i perceive a typically polarized argument going on here, so i'm going to interject some comments... just because i'm so damn sick and tired of both sides of the left-right culture war!!!
On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 12:07 PM, Zuukie wrote:
-Caveat Lector-
I sent Mark's post to a number of people. Here is a response from one of them:
Fascism is based on the ideal of National SOCIALISM. The only real difference between a Nazi and a Communist is that a Nazi believes that socialism can be achieved in a single nation while a communist believes that a global socialist state is need to fully implement socialist tyranny.
IMO, the idea that National Socialism was genuine socialism (as the left sees it, anyway), and the idea that National Socialism was the capitalist world's defence against socialism are BOTH bullshit hoaxes, perpetrated by the ideologues of left and right on eachother. these arguments are a disease of those who need to think in dualistic terms. however, i have recently been tilting somewhat to the opinion that the absolute categorization of the nazis as "right wing" is a distortion of history by the left (especially trotskyists, who have abused the very word "fascism" into oblivion by using it as a facile verbal weapon against any ideology they don't like, whether or not it accurately fits). this is certainly the case if one equates fascism with "late capitalism", which has always been a cheapshot marxist canard. the nazi party platform was very heavily collectivist and strongly espoused a planned as opposed to a market economy, and there was a notable anti-capitalist element in both the nazi platform and many right-wing nationalist movements of the time (a competitive, free-market system, whatever it's real flaws may be, was seen as the enemy because it gave an undesired equality to outsiders and thus weakened the "volk"). a more perceptive and fair way to look at the nazi regime was as a rendition of what james burnham called the "managerial society", which was neither capitalism nor socialism, and in fact is antithetical to both in important ways. it is this "managerial state" which is the real agenda of the wall st. so-called "capitalists" who supported hitler (and some of whom, such as the rockefellers, had earlier supported the rise of the bolsheviks, who created what burnham also considered to be a "managerial society"). http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/burnham.html
anyway, here's a quote from a dissenting point of view:
"The evidence that Nazism was part of the socialist tradition continues to accumulate, even if it makes no headlines. In 1978 Otto Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant appeared in its original German. Wagener was a lifelong Nazi who had died in 1971. His recollections of Hitler's conversations had been composed from notes in a British prisoner-of-war camp, and they represent Hitler as an extreme socialist utopian, anti-Jewish because ``the Jew is not a socialist.'' Nor are Communists--``basically they are not socialistic, since they create mere herds, as in the Soviet Union, without individual life.'' The real task, Hitler told Wagener, was to realize the socialist dream that mankind over the centuries had forgotten, to liberate labor, and to displace the role of capital. That sounds like a program for the Left, and many parties called socialist have believed in less.
Hitler's allegiance, even before such sources were known, was acknowledged by socialists outside Germany. Julian Huxley, for example, the pro-Soviet British biologist who later became director-general of UNESCO, accepted Hitler's claim to be a socialist in the early 1930s, though without enthusiasm (indeed, with marked embarrassment).
Hitler's program demanded central economic planning, which was at the heart of the socialist cause; and genocide, in the 1930s, was well known to be an aspect of the socialist tradition and of no other. There was, and is, no conservative or liberal tradition of racial extermination. The Nazis, what is more, could call on socialist practice as well as socialist theory when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and began their exterminatory program. That is documented by Rudolf Hoess in his memoir Kommandant in Auschwitz (1958). Detailed reports of the Soviet camp system were circulated to Nazi camp commandants as a model to emulate and an example to follow."
from, "Never Blame the Left" by George Watson, quoted at http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/genocide.html (note: i don't endorse everything on this page...)
He also assumes that the elimination of all social barriers is a good thing. History shows us this isn't so. The social anarchy that followed the French and Russian revolutions were not the beginnings of a socialist utopia, they were rightly called Reigns of Terror.
i think this is oversimplistic, but i would agree that left utopianism is more directly responsible for unexpected nightmarish consequences than the left admits. this is particularly an issue when it comes to the common portrayal of genocide as an exclusively "right wing" predilection. while right wing forms of racism or nationalism can certainly be causes of genocide & oppression, there is also a pro-genocide tradition on the left, which goes all the way back to marx and engels themselves. in 1849, engels (with marx as editor) wrote a newspaper article EXPLICITLY SUPPORTING THE EXTERMINATION OF ENTIRE NATIONS WHICH DID NOT JOIN THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION, and were thus enemies of "the people":
http://www.interlog.com/~girbe/Engels.html http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm
"In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels' article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or independent did anything of the kind." George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism, 1998
thus, there is every reason to be suspicious of a dark side to ideologies which claim to represent pure "liberation" of the "oppressed", even on the part of those who believe they are doing good; this suspicion in itself does not make one reactionary or fundamentalist.
The "gay rights" movement isn't about civil rights for homosexuals. Homosexuals enjoy all the same civil rights as other Americans. Its about government mandated endorsement of sodomy and nothing else. The 'gay rights' movement wants to create a 'right of access' for homosexuals to other people's children. The have demanded that the Congress reverse Loving v. Virginia, where the court ruled that marriage was a common law institution that was not subject to redefinition by the state and in the process they did away with miscegenation laws. Now they want to say marriage is whatever the state says it is. It's not as if these demands have improved the lot of homosexuals. In the Netherlands, where they've gotten everything they've wanted, their median age of death is still roughly 40 years younger than similarly situated heterosexuals and they suffer MORE greatly from depression and other mental illness than in the states.
i personally have nothing against those who wish to engage in "sodomy"; it's their body and their right. however, i do have a disagreement with one homosexual "right" which i think crosses the line is the idea that homosexual couples have the "right" to adopt and raise children. this one needs to be thought through much more carefully, on behalf of children and not on behalf of narcissistic, would-be alt-parents who see posession of a child as a "right". based on recent developmental research that i am aware of, i feel that children are healthiest when they grow up with both a male and female parent (or role model) in their immediate, closely-bonded family group. in other words, children need a mother and a father, plain and simple. in PC terms, that makes me a bigot!
in regards to the histrionic and narcissistic tendency of the 60s left to insist that they are heroically defending oppressed forms of sexuality against a bigoted overclass, i find this a bit off-putting and in fact deluded in some ways. for one thing, everyone needs to take a very close look at where the "sexual revolution" came from. two recognized founding documents of the sexual revolution -- the kinsey studies, and herbert marcuse's "eros and civilization" were both funded and published with rockefeller money. think about that. also, marcuse came out of the semi-marxist "frankfurt school", which also included max horkheimer, theodor adorno, erich fromm, etc. some of the important work of the frankfurt school was funded directly from the core of the US elite, including the infamous "authoritarian personality" research which culminated in a book of the same name by adorno, which was published with CIA money. the "authoritarian personality" theory was supposed to be an explanation of anti-semitism and other social prejudice, but wound up being manipulated and slanted pseudo-science whose agenda was essentially to blame social conservatives and traditional values for fascism. "repressive" sexual mores as a supposed trigger of authoritarian traits was part of this frame-up. (note also that the study was funded by the National Jewish Committee, which had close ties with the warburgs, who as we all know were up to their necks in the bush-harriman-rockefeller-nazi scheme. does that lend credibility to a so-called expose of the "roots" of fascism, or does it amount to what is obviously a cover-up of the real origins of the nazi state in the conspiratorial world of depraved, occultic billionaires?)
now, without meaning to imply any lurid demonization of the 60s radicalism, it is nonetheless a fact that herbert marcuse (who had also once worked for the OSS) insinuated himself into the New Left and became a widely recognized leading "guru" of the "new left". while this doesn't make me reject outright all of the ideas of the 60s, it does make me very concerned about the degree to which the "culture war" which was kicked off and provoked by the 60s left (and answered in a predicable and inevitable response by the "traditional values" crowd) is part of an opportunistic psy-op designed to divide and conquer the people as well as cause a chaotic weaking of the overall social fabric, thus softening up and fragmenting the culture in a way which facilitates the imposition of the new world order.
(an aside: i think there needs to be more discussion of the influence of a bitter animus against western culture on the part of radical jews, which has had a profound impact on the development of "leftist" ideas in the past century. this is obviously a very sensitive topic, but it's a legitimate one, and ties into the "counterculture" phenomenon. i recommend the website of peter meyers (incidentally a leftist and socialist, but unconventional) for a reasonable discussion. here's some of his thoughts on the new left: http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/new-left.html. see also http://www.geocities.com/roundtable_research_editions/ frankfurt_resed.html, )
anyway, since the work of the frankfurt school is one of the dominating influences on the way the left conceives of "fascism" and "oppression", as well as being a formative influence on some specific "counterculture" notions, some dissenting opinions are in order...
"authoritarian personality" debunked: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~jonjayray/skeptic.html http://socsci.blogspot.com/2003_03_02_socsci_archive.html#90290405
there are some frankfurt school links to tavistock and psychological warfare: http://www.e-files.org/archive/edition6.html http://www.aldenchronicles.com/articles_by_diane/diane_050102.html http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/rogers.html (biased, but excellent research)
Feminism isn't about civil rights for women. Women have had all the civil rights of men since the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. It's about redefining society to say men and women are identical (as opposed to equal), that men and male perogatives like fatherhood and the traditional family are 'outmoded'. Of course, with the adoption of feminist demands like easy divorce, government preferrence of single mothers, abortion on demand and so on, we've seen our juvenille deliquency rates sky-rocket, we've seen the absolute destruction of the family unit in the black and latino communities (and it's not in such great shape among whites either, but Asians and Jews seem to be fairly a little better).
i agree about the importance of recognizing these disproportionately negative impacts on minorities.
but, i think it's possible to support some reasonable forms of feminism
while recognizing the abuses of radical feminism (which happens to have
important ties to the frankfurt school theorists). it needs to be
recognized that radical feminism rejected the notion of complimentary
differences and balance between the sexes, and this has done incredible
harm to society. also, contrary to myth, in many ways our society is
very emasculated and harmful to males; i think this is difficult for
those of the counterculture generation to perceive or admit, but it is
more easly perceived by members of my generation ("x") who have had to
grow up with the shadow of feminism. i recommend the books of david
gurion for a fair discussion of the serious damage that has been done
to boys who have been raised with some of the bad ideas and myths about
gender that have come out of radical (countercultural) feminism.Wicca, and these other New Age religions, seek to reduce man to the level of the animals instead of recognizing that each of us is a unique creation. Likewise, these religions are socialist, emphasizing the group over the individual. Man exists to serve the state (or the coven, or whatever group you like). Whereas under Jewish morality, government exists to serve the people. Instead of the worker being a cog in the state managed "greater good" (as under socialism and New Age religion), Judaism holds that each man, even the lowliest laborer, is entitled to seek his own betterment, the economy serves the person NOT the otherway around. Insofar as it is human nature to seek one's own interests, and insofar as Judaism teaches one how to do so in a way that builds a better world for everyone it is FAR more human than any religion that man conceived.
concerning new age religion... growing up in northern california, i have naturally had plenty of encounters with new-age types, and a few wiccans. for the most part, i don't have any problem with them and i don't think they should be villified per se. but on the other hand, i have about zero sympathy towards the idea that new agers and pagans are "oppressed" by mainstream culture, fundamentalists, etc. i actually feel this is hypocritical, because i have encountered quite a few new agers (and counterculturalists) who subscribe to what is more or less an across-the-board demonization of traditional culture, and in particular judeo-christian religion, to an extent that i consider to be both emotionalistic and outright bigoted. i mean that very seriously. i think this attitude has done a lot of damage -- maybe even fatal damage -- to the ability of society to unite and fight the REAL roots of fascism.
speaking of which, one thing which really bugs me is the common belief on the left that the nazis represented an outgrowth of the western, christian tradition. the truth is that the nazis were, in the words of mark evans, "shit kicking pagans". in fact, the occult beliefs of the high elite in the nazi party have much more in common with what we now call "new age" (particularly some kinds of theosophy) than any form of christianity (but of course the nazis used plenty of christian-themed propaganda for public consumption, exactly as the US elites are currently doing). furthermore, i agree tenatively that it is fair to draw *some* parallels between "new age religions" and the decline of individual rights in the name of the "collective interest". yes, the seemingly liberating ideas of viewing humans as equivalent to animals, or giving up "selfish" individual rights for the "collective interest" can be traps to hasted the erosion of the concept of natural law and god-given inalienable rights, which is the basis of the constitution and bill of rights. (for the record, i'm not a religious person myself; i have no bias in that regard).
i hope i've contributed something constructive, because i've just had enough of knee-jerk bickering matches between duped, righteous reactionaries and duped, smug counterculture leftists. a pox on both your damn houses! having society divided into two groups who are constantly attacking eachother for having the wrong "values" does not help us unite and take on the elites, whose values are alien to all of us.
-bs
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