02-04-2018, 12:40 PM
(02-04-2018, 07:53 AM)nom Wrote: https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/mark-judge/...socialists
It is still possible to have some measure of economic success without a graduate degree, or even a college degree, or even more than a high-school diploma. But not in academia. If one is to make heterodox statements and not get ridiculed, one had better have a college degree in the appropriate field, lest one take ridicule. Sure, Peter Jennings could be the long-time anchor of ABC Nightly News, but at least he turned his talents as a disc-jockey into those of a journalist. He knew what not to say. The last bit of basic knowledge that anyone came up with in science while not an academic or in some corporate-or government-funded laboratory was special relativity... from 1905, 113 years ago. Albert Einstein was an odd-ball, but he was quite careful in his writing.
Claiming that Adolf Hitler was a socialist while leader of the Devil's Reich is about as false as saying that Young-Earth Creationism is science. Yes, there were socialists in the Nazi Party, the people who like the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser whose idea of socialism was to deliver the German people from the monopolistic exploitation of the Jews (the Jews were no worse than any others at that, which is another story. Yes, there were many socialists in the Nazi Party in 1933, the "roast-beef Nazis", brown on the outside and red on the inside. Hitler, who had become a stooge of industrialists and financiers before 1933 and would eventually privatize much of the Weimar economy, would kill or incarcerate the "roast-beef Nazis" who didn't take the hint and emigrate as did Otto Strasser. Gregor Strasser was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. Otto Strasser founded his variant of Nazism, Strasserism that melded socialism with Jew-hating. Other socialist movements (except perhaps Ba'athism, which has much in common with Nazism in its tyranny, expansionism, and contempt for the value of human life, and whose identification as socialist is shaky) are typically more strictly humanist (socialism without humanism quickly degenerates into tyranny in which the 'socialism' is nothing more than the formation of Big Government using its power to oppress and regiment people) and anti-racist. Social democrats have no use for white supremacy and antisemitism, and recognize racism as a demeaning tool for exploiting and degrading people who deserve better.
Big government is not inherently socialist. I remember my brother telling me of a book that he was reading that it held that Pharaonic Egypt had the tightest controls of the economy anywhere and at any time. "Even tighter than the Soviet Union?", I said.
"Yes!", he responded. "Even tighter than the Soviet Union". Pharaonic Egypt had a hierarchy in which the Pharaoh controlled everything through a hierarchy in which the common man got whatever was necessary to do his task and nothing more, and was sweated as much as possible to ensure that the Pharaoh and his associates could live in opulent splendor and be buried in the most grandiose tombs ever built (the Pyramids). It was close to slavery, but nobody needed any slave auctions to impress slaves about being owned. Getting out of Egypt was theoretically possible but practically difficult. Because some plutocrat (the Pharaoh) really owned everything, it was clearly not socialist as modern people would recognize socialism. There was no welfare system; if one was no longer useful to the system one starved to death.
Big Government can exist to enforce the will of economic elites, including plutocrats and executives, as in the USA, or to serve a dehumanizing racism, as in Nazi Germany or Apartheid-era South Africa. Socialism without democracy, most obviously leads to an order in which the executives and political hacks become an oppressive elite, as in the Soviet Union and its satellites. Yes, it is possible to have socialism without social justice, as one critic of the Commie regime in Poland before its collapse.
If we must have Big Government of any kind, then we had better have democracy and legal process as checks on political madness and humanistic values to guide the morals of the order.
Chuck Woolery is as right about Nazism being 'socialist' as Immanuel Velikovsky is about recent calamities among the planets of the Solar System and Erich von Daniken is about visitors from distant planets visiting and informing ancient peoples about technologies that made civilization possible. Both are cranks, and cranks contribute only garbage to intellectual life. Yes, the common man can discuss science and history, but the common man must cling to orthodox positions on science and history to maintain credibility. (OK, there are amateur astronomers, historians and archaeologists who have made discoveries -- but those respect the Establishment in their academic fields, and work on the fringes of details).
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.