mentalblog.com comments:
Rarely can be seen such verbosity and so little said. I gave way at this sentence:
"Give me a break, children do not go off the derech because they were abused. Unless you count exposure to the mind numbing crap of a religion"
Is there ANYONE approaching this with no agenda?
And you spent HOW MUCH time sitting in the NYU library to be able to write this drivel???
This is hilarious.... Great prose! Fantastic.
Those damn lubabs with their blasting mivtzva-tank-music did make him go mad, after all.
people around here have long memories...but it make sense if you read this 3 times.
where do I get a piece of "maggidic prophecy"?
The fun with this one has only begun:
Upper West Side: Molest In Peace.
There are no ways to know forsure if they are all true, anyone who has a grudge against a former teacher can spread such rumors and he is doomed
guravitzer, your geography is off.
esti K has a very relevant point, however, the difficulty, shame, and stigma that unfortunately keep so many of those harmed from speaking out has the flipside effect of discouraging spurious accusations, out of, say, spite.
you lost me at auschwitz , guantonimo ... shit like that majes any shred of credibility your rant had , vanish
to pu aushwitz together with guatannimo, is beyond me but then again you speak and speak and say nothing.
and i see you managed to throw in the meshichistin now you have my vote. who cares what the topic is but you canblame the meshichistin
and to esti k you are right, but we need both sides, we need to get to the truth
i expect better from the readers. You people expect cookie cutter drivel? This is a deep and creative post. Read it again it is all there.
chakira,
Your eloquent expression would better serve a more rational point of view.
I must agree with those who find it absurd, as well as an atrocious insult to the real martyrs of Auschwitz, to mention that infernal hellhole in the same breath as the internment camp at Guantanamo, which is for all practical purposes a Caribbean resort in which some of the most vicious and fanatical killers in the world, men who are morally on a par with the criminals who ran Auschwitz, and who share much of the ideology of the criminals who ran Auschwitz, have their every fanatical superstition catered to, and enjoy the best food and medical care they have had in their entire lives.
To trivialize the terrorist threat to the West as you do is typical of the truther morons who are more afraid of what might happen 100 years from now if their worst fantasies of bad climate science come to pass, than about cold-hearted killers who are pursuing an implacable agenda.
As far as institutionalizing repeat sex offenders is concerned, may I commend to your attention the recent studies by Bernard Harcourt, in which he shows that the aggregated institutionalization rate, including both institutionalization in mental hospitals and prisons, was higher in the 1950s than it is even now. Moreover, the overall homicide rate in the US, and in every individual state, is well correlated with the total institutionalization rate: the higher the rate of institutionalization, the lower the murder rate.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/
pape...tract_id=881865
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/
pape...tract_id=970341
People have the right to protect themselves from serial molesters.
The obscurantism which promotes toleration of the intolerable is part and parcel of the Gramscian warfare by which post-modern cultural relativists hope to destroy the West.
Gandalin, Right on!
Tzemach, the post is very creative, EXTREMELY creative - so creative that although it has no valid point to make, it still manages to sound passionate and logical. It is an excersize in creative writing, no more. I find it amusing that you are duped by it.
As far as geography, "Why is Chevron mentioned? To remember those who are buried in Chevron..."
Didn't Texaco buy Chevron? And who's buried there?
I wonder.....
Tzig and his drivel............
Enron is buried there.
Chakira,
Let's take up your insights in a more disciplined manner, okay? Here are a few reactions to your comments, point by point. This message will be sent in two parts.
Part one:
"Just writing to say that I find it amazing that the fear of child molestation, which is such a huge trope in American society is being accepted wholesale in front of our eyes by haredim."
Why is it amazing? Based on what is reported, isn't it rather about time? After more or less deliberately keeping themselves in the dark about this problem, isn't it better to bring it to the light of day?
“I am not saying this thing isn't terrible, but”
There it is – the infamous left-liberal “but.” It ought to be in 48 point type: BUT. I am not saying this thing isn’t terrible BUT I AM.
“but it also isn't as bad as other things like murder,”
Some might say that child molestation is worse than murder . . . and with good reason, since it poisons the victim, and often perpetuates itself in subsequent generations . . .
“exploiting hundreds of millions of people,”
To what does this refer? We’re talking about a real crime committed by one real person against another real person, not the Marxist-Leninist meme of the “exploited masses.”
“or probably even the problems that seem less pressing like prescription drug benefits or budget deficits. Not to mention terrorism, the most trivial fear of all.”
Terrorism is not a trivial fear. The latest phase of the jihad against America began in 1979, and continues relentlessly. Since September 11, 2001, jihadist terrorists have launched over 7,000 terror attacks around the world. The death toll is in the tens of thousands. In the absence of the heightened surveillance and security procedures put in place since then, there would have undoubtedly been far more and far worse attacks, as well.
“Yet NY state now wants extra judicial power to circumvent the constitution and build post-jail jails to contain these people.”
Utter hyperbole. Whatever authority is required to keep the public safe from these predators will not abrogate the basic legal rights, e.g. habeas corpus, and there will in any event always be the possibility of judicial review of whatever administrative decisions are taken. (In fairness, I do admit that the New York State and Federal Courts denied “Typhoid Mary” a habeas corpus hearing almost 20 times.)
“Whatever the recidivism rates, that is obviously an unacceptable abrogation of the law in the name of fear, equivalent to the faceless state of exception proclaimed over the black holes of Guantanamo bay, Auschwitz, etc.”
Here you take leftist filth to the very depths. First of all, it is not “an unacceptable abrogation of the law,” and even if it was, it is not “equivalent to the faceless state of exception proclaimed over the black holes of Guantanamo bay, Auschwitz, etc.” First of all, it is idiotic to equate the legally sanctioned sequestration of sex offenders with the two very different phenomena that you viciously and maliciously conflate. Secondly, as previously stated, the detention facility at Guantanamo bay is not a “black hole.” It has been inspected by Alain Grignard, the deputy head of Brussels' federal police anti-terrorism unit, and in his opinion, the conditions at Guantanamo are better than those that obtain in most European prisons.
(http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200603/
s1585574.htm)
The religious practices of the inmates at Guantanamo are rigorously respected, and they receive excellent medical care, and better food than is issued to their warders.
Moreover, as previously stated, the equation of the detention facilities at Guantanamo bay with the death camp at Auschwitz reveals the utter moral turpitude and depravity of the left. The inmates at Guantanamo include many fanatical terrorists whose only dream is to kill as many innocent people as possible, and in many cases, to exterminate the Jewish people in particular. They share the totalitarian ideology of the miscreants who built and ran Auschwitz, they believe in subjecting the entire world to the dictatorial rule of a totalitarian caliph who will impose his absolute will on everyone, and kill everyone who dissents. It is entirely fair that they be sequestered from those they have already designated as their intended victims.
“It does not matter to the unfeeling constitution whether a murderer will go out and murder again, it matters what a jury of his peers has to say.”
Of course it matters to the Constitution; the Constitution ensures that the jury will make that determination.
“It is amazing that the logic of sovereignty is deployed in these two trite instances: we are afraid of people with negligible numbers, funding brains and firepower who managed to demolish one building in the last decade, and people, again a small number, who want to do various unacceptable things with our children.”
Typical leftist obfuscation. That the terrorists “managed to demolish one building in the last decade” is simply false. Around the world there have been almost 9,000 jihadi terror attacks in the last 10 years. (www.thereligionofpeace.com) They have destroyed far more than one building, and were it not for the diligence of Western governments, they would have succeeded in carrying out an even larger number of attacks. They have killed tens of thousands of innocent victims, all over the world. The number of terror supporters in the world is not neglible, their funding is adequate for their purposes, and they are hellbent on acquiring thermonuclear firepower.
Part two:
“This does not mean that it is good to be blown up in the Twin Towers, nor to be raped in Yeshiva (when i was in Ner Israel I had a chavrusa who was a victim of several incidents of molestation). Far from it. Rather, that the money and energy spent and crimes committed to stop these things might not be justified.”
Not justified, compared to what?
“The systematicity of the system might demand the logic of sovereignty as exception in a pressing case like a real war, I admit this. But to gut the system in order to stymie shoeless salafists and kiddie porn addicted meshichists seems like a waste of the system. Might as well give people the death penalty for more common crimes like Grand Theft auto.”
The “global war on terror” is a real war. It has been going on since before you were born, and it will likely continue for decades to come. The enemy recognizes that this is a thousand-year struggle. It is high time that we understand that.
“That ALL having been said, the pendulum now swings the other way. In a frum community which traditionally saw these things as individual acts, a new narrative of predators is created.”
So the serial child molesters are NOT predators? I am not as sympathetic to them as you are. I think they are predators, they are serial predators, and they will not stop their behavior on their own accord.
“Parents spiritual anxiety that their kids might reject their empty perlocutions over glutinous Shabbath tables is now creatively mixed with the dark lurking specter of the child molester. Give me a break, children do not go off the derech because they were abused. Unless you count exposure to the mind numbing crap of a religion that gives a less compelling narrative than the Sopranos as abuse (and I might be inclined to agree) there are a million mundane reasons not to be frum. And a trillion not to keep the extremist reified set of polemics that Haredism has become. So give me a f-ing break.”
This irrelevant attack on Yiddishkeit reveals the post-modernist leftist ideology that underlies all of the compassion for murderers, terrorists, and sexual predators. It is always the rights of the predator that the leftist worries about, never the rights of the prey. Whether you want to be frum or not, the trillions of reasons to which you refer have nothing to do with this issue.
“Anyway, back to the logic of sovereignty, be aware that when we castigate abusers we take sovereignty from God and invest it in the kind of pop psych bullcrap espoused on your blog.”
Nonsense. It has long been understood that the Noachide commandments include the establishment of courts of justice. Human beings are not expected to leave everything to the final judgment of Heaven, we are expected to learn to manage our own affairs, to proclaim laws, and regulate our societies. To do so does not take sovereignty from God, rather it acknowledges God’s sovereignty.
“The fear of pants pulling generates the desire for a new normal untrammeled by Yehuda Kolko.”
Another typical dodge. By referring to “pants pulling” you are attempting to trivialize the issue of rape.
“If this issue has the symptom of removing Rabbinic sovereignty as well, kol hakavod, but for me, thank God that is not such an issue. I suspect that the non idiot rabbis will ally themselves with the pop psych crowd to create a new amalgam that no longer has room for such creative excuses as were employed in the past. Those who defend the abusers might gain cachet for their authenticity though, among those in the ever fracturing world of Haredi politics who like the calculus of creative exceptions that allows me to eat out, even if I don’t eat out on Passover (or at OU restaurants). Which is the new traditional in a sense. So we have a moment of fissure and two logics of what is normal, what is sovereign, and the frummer people are those who except excuses for mishkav zachar.”
“If only it were so simple. To complicate things a bit I want to add that the frummer people may not recognize the pop psych anxiety of their newly different cousins. But they also have invented new excuses out of the whole cloth. In former times rabbinic cultures did not have a problem with lashon harah or rechilut, and other fake halakhot. Now these are trotted out to defend the abusers, which is, as far as I am aware, without precedent in rabbinic literature.”
Now you betray your confusion. You have changed from minimalizing and trivializing the abuse, and defending the abuser, to attacking those you think are defending the abusers, because what you really want to do is attack the rabbonim andf manhigim of the frum community.
“Old style cover-ups were probably different in different milieu but might’ve been more intracommunal, given the great autonomy of many Jewish communities in Italy, the Ottoman Empire etc. OTOH there might not have been a need for a cover-up at all, as we see in Foucault, in many of these medieval and modern cultures, having a catamite might not be public, and might not be so terrible. R Yisrael Najara was accused of engaging in homosexual intercourse by maggidic prophecy in Safed by R Hayyim Vital. But he is still in the bencher. And no one so far as I know said that this was Lashon Harah! So there are הלכות המתחדשות בכל יום “
“As a point of clarification I am not condoning any form of pederasty so much as pointing out the new normal it imposes, the logic of sovereignty it exploits, the new halachic universe it creates, the cultural influences it exposes and the ever renewing cycles of distinction it imposes.”
Pederasty was recognized as an abomination from Har Sinai. It doesn’t impose any new normal. What’s normal is still normal. It doesn’t create a new halakhic universe, unless you want to go with the Reconstructionist, Reform, and now Conservative movements who have decided to consecrate the forbidden and forbid what is commanded. It is not pederasty, but the acceptance and celebration of pederasty that define the new cultural norm of the New York Times and the far left.
“If I am guilty by way of analysis of hurting the victims, then I apologize profusely. But if they wanted to be mollycoddled they should stick to the offices of ego psychologists and stay far far away from any critical thought patterns.”
I don’t think the victims want to be mollycoddled. I think they want to be recognized as the victims of vicious predators who took advantage of their victims’ naiveté and weakness to commit heinous crimes. The victims need have no fear of critical thought patterns at all. It is the Gramscian post-modern left that makes critical thought a crime.
Dear Gandalin
Lets talk for a moment about the equivalence between locking up sex offenders after they have served time, auschwitz, and gitmo. Obviously the decision to compare these three would not hold if we were talking about levels of suffering. Auschwitz could kill thousands daily, Gitmo might spur people to suicide, but there are no gas chambers, and I assume that separating sex offenders from the general population might be helpful to their health, given current attitudes towards these miscreants. Such a comparison would rightly be seen as insulting those who died in the Shoah, not to mention counterfactual.
Yet, there are proponents of another kind of exceptionalism which sees placing auschwitz in any comparison as blasphemous and trivializing. I cannot help but sympathize with people who feel that their suffering was exceptional and I cannot but express my distaste for suffering contests ("The Black Holocaust" of the middle passage comes to mind). Of course all genocides have their unique valences, all victims their unique identities. Stricto sensu NOTHING is comprable to the holocaust, in the same way nothing is comprable to the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan genocide.
My point in making this comparison is not to belittle the holocaust, nor to have a suffering contest, nor to violate the very real sacred which persists around the memory of European Jewry. Any of those goals would be trite. Instead, what I meant to do was outline a strict comparison within what Agamben calls "logics of sovereignty." What Agamben wants to do, drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt is to show the progress of modernity towards Auschwitz. Indeed, if the sovereign consists of the one who declares the exception, in the interests of restoring the normal, than sovereignty consists of the abrogation of law as law, or the exceptionality becoming the rule. Agamben draws attention to the fact that Auschwitz was both the most legal and least legal place on earth. At one time it was administered by all the apparatuses of government, and approved, we presume on a high level in the Nazi bureaucracy. Yet, as we all know, it was the ultimate crime, in a very real sense, the transgression of the law par excellence. Part of what drives this logic forward is the technologization of Foucauldian biopolitics. Meaning that to create the homogenized technological society, control is needed over bodies and power is asserted (reciprocally of course) in unprecedented ways.*
What I want to do is call attention to the fact that the conditions of possibility of Auschwitz and the conditions of possibility of Gitmo derive from similar logics of sovereignty. Both rely on abrogating the law to create the site of legality, and this is something which disturbs me.
As I said, I might favor abrogating the law in the case of a real war or another real threat like famine or disease. There might be times when we need to illegally quarantine thousands of sufferers of bird flu, and employing the logic of sovereignty in these cases is the very basis of government. I just think terrorism could be dealt with in federal prisons with juries and judicial oversight. Similarly child molesters should either be sentenced for longer, given better therapy or let go.
It is the climate of fear disturbing our normality which makes me most afraid.
*(One precursor to this analysis is Arendt, who, in the Human Condition and Eichmann in Jlem limns the famous banality of evil (though not in Origins). For Arendt, as for her mentor Heidegger, the holocaust was less a German problem than an inexorable problem of modernity. Of course, Heidegger's unapologetic stance toward his nazi activities has been a source of much pain, many saw his analysis of the holocaust as losing touch with being as postfacto justification. I obviously disagree with that position and see value in the analysis of modern society as losing touch with dasein. (If you need a non-Heideggerain trajectory for this kind of analysis, I would refer you to a victim of the holocaust, Adrono, who sees a similar phenomenon in the dissipation of the a priori around aesthetic judgement.)
These issues of comparison are very fraught, and I cannot help but maintain my position while conceding the validity and hoping for the continued vigor of other positions. Castigating Arendt for ignoring Heidegger's nazism and accepting his postfacto excuses, Richard Wolin (Heidegger's Children) summarizes an important countertrend and I would recommend reading that, along with Janicaud's book on the topic and a hefty dose of Levinas, for those who are afraid that the ontotheology can lead directly into the fuhererprizip. ..)
And I thought I was bad. Please, make him stop!
A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.
Dear Chakira,
Oy vey! Where to begin?
At any rate, thank you for providing us with a crystal clear demonstration of the muddy confusion of the post-modernist lefty mentality.
"Lets talk for a moment about the equivalence between locking up sex offenders after they have served time, auschwitz, and gitmo."
Yes, that's what you tried to establish -- their equivalence.
"Obviously the decision to compare these three would not hold if we were talking about levels of suffering. Auschwitz could kill thousands daily, Gitmo might spur people to suicide, but there are no gas chambers, and I assume that separating sex offenders from the general population might be helpful to their health, given current attitudes towards these miscreants. Such a comparison would rightly be seen as insulting those who died in the Shoah, not to mention counterfactual."
I don't object to a comparison, I object to your attribution of equivalence. As the facts show, when you compare the detention facility at Guantanamo to Auschwitz, you are comparing a summer camp for criminals to an inhuman death camp. Comparing them as they are is indeed illuminating, because the comparison shows that your attempt at equivalence, in order to demolish the West, is wrong. Your attempt to establish a moral equivalence between Auschwitz and Guantanamo, or between Auschwitz and the institutionalization of serial sex offenders, is in fact evil. You are trivializing the real evil in order to pursue your ignorant and childish leftist "critique" of Western civilization.
"Yet, there are proponents of another kind of exceptionalism which sees placing auschwitz in any comparison as blasphemous and trivializing. I cannot help but sympathize with people who feel that their suffering was exceptional and I cannot but express my distaste for suffering contests ("The Black Holocaust" of the middle passage comes to mind). Of course all genocides have their unique valences, all victims their unique identities. Stricto sensu NOTHING is comprable to the holocaust, in the same way nothing is comprable to the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan genocide."
As I said, I have no problem in making comparisons. It is your idea that the detention facility at Guantanamo is equivalent to Auschwitz that I find insultingly stupid.
"My point in making this comparison is not to belittle the holocaust, nor to have a suffering contest, nor to violate the very real sacred which persists around the memory of European Jewry. Any of those goals would be trite."
Not too trite for the leftist ideologues at whose feet you worship, but no matter.
"Instead, what I meant to do was outline a strict comparison within what Agamben calls "logics of sovereignty." What Agamben wants to do, drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt is to show the progress of modernity towards Auschwitz."
Codswallop.
"Indeed, if the sovereign consists of the one who declares the exception, in the interests of restoring the normal, than sovereignty consists of the abrogation of law as law, or the exceptionality becoming the rule."
In so far as Guantanamo is concerned, or the administrative sequestration of serial child sex offenders, there is nothing exceptional about it. A normal, healthy society will unexceptionally defend itself by defeating its military enemies and by locking up habitual criminals. No appeal to some high-falutin' cockamamie concept of sovereignty is needed.
"Agamben draws attention to the fact that Auschwitz was both the most legal and least legal place on earth. At one time it was administered by all the apparatuses of government, and approved, we presume on a high level in the Nazi bureaucracy. Yet, as we all know, it was the ultimate crime, in a very real sense, the transgression of the law par excellence."
Pure and imple taureau-manuro, dear Chakira. Auschwitz was no more legal or illegal than the post office. It was a governmental institution, established by the government according to its procedures. The contracts to build the gas chambers were let out on a sealed bidding process. The DeutscheBahn collected fares for the prisoners transported to their deaths (albeit only on the excursion fare, since the SS [ymach shemam] boughth tickets in lots of 400.) There's nothing exceptional about that.
"Part of what drives this logic forward is the technologization of Foucauldian biopolitics. Meaning that to create the homogenized technological society, control is needed over bodies and power is asserted (reciprocally of course) in unprecedented ways."
That statement doesn't mean a thing.
"{What I want to do is call attention to the fact that the conditions of possibility of Auschwitz and the conditions of possibility of Gitmo derive from similar logics of sovereignty. Both rely on abrogating the law to create the site of legality, and this is something which disturbs me."
That's just vile nonsense. The establishment of a detention facility for enemy combatants at Guantanamo abrogated no law. Under the traditional laws of war, and the Geneva Conventions, irregular, non-uniformed terrorsits posing as civilians are shot on sight. Instead, they have been given a Caribbean country club environment where they continue their jihad by attacking their captors in a variety of ways, or even in attempting the shahada suicides they think will earn them 72 houris.
"As I said, I might favor abrogating the law in the case of a real war or another real threat like famine or disease. There might be times when we need to illegally quarantine thousands of sufferers of bird flu, and employing the logic of sovereignty in these cases is the very basis of government. I just think terrorism could be dealt with in federal prisons with juries and judicial oversight. Similarly child molesters should either be sentenced for longer, given better therapy or let go."
Again, this is a real war. And the people you disparage and attack are the only ones keeping Muhummad's knife from your throat.
"It is the climate of fear disturbing our normality which makes me most afraid."
Actually, is the promise that post-modernist leftism will finally be forced to go away that troubles you the most. I'll deal with your footnote in a separate comment.
Gandalin, why is labeling really necessary when Chakira's arguments are as "obviously" flawed as you claim they are?
And real war? Metaphorically speaking, maybe. We're trying to swat a fly with a bulldozer. The rules no longer favor military engagement, nor is this new "war" an excuse for indefinite detainment by presidential decree and outsourcing black sites overseas because they're illegal stateside.
Lesly,
What I am doing isn't just "labeling" because it is part of a linnean taxonomy.
Not a real war? Study the history of the past 1300 years of the Jihad, and you will see that this is a very real war indeed.
Not a real war? Tell that to the hundreds of thousands that the jihadists have killed since 1979.
As far as indefinite detainment goes, there is no other lawful option in wartime. It would be a criminal offense against the Geneva Conventions to put uniformed enemy combatants on trial simply for being part of the armed forces that wages war against us. After they surrender, enemy combatants are customarily held in indefinite captivity -- until the war is over.
For some reason my comment on Chakira's footnote referencing Arendt, Heidegger, Wolin, Janicaud, and Levinas seems to have disappeared from the server. Perhaps in deference to the memory of the recently departed Richard Rorty, I'll let it go for now. But why not drag in Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari while we're at it? Not to mention De Man, Destouches, and the other beloved totalitarian philosophers of the left?
Gandalin, I want to see what you have to say re the footnote
Woo, Gandalin! I always thought you to be kind of bookish and sissy. But, boy, have you got a pair!
Rock on! This guy doesn't even understand how bad he's getting trashed, but keep it up anyhow because it's been a long time since I've seen somebody get their ass whipped that bad on a blog and I, for one, am loving it!
Gandalin: What I am doing isn't just "labeling" because it is part of a linnean taxonomy.
Science doesn't render your mad debate skills less subjective.
Gandalin: Not a real war? Study the history of the past 1300 years of the Jihad, and you will see that this is a very real war indeed.
Jihadis have been at war for over a thousand years and we're just now taking notice? Our powers of observation are in the tank.
Gandalin: Not a real war? Tell that to the hundreds of thousands that the jihadists have killed since 1979.
Communism killed millions and we had a Cold War. Was that a miscalculation on our part?
Gandalin: As far as indefinite detainment goes, there is no other lawful option in wartime.
The article I referenced concerns U.S. citizens here and abroad, and U.S. residents apprehended stateside on suspicion alone. Perhaps this is okay because we've been at war since the seventh century?
Chakira,
Thank you for your interest in my comments. Although I do not apologize for vigorously opposing your ideas, I bear you no personal animosity, and my intent is not to whip you ass, as Tony Montana puts it, but to expose ideas that I find putrid to the beneficial influence of fresh air and sunlight. (Tony Montana, I am pleased that you are enjoying this exchange.)
Here is your footnote, and my comments:
"*(One precursor to this analysis is Arendt, who, in the Human Condition and Eichmann in Jlem limns the famous banality of evil (though not in Origins). For Arendt, as for her mentor Heidegger, the holocaust was less a German problem than an inexorable problem of modernity."
It is not surprising that an unapologetic Nazi and his German-Jewish paramour would deny the German-ness of the holocaust, is it? But "modernity" didn't kill any Jews, Germans did.
"Of course, Heidegger's unapologetic stance toward his nazi activities has been a source of much pain, many saw his analysis of the holocaust as losing touch with being as postfacto justification."
I assure you that Heidegger's naziism causes me no pain at all. It's just a manifestation of his totalitarian leftism. I am sure he was a disappointment to Professor Husserl, but one's intellectual children can be as perverse and unapologetically parent-denying as one's physical children.
"I obviously disagree with that position and see value in the analysis of modern society as losing touch with dasein."
I think that Heidegger was wrong about this. Although you are correct in understanding that leftism is basically hostile to modernity, and in both its communist and national-socialist manifestations sought to return society to a pre-modern bestiality. Modern society did not lose touch with dasein, Heidegger's dasein lost touch with his (its) Creator.
"(If you need a non-Heideggerain trajectory for this kind of analysis, I would refer you to a victim of the holocaust, Adrono, who sees a similar phenomenon in the dissipation of the a priori around aesthetic judgement.)"
Despite the fact that Adorno was victimized by the nazis, he was a committed leftist, and his totalitarian world-view is not that different from theirs. he just had the misfortune of being a red and a Jew instead of an Aryan. Otherwise he would have fitted in to the nazi professorate as easily as Heidegger did. (Did somebody mention Erhard Milch?)
"These issues of comparison are very fraught, and I cannot help but maintain my position while conceding the validity and hoping for the continued vigor of other positions.":
Very kind of you. . .
"Castigating Arendt for ignoring Heidegger's nazism and accepting his postfacto excuses, Richard Wolin (Heidegger's Children) summarizes an important countertrend and I would recommend reading that, along with Janicaud's book on the topic and a hefty dose of Levinas, for those who are afraid that the ontotheology can lead directly into the fuhererprizip. ..)"
I think Ayn Rand is a bit overboard in her denunciation of Kant, but problems do set in when you get to Hegel . . . especially Kojeve's Hegel.
As the Rebbe's brother would say, unless you can discuss a concept in Chasidus without once mentioning the technical term for it, don't bother.
Guravitzer,
This conversation isn't meant to be understood by outsiders. It's like watching two Jamaicans go at each other out in the parking lot with switch blades. I've got no freakin' clue what they're saying or what they're fighting about, but it's a hell of a lot of fun to watch!
This guy is not only a jackass, he's an ignorant fool as well, spewing about things he knows nothing about.
Oh please. A little wiki and a little guessing and you can put it together.
I am curious, when a left wing red diaper baby throws in Arendt, does that make it Jewish? Can one call a Jewish symposium on ethics, start off with a quote of Arendt, and then move on to Nietzche and Nasrallah?
guravitzer, do you have anything to add to the discussion besides needless quoting and name-dropping...?
What in the world is this discussion other than needless name dropping?
I am enjoying this immensely.
I am waaaaaaaaaaay toooo drunk to understand anything being said here right now, but... I have long ago etablished az tvias ayin hob ich - for I have endorsed Gandalin as one of the very best here (an I say 'one of' only with great kindness to the rest...) LECHAYIM!!!!!!!
Gandalin to Ayn Rand and Kant is as the Rambam to Galen and Hippocrates.
is this an SAT cheat-sheet?
Why are you drunk?
Noch a farbrengen?
I thought you were not one of the 'yellows'
guravitzer,
You are right (about using plain speech) and after all, this discussion is actually quite simple.
There are serial sexual predators in the world. That's the starting point. They exist in many communities. For the longest time, their crimes were usually whispered about, swept under the rug, covered up, and banished from the community's consciousness. Their victims suffered a silent agony.
For a variety of reasons, the existence of this problem has become a matter of more or less public discussion. The victims are now more willing to confront their tormentors. The community leaders who enabled the abuse by their silence and protected the abusers by their complicity are now being forced to do something about it.
That's all there is to it, really. There is no need to drag in Guantanamo, -l'havdil- Auschwitz, Heidegger, Arendt, or anybody else. Those things have nothing to do with the problem of serial sexual predators.
What we have seen in Chakira's comments is an example of the left's metaphorical thinking, of the misuse of the "as if" to confuse and distort a simple matter.
The post-modernist leftist begins with a metaphor . . . one thing is "as if" some other thing. Thus institutionalizing a serial pedophile predator is equated in a series of metaphorical free-associations to be the equivalent of an extermination camp. And the detention of jihadis who openly proclaim their genocidal intentions and who were caught red-handed on the field of battle in a terror war is thus seen "as if" they were the victims of a death camp.
Then the leftist expresses his fear that these completely wrongheaded and inverted metaphors are actually more frightening and more dangerous than the actual horrors to which his metaphors pointed. He is not afraid of murderous terrorists who rain 100 missiles a day on Sderot, who are seeking nuclear weapons, who have used chemical and biological weapons against civilians, who have conducted nearly 10,000 terror attacks worldwide in the past 10 years . . . he is afraid of . . . Alberto Gonzales!
Lesly,
"Jihadis have been at war for over a thousand years and we're just now taking notice? Our powers of observation are in the tank."
Actually, "we" haven't just noticed.
In 1787, for example, US Ambassadors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson met with the Tripolitanian plenipotentiary in London, to determine why ships under the authority of Tripoli and Algiers were preying on American shipping in the Mediterranean . . . they were told that based on the Mahometan religion, the corsairs were entitled to seize everything belonging to infidels . . . and over the next 25 years or so, the United States fought two wars with the jihadist city-states of the Barbary Coast. So in fact, this is not the first time that the United States has dealt military with the jihad . . . and of course you can't blame the United States for failing to send troops to the siege of Vienna in 1683, can you?
"Communism killed millions and we had a Cold War. Was that a miscalculation on our part?"
I love the way you communist sympathizers refer to the "Cold War" as if it were a period of unbroken peaceful diplomacy. What horses**t.
You are forgetting the very hot wars in Greece in the late forties, in Korea -- in which nearly 40,000 Americans died -- and of course Vietnam. Not to mention Angola and the other African wars, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the conquest of China by the communist armies in the late forties, and so on. The "Cold War" was actually very bloody.
Moreover, it was a close call for Western civilization. It is easy now to dismiss Soviet communism as a straw dog or a paper tiger, but even as late as the 1980s when President Reagan announced his intention of deeating communism, all of the communist sympathizers in the New York Times, the State Department, NATO, and the U.N. castigated him for his stupidity in failing to realize that communism would last for 1,000s of years, and that the US system must inevitably become more communistic. Disinformatzia, Lesly, that's all it was.
Gandalin: In 1787, for example, US Ambassadors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson met with the Tripolitanian plenipotentiary in London, to determine why ships under the authority of Tripoli and Algiers were preying on American shipping in the Mediterranean.
Ah. Islam-based piracy == terrorism. Greed-based French, English and Greek piracy == piracy.
Gandalin: and of course you can't blame the United States for failing to send troops to the siege of Vienna in 1683, can you?
Yeah. Trying to retake control of Hungary before international law outlawed territorial acquisitions through war is always a terrible injustice. Suleiman I must’ve fancied himself a European king.
Gandalin: I love the way you communist sympathizers refer to the "Cold War" as if it were a period of unbroken peaceful diplomacy.
I’m so not liking your political crystal ball of linnean taxonomy.
Gandalin: You are forgetting the very hot wars in Greece in the late forties
Yeah, Greece’s civil war.
Gandalin: in Korea -- in which nearly 40,000 Americans died --
Actually, 40,000 men died in a civil war conflict. Congress never declared war.
Gandalin: and of course Vietnam.
Another undeclared war. The most costly signals war we ever had with Soviet Russia.
Gandalin: The "Cold War" was actually very bloody.
And yet economic collapse brought it to an end. If terrorism was the latest and greatest existential threat we’d have invaded Saudi Arabia. It wouldn’t cut off funding for independent actors, but at least our soldiers would be pulling bodies from humvees in the right country.
Gandalin: Disinformatzia, Lesly, that's all it was.
Well, thanks for the history highlights but really, it was unnecessary. Maybe next time we can have a protracted, though probably off-topic, conversation if you forget your script.
Lesly,
Yes, they were called the "Barbary pirates" but you should study the actual history of the American wars against Tripoli, Algiers, and the other jihadi city-states before deploying another metaphorical false equivalence between them and the buccaneers of the high seas. The so-called "Barbary pirates" were the navies of Islamist city-states, and the wars they conducted absolutely terrorized Mediterranean shipping until the middle of the XIXth century. They raided the English coast for slaves upo through the XVIIth century.
You snarky comments about Greece, Korea, and Vietnam are equally wide of the mark. Whether Congress voted on a declaration of war or not, those were wars, and whether there were Greeks on both sides, Koreans on both sides, or Vietnamese on both sides doesn't change at all the fact that they were wars of communist subversion and conquest.
Dear Gandalin and Tony Montana.
The metaphor of Jamaicans with switchblades in a parking lot is disgusting. I think we can all agree that it is not fun to watch other people be mutilated and violated. I do not know how enjoying such a thing, or rendering such valences to a civilized discussion, fits into the rubric of "rachmonim, bayshonim and gomlei chasadim." I hope none of my discussions ever degenerate to this level, and I hope my true interlocutors, mistaken as they may be, would not stand for such violence, even in rhetoric.
To return to more serious and salient points, I want to move the discussion away from Barbary pirates and jihadi ideology, and back to where it began, with sexual predators.
Gandalin, you try to say that I am confused, moving from condoning or trivializing abuse to attacking rabbis willy nilly. First, I do neither of these things and I will explain why not. Second, I will try to hint at your own fundamental confusions.
To begin, in saying that the narrative of predators is a sui generis creation does not mean that there arent pedarists, that they arent bad and that it wasnt a bad idea to rape children a hundred years ago or even from Har Siani. Instead I am pointing to a shift in priorities and tones which is more subtle. What I have noticed anecdotally is the prevalence of this kind of talk on the blogosphere. Starting with Protocols and JWB and continuing now with OUJ and Hirhurim, tremendous attention is being given to issues of molestation. Fast on the heels of the catholic molestation scandals, there has been a whole crop of frum molestation scandals. This comparison was made in the title of the NYMaf pice on Kolko and I think it is valid, in a sense this is the catholic preist problem redux.
It IS about time for these issues to be addressed and I for one hope that the community builds guidelines to sanely protect children from predators. But even you Gandalin implicatly admit that this was not a communal concern until very recently. Of all the abusive melamdim we read of in Maskilic literature, none (so far as I am aware from a perusal of large amounts of the stuff) deal with molestation. Sparser still is evidence of molestation as a problem within responsa literature. If these things happened, they did not leave more than the smallest traces on j history.
Which leaves us with a choice to make.
a) There were fewer child molesters in premodern, early modern time and even until recently. (Perhaps this could be imputed to a sea change in "traditional values")
b) There were, but it was not as big of an issue
c) some combination of the two approaches (there were not none, but fewer, and it was less of an issue)
Gandalin, I assume you believe (a) with perhaps a mitigated allowance for (c).
Whatever the case, the narrative of predators is something new.
In addition to the newness of this fear of predators, there is a scent of discontent. From the local issue of sexual abuse people like UOJ launch wider critiques of American Orthodoxies. UOJ specifically frames his critique as an attack on institutions around Flatbush. Radloh sees Lubavitch as complicit in his abuse, perhaps adding to his ill will towards that group. In many cases critique of rabbis up to and including "gedolim" goes hand in hand with critiques of abusers. In the Kolko article there was a not so veiled attack on R CP Scheinberg.
In earlier eras of Jewish life critique flowed from many waters, but never before from the accusations of abuse. The the Early Modern period critique towards the Rabbinic establishment proceeded from both Sabbatean messianic expectation and Marrano rereadings of the Bible. In later times Maskilic critique focused on the inadequacy of contemporary rabbis to combine moral instruction and blidung with Torat haElohim. Later polemics focused on just as multifarious a set of issues-- the Rabbis were out of touch, failed to prevent the holocaust or too controlling of state religious apparatuses in Israel. In none of these critiques were rabbis framed as condoning sexual abuse.
I hope this explains why I said that the narrative of abuse is something new.
What I went on to say, simply, was that some traditionalists recognize the newness of the combination of current events, pop psych and general critique that forms the backbone of the abuse narrative. And they rebel, retreating, seemingly, into a traditionalist mode. While these people may look more "frum" (think R CP Scheinberg or R YS Elyashiv vs R Y Blau or R M Dratch) they are also inventing a new response to a new event. Lashon Harah laws, while always "on the books" have morphed from minor traffic violations (the price of doing business) into full scale felonies which stymie critique of forms of rabbinic authority. Thats a new one, an invented Halacha meant to fight off an invented problem. Which doesnt mean Lashon Harah is allowed, or pedarasty, but that theyre thought of in new ways by a community so superficially resistant to change.
Gandalin: The so-called "Barbary pirates" were the navies of Islamist city-states, and the wars they conducted absolutely terrorized Mediterranean shipping until the middle of the XIXth century. They raided the English coast for slaves up through the XVIIth century.
Viking latecomers. Buccaneers may have a romantic ring but I don't know why you dredge up history as if it can support your assertion that jihadis have been at war for over a thousand years. I wouldn’t expect you to buy the lie that Islam’s modern radicalization is a matter of faith.
Gandalin: Your snarky comments about Greece, Korea, and Vietnam are equally wide of the mark. Whether Congress voted on a declaration of war or not, those were wars, and whether there were Greeks on both sides, Koreans on both sides, or Vietnamese on both sides doesn't change at all the fact that they were wars of communist subversion and conquest.
Snarky? Short, definitely, but I left snarky for other parts of my response. Besides, I thought you cared about constitutional rule of law and all that. Ironically we may've been able to avert Vietnam if we had not backed France's colonial conquest. But don't tell me—I'm signaling my desire to destroy Western civilization by mentioning this inconvenient historical factoid, right?
Right.
Anyway, my point was the Cold War was an ideological war in spite of our losses, which were small comparing our military commitments and the number of those commitments escalating into theater v. overall deaths, to say nothing of the “hundreds of thousands that the jihadists have killed since 1979”. I did mention Communism killed millions like a good communist sympathizer, didn’t I? Today Afghan operations can be defended but Iraq is an economic diversion. Perhaps this thousand-year war can provide a pretext for spilling blood and spending Treasure throughout the Middle East for you, but my views are more circumspect.
Lesly,
The failure to engage the Soviet Union militarily in 1946 meant that 300 million people had to endure communist tyranny for another 50 years.
It's easy for you to descant on the desirability of your circumspection while you comfortably sip lattes on the Upper West Side (figuratively speaking) but the gulag was very real for the hundreds of millions of people who endured communist tyranny.
Chakira,
You'd do better if you wrote in plain English.
"To begin, in saying that the narrative of predators is a sui generis creation does not mean that there arent pedarists, that they arent bad and that it wasnt a bad idea to rape children a hundred years ago or even from Har Siani. Instead I am pointing to a shift in priorities and tones which is more subtle. What I have noticed anecdotally is the prevalence of this kind of talk on the blogosphere. Starting with Protocols and JWB and continuing now with OUJ and Hirhurim, tremendous attention is being given to issues of molestation. Fast on the heels of the catholic molestation scandals, there has been a whole crop of frum molestation scandals. This comparison was made in the title of the NYMaf pice on Kolko and I think it is valid, in a sense this is the catholic preist problem redux."
The simple truth is that after many years, a grass-roots movement of Catholics succeeded in overcoming the resistance of the hierarchy, and brought the scandal of the priestly pedophiles out into the open. Encouraged by the success of that liberating process, abused victims in the Jewish community gathered the courage to force the criminals who tormented them out into the open. What's so surprising about that? It wasn't the subliminal propagation of some uber-conspiratorial meme, it was the openly reported example of what the Catholic victims had achieved that inspired others.
I don't think there were necessarily fewer pedophiles in the past. However, the absence of a user-directed medium in which such crimes could be discussed was certainly a factor in keeping them suppressed. It was easier to keep things quiet when the only means of communicating from shtetl to shtetl was a written letter, that could be written only by the literate, and which could be intercepted easily. The blogs that you mention are part of the web-world that has made it easier for victims to find a voice, and be heard.
And you think that is a bad thing?
Finally, I don't think that the rabbonim are inventing new halakhos so much as phumphering around in their inability to deal with so many new things at once. The frum community will have to evolve its response to many aspects of new technology, and also to many things about themselves, and about life in general, that the new technology has allowed to appear.
Gandalin: The failure to engage the Soviet Union militarily in 1946 meant that 300 million people had to endure communist tyranny for another 50 years.
It wasn’t a failure to engage, Gan. It was a reluctant choice. FDR and Truman knew what they were dealing with and bought the U.S. some time. 300 million people endured because they could not vote for the president of the U.S. and were not its primary concern, like it or not.
Gandalin: It's easy for you to descant on the desirability of your circumspection while you comfortably sip lattes on the Upper West Side (figuratively speaking) but the gulag was very real for the hundreds of millions of people who endured communist tyranny.
I don’t ignore reality to “descant” on my circumspection (speaking of plain English). I accept the fact that states are foremost concerned with their own interests and Communism’s expansion meant we had to choose our battles while the gulags operated. We won, remember?
Have the last word if you want. Chakira’s right. This is really off topic and I need some food to go with my latte.
Leslty,
What exactly is Chakira right about?
Of course chakira is he right, he wrote "sui generis".
Gandalin
How do we disagree?
I said its not a bad thing.
Its just a new thing.
I do not want to make value judgments about developments that have not fully played out.
Chakira,
Serial predatory pedophilia is an old thing and a bad thing, so it seems we disagree about both aspects.
i said it is old and bad
just focusing on response
become a more attentive reader
Please. God. Stop using the term "lefty." It's not just a strawman, it's the most absurd description of a set of beliefs ever penned. I haven't seen Chakira express a single traditional "leftist" view, so how about you attack the ideas, not the political context you seem to experience the world through. (And thank Fox Network and the NY Post for reducing everything to right/left. Very sophisticated.)
Also: The less comments about "OMG! They use such big words!" the better. You don't look intelligent when you complain about the language. You look like an idiot. Imagine hosting a Baal Tshuvah at your home who balks at all the "frum" jargon you use. You wouldn't feel cowed, you'd be annoyed that he didn't bother to learn the terminology before complaining. We have google, people. Use it. And read a bit more.
Also: PLEASEGOD. Do no cite Ayn Rand to argue with Kant. That's just... I mean... look. So sad.
And finally: Gandalin, you're making an argument from morality and Chakira is making an argument from power dynamics. You're talking two different languages. Chakira happens to be talking the more sophisticated and significant one (since your morality argument can't be argued - it's just parroting frum trope), but please. Stop pretending like you can argue with his points by calling people 'communist sympathizers' and 'Nazis.' It's distasteful to anyone following along. You haven't made a significant point that hasn't relied on idealogical assumptions. Very convincing.
Mordy, using big words is just as entertaining as talkin' redneck and foul language. We are enjoying the entertainment, just as we would comment on a live sportsgame.
No. It's not the same. When you use words that are considered "big," you're using them for precision and articulation. It's because you can't express your idea with a stunted vocabulary. When you talk "redneck" or "foul language" it's because you lack education.
And it's concerning that you're entertained by this discussion.
Mordy, I am VERY entertained by this discussion. But I'd like to change my metaphor now from two Jamaicams fighting with switchblades out in the parking lot to two Little League coach dads having a shoving match at the ice cream shop after the game.
Gandalin,
Chakira is right about our discussion being off topic notwithstanding the profound impression “sui generis” made on Guravitzer.
"It's because you can't express your idea with a stunted vocabulary."
Change that to "you can't express your idea with a normal vocabulary, resorting to technical terms." Ipso facto, that is.
Habeas Corpus makes the greatest impression on me. If chakira would have used it, he would have won. Of course, he who Habeas Corpus Mortatis always wins.
I want to tell you all that the very best street fight I ever saw in my life was a four-way brawl between three gay guys and a transexual on the corner of San Vicente and Santa Monica Blvd. in W. Hollywood, California.
THIS is starting to remind me of THAT.
about the pretentious vocabulary in this thread - as Einstein famously said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
If I have to point out how asinine the term "normal vocabulary" is in this context, I think the level of discourse has been completely compromised.
In simpler terms for the idiots reading the thread: Just because I know words you don't doesn't make my vocabulary abnormal. Guess what? My friends talk like I do.
Looks like the Gandalin/Chakira fight is pretty much over for now.
Lesly and Mordy did a good job of killing the flow when they came in and tried to team up with Chakira.
Now that the dust has settled and Gandalin has sufficiently proven disassociation from the hippy-ish beliefs of his youth, I'd like to say that if anything positive can come from this it is that perhaps select quotes from the transcript of this debate could be used to make a good PSA for the dangers of cholov aku"m.
Tony: Lesly and Mordy did a good job of killing the flow when they came in and tried to team up with Chakira.
I didn't get the memo.
Guess what? I know all the words chakira and Gandalin know, and consider them mumbo jumbo and would never use them in a conversation. Just as I would never tell someone whose internet connection is not working that they have a TCP/IP problem due to energy I/O interruption instead if telling them to put the plug back in.
I'm not aware of using any fancy words.
Nor do I think I am talking about morality.
If you seriously think that the detention facility at Guantanamo is equivalent to Auschwitz, you have a more basic problem than no morality.
If you seriously think that locking up serial pedophile rapists is equivalent to Auschwitz. you have a more basic problem than no morality.
See, you're still framing the question in terms of morality. Is Guantanamo equivalent to Auschwitz in the realm of morality? Of course not. Ditto to your second question. But Chakira wasn't asking when they were morally equivocal. He was asking if they rely on the same shows of force/power/authority/etc.
Mordy, is disciplining my child, and the force/power/authority/ that it expresses ALSO equivalent to Auschwitz??
I'm not defending that position, I'm just clarifying it. But maybe Chakira has an answer.
boruch ayzel- your reductio ad absurdum of disciplining ones child= auschwitz misses the critical points of non-scalability and qualitative difference. Prussic acid and butter toffee are both made from almonds. Power/force/authority exist in many forms and pointing out that they exist in two temporally and phenomenologically distinct entities is hardly an argument.
Mordy,
"But Chakira wasn't asking when they were morally equivocal. He was asking if they rely on the same shows of force/power/authority/etc."
Mordy, if you seriously contend that the detention facility at Guantanamo relies on "the same shows of force/power/authroity/etc." as Auschwitz, you don't know jack s**t about the history of either, and you are just spouting worthless moronic leftist propaganda.
If you seriously contend that a legal system for the sequestration or institutionalization of serial pedophile rapists relies "on the same shows of force/power/authority/etc." as Auschwitz, you don't know jack s**t about either, and you are just spouting worthless moronic pseudo-intellectual filth.
It has nothing to do with morality.
I note that you claim not to believe that morality is a real category of knowledge and action, anyway.
torahumaddachic,
der ayzel's r.a.a. is no less compelling than Chakira's.
i'm not convinced that Chakira's analogy is a RAA argument; please to elucidate.
If der ayzel's comparison was absurd, so was chakira's.
"you are just spouting worthless moronic leftist propaganda."
How disappointing. You can't make an argument without regressing to the same ad hominen over and over again. What happened to secure your obsession with "leftists"? Did a leftist molest you when you were a child?
Mordy,
It isn't ad hominem. I didn't attack you, I derided the equation of Auschwitz and the detention facility at Guantanamo -- the same equivalence, by the way, that the jihadists who want to kill every Jew on earth have recently made in the Saudi "Arab News."
An no, I was never molested by a leftist. And I have no obsession with leftists.
Leftists, however, were responsible for Auschwitz, for the gulag, for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in genocides, democides, and their wars of totalitarian aggression.
It seems only prudent to recognize their spoor wherever we come across it.
Mordy,
Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you question my "obsession" with leftism and ask if I was "molested" by a leftist, it is you who are resorting to crude ad hominem argumentation.
Wherein I do happen to recognize the spoor of leftist thinking.
It would be hard for you to be untouched by leftism, since leftism dominates the universities of this country, the teachers' colleges, and through them, the schools.
Gandalin,
I'm going to be straight with you, and this is the last comment I'm posting on the discussion. When you use the expression 'leftist' or say that leftists were responsible for Auschwitz, etc, etc, you delegitimize any authentic, worthwhile points you may have. Forgive me, but you come off as a lunatic. There isn't a leftist cabal.
Mordy,
Of course there isn't a leftist cabal! And leftists weren't secretly responsible for Auschwitz, they were openly responsible for Auschwitz!
Forgive me for stating what should be obvious. It's not lunacy.
WTF do you think the nazi party was? Of course you know that "nazi" is short for "national-sozialistische" don't you? That the full name of the party was the NSDAP -- the "National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei" -- the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party? Isn't that obviously leftist enough for you?
You didn't know that Hitler was a leftist? A vegetarian, anti-smoking, "green," anti-capitalist socialist? Read his speeches. Read the NSDAP's electoral program. Realize that the nazi state employed more central economic planners than did Stalin's Russia.
Too many Jews have unthinkingly swallowed the communist party's propaganda, which obscures the simple facts that fascism and naziism no less than communism are variants of the totalitarian socialist idea. It's all the same filth, from Plato's "Republic" to More's "Utopia" to Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mugabe. And the one ummah-one caliphate-one caliph ideal of totalitarian islamism is basically the same load of crap.
Gandalin: And leftists weren't secretly responsible for Auschwitz, they were openly responsible for Auschwitz! WTF do you think the nazi party was? Of course you know that "nazi" is short for "national-sozialistische" don't you?
Dude, the name was a front at a time when Germany was leaning left; a cover for Hitler et al to get their foot in the door and more importantly, get elected to "legitimize" their power consolidation over a country with an extremely depressed economy. If they were leftists they would've been commies, not fascists, which is conservative by definition, breaking up Germany’s communist party and killing its supporters. It's true that extremes of any ideology lead to dictatorship, but how they arrive at those extremes is very different.
I thought you were a student of history. You are just another cognitive miser focusing on information that confirms personal biases. Enjoy your relativist fallacy and comfortable belief that one ideology is solely responsible for all of the modern world's greatest travesties.
Lesly,
Thank you for your comment. I see now where the problem is. For many years, we have accepted that communism is the totalitarianism of the left, while naziism is the totalitarianism of the right. Actually, as I have argued, they are both leftist movements. And I realize how painful it is for a leftist to deal with that.
(In passing, let me just also note that you, like Mordy, have decided to attack me, instead of the information that I am presenting to you.)
I am quite serious in asserting that fascism, naziism, and communism are each and every one of them the spawn of socialism, which is to say that they are all leftist. They all believe that society is to be ordered as an organic whole, essentially by the state, and that all aspects of individual and communal life in society are to be ordered and controlled by the totalitarian state apparatus.
The fact that the nazis saw the communists as enemies doesn't disprove that at all. They were competing for the same voters in the electoral process, and for the same power over all. That very similar antagonists hate each other even more than they hate less similar antagonists is not at all uncommon, after all.
You need to further your education on the nature and history of the socialist idea.
You might re-read Plato's "Republic," in which you will find almost all of the totalitarian characteristics of the communist or nazi state, well before the advent of the free market economy from which, argued Marx, the drive towards socialism derived. Thomas More's "Utopia" and Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" describe societies with the same sort of centralized authority and totalitarian control.
A former socialist, Joshua Muravchik, has written a masterful history of the socialist project from the time of Babeuf in the French Revolution to our times, "Heaven on Earth." And finally, although it is out of print (available on line, I think, in Russian and English) Shafarevich's "The Socialist Idea" shows the same sort of societal organization in the Peru of the Incas and in ancient China, and goes on to discuss the sort of society that emerged in Russia during the years of "War Communism." Truly remarkable scholarship, when you consider that it was done using the XIXth century German and Russian sources still available in Soviet libraries.
As for the essential similarities between the Nazi state and the communist state, you can begin with Peter Temin's 1991 article on economic planning in Germany and Russia in the 30s, or consult Peter Overy's colossal book, "The Dictators," which describes the very similar visions of Hitler and Stalin. He shows that these regimes were very much "kindred spirits" in terms of methods, cultural aspirations, utopianism, economic organization, use of terror, and moral language. Both Hitler and Stalin were committed anti-capitalist revolutionaries who wanted to transform the world totally, and in very similar ways.
If you don't care to buy the book, you could start with some of John Ray's articles on the web: "Hitler was a Socialist" will be found here:
http://ray-dox.blogspot.com/2006...n-
internet.html
"Authoritarianism is Leftist, not Rightist" will be found here:
http://tongue-tied2.blogspot.com...ch-
shorter.html
His article on Mussolini, "Modern Leftism as Recycled Fascism," will be found here:
http://ray-dox.blogspot.com/2006...of-
article.html
I realize of course that upon first reading these articles, you will be unconvinced. As Max Planck once said, there is no convincing the already convinced. But some readers of this blog may not have already made up their minds, and they may find this information useful.
Sei gezint!
Gandalin: For many years, we have accepted that communism is the totalitarianism of the left, while naziism is the totalitarianism of the right. Actually, as I have argued, they are both leftist movements. And I realize how painful it is for a leftist to deal with that.
This is called historical revisionism, to put it kindly.
Gandalin: (In passing, let me just also note that you, like Mordy, have decided to attack me, instead of the information that I am presenting to you.)
Mm-hmm. And when you toss words like leftists (whom according to you are responsible for the Jewish holocaust) and communist sympathizer you mean it in the nicest most scholarly way possible because The Truth is on your side, right?
If you think my last response was a personal attack Gandalin Philosophy must invite a persecution complex because ideas and attitudes are immune from attack.
Gandalin: I am quite serious in asserting that fascism, naziism, and communism are each and every one of them the spawn of socialism, which is to say that they are all leftist.
I know you're serious. That's what makes the entire framework of your political beliefs questionable and this conversation futile. Although, it's also a bit ironic since a few weeks ago I had an argument with a student of Austrian laissez-faire economics swear up and down that George Bush was, in fact, a socialist. "Leftist" philosophy is either the sneakiest philosophy in the world or the world's favorite straw man.
This fellow said we might have to overthrow the state someday since economic planning by the state continued at an unprecedented rate. Socialism everywhere, baby. All praise Marx.
Gandalin: They all believe that society is to be ordered as an organic whole, essentially by the state, and that all aspects of individual and communal life in society are to be ordered and controlled by the totalitarian state apparatus.
Yeah, a dictatorship. In the end it doesn't matter how you got around to controlling the state apparatus.
Gandalin: You might re-read Plato's "Republic," in which you will find almost all of the totalitarian characteristics of the communist or nazi state, well before the advent of the free market economy from which, argued Marx, the drive towards socialism derived.
Wow, digging back to ancient Greece for proof of leftist ideology before there was a Western world and awareness that human rights wasn't confined to the ruling class. Well I guess I should expect it since you declared we've been at war with jihadis since before there was a West, too.
I tried reading the Republic but couldn't finish it, actually. I've never understood why conservatives like Russell Kirk admired this dialogue or even why men like Thomas Jefferson admired Rome's oligarchic Senate. Romanticized impractical nonsense incompatible with representative democracy.
Gandalin: A former socialist, Joshua Muravchik, [snip]
And present neocon...
Gandalin: And finally, although it is out of print (available on line, I think, in Russian and English) Shafarevich's "The Socialist Idea" shows the same sort of societal organization in the Peru of the Incas and in ancient China, and goes on to discuss the sort of society that emerged in Russia during the years of "War Communism." Truly remarkable scholarship, when you consider that it was done using the XIXth century German and Russian sources still available in Soviet libraries.
I think you mean "The Socialist Phenomenon". I can't comment on these references but you sound amazed that liberalism and conservatism, if taken to the extreme of their continuums, end in totalitarianism and become indistinguishable from one another except for slogans and symbolism. Did someone other than a communist or fascist lead you to believe differently? I sense buyer's remorse. A dissatisfied former starry-eyed liberal, perhaps?
No tengo ninguna idea qué "sei gezint" es pero coňo eres un bicho raro en el sentido politico.
Lesly,
Of course you can't comment on the references that I suggested, because you've never read them.
Congratulations on keeping your mind closed!
When you read them, let's try this discussion again.
Gandalin,
I'll give you the same response I gave the socialist America conspiracy theorist: if reading your recommended list means there is a risk I'll wind up thinking like you, I'll pass. And viola, this thread is done. Not that I could read it before my response or yours, and not that I think it will shed new light on Hitler's hysterical "Mein Kampf" and other documents, but you have a right to hold the conversation hostage by crossing your arms.
A shame. I would have liked to know about your political background.
Lesly,
I'm not crossing my arms, and I'm not holding this conversation hostage.
I am sorry to learn that you think your own psychic membranes are so weak that you would be unable to judge whether information that is new to you can safely be examined.
However, since I know that leftism is based on lies, I am confident that exposing yourself to the truth will change your thinking.
But you don't have to take my word for it, and you don't have to rely on secondary sources. Go to the primary sources, and make your own judgments. Read the National-socialist political programmes from the 1920s and 1930s. They are available on line, in German and in English. Decide for yourself if it isn't the same drivel that leftists spout today. Look at the propaganda the Germans used all over Western Europe, inviting the masses to join them in their struggle for peace, justice, and against capitalism.
Read Karl Marx's correspondence with Engels, and decide for yourself why he spouts the most vicious anti-semitic and anti-african bigotry. Or read his pamphlet on the "Jewish question" anhd understand why anti-semitism was called "the socialism of fools."
Examine the actual results of the "socialist phenomenon" wherever it has been brought into existence, and you will find the same thing: a militaristic police-state, a gulag, poverty, repression, terror, and war. You can see the nascent phases in Venezuela today, and the more developed phases in Zimbabwe or Cuba.
Read Frantz Fanon and you will find the same fascination with self-destructive violence that you will find in the poetry of "Adonis" or the "philosophy" of Tariq Ramadan.
Consider the killing fields of the Sorbonne-educated socialist Pol Pot, or the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution."
Consider why Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez ("Carlos the Jackal") has become a Muslim, and urges all leftist revolutionaries to become followers of Usama Bin Laden.
You don't have to take my word for it.
Commenting by HaloScan
