Posted on 12/09/2014 12:49:51 PM PST by Kaslin
Is Obama a socialist?
If you’re asking whether he’s a big-spending interventionist, the answer is yes.
But if you’re asking whether the President believes in government ownership of the means of production (which is the defining issue in the socialist economic platform), the answer is no (though the White House surely won’t like how Thomas Sowell describes Obama’s ideology).
But I generally don’t care about these word fights. Big government is bad because it hurts people and relies on coercion, and that’s true whether we’re talking about socialism, communism, Nazism, corporatism, or other forms of statism.
But I do care for historical accuracy and honesty.
Writing for the U.K.-based Telegraph, Dan Hannan of the European Parliamentexplains that the German National Socialists of the Hitler era were….well, socialists.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk. So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring.
Anti-capitalist propaganda from the Nazis
Not that today’s leftists should be surprised. Unless, of course, they’re historically illiterate. After all, the Nazi political vehicle was the National Socialist German Workers Party.
Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said. Hitler…boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”. Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. …authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.
In other words, Soviet-style socialism and Nazi-style socialism were both evil forms of statism, but one attracted people by fomenting class envy and the other sought recruits by demonizing non-Aryans.
Hannan hastens to add that he doesn’t think that modern self-proclaimed socialists are closet Nazis, but he does object to leftists who try to put National Socialists on the right side of the political spectrum.
The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. …What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who…seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.
Citing the comprehensive work of Jonah Goldberg, Hannan’s column then makes a key point about government coercion.
Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries. Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis”.
To be fair, this doesn’t mean Wells was a horrible person, at least in the sense of embracing Hitlerism. In the early 1930s, the fascist policies of Mussolini and Hitler were simply about government intervention. At that point, few people recognized that racism and anti-Semitism were part of the fascist program.
I’m much more likely to be critical of people whomake excuses for communism still today. Do they really want to romanticize an ideology that killed tens of millions of innocent people?!?
And it’s disgusting that people wear Che Guevara t-shirts when he was a brutal enforcer of Cuba’s totalitarian regime.
P.S. On a lighter note, here’s the “bread-ish” difference between socialism and capitalism.
P.P.S. Regarding European socialism, we have great (although technically inaccurate) cartoons from Glenn Foden and
Bammy believes in the the Gov't Ownership of Health Care.
Yes. Politics isn’t so much a spectrum from left to right, but a circle, with anarchy on the outer edge, absolute Pharoahic tyranny in the center, and a range inward and outware with libertarian ideas, free markets, socialism, etc., where the variable is more control or less control, over this aspect or that aspect of life.
...including liberalism, progressivism as practised by Democrats, GOPe, RINOs, etc.
Yes. He’s using the Fabian approach of gradually slipping in socialism. And of course there was Government Motors.
The answer is most definitely yes.
Making the right campaign contributions are becoming as important to a company as research and development.”
Next, they’ll get on their knees to 0bama.
Obama believes in government CONTROL of the means of production. Which is a tenet of fascism.
The idea that one knows what is best for some other guy, and that it’s ok to coerce his cooperation with that idea, is the root of all evil.
All governments use coercion. It is more or less the defining characteristic of an organization that is a government as opposed to something else.
Governments use force when then think they need to, and they claim a monopoly on violence. Nobody else is allowed to use it.
So the difference is not between government that do and those that do not use force. It’s the amount of coercion used and the purpose of that coercion that separates one government type from others.
At least that is what he says, for now. Changed his mind, supposedly, on gay marriage, didn't he? Changed his mind on executive order for immigration, didn't he? Leftists NEVER tell the truth about their ultimate goals, else they would never be elected. No doubt about it in my mind, Obama is lying, thievin', filthy, stinkin' Commie.
This actually makes sense, sort of.
Every society has its own traditions that conservatives seek to protect or return to. What they are varies, so an American conservative has very little in common with a Russian or Afghan conservative.
OTOH, leftism around the world, whether of the national or international variety, has a great deal in common everywhere.
BTW, while Nazism was national socialist at its core, in blended in so much of the toxic European and specifically German varieties of conservatism (Church and Crown, blood and soil) that I think it stretches terminology to call the Nazis "socialist" without a great deal of explanation of terms.
The German right characteristically denounced socialism, while supporting the welfare state, demanding government supervision of the economy, and preaching the duty of property-owners to serve their country.
The German left characteristically denounced nationalism, while extolling the feats of imperial Germany, cursing the Allied victors of the war, and urging the rebirth of a powerful Fatherland.
The Nazis took over the essence of each side in the German debate and proudly offered the synthesis as one unified viewpoint. The synthesis was National Socialism.
Sorry, should have said that Nazism incorporated the most toxic elements of European and German conservatism. Not all elements of this tradition were so toxic.
Well, they were the National Socialist Workers Party.
They certainly were into "social engineering" weren't they?
Mark Levin words.. before Mark almost never heard these words..
Ameritopia.. another Mark Levin word..
Lots of commie countries called themselves Democratic Republics though they were neither.
Socialism, to my mind, is simply “all men are created equal” carried one step too far, to include economic equality as well as social and political equality.
“Socialists” have always varied enormously about how they think that goal should be achieved, and what methods they are willing to use to get there. A lot of Americans equate Marxism and Socialism, but of course Marxism is only one of the many variants, albeit the most famous and influential.
If you accept this definition of “socialism,” then Nazism doesn’t qualify. Its goal was to create a permanent hereditary aristocracy of the German people dominating the rest of the world. And of course it’s Fuehrer Principle pretty much put paid to the idea of any real equality within the German people themselves, though it was not supposed to be hereditary.
The Nazis are very difficult to fit into any of the traditional political categories. Italians Fascists, OTOH, are more clearly a variant of socialism.
So he’s a fascist.
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