As bad as the Holocaust?

This keeps coming up. People say, “X is as bad as the Holocaust”.

The Holocaust was not uniquely evil. There are many comparable horrors. But it was extraordinary enough that one should make comparisons judiciously.

Often I answer, “X is indeed very very bad. But I don’t think you understand the Holocaust. Can you explain why they fed the inmates at Auschwitz?”

“What?”

“You have seen the photos of the gaunt people at Auschwitz. They were starving. But the place was a murder factory, so why feed them at all? Why have gas chambers?”

“Huh. It doesn’t make sense.”

“But it does. The bottleneck was disposing of dead bodies. Where do you put them? Someone had to sit down with a pencil and paper and figure out the exact minimum they could feed people, in order to warehouse them before killing them. The only reason that anyone survived was that the Nazis could not solve the logistics of killing faster.”

More commentaries

This post started as a Bluesky thread inspired by a thread by Nome Da Barbarian:

Rebel Against Hate says:

Trump originally thought there would be one single day when all of his authority would be brought to bear and all of [the] “undesirables” would be removed.

He said this multiple times. He wanted a show of force that would have, had it materialized, been the beginning of the Second Civil War.

The right craves “The Day of the Rope”, and have for years — because they fantasize about having power, not any of the work that using it even for evil ends by definition requires.

Part of their fantasy is that problems are simple, and that wielding power is easy.

They buy their own myth — the myth, for instance, of “German Efficiency” turning the German economy around, as opposed to slave labor, taking loans they never intended to pay back from countries they were going to annex, and putting everyone on amphetamines.

The fascists have never “made the trains run on time,” because trains are a complex system that requires expertise, compromise, and concession — with reality if nothing else; no matter how competent you are as an administrator, you can't simply order that there will be no delays.

Systems take work.

Vance put out a tweet recently about “what process is due,” and part of that was suggesting that in order for “due process” to be valid, we’d have to deport “a few million” people per year.

Our entire federal court system doesn’t see a million cases filed in a year. Filed, mind you — not heard.

The bane of anyone with a disability, “why don’t you just—” is the whole mindset. You must assume:

1. Problems have solutions
2. These solutions are easy to implement
3. These solutions will not create their own problems
4. Reality will cooperate
5. Nobody until you has thought of these solutions

When Hitler began programs of mass death, the Nazis immediately ran into problems of implementation.

It took years to build the infrastructure, and they only started once they realized that they physically could not just shoot every person they wanted dead.

Even if they had enough bullets, even if they had enough executioners, even if every single person went to their death without a fight, the industrial scale of the murder involved was outside of human capacity.

They tried. And they ran into hard limits of the bodies and minds of their executioners.

That’s the problem with reality — it tells you no, sometimes.

Fascists aren’t good at hearing that word. If they were, they wouldn’t be fascists.

It makes them furious, that anything or anyone would defy their will. Cnute’s advisors, sure that their king can give orders to the tide.

But that’s the whole point of the Cnute story, after all — the point they miss. He knows, and is demonstrating as if for children, that there are thing outside of his control. He is making a point to his court.

Because he was an actual king. A ruler, who did the work of ruling.

You may know that I hate the concept of time zones. I’ve shitposted about that before, but my hate is genuine. I think it’s a bad system, made with 19^th century technology to solve a 19^th century problem, and that it persists only due to inertia, causing constant problems.

It’s bad. I hate it.

I will never sincerely advocate that we should change it — that we should abolish time zones, and run the world off of UTC — because the implementation of that is a nightmare of logistics beyond the scope of mortal understanding.

I don’t even know how to get the US on Metric, for fuck’s sakes.

But as long as we’re talking about impossible systems we should implement, how about this one:

You can’t be a dictator unless you manage to have a D&D group of six adults successfully meet once a week for a year.

I live with my D&D group, and we haven’t played since at least November.

Clear that hurdle, and maybe we have you manage a local non-profit that relies on volunteers.

Work your way up the administrative ladder.

Much like “everyone should work a service industry job,” doing the actual work of managing a system more complex than a household leisure activity (without the power or money to avoid ever hearing the word “no”) will disabuse you of the thought that you can order the tides to stop.

God save us all from “Idea Guys.”

My little thread inspired a telling little thread by Pashawasha:

In her memoir about her time in Auschwitz Dr. Gisella Perl writes about how incomprehensible it is that an entire block of pre-teen and teen boys were made to do calisthenics every day until they dropped from exhaustion, injury, and weakness. Guards said it was to make them “beautiful” but one day the entire block was sent to the crematory while their mothers in the neighboring block watched and screamed. Dr. Perl wonders why the guards had done all this and I have two thoughts.

1. To maximize the cruelty.
2. The leaner the bodies are the faster and more completely they burn.

Nazis were good at exactly one thing and that was turning every stumbling block and every victory into a chance to inflict the most cruelty they possibly could on the people they were exterminating.

The inventiveness of Nazi cruelty is another way in which they were notably extraordinary, though not unique.

Which brings us to another thread, by Sunny Moraine:

Yeah, like … speaking as someone who did a doctoral dissertation heavily focused on extermination / death camps, those are highly specific things and moral clarity is not served by muddying the waters.

This isn’t even saying “well some things aren’t so bad”, it’s literally just “words have meaning”.

I think it’s also not pedantry, although it can be that.

When a state transitions from things like slave labor camps and concentration camps to camps that exist solely and entirely to kill people it’s in a new phase and it’s worth being clear about that.

And again, this is not to say that “well as long as they aren’t building death camps we’re okay”, because I don’t trust people on here to not fucking read that even though I did not say it.

Once you’re building concentration camps, death camps aren’t that big a leap. It’s already very bad.

Which is to say that we as a county have always been much closer to death camps than any of us would like to realize.

(A crucial component to this is the government establishing zones of statelessness within those spaces, which would in fact be something new in this context and which the regime would clearly like to do. Dr. Timothy Snyder writes about this in his book Black Earth and it’s worth a read.)

Why this came up

Moraine’s thread has one more post:

CECOT is the test case for this, a place over which the regime undeniably has massive influence but where it claims anyone it sends there is in that kind of stateless condition.

Dr. Snyder’s essay State Terror addresses this directly.

A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one's own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.

CECOT is a concentration camp, not a death camp.

A cruelty factory, rather than a murder factory.

But.

It is the kind of emphatically dehumanizing concentration camp that becomes a death camp. Like the Nazis built outside Germany to avoid the complications of German law. It is easy to recognize.

The day after I posted this, we also got pictures of Trump visiting “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida. I wouldn’t choose Alcatraz as the metaphor which starts with A.

We know where this leads.

Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism

A friend shared a social media post to me:

Liberalism is not anti-fascist as it is coupled with an economic system (capitalism) that leads to fascism. Dems are certainly not anti-fascist as they are half of the corporate governemtn. Liberals can become anti-fascist if they are willing to ideologically develop beyond liberalism.

This is a good summary of what one might call Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism. I have been meaning to write up something proper about DALA for quite some time, and have not gotten around to it. So as a goad to myself, I’m going to capture my rough, rant-y text conversation with my friend, which I hope will inspire me to refine this into a better version.

Two liberalisms

The broad American political discourse understands neither liberalism nor the Left.

When leftists contrast leftism with liberalism, they are usually talking about liberalism in the sense of a position on the left-right spectrum. I take that post as belonging to that species, since it uses “liberalism” to mean “the ideology of the Democratic Party in the US”.

Yes, anyone with any sophistication registers the inadequacy of trying to describe the range of political positions by placing them on a single linear scale … but the spectrum is the best simple model available, a very powerful instrument if used carefully, with an understanding of its limitations.

Check out the summary diagram from the post I just linked:

One can see the basic nomenclature exercised in that post:

• Liberals want policy victories toward greater equality, but do not want institutional change at the level that would overthrow capitalism
• Leftists see such a profound need for institutional change — including the overthrow of capitalism — that they consider liberals’ attention to policy within existing institutions as practically pointless

On those terms I am pretty much a leftist, given our multifaceted institutional crisis … though I suffer a skull-splitting hangover of progressive engagement with the cut-and-thrust of politics within existing institutions.

Capitalism is indeed definitional to liberalism in the Place On The Political Spectrum sense. But DALA conflates liberalism in that sense with liberalism in a deeper sense, which I often refer to as “liberalism as in Isaiah Berlin” or “liberalism as in liberal democracy” or “libdem” for short. That liberalism is a constellation of praxis for society & governance — reason, rights, institutionalism, et cetera.

Consider libdem reflected in the Declaration Of Independence. That’s not the policy agenda of the Democratic Party, it’s something far deeper. It not only provides a manifesto for libdem conceptions of rights, government by consent of the governed, et cetera — its existence as a document reflects the libdem sensibility that to do something profound in politics one bears an obligation to articulate reasons … and has an opportunity to persuade people.

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them

We must ask pointed questions about the paradoxes of the history of libdem — the Declaration was an instrument of people securing an order of brutal racist colonial exploitation! — but its libdem liberalism does not include capitalism because industrial capitalism had not yet been invented. Capitalism emerges together with the libdem order emergent in the wake of the American Revolution and the various Revolutions Of 1848 in Europe, but these are not just all the same thing. Claiming that capitalism is definitional to liberalism is just plain wrong.

DALA does not just miss the distinction between those different senses of “liberal”, it implicitly claims that there is no distinction to make, that this singular “liberalism” is principally defined by commitment to capitalism, that making the distinction is disingenuous. It dismisses all of the libdem stuff about rights, reason, institutionalism, et cetera as nothing other than deceit in service to capitalism.

Even the Democratic Party’s liberalism reflects more than that.

Understanding fascism

Assuming that liberalism = capitalism is not just bad for understanding liberalism, it leaks into a misunderstanding of fascism, which we cannot afford. DALA takes fascism as what you get when the capitalist core of liberalism sheds its false pretenses of rights, democracy, et cetera.

That’s wrong about both liberalism and fascism. I have given the nature of fascism a lot of thought and study, and DALA fumbles even its own good insights about the relationship between libdem and fascism.

• Yeah, capitalism can lead to fascism … but as a stupid reaction to capitalism’s failings. Fascism is an anti-capitalism of fools with right-leaning sensibilities, not-coïncidentally paralleling how “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”.
• Yeah, republican democracy (small r!) does lead to fascism … but in opposition to it, both reacting to republican democracy’s real failings (it is a PITA to do!) and to republican democracy’s tensions with the sensibilities of the right (it is too egalitarian!).
• Yeah, libdem can lead to fascism … but in opposition to democracy — authoritarian rejection of rights & institutionalism, irrationalist rejection of reason, et cetera.
• Yeah, fascism finds its way to power through the support of the owners of the means of production — but that is popular fascist movements exploiting an ally with resources (an ally they betray if they actually seize power!) rather than the agents of capitalism creating fascist movements as their instrument.

And DALA is entirely wrong about the nature of fascism:

• Capitalism is no more definitional to fascism than it is to libdem. Actual fascist regimes produced weirdly mixed economies. People who claim that Mussolini defined fascism as support for capitalist corporations are wrong. Fascism cares about entirely different stuff from economic policy: it imagines that once it violently purges the nation of corruption, boring nerd stuff like economics will just sort itself out.
• Fascism is directly opposed to libdem. 20^th century fascists said so very directly. In the US, libdem rhetoric is so integral to our political discourse that our fascists use it, but that reflects a mix of irrationalist confusion about what libdem rhetoric means together with deliberate bad faith lies.

Antifascism

Understanding fascism and liberalism clearly demonstrates that libdem and liberalism-as-in-the-Dems are both fundamentally anti-fascist. They just are not good at it in the US right now, as demonstrated by MAGA fascism seizing this moment of reälignment in American politics. The actual Dems are bad at anti-fascism because they are bad at both kinds of liberalism, but their institutionalism is firmly opposed to the revolutionary transformation of society which fascism pursues. Deep libdem in the US is also bad at anti-fascism because it is simply weak; few people understand it, and fewer are good at fighting for it. The strong fascist movement we have in the US emerges from an opportunity created by these weaknesses!

DALA assumes that leftism is inherently effective antifascism and that antifascism is necessarily leftist. I am a leftist antifascist, and the two projects are entwined in my heart, but I do not share DALA’s confidence.

Someday I need to write another long-overdue post, on understanding the the contemporary Left as having two elements: opposition to capitalism and advocacy for social justice. I’m going to try to use that distinction without getting completely sucked into it.

The anti-capitalist aspect of leftism may be anti-fascist in the long view because people living in fully automated gay space communism would be too happy to turn to fascism. Hope springs, but in the meantime there is no reason to think that a movement which has failed to overthrow capitalism has a compelling power over fascism. Again, fascism does not really give a damm about the question of capitalism. So not only does that not make fascism vulnerable to leftist anti-capitalism, it makes leftist anti-capitalism vulnerable to fascist appropriation in bad faith.

The social justice aspect of leftism is fundamentally anti-fascist, because fascism is fundamentally opposed to egalitarianism. But the dominance of the identity politics school of social justice in contemporary leftist culture presents its own challenges in navigating the contest with fascism with liberalism in both senses on the board, when we consider the relationship between what I would call “soft” vs “hard” identity politics.

I am an advocate for soft identity politics, which embraces the libdem framework of rights et cetera as a useful but incomplete instrument of social justice. “The law in its majestic equality” et cetera means that yes, we need rights protections but also need other proactive measures to correct the system dynamics which reproduce inequities.

Hard identity politics says that libdem is not merely inadequate to fully address social injustice, it is nothing other than an instrument which sustains injustice, so we must reject libdem — its toolkit of rights, institutionalism, proceeduralism, and perhaps even reasoned argument. Leftists committed to hard identity politics present an obstacle to working with liberals in a popular front against fascism.

Leftist antifascists often argue that when the chips are down, liberals will side with fascists against leftists, rather than join with leftists in a popular front against fascism. We know from the 20^th century that this can happen. But in the current crisis in the US, more and more liberals are stepping up against fascism … and for leftists to refuse to stand with liberals against fascism now would be a bitter irony.

Liberals in either sense do not need to “develop beyond” liberalism to be antifascist. Leftists who insist that they must are committing the exact failure of coalition solidarity they claim liberals will commit. Opposing fascism takes priority.

Yes, liberals have failed to meet the moment before, and too many are failing now, but there are plenty of examples of liberals fighting fascists. The left likes to claim to be mighty anti-fascists because the Soviets did the heavy lifting to beat the Nazis … but only after bargaining with the Nazis failed … and liberals did showed up for the fight. When leftists tried to take on both the fascists and the liberals in the Spanish Civil War, they lost catastrophically.

What do DALAs expect to gain from refusing to admit the possibility of liberal antifascism? Leftists are weak in the US. What, is their plan to convert all of the liberals into leftists first, and then defeat fascism? The wolf is at the door.

I’m a leftist on the merits, and I do think it is the best place to stand fighting fascism. But sure do want to stand with liberals in antifascism. I even want to stand with conservative antifascists.

One more question

And I ask leftists who reject not just liberal policy, not just capitalism, but also the whole libdem governance ideology of rights, rule of law, et cetera — what do you propose instead? Because the 20^th century does not just teach us to dread authoritarianism from the right; it shows the dangers of authoritarianism by the left, too.

Treading carefully & the feminist project

I caught this Actors Being Charming trifle and I have been thinking about the bit at 0:22 where DeVito jokes about being sweet on Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992).

I watched it bracing myself a little for the moment it would turn sour.

To my eyes, it didn’t. Farrell & DeVito conspired to joke at DeVito’s expense rather than at Pfeiffer’s. I could easily be wrong when I imagine most women watching that bit and having a similarly generous read; I’m just a fella who tries to pay attention. Nor do I want to give the guys a gold star for Not Being Utterly Terrible; that is too low a bar. F’rinstance, it seems unmistakable to me that respect for Pfeiffer as an actor animates the whole exchange, but in the world we have they would have done well to name that more explicitly.

But still — I enjoyed the silly and innocent note.

In a sexist world, I imagine most women cannot enjoy it the same way, suffering a much stronger version of the dread of the joking taking a bad turn … and I expect that some women are raw enough from countless wrongs that the bit does not land as fun.

Social justice advocacy culture sometimes forgets how high a bar this sets for navigating these waters. I want us able both to admire the ways Farrell & DeVito were graceful and to examine what they might have done better. To do those in the same breath, in a generous spirit.

Anti-feminists bemoan doing any thinking about this at all. Such a bummer, can’t we just enjoy lighthearted banter? They grumble that taking care to avoid Doing Sexism blunts our ability to take pleasure in what I read those guys trying to do, and I have to grant that there is a little something to their annoyance. But they draw the exact wrong conclusion. A sterile, sexless, That’s Not Funny public sphere — in which DeVito cannot clown about how pretty Michelle Pfeiffer is — is not the goal of the feminist project. Reflection on micro-aggressions et cetera, and taking care to avoid those harms, is an instrument toward a deeper goal.

The feminist project pursues a world in which DeVito could joke safely about being sweet on Michelle Pfeiffer because women are not raw from constant harassment, from constant dehumanizing judgment about their looks, from having the substance of their work ignored, et cetera. That is a world I want to inhabit.

Regional cuisine in these United States

I have San Franciscan pride in the unique magic of the Mission burrito. But I have the good grace not to claim it is the Only Good Burrito. Tex-Mex does not appeal to my California palate but it is legit; if you think it is the best Mexican food in Los Estados Unidos, I respectfully disagree.

Texas style wet brisket is my favorite American barbecue, but Americans have the good grace to know that we are engaging in joking chauvinism when we claim that Our BBQ Is The Best. This is how we keep the Union together.

To that point, I respect New Yorkers’ smug enthusiasm for their disgusting pizza because they have that little bit of grace to claim that it is the best pizza, not the only good pizza. We are humoring you when all we do is roll our eyes over it. Take the win on having a terrific local style of “Chinese” and the best bagels and the only real pastrami.

Some time ago a colleague of mine rolled over to my desk at work and said, “Hey JK, you know about This Kind Of Thing so I hope you can help me.”

“Already I am flattered. What are you wondering?”

“I just got back from NYC and while I was there I had this pastrami sandwich …”

“Oh yeah. That’s the stuff, Brother.”

“I couldn’t believe it. This pastrami sandwich was a religious experience.”

“No lie. Nothing better in this world.”

“So where do I get that here in San Francisco?”

“Oh my Brother, I am so very sorry. Your average pastrami sandwich in San Francisco is not even going to qualify as a real pastrami sandwich. I can point you to several places where you can get a real one, and a few where you can get a good one. But that sandwich? The one you had in New York? That sandwich is not available in exchange for love or money anywhere closer than Los Angeles, and even there you have to be smart enough to go to Canter’s Deli to get it. There is nothing to be done.”

I also love the regional stuff that does not properly exist at all elsewhere. The weird, delicious toasted ravioli of St. Louis. The gross-yet-magnificent Italian beef sandwich of Chicago, which is Just Not The Same if you get it somewhere else. (Also gotta love the deep dish pizza, though I insist that the best version in the world is weirdly only found in Berkeley.)

But, uh, Cincinnati? If you are going to brag about that … stuff … fine. Call it “chili” if you want, whatever. But you have to warn people that it is a completely different dish, fergawdsake.

The state of UX design, and a job I did not take

An old colleague reminded me of a story about a job I did not take. It’s partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2010, partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2025, and partly a story about professionalism & org development.

I interviewed to become the First UXD at midsize company making niche consumer electronics which had superb industrial design capacity but did not have a UX design practice at all, and realized they needed it. It was a good org in a lot of ways. I liked the people I met. They did not understand UXD, but they mostly knew that they didn’t know.

They gave me an offer. It was Grown-Up Money, but the number was weak, rolling back the odometer on my career by a decade.

I told the hiring manager that I would not take the offer. He was unsurprised, had warned HR that the salary was inadequate, and was confident that he could get them to improve it significantly.

I said:

Look, more money in itself won’t change my mind. That number reflects a different conception of what this job is than I thought we understood. That number is low for someone to do UX design, and you need someone to pioneer a UXD practice.

He replied:

You’re right. We don’t have a commitment to go heavy on UX design. We are adding a UX designer to the team as an experiment. If that works out, we want to build a practice.

I said:

That sounds reasonable. And it is doomed to fail.

If you don’t address how UX design connects to your design & development process, you won’t get much leverage even from a great designer. With the pay you offered me, people in the org will smell on the person in that role that they are not worth listening to about the process & organizational elements of turning good UX design into actual products with good UX.

It is even worse if the person in this job manages to drive some product improvements in spite of that problem. The org will learn the wrong lesson. They will expect modest gains without org change. They will never invest organizational juice into supporting UXD properly.

This position is set up for failure. I don’t want that job, even if you pay me more to do it.

The hiring manager said:

That is very clarifying. I only half-understood that problem. I know I cannot address it from where I am sitting in the org.

I said:

You really need someone who has made it happen before, but there are all of a dozen people in the world with that on their résumé, and you’ll need a crowbar to pry them loose from where they work now, so the best move available to you is to roll the dice on investing a lot of trust in someone like me, who does not have that experience but has the skills and a fundamental understanding of the process & org challenges. But it is obvious why it is so hard to make a commitment to that. You need executive air support.

Because I like what y’all do and want to see y’all build a real UXD practice even if I don’t get to be the one to do it, I’ll offer you a bit of free consulting time. Put me in front of someone who can drive org change, and I will lay it out the case for them, like I just did for you.

The hiring manager was enthusiastic about that being the Right Thing. They said that they would communicate my offer, but predicted that leadership would not bite. I was unsurprised that I never heard from them again. I needed a new job, but I felt relieved that I had dodged a bullet.

In the 2010s, we saw a lot of orgs became enthusiastic about the importance of user experience. They hired a bunch of designers, then just sprinkled them into their organizations without changing any of the structures or processes.

My prophecy for that organization I interviewed with happened across the industry. User experience design “didn’t work”, as in the famous parable we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

The fanatical proponents of baseball tell us that it is a very exciting game, fun to play and fun to watch. They are clearly either stupid or evil or both, because we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

First of all, the requirements for the game are stupid: it does not scale. They say you need at least nine players on a side. That’s stupidly inefficient. The minimum number of players is clearly four: three men on and one batting. That’s how we played: four people on a side.

With only four players, we didn’t need all those bases ⋯

[⋯]

The thing that finally condemns the entire “baseball” idea, however is this: even with all these improvements, the game is no fun at all.

We tried baseball, and it didn’t work.

Frankly, the UX design profession bears significant responsibility as well. We have not delivered clarity about what we need or even what we do, because we lack it as a professional community. Too many of us were insufficiently skilled. Too many of us accepted doomed positions because we felt we had to.

Now we have a lot of capable UX designers leaving the profession or having trouble staying in it … and a lot of crappy products & services. A tragedy.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”?

I want to never lend strength to Israel apologists who disingenuously find antisemitism in anything anyone ever says and does in the name of Palestinian liberation. All people of conscience must vigorously oppose the escalating genocide in Gaza, must not settle for merely ending that horror, must support an end to countless forms of oppression for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, inside Green Line Israel, and in the diaspora. We must ground commitment to Palestinian liberation in the rightness of the cause, not make it contingent on the movement using the right slogans. We have a genocide to stop.

But I confess to weariness with people saying bad things and then brushing off criticisms by saying “who cares while there is a genocide?” I hope we would agree that saying “kill the Jews” would be unacceptable, so it is possible for slogans to matter.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is a far cry from “kill the Jews”. Most who use it mean neither more nor less than a call for Palestinian liberation. I do not fault them.

But the slogan itches at me. Rhymes make good chants, but the alchemy of combining “from the River to the Sea” with “Palestine will be free” gives this particular slogan unsavory implications which are not obvious to gentiles. We must closely examine it as rhetoric and see how that lands with Jews not because those are overwhelmingly important in themselves, but to contextualize the movement for Palestinian liberation choosing it as the slogan they promote.

From the River to the Sea

Defenders of the slogan dismiss Jews’ uneasiness with the expression “from the River to the Sea” as disingenuous, for good reasons. We have decades of both Palestinians and Israelis using “from the River to the Sea” as a call for solidarity between Palestinians and Israelis. But that usage emerges in dialogue with other history.

The phrase “from the River to the Sea” can be found in print well before the founding of Israel, used in aspirations to claim the whole territory for an ethnically homogeneous nation. Both Arabs and Zionists did this.

It also brings to mind the expression “push them into the Sea”, used — again both by Arabs and by Zionists, again dating back to even before Israel was founded — to name intent to expel people from the territory. Most Jews recognize it first from Israel hardliners who rationalize the Nakba — the genocidal expulsion of Arab Palestinians at the founding of Israel — with a claim that Palestinians fled their homes at the direction of Arab leaders who told them to flee in order to clear the way for Arab armies to “push the Jews into the Sea”. Reasonable people could once believe that story, since the founding of Israel was chaotic with conflicting accounts on all sides, but decades ago scholarship conclusively established that it is a pernicious lie, inverting how it was Israeli brutality rather than Arab hostility which sent 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes.

So saying “from the River to the Sea” is not a call to commit horrors, but it is not simply disingenuous to register that the more history one knows, the more hearing it summons such calls to mind. That does not disqualify use of the phrase in itself, but those ambiguities combine with ambiguities in the other half of the slogan ….

Palestine

“Palestine” can mean several different things —

1. The loosely-defined region extending far to the east of the Jordan River, including both what we now call Israel and Jordan (archaic, since this usage was typical of the late Ottoman Empire)
2. The current quasi-sovereign Palestinian Authority comprised of Gaza and the West Bank
3. A hypothetical truly sovereign successor to the Palestinian Authority with the same borders, no longer subject to Israeli military interference or settlements
4. The territory of British Mandate Palestine which between WWI-WWII included the whole area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, now broken into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
5. A hypothetical egalitarian unified state with equal rights for all, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority
6. A hypothetical secular Arab ethnic state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered
7. A hypothetical theocratic Muslim state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered

This ambiguity confuses many conversations about Palestinian liberation.

Naming Palestine in the same breath as “from the River to the Sea” excludes ^#1-3 … which rejects the legitimacy of a two-state resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

There are good reasons to oppose a two-state resolution. I favor ^#5, a unified democracy, as ideal. But two states are a legitimate alternative one could regard as preferable on the merits … or just as more achievable.

Not only Zionists say this. The PLO publicly accepted a two-state resolution in principle back in the late 1980s. Hamas have at least nominally accepted it for about a decade; there are good reasons to doubt their sincerity, but they did say it.

It is weird to use a slogan which takes the two-state option off the table.

The slogan has room for “Palestine” to mean ^#5, ^#6, or ^#7. Most people using the slogan unmistakably intend to it to mean ^#5, the democratic, egalitarian version.

But many real advocates for Palestinian liberation demand the genocidal, undemocratic options ^#6 or ^#7. The original PLO charter called for ^#6, a secular Arab state denying citizenship to Israelis. The original Hamas charter called for ^#7, a theocracy. Plenty of people still take those positions today.

It is weird to use a slogan which excludes a two-state resolution while not excluding the displacement or genocide of Israelis.

Palestine will be free

With genocidal visions of Palestine on the table, what does “free” mean? The slogan does not say Palestinians will be free, it says that Palestine will be free. To Arab ethnic nationalists, a “free” Palestine means a state only for Arabs. To Muslim theocrats, a “free” Palestine means a state dedicated to Islam.

Plus Jews cannot help hearing a rhyme with the Nazi dream of a “Judenfrei Reich”, a Nazi slogan for the utopia they wanted to create through genocide. Will Palestine “be free” of Jews?

A cocktail of allusions

Again, we know that most people do not mean the expulsion of Jews when they use the slogan. But it evokes the prospect in several ways in the space of just ten words. Knowing what most people mean does not prevent feeling a sting from that.

I would say that Jews have an obligation to just handle how that spooks us, but yet more context complicates things further.

Antisemitism

Assuming universal or inherent antisemitism among Palestinians & Arabs is a racist fantasy. Contrary to what Israel hardliners claim, the movement for Palestinian liberation is not fundamentally antisemitic. Those hardliners’ use of big platforms to misrepresent any criticism of Israel as “antisemitism” makes it harder for everyone to think. It tempts advocates for Palestinian liberation to dismiss all concerns about antisemitism as nothing other than Israel apologetics.

We must resist a paranoid temptation to find antisemitism in everything. We must resist naïvely dismissing antisemitism as irrelevant. Antisemitism is tricky, subtle and complex and hard even for well-informed people to think about. Most gentiles are not just poorly informed — they rarely know just how complicated the territory gets.

Many people — Palestinians, Arabs, and otherwise — have antisemitism woven deeply into their thinking about Israel-Palestine. As exemplified in the subtle problems with the slogan inspiring this post, most of that antisemitism reflects ignorance or confusion rather than bigotry.

Fascists and other overt bigots often pose as “anti-Zionists” or supporters of Palestinian liberation. Sometimes they just use that pose as camouflage, to make their antisemitic propaganda sound reasonable. Sometimes they try to bend the movement for Palestinian liberation into an instrument of their efforts through entryism.

There are even Jewish cults muddying the waters with disingenuous opposition to Israel motivated by disgust that Israel is not the theocracy they dream of having.

With all that chaff and more in the air, “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is only one among a host of examples of antisemitic rhetoric Jews encounter while trying to stand for Palestinian liberation.

Social justice praxis

I cut Palestinians a lot of slack for intemperate language & ideas. One must respect Palestinians’ experience of their own oppression.

But accepting confusions and bigotries without comment plants landmines in the road to a more just future.

It is profoundly unfair that the movement for Palestinian liberation bears this extra burden of avoiding & addressing antisemitism. Worse still navigating so many bad actors working in all directions. But rising antisemitism creates an obligation which frankly the movement has not met. Too many refuse to admit any antisemitism at all.

I was prompted to finally assemble this post by people telling me, “Golly gee, there is no good reason to feel spooked by the slogan. Your grumbling is no different from white people rejecting the slogan ‘Black lives matter’. You obviously will never accept any slogan because you just oppose Palestinian liberation.”

Of course there are plenty of people who object in bad faith, but I hope I have made clear how I speak from solid support for Palestinian liberation and have substantive reasons to object to this particular slogan. It is maddening that so many people serious about social justice praxis seem to forget it when gentilesplaining to Jews about antisemitism.

How much does this matter?

In the current moment, few concerns in any domain rank with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Jews’ feelings about clumsy slogans do not remotely make the cut. Support for Palestinian liberation rests on justice, not on the conduct of the movement. We must avoid tone policing which says, “Golly, I would support the cause if you were nicer about it.”

But we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and this slogan connects to the broad relationship between Jews and the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Jews do not bear a special obligation to speak out about Israel-Palestine but we do have an opportunity in our voices bringing a different weight than gentiles’. But the more vigorously we support the cause, the more we encounter its large & small manifestations of antisemitism. We feel raw. It throws grit in the gears. The slogan is one more damm thing, doing antisemitism even when innocent of bigotry or malice.

The point, at last

It’s not about Jews’ feelings, or the reasons for Jews’ feelings. But one cannot understand what is important without having that background. Here’s the real thing:

The leaders of the movement study the history of the conflict. Many of them do know all of this context. They have heard these objections before, from other supporters of the cause. They know how this particular slogan lands differently with Jews than with gentiles.

Why do they encourage people to use this slogan despite that?

Indeed, they have plenty of other slogans. But we hear this one a lot. So they prefer it. Why? I find it hard to resist the conclusion that they choose this slogan because of the reaction Jews have to it.

At best, that choice is antisemitically callous toward Jews, a signal that those leaders do not want our support.

At worst, it maliciously uses dogwhistles which gentiles do not register to provoke Jews into seeming unreasonable, compounded by them gaslighting us by saying “don’t center your feelings, you have no good reason for them”.

With so much nonsense which the movement cannot control, I cannot imagine a charitable explanation for them embracing this heartache.

I will continue to grit my teeth and accept the slogan among countless other microagressions from the movement. I encourage Jews who feel as I do to do the same. The cause is more important than our feelings.

But solidarity does not require that I pretend not to see a problem.

Wouldn’t it be better if the movement did Jewish allies the kindness of abandoning this slogan for any of the countless better alternatives?

FREE PALESTINE

PALESTINIAN LIBERATION NOW

Another terrible analogy for Israel-Palestine

Over on Bluesky, someone challenged me over my insistence that “Zionism” means neither more nor less than wanting Israel to continue to exist in some form with a pointed analogy:

I think the states South of Mason-Dixon should be able to have the right to resist Federal imposition of human equality in some form. The only forms I materially support exactly conform to the Confederacy, but how dare you imply that I support the Confederacy!

I’m impatient with anti-Zionists offering bad metaphors for the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I have to admit that the challenge in that had real edge. I thought it was recoverable into a useful form.

But I was wrong; it is rotten at the core, and trying to reframe it into a better form only had me wading out into a revisionist history which is easily misread as apologetics for the Confederacy, which I certainly do not want to do. I should have remembered my own warning against analogizing the history of Israel to the history of the United States.

Retaining it here to keep myself accountable for putting my foot in my mouth.

An alternate history

To try to really work the analogy, one must break the parallel between Israel and the Confederacy by first recognizing how the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Green Line Israel are brutal, and the Nakba was a genocidal horror, but antebellum Southern slavery was even worse than that. We should be wary of mapping the oppression of Arab Palestinians inside Green Line Israel directly to Jim Crow (or to other inequities like South African apartheid), but it is similar enough to accept for the sake of the allegory. We must also register how the Confederacy was defined by its project to preserve that nightmare in a way that Zionism is not.

That blunts the analogy, but it still very sharp. Jim Crow was profoundly unjust. With that, we can conceive a loose dystopian alternate history parallel to the history of Israel-Palestine:

1862 — The Confederacy successfully secedes with Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. Black people fleeing & driven from their homes escape to the Louisiana & Tennessee territories of Mexico and the USA.

Late 19^th century — Mexico & the US fight a series of wars trying to destroy the Confederacy. It is clear that if they win, they will genocide the Confederates.

1885 — The Confederacy seizes Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia in one of those wars. They start establishing settlements and repress the Black people there even more brutally than in the CSA itself.

1890 — The wars end because the Confederacy hint that they have dynamite technology.

1900 — The USA & CSA sign a major peace treaty which ends their border conflicts. The USA gets North Carolina & Virginia back. The Confederacy retains Louisiana & Tennessee, under military occupation.

1915 — After lengthy, bitter negotiation, the Confederacy makes weak concessions to Black people in Louisiana & Tennessee, which become a pseudo-sovereign state of the South. Confederate settlements remain, and the South remains subject to military policing. But there are free elections, which leaders of the formerly-terrorist Southern Liberation Organization win.

1930 — Conditions have diverged between Tennessee and Lousiana.

In Tennessee the Confederacy has expanded their settlements, making it a fragmented mess under de facto Confederate control. They are still governed democratically, under a corrupt party which evolved from the SLO.

In Louisiana the Confederacy have retreated, sort of: they abandon their settlements but blockade the state, creating grinding poverty. They have elected the authoritarian, theocratic Nation Of Islam to power … who never allow another free election again.

“Liberal Confederates”?

Let’s stop in 1945, before the Nation Of Islam conducts a brutal attack on Confederate civilians which produces an immense, genocidal response by the Confederacy, so we can look across this long, terrible history without that final horror consuming the story.

This less bad alternate Confederacy is still very bad.

It has liberal Confederates who say, “For generations we have fought for full sovereignty for the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee, full equality for Black people inside the Confederacy, and reparations for Black people in recognition of the Confederate history. The CSA is guilty of countless wrongs which we oppose, but we still love our home and want it to be far better.”

Would I count myself a liberal Confederate? Heck no. I don’t want the legacy of the Confederate project. I would want a just, unified, liberal democratic South encompassing all of the Confederacy plus the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee.

Would I count myself an anti-Confederate? Not quite. I would grant that liberal Confederates held a legitimate position which I respectfully disagree with. It is good to dream of a better version of one’s country.

Would I respect people less sympathetic to liberal Confederates than I was? Of course. Especially I would cut a lot of slack for Black Southerners saying that liberal Confederates are only rationalizing the white supremacy of the CSA. They would have good reasons, and their analysis would have a lot of truth to it, with plenty of “liberal Confederates” unwilling to really face the depth of the injustices they have an obligation to correct. And I would insist that sincere liberal Confederates dedicated to justice really existed, even if I was pessimistic about how many there were and the viability of their dream.

I’d also pointedly wonder how anti-Confederates imagined a harmonious United South working if they found themselves unable to imagine sincere liberal Confederates.

Some people would argue that animosity between white Confederates and Black Southerners is so intense that a two-state resolution would be better than a United South. I would not agree that it was better, but I would grant that they had a good case that it was more achievable.

One last thing

To properly parallel the history of Israel-Palestine, we would also need to imagine a Confederacy founded not by white people but by Native Americans fleeing genocide in the USA & Mexico, populated mostly with more Native Americans who arrived in the decades after succession — to parallel the Shoah, the Jews already in Palestine before Zionism, and the migration of Mizrahi Jews unwelcome elsewhere in the Middle East.

Wait, this is all terrible

So. Ugh. So I end up recruiting the genocide of Native Americans into this analogy, inventing a Confederacy without slavery, inventing an ahistorical Nation Of Islam as an anti-Confederate equivalent to Hamas, and more which is bananas if not ten kinds of racist. That is awful. Let’s … not.

So to the original point: the Confederacy is not a good analogy for Israel.

Arizona Public Service killed my mother

This has now grown beyond what a post can or should hold, so it has its own website:

APSKilledMyMom.com

Andor

Andor : Star Wars
   ::
The Wire : cop shows
   ::
Deadwood : Westerns

It uses Star Wars as a setting to talk seriously about how authoritarian governments actually work, and how to actually fight them, without getting hung up on any historical or contextual specifics. And like those other series, it as well-crafted and entertaining as it is serious. And of course now timely.

Nemik’s Manifesto

Of course it’s my favorite thing. I am very fond of this little adaptation with some very graceful allusions to Star Wars at large.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And …

Remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

A wise internet acquaintance says of it [spoilers]:

I’m sort of a cruel cynic because while that monologue is genuinely stirring, I can’t help but remember the incredibly cynical beat where the idealistic little “read theory!” guy writing his manifesto is literally crushed to death by money (the real power of a rebellion) after achieving very little. Like yes, the monologue is great, but Andor is also cold enough to recognize that what sparks the rebellion after decades of Imperial oppression, is a theft of cold hard cash deliberately conducted to provoke reprisal, not just stirring words alone.

Despite being someone sentimental about the stirring words, I agree. It’s part of what I love about Nemik’s story and Andor more broadly. The series insists that revolution against authoritarianism is no one thing. It warns of the danger of resting the movement on any one thing. Some moves just won’t pay off.

I assume that Star Wars lore will eventually succumb to making Nemik’s Manifesto the rallying cry of the Rebellion. But at least as of today, while we just have Season One, Andor is wise enough to hint that Cassian Andor — Nemik’s “ideal reader” — is the only person who read it and no, the Manifesto didn’t radicalize Cassian Andor.

At first.

By itself.

But even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

A hero

Rescuing a thread from the Bad Place which explains why I caught feelings from a glimpse of a tiny little street sign in the background at the 15-second mark in the first proper trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I will never, ever locate and re-read Marvel Two-In-One Annual ^#7 because I want my memory of it from when I was twelve to remain pristine, because when I think of a hero, I think of that comic and the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing.

In the comic, this big blue zillion-year-old alien guy The Champion comes to Earth. He loves to box and travels the Cosmos challenging people to boxing matches. So when he arrives at Earth, of course he teleports a bunch of Marvel superheroes to his boxing gym.

The heroes are like, dude, we are not getting into the ring with you for your entertainment. The Champion is like, I am not asking, I am telling. Defeat me in a boxing match or my spaceship will blow up the Earth. So it’s superheroes vs. The Champion for all the marbles.

Cut to a huge stadium. The boxing match will be simulcast on all the TV channels.

One by one, The Champion squares off against various brawny superheroes. They get quickly dispatched or disqualified. The Hulk cannot keep his composure and obey Queensbury rules. Thor refuses to put down Mjolnir. Wonder Man probably just got KO’d with one punch because he’s such a doof. I do not recall all of the details.

The important thing is that the last hero left is The Thing.

The Champion soliloquizes: Woe is me, I have traveled from one end of the Universe to the other seeking a worthy challenge, but I am just too good at boxing.

The Thing asks do ya plan to win the fight by boring me to death?

Fans of The Thing know what time it is. But alas, it is immediately apparent that it is not The Champion who will get clobbered. The Thing is outmatched!

Ding. The first round ends and The Thing staggers back to his corner. The Champion soliloquizes some more about how sad he is that his might is peerless. The Thing tells the Champion I’m just gettin’ warmed up.

Ding. Round two. The Thing keeps taking a pounding. The Champion brags that the fight is a foregone conclusion. The Thing says my Aunt Petunia throws a better punch than you.

Ding. The round ends. The Thing is bleeding. The Thing. Bleeding. Twelve-year-old Me was very not okay with this. I had seen him take hits from wrecking balls, kaiju, howitzers, lasers, and what have you … and just dust himself off. This is scary.

As The Thing catches his breath in the corner, the Fantastic Four are there. Reed is like, don’t do this to yourself, Ben. The Thing is all, sorry Egghead but ya know I am just too dumb ta know how ta quit.

Ding. Round three. The Champion continues to mock The Thing while beating the tar out of him. He moans once again I have been denied the glory of a real fight. The Thing tells him I’m from Yancy Street so I know more about a real fight than you ever will.

The Champion lands a punch on The Thing which lays him out on the canvas. People in the stadium and around the world gasp. The ref starts counting.

Just as the count is about to run out, The Thing stands back up and puts up his fists, of course. But he looks bad.

The Champion mocks him some more. Why get up? You are bleeding and your ribs are broken and you can barely stand, Loser. I’m not even winded. It’s over.

The Thing says: The deal here is that when the fight ends the world ends, right?

The Champion says: Yeah, that’s the forfeit since you are such a loser.

The Thing says: Then I’m gonna keep gettin’ up, no matter how many times ya knock me down.

Ding. The fight is back on. But the Champion lowers his fists.

The Thing is all are we gonna fight or what?

The Champion tells him: No. The fight is over. Sure, I could knock you out, eventually. But you will not be defeated, will you? Not really. Not ever. I travelled billions of light-years seeking a worthy opponent and never even knew what one was.

Superheroes are silly. That story is silly. And of course that story is in no way original. It’s older than the written word. But I first got it in the form of The Thing.

I got teary retelling it.

So it was good seeing a little sign announcing “Yancy St”. I know a hero from that neighborhood.

Israel’s “right to exist”

Many commentators allude to the question of “Israel’s right to exist”. Noah Berlatsky calls shenanigans on that turn of phrase in his post The Right To A State And State’s Rights:

Only individuals can have rights. Nationalist projects, however, are addicted to claiming rights for themselves.

Just so. His post lays out the ugly implications in asserting that nations have “rights”, not least in apologetics for the Confederacy and Jim Crow in US history.

That said, most people addressing Israel’s “right to exist” are not really engaging with any such theory. People generally reject it in response to Israel hardliners saying it to rationalize wrongs Israel has committed. People generally defend it in response to the common and ultimately antisemitic suggestion that Israel is a uniquely (or at least extraordinarily) illegitimate nation-state.

That attack on Israel’s legitimacy is not a fantasy of Israel hardliners. The original PLO charter in 1964 — three years before Israel’s occupation of Gaza & the West Bank — asserts:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate [which includes all of Israel], is an indivisible territorial unit.

[⋯]

The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.

[⋯]

The liberation of Palestine [⋯] will safeguard the country’s religious sanctuaries and guarantee freedom of worship and of visit to all, without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion.

Most of the 2½ million Jews in Israel in 1964 had no other home — they were refugees from the Shoah, Zionists who moved between WWI & WWII, and their descendants born in Israel. That charter sought to deny them citizenship in the Arab state of Palestine which the PLO wanted to displace Israel to create.

The PLO went on to recognize Israel’s legitimacy three decades later, demonstrating that one can both stand for Palestinian liberation and accept that the state of Israel has fundamental legitimacy. But not all advocates for Palestinian liberation have done the same; implicit (or even explicit) rejection of Israel’s legitimacy remains common, carrying with that the suggestion that one wants to see the displacement of Jewish Israelis. Asserting Israel’s “right to exist” is a bad way to respond, but it does address a real point in contention.

I avoid the expression “Israel’s right to exist”. I recommend that others do the same. We must talk about Israel-Palestine as crisply as possible. But I find it a lot more forgivable than many rhetorcial moves people make in this space which have bad unintended implications. And I embrace the extremely modest defense of Israel which it tries to offer:

• I reject claims that a state has a “right” to exist while seeing millions of Israelis who have never known another home as cause for recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I reject the Westphalian order of nation-states as the right way to structure geopolitics while accepting it as the reality of the world we have now, which compels recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I consider Israel’s government illegitimate because of their longstanding apartheid policies and current genocidal attack on Gaza, while distinguishing that from my recognition of the state of Israel as legitimate.
• I consider a single democratic state of Palestine vastly preferrable to the liberal Zionist dream of a soft-ethnonationalist Israel — more just, committed to inviting immigration by diaspora Jews, recognizing a truly sovereign neighbor state of Palestine in Gaza & the West bank — and even consider that liberal Zionism unworkable, while still counting liberal Zionism as a respectable position out of recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.

Starship Troopers

In my wasted youth, I read most of Robert A. Heinlein’s published writing. I cannot recommend doing that. But that inheritance from my younger self has me frustrated with the state of Discourse around his novel Starship Troopers. At the risk of talking about the orangutan, I have something to add which I am puzzled no one else seems to have said. I feel an itch over failings I see in both defenses & critiques of the novel.

Yes it is fashy

One cannot talk about fascist themes in the novel without addressing the other Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s film, a satire offered as if it were propaganda from a fascist society. Many Heinlein fans grumble, with some cause. The film cutting so directly against the novel whets my own appetite to see its strengths somehow presented in film. I am nerd enough to want to see a depiction of a capable Mobile Infantry in powered armor, and I am sentimental enough that I feel moved whenever I re-read how Flores dies on the way up.

But people who reject the film because the novel is Not Fascist At All misunderstand both the novel and fascism. The book is fashy as heck.

In the world of Troopers, civic vigor results from martial valor, because it restricts the franchise to people who have volunteered to fight in endless frontier wars. This political order emerged after a brownshirt rebellion against “failed” liberal democratic governance, explicitly rejecting universal human rights, including the right to vote, producing a better society. That is the core fascist dream. Considering that plausible — not even good, just plausible — is fashy thinking.

David Forbes’ superb long essay The Old Iron Dream (summarized here) situates Heinlein in a context of the far right strain in golden age science fiction; Noah Berlatsky observes how entangled far right fantasies and SF have been with each other. My favorite single commentary on Troopers is a series of long video-essays contextualizing Troopers in Heinlein, Verhoeven, and the essayist’s family (!) which defends having a soft spot for the novel while registering unmistakably fashy elements in its foundations.

But all that said, I do not read the novel as simply fascist propaganda, and taking Heinlein as a fascist badly misunderstands him.

Politics in Heinlein’s fiction gets weird

Heinlein’s harshest critics look past how protean and strange both his fiction and his personal politics really were. SF writer Charlie Stross’ comment Dread Of Heinleinism contextualizes the ideas expressed in his fiction.

Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20^th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).

In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).

We need to get that to get Heinlein’s portrayals of strange politics. One should never take him as simply advocating for the political order presented in any of his fictions.

Stross points to how many read Luna in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a libertarian utopian fantasy despite how it depicts an anarchist culture muddling through in the context of a very neglectful authoritarian rulership and very peculiar material conditions. In Double Star, the Emperor Of The Solar System offers a spirited defense of constitutional monarchy! I take these stories, and others, and Troopers as provocations, letting illiberal socieites make their best case for themselves on their own terms. Each is a different exercise in pushing against how the core principles of liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy are sacred cows in American society — inadmissible thought experiments indeed.

Part of why I read Heinlein in my youth is how I share his taste for looking the Devil in the eye, though I have learned that one must tread carefully. Heinlein was not careful enough, but his failures are interesting and twisty.

What I read RAH trying to do

The social & political order in Troopers has unmistakably fascist characteristics, but also includes a few breaks from the pattern of fascism. Importantly, it has no dictator, no cult of personality.

The core of its unique political system is now famous because Verhoeven’s explicitly satirical film adapation points directly to it:

• Only people honorably discharged from military service may vote (so people in service cannot)
• The military must accept all volunteers
• People in service may generally retire at will, but then they do not get the franchise

I read this What-If emerging from a tension between his romanticization of the military (which animates many of his stories, including my favorite) versus the liberatarian-unto-anarchist aspect of Heinlein’s worldview (evident throughout his work, loudest in Moon, which he wrote a few years after publishing Troopers).

Heinlein assumes not just that war emerges inevitably from human nature but that this reflects nobility, in protecting one’s society with violence. He dreads democracy devolving to lazy, destructive “bread & circuses” populism. Fashy sentiments. But Troopers also reflects Heinlein’s libertarian-ish disgust at conscription, and his sober dread of authoritarian alternatives to democracy. The world of Troopers tries to square the circle of these conflicting sensibilities through what Heinlein imagines could act as a tidy, clever system of checks-and-balances:

1. Requiring service as a test & training for a sober and truly public-minded electorate addresses his anxieties about electoral democracy — to vote, one must demonstrate willingness to commit to the public good.
2. Requiring that service accept every volunteer is meant to be quasi-democratic in spirit — since any can serve, none are disenfranchised. (I find it telling how in later commentary on the novel, Heinlein mis-remembered it as including the enfranchisement of people unsuited to the military by allowing for other forms of service.)
3. People in service cannot vote, to keep them from bending the military away from serving society.
4. Since voters have all Been There, that deters them from abusing the people in service.

But if one thinks about this with any depth, it falls apart.

Consider, f’rinstance, how this system would still allow a racist society to prevent the enfranchisement of people of color, simply by assigning Black & brown people in service to far more dangerous and degrading duty and refusing to ever discharge them from service. People of color would never become veteran voters who could prevent such abuses. Such shenanigans are so obvious to anyone familiar with the sham faux democracy of Jim Crow that one might suspect Heinlein of trickery.

I don’t. I see a naïve sincerity.

Heinlein’s good heart enabled this bad idea

If one has read much Heinlein, one cannot miss his disdain for bigotry. He wrote a lot of smart, capable women. He often would make that mid-20^th-century move of revealing that a hero was a person of color midway through a work. But as Stross observes, he had the sincere commitmment combined with shallow analysis of injustices like racism & sexism characteristic of white men of the era. He could not see the misogyny threaded through his Strong Woman Characters, and wrote tone-deaf tranwrecks when making unmistakable attempts to stand against bigotry.

I submit that the potential for a racist version of the Troopers political order just did not occur to Heinlein. This kind of mistake is why we need to be no less wary the dangerous short-sighted-ness of white male privilege than we are wary of overt bigotry and cruelty.

Someone as fundamentally pessimistic about human nature as Heinlein presented himself as being would have seen this and countless other potential abuses of the system in Troopers. Heinlein’s fundamental decency paradoxically hobbled his imagination.

I suspect that decency also protected him from sliding down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. Among the anarchist fantasies, prescient warnings about American Christian theocratic totalitarianism, and other inadmissable thought experiments, Troopers was the high water mark of his fascist sensibilities in a writing career which lasted almost thirty more years. He probably would have voted for GWB in 2004 as the “lesser evil” had he lived so long, but I am confident that he would have hated Trump.

I think Heinlein’s libertarian-ish impulse won out because he wasn’t mean enough to turn to fascism.

The skeptical, satirical Heinlein

Heinlein’s faux-cynicism also reflects another virtue which softens my disgust at Troopers. Despite the smug, didactic, that’s-just-how-it-is tone of his writing, he was too cheerfully skeptical of everything to entirely buy any of the suggestions implied in his fiction, even from his own mouthpiece characters.

Some of his work is outright satirical — he named Stranger In A Strange Land explicitly as a satire. Even in works not intended as satires, the satirical note bubbles up often. I think of an aside in Friday depicting an independent Republic Of California with an exaggerated version of the state’s realworld ballot initiative process. In that example, though Heinlein lampoons “too much democracy”, the fictional political order is harmlessly goofy rather than sinister; he couldn’t help blunting the teeth of his own critique.

Indeed, a few defenders of Heinlein’s novel claim that Verhoeven’s film makes overt a critique of fascism covertly embedded in the novel. I don’t buy that, but Heinlein’s sensibility creates openings to read it that way. Consider a counter-reading which finds that the novel presents a dystopia of slavery and mind control.

There is evidence, however, that enslavement is ubiquitous in Starship Troopers in the form of coercive mass hypnosis. Such a plot device occurs in no other RAH book, so it can’t be dismissed as an accidental trope. RAH included it on purpose.

[⋯]

The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. [⋯] to make him do what you want him to do. [⋯] But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. [⋯] that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. [⋯] other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say supply the control.

Implication: the Politburo, made up of and selected by a single party state of Komsomol veterans, control the rest of the population through mass hypnosis. That’s not to say the book is not a paean to duty and patriotism, but that it’s primarily a cautionary tale of enslavement by mind-control of diligent patriots by Soviet-style communism. And, to that extent at least, the book is intended as a satire.

That linked post describes that reading to debunk it — and I don’t find the Mind Control Dystopia reading convincing myself — but the argument in full does demonstrate that reading as very available.

That satirical impulse makes it hard to measure the sincerity of Troopers ….

How plausible did Heinlein consider the political order in Troopers?

Aside from the basics of the backstory and political system, Troopers invokes a lot of fashy ideas.

Consider one of the passages in which the protagonist of Troopers reflects on his high school class in History And Moral Philosophy, which features a teacher given a lot of space to speak with Heinlein’s unmistakable Author Mouthpiece voice.

Law-abiding people hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.

[⋯]

Were [those criminal kids] spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.

[⋯]

the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’

Disgusting. Research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is harmful and indeed produces worse-behaved adults. This exemplifies authoritarian myths offered uncritically throughout the book. The passage goes on to have the teacher, Dubois, reject universal human rights as the failing of the society — our society — which the future social order presented in Troopers is said to have replaced.

“⋯ Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’”

Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. “Sir? How about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. [⋯] that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Repellant.

And yet.

In the middle of this passage, Dubois claims that moral philosophy has become an “exact science”:

⋯ the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.

[⋯]

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Oh … really?

Heinlein never returns to this science-fictional conceit of an exact science of morals. He just leaves it as an assertion by the propagandist for their social order in our protagonist’s high school classroom. In moments like that — as when he gives us an Emperor rationalizing constitutional monarchy, or an anarchist philosopher, or countless other advocates for Inadmissible Thought Experiments — I sense Heinlein’s tounge reflexively drifting toward his cheek, perhaps without him even realizing it.

”Do you believe that the people of this world are right to be so smug about having this all worked out?”

Bad and complicated

So. I want to embrace that nuance without doing the thing of defending a villain by calling them “complicated”.

Heinlein’s political provocations are always weird, often dumb, sometimes ugly, and in the particular case of Starship Troopers, odious.

And complicated.