After today’s elections it seems likely that the Alternative for Germany party will hold seats in the country’s parliament. The BBC and all our newspapers are appalled. First item on the news this morning the presenter said, “This will be the first time members of the far right have achieved significant political representation since the days of Hitler’s Nazis.”
I can find only one thing wrong with that statement: the Nazis were not a party of the far right, or indeed of any sort of right
They were called The German Workers National Socialist Party. And the name was appropriate.
It is often argued that the Nazis were not socialists because they left industry and commerce – the means of production and distribution – in the hands of private companies. But this facade concealed the truth that the bosses of these companies were merely functionaries, managers who obeyed the orders of the actual owner which was the Nazi government.
The socialist policy of the Nazis was enforced three years into their rule when, in 1936 the government introduced controls over prices and wages. These controls inevitably lead to shortages, because they abolished the flexible system of supply and demand.
The response of a socialist government to shortages is rationing. This is made easier when the socialist government is also totalitarian and brooks no opposition.
Hitler’s totalitarian socialist regime didn’t stop at the regulation of wages and prices: it decided what goods should be produced, in what quantities and how these goods should be allocated and distributed. The thorough bureaucracy required to do this produces stagnation and economic chaos.
Figuratively speaking, in a National Socialist brewery, there wouldn’t be enough beer to organise the proverbial piss up.
Shortages produce endless queues for whatever goods might become available.
They also produce a flourishing black market. The government must clamp down very heavily on this and ensure harsh punishments for those convicted. This requires a huge network of informers which makes daily life hell on earth for the people who are forever in the most fearful doubt over who might be an informer – often one’s own friends or even family.
Convicted black marketeers were not tried by normal juries, because ordinary citizens sitting on a jury would never hand out the stiff sentences which the government required – for a trivial offence such as selling a pound of meat illegally. So judgement and sentencing were carried out by government-appointed administrative tribunals.
The last state of that polity which began with price and wage control was a regime which exercised total control and its instrument was the secret police, the Gestapo.
Welcome to the full-blown reign of terror. And it was a socialist reign of terror as thorough as anything instituted by Joseph Stalin
But business did very well out of the Nazis – as did the aristocracy, who only got moral qualms when they saw millions of Russians on the edge of their estates.
After excoriating Hammurabi and several others for their economic dirigisme, an economist said the only person who came off well was Goering for admitting it didn’t work.
Some have said that Nazi Germany was facing economic collapse in late 1939 and only the outbreak of war fended it off. It is not true. German salesmen had already kicked the British out of the Balkans and were on the verge of doing the same in South America. In Turkey in 1990-2 we had a cooker made by Messerschmitt in 1940. My wife extolled its wonderful oven. I mused that perhaps the man responsible was promoted to design one a bit larger.
And racial theories? Aryan supremacy? The difference between the Nazis & the communists is the word ‘national’. Ve are ze master race!
Not sure what you are saying there Martin.
I think the evidence is that Ashkenazi Jews, as a distinct group rather than as a race, have by proportion of population, supplied the most outstanding individuals in a broad array of useful human activities, at least after they got into wider host societies that support human achievement.
That is, so far.
Seems now that a sub-population of NE Asians is throwing up a lot of extraordinarily talented and achieved folk, now that they too have have gained benefits from host open-societies in the Euro-West.
We can go further, with the “who’s on top?” question, now that we better understand population descriptive stats, and the interplay of raw talent with positive, highly-endowed learning environments.
BTW, does anyone know the Jewish/non-Jewish numbers of the top 1,000 or so players in the Oct 1917 Russian Revolution?
Pretty obviously the German National Socialists weren’t social conservatives.
In the 1939 Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs series, No 21, The Nazi Conception of Law, the author, J Walter Jones, wrote: “It is the common feature of the despotisms of Russia, Italy and Germany that they deliberately encourage the continuance of a revolutionary outlook, provided, of course, that it is not directed against themselves.” (p15).
If one wanted to give any credence to Rauschning, he claimed Hitler had declared that “National Socialism is socialism in evolution; socialism in everlasting change.” (Gesprache mit Hitler, New York, 1940, p177).
Fact, also let the Left and Right each have their own Courts, Prisons, Police Force (or service in the case of the Left) and every thing else the tax-payer pays for.
And let the clients choose.
Along with all the fun, the Tax-Payer will rise up, I think.
And the Left will be nose-to-nose with the consequences of their silliness.
Yes, let us win the debate that it’s the Left that is Totalitarian, and vice versa, and that the Right prefers the freedom and dignity of the individual over the power of the State.
Now, to retrieve our once very pleasant civil society, the one of orderliness, honest day’s work for honest pay, limited if clever smut in the entertainment industry, better manners, clean streets, and not very much violence, here’s one thing we must do:
Fight to split in two the budget of the tax-payer funded BBC and education system from kindergarten to university:
Half for the Left, and half for the Right.
Peter is correct to point out the commonplace error that National Socialism is a creature of the political Right. This correction can’t be repeated often enough since the political Left continuously rely on mis-direction to avoid guilt by association. We really do need to challenge the misuse of the term ‘Right Wing’ at every turn!
A veritable truth!
There’s also Ecclesiastes, 10.2.
Yes, the Gestapo and all the other horrors of the totalitarian state.
I know, and the slaughter of the tens/hundreds of millions, let’s say a couple billion, eh?
Let’s not do that Ever Again.
But please, describe an answer to the Islamic insurgency that will not involve, at the least, very large-scale indefinite internment.
Russia would be willing open to de-mothball all those camp sites in Siberia, at the right price, to warehouse the “difficult ones” within the UK and more broadly the European Muslim population.
For the UK, and Europe, a benefit/cost analysis would strongly favour internment of bad guys and their supporters, rather than leave them free to:
1. Kill, maim and sexually torture folk on the streets and public transport, in places of entertainment, and in their homes.
2. Incur massive economic damage by destruction of public and private property, including the very low-cost method of placing suspicious looking packages under bridges on motorways.
(A bit more expensive for them, but very effective, is insurgents cause fuel and chemical transport vehicles to crash or catch fire on important roads in peak travel hours. This is happening with alarming frequency in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in Australia to no media, police or political comment.)
Well, my point is that costs vastly exceed benefits in our current response to the Islamic situation we are in.
Think of the costs in surveillance, police time, military time, court time, lawyers time, not forgetting the welfare expense to tax-payers of housing, feeding, medicating, “educating” these people and their dependents, as we continue to permit 25,000 intending terrorists, and their additional approx 250,000 supporters to roam about.
And to what other useful employment might those resources be put?
All this cost, to what benefit?
Ha! The benefit!
That would be that we never acted ruthlessly and brutally to protect our ourselves, our children, and the long traditions that built up the best the world had seen in civil society, for such a large proportion of the populace.