A good post from Tim Dunlop
Posted by DeLong at May 13, 2003 03:05 PM | TrackBackthe road to surfdom: It's one thing to strongly disagree with the likes of the Bush Administration or the Howard Government, or Tony Blair's Labor Party. In fact, I'd suggest sanity and citizenship demand nothing less. But those who persist in comparing them to Stalin and Hitler etc. really miss the point and perhaps blind themselves to stuff like this. So while I'm (once again) having a go at the Bush Administration (in the last few posts) for, well, just about everything, let's not forget to note what went on under Saddam Hussein:
The remains of 15,000 people killed by the regime of Saddam Hussein have been found in mass graves discovered last week in the central city of Hilla, site of ancient Babylon, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) said Tuesday.
"In the last week, four sites have been discovered in Al-Hilla city alone, with approximately 15,000 bodies," said Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesman of the group led by US-backed Ahmed Chalabi...
The remains of 15,000 people killed by the regime of Saddam Hussein have been found in mass graves discovered last week in the central city of Hilla, site of ancient Babylon, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) said Tuesday.
The INC? Now there's a credible source.
Posted by: Billmon on May 13, 2003 03:23 PMProbably true. But what does it have to do with whether our leaders lied in order to get a war started, and whether we're going to be able to do anything about that?
Posted by: IssuesGuy on May 13, 2003 03:35 PMme? I have no doubt that saddam was a tyrannical murderer in the true stalinist mode, but as billmon says, the credibility of the INC, source of so-many wrong-headed Bush Admin moves already, is nonexistent.
Posted by: howard on May 13, 2003 03:36 PMHow many of them were there when the invasion of Koweit? And in a lot of other places?
DSW
Posted by: Antoni Jaume on May 13, 2003 03:36 PMme? I have no doubt that saddam was a tyrannical murderer in the true stalinist mode, but as billmon says, the credibility of the INC, source of so-many wrong-headed Bush Admin moves already, is nonexistent.
Posted by: howard on May 13, 2003 03:39 PMme? I have no doubt that saddam was a tyrannical murderer in the true stalinist mode, but as billmon says, the credibility of the INC, source of so-many wrong-headed Bush Admin moves already, is nonexistent.
Posted by: howard on May 13, 2003 03:40 PMNo one doubts Saddam was a bad guy. But I suspect if Saddam was still useful to the US (fighting the Iranians, for example), he would still be in power and the government of the United States of America would be telling everyone how Saddam was such a strong leader in the war on terrorism.
Maybe we did a good thing in Iraq. But I don't believe good things will follow in the wake of lies, forgery and self-deceit.
Posted by: Troy McClure on May 13, 2003 04:21 PMLet's see a list of those who actually compared Bush to Stalin and Hitler. I suspect the list is very short.
Wasn't H. R. Haldeman Hitler? And we were told that various Clinton folks were Stalin.
Posted by: John Thullen on May 13, 2003 06:09 PMHmmm... okay, Stalin and Hitler comparisons for (basically) democratically elected leaders are getting rather stale, I admit. What about Indira Ghandi or Ferdinand Marcos comparisons, though? One needn't be a horrific, genocidal monster to be a bad leader who undermines the country's economy and traditions of justice, and I think Bush would likely be a dictator-president of some sort if it weren't for the well-developed authority of U.S. institutions like judicial review and constitutional authority (that is to say, Bush's rule is not like Marcos's, but if American institutions were like the Philippines' institutions, Bush's rule would likely resemble Marcos's.). I might also say that if it weren't for the strength U.S. institutions, Richard Nixon and Franklin D. Roosevelt might also have been dictators of some form.
Okay... I feel like I danced on the line of being horribly slanderous to the current administration. What do you think?
Hitler and Stalin analogies, though, are horribly stale, regardless of their (nonexistent) accuracy!
Posted by: Julian Elson on May 13, 2003 08:00 PM"Hitler and Stalin analogies, though, are horribly stale, regardless of their (nonexistent) accuracy!"
How about comparisons with Mussolini?
In Martin Clark: Modern Italy 1871-1995; Longman (2nd ed. 1996), on page 250, where the author writes about the policies of Mussolini's fascist government: "They seemed to offer 'a third way', between capitalism and Bolshevism, which looked attractive in the Depression."
The author is an academic historian at Edinburgh University and the book was published before Tony Blair became prime minister of Britain in 1997 and commended a Third Way.
Coincidence?
In Geoffrey Foote: The Labour Party's Political Thought: A History (3rd edition, 1997), page 311: "However it was with the idea of a state planning agency that Holland [sometime Labour MP for Vauxhall in London and previously an academic at Sussex University] hoped to show the new possibilities open to a more just economy. He looked to the Italian example of the IRI (the Industrial Reconstruction Institute), set up by Mussolini and used by subsequent Italian governments to develop the economy. This had, of course, already been tried through the IRC (the Industrial Reorganization Corporation) set up as part of the [UK] National Plan in 1966, but the IRC had been too small to have much effect on the British economy. A revamped IRC in the form of a National Enterprise Board would, however, have a major effect in stimulating the private sector through an active policy of state intervention and direction."
Holland's book: Socialist Challenge (1974), goes into more detail in proposing state investment institutions modelled on those of Mussolini's fascist government. On the evidence from independent sources, successive Labour governments in Britain have found inspiration in Mussolini.
On comparisons between European socialist parties and the Nazis, the formal name of which was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, besides Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944), we have from Peter Temin: Lessons from the Great Depression: The Lionel Robbins Lectures for 1989; MIT Press (1989), p 117:
"'In the long run, the Nazis aimed essentially at an economic system which would be an alternative to capitalism and communism, supporting neither a laissez-faire attitude nor total planning.' [citation to Hardach: The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century; University of California Press (1980), p 66 ] They introduced administrative controls over investment through licensing and direct allocation of raw materials. But their brand of socialism emphasised central control over economic activity rather than public ownership of firms. Instead of dispossessing private owners, the Nazis severely circumscribed the scope within which the nominal owners could make choices by currency controls, taxes on profits and direct allocation measures of the state."
In W Brustein: The Logic of Evil - The Social Origins of the Nazi Party 1925-33; Yale UP (1996), p. 51: "The Nazi Party leaders were savvy enough to realise that pure racial anti-semitism would not set the party apart from the pack of racist, anti-semitic, and ultranationalist groups that abounded in post-1918 Germany. Instead, I would suggest, the Nazi success can be attributed largely to the economic proposals found in the party's programs, which in an uncanny fashion integrated elements of 18th and 19th century nationalist-etatist philosophy with Keynesian economics. Nationalist etatism is an ideology that rejects economic liberalism and promotes the right of the state to intervene in all spheres of life including the economy."
The fundamental program of the Nazi Party, set out in 1920 and not subsequently amended, included besides notorious racist features:
11. The abolition of incomes unearned by work.
13. We demand the nationalisation of all businesses which have been formed into corporations [trusts].
14. We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.
15. We demand the extensive development of insurance for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of of a healthy middle class, the immediate communalising of big department stores, and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders, and that utmost consideration shall be shown to all small traders in the placing of State and municpal orders.
17. We demand a land reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
Source: J Noakes and G Pridham (eds): Nazism 1919-1945 - Vol 1 The Rise to Power 1919-1934; University of Exeter Press (1996).
Apart from certain resonances with present opportunities for profitable investment in rearmament, this quote from a speech by Goering in 1936 by John Hiden: Republican and Fascist Germany (1996), page 128, reads in part much like some socialist rhetoric I have come across, viz: Production for use, not profit - regardless of cost:
"The context to which we look forward calls for enormous efficiency. No end to rearmament is in sight. All that matters is victory or defeat. If we conquer, the business world will be fully idemnified. We must not reckon profit and loss according to the book, but only according to political needs. There must be no calculation of cost. I require that you do all that you can and to prove that part of the national fortune is in your hands. Whether new investment can be written off in every case is a matter of indifference. We are playing for the highest stakes. What can be more profitable than rearmament orders."
Stalin evidently found no insuperable ideological objections to the Friendship Treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, signed on 28 September 1939 when Britain and France were already at war - Norman Davies: Europe; OUP (1996), page 1001-
Posted by: Bob Briant on May 13, 2003 10:33 PMAddendum
A socilist slant was not unique to German and Italian fascism. It was also a feature of the pathetic and utterly abortive attempt by Sir Oswald Mosley to start a fascist movement in Britain in the 1930s. We have this contemporary description in the diary of George Orwell while he was researching the background for the book that became: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). The diary entry for 16 March 1936 reads:
"Last night to hear [Sir Oswald] Mosley speak at the Public Hall [Barnsley, South Yorkshire], which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full - about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap - Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied 'We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.' . . ." [George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940; Penguin Books, p. 230]
The significance is that it was a contemporary account by an unusally acute observer of politics and not intended for publication - the diary was not published until 1950, after Orwell's death. As Orwell writes: ". . M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle." What is also certain is that Mosley himself regarded his politics as leftist. He had been a cabinet minister in Ramsay Macdonald's Labour government of 1929-31 until resigning in 1930 on the issue that the government was doing too little to address the mounting problem of unemployment. In a letter to The (London) Times [26 April 1968], Mosley wrote: "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics."
Incidentally, in the later 1940s Mosley was one of the early proponents of European integration but then Hitler had the same idea.
Nice Comment from Mr. Dunlop. It reminds one of Michael Totten's now infamous blog post of a week or two ago, subsequently adapted into a WSJ editorial.
Totten made a lot of rather silly sweeping generalizations, but he also stumbled across a very powerful insight about the trite and tiresome habit of people on the right calling liberals "communists," and people on the left calling conservatives "fascists".
Totten argued that dumb liberals call conservatives fascists because they fundamentally don't understand anything about historical fascisim. They say stupid things about Bush not being any better than Hussein because they don't grasp the staggering brutality of the Hussein regime. To such people, Bush is bad, and thus, Hussein, even if he's bad too, can't be any worse. Because hey, asking for expanded wiretapping authority is the exact same thing as running a torture state complete with children's prisons. Isn't it?
But dumb conservatives call liberals communists, not because they are ignorant of communism, but because they are ignorant of contemporary western liberalism. They honestly seem to believe that the Hiliary Clintons and Barbara Boxers of the world want to abolish private enterprise. Because hey, calling for universal single-payer health insurance is the exact same thing as agitating for the Dictatorship of the Porletariat. Isn't it?
Of cousre, we'd all be better off if the "Bush is Hitler" and "Clinton is Stalin" crowds grew up and started making real, informed arguments. But it helps to understand that these two similar, and similarly obnoxious, political habits of laziness don't neccessarily come from the same source.
Posted by: sd on May 14, 2003 07:26 AMI think we've stumbled upon a winning campaign slogan.
"Bush- not nearly as bad as Saddam, way better than Hitler!"
Posted by: Instahack on May 14, 2003 11:08 AM