Is the West Fascist ? Oligarchic? Plutocratic?

[GrandmasterP]

Do many of us engage with government or the powers that be to the extent that we actually give a monkey's anyhoo?

I never vote, pay my taxes because I have to, only read the funny section and TV listings in the one daily newspaper we get.

Politics, for me; is something done by other people, rather odd people here in Blighty. Those are people from 'elsewhere'.

Their doings simply do not impact on me and mine in any meaningful way.

[Marblehead]

Do many of us engage with government or the powers that be to the extent that we actually give a monkey's anyhoo? I never vote, pay my taxes because I have to, only read the funny section and TV listings in the one daily newspaper we get. Politics, for me; is something done by other people, rather odd people here in Blighty. Those are people from 'elsewhere'. Their doings simply do not impact on me and mine in any meaningful way.

Yes, there are people who give a hoot. Yes, I pay my taxes because I have to. I would likely pay even if the government didn't know exactly what my income is. Yes, I vote. Always have. Yes, I write my Senator or Representative whenever I have something to say that I feel they need to hear. Yes, I take part in political polls. Yes, I know that my voice means very little to them but that doesn't keep me from voicing my opinion.

 

BTW GrandmasterP, nice to see you posting.

[Thunder_Gooch]

Do many of us engage with government or the powers that be to the extent that we actually give a monkey's anyhoo? I never vote, pay my taxes because I have to, only read the funny section and TV listings in the one daily newspaper we get. Politics, for me; is something done by other people, rather odd people here in Blighty. Those are people from 'elsewhere'. Their doings simply do not impact on me and mine in any meaningful way.

 

 

 

First they came for the communists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

 

Then they came for the socialists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

 

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

 

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me.

 

-Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

[Marblehead]

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me.

 

 

That's what happens when one sits on their ass and relies on faith and hope.

[Thunder_Gooch]

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

 

An excerpt from

They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

Milton Mayer

 

But Then It Was Too Late

 

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

 

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

 

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

 

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

 

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. ‘One had no time to think. There was so much going on.’"

 

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

 

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

 

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

 

"Your ‘little men,’ your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

 

"Yes," I said.

 

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

 

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

 

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

 

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

 

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

 

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

 

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

 

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

 

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or ‘adjust’ your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

 

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

 

"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn’t an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In ’42 or ’43, early ’43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an ‘Aryan’ woman. This was ‘race injury,’ something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a ‘nonracial’ offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party ‘processing’ which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the ‘nonracial’ charge, in the judge’s opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

 

"And the judge?"

 

"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That’s how I heard about it.) After the ’44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don’t know."

 

I said nothing.

 

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was ‘defeatism.’ You assumed that there were lists of those who would be ‘dealt with’ later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a ‘victory orgy’ to ‘take care of’ those who thought that their ‘treasonable attitude’ had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

 

"Once the war began, the government could do anything ‘necessary’ to win it; so it was with the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,’ which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its ‘necessities’ gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany’s losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

 

 

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1955, 1966 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)

 

Milton Mayer

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

©1955, 1966, 368 pages

Paper $22.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-51192-4

[Thunder_Gooch]

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

 

-Edmund Burke

[Thunder_Gooch]

A lot of people seem to be saying.. "It's not that bad" "What are you complaining about?"

 

etc.

 

The Germans felt the same in 1925-1945.

 

They felt their actions and the actions of their government were normal, ok, not so bad, and one shouldn't complain and just go with the flow.

 

I urge you to look around you and see exactly what is going on, and it isn't very hard at all to see exactly where all this will end up.

 

You people are intelligent (some of you), don't let fear keep you blind to the reality you are in.

 

Deep down you know exactly what is happening, and you know exactly where this is going, and exactly what is going to happen. Don't be naive.

 

You know we have crossed the point of no return and where this all leads to, and if you don't you are in denial.

Edited October 23, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[Apech]

A lot of people seem to be saying.. "It's not that bad" "What are you complaining about?"

 

etc.

 

....

 

 

It is bad ... its worse in some ways (i.e. more sophisticated control) but its not fascism. That's my position.

[Thunder_Gooch]

It is bad ... its worse in some ways (i.e. more sophisticated control) but its not fascism. That's my position.

 

Translation: I can still afford food and my tv still works, it can't be that bad.

 

The Romans called it panem et circenses (breads and circuses). When these run out you'll find you are living in a very different place than you imagine yourself to be.

 

 

 

Edited October 23, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[Apech]

 

Translation: I can still afford food and my tv still works, it can't be that bad.

 

The Romans called it panem et circenses (breads and circuses). When these run out you'll find you are living in a very different place than you imagine yourself to be.

 

 

 

 

 

No what I am saying ... if you look at what I actually say ... is that the control now comes from unseen sources and our culture(s) have been degraded to a point where there is very little that people get energised about. We are kind of politically sedated. But its not fascism because with Mr. Hitler and others you knew where the power was and could attack it ... now our leaders are not our leaders ... they are puppets. Material prosperity is a kind of anaesthetic ... and so on.

 

Anyway if you want to call it fascism that's up to you guys ... the OP title had a question mark which I thought meant this was about a debate ... but I guess you prefer to use this term ... so I'll go away and play with my chakras ...

[Brian]

I intentionally try to avoid attempts to pin any real-life system strictly to the theoretical/philosophical models because real-life rarely "follows the rules" and because the manipulators are intentionally morphic.

 

Clearly this doesn't apply to only the statist agenda (and the "morality police" on the far-right are no better than their Big Brother counterparts on the left) but it is a good illustration -- most are familiar with the shifting self-appellations (Progressive, Liberal, Democrat, Socialist, Communist, Maoist, what-have-you (and please don't get too hung up on the off-the-cuff list I just threw out)) and the way the terms slip in and out of favor, and you will encounter lengthy discussions on the differences between them (including between socialism & communism) but few realize how Marx himself explained the difference. I am paraphrasing (because I am too lazy to go find the quote) but he basically said we (he & Engels) called it "communism" on the European continent but switched to the term "socialism" in England after getting run out of Europe because "communism" had gotten such a bad rap.

 

Obama echoed that sentiment during the run-up to his election when pointedly asked how his plans differed from Marxism, BTW...

 

When you try something and it blows up in your face but your really REALLY want to try it again, you have to be a little more cagey and subtle about it the next time around!

Edited October 23, 2013 by Brian

[Marblehead]

No what I am saying ... if you look at what I actually say ...

 

And you actually did a pretty damn good job with that post.

[Thunder_Gooch]

What I was getting at is that at no time during 1925-1945 did the German people think anything was wrong (the majority of them).

 

They didn't believe the Reichstag fire was a false flag, which was used to pass the enabling act giving Hitler near dictatorial power, they didn't think anything of using Jews as scape goats for all their countries problems, they didn't think anything of the wars their country started, from their perspective it was all just normal life.

 

Living in the middle of it you never realize how bad it really is.

 

You are right that it is different this time, removing the current administration would be only removing a sock puppet from a hand controlling it.

 

You aren't exactly right though, that we can't know the true face of those behind the curtains. All you have to do is follow the money and ask yourself... Cui bono.. Who benefits?

 

They are the 1% income earners, the ones in control of the financial systems, the banks, the federal reserve.

 

"Let me issue and control a Nation's money and I care not who makes its laws".

-Amsel (Amschel) Bauer Mayer Rothschild, 1838

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No what I am saying ... if you look at what I actually say ... is that the control now comes from unseen sources and our culture(s) have been degraded to a point where there is very little that people get energised about. We are kind of politically sedated. But its not fascism because with Mr. Hitler and others you knew where the power was and could attack it ... now our leaders are not our leaders ... they are puppets. Material prosperity is a kind of anaesthetic ... and so on.

 

Anyway if you want to call it fascism that's up to you guys ... the OP title had a question mark which I thought meant this was about a debate ... but I guess you prefer to use this term ... so I'll go away and play with my chakras ...

 

No what I am saying ... if you look at what I actually say ... is that the control now comes from unseen sources and our culture(s) have been degraded to a point where there is very little that people get energised about. We are kind of politically sedated. But its not fascism because with Mr. Hitler and others you knew where the power was and could attack it ... now our leaders are not our leaders ... they are puppets. Material prosperity is a kind of anaesthetic ... and so on.

 

Anyway if you want to call it fascism that's up to you guys ... the OP title had a question mark which I thought meant this was about a debate ... but I guess you prefer to use this term ... so I'll go away and play with my chakras ...

Edited October 24, 2013 by More_Pie_Guy

[joeblast]

[JustARandomPanda]

Here's 2 interesting essays by NT Times blogger Douthat.

He critiques Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.

BTW - his points have also been the subject of study by some people in U.S. Military academies (at least according to an Atlantic Monthly article published about 10 years ago). The military is aware of the very things Douthat points out in his critique of Pinker's book.

I know it's going off on a tangent from the topic but I found it interesting enough to share here.


Enjoy:

Democracy’s Collateral Damage


By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: October 15, 2011

THE Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, tracing its roots to St. Mark the apostle and the first century A.D. Coptic Christians have survived persecutions and conquests, the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. They have been governed from Constantinople and Ctesiphon, Baghdad and London. They have outlasted the Byzantines, the Umayyads and the Ottomans, Napoleon Bonaparte and the British Empire.

But they may not survive the Arab Spring.

Apart from Hosni Mubarak and his intimates, no group has suffered more from Egypt’s revolution than the country’s eight million Copts. Last week two dozen people were killed in clashes between the Coptic Christians and the Egyptian Army, a grim milestone in a year in which the Coptic community has faced escalating terrorist and mob violence. A recent Vatican estimate suggests that 100,000 Copts may have fled the country since Mubarak’s fall. If Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood consolidates political power, that figure could grow exponentially.

This is a familiar story in the Middle East, where any sort of popular sovereignty has tended to unleash the furies and drive minorities into exile. From Lebanon to North Africa, the Arab world’s Christian enclaves have been shrinking steadily since decolonization. More than half of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have fled the country since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.

More important, though, this is a familiar story for the modern world as a whole — a case of what National Review’s John Derbyshire calls “modernity versus diversity.” For all the bright talk about multicultural mosaics, the age of globalization has also been an age of unprecedented religious and racial sorting — sometimes by choice, more often at gunpoint. Indeed, the causes of democracy and international peace have often been intimately tied to ethnic cleansing: both have gained ground not in spite of mass migrations and mass murders, but because of them.

This is a point worth keeping in mind when reading the Big Idea book of the moment, Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Pinker marshals an impressive amount of data to demonstrate that human civilization has become steadily less violent, that the years since 1945 have been particularly pacific, and that contemporary Europe has achieved an unprecedented level of tranquility.

What Pinker sometimes glosses over, though, is the price that’s been paid for these advances. With the partial exception of immigrant societies like the United States, mass democracy seems to depend on ethno-religious solidarity in a way that older forms of government did not. The most successful modern nation-states have often gained stability at the expense of diversity, driving out or even murdering their minorities on the road to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.

Europe’s era of unexpected harmony, in particular, may have been made possible by the decades of expulsions and genocide that preceded it. As Jerry Z. Muller pointed out in a 2008 essay for Foreign Affairs, the horrors of the two world wars effectively rationalized the continent’s borders, replacing the old multi-ethnic empires with homogeneous nation-states, and eliminating — often all too literally — minority populations and polyglot regions. A decade of civil war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia completed the process. “Whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality,” Muller wrote, “by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up.”

Along the same lines, the developing world’s worst outbreaks of ethno-religious violence — in post-Saddam Iraq, or the Indian subcontinent after the demise of the British Raj — are often associated with transitions from dictatorships or monarchies to some sort of popular rule. And from Kashmir to the West Bank, Kurdistan to Congo, the globe’s enduring trouble spots are usually places where ethno-religious communities and political borders can’t be made to line up.

This suggests that if a European-style age of democratic peace awaits the Middle East and Africa, it lies on the far side of ethnic and religious re-sortings that may take generations to work out.

Whether we root for this process to take its course depends on how we weigh the hope of a better future against the peoples who are likely to suffer, flee and disappear along the way. Europe’s long peace is an extraordinary achievement — but was it worth the wars and genocides and forced migrations that made it possible? A democratic Middle East would be a remarkable triumph for humanity — but is it worth decades of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing?

I don’t know the answer. But maybe we should ask the Copts.

 

Steven Pinker’s History of Violence


My column yesterday took a modest jab at Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” and I thought that I would follow up with a few more comments on his thesis. I should stipulate that I am broadly convinced by the argument that our current era of relative peace reflects a longer term trend away from violence, and broadly impressed by the evidence that Pinker marshals to support this view. (I found the book’s story more persuasive than did, say, John Gray, to pick out the most hostile review I’ve seen to date.) But here are some criticisms and caveats.


1) Pinker links the decline in violence to the development of the modern state, with its promise of public safety and its monopoly on force. But he tends to understate the extent to which strong central governments seem to be associated with bigger spasms of mass killing, even as they clearly reduce violence in the day-to-day. When he wants to argue, for instance, that the 20th century was not uniquely violent, he cites a list of the 21 worst atrocities in human history and notes that when you adjust for the size of world population only one 20th century horror (World War II, taken as a whole) makes the top ten. But look down his list, and you’ll notice that only five of the atrocities took place before the 16th century — i.e. before the rise of the modern nation-state. (The same pattern shows up when Pinker charts a list of the 100 worst wars and atrocities.) What’s more, the pre-modern mass deaths tend to be spread out over long periods of time and carried out by a highly diffuse set of actors (the fall of Rome, the Mid-East slave trade), whereas the more modern atrocities tend to be chronologically concentrated and politically centralized. This lends support to Tyler Cowen’s critique of Pinker:

Another hypothesis is to see modern violence as lower, especially in the private sphere, because the state is much more powerful. Could this book have been titled The Nationalization of Violence? But nationalization does not mean that violence goes away, especially at the most macro levels. In a variant on my point above, one way of describing the observed trend is “less frequent violent outbursts, but more deadlier outbursts when they come.” Both greater wealth (weapons are more destructive, and thus used less often, and there is a desire to preserve wealth) and the nationalization of violence point toward that pattern. That would help explain why the two World Wars, Stalin, Chairman Mao, and the Holocaust, all came not so long ago, despite a (supposed) trend toward greater peacefulness.

This also relates to the point I made in Sunday’s column, which is that Pinker underestimates the extent to which yesterday’s state-sponsored violence may be the cause of today’s state-sponsored peace. That is, while the gradual consolidation of the modern state may eventually tend toward the relative pacific conditions that currently prevail in Europe, that consolidation tends to be so bloody in and of itself — thick with persecutions and genocides and “cleansings” of various sorts — that one could reasonably doubt whether the ends were worth the means. (If you look at Europe’s settler states, for instance, from the United States and Latin America to South Africa and Australia, there’s often a plausible correlation between how completely the native population was wiped out during the age of colonization and how stable and prosperous they are today.) When Pinker talks about the benefits of “the civilizing process,” in other words, he doesn’t give enough weight to the interests of the peoples who were “civilized” out of existence.


2) Pinker dismisses the “nuclear peace” theory of the world’s post-1945 stability, arguing that it can’t explain “why countries without nuclear weapons also forbore war,” and pointing out that non-nuclear powers like North Vietnam were still willing to go to war with nuclear powers like the United States. But one can tell a plausible story that incorporates those data points, by focusing on the role of nuclear arsenals in 1) consolidating the developed world into two armed camps, whose members were naturally less likely to pick fights with one another, and 2) preventing great power conflicts from escalating to total war, as they had frequently in the preceding centuries. In this theory, nuclear arms don’t prevent war entirely, but they limit conflicts between nuclear-armed powers (note that India and Pakistan fought three bloody wars before both went nuclear, and none since), while providing a strong incentive for keeping war aims limited and avoiding potentially existential conflicts. Pinker cites many examples of non-nuclear powers “defying” nuclear powers, but it’s telling that few if any of them are cases where a non-nuclear power tried to conquer a nuclear-armed state. That’s the kind of war — a total war, aimed at total victory — that nuclear weapons have really driven out of fashion.


3) Pinker is similarly dismissive of what you might call the “benevolent hegemon” theory of global peace, writing that there were “never any signs of a Pax Americana or the Pax Britannica: the years when one of these countries was the world’s dominant military power were no more peaceful than the years in which it was just one power among many.” But his own chart showing the decline of great power conflict seems to track pretty well with the rise of first Great Britain and then the United States: It depicts a gradual decline in warfare that’s broken by irruptions of violence when first France and then Germany challenges the Anglosphere’s hegemony. (Here I wish that he had addressed William C. Wohlforth’s late-1990s argument about the unique stability of a unipolar world.)


4) For a book whose title (and cover art) evokes the narratives of Western monotheism, the treatment of religion in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is astonishingly glib. Pinker is under no obligation to credit Judaism or Christianity with any particular role in the story he’s telling, but a book that essentially portrays European civilization as a kind of moral vanguard for humanity should at least address the possibility that this distinctive turn away from violence was influenced by the West’s distinctive religious heritage. Instead, Pinker delivers a Hitchens-esque summary of the Old Testament’s endorsements of holy war, quotes Jesus’s line about bringing peace rather than a sword in order to dismiss the New Testament’s pretensions to pacifism, and then blames the violent imagery of the crucifixion for inuring Christians to state-sponsored violence and torture. (It’s a straight line from the choice of the crucifix as the symbol of Christianity, he suggests, to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.)

There are some cursory nods to Isaiah and turning the other cheek, and late in the book (p. 677, to be precise) Pinker grudgingly acknowledges that while “little good has come from ancient tribal dogmas … particular religious movements at particular times in history have worked against violence.” But this is a doorstop of a book about the progress of non-violence and humanitarianism in Western civilization whose index contains no references to Francis of Assisi, Bartolome De Las Casas, or William Wilberforce, and whose author betrays not even the slightest interest in the various sympathetic and provocative accounts of religion’s role in the development of the modern West and modern world. Pinker has written a Whig’s interpretation of history, and he is never more Whiggish than in his assumption that we owe almost everything to the Enlightenment, and all that came before was a long medieval dark.

Edited October 24, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[JustARandomPanda]

Check this out.

 

 

Necrometrics.com

Edited October 24, 2013 by JustARandomPanda

[JustARandomPanda]

Thought I'd post this again. Apech did a really good job summing some of this up.

 

 

The 19th and 20th centuries 'experimented' with various kinds of governmental regimes. Communism actually stems from an economic theory of collective ownership of land and means of production. Soviet style socialism was not actually full communism but intended as a means to achieve that. It involved central control of the economy and the Soviet assembly which set economic and social programs. This style of socialism is almost defunct unless you count Cuba and North Korea (which is actually more like a god-king oligarchy).

 

Fascism is also central control but by the 'few' ... that is the elite who hold the society and economy together hence the fascist symbol which is an axe with a bundle of wood around it. The axe is the elite and the wood the people. In an ideal fascist state (if such a thing were possible) the few, the elite would through their greater intelligence and far sightedness act for the benefit of the many. However this is actually given human nature an impossible ideal as the elite will always act in their own interest.

 

The experiments failed. The soviet union collapsed, Fascism through the excesses of the Nazis became unacceptable and recognisably flawed. So that left the liberal democracies. Liberal because of the focus on individual rights and democracy because of the election of the government ... different models exist of course because of the historical differences in various countries and cultures ... the main three being American style Presidential democracy, British Parliamentary democracy and the republics of Europe. It is one of these models which we export into iraq and other countries - a mistake in my view because democracy and the exact model used has to be grown from the base up and not imposed from above to work properly.

 

Nothing that you will see in the US is or will ever be anything approaching communism since collective ownership is an impossible idea. However because of the Cold War the word communism is sued as a kind of insult/monster in the dark to scare people and this only works if they have no idea what it really is. Fascism of a kind probably does exist because those who hold all the cash and power exert massive influence and try to control everyone's lives. However even this is not real fascism as a principle because the elite are hidden behind and rely on the front of the elected officials.