I see that Justin has been getting all shirty about folk who draw comparisons between Hitler’s National Socialists and Socialists:
The next person to make a non-ironic and in-all-seriousness comparison between the Nazis and anybody else in the comments on this blog is banned for all eternity from making any other contribution.
It’s not clever. It’s not satirical. It’s rhetorically empty and it makes you look like a tit. That is all.
His blog, his rules. However, I can’t help but smile – after all, he is now doing exactly what he castigated the Devil’s Kitchen for doing only a few days previously (i.e. dishing it out, but getting all po-faced when it comes flying back). It was in that discussion (about the rather unpleasant and stupid remarks made by the Bishop of Stafford) that the Nazi/socialist comments reared their head. Justin and his co-conspirators took exception and argued the semantics ad nauseum.
It’s not a discussion I’ve bothered to get into, after all, there is no comparison whatsoever. National Socialism was a particularly unpleasant collectivist authoritarian ideology, whereas socialism is a particularly unpleasant authoritarian collectivist ideology. There, no parallels whatsoever.
Now, where’s my copy of Animal Farm?
Well, it’s less me getting po-faced and more my patience and tolerance for dickheads finally being exhausted. It’s taken over four years so I reckon I deserve a bit of credit.
As you say, my gaff, my rules. It’s bit like going to the pub. I don’t want to spend my quality time having to deal with tedious, hyperbolic berks when I could be having a lovely, stimulating chat with mates. Do you? It used to be fun but the buggers are breeding.
I don’t drink with arseholes and I can’t be bothered with them on the blog any more. (And, I get to choose who the arseholes are. Lovely.) Life’s too short for it. It massively takes the fun out of blogging which is why any of us do it in the first place.
Justins last blog post..Administrative notice
Indeed so. It tickled my funny bone that’s all and I couldn’t resist 😉
Ah yes, but the Nazis had cool leather greatcoats, whereas the Commies wore rather drab khaki. Worlds apart. Absolutely no comparison.
Mark Wadsworths last blog post.."Tory chairman defends nanny pay"
Actually, I rather liked the cool leather greatcoats… 😀
But the commies did have those cute furry hats.
So did Harold Macmillan.
Of course there was no real difference between the German socialists and the Russian ones. Even Stalin and Hitler themselves recognised that communists made the best converts to nazism and vice-versa. As Paul Johnson said of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
“Ribbentrop reported: “It felt like being among old party comrades.” He was as much at ease in the Kremlin, he added, “as among my old Nazi friends.” Stalin toasted Hitler and said he “knew how much the German people loved the Fuhrer.” There were brutal jokes about the Anti-Comintern Pact, now dead, which both sides agreed had been meant simply to impress the City of London and “English shopkeepers.” There was the sudden discovery of a community of aims, methods, manners, and, above all, of morals. As the tipsy killers lurched about the room, fumblingly hugging each other, they resembled nothing so much as a congregation of rival gangsters, who had fought each other before, and might do so again, but were essentially in the same racket.”
Blood-thirsty murdering bastards the lot of them and anyone who thinks otherwise is a moral idiot.
Of course there was no real difference between the German socialists and the Russian ones. Even Stalin and Hitler themselves recognised that communists made the best converts to nazism and vice-versa
Actually there is quite a lot of difference between the various shades of left wing and communist ideologies. And when you say ‘German socialists’, which ones do you mean? The ones in the social democratic party who allied themselves with Prussian militarists to suppress the nascent workers state in Bavaria in 1919? Or the organisers of that abortive revolution or the socialists who were sympathetic but opposed it? And if ‘National Socialism’ was so left wing, why did it attract legions of erstwhile monarchist right winger militarists to its ranks? Yes, we all know that Soviet Communism and German Nazism were brutal collectivising ideologies with absolutely no respect for the rule of law. Though Nazi collectivation didn’t go so far as to expropriate the profits of the great German industrialists, who stayed on rather good terms with Hitler. We also know that cats and cows both have four legs but it doesn’t make them the fucking same. As for the quotes unearthed by Paul Johnson, we know that the Nazi elite consider Bolschevism to be a front for ‘International Jewry’ and had utter contempt for it. Didn’t Johnson consider that Ribbentrop’s comments might just be a little self serving. He was a diplomat, after all, a caste not reputed for speaking its mind clearly and unambiguously. It is certainly true that Nazis found it convenient to recruit ex-Communist toughs. But both ideologies were violent anti-bourgeois movements so that is scarcely surprising. But the idea that socialistic ideas, which stretch from New Labour (bastards but not Nazis) via various strains of humane social democracy, through Orwell’s libertarianism then on to anarchism, is all of a piece with Nazism is historically illiterate.
I have now done a proper post on this topic.
Mark Wadsworths last blog post..The difference between ‘right wing’ and ‘left wing’ dictators