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Posts Tagged ‘authoritarianism’

Hitler vs Stalin

Tagged: authoritarianism

I very rarely attempt to write political commentary, or responses to newspaper columns. It hardly excites me, and often feels like a waste of time – like shouting into a hurricane. But Labour MP Denis McShane’s asinine comments have riled me so much that I feel I must use this space to rant and vent.

Some of you may remember Mr McShane from the Union’s Middle East debate in Michaelmas term. If his appearance has slipped your mind, he was the one who accused a floor speaker of being a member of Hamas, and constructed his ‘argument’ around the principle that anyone who criticised Israel was a supporter of the Holocaust. Impeccable logic, no?

In today’s Guardian he has turned his attention to the more controversial allies of the Conservatives in the European Parliament, in particular the Polish Law and Justice Party and Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom. He may have some valid points, but it this position which has riled me so much. It is his interesting take on ‘rightwing revisionism’ which has made my blood boil. Expounding a view which can at best be described as muddle-headed, he declares:

‘Stalin’s crimes are being elevated to a par with the exterminations of Jews by those who want to banalise or relativise the Holocaust and reduce its historical centrality to just another example of wartime mass murders.’

The ignorance showcased here is just astounding. First, the idea that Stalin’s crimes need to be ‘elevated’ is just baffling. There are few reliable estimates for how many people died under the Stalinist regime – demographic analysis suggests the population in 1940 was perhaps 30 million lower than could be expected. Up to 10 million of those were killed by man made famines during collectivisation. Millions more were shot in the purges or deported to GULAG camps. Many of these were subjected to horrendous acts of torture, some had their hands boiled in water and the skin peeled off, others were forced to watch their own wives and daughters raped. As the Red Army moved westwards at the end of the Second World War, so too did the crimes of Stalinism. McShane refers to the rapes committed in Lithuania by such soldiers, I do not know what the figures for that nation are, but in Hungary 1/3 of the female population were subjected to such assaults. In short, Stalinism was a vile and evil system and to suggest that comparing them to those of Hitler is somehow ‘elevation’ is simply wrong.

Similarly, by comparing the Holocaust to Stalinism in no way belittles the former. The crimes of the Nazi regime were undoubtably abhorrent – but then so too were those of Stalin. There are many comparisons made with Nazi Germany everyday which do belittle the evil of that regime; Hitler’s name is invoked in countless internet debates, every political hate figure will be compared to him (just pick a politician and google ‘name + Hitler’). Equating Bush, Blair, Obama or any other mainstream politician with a genocidal maniac is offensive and undermines the severity of the Nazi regime. But Stalin? A man responsible for countless murders and repressions. Hardly. To compare Bush to Hitler is like comparing ‘flu with the plague. Stalin is more like ebola.

Finally, I must take issue with the ‘historical centrality’ of the Holocaust. Anyone who is familiar with The History Boys will have seen a snapshot of this argument, and in many quarters the Nazi programme of extermination has a strange mysticism attached to it which make it ‘above’ historical investigation, because contextualisation and explanation may somehow (to quote McShane) ‘banalise’ it. Again, McShane is talking outdated nonsense. As horrendous as it was, the Holocaust was just one act of genocide within the 20th century. That is not a moral judgement, or an analytical verdict, it is just a fact. From its opening to its end, the 20th century was marked by waves of extermination and murder – from Armenia to the Balkans. Accept this does not belittle the Holocaust, but it does reject the false belief that Hitler’s murderous regime was some sort of anomaly, and this is a belief which must rightfully be dispelled. By believing that the Holocaust was somehow unique, a one-off mars not just our understanding of that tragedy, but also that of other crimes against humanity.

Thus what Mr McShane may see as ‘rightwing revisionism’ is not some attempt to belittle the murder of 6 million Jews (I’ll save my rant about how the Holocaust should not be seen as an exclusively Jewish tragedy for another time, as well as any discussion of whether Nazism was ‘rightwing’). It is an attempt to analyse history in a sensible way, and seeks to understand, not ‘absolve’, ‘belittle’, ‘relativise’ or anything else Mr McShane accuses it of. Indeed, the only person who seems to be belittling suffering for political ends in this particular piece is McShane himself, as he seeks to raise the suffering of one group of people above those of other victims of tyranny.

To conclude, I would suggest that McShane and all others restrain from comparing dictators – it is a pointless and offensive parlour game. For if one tyrant is worse, be it Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot some have to be ‘better’ and such a label denigrates the suffering that they caused. Furthermore, ignorant grandstanding politicians should probably keep their historiographical perspectives to themselves.

Anyway, I have now vented my anger. If you have bothered to read this and wish to disagree/comment, I do welcome your thoughts.

“An Englishman’s home is his castle”

Tagged: authoritarianism, privacy, statism

An Englishman's Home

An Englishman’s home ceased to be his castle a long time ago. The state has 1000 laws allowing it to break into your home. It is not enough to streamline the law. We need wholesale repeal of much legislation.

It’s not just entering your home, though. Rafts of legislation prevent us doing what we want to or in our home,whether it’s minor building works or lighting a coal fire. The state intrudes even when you buy or sell your home.

Last year I read an article by Boris Johnson on government plans to put health warnings on alcoholic drinks.

“In all that time, no government in history has yet thought the people so moronic that they needed to be told, on the bottle, that wine could go to your head; and Flint’s proposed act of desecration is all the more shameful and baffling when you consider – in your state of agreeable post-prandial rapture – that a bottle of wine is really a thing of quiet beauty.

For hundreds of years, the play of light on the glass and the liquid has entranced the eye of our greatest painters, from Caravaggio to Manet. Think of all those bottles twinkling away behind the bar girl in the Folies-Bergeres; think of that Van Gogh still life – the bottle, the bread, the cheese.”

No one would possibly argue that we need the state because without it we wouldn’t have these warnings. They are philistinistic: a bottle of wine should indeed be a thing of beauty, not a reminder of the power the government has over the minutiae our lives.

But worse, it represents an intrusion of the government into an Englishman’s home. My home is largely free of the government. I do not want government icons looking down at me from my drinks cupboard.

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.”

A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (1965)

NeueArbeit Macht Frei, or: Labour are illiberal authoritarians

Tagged: authoritarianism, Labour, liberty

“We don’t ask anything in particular of the accuracy of the judgment of individuals as to their own interests, which would suggest some extrinsic criteria. What concerns us is that it is for them to judge.

Autonomy of will, not calculating rationality, is at the heart of economic liberalism. De gustibus non est disputandem shall be the whole of the law. Which is why social authoritarians are seldom genuinely economic liberals, even though they often try to pretend to be. And, for that matter, why economic authoritarians are seldom really social liberals. They are almost always looking to penalise people who don’t live as they deem they should, but see economics as primary and so are most inclined to look there for carrots and sticks.”

Guy Herbert

It should be clear after ten years that the Labour Party are not social liberals; they are unreconstructed socialist authoritarians.

Centralisation has increased under Labour and they will not simply give people the money to buy education and healthcare. They are not content with redistributing money; they insist on spending it for us as well.

But the problem is more than economic. Whether they are trying to ban consensual prostitution, or incarcerating people in state schools, or banning “extreme pornography” with the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, they cannot resist the urge to interfere with people’s private lives.

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