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.
So you are saying that the academics and media elits who redefined the Nazis as right-wing after the war are the same as crooked Cicero politicians?
Works for me. ;~))
Genocide is needed to maintain the control, the victim is irrelevant, it is usually the Facist if the Communist are in power, and vice versa. Hitler used race because it was already in the Nationalist Party Platform, but he also targeted the Communist in Russia and Eastern Europe. Class has also be used. Any division can be utilized, as the ends justify the means.
people to adopt socialism at first, before violent upheaval brings about the communist state. No, communism and socialism are identifies as two stages, and the transition between the two is necessarily peaceful: it is predicated on the "modification" of men and increased roductivity. Most of this was refined by Lening from the rudiments given by Marx and Engels.
In the former Soviet Union, they declared the victory of socialism around 1937. No revolutions there.
The vanguard can be class envy. It can be racism. It can be religion. These are morives, and the terminology is certainly not Marxian. Nothing about racism, either: history is the struggle of economic classes, everything else is a byproduct.
Originally, Marx and Engels felt that nationalism was an impediment to Marxism. No, not to Marxism. And not quite: Marx believed that the revolution could not happen in one country; socialism must win everywhere at once. It was Lenin who abandonde that premise and led his proletariat to victory in 1917.
The leftist uprising that led to the Axis and World War II Surely you ar enot suggesting that WWII started as a reaction to some misterious leftis uprising!
The Shootist claimed that Hitler was not a socialist because whatever views his were based on, he perverted to his own end. That is just the point; Marxist theory holds that this is precisely what will happen and why the progression from private ownership to a form of socialism and then to communism is inevitable. Sorry, this is false.
Men will grab hold of a vanguard and twist it to their own ends, with it resulting in socialism. Whatever it takes. The result is what is important, not what path is chosen.
Actually, they have debated this point quite a bit. In restrospect, we know that, historically, those who followed or aspired to socialism did, in fact, begave this way.
However, this does not follow from their wrtings, which is why socialism is so attractive to many: they often claim that true socialism has never been tried; Stalin and Mao perverted it. Perhaps, the proper way to say it is this: with no built-in protections from the base elements in the human nature, socialism always deteriorates into violent oppression of its own, although the abominable methods are not actually advocated.
Heck, if you go to Marxists.org and read their philosophies and current thinking, you will find that now radical Islam is accepted by them as being a tool for "social change".
This is patently false. And, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Web is not the ultimate source of education.
That is why you have radical leftists like Ramsey Clark stating that "Islam has probably a billion and a half adherents today. It exists. And it is probably the most compelling spiritual and moral force on earth today. People hate to hear that." The truthfulness of this observation does not depend on whether the protagonist has socialist aspirations.
Notice that the radical Islamics such as Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban all are virulently opposed to capitalism. I have never heard this stated before. Could you please point me to the source?
Rarely do you ever hear that Nazism only became possible as an outgrowth of Communism and totalitarian politics.
Do you have any references to the use of the terms right and left from that time period? I always thought in these inter party battles, the winners called the losers 'counter revolutionaries." I never saw anything that used the terms right vs left.
Lefties today want to blame "nationalism" on the horrors of the 20th century while totally exonerating socialism and communism. When held up to the facts, they just don't pass the smell test. Most of the left loves Nietzsche's "Will to Power" and will excuse away the consequences of this with flimsy explanations. Even more of them have avoided talking about the deadly effects of communsim altogether.
At any rate, the Nazi's were a leftward group, but its "nationalism" contrasted with the the other lefts' "internationalism".
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Because, as I said, those designations are arbitrary and pretty much worthless. You can use pieces of them to describe just about anyone - remember when Yeltsin stood against the established Communist party? And it was they who were labeled the "rightwing" and Yeltsin, their opponent, who was labeled "leftwing?"
The same might be said about the labels "conservative" and "liberal" - they're pretty much arbitrary. An American "liberal" is nothing like a classic, Continental liberal, who believed in free markets. Neither is a British Liberal. And "conservative" depends pretty much on what it is you're trying to conserve - tree-huggers, who wish to conserve the status quo when it comes to logging, blanch at the thought that they'd be so labeled, so much so that they had to change the very name of the activity from "conservation" to "environmentalism." And to make the whole thing even sillier, they, who are chaining themselves to road machines to prevent development, call themselves "progressives."
I think we'll have to find other, more accurate labels if we're really to have them mean something in political discourse. But that will mean that people have to think instead of merely using pigeonhole labels as intellectual crutches, and I don't think most are willing, and some not able, to put up the necessary effort.
Sonce German national socialism postulated state control with private ownership and management then it clearly is possible for corporations to continue to function so long as the Nazi Party got their cut. It actually is not all that different than many companies operating in socialist nations. By the way the Volkswagon was Hitler's idea. It was designed by Willy Porshewith much personal input from Adolph himself.
Volkswagon was founded as a Nazi company.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
The word is vanguard. And it means the frontal position or tose occupying the same.It also means the forefront of an action or movement. Often, what is at the forefront of a movement is a shared motivation. A driving force, if you will.You are talking about motives. Marxists have identifies the proletariat as the vanguard. No variations.I would agree with you, except for the fact that you are wrong. From Marxists.org:In any social movement there is a vanguard and a mass. On one side, the vanguard, are groups of people who are more resolute and committed, better organised and able to take a leading role in the struggle, and on the other side, the mass, are larger numbers of people who participate in the struggle or are involved simply by their social position, but are less committed or well-placed in relation to the struggle, and will participate only in the decisive moments, which in fact change history.ANYTHING which can be used as the motivation for the vanguard.people to adopt socialism at first, before violent upheaval brings about the communist state. No, communism and socialism are identifies as two stages,Which is just what I said.and the transition between the two is necessarily peaceful: it is predicated on the "modification" of men and increased roductivity. Most of this was refined by Lening from the rudiments given by Marx and Engels.Again, from Marxists.org:The Marxist theory of the vanguard, in relation to class struggle under capitalism, stipulates that the working class, the mass, needs to be militantly lead through revolutionary struggle against capitalismThe vanguard can be class envy. It can be racism. It can be religion. These are morives, and the terminology is certainly not Marxian.You are arguing about a distinction with no difference. The vanguard are the motivated people who overcome the apathy of the mass. What moves the vanguard does not matter. When a wave sweeps over a nation, one can say that the motivations were incidental, that the people involved swept the nation, but more likely it would be described as the motivation sweeping the nation (so-and-so was swept into power on a wave of nationalism, for example).Surely you ar enot suggesting that WWII started as a reaction to some misterious leftist uprising!I am suggesting that WWII could not have occurred had leftists remained out of power.However, this does not follow from their wrtings, which is why socialism is so attractive to many: they often claim that true socialism has never been tried; Stalin and Mao perverted it.That is because Marxism is wrong.Perhaps, the proper way to say it is this: with no built-in protections from the base elements in the human nature, socialism always deteriorates into violent oppression of its own, although the abominable methods are not actually advocated.Close. There can be no built-in protections. None are possible. It will always degenerate. It is a flaw in the theory, and it is the reason why Marxism has been the most evil theory ever promoted on the planet.> Heck, if you go to Marxists.org and read their philosophies and current thinking, you will find that now radical Islam is accepted by them as being a tool for "social change".You are right. Silly me, ignore the Marxists and what they themselves put out (which does include all of the references to the books and such), and instead listen to TopQuark!This is patently false. And, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Web is not the ultimate source of education.
Notice that the radical Islamics such as Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban all are virulently opposed to capitalism. I have never heard this stated before. Could you please point me to the source?You can do your own research, thank you, but let me start you with this excerpt:"But I am confident that Muslims and this nation of 12,000 million Muslims, will, God willing, be able by counting on the help of God to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America. [snip]Sound familiar? Where else do we hear about the mass having their rightful property stolen from them by capitalists (Americans), leaving them with mere crumbs?"The American forces should expect reactions to their actions, from the Muslim world. Any thief or criminal or robber who enters the countries of others in order to steal should expect to be exposed to murder at any time.[snip]
"But to count of these non-believers, who steal the wealth of Muslims then give back some crumbs to certain Islamic states or mini-states reflects a flawed understanding of their duties...
"...the world is governed by the law of the jungle." ABC News interview with Osama Bin Laden
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