George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/docume...
Also the wikipedia page states that because of the German (pre-nazi) agreement with the vatican that was seen as lending legitimacy to the nazi government, this rebuke by the pope was seen as a great step forward for German catholics, lending legitimacy to an already existing opposition amonst catholics which was then publicly and violently suppressed ...
I'd be interested in hearing more.
* Germany invades Poland (September, 1939)
* Britain, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand declare war on Germany (September, 1939)
* Soviets invade Poland, which is later split (October, 1939)
* Nazis begin euthanasia of ill and disabled in Germany (October, 1939)
* Soviets attack Finland (November, 1939)
So by the time Orwell published his review, it was clear Germany and the Soviets were mobilizing for war, but it was entirely unclear what would happen next.
In the next six months, Germany would invade Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands while beginning their blitz on Great Britain. The Soviets would take Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Mussolini would meet Hitler in Munich, declare war on France and Britain and Italian forces would take Greece and enter Egypt. The Tripartite Pact would be signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan to formalize their alliance.
It's amazing to me how fast things moved during that time.
The US is looking to disengage as much as possible from global conflicts. I think that they would be extremely reluctant to be pulled into a head on war against Russia/ China over a lot of 3rd countries.
An example could be nuking a large staging area or aircraft carriers. There's nothing irrational about it, once war progresses this far.
The premise is that when the Soviets decided to invade they'd lob a few of these at their forces and pin them down for a little while, so the rest of NATO could mobilize.
It seems that even at that time, the US wanted to keep the conflict nuclear-free as much as possible.
Putin is deliberately isolating conflict regions from each other and from the bigger picture, somehow hoping that no single attack is worth it for NATO to actually retaliate in any form. So far, as long as no NATO countries are in immediate danger, this works extremely well.
(I'm French, just stating)
Before 1783 Crimea was part of Ottoman Empire (Crimean Khanate), from about 1449. That makes 334 years.
And before that Mongols ruled there from about 200 years.
And even before it belonged partly to Kiev Rus' and Bizantium for another 300 years.
So basing solely on the years (assuming that what you mean by historically) it looks like Crimea should go back to Turkey or split between Ukraine and Greece, surly not to Russia.
These cities changed hands every 50 years or less for last few centuries. It's useless to argue about these things.
Basically whole C&E Europe is a huge barrel of powder. If you start to do this stuff (this is MINE because history) the powder will explode.
That's why nobody (except Russia) do it. Even the worst nationalists in Poland don't actually want L'viv or Vilnius. Even though L'viv was a very important city for Polish culture and still 80 years later there are songs about how great a city Lwów was (French wouldn't understand, you only have one city ;) ). It was Polish San Francisco, and we don't want it back.
That's because we know that we are only safe because we're past the WW2 era of petty nationalisms. We've learnt our lesson.
Putin doesn't care - he knows EU is not united enough to react, so he basically replays Hitler 1938 strategy and he goes away with it. French traditionally don't want to die for Danzig(Donetsk this time), they even sell weapons to Putin. Great job, guys.
It's very frustrating to see it in real life and see how useless and clueless western politicians are. Like nobody learnt anything from WW2.
It's pretty unlikely, but there are numerous examples of a larger power intervening in another country in support of a particular ethnic group.
Hitler actually blamed Mussolini's "idiotic campaign in Greece" for his failure in securing major victories against the USSR, so we definitely have much to thank the Greek army for.
This isn't just to be pedantic, I'm currently reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans, and this is an instance of the Nazi emphasis on appearing as though they had a legal basis for their actions, even well into the dictatorship. It's one of the most bizarre parts of the story to me.
The euthanasia was attempted to be done in secret, so under what circumstance the backdating (or even the existence) of the law could possibly have been useful is beyond me. Under Nazi victory, those involved were safe from prosecution, and in case of defeat, the law could not have saved them.
It's like something straight out of the movie Brazil, though not being fiction and having resulted in the death and suffering of countless real people makes not possible to enjoy the insanity of the situation.
I highly recommend the books, though I don't exactly have a weak stomach, and many parts were quite difficult for me. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, which was also extremely long and dense with suffering.
I think we tend to err by confusing cruel governments with common criminals. Criminals tend to be irrational and self-defeating. Governments and larger criminal organizations tend to be cold and calculating, and their use of violence is not random; their goal isn't violence at any cost, like an individual who goes on a killing spree. They wanted to operate a government, after all, and they expected it to be enduring. They could not abolish all order and personal responsibility. Presumably, even if you were doing something abominable as part of your job, government workers could still be fired if they showed up late or got drunk on the job, etc. Maybe record-keeping was considered an essential part of maintaining an organized regime.
Edit: I don't want to overstate the calculating aspect-- It's possible that, from the standpoint of the Nazis, persecuting Jews was a drain on resources and served no rational purpose for the organization, and even that some Nazis were aware and privately opposed it. But what matters as far as running a disciplined organization is not so much that orders must serve a rational purpose; what matters is that the orders must come from the appropriate authority.
This is actually true in any disciplined organization: in the army, if you are in combat and your commanding officer orders you to shoot that guy, you're expected to shoot that guy, period. But the order makes the difference; you can't shoot people at random.
I also don't think it's inevitable that the T4 perpetrators would have been punished if the Nazis had lost power at some point in, say, early 1941. The western world had been increasingly heading in that direction before the war, and to a large and increasing extent it's arriving back there now, as evidenced by, for example, the mysterious absence of Down's Syndrome children in many places these days. Come to think of it, many of the people implicated in T4 didn't in fact end up facing justice after the war either.
could you please expand ?
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10521836
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22418958
[2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pd.2702/full
Wrong, soviets invaded on 17th September. In October most fighting was already done.
People did not want struggling at the time. After the Great depression created by the banks bubble and having everything they could produce taken by countries like France as payment for WWI GERMANS WERE ALREADY STRUGGLING.
Germans were dying in winter because the coal was sent to France as payment. And this is not like winter in Morocco. In Germany you have no energy in winter, with 30 Celsius degrees under zero you die.
Not only they were struggling, but having all what they could make confiscated to pay debts created a very dangerous situation, there was NO HOPE.
They had become slaves. Romans already measured that a slave worked way less than half what a free man did.
So Hitler brought hope. He stopped paying the debt(default), the military occupied the coal areas back for Germany and brought hope.
Is not that he promised suffering, but that he promised that suffering will end.
He also made suffering more tolerable making it social. Hitler created social programs for workers that let them travel and meet other people.
It is probably hard to understand for Westerns, but there are millions of people in Africa or India that are happier than people from the West, even while being very poor, because money is not everything, there are friends, for example, that people from Africa have more than isolated westerns.
Today the world is in Great Depression number II. Countries are over indebted, and we have the same problem they had: economies had stop to a halt and will be there until bad debts are cleaned, and defaults are issued.
Looks to me that it's what Orwell described in that excerpt (at the end of the essay):
> at this moment “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” is a winner.
"He [Hitler] had crushed the German labor movement and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both left and right concurred ... that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.
Plus ca change...
The funny thing is that many conservatives think National Socialism was "socialism", when in fact it was just their very own hard right conservatism. Tea Party and Republican candidates are where the Hitlers of the future will probably arise from.
> Down with immigration! Up with capital! Be a real American!
Welcome to the past.
Edit: I see the fascists have discovered my comment. Down vote away. It doesn't change history.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/25points....
Read it, then tell me if you still don't understand why these people might get classified as left-wing. They implemented quite a few of these points too, by the way. You can say whatever you want about Nazi's but they are by far the most successful leftist party in history, and quite a few "left-wing" rights today were first implemented by Nazi Germany. Big example : pensions. Scholarships (of the for-the-needy kind, not for-the-really-smart kind). There's many examples.
That said, it is beyond obvious that they are not comparable to today's left wing.
As hard as it is to understand today, the left-wing was very much anti-immigrant in the 1930's. But it's just one of many historical facts that have changed. What I still find hard to believe, is that it's the democrats were the pro-slavery anti-black side of the aisle.
Some choice cuts :
(the first parts are anti-versailles, and some anti-immigration)
7. We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.
10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all.
11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13. We demand the nationalization of all trusts.
14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.
15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.
My point was that by figuring out whether the Nazis were left or right wing nothing is learned. There are left wing and right wing democracies and there are left and right wing dictatorships. Left wing governments have killed a lot of people and so have right wing governments.
War profits continued (indeed, Nazis who tried to actually push for getting rid of the profit motive were quickly removed from their posts and marginalized).
"Unearned" income continued. The Nazis even maintained the gold standard for international trade long after the other major economies had devalued their own currency, and much of the mobilization of their wartime economy came via inventive capitalist measures from the Reichsbank, Reich Economic Ministry, military-economic departments of the Oberkommandowehrmacht, and more.
Likewise the trusts were not only not nationalized (at least, at any great scale), but businesses and industry were forced to join specified cartels based on their market sector. It was through these cartels that the Reich enforced economic policy.
Most of the "left wing" economic policies that were enacted were emulated using good old standard "right wing" methods. Markets remained; instead of centrally planning economic output directly, the Reich simply regulated the market such as to achieve mostly the desired effect. Instead of banning refrigerators outright, the Reich simply failed to import enough iron ore to make civilian goods once the priority list for Wehrmacht and export needs had been filled.
Chemical plants that were absolutely essential for the Reich's strategic needs were contracted to companies like IG Farben with profit guarantees and profit sharing agreements, methods that would be perfectly accept to almost any right-wing economist.
There were state industries too (Junkers, a strategic industry expansion program, a steel/coal production cartel, etc.) so it's not as if Nazi Germany didn't have traditionally left-wing attributes to it. But nor was it lacking in traditionally right-wing attributes or methods.
All of these methods were means to an end, as opposed to being taken from either a left-wing or right-wing palette of options because they were left- or right-wing.
Most trusts were nationalized, just nazi style : their management was replaced or forced to obey party rule, mostly by threats. Yes that doesn't technically qualify as nationalization, but for all practical intents it boils down to the same thing. It is most definitely not a laissez-faire policy.
> Most of the "left wing" economic policies that were enacted were emulated using good old standard "right wing" methods
We're talking about the introduction of pensions, scholarships, unemployments payment increases, job guarantees, ...
> Chemical plants that were absolutely essential for the Reich's strategic needs were contracted to companies like IG Farben with profit guarantees and profit sharing agreements, methods that would be perfectly accept to almost any right-wing economist.
You left out the part where the party threatened to imprison (or worse) management if they did any orders that weren't for the government. Frankly, if a party with a thorough reputation for excessive use of violence that is in control of the government threatens prison if you don't sign a contract ... would you consider that free enterprise or laissez-faire ?
I agree that the methods used were not full-blown communist. The state was in absolute control, that was the goal, the means and what happened on the ground. Calling this right-wing policy is lunacy.
The way I see left, right, far left, and far right is this :
left: communist-lite policies. Try to achieve the same aims as communists, trying to avoid the worst inefficiencies of that by having market-based policies, with judicious application of direct government intervention and regulation. Example: Obamacare.
right: laissez-faire policies. Try to achieve (mostly) the same aims as communists, doing as little as possible to achieve those aims. If something needs to be done at all, don't let the government do it itself.
far left: outright communist policy. Put the government in direct control of everything, and have a direct reporting chain into the government for everything that happens. Government intervention is the only thing allowed to exist.
far right: don't try to achieve anything at all using the state. Anarchism.
On this scale, Nazis fall under "far left". They never had the time to really get to full-blown communism but they made great progress in that direction.
That wasn't the point I was trying to make.
And after re-reading, I'm pretty sure that wasn't the point I actually made. In fact I tried to make it pretty clear with the last sentence.
But perhaps it would be simpler to note that the Nazis were not simply a left wing group without confusing substantiation.
Populism alone is not left-wing.
Your definition of left/right doesn't include aspects of the far right such as anti-labor measures (while calling themselves a "worker's party", the Nazis actually destroyed worker rights, which made them appealing to the industrial elite), and extreme racism. The Nazis also used the power of the state in a distinctly right-wing way: as a way to safeguard business and the property rights of the wealthy.
It keeps baffling me how offensive people find the idea that the far left was leaning towards racism and the far right was the more tolerant side of aisle during this period. Things change. Is this really so hard to imagine ? Everyone knows that the Vatican, for example, is very much for equality between races and has actually stood by this stance when politically inconvenient, just like they stand behind their (somewhat lunatic) anti-birth-control stand today. Given that, and the similar attitude of other religions, is it really so hard to believe that when public opinion turns racist (as I'm hoping people are still capable of realizing that it did), populist parties will turn with it, including leftist parties. Conservatives, as the name implies will be more constant, and will resist this change on both sides. Right now they're anti-immigration, because they're more so than the "big" left party, but not by much. That can change in a heartbeat, and if history is any guide, it will.
You know those old movies where you see rich women react to black people as if they were smelly insects ? Those movies are quite realistic and, like today, rich women are rather unlikely to be conservatives. Those people were part of the left. There was a time, not that long ago, when that was the norm, the social and popular thing to do. I bet most black adults can enlighten you to these facts if you're confused.
Everytime some range of immigrants starts lowering pay for a large group of workers, racism becomes popular, for obvious reasons. 1930 in Europe was like 2009, on the Mexican border, for people without a degree, only worse to the point where they actually feared starving to death on a regular basis (especially in Germany, where there were a few regions where there actually was starvation). Is it really so hard to comprehend that under those circumstances, sentiment will turn racist ? Doubly so given that the majority of taxes was going to foreignors ?
I'm willing to concede many points, for example:
- That some branches of the left can be "conservative" at times, if we define conservative to mean "staying with the satus quo". For example, if the status quo is a leftist society. Also, individual people may be conservative as a general attitude towards life, regardless of political ideologies.
- That some groups historically called leftists were so in name only, or had right-wing traits at the same time.
- That the more extremist left and right wing at times are cosmetically very similar, especially when their discourse is at its most strident.
But the Nazis were far-right, paying only lip service to worker's rights. Most Western entrepreneurs were also anti worker's rights, which is why they initially saw Nazis in a very good light. They were definitely not "more tolerant" than the left.
I do not consider the Vatican or the Church as right-wing organizations, by the way. More like conservatists, which I have already agreed is a more broad classification. There exist sub-groups within the Church which belong to the extreme right, of course.
Strange. I must have missed that when it came to
1) First and foremost, Che Guevara. Allow me to quote him
"The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations."
Clearly being a racist murderous bastard does not preclude any leftist credentials. I would argue that if you checked the newspapers in the 1930's and 1950's-60's-70's you will find that similar reverence existed in the left for Hitler (up till July 1941, guess what happened at that moment), and Stalin, even when it was known that Soviets did the extermination camp thing.
Other examples that come to mind
2) the Soviets (against Jews, homosexuals, tatars, ...)
3) The open racism of Egypts various socialist government parties (religious, sexist and ethnic). Most glaringly, the left's support for the arab spring even when it got taken over by the muslim brotherhood, who is not merely racist, but genocidally so.
More generally, you'll see a lot of examples of this in the middle east.
4) The open racism in China, before (and even during) the latest pro-pseudo-capitalism era. And yes, this was while China was doing the Nepal thing.
Again, not just China, but a lot of Asian countries enjoyed this leftist support.
So forgive me for stating the obvious here : the left has a specific agenda, and is certainly willing to accept open racism in people it reveres, racist policies and even racist genocides to some extent, as long as they advance the cause.
I am more of a European-style leftist (meaning I find the democrats nowhere near the centre of the political spectrum), but I have very few illusions on this. I have been a party member at one time (student days ...) and after a while I was forced to conclude that while, yes, it was far-fetched that these people would ever be given the chance for genocide, but
1) there was a (granted, small) group always talking about it. Mostly about Jews and/or Israel
2) after a while I started to believe them.
3) these people were not just tolerated, but actually had high status. Some were part of the "core" of the party.
4) obviously, most people in the party were very much opposed to actually implementing this. Unlike this loud group however, they were not willing to sacrifice anything for that.
I won't discuss China, the Soviet Union, Che Guevara (where is that quote from, btw?) or anything of the sort here. It simply is not possible or suitable to debate this in a forum like hackernews. Call it a cop out if you want :)
However, I'll say I disagree with your fundamental assertion, that the Left is willing to tolerate open racism when it suits their needs. Racism stands directly against what the Left stands for. Of course corrupted leftist movements, often leftist in name only, are free to forget leftist ideals, just as religious organizations sometimes forget their founding principles.
But let me place emphasis on this: if a leftist movement turns racist, this is a serious contradiction that must be pointed out. If a rightwing movement is racist, there is no contradiction and its intended audience will applaud it; racism and discrimination are cornerstones of rightwing thought. It is a mistake for a leftist movement to tolerate a racist ally when it would temporarily help heir cause, but this is never a mistake for a rightwing movement because racism is often part of its core ideology.
By this definition, which I think is mainstream, it's impossible to consider the Nazis a far left movement. I believe there is an ideological intent to conflate the two extremes, left and right, which says less about them than about the people doing the conflating...
Both the extreme left and the extreme right are very much opposed to unions. Ergo making a difference between them on that basis seems impossible.
It worked on the other side of the fence as well : Nazi Germany restricted or outlawed trade and business organisation just as it did it unions. They went after the Church too. They restriced universities. They replaced or otherwise forced the management of large businesses to do their bidding too. Hell, they went after a number of soccer clubs.
And the Soviets did the same. Slightly different order, with the emphasis placed slightly differently, but the same result.
In general I'd say that extreme left and extreme right are both totalitarian ideologies and will not allow any form of authority or power to reside in any organisation other than their own. Left or right merely determines the order and the emphasis.
Failing said state, it would require a very sizeable majority of the whole mass of people to simply switch over all at once, and again, somehow defend that new order from warlords and parasites.
But the propaganda that Stalinism is actually what socialism stands for was in the interest of both sides of the cold war, and we live with this "repeat-until-its-true" legacy today.
I was about to upvote you when I read this. Please don't be so anally frustrated in the future.
Sure, there are branches of Conservative thoughts that intersect with National Socialism, but the very same thing can be said about social liberalism.
In reality, however, neither side -- left or right -- in America is that close to the ideas of National Socialism.
To suggest otherwise is either genuine ignorance or a weak attempt to score political points.
...
> False equivalence is a logical fallacy which describes a situation where there is a logical and apparent equivalence, but when in fact there is none. It would be the antonym of the mathematical concept of material equivalence.
...
> A common way for this fallacy to be perpetuated is one shared trait between two subjects is assumed to show equivalence, especially in order of magnitude
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
The party that attracts militias is probably not the same as the one that attracts pacifists.
Modern American conservatism, especially lately, is almost exclusively the boring and literal type of conservatism--the type that talks about traditional values and the merits of the status quo and says "no" to all these new liberal initiatives, ranging from gay marriage to Obamacare. It doesn't have the desire to overthrow the existing order of things, nor the ideological fervor to know what to do if it did.
Mao's leadership led to the death of 45 million:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/m...
Stalin killed an estimated 20 million:
http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kil...
Pol Pot killed 1.4 million+:
Ah yes the great "leftist" Mao, so "left" wing, he purged everyone who disagreed with him (McCarthy?). Ah yes Stalin, "left" wing extraordinaire with his extermination and enslavement of Russian minorities (The Conservative American South?). Pol Pot, such a "left" wing hippy he was a jack booted military thug (Brownshirts?).
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics
vs.
> Right-wing politics are political positions or activities that view some forms of social hierarchy or social inequality as either inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically justifying this position on the basis of natural law or tradition.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics
Which one seems to be more favorable to enacting your statement:
> exterminates and enslaves minorities
The equality faction or the hierarchy faction?
Here is an analogy:
You can claim yourself to be a pacifist (left wing) all you want. But if your actions are aggressive and cause war (right wing), then you aren't a pacifist, even if you claim to be one.
Yes, and these are the positions Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot took. They killed people using the justification that the people they killed were standing in the way of these ideals.
The next demagogue to rack of a massive body could could come from either the left or the right.
Also, if pacifism is left-wing, then the Obama administration is certainly not left-wing or anything close to it, since he has repeatedly authorized military action. I suppose you could finesse this point by saying that neither major party in the US is left-wing by your criterion. But trying to apply this more generally, for example to claim that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were not "really" left-wing, looks a lot like a "no true Scotsman" argument.
In fact, by the pacifism criterion, I'm not aware of any government or political movement that has ever been left-wing; the closest thing to it would be some religious orders, like the Amish, who really do try to be pacifists. (Some people would put the Quakers in this category, but the Quakers have always flavored their surface pacifism with a strong pragmatic streak; they sold gunpowder to Washington's army during the American Revolution, for example.) But this makes "left-wing" a basically useless term, not to mention that you would have to explain to an awful lot of people that they have been using it wrong for a long time, since most people apply the term to Stalin, as I noted above, as well as Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
Finally, if left-wing means supportive of social equality for everyone, then once again, there are hardly any true left-wingers and never have been. Take trade unions, for example: yes, they're very supportive of social equality for their members, but are they equally supportive of social equality for management? Not to mention social equality for people who are not members but would like to learn one of the trades that are unionized? In my experience, unions do a very poor job with things like apprenticeship programs, because training new members means less job security for existing members.
Similarly, central planning in economics, which is supposed to promote more economic equality, ends up giving special privileges to the planners and those who are closely connected with them (like large financial institutions); witness the huge bailouts of investment banks after the crash of 2008, while ordinary people got foreclosed on. The closest thing to true left-wingers by this criterion are left-libertarians or anarchists (which, to be fair, the Wikipedia article does mention).
I'm pretty sure that Stalin has been post-categorized into the "Left-Wing" camp as he stood for "Socialism".
That one label is about the only thing about Stalin that could be classified as "Left-Wing". There has been an enormous amount of jostling amongst all "Left-Wing" political parties (globally) since then in order to differentiate themselves from Stalin.
"Socialism" is now very different from Stalin's view of it, just as "Liberalism" has now been watered down to mean anyone who isn't on the extreme right.
Arguing left vs right is not the way to view this problem. Seeing through the emotive labels and debates, and analyzing the actual behaviour will show you that personal power is the driving motivator, not any political ideology.
According to Plato "The measure of a man is what he does with power". Most of our world leaders at the moment aren't measuring up.
Didn't released documents after 1989 show that most of the West European communist parties took orders directly from Moscow/Stalin?
IIRC, it was a big shock that the reason the Italian communist party was so reasonable after WW II was because it was orders from Moscow. (Stalin wanted to split Europe in two.)
I remember that the Swedish communist party used to be staunch Stalinists until Moscow told them he was wrong. Is that where the different view of Socialism came from? :-)
(The Swedish communists (SKP/VPK/V) claim to have stopped taking orders in the 1960s and have been critics of Soviet since 1989.)
I'd also refrain from conflating the "communist" parties from Europe with "Socialism", despite the obvious, ideological connections. Times had changed, labels were still being re-used.
I agree that terminology in this area is very, very messed up. That's largely because the terminology has been used as a tool to gain and hold power, rather than as a tool of clear communication--Stalin being an obvious example.
So you mean "left wing" is anything that leads to peace and "right wing" is anything that results in war. You may want to look up "tautology" or "circular reasoning".
By that standard a successful nuclear strike is left wing, and a failed one is right wing.
Similarly, if we do the obvious thing and conflate "left wing" and "socialist", and believe that socialism has an ideological character beyond simply hating the existing organization of society, then extermination, slavery, thuggery, coercion, and violence are inherently anti-socialist.
This view is also the conclusion Orwell was operating under---the utopian ideal of capital-S Socialism which he approved of was used as operating cover to assist in the seizing of power by technocratic middle classes.
This view was pretty much explicitly stated in the Goldstein treatises in 1984, which described "English Socialism" as actually a form of "oligarchical collectivism," and claimed that "The Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism."
Similarly, there's this bit from the supposedly ex-Trotskyist James Burnham (who Orwell rightly abuses for being a power-worshiping scumbag):
"Some apologists try to excuse Marxism by saying that it has ‘never had a chance’. This is far from the truth. Marxism and the Marxist parties have had dozens of chances. In Russia, a Marxist party took power. Within a short time it abandoned Socialism; if not in words, at any rate in the effect of its actions. In most European nations there were during the last months of the first world war and the years immediately thereafter, social crises which left a wide-open door for the Marxist parties: without exception they proved unable to take and hold power. In a large number of countries — Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, England, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, France — the reformist Marxist parties have administered the governments, and have uniformly failed to introduce Socialism or make any genuine step towards Socialism... These parties have, in practice, at every historical test — and there have been many — either failed Socialism or abandoned it. This is the fact which neither the bitterest foe nor the most ardent friend of Socialism can erase. This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the Socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, Socialism is not going to come."
To be fair, it's easy to believe claims about Stalin not being a socialist are simply ego-bruised leftists invoking the No True Scotsman fallacy. I don't think this necessarily applies simply because socialism is inherently an ideology. If someone claims to be a pacifist while marauding through a public place with an assault rifle, massacring people as they go, we have no problem resolving this dissonance: the murderer's claims of pacifism are simply lies.
Of course, pacifism was never taken all that seriously to begin with, so it's safe for us to simply say "you're lying about being a pacifist." We feel a bit more constrained telling someone they're lying about their status as a Christian or a socialist.
> How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists.
I'd have been better off identifying him as a Christian Democrat although that lacks something. He was one of the last of the Junkers Prussian caste to rule, and that really doesn't compare to much outside Germany and then only before WWII.
Of what came after, I'd say the CDU is closest to what von Hindenburg stood for, although it's still a stretch.
I dunno then - what do you call post-Bismarck welfare-state Germany? It was certainly cradle-to-grave, something we now identify with socialism. And yes - Bismarck was generally considered a conservative as well.
But the entire idea of Germany was basically... uh... racial. So it's a racial-ist socialism. Don't look at me like that, it's was their doing :) 19th century, phrenology, all that.
The Wikipedia page refers to Bismarck as a "revolutionary conservative". Ooh, my head hurts now :)
And technically Conservatism is also quite Liberal, coming as it had from Burke. It's just been abused to identify illiberal things.
What surprised me is that Orwell did not directly identify the sadomaschistic core of Naziism. Perhaps that came later, but given "Burmese Days" and how well known the ...libertine nature of Wiemar was, why I'd a thought...
I think this thread has reached a Godwin level. Both may be right-wing but:
Hitler supported abortion, gun control, big government, and other things the conservatives claim to be against.
To simply say conservatives = Hitler because both are right-wing is just as wrong as saying liberals = communists or anarchists because all are left-wing.
Well, it's hard not to mention Nazism in a thread about Mein Kampf... (sorry, I couldn't resist -- I do get what you are saying though).
Doesn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...
There are liberals in the government today, but they are a minority and wield very little power.
Here's an interesting historical perspective of the Supreme Court:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_leanings_of_U.S._Su...
And a contemporary analysis of Congress:
http://thatsmycongress.com/house/ http://thatsmycongress.com/senate/
The extreme skewing towards conservatism is most evident at the extreme ends of the spectrum in the House: there are only 22 strong liberals vs 74 strong conservatives. There are two Congressmen with perfect 100 conservative scores and not a single one with a perfect liberal score.
As for your list of "true" liberals, McGovern is the only one who strikes me as consistently furthering "liberal" positions (by which I mean "liberal" by the definition you appear to be using--see below). Mondale didn't strike me as consistently furthering much of anything. Johnson got us deep into Vietnam. FDR got us into World War II (by which I don't just mean he was President when it started, I mean he consistently took actions, often covert ones, that were calculated to get us into the war). Douglas voted with the majority in Korematsu v. United States (his positions did change over time, so, for example, he wrote the majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut; but that just points up the fact that he wasn't always consistent). Marshall did win Brown v. Board of Education, but while education in the US is more integrated today than it was then, I question whether it is any more equal, unless it's in the sense that it's more equally bad. (To be fair, Marshall was pretty consistently liberal in his opinions as a Supreme Court Justice.)
Of course, from your point of view, this just makes the case stronger that "true" liberals have very little power in the US. But from my point of view, it makes the case stronger that your definition of the word "liberal" is not a useful or historically accurate one.
When did foreign journalists have access to ccs? When did ccs have markets in broad daylight? Where is forced labour? (I didn't mention starvation etc because those ones are contested but still.)
I literally don't like to bring this up as it isually brings downvotes but letting people frame something this important, -no.
1. Gaza has among the highest population growths on the planet. Anyone implying organized murder is ... well, to not be impolite I also have to say: "is an offense to anyone who experienced any real [concentration camp]".
2. The borders were quite open to Israel, until the murders of Israeli civilians really started. It was common that people commuted to work in Israel and Israelis drove the car over to Gaza to have it fixed. Some problems are self generated.
But I should say that I didn't really want to emphasize the "conservative" aspect of what Orwell wrote about Hitler so much as that he was able to get away with a lot of what he did in the early days because the "property-owning classes" allowed him to. That is the part I found chilling.
It is better associated with the Warsaw ghetto, but your requirements for a concentration camp are not actually definitive of one.
Is Gitmo a concentration camp? How about Manus Island? Azouli Prison? These "detention centers" are full of people put there by both conservatives and self-labelled "liberals".
Left / Right, Conservative / Liberal, etc. don't really matter if the people in charge are just aligning themselves with these ideologies for political gain. I think you'll find that the politically opposed leaders of the world have more in common with each-other than they do with the average members of the populations they represent.
More seriously the claim was xxxism doesn't send people to concentration camps, this was responded to by counter examples. This is a perfectly reasonable response and disproof of the claim that xxxism doesn't send people to concentration camps. It was not a standalone claim that xxxism leads to concentration camps which may need to be supported as you wish.
I know the ideology wasn't xxx but exactly what it is isn't important to the point I was making.
People justify their actions with -isms and theses and society often accepts those justifications. You can always say the -ism isn't to blame, because the person would have probably found another suitable -ism to justify their actions anyway.
The mistake a lot of people make is assuming that political leaders actually believe in ideologies (-isms), rather than assuming they just manipulate them for their own gain. Most politicians will flip-flop on any stance if their constituents demand it.
Nazism entails the belief that a group of humans is inferior to other humans and that they can be destroyed. The arrow "someone is Nazi" -> "someone sends people to concentration camps" follows from their ideology. It would be absurd to say that Jainists or postmodernists send people to concentration camps, because nothing about their beliefs suggests a destruction of other people!
Saying that people's -isms "don't do anything" is dangerously morally relativist. Don't pretend that meaningful things cannot be said about the consequences Nazist beliefs might have. -isms are an important categorization of what kind of software people are running on their brains. It is useful in distinguishing what kind of destructive behaviour that software can result in.
Secondly, you're conflating modern American ideas of what a Conservative is with what it would have meant in the 1930s or earlier. In the 19th century, conservatives would have been the guys in favour of protectionism and big government intervention in business, compared to the liberals of the day who'd have been more in favour of laissez-faire economics. By the 1940s, laissez-faire had been discredited by the Great Depression and nobody was too enthusiastic about the free market.
As for concentration camps, they were invented by the Conservative British government during the Boer war. (The six or seven death camps in Poland were an unprecedented phenomenon, so far unique to Nazi Germany, of course).
Political ideas change over time. You're trying to impose modern political ideas inappropriately onto what happened in the past.
http://www.vice.com/read/undercover-in-americas-privitised-p...
The money quote:
"I didn’t believe that a “concentration camp” could exist in America until, in Phoenix, Arizona, I saw one with my own eyes."
(full disclosure I work at Genius.)
So please don't hijack it.
For philosophical reasons: genius is about annotating text, and as a result, about close reading. We'd rather optimize for a close read than a speed read.
Moreover you actually break selection pretty badly along with it. There are other ways to annotate than to pop crap up every time a user highlights text.
I'm in no mood of solving UX problems for a website that has gotten me so disgusted within seconds of opening it. And no, this is not an exaggeration. Imagine if, while reading the newspaper, every few seconds some really annoying guy moved it out of the way and yelled "DID YOU SEE THE SPORTS SECTION?" or similar crap you don't care about. This is the most direct analogy I can find to explain the situation to someone who doesn't highlight-read.
Would this bother you as much if the "Annotate" pop-up was off in the margin?
Would it be possible to move the button just to the right of the highlighted block? Then speed-readers don't get hindered, and the annotate functionality remains usable.
DO NOT fuck with basic functionality.
[edit: Come to think of it, I'd love to see three modes: the current highlight, none, and footnotes (which one might hoover/click). Whenever I read annotated texts, I rarely care about all annotations -- I only look up the things I need to look up. And the highlights are really annoying when reading a text.]
I'm not sure that any propaganda is necessary to convince 99.9% of people that the instigator of the largest genocide in human history is, in fact, a "caricature of pure evil."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll Mao Zedong is believed to be responsible for 34,300,000–63,784,000 deaths and Joseph Stalin for 23,000,000–60,000,000.
And where is this written as Canon?
Politics is also performed with imperfect predictions of the future. If policies pursued in good faith result in the death of millions, the people implementing them are not as responsible as those for whom death is the policy.
Now, if their intent was to starve the masses to further their goals, you would have a point.
> And where is this written as Canon?
In the minds of the survivors.
> If policies pursued in good faith result in the death of millions, the people implementing them are not as responsible as those for whom death is the policy.
History doesn't see it that way. People don't see it that way. Hitler and Stalin are equally reviled, even though Hitler's genocide was intentional and Stalin's was a side effect of "good intentions" -- a Communist revolution.
> Now, if their intent was to starve the masses to further their goals, you would have a point.
Like Mao and Pol Pot? Both were able to explain their programs as "for the good of the people", and both pursued their programs long after their effect was perfectly clear.
killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The intent is important, no matter what you might believe. That's why the killings in Srebrenica were recognized as genocide, even though "only" 8000 civilians were killed. It does not matter if 10 million or 10 thousand are killed, the intent is all that matters.
What follows is that the starvation caused by Maos policies were not a genocide, no matter how many people died, simply because the government didn't intend to kill all Chinese systematically. Quite to the contrary, they seriously believed that collectivization would end the starvation that has plagued China for decades.
The same applies to most deaths caused by Stalins regime. In some cases there was genocide going on, but the largest part of the victims of his regime were due to failed economic policies (starvation) and political persecution.
Whereas Hitlers policy was to exterminate ethnical or religious groups he deemed worthless, like the Jews, the Slavs, the Roma and many more. He clearly had the intention to exterminate those groups, he even stated it publicly.
For a discussion on the historiography see http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-...
Thus, communism is associated with a wider spectrum of ideas and events than nazism, and because of that expressing some forms of communist ideas is tolerated in the modern society better than expressing the Nazi ideology.
the nuke could have done it. Scientifically Germany was on top since the second half of 18-nth century. Oppie took a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Gottingen, 1927.
> this thread rises lots of questions
'evil is perverted good' Paracelsus of middle-ages.
There are however also theories that people actually didn't knew how ugly this was and there was often uncertainty if actually systematic genocide was in progress. It was only after allies found concentration camps, mountain of skulls, gas chambers etc, they realized full extent of what was going on. So Hitler's "caricature of pure evil" probably wasn't possible because of lack of reliable facts until he got defeated.
The mistake often made in describing the crimes and actions of the Third Reich is to somehow dehumanize them, turn all the players into demons and monsters, the same techniques used by the Nazis themselves to target and exterminate Jews and other undesirables. To dehumanize Nazis is to turn them into archetypes as opposed to functioning humans; it sets us up to be "surprised" again when traits of the Nazis show up elsewhere, in other places, at a lessened level but with the same misguided goals and logic behind them.
So, merely reading it transforms you into a monster?
It is amazing though how it pretty much spells out exactly what he would end up doing once he took power, in all the horrid detail, and yet some politicians of the time believed that simple appeasement would work...
As someone else here said, the lesson is that crazy people sometimes mean what they say, even when it sounds totally crazy.
Yeah, the challenge is to figure out which crazy people are actually crazy and mean what they say, and which ones say crazy things simply to gain votes.
Well, at least most of them are really short.
I'm unsure what the definition of pamphlet is, but the communist manifesto definitely exceeds what I'd consider length limits for pamphlets.
The definition of a pamphlet is an unbound booklet, which is how the Manifesto was originally printed. It's length was 23 pages.
Having anything about Mein Kampf in your browser history is absolutely zero problem in the US at least.
You could read about Hitler and read his book all day long if you like, nothing will come of it. Not an exaggeration, not a joke.
Mein Kampf can be purchased at just about any major bookstore in the US. Very few people in this country would find it weird or shocking if you read that book. If you proclaim an association with his ideas or the Nazi movement, that's an entirely different matter.
The legal situation is this:
The free state of Bavaria has inherited Hitler's assets. Including the copyright to My Kampf.
Bavaria does not allow any reprints, unless for scientific purposes with commentary alongside the text. Obviously publishers abroad don't always care about that.
(Interestingly, publication in the US and England is actually legal, since the rights to publish in English were sold long before Hitler's death).
Other than that copyright issue there is no legal mechanism in place to ban Mein Kampf. People have been buying, bequeathing and selling unannotated versions (of which there are many around, the Third Reich isn't some fantastically distant past, after all!) without problems.
The question that has been popping up in political circles every now and then and that has reached some urgency now is how to proceed.
Because Hitler died in 1945, his copyright ends on January 1st, 2016.
There are people calling for special legislative action, but I doubt it's coming.
You can easily find the English edition online.
Especially his speeches, rhetorics and strategies, and why they worked out how they did.
I hate to feel that hitler is somehow still a little controversial today. I don't really want to watch his speeches or read what he was saying because it's a little depressing and painful to think about, but understanding how he politically convinced people, and the underlying causes.
We're safe from that today, but I'd still like to understand how we protected ourselves from that happening again.
It already happens where I live where we have what I'd consider a mean government in power, winning the vote based on fears over financial position and terrorists and Muslims and whatever else.
I think the belief that we're more wary and would "see it coming next time" is quite dangerous.
Mein Kampf actually does not have any plans or even hints for the atrocities that Hitler's regime performed later on. There are few words of Hitler's dislike for jews here and there where he basically complains that they are not as sophisticated as Germans, they smell, have unusual rituals, they look different etc. He then complains about they controlling major outlets of newspapers and art. Finally he discloses his real reason for dislike: He believed that jews supported socialist party that Hitler hated truly bottom of his heart, perhelps far more than jews.
One should not underestimate frustration of German people in those days. After WW-I, the peace treaty essentially put Germany in the dumpter. They can't have their army, Austria was broken apart, country needed to pay huge sums as part of the treaty and entire nation was under extreme financial depression. It was difficult to get a loaf of bread during that time for an average person. German people though their nation was sold off to winners of World War by their monarch. They thought they had been forever relegated as defeated people from who winners of the war stole everything. This was quite opposite to their belief of Germany as the greatest nation before the WW-I started.
Hitler promised to make bold moves including breaking the post WW-I treaty and payments all together. He promised to throw away monarch and socialist party which were favoring the status-quo. It was little surprise that he won hands down in elections.
The interesting part of Mein Kamf is that Hitler was rather regular guy without any political connections and even desires during the early years. He had bad experiences with members of socialist party which combined with his belief that nation was being sold by them and monarchs, lead him to rebel without caring about consequences including going to prison. This gave him publicity and outlet to write articles in newspapers as well as his autobiography. This in turn earned him strong supporters and even more exposure. Rest is the history.
I wonder how much anyone care about not going in to war, deep in one's heart, to not let crazy type be in control, especially nowadays politicians.
I believe democracy and moderate, boring, slobbish politics are still the key in having a peaceful civilization. If the CIA is conspiring to assassinate potential war-mongerers, I would feel fine about it. Conspiracists have a point that peaceful and consented exploitation is a sad situation to be in, but it's far better than the many past horrors of conflict.
The more WW2 gets old, the more people don't realize what war really is. Short conflicts in the middle east or vietnam are not the same than when a conflict comes at your doorstep.
Somebody asked, why this document is so high up-voted. I would say, we can't up-vote it enough, when we have the chance to learn from history and especially from the dark sides of history and from people like George Orwell.
Chance is very big, that a new era of darkness could fall on humanity, if we don't stop it at the right time (and nobody knows, when the chance is over).
For some time governments that were opposed to Hitler congratulated themselves on resolving international territorial disputes without all the messy fighting and dying. Hitler's troops were clearly superior to those of the countries he was invading (in terms of number and equipment) so the outcome was obvious and the actual business of conflict seen as archaic, other than maybe a few token shots to satisfy military honor. Even when Germany and Britain finally declared war on Hitler, there was no actual fighting at first - this period is referred to by historians as 'the Phoney War', and at the time it was humorously called 'Sitzkrieg' (a pun on the Blitzkrieg, or 'lightning war' style of Hitler's conquests up to that point). It was imagined that when Britain and France had their forces in place, they could be sized up against the German forces, and a simple economic calculation would quickly bring Hitler to the negotiating table.
To the astonishment of most of the allies (though not Winston churchill, who had dourly foreseen exactly this outcome) Hitler responded to the deployment of forces with an all-out attack, ignoring treaties and invading the Low Countries (Belgium, NL, Luxembourg) almost incidentally in order to encircle the British and the French, dealing a crushing blow. France in particular wildly overestimated the robustness of its own defences, which were essentially a giant fortified wall (the Maginot Line). Since the Germans had been manning their version (the Siegfried Line) without doing anything very much, the French convinced themselves that they had forced a stalemate and that sooner or later a diplomatic solution would emerge.
Obviously, I'm simplifying a great deal here.
Now of course, people might have responded to Hitler much earlier if they had taken all his Jew-baiting and so on at face value, and realized that when he talked about exterminating large groups of people he meant exactly that, as opposed to just conquering and looting in the traditional fashion. But I can easily imagine contemporary parallels.
Now of course, people might have responded to Hitler much earlier if they had taken all his Jew-baiting and so on at face value, and realized that when he talked about exterminating large groups of people he meant exactly that, as opposed to just conquering and looting in the traditional fashion.
If people had called Hitler's bluff, things would have gone differently. Do you think the next one will be able to bluff?
Of course, another major factor in enabling Hitler to become Hitler was the circumstances of world power. WWII didn't happen in a vacuum. It was the dramatic culmination of the centuries-long rise of Europe. You mentioned that WWI was destructive. But not destructive enough: thirty years later the same adversaries were ready for another attempt to settle scores and dominate Europe. WWII had to be the end of that cycle: after WWII, Europe was shattered, and world power had shifted to the east and west. The Europe that the combatants had sought to dominate no longer existed.
I'm not much of a scholar of Napoleon, but the way it was framed to me was that the Napoleonic war(s) was the first total war: the size of the French forces were unprecedented, and contemporaries could have been forgiven for not predicting the outcome. Each subsequent war of this type raised the stakes further. That cycle has run its course forever, because the stakes are now so high that victory would mean acquiring territory that was radioactive and uninhabitable.
PS. One of the things that's striking about Mein Kampf is how provincial and small-minded it is. I read a little bit, and one of Hitler's biggest bugbears was the Habsburgs and their treatment of Austria. Hitler was very much a product of his time and place. That time and place is gone forever.
My final point: no one wants to be the next Hitler. What do you suppose was going through Hitler's mind when he committed suicide in a bunker beneath Berlin, surrounded by foreign armies closing in from all sides? He may have anticipated being hanged as a war criminal, or feared retribution from his own people now that defeat could no longer be credibly denied. People make a lot of how Hitler was a maniac and insane, but he knew he lost. In photographs of Hitler from near the end of the war, he looks clearly downcast and exhausted. Hitler started the war maniacally certain of victory, and he ended his reign thoroughly aware of his failure. Hitler was not an imbecile, and if he had known what was coming, I don't think he would have chosen it.
I do agree that nobody could be as obvious about their ill intentions as Hitler was; mass communication through radio, film newsreels and so on was a fairly new phenomenon when he rose to power and people were not fully aware of how it could support totalitarianism as they are today. But you can get away with a lot in politics by simply making the right noises, sadly.
Has a totalitarian state always to come with a crazy person? How about a group of people, how about a system, where you don't see "one big dictator"?
The people in the 30s also did not foresee another big dictator rising. Other parties in Germany for example thought, they could "tame" Hitler.
I don't think that mustache will come back into style. Ever.
The USSR was initially part of an anti-fascist pact but made amends with Germany after the western allies' betrayal of Czechoslovakia.
If Germany hadn't broken their agreement with the USSR the Soviets probably would have stayed out of the war - remember that they had just been humiliated by the Finns.
He only "ruined it" for all future Hitlers in the next ~100 years. A lot of peace and prosperity we have enjoyed in the last 60 years can be attributed to people remembering and recovering from death and destruction of the II World War. There are only few people alive today who lived during WWII, soon there will be no one with first-hand memories of what has happened then. You can already see a new wave of nationalistic trends. For many young people today, Hitler is no different than Napoleon, Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan - some dude who killed a lot of people some time ago. They can't relate to them in any way.
A lot is made of the fact that people are ignorant of history, but Hitler wasn't: he loved history, perhaps a little too much. He inserted himself into historical events and imagined that he could right historical wrongs and slights suffered by Germans. That is the underlying theme of Mein Kampf. You can say that he distorted history, and I won't dispute that point -- however, his ideas were based on real events, with added sentimentality and sensationalism, the way Hollywood movies are.
Nazism was crushed as thoroughly and decisively as probably any movement ever has been. Hitler is despised by people that don't even know history. Historical events may become dormant, but they are remembered when they become pertinent again, and there has rarely been a historical event as clear and one-sided as WWII: whether Hitler was wrong is a matter of opinion and can be debated (not a good idea in public), but that Germany suffered total military defeat under Hitler's leadership is indisputable fact.
EDIT: I can only attribute this silly parrallel between Hitler and Napoleon to Orwell's origins. Being a British writer, he was probably educated throughout his life to loathe Napoleon, presented as the ultimate Evil causing trouble in Europe.
"I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it."
Similarly, Hitler saw himself as being the concrete expression of the soul of the German people. He may not have been aware of the quote, but the ideas it expressed were strong themes in the German romantic movement.
"As far as the philosophy of history is concerned, what is the first trait of the Hegelian vision of the Napoleonic hero ? A famous passage is often quoted. It is an extract from the letter Hegel addressed from Iena to his friend Niethammer, October 13th, 1806, when he had just finished writing The Phenomenology of Mind : " I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it. " (Correspondance, T. I, p.114)."
"Napoleon soul of the world" makes a pretty good search phrase[2].
[1] http://www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/files/napol... [2] https://www.google.com/#q=emperor+napoleon+this+soul+of+the+...
Anyway, let me recommend "Down and out in Paris and London". It taught me more about the human condition, and why you want to stamp out poverty and let everyone to be able to have a humane life, than most any book I ever read.
Also, imho after learning a bit about Eastern Europe after 1945, I put "Animal farm" along "1984". It is a master piece.
Edit: 'adventured', I really hope you are correct. The problem with your argument is that we see Hitler with hindsight now; he was a joke in the beginning too.
Even Putin's attempts at nationalistic projection have been remarkably pathetic by historical comparison. Putin's dominance of Russia won't leave the mark / impact that other far more dangerous people throughout history have. Stalin would eat Putin for lunch.
I expect Putin to be forced out of office, rather than die in office. If Putin's inner circle wanted him gone, he'd be gone tomorrow. Eventually they'll tire of him.
"The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century." - Putin 2005
This seems wrong (with hindsight, I suppose). My mental image of Orwell is that he was quite sharp. How did he manage to get this bit wrong so badly? Does anyone know the reason?
Given how prosperous and successful such societies have turned out to be in the past (they all failed), I would have expected someone to just reject it outright in favour of all the other ideas like individuality and freedom, as they are clearly better. I mean, you can't say some ideology is "psychologically sound" and have all its adoptees crash and burn everywhere causing untold amounts of damage. That's not sound at all.
So I was wondering if he meant it, or he was just depressed from how the war was going in 1940. Plus, and maybe I'm just ignorant, I always thought he was against totalitarianism.
What he writes, does not imply that he is pro-totalitarianism. He only says, that the concept to give people something to hope for, to fight for, to give their life for a "higher meaning" is a more sound psychological concept as "hey, have a good time ... and just live for the next gadget"
I think Orwell was wrong, but not for the obvious reasons.
As an observation, it's impossible to argue with the suggestion that humans need more than comfort. Humans have been creating crusades, pogroms, holy wars, riots, race riots, and revolutions since almost forever.
But I don't think he understood what made Nazi fascism so extreme - which is the way it turned war, patriotism, and death into ends in their own right, rather than means to an end.
There was no pretence at higher purpose or salvation. The entire German political system became a suicide and death cult, and swallowed itself whole.
Maybe not in the traditional form (with religious meaning), but in a new, nationalistic form. The pretence of a higher purpose of the NS system was in my opinion, that the nation will succeed in its god given plan to succeed. You can hear it shining threw in many of Hitlers speeches.
No, when you understand "purpose" in a strict religious way, it did not have such pretence. But when you have an open mind to something that is more common than religion, it definitively had.
There are also many things that are clearly directed into a cult or replacement-religion. Also Hitler uses many religious phrases and imitations. Many see this as a clear sign for a cult.
Also the fact, that for example the wife of Goebbels killed her children, speaks clearly that many people (many killed themselves either) lost all hope and life purpose, because the NS system was (for them) something like the salvation for the German nation.
>The entire German political system became a suicide and death cult, and swallowed itself whole.
Now you say it yourself and contradict yourself by saying that it became a cult. It was a kind of cult and thus had the pretence of a higher purpose. (of course, if you always define "purpose" as going to heaven, you are right -- but in my opinion there are different levels or kinds of purpose).
That is right. But this was possible, because with the dead of the system, many of the involved people also lost hope for Germany as a whole. I don't want to excuse, what they did (some of them slaughtered their own people and behaved like real monsters), but in some cases it might become a little more understandable.
I also don't want to show this cult in a shiny light. It was really a death cult (and that from the start) -- but because of a different reason: The system was based on the notion, that the German nation will rise -- and the condition for that was, that others had to fall. It was a kind of social-darwinism (hope, got that word right). This whole notion: I will rise, and others have to fall (for that) is anti-christian and a total abuse of Darwins findings. It is a cult, based on the death of others. What happened was, that this death fired back on the Germans.
Why do you think, the catholic church survived for 2000 years -- that is longer than the US capitalism currently lived.
> [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades…. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
I'm not sure this appeals to people more then peace and prosperity but it can have a strong appeal to some people some of the time especially to young men(see ISIS) and especially when your side is winning the war and civilian losses are low.
It's not saying nazism is 'correct' and should be practiced, but rather the way nazis view human psychology is a better model than that of the hedonist.
Not that wrong. The whole passage tells more about how he meant it: that people don't just want ease and hedonism, but they also need struggle and passion and meaning and hurt.
People that have it all too easy more often than not fell in for drugs, depression, etc. And conversely, some of the most "happiest" place on earth, according to their citizens own estimations in polls, are places with tragic poverty and harsh conditions.
That's very far from my recollection of those polls where Scandinavian countries frequently come out on top. Common denominators of those countries include low wealth inequality, an extensive social safety net, and a grounded attitude towards the future. With all this, there's still plenty of struggle and passion and meaning and hurt in the microcosm of daily existence. Humans don't seem designed to be suspended in a state of constant happiness.
By my reading, Orwell is giving Hitler a bit of credit, not only in the fact that he rejects this premise and emphasizes patriotic and militaristic virtues above quality of life, but that he could move an entire nation to agree with this vision. What Orwell means here is that people don't just want comfort and prosperity; they are in fact willing to actively sacrifice these things to achieve a vision, especially one expressed in warlike or patriotic terms. Orwell might be a bit disappointed, and is definitely unsympathetic to fascism, but he does give it credit for being able to inspire people to a grander cause than their own comfort and well-being.