Never Blame the Left (Were the Nazis Left or Right?)

National Review Via http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/genocide.html ^ | Dec., 1995 | George Watson

[Ditto]

http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/genocide.html

from National Review, 1995-Dec-31, by George Watson:

Never Blame the Left

The Left is perceived as kind and caring,
despite its extensive history of promoting genocide.

When it comes to handing out blame, it is widely assumed that the Right is wicked and the Left incompetent. Or rather, you sometimes begin to feel, any given policy must have been Right if it was wicked, Left if it was incompetent.

Mr. Watson, formerly a professor at New York University and now a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, is the author of Politics & Literature in Modern Britain and The Idea of Liberalism He is currently completing a history of socialism.

To give an example: I happened recently in Vienna to pass a restaurant that was advertising Jewish food, with two armed policemen standing outside. They were there, one of them explained to me, to guard against right wing radical extremists. There had been no violence against the restaurant then, and I believe there has been none since. But racism, and especially anti-Semitism, is wicked, so it must be right-wing.

That is fairly astounding, when you think about it. The truth is that in modern Europe, genocide has been exclusively a socialist idea, ever since Engels proclaimed it in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in January-February 1849. Ever since then everyone who has advocated genocide has called himself a socialist, without exception.

The Left has a lot to hide. In the 1890s, for example, French socialists dissociated themselves from the Dreyfus affair, and in January 1898 the French Socialist Party issued a manifesto that called it a power struggle within the ruling classes, and warned the workers against taking sides in the matter. Dreyfus's supporters were Jewish capitalists, they argued, eager to clear themselves of financial scandals. A few years later, in 1902, H. G. Wells in Anticipations repeated the Marxist demand for genocide, but with variations, since the book is a blueprint for a socialist utopia that would be exclusively white.

A generation later Bernard Shaw, another socialist, in a preface to his play On the Rocks (1933), called on scientists to devise a painless way of killing large mulititudes of people, especially the idle and the incurable, which is where Hitler's program began six years later. In a letter to his fellow socialist Beatrice Webb (February 6, 1938) Shaw remarked of Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews that ``we ought to tackle the Jewish question,'' which means admitting ``the right of States to make eugenic experments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable.'' His only proviso was that it should be done humanely.

Ethnic cleansing was an essential part of the socialist program before Hitler had taken any action in the matter. The Left, for a century, was proud of its ruthlessness, and scornful of the delicacy of its opponents. ``You can't make an omelette,'' Beatrice Webb once told a visitor who had seen cattle cars full of starving people in the Soviet Unions, ``without breaking eggs.''

There is abundant evidence, what is more, that the Nazi leaders believed they were socialists and that anti-Nazi socialists often accepted that claim. In Mein Kampf (1926) Hitler accepted that National Socialism was a derivative of Marxism. The point was more bluntly made in private conversations. ``The whole of National Socialism is based on Marx,'' he told Hermann Rauschning. Rauschning later reported the remark in Hitler Speaks (1939), but by that time the world was at war and too busy to pay much attention to it. Goebbels too thought himself a socialist. Five days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he confided in his diary that ``real socialism'' would be established in that country after a Nazi victory, in place of Bolshevism and Czarism.

The evidence that Nazism was part of the socialist tradition continues to accumulate, even if it makes no headlines. In 1978 Otto Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant appeared in its original German. Wagener was a lifelong Nazi who had died in 1971. His recollections of Hitler's conversations had been composed from notes in a British prisoner-of-war camp, and they represent Hitler as an extreme socialist utopian, anti-Jewish because ``the Jew is not a socialist.'' Nor are Communists--``basically they are not socialistic, since they create mere herds, as in the Soviet Union, without individual life.'' The real task, Hitler told Wagener, was to realize the socialist dream that mankind over the centuries had forgotten, to liberate labor, and to displace the role of capital. That sounds like a program for the Left, and many parties called socialist have believed in less.

Hitler's allegiance, even before such sources were known, was acknowledged by socialists outside Germany. Julian Huxley, for example, the pro-Soviet British biologist who later became director-general of UNESCO, accepted Hitler's claim to be a socialist in the early 1930s, though without enthusiasm (indeed, with marked embarrassment).

Hitler's program demanded central economic planning, which was at the heart of the socialist cause; and genocide, in the 1930s, was well known to be an aspect of the socialist tradition and of no other. There was, and is, no conservative or liberal tradition of racial extermination. The Nazis, what is more, could call on socialist practice as well as socialist theory when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and began their exterminatory program. That is documented by Rudolf Hoess in his memoir Kommandant in Auschwitz (1958). Detailed reports of the Soviet camp system were circulated to Nazi camp commandants as a model to emulate and an example to follow.

Soviet exterminations under Lenin and Stalin may have totaled 25 to 30 million, which (if the estimate is accepted) would represent about three times the Nazi total of nine million. That seems to matter very little now. My Austrian policeman was still certain that racism is right-wing. As are a lot of people. After a recent bomb outrage against a synogogue in Lübeck, the German press instantly assumed, before anyone was charged with the crime, that the Right was to blame. The fact that there is no non-socialist tradition of genocide in Europe has not even been noticed.

That is an impressive act of suppression. The Left may have lost the political battle, almost everywhere in the world. But it does not seem to have lost the battle of ideas. In intellectual circles, at least, it is still believed that racism and the Left do not mix.

Why is this? How has the evidence of socialist genocide, how has Hitler's acknowledgement of his debt to Marx, been so efficiently suppressed?

The answer, I suspect, lies in the nature of political commitment. Political knowledge is not like botany or physics, and commitment is not usually made by examining evidence. When socialism was fashionable I used to ask those who believed in it why they thought public ownership would favor the poor. What struck me about their responses was not just that they did not know but that they did not think they were under any obligation to know. But if they had really cared about poverty they would have demanded an answer before they signed up, and would have gone on demanding an answer until they got one. In other words, they were hardly interested in solving poverty. What really interested them was looking and sounding as if they did.

When Marxism was fashionable, similarly, I used to ask Marxists what book by Marx or Engels they had read all the way through, and watch them look shifty and change the subject. Or, for a change, I might ask them what they thought of Engels's 1849 program of racial extermination, and watch them lose their temper. Politics, for lots of people, is not evidence based. It is more like showing off a new dress or a new suit.

There are three motives, broadly speaking, for political commitment, of which the third is admirable. I shall leave it till last.

The first is self-definition. You call yourself Left or Right, that is, as a way of proclaiming to the world and to yourself that you are a certain sort of person--kind and caring if you are Left, competent and realistic if you are Right. The reasons for these associations of ideas are far older than our century and matter now only to historians, and even they would usually prefer not to be asked about them. It might be worrying if anyone did. The line between the efficient and the inefficient, after all, is nothing like as simple as the line between the private and the public, and not all public enterprise is caring: Auschwitz was public enterprise. Never mind. If you want to look caring, you will not ask such questions, and if anybody does it is always possible to change the subject.

The second motive is a sense of community. You choose a political side because the people you know, or would like to know, are already there, and you would like them to be like you. There was a time when, in university life, you would not be accepted unless you were Left, and it took enormous courage in that age to speak out on campus against Soviet or Chinese exterminations. That view is not yet dead. There are still those on both sides of the Atlantic who move, and intend to go on moving, in circles that think anti-Americanism a sufficient substitute for connected thought.

The third motive is instrumental. You can hold a political view with the admirable purpose of achieving something specific like constitutional change or a balanced budget, and support those who support it, whatever their party color. A moment's reflection suggests that this is rare. It is hard work, for one thing. It seldom attracts admiration, for another, though it often should. And it is not always easy to believe that this will work. Much more agreeable, on the whole, to use politics as a way of defining yourself or of making and keeping friends.

The Left got away with its crimes, I suggest, because those who form opinion had their own reasons for looking in another direction. They wanted to see themselves in a certain light and to keep the good opinion of the people whose friendship they valued. They had no wish to look at evidence, and they were adept at pretending, when it was produced, that it did not mean what it said. I remember once, ni a controversy in a British journal, being told that Marx, Wells, and Shaw were being whimsical and nothing more when they committed socialists to mass-murder. Couldn't I take a joke? Evidence is seldom as inconvenient as that in the physical sciences, and scientists do not enjoy such convenient excuses for dismissal as whimsy or irony. Most critical theory, in our times, has been a way of pretending that evidence does not, and perhaps cannot, be taken literally.

The effects of that mood are still visible. The history of socialism, above all, is studiously neglected and even, in some aspects, simply taboo. What we need now is a serious and unblinking study of socialism, of what it said and what it did: one that does not judge the evidence; one that is brave enough to tell it as it was.

[neutrino]

The whole idea of National Socialism was that the individual should subordinate his interests to those of the race. It is a form of socialism, though distinct from what we usually see. Consider the following quote from Mein Kampf, Vol. 2, Ch. 1:

The bourgeois world is Marxist but believes in the possibility of a certain group of people – that is to say, the bourgeoisie – being able to dominate the world, while Marxism itself systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews.

(Yes, I know, he's got a hang-up about Jews. This is just a quote.)

Anyway, the salient point - a valid one, IMO, is that any form of Marxism is fundamentally economic, and deals with economic classes. This is what the liberals in this country aim at. So they tear down the "rich" for the greater good of...the community...or the country...or all mankind.

Now, consider this as well, same source, Vol. 1, Chapter 11:

The constructive powers of the Aryan and that peculiar ability he has for the building up of a culture are not grounded in his intellectual gifts alone. If that were so they might only be destructive and could never have the ability to organize; for the latter essentially depends on the readiness of the individual to renounce his own personal opinions and interests and to lay both at the service of the human group. By serving the common weal he receives his reward in return. For example, he does not work directly for himself but makes his productive work a part of the activity of the group to which he belongs, not only for his own benefit but for the general. The spirit underlying this attitude is expressed by the word: WORK, which to him does not at all signify a means of earning one’s daily livelihood but rather a productive activity which cannot clash with the interests of the community. Whenever human activity is directed exclusively to the service of the instinct for self-preservation it is called theft or usury, robbery or burglary, etc.

Notice that he clearly advocates subordination of personal interests to the so-called common good.

So, as I said earlier, I believe that it really is socialism. Anytime a person is told to put their interests aside for the purported good of a group, I smell the rot of socialism. And whether the group waves a hammer and sickle banner...or something else...the simple truth is that one's labor and the fruits thereof are being taken away.

[Petronski]

Far left, not far right. Did you even bother to read the article?

Yes, I read the article. That does not mean I agree with it, nor does it mean that it is the truth. I would refer you to #98, which is also not something which you might agree with, nor is it necessarily something you must accept.

I understand libertarians prefer to think of the left as total government control and the right as total liberty. That model is their innovation, and though that might be your preferred way to view the matter, it does not mean it is right and the other is wrong.

Some define left v. right as no-private-property v. all-private-property, others have chosen to view it as tyranny v. freedom.

I would to submit to you that the model listed in #98 has been around much longer and is far more widely accepted.

[Petronski]

Anytime a person is told to put their interests aside for the purported good of a group, I smell the rot of socialism.

Some would argue that Christ asked us to do just that.

[neutrino]

Some would argue that Christ asked us to do just that.

There is, I think, a profound difference between "asked" and "told".

But aside from that semantic difference, I note that most (perhaps all?) communities - even Christian - based on a communistic or socialistic model have failed. The various monastic organizations seem to be an exception, but they bring in only a select group of people. They do not seem to be (nor intend to be) a general model for everyone.

[Leesylvanian]

That Civil War thing was 'brother against brother' wasn't it? It was in mine - five brothers from Kentucky split, three for the CSA and two for the USA.

[Ditto]

I would to submit to you that the model listed in #98 has been around much longer and is far more widely accepted.

Here it is. From what I can gather, this 'model' has been around since sometime after WWII. Before then, political thinkers referred to the Nazis as a socialist movement. As I pointed out responding to #98, this model makes no sense logically.

It says that the far left exposes centralized control and group rights/liberties and as you move to the right you get greater degrees of more decentralized government and individual rights/liberties. But suddenly, when you get to the far-right you suddenly revert to a draconian centralized control and ultimate group think with no individual rights.

Yes, it is conventional wisdom --- but it is also completely illogical.

[harpseal]

Then I assume you mean that the Nazis were not so much "Totalitarian" as they were "Authoritarian"....

Given the history I believe the Nazi government was both authoritarian and totalitarian. They sought to control every aspect of their citizens lives from conception to death. The Lebensborn program is but one example of their totalitarianism. The Soviets also qualified on both counts.

and as far as "getting their cut"...dos'nt every single govt. in the world "get their cut" in the form of Taxes?

The Nazi Party carried their control and taxing of private businesses to an extreme. Businesses were able to avoid regular taxation to some extent by paying off the Nazi Party and many of its officials. Businesses who did not pay off the Nazi Party were unable to get through the regulatory process. You are correct in seeing a resemblence to current American government. It was not always this pervasive, however. In short, yes, government always taxes but maintaining the faction that controls the government has not always been mandatory particularly in the USA.

Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown

[bluester]

One might ask himself where KKK, Aryan Nation and people like David Duke stand.

[Ditto]

One might ask himself where KKK, Aryan Nation and people like David Duke stand.

If they favor the use coercive government power to persecute individuals based on race, religion, class or any of the myriad of excuses used by totalitarians, they belong on the left side of the spectrum. Their stated goals can only be achieved by using the power of the state against individuals. That requires a large and intrusive government apparatus. Therefore, they can not be on the right by any logical analysis.

[bluester]

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Actually everyting they stand for belongs to the extreme right.

[Ditto]

Actually everyting they stand for belongs to the extreme right.

Please define those thing. What makes them 'far right'?

If far left is total government would not far right be no government?

[bluester]

Total government and no goverment is not everything. There are a couple of other issues (more important in this case) which set them on the far right. Those things have been clear since WW2. Just as things regarding communism and Stalinism on the left have been. I really don't know why some people have a hard time accepting that. After all, that doesn't mean they all agree with those extreme ideas, just as those on the left don't agree all with communism or Stalinism.

[Ditto]

Total government and no government is not everything. There are a couple of other issues (more important in this case) which set them on the far right. Those things have been clear since WW2

Well what are those things? Please be specific.

Just as things regarding communism and Stalinism on the left have been. I really don't know why some people have a hard time accepting that. After all, that doesn't mean they all agree with those extreme ideas, just as those on the left don't agree all with communism or Stalinism.

I made no implication that people in the middle of the spectrum 'agree with those on the extremes'. I see anarchy as extreme right, but I surely do not advocate anarchy.

I am simply looking for a logical spectrum and it is not logical to me to have big totalitarian governments on opposite ends. Many like you simply accept the conventional wisdom that the Nazis were 'right wing' but they can't tell me why they are right wing. Putting the Nazis on the right and the Commies on the left is like a pH scale with acid on both ends. It's not logical. Opposites should be opposite, not alike.

[Geopolitica]

Watson, I believe, is George Watson, a professor of history (or maybe International Relations) at Cambridge University. Really dislikes Commies and socialists. I think he used to write a lot for National Review, but he's getting older now and seems to have quietened down. He's a good guy.

[The Shootist]

You can successfully argue that the Nazis were "not socialist", I suppose, but you can't reasonably do so using my definition. And mine comes from the dictionary. So: what's yours? And where does it come from?

Socialism, n. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.

NAZI Germany neither owned the means of production nor distribution. By this definition the NAZIs fail to be Socialist. I would also point out that the NAZIs did not seem interested in the "public welfare", at least not from the perspective of the 1930s, 50s or 90s for that matter.

Perhaps this will help, socialism is a political ideology whereas fascism has no particular ideology. The National Socialist German Worker's Party was perverted, by Hitler, Rohm and others, to fit their twisted views.

Let me quote from Juan J. Linz, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Yale. He is Chairman of the Committee on Political Sociology, Research Committee of the International Sociological Association and the International Political Science Association.
"We define fascism as a hypernationalist, often pan-nationalist, anti-parliamentary, anti-liberal, anti-communist, populist and therefore anti-proletarian, partly anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois, anti-clerical or at least, non-clerical movement, with the aim of national social integration through a single party and corporative representation not always equally emphasised; with a distinctive style and rhetoric, it relied on activist cadres ready for violent action combined with electoral participation to gain power with totalitarian goals by a combination of legal and violent tactics" and further on, "Hostility to the anti-national and anti-human solution that proletarian classism offers to solve the obvious probelms and injustices of the capitalist system".

Doc, the only thing socialist about the NAZI was the word in their name.

[The Shootist]

:-)

[The Shootist]

I would refer you to post 135.

[vladog]

Some historian, I can`t remember who said the the Nazis were a cult with AH as the godhead. Their agenda was fuzzy to say the least. Outside of cleaning out the Jews, Commies, and getting even for WWI they weren`t much different than the Kaiser`s Germany. Ah was bankrolled by big business Krupp and company.

[tarpon_bill]

>>> If the far left is total government, would not the far right be total anarchy?

yes

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

First Plank: Abolition of property in land and the application of all rents of land to public purposes. (Zoning - Model ordinances proposed by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover widely adopted. Supreme Court ruled "zoning" to be constitutional in 1921. Private owners of property required to get permission from government relative to the use of their property. Federally owned lands are leased for grazing, mining, timber usages, the fees being paid into the U.S. Treasury.)

Second Plank: A heavy progressive or graduated in-come tax. (Corporate Tax Act of 1909. The 16th Amendment, allegedly ratified in 1913. The Revenue Act of 1913, section 2, Income Tax. These laws have been purposely misapplied against American citizens to this day.)

Third Plank: Abolition of all rights of inheritance. (Partially accomplished by enactment of various state and federal "estate tax" laws taxing the "privilege" of transferr-ing property after death and gift before death.)

Fourth Plank: CONFISCATION OF THE PROPERTY OF ALL EMIGRANTS AND REBELS. (The confiscation of property and persecution of those critical - "rebels" - of government policies and actions, frequently accomplished by prosecuting them in a courtroom drama on charges of violations of non-existing administrative or regulatory laws.)

Fifth Plank: Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. (The Federal Reserve Bank, 1913--the system of privately-owned Federal Reserve banks which maintain a monopoly on the valueless debt "money" in circulation.)

Sixth Plank: Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.

(Federal Radio Commission, 1927; Federal Communications Commission, 1934; Air Commerce Act of 1926; Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938; Federal Aviation Agency, 1958; becoming part of the Department of Transportation in 1966; Federal Highway Act of 1916 (federal funds made available to States for highway construction); Interstate Highway System, 1944 (funding began 1956); Interstate Commerce Commission given authority by Congress to regulate trucking and carriers on inland waterways, 1935-40; Department of Transportation, 1966.)

Seventh Plank: Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. (Depart-ment of Agriculture, 1862; Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1933 -- farmers will receive government aid if and only if they relinquish control of farming activities; Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933 with the Hoover Dam completed in 1936.)

Eighth Plank: Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies especially for agriculture. (First labor unions, known as federations, appeared in 1820. National Labor Union established 1866. American Federation of Labor established 1886. Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 placed railways under federal regulation. Department of Labor, 1913. Labor-management negotiations sanctioned under Railway Labor Act of 1926. Civil Works Administration, 1933. National Labor Relations Act of 1935, stated purpose to free inter-state commerce from disruptive strikes by eliminating the cause of the strike. Works Progress Administration 1935. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, mandated 40-hour work week and time-and-a-half for overtime, set "minimum wage" scale. Civil Rights Act of 1964, effectively the equal liability of all to labor.)

Ninth Plank: Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country. (Food processing companies, with the co-operation of the Farmers Home Administration foreclosures, are buying up farms and creating "conglomerates.")

Tenth Plank: Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production. (Gradual shift from private education to publicly funded began in the Northern States, early 1800’s. 1887: federal money (unconstitutionally) began funding specialized education. Smith-Lever Act of 1914, vocational education; Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 and other relief acts of the 1930’s. Federal school lunch program of 1935; National School Lunch Act of 1946. National Defense Education Act of 1958, a reaction to Russia’s Sputnik satellite demonstration, provided grants to education’s specialties. Federal school aid law passed, 1965, greatly enlarged federal role in education, "head-start" programs, textbooks, library books.