…and incompetence. Thoughts on the socialist program from Jerry Pournelle:
So the question becomes, is liberal socialist democracy evil or incompetent, or just plain wrong?
I think that this is a good example of (J. Porter) Clark’s Law. He came up with it for spammers, I think, but it applies here as well: “Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice.”
Oh, and I found this quite interesting. Jonah Goldberg, call your office:
If Liberal Democracy is a conspiracy, it hasn’t done much of a job of hiding its objectives. They’ve been clear since the days of Beatrice and Sydney Webb. So have their tactics: there is no enemy to the left. Solidarity forever. The union makes us strong. George Bernard Shaw was aware of Stalin’s starvation tactics and the Ukraine famine, but chose not to say anything about it because Solidarity was a guiding principle. So were many others, for the same reasons. Being a communist fellow traveler was quite fashionable among intellectuals. It took the Hitler Stalin Pact to break the subservience of American intellectuals to the Popular Front, and even then many stayed with the communists. Recall Fred Pohl: An intellectual friend, well known in science fiction circles of 1940, brought the news of the Fall of Paris to the Germans to Fred and other editors.
“He bought us wine, held up his glass, and proposed a toast: “To the liberation of the bourgeois capital by the people’s forces of socialism.” I drank his lousy wine. But it lay sour in my stomach while I brooded in my office all that day.”
Was that incompetence or malice? Was it incompetence or malice to drink the lousy wine and brood?
Well, they were national socialists. It said so right in their name. As noted, the Left and academia has rewritten history to pretend that they weren’t.
As noted, the Left and academia has rewritten history to pretend that they weren’t.
True, but there were both truly socialist and nationalist wings of the Nazi party. Hitler got rid of the socialists and pretended nothing had changed. There are many flavours of evil.
True, but there were both truly socialist and nationalist wings of the Nazi party. Hitler got rid of the socialists and pretended nothing had changed.
I don’t have any idea what this means. The Nazi Party platform was quite socialistic. Much of it in fact was quite similar to the modern Democrat Party platform. Take away the explicit racism, and it’s actually little diffeent.
Hitler got rid of the socialists and pretended nothing had changed.
He got rid of the international socialists. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a socialist. Stalin got rid of a lot of communists, too, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a communist.
There are many flavours of evil.
I would say there are a lot of flavors of statism, and the similarities among them all are far more significant than the trivial differences, which are mostly transparent to the user.
Socialism is opposed to private property and Hitler was not. In fact he seems to have been strongly opposed to abolishing private property. To be sure industry would have to comply with his wishes and serve the ‘national interest’ as he saw it, but it would not be nationalised wholesale. He forced Goebbels to switch sides and ruthlessly eliminated the proponents of the true socialist line. Roehm was no international socialist. His fear of the growing threat posed by the SA combined with Hindenburg’s threat to dismiss the government and declare martial law would have compelled him to act anyway, but I believe ideology played a role too.
I would say there are a lot of flavors of statism, and the similarities among them all are far more significant than the trivial differences, which are mostly transparent to the user.
But not to those in power. Confusing various forms of statism is like confusing free market capitalism and crony capitalism. It may look the same to leftists, but it isn’t.
But not to those in power.
What difference does it make? It’s those not in power who suffer in all cases.
And there is a huge difference between free markets and crony capitalism to the user.
“is liberal socialist democracy evil or incompetent, or just plain wrong?”
Yes.
“In fact [Hitler] seems to have been strongly opposed to abolishing private property. To be sure industry would have to comply with his wishes and serve the ‘national interest’ as he saw it…”
That’s what makes National Socialism one step worse than plain old Socialism. Property is nominally privately held. But *control* over its use and disposition is dictated by the State.
So a property owner has the liability of preserving “his” property, but no say over its use or disposition. I would argue that the “use and disposition” of property without outside conditions is actually the definition of private property. Without those, what is a person left with? Just the burden of keeping it up, that’s what.
At least Socialism is completely honest about pretending to own everything.
But *control* over its use and disposition is dictated by the State.
More accurately, the state reserved the right to interfere, but usually left the running of the economy to business. I hope you realise I’m not defending national socialism, just advocating proper use of terminology. Something the Nazis themselves obviously did not. Socialism is – at least in theory – an egalitarian ideology, which national socialism certainly wasn’t. It believed in giving individuals a rank in society based on merit and ability – according to its own twisted perceptions of those. And in theory socialism does not require a leadership cult – though in practice it almost invariably does. National socialism on the other hand was based around a leadership cult.
“Hitler got rid of the socialists and pretended nothing had changed. There are many flavours of evil.”
I agree, as in Ernst Röhm and the Night of the Long Knives.
“I would say there are a lot of flavors of statism, and the similarities among them all are far more significant than the trivial differences, which are mostly transparent to the user.”
I agree with this, too.
“Hitler got rid of the socialists . . .” Big deal. He got rid of a rival gang. The Capone mob got rid of the Bugs Moran gang. They were all still gangsters. When a Mafia family wipes out a rival family, they’re all still mafia.
Mr. Meijering’s sketch of National Socialism certainly clashes with all the anti-market, anti-bourgeoisie, socialism-with-a-jackboot Hitlerian rhetoric quoted by Goldberg in LIBERAL FASCISM and Von Kuehnnelt-Leddhin’s LEFTISM. Was Hitler just indulging in anti-capitalist showboating to impress and curry favor the European and American Left? I wouldn’t put it past him. I understand that Hayek’s ROAD TO SERFDOM was written in response to the rise of National Socialism. One wonders why he bothered.
Big deal. He got rid of a rival gang. The Capone mob got rid of the Bugs Moran gang. They were all still gangsters. When a Mafia family wipes out a rival family, they’re all still mafia.
I didn’t say he was any better than Roehm and his ilk, just that he disagreed with their socialist policies. It certainly was not the jackboots, the nationalism, the violence, the anti-semitism or the leadership cult he disapproved of.
Gaining the support of the middle classes and the army was part of it, but apparently so was ideology. Confusingly, Hitler – like certain leftist loonies – felt a limited amount of market forces was a natural consequence of so-called “social Darwinism”. Unlike those loonies, this led him to embrace the concept. Hey, I didn’t say the guy was sane.
Mr. Meijering’s sketch of National Socialism certainly clashes with all the anti-market, anti-bourgeoisie, socialism-with-a-jackboot Hitlerian rhetoric quoted by Goldberg in LIBERAL FASCISM and Von Kuehnnelt-Leddhin’s LEFTISM.
I haven’t read those, but it sounds as if Goldberg is talking about the Strasser/Roehm wing of the party. Roehm was the leader of the jackbooted brown shirt SA thugs. He wanted a second, socialist revolution to complete Hitler’s first national revolution and accused Hitler of betraying the movement’s “ideals”.
I certainly do not claim to be an expert on socialism or on national socialism. What I know of national socialism comes from what we were taught in history class and from what I’ve read on the web. I recommend the Wikipedia articles on national socialism, Ernst Roehm and the Night of the Long Knives. The image of national socialism as just another form of socialism is as naive and wrong as the traditional image of national socialism as just another form of far-right extremism.
Statism is a more general term than socialism. Mercantilism for example is statist but not necessarily socialist, though many socialists are also in favour of mercantilism.
Note that I despise both socialism and national socialism and statism in general.
I understand that Hayek’s ROAD TO SERFDOM was written in response to the rise of National Socialism. One wonders why he bothered.
From a libertarian or classical liberal point of view all these statist ideologies are reprehensible, just in different ways that in the end matter little to the end user as Rand puts it. Note that statist, like capitalist is a pejorative.