The Stupidity of Sophisticates ... Mark Steyn

Steyn Online ^ | 7 July 2015 | Mark Steyn

[Rummyfan]

Last week, I swung by the Bill Bennett show to chew over the news of the hour. A few minutes before my grand entrance, one of Bill's listeners had taken issue with the idea that these Supreme Court decisions weren't the end and, if you just got on with your life and tended to your garden, things wouldn't be so bad:

Claudine came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out?

David Kelsey writes from the University of South Carolina to scoff at that:

In one corner, we have government recognition of marriage contracts between gays. In the other corner, we have Jews, Catholics, gays, their sympathizes [sic] and other undesirables being put in Nazi concentration camps.

One of these things is nothing like the other, unless you're a lunatic. Maybe the reason conservatives keep "losing everything that matters" is because they really can't tell the difference. Which causes increasing numbers of people to recognize them as lunatics.

Since you call me and Claudine "lunatics", allow me to return the compliment and call you an historical illiterate. If "one of these things is nothing like the other", it's because that's never the choice: It's never a question of being Sweden, say, vs being the Islamic State (although, if you're a Jew in Malmö, they're looking a lot less obviously dissimilar than you might think).

[Rummyfan]

Read the whole thing. It's chilling.

[Rummyfan]

There is a virus in the American bloodstream right now, frothing away at Miss Schumer, "Dukes of Hazzard", and a million other things none of which is particularly consequential in itself. But the trick of civilizational self-preservation is to spot this stuff when it's just small things and stop it at the itsy-bitsy stage. It's never one thing that is unlike the other, two opposing corners of civilization and barbarism, an express train rocketing from one to the other. It's always a continuum. The gleefulness of the culture warriors - the abandonment of even any pretense to the tolerance of differing views - does not speak well for where we're headed. The left takes the view that, in Kathy Shaidle's words, it's different when we do it. So banning Gone With The Wind is bad when Nazis do it but good when progressive liberals do it.

For some of us, that won't do: what matters is the abandonment of first principles - on free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion and much else - and when that happens you stand against it, because it won't stop there. It never does.

[Sun]

“..Claudine came on and said that’s what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How’d that work out?..”

Good point.

[beaversmom]

Gonna post that concluding statement one more time:

For some of us, that won’t do: what matters is the abandonment of first principles - on free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion and much else - and when that happens you stand against it, because it won’t stop there. It never does.

[aquila48]

Bookmark

[hosepipe]

Good screed by Mark... America is truly Bewitched..

Federal schools have done their deed..
Americans have been cretinized.. by much greater scope than I thought possible..

Alas; JayWalking by Jay Leno was showing the average American.. not a few stupid droolers..

[hosepipe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJlY9C7YWzI

[dr_lew]

Claudine came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out?

I constantly think of this. You know, the Anglo-American experience of that decade has been seriously expunged and revised. There was a lot of support for German and Italian fascism among the intellectual class, not just in the political, but in the cultural and philosophical realm. If you dig deep you can find remnants of it, even though it was all speedily abandoned once the war commenced.

[kaehurowing]

I’ve gotten to the point where I just call the homosexual spammers Nazis right off the bat. They go crazy.

[antidisestablishment]

It was never abandoned; only disguised and repackaged. After all, words matter.

No one would ever support eugenics or racism, but only a Nazi would stand against choice and multiculturalism!

[nathanbedford]

Mark Steyn continues to vie with Pat Buchanan as our most insightful modern columnist. Both of these men have pointed to the dangers of demographic decline and open immigration. Pat Buchanan has been an activist as well as a pundit and has won his spurs about a half century ago. Pat Buchanan's dire predictions have been so prescient and so terribly fulfilled that he becomes almost Churchillian in his warnings. Mark Steyn is clearly the more gifted writer and he is equally global in his grasp.

Not to detract from Mark Steyn's column but to simply request that we stop reaching for Nazi examples but for examples of heinous crimes arising out of the left. Surely Stalin offers a target rich environment for those who would summon the people to rally to liberty.

If one wants to compare the potential tyranny arising out of the homosexual movement with terrible examples in history one could consider the terror of the French revolution, the paranoia of Stalin's show trials, Chairman Mao's cultural Revolution, the excesses of the communists during the Spanish Civil War, or Castro's Cuba. The world is full of leftist examples of tyranny which have always been advanced under a banner of righteousness.

I make a suggestion because tyranny today is advancing from the left, not from the right. The examples in history should reflect that.

[sauropod]

bfl

[Boomer]

Excellent read. Really captures what is happening in America right now.

[Tax-chick]

Yes, it is.

[FreedomPoster]

Much of it didn’t disappear until 1941.

Why 1941? Why not earlier?

Because a significant component of the American Left was taking its cues from Soviet Communists. And they were allied with Germany until 1941, at which point the Red Left got on board with stopping Hitler.

The fact that the USSR helped in the dismemberment of Poland in 1939 gets forgotten by most.

[oblomov]

I suggest reading this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312427433?ie=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=283155&redirect=true&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper

The author is on the left, but the book is written with true scholarly objectivity. Schivelbusch draws several conclusions that should make admirers of FDR (and modern progressives in general) uncomfortable.

[FreedomPoster]

The Nazis, the National Socialists, were of the Left. See the Hayek quote on my profile page for a beginning on the reasons why. I’ve got a number of good links I can post later that explain why at length, better than I could.

I don’t disagree that examples from other totalitarians would be good.

[bigeggo]

I think Steyn wanted to address a continuum or progression of abuses and this was best done within the context of a single nation, e.g. USA vs. Germany. I do agree that it would be nice to have a change now and then, not always picking on the Huns.

[stevem]

Read the whole thing. It's chilling.

It is, but you can see it happening all around, every day. You have thought crimes everywhere handled "benignly" as are many of Steyn's examples. There is nothing benign about destroying a man's life, stealing his property and, eventually, putting him in prison because he won't behave like a proper slave and bake a cake as a judge and a "chancellor" ordered him to do.

So far many followers of NASCAR have told the NASCAR "leaders" to place it where the sun don't shine. What we need is NASCAR "leaders" to say that to the thought police.

We need a bunch of governor's to tell the Supreme Chancellors to rule however they like, but "Your rules don't apply in our state." Then they need to make that stick.

I don't know if the good guys can win in this, but they can at least die with dignity. Many of the good guys still have guns.

[Stosh]

Gotta disagree that comparisons to largely communist regimes provide a better approach.

While the use of comparison to Hitler and Nazism is well-recognized as what is often a desperate rhetorical crutch, I would (and will) argue that’s not the case with Steyn. Moreover, substituting Stalin and his ilk just sets one up for accusations of “neo-McCarthyism”, a reaction as knee-jerk as those engendered by bringing up the Nazi’s.

Moreover, once one hits the level of authoritarianism idealized by all these regimes, left/right distinctions pretty much fade away - granted, Hitler had a fondness for much that was traditional, but that didn’t include the Church (the Nazi’s gravitated to neo-paganism), and they were after all national *socialists*, albeit socialism that began more like the crony capitalism favored by our overseers rather than local soviets commandeering the means of production. At least for me, the heart of being a man of the right is a desire for less, not more statism - in that sense, Nazi’s and commies are virtually indistinguishable.

But the key distinction is that all the other examples of possible points of comparison involve regimes instituted by the sudden, drastic and generally violent upheaval of existing social structures. Steyn’s key point is that the horrors of Hitlerism came about through a steady perversion of the political and social structures then established. In about a generation, the Germans and Austrians went from the culture responsible for the “Ode to Joy”, Bauhaus, and sulfa drugs to the “Horst Wessel March”, Dachau, and Zyklon B - not in a dramatic overnight turn of events, but as the result of a steady progression (or regression) not just in the nature of the leadership, but in the national ethos.

If anything, Steyn doesn’t go far enough. In Walker Percy’s “Thanatos Syndrome”, there’s a short passage about a couple of Weimer-era doctors putting out a work on “The Defense of the Destruction of Life Without Value”. From intellectual positions like that, Walker implies, it’s only a short trip from the sterilization of the mentally defective to the systematic elimination of those judged to be the untermensch. In our country, where a regulation protecting the delta smelt can persist for decades in the face of a state-wide drought, while a regulation affecting an abortion clinic will get slapped down before the ink is dry those are lessons we probably should be noting.