Posted by Jed Lewison on Wed May 2, 2007 at 5:53 PM Pacific

The many mistakes of Steve Sailer

This blog entry examines a recent posting by Steve Sailer, a moderately influential and extremely conservative commentator on race, gender, and immigration issues. Although Sailer's post is a commentary on the Iraq War (which he opposes), it is representative of the same types of logical and factual mistakes he makes in many of his other more inflammatory musings about race and genetics. Since this post is about a comparatively sedate topic, it presents the opportunity to critique Sailer's intellectual abilities without allowing allegations of racism or sexism to cloud a dispassionate assessment of his thought process.

In his post, Sailer begins by noting that both Rice and Rumsfeld offered misleading accounts of post-WWII Germany to justify their troubles in post-Saddam Iraq. (Rice and Rumsfeld’s assertions have been thoroughly debunked.)

The origin of Rice's and Rumsfeld's "Werewolves" theory: Back in August 2003, National Security Advisor Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that we shouldn't worry about armed guerilla resistance in Iraq, because we had to deal with the same thing in Germany in 1945-47, and look how well that turned out.

Sailer then wonders how Rice and Rumsfeld could be so wrong:

So, where did the speechwriters of the Bush Administration luminaries come up with this idea? Apparently, they misread a lame pro-war fictitious satire written on July 28, 2003 by Rand Simberg as being real! Simberg blogged:

Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire

August 12, 1945

WASHINGTON DC (Routers) President Truman, just a few months into his young presidency, is coming under increasing fire from some Congressional Republicans for what appears to be a deteriorating security situation in occupied Germany, with some calling for his removal from office.

Over three months after a formal declaration of an end to hostilities, the occupation is bogged down. Fanatical elements of the former Nazi regime who, in their zeal to liberate their nation from the foreign occupiers, call themselves members of the Werwolf (werewolves) continue to commit almost-daily acts of sabotage against Germany's already-ravaged infrastructure, and attack American troops. They have been laying road mines, poisoning food and water supplies, and setting various traps, often lethal, for the occupying forces. …

Here's the problem I have with what Sailer said: there is no evidence that Rice, Rumsfeld, or anyone else in the administration took what Simberg wrote literally. For starters, on his blog, the news agency is "Routers" not "Reuters." Moreover, when Fox News published the piece it was offered with the following preamble:

If today's journalists were sent back in time to cover World War II, a Reuter's dispatch dated Aug. 12, 1945, might look something like this:

I don't agree with Simberg's take on the situation, but it's pretty clear that he is making a point about the media and political environment in 2003. Moreover, it's clear that Simberg was hardly original in trying to link post-war Germany with post-war Iraq. Simberg says:

There was plenty of discussion of the Werwolf at the Command Post and other sites before I wrote my piece (and in fact, such discussions were what partially inspired the piece). We know that CNN and Fox were monitoring that site, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if the White House and Security Council were as well. There's no reason to think that my piece was the only, or even the first time that they had heard of the situation in the ex-Third Reich.

I'm not attacking Simberg as a plagiarist, I'm just saying that he wasn't the first person to publicly compare the two situations. It should have been immediately obvious that the comparison was badly flawed, but then again, Simberg is not a historian. And it is admittedly much easier to see just how wrong the comparison was now that another four years have passed.

I hold Rice and Rumsfeld to higher standards of truthiness than Simberg. Not only should they have known more about World War II history, they probably actually did, and they certainly knew enough about what was happening on the ground in Iraq to know their historical analogy was false.

Simberg's blog posting was not the only potential source of the Rice-Rumsfeld distortion. Given the availability -- at an earlier date -- of many similar such theories, there is no particular reason to believe that Simberg is the root of what Rice and Rumsfeld said. As even Sailer admits:

We don't know for sure that this influenced Rice and Rumsfeld, but it's the likeliest source I've heard of.

So after several hundred words, Sailer ultimately takes back most of what he has previously written. Yet I wonder how many casual readers will realize that he has taken five steps forward and four steps back?

But, almost like magic, Sailer continues his dissertation as if he had never taken those four steps backwards, asking what he now offers as the central question:

Now, Rice is supposed to be an academic expert on the Soviet Union, so the history of Central Europe in 1945-47 shouldn't be such terra incognita to her. (And Rumsfeld, who was born in 1932, is old enough to know better.)  So, why were they so credulous (besides, of course, wanting this to be true to make their policy look less disastrous)?

Even if you hadn't taken the time to research Sailer's initial claim that Simberg's piece informed Rice's and Rumsfeld's speeches, alarm bells should be going off. First, Sailer claims that Rice and Rumsfeld's statements were based on a "misreading" of Simberg. Second, Sailer admits that he doesn't know if his first claim is true. Next, he wonders why they would have ever believed that you could draw a parallel between WWII and the war in Iraq.

But he never addresses the question of whether Rice and Rumsfeld actually believed what they were saying. Given the tendency of political figures to optimize for winning arguments rather pursuing truth, I would not by default assume that when a political figure says something that he or she believes it. While it's almost always true that they believe that what they are saying will help them get what they want, that does not mean that they believe that what they are saying is true.

But if he hasn't lost you so far, here's where Sailer really goes off the deep end:

As usual, I see an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities as a source of ignorance among decision-makers. One of the basic generalizations that anybody who looks around at the real world with open eyes quickly comes up with is the reverse correlation between organized violence and disorganized violence. Groups that are competent at organized violence in wartime, such as the Germans and Japanese, tend to be orderly during peacetime. And groups that tend to be anarchic during peacetime also tend to be incompetent at organized violence during wartime, with the Iraqis being perhaps the most notorious example of this.

There are many exceptions to this, but it's still one of the most obvious patterns in 20th Century history. However, if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy.

So, to recap, Sailer is arguing that:

  1. Rice and Rumsfeld's speechwriters saw a satirical blog posting comparing post-war Germany and post-war Iraq and used a clearly ahistorical news article intended to parody today's media and politicians as their primary source material.
  2. He might be wrong about #1. (Sailer is wrong; he fails to mention that even the blog's author notes he was inspired by other sources.)
  3. Rice and Rumsfeld actually believe what their speechwriters wrote, even though they should know better.
  4. The reason why they believe what they said is "an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities."

Ultimately, Sailer's article is another bizarrely constructed defense of what I'll call his "ostrich theory" that "if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy." When he says "morally opposed to noticing patterns" he means patterns about race and ethnicity, which he generally believes are rooted in genetics, or what he calls "biodiversity."

In this case, he builds support for his "ostrich theory" with casual disregard for the evidence and with giant leaps of faith. Normally, the targets of his scorn are white liberals, but this article is sort of an equal opportunity smear. It's quite ironic then that Slate provided one of the very first critiques of Rice and Rumsfeld. Perhaps more ironic is that the Washington Times, a conservative paper that is the antithesis of Sailer's hated New York Times, provided a defense of Rice's comments:

"SS officers called werewolves engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today's Ba'athist and Fedayeen remnants" in post-Saddam Iraq, Miss Rice told a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in San Antonio last month.

Historians point out, however, that the Nazi Secret Service officially disbanded the werewolves shortly before Germany surrendered.

Nevertheless, other radicals who viewed Adolf Hitler as a martyr — many of them associated with the Hitler Youth — continued to call themselves "werewolves" and engaged in violence up to a year after the war ended.

The werewolves were blamed for the assassination of the mayor of Aachen, Germany, in May 1945.

So if we are going to take Sailer's argument seriously -- and I don't think we should -- then I guess we have to conclude that conservatives are too focused on being political correct. After all, its liberals who were the leading forces in debunking Rice and Rumsfeld. Meanwhile, conservative voices supported them.

The level of absurdity to which this line of thinking must descend captures the essence of Steve Sailer's thinking. Despite his excellent rhetorical skills, he's not the greatest analyst, and all too often it turns out that things that he thinks facts are in fact false, and things that he thinks are logical are in fact illogical.

It's hard to take Sailer, who has an obvious chip on his shoulder, terribly seriously. If it weren't for the fact that so many people do take the time to read what he has to say, I'd find it hard not chuckle while reading him. (Actually, he still makes me laugh, I just can't help it.)

Sailer is the type of guy who many will simply dismiss as a racist nut and move on. But even though I disagree with his views on race, I wouldn't put him in the same category as David Duke. At the very least, Sailer is much smarter than racists like Duke. And although Sailer has occasionally voiced opinions that even commentators from the National Review say are disgusting, his rhetoric is normally quite disarming, and to the casual conservative reader, probably quite convincing. Hopefully, any of Sailer's fans who have made their way all the way through this long blog post will be better equipped to analyze what he says -- and the mistakes he is likely to make -- when they read him next.

The many mistakes of Steve Sailer

This blog entry examines a recent posting by Steve Sailer, a moderately influential and extremely conservative commentator on race, gender, and immigration issues. Although Sailer's post is a commentary on the Iraq War (which he opposes), it is representative of the same types of logical and factual mistakes he makes in many of his other more inflammatory musings about race and genetics. Since this post is about a comparatively sedate topic, it presents the opportunity to critique Sailer's intellectual abilities without allowing allegations of racism or sexism to cloud a dispassionate assessment of his thought process.

In his post, Sailer begins by noting that both Rice and Rumsfeld offered misleading accounts of post-WWII Germany to justify their troubles in post-Saddam Iraq. (Rice and Rumsfeld’s assertions have been thoroughly debunked.)

The origin of Rice's and Rumsfeld's "Werewolves" theory: Back in August 2003, National Security Advisor Condi Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that we shouldn't worry about armed guerilla resistance in Iraq, because we had to deal with the same thing in Germany in 1945-47, and look how well that turned out.

Sailer then wonders how Rice and Rumsfeld could be so wrong:

So, where did the speechwriters of the Bush Administration luminaries come up with this idea? Apparently, they misread a lame pro-war fictitious satire written on July 28, 2003 by Rand Simberg as being real! Simberg blogged:

Administration In Crisis Over Burgeoning Quagmire

August 12, 1945

WASHINGTON DC (Routers) President Truman, just a few months into his young presidency, is coming under increasing fire from some Congressional Republicans for what appears to be a deteriorating security situation in occupied Germany, with some calling for his removal from office.

Over three months after a formal declaration of an end to hostilities, the occupation is bogged down. Fanatical elements of the former Nazi regime who, in their zeal to liberate their nation from the foreign occupiers, call themselves members of the Werwolf (werewolves) continue to commit almost-daily acts of sabotage against Germany's already-ravaged infrastructure, and attack American troops. They have been laying road mines, poisoning food and water supplies, and setting various traps, often lethal, for the occupying forces. …

Here's the problem I have with what Sailer said: there is no evidence that Rice, Rumsfeld, or anyone else in the administration took what Simberg wrote literally. For starters, on his blog, the news agency is "Routers" not "Reuters." Moreover, when Fox News published the piece it was offered with the following preamble:

If today's journalists were sent back in time to cover World War II, a Reuter's dispatch dated Aug. 12, 1945, might look something like this:

I don't agree with Simberg's take on the situation, but it's pretty clear that he is making a point about the media and political environment in 2003. Moreover, it's clear that Simberg was hardly original in trying to link post-war Germany with post-war Iraq. Simberg says:

There was plenty of discussion of the Werwolf at the Command Post and other sites before I wrote my piece (and in fact, such discussions were what partially inspired the piece). We know that CNN and Fox were monitoring that site, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if the White House and Security Council were as well. There's no reason to think that my piece was the only, or even the first time that they had heard of the situation in the ex-Third Reich.

I'm not attacking Simberg as a plagiarist, I'm just saying that he wasn't the first person to publicly compare the two situations. It should have been immediately obvious that the comparison was badly flawed, but then again, Simberg is not a historian. And it is admittedly much easier to see just how wrong the comparison was now that another four years have passed.

I hold Rice and Rumsfeld to higher standards of truthiness than Simberg. Not only should they have known more about World War II history, they probably actually did, and they certainly knew enough about what was happening on the ground in Iraq to know their historical analogy was false.

Simberg's blog posting was not the only potential source of the Rice-Rumsfeld distortion. Given the availability -- at an earlier date -- of many similar such theories, there is no particular reason to believe that Simberg is the root of what Rice and Rumsfeld said. As even Sailer admits:

We don't know for sure that this influenced Rice and Rumsfeld, but it's the likeliest source I've heard of.

So after several hundred words, Sailer ultimately takes back most of what he has previously written. Yet I wonder how many casual readers will realize that he has taken five steps forward and four steps back?

But, almost like magic, Sailer continues his dissertation as if he had never taken those four steps backwards, asking what he now offers as the central question:

Now, Rice is supposed to be an academic expert on the Soviet Union, so the history of Central Europe in 1945-47 shouldn't be such terra incognita to her. (And Rumsfeld, who was born in 1932, is old enough to know better.)  So, why were they so credulous (besides, of course, wanting this to be true to make their policy look less disastrous)?

Even if you hadn't taken the time to research Sailer's initial claim that Simberg's piece informed Rice's and Rumsfeld's speeches, alarm bells should be going off. First, Sailer claims that Rice and Rumsfeld's statements were based on a "misreading" of Simberg. Second, Sailer admits that he doesn't know if his first claim is true. Next, he wonders why they would have ever believed that you could draw a parallel between WWII and the war in Iraq.

But he never addresses the question of whether Rice and Rumsfeld actually believed what they were saying. Given the tendency of political figures to optimize for winning arguments rather pursuing truth, I would not by default assume that when a political figure says something that he or she believes it. While it's almost always true that they believe that what they are saying will help them get what they want, that does not mean that they believe that what they are saying is true.

But if he hasn't lost you so far, here's where Sailer really goes off the deep end:

As usual, I see an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities as a source of ignorance among decision-makers. One of the basic generalizations that anybody who looks around at the real world with open eyes quickly comes up with is the reverse correlation between organized violence and disorganized violence. Groups that are competent at organized violence in wartime, such as the Germans and Japanese, tend to be orderly during peacetime. And groups that tend to be anarchic during peacetime also tend to be incompetent at organized violence during wartime, with the Iraqis being perhaps the most notorious example of this.

There are many exceptions to this, but it's still one of the most obvious patterns in 20th Century history. However, if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy.

So, to recap, Sailer is arguing that:

  1. Rice and Rumsfeld's speechwriters saw a satirical blog posting comparing post-war Germany and post-war Iraq and used a clearly ahistorical news article intended to parody today's media and politicians as their primary source material.
  2. He might be wrong about #1. (Sailer is wrong; he fails to mention that even the blog's author notes he was inspired by other sources.)
  3. Rice and Rumsfeld actually believe what their speechwriters wrote, even though they should know better.
  4. The reason why they believe what they said is "an aversion to politically incorrect generalizing about ethnicities."

Ultimately, Sailer's article is another bizarrely constructed defense of what I'll call his "ostrich theory" that "if you are morally opposed to noticing patterns, as so many people are today, you'll be a sucker for idiocy." When he says "morally opposed to noticing patterns" he means patterns about race and ethnicity, which he generally believes are rooted in genetics, or what he calls "biodiversity."

In this case, he builds support for his "ostrich theory" with casual disregard for the evidence and with giant leaps of faith. Normally, the targets of his scorn are white liberals, but this article is sort of an equal opportunity smear. It's quite ironic then that Slate provided one of the very first critiques of Rice and Rumsfeld. Perhaps more ironic is that the Washington Times, a conservative paper that is the antithesis of Sailer's hated New York Times, provided a defense of Rice's comments:

"SS officers called werewolves engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them, much like today's Ba'athist and Fedayeen remnants" in post-Saddam Iraq, Miss Rice told a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering in San Antonio last month.

Historians point out, however, that the Nazi Secret Service officially disbanded the werewolves shortly before Germany surrendered.

Nevertheless, other radicals who viewed Adolf Hitler as a martyr — many of them associated with the Hitler Youth — continued to call themselves "werewolves" and engaged in violence up to a year after the war ended.

The werewolves were blamed for the assassination of the mayor of Aachen, Germany, in May 1945.

So if we are going to take Sailer's argument seriously -- and I don't think we should -- then I guess we have to conclude that conservatives are too focused on being political correct. After all, its liberals who were the leading forces in debunking Rice and Rumsfeld. Meanwhile, conservative voices supported them.

The level of absurdity to which this line of thinking must descend captures the essence of Steve Sailer's thinking. Despite his excellent rhetorical skills, he's not the greatest analyst, and all too often it turns out that things that he thinks facts are in fact false, and things that he thinks are logical are in fact illogical.

It's hard to take Sailer, who has an obvious chip on his shoulder, terribly seriously. If it weren't for the fact that so many people do take the time to read what he has to say, I'd find it hard not chuckle while reading him. (Actually, he still makes me laugh, I just can't help it.)

Sailer is the type of guy who many will simply dismiss as a racist nut and move on. But even though I disagree with his views on race, I wouldn't put him in the same category as David Duke. At the very least, Sailer is much smarter than racists like Duke. And although Sailer has occasionally voiced opinions that even commentators from the National Review say are disgusting, his rhetoric is normally quite disarming, and to the casual conservative reader, probably quite convincing. Hopefully, any of Sailer's fans who have made their way all the way through this long blog post will be better equipped to analyze what he says -- and the mistakes he is likely to make -- when they read him next.

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