UPDATE TO THE POST BELOW: The German media is saying that HUNDREDS of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets in protest: The A-Job bullets can't get them all. Something's HAPPENING, FOLKS..and THIS is why I wrote the post:Daniel Pipes is happy with the weekend's Iranian election results. Me, too. Even though A-Job "won", so to speak. Click HERE for what A-Job thinks, if you really care! (Update: From some of the comments, I haven't made myself clear; I would have PREFERRED, by a very LONG SHOT, that he LOST), BUT, there is some hope on the horizon,hence the reason for my citing Pipes and adding to it: Here's my original post:
Click HERE for Pipes' reasons for being 'pleased', most of which I agree with. Another reason for positive thinking is that Israel can keep the pressure on the world with a complete nutcase like A-Job in power. (They'll have to now that Netanyahu has amazingly said THIS). With the less hard liner in Iran, it might have been more difficult to keep up the reactive pressure. Just a thought, and not mine, but I couldn't agree more. It makes sense.
I'd posted about this (HERE) the other day and I stick to my feelings that no matter how the election went, this was a win for Iran and a win for the West. Things are brewing and, as Daniel Pipes says, the further A-Job pushes the Iranian students into submission and oppression, the more they're going to fight back. The numbers are impressive now, it's not just a grass roots thing.
The German media reports that the government of Iran had 57 million ballots printed for 47 million voters. Maybe the million extra went down Sandy Berger's pants, I don't think so. I think this was more Iran's version of ACORN, don't you?
You think this is good news, that there's a chance for real reform in Iran even WITH the Ayatollah pulling A-Job's strings? (if you want a good laugh, read THIS!)
By the way: This is a rich one: "His charges that Friday's vote was riddled by fraud brought sympathetic statements from Vice President Joe Biden and other leaders"
z
190 comments:
Pipes listed as a net positive:
Ahmadinejad remains in charge of the Iranian economy, which he is progressively wrecking, thereby reducing the country's capabilities to make mischief abroad.
Two words: North Korea.
With the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il threatening to scorch the Korean peninsula with nuclear weapons largely paid for with American tax dollars courtesy of President Clinton and the yeoman's work of the Democrat Party's most revered foreign policy expert ::cough:: Joe Biden, why wouldn't the mullahs of Qom keep Ahmadinejad "in charge?" You can accelerate quite a few WMD and missile programs on the backs of starving people - and get autographed basketballs for it.
And with President Ogabe, er, Obama demanding that Israel allow Palestinians to turn Jewish communities in Samaria into rocket artillery positions similar to those established in Gaza, why should America's new leaf of Islamic appeasement deter Iran from shocking the [head-in-the-sand useful idiot leftist] world with a nuclear test of their own?
No, Ahmadinejad's "re-election" isn't "happy news."
It's a sign that we've achieved the second coming of Jimmy Carter.
If Ahmadinejad's re-election is considered good news here, then the latest CNN story of a vote-rigging inquiry must be bad news:
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Iran's election authority said Monday it will probe allegations presidential elections were marred by ballot rigging as chaos following hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declared victory continued for a third day. The country's government-funded Press TV reported that Iran's Guardian Council -- a body of top clerics and judges -- will investigate reformist opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi's claims.
Meanwhile, Moussavi was expected to ask followers to call off the demonstrations and appeal for calm, sources told CNN.
Pipes does make some good points. However, Ahmadinejad's win holds powerful anti-American symbolism in the Middle East and in Asia (NK).
BTW, have you seen this email from Iran?
I hear that it's rockin' and rollin' inside Iran today too.
PsiBond,
The country's government-funded Press TV reported that Iran's Guardian Council -- a body of top clerics and judges -- will investigate reformist opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi's claims.
How much do you want to bet that the Guardian Council will find that one of the candidates approved to run by the Guardian Council won the election?
And that the findings will be announced on Iranian state-run TV that Guardian Council approved candidate Ahmadinejad won?
And that Guardian Council approved "reformist opposition" candidate Mousavi will concede that his fellow Guardian Council approved candidate Ahmadinejad ran the better "Israel must be wiped off the Earth with our peaceful nuclear energy" program?
TEHRAN, June 15 -- Iran's supreme leader on Monday ordered a probe of Friday's presidential election, as protests over alleged voter fraud continued for a third straight day. But since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has already congratulated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his apparent reelection, some observers dismissed the investigation as an attempt to diffuse the anti-government demonstrations.
--------------------------------
This is hardly finished.
Click HERE for Pipes' reasons for being 'pleased', most of which I agree with. Another reason for positive thinking is that Israel can keep the pressure on the world with a complete nutcase like A-Job in power.
----------------------------
Let's see it's good that Iranians have to deal with further repression because it makes a Likud nutlog happy.
Yup, that makes plenty of sense.
AOW,
I'm thinking about Iran's government sharing the anti-Semitic views of leftists Adolf Hitler and Jimmy Carter.
Indeed Persia renamed itself "Iran" in the 1930s in solidarity with Germany's "Aryans."
And no one American has the street credentials in certifying sham elections in other nations like Jimmy Carter, who also has the distinctions on his resume of assisting the Iranian Islamic Revolution hold Americans hostage and a reputation for Jew hatred.
Hitler's dead. Let's get President Ogabe to send Carter over there to certify the election. While he's there, he can offer American money to fund Iran's nuclear weapons programs, because it's just not fair that we paid for the nuclear weapons program of Stalinist North Korea. It shows a bias.
And we have the Army declaring neutrality in the matter which certainly favors the opposition but you're right z, all that really matters is Israel.
The fact that Iran is moving to a moderate position is secondary.
Sorry everyone took my post as if Pipes (AND I!) thought A-Jobs win was better than had Moussavi had won!! NO, that's not the point.
The point is there's HOPE in the huge amount of people who voted AGAINST Ahmedinejad. That is the good news.
If Germany's news is right (and it normally gets more information and doesn't editorialize like our front pages do for the Left now), that ten million more ballots spoke volumes.
Ducky, you said this below on another post's comments:
"FrogBurger, I'm am on record in these blogs stating that there is a centrist movement in Islamic countries."
You sure didn't reiterate that on this column, the exact point I'm trying to point out and celebrating here. (I've been saying this for years because France and Germany's medias are honest and want their people to know ALL the news, not our leftist drivel which didn't seem to think that news was important enough, and I've seen Iranians march against A-Job for YEARS, uncovered here)
hm
And, Ducky, could you show me where I said "All that matters is Israel?"
thanks.
z, when you title something "Daniel Pipes and me..." you pretty much tip your Likud hand.
Ducky, when you say that, you pretty much tip your hand you didn't pay attention to all of my post again.
Or what I've said countless times about Israel; that I feel she deserves to be there and free from Palestinian constant attacks....something the ruling party, Likud, also feels.
Z,
re: Ducky
see my post above about leftist anti-Semites.
beamish, I know. sometimes I forget that there are people who still think it's not just Jewishness that makes the PAs break every treaty.
Beamish, you truly are a one trick pony.
We don't know what's happening here and one thing that may have happened is a coup by the ruling council which means they are going to continue the nuclear program, funding Hezbollah and pretty much flipping the digit to everyone.
Count on Nuttyahoo to fan the flames. This could mean it's going to get a lot tougher in Afghanistan and Iraq, who have both voiced support of the results.
Ya, ducky, why anticipate the worst...?
Look into what the Moussavi campaign said; it's enlightening. it's not earth shatteringly wonderful..we're realists, not utopian libs here, most of us.
This is not like Americans taking over (except it's rather like THIS admin, come to think of it)...this is about people slightly to the right of the Ayatollah...a LITTLE more pro Western.
That can't be bad.
Ducky,
Beamish, you truly are a one trick pony.
I prefer to see it as having over 20 years direct experience with identifying leftists of all stripes and swastikas.
We don't know what's happening here and one thing that may have happened is a coup by the ruling council which means they are going to continue the nuclear program, funding Hezbollah and pretty much flipping the digit to everyone.
You don't know what's happening, but the one thing you theorize may have happened will result in the status quo not changing at all (i.e. Iran continuing their nuclear program funding Hezbollah, etc.)?
Wow. Them's some deep thoughts you've got there Ducky.
Try not to let the doctors feed you invisible popsicles.
beamish: How much do you want to bet that the Guardian Council will find that one of the candidates approved to run by the Guardian Council won the election? And that the findings will be announced on Iranian state-run TV that Guardian Council approved candidate Ahmadinejad won?
So, that's good news for you folks. If the conservatives in power do not make Ahmadinejad the winner, he could knock up Iran's high court for a Bush v. Gore decision, pull a Norm Coleman caper, or propagate a Palinesque-style Letterman feud. Then U.S. righties would have to declare with sangfroid Ahmadinejad's trying to steal the election.
And that Guardian Council approved "reformist opposition" candidate Mousavi will concede that his fellow Guardian Council approved candidate Ahmadinejad ran the better "Israel must be wiped off the Earth with our peaceful nuclear energy" program?
If the protestors are suppressed, I'll bet righties will be delighted that Obama's influence out of Cairo apparently failed to be manifested, that conservative extremism was shown to be a Muslim master mightier than the pen.
PsiBond,
How could you not see Obama's pandering speech in Cairo as influential in the Ahmadinejad "election victory?"
Obama's speech:
- greenlighted Iran's nuclear ambitions
- promised to remove American obstacles to donating to Muslim charities that finance terrorism
- portrayed the Iraq War and its resulting democracy and opening of the two holiest cities in Shia Islam to pilgrimages as a "mistake"
- demanded Israel allow Jewish communities in the West Bank to become Palestinian rocket artillery positions as occured in the Gaza Strip
Now, I realize the only model of "restoring democracy" you Democrats have to feather your cap with is Clinton's reinstalling the dictator Aristide in Haiti.
That coupled with Clinton's arming North Korea with nuclear weapons suggests that the reversal of Bush geopolitical strategies will have Obama sending the military to reinstall Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Qom to power if the IRG has trouble keeping them there.
Obama's appeasement speech in Cairo would be very sucessful. We'll have to see how it plays out.
How could you not see Obama's pandering speech in Cairo as influential in the Ahmadinejad "election victory?"
How can you resist making false claims about Obama’s Cairo speech, beamish? So,then, according to you, at least, Pipes was wrong to worry about it leading to a change in the Iranian leadership.
Obama's speech:
- greenlighted Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Actually Obama said, ”a nuclear arms race in the Middle East … could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path.” And “any nation, including Iran, should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”. But it is widely believed by Obama and many others that Iran‘s nuclear ambitions are to build nuclear weapons not to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. He has publicly vowed on a number of occasions not to allow the former.
- promised to remove American obstacles to donating to Muslim charities that finance terrorism.
“I'm committed to work with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat,” he said. Rationally speaking, that is different than a promise to remove every restriction now in place on donations.
- portrayed the Iraq War and its resulting democracy and opening of the two holiest cities in Shia Islam to pilgrimages as a "mistake".
As a matter of fact, he did not use the word “mistake” in his single mention of Shias or in his references to the Iraq war. He said the resulting “democracy” had made the Iraqi people “better off”: “Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”
- demanded Israel allow Jewish communities in the West Bank to become Palestinian rocket artillery positions as occured in the Gaza Strip.
It is not true that he demanded that Israel allow the Palestinians to have rocket artillery positions in the West Bank. On the contrary, he said, “Threatening Israel with destruction or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews is deeply wrong and only serves to evoke in the minds of the Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”
And he said, “America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.” Which echoes George Bush.
Blathering about and fixing blame on conditions twelve or more years ago is not helpful to a discussion of the present world state. More pertinent to a serious consideration of the present state of relations with North Korea is a mention (which you omitted) of Bush’s diplomatic initiatives toward that country.
Obam"a's appeasement speech in Cairo would be very sucessful. We'll have to see how it plays out.
Obama's peaceful engagement speech in Cairo could change the dynamics in the Middle East over the next several years. We'll have to see how it plays out.
PsiBond,
Your comments serve again as a example of how there is always a inherent chasm of difference between leftist rhetoric and intelligent thought.
Blathering about and fixing blame on conditions twelve or more years ago is not helpful to a discussion of the present world state.
Of course it wouldn't be helpful - to you, or other members of the imbecilic left - if discussions of geopolitics (or anything) were held to logical standards of critical inquiry, particularly in the recognition of chronology in the passage of events leading up to events. Otherwise, Obama's statement that "...I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible" couldn't be taken as ignorance of the fact that 15 years of diplomatic efforts and international consensus lead up to the Iraq War.
I realize leftists are still trying to figure out how to sit down without suffocating. I humbly suggest logic will lead you to pull your heads out of your asses, just as logic has lead rational people to not have confidence in a Democratic Party that has an observable history of foreign policy ignorance.
“If you look at our position, it’s been very consistent,” Obama stated on his campaign plane, according to Reuters. “I am unwavering in the belief that this has been a strategic mistake and that this war has to end. It would be a further strategic mistake for us to continue with an open-ended occupation of the sort that [Republican presidential candidate] John McCain has promised.”
And in the 2004 campaign, Bush admitted he had made a mistake in Iraq.
Bush said during a 30-minute interview that he made "a miscalculation of what the conditions would be" in post-war Iraq.
He insisted that the long insurgency was an unintended by-product of a "swift victory" against Saddam Hussein's military (which fled and then disappeared into the cities), albeit brought on in some part by his ill-advised challenge to the insurgents. (In the interview, Bush deflected efforts to inquire further into what went wrong, suggesting such questions should be left to historians, and insisting, like his father, that he would resist going ''on the couch'' to rethink decisions.)
Several years late(r) he admitted that daring the insurgents to bring it on was a mistake, too.
Nowadays, the term 'Iraq war' is used to refer to combat against the insurgents in 'post-war Iraq', a term that is now obsolete in political discussions of Iraq.
Your comments serve again as a example of how there is always a[n] inherent chasm of difference between leftist rhetoric and intelligent thought.
An ad hominem attack on my intelligence, your standard subterfuge, is not a rational rebuttal of my exposure of your blatantly false statements about what Obama said in his Cairo speech.
Rationally, one can only call stupid an agenda that seeks to convince people of their "stupidity" who believe their perspective is valid. Only someone fanatical would dedicate his efforts to that end----which sounds just like you, beamish.
Of course it wouldn't be helpful - to you, or other members of the imbecilic left - if discussions of geopolitics (or anything) were held to logical standards of critical inquiry, particularly in the recognition of chronology in the passage of events leading up to events.
In that case, I think, in any present-day serious discussions of our current relations with the U.K., we need to examine in a scholarly way the relationship of America to Great Britain under George III in the eighteenth century, and follow where the chronology goes, in terms of the passage of geopolitical events leading up to June 17, 2009.
You may wrap yourself in the trappings of seriousness, beamish, but you don't fool people capable of critical inquiry.
Otherwise, Obama's statement that "...I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible" couldn't be taken as ignorance of the fact that 15 years of diplomatic efforts and international consensus lead up to the Iraq War.
Are you ignorant, beamish, of the fact that Bush played a large role in the diplomatic efforts with Iraq and the "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea (NK), or do you just hope readers will be?
I realize leftists are still trying to figure out how to sit down without suffocating. I humbly suggest logic will lead you to pull your heads out of your asses, just as logic has lead rational people to not have confidence in a Democratic Party that has an observable history of foreign policy ignorance.
Pitifully, you are feverishly projecting your own observable limitations onto Americans on the other side of the aisle. It can be deduced from your irrational rant above that someone like you, beamish, who can't believe Americans who think differently are not stupid, is challenged not only to understand intelligent thought but to communicate in a civil manner.
Will you come back with still more diversionary disingenuousness?
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
PsiBond,
On the contrary, I think it is important to make a distinction between critical inquiry and the buffoonery you, Obama, and other leftists represent.
In this way, you may point to the years of diplomatic efforts that preceeded the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power and show Obama's statement about "being reminded of the need to use diplomacy" as either ignorance of those years or pre-war diplomacy (likely) or evidence that Obama is an imbecile (very likely).
In this way, you may point to North Korea's nuclear tests and missile tests and wonder how far along they would be with those tests if Clinton and Congressional Democrats had not insisted upon giving North Korea $4 Billion to start a nuclear program and a basketball to stop the missile programs.
You can point to Aristide's thugs in Haiti burning political opponents to death with gasoline-filled tires around their necks after Clinton reinstalled him there and deduce that "Operation: Restore Democracy" was obviously considered a blazing success to the leftist mind when the left criticized Bush for removing Aristide.
The dearth of deductive reasoning skills on the left isn't anyone's fault. Logic and leftism are vividly incompatible, as you are quite eager to display.
Back page news: Russia used their veto in the UN Security Council to end UN cease-fire monitoring in Georgia (PsiBond: that's Georgia the former Soviet Republic, not Georgia the state south of Tennessee)
“If you look at our position, it’s been very consistent,” Obama stated on his campaign plane, according to Reuters. “I am unwavering in the belief that this has been a strategic mistake and that this war has to end. It would be a further strategic mistake for us to continue with an open-ended occupation of the sort that [Republican presidential candidate] John McCain has promised.”
posted again June 17
I'm thinking that Bush not knowing WHAT to expect in a WAR isn't quite as stunning as you do, psi bond; If we'd collapsed and given in after the first battle in Europe or the South Pacific "Gee! We didn't KNOW the Japanese were THAT GOOD! YIkes...let's go home. someone might get KILLED...and it could be THEM!!! Don't want THAT!!!!!" (oh, sorry, that's the new America not the strong, wonderful America which brought peace to the world )
This is as silly an argument on your part as the dopey leftwingers who blame Bush for 9/11.
"THEY KNEW THEY DISCUSSED PLANES!"
OOPS...
"We have NO IDEA how they plan to USE those planes, so.....let's just GROUND ALL AIR TRAFFIC FOREVER, THAT'll keep us safe!"
You may think the Iraq war is seamlessly comparable to WWII. I don't. WWII was a necessary war.
Bush stated that he was unprepared for what came next after his invasion, having no well-thought-out strategy for what he found when the enemy had fled.
"OOPs, we don't know how fierce and driven these insurgents will prove to be. Hey, why don't we just nuke the whole country----that'll keep our GIs and our country safe. That's a plan, Dick, huh? .... Don??"
We can trade campaign trail quotes all day, Z, as if they meant a whole lot in presidential policy making, but, while you seem to think so, I don't consider staying on topic silly.
Fact: Obama speaking in Cairo did not call the Iraq war a mistake.
On the contrary, I think it is important to make a distinction between critical inquiry and the buffoonery you, Obama, and other leftists represent.
Seriously, beamish, you don't seem to understand that misrepresenting and otherwise distorting selected facts for partisan advantage is not critical inquiry.
In this way, you may point to the years of diplomatic efforts that preceeded the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power and show Obama's statement about "being reminded of the need to use diplomacy" as either ignorance of those years or pre-war diplomacy (likely) or evidence that Obama is an imbecile (very likely).
As both Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed, a concerted diplomatic initiative toward Iraq preceding the U.S. invasion was the preferable strategy of first resort. Considering what he has said, it is very likely that Obama is cognizant of that preferability. An imbecile would prefer to strike first and negotiate after.
In this way, you may point to North Korea's nuclear tests and missile tests and wonder how far along they would be with those tests if Clinton and Congressional Democrats had not insisted upon giving North Korea $4 Billion to start a nuclear program and a basketball to stop the missile programs.
Oddly missing from your chronological geopolitical buffoonery is any consideration of the last eight years during which Bush convened much-heralded six-nation negotiations that led to the Democratic Evil Axis Republic (DEAR) leader agreeing to desist from developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles in exchange for loot he asked for. Bush solved the problem, didn't he? So not to worry.
You can point to Aristide's thugs in Haiti burning political opponents to death with gasoline-filled tires around their necks after Clinton reinstalled him there and deduce that "Operation: Restore Democracy" was obviously considered a blazing success to the leftist mind when the left criticized Bush for removing Aristide.
Operation Uphold Democracy (September 19, 1994 – March 31, 1995) was a justifiable response to the overthrow and expulsion of the duly elected government of Haiti by a military coup. As military forces prepared to deploy, a first-resort diplomatic element led by Colin Powell entered the country and was successful, persuading the military leaders of Haiti to step down and allow the elected officials to return to power. Aristide disbanded the Haitian army and the subsequent power struggle in Haiti became convoluted and bizarre. Only imbecilic rightwing jihadis can tar Democrats in the U.S. with these developments.
Your insinuation is that Democrats can't control unfolding events but Republicans can. You should have better luck with that "logic" at a Fire Letterman rally.
Most importantly, Obama didn't say anything about the events in Haiti in his Cairo speech. You've got difficulty, beamish, focusing on the subject. You seem to want to digress.
The dearth of deductive reasoning skills on the left isn't anyone's fault. Logic and leftism are vividly incompatible, as you are quite eager to display.
Notwithstanding your dearth of understanding of the nature of logic (perhaps, the fault of your education), every logician knows that deductive logic is not inherently incompatible with any particular ideology, no matter how objectionable that may be. Necessary to any deductive logical thinking is a set of irreducible postulates, which, whatever these may be, cannot be logically proved true or false. When they are taken as credible, however, no matter what they are, the rest, by logic, must follow.
Back page news: Russia used their veto in the UN Security Council to end UN cease-fire monitoring in Georgia (PsiBond: that's Georgia the former Soviet Republic, not Georgia the state south of Tennessee).
Given the context, your explanation is quite unnecessary, beamish.
As I told you previously, context matters.
PsiBond,
Oddly missing from your chronological geopolitical buffoonery is any consideration of the last eight years during which Bush convened much-heralded six-nation negotiations that led to the Democratic Evil Axis Republic (DEAR) leader agreeing to desist from developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles in exchange for loot he asked for. Bush solved the problem, didn't he? So not to worry.
Except that there was no transfer of "loot" to North Korea under Bush or the 6 party talks, nor was there a transfer of nuclear technology to North Korea under Bush or the 6 party talks.
North Korea has nukes because imbecilic Democrats under Clinton gave them nuclear technologies and paid for their conversion into weapons programs.
No nuclear technology transfers under Clinton = North Korea has no nuclear weapons.
We'll work on shapes and colors next.
PsiBond,
Operation Uphold Democracy (September 19, 1994 – March 31, 1995) was a justifiable response to the overthrow and expulsion of the duly elected government of Haiti by a military coup. As military forces prepared to deploy, a first-resort diplomatic element led by Colin Powell entered the country and was successful, persuading the military leaders of Haiti to step down and allow the elected officials to return to power. Aristide disbanded the Haitian army and the subsequent power struggle in Haiti became convoluted and bizarre. Only imbecilic rightwing jihadis can tar Democrats in the U.S. with these developments.
Only imbecilic Wikipedia skimmers such as yourself would neglect the preceding history that Aristide was removed from power in Haiti during the Clinton years by a military coup after Aristide had jailed or killed political opponents and trashed the Haitian constitution and assumed all powers of the government to himself when their courts ruled to remove him from power. Clinton returned the thug Aristide to power, and Aristide went back to necklacing political opponents with flaming gasoline filled tires.
Do you get that? Aristide burned political opponents to death when he was in power, and after Clinton "upheld democracy" to return him to power.
Most importantly, Obama didn't say anything about the events in Haiti in his Cairo speech. You've got difficulty, beamish, focusing on the subject. You seem to want to digress.
When my subject is Democrat foreign policy imbecility and incompetence, the re-installation of an ousted dictator in Haiti and the arming of Stalinists in North Korea with nuclear weapons are but two examples bolstering my case.
Oddly missing from your chronological geopolitical buffoonery is any consideration of the last eight years during which Bush convened much-heralded six-nation negotiations that led to the Democratic Evil Axis Republic (DEAR) leader agreeing to desist from developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles in exchange for loot he asked for. Bush solved the problem, didn't he? So not to worry.
Except that there was no transfer of "loot" to North Korea under Bush or the 6 party talks, nor was there a transfer of nuclear technology to North Korea under Bush or the 6 party talks.
In February 2007 North Korea agreed to eventually dismantle its nuclear program. In June 2008, the Bush administration removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism---something North Korea had found particularly onerous----after Pyongyang submitted a 60-page report on its nuclear program. Six months after that, in December, North Korea refused to accept the terms proposed by the U.S. for verification.
North Korea has nukes because imbecilic Democrats under Clinton gave them nuclear technologies and paid for their conversion into weapons programs.
No, North Korea has nukes because Bush did nothing. North Korea joined the nuclear club in October 2006, during Bush's presidency. What did Bush do to prevent that from happening? Bush had said he would never let the world’s “worst dictators” obtain the world’s most dangerous weapons.
North Korea announced its nuclear breakout in early 2003, kicking out international nuclear inspectors and very publicly beginning its drive to turn its spent nuclear fuel rods into a small arsenal of weapons. Focused then on the coming war with Iraq, Bush made no effective response and chose to set no limits.
The CIA's estimates in the following years have been that the United States has been tolerating exactly that — a small arsenal of nuclear fuel sufficient to produce six or more weapons.
No nuclear technology transfers under Clinton = North Korea has no nuclear weapons.
No, it means North Korea would have had to rely on more commercial sources. Assistance for nuclear energy programs has been offered to other countries, like Iran by Bush.
We'll work on shapes and colors next.
The shapes and colors you perceive do not correspond with reality.
Only imbecilic Wikipedia skimmers such as yourself would neglect the preceding history that...
If you are considering consequential U.S. foreign policies, you shouldn't skip over the overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953 (Eisenhower) with U.S. help and funding (Operation Ajax), which left 300 dead and gave rise to the chant "Death to America". On April 4, 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles approved $1 million to be used "in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddeq". You're unlikely to find that on rightwing blogs.
Aristide burned political opponents to death when he was in power, and after...
You confuse the acts of lawless supporters, armed opposition groups, and former soldiers with the actions of Aristide.
In 2004, the insurgents that toppled Aristide's government were a motley group led by several former military and police officials responsible for extensive human-rights violations and suspected of drug trafficking.
In 1990, encouraged to run for president by the mass movement known as the Lavalas (which means “torrent” in Creole), Aristide won Haiti's first free democratic election by a landslide and was inaugurated on February 7, 1991. As president, Aristide, a former Catholic priest, initiated a literacy program, dismantled the repressive system of rural section chiefs, and oversaw a drastic reduction in human rights violations. His reforms, however, angered the military and Haiti's elite, and on September 30, 1991, Aristide was ousted in a coup.
In 200 years the country has suffered through 32 coups. Military leaders in Haiti frequently used their institution's power and prestige to influence political events or to take over the government by force. Haiti's various military, paramilitary, and police units were also notorious for corruption and human rights abuses. The Duvalier regimes (1957–86) terrorized and eliminated opponents with an armed group called the Volunteers for National Security, commonly known as the Tontons Macoutes; the group was formally disbanded in 1986, but its members continued to terrorize the populace. Haitian police and military units also acted with impunity. During a U.S.-led occupation of the country in the mid-1990s, Aristide's government disbanded the military but failed to disarm its members, and the United States and United Nations began to create a new Haitian police force. However, the first recruits were trained for only a few months, and by the turn of the 21st century many had been implicated in violent crime or corruption associated with drug trafficking.
When my subject is Democrat foreign policy imbecility and incompetence, the re-installation of an ousted dictator in Haiti and the arming of Stalinists in North Korea...
The subject you want to address any way you can is the "imbecility" of liberal Democrats. Toward that end you twist selected facts and half-truths. They re-installed not a dictator but an elected president, who was subsequently re-elected ten years later. And they did not give arms to North Korea, not like the Reagan administration giving arms for cash to Iran.
Who knew that extreme rightwingers were ardent supporters of human rights and greatly respected the Haitian Constitution? I'll bet you argue that it was liberals who tortured and lynched American blacks, bombed their churches, forced them into the back of the bus, and beat up gays. Did you protest last year, beamish, when Christian leaders declared that the alleged homosexuality of Michèle Pierre-Louis (who had served in Aristide's cabinet) should disqualify her nomination for prime minister by President Préval?
You want to digress from considering the present to mischaracterizing the past. Cherry-picking touted "examples" and inductively drawing out of them a bogus universal inference is the way you prefer, rather than discussing honestly current events. The addictive use of such stock "examples" is merely the modus operandi that pitiful rightwingers have contrived to try to maximize their imagined power.
PsiBond,
I'll bet you argue that it was liberals who tortured and lynched American blacks, bombed their churches, forced them into the back of the bus, and beat up gays.
I know it was Democrat Klansmen who burned my grandfather's business to the ground in Birmingham, Alabama. Terrorism is not new to the left (see Robespierre) nor is homophobia (see the left-wing government of Nazi Germany and Democrat efforts to remove Republican homosexuals and suspected homosexuals from office in Washington)
Arguing that leftists (which includes liberals) are prone to senseless acts of intolerance, rage, and violence is like browbeating people with the fact that the sky is blue. One need only to look at the window-smashing, firebomb tossing re-enactments of the leftist holiday of Kristallnacht during "anti-globalization protests" outside World Trade Organization conferences to get a feel for where leftists have their hearts and minds.
C'mon PsiBond, you're not even trying to present a defensible argument. You certainly haven't shown that Democrats have anything but imbecility to offer on the foreign policy front (who knew rangling up memories of Democrats lynching blacks in the American South was a foreign policy argument?)
Go back to the gym and train, lightweight.
I know it was Democrat Klansmen who burned my grandfather's business to the ground in Birmingham, Alabama. Terrorism is not new to the left (see Robespierre) nor is homophobia (see the left-wing government of Nazi Germany and Democrat efforts to remove Republican homosexuals and suspected homosexuals from office in Washington)
I'm sorry about your grandfather's business, beamish, but your hatred is misplaced: As I predicted, you confuse Southern Democrats with liberals in America.
Was Robespierre an American? I don't think so. Politics in 18th century France have little bearing on American politics and American liberals today. The truth, though you scorn it, is that klansmen were Southern conservatives who violently sought/seek to conserve a waning social system that denied blacks the vote, political equality and even equality in public accommodation. They were Democratic voters before the Democratic Party earned the reputation of being the party of civil rights and Enlightenment values. They were Democrats but not liberals. These days, they all vote Republican.
Political equality for all citizens is a basic principle of liberalism. That principle is not found in Nazism, a virulent rightwing ideology that discriminated on the basis of religion, race, and sexual orientation. Many rightwingers in America participate in harsh condemnation for some of the same reasons and for some others, including for being a liberal.
Notwithstanding your attempted smears, it is not liberals who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage and want to deny gays the right to openly serve their country in the military. It is most conservatives who do.
The appetite for disingenuously blaming the left for nasty rightwing ideologies is a peculiar disorder observed in modern America in feral rightwingers.
Arguing that leftists (which includes liberals) are prone to senseless acts of intolerance, rage, and violence is like browbeating people with the fact that the sky is blue.
That all human beings, no matter what their political principles, can be vulnerable to raw emotion in their personal lives is, yes, as evident as that the sky is blue (at least when the sun is high and it is not clouded over, or when there's a blue moon shining). But that is no explanation at all of why those on the left are often reviled as bleeding hearts by those on the right who are usually bloody-minded in their approach to foreign policy.
One need only to look at the window-smashing, firebomb tossing re-enactments of the leftist holiday of Kristallnacht during "anti-globalization protests" outside World Trade Organization conferences to get a feel for where leftists have their hearts and minds.
Rightwingers are always bringing up that old example, which you typically distort, but who initiated the violence in those protests? Was it a small minority? Were these categorically leftist crowds? Some groups represented farmers who believe the removal of trade barriers will cause multinational companies to take over their markets and lands. Some were consumers concerned that the profit motive has led corporations to push sales of harmful products such as tobacco and genetically-engineered foods. How much of the violence was due to pro-globalization groups opposing the protestors or defacing their signs? Was the violence sanctioned by liberal public officials? Were there more violent protestors than peaceful ones? I doubt it. Many prominent liberals support globalization, some of whom were inside the conference while others were outside.
U.S. extremists on the left who turn to violence tend to take pains to safeguard human lives. However, U.S. extremists on the right tend to take human lives as the targets of their weapons–––James W. von Brunn, 88, and Scott Roeder, 51, are but recent examples.
Continued
C'mon PsiBond, you're not even trying to present a defensible argument. You certainly haven't shown that Democrats have anything but imbecility to offer on the foreign policy front (who knew rangling up memories of Democrats lynching blacks in the American South was a foreign policy argument?)
It's an imbecilic argument to contend that the meagre, ill-defended, hackneyed examples you present prove the "imbecility" of Democrats in every administration across the foreign policy front.
Who knew that that sentence about what I bet would upset you? It was an aside expressing wonder at how much compassion extreme rightwingers seem to summon for blacks in Haiti when their history is quite different regarding blacks in their own country.
Calm yourself, beamish, and you'll see that you are distracting wildly from what I said, that you are not even trying to address it. Was it wrong for the U.S., the champion of democracy everywhere, to act in its backyard to restore the first democratically elected Haitian president, who had been ousted after several months in office by a military coup, in a country that had 32 coups in its 200 year history?
Was the Eisenhower administration's planning and paying for the overthrow of Mosaddeq in Iran a smart policy?
And was Bush's policy of not taking a firm stand after North Korea announced in 2003 its intention to develop nuclear weapons technology? Was the decision of Bush the Father smart to not move on to Baghdad in 1991, which could have saved thousands of lives lost in the immediate vindictive aftermath?
Was it smart for Bush to react with a yawn to an intelligence memo informing him that bin Laden was planning to mount a strike within the United States?
I know you will never answer these questions honestly without digression.
Go back to the gym and train, lightweight.
To twist the truth like you do obviously takes a whole lot of training.
PsiBond,
Democrats do deserve some credit for getting the nation behind Republican Senator Everett Dirksen's civil rights legislation. Bull Connor's despicable firehosing of peaceful civil rights protesters on national television probably sealed the deal. The martyrdom of Republican civil rights leader Martin Luther King and the bombings of black conservative Christian churches by Democrats probably helped as well.
A handful of Democrat politicians did leave their party and become Republicans during the turbulent 1960s. Most of them left politics altogether. How many Republicans split from the GOP to join the "Dixiecrats?" None. And if "conservative racists" (whatever that means) were ever a monolithic force in American politics or the South, why didn't Dixiecrats win any elections when they were out front appealing to them?
For that matter, did the South suddenly become "racist" when Republicans started winning elections there?
The argument that racism is a "conservative ideology" key to Republican victories in the South is both ahistorical and bizarre.
Was it wrong for the U.S., the champion of democracy everywhere, to act in its backyard to restore the first democratically elected Haitian president, who had been ousted after several months in office by a military coup, in a country that had 32 coups in its 200 year history?
It was wrong when Aristide, democratically elected or not, began jailing and burning his political opponents. It is wrong for the Clinton Administration to pretend this wasn't happening prior to the coup against Aristide.
Was the Eisenhower administration's planning and paying for the overthrow of Mosaddeq in Iran a smart policy?
Who considers Eisenhower a right-winger or even conservative? He greenlighted the Soviet occupation of Hungary too.
And was Bush's policy of not taking a firm stand after North Korea announced in 2003 its intention to develop nuclear weapons technology?
What could Bush do? Tell the Norks that Clinton gave them a basketball not to do it?
Was the decision of Bush the Father smart to not move on to Baghdad in 1991, which could have saved thousands of lives lost in the immediate vindictive aftermath?
In a word, no. But you'll have trouble finding conservatives that consider Daddy Bush a conservative.
In fact, you have to go back to Reagan to find the last actual conservative President.
Keep training.
U.S. extremists on the left who turn to violence tend to take pains to safeguard human lives. However, U.S. extremists on the right tend to take human lives as the targets of their weapons–––James W. von Brunn, 88, and Scott Roeder, 51, are but recent examples.
Von Brunn is a self-professed Socialist in the mold of left-wing labor activist Adolf Hitler. Not right-wing.
Scott Roeder is an extreme anti-abortionist. I think we can split the difference on him. If you think post-natal abortion of late-term abortion providers is wrong, don't post-natally abort any.
U.S. extremists on the left who turn to violence tend to take pains to safeguard human lives.
Who? Bill Ayers? Theodore Kaczynski?
Who? Bill Ayers? Theodore Kaczynski?
Theodore Kaczynski , the Unabomber, was a neo-Luddite, not a leftist. He considered his bombings targeting individuals through the mail necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization. His enemy was industrial civilization. He was influenced by his reading of the Christian Universalist philosopher Jacques Ellul, of whom Ann Coulter is a fan.
William Ayers participated in bombings of a statue in a deserted square and buildings when, according to plan, no one was around.
Not all conservatives were Southern Democrats, of course, but most of the so-called Southern Democrats were conservatives. In the early 1800s, they distinguished themselves from the more liberal Northern Democrats by being strongly pro-slavery. After losing control of their party and territory in the Civil War, and during the Republican-led Reconstruction that followed, Southern Democrats regrouped into various vigilante organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan and the White League. Eventually "Redemption", the establishment of white Democratic, one-party rule in the post-Reconstruction South, was finalized in the Compromise of 1877 and the Redeemers gained control throughout the South.
As the New Deal began to liberalize Democrats as a whole, Southern Democrats largely stayed as conservative as they had always been, with some even breaking off to form farther rightwing splinters like the Dixiecrats. After the Civil Rights Movement successfully challenged the Jim Crow laws and other forms of institutionalized racism. and after the Democrats as a whole came to symbolize the mainstream left of the United States, the form, if not the content, of Southern Democratic politics began to change. At that point, most Southern Democrats defected to the Republican Party, and helped to accelerate the GOP's transformation into a more conservative organization.
After WWII, during the civil rights movement, Democrats in the South initially still voted loyally with their party. The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, was the last straw for most Southern Democrats, who began voting against Democratic incumbents for GOP candidates. The Republicans carried many Southern states for the first time since before the Great Depression. When Richard Nixon courted voters with his “Southern Strtegy”, many Democrats became Republicans and the South became fertile ground for the GOP, which conversely was becoming more conservative as the Democrats were becoming more liberal.
Today, Southern Democrats are conservative Democrats who follow the principles of strong foreign policy, fiscal responsibility and support for legislating allegedly traditional values.Democrats in the present-day South who vote the Democratic ticket are mostly urban liberals. Rural residents in the South tend to vote the Republican ticket, although there are a sizable number of conservative Democrats.
A handful of Democrat politicians did leave their party and become Republicans during the turbulent 1960s. Most of them left politics altogether. How many Republicans split from the GOP to join the "Dixiecrats?" None. And if "conservative racists" (whatever that means) were ever a monolithic force in American politics or the South, why didn't Dixiecrats win any elections when they were out front appealing to them?
Southern Democrats (like Strom Thurmond, former Dixiecrat presidential candidate, running against Truman) who left their party to join the GOP found a more congenial ideological home there. The Dixiecrats didn't win any elections because their platform of Jim Crow segregation had narrow regional appeal but no national appeal. Lyndon Johnson was a Southern Democrat who was called a traitor to the South for his key role in the passage of civil rights legislation. He overcame southern resistance and convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. John Kennedy originally proposed the Act and, by the time of his death in November 1963, had lined up the necessary votes in the House to pass his civil rights act. However, for the fight in the Senate, Johnson was the one to get it pushed through. He signed it into law on July 2, 1964. Legend has it that, as he put down his pen, Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation," anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against the Democratic Party.
Continued
The argument that racism is a "conservative ideology" key to Republican victories in the South is both ahistorical and bizarre.
The Jim Crow laws that liberals vigorously opposed were a regressive attempt by conservatives to preserve their power in a vanishing sociopolitical regime. Those who voted for conservatives voted for Jim Crow laws. Prejudice against blacks as blacks is consistent with the vilification of liberals per se as "imbeciles".
Was it wrong for the U.S., the champion of democracy everywhere, to act in its backyard to restore the first democratically elected Haitian president, who had been ousted after several months in office by a military coup, in a country that had 32 coups in its 200 year history?
It was wrong when Aristide, democratically elected or not, began jailing and burning his political opponents. It is wrong for the Clinton Administration to pretend this wasn't happening prior to the coup against Aristide.
Allowing an elected president to be toppled by armed thugs is not a good precedent. Politics in Haiti is an all-or-nothing contest. There is no mentality of tolerance. The military juntas that succeeded Baby Doc Duvalier oppressed the poor. The regimes of both General Prosper Avril and Lieutenant General Henri Namphy were criticized from Aristide's pulpit. In retaliation, in 1988, the Tonton Macoutes attacked the Church of St. Jean Bosco, killing 13 members of Aristide's congregation,wounding 70, and burning the building to the ground (the army and police, standing outside, took no action), two weeks before he was expelled from the Salesian order for preaching too politically. The Roman Catholic Church ordered Aristide to Rome. But that "transfer" resulted in one of the largest street demonstrations in Haitian history, with tens of thousands of Haitians angrily blocking Aristide's departure by air. He became a national figure as a defender of the poor against the oppressive, violent policies of the ruling Duvalier family. Surviving three assassination attempts by paramilitary forces enhanced his popular stature. In December 1990, in a field of 12 candidates, Aristide won 67% of the popular vote, with 85% of the electorate turning out. "With popular support and help from the United States [Daddy Bush], in 1991 Aristide took office as Haiti's first democratically elected president." In his inaugural address, Aristide ordered six of the country's seven highest-ranking generals----men associated with the violence of the old guard----to retire. He also jailed army officers, judges, and police who had been involved in corruption and violence.
"A combination of international pressure and the fear of escalating illegal immigration from Haiti into Florida were the main factors in forcing Aristide's return. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations had made it clear that they were suspicious of Aristide himself and would much prefer another Haitian leader."
Aristide is now living in South Africa, where he became an honorary research fellow at the University of South Africa, learned Zulu, and on April 25, 2007 received a doctorate in African Languages.
Time magazine reported, "Haiti's overall human-rights record improved during his brief presidency [in 1991]."
If they are passionately concerned about the human rights of Haitians, why haven't U.S. conservatives like you demanded that Aristide be charged with crimes against humanity? Why are you not concerned about Lt. General Raoul Cedras, who ousted him and consolidated its power with new waves of violence and repression?
Continued
Was the Eisenhower administration's planning and paying for the overthrow of Mosaddeq in Iran a smart policy?
Who considers Eisenhower a right-winger or even conservative? He greenlighted the Soviet occupation of Hungary too.
Although not answering my question, you inadvertently confess that the neat equivalence you promote between political party and ideology does not work for earlier times.
When you talk of liberals you want to conflate them ahistorically with Southern Democrats, but when you talk of Eisenhower, who was a Republican, you reject him as a conservative. Should Eisenhower have sent U.S. troops into Hungary in 1956? Did Eisenhower make a foreign policy mistake in not supporting Hungary's freedom fight?
And was Bush's policy of not taking a firm stand after North Korea announced in 2003 its intention to develop nuclear weapons technology?
What could Bush do? Tell the Norks that Clinton gave them a basketball not to do it?
He could declare Dear Leader's a lousy sportsman? Are you saying by this evasion of yours that the U.S. under Bush was powerless to do anything about it? Was it smart foreign policy for Bush to signal such weakness to the world? To Iran?
Was the decision of Bush the Father smart to not move on to Baghdad in 1991, which could have saved thousands of lives lost in the immediate vindictive aftermath?
In a word, no. But you'll have trouble finding conservatives that consider Daddy Bush a conservative.
Thus you admit that a foreign policy of a Republican president was imbecilic. But you want to evade the logical consequences by telling me he doesn't satisfy the membership requirements for the ideological club in your mind. What, you didn't vote for him? And you know no conservatives who did? So Bush's Daddy was an "imbecile", huh? Who knew?
In fact, you have to go back to Reagan to find the last actual conservative President.
Does that mean that conservatives did not support and vote for any Republican presidential candidate after Reagan? Were they all "imbeciles"?
You declined to answer the last question. As I predicted, you did not answer the questions honestly and without evasion.
Keep training.
You're talking about yourself, beamish. Keep training----your absurdity has become preponderous and you're out of shape
Von Brunn is a self-professed Socialist in the mold of left-wing labor activist Adolf Hitler. Not right-wing.
Von Brunn had a website on which he specifically cited liberalism as contributing to the destruction of America.
Scott Roeder is an extreme anti-abortionist. I think we can split the difference on him. If you think post-natal abortion of late-term abortion providers is wrong, don't post-natally abort any.
Anti-abortionism is a fundamental cause of the right, not of the left, your spurious argument notwithstanding. Only extreme rightwingers believe it is right to kill doctors providing abortion.
PsiBond,
If LBJ's statement about "losing the South" upon signing Republican Senator Everett Dirksen's Civil Rights Act into law and the branching of the Democratic Party into a "Dixiecrat" faction (not to mention the years of Democrat state governors fighting federal desegregation orders - a cause still championed by the current Democrat governor of my state of Missouri by the way) doesn't tell you that Democrats for years have been the party of racism, at least educate yourself on why your myth of racist Republicans is ahistorical and bizarre.
On Eisenhower's foreign policy, he was a moderate, not a liberal, but certainly to the left of conservatism proper. Soviet tanks did not roll into Hungary until Ike announced that America would not support agression on the borders of the Soviet Union.
His anti-communism strategy in southeast Asia, on the other hand, was more effective than Johnson's.
On North Korea, Clinton had already bought and paid for their nuclear weapons program. What could Bush do but force North Korea into talks with its neighboring countries (no doubt apologizing to the six-party nations for Clinton's enabling of North Korea's nuclear weapons program in the first place)
In short, Republican foreign policies can be, and a few have been wrong in the past.
Democrat foreign policies have never been right.
The Presidents that have had successful foreign policies have been political conservatives.
The Presidents that have had undeniably disasterous foreign policies have been Democrats.
That Democrats suck at foreign policy is a truth that has been acknowledged by political analysts for decades.
That Joe Biden is considered one of the Democratic Party's "foreign policy experts" is a symptom, not the disease.
beamish: If LBJ's statement about "losing the South" upon signing Republican Senator Everett Dirksen's Civil Rights Act into law and the branching of the Democratic Party into a "Dixiecrat" faction (not to mention the years of Democrat state governors fighting federal desegregation orders - a cause still championed by the current Democrat governor of my state of Missouri by the way) doesn't tell you that Democrats for years have been the party of racism, at least educate yourself on why your myth of racist Republicans is ahistorical and bizarre.
Here's the point: Republicans are not inextricably racist; by the same token, Democrats are not inextricably racist, although many, if not most, Republicans are invested in circulating the myth that they are and that liberals are thereby implicated. But, until the civil rights era, neither party was dominated or perceived to be dominated by a liberal or conservative ideology.
If Republicans began to be associated with racists, it may be because most supporters of Jim Crow laws, including former voters for segregationist Democratic governors, came to see the GOP as more receptive to their fears about the rise of black political power. In the last presidential election, the Deep South was the only region where the GOP picked up more votes than in 2004.
The polemic cum book review that you link from the Claremont Institute (a solidly conservative think tank, whose legal philosophy is said to be close to that of Clarence Thomas) does not prove that the GOP was free of racists. Indeed, before finessing the data at 3500-word length, it acknowledges that "local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. And from the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable."
The rest of the story on Dirksen: The fear of a filibuster in the Senate was the driving force behind the administration's strategy for passage of the civil rights bill, Kennedy introduced the bill in the more liberal and less aggressive atmosphere of the House of Representatives, hoping a bill acceptable to all sides would emerge, thus lessening the chances of a filibuster in the Senate. After months of winding through the House's legislative maze, an uncompromised bill was passed by a vote of 290 to 130 on February 10, 1964. Some of the impetus for passage came from the shock of President Kennedy's assassination and the determination of his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to pass the strongest possible bill.
The measure now faced its greatest challenge in the U.S. Senate. Senator Richard Russell (D-Ga.) began a filibuster against the bill on March 9, 1964, just days after it was introduced in the Senate. To get past a filibuster, Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, with a small working group, fashioned a substitute bill that bore little resemblance to the original House bill. Dirksen's had his own reservations with the original. Though recognizing the need for civil rights legislation, Dirksen had constitutional objections to several parts of the bill, particularly those dealing with public accommodations.
By mid-May, Dirksen felt comfortable enough with the substitute bill to present it to his fellow Republicans. He immediately faced a revolt by a bloc of conservative Republicans led by his political rival, Bourke Hickenlooper* of Iowa. The time had come for Dirksen to take a stand or face a devastating defeat. On May 19, Dirksen called a press conference, and summoning all of his rhetorical skills, he lectured an audience of astounded newsmen about the moral need for a civil rights bill. In the aftermath, Hickenlooper and the opposition were routed; he got the needed votes for cloture; and the bill passed the Senate.
Continued
*Of Sen. Hickenlooper, Wikipedia interestingly says, "In the Senate, Hickenlooper was known as part of the most conservative and isolationistic members of the Republican Party, and as possibly one of the most conservative American congressmen. He became one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, serving as the Republican Policy Committee Chairman from 1962 to 1969. In this position, he had an intense rivalry with Everett Dirksen, the liberal Senate Republican leader at the time. Hickenlooper opposed civil rights legislation including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, largely because Dirksen was working on this legislation in collaboration with liberal Democrats and attempting to get Republicans to support it, which would threaten Hickenlooper's power."
On Eisenhower's foreign policy, he was a moderate, not a liberal, but certainly to the left of conservatism proper.
Yes, if "conservatism proper" is how you're referring to extreme conservatism. Extreme rightwingers on the blogs generally refuse to recognize moderate conservatives as conservatives at all. Obviously, Eisenhower considered himself a moderate conservative: In 1962, he said, "I have no patience with extreme Rightists who call everyone who disagrees with a Communist, nor with the Leftists who shout that the rrest of us are heartless moneygrubbers."
Soviet tanks did not roll into Hungary until Ike announced that America would not support agression on the borders of the Soviet Union.
I think you mean that America would support aggression. Ike said he deplored the intervention of Soviet mnilitary forces in Hungary.The Hungarian revolution occurred largely because they naively expected help from the United Nations and the United States. Some 4000 were killed fighting the Russians. Three hundred were executed.
His anti-communism strategy in southeast Asia, on the other hand, was more effective than Johnson's.
Eisenhower got a cease-fire in Korea that has held until the other day. He tried to aid the French in holding on to the Indochinese colonies that were slipping away from them, and after the French left, sent the first U.S. military advisors into Vietnam. If they can be said to have been in some way more successful, it may have been because they had a simpler situation to deal with than what came after. Nixon "abandoned" the South Vietnamese regime, according to Gen. Westmoreland, when he agreed to a cease-fire accord in January 1973 that left North Vietnamese troops in the south.
On North Korea, Clinton had already bought and paid for their nuclear weapons program. What could Bush do but force North Korea into talks with its neighboring countries (no doubt apologizing to the six-party nations for Clinton's enabling of North Korea's nuclear weapons program in the first place).
It is doubtful that Bush could force North Korea into talks it did not think it could gain anything from. At the beginning of his administration, Bush said he had no intention of negotiating with North Korea. Thus his convening of protracted talks was a sign of weakness, one that was evidently picked up on by Iran. The failure of Bush to take a tough-guy stance can only have emboldened Iran.
In short, Republican foreign policies can be, and a few have been wrong in the past.
Therefore, it cannot be asserted that Republican administrations are never wrong about foreign policy. As a result, the only way rightwing partisans can improve their arguing stance is by maintaining that Democrats are wrong more often or always so.
Democrat foreign policies have never been right.
An extreme declaration that Democrats are never right is not a logical proof of anything.
The Presidents that have had successful foreign policies have been political conservatives.
Only presidents who satisfy your requirements for being a conservative have had success in foreign policy in your mind.
What a surprise!
Continued
The Presidents that have had undeniably disasterous foreign policies have been Democrats.
In other words, you are willing to acknowledge undeniably disasterous foreign policies only in Democratic administrations. As everyone should know, comparisons of presidential administrations, even when done by scholars, are not scientific.
That Democrats suck at foreign policy is a truth that has been acknowledged by political analysts for decades.
Political analysts who say they "suck" are the only pundits to whom you will pay serious attention. Broad facile conclusions of that sort are partisan-driven. Since Reagan is the most recent Republican you are willing to recognize as conservative, there can only be a limited number of comparisons, not an adequate sample, even for a nonscientific analysis.
That Joe Biden is considered one of the Democratic Party's "foreign policy experts" is a symptom, not the disease.
Your having no respect for the foreign policy experience of Joe Biden, giving greater credence to your own experience, is a diagnostic symptom of viral liberal derangement disorder.
PsiBond,
On the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some historical points for your consideration:
It was nice of you to mention that JFK reintroduced in 1963 the Republican authored and championed Civil Rights Act of 1875 into the House of Representatives. 88 years is a long time to wait for the turnaround of at least a few Democrats to agree with the largely entrenched Republican sentiment that racial discrimination in housing, employment, and accomodations is wrong. So, JFK reintroduced a Republican bill, and despite his being the son of America's most vocal political ally of Adolf Hitler, he should get at least some credit for his belated bipartisanship.
But, upon introduction to the House of Representatives, a discharge petition had to be circulated to get it out of the Democrat-controlled House Rules Committee for floor vote, a daunting task considering the Democrat majority in the House of Representatives. Still, with a majority of House Republican signatures on that discharge petitition and the timely "March on Washington" by supporters of Republican civil rights activist Martin Luther King, the House Rules Commitee chairman Howard W. Smith was politically embarrassed enough to end his legislative blockade. The 88 year old Republican bill found itself under Congressional consideration again.
Faced with the federal reversal of the political revival and entrenchment of the Ku Klux Klan that Democrat President Woodrow Wilson had worked so hard to achieve, Democrats in the House added repugnant amendment after repugnant amendment to the ressurected 88 year old bill, to either guarantee it would not pass either Senate consideration or doom it to certain death before the Supreme Court. Democrats in the House fought hard to stop the 1875 law from going back on the books by amplifying the unconstitutionality of provisions that didn't pass muster before the Supreme Court in 1883, and adding a few more deliberately toxic provisions for good measure. The near-century old Republican effort for civil rights legislation barely made it out of the House.
It was then up to KKK Grand Kleagle Robert Byrd, today's Democrat "statesman of the Senate" and his racist Democrat Senator allies to filibuster any effort to defend the victory of Republicans in both the Civil War and post-Civil War civil rights efforts. And quite an effort the "statesman" put forth against Republican Senator Everett Dirksen's alternative to the House-poisoned revival of the 1875 law - who knew "I hate niggers" could be stretched to a 14 hour long stemwinder? Byrd's future longwinded opposition to the Senate confirmations of Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice still serve as reminders of what it takes to be a Democrat "statesman."
[continued]
Finally, despite Democrat efforts to kill any Republican civil rights legislation (from 1875 or 1964) at every point in the process in the House AND the Senate, Senator Dirksen's bill reached President Lyndon Johnson's desk with just over a third of all Democrats in both Houses of Congress combined opposed to it, and over two-thirds of Republicans in both Houses combined in support. Clearly the vote record in both Houses and the history of the legislation show that had Democrats had a larger majority in Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have never hit the President's desk for Lyndon Johnson's reluctant approval.
Johnson believed his signature had "lost the South for a generation." This, despite Johnson's relentless efforts to illegally wiretap and entrap Republican civil rights activist Martin Luther King in sex scandals and smearing him as a Communist.
But did Johnson's betrayal of Klansman sensibilities really "lose the South" for him? That prediction certainly doesn't reflect continued Southern Democrat victories in the re-election of Johnson in 1964, nor the victories of Southern Democrats in the Congressional and state-level elections of 1966.
It wasn't until Democrats revived their 1948 split into a "Dixiecrat" faction that the Democrats lost the 1968 Presidential election to Republican Richard Nixon. Indeed, Johnson's disasterous handling of the Vietnam War and quitting politics altogether in wartime rather than seeking re-election had more to do with the Democrat Hubert Humphrey's loss in 1968 than the 20 year old "Dixiecrat" faction siphoning votes away from them.
And what of that "Dixiecrat" faction turning Republican? Of the bloc of "Dixiecrat" Senators, state Governors, and local elected officials of 1968, a grand total of ONE eventually became a Republican - Strom Thurmond.
"Flimsy" is too generous a word to describe the case that modern Democrats make for an alleged appeal to white supremacy by Republicans in any election.
The overwhelming election of Californian Ronald Reagan over Southern Democrat President Jimmy Carter certainly only exacerbates the difficulty of Democrats making a case for racism "losing the South" for them.
The record speaks for itself. What Democrats have done for civil rights in America could fit in a thimble and leave room for an air show.
The debate may be long. But I am confident that this Congress will live up to its responsibility to ensure that all Americans - regardless of race - are allowed to participate in the most fundamental process of our democracy - the selection of the officers of government.
-- Senator John F. Kennedy, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 20, 1960
Some historical points you omitted, beamish
You can bend what I say, twist the data to your liking, doggedly smear liberals quaDemocrats as racist, make false correlations, and pronounce contrary facts flimsy, beamish; you can even try to defame John F. Kennedy through his father (whom rightwing bloggers seem fond of calling "America's most vocal political ally of Adolf Hitler", beating out Prescott Bush*). Nonetheless, you cannot refute the truth that Everett Dirksen was not the moral leader of the civil rights movement, or that Kennedy deserves a great deal of credit for providing inspirational official sanction to the movement. The Kennedy administration responded to black demands for civil rights with executive action, a legislative program, and moral leadership. Through executive action, he ordered in November 1962 an end to discrimination in housing owned, operated, and financed by the federal government; established the President's Committee on Equal Opportunity Employment; appointed many blacks to prominent federal positions, and insured executive support for the civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders. The Kennedy legislative program, calling for desegregation of public facilities and greater authority for the attorney general in bringing suits against segregated school systems, was fulfilled under Lyndon Johnson. President Kennedy stirringly exerted moral leadership on civil rights issues in a television address on June 11, 1963, announcing the integration of the University of Alabama using the National Guard, and challenging the American people to live up to the promise of American ideals and abide by the Golden Rule:
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.
Continued
*"Prescott Bush was a fanatical opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt. There were even rumors that Bush tried to encourage a military coup against Roosevelt after his election as President in 1933. But the evidence - while intriguing - has never been conclusive.
Similar secrecy and uncertainty surrounded the intricate web of ownership and control of Harriman's Union Banking Corp., which Prescott Bush administered in collaboration with backers of Germany's Nazi Party.
As a rising star at the Harriman firm, Prescott Bush became a director (effectively in charge) of Harriman's UBC, which had a financial relationship with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an early supporter of Adolf Hitler.
Brown Brothers Harriman supplied Thyssen with financing and other banking services that allowed the Nazis to build up their war machine. After Thyssen broke with Hitler in 1939, Thyssen's banking empire came under control of the Nazi government, with Prescott Bush continuing as a behind-the-scenes force in the relationship."
"In 1926, Averill Harriman welcomed a familiar name into his Wall Street firm (W A Harriman and Co) as senior partner - Prescott Bush, father to one American president and grandfather to another. The association was to end simultaneously in fabulous wealth and temporary ignominy - at the height of the Second World War, in 1942, the New York Herald Tribune reported that the Union Banking Corporation, of which Prescott Bush was a director and E Roland Harriman a 99 per cent shareholder, was holding a small fortune under the orders of Adolf Hitler's financier. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, all of Union Banking Corporation's capital stock was seized."
However, none of this has anything whatever to do with George H.W. Bush or George W, Bush, Prescott Bush's son and grandson.
Without the support of liberals in both parties, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would not have been passed over the opposition of conservative Southern Democrats, nor would the Civil Rights Act of 1957 or 1960. Bizarrely and ahistorically, the account you offer of civil rights legislation gives no credit to Democratic and Republican liberals in Congress. No doubt, devotion to partisanship rather than mere lack of generosity accounts for this glaring omission.
At the 1964 Democratic Presidential convention, which nominated Lyndon Johnson, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society were specifically condemned. In the national election, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater won only his home state, Arizona, and five states in the South. It was hardly a geographical surprise: Goldwater (who is most often credited with sparking the resurgence of the American conservative movement) had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, thus enhancing his appeal to conservative Southern Democrats. His Democratic rival had enthusiastically supported and signed the Act. Eisenhower qualified his voting for Goldwater in November by remarking that he had voted not specifically for Goldwater, but for the Republican Party.
Southern Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia, an ex-chief-of-staff for segregationist Lester Maddox, denounced President Johnson as a traitor to the South for signing it. Miller was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Republican Convention, where he found politicians more warmly receptive to his political philosophy.
Today, paleoconservatives, feeling the pressure of political correctness (which many of them rail at oppressive), will not declare that blacks are not entitled to equal rights. Among extreme conservatives, the 'new racism' manifests itself in different ways, such as anti-immigrant chauvinism, demonization of Muslims as Muslims, denial of the legitimacy of gay rights, belief in the imbecility of non-conservatives, projecting racism onto liberals, and hostility to multiculturalism.
Concluded
The record speaks for itself. What Democrats have done for civil rights in America could fit in a thimble and leave room for an air show.
The historical record is undeniable–––what heroic liberals, both Democrats and Republicans, have done for civil rights in America cannot be obfuscated by a feral mob of extreme rightwingers doggedly smearing the Internet with their sanctimonious harangues.
PsiBond,
Bizarre FDR assassination conspiracy theories aside, thank you for mentioning Prescott Bush, the left-wing Progressive Society industrialist who shared the same left-wing eugenicist views as liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson (who as President enthusiastically turned the Ku Klux Klan into a national organization with federal money) as well as the progressive leftist eugenicist and labor activist Adolf Hitler. I think it's very important to highlight the undeniably left-wing ideological positions of those who ressurected the Ku Klux Klan as well as those responsible for keeping American union steelworkers employed supporting the militarism of their fellow leftists in Nazi Germany. Woodrow Wilson, Prescott Bush, Joseph Kennedy, and Adolf Hitler - an impressive list of ideologically progressive leftists.
Now who knows where JFK's more right-friendly policies of cutting taxes to stimulate economic growth would have taken America in a second term had he not been assassinated by the leftist Lee Harvey Oswald, but we can be reasonably sure that his sucessor Johnson got the message and reversed course with a swift expansion of the size of the federal government.
This is important to note not just because Kennedy deserves some credit for belatedly jumping on the Republican desegregation bandwagon, but also because Kennedy represents an intersection as both the first Democrat to champion the free market solutions perenially heralded by the anti-New Deal Republican Party ("ask not what your country can do for you...") and the first post-Wilson Democrat President to not consider minorities lab rats for dubious eugenics and medical science experiments. These breaks with fiscal and social liberal ideology condemned him to an untimely death at the hands of a leftist more than his agitation against the Dixiecrat wing of his own party. Even his traditional Democrat disaster foreign policy in Cuba, Turkey, and Germany couldn't save him. Risking the southern states in a game of nuclear chicken with Russian missiles in Cuba probably exacerbated the 20 year old Dixiecrat rift more than Kennedy's emulation of Eisenhower's National Guard-enforced desegregation of schools.
[continued]
But no such rift between left-wing eugenic segregationists and left-wing federal power expansionists ever existed in the Republican Party. Kennedy pissed on both wings of his own party when he half-heartedly took up the cause of Republican civil rights legislation. We know now that that illegal wiretapping and surveillance of Republican civil rights activists like Martin Luther King began under Kennedy's Justice Department under his brother Robert Kennedy and perennial leftist transvestite FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. If Kennedy were concerned with civil rights in general, he was specifically against the civil rights of Martin Luther King.
Turn back the clock 12 years before Republicans twisted Johnson's arms into signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and you find a New Deal Democrat by the name of Ronald Reagan campaigning for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, and for Nixon in 1960, lambasting the leftward, fascistic turns of his party before deciding to join the party of smaller government, private sector solutions, and racial desegregation.
Ronald Reagan's "Democrat-in-name-only" conservatism and support for Republican presidential candidates throughout the 1950's prior to the Kennedy-Johnson administration shatters the fragile "conservative = racist" myth.
The Ku Klux Klan burned my grandfather's electronics repair shop in Birmingham, Alabama to the ground in the 1960s because of his work as a Republican Party organizer and registering blacks to vote. My grandfather was as politically conservative as they come - evangelical Christian, opposed to big government, for private sector economic solutions, decidedly against racial segregation, and a veteran of the war against the leftists in Nazi Germany. He was no aberration in conservative thought or action.
The Republican Party has no history of racism to apologize for. Neither do conservatives.
Z: well, you guys are still going at it...great stuff to read.
Thanks, Z.
but, pardon me, Psi....wait. We can't judge jfk on his father's shenanigans with Hitler, but the Bushes are open season, is that right? Too bad Bush didn't overcome FDR, the depression might have ended sooner, huh?
Wait, Z, you may have skipped over this in my post: "However, none of this has anything whatever to do with George H.W. Bush or George W, Bush, Prescott Bush's son and grandson." In other words, the sins of the fathers should not be visited on the sons, nor their shenanigans either. Nor your misreading on all rightwingers.
The extreme right probably thought FDR was a communist but they didn't have the knowhow to get a coup off the ground. What a pity for you strict constuction folks, huh?
Re this "Among extreme conservatives, the 'new racism' manifests itself in different ways, such as anti-immigrant chauvinism, demonization of Muslims as Muslims, denial of the legitimacy of gay rights, belief in the imbecility of non-conservatives, projecting racism onto liberals, and hostility to multiculturalism."
Most conservatives, and you KNOW THIS, are all FOR immigration, we just don't like law breakers...
Then you should have no problem with amnesty for the illegal immigrants who have been here for decades, have contributed sufficiently to the community to gain their redemption. So those vocal rightwingers must be atypical who promote the impression that most of them are murderers or criminals committing other violent crimes.
Next point; the muslims don't need US to demonize them, they're doing a dandy job on their own after 9/11, making demands of THIS COUNTRY which doesn't suit THEM (and I mean extremist muslims and YOU know THAT)...
Next response: I am sure that most Muslims are not as you wish to characterize a small number of them. But I have seen many rightwingers accord them and Islamic civilization no respect and demonize all of them together nonetheless. In fact, some rightwingers have said they wanted to deport Muhammad Ali, imagine that, a natural born American and an American icon.
Gays deserve all the rights they can get; and they can get ALL of them in a lawyer's office; my own homosexual friends laugh at this RIGHTS thing adding that they'd never marry and most gays don't want to and they have the rights they need; they want to live as Americans,not with GAY written across their foreheads.
Gays deserve all the rights that straight people have. They should not have to go to a lawyer, identify themselves to him as homosexuals, and have to pay him a lot of money to get the legal recognition that heterosexuals have naturally without any hassle. Gays ought to have the right to serve their country in the military free of the danger of being thrown out just before they qualify for retirement benefits, as many of them are. They don't want GAY written as the reason for discharge across their separation papers. Considering the powerful demand for the rights that gays can't exercise, you might consider the possibility that, as confident as you seem to be that you do, you do not speak for all gays. It's worth noting, too, that in 1776 the revolutionaries were much less than a majority among American colonists.
Continued
also, Non-conservatives might not be imbeciles but they either don't understand our great forefathers or they hate them.
Or their interpretations differ and are just as valid. Despite your extreme stance, they are not necessarily incapable of understanding or unpatriotic or treasonous. As you know, even religious people may have different interpretations of the Bible. Of course, in former times, when only one interpretation was permitted, those found not to be righteous ones were put to death as heretics. In these times, hopefully, we are more Enlightened.
Liberals are the racists (affirmative action, 'promise them anything for their dumbed down vote', Jesse Jackson support, etc )
Notwithstanding your typical semantics-based interpretation of liberal intent, liberals are not racists for wanting to help the poor and disadvantaged to become rich and, forgetting their roots, Republican. Unfortunately, the most effective way of counteracting the wrong of generations of bias by the dominant element in society is with some corrective bias in the opposite direction.
..and OH, MY....NO COUNTRY SURVIVES WITH THE KIND OF MULTICULTURALISM WE'RE GETTING INTO NOW, DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, PSI!...OR, by the time you do, will it be too late to save the American culture IMMIGRANTS WHO COME LEGALLY ARE EAGER TO ADAPT TO, GRATEFUL JUST TO BE HERE. But, of course, the left's screwing THAT up, that 'just to be here', too....because this is NOT America anymore.
James von Brunn, according to a website he had, believes liberalism will bring about America's ruin. I don't share his belief, or your "historical" judgment of doom. The America you rail against, Z, is America at its best; it's not at all screwed up. I believe that diversity is America's strength. I decline to subscribe to your frantic upper-cased apocalyptic belief. Some of my relatives are orthodox, wear yarmulkes in public. and preserve traditions from Eastern Europe. I don't believe they need to give them up to ADAPT, as you put it. They are not eager to ADAPT.to the dominant secular and Christian lifestyles, and they shouldn't have to.They are successful in America as they are. I fundamentally disagree with cultural conservatives, whether Christian or Muslim fundamentalists, who want to impose a freeze on culture for an entire country.
The old racism was about the righteousness of the privileged ones. So is the 'new racism', but the nature of righteousness has been redefined for new times.
You would have to be an imbecile not to see that.
This quasi-religious belief that everyone is an imbecile who does not see how right you are ----
one would have to be awfully naive not to see that that is an extreme rightwing perspective.
Now you are going back, beamish, almost one hundred years ago to Wilson. You can go back as far in time as you like, beamish, to try to make an argument, but be advised that the modern political term 'conservative' was first used by Chateaubriand in 1819.
If we are going to keep reaching further back in time, let me point out here that the Democratic Party platform in 1892 condemned the oppression of Lutherans and Jews in czarist Russia.
William Jennings Bryan was a powerful Democrat who endorsed Woodrow Wilson at the 1912 convention, but today he is best known as an implacable foe of Darwinian evolution. Which should indicate that modern liberal and conservative ideologies and battle lines were not as well-defined in Wilson's era as you would like to pretend.
Prescott Bush was a longtime supporter of the United Negro Fund. In your face-saving classification scheme that means he should be considered a conservative, not a leftwinger as you make him out to be. He was, in fact, a fiscal conservative.
Persistently, you try to confuse the philosophy of liberalism with that of conservatism and vice versa. Liberalism is a broad class of political philosophies that considers individual liberty and equality to be the most important political goals. Liberalism emphasizes individual rights and equality of opportunity.
Conservatism, on the other hand, indicates, as the name suggests, support for traditional values and systems, which vary in different countries and time periods.----e.g., the Church, hereditary monarchy, slavery, the Jim Crow South, et al. Conservatives are strong supporters of the right of property. Most conservatives strongly support the sovereign nation (although that was not so in the 19th century), and patriotically identify with their own nation. Nationalist separatist movements may be both radical and conservative. Thus the secession of the Confederacy was a conservative undertaking, largely precipitated by the threat to the survival of the slavery system. Contrary to what rightwingers may like to pretend, it was not liberals who broke away from the Union.
Liberal conservatism is a variant of conservatism that combines conservative values and policies with liberal stances. As these latter two terms have had different meanings over time and across countries, liberal conservatism also has many meanings. Historically, the term often referred to the combination of economic liberalism, which champions laissez-faire markets, with the classical conservatism concern for established tradition, respect for authority and religious values. It contrasted itself with classical liberalism, which supports freedom for the individual in both the economic and social spheres. Over time, the general conservative ideology in many countries adopted economic liberal arguments, and the term liberal conservatism was replaced with conservatism.
Of course, many individuals have been quite eclectic and changeable in their political thinking with regard to these ideologies.
Continued
Ronald Reagan, for instance, began his political career in the 50s as a registered Democrat, an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and a supporter of the New Deal.
The murders of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish anthropology student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old white Jewish CORE organizer and former social worker also from New York, symbolized the risks of participating in the Civil Rights Movement in the South. The lynching of the three young men occurred in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964, when they came to investigate the burning of a church that supported civil rights activity. On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan gave his first post-convention speech after being officially chosen as the Republican nominee for President of the United States at the Neshoba County Fair. The speech drew attention for his use of the phrase "states' rights" at a place just a few miles from a town associated with the 1964 murders of civil rights workers. As a young congressman, Trent Lott was among those who urged Reagan to deliver his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. "The sad truth is that many Republican leaders remain in a massive state of denial about the party's four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting," Time magazine wrote in 2002.
The platform of Theodore Roosevelt was more or as liberal as that of Wilson, against whom he ran unsuccessfully in 1912 as the candidate of the Bull Moose or Progressive Party. It included support for women's suffrage, prohibition of child labor, a six-day work week and an eight-hour day, a minimum wage for women, workmen's compensation insurance, a social security system, creation of a national health service, and graduated inheritance and income taxes. Tjhe Democratic platform, among other things called for an immediate declaration of intent to recognize the independence of the Philippines, a workmen's compensation law, and stricter pure food and public health laws (which rightwingers today would label intrusive government). Wilson signed the America's first-ever federal progressive income tax passed by Congress.
Concluded
Wilson's idealistic internationalism, calling for the United States to enter the world arena to fight for democracy, progressiveness, and liberalism, has been a contentious position in American foreign policy, serving as a model for "idealists" to emulate or "realists" to reject for the following century. While Wilson abided and encouraged the rise of Jim Crow, JFK forcefully did the opposite, even as a senator. In a 1923 letter to Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas, Wilson noted of the reborn Klan, "...no more obnoxious or harmful organization has ever shown itself in our affairs." However, the segregation introduced into the federal workplace by the Wilson administration was kept in place by the succeeding presidents, of which three of the four were Republicans, and not officially ended until the administration of Harry Truman----another Democrat, whose desegregation of the U.S. military was to a large extent responsible for the conservative Dixiecrat revolt in 1948. The Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond switched parties to become a Republican after the Democratic Party became known as the champion of racial desegregation and a traitor to the South.
A recent C-Span survey of historians ranked the presidents in ten areas, including international relations. Lincoln, a Republican, was at the top. Washington, who predates party politics, was second. Including those rankings, the top ten were split five Democrats and four Republicans.
The Republican Party has no history of racism to apologize for. Neither do conservatives..
This bizarre, infantile declaration betrays a guilty political conscience. I didn't suggest they need to apologize for being what they are. Nor would I.
PsiBond,
I have no "guilty political conscience." I am quite proud of the Republican Party's 155 year old legacy of fighting for civil rights in America. You should proud that Republicans were successful in getting at least a few Democrats heading in the direction of fighting for civil rights 61 years ago. In this area, pressuring former Ku Klux Klan member Harry Truman into desegregating the military was reminiscent of Lincoln's assignment of freed slaves and black volunteers to Union armies fighting the Confederacy in the Civil War.
You may recall the Democrat "statesman of the Senate" and Grand Kleagle of the KKK Robert Byrd's reaction to Truman's betrayal of party values: "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."
But the year is 2009, and Robert Byrd (D - KKK) is still a valued member of the same Democratic Party that turned its resources towards running a primary challenger for the Senate seat of Joseph Lieberman at the direction of Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, a man who claimed to want the vote of people who fly the Confederate battle flag.
Democrats moved everything they could to throw the Jewish-American Joseph Lieberman out of the Democratic Party and out of the Senate. Even Lieberman's record as a liberal on most any issue you can think of and running as a VP candidate with the son of an infamous segregationist (Al Gore, Sr.) couldn't counter the fact that he had earned the ire of Iraqi Baath Party sympathizers and nostalgic Joe Kennedy-style Nazis in the left-most reaches of the Democratic Party by supporting the war in Iraq. No such effort has ever been mounted against the Democratic Party's most favored Klansman Senator. Ever.
One can point to the left-wing ACLU defenses of Ku Klux Klan gatherings and even leftist Democratic Party presidential candidate Al Sharpton's work to allow Klansmen to wear masks in their marches in New York City to show that Democrats still, in the 21st Century, are the the left-wing party of hate-mongers. Bringing up the liberal Time magazine's Adolf Hitler "Man of the Year" article and its lavish comparison of Hitler's government programs to the New Deal programs of left-winger Franklin Roosevelt would be overkill. Bringing up that FDR's first Presidential campaign was fond of accusing President Hoover of being a "communist" is beating the dead horse on exposing the Democratic Party for its fascist tendencies of labeling "the other" with labels most aptly applied to itself.
No, PsiBond, if there is a "guilty political conscience" at work here, it is yours.
SHERIFF RAY STUCKEY: Do you like baseball, Mr. Anderson?
MR ANDERSON (Gene Hackman): Yeah, I do. It's the only time a black man can wave a stick at a white man and not start a riot.
--Mississippi Burning (1988), perhaps the finest film about the Civil Rights Era.
You seem to be a great believer in guilt by association, beamish. Hence your sense of deep unease about the segregationists who formerly infested the U.S. conservative movement is quite understandable. Your desperate need to make charges of racism in instances where there is none is also understandable. It is easy to see why you feel compelled to deflect in every tangential direction. Indeed, it threatens to consume you, but you can beat it. Beat it is what you need to do, beamish. Yes, beat it. (Woe for us! the King of Pop is dead!)
The ACLU, in the case you want to bring up, was defending not the ideas of the KKK but freedom of speech for unpopular ideas. It believes that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and press would be meaningless if the government could pick and choose the persons to whom they apply.
The same Democratic Party that has Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who apologized for the KKK membership of his early years (joining the KKK was "the greatest mistake I ever made," he said), also had Zell Miller, who unapologetically denounced Lyndon Johnson as a traitor to the South for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which Johnson helped to get passed. Wikipedia notes, "Byrd holds a wide variation of both liberal and conservative political views. A lifelong Democrat, Byrd did not leave the party as its views shifted from social conservatism to social liberalism."
In the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) Congressional Report Card for the 108th Congress (2003–2004), Byrd was awarded with an approval rating of 100% for favoring the NAACP's position in all 33 bills presented to the Senate regarding issues of their concern. Only 16 other Senators of the same session matched this approval rating. In June 2005, Byrd proposed an additional $10 million in federal funding for the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington, D.C., remarking that "With the passage of time, we have come to learn that his Dream was the American Dream, and few ever expressed it more eloquently."
Stephen "Don" Black, a 55 year old former KKK Grand Wizard, said in an interview that he hates President Obama and blames illegal aliens for undermining the economy. The number of registered members and readers on his website has “surged to unprecedented levels in recent months,” according to CNN. On the day after Obama’s historic election, more than 2,000 people joined his Web site, a dramatic increase from the approximately 80 new members a day he was getting, His Web site, which was started in 1995, is one of the oldest and largest hate group sites. The site received so many hits that it crashed after election results were announced. The site boasts 110,000 registered members today, Black said. “People who had been a little more complacent and kind of upset became more motivated to do something,” said Black, who also said he joined his first hate group at age 15. Nick Griffin, the leader of a far-right and whites-only British party (not represented in Parliament, but with seats in the European Parliament) caused notice in the press when he met with Black at racist conferences in the U.S. The U.K. has banned Black for extremism.
No less a conservative than Ann Coulter once grudgingly admitted that liberals deserve the credit for the civil rights triumphs.
The unmistakable guilty political conscience that you and others of your kind have to bear, leads you to hysterically point fingers in all directions save toward rightwingers, to ahistorically insinuate that liberals had little or nothing to do with the success of the civil rights struggle, to tenaciously promote the sham equation of liberalism with the rightwing ideology of Nazis----in short, to pridefully display irrational, infantile behavior.
GOP blind to its race problem
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
The Miami Herald
June 6, 2009
The modern GOP was created in 1965 with a stroke of Lyndon Johnson's pen.
If that is an exaggeration, it is not much of one. When Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, he made a prediction: In committing the unpardonable sin of guaranteeing the ballot to all citizens regardless of race, he said, he would cause his party to lose the South ``for a generation.''
And indeed Southern Democrats, who for a century had bombed schools, lynched innocents, perverted justice and terrorized millions in the name of intolerance, responded by leaving their ancestral party in droves. They formed the base of a new GOP, a reality acknowledged by Ronald Reagan when he opened his 1980 campaign at a segregationist fair in a town where three civil-rights workers were infamously martyred, by declaring, 'I believe in states' rights.''
In embracing its new southern base, the Republican Party became the Repugnant Party on matters of race, a distinction it has done little to shed.
So some of us were disappointed but not surprised last week when Sherri Goforth, an aide to [Republican] Tennessee state Sen. Diane Black, came under fire for an e-mail she sent out. It depicted the 44 U.S. presidents, showing the first 43 in dignified, statesmanlike poses. By contrast, the 44th, the first African American, is seen as a pair of cartoon spook eyes against a black backdrop. Goforth's explanation: the e-mail, which went to GOP staffers, was sent ``to the wrong list of people.'' [In February 2009, Black canceled a meeting with LGBT constituents she represented, allegedly telling them that she didn't need to hear what they had to say about their issues].
You may wish to let that one marinate for a moment.
And please, don't bother reminding me of Democrat Robert Byrd's onetime membership in the Ku Klux Klan; I make no argument that the Democrats are untainted by bigotry. Rather, my argument is that the GOP is consumed by it, riddled with it, that it has shown, sown, shaped and been shaped by it, to an abhorrent degree.
You think that's unfair? Well, after Goforth's e-mail, after ''Barack the Magic Negro,'' and John McCain's campaign worker blaming a fictional black man for a fictional mugging, and a party official in Texas renaming the executive mansion ''the black house,'' and an official in Virginia claiming Obama's presidency would see free drugs and ''mandatory black liberation theology,'' and a Republican activist in South Carolina calling an escaped ape one of Michelle Obama's ''ancestors,'' it seems wholly fair to me. Indeed, overdue.
And keep in mind: All that is just from the last year or so. I could draw up a much longer list but space is limited, and there is a final point to make.
Which is that, yes, I am cognizant of the danger of painting with too broad a brush and no, I am not saying membership in the GOP is synonymous with membership in the KKK. I know there are Republicans of racial enlightenment and common decency. Indeed, I am counting on it, counting on them to search conscience and demand their party find ways of winning elections that do not depend on lazy appeals to the basest emotions of the hateful and the unreconstructed.
Do it because it's the right thing. And do it because it is in the party's long-term interest. As a 2008 Gallup poll indicates, black people are more religious than Republicans as a whole and just as conservative on some key moral issues. Yet only 5 percent identify with the party of religion and conservatism. The GOP's ongoing inability to win over such a natural constituency speaks volumes.
I keep waiting for somebody to do something about it. I mean, I can hear Republicans of racial enlightenment and common decency yelling at me from here.
They want me to know there is nothing honorable, much less inherently Republican, in the hatred expressed by these weasels in elephant's clothes. In response, I would give them this advice:
Don't tell me. Tell them.
PsiBond,
As expected, instead of attempting to refute any of my argument, you've retreated into the tactics of Saul Alinsky's most apt pupil, Pee Wee Herman - "I know you are, but what am I times infinity."
Rather than correct you, again, on the very leftist policies of Adolf Hitler currently championed by the Democratic Party, I'll just answer your argument thusly:
Your bike is in the basement at the Alamo.
And since I have to answer the twit Leonard Pitts as well:
Your party chairman wants the vote of Confederate flag-wavers.
My party chairman is a black man.
As expected, instead of attempting to refute any of my argument, you've retreated into the tactics of Saul Alinsky's most apt pupil, Pee Wee Herman - "I know you are, but what am I times infinity."
Not surprisingly, rather than answer me honestly, beamish, you fall back on your simple stock shtick.
Albeit ineptly, you endeavor to employ Saul Alinsky's fifth rule for radicals, that advises ridiculing one's opponent.
Rather than correct you, again, on the very leftist policies of Adolf Hitler currently championed by the Democratic Party,
Your basic argument, that liberals had nothing to do with the success of the civil rights movement, has been thoroughly rebutted by me and you have not refuted this. Your arguing stance is heavily based on the deceptive ahistorical use of the term 'Democrat' as a codeword for 'liberal'. Thus you studiously ignore the historical point that, during the Civil Rights Era, after the failure of Southern Democrats to stop civil rights legislation, the prevailing philosophy of the Democratic Party shifted from social conservatism to social liberalism, and that of the Republican Party shifted in the opposite direction. You refuse to acknowledge the facts, or Ann Coulter's aforementioned admission. Instead, you want to deflect from them, in typical extreme rightwing fashion, by offering the I-know-who-I-am-but-who-are -you argument that liberals are really Nazis, devotees of Adolf Hitler, well known as a hater of blacks and other groups, which hatred he enacted into national policy. Amazingly, that logically explains for you why the large majority of blacks vote for liberal Democratic candidates----that is, for 'American Nazis', as it were. And it explains within the bounds of your Pee Wee mind why Jews overwhelmingly vote for these alleged neo-Nazis. "Embittered at his rejection by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, he [Hitler] was to spend "five years of misery and woe" in Vienna as he later recalled, adopting a view of life which changed very little in the ensuing years, shaped as it was by a pathological hatred of Jews and Marxists, liberalism and the cosmopolitan Habsburg monarchy." In other words, Hitler thought Marxists, Jews, and liberals were imbeciles. He probably thought no differently about “stone worshipers”, which is how you think of Muslims.
I'll just answer your argument thusly: Your bike is in the basement at the Alamo.
Your bike is at Saul Alinsky's memorial. In the back, on the sidelines. Your inept argument inadvertently ridicules itself.
And since I have to answer the twit Leonard Pitts as well:
Leonard Pitts, an African-American columnist (who won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 2004 and National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Columnist of the Year, 2002, among other awards), is right to ask decent conservatives to tell the other conservatives that racist shenanigans are not cool, or helpful to them in overcoming their history.
Your party chairman wants the vote of Confederate flag-wavers.
The current chairman of the Democratic National Committee is Tim Kane, who was once considered a likely running mate for Barack Obama.
Interpretations of the remark of former DNC chairman Howard Dean ("I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks"), made when a candidate in the 2008 primaries and quoted by rightwingers ever since, created a flap exactly because it is not usual practice for Democrats to appeal to Confederate flag-wavers, who mostly vote for Republicans.
My party chairman is a black man.
The RNC chairman is, as a black man, an anomaly in a Republican leadership position. A number of Republicans have raised objections to him on traditional racist grounds. The timing of his race-precedent-shattering appointment is clearly not accidental. Despite touted appearances, however, it doesn't prove, nor do any of your weak, stale innuendoes, that conservatives were the leaders of the civil rights movement.
Thank you for trying, beamish.
The current chairman of the Democratic National Committee is Tim Kane, who was once considered a likely running mate for Barack Obama.
This is correct. Howard Dean is no longer DNC chairman. Dean's latest activities have included opening complaining that the Obama administration has discriminated against him having a position in his administration over the content of his character.
Interpretations of the remark of former DNC chairman Howard Dean ("I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks"), made when a candidate in the 2008 primaries and quoted by rightwingers ever since, created a flap exactly because it is not usual practice for Democrats to appeal to Confederate flag-wavers, who mostly vote for Republicans.
You're getting your racists at the highest levels of the Democratic Party confused. Dean made his appeal in the 2004 primaries. It was former President Bill Clinton, apt pupil of his mentor segregationist J. William Fulbright, that made racist appeals on behalf of Hillary Clinton while campaigning in South Carolina.
The RNC chairman is, as a black man, an anomaly in a Republican leadership position.
Anomaly? Are former national security advisors and Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice "anomalies" too? Alan Keyes representing the United States in the United Nations Economic and Social Council under Reagan? Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court?
Admit it PsiBond. You see them as "anomalies" because you believe African-Americans belong on a Democrat welfare plantation rather than shaping policy at the highest levels of government and international organizations under Republicans.
At the highest levels of Democrat politics, you've got racists galore.
At the highest levels of the Republican Party, you've got African-Americans in leadership positions.
A Grand Kleagle of the KKK is the Democrat's "Statesman Senator."
A former DNC chairman waving the Confederate flag.
A former President making racist appeals on behalf of his wife.
A current President throwing members of his family that were eyewitnesses to his birth in Kenya under the bus.
Oh, but an obscure staff member of a state senator emails a tasteless joke and the whole GOP is indicted.
Weak.
Martin Luther King and other conservative Christians going back to the days of 19th Century protests for the abolition of slavery counted themselves as Republicans. In fact, it was 19th Century conservative evangelical Christian slavery abolitionists who actually started the Republican Party, and their spirit of championing human rights regardless of skin color is at the heart of the philosophy which drives contemporary Republican foreign policies to fight tyranny and spread economic and political freedom to the world abroad.
But African-American voters living in political districts ruled by Democrat-controlled local law enforcement agencies are intimidated by cops at their polling places.
Go figure.
The current chairman of the Democratic National Committee is Tim Kane, who was once considered a likely running mate for Barack Obama.
This is correct. Howard Dean is no longer DNC chairman. Dean's latest activities have included opening complaining that the Obama administration has discriminated against him having a position in his administration over the content of his character.
So now, acording to your view, the Obama administration is racist, biased against the whole Howard Dean 'klan'. You are compounding your compounded mistake, beamish.
Interpretations of the remark of former DNC chairman Howard Dean ("I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks"), made when a candidate in the 2008 primaries and quoted by rightwingers ever since, created a flap exactly because it is not usual practice for Democrats to appeal to Confederate flag-wavers, who mostly vote for Republicans.
You're getting your racists at the highest levels of the Democratic Party confused. Dean made his appeal in the 2004 primaries. It was former President Bill Clinton, apt pupil of his mentor segregationist J. William Fulbright, that made racist appeals on behalf of Hillary Clinton while campaigning in South Carolina.
There was no confusion about the matter. In 2003, Howard Dean made the remark that you bring up. It was so noted in my corrected version which, unfortunately, was not the one that got posted. Dean said, "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," when he was running in the Democratic primaries, not as DNC chairman, something about which you showed confusion. Nor was it made by the person who is the current DNC chairman.
Bill Clinton , the acclaimed first black president, is not a racist, no matter how you choose to misrepresent for your purposes his campaign remarks on behalf of his wife. He did not mock Obama for the color of his skin. Misconstrued remarks made in the midst of a hectic campaign for the presidency are weak evidence of a politician's personal convictions.
The RNC chairman is, as a black man, an anomaly in a Republican leadership position.
Anomaly? Are former national security advisors and Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice "anomalies" too? Alan Keyes representing the United States in the United Nations Economic and Social Council under Reagan? Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court?
Factually speaking, Michael Steele (not the first black to chair either major party's national commitee) is an anomaly in an independent leadership role in Republican politics. Except for Clarence Thomas, the blacks you named were not leaders but appointees serving at the pleasure of the president. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas does not represent the Supreme Court; nor is he its leader. Your mention of Colin Powell, who endorsed the liberal candidate (Obama) in the presidential race, is the only rightwing attempt to portray him positively that I have seen in a long time; Dick Cheney could not disagree more. But that is not to say that Cheney is racist.
Admit it PsiBond. You see them as "anomalies" because you believe African-Americans belong on a Democrat welfare plantation rather than shaping policy at the highest levels of government and international organizations under Republicans.
I admit, beamish, that you are clearly ready to make accusations that are utter nonsense to attempt to prove a bogus rightwing point. See above.
At the highest levels of Democrat politics, you've got racists galore.
At the highest levels of Democrat politics, you've got enthusiastic support for President Barack Obama.
At the highest levels of the Republican Party, you've got African-Americans in leadership positions.
There are no black Republicans in Congress. On the other hand, some forty Democrats in Congress are black.
Continued
A Grand Kleagle of the KKK [you embroider: he was a Kleagle not a Grand Kleagle] is the Democrat's "Statesman Senator."
In actual fact, no "Democrat's 'Statesman Senator'" is a member of the KKK. Senator Byrd regrets his brief time in the KKK 67 years ago, when he was 24, as the worst mistake he ever made. "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened,". he said. But extreme rightwingers lack faith in redemption. For Democrats no, only for themselves.
A former DNC chairman waving the Confederate flag.
In fact, a former DNC chairman did not wave the Confederate flag; he waved a pickup truck.
A former President making racist appeals on behalf of his wife.
In fact, the former President has high praise for Obama's intellectual abilities.
A current President throwing members of his family that were eyewitnesses to his birth in Kenya under the bus.
Conspiracy theorists who believe Obama is an alien, an Other, have unwittingly thrown themselves under the bus.
Oh, but an obscure staff member of a state senator emails a tasteless joke and the whole GOP is indicted.
In fact, the e-mail mocked President Obama for the color of his skin. Decent conservatives should be shamed, at least enough to tell the other conservatives to cool it. Your weak deflecting innuendoes prove your desperation, beamish. Liberally smearing people on the left with decontextualized remarks and finding excuses for conservative people who e-mail insults based on race does nothing to alter civil rights history. Liberals did it, as even arch-conservative Ann Coulter had to acknowledge.
Weak.
Bleak, that you are ashamed of neither your tactics nor your lack of shame.
Martin Luther King and other conservative Christians going back to the days of 19th Century protests for the abolition of slavery counted themselves as Republicans. In fact, it was 19th Century conservative evangelical Christian slavery abolitionists who actually started the Republican Party, and their spirit of championing human rights regardless of skin color is at the heart of the philosophy which drives contemporary Republican foreign policies to fight tyranny and spread economic and political freedom to the world abroad.
The pro-slavery supporters were no less Christian and religious. Waving their pious interpretations of the Bible, they justified slavery, segregation, and KKK activism . Jim Crow supporters were mostly religious Christians. In fact, when, to communicate their hatred, they burned a symbol in the front yard of a house owned by a black, it was the Christian cross that they set ablaze. "The Fiery Cross is used as a Klan symbol representing the ideals of Christian Civilization. In no way does it represent a desecration of the cross, for it actually represents the lighting of the cross, that is, the truth and light of Jesus Christ, our sacred cause and the blazing spirit of Western Christian Civilization," states a KKK website.
Verily, an online recruitment call for people to join the KKK preaches, emulating the same rightwing ideas of exclusivity promoted by Hitler, in apocalyptic tones:
Concluded
The need for a racial awakening among our people has become all too obvious. The White race has become second class citizens in our own nation. Racial prejudice against our people has been instated as a means to destroy our culture, heritage and values. We are a people under siege. Our children have very little to look forward to under present conditions. Yet few, it seems, care. At the turn of this past century the white race equaled about one out of every two people in the world. Today that radio [sic] has been reduced to less than one out of eight. Another fifty to seventy years will prove disastrous unless something is done to stem the tide. The Bible declares, "when the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Lord shall lift up a standard against them."
The original Ku Klux Klan was organized by conservative ex-Confederate elements
Speaking of human rights,the introduction of human rights into foreign policy concerns is historically due to Jimmy Carter, a modern Southern Democrat who was a liberal. The cornerstone of the Carter administration's foreign policy was a call for human rights around the world. Foreign aid was tied to human rights records.
But African-American voters living in political districts ruled by Democrat-controlled local law enforcement agencies are intimidated by cops at their polling places.
Thereby you torpedo your patchy probity. Go figure why no reporter has written that blacks are terrified every four years into voting for Democrats by "menacing" cops at the the polls, and why no black leaders or GOP officials like Michael Steele have spoken out about this alleged quadrennial terrorism. In your rightwing view, are most Jews in America similarly intimidated at the polls to vote for alleged neo-Nazis? You claim that Democrats today have an anti-black bias. So, go figure why Democrats allegedly used terror at the polls to elect a black man president. At least, your contortions should be most interesting.
Speaking figuratively, you make it clear that you have to tie yourself in complicated knots, if you are going to have any chance of proving that conservatives, not liberals, were the civil rights leaders.
Go figure.
Better luck next time. beamish.
PsiBond,
Thr only complicated knots you will find are the ones you've had to figuratively tie yourself into portray the socialists and eugenicists led by left-wing labor activist Adolf Hitler as "right-wing."
More knots you'll find yourself in is trying to explain why allegations of black voter intimidation by police emerge only from localities governed by Democrats at the law enforcement level.
But, that's the legacy of racism that still bothers the "guilty political conscience" of Democrats. Even the twit Leonard Pitts has to give a huge pass to Democrats, the party of slavery, horsewhippings, lynching, federally funded KKK recruitment, firehoses, voter intimidation, black church burnings, and racially motivated police brutality to search high and low through 155 years of Republicans championing civil rights to attack the GOP over an tasteless email from a obscure state senator's staffer. Sure, all those offensive blackface comedies and cartoons churned out for decades by the Hollywood entertainment industry came from the paragons of virtue in the right-wing.
No wait, I'm sorry. Democrats get credit for putting blackface comedies into the mainstream alongside their eugenicist fears of miscegenation and Klan rallies and firehosings to campaign for the same.
And Republicans should make sure none of our own emails a tasteless joke. Rather we should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by tasteless jokes, a throwback to the blackface acts from the liberal Democrat Hollywood wilds.
Checkmate.
Why hasn't Michael Steele spoken out about these cops that you say are intimidating blacks at the polls? Why hasn't Fox News? Why did these allegedly Democratic policemen commit illegal acts at the polling places aimed at electing a black man president of the United States in 2008, when Democrats today, according to your argument, hate blacks? Were Jewish voters also intimidated by these mysterious cops at the polls to paradoxically vote in overwhelming numbers for candidates of a party that you insist in breathless innuendoes is a U.S. extension of the Nazi Party in Germany? You are unable to answer these questions in a rational manner because, clearly, you have tied yourself in inextricable knots to make a nonsensical argument.
In fact, Republicans are responsible for the most egregious tampering with the voter rolls in recent history. In 1999, in preparation for the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican-controlled state government of Florida hired Database Technologies Inc. (DTI) to "cleanse" Florida’s election roles of convicted felons, who under Florida law, are disenfranchised for life from voting. In what DTI identified as a "minor glitch," 8,000 predominantly African American voters who had never committed felonies were "mistakenly" removed from the voter rolls, resulting in some of the worst election day chaos observed by the NAACP, in which great numbers of black voters were turned away from polling places. With African Americans voting for Gore at rates of 80-92%, this glitch swung the election from Gore to Bush, who won the state by 154 votes. The NAACP gathered testimony from 486 African Americans who allege that they were wrongly denied the right to vote in the presidential election. If conservatives have ever complained about this systematic wrong, except to say that Floridians don't know how to vote for anyone but Pat Buchanan, I must have missed it.
The American Eugenics Society (AES), founded in 1922, supported the proposition that the wealth and social position of the upper classes was justified by a superior genetic endowment. American eugenicists also supported restrictions on immigration from nations with “inferior” stock, such as Italy, Greece, and countries of eastern Europe, and argued for the sterilization of insane, retarded, and epileptic citizens in the U.S. Prominent figures on both left and the right supported the eugenics craze in its heyday, and these included Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican president, and Winston Churchill, a conservative icon. Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 wrote, "we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world." In the same year, Winston Churchill lobbied for compulsory sterilization of the mentally handicapped: "I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed." Britain never did pass such a law, thanks to determined opposition from a libertarian member of parliament. Liberalized attitudes disdaining patriarchal or government intrusion in private life, including in mating decisions, eventually turned the public against eugenics. Eugenics was thoroughly discredited, at least in the liberal mind, by the rightwing fanaticism of the Nazis, who used eugenics to support the extermination of Jews and the murder of many Gypsies, mentally ill persons, and homosexuals.
Concluded
The testimonies of the president of the AES and other eugenicists were influential in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act (signed into law by Calvin Coolidge, a Republican president), which limited immigration to the U.S. according to quotas based on national origin. Congressman Albert Johnson (R-Wash) and Senator David Reed (R-Pa) were the two main architects. Johnson was the chief author of the Act, which in 1927 he justified as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed." Johnson has been described as "an unusually energetic and vehement racist and nativist." He was the head of 'The Eugenics Research Association', a group which opposed interracial marriage and supported forced sterilization of the feeble minded.
In 1965, Congressman Emanuel Celler (D-NY) proposed and steered to passage the Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated national origins as a consideration for immigration. This was the culminating moment in Celler's 41-year fight to overcome restriction on immigration to the United States based on national origin. Celler was also involved in drafting and passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and the Voting Rights Act.
Blackface was not invented by Hollywood, which you seem to think was built by people identifying themselves primarily as Democrats, rather than ruthless capitalists. Blackface had its theatrical beginnings around 1830 in the U.S. However, by the mid-20th century, liberalized attitudes about race and racism effectively ended the prominence of blackface makeup used in performance in the U.S. and elsewhere.
All of your blustering talk of Democrats and Republicans scrupulously evades for purposes of confusion the actual issue, which is one between liberal and conservative ideologies. Although, in your harangues about the hated "evil" Democrats, you tie yourself tightly in knots to eschew mention of these ideologies, your true colors come out nonetheless. Casting pre-1960s Democrats as the protagonists of racism is no indictment of liberalism.
You have exposed your red-faced king, thus checkmating yourself.
PsiBond,
Black voter allegations of intimidation by police at the polls from today on back to just after the Civil War overwhelmingly occur in areas where Democrat officeholders run the local law enforcement. This is undeniable fact.
The evils of the "science" of eugenics were being warned against by conservative Christians like G. K. Chesterton at the same time progressive leftists like Ku Klux Klan fan Woodrow Wilson was pushing it. It took the leftists of Nazi Germany to really demonstrate the evil Chesterton warned against well before Adolf Hitler's left-wing labor movement ever achieved political power in the Reichstag. The spirit of the progressive leftist Margaret Sanger's eugenics which inspired the Holocaust now motivates her "Planned Parenthood" organization to locate abortion clinics closest to the people she didn't want breeding - blacks in urban areas.
As for why Michael Steele isn't chiding an obscure staff member of a state senator sending a bad joke through e-mail, the answer is obvious. It's not exactly Bull Connor's firehose at work.
As for asking Democrat-controlled local law enforcement agencies to not intimidate black voters anymore, wasn't a Civil War and over a century of dragging Democrats kicking and screaming towards the conservative Christian dream articulated by Republican and civil rights activist Martin Luther King enough?
Apparently not.
As I've spent too much time already engaging and refuting a defender of the party of racists and segregationists past and present (including my own current segregationist state governor Jay Nixon), I'll leave you and your guilty political conscience to fester alone here.
Black voter allegations of intimidation by police at the polls from today on back to just after the Civil War overwhelmingly occur in areas where Democrat officeholders run the local law enforcement. This is undeniable fact.
Thus, in your mind, undeniable fact is an unreported convenient allegation for which you have produced no documented evidence. Not even the NAACP has stated that conspiratorial cops at the polling places have intimidated black voters to cast their votes for Obama. Did they finger their guns suggestively? Did they watch them in the voting booths? Did they point guns at their heads? Or did they display a hangman's noose? This secret intimidation program was so widespread and successful across America that Obama garnered something like 96% of the black vote, eh? If Democrat officeholders running the local law enforcement had ordered police, some of whom if not most of whom are Republicans, to threaten blacks who don't vote for the Democrat, that would have been a sensational news story, especially for Fox, because someone would have leaked it. You sure know how to spin it, beamish. Do polling studies that confirm the preference of blacks for Democratic candidates employ pollsters who threaten them?
The evils of the "science" of eugenics were being warned against by conservative Christians like G. K. Chesterton at the same time progressive leftists like Ku Klux Klan fan Woodrow Wilson was pushing it. It took the leftists of Nazi Germany to really demonstrate the evil Chesterton warned against well before Adolf Hitler's left-wing labor movement ever achieved political power in the Reichstag. The spirit of the progressive leftist Margaret Sanger's eugenics which inspired the Holocaust now motivates her "Planned Parenthood" organization to locate abortion clinics closest to the people she didn't want breeding - blacks in urban areas.
Well. thank God, Republican president Teddy Roosevelt and conservative icon Winston Churchill came to their senses! G. K. Chesterton famously mocked tolerance, which is something that the Nazis after his death made a mockery of. I shouldn't be surprised Chesterton's one of your heroes, huh? However, Chesterton, as political thinker, cast aspersions on both Liberalism and Conservatism, saying:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
Unfortunately, America, for more than a generation (until 1965) had to carry on under an immigration law authored by two Republicans in Congress who used pseudoscientific eugenics theories to impose their peculiar concepts of "racial hygiene". Even after these ideas had been discredited by the extreme rightwing policies of exclusivity implemented by the Nazis under Hitler. Fortunately, a determined ultimately successful fight over many decades to correct this mistaken law was waged by a liberal Democrat, who was also one of the architects of the landmark civil rights bills of '64, '65, and '68.
As for why Michael Steele isn't chiding an obscure staff member of a state senator sending a bad joke through e-mail, the answer is obvious. It's not exactly Bull Connor's firehose at work.
That is not the question I asked about Michael Steele. This is the question I asked: "Why hasn't Michael Steele spoken out about these cops that you say are intimidating blacks at the polls?" You exhibit a penchant for evasion through altering questions for your convenience. If such police intimidation exists, as you allege, and Steele does not speak out, he certainly is not doing his job properly as RNC chair.
Concluding
As for asking Democrat-controlled local law enforcement agencies to not intimidate black voters anymore, wasn't a Civil War and over a century of dragging Democrats kicking and screaming towards the conservative Christian dream articulated by Republican and civil rights activist Martin Luther King enough?
Neither did I ask about why Democrat-controlled local law enforcement agencies are not asked to not intimidate black voters anymore. Exposing such intimidation should effectively stop them. You have not answered any of the questions in my post. Instead, you deceptively changed them into questions you can answer deceitfully. You get points for disingenuousness, not for answering questions.
Contrary to the confusion you want to promote, the fact is ---- as many Democrats were conservatives----so, many Christians are liberals. Martin Luther King Jr fought to liberate blacks from the oppressive traditional social system then entrenched in America, thus making himself the enemy of conservatives who were determined to preserve it. King’s strategy was to employ the principles of nonviolent confrontation, the philosophy of Gandhi, who was certainly not a rightwing icon.
Apparently not.
Apparently you think your dialogue using questions you make up would fool a rational person into thinking you're having an honest dialogue with me.
As I've spent too much time already engaging and refuting a defender of the party of racists and segregationists past and present (including my own current segregationist state governor Jay Nixon), I'll leave you and your guilty political conscience to fester alone here.
It seems you have exhausted your amusing albeit disingenuous arguments, which is regrettable, for my time here has been spent enjoyably and informatively in exposing an extreme conservative who madly wants to believe he can somehow overcome the dubious history of conservatism by reverting to the debased Nazi-like tactic of making a scapegoat of the Democratic Party, and by weakly trying to usurp on behalf of conservatives the credit for liberals' hard-fought civil rights victories.
The Democratic Party and liberalism are discrete monads, as Leibniz might say–––i.e., separate entities. Liberalism has always favored individual liberty and equality for all; the Democratic Party has not.
Throughout your hysterical performance here, you have been acting unconvincingly as if the two are identical. This is your problem. But I don't know if it's one for wardrobe, makeup, or hairdressing.
We are having a discussion.
It's a discussion where you answer questions that you have put in place of the ones I asked
If we were having an honest discussion, you would be stressing the fact that you're an imbecile.
Thus you make it easy to see how delusions of supremacy arise naturally from the conservative fantasy of being right about Absolute Truth.
In an honest discussion, you would acknowledge that spending one's time maintaining a daily discussion online for almost four weeks with someone you believe is an imbecile is imbecilic.
Not that you're making any attempt to hide it.
As always, you make no pretense of hiding your self-righteous albeit bogus notion of whitewing supremacy.
You want to try to pin the crimes of racism on conservatives (when they're Democrats) and Republicans (when they're not conservatives).
When they're not conservatives? So you blame liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans for "the crimes of racism"? Why are you tying yourself up in such awkward circumlocutions? At least, you now seem to admit that both Democrats and Republicans were blackened by this history.
It is you doing the knot-twisting and buffoonish gymnastics trying to paint Civil War insurrectionists in the "Confederacy" as conservatives (violating the Constitutional ban on interstate confederations and other federalist components is conservative?)
In the tradition of the Articles of Confederation, which historically preceded the U.S. Constitution as U.S. law, and which placed most of the power with the states, it is conservative for states to form a loose confederation in opposition to a strong federal government threatening to destroy their slave-dependent economy and way of life. In fact, 'states' rights' remains a war cry of conservatives, when that is convenient for them. For preserving state segregation policies it was convenient. Six states exerting states' rights to legalize same-sex marriage is inconvenient for them.
on through liberal Woodrow Wilson's revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan.
The KKK was originally a product of the Southern white conservatives upset at the ending of slavery. The newly freed slaves were terrorized by whites who hid their identity under masks and costumes in order to deny them civil rights. The KKK was (and is) also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish.
Great strides were made in civil rights in the last years of the 19th century, but under President Woodrow Wilson's two terms :1912-1920 ( he was from a Southern state, Virginia), civil rights slipped and the KKK was revitalized, although Wilson denounced the KKK as a lawless vigilante organization. Wilson was not a member of the Klan.
But Republican Warren G. Harding may be the only president to have been inducted into the KKK in the White House (in the basement, the Green Room). Members of the five-man induction team were so nervous that they forgot their Bible in the car, so Harding had to send for the White House Bible. In the papers of Republican Calvin Coolidge (who succeeded Harding, who died in office during a trip to Alaska), there is a letter from Wizard Edward Young Clarke to President Calvin Coolidge on 27 December 1923, charging Wizard Hiram W. Evens with trying to turn the Klan into a “cheap political machine”. “It [the Klan] was to be an organization designed to up-build and develop spirituality, morality, and physically the Protestant white man of America.”
Edward L. Jackson, Republican governor of Indiana from 1925 to 1929, was a member of the Indiana branch of the Ku Klux Klan. A case of Klan bribery, which occurred when he was Indiana Secretary of State, led to a hung jury and caused his leaving the governorship in disgrace. He had tried in 1923, on orders of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, to bribe the then governor, who refused (he also angered the Klan by vetoing a bill to celebrate a "Klan Day"), to fill several public offices with Klan members.
Continued
The Klan members saw themselves as the upholders of morality, justice, and the American way, a lot like rightwingers do today.
Do any of these historical points indicate that liberals joined the KKK?
I think not.
Do they indicate that all rightwingers joined the Klan in its heyday?
I think not.
Do they indicate that some rightwingers joined the Klan ?
I think so.
to Democrat governors fighting desegregation EVEN TODAY.
Relict Southern Democrats may think the South will rise again, restored to its former glory, a Second Coming, as it were, in denial of the ascendancy of liberal thought in the public mind.
Margaret Sanger and other eugenicist heroes of left-wing labor activist Adolf Hitler were conservatives too?
Many on both the left and right misconstrued the pseudoscience of eugenics as bona fide science.. Even figures on the right as prominent as Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did so.. Adolf Hitler, who masqueraded as a labor leader in his rise to power, had a pathological hatred of liberalism. When in power, he seized upon eugenics to justify his far right non-egalitarian theories of racial hygiene and racial purity..
You don't need me to pull out any reports of black voter intimidation to show that Democrats rule the local law enforcement community where those incidents usually take place.
If, as you suggest, evidence is a silly requirement for making serious charges of voting fraud, then let me join in: You don't need me to pull out any reports of black voter intimidation to show that Republicans rule the local law enforcement community where cops have frankly intimidated voters to vote for Republicans in the last several elections.
You don't need me to show that the minimal effort of some Democrats to address civil rights in America borrowed heavily from laws written by Republicans nearly a hundred years before Bull Connor embarassed his fellow Democrats on national TV with his police dogs and firehoses.
You need maximal effort to erase the contributions of liberals in both the Republican and Democratic parties in drafting and getting passed strong civil rights legislation. After the racial disturbances in Birmingham, JFK went on national TV to tell the nation, "We face ... a moral crisis as a country and a people .... It is time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body, and, above all, in all of our daily lives " A few days after that, he sent a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress.
Bull Connor was a rightwing icon determined to perpetuate the status quo. His reputation among the rank-and-file was that of an honest, albeit colorful man who maintained "his willingness to keep blacks `in their place'" Connor had the backing of the local corporate elite in spite of his declarations of being free of outside influence. His preaching about economy in government and no new taxes reflected the influence of Birmingham's industrial and financial interests, who "always insisted in cheap government with only bare essential services." A conservative Democrat, not a liberal. Did you think he was a liberal?
Continued
Connor, the police commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 when civil rights protests led by Fred Shuttlesworth, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference brought the city to a halt, used fire hoses and attack dogs to suppress peaceful protestors, many of them children. Americans, who saw this violence on national television, were shocked and disgusted. Unwittingly, Connor helped the civil rights movements. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, Connor's violence served, "to subpoena the conscience of the nation." When everyone saw the terrible treatment that African-Americans received, they felt they must do something. This could not be happening in America to American citizens. "We face ... a moral crisis." JFK said. Eugene "Bull" Connor was for the civil rights movement the perfect adversary. The incidents in Birmingham moved JFK to remark that "the civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln."
You don't need me to show the recent primary campaigns within the Democratic Party between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama often took nasty, racist directions as would be expected from a Southern Democrat ex-President and student of segregationist J. William Fulbright. Are we to dismiss the Obama campaign's accusations against the Clinton campaign as dishonest and unfounded? I think not.
No matter how Fulbright Scholar Clinton's remarks, made in the context of a hard-fought campaign, are taken and how anyone wishes to interpret them now, can one logically conclude therefrom that liberals have a hatred of blacks? I think not. Assuming that what one person says extends to an entire large group is a conservative mode of thinking.
While we are asking ourselves questions, I pose to myself this question: Does the infidelity of Republican Governor Mark Sanford enable one to logically conclude that Republicans are people who do not keep their marriage vows? I think not.
In the battle you want to make, "who supports the racist party and ideology?" - I point to Democrats rebelling against the Constitution and federal law to export their institution of slavery to federal territories,
Conservatives in the 19th century seeking to perpetuate the institution of slavery, politically needed the extension of slavery to new territories, since the Constitution counted each slave as three-fifths of a human being for reasons of apportionment in the House and distribution of taxes.
Democrats engaging in KKK terrorism after the Civil War, a liberal Democrat President federally funding the KKK while his fellow progressive leftists were pushing eugenics and inspiring their fellow leftists in post-WWI German labor movements led by leftist Adolf Hitler, to Bull Connor's Jim Crow firehoses, Lyndon Johnson's illegal wiretapping and trying to smear civil rights activists as "Communists," the current honorifics bestowed upon the Democratic Party's favorite Klansman, Robert Byrd, and the left-wing socialism of Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn.
Blaming rightwing activism in the KKK on liberal Democrats, J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping on Johnson, alleging leftist sympathies for white supremacist murderer James von Brunn, someone who claimed that liberalism was slowly destroying the U.S. (Rush made the same allegation about him; at least you don't claim like some on the right, that he's a hoax), and all your other repetitive gross manipulations of history do not make a good case that you respect facts. Quite the contrary.
We believe that to err is human. To blame it on someone else is politics.
— Hubert H. Humphrey
beamish: The thing that is knee-slappingly hilarious to me is that in your squirming, to rhetorically distance yourself from leftist killers like Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Bin Laden, Von Brunn, et. al. you camp yourself on the political spectrum as a "liberal" - to the "right of the rest of the left."
Moderate right is to the left of the extreme right, which may be why the latter often refuses to recognize the former as being right at all.
It is a tactic of the worst dictators to blame someone else for everything. And, in doing so, you follow in a grand albeit heinous tradition.
I said liberals are the champions of democracy and human rights, and hence opposed to tyrannical governments anywhere on the political spectrum. American liberals have no sympathy for human rights violators such as "Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Milosevic, Bin Laden, Von Brunn," et al. Not that you are troubled by facts, but, among other points, Milosevic was brought to trial for human rights violations largely through the efforts of President Clinton----and von Brunn hated liberalism.
It's unwittingly funny how you get off on your unsubtle, semantic contortions. Indeed, you can laugh yourself silly because, like the Nazis before you, you've found a scapegoat for everything wrong.
Your dabbling rightward against the standard left-wing ideologies of fascism, socialism, and communism that have pressed their adherents into committing the most heinous crimes against humanity is commendable if we cherry-pick your views away from leftism in general, but at the end of the day, you're still on the left, with history's most high-scoring genocidalists and racists and intolerant people. They don't even tolerate your rightwing swing from them towards "liberalism."
The same argument can be applied to conservatives. If people choose to lump all together instead of pick out the cherries, conservatives become just a bunch of white supremacists, abortion doctor murderers, gay bashers, wife-beaters, and, of course, neo-Nazi racial puristas. It's like, to you, all rightwingers are right. On the contrary, I believe discerning distinctions among conservatives are appropriate.
According to your brash broad-brush view, liberals are somehow to blame for every bad system of governance except for monarchies, aristocracies, and master-slave relationships, which have their support in conservative biblical tradition.
In fact, many U.S. conservatives have supported egregious abuses of individual rights, such as incarcerating Americans indefinitely without a trial or access to a lawyer, warrantless searches of citizens, government intrusion in the sex lives of adult citizens (even when married to each other), and requiring lip-service to their god---not to mention having condoned the bombing of black churches, lynching innocents, perverting justice, and terrorizing millions in the name of self-righteous Chestertonian intolerance.
Yet, you're still left, and left with them.
In other words, you're left squirming strenuously to divert attention from the presence of rightwingers in the KKK, who avow they are defending "traditional American values".
Concluded
I'm to the right of that, on the more libertarian side of the political spectrum which fights for keeping the government too small to ever become totalitarian.
Some of us think we cannot dispense with a standing military and police force and courts, and that these should not be privatized.
You don't seem to know that there are libertarians on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.
The online free encyclopedia rightly observes: Libertarianism is a term used by a broad spectrum of political philosophies which seek to maximize individual liberty and minimize or even abolish the state. Libertarians embrace viewpoints across that spectrum ranging from pro-property to anti-property, from minimal government to openly anarchist. Noam Chomsky is a left-libertarian. Bob Barr and Ron Paul are right-libertarians.
You're on the left, but you don't want your "a little totalitarianism is a good thing" leftism to go as far left as Hitler or Stalin. But you're still left, and left with them.
Only in the confusion of your mind, which hates inconvenient distinctions. Liberal Democratic presidents have not been left with them. They have been right to fight against them, mostly successfully,on a global scale.
At least Stalin might have seen you as a "useful idiot," rather than just an idiot.
Disseminating disinformation insinuating that KKK supremacist ideas are liberal ideas, you enable the Klan's Grand Wizards to see you as a helpful accomplice, a "useful idiot", or just useful
I know who I am, and I may know who you are, but those folks with you----I don't know what they are.
You're on the left, but you don't want your "a little totalitarianism is a good thing" leftism to go as far left as Hitler or Stalin. But you're still left, and left with them.
Only in the confusion of your mind, which despises inconvenient distinctions. Liberal Democratic presidents have not been "left" with them. They have been right to fight against them, mostly successfully,on a global scale.
At least Stalin might have seen you as a "useful idiot," rather than just an idiot.
Disseminating disinformation insinuating that KKK supremacist ideas are liberal ideas, you encourage the Klan's Grand Wizards to look upon you as a helpful accomplice, a "useful idiot", or just useful
I know who I am, and I may know who you are, but the folks with you----I don't know what they are.
PsiBond,
The difference between your silly argument and my cogent argument is that when you go looking for conservative Christians to blame for black church bombings, you find the largest conservative Christian denomination in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, fighting for desegregation policies long before it ever occured to Democrats to accept their loss in the Civil War and strike down their Jim Crow and lynching laws.
I don't have to stretch, at all, to show that the Nazis were leftists. In your search for mass murderers from the right wing, you don't even come close to the death tolls generated by leftists and leftist ideology, even if you mistake the Nazis for right-wingers or ignore that eugenics-inspired abortion of pregnancies is murder. The left can't possibly be seeking to exile the Nazis from their wing of the spectrum for anything other than not killing enough people per year.
In fact, many U.S. conservatives have supported egregious abuses of individual rights, such as incarcerating Americans indefinitely without a trial or access to a lawyer...
Like Japanese-Americans in World War 2? Oh wait, FDR was a leftist.
warrantless searches of citizens
Like Woodrow Wilson's Palmer Raids and Bill Clinton's pursuit of Metallica downloaders?
Oh wait, they're both leftists.
Ad infinitum.
You know, PsiBond, for a leftist, you sure sound like you hate being lumped in with leftists like Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler.
Come a little bit further to the right, so you can condemn all human rights abusers.
beamish: The difference between your silly argument and my cogent argument is that when you go looking for conservative Christians to blame for black church bombings, you find the largest conservative Christian denomination in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, fighting for desegregation policies long before it ever occured to [conservative] Democrats to accept their loss in the Civil War and strike down their Jim Crow and lynching laws.
The often obscure and marginal nature of the cases you bring up only illustrate the poverty of your impotent arguments. Your lack of respect for facts does not earn my respect for your efforts.
Notwithstanding your cleansed hagiographic picture of the SBC, the online free encyclopedia notes:
Slavery was the most critical issue among Baptists. Early Baptist and Methodist evangelicals in the South before the Revolution had promoted the view of the common man's equality before God, which embraced African Americans. They challenged the hierarchies of class and race, and urged planters to abolish slavery.
Baptists struggled to gain a foothold in the South. The next generation of Baptist preachers accommodated themselves to the society. Rather than challenging the gentry on slavery, they began to interpret the Bible as supporting its practice. In the two decades after the Revolution, preachers abandoned their pleas that slaves be manumitted. Many Baptist preachers even wanted to preserve the rights of ministers themselves to be slaveholders.
The split among Baptists between North and South, liberal and conservative, reflected the division in the Democratic Party of the time.
The increasing tensions and discontent of Southern Baptists regarding national criticism and criticism from other Baptists.of their slave-dependent social system led to their withdrawal from the national Baptist organizations and the formation of their own governing body, the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. Residual effects of the decision to separate from other Baptists in defense of white supremacy and the institution of slavery have been long lived. The Southern Baptist Convention of 1995 voted to adopt a resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its past defense of slavery. The resolution repenting racism marked the denomination's first formal acknowledgment that racism played a role in its early history. Several liberal congregations have split off from the Southern Baptist Convention to form independent bodies following the "Conservative Resurgence"..
Lawyers in the Bush administration who endeavored to interpret the law so as to legitimize torture found widespread favor with rightwingers, whose devotion to human rights has always been rather dubious.
The internment of Japanese Americans, mostly American citizens, in War Relocation Camps was the result of Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, which allowed authorized military commanders to designate "military areas" at their discretion, "from which any or all persons may be excluded." It was not the work of liberals. In the words of Department of Justice officials writing during the war, the justifications for internment of Japanese Americans were based on "willful historical inaccuracies and intentional falsehoods." Internment was popular among rightwingers, as well as many white farmers who resented the Japanese American farmers. "White American farmers admitted that their self-interest required removal of the Japanese." These individuals saw internment as a convenient means of uprooting their Japanese American competitors. In fact internment was likely responsible for a massive influx in immigration from Mexico. A large labor force was necessary to take over the Japanese Americans' farms at a time when many American laborers were being inducted into the military. Thousands of Nikkei, released temporarily from the internment camps to harvest Western beet crops, were credited with saving that industry.
Concluded
In 1988, Congress, in which Democrats overwhelmingly controlled both the Senate and the House, passed and Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership". About $1.6 billion in reparations were later disbursed by the U.S. government to surviving internees and their heirs Today,the only defenders of the internment are conservatives like Michelle Malkin, who wrote a best-selling Regnery book excusing it. Liberals do not defend it. It has become a model for some rightwing bloggers who have been fond of proposing detention camps for Muslims and/or liberals.
A Japanese American arrested in 1942 poignantly said:
After I was released in 1945, my criminal record continued to affect my life. It was hard to find work. I was considered to be a criminal. It took almost 40 years and the efforts of many people to reopen my case. In 1983, a federal court judge found that the government had hidden evidence and lied to the Supreme Court during my appeal. The judge found that Japanese Americans were not the threat that the government publicly claimed. My criminal record was removed.
But, for many rightwingers, it is okay to strip an entire ethnic or racial group of its civil rights. Malkin argues for the legitimacy of guilt by racial or ethnic association, just as many conservatives, in a bid to revise their history, argue for guilt by association with a political party, including its prevailing philosophy in the 19th century, albeit rejected in the 20th century. While liberals argue for individual liberty and equality, a large number of hardcore rightwingers argue that all members of the same race, the same ethnic group, the same religion, or the same political party that they have vilified should be equal in their contempt. Which is eerily suggestive of Nazi thinking.
Should Japanese Americans be condemned as guilty for the killing of thousands of Americans by Japanese soldiers in WWII?
Should liberal Americans be condemned as guilty for the mass killings and human rights violations of despotic leftist regimes?
Should conservative Americans who are not racists be condemned as guilty for the crimes of racist conservatives in America or of rightwing despots like Hitler?
In each case, as a liberal, I think not.
PsiBond,
In each case, as a "liberal" you're full of shit.
The internment of Japanese Americans, mostly American citizens, in War Relocation Camps was the result of Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942, which allowed authorized military commanders to designate "military areas" at their discretion, "from which any or all persons may be excluded." It was not the work of liberals.
Franklin Roosevelt was a "liberal" - it was his pen that signed the executive order that began internment of Japanese-Americans in World War 2.
And so on. I'm beginning to pity your inability to rouse a serious defense of leftism.
Why you reject the labor activist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as leftists when you're willing to accept people who killed even less or even more as your fellow leftists remains a mystery to me. The socialist economic policies of Adolf Hitler were entirely modeled upon Soviet Five Year Plans and Roosevelt's New Deal government work projects, and Hitler himself was an extreme anti-capitalist, making as a part of his "case" against Jews the same argument that Marx used to anti-Semitically malign Judaism as a religion of capitalism and worshippers of money in his own leftist calls for a "world without Jews."
Hitler was a leftist, and coupled with his zeal for eugenics, neo-pagan tree-worshipping environmentalism, and welfare statism, a very thoroughbred leftist. He's yours. Keep him.
Should liberal Americans be condemned as guilty for the mass killings and human rights violations of despotic leftist regimes?
No. But it should always be pointed out that "liberals" stand on the same side of the left-right political spectrum as Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and other infamous totalitarian killers, and that they do so by choice, mitigating it somewhat by positioning themselves to the right of them, but not quite in the right-wing camp.
beamish: In each case, as a "liberal" you're full of shit.
In each case, as a liberal, I hold that not all members of a broad group that includes some criminals can be considered guilty.
Some American servicemen have committed crimes, but not all American servicemen are guilty.
Some Muslims have committed crimes, but not all Muslims are guilty.
Some African Americans have committed crimes, but not all African Americans are guilty.
Some Italian Americans have committed crimes, but not all Italian Americans are guilty.
Some liberal Americans have committed crimes, but not all liberal Americans are guilty.
Some conservative Americans have committed crimes, but not all conservative Americans are guilty.
Nor should all members of a broad group that includes some criminals be stigmatized for the acts of those criminals. That is to say, they should not be treated as pariahs.
This I believe as a liberal.
Franklin Roosevelt was a "liberal" - it was his pen that signed the executive order that began internment of Japanese-Americans in World War 2.
The act cannot be fairly isolated from the context of the times in which it occurred. Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized it by executive order after the Secretary of War asked for authorization to remove alien and citizen Japanese to detention camps. Liberals saw it as unjustified and do not justify it now. Only extreme conservatives like Michelle Malkin applaud it today. A generation later, a liberal Democratic Congress issued an apology, which was something many rightwingers were not at all happy about.
It should be remembered, that Lincoln, who was a liberal for his day, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, in Maryland and parts of Midwestern states. In the early 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina, as part of federal civil rights action against the Ku Klux Klan. It was also suspended in Hawaii during World War II, when martial law was declared in Hawaii in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Blamed for dividing the nation, belittled as an idiot, and charged with incompetence, Lincoln censored the press during the Civil War. His administration took control of telegraph lines, temporarily shut down disloyal newspapers and denied them access to the mails (the primary means of communication in a world before phones, radio, TV, and the Internet), and arbitrarily arrested editors.
And so on. I'm beginning to pity your inability to rouse a serious defense of leftism.
My pity is for your overwhelming self-delusion. Defense of liberalism from your puerile hackneyed smears of guilt by association requires little effort. If guilt by association were really valid, Republicans would have lost the game long ago when Donald Rumsfeld shook the hand of Saddam Hussein on videotape, or, more recently, when McCain plucked Palin out of obscurity.
Continued
Why you reject the labor activist Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as leftists when you're willing to accept people who killed even less or even more as your fellow leftists remains a mystery to me. The socialist economic policies of Adolf Hitler were entirely modeled upon Soviet Five Year Plans and Roosevelt's New Deal government work projects, and Hitler himself was an extreme anti-capitalist, making as a part of his "case" against Jews the same argument that Marx used to anti-Semitically malign Judaism as a religion of capitalism and worshippers of money in his own leftist calls for a "world without Jews." Hitler was a leftist, and coupled with his zeal for eugenics, neo-pagan tree-worshipping environmentalism, and welfare statism, a very thoroughbred leftist. He's yours. Keep him.
Israel also has great reverence for trees and encourages the planting of them. Israel has welfare programs and kibbutzes. But none of that means to a rational person that Israel is comparable to Nazi Germany. Hitler encouraged German women to stay at home and bear children, arguing that for the German woman her "world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home." Does that make him a Christian traditionalist? Hitler expanded a government program of civil works projects. Does that mean FDR was a Nazi? Cherry picking details and obfuscating distinctions is easy for the ruthless propagandist.
But Hitler's social and economic policies were carried out in pursuit of his goals of extreme nationalism and racial purism, which were opposed to the internationalist and egalitarian leanings of leftists.
Under Hitler, private corporations in Germany flourished and gained great power. America's foremost industrialists admired Hitler for his anti-communism (he came to power promoting German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism) and did business with him. U.S. based ITT was designing and building Nazi phone and radio systems as well as supplying crucial parts for German bombs. U.S. companies trading with the Third Reich included Ford Motor Company, General Motors, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the Chase National Bank.
Gustav Krupp, a major German industrialist who was initially hostile to the policies of the Nazi Party, was won over in a private meeting in 1933 by Hitler's promise that the Nazi government would destroy the trade unions and the political left in Germany.
"Bal Thackeray, leader of the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party in the Indian state of the Maharashtra, declared in 1995 that he was an admirer of Hitler." In 1935, Winston Churchill's assessment of Hitler was half admiration and half denunciation: "What manner of man is this grim figure who has performed these superb toils and loosed these frightful evils?"
The political spectrum can be rather easy to manipulate for partisan points because, by convention, it is oriented on a single linear axis in accordance with attitudes toward property. According to the simplest left-right axis, communism and socialism are usually internationally regarded as being on the left, with conservatism and fascism opposite them on the right. If political positions were oriented instead on an axis by attitudes toward human rights and individual liberty, arranged left to right by decreasing respect, then, while liberals would be on the left, Nazis and fascists would clearly be on the right.
Concluded
Should liberal Americans be condemned as guilty for the mass killings and human rights violations of despotic leftist regimes?
No. But it should always be pointed out that "liberals" stand on the same side of the left-right political spectrum as Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and other infamous totalitarian killers, and that they do so by choice, mitigating it somewhat by positioning themselves to the right of them, but not quite in the right-wing camp.
No one should be made a pariah for the actions of others. The family members of rightwing white supremacist James von Brunn should not be made pariahs for the heinous act he committed.
Nor should anyone be made a pariah because of, on the right, heinous dictators like Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco (Franco's fascists were losing the civil war, but military support from Hitler, Mussolini, and the U.S. corporations that backed Hitler turned the tide in his favor), General Augusto Pinochet (who had 3,200 people killed, while at least 80,000 were incarcerated without trials and 30,000 subjected to torture), the Duvaliers, Papa Doc and Baby Doc (both of whom enjoyed U.S. support for being anti-Communist while killing scores of thousands of Haitians), Shah Reza Pahlevi of Iran (installed by the CIA, the Shah's agents raided a religious school and hurled hundreds of students to their deaths from the roof, and his secret police agency, SAVAK, which was managed, financed, and equipped by the CIA, practiced torture methods that included electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails), and Fulgencio Batista, or on the left, heinous dictators like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro.
Liberals fundamentally support what all dictators fundamentally oppose. Since there is no crime for liberal Americans in being what they are, no mitigation is called for. Likewise, non-racist conservative Americans should not be made pariahs for the heinous acts of racist conservative Americans.
That is to say, as a consequence of the principles of liberalism, making outcasts of all members of a broad group that includes some criminals is always wrong.
PsiBond,
No one should be made a pariah for the actions of others.
If that's the metric, you lost this exchange of ours after I pointed out the imbecility of Clinton's restoring the thug Aristide to power in Haiti you responded with an insinuated accusation that conservatives and right-wingers don't care about the rights of black people.
Which began my reintroducing you to racist totalitarianism and violations of civil rights as official government policy, all done by those revered as leftist and / or liberal.
The political spectrum can be rather easy to manipulate for partisan points because, by convention, it is oriented on a single linear axis in accordance with attitudes toward property. According to the simplest left-right axis, communism and socialism are usually internationally regarded as being on the left, with conservatism and fascism opposite them on the right. If political positions were oriented instead on an axis by attitudes toward human rights and individual liberty, arranged left to right by decreasing respect, then, while liberals would be on the left, Nazis and fascists would clearly be on the right.
And communism wouldn't appear anywhere because Hitler was to the right of Stalin and communism's never been tried. Woohoo!
And if you look at the Rodney King beating video in reverse, the Democrat-commanded cops can be seen helping him up and putting him in his car and sending him on his way. (with apologies to Bill Hicks)
Last chance, PsiBond. Say something interesting and factual.
No one should be made a pariah for the actions of others.
If that's the metric, you lost this exchange of ours after I pointed out the imbecility of Clinton's restoring the thug Aristide to power in Haiti you responded with an insinuated accusation that conservatives and right-wingers don't care about the rights of black people.
On the contrary, it is, in fact, not a measurable metric----it is an incommensurable belief in a liberal principle of conduct.
In fact, I said, "Who knew that extreme rightwingers were ardent supporters of human rights and greatly respected the Haitian Constitution?" Given the enthusiasm of most extreme rightwingers for torture and suppressing the rights of gays, the jest I made registered astonishment that you would profess to be outraged by the brutal killings in Haiti that you want to attribute to the Clinton administration, especially since you showed no similar concern for the killings and torture that occurred in the regimes of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier, who were supported by the Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Perhaps you do have a similar strong concern, but, over several days, you were too busy trying to create a human-rights pariah out of Clinton to bother mentioning it.
Which began my reintroducing you to racist totalitarianism and violations of civil rights as official government policy, all done by those revered as leftist and / or liberal.
Which occasioned my pointing out that the isolated, decontextualized, dust-laden events that you warp and shake an "outraged" finger at don't comprise a rational case to support your contention that liberals per se should be treated as pariahs.
The political spectrum can be rather easy to manipulate for partisan points because, by convention, it is oriented on a single linear axis in accordance with attitudes toward property. According to the simplest left-right axis, communism and socialism are usually internationally regarded as being on the left, with conservatism and fascism opposite them on the right. If political positions were oriented instead on an axis by attitudes toward human rights and individual liberty, arranged left to right by decreasing respect, then, while liberals would be on the left, Nazis and fascists would clearly be on the right.
And communism wouldn't appear anywhere because Hitler was to the right of Stalin and communism's never been tried. Woohoo!
So everyone is delusional who has been talking all these years about fighting the communists in the world? Oh, wow!
Although some claim that communism has never been tried (some say the same of Christianity), it requires a place in the political spectrum by virtue of being a political position that some have held. Researchers have frequently noted that a single left-right axis is insufficient in describing the existing variation in political beliefs, and often include other axes. In a linear political spectrum that takes account of respect for individual liberty and human rights, all totalitarian governments (taken as distinct from the political ideologies they espouse) belong on the right.
Concluded
And if you look at the Rodney King beating video in reverse, the Democrat-commanded cops can be seen helping him up and putting him in his car and sending him on his way. (with apologies to Bill Hicks)
So that's why cops may claim with pride, "We treat you like a King."
To Bill Hicks' shtick, you add your own. Democrat-commanded cops? Was each one reading a miniature copy of the Party platform as he repeatedly operated his baton? Given your factoidal description, all of them would appear to be some sort of humanoid Manchurian candidate.
However, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, was a Democrat who strongly condemned the officers involved, saying "the jury's verdict will not blind us to what we saw on that videotape. The men who beat Rodney King do not deserve to wear the uniform of the L.A.P.D." . In other words, the L.A. mayor who had control of the police in L.A. was, in fact,
a Democrat.
Facts are stubborn things, beamish.
In 1973, Tom Bradley, who served as L.A. mayor from 1973 to 1993, had unseated Mayor Sam Yorty, a conservative Democrat (later a Republican). Yorty was a critic of the Civil Rights Movement, and had endorsed Nixon over Kennedy in 1960. He failed in a bid for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1980.
Last chance, PsiBond. Say something interesting and factual.
By July 1933, six months after becoming Reich Chancellor, Hitler had abolished the trade unions, eliminated the communists, the Social Democrats and the Jews from any role in political life and was sweeping his opponents into concentration camps, thus securing the support of the big industrialists and nationalist conservatives.
However, as a matter of fact, for you, preconceived conclusions are more important than facts. All the interesting pieces of information I have researched and cited, which undermine your ham-fisted anti-liberal smears, are factual. Yet, not surprisingly, you have studiously avoided paying attention to them. In fact, your appetite for sham, spam arguments has been enlarged by your gargantuan hunger for a scapegoat.
PsiBond,
In a linear political spectrum that takes account of respect for individual liberty and human rights, all totalitarian governments (taken as distinct from the political ideologies they espouse) belong on the right.
"taken as distinct from the political ideologies they espouse" is as close to an admission of defeat in this debate as you're going to come.
Allow me to rephrase your point for illustration of its inherent absurdities:
"In a linear political spectrum that takes account of respect for individual liberty and human rights, the totalitarian government of the Soviet Union (if we ignore the communist ideology it espoused) belongs on the right."
"In a linear political spectrum that takes account of respect for individual liberty and human rights, the totalitarian government of Nazi Germany (if we ignore the socialist centrally-planned economics policies it pursued) belongs on the right."
"In a linear political spectrum that takes account of respect for individual liberty and human rights, the libertarian government of Ronald Reagan (if we ignore the small government, laissez faire economics policies of conservatism) belongs on the left."
You want to find a way to put Hitler (and all totalitarians) on the right wing of the political spectrum. The only way you've found to do so is to take political ideology out of the equation.
You're not making a political spectrum, you're making a fool of yourself. QED.
Check and mate.
You seem not to get it, beamish. But, notwithstanding the transparency of your sham obfuscation, systems of governance are classifiable apart from, independently of, the ideologies of their heads of state, and vice versa. Thus, in liberal democracies, one finds both leaders on the left and leaders on the right. And the same is true of one-party totalitarian systems. Fulgencio Batista was a dictator on the right, while Fidel Castro was a dictator on the left. There is a spectrum running from government of the people, by the people, for the people to government of the people, by an elite, for the elite.
However, I do not have to find some way to put Hitler on the right. His extreme nationalism and aggressive militarism aimed at Lebensraum and racial purity assure him a place on the far right. Once in power, Hitler showed his true colors by promptly breaking all his promises to workers. He quickly destroyed leftist power in German politics, making his conservative allegiances clear. Your refusal to pay attention to these facts does not alter them:
By July 1933, six months after becoming Reich Chancellor, Hitler had abolished the trade unions, eliminated the communists, the Social Democrats and the Jews from any role in political life and was sweeping his opponents into concentration camps, thus securing the support of the big industrialists and nationalist conservatives. The advances made under the Weimar Republic by socialism, trade unions, and women were undone.
By brash denial of contrasting facts, you fool only yourself. Just as Hitler delusionally thought he was winning the war when he was losing it. And as Hitler thought everyone not a Nazi was just a fool, you illiberally think the same about your political opponents. Hitler made outcasts of them, and, likewise. your broad-mindedness induces you to urge doing the same with a broad group of ordinary Americans.
Check and mate.
Sorry, it's not checkmate. The knight makes L-shaped moves----it cannot move blitzkrieg-style, like a rook, across the board.
Besides, your king has no clothes.
However, I do not have to find some way to put Hitler on the right. His extreme nationalism and aggressive militarism aimed at Lebensraum and racial purity assure him a place on the far right.
But Stalin's extreme nationalism in the "Second Patriotic War" and all those tank and missile parades through Red Square throughout the Cold War decades don't put Communism on the right, any more than the progressive leftists Charles Davenport and Ernst Rüdin working up psuedo-scientific justifications for eugenics laws in general and Nazi Race Laws in specific suddenly made them right-wing thinkers.
However, I do not have to find some way to put Hitler on the right. His extreme nationalism and aggressive militarism aimed at Lebensraum and racial purity assure him a place on the far right. Once in power, Hitler showed his true colors by promptly breaking all his promises to workers. He quickly destroyed leftist power in German politics, making his conservative allegiances clear. Your refusal to pay attention to these facts does not alter them:
I can't "pay attention" to facts that you haven't produced.
I'll let Hitler's contemporaries at Time Magazine answer this.
""Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism." - Time magazine, "Adolf Hitler: Man of the Year 1938," January 2, 1939.
State ownership of businesses and government command of industrial production orders, increases in capital gains taxes, price and profit controls, national health care mandates, eugenics based racial hygiene laws, a Marxist hatred for capitalism and Jews (as a "religion of capitalists") Hitler was a leftist. Keep him on your side with the rest of the anti-capitalist totalitarian racists.
Hitler adopted the swastika symbol (which appeared on post-Bolshevik Revolution Russian currency long before the Nazi Party formed), as well as the ideas of secret police and labor camps, from his fellow leftists and former allies in the Russian Communist Party.
There was nothing "right-wing" or "conservative" about Hitler or the Nazis at all. Anyone who screams about himself and his comrades "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions!" as Hitler did in 1927 and had achieved by 1938 rules himself out of being right-wing.
Right-wingers against capitalism?
Switch to Diet Crack. The potent stuff is fuggin you up, PsiBond.
By brash denial of contrasting facts, you fool only yourself. Just as Hitler delusionally thought he was winning the war when he was losing it. And as Hitler thought everyone not a Nazi was just a fool, you illiberally think the same about your political opponents. Hitler made outcasts of them, and, likewise. your broad-mindedness induces you to urge doing the same with a broad group of ordinary Americans.
Uh, yeah.
Good thing I'm right-wing and stop at just pointing out your idiocy for everyone to laugh at.
If I were left-wing, I'd be loading you onto a cattle car.
By brash denial of contrasting facts, you fool only yourself. Just as Hitler delusionally thought he was winning the war when he was losing it. And as Hitler thought everyone not a Nazi was just a fool, you illiberally think the same about your political opponents. Hitler made outcasts of them, and, likewise. your broad-mindedness induces you to urge doing the same with a broad group of ordinary Americans.
beamish: Uh, yeah.
Yeah, without doubt, having a mirror held up to you can be a painful experience.
Good thing I'm right-wing and stop at just pointing out your idiocy for everyone to laugh at.
Indeed, with all your huffing and puffing and bluffing, self-servingly trying to paint me the way you want, you're making yourself quite laughable.
If I were left-wing, I'd be loading you onto a cattle car.
Hence, it seems mendaciously characterizing your political opponents comes as naturally to you, beamish, as it did for Hitler. Liberals are not neo-Nazis; they definitely do not believe you or anyone who thinks like you should be made an outcast and loaded onto a cattle car----nor even tied behind a car and dragged down the street to prove someone's point.
It's a good thing you're not one of them bigots, or your intense animosity toward liberals per se might be cause for some concern.
You sound awfully tame. Do you also wash and iron?
Alan Bullock, who may be the world's greatest Hitler historian, wrote:
While Hitler's attitude towards liberalism was one of contempt, towards Marxism he showed an implacable hostility… Ignoring the profound differences between Communism and Social Democracy in practice and the bitter hostility between the rival working class parties, he saw in their common ideology the embodiment of all that he detested----mass democracy and a leveling egalitarianism as opposed to the authoritarian state and the rule of an elite; equality and friendship among peoples as opposed to racial inequality and the domination of the strong; class solidarity versus national unity; internationalism versus nationalism.
-- Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, abridged edition, (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), p. 228-9.
I'll let Hitler's contemporaries at Time Magazine answer this...
They don't answer it the way you think. The much-blogged-about story from Time, from which you provide an excerpt, does not indicate that Hitler was a liberal or that he was a communist or that he was opposed to capitalism. It shows he was defying the Treaty of Versailles and organizing the country to wage a large-scale war. To build a war economy, FDR took similar mobilization steps. Nor does the Time piece indicate he did not abolish the trade unions, eliminate the communists, the Social Democrats and the Jews from any role in political life and sweep his opponents into concentration camps, thus securing the support of the big industrialists and nationalist conservatives.
The reason for making Hitler Time Man of the Year, was not international acclaim. Rather, it was the skill Hitler had demonstrated in outmaneuvering his European rivals in his quest to enlarge Germany. "The figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing Europe with all the swagger of a conqueror. Not the mere fact that the Führer brought 10,500,000 more people (7,000,000 Austrians, 3,500,000 Sudetens) under his absolute rule made him the Man of 1938. Japan during the same time added tens of millions of Chinese to her empire. More significant was the fact Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today." (Time, January 2, 1939, p.12) Many conservatives in the U.S. have falsely propagandized that because Time was "a liberal magazine", it lavished high praise on Hitler in its 1939 issue. Liberals are supporters of democracy and civil rights, and denounced those, like Hitler, who threatened them. Hitler's abolition of civil rights for opponents and especially Jews was noted quite explicitly by Time: "Germany's 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets."
Get yourself a tutor, beamish, who can teach you the historical context of decontextualized excerpts that you read and quote.
"Germany's 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets."
You mean Hitler eliminated private property for targeted enemies of his socialist reforging of Germany at the same time his fellow leftists were enforcing leftist-created eugenics "race laws" and nationalizing industries and businesses in a leftist centrally planned economic structure?
Hitler had contempt for liberals and communists? So? Stalin had contempt for liberals ("useful idiots") as well.
All you're showing is that the left has many faces and divisions and rivalries within its ranks. Stalin and Trotsky... who's the leftist and the right-winger there?
Marx and Engel's "The Communist Manifesto" begins with an attempt to present itself as the intellectual voice of the various bank robbers and firebomb-throwing thugs that were also calling themselves "communists" at the time. It met with as much success as it did disapproval among Marx's contemporaries on the left. For a while there, it seemed that the only thing prominent leftist thinkers Marx, Proudhon, and Bakunin could totally agree on was that the world would be better off without Jews. Anti-Semitism and specific calls for the eradication of Judaism was well entrenched leftist mantra long before Hitler's "race laws" and even before Stalin's purge of the Yevsektsiya and pet conspiracy theories (Stalin was self-convinced Harry Truman was a Jew).
Hitler was a leftist. National socialism was his brand of leftism.
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294.
Which means Proudhon was an advocate of limited government or no government.
"Germany's 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets."
You mean Hitler eliminated private property for targeted enemies of his socialist reforging of Germany at the same time his fellow leftists were enforcing leftist-created eugenics "race laws" and nationalizing industries and businesses in a leftist centrally planned economic structure?
Not just the right of Jews to own property (important as property rights are to conservatives), but their right to be treated as human beings was denied, for Hitler eliminated the human rights and individual liberty of those citizens designated racially impure, whom he considered a threat to his extreme nationalist goals, and, in order to "purify" the German people, he exploited the pseudoscience of eugenics (which. atomic physics, is neither left nor right, having proponents on both sides) and at the same time stripped workers of their unions and bargaining rights, policies that gained him the loyalty of industrialists, who, while, in most cases, retaining full control of their companies, submitted themselves to regulations deemed necessary to satisfy state goals (somewhat like the U.S. corporate scene today).
After the war, the institutions of private industry were intact enough in Germany to make a quick and strong economic recovery. By contrast, this was hardly the case in Russia shortly after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.
Hitler had contempt for liberals and communists? So? Stalin had contempt for liberals ("useful idiots") as well.
You have contempt for liberals. But I wouldn't therefore conclude on the basis of that that you're a leftist. However, it's a good bet someone who, like Hitler, despises liberalism, socialism, and communism is not a leftist.
All you're showing is that the left has many faces and divisions and rivalries within its ranks. Stalin and Trotsky... who's the leftist and the right-winger there?
Trotsky was not a Trotskyite. The right has fractious factions as well. Psychologists have found that some people espouse conservative views because in their groups such attitudes permit the expression of strong underlying intolerant hostile feelings. For other people, conservatism reflects adherence to the traditional values of their segment of society. Yet some conservatives have a number of traits in common with liberals. In fact, some prominent conservatives, including a few Republican presidential candidates, are pro-choice and/or pro-gun-control.
Concluded
Marx and Engel's "The Communist Manifesto" begins with an attempt to present itself as the intellectual voice of the various bank robbers and firebomb-throwing thugs that were also calling themselves "communists" at the time. It met with as much success as it did disapproval among Marx's contemporaries on the left. For a while there, it seemed that the only thing prominent leftist thinkers Marx, Proudhon [an anarchist who had a philosophical difference with Marx], and Bakunin [anarchist and opponent of Marxism] could totally agree on was that the world would be better off without Jews. Anti-Semitism and specific calls for the eradication of Judaism was well entrenched leftist mantra long before Hitler's "race laws" and even before Stalin's purge of the Yevsektsiya [the Yevsektsiya section was disbanded in 1929, more than five years before the Stalin purges] and pet conspiracy theories (Stalin was self-convinced Harry Truman was a Jew).
Unlike in Hitler's Germany, no systematic program existed in Stalin's Russia to purify the Russian stock by murdering Jews. Anti-Semitism is not an exclusive trait of some on the far left. Christians who are anti-Semites are not necessarily leftists. Ku Klux Klansmen were/are anti-Semites, but no one who is rational would suggest that they are thereby leftists. The KKK perceived Jews as an affront to the superiority of Protestantism and to the purity of the right God-fearing race. In other words, to "one-hundred percent Americanism." (The arrogant exclusiveness of which is evocative of how some conservative Republicans do not pale in using the term "Real Americans".) German nationalist conservatives saw Jews as international agents undermining the stability of the German fatherland. The well-known conservative American industrialist Henry Ford was also a well-known anti-Semite who wrote a tract in the early 1920s on the menace of the "International Jew" that may have influenced Hitler's Mein Kampf. It is known that Hitler kept a life-size photo of Ford next to his desk. Of course, in the membership of the Communist Party of the United States in the first half of the 20th century, Jews were over-represented.
Hitler was a leftist. National socialism was his brand of leftism.
Implacable foes of liberalism are either radical leftists or radical rightists. Hitler is not a liberal, as some rightwing revisionists claim. Hitler's combination of extreme and exclusive nationalism and chauvinist expansionism pretty much identifies him as a man of the far right. National Socialism initially presented itself in electoral politics as a populist movement appealing for the votes of the masses as well as of conservative elites, but once in control of the state, it abolished the unions, and eliminated the collective bargaining power that the working classes had enjoyed, and proved itself the representative of nationalist conservatives, who wanted by extreme means the restoration of the power and glory of the German nation, which had been humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. This is strangely evocative of conservatives in the American South dreaming of resurrecting the power and glory of the Confederacy, humiliated by the policies of Reconstruction.
Hitler is a far-rightwing icon. He put his brand on American neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and xenophobic far right parties in modern Europe.
Distinguished historian Steven Beller (Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction, 2007, p. 28) wrote: "There was no significant break between the traditional anti-Judaism of medieval Muscovy and the official hostility to Jews that continued to 1917. In that sense, Russian antisemitism was much more directly linked to traditional Christian anti-Judaism than was antisemitism in the West." In other words, the historical context shows Russian anti-Semitism was not the innate trait of leftist politics (any more than violence is). Although many of the leaders in Yevsektsiya, (which was disbanded and superseded in 1929) were purged in 1936 and following years, along with others who were not Jewish, it was not because of their Jewishness, but because of their alleged status as heretical Stalinists. It is zealous partisanship not academic scholarship to make this out to be Soviet genocide of Jews.
Notwithstanding your sweeping albeit weak ahistorical claims, beamish, it is undeniably easy to show that no rational basis exists for insinuating that American liberals support ethnic violence, or for making them outcasts for those heinous crimes. Intolerance and genocide are not logical consequences of their fundamental liberal principles of individual liberty and equality. Liberals did not approve or encourage Hitler's race laws, the Armenian genocide, Saddam Husein's slaughter of Shias and Kurds, Milosevic's ethnic cleansing, the lynchings of African Americans, or the massacres of American Indians. Nonetheless, rightwing intolerance of liberalism leads to desperate bogus innuendoes earnestly suggesting exactly that.
It is extreme ideologues convinced they are possessors of The Absolute Truth who believe theirs is the undeniably right understanding of history. Not surprisingly, in their eyes, liberalism turns out to be the root of all human rights violations (except perhaps for a few drops of blood shed in biblical and medieval times, or as a consequence of the Reformation).
It is a mistake to assume that extreme and exclusive nationalism and chauvinist expansionism are quantifiable metrics that can statistically place a person on the right (partial correspondences can be found in other countries). Rather, they are taxonomic characteristics the presence of both of which, in combination with others, help to identify a political position as far rightwing.
National socialism was not actually concerned about workers’ rights–––it did away with unions and collective bargaining and gave complete control over workers to the heads of corporations. In Nazi Germany, expansionist rightwingers thought it was the destiny of Germany to subjugate Europe and become "master of the globe". This is a prime example of what is really meant by extreme nationalism and chauvinist expansionism. No less important, it was exclusive nationalism. Hitler discovered behind all his changing adversaries "the Jew" to be destroyed, whether communism or Moscow or Great Britain or the United States. National socialism was fundamentally opposed to all concepts of international cooperation and universal catholicity (which is reminiscent of the antipathy of the modern American far right to peaceful diplomacy, the UN, and U.S. presidents who assert they are citizens of the world, which even Reagan did at a UN session, though rightwing propaganda won't acknowledge it).
Concluded
It destroyed the framework of a common humanity with absolute Germanic standards of law, truth, and good, applicable to all people. National socialism regarded Christianity and prophetic Judaism, with their emphasis on the equality of all men under a common God, as alien and inimical to the new hero ideal of the Nordic super-race, which was interpreted as the true Germanic ideal. This Real German had the veneration that the Real American has today for Americans on the far right. National socialism proclaimed the Germanic race as the new corpus mysticum on which the salvation of the world depended. Which is quite a lot like the neoconservatives' notion of American exceptionalism.
The rejection of the international community and its standards of justice, law, and reciprocity led to the proclamation of the official maxim: "Right is whatever profits the German nation; wrong is whatever harms it" Reichsminister Hans Frank, the head of the Academy of German Law, in an address on December 4, 1939, called it the "beginning of national socialist justice". Substitute 'American' for 'German' in the maxim and few rightwingers here are likely to be uncomfortable with it.
In earlier times, it was a lot more than a trope to cast the Jews as the villains at the root of all the world's evil. Of course, these days, far rightwingers, armed with a mangled version of history, are casting liberals in America as that same scapegoat. Hitler believed that propaganda should say very little, but repeat that little forever. No wonder then that rightwingers have filled the Internet with the self-serving assertion that Hitler was a leftist.
Though all your pawns have been captured, beamish, and your misconceived defenses have been penetrated, you play on. Such absolute foolhardiness is pathetic but praiseworthy, ironically speaking–––it beats going fishing in Alaska.
PsiBond,
You're continuing to flail helplessly. Now neoconservative conceptions of American exceptionalism (that America's greatness comes from its economic and political freedom and that other nations can prosper by opening their markets to capitalism and their societies democracy, i.e. exporting "classical liberalism" aka American conservativism to the globe) is "quite a lot like" the leftist Nazis' vision of an Aryan Supremacist Third Reich?!
Did you miss all the ethnic purges in Russia under Stalin that went along with his political purges? Forced famines, exiles, executions?
You can't possibly be that stupid.
I don't have to "fish in Alaska."
You're an easy barrel full right in the sights.
Neoconservatism has nothing whatsoever to do with or in common with the leftist eugenics based Aryan race mythologies of Third Reich fantasists among German national socialists, or their forebears:
"True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's: "Give back Alsace and Lorraine". For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?" - Karl Marx, proto-Nazi
Your whimpering over my using a "shooting fish in a barrel" metaphor to describe the ridiculously easy manner of defeating your feeble arguments in each round of this exchange did not come as a response to a threat to violence, representative alarmist hardline leftist victimology tropes aside.
Heil Hillary
On July 5, 2009, you wrote, "put Hitler ... on the right wing of the political spectrum," but that is taken out of context. The full context shows that that is the opposite of what is meant.
Unwittingly caricaturing yourself, beamish, you underscore that you are unable to make a legitimate argument when you link someone's uploaded video clip that removes the surrounding context from a remark by Hillary, one made back in 2006.
The full context for Hillary's remark ("'Well, I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy'") is given below:
HILLARY CLINTON: Suppose that you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. First parent comes and says ‘I want to send my daughter to St. Peter’s Roman Catholic School’ and you say ‘Great, wonderful school, here’s your voucher. Next parent who comes says, ‘I want to send, you know, my child to the Jewish Day School. Great here’s your voucher! Next parent who comes says, “I want to send my child to the private school that I’ve already dreamed of sending my child to.’ Fine. Here’s your voucher.
Next parent who comes says, ‘I want to send my child to the school of the Church of the White Supremacist.’ You say, ‘Wait a minute. You can’t send…we’re not giving a voucher for that.’ And the parent says, ‘Well, I read Genesis, Cain was marked, therefore I believe in white supremacy. And therefore, you gave it to a Catholic parent, you gave it to a Jewish parent, gave it to a secular private parent. Under the Constitution, you can’t discriminate against me.’
Suppose the next parent comes and says ‘I want to send my child to the School of…the Jihad.’ Wait a minute! We’re not going to send a child with taxpayers dollars to the School of Jihad. ‘Well, you gave it to the Catholics, gave it to the Jews, gave it to the private secular people. You’re gonna tell me I can’t? I’m a taxpayer. Under the Constitution.’
Now, tell me how we’re going to make those choices.
As the context shows, Hillary was quoting a hypothetical white supremacist to illustrate her point. Next thing, you'll be saying she was speaking at a KKK rally. Ha!
You are the victim of your own zealotry, beamish.
As is your honesty.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we," said George W. Bush, on August 5, 2004. This is out of context: Bush is not quite that stupid.
Neoconservatism has nothing whatsoever to do with or in common with the leftist eugenics based Aryan race mythologies of Third Reich fantasists among German national socialists, or their forebears:
And it has nothing to do with any tree-hugging, either. The point is not that neoconservatism is Nazism, but that both of these far-rightwing ideologies share an extreme notion of national supremacy.
"True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's: "Give back Alsace and Lorraine". For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?" - Karl Marx, proto-Nazi.
Was Marx in favor of murdering Germans with Jewish blood like himself? The socio-economic philosophy for which Marx became known was internationalist and inclusive, not exclusive. Although personal opinions Marx had about German claims to disputed lands were shared with conservatives, in other respects, he had philosophical ideas that were far left about capitalism. Hitler despised Marxism.
It's reported that Jesus said one must put him above all others. So did Hitler, who required public officials and military officers to swear loyalty to him rather than to the state. Was Jesus a "proto-Nazi"?
Your whimpering over my using a "shooting fish in a barrel" metaphor to describe the ridiculously easy manner of defeating your feeble arguments in each round of this exchange did not come as a response to a threat to violence, representative alarmist hardline leftist victimology tropes aside.
In your self-embarrassing cockiness that deceives you into thinking you're winning this contest, honest observation appears as whimpering. "You're an easy barrel full right in the sights" is what you actually said (for most gun owners, a barrel does not require locating in one's sights).The ostensible reference is to a shotgun and to the shooting of someone (me). I am not at all frightened, beamish, though your representative gun is now out in the open. Might makes right, eh, beamish?
By the way, what Karl Marx thought about Alsace and Lorraine is not a rational basis for insisting American liberals be made pariahs (as the Nazis did with the Jews).
Was Marx in favor of murdering Germans with Jewish blood like himself?
Marx desired to abolish religion itself, and specifically claimed Judaism's god was Mammon (money) in his writings, notably his essay "World Without Jews" where he specifically identified Judaism with the forces of capitalism itself (a key feature of anti-Semitic "international banker" conspiracy theories cherished by leftists as diverse as Father Coughlin, Hitler, Stalin, and today's "anti-globalization" movenment)
Given the bizarre obsession Marx had with eliminating capitalism, his slurring of Judaism as a religion that inherently IS capitalism, his advocacy of violence after the "Paris Commune" failed, and the general idea that communist revolution can't be bloodless if the power to be overthrown has guns and shoots back... Marx was in favor of ridding the world of Judaism, regardless of the nationality of its adherents. By Marx's own hand, the Jewish religion is allegedly capitalism itself. Whether he meant Jews should be exterminated or not is rather moot if, by Marx's and Stalin's and Hitler's and James Von Brunn's pernicious and warped leftist meme, even non-Jewish capitalists are either philosophically "Jewish" or "controlled by Jews."
What leftism's many strains lack in intellectual depth is more than compensated for in self-justifying calls to violence. Calls to violence - "might makes right" - are nothing new to leftism:
"If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs. It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty's despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?" - Maximillien Robespierre, Justification of the Use of Terror
Flop like a pathetic fish out of water if you must, PsiBond, but I honestly didn't threaten to shoot you.
It's much more fun making you squeal inanities like "neoconservatism is far right" while I systematically demolish your arguments on a daily basis.
I think Michael Moore uploaded that Hillary Clinton YouTube video.
She was speaking before Democrats, not a Klan rally, although I understand the difficulty in distinguishing the two apart.
I think Michael Moore uploaded that Hillary Clinton YouTube video.
I think it more likely it was the architextual Karl Rove, up to his usual dirty campaign tricks. (It was someone called 'danehoy', who gives his/her age as 40, who uploaded it, but that could be Rove's avatar.)
She was speaking before Democrats, not a Klan rally, although I understand the difficulty in distinguishing the two apart[sic].
Although most Americans would have no problem, I can understand the difficulty in distinguishing the two that pathetic partisans like yourself would experience.
The fact you don't wish to acknowledge is that Maximillien Robespierre's justification of the use of terror is alien to the American tradition of liberalism. His words are not any part of the thoughts we quote as fundamental to the United States of America. You can cite any terrorist you like, beamish, brand him, to suit your argument, a proto-American liberal, and then foolishly proclaim that you are demolishing my argument----but really what you are demolishing is your integrity and your seriousness. Robespierre, a founder of the French Reign of Terror has never been a hero of American liberals. He has never been considered to be a member of the American pantheon that includes Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In actuality, when he favored the indiscriminate illiberal use of force in his country to preserve his own political power, he became a fanatical dictator who lost his head.
It is worthy of note that, at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Robespierre learned to admire the idealised Roman Republic and the rhetoric of Cicero, Cato and other classic figures. The principal defenders of the Roman Republic in the latter half of the first century BCE were conservative aristocrats, fighting to preserve their privileges. Cicero and Cato are venerated by many American conservatives and right-libertarians (in fact, one or two rightwing bloggers that I know of have used 'Cato' as a screen-name). Liberal intellectuals in America may admire the rhetoric of these two, but not their political actions. Robespierre became intrigued in school by "the idea of a virtuous self, a man who stands alone accompanied only by his conscience". This may remind some of illiberal megalomaniacs they have known from history. "Robespierre believed that the Terror was a time of discovering and revealing the enemy within Paris, within France, the enemy that hid in the safety of apparent patriotism." Robespierre charged his opponents with complicity with foreign powers. Robespierre's rhetorical defense of the use of terror could easily have been adapted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy to justify blacklisting, intimidation, and attacks on the patriotism of political opponents.
You make a mockery of your simplistic argument by cavalierly assigning to the left everyone who has advocated or used violence. I suppose, according to you, Pinochet, Franco, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Timothy McVeigh, and the popes who ordered the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the burning of heretics are all leftists. The verifiable truth is "Might makes right" is a mantra most often seen in the posts of rightwing bloggers. The words of Abraham Lincoln, a liberal for his day, in his February 27, 1860, Cooper Union Address turned it around to completely reject it: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." Hitler believed that might confers on the strong the right to dominate the weak, but that liberalism wrongly gives the weak power over the strong.
You gave a rambling, dissembling reply to my question, "Was Marx in favor of murdering Germans with Jewish blood like himself?" The proper answer is that there is no documentary evidence to suggest that he was in favor of such genocide as the Nazis perpetrated. Abolishing Judaism or any other religion and replacing it with a different ideology is not what rational people call genocide On that point, there is nothing moot. If he had meant Jews like himself should be physically exterminated for Marxism to succeed, it would have been necessary for him to somewhere state as much.
American liberals do not seek the abolition of religion. Nor do they want the religion of others imposed upon them. (On 7 May, 1794, Robespierre had a decree passed that established a Supreme Being.) Nor do they want religious people burned at the stake, stoned, or otherwise persecuted or put to death.
Concluded
You failed to answer the other question, Was Jesus a "proto-Nazi"? The point here is, by putting heavy emphasis on one characteristic of an historical figure, it is child's play for a propagandist to make anyone out to be anything one likes him to be. That is what you have been doing here and what you've been fooling yourself about, bragging of it as the "demolition" of my argument.
By the way, what Robespierre believed in the 18th century about the use of oppressive terror is not a rational basis for insisting American liberals be made pariahs (as the Nazis did with the Jews). Indeed, to ostracize American liberals per se as enemies of the people would be to resurrect Robespierre and import him.
Flop like a pathetic fish out of water if you must, PsiBond, but I honestly didn't threaten to shoot you.
Pathetic is the squeamish gun owner who needs to find a barrel in his sights in order to hit it.
When you shoot your mouth off, you are not master of what you are saying. Nonetheless, I accept your apology, oblique as it is.
PsiBond,
I've already accepted that you wish to distance yourself from Stalin, Hitler, Robespierre and other true believers among your fellow leftists. I've already pointed out that you had to position yourself "to the right" of totalitarian leftisms like Communism or Fascism without crossing the left-right threshold betweem collectivism and individualism, government planned economies and laissez faire, illiterate mobs and conscientious thinkers.
I am not making "liberals" pariahs. I am making leftists pariahs. If you wish to remain on the left side of the political spectrum with leftism's legacy of totalitarians, genocidalists, and terrorists, that's on you. You don't seem to want to be to the left of Stalin, or between Stalin and Hitler, so you must be closer to the right-wing than either of those two leftists.
August Bebel, a social democracy Marxist, once remarked that "anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools." Note that this celebrated Marxist theorist, early feminist, and gay rights advocate did not say that anti-Semitism is the "capitalism of fools." He at the least, clearly saw the anti-Semitism of his fellow socialists.
But before we get all cozy with Bebel's "liberalism," let's keep in mind that he also counseled Otto von Bismarck that "the Imperial Chancellor can rest assured that German Social Democracy is a sort of preparatory school for militarism."
Anti-Semitism for the dumb socialists, militarism for the smart ones. Gotta love that progressive lefty Bebel.
Throw in Werner Sombart's own contributions to the left's anti-Semitic Judaism = Capitalism canon and you really see what Hitler meant by "a Communist will make a good Nazi." After all, they're all, as leftists, out to destroy capitalism, kumbaya...
Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice..
-- Adolf Hitler
beamish: ... and you really see what Hitler meant by "a Communist will make a good Nazi."
Spurious Hitler quotes are not impressive, beamish. Communist Jews would make good Nazis? Before or after they accepted the Final Solution?
Most conscientious American voters who prefer candidates on the left side of the aisle are supporters of individualism, capitalism, and minimal government intrusion (guaranteeing civil rights under the Constitution is a necessary exception), and are nonetheless liberal and humanitarian in their thinking. These millions of Americans, by no means illiterate, do not believe that, by voting for a liberal Democratic candidate, they are showing themselves to be in support of (as you wish to assume), not only totalitarianism, but genocide and terrorism, or that they are confessing thereby an admiration for Stalin and Hitler and other tyrants of the left and right. The thinly stretched and twisted parody of reason purporting to prove that that is the case is nothing more than a shallow rightwing contrivance for propagandizing and vilification. It makes no more sense than claiming that those voting for a conservative Republican candidate are showing themselves in favor of a monarchy or imperial presidency, and that they are loyal admirers of King George III. If you wish to sign on to such heavy-handed, Jonah Goldberg disseminated, conspiracy theory, beamish, well, that’s on you.
Jonah, like you, makes much of what he says is "August Bebel’s famous description of anti-Semitism as the 'socialism of fools.'” But few Americans know who Bebel was nor do they care, and, no matter to what it was actually referring, this totally decontextualized description from a century ago (or his remark in 1892 to Bismarck) has no sensible application to their votes or political affiliations or beliefs. Rightwing conspiracy theory is the mental terrorism of angry fools. That's my soon-to-be-famous description. Oh, my, Jonah Goldberg disciples would have made good Nazis----that's what people will be saying a hundred years from now. Mark my words. My prescient words.
Just wait until year 2109 rolls around.
By the way, there is no rational basis for herding American liberals into cattle cars painted with the vague collective label 'leftists' so as to make of them pariahs (as the Nazis did with the Jews). Nor does following Robespierre's lead to proclaim that establishing who's a liberal and who's not is a means to reveal the enemy in America, have any basis in reason.
Yet: Cool By You.
As a socialist himself, Hitler knew that not all of his fellow leftists were Jews. I don't suspect Jewish Communists would have fared well in Nazism's more exclusive, nationalized form of collectivism and his "final solution" - a final solution to "the Jewish Question" perennially asked by leftists like Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx from the French Revolution onward. Like Bauer, Marx sought the abolition of religion. Marx was one of the first to explicitly advance the socialist Judaism = Capitalist dogma, from which much of Marx's later thinking emerged.
It is important to follow this line of thinking, this leftist ideology, because the entire "Jewish Question" that leftists have anguished themselves over since the French Revolution - "How will Jews fit into a truly socialist society?" and Marx's resounding answer that they can't, as their religion is capitalism itself, which as discussed, comes out in Bebel, Sombart, Stalin, Hitler, and the leftists you see painting swastikas on Israeli flags and smashing windows at anti-globalization protests.
I'll leave it to you to figure out how a socialist or communist revolution abolishes a religion, but we've got plenty of examples of leftists, like Hitler and Stalin, attempting to do just that with pogroms and genocides, and both grounded in the Jew = Capitalist dogma that has filled leftist thinking since the Reign of Terror.
If the label "leftist" is vague, then why do you goosestep up when I attack leftism?
You know who I'm talking about.
It took the Holocaust to get leftists to stop asking the "Jewish Question" for a while. They still want an answer to it.
It has never occured to right-wing ideologues and writers that there was a "Jewish Question" to be asked or answered.
Hitler was left-wing. Keep your one nut Schickelgruber. We don't want him.
Realistically speaking, communists would not make good Nazis because, whether Jewish or not, they do not despise, as Hitler did, communist ideas for organizing secular society. In On the Jewish Question, his 1843 critique of Bruno Bauer's idea that the abolition of religion and secular society were necessary to political emancipation in Poland, Marx concludes that, even when one is free spiritually and politically in a secular state, economic inequality still binds one to material constraints on freedom. (Nazism did not address economic inequality. Indeed, it stripped German workers of the political means to improve their economic situation. It was socialism for the élite.) However, it is important to see that the Jewish Question, which concerned how Jews will fit into a secular society, and which has been grappled with in some form by rightwing regimes in Europe ever since medieval times, is a distraction from the central question in the argument here.
By the way, unlike the post-Civil War South, where conservatives grappled with the African-American Question, how will black freedmen fit into traditional society, Germany never took up the African-American Question at all. How about that?
Neither communism nor socialism nor their theorists were at the root of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. In Mein Kampf, Hitler listed Martin Luther as one of the greatest reformers. And similar to Luther in the 1500s, Hitler spoke against the Jews. Indeed, the eliminationist form of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany may not have occurred without the influence of Luther's hateful book On the Jews and Their Lies. Walter Buch, a German jurist and SS-Obergruppenführer war criminal, said, "Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held.... From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther. What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds." (Buch, who exonerated the Nazi Party members involved in Kristallnacht, was sentenced to five years in a labor camp, but in July 1949, in the course of yet another wave of Denazification, he was classified as being among those who were "guiltiest" of war crimes. In November, 1949, Buch slit his wrists and threw himself into the Ammersee, a lake in Upper Bavaria.)
If the label "leftist" is vague, then why do you goosestep up when I attack leftism?
The reason is that goosesteppin' rightwingers unscrupulously use 'leftists' as a codeword for ‘sinister liberals’. We know they are not marshalling all that verbiage in building a collectivized stereotype in order to target a few thousand Americans who are members of the U.S. Communist and Socialist parties. In acting thus, rightwingers implement the lesson provided by Adolf Hitler when he instructed, "The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."
Hitler was left-wing. Keep your one nut Schickelgruber. We don't want him.
I can understand your extreme discomfort, beamish, given Hitler's radical conservative convictions, including his disgust for humanitarianism, liberalism, and democracy. And I understand your enflamed desire, oft-repeated, to dispose of him in any way you can, no matter how disingenuous the means. "It is not truth that matters, but victory," Hitler said, which is what rightwingers have in mind when they often chant, "Might makes right". I can also understand your emotional need to take refuge in simple-minded political equations readily lending themselves to bumper stickers, and the like. Nonetheless, although it gratifies the Nazi-emulating exclusionary thinking habits of many rightwingers to make pariahs of liberals, such cannot be the answer in America to the "Liberal Question". Even if that may oblige quite a few or most rightwingers to go hopelessly nuts.
Despite your bombastic attempts to rhetorically transform Hitler into a "right-wing" figure, the anti-Semitism he had in common with his fellow socialists does not make him "right-wing" just as Stalin's anti-Semitism do not make Stalin a "right-winger." The nationalist sentiments of Hitler do not make Hitler "right-wing" just as Hugo Chavez's Venezuelan nationalism do not make Chavez a "right-winger." Hitler's militarism does not make him a "right-winger" just as Che Guevara's militarism does not make Che Guevara a "right-winger."
Your wish to make Adolf Hitler and the Nazis "right-wing" through these avenues is a hypocrisy - you'll keep Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, Castro, Chavez, Robespierre, Bin Laden, et. al. on the left with you, guity as charged with all the things you wish to claim make the leftist Nazis "right-wing," but not Hitler the anti-Semitic militaristic national socialist.
The Nazis have to go, so you can stand proud on the left with the murderers of over 200 million people? Nazism's addition of 17 million more victims of leftism is too much?
You're a joke, PsiBond. A sad joke.
The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
— Winston Churchill
No, beamish, claims predicated on such simple linear equivalences as you claim I proposed are not at all what I claimed or approve. Simple equivalences are the rich stuff that competent propagandists formulate and exploit.
Robert Fine, chair of the Sociology Department at Warwick University, wrote in 2006:
Let us explode the myth that Karl Marx was in some sense anti-Semitic in his critique of capitalism. The myth arises in part out of the inability of a very diverse array of commentators to read Marx in the original, in part out of a deafness to the uses of the ironic style in Marx’s writings, and especially out of the presupposition of an intimate association between revolutionary socialism and anti-Semitism. From his earliest writings Marx sought to develop a radical critique of all existing conditions which distinguished itself from other forms of radicalism by its complete and explicit rejection of any anti-Semitic coloration..... Marx’s 1843 essay On the Jewish Question was an important and early case in point. In this essay Marx’s aim was to defend the right of Jews to full civil and political emancipation (that is, to equal civil and political rights) alongside all other German citizens. The target of Marx’s critique was one of the mainstays of the young Hegelian movement, a well-known radical by the name of Bruno Bauer.
In short, Marx defended the rights of Jews and was not an anti-Semite, as rightwingers like to claim.
To summarize my point, Hitler was an opportunist, probably the most successful in history, who capitalized on traditional hatred of Jews in Germany (sanctioned by Martin Luther), harnessed the economic chaos of the Depression, when centrist parties formed and collapsed, and hijacked the hope in socialism of impoverished workingmen, to win general allegiance and absolute power in order to realize his radical rightwing worldview of German exceptionalism.
Liberals and moderate conservatives deplore him. Far right conservatives, however, doggedly try, employing bogus scholarship and bombast, to prove Hitler is a "leftist" in the quixotic hope of making pariahs of U.S. liberals----just as Hitler did with the Jews.
Thus, your goebbeled (sp?) mischaracterization of my words to suit your insistent anti-liberal agenda is an ironic joke on you, beamish.
Marx's "World Without Jews" essay is available on the web (as are Marx's personal correspondances with Engels and others in which he is quite liberal with his ethnic and anti-Semitic slurs) I suggest you read it for yourself and come back and explain how Marx's claim that the "God of Israel is Mammon" (hence Jews = money worshippers / capitalists) is not anti-Semitic.
As for Nazi "opportunism" - Hitler rose to power in a parliamentary election on anti-capitalistic promises made to the working class - "national socialist German workers' party" - following a litany of progressive leftist reform proposals very familiar to socialists immersed in Jew = Capitalist conspiracy theory.
Leftists of the Weimar Republic were not "duped" into bringing Hitler into power. They enthusiastically placed him there, as one of their own, to bring about the anti-capitalist "dictatorship of the proletariat" dream of socialism. Which the Nazis, once in power, moved quickly to act upon - collectivizing agriculture, assimilating unions into the Nazi Party to run a centrally planned economy with state-owned or state-run industries, massive government work projects, national health care initiatives, environmental protection... Nazism was left-wing, and undeniably so.
Nazism's anti-capitalism utterly excludes it from consideration as a right-wing ideology. Nazism's other horrific beliefs and practices are leftist in origin, as demonstrated previously with eugenics and the actual hand of leading progressive left eugenicists like Davenport writing Nazi race laws.
The Nazis were leftists, in name and deed.
Marx also said, "Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities." His pamphlet "World Without Jews" is not a call for the extermination of Jews, as the title might imply, but rather Marx's analysis of why most Jews were not interested in the working class movement of his day. He wanted Jews to cease identifying themselves as a separate group first and foremost and instead adopt a more internationalist outlook, which would be helpful to their participation in the workers' movement that Marx promoted. It is not hard to see, however, how those susceptible to the persuasiveness of simple equivalences would misinterpret the pamphlet
In fact, anti-Semitism occurs in all countries and cultures to varying degrees.
Hitler's opportunistic rise to the point where he could pressure Marshall von Hindenburg to appoint him Chancellor involved making promises to groups on the right as well as the left to gain strong parliamentary representation for his Nazi Party. During the Weimar Republic, liberal politics collapsed in Germany. There was "civil unrest, with right-wing groups fighting communists on the streets, an ineffective parliament, an autonomous army, and a nationalistic population humiliated and frustrated by their own and their country's position. Political parties began to emerge that articulated these frustrations and the desire for a new Germany" (Roger Osborne, Civilization: A New History of the Western World, 2006, p. 442). Hitler was opportunely poised to step in.
In the election of 1930, simplistic solutions began to appeal and the Nazis received 18.3 percent of the vote. The Nazi Party had over 100,000 members in paramilitary uniforms, more than the permitted manpower of the German army. In mid-1932, a parliamentary coalition collapsed and an election was called for July 31. This time the Nazis got 37.4 per cent, making them the largest party in parliament. Hindenburg, the president of the republic, nonetheless refused to make Hitler chancellor, fearing a political catastrophe. "In the subsequent November 1932 election, the Nazi vote shrank to 32 per cent, as, once again, the German economy began to improve----this might have been the beginning of the end of the Nazis as a major political force. However, after the November 1932 election, a group of conservative politicians, officials, industrialists, and bamkers wrote to President von Hindenburg urging him to appoint Hitler as chancellor.... On January 30, 1933 Hitler was made chancellor of Germany." (Osborne, ibid, pp. 443-4) Hitler then had control of the apparatus of a modern state. When Hindenburg died in the following year, Hitler became president as well as chancellor.
Capitalists in Germany and abroad viewed Hitler as a bulwark against the anti-capitalist threat of communism. Designing his economic policies to prepare Germany for planned territorial expansions and the coming war, German capitalists and U.S. companies doing business in Germany were enriched, while workers were enslaved. But humiliated Germans saw the rise of Hitler as "a new morning", the restorer of Germany to its "right" place in the world, "a Shining City on a hill." so to speak.
Concluded
Nazism's other horrific beliefs and practices are leftist in origin, as demonstrated previously with eugenics and the actual hand of leading progressive left eugenicists like Davenport writing Nazi race laws.
Charles Davenport, the "eugenic crusader-in-chief", was not a progressive leftist, as you claim. He grew up in Brooklyn Heights as the proud descendent of a long line of English and Colonial New England Congregationalist ministers. His authoritarian father "cloaked his family's world in a heavy mantle of puritanical religion." (Edwin Black, War Against the Weak, 2003, p. 32) Davenport's father, the co-founder of two Brooklyn churches, "infused his household with pure fire and brimstone, along with principles of commerce and market value." Davenport requested his father's written permission to study the sciences. "Eugenics appealed to Davenport not just because his scientific mind was shaped by a moralized world choked with genealogies and ancestral comparisons, but because of his racial views and his obsession with racial mixture." (Black, ibid. p. 35) He saw ethnic groups as biologically distinct: non-Nordic types swam a the bottom of the hereditary pool; Italians were predisposed to personal violence; the Irish had "considerable mental defectiveness"; while Germans were "thrifty, intelligent, and honest". Each type, Davenport believed, had, as well as visible physical characters, moral, intellectual, and spiritual characters, transmitted genetically across generations. In short, Davenport was nothing like a liberal or "progressive leftist".
At the First International Congress on Eugenics, "Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, would represent the king. Churchill [the rightwing icon] was alarmed at Britain's growing population of 'persons ... of mental defect' and advocated a eugenic solution." (Black, ibid. p. 71) Davenport was a vice-president at this meeting.
"Finally [in 1910] the government agreed to consider the legislation [the Mental Deficiency Act, after the Eugenics Education Society mailed letters to every sitting member of Parliament and other officials]. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, reassured one group of eugenicists that Britain's 120,000 feebleminded persons 'should, if possible, be segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations.' The plan called for the creation of vast colonies. Thousands of Britain's unfit would be moved into these colonies to live out their days." (Black, ibid. p. 215)
The Nazis were leftists, in name and deed.
The name is no more revealing than that of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the official name of North Korea). Or the People's Republic of China (the Communist Regime of China).
Most U.S. rightwingers oppose abortion and support family values, and many of them favor a traditional role for women. And so did Hitler. That does not indicate, however, to liberal-minded people that 'rightwinger' equals 'Nazi'. Of course, in Hitler's view, 'liberal-minded' equaled 'feebleminded'. Or 'imbecilic'.
Whatever Churchill may or may not have believed about eugenics or the eugenics movement within comtemporary leftist politics in 1910, until you show up with enacted Churchillian "race laws" in Britain to match their actual realization in leftist Nazi Germany, you're blowing smoke.
I'm personally not aware of any enacted British race laws based on eugenics, much less any enacted British race laws based on eugenics ideology posited by Churchill or Davenport. I don't mind seeing leftist flaws in conservatives revealed if they are there. I seriously doubt I'm "to the right" of Churchill on many issues, but if he was a "eugenics enthusiast" he'd certainly be well to my left on social policy.
I don't think he was though. Churchill was an outspoken critic of the Nazis and well aware of the Holocaust-in-progress:
'None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew the unspeakable evils wrought upon the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazi's first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity. He has borne and continued to bear a burden that might have seen beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit; he has never lost the will to resist. Assuredly in the day of victory the Jew's suffering and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten.' - Winston Churchill, November 14, 1941
Such was Churchill's public outcry against the Nazis and their determined extermination of Jews, throughout the war, that an entire cottage industry of Holocaust-denying, historical revising leftists have sought to recast Churchill within their "Jew = Capitalist" mentality and empathize with Hitler's view of capitalist enemies as "tools of the Jews" bad-mouthing Hitler,
or the equally anti-Semitic Holocaust-denying / minimizing tactic of smearing him as ideologically identical to Nazi eugenics theorists.
The progressive left's psuedoscientific race theories did not find an outlet in Britain. They did in the bastion of leftism in national socialist Germany.
From theory to practice. Socialism is the point between capitalism and communism. All attempts to restrain or destroy capitalism are essentially leftist, whether they stop at "liberalism / social democracy," or at Fascism / national socialism, or beyond to Communism.
History shows us, in the French Reign of Terror, the Nazi driven Holocaust, in the Communist Russian forced famines, in the slaughter of Cambodians, and so on, what happens when leftists are the ruling power, when leftist theory becomes leftist practice.
Show me a socialist government on Earth today that isn't monoculturally tied to and comprised of a specific ethnicity / national identity.
There's a little Nazi in all of you leftists. Admission of a problem is the first step to recovery. The problem is not Nazism. That's just a symptom.
The problem is leftism.
Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.
— Adolf Hitler
beamish: Whatever Churchill may or may not have believed about eugenics or the eugenics movement within comtemporary leftist politics in 1910, until you show up with enacted Churchillian "race laws" in Britain to match their actual realization in leftist Nazi Germany, you're blowing smoke.
Eugenics was not a "leftist" political movement, much as you'd like to pretend it was. It was a pseudoscientific movement that had many enthusiasts on the right, including Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt. As noted previously, Churchill was alarmed at Britain's growing population of 'persons ... of mental defect' and advocated a eugenic solution. Churchill's letter in December 1910 to Prime Minister H. H. Asquith showed how much he regarded British racial health as a serious and an urgent issue:
The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a terrible danger to the race.
Concerned by the high cost of forced segregation, Churchill preferred compulsory sterilisation to confinement, describing sterilisation as a "simple surgical operation so the inferior could be permitted freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others."
In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt had a private meeting at his Long Island retreat with Charles Davenport and his circle of eugenicists. "On January 3, 1913, former President Theodore Roosevelt wrote Davenport, 'I agree with you ... that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.... Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.'" (Edwin Black, War Against the Weak, 2003, p. 99) High officials in the Protestant clergy also endorsed eugenics. Conservative Rev. Clarence True Wilson, the General Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, and the man chosen to debate Clarence Darrow after William Jennings Bryan’s death, believed that only the white Aryan race was the descendent of the lost tribes of Israel. In the 1910s, Methodist churches hosted forums in their churches to discuss eugenics. In the 1920s, many Methodist preachers submitted their eugenics sermons to contests hosted by the American Eugenics Society.
According to one such sermon, “the strongest and the best are selected for the task of propagating the likeness of God and carrying on his work of improving the race.” None of this should be surprising, since many conservatives have posited the need for an elite to protect "good" society from the teaming masses yearning to breathe free. Indeed, many rightwing bloggers have deplored the so-called "illiterate mobs" (to quote you on July 12, 2009). Arch-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. wrote to this rightwing concern on August 24, 1957 in an editorial in his magazine National Review:
Concluded
The central question that emerges--and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal--is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage..
Presumably, the "catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal" was a Buckleyesque reference to the United States Constitution. Fifteen years earlier, Hitler had believed the claims of "Aryan" civilization superseded those of racial equality and common humanity.
"Mental defectives were created by the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 and abolished by the Mental Health Act of 1959. They were divided into three different categories: the 'imbeciles' and 'idiots' who would nowadays be considered to have a learning disability and the more nebulous group of 'feeble-minded'. The latter included people of average intelligence who had somehow fallen by the wayside, the 'socially inefficient' as they were called in those days. Mental efficiency legislation had originally received support from politicians of all parties (Liberal MP Josiah Wedgwood the 'last of the radicals' - was a notable opponent of the Act) as it was seen as a more humane alternative to incarceration in lunatic asylums, workhouses or prisons. But by the 1940s there was widespread concern about the numbers of people being held under the Act and the National Council for Civil Liberties led a campaign which exposed abuses of the Act and accused authorities of using the inmates of mental deficiency institutions as a source of cheap labour."
For the good of America, liberals and conservatives can work together and get along. The persistent problem is far-right extremists like you, brandishing codewords like 'leftists' and 'Democrats', who relentlessly labor to heap all things shameful on liberals so as to make them pariahs, thereby attempting to emulate what Hitler did with the Jews.
Despite your obsessive huffing and puffing to associate liberals with Hitler, beamish, liberal does not equal "leftist"; nor does "leftist" equal Nazi.
Conservatives should feel some embarrassment and shame that we are outraged at instances of racism now that it is easy to be. Conservatives...were often at best MIA on the issue of civil rights in the 1960s. Liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race. And conservatives should probably admit that more often.
— Jonah Goldberg, 2002
"[Frankly I had thought that] At the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of... [But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it [Roe] had been altogether wrong.]" - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, July 9, 2009.
Despite the implication you wish to convey, this was not an allusion to any belief of Ginsburg in cleansing society of the "unfit" or to racial eugenics, but to her understanding of the basis on which Roe was decided, which understanding she subsequently found to be wrong, something that is indicated in a part of her statement that you did not quote. At mid-twentieth century, it was hypothesized by a few scientists that unchecked growth in population was unsustainable because of a looming food shortage. Although famines did occur in some countries in Africa, world food production grew exponentially at a rate much higher than the population growth.
The main aim of the pseudoscientific eugenics craze, which attracted the financing of the wealthy and powerful in America, was to cleanse society of the supposedly mentally deficient, the criminals, and the "unfit", a goal which well served the need that rightwingers felt to protect their vision of society from the danger of the unworthy, those who did not belong to their self-selected elite. President Theodore Roosevelt bluntly said, "we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type." Preachers and clergy who embraced eugenics helped to sell it to the public. The beliefs in racial eugenics of two conservative Republican congressmen led to the enactment of the National Origins Act in 1924, which severely limited immigration by ethnic origin and excluded immigration of Asians.
In the earliest times the conservatives' elite consisted of the king and the nobility. In the first half of the twentieth century, in America, their elite had morphed into the "White community", which William F. Buckley Jr. believed was "entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically." Thereby, conservatives expose their contempt for American democracy. As has been the case in all ages, conservatives revere their own inherited privileges----to the exclusion of the rights of all citizens, "born Equal". Buckley, who is considered the founder of modern conservatism, made the rightwing's fundamental quarrel with the principles of democracy explicit:
"National Review believes the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened."
An integrated lunch counter is atavistic? A throwback to racial equality? During the era preceding the Civil Rights Act in which Buckley wrote this editorial, vigilante conservatives in America were showing themselves willing to resort to primitive violence in order to brutally deprive African Americans of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness----just as like-minded people on the right in Germany had done with Jews, Slavs, and other groups that the Nazis considered threats to Germany's manifest destiny and to the racial purity of the Nordic master race. These were hate crimes and human rights violations. Liberals have been in the forefront of the fight against such crimes, although rightwingers have joined them, usually reluctantly. The opponents of hate crimes legislation are often rightwingers who ruthlessly hate liberals. And the hostility of rightwingers toward society's "unfit" can be seen expressed by those who choose to beat up and torture homeless people and gays.
Concluded
"Conservatives should feel some embarrassment and shame," leading conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg acknowledged, for "Liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race". But the most extreme rightwingers are opposed to showing any contrite feelings. These enraged, implacable people (including you, beamish), feeling they've been victimized by history, opt instead to confuse and decontextualize the history, reverse the political spectrum, and contrive ahistorical allegations and false associations, in an irate attempt to fraudulently fix blame on liberals in America, and hang them with the evils of every totalitarian regime abroad, starting with----I kid you not----the Jacobin excesses of the French Revolution. (How odd that rightwingers, the motto of whose 1964 standard bearer was "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice", should profess to weep for the innocent victims of the Jacobins!) Though they couldn't care less, these enraged persons are unhelpful to defending the gravitas of American conservatives. And to intelligent political discourse. Their unyielding hatred does not demonstrate that they are incapable of the hatred that reigned in America's recent unsavory past.
Why are they so insistent? Adolf Hitler explains, "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed."
One of the many benefits of not being a leftist is that my judgement is not clouded by a persistent lack of reading comprehension skills.
When Roe was decided, Ginsburg, as she candidly admits, viewed the issue from the eugenics population control position. And, she admits that her position later changed when McRae upheld the Hyde Amendment that prevents Medicaid subsidization of abortion on demand - she apparently saw the implications of a federal government in the eugenics population control business, likely in the precedent set by the Nazis.
I'm not twisting Ginsburg's words or removing them from context. Ginsburg, left-wing Supreme Court justice, were she on the Supreme Court in 1973, would have extra-Constitutionally created the "right to abortion on demand" on eugenics grounds. Certain people shouldn't breed, and Hitler's heroine and left-wing eugenicist population planning advocate Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood set up abortion clinics wherever the targeted population, poor black mothers, could walk or be bussed.
I've read the Buckley article from 1957 you're boldly mischaracterizing. A clear reading of that text reveals the strawman and slander you make of the actual Buckley. The "atavistic will of the majority" Buckley refers to is the South's Jim Crow laws, the "enlightened" being the overthrow of this bulwark of Democratic Party white supremacist thinking - which still persists today in the left-wing assumptions of inherent inferiority of certain racial groupings and that assumption's driving force behind affirmative action quotas. The leftist view, summarized: "If we fudge a few of them dumbass darkies' test scores and let a few of them into college, maybe they won't notice we're aborting their kids and imprisoning their fathers."
Further discussion of Buckley's 1957 article requires you to reveal what language you read it in. It wasn't English. I don't care to revisit the growing evidence that leftists lack reading comprehension skills or debate the color of the sky at this time. Learn English on your own time.
Regardless, your labelling Buckley as "founder of modern conservatism" is silly on its own merits without trying to fit it into your other incongruencies of calling the proto-Fascist land nationalizing "trust buster" Theodore Roosevelt a "conservative" or diminishing the horrors perpetuated by your fellow leftists in the Holocaust by construing an obscure anti-immigration law that never rounded up and executed anybody in the United States to be on par with the leftist Final Solution to Bruno Bauer's Jewish Question.
I note that you didn't address the ideological similarities between the leftist Obama's "you're too old to waste health care on" social agenda and that of his fellow leftists in Nazi Germany's medical cost cutting T4 euthanasia program.
There is an explanation for this.
"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." - Norman Thomas
Socialists have hijacked the word "liberal" after their fellow leftists Hitler and Stalin made Socialism unpalatable. American conservatism is best described as "classical liberalism:" individual freedom from restraint, individual property rights, natural rights, the protection of civil liberties, equality under the law, constitutional limitation of government and free markets.
You know, the founding principles of America that "conservatives" want to "conserve."
The left has made "liberal" an ugly word by calling themselves that. This is primarily why I refer to leftists, not "liberals," when discussing politics. Nobody gets to dance around definitions that way, and the Nazis get to stay on the left-wing with the enemies of capitalism, where they belong.
The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it; from this premise all else proceeds. That, of course, is demagogy.
— William F. Buckley Jr., 1957
Buckley argues that the South has a superseding right to insure that only those who know how to use the vote "properly" should be permitted to vote. The South, he claimed, has "the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races." The Nazis argued that the superior mores of the master race obviated the claims of equality with the rest of humankind for a thousand years.
I've read the Buckley article from 1957 you're boldly mischaracterizing. A clear reading of that text reveals the strawman and slander you make of the actual Buckley. The "atavistic will of the majority" Buckley refers to is the South's Jim Crow laws, the "enlightened" being the overthrow of this bulwark of Democratic Party white supremacist thinking - which still persists today in the left-wing assumptions of inherent inferiority of certain racial groupings and that assumption's driving force behind affirmative action quotas. The leftist view, summarized: "If we fudge a few of them dumbass darkies' test scores and let a few of them into college, maybe they won't notice we're aborting their kids and imprisoning their fathers."
Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century", according to George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement. "For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure."
On the contrary, beamish, you mischaracterize Buckley, whom many consider the founder of modern conservatism. The "atavistic will of the majority" is your will to put words in his mouth, Those are not his words. He was writing about issues where, according to him, "there is a corporate disagreement between Negro and White." "The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain it has its way," he says. As a means of justifying that dominance, he argues in favor of juries that set aside the law to find in favor of the White community. Though he admits a federal judge might find the defendant guilty, and thus affirm the law and conform to "relevant political abstractions" (presumably including the guiding abstraction of being born Equal), the consequences, he warns, may be "violent and anarchistic". He argues that the central question in this matter is not a parliamentary or constitutional question, but really a question of whether the White community has the extralegal right to prevail in areas where it lacks superior numbers electorally. Buckley's answer is an unequivocal Yes. The answer of liberals is an unequivocal No. The answer is No, even though you shamelessly do a frenetic dance to distract, beamish, bringing up your extreme view of affirmative action, inventing bogus quotes for liberals, and implying that liberals employ characteristically rightwing slurs like "dumbass darkies". No.
A rightwing blogger who uses the Nazi flag as his online graphic symbol, wrote in April 2006: "Those dumbass darkies are killing each other. Rather saves the KKK from doing all the dirty work. *ROTFLMAO*. No doubt the black kids will be saying 'wow! Lookit! Anudder gangsta be offed! Me wanna be dat cool too. How me do dat? Me gets a gun and me goes killafew udder niggers'...." A lot of rightwing bloggers just love to mock what they conceive to be Black English.
Continued
Further discussion of Buckley's 1957 article requires you to reveal what language you read it in. It wasn't English. I don't care to revisit the growing evidence that leftists lack reading comprehension skills or debate the color of the sky at this time. Learn English on your own time.
You provide ample evidence herein that you misread texts so as to reinforce your assumptions. William F. Buckley Jr believed that, in disagreements where racial interests are involved, Universal Suffrage was to be seen as more demagoguery than a fundamental a priori axiom. I expect your dance around that one should be extremely amusing, beamish.
One of the many benefits of not being a leftist is that my judgement is not clouded by a persistent lack of reading comprehension skills.
And one of many benefits of this exchange that I'm enjoying is seeing how farcical your self-assessment is. Your judgment is clouded by a nebulous grasp of the distinction between fact and pre-conception.
When Roe was decided, Ginsburg, as she candidly admits, viewed the issue from the eugenics population control position. And, she admits that her position later changed when McRae upheld the Hyde Amendment that prevents Medicaid subsidization of abortion on demand - she apparently saw the implications of a federal government in the eugenics population control business, likely in the precedent set by the Nazis.
When Roe was decided, "frankly [Ginsberg] had thought that" the basis may have been concern about the sustainability of population growth. Overpopulation had become a household word. Paul Ehrlich's book "The Population Bomb" had become a bestseller. Ginsburg said nothing about eugenics; you are putting words in her mouth. By 1973 eugenics had been long discredited by the excesses of the rightwing Nazis, who thought there were no inherent human rights they were bound to acknowledge.
I'm not twisting Ginsburg's words or removing them from context. Ginsburg, left-wing Supreme Court justice, were she on the Supreme Court in 1973, would have extra-Constitutionally created the "right to abortion on demand" on eugenics grounds. Certain people shouldn't breed, and Hitler's heroine and left-wing eugenicist population planning advocate Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood set up abortion clinics wherever the targeted population, poor black mothers, could walk or be bussed.
You are misreading her words to please yourself, and omitting words that don't fit your pre-conception. Ginsburg's judgment would not have been made on eugenics grounds, as you speculate. Ginsburg made it clear in the New York Times interview from which you took an excerpt that you thought you could disingenuously distort the meaning of to defame her----she made it clear that it was not about forcible government action but about women's reproductive rights and a woman's right to freely choose, provided by the Constitution:
Q: When you say that reproductive rights need to be straightened out, what do you mean?
JUSTICE GINSBURG: The basic thing is that the government has no business making that choice for a woman.
She went on to say, "It will be, it should be, that this is a woman’s decision. It’s entirely appropriate to say it has to be an informed decision .... I still think, although I was much too optimistic in the early days, that the possibility of stopping a pregnancy very early is significant. The morning-after pill will become more accessible and easier to take. So I think the side that wants to take the choice away from women and give it to the state, they’re fighting a losing battle. Time is on the side of change." In other words, it was not for purposes of forcible government intervention that abortion is legitimate, in her view.
"A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education," said Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican conservative. It's hard to imagine any sober liberal ever saying that.
Concluded
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people," said Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican conservative, expressing traditional conservative distrust of government. His saying, "Speak softly, but carry a big stick" is the oft-quoted motto of many a hardline conservative. "Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country." This proposed enforcement by Roosevelt of English-only using the threat of government force would be approved by many conservatives. "Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind," said Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican conservative, expressing a great thought that gave emphasis to traditional conservative disdain of intellectuality. "The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight," said Teddy Roosevelt. No responsible conservative could take issue with that.
Socialists have hijacked the word "liberal" after their fellow leftists Hitler and Stalin made Socialism unpalatable. American conservatism is best described as "classical liberalism:" individual freedom from restraint, individual property rights, natural rights, the protection of civil liberties, equality under the law, constitutional limitation of government and free markets.
In fact, the word 'liberal' predates 'socialist' in the language, and they are not synonyms, rightwing usage notwithstanding. It seems you would be more comfortable being called a 'classical leftist' than a 'conservative'. Ironically, in the early 21st century, those of us who call ourselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative. while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical. Liberals want to restore and protect middle class society, while those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history. Liberals defend longstanding institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions. Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want Republican presidents to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisoned people without charges, and they supported subjecting them to torture.
You know, the founding principles of America that "conservatives" want to "conserve."
Fundamentally, conservatives want to conserve the status quo. The only changes they are likely to support are changes that reverse necessary growth and return to the status quo of some "golden age".
The left has made "liberal" an ugly word by calling themselves that. This is primarily why I refer to leftists, not "liberals," when discussing politics. Nobody gets to dance around definitions that way, and the Nazis get to stay on the left-wing with the enemies of capitalism, where they belong.
Although decades of big-lie rightwing propaganda have had a modicum of success in making 'liberal' an ugly word, Jonah Goldberg does not shy away from using it or claim that that title belongs to conservatives by privileged right. Unlike you, he does not tap dance around it in an attempt to usurp credit for liberals' triumphs in the civil rights struggle. In a straightforward manner, he admits liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race. Conservatives, he admits, were on the wrong side on the issue of race. Ignoring his point is wrong, and vociferous self-satisfying proclamations that liberals had little or nothing to do with civil rights legislation are even more wrong. I can understand your discomfort, beamish, but history is not yours to make of it what you please.
I do not diminish WF Buckley's role in modern conservative political organizing by not crediting him as the "founder of modern conservatism." Modern conservatism has many influences and "founders," far too many to list in detail here.
I will not waste my time using Buckley's 1957 article to teach you English grammar and subject-verb agreement. Suffice it to say the end of that article drives Buckley's thinking home:
The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro--and a great many Whites--to cast an enlightened and responsible vote.
My grandfather was a part of that effort as a Republican Party organizer registering blacks to vote in Birmingham, Alabama and employing blacks in his shop. DemoKKKrats burned his business to the ground for this.
Buckley continues: The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve teh Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
Buckley was no racist, nor was he a white supremacist. He clearly saw that the South was doing precisely what he said "it must not do." The governments of the Southern states, with their legacy of Democrat-instituted Jim Crow social policies, was the problem.
Thankfully through the hard work of Christian conservative grassroot organizers like my grandfather, a few Democrats began to join the fight for civil rights that Republicans began 100 years before them. To smear Buckley as a white supremacist as you have attempted to do in the light of history and Buckley's own words of admonishment directed at the Southern Democrat maintenance of Jim Crow laws merely reflects poorly on your reading comprehension as an imbecilic leftist (forgive the redundancy). Buckley had the principled libertarian stance of not reversing inequality under the law by creating inequality in the opposite direction, as Democrats opposed to the 1964 revival of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 attempted to do by peppering it with amendments that didn't pass Constititional muster before the Supreme Court in 1883, and likely wouldn't in 1964 much less today.
Thank goodness Republicans led by Senator Dirksen presented an more Constitutionally sound alternative and twisted arms (including President Johnson's) into signing it. Was there a version of the Civil Rights Act that wouldn't have "lost Democrats the South for a generation?" Hello?
Theodore Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick" doesn't make him a conservative any more than Al Gore (while campaigning for the Vice-Presidency) complaining about "known terrorist sponsor Saddam Hussein" being left in power after Desert Storm makes Gore a conservative. And considering Roosevelt used his "big stick" to bludgeon the private sector economy with "Square Deal" anti-capitalist regulations, uh, no. Not conservative.
And as long as you're trying to pin down the left-wing race-scientific socialists of Nazi Germany as individual freedom, laissez faire, limited government advocates (aka "right-wing conservatives"), the only tapdance here is your spastic leftist twitching when you hear your Nazi name called.
Still not going to address Jonah Goldberg's statement, eh, beamish? Barack Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are not Nazis, your Nazi-emulating smear-mongering propaganda notwithstanding.
I do not diminish WF Buckley's role in modern conservative political organizing by not crediting him as the "founder of modern conservatism." Modern conservatism has many influences and "founders," far too many to list in detail here.
Buckley established himself as intellectual father to modern conservatism in 1955, when he founded National Review.According to the New York Times, his "refined, perspicacious mind" was the key factor to "elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse."
On his death in 2008, Timothy Noah wrote, “Buckley gathered and sifted through these disparate groups [of conservative WASP aristocrats], spurning the anti-Semites and anti-Catholics (prompting the John Birch Society to tag him the "pied piper for the establishment"), tolerating but not joining the racists and the nativists, and embracing the libertarians so long as they didn't disparage religious belief.”
I will not waste my time using Buckley's 1957 article to teach you English grammar and subject-verb agreement. Suffice it to say the end of that article drives Buckley's thinking home:
The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro--and a great many Whites--to cast an enlightened and responsible vote.
So it seems you believe it is the job of the government or a paramilitary to teach newly eligible voters how to use the vote in an enlightened and responsible way. And it seems you do not think this does violence to the spirit of American institutions. Does what you call "the atavistic will of the majority" (Buckley does not use such a crude term) require a countering government re-education program or the threat of violence to obtain what the elite deem enlightened and responsible voting behavior?
My grandfather was a part of that effort as a Republican Party organizer registering blacks to vote in Birmingham, Alabama and employing blacks in his shop. DemoKKKrats burned his business to the ground for this.
In that era, although political parties were less polarized, the party affiliations of liberals and conservatives were to a large degree the reverse of what they usually are today, especially in the South. But every liberal, including me, would have no ideological hesitation to praise and thank your grandfather for the heroic deeds you describe.
Buckley continues: The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve teh Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
What Buckley neglects to mention is that the South was using its supposedly superior moral power to perpetuate the servile status of Negroes in post-Civil War society. I wonder if Buckley would have had similar reservations about newly enfranchised women in the 1920s.
Many rightwingers have claimed that 95% of blacks voted as a bloc for Obama solely on grounds of race identity. Should these “atavistic” blacks be kept from voting until Republican organizers can re-educate them so as to be “in step with civilization”?
“Political scientists assert that minorities do not vote as a unit. Women do not vote as a bloc, they contend; nor do Jews, or Catholics, or laborers, or nudists--nor do Negroes; nor will the enfranchised Negroes of the South. If that is true, the South will not hinder the Negro from voting….,” said Buckley.
Continued
Buckley was no racist, nor was he a white supremacist. He clearly saw that the South was doing precisely what he said "it must not do." The governments of the Southern states, with their legacy of Democrat-instituted Jim Crow social policies, was the problem.
I take note that you said "Democrat-instituted Jim Crow" not "liberal-instituted Jim Crow", which would be an ideological oxymoron. Those who instituted the Jim Crow laws put a high value on private property and cultural tradition. So it couldn’t have been “leftist-instituted”.
Thankfully through the hard work of Christian conservative grassroot organizers like my grandfather, a few Democrats began to join the fight for civil rights that Republicans began 100 years before them. To smear Buckley as a white supremacist as you have attempted to do in the light of history and Buckley's own words of admonishment directed at the Southern Democrat maintenance of Jim Crow laws merely reflects poorly on your reading comprehension as an imbecilic leftist (forgive the redundancy) .
Putting words in my mouth and in the mouths of others is an imbecilic habit of yours. I did not call Buckley a white supremacist----even though he said the White community was the advanced race (for the time being). Buckley was too subtle to be captured in such a simple equivalence as that. He said he could adduce statistics to prove "the median cultural superiority of White over Negro." Thus, the enfranchised Negro would seem to pose a threat to civilization, as Southerners knew it, statistically speaking. But the notion that valid conclusions could be drawn from racial statistics had its origin in eugenics studies.
Buckley had the principled libertarian stance of not reversing inequality under the law by creating inequality in the opposite direction, as Democrats opposed to the 1964 revival of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 attempted to do by peppering it with amendments that didn't pass Constititional muster before the Supreme Court in 1883, and likely wouldn't in 1964 much less today.
According to the online free encyclopedia, Many of the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 [passed in the waning days of Reconstruction] were passed into law in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act using the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.
The Act guaranteed that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in "public accommodations" (i.e. inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement) [Public scchool desegragation was stricken at the last moment.].…. In the 1883 Civil Rights Cases the Supreme Court deemed the act unconstitutional on the basis that Congress had no power to regulate the conduct of individuals. The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination by the state, not by individuals.
Thank goodness Republicans led by Senator Dirksen presented an more Constitutionally sound alternative and twisted arms (including President Johnson's) into signing it. Was there a version of the Civil Rights Act that wouldn't have "lost Democrats the South for a generation?" Hello?
So as to deny any credit to liberal Democrats, you unscrupulously overstate the role of Everett Dirksen. If Johnson had not done the arm-twisting with the Senate that he was noted for and signed the bill, U.S. electoral history would have been markedly different. Then Zell Miller, who, voicing conservative Southern Democrats’ outraged sense of betrayal, called him a traitor to the South, would not have done so.
Concluded
Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who genuinely liked Sen. Dirksen, paid ample homage to his enormous ego, and needed his legislative support. "A shrewd tactician and a good committee man, Dirksen was sometimes mocked for his tendency to change his mind on crucial issues, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (he initially opposed it and then urged support of it." As Dirksen said at the time, quoting Victor Hugo, "Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come."
Theodore Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick" doesn't make him a conservative any more than Al Gore (while campaigning for the Vice-Presidency) complaining about "known terrorist sponsor Saddam Hussein" being left in power after Desert Storm makes Gore a conservative. And considering Roosevelt used his "big stick" to bludgeon the private sector economy with "Square Deal" anti-capitalist regulations, uh, no. Not conservative.
So, Teddy was a proto-Nazi, huh? Who knew?
Despite his strong anti-trust record, most of big business remained staunchly Republican in 1904. J.P. Morgan contributed $150,000. Nothing else he said shows his conservative orientation? His insistence on U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere was a large part of his Big Stick Diplomacy.
Hey, he was a Republican president——according to your uncompromising Manichaean point of view: Republicans good, Democrats evil. Or maybe it’s not as simple as you’d like it be.
And as long as you're trying to pin down the left-wing race-scientific socialists of Nazi Germany as individual freedom, laissez faire, limited government advocates (aka "right-wing conservatives"), the only tapdance here is your spastic leftist twitching when you hear your Nazi name called.
How comfortingly simple things must be in the mind of someone like yourself who believes anyone is a Nazi who doesn't subscribe unquestioningly to modern conservatism's alleged trinity of core principles. So simple an equation is at the base of all oppression by authoritarian governments.
Back in the day when conservatives favored kings instead of captains of industry, they did not call themselves "individual freedom, laissez faire, limited government advocates." If that's how you wish to define modern conservatives, then those of us who (despite demeaning rightwing propaganda) are brave enough to call ourselves liberal are conservatives, too. American liberals believe in freedom of the individual, including the right of women to choose their destiny and of gays to be themselves in the military and elsewhere; laissez faire capitalism, with minimal government regulation to insure fair competition, the protection of public health, and the prevention of a national economic meltdown; and limited government, especially with regard to the bedrooms of America and the power of officials to detain or physically abuse people. We also support democracy, Universal Suffrage unsupervised by a self-selected "civilized" elite, human rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law–––which makes us proud liberals.
Still not going to address Jonah Goldberg's statement, eh, beamish? Barack Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are not Nazis, your Nazi-emulating smear-mongering propaganda notwithstanding.
Obama, Ginsburg, and the Nazis have leftism in common.
according to your uncompromising Manichaean point of view: Republicans good, Democrats evil.
Not my view at all.
There have been some horrible Republican presidents.
There has never been a good Democrat president.
according to your uncompromising Manichaean point of view: Republicans good, Democrats evil.
beamish: Not my view at all.
There have been some horrible Republican presidents.
There has never been a good Democrat president.
I was simplifying, but nonetheless let me publish a correction:
In your humble albeit extreme judgment----some Republicans good, all Democrats bad.
In the objective world, that doesn't mean much, but I appreciate your letting me know how you feel.
A body acted on by forces acting jointly describes the diagonal of a parallelogram in the same time in which it would describe the sides if the forces were acting separately.
Still not going to address Jonah Goldberg's statement, eh, beamish? Barack Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are not Nazis, your Nazi-emulating smear-mongering propaganda notwithstanding.
Obama, Ginsburg, and the Nazis have leftism in common.
This repetitious contention of yours is an "atavistic" one, a throwback to Nazi propaganda tactics,not in step with enlightened civilization. Hence, indubitably, William F. Buckley would have wanted to get you in his re-education program, beamish.
Obama, Ginsburg, and the Nazis do not have leftism in common. The Nazis hated every ideology on the left.
Besides, you, I, and David Duke have being American in common. So what? The three of us couldn't be politically more different from each other.
Liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race.
— Jonah Goldberg
Back in the day when conservatives favored kings instead of captains of industry, they did not call themselves "individual freedom, laissez faire, limited government advocates." If that's how you wish to define modern conservatives, then those of us who (despite demeaning rightwing propaganda) are brave enough to call ourselves liberal are conservatives, too.
Classical liberalism is conservatism is right-wing.
American liberals were and are classical liberals, who began with an entrenched suspicion of the power of monarchies and authoritarian governments. Conservatism is often usurpation and traditionalization of what liberalism has demonstrated to be to the public good.
I've already accepted that you're to the right of Hitler and Stalin, but not right enough to get completely away from their socialist paths to totalitarianism.
That doesn't matter. I've already accepted that you would like to unreasonably attack liberals by radically redefining the political spectrum so as to make it seem "leftism" is the source of every evil in the world.
The fact is: Both Hitler and Stalin had contempt for individual freedom, human rights, the rule of law, and tolerance of more than one political party----and that constitutes the primary reason U.S. liberals utterly reject their systems of government.
So, Hitler and Stalin remain as your fellow leftists.
I understand you want to distance yourself from the truth.
Although in principle there were significant differences between fascism and nonfascist conservatism, the two camps shared some of the same goals, which in times of crisis led some nonfascists to collaborate with fascists. As Weiss observed, “Any study of fascism which centers too narrowly on the fascists and Nazis alone may miss the true significance of right-wing extremism. For without necessarily becoming party members or accepting the entire range of party principles themselves, aristocratic landlords, army officers, government and civil service officials, and important industrialists in Italy and Germany helped bring fascists to power.” Without the aid of President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Franz von Papen, and other German conservatives, Hitler, who never won an electoral majority, would not have been appointed chancellor.
During the Great Depression, thousands of middle-class conservatives fearful of the growing power of the left abandoned traditional right-wing parties and adopted fascism. The ideological distance traveled from traditional conservatism to Nazism was sometimes small, since many of the ideas that Hitler exploited in the 1930s had long been common currency within the German right.
— Encyclopædia Britannica, 2009.
The Nazis hated every ideology on the left.
All leftists hate every ideology on the left except their own.
Washington Post columnists Jim Hoagland (a centrist), E.J. Dionne (a liberal) and Harold Meyerson (very, very liberal) have all suggested that Obama intentionally or otherwise is putting us on the path to "social democracy." Left-wing blogger and Democratic activist Matthew Yglesias last fall hoped that the financial crisis offered a "real opportunity" for "massive socialism." Polling done by Rasmussen — and touted by Meyerson — shows that while Republicans favor "capitalism" over "socialism" by 11 to 1, Democrats favor capitalism by a mere 39% to 30%. So, again: Is it really crazy to think that there is a constituency for some flavor of socialism in the Democratic Party?
When the question is aimed at them like an accusation, liberals roll their eyes at such "paranoia." They say Obama is merely reviving "New Deal economics" to "save" or "reform" capitalism. But liberals themselves have long seen this approach as the best way to incrementally bring about a European-style, social democratic welfare state. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (Robert's father) wrote in 1947, "There seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals."
Personally, I think socialism is the wrong word for all of this. "Corporatism" — the economic doctrine of fascism — fits better. Under corporatism, all the big players in the economy — big business, unions, interest groups — sit around the table with government at the head, hashing out what they think is best for everyone to the detriment of consumers, markets and entrepreneurs. But, take it from me, liberals are far more open to the argument that they're "crypto-socialists." - Jonah Goldberg
The Nazis were leftists. They sure as hell were not right wing. The Nazis may have not preached and practiced your favorite flavor of leftism. But given your devotion to party and Obama, perhaps to your impending embarassment, they did:
"We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the right of self-determination of people." (The right-wing is all about extending the vote to non-citizens outside their nation's borders?)
"We demand equality of rights for the German people in respect to the other nations; abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain." (Because right-wingers really want to reform international law?)
"We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people, and colonization for our surplus population." (Because right-wingers have a Manifest Destiny to take land from others?)
"Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race." (Because right-wingers so hate religious freedom?)
"Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest, and must be under the authority of legislation for foreigners." (Because right-wingers are all about having different laws for certain people?)
"The right to determine matters concerning administration and law belongs only to the citizen. Therefore we demand that every public office, of any sort whatsoever, whether in the Reich, the county or municipality, be filled only by citizens. We combat the corrupting parliamentary economy, office-holding only according to party inclinations without consideration of character or abilities." (Because only right-wingers care about an office-holder's birth certificate?)
"We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to sustain the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) are to be expelled from the Reich." (Because right-wingers are all about their government providing welfare and employment services and finding a way to pay for it later?)
"Any further immigration of non-citizens is to be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans, who have immigrated to Germany since [2 August 1914], be forced immediately to leave the Reich." (Because right-wingers so hate both immigration amnesty and legal paths to citizenship?)
"All citizens must have equal rights and obligations.
The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all." (Because right-wingers are totally against profitting from one's own labor?)
"Consequently we demand: Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery." (Because we all know right-wingers just hate property owners and corporate stockholders?)
"In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people." (Because the right-wing hates the defense industry?)
"Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits." (Because windfall profits taxes are so so very right-wing?)
"We demand the nationalisation of all (previous) associated industries (trusts)." (Because right-wingers need to pass economic stimulus RIGHT NOW?!)
"We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries." (Because all right-wingers really want is to make heavy industry unprofitable?)
"We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare." (Because right-wingers are dead-set against privatization of Social Security and Medicare types of programs?)
"We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality." (Because the right-wing just can't stand it that their government isn't centrally planning the distribution of goods and snuffing out entrepreneurial competition?)
"We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land." (Because not only do right-wingers hate property owners and stockholders, they want to do away with private property and real estate investment?)
"We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race." (Because no greater cry of right-wing revolutionary thought is "DEATH TO CAPITALISTS?")
"We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order." (Because right-wingers remember too well the Paris Commune would have worked if the gold in the treasury would have been seized like right-wing champion Karl Marx and others urged?)
"The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession." (Because right-wingers so love Departments of Education?)
"The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young." (Because personal health care decisions and the medical insurance industry is something right-wingers want the government to own and control?)
"We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army." (Because right-wingers all believe that only the government should be armed?)
"We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands." (Because right-wingers are upset promulgation of alternate media sources like blogs and talk radio?)
"We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: The good of the state before the good of the individual." (Because right-wingers all believe that anyone who takes care of himself before taking care of the world is a tool of the Jews?)
"For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general. The forming of state and profession chambers for the execution of the laws made by the Reich within the various states of the confederation. The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration." (Because above all else, right-wingers want a strong, intrusive, centrally-planned socialist dictatorship without debate right friggin' now!?)
No, PsiBond. The Nazis were leftists. Your fellow leftists.
You might even call them messianic "hope and change" leftists.
The Nazis hated every ideology on the left
All leftists hate every ideology on the left except their own.
If that's true, why do you expect anyone to believe, as you suggest, that liberals look favorably on socialism? Nazis had an expressed total ideological hatred of liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and liberalism. That is, they rejected leftist ideas.
It's not surprising that people on the right hate the thinking of those on the left. But that people on the left completely hate every other type of leftist thinking is not a rational contention.
Washington Post columnists Jim Hoagland (a centrist), E.J. Dionne (a liberal) and Harold Meyerson (very, very liberal) have all suggested that Obama intentionally or otherwise is putting us on the path to "social democracy." Left-wing blogger and Democratic activist Matthew Yglesias last fall hoped that the financial crisis offered a "real opportunity" for "massive socialism." Polling done by Rasmussen — and touted by Meyerson — shows that while Republicans favor "capitalism" over "socialism" by 11 to 1, Democrats favor capitalism by a mere 39% to 30%. So, again: Is it really crazy to think that there is a constituency for some flavor of socialism in the Democratic Party?
Yes, beamish, it is crazy to think that given what you asserted above, namely that, "All leftists hate every ideology on the left except their own." The question posed in the cited poll by the rightwing Rasmussen did not define either capitalism or socialism. The fact is, a majority of liberal Democrats favor a free-market economy.
When the question is aimed at them like an accusation, liberals roll their eyes at such "paranoia." They say Obama is merely reviving "New Deal economics" to "save" or "reform" capitalism. But liberals themselves have long seen this approach as the best way to incrementally bring about a European-style, social democratic welfare state. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (Robert's father) wrote in 1947, "There seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals."
That may have appeared to some to be a sensible perspective in 1947. But, some sixty years later, total government control of the economy is not on the horizon. Subsequent history has shown that government-managed economies, particularly a USSR-like economy, are prone to be infeasible.
Personally, I think socialism is the wrong word for all of this. "Corporatism" — the economic doctrine of fascism — fits better. Under corporatism, all the big players in the economy — big business [which is energized by entrepreneurs], unions [which are profoundly affected by markets], interest groups [which would include consumer and various market groups, and congressmen advocating for their businessmen constituents] — sit around the table [that must be an enormous table], with government at the head[which is unlikely to have business acumen], hashing out what they think is best for everyone to the detriment of consumers, markets and entrepreneurs [who can believe a democratic people will support that?]. But, take it from me, liberals are far more open to the argument that they're "crypto-socialists." - Jonah Goldberg.
Personally, I think compulsive simplistic nanoscale taxonomy of ideologies has grown into a self-rewarding cottage industry for fuming far-right commentators. Take it from me, liberals are fully aware that far rightwingers are maniacally bent on developing devious arguments associating liberals with defamed ideologies so as to imprison them, figuratively speaking, in a public concentration camp of the mind, which intolerant behavior may be a Dr. Strangelove-like self-betrayal–––yet, those hoping to keep a shred of dignity do not deny that liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race.— psi bond
The Nazis were leftists. They sure as hell were not right wing. The Nazis may have not preached and practiced your favorite flavor of leftism. But given your devotion to party and Obama, perhaps to your impending embarassment [sic], they did:
Repeat "The Nazis were leftists" three times and you can be made an honorary Nazi propagandist. I'm sure that wouldn't embarrass you.
"We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the right of self-determination of people." (The right-wing is all about extending the vote to non-citizens outside their nation's borders?)
Nice try, beamish, but this is a reference to Nazi Pan-German nationalism, not to any liberal policy on immigration. Self-determination was intended to apply to countries with large German populations like Austria, which favored unification with Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
"We demand equality of rights for the German people in respect to the other nations; abrogation of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain." (Because right-wingers really want to reform international law?)
Far rightwingers in the U.S. deny the legitimacy of international law. They promote the idea that the U.S. should only recognize its own law, and act accordingly.
"We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people, and colonization for our surplus population." (Because right-wingers have a Manifest Destiny to take land from others?)
Yes, far rightwingers used the concept of Manifest Destiny to justify westward expansion in America at the expense of the Native Americans, who were subjected to massacres and forced marches.
"Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race." (Because right-wingers so hate religious freedom?)
Nice try, beamish, but this clause wasn't about religious freedom, but about racial purity. German-born Jews were not allowed to be German citizens.
"Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest, and must be under the authority of legislation for foreigners." (Because right-wingers are all about having different laws for certain people?)
Nice try, beamish, but this clause is not about having different laws for certain people, but about recognizing the rights of citizenship only for those who meet (racial) standards established by the government.
"The right to determine matters concerning administration and law belongs only to the citizen. Therefore we demand that every public office, of any sort whatsoever, whether in the Reich, the county or municipality, be filled only by citizens. We combat the corrupting parliamentary economy, office-holding only according to party inclinations without consideration of character or abilities." (Because only right-wingers care about an office-holder's birth certificate?)
Does that mean that every country is Nazi if it prohibits non-citizens from becoming head of government?
Only far rightwingers, deeply suspicious of the American-ness of many American citizens (as the Nazis were of the German-ness of German citizens), make a fuss about a Democratic president's birth certificate that has been certified to exist by the conservative World Net Daily. McCain, by the way, was not born in one of the fifty states, and a daily newspaper in Hawaii carried a contemporary announcement of Obama's birth.
Concluded
"We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to sustain the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) are to be expelled from the Reich." (Because right-wingers are all about their government providing welfare and employment services and finding a way to pay for it later?)
Because many far rightwingers want to summarily deport millions of non-citizens who have lived in the U.S. and contributed to its economy for years. This clause reflects the conservative lack of accommodation and generosity toward foreigners that was endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt, when he said, "Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country." Consistently, Teddy Roosevelt also felt that society had no business tolerating its unfit members, who couldn't pull their own weight ("The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.").
In the United States, degenerationism translated into alarm about immigrant invasions and miscegenation, and admonitions against "race suicide," which President Theodore Roosevelt, for one, was convinced was jeopardizing America's vitality and global stature. Eugenics was sown in the soil of degenerationism.
— Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation, 2005, p. 14.
Thanks for reposting the 1920 25-point totalitarian programme of the Nazi Party. Hitler did not mention any of the planks of the programme in Mein Kampf and he only mentioned it in passing as “the so-called programme of the movement”. Your labors do not help make your absurd case, beamish.
Intellectual origins of fascism
Mussolini and Hitler did not invent fascist ideology. Indeed, fascism was neither a 20th-century creation nor a peculiarly Italian or German one. Originating in the 19th century, fascist ideas appeared in the works of writers from France as well as Austria, Germany, and Italy, including political theorists such as Theodor Fritsch, Paul Anton de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Joseph de Maistre, Charles Maurras, and Georges Sorel; scientists and philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Giovanni Gentile, Gustave Le Bon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vilfredo Pareto, Karl Vogt, and Ernst Haeckel; historians and social thinkers such as Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau, Hippolyte Taine, and Heinrich von Treitschke; artists, writers, and journalists such as Gabriele D'Annunzio, Richard Wagner, Édouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, and Guido von List; and conservative politicians such as Otto Böckel and Adolf Stoecker.
Many fascist ideas derived from the reactionary backlash to the progressive revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 and to the secular liberalism and social radicalism that accompanied these upheavals. De Maistre condemned the 18th-century Enlightenment for having subverted the dominance of traditional religion and traditional elites and paid homage to the public executioner as the protector of a divinely sanctioned social hierarchy. Taine lamented the rise to power of the masses, whom he suggested were at a lower stage of biological evolution than aristocrats. Le Bon wrote a primer on how to divert the barbarism of the masses from revolution to reaction. Barrès fused ethnic rootedness with authoritarian nationalism and contended that too much civilization led to decadence and that hatred and violence were energizing remedies.
German populist politicians and writers such as Stoecker, Böckel, and Fritsch extolled the idea of racially pure peasants close to the soil who would one day follow a charismatic leader able to intuit the Volk soul without benefit of elections. Anti-Semitism was a staple in the work of Drumont, Maurras, Lagarde, Langbehn, and a host of other best-selling authors. Britain's Houston Stewart Chamberlain preached Aryan racism, and many of the anti-Semitic ideas espoused by Carl Lueger's Christian Social Party and Georg von Schönerer's Pan-German movement in Austria were later adopted by Hitler.
Racial Darwinists such as Vogt, Haeckel, Treitschke, Langbehn, Lagarde, and Chamberlain glorified the survival of the fittest, scolded humanitarians for attempting to protect the racially unfit, and rejected the idea of social equality (“Equality is death, hierarchy is life,” wrote Langbehn). Chamberlain saw no reason to give inferior races equal rights. Treitschke raged against democracy, socialism, and feminism (all of which he attributed to Jews), insisted that might made right, and praised warrior imperialism (“Brave peoples expand, cowardly peoples perish”). Lagarde said of the Slavs that “the sooner they perish the better it will be for us and them,” and he called for the extermination of the Jews—a sentiment that was shared by his contemporary Langbehn. As John Weiss remarked of Lagarde and Langbehn, “The two most influential and popular intellectuals of late nineteenth century Germany were indistinguishable from Nazi ideologists.” Weiss also noted that “the press and popular magazines of Germany and Central Europe had fed a steady diet of racial nationalism to the public since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and anti-Semitic stereotypes were nothing if not commonplace in German mass culture.”
Concluded
In the late 19th century many conservative nationalists were philosophical idealists who accused liberals and socialists of materialism and thereby portrayed their own politics as more spiritual. Other 19th-century thinkers propagated some protofascist ideas while rejecting others. Nietzsche rhapsodized about the heroic vitality of elite souls who were uninhibited by Christian ethics or liberal humanitarianism, but he was appalled by völkisch nationalism and anti-Semitism. Similarly, Sorel preached violence as an antidote for decadence—an idea that Mussolini admired—but his economic thought was too socialistic for most fascists.
— Encyclopædia Britannica, 2009
In Italy thousands of landowners and businessmen were grateful to Mussolini's Blackshirts for curbing the socialists in 1920–21, and many in the army and the Catholic church saw fascism as a bulwark against communism. Before the beginning of Franco's rule in Spain, many monarchists had close relations with the Falange. Although the Franco regime arrested some of its fascist rivals, it gave others important positions in its propaganda agencies. Horthy's government in Hungary was soft on fascism, and in its early stages it employed fascist methods itself, sending strong-arm squads to raid leftist trade unions, clubs, and newspaper offices and countenancing the slaughter of hundreds of communists and socialists throughout the country. In Greece, King George II and conservatives in the parliament helped Metaxas to establish his dictatorship in 1936.
Fascists also received support from Christian conservatives. Between 1930 and 1932 Hitler was supported by many Protestant voters in rural Prussia, and after 1933 the Catholic church in Germany largely accommodated itself to his regime. In 1933 the Vatican, which had previously interdicted Catholic membership in socialist organizations, signed a concordat with Germany that forbade priests to speak out on politics and gave Hitler a say in naming bishops.
In France the leading Catholic newspaper, La Croix, expressed early support for Hitler's crusade against bolshevism, and the largest Catholic parliamentary party, the Republican Federation (Fédération Republicaine), included fascists in its ranks. In 1936, when the Cross of Fire became an electoral party (changing its name to the French Social Party), it absorbed much of the Republican Federation's membership.
— Encyclopædia Britannica, 2009
I accept that there are many different degrees and strains of socialist philosophy and approaches to creating a centrally planned economy under a strong government.
And I accept that all of these degrees and strains are left-wing.
Leftists that want to call themselves "liberals" usually try to deny an association with socialism because of the history of socialist governments like Hitler's.
But it doesn't make these "liberals" or the Nazis less leftist.
Hitler's on your side of the left-right spectrum. You can argue with his particular approach to socialism. You can't make him not a socialist. You can't make him not left-wing.
In fact, in generosity, I'd say you're probably better than your fellow leftists in the Nazi Party because you wish to be to the right of them.
If that's true, why do you expect anyone to believe, as you suggest, that liberals look favorably on socialism? Nazis had an expressed total ideological hatred of liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and liberalism. That is, they rejected leftist ideas.
Many of today's "liberals" and "social democrats" are in fact crypto-socialists (see Norman Thomas quote above) and would have no serious objection to the corporatist approaches of either Mussolini, Hitler, or Obama.
beamish: ... it doesn't make these "liberals" or the Nazis less leftist.
Your authoritarian edicts don't make liberals Nazis or you respectable; they just reflect your political extremism. As well as your fondness for your frivolous name game: Leftist, Democrat, socialist. Classical far-right conservatives have fully absorbed Adolf Hitler's lesson: "The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."
The truth is, most conservative Republicans accept some elements of what you strive to vilify with the name of socialism----whether it is Social Security benefits, Medicare, unemployment benefits, veterans' benefits, or some other government program.
I agree, beamish, that, as an extremist, you are driven by a compulsive need that makes you just want to call liberals Nazis in your conniving, usually roundabout way----even though, altogether unlike Nazis, liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race.
All leftists hate every ideology on the left except their own.
If that's true, why do you expect anyone to believe, as you suggest, that liberals look favorably on socialism? Nazis had an expressed total ideological hatred of liberal democracy, socialism, communism, and liberalism. That is, they rejected leftist ideas.
Many of today's "liberals" and "social democrats" [sorry, but if you call yourself a social democrat, you cannot be a CRYPTO-socialist] are in fact crypto-socialists (see Norman Thomas quote above) and would have no serious objection to the corporatist approaches of either Mussolini, Hitler, or Obama.
As usual, you have no honest answer to my question.
Proponents of corporatism are found on both ends of the political spectrum.
Looking backward, the self-serving surmise of Norman Thomas (jubilantly quoted out-of-context all over the rightwing blogosphere) about what the American people will accept, was erroneous.
According to Wikipedia:
Corporatism has been supported from various proponents, including: absolutists, conservatives, fascists, progressives, reactionaries, socialists and theologians….
At a popular level in recent years "corporatism" has been used in a pejorative context to refer to the application of corporatism by fascist regimes or to mean the promotion of the interests of private business corporations in government over the interests of the public.... A number of reactionary corporatists favoured corporatism in order to end liberal capitalism and restore the feudal system..
Although concepts of corporatism have been traced back to ideas found in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, and Islam, there can be little real doubt that most liberals, including Obama, would reject in economically healthy times an undemocratic corporatist approach (in the pejorative sense of the term that you intend) by Obama or Bush or any other national leader.
But, if we are free to make any unbacked bizarre claim we like, let me join in the fun: Many contemporary conservatives are best described (sensu Vidal) as crypto-Nazis.
You're verbose, but still left-wing.
To the right of the leftist Nazis, but still leftist.
In Germany, between the world wars, a liberal democratic republic was superseded by a rightwing ultranationalist totalitarian regime, assisted by a conservative elite seeking to retain power:
Alongside the Germany of anti-Semitism there was a Germany of enlightened liberalism, humane concern, civilized rule of law, good government, social security, and thriving social democracy. Even Hitler's rise to power in January 1933 was not the result of electoral success (the Nazis' share of the vote had seriously declined in the fall of 1932). Rather, Hitler's triumph was the product of backstage machinations by conservative politicians and industrialists who overcame the hesitations of a senile president by convincing him (and themselves) that they were "hiring" Hitler to restore order and curb trade unions. Installing Hitler as chancellor was not the only alternative at the time.
— Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, 2002, pp. 11-12.
You're verbose, but still left-wing.
To the right of the leftist Nazis, but still leftist.
Dance as you might, you can't tell left from right.
Dance as you might, you can't tell left from right.
Sure I can.
The right has nothing to do with socialism, be it international in scope, or a modified version strictly tuned to a national identity.
The right would never have a politician in its ranks screaming about how he is a socialist seeking the destruction of capitalism.
The right's defining opposition to socialism would never have the right seek a "third way" between capitalism and socialism, as the Nazis did and today's Democrats do as "third way" hope and change crypto-socialists.
You don't have to be a full blown communist to be left-wing. All it takes is a dab of socialism in your politics to permanently jump the center line between left and right. You can flirt with it, and call yourself a "liberal," or you can dive in deeper into the left and call yourself a Nazi.
psi bond, that quote from Elon is THE lamest quote you could possibly find...who the heck cares what he said? He says what YOU want to hear, so that's gospel?
WOW
You should read more history yourself....You probably still think the Germans started WWI, too..:-)
Z,
The Elon quote is not that bothersome to me given the historical context - as there was "order to restore" in Germany in the early 1930s, and Hitler had a large enough following among his fellow leftists to have been considered a good "compromise" populist leader. Conservatives joined with Hitler's leftists to fight leftists that were further to the left. Conservatism did not produce Hitler, the Nazis never enacted any conservative programs, and by 1939, the Nazi government controlled over 80% of German production (i.e. socialism) and any conservatives that had helped Hitler become chancellor were long removed from any positions of power.
PsiBond's fellow leftists were having the leftist equivalent of an intellectual dispute (violent mobs, terror bombings, etc.) between international and national socialism, and communists were throwing bombs even in America at that time.
Hitler found a political third way that could deceive some on the left (electorally) and assuage the fears of traditional conservatives (with backstage deals) in order to further a quest to realize the ultranationalist rightwing dream of world domination and racial purity long held by the ultra-conservative Pan-Germanists, who formed Hitler's worldview. Your fellow far-rightwingers, beamish, in the blogosphere, are perpetuating a Nazi-like campaign of deception by repeating the slogan "Hitler was a leftist" in a desperate propaganda effort that they believe will attain for them and their views respectability.
I knew you'd take the bait
to just pontificate.
Preach your fallacious verbose variety of extremism to the world, beamish; you can't preach it to me.
Your pseudo-logic is not among the universal laws of logic: If A has character c2, it does not follow that it is a member of the set B of all entities with character c1, some of which have character c2. Rather, that's a perverted version of the inductive fallacy.
psi bond, that quote from Elon is THE lamest quote you could possibly find...who the heck cares what he said? He says what YOU want to hear, so that's gospel?
WOW.
I'm sorry that the late Amos Elon (July 4, 1926 – May 25, 2009) is disconcerting to your preconceptions, Z. But really you're saying you don't care what Elon says because it's far from what you wish to hear and want to believe. The fact is, Elon (born in Vienna, he immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1933 and studied law and history in Israel and England at Hebrew University and Cambridge) is not the only historian to say that Hitler was handed the reins of power by a powerful clique of conservatives.
You should read more history yourself....You probably still think the Germans started WWI, too..:-)
It may not be clear that any country actually wanted WWI, but certainly Germany, believing it had a lot to gain, had an influential hand in getting it going
If you feel free to indulge, Z, in belittling presumptions of no relevance about an opponent I'll have some fun, too:
You probably still don't think the Germans started WWII. I suppose Mr Z has a well-practiced argument to that point that turns history on its head :-)
"These parades are one of the most disgusting accompaniments of the war," he [Franz Kafka]noted. Like most people, he must have been convinced that everything would be over in a couple of weeks. Austrian warmongers were insistent on punishing Serbia for the assassination in Sarajevo (by a Bosnian adolescent) of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. It would have been in Germany's power at that stage to defuse or localize the mounting crisis, but the kaiser supported Austria in the name of "Nibelung loyalty." In reckless disregard of Europe's interlocking alliances, he risked world war by giving the Austrians the equivalent of a blank check. A cabal of conservative politicians and powerful generals in Berlin was interested in breaking the peace for its own reasons----to humiliate France and extend German power in Europe and overseas. A furious arms race----the first in the history of Europe----had been going on for almost a decade; still, the conservative schemers expected a quick victory, as in 1870. Intoxicated by his own rhetoric, the kaiser assured the soldiers that they would be home "before the leaves fall from the trees.
— Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, 2002, pp. 297-8.
In view of the catastrophe that ensued, its instigators later spoke of the First World War as a natural disaster far beyond their scope and responsibility, much like an earthquake or the eruption of a volcano. " I did not want it," the Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz-Josef fatuously declared just before his death in 1916, a remark that was bitterly parodied. William II [Kaiser Wilhelm] had some last-minute jitters. Former chancellor Bulow found him looking pallid, frightened, almost desperate. On July 30, the kaiser lamely asked his generals if the war could not be limited to the Balkans and was told that since war was bound to break out anyway within the next two years it was not in Germany's interest to delay it. Better to wage and win it now, they claimed before Russia finished building its Baltic fleet and laying strategic railway lines through Poland.
— Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933, 2002, p. 300.
PsiBond,
It is not a failure of inductive logic to find that the if the Nazis have universal political characteristics found on both sides of the political spectrum and specific political characteristics that by definition exclude it from the right-wing, then the Nazis were left-wing.
Besides, we can take Hitler at his word and deed. He said the Nazis were socialists, and the Nazis ruled with a socialist bent - nationalizing industries, absorbing unions members to execute the centrally planned economy to eradicate capitalism.
You can't revise history and make your fellow leftists in Nazi Germany into right-wingers any more than you'll have luck convincing a math professor that 2 + 2 = 5.
It is not a failure of inductive logic to find that the if the Nazis have universal political characteristics found on both sides of the political spectrum and specific political characteristics that by definition exclude it from the [present-day] right-wing, then the Nazis were left-wing.
Hitler was a lover of blonde women (c2), and he was a Nazi (c1).
Mr. X is a lover of blonde women (c2).
Therefore, Mr. X is a Nazi (c1).
That is inductive pseudo-logic, not Aristotelian deductive logic. It leads to absurd conclusions, as your specious arguments demonstrate.
Nazism has characteristics that exclude it by definition from the left and from liberalism. Especially, its utter contempt for egalitarianism, a contempt that it shares with paleoconservatives in America. Also, the Nazis' quest for the restoration of national glory by means of world domination, which is reflected to some extent in the appetite of many modern conservatives for global interventionism. And Nazism's disdain for international law and treaties, also shared by many modern conservatives. Conservatives' anti-immigrationism is consistent with Nazi concerns about racial hygiene and racial purity. The counterparts of these concerns in American society were rightwing-inspired miscegenation laws and the infamous National Origins Act, which, after decades of conflict, was finally repealed by a Congress in which liberals were the majority. All of these issues, beginning with anti-egalitarianism, are concerns that relate to the core concern of conservatism, conserving traditional society, what rightwing bloggers are fond of calling "civilization as we know it."
Besides, we can take Hitler at his word and deed. He said the Nazis were socialists, and the Nazis ruled with a socialist bent - nationalizing industries, absorbing unions members to execute the centrally planned economy to eradicate capitalism.
Like Hitler, you are shamelessly willing to say anything to try to gain some point. However, taking Hitler at his word is exactly what the Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did, to his everlasting shame in the rightwing blogosphere. Yes, Hitler said the Nazis were socialists, but he was lying, as no less than Winston Churchill proves----see the quote below from Churchill's WWII history. Government planned economies are not exclusive to socialist countries. It was instituted by Germany during WWI, enabling the country to continue its war effort for years despite shortages of labor and essential raw materials.
You can't revise history and make your fellow leftists in Nazi Germany into right-wingers any more than you'll have luck convincing a math professor that 2 + 2 = 5.
You delude yourself thinking far-rightwingers like you can revise history to suit their agenda. Reasonable folks are not convinced that the Nazis were leftwingers preaching equality and humanitarianism, in tandem with liberals. It is a lot easier to convince mathematicians that 1 + 1 = 10. Which it does in the binary system of numeration that is hardwired into all modern computers. (2 + 2 = 11 in the ternary system, by the way.)
On March 21, 1933 [on February 2, three days after being named chancellor, Hitler had already used his power to crack down on Communist Party members, arresting thousands], Hitler opened, in the garrison church at Potsdam, hard-by the tomb of Frederick the Great, the First Reichstag of the Third Reich. In the body of the church sat the representatives of the Reichswehr [the military organization of Germany from 1919 until 1935, when it was renamed the Wehrmacht], the symbol of the continuity of German might, and the senior officers of the S.A. and the S.S., the new figures of resurgent Germany. On March 24, the majority of the Reichstag overbearing or overaweing all opponents, confirmed by 441 votes to 94 complete emergency powers to Hitler for four years. As the result was announced, Hitler turned to the benches of the Socialists and cried, "And now I have no further need of you."
— Winston Churchill, The Second World War: The Gathering Storm, 1948, p. 70.
Hitler was a lover of blonde women (c2), and he was a Nazi (c1).
Mr. X is a lover of blonde women (c2).
Therefore, Mr. X is a Nazi (c1).
That is inductive pseudo-logic, not Aristotelian deductive logic. It leads to absurd conclusions, as your specious arguments demonstrate.
Respectfully I ask that you and all leftists stick to designing centrally planned forced labor camps and leave logic lessons to people with reading comprehension skills.
Since losing this exchange well over a month ago, you've done nothing but launch absurdity after absurdity in your efforts to expel the Nazis from among your fellow left-wingers and somehow make them right-wing by listing characteristics found in both left-wing and right-wing groups. After the weak argument that "nationalism" or "militarism" made the Nazis right-wing (when there are nationalists and militarists galore on the left-wing) I half expected you to list oxygen-breathing as a right-wing trait.
There is no way to make the Nazis a part of the right-wing, the side of the spectrum defined by belief in limited government power, individual freedom, and equality under the law.
You delude yourself thinking far-rightwingers like you can revise history to suit their agenda. Reasonable folks are not convinced that the Nazis were leftwingers preaching equality and humanitarianism, in tandem with liberals.
You delude yourself thinking that leftism is defined by humanitarianism and that Stalin and Hitler are to your right.
Hitler was a lover of blonde women (c2), and he was a Nazi (c1).
Mr. X is a lover of blonde women (c2).
Therefore, Mr. X is a Nazi (c1).
That is inductive pseudo-logic, not Aristotelian deductive logic. It leads to absurd conclusions, as your specious arguments demonstrate.
Respectfully I ask that you and all leftists stick to designing centrally planned forced labor camps and leave logic lessons to people with reading comprehension skills.
Logic is not the strong point of people like you who believe someone who disagrees with their ideology shows a lack of reading comprehension skills.
I sensibly suggest that anyone who believes, as you contend, that "we can take Hitler at his word", exhibits extreme foolishness. He's on a level with Neville Chamberlain, the conservative Prime Minister of Britain, who thought Hitler was a peace-loving guy who would not violate international treaties. Hitler was a world-class swindler who pathologically lied to the voters and had his aides stage street riots to create the impression that only he could restore order.
Since losing this exchange well over a month ago, you've done nothing but launch absurdity after absurdity in your efforts to expel the Nazis from among your fellow left-wingers and somehow make them right-wing by listing characteristics found in both left-wing and right-wing groups.
Failing to prove Hitler was a leftist, the only fallback strategy you have is the big-lie Nazi propaganda strategy ---- falsely repeating over and over that I lost the exchange. The truth is, Hitler turned his dictatorial power against all th leftists on the political scene, the liberals, democrats, socialists, and communists. He used the power of rightwing groups that backed him to destroy the left. One of his first acts as chancellor (which position he attained not through election but as a result of back-room dealing by conservative power brokers), was to launch a massive crackdown on the Communist Party. He followed that up with similar action toward the Socialists, after revealingly telling them, at the moment of his full empowerment, as Winston Churchill (the conservative icon) reports, "And now I have no further need of you." He dismantled the power of the left in Germany so he could put into effect his far-rightwing agenda unhindered.
Your arguments that he was a socialist because he said he was to voters and because he created a government-planned corporatist economy don't hold up. Contrary to what you profess to believe, he was not a man of his word, and, in WWI, the rightwing German regime had a government-planned corporatist economy that used forced labor. In fact, a special department set up in the War Ministry established the first truly planned modern economy in Europe during WWI. Without this planned economy, Germany might have succumbed in months; its adversaries had greater stocks of food, minerals, cannonballs, bullets, and open supply lines if stocks ran out.
After the weak argument that "nationalism" or "militarism" made the Nazis right-wing (when there are nationalists and militarists galore on the left-wing) I half expected you to list oxygen-breathing as a right-wing trait.
I have never said that mere "nationalism" and/or "militarism"----as evidenced in almost every country to varying degrees----made the Nazis rightwing. You are putting words in my mouth----again.
Concluded
To a certain extent, nationalism and militarism are healthy. Nonetheless, militarism is more consistent with rightwing than with leftwing viewpoints. In recent months, dozens of personal profiles of individuals listing "military" as their occupation have been found on a neo-Nazi website by investigators for the Southern Poverty Law Center (which urges Congress to investigate growing evidence that racial extremists are infiltrating the U.S. military and take steps to ensure that the armed forces are not inadvertently training future domestic terrorists). One person, apparently serving in Afghanistan, lists The Turner Diaries as his favorite book. That's the book by neo-Nazi leader William L. Pierce that served as the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing by Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh.
There is no way to make the Nazis a part of the right-wing, the side of the spectrum defined by belief in limited government power, individual freedom, and equality under the law.
That is the Goldwater creed of most modern conservatives, although many, probably most, conservatives would add to that, 'a strong military force'. (In 1964, by the way, Goldwater rejected a plank in favor of civil rights, which LBJ campaigned on. LBj won in a landslide.)
However, many conservatives have supported disregarding the principle of limited government power in the bedrooms and terminal sickrooms of America. Individual freedom may not survive the power of the government to conduct warrantless searches. Equality under the law was/is not a mantra of paleoconservatives, unless it is Jim Crow law. Nor was it the mantra of the Nazis.
Rightwingers behave somewhat like science-fiction shape-shifters. Today, most of those hoping to regain power are for equality under their circumscribed conditions. But, less than half a century ago, that was not so. Hitler was a shape-shifter, too, favoring the weak when his power was weak, but acting to further the interests of the strong when he was strong and on top.
You delude yourself thinking far-rightwingers like you can revise history to suit their agenda. Reasonable folks are not convinced that the Nazis were leftwingers preaching equality and humanitarianism, in tandem with liberals.
You delude yourself thinking that leftism is defined by humanitarianism and that Stalin and Hitler are to your right.
You deeply delude yourself believing you can make over history for your political needs to show that liberals were on the wrong side of history on the issue of race–––an ahistorical contention on which levelheaded rightwingers will give you no support.
You deeply delude yourself believing you can make over history for your political needs to show that liberals were on the wrong side of history on the issue of race–––an ahistorical contention on which levelheaded rightwingers will give you no support.
That would be the levelheaded Jonah Goldberg that makes a clear distinction between "classical liberalism" (American conservatives - small government, individual freedom, pro-laissez faire) and "social / progressive liberalism" (you belong to the state) and has researched and written a bestselling book Liberal Fascism showing not only the progressive leftist roots of Nazi belief and practice, but how they're still underlying the ideologies of "liberal" crypto-socialists today.
At long last, beamish, I’ve got you to acknowledge Goldberg's statement admitting that liberals were on the right side of history on the race issue. Goldberg is levelheaded----i.e., sensible----with regard to his acceptance of historical fact, which doesn't permit him to deny that liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race, but not so with regard to the pandering historical analysis he offers in his bestselling book.
His bestseller tells rightwingers what they wish to hear, insinuating that liberals are on the wrong side of politics by virtue of their supposed association with those who were .on the wrong side of history on the issue of race. His political analysis makes no real sense; hence it sells well to extremists.
It makes no sense that Hitler, who derived his power from a conservative clique, and violently destroyed the leftists in his country, was a leftist. It makes no sense that neo-Nazis who ally themselves with rightwing groups, are leftists. Not only does Goldberg misunderstand liberalism, but also he refuses to see it simply as liberalism. What is undeniably true is that liberalism has spread its influence around the world, not through coercion, but because of its universal appeal.
It's obvious, beamish, that Goldberg's polemical historical analysis is accepted by you as gospel, as the right's new Mein Kampf, but do you also accept his statement of historical fact recognizing that liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race?
I was wondering how long it would take you to feel comfortable enough to engage in Chomsky-approved leftist Holocaust denial.
Now the Jewish Jonah Goldberg has written a "new Mein Kampf?"
And this "neo-Nazi" Goldberg that "misunderstands liberalism" credits them with being on the "right side of history on race?"
You're pathetic, PsiBond. If "Liberal Fascism" is even remotely similar to "Mein Kampf" in your tiny mind, you might try reading both books before you burn them.
I have already pointed out that Goldberg is careful to not lose sight of the distinction and differences between classical liberalism and social / progressive liberalism.
American conservatives (like Goldberg) are "classical liberals." The progressive / social liberals in America began calling themselves "liberals" and classical liberals for the most part took on the name "conservative."
Goldberg correctly looks past names and delves into ideologies, and he finds that the governmental policies of Italian Fascism and German Nazism emerged directly and undeniably from the progressive left elitists and eugenicists / Social Darwinists of the late 19th / early 20th Century.
Not only were the Nazis left-wing, today's "New Left" isn't new.
I was wondering how long it would take you to feel comfortable enough to engage in Chomsky-approved leftist Holocaust denial.
In this ploy, you may be tryng some diversionary projecting, beamish, since I've done nothing of the sort.
Now the Jewish Jonah Goldberg has written a "new Mein Kampf?"
That isn't what I wrote.
Once again, a penchant for confusion is showing that induces you to develop absurd conclusions from false premises. In this case, the false premise from which you proceed is evidently due to faulty reading comprehension skills. I did not write that Jonah Goldberg (who is half Jewish, by the way) "has written a 'new Mein Kampf'". Read it again: What I wrote is that his book is accepted by you as such. Goldberg has written a rightwing-pleasing potboiler posing as serious historical analysis that you have obviously taken to be an absolutely true objective model of history.
And this "neo-Nazi" Goldberg that "misunderstands liberalism" credits them with being on the "right side of history on race?"
You're confused again, beamish. I didn't say he's a neo-Nazi; you're putting words in my mouth again. And, although the conservative Goldberg's book misunderstands the nature of liberalism and never examines the racial attitudes of the ideologies he discusses, he knows who are the liberals. Also, five years before the book's publication, he knew that as well when he wrote his statement admitting that liberals not conservatives were on the right side of history on the issue of race.
You're pathetic, PsiBond. If "Liberal Fascism" is even remotely similar to "Mein Kampf" in your tiny mind, you might try reading both books before you burn them.
Your presumption is pathetic: It is my liberal inclinations that prevent me from burning books. Goldberg wrote his book, as he admits, to exact revenge from liberals whom he said had called him and other conservatives fascists. In essence, he attempts to characterize liberals as vermin, which is how Hitler saw Jews in his book Mein Kampf. It is this bestselling rightwing populist image of them that spurs rightwing extremists like you to accept Goldberg's book as a modern manifesto for the removal and extermination of liberals from American political life.
I have already pointed out that Goldberg is careful to not lose sight of the distinction and differences between classical liberalism and social / progressive liberalism.
He loses sight of the fact that this wishfully retroactive dichotomy is not representative of the full political spectrum. Besides, classical liberalism has some commonalities with modern libertarianism in both its leftist and rightist varieties.
American conservatives (like Goldberg) are "classical liberals." The progressive / social liberals in America began calling themselves "liberals" and classical liberals for the most part took on the name "conservative."
Goldberg hypothesizes a phony dichotomy that posits, in effect, rightwing liberals (who aren’t those nasty guys who sat to the right of the king) and leftwing liberals (who are those nasty guys denying individual liberty who used to sit on the right or were behind the throne, not at the table). It is not liberalism that is sinister, but rightwingers' redefinition of it. Liberalism is America's best, most important export.
Goldberg correctly looks past names and delves into ideologies, and he finds that the governmental policies of Italian Fascism and German Nazism emerged directly and undeniably from the progressive left elitists and eugenicists / Social Darwinists of the late 19th / early 20th Century.
Goldberg looks only as far as his own convenient definitions of Orwellian labels. He fails to look past his supposedly nifty taxonomy at liberalism itself, which is not as sinister as he sorely wants to insinuate.
Concluded
Not only were the Nazis left-wing, today's "New Left" isn't new.
Goldberg, who is not an academic historian, grotesquely misrepresents the state of academia regarding the study of fascism, which, while widely varying in many regards, has seen a broad consensus develop regarding certain ineluctable traits that are uniquely and definitively fascist: its populism and ultranationalism, its anti-intellectualism, its carefully groomed culture of violence, its insistence that it represents the true national identity, its treatment of dissent as treason, and what Oxford Brookes University scholar Roger Griffin calls its "palingenesis" (no pun intended)----that is, its core myth of a phoenix-like rebirth of the national identity in the mold of a nonexistent Golden Age. And, of course, it has historically always been vigorously----no, viciously---anti-liberal.
So when Goldberg self-satisfyingly proclaims early on: "This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists," more thorough observers of history might instead just shake their heads. After all, the facts of Mussolini's socialist origins and the Nazis' similar appeals to socialism incorporating the name are already quite well known to the same historians who consistently describe fascism as a rightwing enterprise.
What these historians record----but Goldberg either ignores or minimizes---is that the "socialism" of "National Socialism" was in fact purely a kind of ethnic economic nationalism, which offered "socialist" support to purely "Aryan" German business entities, and that the larger Nazi cultural appeal was built directly around an open antipathy to all things liberal or leftist. Indeed, whole chapters of Mein Kampf are devoted to vicious smears and declarations of war against "the Left," and not merely the Marxism that Goldberg acknowledges as a major focus of Hitler's hostility.
The first Germans sent off to Nazi concentration camps were not Jews but socialists, communists, and other left-wing political prisoners, including "liberal" priests and clerics.
Not only were the Nazis not leftwing, but the so-called New Left's heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s, and even at that time many liberals wanted no part of it.
The truth is you are misreading Goldberg's quoted statement:
Conservatives should feel some embarrassment and shame that we are outraged at instances of racism now that it is easy to be. Conservatives...were often at best MIA on the issue of civil rights in the 1960s. Liberals were on the right side of history on the issue of race. And conservatives should probably admit that more often.
Hitherto, 'leftist' was the only term you preferred to use, and now you want to use 'liberal' together with various convenient qualifiers to build your case. It is a disingenuous convoluted name game you're playing to contend that by 'conservative' Goldberg really means 'liberal', in the above statement, and by 'liberal' he must mean 'conservative' somehow. He did not say those who were on the right side of the race issue, whom he identifies as 'liberals', were rightwing-thinking liberals, those who may like to style themselves 'classical liberals'. Goldberg's statement makes it clear that the liberals he is referring to were the liberals who were ideologically opposed to conservatives like himself----i.e., the liberals whom he considered to be his political adversaries.
Do you accept Goldberg's statement according to this straightforward reading of it?
I'm not familiar with the context you extracted Goldberg's quote on liberals and race from to judge whether or not your interpretation of it is meritous. Interpreted as you have, I reject it. Given that the Goldberg I'm familiar with takes care to point out the difference between classical liberals and the crypto-socialists that have taken to calling themselves "liberals," I find it unlikely that he'd claim your fellow leftists in Hitler's Nazi Party were on the "right side of history on race."
But my opinion of Goldberg's opinion (correctly represented or not) is not the issue here.
It is FACT that the political policies of the Nazis were derived from left-wing ideologies, and that the Nazis ruled Germany with left-wing economic theories, and that many of those same ideas IN FACT still dominate the thinking of socialists today, whether they're ashamed to admit they are socialists or do so proudly. Nazism was left-wing, and, if the "Green" Socialists at Nazi.org are to be believed, is STILL left-wing.
Since emphatically losing this debate well over a month ago, you've done nothing to show that the anti-capitalist and racial supremacist ideologies of Nazi Germany have anything to do with conservatism / classical liberalism, while I've pointed out that the Nazis' "Capitalists = International Jews (or tools thereof)" comes straight out of leftist thinkers like Marx, and those today that pine for Hitler's socialism in America, such as James Von Brunn. I've pointed out that the Nazis' race mythologies come straight out of the progressive leftist pseudoscience of eugenics, currently rearing its ugly head in "Obamacare" euthanasia proposals.
And so, you're reduced to calling American conservatives, particularly religious Christian conservatives - those "classical liberals" who via their religion have been moved throughout American history to fight for the end of slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, and support for Israel's existence - you call them "Nazis."
You lost the race before you even queued up on the starting line.
Lost in the mix is which question is harder for you to answer - why anyone shouldn't consider you an imbecile, or who's more left-wing between you and Stalin?
I'm going out of town until the middle of next week. I'll return to replying in kind after I get back.
In the meantime, do try to advance your argument past the qualifier laps.
I'm not familiar with the context you extracted Goldberg's quote on liberals and race from to judge whether or not your interpretation of it is meritous [do you mean 'meritorious'?] . Interpreted as you have, I reject it. Given that the Goldberg I'm familiar with takes care to point out the difference between classical liberals and the crypto-socialists that have taken to calling themselves "liberals," I find it unlikely that he'd claim your fellow leftists in Hitler's Nazi Party were on the "right side of history on race."
In his wilderness years before bestsellerdom, Goldberg did not craftily craft such retroactive nifty definitions for liberalism and conservatism as now make rightwingers swoon.
The way I have interpreted the statement is not at all far-fetched. It is the rational, straightforward way. When Goldberg says, "Conservatives should feel some embarrassment and shame that we are outraged at instances of racism now that it is easy to be," the pronoun 'we' therein undoubtedly refers to him and other conservatives. In his statement, liberals are those whom people in the real world know as liberals, and conservatives are those whom people in the real world know as conservatives.
If you find it unlikely that liberals could be on the right side of the race issue, you need to re-examine your distorted notion of liberalism, as defined by extreme rightwingers. At the foundation of liberalism is reverence for equality, which opposes the racial discrimination of the Jim Crow laws. At the foundation of conservatism is respect for tradition, which supported segregating blacks to preserve traditional society.
Liberal Fascism is similar to other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits----including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason----in that it employs the same historical methodology that Holocaust deniers and other rightwing revanchists have used---- namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.
But my opinion of Goldberg's opinion (correctly represented or not) is not the issue here.
It's funny you don't know how hilarious you are, beamish. You say that Hitler can be taken at his word, yet Jonah Goldberg cannot be.
Your grotesque opinions are the whole of the issue under discussion herein.
It is FACT that the political policies of the Nazis were derived from left-wing ideologies,
That is not established fact. Scholars have revealed the roots of Nazism in the ideas of conservative Pan-Germanists.
and that the Nazis ruled Germany with left-wing economic theories,
Conservative-backed corporatist economic theories that benefited private enterprise and stripped workers of rights are not leftwing.
and that many of those same ideas IN FACT still dominate the thinking of socialists today, whether they're ashamed to admit they are socialists or do so proudly. Nazism was left-wing, and, if the "Green" Socialists at Nazi.org are to be believed, is STILL left-wing.
The snuff at the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" site you mention is, I think, clever satire----i.e., crypto-humor. The name itself should tip you off.
No, beamish, liberals are not undercover Nazis scheming and conspiring against you, and planning the destruction of Western civilization.
Since emphatically losing this debate well over a month ago,
Repetitiously and emphatically declaring that self-assessment doesn't make it any more credible. Rather, it highlights your absurdity since you are still here trying vainly to prove you're right.
Continued
you've done nothing to show that the anti-capitalist and racial supremacist ideologies of Nazi Germany have anything to do with conservatism / classical liberalism, while I've pointed out that the Nazis' "Capitalists = International Jews (or tools thereof)" comes straight out of leftist thinkers like Marx, and those today that pine for Hitler's socialism in America, such as James Von Brunn.
Are all conservatives what you like to call classical liberals? Are no liberals classical liberals, in your view? Who were those guys on the right side of the king? Leftists? I don't mean Rodney King.
One can point out similarities of thought in many ideologies, but, by themselves, they do not prove a family relationship. As I said, not only above but previously, scholars have traced the origins of Hitler's ideas, including his anti-Semitism, to conservative Pan-Germanists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See the last chapter of Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler,2004, for a good scholarly discussion of Hitler's intellectual roots.
When he [Hitler] came to power, business collaborated wholeheartedly, up to the point of using slave labour and concentration-camp labour for its operations during the Second World War. Large and small business, of course, benefitted from the expropriation of the Jews," observed historian Eric Hobsbawm. Business also benefited from the elimination of labor unions and other limitations on the rights of management to manage its workforce. The destruction of labor movements helped to secure an unduly favorable solution of the Depression for business. Whereas in the U.S. the top 5% of households saw their share of the national income fall by 20% in the period from 1929 to 1941, in Germany the top 5% gained 15% during the same period.
James Von Brunn's extreme views on race disqualify him as a socialist or a liberal. His expressed animosity to liberalism makes him not a liberal. He wrote an Internet post, as many rightwingers have done, complaining that Obama's birth certificate and other documents have not been made public. In a 2008 post, von Brunn rails against "the Media" that supposedly is covering up the birther controversy. "The same Media went to great lengths to scandalize & destroy Sarah Palin," he complains, sounding like many a rightwinger. This March, he wrote in a post, "Millions of low IQ non-whites are encouraged to illegally invade the USA . They are provided sanctuary, jobs, health-care schooling, by those intent upon destroying Western Civilization." Which is quite close in its ideology to what lots of rightwing bloggers are saying. Von Brunn thinks like an American rightwinger, talks like an American rightwinger, .."
I've pointed out that the Nazis' race mythologies come straight out of the progressive leftist pseudoscience of eugenics, currently rearing its ugly head in "Obamacare" euthanasia proposals.
I've pointed out that prominent rightwingers, including Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt, were caught up in the pseudoscientific eugenics fad. More recently, liberal Democratic governors have apologized for the former eugenics-inspired sterilization laws in their states, including Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber of Oregon and Democratic Gov, Mark Warner of Virginia.
The so-called "Obamacare" euthanasia proposal is terminology Republicans are using to create a wedge between senior citizens and Democrats. Politico.com reports that the concept behind the provision in question has been embodied in federal law since 1990 and has been promoted by Republicans and Democrats for years.
Concluded
And so, you're reduced to calling American conservatives, particularly religious Christian conservatives - those "classical liberals" who via their religion have been moved throughout American history to fight for the end of slavery, women's suffrage, civil rights, and support for Israel's existence - you call them "Nazis."
You're still committed to writing ill-constructed sentences alleging what you cannot see the absurdity of. And still, you're putting words in my mouth. In my view, not all conservatives are extremists.
You lost the race before you even queued up on the starting line.
Considering your refusal to seriously address contravening evidence and your avoidance of responsive argumentation, it's not surprising that you are able to delude yourself bleating that you have won while huffing and puffing furiously to catch up.
Lost in the mix is which question is harder for you to answer - why anyone shouldn't consider you an imbecile, or who's more left-wing between you and Stalin?
The more serious question you raise is this: Why should anyone consider someone like you to be sensible who evidently thinks it's worthwhile to spend a huge amount of time prattling to prove puerile preposterous propositions.
I'm going out of town until the middle of next week. I'll return to replying in kind after I get back.
You obviously need a break. Get a laptop. I'm sure jail cells have wireless connectivity. You should refrain from beating up in plain view liberal fascists that you spot on the street. I'm kidding, of course----go ahead.
In the meantime, do try to advance your argument past the qualifier laps.
In the meantime, try to think of an answer to this question: Why did influential traditional conservatives back giving dictatorial power to fascists in both Italy and Germany?
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