Heck... THIS guy's less gay than Andrew Greeley:
:)
Posted on 06/11/2004 6:27:32 AM PDT by aragona
This was a worthy thread.
--aragona
Let me clarify my point about being a worthy thread.(I worded it poorly).
I agree with all your comments. This article was posted originally on realclearpolitics.com with a request to send Mr Greeley and the editors of the Chicago Sun-Times an email letting them know your thought about this awful op-ed piece. I had just posted my complaint email to the editor and then the thread was pulled.
If you have comments, email Andrew Greeley (agreel@aol.com) and let him know what you think. Don't forget to copy Steve Huntley, the editor of the Sun-Times editorial page (shuntley@suntimes.com).
Thanks,
--aragona
First off, the article was posted by a newbie troll. Secondly, this is the day of Reagan's funneral, why discuss such garbage which is counter to everything Reagan stood for. Thirdly, I happen to disagree that we need to give exposure to people with extreme viewpoints. There are so many things to discuss that are much more worthy of our time.
Thyssen and Krupt, for example, one manufactured chemicals the other, weapons. TheBig Bertha gun was named for Bertha Krupt.
Thyssen originally proposed Hitler become vice-chancellor to ease the tensions and prevent violence in the country. Hitler eventually turned on Thyssen, and he fled the country, but was eventually found and sent to prison. His company was used to make much of the gas used to kill the Jews in the camps.
The Krupt family suffered the same way, and wasso ashamed of what happened, they sold their company in 1962 and all rights to their own name.
Yep - but all other peoples (Jews, Slavs, Ukrainians, etc.) were forced to have abortions/sterilizations/etc.
- nationalization (he was well-funded by German industrialists and not even weapon manufacturers were nationalized, hence Porsche made the Panther tanks, Messerschmidt the planes, etc)
Hitler nationalized entire industries and nearly all the economy. All private organizations of business, labor, and agriculture, as well as education and culture, were subjected to party control and direction. Not one decision could be made with party approval.
- wealthy men (part of which gave him money)
A major component of Hitler's campaign themes to appeal to unemployed workers and disaffected youth with the promise of wealth redistribution.
- promoting people because of their look and not their merits (there were as many cases of promotion for yes-men as there were for competent leaders. In the military, think about Rommel or von Manstein, for example)
Which is why he kicked out brilliant non aryan scientists (like Einstein) because they didn't look right or didn't have the right background.
When you read how Hitler came to power, it is chilling how it reminds you of tactics and beliefs the liberal democrats of America today.
Because the forum is getting over-moderated.
Threads exposing liberals and their wacky views are starting to get pulled faster from FR than they ever have been.
The way its going, you will soon be able to post editorials only from "approved" columnists.
What are the mods scared of?
Like these?
Man Lies Dead in Apartment for 20 Years
Hooded Thai Assailants Slash School Guard
N.C. man who killed two people disappears from state mental hospital [You will not believe this]
Pistons leave Lakers in dust in Game 3
'No link' between sex, money [Can't buy me love]
Vanity help needed: Who sings like Ray Charles?
Yes, that kind of abortion, certainly - even if he was in favor of sterner measures like forced sterilization for retarded or disabled would-be parents. But he had no plan for allowing abortion for "normal" Germans, quite the contrary. Every woman was supposed to give birth to a whole soccer team of German babies, so there would be no shortage of colonists when Germany would claim new territories.
;-)
Maybe we are differing on semantics. What do you call it when a government can tell entire industries what to make, where to make it, who to hire and what price they can sell it for? What do you call it if anyone in industry tries to oppose these government policies they (and their families) wind up in a concentration camp?
As for the campaign themes, Hitler himself often told to his aides and to the German industrialists he was courting at that time he did not take them seriously. In fact, Hitler only put them in his program to lure the leftist voters.
When you look at Hitler's campaign, many of themes are socialist and could be easily substituted for what liberals want to do to America. What Hitler really believed - who knows? Probably anything that would get him more power...
Heck... THIS guy's less gay than Andrew Greeley:
:)
I knew someone who met him... he said greeley was a bit manic. Much of Greeley's work is good, but as he gets older, he is getting weirder.
As a doc, I note that people's personalities get stuck in a rut, and then exaggerate as they get older. So mildly paranoid people start seeing conspiracies, and sweet people stay nice even when their brain is destroyed by Alzheimer's.
Greeley seems to be going off the deep end. And personally, I like his "soft porn"...
HITLER WAS A SOCIALIST
John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
The Demand for Explanation
Now that more than 50 years have passed since the military defeat of Nazi Germany, one might have thought that the name of its leader would be all but forgotten. This is far from the case, however. Even in the popular press, references to Hitler are incessant and the trickle of TV documentaries on the Germany of his era would seem to be unceasing. Hitler even featured on the cover of a 1995 Time magazine.
This finds its counterpart in the academic literature too. Scholarly works on Hitler's deeds continue to emerge (e.g. Feuchtwanger, 1995) and in a recent survey of the history of Western civilization, Lipson (1993) named Hitlerism and the nuclear bomb as the two great evils of the 20th century. Stalin's tyranny lasted longer, Pol Pot killed a higher proportion of his country's population and Hitler was not the first Fascist but the name of Hitler nonetheless hangs over the entire 20th century as something inescapably and inexplicably malign. It seems doubtful that even the whole of the 21st century will erase from the minds of thinking people the still largely unfulfilled need to understand how and why Hitler became so influential and wrought so much evil.
The fact that so many young Germans (particular from the formerly Communist East) today still salute his name and perpetuate much of his politics is also an amazement and a deep concern to many and what can only be called the resurgence of Nazism among many young Germans at the close of the 20th century would seem to generate a continuing and pressing need to understand the Hitler phenomenon.
So what was it that made Hitler so influential? What was it that made him (as pre-war histories such as Roberts, 1938, attest) the most popular man in the Germany of his day? Why does he still have many admirers now in the Germany on which he inflicted such disasters? What was (is?) his appeal? And why, of all things, are the young products of an East German Communist upbringing still so susceptible to his message?
Modern Leftism
Before we answer that question, however, let us look at what the Left and Right in politics consist of at present. Consider this description by Edward Feser of someone who would have been an ideal Presidential candidate for the modern-day U.S. Democratic party:
He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend "lived together" for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man's personal morals were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.
He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: "As Christ proclaimed 'love one another'," he said, "so our call -- 'people's community,' 'public need before private greed,' 'communally-minded social consciousness' -- rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!"
The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was not personally a Christian, regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into as an irrational superstition. In fact he admired Islam more than Christianity, and he and his policies were highly respected by many of the Muslims of his day. He and his associates had a special distaste for the Catholic Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized Protestantism, taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one that forsook the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and accommodated itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be implemented by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity might eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to paganism, a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the heritage of their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that a people's ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a kind of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right or wrong in some sense depends on one's ethnic worldview, and especially on what best promotes the well-being of one's ethnic group
There is surely no doubt that the man Feser described is in fact a mainstream Leftist by current standards. But who is the man concerned? It is a historically accurate description of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own day but he would even be a mainstream socialist in most ways today. Feser does not mention Hitler's antisemitism above, of course, but that too seems once again to have become mainstream among the Western-world Left in the early years of the 21st century.
Party programmes
Let us start by considering political party programmes or "platforms" of Hitler's day:
Take this description of a political programme:
A declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists".
And this description of a political movement as having a 'revolutionary creative will' which had 'no fixed aim, no permanency, only eternal change'
And this policy manifesto:
9. All citizens of the State shall be equal as regards rights and duties.
10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. The activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good.
Therefore we demand:
11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in life and property, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as a crime against the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits whether in assets or material.
13. We demand the nationalization of businesses which have been organized into cartels.
14. We demand that all the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.
15. We demand extensive development of provision for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle-class, the immediate communalization of department stores which will be rented cheaply to small businessmen, and that preference shall be given to small businessmen for provision of supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.
17. We demand a land reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to confiscate from the owners without compensation any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
So who put that manifesto forward and who was responsible for the summary quotes given before that? Was it the US Democrats, the British Labour Party, the Canadian Liberals, some European Social Democratic party? No. The manifesto is an extract from the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party and was written by the leader of that party: Adolf Hitler. And the preceding summary quotes were also from him (See towards the end of Mein Kampf and O'Sullivan, 1983. p. 138).
The rest of Hitler's manifesto was aimed mainly at the Jews but in Hitler's day it was very common for Leftists to be antisemitic. And the increasingly pervasive anti-Israel sentiment among the modern-day Left -- including at times the Canadian government -- shows that modern-day Leftists are not even very different from Hitler in that regard. Modern-day anti-Israel protesters still seem to think that dead Jews are a good thing.
Other examples of Hitler's Leftism
Further, as a good socialist does, Hitler justified everything he did in the name of "the people" (Das Volk). The Nazi State was, like the Soviet State, all-powerful, and the Nazi party, in good socialist fashion, instituted pervasive supervision of German industry. And of course Hitler and Stalin were initially allies. It was only the Nazi-Soviet pact that enabled Hitler's conquest of Western Europe. The fuel in the tanks of Hitler's Panzern as they stormed through France was Soviet fuel.
And a book that was very fashionable worldwide in the '60s was the 1958 book "The Affluent Society" by influential "liberal" Canadian economist J.K. Galbraith -- in which he fulminated about what he saw as our "Private affluence and public squalor". But Hitler preceded him. Hitler shared with the German Left of his day the slogan: "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz" (Common use before private use).
And we all know how evil Nazi eugenics were, don't we? How crazy were their efforts to build up the "master race" through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women -- the "Lebensborn" project? Good Leftists recoil in horror from all that of course. But who were the great supporters of eugenics in Hitler's day? In the USA, the great eugenicists of the first half of the 20th century were the "Progressives". And who were the Progressives? Here is one summary of them:
"Originally, progressive reformers sought to regulate irresponsible corporate monopoly, safeguarding consumers and labor from the excesses of the profit motive. Furthermore, they desired to correct the evils and inequities created by rapid and uncontrolled urbanization. Progressivism ..... asserted that the social order could and must be improved..... Some historians, like Richard Hofstadter and George Mowry, have argued that the progressive movement attempted to return America to an older, more simple, agrarian lifestyle. For a few progressives, this certainly was true. But for most, a humanitarian doctrine of social progress motivated the reforming spirit"
Sound familiar? The Red/Green alliance of today is obviously not new. So Hitler's eugenics were yet another part of Hitler's LEFTISM! He got his eugenic theories from the Leftists of his day. He was simply being a good Leftist intellectual in subscribing to such theories.
The summary of Progressivism above is from De Corte (1978). Against all his own evidence, De Corte also claims that the Progressives were "conservative". More Leftist whitewash! See also Pickens (1968).
And are feminists conservative? Hardly. And feminists are hardly a new phenomenon either. In the person of Margaret Sanger and others, they were very active in the USA in first half of the 20th century, advocating (for instance) abortion. And Margaret Sanger was warmly praised by Hitler for her energetic championship of eugenics. And the American eugenicists were very racist. They shared Hitler's view that Jews were genetically inferior and opposed moves to allow into the USA Jews fleeing from Hitler (Richmond, 1998). So if Hitler's eugenics and racial theories were loathsome, it should be acknowledged that his vigorous supporters in the matter at that time were Leftists and feminists, rather than conservatives.
Hitler the Greenie
And Hitler also of course foreshadowed the Red/Green alliance of today. The Nazis were in fact probably the first major political party in the Western world to have a thoroughgoing "Green" agenda. I take the following brief summary from Andrew Bolt:
Hitler's preaching about German strength and destiny was water in the desert to the millions of Germans who'd been stripped of pride, security and hope by their humiliating defeat in World War I, and the terrible unemployment that followed.
The world was also mad then with the idea that a dictatorial government should run the economy itself and make it "efficient", rather than let people make their own decisions.
The Nazis -- National Socialists -- promised some of that, and their sibling rivals in the Communist Party more.
The theory of eugenics -- breeding only healthy people -- was also in fashion, along with a cult of health.
The Nazis, with their youth camps and praise of strong bodies and a strong people, endorsed all that, and soon were killing the retarded, the gay and the different.
Tribalism was popular, too. People weren't individuals, but members of a class, as the communists argued, or of a race, as the Nazis said. Free from freedom -- what a relief for the scared!
You'd think we'd have learned. But too much of such thinking is back and changing us so fast that we can't say how our society will look by the time we die.
A KIND of eugenics is with us again, along with an obsession for perfect bodies.
Children in the womb are being killed just weeks before birth for the sin of being a dwarf, for instance, and famed animal rights philosopher Peter Singer wants parents free to kill deformed children in their first month of life. Meanwhile support for euthanasia for the sick, tired or incompetent grows.
As for tribalism, that's also back -- and as official policy. We now pay people to bury their individuality in tribes, giving them multicultural grants or even an Aboriginal "parliament".
But most dangerous is that we strip our children of pride, security and even hope. They are taught that God is dead, our institutions corrupt, our people racist, our land ruined, our past evil and our future doomed by global warming.
Many have also watched one of their parents leave the family home, which to some must seem a betrayal.
They are then fed a culture which romanticises violence and worships sex -- telling them there is nothing more to life than the cravings of their bodies.
No one can live like this and be fulfilled. People need to feel part of something bigger and better than ourselves -- a family, or a church, or a tradition or a country. Or, as a devil may whisper, the greens.
The greens. Here's a quote which may sound very familiar -- at least in part. "We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. "Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . .
"This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."
That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homoepathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.
HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.
This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men.
The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913.
In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned.
Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party.
Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."
Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals.
We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god.
We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers".
And our growing church of nature worshippers insist that science make way for their fundamentalist religion, bringing us closer to a society in which muscle, not minds, must rule.
It's as a former head of Greenpeace International, Patrick Moore, says: "In the name of speaking for the trees and other species, we are faced with a movement that would usher in an era of eco-fascism."
This threat is still small. But if we don't resist it today, who knows where it will sweep us tomorrow?
I didn't read it, but my guess is that it probably sucked.
You left out his attacks on tobacco.
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