Frank Wilkinson has died. He was, according to the obituary writer at the New York Times, a campaigner for “free speech” and for “antipoverty” efforts. Um, right. It’s not until the eighth paragraph of the obit that we learn that he was for more than three decades a member of the Communist Party, which did a great deal to suppress free speech and to promote poverty, and that he worked with a variety of Communist Party front groups, all of which were — all of the time — entirely opportunistic and subservient to the interests of the USSR.
My colleague David Boaz collects these things. Sometimes he brings them to my attention. It’s a regular feature that obits laud life-long Communists as “free speech” champions (although invariably the cases in which they were involved were entirely opportunistic, and involved defending only those who toed their line), or as “civil rights” champions, or as “peace campaigners.” I wonder (well, not for very long) whether the New York Times would describe the Nazi marchers in Skokie as “free speech” champions, or the opponents of going to war with Hitler as “peace campaigners.”
Yeah, but wasn’t it you who praised the German system, which outlaws right-wing totalitarians and touted their government spy system? You and your friend Natalie Vogel. You also advocated outlawing the Communist and national socialist parties. Seems like you are not such a great friend of free speech yourself.
“Brahmin” seems, like other followers of Justin Raimondo, to have difficulty with concepts like “context.” I’m strongly in favor of recognizing the rights of Communist Party members or National Socialist Party members to spout evil all they want, but not to be able to actually carry out their evil designs. I don’t favor “free speech” for only those who agree with me. People should have the freedom to express their support for suppressing free speech, as well. A reasonable distinction can be made between speech and incitement to violence, however. A mob boss’s order to a subordinate to kill another person is not mere “speech,” but an essential element of a criminal act. In 1946 Germany, it was the right thing to dismantle the National Socialist party, which had just plunged Europe into war, murdered millions of people, and subjected many nations, Germany included, to savage violence and lawlessness. The National Socialist Party was itself a criminal conspiracy that, had it been reconstituted, would have done it again. The rest of us have no obligation to wait to be slaughtered. In the U.S., there is no danger that such groups would gain such powers and no warrant for interfering with their freedom of speech. They should be tolerated. In Germany it is time to repeal laws restricting the expression of ideas or claims of fact (such as denying the holocaust; suppressing such idiots merely gives them more credibility, anyway), but it is a foolish case of ignoring context to insist that in Germany in 1946 the National Socialist Party should have been allowed to reorganize and attempt to regain power; as foolish as insisting that Hitler should have been allowed his freedom on the grounds that he didn’t actually “kill” anyone — he just spoke to others to get them to kill other people.
Tom,
Am I to conclude from your comment that you think it was a great idea for the US government to go to war against Hitler? Would it have been better had we not waited until late ’41? Does FDR’s clearly mendacious efforts at getting re-elected on the grounds he’d keep us out of war (in a country the large majority of whose inhabitants wanted to remain neutral)factor into your analysis? Or was it the last Good War after all?
Interesting and important questions, but neither relevant to, nor inferrable from, my remarks above. A direct comparison would be domestic restrictions on incitement to riot; can one say that one is just exercising a legal right by expressing one’s opinion if one is standing outside a person’s home with a crowd of excited torch-bearing yahoos and shouting “Death to the [fill in this space with the name of the group to which that person belongs]!”? I think not. And for that reason I endorse the justice of banning criminal conspiracies when they have committed crimes or are actively organizing to do so and there is a real danger that they will be able to carry them out. That was certainly the case with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1946 and with the Communist Party of the USSR in Russia in 1991.
I should add to the above that it would not be warranted to conclude from my comments anything about foreign policy. One could think that the decision to go to war was not justified or that it was justified and still come to the same conclusion (or to a different one).
I apologize for being so slow on the uptake. You had said: “I wonder…whether the New York Times would describe the Nazi marchers in Skokie as “free speech” champions, or the opponents of going to war with Hitler as “peace campaigners.”
Clearly we don’t care much for Nazi marchers, and would refer to them as “free speech” champions only ironically. I guess I thought that meant you also thought ill of “the opponents of going to war with Hitler” (that is, primarily, the America First crowd), and would only refer to them as promoting peace ironically. So I asked your thoughts on whether or not you, yourself, would have opposed American entry into WWII prior to Pearl Harbor…whether, that is, you yourself would have been described at that time as an “opponent of going to war with Hitler”.
I’m still not clear on why this, to me straight-forward, interpretation of your comments is “neither relevant to, nor inferrable from, [your] remarks”. You now analogize the situation to incitement to riot restrictions. I’m sure I must be misreading to think you’re suggesting that the US govt. would have been right to restrict the meetings of America First on such grounds.
Perhaps, getting to the real point of your post, you were thinking not of America First, or the large fraction of American citizens who, weary of the deaths and lies associated with their then-recent involvement in WWI, did not want to go to war against Hitler. Perhaps instead you wanted your comments interpreted as being focused on the pro-Hitler contingent that was not really for peace but simply against fighting Hitler, whom they supported. I believe this was actually a very small fraction of the pro-peace movement at the time, so you can understand my confusion, but this is not an area of advanced study for me, so I may be wrong.
If I may be so gauche as to return to the point of Tom’s original post — why are communism and stalinism still considered to be politically respectable doctrines, when they are demonstrably equivalent to nazism in terms of destroying human life and liberty?
I can think of various reasons, but the important point is that those of us who understand the equivalence ought to point it out whenever we have the opportunity. Those who defend communism defend murder.
I now see why Ross made the inference he did. I did not suggest that Nazis who marched in Skokie and campaigners against entry into World War II had anything in common other than that the New York Times would never describe them as “free speech champions” or as “peace campaigners.” That’s because they don’t like either of those groups. (I had thought about adding Charlton Heston and asking whether the NYT would have described himi as a “civil rights campaigner,” but thought it would be too long. They wouldn’t, of course, because of his involvement with the NRA, which they hate, despite the fact that he was an active campaigner for the civil rights of black Americans.) But aside from assuming wrongly that I was equating the two, Ross’s inference has no foundation.
Regarding Charles’s question, I think that the reason is substantially because the Marxists had, at least, a universal claim with which it is easier for intellectuals to identify. The proletariat was, allegedly, the universal class. In contrast, fascists and national socialists typically vaunted one group (their “nation” or “race”) above others. It’s hard to be a big enthusiast for a group that considers you inferior if you’re not one of them. Of course, intelellectuals weren’t generally proletariat industrial workers, but they could believe that they had a special role as the “vanguard” of the proletariat revolution. I think that that explains much of the ongoing appeal of communists to intellectuals, despite the appalling mass murders committed by communists; it’s an appeal that fascists can’t have because fascists typically were particularistic and nationalistic (or racist).
Interestingly, the new trend in much of political theory is for particularistic forms of collectivism, which shed the universalistic patina that Marxism gave to collectivism. I think that those varieties, despite having many defenders in academia, are less likely to be attractive to intellectuals, in comparison to the enormous and lasting attraction that communism has had.
It’s ridiculous to posit that everyone who disagrees with you in any fundamental way is “a follower of Justin Raimondo.” Your obsessions are showing.
There is no “context” in which banning free speech or the right to organize volunary associations is permissible, at least from a libertarian point of view. And while I’m faor;u certain that Raimondo would agree with me, I don’t think that makes me a “follower” of his — merely a libertarian.
“Brahmin”: Since you post from the same IP address that has been used to make changes to an online biography of Mr. Raimondo and to repeat Raimondoite charges (including knowing the name of a friend in Moscow…talk about obsessions), I’d say that makes you either Raimondo or a follower. But, whatever.
More importantly, failing to make distinctions of context is not a sign of a “libertarian,” but of a shallow and unserious thinker. One has no “right” to engage in murder, even if it is in voluntary association with others. Nor has one the right to present a clear and present danger to others by engaging in “speech.” If I point a gun at someone and say “I’m going to kill you” and he has a reasonable fear that I may be able to carry it out, he has the right to defend himself with force. (For example, if we’re not both actors in a play or a movie reading our lines, but a teller and a masked bank robber.) Add the two together, and you’ve got a good reason — for a libertarian or any other decent person — to ban the Nazi party in Germany in 1946. Not in California or Texas in 1946 (or Germany in 2006), where they didn’t present a threat to take over power and massacre people, but in Germany in 1946, without a doubt. That’s not a violation of libertarian principles; it’s an application of libertarian principles on the basis of common sense.
I just blogged a fairly lengthy post on _The Soviet World of American Communism_. (The book details the varieties of Soviet control over the American Communist Party based upon documents from the briefly-open Russian archives.) Since I quoted this post, I though I should at least post a link:
http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2006/01/soviet-world-of-american-communism.html
(The whole post is really too lengthy to reproduce here.)
Brahmin writes “There is no “context” in which banning free speech or the right to organize volunary associations is permissible, at least from a libertarian point of view.”
The “voluntary association” referred to in this discussion would include voluntary associations such as the Waffen SS…all volunteers. And orders given them were the free speech.
There are plenty of circumstances where voluntary associations and certain speech should be banned on libertarian grounds — the circumstances being whenever they violate the rights of other individuals. Even someone with a faint understanding of libertarianism ought to understand this.
Diana’s link is worth reading.
Back to Tom’s original point — the “universality” argument makes sense, but I don’t think it fully explains. For one thing, prior to WW2 there was a big eugenics movement in the U.S., championed by in particular by progressives (BTW the latest Jnl Econ Perspectives has a piece on economists’ roles in this — I have only skimmed it so far but it looks interesting). Racism and nationalism don’t seem to have been found objectionable in this context.
I speculate that there’s a certain amount of historical accident and “lock-in” involved in the acceptance of communism. It strikes me that at least part of the reason for the wide difference in how communism and nazism are perceived is that we never fought a world war with the communists, never invaded the USSR and found first hand the mass graves, etc. Pre-war views of nazism in the U.S. tended to be far more favorable than post-war views, I think.
Even this isn’t a full explanation; maybe the longer history of Marxist thought and its supposed scientific bases were a factor as well.
All of this complements the universality argument.