“”There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the… momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” – Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Inspired by the self-congratulatory display in the comments of this Ta-Nehisi Coates post. I confess as much of an inability to put myself in the shoes of Coates and his commenters here as they do of an inability to put themselves in the shoes of Russian revolutionaries. When I read dialogue like that, I cannot possibly understand what any of them believe they are accomplishing. I believe in argumentation and care about rhetoric because I believe that in a deeply unjust world, only the clash of ideas, passionately expressed and honestly rendered, can lead to productive change. The internet is full of places where the sympathetic meet to enjoy their mutual admiration. If people who think of themselves as good people getting together to share in their goodness actually changed the world for the better, we would have made much more progress by now.
Every aspect of that conversation is people who are already convinced congratulating each other on their moral and intellectual superiority over long-dead Russian communists. Dozens of comments say essentially “I just can’t understand why anybody thought the things they thought!,” and they are all upvoted. There’s not even an honest accounting of the horrors of the Tsars or the fact that famine and poverty were endemic to Russia before the revolution. It’s a bizarre way to talk about the world, but it’s endemic to Coates’s blog, where the quality of his writing is always balanced against the strange, sad world of his comments. He has always had a dedicated group of commenters who do essentially nothing but congratulate Coates for being correct and each other for being correct along with him. And he bans anyone who deviates from that script.
The pity of our time, of course, is precisely that most of the people who hate the horrors of the status quo nevertheless oppose the kind of change that could actually end them. These commenters all claim to hate white supremacy, and yet white supremacy is written into the very fabric of late capitalism. They will never countenance a radically different system, but they will also never experience an end to white supremacy within the system that they reflexive protect. And so it beats on.
Freddie what do you think of Nazism and its adherents? This is not rhetorical in the least. Do you think that your personal attitude towards the Nazis is better than [the attitude of Coates’ commenters towards the Bolsheviks?] [Henceforth ibid]
Germany wasn’t a backwater by any standards, cultural, scientific, economics, what have you. They supported Hitler. A minority, yes, but a vocal, dedicated minority.
What about dead philosophers who held sexist and racist views? Do you think your attitude toward’s Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Hegel’s misogyny is different or better than ibid? Do you think your attitude toward’s Kant’s comments on Africa is different or better than ibid? Do you think your attitude towards Cicero or Luther’s anti-semitism is different or better than ibid?
Suppose that your attitude towards the aforementioned are different from ibid. Why don’t you go criticizing people whose attitude towards the aforementioned are even more cavalier than ibid? People dismiss Schopenhauer’s misogyny and Kant’s white supremacy and Cicero’s anti-semitism far more brusquely and sanctimoniously than they dismiss communism, which is still respectable in academia–Zizek openly defends Stalin–even though communism has killed far more people than sexism or racism.
Is it because your own views are much closer to communism than nazism? Is it because you’re an enlightened social democrat and Coates’ commenters are brain-dead neoliberals? Why does it matter than Coates’ commenters can’t pass the Bolshevik Ideological Turing test? Far more people can’t pass the Nazism Ideological Turing Test. You give the impression that you’re criticizing the intellectual orientation or Coates’ commenters but in fact you just disagree with them and you want them to be brainwashed to believe what you believe.
You do this a lot, Freddie. You sanctimoniously criticize people’s intellectual attitude to score points and make yourself look better in lieu of discussing the substantive impact of ideologies, as if the fact that Noah Smith and Adam Ozimek are too closemindedly lazy to read a Jacobin article means that neoliberalism is wrong.
Why does it matter if Coates’ bans people who deviate from that script? At least he’s not trying to get anyone fired from their job for making a twitter joke. You like to rant about Yglesias occasionally, yet he’s one of the most principled liberals I know, e.g. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/377453621077868545. I don’t see you complaining about Coates’ banning racists from his comment section either.
Asians and Jews are also doing very well in late-capitalism, I suppose late capitalism is Asian and Jewish supremacist as well.
I am talking about the substantive impact of ideology. I am talking about the substantive impact of people who would rather enjoy themselves by feeling their superiority on dead questions rather than recognizing the ways in which this enjoyment is itself a reactionary impulse that prevents positive change. I am taking Twain seriously: I am placing the people who tonight freeze to death under bridges in the richest country in the history of the world on the same moral plain as those who were killed in the gulag. That is nothing but substance.
I think Freddie’s point was that these little circles of self-congratulation don’t accomplish much, other than, as Jesus supposedly said, “they have their reward.”
That was a very discouraging post by TNC. It poses the ridiculous question of “what Lenin, and then, Stalin was trying to accomplish.” The answer is not only simple, it is trivial, banal, circular; the individuals that history records as having consolidated power were trying to consolidate power. One could just as well claim confusion as to what Andrew Jackson and Jefferson Davis were trying to accomplish.
I normally can’t stand the Coates comment section, but Freddie, when are you going to face the fact that you are a fucking spaz? I really don’t think Ta-Nehisi or too many of those commenters are confused about why someone would want to overthrow Czarist rule, they’re wondering about what happened AFTER the revolution. I like how your quote is about a few thousand people dying in the French Revolution and how they could all fit in a cemetery and the issue under discussion is the death of millions from deliberately engineered starvation in a few fucking years in eastern Europe like a decade after the revolution in Russia but you think the situations are remotely comparable.
I also like how you always talk about “no enemies to my left!” and the evils of hippie-punching but you feel free to write off everyone a little bit to your right who would favor all kinds of things that would actually make a material difference in people’s lives for being insufficiently pure. How do you think the majority of the commenters there feel about significant increases in the minimum wage, cuts in military spending and military footprint, increased anti-poverty spending, ending the drug war, etc.? But who cares? They’re not enthusiastically signing on for your revolution where we expropriate the expropriators while remaining democratic pacifists the whole time! They must be idiots!
when are you going to face the fact that you are a fucking spaz?
Any day now, with encouragement like that!
Incidentally– deaths from poverty, starvation, and similar types of material need dwarf the number of deaths from every genocide in the history of the world. Which is the broader point, of course.
deaths from poverty, starvation, and similar types of material need dwarf the number of deaths from every genocide in the history of the world. Which is the broader point, of course.
Over what timespan? Deaths from old age dwarf deaths from every genocide too. So what? If your point is that far more people died from poverty than died from communist terror, well far more people died from communist terror than Nazi brutality, and so what of that?
Your point seems to be that it’s meaningless to talk about the deaths caused by the communists while there are more people dying *right now* from poverty. The problem is that a great many of the people proposing solutions to those deaths from poverty—yourself included—want to handwave away the massive holocaust that came about the last time people of your persuasion got the power to put ideas into action. If you could explain why your fellow socialists are not like those socialists, maybe you would be more trustworthy. But so long as you grumble about anyone who wants to talk about, be horrified by, or draw attention to the appalling murderousness of communism in action, you will continue looking like a Southerner who loves to talk about “state’s rights” and gets cranky when anyone suggests that worked out badly the last time.
Fuzzy! As I live and breathe.
“I really don’t think Ta-Nehisi or too many of those commenters are confused about why someone would want to overthrow Czarist rule, they’re wondering about what happened AFTER the revolution.”
Oh, please. If you really wanted to know the answer to that then your local academic library has shelf after shelf of scholarly literature on the matter. Why in god’s name would you ask a bunch of random blog commenters? Even Wikipedia would be preferable to that. It’s patently obvious that when somebody poses a question like that on a blog they’re angling for something else.
“deaths from poverty, starvation, and similar types of material need dwarf the number of deaths from every genocide in the history of the world. Which is the broader point, of course.”
But the death rate in Lenin’s & Stalin’s USSR was maybe worse overall (I don’t know), than in Czarist Russia, and certainly much worse for certain kinds of people. Not to mention the explosion in imprisonment, police-state repression, cultural & linguistic degradation, etc. In his history of the Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes says (quoting from memory) that the Bolsheviks executed more prisoners in their first three months (when they controlled only the area around St. Petersburg & Moscow) than the czar’s government did in the previous century. I know Pipes is often accused of bias, but I have faith he got the facts straight.
I don’t think you are actually excusing those crimes, but the quote above is something people making that defense tend to say. It’s something communists at the time themselves did say to justify the USSR’s actions.
I would think that someone with leftwing or Marxist (?) politics would want to highlight the longterm problems radical change is supposed to address, while at the same time denounce as loudly as possible the Leninist “solution” to those problems. First because the 80–100 million victims of communist governments deserve to be remembered. Second, because the disastrous experience of “actually existing” communism is a main reason most people no longer take seriously radical change.
Of course I’m not excusing those crimes. What I am doing is saying that I take the lives of people who freeze to death under bridges as seriously as I take those who died in the gulags. And since we can save the former and can’t save the latter, unfortunately, that’s where our focus should lie. Refusing to allow the dead in gulags to function as a distraction from the dead killed by capitalism is all that is required to be a communist.
Not being so leftwing, I disagree that deaths from poverty are the result of an economic system that only goes back a few hundred years, and much less in many parts of the world. But that’s a quibble, and I just want to say obviously you make a good point. Thanks for the reply.
A distraction???? You’re calling millions of dead a “distraction”???? This is why people don’t trust communists: rather than articulate how you’ve learned from the horrors of Leninism in action, you get sulky about anyone bringing them up. You seem to think that revolutionary socialism is the way to save those dead under bridges. The problem is that every other time it’s been tried, revolutionary socialism has led to far more death. This is not “a distraction”. This is the very heart of your lack of credibility.
The dead are not a distraction. But the insistence on focusing on crimes that took place 50-90 years ago becomes a distraction from focusing on the crimes that are occurring today. Just as the Chinese use crimes committed against them during World War II– and there were many, terrible and unforgivable crimes– to change the subject from their own abuses now.
One of the big problems with discussions of this sort is what gets left out. Stalin and Mao are routinely blamed not only for those directly executed by them but also the millions who died from starvation or disease in conditions exacerbated by their policies. Fair enough, but applying those standards universally means that the greatest atrocity in human history was in fact the conquest and depopulation of the Americas by western powers including the USA.
First of all, I guess I should state that while I read Coates regularly, I do not usually read his comments section, nor have I ever commented there. I read the stuff that Coates writes for the same reason that I read what you write—you both are passionate about an interesting range of issues, have very different perspectives from my own, and you both make me think. Since there is little to be gained, as you point out, with a mutual admiration society or echo chamber, I will proceed directly to a few areas in your post where I have bones to pick.
“I believe in argumentation and care about rhetoric because I believe that in a deeply unjust world, only the clash of ideas, passionately expressed and honestly rendered, can lead to productive change.” If only it were that simple…even when “good” ideas win the day and get the green light, there remain the hurdles of funding, implementation, and preservation. Identifying and expressing good ideas, with good supporting evidence/documentation, is about 15% of the battle, in my experience.
“If people who think of themselves as good people getting together to share in their goodness actually changed the world for the better, we would have made much more progress by now.” I think I understand your sentiment and frustration, but before you pass judgment on how much progress should have been made by now, and on the efforts of those engaged in the struggle, please spend a few years in the world trying to change it for the better. Generally speaking, the world is resistant to change, and does not take kindly to the efforts of change agents, which I think needs to be taken into account when passing judgment on those in the arena.
“The pity of our time, of course, is precisely that most of the people who hate the horrors of the status quo nevertheless oppose the kind of change that could actually end them.” This is a pretty broad and serious allegation, and I am interested in what your evidence or basis is for it. I am also unaware of a panacea for all of the world’s ills having been identified, but I don’t get out much, so maybe I missed that. Perhaps I spend too much time browsing neoliberal, anti-academic sites….
“I am taking Twain seriously: I am placing the people who tonight freeze to death under bridges in the richest country in the history of the world on the same moral plain as those who were killed in the gulag.” With respect to people freezing under bridges, I am by no means an expert, but the issue of homelessness is pretty complex, especially with regard to the subgroup suffering from mental illness. Within this subgroup, a significant percentage has limited insight into their condition, and is resistant to treatment. Oftentimes, even when there are family members and government actors who are interested in helping, there are still bad outcomes, partly because of concerns regarding the perils of forced treatment. Sometimes the menu contains nothing but bad options, and assigning blame to the authors of the menu is not as simple as it sounds. More could be done to help many, of course, which I think is part of your point. Even so, I am not sure it is fair to say that “more could be done to help the needy in the United States” is the moral equivalent to the atrocities committed recently in Syria, Sudan, the Congo, or the DPRK.
Famine was not endemic to Tsarist Russia. You are confusing hunger with famine and need to go read Sen again. There was one major famine in the Russian Empire in the 19th Century in 1891-1892 and it was centered on the Volga region. Under Soviet rule there were three major famines, and they killed millions of more people than died in the Tsarist era famine. The first was in 1921-1922 again heavily effecting the Volga, but also Ukraine and other areas. In 1932-1933 there was a completely artificial famine centered on Ukraine, but also effecting the Kuban, Volga, and Kazakhstan. Finally, in 1946-1947. These three famines which resulted from Soviet policy killed a lot more than the 1891-1892 famine.
Right, and the fact that Russia lost 14% of its population in World War II had nothing to do with structural resource problems, right? Hey, anything to preserve our pro-capitalist propaganda, right?
Your answer makes no sense. The 1932-33 famine was a direct result of Soviet policies and killed millions of people. Far more people died in Ukraine, Kuban, and Kazakhstan of famine during those two years than died of famine during the entire 19th century in the Russian Empire. I am not sure with what that has to do with Soviet losses during 1941-1944. Many of these were a result of structural problems created by the Soviet government such as an inability to feed or house prisoners and internal deportees. But, most of the deaths in the USSR during WWII were non-Russians, the war was mostly fought on Ukrainian and Belorussian soil. Even in the rear echelons ethnic groups persecuted by the Stalin regime because of their race like the Kalmyks made up most of the deaths caused by lack of food, housing, and medical care.
http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2013/12/letter-from-beria-to-molotov-on-kalmyks.html