Posted on 10/01/2020 3:57:14 AM PDT by Levy78
First you need to understand the German environment in the period 1918-1930.
You had an attempted Communist revolution in Germany in 1919. You had Germany's Antifa marching through the Streets in the 1920's beating up political opponents. You had the successful Communist revolution in Russia. You had a brief Communist dictatorship in Hungary under Bela Kun.
The German middle class were frightened, and willing to vote for ANYONE who was willing to fight back against the Communists, at a time when Establishment politicians were all about appeasement.
Give Antifa a few more years of running wild, and the US public will be looking for somebody to make it stop.
I have always found it interesting that so many people view Fascism and Socialism (Communism) as somehow being at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, when in reality, they are both at the same end of the political spectrum.
(If you can’t tell, I am an adherent to the political spectrum that places total government control and tyranny at one end of the spectrum, and total anarchy (no government) at the other)
I am told by some that is incorrect, but...that makes total sense to me, and explains why fascists and communists I am told viewed the rank and file of the other as fertile ground for recruitment...at least in the earlier part of the 20th Century.
Does your company have any Federal contracts? Make sure to report them if they do any Critical Race Theory diversity training.
The Nazis and Communists were two rabid dogs going after the same bone.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ve put both on my reading list.
Yes. One of my pet peeves is that I think the world should have learned a lot of lessons from WWII in Europe. But I don't think we did. I think we learned one lesson, and learned that one imperfectly. The one big reason why "Nazis are bad" is that they killed 6 million Jews.
Well, sure. That was bad.
But the Nazis did more than that. They subverted their education system. They subverted their law courts. They ignored rights of the individual. They supported tribalism and group identity politics. They joined Big Business and Big Government together into a monstrosity of social control.
But we tend to ignore all of that. And now we see that our own society is repeating all of that. But Americans (Democrats) feel good about themselves. We are doing all of the above. And we feel justified in doing it. Because we're good people. right? I mean … it's not like we're killing all the Jews, right? So, it's not like we're Nazis ...
Some Business Leaders Should Face A Firing Squad,
Agree, but French Revolution method better.
You are correct. Hayek saw this and pointed it out almost 80 years ago:
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
This has always made sense to me as well, because the more extreme people get on either side, it doesn't matter what their ideals are, they just end up forcing people submit to their demands. There is no room for freedom. In the end, all that you end up either way with is total government control over every aspect of your lives.
Both of those commentaries were well chosen to portray the danger presented by the Left.
The first one, which is generally the Leftist mantra of “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler”, is so dog eared it needs no explanation.
The second one, though, illustrates a deeper issue we face in our society, and that is the issue of agreement on objective truth.
In the past, there was a time when people from all ends of the political spectrum could agree that, yes...the sky was blue.
Now, you can just as easily have someone state that the sky is blue, and the Left would steadfastly disagree and trot out a rationale constructed out of plain cloth that is accepted as dogma by everyone on their side, and believed, that this sky is chartreuse.
Look at the Left now, and their mantra that all the violence is being caused and fomented by right wingers, when with your own eyes, you can see with THEIR footage they provide, that it is all caused and fomented by the Left.
It is astonishing, and would be actually material for a hilarious skit, if it weren’t so disturbing and deadly seriously scary.
dfwgator, that is a GREAT way to put it.
This is an important point more people need to realize. These "anti-racist" and "antifa" cult members actually do think they are doing good... SJW isn't just a right-wing laugh-line, these people are serious about it.
The problem is that they are too single-minded. They are obsessed with this one "problem". To be blunt about it, many are just ignorant of history and worse, willfully stupid. Our education system is to blame for that. And by education system, we should include both our corrupted public schools and our broken home life as well, where kids are often given *no* real education about how the world really works.
He needs to play Russian Roulette with a semi-automatic pistol.
Hayek was one of the most influential voices in my political foundation (once I saw the need to make sure I had one actively built)
His book “The Road To Serfdom” also was key in my desire to migrate to electronic books from hard cover books.
My eyesight has been getting very poor...I used to read obsessively, but in the last 5-10 years, I have had to abandon it nearly completely, which breaks my heart. I just spent nearly a thousand dollars on different types of eyeglasses to no avail.
But I still buy hardcover books, but only rarely. Most books now are audiobooks for me.
But I also have select books that I purchase electronic book versions of, and in some cases, I have all three versions...audiobook, electronic book, and hardcover.
After I got my new glasses, I wanted to see if I could read any more effectively, and the one book I pulled down to read was “The Road to Serfdom”.
I couldn’t read it any better, but what I saw made me laugh...it was stupid-there were so many highlighted sections, with things written in the margin, circled, starred, and underlined that there were probably fewer parts in the book NOT marked up than there were!
To go back and find any marked up part was impossible. I found that electronic books gave an unprecedented way to be able to mark and later look up important parts, so...The Road to Serfdom was one of those that I have all three types on.
Getting back to deranged, these people see things, it goes into their brains, get transcribed, and comes out far different than the actual event. Most recent example is questioning the grand jury about the decision to not indict the officers for murder in that search warrant service. Armed with half or less of the info, they “know” the presentation was tainted. Look at this nitwit
Cole Brown: he sees vigilantes shooting from rooftops in Baltimore!. He sees white orchestrated violence in Charlettsville.
You cannot fix stupid. What we have to come to grips with is these people actually believe their distorted version of events AND WILL ACT UPON IT. They need a dose of reality back: just because you say it is so, does not make it so. After that, realize they cannot be rationalized with and excise them from society.
Well, they haven’t done that yet, and if they do, I will make a stink about it.
Being a large organization, they have mandatory diversity and sexual harassment training, and it used to make me angry to be subjected to it, where back in the old days, it was a large training session where you were occasionally forced to actively participate in. I would bring my laptop and do work during it, which pissed some people off, and now they have electronic training.
They have it set to where you are forced to watch a 30-40 min video (it won’t let you take the test until you have watched it) I used to get really angry about this waste of time until I discovered the trick of passing the test-
You can just have the video running with the sound off, minimized so you don’t even see it, and continue to work. When you take the test...you simply put on your “Leftist Hat” and answer all of the questions as if you were a Leftist!
I think I understand Leftists well enough, that doing this makes the annual requirement so easy it is almost enjoyable in a perverse way...:)
That is much the same way I see it. People who are more educated than I am occasionally attempt to correct me, but my gut tells me my view (and yours) is the correct one.
It may be academically wrong, but is in real life, empirically right!
“The Nazis and Communists were two rabid dogs going after the same bone.”
Best way I’ve ever seen it described!
Remember the famous Hitler-Stalin pact, when they decided they couldn’t both get the bone and decided to put their pieces of the bone together...so clearly, they had no objections to each other’s principles.
It was only when they both went back to trying to get each other’s bone that everything broke up. Not for philosophical reasons.
That guy sounds like a Nazi.
It’s time for a everyone in this country to decide if they are a democrat or an American.
Not everyone has the option to move from one area to another.
Additionally, I am not one of those who thinks that migration should take place.
In my opinion, if we are going to become balkanized, then we cease to be the United States of America, and I am not going to give that movement towards balkanization any momentum, even it it may happen anyway.
I may be eventually driven from the territory, but I don’t cotton to surrendering it without a fight.
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