General Wesley C. Clark and his bizarre apologists.

Marx, Engels, Clark, Hitler, Mussolini: At least the USA stopped one of them without bloodshed.

Way back on 15 June 2003, retired General Wesley C. Clark let spew forth this gem whilst chatting with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press:

The Bush tax cuts weren't fair. The people that need the money and deserve the money are the people who are paying less, not the people who are paying more. I thought this country was founded on a principle of progressive taxation. In other words, it's not only that the more you make, the more you give, but proportionately more because when you don't have very much money, you need to spend it on the necessities of life.

One 'funny' thing about this quote is it was one of the only 2003 video clips of General Clark that is not available on the internet today.  If you search for video with Wesley Clark from 2003, you get all sorts of interesting crap that New World Order conspiracy theorists love, and a little FOX News bashing, but nothing on this, although the quote above is all over the place.  I was unable to find the transcript on the NBC website too, but that might just be me.

So, retired General Clark thinks that this country was founded on a principle of progressive taxation?  Seriously? Eugene Volokh made a great response at the time:

Somehow I slept through the class session in American History where they explained just how the country was founded "on a principle of progressive taxation." "No Taxation Without Progressivity," was that the big slogan? (Thanks to Dan Gifford to the pointer; I should also note that columnist Walter Williams also made the same observation shortly after the Clark speech, and I'm sure many others did, too.)

Although I like both Volkh's and Williams' responses, I had a decidedly different reaction.  General Clark was spewing the Communist Manifesto and labeling it USA founding principles.  Progressive taxation has been item two in the handy list Marx and Engels included in the Communist Manifesto since its publication in February, 1848.  It is also addressed as a tax on business and investment income in both Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto and in the German National Socialist's 25 Points of 1920, and in the current American Nazi Party.

While trying to find the video, or just the audio, of Clark's 15 AUG 2003 Meet the Press appearance, I cam across this bit of humor by one Nathan Newman (note, all of the links to his evidence are broken):

September 18, 2003
Volokh Gets It Wrong
US Founded on Progressive Taxation

Eugene Volokh is accusing Wesley Clark of being historically ignorant.

The complaint?

Clark attacked Bush's tax cuts as a betrayal of America's progressive history:

The people that need the money and deserve the money are the people who are paying less, not the people who are paying more. I thought this country was founded on a principle of progressive taxation.Volokh snidely dismisses Clark by saying, "Somehow I slept through the class session in American History where they explained just how the country was founded'on a principle of progressive taxation.'"

But it's Volokh who has his history wrong.

For those of us for whom this country was founded in the "New Birth of Freedom" that ended slavery and completed the Constitution with the post-Civil War Amendments, the United States WAS founded on progressive taxation.

In fact, the first progressive income tax was in 1862 to fund the Union troops. From the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA):

It was a "progressive" tax in that it initially levied a tax of 3 percent on annual incomes over $600 but less than $10,000 and a tax of 5 percent on any income over $10,000. In 1864 the rates increased and the ceiling dropped so that incomes between $600 and $5,000 were taxed at 5 percent, with a 10 percent rate on the excess over $5,000. Passed as an emergency measure to finance the Union cause in the Civil War, the first income tax generated approximately $55 million in government revenues during the war. Paying the taxes was viewed as part of the patriotic war effort, and the whole country was proud when the merchant prince A. T. Stewart paid $400,000 in taxes on an income of $4 million.So yes, pride in a progressive income tax is EXACTLY what this country was founded upon.

It's worth noting that the Congress assumed it had the power to pass an income tax on that basis and revived it in the 1890s, only to have a rightwing Supreme Court strike the income tax down. This led to passage of the 16th Amendment, further ratifying progressive taxation as a founding principle of our constitutional system.

One thing that conservatives don't understand about America-- liberty was not founded in 1776. It's been a continual process with each generation having to refound this country in struggle -- a little bit of revolution periodically in Thomas Jefferson's phrase. But there is little question that our modern constitutional system was only established with the Civil War, and progressive taxation was at the heart of that effort.

Posted by Nathan at September 18, 2003 05:37 PM

Today I did attempt to respond to this load of crap thusly, but Nathan Newman's website redirected to a "page not found" message:

Okay, in what universe can you possibly read the US Constitution and glean that before the ratification of the 16th Amendment that an income tax was constitutional?  The Congress attempts all sorts of laws outside their powers that they know full well are outside of their powers.

The only way a "right wing" Supreme Court excuse fits is in the same way that Howard Dean criticized the Kelo v. New London decision on eminent domain was decided by a "right-wing Supreme Court": he lied about it.  Maybe he got the idea from you, since that happened a couple of years after you made this post.

Also, the Supreme Court did not overturn the Civil War Income Taxes, the Grant administration successfully lobbied Congress to do so.

Wesley Clark was engaged in the same sort of retread falsehoods as Ted Kennedy did on 12 AUG 1980 speaking on progressive taxation. He engaged in fabrication. Kennedy may not have known that progressive taxation is item two in the list at the end of "Chapter II. Proletarians and Communists" in the Communist Manifesto, but he should have at least known that Progressive RINO Teddy Roosevelt did not invent it and it sure did not originate in the USA. BTW, a progressive tax on capital is the first item under Finance in Mussolini's 1919 Fascist Manifesto and similar can be found in the 1920 German National Socialist 25 Points.

Seeing a General express these bizarre notions is no surprise. After 30 years of service, I became surprised when I met a fellow officer *without* a natural leaning to Commu-Fascism.

 I didn't realize until after reading that my response sounds like Dr. Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory.

Goldberg's Critics are Maddening

Okay folks, I need to quit doing things like this, but I don't think this post will be the last one like it.

Via a post by Jonah Goldberg about one of his critics, I found this big pile of crap at the History News Network: Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions by Matthew Feldman
After a paragraph about Feldman's credentials, he opens with this:

"Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and the economic sphere," proclaimed Mussolini in his co-written The Doctrine of Fascism from 1932, for this is the century of authority, a century tending to the "right", a Fascist century. If the nineteenth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the State. It is quite logical for a new doctrine to make use of the still vital elements of other doctrines.

"But what did he know? Had Mussolini's co-author been a pugilistic journalist like Jonah Goldberg rather than a fascist intellectual like Giovanni Gentile, that keystone of texts on fascist ideology would have sounded more like this . . ."- Dr. Matthew Feldman

And he goes on and on calling Jonah Goldberg a dimwit for daring to notice that Mussolini would be called a Liberal and a Leftist today.  The people Mussolini was "right" of were Stalin, Hitler and Trotsky.  He might have been barely left of FDR, which is open to debate.

Perhaps the fine man of letters, an Oxford Research Fellow no less, did not make it all the way through the passage he quoted.  This seems like a key bit: If the nineteenth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the "collective" century, and therefore the century of the State. It is quite logical for a new doctrine to make use of the still vital elements of other doctrines.

Update 11 June 2012: Even Wikipedia has this correct -

The term classical liberalism was applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from the newer social liberalism.[10] Libertarianism has been used in modern times as a substitute for the phrase "neo-classical liberalism", leading to some confusion. The identification of libertarianism with neo-classical liberalism primarily occurs in the United States,[11] where some conservatives and right-libertarians use the term classical liberalism to describe their belief in the primacy of economic freedom and minimal government.[12][13][14]

What is the modern Liberal (Leftist) all about today?  Collectivism!  In the 19th century "Liberal" was about the individual, now every Liberal west of Iceland and east of the International Date Line calls for big government control of every aspect of our lives.  Show me one American Liberal who wants to abolish the minimum wage and if you find one in the wild, go search for one in the United States Congress.  They are all for legalizing marijuana as long as nobody makes a buck off of it, in stark contrast to the Liberty embracing libertarians who don't care if you grow it, smoke it, buy it, sell it, or use it.  If you can manage to make a living from it, so be it.

Update II: 11 June 2012: How the Oxford English Dictionary defines the political Liberal  (no entry for Classical Liberal) - Pronunciation: /ˈlɪb(ə)r(ə)l/

adjective
     1 willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas: 

• (in a political context) favouring individual liberty, free trade, and moderate political and social reform: a liberal democratic state

Yes, Mussolini was squarely against that and so are the current self-identifying American Leftists (self labeled Liberals).  In the USA, where Goldberg is from and his books are published, a British Liberal is known as a Classical Liberal.  As David Horowitz says about people who call themselves Liberal in the USA, "The only things they are liberal about are hard drugs and sex."  They have no tolerance for individual liberty and mentioning free trade to them is like feeding garlic to a vampire, just like Mussolini was his entire life.

American Liberals are Leftists and Statists.  The current crop of American Liberals running the federal government are as corporatist as Mussolini.  Just witness their General Motors antics and two terms, with a party swap, of showering car companies, 'green energy' firms, banks, investment firms, and insurance companies with bailouts.  Real ones, not the 1979 Chrysler variety.

For evidence of Mussolini's consistency  on Fascism being the opposite of individualism, see my page about Liberalism that includes the Fascist Manifesto.

More on North Korea

Blane Harden

Brian Lamb had a great Q & A with Blaine Harden (video link) last night on C-SPAN about Harden's book "Escape from Camp 14".  Here is a dump from the C-SPAN web page:

Shin Dong-hyuk

Washington, DC
Sunday, April 29, 2012

This week on Q&A, author Blaine Harden discusses his historical narrative "Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West." Harden tells the story of a young man named Shin Dong-hyuk, who was born in captivity at prison camp 14, located in central North Korea. Shin escaped in 2005. Harden says that Shin is the only individual actually born in a labor camp to escape. In his book, Harden explains that Camp 14 holds approximately fifteen thousand prisoners and is the toughest of six camps in the country because of the brutal working conditions and vigilance of the guards. He relates how Shin witnessed the execution of his mother and brother, whom he had reported to guards after overhearing them discuss the possibility of escape. He was severely beaten and tortured for information about his mother and brother until he convinced the guards that he had turned them in to authorities as required. Harden details Shin's escape through an electrified fence by climbing over a dead companion's body and his hazardous journey through China into South Korea. Harden talks about the process Shin undertook to learn about society and civilization, and how he ended up meeting him in 2008 while writing a story for The Washington Post. In addition, Mr. Harden discusses his early career as a writer and his motivations for becoming a journalist.

Blaine Harden currently reports for PBS Frontline and contributes to The Economist. He was a correspondent for the Washington Post in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a national correspondent for The New York Times and a writer for Time Magazine. He won the Ernie Pyle Award for coverage of the siege in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.

It sounds like a great story and I found some video of Harden and Shin that I will post here later posted below.  It was hard for me to find anything to object to in the interview, save one quibble.  Harden kept calling the North Korean regimes after Kim Il-sung totalitarian.  Perhaps under sloppy modern usage of totalitarian it is true, but the more accurate word would be dictatorship.  Harden correctly points out that Kim Il-sung was a popular leader when his regime began. That is totalitarian in the Mussolini style of totalitarian, all in this together, stronger together than individually, etc.

However, at some point in the Kim Il-sung regime that totalitarianism was no longer a universal free choice and became a dictatorship.  Certainly every moment under Kim Jong-Il was a dictatorship, as with his successor Kim Jong-un.

For more on this story, go to National Review Online and read:  
A Child of the North Korean Gulag
Shin Dong-hyuk flees Camp 14 in search of meat.

By Joseph A. Rehyansky

A short video via Economist Magazine:

More video on this via the Frontline Club and it opens with plenty to object to, but otherwise is excellent:

First, from the description - Little is known about the prison camps of North Korea where it is estimated that 200,000 are imprisoned. Bullshit.  The prison camps of North Korea are some of the best documented operating camps in the history of the world.  Little was known about the Soviet Gulags before Khrushchev made his 'secret speech' and little was known about German concentration camps before they were liberated.  Today, we have 30,000 North Koreans who have escaped and now live in Seoul.  Several prison camp escapees live in Seoul right now, willing to talk about the inner workings of the camps and satellite photos of the camps are available from Google Earth.

Another objection I have is to Harden's introduction and slide show.  He claims that Red China stopped being "totalitarian" after Mao.  He uses totalitarian interchangeably  for things that can better be described as authoritarian or dictatorial, which Red China still is to this day.

The big difference between the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag system or the North Korean Gulag system is simple: Socialism cleanses all sins with "fellow travelers" who write the news today.  They denied the Soviet system, even after Khrushchev's speech was leaked to the world, they ignored the Red Chinese version and they ignore this while they bitch and whine about the National Rifle Association and create an imagined American Gulag constructed with lies:

Ayn Rand and the Lying Liars Who Hate Her

Ayn Rand smoking on left and with Alan Greenspan on right

I happen to be one of those folks who has never read more than a page or two of any fiction by the greatest selling single author in the history of the world, Ayn Rand.  There are a lot of her quotes out there that I like and I pass them on when I come across them, however I have no doubt that if I read Atlas Shrugged my assessment would be similar to those of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr.  If I had met her in person, I have no doubt that I would 'like' her as much as Buckley too.  However, that has never spared me the tired, scripted speeches from Stalinist Leftists who have some sort of pathological hate for the woman.

This hate is not a puzzling one, it is one that is easily explained by a core trait of the Leftists in general: Authoritarianism.  You see, if they don't like something then nobody else is supposed to like it either.  Rarely do they bother with a substantive critique, no they launch into a bunch of fashion/taste/emotional issues.

Below is an example of one of those scripts and I have finally found a reason to say something nice about Paul Krugman.  He made an attribution of the slam, which is quite rare for the Rand attackers.  In person, nobody has made any sort of attribution in my presence. It is as if they all spontaneously came up with the same words, in the same order, independently.  Something like the "herd" of independent thinkers that Dinesh D'Souza used to talk about on his book tours.

Here is a great one via Paul Krugman:

September 23, 2010, 3:34 PM
I’m Ellsworth Toohey!

So says one of my commenters (sic). And for my sins, I actually get the reference.

The best line I’ve ever heard about Ayn Rand’s influence:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Funny thing, someone I went to high school with used that quote when responding to a Rand non-fiction quote I posted in 2011.  I asked him where he got it, because I had seen it before, and he said he made it up himself.  Coming from a former editor, communications director, budding novelist, and ardent devotee of Paul Krugman, this level of plagiarism can be easily explained by another trait of the Leftist: Any lie will do when trying to "win" an argument, even if nobody was arguing.

The absurdity only increased on that topic.  He had a fit that Rand based her philosophy on "selfishness."  Which brought a big "so what" from me and she always struck me as being for self interest, which is different.  Another whine of his was that she thought philanthropy was "stupid."  Again, so what?  I don't think that and believing every word any person says as gospel is just stupid.  He later once told me that I need to make a "choice" between Ayn Rand and being a Christian.  Of course, this edict did not come as a question, it came as an order, which resulted in literal laughing-out-loud on my end of the internet.

What brings out these off-the-rails ravings is beyond me.  Seriously, I doubt that Mussolini showed up every time one of his classmates went to Church and challenged God to strike him dead on the steps of the cathedral, followed by a demand that said friend either renounce Samuel Clemons or the Lord.

By that logic in the modern day, I would have to stop enjoying Seinfeld and stop quoting atheist Larry David (MP3), or renounce Christianity.  Video here:

One of the Krugman commentators appears to have the same experience as me, with regard to hearing these things before:

D. Taggert
Portland
I always heard it as "involves Hobbits." Of course, I never read fantasy, as I was too busy building my railroad empire.
Sept. 24, 2010 at 10:08 a.m.

The most often heard Ayn Rand "take-down" I've encountered is the one that goes "the only people I've met who read Atlas Shrugged were teenage girls . . ." and every time I hear it, it is exactly the same, while at the same time it is so vapid  that I can never remember the whole thing until I hear it again.  Rarely am I ever able to find it online, probably because I am not wording it correctly for a search engine to find it.  If anybody reading this knows what I am talking about, please comment or forward.  In a concise impact statement, the speaker tries to make the implication that only maladjusted teenage girls and equally damaged males would appreciate her fiction.  A long-winded version can be found here, but I cannot find the short trite version as I write.  The same author decided to rip-off Winston Churchill's famous quip: Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains. like this:

This is a sign, mind you, of developmental disability. When you’re 19, you are permitted to find the Fountainhead inspiring and brilliant. If you still find it so when you’re 39, instead of seeing it correctly as turgid, overwrought garbage, then you are experiencing some form of mild intellectual retardation.

Again, every time these people find me in person, mentioning that I've never read, nor claimed to have read Atlas will stop the speech that each speaker claims as his own.

It is like those intense Ford vs. Chevy guys on loads of pot.  Most car guys respect each other and their rides.  There are a few of those Ford or Chevy guys who hate each others brands, but they usually shut up when they find out that you are in neither camp, but not always.

I suppose the least frequent Ayn slam, but frequent enough to include, would be the "I've never met anybody who said they read Atlas Shrugged (or Ayn Rand) who has actually read a word of it."  It usually comes from people who speak in absolutes about others, but hold the notion that there are no absolutes.  Somehow they have managed to live over half of a century without meeting a single person who has read the biggest selling author ever, but they have no trouble meeting people willing to lie about it.

That one was tossed at me by the 'editor' mentioned above and by another high school classmate who is now a professor.  When I mentioned to the Professor that Editor had said the same thing, the Professor claimed no knowledge of anybody ever saying that before, it was his own personal observation.  Of course, I was supposed to believe that the identical wording had to be a coincidence that repeated itself at least a dozen times over the years.

It took a while for the professor to "get it" when I said, several times, that I've never read Atlas, nor have I ever claimed to.  As for both of them, I see that not having any contact with them for a couple of decades was no loss, not just because of the Rand thing.  As with most people non scripts, conversing with them is annoying at best and impossible at worst.

Socialist Speak

If mass murder is Right Wing, why do Liberals wear these guys on their t-shirts?

I have finally deciphered a key bit of Socialistspeak, as it will be called in Would You Like Borders With That Socialism.

It does not matter how Left a Socialist regime was, if they were not Stalinists they are labeled Right Wing.  I know, I have said that before right here on this blog, but it deserves repeating.

When Castro eliminated unions, it was ignored.  Yet another thing in the memory hole.  Noticing a pattern yet?  When Mao Nationalized/Socialized unions (consolidated all into one union under Mao), it was hailed.  When the All-China Federation of Trade Unions was abolished in 1966, well good luck finding any comments, especially negative, online about that.  When Mussolini and his Parliament instituted milder measures, this is what is said about it now?

The trade unions were also deprived of any independence and were integrated into what was called the "corporative" system. The aim (never completely achieved), inspired by medieval guilds, was to place all Italians in various professional organizations or "corporations", all of which were under clandestine governmental control.

Is it the "clandestine" part that makes National/Yellow Socialist Mussolini  "Right Wing?"  You will never get a Socialist to admit that.  They just recite, as if their school teachers were infallible deities, that "Mussolini was a Fascist!" with the expectation that everybody agrees the Fascist party was "Right Wing."

The fact of the matter is, any provable measure used to call National Socialists "Right Wing" are all Socialist, authoritarian, totalitarian measures that are common among all Socialists, Red or Yellow.  It is also the opposite of laissez-faire/free-market measures.

Seriously, this is shaping up to be a mental disorder and Liberal Arts departments around the world are spreading the disease.  Witness what passes to be a scholarly critique of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism (order from link at the left), by none other than the George Mason University History News Network.  Full article at the link, I will examine one little bit here:

Professor Robert Paxton

Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - 14:27
The Scholarly Flaws of "Liberal Fascism"

Robert Paxton is emeritus professor of history at Columbia University. His latest book is Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage, 2005). 

Jonah Goldberg knows that making the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and FDR the creators of an American fascism – indeed the only American fascism, for George Lincoln Rockwell and other overt American fascist or Nazi sympathizers are totally absent from this book – is a stretch, so he has created a new box: Liberal Fascism.

National Socialist George Lincoln Rockwell

True, Jonah left George Lincoln Rockwell out of his book (taking this on faith, my copy is not here with me at Starbucks at least GLR is not in the index), but I will not be leaving him out of my book.  It appears that Professor Paxton has written at least one book, so he should know that there is not an infinite amount of room to include every instance and example into one volume.  Current National Socialists are indeed Socialist, so was Rockwell, and they are open and proud about this fact, just as Hitler was.  Just listen to Hitler in this subtitled video:

The article really deserves a Fisking, but I will not bore you with that here.  A complete book on the topic of Yellow/National Socialism being a true flavor of Socialism could be written just off of this article.  Here is the main part I wanted to talk about here:

Communists voted with me, not against me.

Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice. Since the Nazis recruited their first mass following among the economic and social losers of Weimar Germany, they could sound anti-capitalist at the beginning.

Which is what they were throughout their existence. Which is why the Red Socialists (Communists) voted with them, on orders from Stalin.  Goldberg actually does go into NS policies at length, especially the health-food craze and their anti-smoking jihad.  I do not see how it is possible to read the book and miss this.

Goldberg makes a big thing of the early programs of the Nazi and Italian Fascist Parties, and publishes the Nazi Twenty-five Points as an appendix. A closer look would show that the Nazis’ anti-capitalism was a selective affair, opposed to international capital and finance capital, department stores and Jewish businesses, but nowhere opposed to private property per se or favorable to a transfer of all the means of production to public ownership.

Any honest look at the National Socialist Worker's Party Twenty-five Points shows that the party aims at taking the decision making in the means of production out of the hands of private ownership and have the government run things.  After they were elected, they delivered on those promises.  All National Socialist movements, then and now, promise to take the profits from private businesses and have the government tell the owners how to run them.  Hillary Rodham Clinton said the same things in her campaign against Barack Hussein Obama, and Obama delivered National Socialism to the energy, automobile and healthcare industries.

Note what The National Socialist German Worker's Party says about the arms industry in that very document.  It is the same thing that Mussolini said in his manifesto and it is a condensed version of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party Platform.  This is not to say that it isn't full of racism and bigotry, it has that in spades too.  However, nobody can point to a free market item in the Twenty-five Points nor in Hitler's government.

He belongs on t-shirts next to Lenin

Here is another gem:

Having headlined the violent history of “liberalism,” Goldberg soft-pedals that of fascists, especially Mussolini. There are the ritual references to Auschwitz, but he denies that racial extermination is integral to Nazism by noting how many Progressive reformers fell for Eugenics in the early twentieth century.

NO! Goldberg never asserted any such thing, but it reveals the Leftist writer's bias of Professor Paxton. Goldberg, in print and on the stump, said that if you want to focus on genocide, then call that "Hitlerism" or something else, (I am comfortable with calling it Naziism myself) because the Nazis and the Vici were the only National Socialists (some call them fascists) doing that.  Yes, it had its roots in the earlier Eugenics movement, but the Italians and Spanish did not partake in it.  I will add that neither did the Greeks or Portuguese.  Maybe Professor Paxton regularly confuses Franco with Mussolini with Hitler with whomever was running Vici France.  Also, Goldberg addresses the Progressives as pre-fascist, he does not ignore it a bit.

His Mussolini – that lifelong “man of the left – is seen largely through the eyes of his many foolish American admirers. Che Guevara killed more people than Mussolini, he asserts (p. 194). This is possible only if one leaves out of the picture the murder of over a thousand Italian citizens by the squadristi who brought Mussolini to the brink of power in 1922, or of the Italians’ use of poison gas, forced displacement into camps, and aerial strafing against the populations of Libya and Ethiopia.

Finally, a detail I can use in my book that I was unaware of, but the pissing contest over who was a worse despot is pretty petty.  The throngs of Left Liberals who sport Che t-shirts should be evidence enough that murder is indeed a Liberal value.  Liberal Leftist Socialist Mussolini did it, and I will concede to Paxton that Che tried to eclipse it.  How is this any evidence at all that Mussolini was not a creature of the Left?

Soviet ally Nasser of Egypt used chemical weapons in Yemen throughout the 1960s and into 1970s, a history that is still easy to find.  Does that make the Soviets National Socialists of the 'Right Wing?'  Lenin murdered more people than Mussolini, Che and Fidel combined.  Is that what makes Lenin a person of the Left, his murders?  So Hitler murdered more than all for of the just mentioned people and Stalin beat that in just Ukrainians while Mao beat them all.  Seriously, the Leftists need to stop bringing up any murders in their 'evidence' against Yellow Socialism.

Face it Leftists, Mussolini and Hitler belong to you, not us.

National Socialists Are Keynesian

Sexy Nazi

The title should be no surprise to anybody who knows what National Socialists are or what Keynesian Economics is all about.

Let me qualify that a bit. The Italian and German National Socialists rose to power with the use of Keynesian Economics before John Maynard Keynes finished explaining his vision of the economic world. Of course, as with all massive government programs, the Nazis and Fascists took off in completely different directions from any that resembled what brought them to power. Here is Hitler in his own words via the American Nazi Party:

As you can read in the subtitles, Hitler tells corporations that they will be left alone as long as they play along and do as they are told. Don't take my word for it, look for yourself.  Everything in his speech is Keynesian and Socialistic.  If you think the Hitlerian National Socialists of today are any different, guess again.

John Maynard Keynes

As far as the German National Socialists go, what did they do when they took over the country?  They started big public works monuments to government, like the Autobahn.  Here is a WikiPedia passage that highlights a few of them:

Nazis came to power in the midst of the Great Depression. When the Nazis came to power the most pressing issue was an unemployment rate of close to 30%.[18] Before World War II, Hitler appointed Hjalmar Schacht, a former member of the German Democratic Party, as President of the Reichsbank in 1933 and Minister of Economics in 1934. [18]

At first, Schacht continued the economic policies introduced by the government of Kurt von Schleicher in 1932 to combat the effects of the Great Depression. These policies were mostly Keynesian, relying on large public works programs supported by deficit spending — such as the construction of the Autobahn network — to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. There was major reduction in unemployment over the following years, while price controls prevented the recurrence of inflation. The economic policies of the Third Reich were in the beginning the brainchildren of Schacht, who assumed office as president of the central bank under Hitler in 1933, and became finance minister in the following year. Schacht was one of the few finance ministers to take advantage of the freedom provided by the end of the gold standard to keep interest rates low and government budget deficits high, with massive public works funded by large budget deficits.[18] The consequence was an extremely rapid decline in unemployment—the most rapid decline in unemployment in any country during the Great Depression.[18] Eventually this Keynesian economic policy was supplemented by the boost to demand provided by rearmament and swelling military spending.

The last sentence in that passage is quite misleading.  Military spending is government spending and really is just part of a Keynesian framework, especially in an era where the Left found militarism appealing.

Socialist Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini

So, what of the Italian National Socialists, Mussolini's Fascists?

The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity. The Fascist State with its corporative conception puts men and their possibilities into productive work and interprets for them the duties they have to fulfill. (p. 280)  - Mussolini, Benito. My Autobiography. New York: Scribner’s, 1928 (via econlib.org)

Remember, whenever anybody tries to tell you that National Socialists are/were something other than  collectivist socialists, they are lying.

The same folk will try to tell you that it was the 'corporations' dishing out the power to Mussolini and Hitler.  Think for a moment, just who had the police power?  Mussolini or Fiat?

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

What Do Mussolini, Hitler, Obama and Newt Gingrich Have In Common?

They loved FDR, in the beginning.

They all praised Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great President with great policies.  Yes, it is true, Mussolini and Hitler praised FDR  in the same way that Progressive Newt Gingrich does today.  As George F. Will wrote on December 2, 2011 of Gingrich:

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order. Conservatism inoculates against the hubristic volatility that Gingrich exemplifies and Genesis deplores: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.”

As any thinking person knows, there is precious little difference between Marxism and the other Socialisms, beyond marketing.  "Progressive" is just the latest relabeling of National Socialism, an authoritarian system of government that began as Yellow Socialism in France, but did not catch on in Europe after it was made popular in the USA by Theodore Roosevelt, his cousin FDR, and Woodrow Wilson.

If that is not enough, just read this: Newt Gingrich Praised SEIU Head Andy Stern's Forward-Looking Vision. If you have been following this blog, you will know that Andy Stern is a Socialist who endorses the latest crony capitalism/central planning developments in Red China.  The Huffington Post quotes Gingrich as saying this in his book Real Chance: From the World That Fails to the World That Works:

Andy Stern, the head of the Service Employees International Union, is the union leader who probably best understands the challenge of the world market and the need to make American union members productive in the face of world competition. Sadly, he is a distinct minority among union leaders.

The thing that divides Progressives like Newt Gingrich from libertarians like Ron Paul is freedom, especially the freedom for the consumer to chose in a free market. The sad thing is, Gingrich can play the nomination game better than the Ron Pauls of the world.

Firing Line: A Distinction Between Left And Liberal By Malcolm Muggeridge, Plus Other Buckley Videos

William F. Buckley, Jr. talks with Malcolm Muggeridge about the distinction between Left and Liberal. Bonus, how Mrs. Roosevelt did more damage than Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler, i.e, how Liberalism is bad. Strikes me as similar to how Libertarians view things.

Here (sorry, no embed), Buckley talks about Getting it Right just after its release in 2003.  His introduction to the book is great, covering "the conservative scene" of the 1950s.  During question time, an audience member from AP informs him that Daniel Patrick Moynihan has died and asks Buckley for a few words.

Added bonus. William F. Buckley objects to being called a "crypto-Nazi" by Gore Vidal and threatens to hit him so hard that he will "stay plastered." Over the years Buckley's phrasing has been twisted into "stay stoned."

Gore Vidal: As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.

William F. Buckley: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in your god damn face and you'll stay plastered.

Only included because I have been looking for this clip for years and finally found it.

Still looking for a speech Buckley gave about how "the Left has won" in our society.

Coming soon to a gun show near you!

Was Hitler Really That Bad?

Yes, of course he was.  Now that I have your attention, the real question is: How can anybody think that Lenin, Stalin and Mao were not bad, or even half bad?  It has to do with marketing, called propaganda when it comes from the government.

Hitler bad

As I have mentioned before in Socialists and Marketing, the Socialist is under the impression that every consumer choice is made due to some marketing campaign.  An additional thought now is that Socialists, and Leftists in general, are particularly susceptible to advertising.  It does explain the actions of the Bloombergs, Obamas, and Ayers of the world quite nicely.  Whatever they decide is right and proper is always accompanied by a massive marketing blitz, along with attempts to silence any opposition to their "we are doing it for you" do-goodery.

Stalin not so bad?

What does this have to do with Hitler?  Everything, actually.  With one edict, Stalin turned his Socialist kinsman, atheist Germanic Pagan, vegetarian, cigarette hating, industry nationalizing, frustrated artist into a Right-Winger.  Stalin's order, that Communism was "Left" and everything else was "Right" went out to the Communist true-believers in the "commanding heights of society" to echo for centuries.  In 1928, not even Social Democrats were "Left" enough for Stalin:

Hence the tasks of the Communist Parties:

Firstly, to wage an unceasing struggle against Social-Democratism in all spheres -- in the economic and in the political sphere, including in the latter the exposure of bourgeois pacifism with the task of winning the majority of the working class for communism.

Secondly, to form a united front of the workers of the advanced countries and the labouring masses of the colonies in order to stave off the danger of war, or, if war breaks out, to convert imperialist war into civil war, smash fascism, overthrow capitalism, establish Soviet power, emancipate the colonies from slavery, and organise all-round defence of the first Soviet Republic in the world.

Such are the principal problems and tasks confronting the Sixth Congress.

These problems and tasks are being taken into account by the Executive Committee of the Comintern, as you will easily see if you examine the agenda of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern.

An adorable Mao?

Stalin was in a squabble about Socialist competition and a few years later, he was executing folks like Trotsky, not because they were free-market capitalists, but because they were not Communist enough, especially as their followings grew.  Note the beginnings of the conflagration of fascist.  Stalin lumped the Fascists of Italy in with the Nazis of Germany, whirled the red blender and they became one-in-the-same for the rest of Leftwing history.

Any lie was fine after that, like this one: Not until Germany’s tanks were on the borders of England and France did those governments ‘switch’ sides: now it was their imperialist domination being threatened.  Bolding mine, least anybody miss the detail of absurdity that Socialists toss about.

In their attempts to draw a distinction between the "real" Socialists and those fake National Socialists, the Communist hive came up with a neat little checklist aimed at the National Socialists.  One little problem with that, it describes the Soviet system to perfection.  Quoting just the first point here, the rest is just as comical.

There are several fundamental characteristics of fascism, among them are:

1. Right Wing: Fascists are fervently against: Marxism, Socialism, Anarchism, Communism, Environmentalism; etc – in essence, they are against the progressive left in total, including moderate lefts (social democrats, etc). Fascism is an extreme right wing ideology, though it can be opportunistic.

Meanie Mussolini?

Sure, all of these leftist parties are rivals with each other, the same way Republicans and Democrats in America.  The same way that allies Hitler and Mussolini faced off against each other in France, at the beginning. But National Socialists (fascists in the text) are anti-Environmentalism vs. Communists/Socialists as grand stewards of the earth?   Sounds good on paper, but in reality the Soviet Union, and later China, North Korea, Haiti and Cuba, all destroyed the environment they controlled in rates and volumes unparalleled in all of human history.  Meanwhile, the German National Socialists institutionalized their Environmentalist Movement before and during WWII, called Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (RNG, Reich Nature Protection Law).

Of course, the marketing campaign that only a Socialist could fall for does not end there and what has been referenced above does not explain why Hitler, a murderer of 12 million people can overshadow Stalin, a murderer of 20 million, or for that matter Mao, a murderer of 77 million as the worst human in history.  Arguably, the runner up behind Hitler should be Lenin, with his Cheka murders knocking off about 0.5 million and intentional famine starving millions more. They are all bad, all horrible pieces of disgusting human filth.  But not to the Left, who like to sport t-shirts with images like this:

Heroes of the Left have the highest body counts.

It all goes back to Stalin's Third Period Declaration of 1928.  Once the Socialists get an order, the large portion who take their marching orders from Moscow directly or indirectly, they follow it to any extreme.  After Hitler and Mussolini were declared "bad", for being more popular internationally than Stalin and nothing else, the professors, and other writers populating the commanding heights of society, set to work with a "Stalin good/Hitler bad" narrative that continues today.

Still not convinced?  Ever hear of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?  He was a Gulag survivor who wrote a few good books.  However, not until Soviet leader Khrushchev made a secret speech could his books about the Gulag could be published.  At least the speech was supposed to be a secret.  Israeli intelligence furnished the US Central Intelligence agency a copy, they in turn furnished the New York Times a copy and it was published.  Immediate howling ensued from the true believers of Soviet Socialism, they likened any criticism of Stalin to "spots on the sun", partly because the news came from somewhere besides Moscow.  Eventually Moscow did own up to it, but the speech was either ignored or used as evidence by Western Communists that Khrushchev destroyed communism.

No, Hitler's reputation as "worst ever" certainly has nothing to do with genocide, murder, or intentional starvation.  The people of Finland, the Balkan States and Taiwan can attest that it has nothing to do with "totalitarianism" either.  It is due to marketing of the worst kind.

Conventions

I have always taken issue with fascism and National Socialism being used interchangeably. The biggest problem comes in speech, when one says Fascism but they mean fascism, Yellow Socialism, or National Socialism It is similar to the confusion between an asymmetrical airfoil and a symmetrical airfoil. Using symmetrical and non-symmetrical clears that up nicely. So does using National Socialism for what it is, Socialism with a nationalistic marketing plan, no matter if it is Germans, Israelis, Italians, Spaniards, or Americans doing it and leave the Fascism to Mussolini era Italians.

One thing this convention does is it removes a bad rhetorical 'weapon' from the Socialists who want to confuse the issue. For example, when they call people fascists when they mean Nazi. Now, no member of the National Socialist Worker's Party ever called himself a fascist and no Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) member would ever call himself a Nazi, and neither would sit still to be called one either. However, every member of each group is in fact a Socialist and a National Socialist. Similarly, the International Socialists are Communists, be they Leninist, Stalinist, Marxist, or any of the others. Trotskyites do seem to fall in the National Socialist camp of the Marxists, for now.

The Socialists get a bit irate when one lumps them together. Similar to when various members of religious factions are misidentified. The Communist takes offense at the label Nazi, even though they were allied and voted with each other in the German parliament (Bundestag). Also quite similar to an American baseball Cincinnati Reds fan who takes offense at being called a Boston Red Sox fan. In fiction, the Monty Python players captured this in their film, The Life of Brian, through the use of political satire.

In my upcoming book, Would You Like Borders With That Socialism? I try to stick with the convention of a fascist being a Fascist of Italy, and a Nazi being a member of the National Socialist German Worker's Party. All are National Socialists and all Socialists. The differences appear to be with their marketing strategy and body count.

Would You Like Borders With That Socialism? Progress and Background

I think that I have most of this book in my head now.  The only hurdle is writing it down in a manner that others can follow, or at least stand to read.  The experience is a little strange, because I used to write papers, studies and long reports when I made my living as a defense analyst.  However, those writings were not for that broad of an audience.  There was always someone around to proof read too, and I am doing this solo.  My other books are fiction, set in the future, which is easier and harder than doing this.  It is easier because, in fiction, I invent the world that the characters populate.  Fiction is harder because In have to remember what I made up throughout a series.  I have no problem with consistency in non-fiction, but Socialists and Leftists have none of these problems, because they do not let that pesky consistency bother them.

Actually, the vetting of anything I touched in defense was reviewed, proof read, shot at, blown up, rewritten, and required approval of so many other analysts that it was nearly impossible for it to escape into the wild as bad work.

I am still reading Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism.  I cannot stress enough what a must read book this is for any Libertarian, libertarian, conservative or Conservative.  Small confession here, when I began this writing project I sought out a copy of Liberal Fascism only as a reference source for my new book.  There was one, and only one, copy at Barnes & Noble and my only intention was to find a few important references that Jonah mentioned when he was speaking to the Heritage Foundation.  Being generous here, I will estimate that it took all of ten minutes for me to decide this paperback needed to be on my bookshelf.  It has been my constant companion, second only to my fiancee, for the past week.  See my YouTube channel under Favorites for video of Jonah Goldberg speaking before Heritage and at the Rio Grande Foundation.

One "problem" with this project is, like many other things, I thought of or observed many things that others have written about already.  Liberal Fascism covers more of things I thought of, within the scope of modern political divisions and their roots, than any other book I have found.

If that were all there were to it, I could just pass around writers and essays that match what I like and believe, help others to see the fallacy of Socialism, and be done with it.  Well, there is something else that I hope to bring to the table.  I see other connections that others seem to miss, or at least they do not connect them together.  Sticking with Liberal Fascism, Jonah writes at length about the Leftist/Socialist connection to Moscow.  There is a lot more to that than most political writers seem to acknowledge.

For this post, I leave you with yet another misuse of Fascist/Nazi combined with disinformation all rolled into one.  A video clip I shot 10 OCT 2010 that includes a Lyndon LaRouche supporter 30 seconds into the video.  If you do not know, the Lyndon LaRouche camp are the Democrats who show up at rallies with photoshopped posters of Obama wearing a Hitler mustache.  I allowed the LaRouche supporter to give his spiel about what they stand for.  Basically, they are for everything the Nazis were for, minus the genocide, but they paint Obama as Hitler.  I think the better image for Obama would be a black shirt with that cute little Il Duce cap and fasces.