Posted on 12/10/2001 10:32:57 AM PST by Ditto
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/genocide.html
from National Review, 1995-Dec-31, by George Watson:
Never Blame the Left
The Left is perceived as kind and caring,
despite its extensive history of promoting genocide.When it comes to handing out blame, it is widely assumed that the Right is wicked and the Left incompetent. Or rather, you sometimes begin to feel, any given policy must have been Right if it was wicked, Left if it was incompetent.
Mr. Watson, formerly a professor at New York University and now a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, is the author of Politics & Literature in Modern Britain and The Idea of Liberalism He is currently completing a history of socialism. To give an example: I happened recently in Vienna to pass a restaurant that was advertising Jewish food, with two armed policemen standing outside. They were there, one of them explained to me, to guard against right wing radical extremists. There had been no violence against the restaurant then, and I believe there has been none since. But racism, and especially anti-Semitism, is wicked, so it must be right-wing.
That is fairly astounding, when you think about it. The truth is that in modern Europe, genocide has been exclusively a socialist idea, ever since Engels proclaimed it in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in January-February 1849. Ever since then everyone who has advocated genocide has called himself a socialist, without exception.
The Left has a lot to hide. In the 1890s, for example, French socialists dissociated themselves from the Dreyfus affair, and in January 1898 the French Socialist Party issued a manifesto that called it a power struggle within the ruling classes, and warned the workers against taking sides in the matter. Dreyfus's supporters were Jewish capitalists, they argued, eager to clear themselves of financial scandals. A few years later, in 1902, H. G. Wells in Anticipations repeated the Marxist demand for genocide, but with variations, since the book is a blueprint for a socialist utopia that would be exclusively white.
A generation later Bernard Shaw, another socialist, in a preface to his play On the Rocks (1933), called on scientists to devise a painless way of killing large mulititudes of people, especially the idle and the incurable, which is where Hitler's program began six years later. In a letter to his fellow socialist Beatrice Webb (February 6, 1938) Shaw remarked of Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews that ``we ought to tackle the Jewish question,'' which means admitting ``the right of States to make eugenic experments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable.'' His only proviso was that it should be done humanely.
Ethnic cleansing was an essential part of the socialist program before Hitler had taken any action in the matter. The Left, for a century, was proud of its ruthlessness, and scornful of the delicacy of its opponents. ``You can't make an omelette,'' Beatrice Webb once told a visitor who had seen cattle cars full of starving people in the Soviet Unions, ``without breaking eggs.''
There is abundant evidence, what is more, that the Nazi leaders believed they were socialists and that anti-Nazi socialists often accepted that claim. In Mein Kampf (1926) Hitler accepted that National Socialism was a derivative of Marxism. The point was more bluntly made in private conversations. ``The whole of National Socialism is based on Marx,'' he told Hermann Rauschning. Rauschning later reported the remark in Hitler Speaks (1939), but by that time the world was at war and too busy to pay much attention to it. Goebbels too thought himself a socialist. Five days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he confided in his diary that ``real socialism'' would be established in that country after a Nazi victory, in place of Bolshevism and Czarism.
The evidence that Nazism was part of the socialist tradition continues to accumulate, even if it makes no headlines. In 1978 Otto Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant appeared in its original German. Wagener was a lifelong Nazi who had died in 1971. His recollections of Hitler's conversations had been composed from notes in a British prisoner-of-war camp, and they represent Hitler as an extreme socialist utopian, anti-Jewish because ``the Jew is not a socialist.'' Nor are Communists--``basically they are not socialistic, since they create mere herds, as in the Soviet Union, without individual life.'' The real task, Hitler told Wagener, was to realize the socialist dream that mankind over the centuries had forgotten, to liberate labor, and to displace the role of capital. That sounds like a program for the Left, and many parties called socialist have believed in less.
Hitler's allegiance, even before such sources were known, was acknowledged by socialists outside Germany. Julian Huxley, for example, the pro-Soviet British biologist who later became director-general of UNESCO, accepted Hitler's claim to be a socialist in the early 1930s, though without enthusiasm (indeed, with marked embarrassment).
Hitler's program demanded central economic planning, which was at the heart of the socialist cause; and genocide, in the 1930s, was well known to be an aspect of the socialist tradition and of no other. There was, and is, no conservative or liberal tradition of racial extermination. The Nazis, what is more, could call on socialist practice as well as socialist theory when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and began their exterminatory program. That is documented by Rudolf Hoess in his memoir Kommandant in Auschwitz (1958). Detailed reports of the Soviet camp system were circulated to Nazi camp commandants as a model to emulate and an example to follow.
Soviet exterminations under Lenin and Stalin may have totaled 25 to 30 million, which (if the estimate is accepted) would represent about three times the Nazi total of nine million. That seems to matter very little now. My Austrian policeman was still certain that racism is right-wing. As are a lot of people. After a recent bomb outrage against a synogogue in Lübeck, the German press instantly assumed, before anyone was charged with the crime, that the Right was to blame. The fact that there is no non-socialist tradition of genocide in Europe has not even been noticed.
That is an impressive act of suppression. The Left may have lost the political battle, almost everywhere in the world. But it does not seem to have lost the battle of ideas. In intellectual circles, at least, it is still believed that racism and the Left do not mix.
Why is this? How has the evidence of socialist genocide, how has Hitler's acknowledgement of his debt to Marx, been so efficiently suppressed?
The answer, I suspect, lies in the nature of political commitment. Political knowledge is not like botany or physics, and commitment is not usually made by examining evidence. When socialism was fashionable I used to ask those who believed in it why they thought public ownership would favor the poor. What struck me about their responses was not just that they did not know but that they did not think they were under any obligation to know. But if they had really cared about poverty they would have demanded an answer before they signed up, and would have gone on demanding an answer until they got one. In other words, they were hardly interested in solving poverty. What really interested them was looking and sounding as if they did.
When Marxism was fashionable, similarly, I used to ask Marxists what book by Marx or Engels they had read all the way through, and watch them look shifty and change the subject. Or, for a change, I might ask them what they thought of Engels's 1849 program of racial extermination, and watch them lose their temper. Politics, for lots of people, is not evidence based. It is more like showing off a new dress or a new suit.
There are three motives, broadly speaking, for political commitment, of which the third is admirable. I shall leave it till last.
The first is self-definition. You call yourself Left or Right, that is, as a way of proclaiming to the world and to yourself that you are a certain sort of person--kind and caring if you are Left, competent and realistic if you are Right. The reasons for these associations of ideas are far older than our century and matter now only to historians, and even they would usually prefer not to be asked about them. It might be worrying if anyone did. The line between the efficient and the inefficient, after all, is nothing like as simple as the line between the private and the public, and not all public enterprise is caring: Auschwitz was public enterprise. Never mind. If you want to look caring, you will not ask such questions, and if anybody does it is always possible to change the subject.
The second motive is a sense of community. You choose a political side because the people you know, or would like to know, are already there, and you would like them to be like you. There was a time when, in university life, you would not be accepted unless you were Left, and it took enormous courage in that age to speak out on campus against Soviet or Chinese exterminations. That view is not yet dead. There are still those on both sides of the Atlantic who move, and intend to go on moving, in circles that think anti-Americanism a sufficient substitute for connected thought.
The third motive is instrumental. You can hold a political view with the admirable purpose of achieving something specific like constitutional change or a balanced budget, and support those who support it, whatever their party color. A moment's reflection suggests that this is rare. It is hard work, for one thing. It seldom attracts admiration, for another, though it often should. And it is not always easy to believe that this will work. Much more agreeable, on the whole, to use politics as a way of defining yourself or of making and keeping friends.
The Left got away with its crimes, I suggest, because those who form opinion had their own reasons for looking in another direction. They wanted to see themselves in a certain light and to keep the good opinion of the people whose friendship they valued. They had no wish to look at evidence, and they were adept at pretending, when it was produced, that it did not mean what it said. I remember once, ni a controversy in a British journal, being told that Marx, Wells, and Shaw were being whimsical and nothing more when they committed socialists to mass-murder. Couldn't I take a joke? Evidence is seldom as inconvenient as that in the physical sciences, and scientists do not enjoy such convenient excuses for dismissal as whimsy or irony. Most critical theory, in our times, has been a way of pretending that evidence does not, and perhaps cannot, be taken literally.
The effects of that mood are still visible. The history of socialism, above all, is studiously neglected and even, in some aspects, simply taboo. What we need now is a serious and unblinking study of socialism, of what it said and what it did: one that does not judge the evidence; one that is brave enough to tell it as it was.
Not usefull if we're debating Monarchy vs Democracy, but how many people today base their political identity on the post WWII definition of these terms. Again the question is: If the far left is total government as we had in the Soviet Union, or Mao's China, what is the far right? How could the Nazis be far right is they are so similar to the far left?
If, we're reading by an aforementioned definition (left = more centralized control, right = less/more distributed/no control), I would venture to say that far-right ("Absolutely no governmental control" === "No government") nations don't exist in the world today, and probably have never existed in history.
Don't mean to throw a monkey-wrench into the cogs of discussion.. Just a little bit of dT theory.
Personally, I think that Left can generally be described as "In favor of centralized Governmental control" and Right can be described as "In favor of less-central or more-distributed Governmental control." -- and that's without taking into account extreme sides. Personally, I honestly believe that this interpretation (a traditional American interpretation, it is!) on left vs. right is still completely valid at present, if perhaps vastly misunderstood by the "centrists" (which, in previous rants/discussions, I've asserted don't exist).
It's no wonder polysci grads don't ever accomplish anything in the private sector... The laws of Politics have no parallel in real life.
;) ttt
... But if the Communists had TOTAL GOVERNMENT CONTROL (and they _did_), how can the Left be different from the Top?
;) ttt
Is this 2-D graph a Mobius Strip? Right is state control of all economic resources (companies natural resources etc.) and left is state ownership of all economic resources? What is the difference?
The two primary events that defined National Socialism as being on the right-wing were the Spanish Civil War and operation Barbarosa during World War II. When Hitler supported the rebels in Spain the first break with the Stalinist USSR occurred. There then came a rapproachmont with the non-agression pact of 1939 between the Third Reich and the USSR. If one reads early accounts of the Second World War Germany and the Soviet Union were considered allies in 1939 and 1940. It was not until 1941 when Germany invaded soviet occupied Poland that the two were at war.
When Hitler first came to power in Germany it was the Soviet Union that provided military training facilities for German paratroops. The original ideaology for Nazism was very much socialists so much so that the bronshirts were often refered to as Beefsteak Nazis. That is they were brown on the outside but red on the inside. The social programs of the Nazi Party were very much socialist. Expansion of national medical insurance and guaranteed employment were part of the Nazi programs. In fact the initial extermination of mentally handicapped was started both as a eugenics concept and a cost saving measure.
Mussolini also got his start as head of the Italian Socialist Party.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
So if Hitler is right wing, and Marx is left wing, where, pray tell, does Thomas Paine fall on your political spectrum.
The difference between National Socialism and Communism is the difference between Vanilla and French Vanilla. To think that they are the defining extremes on a scale that describes all political thought is absolutely delusional.
I'm not surprised. When you go through life saying 'I'm better than you because I'm not a Nazi" and then someone tells you that what you are is the same as a Nazi.... well, that isn't going to be received too well. I have had this debate going off line for nearly a week with a lefty poster, and he has called me every name in the book. I kept asking him to give me some concrete definition of what is left and what is right. He only responded emotionally. This isn't something that was part of my 'inner core' before, and I had never really done any research on it until now. But from my days in high school 30+ years ago, I never bought into the political spectrum chart that placed the Nazis and Commies on opposite ends. They were different in some ways, but their differences were not all that great while their similarities (genocide, totalitarian, cults of personality, atheistic, central economic planning) had to put them on the same side of any logical political spectrum.
To me we can call them left, right, up or down, but you can not logically call the Nazis and Commies opposites.
So did Al Capone become a 'crime fighter' with the St. Valentine's Day massacre? ;~))
I haven't read Mein Kampf but I bet Hitler never wanted to create the Marxist utopia after the totalitarian phase. Although, Hitler did manage to avoid the bloody revolution on his way to power...
The vanguard can be class envy. It can be racism. It can be religion.
Originally, Marx and Engels felt that nationalism was an impediment to Marxism. With the failed rebellion in Ireland at the turn of the century, however, it became clear to some Marxists that nationalism itself could be the vanguard. The leftist uprising that led to the Axis and World War II used nationalism as part of its motivating interest. Notice how the radical left that trashed Seattle a few years ago was nationalist in nature.
The Shootist claimed that Hitler was not a socialist because whatever views his were based on, he perverted to his own end. That is just the point; Marxist theory holds that this is precisely what will happen and why the progression from private ownership to a form of socialism and then to communism is inevitable. Men will grab hold of a vanguard and twist it to their own ends, with it resulting in socialism. Whatever it takes. The result is what is important, not what path is chosen.
Heck, if you go to Marxists.org and read their philosophies and current thinking, you will find that now radical Islam is accepted by them as being a tool for "social change". Yes, Marxist theory holds that religion is a crock, but they accept and understand that it can be used to acheive the progression they feel is inevitable.
That is why you have radical leftists like Ramsey Clark stating that "Islam has probably a billion and a half adherents today. It exists. And it is probably the most compelling spiritual and moral force on earth today. People hate to hear that." Clark is a communist, yet to those who would deny that Hitler was a product of the left would deny that Islam is compatible with Marxism because Marxism states there is no God. It appears as if the communists themselves understand- whatever vanguard it takes.
Notice that the radical Islamics such as Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban all are virulently opposed to capitalism.
This is called Begging The Question. You are assuming the conclusion of your argument (fascism is on the right) is true in order to prove it. But what justifies putting the word "fascist" on the right side of this graph, in the first place?
Imagine that I am trying to prove to you that 10 is a larger number than 20. You disagree and say "no way", so to "prove" my statement I say, "One must imagine a number-line graph with 20 being on the left, the numbers increasing as you move right, and 10 being on the right."
You would correctly recognize that this is a nonsensical argument and wouldn't "prove" a thing.
Right v. Left is a question of economic outlook
Okay, this is a starting point, then. On the left of your graph we have communists/international socialists who believe that property should be owned and operated by the government, for the "public good" (as the government defines it).
On the right of your graph we have fascists who believe... that property should be owned and operated by the government, for the "public good" (as the government defines it).
Hmmm. What exactly is the difference between these two economic outlooks? (I mean, the Nazis allowed nominal private ownership by government lackeys, but other than that?) Let me know.....
Correct, half correct, and incorrect. IMO. totalitarianism need not be either, or it may be both. My read is that the totalitarian craves power above all things, and will lean (or lurch) in either social direction to maintain and/or increase power. Therefore, in my very humble opinion totalitarians are inherently
CENTRISTS
Two separate worlds. Always in conflict.
Off the top of my head, I'd say Somolia in 1992, most of China in the 1920s, and parts of Afghanistan as we speak are places where there is 'no government'. It is anarchy. I'm sure there are many other examples. I didn't say it's a good thing, but to me, that would be the far right, not a megga state that managed nearly every aspect of life like Hitler's Germany.
All genocidal tyrants of the past and current century were/are left-wing/socialists. The left and the right are at opposite ends of the political spectrum. The further left you go, the more "big government" you will find. The further right you go, the lesser "government" you will find. An "extreme right wing" ideology can most accurately be described as libertarian.
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