IIRC Hitler, besides using old time religion, also had the Nazi party taking over the roles and reapplying the values that the old empires in Europe had.
Several points, please.
First of all, Castro’s attitudes toward gay people can’t be attributed to remaining Catholic sentiment, as Castro simultaneously was persecuting the Catholic Church in Cuba. Moreover, those attitudes toward homosexuality were commonplace throughout the Communist world - in the Soviet Union, gays could expect, if caught, to endure years of reeducation complete with massive doses of psychotropic drugs.
The Soviet Union cannot be considered in this era to be affected much with religious fervor of any kind, so that theory is right out.
Secondly, we have shown that Hitler wasn’t conservative at all, so how he could be considered a reactionary - extremely conservative - is a mystery. You can claim that it is because Hitler was having the party assume imperialistic roles - but these were in the service of myths (Aryanism, paganism, occultist thought, and the like) rather than an actual ideal past. So no, it is better to describe Hitler as what he was - a radical driven by notions of racial purity, nationalism, and a form of socialism that rejected “financiers” and embraced policies aimed at both full employment and rearmament.
Your rejection of evidence that the “bourgeoisie” used Hitler is the big mistake here, they were not rejected, and still it remains the reality that Hitler looked like an emperor, sounded like one and gooseteped like one.
Wow, this thread has turned into a clusterfuck of large proportions, with anachronistic and inappropriate political labels flying left, right, and center (pun intended). Everyone seems to be trying, without explicitly saying so, to associate their political opponents with Hitler or Stalin or some other unsavory character.
So much for the OP’s topic, i guess. It was a fairly interesting one, while it lasted.
What does this have to do with the absurd claim that a 219-year-old constitution constitutes “radical” ideas? They’re as common as dirt and nearly as old. You just aren’t that special anymore. Someone who wanted to get rid of the Constitution, or replace it with a totally different one, would be the radical now.
This is sort of like saying “Hitler was a pretty bad guy in some ways, but in others, you know, he was a good guy. He was nice to dogs.”
Nobody cares if he was nice to dogs; he was evil. Similarly, calling him anything but radical is pure baloney. There has never been a head of state in modern history who was more radical. Characterizing Hitler as being a “Conservative” or even a “reactionary” betrays a complete ignorance of Hitler’s philosophy and Nazism, and more specifically demonstrates an inability of people to understand that you can’t classify political philosophies along one dimension.
Nazism constituted the complete rejection of the old order of things. Nazism rejected Christianity, rejected free market capitalism, rejected all notions of liberalism (like equality, rule of law, and the like) and embraced a philosophy that would be completely alien to pretty much anyone you know. It is truly amazing to state that he reapplied “The value that the old empires in Europe had.” He reapplied none of the values the “old empires” had. The European empires, whatever their faults, were Christian kingdoms that, most of the time, respected the rule of law and regarded the sovereignty of independent states or kingdoms as having intrinsic value, concepts entirely rejected by Nazism.
Nazism isn’t anything like liberalism, and it isn’t anything like “conservatism” as you’d define it in the United States. Nazism was as radical a departure from anything before it as any political movement in recorded history. Nazis regarded all human endeavour and history as being reflective of an endless biological struggle and nothing else. Liberals and conservatives in the USA in 2008 argue over very narrow differences of opinion in terms of how law should be applied; the Nazi belief is that law is ultimately irrelevant. In Nazi terms, law and morality are not pertinent issues; there are no permanent values. Writes Richard Overy in The Dictators,
In the USA, and most Western countries today, there’s a debate over the manner in which a democractically elected government should apply the law to people, but the basic ideas are the same; the government should be answerable to the people, everyone should be equal, the rule of law should be respected, people have a certain number of individual rights, etc. We can argue over the application (is affirmative action equality, or inequality? What are reasonable limits on liberty? How much should the government interfere in the economy?) but the basic concepts are agreed upon. Not so in Nazism. In Nazism, there’s no rule of law beyond what Hitler wanted, no equality, no justice. Human beings are not even people; they’re either predators or prey, and even then not as individuals, but in groups.
The ethos of Nazism was not capitalism or socialism; Nazi economic policy was to use either capitalism or socialism as was useful to the REAL ethos, which was war. Nazism was about war and genocide. War was not a tool, the way they are to the USA or most any other nation. They were the very purpose of the German government, the natural state of all human beings at all times. The Nazi assumption was that all “races” would always be in a perpetual state of war, forever, unless and until one destroyed the rest.
Hitler despised both Western capitalism AND Communism, which is, not incidentally, how he got into a war with both. Nazism simply does not map onto conservatism or liberalism; it is totally, utterly along another line of thought, that proceeds from completely different underlying beliefs about fundamental truths.
There is NO politician in the United States today who is anything like Adolf Hitler. There is no serious political movement close to Nazism.
You just do not have any perspective, I come from El Salvador, and really, trying to follow a concept like fredom of speech could get you killed. It still can. If you still think it is not a radical document you have also to ignore the constant calls to limit the constitution and worrisome polls showing that many items from the constitution and the bill of rigths could be removed if the people had a vote on it today.
:rolleyes:
Nope, Hitler was evil as a radical (the problem I have here with using radical is that a radical is enforcing any ideology, so it is important to define what is the radicalism all about) and that does not deny that conservative ideas also where part of his whole package, just pointing out that Hitler was a radical does not exclude the conservative economical ideas he had.
Union leaders? First make laws against them (the conservative element)
Still bugging me? To the camps with you! (the radical action)
So you’re saying Hitler banned independent trade unions? How is this conservative, considering that Communist governments tended to do the very same thing?
Communists and Fascists and Nazis all were similar in this respect - they set up labor organizations totally loyal to the party and state. They coopted the labor movement and made it yet another front for the control of society and its population. Again, how can this particular action be considered conservative? A conservative in a free society might oppose trade unions, but wouldn’t subvert them in this way.
That is good just partially, while you can make a parallel with what Nazis and Communist do with unions you need to consider that I also see Communists as radicals of a different ideology, that they co-opted labor unions does not deny that Fascists seek to get rid of them in deadly forms, and it does not deny that conservatives do oppose unions.
The main point remains and it does not allow any parallels, the bourgeoisie got protection from Hitler (and slave labor to boot). When conservatives in the US entertained the idea of how to subvert the American government (the cocktail putsch of 1934) they looked at the Fascists as their model, not the socialists or communists.
That they co-opted puritanical ideas from the church in no way can stop them from also persecuting the Catholic Church.
And it also depends on what Church, Liberation theology showed to me that the prosecution you are remembering was directed to the elements of the church that favored the well to do and church members that were also well to do.
Does not mean that I approve, only pointing out that it was really silly from you to propose that prosecuting someone automatically prevents the evildoers from using ideas of the group they oppose when convenient.