(no subject)

[fpb]

Anyone who thinks that I was too harsh about Jonah Goldberg's repulsive and politically motivated rewriting of my own country's history ought to read today's Thomas Sowell column, where it is taken entirely at its own valuation and highly recommended as summer reading for the children of conservatives. This unhistorical, culturally imperialistic propaganda, that distorts my country's and my continent's history in the service of provincial American concerns, is going to enter the bloodstream of a whole American party, If it has not already done so. This will increase further the mutual incomprehension between USA and Europe, because you cannot stand on your two hind legs and inform anyone who knows anything of continental history - France, Italy, Germany, etc. - that Nazism and Fascism were "left wing". This sort of rubbish, especially if spoken with the arrogance of Goldberg and Sowell, will increase European contempt for American viewpoints and culture. Do we really need this sort of trash further complicating our already difficult relationship, and all for the sake of a few Republican votes in the next election?

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[fpb.livejournal.com]

You may ask the great Italian and German industrialists whether they found the Nazi and Fascist policies so indistinguishable from Communism. You cannot speak so glibly of the difference between a form of government which not only safeguarded private property but exalted the figures of industrialists and one which wanted them dead and free enterprise suppressed.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

That’s only because a police state founded upon class-warfare persecutes different people from one founded upon race-warfare — or at least, it goes after a different set of victims first.

As for safeguarding private property, the case of I.G. Farben is instructive. The Nazis were quite content to let industrialists alone, as long as they obeyed orders. But they were quick to make an example of any industrialist who did not run his firm as an instrument of state policy. There was nothing resembling free enterprise in Nazi Germany. In fact, all companies with a capital less than a certain figure — I seem to recall offhand that it was something like 100,000 marks — were simply outlawed, and the formation of new companies was strictly regulated. The corporatist structure of Fascist Italy (though never really implemented) was supposed to turn each major industry into a compulsory cartel. Monopoly firms carrying out the orders of the state are not socialist in the ordinary sense of the word, but they are not free in any sense of the word.

You must also remember that there was a radical wing in the Nazi Party, led at first by the Strasser brothers and later represented by Goebbels, which did want German industry nationalized immediately the Nazis took power. Hitler stopped them only because he wanted rearmament above all else, and he knew from the Russian experience that shooting the factory-owners was a quick way to wreck the economy. In effect, he left the same people running German industry because they knew how to do it and Party hacks did not: a lesson that Lenin did not live long enough to learn, and Stalin came too late to profit by. Late in the war, Hitler expressed regrets that he had not listened to his radicals, nationalized heavy industry, and purged the officer corps as Stalin did.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That does not begin to compare with Communist state capitalism.