You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This is from Chapter 4 (Race and Slavery of Michael Fellman’s The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000). Of course I’ve written about this before, in GT 2005-01-03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery. I picked up Fellman’s book as another source to consult over the relevant sections of WikiPedia:Robert E. Lee. The passage contains some new material that I hadn’t been aware of before. It also contains a couple of minor factual errors; see below.

No historian has established how many slaves Lee actually owned before 1857, or how much income he derived from this source. The more general point is that to some extent he was personally involved in slave owning his whole adult life, as was the norm for better-off Southerners, even those who did not own plantations. Unlike many other slaveholders in Baltimore, for example, he did not manumit his personal slaves while he lived in that city and, indeed, recoiled at the thought of losing them. He carried them back with him when he returned to Virginia.

When his father-in-law died, late in 1857, Lee was left with the job of supervising Arlington and the various other Custis estates, perhaps as many as three others. Moreover, the Custis will specified that these slaves be freed by January 1, 1863 {sic–see below –RG}; therefore Lee had the dual tasks of managing these slaves in the interim and then freeing them, immersing him in the contradictions of owning, protecting, and exploiting people of a different and despised race. It was very likely that the Custis slaves knew that they were to be freed, which could have only made Lee’s efforts to succor, discipline, and extract labor from them in the meantime considerably more difficult.

Faced with this set of problems, Lee attempted to hire an overseer. He wrote to his cousin Edward C. Turner, I am no farmer myself & do not expect to be always here. I wish to get an energetic honest farmer, who while he will be considerate & kind to the negroes, will be firm & make them do their duty. Such help was difficult to find or to retain, and despite himself Lee had to take a leave of absence from the army for two years to become a slave manager himself, one who doubtless tried to combine kindness with firmness but whose experience was altogether unhappy. Any illusions he may have had about becoming a great planter, which apparently were at least intermittent, dissipated dramatically as he wrestled with workers who were far less submissive to his authority than were enlisted men in the army. The coordination and discipline central to Lee’s role in the army proved less compatible with his role as manager of slaves than he must have expected.

Sometimes, the carrot and the stick both worked ineffectively. On May 30, 1858, Lee wrote his son Rooney, I have had some trouble with some of the people. Reuben, Parks & Edward, in the beginning of the previous week, rebelled against my authority–refused to obey my orders, & said they were as free as I was, etc., etc.–I succeeded in capturing them & lodged them in jail. They resisted till overpowered & called upon the other people to rescue them. Enlightened masters in the upper South often sent their rebellious slaves to jail, where the sheriff would whip them, presumably dispassionately, rather than apply whippings themselves. Whatever happened in the Alexandria jail after this event, less than two months later Lee sent these three men down under lock and key to the Richmond slave trader William Overton Winston, with instructions to keep them in jail until Winston could hire them out to good & responsible men in Virginia, for a term lasting until December 31, 1862, by which time the Custis will stipulated that they be freed. Lee also noted to Winston, in a rather unusual fashion, I do not wish these men returned here during the usual holy days, but to be retained until called for. He hoped to quarantine his remaining slaves against these three men, to whom the deprivation of the customary Christmas visits would be a rather cruel exile, though well short, of course, of being sold to the cotton fields of the Deep South. At the same time, Lee sent along three women house slaves to Winston, adding, I cannot recommend them for honesty. Lee was packing off the worst malcontents. More generally, as he wrote in exasperation to Rooney, who was managing one of the other Custis estates at the time, so few of the Custis slaves had been broken to hard work in their youth that it would be accidental to fall in with a good one.

This sort of snide commentary about inherent slave dishonesty and laziness was the language with which Lee expressed his racism; anything more vituperative and crudely expressed would have diminished his gentlemanliness. Well-bred men expressed caste superiority with detached irony, not with brutal oaths about niggers.

The following summer, Lee conducted another housecleaning of recalcitrant slaves, hiring out six more to lower Virginia. Two, George Wesley and Mary Norris {sic–see below –RG}, had absconded that spring but had been recaptured in Maryland as they tried to reach freedom in Pennsylvania.

As if this were not problem enough, on June 24, 1859, the New York Tribune published two letters that accused Lee–while calling him heir to the Father of this free country–of cruelty to Wesley and Norris {sic–see below –RG}. They had not proceeded far [north] before their progress was intercepted by some brute in human form, who suspected them to be fugitives. They were transported back, taken in a barn, stripped, and the men [sic] received thirty and nine lashes each [sic], from the hands of the slave-whipper … when he refused to whip the girl … Mr. Lee himself administered the thirty and nine lashes to her. They were then sent to the Richmond jail. Lee did not deign to respond to this public calumny. All he said at that time was to Rooney: The N.Y. Tribune has attacked me for the treatment of your grandfather’s slaves, but I shall not reply. He has left me an unpleasant legacy. Remaining in dignified silence then, Lee continued to be agonized by this accusation for the rest of his life. Indeed, in 1866, when the Baltimore American reprinted this old story, Lee replied in a letter that might have been intended for publication, the statement is not true; but I have not thought proper to publish a contradiction, being unwilling to be drawn into a newspaper discussion, believing that those who know me would not credit it; and those who do not, would care nothing about it. With somewhat less aristocratic detachment, Lee wrote privately to E. S. Quirk of San Fransisco about this slander … There is not a word of truth in it. … No servant, soldier, or citizen that was ever employed by me can with truth charge me with bad treatment.

That Lee personally beat Mary Norris seems extremely unlikely, and yet slavery was so violent that it cast all masters in the roles of potential brutes. Stories such as this had been popularized earlier in the 1850s by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and they stung even the most restrained of masters, who understood that kindness alone would have been too indulgent, and corporal punishment (for which Lee substituted the euphemism firmness) was an intrinsic and necessary part of slave discipline. Although it was supposed to be applied only in a calm and rational manner, overtly physical domination of slaves, unchecked by law, was always brutal and potentially savage.

–Michael Fellman (2000), The Making of Robert E. Lee. New York: Random House. 64–67

No servant, soldier, or citizen that was ever employed by Robert E. Lee could with truth charge him with bad treatment. Except for having enslaved them.

The letters to the Trib are online at Letter from A Citizen (dated June 21, 1859) and Some Facts That Should Come to Light (dated June 19, 1859). Wesley Norris told his own story in 1866 after the war; it was printed in the National Anti-Slavery Standard on April 14, 1866.

Although Lee acted as if the will provided for him to keep the slaves until the last day of 1862, what Custis’s will actually said was And upon the legacies to my four granddaughters being paid, and my estates that are required to pay the said legacies, being clear of debts, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executors in such manner as to my executors may seem most expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease. (Meaning that at the very latest the slaves should have been manumitted by October 10, 1862, the fifth anniversary of Custis’s death.) Fellman also seems to have misread the primary sources, which state that three slaves tried to leave in 1859 — Wesley Norris, Mary Norris, and a cousin whose name I haven’t yet been able to find. Mary and Wesley were the children of Sally Norris. It’s possible that Fellman misread a reference to a George, on the one hand, and Wesley and Mary Norris, on the other; in which case the third might have been George Clarke or George Parks. I’ll let you know if I find out more later.

Further reading

• GT 205-06-26: Lost Causes
• GT 2005-01-03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves and defended slavery

(Via Philobiblon (2006-02-13): Weep for Australia. Weep.)

There’s been some debate in the Ozzie parliament lately over abortion, mostly focusing on abortifacient drugs, and whether to approve the use of Mifepristone (RU-486) in particular. On Tuesday, MP Danna Vale decided that it was time that the real issue in this debate — how many Australians are Muslim and how many are Christian — got a hearing.

AUSTRALIA could become a Muslim nation within 50 years because we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence, a Government backbencher says.

The former minister Danna Vale is one of five Coalition women proposing an amendment to the private member’s bill that seeks to remove ministerial veto over abortion drugs such as RU486. At a news conference called by the five yesterday, she said it was important politicians considered the ramifications for the community and the nation we become in the future.

I have read ... comments by a certain imam from the Lakemba Mosque [who] actually said that Australia is going to be a Muslim nation in 50 years’ time, said Mrs Vale, MP for the southern Sydney seat of Hughes.

I didn’t believe him at the time. But ... look at the birthrates and you look at the fact that we are aborting ourselves almost out of existence by 100,000 abortions every year ... You multiply that by 50 years. That’s 5 million potential Australians we won’t have here.

… The Liberal member for the Sydney seat of Greenway, Louise Markus, said no one wants as many abortions as there are now. The other two women supporting the amendment are the South Australian Liberal Trish Draper and the Queensland National De-Anne Kelly.

— Stephanie Peatling, Sydney Morning Herald (2006-02-14): Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP

In an unexpected development, Ms. Vale, Ms. Markus, Ms. Draper, and Ms. Kelly. did not volunteer to bear the 5,000,000 potential [non-Muslim] Australians that they think it’s so overwhelmingly important to bring into the world.

But there’s always the advantage of sitting in Parliament: if you’re unable or unwilling to volunteer your own womb for the sake of the demographic cause, you can always volunteer other women’s wombs — whether the other women like it or not.

For example, by using bureaucratic red tape and parliamentary stall tactics to force women not to buy abortifacient drugs when they want them.

The Senate has already voted to remove the minister’s veto, but if the amendment succeeded, it would have to be returned to the Senate to be voted on again.

Debate on the bill will begin in the House of Representatives today. Jackie Kelly said she was confident her amendment would be successful.

Another amendment is being proposed by the Queensland Liberal Andrew Laming.

But members are understood to be concerned that the amendment would mean Parliament would be forced into a de facto debate on abortion every time an application was received.

— Stephanie Peatling, Sydney Morning Herald (2006-02-14): Abortion will lead to Muslim nation: MP

Nay-sayers might call that forced pregnancy; they might even cast aspersions on the high-minded public spiritedness of volunteering other women to bear the children you’re not willing to, and making them do it when they’re not willing to. But you could also think of it as a sort of Reproductive Eminent Domain — a sort of polite request that women who don’t want to be pregnant put aside their selfish interests and petty little lives for a while in the name of a Christian Australia. A request which will, of course, be enforced if necessary. All for the good of The People, of course.

Pro-choice feminism is the radical notion that a woman’s uterus is not public property.

Around the web in the past couple weeks. Some of the news that’s fit to link.

• Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children takes on professional anti-feminist Caitlin Flanagan (for background reading, see the profile in Ms.) and her latest foray into the teensploitation genre — a hand-wringing and voyeuristic article about a non-existent teenage oral sex craze amongst our Troubled Suburban Youth, and touches on feminism, amnesiac nostalgia, privileged suburban angst, and Judy Blume in the process.

  Thinking back on my own privileged adolescence, I can remember girls who performed oral sex on boys on a more or less casual basis, girls who denied rumors that they did the above, girls who did it with their boyfriends and related the experience the next morning with a mix of panic and excitement, girls who didn’t think it was a big deal, girls who thought it was a big deal, girls who talked about it loudly at lunchtime and did seductive poses with every potentially phallic food product in sight (including CapriSun straws and granola bars) but had no more than a vague idea what it actually involved, girls who thought it was the grossest thing ever, EVER, oh my God, girls who had no qualms about doing it (it in italics) but thought oral sex was unnatural, girls who tried to freak out self-consciously innocent girls like me by saying, Luke Lepinski is SO CUTE. Don’t you just want to put his DICK in your MOUTH? and then laughing like maniacs at my genuine bafflement, Christian girls who plugged their ears and shrieked if you tried to talk about any kind of genital-related program activity, even in the most abstract and theoretical language, girls who had heard you could get pregnant that way (and might have a cousin who knew someone who did,) and myself. My opinions on the matter were all based on my strong and growing aversion to boys, and were not particularly well-formed, nor did I have occasion to put them into practice. I recite this autobiographical litany as a way of illustrating the complex nature of that steady decline in morals called growing up, and to suggest that gnashing one’s teeth about the unexpected depravities of our formerly delicate rosebud-like daughters may not be the best response thereto. What is the best response? I don’t know, but Caitlin Flanagan is a bit too eager to put down Planned Parenthood for its attempts to give sane and sensible advice on the matter ….

  — Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  … and don’t miss the response to Flanagan’s closing remarks — an employment of the old Double Standard so overt and so uncritical that it leaves no avenues of criticism open other than something stodgy like rank sexism:

  Frankly, I’d rather have a daughter who gives out a few undeserved blowjobs of her own volition than a son who thinks sex is his right and privilege as a Hot-Blooded American Male. Oops, there I go slandering men with my insane expectation that they take responsibility for their own desires! Damn insidious radical feminist influence! What won’t it disfigure with its toxic fumes of seething, sulfurous hatred?

  — Hopelessly Midwestern (2006-02-03): Petting =/= Popularity: A Shocking Look At The Sex Lives Of Our Children

  Read the whole thing

• Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence gives a shout-out to a new program for rehabilitating men who batter women, called Resolve to Abolish Violence Everywhere. The plan? Stop focusing on anger management, and start tackling male entitlement:

  What’s exciting about this approach to combating domestic abuse is that it tackles the institutionalization of male dominance, looking at the offender’s action within a larger system of violence. Women’s eNews reports, Staffers [in Austin] say this program assumes that violence arises from a decision based on deeply-held beliefs of male dominance, not a flash of uncontrollable emotion. Whereas most anger management classes are just three or four weeks long, this program works with the offender for an entire year after his release.

  — Sarah Goldstein at Broadsheet (2006-02-03): New hope in the fight against domestic violence

  Of course, there’s no magic bullet for ending battery, and this program, like any others, has limitations to worry about (like the institutional limitations imposed on any program run by cops, or the fact that it only catches men once they’ve already tortured one or more women to the point that it reached the criminal justice system). But insofar as there are going to be court-mandated rehabilitation programs, this is certainly a step forward, and I wish them the best.

  Read the whole thing.

• Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts points out a story from this month’s Prospect that will make you want to tear your hair out and then run out in a blind rage and bury the entire psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex under a library of Women and Madness and the collected works of Thomas Szasz.

  But then tragedy strikes. The drug that works also makes her fat. This a horror the doctors find intolerable. Her beauty is destroyed. So they take her off that drug because in a patriarchy a hot girl cannot be fat. So Nia immediately goes nuts again because the new drug, though it does not make her fat, also doesn't work. She is nuts again, but at least she's still a babe. Whew. That was close.

  But she is so nuts that, after a month of hell, doctors reluctantly put her back on the fat drug. The crazy part is that Nia doesn't give a crap about being fat. She's happy as a clam to get rid of the voices. Yet the doctors assume that, because she isn't crying herself to sleep every night over her lost beauty, she isn't really getting well at all. Any 17-year-old in her right mind would be bulimic and wanna slice herself up with razors under these circumstances, right?

  — Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy (2006-02-07): To Be Hot And Nuts

  Selections from the first five or six comments: Oh give me a fucking break, I don't know what to do besides shout obscenities. Good fucking god, This makes me so mad I can't see straight. That last paragraph … is insulting in about 10 THOUSAND different ways and makes me want to slap the authors and Nia's dr's repeatedly about the head and face, etc. That’s just about right.

  Read the whole damn thing. But only on an empty stomach. Then write a letter to the editor.

• Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege looks at the politics of housework, as one of the arenas of in which anti-feminists love to point out how women themselves are deputized as the primary enforcers of sexist standards. Shockingly, she finds that this looks more like classic male privilege than it does some kind of self-imposed drudgery that women have ended up with by being naturally the Fairer Sex.

  You see this sort of thing a lot, where women are judged by a different standard than men, but the appointed judges are technically other women, so the whole thing can be written off as women being weird instead of women trying to adapt to a patriarchal system. That way, not only can men benefit from the thing women are supposed to do to fit into a standard, they have the added bonus of acting like they are simply above such female nonsense. In the case of housework, men can benefit from having a clean home without either working or appearing so uncool as to care if the house is clean, since the work is done by invisible female hands.

  … It's true–make-up, shoes, exercise, dieting, the whole routine is developed by and enforced by women while being sneered at all too often by the very men the entire routine is developed to benefit. The complaint is not so much that women do all these things, of course. It's that men might accidentally be exposed to these things; in the good old days, I suppose, women worked harder at the conspiracy to shield men from having to perceive their own privilege. (For a really great example of this, read Pink Think by Lynn Peril–she excerpts an advice book to women that suggests that women should rise before their husbands to do their make-up and preserve the illusion that they never look any different.)

  … That's the basic argument behind choice feminism, and it's whipped out to explain away every instance of women's second class status, from breast implants to domestic service. And that's the argument that EricP is resorting to when explaining away the difference between expectations on men and women for level of cleanliness. It's easy to look at how women are expected to police ourselves for adhering to a patriachal standard and say that it's our fault. But it's not the cops that are the ones to look at when the laws themselves are suspect.

  — Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-02): Vacuums, internalized sexism and yes, that invisibility of privilege

  Read the whole thing. I’d also like to add a note from Andrea Dworkin that I came across the same day that I read Amanda’s post. This is from In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson, in Life and Death (41–50):

  While race-hate is expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare.

  –Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death, pp. 49–50

  Maybe one way to gloss the essential goal of feminism is to create a platform from which that private empathy can erupt into public solidarity and action.

• BB at Den of the Biting Beaver (2006-02-10): Friday Fun with Sitemeter offers a guided tour to the kind of Google searches that you get when you run a radical feminist anti-pornography website.

• Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire (2006-02-03): Tarzan’s Burden mentions Hollywood popcult’s mutilation of the character of Tarzan, and points to an interesting four-part essay by F. X. Blisard on race relations in the Tarzan novels and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ work in general — fairly enlightened for Burroughs' era, it turns out, and far superior to Hollywood's treatment. Read the whole thing.

• Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With… takes another look at Jules Verne, his literary accomplishments, his prescience, the way his politics have been excised from bowdlerized English translations until very recently, and what those politics were (in short, a mixed bag):

  Verne’s novels have contrary trends: support for national liberation movements such as the Irish and Polish, but also a strong pacifist streak; paternalism toward colonial peoples, but a hatred of slavery and imperialism (especially British); sympathy for utopian experiments, but resentment toward state power; affirmation of free enterprise, but assaults on big capitalism (especially American); a celebration of loyalty and community, but sympathy for militant individualism.

  — Ken Gregg (2006-02-08) at CLASSical Liberalism: It Usually Begins With…

  Read the whole thing.

• media girl (2006-02-10): Spying on Americans is for kids! takes a look at the NSA’s ongoing attempts at cute, furry cartoon outreach to children, which is either a very funny comment on bureaucratic rationality or else a daring new form of avant-garde surrealist theater.

• The Dominion (2006-01-16): CBC’s true colors discovers that the government-owned CBC is solicitous of the party in power in the government to the point of altering their logo to match the party color scheme. Surprised?

• Paganarchy (2006-02-04): Serious Organised Crime? Ha Ha Ha! — a squad of clowns takes to the street to protest restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly around Parliament, and a copper stops them from entering Parliament to talk with their MPs:

  Our first port of call was to visit our MPs in the House Of Commons. Just through the security gate and whoa — the duty sergeant stopped us from going in. Alas, we were deemed not dignified enough by a copper calling himself the chief arbiter of style.

  As opposed to the grave dignity of a copper who has appointed himself the chief arbiter of style for the House of Commons and taken it upon himself to make sure the dress of visitors is up to his sartorial standards.

  Read the whole thing.

• The North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists posts links to left-anarchist debate over the iterative Five Year Plan participatory economics.

• Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know? looks at mutualist anarchism, worker self-management, and the knowledge problems that afflict corporate as well as government bureaucracies. (Yeah, I know it’s from last September. But it’s good, and I just found it in the past couple weeks. Also, you may find it relevant in connection with the debate over Five Year Planning by iterated collective bargaining between the deputies of several massive federations in an appropriately participatory bureaucratic forum.)

  As Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3) of the Movement of the Libertarian Left said somewhere (I can’t find it–little help?) organizational inefficiency starts when you have one supervisor taking orders from another supervisor: that is, the point at which hierarchy replaces market contracting.

  … The central problem is that, since the costs of tracking the results of individual decisions becomes prohibitively expensive in a large organization, market incentives must be replaced by administrative ones. Milton Friedman pointed out long ago that people do a better job of spending money on themselves than on other people, and do better spending their own money than other people’s money. That’s the standard, and correct, libertarian argument for why government is so inefficient. It’s spending other people’s money on other people; and unlike a private firm not only can it not go out of business for inefficiency, it gets rewarded with more money. Well, the very same incentive problems apply to the decision-maker in a corporate hierarchy. He’s a steward of other people’s money, and the costs and benefits of any decision he makes can be determined only badly, if at all. Unlike a self-employed actor whose relations with others are mediated by the market, he is motivated by purely administrative incentives.

  — Kevin Carson at the UnCapitalist Journal (2005-09-22): What Can Bosses Know?

• Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek (2006-02-09): We Don’t Make Anything Anymore takes on the factory protectionists over the state of industry in America. The worriers like to complain that we don’t make anything anymore. America is being hollowed out. Soon we’re going to be left doing one another’s laundry. Boy, will we be poor then. The problem is an old one: the heavy-industry hand-wringers are measuring the inputs, not the outputs. When you look at the stuff actually being produced, rather than the number of people employed or the size of the pile of resources invested in producing it, you’ll find that we’re making more stuff than ever. (I’d add that there are lots of reasons to worry about what happens to heavy-industry workers as they lose their jobs. And that Roberts’ summary and selective swipes at the unions are unwarranted. But the basic point is well-taken. Our aims should not be to prop up an elaborate industrial make-work program.)

• David Friedman, Ideas (2006-02-09): Unschooling: The Advantage of the Real World: One point raised in comments on my recent unschooling post was that you sometimes have to do things you don’t like, a lesson we can teach our children by making them study things they are not currently interested in studying. It is an interesting point, and I think reflects a serious error. Friedman challenges would-be educators to help students expose themselves to the natural consequences of effort and fortitude, rather than imposing make-work punishments and rewards on them in order to teach them a lesson where the incentives bear no natural relation to the task at hand. Read the whole thing.

• Tim Bray, ongoing (2006-02-10) asks, What Do GNU and Linux Mean? in a free software world where the user experience is (praise the Good) further and further removed from the technical wotsits of the kernel, where Firefox, OpenOffice, and GNU software provide an increasingly standard software environment, and where the choice between GNU/OpenSolaris and GNU/Linux is going to be a strictly technical choice with basically no impact on the end-user environment? What should you even call what’s emerging? Tim suggests some deliberate provocations: So you've got the combination of a Solaris or Linux kernel with a mish-mosh of GNU, Mozilla, OpenOffice and other random software, and calling it Linux or Solaris is misleading. I think Sun could legally ship something like this under the name GNU/Unix. Which would be concise, descriptive, accurate, and funny. (Because GNU stands for Gnu's Not Unix and Solaris, after all, is.) I think maybe we should just call it GNU, and encourage ordinary users to leave the worries about what comes after the slash to people who have reasons to care about kernels.

• August Pollak (2006-02-08): As a white guy, did you just throw up right now? and Mikhaela Reed (2006-02-09): The so-called conservative Doonesbury … mention Chris Muir’s imaginary Black friend and the excellent opportunity that having one provides white cartoonists to lecture African-Americans about how they should think of themselves in early 21st century America. A Touch of Ego offers some background context on Muir and Day By Day. Amanda at Pandagon (2006-02-08) calls for fixes to help Chris Muir write a funny strip. My favorite repair job is from Ampersand at Alas (2006-02-09).

• Claire Wolfe (2006-02-13): Back from the meditation workshop reviews the good, the bad, and the ugly of her two-week long meditation retreat in silence. One of the good things about the retreat was the distance it allowed from the hot air of professional blowhards that passes for News and Views these days: The omnipresent Information Flow also became irrelevant. I worried at times about what was happening to Steve Kubby and Cory Maye, but could have cared less about the monotonous, inevitable sturm und drang that passes for Vital News. Funny, too. They call it news, but the same rot was being broadcast and podcast and web-posted when I left and when I returned. Nothing new about the news. … Time to live. Time to think deeply, rather than think in quick brain bytes between rushed emails and frequent checks of LewRockwell.com, Rational Review, Google News, and TCF. Read the whole thing.

• Carnival is two weeks from today. In honor of the liturgical occasion, be sure to read up on the latest weblog Carnivals. In particular, the inaugural editions of the Radical Women of Color Carnival and the Big Fat Carnival are up at Reappropriate and Alas, A Blog respectively. Not to mention the eighth Carnival of the Feminists at Gendergeek. Enjoy!

Let’s suppose, arguendo, that there exist some individual Palestinians who had identifiable parcels of land in Israel, or in the Occupied Territories, stolen from them, during the 1948 war, or the 1967 war and the occupation that followed it. Considered as a matter of justice — without any claims as to how far the hypothetical represents reality, or bears on the best way to solve the diplomatic conflicts between the state of Israel and its various rival states and quasi-states — should those Palestinians be able to demand that their old parcels of land be returned to them? And if they do, and the parcels aren’t returned on their demand, are they justified in using proportional violence, or designating others to use proportional violence on their behalf, to evict the trespassing occupants currently on their land? In comments at No Treason, Stefan suggested that they would be, and Tim Starr dissented:

Assuming for the sake of argument that some of the land in Israel actually was stolen from individual Palestinians in the Israeli War of Independence (there was absolutely no general policy to do so, see Efraim Karsh’s Fabricating Israeli History on this), I would disagree with Stefan that this fact actually would justify forcible removal of the Israelis from that land and its return to its Palestinian owners.

For one thing, compensation in lieu of returning the property may be more appropriate. Also, is there no statute of limitations for land theft? Furthermore, a good many Jews used to live in Islamic countries that expelled them and confiscated their property — how come that is never brought up by those who want land returned to Palestinians by Israel? Do those Jews not have the right to have their property returned, or to receive compensation for it? Also, what about compensation to the families of all the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism?

In fact, Israel is the only country in the Middle East which HAS returned land that it had conquered. Israel returned the Sinai Desert to Egypt as part of its peace treaty with Sadat, and returned land to Jordan as part of its peace treaty with Jordan. Israel also relinquished control of southern Lebanon and the Gaza strip, even though it faced a serious increase in the scale and frequenty of terrorist attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas as a result. Israel has also inflicted ethnic cleansing upon itself twice, once when it returned the Sinai and again when it relinquished Gaza, making sure those territories were nice and judenrein when the Islamo-Nazis took them over.

Israel has also offered tens of billions of dollars in compensation to the Palestinians for any injustices they might have suffered at Israeli hands, but the Palestinians have never offered any compensation to Israel for killing Israeli civilians as a means of achieving Palestinian political goals.

Instead, each of these concessions has been taken as a sign of weakness. Israeli land for peace deals w/ compensation have been taken as invitation to Intifadeh; Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza have been taken as invitations to rocket attacks from the territory Israel de-occupied.

In short, Israel has bent over backwards for peace in the Middle East, and the Islamo-Nazis and their international sympathizers on the commie-left and nazi-right have merely replied to each effort by saying that Israel wasn’t bending over far enough.

Comment by Tim Starr — 2/7/2006 @ Feb 07, 06 | 4:58 pm

I objected to the details of Starr’s claims — arguing that there was no reason to suggest that either the perpetrators or disinterested third parties had a right to determine whether land or some pile of money was the appropriate form of compensation for the theft, and that that is properly left up to the victims to decide. And further that Starr’s attempts to dismiss or dicker down the claims of these hypothetical Palestinian victims of land theft on the basis of later terrorism committed by other Palestinians against Israelis, amounted to nothing more than a change of subject, and an exercise in shameless tribal collectivism from beginning to end.

Starr objected to my objections; this is rapidly spiralling way out of the range of the comments space at a [No Treason post][] intended primarily to point out a historical gaffe in an article on Ireland and Ulster at LewRockwell.com. So I bring it here. Here’s Starr’s response to my first objection:

While I agree that it is not primarily up to the beneficiaries because of their obvious conflict of interest, I disagree that it is primarily up to the victims. Victims are usually biased in their own favor, so they also have a conflict of interest.

Disinterested third parties are precisely who ought to be the judge of such things, which is why arbitration by such parties is advocated by anarcho-capitalists like David Friedman and myself. The way that disinterested third-party arbitrators know what the best remedy is for such offenses is by hearing the evidence on all sides of a case.

There’s a perfectly good reason why (genuinely) disinterested third parties should serve as arbiters in disputes in a free society. People in a dispute may be mistaken, or dishonest, about the facts as to whether or not they are victims of aggression (so disinterested third parties may come to the right verdict where the disputants wouldn’t). That’s fine; three cheers for disinterested arbiters. But there’s no question as to the verdict here, or as to proportionality: we’re presuming (arguendo) that the individual Palestinians in question are, and can prove to honest arbiters that they are, victims of land theft.

The question is about the appropriate form of compensation. There may, again, be a place for disinterested mediators if you think that someone is mistaken, or dishonest, about the level or kind of compensation that would be fit for the injury — suppose I knocked a baseball through your window, and you demanded $1,000,000 compensatory damages because of the sentimental value you attached to it. But this is not a case like that. If I steal something from you, then the presumption is that the best kind of compensation is the return of what I stole (plus whatever damages I may owe for the duration of the theft). There are ways that the presumption can be overridden in favor of some equivalent level of compensation paid out in some other good: if the item is fungible without a loss in value to you — suppose I stole $500 from you and you didn’t care whether you got back the specific bills I took from you, or some other bills, or a check — or if the item is no longer distinctly identifiable — suppose I stole a chunk that you took from the Berlin Wall and added it to my collection of indistinguishable Berlin Wall chunks — or if the item itself can’t be returned without inflicting a disproportionate burden on me above and beyond the loss of the stolen good — suppose I stole a bottle of pills from you that I need to take in order to survive, but that you value for purely sentimental reasons. But we’re not looking at a case like that here. There’s no question of proportionality: if you steal my land, then losing the stolen land is not a disproportionate burden to bear. We’re supposing that the parcels of land are identifiable by the specific victims. And if the victims were willing to take the money as compensation instead of the land, then there wouldn’t be any issue at all: they’d just take the money.

So the only question at hand is: which of two proportional forms of compensation — getting your own land back or getting money back in return for your land — is the better form of compensation for a proven victim of land theft? Starr seems to suggest that disinterested third parties have a right to set terms not only as to the verdict, and as to the limits of proportionality in compensation, but also as to which of these two forms of proportional compensation the victim can demand. I reject this completely, because the aim of justice here is restoration, and I reject the notion that third party arbiters can overrule the victim’s own judgment about what best restores them to their proper state as long as the judgment is within the bounds of proportionality. I reject it for roughly for the same reasons that I reject the confiscation of property through eminent domain, even if monetary compensation is paid after the fact. If the monetary compensation offered isn’t enough to make the victim freely turn over her legitimate demands to her own land, then it isn’t enough to satisfy the just demand that she be put back into her own.

So let me suggest to Starr that there are only three possible grounds here on which you could suggest that anybody other than the victims themselves has a right to impose terms as to whether or not individual Palestinian victims of land theft can demand their own land back, or get some other appropriate form of compensation. (1) You could claim that getting the land back is (potentially, at least) disproportionate compensation for having the land stolen from you. But why? Or (2) you could claim that, even though the land is within the range of proportionate compensation, disinterested third parties have reliable epistemic access to the real worth of the land to the victim, independent of, and even overruling, the victim’s own judgment as manifest in her decision not to accept the money as satisfactory compensation. If so, then you could just pay them out the equivalent of the real worth of the land in money, and even if the victim wouldn’t agree that that’s satisfactory, you’d know that that pays off the debt. But how would you know this? (And are you willing to excuse eminent domain seizures on the same grounds?) Or (3) you could argue that the worth to the victim is just irrelevant to the appropriate level of compensation, even if it falls within the bounds of proportionality. But why? What else would you use to determine the injury? What the land is worth to somebody else? Why should the victim care about that? Why should we?

Finally, I should note that this is all in response to Stefan’s hypothetical claim that where there are individual victims of Palestinian land theft, they are justified in using proportional force (or having others use proportional force on their behalf) to make the current inhabitants vacate the stolen land that they are occupying. Whatever form of compensation might be the appropriate outcome of a fair arbitration process, it is important to note that there simply is not a fair arbitration process in existence, and there is absolutely no credible reason to suggest that the Israeli government — whatever its merits — or the governments of various world powers — whatever their merits — or the govenments of the world assembled in the United Nations — whatever their merits — constitute a disinterested third party in this dispute. Given the lack of a substantial arbitration process to participate in, the rights of self-defense revert to their original holders: the aggrieved. So I don’t see how this answered Stefan’s point at all.

In response to my charge of tribalism, Starr replies:

As for my alleged collectivism, where are the Palestinians who are merely innocent victims of Israel, who have never supported any anti-Israeli terrorism? Where is the Palestinian peace faction? Where is the Palestinian support for the legitimate rights of Israelis to live in peace in at least some of the land of Israel? Where can these Palestinians be found, either within the occupied territories themselves or elsewhere, outside the control of either Israel, Hamas, or any of the Arab governments of the world? If there are any such Palestinians, they are so few as to be virtually non-existent and completely irrelevant to this subject.

But what are you asking for? (1) A list of individual Palestinians who have never directly participated in terrorist operations against peaceful Israelis, or (2) a list of individual Palestinians who have never said or believed that terrorism against peaceful Israelis is justified? In either case (a) there are plenty, and (b) it’s bloody well irrelevant, for reasons I’ll mention below. But if (2) is all you mean, this is a plain demand for tyranny; the suggestion would be simply that Palestinians can be robbed of their land — or rather the robbery of their land can be retroactively justified or excused — by the fact that, after the fact, they came to have evil thoughts. Evil thoughts don’t justify violent force, either before or after the fact. The initiation of violence does.

Starr continues:

Rad Geek also seems to have missed the relevance of Arab/Palestinian offenses against Israelis to the question of Israeli offenses against the Palestinians. The relevance is that the compensation claims tend to cancel each other out and, to the extent that Palestinian offenses against Israelis have been worse than Israeli offenses against Palestinians, it is the Palestinians who have an outstanding debt of compensation which they owe to Israel.

But this is overtly tribalist rot. Israel does not owe a goddamned thing to Palestinians, and Palestinians (let alone Arab/Palestinians, whatever the hell that is intended to mean) don’t owe a goddamned thing to Israel. Ambiguous-collectives do not offend, do not owe, and do not compensate, because they do not act at all.

The question is whether individual Palestinians, not participants in an Arab/Palestinian hive mind, have actionable claims against individual Israelis, not cells in the corporate body of Israel. Suppose we’re talking about someone who was actually materially involved in terrorism against innocent Israelis. If X has land stolen from her by Y, and then X goes on to do unjustified violence to Z — who, by your stipulation is an innocent who had nothing to do with the theft — then that does not cancel out Y‘s obligations to restore X‘s property. Even if Y and Z and happen to be members of the same ethnic group, or subjects claimed by the same self-proclaimed tribal collective-bargaining agent. What it does is create a new obligation that X has to Z. It may be the case, under some imaginable set of circumstances that that obligation from X to Z should be paid to Z out of the compensation that Y pays X. But it certainly provides no justification whatsoever for Y to be left in possession of property that she (ex hypothesi) stole and never did anything to earn. Now let’s suppose that we are talking about a Palestinian who hasn’t ever been materially involved in terrorism against innocent Israelis. Then what happened is that W has a claim to land stolen from her by Y and X unjustifiably attacked Z, where W and X both happen to be Arab/Palestinians (whatever that means) and Y and Z both happen to be Israelis. But it ought to be obvious that in that case X‘s attack on Z has no effect at all on Y‘s obligations towards X. No matter what the tribal affiliations, or citizenship status, of W, X, Y, and Z happen to be.

Starr, however, has made no attempts at all to pick out victims and perpetrators as individuals, or to sort out the individual obligations that those people have towards each other. He has only recited the evils committed by some ill-defined grouping of the heads of Arab states and self-appointed “representatives” or “defenders” of the Palestinians as a people, have committed, and then (attributing responsibility for those crimes to the ambiguous-collective of Palestinians or Arab/Palestinians and identifying the victim as the ambiguous collective of Israel), suggested that this somehow has some bearing on the compensation that is owed between individual Palestinians individual Israelis. That’s why I accused Starr’s comment of being an exercise in tribal collectivism. And why I stand by that charge in light of his clarifications.

As for the peace process, like Stefan, I’m not interested (here) in solving the diplomatic conflict between the state of Israel and the quasi-state in the Palestinian Authority, or between Israel and its various rival states in the region. I’m interested only in determining what it is that justice requires for individual Palestinians and individual Israelis, and have mentioned no other topic. And in that connection I couldn’t possibly be motivated to care a whit about the claims of the PLO, Fatah, Yasser Arafat (!) or the Arab League (!!) to speak for and serve as representatives of, leaders of, or collective-bargaining agents for, all Palestinians everywhere.

Quick quiz. Here’s a selection from an interview with novelist Danyel Smith:

cg: The writing style of [More Like Wrestling] is absolutely unique, definitely daring and I remember being a little surprised that it made it into print.

DS: For that I have to thank my editor, Chris Jackson. He is extraordinary. My agents really stuck by me as well. They sent MLW out September 10, 2001, if you can believe that. Three or four houses were interested, good houses, but I mean, no one was jumping though hoops to acquire this book. This is my first time saying this on the record, so I want to phrase this carefully I had lunch with this one editor, she took me to this fancy restaurant, and she told me I had to make a decision whether or not I was writing for black people or white people. And that I needed to have clearer heroes and heroines in the book.

Your assignment: before you follow the link to read the whole interview, see whether you can accurately predict the race of the novelist based on the fact that an editor subjected her to this kind of question.

I’ll bet you can.

(Link thanks to Kameron Hurley @ Brutal Women (2006-02-03): You Need to Make A Decision.)

Previous lessons

• GT 2006-01-26: Whiteness studies 101: Ethnicity