Inhumanity begins with ignoring what others think and feel. The next step is to cut yourself off from those you decide to despise, then demonize and attack them on every issue and conceivable point of difference. Like paid cadres who have a stake in misdirecting and disinforming the public, some on the far side of right desperately malign those who oppose them. So busy are they at prejudicial talk they never learn what their opponents think, let alone the reality that may follow from what they propose or reject. They prefer tarbrushing to conversation. For them, it’s cut and dried. They project their own hatred. But, rather than hate back, those they stereotype merely detest unbalanced attacks by people who know less than they pretend.
As it happens, many attackers are weak on political history. For instance, a few easily lost in words think Fascism lies over to the Left with Communism. Worse, they imagine National Socialism is Socialist because of a word in its title. It’s time for a little comprehensive background such as a bright kid could find in the high school library. People must come to grasp what terrible things lie beyond both Right and Left of their slender slices of view. Soviet Communism lay far beyond Left, as will be explained, and both German National Socialism and Italian Fascism lay far beyond any Right-wing concept in U.S. polity, though financial powers were happy to work horrors on Third-World peoples, aided by such low-profile agencies as the School of the Americas. As of this very day, uproar from citizens urging closure of the School at Fort Benning, GA, and supression of demonstrators continue with arrests and heavy fines. The history of its Latin American army graduates forms the strongest argument against training assassins to control populist revolts that dare even remotely threaten U.S. profits.
In FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE (500 Years Of Western Cultural Life, 1500 To The Present, 2000, HarperCollins, mid-page 195,) Jacques Barzun writes that the people who became the French nobility “had come out of the German forests and conquered the mixed race of ‘Gallo-Romans’” who peopled the countryside of Gaul. The conquerors had remained “fighters, masters, leaders of crusaders, and …. enjoyed power until the kings, [betraying their own race, i.e., line of descent)] made the kingdom a monarchy.” (Kingly power derives from tradition and tribal or regional councils in a complex of understood rights and obligations. Monarchy rests on armed force and/or loyal populace. The difference is less absolute than relative.)
…. But, in the reign of Louis XIVth, …. “the Comte Henri de Boulainvilliers published a theory of race superiority that later played a part in the politics of nationalism and ultimately of National Socialism.” Comte Henri seems to have viewed the French aristocracy, anciently descended in assumed purity from Germanic tribes, as innately superior to the paisans of the countryside. This was pre-scientific and false, but it initiated a long thread of influence, the first root of an idea of The Master Race.
Barzun notes Hitler’s mistaken inclusion (page 671) of Friederich Nietzsche as a notable prophet of Nazi dogma. Later, the Nazis realized that Nietzsche’s idea was aristocratic and conflicted with Nazis’ bourgeois egalitarianism (except for non-Aryan peoples.) He notes the “Great Switch” in the 1880s (page 688) which reversed Liberalism into liberality, soon to be evident in Bismarck’s theft of the Socialist program by starting old age pensions and other people-serving measures. Liberalism, that had risen on the idea of least government, turned from “liberty” to “liberality,” throwing political vocabulary into disorder to this day. Higher on page 688, Barzun notes the impact upon the young journalist Mussolini by the French Socialist engineer George Sorel’s book, REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE, urging unions to coalesce and overthrow the capitalist system. Mussolini later used socialist means and appeal to overthrow democracy in his corporate conspired, extremely Far Right-wing, Fascist state.
Paul Johnson, in MODERN TIMES, (rev., 1991, HarperCollins, on page 15) writes: “Imperial Russia, in its final phase of [pre-1913] peace, constituted a large-scale experiment in state collective capitalism, and apparently a highly successful one. It impressed and alarmed the Germans: indeed, fear of the rapid growth in Russia’s economic (and therefore military) capacity was the biggest single factor in deciding Germany for war in 1914.”….
“With the onset of the war, each belligerent eagerly scanned its competitors and allies for aspects of state management and intervention in the war economy which could be imitated. The capitalist sectors, appeased by enormous profits and inspired no doubt also by [national] patriotism, raised no objections. The result was a qualitative and quantitative expansion of the role of the state which has never been fully reversed– for though wartime arrangements were sometimes abandoned with peace, in virtually every case they were eventually adopted again, usually permanently. Germany set the pace, speedily adopting most of the Russian state procedures which had so scared her in peace, and operating them with such improved efficiency that when Lenin inherited the Russian state-capitalist machine in 1917-18, it was to German wartime economic controls that he, in turn, looked for guidance. As the war [lengthened, losses and desperation rose and] the warring states became steadily more totalitarian, …. In Germany the end of civilian rule came on 9 January 1917 when Bethmann Hollweg …. fell from power [completely in July,] leaving General Ludendorf and the admirals in possession of the monster-state. …. phone-tapping was legal under the ‘state of siege’ legislation, which empowered area military commands to censor or suppress news-papers. Ludendorff was likewise authorized to herd 400,000 Belgian workers into Germany, thus foreshadowing Soviet and Nazi slave-labour methods. In the last eighteen months of hostilities the German élite fervently practiced what was openly termed ‘War Socialism’ in a despairing attempt to mobilize every ounce of productive effort for victory.”
Clearly, socialism takes several forms that have in common only systematic production organized by initiative from the top down with little or no means instituted for creativity to percolate up from anywhere below. Within one month of Lenin’s return to Russia he had solidified a power structure in the name of working classes that did away with humane life for abstract ideals. Soviet Communism passed beyond any sensible concept of Leftism into absolutist autocracy administered by Soviet oligarchies. In Germany, National Socialism went from conspiracy between business and party to an equally absolutist autocracy. Corporate heads and the great, landowning Junkers got sucked in, thinking they would gain control of everything. Hitler turned the tables on them just as did Mussolini, the tails wagging the dogs via Black Shirts, students and workers in Italy, and Brown Shirts, then Gestapo and S.S. in Germany, all profiting from the sacking of European Jewry. Immoral, would-be authority needs scapegoats.
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