracted them. When people change their minds, they openly retract what they previous said. He changed his rhetoric, and not his mind. He didn’t change his rhetoric because he wanted to hold on to the base he’d created with his militaristic and racist rhetoric; he’d risk losing them if he retracted those sorts of statements. When a political figure suddenly changes their rhetoric, then we have to figure out which sets of statements s/he meant, and one relatively straightforward one is: they believe the one they’ve never retracted, even if they’re stopped saying it or are saying the opposite.

But, back to Rumbold’s despatch about the May 11 meeting.

Rumbold says that Hitler complained about the “Polish Corridor:”

He only wished that the Corridor had been created far more to the east. (This is the same remark as that which he recently made to the Polish Minister). The result of the creation of the Corridor had been to provoke grave dissatisfaction in Germany and apprehension in Poland, for the Poles realized that it was an artificial creation. Thus a state of unrest was kept alive.



So, what is Hitler doing?

First, he wasn’t a mastermind of rhetoric. Someone genuinely skilled in rhetoric wouldn’t harangue people in small meetings, but he was notorious for that—not only for, as he does in this meeting, doing almost all the talking, but actually slipping into giving a speech. He was highly skilled at one kind of rhetoric—he was good at making a speech that moved a crowd. Even William Shirer, the Berlin correspondent for American media, says that he sometimes found himself temporarily moved by Hitler’s speeches, and he knew exactly who Hitler was and what he wanted. Paradoxically (given what we know about Hitler), what came across so effectively in the big public speeches was that Hitler was completely, passionately, authentically, and even irrationally committed to the cause of Germany (the in-group). We don’t expect rational discussions of policy options in large public speeches (although maybe we should); we are particularly prone to the rush of the charismatic leadership relationship. And that’s what Hitler offered.

In one-on-one situations, charismatic leadership works less well—that Hitler was irrationally committed to the cause of Germans wasn’t especially interesting to the British Ambassador. What does work, but only for people who are looking to be persuaded, are the strategies that Hitler uses: projection, whaddaboutism, lying, exaggeration.

Take, for instance, Hitler’s comments about the “Polish Corridor.” The idea that there are “natural” boundaries, which the Polish Corridor violated, is part of Hitler’s racist notions about some “races” being entitled to territory. Of course the boundaries are artificial—that is, made by humans—because that’s what boundaries always are. Poles weren’t worried about the boundaries being artificial; they were worried about German aggression. Hitler’s passive—a state of unrest was kept alive—makes it seem as though Poles were partially responsible for the state of unrest. Were the Poles completely confident about the borders, there would still be a state of unrest because of Hitler’s rhetoric about German entitlement. Poles weren’t apprehensive about the boundaries; they were apprehensive about Nazi aggression. Hitler projects his unrest he creates onto the Poles.

This strategy would work with an interlocutor who believed that states have “natural” boundaries, or that the boundaries set by the negotiations at the end of the Great War were artificial or unfair to Germany. This way of presenting the situation would also work with someone who didn’t really believe that Poles were people who should be considered, or at least not considered as having the same natural rights to self-determination and a nation-state as, say, Germans.

What many people now forget is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed with the Great War, and one consequence was the rebirth (or creation, depending on your narrative of history) of various nation-states that hadn’t existed for several lifetimes. Poland and Czechoslovakia were two of those nation-states. Given the vexed and sometimes violent history of 19th century conflicts over nationalism, language, and oppression, some boundaries had been deliberately designed to keep Germans a minority. Were he talking to the kind of racist who believed that Germans were better people than Slavs, Hitler’s implicit argument about the boundaries would seem reasonable. As it happens, he wasn’t at that moment, but he often was. So, one reason that major political figures argued for appeasing Hitler was that they agreed with him that Germans should be politically dominant in central Europe because Slavs were, you know, so Slavic. They would, therefore, overlook that a state of unrest was kept alive because of German leaders like Hitler, and instead be willing to see the situation—self-determination for Slavs designed to keep a minority German population from dominating—as artificial, with some vague sort of “both sides are at fault” way of framing the situation.

These people wouldn’t necessarily think Germany should take over all the areas previously controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they would be sympathetic to Germany calling a situation artificial if it kept German speakers from political domination. They might object to Germany dominating Europe, but not what they (wrongly) imagined to be racial Germans dominating the political situations in most Central and Eastern European countries.

We now forget (or don’t know) how widespread what we now know are bullshit narratives about “race” were in that era. Race, which even the most respected and cited scholarship on race couldn’t define consistently, was incoherently associated with language, and sometimes phenotype (but only when that was politically useful). Books like Passing of the Great Race (1916) or The Rising Tide of Color (1921) were tremendously popular in the US and Britain, and they were pearl-clutching jeremiads about the danger to civilization from Central and Eastern Europeans—that is, from Slavs and, worst of all, Slavish Jews. That was the whole point of the extremely restrictive 1924 Immigration Act—it was designed to reduce the number of people coming from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe.

Hitler’s griping about the “artificiality” of the Polish Corridor was grounded in the belief that people who self-identified as German (what he would have called “Aryans”) should not be politically dominated by Slavs. And that argument would work with anyone who agreed with the unhappily common premise that politics should not be people from different groups arguing from their different perspectives, but people who have the right point of view being dominant.

So, for our fantasy that we would never have supported Hitler, the important question is: do we believe that ideal political deliberation has people with radically different points of view, people we really dislike and look down on, arguing with one another, or do we think it consists of our in-group being “naturally” (ontologically) entitled to political domination?

If the latter, then we would have loved Hitler, as long as we agreed with him as to what in-group was entitled to political domination.

Just in case I’ve been unclear: if we condemn Hitler, but believe that only our group has a legitimate political stance, and that our group is entitled to domination, then we don’t really condemn Hitler. We would have been open to persuasion to his narrative about the victimization of Germans, since we believe that a group can be victimized simply on the grounds that it isn’t as dominant as it feels entitled to be.

One of the reasons that people supported Hitler–including people shocked that he did what he’d said he would do were he in power–was that they agreed with his premise that there is an in-group that should have all the political power. If we agree with that premise, but disagree as to which group it is, we’re close enough to Hitler that we’re just splitting some very fine hairs.










Graduate school writing as a transition to scholarly writing

marked up draft

The video is available here, along with various other UT Writing Center videos.

Difference between undergrad and grad (if oriented toward academia)
• Undergrad: smart insight (“At first it might look like this, but if you look more closely you see…”), good close analysis, good organization
• Scholarly: insight that changes a scholarly conversation
• Grad: insight that extends a (possibly very specific) scholarly conversation in some specific way

Some things that make scholarly writing hard for graduate students (and junior scholars)
• We think of “the scholarly conversation” in terms that are too broad (“rhetoric,” “teaching writing,” “Victorian Literature,” “history of slavery”)
• We are accustomed to starting the writing process by coming up with our thesis
• Asking a graduate student to make a significant contribution to “the field” is like asking a guest to give you advice on redecorating your home when they’re still standing in the front door and haven’t seen the rest of your house
• The metaphor of finding a “gap” is advice that made more sense many years ago when it was possible to read “everything” written about a subject
• We’re accustomed to letting panic drive the bus (partially in order to manage imposter syndrome)
• You read things that write in a way that might be rhetorically unavailable to you (unsupported generalizations about a field, neologisms, swipes at major scholars) and don’t read the genres you’re writing (so you don’t have the templates)

Some potentially useful strategies
• Write to learn, to think through things, to imitate others, get some ideas on paper—in other words, be willing to write crap
• Get a first draft by imagining a friendly audience (e.g., another student in class, an undergraduate teacher), writing inductively (start with the close analysis), and generally not feeling that you have to write the paper in the order it will eventually have
• Start with a question: a puzzle, apparent contradiction, confusion (existing scholarship suggests we should see this here, but we don’t—we see something else; why?)
• Write an introduction that works for you (why are you writing about this, what’s the best way to formulate the question, what makes this an interesting question, how did you come to this question) and then write a new introduction as your last step in the writing process
• Instead of thinking about a gap, try to formulate a question that might put you in a different posture in regard to existing “literature” on the topic
o Additive
o Definitional (redefining the question—the “prior question” move)
o Methodological (proof of concept)
o Refutative
o Synthesizing
o Taxonomic

If you’re bragging that you aren’t “woke,” then you’re bragging that you’re racist

Theodore Bilbo


There are some things about people who call themselves “conservative” that I find really interesting. To be clear, I think conservatism, as advocated by Schlesinger, Niebuhr, Oakeshott, and various other theorists is an important view that we need in our political deliberations. I don’t agree with it or them—I think they’re wrong. But I think that political deliberation (or, to be honest, any policy deliberation) is better if there are people arguing from various premises (which, as I’ve said in many places, is not a binary or continuum of left v. right). We should have a public sphere of discourse in which there are people arguing vehemently for a social safety net, an unconstrained market, a market that is constrained in such a way to promote fair competition, isolationism, protective trade, free trade, a foreign policy that promotes our economic interests, a foreign policy that promotes democracy, a foreign policy, the government taking on issues of long-term concerns ignored by the market, and so many other positions.

And, if you think that range of positions is usefully represented by left v. right, then I would like to interest you in some shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. Just think about what you could make with the tolls.

The media is demagogic to keep referring to sources or figures as “conservative” who simply aren’t. Fox News isn’t conservative—it’s pro-GOP. And the GOP is rarely conservative.

Conservatism is skepticism about social change, grounded in skepticism about human nature (so “prosperity gospel” is completely incompatible with conservatism). In fact, people who call themselves “conservative” are far closer to “neo-liberal” than “conservative,” at least insofar as what they claim to have as principles. Neo-liberals (such as Reagan) endorse “a policy model that encompasses both politics and economics and seeks to transfer the control of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector. Many neoliberalism policies enhance the workings of free market capitalism and attempt to place limits on government spending, government regulation, and public ownership.”

The GOP is and has long been intermittently neo-liberal; they’re neo-liberal in terms of the principles they claim to have, but not in terms of policy agenda, as various sources have noted. The one position on which the GOP has been consistent since 1968 is racism—sometimes dog whistle, and sometimes trumpeted. When it comes to neo-Jim Crow policies (that is, laws that make it harder for non-whites to vote) they reject the notion that a free market will lead to the right outcomes. And they long have–the Georgia race-based voter suppression “is the sort of policy Republicans used to enact quietly, with little protest, back before everybody detested them.”

So, in the GOP ideological world, saying that someone is “woke” is an insult. What does it mean to be “woke”?

I have to say that I haven’t heard a leftist use the term “woke” in anything other than an ironic way in years, but a google search suggests that some people are still using it in the old way, which was “being awake to social injustices , especially those created by racist institutions.”

What’s incredibly weird about how the pro-GOP media and supporters use the term is that’s what they mean too. They believe that being “woke” means calling attention to racist injustice.

They think it’s a joke because because they believe that there is no racism. Because they’re racist.

Although they admit that non-whites have higher rates of getting arrested, convicted, and killed, have a harder time getting jobs or apartments, and are generally treated worse, they think that’s because non-whites deserve the treatment they get—a very racist belief. Pro-GOP are sad puppies because racist books don’t win prizes, publishers decide not to publish racist books, scholars who do shitty research that supports racism have trouble getting published, people who say racist things get criticized, racists get fired, companies and advertisers don’t want to be associated with racists. They’re victims because they can’t advocate racism without getting called racist.

So, people who claim to be the party that advocates personal responsibility feel sorry for themselves if people hold them responsible for their statements and actions. If you’re bragging that you aren’t “woke,” you’re bragging that you’re racist, and you’re bragging that you’re a whiner who doesn’t like to be called racist.



Was Hitler a vegetarian? What’s your onion?

Onions hanging from ceiling
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Onion_bulbs#/media/File:Cebolas.JPG

When I first read that Hitler was vegetarian, I found all sorts of reasons to say he wasn’t really vegetarian. For instance, and this is just one of the deflections I found, I decided (and told people) that he was what snarky vegetarians call “carbotarian,” meaning he just ate pasta and dairy. And some people say he sometimes ate meat. The fact is that he was vegetarian. But the interesting question is: why did I care so much that I would engage in hair-splitting about it? Why was his being vegetarian such a threat to me that I, a scholar of argumentation, engaged in really bad arguments to make him not a vegetarian?

Because that’s how we all are when it comes to protecting our sense of our in-group as essentially good.

Vegetarians are an in-group for me. I have some grumps with vegetarians, but, since they’re an in-group, I always attribute basically good motives to them (even when I think they’re wrong). And that’s pretty typical for how all of us cognitively manage appalling behavior on the part of an in-group member. Once we’ve gone through “they didn’t do it,” “it wasn’t that thing,” “others have done worse,” and we’ve got Hitler, and he’s in our in-group, then we say, “he isn’t really in our in-group.”

So, obviously, this post isn’t really about Hitler, and it isn’t about vegetarians, but it’s about how we engage in actively stupid and irrational reasoning (“Hitler was a carbotarian”) because we’re really trying to hold onto the moral licensing that in-group membership gives us.

“Moral licensing” is the term that some researchers use for the fact that we all engage in very bad math about our own behavior. We have a tendency to engage in a credit/debit calculation: I did this good thing, so it’s okay for me to do that bad thing. But it’s always bad math. Giving some money to a homeless person on the freeway off-ramp doesn’t erase from the ledger voting for criminalizing homelessness or cutting services to the poor. But that’s how we reason.

I love the story in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov about the onion. A woman who has been completely evil in her life begs to be lifted from Hell on the basis of having once given a beggar an onion. It doesn’t work because that one act of kindness was just the only time she was ethical. In-group membership is the onion—it’s the one thing we do that we hope will justify everything we do and are.

The fantasy of in-group social licensing goes further—it goes into our fantasies about our in-group and history. We all want to believe that we would have been in the resistance, we would have been abolitionists, we would never have supported Hitler because our in-group is good, and therefore members of our in-group have always been on the right side of history, and therefore we would have made ethical choices.

But, if Hitler was vegetarian, and vegetarians are an in-group for me, then my in-group identification doesn’t guarantee I would never have supported Hitler. Hitler being a vegetarian means that being vegetarian isn’t a guarantee that I am and would always have been good.

And that is why I was so intent on profoundly irrational ways of trying to make Hitler not a vegetarian: because what was at stake was not whether he was vegetarian, but whether I was willing to admit that my in-group should have moral license—whether being a member of my in-group means that we are guaranteed to be right and good on the whole and can therefore be shitty at all sorts of individual moments.

What I had to do was to step back from my thinking about Hitler in terms of trying to hold onto a moral license for vegetarians and instead look at all the major scholars of Hitler, and admit that there was only one that would support my argument. More important, I had to think about how I was arguing. Could I find data to support my claim? Sure. Anyone can find data to support any claim. Having data doesn’t make an argument rational.

What I couldn’t do was make an argument that Hitler wasn’t really vegetarian that wouldn’t also mean all sorts of other people weren’t really vegetarian. What I couldn’t do was create a set of criteria of vegetarianism that I was willing to apply across people I do and don’t like (including me).

There are people who claim that Nazism was Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, or atheist, and they are making arguments as desperately irrational as my trying to claim that Hitler wasn’t vegetarian. They can find evidence to support their claims, but what they can’t do is come up with a set of criteria for Nazism being Protestant, left-wing, Catholic, atheist, or whatever that wouldn’t also apply to lots of governments, groups, and people (even including themselves) that they don’t want to condemn. For instance, if Hitler was left-wing because he supported a social safety net, then so was Reagan. If Hitler was Protestant because many of his supporters were Protestant, then Niemoller and Bonhoeffer were Nazis. If voting for Hitler becoming dictator means a group was Nazi, then Catholics were Nazis. Instead of deflecting the data, we need to think about the major premise: supporting a social safety net doesn’t make a person left-wing (as both Reagan and Eisenhower show); that Protestant areas gave Nazis a lot of support doesn’t change that the Catholic Party voted unanimously for Hitler becoming dictator. In-group membership is not some kind of “you’ve always been on the right side of history” guarantee.

Hitler was right-wing. There is simply no doubt about that. He was part of a right-wing coalition, he supported right-wing policies, and right-wing politicians saw him as any ally. The only people to vote against his becoming dictator were democratic socialists.

But, and this is the important point: Nazism eventually got buy-in from most Germans. Nazism was not a system of a small group of people who, because of their being members of some out-group, were able to force others to do tasks those people knew were wrong and didn’t want to do. Nazism was a group of policemen standing by a ditch murdering Jews even when they didn’t have to. And that group had people from all over the political, religious, and cultural spectrum. Nazism is not what that out-group does. It is what members of our in-group did. It isn’t what people like us would never do; it’s what people like us did. If we don’t understand that, then we will never understand Nazism.

We are so desperate to hold on to in-group moral licensing that we compulsively engage in all sorts of hair-splitting (not really vegetarian, dog-lover, conservative, Catholic, Protestant), even when that hair-splitting is completely inconsistent. That we use that kind of hair-splitting to pretend that people like us had nothing to do with Nazism (although they did) isn’t the worst consequence of in-group membership being treated as moral license.

In addition to in-group moral licensing enabling us to engage in bad math about behavior, and tell ourselves comfortable lies about how our in-group is always on the right side of history (and therefore we are, always will, and always would have been on the right side of history), it enables Machiavellianism and a sloppy moral relativism. Machiavellianism, in psychology, is a personality trait of people who “are temperamentally predisposed to be calculating, conniving, and deceptive. Essentially amoral, they use other people as stepping stones to reach their goals.” Machiavellianism says that strategies for getting what we want—the means—are amoral. Moral licensing says that lying, coercion, violating the law, blackmail—they’re amoral. What makes them moral or immoral is whether the person is engaged in them is in- or out-group. Since the in-group is essentially moral, then any act on the part of an in-group member oriented toward the triumph of the in-group is moral, even if we would condemn it as immoral were it done by out-group (once again, moral licensing). This sense that the in-group can behave in ways we would normally condemn as immoral and yet still praise their actions as moral is the basis of far too many Law and Order episodes, as well as almost all action movies.

In-group moral licensing is all about saying that we are allowed, in this moment, because of who we are and what we believe, to engage in behavior we on principle condemn, while we continue to claim that we are adherent to that principle. Moral licensing enables us to claim that we are committed to principles we violate (feminists and Bill Clinton, Mitch McConnell and the timing of appointing a SCOTUS justice). In-group moral licensing enables factional Machiavellianism.

I’m not saying that “both sides are equally bad”—I don’t think US politics is about two sides, and I’m not going to endorse the bad math of in-group moral licensing. More important, it doesn’t matter if the “other side” violates a principle. If we violate it, then it isn’t a principle for us. As Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters, it’s more of a guideline than a rule.

In-group moral licensing enables a kind of sloppy moral relativism in that the morality of an action is entirely dependent on whether the person engaged in the action is in- or out-group.

Here’s what I’m saying.

We can have a political world in which political leaders are motivated by the principles that maintain democracy or we can have factional Machiavellianism. If people want to engage in rabid factionalism, then they should own it, and stop claiming that they are acting on any principle other than promoting the in-group.

I’m a big fan of a guy who is very unpopular in US political discourse right now, who completely rejected the notion that your in-group membership means you can treat people in ways you would never want to be treated. If you take seriously what he said, then there is no such thing as moral licensing. That you believe that you are on the side of the good—that you believe your in-group is good—doesn’t, by his standards, mean that you can violate principles you want maintained on your behalf.

As I said, not a lot of people care about what he said. He didn’t say “do unto others in your in-group” or “do unto others except out-group.” He didn’t mumble.

And, if you’re claiming something is a principle, except when it isn’t, it isn’t a principle. It’s a rationalization. Hitler was a vegetarian. Your in-group membership is an onion. It will not pull you to heaven.

How defending the in-group can land us in unintentional racism

A stained glass from the Brussels Cathedral showing Jews desecrating the host, a libel that led to a massacre of Jews and a Catholic cult was recognized until 1968.


I retired for several reasons, but one of them was so that I could work more. I love visiting campuses and classes (it’s teaching without the grading), doing podcasts, and writing. I think I wrote five or six contributions to book collections this year, visited three or four classes, and gave two or three workshops. I made a lot of progress on a new book. That’s what I wanted to do with my retirement. If anything, I’d like more class visits, workshops, contributed chapters, and lectures than I had this year. I’m saying this just to be clear that I don’t object to working, but I object to working when something is supposed to be play.

I signed up for a course that was supposed to be play—about the Inquisition (way out of my area of expertise). It wasn’t play; it was work. The first part of the course was about various heresies in the early Christian church, and it was fascinating, useful, thoughtful, and nuanced. And then we got to the Inquisition. And I dropped the course because it turned into work.

But the way that this class was work is a useful example for something I’ve had a lot of trouble explaining in my writing: how in-group favoritism can seem and feel harmless, since it happens when we’re focused on praising or defending (especially defending) our in-group, and we don’t necessarily mean to do so by denigrating, blaming, or negatively stereotyping some out-group. But it happens. What I have trouble explaining is that in-group favoritism can easily lead into defending the in-group in such a way that problematic in-group behavior gets minimized, redefined, dissociated, and deflected onto the victims, and then it becomes racist.

And that’s what happened in this class. And you see it all the time—people trying to defend Prince Philip end up diminishing (or seeming to justify) his racism, probably out of the impulse to give a very, very old guy a break.[1]

When we admire a person, civilization, or policy of the past, we’re almost certainly admiring something racist, colonialist, misogynist. That’s just how history works. It doesn’t mean that we can’t admire anything or anyone in the past. The false assumption that things (people, institutions, actions) are either good or evil, and that it is an absolute binary—good things are purely good, and anything not purely good is evil—means that we have trouble talking usefully about racism. If we think of racism as an evil, and that no good person has any evil, then we either have to condemn everyone as equally evil, or we have to find ways to say that the in-group wasn’t evil. And so we justify, deflect, and rationalize the racism of people, institutions, or practices that we believe aren’t completely evil.

And then we’re enabling racism.

If we stop thinking about racism as an evil pit in which evil people live, and instead as an unconscious and damaging way that we understand our world, then we can simultaneously say that someone was racist, and that that someone did a lot of good things. We can praise that for the good things, and yet condemn their racism. In other words, condemning racism isn’t condemning a person as a being spit into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—it’s condemning what they’ve said or done. Similarly, condemning an institution for racism isn’t necessarily saying that the institution has never done anything good; it’s saying the institution engaged in racist practices.

And, once we can say and see that someone or some institution we admire has done and said racist things, then we are more open to seeing how we do racist things. And then we can try to be less racist. As long as we refuse to see or acknowledge racism in our in-group, we will not change the actions and beliefs that are racist.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, neither demagoguery nor racism are necessarily intentional—in fact, I think it’s pretty rare that someone believes that they are engaged in demagoguery or being racist and does so anyway.[2] And racism is not about individuals who are consciously hostile to members of other races, or individuals who decide that they will get up today and be racist; it’s often about how in-group favoritism fuels, justifies, or enables us to ignore systemic differential treatment of various groups. It’s about how people only think about this particular policy, person, incident, issue, or case affects us without thinking about how what we’re saying has larger and longer implications and consequences.

And here I should explain briefly about in- and out-groups. In-groups are groups we’re in—they’re groups we use to identify ourselves to others, and whose basic goodness is intermingled with our own. If I believe that my rescuing dogs from shelters is a good thing, then I will think of myself as in the category of people who rescue dogs from shelters—I’ll identify with them, in Kenneth Burke’s terms. And, since I think I’m good for rescuing dogs, then I’m very likely (illogically) to decide that people who rescue dogs are good. (Since I’m good for rescuing dogs, people who rescue dogs are good.) They’re in my in-group, and, if that group is accused of bad behavior, I’ll defend it as vigorously as I’d defend and deflect accusations of bad behavior against me.[3]

That’s what this prof was doing (and what we all do). He was responding to ways that Catholicism has been under attack. And, to be clear, it has. Most of our notions about the torture devices of the Inquisition are 19th and 20th century tourist trap bullshit or anti-Catholic demagoguery. And, like many people defending their in-group, he engaged in textbook in-group favoritism and its attendant deflection and dissociation (in the rhetorical sense, explained below). He over-defended his in-group to the point that he got into very creepy and not okay territory. As do we all. And that is my point in this (very long) post.

Here was his argument about the Inquisition. Initially, the “inquisition” was the first step in someone having been accused of heresy, and it was conducted by the church, and oriented toward persuasion. It only involved “minor” torture (he used that term multiple times), and the vast majority of people expressed sorrow that they had been wrong in their doctrine, and were happy to have been corrected. They were given some minor penance. Only a small percentage were handed over to the secular authorities, who tended toward execution. So “the Church” didn’t execute people; secular authorities did. The Spanish Inquisition was entirely secular authorities. The official position of the Catholic Church was that conversos (Jews who had been forcibly converted or only converted to escape death) could renounce their conversion with no punishment. Many didn’t, and so, when the Spanish Inquisition started—which he was clear was initially completely out of control, and basically a witch hunt—and conversos were particularly victimized, many came forward to prevent being executed, and they blamed their drifting back into Jewish practices on Jews (since they often chose to live in Jewish communities). So, the secular authorities decided that Jews were infecting the state and expelled them. The question of the burning of the Torahs also came up, which he described as, after the initial burning, very minor. As long as authorities didn’t know about the Torahs, they wouldn’t do anything, so, when it happened, it was because another Jew had reported that there was a Torah.

Like much in-group favoritism that drifts into racism, it was thoroughly well-intentioned. He was trying to counter the anti-Catholic demagoguery of the 18th and 19th centuries that created myths we still have about the Inquisition and Catholicism. Richard Hofstadter once said that “anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” and he was right. People opposed to pornography in principle could read descriptions of convents as whorehouses for priests and feel simultaneously pruriently stimulated and self-righteous. Six Months in a Convent and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk were best sellers, after all.

Torture devices attributed to the Inquisition are almost all semi-pornographic (or full-on pornographic) imaginations of Protestants, such as the Iron Maiden (which was never used in the Inquisition). But, there is one device they used (as did the Nazis), the strappado. Since strappado is so horrifying, but I will link to something, and, just all the content warnings. It’s torture. This professor said the strappado was “minor” torture, and that people who were threatened with it were “persuaded.”

So, let’s take seriously what he was claiming (more seriously than he did). If the strappado was minor torture, and someone told, “Agree with me, or we’ll apply the strappado to you” was an object of persuasion and not coercion, then were I to say to him, “I think you’re wrong, so, either agree with me, or I’ll use the strappado against you,” then he would say I persuaded him.

Of course he wouldn’t. But, if he wouldn’t, then his whole argument about the “inquisition” being about persuasion and not coercion collapses.

He could say that people confronted with strappado were facing “minor” torture (and people who were threatened with their holy books being burned was “minor”) because he never imagined himself as the object of that behavior. I want to stop here for a moment, and emphasize this point. He would never have told the story of the Inquisition the same way he did had roles been reversed, and Catholics been treated exactly as Jews and Muslims were. He would never make the claims about the Inquisition had he been the one “persuaded” by the threat of the “minor” torture of the strappado.

In-group favoritism is always a failure of imagination. It means we deflect, dissociate, rationalize, or minimize behavior toward others we would be outraged were that behavior oriented toward us because we are imagining the situation only from the in-group position. We don’t imagine ourselves being the object of in-group action, only the subject.

We are all drawn to defending our in-group, and we therefore do what he did. We minimize the actions of our in-group (strappado was minor), put our behavior in the most favorable possible light (threatening someone with strappado if they don’t confess and renounce their beliefs is “persuasion”), deflect responsibility onto the victims (Jews turned other Jews in—this was an important point for him), engage in the most hair-splitting of rhetorical dissociation (so “the Catholic Church” is not what Catholics, nor Catholic governments do, even if they have officials of the Catholic Church participating, but only [the most rhetorically useful] statements on the part of the Pope).

I want to pause on a point that is easily lost. The Catholic church banned the Torah—he made a big point that Jews were allowed to argue for it not being banned—and so any Jewish community with a Torah had to live in constant fear that they would have their Torah confiscated and burned. He dismissed that condition as minor, and he said a Torah was only burned if a member of the Jewish community reported that there was a Torah.

He may be technically correct that Jews during the Inquisition and throughout the many years of the Torah being prohibited were “turned in” by other Jews. Why make that point? People who want to defend the slaveocracy of the US will often point out that African slaves were initially enslaved by other Africans. Why is that point relevant?

When I’ve asked people, they say, “Well, it’s true.” Well, lots of things are true. It’s also true that the “secular” authorities that engaged in the behavior he wants to deflect and dismiss were Catholic governments, who saw themselves as promoting Catholicism. It’s true that the Catholic church actively venerated the massacres of Jews until the 1960s. Simon of Trent was in the Roman Martyrology until 1965. The cult over the Brussels massacre of Jews was recognized by the Catholic Church until 1968. I could go on. (I could also go on about Protestant abuses of Jews.) It’s also true that conservative white Evangelicals defended slavery (and segregation), and still do.

That some Jews turned in a Jewish community for having a Torah, or that Africans sold other Africans into slavery has no relevance to the question of whether Catholics persecuted Jews or Americans bought slaves. Nor do those facts make the persecution of Jews or American slavery any less appalling and immoral than they were.

So why did he emphasize it?

People who are irrationally committed to defending the in-group shift the question of “did our in-group do this bad thing” to “are we, and we alone, responsible for the tragic consequences of our behavior?” And then we try to find other groups on whom we can fling some of the blame, as though that’s relevant. It isn’t. Whether Catholics who banned and burned Torahs were sometimes assisted by Jews doesn’t change that Catholics banned and burned Torahs. Whether Africans sometimes sold other Africans into slavery doesn’t change that Americans are entirely responsible for American slavery.

What if looking at history wasn’t about defending our in-group, but about understanding what happened? What if the question was one about rhetoric? Instead of trying to deflect, dissociate, and diminish the bad behavior of our in-group, what would it be like if we instead asked a question about rhetoric: how did our in-group–which we want to believe is good–get persuaded into doing that bad thing?

And then we don’t have to blame Jews for Torahs getting burned or Africans for US slavery. We don’t have to have a contest about Protestants v. Catholics in terms of bad behavior. We don’t have to call behavior “minor” that we would be outraged were it to happen to us. We can acknowledge that being a member of our in-group doesn’t guarantee that we’re right. We can be part of the vexed, complicated, and unclear world of doing wrong when we don’t mean to, of failing to think from the perspective of others.

Just to be clear: I think the professor is a very good man, and a great scholar, and almost everything he said was (technically) true—except calling strappado minor torture. That’s just false. Setting aside that (kind of horrifying) rationalization of Catholic practices, I’ll say that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he genuinely had very good friends who are Jews, and he would be outraged, I think, at the implication that he was even mildly anti-semitic. He was very clear that the treatment of Jews under Torquemada was appalling, and he didn’t defend the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at all. He is not hostile to Jews; he doesn’t want Jews expelled from anywhere; he doesn’t want Jews tortured. He’s just very invested in defending Catholicism.

So, I’m not writing about him because I think he is a terrible person—I think he’s a good person. He’s a careful scholar, and a dynamic teacher, and working hard to combat anti-Catholic demagoguery.[4] What I’m saying is that he is us.

We like to imagine that racism is a self-conscious hostility to members of another race, but I think it’s most often in-group defensiveness. People who refuse to think that policing might be racist are more interested in defending an in-group (white police officers) than they are in deliberately promoting violence against non-whites. Regardless of the intention, defending the police to the extent that it involves a refusal to acknowledge racist policing means defending racist policing. People who are committed Lutherans, Republicans, Democrats, vegans, second-wave feminists who are more interested in defending Lutherans, Republicans, and so than we are in trying to make our in-group less racist are racist.

Being Catholic, Republican, or supporting the police doesn’t mean you’re racist. Defending Catholics, Republics, or the police doesn’t make you racist. Being Protestant, Democrat, or criticizing the police doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. Supporting our in-group by deflecting or diminishing our in-group racism is racist.

It doesn’t matter if our in-group is gun owners, Lutherans, vegetarians, Texans, Democrats, Christians, dog-lovers, or anything else. Being right means admitting we’ve been wrong. It means not deflecting, dissociating, and minimizing about how our in-group has been very wrong.

The irony of this very good, and I think very devout, Christian promoting narratives that defend his in-group (Catholics) at the expense of his non-in-group (Jews) and his out-group (Protestants) is that he is, as are we all, rejecting what Christ said. He is a good scholar, but he’d be a better one, and we’d all be better people, were we to take seriously: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”







[1] Instead of refusing to call him racist, or pretend he didn’t say racist things, it would have made more sense just to say, “Yeah, racist.”

[2] I’m saying rare just because I don’t like all or never statements, but I honestly can’t think of a time. Even racists like David Duke or Adolf Hitler insisted that they were being realists, not racists.

[3] If I slip from believing that adopting surrendered dogs is a good thing to believing that adopting surrendered dogs is what good people do, then I’ll start to denigrate people who do something else, like get dogs from responsible breeders. That’s a different post.

[4] Which, oddly enough, still exists. For reasons to complicated to explain, I recently ran across work by a major figure among fundagelicals who gets lots of churches to support his work to spread “Christianity,” oriented entirely at Catholic areas.