Recent events in Charlottesville.

Drew_TNBD

brojangles said:

which is what the bulk of the Confederate statues were put up to do

This is where I'd like to see proof. Because I've not seen anyone provide any concrete evidence that this is why those Confederate statues were put there. I have seen proof that they were put there to honour the dead, because it's written on a lot of them.

Drew_TNBD

Lewy said:

Drew_TNBD said:

Lewy said:

Drew_TNBD said:

 Nazi's were national SOCIALISTS. That's what the word means and that was their doctrine.

What credible historians can you cite that place the Nazis anywhere but to the far right of the political spectrum? Yes, the word is contained in the name Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei but I've never seen that treated as anything more than a name. What were their left wing policies and actions?

What the actual fuck?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

Yeah we can all look at Wikipedia, shitty-pants. It also says:

The majority of scholars identify Nazism in both theory and practice as a form of far-right politics.[13] Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements

Okay,

A: I didn't call you any names or insult you.
B: I'm NOT fucking saying that the Nazi's had zero far-right politics!! But you're trying to white-wash their left-wing heritage, and I think that's doing a disservice to the entire debate.

And the debate is - should that rally have been allowed to go on? The supreme court said yes.

Veganic

What are we arguing about now?

Violence as a political means or the meaning of left and right?

ourmaninthenorth

Drew_TNBD said:

Lewy said:

Drew_TNBD said:

 Nazi's were national SOCIALISTS. That's what the word means and that was their doctrine.

What credible historians can you cite that place the Nazis anywhere but to the far right of the political spectrum? Yes, the word is contained in the name Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei but I've never seen that treated as anything more than a name. What were their left wing policies and actions?

For clarification, I'm asking about what is generally accepted to be the Nazis we fought in WWII, as opposed to the formative factions. I know there were Nazis along the way who opposed capitalism but Hitler certainly didn't.

I guess all my point was is that looking at this stuff in simplistic good versus evil terms like Empy would have us do, gets us nowhere. Whether the key word is nationalist or socialist ... that's just a distraction. The main point is that he's calling centrists like me lily livered because we condemn both sides. He thinks that condemning both sides is giving these neo-nazi white supremacist fucks a pass.

And it just fucking is not the case.

It's the distinction. 

CabbageCat

Left and right mean different things to different people. Right wing economics is pretty universally accepted to mean free trade and a lack of state control but for social policy it's woollier, which is why people often use authoritarian/libertarian in their place.

Personally, it appeals to my sense of consistency for "left wing" to mean "state control" and it applies to social policy as well as economic - in which case the Nazis would be very left wing - but I appreciate that this doesn't fit with other definitions (although their manifesto is clear about equal rights it didn't work out that way in practice...and equality is another barometer of leftyrightyness).

Axe_meister

Having learned about the Nazis from a German perspective (I went to a German school in Germany). The Nazis took the word Socialist purely for propaganda reasons as they saw the rise of socialism across Europe. Just like they took inspiration from Russia in using lots of red in their flags.
These American Nazis/White supremacists need to actually leave their country and travel the world and experience other cultures and on the trip take a visit to Dachau or Ausschwitz.
I will never forget the guide who was a former prisoner but signed up to be a guide the day Dachau opened as a museum.
America has a real problem coming to terms with globalisation because they have no reference point being boarded by only Mexico and Canada. All they see is "others" invading their space.
For a nation that appears so confident they sure are a paranoid nation.

MrBump

The Nazi party was fascist - I don't think that there is any dispute about that, they modelled themselves on Italian fascists of the time.  Fascism and Socialism are fundamentally different.

CabbageCat

MrBump said:

Fascism and Socialism are fundamentally different.

But they also share a lot of similarities. The collective ahead of the individual; government control over industry and markets; moral and ethical homogeny.

They sometimes appear at opposite ends of a spectrum because of equality issues but in many ways they are more similar than they are different.

MrBump

CabbageCat said:

MrBump said:

Fascism and Socialism are fundamentally different.

But they also share a lot of similarities. The collective ahead of the individual; government control over industry and markets; moral and ethical homogeny.

They sometimes appear at opposite ends of a spectrum because of equality issues but in many ways they are more similar than they are different.

Ah, I didn't want to get into an argument, but...



I don't think that's correct, or at least it's an incorrect emphasis.  Collective instead of individual, for example.  Collective from the fascistic perspective would be the state - whereas the emphasis for socialists would be the good of the collective individuals, not the state.  Government control, sure - but fascists were very hot on profit and private enterprise.  Not sure I understand moral and ethical homogeny... everyone sharing the same morals and ethics?  

Anyway - Hitler bad.

Fretwired

Evilmags said:

That makes the very lazy and not entirely true assumption that the Civil war was entirely fought overy slavery. It also ignores Lee''s role in post war reconciliation, education and preventing retribution upon former slaves. Lee was a general, not an idealoge or political leader and led a long and complex life. Simplifying him to a Hitler like black and white figure is the sort of intellectual level so enjoyed by Donald Trump amongst others. 

Lee wasn't a real general and wasn't even a decent soldier. His first victories were against poor opposition - bad Union generals and poorly trained troops. He should have won more decisive victories. At Gettysberg he made the sort of error a Napoleon or Wellington wouldn't made 50 years before .. marched his men in close file into the massed ranks of canons and men that was a bigger Union army. Lee's army lost lots of men and with it the war.

Afterwards as far as I recall Lee shot ex-slaves and wanted blacks kept in their place. He was a truly nasty piece of work.

CabbageCat

MrBump said:

CabbageCat said:

MrBump said:

Fascism and Socialism are fundamentally different.

But they also share a lot of similarities. The collective ahead of the individual; government control over industry and markets; moral and ethical homogeny.

They sometimes appear at opposite ends of a spectrum because of equality issues but in many ways they are more similar than they are different.

Ah, I didn't want to get into an argument, but...



I don't think that's correct, or at least it's an incorrect emphasis.  Collective instead of individual, for example.  Collective from the fascistic perspective would be the state - whereas the emphasis for socialists would be the good of the collective individuals, not the state.  Government control, sure - but fascists were very hot on profit and private enterprise.  Not sure I understand moral and ethical homogeny... everyone sharing the same morals and ethics?  

Anyway - Hitler bad.

Yeah, everyone sharing the same morals and ethics. A lack of cultural diversity if you will.

You are right about the differences. Fascism is more like a sports team where everyone has to work together to be as good as they can be for the collective glory; socialism is more like a student flat where everyone by necessity has to chip in to avoid dying from septicaemia or legionnaire's disease. 

brojangles

@Drew_TNBD:

One piece of evidence is that memorials to the Confederacy didn't go up in the generation or so after the war, even though that was when the people who knew the dead and might have been comforted by such things were around in the largest numbers. That's because even figures like Lee understood that it would have been a bit punchy to start bigging up their defeated cause while they were still under scrutiny, however half-hearted, from the victorious north. 

Another is the history of organisations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which put up most of the Confederate memorials in the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm sure that body contained plenty of genteel southern ladies who liked to get dewy-eyed about the gallant boys who rode off in support of a romantic lost cause. But those ladies got their history from ideologues who consciously came up with stories that played down southern wrongdoing and justified continuing white supremacy - the same people who invented the 'it was about states rights!' horseshit that people still come out with today. And you don't have to do much Googling to find out that academic research on the United Daughters is filled with phrases like 'rather thinly veiled support for white supremacy'. 

Then there's the more general point that, if you're operating a semi-official system of racial terror, as lots of the southern states were well within living memory, and you put up lots of statues of people who took up arms in defence of chattel slavery and go on and on about how noble they were, then people will make the obvious inference about where you're coming from ideologically, no matter how much you dress it up with mint juleps and courtly manners and whatnot. And this was understood by all the participants in Charlottesville. The protesters weren't antiquarian statuary-fanciers, they were there to defend white hegemony, and when Trump talks about 'heritage' they understand him to be talking about that, not about ol' grandma's secret recipe for biscuits and gravy. 

Drew_TNBD

MrBump said:

 fascists were very hot on profit and private enterprise.  

That seems to fly in the face of the 25 key proposals put forward by the Nazis in their national socialist program.

ourmaninthenorth

Drew_TNBD said:

MrBump said:

 fascists were very hot on profit and private enterprise.  

That seems to fly in the face of the 25 key proposals put forward by the Nazis in their national socialist program.

And somewhat stranger still perhaps is the absent mention of their final solution in their program - not merely the planned extermination of the Jews, but the 25 million, non combatant peoples actually exterminated by them as their real agenda began to play out across Western Europe. There are innumerable academic, evidenced based articles on this subject.  

Find Reinhard Heydrich's speech ( Wannsee , 20th January 1942 ) entitled "the Final Solution" .... similarly find Gideon Hausner's opening address to the trial of Eichmann ( Jerusalem 17-18th April 1961 ) entitled "That man was Eichmann" 

Both narratives chill me to the DNA. 

This is what's at stake. This is what these fake, plastic Nazi's believe and deny in equal measure, I absolutely shit em. 

JezWynd

Drew_TNBD said:

Axe_meister said:

The trouble is these statues where erected in the 60s as a protest against the civil rights movement rather than being historical monuments. They should be moved into a museum.
Personally I think a line needs to be drawn in the sand (like in Germany) as to where free speech should end. i.e. displaying Nazi sympols and celebrating the Nazi regime.

That's not true dude. The Robert Lee statue at the centre of the Charlottesville disagreements was erected in 1924.

There was a resurgence of the KKK following the release in 1915 of DW Griffith Birth Of A Nation. It was a 3hr movie, unheard of at that time and many took it as a historical representation. A lot of these statutes should be viewed not as historical remembrance but rather as an attempt to reignite a movement off the back of a movie.

Chalky

I have even more respect for @Drew_TNBD now. Trying to educate folks who don't want to listen or learn.

The arguments about General Lee make me smile - folks who have even the tiniest amount of knowledge of the US will know that George Washington was far worse than Lee for racism, and complete belief in the validity of enslavement. Yet the far Left won't take on that icon.

brojangles

Yeah but as symbols they're kind of different. Washington is celebrated as the general who made the founding of the republic possible, with all the idealistic stuff that goes with that. Lee is not exclusively but largely celebrated as a Confederate general, so the slavery thing is a bit more central to his role in the public imagination, it seems to me. 

Chalky

brojangles said:

Yeah but as symbols they're kind of different. Washington is celebrated as the general who made the founding of the republic possible, with all the idealistic stuff that goes with that. Lee is not exclusively but largely celebrated as a Confederate general, so the slavery thing is a bit more central to his role in the public imagination, it seems to me. 

Agreed, but if the left-wing activists are against protagonists of slavery then why not tear down monuments to Washington?  The reason they don't is that they would reveal themselves to be as peripheral and irrelevant as the alt-right. Their agenda is about something, but it is not about righting the wrongs of history.

Drew_TNBD

I'm not going to be drawn into defending myself from accusations that I am sympathetic to the KKK and Nazi party. Because I don't fucking agree with them and I despise both. My history of both of them is a little rusty and my wider points are being lost in the miasma.

I don't think that "nazi's bad, not-nazi's good" is a complex enough argument and it leaves a lot to be desired. That's my wider point.

As much as my historical knowledge is lacking on these issues, if you think the far-left (IE: the people who protested the protest in Charlottesville) are any better than the skinheads, then you just don't know enough about them.

Their ideology comes from a heady cocktail of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, and Stalinism. All failed variants of socialism and communism. They are violent and will do whatever it takes to tear down Western capitalist democratic societies.

I am here simply to point that out and to defend classical liberalism and to encourage people to think of themselves as individuals instead of seeing themselves as part of a subset.

Richard Spencer is a spanner.

brojangles

I'm sure you could find some left-wing activists who'd want to take down statues of Washington etc, but they'd be pretty fringe-y in terms of their access to political power, to the establishment etc. (Whereas the alt-right has one of its own in the White House!) But I don't think the majority of people who think it's a bit de trop in this day and age to litter the landscape with memorials to the Confederacy are all hard-left activists: even Trump conceded a couple of years ago that Confederate flags belong in a museum. I mean, I think it's fine to take the statues down and I'm so right-wing that I voted for Owen Smith in the last Labour leadership election.