Counter Statism

An excerpt taken from The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan.

Most of us don’t merely oppose shifting the cost of education from taxpayers to students. We recoil at the idea. When rising tuition curbs attendance, who is most likely to be curbed? The poor. Instead of fretting about education’s social return, shouldn’t we fix our gaze on social justice—our commitment as a society to our least fortunate members?

These concerns would be well-founded if education were largely about teaching useful job skills. In such a world, raising tuition doesn’t just make the workforce less skilled. It amplifies the inequality of skill: The poorer you are, the less you learn and the less you can earn.

Since education is mostly signaling, however, the social justice catechism is wrong. Yes, awarding a full scholarship to one poor youth makes the individual better off by helping send a fine signal to the labor market. Awarding full scholarships to all poor youths, however, changes what education signals mean—and leads to more affluent competitors to pursue further education to keep their edge. The result, as we’ve seen, is credential inflation. As education rises, workers—including the poor—need more education to get the same job. Where’s the social justice in that?

[…]

Subsidies don’t just help the poor by fueling credential inflation. They reshape hiring and promotion to the poor’s detriment. Picture a society where half the population can’t afford college. In this setting, reserving good jobs for college grads is bad business. “There are plenty of qualified candidates who didn’t go to college” is not wishful thinking, but literal truth. Education still signals something, but lack of education is not the kiss of death. When asked, “Why didn’t you go to college?” “I couldn’t afford it” is a great excuse. Heavy subsidies take it off the table. Indeed, what excuses are left? “I’m a bad test taker”? “I didn’t feel like going to college”? “I figured I could learn better on the job”? Once the good excuses are gone, employers have little reason to stay open-minded.

More technically, subsidies raise the correlation between education attainment and employability. By itself, this helps high-ability, low-income students… Unfortunately, as the correlation between education and talent rises, education becomes more convincing to employers—and hence more lucrative. Rich rewards in turn spur students to amass even more education. If parental income were the sole determinant of educational success, education would signal little to employers and therefore entice little waste.

I grant that subsidies seem to promote social justice. My best friend in my Ph.D. program came from a poor rural family. If a top state school hadn’t given him a full ride for his B.A., he probably wouldn’t have been sitting next to me at Princeton. Anyone who wanders a college campus will find equally visible success stories. To detect subsidies’ downside for social justice, you must dwell on the opportunities the poor have lost because of credential inflation. When most Americans didn’t finish high school, dropouts faced little stigma in the labor market. The stigma is now severe. When few Americans finished college, high school grads could plausibly work their way up the corporate ladder. No longer. The main difference isn’t that “the economy changed,” but that education rose, so workers need higher credentials to compete. 

While I think the Berkeley College Republicans were being disrespectful of the mission of their educational institution by giving a troll a microphone to bully their classmates with, I think Middlebury was absolutely acting within its educational mission to host a talk by Murray. And it’s terrifying that this, too, gets a violent response. 

Also, Murray is not a white supremacist, but I think the first three points are our more substantial disagreements.

http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/01/29/california-just-threatened-stop-paying-taxes-trump-cuts-federal-funding-sanctuary-city-status/

The State of California’s elected officials are exploring ways to combat President Trump’s Executive Order cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. National legal experts say that Trump’s sanctuary cities order is unconstitutional because, at its core, the order is an attempt to commandeer state and local officials in violation of the 10th Amendment.

California’s Democratic leaders believe there are numerous federal programs receiving state funds as well, which they will seek to cut, to make up for anything Republicans siphon out of their budgets. San Francisco’s CBS affiliate reports that the federal government only spends 78 cents in California for every tax dollar sent from that state to Washington:

The state of California is studying ways to suspend financial transfers to Washington after the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal money from sanctuary cities, KPIX 5 has learned. “California could very well become an organized non-payer,” said Willie Brown, Jr, a former speaker of the state Assembly in an interview recorded Friday for KPIX 5’s Sunday morning news. “They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”

Oh man, you know what I just remembered? That time in the ‘90s when some guy went on an interstate murder spree and disappeared, and then while he was an active news story on the Ten Most Wanted list he emerged to finish it off by killing Gianni fucking Versace and people still don’t know what that was about

That drew me to this September 1997 article, which fascinated me in its own right because there’s something here I want to draw your attention to. Two things, actually.

First, I assume Vanity Fair still commissions some decent longform, but look how fucking lush this is - 12,500 words, people even tangentially related to the subject interviewed across several states, 16 months in development and published a year after the last bodies were cold.

I’m not gonna say this was the norm, but the norm was still a bit off in that direction back then. Newspapers and TV news would deliver their first draft of history the next day, and a spry reader might subscribe to a few weekly magazines, but past that things just developed at a slower pace. Or, rather, things developed on their own and a while later you’d hear a reasonable account of what happened.

I suppose CNN was already disrupting towards a constant news cycle though, MSNBC and Fox News had launched as me-toos in 1996.

(As point One-and-a-Half, notice how in a pre-Internet world how much social power Cunanan acquires just by reading a lot, remembering things, and other people being unable to check or refute his claims)

Second, another “look into a lost world” in this 20-year-old article is just how natively fluent everyone is in a psychiatric idiom. It’s not really Freudian per se, the old man was already musty in 1997, but a thoroughgoing sense that you can explain someone by reference to the development of their psyche, that they pursue this desire this way but encounter this obstacle and that warps them this way in response…

Some of the cops come from the FBI profiling tradition so fair enough. (Should note the idea of the “serial killer” only dates to the 1980s and the concept of “profiling” got a lot of attention in response I suspect as much as anything as a way for the state to reassure the citizenry that in a relatively un-surveilled, pre-computerized, pre-DNA testing world, they had some defense. This was the context for Silence of the Lambs.)

And maybe it was the author who chose that angle for the piece but geez, her interviewees sure gave her a lot of quotes to work with, it’s really striking how people with even limited contact with Cunanan feel confident talking past observed actions to the nature of his character, on to inferred internal motivations and placing their experience in the context of a narrative or character arc.

Now this was all gay culture in the not yet normie mid-90s, where you might expect people to have a more complex sense of the relationship between interiority and social performance than the average bear. But remembering back it’s just like the writing - this was maybe an outlying case, but things in general did used to be noticeably more like that, now that I think of it.

And maybe that could be done poorly, and even done properly it wasn’t ~scientific~, a bit of Freudian speculation plus a bit of residual Christian “spiritual development”, each put through a few washes of folksy popularization before combining and then put through a few more. “Scientism” wasn’t as strong as it is now, I really have the sense it was more accepted that if some social or hard science expert made a claim about human experience and supported it by reference to math or scientific consensus it was much further “in bounds” for a humanities expert - a reverend, an analyst, a Foucauldian critic - to rebut them by reference to their own traditions.

This was what Alan Sokal was peeved about, and are we better for living in his world now? Honestly I think maybe when a guy who’s intense into hard S&M bashes a guy’s face in with a hammer as part of a murder spree we should consider “huh, maybe he’s a sadist, what’s that about?”

(I have seen a bit of a spike in essayistic psychoanalysis lately with people trying to explain the 4chan/alt-right nexus but you can tell they’re just equipping polemic arms, clumsy in their mouths, not the idiom they see their own lives through)

The flip side of all this, of course, is I’m reading through this whole psychological profile of an article, noting all the times Cunanan varied between reclusive or despondent to life-of-the-party, five-figure spending sprees, sudden intense violence and I’m wondering when they’d speculate he was bipolar. (Actually, I was wondering if it would still be “manic-depressive” back then.)

And the answer is… never. And you realize that “having X mental condition” as a way to understand yourself or others was not yet the thing it now is, the big breakthrough of that narrative into mainstream culture was in 1993-4 with Listening to Prozac and Prozac Nation (I once intended to borrow the latter from the library and picked up the former instead, which was not as bad as the time I intended to rent Steel Magnolias and got Magnolia).

Now I’m not suggesting Eli Lilly created “chronic depression” to match Prozac in the same way Listerine created “chronic halitosis”. But I am saying a consequence of bringing their breakthrough blockbuster SSRI to market was the cultivation of a narrative with a constituency by which you took the drug and were your self, whereas before you had been under the influence of something that was in hindsight distinct from your self. And this narrative matching experience, and being socially validated, in a way Valium or Halcion weren’t.

Me when talking to statists: 

…and then most importantly make it so that the first one has enough nukes to ensure that the politicians the second one elects can be just ignored instead of people having to live through the consequences.

When you have university students unironically demanding prayer rooms (”it doesn’t violate the separation of church and state because any religion can use it at the designated Muslim praying hours (because we’ll just convert the space to other uses at all other times)”) (shit, I so miss the early ‘00s when the woke liberal thing was to oppose religious intrusion into education) and an “Immediate response to hate speech or actions from the University including a consequence (e.g. mark on transcript, potential suspension)” while simultaneously professors say that murdering whites is a good thing, it doesn’t take much to spot the obvious hypocrisy which is feeding the cancer…

Then you add to that the way the establishment high-status popular left is full of people who didn’t get the memo that murderous authoritarian regimes are still bad even though their edgy aesthetics used to epate the bourgeoisie a few decades ago before the sort of low-key “Cuba Venezuela is totes cool as long as I don’t actually have to be among the people they oppress” flirting with socialist tyranny became effectively mandatory for the visible bourgeoisie…

Then you add to it the undeniable fact that there are places in the US where being white after sundown is a personal health hazard (exactly the same way existing while black is in other places, in some places the gangs causing it just don’t have badges)…

And the endless apologia for tyranny as long as it’s “””your””” side doing it…

And the way there are something like 60 UN condemnations of Israel while places like Saudi Arabia don’t get a routine stream of int’l outrage directed at them…

…Then you’re really, really, really playing with fire if your long-term plan relies on the right not seeing that and concluding that this is apparently how politics is supposed to work, and then outdoing you on all of them because they are doing it sincerely instead of from behind a layer of post-ironic detachment: straightforward ethnostatism instead of building rhetorical pretzels to justify basically the same thing; explicit ideology of racial conflict instead of a pile of bad decisions causing the appearance of what effectively might as well be it; right-wing authoritarianism at home instead of cheerleading left-wing authoritarianism abroad; full utilization of the powers the government has been given…

Or for a TL;DR:

if you believe that straight white tribe P males are more powerful than you, why the fuck would you do seemingly everything in your power to convince them that one side really really needs to destroy the other?

But since secession is probably not going to work, here is my super edgy alt-left platform to replace the Democratic Party with something decisively politically incorrect:

Domestic policy: Violent crime is actually bad. Poor people, people of color etc. are disproportionately suffering from violent crime in their neighborhoods. Not all of this crime is done by cops. All of this crime is bad.

Values: Religious conservatism, when used to justify violence or the denial of basic rights, is actually bad. If you would give a televangelist shit for something, you are not a bad person for giving an imam shit for the exact same thing.

Immigration policy: Immigrants are welcome iff they don’t commit crimes. They must also assimilate into American cultural norms like freedom of speech, religion, separation of church and state, etc.; if they don’t like that they should’ve gone to Europe instead.

Foreign policy: Authoritarian governments are actually bad. Cuba is actually a shithole. Terrorists are not precious cinnamon rolls incited into action by evil colonialist policy, but actually shitty people. Nonetheless, we’re going to stop fucking around so much in the areas where terrorism is concentrated in because the aroundfucking isn’t helping; instead we’ll just act as an air force to the Kurds unless they become shitty too.

Economic policy: Having manufacturing in the US is actually useful for technological sustainability. We are going to ditch subsidies and other such shit, and just take away as many unnecessary bullshit barriers to industry as possible while making a distinction between them and the actually useful restrictions like “no dumping toxic waste on underprivileged communities”. Pretending all regulations are the same is to be considered harmful and instant grounds for expulsion from the movement.

Diversity (ooh boy here comes the edge):

We are going to focus on how the US is an inherently diverse nation, and universities etc. will be encouraged (not with laws or money, just with cultural zeitgeist) to recognize this fact.

Especially the fact that there is no such thing as white culture, because in reality the US has so many “white cultures” that no homogenous overarching “white culture” can exist: New England culture is different from Appalachian culture is different from Deep South culture is different from {…someone else fill in this part because I’m not adequately familiar with all this; we’re going to blackmail someone who actually knows this stuff to figuring it out by threatening to use Albion’s Seed as the primary foundation unless a better source on the various American cultures is provided…}.

Most importantly we’re going to recognize that there is more to southern culture than slavery and wishing slavery still existed. In fact we’re completely going to eradicate the latter part from our conception of dixie culture. Anyone who claims southern culture is about wanting to oppress people is going to get labeled as culturally insensitive and #problematic AF and probably shilling for the KKK or something. The way oppressive politics is able to feed off the way yankees actually genuinely love to shit on dixies has to stop yesterday.

We’re going to give up on attempts to seek demographic parity in representation, and instead have general diversity policy focus on alleviating gross discrepancies where some groups have effectively zero representation in stuff where representation is considered relevant.

Groups like “Appalachian Scots-Irish” will also be eligible for diversity scholarships (as long as academic standards are fulfilled, obviously), being included in cultural sensitivity training and other symbolic recognition, etc.

We are going to stop using “white” as a category. That category is going to get the fuck splitten out of it.

One part of this is a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy to highlight intra-group differences to reduce racial polarization and bust the potential for homogenous white populism

one part is to normalize the good parts of diversity multicultural SJ stuff for whites by giving them an equal place in it

one part is to force some of the worse SJ stuff to calm the fuck down once the people advocating it realize that the Appalachian Scots-Irish would also be eligible for the same treatment

one part is to render the system so complex and incomprehensible that people simply have to chill the fuck out over racial/cultural differences. (If anyone complains about taking differences between white American cultures into account because they all just look the same, we’re going to call them out for being #problematic because they wouldn’t say Japanese and Chinese are the same thing.)

One big part is to focus on the way culture is not race, race is not culture, and culture is not monolithic and unchanging. Gullah “black culture” is pretty damn different from Detroit “black culture”, so is Appalachian “white culture” from New England “white culture”, or recent immigrant “asian culture” from ancestors-lived-in-california-since-before-the-civil-war “asian culture”. And nobody is allowed to shoehorn others into some kind of cultural identification “everyone must have a category” bullshit; assimilationist rootless cosmopolitan culture is just as valid as any other (after controlling for non-value-neutral factors; we aren’t going to pretend bad things are okay just because they are someone’s peculiar cultural institution).

I should’ve realized – the real solution to the housing crisis isn’t to build houses for all the people moving to the bay area, it’s to realize that all those people should never have been born in the first place. If we just have the government restrict everyone to at most one child, the problem will correct itself in no time!

Dude, if you’re going to argue with me, have the balls to do it openly instead of thinking that I can’t reblog your arguments if you hide them in the tags.  I’m only gonna screenshot that shit and do it this way.  lmao

I meant to be insulting calling the absolute fail the fail it is.  Was that not in fashion this current year?  Who gives a fuck?

As for if anarchy is possible or not, anarchy is nothing more than the absence of government, any government, not necessarially the one in place.  What do you think is going to happen in anarchy?  We’re all going to sit around the campfire singing kumbaya?  lmao  

No, killers will kill more since there’s no one to stop them.  Rapists will just rape whoever they please without fear of consequence.  Thieves will just take whatever the hell they want and so on.  No rules, people doing whatever the hell they want which will wind up in the physically strong preying on the physically weak.  

Wait you say (I can almost hear you doing so) the killer has to worry about the victim’s family killing them in turn; the rapist has to worry about the victim and those who care about her exacting revenge since there is no law to stop them, the victim of theft will gather his friends to help him take back his possessions by force.

Exactly.

Do you really think that the weak are just going to take being bullied by the strong lying down or do what they’ve always done and band together for protection and, as a group, make up rules limiting behavior and how we treat one another and using the power of the group to enforce those rules aka laws.  That, my friend, is government.  You overlook that government is born out of anarchy to begin with.  lmao If you actually think it through, anarachy is literally impossible.  If you come back with no in anarchy thus and thus will be enforced than all you’re doing is describing government, just not the current government.  If anything at all is enforced, it is not anarchy:

I literally have no words for how dumb this argument is.

But to more directly answer your question, maybe we could have small governments, town size instead of nation size, sort of like native Americans had before the white man came but I doubt it.  For the simple reason that things that start out small grow.  

I really don’t agree with that, but that is okay, I do not want the point of this discussion to be about use of terms but rather about what we believe.

Using your terms you could say a lot of anarchists would be okay with governance, just not one done by the kind of entities we have now. You might have heard of the motto “without rulers, not without rules”. If you think that having any rule enforced is not anarchy based off of a dictionary definition then… okay? That’s a really weird way to approach debating though. It is reminiscent of feminists debating that feminism as a movement is as interested in the betterment of men as it is for women because the dictionary definition of feminism asserts its egalitarian nature.

I simply wish for people to have control over their lives and to have the freedom to seek legal systems that suit their needs rather than having a single legal system that finds it appropriate to exercise lethal force against any entity that dares to compete with it in any relevant way. The less people’s lives are interfered with against their consent the better. One way to do this is to leave functions of the government up to markets rather than political systems. To those ends we explore the possibility of polycentric legal systems and other ways of administering the law. I think one of my friends linked David Friedman’s works to you.

The only reason anarchy became synonymous to chaos and lawlessness is because elites and intellectuals that highly favored the existence of large states and deference to authority loudly trumpeted the merits of their system in opposition to anarchy (statelessness, society without rulers) which they began to smear and characterize as disorder chaos in order to promote their cause.

Diogenes of Sinope, Crates of Thebes and especially Zeno of Citium advocated for forms of organizing society without state structures.

Meanwhile philosophers like Plato envisioned an utopia with an all powerful state whose existence was absolutely necessary for the application of law. A society ruled by philosopher-kings that are in no way accountable to the public.

Considering these two sides and the fact that philosophers like Plato were much more popular and useful for later intellectuals to justify the existence of their rulers and states, it’s probably a given that anarchy was repeatedly painted as a bad thing until it became synonymous with chaos.

Electrical grids need parity between supply and demand. If there’s too much power in the grid, you need to shut down some generators. If there’s too little, you need to turn more on.

That means there are two tiers of suppliers: base load plants and peaking plants. Base load generators provide the minimum supply or ‘base load’ in the system. They are large and their energy is cheap. But they are expensive to turn off and on.

Peaking plants provide supply during peak hours, usually on weekdays and evenings. They are turned on and off to meet that surplus demand. They are smaller and their energy is more expensive. But they are inexpensive to turn off and on.

These two tiers traditionally have different energy mixes. Nuclear and hydroelectric plants are base load plants. Peaking plants are fossil plants. Because rates are set at marginal cost (i.e., the peaking plant cost), they’re higher than the base load cost.

The marginal cost of peaking supply is higher than the marginal cost of fossil energy, because the peaking plants demand rates high enough to cover fixed costs, including the cost of maintaining the plant during downtimes.

Solar energy, especially household solar, is surplus to requirements in this system. It can’t be easily turned on and off. It doesn’t reliably supply base load power. It doesn’t reliably supply peaking power. And although it might be cheaper than the marginal cost of the peaking plants, it’s not price competitive with base load plants.

MicroFIT contracts are a costly boondoggle, and if Australia is deciding to price them accurately, all the better for them.

Here in Ontario, where we have a MicroFIT program, we pay $491 per MWh for solar. Compare that to the price of what makes up our base load – $62 per MWh for nuclear and $48 per MWh for hydroelectric – and you find that the program just doesn’t make much sense. 

Especially now that we have more base load power than we know what to do with:

Ontario has experienced more days with surplus electricity generation in recent years, from 172 days in 2011 to 319 days in 2014—an 85% increase over four years. From 2009 to 2014, the province’s available electricity supply exceeded its maximum demand by 5,160 MW per year, on average—an amount that approximates the total existing power generation capacity of the Province of Manitoba. In 2014 alone, Ontario’s available electricity supply exceeded the peak demand by about 7,500 MW. 

That only happened because we paid people to install solar panels they didn’t need.

Dude, if you’re going to argue with me, have the balls to do it openly instead of thinking that I can’t reblog your arguments if you hide them in the tags.  I’m only gonna screenshot that shit and do it this way.  lmao

I meant to be insulting calling the absolute fail the fail it is.  Was that not in fashion this current year?  Who gives a fuck?

As for if anarchy is possible or not, anarchy is nothing more than the absence of government, any government, not necessarially the one in place.  What do you think is going to happen in anarchy?  We’re all going to sit around the campfire singing kumbaya?  lmao  

No, killers will kill more since there’s no one to stop them.  Rapists will just rape whoever they please without fear of consequence.  Thieves will just take whatever the hell they want and so on.  No rules, people doing whatever the hell they want which will wind up in the physically strong preying on the physically weak.  

Wait you say (I can almost hear you doing so) the killer has to worry about the victim’s family killing them in turn; the rapist has to worry about the victim and those who care about her exacting revenge since there is no law to stop them, the victim of theft will gather his friends to help him take back his possessions by force.

Exactly.

Do you really think that the weak are just going to take being bullied by the strong lying down or do what they’ve always done and band together for protection and, as a group, make up rules limiting behavior and how we treat one another and using the power of the group to enforce those rules aka laws.  That, my friend, is government.  You overlook that government is born out of anarchy to begin with.  lmao If you actually think it through, anarachy is literally impossible.  If you come back with no in anarchy thus and thus will be enforced than all you’re doing is describing government, just not the current government.  If anything at all is enforced, it is not anarchy:

I literally have no words for how dumb this argument is.

But to more directly answer your question, maybe we could have small governments, town size instead of nation size, sort of like native Americans had before the white man came but I doubt it.  For the simple reason that things that start out small grow.  

I really don’t agree with that, but that is okay, I do not want the point of this discussion to be about use of terms but rather about what we believe.

Using your terms you could say a lot of anarchists would be okay with governance, just not one done by the kind of entities we have now. You might have heard of the motto “without rulers, not without rules”. If you think that having any rule enforced is not anarchy based off of a dictionary definition then... okay? That’s a really weird way to approach debating though. It is reminiscent of feminists debating that feminism as a movement is as interested in the betterment of men as it is for women because the dictionary definition of feminism asserts its egalitarian nature.

I simply wish for people to have control over their lives and to have the freedom to seek legal systems that suit their needs rather than having a single legal system that finds it appropriate to exercise lethal force against any entity that dares to compete with it in any relevant way. The less people’s lives are interfered with against their consent the better. One way to do this is to leave functions of the government up to markets rather than political systems. To those ends we explore the possibility of polycentric legal systems and other ways of administering the law. I think one of my friends linked David Friedman’s works to you.

Dude, if you’re going to argue with me, have the balls to do it openly instead of thinking that I can’t reblog your arguments if you hide them in the tags.  I’m only gonna screenshot that shit and do it this way.  lmao

I meant to be insulting calling the absolute fail the fail it is.  Was that not in fashion this current year?  Who gives a fuck?

As for if anarchy is possible or not, anarchy is nothing more than the absence of government, any government, not necessarially the one in place.  What do you think is going to happen in anarchy?  We’re all going to sit around the campfire singing kumbaya?  lmao  

No, killers will kill more since there’s no one to stop them.  Rapists will just rape whoever they please without fear of consequence.  Thieves will just take whatever the hell they want and so on.  No rules, people doing whatever the hell they want which will wind up in the physically strong preying on the physically weak.  

Wait you say (I can almost hear you doing so) the killer has to worry about the victim’s family killing them in turn; the rapist has to worry about the victim and those who care about her exacting revenge since there is no law to stop them, the victim of theft will gather his friends to help him take back his possessions by force.

Exactly.

Do you really think that the weak are just going to take being bullied by the strong lying down or do what they’ve always done and band together for protection and, as a group, make up rules limiting behavior and how we treat one another and using the power of the group to enforce those rules aka laws.  That, my friend, is government.  You overlook that government is born out of anarchy to begin with.  lmao If you actually think it through, anarachy is literally impossible.  If you come back with no in anarchy thus and thus will be enforced than all you’re doing is describing government, just not the current government.  If anything at all is enforced, it is not anarchy:

I literally have no words for how dumb this argument is.

would the rest of the world have gone to war over that? I’m guessing not.

the Holocaust happened because the Germans were able to evacuate and kill Jews with impunity wherever their armies marched; there was no Holocaust in Germany, only a Holocaust by Germans outside Germany, and where Germans had destroyed the state or disabled it

without war, the Germans couldn’t have done that – there was no Holocaust before the war began – and where the Germans did not go, far fewer Jews died than where they did go

Where Germans obliterated conventional states, or annihilated Soviet institutions that had just destroyed conventional states, they created the abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nothingness. In this black hole, Jews were murdered. When Jews were saved, it was often thanks to people who could act on behalf of a state or by institutions that could function like a state. When none of the moral illumination of institutions was present, kindness was all that remained, and the pale light of the individual rescuers shone.

The state stood at the middle of the story of those who wished to kill Jews, and of those who wished to save them. Its mutation within Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and then its destruction in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in 1938 and 1939 transformed Jews from citizens into objects of exploitation. The double assault upon state institutions in the Baltic states and eastern Poland, at first by the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940 and then by Nazi Germany in 1941, created the special field of experimentation where ideas of a Final Solution became the practice of mass murder. The Holocaust as mass shooting extended as far east into Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and Soviet Russia as German power reached. The German policy of total killing then spread back west into territories that the Germans had conquered before the final, fateful conflict with the USSR that began in 1941. The removal of institutions had been, however, irregular throughout western, central, and southern Europe; the Holocaust spread insofar as states were weakened, but no further. Where political structures held, they provided support and means to people who wished to help Jews.

where the state survived, where Jews still had their citizenship, they might be protected, as the Jewish POWs of the Western Allies were, as Danish Jews were, as native French and Italian Jews were, before their states were destroyed in 1944 – but where Germany destroyed state and citizenship, the Jews were destroyed along with them

if there was no war, none of this could have happened – Hitler and the Third Reich would have oppressed the Jews of Germany, stripped them of their status and their possessions, pressed them to leave until the world would not take them – perhaps he might have started the Holocaust on German soil, but there are always reasons to doubt

Even German bureaucracy did not kill Jews by itself. Even after it was overlaid and penetrated by Nazi structures for six years, German bureaucracy was not capable of murdering the Jews of Germany. German officials were never even instructed, in any final and dispositive way, as to who among German citizens counted as a Jew. At the infamous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, the issue seems to have consumed more time than any other; but it was not resolved, either then or later. This was not for lack of desire: The lawyers concerned believed that Jewish “blood” had to be cleansed “from the German and indeed the entire European bloodstream.” Such a thing could be undertaken only when neighboring European countries were invaded and their polities wrecked. German Jews died not because of bureaucratic precision in Germany but because of the destruction of bureaucracies in other countries. German Jews were not killed, with a very few exceptions, on the territory of prewar Germany. Instead they were extracted from Germany and deported to bureaucracy-free zones in the East, places where they would have been entirely safe before the war.

The killing sites of German Jews were places such as Łodż, Riga, and Minsk. If the Holocaust is recalled from the perspective of German Jews, as it usually is, these names evoke nothing but the horror of death amidst the unknown. In the minds of many Germans, and thus in many German sources, these cities are nothing more than improbable assemblages of subhumans in the colonial Lebensraum. …

[…]

Bureaucracies in Germany could kill Jews only when bureaucracy-free zones elsewhere had been established. The elimination of Polish statehood at the beginning of the war was thus crucial for the entire course of the Holocaust, since it was on occupied Polish territory, in Germany’s special colonial zone, that death facilities could be established. The Germans also considered creating a death facility in the occupied Soviet Union, in Mahileu. This was never undertaken; the crematoria designed for Mahileu were delivered instead to Auschwitz.

but even if Hitler had been able to carry out the Holocaust on German soil, if he had not gone to war, the millions of Jews who lived beyond Germany would have been saved

and there were a lot more of them

Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth is not a good book, but it’s heartbreaking one, and it has a profound lesson:

The dominant stereotype of Nazi Germany is of an all-powerful state that catalogued, repressed, and then exterminated an entire class of its own citizens. This was not how the Nazis achieved the Holocaust, nor how they even thought about it. The enormous majority of the victims of the Holocaust were not German citizens; Jews who were German citizens were much more likely to survive than Jews who were citizens of states that the Germans destroyed. The Nazis knew that they had to go abroad and lay waste to neighboring societies before they could hope to bring their revolution to their own. Had Hitler been assassinated in 1939, as he almost was, Nazi Germany would likely be remembered as one fascist state among others. Not only the Holocaust, but all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised. The German murder of five and a half million Jews, more than three million Soviet prisoners of war, and about a million civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations all took place in stateless zones.

Since the Holocaust is an axial event of modern history, its misunderstanding turns our minds in the wrong direction. When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary. On the political Right, the erosion of state power by international capitalism seems natural; on the political Left, rudderless revolutions portray themselves as virtuous. In the twenty-first century, anarchical protest movements join in a friendly tussle with global oligarchy, in which neither side can be hurt since both see the real enemy as the state. Both the Left and the Right tend to fear order rather than its destruction or absence. The common ideological reflex has been postmodernity: a preference for the small over the large, the fragment over the structure, the glimpse over the view, the feeling over the fact. On both the Left and the Right, postmodern explanations of the Holocaust tend to follow German and Austrian traditions of the 1930s. As a result, they generate errors that can make future crimes more rather than less likely.

[…]

When states are absent, rights—by any definition—are impossible to sustain. States are not structures to be taken for granted, exploited, or discarded, but are fruits of long and quiet effort. It is tempting but dangerous to gleefully fragment the state from the Right or knowingly gaze at the shards from the Left. Political thought is neither destruction nor critique, but rather the historically informed imagination of plural structures—a labor of the present that can preserve life and decency in the future. One plurality is between politics and science. […] Another plurality is between order and freedom: each depends upon the other, although each is different from the other. The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny. The claim that freedom is the lack of order must end in anarchy—which is nothing more than tyranny of a special kind. The point of politics is to keep multiple and irreducible goods in play, rather than yielding to some dream, Nazi or otherwise, of totality.