I am going to poach Prof. Crisy's habitual hunting ground and scatter some buckshot in the direction of the New York Time's own Mama Rose, Frank Rich. The column is a cavalcade of Donk hackjobbing, but fortunately for us, its full fatuousness is revealed in a single sentence:
Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts.Oh, do we?
Manufacturing a false crisis while strongly implying the necessity of lesser evilism in a single sentence is a turn of propaganda worthy of Goebbels, and yes, Mary, I did just compare Frank Fucking Rich to Goebbels. If, in fact, Obama's presidency is a skein of false starts and dissapointments, broken promises, bad faith, failure, retreat, and defeat, than why is its early end an "alarming prospect." Oh, oh, wait, I think I know. Because the Republicans are so much worse, right? They are, um, well, to coin a phrase, "The Party of No." Right? A cackling gang of incoherent nativist xenophobes in paradoxical thrall to foreign military adventurism with a strong undercurrent of anti-Constitutional authoritarianism. Unlike the current Donk gang, who only appear as such because they happen to be aping and enforcing and expanding all of those hated anti-Democratic, unconstitutional, illegal, unfair, unjust, ad inf. policies, not that they actually believe in it. It's just, if you want to unmake an omelette, first you have to make more omelettes
The "President's" health-care bill, his "signature issue," is a piece of shit. The fact that the Republicans misidentify it as Communism doesn't make it by some magical property of implied alchemical transference any less of a piece of shit. And if it fails, if The President fails, then that is because they are totes, legit failures reaching their fabulously FAIL apotheosis, or nadir, or, you know, whatever.
48 comments:
what, you don't think pre-existing conditions are a big issue, because you're either against pre-existing conditions or you're with the terrorists.
Justifying the confiscation of funds for private enterprise with the resolution of the pre-existing conditions problem and long-term meta-cost reductions is like justifying invasion and occupation with the resolution of unidentifiable security threats and "democracy" promotion.
Which is to say that a unique feature of American government policy is the obsolescence of scale; the complete evisceration of comparative analysis. Everything operates in a complete vacuum, one at a time. Empire governance as Whack-a-Mole addiction.
It would have been enough to say that it's a false dilemma and a disingenuous presentation of equally fictional options. Invoking Goebbels, though, is a bit crass.
It seems that, a la Rana's remark, America indeed possesses a crisis in establishing scale. It's a shame when it's as present among critics as well as defenders of the system.
And, of course, all of you who disagree with me are Nazis.
if you want to unmake an omelette, first you have to make more omelettes
This is a well known principle of democratic cooking. Unmaking omelettes is hungry work, man.
Besides, few things taste better than Uncle Sam's famous ham omelettes. Maybe what you really need is a better seat at the table, or a larger helping?
I'm sure a platitude about gay marriage will get IOZ to go along with his tribe. That always works, right?
I saw The Big Lebowski for the first time yesterday. It was alright, I can see why people quote it so much. Mostly though, I just want to see a bowling themed porn now.
"Invoking Goebbels, though, is a bit crass." Yeah but it feels so good. Wake me when the Sulzbergers are put on trial for peddling war crimes.
"Wake me when the Sulzbergers are put on trial for peddling war crimes."
You pay federal taxes? You fiend. Let's do the full Monty. No equivalencies are false.
I rode in a car the other day. Also ate some chicken. It's Nuremberg for me, no doubt.
steph g is like a child, who has wandered into a movie...
Well they certainly play a part; journalists and media producers aren't separate from political context. And I wouldn't object to consequences for people involved in such decisionmaking, just as I wouldn't object to politicians standing trial. (And fuck all those people who are like "but then they wouldn't be able to lead!" Commoners aren't given such a degree of leeway in their work. No, the difficulty is, as with all prosecution, finding an authority deserving of the power to try them.)
But saying they're monsters, cheerleaders to horror? Sure. I don't reject the point behind Monsieur's flourish. I just found it a bit easy.
"It would have been enough to say that it's a false dilemma and a disingenuous presentation of equally fictional options."
Sure, if you thought this was the first false dilemma and disingenuously presented fictional options. Not quite as simple as disagreement, I'm afraid.
Oh, no, it's a consistent pattern of misleading and apology for the state. Next point.
Leave Obama Alone !!!
He SAID he was going to close Gitmo, hold civil "terror" trials, reverse Patriot Act invasions of privacy, and halt the Wars on Terror. He KNOWS gay marriage is right, and that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and religious-moralist limitations on abortion services are wrong.
Good proggies can't afford to let Obama suffer a crushing defeat on the health care "reform" front. His very credibility is at stake.
OT to IOZ: if you didn't know Joel McHale (The Soup) was straight, would you think he might possibly be gay? He seems to project a very ambivalent image, perhaps deliberately?
There is no such thing as acting like Joel McHale. Plus, Anonymous, are you queer?
Inkberrow, I wanted to mark the occasion: I unreservedly agree with your comment. Completely fair.
The Dude wins!
to Ashley: why do you ask? do I project an ambivalent image, perhaps deliberately?
"...legit failures reaching their fabulously FAIL apotheosis, or nadir, or, you know, whatever ..."
Now now IOZ - they're just trying to save us from "A Nadir Named Ralph."
So then, the Goebbels comparison is the exclamation point that grabs one's attention. Short of it, the entry would not pack the same punch. And - if I might be so bold as to turn a phrase - it's barely hyperbole.
And THAT is the (next) point.
"Unlike the current Donk gang, who only appear as such because they happen to be aping and enforcing and expanding all of those hated anti-Democratic, unconstitutional, illegal, unfair, unjust, ad inf. policies, not that they actually believe in it. "
Haven't you heard? It's voodoo ju jitsu, IOZ. The plan is to heighten the contradictions and force the courts to strike down all these policies. Nothing is fucked here, dude.
Not every toady with a degree is Goebbels just because Goebbels was a toady with a degree. Oh, sure, there are parallels between all those who lick boots and shrug at violence, but to call Frank Rich a Goebbels is a conflation that, I feel, is inimical to appreciating the shittiness of each.
Cuneyt@1133 - no Big Lie can be a Big Lie unless there's and elephant in the room. IOZ is merely pointing out what corner it's in.
Ah, but I so much appreciate the stench that by way of this conflation wafts. We are just talking about propensity for propaganda; in that regard, both turds stink.
I think it's funny how Americans get so outraged! over obvious, and apt, comparisons of their society to murderous dictatorships. I'm sorry, but which paper is a government front for proffering lies in order to wage wars of conquest that have killed millions of people again?
Unless I'm mistaken, Cuneyt isn't an american, he's a euro-proggle; the mere mention of nazis is distasteful.
Then the comparison between the Times and Pravda, or Der Sturmer, is what we're looking for, Enron. Not between one columnist and Joseph fucking Goebbels. As much as I'd like to make the comparison, Thomas Friedman isn't a Goebbels either; more like a Kipling with even less poetry.
And I am an American, depending on citizenship (and on who you ask), though of heavy European dosing. And for the record, I'd object as much to this hasty comparison as to those involving Stalin or Mao. What next: Sanjay Gupta is an idiot of the medical establishment, so he's Dr. Mengele?
Also sprach Cuneyt:
"... Thomas Friedman isn't a Goebbels either; more like a Kipling with even less poetry."
Point goes Cuneyt (polite applause).
However:
"What next: Sanjay Gupta is an idiot of the medical establishment, so he's Dr. Mengele?"
No, but the anonymer Bürokrat MDs that OK drastic changes in vaccination schemes*, or push Gardasil, do their best impersonation (under the circumstances) of Nazi "medicine".
Capt'n Obvious
*(GW syndrome, and I've seen anthrax vaccine victims pers'nally)
Having read only the comments on this post brings to mind the immortal words of Alvy Singer:
"What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it."
Fuckin' Nazis, dude. Nothing ever changes.
Hard to do more than quibble about details on that, Cap'n. Though I'd say that sometimes a person is more on the side of the Evil of Banality than the Banality of Evil. And maybe I'm pathologically opposed to such equations when I ought to see parallels. For me, it's like people saying that the Japanese were like the Nazis and, to be fair, the IJA largely was. But there's a difference between machine gunning a bunch of prisoners or working people until they died and the death camps. Fuck, there's a difference between the work camps and the death camps. Maybe only a devil's difference, I suppose. I mean, I think the Japanese experimental surgeries were basically identical to those carried out by Nazis, but in other areas of governance and racial theory there were important distinctions.
And my Kipling remark isn't just a cute throwaway. I find a lot of our (meaning American) governing style more similar to the bastard English, rather than the continental authoritarians. I think it's important to know one's ruler (or enemy, or whatever term we like), and making them into Nazis might feel right, but it's really kind of embarrassing when you get down to it. I mean, this is an old argument for me in these comments. I'd like to say a million dead is a million dead and be done with it, and it's definitely all the same to the dead by that point, but for someone to say that a million out of 13 millions killed by the Nazi death machine is equivalent to the million out of maybe 4, right?, millions that we (again the Americans) killed in Indochina... Well, they're both awful and horrible, and I don't mean to let us wriggle off the hook by pointing out distinctions, but there are distinctions, and assaulting either must take into account the distinctions of each.
And Frank Rich just doesn't have the style or the audacity of that little weasel Dr. Goebbels. So as I say, make the Times into Pravda, but to say that Rich is Goebbels is misunderstanding the way we peddle our bullshit to make exactly what point? It's a flail, and I suppose I object to it as much on aesthetic grounds as intellectual.
And how dare they who call me a progressive. I'm reminded of that clip Perrin once posted of a better Hitchens when he was called a liberal and said that the caller did him a greater insult, no doubt, than she could have imagined.
Cuneyt
But wasn't this what shocked the Israelis when they got a hold of Eichmann? They expected of a monster and found a faceless bureaucrat!?
Wouldn't Vietnamese had a similar shock had they gotten a hold of McNamara? And he, like PolPot and many other mass-murderers (even Nazi ones like Manstein, and Paulus for example) got to die in their own beds.
When millions of civvies end up dead due to the direct actions of inveding power, what details could actually matter?
Capt'n Obvious
So he's not even Goebbel's poor unwitting wurst-dog - because "our" methods are "distinctly" better than those of the Nazi's, with whom all comparisons simply "must" give way.
Now that the secret prisons are no longer secret, they are no longer secret prisons, gel?
If only the Nazi's had managed to suppress the release of their war-crime photos.
Oh crap. I just remembered what this post alluded to originally: Come November, the Lesser of the Evil of Two Banalities might lose the House! Wouldn't that just be awful? Well, not as bad as the Banality of Evil. Great news for the 'stans.
I never said "better," jackass. Let's talk when you learn how to read.
Meanwhile, Capt'n, a response to you will take a little while. I just had to chastise the chillun.
So Capt'n, I've had this conversation with you before. As I've said, I'd like to say that a million dead is a million dead, but context matters. A million dead Soviet soldiers are not the same as a million dead Germans (and no, kids, it's not about one being better than the other), nor are either equivalent to, say, a million dead Jews or gypsies or puppies. I think that you're coming at this from a "we're all basically equal" position. Maybe not. If so, I don't disagree with that, and in fact I see it as rather noble. But personally speaking, I don't think that a life is a standardized unit of measure, and I feel that, say, unarmed civilians who support a military effort are distinguishable from combatants, or from wholly non-partisan individuals (and actually, I believe that nobody's really non-partisan because politics is all relative), and that combatants are in turn distinct from each other in terms of hierarchy, degree of influence, and personal actions. I mean, who can say that the death of a Vietnamese child was the same as the assassination of John Kennedy? One is more horrific in a moral sense, the other more effecting in a political sense.
Nor do I believe that all sinners are united in sin (a concept that is passed around by a great many unbelievers). We are so quick to seize on hypocrisy that we see everyone as equal in their deceit, inconsistency, and selfishness. And while that is true, our various trespasses are meaningfully distinct. A robber of one is not the same as a robber of a thousand, again in a moral and in a political sense (more acceptable in one, less in the other). And a killer may likewise be distinguished from a killer.
So let me actually answer the question you pose: "When millions of civvies end up dead due to the direct actions of inveding power, what details could actually matter?"
Well, first a dodge. I'd like to remind you that I object to the statement that "hey guys, we have to push this shitty healthcare plan or else the Republicans are gonna have their way!" is the same as "if we don't destroy the Jews, Bolshevism will envelop the earth!"
But your actual question: I'm not sure what you mean by "matter." To me, ideological distinctions, even if they're all bullshit, matter because they can change the way people act. The British who slaughtered millions of Indians were also quite happy to convert them to British manners and, when they could, faith and worldview. The Nazis were not interested in Germanizing Jews; many Jews were assimilated already. And this marks an important departure from older German anti-Semites who believed that Jews were wrong in their faith, or in their culture, but not their blood. Martin Luther was an anti-Semitic bastard who encouraged murder, and yet if you say he was a Nazi, you're going to misunderstand how he behaved and the culture that he came from as well as that he fostered.
I don't think that the Nazis are the yardstick for anything. They're surely an extreme example, and a case study in many syndromes of government. And it's true, they have many parallels with other states. I've myself compared in conversation the Luftwaffe in Spain with the Air Force in Vietnam, and I think that's a completely fair parallel to make. But I don't approve of impoverishing our political vocabulary to the point where everything is some reflection of a Nazi archetype. History didn't begin in 1933, contrary to American points of reference. I mean, after all, why should I accept IOZ's "he's a Goebbels" and not GHW Bush's "he's a Hitler"? I've had the same argument with a vet who got the military version of history. She told me all about Saddam's Nazi connection. But maybe it's okay when I apply it to the right people?
Did I say "better". Boy am I embarrassed. I'm sure I meant "devil's difference". Aesthetic grounds, indeed.
Cunyet,
While the United States is not Nazi Germany, succumbing to pure relativism can also obscure important comparisons. Recall that 19th Century American history inspired their designs for Eastern Europe/Russia. Ontology matters, but what goes on in Abu Ghraib is little different from the practices of the Gestapo prior to 1938.
Cunyet and Enron debating would be like underwater kickboxing
Nihilists, Donny.
Enron, you are right that we read from the same playbook. (And Manifest Destiny is indeed damn close as Drang Nach Osten; I've argued that myself, my current objects notwithstanding.) I'll even restrain myself from going into the healthy, native German history of invading the East. I mean, once we get into the eugenics piece, there's a bee-line between American policies and German policies. Ditto Bernays' "Crystallizing Public Opinion" and Goebbels. And now we've come full circle.
But I wouldn't say I've succumbed to pure relativism. As I hope to point out above, parallels are myriad. I just object to this one made in this way. Hell, I love Cole's premise that our Middle East imperialism parallels Napoleon's PR campaign two centuries ago. I delight in historical analogues. I just thought this one was a dud.
And since I'm coming to like that line of argument more and more, I'd again like to ask what the difference is between IOZ's remarks and the standard "our enemies are Hitler" fare I expect from American statists.
Well, let's compare the two.
IOZ's remarks:
"Manufacturing a false crisis while strongly implying the necessity of lesser evilism in a single sentence is a turn of propaganda worthy of Goebbels, and yes, Mary, I did just compare Frank Fucking Rich to Goebbels."
American statists standard fare:
"Our enemies are Hitler."
I guess the difference is that IOZ referred to someone as "Mary". Otherwise the utterances are so alike that it's downright eerie.
"Our enemies are Hitler" is the consequence of a few generations with effeminate handwringing and wishful pacifism dominating the cultural discourse. These same statists would have been quite content with "Our enemies...", Among Good People these days, anyway, a proper showing of Hitlerian qualities is the prerequisite for beginning the discussion of a debate on potential concerted military action. Poor Hitler got typecast....
Inkberrow, I have no idea what you're saying.
And for a fair comparison, let's take a few of these statements:
http://www.roembus.org/english/journal/bush/conf-praga.htm
"Those who have lived through a struggle of good against evil are never neutral between them. Czechs and Slovaks learned through the harsh experience of 1938, that when great democracies fail to confront danger, greater dangers follow. And the people of the Baltics learned that aggression left unchecked by the great democracies can rob millions of their liberty and their lives."
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030409-secdef0084.html
"The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. We are seeing history unfold events that will shape the course of a country, the fate of a people, and potentially the future of the region. Saddam Hussein is now taking his rightful place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ceausescu in the pantheon of failed, brutal dictators, and the Iraqi people are well on their way to freedom."
Cuneyt---
Fair enough on your top-post specifics. I was attempting to go macro-. Hitler gets trotted out as often as he does, from every direction, because he's the last-standing, even sole remaining, accepted example of a True Enemy warranting a Just War. Even that's under consideration, from the "He's sui generis" opponents, anyway. Meanwhile, the goalposts have shifted, to endzones five yeards apart.
Cüneyt,
It seems to me that the main difference between the quotes above and the remarks in this post is that IOZ is not using the comparison to justify murder - before or after the fact.
I'll admit that for this reason more than any other, I find his remarks spot on. But they please me aesthetically because - taken in the context of his criticism (using one's idealogical adversary as a rallying crutch) - the provocative comparison makes a valid point: It is Frank Rich, after all, who is using the GOP bogeyman on November's horizon in a pathetic attempt to validate the anti-worse of two evils mindset, adequate opposition be damned.
Just because Rich is not a homicidal maniac doesn't mean his verbiage isn't worthy of another who was. And if we were going to differentiate, then we'd have to have a discussion about the fact that, "well, Goebbels wasn't a 'homicidal maniac' per se."
Again, it seems to me that if you're going to draw distinctions in your analysis of this post, you might start with the fact that IOZ's comparison begins with the criticism of a single sentence "worthy of Goebbels".
Is Frank Goebbels? Doubtful; still one can compare for illustrative purposes. Is the US the same as the Third Reich? Hm. I suppose if we ignore certain American financial and political elements' complicity before and after the "rise and defeat" of Nazi Germany, absolutely not.
But Rich is a prominent voice for some faction of the Liberal Elite and her constiuency nevertheless. To them (amongst their political savvy, not naive selves), the GOP will always be their reason for existence - adequate opposition be damned.
For me, as long as both parties maintain a murderous military machine, anyone who enables this status quo is suspect. On the other hand, anyone who channels his anger to remove the varnish of this status quo has already got a leg up, if you will.
And finally (and this is where we obviously disagree), to me, Rich is at least more like Goebbels than the sentences you pasted above are like this post.
@Cuneyt
Mutatis Mutandis, I'd prefer to call the POTUS, US's limited term Kaiser.
Both had the same broad powers, similarly limited by the self-logic of the humongous state apparatus and covered their crimes with similar melifluous lies.
Re: Nazis.
As I've said before, had Nazi Germany survived, you'd have some "denunciation" of Adolf's "excesses" after his demise, most of the blame attributed to the subordinates who lost the power struggle. Eichmann, the KZ honcho, might have been scapegoated and had a shorter lifespan in this ATL than in OTL!
The standard propaganda line is that Nazis were something distinct and evil from everything else in history. Which is a hilarious lie. But, by identifying actions of today or past "sainted" gub'mints with comparable Nazi crimes, we're able to quickly and convincingly unmask their hideousness. Turning the Nazi propagandeering concept into a powerful tool against current or sainted past criminals.
Capt'n Obvious
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