Why We Can't Have Nice Things

I'm feeling cranky today, which means it's time to get started on this one.

NBC News reported on Thursday that a school administrator in Texas told schoolteachers who worried -- "terrified" was their word -- about the state's new "guidelines" regarding controversial issues in the classroom:

"Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979," [Gina] Peddy said in the recording, referring to a new Texas law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing "widely debated and currently controversial" issues. "And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust," Peddy continued, "that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives."

"How do you oppose the Holocaust?" one teacher said in response.

"Believe me," Peddy said. "That’s come up."

Oh, I believe her.  This is America, after all, and that is Texas.  There's a lot of Holocaust denialism in this country, so I'm not at all surprised to hear that some parents have objected to their kids being taught about the Holocaust.  I'm concerned that these teachers don't know it, just as so many good liberals are determinedly ignorant about a lot of things they don't want to think about.

The rest of the article is mildly entertaining, in a horrible kind of way.  The meeting where Gina Peddy said this was recorded secretly, so the reader gets to watch numerous Texas officials and politicians scrambling to do damage control, and doing it badly, because that's the American way.

Just as bad, and possibly worse, is the way liberals react to bigotry: by panicking.  For example, this "Journalist & historian. Pub musician. Dad. Husband. I also do dishes" posted on Twitter:

It’s important as a historian to help people understand why and how people in the past understood themselves and made decisions. It is important to understand antisemites and racists and genocidaires and slavers. But not to teach as opposing and equal views, as controversy.

Yeah, no.  I've seen numerous attempts to solve the problem by definition, as here.  The word "controversy" doesn't remotely mean that the views at issue are "equal," let alone equally valid, as I think David M. Perry wants us to believe.  Nor does "opposing" imply it, as Perry seems to assume.  It just means that there's a disagreement going on.  (For example, the pronunciation of "controversy," but I'm not going to go into that.)  I wonder why Perry gets that so wrong -- no, actually, I don't.

The real trouble with "opposing," I'd say, is that it implies that there are only two sides involved.  Usually there are more, and often all of them are arguably wrong.  For example, in American controversies over slavery, not all white abolitionists wanted emancipated slaves to be free and equal American citizens: there was widespread sentiment, including in high places, for relocating them to Africa. Many white liberals have found this fact unsettling and have tried to suppress it, because it made history less simple and more confusing.  To insist on telling the historical truth is not even close to saying that resettlement is an "opposing and equal" position, and one should be suspicious of anyone who tries to end a dispute by pretending otherwise.

I'm not saying that teachers should keep books denying the Holocaust in classroom libraries.  I'm saying that teachers had better be prepared to refute Holocaust denialism among their students.  The same goes for erasure of American white supremacy; of Creationism and Intelligent Design; of opposition to masking and vaccination to contain COVID-19; of antigay bigotry; of anti-Islamic bigotry; of any and all historical or scientific distortions, because sooner or later they will come up.  That has always been my answer, in speaking to classes, when students ask why elementary school kids should be taught about LGBT issues: because the kids themselves will hear about them in the media, from parents and other adults, and from other kids, so teachers should be prepared to address them. Take the current hullabaloo over Critical Race Theory: it's not really teachers who are ensuring that students will have questions about the topic, it's right-wing racist media and parents.

As the teachers told Gina Peddy, they are frightened for their jobs, and they have good reason to be.  I don't believe Peddy when she told them that she and school administrations would fight with them: some will, I suspect most will not.  That means that teachers will need allies among parents and students.  Unfortunately many liberal parents sit out school board meetings, even before Joe and Kammy took office and those parents announced their determination to take a four- (or better, eight-) year nap free of concern about politics.  It seems, for example, that when Central York district in Pennsylvania "essentially banned" anti-racist books, parents did nothing until the students mounted a protest.

What really baffles me is that there's an obvious response to right-wing initiatives demanding "differing perspectives" on controversial issues.  I'm all for differing perspectives, and liberals pretend (as right-wingers also pretend) to want them too.  If your school's curriculum teaches that slaves were mostly contented and well-cared for by their kindly masters, demand that differing perspectives be given a fair hearing.  Demand that your state-approved textbook be supplemented by the differing perspective of the 1619 Project.  If your school's curriculum teaches Intelligent Design, demand that the differing perspective of Darwinian theory be taught as well.  If your school teaches that the USA is a Christian nation, if your school teaches Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, if your school teaches abstinence from all sexual expression until marriage, there are differing perspectives, and these laws and "Academic Bills of Rights" actually require that they be made available to students.

Of course this all means more work for parents and teachers and administrators and students.  I've acknowledged before that there isn't time to teach all the conflicts.  (Note: when liberals and progressives sneer at the idea of "teaching the conflicts," remember that they are authoritarians at heart and really don't care about freedom, including your freedom to disagree with them.)  Exploring complex issues will take time away from the standardized testing that right-wing authoritarians have imposed on our educational system, precisely and often knowingly to take time away from classroom time for actual teaching.  That means we have to get rid of those standardized tests, no small task.  

But there's a lot of bad faith in liberal objections to teaching the conflicts.  Some of it comes from simple authoritarianism, as just noted.  Some of it comes from ordinary human laziness and ignorance. Do those liberals who oppose right-wing objections to their beliefs do so because they've examined the evidence and arguments themselves?  Almost never as far as I have observed.  Often they're actively misinformed, as with avowed Darwinists who are really Spencerians or even Lamarckians, rejecting actual Darwinian theory unawares in favor of scientific racism.  And in general, like their opposite numbers, they have no idea how to debate: they can declare their beliefs and principles against their opponents, but neither side knows how you proceed after that.  (This is why I'm critical of Noam Chomsky's strictures on debate: Yes, many or most people do it badly.  The remedy is not to refuse to do it at all, but to learn to do it better.  One could say the same thing about thinking.  Chomsky's somewhat hypocritical, since he himself often debates, and not always very well.)

One of my favorite pastimes is observing people online who misread satirical posts, often from self-labeled parody or satire accounts, by taking them at face value. This is often known as being Waltered, in honor of the great account Walter(OwensGranp.  Admittedly, actual responsible media are generally beyond parody, which may make it difficult to tell if New York Times Pitchbot's "Whether it's liberals wearing masks outdoors or conservatives teaching opposing perspectives on the Holocaust, both sides have an extremism problem" is real or Memorex, but damn it's fun to watch people who can't parse sarcasm.

To be fair, sarcasm puts a lot of strain on cognition.  It takes young readers years to learn to recognize it, especially in writing where they can't hear the tone of voice that may signal it, and many adults never do. But it's a very common tactic on social media, especially Twitter, and even after it has been explained to them many times, many adults persist in taking articles from the Onion as straight news.

Is it unfair to expect adults to recognize satire and irony?  I say it's not only fair but obligatory that they learn.  I've noticed that even scientists seem to dream of a world where all problems will present themselves neatly and cleanly, so that they can be solved like the most basic arithmetic problems.  (Though they also like to congratulate themselves on seeing past Nature's sneaky attempts at deception.)  Even when there's no attempt to deceive their opponents, debaters will often deceive themselves.  Critical thinking involves learning to recognize fallacy and error, even or especially when they aren't deliberate.  (It also involves learning to recognize fallacy in your own beliefs and arguments.)

So when liberals demand that satire and sarcasm be labeled for them so they won't get confused, they're not only undermining public discourse, they're announcing that they're too dull to read for comprehension above a first-grade level.  (I single out liberals here because everyone knows that this is true of conservatives.)  Yet these same people often congratulate themselves on their power to see past the lies and escape media brainwashing, which you can't do if you expect the media (let alone other people) to tell you in advance when they're lying or joking.  And don't right-wingers delude themselves that they have seen past the media lies?  If you read Twitter, or the New York Times, in the expectation that you can take it all at face value, you're going to fall on your face regularly.

An old friend, a graduate student in philosophy, used to chide me for being skeptical of religious claims, saying that she felt I was 'afraid of being fooled.'  As if that's an unreasonable fear, even if she were right about me.  It's a very common fear expressed by Christians, historically and in the present.  But that can only be part of it.  More of it is a self-critical desire not to be mistaken about the world I live in.  I'm not afraid of being mistaken, I want to learn from my mistakes, and I know that takes effort.  I can't think of many more valid and interesting pursuits for any human being, and I remain unable to understand why a philosopher of all people would consider that aim discreditable.

In any case, if you misread a satirical statement on Twitter, there will be plenty of people who will correct you, with varying degrees of empathy.  Most of them, whether they'll admit it or not, have been Waltered themselves at some point, and will be again.  And that most definitely includes me.

All this, I think, casts some light on why so many liberals are eager to suppress free discussion about disputed (I won't say "controversial") topics.  It's a desire they share with the Right, because they don't know why they believe what they do and don't know how to think about it.  The possibility that someone might disagree with them, rightly or wrongly, makes them very uncomfortable.  They don't mind making others uncomfortable, but they must never experience the discomfort of uncertainty or knowing they're wrong about anything important.  When they say that learning history should make you uncomfortable, they don't include themselves, just as when Trumpies say "Fuck your feelings," the operative word is "your."

What's in a Name, Etc.

I was pleased when I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweet that "for the shrieking Republicans who don’t know the difference: concentration camps are not the same as death camps."  At least she knows the difference.  A lot of people don't.

That, I think, is the problem.  Of course Ocasio-Cortez was attacked by the Right, who claimed that she was comparing the Obama-Trump incarceration of migrants to the Holocaust, and she made exactly the right rebuttal.  She was referring not to Nazi death camps but to concentration camps, whose use by the United States and other countries predates the Nazis by a century or more.  (Unsurprisingly, controversy over the meaning of "concentration camp" isn't new either: some people have objected to the term's being applied to US camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.)  She was supported by numerous experts, including Jewish ones, on the point, though of course Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to undermine her with typical centrist-Democratic pusillanimity.  Probably she too believes that "concentration camp" refers to a specifically, even uniquely Nazi institution.  As one of the articles I quoted above points out:

Right-wing gentiles like [Lynne] Cheney are not credible advocates for Jewish Americans; their invocation of the Holocaust is a bad-faith ploy to distract Americans from the horrors of the current camps. But it’s a bad-faith attack that can easily find fertile ground in the American imagination because of a fundamental, and apparently widespread, misconception that the phrase "concentration camps" somehow belongs solely to the history of the Holocaust.

But it isn't only "shrieking Republicans" who cling to this misconception.  Quite a few of Ocasio-Cortez' fans and supporters believe, and say even in comments on her tweets, that she was in fact invoking the Holocaust, and was in effect lying about the distinction she drew so explicitly.  At best they ignore her denials and bring up parallels to Nazi Germany.  This isn't surprising, since Americans (among others) love to draw parallels to Nazi Germany, despite an ample supply of parallels in our own history, and every foreign leader who gets in our way will be compared to Hitler.  (Actual admirers of Hitler can be excused if they are Our SOBs.)  It's so much easier to dwell on the crimes of official enemies than to recognize or admit those of one's own country, and safer to blame whatever one deplores in one's countries on the evil influence of foreigners.  From anti-Papist agitation in the early 1800s to blaming Trump's presidency on Putin now, Americans have preferred to play it safe in this way.

So, for example: "Those soldiers on the train platforms in Germany loading the freight cars with people were just like this."  Why rely on foreign suppliers when such we have an ample collection of such behavior made right here in America? Those soldiers who massacred civilians in Korea and Vietnam and every other US war down to the present were just like this.  Those soldiers who drove Indians off their land on forced marches in which thousands died were like this.  Those Americans who returned escaped slaves to slavery were like this.  Those Americans who flocked to lynchings were like this.  Those Americans who did nothing when American citizens of Japanese descent were removed from their homes and sent to concentration camps were like this.

Besides blaming our problems on foreigners, it's easy and safe to rend one's garments over "what we've become," as though herding brown people into cages were a Trumpian aberration.  Again, there is nothing new about Trump's policies and actions; they're as American as apple pie.  There's been a wave of liberal fury, fully justified, at the federal government attorney who argued in court on behalf of the Trump regime that denying child detainees soap and toothbrushes, suitable food, and proper shelter, was compatible with the legal requirement to provide them with "safe and sanitary conditions."  But it must not be forgotten that the same attorney was in court four years ago, defending the Obama regime's policy of putting detained children into solitary confinement to punish their parents for insubordination.  Yet almost every day I see forlorn Obamaphiles lamenting that their god-king no longer holds the reins of power, and wishing he would return on clouds of glory to judge the quick and dead.

I've been wondering, though, how "concentration camp" came to be the standard name for the Reich's death camps. It feels comparatively euphemistic, though like most euphemisms it came to acquire negative associations.  It might have been partly because not all the camps were death camps, and "concentration" was chosen as an umbrella term.  It's not surprising that the pre-Nazi history of concentrations camps has been forgotten by most Americans -- it would be uncomfortable and so unnecessary -- and that they prefer to focus exclusively on the use of the camps by our enemies to the exclusion of our own.  And I can't help thinking that although Ocasio-Cortez knows the difference, the term has power for her because of its association with the Nazis.  I'm sure it does for her fans.

Another annoying motif is the Slippery Slope, that Hitler began with baby steps and became worse only gradually, because people elsewhere in the world didn't realize how bad it would get.  This comes partly from Martin Niemöller 's famous litany, and it's not entirely invalid.  But it overlooks that coming for the trade unionists was just fine with many people, not just in Germany but around the world.  So was stomping on Jews, and homosexuals, and Communists.  So was sterilizing the allegedly unfit, which had after all been pioneered by the US at the turn of the century.  There was widespread support for fascism in the United States in the 1930s, and that was a major reason why there was less concern about the implementation of fascism in Europe: not "isolationism," not "America First," not even myopia about how bad things would get; but active endorsement of Hitler's agenda, and a wish to emulate it here.

If Trump's concentration camps are a slippery slope, it's one that we've been careening down for some time now, on a bipartisan sled.  Perhaps bearing down on the accurate history would make many liberals uncomfortable. If so, so much for the worse for them. Take a cue from Martin Luther King Jr.: "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government."  White liberals didn't like King's criticism of Lyndon Johnson's war, but so much the worse for them.  But it's more comfortable to draw a line between Us and Them, locating all the evil with Them, the Others, than to start looking for the source of the trouble at home.

There's been some complaint online about "quibbling over semantics" instead of acting against the camps.  I don't see them as mutually exclusive, and I believe that at least some people will learn something useful from the debate.  When the Right claims that "concentration camp" refers only to the Holocaust, they are lying, and it's always important to challenge lies.  Here's the thing: if the term you use for the US concentration camps makes them sound less bad than they are, it's the wrong term to use.

Luckily, We're All Enlightened Progressives Here

Someone I know "liked" this image on Facebook today, and I couldn't comment there so I'm reposting it and commenting here. It's not the first time I've seen it. It comes via a page called "The Comical Conservative," and when I've seen it before it's been shared by right-wing white racists who want to believe that they are endangered by Obama, just like the Jews under Hitler. (Never mind that if they were alive in the 30s, they'd probably have been fans of Father Coughlin and other anti-Semites, and would have objected to letting refugees from Nazism into the US.  European Jews didn't accept their fate "blindly"; the only workable option, though, was emigration, and that door was locked on both sides.) I think that's what the meme is meant to say, because the text is confused, perhaps deliberately.

Hitler didn't "get over 6 million people to follow along blindly and not fight back." By the 6 million, the meme-maker presumably means the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, and they mostly did not follow Hitler.  There were some German Jews who did support Hitler, thinking that they could prove that they were Good Germans.  But they were few.  Before Hitler came to power (if you don't vote, you can't complain!), the Nazis relied on street violence through their thugs to intimidate their opponents, not all of whom were Jews.  After he came to power Hitler passed laws depriving German Jews of their rights as German citizens; these were enforced by more violence, this time official state violence.  Many of the 6 million weren't German -- they were in countries the Germans invaded and controlled. They didn't follow Hitler either.

The racists who share this meme think that German Jews could have resisted successfully if they hadn't been disarmed. (It's a popular racist Israeli fantasy, too.) That's doubtful, since Jews were a tiny minority in Germany: even armed resistance would have been put down brutally, and would have been used to justify Nazi propaganda against Jews as a threat to civilization. By contrast, the white American racists who share this meme are among the overwhelming "racial" majority in the US. They are generally armed, and no laws have been passed that would change that.  African-Americans, who are an oppressed minority in the US, have often resisted, sometimes but not always violently, but the white racists who made this meme don't approve; instead they see their dark compatriots as a threat to them.

The message of the meme, then, is that HitlerObama is leading white Americans, whom he has disarmed, down the primrose path to their/our ultimate elimination. The person who shared the meme from The Comical Conservative remarked, "The even more scary thing is that almost all 'western' nations are on that path, threatening something much much worse than WWII. If we are truly honest, WWIII is already underway."  Evidently he didn't think about its content either.  So why did an anti-racist, politically left person approve this nonsensical piece of racist propaganda? 

From what the friend who liked the meme on Facebook told me, she assumed that "more than 6 million" could not refer to the Jews, presumably because the iconic number for Jews killed in the Holocaust is 6 million, not "more than" 6 million.  I understand this, since it gave me pause when I first saw the meme.  Probably she read it in the light of what she knew of the person who brought the meme to her attention, another progressive.  Someone else, commenting on our exchange, said that he'd seen the same meme invoked against Donald Trump and his racist followers.  I think this confirms that they're misreading it: who would expect Trump's white racist fans to "fight back" against him, any more than one would expect German anti-Semites to "fight back" against Hitler?

I'm also put off by "almost all 'western' nations are on that path."  Why "western," and why in quotes?  Non-western nations don't have a good record either.  The strange thing, for a person as misanthropic as my friend, is that she can look at human history and see Hitler and the Holocaust as aberrations in kind, rather than in degree, let alone affect to be surprised by them.  Anti-semitism was deep-rooted in Germany, as in Europe generally; the mechanization of death began not with Zyklon B but with heavy artillery (remember that the American Civil War was the bloodiest war in history in its day), if not the invention of gunpowder; Nazi race science drew heavily on American eugenics, as well as the extermination of our pre-Columbian peoples -- who were no angels themselves, but the wrongness of mass slaughter is not dependent on the moral purity of the victims.

No doubt I'm overreacting; I don't see that as necessarily invalidating my response.  It's legitimate to be appalled by the eruption of white racism in the US.  Racists have clearly been emboldened by Donald Trump's strutting about; comparisons to Hitler are not entirely out of line.  But simple Us/Them divisions aren't going to help, and we need to think about the propaganda we ourselves appropriate.