Posted on 12/10/2001 10:32:57 AM PST by 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.
Well, yes, most of the time. The right usually refers to the party that has enjoyed the longest running popularity, and/or is the current regime. In fact, you could consider the Taliban to be "on the right" because they are the outgoing regime.
The United States is unique in that "the right" has traditionally meant "people who believe in the values and intentions of our founding fathers". "The left" are traditionally "those who think the founding fathers were a little short sighted and that they can improve on the Constitution."
Unfortunately, I found this site, called "Free Congress", which claims to be right wing oreinted, while spouting Socialist/Communist dogma at us. You have to scroll down to their "NEW! Traditionalism Project", because the site is in frames. In other words, they're following Hitler's playbook in order to make Socialism/Communism more palatable. And don't forget, Hitler was in Germany's "right".
If you need any more convincing of my assessment, think about the political agenda of our previous administration, and compare their anti-gun, jack-booted Justice Department style to Hitler's agenda.
FYI, Their "Support of an Elite More Valuable than Support of the Masses" section says, in part:
"We will initially operate according to the belief that it is more important to win over the elites (or create a new, better one) than to build up a mass movement. Furthermore, it is more important to have a few impassioned members than a large number of largely indifferent members. The amount of energy, élan, and self-assurance that we are able to inculcate in the leaders of our movement will ultimately determine its success or failure.
"The new movement must be, in part, exclusive and elite. It must not be afraid to pass along a body of knowledge that is not readily accessible to and understandable by everyone. The strong appeal of a feeling of exclusivity and superiority will give our members a reason to endure the slings and arrows of popular disapproval.
"The New Traditionalist movement will appeal to the masses, but not immediately. The ideas of the masses never come from the masses. [ can you say Nanny Culture and Big Brother? Nice folk.] To the extent that the masses are more conservative than the elites, this is primarily because the masses have a long collective memory, and they still value the beliefs articulated by a long-lost elite. The conservative instincts of the American people will continue to erode unless a new elite is formed to refresh that memory."
I found this yesterday, and have been scared ever since. Now, I log off and bid you a very frightend good day.
Theories of Mass Culture, from The Media History Project
Political Propaganda as a Moral Duty, Dr. Joseph Wells, 1936
Marxism in Our Time, Leon Trotsky --reprint of entire pamphlet on
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~socappeal/MIOT.html, 1994
Socialism Today, issue 49, July 2000 Trotsky's relavence Today
Anarchism, Marxism, and Socialism/Communism, from Thinkquest
Why?
What are the reasons that Socialists are left and Fascists are right. Quantify it... use economic, social, intellectual or what ever units of measure you choose to show me why they are opposites and not similar.
MODERN TIMES The World From the Twenties to the Eighties. By Paul Johnson
Revied by By Robert Nisbet, New York Times, June 26, 1983
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/johnson-modern.html
snip…
Finally, as Mr. Johnson stresses correctly, Lenin was the true author of the policy of genocide: ''Once Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had started to 'exterminate' (a word he frequently employed) whole classes, merely on account of occupation and parentage, there was no limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. There is no essential moral difference ... between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the practice of genocide was born.''….snip…A good deal of Mr. Johnson's book is devoted to tracing the spread of Leninism, and all its ramifications, in the world. Ordinarily we sharply distinguish communism from what became known as fascism. But he sees the distinction as being without much difference. All the founding fathers of totalitarianism, Hitler and Mussolini included, were socialists in principle -but they shared a hatred of parliaments, personal rights against the state, free elections, intermediate associations possessed of any autonomy whatever and any form of government other than that of chosen elites. Lenin adopted one innovation from the Germans that unnerved his early supporters. After the Kaiser's government had begun to disintegrate during World War I, Gen. Erich von Ludendorff and his colleagues, frantic to mobilize every sector and energy of society for the war effort, promoted what they called ''war socialism'' - nothing less than a total absorption of society into the military effort. From the time Lenin (to the unhappiness of some Bolsheviks whom he promptly excoriated for ''Left infantilism'') adopted the fundamental principles of Ludendorff, a further feature of totalitarianism was dominance by the military.
THOSE who exclaimed so loudly and naively in 1939, when the pact between Stalin and Hitler came into being, simply had no comprehension of the enormous similarity of policies and institutions in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It was Hitler's massacre of the Brownshirt leader Ernst Roehm and his thousands of ''left'' followers in 1934 that gave Stalin the idea for the later Moscow Trials, with the consequent butchery or penal enslavement of many thousands of Bolsheviks, along with high ranking military officers and government officials whom Stalin had come to fear. Mr. Johnson notes that Hitler, during his final days, lamented that he had always been too benevolent for his own good and that he had not followed Stalin's example of killing off his generals before war began. And so comfortable was Stalin under his pact with the Nazi state that, even after Hitler had massed troops for an invasion of Russia and after Churchill and others had repeatedly warned him, Stalin refused to believe, until it was almost too late, that Hitler was going to make war on him.
Totalitarianism is but one form, the most evil to be sure, of the political state. Mr. Johnson sees statism, along with moral relativism, as the crowning disease of the 20th century, even in the democracies. ''The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless,'' he writes. ''Expand the state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too, pari passu.'' World War I, as he emphasizes, gave immense acceleraton to the idea that the state is omnicompetent; and the varied instrumentalities employed from 1914 to 1918 by the warring states with respect to economy, social order, institutions and culture were not forgotten when the Depression hit the world in the 30's. Nor were they forgotten during and after World War II in the democracies. Mr. Johnson stresses the fact that the first totalitarian regimes appeared in nations, including Russia and Japan, where a powerful tradition of statism had existed. We may give all the credit we like to revolutionary parties as the prime instigators of totalitarianism, but their effectiveness is intimately linked with an already existing powerful state which is accustomed to governing human minds as well as all institutions.
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I again assert that the political spectrum should be measured by some rational method. If totalitarians such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao are on the extreme left, it is completely illogical to place a fellow totalitarian like Hitler on the extreme right. It seems that Paul Johnson agrees.
For background knowledge see:
George Orwell (yes the George Orwell) - Homage to Catalonia
If you are going to invoke "Homage to Catalonia", you might also mention the chapter describing the destruction of the Anarchists and Orwell barely escaping with his own life. This was accomplished by the very same Marxists the Anarchists were temporarily allied with. You might also mention that Orwell got to experience a lot of the themes from "1984" in Spain inflicted not by Franco, but by his own Socialist side.
Why do Sicilian Mafia families have gang wars? Answer, to be rid of the competition. Do they sometimes form a common front against the police? Yes.
One of the features of the Cold War was the breakup of the Communist block and the fact that Communist China and the USSR had their own little cold war (along with some hot border clashes), not to mention the split between Yugoslavia and the USSR. Robert Conquest has a wonderful quote from a Soviet general who plainly states that warfare between Communist states will be ultimately bitter and eternal.
And sometimes they pulled together against the United States and the Western world.
As an aside, you also might want to explain why any sane person would be better off ruled by the Spanish Republicans (read Socialists run by Communists) than by Franco. After all one of the triggering incidents was La Pasionara (Communist spokeswoman) proclaiming that the parliamentary leader of the center-right party was a dead man and then him ending up dead, killed by Republican Guards.
I definitely agree with you that Hitler’s Germany definitely is not “far-right.” That was a misnomer caused by Stalin to cover up his own atrocities. Hitler’s Germany, if anything, was closer to the far-left, being separated from Stalin’s Russia only by a few short degrees.
However, I won’t say that complete anarchy is the far right either, even WITH those examples, especially when there were plenty of anarchists and anarchistic groups that were, if anything, on the far left of the spectrum. From the top of my head, I can name Bill Ayers, Nicola and Bart (you know, those two Italian guys who were executed back during the 1920s. Here’s to You was made in their “honor.”), Noam Chomsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and the like. Foucault, as a matter of fact, actually wanted “popular justice” akin to the September Massacres (which were beyond even most other radical leftists, even Marx, who usually saw fit to try to emulate the Reign of Terror), and considered literally any form of position a “prison” like some conspiracy theorist nut. Heck, one of the leadins to Communism is not just the abolishment of class, but also the abolishment of the state, being anarchistic in other words.
And Socialists fighting other Socialists was not even a bug, it’s a feature. Karl Marx made it explicitly clear in his correspondences that he and Engels were specifically aiming to recreate the 1793 Reign of Terror under Robespierre, and that event had a LOT of people trying to kill each other despite technically being on the same side (Grignon even ordered for his own men to kill anyone they found, even fellow Republicans, for fun, to satiate bloodlust). Not to mention there wasn’t ANY government at all, at least no rule of law, literally everyone that time was killing each other for sheer kicks.
I disagree regarding whether anarchy is “too far to the right”, since it, if anything, occupies the same placement as the left. A whole lot of anarchists were notorious for being left-wingers as well, like Sartre and Foucault. Even Karl Marx indicated that “true communism” would lead to the state fading away as well, meaning it was meant to be anarchistic.
Fully agreed, though I’d probably place Jefferson and possibly Locke as closer to Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and various other strains of socialism than to our tradition, or at least my tradition. The reason why is because Jefferson, believe it or not, actually supported the French Revolutionaries (who definitely belonged to the same camp as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidigger), even when their more sordid elements came to light, such as the September Massacres and even to a certain extent the Reign of Terror. You can read about it here: https://allthingsliberty.com/2017/05/understanding-thomas-jeffersons-reactions-rise-jacobins/ It’s probably a good thing the Constitution was made without Jefferson’s input, as otherwise, he’d probably have made it an English-language clone of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (which he also played a massive role in drafting).
As far as Locke, well, Rousseau got his ideas on government from Locke as well, the Social Contract originally being his idea, and Locke and Hobbes were about as different from each other as Marx and Bakunin were, or how Hitler and Stalin were (meaning, different only in the precise degree they should carry out their plans, and beyond that, not by much).
Was Fascism Right-Wing (Again)?
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/417926/was-fascism-right-wing-again-jonah-goldberg
And we’re back to using the Soviets as the only benchmark for what counts as left-wing. For the record, I agree with much of what he says about Mussolini and Mussolini’s fascism. But Hitler most certainly was an anti-traditionalist (as was Mussolini personally), who loathed the Church and had zero desire to restore the monarchy. The Horst Wessel Lied identifies both the Red Shirts and the reactionaries as the enemy
Nazi’s and Hitler were on the left. It is just a matter of degrees as Jonah Goldberg points out in this essay as well as in his book Liberal Fascism.
The real spectrum is State power versus individual freedom. At one extreme, you have the people in charge of the State having total control over production, and can take as they please. In this situation, it doesn't really matter whether the State is the Communist Party, the Nazis, or the Pharaoh -- whoever is on top controls all the individuals on the bottom.
The other extreme is anarchy, where there is no state. Anarchy is unstable -- individuals WILL band together to maintain some degree of order, and to protect their property from bandits.
For me, the ideal situation is where individuals have maximum freedom to do as they please.
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