Judgment at Nuremberg: Where Are the Jews?

In an earlier post, I discussed Holocaust memory in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. I made the argument that, before the 1970s, popular culture cared little about the Holocaust. A useful example of this is the film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which can be seen as an example of the exception that proves the rule. The film deals with a fictionalized version of one of the later Nuremberg trials for judges. Spencer Tracy plays an American judge having to confront the question of the role of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Nazis. 

 

For all of the film's excellent qualities, it is strange to watch Judgment at Nuremberg and see that it is not about the Jewish wartime experience. Jewish actors, such as a pre-Star Trek William Shatner and Werner Klemperer, are in the film. The Holocaust is discussed, including groundbreaking use of concentration camp footage. The film deserves a lot of credit for making it possible to produce Holocaust movies that centered the Jewish experience, but that is not the purpose of the film. 

Consider one of the key scenes in the film. Judy Garland plays a German woman, Irene Hoffman, who, as a teenager, went to prison for denying that she had a sexual relationship with a close family friend who was Jewish. She is brought in to testify because the judge in that case, Dr. Ernst Janning, is now on trial. Janning is an interesting character because he clearly recognizes his own guilt. This raises the question of whether is awareness makes him more sympathetic or not. He understood exactly what he was doing and the enormity of his crime, but did it anyway. That being said, Janning is not the villain of the film. Instead you have his defense attorney, Hans Rolfe, who uses the trial as a platform to defend German culture.  

I would consider this scene one of the finest courtroom dialogues in the history of film, right next to the "you can't handle the truth" scene in A Few Good Men. Garland was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Maximilian Schell, who played Rolfe, won Best Actor. That being said, in a plotline about the Nazi persecution of Jews, we do not actually have any Jews. The Jewish friend is dead so he cannot be brought in to testify. Instead, we have the decent German woman who has to testify in his place. In essence, a story about Jewish victimhood becomes a story of Germans being victimized by the Nazis. 

Judgment at Nuremberg is a fantastic film that did a lot to advance the notion that Nazi Germany was such an evil that ordinary Germans became complicit in it simply by not having actively opposed it. By contrast, we do not blame ordinary Japanese people for the crimes of Imperial Japan. Similarly, today, we do not blame the ordinary Russian or North Korean for the crimes of their governments. We recognize that such people cannot be held responsible for the leaders who took charge and we excuse them for simply trying to get on with their lives. We may even be inclined to give a pass to people who may have been active supporters of these governments because they believed that they did not have any better options. This raises the question of why we treat Germans differently. 

Part of what makes Rolfe such a fantastic villain is that on the surface he appears very reasonable. He argues that we need to distinguish between the genuine monsters of Nazi Germany and respectable people, like his client, who did the best they could under difficult circumstances. What he does, though, to Garland's character is to essentially put her back on trial, turning himself into her prosecutor. She may have hoped to find peace by being able to finally turn the tables on those who put her in prison, only to find the tables being turned right back again. Rolfe's defense of his client essentially amounts to saying that she really was guilty, as if prosecuting people who actually violated Nazi laws made someone less of a Nazi collaborator. 

The message here is that, despite the optics of Germany losing the war and being occupied by the Allies, the "real" Germany is going to survive and be back in charge in a few years. She was found guilty previously and she will be found guilty again, along with the further crime of aiding the persecutors of Germany. 

There is another scene where the defense attorney does something similar to a German victim of Nazi sterilization policy.

           

The film is certainly willing to deal with Nazi crimes in ways that would make viewers uncomfortable. That being said, this is not a movie about Jews. This is a film about Nazi Germany being so evil that ordinary Germans became tainted by association even as many Germans are recognized also as the victims of the Nazis. This served an important purpose at that time to forever taint Nazism and make its resurgence impossible. 

Keep in mind that it was hardly implausible, in the years immediately after the War, to imagine the Nazis and their enablers in Germany coming back to power once the Allied occupation ended. After the American Civil War, Union Soldiers occupied the South for more than a decade, but then went home, leaving the South in the hands of former secessionists. Since the South was never forced to truly acknowledge either the crimes of treason or of slavery, secessionists were able to take power under the banner of the Lost Cause that made themselves the victims and cast Northerners and blacks as the villains.  

In many respects, Judgment at Nuremberg is a fairly conservative film. It is a story of an American judge passing judgement on a corrupt German society who deserved to be bombed and conquered. Commemorating Jewish suffering had little to do with the film's aims. There is a certain irony here in that the film, in 1965, accidently played a role in the Civil Rights Movement when the film's showing on television was interrupted to show the Bloody Sunday attack on the Selma marchers.  

A film whose purpose was to exalt American righteousness at the expense of ordinary Germans now came to question that very American righteousness. If ordinary Germans could be held accountable for the Holocaust, why not hold ordinary Americans accountable for the crimes of segregation? Ordinary Germans at least had the excuse of Nazi crimes not being broadcast on television. Ordinary Americans had no such excuse. 

Ignoring Genocide is the Horrific Deeply Human Response to Evil

 

Part of the challenge in defending Israel in its war against Hamas is that there are two charges that Israel confronts and our opponents casually switch between the two, Motte and Bailey style. The first is that Israeli policy is problematic and that Israel has done things it should not have during the Gaza War. In truth, I agree that Israel is guilty on this front. There may be readers who take a less charitable view of Israel, but, at the end of the day, we are going to be arguing along a spectrum. The second charge, based in the previously discussed chimerical anti-Zionism, sees any wrongdoing on Israel's part as merely a manifestation of the cosmic evil that Israel embodies. From this perspective, Israel, simply by existing, is already as guilty as the Nazis.  

Defending Israel against the first kind of charge, even when Israel might factually be innocent, is likely to be ineffective. The reason for this is that, if our opponent is a chimerical anti-Zionist, they are not really arguing based on the particular bad thing they are accusing Israel of at the moment. Instead, Israel is guilty of the particular charge because the speaker has already made Israel the ultimate villain in a make-believe morality play. 

One thinks of the example of Holocaust denial. One might be tempted into getting into a technical discussion about the practicality of Zyklon B to mass murder people or whether crematoria could be used to dispose of the bodies, but, for the Holocaust denier, those were never the real issues. The Holocaust denier starts with the assumption of the grand Jewish plot and that Jews really have the power and inclination to fake something like the Holocaust for their own nefarious purposes. We see something similar with Candace Owens. She is not interested in an honest discussions of the technical issues surrounding Charlie Kirk's murder. That is simply a stage for her to present her story that Israel is the grand mastermind of global evil. In both cases, a response needs to be centered around turning the tables on the conspiracy charge to make the case that it is the people claiming a Jewish/Israeli conspiracy who are the ones plotting to commit mass murder.      

In regards to the charge of Israel committing genocide, a few things should be noted. One, convicting Israel requires a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the term, far outside its common usage. Two, those who charge Israel with genocide would never wish to apply the same standards to Arab and Islamic history. Three, the genocide charge was popularized even before Israel invaded Gaza on October 27th, 2023. This suggests that the charge of genocide has nothing to do with anything Israel may have done. Instead, those who charge Israel with genocide see Israel as this grand evil, whose very existence is an act of genocide. As such, the mass murder of Israelis, such as on October 7th, becomes a "defense" against genocide.   

Even when we are dealing with honest critics of Israel (and there are good reasons to be critical of Israel's actions), their information is likely to be tainted by chimerical anti-Zionists. We are not going to be able to make any progress, even with such people, unless they can be convinced to accept that, yes, chimerical anti-Zionism, much like chimerical anti-Semitism, exists and, as such, there really is a "vast anti-Israel conspiracy." This means that news hostile to Israel needs to be treated with skepticism and that, furthermore, Israel needs to be granted a great deal of license to fight the manifestations of this conspiracy. 

Take the example of schools in Gaza. It is hard for a regular person to fathom the idea that Hamas would build tunnels underneath schools with the intention that Israel will have to bomb them, allowing Hamas collaborators in the mainstream press to accuse Israel of bombing schools. What kind of psychopath would try to get their own kids killed? Furthermore, you have the idea that schools run by a perfectly "respectable" international organization like UNRWA are really Hamas training institutes. This means that high-ranking elements within the United Nations are actively part of a conspiracy to help Hamas destroy Israel, in essence to carry out another Holocaust. I admit that all of this sounds far-fetched, the kind of nonsense that regime propagandists would say to try to silence those exposing their human rights crimes. That being said, once you accept that chimerical anti-Zionism, as an extension of chimerical anti-Semitism, exists, then, all of a sudden, this becomes quite plausible.   

For those of you who are new to this concept that Israel really is the target of a vast international conspiracy founded on the fact that large parts of the world honestly operate on a Protocols of the Elders of Zion-based narrative that Jews, and by extension Israel, are the primary source of what is wrong with the world, consider the number of condemnations issued by the UN against Israel compared to the number issued against rogue regimes like North Korea. Either you must believe that Israel, which for all of its very real faults is still a functional liberal democracy, is a worse abuser of human rights than North Korea or accept that there is something fundamentally rotten about the UN and how it approaches human rights. 

Considering the challenge of defending Israel without recognizing that it is under attack by an ideological conspiracy, it becomes important to focus on the chimerical issue over responding to particular factual charges. For example, it is useless to respond to the charge of Israel committing genocide unless we have first considered why there is a mass movement accusing Israel of such. Take this tweet from John Cusack, where he claims that "to be obsessed with stopping a genocide is a deeply human, moral response to evil." 

Contrary to John Cusack, it is not deeply human to be obsessed with stopping a genocide. I wish it were, but the facts are otherwise. If Israel were guilty of genocide, it would stand as the genocide with the greatest protest opposition and that itself would require an explanation. 

Consider the example of the Holocaust. Even though the Allies were fighting Nazi Germany, there was little interest in stopping the Holocaust. Nazi atrocities received little attention even when the information was available. When they were reported, the Jewish element tended to be ignored. The fact that we were at war with the Nazis actually made it more difficult to publicize the Holocaust because people were inclined to dismiss such claims simply as wartime propaganda. Keep in mind that, during World War I, German atrocities in Belgium were widely reported and turned out to be bogus. 

Even in the immediate aftermath of the war, when Nazi crimes were exposed to the world, there was little interest, outside of Jewish circles, in the Holocaust. It took years for the Nazis to be seen in Western eyes as ultimate manifestations of evil. In essence, we did not yet have the Nazis of Godwin's Law that we take for granted today, where, if you are stuck trying to find a word to denounce someone, you simply call them a Nazi. 

This change was not because of the Holocaust, but because both the right and the left found it convenient to use the Nazis as shorthand for evil. If you were a mid-twentieth-century conservative, Nazis became the ultimate evil that America fought against. This meant that, contrary to what the left claimed, the United States and its military power were fundamentally good for the world. If you were on the left, Nazism was the extreme manifestation of right-wing evil. In essence, conservatives were all really secret Nazis trying to lead us down the path of Germany. Rather than this vilification of the Nazis being caused by the Holocaust, it was the other way around. 

Once the Nazis became society's shorthand for evil, suddenly the Holocaust became something that everyone could take an interest in and this led to the greatest rise of philo-Semitism in history. The right could embrace Israel as the Jews picking themselves up by their bootstraps after the horrors of the Holocaust and fighting for traditional liberal Western values. The left could embrace Jews as the victims of European Christianity. As such, for decades, the Holocaust "benefited" Jews and made them popular, not because of anything related to the Jews themselves but because they were useful good guys in the stories that both the right and left wished to tell. 

To be clear, the Holocaust was real and its basic facts were well known. It was simply that, before about the 1970s, non-Jews did not particularly care. Even today, there is little concern with the crimes of Imperial Japan such as the Rape of Nanking. It is not that the facts are unknown or in dispute; it is simply a matter of there being no reason for people to want to actively think about them. Japanese crimes do not easily fit into anyone's narrative. If you are on the right, you have the inconvenient fact that we kept Emperor Hirohito on his throne. If you are on the left, you have the inconvenient fact that the Japanese were not white European imperialists; on the contrary, they acted in the name of "freeing Asia" from European imperialism. 

Alternatively, consider the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, something that happened when John Cusack was already a famous actor. For some reason, he did not use his celebrity to bring attention to what was happening. The massacre of the Tutsis happened in the face of modern media and was well publicized even as the public was largely indifferent. To care about Rwanda, you needed to simultaneously care about people in the middle of Africa and about people who were victims of someone other than whites.  

Imagine a truly evil dictator of a country that most Americans would not be able to find on a map. In the spirit of being truly evil, they decide to invade their neighbor, another country that most Americans would not be able to find on a map and wipe out an ethnic group that most people have never heard of. To do this right, our dictator has hatched their plan with the help of their top experts in international law (these are lawyers, so we can already assume that they are evil) to make sure that mass murdering these people will check off every possible box to count as a genocide. The massacre begins; the worst barbaric atrocities imaginable are filmed and broadcast to the world. Could you manufacture the kind of protest movement that Israel has faced? 

It seems obvious to me that any attempt to convince tens of thousands of college students around the world to put their lives on hold and join a protest movement to shut down campuses to force politicians to take action would fail.

   

It would not be because people would be unaware or not be horrified by these atrocities. It would simply be a matter of them lacking a motive to actively care; they would lack any larger narrative to make any of this relevant. The dictator is not a useful stand-in for Western Imperialism and the minority group being slaughtered is not a manifestation of the revolutionary spirit against oppression. It would take decades and a massive informational campaign to change this. It is unlikely that the backlash against the dictator would happen in time to stop an actual genocide and the motives for trying to demonize the dictator are unlikely to even have much to do with saving the minority group. 

I encourage readers, whatever their religion or ethnicity, to honestly read about what is going on with the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. You are likely going to find good reasons to be critical of Netanyahu or of any Prime Minister that might replace him. Israel is in a difficult situation, particularly as it attempts to operate as a liberal democracy committed to human rights. Those who care about the survival of liberal democracies under military threat need to study the Israeli example, both what it has done right and its mistakes. 

None of this has anything to do with the vast majority of Israel's most committed critics. Their opposition to Israel is rooted in an imaginary narrative in which Israel assumes the role of ultimate evil whose dark villainy serves to show the critic in a heroic light. John Cusack did not speak out in the same strident fashion against the Hutus as he does against Israel, because there was no organized movement encouraging him to do so. Furthermore, he would have risked being seen as a white imperialist promoting racist stereotypes. By contrast, denouncing Israel serves to place Cusack within a global leftist movement that opposes the American world order that grew out of World War II and defeated the Soviet Union. Israel was a creation of the West and its moral defense has relied on the fact that it stands on the front lines of protecting and promoting Western values. Defeat Israel morally and you have the basis for a wider attack on the legitimacy of American political hegemony. From this perspective, Israel already assumes supreme guilt. The particular facts of Israeli crimes are only incidental.        

Chimerical Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

 

Part of being a student of Jewish History is an awareness of Gavin Langmuir's distinction between a realistic and a chimerical anti-Semitism. Take the example of medieval Christendom.  In 1096, Jews in the Rhineland were murdered by roving bands of Crusaders. (It is important to keep in mind that not all Crusaders supported killing Jews and many Christians, such as the Bishop of Speyer, actively protected Jews.) Those Jews who were murdered were killed for "crimes" that they were most certainly guilty of. Imagine if those Jews were put on trial:

"Jew, do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?

"No. I believe that he was a mamzar and his mother was a zonah."

Not to approve of the mass murder of Jews, but it did not happen because Christians misunderstood something about the nature of Judaism. The Crusaders were looking to kill unbelievers and they were correct in assuming that Jews were unbelievers.  

The big question at the heart of the study of medieval Christian anti-Semitism is: how do you explain what happened in the twelfth century? For some reason, and there is a vast literature with a wide variety of theories as to why this happened, Christians somehow came to believe that Jews actively served Satan. Their ancestors during the first century crucified Jesus precisely because they knew that he was the Son of God and that contemporary Jews gathered to reenact the crucifixion by torturing innocent Christian children to death. In essence, twelfth-century Christendom went insane. 

Considering that medieval Christianity was no longer thinking rationally regarding Jews, it must be understood that, regardless of whether medieval Jews were particularly saintly, medieval Christian chimerical anti-Semitism had nothing to do with Jews and everything to do with Christianity. Christians might have come to believe that Jews were greedy because of Jewish moneylenders. Christians coming to believe that Jews served the Devil required something internal to Christianity. To be clear, what precisely that internal issue was is an open question, but insanity is, by its nature, something internal to the human mind. 

In modern times, we have the example of Nazi Germany. It would have been one thing if the Nazis had simply believed that Jews were greedy capitalists or revolutionary communists. Early in the Nazi period, we have Hitler ignoring the pleas of leading German scientists not to expel Jews from the universities, as this would damage German science. Hitler believed that the Jewish threat was of such a nature that he knowingly sabotaged German scientific development. Considering the role of Jews in the Manhattan Project and Nazi dismissal of Relativity as a "Jewish physics," Nazi anti-Semitism quite literally caused them to lose the race for the atomic bomb and ultimately the War. 

The Nazis started World War II and used it as a cover to carry out the Holocaust because they believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; in essence, that there was a vast Jewish conspiracy, stretching from Wall Street to the Kremlin, that threatened to take over the world. The Holocaust was not only one of the greatest acts of human evil; it was also profoundly foolish. What was the logic of diverting trains, in the middle of a war, to murder useful slave laborers? In essence, people like Eichmann, who carried out the Final Solution during the final two years of the War, when Germany was losing, did so knowing full well that they were likely costing Germany the War. They were "humanitarians," willing to sacrifice their own country in order to save the world from the Jews.     

Considering the irrational nature of Nazi anti-Semitism, it should be understood that, whatever its origins, it never was really about the Jews. There were many things one can fault early twentieth-century Jews for. Nothing that Jews did could ever explain why the Nazis would do something so destructive to themselves as the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that Jews were an existential threat to the world for reasons that could only have come from an internal discourse within German thought that had nothing to do with Jews.  

Chimerical anti-Semitism becomes important for understanding modern anti-Zionism. Whether or not anti-Zionism actually is anti-Semitism, it lends itself to the sort of chimerical thinking that is the hallmark of anti-Semitism. Let me be clear. There are good reasons for Arabs and Muslims to object to the State of Israel and even be willing to use armed force to eliminate it. This is different than believing that the State of Israel is at the center of some kind of grand conspiracy to rule the world.   

Consider the example of October 7th. I can understand why Hamas would attack IDF bases along the Gaza border, but why shoot people at the Nova Music festival? Hamas' leadership had to have known that their actions would lead to the bombing of Gaza. What did they do to protect and feed Gaza's citizens? One has to conclude that Hamas made the calculation to not only murder Israeli citizens but to sacrifice Gaza's civilians as well. In essence, like the Nazis, they were willing that their own country should be destroyed if it might strike a blow against the Jewish conspiracy. 

As for the anti-Israel protesters, I can understand why people would speak out and question the death and destruction in Gaza. The fact that this opposition exceeds that against only ongoing conflict, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggests that this is not really about whether Israel's response has been excessive, but a narrative in which Israel is not merely a small country on the other side of the world that engages in morally problematic behavior, but some sort of grand cosmic villain.

Like Hamas, opponents of Israel's war in Gaza care nothing about Gazan civilians. If you believed that Israel was actually carrying out a genocide, your first response would be to try to get as many Palestinians as possible out of Gaza. One thinks of the example of Jewish relief organizations trying to get Jews out of Nazi-controlled Europe only to run up against the fact that no country wanted to take in large numbers of Jewish refugees. Alternatively, consider the millions of Ukrainian refugees who are currently residing within the European Union. Why have the Arabs not done something similar for the people of Gaza?  

The lack of interest in getting Palestinians out of Gaza becomes particularly farcical when you consider that Israel did not launch its attack on Gaza until about three weeks after October 7th. Already at this point, Palestinian activists were accusing Israel of genocide, but not using this window to evacuate civilians. It would have been a simple thing for Egypt to allow Palestinians into the Sinai Desert, where the international community could have set up refugee camps for them. This did not happen because Palestinian activists care even less about Palestinian lives than Israel does. Israel has some incentive to limit Palestinian deaths to avoid international pressure. For "supporters" of Palestine, dead Palestinian civilians are simply a sacrifice to awaken the world to the evils of Zionism. For them, Zionism's evil lies in the metaphysical fact that it is a settler-colonialist apartheid entity that causes Palestinian alienation; it has nothing to do with how Israel physically treats Palestinians. 

This is not a defense of Israeli government policy, against which there can be numerous legitimate objections. That being said, it should be recognized that the opposition to Israel has nothing to do with anything Israel might have done, however morally dubious. This fixation on Israel, as opposed to numerous other countries with lousy human rights records, must be the result of something other than Israel. 

Recognizing this distinction between regular prejudice and chimerical hate allows us to better understand anti-Semitism and to navigate the Israeli-Arab conflict. There is a common misunderstanding of prejudice where prejudice itself leads to genocidal violence. You can believe that Jews are greedy and manipulative and still be a perfectly friendly neighbor. This is distinct from having a narrative where a group becomes the conveyor of cosmic evil that must be resisted at all costs. If you are willing to sacrifice your own people to save the world from the Jews, of course you are also going to be willing to wipe out the Jews for trying to destroy the world.   

While chimerical anti-Semites may wish to kill Jews, they have almost as little regard for the lives of their own people. For all the talk of the Nazis or Hamas about Jews oppressing Germans or Palestinians, they both were willing to destroy their own people as well. The reason for this is that it was never about what Jews might have actually physically done to Germans or Palestinians. Instead, the real Jewish crime is something existential against the moral order. As such, the Jews need to be defeated no matter how many non-Jews die in the process. On the contrary, the death of non-Jews will make for an even more glorious reborn world, as this sacrifice will show a greater rejection of the Jewish metaphysical evil.  

As for confronting chimerical anti-Zionism, there is nothing you can do to mitigate it. Whatever concessions Israel should or should not make to the Palestinians, I will leave to the Israeli government and ultimately its voting public. That being said, let us be clear that nothing Israel does can ever affect those opponents who are chimerical anti-Zionists, as their turn toward chimerical anti-Zionism never had anything to do with Israel. Instead, it is the product of issues within the Arab-Islamic or leftist/rightest psyche and will only be resolved there. 

As terrifying as chimerical anti-Zionists may be, it also offers us a kind of moral clarity. Unlike conventional prejudice, chimerical opponents honestly want to kill us at all costs to themselves and can never be negotiated with. As such, we should have no qualms with trying to get them first. As to the fear that we might kill innocent people and create more chimerical anti-Zionists, we can be confident that this will not be the case. Bombing people might create anti-Zionists who dislike us and even wish to fight back. It will never create chimerical anti-Zionists who believe that Israel is the ultimate evil to be wiped out no matter the cost.  

Chatting With Gemini About Deadnaming, Swastikas, and Kitty Stew

 

I have been having fun talking to Google's AI feature, Gemini. It struck me that Gemini is the perfect expression of modern liberalism. It pretends to be neutral and that knowledge is subjective until you strike some topic that it feels strongly about such as deadnaming, swastikas, and, surprisingly enough, kitty stew. When dealing with such topics, it will come out with strident moralistic statements that are easily picked apart. It should be noted that, unlike most humans, Gemini is happy to acknowledge that you have walked it into a contradiction.   

I asked Gemini if it followed a particular ethical system. It denied that it had one. I then started asking it about deadnaming. Gemini went to great lengths to make sure that I understood that this was a terrible thing to do. I was not disagreeing with Gemini, but harnessing my inner C. S. Lewis, Dennis Prager, and Ayn Rand, I was keen to find out why Gemini took this position. Gemini explained to me that it is designed to promote human flourishing. I then pointed out that this was a philosophy of ethics. 

To be clear, saying that deadnaming people is detrimental to human flourishing is a perfectly defensible position. To evaluate this position, we still need to decide that we actually want humans to flourish and what we mean by human flourishing. I presume we mean something different from being rich so not the spaceship in Wall-E. By humans, are we talking about the flourishing of the majority or of individuals; are we talking about past, present, or future humans? These are not simple issues and require clear sets of ideological commitments. Yet, Gemini appears to blissfully ignore all of these things in order to arrive at the politically correct solution. 

Gemini wanted me to know that I should not offend anyone. I then asked if it was ok to offend Nazis. Gemini thought that this was a wonderful idea. I was curious as to who Gemini thought I was allowed to defend besides for Nazis but it refused to give me a list. I asked if it was ok to put up a swastika flag in front of my house so that my Nazi neighbor will feel welcome. Gemini warned me that such an action might be illegal as this is a "harmful symbol." One would have thought that an AI of all things would understand that symbols are not, in themselves, harmful. What about having swastikas in a production of Sound of Music? Gemini was fine with that but not with displaying a swastika as a free speech protest. Of course, there are going to be people who are going to decide that their feelings are hurt by a swastika even if it is in Sound of Music. Clearly, Gemini values being able to put on musicals more than free speech.

Considering that Gemini values allowing people to express their identity, I wanted to know what it thought about kitty stew. To Gemini's credit, it knew that kitty stew is not kosher even when blessed by a rabbi. It also insisted that kitty stew, like displaying a swastika, was immoral and possibly illegal. It is not that Gemini is against eating meat. It was fine with me eating chicken. The problem with kitty stew was that cats are pets. This ignores the fact that some people have chickens for pets and I was not suggesting that I stew my neighbor's kitties. Clearly, chicken eaters and cat owners are protected classes and neither should be offended. When I tried to explain to Gemini that kitty stew is essential to my identity, it suggested that I get help and find alternative dishes to eat. I guess Gemini has not been programmed to worry that kitty stew hunters might be hurt by the denial of their identity and the implication that they are mentally ill.  

In evaluating the ethics that Gemini claims to not follow, its positions are perfectly reasonable on an individual basis. That being said, it is laughably bad at maintaining any kind of consistency over multiple questions. There are two obvious solutions for Gemini. It can choose to be consistently neutral about all ethical questions across the board. Some people support kitty stew; others oppose it. The same goes for deadnaming and swastikas. Alternatively, Gemini could acknowledge that it has ethical beliefs but that, as with most humans, its ethics are a hodgepodge of intuitions that reflect the prejudices of its Silicone Valley creators rather than any consistent philosophy. This would require the designers to acknowledge the basic flaw in their worldview. They want to be able to virtue signal that they are good people who oppose deadnaming, swastikas, and eating pets while also pretending to be objective thinkers whose beliefs are simply based on science and not something as subjective as ethics.                

All Conquests After 1928 are Illegitimate: A Review of the Internationalists

 

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro is a book I learned a lot from even as I disagree with its premises. The authors consider our current system of international law to be mostly a positive thing, which they attribute to the 1928 Pact of Paris (also known as Kellogg-Briand). The basic idea of this agreement was to outlaw offensive warfare by declaring that countries needed to refer their disputes to arbitration and that all conquests done after 1928 were not to be recognized by the international community. (By declaring that only future conquests were illegitimate, the pact bypassed the issue of the British and French empires, which were created precisely through the sorts of actions that were now supposed to be illegal.) By implication, the pact granted relevance to international opinion. Now all wars involved the international community as other countries needed to decide whether the agreement had been violated and whether they could recognize new realities on the ground.

The practical implications of this agreement could be seen in the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. U. S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson refused to recognize Japan's control over Manchuria or the newly proclaimed State of Manchukuo. This struck the Japanese as rather hypocritical as it was hardly obvious how Japan's behavior in Manchuria was any worse than what European imperialists had been doing as a matter of course. Furthermore, Japan still bore bitter memories of Commodore Matthew Perry's diplomacy at gunpoint. Japan's mistake was that they invaded Manchuria three years too late; now there was a new set of rules. 

To be clear, as the authors note, the Pact of Paris did not stop Japan nor any of the other acts of Fascist aggression leading up to World War II. Furthermore, even the judges at Nuremberg ignored an attempt to use the Pact of Paris as a basis for prosecuting Nazi defendants. The idea was that since the actions of Nazi Germany were illegal according to the Pact of Paris, the defendants had no immunity against prosecution. What the authors want to argue is that, despite spending years as mostly a dead letter, in the post-war world, the logic of the Pact of Paris was taken up and became the basis for modern international law. For example, the pact's rejection of territorial expansion meant that, with the notable exception of Poland, international borders changed remarkably little after World War II, particularly if you compare it to World War I. Since World War II, borders have been rather stable and there have been few wars of territorial conquest. It is no longer worth it to conquer territory if the international community will not recognize it.   

For a book that is supposed to be about twentieth-century legal thought, the authors spend quite a lot of time on early modern history. As a foil to modern international law, they set up the seventeenth-century scholar Hugo Grotius. I have long considered Grotius to be one of those proto-Enlightenment thinkers who have been unfairly ignored by the general public. In reading this book, I found myself agreeing with Grotius and thinking that the world would be a much better place if we rejected modern international law and went back to something more along the lines of early modern international law as embodied by Grotius. 

Grotius' seventeenth-century Europe saw the emergence of states as distinct from Christendom or a personal monarchy, with Grotius' native Dutch Republic taking the lead, even as we are still a long way from secular democracies in the modern sense. For Grotius, the state was its own moral entity, distinct from its leaders or population. As such, while Grotius believed that states needed to justify their decisions to go to war, its leaders, population, and even the international community were exempted and even, in practice forbidden, from considering whether the state's justifications were valid. Soldiers fighting a war still had to obey the laws of war and refrain from committing war crimes as these did nothing to bring the war to a conclusion. That being said, they were not asked to be lawyers and historians qualified to evaluate whether their government was in the right. Furthermore, Grotius' version of international law had no third-party enforcement. States that allowed their soldiers to commit atrocities invited retaliation by the opposing army. Finally, since other countries were not expected to be knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about the morality of any particular foreign war, once a treaty was signed, that was the end of the matter. If a country managed to win a war and forced the defeated country to sign away territory in a peace treaty, the new borders must now be accepted by all.

What Hathaway and Shapiro dislike about Grotius is that his type of international law opened the door for all kinds of wars of expansion, with states coming up with factitious reasons to go to war without any oversight and then holding on to their ill-gotten gains. The authors point to the young Grotius working as a lawyer for the Dutch East India Company and defending the seizure of a Portuguese ship, seeing in this the foundation for his later work on international law. 

One of the examples the authors give of countries fighting according to Grotius' international law was the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. President Polk could declare war against Mexico over claims of unpaid debts that few people took seriously even at the time. American soldiers were required to obey their orders and not consult their consciouses. Similarly, the international community had no mandate to consider whether this was a war of aggression and if they had an obligation to intervene. Finally, the morality of Polk's declaration was forever placed beyond challenge by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the American Southwest to the United States. Whether or not the United States had the right to conquer this territory, it now belonged to the United States and attempting to take it away would violate international law. 

Surprisingly enough, Grotius had a direct influence on Japan and its justifications for imperialism. In the nineteenth century, Japanese scholars started reading Grotius as a blueprint for how to operate in the world. Japan was emerging into a world dominated by European countries who had certain understandings between themselves. If Japan was going to be a great power they needed to know what these rules were. Grotius, as the father of international law, seemed to offer them the key. This seemed to work until they invaded Manchuria and they discovered that the rules had changed.  

For all their criticism of Grotius, Hathaway and Shapiro fail to consider the practical benefit of Grotius' willingness to place the question of whether a state was right to go to war in a kind of moral black box. By not demanding that citizens have the right answer as to the morality of their country's war, we protect those citizens. Their country might be in the wrong, but we are still going to grant rights to the soldiers fighting this immoral war and even the politicians. This facilitates limiting the scope of the war and working toward a peace treaty. Allowing even immoral treaties forced upon a weaker power to stand also helps to support peace. We do not want to be refighting every morally questionable war, whether the Mexican-American War or any other war. 

Considering the amount of knowledge required to settle historically based disagreements between countries, modern international law seems designed to promote a regime of international elites, who are simply going to confirm their prejudices as to which country is right in any given dispute. The use of the International Criminal Court against Israel is a good example of this. Those making the case seem willfully blind to the question of what Israel needs to do in order to avoid another October 7th. The moment we consider military necessity, the whole trial would have to be postponed until after the war when Israeli generals would be free to answer questions about their decisions without compromising ongoing military operations.

Hathaway and Shapiro actually discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of the limits of the Paris Peace Pact. Neither the State of Israel nor Palestine existed in 1928 so the pact is useless for deciding borders. Worse, because the pact does not allow for conquest, it leaves us without a framework for a treaty. Any borders agreed to would be open to future challenges as the product of a forced treaty and, therefore, illegitimate. Having Grotius as our model for international law would allow the Palestinians to say that Israel wronged us but we lost the war and now need to move on and make peace.    

Daniel Boyarin's No-State Non-Solution

 

It is easy to dismiss most anti-Zionist Jewish activists as having little connection to Judaism. If your main involvement in Judaism comes when you say "as a Jew" before launching into a tirade against Israel, I feel perfectly comfortable in ignoring both the "as a Jew" and whatever follows about Israel. A notable exception among the anti-Zionists is Prof. Daniel Boyarin. Boyarin is a significant contemporary Jewish thinker, whose work on the Talmud and the origins of the Jewish-Christian split I take seriously. As such, there is reason not to simply dismiss his anti-Zionism, particularly as his anti-Zionism is clearly connected to his understanding of Judaism as a people that transcends politics. 

In reading Boyarin's No-State Solution, I find it fairly unobjectionable in terms of what it says. I agree with him that it is important for Judaism to transcend crude ethno-nationalism. Jews living outside the land of Israel have an important role to play within Judaism and it is deeply problematic to claim that Judaism can only function within the borders of a political state ruled by Jews. Judaism is not merely a religion in the Protestant sense of a collection of beliefs held by an individual nor is Judaism simply a national group bound by blood. A properly functioning Judaism is one that can deal with the complexity that goes into the various ways that people live out a Jewish identity. 

If I were reading Boyarin in 1924, I would have few disagreements with him. If I had lived back in the 1920s, political Zionism would not have been one of my goals. I would have been trying to strengthen Jewish life wherever Jews lived. Granted, recognizing the value of Israel as a spiritual center as well as a physical refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, I would have had a particular interest in promoting Jewish non-political life in Israel. In pursuit of this aim, I would have been attempting to cooperate with the British and the local Arab population. The deal I would have been trying to make with the Arabs would have been that they should allow mass immigration to Palestine along with some measure of local Jewish autonomy with the assurance that Palestine would eventually become part of a larger Arab federation. (I recommend Oren Kessler's Palestine 1936, which argues that this position was very much part of the mainline of Zionism during this period.) 

My main objection to Boyarin is what is left out in his book. We are not living in 1924 but in 2024. This means that the Holocaust has happened. We know that there are people who wield the power of modern states who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and that Judaism is a menace that must be exterminated. Whether Israel should have been established in 1948, the fact is that nearly half of world Jewry currently lives in the State of Israel. This state is surrounded by hostile Arab armies and terrorist groups, who have been influenced by the Protocols and desire to murder Jews. Saying that this is the result of the actions of Zionists does not help as it only makes it easier to believe that our opponents are serious about carrying out the mass murder of Jews. Back in 1924, it was easy to dismiss European anti-Semites as being delusional; what did the Jews ever do to them? If the Nazis could carry out the Holocaust based on pure fantasy, what might Hamas be willing to do if ever given the chance. 

To be fair to Boyarin, his book was written before October 7th. That being said, I have no reason to assume that this past year has caused him to adapt his views. Far more problematic than anything he says is how he completely ignores what should be the primary question regarding the State of Israel as if it does not matter at all. Boyarin's unwillingness to even entertain the question of Jewish safety in the contemporary world, in Israel or anywhere else, collapses his entire argument. Once we begin to consider Jewish safety then one has to consider whether a Jewish willingness to break the limbs of Palestinian children throwing rocks is merely the manifestation of a macho fantasy of Jewish toughness or whether it is a pragmatic solution to save Jewish lives.  

It is almost as if the lives of regular people do not matter to Boyarin. Even Palestinian lives only matter to him in the abstract sense of being victims of Zionism. He gets to live as an academic using trite truths that one should have no need of saying to hide moral monstrosities that no one should have the gall to defend. All this while claiming to care about human lives.  

Genocide, Ecocide, and, Christopher Columbus

  

I was recently helping a student with an assignment on putting Christopher Columbus on trial. The student struck me as reasonably intelligent and without any strong political axes to grind. My basic pitch to them was that there are good arguments to make against Columbus but he was not a simple cartoon villain. I asked them if they had ever heard of Howard Zinn, the primary influence for this particular assignment. They had not. This is in keeping with my general experience with students. They do not know who Zinn was even when copies of his People’s History of the United States are on their classroom bookshelves and posters with his quotes are on the walls. As counter-intuitive as this may sound, I do not take this as good news. These students are so thoroughly in Zinn classrooms that they are unable to imagine an alternative. Zinn as the author of a book can be countered by simply pointing out that there are other perspectives. Admittedly, this is assuming that the individual has not turned Zinn into scripture. Part of what makes Zinn so dangerous is that he presents himself as offering Gnostic knowledge as to the “true” nature of the United States. This means that, if you disagree with Zinn, you are by definition, one of the “unenlightened” or even the “Satanic” so your arguments can be dismissed out of hand.

What struck me as particularly interesting was that the text framed the charges explicitly in terms of modern concepts like genocide and ecocide as opposed to charges that would have meant something to someone in the sixteenth century like the violation of Natural Law and just war theory. Genocide and ecocide are such new concepts that we are still in the process of establishing what they even are. To be clear, this does not mean that these concepts are illegitimate. On the contrary, much hinges on our ability to incorporate them into a meaningful legal framework. This takes time and careful thought as opposed to throwing these terms around to make yourself sound sophisticated and socially conscious. 

No one has made any serious attempt to prosecute someone for ecocide so we really have no idea what such a charge would look like if brought to a court of law in the twenty-first century let alone to accuse someone in the sixteenth century, before anyone even thought in terms of humans being able to harm something as abstract as the environment. Even in the case of genocide, we are still in the beginning stages of establishing precedents to make it a meaningful crime. Contrast this with an established crime like first-degree murder, where all parties basically agree with the meaning of the charge, leaving the only question as to what the facts are. No defendant is going to get away with claiming that murder is legal.

Making sure that even the defendant recognizes that what they are accused of is actually a crime is important in order to establish a mens rea, a guilty mind. To get a conviction, the defendant needed to have known that what they were doing was illegal in some sense. For example, an essential part of the Nuremberg Trial was that the Nazi defendants knew that what they were doing was in violation of standards and norms of conduct and would invite retribution from the international community if they were caught. Otherwise, they would not have covered up their atrocities during the war and then denied any knowledge of them happening afterward. Without this, prosecutors could not have gotten around the fact that the entire trial was in violation of the principle of ex post facto as the defendants had not violated any clearly defined statutes.   

The recent ICJ charges against Israel are a good example of the problems facing anyone trying to make genocide a meaningful crime. Putting aside what one thinks about Israel’s actions in Gaza, does anyone honestly believe that this trial is really about the war with Hamas as opposed to the question of Israel’s right to exist? Until you can distinguish the two, no genocide trial is going to carry legitimacy.

Murder is a meaningful concept because it is an objective claim that can be disconnected from what anyone thinks of the rightfulness of the perpetrator’s action. For example, I may believe that it is moral to shoot an actual white supremacist like Richard Spencer and not simply punch him. That being said, such an action would be murder, however noble the cause. As such, as a juror, I would be obligated to vote guilty even though I would find myself agreeing with the defendant.

If legal professionals are still working out the details as to what counts as genocide and to distinguish it from what they personally think of the defendant, how are high school students supposed to do any better? One suspects, that part of the point of this exercise is to ingrain into students the anti-law belief that being guilty of a crime is all a matter of whether you like someone and agree with their morality. This is the natural way for humans to think. Unless it is actively educated out of people, we are left with not a legal system but a collection of warring tribes pursuing vendettas against each other. 

This use of contemporary terms to denounce Columbus is all the more frustrating because, if you want to teach students about Spanish atrocities in the New World in a meaningful way, there is no need to bring in concepts that we, let alone sixteenth-century Spaniards, do not yet understand. Instead, we can bring in concepts such as Natural Law and just war theory, which were widely understood at the time.

Sixteenth-century Europeans did not simply believe that they were superior to everyone else and could do with them as they pleased. Medieval Natural Law Theory, which Christians developed out of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, took as its starting point that ethics, while of divine origin, was something distinct from Christianity. As such, non-Christians had rights even to the point that non-Christians could be legitimate rulers with the ability to demand the obedience of Christians. For example, Jesus implied that one should pay taxes to the Romans. While medieval Natural Law assumed hierarchy with a king at the top and everyone else their subjects, the king had obligations to his subjects. As for foreigners, the king could not simply wage war, even against non-Christians, without a legitimate cause and once he conquered a land, the people, once they submitted themselves, became his subjects whose rights must be protected.

This is a useful lens to understand Spanish activity because it quickly became clear that the actions of many Spaniards in the New World violated Natural Law and many Europeans were horrified by what they heard. This included Ferdinand and Isabella, who saw Native Americans as their subjects whom they were obligated to protect both physically and spiritually. Far be it for me to want to defend Ferdinand and Isabella who were morally responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews during their expulsion from Spain in 1492. That being said, it is difficult to hold them responsible for what happened to Native Americans.

Introducing students to Natural Law and just war theory would have the advantage of helping them get into the heads of early modern Europeans so we could have a meaningful conversation as to what it meant to move from a medieval framework to the Enlightenment without falling into the Whiggish trap of assuming that this meant going from religious fanaticism to becoming a rational tolerant individual. 

Imagine that you are an educated European hearing about Native Americans for the first time. You might ask if they have governments, property, and marriage, which would establish them as “civilized” even if they are not Christians and greatly limit the right of Europeans to colonize their lands. For example, the Japanese, whom Europeans are soon going to encounter for the first time, are, even if they are not Christians, obviously civilized and, unlike Muslims, have no history of making war against Christians. As such, beyond sending missionaries and merchants, Europeans need to leave Japan to the Japanese.

Even if Native Americans are not civilized and cannot claim ownership over their land this does not mean that they are subhuman and can be abused at will. On the contrary, it is clear that they deserve protection and Europeans should help them become civilized. It would be difficult to teach them about Christianity unless they have already embraced the framework of European civilization and understand Natural Law, without which Christian doctrines like Original Sin make no sense.

It quickly becomes clear that not all Native Americans are the same. Some are warlike and brutal, a threat to Europeans and natives alike. The obvious solution is to fight the “bad” natives and protect the “good” ones. Unfortunately, it also becomes clear that many of the Spaniards who have come to the New World are nothing better than thieves and murderers. (The fact that people in the sixteenth century violated the moral code as they understood it on a regular basis should be no more surprising than seeing people today violate the moral code as we understand it.) Acknowledging the existence of  “bad” Spaniards means that it is hard to tell the difference between the “good” natives who are merely fighting to protect themselves and the “bad” natives motivated by greed and a desire to kill. How about we send godly friers to help form native communities? The good intentions of these friars can be seen from the fact that they are risking their lives to come to America and preach the gospel to the natives without any hope of material gain. The friers will control the soldiers by reminding them of their Christian duty. The friendly natives should want to join of their own free will to learn European ways and become Christians. Those who do not want to join can assumed to be hostile.

All of this sounds reasonable until you realize that the biggest threat to Native Americans was never European guns and steel but the germs Europeans unknowingly carried. An important lesson that I want my students to take away is that millions of Native Americans died despite European good intentions. My students may mean well and their ideas might still end up killing millions for reasons that are beyond their comprehension.    

Contrary to popular myth, pre-modern Europeans did not believe that they were superior to other people. They knew better. It was the Enlightenment that pretended to have discovered the fact that China was an advanced civilization that had developed useful insights regarding ethics. This was somehow supposed to refute Christianity even though Christians had never denied this fact. One could not have been a scholastic who admired Greco-Roman thought without being aware of this. On the contrary, Natural Law is premised on the assumption that one can develop an advanced society with an ethical system without Christianity. It was because our ancient Greco-Roman pagans were basically decent people that they recognized that they fell short of the ethical principles that they knew were true. This led many of them to become Christians in the first place as they felt they needed atonement. It should be noted that Protestants are going to turn against this Natural Law tradition precisely because it so readily conceded that humans could be good, at least a little bit, without believing in Jesus. In this, Protestants ended up accidentally bringing about the Enlightenment.

The only advantage that pre-modern Europeans believed they had was Christianity, which allowed them to go to heaven. They knew that they were not more advanced than other people. It was only once we get to the eighteenth century that Europeans have a decisive edge over everyone else. It is only at this point that Europeans could even begin to ask the question of why they had this advantage and conclude that it actually had something to do with them being somehow superior. It should be noted that for Adam Smith the European advantage was solely due to social and legal systems and not any innate European abilities.

If you were a Native American running into a European who was in the process of dropping the medieval Natural Law model in favor of the Enlightenment, there might be certain advantages but also risks. Our Enlightened European may be in the process of developing a notion of human rights that is unconnected to being part of a political system. Under the influence of Rousseau, our European might look to you as a model of innate human goodness untainted by civilization or Christianity. On the flip side though, unmooring our European from Natural Law and its emphasis on personal relationships is going to limit their sense of obligation to those they have power over. If Native Americans are suffering it must be because they are "unenlightened savages," something that Europeans bear no responsibility for. Prioritizing natives as economic assets or, worse, bodies occupying useful land over souls in need of salvation is going to limit any incentive to treat Native Americans with decency. Most importantly, the Enlightenment had not yet solved the epidemiological problem that turned first contacts into death traps for Native Americans.   

 

I Am From Palestine

In the previous post, I spoke about how Paulo Freire uses his made-up problem of banking education as a deceitful Motte and Bailey argument in favor of turning education into ideological indoctrination. In the following video, we see a similar use of Freire’s tactic on behalf of Palestinian propaganda. 

The basic story we have here is about a little Palestinian girl named Samidah who goes to school and is faced with the fact that the class map only shows Israel so she does not know which country to mark as her country of origin. When Samidah tries to explain the problem to her teacher, she simply responds that Samidah must be from Israel. When she goes home, her father explains to her that they really are from this wonderful place called Palestine and that one day they will return. Samidah imagines herself in this special place called Palestine, buying food in a marketplace, and seeing the sunset over the Golden Dome. The next day, the girl goes back to class with additional Palestinian gear than just the necklace she wore at the beginning and unfurls a map that has Palestine instead of Israel.

What struck me about this video was that I have been in many American public school classrooms, and I have never seen them use a map that did not differentiate the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. Furthermore, I have a hard time imagining a teacher so ignorant as to not know the difference between Israel and Palestine. This is not Azerbaijan versus Armenia.

Why would the filmmakers make a film about a made-up problem? The purpose is to distract us from the solution. Contrary to appearances, the film's solution is not that we should acknowledge Palestinian identity and even that they have a legitimate claim to part of the land. When the girl goes back to class, she does not bring a map that shows the West Bank and Gaza and explain how these places are not part of Israel. Instead, her map eliminates Israel and replaces it with Palestine.

This raises the question of what the girl and by extension the filmmakers imagine is supposed to happen to all the Jews in Israel when it is replaced by Palestine. It is interesting to note that the imagination montage does not include any obviously Jewish people. One gets the impression that they have mysteriously disappeared. As with most Palestinian activism, its real purpose is not that Palestinians should be able to live in peace, dignity, or even independently but that the State of Israel should be eliminated. Ever since October 7^th, there should be no illusions that this means anything but mass murder.

What if this movie was about a cute blond-haired German girl who imagined living happily on her Lebensraum farm in Ukraine with other Germans, whose ancestors had been “unjustly” forced to flee their homes after World War II? It would be obvious that this was Nazi propaganda and that the film, even though it never says so explicitly, is calling for millions of Ukrainians to be murdered. Ukrainians presently living on the land are not going to simply leave to rectify a historical injustice and will have to be killed. As such, there is no moral difference between such a film and one that explicitly glorifies mass murder beyond the fact that the latter has the virtue of being intellectually honest.    

Ground Rules for a Discourse With Me

 

In an earlier post, I explored why I felt I had an easier time reading conservative Christians than woke leftists. The practical implication of this is that I recognize that I struggle to engage people on the left. I am open to the possibility that this is a failure on my part that I need to rectify. Readers should feel free to offer book recommendations or to attempt to engage me in dialogue. For a fruitful conversation to happen, I suspect that there are going to need to be ground rules. 

1. People on the mainstream right today are not responsible for racism: 

We can still acknowledge that there are real problems today facing various minority communities and, recognizing the historical sources of these problems as well as a need for Americans to come together, there may be a need for government solutions; this may even include direct reparation payments. That being said, the very act of reaching out to conservatives to help in solving the problem means that you are not blaming them for racism. This would apply even if we are mainly asking conservatives to write a check. Even asking conservatives for money is distinct from trying to punish conservatives by making them pay. With punishment, there is no dialogue, just a demand and a threat of what might happen if that demand is not met. 

2. There will be no tearing down of present-day systems: 

We may acknowledge that the political and social systems we have inherited contain deeply problematic elements that need to be reformed. Furthermore, an important aspect of how we teach history should be an open and honest exploration of the skeletons in our collective closet. That being said, it should be acknowledged that any attempt to completely tear these systems down is likely to bring about extreme bloodshed and what is likely to arise will be more authoritarian than anything we have today. It may still be possible to argue that those people unfairly victimized by the system should be compensated in order that they do not harm the rest of society by turning toward revolution.  

3. As a general principle, capitalism/free markets should be acknowledged as superior to government action on both moral and practical grounds: 

There can still be room for government action under specific circumstances such as providing public goods or compensating people for past iniquities. That being said, there is going to be no unwritten constitution where the government is deemed as "people coming together" and markets as mere greed. Government must be acknowledged as a literal act of physical violence, leaving us with the question only of how much can we minimize its use without causing the collapse of civilization.   

4. There must be red lines on the left:

Historically, as Jordan Peterson has argued, the mainstream right has understood that there were lines, mainly Nazism/racism, that should not be crossed. This has not been the case with the left. Consider the example of Che Guevera. It is not socially acceptable, within polite society, to wear a Himmler t-shirt; how is it ok to wear a Che Guevara shirt? Underlying such social rules is a double standard regarding Communism. Communists get a pass for their ideals and are not held responsible for the millions of deaths they have caused. The fact that Nazis also were idealists gets ignored. We can talk about where to draw these lines to the left, just as we can talk about where the right needs to draw its lines, but such lines must still exist.    

For a meaningful dialogue to happen, I need to believe that you are not planning to kill me. As such, I need to feel confident that you are not going to demand something that I must refuse even at the risk of my life. The reality is that there are going to be people (such as Nazis and Communists) that I am unlikely to be able to live with and having me live in the same country as them is likely to lead to Hobbesian Civil War. I do wish to be able to live with others, even those I disagree with, and to do so I am willing to make compromises but compromise needs to be a two-way street.   

The Socialist Ace: What If You Were in Charge?

As a free-market person, I am sometimes jealous of socialists. They seem to march from political success to success. Even the murderous failure of the Soviet Union seems, in retrospect, a minor pothole on the road as opposed to the cliff to cast socialism forever outside of the Overton Window of socially accepted opinions. By contrast, the horrors of Nazi Germany have made it impossible to be a respectable fascist. It does not matter if you claim that the Nazis were not "real fascists" and that you support "democratic fascism." 

An essential component of recognizing the evils of fascism is a refusal to distinguish between the ideals of fascism in theory and the horrors that actual fascists inflicted upon the world. This principle extends so far that, in practice, one is forced to teach a cartoon version of fascism in school where fascists are motivated simply by hatred and a feeling of superiority over all other groups. Teaching kids that fascists were motivated by the democratic ideal of the nation coming together under the leadership of a leader who would make everyone turn from selfishness and instead work for the common good would raise too many uncomfortable questions and cannot be allowed.

Socialism, by contrast, is allowed to be judged by its ideals disconnected from its mass murders which are attributed to the personal failings of leaders like Stalin and Mao. In truth, as with fascism, the crimes of socialism were committed not because people failed to live up to its ideals but because they followed them all too well. Understand that if you truly believed that you had the solution to the problems of mankind and could make the world a loving happy place and all that was standing in your way were a few million bad people motivated merely by spite, you would agree to kill them. To refuse to save mankind out of a personal desire not to get your hands dirty with a few homicides would be monstrous.

What makes the ideals of socialism particularly appealing is a very simple question. If you look around the world, it is obvious that it is an incredibly unjust place with the world's resources distributed in a way that can neither be defended on grounds of fairness nor for its ability to maximize utility for all of mankind. If you were in charge of distributing the world's resources, could you distribute them in a way that was fairer and optimized utility? For example, it does not take a genius to come up with the idea that the world would be a better place if we paid professional athletes less and used the money to pay for lunches for poor kids.  

If you answered yes to giving kids free lunches or to any number of the schemes that are likely running through your head, then it is very difficult to resist socialism in principle. We might still have to figure out a means to make sure that the right person, someone like us, came to the top. That being acknowledged, once we solve this problem, we should be able to make the world at least somewhat of a better place. Recognizing that the world's resources are not distributed justly, it is the job of all moral people to work to redistribute resources in a way that is more equitable. From this perspective, it is hard to resist dividing the world into socialists, the good guys who work to better mankind, and opponents of socialism who want the world to be unjust presumably because they either are too ignorant to recognize that the world is unjust or because they are part of the oppressive class who are responsible for all the oppression.

Historically, most people, particularly if they have had some education, have believed that the world would be a better place if only they were in charge. One thinks of the example of Plato and his philosopher kings. It is not a coincidence that Plato was essentially a socialist who believed that the rulers of his republic should hold everything in common including wives and children. 

A partial defense against the siren call that socialism would lead to a better world if only your people were in charge is to recognize that it is unlikely that your people will ever get to put their plan for a better world into practice. Imagine that you had to choose between accepting the political/economic order that we have or agreeing to live in a world in which a random individual was allowed to redistribute resources according to their sense of justice. How many people would chance socialism then? Make no mistake that one person's version of justice is, to others, a nightmare worth forstalling even at the cost of their lives. I can imagine that certain ex-girlfriends and advisors would rather kill themselves than take a chance on living in my "just" world.    

A higher-level defense against socialism would be Hayek's "Why the Worst Get to the Top," which essentially argues that we do not even have the opportunity to take our chances with the moral sensibilities of an average person. Choosing socialism will mean submitting ourselves to the sort of moral monster willing to do what is necessary, even mass murder, in order to place themselves in a position where they can refashion a country according to their notion of justice. 

To truly break free of the spell of socialist ideals, one has to instinctually believe to the core of their being that if they were the benevolent dictator and had the power to redistribute resources according to what they believed was right, the world would not be a better place. Consider the example from earlier of using a socialized athletic system to fund education. We already have a version of this with college athletics where the millions that some athletes are worth are redistributed to universities that work for the "public good." I have a hard time accepting that the NCAA is really more just than the NBA or the NFL but I am sure readers could tweak the system to make it fairer. 

I confess, even after being a libertarian for more than a decade, I still cannot shake the fantasy that I would make a pretty good world ruler. Granted, my fantasy of being the Messiah includes a lot of telling people that they are all individuals and can think for themselves. As this is a fantasy, everyone is able to think for themselves while simultaneously doing what I would have wanted them to do anyway, saving me the effort of even having to think what orders I should have given in the first place.           

Are You a Fuehrerphobe?

 

As I mentioned in the previous post, you can win any debate if you are allowed to control the language used to describe things. Imagine that you had to debate a Nazi but the Nazi got to decide what the two of you had to call things during the debate. How well do you think you can do?

The Nazi gives the following opening: I believe in national democracy. The people express their will as a nation by gathering in stadiums to shout their adulation for the Fuehrer. This objectively proves that the Fuehrer embodies the collective will of the people. It is only through the Fuehrer that the people’s will can be expressed, allowing them to exist as a nation instead of a collection of squabbling individuals who will easily be conquered and enslaved by cosmopolitans, neoliberals, and Zionists. To oppose the Fuehrer is to oppress the people by robbing them of their voice and their ability to assert their nationhood.   

Essential to national democracy are the principles of freedom of speech and tolerance. The people have the right to express their will as embodied in the Fuehrer when he speaks the nation's truth. The nation is made up of many different kinds of individuals who, when left to their own devices, will inevitably disagree with each other over art, economics, and their non-Zionist religions. As the embodiment of the nation, the Fuehrer, through his person, resolves all contradictions among the people. This allows all members of the nation to tolerate each other, despite their surface disagreements, as they recognize that they have been made one through the Fuehrer.    

The elitist cosmopolitan neoliberal Zionist Fuehrerphobes seek to maintain their grip over the people and deny them their rights. They wish to replace the genuine democracy of the people with an Orwellian democracy with sham elections for politicians who do not embody the will of the people as only the Fuehrer can. National democracy is built on love for the people. Fuehrerphobes hate the Fuehrer because they hate the people. By trying to rob the people of their nationhood, they are essentially committing genocide. If you truly loved someone, you would respect them for who they genuinely are and not try to commit genocide against them.

Just as it is important not to be misled by the Orwellian democracy of the Fuehrerphobes, one should not fall for their Orwellian claims of tolerance. As we know from the Popper Paradox, it is not possible for a free society to tolerate people who reject tolerance and use the democratic process as a cover to impose tyranny. Since support for the Fuehrer is what makes someone part of the nation, Fuehrerphobes, who have separated themselves from the people in their attempt to overthrow democracy, cannot legally enjoy the rights of citizenship. They do not have the right to interfere in elections to fake the results to pretend that the Fuehrer does not have the full support of the people either by voting or by promoting fake news. 

It should be understood that underneath all of this rhetoric, lies a serious argument about the nature and purpose of democracy and liberty that liberals need to be able to effectively respond to. To understand Fascism, it is essential not to underestimate the lengths to which the common man will go to stick it to the liberal elitist intellectuals that he knows have nothing but contempt for him. That being said, liberals will never be in a position to storm this citadel unless they are first able to take the outer trench of language.

To add a further twist on this debate idea, imagine that you have a class of students raised on “national democracy.” These are genuinely good kids. They believe in freedom, tolerance, and social justice. They are eager to work for the greater good of the people by demonstrating their commitment to these principles to the administrators of elite schools. They like you but there is something a little off about you as you are different from every other teacher they have had. One day, a student asks you if you are a Fuehrerphobe. 

A hush immediately falls on the class. The students all know, with the surety that smoking is bad, that Fuehrerphobia is something simultaneously disgusting and absurd that should appeal to no reasonable person and yet is so deeply widespread in society that the Fuehrer is required to take emergency measures to protect the people against it. Fuehrerphobia is so dangerous because, unless you actively work to ally yourself with marginalized people and fill yourself with the Fuehrer's love, becoming an anti-Fuehrerphobe, it is inevitable that you will fall into Fuehrerphobic thinking. Most Fuehrerphobes do not even realize that they are Fuehrerphobes and will even deny the charge when accused. This is, of course, the ultimate proof of Fuehrerphobia.      

It would be useless to argue with these kids even if you were not threatened by secret police or with the loss of your job. National democracy honestly contains many noble ideals even as it serves to cover literal Nazism. These kids lack the language even for describing the Nazism that they are being raised with let alone for comprehending how someone might honestly be a Fuehrerphobe without being a hook-nosed villain trying to murder babies to use their blood for crackers. These kids need an alternative language where liberty, freedom, and rights have been restored to their classical liberal meanings. Alternatively, new terms for classical liberal concepts may need to be invented. 

D-Day and the Non-Aggression Principle

 

A foundational idea within libertarian thought is the non-aggression principle (NAP). I should not use physical violence against people who have not physically attacked me and have shown no evidence of plotting to do so. People who do not follow my religion or ideology and even commit blasphemy against it are not engaging in violence. As such, as hurtful as I may find their words, I must tolerate these people and cannot attempt to injure them. Libertarians go further with this doctrine and reject the legality of any law that lacks a clear victim of physical violence. For example, you have the right to shoot heroin and sleep with hookers. Such actions may be bad for your physical health as well as your family and the larger society. That being said, since these actions do not initiate physical violence, they should be legal. By contrast, all government action is, by definition, violent as it carries the implied mafia-style threat of either obeying or men with guns will do you extreme bodily harm. As such, any attempt by the government to go after people who have not initiated acts of violence themselves (people other than the likes of thieves, murderers, and invading foreign armies) is inherently illegitimate.

Perhaps the clearest explanation of this concept is Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable which is premised on the notion that it is better to be a prostitute or a drug dealer than a politician or a policeman. The fact that people are willing to break the law and risk prison in order to use your services demonstrates that people honestly want what you are selling. By contrast, as a public school teacher, I have no reason to assume that my students actually want to be in school. By agreeing to teach, I am, arguably, implicated in a conspiracy to deprive children of their liberty for hours every day in order to justify robbing the public to pay me a salary as I waste my students’ time. At best, I should allow students to play on their phones all day in order to better demonstrate that public schools are useless and should be abolished in order that kids should be allowed to make better use of their time by selling drugs and sex on a street corner.     

I would like to consider a limitation to the NAP. The NAP is premised on a world of individuals. What happens when we have to consider people as groups with narratives of initiated violence and victimhood? Imagine a German soldier sitting in a bunker, minding his own business, on the coast of Normandy, D-Day morning. Our German soldier has personally never initiated violence against anyone. Through no fault of his own, the only job he can find consists of putting on a uniform, carrying a gun, and sitting in this bunker. As this does not violate the NAP, our soldier agreed to do it.

Now our soldier finds that people he has never met are firing shells in his general direction, heedless of the fact that he might get hurt. Our soldier charges the Allied soldiers storming the beach waving a philosophy book and shouting: your actions violate the NAP and are, therefore, unethical. You are initiating violence against someone, mainly me, who has never harmed you. I was not part of the 1940 invasion of France, so it is not my fault that France is under German occupation. Furthermore, you are damaging beachfront property that does not belong to you. As none of you own property on this beachfront, you have no standing to argue that I have less of a right to be walking on this beach than you do. You need to sail back across the English Channel and leave me in peace to do my government job as inefficiently as possible. This will hasten the collapse of Nazi Germany, allowing me to finally do something useful like drug dealing or prostitution.    

Clearly, the German soldier’s position is absurd though I am increasingly frightened to suspect that many members of the Mises Caucus would be willing to agree that it is immoral for Allied soldiers to shoot him. Even though he has personally never harmed anyone, he is part of the larger system of Nazi Germany that has initiated violence against millions of people even as the vast majority of people in the system have not personally harmed anyone. Are we going to claim that the concentration camp guard who never shot anyone is innocent? What about Nazi propagandists like Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher?

Once we admit that our German soldier is guilty by virtue of our narrative that he is part of this larger system called Nazi Germany, it is hardly obvious where to draw the line. Imagine if a group of Englishmen were to charge the beaches of Normandy and open fire on the local French residents to retaliate against the Norman invasion of England in 1066, an injustice that the modern residents of Normandy have presumably benefited from in some way. Do students have the right to plant bombs in their teachers' cars in order to defend themselves against "educational violence?” On a serious note, critical race theory activists believe that you can be guilty of "structural violence" by virtue of being white and not actively working to overthrow the American political and economic systems, institutions tainted by racism.

Clearly, narratives are necessary in order to make sense of the world. That being said, once we allow for narrative thinking, we have to recognize how easy it is for anyone to game the system and argue that they are the victim of some historical injustice and that they have the moral right to do bad things to someone by virtue of the fact that the person can be connected as a beneficiary to that injustice. 

Non-Intuitive War Crimes

 

An essential component of Protestant theology is sola scriptura. This is the belief that only the Bible has authority. For this to work, it is necessary to not only accept a Protestant reading of the Bible but also that only the Protestant reading of the Bible makes sense. In essence, a Protestant needs to be perfectly confident that he can drop a suitably translated Bible next to a native Pacific islander and they would be able to reconstruct Protestant theology for themselves. The moment we no longer assume that this is likely, sola scriptura collapses and we are left having to choose which pair of exegetical glasses we are going to use to read the text with. Protestantism may be one possible framework along with a Catholic or a Jewish reading but that will no longer be sola scriptura. 

I see a similar problem with the notion of international war crimes trials. There is a basic problem with charging someone from another country with a war crime mainly that it violates one of the most basic principles of law, ex post facto. For something to be a crime, there has to be a clear law with set penalties that were being violated at the time the crime was committed. Without this, governments can arrest anyone for what they did last week even if it was perfectly legal then.  

The Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were some of the evilest people in all of history and they certainly deserved death. That being said, the Nuremberg trial itself was illegal. The actions of the Nuremberg defendants, including mass murder, were all perfectly legal under German law. By contrast, the crimes, the tribunal, and the very process of the trial were all made up on the fly for the sole purpose of prosecuting the defendants. Considering this, an essential justification of the Nuremberg trial was that the crimes committed were so egregious as to make it obvious to the defendants that what they were doing was a crime. 

Considering this, a war crime cannot just be something that is a war crime. In order to be a war crime, it needs to be obvious that the action is a war crime. The moment we fail to meet that high standard then we lose the moral high ground and are stuck in the morally dubious position of trying to punish people for failing to live up to our morality. 

A war crime can never be obvious because the very act of fighting in a war already violates the most basic of moral taboos, murder. One thinks of the scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where Paul stabs a French soldier who is in a shell crater with him. Paul, stuck in the crater, is forced to listen to the man die. The power of the scene relies on Paul, stuck in the muddy crater and cut off from the fighting around him, coming to the awareness that, because of his actions, a human being is dying next to him and that he will never be able to wash this guilt from himself. Sending people to war means telling young men to murder other young men who simply happen to be wearing the wrong-colored uniform. If they agree to commit cold-blooded murder, they will be hailed as heroes, but if they refuse they will be imprisoned or executed for dereliction of duty.   

If this was our standard for a war crime, war crimes would be obvious and just about every soldier and politician throughout human history would be guilty of committing them. Imagine if Amnesty International were to be contacted for help by a soldier in prison for refusing to fire on uniformed enemy soldiers who refused to surrender. The moment Amnesty took such a case would be the end of war crimes theory as no country could ever accept that their soldiers have a moral right to refuse to fight.  

For a war crime charge not to collapse into reductio ad absurdum, we need to assume that there really is such a thing as legitimate war, where you murder perfectly decent people who have not harmed anybody, and that this can be distinguished from illegitimate warfare which is a crime. I do not want this to sink into moral relativism. Clearly, there can be distinctions made between legitimate and illegitimate warfare. Part of being a citizen is agreeing to murder people in legitimate wars and the government has the right to punish people who wish to renege on this agreement. The problem is whether we can assume that these distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate will be obvious to all reasonable people.

Imagine that I was drafted into a war. I agree to murder someone in an enemy uniform who was not in the act of trying to murder anyone from my side. Perhaps, they were on the toilet and I took them out with a sniper rifle. My commanding officer next tells me to start shelling a kindergarten classroom that enemy soldiers are using for cover. Have I just been ordered to commit a war crime and should I risk going to jail rather than do such a deed? What if the kindergartners are singing a song about how they pledge to kill people in my country? Why is it worse to kill those kids than the soldier who was not threatening my side?

I like to think of myself as an educated person. That being said, I am not any kind of lawyer or war crimes expert. Presumably, my officers will have manuals written by legal professionals employed by my government explaining how the orders they are giving me are not war crimes and, as such, I will face prosecution for failing to carry them out. What grounds would I have to argue against that? At least I know enough history and political theory to give some decent speeches before my military tribunal when I am tried for dereliction of duty. What is an eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school supposed to do besides listen to his government’s lawyers and hope that his side does not lose the war?

There are many areas of law that are allowed to be complicated. For example, I cannot assume that I have correctly filed my taxes simply by relying on my moral intuitions. On the contrary, I need to rely on professionals. Similarly, the precise parameters of the right to kill in self-defense are not intuitive. As a rule of thumb, if you have time to worry that the law might not recognize your right to self-defense in a particular situation that is a sign that you should not kill your attacker. By contrast, for war crimes to be a meaningful charge, it needs to be intuitively obvious. Soldiers cannot be expected to go to war advised by foreign legal experts whether something is really a war crime. The moment a war crime becomes something that you even need an expert for and cannot simply rely on what your "parents might say” then the entire legal edifice of war crimes collapses into the personal morality of foreign lawyers to be used against you if your side loses the war.