Astral Codex Ten

Nazi

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Nazi

Article

Nazi is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between April 19, 2021 and August 04, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the new Rose Garden encodes Nazi symbology”; “Nazi and Stalinist art both used ‘naturalistic’ representational techniques”; “this is the same level that Nazi bureaucrats were at”. It most often appears alongside Germany, France, Hitler.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: April 19, 2021
  • Last seen: August 04, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
Comments: Part of my argument was that people were interpreting innocuous or stupid comments by Trump as endorsements of racism, Nazis, and the KKK. An implicit prediction of this was that, once Trump was President for a while and we had a much larger sample size of his comments, it would become clearer that he wasn't explicitly expressing support for racism.
In practice, the main post-election comment everyone holds up as Trump Explicitly Saying Nazis Are Good was his post-Charlottesville comment, where he said that there were "good people on both sides" of a protest that included alt-right figures. What actually happened: Trump said that "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence." Later he said of the protesters that "You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides". When asked to clarify he said "I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."
Inline links: said
Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
In the year 2000, the composer Stefania de Kenessey puckishly announced a new "movement" in the arts, Derrière Guard, which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative. If that sounds too innocuous to count as a movement, consider the response of the director of the Whitney, the shrine of the dismembered-torso establishment, who called the members of the movement "a bunch of crypto-Nazi conservative bullshitters."
The underlying opposition is not so much stylistic, as about the "purpose" of art. "Spiritual" art comes from the point of view that one already possesses absolute Truth, and the purpose of art is only to indoctrinate (as in Plato). Nazi and Stalinist art both used "naturalistic" representational techniques, yet were spiritual in nature: they used art for the same propagandistic purposes as religions do; they always presented images of either the ideal or the demonic; they are generally images of power. Art that is naturalistic "in nature", by contrast, is made by people who are studying nature and trying to understand it, as opposed to people who scorn messy, "imperfect" nature in favor of their beautiful abstract "Truth". Naturalists don't see everything in terms of propaganda, power, and conflict.
Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 10, 2022 · Original source
The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented An alternative way of looking at these three laws is to note that defense mechanisms emerge to sustain addictions even when the developmental environment that originally nourished it vanishes. Defense mechanisms though, are more useful as a partial catalog of phenomenology than as a foundational idea. These then are the developmental psychology roots of the Gervais Principle. Recall that Cluelessness goes with overperformance. That overperformance is caused by arrested development around a strength, which has been hooked by an addictive environment of social rewards. Mediocrity is your best defense against addiction, and guarantor of further open-ended psychological development. And yes, for the alert among you who have spotted a connection, arrested development is the dark side of strengths in the sense of Positive Psychology. A strength in one situation is merely an entrenched piece of arrested development in another. In our model, the three development stages – Clueless, Losers and Sociopaths – correspond to different patterns of arrested development and different strength-addictions. That is, development involves progressing from one stage (eg school) to another stage (eg the real world). But if you’re too good at an early stage, you become accustomed to the reward you get from success. Suppose you loved school and did great at it. Then you get invited to participate in the real world, a noticeably non-school-like environment. You try it, and instead of getting praise/reward/validation all the time, you get those things rarely or not at all. If you can, maybe you go back to school (ie get a PhD), a strategy with problems of its own. But if you can’t real-world actually go back to school, instead you might remain permanently stuck at a psychological stage where everything feels like school, where you try to distort your perceptions until your world-model looks vaguely school-like, and where you use your school-based skills and coping mechanisms for everything. The particular example I just gave, about school, is Rao’s explanation for Dwight Schrute: Dwight, with his stern German upbringing, lacked the normal encouragement of early-childhood creative-performance instincts (we see several glimpses of this, including his attempt to read horrifying medieval cautionary tales to the kids during bring-your-child-to-work day, and his own description of his childhood, which left his brother actually developmentally disabled). He has therefore developed none of the addiction to childhood applause-seeking performance behaviors that have trapped Michael. Instead, Dwight found relief in the graded, performance-oriented worlds of school and varied medieval-guild-like worlds, such as farming, animal husbandry and karate. His attempts to understand the world of management, which is decidedly not a world of grades or guilds, are based entirely on peripheral guild-like elements. He is the only one excited about the Survivor-style successor-selection event Michael arranges (in the bus on the way over, he asks, “Will there be business parables?”). When he attempts manipulation, his mind naturally turns to hidden microphones, doctored documents and other elements of tradecraft learned from spy novels, and only rarely to psychology. He banks the occasional tactical victory, but cannot play or win the mind games required to beat the Sociopaths. In Dwight’s world, everything worth learning is teachable, and medals, certificates and formal membership in meritocratic institutions is evidence of success. Even where play behaviors are concerned, the Dwights of the world can more easily get lost in points-and-rules worlds. It is significant that Dwight has never seen/read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which is about creative-performance play), but is obsessed with gaming worlds and sci-fi/fantasy universes. Perhaps the clearest example of Dwight’s need for formal affiliation is his lame attempt at the insider stand-up comedy routine, The Aristocrats. To Dwight, everything is a formal contest, and there are always authority figures who provide legitimacy and rankings. He has no sense of humor (thanks to skipping early childhood), and has no idea how to actually evoke laughter, so he tries to ace the only formal membership test he can see, the ability to tell the Aristocrats joke. Michael, by contrast, can at least tell juvenile jokes, and Andy can manage some bad frat-boy humor. Rao argues that Michael Scott, the “boss” in the show, is stuck at an even lower level: Little children in normal environments win their first victories through creative performance: reciting nursery rhymes, drawing pictures, and demonstrating creative play behaviors. If they succeed too much, they get addicted to the typical adult reaction: Wow, aren’t you cute/clever? and, to a lesser extent, to admiration from younger siblings. In learning to thrive in this particular reward/penalty environment, little children rely mostly on responding to the emotional content of what they hear and see, since they do not understand much. With a few evolved defense mechanisms thrown in, to protect against adult realities that don’t conform to childhood environments, that’s exactly what it feels like to be Michael. When he hears somebody talking, all he hears is “blah blah blah good job, blah blah blah, how could you do this Michael?” in conjunction with facial expressions and body language. Michael’s head is a massive library of childlike mappings between situations, canned phrases and reactions. He is not completely responsible for his actions and utterances because he genuinely does not understand them. There is coherence in what Michael says though; he does not sound completely nonsensical because he reacts meaningfully to body language, facial expressions and emotional cues. “You talkin’ to me?” (borrowed from De Niro) is a belligerent line, and by pulling out that line when he feels threatened, and then displacing the tension with laughter, Michael is able to derail the conversation. His trademark joke, “That’s what she said!” is an extreme example. It makes no sense in most contexts where he trots it out; its only purpose is to dissolve tension and displace threats. Either laughing with Michael or throwing up your hands in frustration is a victory for him. The only effective response is to calmly ignore his disruptive actions, wait for the reaction to die down, and continue the conversation in dominant mode, like Cesar Milan with his dogs … Around Packer, his boorish friend, insulting and objectifying ways of talking about women gain approval, so he trots out borrowed, misogynistic man-talk. Withering under the collective glare of his politically correct employees, phrases like “respect women” gain smiles and halt frowns, so that’s what he offers. […] Here is why: delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service of a fixed script through defense mechanisms, with the rest of the meaning thrown away. To manufacture original thought you have to look at/listen to reality in open ways for data. That is why Michael’s database is so full of movie lines. Movies are goldmines of canned situation-reactions that don’t require much present-reality data to retrieve. When kids quote adults or movies, they seem precocious, and gain approval. In an era where more kids are raised by TV than by parents, parroting movie lines comes more naturally than repeating bromides learned from parental figures or at churches and temples. Recall that social calendars force you through later stages whether or not you master previous ones. So what about later stages? Michael is not quite as enamored of medals and certificates as Dwight because (as a lousy student) he never got very good at earning them, and could therefore not get seriously addicted to them. Finally, Michael has poorly developed peer-affiliation drives. He wants to be the center of attention, not one among many equals in a huddle of peers. When Michael appears to be operating under a peer-affiliation drive (the sort that animates Andy), he is really casting child behaviors into a teen mould. He believes that specific people, rather than formal or informal groups, are cool or admirable (proxy parental figures, older siblings). If they are not cool or admirable, they must be made to view him as cool and admirable (younger siblings). I was struck by a line in an appendix, saying this is the same level that Nazi bureaucrats were at. Just for fun, let’s compare the rest of Rao’s profile of Michael with Arendt’s profile of Adolf Eichmann (all quotes taken from my Eichmann In Jerusalem review): Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (“Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement. I refuse it; I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? And: The judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk” – except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. And finally (this time in my voice): If [Arendt] has any thesis at all, it’s that Eichmann believed in something larger than himself. We usually encourage this sort of thing, but I think the prosocial version involves having a specific larger-than-yourself thing in mind. Eichmann (says Arendt) just liked larger-than-himself things in general, and the Nazi vision of eternal struggle for racial supremacy was the biggest thing he could find in the vicinity. We’ll later see that he had a strange respect for Zionists, and this was because they too believed in something larger than themselves. Eichmann’s infamous cliches were the cliches of pomp and circumstance and glory and high words, the ones which made him feel like he was engaged in a great enterprise whether or not there was anything behind them. The reason he admitted neither to “just following orders”, nor to a deep personal belief in anti-Semitism, was that his loyalty to Hitler came from neither. When Hitler said to kill all the Jews, he gladly complied; if Hitler had said to kill all the Christians, he would have done that too. Not because he was a drone following orders to save his skin, but because he believed. Not in any of the specifics of Nazi ideology. Not even in Hitler’s personal judgment. Just in whatever was going on at the time. IV. When he gets to the next section, on Losers, Rao mostly forgets the developmental psych. Now this is a book on status economics. Rao’s poetic description: Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live. In their troubled twenties, each seeks the one true love that they know is out there, waiting for them, and their real calling in life. Each time they fail at life or love, their friends console them: “You are a smart, funny, beautiful and incredibly talented person, and the love of your life and your true calling are out there somewhere. I just know that.” The friends are right of course: each marries the most beautiful man/woman in the world, discovers his/her calling, and becomes the proud parent of the most beautiful baby in the world. Eventually, each of them retires, earns a gold watch, and somebody makes a speech declaring him or her to be a Wonderful Human Being. You and I know them as Losers. Being a Loser means clinging to the delusion of being special, while also being fully accepted by your social group (indeed, your specialness only matters instrumentally and insofar as other people appreciate you for it). But these two imperatives are Scylla and Charybdis: insist too hard on actually being special and you’re a narcissist who everyone hates; try too cravenly to seek acceptance, and you’re acknowledging other people are better than you. Rao views Loserdom as a series of conspiracies to manage this paradox. The end solution looks something like "everyone is special in their own way”. Loser dynamics are largely driven by Lake-Wobegon-effect snow jobs, which obscure pervasive mediocrity. But unlike the delusions of the Clueless (false confidence of the Dunning-Kruger variety which we saw last time), which are maintained through the furious efforts and desperate denials on the part of the deluded individuals themselves, Loser delusions are maintained by groups. You scratch my delusion, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger. And we’ll both convince ourselves that our lives are to be valued by these different measures. Loser above-averageness is generally not based on an outright falsehood. Unlike Michael’s pretensions to comic genius, which are strictly not true, Pam really is the best artist in the group. The delusion lies not in a false assessment of her artistic skills, but in the group choosing to evaluate her on the basis of art in the first place. In other words, Losers are too smart to fool themselves. They enter into social contracts which require them to fool each other […] At the life-script level, the game-playing social contract creates complete nominal illegibility. Each individual in a group is judged according to a custom life script that makes it impossible to compare two lives within the group. Pam’s life has a redemptive script based on the fact that she is the cutest one in the office, can paint well, and forms the “It” couple with Jim. Kevin’s is based on the fact that he is in a band. Creed’s uniqueness lies in his weirdness…Remember, you are unique, just like everybody else. A second, corollary paradox: Groucho Marx joked that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept him as a member. But then why do people ever associate in clubs? Suppose you joined a club that was clearly not good enough for you - maybe you’re a famous billionaire and they’re a bunch of losers who watch crappy TV in a basement once a week. Why would you be in this club? But suppose you tried to join a club that was clearly too good for you - you’re a poor person with no social skills, and you apply to the rich billionaires’ country club. Why would they ever accept you? This suggests that people won’t join clubs that are too much higher or lower status than they are. But why would they join clubs that are even slightly higher or lower status? Wouldn’t you expect nobody ever joins anything except in the vanishingly rare case where their status and the club’s status are exactly the same? Rao is trying to make the point that all associations require some level of status illegibility. If you knew status perfectly - if you went around with “Status: 6.8/10” tattooed on your forehead - then you could see a club all of whose members had statuses 6.2 - 6.5, and know that you could do better. So instead, the same social conspiracy that keeps people convinced they have useful talents, also keeps status illegible. This takes the form of everyone teasing each other, creating a constant churn of minor status increases and decrements which is too complicated for anyone to track properly. (Rao says that the single-highest and single-lowest status people in any group can sometimes be legible - creating an observable range for what status people in the group can be, ie “we’re for people between 6/10 and 7/10” - but the middle always has to be illegible, to allow the majority of people to preserve their polite fiction that they’re among the higher-status members of their group.) This section on status economics ends with a digression on jokes. Not as in knock-knock jokes. Jokes where one person makes fun of another, gaining status at their expense. These kinds of jokes are status economics transactions. According to Rao, the minimum viable Loser joke is three people: the joker, the victim, and an audience. The joker makes a joke. The victim has a chance to retort (eg “takes one to know one!”) and the audience decides how to mentally update everyone’s status. Rao uses examples from The Office, but I haven’t seen it, so I was thinking about an episode of Seinfeld: When George was stuffing himself with shrimp at a meeting, Reilly remarked, "Hey, George, the ocean called. They're running out of shrimp." Slow-witted George could not think of a comeback until later, while driving to the tennis club to meet Jerry. His comeback was: "Oh, yeah, Reilly? Well, the jerk store called, and they're running out of you." Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer did not think 'jerk store' was a good comeback mainly because "there are no jerk stores." Elaine suggests, "Your cranium called. It's got some space to rent." Jerry suggests, "The zoo called. You're due back by six." Kramer finally thinks George should just tell Reilly that he slept with his wife. After discovering that Reilly was let go from the Yankees and now works for Firestone, George flies to Akron, Ohio just to try the jerkstore line. When he says it, however, Reilly responds, "What's the difference? You're their all-time best seller." George, unprepared for this, ends up using Kramer's line. He's then told that Reilly's wife is in a coma. Rao asks: in what sense did Reilly successfully “score” on George? Suppose George had been a very stupid person, and hadn’t understood that Reilly’s comment was supposed to be teasing/hurtful; he would have been unaffected. Or suppose he had something totally outlandish (“Yes, but there are canyons on Mars”), then insisted that it was a brilliant comeback and let Reilly exhaust/embarrass himself trying to prove it wasn’t? In contrast, if there had been a third person there (let’s say a love interest who both George and Reilly were pursuing), this pointless narcissistic zero-stakes game would become relevant: the love interest gets to evaluate the two against each other, and award status to the victor. This isn’t always the wittier of the two. You can also imagine a world where George says “Excuse me, I have an eating disorder, I think it’s incredibly stigmatizing for you to bully me like this.” Then the third person gets to decide whether to treat this as Reilly making a hilarious joke and George being too thin-skinned to take it, or as Reilly saying something offensive and George bravely calling him out. Crucially, if she wants, she can let her decision hinge on whether she liked Reilly or George better to begin with, or whether one or the other would be a better ally in the future - so this is part status-transaction and part status-test. But in the actual Seinfield episode, there is no love interest. George and Reilly are trying to score points on each other, totally unaware that this is meaningless. For Rao, this is a sure sign of Cluelessness - anyone with social skills would realize no status could be gained or lost and the whole game is pointless. So Loser jokes are 3+ people, and Clueless jokes are 2 people. Continuing the pattern, a Sociopath joke must be for one person - the joker amusing himself, totally unconcerned whether anyone else appreciates it. V. Sociopaths aren’t necessarily evil. They’re just . . . unbeholden to anyone else. They might still follow the rules because it advantages them to do it, or because they have personally chosen to follow some moral code they happen to like. But they don’t crave approval from anyone, not even abstract concepts. If the Clueless come from arrested development, and Losers from normal development and its attendant status economics, Sociopaths are formed by a sort of dark enlightenment. They have a moment when they realize nothing is true and everything is permissible. Rao’s poetic side writes: Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks. Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe. There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities that can be created via subtraction of conflicting evidence, polishing and masking. Mask is an appropriate term for any social reality created through subtraction, because an appearance of human-like agency for non-human realities is what the inhabitants require. By humanizing the non-human universe, we make the human special. All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy. […] When a layer of social reality is penetrated and turned into a means for manipulating the realities of others, it is automatically devalued. To create medals and ranking schemes for the benefit of the Clueless is to see them as mere baubles yourself. To turn status-seeking into a control mechanism is to devalue status. To devalue something is to judge any meaning it carries as inconsequential. In terms of our metaphor of masks of gods, the moment you rip off a mask and wear it yourself, whatever that mask represents becomes worth much less. So the Sociopath’s journey is fundamentally a nihilistic one. The climactic moment in this journey is the point where skill at manipulating social realities becomes unconscious. Suddenly, it becomes apparent that all social realities are based on fictional meanings created by denying some aspect of natural, undivided reality. Reality that does not revolve around the needs of humans. The mask-ripping process itself becomes revealed as an act within the last theater of social reality, the one within which at least manipulating social realities seems to be a meaningful process in some meta-sense. Game design with good and evil behaviors. Losing this illusion is a total-perspective-vortex moment for the Sociopath: he comes face-to-face with the oldest and most fearsome god of all: the absent God. In that moment, the Sociopath viscerally experiences the vast inner emptiness that results from the sudden dissolution of all social realities. There’s just a pile of masks with no face beneath. Just quarks and stuff. Both Losers and Clueless are trying to manipulate other people’s impressions of them. Sociopaths are trying to manipulate reality. Reality includes other people’s impressions - if your goal is to become President, in some sense you care what the electorate thinks of you. But it’s an instrumental goal. Sociopaths crave the Presidency (or whatever) and use other people’s good opinions as stepping-stones. Losers and Clueless crave the good opinions directly. Once you stop craving other people’s good opinions, you lose some mental blocks that would normally prevent you from coming up with manipulative strategies. Rao says the most basic Sociopath manuever is “heads I win, tails you lose” - coming up with some way of arranging systems so that they get the credit for good results while avoiding the blame for bad ones. A simple strategy is to come up with a plan and appoint a Clueless pawn as Director Of The Plan. If the plan goes well, it was always your idea and you hand-picked and mentored the person who carried it out. If the plan goes poorly, it was always the director’s idea, you maybe thought it had some promise but he clearly bungled the execution. But this is a weak 101-level version of the maneuver; the real thing involves a bunch of bureaucracies, committees, and total deniability. Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit. Is everyone else against this? Do they view it as duplicity and oppression? Rao says no. Sociopaths aren’t just CEOs. They’re priest-kings, creating meaning for everyone else. The Clueless demand a world of legible rules, legible rewards and punishment, and a legible Authority tracking everyone’s balance. Sociopaths, who create companies, religions, governments, and every other form of authority, help Clueless people live in the legible gamified rank-able worlds their minds crave. I’m less able to follow Rao’s explanation of “Loser spirituality” and how Sociopaths control it. My guess is something like: Losers “worship” positive emotions, belongingness, and “good vibes”, within carefully obfuscated conspiracies of mutual status-blindness. These aren’t really capable of dealing with the real world: a typical fiction is that “we’re all really talented and gave our all on this project”, but in fact the project might be failing. Sociopaths are outside those conspiracies and outside local status competitions, ie your CEO isn’t going to share banter over a glass of beer with you. So they are allowed to (carefully, emotionlessly) communicate/represent/convey reality to the status-maintenance conspiracies in a way where no particular member loses status by admitting reality first. Although in some vague sense the Sociopaths are oppressing and manipulating everyone else, this isn’t how it feels from the inside: both Clueless and Losers are grateful to the Sociopaths for taking the burden of confronting reality off their shoulders. If the Sociopath fails at this, and a Clueless or Loser has to confront reality unmediated, they’ll either have a very bad time but eventually bounce back, or become a Sociopath themselves. VI. So that’s The Gervais Principle. Is any of it true? I don’t find myself or the people I know best falling clearly into any of these archetypes. They’re useful to have around. I can see pieces of all of them. But none are a great match. I can see bits of myself in the Clueless archetype. I like legible systems. I’m the person who did really well on standardized tests, really badly at networking, and ended up in medical school because it was the highest you could go on test scores alone. I’ve occasionally suggested that all politics should be replaced with some kind of system for calculating how much utility every option has, then doing whichever one is best (bonus points if it’s on the blockchain). But I’m bad at listening to authority figures,and quit my last job to start my own company. Also, Clueless people are supposed to be bad at using language in original ways, and I’m a professional writer. Sociopaths are supposed to fiercely distrust collectivism and come up with their own, usually utilitarian-inspired morality, which I identify with. But I can’t manipulate my way out of a paper bag. Also, a few weeks ago I got in an argument with a clerk over the right amount of change, after double-checking it turned out I was wrong and the clerk was right, and even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it. Doesn’t really feel very ubermensch-ish or transcended-the-need-for-other-people’s-good-opinion-y. I have a group of friends, and within that group of friends I’m acutely aware of the things I’m unusually good at vs. bad at, and I worry a lot about whether my strengths qualify me to be a member in good standing. My status within that group is illegible and I prefer that to the alternative. Does that make me a Loser? Who controls the microphone in my head? Whose approval do I crave? When I was younger, I remember pretty vividly that it would be whoever I had a crush on at the time. When I started blogging, it became my blog audience. But sometimes it gets hijacked by random store clerks. And I particularly remember being invited to an event with some big name tech people, fretting about whether they would like me, exerting some willpower to remind myself that I was valid with or without their approval, and then realizing afterwards that what I had actually done was fantasize about how if I wasn’t obviously craving their approval, they would be impressed by my independence and put-togetherness and respect me even more. So fine, I (and the few other people I know well enough to use as examples) don’t naturally fall into any of these categories. Whatever, Rao said (in one sentence) that everyone has multiple types. But then what’s the use of this categorization system? If I invent three random types of people: Green: introverted, long hair, likes the cold, complains too much
Inline links: defense mechanisms, The Aristocrats, Eichmann In Jerusalem, an episode, the real thing, that make me a Loser
Your Book Review: The Internationalists
July 01, 2022 · Original source
Hersch Lauterpacht was a lawyer who worked on the intellectual implications that the Pact had on other behavior in international relations, including the changes to expectations of neutrality, the use of sanctions, and many other aspects. He is also credited as the author of the arguments that were used against the Nazis at the Nuremburg trials, though he himself did not attend, perhaps because he had lost nearly his entire family to the Holocaust.
Inline links: Hersch Lauterpacht
The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I will briefly summarize the 3 major sections of the book and how they tackle the first five claims. Section 1: The Old World Order This section refutes the claim that outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. To do so, it covers the history of the international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace, including how he came to write it, what the laws were, and how they were used and understood. In this section, H&S work to fully immerse us in the laws of war before the Peace Pact, and the ways that people understood war as a result. I’ve already included a number of things about this up above, so I’ll just put in a few interesting notes here, and if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book. There is lots of historical evidence that attitudes toward war before the Peace Pact were not like attitudes toward war today, that people - lawyers, diplomats, sovereigns, and citizens - believed it to be normal and legal, and frequently justified. Conquest in response to debts or offenses was one of the primary motivators of war in the period ruled by the Old World Order (generally, from some time before 1625 when Grotius wrote the rules down to 1928, when the Peace Pact was signed), though H&S also document some of the weirder ones, like a King who declared that they had the right to wage war against another because the other King stole his wife. But because Grotius had declared that no one outside the belligerents could determine whose side was just without violating neutrality, the reasons for war were largely whatever Monarchs could get away, which ran the gamut. Perhaps because it was fashionable, perhaps to convince their citizenry of their rightness, Monarchs paid handsomely for famous thinkers to write manifestos explaining why they were going to war, and other Monarchs and the citizenry generally accepted these reasons. It would be like if Putin had called up Google co-founder Sergey Brin and asked him to write out why Russia had the right to conquer Ukraine, and then everyone else shrugged and decided, sure, that sounds reasonable. Heads of state enlisted esteemed writers and scholars as well as experienced lawyers to draft [war manifestos]. The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell commissioned John Milton, the great epic poet, to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655 when he ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. In 1703, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I employed Gottfried Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, co-inventor of calculus, and a trained lawyer, to compose the Manifesto for the Defense of the Rights of Charles III, which defended the empire’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and returned for real the next year. Because they were so confused about how the laws of war were supposed to work, Japan proceeded to send Nishi Amane to the Netherlands to study the Law of War and Peace, and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea. Their logic for doing so was that they were afraid Europe or China would get there first. The world recognized their conquest at the time, though after WWII they were made to give it up. Korea was alluring prey for aggressive Western nations. As Nishi Amane [the scholar who brought the Grotian rules to Japan] would later explain, defending one’s borders “is like riding in a third-class train; at first there is adequate space but as more passengers enter there is no place for them to sit. The logic of necessity requires the people to plant both feet firmly and expand their elbows into any opening that may occur for, unless this is done, others will close the opening. (Chapter 6) Section 2: The Transformation Period Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 2 and 3. 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. This section tells the story of how the Peace Pact came into existence, including how influential it was on the thinkers of the time. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, thinkers and diplomats attempted to turn the Peace Pact into practice, and then, when World War II demonstrated that they needed significantly more teeth to make the Peace Pact real, created the United Nations and other international institutions dedicated to supporting the Pact’s goals. At the time, they viewed World War II as a sign that they hadn’t gotten the right combination of institutions to make the Peace Pact succeed, not that it wasn’t important. This was a classic situation of needing More Dakka and they did, indeed, keep adding more until it worked. In an account composed more than a decade later, Jackson recounted that this view of the Pact was shared by the president and his inner circle. The Peace Pact, he reported, “left no vestige of legal right for [a state] to resort to a war of aggression. From the beginning, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, Stimson and I had been in agreement that Hitler’s war . . . was an illegal one, and that other powers were under no obligation to remain indifferent. (Chapter 11) There is some counter-evidence in support of #2, from the side of the Japanese at least. Japan, for example, did not think that it had renounced the rules of the Old World Order on August 27, 1928. Its signing of the “No-War Pact,” as the Paris Peace Pact was known in Japan, was regarded as a diplomatic gesture, a noble proclamation affirming the aspiration of all civilized nations to seek peace. Indeed, Japanese officials considered it a sign of how far their nation had come that it was included among the fifteen countries at the grand ceremony in Paris. (Chapter 7) But at least on the Allies side, they had intended it seriously, and as World War II went on, that intention redoubled. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State during World War II, was assigned by Roosevelt to create a plan for peace after the war. What he and James Shotwell authored was effectively an outline of the United Nations, and they put the Peace Pact at the very center of it. Shotwell was far from subtle about his effort to treat the Pact as a starting point. He placed the Pact at the start of his preliminary draft. Article 1 repeated the Pact verbatim. Article 2 provided that “[t]he United Nations, in order to strengthen and safeguard the peace of nations as set forth in the General Pact for the Renunciation of war, agree to cooperate in the establishment of the necessary instrumentalities for its effective maintenance.” What followed was an outline of nearly every essential institutional component of the modern-day United Nations. Ten days later he circulated a more detailed draft, now entitled “Provisional Outline of International Organization.” (Chapter 8) It wasn't just the United Nations. NATO was built off of the Atlantic Charter, and it was also designed to reinforce the Peace Pact. This is why it's reasonably accurate to describe it as a defensive alliance. The [first draft of the Atlantic Charter] was a remarkable document. It began by restating the principles of the Stimson Doctrine—there would be no conquest; the two countries would “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.” Moreover, there would be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The Charter looked ahead to a time “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a remarkable statement for a neutral in the war—and declared the two states’ “hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries. (Chapter 8) This section brings to bear quotes from leaders at the time showing how important they considered the outlawry of war, how they viewed it as changing the world, but also how unprepared they were for how to react to countries choosing to ignore the Pact. Most importantly, they show how the Allies were strongly motivated to fight World War II specifically to preserve and expand the Pact, to make the world safe for peace. Unfortunately, then, as now, Russia/the Soviet Union did not quite live up to the ideals that the Allies generally advocated for. The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so. The only ally to gain any significant territory after the war was the Soviet Union. More than twenty million of the nation’s citizens had died in the course of the war, and Stalin insisted on several territorial gains as the price of peace—many, but not all, of them in areas previously contested. … These concessions to Stalin were seen by the other Allied powers as regrettable deviations from accepted law, not precedents to be followed in the future. (Chapter 13) To be fair, we are talking about Josef Stalin, here. Who’s surprised? Section 3: The New World Order Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 4 and 5. 4. The world isn't more peaceful post outlawry. 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. H&S walk through the best academic evidence we have of whether the world is more peaceful today than it was in the period from 1816 (when our data collection starts being decent) to the Peace Pact. They then spend some time discussing why the evidence better supports the Peace Pact than other causes. In particular, H&S highlight that only since the Peace Pact have countries been denied territorial gains from their conquests. There's a lot of detail in there. Here's just a taste of it. A loose team of political scientists has assembled comprehensive data to help them study war. The resulting project, with the intentionally clinical name “Correlates of War,” hosts datasets on everything from “militarized interstate disputes” to “world religion data” to “bilateral trade.” Most relevant here, it includes extensive data on “territorial change”—a record of every single territorial exchange between states from 1816 to 2014, totaling over eight hundred entries. What do our 254 cases of territorial change tell us? They tell us something that is at once striking and surprising: Conquest, once common, has nearly disappeared. Even more unexpected, the switch point is that now familiar year when the world came together to outlaw war, 1928. From the time the data start in 1816 until the Peace Pact opened for signature in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one conquest every ten months (1.21 conquests per year). Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year. Those may seem like pretty good odds. They are not: A state with a 1.33 percent annual chance of conquest can expect to lose territory in a conquest once in an ordinary human lifetime. After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13) The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya One disappointment I have is that H&S do not spend much time discussing the US wars of the last two decades. The book was published in 2017, so there’s really no excuse for this. Even counting them, their claim that wars since the Peace Pact have been fewer and less world-changing than before the Peace Pact still holds up, but since they don’t directly discuss the most notable wars of the last two decades, they leave a significant hole in their argument. I can imagine defenses that they would make, but they should have made them. They mostly refer to these conflicts either as not a conquest (since the US isn’t officially running those places now) or as a side effect of the Peace Pact in allowing failed states (See Addendum 1 for more on that) More recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. Exerting influence indirectly is inefficient and expensive. (Chapter 13) And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact. Indeed, they are the predictable consequences of it … the prohibition on the use of force by one state against the territory of another has allowed two sources of conflict to simmer… within [states]. (Chapter 15) The broader intellectual history of war Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war. H&S include some comments that hint at it, for example describing the Principle of Distinction and other agreements made about how to behave during war. Fortunately for the civilians of Europe, the biblical model of war was finally repudiated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European armies had come to recognize a “Principle of Distinction,” the doctrine central to modern humanitarian law, which distinguishes between soldiers and civilians and protects the latter from the former. The Principle of Distinction was the first curtailment of Grotius’s blanket immunity for those waging war. In the next century, it was followed by a flood of new legal regulations placing stricter controls on a soldier’s license to kill. International treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864) prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive, and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874) banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas, and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899) and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war, and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907). (Chapter 3) But the history of this and other pre-Peace Pact intellectual history of war is thin within the text, as the point H&S are chasing is specific to the Peace Pact's relevance in history, not the broader history of war. Some of my favorite books are books that tie together aspects of history across wide gulfs, which The Internationalists succeeds at. It’s rare and delightful to see how a piratical ship capture by the Dutch in the 16th century ties together with the opening of Japan, the US battles with Mexico, and finally, the creation of the United Nations. H&S’s perspective is that the Peace Pact marks a turning point, and one that should not be forgotten. It’s also clear that it marks a capstone on a long history of small changes that are also, themselves, interesting battles in the long-running war to make the world less intolerable. In the end, they identify four key changes in the intellectual landscape, with Lauterpacht’s fingers in nearly all of them. Neutrality no longer requires impartiality. States can help those they view as victims.
Inline links: More Dakka
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
Beroe: Eugenics inspired the Nazis (and 1920s Americans) to do very evil things. But Islam inspired Osama bin Laden to do very evil things, and we rightly believe that it’s fine to practice Islam as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to do evil things. Islam isn’t bad, flying planes into buildings is bad. Likewise, eugenics isn’t bad, involuntarily sterilizing people, or sending them to gas chambers, is bad. What’s the argument against forms of eugenics that don’t do this?
Adraste: A brief aside: eugenics, as implemented in the early part of the 20th century, was extraordinarily evil. We might loosely consider the entire Holocaust eugenics, based on Nazi theory of racial purity1, but even if we restrict the label to the Nazis’ specific campaign against the disabled and mentally ill, it caused about 300,000 deaths. And although “Nazis are bad” is already priced in to our moral system, here in the United States we sterilized between 60,000 and 150,000 people. Also - it wouldn’t have been any better if it was scientifically competent, but it really wasn’t2. They sterilized 2,000 people for a form of blindness that wasn’t even genetic.
Inline links: 1, 2
As far as I can tell, Galton had a reasonable 19th century view of genetics, making a few good guesses while also appreciating how little he knew. His successors were utterly and inexcusably confused about the topic, and conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes; once these were were removed from the population by killing or sterilizing their carriers, nobody would have negative traits anymore. A grim reminder of how wrong they were: the Nazis killed nearly ever schizophrenic in Germany, hoping to eliminate “the schizophrenia gene”. Today, Germany has exactly as many schizophrenics as any other country, because there are thousands of genes involved in schizophrenia, and all the deleterious variants are present in some frequency in the healthy population. But see footnote 4 below.
Inline links: conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
July 28, 2023 · Original source
To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. The German Catastrophe The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive. And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars. This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers. These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went. Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake. This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went. The author in his time One remarkable witness to this entire catastrophe was Ernst Jünger. In 1938, when he picked up the pen to write Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs), he was 43 years old and a complicated man in a complicated situation. He was first and foremost a highly renowned soldier. He had the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the Kaiserreich, which would entitle him to a decent stipend if the Kaiserreich hadn't been gone for twenty years. He was clearly brilliant, especially as a writer, very well connected and exchanged many letters with important men on the political right. He made a living as an author, mostly because his first book, the World War I memoir “Storm of Steel”, was a great success and continually got reprinted. He had followed it up with a string of books, all nonfiction — almost all memoirs, about the war, or both. And he had written a flurry of political articles, mostly in ultraconservative and nationalist magazines. On the Marble Cliffs is his very first fiction novel. Or he claimed it was fiction — but he was fooling nobody. Jünger wrote for an audience that was very familiar with Storm of Steel and, because of the autobiographical nature of all of his preceding work, with him as a person. His books revealed him to be a highly perceptive, highly but coldly intelligent, very erudite, sensation seeking… sociopath. He has masterful eloquence and a keen interest in nature. Even in the trenches of the World War, where he enjoyed “hunting down” enemy soldiers with sniper shots, he seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on. And his protagonist in the Marble Cliffs is both the first-person narrator and almost exactly the same guy! All of the following points are true both for the protagonist of this novel, and the author at the time of writing. He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.
His emotional range spans only from a kind of tired nostalgia to the reckless joy of intoxication, punctuated by his most prized feeling by far, the gleefully murderous “bloodthirst” of mortal combat. So everyone who had read some Jünger, which at the time of publication would likely include most of the German population and definitely most of the Nazis, could see right through the facade of fiction. It is an obvious conceit that made the book just barely publishable, in a time and place where saying outright that the Nazis were disgusting savages would have gotten everyone involved a headshot. After 1945, Jünger did admit that the book was (also) a commentary on the political reality of its time. And that he knew perfectly well that in publishing this “fiction” he was playing with his life. And still he got it published, uncensored, in Germany in 1939, just before Hitler started the second World War. Today the most widely accepted history of the subject is that Jünger was only saved from a grisly fate by the personal intervention of Hitler himself, who loved “Storm of Steel” and presumably wouldn't have liked to admit that his favorite author utterly despised him. And it would have been very tempting to just not admit that, because before the Nazis came to power, Jünger had sympathized with them, although he never counted himself among them. Hitler had sent Jünger fan letters; the responses have unfortunately been lost. Jünger’s many political rants in the 1920s do contain several explicit endorsements of the strength of the Nazis and of their value as allies to Jünger’s vague and contradictory nationalist cause. By the time he wrote the Marble Cliffs, he had stopped endorsing them. But this history made it easy for the Nazis to publicly pretend he had just written a fictional novella, or maybe he was talking about Bolshevism or something, but surely he didn’t mean them. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, where nobody dared to say out loud what everyone could see. Although additional reprints were verboten in 1942, the excuse of a lack of paper due to the war was perfectly plausible and didn’t betray the discomfort with the content that nevertheless is well-documented to have been present among the Nazi ranks. All of that is to say we can safely dispense with the charade entirely and accept that this book is about the Nazis. It makes general points on the nature and fate of tyranny that do apply to Bolshevism, but the Nazis are the immediate and obvious instance of tyranny to which this book clearly reacts. And it is written by someone who had walked among the Nazis, had previously been friends with some of them, exchanged letters with many of the best-informed men especially in the military, and was perceptive enough for his opinions to deserve much of the confidence he states them with. Besides this conceit, the other concession to the political realities Jünger makes is that the book makes no mention of Jews. The world he is describing is fictional, but it is an amalgamation of European cultures that all had some Jews, so this absence is conspicuous. Obviously Jünger couldn't possibly have seen this book published if it depicted Jews in any way that wasn’t extremely negative. I guess he was unwilling to do that. In the 1920s, Jünger had ranted against “globalist” liberal Jews several times, and once even argued that one couldn't be both a Jew and a German. But he saw nothing wrong with being an orthodox Jew, openly admired Zionism, expressed in letters complete revulsion with Nazi antisemitism and had even publicly spoken out against the pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis. After writing this book, when serving as an officer again in France, Jünger went on to save a couple of French Jews from deportation and death, at moderate risk to his own life. Later he’d discuss the Kabbalah with Gershom Sholem, the brother of his childhood friend Werner Sholem. For these reasons, I imagine he did not see Jews negatively enough for the Nazis, and was too uncompromising to pretend that even his narrator did. I think this dilemma fully explains why there are no Jews in this book. In 1935, when Winston Churchill for example still publicly admired “the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force” of Adolf Hitler, Jünger claims to have already understood the bottomlessness of Hitler's depravity by noticing he was using the word “Vernichtung” (annihilation) way too much. He was remarkably right, years before most could see it, but even more remarkably his method of understanding was a poet's acute sense of word choice! And from then, even though he agreed with nationalist dictatorship as a goal and method, he distanced himself from National Socialism because he was disgusted with the vile character of the leader of this particular nationalist dictatorship. If that doesn't show you the peculiar kind of man Ernst Jünger was, I don't know what to tell you. The craft and the poetry You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. The “marble cliffs” in the title of this short novella unite senses of beauty, majesty and danger, which is programmatic for this entire book. It begins with a visionary description of life in the traditional society of “the Marina” in an overwhelmingly beautiful state of paradise. The narrator lives on the edge of this society in a “hermitage” with his brother, his housekeeper and his son. The latter has a strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes. This opening act is without question the most elaborate celebration of poetic beauty I have ever read. Superficially it could be dismissed as purple prose. But due to Jünger’s clever use of poetic techniques in what at first appears to be prose text, there’s a rhythm, a density and a lucidity to it that makes it pretty much a very long poem, and gives it an intoxicating quality which is most apparent when you read it out loud. In the autumn we feasted like sages and did honour to the exquisite wines in which the southern slopes of the Marina abound. When in the vineyards between red foliage and dark grape clusters we caught the jocund calls of the vintagers, when in the little towns and villages the wine-presses began to creak, and the odour of the pressed grape skins drew its heady veils round the farms, we would go down to the innkeepers, coopers and wine-growers, and drink with them from the full-bellied jug. And there we would always meet with gay companions, for the land is rich and fair, so that in it flourishes untroubled leisure, and wit and humour are its unquestioned coin. I know this works, because I did an experiment. I read this book aloud, to a room full of people who were smoking pot. The book is short and the plan was to read all of it over the evening. I have read to pot smokers occasionally, but with this book it was different. They were enjoying it very much for the first couple of chapters, and exclaimed many times it was “perfect” for pot. But some hours, chapters and joints in, when the narrator goes on an expedition into a fantastically beautiful forest, they were so utterly overwhelmed by the intensity of the descriptions of nature they asked me to stop. I and the only other sober person in the room were the only ones who were willing to continue. We all had very intense dreams that night. Once we had broken through the thick hedge of dogwood and blackthorn we entered the high forest, territory where the blow of an axe had never resounded. The ancient trunks, the pride of the Chief Ranger, stood gleaming damp like pillars with their capitals hidden by the mist. We walked among them as if through a spacious hall, and, like the magic setting of a stage, festoons of ivy and clematis blooms hung down towards us out of the void. The ground was piled high with mould and rotting branches, in the bark of which fiery red mushrooms had sprung up, so that we felt for a moment like divers wandering among coral gardens. Wherever one of the mighty trunks had fallen from age or struck by lightning, we stepped out on to a little clearing on which the yellow foxglove grew in thick clumps. On the rotting ground the deadly nightshade bloomed in profusion; on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells. It comes as no surprise that Jünger had much practice writing that way, from putting into his diaries a lot of his dreams and his numerous drug experiences. Jünger had long been inclined to deeply poetic descriptions of the real events he described, but this intensity at this length is genuinely new to his writing. Wherever he can use plurals he prefers them over the singular, wherever he can use more melodic and beautiful verbs (like when the characters “step out on” rather than “walk into” clearings) he does. Maybe the pretense of the narrator not being himself allowed Jünger to wallow in his characteristic aestheticism, take it to an extreme and arguably to the point of self-parody. Skip to the next heading if you don’t care about translation The extreme language of this book made me doubt there would be any translation into English that could do it justice. After all, if you throw this last excerpt into DeepL you get: After breaking through a dense fringe of blackthorn and cornets, we entered the high forest, in the grounds of which the blow of the axe had never sounded. The old trunks, which formed the pride of the head forester, stood in the damp glow like columns whose capitals were hidden by the haze. We walked among them as through wide vestibules, and like the magic work on a stage, ivy vines and clematis blossoms hung down on us from the invisible. The ground was covered high with mulm and decaying branches on whose bark mushrooms, burning red cup fungi, had settled, so that a feeling of divers walking through coral gardens crept over us. Where one of these giant trunks was tossed by age or lightning, we stepped out into small clearings where yellow foxglove stood in dense clumps. Belladonna bushes also proliferated on the rotten ground, on whose branches the flower calyxes in brown violet swayed like death bells. It’s still pretty, and it works on a matter-of-fact level. None of it is just wrong. But can you see how it has a lot less of the dreamlike quality? A “fringe” is a geographical feature, while the “hedge” emphasizes its role as an obstacle in a journey. Those “old” trunks are less poetic than “ancient” ones. A “head forester” is a job description, while a “Chief Ranger” is a seminal figure. The “vestibules” are a literal translation of the original, but the English word is used a lot less than German “Vestibüle” was back then. So that’s a word you may need to work to understand, which gets you out of the story’s flow, so “spacious hall” is better. There are even more such nitpicks to be made even in this short paragraph, but my point is these difficulties pervade every single paragraph of the book. ChatGPT very similarly fails to overcome them. Since January, there is a new translation by Tess Lewis, which has the advantage of being available on Kindle. I’ll spare you another repeat of the same paragraph and just say I think DeepL did most of this translation. But Tess Lewis did improve on many of its word choices and I’ll grudgingly concede this translation is good enough. It still sounds too modern for me, too much like prose and too little like poetry. Therefore, all previous and following excerpts are from the Stuart Hood translation, published in 1947, which I was astonished to find does pull it off! Let me assure anyone who doesn’t speak German, or doesn’t study translation, that this one is absolutely exemplary and surely represents years of painstaking work. Stuart Hood was a Scot who knew German very well. Like Jünger he was a veteran officer, and he needed German for his intelligence missions in World War 2. This is his very first published translation of an entire book. It harnesses a considerable talent, which is also evidenced by how Stuart Hood went on to become an accomplished writer himself, a BBC executive, a professor and several other notable things. And it is clearly a labor of intense love — right after the war, while working on it, Hood corresponded with Jünger and even went to visit him at least twice and they talked at length about the art of translation and how to translate specific points of the Marble Cliffs. The end of this last quote, “on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells.” exemplifies how precisely Hood has understood Jünger. Why “calices”, not “chalices”? Because that is the old-fashioned form of this word, and using it is unnecessarily peculiar, but it doesn’t make you stop and look into a dictionary. It isn’t even more precise than DeepL’s and ChatGPT’s and Tess Lewis’s “calyxes” for the word “Blumenkelche” in the Original. But it captures precisely how the author was using his German language. This is because on every page of the original, there are choices of individual words that evoke subtleties of mood and allusion that are strictly impossible to translate, because English doesn’t have a similar-enough group of synonyms from which to make the equivalent choice. Some of that must inevitably get lost in translation. But these “calices” are an example of how Hood has the audacity to frequently insert his own new peculiar word choices — which restore exactly the same effect! It might take entire months until AI can do that! Unfortunately the New Directions edition with this translation has been out of print for a while, although I heard from a regrettably less law-abiding friend that the PDF is easy to find. But a few years ago someone bought the UK rights to this translation and republished it. While this edition has several uncorrected OCR mistakes, one of which horrifyingly turns “Flayer’s Copse” into “Player’s Copse”, at least this makes the better translation available (legally) again. What actually happens (spoilers) After six chapters of descriptions of paradise, and of the botanical work the brothers do since they don’t need to make a living, the book continues with a gradual decline of this gorgeous world. This again is much more of a richly detailed description than a story plot. It begins with the introduction of the Chief Ranger. The brothers know him from their military community, from before his takeover begins. There is some debate about whether the Chief Ranger stands for Hitler, Stalin or Hermann Göring. I think this debate is misguided. The character of the Chief Ranger, the antagonist of the narrator and all he holds dear, is never named but only ever referred to by his title. He does not appear to have staff or lieutenants at all, nor any personal history. And Jünger is profoundly uninterested in the personalities of all his characters beneath what they pay attention to (except the narrator’s brother) so even this important figure is roughly sketched at best. Therefore, I believe he is best understood as more of an archetype or role, The Tyrant, denuded of the individual traits or histories that make one tyrant a Führer, another a General Secretary and yet another a Great Leader. So, what makes a tyrant? According to Jünger, “wherever free spirits establish their sway these primeval powers will always join their company like a snake creeping to an open fire. They are the old connoisseurs of power who see a new day dawning in which to reestablish the tyranny that has lived in their hearts since the beginning of time.” The Chief Ranger is also “a master of feigning frankness that was full of snares for the unwary.” He has a reputation for wealth and a strong visual brand (a gold-embroidered green coat) that makes sure he always leaves “an imprint on one’s memory”. He exudes a “breath of primitive power” and has a strong charisma that gives an impression of “both cunning and unshakable power — yes, at times even majesty.” As he begins to usurp power, “reports spread from mouth to mouth of infringements of the law and of acts of violence in the neighbourhood, and finally such incidents occurred publicly and with no attempt to concealment. A cloud of fear preceded the Chief Ranger like the mountain mist that presages the storm. Fear enveloped him, and I am convinced that therein far more than in his own person lay his power.” From what I know about tyrants, that sounds about right. For the next seven chapters, the vile followers of the Chief Ranger continually corrupt everything. The sophisticated culture of the Marina is surrounded by the rough herdsmen clans of the surrounding Campagna steppe, beyond which lies the Chief Ranger’s forest populated by lowlifes. The class metaphor is blindingly obvious, and Jünger’s theory of how these lowlifes overcome first the Campagna and then the Marina is not subtle either. After the Alta Plana war, and the defeat, the entire society has been weakened. “Thus in exhausted bodies corruption will set in by way of wounds which a sound man would scarcely notice. The first symptoms, therefore, were not recognized.” Very gradually, law gives way to lawlessness, spreading from and with the lower classes foresters in many different ways. Violent crime grows, in descriptions very reminiscent of the many deadly street fights of the late Weimar republic. Various elements of traditional culture become corrupted. Those who would defend it are intimidated and attacked. The constitutional lawful reaction is too slow, so by the time it manages to convene and have democratic debates, it is already infiltrated. And there’s one paragraph worth quoting in full. Herein, above all, lay a masterly trait of the Chief Ranger. He administered fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance. The role he played in the disorders which were so finely spun in the heart of his woods was that of a power for order; for while his agents of lower rank, who had established themselves in the clans, fostered anarchy, the initiated penetrated into the civic offices and the magistracy, and there won the reputation of men of deeds who would bring the mob to its senses. Thus the Chief Ranger was like an evil doctor who first encourages the disease so that he may practise on the sufferer the surgery he has in mind. Today this is a mainstream view in German history. In 1939, it could have been prosecuted as high treason and punished with death. On the backdrop of ever escalating mayhem, two old men who are friends of the brothers are described: Belovar, a clan patriarch from the Campagna, and Father Lampros, an eminent Christian monk. In very different ways, they both are very helpful, each both in the botanical work and against the mounting threat. The brothers decide against meeting the violence with violence, delve deeper into their work, become increasingly pessimistic and develop a hope that they can rescue the results of their work into an imperishable afterlife by burning it with an ancient mystical crystal lens that they somehow inherited. The narrator describes continued excursions for rare plants, through the country that is becoming increasingly treacherous and foreboding, until finally, well after the middle point of the book, with one particular excursion for an extremely rare flower, the actual continual story begins. Today we look at the Nazis with horror, but Jünger has dug too many trenches into hills of rotting corpses to be easily horrified. Instead of horror, his feelings towards the Nazis are mostly contempt, seasoned with disgust, and that has been pervading his description of the rise of the Chief Ranger’s henchmen over the last couple of chapters. But he does give one instance of pure horror and it is here, in the very heart of the book, when the two brothers on their excursion happen to discover, in the ill-reputed area of Flayer's Copse, the Chief Ranger’s remote “flaying-hut” of Koppels-Bleek. The original Köppels-Bleek is a German wordplay, about as subtle as a drone base in a sci-fi novel that happens to be called Obamazliez. Koppels-Bleek is where the Chief Ranger has his enemies tortured to death. It has frequently been called a concentration camp, but that is imprecise. It is really a Vernichtungslager, a death camp, which unlike a “normal” concentration camp is built for the express purpose that no torture victim ever gets out alive. This is a prediction, because while Nazi concentration camps were set up starting in 1933, Vernichtungslager were only built three years after the “Marble Cliffs” were published. After an intensely gruesome description of the particulars of this place, the narrator assesses its importance as follows. Such are the dungeons above which rise the proud castles of the tyrants, and from them is to be seen rising the curling savoury smoke of their banquets. They are terrible noisome pits in which a God-forsaken crew revels to all eternity in the degradation of human dignity and human freedom. He is so certain he has captured the very essence of tyranny, “the abode of tyranny in all its shame”, that he puts this climax at the two thirds mark of the book and makes it exceedingly obvious this is where the third and final act begins, as the pace of the book changes entirely. Although the narrator still includes some retrospectives, he is now finally telling a real story. Strikingly, the brothers return to botany — remember this, it will be important later — and then to their home, where they soon get two conspiring visitors. Braquemart is a competent, racist, nihilistic fellow veteran. The narrator despises him at length for his heartless theory-mindedness. Prince Smyrna is new, young, seems to the narrator to know “the nature of justice and order” but is too weak and inexperienced to shoulder the responsibility he is heroically taking on. The two visitors want to Do Something about the Chief Ranger — what exactly is never said, though a personal confrontation or assassination is implied. They leave for the Chief Ranger's territory. This entire chapter feels very much like a comment on some political acquaintances of Jünger who attempted to challenge the Nazis, and failed. The next day, Father Lampros gives the narrator a mission to arm himself and look for these two men. He goes to old Belovar's farmstead, where he learns of commotion in the direction of Flayer's Copse, and the old clan patriarch goes to war. Before, the book was a dreamy soliloquy; now we see dramatic wartime action. Ernst Jünger has had a lot of practice with writing about that kind of thing, and it shows. Their small but experienced war party with a lot of dogs goes towards Koppels-Bleek and is soon met with two confused, horrific, riveting battles. The narrator stumbles through and finds at Koppels-Bleek the heads of Prince Smyrna and Braquemart. The former strikes him as a symbol of how nobility remains real, and he picks it up. With it, he retreats through mayhem and danger into the complete flaming destruction of the Marina. He marvels at the beauty of the flames — remember this too, it will also be important later — and, with his hunters in hot pursuit, runs to his house. There his son uses his strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes to make them defeat the nearest attackers. The brothers burn down the house, go find Father Lampros and see him die. From an old soldier comrade who owes them a favor they get room on a ship to flee across the water to Alta Plana, where an old enemy who owes them another favor takes them in. There’s an implicit framing story of how the narrator lives to tell the tale of these memories to some unspecified audience, and as it ends it mentions in passing that sometime after these events, a new cathedral has been built on the ruins of the Marina and the head of Prince Smyrna went there as a relic. This small bit still stands out today, and would have stood out even more starkly to contemporary readers, because in the context of everything that happened before, this bit publicly, extremely boldly, and correctly, predicts the eventual fate of the Nazis. Not once in this entire story has the narrator expressed surprise at this progression of events, or given any other indication it is in any way unlikely. The narrator, and the author through him, seems to be saying this is just the way it goes with tyranny, when a society has lost too much of its strength to fight off the bestial attacks of the lowly. I have omitted not just many smaller elements of the story but also a huge number of allusions to ancient history, (German) literature and especially the Bible. I imagine Jünger put them there as prizes for the few who would find them. This is one of the ways that I think On the Marble Cliffs is Ernst Jünger’s Unsong: a vehicle that lets a prolific nonfiction author
They describe the obvious allegorical nature of the book and Jünger's relationship to the Nazis, much like I did above. They vary in how much they emphasize his earlier sympathy with the Nazis or his later revulsion, and often omit one or the other.
Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
August 04, 2023 · Original source
In 1920, the DAP added two words to its name and became the National Socialist German Workers' Party or, as its enemies would call it derogatorily, the Nazi Party. At the same time, Hitler quit his army job to focus on growing the movement. Drawing on his artistic experience, he designed an emblem for the party to rally around: the now-familiar black swastika in a white circle on a red field.
In the former Austrian vagabond the conservative classes thought they had found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain their goals. The destruction of the Republic was only the first step. What they wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic “nonsense” and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These were Hitler’s aims too. And though he brought what the conservatives had lacked, a mass following, the Right was sure he would remain in their pocket—was he not outnumbered eight to three in the Reich cabinet? Such a commanding position also would allow the conservatives, or so they thought, to achieve their ends without the barbarism of unadulterated Nazism.
Hitler worked so hard to grow the party that he nearly became the party. Concerned by his burgeoning influence, the other members of the Party’s committee decided to take Hitler down a peg. They investigated whether they could ally with other parties to dilute Hitler’s absolute control. On discovering these plans, Hitler threatened to resign from the Party. This would have been disastrous for the Nazis: Hitler’s electrifying speeches brought in most of the Party’s funds. The committee refused to accept Hitler’s resignation. Sensing his bargaining power, Hitler turned the tables on the committee—if they wanted to keep him, they would need to formally acknowledge him as dictator of the Nazi Party.