[FONT=Arial]“The story of America is really one of self-reliance and optimism, and profound faith. Not only in the context of religious freedom, but also in the unprecedented faith in the ability of human beings to control their own destiny.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“…but eventually those seeking a different path than the ones the founders settled on realized the only way to really defeat the Constitution was for the people to stop reading it. Progressives realize victory required changing history: to defeat them we have to correct that.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Defeating the Constitution? That’s funny, I didn’t know George W. Bush was a progressive. I mean with the constitutional rights violations in the PATRIOT Act and how he observed that the Constitution itself was ‘just a piece of paper’ he must be some kind of socialist loony who hates America, right?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“We’ve always been told that genocidal dictators of the world — oh, they’re just manifestations of the hateful right, that the left wing icons like Che and Mao need to be understood in context.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Most leftists do not treat Stalin as an ‘icon’, and indeed many are critical of Mao. In fact many socialists repudiate Stalin and Mao and their policies. Throughout this entire propaganda film Glenn Beck never once mentions Vladimir Lenin, one of the few socialists who stood up to the world leaders against starting the First World War and helped the workers take power during the Russian Revolution. Neither does he mention Leon Trotsky, the well-known communist and intended successor to Lenin who led a Left Opposition against Stalin in the USSR and was eventually assassinated by a Stalinist agent for his efforts. Rosa Luxemburg, the German communist who was brutally killed by right-wing militias while trying to lead workers to take power in Germany after the Kaiser had been deposed. Karl Liebknecht, Luxemburg’s colleague who was also murdered. Salvador Allende, the socialist and democratically elected Chilean president who died defending the Presidential Palace to the very end against fascists and conservatives such as General Augusto Pinochet (who, with backing from the USA, would go on to murder thousands of innocent workers and establish a brutal free market dictatorship). The list of named and unnamed socialists who died fighting against oppression from the left, right and centre goes on and on. Whether Beck is ignorant of this or just omits them out of hate for the working class, neither is a valid excuse.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“RONALD REAGAN, FMR. U.S. PRESIDENT: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]BECK: That’s modern conservatism in a nutshell. Yet, we’re always told that Nazi Germany, who controlled every aspect of its citizens’ lives, was somehow right-wing. Is that true? Or is it an attempt to distract from other much more inconvenient similarities?”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Ignoring the sheer irony of a president speaking out against government, Beck is omitting many other aspects of conservatism. Whether politicians or businessmen have the political power, the workers have almost none. All of them are members of the ruling class and have only class interests in exploiting the working class and keeping them under state control. It should be noted that even though conservatives vehemently oppose government control they are not anarchists, for some reason that seems hard to comprehend – perhaps because they think the common person and his/her community is not able to organize on their own and need a government to do it for them. One way or another, the left-right political spectrum is not simply a matter of government control. If it were, anarchists and right-libertarians would both be considered to be on one side of the spectrum, even though they both have massive ideological differences. For the record, most socialists are absolutely opposed to dictatorships.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“…yet we’re always told, somehow, that Nazi Germany was right wing.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“There are a lot of problems with this. His social agenda was for expanding access to universal healthcare, for expanding access to education, it was for cradle to grave welfare state.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]There was also the strongest anti-tobacco movement anywhere in the world in Nazi Germany. From this, according to Jonah Goldberg’s logic, we can assume that anti-tobacco lobbyists are all fascist anti-Semites. Seeing as Hitler was a vegetarian it must be true that all vegetarians are Nazis. Having elements that are associated with socialist states will not necessarily make a state socialist.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“People say, “Well, Hitler abolished labour unions, he was a right-wing then.” Well, how did labour unions do under Stalin? How are labour unions doing under Fidel Castro?”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]To answer your question, in the USSR labour unions were incorporated into the government as a workplace management organization as opposed to a group that simply represented the interests of the working class.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]In Cuba, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions the major union in Cuba is practically just another arm of the ruling party. Other unions are apparently harassed by the government and joining one can lead to losing one’s job.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Indeed, trade unions did lose most of their power and legitimacy under Stalin and Castro. They haven’t faired much better in the US either, with the Taft-Hartley Act (named after the two conservative Republican politicians who sponsored it) severely restricting the activities unions can take. It was supported by the Republicans and Democrats, political parties which both take equally anti-worker stances. As recent as 2002 the conservative Bush administration threatened to use military force against striking dock workers. So what kind of point are you trying to make here, Mr. Goldberg?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“Almost anything you can find on a checklist that allegedly proves Hitler was a right-winger, you can apply to almost any one of the major communist dictators of the 20th century, and the similarities are almost identical.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]For a start, this just goes to show what a horrifically poor understanding Goldberg has of politics – it’s as if writing a book called ‘Liberal Fascism’ (which is an oxymoron, liberalism by definition is not fascist) wasn’t enough to destroy his own credibility. Goldberg should really be reading books instead of writing them, but that’s beside the point. A person’s place on the political spectrum is not decided by a ‘checklist’ of organizations and ideas supported by that person. It is decided by their stances on things like personal freedom, economics, social policy, et cetera and the connections between them. Even then, it is a poor way to attempt to understand one’s political ideology, as even people on the same side of it can hold ideologies that are almost completely incompatible with each other. Consider two left-wing ideologies – say, communism and social democracy, for example: Communism is anti-capitalist and calls for a complete overthrow of the capitalist system, social democracy on the other hand calls for the capitalist system to be reformed via a mixed economy and progressive policies. Communist economic policies are incompatible with social democracy, as communists want to change the entire system and not just make it more tolerable or equal within the confines of the current system. Politics is much more complicated than just left and right, even if you bring the authoritarian-libertarian scale into the equation.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Regardless, Nazism is indeed a right-wing ideology. It is inherently reactionary because it focuses on a bygone ‘golden age’ or an old social order that supposedly existed once before: in this case the previous order was the mythical ‘Aryan race’ which Hitler idealized through German folklore and nationalism, and declaring Nazi Germany the ‘Third Reich’ which traces back to the other Reichs - the Holy Roman Empire of Germany and the pre-Weimar German Empire. Fascism is often thinly-veiled as revolutionary or new: Mussolini said that fascism[/FONT] [FONT=Arial]"is not reactionary [in the old way] but revolutionary." Mussolini declares the true nature of his ideology and that "fascism, which did not fear to call itself reactionary, has not today any impediment against declaring itself illiberal and anti-liberal." The blackshirts in Italy were known for clashing with anarchists and socialist protestors, and socialists and trade unionists were among the first to go when the concentration camps opened in Germany. The ‘socialist’ in ‘National Socialist’ was nothing more than a populist label to help gain support from the working class. Nazism divides people by their genetics or perceived race and largely ignores class, as opposed to their relations to the economy and production which Marxists use in analysis. In reality, the differences between fascism and communism are massive.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The assumption that Kim Jong-Il is a communist has inevitably come up as well, and nothing could be further from the truth. Songun, North Korea’s ‘military first’ policy, puts the military before the working class and designates it as the ‘supreme repository of power’. The North Korean state ideology of Juche has no roots in Marxism and final authority of its interpretation is officially given to Kim Jong-Il. It is more of a justification of Kim Jong-Il’s dictatorship than a real political ideology and has no actual relation to communism, other than symbolism and rhetoric.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]…..[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“The communists in the Reichstag voted almost uniformly with the Nazis. They voted in lock step. And the slogan for the communists in the Reichstag was: First, brown, then, red. The general understanding among the communists, among socialists back then was that Nazism was a steppingstone towards the ultimate victory of socialism and communism.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]The communists in the Reichstag – the KPD – did not vote with the Nazis at all. The slogan ‘first brown, then red’ is incorrect, it was actually ‘red equals brown’ and was in fact the rationale behind the German Social Democratic Party assisting the anti-communist parties in opposing the more radical communists of the KPD. The Berlin police, under SPD command, shot communist workers who demonstrated on May Day and the SPD legislated against freedom for the communists. The KPD tried to use the Nazi Party against the SPD, believing the Nazis were not really a threat, as opposed to Nazism being a stepping stone towards socialism as Goldberg claims. Claims of being ‘social fascists’ were thrown around between the two left-wing parties and it seems only the Russian communist Leon Trotsky foresaw the inevitable reality that fascism would bring, declaring:[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]"Worker-Communists, you are hundreds of thousands, millions; you cannot leave for anyplace; there are not enough passports for you. Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory. Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!"[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]By the time the socialist parties had realized the threat of fascism it was too late. Both the SPD and KPD had been outlawed by Hitler’s regime and countless communists and unionists joined the other oppressed in graves and concentration camps. The failure to form a united front against the Nazis had led to death and oppression under the regime. The heated conflict between the two parties and failure to recognize the fascist threat had helped Hitler’s rise to power, not willing ideological collaboration as Goldberg claims. We suggest he do some more research or just stop wilfully lying to the public accordingly.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]….[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]“He was a proud German, a German nationalist, a German jingoist, not a patriot but a nationalist. And he rejected that element of Marxism, but he embraced socialism entirely. He embraced the idea of racial solidarity, socialism for one race.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]A nationalist, but not a patriot? Let’s see how ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’ are defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Patriotism: ‘love for or devotion to one's country’.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]Nationalism: ‘1: loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially : a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]2: a nationalist movement or government.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial]So Mr. Goldberg, tell us how one can be a nationalist but not a patriot? Or are you just trying to disassociate conservative patriotism from the nationalistic fervour that propelled the Nazis to power?[/FONT]
