Posted on 02/17/2013 10:33:22 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Daniel Hannan cuts through the disinformation routinely spewed by the pundit class to reveal the true historical nature of fascism, albeit as it pertains to British politics. The lessons, however, are applicable here as well.
'I am a Socialist,' Hitler told Otto Strasser in 1930, 'and a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow'.
No one at the time would have regarded it as a controversial statement. The Nazis could hardly have been more open in their socialism, describing themselves with the same terminology as our own SWP: National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Almost everyone in those days accepted that fascism had emerged from the revolutionary Left. Its militants marched on May Day under red flags. Its leaders stood for collectivism, state control of industry, high tariffs, workers' councils. Around Europe, fascists were convinced that, as Hitler told an enthusiastic Mussolini in 1934, 'capitalism has run its course'.
One of the most stunning achievements of the modern Left is to have created a cultural climate where simply to recite these facts is jarring...
(Excerpt) Read more at directorblue.blogspot.com ...
Hear! Hear!
lol
Like dems always bad and pubbies always good
Nazis and fascists were more like super nationalistic police state hybrid of crony capitalism and cradle to grave guarantees
Not really progressives at all
Progressives utterly reject nation state legacy and identity
Fascism embraces ...exalts.....exaggerates....and ...emphasizes it
There is not really a new messianic man of each according to need but rather a new man who embraces and embodies the ideal of the historical
Freepers probably won't care for this
In any event both totalitarians and authoritarians eschew liberty
Which is in comparison a third rail
As a social conservative.....hard as it may be.....i have zero in common with totalitarian progressives but i do have nationalism and cultural integrity in common with fascists
So....our academic critics are partly right about us....or me at least
I miss nolu chan and goetz von berlichingen
Everything has its price. The price of Socialism is way too high.
Von Berlichingen was a very thoughtful poster here back in 2000...he left declaring the Iraq war was stupid.....and one could argue he had a point
You can read the moniker origin for yourself
It predates SS by 500 years
We are a nation of ideas and culture born almost entirely of white European origin
It would be impossible for our nationalism not to have some foot in what progressives will call racism
So be it
Its the culture that we have the most right to be proud of worldwide racist or not
Imagine a world without the America of 1617 till the 1970s or no western culture at all
Give it some hard thought
No disrespect but racism is just not my first concern nor is what is called racism today actually that
Really?
Excerpts From: "Dreams from My Father." by Barack Hussein Obama
"If nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence."
on nationalism: "whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. Rise up, ye mighty race!"
"This process of displacement, this means of engaging in self-criticism while removing ourselves from the object of criticism, helped explain the much-admired success of the Nation of Islam"
But I was still curious about this strange chant and dug around in the family encyclopedia to find out just what it was all about. I dug around to find out just what the flag did officially symbolize in case my ideas were different.
When looking up the pledge I found out it wasn't as old as the Declaration or Constitution and was obviously not as well thought-out. It didn't always have "under God" in it. A wayward minister concocted the thing but not a minister like our preacher, that's for sure, because the minister forgot to put God first, heck, he forgot altogether. It was added in later, like a band aid on a festering wound. I had to look his entry up. It being an old encyclopedia the passage on the pledge and on the author mentioned Fabian Socialism and that of course had to be looked up.
Years later in high school an English teacher assigned me to write a paper on Edward Bellamy- who she apparently was enthralled with- and to her everlasting surprise she got an unexpected earful that put us at odds for the rest of the term.
The amusing thing is that the Pledge, a socialist creation designed to train American youth to be mindlessly loyal to the state, is what led me to discover and reject socialism. I hope Edward Bellamy's grave gets urinated on frequently.
You need to use a different example. Medieval guilds were not controlled by the state or by the king or by some huge evil entity. They were controlled by its own members for the member's own needs. They were more like the old New England township government structure. They were incorporated, but that was it.
bookmark
You’re right. Medieval society would find Fascism’s centralized authority alien and rather frighteningly arrogant.
While guilds weren’t laissez-faire capitalism since they obviously preceded such ideas, they are only loosely reminiscent of the modern type of Corporatism.
I guess I was more tired than I thought!
I opted for Churchill at that age. Didn't get to Shirer and Speer until middle school.
If you read Hitler's 25-point program of 1920 you'll see some stuff that isn't exactly 'right wing':
7. We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens.
11. Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.
12. In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13. We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
14. We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
15. We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
16. We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
17. We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.
18. We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
20. The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions.
22. We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
23. We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands. (Sound familiar?)
25. For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general. The forming of state and profession chambers for the execution of the laws made by the Reich within the various states of the confederation. The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration.
That's more than half of the 25 points.
wow- that sounds like an obama speech
in April 1945 it was not only condensed in the Readers' Digest, it was the first and still the only condensed book to be the first article in an issue of the Digest, rather than being in the back. Hayek was sailing to America for what he thought would be a modest book tour at the time the April 1945 edition hit the newsstands - and he arrived to learn that The Road to Serfdom was a sensation in America and he would be speaking to huge audiences. - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1394906/posts (Warning - this link contains a link to the condensed version itself, but that link is broken, and the correct link, http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/upldbook43pdf.pdf is at Reply #45 of that thread).The occasion when I first read The Road to Serfdom by Hayek is lost in the mists of time - I must have gotten ahold of that old issue of the Reader’s Digest at my grandmother’s house some time later than 1945 for me to have been able to read and understand it.But that aside, I think I was born conservative.
The original uncondensed book has gone through multiple printings since then, at least as recently as a 50th anniversary printing in 1994. It has been printed in many languages, and was read sereptitiously behind the Iron Curtain.. . . but that condensed version still constitutes the majority of all copies of Serfdom ever printed.
not sure what your point is other then his dad decided nationalism was no cure
liberals today in the west associate nationalism with racism
even on this forum
just look at my recent exchange last night
Americans today are willing to forgo national identity in the name of destroying racism and that has killed the country basically
of course their own national identity which they do more often than not while the majority group self flagellates over fears of racism but only that committed by themselves
racism concern is in the end..a red herring for the goal of progressive utopia
Don't worry. I am just doing some research right now and I am bumping into some very interesting stuff, like the outflow of charity was tremendous when people ruled themselves before Henry VIII, due in part to the workings of the guilds. Henry VIII put the kibosh on charity from the people when he took over the monasteries. He essentially did what Obama is doing now by making the government the repairer of all social ills. In Elizabeth's time people had no Christian incentive to donate their money so she had to resort to fines for not giving money to the poor. Then the beggars became a problem so they were fined. Repeat offenders had holes drilled through there ears, etc. All because government thought they could do a better job at doling out other people's money, when the people left to themselves did a great job.
‘Born Conservative’ might be a good FReeper handle
Democrats are always bad. Republicans are sometimes worse.Nazis and fascists were more like super nationalistic police state hybrid of crony capitalism and cradle to grave guarantees
Not really progressives at all
Progressives utterly reject nation state legacy and identity
Fascism embraces ...exalts.....exaggerates....and ...emphasizes it
Ah, yes - the old “nationalist vs. internationalist dichotomy.” F. A. von Hayek dispatched that in 1945:Nobody saw more clearly than the great political thinker de Tocqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: ‘Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,’ he said. ‘Democracy attaches all possible value to each man,’ he said in 1848, ‘while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.’ To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives – the craving for freedom – socialists began increasingly to make use of the promise of a ‘new freedom’. Socialism was to bring ‘economic freedom’ without which political freedom was ‘not worth having’.To make this argument sound plausible, the word ‘freedom’ was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.
The claim that a planned economy would produce a substantially larger output than the competitive system is being progressively abandoned by most students of the problem. Yet it is this false hope as much as anything which drives us along the road to planning.
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under ‘communism’ and ‘fascism’. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, ‘the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.’
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as ‘the general welfare’. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people’s agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all. - The Reader’s Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom
I should have qualified what I meant by racism. The Left loves to jump on ‘’nationalism’, confusing it I think with patriotism which we conservatives have and the Left doesn’t.In some cases nationalism is racist, like the Nazis and Communists. These are creations of the Left and they love to stick that label on us when in reality it is they you are the racist. In answer to your query, I couldn’t imagine a world without the US at any time in history.
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