Fascisms: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2022

Jeremy was a dandy. At a time when young men were going hippie—growing their hair long, wearing faded, ripped blue jeans with western or tie-dyed shirts, buckskin or Edwardian vests and sandals or cowboy boots—Jeremy wore sharply pressed pleated dark slacks, pastel dress shirts with smart cardigan sweaters highlighted by the occasional ascot, and black or brown wingtips. This was 1970 and I was just such a wannabe hippie when I boarded the local Ventura city bus to sit down next to Jeremy. He sniffed in disdain at my unruly appearance and went back to writing in his notebook.

“I’m on the Prom Committee,” he said, holding his pen in the air between thumb and forefinger. “We’re developing the theme for this year’s Prom. What do you think about ‘a taste of bittersweet’?”

I had no school spirit nor had I plans to attend my high school prom so I simply shrugged. Jeremy was a walking contradiction. Everybody knew he was gay even though he was not out. He was overtly Catholic however and always wore a silver crucifix with a finely tooled image of the bloodied Jesus around his neck. Michael boarded the bus the next stop and sauntered back to where we sat. Michael was a year older and now a freshman at UC Santa Barbara where he had participated in the Isla Vista student riots that burned down the Bank of America. He wasn’t just a shaggy hippie but also a burgeoning New Leftist like myself. Michael and Jeremy despised each other. So while Michael and I chatted, Jeremy and Michael ignored each other. Then Michael happened to mention he “planned to hitchhike around Europe in the summer.”

“Spain is quite lovely, although a tad hot in the summertime,” Jeremy feigned a casual air. “I visited Spain last summer for an Opus Dei retreat and I had such a wonderful time.”

American fascist exceptionalism?: “What’s Left?” September 2019 (MRR #436)

If you can’t tell the difference between glorification and ridicule—does it matter?

—Spencer Sunshine

I read recently that San Francisco’s Financial District, called “Wall Street West,” is being downgraded. The district is both downsizing economically and shrinking physically. Financial services are moving online and it’s just too damned expensive for employees in downtown banking and financial companies to live in the city anymore, thanks to the booming tech industry’s gentrifying impact on San Francisco. I remember back fondly to Sunday, February 16, 2003, when a quarter of a million people protesting Junior Bush’s invasion of Iraq shut down the Financial District and briefly the Bay Bridge. Mass anti-war protests continued to disrupt “business as usual” in Wall Street West for weeks to come.

I’d forged my leftist politics and love for street action during the ’70s, but America’s steady rightward reaction and the sudden international collapse of the Soviet bloc over the next two decades depressed the hell out of me. The resurgence of Left activism with the Iraq War was quite heartening. I wanted to be in the thick of those demonstrations despite having fractured the big toe and one of the sesamoid bones in my right foot in an accident several months before. I was hobbling around in great pain but nevertheless elated to be experiencing popular street politics once again, exhilarated to be roaming the city with a small group of friends demonstrating, blockading traffic, participating in impromptu sit-ins, engaging in general vandalism and mayhem, etc. I had my black bloc gear in hand, but I was in no shape to participate in those tactics.

Tim Yohannan. ¡Presente!: “What’s Left?” May 2019, MRR #432

[E]verything that was in opposition was good…
Michael Baumann, How It All Began, 1975

No one who likes swing can become a Nazi.
Arvid (Frank Whaley), Swing Kids, 1993

It was Movie Night at Maximum Rocknroll at the old Clipper Street headquarters circa 1994. The featured movie was Thomas Carter’s 1993 film Swing Kids. It was Tim and me and maybe one other person. I think Tim actually made Jiffy Pop popcorn and I had my ubiquitous six pack. The plot was simple; as the Nazi Party rises to power in pre-WWII Germany a tight countercultural scene of young kids grow their hair long, wear British fashion and use Harlem slang as they listen to banned American swing music, hold underground dances and street fight the Hitler Youth. Two rebellious young men take different paths—one into the Hitler Youth, the other into the Swing Kids and eventually jail.

The parallels to the mid-1990s were clear, with the rise of the Right politically and the explosion of punk’s second hardcore wave in the streets. After the closing credits rolled and Tim popped out the VHS tape he made the connections explicit. “Punk is like swing was in Nazi Germany. It’s the core of a revolutionary youth culture with rebellious kids resisting fascism in the streets.”

Tim loved punk, no doubt about it, but he was also on a mission. He not only wanted to cover the scene and its music, he wanted to push the politics of punk to the fore. And that link between punk music, the scene, its politics, and the fight against the Right is crucial to understanding both Tim Yo and his project, MRR. Tim considered MRR a lynchpin between punk music and the punk scene on the one hand and the Left’s fight against reactionary politics on the other hand.

Crisis on the Right: “What’s Left?” August 2017, MRR #411

This is my overlong analysis of the crisis of the Left and the crisis on the Right . I owe the tripartite analysis of the modern American Right to Political Research Associates, which does excellent work dissecting the Right through investigative reports, articles, and activist resource kits.

———

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Yet periods of ideological decay often breed strange new variants, such as the ‘Red-Brown alliance’ in the former Soviet Union, which do not easily fit into conventional political-science categories of “left” and “right.”

Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day

I’m ass deep into analyzing the crisis of the Left. There are three components to this crisis, beginning with the defeat of organized labor by ascendant neoliberalism in the industrialized west (Reagan busting the PATCO unions in 1981, Thatcher defeating striking coal miners in 1984-85). Next came the collapse of real existing socialist regimes with the disintegration of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91. These two events mark the decline of Marxism broadly and Leninism more narrowly as the third component of this ongoing crisis. The present growth of anarchism and left communism and the breeding of “strange new variants” like insurrectionism and communization I consider a mixed blessing because this actually demonstrates the Left’s weakness. The relationship between the resurgence of the anti-authoritarian Left and the decline of the rest of the Left, in turn, reflects a broader relationship between the politics of Left and Right, with the “ideological decay” of the Right hinting at something broader.

If the crisis of the Left is also a crisis on the Right, perhaps I need to use the word interregnum. The sentiment of the Yeats poem, borne by the mystic, cryptofascist Irish nationalist in his reactionary politics, conveys the sense of a violent interruption between old and new orders. An old order loses its grip, but before a new order manages to establish itself there is a period of social chaos and disintegration when things “do not easily fit into conventional political-science categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’.” An interregnum, by definition, is a big deal.

The Latin term interregnum originated with the English civil war to designate the period from the execution of Charles I in 1649 to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Cromwell’s dictatorship is sometimes considered a prequel to the bourgeois revolutions that ushered in the modern world. Most of the history I tend to fixate on—the French 1789 Revolution, the Russian 1917 Revolution, the German 1918-19 workers’ revolt ushering in the Weimar Republic, the Spanish 1936-39 civil war, etc.—also indicate relatively short-lived, national interregnums. But interregnums can also be long and slow moving, involving a much wider geographic scope.

The Papal Schism that split the western church between three contending popes from 1378 to 1417 damaged the Catholic church’s reputation and authority. Along with issues of priestly celibacy, the marketing of relics, and most importantly the selling of indulgences, the Protestant Reformation was all but inevitable. From Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses in 1517 through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europe experienced scores of religious wars predicated on dynastic conflicts and as many as 20 million deaths due to religious violence, not to mention a continental reshaping of European social, political, and economic realities that eventually gave rise to the modern nation-state system. That’s over a century-long, diffuse, continental interregnum. Alternately, the series of national interregnums from the beginning of the first World War in 1914 to the end of the second World War in 1945 might be threaded together into a single, grand, worldwide interregnum. A global interregnum

I’m paleo when it comes to my Marxism. Interregnums fit nicely into a history propelled by class struggle and revolution. As for modes of production and stages of history, I’m both less and more orthodox. Less because I don’t think historical modes of production prior to capitalism were comprehensive, and more because once the capitalist mode of production arose it eventually became socially and globally all-embracing. And I’m definitely old school in contending that the French revolutionary interregnum of 1789 ushered in the modern world, starting with the riotous sans culotte and culminating in Napoleon’s more disciplined conscripts sweeping across continental Europe.

The first bourgeois revolution in France coincided with a wide variety of interrelated historical processes and cultural phenomena—from the Enlightenment and scientific revolution to modern warfare and the rise of industrial capitalism—to mark the watershed between pre-modern and modern eras. It also introduced our modern-day distinctions between Left and Right through the representative seating at the 1789 National Assembly. Here’s a standard high school PolySci description: “In a narrow sense, the political spectrum summarizes different attitudes towards the economy and the role of the state: left-wing views support intervention and collectivism; and right-wing ones favor the market and individualism. However, this distinction supposedly reflects deeper, if imperfectly defined, ideological or value differences. Ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism are generally seen to have a left-wing character, while notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism are generally seen as having a right-wing character.” [Andrew Heywood, Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations] The Left’s stress on reason and program in accepting modernity makes for greater structure and coherence compared to the eclectic, muddy stance of the non-rational, instinctual Right in the rejection of modernity. But it all does come down to an embrace of, versus a revolt against, the modern world.

And here we encounter a contradiction central to the Right. For in order to revolt against the modern world, the Right must simultaneously embrace it. Moderate conservatives like Edmund Burke who were terrified by the French Revolution were dragged kicking and screaming into modernity, accepting the economics of Adam Smith and the private property of Locke while demanding that tradition put the breaks on changes wrought by capitalism. Reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre advocated for “throne and altar” in a restored ancien regime—a Counter Enlightenment counterrevolutionary—yet he still admired Napoleon. The Left went full-bore into mass politics, vanguard parties, technological innovation, and heavy industrialization with the Bolshevik turn after 1917, yet another national interregnum. From Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome through Hitler’s 1933 acceptance of the German chancellorship, the extreme Fascist right responded by producing an anti-liberal, anti-conservative, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist revolutionary mass politics to reindustrialize central Europe around a vanguardist, ultranationalist, palingenetic core. The Right has always been in reaction to the Left because of this central contradiction, and there are scholars of Fascist Studies who claim that Fascism was actually a synthesis of revolutionary Left and Right.

Lacking a feudal past, a universal church, and monarchist and aristocratic traditions, the Right in the United States remained confined to moderate conservative factions in the prominent pre-civil war electoral parties—Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Whigs, and Jacksonian Democrats. It’s been argued that the American Right actually started as a form of European liberalism. At its most immoderate, early American conservatism demonstrated strong nativist and isolationist tendencies, as with the American “Know Nothing” Party. The country’s Protestant citizenry was subject to populist Great Awakenings, rightwing fundamentalist movements, and heretical cults like Mormonism. And, of course, the prevailing assumption across the board was that the United States was a white man’s nation, owned and run by white people. Southern slave society came closest to offering a European-style Right based on aristocracy and tradition. The struggle over slavery that lead to the civil war also drove conservative elements of the southern Democratic Party into the extremism of the Ku Klux Klan’s white supremacist militia terrorism after the civil war, while much of the GOP drifted into an isolationist, laissez-faire Old Right.

Along with a revival in rightwing religious movements like Christian evangelicalism and pentecostalism, the United States witnessed its own fascist movement paralleling European Fascism between the world wars. Based on a reborn, white supremacist, mass KKK that was also anti-Catholic, antisemitic, and populist, it included the antisemitic ravings of Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh’s America First movement and sympathies for Nazi Germany, Pelley’s Silver Shirts and Christian Party, even the more demagogic leftist populism of Huey Long. The threat of an American Fascism was very real in the 1920s and 30s.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the end of the global interregnum, in large part thanks to the Soviet Red Army, it was assumed that Fascism had been liquidated once and for all. The United States assumed for itself the sole superpower and the center of empire, capable of imposing a Pax Americana over the world, except for an obstreperous Soviet Union. Some form of Cold War anti-communism became a mainstay of mainstream American politics. It should be remembered that Joseph McCarthy started out a Democrat and ended up a Republican. McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and Barry Goldwater’s faction of the Republican Party were all radically anti-communist.

But the Right in the United States remained fractious. It included the antisemitic white supremacism of the Klan, George Wallace and the Dixiecrat revolt, the beginnings of the patriot/militia movement in DePugh’s Minutemen and Beach’s Posse Comitatus, the paleoconservatism of Russell Kirk and Paul Gottfried, embryonic conspiracy theorizing a la Bircher anti-fluoridation paranoia, Ayn Rand’s atheist Objectivism, the first inklings of Murray Rothbard’s AnCap libertarianism, and the like. In contrast to the rightwing alliance between Christian evangelicals and Catholic bishops on everything from school prayer to abortion, serious theological divisions emerged in Reconstructionism, Dominionism, and Christian Nationalism alongside religious cults like Children of God, Unification Church, Fundamentalist LDS, Church Universal and Triumphant, etc. As the Right so often mirrors the Left, American conservatism tried to force a contrapuntal unity against the perceived “international communist conspiracy for world domination.”

William F. Buckley founded the National Review Magazine in 1955 in an explicit effort to demarcate a proper American conservatism and to keep it properly policed through vicious polemics and purges of racists, antisemites, and conspiracy wingnuts. He wanted an official American conservative movement that overlapped with the Republican Party, a pro-business/anti-union conservative movement dedicated to a disciplined, uncompromising, good-vs-evil crusade against communism. Buckley thought of this as standing athwart history, yelling stop, in his version of revolting against modernity, but he discovered that policing the Right was like herding cats. It’s been argued that Buckley’s National Review conservative movement was a facade; that the Right didn’t grow less diverse or more unified under Buckley’s shepherding. Yet what ultimately vanquished Buckley and the conservative movement was the crisis of the Left that bubbled up during the 1980s, culminating in the Soviet bloc’s sudden collapse from 1989 to 1991. The United States won the Cold War and truly became the sole superpower and center of empire. Yet things fell apart and the center could not hold as another global interregnum took shape.

I argue that the crisis of the Left produced a corresponding crisis on the Right, a proliferation of “strange new variants” on the Right. The Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal rebranding of official conservatism primed the crisis, alongside the direct mail Viguerie New Right and imported rightwing countercultural currents like Skinheads. All sectors of the Right subsequently proliferated, from the Secular Right (Libertarianism, Neoconservatism) through the Religious Right (soft and hard Dominionism) to the Xenophobic Right. The latter witnessed the most explosive growth through populist movements (armed citizen militias, Sovereign Citizens, patriot groups) and white nationalist ultraright movements (Christian Identity, Creativity Movement, National Socialist Movement, National Alliance).

The most visible aspects of the growing Right—the Tea Party Movement and now the Alt.Right—are just the tip of the rightwing iceberg. Whereas the Secular Right remains committed to a pluralist civil society, the Xenophobic Right is hardline anti-democratic, with the dividing line between conservative and hard Right falling somewhere in the Religious Right. The confusing variety on the Right can barely be contained by this conceptual triad, unlike the Left’s greater structure and coherence which falls easily into antiauthoritarian, democratic/parliamentary, and Leninist categories.

The changes to global capitalism that underpinned the rise of this current global interregnum must wait until a future column. I’ll conclude by quoting Tom Robinson: “If Left is Right, then Right is Wrong. You better decide which side you’re on.”

Piling up the corpses: “What’s Left?” July 2015, MRR #386

Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember [that] which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid [wait] for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Samuel 15: 2-3 (King James Version)

Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?

Adolf Hitler

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

attributed to Josef Stalin

Last column, I took anarchism to task and concluded that it is ineffectual in practice. Hell, I called anarchism a joke. But what about anarchism’s chief rival on the Left? Time was, Marxist-Leninist one-party totalitarian regimes ruled over a fifth of the world’s land surface, governing around a third of humanity. Communism has fallen on hard times since those dizzying heights in 1985, yet there are still those who would revive Leninism’s lost fortunes, with many more nostalgic for the “good old days” of Stalinist dictatorships. So, let’s delve into one of the more prominent aspects of the Marxist-Leninist Left, that being mass murder.

Talking about mass murder is a tricky business. After all, who’s hands aren’t steeped in blood. Several years ago, France and Turkey exchanged words in a diplomatic row in which the French insisted that Turkey take responsibility for the slaughter of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, with the Turks responding that France had butchered perhaps 1.5 Algerians during the Algerian colonial war from 1954 to 1962. Claims and counterclaims flew back and forth as to who did what, when, and how, and as to whether one incident of mass murder could be compared to the other. What I’m prepared to do is far more foolish, but potentially more interesting, in that I plan to set up a ranking for mass murder, starting with Leninism’s crimes.

A note first on terminology. Mass murder and mass killing are the general words for a host of terms with more specific meanings. Genocide means the elimination of a race, ethnocide of an ethnic group, and classicide of a social class. Democide means the intentional killing of large numbers of unarmed people, and politicide the extermination of people based on their political beliefs or the deliberate destruction of a political movement. Femicide or gynocide refers to the massacre of women, and fratricide of family members killing each other, which is often used as a synonym for civil war. Finally, ecocide refers to the wanton destruction of an ecology or natural environment. All are perpetrated primarily, but not exclusively, by governments. Humans have become so expert at slaughter that there is a need to specify the kind of slaughter.

Now, let’s consider history’s real mass murderers, a variety of totalitarian regimes all from the 20th century. For sources, I will be using Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder by R.J. Rummel, 1992, and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Laffont, Courtois, Werth, Panné, Paczkowski, Bartosek, Margolin, 1999. And, to further the thesis I’m arguing, I will consistently cite mortality figures in the mid range.

I’ll begin with worldwide Marxist-Leninist communism. Through “bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide,” all Marxist-Leninist regimes since 1917 have butchered around 110 million people. This breaks down for the major players to 62 million for the old USSR, 40 million for China, 2 million for Cambodia, 1.6 million apiece for North Korea and Vietnam, and 1 million for the former Yugoslavia, covering in total eastern Europe and most of the Asian land mass, as well as significant portions of Africa. Count in another 30 million for aggressive wars, civil and guerrilla wars, insurrections and uprisings, and the dimensions of this “red holocaust” are complete.

But wait, this is superseded by the “brown holocaust” perpetrated by Nazi Germany, which murdered outright roughly 20,946,000 people from 1933 to 1945. That includes some 5,291,000 Jews, 258,000 Gypsies, 10,547,000 Slavs, 220,000 homosexuals, 173,500 handicapped Germans, and assorted millions of French, Dutch, Serbs, Slovenes, Czechs, and other European nationals. This was accomplished “[b]y genocide, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, ‘euthanasia,’ starvation, exposure, medical experiments, and terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps.” Add that to the approximately 20 to 30,000,000 slaughtered by the Nazi’s militarily, and that’s a figure of over 40-50 million human beings obliterated in something like 12 years across continental Europe (this excludes all other fascist regimes; Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Hirohito’s Japan, etc.).

To emphasize how the Nazi “brown holocaust” qualitatively surpassed the Communist “red holocaust,” another quote from R.J. Rummel is in order. With respect to mass murder alone: [a]nnually […] the Nazis killed six to seven people out of every hundred in occupied Europe. The odds of a European dying under Nazi occupation were about one in fifteen. […] Moreover, even though the Nazis hardly matched the democide of the Soviets and Communist Chinese […] they proportionally killed more. […] The annual odds of being killed by the Nazis during their occupation were almost two-and-a-half times that of Soviet citizens being slain by their government since 1917; over nine times that for Chinese living in Communist China after 1949. In competition for who can murder proportionally the most human beings, the Japanese militarists come closest. The annual odds of being killed by the Japanese during their occupation of China, Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Indochina, and elsewhere in Asia was one in 101. Given the years and population available to this gang of megamurderers, the Nazis have been the most lethal murderers; and Japanese militarists next deadliest.

Much the same point is made by Paul Preston in his massive tome The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (2011). Without discounting, downplaying, or apologizing for either the calculated CP-instigated Red Terror or the more spontaneous anarchist-inspired massacres of capitalists and clergy in the Republican zone, Preston contends that around 50,000 Spaniards were slaughtered by Republican forces, as compared to 150,000 Spaniards massacred by Franco’s rebel forces throughout Spain. This lead Preston to conclude that Franco’s atrocities during and after the Civil War amounted to nothing less than a holocaust, “a carefully planned operation to eliminate … ‘those who do not think as we do’,” a mass murder of Spaniards unprecedented in Spanish history.

In contrast, let’s try and calculate this country’s genocidal/democidal burden, an extremely difficult task for several reasons. First, the native Americans. It’s impossible to know how many Indians lived in what would become the territorial US of A prior to colonization, and thus it becomes just as impossible to come up with a number for those outright murdered by colonial and national Americans. Even if we take the maximum figure of 112 million natives residing across both North and South America prior to 1492, only some 6 million remained alive in the western hemisphere by 1650. Upwards of 90% of the native population on this continent died of European diseases introduced unintentionally after 1492, well before the first English colonists set foot in what would become the United States. And this does not account for native Americans killed in military action or massacred by white American settlers. The black population can be calculated with greater precision: about 645,000 Africans were imported as slaves to America, and that population had grown to 4 million by 1860. But figuring how many black American slaves died from outright murder or were worked to an early grave through forced labor, again, is impossible to accomplish with any accuracy. For the sake of argument, I propose using a figure of 1.5 million, which is incredibly high.

Now, let’s assume that every war Americans ever fought, as colonials and nationals, was imperialist in nature. That amounts to some 26 more or less official wars, and well over 200 unofficial interventions, in which around 1,340,000 Americans died, including the 625,000 who perished during the US Civil War. We didn’t get going with our military killing machine until we started targeting Asians (WW2—2 million Japanese; Korea—1 million North Koreans, 500,000 Chinese; Vietnam—1 million Vietnamese). Combining these numbers with other enemy casualties, we come up with around 8 million dead due to American military imperialism. Now, consider the costs of American capitalism, in workplace casualties, workers killed by Pinkertons and police, industrial accidents, overwork, etc., and put that figure at another 1.5 millions, again super inflated. Let’s put America’s overall genocide/democide of 11 million killed over some 400 years across the territorial United States, western Europe, and select regions of the Third World. This is an insanely hyperbolic description of American mass murder. To make the point this column is striving for, let’s double the figures for people of color killed and death by capitalism to 3 million each as a kind of “liberal white male guilt” gratuity, and round the total American genocide figure to an even 15 million slaughtered over 4 centuries over the same area described above. As a budding leftist in the 1960s, I believed that a wildly exaggerated number like 15 million was quite reasonable.

I’m sure I’ve opened myself up to criticism from those pomo Leftists (the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-classist, anti-ageist, anti-ableist bastard children of the New Left and French philosophy) who would contend that, because I’m white, male, well-educated, and middle class, I passed—I avoided experiencing America’s full genocidal/gynocidal wrath. But when compared to the blood-soaked history of Nazi Germany or Leninist communism, America’s crimes, no matter how much I intentionally exaggerate them, simply cannot compare.

To conclude, Nazi Germany ranks at the top of the list for murdering people, followed closely by the rest of fascism. Leninism worldwide is actually only middling with respect to massacre. And the USA is in a paltry third place.

There are advantages to living in a liberal Western democracy.

(Copy editing by K Raketz.)

The enemy of your enemy?: “What’s Left?” May 2012, MRR #348

Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice.

Proverbs 24:17

It’s a thought experiment. Imagine that you can go back in time and personally assassinate dictator X, and by doing so, save Y number of lives, all the people slaughtered by said dictator. Would you do it?

Personally, I would do it in a New York minute. Hitler? Stalin? One life for millions? No question. I would do it in a heartbeat.

Now, take this another step. Imagine that you can travel back in time, but instead of taking out dictator X, you can only kill the dictator’s mother, thus aborting the dictator’s birth, and thereby preventing the murder of all the dictator’s victims. Would you do it?

That’s where I draw the line. I couldn’t do it. I could not kill an innocent in order to prevent evil from being born into the world. Aside from dyed-in-the-wool pacifists, I think most people would opt to blow away a monstrous tyrant, if in doing so they saved thousands, perhaps millions of lives. But this line—being willing to kill the dictator but not the mother of the dictator—seems to be the way most people would respond to this exercise.

Perhaps I’m being too optimistic though. There is a surprisingly common tendency to hold the family and friends of a criminal responsible, guilty by association if you will, for the crimes committed by that individual. Initiated by the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war, the practice of holding ones enemy’s families hostage as an act of terror appears to be widespread in conflicts around the world, despite being prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Hell, the Bolsheviks held hostage the families of deserters, rebellious Kronstadt sailors, even Bolshevik Red Army generals in order to insure their loyalty. The willingness to produce collateral damage however doesn’t require excuses like “the ends justify the means” or “by any means necessary.” Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that, in the war on terror, the US government has the right to murder one of its own citizens as suspected terrorists whenever and wherever it choses to do so, simply on the word of the President, in order to “save lives.” In this case, the real victim is due process and the US constitution.

This little thought experiment was brought to mind by the sudden death of Andrew Breitbart at 43. Now, don’t get me wrong. Breitbart was a despicable individual who was willing to deliberately distort facts in order to get the results he desired. In the case of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, he edited down the video of a speech she gave at an NAACP fundraising dinner in order to “prove” that she was an anti-white racist. As a consequence of his video hatchet job, the NAACP condemned Sherrod, and the government fired her. When Breitbart was forced to post the full video, it was revealed that Shirley Sherrod had said the exact opposite and opposed discriminating against whites. The NAACP apologized, the Department of Agriculture did as well, offering her another job, and Sherrod sued Breitbart for defamation. But the damage had been done. So I have no love for Andrew Breitbart, a slimy, loathsome individual at best who practiced a shoddy, scurrilous form of character assassination he mislabeled as journalism. Yet I was extremely uncomfortable over the outright gloating with which many progressives greeted the news of his death.

Take Henry Kissinger, for another example. I consider Kissinger nothing less than a war criminal. If I could have been assured that, when he was Secretary of State, his assassination would have saved the lives of a million Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Chileans, I might have condoned such an act. But better to have him arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a six by nine cell for the rest of his sorry life. I still think it’s a great option. Or better still, have him slave away gathering night soil for Vietnamese or Chilean peasants in his old age. It would be justice that he suffer for his crimes. When someone chided a left communist I know that “the rich are human too,” he retorted, “yes, I’m glad they’re human because I want them to suffer when we take everything away from them.” I want to take everything away from the likes of Henry Kissinger, leaving his kind to eke out the remainder of their lives in abject misery.

I shouldn’t be quoting the commie in question. He thinks of himself as Marx’s gift to the ultraleft and once scolded fellow radicals not to let their compassion get in the way of their politics. He manufactures enemies at the drop of a hat, and if anyone would take their families hostage as an act of terror, it would be this asshole.

One person I’m not reluctant to quote is Tim Yohannan. Back in the day, it was rumored that Tim was not just an upfront Maoist, but also associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party. I once asked him how his politics had changed over the years, and was surprised when he said “I guess I’ve mellowed with age.” To hear Tim use the term mellow in reference to himself was quite a shock, and he went on to explain “I used to think that the guy who runs a Fortune 500 corporation should be put up against a wall and shot. Now I just think he should be forced to be the janitor and push a broom around his company all day.”

I’ve been mulling things over as I’ve gotten older—past associations, actions and ideas—and like Tim I believe I’m mellowing with age. Last column, I made a clear break with the liberatory Left I once considered myself a member of—both left anarchism and left communism—by expressing my doubts that workers are capable of emancipating themselves as a class. Now I’m arguing that even heinous war criminals like Henry Kissinger shouldn’t be summarily executed, but rather severely punished for their crimes. I’m even queasy about celebrating the death of right-wing morons like Andrew Breitbart.

What’s more, I’m approaching my own death with much contemplation, and a bit of soul-searching. I’ve made my fair share of enemies in my lifetime. I hate to think of people wishing that I would die, or gleefully celebrating my death once it happens. I suppose that many of my political associates would contend that it is far better to be hated than to be ignored, that to be despised by the class enemy equates to being effective. I’ve got a decent ego, but even I don’t think I’ve been so effective politically as to merit being placed on some blacklist, either governmental (FBI, Terrorist Watch, etc.) or private (David Horowitz’s http://discoverthenetworks.org/ being the most egregious). No, most of the folks who hate me do so because of some past, personal fight, or more likely, because I was an asshole. Tim Yo, when he knew he had non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and was actively looking for ways to have MRR continue operation, asserted that a key characteristic of any magazine coordinator had to be their willingness “to be an asshole.” Unfortunately, my being an asshole had nothing to do with any managerial strategy, but was due instead to my immaturity, my drug abuse, or my desperate circumstances mostly of my own devising. I have tried making amends, and I try not to behave like an asshole any longer. Still, I’ve done personal damage I’m not proud of, so I dread thinking of who’s lining up to dance on my grave.