Democrats would have loved the guy. He was their kind of single testicle freak.
"You really like me!"
Posted on 08/25/2007 9:37:52 AM PDT by Renfield
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There is surely no doubt that the man Feser describes sounds very much like a mainstream Leftist by current standards. But who is the man concerned? It is a historically accurate description of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own day but he would even be a mainstream socialist in MOST ways today. Feser does not mention Hitler's antisemitism above, of course, but that too seems once again to have become mainstream among the Western-world Left in the early years of the 21st century. See here for more on that.
One way in which Hitler was unlike modern American Leftist political leaders, however, is that he was to a considerable extent a genuine man of culture. The photo below shows him in white tie and tails attending the Wagner opera festival at Bayreuth in 1939. There is no doubt of his real devotion to opera -- and indeed to classical music generally. Any claim that a devotion to high culture is especially virtuous does therefore tend to be undermined by Hitler's example -- if that is not too ad hominem.
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(Excerpt) Read more at jonjayray.tripod.com ...
Homosexuals were a WELCOMED part of National Socialism in the Early Days. Ernst Rohm, head of the SA was a raging flamer...
It wasn’t until Rohm became an embarrassment, (and a threat to Hitler’s power) that they were purged from the Party..
Are you talking about the real world or books? In practice, they come out almost the same.
Read most of the article. Verry long.
I think the author’s primary problem is with definitions.
For instance, he appears to define the “right,: conservatism, as roughly equivalent to libertarianism; while the “left” is defined as socialism and authoritarianism.
To understand why such a definition is inaccurate, you have to look at the origin of the Left/Right spectrum, which originated in the French Revolutionary assemblies. Those who were most conservative, supporters of King, Church and aristocracy, sat on the right of the hall. Those who were most anxious to overthrow the existing system and replace it with one of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity sat on the left. The wishy-washy guys sat in the middle.
This points out an immediate problem with applying the spectrum to American, and for that matter most other modern, political controversies. America never had a Right, in the sense of organized groups campaigning for King and established Church. The closest we came were the early Federalists, who had aristocratic tendencies. Had the South won the WBTS, it would probably have wound up with a pretty right-wing government. OTOH, in Europe true Rightists, in the original sense of the word, hung on till WWI and perhaps later.
The Left, meanwhile, in the original sense of the term, was focused primarily on Equality. This was originally political and social equality, but when these goals were largely achieved they started chasing the impossible dream of economic equality.
In the general use of the term, Socialist or Leftist today means Marxist, of one variety or another. The three primary distinguishing characteristics of Marxism are its obsession with economic equality, its opposition to nationalism and other dividers of people, and its belief that the State will eventually “wither away.”
The Nazis denied all three.
While they ran a massive welfare state, the had no particular problem with economic inequality as such, and even intended to impose it by force, with Aryans to be given much more economic power than inferior races.
The “Fraternity” the Nazis wanted glorified nationalism, with all Germans lined up together in opposition to the internationalist “Fraternity” of the socialist working class. In essence, the fraternity of the Nazis was divided vertically. (All Germans against everybody else). The “Fraternity” of the socialists was divided horizontally. (All members of the working class worldwide against everybody else.)
The Nazi ideal was a world dominated by Aryans, with all others enslaved and perhaps eventually exterminated. The socialist ideal was a world of peace, freedom, and equality; with little thought given (in pre-Revolution days) to what might be necessary to get there. What would happen to all those people who weren’t “class-concious proletatians” wasn’t discussed much. The Nazis, OTOH, gloried in the pain, blood and suffering they would inflict on their inferiors.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Nazis and socialists was their attitude towards the state. Before the Bolshevik Revolution socialist assumed the State would rapidly “wither away.” After the Rev it became obvious that this wasn’t going to happen anytime soon and the ideal got moved to the distant future, as the State got more powerful and oppressive. But the ideal never went away.
The Nazis, OTOH, glorified the State and intended for it to last forever.
To sum it up, the Nazis and socialists/communists shared many methods, and were both unalterably opposed to the liberal (original sense of the word), middle-class capitalism on which America has been built, but their goals were about as opposite as any two groups can be.
I've said many times that modern China most resembles a Fascist state. This quote is an interesting take that I hadn't considered before.
WRT your very last paragraph:
This is precisely the point.
“Liberalism” is no longer about liberty. It is about government, regulations and laws.
Libertarians are now the true liberals. And the opposite, of Socialists, Nazis, and ... “liberals”.
That is a common misconception, but Hitler wasn't a fascist. A good example of fascism would be Mussolini. Hitler's brand of socialism (national, rather than international) is often confused with fascism because it shares a common national focus (with the "volk" in the case of Nazism).
Other reasons for the confusion is due to the simplistic way most people describe the political spectrum. On the so-called "far right" they place the Nazis (national socialists), in the center they place the "social democrat" moderates, and on the far left they place the communists. The only problem with this model is that every point of the spectrum is some form of authoritarian socialism.
But probably the biggest reason for the confusion is that there really isn't that much difference between socialism and fascism. Both are fundamentally authoritarian systems. When you start following down the path that government is supposed to control the population (whether it be via a complex legal system, gun control, complex tax codes, or some other means) rather than the other way around, you will inevitably arrive at some form of tyrannical government.
Agreed.
The only important difference between Nazi-ism, Fascism, Communism, Socialism and Liberalism is the spelling, and that the last group hasn’t got the brains to figure it out.
- Bill Vance
'Socialism' is by traditional definition 'government ownership of the means of production', with a traditional example typically being the Soviet Union. Similarly, 'fascism' is by definition 'government control of the means of production', with a typical example being Nazi Germany or Italy under Mussolini.
Hitler was indeed a fascist, but fascism is merely socialism-light in economic terms, and is usually cojoined with a strong component of nationalism.
On 1 May 1927, at the Nazi party congress, Hitler specifically declared that he and the party were socialist. Indeed, he said as much in many speeches, quite a few of which are available on line. As he put it, ''we do not care who may own a factory or a shop; our socialism goes much deeper than simple ownership.'' Definitionally illiterate, of course, but his intent is unmistakable.
Bravo! Well cited!
Hitler the Greenie
And Hitler also of course foreshadowed the Red/Green alliance of today. The Nazis were in fact probably the first major political party in the Western world to have a thoroughgoing “Green” agenda. I take the following brief summary from Andrew Bolt:
Hitler’s preaching about German strength and destiny was water in the desert to the millions of Germans who’d been stripped of pride, security and hope by their humiliating defeat in World War I, and the terrible unemployment that followed.
The world was also mad then with the idea that a dictatorial government should run the economy itself and make it “efficient”, rather than let people make their own decisions.
The Nazis — National Socialists — promised some of that, and their sibling rivals in the Communist Party more.
The theory of eugenics — breeding only healthy people — was also in fashion, along with a cult of health.
The Nazis, with their youth camps and praise of strong bodies and a strong people, endorsed all that, and soon were killing the retarded, the gay and the different.
Tribalism was popular, too. People weren’t individuals, but members of a class, as the communists argued, or of a race, as the Nazis said. Free from freedom — what a relief for the scared!
You’d think we’d have learned. But too much of such thinking is back and changing us so fast that we can’t say how our society will look by the time we die.
A KIND of eugenics is with us again, along with an obsession for perfect bodies.
Children in the womb are being killed just weeks before birth for the sin of being a dwarf, for instance, and famed animal rights philosopher Peter Singer wants parents free to kill deformed children in their first month of life. Meanwhile support for euthanasia for the sick, tired or incompetent grows.
As for tribalism, that’s also back — and as official policy. We now pay people to bury their individuality in tribes, giving them multicultural grants or even an Aboriginal “parliament”.
But most dangerous is that we strip our children of pride, security and even hope. They are taught that God is dead, our institutions corrupt, our people racist, our land ruined, our past evil and our future doomed by global warming.
Many have also watched one of their parents leave the family home, which to some must seem a betrayal.
They are then fed a culture which romanticises violence and worships sex — telling them there is nothing more to life than the cravings of their bodies.
No one can live like this and be fulfilled. People need to feel part of something bigger and better than ourselves — a family, or a church, or a tradition or a country. Or, as a devil may whisper, the greens.
The greens. Here’s a quote which may sound very familiar — at least in part. “We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. “Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . .
“This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.”
That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn’t alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homoepathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.
HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany’s “sacred” forests.
This isn’t a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany’s main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men.
The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913.
In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned.
Heard all that recently? I’m not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens — the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party.
Its message is much as Hitler’s own in Mein Kampf: “When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall.”
Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals.
We must realise a movement that stresses “natural order” and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god.
We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the “AIDS of the earth”, and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps “dictatorial powers”.
And our growing church of nature worshippers insist that science make way for their fundamentalist religion, bringing us closer to a society in which muscle, not minds, must rule.
It’s as a former head of Greenpeace International, Patrick Moore, says: “In the name of speaking for the trees and other species, we are faced with a movement that would usher in an era of eco-fascism.”
This threat is still small. But if we don’t resist it today, who knows where it will sweep us tomorrow?
I don't remember which book it was in, but Dr. Sowell had a very profound comment along these lines.
All human political history prior to the American Constitution was essentially a battle over who would have power over the common people. Every group claimed that all that was needed to solve the nation's problems was to put its leader in power.
The US Constitution said nothing about who would hold the power. Rather, for the very first time in history, it limited the power of the government with the aim of allowing the common people to live their own lives without the government interfering. It was in some ways an attempt to abolish government as it had previously been known.
The Constitution also somewhat reminds of the Lord of the Rings, where the good guys decide to destoy the Ring (absolute power and domination) rather than try to use it for good. The power and domination over others is evil by nature, and cannot be used in the service of Good.
The whole 'left'/'right' pseudo-division of the political spectrum was first popularised by the German Communist party in the late 1920s. Both they and the Nazis were, of course, socialists (frankly, not a penny's difference between them except for the Nazis' extreme nationalism), and the Reds hammered on the 'leftist/rightist' spectrum as a means of differentiating themselves from the Nazis.
Socialism cannot stand even the prospect of ideological competition. Guess which group Hitler went after first once he was in power? Jews? Slavs? Gypsies?
Not a chance. The Communists, first go, right out of the gate -- less than a year after he got rid of his co-chancellor von Papen.
He named his party "The National Socialist Party" and he wanted socialism for all good Germans--servitute or death for everyone else.
The money came from over here, do your research.
Our Corporations have ties with German Corps..
Our oil companies supplied them w/av-gas before they could make their own, etc. & etc..
Bingo. That quote is directly applicable.
If you haven’t read The Road to Serfdom, I highly recommend it. It’s not very long, though it is fairly dense reading.
Indeed it does, on more levels than most toadheads think.
Democrats would have loved the guy. He was their kind of single testicle freak.
"You really like me!"
Before arguing about whether fascism and nazism are “really” socialism, we really should define our terms.
What is socialism? What characteristics set it apart from other political ideologies? What deviation from these characteristics are sufficient to make it no longer “really socialist?”
If you don’t define your terms, “socialism” tends to wind up only being a synonym for “things I don’t like.”
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