The Politics of Resentment

Al Gore wins a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, so National Review's Iain Murphy decides that maybe Osama bin Laden should get a Nobel too since he "implicitly endorsed Gore's stance — and that of the Nobel committee — in his September rant from the cave." At first blush, this would appear to belong to the Hitler was a vegetarian line of argumentation, but even that's going to far. Hitler, after all, as best one can tell was sincere in his desire to reduce cruelty to animals. OBL as climate change activist seems about on a par with the idea that Josef Stalin was driven a principled opposition to European colonialism, and that in order to spite him we ought to encourage its perpetual continuation.

Which, come to think of it, actually was the view of National Review and the American conservative movement of the time. Brad DeLong celebrates this occasion by pointing me to National Review's contemporaneous attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Generally speaking, the list of past winners isn't one the American right can have much enthusiasm about.

Comments

Hitler was not a vegetarian

Robert Payne is widely considered to be Hitler's definitive biographer. In his book, Hitler: The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler, Payne says that Hitler's "vegetarianism" was a "legend" and a "fiction" invented by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

Posted by jimBOB | October 14, 2007 12:12 PM

National Review is now National Lampoon. That once venerable magazine is now a national disgrace.

But it's also a warning to those who follow illogic to its tragic ends. You end up defending the indefensible and attacking the truth. They're the crazed old man at the end of his life, realizing his life was a failure, and lashing out at everyone around them.

Yes, National Review is now Wily Loman. Funny, but tragic.

Posted by WinSmith | October 14, 2007 12:47 PM

Don't miss DeLong's post; younger people should understand how far conservatism has come (I am being charitable) at least in some respects.

A recent discussion of the Fairness Doctrine (at the Volokh Conspiracy) should be read in the light of how deeply racist, regressive and "anti-thought" etc etc hard-right conservatives were in the 50s and 60s and how much of local (and national) media they controlled.

Posted by David Sucher | October 14, 2007 1:09 PM

The Hitler-was-a-vegetarian thing was always a fraud. He took no position on cruelty to animals.

Posted by phil | October 14, 2007 2:10 PM

Bush is against intervening into the free market for oil. So is bin Laden. OMG Bush is really bin Laden in drag!!!!111! LOL

Posted by Reality Man | October 14, 2007 2:19 PM

I think jimBOB and phil prove MY's point about the view that if odious people embrace some noble things, the principled thing to do is either oppose the noble things or deny the odious person ever encompassed some noble things.

Hitler was a vegetarian for much of his latter life with many contemporanious accounts testifying to it, blaming it on his farting, etc. Also recorded were his disgust with the meat-eating gluttony of Goering and other bigwigs.

As for anti-animal cruelty - yes, the Nazis passed animal cruelty laws. Hitler and folks like Goebbels were big-time dog lovers. Hitler was also an anti-smoking crusader and considered excessive alchohol consumption a sign of a man's weakness.

Shorn of his more violent tendencies and sentiments about other races, he would have made an excellent Nanny State Democrat.

And some of the examples MY gave were sort of lame. Mandela was a terrorist. Kissinger didn't deserve it anymore than his hardcore commie counterpart. If Gorbachev deserved it, so did Reagan, maybe more so. Carter got it as a committee member confessed, to "send an insult to that Bush idiot."

MLK was the beneficiary of LBJ's decision not to share MLK's more scuzzy personal traits and use by the Communists to the Nobel Committee - something Hoover and others wanted to use the FBI to brief them on.

Rigoberta Mechu and her terrorist background made for another lame one. Same with the "Doctors of the Nuclear Freeze Movement".

Noble Algore's Nobel might look ridiculous in later years if the science shows we are in far less difficulty than Algore's alarmism indicates and illustrates the difficulty of the Lefties in charge of the Nobel Peace Prize advancing their subjective politics in a objective scientific controversy.

Posted by Chris Ford | October 14, 2007 2:29 PM

"Shorn of his more violent tendencies and sentiments about other races, he would have made an excellent Nanny State Democrat."

You'd have to know almost nothing about national socialism to make that claim, but even if true it really amounts to saying "Shorn of its claws, teeth, and violent disposition, that grizzly would make an excellent pet."

Posted by Patrick | October 14, 2007 2:53 PM

National Socialism
National Review

Close enough for me.

And Nancy Pelosi is exactly like Hitler. Just ignore the big gaping absence where "Try to eliminate the Jews" should belong. Really, these comparisons are so profound, unique and fruitful. Keep going.

Posted by Neal Murray | October 14, 2007 3:57 PM

Believe me, the analogies between National Review in its supposed Good Old Days and the Nazi Party are very far from being excessive. I cordially invite you to read W.H. Von Dreele's seemingly endless parade of cute little poems furiously excoriating opponents of white racism from 1961 through at least the mid-1980s. (In 1978 he was still comparing Martin Luther King to Father Divine, and announcing that Earl Warren deserved to go to Hell because he wanted us to 'INTEGRATE', to quote VD's capital letters.) Or its long series of articles and book reviews between 1969 and 1979 by a bizarre University of Colorado anthropologist named John Greenway, who was fond of foaming -- both in and outside the magazine's pages -- about "the truth of racist nihilism", "the only morality: that which encourages the survivial of one's own group", "the etiolated Puritans who opposed slavery", "racism and its loathsome corollary, anti-racism", "mongrel dams of mongrel spawn", and the need to exterminate all American Indians (in between fits of weeping about the "smarmy, sanctimonious, smart-assed new generation" that objected to his own passionate personal love of sadism. NR absolutely loved him, and said so repeatedly -- at least until 1980, at which point he perhaps turned a little too radioactive even for them.

Under the circumstances, such other items as NR's praise of the Pinochet government for car-bombing Orlando Letelier and the Moffatts on the streets of D.C., and their tearful obituary for the "softhearted, sentimental glad-hander" Ferdinand Marcos in 1989, seem positively benign.

(As for Chris Ford denouncing Mandela as "a terrorist" and Martin Luther King for being "pro-Communist" and a philanderer: congratulations. It's no small feat to get far to the right of Bill Buckley and the early 1990s Reader's Digest.)

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 14, 2007 4:17 PM

Wow. Chris Ford usually admires Hitler's teutonicness. How did Ford and Adolf have a falling out? Surely he needs to go back to that well thumbed copy of Mein Kampf, the one with all the underlinings and He's Right!!! in the margins, and read some of his favorite passages again. After all, remember, Hitler was defending the white race from Asiatic Bolshevism, which has elicited gasps of ecstatic agreement from Ford in other comments.

It must be one of those fantasy lover spats. For really, to have said Hitler would be a democrat is, perhaps, the lowest blow in Ford's vocabulary. It is a simple world view: there's the KKK at the top, defending all that is good and pure, especially our white womanhood, and then there are the democrats on the bottom, promoting the soiling of the purity of our white womanhood and such.

Ford needs to get back in touch with his inner Sturmfuhrer. Maybe a few excellent hours spent on some video war game, so he can hallucinate himself that military career again, - which, as soon as he achieves the age of 18, he's certainly going to pursue, if he can find a recruiter with low enough standards - and he will be all toned up, and willing to Sieg Heil as per usual.

Posted by roger | October 14, 2007 4:19 PM

roger, maybe Chris Ford thinks Hitler's vegetarianism made him too nice and squishy. A real man would have all puppy dogs and teddy bears water boarded and shot.

Posted by Reality Man | October 14, 2007 5:04 PM

"That once venerable magazine is now a national disgrace."

Once venerable? Now Bill Buckley is no little Ricky Lowry, but "venerable" is a bit of a stretch.

Posted by Rihilism | October 14, 2007 5:21 PM

I think jimBOB and phil prove MY's point about the view that if odious people embrace some noble things, the principled thing to do is either oppose the noble things or deny the odious person ever encompassed some noble things.

I don't have any position on the nobility/lack of nobility of vegetarianism. I was just pointing out there are legitimate questions on whether Hitler really was a vegetarian. I could be wrong, maybe he was partly/mostly vegetarian. Whatever.

Noble Algore's Nobel might look ridiculous in later years if the science shows we are in far less difficulty than Algore's alarmism indicates

And if the world turns out to be flat then Columbus' historical reputation will sure take a hit.

Posted by jimBOB | October 14, 2007 6:08 PM

jimBOB: All educated people in Columbus's time (and maybe most uneducated as well, although their views are harder to ascertain) knew the world was round, and that had been true for centuries. Thomas Aquinas knew it was round and referred to it as such in his Summa Theologica. Dante knew it was round and depicted it as such in his Divine Comedy. Its rotundity was taught in all medieval European universities. Columbus's claim was that the earth was smaller and therefore Europe was much closer to Asia than the scholars of his time believed. He was wrong and the scholars were right; Columbus was saved from humiliation (or even death) by the fact that there was a giant undiscovered continent where he expected Asia to be. The idea that Columbus's contemporaries believed the world was flat and he enlightened them was largely invented by Washington Irving in order to make for a more exciting story, and since then it has largely served as a handmaiden to anti-medieval ignorance and even anti-Catholic prejudice.

Posted by James Kabala | October 14, 2007 8:24 PM

When Columbus sailed, it was regarded by Western and Muslim mariners and cartographers as incontrovertable fact that the world was a round sphere, backed by Greek and Muslim mathematicians showing it was so.

Unfortunately for jimBOB, we don't know a lot about global warming. We do know the world is worming, as it did during other periods like AD 200-500, AD 1100-1400 but we DON'T know if this latest period is man-made, partially manmade with X amount of contribution, or what the effects will be in the future. Algore projects worst case. He very will could be wrong because the climate debate is nowhere as "clear" as sphere vs. flat Earth was with scholars in 1490.

I sort of like the idea of Hitler as a Nanny State Democrat gone bad. I wonder how roger would refer to his meat-eating, smoking, heavy drinking buddy Stalin.
Maybe since Barack Obama smokes, drinks, and eats meat and is called "stinky" by his kids (Stalin went weeks without washing) - Stalin could be called an Obama gone bad...

Posted by Chris Ford | October 14, 2007 8:28 PM

Chris' reasoning on Stalin and Hitler as really being liberals DOES go very nicely with Iain Murray's announcement yesterday on NRO that Bin Laden was as worthy of the Peace Prize as Gore, because Bin Laden too has said be believes in global warming. Of course, as someone pointed out on Kevin Drum's site, since we have it on good authority that Bin Laden also brushes his teeth, it naturally follows that if you either believe in global warming or brush your teeth the terrorists have won.

As for the GW debate, it would be nice if Ford actually read a little bit on the subject in the actual science journals -- say, "Science" or "Nature" -- since the arguments he's trying to make have been routinely made, and routinely swatted down by the overwhelming majority of atmospheric scientists, since about 1990. Granted that we're still dealing in probabilities, but the probabilities at this point are approaching near-certainties. It's generally considered very unwise to ignore probabilities in such a way when you're doing war planning, Chris.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 14, 2007 8:39 PM

All educated people in Columbus's time (and maybe most uneducated as well, although their views are harder to ascertain) knew the world was round

Just as nearly all educated non-wingnuts of our time are aware of the overwhelming consensus among climatologists that global warming is real and almost certainly the result of human activities.

Unfortunately for jimBOB, we don't know a lot about global warming.

Speak for yourself, bro. See above.

(Must have struck a nerve with that throwaway line of snark.)

Posted by jimBOB | October 14, 2007 9:34 PM

we DON'T know if this latest period is man-made, partially manmade with X amount of contribution, or what the effects will be in the future.

I know enough about global warming to know that you don't know a lot about global warming.

Posted by albert | October 15, 2007 12:24 AM

just another item to add to the long list of yglesias hypocriscy.

Here is the puffed up little turd talking about the politics of resentment and the 'hitler was a vegetarian line of argumentation' eventhough it was little more than a month ago that he threw his considerable girth behind the 'omg bin laden talked about low taxes he's a republican' brand of nonsense which was floating around the lefty blogosphere basin at the time, and just about his only article to garner any appreciable attention was an example of him making the hitler was a vegetarian line of argumentation at tedius length.

Posted by pimp hand strikes! | October 15, 2007 4:14 AM

the national review piece, by the way, looks extraordinarily prescient in retrospect. An explosion of black lawlessness followed the civil rights era.

Posted by pimp hand strikes! | October 15, 2007 4:18 AM

Al Gore, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, in late September, 2002:

"Back in 1991, I was one of a handful of Democrats in the US Senate to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf War. I felt betrayed by the first Bush administration's hasty departure from the battlefield, even as Saddam began to renew his persecution of the Kurds in the North and the Shi-ites in the South...

Yglesias, Krugman, Drum, etc. are outraged that the wingers think Gore's a hypocrite.

Posted by ERF | October 15, 2007 8:55 AM

Cripes. No, no one on 'the left' was really saying that bin Laden was a Republican because of his (OBL's) noting that Islam had a policy of low taxes.

That was well-chosen silliness to point out the standard lunacy of Republican discourse: right wingers feel free to cite every burp and bit of static from bin Laden to say that he is a Democrat and support them.

The 'Osama's a Republican 'cause he likes low taxes' was not repeated as a serious argument that he is a Republican.

Posted by El Cid | October 15, 2007 10:39 AM

In retrospect, the entire Civil Rights movement should be ashamed of itself.

If those radicals (many of whom had questionable personal characteristics compared to Our Conservative Leaders) hadn't stirred up so much agitation and resentment, conservatives would have slowly and carefully introduced the notions of equality before the law, without interrupting either states' rights or business prerogative, and instead of the utter mess we have now, we would be looking at an even path to civil rights in perhaps a scant 75 years from now.

Modern conservatives know precisely who heroes are and who they aren't, and their disdain for Martin Luther King Jr. just shows the depth of their insight and understanding of all peoples, particularly the black ones.

Posted by El Cid | October 15, 2007 10:49 AM

It wasn't so much civil rights that destroyed black culture, such that it was, but welfarism.

Posted by Jules | October 15, 2007 11:32 AM

" . . . Algore's . . Algore's . . . [etc]"

I won't speculate on what Ford might be doing that apparently renders him unable to use the space bar and caps lock appropriately.

Posted by Dan S. | October 15, 2007 11:51 PM