Posted on 02/18/2002 2:19:04 PM PST by TLBSHOW
That's a laugh.I like how you substitute cutting and pasting for critical thinking. Very efficient.
You obviously have not read Marx's essay.Not with the same degree of misunderstanding that you and your friends have applied to it, no.
My own readings on Communism and its relation to Naziism are pretty much limited to Thomas Sowell's 'eighties-era Marxism and F.A. von Hayek's WWII classic, The Road to Serfdom. I'm afraid I have very little patience for the original texts of Hitler and Marx--but I confidently hope that the WWW hyperlink technology will be employed to illustrate the weaknesses and especially the misrepresentations in the various arguments (such as those attributed, I make no doubt accurately, to Marx). TLBSHOW's proposed book will also be a valuable contribution, I would hope.
In fact, I have come to the belief that socialism crucially depends on superficiality--on obscuring intellectually important connections--for any appearance of validity that its adherents are able to give it. Talk radio--"the long form," as Rush Limbaugh styles it--and the WWW and book publishing all contrast with journalism primarily in that the latter is stylized and has short deadlines--is specificly slanted towards the short-attentio-span public. And broadcast--especially TV--journalism is worse even than the newspaper.
Journalism tends, for commercial reasons, to negativity as well as sperficial negativity, and "superficial negativity" comes pretty close to "cynicism". It is in fact highly anticonservative in tone for those reasons--journalism is not so much the first draft of history as it is the first draft of the Democratic Party Platform.
But wouldn't it also be wonderful if the "Hitler him bad" channel--a.k.a. the History Channel--would treat Stalinism with remotely similar thoroughness? Or even turn The Road to Serfdom into a miniseries?
This is a ludicrously anodyne misreading of Marx's essay (assuming for a second that you have actually read the essay). The essay is widely available: I commend it to anyone interested in the subject. And, no, Karl Marx did not advocate the liquidation of the Jews, any more than he advocated the liquidation of the Kulaks. But the Jews represented the same thing for him as they did for Richard Wagner or Joseph Goebbels: the wickedness of egoism and trade, of social relations based on contract and economic calculation. No, Karl Marx is not the ancestor of Nazi anti-Semitism -- Marx merely endorsed the traditional view of Jews as "money-grubbers," and the "problem" of Jewry and Jewish money-idolatry is merely a side-issue in his writings, a problem supposedly to be resolved by the historically-determined destruction of the bourgeois liberalistic order and the institution of a utopian socialist society.
You aren't related to Catch, are you?
After the horrific, blood soaked 20th century, in which more people were murdered by their governments in deliberate pursuit of Marxist ideology than were killed in all the wars, I would not expect any reasonable person to be trying to defend this man whose actions in his personal life (see the Paul Johnson capsule biography in "Intellectuals") embodied the same malevolence as his philosophy.
Funny you should ask. At the last intergalactic "22" club meeting, Paramount_22 complained that the owl image subliminals were taking-up too much valuable space in the medias.
"These are bumping us out of time slots that could better serve 22-conditioning.", She said.
"Screw the humans anyway.", Catch_22 chuckled. "They're going to war no matter how hard they try not to. In fact, the harder they try to avoid it the more apparent it becomes."
Well, Mars is with the New Galactic Order and nobody's sweetheart but we like Earthlings, such as they are. If Catch wasn't my 6th cousin I'd have kicked his lack of compassion.
...but he was right.
... It would appear that Marx's whole hatred of the bourgeoisie was a projection onto the larger society of what he saw as specific jewish characteristics ...For those who content themselves with the text on the page, as opposed to attempting to read the minds of writers or divine the hidden intents of their hearts, what you write is a complete waste of bandwidth.
True, he did keep his theory a "moving target." But that was not to accommodate emprirical test or data, but to avoid them.
As to his integrity, read "Marx: The Red Prussian" based in large part on his correspondence with F. Engels.
He apparently was neither a nice nor an ethical man.
In fact, according to the author, Leopold Schwartzschild (sp?), his nickname in his graduate student days was "the calf biter"!!!!
My reading of "On the Jewish Question" also sees it as antisemitic (self-hating?) and positing an identity between "Judaism" and "Capitalism."
Much as Weber later linked "Protestantism" (The Protestant Ethic)with (the Spirit of)"Capitalism."
Actually I think you have it reversed. The elimination of Capitalism (the latest and greatest form of exploitation), would eliminate the cause and basis of all religion.
Marx was a materialist; religion was epiphenominal.
It was a secondary consequence of exploitation, not its root or cause.
... and positing an identity between "Judaism" and "Capitalism" ...Of all your claims this is the most laughable. The Jews of Marx's era were not capitalists; they were ghetto-dwellers, forced to live in the margins. Some became bankers-money-lenders-usurers, like the Rothschilds, but this was also an artifact of their exclusion from civil and economic life, as Jews were excluded from trades and schools.
In Europe the old monarchical system counted as the right. A restorationist or legitimist Bourbon or Orleanist would probably count as an "extreme rightist," at least before Nazis and fascism complicated things.
The whole left-right schema has a lot of problems.
First of all, those monarchies were not so conservative in the days when they were accumulating power, and absolutism was not a form of conservatism.
Secondly, the Nazis-right, Communists-left dichotomy is dubious. It grew out of the street fighting of the Twenties and Thirties. The Nazis were not classic rightists, but neither were they model socialists. Their ideology, like Mussolini's fascism, was a mixture of right-wing and left-wing elements, that was tagged rightist because of the street combat, not because of a detailed analysis of their program. Given that Strasser and other more socialist Nazis were purged, though, simply labeling the NDSAP left-wing or socialist would also be an oversimplification.
Perhaps it's time more than anything that matters: socialist, nationalist and social darwinist ideas were far stronger from, say 1870 to 1980, than they were before or since. Ideas that we now unhesitatingly identify as right or left like eugenics or nationalization were stronger at various points on the political spectrum then, than they were at almost any point since, save on the very fringes of political debate.
But then, the whole one-dimensional left-right scheme is itself an over simplification. Political scientists have tried to give it more substance and explanatory power by making it a two or three dimensional model. Libertarians also like the two dimensional grid. One sci-fi writer labels his axes: "Attitude toward the State," and "Attitude toward planned social progress".
Not true.
The sad fact is, that Hitler learned about concentration camps from American history. He often used the examples of indian reservations, and america's genocide policy against the american indians, when explaining to his generals what he wanted to do with the jews. Disarming the indians, taking their land and possessions, means of livelihood, giving them no legal rights, rounding them up, putting them on reservations, starving them, killing them, etc.
... Your evasive answer suggests a mind steeped in ideological commitment, that simply will not face reality ...More of your mind reading I suppose. What I am committed to is the integrity of the text. To put words in Marx's mouth (or thoughts in his head in your case) does not make for sound hermeneutics.
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