Replies

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.

>>in that sense, Nazi’s and commies are virtually indistinguishable.

OK, I'll just post the Hayek quote from my profile page, it's germane to the thread, since the idea behind your comment keeps coming up. Realize this was an educated contemporaneous observer writing just after the events.

Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."

No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.

-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Realize that Hayek's "liberal of the old type" is what we today would term a conservative, that the collectivist Left in this country has appropriated the term "liberal" to hide from socialist and communist.

Nathan Bedford's Third Maxim of Politics: Culture Trumps Politics and Bottom up Beats Top-Down.

In the wake of World War II Hollywood knew who the bad guys were but at the end of the Cold War Hollywood never got the memorandum about the Soviets, Cubans, Chinese, or the North Koreans, at least not to the same degree. This is understandable, if you are perchance a Jewish producer or director financing or directing a movie, your natural inclination is to portray mass murderers of Jews for what they were. The same tendency obtains throughout the media.

But a political writer on the right who does not have a culture receptive to conservative values because it has been conditioned by movies and television, should choose his historical examples very carefully. When Mark Steyn chooses to make his point by pointing to Nazis rather than Soviets he makes his choice drawing on his consummate literary skills but I would rather he considered his metaphors in the light of how the choice might condition the electorate.

Our media discourse has come to a point at which a conservative observer must ask, are there no villains on the left? It is in this that context I urge conservative spokespeople (there's little point in exhorting right-wing moviemakers or television producers because there are so few of them) to choose a left-wing example to exemplify evil whenever practicable.

I could extend the same observations to media portrayals of Christian men of God. These people, especially if Protestant, are invariably depicted as hypocritical and/or overbearing and absurd. Jewish prelates are portrayed with a kind of bemused respect. Generally, Catholic priests are treated better than Protestant ministers; Catholic nuns are treated better than Catholic priests but one senses that all of that is changing rapidly as nice distinctions among Christians disappear and we are all tarred with the same brush.

When a conservative writer reaches out to make a parallel example of a villain, let him look to a secularist, to an atheist, to a hater of Christians of whom there is certainly a surplus. When Christian life is distorted in movies let us react in indignation claiming all the rights of a defamed minority, in short, demanding that Christians be accorded the same decent respect enjoyed by leftist "victims" who are currently in fashion.

When a movie portrays a hero reaching deep within his inner character to overcome all obstacles to save the world and get the girl, let us routinely point out that Hollywood virtually never chooses to have a hero be motivated by his faith. It is okay for heroes to be motivated by emotional love, Freudian childhood misunderstandings with their fathers, bereavement, or even homosexuality, anything but the courage that one might derive from Christian faith.

When I was a lad it was still the practice to find examples in the Bible to illustrate a point or to illuminate a side of character. Today, even conservative writers are liable to look to a character in Star Wars or in a Harry Potter novel to make a point. The tendency is to secularize our mythology and that results in secularizing our epistemology. A secular mythology inevitably produces a leftist electorate. We lose the myth, we lose the language, we lose the election.

We still have a First Amendment which gives us the power to choose our mode of expression. We conservatives should use it to fight our corner. We are in a culture war, a war conceived by the Frankfurt school, implemented by Saul Alinsky and waged by Barak Obama. The weapons in this war include language, metaphor, myth and historical examples.

The left rarely fails to deploy these weapons to their advantage. We must do the same.