Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

If Lenis is Frankenstein then Marx is Frankenstein's teacher Thomas Waldman.

The problem with Lenin as Frankenstein is that Dr. Frankenstein had a medical degree and good intentions.

It's kind of Sadaam predeux. The Bolsheviks were scum but so were the Czars and, as the song goes, I don't like anybody very much

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Your father taught Dr. Frankenstein?

A textbook example of the process that reshapes history into a set of psychologically convincing stories. It's not, as relativists would have it, that we are doomed to such distortions, and we can surely approximate to a true undestanding if we really try; but it's impossible to start teahing or learning history with nuance. White hats and black hats!

That said, Lenin as black-hat Frankenstein - essentially Richard Pipes' account - is however a lot better than Lenin as white-hat Master of History (Edmund Wilson's account).

"the modern conservatives who see no good for the means were so destructive"

Shouldn't this be how *all* decent people ought to see things? Roads to hell, good intentions and all that ...

"Shouldn't this be how *all* decent people ought to see things?"

No good at all, Abiola? Not a single flower blooming in the rubble?

Heck, even Hitler gets credit for the autobahn . . .

Sean Hannity's latest book, "Deliver Us From Evil," is even better than his last. It hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list the week it came out and stayed there for at least five weeks. This explains the huge cover story on Hannity in the latest New York Times magazine, as well as that big NPR profile on him – wait, neither of those happened. Indeed, not a single major mainstream newspaper has reviewed it.

That's unless you include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which briefly mentioned Hannity's book in order to say that it compared unfavorably with another book and to call Hannity an "angry conservative" (redundant in liberal-speak).

The reviewer, Harry Levins, Post-Dispatch "Senior Writer," complained that Hannity's book "reads like a long, long transcript of his television and radio shows." Inasmuch as Hannity's TV show is the second-most-watched show on cable news and his radio show is the No. 2 radio show in America, only a liberal would consider that an insult. Levins is hoping for a book that would read more like a transcript of Al Franken's listener-free show on Airhead America.

Hannity's book is chock-full of something that frequently makes liberals uncomfortable – history. He begins by reciting historic evils such as the Holocaust and the 9-11 terrorist attacks and contrasts those with everyday stories of evil culled from the newspapers: A suicidal woman is poised to jump from a bridge in Seattle and, after a few hours, someone from the crowd below yells out, "Jump, b----, jump!" The woman jumps.

Hannity says we face moral choices between good and evil every day. If we make excuses for evil – Hitler was a "madman," a pedophile priest was "weak" or, as philandering actor Ethan Hawke recently advised us, Bill Clinton "suffered from" infidelity – soon we cease being able to distinguish good from evil at all. (I would add to the excuses for evil, "It's just about sex.") With each choice we make, large and small, we take a step closer to the devil or a step closer to God.

The leaders of the modern Democratic Party, Hannity says, have made excuses for evil for so long that they cannot recognize evil anymore. The closest thing to it in their vocabulary would be "someone who wears fur." And of course, they recognize evil in the person of "George W. Bush," whom they see as the very essence of evil. In fact, Bush may be the only force of evil in the world liberals haven't wanted to appease.

"Deliver Us From Evil" runs through an enormous amount of history that's fun to hear again. Hannity quotes Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, a few years before German warplanes began ravaging Britain, promising the British "peace in our time" and advising them, "Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." (This was just after Chamberlain's "national malaise" speech, if memory serves.)

Chamberlain's proud boast that he had removed "those suspicions and those animosities that have so long poisoned the air" sounds eerily like today's Democrats so eager for the rest of the world to love us. Sen. John Kerry has condemned Bush's "belligerent and myopic unilateralism," and called for a "progressive internationalism." To reprise an old joke from the Cold War, if Democrats aren't on al-Qaida's payroll, they're being gypped.

And speaking of old jokes from the Cold War, Hannity turns to Jimmy Carter next. Carter could see evil in the world; he just mistook it for a rapidly moving bunny rabbit. Reacting to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Carter exclaimed on ABC News: "This action of the Soviets made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office."

Hannity then runs through a few other incidents that might have caught the president's attention – Stalin's and Mao's mass murders, genocide in Cambodia, the Berlin Wall, Soviet tanks crushing uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the personal testimony of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – before concluding: "The evil of communism was no secret." Well, yes, but Carter was distracted by that rabbit.

In his defense, there has not been a documented rabbit attack on a U.S. citizen since Carter left office.

And of course there was Carter's masterful handling of the crisis in Iran, leading America to betray our ally, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi. Even as Carter was back-stabbing this loyal U.S. ally, the Shah was assuring those around him, "The United States has always been our friend, and it won't let me down now." Sadly, there was no one to warn him: "Run for your life! A Democrat is in the White House!"

In addition to covering Carter's accomplishments in Iran, which taught Islamicist animals that Westerners can be made to grovel before terrorism, Hannity reviews what Democrats in Congress have done about brewing trouble in the Middle East over the last 20 years: i.e., nothing.

After Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait in 1990, torturing men and raping women, Rep. Nancy Pelosi took to the floor of the House to say, "I hope the point will be made that we take very seriously the environmental consequences of our actions." Rep. Dick Gephardt said: "History shows that even brutal dictators have been toppled and defeated by sanctions." And so it was again after 9-11. Sixteen months after the attack, John Kerry gave a speech saying, "Mr. President, do not rush to war."

According to the latest polls there's at least a fair chance that an amoral appeaser and foreign suck-up like John Kerry could be our next president. Now everyone go home and get a nice quiet sleep.

"Heck, even Hitler gets credit for the autobahn"

I remember a German foreign student once trying to excuse Hitler's rule with precisely that line of thinking. My response to him at the time is unprintable on this blog; let's just say that I'm an equal opportunity opponent of giving any credit to monstrous regimes.

Re: Adrian Spidle

Thank you, Captain Non-Sequitur!

To everybody else who is thinking about responding to Adrian's little diatribe:

YHBT. YHL. HAND!

No, Lenin. Evil little kid

" The challenge is to bundle the hope, the despair, the violence, and the total upheaval of dragging a nation, kicking and screaming, from the 1820s into the 1920s, and to do so while being fair to the good intentions and brutal side-effects of the transition."

Have them read Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard".

I would more imagine the socialists of the early 20th c (like the Germans who supported Lenin late in WWI) as Dr. Frankenstein and Lenin as Frankenstein's monster. But then again I object both to Lenin's ends and to his means. They're inseparable.

Abiola and Adrian,

The notion that we “should” see history in a particular way, especially if that way is to insist on narrowing our choices to “good and evil” certainly would cut down on discussion, but probably wouldn’t help us understand. One can just insist that “good and evil” is all we need to understand, but that only covers the normative side of things. As long as there is evil in the world, as long as we don’t have the power in every case to insist that evil end and make it so, then we need more knowledge than simple normative dicotomies offer. We need objective knowledge. We need a finer grained understanding than the Hannitys of the world can offer.

By the way, Adrian, just an aside. The right-wing triumphalist schtick was cute at first, but it’s tired now. Can you move on to intelligent discussion, please? This Republican-good, Democrat-bad stuff, while it fits the good-and-evil model nicely, misses the fact that the US has increased its prosperity and power under both parties, that crime rates go up, and down, with either party in power, that members of both parties have been jailed for their behavior while in office, and that members of both parties often vote for the same legislation. Maybe, instead of letting Mr Hannity and his like do you thinking for you, you could do some of your own. This is actually a rather good place for that sort of thing.

"We need a finer grained understanding than the Hannitys of the world can offer.
Posted by K Harris"

Well K, I must admit I find you to be one of the more thoughtful posters here and definitely one of my favorites.

However, while persuing a finer grained understanding is a wonderful goal and a rather erudite expression, I'm afraid you're missing a very important point.

Can one have a finer grained understanding of the question of whether or not someone is pregnant?

Maybe you can, as, for example, is a 7 month pregancy more pregnant than a one month pregnancy, or is a murderer of a million people more evil than the murderer of merely a few?

The point we triumphalists think you fine grained understanders miss is that there really is evil in this world and that it must sometimes be defeated by violence.

This is a question I'd love to enquire into with you if you're willing.

Adrian the proud triumphalist (I really like the sound of that)

Er, Adrian. Of course the murderer of a few people is less evil than the murderer of a few million. That's the only thing that allows any just wars ever to occur.

And, yes, Virginia, we're all well aware that "there is evil in the world and it must sometimes be defeated by violence". We're just aware that this doesn't really provide all that much useful advice on precisely HOW to defeat any particular form of evil with violence, and what forms of violence in a particular situation can be so misdirected as to be counterproductive. (As we're now seeing again.)

As for Kerry being "an immoral appeaseer and foreigh suck-up": well, there IS the little matter of the Bush family's long-time enthusiastic friendship with the Saudi government -- which (as many conservatives agree) just may have gotten out of hand. Which in turn may explain the still-mysterious hasty shipment of Bin Laden's relatives out of the US on 9-11 before the FBI could question them more than cursorily.

And as for Sean Hannity's supposed furious opposition to "making defenses for evil": he was one of the few conservatives to enthusiastically defend Trent Lott's famous comment that the US would have been better off if white racists had taken over the entire country.

Come to think of it, though, why am I wasting my time and my fingertips responding to a habitual fool?

"The point we triumphalists think you fine grained understanders miss is that there really is evil in this world and that it must sometimes be defeated by violence." --Adrian Spidle--

"Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man." --Mahatma Gandhi--

But then, compared to you, Adrian, Gandhi was just a fool.

For a heartfelt and literate insider's view of the Russian revolution and its aftermath, you might want to read Victor Serge's "Memoirs of a Revolutionary." It's less emotional than John Reed, more objective than Trotsky (whom Serge knew well), and closer to the ground of the Bolshevik bureaucracy than the academic histories.

Nonviolence worked just dandy against the British Raj. Harry Turtledove's novella "The Last Article" examines how such tactics would have faired against another opponent.

"...there really is evil in this world and... it must sometimes be defeated by violence."- Adrian Spidle

And this notion differs from Leninism exactly how?

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