Comments on: If the other children told you to jump out of the window …

By: Helen

Helen — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:52:11 +0000

I am not sure I agree with a few of your points, Tehag. 1914 – war over divine right of kings? You what? How do you work that out?

Without wishing to defend European countries I need to point out that Russia and USSR are not precisely European. Especially not the USSR.

Horthy’s regime in Hungary was authoritarian and nationalistic but not fascist in any real sense of the word.

Much as I dislike the EU (and boy, am I on record disliking the EU), I do not think it is in any way like Nazism or Communism or a substitute for either.

That, I may add, still does not make them “cool” countries. The original comment was, as I understand it, ironic and my use of it also.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:42:19 +0000

One has to wonder why Europe has ‘cool countries.’ A quick review of the last 100 years (it’s what makes them cool, isn’t it) (all dates approximate):

1914 War begins over the divine right of kings (Sweden remains neutral.)
1917 Communism
1922 USSR opens labor camps-slavery returns to Europe
1922 Fascism in Italy
1922- EU intellectuals praise Mussolini (G.B.Shaw, H.G. Wells), Stalin (Sartre, Wells), Hitler (Heidegger)
1920s Fascist dictatorships in Hungary, Romania.
1932 USSR murders millions in Ukraine; opens death camps in Arctic and Siberia.
1933 Nazism rules Germany
1930s
Mass murder by show trials and purges in USSR
Nazi-Fascist dictatorships in Poland, Austria.
USSR conquers Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.
Nazi Germany conquers Austria, Czechoslovakia
Nazi Germany opens labor camps-more slavery
Nazi Germany opens death camps, kills millions.
1939 USSR and Nazi Germany partition Poland; USSR murders Poles at Katyn.
1939 War begins over which variety of socialism will rule Europe, Germany’s national socialism or Russia’s international socialism; ten of millions killed. (Sweden remains neutral.)
1945 USSR conquers Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, east Germany. More labor camps, more death camps. Communists rule Yugoslavia.
1945- Vast numbers of western European voters vote for Communist parties in elections; European intellectual praise Communism and condemn the “Coca-colaization of Europe.” (Sweden joins with communists in blaming America for all the world’s ills.)
1950s – EU, replacement for both Nazism and Communism founded
1953 Last (formerly) Nazi German labor camp closes in east Germany
1950- EU intellectuals blather about socialism with a human face, denounce America, praise communism.
1989 Berlin Walls falls.
1991 USSR disintegrates; slavery abolished in Europe (at last, something good).

Europe should be cool and won’t be cool until its people can go 100 years without endorsing and murdering millions based on crazed and crackpot theories of economics and biology.

Tehag

By: Jim Bennett

Jim Bennett — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:56:05 +0000

Yes. Roman law was one source of this — central authority is built into it. Another was the military competition in land wars that, after ~1600, started to require large standing armies with expensive infrastructure, high taxes and large bureaucracies to collect them, and military bureaucracies to manage conscription. Countries that did this, like France and Prussia, survived and grew powerful. Countries that didn’t, and had no natural barriers to invasion, like Poland, disappeared from the map. Invasion and conquest was such a miserable experience (see Thirty Years War, etc.) that the average subject would prefer obedience to a strong state to exposure to invasion in a weak state. The smarter elites realized that the common people needed to have a certain amount of health, education, and prosperity in order to pay taxes and pass conscription physical exams. Thus, the state took a directive role in such matters. Many of the socialist and welfarist institutions and practices actually were instituted by continental “conservatives” (American conservatives, even self-described traditionalists, are liberals by continental definitions) in order to improve the military efficiency of their states. Railroads were built under state supervision or built directly by the state in order to assure their military utility. Health systems were set up after too many urban conscripts started failing their physicals. Pension systems were set up to insure the loyalty of workers to the state. The privileges of the rich and powerful were never endangered by such measures; rather they were more firmly entrenched.

England started to see some of these institutions established during Cromwell’s Protectorate, especially the New Model (i.e., Continental-style) Army. They didn’t like what they saw, and after the Restoration deliberately abolished such systems. The aversion to standing armies in the US Constitution (see the bit about well-regulated militias and free states in a certain Amendment) is another. It was only in the Twentieth Century that these things have started to creep into everyday life in the Anglosphere. The results are not uniformly impressive.

By: Shannon Love

Shannon Love — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:07:53 +0000

Continental Europe (CE), more so as distance from the ocean increases, has only a passing familiarity with freedom as the Anglosphere defines it. Europeans seem to define “freedom” in terms of “freedom from” instead of “the freedom to”. This is especially true in the case of “freedom from want”. Continental Europeans seem genuinely puzzled that those in the Anglosphere, especially Americans, would rather forego material benefits in order to preserve their freedom of choice and action.

I presume this is because most of CE has never existed in an authority vacuum and has always existed in a condition of top-down governance. The political culture of CE assumes top-down rule by an elite. All the CE political debates of the last 400 years have revolved around deciding which group of elites should rule, not whether elitist rule is itself a good thing.