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.

Against 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 government. Liberals can become anti-fascist if they are willing to ideologically develop beyond liberalism.

For a stronger and more thorough version of that argument, I like Liberalism and Fascism: Partners in Crime, which points to some chilling real history of capitalist “liberals” aligning with fascists which has unhappy parallels in our present moment. (Though I will eventually get to a key critique of its telling of history.)

To summarize the Dumb Antiliberal Leftist Antifascism thesis — DALA for short —

• The core of liberalism is capitalism, private ownership of the means of production. The high-minded claims of liberalism are ultimately rationalizations, evasions, or supports for the injustices emergent from capitalism.
• Fascism is also capitalism, stripped of the mitigations offered by liberalism.
• Liberalism faced with the crises inherent in the capitalist order — loss of popular support, which tends to produce a leftist challenge to the political & economic order — cultivates fascist movements as a way to secure the place of capitalism with theatre and violence.
• In those moments of crisis, liberals reliably align with fascists rather than than leftists.

I reject that analysis as dangerously confused about liberalism, about fascism, about capitalism, and about the relation between the three. This post originated as a capture & refinement of my rant-y text conversation with the friend who offered me that post, and it has grown and evolved since, because this keeps coming up.

Liberalism ≠ capitalism

To understand the problems of DALA, we have to face how broad American political discourse understands neither liberalism nor the Left.

Anyone serious about political ideas recognizes how slippery the terms “left” and “liberal” get. Each has a few distinct meanings, and each of those meanings are hard to describe crisply.

Most Americans use the term “left” and “liberal” interchangibly in a simple reduction of politics to a spectrum of positions on a single spectrum from very “liberal” on the left to very “conservative” on the right. While anyone with any sophistication registers the inadequacy of trying to describe all possible political positions by placing them on a single linear scale, the left-right spectrum is the best simple model available, a very powerful instrument if used carefully. Here’s a summary diagram from the post I just linked:

Thus unsophisticated Americans tend to think of the Democratic Party as “the left”, but less left than the “radical” left. On that diagram, Dems occupy the positions between the “hard” and “moderate” left. And to a first cut, there is value in placing different political ideologies on one side or the other; when necessary I will roll everything into two huge categories of the “broad left” and “broad right”.

But that diagram also registers a phase shift in relationships with institutional politics, which in the US includes a presumptive commitment to capitalism. The Democratic Party is institutional and therefore capitalist; the radical and far left want profound institutional change including the overthrow of capitalism.

That portion of the broad left which rejects capitalism is confusingly called … the Left. The capitalization is common but not universal; I like it as a signal that one is not talking about the broad left, and sometimes further emphasize it with my idiosyncratic expression “the proper Left”. People referring to “the left” may referring to the broad left or the proper Left, which is very confusing.

It is differently confusing that — unless one is on the right and either ignorant or deceitful — “leftists” never refers to all people on the broad left, it means only people on the proper Left. Leftists use the term “liberals” or “libs” to describe people on the broad left who are not leftists — the “hard” to “moderate” range reflected in the Democratic Party, and political science types generally accept that as a legitimate usage. So:

• liberals or libs want policy victories toward greater equality, but do not want institutional change at the level that would overthrow capitalism
• leftists of the Left 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

That political spectrum post I linked above has a lengthy section further exploring the lib-leftist distinction. So in this sense, DALA is correct to say “liberalism is committed to capitalism”, though it should already be apparent that liberalism is defined by a lot more than just capitalism.

One can also see that the things we talk about when we talk about positions on that spectrum are mostly policy questions. F’rinstance, in the US considering healthcare policy:

• the moderate left favors retaining of the existing system of private insurance, hospitals, et cetera, with government regulation and a bouquet of government programs funding some people’s medical insurance, though they may want a number of particular refinements to the system
• the left wing does not want to completely change the existing system, but does want much stronger government interventions in regulating and funding healthcare in order to deliver better care to more people
• the hard left wants significant change to the existing system, with government provisioning health insurance for everyone — perhaps by simply making everyone eligible for the existing funding system of Medicare — but not transforming everything, such that there might still be privately-owned hospitals and pharmaceutical companies et cetera
• the radical and far left rejects any privately-held healthcare institutions — hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, et cetera (though that does not necessarily mean direct state control, it could mean things like hospitals owned by their workers, or other arrangements)

Notice that this exemplifies how moving further left can imply stronger state control, but contrary to the claims of the right it is the vigor of efforts to ensure equity rather than state power which defines how far to the left one stands.

(For what it’s worth, on those terms I am pretty much a radical leftist … though I find I cannot completely let go of progressive engagement with the cut-and-thrust of politics within existing institutions.)

We must contrast “liberal” as a cluster of policy positions from a very different sense of “liberal”, naming an ideology of society & governance, summarized in a familiar way in the Declaration Of Independence:

all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

That is not the policy agenda of the Democratic Party! It is a complex vision of universal rights, democratic institutions, rule of law, reason, et cetera. For clarity I often refer to “liberalism” in this sense as “liberalism as in Isaiah Berlin” or “liberalism as in liberal democracy” or just “libdem” for convenience. Libdem does not contrast with ideologies addressing policy like movement conservatism, it contrasts with ideologies addressing the social & political order like feudalism; movement conservatives are (or at least pretend to be) committed to libdem.

Looking at the history of libdem raises hard questions about how well it delivers justice & equity in practice. The Declaration articulating libdem principles was hypocritically an instrument of people securing an order of brutal racist colonial exploitation. Libdem’s emergence as a challenge to monarchism in the West was deeply entangled with capitalism’s emergence as a challenge to feudalism & mercantilism in the West. The “liberal democracies” — nation-states grounded in libdem principles — have capitalist economic orders.

Leftists commonly assert that in light of that history, capitalism is at least integral to “liberalism”, if not liberalism’s true singular defining characteristic, as we see integral to the DALA analysis; that often implicitly conflates the two different senses of “liberal”, as if the cluster of policy positions and the governance ideology were just the same thing.

This is just plain wrong. Not only can we distinguish liberalism from capitalism, we must in order to understand either one. When the Declaration was written, industrial capitalism had not yet been invented. Ideological commitment to the governance order of democratic institutions, universal rights, due process of law, et cetera is orthogonal to the economic order — one can have liberal governance without capitalism and capitalism without liberal governance.

Fascism ≠ “liberalism laid bare”

When DALA takes fascism as what we get when the capitalist core of “liberalism” sheds its false pretenses, worse than misunderstanding liberalism, that misunderstands fascism. I have given the nature of fascism a lot of thought and study, and DALA is dangerously confused about the relationship between the two, offering misleading half-truths.

• 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, democracy can lead to fascism … but as authoritarians’ praxis for undermining democracy.
• Yeah, libdem can lead to fascism … but as an expression of authoritarians’ disgust at libdem valueslike equality, rights, even reason.

Fascism is emphatically opposed to libdem. 20^th century fascists said so explicitly.

This gets slippery in the US, because fascists lay claim to representing the essence of the nation and libdem rhetoric is so integral to our national myths and political discourse. But one can easily see how American fascists pervert libdem rhetoric with a mix of irrationalist confusion about what words like “freedom” mean together with deliberate bad faith lies.

Fascism ≠ capitalism

DALA also misunderstands the relationship between fascism & capitalism. Even if one misunderstands libdem as nothing other than capitalism with a thin candy coating, fascism is not capitalism’s true nature stripped of deception because fascism is not capitalist. Yes, historically fascism has found its way to power in an alliance with the owners of the means of production. But the agents of capitalism do not create fascist movements, they emerge as organic popular movements discontented with libdem and the consequences of capitalism. Fascists are confused about the “elites” that animate their rage, not pretending. The rich see fascists’ popular support and disdain for libdem institutions, then arrogantly assume that they can support fascist movements to use them as pawns who will destroy the libdem institutions which act as a brake on the rich exercising power. But history shows that fascists bloodily betray many of their rich sponsors whenever they actually seize power.

It is worth noting here that people often point to Mussolini supposedly defining fascism as support for capitalist corporations. They are wrong about Mussolini and the nature of fascism on several scores. Actual fascist regimes produce weirdly mismanaged mixed economies because fascists have no investment in capitalism and no loyalty to their rich sponsors. Fascism is defined by a fantasy of violently purging the nation of corruption; fascists assume that boring nerd stuff like economics will just sort itself out once they do.

Antifascism

Liberal antifascism

Understanding fascism and liberalism clearly demonstrates that both libdem and liberalism-as-in-the-Dems are fundamentally anti-fascist … but bad at it. That is how fascism happens. Libdem always inspires fascism as a form of opposition. Fascism gains traction when liberal policy & libdem ideology are weak: in the face of crisis, when libdem institutions break down, when the public does not understand the case for libdem. We are having a moment of reälignment in American politics, which gives MAGA fascism the opening to seize power.

The institutionalism of the Democratic Party makes them fundamentally opposed to the revolutionary transformation of society which fascism pursues, but actual Dems are bad at both kinds of liberalism, which makes them bad at anti-fascism. Libdem outside of the Democratic Party in the US is also bad at anti-fascism because it is simply weak: the long-windedness of this post emerges from how few Americans understand what libdem is at all, much less know how to fight for it.

This weakness of libdem in the US is part of why DALA imagines that liberal antifascism is a contradiction in terms and cannot recognize libdem antifascism when it does appear.

Left antifascism

DALA assumes that leftism is inherently effective antifascism and that antifascism is necessarily leftist. I would love to believe that, since I am a leftist antifascist, with leftism & antifascism entwined in my heart. But I do not share DALA’s confidence.

To explain the Left’s current weaknesses in combatting fascism I have to put my hand in the lion’s mouth and point something which merits a much more sophisticated analysis than I can fit into this already-rambling post. We need to understand two elements of the contemporary Left: opposition to capitalism and advocacy for social justice.

Anti-capitalism ≠ antifascism

DALA casts the anti-capitalist aspect of the Left as the only legitimate ground for opposing fascism by a sort of transitive property math:

1. leftism = anti-capitalism
2. fascism = capitalism
3. liberalism = capitalism
4. therefore liberalism = fascism
5. therefore Left opposition to liberalism = opposition to fascism
6. therefore leftism is the only legitimate antifascist position

But points 2 & 3 are wrong.

I hope that the anti-capitalist aspect of leftism proves antifascist in the long view because people living in fully automated gay space communism would be too happy to turn to fascism. But we don’t have that to work with. There is no reason to think that a movement which has failed to overthrow capitalism has compelling power over fascism. Indeed, since fascists have no investment in capitalism, take protean policy positions in pursuit of power, and love to take a pseudo-populist stance for the “real” people against corrupt “elites”, leftist anti-capitalism is vulnerable to fascist appropriation and entryism.

Anti-liberal social justice ≠ antifascism

At the most fundamental level, any form of social justice advocacy is inherently antifascist, since fascism finds egalitarianism disgusting. But the dominance of the identity politics school of social justice in contemporary leftist culture complicates this. Identity politics rightly faults libdem as unable to deliver true equity — “the law in its majestic equality” — which deters alliances between leftist antifascists and libdem antifascists.

“Soft” identity politics embraces libdem commitments to equal rights et cetera as good, but considers them incomplete in creating equity and demands counterweights to those failings. “Hard” identity politics opposes libdem as nothing other than an instrument which sustains injustice, often marrying with leftist misunderstanding of libdem as nothing other than a defense of capitalist injustice. The hard school therefore hesitates to ally with libdem for any purpose … and can even cede ground to fascists in rejecting the libdem toolkit of rights, institutionalism, proceeduralism, reasoned argument, et cetera.

A popular front

All this presents a bitter irony. Up at the top of this essay, I registered how leftist antifascists argue that history shows that when the chips are down, liberals refuse to join a popular front with leftists against fascists, siding instead with the fascists against leftists. We know from the 20^th century that this can happen … and we also know from the 20^th century that it can cut the other way. The Counterpunch article I linked at the top of this post as a good articulation of the DALA argument inverts the story of how the Nazis seized power in Germany, claiming that “Social Democrat leaders [⋯] refused to form an eleventh-hour coalition with the communists against Nazism”, when even many leftists recognize in fact the leftist KPD called liberals of the SPD “social fascists” and refused to work with them. When leftists tried to take on both fascists and liberals in the Spanish Civil War, they lost catastrophically, resulting in generations of authoritarian rule.

So no, liberals (in either sense) do not need to “develop beyond” liberalism to be antifascist. Leftists who insist that they must are the ones refusing solidarity, making the exact mistake history teaches us to avoid. This is a three way fight. I think the Left must always prioritize opposing fascism as the greater threat, and certainly must set that priority now.

In this moment in the US, what do DALAs expect to gain from dismiss the possibility of liberal antifascism? Leftists are weak in the US. Do they 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 to fight fascism, I think the Left is the best place to stand. But I sure do want to stand with gormless Democrats in antifascism. I even want to stand with conservative antifascists. Leftists need to get our heads straight … and my sibling post against “centrist” Dem anti-leftism argues that the liberal establishment has an even greater obligation and opportunity to get over themselves and reach left.

One more question

Fascism aside, 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? The 20^th century does not just teach us to dread authoritarianism from the right.

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.