All opinion pieces represent the opinion of the authors.
By Paul Dowling
“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 determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
– Adolf Hitler, May 1, 1927, paraphrasing Gregor Strasser’s one-page National Socialist talking-points memo from June 15, 1926
“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don’t believe the government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”
– Bernie Sanders, from a speech at Georgetown University, on November 19, 2015, referencing FDR’s socialism and defining himself as a democratic socialist
What Does It Really Mean to “Feel the Bern”
Bernie Sanders, in a self-defining speech given at Georgetown University, described democratic socialism like this: “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.”
It is interesting to note that the National Socialists of prewar Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s, also did not wish for the government to “own the means of production.” And they too wanted a “fair deal” for the people, after a long list of abuses the people had been subjected to, as a result of the Treaty of Versailles.
According to Hermann Rauschning, Adolf Hitler once made this comment concerning his view of socialism: “Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.” This idea represents, in a nutshell, the importance of Hitler’s promotion of National Socialist-prescribed cultural norms, since, as Andrew Breitbart has famously pointed out, “Politics is downstream from culture.”
Although responsible for the burning of books written by “non-Aryan” authors and the wholesale slaughter in death-camps of people not considered to be of the Master Race, Hitler’s Germanic-only cultural slant helped make Hitler appear to be “culturally conservative,” even if the economics Hitler utilized could only be defined as Leftist.
Indeed, it is true of socialists in general that they plan to take over cultural narratives, which then become representative of the dominant culture they wish to promote – the newly preferred, or “culturally conservative,” frame of reference that shall be used to undergird the propagandistic narratives being generated by politically-correct indoctrination media.
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Statists are not liberal in the classical sense at all, although they have coöpted the term “liberal” to get people to vote unwittingly for statist measures that are far from being anything close to the classical liberalism that nurtures freedom.
Classical liberalism holds individual liberty and freedom from coercion in high esteem. Classical liberals believe in a limited scope of government action and a wide scope of individual endeavor.
Progressive statism holds individual liberty in disdain and regularly infringes the property rights of the people, citing the needs of the collective repeatedly, until no individual rights exist anymore, except in name only. All civil rights are lost under socialism because civil rights are synonymous with property rights; every right contained in the Bill of Rights is a property right.
On the other hand, socialism – a child of the Left, as are all forms of statism – does not demand that property be stripped from the hands of all property owners; however, those “owners” do lose their rights to control property, to decide what may or may not occur within the precincts of any properties deeded to them.
Only the State may ultimately decide who can use any given property and the purposes for which a property may be utilized. As long as the formal holder of a property is willing to collaborate with political leaders, he will be handsomely rewarded with Party membership, as well as the wealth and power that come with it.
Property can easily be taken by government force from disagreeable personages and given into the eager hands of obsequious sycophants in exchange for loyalty and the carrying out of all orders issued. Thus, business owners – especially those with large sums of wealth and property – easily combine their corporate enterprises with the machinations of the State, while the “little guy” falls victim to the fascist dictates of this new fusion of statism and corporatism.
Benito Mussolini once said, “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” So, Americans should not be soothed by Bernie’s assurances that he does not believe in government ownership of the means of production – for neither did Mussolini nor did Hitler.
Hitler Rose to Power by Democratic Means, Blazing the Trail for Fellow Travelers
Adolf Hitler was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). According to Hermann Rauschning, who later would renounce his Nazism and emigrate out of Germany, Hitler said of his brand of socialism that “[t]he party is all-embracing. It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth. . . . Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. . . . This is Socialism – not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape. Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over all, regardless of whether they are owners or workers. . . . Our Socialism goes far deeper.”
To Hitler, it mattered not who owned the things, but who controlled the things that were owned. In other words, the end-game for Hitler was power.
Hitler was, at heart, a socialist who was dedicated to socialism, not democracy. Knowing the history of Hitler’s use of democratic means to become Führer allows for easy comprehension of Ayn Rand’s statement about democratic socialism: “There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”
When it came to Hitler’s style of power politics, “Hitler proclaimed that he would ‘destroy democracy with the weapons of democracy.’ . . . For the most part, democratic governance was never embraced by the German masses or by the elite. The ill-fated Weimar democracy’s inability to provide economic relief to the German people during the Great Depression further enhanced its image as an ineffective system of government amid the masses. Hitler offered people the prospect of a ‘new and better society.’”
Through various election cycles, Hitler worked tirelessly until his Nazi Party, at last, had enough power in the German parliament to make Hitler’s being appointed chancellor a real consideration.
Ultimately, that is what Hindenburg chose to do; this was Hitler’s triumphal moment under the rules of the Weimar Republic that would eventually allow him to prevail in obtaining absolute dictatorial power. Soon after Hitler’s assumption of power, democratically and by the rule of law, all other political parties were dissolved. The day of democratic socialism was over, the only remainder being socialism itself.
Sanders for Dictator?
It is interesting that Sanders, like Hitler, may be guilty of wanting to “destroy democracy with the weapons of democracy.” Although Sanders himself has used no such verbiage, his field organizer Martin Weissgerber favors a National Socialist-style dictatorship with Bernie in charge, once Sanders has been democratically elected president, even if Weissgerber’s stated plans for “the ‘re-education’ camps” are Soviet-style references.
Here are the words of Weissgerber on the subject of imprisoning persons whom Sanders might view as being guilty of thought crimes: “So, do we just cease – do we just dissolve the Senate, House of Representatives, the Judicial Branch, and have somebody like Bernie Sanders and a cabinet of people make all the decisions for the climate? I mean, I’m serious. . . . What will help is when we send all the Republicans to the ‘re-education’ camps. Can you imagine Mitch McConnell? Lindsey Graham? The [Soviet Russian] gulags were founded as re-education camps. . . . The first gulag that was opened; have you heard about the Belomorkanal? People came from America to work on the Belomorkanal, for the Soviet project, for the communist project. It’s a beautiful thing. We have more people in prison in this country right now than Russia did at the height of the gulags. We do. That’s a fact. The Soviet Union was not horrible. . . . I mean, for women’s rights the Soviet Union is – I think – the most progressive place to date in the world.”
In his progressive exuberance, Weissgerber leaves out the fact that the Belomorkanal [aka the White Sea–Baltic Canal] was a Soviet work project on which 25,000 workers were killed; Weissgerber also fails to mention that the democidal Soviet Gulag State murdered 61,911,000 people – almost sixty-two million souls!
It is no wonder the incarceration rate was so low under the rule of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka the USSR). Many of those who were arrested simply died in the custody of the State, a situation which is far from being the case in the United States of America. Also, in America, people are not imprisoned in order to have their political beliefs brainwashed out of them.
And most Americans, properly informed, will choose the freedom of conscience over “feeling the Bern” by way of Weissgerber’s description of Sanders-style communist reëducation. Eventually, the goals of socialism and the goals of communism are one and the same, for, according to none other than Soviet Socialist leader Vladimir Lenin himself, “The goal of socialism is communism.”
Jews In Name Only Worship the State, to Tragic Effect in Germany and America Alike
Bernie Sanders claims Jewish heritage. And certainly, a Jew would not lead his fellows down a dangerous path, like the one that Hitler took in the course of exterminating of six million Jews and four million Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, et al. Surely a Jew would not take his compadres down the trail of tears so well-trodden by Russian Jewry and Christendom.
Sanders, however, is not a religious Jew; Sanders is a Jew In Name Only – a JINO – who offers no proof of religious devotion, other than his worship of Big Brother.
Ben Shapiro once wrote the following words about Jews whose priorities do not include living a religious life devoted to Zionist ethical monotheism: “In 2008, Obama grabbed 78 percent of the Jewish vote. Even the most wildly optimistic polling today shows that Obama’s support remains high among Jews. It’s a result that Republicans simply can’t understand – why do so many Jews continue to support a president who has shown time and again that he stands against the State of Israel? Why the reflexive lever-pulling on behalf of a man who appoints anti-Semites to positions of high power, attends a virulently anti-Semitic church for 20 years and sees Israel as the cause of the West’s conflict with the Muslim world? The answer is deceptively simple: the Jews who vote for Obama are, by and large, Jews In Name Only (JINOs). They eat bagels and lox; they watch ‘Schindler’s List’; they visit temple on Yom Kippur – sometimes. But they do not care about Israel. Or if they do, they care about it less than abortion, gay marriage, and global warming.”
It is apparent that Bernie and Bernie Bros share a similar outlook when it comes to believing in God or living a religious life that affirms the principles of Judaism. Being Jewish is not really about being born to Jewish parents (or else there would be no converts who are Jews by choice but not by birth); being Jewish is all about choosing to live according to a set of ethical beliefs based upon principles, just as being an American is really about committing to a set of agreements based upon the property rights that belong to those individuals who share in the enjoyment of opportunities that can only exist in a state that values natural rights, among them the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Although Hitler was in love with socialism, he was not in love with Judaism, let alone the Jews. Not even Jews like Bernie Sanders.
Hitler’s xenophobia, which caused him to see anyone “non-Aryan” as not being truly German, would not even allow him to admire the socialist writings of Karl Marx, a Jew by birth. (It should be noted that the Russian Soviets were anti-religion more than they were anti-Jewish, a philosophical position perfectly compatible with the atheism of Karl Marx; the Jewish problem in Soviet Russia stemmed mainly from the fact that Orthodox Jews clung to their religion more tightly than most.)
So, in his quest to found a totalitarian State, Hitler looked to Italian Fascism as a model, rather than Russian-style Marxism.
Hitler saw the corporatism-wedded-to-socialism that was playing out under Mussolini as a better way forward for the purposes of his National Socialists, since it was the socialization of the people that was most important, above and beyond the formal economic structures prescribed by Marxist dogma.
As long as people served the Führer, so would their companies. As long as the property was used in accordance with rules laid down by Hitler, it did not matter who formally owned said property. It was obedience to the State that was paramount.
This is true, as well, of the Bernie Bros. Government’s dictates are much more important for socialists than God’s commandments. The biggest danger to a socialist state is people who “cling to their guns and religion.” (This is why socialists favor “gun control” to disarm religious and anti-statist people as well as bans against religious and anti-government expression in public places and on social media.)
Could Sanders and his Bernie Bros be paving the way for a socialist State which, upon attaining absolute power over the people, will eventually begin to punish religious Jews, Christians, and others who do not worship the State?
While there may be deep irony in such a concern, due in no small part to the fact that Sanders was born Jewish, there is precedent – albeit an unhealthy one – for Jews facilitating an anti-Semitic pathway to a genocidal Holocaust. This self-hating and self-destructive behavior also existed under Hitler’s National Socialists.
The German Vanguard (Der deutsche Vortrupp), a pro-Nazi Jewish group whose goal was Jewish assimilation into the German people, was led by Hans Joachim Schoeps. It has been alleged that these Jews ended their meetings with the Nazi salute, all the while wryly shouting, “Down with us!” Whether this is only a darkly humorous commentary on the group is not known with certainty. What is known is that Schoeps eventually fled to Sweden to save his skin.
The Association of German National Jews (Der Verband nationaldeutscher Juden) was yet another pro-Hitler Jewish group. The Association’s membership was exclusively Jewish, and it unapologetically supported Adolf Hitler.
The founder of the Association, Dr. Max Naumann, who established the group in 1921, “declared in an interview that Nazi action against Jews was in many ways justified.” The stated purpose of the Association, like that of the Vanguard, was the assimilation of the Jews into the German people, with the Jews abandoning all Jewish identity.
There are many Jews like Schoeps and Naumann in America today, often referred to by religious Jews as “self-hating Jews,” especially when they proclaim their Jewishness while supporting policies that put Jews at risk. Max Naumann was an anti-Zionist who would have fit right in with Sanders and other anti-Zionist Jews who dream of moving the US embassy back to Tel Aviv, as well as joining forces with Jihadists and otherJew-haters, like Linda Sarsour.
Even the non-partisan Jewish group AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has found Sanders’ anti-Israel statements “truly shameful.”
Why Utopians Target Jews and Christians
A study of utopian socialist governments of the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries reveals that they all hold in common the eventual persecution of Jewish and Christian religious communities. The reason for this is because Jews and Christians who rely on God are far less likely to rely on government. In general, they also prefer to help each other, as a way of doing God’s work, rather than prevailing upon the government to do so.
In a Judeo-Christian world, there is good and evil, right and wrong. People are in control of their consequences by behaving in a way that reaps more rewards or more punishments. This means that all behaviors are not created equal; some actions are better (thus more rewarding) than others.
In places where the government cares for people – housing projects, for example – people stop caring about themselves or each other, leading to dilapidated homes and violent crime. Benjamin Franklin once said, “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means.
I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them exist in poverty but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course, became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
What Dr. Franklin knew was that, without responsibility, freedom must give way to dependency. This natural consequence of utopianism is what the Founders endeavored to save America from, blessing Americans with more abundance than any other nation by freeing the people to pursue whatever makes them happy, so long as they did not harm anyone else while doing so.
Ayn Rand Was Right: George Orwell on Hitler’s “Going Bolshevik”
Although the Russians came by their socialist republics by bullet, rather than ballot, the Russians’ nightmare of totalitarianism was not much different from the Germans’ reign of terror.
George Orwell, the renowned author of 1984, wrote this of Hitler’s socialist despotism: “National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker. The two regimes [of Russia and Germany], having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system – a form of oligarchical collectivism [a police state that fronts a dictatorial strongman]. . . . It is Germany that is moving towards Russia, rather than the other way about. It is, therefore, nonsense to talk about Germany ‘going Bolshevik’ if Hitler falls. Germany is going Bolshevik because of Hitler and not in spite of him.”
So, for all the technical differences as to whether the State owns the property outright or controls property administratively, the realities of life play out in much the same way under both socialist and communist systems. For Orwell’s money, Ayn Rand was right!
The Myth of Nordic Democratic Socialism
The spirit of Ayn Rand would seem to be haunting the 2020 American presidential election, as it would appear not to matter much which Democrat candidate’s philosophy might serve as a starting point for an American socialist State; each candidate harbors policy ideas that would initiate the process of moving Americans ever-closer to the monochromatic vision of a socialist/communist utopia.
Of course, Bernie Sanders claims that his ideal – the mythical “Nordic model” of socialism – would work for the American people; he only fails to mention one simple detail: The Nordic model of socialism is a myth, a figment of the Leftist imagination, as it were.
In an increasingly well-known article (with well over a million views at the time of this writing) entitled “Sorry Bernie Bros But Nordic Countries Are Not Socialist,” Forbes economics and policy analyst Jeffrey Dorfman writes this: “As the American left embraces a platform that continues to look more and more like a socialist’s dream, it is common for those on the right to counter with the example of Venezuela as the nightmare of socialism in reality.
A common response from the left is that socialism (or democratic socialism) works just fine in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. . . . The myth of Nordic socialism is partially created by confusion between socialism, meaning government exerting control or ownership of businesses and the welfare state in the form of government-provided social safety net programs.
However, the left’s embrace of socialism is not merely a case of redefining a word. Simply look at the long-running affinity of leftists with socialist dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for proof many on the left long for real socialism. . . . It is allowing businesses to be productive that produces the high corporate and personal incomes that support the tax collections making the government benefits feasible. The Nordic countries are smart enough not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”
But no one bearing witness to the political landscape of 2020 can easily trust that any Democrat running for president has the good sense to keep the economy deregulated and maintain a hands-off approach when it comes to letting the markets operate in an environment that is as close to a laissez-faire state as possible.
The only candidate of the 2020 presidential field of candidates who possesses the economic acumen to keep America’s unemployment rate down – across the board, for all demographics – while keeping the markets up is President Trump, the one candidate who has been under 24/7 attack by smear campaign after smear campaign orchestrated by the Democrat-controlled socialist media of the Left.
The good news is that people are waking up to the fact that 90% of media are controlled by five or six corporations, all of them owned and controlled by the banks and bank-courting Democrats.
Alas, it is the history of bankers that they, more often than not, promote public policy that empowers the state over the individual, in an effort to enlist state aid in the protection of their own banking interests.
During the era of the Russian Revolution, White Russian General Arsene de Goulevitch wrote the following: “The main purveyors of funds for the revolution . . . were neither the crackpot Russian millionaires nor the armed bandits of Lenin. The ‘real’ money primarily came from certain British and American circles which for a long time past had lent their support to the Russian revolutionary cause. . . . The important part played by the wealthy American banker Jacob Schiff in the events in Russia, though as yet only partially revealed, is no longer a secret.”
It is also true that Jacob Schiff gave Leon Trotsky $20 million in New York, while others who donated to the Bolshevik cause were such notables as J.P. Morgan, Sir George Buchanan, William Boyce Thompson, Albert H. Wiggin, the Warburgs, and the Rockefellers.
While free markets and anti-trust laws do a great job of protecting working Americans, it is raw statism that keeps economic power in the hands of the fewest, most elite, actors. Thus, it should come as no surprise that, in the hands of the elitist Bernie Bros – or other like-minded socialists – the rise of corporate fascism is at hand. And only a strong America of free people and free markets can consign this threat of statist corporatism – of “feeling the Bern” – to the ash heap of history for once and for all.
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Paul Dowling
Paul Dowling has written about the Constitution, as well as articles for American Thinker, Independent Sentinel, Godfather Politics, Eagle Rising, and Conservative Notions.
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