08-24-2016, 02:18 PM
(08-24-2016, 12:50 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Sadly, there is this whole WW2 denialist camp. In a way, there has been one since the 1930s - it started with the America Firsters. The typical tin foil theory goes something like this:
'We didn't need to get involved in WW2, doing so was doing the bidding of the grand Atlanticist cabal with no borders (e.g. Wall Street, Fleet Street and the Jews who "run" them). We should have let Hitler do his thing over there. Meanwhile, we ought to have embraced selective elements of Nazism without losing our democracy, most especially, doubling down on America Firstism, and, "rightfully" considering the Jews as suspect and perhaps Anti-American enemies. After all, everyone knows it was the Jews who created Marxist-Leninist Communism. Dividing up the world between an America First US (with our Monrovian sphere of the Americas) and the Axis, would have led to 1000 years of peace and prosperity.'
Sick stuff, I know. But as there were true believers mid last Century, there are also true believers now.
It's manifestly obvious that the Nazis did not know how to create human happiness -- only destroy it. Slaves cannot be happy except when diverted from such a reality. The brutality of Nazi economics even without the horrors of the Holocaust establish the need to have destroyed Nazism.
I once saw a Nazi tract that cited Churchill, of all people, on the horrors of "Jewish Communism". I cannot deny the horrors of Stalinism, but I can notice that what Churchill found wrong with "Jewish Communism" wasn't that the Jews were expressing their Jewish "spirit" or "race" -- but that instead that the "Jewish Communists" weren't Jewish enough, and that their return to Judaism would solve all that was wrong with them. Churchill had no problem with the devout Jew.
Dividing the world with the Nazis? Stalin did that in 1939, and look what that got him in less than two years -- his regime in mortal peril because it had only one nearly-licked ally. So why could Americans have trusted the Nazis? All that I saw in Nazi leadership was lying sociopaths, people who at best belong in prison preying upon each other instead of upon the rest of humanity.
Junk thought is nothing new. It always has its temptation. So as a gentile you have a dispute with a Jewish landlord? Maybe it is tempting to raise the right arm at a 45-degree angle and shout a Nazi slogan. It's also horribly wrong. Maybe you are living in a place that you can't afford and might as well consider moving to another apartment -- or doing what my brother did, going from the paradise of the San Francisco Bay Area to grim, dreary, joyless, mindless (but cheap-to-live-in) rural Michigan, where "culture" means your music and video collection, or whatever happens to be on cable TV. Books? Worthless if you don't find anyone willing to talk about them. Economic distress isn't easy to deal with; it requires compromises of one's dreams just to put food on the table. Find that the person among whom twenty other applicants who got the job is black? Would you be any happier if one of your white competitors for the job got it? The problem is that there are so few job openings, and so many jobs too small for your spirit. If you don't like such work, then maybe you ought to consider starting a business that requires 70 hours of work a week and offers no guarantee -- instead of working 40 hours a week where you have the certainty of poverty. Don't like being in hock to loan sharks? Then maybe you need a union card instead of a credit card. America was a better place in many respects when working people were more likely to have a union card than a credit card. But no -- have faith in right-wing pols who seek to promote growth through economic exploitation.
America is in many respects a nastier place than it used to be, mostly because the economic elites have debased their morals for maximal profit. The secret for getting ahead in most non-menial roles in life is to be a bad person who does not get caught -- someone who cons people or enforces the terms of exploitative contracts. The people who really rule us care more for their luxuries than for Humanity as a whole, and all that keeps them from doing the worst to Humanity as a whole is fear of retribution.
The raw deal is a bad deal, more immediately for the person who gets the raw part -- and in the end, the person who profiteers early from the raw deal. If I were to give a lecture on economics on one topic it would be the theory of the deal. One can trade trash for trash, but that gets nobody nowhere. Fleece deals that hurt one of the participants leave the person fleeced with no further options. Trades of quality for quality: so long as people can make or do something of quality one can have a healthy series of exchanges that create real prosperity. I could even throw in the concept that there is no such thing as a free lunch into the lecture because the free lunch involves a sort of fleece.
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.