Russia v. Ukraine: Causes and Consequences

What are the causes and consequences of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?

It seems pretty clear the causes of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine consist of a combination of ethnolinguistic divisions and security concerns, with some small historical factors thrown into the mix. I'm a big fan of maps as a means of understanding issues. Below is a map that I feel represents the ethnolinguistic situation fairly well:

Unsurprisingly, the areas annexed by Russia -- particularly Crimea -- are those areas with a Russian ethnic majority or significant minority and that are Russian-speaking. I wrote last week about the extent to which Putin's foreign policy has been irrendentist at least with regard to the protection, if not annexation, of Russians living outside Russia's borders.

Another map lays out why security concerns caused the conflict:

  

This map of the Rada election results in 2014 shows People's Front (pro-EU) voters in the Ukrainian ethnolinguistic areas and the opposition in the Russian areas. Therefore, for Russia, concerns about accession to the EU and further separation of Ukraine from Russia at the very least provided a pretense for intervention. Finally, it bears noting that the USSR had bestowed Crimea on Ukraine only in the 1950s, so an historical argument could be made that, in the case of the peninsula, a legitimate claim cwas being made by Russia.

In terms of the consequences, the most important one, I think, is the extent to which it has brought Putin and Russia into further conflict with the EU and United States. Hawks in the U.S. had already been gunning for Putin over his intervention in Georgia, but the Obama administration had sought a "Russian reset," at least during Obama's first term. However, the Ukrainian conflict turned the relationship overwhelmingly negative, giving rise to Russian-U.S. conflict the full extent of which we have yet to see.

The Medvedev Interregnum

6.1. What was the significance of the Medvedev interregnum?

I think the greatest significance of the Medvedev interregnum was that the period signaled to the world and the country itself that Russia would at least continue to give the outward appearance of democracy, even while ultimate political power continued to be wielded by Putin. For all of the ink (apparently) spilled in considering the extent to which consigning Putin to a term as prime minister as Medvedev ascended to the presidency would change the power dynamic, I don't think that the period was all that significant in terms of genuine changes implemented by Medvedev. Perhaps in making this assessment I am relying too much on knowing the outcome in the five years since Putin has returned to the presidency.

Here, Alexander Baturo and Slava Mikhaylov seem to have made a strong case for Medvedev at least believing for some of the period that he might be an independent actor from Putin in establishing his own policy initiatives. They emphasize his liberalization and modernization schemes, for example, although they note that he mainly enunciated these goals in speeches and writing rather than in concrete proposals. Thus, they conclude, Medvedev "could be regarded as neither a figurehead nor a fully-fledged successor."[1] Simultaneously, they note, Russian regional governors drifted more into Putin's orbit during Medvedev's presidency. Thus, in the end, Medvedev was more of a placeholder than perhaps he himself realized at the time.

What I'm left wondering is why Medvedev stayed on with Putin after the latter returned to the presidency. Ola Cichowlas wrote in March of this year that Medvedev had made himself a millionaire several times over via corruption as part of Putin's team, but he was increasingly being seen as a scapegoat for the government as economic misfortune has led to dissatisfaction among the population. "While Putin’s approval ratings have soared as a result of his efforts to play tough with the West and secure military victories abroad," Cichowlas writes, "Medvedev has taken the blame for falling living standards at home. For the past few years, the Russian public, and even some within Putin’s hard-line inner circle, have considered Medvedev both weak and dispensable."[2] Nevertheless, at this writing, Medvedev remains the prime minister. Perhaps he poses more of a danger to Putin's hold on power as a potentially popular figure than as the unpopular man he is today.

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[1] Alexander Baturo and Slava Mikhaylov, "Reading the Tea Leaves: Medvedev's Presidency Through Political Rhetoric of Federal and Sub-National Actors," Europe-Asia Studies, 66, no. 6 (2014): 974.
[2] Ola Cichowlas, "The Most Hated Man in Russia," Foreign Affairs, March 28, 2017,
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/28/the-most-hated-man-in-russia-dmitry-medvedev-protests-putin/, accessed November 27, 2017

Failure of Democracy in Post-Soviet Russia

5.2. Why has the post-Soviet space not democratized?

To some extent, I think, to recognize why the post-Soviet space has not democratized, it's necessary to recognize why other places have. The so-called Western democracies democratized slowly over the course of decades if not hundreds of years, so it's perhaps fair to ask whether we might not have to wait a similar period of time before democratization really happens elsewhere. In addition, it is important to examine where democracy has succeeded and failed elsewhere in the world, e.g., in some parts of Latin America (Chile and Uruguay, for examples) and in the Middle East, respectively. In the end, I think it is a combination of economics and security concerns that has prevented full democratization in the post-Soviet area. 

On the former point, those countries that did democratize, whether in the tradition of the Western nations or the later cases in Latin America, did so within an environment of relative economic health. While it is a foregone conclusion that bad economic times can cause people to abandon democracy, it might be less obvious that economic stability can foster greater democratization. In the case of the post-Soviet space, the economic situation has not been great since 1991. Although there was obvious economic growth during the 1990s, it went mostly to the top levels, where it increased wealth inequality, rather than the growth being distributed more evenly among income groups. This pattern of growth was especially true in Russia. Since 2001, energy crises due to 9/11 and the subsequent war on terrorism and the 2008 global economic crisis both negatively affected even those economics that had done well during the 1990s, with the result of democratization, slow as it might have been, being reversed and authoritarianism re-asserted. 

On the latter point, Plato asserted 2,500 years ago that tyrannical rule emerged out of democracy yielding chaos and that tyrants went to war to consolidate their regimes. While the comparison to contemporary authoritarian regimes is less than perfect, it is nevertheless true that serious security concerns have arisen in many of the post-Soviet states, with the result that a decreased emphasis on diversity of opinion has been the result. For instance, where ethnic conflicts have emerged, e.g., between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, there has been stunted democracy and the re-emergence of authoritarianism. To some extent, have a history of being victims of genocide has facilitated this reaction among Armenians; the sense of being besieged probably contributes to this phenomenon among Azeris. In a larger sense, concerns about Islamic fundamentalist violence could fuel security concerns in Central Asia and, during the 1990s, in Russia itself. It is more likely that Russia and Russian-aligned states fear the United States militarily and that those states pulling away from Russia fear Russia seeking to re-establish (neo-)colonial rule on the basis of protecting ethnically Russian populations. The specific fears are different on the two sides of the border, but the end result of resurgent authoritarianism is shared.

Why Did the USSR Collapse?

5.1 Is the collapse of the USSR more attributable to personality, institutional or structural features?

I think the collapse of the USSR was attributable to all three of the features: personality, institutional, and structural. Presuming that Mikhail Gorbachev is the person referred to in the first regard, I think it's fair to say that his personality played an essential role in the country's collapse, although obviously it's more difficult to say whether the dismantling of the Soviet state was by design or an unintended consequence of reform. Here, the readings for the week offer a range of viewpoints. David Marples's analysis is particularly useful in pointing out how, on the one hand, Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the party into the elite with the paradoxical effect that "Neither workers, nor peasants, nor the intellectual elite accepted him as one of their own."[1] While such a characterization might initially seem to constitute a handicap, I rather think the lack of personal connections allowed Gorbachev to have a sort of maneuverability that a leader more attached to the party (e.g., Brezhnev) or to the workers and peasants (e.g., Khrushchev) might not have had. At those times where the wisdom of Gorbachev's decisions faltered (such as in the Lithuanian crisis early in 1991), he was probably saved more by luck than ability, but outside of the last year of his tenure, I don't think was the overarching style of Gorbachev's leadership.

Regarding institutional features, the diminishing role of the party probably plays the most important role. Here, in ultimately excluding the party from an exclusive role as the single guiding party of the system, Gorbachev delivered a coup de grace to a system that had been deteriorating over at least two decades. As Alexander Dallin points out, although the party grew to a heavily bureaucratized state with deeply entrenched control by the dawn of the Brezhnev era, the stagnation of that era resulted in a fundamental disconnect between the people and the party, made worse by rampant corruption. When the glasnost policy brought all of these problems out into the open, Dallin writes, "all this brought about a remarkable sense of having been lied to, of having been deprived of what the rest of the world had had access to […] a transformation of the Communist Party from the unchallenged clan of privilege to a hollow institution without a rational task other than self-preservations."[2] With glasnost in place, there could not help but be a vicious cycle of openness evoking party delegitimization evoking more openness, etc. Without the guiding hand of the party over the party state, the state could not but help but dissolve.

Finally, the structural features are most complex of all, involving both the rise of nationalism and the dissolution of totalitarianism. On the former point, a two-faced minorities policy that for decades had preached local self-determination but practiced aggressive Russification could not have helped but fuel nationalism, everything we know about nationalism considered. Regarding the latter point, I found Rasma Karklins's essay most helpful. As she notes, "If one links the totalitarian model's assumptions about the significance of the party's ideological and media monopolies to a dynamic concept of political culture, the erosion of these monopolies reveals itself as even more of a systemic change."[3] Karklins is clear that the roles of personality, ideology, and institutions are interrelated in her essay, so she bears in mind Gorbachev's role of instituting democratization "from above" and his dilution of the party's key role. Overall, I found her analysis to be the most incisive.

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[1] David R. Marples, The Collapse of the Soviet Union 1985-1991 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 103.
[2] Alexander Dallin, "Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union," Post-Soviet Affairs, 8, no. 4 (1992): 298.
[3] Rasma Karklins, "Explaining Regime Change in the Soviet Union," Europe-Asia Studies, 46, no. 1 (1994): 34.

Brezhnevism or Neo-Stalinism?

4.2.3. Is there such a thing as Brezhnevism? What, if anything, characterises the ideological politics of Brezhnev's long term in office?

There is such a thing has Brezhnevism, but I don't think Brezhnevism is the right word to use for it. On the one hand, there certainly was a series of policies and actions undertaken by the Soviet government between 1964 and 1982. On the other hand, whether it is correct to apply Brezhnev's name to these policies and actions seems to be to rely on the extent to which Brezhnev contributed to these policies or whether they would have been pursued if he had not been the leader of the USSR during this period.

If there is one aspect of Brezhnevism that seems initially indisputable, it is the Brezhnev Doctrine of armed intervention to prevent the overthrow of socialist governments in Eastern Europe. No better example of this doctrine in action exists than the Soviet and Warsaw Pact deployment of tanks to Czechoslovakia to put down the so-called Prague Spring. However, the decision to intervene in Prague does not seem to have been Brezhnev's call. For instance, in his discussion of the topic, Stephen Hanson mentions not Brezhnev's concern but Kosygin's, even as he refers to the consequent doctrine promulgated in the general secretary's name to be "Brezhnevian orthodoxy."[1]

The explanation for this focus on Kosygin is given by Richard Sawka, who notes the emphasis during the Brezhnev era on collective leadership. Sawka writes that Brezhnev was "dour and (mindful of his predecessor's fate) sought to rule by consensus."[2] Thus, if there was a Brezhnevism, understood as the body of decisions made by the Soviet leadership when Brezhnev was general secretary, it seems unfair to tag this period with his name, despite his status as first among equals with the CPSU leadership.

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[1] Stephen E. Hanson, "The Brezhnev Era," in Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3, edited by Roland Suny (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 300.
[2] Richard Sawka, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 351.

Was Khrushchevism a Period of De-Stalinization?

4.1.3. It is sometimes suggested that historians ought to swap the term "De-Stalinisation" for Khrushchevism. What do you think? Is there such a thing as ‘Khrushchevism’? Can more insight into the transition from Stalinism be gained by focusing on what was distinctive about the ideological politics of the Khrushchev era?

While I am unsure whether there was such a thing as "Khrushchevism," I am certain that it is wrong to equate the Khrushchev era with De-Stalinization. The clearest argument against De-Stalinization" under Khrushchev is the re-emergence of Stalinist policies once Khrushchev was removed from office. A closer look at the ideological politics of Khrushchev's tenure can shed some light on this confusion of terms.

It is tempting to link De-Stalinization with Khrushchev because of the latter's "secret speech" at the CPSU congress in 1956 and its denunciation of his predecessor's cult of personality and crimes. However, it ought not be forgotten that Khrushchev was an active participant in these crimes, particularly when he was first secretary in Ukraine during the 1930s. As Miriam Dobson writes, "condemning Stalin and the terror compelled society to rethink the way it understood its own recent, and very bloody, past—and by extension how people were now to relate to their own life stories."[1] In the case of Khrushchev, such a meditation would require him to review his own personal actions.

Beyond the issue of personal responsibility, Khrushchev also knew that he could not allow the "thaw" that accompanied the speech to become too warm, as doing so would endanger his own position as general secretary and de facto ruler of the country. Quoting Aleksei Adzhubei, William Taubman writes, "Khrushchev sensed the blow had been too powerful, and . . . increasingly he sought to limit the boundaries of critical analysis, lest it end up polarising society."[2] Taubman links the crushing of the Hungarian uprising to the unwanted effects of greater openness. That Khrushchev chose to crush it rather than take a moderate approach demonstrates the extent to which De-Stalinization was a form of cover that Khrushchev provided himself so that, whatever he did, the crimes of Stalin would appear worse.

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[1] Miriam Dobson, "The Post-Stalin Era: De-Stalinization, Daily Life, and Dissent," Kritika, 12, no. 4 (2011): 907.
[2] William Taubman, "The Khrushchev Period, 1953-1964," in Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3, edited by Roland Suny (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), 270.

Revisionism in Stalinist Historiography

What are the (relative) advantages of the revisionist interpretations of Stalinism?
I think one of the most important advantages of the a revisionist interpretation of Stalinism is that it becomes easier through one to understand how and why Stalin undertook the mass repressions that he did. For instance, although the "traditional" historians and revisionists both agree that Stalin ordered mass repression, e.g., in the Great Terror, it is only the revisionist version that engages the social science underlying how a dictator who was geographically quite distant from the scenes of actual violence could order murder and actually have it carried out. Some of the "credit," of course goes to the sequence of secret police chiefs upon whom Stalin relied, but even they ultimately needed to be able to exploit some aspect of the executioners' situation. Whereas the scholarship on Nazi Germany has considered this sort of question for more than twenty years (i.e., Täterforschung), I had not seen such considerations in the literature on Stalin until I read Arch Getty's two books on the Great Terror.[1] Having done so, I can see how the expansive bureaucracy of Stalin's USSR lent itself to the kind of manipulation that, in Germany, culminated in the Holocaust. This to some extent explains the how of Stalin owing to revisionism.

The why is more complex, but again, it is a question I had not seen seriously considered until I read revisionist historians. Here, the emphasis is on going beyond the ascription of mere insanity to Stalin and understanding more completely why he ordered mass violence. Here, although I'm unsure whether she would be correctly identified as a revisionist, given her political conservatism (although I assume she at least relies on revisionists), Anne Applebaum's essay is helpful in undersatnding the actual political motivations: "[Stalin's] violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist-Leninist ideology."[2] If we consider Stalin from this vantage, rather than as a crazy person, and if we consider Stalin additionally as building on basic concepts inherited from Lenin, then it becomes much easier to understand his thinking and – perhaps more importantly – the interior logic of that thinking.

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[1] J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1999); and J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1985).
[2] Anne Applebaum, "Understanding Stalin," The Atlantic, November 2014, available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/11/understanding-stalin/380786/

Stalinist Totalitarianism

3.1. Stalin’s regime is an archetype (or model) of totalitarianism. Do you agree?

I don't think it's much of a question of whether Stalin's regime was totalitarian. Rather, I think the dispute that has arisen is not over whether it was totalitarian but rather over how well and accurately the term had been defined before the advent of revisionism. This is a question to which I've dedicated quite a bit of thought over the years, but I hope to make my point here without being too verbose. I think there are essentially two points that should be made in justifying Stalin's archetypal status as a totalitarian dictator: the extent to which totalitarianism can be defined abstractly; and the extent to which it can be distinguished from garden-variety authoritarianism.

On the first point, as I mentioned in class on Thursday, Jan Gross (in Revolution From Abroad) offers an interesting definition of totalitarianism, using Stalin's regime as a test case. If we consider totalitarianism from the standpoint of the tendency of totalitarian governments to eliminate public, collective forms of action unless it sponsors those forms itself, then, as Gross writes, "it thus appears that the totalitarian state confiscates the private realm."[1] However, he continues, this is untrue; it is in fact the opposite "because of the privatization of the public realm."[2] What Gross means is that the Soviets established totalitarian control – at least in its occupation of the Kresy from September 1939 to June 1941, was to make people feel as if participation in public forms of collection action was a way to express private desires, whether it was personal empowerment or settling scores with one's enemies. Clearly Stalin's methods in evoking denunciations, e.g., falls under this definition.

On the second point, since it's unlikely that one would define Stalin as anyone but one or the other (authoritarian or totalitarian), I found an article by Paul C. Sondrol particularly helpful in distinguishing the two terms.[3] Comparison Fidel Castro (totalitarian) to Alfredo Stroessner (the Paraguayan authoritarian dictators), Sondrol suggests seven criteria by which to judge an historical situation: Stalin meets six of these seven (role conception as a function, public ends of power, minimal corruption, official ideology, lack of pluralism, and high legitimacy). Where Stalin seems to have fallen short of one of Sondrol's criteria is in lacking personal charisma, although as noted by Philip Boobbyer remarks, among others, Stalin is able to form a personality cult by advancing one for Lenin and connecting himself as the nature evolution in the Soviet leadership.[4]

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[1] Jan T. Gross, Revolution From Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1988), 117, italics in original.
[2] Ibid, italics in original.
[3] Paul C. Sondrol, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Dictators: A Comparison of Fidel Castro and Alfred Stroessner," Journal of Latin American Studies, 23, no. 3 (1991): 599-620.
[4] Philip Boobyer, The Stalin Era (London: Routledge, 2000), 15-16.

Why Lenin?

2.2. To what extent was Bolshevist Marxism adapted for the age of imperialism?
I think Bolshevism was fairly adapted to the conditions of imperialism and specifically to the conditions of Imperial Russia. The underlying assumption of the need for a party vanguard, as expressed by Lenin in What Is to Be Done?, is that a class of professional revolutionaries is needed to direct the energy of a revolutionary mass of people toward a political goal, using a concrete ideology such as Marxism. Lenin writes, "At this point, we wish to state only that the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory."[1] Further underlying this assumption is that, in a country like Russia, which lacks an industrial proletariat with class consciousness, a revolution can only be successful when such a vanguard exists.

This consideration does raise the question of whether a country like Germany, which Marx saw as being the ripest ground for revolutionary socialism against an industrial bourgeoisie, would require a vanguard to mount a revolution on the order of that in Russia. Two main points of evidence argue against this viewpoint. First, the more "organic" of the changes in government in 1917, the February Revolution, seems to have lacked a party vanguard directing it, so even a revolution in a country without a formal class of professional revolutionaries could be successful, to the extent that the February Revolution could be considered successful. Second, the revolution that actually did break out in Germany in November 1918 also lacked a party vanguard directing public unrest toward a specific ideological goal. Rather, mutiny in the military culminated in the German Empire's collapse. Thus, even in other imperial age states, a vanguard might not be essential.

Perhaps then the best answer is that Leninism/Bolshevism was adapted for the imperial age in the specific national context of Russia and the specific period of the Provisional Government, but not for the age of imperialism generally. In so far as the ideological goal of a revolution led by a vanguard would be the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletaria, we must consider the Bolshevik seize of power successful.

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[1] V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement in Collected Works, volume 5, translated by Joe Fineberg and George Hanna (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm, emphasis in original.

The Road to October

Do you think that the October Revolution would have happened with or without the Bolsheviks? 

I think a revolution of some kind would have occurred without the Bolsheviks but probably not a coup on the level of what the Bolsheviks actually pulled off. Because Kerensky's government refused to end the war and it was fairly clear that Russia would end up on the losing end of that conflict unless Germany was defeated sooner rather than later, it is unlikely that Kerensky's government would have been able to forestall widespread mutiny for very long. The threat of mutiny in and of itself might have resulted in a coup from the military itself on the order of the Kornilov coup or perhaps even from the military rank and file. Of course, it's also true that Germany was on a course to lose the war by the time American troops deployed in Europe, but that deployment was more or less coincident with the October Revolution. The other possibility is that some faction from within the Provisional Government, perhaps the Left SRs, would make a play for power in the environment of widespread mutiny and ride a wave of rank and file military support to political power. Whether that power would exist within the context of the Provisional Government, a military-backed coup, or some combination of the two is difficult of say, obviously, but it does seem to me that the ongoing war was a guarantee of the Provisional Government disappearing at some point.

To elaborate on these points, first, it's necessary to distinguish what the Bolsheviks actually did from the possibilities listed in the previous paragraph. While it is true that the Bolsheviks controlled the Petrograd Soviet at the time that they staged their coup, they were quite far from being able to claim a popular mandate outside the city, much less outside that city's soviet. This being the case, it becomes clear that seizure of power in the capital is more of a decapitating movement than an expression of popular revolt. Nothing else proves this point more than the elections to the Constituent Assembly and the move by Lenin et al. to nullify the results of the election and rule by decree. Orlando Figes in quite clear in his book that Lenin had no interest in drawing political power from a deliberative body but rather to create a dictatorship. Figes writes, "The 'class struggle' and the defeat of the 'counter-revolution' demanded the consolidation of Soviet power and, unless the Assembly was ready to recognize this, 'the entire people' would agree that it was 'doomed to politiical extinction'. It was a declaration of intent to abolish the Assembly, unless the Assembly agreed to abolish itself."[1] Figes's use of inverted commas here is intended not only to provide direct quotation but also to sneer not so subtly at the terminology used by Lenin to deligitimize the institution. Any other party attempting to seize power would have had to do so while maintaining the legitimacy of the Provisional Government or at least of the Duma. In this regard, Lenin's decision to boycott the Provisional Government was wise.

Finally, the Bolsheviks' emphasis on a party vanguard allowed them to harness the popular unrest and violence of the immediate period of the Provisional Government's collapse. Whereas civil wars are commonly environments in which petty violence and personal score-settling become commonplace,[2] and Russia in the fall of 1917 was no exception, the Bolsheviks, operating on the basis of an ideological mandate to direct the power of the masses, could determine how best to tolerate the street violence until their control of power was firm. It is unlikely that any other single party would have had to discipline to take control of such a volatile situation.

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[1] Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 513.
[2] This is a point made well in Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Late Tsarism in Russia

I'm back in school, after having completed my Bachelor's degree on September 1 (below).

Not much time off, but I've started a Master's program in history at the University of Edinburgh, which has an online program. The first class -- Ideology and Politics in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Space -- is a hybrid course taught online and via Skype in a classroom. So far so good. Here's my first discussion post for the course.

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I chose to answer these two questions together since I see them as inherently inter-related. In the mid-19th century, the Russian government under the Romanovs was still an absolute monarchy, although it was arguably moving in the direction of a more constitutional state. Since the idea of constitutional governance does not really catch on in Europe until the Enlightenment, it is fair to assess (briefly) Russia's evolution from that point. I had always believed that the Enlightenment more or less failed to influence Russia by virtue of Napoleon's failure there. However, as indicated by Edwin Bacon, the experience of Russian soldiers in Paris as occupiers in 1814 had the effects that Napoleon's invasion could not.[1] Before 1814, the primary reformer in Russia had been Peter the Great, but importantly, his influence was exerted even as he maintained an absolute hold on power. Perhaps the most appropriate comparison for Peter is the "enlightened despotism" of Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Bacon's treatment of late 18th century/19th century Russia begins with Catherine the Great, so it seems appropriate to start there. Bacon notes that her reign was marked by an initial embrace of Enlightenment values that was undone by the anti-monarchism and regicide of the French Revolution, with the empress returning to censorship in its wake. The so-called Great Reformer, Alexander II, who came to the throne nearly sixty years later, is depicted by Bacon as a man torn from both sides, by radical revolutionaries on the left who thought his reforms insufficient and conservatives and but reactionaries on the right who sought to reverse their loss of both serfs and privilege. His assassination resulted in a reversion to severe repression under his son and grandson, Alexander III and Nicholas II, respectively, who ruled as absolute monarchs. Thus, it seems an easy conclusion to draw that Russia's monarchy had moments of development into a constitutional state that were erased under subsequent reigns in which the monarch or his/her successor reacted to revolutionary violence.

Oddly, it seems that it was only Nicholas II who reacted to revolution with anything other than repression, although it was certainly his first response. However, the longer-lived, quasi-reformist of establishing the Duma was increasingly undone by the tsar's prime ministers and the tsar himself, such that, by the time World War I began, the promises inherent in establishing the Duma seemed distant. The conclusion here is that Russia took two steps back for each step forward with regard to a more liberal system of government. Joshua Sanborn,[2] for one, argues that it ultimately took the war for the monarchy to dissolve, but he does not attribute the fall of the tsar to the usual factors of other writers. Instead, Sanborn sees the increasing disintegration of order at the front and in border areas as playing the primary role in the erosion of the tsar's authority. I tend to agree with him on this point.

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     [1] Edwin Bacon, Contemporary Russia, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2014), 16-17.

     [2] Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014).

Convicted Felon Publishes "History" Book

Here's the whole series, nine parts linked to individually (12,000 words total):

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

Convicted Felon Publishes "History" Book, Part 4.2 (concluded)

Click here for the previous part of this series.

Franklin the Fascist

Much of D’Souza’s treatment of the FDR administration and the New Deal is dedicated to comparing it to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. This is to be expected in a book dedicated to proving that the roots of the American left lie in fascism/National Socialism. After all, the New Deal and its effects on the country remain the primary legacy with which supply-siders, right libertarians, and the like must deal.

What’s curious about D’Souza is the extent to which he will excoriate FDR for things that could be fairly laid at the feet of Lincoln – but because Lincoln was a Republican, they are ignored or excused. D’Souza writes, “The Leviathan government we have now wasn’t all FDR’s doing, but it was started by FDR. Before him, we had economic liberty as a constitutional right. After him, we didn’t.”[1]

To start with, it’s a truth nearly universally acknowledged that the expansion of federal power began not with FDR but with Lincoln, who used the power of the federal government to crush the secessionist movement. This is to be expected – the Republican party was a party of concentrated federal power at the time, including the use of this power for the abolition of slavery.

Moreover, as dewy-eyed as D’Souza and his cohorts wax rhapsodic economic freedom, it’s an unfortunate fact of history that the U.S. right through the period of World War I operated with an overwhelmingly protectionist economy, setting high tariffs to prevent cheaper imported goods from outcompeting with domestic goods. You can say what you want to about protection as an economic policy, but what you can’t say is that it even closely resembles free trade. Republican governments and Democratic governments imposed tariffs. Curiously, the current noise about tariffs is being made by the Trump administration.

Not once does D’Souza consider the idea that FDR might have done the things he did as president, whether justified or not, because he truly believed that they were the best things for the country. In this regard – not to mention his similar attacks against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – he is guilty of the same behavior he blames the left for of impugning the patriotism and good intentions of Trump.

To further prove that FDR was a fascist, D’Souza brings up his relationship with Hugo Black, a onetime KKK member, senator from Alabama, and eventually Supreme Court justice named to the court by FDR himself. Needless to say, Black, like all pro-segregation politicians, is a highly problematic figure. That said, it’s also important to remember why FDR cooperated with Black and other Southern Democrats in the manner D’Souza alleges.

While Democrats were a majority in the legislature, they were not on board with the New Deal – particularly among the Southern wing. Avoidance of the race issue was the price that FDR paid for the Southern wing’s support for the New Deal. It’s reasonable to believe that this was a deal that FDR made with the devil. At the same time, it’s easy to think that from the comfort of not being in the situation.

Humorously, D’Souza writes, “Not until 1954, when Republicans controlled the presidency, the House, and the Senate did they finally eliminate the exclusions that denied many blacks Social Security and other benefits.” As stated before, D’Souza offers no citation here to check his assertion, but it’s reasonable to assume that he is referring to the Brown decision, which while limited to outlawing segregation in education ultimately was extended to all publicly provided services. It’s humorous because one of the nine Supreme Court justices who vote unanimously in the Brown case was Hugo Black. Conveniently, that’s a fact omitted by D’Souza.

Finally, D’Souza indicates that FDR was a fascist and racist for interning Japanese Americans during the war but not German or Italian Americans, at least to the same extent. It should be clear that there is no justification for interning any American regardless of their ethnic background. Italians and Germans were interned, but largely only foreign nationals, which is what countries do with foreign nationals in times of war.

In closing out this chapter, D’Souza details how, in his opinion, the left has sought to conceal FDR’s complicity with fascism. He lays much of the responsibility at the feet of FDR himself for changing his tune regarding fascism, citing an April 1938 message to Congress by the president. However, D’Souza doesn’t mention just how much had changed between the beginning of FDR’s presidency by then. First of all, Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and Italy had been expelled from the League of Nations. Further, Hitler had annexed Austria and begun to press for the Sudetenland. On top of all that, the Spanish Civil War had been raging for two years.

The rest of the blame D’Souza lays at the feet of historian Ira Katznelson. Here he does provide citations, although they are to the wrong book (D’Souza’s quotes from Katznelson come from Fear Itself, and not from When Affirmative Action Was White). Nor does D’Souza quote Katznelson faithfully.

D’Souza writes that Katznelson uses the phrase “most profound imperfections” to refer to FDR’s administration overall, with its “racist and dictatorial tendencies.”[2] In fact, while Katznelson uses the phrase, he uses it to refer to the New Deal, not the overall administration.[3] Nor does Katznelson actually use the phrase “rotten compromise,” as D’Souza claims. Rather, Katznelson quotes the phrase as used by Avishai Margalit.[4] This is sloppy scholarship, to be sure.

Back to the Present

In his eighth chapter, D'Souza returns to the Trump presidency. Here, he turns his fire on the holy trinity of the left -- academia, Hollywood, and the media -- which he says operate as a veritable "state within a state," undermining Trump's legitimacy. This, D'Souza tells us, is a recent development ushered in by the student protest movements of 1968 and codified by progressive Gleichschaltung.

In his discussion of the academic left, D'Souza identifies three key villains: Heidegger, Marcuse, and Soros. Marcuse, we're told, was one of the group of Jews around Heidegger to absolve Heidegger of his Nazi sympathies. The treatment of Marcuse is wrapped up in an analysis of the Frankfurt School and Adorno, particularly the latter's The Authoritarian Personality and the former's theories of fascism being rooted in fascists' sexual repression.

This is entertaining stuff when viewed through D'Souza's puritanical lens. It's also amusing given D'Souza's apparently predilections for adultery and felonious behavior. He does descend into a fairly disgusting Pink Swastika-style characterization of the Nazi Party as tolerant of homosexuality, which has some basis in truth, at least in the early years of the movement.

Presumably, D'Souza attacks Marcuse because he represents the underlying philosophical principles of the New Left, which drove much of the student unrest of the 1960s. He's actually on relatively firm ground in his analysis but spins out of control when he attacks Trayvon Martin and Black Lives Matter and characterizes Bill Clinton as engaging in "predatory behavior," this from a confirmed adulterer.

Most objectionable is D'Souza's treatment of Soros, which repeats the oft-repeated of Soros as collaborator with the Nazis in 1944 Budapest. Even if what is alleged about Soros were true, nobody who has not been in that particular position is any place to judge his actions. Certainly, D'Souza has not been.

The last, short chapter of this book is a list of suggestions of how we can "de-Nazify" the progressive fascists of today. Rather than address his "points" here, I suppose I should acknowledge that, since starting this series of posts, we were "lucky" enough to have a genuine demonstration of fascism in the United States last week in Charlottesville, Va. We should be clear who the fascists are at this point, Trump's equivocations aside.

There's an enormous difference between a group of very young, perhaps misdirected people who organize and are willing to use violence because they are at fear for their lives and a group of presumed adults who come almost uniformly from highly privileged backgrounds and who rally beneath identifiable symbols of hatred to protect that privilege. That anyone would draw an analogy between the two is like agreeing with the abusive husband who blames his wife and says, "She makes me hit her."

D'Souza's whole book is dedicated to such an undertaking. Thankfully, he is getting pushback from progressives more than Jonah Goldberg ever received for his book. Dinesh D'Souza, meanwhile, soldiers on. Perhaps if his current book tour comes my way, I'll ask him some of my questions in person.

[1] Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), Loc. 3242.
[2] Ibid, Loc. 3308.
[3] Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Norton, 2013), 7.

[4] Ibid, 486.

Convicted Felon Publishes "History" Book, Part 4.1

Click here for the previous part of this series.

The Main Event

In his seventh chapter, D’Souza finally gets to brass tacks. He sets out to draw a straight line between the fascist and National Socialist experiments in Italy and Germany, respectively, and the American left. Notably, he will not be able to triangulate this connection with one to racism, which explains why D’Souza already spilled so much ink belaboring the points about Italian fascist racism. The goal now is to tie Franklin Roosevelt to Hitler.

Fascism, D’Souza tells us, is actually what the attempts of the Democratic Party to maintain or increase financial and environmental regulations or to introduce some standard of managed care beyond Medicare. Gentile and Mussolini, he tells us, “were not in favor of state ownership; [they] knew their fellow socialists had no idea how to run industries. Instead they advocated state-run capitalism, putting the industrial might of the private sector at the behest of the state.”[1]

The problem with this statement isn’t that it’s false – it’s actually largely true. Rather, the problem is that what he’s describing isn’t socialism. It’s corporatism, which I hope I’ve shown in previous installments isn’t the same thing. “Strictly speaking,” he explains, “socialism involves workers owning the means of production.”[2] No, that’s syndicalism. Socialism is the state owning the means of production. That’s an important distinction, whether D’Souza likes it or not.

After briefly returning to early Soviet history to offer another embarrassing error (Leninists fighting Trotskyists in the early 20th century[3]), D’Souza goes on to say that socialism, fascism, and progressivism are all forms of leftism. All three are united in their opposition to capitalism. This brings us back to a problem addressed in the first installment of this series, i.e., what exactly does it mean to be “left wing”?

Like manna from heaven, current events have intervened to offer us a decent cheat sheet. This past week, a young software engineer at Google was fired for circulating a sort of white paper opposing certain measures adopted at Google to foster greater gender and racial diversity. Although the paper’s author has a level of rigor in his scholarship akin to a guy who spent half an hour reading mises.org, he does offer a decent list of left-right distinctions. Quoting the memo directly, he breaks down the biases of left and right thus:

Left Biases
• Compassion for the weak
• Disparities are due to injustices
• Humans are inherently cooperative
• Change is good (unstable)
• Open
• Idealist
Right Biases
• Respect for the strong/authority
• Disparities are natural and just
• Humans are inherently competitive
• Change is dangerous (stable)
• Closed
• Pragmatic[4]

His points can be disputed, certainly, but he hits at two key aspects of the left/right divide: on the left, equality and change are favored, while on the right, freedom and stability are favored.

Notice that the above bullet points don’t mention anything about economics or social policy – that’s important too since economic and social policies are largely outgrowths of these biases, the former more than the latter. Socialists want equality of opportunity, if not of outcome. State control of capital, in theory, helps in redistributing wealth and promoting social welfare. Capitalists believe in innate inequalities and the way the market determines things being best.

Would D’Souza disagree with this breakdown? It’s hard to say; as far as I’m aware, he hasn’t yet. It’s hard to think he’d dispute the notion that capitalism and socialism would apply to the right and left biases, respectively, from the Google memo. What about the repressive vs. permissive axis I talked about in my first post in this series? Remember that we did not classic these qualities as either right or left. All we did was chart social and economic policies along two axes.

Granted, the model from either myself or from the Google memo isn’t perfect. The Google memo charts change as a bias of the left, but there’s no question, as established, that fascists intended to change things. It’s also true that fascists had a utopian veneer about them. But undoubtedly, fascists tick off more bullets on the right than on the left.

So when D’Souza or anyone else tries to tag fascist and National Socialism as inherently leftist, they are truly trying to pull a fast one. Fascism undoubtedly favored the strong, believe in natural disparities, and believed in a closed society.

Some of D’Souza’s more preposterous claims, as already established, he doesn’t bother to source, making it especially difficult to dispute them. For instance, D’Souza acknowledges that the leadership principle (Fuehrerprinzip) was a core value in fascism but just as quickly goes on to say that FDR himself believed that he played this role – that he embodies the U.S. in the same way that Mussolini did Italy or Hitler did Germany. Then, to “prove” his point, he cites not any evidence from FDR himself but rather the observations of people who admired both fascism and FDR.

We should not put too much stock into the fact that people could admire both FDR and Mussolini or even Hitler. If one admires strength in a leader, then one is likely to find something to admire in these men, particularly before World War II and the true extent of what evil people could do was exposed. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was distasteful to many Americans but not because they loved Jews; indeed, “country club” anti-Semitism was common here until after the war.

We should therefore not exist that the anti-Semitism of the Nazis would be a deal-breaker for many Americans. After all, as D’Souza himself points out, we treated African Americans in the south just as badly, perhaps even worse, at least until Reichskristallnacht.

To drive home the idea that we should not be surprised that there was mutual admiration among leaders of countries and should not conclude that admiration was equivalent to sympathies with politics, Churchill was among the world leaders who expressed admiration of Mussolini, particularly for his economic policies. But D’Souza also admires Churchill. Does this mean that Churchill was a fascist and, by extension, D’Souza himself?

Hey Mister Wilson!

To wrap up the progressive-fascist connection in a bow while lacking any indication of racism on Roosevelt’s part, it’s necessary for D’Souza to go back to Woodrow Wilson for the racist content of the progressive ideology. Remarkably, D’Souza doesn’t mention anywhere in his analysis that Wilson was a Southerner – a native of Virginia. Thus his support for segregation, although this fact certainly doesn’t excuse it.

The treatment of Wilson offers one of the most remarkable statements in D’Souza’s book. Remarking on Wilson’s likely significant role in making The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s infamous Civil War and Reconstruction drama that lionizes the KKK, a popular film in the U.S., D’Souza recounts an anecdote of Griffith saying that Wilson found the film “terribly true” and “like writing history with lightning.”

Noting that there is independent corroboration of these statements, D’Souza says, “[B]ut there is no reason to doubt Griffith’s veracity on this point.”[5] Really? The man was an inveterate racist, but lying would be out of the question? This seems to be an assessment by D’Souza of Griffith’s truthfulness pulled wholly from his posterior.

Subsequently, D’Souza spends a lot of time listing purported leftists who admired Mussolini and/or Hitler. He does eventually return to FDR, first pointing out that Mussolini and Hitler both admired him – at least at first. He then sets out to show that FDR had designs for authoritarian seizure of power. Here, D’Souza focuses on FDR’s New Deal economic reforms, including the National Recovery Administration. Besides D’Souza’s failure to distinguish the NRA from the act that created it, the National Industrial Recovery Act, D’Souza again relies on third party assessments to conclude it was “fascist” and continues to conflate socialism and corporatism.

The New Deal, D’Souza says, was fascist because it permanently destroyed economic liberty in the U.S. Assuming for a moment that this statement about lost liberty is true, that still doesn’t make it fascist. Expansion of the welfare state by the New Deal, D’Souza says, is both fascist and progressive because the idea of the welfare state was introduced by Bismarck, who practiced “moderate, conservative progressivism.”[6]

At this point, it’s gotten so that terms has essentially lost their meaning. Progressives are socialists, we have been told by D’Souza repeatedly, or at least in favor of government control of the means of production (or was that workers’ control?). Now, Bismarck, the man who introduced a welfare state to push back the rising power of German socialists is a progressive?

To be continued

[1] Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), Loc. 2854.
[2] Ibid, Loc. 2838.
[3] Ibid, Loc. 2902.
[4] “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320
[5] D’Souza, ibid, Loc. 3046.
[6] Ibid, Loc. 3236.

Convicted Felon Publishes "History" Book, Part 3.2

Click here for the previous part of this series.

Racism vs Anti-Semitism

In continuing his characterization of American racism as the source of Nazi anti-Semitism, D'Souza writes, "I have to say in its outset that, in its sheer volume and vehemence, the racism of the Democrats and progressives outdistances not only Italian fascist racism, which was marginal, but also German anti-Semitism. Only the vile anti-Semitism of the Nazi era matches the racism of the Democrats."[1]

Putting aside the matter of conflating progressives and Southern Democrats (addressed earlier), the statement has some bit of truth to it – it's true that Italian fascist racism was mild, that pre-Nazi German anti-Semitism was mild, and that Southern racism was seriously voluminous – but at the same time, it belies a tremendous ignorance on D'Souza's part when comparing anti-black racism in the U.S. between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and Nazi anti-Semitism.

In some ways, Southern racism and Nazi anti-Semitism shared similarities. For instance, they both relied heavily on caricature and stereotyping, and they both had the belief of white supremacy at their roots. However, the goal of Nazi anti-Semitism was always the elimination of the Jews – either by their mass expulsion or their extermination; the technique was frankly less important than that they be gone.

In contrast, for most Southern whites, and certainly for the power establishment, elimination of Southern blacks was never the goal, for the simple reason that the elimination of African Americans would cause the economic collapse of the South due to a lost supply of extremely cheap labor. This might seem like a distinction without a difference, but it's really not. D'Souza himself claims (rightly) that intent is an important component of determining whether genocide has occurred. The intent of Jim Crow, segregation, and all its attendant honors was never extermination of black people – it was what the sociology Michael Mann called "exemplary violence," i.e., violence designed to keep a people in line, rather than to erase them from the earth.

Please note that none of this is meant to excuse any aspect of racism against anyone or to suggest that one people's suffering is worse than others. The experience of African Americans and European Jews have some areas of overlap, but mostly they don't and aren't terribly comparable. D'Souza has decided to engage in a direct comparison, so I have to engage that comparison on the basis of the facts.

In taking issue with some scholars who have suggested that racism was more of an American problem and less of a problem of a particular party, D'Souza decides to compare the words of 19th and 20th century Democratic racists and the Founding Fathers. E.g., he quotes from Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and then rights, "Jefferson isn't even sure that blacks originally constituted a race" and only suspected – he did not know for sure – that black people were less intelligent than whites.

In addition, D'Souza adds, the Founders didn't sponsor government-enforced segregation or found the KKK – all that was 19th and 20th century Democrats. Except that D'Souza leaves out a pretty important distinction of many of the Founding Fathers, Jefferson included, that distinguished them undoubtedly as racists: They owned other human beings. 
 
Much of D'Souza's commentary on Democratic racism that follows is unobjectionable, but he does pose an interesting question: "What does white supremacy offer that might convince white Southern voters to keep reelecting the Democrats?"[3] The answer, he suggests, is that white Southerners, e.g., fought in the Confederate Army despite not owning slaves because they wanted to maintain his superiority as a member of an "aristocracy of color."[4]

Does that seem like a convincing argument to force a man to put his life on the line? While we might argue that the average Southerner who did not own slaves or have an economic interest in its maintenance was nevertheless racist in his/her attitudes, we have to also consider factors such as conscription, patriotism, etc. D'Souza's explanation here is overly simplistic.

D'Souza last point of comparison in the chapter is between the SA and the KKK. D'Souza suggests that, around 1890, the KKK waned in its power due to the withdrawal of patronage from the Democratic Party on the basis of the newly enacted black codes that provided a legal framework for Jim Crow. However, D'Souza ignores that the KKK had its largest membership in its history after World War I.

D'Souza further suggests that a key similarity between Southern Democrats and the Nazis is that they both suppressed their terrorist wings – respectively, the KKK and SA – once their political goals had been established. As just noted, the KKK actually expanded after this point in the U.S. Regarding the SA, D'Souza uses Reichskristallnacht as the touchpoint for his comparison.

Oddly, D'Souza points out that the Röhm putsch of 1934 was designed to eliminate the SA as a violent organization, even though Kristallnacht was four years later. This is an excruciatingly avoidable timeline errors on his part. In addition, D'Souza ignores that the Nazis regularly employed public violence against Jews during the war to accomplish some of their dirty work.

The P Word

In the next chapter, D'Souza turns to the topic of eugenics, as evidenced by his quotation from the founder of Planned Parenthood and conservative bête noire Margaret Sanger. Amusing is his assessment that Hannah Arendt's phrase "banality of evil" refers to the evil act, rather than the evil person. Arendt's chief point, in fact, was that Adolf Eichmann, who ran the so-called Jewish desk within the Gestapo and was largely responsible for the mass deportations of Jews to death camps, was to all appearances an absolutely ordinary person and not the devil incarnate. Nevertheless, he committed tremendously evil acts.

Much of the first section of the chapter is dedicated to comparing the Holocaust to abortion generally and Josef Mengele to Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell specifically. This is frankly far less interesting than the comparisons that follow: between Southern plantation slavery and concentration camps run by Nazi Germany, in which D'Souza extends the plantation metaphor to the African-American ghetto of today; and between early 20th century American eugenics and Nazi euthanasia.

In this latter comparison, D'Souza finally begins to contextualize the word "progressive" a bit and, notably, claims that Theodore Roosevelt "only became an ardent progressive when he quit the Republic Party, after two terms as president."[5] Still, D'Souza says, this was "soft" progressivism vs. Woodrow Wilson's (i.e., a Democrat's) "hard" progressivism. "So," he continues, "I am not indicting all progressives, only left-wing progressives who are the political and spiritual ancestors of the ones we have now."[6]

There's a lot to unpack in these claims. First, there was a president between Roosevelt and Wilson – Taft. Notably, Taft was more conservative than Roosevelt. So now, after pages and pages of banging on about how terrible progressives are, D'Souza has decided, seven chapters in, to redefine his term and separate progressive from left wing – precisely because not doing so would require him to denounce two Republican presidents nearly universally recognized as being progressives.

Second, D'Souza is not incorrect in comparing left-wing progressives of a hundred years ago to those of today as "ancestors." However, this assertion undermines his previous assertion that the racist KKK and Southern Democrats were the ancestors of the contemporary progressives. Does it seem likely that both could be true?

Here, D'Souza turns to a short history of American eugenics, which he ties to the 1924 Immigration Act (see previous blog entry on) and the institution of laws barring interracial marriage. Although it's true that eugenics was a widely embraced cause by progressives, the barring of interracial marriage and, as argued above, the 1924 Immigrant Act were conservative and, in the latter case, Republican endeavors.

A history of the international eugenics movement, of which the American experience was a part, is beyond the scope of this review. There is one point worth making, however: When D'Souza cites Hitler from Mein Kampf on the purpose of marriage being procreation and not love, i.e., "the increase and preservation of the species and the race." D'Souza says that traditionalists would never support that viewpoint, but is that really true?

To answer, I'd direct D'Souza to the catechism of his own Catholic Church: "The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring."[7]

D'Souza goes on to claim that the historian Richard Hofstadter was largely responsible for associating Social Darwinism with the right and laissez-faire via Spencer and William Sumner. Why not Hayek and Adam Smith?, D'Souza protests. Sumner, he says, was "virtually unique" in connecting capitalism to Social Darwinism, but of course, he wasn't – Spencer had written the same, and he was far more influential than D'Souza gives him credit for – not to mention being a mainstay of classical liberalism.

He concludes the chapter by linking eugenics back to abortion and, by extension, Stephen Douglas's campaign slogan of "Choice" to the pro-choice movement of today. If that seems like a compelling argument, I'd like to show you a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

To be continued 
 
[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), 2241.
[2] Ibid., 2271.
[3] Ibid., 2300.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 2652.
[6] Ibid., 2571.
[7] Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Two, Section Two, Chapter Three, Article 7, paragraph 1601, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c3a7.htm

Convicted Felon Publishes "History" Book, Part 3.1

Click here for the previous part of this series.

Same Biscuits, Different Tin

As I noted in the first blog post in the current series, D'Souza has been peddling his nonsense about the current-day Democratic Party bearing responsibility for the sins of its past iterations. In the fourth chapter of The Big Lie, all D'Souza really does is extend his false equivalence of the Democrats with racism to fascism generally and National Socialist specifically.

I recommended some key points to bear in mind during this discussion, which bear repeating here:

• Would anyone characterize the white supremacist Democratic Party from Jackson to George Wallace as progressive? Why or why not?  
• Did the Confederate States favor a strong centralized government?  
• Were the Southern Democrats socialists or syndicalists? 

D'Souza begins the argument here by definition the idea of Lebensraum as found in National Socialism and then comparing it to the Indian removal policies of President Andrew Jackson. "[T]he Left loves to depict Hitler as a right-winger," he writes, "but notice here how he allies himself completely with the pro-slavery and Indian removal policies of the Democratic Party. Hitler would be far more at home with [Jackson] or Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun than [with] Lincoln."[1]

On the matters of racial prejudice and the potential benefits of ethnic cleansing, there's nothing controversial about this statement. However, the fact that Southern Democrats, on the one hand, and Nazis, on the other, shared certain qualities does not make them equivalent. But what were the philosophies of government of Jackon, Calhoun, Lincoln, and Hitler? Jackson and Calhoun were both pro-states' rights. Jackson famously opposed the creation of a national bank. Calhoun was known for his support of nullification, i.e., rejection of federal law by individual states.

Lincoln, the first Republican president, believed in a strong federal government – strong enough literally to use force to prevent the secession of individual states. Hitler (obviously) believed in a strong central government. Note that this does not mean that Lincoln was therefore a Nazi. It merely means that the two men preferred strong centralized government.

D'Souza seems to want to seize on a single facet of National Socialism, find it elsewhere, and then proclaim that the philosophy found "elsewhere" is the equivalent of NS. It's really a form of genetic fallacy, laid even more bare by the fact that D'Souza refuses to apply the large government comparison or, indeed, even acknowledge that Lincoln-era Republicans favored big government.

D'Souza spends several pages detailing the crimes against humanity enumerated by Jackson and his army during the Indian removal and Trail of Tears before concluding, "This, then, is the genocide perpetrated by Andrew Jackson and his progressive Democratic successors."[2] There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that the perpetrators in this case were Democrats; however, is it really correct to refer to them as progressives?

Remember that, among the American presidents we consider to have been progressive, we include Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. Wilson was famously racist (as noted by D'Souza elsewhere in this book), but Roosevelt famous hosted Booker T. Washington at the White House, which, for its time, was remarkably open-minded. Is Roosevelt comparable to Jackson in his views on race? Is he comparable to Hitler? Apparently not, since D'Souza references this very meeting in his book.[3]

Redefining "Progressive"

D'Souza closes the chapter with a comparison of slave plantations and Nazi concentration camps that is actually well researched and argued, although it does little to advance his argument. He turns in the next chapter to demonstrating how American racism (as practiced by Democrats) influenced Nazi racist policies. Among the American racist policies that D'Souza mentions is the 1924 Immigration Act, although interestingly, D'Souza does not mention that this law was signed by a Republican president, Calvin Coolidge. Moreover, the legislators who sponsored the act, Albert Johnson and David Reed, were also Republicans.

Again, this says nothing about racism and the Republican Party. Rather, D'Souza says that it was progressives who passed the law, not acknowledging that the act received broad bipartisan support. I.e., the act says more about racial policies in America in the 1920s than about either party.

Humorously, D'Souza tells his reader that he did not know that the American (Democratic) racism had influenced Nazi racism, only that the one had preceded the other. Now, of course, he knows differently. In making this statement, he commits himself to the post hoc fallacy that follows. Also amusingly, he attacks historian James Whitman for purportedly denying the Democrat/progressive influence on the Nazis but suggesting that Trump and his administration, in embracing voter ID laws, might be attempting to roll back voter protections, which were at the heart of Jim Crow. The argument D'Souza employs here amounts to refusal to accept his personal definition of "progressive" is akin to lying.

In turning now to Nazi Germany, D'Souza sets out two questions: 1) Was Nazi anti-Semitism left wing or right wing; and 2) What caused Nazi anti-Semitism? Taking the second question first, it's worth noting that no small amount of ink has been spilled on this topic, and the answer is still essentially unsettled. There's no question that race was a core concept of National Socialism and that a racial hierarchy existed according to their worldview. Within this view, Jews were actually not inferior so much as an anti-race – a race that actively sought to destroy other races, the "Aryans" most of all.

This is a crucially important point about Nazi anti-Semitism: Jews are objectionable definitionally. It matters not what they personally believe or don’t believe. This is why Hitler denounced both capitalism (primarily banking) and communism, both of which he identified with Jews, in Mein Kampf and other materials – not because of anything inherent in their content so much as that he saw them as obverses of the same coin with which the Jews sought to destroy the Aryan race.

It's also clear that this was not a matter of religion for the Nazis, which is why they did not exempt Jews who had converted to Christianity or who were atheists from anti-Semitic legislation. However, there is little question of a continuum in the history of anti-Semitism between religious anti-Semitism in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, not to mention in the teachings of Luther, and the later "racial" anti-Semitism that NS embodied.

What's truly curious is that D'Souza chooses to examine Götz Aly's writing on this topic, given Aly's long association with the political left. However, it becomes clear that he does so because Aly's thesis that the Nazis did not see Jews as inferior but as highly successful and thus a threat to the German people on a primarily economic basis. There's much to be said about this thesis, not the least of which it is, in my opinion, neither entirely false not true. However, after developing the topic of "Jewish" finance capitalism vs. "German/Aryan" productive capitalism, D'Souza proclaims, "It should be obvious from the argument above that, for Hitler as for others, anti-Semitism is to a large extent rooted in anticapitalism."[4]

This is an overstatement of the point, to say the least. It is 100% accurate to state that race, and thus anti-Semitism, was at the heart of National Socialism. However, it is very inaccurate to subsequently claim that anti-Marxism was not a nearly as important facet of NS. To suggest that Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in hostility to capitalism and ignore the pervasive trope in Nazi propaganda of Judeobolschewismus is to truly miss the point.

Instead of identifying anti-Marxism with NS, D'Souza instead attempts to link Marxism to anti-Semitism. This is admittedly not a quantum leap in some sense, although it's a curious tack to take in taking about anti-Semitism, Marx, and Nazis. To make his point, D'Souza chooses to excerpt Marx's "On the Jewish Question." Although it's difficult to imagine his reader does not know this fact, D'Souza does omit that Marx was Jewish himself, although it doesn't detract from the anti-Semitism of the essay, nor does it address the fact that Marx felt that, by being an atheist, he had effectively eliminated his own Jewishness.

To be continued.

=====

[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), 1561.
[2] Ibid., 1777.
[3] Ibid., 2250.
[4] Ibid., 2191.

Convicted Felon Publishes "History" Book, Part 2.2

Click here for the previous part of this series.

The Heart of the Matter 

It's really when D'Souza gets down to the history of early fascism that he gets to the heart of the argument about the origins of American left in fascism. It's notable that much of D'Souza's account here is correct, and even some of his conclusions, e.g., that fascism combined the philosophies of syndicalism and nationalism. However, because he is nebulous with his terminology and he falls into the trap of oversimplification, his conclusion is laughable: "When you fuse the two ideas of 'nation' and 'socialism,' what you get is National Socialism."[1]

There are some big problems with that conclusion. Perhaps most importantly, it conflates syndicalism and socialism. Primarily, they differ in terms of where they invest power: with socialism, it is in the state; with syndicalism, it is with the workers. These are both anti-capitalist, but the necessary philosophical overlap ends there.

Socialism is universally recognized to be a left-wing ideology because of its stated goal of effecting social and economic equality through state control of the means of production. As we've already seen, socialism can be democratic or Marxist. Moreover, there is no necessary relationship between socialist economic policy and the inherent social repressiveness or openness of the state.

Syndicalism similarly has a brought range of manifestations. Spain had both left and right wing syndicalist groups exercising government power at different times. During the Spanish Civil War, left-wing anarcho-syndicalists, favoring a highly decentralized state and a socially permissive society, ruled Barcelona for a time. Conversely, the Falange party, which provided much of the ideological basis for the Franco regime, was characterized as right wing and national syndicalist. It was socially repressive, traditionalist, and authoritarian, but at least in theory, it sought to empower workers – but not at the expense of a strong state.

This is why it's important not only not to confuse socialism and syndicalism but also not to lump all varieties of syndicalism together. Where as in Anarchist Catalonia, class conflict and its resolution in favor of workers was at the core of the ruling ideology, in the Falange, the emphasis was on class collaboration, i.e., mitigating or preventing class conflict by having workers and managers empowered and facilitated in negotiating. This is the backbone of fascist corporatism (on which more below).

The second problem is the assumption by D'Souza that a syncretic combination of socialism and nationalism would be the equivalent of National Socialism, which is the same as assuming that any organization that chooses a name is automatically applying that name correctly from an objective standpoint. If you find this a compelling argument, consider whether you'd consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (i.e., North Korea) to be democratic or even a people's republic?

What D'Souza might not be aware of is that the Nazis were not the first political party to refer to themselves as national socialist. In fact, the concept predates fascism entirely and was certainly not inherently anti-Semitic until the Nazis got their hands on it. Among the earliest political attempts to fuse nationalism and socialism was the Czech National Social Party, which would today be characterized as a typically center-left European social democrat party. Many parties with similar platforms would similarly be called national socialist were it not for the NSDAP destroying the utility of the term. None of these parties were right wing; all of them believed in varying levels of socialism and a moderate civic nationalism, which is quite different from the ethnic nationalism lying at the core of fascism.

So fascism as a syncretic movement was really national syndicalism, with the nationalism heavily ethnic and the economic policy of syndicalism offered as a theoretical "third position" of neither capitalism or socialism. The extent to which these theoretical considerations of worker empowerment would be applied in reality would obviously vary on a case-by-case basis.

Therefore, when D'Souza moves on to associate fascism with progressivism, he merely takes a further step with the same foot with which he'd already taken his first false step. D'Souza's claim is that what tied the fascists and progressives together was a strong centralized state, but the Soviets and Nazis both had strong centralized states but were diametrically opposed politically. Even D'Souza doesn't claim the Soviets were fascists. That fascists and progressives share a believe in a strong centralized states (if that generalization is even true for progressives) implies nothing at all about further similarities.

When finally D'Souza, toward the end of this chapter, uses the term "corporatism," in identifying the term Mussolini used for his economic platform, he writes

… a more descriptive term would be state-run capitalism. Mussolini envisioned a powerful centralized state directing the institutions of private welfare, forcing their private welfare in line with the national welfare. Isn't this precisely how progressives view the federal government's control of banks, finance companies, insurance companies, health care, energy, and education?"[2] 

Well, frankly, no. While (some) progressives certainly favor a strong centralized state, they are not seeking state-run capitalism, which is a surprisingly accurate term for D'Souza to use for fascist corporatism in practice, if not in theory.

Understanding economic corporatism is arguably even more important than understanding syndicalism as a system of political economy. Corporatism has its roots in the Catholic Church as a strategy for organizing a cooperative society. The idea underlying corporatism is that every interest group within a society is represented by a corporation that negotiates in its interests. Within the Catholic paradigm, the church and the state would also be corporations that would also negotiate on their best interests.

Although always lurking in the background of Catholic philosophy, corporatism entered the modern period as a specific reaction to Marxism, seeking to replace Marx's core concept of "class struggle" with "class collaboration" (see above). In seeking to position itself as "neither left (socialist) nor right (communist)" in terms of economic policy, the fascists embraced corporatism as a way of taking the pre-existing trade union structure inherent to syndicalism and associated it formally with corporation-style government.

It is true to characterize this as a planned economy of sorts; however, at least in theory, it leaves much economic power decentralized and in the hands of workers. Moreover, it leaves much of the means of production in private hands; it merely prioritizes the exercise of political power by the state. In reality, the implementation of corporatism in fascist states varied from not being applied at all (in Nazi Germany) to being applied in a slipshod manner (as in Italy). Some authoritarian states applied a corporatist model as an anti-socialist measure, notably Austria under Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. None of them embraced socialism. None of them completely disempowered individual capitalists.

These are enormously important points to bear in mind as we move into the next chapter, which purports to detail the Democratic Party's history of fascism and its impact on European fascism.

The major points to bear in mind can best be expressed in the form of questions:

Would anyone characterize the white supremacist Democratic Party from Jackson to George Wallace as progressive? Why or why not? 

Did the Confederate States favor a strong centralized government? 

Were the Southern Democrats socialists or syndicalists? 

Although certainly racism will unite the Southern Democrats until the Franklin Roosevelt administration and the Nazis, it should be clear going forward that there is almost nothing else that does. In virtually every sense, on a social level, the Southern Democrats were highly repressive and therefore quite socially right wing or conservative. From an economic standpoint, they were capitalist and particularly favored the yeoman farm as the core economic unit of society. And politically, they were heavily in favor of "states' rights" -- thus, they by definition they opposed a strong, centralized state. Bear these points in mind going forward.

To be continued. 

=====

[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), 1478.
[2] Ibid, 1500.

Convicted Felon Publishes "History" Book, Part 2.1

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Benny the Moose

D’Souza’s next chapter is entitled “Mussolini’s Journey” and is largely concerned with tracking Mussolini’s transformation from a socialist in the years leading up to World War I to a fascist once the war had ended. It’s true that Mussolini was a committed socialist before the war. Some of D’Souza’s other claims about him seem a bit overblown, however.

For instance, to link Mussolini’s fascist turn to his socialism, it’s necessary for D’Souza to distinguish Mussolini from some run-of-the-mill Italian left-wing in fin de siècle Europe. To establish this level of credibility, D’Souza writes, “this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world.”[1] In fact, D’Souza continues, Lenin congratulated Mussolini on the latter’s founding of the his fascist party.

The problem with disputing some of D’Souza’s claims is that they are unsourced, for instance, this notion of Lenin congratulating Mussolini. The two men were certainly aware of one another; Lenin wrote of Mussolini in January 1915 that he was a deserter from the cause of workers and a chauvinist.[2] However, if the story D’Souza tells is true, Lenin had certainly changed his mind only a year later, when he wrote about Mussolini in his tract “Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, referring to the Italian as the leader of a “group of renegades ... who advocated the bourgeoisie’s imperialist policy and supported the war.”[3] In short, if the story in this chapter is true, it was out of character for Lenin.

Continuing, D’Souza distinguishes the fascism of Mussolini from the National Socialism of Hitler, but points out their similarities as well: “Hitler was, like Mussolini, a man of the Left. Hitler too was a socialist and a labor leader who founded the German Socialist Workers’ Party with a platform very similar to that of Mussolini’s fascist party.”[4]

In a way, it’s remarkable that so much wrong information could be packed into so compact a space. Leaving aside the notions that Hitler was a socialist or a man of the left, he was (1) never a labor leader and (2) did not found the Nazi party, (3) which was called the German Workers Party – not the German Socialist Workers Party, at its founding and subsequently, under Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Moreover, compare the platform of Italy’s National Fascist Party (NFP) with the 25 points from the NSDAP posted earlier:

http://web.tiscalinet.it/regno76/testi/manifesti/Il%20manifesto%20dei%20fasci%20di%20combattimento.htm

The platform calls for things the Nazis would not have been caught dead requesting: universal suffrage, proportional representation and a corporatist negotiating body, the empowerment of labor unions, taxation (rather than abolition) of unearned income, and curtailment of the rights of religious organizations, including the seizure of their assets. Do these platform planks make the NFP a “left wing” party? No more so than the left-leaning points of the Nazis’ 25 points make the NSDAP one.

Quoting Gregor again, D’Souza claims that Mussolini was hardly alone in being a left-winger who became involved in fascism. Curiously, although D’Souza quotes Gregor correctly in writing that the first Italian fascists were “almost all Marxists,” the beginning of the very same paragraph in Gregor’s Faces of Janus notes that these same men were “opposed to organized socialist and communist political institutions.”[5]

Clearly the actions of Mussolini after WWI resulted in a rift in international socialism, one that Gregor himself notes was based on the nationalism inspired by Italy’s entry into the war. Indeed, the extent to which the socialist parties distanced themselves from the rising nationalism of the interwar period says much about the extent to which this core philosophical underpinning of fascism was at odds with the left at large.

After a tremendous error, in which he claims that Bolshevism divided into Leninist and Trotskyite factions, with Lenin finally ordering Trotsky’s assassination (for real),[6] D’Souza moves on in his attempt to trace the ideological origins of fascism within socialism. From the viewpoint of fascists, D’Souza writes, “Marxism and socialism were too inert and needed to be adjusted leftward.”[7] The fascists, he says, were the left wing of socialism.

Certainly this pronouncement would come as a surprise to the Left Opposition within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led at one point by Trotsky and subsequently by Kamenev and Zinoviev, who were marked by their opposition to Lenin’s New Economic Program. It would probably also come to the genuine left opposition to the Bolsheviks in general, characterized not only by Marxists like Luxemburg but also the anarchists of the Kronstadt Rebellion, none of whom could be characterized as remotely fascist.

The Crisis of Marxism

D'Souza's core claim in his history of fascism as a tendency within socialism claims a crisis in Marxism, and in a way this is true, although there is a sloppiness on D'Souza's part by not distinguishing between Marxism and socialism -- all Marxists and socialists but not all socialists are Marxists. There then is the matter of which crisis he might be referring to here. Is it the Bolshevik/Menshevik split over the notion of a party vanguard? The aforementioned split, which was not limited to Italy, over support for WWI? How about the division of socialist parties generally between Marxist and democratic wings?

None of these, it turns out. Rather than, e.g., dealing with the matter of socialist parties dividing between Marxist and democratic tendencies, D’Souza instead glosses over this schism, even while mentioning one of its principal protagonists – Eduard Bernstein. He quotes a letter from Bernstein to Engels from the 1890s in which, it appears, Bernstein abandons Marxism or socialism or both; in fact, in this letter,  Bernstein is pointing out that Marxist conditions for revolution are not present, and therefore socialism must be sought by different, democratic means.

So, D’Souza writes, “A great debate emerged Marxists, socialists, and leftists, and the result was the emergence of two new strains of Marxian socialism that would dominate the new century. The first was Bolshevism or Leninism. The other was fascism or National Socialism.”[8]

I suppose half right is better than entirely wrong. Yes, one of these strains was Bolshevism/Leninism/Soviet communism. But the other strain in the struggle in which Bernstein was on one side and Kautsky, Luxemburg, et al. were on the other was not fascism – it was democratic socialism.

Rather than acknowledge this point, D’Souza launches into an overview of how Lenin justified the emergence of communist revolution in preindustrial Russia, rather than, as predicted, Germany or the U.K. He covers vanguardism and how Lenin’s position was at odds with those of Luxemburg and Kautsky. He fails, however, to acknowledge that the positions of Luxemberg and Kautsky, on the one hand, and of Bernstein and other democratic socialists, on the other, constituted, respectively, the left and right wings of the socialist movement in Europe, with the center occupied by the Soviets.

Finally, Syndicalism?

Now, finally, D’Souza begins a discussion of syndicalism. Proving the observation that even a stopped clock is right twice per day, he notes that the core philosophical movements that united within fascism were nationalism and syndicalism and ties this synthesis in part to Sorel. Unfortunately, D’Souza never distinguishes syndicalism from socialism, even as he notes correctly the contributions to fascism of Sorel in the form of revolutionary violence.

In short, D’Souza notes the similarities between Sorel and Lenin and between Sorel and Mussolini and presumes that, because two people share some similarities with a third, then those two people must also share similarities with each other. D’Souza does not entertain the possibility that these sets of similarities might be mutually exclusive.

It is worth noting that there are appreciable points of overlap among these three men. All three men obviously saw value in violence. All men at one point or another embraced the idea of empowering workers, although the organizational structure under which they could be empowered varied among them: Lenin favored the party, Sorel the union, and Mussolini (at least in theory) the corporatist state. Conversely, while Mussolini favored a strong state, Sorel was essentially an anarchist, while Lenin saw the state as transitional (again, at least in theory).

The national question is the final area of dispute: Mussolini was explicitly ultranationalist, and Lenin was explicitly internationalist. Sorel seems to have broached nationalism at times and avoided it at others, although the fusion of nationalism with syndicalism was facilitated in no small part by Sorel’s ideas. In fact, this is a crucial distinction between syndicalism and fascism because, when fascists sought to incorporate syndicalism into their economic planning, they did so mainly to circumvent the emergence of socialism.

When D’Souza next returns to the issue of nationalism, he finally acknowledges the specific contribution of ethnic nationalism to fascism, but rather than contrasting ethnic nationalism with the internationalism of the left or even with the civic nationalism of other states, he instead ties it to 21st century identity politics on the American left – a connection that ignores white nationalism.

To be continued

[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), Loc. 1135.

[2] V.I. Lenin, "What Next? On the Tasks Confronting the Workers' Parties with Regard to Opportunism and Social-Chauvinism," Social Democrat, no. 36 (January 9, 1915), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/jan/09.htm

[3] V.I. Lenin, "Left Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (Moscow, 1920), chapter 7, footnote 28,  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm

[4] D'Souza, ibid, Loc. 1183.

[5] A. James Gregor, Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2000), 20; D'Souza, ibid, Loc. 1194.

[6] Ibid, Loc. 1206.

[7] Ibid, Loc. 1230.

[8] Ibid, Loc. 1268.