Are the teabaggers really so dumb as to not know the difference between Nazis and Communists?

[joebuck20]

Sadly, some people will believe anything if it fits into their political worldview. I grew up around such folks. If Rush Limbaugh had told them the world was flat, they not only would have believed it, but they probably would have picketed any school that dared to teach otherwise.
But don’t these people know anything about history and the titanic clash between Nazism and Communism that was the Eastern front during World War II? Or for that matter the irony of linking Obama to a white suprmacist movement?

[DanBlather]

@joebuck20

But don’t these people know anything about history and the titanic clash between Nazism and Communism that was the Eastern front during World War II? Or for that matter the irony of linking Obama to a white suprmacist movement?

No.

They also don’t know about the history of the Democratic and Republican parties and how they have basically switched positions over the years, and they don’t understand that the 40 hour work week and over-time laws were part of the progressive movement, and they have no clue about economics, and they don’t know much about the rest of the world and the advantages and disadvantages of their systems over ours. It’s shocking how stupid most people are.

[silenus]

You’re talking about people who don’t believe in evolution, think white folk are inately superior to those who sport a darker hue, and probably think the earth is flat as well. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.

[NajaNivea]

Are the teabaggers really so dumb as to not know the difference between Nazis and Communists?

Yes, and it sure doesn’t stop there. I stopped laughing after the first half-dozen times I heard “if you like socialism so much, why don’t you move to China?”

[C3]

My favorite is when they put little hammer & sickle symbols on their “Down with Czars!” signs.

(shouldn’t this thread be in the Pit?)

[Beware_of_Doug]

@NajaNivea

Yes, and it sure doesn’t stop there. I stopped laughing after the first half-dozen times I heard “if you like socialism so much, why don’t you move to China?”

Well, you have to admit it’s got a lot more punch than "“if you like socialism so much, why don’t you move to Denmark?” Nobody doesn’t like Denmark. Hell, I’d move there.

[MrBerious]

Didn’t you see McBain fighting those CommieNazis?

[Thrash_the_Almighty]

@joebuck20

Sadly, some people will believe anything if it fits into their political worldview. I grew up around such folks. If Rush Limbaugh had told them the world was flat, they not only would have believed it, but they probably would have picketed any school that dared to teach otherwise.
But don’t these people know anything about history and the titanic clash between Nazism and Communism that was the Eastern front during World War II? Or for that matter the irony of linking Obama to a white suprmacist movement?

One explanation is that they are stupid and unaware of the difference. Another is that they are angry and are trying to shock and insult in any way they can. I suspect that you would find some of both groups amongst the teabaggers, but I have no cite to back that up.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Thrash_the_Almighty

One explanation is that they are stupid and unaware of the difference. Another is that they are angry and are trying to shock and insult in any way they can. I suspect that you would find some of both groups amongst the teabaggers, but I have no cite to back that up.

I understand going for shock value a slinging any shit you can hoping some will stick. Still, the shock value loses a lot of effectiveness when they lampoon themselves.

[BrainGlutton]

IME from other boards, some of them are perfectly aware of the history of mutual Nazi/Communist hostility, but stoutly and repeatedly maintain it is irrelevant: Hitler was a “socialist” and used the word in his party’s name and had universal health care and he was a totalitarian and Stalin was a totalitarian, and they’re both the same really, like Shi’a and Sunni to a Christian, or Baptists and Catholics to Muslim. Therefore Obama can be equated with Hitler because he wants health-care reform and favors labor unions and nationalized the banks and the auto companies, etc.

In a way this is much worse than simple ignorance.

[tomndebb]

Rants are better posted in the BBQ Pit.

Off you go.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@BrainGlutton

IME from other boards, some of them are perfectly aware of the history of mutual Nazi/Communist hostility, but stoutly and repeatedly maintain it is irrelevant: Hitler was a “socialist” and used the word in his party’s name…

Apparently they are not aware of history.

I mean, what’s in a name?

North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Former East Germany was the German Democratic Republic.

Hey! Look at that! They used the word “Democratic” in their name so it must be so!

:rolleyes:

(Not ranting at you BG)

[Tom_Scud]

@Whack-a-Mole

Apparently they are not aware of history.

I mean, what’s in a name?

North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Former East Germany was the German Democratic Republic.

Hey! Look at that! They used the word “Democratic” in their name so it must be so!

:rolleyes:

(Not ranting at you BG)

See! The Democrats ARE Commies!

[BrainGlutton]

Funny thing is, these RWs who equate Nazism and Communism actually have something of a historical case, if you kind of squint and toss all intellectual honesty out the window. Mussolini did start out as a Communist, after all. Fascism bears roughly the same relationship to Marxist socialism as Islam to Judaism/Christianity (Mohammed was unclear on the difference between the two, BTW) – inspired by some of the same or similar ideas, but radically re-envisioned. Thus, you have race- or nation-socialism instead of class-socialism, the corporatist idea of class cooperation instead of Marxist class struggle, national syndicalism instead of anarcho-syndicalism, aggressive nationalism instead of internationalism; but a common totalitarian approach to government and society, plus a common element of street-populism and a mobilized proletariat. And there actually was a distinct leftist, working-class-socialist element in Nazism – it’s called Strasserism – which was embodied in the SA and which, with the SA, was pretty much put down for good and all in the Night of the Long Knives.

What they’re missing – well, one thing they’re missing – is that the ideological/cultural/intellectual roots of socialism and fascism are completely different and inimical.

From “Which Civilisation?” by Michael Lind, 10/25/01:

On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another.

Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.

Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).

Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.

The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.

See also this review by conservative Catholic intellectual John J. Reilly of Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell (1996); it’s very, very interesting.

This ideological difference between socialism and fascism is obscured (or dismissed) in the Nolan Chart of political ideologies but clarified in the Pournelle Chart.

What the RWs who equate Obama with Hitler are also missing (or dishonestly denying), of course, is that the American Democrats’ liberalism, and even today’s European social democracy (roughly equivalent to what I call “progressivism” in a contemporary American context), are firmly within the “humanist” tradition as defined above, and have no relevant elements in common with totalitarianism, whether rationalist or romantic, fascist or socialist.

[Thrash_the_Almighty]

@Whack-a-Mole

I understand going for shock value a slinging any shit you can hoping some will stick. Still, the shock value loses a lot of effectiveness when they lampoon themselves.

I wonder to what extent their target audience thinks that they are lampooning themselves. You obviously see them as making a mockery of themselves, but I kind of doubt you were on the fence to begin with. Do their tactics gain them more support than they loose? I honestly don’t know the answer to that one.

It seem to me that their message is more about anger than communism or Nazism and that message is getting through loud and clear.

[NajaNivea]

@BrainGlutton

Funny thing is…
…whether rationalist or romantic, fascist or socialist.

Ooh, pretty. May I quote you (elsewhere)?

[Guinastasia]

@Whack-a-Mole

Apparently they are not aware of history.

I mean, what’s in a name?

North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Former East Germany was the German Democratic Republic.

Hey! Look at that! They used the word “Democratic” in their name so it must be so!

:rolleyes:

(Not ranting at you BG)

Yep – the Nazis were lefties!!!

(You might also want to point out that both North Korea AND the former Soviet Union had REPUBLIC in their names…so they’re…REPUBLICAN!!! And the Soviets didn’t even temper it with Democrat!)

[BrainGlutton]

See also The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, by George Orwell (1941):

What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism – that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit — DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddlesteamer of equal horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one. But it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-abused words, Socialism and Fascism.

Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment.

However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.

But what then is Fascism?

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and—this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism—generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human INEQUALITY, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non-nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.

However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.

(Ever since the early days of the Cold War, many American conservatives have admired Orwell for his fervent anti-Stalinism as expressed in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and appear to be completely unaware that he remained a fervent Socialist, as defined above, to the end of his life.)

[BrainGlutton]

@NajaNivea

Ooh, pretty. May I quote you (elsewhere)?

By all means!

[BrainGlutton]

@Thrash_the_Almighty

I wonder to what extent their target audience thinks that they are lampooning themselves. You obviously see them as making a mockery of themselves, but I kind of doubt you were on the fence to begin with. Do their tactics gain them more support than they loose? I honestly don’t know the answer to that one.

It seem to me that their message is more about anger than communism or Nazism and that message is getting through loud and clear.

I read this and I’m flashing on the Yippies. Were they trying to practice politics, or art? Did they waste their time, or accomplish exactly what they wanted to accomplish?