Alvin Toffler Investigated by FBI for Communist Activities
paleofuture.gizmodo.com
paleofuture.gizmodo.com
consider how quickly Turkey rounded up critics etc after the failed coup attempt.
technology has only made tracking citizens much easier and more detailed
I wonder what would happen if such a list got leaked? would it automatically prompt the listed people to be rounded up? or would it be too transparent, such that the targeted people start collaborating?
"Pete Seeger on being Black Listed in America, 1965: CBC Archives":
In the US, the word “socialism” seems to be confused with ”communism” like they were exchangeable. Mostly like people think vegan and vegetarian are the same thing. Nazis and Soviets were both socialists, despite being classified as right and left wing respectively.
There’s a lot of things the US could do so much better if it understood that even hardcore republicans can be socialist and remain ideologically intact.
I guess we’ll have to find another word for it, since this one seems to have been tainted during the Cold War.
I mostly disagree when you say that Nazis were socialists. Of those people who supported the Nazis, the vast majority did so in part because the Nazis marketed themselves to those people as socialists. On the other hand, Hitler marketed the Nazis to "the industrialists" as enemies of the communists: in Germany too communism and socialism was bundled together. So I would say it's more accurate that Nazism was a bunch of marketing ideas that Hitler et al used to grab power.
Now, you could say the same thing about the soviets, that their ideology was just a tool for grabbing power. They might have flipfloped on other topics, but I don't think they flipfloped on the specific topic of socialism.
They also did some other pretty socialist-things with ecology
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists...
Correct. Ironically the person you're responding had an issue with the black and white claim that "socialism=communism" and wanted to add nuance, and did that by presenting a black and white claim that "the nazis were socialists", which is a claim that could use a lot more nuance.
I spent a (tiny) bit of time looking for other articles on this topic, and it seems like one of the main arguments goes something like "Nazis were not socialists - they were racists". However, I really fail to see what one thing has to do with the other. The other main argument is much better - that the Nazis were using the word "socialist" in their name as a cynical political ploy, and not really an expression of their "true beliefs".
For my part, I have to say I was quite surprised when recently reading "Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich", which talked a bit about the Nazis actual policies towards the economy. I have to say, they certainly sounded very socialist to my (libertarian-leaning) ears. I mean, they took major control of the economy, dictating work hours and salaries, among other clearly socialist/communist things that I can't quite remember anymore.
I think it's a pretty interesting question, and as others have said, "Socialism" isn't so well-defined. But looking at actual Nazi policies instead of motivations and rhetoric seems to me to be table-stakes in actually understanding the issue.
The alternative is liberalism or the absence of planning.
I highly recommend Hayek's Road to Serfdom for more details.
Without rule of law there is barbarism. Any law infringes 'freedom', the thief's freedom, the plunderers freedom, the polluters freedom, the arsonists freedom, the greedy fisherman's freedom, so whose freedom are you going to protect and whose freedom will you take? And if you take someone's freedom they will not consent so you need force.
That means you need planning to develop rules, to convince the majority to agree to the rules, a system to enforce the rules and reach some kind of ongoing consensus for any sustainable peaceful society. And you are back to a society with planning, rules, democracy, governance and loss of 'freedom'. Even a basic marketplace needs 'planning' and rules to function so this 'market as planner' thesis seems aspirational.
But try for a moment to see it from a fascist's perspective. Who they care about, really? It's easy to only see one's peers, and not so hard to feel contempt towards outsiders. I bet that from the inside, fascism can easily feel socialist. A current example I think would be some anti-fascist groups, which despite their stated goals can be pretty fascist.
I guess no one told the soviet union about their antisemitism being incompatible with their ideology.
The British Labour Party is similarly engulfed in an anti-Semitism scandal at the moment, it’s all over the papers.
Most people don’t dive deep into ideologies. They stay in the surface and end up believing whatever the media outlet expresses as a “truth widely acknowledged”.
Political power is all about selling the dream. Various dreams sell differently to various demographics at various times.
The dreams don't have to make sense, or even be implementable. People just have to buy into them. Highly-emotional, easy-to-understand dreams get a lot of buy-in.
One of the things I like about my personal philosophy, which I'm not going to talk about, is that it teaches me how to lose. That is, it teaches me how to compromise with lots of other folks with different dreams. That's quite unusual. Most of the time the hardcore folks of any political philosophy are busy fighting the evil bad guys in some other group and purity-checking the folks in their own camp.
There is a meta level to politics, and you can live there without sacrificing any of your values.
Marx and Engels used them interchangeably too, so you can see where the confusion would arise.
You might be surprised, if you read them, just how little they had to say about how it would all actually work. There’s no detailed blueprint for a communist utopia anywhere in their writing. Mainly they just critique the class system - and you can see that the observations they made were often quite accurate even in today’s world of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy. I’m pretty capitalist myself, but some of this is taking it too far.
So there's no mistake, it's just a historical practice.
It’s true that some corporations did very well under those regimes, but it’s not accurate to say that enriching corporations is why they did what they did. Hitler never thought “starting a war is the perfect cover for making my buddies in the private sector rich”, he wasn’t angling for a lucrative post-political career as a board member or a lobbyist or after-dinner speaker.
Corporate interests were pretty low down the priority list in those regimes. German corporations would certainly have been more competitive and profitable if they had kept their Jewish workers and been permitted to use "Jewish science". The Nazis merrily hamstrung the corporations in their territory for the sake of their overarching ideology, they totally subordinated economic interests to serve the State.
As far as the implication you mention, I wouldn't say that calling yourself a socialist automatically makes you one; I would say that to determine what "socialist" is supposed to mean it is informative to look at what people calling themselves "socialist" believe; but I would especially say that it's unlikely for the "national socialist workers' party" to have come to power by opposing "socialists".
I am not too familiar with all of this, but surely it's not such a weird thought that a party might call itself socialist even if it opposes the actual socialist? A bit like how a despot might call his party or country democratic.
The opposite of socialist isn't capitalist; it's individualist. Nazis were not interested in promoting diversity in society. Exactly the opposite: conscious and explicit elimination of diversity.
The essence of fascism is teamwork. A feeling of togetherness is its binding emotion, subsuming your identity into something bigger than you. (Only by understanding this can you understand why it's so appealing.) The bundle (fasces) that's tied together won't be broken. The problem is that whomever wields the bundle now has outsize power, and whatever is not part of the bundle is garbage to be swept away.
(I am Russian, libertarian, and keep some interest in Cold War history. By the way, Toffler authored amazing books; if you haven’t read “Third Wave” yet, you totally should. It was finished in 1980 and it completely describes the future of today: from societal anxiety from Silicon Valley automation to the rise of Trumpism. I was really impressed.)
Thats why I ask the question.