I’m not sure if there are any cultures whose folk historical memory of Genghis Khan involves the same visceral horror as the present-day Western reaction to Hitler. So while this is an accurate historical parallel, it might not be one in terms of unintentional hilarity.
I’m not sure if there are any cultures whose folk historical memory of Genghis Khan involves the same visceral horror as the present-day Western reaction to Hitler.
If Hitler had ended up winning the war, there may not be that much memory of visceral horror either by now.
Though according to Wikipedia, there are some places where Genghis is still a very bad memory, for ending the Islamic Golden Age and all that.
And note that there isn’t general visceral horror about the Soviet Union, even though it committed mass murder on a grand scale. You can wear or display Soviet stuff without it being taken nearly as badly as if you were wearing or displaying Nazi stuff.
Although not Soviet himself, Soviet fanboy Che Guevara is another example. I’m not an expert on Latin American history, but some things I’ve read make me never want to buy a Che T-shirt.
But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.
It is not surprising that Guevara’s contemporary followers, his new post-communist admirers, also delude themselves by clinging to a myth—except the young Argentines who have come up with an expression that rhymes perfectly in Spanish: “Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué,” or “I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why.”
[...]
In January 1957, as his diary from the Sierra Maestra indicates, Guevara shot Eutimio Guerra because he suspected him of passing on information: “I ended the problem with a .32 caliber pistol, in the right side of his brain.… His belongings were now mine.” Later he shot Aristidio, a peasant who expressed the desire to leave whenever the rebels moved on. While he wondered whether this particular victim “was really guilty enough to deserve death,” he had no qualms about ordering the death of Echevarría, a brother of one of his comrades, because of unspecified crimes: “He had to pay the price.” At other times he would simulate executions without carrying them out, as a method of psychological torture.
“I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why” is a scary testament to the power of social proof, and the double standards applied to the perpetrators of atrocities based on sympathy towards their ideology.
At this point, using that symbol without knowing the meaning is rather benign and driven by social proof and the artistic qualities of the image. It’s similar to people wearing Gandhi T-shirts. I once saw a mural of Che alongside Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Mother Teresa (once of these things is not like the others).
The fault lies with the members of the leftist* intelligentsia who knew what Che did, but who continued to promote him as a positive symbol of revolution and liberation. It is disturbing, and yes, potentially minorly risky that they are trendsetters. Yet the risk is pretty low, because they are mainly followed out of ignorance. It is a particular sort of leftist consequentialism** promoted by some leftist leaders, intellectuals, and activists that’s the real risk.
*Only some people on the left actually support Che as an icon while knowing what he actually did. This sort of attitude is hardly confined to the left.
**Leftists aren’t all consequentialists, nor are all consequentialists leftists. It’s a particular brand of leftism that I am criticizing.
I know people downvote mind-killers. But is it really a mind-killer to say that Stalin and the Soviet system under him was not clearly better than Hitler?
Aggression against other Sovereign states in the hopes of territorial gain (sometimes with revanchist justification)
Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethnic and ideological groups
Frack considering Stalin was only beat by death from organizing a Pogrom on a massive scale because of his paranoia, and that Atheist Jews no longer where a powerful faction in the Soviet Union circa 1930 to 1950 and that Jews tended to be a bit better off than was appropriate in the age of forced egalitarianism (and disdain for the bourgeois and hunts for kulaks), its not that clear that if say Communists had beaten the Nazis in the struggle for power in Weimar Germany there wouldn’t have been a Shoah anyway.
Communism overall has been historically a pretty terrible system.
Pol Pot became leader of Cambodia in mid-1975. During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed a version of agrarian socialism, forcing urban dwellers to relocate to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labor projects, toward a goal of “restarting civilization” in a “Year Zero”. The combined effects of forced labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions resulted in the deaths of approximately 21% of the Cambodian population.[5]
Mao’s China and North Korea are also data points. The only time Communism was a sort of ok system to live in (NEP period of the Soviet Union, China after Deng, Tito’s Yugoslavia) is when it didn’t really follow its ideology and allowed some economic freedom. And even then it was clearly totalitarian when it came to intellectual liberty (see the use of psychiatric institutions and sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnosis of dissidents or the constant witch hunt for wreckers and contra-revolutionaries).
If one considers National Socialism to be a kind of Fascism (which I don’t think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then one could also add at this point that its arguable that mellow watered down Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow watered down Communist regimes of the same era (1945-1990).
I give people who claim that those people that their brand of Communism would never turn out like that a fair hearing if they don’t seem kooky or clearly irrational, but the same would be true if I ever met a NeoNazi who fit the criteria claiming the same of his political brand. .
I treat the Che guevara T-shirt on a college freshman the same I would treat a child who scribbles swastika graffiti but has no idea what the symbol stands for today. I wouldn’t consider it a crime or even blame them for it, but I would try and convey that the he is normalizing symbolism that carries a message he may not endorse.
I’ve also been confused about the blind eye turned to certain Communist excesses. Mass murder isn’t cool just because it’s your own population… even if your heart is in the right place.
I’ve also been confused about the blind eye turned to certain Communist excesses. Mass murder isn’t cool just because it’s your own population… even if your heart is in the right place.
Excesses? Interesting word choice. So, um, how much murder is the right amount?
Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethic and ideological groups
To be fair to Stalin, under him there was never any campaign of all-out extermination on a purely ethnic basis. There were mass expulsions, relocations, and other projects targeted at various ethnic groups that intentionally and cold-bloodedly inflicted death rates well into double-digit percentages, but the goal was breaking resistance, looting, exploitation of slave labor, preemptive liquidation of potential rebels, etc., never a genocide in the true sense of the term. (Even if the stories about Stalin’s planned anti-Semitic purge are true, it would never have been anything close to a real genocidal campaign.)
The Nazis’ absolute determination to exterminate an entire ethnic group as defined by ancestry down to the very last person at all costs, spending vast resources just to ensure not a single one of its members gets away, is to the best of my knowledge really unique historically.
Otherwise, except for this particular fact, about whose relevance I’d say reasonable people may disagree, one would really have to stretch one’s case to argue that the Bolsheviks were significantly more benign than the Nazis. In fact, the very concept of “Stalinism” and the tendency to heap all blame on Stalin is a propagandistic sleight of hand; his fellow political gangsters like Lenin and Trotsky weren’t much different except in what they were able to get away with.
One source of pro-communist bias here is the common belief that communists, bad as they were, persecuted only dissenters and rebels, and left alone those who conformed obediently—in contrast to the horror of being on the Nazis’ extermination list, where nothing at all would help you, not even the most abject submission. This is however completely wrong: if you found yourself among the intended casualties of a Bolshevik plan, it was no different, except that in fairness these were never plans for all-out extermination on ethnic basis.
If one considers Nazis to be a kind of Fascism (which I don’t think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then mellow Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow Communist regimes.
In the present predominant opinion, the Nazis occupy the absolute first place on the scale of evil, with reasonable justification. However, they are followed on this scale by a bunch of right-wing regimes of all sorts, which are in turn followed by the worst communist regimes, and only distantly. (Even though, as you note, many regimes in the second category were outright idyllic compared to the standard communist fare.)
There is certainly enormous bias there, both because of the traditionally leftist inclination among the Western intelligentsia and because of the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise be caused by celebrating WW2 as a righteous crusade while at the same time admitting that it involved an alliance with a despotism no less awful than the ones it was fought to defeat. (This cognitive dissonance occasionally rears its head in amusing ways even as it is.)
Do you think a child scribbling a swastika graffiti without knowing why (or even what the symbol is associated with) increases the risk of massively destructive political choices?
I don’t know. I’d discourage it for the sake of the children’s reputations and as a kindness to those who don’t want to see swastikas, but that’s a different issue.
It could be because, while the Soviet Union was generally oppressive, it severely toned down the murderin’ during the last ~40 years of its eight-decade history, whereas Nazi Germany spent over half of its brief history conquering Europe and conducting genocide, and then collapsed while it was right in the middle of such activities.
The Soviet Union also wasn’t in a desperate war for survival with the people with whom those with the most power to declare things offensive closely identify.
A more important reason I suspect is that communism as a whole is bigger and Soviet iconography can be indicative of loyalty to some harmless local brand. A british trotskyist waving a hammer and sickle is emphatically not a big fan of the USSR.
There may be places where nazi iconography mostly signals loyalty to some local band of fascists but those local nazis are probably associated with or are violent thugs, not reformist presidential candidates.
Now that you bring it up, I realize I don’t know why people wear Soviet stuff. I’d assumed it was a combination of liking the art style (it’s at least distinctive and not much like anything being done currently) and the wish to be a little edgy, but there are other possibilities.
I’ve seen two main groups, socialists who’ll have something like that “pyramid of workers holding up the aristocracy” poster because they like the message and don’t care about the source*, and people in stereotypically first-against-the-wall jobs who’ll have a poster about killing bankers for kitsch value. People who like the style tend to go in for Polish movie posters.
I’m not sure if there are any cultures whose folk historical memory of Genghis Khan involves the same visceral horror as the present-day Western reaction to Hitler. So while this is an accurate historical parallel, it might not be one in terms of unintentional hilarity.
If Hitler had ended up winning the war, there may not be that much memory of visceral horror either by now.
Though according to Wikipedia, there are some places where Genghis is still a very bad memory, for ending the Islamic Golden Age and all that.
And note that there isn’t general visceral horror about the Soviet Union, even though it committed mass murder on a grand scale. You can wear or display Soviet stuff without it being taken nearly as badly as if you were wearing or displaying Nazi stuff.
Although not Soviet himself, Soviet fanboy Che Guevara is another example. I’m not an expert on Latin American history, but some things I’ve read make me never want to buy a Che T-shirt.
http://www.slate.com/id/2107100/
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1535
[...]
“I have a Che T-shirt and I don’t know why” is a scary testament to the power of social proof, and the double standards applied to the perpetrators of atrocities based on sympathy towards their ideology.
Do you think people wearing Che shirts without knowing why increases the risk of massively destructive political choices?
At this point, using that symbol without knowing the meaning is rather benign and driven by social proof and the artistic qualities of the image. It’s similar to people wearing Gandhi T-shirts. I once saw a mural of Che alongside Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, and Mother Teresa (once of these things is not like the others).
The fault lies with the members of the leftist* intelligentsia who knew what Che did, but who continued to promote him as a positive symbol of revolution and liberation. It is disturbing, and yes, potentially minorly risky that they are trendsetters. Yet the risk is pretty low, because they are mainly followed out of ignorance. It is a particular sort of leftist consequentialism** promoted by some leftist leaders, intellectuals, and activists that’s the real risk.
*Only some people on the left actually support Che as an icon while knowing what he actually did. This sort of attitude is hardly confined to the left.
**Leftists aren’t all consequentialists, nor are all consequentialists leftists. It’s a particular brand of leftism that I am criticizing.
I know people downvote mind-killers. But is it really a mind-killer to say that Stalin and the Soviet system under him was not clearly better than Hitler?
Aggression against other Sovereign states in the hopes of territorial gain (sometimes with revanchist justification)
Confinement relocation and extermination of inconvenient ethnic and ideological groups
Frack considering Stalin was only beat by death from organizing a Pogrom on a massive scale because of his paranoia, and that Atheist Jews no longer where a powerful faction in the Soviet Union circa 1930 to 1950 and that Jews tended to be a bit better off than was appropriate in the age of forced egalitarianism (and disdain for the bourgeois and hunts for kulaks), its not that clear that if say Communists had beaten the Nazis in the struggle for power in Weimar Germany there wouldn’t have been a Shoah anyway.
Communism overall has been historically a pretty terrible system.
Mao’s China and North Korea are also data points. The only time Communism was a sort of ok system to live in (NEP period of the Soviet Union, China after Deng, Tito’s Yugoslavia) is when it didn’t really follow its ideology and allowed some economic freedom. And even then it was clearly totalitarian when it came to intellectual liberty (see the use of psychiatric institutions and sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnosis of dissidents or the constant witch hunt for wreckers and contra-revolutionaries).
If one considers National Socialism to be a kind of Fascism (which I don’t think it is, I think its distinct ideologically) then one could also add at this point that its arguable that mellow watered down Fascist regimes actually come out looking better than mellow watered down Communist regimes of the same era (1945-1990).
I give people who claim that those people that their brand of Communism would never turn out like that a fair hearing if they don’t seem kooky or clearly irrational, but the same would be true if I ever met a NeoNazi who fit the criteria claiming the same of his political brand. .
I treat the Che guevara T-shirt on a college freshman the same I would treat a child who scribbles swastika graffiti but has no idea what the symbol stands for today. I wouldn’t consider it a crime or even blame them for it, but I would try and convey that the he is normalizing symbolism that carries a message he may not endorse.
I’ve also been confused about the blind eye turned to certain Communist excesses. Mass murder isn’t cool just because it’s your own population… even if your heart is in the right place.
Excesses? Interesting word choice. So, um, how much murder is the right amount?
Konkvistador:
To be fair to Stalin, under him there was never any campaign of all-out extermination on a purely ethnic basis. There were mass expulsions, relocations, and other projects targeted at various ethnic groups that intentionally and cold-bloodedly inflicted death rates well into double-digit percentages, but the goal was breaking resistance, looting, exploitation of slave labor, preemptive liquidation of potential rebels, etc., never a genocide in the true sense of the term. (Even if the stories about Stalin’s planned anti-Semitic purge are true, it would never have been anything close to a real genocidal campaign.)
The Nazis’ absolute determination to exterminate an entire ethnic group as defined by ancestry down to the very last person at all costs, spending vast resources just to ensure not a single one of its members gets away, is to the best of my knowledge really unique historically.
Otherwise, except for this particular fact, about whose relevance I’d say reasonable people may disagree, one would really have to stretch one’s case to argue that the Bolsheviks were significantly more benign than the Nazis. In fact, the very concept of “Stalinism” and the tendency to heap all blame on Stalin is a propagandistic sleight of hand; his fellow political gangsters like Lenin and Trotsky weren’t much different except in what they were able to get away with.
One source of pro-communist bias here is the common belief that communists, bad as they were, persecuted only dissenters and rebels, and left alone those who conformed obediently—in contrast to the horror of being on the Nazis’ extermination list, where nothing at all would help you, not even the most abject submission. This is however completely wrong: if you found yourself among the intended casualties of a Bolshevik plan, it was no different, except that in fairness these were never plans for all-out extermination on ethnic basis.
In the present predominant opinion, the Nazis occupy the absolute first place on the scale of evil, with reasonable justification. However, they are followed on this scale by a bunch of right-wing regimes of all sorts, which are in turn followed by the worst communist regimes, and only distantly. (Even though, as you note, many regimes in the second category were outright idyllic compared to the standard communist fare.)
There is certainly enormous bias there, both because of the traditionally leftist inclination among the Western intelligentsia and because of the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise be caused by celebrating WW2 as a righteous crusade while at the same time admitting that it involved an alliance with a despotism no less awful than the ones it was fought to defeat. (This cognitive dissonance occasionally rears its head in amusing ways even as it is.)
Do you think a child scribbling a swastika graffiti without knowing why (or even what the symbol is associated with) increases the risk of massively destructive political choices?
I don’t know. I’d discourage it for the sake of the children’s reputations and as a kindness to those who don’t want to see swastikas, but that’s a different issue.
What do you think?
Not by very much, but yes.
Che and the hammer and sickle being cool on T-shirts spills over due to the halo effect.
However like you seem to imply overall I agree it isn’t something worth too much concern or attention.
It could be because, while the Soviet Union was generally oppressive, it severely toned down the murderin’ during the last ~40 years of its eight-decade history, whereas Nazi Germany spent over half of its brief history conquering Europe and conducting genocide, and then collapsed while it was right in the middle of such activities.
The Soviet Union also wasn’t in a desperate war for survival with the people with whom those with the most power to declare things offensive closely identify.
Depends on the country. In hungary some symbols from the SU are outlawed atm.
A more important reason I suspect is that communism as a whole is bigger and Soviet iconography can be indicative of loyalty to some harmless local brand. A british trotskyist waving a hammer and sickle is emphatically not a big fan of the USSR.
There may be places where nazi iconography mostly signals loyalty to some local band of fascists but those local nazis are probably associated with or are violent thugs, not reformist presidential candidates.
Now that you bring it up, I realize I don’t know why people wear Soviet stuff. I’d assumed it was a combination of liking the art style (it’s at least distinctive and not much like anything being done currently) and the wish to be a little edgy, but there are other possibilities.
I’ve seen two main groups, socialists who’ll have something like that “pyramid of workers holding up the aristocracy” poster because they like the message and don’t care about the source*, and people in stereotypically first-against-the-wall jobs who’ll have a poster about killing bankers for kitsch value. People who like the style tend to go in for Polish movie posters.
*like, I imagine quite a few less wrongers would have no problem hanging this one on their wall: http://img402.imageshack.us/i/leten.jpg/
What is that from?
A Soviet children’s book.