'Collectivism' and 'Statism' are useless words

As the last two posts from me indicate, I've been reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.  Nazi and Stalinist atrocities have taken up enough mental real estate of late that I dreamt last night that my old elementary school was an underground prison.

But these atrocities are in a sense all around us; their memory is omnipresent, from their rather central role in school curricula to the use of Nazi and Soviet history as the ultimate in taboo humor.  They inform our discourse, and similes involving them are ubiquitous.

Most of these similes are too stupid to take seriously.  Comparing Obama to Hitler is so self-evidently moronic that I half suspect that no one truly believes it, people just want to believe it.  But more insidiously, some people use deliberately vague terms as a way to invite comparison between the democratic welfare state and authoritarianism.  Such comparisons are as useless and unenlightening as they are offensive.

They are not obvious, however.  Because one can define one's terms to make such a comparison true, in a trivial way.  You can, for instance, define all those who do not believe in absolute individual liberty as 'statists' or 'collectivists.'  By this definition, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler are all 'statists.'  But in so doing you have done nothing -- you've just invented a word that means 'everyone that disagrees with me' and applied it appropriately.  Such a word is not a term of history, but merely a propaganda tool, a linguistic trick designed to paint all your opponents with a Stalinist brush.

You may protest, that this is a philosophical term, one that accurately describes people's values, to which I would reply, simply -- hogwash.  On the contrary, such a way of speaking shows a perversely abstract way of viewing human belief, human morality and human action, where the bad thing about Stalin was not that he murdered millions, but that he did not believe in individual property rights.  Interestingly, on this point the libertarian agrees with the 1930's Communist apologist, who saw Stalin as just another progressive fighting for equality.

By their fruits ye shall know them.  Any term that turns us away from the actual impact that ideas have on human beings is a perversity, an intellectual temptation to lose sight of our fellow man.  To guard against this we must view 20th century atrocities not as myths or abstractions, but as historical facts, the products of particular systems.  Not merely a watchword for everything we hate.

The Past Ain't Even Past

There is a knee-jerk reaction among many northerners and suburbanites to the southern heritage crowd that wraps itself in the confederate battle flag -- "The war is over, you lost."  Sometimes it is modified by the length of time since the war (120, 150 years, depending on the decade).  But it is always wrong.

As I wrote as much in a comment on the esteemed Kevin Levin's article, but I'd like to expand my thoughts here.

To say that history is not with us because it is long past effectively cedes the field to the Neo-Confederates, and ignores the fact that the issues raised by the war (racial equality, for instance) are still alive today.  It is not a long road from Appamattox to Selma, and toxic notions that blacks are nothing but criminals and loafers can be traced back to the apologists of slavery arguing that free black men lived lives of crime and despair.

As the Comedian Louis CK says 150 years is 'two old ladies back-to-back' -- there are many African Americans alive today whose grandparents were slaves. Beyond abandoning our history to those who celebrate treason, merely moving on minimizes the closesness of the War and how much of the inequality from slavery remains in our society.

I prefer to celebrate the sacrifice of those loyal to the US and to celebrate their accomplishment, rather than just suggesting that the whole affair doesn't matter.
On the other hand, as a descendent of Confederate soldiers and slaveholders (on one side, union soldiers are on the other) I feel like southerners have a duty to wrestle with our past and where we come from (see Faulkner, William). Confronting the ugliness that we find will help southerners understand the South as it is today and to make it better.

I think that the whole-hearted engagement with our past is the only way to counter those who would celebrate our nation's dismemberment.