Tag: Nazis

Bad math, belief, and half Nazis

The above are two very popular tweets (as you can see from the likes), and they rely on a way of thinking about political choices that is often popular. The argument is that you shouldn’t vote for this person because s/he is still in a category of evil people.

You see it all over the political spectrum (we need to stop talking about either a binary or single-line continuum of political positions—it’s false and damaging, and it fuels demagoguery). In 2016, there were informational enclaves that said that people should vote against HRC because she was a socialist, fascist, neoliberal, and therefore no different from Stalin, Hitler, Thatcher.

It’s a way of arguing that eats its own premises, and yet it’s so often persuasive. For instance, the argument that you shouldn’t vote for Biden because he’s half the nazi that Trump is has the major premise that you should never choose the thing that is twice as good.

Of course you should choose the thing that is twice as good. You should buy the car that is twice as good, rent the apartment that is twice as good, take the job that is twice as good. When we’re deciding about a car, apartment, or job, we can do that math, but, when it comes to politics, suddenly people can’t see that half a fascist is twice as good as a full fascist, let alone whether Biden is half a fascist.

So, why do people who can take an imperfect apartment that is twice as good as their other option, when it comes to politics, reject taking an option that is twice as good as the other?

There are a lot of reasons. Here, I want to mention two. First, politics is tied up with identity in a way that getting an apartment usually isn’t (although, people I’ve known for whom their apartment is closely attached to their identity have the same bad math—an apartment twice as good as the other is just as bad as the other); second, people who reason deductively often have false narratives about the past, or don’t care about what has happened. A politics of purity is often connected to a belief in belief.

The first move in that argument is to treat everyone who disagrees with us as in the Other category. There are good arguments that Trump is fairly high on the fascism scale (although with some important caveats, particularly about individualism), but Biden is not a fascist. He’s a third-way neoliberal. But, really, when people are making this kind of argument—HRC is basically Stalin, Sanders is Castro, HRC is Trump—they aren’t putting the argument forward as some kind of invitation to a nuanced discussion about political ideologies. It’s a hyperbolic appeal to purity politics.

Like all hyperbole, the main function of the claim is that it is a performance of in-group fanatical commitment, a demonstration of loyalty on the part of the speaker. The point is to demonstrate that they think in terms of us or them, and they are purely opposed to them.

That seems like a responsible political posture because, in cultures of demagoguery, there are a lot of people (who are bad at math) who decide that being purely committed to the in-group is the right course of action, regardless of whether that has ever worked in the past. They believe that we can succeed if we purely commit to a pure commitment to a pure in-group set of pure policies. That way of thinking about politics—the way to win in politics is to refuse to compromise—is all over the political spectrum.

And, I just want to emphasize: the math is bad. A half-nazi is actually better than a full nazi. A leader who would have done half what Hitler did would have been better than Hitler. Unless you are thinking in terms of purity, and so you don’t actually care about how many people are killed, in which case you’ve fallen into what George Orwell, the democratic socialist, called the fallacy of saying that half a loaf is the same as nothing at all. If you’re hungry, half a loaf is still half a loaf.

A friend once compared it to the trolley problem, in which a person refuses to pull the lever that involves being a participant in an action they really dislike in order to prevent a much worse outcome. I’m not a big fan of the trolley problem as an actual test of ethical judgment, but I think the metaphor is good—it’s a question of whether a person who refused to act (pull a lever that would cause one person to die rather than five) feels that this failure to act is more ethical than acting. When I talk to people who are in this kind of ethical dilemma, it’s clear that they are balking at that moment of their grabbing the lever—they want the trolley to shift tracks; they don’t want Trump to get reelected; they just don’t want to pull the lever.

That was complicated, but all I’m saying is that it’s a question of whether people recognize sins of omission. They don’t object to Biden getting elected; they object to voting for him.

So, how has that worked out in the past? I can’t think of a time when refusing to vote because one candidate was half as bad as the other has worked to lead to a better political situation (but I’m open to persuasion on this), but I can think of a lot of times when it hasn’t. I’ll mention one. It happens to be a time that people could vote for half-nazis, and liberals tried to persuade voters to do exactly that.  

It’s important to remember that the Weimar Communists could have prevented Hitler from coming to power by being willing to form a coalition government, but they wouldn’t because, they said, every other political party (including the democratic socialists) were, basically, fascists.

I’m not saying that compromising principles is always a good choice; a lot of people made the mistake of thinking that they could work with Hitler, that they should stay in his administration (or on his military staff) so that they could try to control him or, at least, direct him toward better actions. They couldn’t. Within a couple of years of his being installed as Chancellor, all the people in his administration who were going to try to moderate him were either fired or radicalized. It took longer with the military, and in that case the people who tried to control him were fired, strategically complacent, or radicalized. But it was the same outcome. There was no working with Hitler—there was only working for him.

If we want to prevent another Hitler, then we have to vote against him.

Be nicer to Hitler, and he’ll stop being Hitler: The Marquess of Londonderry’s Ourselves and Germany (1938)

In March of 1938, The Marquess of Londonderry published an argument that Britain had failed to respond to Germany’s often (and still) outstretched hand for peace, that Germany wanted nothing but that to which it was due, and that Hitler was a leader with reasonable goals that could be met (although Londonberry also mentions that he frequently asked German leaders to list their policy goals explicitly and clearly, and it never happened). Londonderry’s argument was that British foreign policy had caused Germans to be extremist because the British hadn’t been accommodating enough to the Germans who only wanted [keep in mind he’d never gotten German leaders to say what they wanted].

Londonderry published two versions of this book. One after the “Anschluss,” when Hitler forcibly annexed Austria (something Londonderry blames on Kurt von Schuschnigg, basically for resisting). While the annexation appears to have been popular in both Germany and Austria, the celebration consisted of extraordinary brutality toward the Jews. That violence was very public.

March 1938 was also long after the Nuremburg Laws (1935), after Hitler’s violations of various treaties and agreements and his going back on multiple promises, and over ten years after he published Mein Kampf, which clearly lays out his eliminationist, militaristic, and hegemonic goals. That agreement is generally considered a disaster, that emboldened Hitler, betrayed Czechoslavkia, and cemented his popularity with Germans.

Penguin published the book in October of 1938, with a new preface. On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain had signed the “Munich Agreement,” which gave Hitler a large chunk of Czechoslovakia because Hitler promised, for realz this time, that he wouldn’t try to get any more territory and wanted peace.

Londonderry says, in that preface to the October 1938 edition, that the disastrous Czechoslovakia agreement represented “the fulfillment of my hopes,” that “the international barometer […] is at ‘Set Fair’,” and “ I can only have a feeling of great happiness at this moment that all I have advocated has been brought about in a moment of time” (xi, xiii). He believed that the events of September proved he had been right all along. He had the outcome he had long wanted, the outcome he thought was success, and so he concluded the process—relentless appeasement on the part of Britain—was a good one.

Londonderry is a great example as to why what might be called “folk pragmatism” (“the proof is in the pudding”) is a disastrous way to think about policy deliberation.

Londonderry’s argument was that the Versailles Treaty dishonored Germany (he wasn’t making an economic argument), and denied Germany the right to be treated as an equal in regard to decisions about Europe. (t’s interesting to think about why Londonderry assumed that Germany was entitled to be treated as an equal to France and Britain.) There are, and have long been, lots of arguments as to why WWI (aka, “The Great War”) happened, and the scholarly consensus is that it wasn’t mono-causal, but the consensus is also that Germany bore a large portion of the responsibility. There is also a consensus that the conditions imposed on Germany were no worse than what Germany had imposed on Russia, in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty,  or on France, after the Franco-Prussian War.

Londonderry wasn’t the only major British political figure who supported the policy of appeasement, and the British policy of appeasement was supported for very complicated reasons (best explained by Benny Morris, Abraham Ascher, Tim Bouverie, and Ian Kershaw). But Londonderry’s argument wasn’t particularly complicated: Londonderry accepts the Nazi victim narrative that Germany being treated as it had treated France is so dishonoring of Germany that its putting Hitler in power is the fault of the British. Londonderry argues that Nazis want to be the friend of Britain. Nazi Germany can be an ally, and that we need to stop engaging in rhetoric that alienates them. Londonderry’s argument is, at its heart, an argument about feelings: the Versailles Treaty made Germans feel bad; Hitler is acting the way he is because he feels bad; if we make him and Germans feel better, they’ll have different policies. We can changes their policies by changing their feelings.

Londonderry postures himself as a reasonable person willing to look at both sides, but notice that France’s position is not one of the “sides” that needs understanding. He doesn’t need to understand the feelings of the French or the people opposed to his policies.

In fact, he argues that Germany and Britain have far more in common than Britain and France because “There are many points of similarities between our two countries [Britain and Germany], and there is a racial connection which in itself establishes a primary friendly feeling between us which cannot be said to exist between us and the French” (19).

Not only is that statement racist, but it’s typical of how incoherent racism is. “Racial” categories are always just politically useful ways of grouping people that racists want to believe are real. Madison Grant—the man who wrote “Hitler’s Bible,” whose arguments about race meant we sent away boats of Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany, and who was still being cited as an expert in the 1960s–was very clear that “race mixing” was bad, by which he meant a “Nordic” and a “Mediterranean.” For Grant, and people like him, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians weren’t really white, so a Pole marrying a Brit would lead to the downfall of civilization just as much as a Brit and an African. I mention this just because I routinely run across people with Polish, Ukrainian, Greek, or Italian last names who claim praise Grant as a credible source.

White supremacists aren’t very good at reading comprehension.

But, back to Londonderry. He has two points to his argument. First, the current problems between Britain and Germany, he says, can “only” be solved “by a sympathetic understanding” of the German position.

As far as the first, Londonderry’s book makes clear something I’m not sure he himself saw—he repeatedly asked Nazis to say exactly what they wanted, and they never did. Yet, he insisted that Germany had continually extended the hand of friendship to Britain, and it had been rejected. In other words, Londonderry thought the world of politics was one in which people need to feel good about each other, and feel respected by one another. And that was his mistake. He thought the problem with Germany was not that its culture had a victim narrative of being entitled and encircled, that powerful political groups (including the Catholic party, communists, monarchists, fascists, and nationalists) wanted to make sure that democracy failed, but that Germans felt bad, and therefore they advocated aggression. If we treated them more honorably, they wouldn’t feel bad, and so they wouldn’t be so aggressive.

I’m all for understanding exactly what the other sides are saying. I believe to my core that effective deliberation—political, personal, professional—requires that people really understand the arguments that other people are making. Understanding those arguments doesn’t necessarily mean that you think they have any legitimacy; understanding how a bad argument works is like understanding how a bridge collapsed. But that isn’t what Londonderry means.

And it’s interesting to think about just what arguments he argued needed understanding. Hitler’s arguments about honor needed understanding. Arguments about Nazi genocidal policies didn’t. Londonderry exemplifies one way that people argue for a dodgy in-group policies. Londonderry argued for “fairness” regarding Nazis because he didn’t really have any problem with their political agenda, as far as he understood it.

He includes in his book, after a long description of how charming his 1936 visit to Germany was, a letter to Ribbentrop he wrote February 21, 1936. In that letter he says,

“As I told you, I have no great affection for the Jews. It is possible to trace their participation in most of those international disturbances which have created so much havoc in different countries, but on the other hand one can find many Jews strongly ranged on the other side who have done their best with the wealth at their disposal, and also by their influence, to counteract those malevolent and mischievous activities of fellow Jews” (97)

This is a perfect example of someone making what appears to a gesture of fairness, but is actually just a tone of fairness, all the while endorsing Nazis. Fairness shouldn’t be a tone, but an ethic.

There are people (and I try to be one of them) who can say, “I disagree completely with this argument, but it is a valid argument.” This is kind of old-school logic: being true and being valid aren’t the same. That appeal to fairness is wildly different from what Londonderry is here doing. He is engaged in the kind of bothsidesism that nurtures genocide. He is saying that, on the whole, the logic of the Nazis genocidal policy is legit, but don’t go overboard.

Londonderry argued for listening to Nazis, not because he was, in principle, committed to listening to all groups, let alone holding all groups to the same ethical or rhetorical standards—he didn’t try to be fair to the French, let alone to Churchill. He didn’t argue for listening to Nazis in order to understand how to argue against them. He argued for sympathizing with Nazis because he didn’t really have a problem with their wanting a country free of Jews.

As it turns out, being nice to Hitler didn’t change Hitler’s policies. It rarely does. Hitler’s rhetoric (public and interpersonal) was all about feelings; he was all about making “Germans” (his supporters) feel that he was looking out for them, and he enacted policies that got his supporters short-term benefits. He was like a con artist who seduces someone by wining and dining them, all the time on the credit cards he’s stolen from the mark. What mattered about Hitler wasn’t how he felt about Germany, whether he made people feel proud to be Germans, or even, really, how he felt about Jews or Poles or Sinti or Slavs—what mattered is that his policies ensured that Germany would find itself in a two-front war, a kind of war it couldn’t win, unsustainable economic policies, serial genocides. As they say, fuck Hitler’s feelings.

When someone says we should be nicer to Nazis as though that will persuade Nazis to be less Nazi, they’re saying they don’t really have a big problem with Nazi policies. What’s wrong with Nazis isn’t how Nazis feel; it’s the policies they support. We should stop arguing about Nazis’ feelings, and just oppose policies that help Nazis. Fuck their feelings.