Author: Trish

How public discourse about the Vietnam conflict shows what’s wrong with American political debate

shows paired terms of liberals = Dems and GOP = conservative

[This is from a book I’m writing about how we deliberate about war]

In this book I’ve emphasized “paired terms” because (too) much public discourse presumes that issues can be thought of in terms of a set of associations and opposition as though: 1) those characteristics are necessarily associated or opposed, and 2) are necessarily epitomized in the association/opposition of liberal v. conservative, democrat/republican, and 3) these relationships are causal. That is, we too often talk as though Martin Luther King opposed the Vietnam War because he was liberal, and liberals opposed the Vietnam War because of their liberalism. This way of thinking about politics depoliticizes public discourse, in the sense that we don’t argue about whether, for instance, the policies regarding Vietnam are sensible, likely to get a good outcome, worth the costs, and other policy issues—instead, we argue (or, more accurately, fling assertions) about whether “liberals” or “conservatives” are better people. The false assumption is that, if we can prove that our group is good (or that the out-group is bad), we have thereby proven that our policies are good. That way of thinking about politics in terms of associations and oppositions is false at every step, and the public discourse about Vietnam exemplifies how inaccurate and damaging it is to displace policy argumentation with paired terms.

For instance, we now use the term “conservative” as though it were interchangeable with “Republican,” even when the Republican Party advocates a policy that is a striking violation with past practices (such as Romneycare, the adoption of preventive war in regard to Iraq, the level of governmental surveillance allowed by the USAPATRIOT Act ). Many people use the term “liberal” as though it were interchangeable with “democratic socialist,” “progressive,” and “communist” (when those are four different political philosophies). Democrats are not consistently “liberal,” and Republicans are not consistently “conservative.” In fact, it is simply not possible to define either “liberal” or “conservative” as a political philosophy that either the Democrats or Republicans consistently pursue in terms of policies—both parties advocate small government, big government, low taxes, high taxes, military intervention, states’ rights, federalism, and so on at different points, for different reasons, and generally because of short-term election strategies. Sometimes one party takes a stance simply because it is the opposite of what the other party is advocating—as when the GOP flipped on Romneycare. This observation is not a criticism of either party—that’s what political parties do–, but it is a criticism of thinking that partisanship is an intelligent substitution for policy argumentation.

Martin Luther King and Henry Steele Commager criticized US policies in regard to Vietnam, and both did so from what might usefully be called a “liberal” and Christian perspective, both believing that American foreign policy had to be grounded in moral principles. Hans Morgenthau, conservative, Jewish, and a “realist” in regard to international relations, was also a severe critic of American policies in Vietnam, and on April 18, 1965, The New York Times published a long editorial he wrote in which he argued that, while he appreciated a recent statement of LBJ about Vietnam, on the whole, he thought that “the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves.”

Although Morgenthau had a very different philosophical perspective from either HSC or MLK, his criticisms of American policies in Vietnam had some overlap with theirs. While he agreed that China should be contained, he argued that it was a wrongheaded fantasy to think that it could be contained in the same way that the USSR had been in Europe–that is, through “erecting a military wall at the periphery of her empire.” Like HSC and MLK (and as even Robert McNamara would later admit was true), he insisted that the Vietnam situation was a civil war, not “an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression.” Ho Chi Minh “came to power not courtesy of another Communist nation’s victorious army but at the head of a victorious army of his own.” Ho Chi Minh had considerable popular support, whereas Diem did not, and therefore this was not a military, but a political, problem. Morgenthau argued that, “People fight and die in civil wars because they have a faith which appears to them worth fighting and dying for, and they can be opposed with a chance of success only by people who have at least as strong a faith.” Supporters of Diem did not have at least a strong a faith because Diem’s policies resulted in his being unpopular (“on one side, Diem’s family, surrounded by a Pretorian guard; on the other, the Vietnamese people”). Morgenthau pointed out that trying to treat such situations in a military way–counter-insurgency–had not worked. The French tried it in Algeria and Indochina (i.e., Vietnam), and it didn’t work, and it wasn’t working for the US in Vietnam. Like HSC and MLK, he emphasized that Diem (and the US, by supporting Diem) had violated the Geneva agreement, especially in terms of refusing to have an election—a refusal that was an open admission that communism was not imposed on an unwilling populace, but a popular policy agenda (he notes, largely because of land reform).

Unlike HSC and MLK, Morgenthau spelled out a plan that went beyond simply negotiating with North Vietnam. His plan had four parts:
(1) recognition of the political and cultural predominance of China on the mainland of Asia as a fact of life; (2) liquidation of the peripheral military containment of China; (3) strengthening of the uncommitted nations of Asia by nonmilitary means; (4) assessment of Communist governments in Asia in terms not of Communist doctrine but of their relation to the interests and power of the United States.
In other words, the US should be prepared to ally itself with communist regimes, as long as they were hostile to China. This plan was similar to the policy the US justified as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”–how we rationalized supporting unpopular authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records rather than allow elections that might lead to socialist or communist (even if democratic) regimes–but with a more realistic assessment of the varieties of communism and the possible benefits of those alliances. As Morgenthau says, “In fact, the United States encounters today less hostility from Tito, who is a Communist, than from de Gaulle, who is not.”

Just to be clear: Morgenthau had no sympathy for communism. His argument that we should ally ourselves with some communist regimes was, as I said, exactly the same one used for rationalizing our alliances with authoritarian–even fascistic–regimes. His argument that communists should be included in the group that might be the enemy of our enemies was grounded in realism. Realism, as a political theory, values putting the best interests of the nation above “moral” considerations, and strives to separate moral assessments of the “goodness” of allies from their potential utility to the US. We were, after all, closely allied with Israel, Sweden, and various other highly socialistic countries; why not add North Vietnam to that list, as long as it would be an ally?

If we think about the point of public discourse as debating various reasonable arguments, rather than a realm in which we will strive to silence all other points of view, then his is an argument that should be considered. Since support for Diem was grounded in the assumption that we should tolerate mass killings, corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism if the regime is useful to the US, why not try to assess utility without assuming that an unpopular and incompetent anti-Chinese anti-communist is necessarily and inevitably more useful than a competent, popular, anti-Chinese communist?

Because of paired terms. Because, as Morgenthau says, public discourse, and especially the PR about how Vietnam was being handled, was based in an obviously flawed binary:
It is ironic that this simple juxtaposition of “Communism” and “free world” was erected by John Fuster Dulles ‘s crusading moralism into the guiding principle of American foreign policy at a time when the national Communism of Yugoslavia, the neutralism of the third world and the incipient split between the Soviet Union and China were rendering that juxtaposition invalid.
After all, Nixon decided that China could be treated as an ally–why not North Vietnam? In other words, the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-communism was an act (or, as Morgenthau said, PR); it wasn’t grounded in a consistent set of criteria of assessment utility to the US, even about shared enemies. Morgenthau’s point was that we shouldn’t be alternately moralist and realist, and that is what American foreign policy was—“realist” (that is, thinking purely in terms of utility) when it came to authoritarian governments, but “moralist” when it came to self-identified “communist.”

Whether we should be more consistent about those criteria is an interesting argument, and Morgenthau makes the argument for a more consistent approach to other countries from a coherent realist position. I don’t agree with Morgenthau (I think it’s unrealistic, in a different sense of the term, to believe that power politics is amoral), but even I will say it’s an argument worth making, debating, and considering. To say that an argument is worth being taken seriously is not to say we think it’s true, but it’s plausible.

Defenders of LBJ’s policies neither debated nor refuted his argument. Instead, they shifted the stasis to Morgenthau’s motives and identity, pathologizing him, misrepresenting his arguments, and depoliticizing debate about Vietnam. They shifted the stasis away from defending LBJ’s Vietnam policies to whether Morgenthau was a good person whose view should be considered.
On April 23, 1965, Joseph Alsop responded (sort of) to Morgenthau’s argument in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times called “Expansionism Is a Continuing Theme in the History of China.”

In rhetorical terms, Morgenthau’s argument was a “counter-plan.” Morgenthau agreed with the goal of constraining China, but argued that the current strategy was an ineffective means of achieving that goal. Thus, a reasonable response to Morgenthau’s argument would argue that these means (a military response in Vietnam supporting the unpopular Diem regime) are likely to work in these conditions. That wasn’t Alsop’s response. He characterized Morgenthau’s argument as an argument for appeasing China and letting it “gobble their neighbors at will, even though their neighbors happen to be our friends and allies.” Morgenthau never argued for allowing China to gobble up other countries; he argued that the current American strategy for trying to stop China was ineffective. Alsop was not an idiot; he knew what Morgenthau was arguing. He chose to misrepresent it.

And he chose to take swipes along the way at professors who don’t really know what they’re talking about—as though being a journalist makes someone more of an expert on foreign policy?

Alsop’s argument, in other words, never responded to Morgenthau’s, instead attributing to Morgenthau a profoundly dumb argument that had nothing to do with what he’d actually said. Alsop’s argument wouldn’t work with anyone who’d read Morgenthau’s argument, but it would work with someone who already believed that the only legitimate position in regard to Vietnam was the one advocating a military solution—that is, people unwilling to engage in argumentation about their policy preferences, who instead believed that the way to think about policy option is good (us) v. evil (every other position).
McNamara—the architect of the Vietnam War–would later decide that people like Morgenthau, MLK, and HSC were right. It was a civil war, Minh had considerable popular support, communism was not being forced on a completely unwilling populace by the Chinese, the situation was not amenable to a military solution. There were over 50,000 US deaths in the Vietnam conflict after Morgenthau made his argument. If even McNamara came around to Morgenthau’s position, doesn’t that suggest it was a position worth taking seriously in 1965?

I’m not saying Morgenthau’s policy should have been adopted in 1965; I’m saying it should have been argued.

Alsop (and others) did their best to ensure it wouldn’t be argued by making sure their audience never heard it, and instead heard a position too dumb to argue. And that is what partisans all over the political spectrum do—take all the various, nuanced, and sometimes smart critics of their position and homogenize them into the dumbest possible version, and they can count on an audience that never takes the time to figure out if they’re reading straw man versions of the various possible oppositions and critics. There are two lessons from Morgenthau’s treatment by people like Alsop. First, don’t be that audience.

We would never think we have been heard if people have only heard what our enemies say about us. Why should we think we have heard what others have to say if we only listen to what their enemies say about them?

Second, Morgenthau was conservative. He was a critic of how LBJ, a liberal, was handling the Vietnam conflict. MLK was liberal. He was a critic of how LBJ, a liberal, was handling the Vietnam conflict. Paired terms are wrong. It isn’t an accurate map of how beliefs and political affiliations and policies actually work. Good people endorse bad policies; our political options are not bifurcated into liberal v. conservative; being “conservative” (or atheist, Christian, democratic socialist, Jewish, liberal, libertarian, Muslim, progressive, reactionary, realist) doesn’t mean you necessarily endorse one of only two options in terms of policy agenda.

We need to argue policies.

McGeorge Bundy “debated” Han Morgenthau on CBS in June of 1965, and the scholar of rhetoric Robert Newman wrote a critique of Bundy’s rhetoric in the journal Today’s Speech. He said, and it’s worth quoting at length:
Much of the profound disquiet about Viet Nam policy results from the increasing and systematic distortion of official news. There are, of course, especially in academic circles, the “doves” who want peace and noninvolvement even if this means communist control of some distant land. Bundy was not talking to them; nor is Morgenthau one of them. But even those of us who are inclined to be “hawks” are not anxious to back losers. We have had enough of this with Chiang Kai-Shek. We are afraid that Viet Nam, also, is the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. And we are tired of being lied to.

Newman goes on to list the post-war intelligence debacles of the CIA—the Bay of Pigs, wishful thinking about what the Chicoms would do in the Korean conflict, bad predictions about the Viet Cong in 1961. He mentions Secretary Rusk claiming in 1963 that the “strategic hamlet program was producing excellent results” when, actually, “this whole operation was a disastrous failure,” and, well, many other, if not outright lies, then instances of unmoored optimism that were quickly and unequivocally exposed as false. Newman concludes about Bundy’s treatment of Morgenthau, “Thus i[n] a situation where what was desperately needed was reinforcement of the shattered credibility of the government which Mr. Bundy represents, we got only ad hominem attack on a critical professor.”

And that is the problem with our political discourse, all over the political spectrum. That’s all we get, Two Minutes Hate about “the” opposition. What we need is policy argumentation. If you don’t read primary opposition sources, and you only rely on in-group sources for what “they” believe, you’re no better off than fans of Alsop.







If politics is war, what kind of war?

Hitler looking at a map with generals

In May of 1943, Adolph Hitler had to face that the Nazis could no longer hold Sicily. Hitler, relunctantly and uncharacteristically, agreed to an evacuation of the Nazi troops from Sicily to the Italian mainland, but was told that the evacuation would be difficult because several of the ferries that might take the troops to the mainland had been destroyed. Hitler told his generals, “the decisive element is not the ferry, but the will” and “Where there is a will there is a ferry” (137). In another discussion with his generals in December of 1942 about the situation in the Stalingrad encirclement—100,000 troops were surrounded by Soviet forces and quickly starving and freezing to death—he was told that some of the troops were simply dropping dead of exhaustion. He deflected the question of whether there should be a fighting retreat (or even a set of strategic small retreats) to the question of medals. The connection seemed to be that soldiers were dying because they weren’t sufficiently motivated to continue living, something medals would help. He clearly believed that the will could conquer anything, from freezing to death to getting across a strait.

This belief, that the will could triumph over everything, meant that he fired anyone who didn’t seem to him to have sufficient will. This belief in the power of the will was a narrative: people of a certain kind (good people with sufficient will) can triumph over anything, including the lack of a ferry, or starvation and freezing temperatures. Hitler’s decision-making about war was always within that narrative.

Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by other means. If war is politics, then politics is war, and figures ranging from Mao Tse Tung to Steve Bannon have made exactly that argument. Of course, they don’t mean it is literally war, but that the stories we tell about politics are the same stories we tell about war. Many people have argued that we shouldn’t think of politics as war, and I don’t entirely disagree, but I have a different question: what kind of war? What story of war are we telling that we think is the story of politics?

Is the story about groups who are destined to go to war, who cannot possibly co-exist, or about groups who have conflicting material needs that might be negotiated? Is the story that our group has already is already under attack by an enemy determined on our extermination, and so we are in an extraordinary situation in which we are unconstrained by normal notions about moral behavior? Or, is the case that we are bargaining with another group about material goals, and threatening to go to war will enhance our bargaining situation, and so we have one narrative for the people bargaining (this is all a bluff), and another for the general public (we need to go to war)?

Not all wars are the same, not just in that they have different costs and causes, but they are very different kinds. There are limited wars, oriented toward very specific goals, or intended as one of the pressures brought to bear while bargaining. There are total wars, wars of extermination, preventive, pre-emptive, proxy. There are a lot of kinds of wars. So, if we are saying that politics is like war, whether we imagine war as limited and temporary violence or as extermination of the other matters tremendously.

Democracy is a method of government that can withstand passionate fighting among partisans, but when politics is seen as a war of extermination of all but one political position, then democracy is exterminated. This book is an attempt to persuade readers of that claim, but also to explain how and why it is that we move from seeing conflict and disagreement as beneficial to requiring extermination. That part of the argument is more complicated.

By “politics,” people usually mean the policies that are enacted by political figures, and the rhetoric we have about those policies. And, perhaps paradoxically, or perhaps not, the kind of political discourse—that is, rhetoric—we have about whether to go to war can help or hinder effective deliberation about war, whether and how to go to war, how to conduct it, whether to continue it. That is, if we see political discourse itself as war, then what kind of war we think it is (a war of extermination, bluffing, strategic) constrains or even prohibits effective political deliberation about whether we should go to war.

The argument I will make in this book is that how we think about discourse (which I’ll call rhetoric) and how we think about war are mutually inflecting. Take, for example, Hitler. Hitler thought about rhetoric as a kind of war—a war of extermination of opposition points of view that he would win through a combination of seduction, trickery, intimidation, jailing, shooting, sheer will, and success. That rhetoric worked tremendously well with his base, and reasonably well with the German public from 1933 until 1944. In other words, it worked as long as he was winning; it failed when he wasn’t. Equally important for the purposes of this book, that’s how he approached the deliberations with his generals about how to conduct the war. He bribed, lied to, intimidated, fired, and shot his generals until he had a loyal cadre who would support him completely—the same goal he had about Germans in general. He believed that politics and war should both be approached by having a clear vision of and fanatical commitment to in-group domination, as well as expulsion or extermination of all people not fanatically loyal to that vision.

And, because of those beliefs about belief, rhetoric, and war, he lost the war.

As an aside, I’ll mention that there are lots of other examples of leaders in both business and politics whose insistence on only listening to people with fanatical commitment to the vision led them to disaster, whether it’s the disaster of the USSR, or of Theranos.

We like to believe that evil people, and I think Hitler was evil, know that they are evil. But they don’t. Hitler thought he was on the side of Good. He sincerely believed that the world was facing an apocalyptic battle between Good (Aryans) and Evil (Jews and their stooges and tools). And, because he was on the side of Good, anything he did was good. That’s Machiavellianism—the means (even if they’re actions or policies we would normally condemn as immoral) are transmuted to morally good if our ends are good. But we all think our ends are good. Hitler’s weren’t, but he thought they were.

There is a long battle in western European philosophy grounded in what some (including me) would argue is a misreading of Plato: philosophy is the study of what is, and rhetoric is the study of what people can be persuaded is. Since Plato employed Aristotle to teach rhetoric in his Academy, I don’t think Plato was as dismissive of rhetoric as some philosophers would like to think. But, in any case, there is some justice to the characterization of rhetoric as the study of what and how people can come to believe that a particular way of seeing the world, a restricted range of our policy options, this representation of that group, what it means to be loyal—that is, how people come to believe. After all, we don’t go to war because of what the world is, but because of what we believe the world to be.

And we’re often wrong.

While we aren’t Hitler, we’re all people who engage in self-justification, self-servedness, short-term grasping, and in-group favoritism, and those tendencies don’t help us make good decisions. Those impulses constrain our abilities to listen to others, treat others fairly, imagine other experiences, reflect effectively on our own commitments, reason usefully about our policy options, consider unpleasant data, hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others. This book is about how and why we do that, especially when it comes to the question of war.

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.