Cautionary words from Hitler’s Germany: They Thought They Were Free
[Every now and then I may post an excerpt from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. The book, first published in 1955, is an exploration of Germans’ attitudes in the period leading up to WWII and including the war and its immediate aftermath. It features interviews with ten “typical” Germans, conducted a couple of years after the war’s end, and offers extraordinary and often relevant insights into how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long. Here is my general discussion of the book and its author, who was a man of the left. To understand the following excerpt, it is helpful to know that for the purposes of the book, Mayer refers to the ten interviewees as his “friends.” ]
National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was “throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends…
While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers, only the Communists and the Nazis objected. And the bitterest single disappointment of Nazism…was the fact that Hitler had promised that no official would get more than 1,000 Reichsmarks a month and did not keep his promise.
My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption…Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all…
This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning—there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere—called Hitler the Rattenfé¤nger, the “ratcatcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfé¤nger von Hameln
[NOTE: Additional excerpts will follow at intervals.]
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I appreciate these exerpts.
I’ve read extensively about Nazism: It was always a form of populism: Hitler was their “Ross Perot”….
how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long
in office… 2 August 1934 — 30 April 1945
i would not call 11 years long…
in 11 years he transformed a liberal conservative state (they had womens voting first, and other things that we think are social importants), into a war machine that resulted in more than 30 million deaths directly and indirectly…
FDR was in office one year less…
March 4, 1933 — April 12, 1945
however Lenin did his thing in only 7
8 November 1917 — 21 January 1924
do not think that all this will take a long time.. by the reckoning of history they are almost past the halfway mark before the real stuff starts!
however, later guys after things are more perfected have a longer history
3 April 1922 — 5 March 1953
stalin 31 years…
1943 — 1976
Mao, 37 years
30 June 1949 — 8 July 1994
Kim Il-sung 45 years
returning a free state to feudalism and oligharcy doesnt take long, and its easy
first you get the people angry at the rich
then the rich lock down the people that will attack them and steal what they have, and so forth. its natural, no?
then the power that does that takes it all from the rich, who created it to solve their problem with the ones the power disinfranchised to create the sitation.
in this way.. a politician can manipulate the masses to facilitate their own hanging through attacking their own interests without realizing it.
voila.
I’ve read extensively about Nazism: It was always a form of populism: Hitler was their “Ross Perot”….
yes..
and why Obama, a populous president in the idea of pushkin… named his daugher after whom?
ÐлекÑаÌндр СергеÌевич ПуÌшкин
Aleksandr (Sascha) Sergeyevich Pushkin
and the other daughter? Malia?
read the works of Martin Malia..
What is the intelligentsia?
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20026591
Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum
search.barnesandnoble.com/Russia-under-Western-Eyes/Malia-Martin-Malia-Martin/e/9780674002104
As the dust clears from the fall of Communism, will Western eyes see Russia, the unclaimed orphan of Western history or Russia as she truly is, a perplexing but undeniable member of the European family? A dazzling work of intellectual history by a world-renowned scholar, spanning the years from Peter the Great to the fall of the Soviet Union, this book gives us a clear and sweeping view of Russia not as an eternal barbarian menace but as an outermost, if laggard, member in the continuum of European nations.
The Russian troika hurtles through these pages. The Spectre, modernity’s belief in salvation by revolutionary ideology, haunts them. Alice’s looking glass greets us at this turn and that. Throughout, Martin Malia’s inspired use of these devices aptly conveys the surreality of the whole Soviet Russian phenomenon and the West’s unbalanced perception of it. He shows us the usually distorted images and stereotypes that have dominated Western ideas about Russia since the eighteenth century. And once these emerge as projections of the West’s own internal anxieties, he shifts his focus to the institutional structures and cultural forms Russia shares with her neighbors.
Here modern Europe is depicted as an East-West cultural gradient in which the central and eastern portions respond to the Atlantic West’s challenge in delayed and generally skewed fashion. Thus Russia, after two centuries of building then painfully liberalizing its Old Regime, in 1917 tried to leap to a socialism that would be more advanced and democratic than European capitalism. The result was a cruel caricature of European civilization, which mesmerized and polarized the West for most ofthis century. As the old East-West gradient reappears in genuinely modern guise, this brilliantly imaginative work shows us the reality that has for so long tantalized–and eluded–Western eyes.
dont you think that a boy whose parents met in a russian language class and who were friends with stalinists and vetted revolutionaries would not read these works and more?
then there is
Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (1965)
And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption…Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,”
do the feminist shtick and switch things to see how they fly..
And Obama, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption…Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,”…
as i have been saying for a long long time…
most people have no idea how close they are
and the ones that do, are not going to talk much
they know what will happen when they win
and they will win, we let them already
you dont give the keys to the whole kit and kaboodle and then expect the theif to hand it back without a fight, do you?
they have conspiritorialy had this going for over 50 years, while at the same time attackign anyone that might show that a “conspiracy in the open” was going on. even glenn beck gets tagged with conspiracy theories, but he is very careful that he is only quoting and not concluding…
one can see in a concentrated form the game here
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=LG0G1sJn7Q6hJRCXnP2FhFNdykn6Hpcdq7htTd77yzy1FYFm3XLd!-1986555990!1888687908?docId=5001248280
all one has to do is try to confirm the positional statements against facts we know in the archives now.
its like reading walther duranty today..
noted in it is this:
Perceptions of Russia from abroad are explored in Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum by Martin Malia (Harvard University Press, 21.95 [pounds sterling]) which explores the stereotypes that have dominated Western ideas about Russia.
what better book to make someone think that the things we thought during the cold war were lies. when the archives and such show they werent.
i might suggest going back and looking at the names of others writing from the same perspective as “they thought they were free”
Different from any “normal” dictatorship, a totalitarian system goes after the minds and hearts of the population with the purpose to make them do voluntarily what the government wants them to do. This is called mind control, which also is far advanced in the United States. The Nazis controlled 100 percent of the media and also an important part of education. In the schools, control was exercised through godless Nazi teachers where they had some and through Darwinism, which is also taught to American children. The minimum result they had with the Hitler Youth was that there was no other youth organization and that we young people didn’t question the legality of it. It belonged to the system into which we were born. Hilmare Von Campe
now you know why 40 years..
the idea was to create the same conditions…
that the young grow up into a system that they are born in and trust, to their own doom.
There was another Nazi organization that had the same task as all other institutions, namely to keep people under control and influence their thinking. It was the Service to Work (Arbeitsdienst). Young men had to serve half a year before entering into military service. It seems that Obama likes this Nazi feature because he has proposed, in addition to the idea of a civilian national security force, a plan to create a national community service program. Obama’s motives for this cannot be different from the Nazi motives — to bring as many youth as possible under their socialist umbrella and influence. Obama has 3.1 million e-mail addresses from young people who are waiting to do something.
President-elect Obama says that America is no more a Christian nation. He is not a Christian himself because you can’t be a Christian and promote the killing of unborn human beings, which he does. He also wants to neutralize our Constitution by adding class-warfare concepts. His plans point to where he wants to lead the American nation: onto the same road Germany took in 1933. Americans, do you want to go in that direction? It is still time to take the opposite direction — a nation under God.
hilmar von campe
anotehr to read is bella dodd
http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/dodd/dodd.html
she is VERY relevent today..
why?
becasue she was president of the teachers union, AND head of the communist party USA.
and i bet most of you all dont know her at all.
During those years house parties were held by our union members to raise money for Loyalist Spain. Union and nonunion teachers were invited. Communists and non-communists rubbed shoulders and drank cocktails together. Eyes grew moist as the guests were told of bombs dropped on little children in Bilboa.
hey! isnt that the same shtick they use now with hamass and others? of course
its a PROCESS…
the whole idea of lincoln and calling up certain things by obama would never be seen by the average joe.. but those in the know..
problem is that i cant get people to read the huge number of works to which all the references come from.
like listening to pink floyd, and having read thoreau… you wuold know that the line “hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way” was a refrasing from waldon wood.. but who reads that and listens to pink floyd? (you would be surprised)
madonna has stuff like that hidden in too..
like a gay man walking in soho with a yellow bandana in his back pocket, he is telling others what he likes, but not letting others not in the know, what is going on.
The International Brigade was eulogized by many Americans. They failed to realize that the first international army under Soviet leadership had been born; that though all the national subdivisions had national commissars, these were under Soviet commissars!
There was the Lincoln Brigade and the Garibaldi Brigade.
There was the emerging world military communist leadership developing in Spain.
There was Thompson for the United States, Tito for Yugoslavia, Andre Marty for France, and others to act as the new leaders in other countries.
We teachers recruited soldiers for the Lincoln Brigade.
I learned that Sid Babsky, a teacher of the fifth grade in Public School Number 6 in the Bronx who had been a classmate of mine at law school, was among the first to go.
He did not return.
Ralph Wardlaw, son of a Georgian minister, suddenly left his classes at City College and, without even packing his clothes, left for Spain.
Six weeks later we received word of his death.
Some of our substitute teachers enlisted and were spirited away to Soviet agents who got them out of the country with or without passports. In Paris they went to a certain address and there were directed across the border.
During this time communist girls wore gold liberty bells inscribed “Lincoln Brigade,” as a symbol of their pride in those “fighting fascism.”
One of our talented Teachers Union members wrote a marching song which we sang at our meetings:
Abraham Lincoln lives again.
Abraham Lincoln marches.
Up tall he stands and his great big hand
Holds a gun.
With the Lincoln Battalion behind him,
He fights for the freedom of Spain.
And at various social affairs we also sang “Non Pasaron”; and sometimes with fists closed and lifted we shouted the German International brigade song, “Freiheit.”
so if you dont know these things, would you ever realize the references?
In her book, School of Darkness (1954) she states that that Communist Party’s structure “was in reality a device to control the ‘common man'”.
and by the time the reasonable stop argying that what it is, it is not… its way way too late
Bella Dodd was legal counsel of the Communist Party of America ( CPUSA )
Bella Dodd was circumspect about the people behind the Communist Party. She once was told to phone two multi-millionaires who live in the Waldorf Towers if she lost contact with Moscow. Elsewhere, she refers to “a secret well organized world power.” She is obviously afraid to be candid. She suspects that one CPUSA leader’s “suicide” was in fact murder. (172)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
each of the nine floors of the party-owned headquarters at 35 E. 12th St. was devoted to CPUSA business. The Sixth Floor held “the publication offices of the Yiddish newspaper, the Freiheit, and the “Jewish Commission.” (162)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
and i know neo doesnt want to believe the feminist movement is also all connected to this too.
but read this.
Rape is a violent expression of a pattern of male supremacy, an outgrowth of age-old economic, political and cultural exploitation of women by men.”
sounds like a 60s or modern rad fem, eh?
the kind that neo says her freinds and most women dont side with. but most germans didnt side with hitler. most russians didnt want totalitarianism… etc.
It is taken from a pamphlet entitled “Woman Against Myth,” by Betty Millard published in 1948 by CPUSA (the Communist Party of USA.)
as i said, if you dont knw the history, they will get you to suppor them!!!!!!!!!!
i would suggest reading:
Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation
historian Kate Weigand states: “ideas, activists and traditions that emanated from the Communist movement of the forties and fifties continued to shape the direction of the new women’s movement of the 1960s and later.”(154)
“second-wave feminism stands as an excellent example of a 1960’s movement that blossomed from the seeds that Communist women germinated thirty years earlier.” (156) Kate Weigand
all this stuff is interelated…
remember hitler and stalin were first pals
then too paranoid to remain friends..
In the late 1940’s, CPUSA leaders realized that their primary constituency the labor movement was becoming increasingly hostile to Communism. They began to pin their survival on women and African Americans. They hoped that addressing the problems of “male supremacy” would “bring more women into the organization and into the fight against the domestic policies of the Cold War.” (80) Kate Weigand
Professor Weigand follows this process in the pages of the party newspaper The Daily Worker. Feminists began a campaign against “male chauvinism” and “sexism.” For example, a Mrs. Kutzik from the Bronx complained that showing women in bathing suits was demeaning and racist. “What would we think if 90% of the pictures of Negroes in our newspaper showed them in zoot suits?” A writer was roundly criticized by woman readers for a story that suggested that his wife and four daughters spent much of their time worrying about their clothes: “The editors and the author owe the readers an apology and themselves a critical evaluation of their understanding of the woman question.” (92) The caption of a photo of a man with a young child read, “Families are stronger and happier if the father knows how to fix the cereal, tie the bibs and take care of the youngsters.” (127)
cant iradicate what you grew up in and do not want to know the truth about!!!!!!!!!!
remember, fascism is capitalism in decline…
or how i put it, if one is on the far right, and free, one has to pass through fascism to get to communism.
Communist women intellectuals formalized a sophisticated Marxist analysis of the “woman question.” The books In Women’s Defense (1940) by Mary Inman, Century of Struggle (1954) by Eleanor Flexner and The Unfinished Revolution (1962) by Eve Merriam recorded the history of women’s oppression and decried the prevalence of sexism in traditional customs, mass culture and language. The founder of modern feminism, Betty Frieden relied on these texts when she advocated in The Feminine Mystique (1963) that women downgrade their role as wife and mother and instead make career their first priority. With the exception of Inman (who left the Party over a doctrinal dispute) these women (including Frieden) all hid the fact that they were longtime Communist activists. When their daughters (“red diaper babies”) encountered “male chauvinism” in the 1960s New Left, they had everything they needed, including the example of subterfuge, to start the Women’s Liberation Movement.
whats hard is that these people are in a place of power and policy, but yet good people like neo say they dont count. when its people like us who haev no say that dont count.
its sad to realize after you read a lot of these early works that you and everyone else was duped.
better to tell me i am wrong, hsitory is wrong, use anecdote as to freinds, and basically deny any facts leading to a conclusion that would result in no longer siding with the facilitators of the situation we are in now!!!!
The term “politically correct” originated in the Communist Party in Russia in the 1920’s.
In 1980, three women in Leningrad produced ten typewritten copies of a feminist magazine called Almanach. The KGB shut down the magazine and the women were deported to West Germany. In the USSR, feminism had always been an export product. According to Professor Weigand, her “book provides evidence to support the belief that at least some Communists regarded the subversion of the gender system [in America] as an integral part of the larger fight to overturn capitalism.”(6)
all related on MANY fronts. to the point where you can hardly tell who is who as they are ALL marxists
[by the way… remember feminism was a terorist organization in the begining… or have we already forgot rote zora? they just pardoned and let one out of jail, now that her people have won]
What enabled intellectuals to explain away Hitler’s increasing military aggressiveness leading up to World War II, from the Rhineland to Czechoslovakia to Austria to Poland, is what Sowell calls “one-day-at-time rationalism.” This sort of rationalism restricts “analysis to the immediate implications of each issue as it arises, missing wider implications of a decision that may have merit as regards the issue immediately at hand . . . but which can be disastrous in terms of the ignored longer-term repercussions.” Intellectuals focused on each of Hitler’s aggressions separately and considered only the immediate consequences of taking military action against Germany. For example, the French political scientist Joseph Barthélemy asked, “Is it worth setting fire to the world in order to save the Czechoslovak state?” When Hitler demanded annexation of the Polish port of Danzig, a French newspaper asked, “Do We Have to Die for Danzig?” Looking at Hitler’s actions this way obscured the larger and more important question, which, as Sowell states, “was whether one recognized in the unfolding pattern of Hitler’s actions a lethal threat.” Public- opinion polls from the summer of 1939 suggest that shortly before Hitler invaded Poland the French people caught on to what he was doing, but by then it was too late for the Third Republic.
and this is what we do here.
we do not wish to connect all the things that have to be conneted to conclude.
the above is from
The Divine Right of Intellectuals
Too many intellectuals believe they have a duty to make decisions for the rest of us.
By David Hogberg
an article on sowels new book..
intellectuals and society
Artfldgr: I never said leftists were not part of the women’s movement, or that they aren’t still very active in it. They are. And it does matter. But it does not mean that all the principles of the women’s movement are wrong, or that agreeing with a great deal of it means you are under their sway, or that most ordinary women who believe in things like equal pay for equal work or equal job opportunities are more susceptible to Communist influence. Sarah Palin’s a feminist, you know, although she certainly doesn’t swallow feminism’s entire platform, and many feminists hate her guts.
The whole ‘they thought they were free’ thing fits pretty well with today’s lefty nuts IMO. They live in a free country and consider themselves slaves of capitalism and the system… and they go to un-free countries and praise them as free.
The national socialists supporters thought the same things… they just added Jews into the mix (as in, un-free due to capitalism, Jews, and the system)…
neo-neocon Says:
“or that most ordinary women who believe in things like equal pay for equal work”
But when you want government and/or judges to define equal work (as in it is actually unequal work they’re choosing to redefine as equal…)… then yes, you might be a leftist… or their useful idiot.
NeoNeo…It’s been 40+years since I read, “They Thought They Were Free”, during my immersion in Nazi Studies(particularly the SS)in graduate school. It had that same dark pink cover then as the one always pictured on your books list on the right hand column here. Excellent.
Banality, thy name can ever be evil. (With thanks to Hannah..)
Very interesting.
Side note: Is it possible to break Godwin’s law for a post like this?
Holmes: Is this the exception that proves the rule?
As for breaking Godwin…..Sometimes a NAZI is just a NAZI.
On the plus side, this lack of confidence in parliamentary representation is different than disgust with politics. I’m disgusted with politics but not with liberal democracy.
Europe of the period was not. Liberal democracy was new and not deeply ingrained. People could freely attack / critique it… and did. They, also, had flavors of right wing-ness that Americans are unfamiliar with that pushed for strong leaders and an ideology that supported it (the remnants of the attitudes and opinions that supported the old aristocracies).
While in the US, even when people try to thwart our liberal democracy, they at least have to pay lip service to it. It’s a big advantage… because when people finally catch on they tend turn on them.. vs. parts of Europe where large parts of the public simply came to distrust liberal democracy outright…
>300 m Americans. There will be much contention, haggling, and compromise. Read 20th-century history to learn about the alternatives.
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Interesting, Neo. When you look at pictures of the new Nazi government, and photos of the crowds when Hitler rode by, the enthusiasm and adoration by the crowds is pretty obvious.
I’ve always been fascinated with the “spectacle” contrived by the Nazis, and wondered how many were sucked in by the red and black flags, the torches, the death’s heads, the black leather. It was really a spectacle of massed military, and Hitler was supposed to be a mesmerizing speaker.
A good speaker and contrived spectacle can take you a long ways, but at some point reality has to live up to the promise, doesn’t it?
I’d add the converse is true. The progressives think we should respect politics more while weakening the checks and balances of liberal democracy. I’ve read several articles by progressives lamenting that cynicism towards politics prevents change and/or the political action required for it… if only the young were more political they say…
It is another blessing… along with distrust of government… to see politics as unseemly is a great advantage to a society…
To artfldgr,
actually Hitler was in power from Jan 30, 1933, when he was appointed chancellor by president Hindenburg, to Apr 30, 1945. The only significance of Aug 2, 1934, is that this was when he essentially assumed the presidency as well after Hindenburg’s death, calling himself the Fé¼hrer. Thus Hitler had about 51 days more time in power than in FDR. See http://www.biography.com/articles/Adolf-Hitler-9340144
The rise of Hitler was a reaction to frustration and disappointment with conventional politics – and the Depression (the Nazis were a sub-5% fringe party till 1930).
The problem is that conventional politics is intrinsically messy and frustrating. There are lots of competing interests and ideologies, and the actual business of governing and legislating is full of obscure, boring details. And as the Depression showed, and the recent mortgage crash showed, there are problems no one knows for sure how to solve – so the people in office are going to flail around much of the time.
(One reason why wartime can be satisfying is that it presents a society with an obvious problem to which there is an obvious answer which everybody can work for. Natural disasters, much the same.)
Corruption and rent-seeking we have always with us. Fighting it is like fighting cockroaches – a constant dirty struggle, which most people would just as soon let slide… or hand over to some huckster who promises a miracle fix.
I think you folks are reading this the wrong way. The left are not the Nazis. The boiling distrust of both the Dems and the Repubs creates an opening for who knows who, to fill the void.
While I would be very happy to see both parties thrown out on their ear – someone still needs to govern. This history reminds us to be very careful and not go the route of “anyone but the incumbent.”
dataguy, agreed. We on the right can fall into the same trap we excoriate leftists for. Hitler was in a sense a “Ross Perot,” but Perot, even where badly wrong, is essentially in favor of free speech, voting, the tussle of compromise legislation. There are others – mercifully fewer in America than Europe but present nonetheless – who don’t have democracy in their bones. We notice this readily in leftists, because certain masks are off for us. But we are human beings like all others, and susceptible to not looking behind certain masks if we like them well enough.
I am not making dark predictions about secret cabals of corporately-owned Rightists waiting to take over by stealth. I don’t think such things are likely. But “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is only good politics, not good morality.
Rich Rostrum,
I don’t have time right now to expand much further on your comment, but I will offer this: Ideologically based parties in multi-party systems lead to rigidity. It’s a bit like the NGO power we see today; the groups never know when to take a break from their agenda to allow the country to deal with more pressing matters. Our messy sloppy 2-party sytem allows the country to put certain interests on the back burner. Ideological parties can’t stop or they become irrelevant.
Germany is a country that values the ideological, so it is susceptible to many parties that cannot compromise. I think this was probably part of the pre-Hitler experience. At some point the population can’t stand the cacophony and wants some sort of quiet.
Post WWI, the German CDU decided to take a big-tent approach that would deny room for fringes to organize. The Greens broke the mold of CDU or SPD with FDP as change element. Now there are five parties, and it is much harder to govern.
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole … that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual….”
“This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture…. The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.” — 1939, Adolf Hitler explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism.
But it began long before Hitler.
“The best ordered state will be one in which the largest number of persons … most nearly resembles a single person. The first and highest form of the State … is a condition in which the private and the individual is altogether banished from life …” (Plato’s _Republic_ & _Laws_ c. 370 BCE)
Excerpted from: _The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America_, Leonard Peikoff; 1982.
What is ironic to me is that the description of the “ordinary” Germans’ enabling of the Nazis via the “throw them all out” mindset reminds me of … the Tea Party movement.
Ironic because no one has more contempt than I do for the false messiah that occupies the White House today, the totalitarian-minded party that controls the Congress, and the arrogant, smug, simple-minded and willfully ignorant morons who voted for them when anyone paying attention in 2008 could see who and what they were, and what they were planning.
The electorate has since discovered that instead of hope and change, they received a double order of the same leftist green eggs and ham that they have sent back to the kitchen time after time. That is comparable to the state of politics not only in Weimar Germany, but also in Japan of the 1930s — every election seeming to produce only variations of more-of-the-same-old-same-old that everyone was already thoroughly disgusted with.
Until, that is, a new bunch of folks came along — promising to clean the political house like Jesus vs. the money-changers in the temple — and who seemed to really mean it.
The greatest threat to a republic comes when the people no longer believe that anyone in government gives a damn about them anymore, and that only a “Man on Horseback” can save them by sweeping away all the accumulated rot and replacing it with a vaguely-defined sense of “the will of the people” — only to discover, too late, that those claiming to want to empower the people want all the power to go to themselves.
In 2008, the electorate actually fell for this line of thinking: we gave the donkey party tyrannical power, and in return they have acted like tyrants. But in 2010 they’ll get their butts kicked, and we’ll return to our own version of Weimar-style gridlock while the ship of state continues to sink underneath us.
Enter the Tea Party movement — not the “Anybody but George Bush and the Republicans” tantrum of 2008, but “Throw them all out” — and from the resulting political chaos and vacuum emerges our own version of The Man on Horseback — promising to restore us to greatness and to rid us of the corruption of the old order — in exchange for an unnamed price they’ll charge us later.
The only thing needed to make it all happen is an American public so tired of it all, and so ignorant of the legacy that the Founding Fathers left them (“A republic — if you can keep it”) that they gladly succumb to the Siren call to the rocks.
And we have that already: recall the disturbing event from a few years ago when a college poli-sci class sent students door-to-door trying to get people to sign a petition to repeal the first 10 amendments to the Constitution under the slogan, “Let’s get rid of the crime-coddling ‘Bill of Rights'” — and which a majority of those to whom it was presented signed (“Thank God for what you’re doing!” as one of the signers exclaimed).
All the pieces are in place for the death of the American experiment in small-“r” republican government: A donkey party that is inflicting mortal wounds on our economic and social institutions, a passionate and vocal “populist” movement that isn’t interested in checking them via the Republican Party anymore but only seems interested in tearing the whole edifice down — and an electorate that is largely clueless about the catastrophic consequences that can issue if that movement is successful.
I loathe the donks, who in their own visceral hatred of America have become nothing more than The Domestic Enemy; but the Tea Party movement scares the Hell out of me, because they seem willing and ready to open a door on the other side of which waits our own version of Oliver Cromwell … or worse.
Taylor: I am part of the Tea Party movement, myself. But the quote is meant to be cautionary on both sides.
I have read memoirs about Weimar Republic by an German geneticist Richard Goldshmidt. A staunch German patriot, a Jew, a Hitler hater, he held very good opinion about efficiency of the Republic. He thought that Germany hadn’t so competent cabinet in 200 years.
So, the real problem with Germans was not poor government work, but purely psychological repulsion to politics played openly, not behind closed doors, as they were accustomed – with all this dirt and partisan bitterness seen to everybody. They were completely unprepared to democracy, like vegans at sausages factory.
The worst thing about Weimar republic, according Goldschmidt, was class hatred and envy – sentiments that Communists and Nazi alike exploited and ignited, reinforcing each other propaganda.
Taylor, middle-class populism of Tea Party movement is a direct opposite of proletariat addressed populism of leftists (NAZI or Comminsts type). USA is not Venezuela. Middle-class movements want rule of law and small government, not more, but less government intervention in everyday life.
Chaotic times like these are like a supersaturated solution into which a seed crystal is dropped, resulting in a sudden crystallization of the entire solution. Someone or some movement will come along and be the seed crystal, and the resulting crystallization of institutions will depend heavily on what that seed is and where it lands. While Hitler was a seed crystal, not every seed crystal results in a Nazi-like regime. Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution were other such situations.
I see a lot of Nazi tendencies being exhibited by the AGW proponents. They deny reason and logic and instead favor bold action and a strong force of will. They too want to indoctrinate the young to believe that catastrophic global warming is real with fluffy polar bears drinking a Coke and cartoon penguins that scream the polar caps are melting so there won’t be anymore Christmas. There is a racial and cultural component as well in that all the environmental ills are blamed on white westerners and the colored peoples of Asia, Africa, and India largely get a pass. They care not that a strong central authority in the UN is being given power to tax and regulate since all they want is the elimination of our consumptive lifestyles.
I never said leftists were not part of the women’s movement, or that they aren’t still very active in it. They are. And it does matter. But it does not mean that all the principles of the women’s movement are wrong, or that agreeing with a great deal of it means you are under their sway, or that most ordinary women who believe in things like equal pay for equal work or equal job opportunities are more susceptible to Communist influence.
and this is why its hopeless…
and they will win
you cant seem to understand that you dont need feminists to make the same chloices.
in fact, the feminists make you make DIFFERENT CHOICES than whats good for you (but its great for them)
and you prove my point.
each fringe group paid off by this proccess refuses to get rid of the systm that they grew up and became a part of.
they will NOT walk on their own…
as long as they exist, they will manipyulate your goodness, to do their badness.
period.
the WHOLE Movemetn was CREATED by the soviets.
i gave you a FEMINIST HISTORIAN that details it all…
to make it clearer to you… since your a woman, and i am talking about the womans movemetn that targeted you and you defend.
lets put it this way.
do you think that the black national socialists and the panthers will allow peace between the race they SAY they represent and the white race they SAY oppresses them?
not at all.. when they couldnt find enough racism to prove it, they then created the invisable one that is permuted through everything and cant be seen except if your taught to see it.
and so, they foment more race hate to grow and exist. the day the two get along and realize that its the third that causes their ills MORE than their own problems (by exacerbating them with bad advice), will be ejected.
same with feminism wich foloows the SAME EXACT DIALECTIC.. as does gslen…
it would be very difficult for you to stand up and realize that women NEVER needed the feminists and that like capitaism, the statism isnt helping.
you hate the war..
but you dont want to get rid of the generals and planners and colluders that aer making the gender war so that they can facilitate more power.
the logic you use is the same reletivistic argument that is nonsesne.
they do soe good, so we forgive their bad.
thats an inversion of they do bad, so their good dont count.
or rather..
john gotti murders people
but in july 4th he gives great barbecues to the poor
so cant we stop the fight and leave joh gotti alone, after all, look at the good he is doing.
that cracked up.
and we will never agree on that point.
you never even wanted to try to read the chapter weigand wrote as to feminism in soviet countries!!!!
they dont allow it!!!
that would be like drinking the flagon with the poison in it that you gave to someone else.
NONE of the socialist countries (that are not still free) allow that…
its a nto a movement for women
its a movemetn to destroyu the current condition and facilitate a move to a new totalitarian place.
when radicals are in control and in office the view is inverted, and the radicals become normal and you and your more thoughful freinds become the radicals who the state must remove
or as Orwell said (paraphrased):
when lies are the norm, telling the truth is a radical thing
one cant survive a cancer if one decides to keep it cause they like some of it.
the WHOLE movement was NEVER what it seemed to be.
you wonder why they like terrorists..
but you dont get that the leadership and movemetn started in terrorism, as all anarchic comminist things did.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_Zora
Rote Zora started in 1974, when they bombed the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in Karlsruhe to protest against the abortion law.[1]
In addition they bombed the Federal Doctor’s Guild (in 1977),[1] numerous sex shops, the cars of landlords, the Siemens company, and the company Nixdorf Computer AG[2]. While carrying out hundreds of attacks, the group always took care to not physically harm people.
Rote Zora was a split from the organization Revolutionary Cells,[3] though some members continued to associate with both[4]. The group’s last action was in 1995. In 2000, a documentary about the group (titled Die Rote Zora) was made by Oliver Tolmein.
In April 2007, former Rote Zora member Adrienne Gerhé¤user stood trial for the attempted bombings of the Berlin Genetic Technical Institute in 1986, and a clothing factory in Bavaria in 1987, [5] receiving a suspended two-year sentence, the maximum she was eligible for.[6]
so fancy that
your argument is exactly the same obfuscating argument of islam as a religion of love!!!
the majority in islam do not ACT
but we think that means that they dont agree
just like you
but silence and acceptance is agreement in the real world, regardless of what you or i belive
until you start comparing the 4 or 5 of these and start not making false separations… you will see that they are applying the same DIALECTIC to the different problems
and by buying women off with it, they insure that the very people that thsi is to harm, protect it till the job is done.
[this is why the feminists dont fight islam. SAME diaelectic of control with just a fake covering to make it appear different]
read weigand..
Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation By Kate Weigand
Journal of Women’s History
Kate Weigand and Daniel Horowitz – Dorothy Kenyon: Feminist Organizing, 1919-1963 – Journal of Women’s History 14:2 Journal of Women’s History 14.2 (2002) 126-131 Dorothy Kenyon Feminist Organizing 1919-1963 Kate Weigand and Daniel Horowitz Dorothy Kenyon (1888-1972) is not well known among feminists or historians but, as a major player in the women’s rights, civil rights, and labor movements from the 1920s to the 1970s, she should be. Born and bred in New York City, Kenyon received all the advantages conferred by her family’s wealth, including a Smith College education and the freedom, in her words, to “misspend” five years as a “social butterfly” after her graduation from Smith. Sensitized to the problems of poverty and injustice during a year she spent in Mexico with her father, Kenyon decided to enter New York University Law School in 1914 so she could pursue social justice through the legal system. The New York Bar admitted Kenyon in 1917 and, after an eight-year stint working for the U.S. government, she opened her own law firm in 1925. Kenyon began her career in public service in 1936 as the first Deputy Commissioner of Licenses in New York City, where she later served as a Justice on the Municipal Court. In these positions, in her capacity as the U.S. representative to the League of Nations Commission to Study the Legal Status of Women from 1938-1940, and as the first U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women from…
i have read all of this stuff… long ago
this stuff si read by the fellow travelers
not the women you refer to who are being used.
they never even know about these books
bet you dont even know who Pizzey is!!!!!
that is, the history you know abotu them has been STALINIZED just as much as socviet history has been cleansed to make it acceptable to.
go here to a communist/marxist site writing about their glorius hsitory… do you read them? i do.
and almost everyone that i talk to that is not a feminist fellow traveler (like the feminist down the block from me that loves to argue with me, because she can argue 1:1 and not have to cover the game!!!!)
Weigand wrote, “These women, along with many others who are less well-known, worked for women’s liberation within their own political circles and in the United States at large during the hostile years of 1945-56. The group consisted primarily of women who had cut their political teeth in the Left and labor struggles of the 1930s.”
Weigand stressed, “They revolutionized [feminist theory] by conceptualizing the dynamics of women’s oppression and liberation within a framework that made race and class central. They sustained a small but vibrant women’s movement throughout the 1940s and 1950s and transmitted influential terminology, tactics and concepts to the next generation of feminists. Their bold new thinking about the interdependence of gender, race and class, and about the personal and cultural aspects of sexism, shaped modern feminism–both directly and indirectly–and laid absolutely crucial groundwork for the second wave.”
and carefully note this:
weigand is very frustrated that the average woman does not know the history of the movement!!!
she is confused at how such a glorious and successful communist movemetn is completely unknown to the contemporary woman!!!!!!!!!!
[ie. you and your friends]
Weigand concludes, “Why, then, has their story been overlooked? How have feminists and the general public come to believe that the critique of male chauvinism in personal and family relations emerged for the first time in the mid-1960s? The powerful legacy of anti-communism in the United States is largely responsible for their obscurity.”
just like you were a neo liberal before… but then started learning about things they seem to never let you figure out..
take some time to read about erin pizzey
How feminists tried to destroy the family
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-430702/How-feminists-tried-destroy-family.html
take a second here to compare what pizzey says and compare with weigand.
even pizzey didnt know that the movemetn was not new, and was communist.
but since pizzey created the first shelters for battered women AND men… she was on the wrong side of the ideological argument
During 1970, I was a young housewife with a husband, two children, two dogs and a cat. We lived in Hammersmith, West London, and I didn’t see much of my husband because he worked for TV’s Nationwide. I was lonely and isolated, and longed for something other than the usual cooking, cleaning and housework to enter my life.
By the early Seventies, a new movement for women – demanding equality and rights – began to make headlines in the daily newspapers. Among the jargon, I read the words “solidarity” and “support”. I passionately believed that women would no longer find themselves isolated from each other, and in the future could unite to change our society for the better.
Within a few days I had the address of a local group in Chiswick, and I was on my way to join the Women’s Liberation Movement. I was asked to pay £3 and ten shillings as a joining fee, told to call other women “sisters” and that our meetings were to be called “collectives”.
My fascination with this new movement lasted only a few months. At the huge “collectives”, I heard shrill women preaching hatred of the family. They said the family was not a safe place for women and children. I was horrified at their virulence and violent tendencies. I stood on the same platforms trying to reason with the leading lights of this new organisation.
I ended up being thrown out by the movement. My crime was to warn some of the women working in the Women’s Liberation Movement office off Shaftesbury Avenue that if it persisted in cooperating with a plan to bomb Biba, a fashionable clothes shop in Kensington, I would call the police.
Biba was bombed because the women’s movement thought it was a capitalist enterprise devoted to sexualising women’s bodies.
i will bet $10 dollars to you that you dont know this history (be honest).
i have a nursing trainning manual used in the graduate school and it says ALL family violence is from men… NONE is from women.
even you should see that this is propaganda of the worst kind…
did you know about this?
When, in the mid-Eighties, I published Prone To Violence, about my work with violence-prone women and their children, I was picketed by hundreds of women from feminist refuges, holding placards which read: “All men are bastards” and “All men are rapists”.
Because of violent threats, I had to have a police escort around the country.
It was bad enough that this relatively small group of women was influencing social workers and police. But I became aware of a far more insidious development in the form of public policy-making by powerful women, which was creating a poisonous attitude towards men.
In 1990, Harriet Harman (who became a Cabinet minister), Anna Coote (who became an adviser to Labour’s Minister for Women) and Patricia Hewitt (yes, she’s in the Labour Cabinet, too!) expressed their beliefs in a social policy paper called The Family Way.
It said: “It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion.”
It was a staggering attack on men and their role in modern life.
where are those masses of reasonable women?
nowhere… but in their own freinds circles.
these otehrs dont work, they are funded, so they spend all day working on this. they are elected officials, judges, administrators, and so on.
but you use the “most islamics are nice people” defense of feminism.
a mask is a mask is a mask.
and a mask can be a nice face over a dark one
not jsut dark ones over nice ones.
For nearly four decades, these pernicious attitudes towards family life, fathers and boys have permeated the thinking of our society to such an extent that male teachers and carers are now afraid to touch or cuddle children.
yeah.. you know… we are all rapists.. we are all pedophiles. and the only good rape is a rape by a leftist (that director), and a rape by a lesbian to a minor (the coochi snorcher).
I believe that the feminist movement envisaged a new Utopia that depended upon destroying family life. In the new century, so their credo ran, the family unit will consist of only women and their children. Fathers are dispensable. And all that was yoked – unforgivably – to the debate about domestic violence.
To my mind, it has never been a gender issue – those exposed to violence in early childhood often grow up to repeat what they have learned, regardless of whether they are girls or boys.
I look back with sadness to my young self and my vision that there could be places where people – men, women and children who have suffered physical and sexual abuse – could find help, and if they were violent could be given a second chance to learn to live peacefully.
I believe that vision was hijacked by vengeful women who have ghetto-ised the refuge movement and used it to persecute men. Surely the time has come to challenge this evil ideology and insist that men take their rightful place in the refuge movement.
anotehr good one
Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America Horowitz, Daniel
muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/american_quarterly/v048/48.1horowitz.html
Daniel Horowitz – Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Cold War America – American Quarterly 48:1 American Quarterly 48.1 (1996) 1-42 Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America Daniel Horowitz In a certain sense it was almost accidental — coincidental — that I wrote The Feminine Mystique, and in another sense my whole life had prepared me to write that book; all the pieces of my own life came together for the first time in the writing of it. –Betty Friedan, “It Changed My Life,” 1976 In 1951, a labor journalist with a decade’s experience in protest movements described a trade union meeting where rank-and-file women talked and men listened. Out of these conversations, she reported, emerged the realization that the women were “fighters — that they refuse any longer to be paid or treated as some inferior species by their bosses, or by any male workers who have swallowed the bosses’ thinking.” The union was the UE, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, the most radical American union in the postwar period and in the 1940s what historian Ronald Schatz, appreciative of the UE’s place in history, has called “the largest communist-led institution of any kind in the United States.” In 1952 that same journalist wrote a pamphlet, UE Fights for Women Workers, that the historian Lisa Kannenberg, unaware of the identity of its author,…
The only significance of Aug 2, 1934, is that this was when he essentially assumed the presidency
my dates are when he was in POWER
that is, not under someone else.
if we dont use that, then we can renegotiate the term of FDR from when he entered state employ, which was quite a bit before he was in power.
though date wise your 100% correct, and one can argue a bit that his games started when he was not in power but in the employ of the state under another.
but then, we can expand obamas work to his childhood.
messy no matter which way you want to look at it.
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and the lesson is … respect the voice of the people, Obama was elected president by the people, criticize him when needed and praise him when he does well, if you don’t like the way he does things then don’t vote for him.
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