Originally posted by dadudemon
I'll provide a write-up later, on this.Revisionist history and the left wanting to distance themselves for Nazism is what has resulted in "fact checkers" and news articles abounding which purport that Nazis were Right-Wing, Authoritarian, Christians.
It's a sad, really. History is literally being rewritten. Because of agendas. People should stick to the facts and stop consuming fact-check or clearly biased articles. It's better to go straight to historical sources and measure them against political science definitions.
Historians are required to peruse journals, speeches, primary and secondary sources, to form a thesis and support their position. The time required and the verbosity needed to correctly and factually represent the political structures in the 20th Century is beyond most people's abilities to accomplish including journalists.
Follow-Up write-up:
Part 1:
Hitler and the socialist dream
Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels's diary.
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone's disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan "Crusade against Marxism" as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.
His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. "I have learned a great deal from Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that "they had never even read Marx", implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been "a private Russian affair", whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole of National Socialism" was based on Marx.
That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race - implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism "would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground". Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.
Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler's discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.
That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.
Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to "find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution". Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route - a long and needlessly painful route - and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had "averaged downwards"; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.
For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative - the word is many shades too pale - at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.
Hitler's mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.
It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx's view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.
Part 2:
That brutal view, which a generation later was to be fortified by the new pseudo-science of eugenics, was by the last years of the century a familiar part of the socialist tradition, though it is understandable that since the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 socialists have been eager to forget it. But there is plenty of evidence in the writings of HG Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis, the Webbs and others to the effect that socialist commentators did not flinch from drastic measures. The idea of ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century and more.
So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world entered the First World War publicly committed to racial purity and white domination and no less committed to violence. Socialism offered them a blank cheque, and its licence to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory principle which the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret. In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow a party of British visitors to the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving "enemies of the state" at a local station. "Ridiculous to let you see them", said Webb, already an eminent admirer of the Soviet system. "The English are always so sentimental" adding, with assurance: "You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." A few years later, in 1935, a Social Democratic government in Sweden began a eugenic programme for the compulsory sterilisation of gypsies, the backward and the unfit, and continued it until after the war.
The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure, then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe, and from the first years of his political career Hitler was proudly aware of the fact. Addressing his own party, the NSDAP, in Munich in August 1920, he pledged his faith in socialist-racialism: "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose." There was loud applause. Hitler went on: "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?" The point was widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler's right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd. The tradition, what is more, was unique. In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.
The first reactions to National Socialism outside Germany are now largely forgotten. They were highly confused, for the rise of fascism had caught the European left by surprise. There was nothing in Marxist scripture to predict it and must have seemed entirely natural to feel baffled. Where had it all come from? Harold Nicolson, a democratic socialist, and after 1935 a Member of the House of Commons, conscientiously studied a pile of pamphlets in his hotel room in Rome in January 1932 and decided judiciously that fascism (Italian-style) was a kind of militarised socialism; though it destroyed liberty, he concluded in his diary, "it is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality". The Moscow view that fascism was the last phase of capitalism, though already proposed, was not yet widely heard. Richard remarked in a 1934 BBC talk that many students in Nazi Germany believed they were "digging the foundations of a new German socialism".
By the outbreak of civil war in Spain, in 1936, sides had been taken, and by then most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. That sudden shift of view has not been explained, and perhaps cannot be explained, except on grounds of argumentative convenience. Single binary oppositions - cops-and-robbers or cowboys-and-indians - are always satisfying. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was seen by hardly anybody as an attempt to restore the unity of socialism. A wit at the British Foreign Office is said to have remarked that all the "Isms" were now "Wasms", and the general view was that nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience had taken place.
By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead. One may salute here an odd but eminent exception. Writing as a committed socialist just after the fall of France in 1940, in The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell saw the disaster as a "physical debunking of capitalism", it showed once and for all that "a planned economy is stronger than a planless one", though he was in no doubt that Hitler's victory was a tragedy for France and for mankind. The planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism "just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes". Hitler had already come close to socialising Germany. "Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state." These words were written just before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. Orwell believed that Hitler would go down in history as "the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face" by forcing financiers to see that planning works and that an economic free-for-all does not.
At its height, Hitler's appeal transcended party division. Shortly before they fell out in the summer of 1933, Hitler uttered sentiments in front of Otto Wagener, which were published after his death in 1971 as a biography by an unrepentant Nazi. Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, composed in a British prisoner-of-war camp, did not appear until 1978 in the original German, and arrived in English, without much acclaim, as recently as 1985. Hitler's remembered talk offers a vision of a future that draws together many of the strands that once made utopian socialism irresistibly appealing to an age bred out of economic depression and cataclysmic wars; it mingles, as Victorian socialism had done before it, an intense economic radicalism with a romantic enthusiasm for a vanished age before capitalism had degraded heroism into sordid greed and threatened the traditional institutions of the family and the tribe.
Socialism, Hitler told Wagener shortly after he seized power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master's teachings. Mary and Mary Magdalen, Hitler went on in a surprising flight of imagination, had found an empty tomb, and it would be the task of National Socialism to give body at long last to the sayings of a great teacher: "We are the first to exhume these teachings." The Jew, Hitler told Wagener, was not a socialist, and the Jesus they crucified was the true creator of socialist redemption. As for communists, he opposed them because they created mere herds, Soviet-style, without individual life, and his own ideal was "the socialism of nations" rather than the international socialism of Marx and Lenin. The one and only problem of the age, he told Wagener, was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital.
These are highly socialist sentiments, and if Wagener reports his master faithfully they leave no doubt about the conclusion: that Hitler was an unorthodox Marxist who knew his sources and knew just how unorthodox the way in which he handled them was. He was a dissident socialist. His programme was at once nostalgic and radical. It proposed to accomplish something that Christians had failed to act on and that communists before him had attempted and bungled. "What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a position to achieve."
That was the National Socialist vision. It was seductive, at once traditional and new. Like all so- cialist views it was ultimately moral, and its economic and racial policies were seen as founded on universal moral laws. By the time such conversations saw the light of print, regrettably, the world had put such matters far behind it, and it was less than ever ready to listen to the sayings of a crank or a clown.
That is a pity. The crank, after all, had once offered a vision of the future that had made a Victorian doctrine of history look exciting to millions. Now that socialism is a discarded idea, such excitement is no doubt hard to recapture. To relive it again, in imagination, one might look at an entry in Goebbels's diaries. On 16 June 1941, five days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Goebbels exulted, in the privacy of his diary, in the victory over Bolshevism that he believed would quickly follow. There would be no restoration of the tsars, he remarked to himself, after Russia had been conquered. But Jewish Bolshevism would be uprooted in Russia and "real socialism" planted in its place - "Der echte Sozialismus". Goebbels was a liar, to be sure, but no one can explain why he would lie to his diaries. And to the end of his days he believed that socialism was what National Socialism was about.
Citation:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/hitler-and-the-socialist-dream-1186455.html
Part 3:
When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party — Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism?
Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed.
The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.
What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.
De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.
But what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.
The effect of the combination of inflation and price and wage controls is shortages, that is, a situation in which the quantities of goods people attempt to buy exceed the quantities available for sale.
Shortages, in turn, result in economic chaos. It's not only that consumers who show up in stores early in the day are in a position to buy up all the stocks of goods and leave customers who arrive later, with nothing — a situation to which governments typically respond by imposing rationing. Shortages result in chaos throughout the economic system. They introduce randomness in the distribution of supplies between geographical areas, in the allocation of a factor of production among its different products, in the allocation of labor and capital among the different branches of the economic system.
In the face of the combination of price controls and shortages, the effect of a decrease in the supply of an item is not, as it would be in a free market, to raise its price and increase its profitability, thereby operating to stop the decrease in supply, or reverse it if it has gone too far. Price control prohibits the rise in price and thus the increase in profitability. At the same time, the shortages caused by price controls prevent increases in supply from reducing price and profitability. When there is a shortage, the effect of an increase in supply is merely a reduction in the severity of the shortage. Only when the shortage is totally eliminated does an increase in supply necessitate a decrease in price and bring about a decrease in profitability.
As a result, the combination of price controls and shortages makes possible random movements of supply without any effect on price and profitability. In this situation, the production of the most trivial and unimportant goods, even pet rocks, can be expanded at the expense of the production of the most urgently needed and important goods, such as life-saving medicines, with no effect on the price or profitability of either good. Price controls would prevent the production of the medicines from becoming more profitable as their supply decreased, while a shortage even of pet rocks prevented their production from becoming less profitable as their supply increased.
As Mises showed, to cope with such unintended effects of its price controls, the government must either abolish the price controls or add further measures, namely, precisely the control over what is produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it is distributed, which I referred to earlier. The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.
This was the socialism instituted by the Nazis. And Mises calls it socialism on the German or Nazi pattern, in contrast to the more obvious socialism of the Soviets, which he calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.
Of course, socialism does not end the chaos caused by the destruction of the price system. It perpetuates it. And if it is introduced without the prior existence of price controls, its effect is to inaugurate that very chaos. This is because socialism is not actually a positive economic system. It is merely the negation of capitalism and its price system. As such, the essential nature of socialism is one and the same as the economic chaos resulting from the destruction of the price system by price and wage controls. (I want to point out that Bolshevik-style socialism's imposition of a system of production quotas, with incentives everywhere to exceed the quotas, is a sure formula for universal shortages, just as exist under all around price and wage controls.)
At most, socialism merely changes the direction of the chaos. The government's control over production may make possible a greater production of some goods of special importance to itself, but it does so only at the expense of wreaking havoc throughout the rest of the economic system. This is because the government has no way of knowing the effects on the rest of the economic system of its securing the production of the goods to which it attaches special importance.
The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism — most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well.
We can start with the fact that the financial self-interest of sellers operating under price controls is to evade the price controls and raise their prices. Buyers otherwise unable to obtain goods are willing, indeed, eager to pay these higher prices as the means of securing the goods they want. In these circumstances, what is to stop prices from rising and a massive black market from developing?
The answer is a combination of severe penalties combined with a great likelihood of being caught and then actually suffering those penalties. Mere fines are not likely to provide much of a deterrent. They will be regarded simply as an additional business expense. If the government is serious about its price controls, it is necessary for it to impose penalties comparable to those for a major felony.
But the mere existence of such penalties is not enough. The government has to make it actually dangerous to conduct black-market transactions. It has to make people fear that in conducting such a transaction they might somehow be discovered by the police, and actually end up in jail. In order to create such fear, the government must develop an army of spies and secret informers. For example, the government must make a storekeeper and his customer fearful that if they engage in a black-market transaction, some other customer in the store will report them.
Because of the privacy and secrecy in which many black-market transactions can be conducted, the government must also make anyone contemplating a black-market transaction fearful that the other party might turn out to be a police agent trying to entrap him. The government must make people fearful even of their long-time associates, even of their friends and relatives, lest even they turn out to be informers.
And, finally, in order to obtain convictions, the government must place the decision about innocence or guilt in the case of black-market transactions in the hands of an administrative tribunal or its police agents on the spot. It cannot rely on jury trials, because it is unlikely that many juries can be found willing to bring in guilty verdicts in cases in which a man might have to go to jail for several years for the crime of selling a few pounds of meat or a pair of shoes above the ceiling price.
In sum, therefore, the requirements merely of enforcing price-control regulations is the adoption of essential features of a totalitarian state, namely, the establishment of the category of "economic crimes," in which the peaceful pursuit of material self-interest is treated as a criminal offense, and the establishment of a totalitarian police apparatus replete with spies and informers and the power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
Part 4:
Clearly, the enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people. If the government is unwilling to go to such lengths, then, to that extent, its price controls prove unenforceable and simply break down. The black market then assumes major proportions. (Incidentally, none of this is to suggest that price controls were the cause of the reign of terror instituted by the Nazis. The Nazis began their reign of terror well before the enactment of price controls. As a result, they enacted price controls in an environment ready made for their enforcement.)
Black market activity entails the commission of further crimes. Under de facto socialism, the production and sale of goods in the black market entails the defiance of the government's regulations concerning production and distribution, as well as the defiance of its price controls. For example, the goods themselves that are sold in the black market are intended by the government to be distributed in accordance with its plan, and not in the black market. The factors of production used to produce those goods are likewise intended by the government to be used in accordance with its plan, and not for the purpose of supplying the black market.
Under a system of de jure socialism, such as existed in Soviet Russia, in which the legal code of the country openly and explicitly makes the government the owner of the means of production, all black-market activity necessarily entails the misappropriation or theft of state property. For example, the factory workers or managers in Soviet Russia who turned out products that they sold in the black market were considered as stealing the raw materials supplied by the state.
Furthermore, in any type of socialist state, Nazi or Communist, the government's economic plan is part of the supreme law of the land. We all have a good idea of how chaotic the so-called planning process of socialism is. Its further disruption by workers and managers siphoning off materials and supplies to produce for the black market, is something which a socialist state is logically entitled to regard as an act of sabotage of its national economic plan. And sabotage is how the legal code of a socialist state does regard it. Consistent with this fact, black-market activity in a socialist country often carries the death penalty.
Now I think that a fundamental fact that explains the all-round reign of terror found under socialism is the incredible dilemma in which a socialist state places itself in relation to the masses of its citizens. On the one hand, it assumes full responsibility for the individual's economic well-being. Russian or Bolshevik-style socialism openly avows this responsibility — this is the main source of its popular appeal. On the other hand, in all of the ways one can imagine, a socialist state makes an unbelievable botch of the job. It makes the individual's life a nightmare.
Every day of his life, the citizen of a socialist state must spend time in endless waiting lines. For him, the problems Americans experienced in the gasoline shortages of the 1970s are normal; only he does not experience them in relation to gasoline — for he does not own a car and has no hope of ever owning one — but in relation to simple items of clothing, to vegetables, even to bread. Even worse he is frequently forced to work at a job that is not of his choice and which he therefore must certainly hate. (For under shortages, the government comes to decide the allocation of labor just as it does the allocation of the material factors of production.) And he lives in a condition of unbelievable overcrowding, with hardly ever a chance for privacy. (In the face of housing shortages, boarders are assigned to homes; families are compelled to share apartments. And a system of internal passports and visas is adopted to limit the severity of housing shortages in the more desirable areas of the country.) To put it mildly, a person forced to live in such conditions must seethe with resentment and hostility.
Now against whom would it be more logical for the citizens of a socialist state to direct their resentment and hostility than against that very socialist state itself? The same socialist state which has proclaimed its responsibility for their life, has promised them a life of bliss, and which in fact is responsible for giving them a life of hell. Indeed, the leaders of a socialist state live in a further dilemma, in that they daily encourage the people to believe that socialism is a perfect system whose bad results can only be the work of evil men. If that were true, who in reason could those evil men be but the rulers themselves, who have not only made life a hell, but have perverted an allegedly perfect system to do it?
It follows that the rulers of a socialist state must live in terror of the people. By the logic of their actions and their teachings, the boiling, seething resentment of the people should well up and swallow them in an orgy of bloody vengeance. The rulers sense this, even if they do not admit it openly; and thus their major concern is always to keep the lid on the citizenry.
Consequently, it is true but very inadequate merely to say such things as that socialism lacks freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Of course, it lacks these freedoms. If the government owns all the newspapers and publishing houses, if it decides for what purposes newsprint and paper are to be made available, then obviously nothing can be printed which the government does not want printed. If it owns all the meeting halls, no public speech or lecture can be delivered which the government does not want delivered. But socialism goes far beyond the mere lack of freedom of press and speech.
A socialist government totally annihilates these freedoms. It turns the press and every public forum into a vehicle of hysterical propaganda in its own behalf, and it engages in the relentless persecution of everyone who dares to deviate by so much as an inch from its official party line.
The reason for these facts is the socialist rulers' terror of the people. To protect themselves, they must order the propaganda ministry and the secret police to work 'round the clock. The one, to constantly divert the people's attention from the responsibility of socialism, and of the rulers of socialism, for the people's misery. The other, to spirit away and silence anyone who might even remotely suggest the responsibility of socialism or its rulers — to spirit away anyone who begins to show signs of thinking for himself. It is because of the rulers' terror, and their desperate need to find scapegoats for the failures of socialism, that the press of a socialist country is always full of stories about foreign plots and sabotage, and about corruption and mismanagement on the part of subordinate officials, and why, periodically, it is necessary to unmask large-scale domestic plots and to sacrifice major officials and entire factions in giant purges.
It is because of their terror, and their desperate need to crush every breath even of potential opposition, that the rulers of socialism do not dare to allow even purely cultural activities that are not under the control of the state. For if people so much as assemble for an art show or poetry reading that is not controlled by the state, the rulers must fear the dissemination of dangerous ideas. Any unauthorized ideas are dangerous ideas, because they can lead people to begin thinking for themselves and thus to begin thinking about the nature of socialism and its rulers. The rulers must fear the spontaneous assembly of a handful of people in a room, and use the secret police and its apparatus of spies, informers, and terror either to stop such meetings or to make sure that their content is entirely innocuous from the point of view of the state.
Socialism cannot be ruled for very long except by terror. As soon as the terror is relaxed, resentment and hostility logically begin to well up against the rulers. The stage is thus set for a revolution or civil war. In fact, in the absence of terror, or, more correctly, a sufficient degree of terror, socialism would be characterized by an endless series of revolutions and civil wars, as each new group of rulers proved as incapable of making socialism function successfully as its predecessors before it. The inescapable inference to be drawn is that the terror actually experienced in the socialist countries was not simply the work of evil men, such as Stalin, but springs from the nature of the socialist system. Stalin could come to the fore because his unusual willingness and cunning in the use of terror were the specific characteristics most required by a ruler of socialism in order to remain in power. He rose to the top by a process of socialist natural selection: the selection of the worst.
I need to anticipate a possible misunderstanding concerning my thesis that socialism is totalitarian by its nature. This concerns the allegedly socialist countries run by Social Democrats, such as Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, which are clearly not totalitarian dictatorships.
Part 5:
In such cases, it is necessary to realize that along with these countries not being totalitarian, they are also not socialist. Their governing parties may espouse socialism as their philosophy and their ultimate goal, but socialism is not what they have implemented as their economic system. Their actual economic system is that of a hampered market economy, as Mises termed it. While more hampered than our own in important respects, their economic system is essentially similar to our own, in that the characteristic driving force of production and economic activity is not government decree but the initiative of private owners motivated by the prospect of private profit.
The reason that Social Democrats do not establish socialism when they come to power, is that they are unwilling to do what would be required. The establishment of socialism as an economic system requires a massive act of theft — the means of production must be seized from their owners and turned over to the state. Such seizure is virtually certain to provoke substantial resistance on the part of the owners, resistance which can be overcome only by use of massive force.
The Communists were and are willing to apply such force, as evidenced in Soviet Russia. Their character is that of armed robbers prepared to commit murder if that is what is necessary to carry out their robbery. The character of the Social Democrats in contrast is more like that of pickpockets, who may talk of pulling the big job someday, but who in fact are unwilling to do the killing that would be required, and so give up at the slightest sign of serious resistance.
As for the Nazis, they generally did not have to kill in order to seize the property of Germans other than Jews. This was because, as we have seen, they established socialism by stealth, through price controls, which served to maintain the outward guise and appearance of private ownership. The private owners were thus deprived of their property without knowing it and thus felt no need to defend it by force.
I think I have shown that socialism — actual socialism — is totalitarian by its very nature.
https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarian
When taken in it's whole seperating economic factors from governance (which we know will not happen) can create some unique forms of leadership.
One thing is for sure you just went A1 to whirly's alt right list lol.
I wish I had the article but it discussed the issue of far left/right ideologies going around an imaginary sphere that brought them closer together than how ppl wanted to seperate them.
By the way visit Biden's website at 555-745-5555
Originally posted by snowdragon
I wish I had the article but it discussed the issue of far left/right ideologies going around an imaginary sphere that brought them closer together than how ppl wanted to seperate them.
That's called the Political Horseshoe.
The idea is that political ideologies are hardly able to be flattened to a 4 axis Cartesian Plane. That they overlap, greatly, in one idea or another.
And this horseshoe demonstrates why it is tough to peg the Third Reich on the political compass. As you can see, here, they are much closer to the communists/socialists which is why some political scientists support the horseshoe:
Originally posted by dadudemongood image
That's called the Political Horseshoe.The idea is that political ideologies are hardly able to be flattened to a 4 axis Cartesian Plane. That they overlap, greatly, in one idea or another.
And this horseshoe demonstrates why it is tough to peg the Third Reich on the political compass. As you can see, here, they are much closer to the communists/socialists which is why some political scientists support the horseshoe:
Originally posted by dadudemonDamn good stuff, DDM. I highly enjoyed that read and it shed a lot of light on aspects of political and economic theory I was unaware of prior.
Part 5:
In such cases, it is necessary to realize that along with these countries not being totalitarian, they are also not socialist. Their governing parties may espouse socialism as their philosophy and their ultimate goal, but socialism is not what they have implemented as their economic system. Their actual economic system is that of a hampered market economy, as Mises termed it. While more hampered than our own in important respects, their economic system is essentially similar to our own, in that the characteristic driving force of production and economic activity is not government decree but the initiative of private owners motivated by the prospect of private profit.The reason that Social Democrats do not establish socialism when they come to power, is that they are unwilling to do what would be required. The establishment of socialism as an economic system requires a massive act of theft — the means of production must be seized from their owners and turned over to the state. Such seizure is virtually certain to provoke substantial resistance on the part of the owners, resistance which can be overcome only by use of massive force.
The Communists were and are willing to apply such force, as evidenced in Soviet Russia. Their character is that of armed robbers prepared to commit murder if that is what is necessary to carry out their robbery. The character of the Social Democrats in contrast is more like that of pickpockets, who may talk of pulling the big job someday, but who in fact are unwilling to do the killing that would be required, and so give up at the slightest sign of serious resistance.
As for the Nazis, they generally did not have to kill in order to seize the property of Germans other than Jews. This was because, as we have seen, they established socialism by stealth, through price controls, which served to maintain the outward guise and appearance of private ownership. The private owners were thus deprived of their property without knowing it and thus felt no need to defend it by force.
I think I have shown that socialism — actual socialism — is totalitarian by its very nature.
https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarian
I do hope I'm not the only one who reads it. Anyone serious about their politics on this forum should at least closely skim at, at the very, very minimum.
Anyone who disagrees that the Nazis practiced socialism has to read it, to show a sense of impartiality, and then should reply with specific counters if they still disagree.
Originally posted by Scribble
Damn good stuff, DDM. I highly enjoyed that read and it shed a lot of light on aspects of political and economic theory I was unaware of prior.I do hope I'm not the only one who reads it. Anyone serious about their politics on this forum should at least closely skim at, at the very, very minimum.
Anyone who disagrees that the Nazis practiced socialism has to read it, to show a sense of impartiality, and then should reply with specific counters if they still disagree.
The challenge to this is the economic factors vs governing. It's difficult to seperate the two when having a lay conversation and most ppl want to fall to the lowest common denominator and conflate the two. I could be wrong though so there is that.
Originally posted by snowdragon
You're killling me kid, how can you have so much smartz to let the satirical fly by you 😉
Can't help it. That's why I tell people to just explain the joke because I just don't get some humor.
I just assumed you forgot the link and pasted the wrong thing from your clipboard. I think the meme would work if you pasted it as a quote from Biden.
Like this:
Ex-Sanders campaign manager talks unity efforts with Biden backers
Faiz Shakir, the former campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2020 White House bid, said recent unity task force proposals to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign represent an opportunity to push the former vice president more to the left, but activists will keep doing the work to hold him “accountable.”
Speaking to Hill.TV’s “Rising” Thursday, Shakir touted proposals such as federal investments in job creation for health care and childcare workers, among other things, as evidence that the groups, made up of both Biden and Sanders backers, had produced substantive suggestions.
“There’s an opportunity. I think you’ve heard Vice President Biden talk about wanting to be the most progressive president, and our task force members put some meat to the bones on that,” he said. “It could be transformative and certainly a kind of a federal role that probably hasn’t occurred in 100 years.” -snip
Good