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To: TLBSHOW
Here are some further points: Hitler, in "Table Talk," said that everything in his program came from Marx. Mussolini started his career with a book on Marx. Both men were smart enough to see that state ownership of the economy had been a disaster in the Soviet Union. So they modified socialism to continue private ownership, but they maintained complete control through regulation over those matters that affected their programs.

Hitler learned about the use of concentration camps from the Soviets during the period of friendship 1938 - 1940. Stalin in fact regarded Hitler as a close ally, until the Germans attacked the Soviets, whereupon he issued orders they should not be called Nazis (national socialists), but "Hitlerites." Soviet Communism was of course highly nationalistic during WWII.

The idea that Hitler and Mussolini were of the right grew out of the period of the Spanish Civil War, when the Soviets entered Spain on behalf of the Republicans, and proceeded to murder all their opponents on the left (anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.). Stalin then decided to identify all opposition on the left as elements of reactionary capitalism, or the right.

The right in Europe was always associated with the maintenance of the established social order, favored the primacy of "altar and throne," and rule of the best (aristocracy of some kind or another). This of course was the opposite of Hitler's and Mussolini's project of overturning society through proletarian mob action.

When confronted with these facts, those on the left usually try to say that collaboration of business with these regimes made them "right-wing." However, many businessmen will collaborate with government no matter what it is in order to survive or to succeed. Their objective is the bottom line, not politics. Involvement of business with a regime proves little or nothing about its characteristics as left or right.

19 posted on 02/18/2002 2:55:27 PM PST by thucydides
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To: thucydides
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.

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

And we're losing the battle, folks, in every area that really counts. The war is yet to be fought.
58 posted on 02/18/2002 3:34:30 PM PST by Noumenon
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To: thucydides
Hitler learned about the use of concentration camps from the Soviets during the period of friendship 1938 - 1940.

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.

117 posted on 02/19/2002 3:54:25 PM PST by waterstraat
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