“Can anyone imagine--please grant me a moment of poetic license here--that the conservative movement in America might be strongly influenced by Trostkyites? “

DUH! Almost all the Neocons are former Trotskyites. Irving Kristol, anyone?

Ah, I get it now. Sarcasm.

Brilliant piece of satirical savagery!

Great satire.

Although in fact Castro might have begun as a Nazi
sympathizer. Or as John Lukacs puts it, he was basically
a US hater who embraced communism just as he, in earlier
times would have embraced nazism. This pattern can
be found Latin America more often than not. In Argentina
they moved from the extreme right to the extreme left
as long as they got to hate the British Empire and the
US.  Ideology was the least of it…

John’s sarcasm here was so thick that for a moment
I thought he was accepting neoconservative money
in return for denouncing Islamofascism. Believe
it or not, I still meet academics who think
thatuniversities are full of fascists and that all of
the opponents of Muslim immigration into Europe are
former Concentration Camp guards or their admiring
descendants.

I agree with John Ball...the most famous “Leftist” regimes in Latin America were “fascist”...Argentina and Venezuela most prominently.

It is interesting that the “Old” Left--influenced by Marx---focused on finance capitalism, just as the early Nazis did. Much of the anti-Semitism sentiments among the “national socialists” came from the undisputed influence of the Rothchild Bankers, who financed--and profited--from Europe’s continual warfare during the 18th, 19th and early 20th Century.

Somewhere along the line, the “Left” stopped talking about finance capitalism per se, and started focusing on cultural issues, opposition to religion, family structures, re-interpreting US history and so on. This change in direction reached it’s highest point in the “New” Left, which was mostly a cultural phenomena, an elitist perspective focused entirely around the big college campuses in the US. A re-read of the old Port Huron Statement demonstrates this cultural alienation, whose legacy is modern “identity” politics, the environmental movement, and feminism, People of Color, and so on that we are afflicted with today.

Me thinks that a lot of this has to do with the high proportion of Jews that made up a lot of the Left, and their discomfort with focusing on finance capitalism, the FED--for instance, which we know is a “privatization” of the US currency, whose board members are almost all Jewish--except for a Rockefeller---all descendents or associates of the old Rothchild Banking families.

It’s also not surprising that the excesses of the new cultural orientation of the Left against middle class culture would alienate it’s share of true believers, who became today’s Neo-Cons---Horowitz being the prime example, along with Irving Kristol.

An accurate history the roots of the modern Left, it’s morphing into neo-conservatives and it’s roots has yet to be written, although bits and pieces can be pieced together from this and that.

According to my reading, the Rothschilds tried to stop more wars than they started. They certainly tried to prevent World War I. Would to God that they had succeeded.

John Zmirak sed: According to my reading, the Rothschilds tried to stop more wars than they started. They certainly tried to prevent World War I.

You should get some new reading. The Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was involved with the Rothchild Bank, and the Rothchild Bank financed the war.

After WWI, the Rothchilds abandoned Germany, and pulled i’s money out of in order to avoid having their wealth destroyed by the reperations.

Lot’s of old “anti-semitism” can be traced to resentment of the Rochchilds,and their role in the politics of the late 19th and early 2Oth Century politics.

I hate to admit it, but you had me going for a minute there.  Well done.

For a while there, in the first paragraph…

I was just trying to figure out how anyone writing for the New Republic could even have heard of the Strasser brothers.
They might have gotten as far as Strauss, possibly Leo, but more probably Johan…

-no one would dream of attempting to reclaim the good name of a murderous totalitarian such as Leon Trostky. -JZ

that the conservative movement in America might be strongly influenced by Trostkyites? -JZ

Frostykyites? Put down that frosty beer!! Heh.

John,
I hate to spoil the fun, but you might want to do some reading in the recent work on violence in history—check for example Steven Pinker’s latest publications.  This work shows that “the bloody 20th century” actually had one of the lowest known rates of violent mortality.  If the century had followed the historical norm, the number of people dying via being killed by other humans would have been well over a billion, not the low hundreds of millions that actually died.

Also, there is a problem with the statistics you linked.  The list of deaths caused by assorted political weirdos left out the Greens, who killed some 50 million people (A bigger total than that of the Nazis!) in Africa by banning DDT.  Most troubling of all, there is evidence that at least some of the leading Greens at the time knew this “side-effect” would ensue from the ban.

I’m dubious about the findings of social Darwinist Steven Pinker. Is there any evidence whatsoever that in the 19th or 18th century, such a high percentage of the human population was massacred by the State as in the 20th? I’d like to see those figures. Perhaps during the 30 Years’ War, or during Mongol invasions… but those are not quite the point I was making. It is natural (albeit appalling) that civilians are killed in war. What makes the 20th century particularly horrifying is the number of people MURDERED by their OWN GOVERNMENTS, in pursuit of ideological goals. That is unique to the 20th century, and I hope it will not characterize the 21st. As to the question of DDT, I plead ignorance. I do think it was prudent to ban it in the U.S, and do NOT endorse the opinion that it is legitimate to destroy the ecosystem created by God simply in order to maximize human population at a given moment--even if it poisons or denudes the earth which is meant to house our descendants.

John, I think you need to study the DDT question a bit more.

Holy infrarealismo , John, Bolano _was _ a Trotskyite!

“I’m dubious about the findings of social Darwinist Steven Pinker.”

It’s quite clear from his writings that Pinker is a liberal. There hasn’t been a social Darwinist at Harvard for about a century.

DDT might well make sense in Africa, used cautiously so as not to destroy the ecosystems on which future human generations will rely. The global ban on it was typical of ham-handed, universalist solutions imposed without due consideration of local conditions. What else would one expect from the UN. But clearly we can do without DDT here.

John,
For a fully scientific discussion of the decline in violent mortality, see Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (OUP 2006).  In my view, Gat overemphasizes biology and underestimates the influence of culture, but his work is a good summary of the current state of the art on the subject.

Your observation “ . . . do NOT endorse the opinion that it is legitimate to destroy the ecosystem created by God simply in order to maximize human population at a given moment . . . “ has very troubling implications.  After all, this assertion implies you consider it acceptable to reduce the size of human populations to save the ecosystem—just like the Green leaders appear to have done about Africa.  Please, do read about the Nazi’s “General Plan East.” Using the science of 1930s, the Nazis had concluded that Eastern Europe’s population was about 40-50 million too large.  As a result, they were plannig to reduce the population by that number.  Extermination camps could not kill that many, so the plan was to create an articial famine that would have brought the population down to “scientifically correct” level.  (I.e., the Holocaust was only a stepping stone to a much bigger project.)

You wondered why states turned their organization to killing humans.  A look at the cases strongly suggests one of the main reasons was that people followed what they at the time honestly believed to be eminently scientific central planning—i.e., precisely the same attitude you yourself manifest in your ecological thinking. Considering the historical effects of this approach, you might want to give serious thought to just following some of the key commands of Christianity, even when these commands require behavior that contradicts current “scientific” advice.  One command in particular was ignored by both the Nazis and the Communists, because it did not fit their “scientific” theories on how to build a better society: “Thou Shalt Not Kill” Period.

Dear Mr. Konkola,
First of all, there’s a radical difference between killing people and taking actions which seem, on balance, likely to save more lives in the long run. That’s where the virtue of prudence comes in. Here’s a hypothetical: Imagine that it were possible by using some imaginary technology to extend the lives of every single person on earth by 10 years. The only down side is: It would destroy all life in the oceans. By your logic, if I refused to take this action--thinking, rightly, that the next generation might well starve, or suffer greatly, because of the dead oceans, and that it would in addition be a hideous crime against God’s creation--I would be guilty of mass murder.

Likewise, if we could save some lives in India today by eliminating medical patents--at the cost of completely destroying the industries which develop such medicines--by your logic we’d have to do it. Italy did it. They don’t invent medicines over here any more.

Every day, we make decisions which privilege one good over another --including the extension of human life. That is NOT in ANY way the same as killing.

If it were, then every dollar one of us sent to the symphony orchestra, instead of to hunger relief, would amount to an act of murder.

Being pro-life does not mean embracing mindless vitalism, which favors--say, selling off all the artworks in the Vatican, to help pay for keeping people on respirators longer.

It means that you oppose the direct killing of the innocent. Period.

John,
We appear to be talking of different things.  My focus is your observation “ . . . taking actions which seem, on balance, likely to save more lives in the long run.” The specific point here is the science that you use to estimate the long-term effect of your actions.  This is where the historical glitch has been time after time:  The Nazis thought their actions would proudce a superior human via advancement of the Aryan race, and they regarded this goal as so important as to justify the sacrifices; the communists thought eliminating private ownership of the means of production would eliminate conflict from society, and this goal made them see liquidating “harmful” social classes acceptable; the Greens massively misjudged the effects of DDT, and this judgment made them “priviledge” not using DDT to extending millions of Africans’ lives.

It looks very probable that scientific progress will continue, and that people hundred years from now will laugh at much of our current reasoning, just like we now laugh at Nazi’s racial theories and “scientific” dialectical materialism.  (Man-made global warming is one likely source for future entertainment.) This observation raises a question about the reasoning you use to predict the consequenses that form the foundation of your decision about which choice is likely to save most lives in the long run.  How accurate can this reasoning be—after all, we cannot predict innovations, since predicting them would mean making them.  (The Nazis, for example, failed to foresee the explosion in agricultural production caused by fertilizers and weed killers.  Instead of needing Lebensraum to produce enough food, Germany has for years been struggling with overproduction.  Talk about an error with disastrous consequenses!)

In your specific example, the question would be:  can you really say with certainty that something would destroy all life from the oceans?  Can you be sure that our reasoning about the causality is correct, and is it certain that nothing can be invented to prevent this outcome?  You are justifying chopping 10 years off from people’s lives on what history suggests is a very fragile foundation.

It seems to me that precisely this kind of faith in science and its ability to predict long-term consequenses has been the cause of much of the government-produced 20th-century mortality you worried about.  It is also at this point of assorted “scientific” rationalizations of future benefits where the Christian rule, thou shalt not kill—right now, no ifs, ands or buts—becomes very relevant.

“Tenured Fascist” Responds :)

dear mr. zmirak,

“...the good name of eli wiesel”???!!!
paron me - but you must be totally nuts.
regards from germany

m. noetting