Re: GDR (was: Drift away from Clinton frustrates many women

On Mar 4, 1:18 am, "Society" <Soci...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Andre Lieven" <andrelie...@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:313ec9cb-7fce-4536-abc5-5327768ff8e7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Society wrote:

Andre Lieven wrote...

Society wrote:
[...]
(I highly recommend reading Jonah Goldberg's new book
that's climbing the bestseller charts _Liberal Fascism_.)

I'm not as sanguine that his hstorical fact checking
meets basic qualifications.

David Neiwert, writing in The American Prospect,
called the book "bizarro history" and "classic Newspeak."[14]

I'm not surprised that a "progressive" would react to
Jonah Goldberg's book with name calling.

Its not " name calling " to point out that a *book* is crap.

Sigh.  Yet if progressives call a book "crap"
not because it is thoroughly inaccurate but because
its accuracies are thoroughly inconvenient to them... ?

If they ONLY call it crap, that would be a possibility.
But, if they call it crap *and show why it is crap*, with
facts, etc., then the crap call becomes a factual review.

Many here have called " crap " to Feminist tinged books spouting
elementary failures of facts, and that t as it shoudl be.

[...] A point that Goldberg also misses is that the use
of a term in the hands of a totalitarian regime is not always
an honest one: Consider the old GDR: It was German,
but it was pretty much the opposite of being either
democratic or a republic.

First, I'll stipulate that "the use of a term in the hands of a
totalitarian regime is not always an honest one." Anyone
familiar with the works of George Orwell, as Jonah Goldberg
certainly is, knows that.

From what I've read of him, I am not at all certain
that he realises that fact.

C'mon, Andre, that remark was a reach.

Only if you are able to, telepathically, discern *exactly* all that
I know. You are not, ergo, your complaint failed on that ground.

Second, I'd like to see an example of Goldberg failing to
recognize when a totalitarian regime is using a term
dishonestly and by such failure, unfairly blackening the
reputation of progressives.

His claims that anyone dubbing themselves " socialist " MUST
be a leftist is such a set of examples.

Goldberg demonstrates well enough the leftist credentials
of those 20th century socialist regimes that today's progressives
would like to disavow as offsprings of leftist ideology, IMO.

Thats your opinion. It is not mine.

Got a counterexample you'd like to offer?

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/10/what_is_jonah_g_1.html

This site notes how often Goldberg assails those who use " fascist "
at
his sacred cows.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=jonah_goldbergs_bizarro_history

This became manifest in the Italian fascist and German Nazi
transformations from a faction of street
thugs into an actual political power that seized the reins of
government, when fascists gradually shed
all pretensions or appeals to socialism and became violently anti-
socialist and anti-communist. But
it was present all along; "the Left" were the people who were beaten
and murdered in the 1920s by
the squadristi and the Brownshirts; and the first Germans sent off to
Nazi concentration camps like
Dachau were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing
political prisoners, including
"liberal" priests and clerics.

I would say that anyone trying to claim that the Nazis and Fascists
were left wingers who, as
pretty much their first moves when able, attacked the persons and
properties of actual liberal
and socialist political parties, is just not at all clear on what any
of those terms mean.

Is Goldberg next going to try to sell us the insane idea that the far
right anywhere started
by attacked other far right parties, instead of ther-than-far-right
parties ?

I will also add that any " writer " who sticks in the phrase " secret
history " about any issue
that was never covered by Official Secrets Acts is a conspiracy whack
job.

BTW, why did I need to offer " counter examples " ? You offered *none*
of your own...

The regimes that he claims must be leftist due to their
false use of that phrase, shows that Goldberg doesn't at all
understand corporatism.

IMO, Goldberg understands corporatism all too well.

And, in mine, his work shows that he doesn't.

To cast corporatism out of the leftist camp and try to label it
as right wing requires one to accept the improbable claims
that progressives aren't leftists, or that US President Theodore
Roosevelt wasn't a progressive, or that President Woodrow
Wilson wasn't a progressive nor a leftist, and that President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a right winger.

Where are your " primary examples " to back up this factless claim ?

Third, the GDR certainly _was_ a "democratic republic"
as Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, and Mussolini used such terms.
It was a democratic regime in the sense that it claimed
to represent the will of the people and a republic because
the political power was held by a few who ruled as
representatives of the people.

By that " daffynition ", any and every totalitarian regime
is " democratic ".  Thus, the word is rendered free
of actual meaning.

Not necessarily.  For example, the Islamic Republic that
rules Iran is clearly totalitarian yet it does not make the
claim that it rules in the name of the people; its mullahs
rule in the name of Allah.

I was speaking of politics, not religion.

What defines democracy was of great concern to the late
18th and 19th century political thinkers whose ideas were
influential in the politics of the late 19th and first half of
the 20th century. The idea that a government could be
considered democratic if it carries out the will of the
people only sounds daffy to us today because we are so
used to thinking of democracy in terms of plebicites
and elections.  However, you must admit that the results
of elections are often poor gauges of what the majority
of the people want.

No, I " must " admit no such thing. You " must " show some
" examples " in support of *your claim*.

Was it Rousseau or Hegel who first
said that the people do not know what it is that they will?

Your claim, your urden to know. In any case, then you also need to
show some proof that they were factually correct in that claim.
Appeals To Authority just don't cut it...

To insist that the word democracy has always been
understood to require voting would be anachronistic.

" always " is your straw female. I neither said nor hinted in any
such direction. Democracy had a more specific meaning, ierms
of the post WW2 political environment, which is why the Sovietised
Eastern European ntions had it stuck onto some of their names.
Thats also why the Constitution of the fUSSR had legal provisions
for secession, bu quite a different method to prevent such legal
provisions from ever being... used. Said method was The Red Army,
of course; One of my longest standing friends is of Hungarian stock,
whose family got out in 1956...

Consider Napoleon and why he was considered a democrat
by some of the most prominent egalitarian thinkers of his day
even as he was crowning himself Emperor of France.

If you could make the case that that meaning changed not at all
between then and the post WW2 time period, you might have a
case. As it is, you are resorting to the same mine-the-long-dead-past
that Feminists use to try to justify their modern misandry.

[T]he dreadful history of the 20th century
is in large part a history of the terrible
results of these collectivist endeavors.
Once respect for the individual is lost,
then what do 100 million dead individuals
matter-especially if their deaths are for
the "collective good"?

Of course, a liberal would say that a sharing
and caring government doesn't have to turn out
this way. It could be something like Sweden.
And there you have it-the downside: 100 million
people killed; the upside: ABBA, Volvos and suicide.

"How to Explain Conservatism to Your Squishy
Liberal Friends" by P. J. O'Rourke
<http://web.archive.org/web/19990508213003/www.web-presence.com/mac/pj....>

Unfortunately for modern USian "conservatives",
PJ also specified that actual conservatives do things like
balance budgets, not spend like super drunken Democrats.

Yes, very unfortunate.

Well, who bears the responsibility for that ? Certainly NOT non
Republicans...

So, by his standards, the US today contains precious few
conservatives, and pretty much none among the Republican
Party.

Perhaps so.

Definitely so. The facts of what an ALL Republican White House,
Senate and Congress *has done* is clear on that score.

Even Democratic Party war Presidents asked the nation to pay
for the war, though taxes, war bonds, etc. What did W et al ask
of the nation ? Go out and shop !

Plus, it turns out that both of the B Team Republican
candidates don't believe in the fact of evolution.
That adds to their qualifications for Major Loony Party...

Yet the left wing always acts to make sure they remain
far _more_ qualified for that title.  For example, left wingers
believe that the sexes differ because of social conditioning
rather than because of this "fact of evolution" of which
you speak. Therefore, objectively the left wing does not
"believe in the fact of evolution" either.  ;-)

Cute, but false. A disagreement on ONE effect among ONE
species, hardly equals loony " goddidit " Creationists.

   And then there was the Sixties mortality rate --
   not only high but bizarrely selective.  It was like
   some evil force was culling the citizen herd
   to produce a nation of intellectually and morally
   stunted goat mutants.

   *People Who Died During the 1960s* [versus]
   *People Who Were Allowed to Live*

   [died] John F. Kennedy    [lived] Teddy Kennedy
   [died] Robert Kennedy    [lived] Lyndon Johnson
   [died] Martin Luther King    [lived] Don King
   [died] Janis Joplin    [lived] Bette Midler
   [died] Jimi Hendrix    [lived] Prince
   [died] 4 students at Kent State    [lived] All the other
   students at Kent State

" The plural of 'anecdote' is never equal to 'citation'. "

   I could go on but it would be more depressing
   than an old copy of _Look_ magazine's
   "Youthquake" special edition.

   from "Thoughts on the Prospect of a Sixties Revival"
   by P.J. O'Rourke
   http://www.electrictao.net/reading/pj_sixties.html

Well, I like PJ, but I do not agree with everything that he states.
He could be wrong, now and then, too, you know.

In any case, the original claim that corporatist fascistic
political parties are of the left, remains, absurd. Its merely
more of the type of frothing ad hominems of the far US right,
from Crazy Coulter to Faux Noise.

Andre
.

Relevant Pages

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