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.