Posted on 02/18/2002 2:19:04 PM PST by TLBSHOW
They were left-wing socialists. Yes, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left. Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist ``exploitation'' by capitalists -- particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. They instituted and vigorously enforced a strict gun control regimen. They encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and they denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics. Yet a popular myth persists that the Nazis themselves were right-wing extremists. This insidious lie biases the entire political landscape, and the time has come to expose it.
Richard Poe, editor of Frontpage Magazine, sets the record straight:
Nazism was inspired by Italian Fascism, an invention of hardline Communist Benito Mussolini. During World War I, Mussolini recognized that conventional socialism wasn't working. He saw that nationalism exerted a stronger pull on the working class than proletarian brotherhood. He also saw that the ferocious opposition of large corporations made socialist revolution difficult. So in 1919, Mussolini came up with an alternative strategy. He called it Fascism. Mussolini described his new movement as a ``Third Way'' between capitalism and communism. As under communism, the state would exercise dictatorial control over the economy. But as under capitalism, the corporations would be left in private hands.
Hitler followed the same game plan. He openly acknowledged that the Nazi party was ``socialist'' and that its enemies were the ``bourgeoisie'' and the ``plutocrats'' (the rich). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler eliminated trade unions, and replaced them with his own state-run labor organizations. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler hunted down and exterminated rival leftist factions (such as the Communists). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler waged unrelenting war against small business.
Hitler regarded capitalism as an evil scheme of the Jews and said so in speech after speech. Karl Marx believed likewise. In his essay, ``On the Jewish Question,'' Marx theorized that eliminating Judaism would strike a crippling blow to capitalist exploitation. Hitler put Marx's theory to work in the death camps.
The Nazis are widely known as nationalists, but that label is often used to obscure the fact that they were also socialists. Some question whether Hitler himself actually believed in socialism, but that is no more relevant than whether Stalin was a true believer. The fact is that neither could have come to power without at least posing as a socialist. And the constant emphasis on the fact that the Nazis were nationalists, with barely an acknowledgment that they were socialists, is as absurd as labeling the Soviets ``internationalists'' and ignoring the fact that they were socialists (they called themselves the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Yet many who regard ``national'' socialism as the scourge of humanity consider ``international'' socialism a benign or even superior form of government.
According to a popular misconception, the Nazis must have been on the political right because they persecuted communists and fought a war with the communists in Russia. This specious logic has gone largely unchallenged because it serves as useful propaganda for the left, which needs ``right-wing'' atrocities to divert attention from the horrific communist atrocities of the past century. Hence, communist atrocities have received much less publicity than Nazi war crimes, even though they were greater in magnitude by any objective measure.
R. J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documents in his book Death by Government that the two most murderous regimes of the past century were both communist: communists in the Soviet Union murdered 62 million of their own citizens, and Chinese communists killed 35 million Chinese citizens. The Nazi socialists come in third, having murdered 21 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others. Additional purges occurred in smaller communist hellholes such as Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Cuba, of course. Communism does more than imprison and impoverish nations: it kills wholesale. And so did ``national socialism'' during the Nazi reign of terror.
But the history of the past century has been grossly distorted by the predominantly left-wing media and academic elite. The Nazis have been universally condemned -- as they obviously should be -- but they have also been repositioned clear across the political spectrum and propped up as false representatives of the far right -- even though Hitler railed frantically against capitalism in his infamous demagogic speeches. At the same time, heinous crimes of larger magnitude by communist regimes have been ignored or downplayed, and the general public is largely unaware of them. Hence, communism is still widely regarded as a fundamentally good idea that has just not yet been properly ``implemented.'' Santayana said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'' God help us if we forget the horrors of communism and get the historical lessons of Nazism backwards.
The Nazis also had something else in common with the modern left: an obsessive preoccupation with race. Hitler and his Nazis considered races other than their own inferior, of course. Modern ``liberals,'' who vociferously oppose the elimination of racial quotas, seem to agree. They apparently believe that non-white minorities (excluding Asians, of course) are inferior and unable to compete in the free market without favoritism mandated by the government. Whereas Hitler was hostile to those racial minorities, however, modern white ``liberals'' condescend benevolently. Hitler's blatant and virulent form of racism was eradicated relatively quickly and very forcefully, but the more subtle and insidious racism of the modern left has yet to be universally recognized and condemned.
The media often focuses its microscope on modern neo-nazi lunatics, but the actual scope of the menace is relatively miniscule, with perhaps a few thousand neo-nazis at most in the United States (mostly ``twenty-something'' know-nothings). The number of communists and communist sympathizers in the United States dwarfs that figure, of course -- even among tenured professors! And while the threat of neo-nazi terrorism is indeed serious, the chance of neo-nazis gaining any kind of legitimate political power anywhere is virtually zero. That is why the ACLU can safely use them to advertise its supposed commitment to free speech. Neo-nazi rallies incite violence, but they do not persuade bystanders to join their cause! If they did, the ACLU would have nothing to do with them.
--1/02
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Please keep us posted!!!
I think that's a safe bet although he was not week-kneed about the use of force, I doubt he ever envisioned it on a scale of Stalin, Mao or Hitler.
Marx was actually an interesting person. He was like a half baked doctor in many ways. He was excellent at diagnosing the aliment. He had that part right a lot. The part he had trouble with was the cure. His prescriptions ended up killing the patient.
America's Left is no different in aim or outcome. War is coming..."The Party is all-embracing. It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth. We must therefore develop branches of the Party in which the whole of individual life will be reflected. Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the Party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism - not such trifles as the private means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper..."
"The people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them. The gaze fascinated at one or two superficialities, such as possessions and income or rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime, they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."
Adolph Hitler - Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction pp 191-193
But don't hold your breath this sham will be uncovered and rectified. Too many people have too much at stake in the deception to allow that to happen.
I guess it depends on what the meaning of "the human basis of his religion" is. What does that phrase mean? If "the human basis" of the Jewish religion is corrupt, isn't that the same thing as saying Judaism is corrupt?
It's a compendium of scholarly essays by a dozen or more French scholars, a few of them Jewish, recounting in lengthy, scholarly, and nauseating detail the triumph of Bolschevism during the Twentieth Century and its murder, by one means or another (not counting combat casualties, either) of over 100 million people.
In it, the extended role, (out of all proportion to their numerical presence in Russian society), of Jews in the Russian revolution and the following decades, is recounted.
It should not be considered by a rational person as anti-Semitic to note these data, since all of them, or nearly all of them, come from the essays by Jewish scholars themselves.
But it is mentioned more than once how the post-WWII European and American Left were at huge pains to paint German Naziism and Italian Fascism as phenomena of the RIGHT, whatever that might actually be, and to associate them closely with Republican Oibertarianism, or Liberal Democracy, or however you care to designate the political beliefs and practices of the American Founding Fathers.
This book should be required reading in all American universities, and yet you will not find it in more than a tenth or less, of our academic libraries.
It's huge, detailed, and its references along account for a probably a quarter or more of its volume.
If you can find it, read it. I haven't checked Amazon yet since I ordered it from England via Barnes & Noble.
Received it from the hands of an elderly British Lefty crone, who could not disguise her contempt for the idea of listing Leftist crimes.
"Perhaps we should have a Black Book of Capitalism?" she sneered when I expressed my eagerness to get started on it.
English Lefties are far far more obnoxious than our brand, since they don't stop short going all the way.
But the Fiction of "Right-Wing Totalitarianism" persists, and God only knows when this straight-jacket for the mind will finally be shed.
All the best,
Maturin
War is coming...We're already at war. As for the relationship between fascism and the political left, I need no convincing. I agree with you. I've read FA Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Hannah Arendt's Totalitarianism and Eatwell's Fascism; A History and Laquer's Fascism, Past, Present, and Future etc. and I agree with them. Well, most of them.
Again, what is "the empirical essence of Judaism?" How can Marx say "the empirical essence of Judaism" is "huckstering," and not be attacking Judaism?
I've seen it in bookstores before. You can get any newly published hard-to-find book at Amazon.com (or Borders.com, or Barnes and Noble.com, etc.). And if you don't want to order over the internet, you can go into any bookstore, and have them place an order for you, they're happy to do it.
I guess it depends on what the meaning of "the human basis of his religion" is. What does that phrase mean? If "the human basis" of the Jewish religion is corrupt, isn't that the same thing as saying Judaism is corrupt?Here is what you don't understand. Marx at this point in his development based most of his thinking about religion on Feuerbach, another left Hegelian. One of Feuerbach's principal theses was simply that every statement we made about God was really an inverted claim about our own social lives--religion was not about heaven, but an expression of the human condition (or "human basis"). Yes. Marx believed Judaism was corrupt; but he believed all religion was corrupt. He never advocated the liquidation of the Jews.
It has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists, but power lusters. In fact, they are power lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals. The truth is that they are criminals spawned by thinkers, i.e., philosophically produced criminals which is what gave them the kind of world-historical role denied to any plain criminal.And we're losing the battle, folks, in every area that really counts. The war is yet to be fought.The intellectuals of the West today (as at the time as Hitler) are a product of the same philosophical trend. Most of them, still reflecting some remnant of a better past, condemn the actions of Hitler, while advocating the same basic ideas that he did (though in different variants). Such men are helpless to understand Nazism or to explain its emergence or to fight it. They purport to find the roots of Nazism in anything in any practical crisis or any crackpot ideologue buried in the interstices of German history in anything except fundamental philosophical ideas, the ones openly championed all around us, the ones they themselves share. Then they are forced to admit that by their account the rise of Nazism is inexplicable.
One such scholar, after presenting Nazism as an outlandish version of a narrow 19th century political theory (Social Darwinism), concludes as follows: But that such a collection of ideas could capture the allegiance of millions of rational men and women will perhaps remain always something of a mystery. If his account of the Nazi ideology were true, the success of Nazism would be more than something of a mystery. it would be wholly unintelligible.
No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams which turned the Germans into a nation of killers.
The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.
Twice in our century Germany fought to rule and impose its culture on the rest of the world. It lost both wars. But on a deeper level it is achieving its goal nevertheless. It is on the verge of winning the philosophical war against the West, with everything this implies.
The ideas of German philosophy have long since jumped national borders and become the trend of the West. Half the countries of Europe are already enslaved by such ideas. The rest of the continent, under similar guidance, is on the point of collapse.
There is only one country that, though paralyzed at present, is still able to resist the German takeover. In all history, it is the least likely candidate for such a takeover, if it can regain its own ideas and its self-esteem in time. The last great battle of the war of the century is now taking place in the last of the great, unconquered nations left on earth.
Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, pp 97-99
The nazi's are the left wings dream team. Total state control-cradle to grave.
I know that if anyone were to ask hillary clinton if she thought a national work force uniform would be a good idea, she would probably laugh it off with some difficulty because I know, as sure as I know this woman is a marxist thru and thru, that she would LOVE to see this nation in a standard uniform, happy little worker bees dancing for their queen (oh yeah....yeah baby....for sure!).
Hillary, ya know, likes things, ya know, equal. Ya know. Like, REALLY EQUAL. Ya know, except, ya know, well, when it comes to, ya know, herself. Then stealing state items is ok because, ya know, she is, ya know, WORTH IT! Ya know?
Again, what is "the empirical essence of Judaism?" How can Marx say "the empirical essence of Judaism" is "huckstering," and not be attacking Judaism?You changed your position. And I never said Marx wasn't attacking Judaism. (He attacks every religion!) The empirical essense of Judiasm for Marx were the objective-material conditions of exploitation and suffering that made any religion necessary. That sort of thing. Marx never advocates liquidating the Jews.
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