Edgetho
Platinum Member
- Mar 27, 2012
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I'm not going to comment too much on this because I've posted just about everything in it at one time or another.
So it's really not 'news' to me. But I suspect it will be to a lot of very fine, and not-so-fine, people.
At any rate, it's worth the read.
Comment if you like. If you don't want to, that's fine.
But read it anyway because without this basic knowledge, you can't be intelligently involved in modern politics.
Daniel Hannan: Yeah, About the National Socialist Workers Party
Ace
Great piece from @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar.
Hannan's goal is not prove that the left harbors secret Nazi sympathies. His point is rather more nuanced:
It's very difficult to capture any country's politics in the short-hand you use for your own. For example, do you know who the "bad guys" were to the French Revolutionaries?
Well, the monarchy, of course, and the aristocrats, obviously, and the priests, eventually. But there was a fourth villain despised by those of the French Revolution:
Liberals.
Yes, liberals. Because economic liberals had convinced Louis Capet to reduce the mandates and restrictions on trade in grains (that is, they convinced him to let the farmers sell to foreign buyers at the best price they could find).
This proved unpopular, because, as bad luck would have it, France was hit with a few cold seasons of crop failures just before the French Revolution, and Parisians got very angry about paying more for bread under the new liberalized selling regime. The French farmers were selling French grain to the British, you see, and French bread went up in cost, as the new cost was set not by Louis Capet's ministers but the free market. (And the price of bread was a major factor in sparking the Revolution, but there were a set of about four major factors.)
Treason!
The concept of liberalizing economics and freedom became discredited, and liberals were among the enemies of the Revolution.
When the Revolution went into its decapitation frenzy, those damned farmers and bakers refusing to sell their wares for below cost were explicitly charged with economic treason (hoarding), and beheaded.*
Now, it is common for people to immediately analogize all parties in a foreign country with their "analogues" -- not really their analogues, thus the scare-quotes -- from the country they know, their own.
Everyone does this. At first. But as your read more and understand more, you realize that another nation's politics cannot be reduced the easy-peasy lemon-squeezey third grade level template you began with.
But reporters keep on doing it, don't they? And they claim to be "experts" in the subject matters they report on.
The media does this because they are imbeciles. They ought to know better than to pretend that the politics of any country tracks with the American (or British) models.
In fact, they were probably told a dozen times that they shouldn't do this, as it's false.
But they do it anyway. Because they're shamefully partisan and not-terribly-secretly propagandists for leftism.
They refuse to label any bad-acting regime as "socialist" or "communist," even when they are clearly that (and even when it says that right on the tin), and instead insist on referring to all Baddies as Right-Wing.
When anarchists destroy property in the US, they are referred to as "anarchists" and "anti-globalists" -- never "the far left."
When Occupy Wall Street gets a little stinky and embarrassing, they are "anti-capitalists." Never the "far left," and certainly not "extreme liberals."
But all violent regimes are called rightwing, even the ones that are expressly leftwing.
As Hannan explains, they just say that the nice good leftwing government because shamefully Rightwing when it crushed the opposition and murdered dissidents. (Even when they're crushing opposition and murdering dissidents in the service of redistributing wealth!)
Because you know -- leftwing governments hardly ever do that, except for always. Only rightwing people do that, so if it happens, you know what you're dealing with is a rightwing government.
Real the whole piece. The beginning bit, which I didn't excerpt, constitutes his proof that the Nazis were indeed socialist.
* In the interests of accuracy, I should note that the beginning of the French Revolution contained liberals on the revolutionary side. And it also contained a lot of priests on the revolutionary side, too. It contained aristocrats. Hell, it even contained a member of Louis Capet's royal family, his cousin, the Duke of Orleans (Philippe "Egalité," he would style himself, calling himself an equal, not a lord-- but he did keep his property).
In fact, it contained a lot of monarchists on the revolutionary side -- people like Lafayette (IIRC) supported a constitutional monarchy, like Britain's, not an all-powerful sovereign.
But as the grim, bloody logic of the Revolution continued (as almost all revolutionary regimes do), each of these once-allies were deemed enemies, and either forced to flee or brought to Place de la Revolution to have their heads deducted from their bodies' heights.
So it's really not 'news' to me. But I suspect it will be to a lot of very fine, and not-so-fine, people.
At any rate, it's worth the read.
Comment if you like. If you don't want to, that's fine.
But read it anyway because without this basic knowledge, you can't be intelligently involved in modern politics.
Daniel Hannan: Yeah, About the National Socialist Workers Party
Ace
Great piece from @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar.
Hannan's goal is not prove that the left harbors secret Nazi sympathies. His point is rather more nuanced:
It's very difficult to capture any country's politics in the short-hand you use for your own. For example, do you know who the "bad guys" were to the French Revolutionaries?
Well, the monarchy, of course, and the aristocrats, obviously, and the priests, eventually. But there was a fourth villain despised by those of the French Revolution:
Liberals.
Yes, liberals. Because economic liberals had convinced Louis Capet to reduce the mandates and restrictions on trade in grains (that is, they convinced him to let the farmers sell to foreign buyers at the best price they could find).
This proved unpopular, because, as bad luck would have it, France was hit with a few cold seasons of crop failures just before the French Revolution, and Parisians got very angry about paying more for bread under the new liberalized selling regime. The French farmers were selling French grain to the British, you see, and French bread went up in cost, as the new cost was set not by Louis Capet's ministers but the free market. (And the price of bread was a major factor in sparking the Revolution, but there were a set of about four major factors.)
Treason!
The concept of liberalizing economics and freedom became discredited, and liberals were among the enemies of the Revolution.
When the Revolution went into its decapitation frenzy, those damned farmers and bakers refusing to sell their wares for below cost were explicitly charged with economic treason (hoarding), and beheaded.*
Now, it is common for people to immediately analogize all parties in a foreign country with their "analogues" -- not really their analogues, thus the scare-quotes -- from the country they know, their own.
Everyone does this. At first. But as your read more and understand more, you realize that another nation's politics cannot be reduced the easy-peasy lemon-squeezey third grade level template you began with.
But reporters keep on doing it, don't they? And they claim to be "experts" in the subject matters they report on.
The media does this because they are imbeciles. They ought to know better than to pretend that the politics of any country tracks with the American (or British) models.
In fact, they were probably told a dozen times that they shouldn't do this, as it's false.
But they do it anyway. Because they're shamefully partisan and not-terribly-secretly propagandists for leftism.
They refuse to label any bad-acting regime as "socialist" or "communist," even when they are clearly that (and even when it says that right on the tin), and instead insist on referring to all Baddies as Right-Wing.
When anarchists destroy property in the US, they are referred to as "anarchists" and "anti-globalists" -- never "the far left."
When Occupy Wall Street gets a little stinky and embarrassing, they are "anti-capitalists." Never the "far left," and certainly not "extreme liberals."
But all violent regimes are called rightwing, even the ones that are expressly leftwing.
As Hannan explains, they just say that the nice good leftwing government because shamefully Rightwing when it crushed the opposition and murdered dissidents. (Even when they're crushing opposition and murdering dissidents in the service of redistributing wealth!)
Because you know -- leftwing governments hardly ever do that, except for always. Only rightwing people do that, so if it happens, you know what you're dealing with is a rightwing government.
Real the whole piece. The beginning bit, which I didn't excerpt, constitutes his proof that the Nazis were indeed socialist.
* In the interests of accuracy, I should note that the beginning of the French Revolution contained liberals on the revolutionary side. And it also contained a lot of priests on the revolutionary side, too. It contained aristocrats. Hell, it even contained a member of Louis Capet's royal family, his cousin, the Duke of Orleans (Philippe "Egalité," he would style himself, calling himself an equal, not a lord-- but he did keep his property).
In fact, it contained a lot of monarchists on the revolutionary side -- people like Lafayette (IIRC) supported a constitutional monarchy, like Britain's, not an all-powerful sovereign.
But as the grim, bloody logic of the Revolution continued (as almost all revolutionary regimes do), each of these once-allies were deemed enemies, and either forced to flee or brought to Place de la Revolution to have their heads deducted from their bodies' heights.
