Nazi – More Zonkyness

Nazis: Were They Socialists? Atheists? Christians?

Dec 302022

Nazis were Nazis. But not infrequently online arguments will result in accusations along the lines of “Nazis were ${X} so ${X} are Nazis”. Which is incredibly shallow thinking of course. A Nazi could well be a stamp collector, but what made them a Nazi was membership of the NSDAP.

There are ‘interests’ that would be indicative of membership of the NSDAP – ‘racial purity’, anti-semiticsm, etc. but they are specific types of interests and something as innocuous as stamp collecting isn’t indivicative.

But concentrating on Socialism because Socialism appears in the name of the party.

Socialism

The full name of the Nazis party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei^[ (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). The “socialist” appears right there in the name of the party, so of course they were socialists.

Well, no. It isn’t quite that simple.

The first indication is that once the Nazis acquired power, they immediately started suppressing socialists of all varieties – the first imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp were Hitler’s political opponents. Including members of the SDP and KDP (see the list of those killed by the Nazis although not all of those killed were socialists).

There are those who will argue that socialists turn on each other. Certainly the authoritarian ones do have that tendency but not to the extreme that Nazis did. For example, members of the German SPD for forced to join the communist party in East Germany. Even Lenin’s Russia didn’t immediately suppress non-Bolsheviks (Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary Party); they were finally suppressed after each was involved in separate uprisings.

The next indicator are economic policies. This is slightly harder to justify because some of the Nazi government spending during The Depression looks a bit like Keynesian but most of the government spending was very often aligned with Nazi military ambitions. Plus they were always very friendly with corporations and had abolished trade unions.

Finally, the Nazis were originally called Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party). After Hitler took over the party, it was renamed to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in a deliberate attempt to deceive working class voters. Hitler was initially opposed to the name, but he was persuaded to accept it

No serious historian is going to call the Nazis socialists and people who do usually turn out to be far-right idiots trying to demonise the left with quite possibly the silliest argument ever invented.

Why Trump’s Border Camps Should Be Compared With Nazi Concentration Camps

Politics No Responses »

Jun 272019

@AOC seems to have poured a dramatic amount of petrol onto the fiery discussion regarding Trump’s border concentration camps by simply calling them concentration camps.

No matter how many people assume that ‘concentration camp’ means a Nazi extermination camp, that is not what ‘concentration camp’ means. As one dictionary states :-

A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as suspect.

Although that is not from the full Oxford English Dictionary, I have checked with that definitive work and it’s definition agrees with the above.

The relevant Twitter threads are filled with agreements and disagreements, and it is the later I’ll take a closer look at.

At least in some instances; more than a few consist of approximately “Well they’re illegal immigrants so they deserve it” which is so repulsively disgusting that the only appropriate response is a good slap.

The next objection is along the lines of: “You can’t call them concentration camps; that would be disrespectful to the 6 million Jews that the Nazis murdered”.

Funnily enough, it’s rarely mentioned that the Nazis also killed 11 million other people as well as the 6 million Jews. Almost as if there is a politically acceptable “holocaust denial” (strictly speaking the Holocaust is only the Jews; there isn’t an acceptable ‘cool’ name for the entirety of the Nazi crimes against humanity).

Let’s correct a few misconceptions about Nazi concentration camps (and there have been plenty of other concentration camps around the world) :-

The concentration camps were first created in 1933 to hold political prisoners and union organisers. Those targeted for starvation rations, brutal treatment, and slave labour rapidly grew to include homosexuals, Romani, communists, socialists, the disabled, Poles, Slavs, Soviet POWs, and just about anyone who could be labelled “undesirable”.
Jews were also targeted as soon as the Nazis came to power but weren’t sent en-mass to concentration camps until 1939 when they were forced to live in Jewish “ghettos” (effectively concentration camps).
The extermination camps were set up in 1942 to speed up the “final solution”; approximately 90% of those killed at these extermination camps were Jewish.

There is also “But Obama did it first” (these camps were first instantiated in 2014 under the previous administration). This is distinctly reminiscent of the wailing child that gets caught with his or her hand in the cookie jar “But someone else did it first”. As I understand it, the scale of the previous administration’s camps was far less than now, but give me a time machine and I’ll still go back and tell off Obama.

Now back to our original topic. Is it fair to call the border camps ‘concentration camps’? They certainly meet the dictionary definition, and there are genuine reasons why the comparison with the Nazi concentration camps is entirely appropriate.

That is not to say that the border concentration camps are comparable to the Nazi concentration camps in 1944, but there are many disturbing parallels to the Nazi concentration camps in 1934. The time to stop these camps potentially evolving into something similar to the Nazi concentration camps of 1944 is now.

Liam: Trump Isn’t MY Guest

Politics, Uncategorized No Responses »

Jul 142018

Liam Fox has claimed that Trump protesters have “embarassed” themselves by protesting Trump’s visit to the UK. He claims that we have a tradition of being polite to guests (at least until they throw up on the carpet, piss in the wine, and try to have sex with the host).

Well, I didn’t invite that jumped up rancid little toad who is Putin’s lickspittle and quite possibly the closest thing we’ve seen to a major free world leader being a Nazi. So I am under no obligation to be polite to the bankrupt crook.

Besides which, with his unreasonable and unhinged attack on NATO, Trump has been pissing in the wine, so it would not be unreasonable to slam the door in his face. Of course I’m not being “diplomatic” but I’m not a politician so I’m not being paid to be polite to the kind of person resembling that which you instinctively scrape off your shoe.

To USians who might feel a bit insulted by how their president is being treated; well if you did your job properly and didn’t elect someone with the brains of a pea-sized petrified panda turd who separates children and puts them in concentration camps then we might treat them with a bit more respect.

Charlottesville, Trump, Neo-Fascists, and the “Alt-Left”

Politics No Responses »

Aug 192017

The simplistic recitation of what happened in Charlottesville last Friday was that a bunch of fascists organised a protest against the removal of a town statue of Robert E Lee and a counter-protest was organised by anti-fascists. The fascists had a perfect right to peacefully protest (although given their ideology, cringing in their basements in shame would be more appropriate), and the counter-protesters were almost inevitably present – arguably with also a right to be there (peacefully).

The protests turned violent, and on Saturday a fascist drove a car into a crowd of counter-protester killing one, and injuring 19.

Who was to blame? Well before I add my opinion to the pile of opinions out there, let’s take a look at some of the others that have come out since the attack :-

Trump initially sought to blame “all sides”, then went back on his word, and then rolled it forward again. Such decisiveness. But blaming “all sides”? So in other words, the victims of terrorism are to blame as well as the terrorists? You could be generous, and assume that he intended to blame all sides for the general violence, but not to call the attack on anti-fascists terrorism was unforgivable.
Early on, some fascists even tried to claim that the terrorist attack was perpetrated by anti-fascists to blacken the name of fascism. Unfortunately I cannot find a source for this, although I recall it being mentioned (perhaps an entry on the Stormfront site which is currently unavailable to unregistered users). This was a fore-runner of the next part of the “blame game”.
“But BLM/Antifa are terrorists too”. Victim-blaming; even if it were true (I’ll come back to that), the only terrorist attack at Charlottesville was perpetrated by a fascist with anti-fascists as the target. Besides which, the majority of the counter protesters were not members of BLM or Antifa; students, church groups, local residents, hell anyone with half a sense of decency could have been there opposing the fascists.
The deceptive use of the “Alt-Left” label. There is no equivalent of the alt-right on the left; the left have a pretty consistent attitude towards racism. Using the “Alt-Left” label implies that the counter-protesters were members of the lunatic fringe of the left. For a start, whatever you think of the old hard-left (communists and the like), they certainly aren’t new or “alt”in any way. And secondly, many of the counter-protesters were certainly not part of the far left; hell there were probably right-wingers as part of the counter-protesters. I’ve got a low opinion of the mainstream right.

Variations on number 3 above has been common enough online that I have seen it multiple times in my Facebook feed (and elsewhere). Let me emphasise something I mentioned earlier – two wrongs don’t make a right, and there was no BLM/Antifa terrorism at Charlottesville.

Now onto my opinion about who was to blame.

As mentioned before, the only terrorist attack at Charlottesville was carried out by a neo-fascist, and the terrorist attack was the only reason why Charlottesville made a big news story. The counter-protesters were not involved in terrorism.

Now onto the violence. Determining blame here is tricky for several reasons :-

You cannot tell from media reports who was to blame for crowd violence; in particular video footage can be very deceptive especially once it is cut to “sex it up” for the news. When some bozo starts windmilling punches at the fascists, how do we know that he wasn’t hit by a stone thrown by the fascists just before? That could easily be not shown on any video footage. When police forces ask for everyone’s mobile phone video and pictures after a terrorist incident they do so for a reason – they want to see things from as many perspectives as possible.
Reacting with violence to extreme provocation is wrong, but those going out of their way to provoke things are not entirely blameless. Having been on anti-fascist protests myself, I can say that fascists can be extremely intimidating and provoking.

Having said that, there is a school of thought that says that giving a fascist a good kicking is a job well done. Having recently seen a film of what racism seems to inevitably lead to, it is hard to condemn such an attitude :-

Watch that film, and dare say that nazis deserve the protection of the law. At the very least, punching a nazi is no crime. (whatever the law may say).

I have previously used the generic term “fascist” to describe the protesters at Charlottesville, but in reality there was an alphabet soup of right-wing extremists – the KKK, white supremists, neo-nazis, and every other bunch of thugs that are collectively known as “alt-right”. Yes, I said thug. If you scratch the surface of any low-level fascist, you will find a young man who is into violence. What passes for their idiotic ideology is little more than an excuse to justify violence against certain groups.

If you look at listed terrorist attacks in the USA by ideology, 15 attacks have been by left-wing extremists since 1901; 51 have been by right-wing extremists (which excludes lynchings which would bring the figure up into thousands). So which group is the most violent?

Is Putin Another Hitler?

General No Responses »

Aug 152014

To anyone who is aware of the history of Nazi Germany’s actions leading up to Word War II, there’s something alarmingly familiar about Putin’s actions recently.

Germany lost a lot of territory after World War I, and Russia lost a lot of territory after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Germany annexed Austria in what became known as the Anschluss, and in a quite similar move Russia annexed the Crimea.

Germany “rescued” the German minorities from “repression” in Czechoslovakia by annexing the parts of the country with large ethnic German populations; Russia appears to be trying the same thing in the eastern Ukraine.

It is probable that Putin is not trying to emulate Hitler by exterminating a whole “race” of people, but Hitler wasn’t considered to be a monster just because he tried to exterminate the Jews (and other minorities he didn’t like), but also because he was a military adventurer who provoked one of the deadliest wars in history.

And Putin does seem to be in the early stages of something like that.

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