Left2Right

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Posted by: john t

Don H you must have missed Herbert Spencer's Man Versus The State,it show's. I'll be happy to photo copy parts of it and mail them to you on the theory that you can still teach an old dog new tricks.

Posted by: john t | Apr 17, 2005 9:46:48 AM

Posted by: Dan Velleman

Koons' items 4 and 8 make an interesting combination:

4. Liberals complain incessantly that conservatives don't know or understand them yet have never spent more than five minutes listening to conservatives or reading their works.
8. Liberals are boring, since all they ever have to say is "yada, yada, yada, yada,..." [Sorry, I stopped listening after the second 'yada'.]

Posted by: Dan Velleman | Apr 17, 2005 10:14:31 AM

Posted by: ya hoznana

One thing that most non-republicans know how to do is count dead bodies: such as 15,000+ dead Iraqi civilians. While not agreeing with Michael Moore in toto, he does grasp the concept of accountability, something which Coulter (or Koons) and BushCo don't. And as the ad hominem character of this post indicates, conservatives, following in the tradition of TailGunner Joe, tend to rely more on insinuations and defamation than the facts themselves. The facts of the Bush Admin. are that it's "in the pocket" of the wealthy and the powerful. But in some sense the American conservatives are the Wehrmacht to the democrat's vichy.

Posted by: ya hoznana | Apr 17, 2005 10:50:13 AM

Posted by: Literally Retarded

ya hoznana -

Yeah. I hate ad hominem characterization, too.

Posted by: Literally Retarded | Apr 17, 2005 11:10:14 AM

Posted by: Josh Jasper

John Cleese is a liberal. Groucho Marx was a liberal. Rob is either misinformed, or has no idea what most people consider funny.

Posted by: Josh Jasper | Apr 17, 2005 11:51:43 AM

Posted by: Untenured Republican

ya hoznana:

Cool! You get WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam (well, maybe we can split Vietnam, but you get the lions' share-- fair enough?). I get the Civil War (nyah nyah), the Spanish-American War (blush), Panama and two Iraq Wars. Whoever gets the lowest bodycount wins. 'Ray! I win! (No fair talking about toppling evil neither--that's a wash).

Don:

Love the piece, but you leave us speechless. What can one say? Rumor has it that both you and I simply play at partisan because, as Nietzsche said, every man with sufficient intelligence thinks his way through, and out of, his party. The evidence is starting to accumulate, I fear...

Posted by: Untenured Republican | Apr 17, 2005 12:28:09 PM

Posted by: David Velleman

Maybe his post was a parody. (He couldn't be serious, could he?)

Posted by: David Velleman | Apr 17, 2005 12:29:34 PM

Posted by: Mona

One thing that most non-republicans know how to do is count dead bodies: such as 15,000+ dead Iraqi civilians.

Uh-huh. Like the bodies that many "Progressives" willfully refused to count in Stalin's purges, the planned Ukrainian famine, and the slaughter in the Katyn Forest in Poland? Liberal NYT and their boy Walter Duranty got a Pulitzer for such grotesque blindness. Or how about the bodies that have not died in Iraq because a genocidal maniac is no longer around to torture them to death and hold the entire nation in a grip of absolute terror?

And you invoke Tailgunner Joe. Fact is, while he may have been a reckless demagogue, many liberals dropped the ball on Communist infiltration of American government and industry. Hundreds, if not thousands, of highly-placed Americans, including Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, and Lauchlin Currie, were, indeed, turning over intelligence to their Soviet Masters. Marxist physicist Ted Hall, from his place in the Manhattan Project, sped up Soviet acquisition of the bomb by years, thus emboldening Uncle Joe to take the position he did about North Korea, and have a war. And the "martyred" Rosenbergs? Absolutely guilty. (Tho Ethel less so, by far, then her husband.)

Since the CIA released the Venona decrypts in '96, and the Russians opened up some GRU and Comintern archives for study by historians in the 90s, there has been a watershed of documentary evidence that American Communists, and some non-Communist "Progressives" (e.g., Harry Dexter White) spied for Joseph Stalin, a genocidal tyrant. It has been most entertaining to observe how the left has responded to this evidence, mostly with petulance and anger. (Victor Navasky at the Nation, wondering, gee, what is really so wrong with sharing information?)

(I should point out that some liberals were hard at battle against Communists, and understood exactly how vile Stalin was, and what domestic Communists were up to. Hubert Humphrey, Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Draper, Sydney Hook, Walter Reuther. But these also suffered from vicious accusations of hysteria and of aiding the right. )

As the repentant ex-Marxist and famed historian Eugene Genovese wrote in the socialist journal Dissent, on the left there has been: "a willful refusal to examine the evidence that has been piled high from the beginning...In a noble effort to liberate the human race from violence and oppression we broke all records for mass slaughter...we have a disquieting number of corpses to account for."

So, I'm really not inclined to listen to pious claims of body-counting that non-Republicans allegedly engage in, by invidious contrast with those who may vote Republican.

The left lacks the moral authority to make such accusations. Glass houses, and all that.

Posted by: Mona | Apr 17, 2005 12:41:34 PM

Posted by: ya hozna

Mona--

Who was making apologies for Stalin? Not I. I am not a marxist anyways: those who protested Vietnam were not all marxist either (you may recall Bertrand Russell voiced his opposition to the US military acts) . And while the starvation of the Kulaks and other stalinist acts were horrifying, there is evidence to suggest a few things--much of what was happening was not directly attributable to a decision of Uncle Joe but to his generals and henchmen (such as Beria and Zhukov). Stalin did not initiate an Operation Barbarossa as did Hitler and the Wehrmacht, nor did they operate death camps anything like the nazis were doing (and numerous republicans such as the Bush family and McCarthy did have some connections to nazis and german corporations). Russian and Ukrainian casualties due to the german invasion are somewhere near 20 million.
(please don't mention the Hayek joke-thesis that nazis were leftists).

Old-school republicans such as Eisenhower (not to say Abe Lincoln, who appears nearly Nader-like in some comments) were fairly liberal and respectable: Truman himself was, as far as the few things I have read show, quite the authoritarian, and his actions in Korea without approval of the Congress set a poor precedent for future presidents--Dem and GOP--to follow. Yet Coulter and her ilk would, given their ludicrous attacks on Truman and "liberals", would seem to be implying that some massive World War if not nukes in asia were justified.

An LBJ or Nixon differ only slightly but the worst bombing in 'Nam seemed to have occured under Nixon and Kissinger.

Anways I tend more to low-rent Camusian views: extreme left and right both tend towards pathopsychology. Yr in the a**hole of the world, Captain.

Posted by: ya hozna | Apr 17, 2005 1:11:49 PM

Posted by: Mona

David V., he seems serious to me. What I cannot imagine is that Don H. took Koons seriously. Any post that starts out in the format (and implicitly Koons is doing so) "All X are..." sends up red flags for me. On occasion it is accurate to ascribe universal deficits to a constituency, but very, very seldom. (Of course, I think Don was just using Koons as a launching pad for his pithy and entertaining post.)

Among other things, I'd like to know how Prof Koons defines "liberal."

I would also add, if Koons suffers from the delusion that only liberals engage in intemperate, vicious and ad hominem remarks, he should take a gander at the comments section at Free Republic. An absolute cesspool, especially on all things Schiavo.

Posted by: Mona | Apr 17, 2005 1:13:57 PM

Posted by: DBCooper

A Ten Things I Hate About Liberals list, and no mention of hippies? That list is a sham.

Posted by: DBCooper | Apr 17, 2005 1:23:26 PM

Posted by: Mona

And while the starvation of the Kulaks and other stalinist acts were horrifying, there is evidence to suggest a few things--much of what was happening was not directly attributable to a decision of Uncle Joe but to his generals and henchmen (such as Beria and Zhukov).

Actually, this is false. Among other things discovered in the archives of the former Soviet Union, is a signed order from Joseph Stalin to massacre thousands of Polish bourgeoisie at Katyn (many on the left had, for decades, insisted it was more likely that the Germans committed this atrocity). Further, Comintern records demonstrate that he ordered the death of Trotsky and enlisted American, Canadian and other Communists to aid in that assassination, and the killing of other defectors and their families. Stalin ran his show with an iron fist. The documentation and testimony from survivors is overwhelming on this point.

And I did not say you are a Marxist. But the fact is, the left -- non-Marxists -- for the most part, was and angered by opposition to Stalin and domestic Communism. It was wrong. Deadly wrong.

And it is wrong about Iraq as well. Almost none of the promised parade of horrible that invasion was supposed to bring about has occurred; instead, Iraq is moving toward a functional democracy and out from under life lived in a regime that ruled by terror. How this cannot be seen as a good thing for humanity boggles my mind.

Posted by: Mona | Apr 17, 2005 1:26:58 PM

Posted by: Untenured Republican

Mona:

For some reason, I find my thoughts turning toward Resnais' _Hiroshima Mon Amour_. Or possibly Schopenhauer.

This may seem like odd advice, but: Give Up. It's hopeless. What Hitler said about the Turks is true of the Communist Holocaust: no one cares, no one will ever care. The strategy is to deny that anyone was ever for it, which is far more effective than to deny that it ever happened. Insert enough generations between us and them, and the result is historical oblivion. For awhile I thought otherwise, but I now think that anyone who tries to refight these old battles ends up looking like they are complaining about atrocities under Napoleon. Or under Xerxes.

Now if we can just forget about the Nazi Holocaust too, we can all get on with our lives, and the writing of new pages in the book of history with new gallons of blood. As any serial monogamist will tell you: memory is *so* overrated.

Posted by: Untenured Republican | Apr 17, 2005 2:03:26 PM

Posted by: ya hozna

The 20,000 dead Polish officers at Katyn is horrifying, but quite a bit less so than, uh, the nazis' extermination of millions. The Katyn thing is a tragedy, but some of the catholic poles were siding with germans; thus Stalin and his officers probably thought that catholic poles might side with the nazis. That doesn't excuse anything of course. It's incorrect, however, to claim that all the American liberals were implicitly pro-stalin--there were numerous figures who supported Trotsky ( John Dewey and other academics did). As an afionado of Orwell's writing, I am quite aware of Stalinist terrors, but that does not entail that one embraces the likes of Annie Coulter. Moreover, you didn't respond to my hypothetical regarding Annchen Coulter, GOP Shewolf: given her charges that Truman was "soft" and her embrace of McCarthy, is she implying that some nuclear war was justifiable? She's a bloodthirsty, jingoistic nutcase really.

Posted by: ya hozna | Apr 17, 2005 2:06:02 PM

Posted by: RSA

Almost none of the promised parade of horrible that invasion was supposed to bring about has occurred; instead, Iraq is moving toward a functional democracy and out from under life lived in a regime that ruled by terror. How this cannot be seen as a good thing for humanity boggles my mind.

If it turns out that Iraq ends up as a functioning democracy, that will be a wonderful thing. It's still reasonable, however, to think that the war in Iraq was a bad idea. There was an enormous risk involved, and the Bush administration showed in any number of ways that it didn't take that risk seriously. It's fine to say that everything turned out okay (as far as we can see at this point). What I worry about is that Bush will view his success as a justification for the process that was followed, an ends-justify-the-means argument. To exaggerate a bit, if I win a sweepstakes at work, I don't sink my life savings into lottery tickets, thinking that I've got some special analytical ability. The Bush folks don't even seem capable of looking back and seeing what went wrong.

Posted by: RSA | Apr 17, 2005 2:12:03 PM

Posted by: Mona

ya hozna: Let us return to the original point. You wrote that non-Republicans are busy counting the dead in Iraq, in the context of Don's discussion of a sophomoric indictment of liberals by some rightwinger. I did and do take strong exception to your implicit claim that left/liberals are vested with the moral authority to make such pronouncements.

You may not be a Stalin apologist, but many of your intellectual forebears were, and a few still are. And even you seek to diminish the Katyn Forest massacre by invoking the Nazi's genocide of millions. News Flash: Stalin killed more millions than did Hitler, and Katyn was merely one example of depravity that was denied for decades by many on the left. Yes, you can add John Dewey to my list of liberals who got Stalin and the CPUSA's number. There were some, and they suffered mightily for their brave insight at the hands of other liberals. Sidney Hook, a social democrat to his death, was made a virtual pariah among "Progressives," for daring to denounce Stalinism and domestic Communist infiltration of American govt and other sectors of the society. Anti-anti-communism was the position of all who did not want to appear gauche.

But Untenured Republican is quite correct. The left today wants Stalin and the era of Communist espionage and atrocity to go down a memory hole, and there is not going to be the accounting for that period in history -- in which they and they and/or their ideological parents were so UTTERLY WRONG -- because it is, well, embarrassing, Best not examined too much.Ellen Schrecker, an accomplished scholar of American Communism who is most unhappy with what the Venona decrypts and the Soviet archives have revealed (and which devastate much of her prior scholarship), lamented while speaking before the American Historical Association: "We should recognize the issue of communism and Soviet espionage has become an antiquarian backwater. After all, the Cold War is over." Prof Anna Kasten Nelson dismisses the new books coming out dealing with this wealth of damning new evidence: "...it is time to move on." [Quotes taken from one of those book, by Profs, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, "In Denial."] Yeah, this is the kind of sentiment one expects from HISTORIANS, fer god's sake: antiquarian backwaters (from about half a century ago) are dull, and historians should move on. These two might want to check their job descriptions.

But, notwithstanding that this era, in which many on the left apologized for a mass murderer and totalitarian, and who virulently objected to any who criticized him, whenever any of you descendents who have "moved on" dares to raise the notion that you care about human life in contrast to those who may vote Republican, I shall bring up this late unpleasantness.

Posted by: Mona | Apr 17, 2005 3:00:27 PM

Posted by: ya hozna

Another amusing thing about conservatives, especially the Christian type (such as those whacky Xtians at Right Reason), is how they will rant on about the stalinist horrors (and, yes, they were real), and then turn around and praise "Christian values" and proclaim how we should all be more pious and follow biblical principles, never making the Phil. 101 inference that any putative God would be ultimately responsible for world wars and genocide (as well as tsunamis), regardless if brought about by Stalinists or nazis.

Posted by: ya hozna | Apr 17, 2005 3:10:59 PM

Posted by: ya hozna

Miss Mona:

Let's get this right. Anyone who supports the democrats implictly supports people who at one time may have supported communism and thus stalinism, and thus has no moral ground to criticize any subsequent actions taken by any conservative or Republican. So by voting for Kerry, I in effect voted for Stalin.

heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh

Posted by: ya hozna | Apr 17, 2005 3:24:18 PM

Posted by: Don Herzog

Mona hazards a generalization of her own:

The left today wants....

This leftist rallied early and hard to George Orwell, to John Dewey, to Emma Goldman turning sour on Lenin early and spending years trying hard to alert leftists in the West that the Soviet Union was shaping up as a disaster on wheels. (Mencken published her in The American Mercury. Good for him.)

Lots of human history, especially the twentieth century, is a sickening bloodbath. The Nazis. The Soviets. Pol Pot. And on and on, for all too many more. (Pedantic footnote: Early on, Edmund Burke wrote a Vindication of Natural Society which insists that governments cause untold human suffering. Scholars have usually taken it as a satire on Bolingbroke. But Murray Rothbard and others have argued that the young Burke was some kind of anarchist.)

Mona's generalization alas is in fact a pretty good one. But as she agrees, there are honorable exceptions on the left. And as she should agree, there were individuals on the right ready to apologize for the excesses of their guys, even if those excesses were on a hugely smaller scale than Hitler and Stalin. (I'm thinking for instance of the Kirkpatrick-style defense of "authoritarian" regimes in Latin America, pressed when people worried about death squads and other human rights abuses.)

There is a serious political question about whether left or liberal views end up, against the noble intentions of their sponsors, producing floods of blood. If they did, that would be more than ample reason to renounce them. Me, I think of liberalism as in large part a theory about the dangers of state power, and the liberal support of a robust state/society distinction, lots of separate institutions, and a robust civil society, as a fine strategy against the overweening tyrannical state power.

Yes, I recognize that many readers here imagine liberals and leftists as people who turn to the Omnipotent State to Solve All Problems. I think they're wrong about that.

But oh how things have gone sour and somber. Here we could have been delighting in Prof. Koons's profundities.

Posted by: Don Herzog | Apr 17, 2005 3:34:03 PM

Posted by: Mona

Don H.: Yes, there *were* leftists who tried to raise the hue and cry about Lenin and Stalin; Emma Goldman was one such, and she was pilloried by the majority of Progressives for it. (I just saw a fine bio of Emma on PBS, and it made that point, as well as that when she sputtered to Lenin about people having free speech, he basically just patted her on the head and informed her that she was a naive little girl.)

But in the larger discussion, and what I mean about "the left," is that there is incredibly strong institutional resistance to admitting the truth about the spies, and Stalinism. Emory Prof. Harvey Klehr is among those historians who studied Venona and who were given access to the Soviet archives, and then commenced prolific publication about the horrors and the espionage. The overwhelming response among others in his field has been...to deny and continue to defend Stalin among some, to ignore the new scholarship, or to angrily claim this is stuff that is no longer relevant and that the alleged "triumpahslism" the new scholarship evinces is distasteful. Writing on an academic list that enforces rules of civility even more severe than those at L2R, Klehr contains his seething anger in a post titled Holocaust Denial and Stalinism Denial .

And ya hozna: No, I do not think, and did not remotely imply, that a vote for Kerry is a vote for Stalinism. What I did argue, correctly, is that those of you who voted for Kerry and are all busy counting bodies in Iraq, and holding them up as an indictment of any who voted for Bush -- and implying that only your side has the moral sensibility to care about dead bodies -- might want to first count the bodies that most of your ideological forebears denied even existed, while they indulged and even admired the genocidal dictator who produced them. (And yes, a lot of liberals admired Stalin, and thought, "gosh, his way isn't our way, but isn't it interesting what he's trying to do over there." See, e.g., Joseph Davies and Mission to Moscow)At least the dead in Iraq did not die in vain; a democracy is growing there and a brutal dictator who rendered life *hell* has been removed.

And btw, I have yet to encounter even one of the historians who have been pouring out books and articles based on the new data from the Soviet archives, who have a nice word to say about Ann Coulter. They think she is polemicist who, as one of them puts it, depicts a "cartoon character" version of history lacking in necessary distinctions.(And they don't like Joe McCarthy, at all.) Certainly Harvey Klehr does not think Harry Truman was a secret Stalinist or had "treason" in his heart, and in fact, credits Truman with the security measures he finally took that routed many spies from govt posts. I agree, and don't know why you have been wanting me to address Coulter, whom I do not at all care for (altho I sometimes find her witty, which she is, even if one disagrees with her).

Posted by: Mona | Apr 17, 2005 4:05:52 PM

Posted by: Bret

Don Herzog, you are not a liberal. I consider myself moderately conservative and your views are pretty close to mine. I consider you, as you put it once, a "milquetoast moderate".

So I'm sure that reading Koons' screed, if you thought he was applying it to you, would have made you laugh (not just smirk).

Now, go to the democratic underground, michaelmoore.com, and/or moveon.org to learn how real liberals think and speak. Then apply Koons' decalogue to them and you might find it fits a lot better.

Posted by: Bret | Apr 17, 2005 4:09:43 PM

Posted by: Untenured Republican

Reflection on the human condition quickly and inevitably becomes somber. All that may be left to the thinking and feeling human being when confronted with it is that "smile of outward and inner contempt" that Joseph Brodsky wrote of in his impeccable "Flight from Byzantium." Don is quite correct that opposition to tyranny lies at the heart of the liberal tradition properly understood. But Mona would be correct in detecting a certain defensiveness among far too many among my brothers and sisters who Vote Differently. If I am honest, I would have to say that the experience of that defensiveness had quite a lot to do with my own political odyssey, and the strange bedfellows I now find myself snuggled up with, some of whom seem to be quite confused about certain little things like separation of powers, individual autonomy, the proper relationship between religion and government, just for starters. Since "fiscal responsibilty" is something of a wash, I want to report for the record that if I started hearing a critical mass of Democrats having audible and appropriate Sister Souljah moments about the meaning and extent of twentieth century democide, I'd switch parties. In a heartbeat.

Posted by: Untenured Republican | Apr 17, 2005 4:12:41 PM

Posted by: Don Herzog

Oh, here Bret is extending his hand in peace and friendship, and I am going to have to oh so sadly decline. He writes,

Don Herzog, you are not a liberal. I consider myself moderately conservative and your views are pretty close to mine. I consider you, as you put it once, a "milquetoast moderate".

I'd introduced that as a possibility only to sardonically imply that it was false. Predictably I will deny that the "real liberals" spout off at the websites that Bret mentions, though I should add, in caution, that my quick forays into those settings have left me irritated by their shrill dull self-congratulatory tones. Blecch. Does Bret think Anne Coulter is a "real conservative"? Does he want to march behind her banner?

I'm sure I'm a liberal. And — don't flinch — I'm sure some of those we call "conservatives" are liberals, too. I mean the more limited-government market-friendly kind, and emphatically not the "social conservative" kind worried about "values." The latter seem quiet in the blogosphere, or at least this part of it. But if Bret is the former kind of conservative, then he's just an eighteenth/nineteenth century liberal.

Welcome aboard, Bret.

Posted by: Don Herzog | Apr 17, 2005 4:28:50 PM

Posted by: Mona

Untenured Republican writes: I want to report for the record that if I started hearing a critical mass of Democrats having audible and appropriate Sister Souljah moments about the meaning and extent of twentieth century democide, I'd switch parties. In a heartbeat.

Let me strongly second that. And for all the reasons you set forth. On the domestic front, I am increasingly alarmed by what Bush & Co. are doing. I didn't vote for Christian Reconstructionists ( a *true* American Taliban mvmt) to be guiding policy on judicial nominations and the proper role of our courts.

Give me a Democratic candidate with a sane foreign policy, who will make sure those who want to hurt my country, or others, that such evil-doers will believe with that Dem in ofc we will hurt them back, hard, and I'll sign up. I've been seeing this sentiment from libertarians and moderates who voted for Bush, quite all over.

Posted by: Mona | Apr 17, 2005 4:31:13 PM

Posted by: Ted

Seriously? OK, I'll go first: I reject and repudiate Stalin as much as and as vigorously as I reject and repudiate Hitler; I do not defend him now, and I've never defended him in the past. The reason you don't hear a lot of liberals doing this, I suspect, is that most liberals don't know that much, or care that much, about Stalin. He died about fifteen years before I was born, so he certainly wasn't any kind of factor in my intellectual development. In fact (and, Don, I hope you don't regard this as a failure of my education) I don't think I've ever read anything he wrote. Mona seems to want to taint me with guilt by association: since I belong to a political party with some people who once wrongly believed in Stalin, I, and the whole party, are somehow supporters of Stalinism as well. I fail to understand why we liberals should be spending our time condemning Stalin but if you guys want me to do it this once, I have no problem with that. If there are still some aging people on the left who defend Stalin, well, they're wrong, but they're a tiny, uninfluential group.

And, Bret, michaelmoore.com is representative of liberals about as much as littlegreenfootballs.com is representative of conservatives.....

Posted by: Ted | Apr 17, 2005 4:49:12 PM

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