LRC3
Hey, check it out -- top billing at LRC:
I wrote this one last fall, but didn't submit it to Lew Rockwell until the other day, after I read Butler Shaffer's "The Hitler Icon" about the trouble Democratic Senator Richard Durbin is in because "he used the Hitler metaphor beyond the boundaries licensed by the gatekeepers of 'politically correct' rhetoric."
Durbin was referring to the Guantanamo Bay prison, of course. So who's mad at him? People who think he's not treating the Holocaust with sufficient gravity? People who deny the possibility that Americans could behave like Nazis? Probably both and more.
My friend Carolyn tells me that there's been more public outcry over the senator's Hitler reference than there has been to the treatment of the prisoners. Whether or not Durbin went overboard, I think Carolyn's point should be the real story.
I guess there's no reason to be surprised at any of this.
Ethical libertarians (and rationalists in general, I suppose) are always being accused of caring too much about abstractions. But what the Durbin brouhaha and the renewed anti-flag-burning idiocy demonstrate is that politically, people care more about their symbols than they do about anything else.
I think the real difference between them and us is (1) we are aware that our symbols are abstractions, (2) we know where and how the abstract connects back to the concrete, and (3) our abstractions are about principles, not affiliations.
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I wrote this one last fall, but didn't submit it to Lew Rockwell until the other day, after I read Butler Shaffer's "The Hitler Icon" about the trouble Democratic Senator Richard Durbin is in because "he used the Hitler metaphor beyond the boundaries licensed by the gatekeepers of 'politically correct' rhetoric."
Durbin was referring to the Guantanamo Bay prison, of course. So who's mad at him? People who think he's not treating the Holocaust with sufficient gravity? People who deny the possibility that Americans could behave like Nazis? Probably both and more.
My friend Carolyn tells me that there's been more public outcry over the senator's Hitler reference than there has been to the treatment of the prisoners. Whether or not Durbin went overboard, I think Carolyn's point should be the real story.
I guess there's no reason to be surprised at any of this.
Ethical libertarians (and rationalists in general, I suppose) are always being accused of caring too much about abstractions. But what the Durbin brouhaha and the renewed anti-flag-burning idiocy demonstrate is that politically, people care more about their symbols than they do about anything else.
I think the real difference between them and us is (1) we are aware that our symbols are abstractions, (2) we know where and how the abstract connects back to the concrete, and (3) our abstractions are about principles, not affiliations.
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