One basic problem I see is that his “analysis” forgets that the business powers in Germany helped prop up Hitler. The “rotten” deal in opposition to the “New deal” in the USA was in practice the removal of any union power and protection of the corporations at any cost. The most depressing point IMHO is that many of those German corporations were correct, they maintained possession of their businesses in the end.
Well sure, we’re talking about millions of individual people, after all.
To be clear about what I am saying: the German right-wing did not uniformly embrace Hitler or National Socialism. The answer to “what happened to all the far right people during the rise of fascism” is, in Germany, “Some of them supported the Nazis and some of them (Catholics, junkers, the officer class) did not.”
As your quote shows, there were a few bishops that opposed evil, the point stands, if it had been the majority it would had been evident, as it was, there were a good number (not the majority in any case) that deserve eternal praise for opposing evil, but as I point out, some lessons are never learned and after seeing a semi biographical movie from Germany called “The Nasty Girl” it is uncanny how the attempts at white washing the real levels of support that the Catholics gave to evil in Europe are made also nowadays by the extreme right wingers in El Salvador that committed many atrocities (They were catholic also BTW).
That’s your decision, but note that RationalWiki only addresses two of his works, and the thing they criticize him for (praxeology) is unrelated to the work I quote, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, which is a straightforward historical analysis of the rise of Nazism and the total state. It isn’t a work of economics or praxeology.
That section isn’t the sum of his analysis, just a handy passage. He didn’t forget the role business played. Elsewhere in the book, you’ll find:
Why would their votes need to be weighted? Proletarians always outnumber the bourgeoisie.
What structure would that be in the U.S.’ case, and why does that mean our democracy has “failed”?
The Athenian democracy never “failed,” BTW. It was supplanted temporarily by a Sparta-friendly collegial tyranny of aristocrats (the Thirty) as a result of losing the Peloponnesian War, but was soon restored, and survived for centuries more even under Roman rule. Just because a state gets defeated/conquered does not mean its system of government has “failed.”
But that still ignores the point, German capitalists benefited in the end with the unholy deal with Hitler. The recognition of that injustice is the reason why those corporations pay reparations and support to the survivors of the Holocaust and the war.
Hitler was concerned enough about them to murder some of their leaders, close Catholic schools, eradicate Catholic influence on politics, and prosecute priests and nuns in show trials. Relative to other German groups, the Catholics were assuredly not solid allies of Hitler. Nor were other right-wing groups. Others were.
I recall seeing a documentary on the SS saying that Himmler planned eventually to destroy the Catholic Church utterly, substituting Nordic neopaganism. Don’t know if Hitler would have been on board with that.
Does fascism even have an ideology? It always seemed to me as an opportunistic dictator gaining power for the sake of power and by any means that work.
It does; see post #10. What you’re describing could apply to any dictatorship or authoritarian regime. All fascists are authoritarians, but not all authoritarians are fascists. Franco was not really a fascist, though he had fascist (falangist) supporters, he was simply a reactionary with his mind stuck in the 18th Century and trying to drag Spain there; I’ve heard him described as “a cop, not an artist.” Fascists, for all their atavisms, are more modern-minded and forward-looking. From George Orwell’s “Wells, Hitler, and the World State” (1941):
And that was the point I was making, the issue I have is that just mentioning it in passing is done to ignore it in the overall view. Many industrialists were Nazis too.
And regarding the Catholics, again, no all suffered under Hitler, many were willful collaborators, and again, a few dissenting leaders being murdered does not demonstrate the levels of support to the Nazis the affected group had, I do recognize the few that did oppose Hitler, the point remains that it was not the majority of Catholics.
Mises ignores it by specifically addressing it? That’s an odd definition of “ignore”. And he’s right, the alternative for the industrialists was a Communist government. What should they have done?
If I may revisit your first post on this matter:
I’ve pointed out what several groups of far-right people were doing: opposing Hitler, but not directly enough to get themselves killed (though some did). Neither the Catholics, nor the junkers, nor the officer class as groups were part of Hitler’s political base. That doesn’t mean they were fighting the SA in the streets, but they were assuredly not “part of the Reich”.
Once again, it is not accurate to claim that only a few supported the Nazis, the majority did. It is good for the hope of humanity that several did oppose evil, but let us not whitewash the past, because when that is done we can see a repeat of it, like in Latin America and the many priests and bishops that aided and supported dictators.
Regarding modern history, I do have to report that people that did oppose evil like Monsignor Romero are put now as examples to follow, but we should not forget that people like him were accused of being communist. The extreme right still has to learn a lesson, and no, not even being Catholic is a warranty that they will do the right thing in the future when the past is whitewashed.
Also: Being Catholic does not prevent one from being an extreme right winger, and that takes us once again to the original point, it is really silly to make the right wing as **not **being a huge part of the Fascist movements in Germany and other places.
One of my favorite ever authors is Lincoln Steffens. His autobiography http://www.unz.org/Pub/SteffensLincoln-1931 includes a beautiful account of his boyhood, which was included in my fathers college reader.
Lincoln made a career investigating and reporting on political corruption and explotation. He became an American communist: he accepted the label, even though I don’t think he was ever a member of any particular organisation.
At the end of his life, as recorded in his biography, he became reconciled to big business, because he recognised that communism was trying to achieve the same thing.
George Orwell recognised the same thing later, but with much less tolerance:
I always think of the “left-right” spectrum as whatever is left after you take out things like conservatism vs radicalism, and wet vs dry, which are evident in all parties.
In AUS, the main unlabled divergence between the left and the right wing of politics is that the left, because of their trade-union roots, holds to the view that you can make the world better for every individual by making it better for every group, and the right, in opposition to the left, holds the view that you can make the world better for every group by making it better for every individual.
Given this definition of ‘right’ and ‘left’, the left is both more fascist and more communist than the right. Other definitions give other results.
Stop tripping over the words and their manifestos. Every tree has fruits, judge the tree by it’s fruits. They bore the same fruits. The state became god, the state became mother and father, the state replaced the family. (literally in Nazi and Soviet regime)
Check Youtube for documentaries on how Fascism and Socialism sprang from the same roots. These people copied each others text books!
The state took everything, controlled everything, decided everything and oppressed everything. How happy the people were!! Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
- The Who -
I draw a distinction between defining and judging. I can agree with you that we can judge them similarly, in terms of their effects. That doesn’t make them identical, unless the past is irrelevant for all purposes.
The government in Orwell’s 1984 would agree with you, though: to them, the past is irrelevant: it doesn’t exist, and we can say anything we want about it without being counterfactual.