And it's at least mostly my fault for not realizing them sooner. Soon I'll post on where this is coming from and where it's going.
First, we've all heard about how socialism is slightly leftist, and communism is radically leftist (politically, anyway; I'm not sure how neatly Marx's vision maps onto the identity politics that pass for class warfare these days), and fascism and naziism radically rightist--or I guess, reactionary.
And you've heard me talk, at least if you've been snooping through my drafts, about these last two are actually wrong--that they're all leftist.
If you've read or seen Atlas Shrugged, let me remind you that of the scene where the government stooge shows up at Hank Rearden's foundry to tell him how to manage his orders. It's still Rearden's facility, but this loss (or attempted loss) of authority to run it himself is an aspect of fascism.
The difference from socialism? Socialism has more direct involvement; depending on the degree, industries may be nationalized and corporate management acts mainly as lieutenants to government agencies, or government agencies perform activities normally expected of the companies themselves. Roads aren't socialist, but the Eisenhower freeway system might be considered such; the FDA isn't quite fascist, but doctors and nurses who only receive federal stipends and are bound in their diagnoses and treatments by state instead of corporate actuaries would be communist.
So at fist I thought the accusations against libertarians and patriots and Republicans was just the Left projecting again, picking a random villain from recent history and speaking the name often in the hope that it sticks. The USSR and Third Reich didn't get along well, so I wouldn't be surprised by lingering institutional animosity.
Well, it turns out that last bit is the crux of the biscuit.
I was trying to read up on Antifa the other day. They're not much in the MSM currently, which surprised me until I stopped to thin about it. The Wikipedia page turned out to be quite informative, though. I knew it had started in Germany as a movement to oppose any residual Nazis or Naziism, but it turns out that is...not exactly wrong, but somewhat inaccurate, and not the whole picture by a long shot. Well, communists being no true friends to Hitler or Stalin, they were happy to foment such action. And what was something they did? Categorize capitalism as fascism.
This actually makes no sense because the actual free market doesn't impose drudgery and toil on people. Those things do happen, but it's an effect of the human condition, not a feature of capitalism.
But if you can dig up some early Cold War propaganda from that side of the Iron Curtain, you'll see all kinds of imagery about how Americans are wage slaves working in sweat shop conditions, while freedom and leisure for the soviet thanks to efficient central planning were just around the corner.
I used to work with a woman who emigrated from Ukraine after growing up there during the Cold War. We used to laugh at how similar our attitudes as nations were toward each other--the other guys are bad, they live miserable lives, they're just going to bomb us if they decide to attack so all these infantry drills are silly, etc. That was good time.
So okay, it makes sense on the propaganda level. Conflate the existential opponent of communism with the historical one, then just make them sound even worse.
Thus I'm no longer frustrated when I see people compare the optics of German military culture to that of Latin American military culture, declare the latter to be an overall benign communism, and then force Germany to the other pole of a binary scheme; or even if they say "Well, there's communism versus capitalism on one axis, but then there's totalitarianism versus libertarian on another, and fascists are really free market totalitarians," which again makes no sense as such but when you live in a world where it's a question of degrees you can get away with it for a while even when you're being honest.
So that's the first thing. The second dovetails with the first.
I was arguing with a loved one about some of the stuff that's been going on lately. I know her personally so I can't dismiss her foggy thinking as another case of some anonymous idiot who thinks she's well informed because she consumes above average quantities of lies and propaganda. I'm not sure I'll reach her because sometimes I have to end a conversation before I say something that would hit a little too close to home, but I have some hope in taking the indirect approach--like, if a discussion starts going sideways and she accuses me of relying on the lies of Fox News, I can remind her that none of the points I made were based on anything from Fox News. It's also easier than getting caught up in a race to see who can send the most damning articles, and it helps me to keep an open mind if she brings up something I didn't know or actually was wrong about.
Anyway, she's been talking a lot about the patriarchy and white supremacy as if the whole country is 1950s Dixie. I usually just ignore it and hope she'll learn I'm not interested in a discussion if she's coming out of the gate with name calling and middle school levels of nuance. And then she sent me an article about the "boogaloo," which I'd heard of third or fourth hand as a sort of foreboding over how ripe the polarization in this country is going to get. The article itself, of course, couched it all in terms of a white supremacy movement. They didn't invoke the KKK or Tea Party, but when you've got the whole MSM on your side, even NBC can make the association while eliding labels and facts.
I'll write later about how the facts from that perspective don't add up; my point here is just that an epiphany I had watching the riot coverage on the they-call-themselves-news channels opened my eyes to my loved one's fears.
So for starters I don't blame her for having an objective fear of white nationalists. Whether they're a credible threat, goodness never follows them, so I wouldn't be happy to hear about them gaining power or popularity even if it wasn't in my back yard.
But there's that "if" that made me suspicious. Was this Screwtape scaring people into stocking up on fire extinguishers to deal with another flood?
What I noticed about the riots is that there seem to be three groups. There's some overlap, but I think most of that is logistical or a subterfuge. The first group is the actual protesters, people who are fed up and even strident but still in enough control to keep it from going past chanting and shouting and such. This was a pretty mixed group. The second group is the rioters, who as near as I could tell all were white people wearing black clothing and masks. The third group is the looters, who partook of some recreational rioting but mostly raided stores for TVs and shoes and so on; it tragically perpetuates the stereotype so I'm not going to elaborate.
So I've been assuming, when no one was saying it, that the second group is Antifa. Some might be the confederated grassroots types who think they're doing good and just not afraid to throw down with "actual" Nazis wherever they show up, but also the organizers who brought in pallets of bricks (check the Twitter feeds of the affected police departments; it's not just a rumor) and busted windows on the stores expected to be favored by the looters.
This is all going on and my dear loved one mentions a gun store near her home, where there was a line out the building all of white people.
She's white so I do find it a little precious for her to be so woke, but we can still talk about other things, so there's that.
My epiphany was that she made no distinction between the rioters I think are Antifa but she apparently doesn't (can't remember her ever using the word), the white supremacist boogeyman who dominates the news (I'm talking the specter of militant rednecks, not any actual people, except for Trump), and the white people she saw lined up at the store. To her, it's all just escalation.
I'll save the rest for later. Just wanted to point out that this really helped me understand the other side.
First, we've all heard about how socialism is slightly leftist, and communism is radically leftist (politically, anyway; I'm not sure how neatly Marx's vision maps onto the identity politics that pass for class warfare these days), and fascism and naziism radically rightist--or I guess, reactionary.
And you've heard me talk, at least if you've been snooping through my drafts, about these last two are actually wrong--that they're all leftist.
If you've read or seen Atlas Shrugged, let me remind you that of the scene where the government stooge shows up at Hank Rearden's foundry to tell him how to manage his orders. It's still Rearden's facility, but this loss (or attempted loss) of authority to run it himself is an aspect of fascism.
The difference from socialism? Socialism has more direct involvement; depending on the degree, industries may be nationalized and corporate management acts mainly as lieutenants to government agencies, or government agencies perform activities normally expected of the companies themselves. Roads aren't socialist, but the Eisenhower freeway system might be considered such; the FDA isn't quite fascist, but doctors and nurses who only receive federal stipends and are bound in their diagnoses and treatments by state instead of corporate actuaries would be communist.
So at fist I thought the accusations against libertarians and patriots and Republicans was just the Left projecting again, picking a random villain from recent history and speaking the name often in the hope that it sticks. The USSR and Third Reich didn't get along well, so I wouldn't be surprised by lingering institutional animosity.
Well, it turns out that last bit is the crux of the biscuit.
I was trying to read up on Antifa the other day. They're not much in the MSM currently, which surprised me until I stopped to thin about it. The Wikipedia page turned out to be quite informative, though. I knew it had started in Germany as a movement to oppose any residual Nazis or Naziism, but it turns out that is...not exactly wrong, but somewhat inaccurate, and not the whole picture by a long shot. Well, communists being no true friends to Hitler or Stalin, they were happy to foment such action. And what was something they did? Categorize capitalism as fascism.
This actually makes no sense because the actual free market doesn't impose drudgery and toil on people. Those things do happen, but it's an effect of the human condition, not a feature of capitalism.
But if you can dig up some early Cold War propaganda from that side of the Iron Curtain, you'll see all kinds of imagery about how Americans are wage slaves working in sweat shop conditions, while freedom and leisure for the soviet thanks to efficient central planning were just around the corner.
I used to work with a woman who emigrated from Ukraine after growing up there during the Cold War. We used to laugh at how similar our attitudes as nations were toward each other--the other guys are bad, they live miserable lives, they're just going to bomb us if they decide to attack so all these infantry drills are silly, etc. That was good time.
So okay, it makes sense on the propaganda level. Conflate the existential opponent of communism with the historical one, then just make them sound even worse.
Thus I'm no longer frustrated when I see people compare the optics of German military culture to that of Latin American military culture, declare the latter to be an overall benign communism, and then force Germany to the other pole of a binary scheme; or even if they say "Well, there's communism versus capitalism on one axis, but then there's totalitarianism versus libertarian on another, and fascists are really free market totalitarians," which again makes no sense as such but when you live in a world where it's a question of degrees you can get away with it for a while even when you're being honest.
So that's the first thing. The second dovetails with the first.
I was arguing with a loved one about some of the stuff that's been going on lately. I know her personally so I can't dismiss her foggy thinking as another case of some anonymous idiot who thinks she's well informed because she consumes above average quantities of lies and propaganda. I'm not sure I'll reach her because sometimes I have to end a conversation before I say something that would hit a little too close to home, but I have some hope in taking the indirect approach--like, if a discussion starts going sideways and she accuses me of relying on the lies of Fox News, I can remind her that none of the points I made were based on anything from Fox News. It's also easier than getting caught up in a race to see who can send the most damning articles, and it helps me to keep an open mind if she brings up something I didn't know or actually was wrong about.
Anyway, she's been talking a lot about the patriarchy and white supremacy as if the whole country is 1950s Dixie. I usually just ignore it and hope she'll learn I'm not interested in a discussion if she's coming out of the gate with name calling and middle school levels of nuance. And then she sent me an article about the "boogaloo," which I'd heard of third or fourth hand as a sort of foreboding over how ripe the polarization in this country is going to get. The article itself, of course, couched it all in terms of a white supremacy movement. They didn't invoke the KKK or Tea Party, but when you've got the whole MSM on your side, even NBC can make the association while eliding labels and facts.
I'll write later about how the facts from that perspective don't add up; my point here is just that an epiphany I had watching the riot coverage on the they-call-themselves-news channels opened my eyes to my loved one's fears.
So for starters I don't blame her for having an objective fear of white nationalists. Whether they're a credible threat, goodness never follows them, so I wouldn't be happy to hear about them gaining power or popularity even if it wasn't in my back yard.
But there's that "if" that made me suspicious. Was this Screwtape scaring people into stocking up on fire extinguishers to deal with another flood?
What I noticed about the riots is that there seem to be three groups. There's some overlap, but I think most of that is logistical or a subterfuge. The first group is the actual protesters, people who are fed up and even strident but still in enough control to keep it from going past chanting and shouting and such. This was a pretty mixed group. The second group is the rioters, who as near as I could tell all were white people wearing black clothing and masks. The third group is the looters, who partook of some recreational rioting but mostly raided stores for TVs and shoes and so on; it tragically perpetuates the stereotype so I'm not going to elaborate.
So I've been assuming, when no one was saying it, that the second group is Antifa. Some might be the confederated grassroots types who think they're doing good and just not afraid to throw down with "actual" Nazis wherever they show up, but also the organizers who brought in pallets of bricks (check the Twitter feeds of the affected police departments; it's not just a rumor) and busted windows on the stores expected to be favored by the looters.
This is all going on and my dear loved one mentions a gun store near her home, where there was a line out the building all of white people.
She's white so I do find it a little precious for her to be so woke, but we can still talk about other things, so there's that.
My epiphany was that she made no distinction between the rioters I think are Antifa but she apparently doesn't (can't remember her ever using the word), the white supremacist boogeyman who dominates the news (I'm talking the specter of militant rednecks, not any actual people, except for Trump), and the white people she saw lined up at the store. To her, it's all just escalation.
I'll save the rest for later. Just wanted to point out that this really helped me understand the other side.
No comments:
Post a Comment