>Interesting, you have to slam me as espousing revisionist history instead of actually making a point.
That is my point- Nazis=leftist is revisionism. It’s a transparent attempt to shake the mud off our boots. How many neo-nazis, WAR, Aryan Nation/Brotherhood, KKK, and their fellow travelers do you suppose vote Democrat when they vote? You want contradiction? How about anarchists- you know hippies, black bloc, Ayn Rand objectivists... You ready to call objectivists leftists?
>Nobody has ever denied that the Nazis slaughtered jews.
Haw! Better dip back into your David Irving bookshelf. Not too many Democrat voters in that demographic either.
>>This is pretty similar to the communists in the U.S.S.R. slaughtering kulaks, etc in their period. You pick a scape goat and use them as a disposable tool for generating terror and deflecting blame.
Yep, a dictatorship is exactly that and their various flavors differ only in their level of stupidity. History tells us that Hitler was stupider than Stalin.
>>I find it interesting that a party which avows clearly in their platform and stated objectives all the platitudes of the Left, is somehow not leftist.
Hell, Mussolini was an out and out Marxist and communist newspaper editor, then comuno-anarchist and then fascist. There’s your pedigree paradigm example. The left does not like this example, much like the right does not like the example of Hitler being a cancer on conservatism, particularly aristocratic conservatism. Trying to paint Hitler as a leftist is ludicrous and the larger attempt will create a laughing stock. Next you’ll have some carbon futures you’d like to sell me.
>>The whole justification for Nazis being right wing is that they opposed communists (and other softer socialist leftists). It doesn’t, however, happen to be valid.
Is so valid. If Hitler was so ding dong leftist, why didn’t he become a communist, I mean apart from that little anti-semitic doctrine. At no point did he offer a foundational critique of capital accumulation or the Prussian aristocracy or religion or the class system or mass production as a job destroyer, or mouth any of the leftist dogma about peace, love, understanding, tolerance, brotherhood, or the oppression of the working classes by anything other than Jews.
>>Yes, some capitalists did line up with the Nazis (as did much of the Left, as I mentioned and you ignored)
The left lined up as you say for one reason- Stalin told them to in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact. He even handed Hitler the German comintern as a gesture of “good will”. As it was, a huge number of commies left the CP for the Trotskyites after the pact. Your characterization “some capitalists” goes easy on the facts. Anthony Sutton, “Wall St. and the Rise of Hitler”.
but that was clearly because of the opposition to Communism.
Yes. And their opposition to safe working conditions, the ending of child labor, company store robbery, the 12hour workday, the 5 day work week, forced speedups, equal pay for women, vacations... It could be argued that capitalism well into the 20th century actually did give the marxists a reason for existing.
>>The other thing which complicates matters is that the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘left’ with respect to politics is very different in Europe. While it is true that industrialists in Germany backed up behind the Nazis, they came out of it being mere lackeys of the party.
True, but everyone was a lackey of the party eventually. You don’t “game” a dictatorship for long, it’s a seriously dangerous business. But the long view shows that capitalists would rather become a lackey of “the party” than than offer their workers humane working conditions. I mean this is what the entire political backdrop to the industrial age is all about. But I’ll even grant you that most capitalists were not cruel hearted plantation overseers at root. But they allowed themselves to become infected with the arrogant, elitist, xenophobic psychopathology of the aristocracy. It is this aristocratic mind set that should properly be the enemy of conservatism, but it isn’t. Until it is, conservatives are going to be perceived as closet Nazis by all the other people in the world.
>>They also did it out of a choice between lesser evils. I’m not going to excuse them, but I can recognize their lack of good options.
Our globalist corporations happily colluded with a rather nasty array of right wing dictators because they were “anti-communist”. The fact that our best minds couldn’t come up with an alternative foreign policy has condemned conservatism to a dark place unless it can do what Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin et al set as our task- the destruction of Monarchy and it’s aristocratic support apparat. We really dropped the ball on this, and not recognizing conservatism’s implicit and unholy alliance with aristocracy, will kill us.
>>Your understanding of capitalism is fairly minimal. Monopolies generally don’t prosper without government intervention.
Absolutely not true. Capitalism corrupts government almost as a physical law. Capitalism attempts at every turn to circumvent, short circuit and sabotage the rules of fair competition. Lobbying, vote buying, junkets, bribery, extortion, blackmail, price fixing, crying “too big to fail”, pork barrel legislation, all have their point of origination in enterprise whose directors are coping with slimmer profits, new technology, poor management, aging business models, and a lack of ethics.
>>They fall because of their own issues and market pressures. There’s plenty of studies on this subject.
Monopolies fail because the psychological dynamic of desperation and uninspired directorship that lead to the attempt at creating a monopoly in the first place, is a destructive psychological dynamic based on short term thinking. Competition driven by better ideas, a well managed and productive work force and long term thinking, is a constructive dynamic.
>>Of course I do find the comment ‘you didn’t live through the 60s’ as being particularly amusing. Does this imply that the U.S. was fascist in the 60s? Was Goldwater a fascist? Was Nixon a Fascist?
Well, maybe one day there will be a proper study of the 60’s comparing the ratio of long haired hippies who beat up rednecks compared to the ratio of rednecks who beat up long haired hippies. Since I lived through that period, I don’t need any intuition whatsoever to give you a functional analysis of that statistic.
>>(I’m hoping you consider these questions rhetorical, if not I’m left wondering the color of the sky in your world). How are the 60s relevant at all?
We’re looking at historic conservative methodology in creating a world view and where does that world view lead them when under pressure. All I’m saying is that conservatives, finding themselves at the losing end of a number of contemporary sociometrics, might want to consider an upgrade in smarts.
>>Since you’re convinced that the far right and conservatives have some sort of link, why don’t you explain it? I mean it must be self evident (heck with all those caps, it must be).
That would require a lecture on fight/flight response and its psychological analogs. You can try to define conservative away from the hard right and perhaps towards libertarian and I’d support you. But that would be a specialist definition, one that is not in general use for some pretty massive and chronic historic reasons. Funny how so few members of the “party of Lincoln” marched as an activist for the end of Jim Crow laws and attitudes. So we handed the entire racism issue to northern Democrats and are now living with the result.
>>I mean sure the U.S. conservative wants a minimal government, just like the ‘far right’. Oh wait, that’s not true. The American conservative is dedicated to the rule of law, just like the ‘far right’, oh wait, that’s not true either. We conservatives like crony capitalism. Hmm, nope don’t like that either. Ok, I think I finally found one, we don’t like communism. Well the ‘far right’ doesn’t either but for a different reason. The ‘far right’ doesn’t like it because it’s a rival not an opposite.
You have your work cut out for you getting that definition out into the larger public consciousness. I’d like to see it happen, but in the minds of most people conservatism has historically equated to right wing dictatorships, militarism, racism, 3rd World raw materials exploitation, labor abuses, strong arm tactics, coercion, intimidation, organized crime, nostalgia, unimaginitiveness, hard headedness, intolerance, etc. Perhaps that’s unfair to the true conservative, but I’m pretty sure that that overarching understanding is not hegemonous because the world has been hypnotized by an evil wizard.
He certainly wasn't a freedom loving admirer of the US Constitution, nor of limited government, but he sure as hell engaged in "social engineering"...Didn't he.
How many neo-nazis, WAR, Aryan Nation/Brotherhood, KKK, and their fellow travelers do you suppose vote Democrat when they vote?
Yeah, I'd say all of them. You don't think they'd vote for an American Constitutionalist do you?
The KKK?! That's ridiculous. They are the terrorist arm of the democRAT party, formed by Confederate Veterans for the purpose of keeping blacks from voting for Republicans.
You want contradiction? How about anarchists- you know hippies, black bloc...
They're not anarchists. Anarchists don't organize, they're just more Communists. They give anarchists a bad name. Same goes for the Occupackers.
And the hippies...gimme a break. Of course they're Communists...they lived in communes for crying out loud.
Why do you think they all love Castro and Che Guevara?
Of course, they're running the country now.
Democratic Socialists and National Socialists....we got em all Right Here in America...and they're all LEFTISTS!
Just like Hitler.
I really didn’t find most of that interesting enough for a direct response.
I’ll just sum up with something short. The 1 dimensional political scale is moronic. A 2d or 3d model would be a lot more appropriate. Any system which could land a libertarian on the same side as a Nazi is beyond stupid.