I am continuously baffled that Stalin, Lenin, Mao et. al. are not held in the same regard as Hitler. I agree that comparing evilness is a fool's errand, but it's really strange how one genocidal dictator is okay and one is not. Those that deny that the Holodomor happened are just as bad as Holocaust deniers in my mind. But, somehow tankies are just called weird and largely ignored. I know this is mostly a Twitter (or X) thing, or at least social media at large, but it leaks into other areas of life too. I almost guarantee there are more Communist professors than Nazi professors and people would be much less likely to be fired if they said something like "I'm a fan of Stalin's work" than "I'm a fan of Hitler's work." It's a really strange phenomenon that has permeated the zeitgeist so much that even Chat-GPT has a hard time accepting that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia may have both been very evil places that should be cautionary tales and not instruction manuals.
I"ve long wondered why Hitler stands so far above the Communists in the popular consciousness. These are my amateur historian theories:
1. Hitler and the Nazis left us tons of film and photographs. The raw footage creates a visceral reaction to the atrocities. By contrast, I've never seen a single image of Stalin's or Mao's atrocities. (Lenin was too early). I am willing to stand corrected.
2. Hitler exhibited brutal efficiency and purpose in his killing. The other butchers mixed in neglect (famine) along with various other methods.
3. Hitler announced what that he was going to murder people ("Final Solution"). The other butchers initially claimed to engage in some kind of political/social revolution and murder later became a byproduct that wasn't expressly announced.
I’d add on to #3 that, among left-leaning people, communism is often viewed as a noble (if impractical) idea that unfortunately resulted in state atrocities when put into practice by the Soviets. So the principle of communism is seen as defensible, just poorly executed. Whereas the goal of eliminating minorities and creating a pure Aryan race is indefensible in both theory and practice
To wit, I recently watched "Succession" with my mom, and there's a presidential candidate who describes himself with verbiage like, "The spirit of the people has produced a leader."
I said, "Whoa, fashy!" and my mom (who considers herself politically educated) did not understand why my fash needle went to 11 on that statement.
I dunno if this is a worldwide problem, but at least in the US, there's this idea that teaching people what fascism is (or communism, or eugenics, or safe sex, or...) means somehow advocating for that position.
Agreed. People generally just treat it as a synonym for “anything I can vaguely tie to Hitler”, but that’s not really any more correct than assuming “Communism” and “Stalinism” are identical.
I've struggled for decades on how to handle this in a honest manner without unilaterally disarming myself in a debate. We need smaller terms that can describe ongoing government policy in historical terms that don't park themselves in popular notions of true evil. I should be seeing references to revanchism than fascism since the former is more specific and less parked on a popular notion of evil.
Excellent point. It's hard to believe but there are still hard-liners who believe that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Castros, the Kims etc are rogues who perverted an otherwise wonderful concept/ideology. "It hasn't been implemented properly".
There’s plenty of people on the reasonably mainstream right who’d defend forms of authoritarian ethno nationalism. They’d reject the label ‘Fascist’ as a pejorative but embrace much of the underlying ethos.
Is it a wonderful concept? I’ve always been of the belief that those leaders did exactly what they had to do. Communism is a house of cards. It requires society to agree on a singular goal and work towards it. Unlike capitalism, which can allow for a certain amount of graft and still work even if janky- communism as a societal engine needs every part of it to be humming. All parts of its economy need to be tightly controlled. Which means you have to crack the skulls of the people who don’t want to tow the line. Full stop. There’s literally no option left in these regimes. Because communism doesn’t account for people just wanting things they don’t need. Which means yeah. Black markets. And if you don’t have a special police that can go in and shut down those black markets the whole thing unravels. Communism requires, by definition, an awful lot of prohibition. Prohibition leads to black markets. Black markets lead to crime since they end up being self policed plus they have to hide their dealings from the government. So they have to snuff out snitches.
So. No those leaders didn’t pervert a good idea. Communism was never a good idea. It’s a lazy ideology that doesn’t want to wrestle with human desire in any kind of adult way. So yeah. Of course those leaders were brutal. They had to be. Peoples wants kept getting in the way of their beautiful, boring, sandbox. I’d argue they didn’t do anything wrong. In order to safeguard communism from dissent, black markets, immigration, poverty, free riders, bootleggers, etc you literally HAVE to have a pretty strong authoritative police state.
Otherwise it doesn’t work. And that’s the problem. Communism doesn’t work without brutally crushing the people who don’t want to be communist.
see my comments above but soviet and chinese communism wasn't impractical. they rebuild collapsing societies sufficiently to resist their foreign domination and invasions. without the soviet reindustrialization the nazis would have dismembered russia and ukrain, and been much worse. so do you imagine russians had mo right to exist? ok, if so the nazis were ok right to siberia? it's a harsh world and europeans and americans comstanly invaded those countries.
I mean the biggest is simply that Hitler *lost*. Nazi Germany didn’t just collapse under its own weight after several decades, it fought a huge war, was defeated, and was occupied. Its conquerors dug up their excellent records, literally put the leadership on trial, and generally did everything they could to ensure the Nazi system was brutally exposed, denounced, and demolished.
Lenin, of course *won* and then had the decency to die still a hero, and the Communist hagiography of him never really went away. Mao and Stalin’s legacies are more complex within their own systems, but still, their Parties carried on after them.
The Soviets had several decades to bury or at least recontextualize the worst atrocities of Stalin in particular before their fall (at which point there had been enough detente for long enough that the “winners” in particular were not in the mood for a repeat of Versailles or Nuremberg).
The Nazis were horrendously brutal and violent in a way that sticks with you, and as you mentioned, we have ample photo and video evidence of many of those atrocities in part because Nazis were quite showy. You can’t unsee photos of Mengele’s “experiments” or piles of hundreds of emaciated dead bodies.
Dictators like Stalin and Mao inflicted terrible violence as well, but they tried to keep it hidden away and were protected by decades of strict censorship and party control. That made a huge difference. Much of the documentary evidence we have of the Holocaust comes from allied forces who liberated concentration camps. There are numerous Holocaust museums around the world and Holocaust victims have been able to publicly share their testimonies and have a significant cultural impact in the West. Concentration camps were preserved as learning experiences for the public.
On a governmental level, unlike Russia and China, contemporary Germany does not attempt to deny or conceal its past atrocities, to the extent that Holocaust denial is illegal.
The layman simply doesn’t have the same understanding of the horrors of the Soviet Union or Maoist China because the information isn’t as easily accessible or visceral as what we have about the Holocaust.
I swear that if Nazi Germany had not happened and some author came up with the idea for it in a piece of historical fiction people would dismiss it for being too over-the-top and unrealistic. The Nazis were just so flagrantly, on-the-nose evil in a way you don't usually see in history. Most evil regimes try to be more covert and diplomatic about their ideology and actions. It reminds me of the famous British comedy sketch, "Are We the Baddies?":
"Have you noticed that our caps have actually got skulls on them?"
I think Moynihan mentioned it relatively recently, I remember being surprised I actually have seen one of the movies he referenced. Before watching that I didn't realize how much of a hand the NYT had in keeping the Soviet secrets away from American eyes. I have always heard that the news has only gotten worse and used to be better. This made me realize it's always been like this, we only just started noticing.
Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands contains horrific descriptions of people being shot en masse, often for being Jewish and other ethnic minorities, by official Soviet order. I think those among us who give Stalin (et al.) a pass tend to be either ignorant or willing to minimize what self-avowed communists did because the communists persecuted and killed so many people *in addition to* Jews.
I.e., I agree with the journalist whose piece started the controversy, and I wish I didn't understand exactly why he got run out of his job for stating the historically obvious.
IIRC Snyder also explains how/why Soviet atrocities & even Holocaust events were hidden for so long--no free press, locked archives not opened until after 1991, not to mention terror state. Soviet policy was to deny Holocaust on its territory. Or maybe I read that in an amazing memoir about how the Soviets literally paved over a mass grave site in Kiev.
So not only do we have tankies today, but I can testify to the soft soap treatment of “existing socialism” in academic circles throughout 1980s--my ex was an avowed Leninist then (Lenin’s heroic legacy was tarnished by Stalinism but that didn’t undermine Lenin’s brilliance). Vague anti capitalism will always be with us!
I've been meaning to read that for a while, especially given the war, but have kept glossing over it whenever I pick up a new book. Your other reply gave me even more reason to pick it up. I've been trying to figure out a way to frame this without whataboutisming, so that might help.
P. S. The conclusion of Snyder's book is a really admirable example of how to make the case for the evils of Soviet deeds without seeming to gloss over the evils of Hitler's regime.
Truth. Another poster pointed out that thousands of American soldiers actually set foot in Germany and the occupied countries to get a firsthand view of the Nazi atrocities. They were able to walk around and take photos. No American soliders have ever set foot in the former USSR or Red China to witness the butchery of Stalin and Mao.
All of those theories seem correct to me. I think having Auschwitz as a monument to this great evil helps bolster the standing of the Nazis above the Soviets. There aren't any monuments, at least no large ones to my knowledge, in Ukraine that show the extent of the calamity.
Also, the Soviets actively made sure that there was no mention of any of these mass murders (with some help from western journalists, unfortunately) so the numbers are much more shrouded in mystery.
I think the last point also has also lead to the "no true communist" argument (tankies are a different breed, obviously) since there are so many different brands of communism. Somehow though, all them end up in the same dark place. Strange.
Isn’t it obvious it’s just that none of them really hurt the people who write the most popular history books? If Stalin had invaded France and bombed England he would stand in the same stead.
Isolationist authoritarians are never going to achieve the same international hatred as expansionist authoritarians. Like... duh?
You’ve managed to pack in four falsehoods in a pretty small number of words.
Firstly, there’s always been people highly critical of Churchill, if anything the valorisation of one part of his long career over is a relatively recent thing. By ‘modern historians’ you at best mean a pretty small sub set of historians and even then the number of those who’d get even vaguely close to ‘histories greatest monsters’ is minuscule. Churchill did some appalling things, leading Britain during WW2 shouldn’t mean those things are erased. Good luck finding any historian who said the Blitz as ‘redeemed Hitler’. The one thing the world will never be short of is left over straw.
You might want to remember that the first thing Brits did after the war was boot Churchill out of office in a landslide.
For starters it was the British people who stood alone against Hitler not merely Churchill.
At no point did I or indeed do I think any credible historian play down Churchill’s leadership, but it’s truly bizarre to think that should make everything else he did go away or excuse any other appalling things he did, which he has always been criticised for.
I see you’re not even going to try and defend the ridiculous idea that ‘modern historians’ see him as ‘histories greatest monster’.
If you want to see things in childishly simplistic terms I guess that’s your business, but serious should and will look to give account to all aspects of someone’s life and present a nuanced picture.
Millions of refugees poured across Europe fleeing Germany. And Europe (and US) were actively engaged in a very much not Cold War resulting in millions of deaths.
I think it just comes down to the society we live in being more impacted directly. So there's a more salient living memory.
Also. Millions of westerners because they were in the army saw the results of Hitlers policies. The average westerners would have a much harder time actually seeing what Hitler did. Also. Hitler killed in the name of superiority. Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed to create equity
I do tend to think it's a team thing. The left has a weird habit of giving leaders passes if they claim to represent left wing politics, such as Chavez or Castro, and the institutions of higher learning tend to lean left. It's so weird, like if Pioget had done exactly the same things but claimed to be socialist, many would see him as a hero.
There were/are a lot of American Communists running cover for the atrocities of the Soviet Union and the CCP. Plus, there have never been any really good movies about the terrible things they did.
Correct. Instead, some of those Stalinists were purged and blacklisted in the 1950s are today they are held up as heroic resisters to right wing fanaticism. The bad guys are the liberals who fought to remove Communists trying to blow up civil society like Elia Kazan. The good guys are the Stalinists who were so cruelly treated by being blacklisted from Hollywood. Oh the naïveté!
Yeah. It’s funny. The whole red scare is an interesting thing. Moynihan at the fifth column always likes to bring up. “Yes McCarthyism was wrong. But also yes there were a lot of communists actually trying to actively plant spies and propagandize at the same time.”
This is the martyr syndrome in effect. People love a good martyr. And when they guy martyring people (in this case blacklisting, ruining careers etc) is such an unlikable douche as McCarthy then all of the sudden people just inherently take the side of those being persecuted, even if they’re honestly not that much better than the asshole.
McCarthy ironically did more to soften communism than any of those dictators ever could. Because he made them the poor victims. And people love lifting up the poor victims.
It's quite good, although it spends more effort on depicting the debauchery of Walter Duranty's Moscow parties than I think was necessary. (You couldn't, for example, show it in an American high school history class, which I think is a huge mistake if your goal is to influence public perception of historical events via film.)
This has fascinated me for years. One thing I would add to all the comments so far is that there is an intellectual basis for communism which is entirely lacking in nazism. Marx wrote books and founded an intellectual school. You can still read his stuff and gain insights into politics, economics and history, even as you accept that what solutions he proposed would never work. No one apart from a historian of the third Reich or an actual Nazi is going to read Mein Kampf. So Marx has always had disciples who are serious people, who have positions in universities or who write books and newspaper columns that people actually read. And I think they've been inclined to avert their eyes from the crimes of the regimes supposedly founded on his principles as a result.
I like this quote from Robert Conquest, who researched Stalin for more than fifty years: "They're still talking absolute balls. In the academy, there remains a feeling of, "Don't let's be too rude to Stalin. He was a bad guy, yes, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire.""
I'll agree that there wasn't much intellectual basis for Nazism-qua-Nazism (which was largely defined by whatever Hitler happened to be interested in at the moment), but there was a very active Italian fascist intellectual movement led by Giovanni Gentile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile), which the modern left simply by and large pretends didn't exist.
The biggest lie intellectuals tell is that Marx was an intellectual. Marx couldn’t philosophically hold the jocks of his contemporaries.
I’ve never read a philosopher more desperate to flatter his audience than Marx. He is basically begging to be liked by the “Everyman”. Same way every huckster, pseudo-intellectual does. He tell his audience “no. Of course it’s not YOUR fault. It’s this system. Right? Yeah. Nothing you did got you into this horrid state. Noooo. It’s this ‘other’ thing.”
My grandmother was a committed Communist who hated Stalin with a passion - this was in Poland after the war. My mom remembered this and hated Stalin too. Then she met some American history or political science person who said that basically Americans manipulated him in to doing things and he is unfairly maligned.
I think Hitler is more maligned because Mao and Stalin basically killed their own people. Also their goal was not extermination. Regardless the end results are the same.
I don’t think Stalin tried to exterminate *races* but he absolutely tried to exterminate *classes of people*. The Holodomor wasn’t a racial purity project, but brutally suppressing a source of potential political challenge (relatively wealthy kulaks in Ukraine) was clearly seen as a positive outcome for him.
They also were clearly trying to destroy cultures re forbidding the teaching of local languages, history, cultural events, etc. There was also definitely ethnic race factors involved in who was seen as more valuable/not as human.
Being less organized about working people until they died and being open to them potentially not dying right now if they manage impossible agricultural feats isn’t really a big humanitarian step. 🤷🏻♀️
I guess part of the perception isnjust that the Nazis were so much more - blunt and efficient about it? As in Star of David patches and gas chambers vs. starvation-by-bad-central-planning.
> But, somehow tankies are just called weird and largely ignored.
When was the last time tankies marched in the streets en masse?
I think it's because Nazi's are pretty visible and active. Consistently.
Having cut my teeth in the doldrums of the radical left academia (tongue in cheek if not obvious)....I strain to think of a single Stalin apologist. There were a fair share of socialists and some communists. But even the communists student groups were more of the Anarcho Communist flavor and definitely didn't advocate or approve of the mass genocide from Stalin.
So, I just don't think it's that common in practice aside for a bunch of numb nuts who probably haven't even read The Communist Manifesto.
A guy in a bar in Seattle isn't enough to change that, I don't think.
Maybe that’s because many of those leftist academics were Lenin apologists. They sincerely believed that had Lenin lived longer, the Stalinist horror would not have happened. They’re wrong--Lenin taught Stalin how to do it. Their insistence that Stalin wasn’t a true communist, that he’s the reason the USSR finally failed, etc., would be hilarious if it weren’t such an article of faith among academic leftists (eg Stephen Cohen and his ilk).
"When was the last time tankies marched in the streets en masse? I think it's because Nazi's are pretty visible and active. Consistently."
This is quite silly -- Neo-Nazis and similar groups rarely manage to get even 100 people together for their rallies and they are virtually always outnumbered by counter-protesters by at least 10-to-1. To the extent you perceive Neo-Nazis as "pretty visible and active," that's because they receive massively disproportionate media coverage compared to any groups of comparable size and influence.
When I was in CA, they had semi-regular nazi protests or presence. No, they weren't super large, but they were active.
Also, when I went to punk shows, nazi's were almost always present.
In prison, there were Nazi gangs.
But...I can't say I've ever seen anything like that for tankies. I know of no Tankie gangs, or marches (small or large), or really anything.
Sure, just my experience. But Nazis are something I ACTUALLY had to worry about at times and in multiple scenarios....but I don't think I've ever met a sincere tankie....certainly not a whole group of them.
"My point is that Nazi's are just more "present" in US culture than Communists or tankies. "
Yeah, in popular media maybe. How many Nazis do you know in real life? While the tankies stand there with their red t-shirts and picket signs, without anywhere near that kind of (deserved) aggressive criticism.
"I mean seriously, when was the last time a Tankie ran for US state governor and almost won? "
I have no idea, they don't report when that happens. They do report when it happens with a Nazi. See the problem?
I tried not to associate with the Nazi's that I encountered. So I didn't "know" them.
But I encountered plenty of Nazi's. Plenty of them at every punk show I went to. Occasionally show up at house parties. My friend had his nose rearranged (required lots of surgery) by a Nazi because he said something about the racist rhetoric he was going off on. I didn't need the media to report on the Neo-Nazi that ran for governor because I lived in the state and it was mind blowing they almost won. As in, they were a front runner in the runoff for a while.
This in multiple cities and states. Not as if I was just in a tiny hot spot.
And I'm just counting actual Neo Nazis. Not even white nationalists or white supremacists (the old definition...as in "white people are genetically and culturally superior", not the new I'm not even sure what it means definition). Or confederate flag waving generic racists.
And while you might say "well, you just hung out where nazis' were." I would disagree. I also frequented many of the areas you'd expect tankies to be. Academic circles, open mic beatnik style coffee shops. Radical environmentalist circles (direct action, yada yada). Engaged with literal Communist student and activist groups.
If you're in certain scenes, like punk, Nazis are something you actually have to be aware of. Like gangs if you're into underground hip hop. You have to tread carefully when they're around. Tankies? Except for a couple of vague memories of solo weird guys with Che shirts, it seriously just wasn't a thing at any venue I can recall.
"Can you recall another one? A smaller one?"
Smaller ones are pretty frequent. When I was in LA they happened semi-regularly. I'd say once or twice a year. Generally you'd hear of them by word of mouth "hey, avoid XXX street today. Probably terrible traffic, some nazi rally or something". They're totally outnumbered by counter protester usually.
But I never had to reroute my commute or plans due to Tankie protestors.
Can you name any tankie rallies? A large one? Small ones? I'd assume they'd at a minimum be locally reported if they disrupt traffic or murder a couple of people.
The Japanese military in the 19th century were absolutely worse than the Nazis were by nearly every measure, but no one in the West talks about it. Koreans and Chinese know better.
An old friend of mine recently got very angry that people were comparing Stalin to Hitler. Apparently, Hitler having kept capitalism makes him even worse because capitalism is necessary for racism yada yada yada. Plus, Stalin committed his crimes in order to get rid of capitalism, so I guess they were saying that Stalin had good intentions so killing all those people wasn't that bad.
As an aside, one of the reasons that the Chechens do not want to be part of Russia Ardakhar Genocide. During and after World War II the soviets deported the Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia and forced them to work without adequate shelter or food.
I agree. The number of communist apologists also apalls me. I've heard everything from ' that many people weren't killed' to ' they would have died anyway' (about mao's policies) to 'that wasn't real communism'.
It's obscene seeing the same people who cry about police brutality and systemic issues think that a military state is the best solution, so long as 'we the good people are in power'. So naive
My take is that a lot of the reason is how their acts came to light. Hitler lost a war that the US and West were fully committed to. Before the US entered the war, there were Nazi apologists, but they were all swept aside by incredibly powerful forces. Pretty much everyone had immediate relatives who were involved in the war and didn't want to hear about how Hitler was misunderstood.
Stalin's crimes weren't widely known in the West until The Great Terror was published in 1968. By this time, he was dead. There were far more people in academia who had an interest in continuing to minimize Stalin's crimes than there were family members of his victims. Communism continues to be a system that people failed rather than a system that failed people.
I’ve been binging on New Discourses pod where James Lindsey is doing a deep comparison of wokeness to Maoism. I was never a strong history student, but this stuff is fascinating and incredibly disturbing.
I've tried getting into that podcast, but I often just glaze over when I listen. I did like his episode on Gnosticism, though, and thought it was a super interesting look at where we are right now, so I might give that one a try.
Post war American culture explains a lot. Don’t forget the enormous influence of Hollywood and post war TV. Countless movies about WW2 with nasty Nazis and fanatic Germans. TV shows from Combat, Rat Patrol to Hogan’s Heroes. Also many novels with Swastikas on the covers. Your friends in school putting a finger under their nose and raising their arm to say “Sieg Hiel”. You too. Nazis had the best uniforms too. German panzers were considered cool and evil.
As for Stalin and Mao? No movies. No TV shows. No novels. Once the opposition to the Vietnam War got going, Mao was considered cool like Che Guevara. Sex drugs and rock and roll took over. Communists just wanted peace and love. Everyone was too high to think more deeply.
So here we are. We still hate Nazis the most. And those hot black uniforms!
A small point I'd like to make is that leaders are exalted or demonised depending on who won the war and what narrative they want to set at the time. For example, Winston Churchill if a saviour to the West yet he wilfully killed 2 million Indians by rerouting food produced in bengal for the war effort. He didn't do it because he wanted to kill Indians but he was indifferent and in fact despised them. Another 2 million Indian soldiers enlisted to the war in an effort to be able to feed their families and their contributions to the war isn't even acknowledged. sure he didn't do that to kill Indians specifically but what he did was as evil as mao, though he killed less people. 🤷♂️ yet he's still beloved by the west
then your mind is confused by delusions of american exceptionalism. lenin stalin and mao were trying to restore collapsing societies that were under constant foreign militay pressure, and ready to dismember their countries at every opportunity. they were rebuilding under the worst military and economic pressure. the only governments who could have resisted the constant european and american invasions had to be the harshest most military ones. your argument is like beating a child for decades then wondering why they are so mean when they finally gorw up and are bigger. maybe if the usa stopped it's comstant wars against russia and china, and many others they could settle into peaceful development. chinese military strength is the only reason they have been able to become the world economic leader. so do you imagine they could have done that with a liberal democracy? not a chance. the usa and europeans plundered china into collapse for a century and would have continuted. same for russia. yes it was a hars government, but unless you think they have no right to exist then it is unreasonable to expect anything but the harshest and most military government to arise when invaded from all sides.
but communist professors. bulls*** fantasy. parentti said he was the only marxist professor he knew. but rationalizers for permant american war and permannent european war. they are every where.
How have US or European invasions got anything to do with Stalin’s purges in 30s or the Holodomor, or the atrocities and disastrous policies that lead to tens of millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward or Mao’s attempts to defeat internal enemies by launching the Great Leap Forward?
I’m also unclear how the changes Deng launched in the 80s have much to do with military opposition to external invasion?
You criticise American exceptionalism, but it seems to be the height of Western exceptionalism to think all things are merely a response to external Western influence.
Could China have become the force it did without Maoist repression? It’s obvious something we can never know, but for all the fact the Sth Korea & Taiwan took decades to emerge as liberal democracies they never descended to the levels of atrocities that Mao inflicted on China.
They did invade Europe. The USSR started WWII as a secret ally of the Nazis, they divided up Europe in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and, after both sides had invaded Poland, further refined in the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty.
There is a lot of truth that being an ally of the US during WWII did a lot for the Soviet's image in the West, but it's also pretty undeniable that socialists in the West were effective in minimizing the crimes of the Soviet Union. So much so that people forget that the Soviets in fact invaded Europe.
Honestly, yes, people care more about cultures they’re closer to and have more of a relationship with. Sorry? Like, I care more if my cousin gets hit by a car than a stranger?
But the fundamental issue isn’t ‘how do we rank evil’ as it’s a pretty childish question tbh, but the fact there remains schools of people who are apologists for Stalin & Mao. There’s three different strains, 1.The outright liars, the people who are in many ways analogous to Holocaust deniers. 2. The ‘you can’t make an omelette...’ types that cling to the idea that the ultimate project was worthwhile and its sad these awful things happened and yes there were mistakes, but but but...’ 3. The scales balancing types who will point to Soviet Industrialisation and defeating Hitler or advances in education & healthcare under Mao and say well, what they did was a net positive or that we need acknowledge the ‘good things’ as if it lessens the mass murder.
The autobahn’s are pretty awesome, but I no one credible would ever run that argument.
The 1s are moral monsters the 2s & 3s are simply intellectually dishonest.
What influence they have beyond a very small group of true believers is questionable as I’m pretty reluctant to see Twitter leftists as much beyond a cult of the self righteous and stupid.
Your comment highlights so many of the problems with current political discourse.
Whether Tankies have zero influence is moot, but we’re not just talking about Tankies.
It’s telling that you blithely describe MAGA types as ‘neo fascist’ despite that being in the kindest terms a hyperbolic and not particularly historically accurate use of the term ‘fascist’ (It’s entirely possible to recognise the illiberal and authoritarian tendencies whilst acknowledging that using the word ‘fascist’ is both inaccurate and unhelpful. All it does is reduce to a relatively meaningless boo word), yet would I imagine laugh at suggestions that the people pushing a reductive and essentialist version of identity politics and who have clearly inserted the underlying ideological ideas of various academic theories into the mainstream and even into the way institutions are run are ‘Marxists’ or ‘Neo-Marxists’.
If you’re going to play fast and lose with definitions to attack opponents you can complain when your ideological opponents do the same thing.
Again, I think the idea of trying to decide if pushing an illiberal, anti humanist, anti universalist version of the left isn’t as bad as a Illiberal authoritarian version of the right and is the ‘real’ problem is childish and entirely missed the point.
Given that ‘leftists’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone who’d have anything positive to say about Lenin, Mao or Stalin I’d hope so.
Everyone from AOC to Bernie would possibly happily embrace the label ‘leftist’ and even if you vehemently disagree with them it’s absurd & offensive to make any comparison to neo Nazis.
You talk about a sense of proportion and then spam us with a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to show that the ‘American right wing’ (unsure if you mean the entire GOP, all Conservatives or merely Trumpists or you can’t be bothered making any distinctions) are literally fascists.
You could have saved yourself a lot of words, because I have a strong enough grasp of political definitions to know that whatever appalling aspects of authoritarianism Trumpists may embrace calling them ‘fascists’ simply isn’t a serious argument. Actually, I think they’d love nothing more than to have the American left call them fascists as what greater ammunition to argue that the left is unhinged and lost touch with American people.
Also, no of course I don’t think AOC & co are ‘Marxists’, but it is pretty clear that there are aspects of certain ideological positions that draw on critical theory/Frankfurt School idea who were Marxists.
However the bottom line is both side just chuck around terms in ways that are truly embarrassing.
I am usually Team Katie with the low stakes back and forths on the pod, but I hate the AI images man. Something about them is so creepy and disgusting! Can we have the cover photo be cute pictures of Moose instead (if Getty Images are too boring)?
She clearly thinks the bit is hilarious, and maybe it was once or twice. But at this point it’s just lazy, and I mean that literally - you can usually manipulate AI prompts to give you something actually pretty accurate, something so wrong it’s funny, or so wrong it’s horrific. But I’m guessing these vaguely disturbing uncanny valley things are just literally the first thing spit out by the prompt.
I think it’s more “I think this is funny” versus laziness (considering the amount of effort she puts into the reporting on this podcast and elsewhere), but I’m a sensitive smol bean and don’t like gross images (they are literal violence against my eyes). I still can’t listen to that old episode about mukbangs because the cover art of some dude housing a huge amount of pasta is too much for me.
Maybe they can go back to furry art. That was a fun era.
I don't mind using AI images, but choose GOOD AI images. Not this crappy substack stuff. At least go to midjourney or something. Although I think you should technically be paying for it if you do that.
I was thinking they’re trying to show how heinously bad these AI image generators are. I tried Stable Diffusion and it was laughable. Apparently Midjourney is good but you have to do a ton more work than just putting in a prompt
I have made fantastic stuff using stable diffusion. This isn't baby's first photoshop, nor is it a simple google search that returns a good result after, "buh-buh-but I typed the words." It does take a *little* bit of work to get it working right.
In Highland Park, a very wealthy enclave in Dallas, there was a surplus Soviet Lenin statue at a hamburger restaurant. But because this is Texas, it had a plaque on it that said, "haha, we won."
Collecting the standards and treasures of your defeated foes as trophies has a history as old as warfare itself. That’s how most “Nazi memorabilia” started out, although now you’ll get pegged as a neo-Nazi if you have any of it.
I believe the state of Minnesota owns some famous Confederate battle flag, and every now and then whatever Southern state they took it from complains and Minnesota's response is always, "you lost, it's ours, get over it."
Kamala Harris is trash, California politics are trash, and the Bay Area is trash.
She is one of the least-vetted national politicians of my lifetime, but because she says the "right" things, there's no impetus for journalists to really dig down on any of her claims about herself.
For example, she claims to be from Oakland. This is true in that she was born at a hospital a couple miles on the Oakland side of the border, but her parents lived in Berkeley when she was born and she grew up in Berkeley until she moved to Quebec as a teenager.
There's nothing "wrong" with being from Berkeley, some of my best friends are from Berkeley, but for some reason she thinks it's better national politics to claim Oakland as her hometown, even though I can find no evidence that she ever spent so much as a day living in Oakland.
The thought of her being one very old man away from the presidency terrifies me.
Haha. Not the least bit surprising that Harris thinks that pretending to be from the "hood" gives her street credibility with the black Democratic base. And if I recall correctly, she was also being a bit slippery on the history of public school integration in the area.
I like to joke that I was "West Philadelphia born and raised" when in reality my family packed up and left for the exurbs when I was the ripe old age of 6 months.
Isn’t it a little weird that both her and Obama are Black, but not actually “African American”? And I’m not just noting their mixed race. Obama’s father was Kenyan, and Kamala’s father is Jamaican.
I mean I’m genuinely not trying to dogwhistle or darkly hint anything. It’s just an odd fact I don’t know what to make of.
(EDIT: like you with Philadelphia, I jokingly say I’m from Detroit. I was born in a hospital in the city limits, my father worked downtown, but we definitely lived in the ‘burbs. And moved away when I was 2).
The term gaining currency over the last five years or so to describe "actual" black Americans is ADOS, which stands for American Descendants of Slaves.
Sociologists define ADOS or native blacks as people who have four black grandparents born in the continental US.
So Michelle Robinson Obama is ADOS, while her husband (as you correctly point out) and children are not.
The funny thing about affirmative action circa 1970 was that it was designed to identify talented ADOS and Latinos who had been previously overlooked by selective colleges. It was presumed that most of these students would be poor/working class (hence Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor, whose backgrounds have more in common than the Wise Latina would care to admit) .
It was also presumed that these student met the baseline admissions criteria.
Numerical Quotas like those in California were relatively rare.f
Fast forward to 2023, upwards of 66% of the "black" students at selective colleges are not working class ADOS but middle to upper class African or Caribbean immigrants. (There hasn't been much analysis of Latino demographics, but good luck finding a Puerto Rican girl who grew up in the South Bronx housing projects , like the Wise Latina).
Of course, the term is imprecise in that black Americans with recent ancestry from the Caribbean are also "American descendants of slaves." That suggests the distinction isn't actually slavery, but more recent history of racial discrimination.
I would prefer a more precise term to reflect the fact that ADOS refers only to slaves brought to the continental US. Unfortunately,
"Continental United States Descendants of Slaves' doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
I could be wrong here but it seems that over time, "America" has become colloquial shorthand for the United States. When people in other parts of the world refer to "the Americans" or immigrating to "America", do you really think they are speaking of Honduras or Prince Edward Island?
ADOS may have to do unless something more geographically correct comes along.
I disagree. CUSDS, seems to be a great acronym. It feels like it belongs just as much as Latinx. Honestly anyone who speaks a Latin based language cannot ignore the painful irony of a word like Latinx.
And I do think Richard Harris is a descendant of (Caribbean) slaves, although his history is also a bit different than the American experience because he notes that he belonged to a class of black Jamaicans that the colonial British intentionally elevated and educated in the post-slavery era.
I'm also not sure where the suggestion that Sotomayor would have a problem admitting she and Clarence Thomas come from economically similar backgrounds comes from?
I was speaking semi-facetiously about their widely divergent world-views as adult jurists, despite several commonalities in their upbringing. I suppose my wording engendered a too-literal reading.
She once said the following in a speech at Berkeley: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”
Some of the attacks on this quote are a little bit out of context, but not much - a theme of the speech really was that her gender and ethnicity would necessarily affect her judging, and that she considered this a positive thing.
It is not weird at all. It says so mething about how black American children are raised and/or educated and/or perceived that they are not doing as well as black children of immigrants.
I mean there’s also the whole Willie Brown thing. You get instantly labeled a sexist for bringing it up, but it’s a fact that she got a couple of critical “entry point to politics” appointments and a ton of connections from a man 3 decades her senior that she spent 2 years banging. Obviously she’s advanced far beyond that entry point, but that was the critical foot in the door.
The facts don’t seem to be in dispute, in that Willie Brown is an acknowledged “kingmaker” in CA politics, they definitely had an intimate relationship, and he definitely gave her appointments to plum positions after that relationship. That’s clear nepotism and a little scuzzy - the fact that “sleeping your way to the top” is a “sexist trope” shouldn’t preclude us from cocking an eyebrow and noting it when it happens.
Harris lost all credibility with me in that primary debate when she scored points for being bussed in Berkeley as a child while pointing out Biden had voted against some bussing plan. She implied that being bussed to another school was partly responsible for her rise. Well, I was bussed in Berkeley too. Like her I was the child of UC grad students and we were both raised in a highly educated literate household. Her parents lived on the cheap side of town (probably because they were grad students), as mine had, but there’s no chance she was going to be deprived of educational opportunities possible only via the bussing plan. Her parents’ careers took them to wealthier neighborhoods, as mine did. But education and class no longer matter in political discourse, I guess.
It's so exhausting that the only reason this part of African American curriculum is being discussed on the merits is because politicians/journos are trying to score political points against Florida/Desantis.
The fact that the curriculum point was in the AP African American Studies course and no one batted an eye (or was even aware) is concerning. If scholars take such issue with it when Desantis tries to do it, why is it not a problem otherwise (and its not like Desantis is literally in the classroom teaching the course--generic american teachers all across the country are applying these frameworks)? Do we not have in depth discussions about the merits of coursework before trying to score political points?
Additionally the idea that your generic somewhat left-leaning middle school/high school teacher -- especially one that would seek out teaching African American studies -- would lean into the subtle neoconservative choices in frameworks for the course is laughable. Teachers come into their courses with their own biases and filter the frameworks in their own way. There isn't some AI program uniformly instructing kids precisely what is in the frameworks. It's all so silly.
There's also this insistence that history education in America is still the jingoistic version taught during the height of the Cold War. I remember watching Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" shortly after graduating high school and realized that I knew basically all of what he talked about already. That show used Howard Zinn's "People's History" as it's main source, which is obviously not the history of old. I took AP US History in high school, so maybe it's different for the non-AP class, but I'm not sure. Regardless, the history I learned was largely through a left-leaning lens and yet was still accused of being racist in 2020. Exhausting indeed.
Whenever lefties give the stripped down version of CRT they claim they want, the Motte version. It is literally exactly the history I was taught 25 years ago.
There was already an understanding of this, fuck that is where most of them learned it.
Yeah, I did high school in the deep south in the 90's. My AP History teacher was a far left aged hippie. I remember him arguing with the class about affirmative action (the students were more conservative about it than he was).
I went to school the Dallas area and people from the north keep asking me whether I was taught that the south should have won the civil war when in truth we dedicated a good quarter of all of our class time talking about how racist America was before the civil rights movement and a little about how it was racist after.
I hate the ‘X’ branding and whatnot, but think framing how Twitter works “pre” vs “post” Musk is asinine because it every single time it seems to operate under the assumption that Twitter was a “normal” company before Musk bought it.
Yea, Twitter provided tremendous value (for free) to a certain class of people like journalists, but as a business it was an unsustainable disaster that likely only stayed afloat because of the bullshit frenzy Donald Trump created. Since becoming a public company, Twitter has more or less accomplished setting 2 billion dollars on fire. That is where the “free” value came from. It was never going to last one way or the other.
Musk bailed out the incompetent executives running a company hurtling towards financial insolvency, and unfortunately most will probably be employed again where they can do it to another beloved company down the road...once again likely ending with a self-destructive billionaire bailing them out of their own incompetence.
"Do we not have in depth discussions about the merits of coursework before trying to score political points?" No! That would be too reasonable.
Also, I think a backdrop to these controversies is the assumption that all teachers in red states will be bigoted conservatives if you don't write the standards to preclude that. Whereas most teachers will put their own spin on the curriculum, regardless of how it's written, because they're not automatons. AND teachers are as diverse a lot as any other profession--maybe even slightly more left than average due to educational polarization and the politics of teacher compensation. That's certainly my impression from talking to the many teachers I know in FL and other red states.
I do worry given the completely batshit stuff he actually has gotten through, such as the one bill that says "theoretical content" can't be taught in gen ed courses in college, stripping speech and tenure protections from all faculty, sending out lists of problem departments and courses, etc. The orwellian "parents' rights" stuff that's being championed where parents can monitor classrooms (including other people's kids) whenever they want. Rules for removing books that are way too widly applied. The other stuff is actually speech chilling.
Meanwhile none of the stuff in this HS curriculum really seems like it would chill speech considerably - there aren't punishments associated with not saying specific things or saying specific things. It's just a curriculum (non-exhaustively) listing things that should be covered with suggested clarifications.
Jesse and Katie are completely wrong on this issue.
To describe a well-known conservative trope promoting the idea that slaves were taught some skill and to present it as an example of agency or the resiliency of the human spirit is quite a combination of naiveté and ignorance.
Conservatives have claimed that slaves and their descendants have benefited because we took them out of dysfunctional Africa, taught them about western civilization, introduced Christianity to them, taught them a useful trades, etc. Andrew Sullivan had such a conservative on his podcast earlier this year; Niall Ferguson built his career on this idea.
Comparing the AP African American Studies guidelines vs. the Florida ones shows this explicitly:
"Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
- Florida
"In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others,”
- AP
The latter points out that the trades slaves were forced to learn trades that could be used *after* they were freed but were beneficial to the slave owners while they were enslaved. They would not have been able to gain from these trades before that because their labor was owned by their masters---who used it for themselves or rented it out.
The former makes it seem as though forcing a trade on slaves somehow eased the shame and brutality of slavery: we taught them and they benefited, never minding that the total sum of their existence ran to misery even discounting the skills they acquired.
Analogously: when Mormon girls/women are forced to stay with their polygamist, Fundamentalist LDS husband we don't talk about the skills they've learned, like bread making and keeping a garden, that could benefit them personally when they escape captivity. We discuss the failings of the husband and the religion that sanctioned it.
Yes, this episode was so disappointing. Jesse is usually so smart and has written extensively on how to evaluate systems of knowledge yet he really missed this one. They didn’t even mention the slavery apologist narrative with 1) the inclusion of standards highlighting the Islamic slave trade and slavery in Asia, while 2) the pairing of indentured servitude and slavery as examples of the same phenomenon with no mention of the unique features of the institutions created in the Americas that emphasized race. He seems reluctant to even acknowledge the conservative movement’s long-standing push for these curricular changes. They really could have led with Josh Marshall’s essay but chose not to do so but instead chose to bash the liberal MSM and Kamala Harris as being hyperbolic, which is lazy, low-hanging fruit that does nothing new for his audience.
Plus, Jesse frames a very clear debate about the nature and implications of the Enlightenment as some high-level esoteric hard-to-understand discourse about egalitarianism. Really? Jonah Goldberg et al argue that racism existed before Europeans and the Enlightenment was the way out of inequality with its concept of individual rights and Kendi et al argue the Enlightenment entrenched and reinforced racism.
Anyway, at the end of the episode they shrug their shoulders and say no one remembers anything from history class so it doesn’t matter. Their attitude was unexpectedly anti-intellectual for a podcast that usually doesn’t shy away from intellectual concepts.
There seems to be an implication in these debates that one side believes American slavery was the worst form of slavery ever devised, and anything that doesn’t support that claim shouldn’t be taught.
It’s just not true, though. American slavery *should* be contextualized. The lesson shouldn’t be that we had some really bad folks and thank goodness we don’t have them anymore. The lesson should be that American slavery was one instance among countless instances where people were monsters to their out group, and humanity has not outgrown this tendency at all.
It was a very extreme and different form of slavery. It also lasted longer than its European counterparts. And it led to the deaths of ~360,000 patriots, ~250,000 traitors, and nearly to the death of our Republic.
`people were monsters to their out group, and humanity has not outgrown this tendency at all.'
Except that the national, ethnic, and religious prejudices and tensions of today are wholly incomparable to the horrors inflicted on the majority of the black population until about 1860.
To the ear of a non-expert these sentences seem... very closely equivalent though. I think that was their main point here. Normies are going to see these as being the identical. Kids in a classroom are going to get the same thing out of both. And if a teacher is well trained they obviously will point out that the benefits to the previously enslaved person would generally come after they have become free...
I think what you are getting at is that the FL statement should have said "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit after they became free." So adding 4 words at the end?
Also you stopped in the middle of a sentence so I lost you there as to what the FL statement is meant to imply.
The connotation of the FL version is that slavery, despite all of the bad things you hear about it, did some good by providing slaves an opportunity to support themselves after emancipation or by renting themselves out while enslaved.
What this sidesteps is that such `benefits' were never the intention of slaveholders, that slaves were forced to learn these trades, and they could have learned them in non-slavery settings. It follows the well-worn conservative path of downplaying the harms of slavery and pointing out the `positives': ignore the torture, rape, and separation of family, we taught women how to repair shoes and that allowed them to be good capitalists (even though we really didn't want to allow that to happen)! As they did benefit, maybe they should be a little grateful or this evens stuff out a bit?
The non-FL connotation is: some slaves didn't starve or have to indenture themselves because the skills they were forced to learn were in demand. Obviously this is true because slaves had to learn useful skills to keep plantations/households going, at the expense of artificially depressing the income of non-slaves (hard for a poor white man to compete against a slave), and for a long time black skills were not remunerative because their labor was owned by the slaveholders. The very act of teaching slaves a skill was therefore merely another example of the exploitation that blacks suffered at the hands of whites.
Simply put: one does not get to describe as a `benefit' something that was forced upon an owned person.
This change to the curriculum was done at the behest of two, black Republicans. It's clearly politically motivated as the rest of the committee was not in favor of the language.
It is utterly ridiculous to equate slavery with some form of job training, as these Republicans and DeSantis are trying to do. Ask yourself, do you think any ex-slave ever said: `Well thank god for master! He taught me a trade so that I have some way to support myself now that I'm no longer property! Might even help me earn enough money to track down the wife and children he sold.'
To your last paragraph: If there's time, why wouldn't you discuss both? There is room to teach more than simple, mindless, shaming morality in history classes.
My understanding is that's exactly what she's arguing. That's central to a holistic education, not "shaming morality" but telling the whole truth about how something happened rather than just what happened.
The problem is that education is decentralized and some more conservative districts the curriculum may be implemented with less tact than in like Miami or Palm beach where moderating influences will steer it towards reason. Specifically on the more suspect aspects of the curriculum
JESSE: STOP QUOTE RE-TWEETING RANDOM MENTALLY UNSTABLE 13 YEAR OLDS! NO! BAD!
It's IS fair I think to complain about supposedly professional journalists like that Nate guy suicide baiting you/others but you really don't need to do be doing this. Next time you feel like doing it just block and log off for the day.
The responses to the Seattle guy’s piece over on the Free Press are pretty upsetting . . . A lot of “Oh, he’s a leftie, so he’s getting what he deserves.” I love the FP, but their comment sections are like OAN and Newsmax had a baby, and then that baby grew up and had a baby with Alex Jones.
This is what happens when almost all mainstream journalism is culturally monopolized by effete elites. There are normal, thoughtful conservatives too, they just aren't journalists, so there is a dearth of good places to go. The problem is that wild radical conservative rightists go to the same places, so all conservatives based on comment sections seem like weirdos.
Tankies are the worst. As many have said, I think ranking evil doesn't really make much sense. Once you go past a certain point, lets just say the meter is pegged. But if you read stories about the horrors routinely perpetrated by the soviets, it's pretty astounding in it's cruelty. Things like, forcible taking all of the grain grown in a town and storing it in a 'collectivized' storage facility. But either due to incompetence or, in many cases as an intentional campaign to starve out undesiriables, not actually distributing any of the grain and just leaving it to rot. And then the posted guards would shoot starving villagers attempting to sneak and steel the rotting grain.
This wasn't some local authority run amok, these were the official policies of the Soviets during the collectivization push. Their cruelty was astounding.
Outrage bait news story debunking BARPod is my favorite BARPod. I love the crazy people being crazy on the internet stories too don’t get me wrong. But I don’t have time to look into all of these other stories myself and I trust Katie and Jesse to tell me the truth. At least it’s the truth as they see it sans manipulation and they show us their work. It’s really important to have at least a few real journalists still in the mix. Great show!
This is by far the most important work they do. Crazy youtubers and bloggers is BARpod's delicious dessert, but debunking deception and lies in journalism is the real meat here.
I've always been really weirded out by Western leftie fascination with Lenin and other communist figures. Maybe I heard too many horror stories from my Eastern European immigrant parents.
Last year, we did a family trip to the homeland and we went to Grutas Park (aka Stalin's World). It's an open-air museum in Lithuania filled with Soviet era statues that were torn down when the regime fell. The place doesn't glorify these figures. The written information doesn't shy away from the brutality of the time, and there's also a train car that was once used to transport people to the gulag, as well as guard towers and barbed wire meant to invoke the feeling of being in a prison camp. The whole place is really kitschy and weird, and I'm glad someone was able to preserve this history. (As an aside, that someone is a Lithuanian mushroom magnate who financed the effort to recover the statues from various dumps and was later awarded and Ig Nobel Prize for his efforts.)
The visit naturally made me think about US Confederate statues and what to do with them. I think building a similar museum and putting them there with the appropriate historical context could be really interesting. But of course it would be a lightening rod for all kinds of stupid discourse, from both sides.
Interesting story about that Lithuanian park. There's a museum in Germany called the Citadel that actively seeks both Nazi and Communist artifacts. The educational purpose is to put the artifacts in historical context and make sure that citizens "never forget". https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/museum-of-toxic-statues-berlin
I also wish the US had a private museum willing to take on this role.
I couldn't agree more that Seattle is the most beautiful city filled with the most unpleasant people. Someday, Rainer will explode and end it all and sweet relief will wash over us all.
In re: to Jesse's comment about not being able to speak to whether or not the standards devoted enough time to slavery, etc.
I am a bit of an expert on reading state standards and tying them to curriculum, so I would love to speak to that for a moment.
Every state constructs standards, sometimes referred to as Grade Level Expectations, and they are outlined for each grade level k-12 and broken down by subject matter. There are literally hundreds of GLEs per subject. Math, science, reading, social studies, music, art, even PE.... every class that is taught in a public school has a list of state standards associated with it.
There is no way every standard can be touched on in depth, because there just aren't that many hours in a day.
The curriculum that is taught in any individual school or district must align with the state standards, but it will not necessarily be covered deeply. The depth and breadth of curriculum is largely left to school leadership, and the standards are the parameters in which they may operate.
So, as to whether the subject is sufficiently covered to suit the sensibilities of someone like Heather Cox Richardson or Kamala Harris is impossible to discern simply from reading state standards. Though it sounds to me based on what Jesse read aloud, there is quite a bit of detail that goes into slavery as a part of American History. Any school that desires to do a deep dive certainly can, and would then create or purchase a curriculum that does exactly that.
However, "Priority Standards" as they are often referred, are USUALLY selected based in part by their prevalence on state assessments. For example, if a 4th grade state test barely tests kids on geometry but has a lot of questions on division, then most schools would not opt to spend an entire semester on geometry, even though both items are on the 4th grade standards.
So the TLDR- state standards are not curriculum, and they do not dictate how much a school must teach about a topic. They dictate the parameters of what can be taught.
Thanks! I think this is a pretty good rundown of how state standards work. I would also add that the Governor is probably NOT involved in developing learning standards. They are developed to align with state law, of course, but state law also sets parameters, only.
I love the podcast Empire. Listened originally because I go a bit mad for anything relating to the history of the Indian subcontinent, but their third season is on the history of slavery globally. the second half of the season does end up focusing largely on the transatlantic slave trade. Some great episodes in that trench and I feel like they and their guests do a great job discussing the complicated realities of that period
Community Notes is a big innovation. I wrote them a weird letter with lots of instructions for how to build something weirdly close to it after J6. I’m guessing it had almost nothing to do with them implementing it but we do need a decentralized editor and I will die on this hill no matter how autistic and spergy it may seem. Elon pouring more money and attention on that is an unalloyed good.
He’s got right of appeal and public trial with transparent rules on his roadmap which I also think is a good thing. I can see him *almost* getting things right, but I do think working 120 hours a week has made him really nutty.
Agree with Katie on the pricing for Premium Twitter. Her blue check mark should be paid for by simps who subscribe to her. The pricing for business is all wrong, and should be a nominal fee for the business to enroll and then charge per badge beyond a certain amount so you’d get a lot of people with self-importance issues —like writers, sorry— fighting with each other to collect more badges. LIke, look here is my NYT budget, my WaPo badge, my Lighting a Fire without Matches Badge.
On the locking down of Twitter, I believe that he’s trying to avoid people using twitter to scrape tweets for LLM training. Which I think he just needs to throw in the towel on. Twitter isn’t going to be a good LLM training data mine as currently configured, unless he does something like I’ve spergally laid out my substack where he specifically creates the decentralized news editor where he would get a premium fact-checked data set that also has signal in it on how to reason and argue.
I wish he would have just made a good offer to buy Substack and turn the running of Twitter over to that team with maybe some input from him. He needs to extract himself from that company.
Community Notes are indeed great! They make up for a lot of capricious behavior on Musk's part.
And about twitter not being visible, the history in the episode just doesn't seem right to me. I had to switch to third party apps like Nitter way before Musk took over twitter, I think due to a login prompt that kept kicking me to the homepage. I was able to switch back early after his takeover, and it's only been recently that I had to return to Nitter.
Imagine if we had community notes for the entire internet not just twitter. That’s the hill I die on. And not just for bad reputation but good reputation.
I don’t have a twitter account because my wife already says I’m on here too much.
Twitter always prompted you for a login if you did much scrolling around. But you could usually at least read the tweet you were linked to and a few others before you got the prompt. Now, you literally cannot see a TweeX other than the one you are directly linked to, unless you log in.
You can't even just land on a profile page, where a lot of journalists keep their contact information. Prior to Musk, you could even land on an abbreviated explore page.
I am continuously baffled that Stalin, Lenin, Mao et. al. are not held in the same regard as Hitler. I agree that comparing evilness is a fool's errand, but it's really strange how one genocidal dictator is okay and one is not. Those that deny that the Holodomor happened are just as bad as Holocaust deniers in my mind. But, somehow tankies are just called weird and largely ignored. I know this is mostly a Twitter (or X) thing, or at least social media at large, but it leaks into other areas of life too. I almost guarantee there are more Communist professors than Nazi professors and people would be much less likely to be fired if they said something like "I'm a fan of Stalin's work" than "I'm a fan of Hitler's work." It's a really strange phenomenon that has permeated the zeitgeist so much that even Chat-GPT has a hard time accepting that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia may have both been very evil places that should be cautionary tales and not instruction manuals.
I"ve long wondered why Hitler stands so far above the Communists in the popular consciousness. These are my amateur historian theories:
1. Hitler and the Nazis left us tons of film and photographs. The raw footage creates a visceral reaction to the atrocities. By contrast, I've never seen a single image of Stalin's or Mao's atrocities. (Lenin was too early). I am willing to stand corrected.
2. Hitler exhibited brutal efficiency and purpose in his killing. The other butchers mixed in neglect (famine) along with various other methods.
3. Hitler announced what that he was going to murder people ("Final Solution"). The other butchers initially claimed to engage in some kind of political/social revolution and murder later became a byproduct that wasn't expressly announced.
I’d add on to #3 that, among left-leaning people, communism is often viewed as a noble (if impractical) idea that unfortunately resulted in state atrocities when put into practice by the Soviets. So the principle of communism is seen as defensible, just poorly executed. Whereas the goal of eliminating minorities and creating a pure Aryan race is indefensible in both theory and practice
Imagine the pearl clutching if someone argued that fascism was just poorly executed, and that real fascism has never been tried.
People in the US don't even know what fascism is.
To wit, I recently watched "Succession" with my mom, and there's a presidential candidate who describes himself with verbiage like, "The spirit of the people has produced a leader."
I said, "Whoa, fashy!" and my mom (who considers herself politically educated) did not understand why my fash needle went to 11 on that statement.
I dunno if this is a worldwide problem, but at least in the US, there's this idea that teaching people what fascism is (or communism, or eugenics, or safe sex, or...) means somehow advocating for that position.
Agreed. People generally just treat it as a synonym for “anything I can vaguely tie to Hitler”, but that’s not really any more correct than assuming “Communism” and “Stalinism” are identical.
I've struggled for decades on how to handle this in a honest manner without unilaterally disarming myself in a debate. We need smaller terms that can describe ongoing government policy in historical terms that don't park themselves in popular notions of true evil. I should be seeing references to revanchism than fascism since the former is more specific and less parked on a popular notion of evil.
well there are people that argue that, Francoists and the like
Now there's a dude who made it out of the 20th century relatively unscathed, historically speaking.
Neo-nazis do argue this to be clear! And yes pearls are clutched.
Excellent point. It's hard to believe but there are still hard-liners who believe that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Castros, the Kims etc are rogues who perverted an otherwise wonderful concept/ideology. "It hasn't been implemented properly".
I’m still waiting for someone to say “real fascism has never been tried.”
It's more that the people missing Mussolini think he did a great job: https://unherd.com/2022/11/italy-still-mourns-mussolini/
Nostalgia about Nazism and fascism is also a thing in parts of Latin America for obvious reasons.
There’s plenty of people on the reasonably mainstream right who’d defend forms of authoritarian ethno nationalism. They’d reject the label ‘Fascist’ as a pejorative but embrace much of the underlying ethos.
I think that arguably is what Julius Evola (self-described "superfascist") was going for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola
Is it a wonderful concept? I’ve always been of the belief that those leaders did exactly what they had to do. Communism is a house of cards. It requires society to agree on a singular goal and work towards it. Unlike capitalism, which can allow for a certain amount of graft and still work even if janky- communism as a societal engine needs every part of it to be humming. All parts of its economy need to be tightly controlled. Which means you have to crack the skulls of the people who don’t want to tow the line. Full stop. There’s literally no option left in these regimes. Because communism doesn’t account for people just wanting things they don’t need. Which means yeah. Black markets. And if you don’t have a special police that can go in and shut down those black markets the whole thing unravels. Communism requires, by definition, an awful lot of prohibition. Prohibition leads to black markets. Black markets lead to crime since they end up being self policed plus they have to hide their dealings from the government. So they have to snuff out snitches.
So. No those leaders didn’t pervert a good idea. Communism was never a good idea. It’s a lazy ideology that doesn’t want to wrestle with human desire in any kind of adult way. So yeah. Of course those leaders were brutal. They had to be. Peoples wants kept getting in the way of their beautiful, boring, sandbox. I’d argue they didn’t do anything wrong. In order to safeguard communism from dissent, black markets, immigration, poverty, free riders, bootleggers, etc you literally HAVE to have a pretty strong authoritative police state.
Otherwise it doesn’t work. And that’s the problem. Communism doesn’t work without brutally crushing the people who don’t want to be communist.
see my comments above but soviet and chinese communism wasn't impractical. they rebuild collapsing societies sufficiently to resist their foreign domination and invasions. without the soviet reindustrialization the nazis would have dismembered russia and ukrain, and been much worse. so do you imagine russians had mo right to exist? ok, if so the nazis were ok right to siberia? it's a harsh world and europeans and americans comstanly invaded those countries.
I mean the biggest is simply that Hitler *lost*. Nazi Germany didn’t just collapse under its own weight after several decades, it fought a huge war, was defeated, and was occupied. Its conquerors dug up their excellent records, literally put the leadership on trial, and generally did everything they could to ensure the Nazi system was brutally exposed, denounced, and demolished.
Lenin, of course *won* and then had the decency to die still a hero, and the Communist hagiography of him never really went away. Mao and Stalin’s legacies are more complex within their own systems, but still, their Parties carried on after them.
The Soviets had several decades to bury or at least recontextualize the worst atrocities of Stalin in particular before their fall (at which point there had been enough detente for long enough that the “winners” in particular were not in the mood for a repeat of Versailles or Nuremberg).
And the ChiComs of course are still in power.
Makes a lot of sense. Hitler has no ongoing legacy being protected since the Nazi's have no political power, unlike the Communist countries.
And there was no equivalent to Nuremberg for the Communist butchers. If anything, the Chicomms have tightened their grip on power.
The Nazis were horrendously brutal and violent in a way that sticks with you, and as you mentioned, we have ample photo and video evidence of many of those atrocities in part because Nazis were quite showy. You can’t unsee photos of Mengele’s “experiments” or piles of hundreds of emaciated dead bodies.
Dictators like Stalin and Mao inflicted terrible violence as well, but they tried to keep it hidden away and were protected by decades of strict censorship and party control. That made a huge difference. Much of the documentary evidence we have of the Holocaust comes from allied forces who liberated concentration camps. There are numerous Holocaust museums around the world and Holocaust victims have been able to publicly share their testimonies and have a significant cultural impact in the West. Concentration camps were preserved as learning experiences for the public.
On a governmental level, unlike Russia and China, contemporary Germany does not attempt to deny or conceal its past atrocities, to the extent that Holocaust denial is illegal.
The layman simply doesn’t have the same understanding of the horrors of the Soviet Union or Maoist China because the information isn’t as easily accessible or visceral as what we have about the Holocaust.
I swear that if Nazi Germany had not happened and some author came up with the idea for it in a piece of historical fiction people would dismiss it for being too over-the-top and unrealistic. The Nazis were just so flagrantly, on-the-nose evil in a way you don't usually see in history. Most evil regimes try to be more covert and diplomatic about their ideology and actions. It reminds me of the famous British comedy sketch, "Are We the Baddies?":
"Have you noticed that our caps have actually got skulls on them?"
The Anti-Humans episode of Martyrmade was horrifying. There needs to be a movie about the Holodomor.
There is a pretty good film called Mr. Jones about the Welsh journalist who tried to expose the Holodomor--and the pushback he faced from the NYT et. al. I don't know if it would live up to Moynihan's accuracy test, but it's worth a watch! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/mr-jones-remembers-when-stalin-weaponized-famine
I think Moynihan mentioned it relatively recently, I remember being surprised I actually have seen one of the movies he referenced. Before watching that I didn't realize how much of a hand the NYT had in keeping the Soviet secrets away from American eyes. I have always heard that the news has only gotten worse and used to be better. This made me realize it's always been like this, we only just started noticing.
Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands contains horrific descriptions of people being shot en masse, often for being Jewish and other ethnic minorities, by official Soviet order. I think those among us who give Stalin (et al.) a pass tend to be either ignorant or willing to minimize what self-avowed communists did because the communists persecuted and killed so many people *in addition to* Jews.
I.e., I agree with the journalist whose piece started the controversy, and I wish I didn't understand exactly why he got run out of his job for stating the historically obvious.
IIRC Snyder also explains how/why Soviet atrocities & even Holocaust events were hidden for so long--no free press, locked archives not opened until after 1991, not to mention terror state. Soviet policy was to deny Holocaust on its territory. Or maybe I read that in an amazing memoir about how the Soviets literally paved over a mass grave site in Kiev.
So not only do we have tankies today, but I can testify to the soft soap treatment of “existing socialism” in academic circles throughout 1980s--my ex was an avowed Leninist then (Lenin’s heroic legacy was tarnished by Stalinism but that didn’t undermine Lenin’s brilliance). Vague anti capitalism will always be with us!
I've been meaning to read that for a while, especially given the war, but have kept glossing over it whenever I pick up a new book. Your other reply gave me even more reason to pick it up. I've been trying to figure out a way to frame this without whataboutisming, so that might help.
P. S. The conclusion of Snyder's book is a really admirable example of how to make the case for the evils of Soviet deeds without seeming to gloss over the evils of Hitler's regime.
You are missing the biggest one in that we fought a war with hitler.
Truth. Another poster pointed out that thousands of American soldiers actually set foot in Germany and the occupied countries to get a firsthand view of the Nazi atrocities. They were able to walk around and take photos. No American soliders have ever set foot in the former USSR or Red China to witness the butchery of Stalin and Mao.
And Stalin was "on our side." People tend to forget that, but I wonder if it subliminally feeds into our views of them both even now.
All of those theories seem correct to me. I think having Auschwitz as a monument to this great evil helps bolster the standing of the Nazis above the Soviets. There aren't any monuments, at least no large ones to my knowledge, in Ukraine that show the extent of the calamity.
Also, the Soviets actively made sure that there was no mention of any of these mass murders (with some help from western journalists, unfortunately) so the numbers are much more shrouded in mystery.
I think the last point also has also lead to the "no true communist" argument (tankies are a different breed, obviously) since there are so many different brands of communism. Somehow though, all them end up in the same dark place. Strange.
Isn’t it obvious it’s just that none of them really hurt the people who write the most popular history books? If Stalin had invaded France and bombed England he would stand in the same stead.
Isolationist authoritarians are never going to achieve the same international hatred as expansionist authoritarians. Like... duh?
Drew Magary unironically said that the Oppenheimer movie should have had more Japanese people in it.
If we had nuked Germany, would there be people arguing that the dead German citizens should have been given airtime?
The Japanese were the enemy in WWII. They were every bit as bad as the Nazis and they have never apologized.
Americans view "good" countries and "bad" countries through a very distorted lens.
“ the Oppenheimer movie should have had more Japanese people in it”
They were in the prequel.
Yeah an opening with the rape of Nanking would have been interesting if we are just taking about making a political piece instead of a movie.
Wait. Why should there have been more Japanese people? They were part of the Axis.
Well they weren’t exactly isolationists. Their neighbors just didn’t happen to be the history book-writers of the Western world
Of those mentioned who was really an expansionist? They were all more broadly interested in internal control than external conquest.
*Raises hand from a country formerly behind the Iron Curtain occupied by the Soviets for 40+ years*
Oh yeah I forgot about you guys for some reason. You should write more history books of the kind they sell in airports.
You’ve managed to pack in four falsehoods in a pretty small number of words.
Firstly, there’s always been people highly critical of Churchill, if anything the valorisation of one part of his long career over is a relatively recent thing. By ‘modern historians’ you at best mean a pretty small sub set of historians and even then the number of those who’d get even vaguely close to ‘histories greatest monsters’ is minuscule. Churchill did some appalling things, leading Britain during WW2 shouldn’t mean those things are erased. Good luck finding any historian who said the Blitz as ‘redeemed Hitler’. The one thing the world will never be short of is left over straw.
You might want to remember that the first thing Brits did after the war was boot Churchill out of office in a landslide.
More left over straw I see.
For starters it was the British people who stood alone against Hitler not merely Churchill.
At no point did I or indeed do I think any credible historian play down Churchill’s leadership, but it’s truly bizarre to think that should make everything else he did go away or excuse any other appalling things he did, which he has always been criticised for.
I see you’re not even going to try and defend the ridiculous idea that ‘modern historians’ see him as ‘histories greatest monster’.
If you want to see things in childishly simplistic terms I guess that’s your business, but serious should and will look to give account to all aspects of someone’s life and present a nuanced picture.
Winston Churchill valuing the lives of the British over their colonial possessions. Monster!
By colonial possessions do you mean like... the people of Bengal???
I just want to add that there is proof Holodomor was intentional, in that when the famine started they purposefully did nothing to fix it.
I think it's simpler than that.
Millions of refugees poured across Europe fleeing Germany. And Europe (and US) were actively engaged in a very much not Cold War resulting in millions of deaths.
I think it just comes down to the society we live in being more impacted directly. So there's a more salient living memory.
Also. Millions of westerners because they were in the army saw the results of Hitlers policies. The average westerners would have a much harder time actually seeing what Hitler did. Also. Hitler killed in the name of superiority. Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed to create equity
I do tend to think it's a team thing. The left has a weird habit of giving leaders passes if they claim to represent left wing politics, such as Chavez or Castro, and the institutions of higher learning tend to lean left. It's so weird, like if Pioget had done exactly the same things but claimed to be socialist, many would see him as a hero.
Hitler was also stupid enough to declare war on basically everyone.
There were/are a lot of American Communists running cover for the atrocities of the Soviet Union and the CCP. Plus, there have never been any really good movies about the terrible things they did.
Correct. Instead, some of those Stalinists were purged and blacklisted in the 1950s are today they are held up as heroic resisters to right wing fanaticism. The bad guys are the liberals who fought to remove Communists trying to blow up civil society like Elia Kazan. The good guys are the Stalinists who were so cruelly treated by being blacklisted from Hollywood. Oh the naïveté!
Yeah. It’s funny. The whole red scare is an interesting thing. Moynihan at the fifth column always likes to bring up. “Yes McCarthyism was wrong. But also yes there were a lot of communists actually trying to actively plant spies and propagandize at the same time.”
This is the martyr syndrome in effect. People love a good martyr. And when they guy martyring people (in this case blacklisting, ruining careers etc) is such an unlikable douche as McCarthy then all of the sudden people just inherently take the side of those being persecuted, even if they’re honestly not that much better than the asshole.
McCarthy ironically did more to soften communism than any of those dictators ever could. Because he made them the poor victims. And people love lifting up the poor victims.
Mr. Jones is supposed to be good. I’ll have to put in my serious brain & finally watch it sometime.
It's quite good, although it spends more effort on depicting the debauchery of Walter Duranty's Moscow parties than I think was necessary. (You couldn't, for example, show it in an American high school history class, which I think is a huge mistake if your goal is to influence public perception of historical events via film.)
This has fascinated me for years. One thing I would add to all the comments so far is that there is an intellectual basis for communism which is entirely lacking in nazism. Marx wrote books and founded an intellectual school. You can still read his stuff and gain insights into politics, economics and history, even as you accept that what solutions he proposed would never work. No one apart from a historian of the third Reich or an actual Nazi is going to read Mein Kampf. So Marx has always had disciples who are serious people, who have positions in universities or who write books and newspaper columns that people actually read. And I think they've been inclined to avert their eyes from the crimes of the regimes supposedly founded on his principles as a result.
I like this quote from Robert Conquest, who researched Stalin for more than fifty years: "They're still talking absolute balls. In the academy, there remains a feeling of, "Don't let's be too rude to Stalin. He was a bad guy, yes, but the Americans were bad guys too, and so was the British Empire.""
I'll agree that there wasn't much intellectual basis for Nazism-qua-Nazism (which was largely defined by whatever Hitler happened to be interested in at the moment), but there was a very active Italian fascist intellectual movement led by Giovanni Gentile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gentile), which the modern left simply by and large pretends didn't exist.
The biggest lie intellectuals tell is that Marx was an intellectual. Marx couldn’t philosophically hold the jocks of his contemporaries.
I’ve never read a philosopher more desperate to flatter his audience than Marx. He is basically begging to be liked by the “Everyman”. Same way every huckster, pseudo-intellectual does. He tell his audience “no. Of course it’s not YOUR fault. It’s this system. Right? Yeah. Nothing you did got you into this horrid state. Noooo. It’s this ‘other’ thing.”
He literally begs his audience to like him.
My grandmother was a committed Communist who hated Stalin with a passion - this was in Poland after the war. My mom remembered this and hated Stalin too. Then she met some American history or political science person who said that basically Americans manipulated him in to doing things and he is unfairly maligned.
I think Hitler is more maligned because Mao and Stalin basically killed their own people. Also their goal was not extermination. Regardless the end results are the same.
I don’t think Stalin tried to exterminate *races* but he absolutely tried to exterminate *classes of people*. The Holodomor wasn’t a racial purity project, but brutally suppressing a source of potential political challenge (relatively wealthy kulaks in Ukraine) was clearly seen as a positive outcome for him.
They also were clearly trying to destroy cultures re forbidding the teaching of local languages, history, cultural events, etc. There was also definitely ethnic race factors involved in who was seen as more valuable/not as human.
Being less organized about working people until they died and being open to them potentially not dying right now if they manage impossible agricultural feats isn’t really a big humanitarian step. 🤷🏻♀️
That’s a good point.
I guess part of the perception isnjust that the Nazis were so much more - blunt and efficient about it? As in Star of David patches and gas chambers vs. starvation-by-bad-central-planning.
"killing their own people"
Eddie Izzard has a great bit on that:
https://youtu.be/Bk_pHZmn5QM
> But, somehow tankies are just called weird and largely ignored.
When was the last time tankies marched in the streets en masse?
I think it's because Nazi's are pretty visible and active. Consistently.
Having cut my teeth in the doldrums of the radical left academia (tongue in cheek if not obvious)....I strain to think of a single Stalin apologist. There were a fair share of socialists and some communists. But even the communists student groups were more of the Anarcho Communist flavor and definitely didn't advocate or approve of the mass genocide from Stalin.
So, I just don't think it's that common in practice aside for a bunch of numb nuts who probably haven't even read The Communist Manifesto.
A guy in a bar in Seattle isn't enough to change that, I don't think.
Maybe that’s because many of those leftist academics were Lenin apologists. They sincerely believed that had Lenin lived longer, the Stalinist horror would not have happened. They’re wrong--Lenin taught Stalin how to do it. Their insistence that Stalin wasn’t a true communist, that he’s the reason the USSR finally failed, etc., would be hilarious if it weren’t such an article of faith among academic leftists (eg Stephen Cohen and his ilk).
"When was the last time tankies marched in the streets en masse? I think it's because Nazi's are pretty visible and active. Consistently."
This is quite silly -- Neo-Nazis and similar groups rarely manage to get even 100 people together for their rallies and they are virtually always outnumbered by counter-protesters by at least 10-to-1. To the extent you perceive Neo-Nazis as "pretty visible and active," that's because they receive massively disproportionate media coverage compared to any groups of comparable size and influence.
When I was in CA, they had semi-regular nazi protests or presence. No, they weren't super large, but they were active.
Also, when I went to punk shows, nazi's were almost always present.
In prison, there were Nazi gangs.
But...I can't say I've ever seen anything like that for tankies. I know of no Tankie gangs, or marches (small or large), or really anything.
Sure, just my experience. But Nazis are something I ACTUALLY had to worry about at times and in multiple scenarios....but I don't think I've ever met a sincere tankie....certainly not a whole group of them.
I don't understand your point; when was the last time Nazis marched en masse either?
Charlottesville is the largest I can recall in the last few years. Given....it was a coalition between Nazi, Klan, and white nationalist groups.
My point is that Nazi's are just more "present" in US culture than Communists or tankies.
I mean seriously, when was the last time a Tankie ran for US state governor and almost won? Neo-Nazi's have in my living memory.
Can you recall another one? A smaller one?
"My point is that Nazi's are just more "present" in US culture than Communists or tankies. "
Yeah, in popular media maybe. How many Nazis do you know in real life? While the tankies stand there with their red t-shirts and picket signs, without anywhere near that kind of (deserved) aggressive criticism.
"I mean seriously, when was the last time a Tankie ran for US state governor and almost won? "
I have no idea, they don't report when that happens. They do report when it happens with a Nazi. See the problem?
I tried not to associate with the Nazi's that I encountered. So I didn't "know" them.
But I encountered plenty of Nazi's. Plenty of them at every punk show I went to. Occasionally show up at house parties. My friend had his nose rearranged (required lots of surgery) by a Nazi because he said something about the racist rhetoric he was going off on. I didn't need the media to report on the Neo-Nazi that ran for governor because I lived in the state and it was mind blowing they almost won. As in, they were a front runner in the runoff for a while.
This in multiple cities and states. Not as if I was just in a tiny hot spot.
And I'm just counting actual Neo Nazis. Not even white nationalists or white supremacists (the old definition...as in "white people are genetically and culturally superior", not the new I'm not even sure what it means definition). Or confederate flag waving generic racists.
And while you might say "well, you just hung out where nazis' were." I would disagree. I also frequented many of the areas you'd expect tankies to be. Academic circles, open mic beatnik style coffee shops. Radical environmentalist circles (direct action, yada yada). Engaged with literal Communist student and activist groups.
If you're in certain scenes, like punk, Nazis are something you actually have to be aware of. Like gangs if you're into underground hip hop. You have to tread carefully when they're around. Tankies? Except for a couple of vague memories of solo weird guys with Che shirts, it seriously just wasn't a thing at any venue I can recall.
"Can you recall another one? A smaller one?"
Smaller ones are pretty frequent. When I was in LA they happened semi-regularly. I'd say once or twice a year. Generally you'd hear of them by word of mouth "hey, avoid XXX street today. Probably terrible traffic, some nazi rally or something". They're totally outnumbered by counter protester usually.
But I never had to reroute my commute or plans due to Tankie protestors.
Can you name any tankie rallies? A large one? Small ones? I'd assume they'd at a minimum be locally reported if they disrupt traffic or murder a couple of people.
Your comment has inspired intelligent dialogue.
Good job.
The Japanese military in the 19th century were absolutely worse than the Nazis were by nearly every measure, but no one in the West talks about it. Koreans and Chinese know better.
An old friend of mine recently got very angry that people were comparing Stalin to Hitler. Apparently, Hitler having kept capitalism makes him even worse because capitalism is necessary for racism yada yada yada. Plus, Stalin committed his crimes in order to get rid of capitalism, so I guess they were saying that Stalin had good intentions so killing all those people wasn't that bad.
As an aside, one of the reasons that the Chechens do not want to be part of Russia Ardakhar Genocide. During and after World War II the soviets deported the Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia and forced them to work without adequate shelter or food.
I agree. The number of communist apologists also apalls me. I've heard everything from ' that many people weren't killed' to ' they would have died anyway' (about mao's policies) to 'that wasn't real communism'.
It's obscene seeing the same people who cry about police brutality and systemic issues think that a military state is the best solution, so long as 'we the good people are in power'. So naive
My take is that a lot of the reason is how their acts came to light. Hitler lost a war that the US and West were fully committed to. Before the US entered the war, there were Nazi apologists, but they were all swept aside by incredibly powerful forces. Pretty much everyone had immediate relatives who were involved in the war and didn't want to hear about how Hitler was misunderstood.
Stalin's crimes weren't widely known in the West until The Great Terror was published in 1968. By this time, he was dead. There were far more people in academia who had an interest in continuing to minimize Stalin's crimes than there were family members of his victims. Communism continues to be a system that people failed rather than a system that failed people.
I’ve been binging on New Discourses pod where James Lindsey is doing a deep comparison of wokeness to Maoism. I was never a strong history student, but this stuff is fascinating and incredibly disturbing.
I've tried getting into that podcast, but I often just glaze over when I listen. I did like his episode on Gnosticism, though, and thought it was a super interesting look at where we are right now, so I might give that one a try.
Post war American culture explains a lot. Don’t forget the enormous influence of Hollywood and post war TV. Countless movies about WW2 with nasty Nazis and fanatic Germans. TV shows from Combat, Rat Patrol to Hogan’s Heroes. Also many novels with Swastikas on the covers. Your friends in school putting a finger under their nose and raising their arm to say “Sieg Hiel”. You too. Nazis had the best uniforms too. German panzers were considered cool and evil.
As for Stalin and Mao? No movies. No TV shows. No novels. Once the opposition to the Vietnam War got going, Mao was considered cool like Che Guevara. Sex drugs and rock and roll took over. Communists just wanted peace and love. Everyone was too high to think more deeply.
So here we are. We still hate Nazis the most. And those hot black uniforms!
A small point I'd like to make is that leaders are exalted or demonised depending on who won the war and what narrative they want to set at the time. For example, Winston Churchill if a saviour to the West yet he wilfully killed 2 million Indians by rerouting food produced in bengal for the war effort. He didn't do it because he wanted to kill Indians but he was indifferent and in fact despised them. Another 2 million Indian soldiers enlisted to the war in an effort to be able to feed their families and their contributions to the war isn't even acknowledged. sure he didn't do that to kill Indians specifically but what he did was as evil as mao, though he killed less people. 🤷♂️ yet he's still beloved by the west
then your mind is confused by delusions of american exceptionalism. lenin stalin and mao were trying to restore collapsing societies that were under constant foreign militay pressure, and ready to dismember their countries at every opportunity. they were rebuilding under the worst military and economic pressure. the only governments who could have resisted the constant european and american invasions had to be the harshest most military ones. your argument is like beating a child for decades then wondering why they are so mean when they finally gorw up and are bigger. maybe if the usa stopped it's comstant wars against russia and china, and many others they could settle into peaceful development. chinese military strength is the only reason they have been able to become the world economic leader. so do you imagine they could have done that with a liberal democracy? not a chance. the usa and europeans plundered china into collapse for a century and would have continuted. same for russia. yes it was a hars government, but unless you think they have no right to exist then it is unreasonable to expect anything but the harshest and most military government to arise when invaded from all sides.
but communist professors. bulls*** fantasy. parentti said he was the only marxist professor he knew. but rationalizers for permant american war and permannent european war. they are every where.
How have US or European invasions got anything to do with Stalin’s purges in 30s or the Holodomor, or the atrocities and disastrous policies that lead to tens of millions of deaths in the Great Leap Forward or Mao’s attempts to defeat internal enemies by launching the Great Leap Forward?
I’m also unclear how the changes Deng launched in the 80s have much to do with military opposition to external invasion?
You criticise American exceptionalism, but it seems to be the height of Western exceptionalism to think all things are merely a response to external Western influence.
Could China have become the force it did without Maoist repression? It’s obvious something we can never know, but for all the fact the Sth Korea & Taiwan took decades to emerge as liberal democracies they never descended to the levels of atrocities that Mao inflicted on China.
They didn’t invade Europe or bomb London or Pearl harbour. It’s really that simple.
They did invade Europe. The USSR started WWII as a secret ally of the Nazis, they divided up Europe in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and, after both sides had invaded Poland, further refined in the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty.
There is a lot of truth that being an ally of the US during WWII did a lot for the Soviet's image in the West, but it's also pretty undeniable that socialists in the West were effective in minimizing the crimes of the Soviet Union. So much so that people forget that the Soviets in fact invaded Europe.
So ... I'm not European. Ok, thanks for clearing that up.
Honestly, yes, people care more about cultures they’re closer to and have more of a relationship with. Sorry? Like, I care more if my cousin gets hit by a car than a stranger?
Bogi's from Eastern Europe - I'm guessing Poland? Stalin literally invaded Poland in 1939.
But the fundamental issue isn’t ‘how do we rank evil’ as it’s a pretty childish question tbh, but the fact there remains schools of people who are apologists for Stalin & Mao. There’s three different strains, 1.The outright liars, the people who are in many ways analogous to Holocaust deniers. 2. The ‘you can’t make an omelette...’ types that cling to the idea that the ultimate project was worthwhile and its sad these awful things happened and yes there were mistakes, but but but...’ 3. The scales balancing types who will point to Soviet Industrialisation and defeating Hitler or advances in education & healthcare under Mao and say well, what they did was a net positive or that we need acknowledge the ‘good things’ as if it lessens the mass murder.
The autobahn’s are pretty awesome, but I no one credible would ever run that argument.
The 1s are moral monsters the 2s & 3s are simply intellectually dishonest.
What influence they have beyond a very small group of true believers is questionable as I’m pretty reluctant to see Twitter leftists as much beyond a cult of the self righteous and stupid.
Your comment highlights so many of the problems with current political discourse.
Whether Tankies have zero influence is moot, but we’re not just talking about Tankies.
It’s telling that you blithely describe MAGA types as ‘neo fascist’ despite that being in the kindest terms a hyperbolic and not particularly historically accurate use of the term ‘fascist’ (It’s entirely possible to recognise the illiberal and authoritarian tendencies whilst acknowledging that using the word ‘fascist’ is both inaccurate and unhelpful. All it does is reduce to a relatively meaningless boo word), yet would I imagine laugh at suggestions that the people pushing a reductive and essentialist version of identity politics and who have clearly inserted the underlying ideological ideas of various academic theories into the mainstream and even into the way institutions are run are ‘Marxists’ or ‘Neo-Marxists’.
If you’re going to play fast and lose with definitions to attack opponents you can complain when your ideological opponents do the same thing.
Again, I think the idea of trying to decide if pushing an illiberal, anti humanist, anti universalist version of the left isn’t as bad as a Illiberal authoritarian version of the right and is the ‘real’ problem is childish and entirely missed the point.
Many would argue that leftists have far more institutional control in this country (academia, media, etc) than neo Nazis.
Given that ‘leftists’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone who’d have anything positive to say about Lenin, Mao or Stalin I’d hope so.
Everyone from AOC to Bernie would possibly happily embrace the label ‘leftist’ and even if you vehemently disagree with them it’s absurd & offensive to make any comparison to neo Nazis.
You talk about a sense of proportion and then spam us with a bunch of stuff that’s supposed to show that the ‘American right wing’ (unsure if you mean the entire GOP, all Conservatives or merely Trumpists or you can’t be bothered making any distinctions) are literally fascists.
You could have saved yourself a lot of words, because I have a strong enough grasp of political definitions to know that whatever appalling aspects of authoritarianism Trumpists may embrace calling them ‘fascists’ simply isn’t a serious argument. Actually, I think they’d love nothing more than to have the American left call them fascists as what greater ammunition to argue that the left is unhinged and lost touch with American people.
Also, no of course I don’t think AOC & co are ‘Marxists’, but it is pretty clear that there are aspects of certain ideological positions that draw on critical theory/Frankfurt School idea who were Marxists.
However the bottom line is both side just chuck around terms in ways that are truly embarrassing.
I am usually Team Katie with the low stakes back and forths on the pod, but I hate the AI images man. Something about them is so creepy and disgusting! Can we have the cover photo be cute pictures of Moose instead (if Getty Images are too boring)?
She clearly thinks the bit is hilarious, and maybe it was once or twice. But at this point it’s just lazy, and I mean that literally - you can usually manipulate AI prompts to give you something actually pretty accurate, something so wrong it’s funny, or so wrong it’s horrific. But I’m guessing these vaguely disturbing uncanny valley things are just literally the first thing spit out by the prompt.
I think it’s more “I think this is funny” versus laziness (considering the amount of effort she puts into the reporting on this podcast and elsewhere), but I’m a sensitive smol bean and don’t like gross images (they are literal violence against my eyes). I still can’t listen to that old episode about mukbangs because the cover art of some dude housing a huge amount of pasta is too much for me.
Maybe they can go back to furry art. That was a fun era.
I mean I think she does genuinely think it’s funny, but even if it is, repeating the same joke 50 times gets dull.
or elementary kids.
Thank god I’m both.
This is exactly how I feel.
It's an Elon move - her customers hate it, but she's going to do it anyway because she thinks it's funny to troll them.
Katie, don’t be Elon!
Oooh Moose could be in a different outfit for each show. He could have props and location shoots!
I figured it was the furry or the mysterious lazer, but nope, it's Katie who's traumatizing me every episode. Do better. #TeamMoose
All they have to do is use the blocked and reported logo and don't put in any image in at all. It's less work Katie!
Yeah, some of them were kinda funny in the beginning. Lately I scroll down as fast as I can on them; they're just very discomforting.
I don't mind using AI images, but choose GOOD AI images. Not this crappy substack stuff. At least go to midjourney or something. Although I think you should technically be paying for it if you do that.
I mean given that AI is like, an average of internet inputs it’s kind of perfect for this podcast don’t you think?
I was thinking they’re trying to show how heinously bad these AI image generators are. I tried Stable Diffusion and it was laughable. Apparently Midjourney is good but you have to do a ton more work than just putting in a prompt
I have made fantastic stuff using stable diffusion. This isn't baby's first photoshop, nor is it a simple google search that returns a good result after, "buh-buh-but I typed the words." It does take a *little* bit of work to get it working right.
A thousand times this. That Rebecca one looks handled by an apprentice taxidermist. Awful.
In Highland Park, a very wealthy enclave in Dallas, there was a surplus Soviet Lenin statue at a hamburger restaurant. But because this is Texas, it had a plaque on it that said, "haha, we won."
Depending on where you go, there are some confederate flags with the same message
Collecting the standards and treasures of your defeated foes as trophies has a history as old as warfare itself. That’s how most “Nazi memorabilia” started out, although now you’ll get pegged as a neo-Nazi if you have any of it.
I believe the state of Minnesota owns some famous Confederate battle flag, and every now and then whatever Southern state they took it from complains and Minnesota's response is always, "you lost, it's ours, get over it."
I was thinking of that one, actually.
The long history of conquest sometimes makes property claims uncomfortable but if anything is legitimate war booty its a battle flag.
Love it
Kamala Harris is trash, California politics are trash, and the Bay Area is trash.
She is one of the least-vetted national politicians of my lifetime, but because she says the "right" things, there's no impetus for journalists to really dig down on any of her claims about herself.
For example, she claims to be from Oakland. This is true in that she was born at a hospital a couple miles on the Oakland side of the border, but her parents lived in Berkeley when she was born and she grew up in Berkeley until she moved to Quebec as a teenager.
There's nothing "wrong" with being from Berkeley, some of my best friends are from Berkeley, but for some reason she thinks it's better national politics to claim Oakland as her hometown, even though I can find no evidence that she ever spent so much as a day living in Oakland.
The thought of her being one very old man away from the presidency terrifies me.
Haha. Not the least bit surprising that Harris thinks that pretending to be from the "hood" gives her street credibility with the black Democratic base. And if I recall correctly, she was also being a bit slippery on the history of public school integration in the area.
I like to joke that I was "West Philadelphia born and raised" when in reality my family packed up and left for the exurbs when I was the ripe old age of 6 months.
Isn’t it a little weird that both her and Obama are Black, but not actually “African American”? And I’m not just noting their mixed race. Obama’s father was Kenyan, and Kamala’s father is Jamaican.
I mean I’m genuinely not trying to dogwhistle or darkly hint anything. It’s just an odd fact I don’t know what to make of.
(EDIT: like you with Philadelphia, I jokingly say I’m from Detroit. I was born in a hospital in the city limits, my father worked downtown, but we definitely lived in the ‘burbs. And moved away when I was 2).
The term gaining currency over the last five years or so to describe "actual" black Americans is ADOS, which stands for American Descendants of Slaves.
Sociologists define ADOS or native blacks as people who have four black grandparents born in the continental US.
So Michelle Robinson Obama is ADOS, while her husband (as you correctly point out) and children are not.
The funny thing about affirmative action circa 1970 was that it was designed to identify talented ADOS and Latinos who had been previously overlooked by selective colleges. It was presumed that most of these students would be poor/working class (hence Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor, whose backgrounds have more in common than the Wise Latina would care to admit) .
It was also presumed that these student met the baseline admissions criteria.
Numerical Quotas like those in California were relatively rare.f
Fast forward to 2023, upwards of 66% of the "black" students at selective colleges are not working class ADOS but middle to upper class African or Caribbean immigrants. (There hasn't been much analysis of Latino demographics, but good luck finding a Puerto Rican girl who grew up in the South Bronx housing projects , like the Wise Latina).
Of course, the term is imprecise in that black Americans with recent ancestry from the Caribbean are also "American descendants of slaves." That suggests the distinction isn't actually slavery, but more recent history of racial discrimination.
I would prefer a more precise term to reflect the fact that ADOS refers only to slaves brought to the continental US. Unfortunately,
"Continental United States Descendants of Slaves' doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
I could be wrong here but it seems that over time, "America" has become colloquial shorthand for the United States. When people in other parts of the world refer to "the Americans" or immigrating to "America", do you really think they are speaking of Honduras or Prince Edward Island?
ADOS may have to do unless something more geographically correct comes along.
Now I'm getting too nitpicky, but I think "American" modifies "descendants" rather than "slaves" in the abbreviation.
I disagree. CUSDS, seems to be a great acronym. It feels like it belongs just as much as Latinx. Honestly anyone who speaks a Latin based language cannot ignore the painful irony of a word like Latinx.
And I do think Richard Harris is a descendant of (Caribbean) slaves, although his history is also a bit different than the American experience because he notes that he belonged to a class of black Jamaicans that the colonial British intentionally elevated and educated in the post-slavery era.
I'm also not sure where the suggestion that Sotomayor would have a problem admitting she and Clarence Thomas come from economically similar backgrounds comes from?
I was speaking semi-facetiously about their widely divergent world-views as adult jurists, despite several commonalities in their upbringing. I suppose my wording engendered a too-literal reading.
just curious, what's with referring to her "the Wise Latina?" Did she call herself that or something?
She once said the following in a speech at Berkeley: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.”
Some of the attacks on this quote are a little bit out of context, but not much - a theme of the speech really was that her gender and ethnicity would necessarily affect her judging, and that she considered this a positive thing.
She was quoting her mother or grandmother who was passing on some homespun wisdom to young Sonia.
It is not weird at all. It says so mething about how black American children are raised and/or educated and/or perceived that they are not doing as well as black children of immigrants.
Kenya is literally in Africa.
It is! But it’s not, you’ll note, in America. Barack Sr. was Kenyan, but not American.
You’re right though that I could have been a bit more precise to say that he Obama Jr. does not have African American parents/ancestry.
But I thought the rest of my post made it clear what I was talking about. Neither of them are ADOS if we want to use the newer term.
Funny thing is nobody actually thinks she’s hood. Credentials may be easier to fake now but for someone her age it’s closer to impossible tbh
I mean there’s also the whole Willie Brown thing. You get instantly labeled a sexist for bringing it up, but it’s a fact that she got a couple of critical “entry point to politics” appointments and a ton of connections from a man 3 decades her senior that she spent 2 years banging. Obviously she’s advanced far beyond that entry point, but that was the critical foot in the door.
The facts don’t seem to be in dispute, in that Willie Brown is an acknowledged “kingmaker” in CA politics, they definitely had an intimate relationship, and he definitely gave her appointments to plum positions after that relationship. That’s clear nepotism and a little scuzzy - the fact that “sleeping your way to the top” is a “sexist trope” shouldn’t preclude us from cocking an eyebrow and noting it when it happens.
Harris lost all credibility with me in that primary debate when she scored points for being bussed in Berkeley as a child while pointing out Biden had voted against some bussing plan. She implied that being bussed to another school was partly responsible for her rise. Well, I was bussed in Berkeley too. Like her I was the child of UC grad students and we were both raised in a highly educated literate household. Her parents lived on the cheap side of town (probably because they were grad students), as mine had, but there’s no chance she was going to be deprived of educational opportunities possible only via the bussing plan. Her parents’ careers took them to wealthier neighborhoods, as mine did. But education and class no longer matter in political discourse, I guess.
She was bussed to the "good" school for first grade because she got hit on the head with a brick by another student at the "bad" school.
It was much closer to what we'd call "white flight" than it was to desegregation bussing in the big cities on the east coast.
Exactly. Why does she give a shit?
Berkeley?? It’s one of the most recognizable names in the US.
At least as much as Oakland.
Now….they definitely have very distinctive and different cultural stereotypes.
I grew up in a rural town that had more cows than people (not exaggerating).
I knew Berkeley, only knew Oakland for the football team.
This might be plausible if she was from like Emeryville, but I don't think Berkeley is lacking in name recognition.
It's so exhausting that the only reason this part of African American curriculum is being discussed on the merits is because politicians/journos are trying to score political points against Florida/Desantis.
The fact that the curriculum point was in the AP African American Studies course and no one batted an eye (or was even aware) is concerning. If scholars take such issue with it when Desantis tries to do it, why is it not a problem otherwise (and its not like Desantis is literally in the classroom teaching the course--generic american teachers all across the country are applying these frameworks)? Do we not have in depth discussions about the merits of coursework before trying to score political points?
Additionally the idea that your generic somewhat left-leaning middle school/high school teacher -- especially one that would seek out teaching African American studies -- would lean into the subtle neoconservative choices in frameworks for the course is laughable. Teachers come into their courses with their own biases and filter the frameworks in their own way. There isn't some AI program uniformly instructing kids precisely what is in the frameworks. It's all so silly.
There's also this insistence that history education in America is still the jingoistic version taught during the height of the Cold War. I remember watching Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" shortly after graduating high school and realized that I knew basically all of what he talked about already. That show used Howard Zinn's "People's History" as it's main source, which is obviously not the history of old. I took AP US History in high school, so maybe it's different for the non-AP class, but I'm not sure. Regardless, the history I learned was largely through a left-leaning lens and yet was still accused of being racist in 2020. Exhausting indeed.
Whenever lefties give the stripped down version of CRT they claim they want, the Motte version. It is literally exactly the history I was taught 25 years ago.
There was already an understanding of this, fuck that is where most of them learned it.
Yeah, I did high school in the deep south in the 90's. My AP History teacher was a far left aged hippie. I remember him arguing with the class about affirmative action (the students were more conservative about it than he was).
I went to school the Dallas area and people from the north keep asking me whether I was taught that the south should have won the civil war when in truth we dedicated a good quarter of all of our class time talking about how racist America was before the civil rights movement and a little about how it was racist after.
I learned the same. History I was taught was through the lens of the US being the bad guys.
Same same. For decades, every time I read "they don't tell you about _____ in high school" I've thought, "No, we got it in junior high."
Maybe not everyone had the benefit of a class in 1970 taught by a young black man who got his certificate in 1969, though.
In fifth grade our teacher showed us a photo of a lynching and talked to us about how horrible racism is. I don’t know who thinks this is hidden.
I'm gonna take a wild, irresponsible guess that you guys are from a city? Probably north of the mason-dixon line?
Are you implying that Mr. Burnsides at Ulysses S. Grant High School gave me an incomplete education?
Yup. Same. I do not know anyone in the Northeast who grew up in the 70s or later who learned otherwise.
I hate the ‘X’ branding and whatnot, but think framing how Twitter works “pre” vs “post” Musk is asinine because it every single time it seems to operate under the assumption that Twitter was a “normal” company before Musk bought it.
Yea, Twitter provided tremendous value (for free) to a certain class of people like journalists, but as a business it was an unsustainable disaster that likely only stayed afloat because of the bullshit frenzy Donald Trump created. Since becoming a public company, Twitter has more or less accomplished setting 2 billion dollars on fire. That is where the “free” value came from. It was never going to last one way or the other.
Musk bailed out the incompetent executives running a company hurtling towards financial insolvency, and unfortunately most will probably be employed again where they can do it to another beloved company down the road...once again likely ending with a self-destructive billionaire bailing them out of their own incompetence.
"Do we not have in depth discussions about the merits of coursework before trying to score political points?" No! That would be too reasonable.
Also, I think a backdrop to these controversies is the assumption that all teachers in red states will be bigoted conservatives if you don't write the standards to preclude that. Whereas most teachers will put their own spin on the curriculum, regardless of how it's written, because they're not automatons. AND teachers are as diverse a lot as any other profession--maybe even slightly more left than average due to educational polarization and the politics of teacher compensation. That's certainly my impression from talking to the many teachers I know in FL and other red states.
I do worry given the completely batshit stuff he actually has gotten through, such as the one bill that says "theoretical content" can't be taught in gen ed courses in college, stripping speech and tenure protections from all faculty, sending out lists of problem departments and courses, etc. The orwellian "parents' rights" stuff that's being championed where parents can monitor classrooms (including other people's kids) whenever they want. Rules for removing books that are way too widly applied. The other stuff is actually speech chilling.
Meanwhile none of the stuff in this HS curriculum really seems like it would chill speech considerably - there aren't punishments associated with not saying specific things or saying specific things. It's just a curriculum (non-exhaustively) listing things that should be covered with suggested clarifications.
Jesse and Katie are completely wrong on this issue.
To describe a well-known conservative trope promoting the idea that slaves were taught some skill and to present it as an example of agency or the resiliency of the human spirit is quite a combination of naiveté and ignorance.
Conservatives have claimed that slaves and their descendants have benefited because we took them out of dysfunctional Africa, taught them about western civilization, introduced Christianity to them, taught them a useful trades, etc. Andrew Sullivan had such a conservative on his podcast earlier this year; Niall Ferguson built his career on this idea.
Comparing the AP African American Studies guidelines vs. the Florida ones shows this explicitly:
"Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
- Florida
"In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, African Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others,”
- AP
The latter points out that the trades slaves were forced to learn trades that could be used *after* they were freed but were beneficial to the slave owners while they were enslaved. They would not have been able to gain from these trades before that because their labor was owned by their masters---who used it for themselves or rented it out.
The former makes it seem as though forcing a trade on slaves somehow eased the shame and brutality of slavery: we taught them and they benefited, never minding that the total sum of their existence ran to misery even discounting the skills they acquired.
Analogously: when Mormon girls/women are forced to stay with their polygamist, Fundamentalist LDS husband we don't talk about the skills they've learned, like bread making and keeping a garden, that could benefit them personally when they escape captivity. We discuss the failings of the husband and the religion that sanctioned it.
Yes, this episode was so disappointing. Jesse is usually so smart and has written extensively on how to evaluate systems of knowledge yet he really missed this one. They didn’t even mention the slavery apologist narrative with 1) the inclusion of standards highlighting the Islamic slave trade and slavery in Asia, while 2) the pairing of indentured servitude and slavery as examples of the same phenomenon with no mention of the unique features of the institutions created in the Americas that emphasized race. He seems reluctant to even acknowledge the conservative movement’s long-standing push for these curricular changes. They really could have led with Josh Marshall’s essay but chose not to do so but instead chose to bash the liberal MSM and Kamala Harris as being hyperbolic, which is lazy, low-hanging fruit that does nothing new for his audience.
Plus, Jesse frames a very clear debate about the nature and implications of the Enlightenment as some high-level esoteric hard-to-understand discourse about egalitarianism. Really? Jonah Goldberg et al argue that racism existed before Europeans and the Enlightenment was the way out of inequality with its concept of individual rights and Kendi et al argue the Enlightenment entrenched and reinforced racism.
Anyway, at the end of the episode they shrug their shoulders and say no one remembers anything from history class so it doesn’t matter. Their attitude was unexpectedly anti-intellectual for a podcast that usually doesn’t shy away from intellectual concepts.
There seems to be an implication in these debates that one side believes American slavery was the worst form of slavery ever devised, and anything that doesn’t support that claim shouldn’t be taught.
It’s just not true, though. American slavery *should* be contextualized. The lesson shouldn’t be that we had some really bad folks and thank goodness we don’t have them anymore. The lesson should be that American slavery was one instance among countless instances where people were monsters to their out group, and humanity has not outgrown this tendency at all.
It was a very extreme and different form of slavery. It also lasted longer than its European counterparts. And it led to the deaths of ~360,000 patriots, ~250,000 traitors, and nearly to the death of our Republic.
`people were monsters to their out group, and humanity has not outgrown this tendency at all.'
Except that the national, ethnic, and religious prejudices and tensions of today are wholly incomparable to the horrors inflicted on the majority of the black population until about 1860.
To the ear of a non-expert these sentences seem... very closely equivalent though. I think that was their main point here. Normies are going to see these as being the identical. Kids in a classroom are going to get the same thing out of both. And if a teacher is well trained they obviously will point out that the benefits to the previously enslaved person would generally come after they have become free...
I think what you are getting at is that the FL statement should have said "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit after they became free." So adding 4 words at the end?
Also you stopped in the middle of a sentence so I lost you there as to what the FL statement is meant to imply.
The connotation of the FL version is that slavery, despite all of the bad things you hear about it, did some good by providing slaves an opportunity to support themselves after emancipation or by renting themselves out while enslaved.
What this sidesteps is that such `benefits' were never the intention of slaveholders, that slaves were forced to learn these trades, and they could have learned them in non-slavery settings. It follows the well-worn conservative path of downplaying the harms of slavery and pointing out the `positives': ignore the torture, rape, and separation of family, we taught women how to repair shoes and that allowed them to be good capitalists (even though we really didn't want to allow that to happen)! As they did benefit, maybe they should be a little grateful or this evens stuff out a bit?
The non-FL connotation is: some slaves didn't starve or have to indenture themselves because the skills they were forced to learn were in demand. Obviously this is true because slaves had to learn useful skills to keep plantations/households going, at the expense of artificially depressing the income of non-slaves (hard for a poor white man to compete against a slave), and for a long time black skills were not remunerative because their labor was owned by the slaveholders. The very act of teaching slaves a skill was therefore merely another example of the exploitation that blacks suffered at the hands of whites.
Simply put: one does not get to describe as a `benefit' something that was forced upon an owned person.
This change to the curriculum was done at the behest of two, black Republicans. It's clearly politically motivated as the rest of the committee was not in favor of the language.
It is utterly ridiculous to equate slavery with some form of job training, as these Republicans and DeSantis are trying to do. Ask yourself, do you think any ex-slave ever said: `Well thank god for master! He taught me a trade so that I have some way to support myself now that I'm no longer property! Might even help me earn enough money to track down the wife and children he sold.'
To your last paragraph: If there's time, why wouldn't you discuss both? There is room to teach more than simple, mindless, shaming morality in history classes.
My understanding is that's exactly what she's arguing. That's central to a holistic education, not "shaming morality" but telling the whole truth about how something happened rather than just what happened.
The problem is that education is decentralized and some more conservative districts the curriculum may be implemented with less tact than in like Miami or Palm beach where moderating influences will steer it towards reason. Specifically on the more suspect aspects of the curriculum
I think I agree with the general points you’re making here. (I haven’t had coffee yet this morning, so I’m not quite fully alert.)
Katie is honestly the last person of the 4 people who have anything to do with this podcast that I would have thought was posting those AI pictures.
I initially agreed with you but today I realized that the awful AI art is akin to her Twitter profile pic.
JESSE: STOP QUOTE RE-TWEETING RANDOM MENTALLY UNSTABLE 13 YEAR OLDS! NO! BAD!
It's IS fair I think to complain about supposedly professional journalists like that Nate guy suicide baiting you/others but you really don't need to do be doing this. Next time you feel like doing it just block and log off for the day.
The responses to the Seattle guy’s piece over on the Free Press are pretty upsetting . . . A lot of “Oh, he’s a leftie, so he’s getting what he deserves.” I love the FP, but their comment sections are like OAN and Newsmax had a baby, and then that baby grew up and had a baby with Alex Jones.
I hear you---the Free Press comment section is so bad it should roped off and quarantined.
It makes the WashPost commenters seem like Plato's Academy
Yeah the comments section on Free Press or Matt Taibbi articles are *really* crazy. Right leaning substacks attract some absolute maniacs
This is what happens when almost all mainstream journalism is culturally monopolized by effete elites. There are normal, thoughtful conservatives too, they just aren't journalists, so there is a dearth of good places to go. The problem is that wild radical conservative rightists go to the same places, so all conservatives based on comment sections seem like weirdos.
Please please please go back to the old art style I hate the AI images
Tankies are the worst. As many have said, I think ranking evil doesn't really make much sense. Once you go past a certain point, lets just say the meter is pegged. But if you read stories about the horrors routinely perpetrated by the soviets, it's pretty astounding in it's cruelty. Things like, forcible taking all of the grain grown in a town and storing it in a 'collectivized' storage facility. But either due to incompetence or, in many cases as an intentional campaign to starve out undesiriables, not actually distributing any of the grain and just leaving it to rot. And then the posted guards would shoot starving villagers attempting to sneak and steel the rotting grain.
This wasn't some local authority run amok, these were the official policies of the Soviets during the collectivization push. Their cruelty was astounding.
Outrage bait news story debunking BARPod is my favorite BARPod. I love the crazy people being crazy on the internet stories too don’t get me wrong. But I don’t have time to look into all of these other stories myself and I trust Katie and Jesse to tell me the truth. At least it’s the truth as they see it sans manipulation and they show us their work. It’s really important to have at least a few real journalists still in the mix. Great show!
This is by far the most important work they do. Crazy youtubers and bloggers is BARpod's delicious dessert, but debunking deception and lies in journalism is the real meat here.
I've always been really weirded out by Western leftie fascination with Lenin and other communist figures. Maybe I heard too many horror stories from my Eastern European immigrant parents.
Last year, we did a family trip to the homeland and we went to Grutas Park (aka Stalin's World). It's an open-air museum in Lithuania filled with Soviet era statues that were torn down when the regime fell. The place doesn't glorify these figures. The written information doesn't shy away from the brutality of the time, and there's also a train car that was once used to transport people to the gulag, as well as guard towers and barbed wire meant to invoke the feeling of being in a prison camp. The whole place is really kitschy and weird, and I'm glad someone was able to preserve this history. (As an aside, that someone is a Lithuanian mushroom magnate who financed the effort to recover the statues from various dumps and was later awarded and Ig Nobel Prize for his efforts.)
The visit naturally made me think about US Confederate statues and what to do with them. I think building a similar museum and putting them there with the appropriate historical context could be really interesting. But of course it would be a lightening rod for all kinds of stupid discourse, from both sides.
Interesting story about that Lithuanian park. There's a museum in Germany called the Citadel that actively seeks both Nazi and Communist artifacts. The educational purpose is to put the artifacts in historical context and make sure that citizens "never forget". https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/museum-of-toxic-statues-berlin
I also wish the US had a private museum willing to take on this role.
I couldn't agree more that Seattle is the most beautiful city filled with the most unpleasant people. Someday, Rainer will explode and end it all and sweet relief will wash over us all.
In re: to Jesse's comment about not being able to speak to whether or not the standards devoted enough time to slavery, etc.
I am a bit of an expert on reading state standards and tying them to curriculum, so I would love to speak to that for a moment.
Every state constructs standards, sometimes referred to as Grade Level Expectations, and they are outlined for each grade level k-12 and broken down by subject matter. There are literally hundreds of GLEs per subject. Math, science, reading, social studies, music, art, even PE.... every class that is taught in a public school has a list of state standards associated with it.
There is no way every standard can be touched on in depth, because there just aren't that many hours in a day.
The curriculum that is taught in any individual school or district must align with the state standards, but it will not necessarily be covered deeply. The depth and breadth of curriculum is largely left to school leadership, and the standards are the parameters in which they may operate.
So, as to whether the subject is sufficiently covered to suit the sensibilities of someone like Heather Cox Richardson or Kamala Harris is impossible to discern simply from reading state standards. Though it sounds to me based on what Jesse read aloud, there is quite a bit of detail that goes into slavery as a part of American History. Any school that desires to do a deep dive certainly can, and would then create or purchase a curriculum that does exactly that.
However, "Priority Standards" as they are often referred, are USUALLY selected based in part by their prevalence on state assessments. For example, if a 4th grade state test barely tests kids on geometry but has a lot of questions on division, then most schools would not opt to spend an entire semester on geometry, even though both items are on the 4th grade standards.
So the TLDR- state standards are not curriculum, and they do not dictate how much a school must teach about a topic. They dictate the parameters of what can be taught.
Thanks! I think this is a pretty good rundown of how state standards work. I would also add that the Governor is probably NOT involved in developing learning standards. They are developed to align with state law, of course, but state law also sets parameters, only.
I love the podcast Empire. Listened originally because I go a bit mad for anything relating to the history of the Indian subcontinent, but their third season is on the history of slavery globally. the second half of the season does end up focusing largely on the transatlantic slave trade. Some great episodes in that trench and I feel like they and their guests do a great job discussing the complicated realities of that period
On Twitter:
Community Notes is a big innovation. I wrote them a weird letter with lots of instructions for how to build something weirdly close to it after J6. I’m guessing it had almost nothing to do with them implementing it but we do need a decentralized editor and I will die on this hill no matter how autistic and spergy it may seem. Elon pouring more money and attention on that is an unalloyed good.
He’s got right of appeal and public trial with transparent rules on his roadmap which I also think is a good thing. I can see him *almost* getting things right, but I do think working 120 hours a week has made him really nutty.
Agree with Katie on the pricing for Premium Twitter. Her blue check mark should be paid for by simps who subscribe to her. The pricing for business is all wrong, and should be a nominal fee for the business to enroll and then charge per badge beyond a certain amount so you’d get a lot of people with self-importance issues —like writers, sorry— fighting with each other to collect more badges. LIke, look here is my NYT budget, my WaPo badge, my Lighting a Fire without Matches Badge.
On the locking down of Twitter, I believe that he’s trying to avoid people using twitter to scrape tweets for LLM training. Which I think he just needs to throw in the towel on. Twitter isn’t going to be a good LLM training data mine as currently configured, unless he does something like I’ve spergally laid out my substack where he specifically creates the decentralized news editor where he would get a premium fact-checked data set that also has signal in it on how to reason and argue.
I wish he would have just made a good offer to buy Substack and turn the running of Twitter over to that team with maybe some input from him. He needs to extract himself from that company.
Community Notes are indeed great! They make up for a lot of capricious behavior on Musk's part.
And about twitter not being visible, the history in the episode just doesn't seem right to me. I had to switch to third party apps like Nitter way before Musk took over twitter, I think due to a login prompt that kept kicking me to the homepage. I was able to switch back early after his takeover, and it's only been recently that I had to return to Nitter.
Imagine if we had community notes for the entire internet not just twitter. That’s the hill I die on. And not just for bad reputation but good reputation.
I don’t have a twitter account because my wife already says I’m on here too much.
Twitter always prompted you for a login if you did much scrolling around. But you could usually at least read the tweet you were linked to and a few others before you got the prompt. Now, you literally cannot see a TweeX other than the one you are directly linked to, unless you log in.
You can't even just land on a profile page, where a lot of journalists keep their contact information. Prior to Musk, you could even land on an abbreviated explore page.