…and does it matter?
I think the answers are yes, and no. This artificial distinction between “genocide” and the mass murder on a grander scale by Stalin, Mao et al is just a means to distract from the fact that Hitler was not the worst man in history, and that his depredations were actually typical of the left.
Roga’s post reminded me of what I once heard someone say (sardonically, I believe) about either Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun (I forget which): that he was the greatest humanitarian of all time. The reason? Because he didn’t care what color, race or religion you were: he just killed everyone equally.
Rand’s response to the increasingly illogical, strawman- and non-sequitur-prone Bob-1 (clearly a graduate of the Chris Gerrib School of Reasoning) was “You have clearly not been reading for comprehension.” Doesn’t that seem to be true of all the statists who post here? But is it actually true? In some cases, I suspect, they have built-in censors that automatically screen out anything they read that would contradict the Party line or confutes their own weak arguments. In other cases I would guess that they are deliberately sidestepping or misinterpreting what is written in order to go straight for the strawman.
Curt, how do you Hitler and Stalin killed their victims? Starvation and malnutrition were a big part of it.
Curt, how do you think Hitler and Stalin killed their victims? Starvation and malnutrition were a big part of it.
how do you think Hitler and Stalin killed their victims?
Spend 10 seconds and google it.
Starvation and malnutrition were a big part of it.
And I just wasted 10 seconds I’ll never get back typing this.
Curt, my mother (who is reading this) asked me to tell you that her aunt, Frieda Bassman, weighed 80 pounds when her camp was liberated. Her work camp didn’t have gas chambers– they were being worked, but not to kill them via labor — they were just given as little food as possible and it wasn’t enough. Had the war not ended when it did, she would have starved to death.
But I still wish you’d explain how slavery in America fits into the left vs right ideological perspective that you applied in your post above to an analysis of Stalin’s atrocities and Hitler’s atrocities.
It doesn’t? There ought to be a political-historical extension of Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem which holds that no ideological construct can be profitably applied in a context too radically different from the context that construct was built within. Trying to judge Heian jidai Japan by libertarian standards, for instance, strikes me as fairly pointless. Same goes for Sengoku kidai Japan, although that might play into a closer parallel to the Congo question you pose…
But I’m fairly sure that the ur-libertarian theorists have had things to say about slavery, and most of it wouldn’t have been in tones of approval. This seems apropos, and I’m not even that much of a Bastiat groupie.
Also, you should try and learn the basic functional difference between an anarchist and a contractual libertarian. No sane and honest man can look at an imploded contractual failure like the Congo & see a paradise.
Bob, is there ANYTHING you like about America, past or present? Can you ever leave events 80 years in the past and in a different world wide context alone when comparisons and contrasts are made between what were essentially concurrent events? Just once, I’d like to see or an out and out leftist proclaim how exceptional America really is. I know I’m asking for the impossible but one can hope.
That should be “…or read an…”
Hitler used hard work and little food as one of his methods to kill Jews.
American slaves were malnourished.
Ergo 1860 America = Hitler.
Is that your point Bob-1?
Mao, Hitler, and Stalin were all mass murderers and evil men. The big differences in their murders stem from their choice of victims and their mode of execution. Mao and Stalin targeted their political opponents, more or less. They imprisoned them in camps, worked them to death, and executed them with secret police. Both of them killed millions with artificially-induced famines. Where they are distinguished from earlier tyrants is in the number of people they were able to kill. Now look at Hitler: he also targeted his political opponents, but also singled out groups of people for no other reason than their racial identity. He also exterminated them with an industrialized network of death camps. Again, targeting racial/cultural groups for killing is not especially unique. The scale of Hitler’s killings and the organization entailed is what is particularly horrifying. It’s ridiculous for left wingers to assert that Mao and Stalin are somehow pardonable because of their political ideology, but it’s also a mistake to fail to recognize why Hitler’s crimes fall into a different category of horror.
Bob, as to your question about slavery in America, I don’t think slavery had a strong ideological component or was genocidal in nature. First, the wealthy of any ideological flavor in the South tended to own slaves, even some who were nominally anti-slavery. Similarly, the self-serving, moral rationales for owning slaves varied from egalitarian arguments (such as slaves being unable to provide for themselves) to religious (such as slaves were descended from Cain and hence, it was a religious obligation for the sons of Able to control them) to biological (such as slaves were animals who needed a firm hand to rein in their destructive urges). Sure, these rationales were invariably racist, but that’s about all they had in common, ideologically.
Second, while I gather there were frequent exceptions, slaves generally were allowed to keep their cultures, beliefs and languages. They were also allowed to reproduce. This suggests to me that no real genocidal component to slavery existed.
Sure, slaves were treated worse than free people and hence there was more deaths due to poor health, malnutrition, and illness. But given that those extra deaths did not curb the number of slaves, I don’t see it as being genocidal.
Third, it was possible for a slave to legally become a free person (not just via the Underground Railroad) and citizen. I don’t know how common it was, but some slave holders in their wills would free some or all of their slaves. So you have growing numbers of ex-slaves who are free through legal means and allowed to keep their culture, yet another indication that slavery wasn’t genocidal.
Fourth, it wasn’t unique. Similar examples can be found in the Middle East, North Africa (where it continues today), and Europe.
In all, I don’t see a real analogue to Rand’s discussion of 20th century genocides and mass killings. I must agree that the comparison just seems to add noise to the discussion.
If you want to talk about slavery, it ain’t all about black folks.
http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/the-irish-slave-trade-forgotten-white-slaves/
Bob,
I’m going to try to integrate this for you, but I wont’ be using the confounded ‘left-wing, right-wing’ terms that do little to illuminate an ideology.
Genocide, Mass Murder, Slavery do fit together ideologically. They are all features of the moral theory of Collectivism. Collectivism is the idea that a majority/the state/society/’my group’/the pack, determines morality. What is right or wrong is subjectively determined by the whims of the pack. It follows that pack members are property of the pack. The political theories that catalyzed the specific atrocities in your question are all collectivist: Nationalist Socialism (Fascism), Communism, and Democracy.
Theocracy, another political form of collectivism, has contributed to plenty atrocities as well. It hadn’t been explicitly mentioned yet, but I didn’t want to leave it out since you may have been implying it with your reference to ‘right-wing’, it is hard to say with such a useless phrase.
The alternative moral theory to Collectivism is Individualism. That morality is determined by reality, the neccesities of human life. Which leads to the concepts of natural law and individual rights, that all men are ends in themselves, and not exist to be means to the ends of others. The political theory which holds to Individualism is Capitalism.
In the compromises made with collectivistism and writ into our law when the U.S. was formed, like slavery was, the U.S. traded an in-uetero infection for the chance to be born. We never quite met the noble idea of a Republic ruled by law in practice. There was always the infection of collectivism, which has festered into the Democracy and rule of men we see today.
So no, Slavery in the early U.S. was not a ‘failure’. Certainly not of a ‘noble-in-theory-but-impossible-in-practice’ ideology like collectivism (a contradiction). It was not a failure at all. For any political practice that holds to collectivism, oppression is a feature, not a bug.
interested in a governmentless libertarian paradise
No Bob, government is a necessity. However, overreach is a natural component of government. That is what I opposed. So did our founders which is why they set up government the way they did. Lazy thinking is one way government ends up overreaching.
Slavery is a more complicated subject than the way we usually look at it. If you equate American slavery to genocide, who in American history plays the part of Hitler or Stalin? There is no one. You might as well equate sugar and salt in our diet as genocide… Oh wait, the left does! It’s just as stupid.
Bob, you make it clear your intention is not to understand. Because understanding requires certain things. When you choose to muddy waters by being careless in introducing new themes you are not trying to understand anything… or are simply ignorant of how to understand.
Genocide can include slavery. Slavery can include genocide. They are still distinctly different things.
“Slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life, twice the rate of white babies.”
But, at twice the rate of working class white babies? I doubt it. Poor whites had abysmal infant mortality rates. Slaveholders wanted strong slave babies. I think you are more likely to have seen malign neglect of slaves reaching the end of their productive years.
If you have not seen it, the movie “Gettysburg” is an excellent rendition of Sharra’s “The Killer Angels”. There is a great scene where the grizzled Union sergeant offers to Chamberlain his reason for fighting: to prevent the establishment of a nation ruled by an unaccountable aristocracy such as that which his forbears fled. That is what it really comes down to. The Democratic Party of today affects the pose of an aristocracy, which must govern the peasants for their own good. The Republicans oppose that, as they have always opposed it, as they always will oppose it. The only people who believe the Republicans and Democrats of today have switched sides are those who have no idea of the actual history.
All of which, of course, has little bearing on the Hitler vs. Stalin debate. Everyone of any account today acknowledges the unalloyed evil of slavery. As they do of Hitler. All too many, however, are reticent of judging Stalin with the same unreserved, but well deserved, obloquy. From which Party do those people overwhelmingly, well nigh exclusively, hail?
I like the distinction Nock made between government and the State. Nock defined government (which he seemed to have no problem with) as the agency society uses simply to defend itself from aggression, whether from outside invasion, common criminals, etc.; while the State he defined as by nature and origin* an instrument of plunder. (Or as Voltaire said “the State is the device by which money is lifted from one pocket and put into another.”) It’s silly to say that someone who objects to being plundered by the ruling gang must necessarily be an anarchist, but the kind of straw man argument that State-humpers like to use.
At this point I’d be happy if if some moderate Republicans could at least scale back the plundering back to, say, Eisenhower era levels. As a libertarian friend of mine said thirty years ago, “If we ever get to the point where the main political debate in the US is between limited-government conservatives and Objectivists on one hand, and Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists on the other, it would be like paradise compared to today.”
*Basing this on the sociologist Franz Oppenherimer, who in his work THE STATE argued that states arose simply when nomadic raiders decide to settle down and realized that instead of just looting and torching villages and killing everyone in them, they could let the villagers live and loot them regularly and repeatedly by collecting tribute or taxes. He gives as examples such eearly day looters as “Obama the Hun” and “Genghis Bob(1).”
Bart, I sadly must disagree. Neither Hitler nor slavery are pure evil. That’s what Churchill was trying to tell us about Hitler. Hitler can exist today. Slavery certainly exists today. The problem is that we don’t recognize either. Or some recognize them where they don’t exist.
What’s the difference between a wage slave and a bond servant? The bond servant has job security! Ok, seriously, the bond servant must pay the bond to gain freedom where the wage slave can quit at any time.
Either can be treated abusively but that doesn’t mean abuse is required or exists. Slavery is not in itself evil. The evil is not being able to escape abuse. A person in the military is a form of slave, but we don’t usually recognize it as such. I certainly don’t think of the military as pure evil.
Modern politicians have a lot in common with Hitler. Who knows what they are actually capable of under some circumstance? We can only hope our form of government prevents those circumstances from occurring. Don’t for a second doubt that such evil still exists in some hearts. The percentage of sociopaths in society guarantees that.
Do you not see some similarity between the TSA and Schindler’s list?
It doesn’t matter much to the end user as Rand once put it, but one major difference between Hitler and Stalin is that Hitler’s mass murders were inspired by hatred, whereas Stalin’s were inspired by a cynical desire for power and a ruthless determination to root out all potential threats, real or imagined.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history#United_States_of_America
reader Says:
November 26th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Again, the problem with such tu quoque is that nobody of any consequence denies that the Trail of Tears was unconscionable. How do you feel about Stalin?