Where’s the Rest of the Moose? That’s Just the Head!
David Boaz issues another in an occasional series of libertarian whinges about the use of “Soviet chic” decor or fashion, complete with the standard Godwin Substitution. (What if, like, people wore Nazi stuff? Huh? Huh???)
Dude. And dudes. Before anybody writes the next one of these, remember: people wear the pelts of animals they’ve killed. It doesn’t mean they want to be the animals. It means the skins are warm and the animals are dead.
A lot of Soviet iconography is cool-looking. Bold poster lines; hot Cyrillic fonts; dramatic if hilariously overdone profiles. Given that the flagship magazine of libertarianism is reason, and reason has published roughly a thousand articles about how consumers of popular culture are willful repurposers of artifacts and styles, not passive receptors, you’d think that more libertarians would recognize that there’s a lot of repurposing going on with Soviet chic too, especially when it’s the theme of a freaking Atlantic City casino bar.
Americans wear red star t-shirts and buy faux-bolshevik posters and buy $13 drinks in “Leninist” bars because America kicked the Soviet Union’s ass. Same way your uncle clobbered that stuffed walleye on the wall of his lake house.
America kicked the Nazis’ ass too, though, so what about that, huh?? you might say. Count me among those who believe that the Soviets were awful – I’m glad they’re dead – but that the Holocaust was sui generis. Uniquely awful, not in terms of body count but in terms of intention. Nazi Germany earnestly intended to pursue every last Jew on Earth and murder them. Even the Turks were content to allow any Armenians who actually made it out of Turkey to get on with their lives somewhere else.
And I’d point out that there’s been some Nazi-Germany era appropriation too, as any helmeted motorcycle gang will show. Iron crosses, helmets. In places where Nazism is less present as a memory, there’s probably been rather more of it. And there will probably be more as the decades and centuries dull the memory. People think it’s cute to dress like pirates. Pirates sucked.
Comment by Avram —
June 7, 2007 @ 11:34 pm
I thought the Soviet Union kicked the Soviet Union’s ass.
Comment by Happy Jack —
June 7, 2007 @ 11:50 pm
West Coast Choppers? I see the Iron Cross everywhere.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
June 8, 2007 @ 12:26 am
The Iron Cross was established in the early 19th century, mind. The Wikipedia article even has pictures of 19th century Iron Crosses.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
June 8, 2007 @ 12:29 am
Also, I don’t think everyone wearing a red star shirt is being ironic or celebrating the good guys winning the Cold War. Just sayin’.
Comment by joel hanes —
June 8, 2007 @ 12:49 am
Actually, the commies kicked Hitler’s ass while we made heroic distracting noises all about the western borders of the Reich.
Stalin was a monster.
The Red Army did the bulk of the work of defeating Hitler.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
June 8, 2007 @ 1:44 am
What Avram said.
Comment by Andrew Edwards —
June 8, 2007 @ 5:48 am
The way I think about the Commmunist/Nazi difference is as follows:
If young idealistic communists got everything they say they want (equality, fairness, universal care, brotherhood), if the world worked exactly the way they want it to, the world would be an OK place to live. They can’t get everything they want because their system is horribly wrong. But their intentions are good.
By contrast, if young idealistic Neo-Nazis got everything they say they want (racial segregation or annihilation, violent indoctrination as a developmental tool, etc.) the world would be an awful place to live. Their system is terrible and so are their intentions.
Comment by Grant Gould —
June 8, 2007 @ 5:56 am
The US was able to defeat the Nazis by force of arms because they were weak. The Soviet union was strong — far stronger than Hitler — and so required much stronger weapons to defeat. The foremost of these weapons was the American sense of irony.
A major weapon in the defeat of the USSR was the complete impossibility of looking at this stuff without laughing a little bit. That’s the American way. They got McDonalds and Pepsi, we got all their national symbols.
Comment by Jon H —
June 8, 2007 @ 7:06 am
A difference between the Soviets and the Nazis is that if you remove Stalin, most of the worst atrocities go away but there would still be a long Soviet/Communist history. With the Nazis, if you remove Hitler, the Nazis pretty much go away along with all their atrocities.
Comment by Jon H —
June 8, 2007 @ 7:11 am
And where does Catholic iconography fit in here, anyhow?
Comment by Thoreau —
June 8, 2007 @ 8:07 am
I’ve always credited Lenin with the collapse of the Soviet system.
Comment by No Nym —
June 8, 2007 @ 8:35 am
Pirates did suck, but in terms of re-purposing the booty unjustly expropriated from the natives of America, I’d say they were only a second order class of criminal.
Comment by abb1 —
June 8, 2007 @ 9:02 am
Count me among those who believe that the Soviets were awful…
What Jon H said. Stalinism was awful, but before and after it wasn’t anywhere near ‘awful’.
Comment by wade —
June 8, 2007 @ 9:22 am
Pirates were cool.. they only stole from thieves, they made an equitable division of the spoils, had limited democracy and healthcare to boot. AAaarr.
Comment by steveintheknow —
June 8, 2007 @ 9:30 am
Wade is right. Pirate were (are!) the bomb. Always and FOREVER!!!!!
What would be morally unacceptable though, is if people started dressing like ravers again.
Comment by Jon H —
June 8, 2007 @ 9:40 am
“What Jon H said. Stalinism was awful, but before and after it wasn’t anywhere near ‘awful’. ”
I’d put it more as Stalinism was sooper-awful, and the rest was awful.
But the late period of rapidly-deceased Soviet leaders, followed by Gorby, really took the edge off.
Comment by IOZ —
June 8, 2007 @ 9:42 am
Well I think its entirely possible to imagine a world where Jewish hipster kids sport swastika tees all over Brooklyn and the artifacts of Soviet communism and Stalinian pogroms are taboo for personal attire but recycled into a vast, commercialized grief-industry in which the presence of somber coffee-table books in the Great Purge Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. are supposed to prove that it’s definitely not a gift shop.
In other words, I think the error here is assuming that Nazism’s general absence from fashion means that it’s absent from commercial culture. It’s like, doods, have you never watched the History Channel? Hitler selling ad slots on basic cable–this isn’t consumerism?
Comment by monkey.dave —
June 8, 2007 @ 10:18 am
I agree with what you say, but I still won’t wear a Confederate flag, even if it’s on an ironic trucker hat.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
June 8, 2007 @ 10:36 am
A difference between the Soviets and the Nazis is that if you remove Stalin, most of the worst atrocities go away
Mao? Pol Pot?
Comment by BruceB —
June 8, 2007 @ 10:39 am
One benefit to Soviet chic that shouldn’t be overlooked is the extent to which it provokes people like David Boaz.
Comment by Jon H —
June 8, 2007 @ 11:18 am
“Mao? Pol Pot?”
Neither of which were Soviets.
Comment by Jon H —
June 8, 2007 @ 11:23 am
“In other words, I think the error here is assuming that Nazism’s general absence from fashion means that it’s absent from commercial culture. It’s like, doods, have you never watched the History Channel? Hitler selling ad slots on basic cable–this isn’t consumerism?”
It’s consumerism, but it retains the implication of villainy. Why are they so popular on History Channel? Because they were bad guys, and pretty bad-ass bad guys as historical ones go.
You’re not seeing Nazi regalia as ironic pop culture, in which their wrongdoing is ignored.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 8, 2007 @ 11:33 am
abb1: I suspect Andrei Sakharov might have disagreed with you about awfulness. “Not as bad as Stalin” does not imply “not awful”; if Brezhnev’s Russia is not awful, then neither is Guantanamo Bay.
Bruce: a couple of months ago I saw a guy with a t-shirt that had a picture of Ronald Reagan done up like a Che Guevara logo. It struck me as very clever — it’s a design with the potential to provoke basically everyone.
Comment by BruceR —
June 8, 2007 @ 12:12 pm
“Pirates were cool.. they only stole from thieves, they made an equitable division of the spoils, had limited democracy and healthcare to boot. AAaarr.”
Well, if you’re talking the archetypal Caribbean buccaneer of the late 17th century, this is not totally incorrect: they did have some honour among thieves, and did mostly prey on Spanish colonials (although Morgan, L’Ollinois, et al were still pretty awful human beings: enthusiastic torture fans, if nothing else. They also had the same tendencies as their Spanish victims to kill off the natives at the drop of a hat, freely trade slaves, etc.)
Extend the same statement to other locales and times around the world where piracy has thrived, and it’s pretty much nonsense.
Comment by Dave W. —
June 8, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
Nazi Germany earnestly intended to pursue every last Jew on Earth and murder them.
Is this part really true? Did the Nazis have serious plans to conquer the entire world, or is that just extrapolation? Did they have any problem with Jewish people in Palestine? With homosexuals in the South America?
Comment by abb1 —
June 8, 2007 @ 3:38 pm
Why would Andrei Sakharov disagree? He was a privileged scientist who lived quite comfortably before and after he became a dissident. He didn’t hate the Soviet Union, he just thought it needed to be reformed.
Why are you comparing Brezhnev’s Russia with Guantanamo Bay? It doesn’t make sense. Are you saying that under Brezhnev the Soviets were held in prison cells and tortured? Nothing can be further from the truth.
You can compare Brezhnev’s Russia with, say, Mexico. Brezhnev’s Russia was certainly a much better place for an average citizen than Mexico; is Mexico an awful place?
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 8, 2007 @ 3:42 pm
German representatives in Shanghai made earnest demands of Japanese occupation officials that they turn all the local Jews over to them. The Japanese refused. They cleansed Jews from everywhere they conquered and refused to let them leave conquered territories. Hitler declared that it was only moral to kill not just Jewish men or Jewish adults but Jewish children because if he left them alive he would be exposing the German people to a terrible vengeance. I think when you do the math, the answer is, heck yeah, Nazi Germany intended to slaughter every Jew on the planet.
The Holocaust wasn’t a hobby or sideshow; it was a central political aim. Late in the war Germany kept scarce rail stock dedicated to filling the extermination camps with new victims at a time when those trains could have been carrying military supplies to the front. The slaughter of the Jews was not a means or even a subsidiary goal: it was an end, almost THE end, of Nazi policy.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
June 8, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
Perhaps I’m not getting the allusion in the post’s head, but shouldn’t it be:
Where Is Rest of Moose? That Is Just Head!
Comment by Mona —
June 8, 2007 @ 4:56 pm
So, how many Jews did Stalin kill or send to Gulags, with all his good intentions, and all?
Andrei Sakharov was a privileged scientist who lived quite comfortably before and after he became a dissident? Citations, please?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
June 8, 2007 @ 5:22 pm
abb1: I would not use the words “quite comfortable” to describe Sakharov’s life as a dissident; the only way it can make sense is if you think constant police surveillance, official intimidation of your friends and family, and routine, intrusive searches of your home and property are part of a comfortable life.
The Soviet government under Brezhnev did in fact imprison people without due process and torture them. For example, that happened to some of Sakharov’s fellow members of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Sometimes they were sent into internal exile, sometimes thrown in prison on trumped up charges, and sometimes they were just committed to “psychiatric hospitals” against their will.
The important thing is that you see the same kinds of bureaucratic reaction at work there as you do with the US government’s treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo. The Soviet government had a treaty obligation to grant civil rights, and when people asked for them, it defined them as suffering from mental disorders and then “treated” them, so that it could claim it was not violating its legal obligations. Likewise, the US government invented the unlawful enemy combatant in order to do what it liked to Afghan prisoners while maintaining that it is living up to its treaty obligations.
Comment by asg —
June 8, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
Re #7: Since when do Communists, even “young idealistic” ones, not also believe in “violent indoctrination as a developmental tool”? And why is the specter of racial segregation or annihilation so much more awful compared to Communist horrors? Communists are perfectly okay with mass deportations and even the “idealist” ones defend Stalin’s famines, the Great Leap Forward, etc. Moreover, racial segregation and subjugation are surely among humanity’s greatest evils, especially from the perspective of those subjugated, but would living as a slave in the antebellum South be meaningfully more “awful” than living in a gulag?
As for racial annihilation — the ultimate evil — if you don’t think a globally dominant communist state wouldn’t engage in precisely that, you’re being naive, I think. The attitude of the young modern believers, too, is more easily comparable than one might think. Remember there’s a great contradiction in modern neo-Nazi thought: the Holocaust didn’t happen, but if it had, it would have been good! Just as most contemporary Nazis not directly involved in the Holocaust didn’t think too hard about it, perhaps dimly aware that a great atrocity was occurring but not connecting it to their own daily support of the regime, I suspect most “idealistic” Communists would take the same attitude — paying lip service to the unpleasantness that some more extreme elements are engaging in, while continuing to tacitly support the regime. I also suspect that, if most modern neo-Nazis were forced to personally engage in face-to-face mass murder as their ideology dictates they should, many, perhaps even most, would balk.
Bottom line: distinguishing the intentions of Nazi and Communist revolutionaries is not as straightforward as either Jim or #7 makes it out to be. There’s a reason why many of Hitler’s most enthusiastic recruits came from the Communist Party.
Comment by Jon H —
June 8, 2007 @ 5:26 pm
“So, how many Jews did Stalin kill or send to Gulags, with all his good intentions, and all?”
Well, yeah, that’s kind of my point. One of these Soviet dictators is not like the others, kind of thing. Ignore him and the Soviet union’s human rights record becomes one that today’s GOP would find not just defensible, but admirable.
Given his special, uh, gifts, it’s not clear to me that things would have turned out differently had he been running a country with a different economic system than Communism.
Comment by Dave W. —
June 8, 2007 @ 5:39 pm
Thanks for the answer, Mr. henley. If possible, you made me hate the Nazis more than I already do. That is such goddamn crap.
Comment by Mona —
June 8, 2007 @ 6:39 pm
Jon H. you think Lenin had a defensible human rights record?
Comment by Thoreau —
June 8, 2007 @ 6:45 pm
Jon didn’t say that he finds it defensible, Mona, just that the GOP would find it defensible.
These are the people who have no qualms about torture.
Comment by Mona —
June 8, 2007 @ 7:14 pm
Thoreau, Jon H. said: One of these Soviet dictators is not like the others, kind of thing. Ignore him and the Soviet union’s human rights record becomes one that today’s GOP would find not just defensible, but admirable.
Um, no. Stalin was nothing more than an extension of Lenin. And no one is more critical of the modern GOP than I am, but they are not yet in Hitler territory, or Lenin/Stalin domain. We have a civil order that will almost certainly preclude any such thing, or else you and I would not be posting as we do at this site.
Comment by Thoreau —
June 8, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
I hope Jon H shows up and clears the air on this. One or both of us may be misinterpreting him.
From my perspective, the people who applaud Gitmo and warrantless spying, who see the Leader as above the law, and who draw no distinction between the party and the state, are aiming for something that approaches Soviet level.
Comment by Jon H —
June 8, 2007 @ 7:55 pm
Mona writes: “Jon H. you think Lenin had a defensible human rights record?”
Do you think the GOP has a defensible human rights record?
Comment by Mona —
June 8, 2007 @ 10:11 pm
Do you think the GOP has a defensible human rights record?
No, but neither do the Democrats. We also do not have a Cheka or summary executions and suppression of freedom to post as we do here. Unless we mix it up with the DEA.
Comment by abb1 —
June 9, 2007 @ 11:16 am
…constant police surveillance, official intimidation of your friends and family, and routine, intrusive searches of your home and property are part of a comfortable life.
It depends on what exactly you mean by ‘intimidation’, ‘intrusive’ and ‘routine’. All things considered, I’m pretty sure he had more comfortable life than you do.
…you think Lenin had a defensible human rights record?
But of course he has a defensible record – considering the time, place and circumstances. Certainly not less defensible than, say, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill.
Comment by abb1 —
June 9, 2007 @ 11:28 am
I mean, Churchill was a colonial secretary and advocated using poison gas on Arabs, does he have a defensible human rights record?
Washington ordered massacres of Indians, including women and children, and complete destruction of their villages.
And so on.
You are not gonna find a clean head of state; certainly not in the times of crisis, most certainly not during a war, revolution or a civil war. And Lenin had all three.
Comment by Mona —
June 9, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
Washington ordered massacres of Indians, including women and children, and complete destruction of their villages.
Do you have a citation for that? With context? “Indians” were not some homogeneous entity, you know. Some tribes were very pacific, others were wretchedly violent against all other tribes, including the White one. Some Indians committed atrocities — against other Indians — that are the stuff of nightmares.
Trackback by The Distributed Republic —
June 13, 2007 @ 11:42 pm
Good Intentions? Really?…
There’s been an interesting discussion on other blogs about the acceptance of communist chic. Says Jim Henley:
America kicked the Nazis’ ass too, though, so what about that, huh?? you might say. Count me among those who believe that the Soviets wer…
Comment by Rad Geek —
June 14, 2007 @ 2:26 pm
abb1:
Excuses are not the same thing as defenses, and if Lenin’s human rights record comes out “not less defensible” compared to that of two slavemasters and an imperialist terror-bomber, that does not strike me as a particularly high standard to hold him to.
abb1:
This is a plain lie. I do not know whether you are repeating it out of ignorance, or callousness, or deliberate dishonesty, but whatever the case, this assault on memory and truth is perfectly contemptible. Here is a bit about one of the most notorious programs of Comrade Brezhnev’s security forces:
Anne Applebaum:
And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. … In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they try to found new parties, organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.
… If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. … In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation. Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given treatment. As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned in the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers [antipsychotic neuroleptics, such as Thorazine and Haldol —R.G.] which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.
… Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. After all, he wrote, it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.
— Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History (2003), pp. 547–550.
Robert Whitaker:
Comparisons were drawn between such forced drug treatment and the medical experiments of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, all of which led Florida senator Edward Gurney to conclude: “Most horrifying of all in this psychiatric chamber of horrors were the many accounts of the forcible administration by KGB psychiatrists of chemicals which convert human beings into vegetables.”
Over the next few years, Soviet dissidents published further details of this “chamber of horrors.” Aminazine and haloperidol were the two neuroleptics most commonly used to torment them. In a samizdat manuscript titled Punitive Medicine, dissidents described the incredible pain that haloperidol could inflict:
Doctors used neuroleptics, the Soviet dissidents stated, “to inflict suffering on them and thus obtain their complete subjugation. Some political prisoners do recant their beliefs, acknowledge that they are mentally ill, and promise not to repeat their ‘crimes’ in return for an end to this treatment. American psychiatrists also heard usch testimony firsthand. On March 26, 1976, Leonid Plyushch, a thirty-nine-year-old mathematician who had spent several years in the psychoprisons before being freed, spoke at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences. That produced this memorable exchange:
Such descriptions stirred newspapers and television networks in the United States to condemn, with great fervor, the Soviets’ actions. Not long after Plyushch’s testimony, the New York Times ran an extensive feature on “Russia’s psychiatric jails,” in which it likened the administration of neuroleptics to people who weren’t ill to “spiritual murder” and “a variation of the gas chamber.” Dissidents, the paper explained, had been forcibly injected with Thorazine,”which makes a normal person feel sleepy and groggy, practically turning him into a human vegetable.” Neuroleptics were a form of torture that could “break your will.”
–Robert Whitaker, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (2002), pp. 215-217. Emphasis mine.