TAYLOR KINGSTON"S FABRICATIONS
The level of Taylor Kingston's advocacy, which we
have preserved in what follows, speaks and adjusts for
itself. Our comments in what follows will be placed
in multiple brackets.
Here is the Kingston approach to discussion:
he equates our evidently jocose allusions to the
personal, specific fates of three individuals --
Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin -- in the event World War I had
not continued until a totalitarian coup d'etat swept
them to power in Russia, with a broader, inherently
more productive discussion of how WWI was the
fountainhead for the mass annihilation policies of the
20th century.
Another typical bit of our Kingston's rhetoric is
the bit about this writer not being able to read
because we mistakenly attributed to him a comment
written by Sam Sloan. As noted before, this writer
does not receive every posting in Malaysia that
apparently appears on screens Stateside. Sometimes,
earlier messages arrive after later ones. We must
occasionally guess the identity of a poster of a given
paragraph. Our track record is excellent in this
regard, though not perfect. When we stumble, there
is a Kingston to guffaw.
In what follows we examine the analytical, if
that is quite the word, technique of Mr. Kingston and
note either his discouraging lack of background
in the subject under discussion or his rank venality.
This writer has previously explained that World
War I unhinged the Western world, leading directly to
the Bolshevik uprising and to the unsettled society of
Weimar Germany after the abdication of Wilhelm II.
It has been famously said that "war is the
health of the state," and the Great War was viewed by
statists everywhere as a Satansend. In Germany and
England, the respective laborite lefts sup****ted the
war in the spirit of what was then called "field grey
socialism." Namely, rich and poor are on far more
equal terms in military trenches, with walls formed
from human bones and offal, than in civil society with
its ivy-covered walls of educational sanctuaries for
the rich and genial that exclude the poor and dim.
Trench warfare cor****ate bodies, generally
called armies, are equal op****tunity employers.
Executives, the officers and especially leftenants,
are expected to lead by example, which is to say,
first over the top into streams of 50-calibre
machine-gun bullets. Yet private soldiers will also
get their chance soon thereafter. Such is not,
perhaps, perfect equality -- the ultimate stated
goal of all left political movements -- but certainly
imbued with more social justice than peacetime civil
society.
Once again, this writer's comments appear in
multiple brackets in what follows.
[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:
As usual, our Larry distorts and misrepresents. Also
demonstrates his inability to read. A few comments below:
[[[[[LARRY PARR: The "proof" of our inability to read
will be this writer misattributing a statement to
Taylor Kingston that was written by Sam Sloan. Please
note our explanation above. We respond by noting
Kingston's claim that this writer lends an
intellectual patina to his argumentation, which
suggests that Kingston judges us as a vast natural
talent, since to lend such a sheen, though no great
shakes for those who can read and who have written, is
quite a coup for those of us whom Taylor Kingston
would have you believe cannot read.]]]]]
[[[[[FROM THIS WRITER'S EARLIER "DEED OF SHAME"
POSTING THAT WAS ATTACKED BY KINGSTON.]]]]]:
A DEED OF SHAME
Hmmm, so Larry would have preferred that Germany
won World War I. Interesting.> -- Taylor Kingston
Trust Taylor Kingston to offer the argument of a
jackanapes. I wrote that if Germany had won WW1
in 1917, the world would have been saved many of
the the central horrors of the 20th century.
[[[[[KINGSTON NOW RESPONDS TO THE ABOVE AND DOES NOT
DENY MISCHARACTERIZING OUR VIEWS. INSTEAD, HE CHANGES
THE SUBJECT]]]]]:
Thinking up horrors, and actually creating them, has
long been one of man's great skills. I think a more
plausible guess is that had Germany won WW I in some
alternate universe's 1917, there would still have been
an ample supply of "central horrors" not significantly
different from those our history records.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: Kingston's point is puerile. With
the exception of the relatively brief period of the
Napoleonic wars and the French Revolution, Europe had
been largely at political and social peace since 1648,
when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the 30 Years' War.
There had been no people's wars, only limited wars
with aims that did not deny the right of sister
European nations to exist. In the famous "century of
peace" from 1815-1914, human progress was phenomenal.
Both Russia and Germany were modernizing and
democratizing under royal houses, the Romanoffs and
the Hohenzollerns, that were understood by most men of
thought to be declining forces. NOTHING LIKE
totalitarianism existed in mainstream political
thought until after the Great War dissolved the moral
glue holding together Western Civilization. The
crucial year was 1918 because if the Great War had
ended in victory for either side -- most likely, the
German side, if Wilson, contrary to his campaign
pledges in 1916, had not led the United States into
that conflagration -- then the Kasier would not have
had to abdicate, and in Russia, the Whites would
eventually have triumphed in a civil war against the Reds.]]]]]
[[[[[KINGSTON NOW OFFERS A FORM OF INTELLECTUAL
NIHILISM PRESENTED WEAKMINDEDLY]]]]]:
And I say "guess" quite honestly, because that's all
this "alternate history" fantasizing is. Larry's
vision of a post-WWI world free of totalitarianism
strikes me as naive. I would agee with him that such a
world might not have "Hitlerism, Stalinism, or
Maoism," but it would very likely have had evil
dictators with other names.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: Notice Kingston's use of "guess" and
"fantasizing," especially the latter word to describe
hypothesizing about alternate outcomes. That's his
trick to denigrate the very possibility of serious
intellectual investigation and discussion.
Notice the man's conflation of "evil dictators"
with the "totalitarianism" of "'Hitlerism, Stalinism,
or Maoism.'" There are plenty of "evil dictators" who
are not totalitarians and who did not run totalitarian
states. To understand the distinctions between
totalitarianism and autocracy (a vast majority of evil
and not-quite-so-evil dictators in human history have
run autocratic rather than totalitarian regimes), the
works to consult are, first, Carl Friedrich and
Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Totalitarian Dictator****p and
Autocracy" and only then, Hannah Arendt's seminal and
sensationally demanding "Origins of Totalitarianism."
World War I brought totalitarianism to the fore,
and it came to the fore precisely because social
revolution overtook two European great powers, Germany
and Russia. Kingston's weakminded evocation of "evil
dictators with other names" does not mean that such
men would have been totalitarian dictators. They
would have been what evil dictators of the past had
always been: autocrats abusing power.]]]]]
[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON CONTINUES]]]]]:
And in that alternate universe, Larry Parr, or someone
like him, would probably be here arguing that
if only the Allies had shown more determination, and
if only America had entered the war in 1917, the
world would have been spared all those evils, and
would have been made safe for democracy.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: The Kingston ploy here is to
belittle what is a major historical topic of
discussion among all historians in the field -- the
shape of the world influenced by World War I as
that war ACTUALLY DEVELOPED and what would have
occurred had the war come to a decision in 1917 with a
likely German victory in the event that the United
States had stayed out (as Wilson had pledged).
The idea that totalitarianism would have sprung
and become empowered from nowhere is unhistorical. It
sprang first from the visionary minds of some men, and
was empowered by the conduct and outcome of the Great War.]]]]]
[[[[[THE FOLLOWING IS A QUOTATION FROM OUR ORIGINAL
POSTING THAT WAS THEN ATTACKED BY TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:
So Kingston then infers that I preferred a German
victory. My preference was for an allied victory in
1915 or 1916 -- and then the victory of either side in
1917. Anything, in short, to avoid the fatal year of 1918.
[[[[[IN THE FOLLOWING KINGSTON DOES NOT DENY
MISCHARACTERIZING THIS WRITER'S POINT. ONCE AGAIN, HE
CHANGES THE SUBJECT BY TELLING US ABOUT HIS OWN (SEE
BELOW) BLOODTHIRSTY PREFERENCE]]]]]:
I would have preferred that, having won on the Western
Front in 1918, the Allies had marched into Germany
itself. By clearly demonstrating to the German people,
on their own soil, that they had in fact been
militarily defeated, there would have been no myth
that "the army had been betrayed" for agitators like
Hitler to use later.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: So, then, this is the level of
Kingston's analysis. The German army was indeed
betrayed. It was no myth. The other side of the
betrayal coin is that it was not Jewish financiers or
a backdoor man such as, say, Walter Rathenau who did
the betraying. The chief betraitor, to employ a
neologism, was none other than Erich von Ludendorff,
the de facto leader of the German war effort by 1917.
Ludendorff suffered a celebrated nervous breakdown in
August-September 1917, urging the Kaiser to sue for an
armistice, when the German army was certainly capable
of withdrawing to the German border and erecting
defenses with crucially shortened supply lines at
numerous rivers and hills that would have cost the
allies millions of men to breach, given the limited
mobility of both sides during WWI. There would have
been no question in that period of crossing the Rhine.
Kingston's "preference" might easily have been a
retrospective realization of non-interventionist
Senator Burton K. Wheeler's charge, some 20 years
later, that Franklin Roosevelt planned "to plow under
every third American boy." Give this guy Kingston
some power and push backwards his birthdate to the
proper period, and he might have fulfilled Wheeler's
prognostication.]]]]]
[[[[[THIS COMMENT OF OURS IS FROM THE ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:
If you want to understand Kingston's approach to
historical thought, his response is exemplary.
Perhaps the two of us can agree on that much.
[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:
If you want to understand Larry Parr's approach to
argument, keep in mind that he will say pretty much
anything, no matter how absurd, to sup****t Sam Sloan.
He may make it sound all pretty and intellectual, but
the basic aim is to make Sloan look good, or at least
less ridiculous, no matter what the facts may be.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: Taylor Kingston banks on most of you
being unfamiliar with the many past battles that Sam
Sloan and we have had, some of which (for example, a
struggle regarding Carol Jarecki) went on for months.
As the reader will see below, we have no problem
whatsoever in disagreeing with Sam.]]]]]
[[[[[THE COMMENT BELOW BY US COMES FROM OUR ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:
Kingston's next attempt at an argument is to reduce
the observation that WWI resulted in the
decivilization of world politics to a silly reference
to Queen Victoria and haemophilia.
[[[[[TAYLOR KINGSTON]]]]]:
Ahem, Larry -- that statement was made by Sam Sloan,
Not by me.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: As noted earlier, we do not receive
every posting over here in Malaysia and apologize to
Kingston for misattributing to him a silly statement
by Sam. We certainly do not always agree with Sam and
say so. We await Kingston to condemn Edward Winter
for evident lies in his screed "Truth about Larry Evans."]]]]]
[[[[[WHAT FOLLOWS IS FROM OUR ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:
What our Kingston creature would have the readers of
this forum imagine is that the idea of WWI as a
disaster leading to the horrors of totalitarianism is
a farfetched historical construct.
[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:
See, there you go misrepresenting again, Larry. I
never said any such thing. World War I was indeed a
terrible disaster, and yes, it certainly did contribute
heavily to the rise of totalitarianism. My point here
has never been to say otherwise. My point
here is that what you "would have readers of this
forum imagine" that German victory in WW I would have
led somehow to a wonderful alternate world, is just
castles in the air.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: This writer never posited German
victory in 1917 leading "to a wonderful alternate
world." The ploy here by our Kingston is to ****tray
yours truly as a Utopian. Our tired globe, creaking
about its axis, would have continued to be
problem-plagued, though there is every reason to
imagine that the 20th century would not have been the
bloodiest in human history, given the enormous
peaceful progress of Europe during the preceding three
centuries. Once again, totalitarianism sprang from
the brains of men and was empowered by the
prolongation of World War I. To suggest that
totalitarianism would have become empowered on its own
or under Romanoff and Hohenzollern autocratic rule is
nonsense. Wilson's decision to seek a declaration of
war provided the soil for the evil seed to germinate,
thence to send up sturdy shoots.]]]]]
[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:
Speaking of "farfetched historical constructs," I find
especially farfetched your statement that with a
German victory "Stalin would have ended up as a
zookeeper in the Central Caucasus, Trotsky a radical
editor in NYC and Lenin a fairly well-off, if frustrated,
French tutor for advantaged children in Zurich."
[[[[[LARRY PARR: We reckon that most of you will twig
to our Taylor's essential dishonesty in the above
debating point.Of course, our specific posited careers
for the Messrs. Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin are farfetched
in the sense that one is divining a pinpoint specific from
a broad deductive premise. Most of you realize that we
were endeavouring to raise a smile and, yes, stereotyping
Stalinist with the Trotskyist tarbrush of being
intellectually slow, which he was not. Too, we
accepted Trotsky's literary presumptions and fell in
with Solzhenitsyn's ****trait of Lenin in Zurich. Our
point was obviously this: the trio would have been
doing something radically other than leading a great nation.]]]]]
[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:
Since it was, in large part, the Germans who put the
Bolsheviks in power in 1917, bankrolling their
movement and ****pping Lenin back to Russia, and since
Lenin so blithely gave them everything they wanted
at Brest-Litovsk, I tend to think the Germans would
have been quite happy to leave him in power.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: The Germans did not put the
Bolsheviks in power in 1917. The Reds did that,
assisted by Alexander Kerensky's decision to continue
the war. The Germans created necessary but by no
means sufficient conditions for the Bol****es to seize
power. As for Brest-Litovsk, the Russo-German peace
treaty of March 1918, Lenin conceded points to the
Germans precisely because he and his movement never
intended to honor the treaty -- a point understood by
General Hoffman and the other Germans who sealed Lenin
and his human bacillae in the famous train.]]]]]
[[[[[WE WROTE THE FOLLOWING IN OUR ORIGINAL POSTING]]]]]:
And what did Kingston's hero Woodrow Wilson
[[[[[KINGSTON]]]]]:
Eh? You're fabricating again, Larry. I have never
referred here to Wilson as any hero of mine.
[[[[[LARRY PARR: Nor did we say that Kingston
"referred" to Wilson as his hero. We obviously
inferred based on his defense of Wilson's indefensible
decision to seek a war against Germany in 1917.]]]]]
ttk5...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> As usual, our Larry distorts and misrepresents. Also demonstrates
> his inability to read. A few comments below:
>
> On Apr 22, 12:19?am, "parrthe...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <parrthe...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > A DEED OF SHAME
> >
> > ? >Hmmm, so Larry would have preferred that Germany
> > won World War I. Interesting.> -- Taylor Kingston
> >
> > ? ?Trust Taylor Kingston to offer the argument of a
> > jackanapes. I wrote that if Germany had won WW1
> > in 1917, the world would have been saved many of the
> > the central horrors of the 20th century.
>
> Thinking up horrors, and actually creating them, has long been one
> of man's great skills. I think a more plausible guess is that had
> Germany won WW I in some alternate universe's 1917, there would still
> have been an ample supply of "central horrors" not significantly
> different from those our history records.
> And I say "guess" quite honestly, because that's all this "alternate
> history" fantasizing is. Larry's vision of a post-WWI world free of
> totalitarianism strikes me as naive. I would agee with him that such a
> world might not have "Hitlerism, Stalinism, or Maoism," but it would
> very likely have had evil dictators with other names.
> And in that alternate universe, Larry Parr, or someone like him,
> would probably be here arguing that if only the Allies had shown more
> determination, and if only America had entered the war in 1917, the
> world would have been spared all those evils, and would have been made
> safe for democracy.
>
> > ? ?So ?Kingston then infers that I preferred a German victory.
> > My preference was for an allied victory in 1915 or 1916 -- and
> > then the victory of either side in 1917. ?Anything, in short,
> > to avoid the fatal year of 1918.
>
> I would have preferred that, having won on the Western Front in
> 1918, the Allies had marched into Germany itself. By clearly
> demonstrating to the German people, on their own soil, that they had
> in fact been militarily defeated, there would have been no myth that
> "the army had been betrayed" for agitators like Hitler to use
> later.
>
> > ? ? ?If you want to understand Kingston's approach
> > to historical thought, his response is exemplary.
> > Perhaps the two of us can agree on that much.
>
> If you want to understand Larry Parr's approach to argument, keep in
> mind that he will say pretty much anything, no matter how absurd, to
> sup****t Sam Sloan. He may make it sound all pretty and intellectual,
> but the basic aim is to make Sloan look good, or at least less
> ridiculous, no matter what the facts may be.
>
> > ? ? ?Kingston's next attempt at an argument is to
> > reduce the observation that WWI resulted in
> > the decivilization of world politics to a silly reference
> > to Queen Victoria and haemophilia.
>
> Ahem, Larry -- that statement was made by Sam Sloan, not by me.
>
> > ? ? ? What our Kingston creature would have the
> > readers of this forum imagine is that the idea of WWI
> > as a disaster leading to the horrors of totalitarianism
> > is a farfetched historical construct.
>
> See, there you go misrepresenting again, Larry. I never said any
> such thing. World War I was indeed a terrible disaster, and yes, it
> certainly did contribute heavily to the rise of totalitarianism. My
> point here has never been to say otherwise.
> My point here is that what you "would have readers of this forum
> imagine," that German victory in WW I would have led somehow to a
> wonderful alternate world, is just castles in the air.
>
> > It is not.
>
> Speaking of "farfetched historical constructs," I find especially
> farfetched your statement that with a German victory "Stalin would
> have ended up as a zookeeper in the Central Caucasus, Trotsky a
> radical editor in NYC and Lenin a fairly well-off, if frustrated,
> French tutor for advantaged children in Zurich."
> Since it was, in large part, the Germans who put the Bolsheviks in
> power in 1917, bankrolling their movement and ****pping Lenin back to
> Russia, and since Lenin so blithely gave them everything they wanted
> at Brest-Litovsk, I tend to think the Germans would have been quite
> happy to leave him in power.
>
> > ? ? ? And what did Kingston's hero Woodrow Wilson
>
> Eh? You're fabricating again, Larry. I have never referred here to
> Wilson as any hero of mine.
|
