Who's a Nazi now?
If Obama's a goose-stepper, according to Rush, then what about Ike, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dubya?
By Knute Berger
August 18, 2009.
The GOP and far-right media have been working hard to define socialism down. Now everything is socialist: healthcare reform, the New Deal, the Great Society, even presumably Bo Obama, the president's federally housed dog.
Even GOP icons are socialists under the new definition: Ike's Interstate Highway system, Teddy Roosevelt's parks, Richard Nixon's Environmental Protection Agency, George W. Bush's enormous government debt and spending. The only people who aren't socialists: Conservatives who take Social Security, use Medicare, farm on land irrigated and electrified by the feds, grow crops according to the latest federal farm program giveaways, drive on freeways, listen to FCC-licensed talk radio stations, and have their mail delivered by a uniformed agent of the federal government six days a week. No, these people hate socialism.
Now that we've established who's a socialist, the new argument is whether or not you're a Communist socialist or a Nazi-style National Socialist. Last April, I wrote about the right's creeping Nazi rhetoric against Obama in a story on fake populism called "Sieg Heil Obama". One of the dangers is that formerly fringe ideas and claims are being mainstreamed. The healthcare debate, with Congressional representatives being branded as Nazi eugenicists for programs that don't even exist (the so-called "death panels"), is a logical, planned outcome.
The result can be seen in absurdities like a lecture on National Socialism by Rush Limbaugh. Hitler, he tells us, was a socialist. Well kind of. He was an anti-communist fascist dictator who fused the nation's and corporate interests under an iron hand. He was a kleptomaniac who ran a regime that looted Germany and numerous other countries for the benefit of a few. He went to war against the world and massacred millions of people in the Holocaust. Limbaugh says, when discussing National Socialism, you have to put the Holocaust aside — the implication being, aside from not killing Jews and gypsies, Obama, the Democrats, and healthcare reformers are in the same Hitler mold.
Some Republicans are honest enough to call this insane, from David Brooks to former Reagan administration supply-sider Bruce Bartlett, who bravely says what the GOP ragers are really mad about is George W. Bush. It was he, even more than Bill Clinton, who grew government, broke the financial system, failed to address health care. He also expanded the national security state. Republicans, like Limbaugh, spent years defending these depredations. Now they're out of power and they've only got themselves to blame.
Thus, it's easier to hurl the worst insults to obscure the fact that your guy screwed up. As Bartlett wrote on The Daily Beast: "Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect. They can start building some by admitting to themselves that Bush caused many of the problems they are protesting."
If they do that, though, they will have to admit that the Bush/Cheney regime, as many liberals once proclaimed, was by their own definition a National Socialist one. Sieg heil, Rush!
Comments:
Posted Tue, Aug 18, 8:13 a.m. Inappropriate
Well, have you tried having a guest columnist write an article called, "More Natzi than Thou"?
Maybe Rachel Maddow could have the head of the Natzi Party on her show to tell Rush who is who, and what is what.
Posted Tue, Aug 18, 8:13 a.m. Inappropriate
Well, have you tried having a guest columnist write an article called, "More Natzi than Thou"?
Maybe Rachel Maddow could have the head of the Natzi Party on her show to tell Rush who is who, and what is what.
Posted Tue, Aug 18, 8:16 a.m. Inappropriate
Well, have you tried having a guest columnist write an article called, "More Natzi than Thou"?
Maybe Rachel Maddow could have the head of the Natzi Party on her show to tell Rush who is who, and what is what.
Posted Tue, Aug 18, 2:14 p.m. Inappropriate
Despite the accuations being hurled at Obama et al, it's fair to point out that National Socialism is socialism. Although businesses are ostensibly privately held, and profits privately kept, the goverment (or, to be more specific, the party) has veto power over the decisions of business owners and imposes strict industrial policy on the economy. If a business owner gets out of line (such as, say, for being Jewish) his business can be confiscated and a new, more compliant, owner brought in. The practical effect for people living under these governments is that there isn't a hair's breadth of difference between Nazis and Commies.
And, believe it or not, there are a lot of us out here who hold that replacing Big-Government Bush with Bigger-Government Obama is not "Change we can believe in", it's just more of the same kind of abuse of the Constitution that was begun in the 1930s and has continued in fits and starts ever since.
Posted Tue, Aug 18, 5:09 p.m. Inappropriate
Wow, sorry about the repeats. I have had a tough time getting crosscut to load on any computer I use, the past few mornings.
Posted Tue, Aug 18, 5:11 p.m. Inappropriate
When these people hurl the charge of "socialism," I can only assume that they mean "Stalinist- or Maoist-style socialism" and not Norwegian-style socialism.
Because by any measure and despite high taxes Norway is a paradise of people who enjoy wealth, a high standard of living, health care, nice roads, clean sidewalks, good schools, free university education, arts, sports...and they still manage to have healthy free-market-style competition in the industrial sector. If I had the option of voting for Norwegian-style socialism, I'd mark that box in a second. Spend a week or two in Norway, and any American would. Seriously.
Anyone who has studied history knows that the Nazis, despite their name "National Socialists," are properly classified as fascists (right wing)--and not as socialists (left wing). The National Socialists opposed democracy and liberalism--Marxism in particular. (Indeed, socialists were put into concentration camps along Jews, Jehova's Witnesses, gay men, etc.) Capitalists *thrived* under National Socialism, benefiting from free slave labor and lucrative government contracts. Superficially, Soviet-style socialists and and Nazis might look similar because of the authoritarian approach to governance, but the underlying ideologies are radically and fundamentally different.
However, I don't think most people are using the terms "Nazi" and "socialist" with any awareness of these technical meanings: both terms are being used simply as insults, synonyms with the word "tyrant." It's a mistake to think that any deeper thought process is going on behind these slurs (or, likely, behind the health care debate).
Posted Wed, Aug 19, 9:25 a.m. Inappropriate
It's a fallacy to believe that the two are polar opposites. Ask anyone who's lived under such a regime. Political space-time is curved. Go too far in either direction and you end up coming around the other side. Look at China - It went from communist to fascist over the course of a few years, and never passed through a "free zone" to get there. That would be impossible if the two systems were opposites.
Posted Wed, Aug 19, 4:21 p.m. Inappropriate
Greens and libertarians at hempfest (I avoid all three), not only is political space curved, but also a a little paranoid and has the munchies.
Btw, I am not kidding about finding the natzi and getting his opinion about embracing Obama and his policies. That might help the contexturally challenged recognize the error in their choice of symbolic references when fear mongering.
I am not thinking I want to make that call.
Posted Thu, Aug 20, 2:43 p.m. Inappropriate
Authoritarian-style socialism and Nazism are superficially similar, as I noted, but ideologically they are indeed polar opposites. They are quite akin in the kinds of political structures their adherents have embraced historically, but their social and economic *ideologies* are diametrically opposite. Also, I don't see how moving from one to the other should require an intermediate stop in some kind of "free zone."
I think it's problematic to argue that China today has become "fascist," although there is some truth to that assertion. China lacks certain key things fascist states typically have: a mass movement, a focus on violence as progress, a caste-based social structure, a charismatic leader, etc. China is now very corporatist, however. I guess it's too complex to treat here, but I would say it's more a relic or defunct communist ideology that a free market economy has been grafted onto, probably more of a unique hybrid situation than anything. I think the trend in China, furthermore, is slowly pointing toward a social democracy in the style of most European states. I think there will soon come a time when the CPC allows opposition parties, perhaps first in local elections, outside the Special Economic Zones.