sometimes silence is golden
Paco Malo wrote, in reply to secret fantasies of the heart:
In the above post, you both take a cheap shot at the left and also misrepresent Mr. Shaw’s comments.
This is beneath you.
In Mr. Shaw’s Huffington Post commentary, he writes that he is engaging in “[a]n entirely hypothetical yet realpolitik calculus that is ugly, and cold-hearted but must be posited:
This is a type of calculus that Pentagon war games planners and political consultants do all the time- a combination of what-if actions and consequences that are unpleasant to consider but are in the realm of plausibility.”
Mr. Shaw is clearly being hypothetically Machiavellian.
Certain rhetorical projects are bound to encounter resistance because they are inherently disgusting. I think Mr Shaw understood that looking at the bright side of the mass murder his fellow citizens might elicit some criticism, and he tried to deflect that criticism in advance.
Mr Shaw compares his speculations to the “type of calculus that Pentagon war games planners and political consultants do all the time”. I don’t buy it.
Twice Mr Shaw invokes the word calculus, a very fine sounding word which suggests a mathematical method behind his speculations. It is a sham. His method is to pull numbers out of thin air, or some other place.
Mr Shaw compares himself to a political consultant. It would be an insanely poor political consultant who suggested to his employer that maybe terrorists will kill lots of voters and so get you elected. Political consultants pay attention to words. They are paid to make sure their employer does not say things that will make him sound stupid, callous, or deranged. Mr Shaw manifestly lacks the skills of a political consultant.
The difference between Mr Shaw and the military strategist is even more profound. The strategist does not gloat over his own side’s defeat. He does not consider the advantages of the enemy’s victory. Only a journalist would do that.
Some people, because of their professional duties, must do things the rest of us are spared. A policeman might have to examine child pornography. A coroner might have to dissect a corpse. A soldier will almost certainly have to make plans that involve killing people. Absent the professional responsibility, too much fascination with these unpleasant activities is suspect. Mr Shaw’s realpolitik would have been considered ghoulish if he had published it shortly after 9/11. I don’t see why it is any less ghoulish a few months before an election.
Want some realpolitik? A would-be heir should not say aloud how nice it would be if Mother suffered a fatal fall. Some things are better left unsaid.
As for my having taken a cheap shot at the left, I assume you mean my remark that Mr Shaw has the Left Stuff, the willingness to sacrifice others for a higher cause. What is your objection? This is the very essence of leftist thought. The individual is expendable; only the collective matters. This wisdom is older than man. Every ant and every bee knows it to be true. It is the key to the worker’s paradise.
Leftist thought has led to leftist action, and so amassed a body count on the order of 100,000,000 dead in the 20th century. Hardly cheap.
Posted on August 27th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: politics
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You begin here with a dissection of Mr. Shaw opening remarks, but I shall not. I must begin with your last two paragraphs above.
A billion dead in the last century at the hands of leftists in action! That is patently absurd. You cannot be referring to the left in the United States. Compassion and the sanctity of human life are at the heart of U.S. leftist thought. Indeed, it was the U.S. left that played a significant role in turning public opinion against the Viet Nam war.
I can only assume you are confusing the leftist thought Mr. Shaw and I are talking about with the Stalin regime in the U.S.S.R. and Chairman Mao’s regime in mainland China. From my perspective, these were totalitarian regimes cloaked in hollow leftist labels for political cover when they needed it. Stalin and Mao were murderous dictators, and communism in their hands was stripped of its true meaning.
In the middle of the 20th century, the left in the United States abandoned communism, not because they were afraid of Senator Joseph McCarthy, but because of Stalin’s and Mao’s atrocities and their discrediting of communism.
Pehaps Mr. Shaw should not have made the remarks in question here. But isn’t his right to make those remarks, and The Huffington Post getting them out on the Net, what provoked our exchange here. And that’s what freedom of expression, made law in the United States Constitution, is all about.
I’m glad you ripped apart Mr. Shaw’s run for cover at the beginning of his essay. And I’m glad you have given me this chance to respond to your remarks above. As in science, progress is only possible when informed commenters rigorously scrutinize and criticize the work of others.
You make many interesting points; I’ll take them in turn.
First, I cited a body count of 100 million, not a billion. You are correct that I include in that count the work of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and a host of others.
You state that “[f]rom my perspective, these were totalitarian regimes cloaked in hollow leftist labels for political cover when they needed it. Stalin and Mao were murderous dictators, and communism in their hands was stripped of its true meaning.” I could not disagree more. These men understood perfectly the theory of communism, and their practice was completely in accord with theory. The tragedy is not that they failed to understand or implement communism; the tragedy is that they succeeded.
One of the most famous catchphrases in Marxist thought is from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. It is a brilliant slogan, short, memorable, and faithful to the spirit of communism. I always imagine a slave owner, whip in hand, making it painfully clear that he decides what you need, and he decides when you are done working. And you are not done working, and you need to be reminded of your place.
Another popular formulation: the state owns the means of production. Once again, perfectly precise, and perfectly revealing. The factories, the tractors, the mills, the farms are all just so much stuff. They are not the means of production, they are raw materials. The means of production is the human mind. That is what the communist claims for the state, and he damn well means to take it. The inevitable results follow.
You take it as a given that the American left has abandoned communism. I wish it were so.
As for Mr Shaw’s right to make the comments he made, it is sacred to me. I am grateful to live in these times where you and Mr Shaw and I have both the means and the right to talk to each other. The only proper answer to speech is more speech.
No man has a monopoly on truth. I am certainly wrong about many things, but I don’t know which ones they are. We are all in that position. Subjecting ideas to criticism is the only way I know to improve them, and so draw closer to the truth.