Via Instapundit, we delve into the wayback machine to April, 2002, back before Matthew Yglesias learned to hate George Bush.  Ol’ Matt tosses out for consideration a — I don’t think “time-honored” is really an apt expression — resolution of what we might call the “Palestinian Question.”

This is what Matt submits for consideration:

I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied territories.   * * *  All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It’s not like there’s not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it’s just that the other Arab leaders don’t want to cooperate.

He’s right, of course; forced expulsions of mass population groups are humanitarian disasters.  It’s not by accident that I phrased it as “the Palestinian Question,” with its echoes of “the Jewish Question.”  It was, after all, on this day in 1941 that Hermann Goering instructed Heinrich Himmler to began preparations for the Final Solution.  That instruction resulted in the Wannsee Conference in January of 1942 and . . . well, world history knows the rest.

On the other hand, and this is a sobering Other Hand to contemplate:  Among the less fortunate consequences of Wilson’s, Lloyd George’s, and Clemenceau’s fiddling with the borders of Eastern Europe in 1919 was the existence of enormous groups of — shall we say — ethnically inconsistent groups in the new countries established by the treaties that ended the Great War.  The Sudeten Germans are only the most historically infamous.  In truth there were pockets of people all over that part of the world who were linguistically and culturally distinct from their surrounding populations.  Poland, which was re-created for the first time since 1795, was a mish-mash of Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians (I did a will a number of years ago for a Polish-Ukrainian fellow), and sundry other groups.  Hungary was speckled with non-Magyar populations.  The Slovaks themselves were tack-welded together with the Czechs.  And those are just the examples I can think of sitting here at my computer.  Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of the South Slavs, had Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and Albanians.

The result was pretty much as you might predict.  Politics, in addition to absorbing the poisonous brew of communism and class conflict unleashed by the war’s end, also broke very strongly on nationalistic and ethnic lines.  Not to be too blunt about it, but it hamstrung the new societies.  All the strife and mutual suspicion that had been — and not entirely successfully, either — bottled up by the crushing weight of centuries of Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern rule exploded over the land.  Precisely at the time when the world was radically changing beneath everyone’s feet, and by “everyone” I include the United States, and new and creative thinking became an even greater necessity, those countries were mired in bogs of ethnic conflict.

It is, I will suggest, a nearly universal phenomenon that conflict brings to the forefront the most extreme positions of all factions.  This is true of purely political conflict (witness what’s going on in the United States today); it’s true of military conflict (in conflicts as divergent as the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, the Great War, and the communist take-over of China you can observe the steady rise, with the length and desperation of the struggle, of the most hard-boiled, ruthless, and unscrupulous commanders and factions); it’s true of class conflict (Hayek outlines the process in The Road to Serfdom).  And sure enough, it’s what we can observe unfolding across Eastern Europe during the inter-war period.

Not that any particular population group escaped a scorching in the Second World War, but, as is also depressingly typical, the ones across whom the storms lashed most fiercely were those perennial outsiders: the Jews and (to a much lesser extent because there were so many fewer of them) the Gypsies.

Americans, and even Western Europeans, tend to entertain the fond recollection that The War in Europe Ended May 8, 1945.  Well, the war may have ended, but the fighting and the suffering sure as hell didn’t.  The Poles turned on the few surviving Jews.  Pretty much everyone who wasn’t German turned on the pockets of Germans.  And the Soviets bestowed their ministrations on everyone.  And then it started.  Long lines of civilians, pushing prams, hand-carts, or wagons.  Or just carrying a battered suitcase, with everything they owned that wasn’t on their backs in it.  Young and old, off they marched, away from places where their ancestors had lived for centuries.  The Sudeten Germans had settled in Bohemia something like 800 years before.  The Poles in what became the western reaches of the Soviet Union had been there even longer.  The sundry ethnic groups spattered across the former Austro-Hungarian empire had been on their lands for similarly impressive periods.

No matter.  In 1982 I went to the Deutsches Museum in what was then still East Berlin.  I remember seeing one of the placards the Poles put up in Prussia.  Every German had 24 hours to leave town, taking only what could be hand-carried.  Just like that.  In fairness to the Poles, the exact same thing was happening to their east, as millions upon millions of them were kicked out to make room for the Soviets.  The numbers involved were prodigious.  Just among the Germans, somewhere between 12 and 14 million people were on the move in 1945-47.  Add to them millions of Poles, sundry Slavic groups, and of course the forced repatriations to the Soviet Union, and it’s easy to believe the figure I saw once (my memory is a bit fuzzy and I can’t recall where I saw it) that something like ten percent of the gross population of Europe was on the road, mostly on foot, and uniformly on a one-way trip.  In contemplating the physical reality of that process, we ought not forget that the winter of 1945-46 was one of the coldest in recorded European history (George Bush hadn’t invented global warming yet, after all), and the fighting had absolutely played hell with the planting and harvest for well over a year.

All in all, I think Yglesias’s point about it being a humanitarian disaster is fully justified.  In fact the only reason we don’t remember it more is because of what it immediately followed.  With the smoke — metaphorically — still rising from the ovens at Auschwitz, and the rubble still smoldering at Dresden, Warsaw, and dozens upon dozens of other Eastern European cities, what are the tribulations of a couple dozen million refugees?

But behold!  For all its post-war trauma, the one thing that Europe has not had to deal with since 1945 has been the ethnic strife that plagued it before the war.  All that civilian suffering at least produced largely homogenous populations which had the social cohesion to work through their challenges.  Just by way of example, it is no accident that it was the Poles who in the Solidarity movement set the first charges that exploded Soviet rule . . . nor should we underestimate the importance in that development of their adherence to their Roman Catholic faith, a church headed by (I’ll suggest this is one of the most fortunate coincidences in recent Western history) a Polish pope.  With one exception — the Velvet Divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks — the lands that formerly relished nothing so much as a street fight between the Party of Ethnic Group A and the Party of Ethnic Group B, all to be followed by a quick pogrom through the Jewish Quarter, have been freed of at least the endless ructions and violence of ethnic strife.  And notice what’s now happening:  As Europe has been over-run with unassimilated adherents of the Religion of Peace, who periodically turn out to shoot at the police and burn cars and buildings, all the while sucking on the public tit of the European Welfare State, the ethnic strife is returning.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern to what happens when you have significant populations of non-assimilated ethnic groups embedded in societies that uphold irreconcilable value systems.

The unassimilated Arabic populations of Israel’s territory (and I expressly include Gaza and the West Bank as Israeli territory; they conquered it from countries trying to destroy Israel: when you pick a fight and lose it, that’s what happens, viz. you lose territory and you’re entitled to zero sympathy) harbor for their chief ambition the physical destruction of Israel and the physical extermination of its Jewish population.  They are willing to stop exactly nowhere in the pursuit of this goal.  They put rocket launchers in schools and hospitals.  They use their own population as human shields.  And they will never give up.

So however awful it may be to ask the question, and whatever may be the implications for us all in contemplating the issues raised by that question, I think Yglesias’s question deserves a hard-boiled look:  Which humanitarian disaster is worse: the present one or one involving the forcible removal of these people?

[Updated (05 Aug 14)]:  In fairness I ought to observe that the former Yugoslavia in fact has experienced traumatic and bloody ethnic strife since 1945.  And the reason?  Well, after World War II it did not go through the “ethnic cleansing” process that Eastern Europe did.  So when communism collapsed and there was suddenly no longer a common boot on everyone’s neck, all the checkerboard population groups looked about and . . . got down to business.  All of which would suggest that what we’re witnessing in Israel is not unique to the peoples involved or the specifics of their conflict.  Depressing.

This past June 20, a young woman — a girl, in fact, freshly minted as a high school graduate — from Alabama was on a trip to Europe.  On what seems to have been the last day of her trip, she visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious death camp (death by gas for those who didn’t make the screening, death by work for those who did).  And she took a “selfie,” which she posted to her Twitter account.

The picture shows her smiling, with an ear bud in her right ear.

Hoo boy.

For whatever reason (she apparently isn’t the only person to have taken a picture of herself at that place), her picture went viral.  And the political correctness police dropped on her like the hand of doom itself.  She got thousands upon thousands of negative re-tweets, some including threats.

The Washington Post has an article on the whole fiasco, here.  While the WaPo’s author excepts to the torrent of hate-mail washing over this teenager’s head, she still can’t let slip a chance to burnish her own PC street cred:  “That doesn’t make it ‘okay,’ to borrow an un-nuanced, Web-ready phrase. In truth, it’s hard to think of anything less sensitive, less appropriate or less self-aware than a ‘selfie in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp’ — smiley — as if the suffering of millions of people was somehow subsumed by Breanna’s own personal narrative. She was there, sure, but so were tens of thousands of others, and her willful minimization of that fact is, frankly, pretty gross.”

“Less sensitive.”  “Less appropriate.”  “Smiley.”  “Subsumed by Breanna’s own personal narrative.”  “Pretty gross.”

OK.  Let’s unpack exactly what happened, one element at a time, and examine which, if any, are insensitive, inappropriate, or imply that the horror of what happened there is somehow “subsumed in” her “own personal narrative.”  First, the elements:  Someone from eastern Alabama (kudos, I suppose, to our drenched-in-morality authoress for passing up the chance to take a swipe at Alabama as such; that must really have taken some effort) travels a good chunk of the way around the globe, to a place where 25 years ago it would have been nearly impossible for her to go.  I know people who travelled in Iron Curtain Poland, and getting there — unless you were part of a tour group — was made extremely difficult.  And she (i) takes a picture (ii) of herself (iii) wearing the clothes she was wearing that day, and (iv) smiling, which she then (v) posts on her Twitter feed so that her friends can see that she did something she’d undertaken to do for her dead father’s memory.

What, precisely, is objectionable about taking a picture with one’s own hands at Auschwitz?  Our propriety-sodden authoress might poke her damned head outside the Beltway and figure out that there are still a huge number of people in the world who, even if they aren’t actual Holocaust deniers, still just can’t get their minds around the notion that it actually happened.  In specific, identifiable places, to named people, and at the hands of identifiable people.  Slaughtering 6 million humans in the course of six or so years (the real large-scale killings didn’t start until the war, in 1939, even though the Nazis had been in power since 1933), just because, is not an easy concept to internalize, especially not in a country in which those sorts of things are not part of our own native history.  Europeans have been slaughtering Jews on an organized basis since the 1300s; ordinary people there can understand that it actually did happen because it was the endstation of a long and disgusting trip.  The potential of photoshopping notwithstanding, nothing quite says, “No shit; this was real,” like a photograph taken at the place where something happened, and one taken by the person who’s showing it to you.  I would submit that it’s especially important for everyone who visits a place like Auschwitz to take as many pictures as possible, and to show them around to everyone who’ll sit still long enough.

And is it inappropriate for a picture of oneself to be taken at Auschwitz?  “I was there.  I saw this.  This was — is — real.  I’m not making this up.”  I’m among the least photogenic people I know, so I generally avoid having my picture taken, anywhere, out of consideration for my fellow humans if no other reason.  But a picture of oneself is a reminder, of the person one was, that day, of the thoughts in one’s mind at that time.  We don’t keep diaries any more.  We’re insufficiently literate, for one thing, and for another we just have too much Stuff coming at us.  Life these days is like drinking from a fire hose.  So we take pictures, and we rely on these visual records to prompt the flow of memory.  One day this girl will be 60, barring accident, illness, or injury.  She may never have a chance to go back to Auschwitz.  By then it may be a broad-brush outline memory for her.  Until she sees a picture of herself, 18 years old, with all her mistakes still ahead of her, eager to take on the world on her terms, its own, or anyone else’s.  And then she’ll see a picture of herself, taken one year to the day after her father’s death (I want to ask Capt. Superiority at the WaPo if her own father is dead; is he, you dim bulb?).  And she’ll remember the sound of the wind blowing between the cell blocks, the crunch of her step on the gravel.  She’ll maybe remember how the place smells now — trees, grass, flowers outside, and that peculiar old-building scent inside, and how she tried to imagine all those scents overborne by the stench of death and burning human bodies.  The rooms full of luggage, shoes, hair, and so forth will come back to her, and she’ll recall what she was thinking that day.  Was she grieving for her father?  Was she thinking about the agony in all those children at the train platform, as they were separated from their own fathers for the last time?  Did she imagine that grief, that fear, multiplied 6 million times over?  No, if it would not be inappropriate to write a diary entry about one’s visit to Auschwitz, then it is not improper for a picture to be taken of oneself on that same visit.

Was it inappropriate that she took the picture herself?  Bullshit.  Except in the most unusual situations, the specific identity of a picture-taker is irrelevant.  Does it matter that Ansel Adams was the specific human being whose finger snapped the shutter on his photographs?  No.  Notice that this point is entirely distinct from the ambiguities of perspective, immersion, and distance which are implied in all significant photography.  But “the observer” is a conceptualized figure.  Whether the observer is male or female, old or young, a paragon of virtue or Joe Stalin himself just doesn’t matter.  We contemplate the suggestions and the messages of the picture completely independently of such inquiries.  So no, it cannot honestly be said to matter that she was the one who took her own picture.

Perhaps, on the other hand, there is in fact a significance to her having taken the picture.  It’s unlikely that this girl travelled all the way to Auschwitz on her own.  I’m just going to guess that she was with a bunch of other people, mostly of her own age.  Maybe she knew them before the trip, maybe not.  But look at the picture; there’s no one in the background.  We can’t see what’s in her own field of view (that’s one of those teasing ambiguities about photography; all we see is the camera’s perspective (there are, by the way, some incredibly challenging jigsaw puzzles where you’re given a picture and you have to put the puzzle together, not of that picture, but of what someone in that picture would be seeing, looking out)), but for all we can tell, she’s alone.  On the anniversary of her father’s death.  Gee, who could have seen that coming?  Maybe she slipped off, by herself, to take that picture to send back for the people who knew not only her, but her father as well.  This moment was her private moment of memory for the dead, a way station on her path of grieving (Did you call your father today, you puffed-up Correctness Tsarina? I bet you Breanna wishes she could.).  Remind me again what about Auschwitz makes it morally objectionable as a place for private grief?  For a sense of loss in contemplating those taken from this life too early?  Again, we cannot stand in the shoes of those victims as they were hustled out of the train cars, stumbling over those who’d died on the trip.  We cannot know what was in their hearts as they were ripped from each other’s arms.  The most we can do is cast about for such pale simulacra as we can of that pain, that fear (You reckon a 17-year-old is afraid as she watches her father die, you mouth-breathing, booger-eating, drunk-on-your-own-sensitivity imbecile?), that grief, and think:  I know what my own feels like; how much more terrible must theirs have been?  But that would have required someone who can’t do better for a job than working for the WaPo to think herself into someone else’s shoes.  Someone from Alabama (eeeewwwww!!!).  How much easier is it to punch the PC card at the door, sally up to the bar, and order up a tall, cool drink of I’m Better Than You.

With an ear-bud in her ear.  Notice it’s a single ear bud.  I realize that the Empress of All Seemliness may not be hep to the most recent technology, but entertainment ear buds come in pairs.  You know, stereo?  Been around a while, that audio technique.  But Breanna’s got a single ear bud in her ear.  Now, I further realize that our WaPo authoress probably doesn’t get outside the Beltway much if she can help it, and if she does, it’s to some self-absorbed place like New York, but I’ll just go ahead and give you a clue, you moron:  Auschwitz is in Poland.  They don’t speak English in Poland.  If you don’t have the money to pop for a tour guide, what you do is you rent a little machine with an English-speaking voice that walks you through the place, and tells you what you’re looking at, and why it’s significant.  You know, so you can understand it.  Sort of like might seem a good idea to a girl from Alabama who’d actually studied on the Holocaust to the extent of seeking out a real honest-Injun survivor to interview.  But why the ear-bud?  Well, again, our WaPo-staffer might not understand this, but there are a lot of different places in this world, and in most of those places they speak, you know, different languages.  So that if you had a little sound-stick (like I rented at the Dresden Festung in 2011 — although I rented mine in German), with the sound coming out of a speaker, (a) the visitor has only one hand free, and (b) you have an absolute Babel of tour-guide voices.  In a place like Auschwitz, where silence would be the ticket, one would think.

So I’d be extraordinarily surprised if that ear-bud is not connected at its other end to a small electronic tour guide.  If I’m wrong (I could be) I’ll buy our WaPo authoress a beer.  My choice.

Breanna’s smiling.  I don’t know how many different ways she might smile in ordinary life, but this appears to be a posed smile, such as you’d expect to find in any posed photograph.  At the risk of returning again to a theme, and on the assumption that our WaPo drone hasn’t yet had a plexiotomy (that’s a Marine Corps term, honey; look it up and go get you one, because you obviously are desperately in need of it) and so can’t see around her with any clarity, Breanna’s from Alabama.  I guarantee you that she was brought up that young ladies do not scowl at cameras.  She was taught by her mother, and her grandmother, and her aunts, and her older sisters (if she has them), and the ladies at her church, and her schoolteachers, that young ladies when addressed in public or when appearing in photographs present themselves in a cheerful mien.  Now, maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe this is not Breanna’s I’m-in-a-photograph-now-everyone-look-pretty smile.  Maybe this is her I’m-smiling-for-daddy-’cause-I-told-him-I-was-going-to-come-here-and-now-I-have smile.  Maybe this is her I’m-smiling-so-I-don’t-cry-about-my-daddy-he’s-been-gone-a-year-and-God-I-miss-him-and-here-I-am-surrounded-by-all-this-apparatus-of-death-and-why-do-people-do-each-other-this-way-and-why-can’t-I-have-my-daddy-back-I-miss-him-so-much-and-I’m-only-18-and-there’s-so-much-I-never-got-to-say-to-him smile.  Maybe she took this picture, which she obviously took to send back to her friends and family thousands of miles away, to say, “I love you all and thank you for letting me go on this trip.”  Someone explain to me why any or all of those reasons for smiling into a camera, at Birkenau or anywhere else, are objectionable.

And so Breanna posted her photograph on her Twitter feed.  She might have sent it via text, but then we have no idea of the number of people she needed to send it to, and texting requires using the telephone, and not the data service (when travelling abroad, that can make a huge difference in what you’re charged).  E-mail?  She might not have an e-mail with sufficient buffer size to send the photograph.  Maybe she had people whose e-mail addresses she didn’t keep in her phone, and who needed to get it.  Maybe a teacher, or her preacher.  “Just follow me on Twitter while I’m on my trip; that way you can see my pictures right away.”  Gosh what an awful thing to do.  I’m just going to pose a couple of questions to the Goddess of Grief (she’s obviously not very inquisitive but I’m going to ask her to fake it for a moment):  How many high school girls of your acquaintance set out to go to a place like Auschwitz?  How many even want to think that a place like Auschwitz exists, or what happened there?  How many go so far as to hunt up and interview (not just shake hands with, so you can say you did it, but actually sit down and talk) a Holocaust survivor?  So what’s the likelihood that this particular high school girl, who did all of that, and a full year before she graduated (remember she was studying on the Holocaust with her father before he died, and he’s been dead a year now), entered upon this particular part of her trip in a spirit of frivolity or pornographic interest in massive death?  Huh?  Riddle me that, Batdoofus.

So, now having explained things to the WaPo at much greater length and in much greater depth than they’re used around there, let’s examine precisely what reason there is to think that this girl from Alabama’s taking a picture of herself at Auschwitz and sending it back to people she cares about and who care about her was some attempt to “subsume” the horrors of the Holocaust in “her own personal narrative.”  <sound of crickets>

In a place in which so many families were destroyed — families which had somehow, miraculously, hung together through years of persecution, hunger, beatings, expropriations, fear, suspicion (remember that Auschwitz as specifically a death camp didn’t really get cranking until the last months of the war; by the time Auschwitz-Birkenau opened three-quarters of all Jews who would be slaughtered had already died, mostly in the Operation Reinhard facilities like Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, which fewer than 100 are known to have survived, in comparison to the 100,000 Auschwitz survivors) — is it really inappropriate for someone to think of her own family?  Especially when that family is now missing so important a member (Call your father, you snot-faced troll of a reporter, and rejoice that you can.)?

You see, places like Birkenau, Babi Yar, the Katyn Forest, the Lubyanka, Sukhanovka, and other places where humans have ripped off the mask over the centuries are of more than historical interest only to the extent that they awaken within us moving forces to take with us into the world.  The dead are gone and we cannot recall them.  It would be idle to speak of somehow “redeeming” their deaths; you can’t do that.  Dying packed in a swarming, screaming, defecating, sweating, choking mass of people in a gas chamber cannot be redeemed.  The most we can do is salvage something of humanity from the wreckage of what happened there.  What is there of humanity to be salvaged from the contemplation of such places?  Well, we can be reminded of our common humanity and the bonds that tie us each to all others.  We can look at those railroad tracks, that ominous iron gate, the crematoria, the death chambers themselves, and we can understand that real people — people alarmingly just like us — did this, and they did this to people who were — are — our brothers and sisters.  And we can appreciate, perhaps, our living brothers and sister all the more.  And we can have awakened our awareness of the forces of evil, hatred, callousness, and detachment that lurk in every last damned one of us — that means you too, scrivener — and we can promise the dead of Auschwitz that we shall learn from them, and we shall act on our lessons.  Where do those lessons first express themselves?  In the closest circle of our acquaintance: our friends, families, and the people in our communities.  For an 18-year-old that’s still going to be a pretty small circle (among other details not paid attention to in this article is what it means to be 18 years old).

We preserve places like Auschwitz-Birkenau precisely so that as many people as possible can come there and learn those lessons, that they may then go forth into the world, carrying those lessons with them.  The answer to a place like Birkenau is love.  If it is anything else then we have missed the mark; we are merely rubber-neckers to others’ suffering.  If the horrors of Auschwitz prompt an expression of love, you’re just going to have to do a much better job of explaining to me why that is cause to shoot out my lips and shake my head, saying, “This girl stepped over the line,” than ol’ Ms. Pickle-Nipple from the WaPo has done.  I’m hanged if I can see how that’s “pretty gross.”

Go spit on your hands, lady, and get a goddam grip on reality.

Well.  Fancy this.  Children (especially boys, by the way) need to move more.  In all dimensions.  Failure to move leads to physically weakened bodies and sensory systems, which prevents them from . . . you know . . . learning.

Forty-five years ago we put men on the moon.  The men (and most of them were men, back then) who did this pulled it off with access to less computing power than is now available on-board in a previous-generation iPhone.  They were working with slide rules.  They had gone to schools where they had to go without “diversity” sensitivity training.  Where they’d never had to prepare a video presentation on “environmental problems” in their neighborhood which just cried out for them to join ranks and march for the Cause.  Where they’d never had to learn about however-the-hell-many “pillars” exist in the Religion of Peace.  The literature books they read somehow managed to do without “transgressive” pieces designed to rub the authors’ perversions and hang-ups in the readers’ faces.  The folks who sent the Apollo missions out (and back) managed their accomplishments utterly ignorant of how wonderful a thing it is to be homosexual.  When they were young, boys got to settle things on the playground among themselves.  If they got caught there was a quick trip to the hallway with a teacher, a paddle or strap, and hands-around-the-ankles-young-man.  They’d not had “travel ball”; they’d played dodge ball at recess.  They’d not been dragged around to all manner of “enrichment” programs.  They’d never been herded into auditoriums there to be terrorized that unless they hectored their parents into disgorging all their money in taxes and subsidies for politicians’ friends’ businesses, the world would come to an end amid crashing waves of vastly larger oceans.  Every morning before school they’d pledged allegiance to the United States flag (or at least such of them as hadn’t sung the “Horst Wessel Lied” where they’d grown up).  When a foreign country had attacked us on our territory, they’d turned out in millions for the express purpose of so adjusting that country’s attitude that it would be a very long time indeed before they contemplated that shit again.  And they’d gone and done it.

Those, it seems, were the dark ages.

The rot that is now America’s schooling system isn’t peculiar to America.  I’ve written before about Germany’s blowing up a primary education system that was the envy of most of the rest of the world.  And doing so intentionally.  One thing we know for sure:  Those countries which mean us — and by “us” I mean Western Civilization, with its acceptance of precisely that “diversity” so relentlessly preached by the “education” mavens — no good at all are specifically not bringing up their children the way we do.  Red China, Russia, and the Middle Eastern klepto-theocrats are teaching their children to ride hard and shoot straight.  Whatever detracts from those abilities gets short shrift.

The prevalence of Western cultural values — even in parts of the world where its political values have no purchase — is not inevitable.  In terms of survivability there is nothing at all inherently superior about Western Civilization.  I’ll point out that twice in the last century it made a fair attempt to commit suicide, and was at least on the second occasion only saved from itself by virtue of some very fortunate circumstances.

The development of civic systems capable of expressing those Western civilizational values occurred overwhelmingly in the Anglosphere, and have only imperfectly been transplanted onto other soils.  I do not that think that a coincidence.  The ability to survive of a polis in which a central organizing principle is minding one’s own business, and the powers of coercion allowing that to occur, is a luxury to be enjoyed only in those societies who by and large need not spend the bulk of their energies defending themselves from attack from outside.  Defense of tribe and territory requires brutal subjugation of individuality to the life-and-death demands of combat.  Is it really an accident that those societies which have the sorriest records of crushing human aspirations and even existence are precisely those whose history over the course of centuries has been that of repeated invasion, conquest, bitter defense, and exploitation?  I’m thinking the Balkans, Hungary, Russia, Spain, and Germany.  Vienna — beautiful, artful, lyrical Vienna — was a fortress against the Turks until Franz Joseph ordered the destruction of the works.  In contrast, it was only in the Anglosphere, first in England and then in its overseas off-shoots, that society was able to erect political structures that successfully balanced the needs of government to protect with the citizens’ need to flourish.  I suggest this would never have been possible without the geographic accident of the English Channel, and the colonies’ separation by thousands of miles of deep water from those who would prey on them.

These days, the existence of those oceans, to say nothing of a mere 26 miles of shallow sea, is of nearly no consequence.  Churchill, in the introduction to his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, addresses his home island:  You came into existence by an accident of sea power.  You will die by an accident of air power.

In short, by inviting into our schools these forces of degeneration — and I’ll just go ahead, step right on out and say it:  American “education” is degenerate — we are replicating the behavior of the late Roman Empire.  Unwilling to defend itself, it invited the barbarians in and gave them land.  Yeah; that’s right:  The barbarians will protect us.  Remind me again how that worked out.  If Gentle Reader thinks Gibbon a bit too hard going, modern historical methods have produced some more digestible material.  Just by way of example, the latter-linked book contains some interesting ice-core analysis.  During the heyday of the Roman Empire, traces of chemicals produced by copper smelting are discernible in ice cores from Greenland.  Within the space of a few generations after The Fall, that evidence vanishes.

Am I hyperventilating?  I sure hope so.  But it is a failure of human perception to accept one’s surroundings as being both inevitable and permanent.  ‘Twas always thus, and always thus ’twill be.  We forget how quickly we can forget.  After the Fall of Rome, stone building vanished from the European continent for a matter of centuries.  Literacy vanished from England.  Whole ranges of useful arts were extinguished and had to be re-learned in later centuries.  In our day and in this country, there are enormous swathes of large societal groups — specifically, American blacks — which in the course of 50 years have lost the socio-cultural skills to maintain themselves.  A number of years ago I knew someone who was a social worker in a large Northeastern city.  She observed that there were families in her office’s case load in which it had been four generations since anyone in the extended family had held a job.  What is the likelihood of any member of those families re-learning the skills to get a job, hold onto it, and advance to something better?  Modern social research is reminding us how critical for children’s learning and socialization is the presence in the household of both biological parents.  When 80% of your children are born out of wedlock, and not infrequently to multiple and in many cases unknown fathers, what does that mean for those children’s chances to acquire those skills?  Moynihan was a Cassandra.

What happened to American blacks can happen to any group and can happen to the entire country. Vignettes like the blog post linked are canaries in the coal mine.

. . . And no, I don’t mean the “Marine Corpse,” as Dear Leader famously said.  Perhaps I ought not bust on him too severely; after all, I too have no French, unlike German, which in addition to Austrian is also spoken in Austria.  Or something like that.  And racism!!

According to these chaps over at Bloomberg, libertarians are “the new communists.  No, really.  Someone actually got that statement not only published, but put into the headline.  Up is the new down!

The quality of reasoning is laid out right up front:  “Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe.”  And just what specific catastrophes are we talking about, the “same kind” of which we may expect if we go down the libertarian path?  The authors of that article don’t say, so I will trot a few out:  Holodomor (3-7 million dead); Great Purge (something along the lines of 750,000 dead); Great Leap Forward (45-60 million dead); Khmer Rouge (25% of gross population slaughtered).  Those are just the ones that spring immediately to mind.  I haven’t mentioned the death toll in the Gulag (which during the war approached 1% per day, system wide); I haven’t mentioned the execution cellars of the Soviet Civil War; I haven’t mentioned the millions of “kulaks” who were carted off into the taiga and dumped out to freeze or starve where they landed (“special settlers” is what they were called).  I haven’t mentioned the Belomor, or the Moscow-Volga canal.

Mind you:  Those horrors of human cruelty are what these authors are promising us would necessarily follow if we elected Rand Paul or Ted Cruz to be president.  Seriously.  That’s what they are representing as the inherent consequences of permitting individual liberty to maintain ascendancy over the demands of collectivism — “would lead to.”  Not “might” or “could” lead to, or “might so undermine our ability to act collectively that we could not resist” those outcomes, or even “would awaken the darkest desires of mankind, desires whose logical expressions have been seen in,” or similar dire predictions.  No; as night follows the day, so death on the Maoist/Stalinist scale would follow the take-over of the levers of power by the folks who want to . . . destroy exactly those levers.

It’s as if, for these authors, it was Koch Industries which smashed the kulaks as a class, or Sheldon Adelson who marched everyone wearing glasses out into the killing fields, there to put bullets through the bases of their skulls.  Do they think it was Hobby Lobby which stripped the Ukraine of foods, literally down to the last stalks of wheat in places, and then forbid the people to leave in search of food?  Was it Chick-Fil-A which starved the Chinese peasantry to death in their tens of millions by stealing their food?  Do these authors not understand that for each and every one of those catastrophes, it took the massively organized, focused might of the state to accomplish it?  Do they really think that it was just lone bureaucrats wandering into villages in the Ukraine in 1932 who demanded all the grain?  Bullshit.  It was entire teams of grain requisitioners, backed by the Red Army and the NKVD, and their machine guns and executioners, who made it happen.  Marshal Tukhachevsky made his bones crushing the Russians peasants in the 1920s, at the head of divisions of the Red Army.

Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that their characterizations of Paul, Cruz, and the Kochs is correct, they cannot show how an emasculated state might accomplish what it took the very utmost effort from the most highly integrated, centralized states in history to achieve.

Having tried their hands at illogic, the authors then proceed to straw men and bogey men.  “Radical libertarianism assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish, when in fact cooperation is the height of human evolution.  It assumes that societies are efficient mechanisms requiring no rules or enforcers, when, in fact, they are fragile ecosystems prone to collapse and easily overwhelmed by free-riders.  And it is fanatically rigid in its insistence on a single solution to every problem: Roll back the state!”

Let’s just start shooting at random into the barrel.  Selfish and cooperation are not mutually exclusive.  That much was pointed out as long ago as the 1770s, by Adam Smith.  His insight was that the market is the only social mechanism capable of achieving widespread cooperation without coercion.  And it does.  History is littered with the wrecks of enterprises which failed to cooperate in the most basic of senses:  They failed to provide what their customers wanted, with the result that their customers went elsewhere.  Secondly, I’m not aware that libertarianism “assumes” that humans are capable only of selfish motivations.  What libertarianism does do is aim towards a system of social order that can work even if that is in fact all that humans have within them.  It’s all these pie-in-the-sky collectivist theories which require, in order to work, that people consistently entertain loftier ideals than the purely selfish.  Libertarianism aims for a social order that does not depend for its viability the realization of demonstrably false assumptions about how humans behave.

Societies are “fragile ecosystems prone to collapse,” unless presumably their members are shackled together by, and held in thrall to the power of, a state.  Well.  Let’s look at some societies which have actually collapsed without armed intervention from outside, and see if we can find some commonalities.  There’s the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and most of the 1990s.  There’s the China of pre-1911.  There was the Roman Empire of the 5th Century (true, there were the Germanic invasions, but — at the outset at least — they were invited in by the Romans precisely because the provinces were already degenerating into chaos).  1780s France.  And of course the Middle East today.  What do each of those examples have in common?  They were all, each and every last stinkin’ one of them, the product of decrepit tyrannical governmental systems.  In marked contrast, the United States of the Civil War remained a functioning society on both sides all the way through.  Even as Southern cities starved, there was no plundering, no rampaging mobs of AWOL soldiers.  In the North they even had two full federal election cycles (1862 and in 1864 a hotly contested presidential election).  Yes there were places, here and there, where bands of irregulars roamed and looted, but those were very limited.  The closest that either side got to “collapse” was the draft riots in New York City in July, 1863, and that was specifically a reaction against conscription, than which fewer more quintessentially governmental coercive measures exist.

But let’s explore that “prone to collapse” nonsense a little more.  Before 1917, most Americans had little contact with their federal government outside of the local post office.  The Interstate Commerce Commission regulated railroads and set freight rates (and by the way, heavily discriminated in favor of Northern goods travelling south, which were allowed to be transported at much lower rates than Southern goods travelling north), and in the early 1900s the regulation of foods and drugs began.  Even at the state level, in most of the states the hand of regulation was light indeed.  Even things like the “regulation” of Chinese laundries in an attempt to squelch their competition were decidedly local affairs.

And did American society “collapse”?  Was it “overwhelmed by free riders”?  At the risk of understatement, no and no.  How about Britain?  At what point prior to government top-down regulation did British society collapse?  In the British case there were in fact restrictions under which people labored, but if you look at them you’ll notice that most of them were of private origin, for example a landlord restricting what could be done with property ground-leased to tenants.

Societies even more free-wheeling than Britain and America likewise did not collapse under the burden or their “free riders.”  Australia, anyone?

Fanatically rigid about rolling back the state?  Here I’ll just observe that many, if not most, of the “problems” to which libertarianism addresses itself are problems which are themselves the creatures of government intervention in citizens’ interactions.  As an example, I’m unaware that there is such an animal as a “libertarian” response to or position on college sports and its exploitation of ignorant athletes for the colleges’ own gain.  For a libertarian each of the following would be an acceptable resolution, subject only to the caveat that no side held monopoly power over the other or had the ability to coerce participation: (i) the status quo, with athletes going unpaid; (ii) allowing colleges to pay their athletes; (iii) athletes organizing themselves to refuse to work (play) for colleges which did not pay them; or, (iv) the professional sports teams dealing directly with athletes at any age past majority, thereby by-passing the colleges entirely (much as major league baseball does, come to think of it).  For a libertarian the objectionable part would be the colleges’ being granted the authority to punish athletes and colleges which elected for responses (ii) or (iii), or governments forbidding the professional teams and the athletes from response (iv).

By like token, a libertarian is not distressed at sky-high rents in places like San Francisco or Silicon Valley.  How much rent someone is willing to pay for any particular-sized space on this earth does not concern a libertarian.  What does distress a libertarian is the extent to which these sky-high rents can be charged just because of governmental action which prevents would-be landlords from coming in to build additional housing stock.  If that works out to be a few, some, or a whole bunch of people that does not concern the libertarian; the prevailing rent at the point that people aren’t willing to spend the money to build more housing is what it is.  The statist solution so beloved of people like our two authors is to forbid landlords from charging more than $X for Y square feet.  The long-term outcome of that is well-illustrated in New York City.  Don’t let people charge what they can, and fewer people will build housing.  With less housing getting built, the older existing housing ages past the point at which you might expect it to be removed from the housing stock and replaced with something more suitable and up-to-date, and maintenance gets skimped on, so it physically deteriorates faster than it otherwise would, and remains out-of-date while doing so.  Begin mandating upgrades and maintenance so that people don’t get “forced to live in squalor,” as our authors would likely phrase it, and landlords get to where it is cheaper for them to shut the place entirely and get out of the business.  So you have vacant buildings.  Which get taken over by squatters, drug-dealers, and other people extruded by the above-board residential housing market.  The next step is to come in and condemn the buildings and raze them.  Well, what next?  Oh, that’s right: Let’s build . . . government housing!  How has that worked out, again?  Thomas Sowell has written on the dynamic from the economist’s perspective; P. J. O’Rourke has written about it from how it looks on the ground to the people who live in those places.

From straw men and bogey men, the authors then proceed to outright falsehood.  “Communism failed in three strikingly similar ways.”  Since the word “similar” in that sentence is nonsense unless you read in the phrase “to libertarianism’s failings,” I’m going to adopt that reading.  And what three failings does communism share with libertarianism?

First:  “It [communism] believed that humans should be willing cogs serving the proletariat.”  Ummmmm . . . guys:  That position is the diametric opposite of libertarianism, which holds that no person is inherently a cog serving anyone else, and should not be compelled to the service of anyone else in the absence of his free choice to do so.

Second:  “It assumed that societies could be run top-down like machines.”  Again, the diametric opposite of what libertarianism actually believes.  In fact, libertarianism specifically asserts that top-down organization of anything is likely to produce less-desirable outcomes than available alternatives because of the information-aggregation problem.  Hayek wrote extensively about exactly that.

Third:  “And it, too, was fanatically rigid in its insistence on an all-encompassing ideology, leading to totalitarianism.”  The first half of that statement is true; the second is actually diametrically opposed not only to what libertarianism seeks but to actual communist theory.  Communism held — however naively — the belief that upon the realization of communism the state would “wither” away.  We all know that’s not how it worked, and that’s not how its adherents when they took over their first country (Russia) intended it to work.  It’s why you see reference to “Leninism-Marxism” in their writings.  The Soviet state that was erected on the corpses of the Russian people was in that respect at least the antithesis of communist doctrine.  Since our quibble is with the authors’ mischaracterizations of libertarianism, though, let’s concentrate on whether human liberty is an “all-encompassing ideology.”  Well, to the extent that humans’ moral agency is considered to be an inherent attribute of humanity, I guess you can say it’s “all-encompassing.”  But that’s not the point:  The point is the question whether libertarianism is prescriptive, as communism was and is.  In fact it’s exactly the opposite, and it’s that opposition to prescription which means that it cannot lead to totalitarianism because the achievement of totalitarianism requires coercion of all.

So would a libertarian world be paradise on earth?  Most likely not.  Would it produce 100,000,000 or more corpses in less than 75 years (from 1917 to 1989), and untold brute misery and oppression for the survivors?  Absolutely not.

From straw men and lies, our authors next proceed to garden-variety libel.  The authors think they’re being clever by pointing out that the ideal of libertarianism “can’t be applied across a functioning society.”  What an insight, guys!  Who could’ve seen that?  Libertarianism does not assume that it can be applied in its purity.  I’m not aware of anyone who self-identifies as a libertarian, or even who is commonly understood to be a libertarian, maintaining that all governmental coercive power can be done away with.  Libertarianism explicitly recognizes, in fact, the necessity for coercive power (i) to prevent fraud (by which is meant the use of deception to obtain consent where it would not otherwise be granted), and (ii) to protect the physical lives and property of the people.  Beyond that, I’m still waiting for any such person to take a public position that does not recognize that “complete” (as in theoretically pure) liberty can never be achieved, but rather only asymptotically approached.  The authors describe Somalia as being the sort of failed state where “libertarianism finds its fullest actual expression.”  Errrrmmmmm . . . guys, Somalia is what happens under anarchy, in which the prevention of frauds and the protection of life and property no longer exists.  With libertarianism it has nothing at all in common.

But hist!  Our authors know precisely how a “President [Ron/Rand] Paul” would govern, or a Secretary [of the Treasury, presumably] Norquist would deal with the Internal Revenue Service.  He would “eliminate progressive taxation, so that the already wealthy could exponentially compound their advantage, as the programs that sustain a prosperous middle class are gutted.”  Apparently the United States did not have a prosperous middle class before the 16th Amendment, nor did anyone arrive at Castle Garden or Ellis Island carrying literally his entire store of worldly possessions in a suitcase, and thereafter climb to prosperity (and in many cases outright wealth) in his own lifetime.  And sure as hell none of his children did.  A “Koch domestic policy” would “obliterate environmental standards for clean air and water, so that polluters could externalize all their costs onto other people.”

Now, Gentle Reader might question this claimed degree of omniscience.  Gentle Reader might want to see some actual examples of those named persons’ having done things, or said things, which would support attribution of such objectives to them.  The expectation is heightened by the authors’ reference to “[t]he public record of extreme statements by the likes of Cruz, Norquist, and the Pauls” as leaving no doubt on the point.  Well, Gentle Reader is just going to have to take it on faith from these authors, because specifics there are none.  The authors tax the Pauls, the Norquists, and the Kochs of the world with “calling for the evisceration of government.”  I’m still waiting for a single example of such “radical libertarianism” from the mouths of any of them.

Further illustrating the fact that these authors haven’t been paying attention is their conflation of societal evolution and the growth of government.  “It [something the authors call ‘true citizenship’] is based on a reasonable conception of human nature that recognizes we must cooperate to be able to compete at higher levels.  True citizenship means changing policy to adapt to changes in circumstance.  Sometimes government isn’t the answer.  Sometimes it is.”  I’ll just remind the authors that the United States went from an overwhelmingly agrarian, dispersed population to a highly urbanized, industrialized, polyglot continental empire in slightly over 125 years.  From 1776 to 1901 was that short.  Old men in 1901 could remember in their youths meeting old men who were alive to hear the news from Philadelphia.  Was government action absent from that process?  Not at all.  In many instances it was precisely government action which facilitated that process, such as by granting railroads the power of eminent domain, or the Homestead Act.  The railroads are admittedly hard to square with “pure” libertarianism, but then I’m still waiting to hear of the first libertarian purist in either public life or private prominence.  And quite a bit of government action back then took the form of providing land for people to buy.  No one was forcibly re-settled, nor was anyone restricted in where he might settle, nor was anyone forbidden to feed himself and his family on the land settled.  The Northwest Ordinance required that public land be surveyed before it was sold, but I can’t see any aspect in which a libertarian, be he ever so pure, could take exception to that.

No one forced the American steel industry to upgrade its furnaces.  No one mandated that the Pullman company build cars of a particular specification, with certain amenities.  We didn’t have a Coast Guard or a Corps of Engineers to instruct the riverboat builders on minimum or maximum draft, nor were the captains instructed on where they may or may not land.  No one came along and forbade the new construction of wooden ships after a certain point, nor was the shift from sail to steam power a result of government mandate.   Even in the uproar following Sinclair’s The Jungle, it emerged that a great deal of what was being submitted as mandatory by the government was already being done by the larger meat packers.  Why?  Because for them it was worth it.  If ever there were a counter-example to these two authors’ musings, it is the history of the American Republic during those 125 years.

To return to the article’s title, if you want to argue with libertarianism, either on its own merits or as a viable/non-viable alternative to any other system of government, by all means do so.  But at least be honest about what it does and does not seek, and for God’s sake don’t so twist current facts and widely-known history to lie about it and equate it with communism, either in its theory or practice.

Pay no attention to those corpses.