Replies

I’ve spoken to my neighbors about these sorts of things and I wouldn’t want to be the person tasked with convincing them that Hitler was a Liberal. If anything they associate him more with Nationalism than socialism. If conservatives have been successful at anything in the past 50 years it’s been associating love of Nation with conservatism. Hitler=Ultra-Nationalist=Conservative

I have spent much too much time at the computer today and really need to move on, but I could not do so without saying something in response to this post of yours.

As it happens, I am perhaps the only member of Free Republic who does not consider the Nazis "left wing" based on the very popular but ultimately faulty and dishonest political spectrum promoted by the John Birch Society that insists the far right is anarchist and the far left is totalitarian. This is self-evidently untrue, as there are both totalitarians and anarchists on both sides of the spectrum and the propaganda of "liberty loving" palaeoconservatives often sounds identical to that of totalitarian Nazis. In fact, the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories promoted by both "palaeolibertarians" and Nazis is often identical. And when you add the animus against "private banks" and the Fed with the implied (and sometimes articulated) demand that all financial institutions be nationalized . . . well, what do you call that?

Left and Right are complicated concepts. Neither can be branded solely "individualist" or "collectivist," as there is individualism and collectivism on both sides. The collectivism promoted by the Left, at least traditionally, seems to have been atomistic and horizontal while that of the Right was "organic" and vertical. Leftist collectivism is like quicksand, with each single grain of sand suspended individually, while Rightist collectivism is like coral or fungus. Am I making any sense at all?

But this no longer holds as a hard and steady rule either, since the Left since the end of World War II has been dominated not by the old nineteenth century "workers of the world unite" internationalism, but by "national liberation" Communism, which could just as well be called the Communism of "blood and soil." The focus of the Left since 1945 has not been the domestic working class but the oppressed nations who are victimized not by a domestic capitalist class but by the alien capitalist system of the "foreign devil." This form of Communism conflates all members of the nation with the "oppressed" and, where the old Leftism derided all religion in favor of atheism and "science," now attacks the religion of the "foreign devil" while often defending and celebrating the "indigenous" religious belief. All in all the model for this type of Communism--as I have said, the dominant form since 1945--is not Soviet Russia but World War II-era Japan.

Think about it. The "indigenous pipples?" The American Indian Movement? "La Raza?" And of course the Left's now almost universal love affair with "the Arab nation."

But even whites benefit from this nationalist Communism. The Irish Republican Army is the most obvious example (in fact, as far back as the late nineteenth century Irish Catholics were told that Marxism exempted their religion from critique because of its oppression so that they should feel free to join the Marxist movement with a clear conscience) but there are innumerable others. The "Maoist" Scottish National Liberation Army has vowed to force every "English" person out of Scotland (quite a thing to do when one considers that the Lowland Scots are Angles rather than Celts and have been there just as long as the Gaels if not longer). The Welsh, Bretons, and even the Cornish have also hitched their national wagon to the leftist star, as have the Basques in Spain (along with other nationalist groups in Spain which is, after all, a sort of "united kingdom" dominated by Castille as Britain is dominated by England). Even the French Canadians of Quebec--certainly not an "indigenous people" by any sane person's definition--have enjoyed a left wing nationalism and even a Communist "national liberation movement." In fact, were it not for their implication in the Confederacy, I could see the Cajuns of Louisiana getting a similar movement going, perhaps demanding not only the state of Louisiana as it exists today but the entire Louisiana Purchase Territory ("Restored Socialist Louisiana," perhaps?).

This whole business of basically being a fascist nationalist while getting Commies to fall in love with you sounds like a good deal. I'd like to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, as a "redneck," I am the accursed enemy and will never be given the opportunity.