A little Nazi here; a little Nazi there Pt. III
By ATWadmin On January 19th, 2008
Prague- A demonstration of rightist extremists at Prague’s Palackeho namesti square ended without any incident after about an hour this afternoon, the police said.
Some 200-250 rightist militants gathered at the square where public rallies can take place without any authorisation, the police said.
Four of the demonstrators were taken to the police station.
After delivering some speeches, the neo-Nazis dispersed themselves at about 3:00 p.m. (Central European Time. ed.)
Two extremists were detained for the violation of the assembly law. Police spokeswoman Eva Brozova said they had been armed with nunchaku sticks and a knuckleduster.
Another two extremists were detained in order to check their identity, Brozova said.
All of them have been or will be released, Brozova said.
Some demonstrators wore balaclavas and black flags. On one of the flags, there was a logo of Autonomous Nationalists.
Some activists read speeches in which they complained about the ban of the march in Plzen, West Bohemia. They said the ban was illegal.
They also criticised the state of freedom and democracy in the Czech Republic.
The gathering in Prague was to be replace the rally originally planned for Plzen.
Chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities Jiri Danicek told ČTK earlier the date of the march, January 19, was connected with the first transport of Jews from Plzen to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp, north Bohemia, that was dispatched on January 18, 1942.
Out of 2605 Jews on the transport only 112 survived the war.
On Thursday, Plzen mayor banned the planned extremists’ march.
About ten followers of extreme right met at the Plzen Emila Skody square today.
They were prevented from marching to the local synagogue by the police vans that barricaded the streets.
Several hundreds of opponents of fascism gathered outside the Plzen synagogue and remembered the Holocaust victims.
Via ČTK
The Czech news server is reporting that, “A protest rally of anarchists was also to be held in Plzen. However, it was banned. Nevertheless, there are about 100 leftist militants with the banner “No Nazis in Plzen” there. Around 800 opponents of the neo-Nazis have come to the remembrance event for the Holocaust victims outside the Plzen synagogue.”
David Irving & Dr. David Duke were unavailable for comment.
Also at JWF
Scumbags who support the extermination of Jews are not ‘rightists’. Could be muslims though!
Oh dear. We’re back to the nonsense that the nazis were really leftists. Yawn.
A substantial number of ‘journalists’ have been indoctrinated with communist and/or neo-communist ideology. Since national socialism is a slight bit to the right of communist/neo-communist groupthink, ergo, neo-nazis are ‘rightists’.
Peter, I am a rightist in that I believe in a secure nation within strong borders and a small government whose primary duty is to maintain those borders. I was not aware that nazis ever wanted small government.
As for those on the demo, what is it that they are about? If they just want to deny the Holocaust, why don’t they get some assistance from the Iranians or ‘palestinians’. The leaders of both of those regimes are genuine deniers.
Allan
Why not just accept that there is as much of a range of difference good and bad on the Right as there is on the Left. The left can consist of genuine good natured people who would never behave with malicious evil but who genuinely believe in greater efforts by the State to deal with economic and other disparities, just as there are fanatic Stalinists who collectivise farms and destroy private enterprises regardless of suffering in the name of fanatical olitical devotion and equally the Right can consist of genuine freedom loving Conservatives who respect individual rights and choices and fanatic nationalists who promote racial and sectarian conflicts in the name of defeating international socialism.
To repeat: The nazis fought against the communists throughout their existence from 1920 to 1945. They did this in Munich, Berlin, Spain and Russia. The nazis were right-wing totalitarian nationalists. Their political supporters, and those who helped them sieze power in Germany in 1933 were all from the right. Unlike the communists they did not attack private property or collectivise the farms or nationalise manufacturing industry. The communists were left-wing totalitarians who abolished private property.
To describe both communists and nazis as lefitsts is rightist fantasy of the highest order.
Prague is so beautiful. The Jewish cemetry cafes and museum are really something too.
What is the point of the post though? These little groups do this all the time. If you want ones without balaklavas and looking a bit slicker to be horrified at check Le Front Nationale demos in Paris. If you want regular run o’ the mill go to an Italian football match.
Peter
It really depends on your definition. Rightists support a reduced role for the state, individual liberty, freedom of speech and free trade.
Do leftists today want to abolish private property? Nationalise industry? Collectivise the farms? Do you? In fact they are growing more like the Nazis in allowing Capitalism but trying to tame it for the state.
And fighting the communists doesn’t make you right wing. Look how much the communists fought each other. Stalin killed almost all the others including Trotsky. In fact Stalin killed far more communists than Hitler.
Who believes in the power of the state as opposed to the rights of the person? The left. Hitler shared their view but he was not an internationalist. He was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The clue is in the title.
Peter,
You can deny it all you want, but you cannot deny historical facts:-
"…in the German election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the Nazis — with the explanation that they could later fight the Nazis for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government ("’Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing", September 1964, in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pg. 180).
or another little quote, and there are many more;
"When Hitler’s fortunes seemed to be faltering for a time in 1932, a stream of anxious Nazis poured into the ranks of the Communists; the Germans watching said that a Nazi is like beefsteak: brown on the outside, red on the inside. Soon, however, the traffic was in the opposite direction. "[T]here is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it," said Hitler to Rauschning. "There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will" (Quoting from Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction, pg. 131) (Peikoff, 221).
I apologise for the lengthy quotes, but if I just gave a link, I doubt that you would even bother to read it…
If instead of categorising ‘left’ and ‘right’, by their supposedl ‘evil quotient’ – i.e ‘left is good, right is bad’, and instead look at the differences between them, you may find that in one, the individual is paramount, and with the other, it is the State.
Both are capable of horrific crimes against humanity, but – by coincidence, in that respect, it is the admirers of the State that have far exceeded anything the Right has done.
Of course, as with all things political, there is a middle way, but blindly generalising, or categorising things you probably disagree with will never help the debate or enable a consensus…
Both
Well put Henry…
H94 posted:
Who believes in the power of the state as opposed to the rights of the person? The left.
So was Franco a leftist, was Salazar, was Pinochet, were the colonels in Argentina? All of them used the state to oppress the people, and all conducted a campaign of murder against their leftist opponents.
Henry
You are wrong. Conservatives believe in the things you say – Rightists is a broader definition which encompasses fascists and Nazis.
Ernest
You quote one sentence in which Hitler apparently supports bolshevism. But hatred of bolshevism was apparent in virtually all his speeches. The nazis helped to destroy the bolsheviks in Berlin and Munich in 1919-1920.
I repeat, since you obviously don’t get it: The essential feature of communism is its rejection of private property. Read The Communist Manifesto if you don’t believe me. That its totally absent from Nazi Germany. And if the nazis were really leftists, why did they help to destroy the leftist government in Spain, which Stalin supported? Surely they should have been fighting on the other side?
You really can’t have it both ways.
Peter,
State control is a ‘leftist’ mantra. Whether the infrastructure is State owned, – as in communism, socialism, bolshvism, or whatever, or whether the infrastructure is privately owned,, but rigidly controlled by the State, as in facism, nazism, or by dictators suchh as Pinochet, Salazar and Franco.
They all deny the individual…which is basic socialism.
Didn’t the German airforce have several squadrons fighting for Franco, anyway, the various socialist world factions were always at each others throats. The fact that one fought another does not make much difference politically speaking. They were yet another disastrous power struggle among like minded politicians, as with Tito and Stalin, or Hamas and Fatah..etc, etc.
You people need to learn a bit about the influence of fordism and Frederick Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ on the Bolscheviks, Nazis and Fascists, and the common roots in hegelianism and the Prussian state model.
You need to study *where* Hitler got his ‘racial hygiene’ ideas from (hint: social darwinism and the eugenics movement of USA and UK),
You need to stop having these childish arguments about where to place Hitler on a one-dimensional line of left and right.
RC makes a good pint. Stalin and Hitler and all their copycat dictators were and are evil bastards and ultimately it matters nothing which side of the political spectrum they are labelled.
Oops, RC makes a good point too – I haven’t tasted any pint he might make
Hitler became the 55th member of the DAP, but he later claimed to be member number seven (he was in fact the seventh executive member of the party’s central committee). Over the following months, the DAP continued to attract new members, while remaining too small to have any real significance in German politics. On 24 February 1920, the party added "National Socialist" to its official name, becoming the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), although Hitler earlier suggested the party to be renamed the "Social Revolutionary Party"; it was Rudolf Jung who persuaded Hitler to follow the NSDAP naming.
RC -
You’re almost there.
You need to study *where* Hitler got his ‘racial hygiene’ ideas from (hint: social darwinism and the eugenics movement of USA and UK)
Which was a socialist movement. there’s nothing at all childish about where to place the Nazis on any scale; that the Left has been allowed to propogate the plain nonsense that the Nazis were of the Right is one of the great political injustices, and one of the great propoganda coups of any age.
Peter talks of the essential feature of communism as being the rejectin of private property. Their really is no difference between this and Nazism, which ordered to use of private property for the state’s end. The ownership is irrelevent if the state still controls the use.
Any objective study of their history shows that the National Socialist movement was of the Left. Any honest study shows this. Nothing is more plain. They were National Socialists. It developed from the German Workers Party for crying out loud.
The Western Left, in the post-war period, has deliberately portrayed the National Socialists as fascist. It was begun by Stalin’s regime at Nuremburg and quickly adopted by communist journalists and academics in Western Europe and the US. ‘Fascist’ refers properly only to the Italian regime, which wasn’t racist in any way until the Nazis overpowered it.
The reason why it’s important to combat this deliberate and fantastically successful lie is simple – Leftist regimes have flourished and continue to flourish and until Leftism is utterly defeated and discredited, humanity will never escape its inevitable misery and squalor.
Pete
Go over to the Gordon Brown thread and answer my rebuttal of your constitutional views.
You do talk nonsense about political identities Pete. You are in your own world. By any stretch of the imagination the Nazis were a RIGHT WING political movement, whatever silly acrobatic political tricks you try to elaborate to prove otherwise.
Have we yet established a consensus as to the meaning of Right and Left and are they mutually exclusive (the meanings that is)
Colm,
You really are quite amusing!…you really do believe that if you repeat a falsehood, or shall we say, – a misunderstanding or even a misinterpretation, often enough that it will eventually prove to be the truth..
I am not suggesting you change your political beliefs, but you have to accept it has a few warts, and socialism does have plenty of those…
>>You need to stop having these childish arguments about where to place Hitler on a one-dimensional line of left and right.<<
Well said, RC.
One interesting aspect of this, however, is how attitudes to the Holocaust in Eastern Europea are radically different to those in the West.
And in this regard, it’s important to remember that the picture of the Holocaust we in the West have was to a great extent formed in the 1960′s. Before that, most westerns knew or cared little about Hitler’s war against the Jews (except perhaps in places like NY or London, where many Jewish refugees lived), for which there are many different reasons.
My point is that Eastern Europe, because western media were suppressed there, never really experienced the "1960′s", and didn’t get anything of the new awareness of the horrors that happened on their doorstep nor, especially, the way those horrors were interpreted in a psychological, humanistic and historical sense in the West.
One upshot of this is that there is much more of a seamless progression from old conservative to rightist to Neo Nazi in Eastern Europe than would be possible in the West, where the very threat of being seen and labelled as such is usually enough to keep anti-Semites quiet. It never ceases to surprise me how openly some people in Eastern Europe speak of their general dislike of Jews, and, say, a leading journalist, or professor or political leader has little to fear in that regard.
There is also a certain ugly peasant-style anti-semitism among certain people of a Left persuasion in eastern Europe that is almost unknown in the West.
(and, please, none of that bullshit about the western Left being anti-semite because it’s critical of Israel etc).
In any case, this more or less justifies Ron’s "rightist militants" term IMO, as there were probably also quite a few old-style and new-style conservatives among or supporting the neo-Nazis at this demonstration.
p.s.
Colm,
If the Nazis’ were ‘right wing’, just where do you position conservative capitalism on the spectrum
= most westerners
Ernest, and Allan and Pete
you really do believe that if you repeat a falsehood, or shall we say, – a misunderstanding or even a misinterpretation, often enough that it will eventually prove to be the truth..
Colm –
Your ‘rebuttal’ is answered. And when you make an assertion, such as that I talk nonsense, do try and add some layers. Some people might be tempted to think you don’t know what you’re on about.
Noel, Richard,
If you find the right versus left nomenclature so tiresome, as I most certainly do, might I suggest we have an embargo on the use of such terms! We might at the same time lose the idea that left is good and right is bad, which is also nonsense..
Colm,
Sorry, that just wont do, you cannot deny history, and is nothing ore than a very childish response.
No Pete my rebuttal has not been answered. You occupy a narrow and really quite childish place on the spectrum which places yourself on the Right and refuses to believe that anything also on the Right can be shameful or evil. I accept Ernest’s last statement, and it’s vice versa, which is the only mature adult thing to do.
Well Ernest, at least we have by co-incidence agreed to use the term childish in our respective comments.
Colm -
You’re right, I do not believe that there can ever be anything shameful or evil about wanting small government or individual freedoms being asserted.
And you are correct Pete, but as I have already explained on another thread, that is a definition of libertarian Conservative identity , it is not purely a definition of all Right wing political views, but a part of it.
>>If you find the right versus left nomenclature so tiresome, as I most certainly do, might I suggest we have an embargo on the use of such terms! We might at the same time lose the idea that left is good and right is bad, which is also nonsense..<<
Good idea.
Agree with both points. The terms – along with fascist, commie, anti-semite, etc. – are used here too much in a polemic sense, merely to bash someone, so one doesn’t have to confront his ideas (or lack of).
To
Pete Moore
Ernest Young
and fellow-rightists on ATW
I was going to argue point by point against your position that the nazis were leftists. But then I realised that nothing I could say would shake your belief in the slightest, so I won’t waste my time.
I’ve already pointed out the essential differences between communism and nazism, but it’s obvious that you and your rightist fellow-travellers aren’t open to persuasion on this, or indeed any other topic.
So I’ll resort to the tried and tested: ROFL!
BTW, Pete’s contention that the "fascism" label was not attached to Hitler’s lot until Nuremberg is simply not correct.
Also, there are libraries of books, newspapers, letters, diaries etc. WRITTEN DURING THE TIME that show that so many conservatives then, while disliking many aspects of Nazi ideology, had a soft spot for Hitler as they saw him as the best bullwark against Communism in Europe – which they despised both in ideology and PRACTICE.
(one prominent example being the King of England!)
The dictionary gives right wing as being conservative and reactionary and left as radical.
This just leave us that the right wants to keep things the same and the left wants to change stuff.
This definition doesn’t indicate conviction as it is dependant on the nature of the status quo. It would have Hitler as left wing and the Communiists of the 80′s in Russia as right wing (as indeed some commentators described them)
Noel
You’re wasting your time arguing with these rightist zealots. They will always find some quotation from the nazis to prove that they were really commies at heart.
It reminds me of Darwinists arguing with creationists. No amount of scientific evidence in favour of Darwin’s great theory will ever shake the fundamentalist head-bangers of whatever superstition – christian, muslim or jew – they are not open to persuasion and we should simply ignore them and leave them to wallow in their superstition. Which is that the earth was created in six days about five thousand years ago, with all existing species. ROFL!
Aileen
I doubt if you could find a specific agreed dictionary definition of ‘Right’ and ‘left’ in politics. It’s one of those definitions that are agreed by unscientific general consensus. Stalin, Mao tse Tung, and Kim il Sung were left wing tyrants, and Hitler, Mussolino, and Franco were Right wing tyrants. No amount of revisionism by the modern day left or right will alter that definition.
>>This just leave us that the right wants to keep things the same <<
Not necessarily, Aileen. When people of very strong conservative conviction think things have gone too far (which they invariably do), they become reactionaries, i.e. they want to restore some state they think existed in the past (but most usually never did).
The Nazis were extreme reactionaries: they wanted to restore Europe to some golden medieval age, where people lived healthily and happily on the land, where all were of one race, before immigration and the arrival of the Jews, where people were virtuous and families intact, where art was understandable, where there was general discipline in society, personal habits and public expression (like in art and architecture, etc). i.e. it was to a great extent a reaction against modernism and many things that modernism brings.
It was of course all a crazy dream of the past – as are many things the conservative right profess – as the past was demonstrably anything but the way they imagined it to be.
One big exception to the above is the attitude of the right – in almost all its forms – to technological progress. They are generally very much in favour, whereas the new left (but certainly not the old) are often more against it.
But IMO even these things aren’t decisive: the essential difference is the attitude to the nation state, public discipline and hierarchial force.
Colm but if the words have no meaning the arguments don’t either. It’s one of the reasons I have always avoided being labeled in right/left terms. Any of those (very imprecise) quiz things labels me as centre left and more towards libetarian than totalitarian. I am by instinct a default traditionalist but on the other hand in UK terms although I am very keen to preserve the baby, there is a lot of bathwater I’d like to throw out and change.
In different countries I would be more on the left depending where I was, not by comparison with the rest of the population, but because there would be more I’d want to change.
The rightist problem with the past is denial. They can never accept that their guys caused any of the slaughter in 20′th century Europe. It has to be all the commies’ fault.
Hence the pathetic attempt to argue that the nazis were really commies in brownshirts. This is an article of faith in rightworld, almost as much as creationism is for most of them.
Peter even if the Nazis were "right wing" why should anyone who is right wing consider that the Nazis were "their guys"?
Aileen
Rightworld constantly smears the liberal-left as commies. So they should have the honesty to admit that their hands aren’t clean either.
But honesty is lacking in rightworld, as the Nazi = Commie argument proves.
I’ve given up arguing with them on this. Most of them are creationists anyway, not worth debating with.
"But honesty is lacking in rightworld, as the Nazi = Commie argument proves."
No one is arguing that Nazis were Communists, the argument is that they were both forms of Socialism taken to extremes. Pointing out that Communists had differences with Nazis isn’t something that anyone disagrees with.
they were both forms of Socialism taken to extremes
So one form was all for private property, the other was all against it, but in Rightworld this was insignificant and they were both socialist. Yet elsewhere Rightworld argues that respect for property ownership is what distinguishes free societies from totalitarian ones.
Wake up guys!
>>that they were both forms of Socialism taken to extremes<<
Nonsense.
Did Nazism believe all political power must come from the working class?
Did it hold that the working class is by nature in confrontation with capital?
When it had absolute political control for a dozen years, did it at any time give workers control of the means of production?
Any benefits the Nazi state gave to the working class were intended merely to keep them quiet, acquiescent and healthy.
"So one form was all for private property, the other was all against it"
The Nazi’s weren’t all for private property, they tolerated it to a greater extent than the communists but they did put serious restraints on it, for example foreign investors in Germany couldn’t simply take profits out.
"When it had absolute political control for a dozen years, did it at any time give workers control of the means of production?"
Er has any actual communist regime done this?
>>Er has any actual communist regime done this?<<
Er, yes!
But even if they hadn’t, it – like the others – is a core, and indeed characteristic, socialist principle, and that none of these principles appeared to any extent in Nazi ideology or practice shows that Nazism was not a form of Socialism, which you claim it was.
Their really is no difference between this and Nazism, which ordered to use of private property for the state’s end. The ownership is irrelevent if the state still controls the use.
pete, you are confusing totalitarianism with statism. as are most other rightists.
I see (with my one good eye) everyone is still blundering around, blindly bumping into each other.
Noel,
that nazi race myth was taken from the eugenics movement that grew out of social darwinism in Britain and America. It was they who propagated the idea of the ‘nordic man’ being the highest form of evolution in the species. Forced sterilisation was taking place in the US long before Hitler introduced it. The first people the nazis killed off were the disabled and other such ‘bad seed.’
Pete,
‘eugenics was a socialist movement’
Eugenics was an elitist movement. It took darwism as a justification for the powerful to control the weak. Sure, the Fabians loved it – and who were they? The ‘progressive’ elite. It was funded by Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Ford and Carnegie. Were these last socialists in your one-dimensional world?
In general, come on people! Stop being so stupid. Arguing about left versus right is no better than defining things in terms of Rangers versus Celtic.
Political ideology is only one part of the picture, and one that is completely distorted by propaganda. What it’s really about is POWER and CONTROL. The nazi system was an experiment in scientific control. So was the Bolshevik system. So is the system we live under, which I suggest could be called the Fabian system.
The antidote to all these poisonous creeds is individual liberty, democracy and a small state. But this does not solve all Man’s problems, and there are huge barriers to achieving it – mostly barriers erected by the elite who run the Governments and the schools, own the media, control the so-called intelligencia, and have brainwashed us all to such an extent that we are no longer sure that 2 + 2 = 4, or whether it matters either way.
RC
I agree it is totalitarianism v individual liberty that is the real issue.
Marie Stopes was one of the strongest advocates of eugnenics. So much so that she objected strongly to her son marrying someone with defective genes to pass on to her grandchildren. The defect in question being having to wear glasses. The fact that she was the daughter of Barnes Wallis didn’t seem to make up for this dreadful handicap.
RC.Aileen,
Great points.