DONALD TRUMP IS A TRAUMATISED MAN

[tygertgr]

Nazism absolutely was socialism. It was about state control of the economy for the benefit of the race. It differed from other socialist movements in that its emphasis was first on race, and secondly on class, but the distinction is thin. The only reason to argue about this dogmatic attachment to the word socialism.

 

[sunraiser]

All due respect it doesn't matter one bit what's in that video.

I just evidenced the fact naziism was economically defined by control and power in the hands of very large corporate entities with a breaking of the trade unions and inclusive of slave labour.

In socialism the means of production are controlled solely by the workers and the community in general! In a modern sense socialism is often very watered down and it encompasses a mixed market, but still. The nazis were on the very furthest possible end of the political and economic spectrum to the socialists (hence why they arrested them).

We had fascist resurrections under oswald mosley in the UK and it has consistently been socialists on the front lines fighting against them.

Again, I'm not saying Trump is directly a fascist, but I couldn't let the above point go. It's purely a fiction to suggest otherwise.

 

[LUH 3417]

Nazism absolutely was socialism. It was about state control of the economy for the benefit of the race. It differed from other socialist movements in that its emphasis was first on race, and secondly on class, but the distinction is thin. The only reason to argue about this dogmatic attachment to the word socialism.

You, my friend are delusional.

Within two years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the socialist, liberal, Catholic, democratic, and republican parties, which together had commanded about 80% of the vote.

In Germany, there was a very similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists. German workers and farm laborers had won the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, the right to unionize. They had built very powerful political organizations, but heavy industry and big finance were in a state of near total collapse. Business wanted to cut wages and get tax-cuts and massive state subsidies to revive profit levels. The German tycoons greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, and the Nazi party was propelled onto the national stage.

Who did Mussolini and Hitler support once they seized state power? In both countries a strikingly similar agenda was pursued. Labor unions and strikes were outlawed, union property and publications were confiscated, farm cooperatives were handed over to rich private owners, big agribusiness farming was heavily subsidized. In both Germany and Italy the already modest wages of the workers were cut drastically; in Germany, from 25-40%; in Italy, 50%. In both countries the minimum wage laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished or turned into dead letters. Taxes were increased for the general populace, but lowered or eliminated for the rich and big business. Inheritance taxes for the wealthy were greatly reduced or abolished. Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their business patrons by handing over to them publicly owned and perfectly solvent steel mills, power plants, banks, steamship companies (”privatization,” it’s called here). Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry (corporate welfarism). Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations and assumed most of the risks and losses on investment. (Sounds like S&Ls, doesn’t it?)

As in all reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital. As a result, in Italy during the 1930s the economy was gripped by recession, a staggering public debt, and widespread corruption, but industrial profits rose, and the armaments factories busily rolled out the weapons. In Germany, unemployment was eased somewhat because of the massive arms program and the arms spending. But generally, poverty increased. But from 1935-1943, the net income of German corporate leaders rose 46%. In both countries, the conditions of labor deteriorated greatly: speed-ups, dismissals, imprisonment for workers who complained about unsafe or inhumane work conditions, longer hours for less wages.

Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. In fascism, these irrational, atavistic appeals go back to the mythical roots of the people: for Mussolini, back to the grandeur that was Rome; for Hitler, the ancient volk. Then there’s the cult of the leader: Il Duce, the Führer. With leader worship and state worship came the glorification of militarism, war, and conquest-basically conservative symbols to get people distracted from their own immediate political/economic class-interests and get them galvanized into war, the conquest, militarism.

Fascist doctrines stress one people, one state, one leader. The people are no longer to be concerned with class divisions, but must see themselves as part of a harmonious, authoritarian whole, a view that supports the socioeconomic status quo. In contrast, a left agenda advocates a sharpened awareness of class injustice and class struggle, the articulation of popular demands and the self-generated participation of popular forces.

Fascism, especially the Nazi version, had an explicit commitment to racism. Human attributes are said to be inherited through blood. Genetics and biology are said to justify the existing class structure (just as our academic racists today are doing with their bell curve theories and their warmed over eugenics clap-trap.)

Fascism also supports sexual inequality and homophobia. The oppression of gays was criminal and homicidal; the oppression of women was traditionally patriarchal. “Women’s greatest calling is to tend to the needs of her husband and children, producing as many [children] as she can for the state.”

In Nazi Germany, racism and anti-Semitism were used to rechannel some legitimate grievances to irrelevant enemies (scapegoating). Many middle-class Germans knew they were victimized by powerful economic forces, but they were too bound up in the conventional social order to adopt a revolutionary course, so they went in a fascist direction and started voting for the Nazi parties.

Anti-Semitic propaganda was very emotive and irrational, but cleverly crafted to appeal to certain groups. Workers and peasants were told, “It’s the Jewish capitalists, the Jewish usurers, who are doing this.” The middle class was told, “It’s the Jewish trade union leaders and the Jewish communists who are doing this.” The superpatriots were told, “The Jew is the enemy alien, an internationalist.” This is the rational use of irrational symbols and arguments.

What distinguished fascism from ordinary right-wing autocracies was the way it attempted to cultivate a revolutionary aura and give the impression of being a mass movement. Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary sounding mass-appeals and reactionary class politics. The Nazi party’s full name was the National Socialist German Workers Party. Both the Italian fascists and the Nazis consciously tried to imitate the left: youth organizations, mass mobilizations, rallies, parades, banners, symbols, slogans, uniforms. And I think for this reason, too, many mainstream writers treat fascism and communism as totalitarian twins. But most workers and peasants could tell the difference. Industrialists and bankers could tell the difference. And certainly the communists and the fascists could tell the difference.

Western capitalist states have tolerated and cooperated with fascism. After World War II, the Western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Italy or Germany except for the Nuremburg trials, but the police, the courts, the military, security agencies, the bureaucracy have remained largely staffed by those who had served the former Nazi regimes, or their ideological recruits, and that remains true to this day. How do you murder six million Jews, a half million Gypsies, several million Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and others, and thousands of homosexuals, and get away with it? The only way you get away with it is that the very people who are supposed to look into these crimes were themselves complicit.

What happened to the U.S. businesses that collaborated with fascism? Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, ITT, owned factories in these enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces during World War II. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings. General Motors collected $33 million. Since the war, U.S. leaders have done their part in keeping Italian fascism alive, giving millions of dollars to right-wing organizations and neo-fascist organizations in Italy.

A coalition of neo-fascist and separatist groups headed by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi won the 1994 elections in Italy. Their platform: a single tax rate for rich and poor alike, school vouchers, a stripping away of the welfare state, the introduction of private retirement accounts, and, of course, the privatization of just about everything. The Italian neo-fascists are learning from the American reactionaries how to achieve fascism’s goals under democratic forms with democratic facades-use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; convince people that government is the enemy (especially its social democracy aspects); strengthen the repressive capacities of the state; instigate resentments against the newly arrived immigrants; and preach the imaginary virtues of the free market.

The political center is always described as a kind of moderate place between the extremes of left and right. A closer reading of history should tell us that the center is more inclined to make common cause with the right against the left, because the center and the right share a commitment to corporate capitalism and the free market mythology. In the United States consider how gently, for generations, the murderous, lynching night riders, the Ku Klux Klan was treated by federal authorities in this country. Compare that to the way the Black Panthers were treated. Consider how the right is investigated, compared to the left. When the Center for Cuban Studies in New York was bombed by a right-wing Cuban group, which boasted, admitted, they did the act, the FBI didn’t have a clue, couldn’t find them.

Far from being moderates, as they’re always labeled, people in the political center are quite capable of the most immoderate and extremist acts imaginable. It was the Democratic Party who gave us the loyalty purges of the late 1940s. It was the Democratic Party that gave us Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Vietnam. It wasn’t the John Birch Society that tried to bomb Indochina into the Stone Age. It wasn’t the American Nazi Party that perfected napalm. Napalm was developed at Harvard. It wasn’t the Nazis who put thalidomide in the defoliants used throughout Indochina. And today, it’s not the skinheads or the Klan or the militia that maintains the death squads and other homicidal operations throughout so much of the Third World. It’s the best and the brightest of the political center, with plenty of help from the right wing. The way the mainstream shades off into the fascist right can be seen quite clearly in the Republican Party. The GOP agenda today is really not much different from the kind pushed by Mussolini and Hitler; it’s fascism without the swastika, it’s fascism in a pinstriped suit. First, break the labor unions, depress wages, and impose a rightist ideological monopoly over the media.

The rest of the GOP agenda is to eliminate cultural dissidents and the arts, attack the rights of women and gays, abolish taxes for the big corporations and the rich, eliminate government regulations designed for worker and consumer safety and environmental protection, privatize and plunder public lands and enterprises, wipe out public services-and cloak this whole reactionary agenda in a kind of a revolutionary sound. Newt Gingrich talks about the GOP “revolution.” Some revolution! It’s the same old reactionary class agenda. And today in the United States, some middle class Americans, like the middle class Germans of yore, beset by real economic difficulties, turn their anger toward irrelevant or imaginary foes: the immigrants, the Jews, the poor, the welfare mothers, people of color, feminists, gays, atheists, and others.

Growing numbers of us have lost our skepticism that “it could never happen here” because it is happening here. We are facing the Nazi-like Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Bill of 1995, which in effect suspends all Constitutional rights for anyone designated by the President as a terrorist, and anyone giving aid to those labeled terrorists. If you give money to an organization, it might go to their radical wing and you can be labeled a terrorist.

Something else explains the speed-up of reactionism in America today. For years the United States leaders and political and economic elites saw themselves in mortal combat with communism for the allegiance of peoples at home and abroad. They argued that U.S. workers enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts who lived under communism. That was always a theme. “Our workers earn more, our workers live better than anybody under communism, so stick with capitalism.” Competition with an anti-capitalist system sets limits on how far to mistreat the working populace. Long before the collapse of communism they tried to break unions, they tried to depress wages, but now they’re dropping all pretenses at capitalism with a human face.

The potential threat of workers getting radicalized wasn’t the only restraining factor. It was also the working class’s ability to fight back, to win democratic victories, the eight-hour day, Social Security and various benefits. When the communist nations were overthrown in Eastern Europe, a very interesting querulous and irate note began to appear in some of the conservative publications. It went like this: “Eastern Europe is now moving toward a total free market, so why must we here in the United States still have to tolerate these collectivistic, liberal regulations and restraints that are put upon us? Now is the time to sock it to the public. There’s no reason why masses of people in this country should have a middle class living standard. It’s time these people lower their expectations, work harder, and be satisfied with less.

With the collapse of communism, there’s been a shift in policy toward the Third World too. “You’re not going to turn to Moscow now, Moscow’s in our pocket.” So they’re hitting them hard. The IMF, the World Bank, GATT, NAFTA, are undermining the sovereignty of Third World nations, plundering their markets, drastically cutting non-military foreign aid, and in some cases directly invading them and destroying the government that had any reformist tendencies or was maintaining economic development. U.S. leaders are making war against economic nationalism in countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Iraq, Panama, South Korea, Taiwan and so forth.

A lot of people on the left still don’t get it- that these guys are playing for keeps, that they are going after you, that they are not going to leave any little bit for you. There’s only one thing that the ruling circles throughout history have ever wanted-all the wealth, the treasures, and the profitable returns; all the choice lands and forests and game and herds and harvests and mineral deposits and precious metals of the earth; all the productive facilities and gainful inventiveness and technologies; all the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law and none of its constraints; all of the services and comforts and luxuries and advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and none of the costs. Every ruling class in history has wanted only this-all the rewards and none of the burdens.

The danger of fascism comes not from skinheads or the militia or the Christian right fanatics. It comes from the ongoing practices of the National Security State and its various enforcement agencies; it comes from the boardrooms of corporate America. But before we pronounce ourselves doomed, keep in mind that at the present time, there are people who are demonstrating and getting arrested and raising hell to protect the environment and the forests; there are others who are doing the same at nuclear submarine bases; there are people who are demonstrating for justice and against racism in the judicial system as the national protests for Mumia Abul-Jamal show. There are people protesting against nuclear testing in the South Pacific, against Medicare cuts and family assistance cuts, against the suppression of the homeless, against the anti-immigration laws, and for affirmative action. There are large majorities in this country who even support welfare, if you don’t call it welfare, if you say “Should government help the poor, should government do more for the poor?”

We have to get a lot angrier and a lot more determined. They want everything, and everything is at stake. Many people are getting angry; our job is to see that they direct their anger at the real perpetrators of their misery, and not against the very people who want to make common cause with them.

 

[tygertgr]

I'm sure that pile of copypasta is fascinating, but it's ultimately moot semantics because the socialism we have (let alone what you want) is going to collapse and go away in fiscal crisis in less than six years. Europe will go first.

Better adjust your political perspective to hard financial realities. Accounting doesn't care about your ideals.

 

[sunraiser]

You, my friend are delusional.

Within two years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the socialist, liberal, Catholic, democratic, and republican parties, which together had commanded about 80% of the vote.

In Germany, there was a very similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists. German workers and farm laborers had won the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, the right to unionize. They had built very powerful political organizations, but heavy industry and big finance were in a state of near total collapse. Business wanted to cut wages and get tax-cuts and massive state subsidies to revive profit levels. The German tycoons greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, and the Nazi party was propelled onto the national stage.

Who did Mussolini and Hitler support once they seized state power? In both countries a strikingly similar agenda was pursued. Labor unions and strikes were outlawed, union property and publications were confiscated, farm cooperatives were handed over to rich private owners, big agribusiness farming was heavily subsidized. In both Germany and Italy the already modest wages of the workers were cut drastically; in Germany, from 25-40%; in Italy, 50%. In both countries the minimum wage laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished or turned into dead letters. Taxes were increased for the general populace, but lowered or eliminated for the rich and big business. Inheritance taxes for the wealthy were greatly reduced or abolished. Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their business patrons by handing over to them publicly owned and perfectly solvent steel mills, power plants, banks, steamship companies (”privatization,” it’s called here). Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry (corporate welfarism). Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations and assumed most of the risks and losses on investment. (Sounds like S&Ls, doesn’t it?)

As in all reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital. As a result, in Italy during the 1930s the economy was gripped by recession, a staggering public debt, and widespread corruption, but industrial profits rose, and the armaments factories busily rolled out the weapons. In Germany, unemployment was eased somewhat because of the massive arms program and the arms spending. But generally, poverty increased. But from 1935-1943, the net income of German corporate leaders rose 46%. In both countries, the conditions of labor deteriorated greatly: speed-ups, dismissals, imprisonment for workers who complained about unsafe or inhumane work conditions, longer hours for less wages.

Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. In fascism, these irrational, atavistic appeals go back to the mythical roots of the people: for Mussolini, back to the grandeur that was Rome; for Hitler, the ancient volk. Then there’s the cult of the leader: Il Duce, the Führer. With leader worship and state worship came the glorification of militarism, war, and conquest-basically conservative symbols to get people distracted from their own immediate political/economic class-interests and get them galvanized into war, the conquest, militarism.

Fascist doctrines stress one people, one state, one leader. The people are no longer to be concerned with class divisions, but must see themselves as part of a harmonious, authoritarian whole, a view that supports the socioeconomic status quo. In contrast, a left agenda advocates a sharpened awareness of class injustice and class struggle, the articulation of popular demands and the self-generated participation of popular forces.

Fascism, especially the Nazi version, had an explicit commitment to racism. Human attributes are said to be inherited through blood. Genetics and biology are said to justify the existing class structure (just as our academic racists today are doing with their bell curve theories and their warmed over eugenics clap-trap.)

Fascism also supports sexual inequality and homophobia. The oppression of gays was criminal and homicidal; the oppression of women was traditionally patriarchal. “Women’s greatest calling is to tend to the needs of her husband and children, producing as many [children] as she can for the state.”

In Nazi Germany, racism and anti-Semitism were used to rechannel some legitimate grievances to irrelevant enemies (scapegoating). Many middle-class Germans knew they were victimized by powerful economic forces, but they were too bound up in the conventional social order to adopt a revolutionary course, so they went in a fascist direction and started voting for the Nazi parties.

Anti-Semitic propaganda was very emotive and irrational, but cleverly crafted to appeal to certain groups. Workers and peasants were told, “It’s the Jewish capitalists, the Jewish usurers, who are doing this.” The middle class was told, “It’s the Jewish trade union leaders and the Jewish communists who are doing this.” The superpatriots were told, “The Jew is the enemy alien, an internationalist.” This is the rational use of irrational symbols and arguments.

What distinguished fascism from ordinary right-wing autocracies was the way it attempted to cultivate a revolutionary aura and give the impression of being a mass movement. Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary sounding mass-appeals and reactionary class politics. The Nazi party’s full name was the National Socialist German Workers Party. Both the Italian fascists and the Nazis consciously tried to imitate the left: youth organizations, mass mobilizations, rallies, parades, banners, symbols, slogans, uniforms. And I think for this reason, too, many mainstream writers treat fascism and communism as totalitarian twins. But most workers and peasants could tell the difference. Industrialists and bankers could tell the difference. And certainly the communists and the fascists could tell the difference.

Western capitalist states have tolerated and cooperated with fascism. After World War II, the Western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Italy or Germany except for the Nuremburg trials, but the police, the courts, the military, security agencies, the bureaucracy have remained largely staffed by those who had served the former Nazi regimes, or their ideological recruits, and that remains true to this day. How do you murder six million Jews, a half million Gypsies, several million Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and others, and thousands of homosexuals, and get away with it? The only way you get away with it is that the very people who are supposed to look into these crimes were themselves complicit.

What happened to the U.S. businesses that collaborated with fascism? Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, ITT, owned factories in these enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces during World War II. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings. General Motors collected $33 million. Since the war, U.S. leaders have done their part in keeping Italian fascism alive, giving millions of dollars to right-wing organizations and neo-fascist organizations in Italy.

A coalition of neo-fascist and separatist groups headed by media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi won the 1994 elections in Italy. Their platform: a single tax rate for rich and poor alike, school vouchers, a stripping away of the welfare state, the introduction of private retirement accounts, and, of course, the privatization of just about everything. The Italian neo-fascists are learning from the American reactionaries how to achieve fascism’s goals under democratic forms with democratic facades-use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; convince people that government is the enemy (especially its social democracy aspects); strengthen the repressive capacities of the state; instigate resentments against the newly arrived immigrants; and preach the imaginary virtues of the free market.

The political center is always described as a kind of moderate place between the extremes of left and right. A closer reading of history should tell us that the center is more inclined to make common cause with the right against the left, because the center and the right share a commitment to corporate capitalism and the free market mythology. In the United States consider how gently, for generations, the murderous, lynching night riders, the Ku Klux Klan was treated by federal authorities in this country. Compare that to the way the Black Panthers were treated. Consider how the right is investigated, compared to the left. When the Center for Cuban Studies in New York was bombed by a right-wing Cuban group, which boasted, admitted, they did the act, the FBI didn’t have a clue, couldn’t find them.

Far from being moderates, as they’re always labeled, people in the political center are quite capable of the most immoderate and extremist acts imaginable. It was the Democratic Party who gave us the loyalty purges of the late 1940s. It was the Democratic Party that gave us Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Vietnam. It wasn’t the John Birch Society that tried to bomb Indochina into the Stone Age. It wasn’t the American Nazi Party that perfected napalm. Napalm was developed at Harvard. It wasn’t the Nazis who put thalidomide in the defoliants used throughout Indochina. And today, it’s not the skinheads or the Klan or the militia that maintains the death squads and other homicidal operations throughout so much of the Third World. It’s the best and the brightest of the political center, with plenty of help from the right wing. The way the mainstream shades off into the fascist right can be seen quite clearly in the Republican Party. The GOP agenda today is really not much different from the kind pushed by Mussolini and Hitler; it’s fascism without the swastika, it’s fascism in a pinstriped suit. First, break the labor unions, depress wages, and impose a rightist ideological monopoly over the media.

The rest of the GOP agenda is to eliminate cultural dissidents and the arts, attack the rights of women and gays, abolish taxes for the big corporations and the rich, eliminate government regulations designed for worker and consumer safety and environmental protection, privatize and plunder public lands and enterprises, wipe out public services-and cloak this whole reactionary agenda in a kind of a revolutionary sound. Newt Gingrich talks about the GOP “revolution.” Some revolution! It’s the same old reactionary class agenda. And today in the United States, some middle class Americans, like the middle class Germans of yore, beset by real economic difficulties, turn their anger toward irrelevant or imaginary foes: the immigrants, the Jews, the poor, the welfare mothers, people of color, feminists, gays, atheists, and others.

Growing numbers of us have lost our skepticism that “it could never happen here” because it is happening here. We are facing the Nazi-like Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Bill of 1995, which in effect suspends all Constitutional rights for anyone designated by the President as a terrorist, and anyone giving aid to those labeled terrorists. If you give money to an organization, it might go to their radical wing and you can be labeled a terrorist.

Something else explains the speed-up of reactionism in America today. For years the United States leaders and political and economic elites saw themselves in mortal combat with communism for the allegiance of peoples at home and abroad. They argued that U.S. workers enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts who lived under communism. That was always a theme. “Our workers earn more, our workers live better than anybody under communism, so stick with capitalism.” Competition with an anti-capitalist system sets limits on how far to mistreat the working populace. Long before the collapse of communism they tried to break unions, they tried to depress wages, but now they’re dropping all pretenses at capitalism with a human face.

The potential threat of workers getting radicalized wasn’t the only restraining factor. It was also the working class’s ability to fight back, to win democratic victories, the eight-hour day, Social Security and various benefits. When the communist nations were overthrown in Eastern Europe, a very interesting querulous and irate note began to appear in some of the conservative publications. It went like this: “Eastern Europe is now moving toward a total free market, so why must we here in the United States still have to tolerate these collectivistic, liberal regulations and restraints that are put upon us? Now is the time to sock it to the public. There’s no reason why masses of people in this country should have a middle class living standard. It’s time these people lower their expectations, work harder, and be satisfied with less.

With the collapse of communism, there’s been a shift in policy toward the Third World too. “You’re not going to turn to Moscow now, Moscow’s in our pocket.” So they’re hitting them hard. The IMF, the World Bank, GATT, NAFTA, are undermining the sovereignty of Third World nations, plundering their markets, drastically cutting non-military foreign aid, and in some cases directly invading them and destroying the government that had any reformist tendencies or was maintaining economic development. U.S. leaders are making war against economic nationalism in countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Iraq, Panama, South Korea, Taiwan and so forth.

A lot of people on the left still don’t get it- that these guys are playing for keeps, that they are going after you, that they are not going to leave any little bit for you. There’s only one thing that the ruling circles throughout history have ever wanted-all the wealth, the treasures, and the profitable returns; all the choice lands and forests and game and herds and harvests and mineral deposits and precious metals of the earth; all the productive facilities and gainful inventiveness and technologies; all the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law and none of its constraints; all of the services and comforts and luxuries and advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and none of the costs. Every ruling class in history has wanted only this-all the rewards and none of the burdens.

The danger of fascism comes not from skinheads or the militia or the Christian right fanatics. It comes from the ongoing practices of the National Security State and its various enforcement agencies; it comes from the boardrooms of corporate America. But before we pronounce ourselves doomed, keep in mind that at the present time, there are people who are demonstrating and getting arrested and raising hell to protect the environment and the forests; there are others who are doing the same at nuclear submarine bases; there are people who are demonstrating for justice and against racism in the judicial system as the national protests for Mumia Abul-Jamal show. There are people protesting against nuclear testing in the South Pacific, against Medicare cuts and family assistance cuts, against the suppression of the homeless, against the anti-immigration laws, and for affirmative action. There are large majorities in this country who even support welfare, if you don’t call it welfare, if you say “Should government help the poor, should government do more for the poor?”

We have to get a lot angrier and a lot more determined. They want everything, and everything is at stake. Many people are getting angry; our job is to see that they direct their anger at the real perpetrators of their misery, and not against the very people who want to make common cause with them.

This is a really fantastically written essay. Regardless of the context of the conversation I think it's something everyone should read even if just for general knowledge and some structural understanding of historic similarities to the realities we currently face.

Did you just write this in response to the conversation?

 

[LUH 3417]

I'm sure that pile of copypasta is fascinating, but it's ultimately moot semantics because the socialism we have (let alone what you want) is going to collapse and go away in fiscal crisis in less than six years. Europe will go first.

Better adjust your political perspective to hard financial realities. Accounting doesn't care about your ideals.

Regardless of your skills as world economic oracle, it’d be prudent to admit you are dead wrong on nazism being socialism.

 

[LUH 3417]

This is a really fantastically written essay. Regardless of the context of the conversation I think it's something everyone should read even if just for general knowledge and some structural understanding of historic similarities to the realities we currently face.

Did you just write this in response to the conversation?

No it’s Michael Parenti who unlike our friend @tygertgr cites actual events, laws, and objective history rather than leaving us with the vague “I can’t name the proverbial they, but they are billionaires”

 

[sunraiser]

No it’s Michael Parenti who unlike our friend @tygertgr cites actual events, laws, and objective history rather than leaving us with the vague “I can’t name the proverbial they, but they are billionaires”

It genuinely has an excellent structure and is such a coherent and well formed argument. It literally makes me feel stupid reading it :) Not in a bad way, though!

 

[LUH 3417]

It genuinely has an excellent structure and is such a coherent and well formed argument. It literally makes me feel stupid reading it :) Not in a bad way, though!

well here is an excellent video you may like

 

[sunraiser]

well here is an excellent video you may like

Perfect, thanks. I'm gonna invest in finding out more about his views!

 

[tygertgr]

Regardless of your skills as world economic oracle, it’d be prudent to admit you are dead wrong on nazism being socialism.

Nazism was socialist using any consistent semantic definitions. Your argument to the contrary is that Nazism and Fascism did mean things you don't like. Elided from the discussion are the atrocities committed by every self described socialist regime.

I'm always shocked when I encounter unreformed marxists. You would think the events of the 20th century would have killed off these failed ideas, but here we are with nutty ideologues like you, trying to push for the same ruinous nonsense.

 

[LUH 3417]

Nazism was socialist using any consistent semantic definitions. Your argument to the contrary is that Nazism and Fascism did mean things you don't like. Elided from the discussion are the atrocities committed by every self described socialist regime.

I'm always shocked when I encounter unreformed marxists. You would think the events of the 20th century would have killed off these failed ideas, but here we are with nutty ideologues like you, trying to push for the same ruinous nonsense.

The atrocities of elevating the standard of living for rural peasants? Have you ever been to a former communist country and seen the destruction that democracy and capitalism have brought? Have you ever looked into the literacy rates of former communist countries? America cries pluralism every five minutes, do you know how many languages were spoken in the USSR, how many street signs were in different languages in Moscow? Have you watched communities deteriorate, your own family included? Are you counting the atrocities of capitalism and the US across the world? Are you living in a bubble?

 

[tygertgr]

It's at least a small comfort to know that should you get what you want, you'll be first off to the GULAG.

 

[LUH 3417]

It's at least a small comfort to know that should you get what you want, you'll be first off to the GULAG.

At least you revealed your true psychopathic nature of finding comfort in the suffering of others

 

[Amazigh]

Unpopular opinion on here, but I feel like 90% of our government is genuinely trying to do good. It's just that poor health is interfering with brain function and consciousness so well-intentioned actions are having opposite results. The question is just how dangerous is the 5-10% that does have malevolent intentions?

If you look at OpenSecrets.org, you can see the massive amounts of money being shoveled to our politicians by large corporations and rich donors. And, they pay both sides. For example, could you trust Kirsten Gillibrand, who received $80,458 from the pharmaceutical industry in 2018, mostly from Pfizer, to prioritize your needs over the pharma companies that paid her this chunk of money? As of 2015, John Delaney is the 4th richest member of Congress, with an estimated wealth of $232,816,089. He has $124,359,272 in pharmaceuticals and health products, $5,624,209 in insurance. Do you think that just maybe, this might have something to do with his stance against wealth tax and single-payer?

Even if they start out with the best of intentions, as long as they take these large donations from lobbyists and corporations, they will be beholden to them and not us. We need to get big money out of politics.

Study: Politicians listen to rich people, not you

Study: Politicians Vote Against the Will of Their Constituents 35 Percent of the Time -

https://www.google.com/search?q=how...0.0j69i57j0.6951j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

The Problem - Wolf-PAC

 

[tygertgr]

At least you revealed your true psychopathic nature of finding comfort in the suffering of others

 

[LUH 3417]

 

[tygertgr]

That's a horrible track of noise and screeching and no coherent message. You're what Lenin called a "useful idiot."

I'd rather not be a GULAG guard, I'd rather have a real job. But you have to understand that the world you want involves you as slave labor and me as the reluctant GULAG guard pointing a rifle at you from a tower. It's inevitable in your ideology. What you desire is irrelevant: I'm telling you how it actually plays out, over and over in history.

Just as a reader of history, has it occurred to you that Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, and Chile are countries that are actually doing quite well? These are place where I will say to you that the USG was quite active. I wouldn't make full apologies for all that was done. But your default position that everything connected to the American Empire is automatically evil is clearly wrong. I would also argue that the USSR had some positive roles to play in the world before it collapsed in a relatively unfortunate way.

I suspect you can't admit to understanding any of this because you have no point to make other than "i hate my father and all authority. empire is abhorent."

 

[LUH 3417]

That's a horrible track of noise and screeching and no coherent message. You're what Lenin called a "useful idiot."

I'd rather not be a GULAG guard, I'd rather have a real job. But you have to understand that the world you want involves you as slave labor and me as the reluctant GULAG guard pointing a rifle at you from a tower. It's inevitable in your ideology. What you desire is irrelevant: I'm telling you how it actually plays out, over and over in history.

Just as a reader of history, has it occurred to you that Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, and Chile are countries that are actually doing quite well? These are place where I will say to you that the USG was quite active. I wouldn't make full apologies for all that was done. But your default position that everything connected to the American Empire is automatically evil is clearly wrong. I would also argue that the USSR had some positive roles to play in the world before it collapsed in a relatively unfortunate way.

I suspect you can't admit to understanding any of this because you have no point to make other than "i hate my father and all authority. empire is abhorent."

I love my dad.

I’m sure Vietnam’s agent orange victims are flourishing! I would also bet Thailand, Colombia, and Chile have some of the best child sex slave and drug markets around! Really speaks to their ability to modernize under the gentle hand of the United States’ peaceful influence. You forgot Croatia, where they have to sell their own islands because everything’s been privatized and the birth rate has nosedived since the useful idiots met their deserved destiny.

Any opinion on how, as a reader of history, Russia and China are doing?

How you make your deductions about my dad hating based on my pointing out your denial of McCarthyism and an incorrect understanding of the relationship between fascism and communism is difficult to understand other than my guess that you are bitter and resentful. Someone so committed to screeching about how they know how history will pan out sounds ossified and inflexible and quite frankly sick and old. Boo hoo.

 

[Waynish]

You're impossible to talk to @pinacolada - and you just double down on all of your preconceptions. Your writing is wrought with emotionality and devoid of logic and citations. The others you're debating with are missing the mark in my view, but just because you write more words or have the final post - I don't think anyone should assume that is 'winning the argument'... You just ended your post with "boo hoo," and you are female. In the context of his forum's endocrinological reductionism, that would mean you likely have much higher estrogen levels than those you're arguing with.

McCarthyism was a sham, yes.
@tygertgr I don't think you've underplayed the CIA's role, but as a people - not an organization. They're full of leftists and globalists, an insane budget, and very close relationship with Israel and Mossad (and similarly globalist, anti-nationalist, anti-religious, pro-materialism organizations).