Liberal Media Greater threat than terrorism

[Josh Cryer]

ravingdave, you have no idea what you are talking about, the original socialists were anarchists, not statists, most knowledgable leftists recognize this. Nothing in Stalin and Hitler's views are socialist in the original, acedemic, understanding.

He is correct that unions and worker control was shut down in Nazi Germany in favor of a nationalist state.

I could call myself a capitalist but that doesn't make me a capitalist, it's my underlying views and what I do with them. Your own quotes from that guys book (which has been removed from the internet, along with a lot of traces of him posting at sites like FreeRepublic) discredit your attempt at misguiding people and manipulating the facts.

[djolds1]

ravingdave, you have no idea what you are talking about, the original socialists were anarchists, not statists, most knowledgeable leftists recognize this. Nothing in Stalin and Hitler's views are socialist in the original, academic, understanding.

Very little in actual human practice adheres to the proclaimed academic concept. Anarchy is a pipe dream anyway, Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy always asserts itself.

Achieving a policy agenda means holding the mechanisms of power, and after the formation of the Second International (essentially a loose confederation of national socialist parties), the only roads to actual power were the nation states themselves.

He is correct that unions and worker control was shut down in Nazi Germany in favor of a nationalist state.

von Kuehnelt-Leddihn seems a poor source. I'd recommend Jonah Goldberg's recent "Liberal Fascism."

[MSimon]

Military posturing tends to do the opposite.

Actually - experience shows it works rather well if you have the 10 or 15 years usually required to make it work.

The idea is that you turn it into a dead end career for the bombers, and those that pack the bombs, those that raise the funds, leaders, etc.

The fact that with all its ineptness the US Military reduced the terrorism in Iraq to the long tail usually associated with a terrorist defeat in about 5 years is amazing.

And to say terrorists are independent of states is to misunderstand most terrorism in the world. Some is independent of state financing. Most is not.

[IntLibber]

ravingdave, you have no idea what you are talking about, the original socialists were anarchists, not statists, most knowledgable leftists recognize this. Nothing in Stalin and Hitler's views are socialist in the original, acedemic, understanding.

He is correct that unions and worker control was shut down in Nazi Germany in favor of a nationalist state.

I could call myself a capitalist but that doesn't make me a capitalist, it's my underlying views and what I do with them. Your own quotes from that guys book (which has been removed from the internet, along with a lot of traces of him posting at sites like FreeRepublic) discredit your attempt at misguiding people and manipulating the facts.

The falshoods in this post are as follows:

a) The original socialists were Marx, Engels, Bakunin, and Proudhon. Proudhon was a soft left socialist, while Bakunin was the classic crazy haired bomb thrower anarchist. Marx and Engels were absolute statists and firmly believed in using the power of the state dictatorally to impose socialism at the point of a gun and cure anybody who thought otherwise with a lead bullet. Marx and Engels version became communism that was responsible for the deaths of over 100 million human beings in the 20th century. Proudhon's version became european and american socialism, and Bakunin marginalized himself from the very beginning, and wound up only appealing to some of the more violent labor organizers, such as those that founded the IWW, better known as the wobblies.

b) In the US, socialism then started spreading among many of the more liberal protestant sects that had a tradition of communitarian organization. These pastoralist sects were repelled by the pollution and exploitation of the industrial age. Among these was a family by the name of Bellamy who were also very patriotic, and fathered a nationalistic brand of socialism. One of them penned the American Pledge of Allegiance and his followers got it adopted by Congress (minus the "God" clause). His cousin penned a science fiction novel by the name of "Looking Backward", which portrayed a spoiled rich liberal do-nothing scion who was so unproductive in life that he fell asleep for a hundred years without anybody noticing. In the year 1980, his future had the US operated as one huge socialist corporation. They had cable radio, big box stores, mail order shopping, and of course the national religion was nationalism. Every citizen was required to give x many years of service to the nation. It portrayed this all in a very utopian manner. The novel was translated into dozens of languages, and found fertile soil in Europe, where it inspired the formation of the National Socialist Workers Party to implement it.

c) The socialism of Marx and Engels was specifically internationalist in orientation, they wanted to create world peace through socialism and global governance unification. They believed in government force internationally to enforce international law. They did not believe in individual rights.
This form of socialism contrasted with the nationalist socialism of the Bellamys. The Bellamys were more ethnically snobbish while at the same time very much against Jim Crow laws, and the ethnic exploitation of industrialists. They saw it as natural and right that each ethnicity should have its own nation to determine its own national destiny, and that when this was achieved, there would be world peace because then no one ethnic group would be able to repress another in any given country.

d) National Socialism as envisioned by the Bellamys was no different from that of the National Socialist Workers Party with the key exception being the demonization of other ethnicities, particularly Jews, of course, but also Roma, among others.

e) When Hitler signed the secret treaty with Stalin dividing Poland, Speer wrote in his autobiography, the party elites all agreed that it was only natural for german national socialists to find common cause with russian socialists.

f) Many point to the degree to which the Nazis fought with communists on the streets before they took over government, as if this meant they were idiologically opposites. This is not true. They fought because they were vyying for the same constituency, and they later sent communists to the concentration camps because communists in government invariably were found to be spies for Stalin (much as was found in our own government at the time, see the Venona Intercepts for confirmation).

g) Yes, the Nazis shut down communist controlled unions because the unions invariably were taking orders from Stalin's intelligence agencies via the Comintern to sabotage Germany's reindustrialization and military expansion. By the same measure, the soviets never tolerated unions either, nor did the communist chinese.

The left in the US has for decades attempted to erase the Nazis ties to the socialist left. However they also try to accomplish the same thing less successfully wrt to Stalin, who the Trotskyists generally opposed because they claim Stalin did not believe in supporting international revolutionary groups around the globe (this conflicts with the fact that Stalin was successful in backing Mao's revolutionaries in China, Vietnam, and using them in Eastern Europe to consolidate control over those countries, as well as trigger civil war in Greece, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America.)

The Nazis pursued similar goals with nazi parties in every other european country as well as the US and Canada, which were similarly funded and aided by Germany and served as intelligence gathering organizations for the SS. The Nazi parties in scandinavia succeeded in getting elected to parliament and passed eugenics laws, as also happened in much of europe, the US and Canada.

Eugenics was seen by communists and nazis as a means of forcing evolution under the hand of the state to eliminate genotypes they felt were not conducive to becoming good compliant and submissive citizens. That is the core ethic of Lysenkoism, the scientific theology of the soviet union.

[TallDave]

ravingdave, you have no idea what you are talking about, the original socialists were anarchists, not statists, most knowledgable leftists recognize this. Nothing in Stalin and Hitler's views are socialist in the original, acedemic, understanding.

It's true Marx believed the state would cease to exist, but that doesn't appear to be on the agenda of any socialists in power, and indeed the whole notion statists will simply give up power seems very naive and silly a century and a half later, esp. after seeing how disastrously Communists moved in the opposite direction into totalitarianism. It's a "can't get there from here" problem, mostly due to human nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

[ravingdave]

Thank you Great Society for creating all these thugs and murderers who would not have otherwise been created but for your interference with normal human evolution.

Eventually experience sorts things out. It sorted me out.

Wouldn't it be so much nicer to use accumulated wisdom to prevent the misery necessary to sort things out ?

Even today. Now that we can demonstrate that free money and lack of accountability cause people to behave foolish and raise fatherless children who grow up into hoodlums, don't you think we ought to stop doing it ?



David

[ravingdave]

ravingdave, you have no idea what you are talking about, the original socialists were anarchists, not statists, most knowledgable leftists recognize this. Nothing in Stalin and Hitler's views are socialist in the original, acedemic, understanding.

The book goes deep into the origins of the National Socialists, and details how they were put together out of the splintered components of several different socialist organizations. (I'll quote the appropriate passages if anyone expresses interest.)

I noticed that the fellow you quoted referenced William Shirer's "The rise and Fall of the Third Reich" which is a book I also happened to have read, and I still have a copy of it somewhere though i've misplaced it at the moment.

Regardless, something I found interesting in THAT book was Shirer's allegation that Hitler was nudged toward the Nazi party by his army superiors who asked him to infiltrate their meetings and see what they were about. One of the things that Shirer mentions is that the original group of Nazis that Hitler met were basically a Homosexual social club that dabbled in politics. Hitler was engaged in debate, and eventually convinced that the party espoused ideas he liked.

He is correct that unions and worker control was shut down in Nazi Germany in favor of a nationalist state.

I could call myself a capitalist but that doesn't make me a capitalist, it's my underlying views and what I do with them. Your own quotes from that guys book (which has been removed from the internet, along with a lot of traces of him posting at sites like FreeRepublic) discredit your attempt at misguiding people and manipulating the facts.

That's funny. His Wikipedia entry indicates he died in 1999. It also says that he was an anti Nazi Austrian that wrote nasty things about the Nazis during their reign of power and "he could not return to Nazi-occupied Austria." Are you sure we're talking about the same guy ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_von_Kuehnelt-Leddihn


And you mean THIS book is removed from the internet ?




http://www.amazon.com/Leftism-Revisited ... 0895265370


I think we have a case of mistaken identity. Of course with a name like "Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn" it's hard to see how someone can make a mistake with his name.


This book is still available too.



http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Third-Reich- ... 009&sr=1-1

David

[ravingdave]

Very little in actual human practice adheres to the proclaimed academic concept. Anarchy is a pipe dream anyway, Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy always asserts itself.

Amen Brother ! A point I always try to make to my Libertarian/Anarchist-inclined friends.

Achieving a policy agenda means holding the mechanisms of power, and after the formation of the Second International (essentially a loose confederation of national socialist parties), the only roads to actual power were the nation states themselves.

von Kuehnelt-Leddihn seems a poor source. I'd recommend Jonah Goldberg's recent "Liberal Fascism."

I have been out of Politics for years, and had received "Leftism Revisited" as well as many other books from a book club of which I was a member.

I thought at the time (15 years ago) that the book was AWESOME, and explained so much about the difference between right and left that I never really understood before. It has a preface by William F. Buckley, so I figured it had a very prominent seal of approval.

The Wikipedia Entry on von Kuehnelt-Leddihn doesn't make me think he is a poor source. It seems that he was right in the middle of things both Geographically (for a while ) and Chronologically. (William Shirer if I remember correctly was on the rail car when the armistice was signed ending the 1rst world war)

I'm not sure why you regard Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn as a poor source. His notes and index are 180 pages long!

In any case, i've heard of Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Facism", but I haven't read it. It's apparently quite popular with the Right wing nowadays, so i'm gonna have to take a peek at it sooner or later. Same goes for other books like "Liberty and Tyranny" by Mark Levin, etc.


David

[Josh Cryer]

It's simple logic, if this guy was a leftist why wasn't his essay posted at DemocraticUnderground as opposed to FreeRepublic? Is it because it would have been eridicated within a few hours of being posted? As opposed to FreeRepublic which was proud to have his essay (until he killed someone of course)?

I am *not* saying that DU and FR are homogenous or that I agree with everything at DU, but I *am* saying that FR was more in line with his beliefs than DU, in general. Especially given the positive response to his hate speech.

Marx said Prouhon was the "father of us all." And he was right. But the anarchists were killed enmasse by the dictatorial authoritarian socialists. Whether or not it can "work" is for the future to decide (because I do not believe we have once had an attempt at anarchist revolution). But I do know that information, once it is freed, stays that way, and that in the end attempts at proprietarianism probably won't work in a high technology society.

ravingdave, I was talking about the fact that Von Brunn stuff has been taken down from all of the *right wing* sites that espoused it.

[Josh Cryer]

BTW, I don't have as much free time on my hands as you guys and I truly don't feel like responding to all of the Orwellian double-speak. Don't think I defend Marx, though, because he was an authoritarian bastard.

I don't agree with *any* state socialists, I am against expropriation of the means of production, specialization, the division of labor, and yes, even "democratic socialism."

[MSimon]

Thank you Great Society for creating all these thugs and murderers who would not have otherwise been created but for your interference with normal human evolution.

Eventually experience sorts things out. It sorted me out.

Wouldn't it be so much nicer to use accumulated wisdom to prevent the misery necessary to sort things out ?

David

Generally. But it is a case you so seldom see that mere consideration of it is a waste of time.

The collective memory of the human race has a 1/10th life of 50 years. Which says the half life is about 15 years.

Who remembers Jimmy Carter?WIN buttons? Wage and price controls? Stagflation? It appears we are about to get our memories refreshed.

[MSimon]

Division of labor is what creates wealth.

You might want to look up Adam Smith's imaginary pin factory to find out why. It starts with the premise that skills are divided unequally.

Suppose we have a three person pin factory and three skill sets and the output of each person can be determined by the multiplication of the skill sets.

Person

A .27 .64 .89 = .1538
B .33 .69 .53 = .1207
C .74 .22 .27 = .0440

now assign A, B, and C to their best jobs

.89 .69 .74 = .4544

And now the "lowest skill" guy is worth more to the production process because of his excellence in the first task vs the other two workers. Management has more than doubled the output of the factory. More than double the output of the three folks operating independently. So I am all for division of labor.

[MSimon]

Josh,

I do not believe you are against specialization.

Suppose you have two guys equally qualified in every other respect except one has a IQ of 70 and the other has an IQ of 130. That is four standard deviations. Even on an individual comparison basis that is significant.

Who do you want for your airplane pilot?

So what do you do to prevent the specialization trap? Try to learn more about more and more.

===

BTW death is the ultimate end of every socialist scheme. Hayek pointed it out in 1944 re: German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and USSR Communism.

Or as Margret Thatcher put it so succinctly, “The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”

Hayek thought the Socialist countries were impelled to war by their economic condition. In a nut shell Hayek thought socialism couldn't survive without slave labor. Or translated into American: "without taxes going up."

Now Hayek was a humanist realist. He says with countries getting rich that some of the socialist policies might be endurable and even somewhat helpful. What he worried about was getting to the point where socialism strangled the real economy.

Are we there yet? Some of us would prefer moving farther away vs closer.

[ravingdave]

It's simple logic, if this guy was a leftist why wasn't his essay posted at DemocraticUnderground as opposed to FreeRepublic? Is it because it would have been eridicated within a few hours of being posted? As opposed to FreeRepublic which was proud to have his essay (until he killed someone of course)?

I am *not* saying that DU and FR are homogenous or that I agree with everything at DU, but I *am* saying that FR was more in line with his beliefs than DU, in general. Especially given the positive response to his hate speech.

Marx said Prouhon was the "father of us all." And he was right. But the anarchists were killed enmasse by the dictatorial authoritarian socialists. Whether or not it can "work" is for the future to decide (because I do not believe we have once had an attempt at anarchist revolution). But I do know that information, once it is freed, stays that way, and that in the end attempts at proprietarianism probably won't work in a high technology society.

ravingdave, I was talking about the fact that Von Brunn stuff has been taken down from all of the *right wing* sites that espoused it.

Okay, now i'm less confused. I thought we were talking about Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. That's the only person I quoted. I did not quote anything from the Nutjob at the Holocaust museum.

As to Von Brunn's stuff being taken down from all of the *right wing* sites, I wouldn't be surprised. No one would want to be associated with him. Not knowing what he posted, I can't say why the Free Republic (a Web site which I've never perused until today) left his posts up till he became infamous. Maybe they were innocuous, or possibly not bad enough to delete. It's my understanding that the conservative web sites tend to have a thing about "Freedom of Speech" while I hear the Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground routinely delete stuff they don't like. (Don't know if it's true, because I don't go to those places, but I have heard that from others.)

There was a troll that showed up recently at "Ace of Spades", and many of the commenters kept asking management to block him from posting and delete his posts. For some reason, the management just wouldn't do it. They did call attention to the guy, and dozens of people verbally attacked him and ridiculed him.


The only writings from the man that I have to go on are those that were referenced from various articles and commentary. All of the referenced material I've seen indicates the man is a nut, but more of a left wing nut than a right wing nut.

He was, after all, a registered Democrat. He hated corporations, hated Christianity, Hated Bush, the NeoCons, Fox News etc.

Another indication that he wasn't a right wing nut is the size of the gun he brought to the fight. I can't imagine any self respecting right wing nut showing up with anything less than a .223 or 7.62mm weapon.


The difference between Bill Ayers and Timothy McVeigh is that Bill Ayers and Co. were incompetent.


David

[ravingdave]

Eventually experience sorts things out. It sorted me out.

Wouldn't it be so much nicer to use accumulated wisdom to prevent the misery necessary to sort things out ?

David

Generally. But it is a case you so seldom see that mere consideration of it is a waste of time.

The collective memory of the human race has a 1/10th life of 50 years. Which says the half life is about 15 years.

Who remembers Jimmy Carter?WIN buttons? Wage and price controls? Stagflation? It appears we are about to get our memories refreshed.

You're right. People tend to forget lessons that the older generations have learned in their lives. If only there was some way of preserving the lessons learned the hard way by previous generations.

I know! Maybe if they wrote down the accumulated wisdom, and reviewed it from time to time, say weekly, perhaps some of the lessons would sink in to the younger generation !

If only there were some way to get people together once (or more) per week and contemplate lessons learned from the past.




David