Fascism, the American Left and the coming Amstapo

Authoritarian and totalitarian governments have always relied on ordinary people finking out their neighbors. And today's Democrat politicians are no different: L.A. Mayor Wants 'Snitches' to Rat Out Their Neighbors... All for a 'Reward'

Los Angeles Mayor  Eric Garcetti, Democrat

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) is encouraging residents in his city to tattletale on their neighbors who defy his stay-at-home order. Specifically, he's targeting businesses that continue to remain open despite not being considered "essential" (at least by government standards).

“If any non-essential businesses continue to operate in violation of the stay at home order, we’re going to act to enforce the safer at home order and ensure their compliance,” Garcetti said. “You know the old expression about snitches. Well, in this case, snitches get rewards.”

Does Mayor Garcetti know that Hitler's Germany, Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, and the dozens of lesser dictators of the 20th century also rewarded people who ratted on their friends, relatives, acquaintance, and neighbors? Of course he does. Garcetti, et. al. just think there is nothing wrong with it. They want power and control at all costs and neighbor-finking is just one tool in the toolbox. And they will pay you for it.

For the Left, no matter the name of their party, it should never be asked, "Do their ends justify their means?" For in their minds, the end always justify any means. There is no line that must never be crossed to achieve their purposes. There are only lines that should not be crossed yet.

So how did the "inform on your neighbor" program work in Hitler's Germany? It turned the country into a people afraid of one another - even of their own family members - all day, every day. In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo (short for (Geheime Staatspolizei-Secret State Police),

... encouraged German citizens to report anything they thought was “suspicious”. Though denunciations by the general public may have been “sincere” in the early days of the regime, by the later years, the denunciation/informer process was becoming widely abused, and even the Gestapo understood this.

It was not uncommon for squabbling neighbors to settle grudges or simple disputes by reporting one another to their local Gestapo office. Common accusations included overhearing defeatist talk, listening to foreign radio broadcasts(BBC), or even overhearing criticism of the Führer or the Nazi party. In one instance in Essen, a woman accused her elderly disabled neighbor of listening to the BBC in the evening, claiming she heard this when putting her ear up to the common wall. The man was brought in for questioning, and denied the allegations, claiming he and the neighbor had a troubled past. He then hanged himself in his cell the next day. Couples involved in marital disputes also realized that they could use the denunciation process to their own advantage, and these comprised a significant percentage of reports. One woman in Mannheim accused her spouse of making derogatory remarks about Hitler, but an investigation revealed she was involved in an affair with a soldier and wanted her husband “out of the way”. In one particularly disturbing incident, an idealistic grandmother, overhearing her beloved grandson make disparaging remarks about the Führer, and having no idea how severe the penalty was for such a crime, allegedly denounced him to the Gestapo in the hope this would dissuade him from making further such remarks.

Regardless of the motivations of the denouncers, what the process did do, was essentially turn Nazi Germany into a self-policing state. It’s estimated that some 40% of all denunciations were based on the settling of some personal grudge or score... . It got so bad that a Reich Ministry of Justice internal memo dated from August 1943 declared that “The denouncer is the biggest scoundrel in the country”.

So Garcetti is implementing not merely a dictatorship-style government, he is also implementing means by which jilted ex-girlfriends will be paid for lying to police about a former boyfriend, or a man with a longstanding dispute with a next-door neighbor can get even by turning the neighbor into a prosecuted enemy of the people.

To paraphrase Tome Wolfe, fascism is always being planned by the Republicans, but is always implemented by the Democrats.

Welcome to the age of the Amerikanische Staatspolizei, let's just call it the Amstapo for short.

The must-read of the day

Memorize this, then read the rest:

In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

The reason that "the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion" is because politics is their religion. They are millenarians, a world view defined as, "the belief by a religious, social, or political group or movement in a coming major transformation of society, after which all things will be changed" (Wikipedia).

In history, milleniarianism has often been purely religious, found among ancient Jews and ancient and modern Christians. But millenarianism does not have to be either religious or apocalyptic. There are secular-political milleniarists who believe that human society may be brought to flourishing by properly enlightened human institutions. For example, in 1964, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was Leonid Brezhnev. He promised that year that the USSR would achieve "true communism" by 1980. In Marxism-Leninism, true communism was a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

Well, we know how Homo sovieticus turned out.

Political milleniarians believe that society is in deep need of profound change. This change must be compelled from the top because the people are either powerless to bring it about themselves or are too complacent or uninformed to effect it. The present order is corrupt and must be vanquished. Christoph Schönborn in First Things put it this way:

Indeed, the hallmark of this criticism is that society in all its spheres (economics, culture, defense) is continually being told that it should have a “bad conscience”: not because of particular abuses and wrong attitudes, but fundamentally and universally. It is not the abusive practices of banks that are criticized, but their very existence; not this or that measure taken in the defense of a country, but the very existence of this defense. Behind this criticism, which likes to call itself “prophetic,” there lies in reality a kind of “political millenarianism” which, in the name of some future paradisal society, rejects and demonizes the existing society en bloc, demanding that it be overthrown by revolution.

Not necessarily violent revolution, a political one will do just as well, about which more shortly.

Political millenarianism is not purely secular, though. Its adherents have an unbounded (and be honest, historically unjustified) faith in government and its ability to order the lives of the people better than they can order their own lives. Political or religious millenarians are always firmly authoritarian and use the power of government to cement the control of institutions and agencies over the daily lives of the people. Millenarianism always opposes personal freedom. Whether religious or secular, millenarianists have that much in common.

They leave no room in future societies for divergent belief systems. Millennialists have a dualistic view of the present, or an “us against them” view of society. The pluralism of the modern world is rejected in favour of an envisioned perfect monistic future where there are no more political conflicts. These belief systems culminate instead in the end of history, and it is from this monistic approach to the world where the potential for totalitarianism and authoritarianism becomes manifest. “For millennial groups the political compromise necessary for societies to function is anathema, because other groups in society are either in league with evil or under its spell. There is no room for non-believer.”

In more moderate practice, however, the desire for an ideal time is positive. It affirms what common sense and a glance at this morning's headlines reveal: there is something seriously wrong with the present order. Hence, it can impel adherents to avoid complacency in the face of evil, to work for the improvement of the human condition so better to prepare persons to face the coming judgment. Indeed, most Christians have held through two millennia to the idea that the Kingdom of God, preached by Jesus, is just as much a present spiritual state of community as a coming physical reality. The Kingdom is within us now, although we can never achieve it fully on our own efforts. Nonetheless, we must do the best we can.

In Christian history this understanding has led on the one hand to the monastic movements that sprang up in the early Middle Ages. Monasteries were strict communities of faith, set apart from the world (although not so separatist that their leaders eschewed commerce with the world). On the other hand it led to the 20th century's liberationist theologies, which paradoxically came to eschew eschatology altogether and focused solely on the reform and even overthrow of present political orders. (It can be argued, though, that liberationism was as much a product of The Communist Manifesto as the Bible.)

But eschatology becomes evil when its adherents see only their own purity and others' sin. When they see the present state of affairs - always of others' affairs - as wholly corrupt, godless and faithless, then it is a short step to religious radicalism, what we have come to call religious fascism. Examples given: the mullahcracies of Iran and Taliban Afghanistan, internally cruel to the point of murder, oppressive and ruthlessly class-ridden, a sort of real-world Animal Farm, only infinitely bloodier.

If the eschatologists are both radicalized and evangelistic rather than monastic, then the result is holy war, jihad. Holy war focuses on destroying sinners, not converting them.

That is the state of al Qaeda and a great deal of the Muslim faithful today. Al Qaeda is actively jihadist, while many millions of other Muslims are sympathetically so. They seek to attain the ideal time - the true Islamic society. Never mind that millions of other Muslims have a different understanding of what Islamic society should be. The radicalized eschatologist simply can write them off as apostate and make war against them as readily as against infidels.

Non-religious westerners are just as liable to eschatological fervor as religious people anywhere. Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (and heavily romanticized) working classes could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

But, as Soviet army officer Victor Suvorov came to realize, in a True Communist society, who would stoop to volunteer to shovel manure? As he wrote in Inside the Soviet Army, 

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, 'Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?'

Of course not. Despite this basic, and indeed obvious flaw, the Soviet promise of its Ideal Time enraptured enormous numbers of Western elites who should have known better.

The old USSR has gone the way of the dodo and hardly any die-hard true believers remain in its former states. But they remain in droves in the West, convinced that Western economic-political systems remain irredeemably corrupt. Having shunned Christian faith for some decades, Western Marxist and socialist ideologues also discarded a key thing that has prevented Christian eschatologists from experimenting with Taliban-style social orders: the New Testament formally denies the possibility of the self-perfectibility of the human person. (Christian oppressions and brutalities done for other reasons were bad enough, but only rarely, and on small scales, did Christians ever attempt to enforce an Idealized community by force or coercion.)

So the philosophical and ideological origin of the modern Left: Rejecting the idea of a divinely shaped world yet to come, but believing, all evidence to the contrary, that human beings are fundamentally perfectible, most Western ideological eschatologists found a natural fit with Marxism-Leninism: the present order must pass away, and we can build something better on our own. The violent destruction of the present order, if necessary, had a natural fit with Marxism from the beginning.

The Left, rejecting as a basic tenet of its faith the major features of Western societies, came to romanticize heavily non-Western, non-capitalist cultures, especially those of the Third World. The village society became idealized, always assumed to be populated by selfless, caring people whose spirits (never souls, which might need saving!) were uninfected by the crass materialism of capitalism. This was their Eden, the Ideal Time from humankind had sprung; Marxism-Leninism provided the framework for transforming Western societies into a New Jerusalem. Over time, and not a very long time, the Left idealized anyone who opposed the West, no matter how cruel, oppressive or personally repulsive he might be: Castro, Che, Mao, Saddam and others. 

That such figures murdered by the thousands or millions dismayed some of the Left, to be sure. But again, Marxist theory provided a way to rationalize the deaths: building the Ideal Community might well require bloodshed, and besides, such violence and oppressive structures were understood to be mere temporary expedients en route to the Ideal Time, when the inherent goodness of human beings would finally flower and coercion would no longer be necessary.

It must be pointed out that the Left, especially the Hard Left, was always mostly from the privileged classes of Western societies. In their dreams of an Ideal Time, they always remained in power. They saw as natural allies anyone who wished to overthrow the Western order, even if (especially if?) by hard violence. They were apparently oblivious to the fact that the others never saw them as allies, not even Stalin, who had moved firmly in eastern Europe to kill or imprison the homegrown communists there before they could get the foolish idea that they would have some say in the newly established workers' paradise.

The romantic thrall much of the Left has today with Islamism is little different than its swoon over Stalin, and no more moral. The Left never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of Stalin's rule and so never really understood that he considered them "useful idiots" to be eliminated if the Soviets ever occupied their countries. Likewise today, the Left, convinced of its own moral purity, fails to understand that al Qaeda and ISIS view them with contempt equal to Stalin's, and considers them nothing more than infidels to be dealt with when the time comes.

Fortunately, though, there are some of the Left (or at least of liberals) who recognize the peril (link, link, for example) and we may pray others will awaken, too.

Also, I recommend reading "The Ideological War Within the West," by John Fonte, which helps illumine these concepts. Fonte "suggests there has arisen a conflict within the democratic world between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism, between democrats and what he calls post-democrats." Well worth the time.

See also, "Six fatal shortcomings of the modern Left," by Paul Berman, an old-style Leftist, Dissent Magazine, Winter 2004.

Update:

Andrew Sullivan: A Glimpse at the Intersectional Left’s Political Endgame

Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

5 Reasons Socialism Is Not Christian -- read the whole thing, but here is the list:

1. Socialism is Based on a Materialistic Worldview 2. Socialism Punishes Virtue 3. Socialism Endorses Stealing [Actually, socialism is stealing] 4. Socialism Encourages Envy and Class Warfare 5. Socialism Seeks to Destroy Marriage & Family [This has been a longstanding goal of the entire Left for decades]

Xi promises "smashed bodies" - and delivers

The promise: Xi warns any effort to split China will end with 'bodies smashed and bones ground to powder'

Chinese President Xi Jinping cautioned over the weekend that any effort to split with China will result in "bodies smashed and bones ground to powder" amid ongoing unrest in Hong Kong.

The Chinese leader made the warning while visiting Nepal, the Hong Kong Free Press reported.

“Anyone who attempts to split any region from China will perish, with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder," Xi reportedly said.

The promise fulfilled: Jimmy Sham, leader of Hong Kong democracy group Civil Human Rights Front, attacked on Mong Kok street

• Sham is smashed in the head with hammers and spanners by at least four assailants who then flee in a car
• The activist’s pro-democracy group has been responsible for some of Hong Kong’s biggest protest marches in recent years

The leader of a pro-democracy group responsible for some of the largest peaceful protest marches in Hong Kong was attacked on Wednesday, four days before another planned mass rally.

Jimmy Sham Tsz-kit, convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, was set upon by at least four non-ethnic Chinese assailants on Arran Street in Mong Kok at 7.40pm, a police source said.

The attack was the second against Sham in less than two months.

The Civil Human Rights Front said Sham had been smashed over the head with hammers and spanners but was conscious when sent to Kwong Wah Hospital in Yau Ma Tei. He was understood to be in stable condition.

The real question for Xi, as for any totalitarian, is "How many bodies is he willing to smash" to enforce his will? For Chairman Mao, the answer was, "As many as it takes." Mao killed 100 million. Will Xi go that far, or will he draw up short?

Because the answer to how many bodies he is willing to smash is somewhere between 1 (and done) to unlimited. And no one, including Xi, knows in advance what that number will be

Right now, Xi is in the preliminary stages of intimidation rather than military crackdown. As the WSJ reports, "Beijing hasn’t sent tanks into the streets. It’s trying to do the job with criminal gangs and technology."

The Chinese crackdown here is under way. Tanks haven’t rolled into Hong Kong à la Tiananmen Square in 1989. But Beijing is carrying out a subtler, though often still violent, effort to suppress dissent, hoping the world won’t notice. Ask Stanley Ho Wai-hong of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.

The 35-year-old pro-democracy labor activist planned a community event Sept. 29 in Sai Kung, a fishing village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. But that afternoon, tens of thousands were rallying in the city against China’s human-rights abuses, so Mr. Ho canceled his event at the last minute. He was driving away when a stranger called him and asked him to come back so villagers could give him a gift. “It was a trap for murder,” he told me at the hospital earlier this month.

When he arrived back in Sai Kung, he says, three men ambushed him and bludgeoned him with metal rods. Mr. Ho fell to the ground and tried to cover his skull with his hands. It took only half a minute for bystanders to rescue him, but “30 seconds is a long time.” The attack left Mr. Ho with seven gashes in his head and five bruises on his back. His right thumb and three other fingers were broken, the left index finger so severely that he needed surgery.

So yes, Xi was serious about smashing bodies. We are not yet at the stage of grinding bones to powder. But it's coming.

Update: American Digest posts The Hidden History Of The Tiananmen Square Massacre, with many photos. "Massacre" is perhaps an understatement.

Today's Link Sink

Opt out of everything on the internet: Your handy and very comprehensive page where you can opt out of almost any privacy-related matter on the web. Truly invaluable.  Click here.

But Bernie is wrong about everything else, so why not this? WSJ: Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Sweden. My first reaction was, Why should Sweden be the exception? But in fact, Sweden is not socialist at all.

The ‘Nordic model’ of socialism, which he and other leftists tout, is more like ‘ruthless capitalism,’ says [Swedish historian] Johan Norberg.

He idealized the simple life of his ancestors in the 19th century. 

“I had this romanticized idea about them, and I looked at pictures of them: Look at that rural lifestyle, happy farmers.” Eventually he realized 19th-century life wasn’t all he cracked it up to be. “I thought it would come with penicillin, and sort of modern surgery, and instant access to all of the calories I needed to survive another day, and so. And I think history really saved me there, because then when I read up on my ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that they didn’t live ‘ecologically.’ They died ecologically, at a very young age.” ...

A couple of days after our interview, Mr. Norberg emailed a warning for Americans: “The most dangerous place to be is top of the world, think you have it all made and can afford to experiment with socialism or protectionism, because you have plenty of room for mistakes before you hurt yourself,” he wrote. “That’s where Sweden was in 1970. It almost destroyed us, and it took some heroic efforts to get back on track.”

BTW, that's this Norberg:

Not the Police Squad character:

(Whose name was spelled Nordberg, anyway. But what the heck. Go with it.)

David Goldman: The Chinese will hand Trump his head on a platter. Goldman supports Trump and will vote for him next year, but says there are certain realities that Trump is not integrating. Read it and weep.

Speaking of the Chinese  - Africans to Chinese: Get out! Why? Because the Chinese build them nothing without strings (Strings? Heck, chains!) attached and the Chinese con has worn too thin to live with. Besides, I know very well a retired Marine officer who did years of State Dept. assignments in Africa after the Corps, He saw first hand many, many places where the Chinese had done infrastructure work - roads, pipelines, building projects. He told me that without exception they were of very poor quality and would not last. There was no doubt in his mind that the Chinese did not do the work to advance the African's interests, but their own, and saw the contracts as foothold for a permanent presence there.

Which helps explains why Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Because Greenland's government (it self governs although the island is still a Danish colony) asked the Chinese in 2017 whether they would build infrastructure that the Danish government declined to fund.

According to the South China Morning Post, Greenland had been seriously courted by China due to its strategic location and its mineral resources.

BTW, Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland, too, and even offered to swap part of Alaska for it.

Forbes: Trump Might Want to Buy Greenland But His Nemesis, China, Is There Before Him

CNBC: Here’s why Trump wants to buy Greenland

The Smithsonian Institution is not exactly run by the Vast Right-Wing, White-Supremacy Conspiracy, but it sure knocks the New York Times' "1619 project" into the can. The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History

The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history

But to the NYT, that's a feature, not a bug.

The "lungs of the earth" are still breathing. Reason: Don't Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests. As Brazilians attained a higher per-capita standard of living over the years, they decreased clearing Amazon basin jungle. What made the difference? Capitalism, of course.

A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

Ukraine: Nazism equals Communism

Radio Free Europe reports what is basically a "Duh!" headline: "Ukraine's Constitutional Court Upholds Law Equating Communism To Nazism."

Ukraine's Constitutional Court has upheld a law that equates communism to Nazism and bans the dissemination of its symbols, a law that has prompted angry protests from Moscow.

In the July 16 ruling published on its website, the court said the "communist and Nazi regimes" used similar methods of "implementing repressive state policies."

"The communist regime, like the Nazi regime, inflicted irreparable damages to human rights because during its existence, it had total control over society and politically motivated persecutions and repressions, violated its international obligations, and its own constitutions and laws," it said.

The Russians have, of course, protested.

That Nazism and Communism were inherently contradictory is an invented, deliberate lie of the American and British Left of the 1940s and after. Before Germany actually started using its rebuilt military in 1939, no one thought that Nazism and Communism were much different - or for that matter, were either much distinguished from Italian Fascism under Mussolini, who was a devoted, active Marxist until he figured out that Russia wanted to dominate Communism both in Russia and internationally. Mussolini was the original national socialist who broke with the Russian Communist movement to keep Italy politically independent of internationalist socialism. Mussolini was in fact the original national socialist and founded the Fascisti party to implement a kind of "soft" Communism in Italy.

As for German Nazism, Adolf Hitler and other high Nazi leaders said from the beginning that Nazism was socialism; Hitler said explicitly that Nazism was Marxist. ("Nazi" is only an acronym for the Germans words of the full title of the party, National Workers Socialist Party.)

I wrote about that at length two years ago in, "Nazism's Marxist Roots," with many links to other analyses.

Russia, China, Venezuela - all same-o, same-o

There is the old joke of a man who propositioned a woman by telling her he would pay her $25,000 for one evening of certain, um, favors.

"Wow!" she exclaimed. "Twenty-five thousand dollars for a couple of hours? Sure!"

"Well then," he said, " what about doing it for twenty-five dollars?"

 "What kind of woman do you think I am?" she angrily replied.

"Oh, I have already learned that. Now we're just haggling over price."

Venezuela's late-stage socialism

And so it is the Soviet and Chinese communism and Venezuelan socialism. The difference is merely in degree - the price, so to speak - not in kind. UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh explains,

The horrendous history of China, the USSR, and their imitators, should have permanently discredited socialism as completely as fascism was discredited by the Nazis. But it has not – so far – fully done so.

Just recently, the socialist government of Venezuela imposed forced labor on much of its population. Yet most of the media coverage of this injustice fails to note the connection to socialism, or that the policy has parallels in the history of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other similar regimes. One analysis even claims that the real problem is not so much “socialism qua socialism,” but rather Venezuela’s “particular brand of socialism, which fuses bad economic ideas with a distinctive brand of strongman bullying,” and is prone to authoritarianism and “mismanagement.” The author simply ignores the fact that “strongman bullying” and “mismanagement” are typical of socialist states around the world. The Scandinavian nations – sometimes cited as examples of successful socialism- are not actually socialist at all, because they do not feature government ownership of the means of production, and in many ways have freer markets than most other western nations.

Venezuela’s tragic situation would not surprise anyone familiar with the history of the Great Leap Forward. ...

But all is well, comrades, because fairness!

Difference between communism and socialism explained simply

Headlines you can't make up

Link

Middlebury College has canceled a campus speech by conservative Polish Catholic philosopher Ryszard Legutko in response to planned protests by liberal activists.

A professor of philosophy at Jagiellonian University and a member of the European Parliament, Legutko was scheduled to speak Wednesday at the Vermont college's Alexander Hamilton Forum, delivering a lecture entitled "The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies." A member of the anti-Communist Polish resistance during the Cold War, Legutko warns that western democracy is also susceptible to creep towards totalitarianism.

But in the days leading up to the speech, some Middlebury students and professors wrote an open letter demanding the university rescind its sponsorship. The liberal activists took issue with Legutko's pointed critiques of multiculturalism, feminism, and homosexuality, calling them "homophobic, racist, xenophobic, [and] misogynistic."

I am sure you can fill in the rest.

Wokescolds, tribal victimhood identities, and class enemies

The Return of Ancient Prejudices, by Victor Davis Hanson, surveying the political and social landscape:

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

And what might those "noble purposes" be? IMO, they call come down to dependency on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of "class enemies."

Beria was Stalin's chief of internal security. He said quite simply that anyone could be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced without knowing anything about him or her except their Communist class identity. This idea is waxing strong in America today:

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational inquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person’s perspective is “valued” (a favorite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are “oppressed.” 

Favored classes have the virtue of having "revolutionary truth" ascribed to them, while unfavored classes have no redeeming virtue within or redemption without.

Party members signed death warrants for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s,collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was, “not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” 

As, for example, Caucasians and the concept of "while privilege." Inveighing charges against class enemies is the "noble purpose" behind the nearly-countless victimization hoaxes being perpetrated today. But the hoaxes continue - Jussie Smollett's arrest and potential prosecution do not signal the end. Why? Because, as Quillette explains,

[I]f you don’t follow conservative media, you may not have a sense of how often stories of hate crimes turn out to be false or a sense of what the false cases tend to look like.

Even fairly incompetent hoaxes might therefore succeed, which brings us to our second point: Hate crime hoaxes aren’t hard to pull off.

Especially with a compliant mainline media and Left-wing political establishment that wants the hoaxers' claims to be true.

No segment of American society is off limits for striking against class enemies. Recently, the Southern Baptist Church was stricken with details of child sexual abuse and assault made public, committed by some church workers and some pastors. That such acts deserve investigation and punishment surely needs no justification. But according to Stephanie Krehbiel, there is a class of church member who simply needs to be quiet, namely men. All men. Because an individual Baptist man may have abused or assaulted no one and so be personally innocent of anything -- except being a member of a class that is guilty of everything.

I covered earlier that we are seeing the the birth and growth of a new kind of social dynamic that never existed before: the victimhood culture. It never existed before because its birth and growth depend on social media and its enabling of instant tribal grouping across and without regard to bloodlines.

As Quillette explains,

... the third thing to know is that hate crime hoaxes thrive in a culture of victimhood. We use the term victimhood culture to refer to a new moral framework that differs from the older cultures of honor and dignity. Honor culture refers to a morality that revolves around physical bravery. In honor cultures one’s reputation is important, and it might be necessary to engage in violence to protect it. In the dignity cultures that replaced honor cultures, morality more often revolves around the idea that people have equal moral worth. Insults and slights don’t lower one’s status as they do in honor cultures, and people can ignore many minor offenses and go to the police and courts for more serious ones. Victimhood culture, which is in its most extreme form among campus activists, is different from both honor and dignity cultures. Its morality revolves around a narrative of oppression and victimhood, with victimhood acting as new kind of moral status, much like honor was a kind of moral status in many traditional societies.

Something like a hate crime hoax would make no sense in an honor culture. You might falsely accuse someone of insulting you so that you have a chance to display your honor, but you’d be trying to get them to engage in a duel or some other kind of fight. You’d be trying to demonstrate strength, to show you can handle your conflicts on your own. The last thing you’d want to do is claim to be a victim in need of help. Hate crime hoaxes make a little more sense in a dignity culture. Hate crimes are offenses against dignity, and perhaps you’d have something to gain by falsely claiming victimhood. But in a moral world less focused on praising victims and demonizing the privileged, the benefits are lesser and skepticism is greater.

It is in a victimhood culture that hate crime hoaxes are most attractive.

As I wrote before,

Victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids.

 A better explanation of how the child-students in college today practice this is given by Rod Dreher in "Life Among The Wokescolds," in which he recounts what a college professor-friend related.

In one of my classes yesterday we were talking about current events, and a student mentioned that the soldier in the famous Times Square kissing photo had died. “Yes,” I said. “Too bad. Such a beautiful image, and such a moment of joy.” One of my least favorite students, a smug know-it-all in the back row, piped up. “You actually like that photo?” she said. “Well, yeah,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “That’s an iconic image of a moment of unbridled joy.”

“And do you think she consented to that kiss?” she said icily. “No, no she did not. That is a photo of an assault. That man should have gone to jail.”

Now, this happens with some regularity in classes these days. I don’t use Twitter, but I’m familiar with the term “wokescold,” and it’s incredibly accurate. Most of my students are just pure scolds. They’re deeply puritanical (though they have no idea who the Puritans were, given their virtually nonexistent awareness of history). ...

It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. ... 

... We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity.

My students are generally pleasant, but they’re never any fun. Where’s the joy in their lives? They live to denounce. It’s like having 25 Robespierres around you three times a week. They’re always on the lookout for something to be outraged about. 

 I'd love to have some fine ending, full of hope and promise. But I do not. As Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen wrote,

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Hard to put a happy face on that. Want to watch the perpetual infantilism of our children in action? The consider no more than Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's visit by elementary school kids and adults where she encountered wokescolds of all ages.


Update: Commentary: Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation. Well, as Prof. Daneen said, that's what the education establishment considers its most important goal.

Ocasio-Cortez's Revolutionary Truth

Earlier this week, frosh US Representative and self-described socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-Fantasyland) tweeted this:

Let me be blunt: This is a bald-faced lie. It is totally false. AOC tweeted this knowing that it never happened.

But in her mind that does not matter because it is true. Remember, she went on 60 Minutes on Jan. 6 and said, “There's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right" (video at the link).

Welcome, comrades, to the Leftist, socialist world of Revolutionary Truth!

Revolutionary Truth is a Marxist-Leninist doctrine that rests on this foundation:

According to Marx, the coming supremacy of the proletariat over the ownership of the means of production is a scientific inevitability. That is, Marx maintained that he was not offering merely one more historical treatise of human affairs, but an actual scientific proof that the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie.

Because Marxism is a totalist system of belief, its devotees,

... want to impose a new order based on an “all-or-nothing claim to truth.” They operate within distinctive parameters of a “theology of Armageddon — a final battle between good and evil” –  in which the stakes are nothing less than universal salvation. As outlined in Eric Hoffer’s classic, The True Believer, such movements have mastered the art of “religiofication,” that is, converting political grievances into messianic aspirations and “practical purposes into holy causes.”

"Truth" is therefore whatever brings the Revolution closer to reality. This was a world view fully adopted by Leninists and their successors. Truth is only accidentally connected to objective facts, wbich is exactly what AOC meant when she dismissed any connection between morality and facts. In her view, the supreme morality of her politics overwhelms any superficial claim that something she relates did not happen, such as a HUD worker telling her to stay her course even though he has not been paid for three weeks.

How do we know that claim is false? Because not one federal worker has missed a paycheck yet. The first check to be missed is the mid-month  January one, and that check is due out today, Jan. 11. But AOC tweeted her lie on Jan. 6.

George Orwell foresaw these politics in his novel 1984:

"We are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." 

Get used to it, comrades, because that is what will be coming in tidal waves for at least the next two years.

Update: Heh: Exasperated Democrats try to rein in Ocasio-Cortez

Elections are still rigged

In 1980 a Marxist writer explained how elections work - and are supposed to work - in a bourgeoisie country (and the USA is definitely that). After delineating the tedium and manufactured excitement of the primaries and delegate counting and national political conventions and all the rest of American politics, writer Paul Saba explained how the elections were "Reaffirming the Marxist Theory of the State":

What is the purpose of this elaborate extravaganza? Marxists have long noted that insofar as its stated purpose is concerned–determining the question of political power in modern society–it is no more than a charade, a political sleight of hand in which the more things seem to change, the more do they remain the same. But Marxists do not deserve any special credit for making such an observation. One hardly has to be a Marxist to grasp the fact that bourgeois elections do not, in any way, impinge upon or alter questions of power. The general cynicism among the masses toward politics and politicians–a cynicism which runs far deeper than can be measured solely by noting the large numbers of people who do not bother to vote in elections–is itself proof that the futility and corruption of bourgeois politics has become a part of U.S. folklore.

In Marxist theory the whole point of elections is to give the proles the illusion that they have a say in the outcome and how the country is run. But they don't and they shouldn't. At least, not by the bourgeois world view.

What Marxists should do about this was debated quite a bit before the Russian Revolution. On the one hand, a faction believed that once the workers had cast off their chains and appropriated the means of production (the industrial plant), then the proletariat would be able to vote truly and well because the capitalist bourgeoisie would not be allowed or able to blinker them and the natural purity of their proletariat hearts. Hence, right away elections could continue to be held and this time, dadgummit, they actually would mean something.

But in American Democrat party theory, that day is still a long time off.

Levi Tillemann, an author, inventor, and former official with the Obama administration’s Energy Department, moved back home [to Colorado] to make a run against Coffman. He focused his campaign on clean elections, combatting climate change, “Medicare for All,” free community college, and confronting economic inequality and monopoly power. Another candidate for the nomination, Jason Crow, a corporate lawyer at the powerhouse Colorado firm Holland & Hart and an Army veteran, meanwhile, appeared to have the backing of the Democratic establishment, though it wasn’t explicit.

But that was about to change. Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives, went to Denver and met with Tilleman.

Tillemann met the minority whip at the Hilton Denver Downtown to make the case that the party should stay neutral in the primary and that he had a more plausible path to victory than the same centrism that Coffman had already beaten repeatedly. Hoyer, however, had his own message he wanted to convey: Tillemann should drop out. In a frank and wide-ranging conversation, Hoyer laid down the law for Tillemann. The decision, Tillemann was told, had been made long ago. It wasn’t personal, Hoyer insisted, and there was nothing uniquely unfair being done to Tillemann, he explained: This is how the party does it everywhere.

Tilleman recorded the conversation, though, and you can hear it at the link. 

The establishment Democrat party has become the Revolutionary Vanguard of Marxism-Leninism. The Russian Bolsheviks, seeing themselves as the Vanguard, took to heart Marx's instruction that a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat - meaning by Lenin and his gang, not the general proletariat - was the key to bringing forth True Communism.

The vanguard revolutionaries understood that to leap from workers in chains, unaware of how deluded and ignorant they really were, and in political infancy, to the status of the True Communist Man was stupidly unrealistic. So their own dictatorship was a deplorable but critically-important step to bring the long-oppressed and unenlightened proles to political maturity and understanding. Truly fair, honest and meaningful elections certainly would be held - eventually. Just not yet. But trust us, it's right around the corner, any day now. Forever.

Understand that the only time the Vanguard actually seized power was in the aftermath of the Russian civil war that followed the Russian revolution. And the Vanguard were all of the privileged classes of Russia. In fact, the Vanguard must be of the privileged classes of the society that is overturned, because only the well educated men and women of the non-working classes have the leisure time to study how Marxism works. (Well, it doesn't work, but you get what I mean, I hope).

Remember, the point of Marxist revolutions is not to empower the people, it is to brings the reins of state power to the Marxist revolutionaries. Which always means the Vanguard because for the proles' own good the vanguard of the revolution (maybe in its fifth generation by now!) must also be the conservators of the revolution. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

And that is the state of the political establishment in America today. 

Because fairness, comrades!

What it is really like to live under Socialism, by someone who grew up in communist Poland.

Why do Millennials love death?

Millennials would rather live in socialist or communist nation than under capitalism

A majority of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalistic one, according to a new poll.

In the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Annual Report on US Attitudes toward Socialism,” 58 percent of the up-and-coming generation opted for one of the three systems, compared to 42 percent who said they were in favor of capitalism.
The most popular socioeconomic order was socialism with 44 percent support. Communism and fascism received 7 percent support each.

Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said the report shows millennials are “increasingly turning away from capitalism and toward socialism and even communism as a viable alternative.”

“This troubling turn highlights widespread historical illiteracy in American society regarding socialism and the systemic failure of our education system to teach students about the genocide, destruction, and misery caused by communism since the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago,” Mr. Smith said in a statement.

Millennials are more likely to prefer socialism and communism than the rest of the country. Fifty-nine percent of all respondents chose capitalism as their preferred arrangement, compared to 34 percent who said socialism, 4 percent fascism and 3 percent communism.

What is socialism, and what is the difference between it and Communism?  "The goal of socialism is communism," said Vladimir Lenin, and he certainly knew. So the 44 percent of those surveyed who said they wanted a socialist society were really say, though they aren't educated enough to know it, that they want a Communist society. At least seven percent were honest, though it's highly unlikely that they they actually know what Communism is.

What is Communism? It is this, and really, nothing but this:

Trudging through mud in sub-zero temperatures, digging the earth with their bare hands and heaving huge rocks with the most primitive of tools, these horrifying photos have revealed life inside Joseph Stalin's gulag prisons, where people were worked to death in Soviet labour camps through the mid-1900s.

This year marks 100 years since the 1917 Russian Revolution, which led to Vladimir Lenin taking control of the Soviet Union. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin rose to power and became the state's authoritarian leader.

Between 1929 and the year of Stalin's death in 1953, 18million men and women were transported to Soviet slave labour camps in Siberia and other outposts of the Red empire - many of them never to return.

Prisoners worked in the most extreme climates, facing temperatures of -20C (-4F), as they cut down trees with handsaws and dug at frozen ground with primitive pickaxes.

Others mined coal or copper by hand, often suffering painful or fatal lung diseases from inhaling ore dust while on the job.

Labourers in the prisons worked up to 14 hours a day on massive projects, including the Moscow-Volga Canal, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, and the Kolyma Highway.

By the time the last Soviet gulag closed its gates, millions had died. Starvation was not uncommon, as prisoners were barely fed enough to sustain such difficult labour. Other prisoners were simply dragged out to the woods and shot by guards.

Because equality, comrades!

The ghost of Chairman Mao

The ghost of Chairman Mao appeared to today's Chinese President Xi Jinping and cabinet to get an update. Here is Xi's report of their conversation:

From the evergreen American Digest.

What does "anti-Fascist" really mean?

Why you should never use the term 'anti-fascist'

The term "anti-fascist" is of Soviet origin, and it was used before and during World War II to make the aggressive, murderous, war-criminal regime of Joseph Stalin seem more palatable. The entire point then, as now, was to make it seem like the U.S.S.R. had a lot in common with normal, decent people's views, even as millions were being shipped off to die in the archipelago of slave-labor camps that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn experienced for eight years. (His crime? An irreverent reference, in a letter, to Stalin's moustache.) ...

We may not take today's anarcho-communists as seriously as we did back when they had the power, the weapons, and the infrastructure to murder tens of millions of people. But their goals are no different. As they put it, they don't want a "U.S.A. at all." The country they want to occupy the center of North America has no First Amendment, no freedom of expression, and people with opposing views (of any views, not just Nazis) are beaten, imprisoned or murdered for intellectual dissent. They may run the gamut from anarchism to revolutionary socialism in their views, but they have far more in common with fascists than they do with the people they seek to attract with the sweet-sounding "anti-fascist" label.

Read the whole thing.

Antifa and neo-Nazis? It is a distinction without a difference.

A beating in Berkeley - and guess who the beaters were? Here is a hint:

Nazism's Marxist Roots

The condemnable events in Charlottesville, Va, over the weekend have brought out the usual tropes of accusations from all sides of the political spectrum. I am not writing here about the justification, or lack thereof, of what either the demonstrators or counter-demonstrators did. I want to address specifically the charge made that the demonstrators, usually referred to generically as the "alt-right," were actually right wing groups or organizations, and that the counterdemonstrators, the so-called "anti-fascists," or antifa, were completely at the other end of the political spectrum.

That is, the media and others are characterizing the riots and the bloodshed as the result of the Right and the Left making combat upon each other.

This is untrue.

What happened was that two nationalist-supremacist groups came to blows, both with deep Marxist roots, and each wants to rule over the other. (What did you think they would do, hold hands and sing kum-bah-ya?)

We are calling one side the "alt-right" for no other reason than it's easier to keep score, I guess, like we call one team a home team and the other visitors, but they're both baseball teams. What we really saw in Charlottesville was two far-left groups having at each other because neither will countenance a competitor.

Yes, some of the demonstrators carried Nazi flags, just as some of the counter-demos carried hammer-and-sickle Soviet flags. In fact, those flags are almost interchangeable. Everyone knows and acknowledges that Soviet Communism was based on Marxism, hence Marxism and its spawn today are "Left," but everyone also apparently thinks that Fascism and Nazism apparently just sprang up out of thin air with no relation to political theories and contexts that came before, and that Fascism and Nazism were and are "Right."

Untrue. Both Fascism and Nazism were founded on Marxist theory and belonged firmly on the Left side of the spectrum, according to their founders. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler gave a series of interviews to a trusted party member named Hermann Rauschning, in which Hitler explained Nazi theory, founding and outlook. By the end of the decade, Rauschning had left the party and fled to the United States. There he published a book entitled The Voice of Destruction, also known as Hitler Speaks, summarizing his interviews (New York, NY, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940).

Below is a set of quotes in which Hitler himself explains Nazism's Marxist roots. Note that Hitler even invited German Communists to join the Nazi party, saying he would welcome them.

"I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order."

"It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it…. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will."

Hitler was clear in his conversations that Nazism was Left-Socialist and that even Communists were urged to join with him:

"But we National Socialists wish precisely to attract all socialists, even the Communists; we wish to win them over from their international camp to the national one."
Otto Wagener, in Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 26

"After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism."
Otto Wagener in Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, editor, Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Yale University Press (1985) p. 288

As for Fascism, it was the name of the political party founded by Benito Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini, the century's preeminent fascist, invented the word to describe his national political system. As a young man, Mussolini was politically groomed and nurtured by Marxists. He became an active member the Communist International. He corresponded with Vladimir Lenin almost until Lenin died. Mussolini broke from the Comintern for two main reasons. First, he saw little chance of it succeeding in bringing forth international communist revolutions. Second, he rejected the "international" part because he realized that what that really meant was "Russian controlled." Benito was an ardent Italian nationalist and opposed subordinating Italian socialism to Russian oversight.

In 1932, Mussolini wrote this definition of fascism:

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

..The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone ... .

That is practically the template of today's Left.

Later I will address more specifics of why Nazism was solidly Leftist. For this post I will leave the last word to Jeff Goldstein on FB:

I told you all before and I’ll repeat it now: the alt right is not conservative, and it is every bit as driven by identity politics and blood essentialism as the prog left.

Antifa, BLM, CAIR, the New Black Panthers, La Raza, the Pussy Hatters, the KKK — these are all identity movements and all formed and animated by the kind of identity politics championed by the left, and legitimated by the likes of Edward Said and other academic cultural Marxists who recognized the way to power was to divide, and then control, particular identity groups, whose narratives they seek to create and police.

The alt-right is only “right wing” in the continental sense. The American conservative is classically liberal, while the American progressive is Fabian socialist.

Don’t listen to labels; follow the assumptions made by each movement — the alt right, the prog left — and you’ll soon recognize that they are the same. This is tribalism, no more and no less. What we are witnessing is an attempt to corrupt the ideals of a propositional nation based on individualism and individual universal rights (and that’s how our Constitutional republic is designed to operate) — a lesson Google’s pillorying of a software engineer as “anti-diversity” should have made clear.

You should reject this archaic collectivism from whatever group espouses it, because in the end it is simply anti-individualism dressed in mob attire to bolster cowardice and bigotry in numbers.

More later.

Update: As a clarification, I am not saying that Nazism was founded on nothing but Marxism. Of course there were other influences, and Nazism's Antisemitism did not spring from Marxism. Antisemitism was endemic across most of western Europe and went all the way back to the Black Plague years, centuries before, when the Jews got blamed for the plague.

And it's been pretty well covered how German Teutonic mythicism shaped a lot of Hitler's ideology on the supremacy of Aryan blood and German destiny. But as for the political workings of Nazi government and economic structuring, there was not a lot of daylight between what the Soviet communists did and what Hitler did. Unlike the Soviets, Hitler did not outright seize and nationalize industries and businesses, but he did wholly dictate terms of business to them, what they could manufacture, how much they could charge, who would get first claim on output, whom they could hire. German industry remained private really in name only. And if they were smart, business owners joined the Nazi party, just as Soviets knew that to become plant managers and plan supervisors proven reliability as a party member was a basic requirement.

Update: Here is an excellent question:



Update:I am always glad to get cordial correspondence, including when the writer does not agree. Ronnie S. writes,

What you say about endemic Jew-hatred in Europe is true but Marxism carries with it its own strain of Jew-hatred. There is a reason why the term "socialism of fools" has been used to describe anti-semitism. Much modern Jew-hatred has sprung from the left, not the least of which, as you point out, has been the Nazis. Dennis Prager's book about anti-semitism, Why The Jews?, has an entire chapter on leftist Jew-hatred.

Marx himself was no friend to the Jews and he was the venue by which a lot of old tropes about Jews and money got turned into bankers and capitalists manipulating the world.

Author Donald Crankshaw writes,

I read with interest your post about neo-Nazis being on the Left, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. Certainly, Nazism descends from Marxism, but modern understanding of Nazism seems to completely focus on their beliefs about racial purity, not their political philosophy, and I'm not convinced neo-Nazis are any better informed.  

I tend to think that what we saw in Charlottesville is the endgame of identity politics. You can't slice and dice the polity into a hundred different identity groups and designate all the groups but one as victims and the other group as the oppressor, and not expect some of that group to embrace that oppressor identity (though they put it in terms of being inherently superior). And much of the rest of that group to redefine themselves as victims.

Yes, I think a couple of commentators pointed out something like that not long after the election. When one side thinks that group-member identity is the most important thing, based mainly on skin color or race-ancestry, they should not be surprised when the largest such group on the country, white men, start to embrace the idea. I am not endorsing the idea, but anyone who has formally studied human-systems theory (as I have) understands that in systems of relationships, including or especially politics, there is no such thing as a truly isolated shift in equilibrium of a sub-system or relationship.

Donald adds, "My wife and I are currently running a Kickstarter for the second volume of Mysterion, our anthology of Christian-themed science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories. If you're interested, the link is www.mysterion2kickstarter.com. We're in the last week of the Kickstarter, and still short of our goal, so any and all help spreading the word is appreciated."

Consider it done!

Update:

See also, "Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian," at the Mises Institute site, and Encyclopedia Britannica's explanation of the theoretical foundations of National Socialism, which included but was not limited to ordinary political socialism.

Update, Sept. 2018:

A lot more about what the top Nazis said about their Marxist foundation.

From Dissecting Leftism, a blog by  John J. Ray, Ph.D., who describes himself as a "former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society" and "former anarcho-capitalist."

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

Just the name of Hitler's political party should be sufficient to reject the claim that Hitler was "Right wing" but Leftists sometimes retort that the name "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is not informative, in that it is the name of a dismal Stalinist tyranny. But "People's Republic" is a normal name for a Communist country whereas I know of no conservative political party that calls itself a "Socialist Worker's Party". Such parties are in fact usually of the extreme Left (Trotskyite etc.) ...

Who said this in 1968? "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics". It was Sir Oswald Mosley, founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists.

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

At RealClearPolitics, "Leftists Become Incandescent When Reminded of the Socialist Roots in Nazism."