To: jennyp
Hi jennyp - I have never read Hegel but did read Mein Kampf.
If you've ever read it, Hitler was not one for tightly woven philosophical arguments like Marx and Lenin. He was trying to express some things that were hard to put into words so he tended to be rather mystical.
The only really articulate fascist was Mussolini, but even he did not compose an over-arching Fascist manifesto.
I've read elsewhere Peikof's argument that sort of conflates Marxism and Fascism as simply being two versions of statism, and I partially agree and partially disagree.
For the source of Fascist economic statism, I would go back to Walther Rathenau, a Jewish industrialist, who invented a concept known as Rationalization or Industrial Rationalization during WWI as a way of controlling production for the war effort. We never read about Rationalization anymore, but it was a big fad in Germany from WWI on. Stalin was impressed by the concept and introduced it in the Soviet Union.
Boiled down into a nutshell, Rationalization is simply the concept that capitalism is too messy and wasteful, and central planning by educated bureaucrats is more efficient and can eliminate the mess and waste.
It was, in part, an attempt at standardization for mass production.
We had standards boards, too, and still do, but they were not, for the most part, run by the state, but by private industry.
Back to Hitler.
Hitler, more than anything else, in my opinion, was guided by mystical feelings about race. He believed that every person was a member of a race and had deeply rooted characteristics because of their race. Thus, Jews, no matter how well educated and no matter how much they wanted to be different, would always be Jews.
One of the things most people don't know about the Holocaust is that the Nazis spared people who were of mixed German/Jewish ancestry depending on the percentage of Aryan blood and whether the person was a practicing Jew or not.
If you really understand how Hitler thought of the German people aka "Aryan race," watch "Triumph of the Will."
3,340 posted on
07/16/2003 7:03:46 AM PDT by
CobaltBlue
(Never voted for a Democrat in my life.)
To: CobaltBlue
Boiled down into a nutshell, Rationalization is simply the concept that capitalism is too messy and wasteful, and central planning by educated bureaucrats is more efficient and can eliminate the mess and waste. Interesting that conservatives agree that economies can't be designed, but some think ecologies can be designed.
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