George Handlery on the week that was. The fundamentals behind our daily debates. Washington and safe PC. Stalin’s revival: Guilty of useful crimes. What is behind a statistic?

1. Indirectly and somewhat unnoticed, behind our daily debates a fundamental controversy about the necessary and legitimate role of the state is being waged. Alas, this is not done consciously in the pursuit of the primary task of finding those definitions that are needed for principled action. Short-term issues are embedded in the debate that is in about remote causes and effects. Actually the exchange appears to be about the here and the now.  In fact, however, the controversy over the policies of redistribution and the goal to achieve “equality” through state-imposed quotas, involve a fundamental of the democratic state.

To find insights and explanations we need to go back to the essentials. Since the inception of the concept of freedom as an institutionalized system, converting the ideal into practice had an ambivalent record. Originally, the aim had been an order that regarded political equality as makeable because it assumed that all men are capable to determine rationally their own personal destiny. The primary purpose of the democratic state – as affirmed at its inception – is to safeguard individual liberty. Accordingly, the first goal of unions should be the safeguarding of the autonomy of their constituents. The principle is applicable to persons or to groups formed by individuals that find that their interests are best represented in associations that share certain ethnic or principle-defined traits.

 

2. At this stage of our development, we are still without a sound, widely understood and consequently applied answer concerning the purpose of the democratic state. The state’s purpose is to guarantee its members the maximal amount of freedom. Many of the advocated improvements regarding the goal of democratic society reduce this liberty. Security is to compensate for the loss. The assumption is that the trimmed branches of the tree of liberty can be exchanged for social services. This state function widens because its advocates surmise that imperfect men need guidance by a wise and benign state that compensates for the common sense its subjects lack.

 

3. These past days the US’ legislature has voted on a matter that had to be dragged before it by pulling it by its hair. Some oddities surround the action. The subject of the vote was an issue the legislative branch could not determine. The event happened at a location over which the US never had jurisdiction. It involved peoples that, at the time had no significant presence in any territory under American sovereignty. Furthermore, the case is not an ongoing one. And it has not been that for generations. In addition, the vote did not include any measure to rectify the situation on the ground. This being so, no follow-up action of consequence was involved. Therefore, the decision might have been locally popular, and in terms of the stance taken by a few other states, even fashionable. Even so, the vote had only a weak claim to represent a moral position. In fact, a finding devoid of any intent to act upon it shrinks the act to mere symbolism.

Now, to the intentionally unmentioned specifics of the vote. Driven by risk-free PC, the US’ legislature has labeled the “Armenian Massacre” of 1915. It has been decided that this was genocide and that the Turks have perpetrated it. The finding is one with which the writer can agree. A self-serving motive prompting the, as implied, conditional consent, cannot be denied. If you survived two systems that were intent to liquidate you for some inherited trait – and not for having chosen them – any group slaughtered in the name of a theory is assured of sympathy. The implied reservation’s roots are fundamental. Let this begin with a reminder: a fact cannot be legislated. All a vote can do is to determine what the response to existing facts or to the ones about to emerge shall be. The analogy is that no one (except perhaps Al Gore) can decide whether it shall rain or not. What the decision making process can determine is whether we take along an umbrella. Genocide is genocide regardless of whether you agree or not. The vote on it, since it cannot undo a fact, is not designed to move today’s Turks to atone for what the father of their grandfather has done. Quiet nudging behind the scenes is more effective than a salto under klieg lights. In the given case, it is to be assumed that the action has little to do with a crime against humanity and much with the attention coveted by the performing artists.

 

4. The Kremlin is making a propaganda effort to restore Stalin’s reputation. The underlying assumption is that thereby the authority of today’s rulers will jell. The implied continuity with the glory of the “Leader” also appeals to national pride. Therefore, it is assumed that, whatever had been done to augment the community’s power is, regardless of the price paid by individuals and their freedom, justified by “success” expressed by achieved might. One hopes, in appreciation of the implications, that the assumption is erroneous in this case.

The case is illustrative of fallibility. Crimes that we condemn in the abstract can even be honored if they further an approved cause. Post-fact support in cases in which greatness is expressed by the ability to oppress others, ignores morality. It derives its legitimacy entirely from distorted ethics that state egoistical group-interests.

 

5. A disturbing feature of the outwardly moralistic re-evaluation of the past is the likely selectiveness of the action. Overall, the condemnation of major powers whose rulers base their right to rule on a continuity with murderous predecessors are skirted. Preferring weak enemies is a realistic but unkind explanation that is hard to overlook.

These days this writer was confronted with a question to be voted on-line. Its background is a decision of Hungary’s parliament to make Holocaust denial a crime. Here the options: “You agree that the denial of the Holocaust is a crime?; “It is a crime but only if denying the Gulag is also punishable”; “No” ; “No opinion”. The score after several days is this: 7% agree unconditionally that denying the Holocaust is a crime. 69% feel that it is a crime, if, denying the crimes of the Soviet era is also sanctioned. Finally, 23% feel that the negation is not a criminal act. (Very hesitantly, partly to get access to the results, the writer made his click on No. 2.)

What the survey does not state speaks more loudly than its unencoded message. The 23% expresses two very different positions. To their shame, some think that it is best to remain silent now while they also feel that if there will be a “next time” the job would need to be improved. As in “no surviving witnesses”. A minority within this category might agree with the writer. “Bad history” and contemporary idiocy coupled to mental disease are signs of distorted values or of gullibility. That does not amount to a criminal category. Those that deny previous crimes, even if often it happens with the secret wish to repeat them, should be unmasked to deprive them of credibility. Proper counter action does not aim at convincing nuts. Its goal is to deprive them of followers. Criminalizing morons confers upon these the undeserved status of persecutees.

Lastly, there is the case of the vast majority that wishes to connect Auschwitz and the Gulag. It is unwise to furnish a cover for the politics of extermination by supporting the impression that some genocides are worse than others and that nothing worthy of special attention has occurred during and since the Shoa. Those who are not satisfied by proving their decency through recalling the Holocaust alone must not allow it to suppress the memory of analogous crimes. Not the Shoa gains in statue if we allow Auschwitz to blend out Vorkuta. Such selectiveness helps to cover up crimes against mankind, whereby the chances of future genocides improve.