A response to AWH

Brett at AWH has a particularly stupid post here, indicating that all differences between right and left are reducible to economics. Further, Brett claims that anarchism is 'extreme right'. Because I'm banned at AWH, and because my attempts at sockpuppeting under various Russian monikers were unsuccessful, I'll include my brief response here:

If economics is the sole means by which you establish a person's politics, you end up with all kinds of stupidity, as you see in this post. Britain's economy under Churchill had an enormous amount of planning, particularly during WWII. Churchill even nationalised the banks, so by your logic, he is therefore a leftist. Ditto Dubya. Reagen greatly increased state control over the economy by means of regulating labour. He must be a lefty too.

Meanwhile, the most noted anarchists in history - Proudhon, Kropotkin, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, Chomsky - are all firmly on the left.

I presume this post was just another pathetic attempt to claim Hitler was a lefty. Attempt failed.

Damn these guys are stupid.

'Socialism' under Obama

Some people are saying that the GFC has plunged Obama's US into socialism.



But then, some people are morons.

(Chart taken from here).

Conservatism and Fascism

The following has been taken from Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism:

Italian and German conservatives had not created Mussolini and Hitler, of course, though they had too often let their law breaking go unpunished. After the Fascists and the Nazis made themselves too important to ignore, by the somewhat different mixtures of electoral appeal and violent intimidation...the conservatives had to decide what to do with them.

In particular, conservative leaders had to decide whether to try to coopt fascism or force it back to the margins. One crucial decision was whether the police and the courts would compel the fascists to obey the law. German chancellor Brüning attempted to curb Nazi violence in 1931-32. He banned uniformed actions by the SA (Sturmabteilung, i.e. brownshirts - THR) on April 14, 1932. When Franz von Papen succeeded Brüning as chancellor in July 1932, however, he lifted the ban...and the Nazis, excited by the vindication, set off the most violent period in the whole 1930-1932 constitutional crisis. In Italy, although a few prefects tried to restrain Fascist lawlessness, the national leaders preferred, at crucial moments, as we already know, to try to "transform" Mussolini rather than to discipline him. Conservative national leaders in both countries decided that what the fascists had to offer outweighed the disadvantages of allowing these ruffians to capture public space from the Left by violence. The nationalist press and conservative leaders in both countries consistently applied a double standard to judging fascist and left-wing violence.

...

Conservative complicites in the fascism's arrival in power were of several types. First of all, there was complicity in fascist violence against the Left...Mussolini's squadristi would have been powerless with the closed eyes and even the outright aid of the Italian police and army. Another form of complicity was the gift of respectability...Alfred Hugenberg, Krupp executive of the party that competed with Hitler most directly, the German National Party (DNVP), alternately attacked the Nazi upstart and appeared at political rallies with him...But while Hugenberg helped make Hitler look more acceptable, his DNVP membership drained away to the more exciting Nazis.

We saw...that the Nazis received less direct financial help from business than many have assumed. Before the final deal that put Hitler in power, German big business greatly preferred a solid reassuring conservative...to the unknown Hitler with his crackpot economic advisors...[B]usiness contributions did not become a major resource for Hitler until after he attained power. Then, of course, the game changed. Businessmen contributed hugely to the new Nazi authorities and set about accommodating themselves to a regime that would reward many of them richly with armaments contracts, and all of them by breaking the back of organized labour in Germany. (pp. 99-100).


On the 'socialist' misnomer:


Fascists had also found a magic formula for weaning workers away from Marxism. Long after Marx asserted that the working class had no homeland, conservatives had been unable to find any way to refute him. None of their nineteenth-century nostrums - deference, religion, schooling - had worked. On the eve of WWI, the Action Française had enjoyed some success recruiting a few industrial workers to nationalism, and the unexpectedly wide acceptance by workers of their patriotic duty to fight for their homelands when WWI began foretold that in the twentieth century Nation was going to be stronger than Class.

Fascists everywhere have built on that revelation...As for the Nazi Party, its very name proclaimed that it was a workers' party...Mussolini expected to recruit his old socialist colleagues. Their results were not overwhelmingly successful. Every analysis of the social composition of the early fascist parties agrees: although some workers were attracted, their share of party membership was always well below their share in the general population. (p. 103).


Also, Wikipedia has some reasonable information about the Nazi's attempt to position themselves as a workers party that aimed to include the middle class, and which utterly rejected Marxism.

And whilst I haven't quoted the relevant passages at length, the final power grabs of both Hitler and Mussolini came courtesy of conservatives attempting to form coalitions. We can conclude that whilst conservative and fascism are not the same thing, neither has anything remotely to do with leftism, and leftism is not implicated in the rise to power of fascists in Italy and Germany.

Some reflections on ideology, Zionism, and fascism

In response to an excellent and timely piece by Richard Seymour, debunking the myth that fascism was a leftist political movement, I provided some brief thoughts of my own, when the subject turned to Zionism. I've done a little reading in this area of late, and this are my current thoughts, ever provisional:

I think there's a tendency to simplify Zionism. Zionism came in many different forms - left and right, religious and secular. The ruling ideology of Israel is probably best understood as simply violent national chauvinism, perhaps with a few Zionist features thrown in, but not strictly identifiable with Zionism.

I think also that the tendency for the lunar right to support Israel is tactical, in many cases. Paxton makes the point that if fascism were to come to the US, it would steer clear of the repugnant symbols of the fascism of old (i.e. jackboots, swastikas, etc). It makes sense that budding fascist groups would view Muslims as the enemy, and would therefore support the IDF's efforts against 'terrorism'.

...

Maybe the ruling powers in Israel have some fascist tendencies. However, when we look at the most belligerant of Israeli hawks, look at their rhetoric and, more importantly, their actions, there's little that's specifically 'Zionist' about it. They might as well be chauvinist thugs from Russia or anywhere else.
Obviously, we cannot ever accept Zionism as a legitimate solution if we are universalist and internationalist. That goes without saying. But I wonder if Zionism is to the ruling Israeli elite what German Romanticism was to the Nazis - a necessary, but hardly sufficient condition.

Human trafficking

Here is a great resource for anybody interested in the sex trade, and human trafficking.


Courtesy of Hossam.

GFC hits Ireland

Shane MacGowan forced to get teeth.


From this:



To this:




Let's remember the good old days, of lilting folk songs:




And, for your patience, for those of you of my generation, you'll remember tolerating Mr Valentine's antics in order to hear this unzud classic:

'The fashionable ideas of the left'

I've had previous occasion to disagree with Mark Richardson, self-identified 'traditional conservative'. He's at it again today in a post on racism:

There's a fashionable idea on the left that whites invented the concept of race in order to gain an unearned privilege by oppressing others. Therefore, whites are held to be uniquely guilty of preventing the emergence of human equality.

It's hard to know if Richardson is being disingenuous here, or if he's just plain ignorant. Anyway, for his enlightenment, I left him the following response:

Firstly, the notion of race did emerge in its most elaborate form in Europe. This wasn't done to obtain 'privilege' or other such nonsense, but to justify brutality at the expense of colonised peoples. It's a recurring pattern you can find in relation to England, Nazi Germany, imperialist France, fascist Italy, etc. There's overwhelming evidence that this was the case, and I am quite happy to point you to numerous references if you think otherwise.

Secondly, whilst it's quite possible to find examples of various kinds of non-white racism, there is no historical precedent for the racism exhibited by Europe toward the rest of the world. Remember, by the 19th century, pretty much the entire world (with a couple of notable exceptions) was the property of one European power or another. This might give you some idea as to why the ideologies underpinning European racism are of somewhat more interest than racism by Inuits or Khmers.

Finally, as you know full well, 'diversity' has always been evident in Australia, from the time of the Aboriginals onwards. It cannot be got rid of. What we are seeing today, albeit, in the form of limited, localised examples (Cronulla, Camden), are thick-headed would-be brownshirts trying to impinge on the rights of those they see as the enemy (typically Muslims or middle-easterners). There people, whilst on the margins, have nonetheless formed organised groups to further their cause. Can you point us to any nascent fascist groups run by Vietnamese or Somalians that are promoting racist hate, or is post yet another ugly exercise in quashing strawmen and pinning moral responsibility exclusively to minorities?

POSTSCRIPT:
Looking at the output of Richardson and his followers, 'traditional conservatives', I'm struck by the preoccupation with themes of racial and cultural purity homogeneity, the need to restore patriarchal arrangements, the reduction of relations between the sexes (and the nations) to biology, the strident opposition to both leftism and liberalism, the niggling sense of grievance and resentment, as if White Australian Males were the most oppressed group on the planet...
Let me be very clear - I'm not suggesting Mr Richardson is a fascist. But take these precise views, add the slightest hint of radicalism to them, and what you'd end up with is a creed that is formally indistinguishable from the brownshirts of old.