Mon 7 May 2007
Who remembers this debate from two years ago on WSO? Our own Ronit Bhattacharyya ‘07 wrote:
Though I believe strongly in the legal right to freedom of expression, it is clear that certain forms of expression are correctly censured by society. One may be technically free to be a hateful bigot, but the rest of society is free to view hateful bigots with scorn and contempt.
I realize there are certain things I should not say. Not because society restricts my speech, but because these things are themselves vile and loathsome. I should not, for example, support or endorse Nazis. If I speak in support of the Nazi party, or wear clothing that bears the swastika, I will (quite rightly) be criticized for doing so. Anyone who endorses a regime which murdered so many millions deserves to be held in contempt by society.
Yet, several times at Williams, I have seen people wear shirts and sweatshirts embroidered with the hammer and sickle or the “CCCP” logo, or printed with a picture of Mao Zedong or Che Guevara. Wearing such clothing does not seem to attract any undue attention or criticism. It seems quite acceptable.
Communism is thought to have killed about 20 million in the USSR, 65 million in China, and millions more in Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It adds up to nearly 100 million deaths in the 20th-century. These are not casualties of war, but civilian slaughter - deaths in gulags, concentration camps, executions, and famines either planned or unintentionally caused by central policy. Though I am unsure of the exact death toll caused by the Nazis, I think this (100 million) is even higher. If it is unacceptable to endorse the Nazis, why is it acceptable to wear clothing that bears the symbol of an even more murderous ideology?
A fun thread ensues. If Julia had used a picture of Stalin or Mao instead of Hitler, I doubt that security would have taken the posters down. Mary Jane Hitler creates a huge controversy at Williams. Mary Jane Mao? Not so much. Why?
May 7th, 2007 at 9:23 am
The anti-Nazis have done a better propaganda job than the anti-Stalinists or the anti-Maoists.
May 7th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Or….. Pro-Hitler propaganda is associated in the public mind with pro-Hitler violence. The threat of a violent Communist revolution is pretty far from most people’s minds; the threat of anti-semitic violence doesn’t seem nearly as remote.
May 7th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Also, nobody except a few elderly Russians who idolize their youth has any sort of loyalty to Stalin, even among communists, but Hitler is still a rallying symbol for neo-Nazi violence. Death toll is not the only relevant factor here.
May 7th, 2007 at 10:10 am
“The threat of a violent Communist revolution is pretty far from most people’s minds.”
Not in Peru or Nepal. Also, Maoist-oriented revolutionaries have killed far more people in the last 25 years than have neo-Nazis.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Oh, come on…
The Bong Hits 4 Hitler posters were a direct response to posters that commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day.
If some group had put up posters commemorating victims of Chinese Communist persecution, and then some moron had put up Mao posters in order to “create dialogue,” I think there would have been an uproar, and rightly so.
May 7th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
During the Vietnam War my wife and I organized an antiwar protest group and draft resistance center in Atlanta, Georgia, the Atlanta Workshop in Nonviolence. We were active in keeping Marxist groups from having an undue influence in the Sothern peace coalition. At the same time we had good relations with both Trots and CP folks.
One of our strongest allies was a gently elderly woman who had been a member of the Communist Party, Leah Washburn. Leah told us she had become a Commie since the CP was the only national group that would help her when she was trying to organize the textile mill, wher she worked in Georgia. Later she and her blind son, Joe, marched all the way with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery.
The CP was a nussiance in lots of progressive organizations including unions like the United Auto Workers. Walter Reuther eventually purged the Commies from the Auto Workers. But, the Commies had helped organize his union and some good organizers were purged.
There were no members of the American Nazi party marching with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery. There were no Nazis helping organize tetile workers or auto workers, There were no Nazis helping Sue and me in our antiwar activities in the South in the sixties.
There were a few crazy lefties in the anti-Viet War movement. We called them ultra leftists. And some of the things the CP and Trots did hurt the cause. But, they were still part of our movement.
The kids in Che shirts we thought of as misguided.
Che himself comes across in the movie, Motorcycle
Diaries as a nice sheltered rich kid who had a semi-religious conversion on seeing how the poor of Peru lived. His life later turned into a tragedy as he turned against the downtrodden. But, he was a starry eyed idealist as depicted in the Motor Cycle Diaries movie that one can understand young people liking. He was not a young Hitler.
I feel differently about Nazis and Commies.I just don’t know any Nazis, since no Nazi was involved in any of the progressive struggles of the last century that I was involved in. No wondere the kids in Che shirts are seen differently than the Mary Jane Hitler types.
May 7th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Another thing to remember is that the Nazi’s singled out groups to be killed, while the communists killed indiscriminately. Its still horrible, but at least it was equal-opportunity murder.
Discrimination is bad, you see.
May 7th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
What huge controversy? A tepid letter from the administration, seventeen Jewish students at resoundingly ignored town hall meeting, and a letter to the editor from the Jewish chaplin?
Considering the hideously anti-semitic nature of the Bong Hits 4 Hitler poster, it seems a stretch to call the response a huge controversy on campus.
May 7th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Man is defined by his/her prejudices. Every action and each word bears upon the listener. Why discuss the rights of expression when we deny discussions pertaining to details? It appears that we do not support inherent freedoms, nor inalienable rights.
There is a madness in the air. The madness of total quality management. The madness of total control over content and structure, over substance and form.
The state of denial has taken on the dimensions of extreme disorientation. With the founding of the socialist states of the former Soviet Union of Socialist Republics by its illustrious and all-wise founders, alcohol was the medium of dissent, for it precluded reasoned argumentation.
There are no rights. We are being told that inalienable rights do not exist. That rights are conferred. Everyone is held in contempt. Everyone is guilty. Everyone is loathsome. Manageable pigs needs only apply.
This era of peace, tolerance and diversity makes manifest the reactionary bouts with extreme disorientation whereby reality is in denial and self-depreciating behaviors give rise to self-loathing.
This madness, make no mistake about it, will result in a catharsis that will overwhelm historical imagination.
Perhaps everyone should exercise an understanding of love towards others by giving massages to one another, whereby we can use our skillful hands in healing through gentle and meaningful touch. In the world of living organisms, we find that each species preens one another. It is a form of communication, of bonding that supports positive group behavior.
Perhaps learning from the other, we may learn to love one another.
May 7th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
National Socialism, Inter-National Socialism, it’s all the same murderous anti-individualist tripe; it just comes in slightly different flavors, and the Inter-National socialism has a way better marketing department.
re: Henry, I wonder what the commies would have done, had the tables been turned. My sense is that they didn’t support anything “progressive” so much as they wanted to make the US look bad and oppose the status quo.
If it meant joining up with the Nazis yet again (like in the non-aggression pact between the National and Inter-National socialists), they’d do so, the opportunity just didn’t present itself in the US. But a lack of strategic opportunity and a corresponding different strategic choice for the mass-murder-enabling Inter-National Socialists should hardly be seen as a high-minded endorsement of equality before the law.
[space] — no, it’s just that nobody on the Left cares when you’re killing rich people, or intellectuals, or Ukrainians, or rural peasants, or kulaks, or people with glasses or on bicycles (the latter 2 in Beloved Leader’s North Korea) for the good of society. I think that the left has been ready to apologize for breaking of eggs, and much too eager to believe that somebody is even attempting to cook an omelet. It’s not that they don’t discriminate, they just don’t kill people based on ethnic origin (e.g., Jews, Romani) as opposed to national origin (Ukrainians).
May 7th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
The Communists won WW2 so to the victor goes the spoils including writing history’s narrative.
It is not true that the Communists killed indiscriminately. They especially killed the educated classes so potential resistance to Bolshevik domination was eliminated.
May 7th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
In historical practice, both Nazi and Communist countries have committed great atrocities. But as far as the ideas of each of them go, only one is truly atrocious. The ideas of the Nazi Party are directly related to the killing of those who weren’t white Protestant, specifically Jews. Communism does not inherently involve killing. Communist nations have just killed a lot in order to try to get to an end; not everyone who calls themselves communist is inherently violent.
May 7th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Actually the posters were a pretty big deal at Williams…I’d say that Julia is still one of the top five topics of conversation among students. I think any campus issue that commands virtually an entire Record editorial section counts as somewhat of a “big deal.” I agree that the administration’s response wasn’t sufficient. However, hwc, one of your problems is judging “big deals” on campus on the basis of the Record and the Administration alone (Kane does this as well). Just as the Administration talking about alcohol a lot didn’t make that a “big deal” on campus, the Administration not talking about Julia didn’t make her thoughtless actions not a “big deal.”
May 7th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Just as the doctrine of Communism doesn’t involve killing neither does National Socialism. Each had their ideological enemies to dispatch and did so, but the Communists largely escaped scrutiny despite killing up to 65,000,000 innocents by some estimates. The mass killings by the Communists of the educated classes is an atrocity and cannot be ignored or tolerated.
May 7th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
My experience tells that the educated classes probably deserved it.
May 7th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Oh, then in that case we should ignore and tolerate mass killings because the people deserved it.
May 7th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
I think Orwell had a great essay on this topic, but I’ll be damned if I can remember the name of it.
May 7th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
That is what heaven and hell are all about.
May 8th, 2007 at 2:54 am
I would like to see us be a bit less sloppy with regards to terms, especially our discussions of Communism. Stalinism was undoubtedly evil. As was Mao’s reign of terror. But is all communism in all circumstances evil? I don’t know. Stupid? Unworkable? Silly? I’ll agree with all three. But let’s look, for example, at the realities of both imperialism and the Cold War and let’s use as our backdrop Africa. in many cases, when given a choice between ruthless, murderous, rapacious capitalist imperialism and the option that communism seemed to provide, well, no wonder some ran toward the false promise of a Soviet Union that condemned the imperial endeavor. In South Africa the South African Communist Party was on the side of angels — they were the good guys fighting against the ardent anti-communist National party government. I’m glad the SACP did not prevail as the most powerful force within the tripartite alliance that is the ANC, but I am equally happy to see them have a place at the governing table as long as the most radical among them do not end up prevailing in terms of the country’s direction. Nazism was particularly evil because it was based on a spectific time and place that perpetuated certain policies. Communism is simply a broader and more complicated phenomenon, and those who aver that it is “all the same anti-individualist tripe” frankly don’t have enough of a grasp of actual history to take seriously.
dcat
May 8th, 2007 at 4:20 am
Well, time to light my diploma on fire. Thanks to Derek’s chastisement, my major in history is now worthless. Yours can be too, if Derek disagrees with you!
May 8th, 2007 at 5:53 am
It has been recognized all along by all concerned that my diploma, including my major, was valueless - and I have consistently treated it accordingly.
May 8th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Then don’t devalue your history degree with stupid catagorical assertions based on generalizations that would not hold up in any freshman survey course.
It’s not a matter of whether I disagree with you. It is a matter of you saying something that was wrong and sophomoric and that was rather easy to disprove. Communism and Nazism are not, as you asserted, identical, and trying to turn the tables of the argument against me for pointing that out is not a very substantial argument, now is it. Yours was an argument driven by ideology, not history. I’ll gladly have the Communism-Nazism-Fascism-Socialism-Whateverism discussion with you if you would like. I’m sure we’ll disagree and you won’t be wrong because we do. But when you make the sort of base generalizations like you did to prove to the rest of us that you are ardently anticommunist (bold stand, that) you invite criticism of those views. It really isn’t that complicated, and hiding behind your undergraduate major (!) even if that degree is from Williams, does not change that fact.
dcat
May 8th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
This is all strangely reminiscent of the Spring 1988 crosses on Baxter lawn anti-apartheid protest.
As I recall, a certain very conservative fella with the initials D.K., who I recall was disgusted by the ANC tolerance of communists like Joe Slovo in its ranks, insisted that the crosses more properly commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Prague Spring.
So both sides argued over the meaning of the crosses ad nauseum, and nobody would take the damn things down until a day before graduation. As far as I could see, allowing Slovo a place at the table helped defeat fascism, and the commies were not a serious risk to South Africa.