02-04-2018, 03:10 AM
(02-04-2018, 01:27 AM)nom Wrote: There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.
Bob Butler showed you demonstrably wrong in the post just before yours."Socialism" has been so much a peacock word in Germany that future Nazi war criminal Julius Streicher named his right-wing party the "German Socialist Party"... before it merged with Hitler's party as the National-Socialist German Worker's Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP and often shortened to Nazi Party. Hitler's inhuman, anti-proletarian party turned workers into serfs on behalf of rapacious plutocrats in Germany, which is inconsistent with either Marxist or democratic socialism. Paradoxically due to the despotism, expansionism, destruction of civil liberties, and mass murder Nazism has more in common with Stalinism than do any democratic-socialist parties.
Socialism as a word in the American political lexicon is a deprecation, probably because (1) America has had powerful elite who still treated employees (especially in the rural South) almost like serfs and sought to preserve that social reality long past the end of World War II, and (2) because Americans, less familiar with the more benign forms of socialism (especially social democracy) have confused socialism and Stalinism. This deprecation is so strong that left-wing pols have derided big-government policies in favor of extant elites as 'socialism for the rich'.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.