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Say What?
The crazies, it seems, are everywhere. Obama's health care speech here in Portland yesterday brought out, not just roaring helicopters from the placid sky, but a rowdy, bell-ringing, larger-than-some-of-us-expected crowd of Don't Tread on Me-ers, complete with "Marxist In Chief" and "Obama Lies Granny Dies" signs. Vacationland never felt so far from its peaceable roots. Now comes news that more wingnuts are sending threatening letters to over 30 governors, including Maine's, demanding they leave office or be "removed forcefully." The scariest thing about the so-called Guardians of the Free Republics isn't their fervor or "ideas" or dreadful spelling - it's that we truly have no idea what they're talking about.
"If you are tired of being subjected to a corporation posing as a legitimate government that would arrest you for refusing to pray to corporate courts or give up your land or pay taxes to the Rothschilds or exhibit a state-issued confession of subject-class citizenship, then we invite you to (join us)... This is YOUR chance to finally end the economic seige, the foreclosures, tax and criminal cases which lack an injured party, the assaults and terror under color of law by lawfully, expediently and peacefully restoring the de jure (original) institutions of the fifty state republics and the United States of America."
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217 Comments so far
Show All"... it's that we truly have no idea what they're talking about."
No, Abby, we know EXACTLY what they are talking about. While their prose isn't constructed the way mine is, they are absolutely 100% correct about the corporate control of government and subjugation of all to the Money Power. And there was a time when the states in Confederation had control over the national government, which was the IDEAL of 1776.
The areas of commonality that exist between us on the Left and others on the Right are too many to allow Wedge Issues to continue to divide us from reaching our COMMON goal of throwing the Corporatists and the Money Power overboard.
We cannot fear the Other, for they are us. Lincoln said it best: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." There is only one way to end the neverending cycle of Wedge Issues and Division that allows the Money Power to dominate us all, and that is for us ALL to jump out of our little boxes--our comfort zones--and embrace the Other, while remaining mindful of the ultimate goal.
I have to agree with the poster above. I know exactly what they are talking about. It is clear as day. Their rhetoric may differ than mine due to a disparate political shading.
It is precisely what Shakespeare said: "There is something rotten in Denmark."
Abby, please get up to speed. It is exactly this liberal incomprehension that will, trenchantly, allow the rotten tea-bagging roses to bloom.
The people who wrote this mini-manefesto would probably object even more if their taxes were going to poor poeple - especially black poor people, or if government were actually working for the greater working class through soclial wage programs.
And, of course, the remark about the mythical secret Rothchild cabal is unalloyed, anti-semitism of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" sort.
But yes, this little manefesto does reflect the economic poplism of the Tea Party Movement - as there was in Nazism. They didn't call it "National Socialism" for nothing. I've only read excerpts of "Mein Kampf", but from what I've read, the parallels to the tea party movement are chilling.
And frankly, the possibility of the near-nonexistent US left redirecting this popular discontent is about as remote as flying saucers landing in DC tomorrow.
The best we can hope for is for the movement to wear itself out. We can be very, very thankful that no leaders with the charisma and galvanizing stridency of Hitler on the horizon. Meanwhile we must engage in the hard work of re-organizing. At least Obama is making our job easier. Recall the many leftist movement that reaches their Seattle-years peak under the comparably sold-out Clinton administration.
Right on Karlof1, why on earth is CD specifically making fun of rhetoric about "corporations posing as a government," isn't that what our opposition to the terrible Citizens United SCOTUS decision is about? If you find a group that uses specifically hateful racist language by all means tell us for that is vile and wrong, but this is just the most blatant of divide and conquer IMO.
Although they use god language I personally find distasteful as an atheist, I refuse to see people who correctly identify corporations as the enemy as my enemy.
It is 100% certain that if we support Democrats or Republicans in the 2010 elections this problem and most others will worsen.
In virtually every instance in History where a progressive group aligned themselves with the Far Right in order to topple an unpopular Government, the new Government turned on the progressives next ate them and spat them out.
This happened in Mexico, In China and Germany. It happened in Latin America, the Caribbean, in the Middle East and in African nations. It happened throughout Europe in the Revolutions of 1848. It happened in the USA when labor leaders that inherited the mantle of the labor leaders of the 1880s and 1920's compromised to the point where today the Union all but non existant.
I do not see how people who call themselves progressives would march side by side with a person carrying a sign saying "Death to Arabs" because both are opposed to undue corporate power.
Did Kucinich, by embracing "Compromise" rather then holding true to his values advance or hinder the "Progressive cause" in doing so?
Where does the above group say "death to Arabs" that's just a smear you made up until you prove otherwise. Now, you may even be right, certainly when anarchists tried to ally with state centralist Communists in Russia it ended in death for the anarchists so I agree the enmy of your enemy is not always your friend. OTOH you've provided no proof they think "death to Arabs," other than from your own mind. How is making up *hypothetical* lies about people any better than Glenn beck faction tea baggers incorrectly labeling state capitalist captive market health insurance non reform as "socialism?"
>>Where does the above group say "death to Arabs" that's just a smear you made up until you prove otherwise. Now, you may even be right, certainly when anarchists tried to ally with state centralist Communists in Russia it ended in death for the anarchists so I agree the enmy of your enemy is not always your friend
You obviously missed the issue. I was not speaking to any specific group. I was talking about "aligning oneself" with another organzation simply because you might have "A Common Cause".
To the group in question. You know nothing about them really. You do not know who funds them. You do not know whow they feel about Immigration. You do not know whether or not they support the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Militarism.
YET just because they have a common cause against Corporate power you are willing to align yourself with them. This is the same crap that has defeated every progressive movement in the past...that is NOT taking the time to KNOW the true VALUES of those you make common cause with.
For all I know this group could be "Enviromentalists" and support Green Initiatives, they might well support Universal medicare and Social programs for the poor, they might well be opposed to Militarism and want to bring all US forces overseas home and gut military spending.
Yet they may be NONE of these things.
I just took a wee peek that thier website. They are advertising the Latest book by Sean Hannity. They are claiming a war on "Liberalism". They speak of supporting Core GOP principals. They seem an Ultra Conservative group to me. I really do not agree with much of what a Sean Hannity has to say on "liberals". They have a link to a website speaking of "Multiculturalism" that has an image of a arab suicide bomber, and then an essay as to how "Msulim radicals" take over Europe and label Europe as Eurabia.
This same link has an article labled "The War on Terror is a war on Islam" the author of this under the UMbrella of this group you suggest should be supported by progressives makes this claim..
>>For the War on Terror to count for anything, it must be a War on Islam, because Islam is the guiding ideology behind terrorism. Rooting out terrorism without rooting out Islam, only painfully prolongs the struggle. A number of European countries have concluded exactly that, and decided that surrendering to Islam will spare them effort and pain. That is not a choice I can support, but it is at least a choice made based on an understanding of the problem. By contrast pretending that we can fight a War on Terror without fighting a War on Islam is simply wishful thinking.
This guy wants a war on all of Islam. He advocates "deterrence through destruction".
So Sean Hannity...and this Sultan Knish both linked to on their website. Do you reallly SUPPORT that ?
I agree with you I know nothing about them either, and for all I know you may be right they be straight up Nazis and if so a pox on every breath they take on this earth. What bothers me is precisely that we *don't* really know much about them yet are quick to pile on them, mainly I suspect because they are from a poor rural white demographic who talks funny and may have in some ways a naive perhaps even dangerously naive poorly educated view of the world. Even so is that good excuse to engage in the hate we on the left our supposed to abhor?
One group I *do* know about is Front Porch Republic which is filled with classically trained scholars and poets from a Wendell Berry reading right wing agrarian perspective, IMO a *much* more interesting discussion than this one, is, whether as intelligent thoughtful agrarians who don't share our economic or religious views are they good allies? I don't honestly know for certain but I do know I find their thought provoking essays far more enlightening than anything from Dim party hacks published here on semi regular basis. Bill Kauffman an SDS sympathizer *and* agrarian right defender who argues for a strictly anti interventionist foreign policy anjd is big Edward Abbey fan is *far* more interesting than any Obama astroturf "coffee party" supporter IMO.
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/03/it-was-20-years-ago-todayedward-abbey-lives/
http://www.amazon.com/Aint-America-Conservatism-Middle-American-Anti-Imperialism/dp/0805082441
I do think it's telling that CD finds crude web sites from the decentralist right that are easy to make fun, but not IMO very intellectually challenging in debating philosophical differences IMO.
Does straw man ring a bell?
The point I am making is this.
Do not be swayed by a group just because they have a list of Grievances and solutions you might agree with. take the time to INVESTIGATE them in detail.
This is exactly how Barack Obama got elected. He said a whole lot of "Pretty things" that resonated with the people and far too many ATE IT UP without bothering to truly investigate the man. They were far too eager for a Messiah and got themselves another Corporatist.
Sean hannity as a spokesperson for them should be cause enough for concern.
I think what you say makes a lot of sense, Gw. It *is* too easy to think that some person or group is on the side of the angels because that's where we want them to be. That kind of mistake has been the stuff of both low comedy and serious tragedy for ages, mostly tragedy.
I suspect the movement and its core membership have nothing for us. But the membership is doubtless distributed under a curve, and there's no reason to think that some of the people under the tail -maybe quite a lot of them- wouldn't be very good coalition partners, if we can identify and get close to them. Of course that would take work.
I say we move beyond these straw man hate fests and try to figure out who are our real friends are. Maybe the web site above is run by anti Islamic bigots and if so a pox on them completely, but does this from agrarian right wing intellectuals strike you as the voice of fascist tyranny?
"Claremont, CA. Wendell Berry, writer and farmer and hero to the people, might move from the farmhouse to the big house.
Speaking at one of the USDA’s National Identification System (NAIS) “listening sessions,” Berry told the crowd that he would go to jail if the NAIS – the “animal ID” program – becomes law.
“I understand the principles of civil disobedience, from Henry Thoreau to Martin Luther King,” he told the assembled USDA officials. “If you impose this program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you’re going to have to send the police for me. I’m 75 years old. I’ve about completed my responsibilities to my family. I’ll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program – and I’ll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator.”
Electric words, for a decidedly nonelectric cause.
I’m not going to go into the specifics of the NAIS – and the massive opposition to it – because Jerry Salyer has already done that dirty deed, and with great panache. If you’re interested, you might also read descriptions of the NAIS offered by the USDA and NoNAIS.org, respectively.
Instead, I want to pick up on Berry’s language of “civil disobedience.” (So far, as far as my search of the archives can discern, not a single person has uttered those two words on Front Porch Republic.)
Civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt argued, is a particularly American tradition – part of a broader tradition of voluntary associations which are the “specifically American remedy for the failure of institutions, the unreliability of men, and the uncertain nature of the future.”
Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of voluntary association – “the citizens who form the minority associate in order, first, to show their numerical strength and so to diminish the moral power of the majority” – Arendt saw the logic of civil disobedience.
While our shorthand descriptions of civil disobedience usually take the form of reference to specific individuals – think of how Berry invoked the singular figures of Throreau and King, or how I invoked the singular figure of Berry himself to begin this piece – Arendt emphasized that civil disobedience is properly understood as a communal activity.
“The civil disobedient is a member of a group,” she wrote, not an “individual lawbreaker.” Civil disobedience is the activity of “organized minorities” whose joint and public action allows them to be seen from afar.
It’s worth noting that the opposition to the NAIS began with little fanfare – no celebrity endorsement, no kick-off gala, no campaign fund, and certainly no corporate sponsor – about half a decade ago. Since then, the movement against mandatory animal identification has strengthened through organization – not to mention lots of relentless, principled speech from a lot of relentless, principled people. (You can find some really inspired lines in two New York Times articles on the Animal ID program from 2006 and last week, respectively.)
Howard Dean has gotten lots of credit for being the grassroots guru of the internet millennium, but I think that award should in fact be shared by the many small farmers and activists who have opposed the NAIS from the beginning. In only a few years, they have spurred broad awareness of and opposition to this program, though they are separated by vast distances and have lots of other things to do – like, you know, run farms.
Although many of the farmers opposing mandatory animal tagging speak in the language of self-interest – many small farmers are worried that the program will run them into bankruptcy – the opposition to the NAIS has been driven by deep political and communal commitments."
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/will-wendell-be-jailed/
Demonization can take place by trashing easily mocked straw men, and by ignoring more articulate voices that are not 100% from our camp, IMO CD does too much of both and isolates us from interesting thought and *other* people from different cultures outside our insular enclave taking action against corporatist empire in the process.
Oh dear a non straw man challenge, I guess that merits a vast silence of a field of crickets doesn't it?
Debating yourself is rather...odd.
Because everyone else is too cowardly to debate about the intellectually strong articulate decentrlist right wing agrarians at Front Porch Republic web site, and is instead reduced to finding the poorest confused kid to pick on which I find to be an objectionable bullying behavior. I am merely noting that given an intellectually equal opponent that could make for an interesting and enlightening debate both sides could learn from that suddenly the CD readership is *suddenly* no where to be found. It hardly speaks well of our debating skills when we run from a formidable opponent IMO.
Finally it frankly sucks for me as a libertarian socialist Earth First guy to be the one standing up for Libertarians, paleo-cons, and agrarians who I disagree with on *many* things, but I find *all* bullying to be repulsive, and would like to see some spirited debate among equals. The platitudes from the choir get boring after a while, yes real "racism" for example is sick and wrong that was old news in 1860 for people paying attention, tell me something new and interesting. Perhaps something new and intesting produced by a debate among equals rather than a mutual love in of hating on a easy target?
find *all* bullying to be repulsive
-----------------------------
Will you accept a data point? I find your recent treatment of PJ to be rather bullying, though I accept that might not be your actual intent.
I think sometimes we lose track of the fact that being wrong and being evil are entirely different states of being.
Those who pick on the weak which I would argue people piling on the likely not too bright but sincere people running the web site here will always be the target of my scorn. Again why can't we at CD debate intellectual equals which is much more interesting debate. Gore Vidal handing the articulate but wrong William Buckley his ass on a platter is fascinating, engaging, and enligtening:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8
Gore Vidal debating j random racist shithead is just kicking puppies, ie not a fair fight. Now some puppies like racist shitheads deserve to get kicked but nothing is learned in the process is it? I'd argue this whole "Say What" debate is just kicking puppies, but if CD readers were to engage an article at Front Porch Republic or Lew Rockwell, or antiwar.com (Libertarian anti war site) it would be more of a fair fight. We'd still likely win as I *do* believe left ideas are superior but we'd win at a much higher intellectual level and likely new ideas would be brought to the fore as opposed to the in group stroking session seen here of aren't these people baaaaaaaahhhd. What we see here is simultaneously boring and slightly infuriating as a pile on against the intellectually defenseless IMO.
P.S. who is PJ? I find often initials confuse more than enlighten.
PJD412, the guy you've been beating on. Since he's Irish Catlick, I'm presuming it stands for something like "Patrick John Duffy" or similar. Even if it's not his initials, it's initials-like enough for me, whence "PJ".
Sorry but I find his simultaneous declarations to be a Trokyist commie and also an often defender of the polices of the Dim party to be confused and contradictory at best. I call them as I see them, shrug.
If commie sounds harsh know that people like myself aligned with the anarchist tradition have been fighting communists in a long running battle for over a hundred years now. See my exchanges with Damien for a good example of that.
P.S. he has very much "beat on," and insulted me as well, the antipathy is mutual. :(
I very much disagree with your interpretation of history and the examples you use. And just as you say we know little of the group in question, we know very little of each other, correct.
WE can continue to dig deeper the Wedge that's been artfully constructed to keep the populace divided, or we can try something completely different for a *Change.*
I'm 55, and I've watched this chasm grow deeper year after year, decade after decade. MLK saw the same thing, and I'm really just echoing his words, his call to find commonground so we can become the WE that's required to overcome our joint opressors--the Money Power in what we must remind ourselves is the Class War, which they are trying to maintain as a war of Left versus Right.
I 100% agree, it' s disturbing for me to witness how easy it is to turn the ostensible "left" against rural poor people using crude stereotypes. Yes to confronting racism, sexism, homophobia, warmongering, etc in all it's forms, no to writing off vast segments of the populace because of a bad actions of an easily scapegoated *few* people being held up for merciless bullying and classist ridicule. This toothless "Jethro" stereotype has to end IMO. Whatever happened to Dr. Kings magnificent words about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin (or other isms I'd add)? Dr., King was moving towards a class analysis in organizing janitors of all colors, reconciliation with Malcom X, and opposition to U.S. empire in his later life which is probably a large reason why he was murdered IMO. We continue to murder Dr. King's vision when we make fun of people using crude stereotypes IMO. :(
We would all do well to watch the documentary about poor uneducated West Virginians rising up and striking against Peabody coal before ever mouthing off about working class white rural people ever again. Do you think these people rose up because the ostensible left berated them with hateful stereotypes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCiVMngILEI
Yep. We get one of the most poignant, ages-old organising questions the world has ever heard from Florence Reese, a working-class woman from Appalachia who had little formal education but who was a powerful poet and singer in traditional idiom:
Come all of you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell.
cho: Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
My daddy was a miner,
And I’m a miner too,
And I’ll stick with the union,
Till every battle’s through.
They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there.
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J.H. Blair.
Oh, workers can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can.
Will you be a lousy scab,
Or will you be a man ?
Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance,
Unless we organize.
The Latte-Limo Liberals would ignore her if she were still alive, but she definitely had the goods in the parcel!
Thumbs up!
I'm with you, K.!
Abby, the bit you quoted seems perfectly understandable to me. Also correct at its core if perhaps shaky or poorly characterised in its detail. Do we pay taxes to the Rothschilds? They're a large, old, powerful, international family of bankers and industrialists, so I'd guess that yes, a lot of our tax monies do wind up in their pockets if only we but knew it. As our taxes wind up in Bush pockets and du Pont pockets and Rockefeller pockets and....
(My eyes popped open when I looked up the Rotschilds just now out of curiosity to see how far they go back (1700s). One of the palaces they built in Austria is called "Schloss Hinterleiten", which could be translated as "Palace of Lead-from-behind" (Hinter=behind, from which we get the colloquial "hinder" (butt, rump, hind-end) in German-settled areas like Wisconsin, plus leiten=to lead) or, more loosely, "Palace of Power-behind-the-throne". Things that make one go hmmmmm :-)
It was going great through the "corporation posing as a legitimate government" part ...
... admittedly, the message does sort of run off the rails after that.
Its really quite a leftist statement. I wonder if they are aware of how closely aligned they are with the left on statements like that??
Hitler was similarly aligned with the left with regard to a working class populist viewpoint. They didn't call it "National Socialism" for nothing.
Nonetheless, Hitler took much pleasure with sending socialists - he called then "Bolshevists" - to the death camps along with the Jews, Gypsies and Queers.
We have NO common ground with the "Tea Party".
Hitler was NEVER aligned with the left. Leftist rhetoric and slogans were co-opted, but the street battles were between the reds and the brown shirts.
You are wrong. Hitler and the Nazis started as a SOCIALIST party in alignment with the Socialists.
The purge of the Socialists happened after Hitler cut a deal with the Industrialists and started receiving funds from The Bush clan in the USA and others.
>>Röhm had been one of the most prominent members of the party's "socialist" faction. This group took the words "Sozialistische" and "Arbeiter" ("worker") in the party's name literally. They largely rejected capitalism (which they associated with Jews) and pushed for nationalisation of major industrial firms, expanded worker control, confiscation and redistribution of the estates of the old aristocracy and social equality. Röhm spoke of a "second revolution" against "reactionaries" (the National Socialist label for conservatives), as the National Socialists had previously dealt with the Communists and Socialists.
The Socialist faction in Germany saw the Jews as "Capitalists" and the "Reds" as Communists and rejected both in favor of "National Socialism".
Those that allied with Hitler "Out of common cause" including many workers paid the price. If one allies with the Right Wing of the "Tea party" just because BOTH oppose the exist Government, it would make matters even worse in the long term.
Another way to look at it is that Hitler and his thugs jacked the name up and drove another party in under it. Not unlike taking a bottle that originally held a 1959 Ayler Kupp Trockenbeerenauslese and filling it with poisoned widdle: same label, totally different contents.
Thank-you GWNorth, for doing the legwork necessary to correct this notion of a "common cause" with the right wing loonies.
There is a difference between "common cause" and dialog and outreach, perhaps such subtleties are lost on you, I am quite certain it wasn't lost on Joe Hill when he talked with illiterate mine workers I'd bet all of whom were not angels of p.c purity. One thing we can know with absolute certainty is that since you have protected the clubby *purity* of the 90+% college educated middle class and upper middle class left that the oligarchy sleeps easier. Thanks for preserving our p.c purity and dividing "us" from "them" as one of the elect I feel so hip and special and enlightened, that's what counts right, not an actual revolution of many poor people of all backgrounds in the streets that might make the oligarchs piss their pants with fear idn't it?
Hurray for smug superiority and lack of outreach, I feel a slightly saintly glow and halo about my head, how about you?
Hint over on the racism item the one self proclaimed African American said that class is more important than race, but hey who cares what the actual black dude said we've got marching orders, forward ho into another tedious meeting of irritatingly righteous middle class white people declaiming their superiority hurray. How do we differ from militias again, I keep forgetting, oh yeah our meetings are monochrome too just full of more well to do pale people. :( Good stuff, we showed them funny speakin' types with crude web sites a thing or two didn't we?
Sigh!
not just monochrome but monosexual and mostly over fifty
That too..
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
No, you are wrong. You conflate party transitions and Hitler's manipulative ultra-nationalist, racist strategy with doctrinal sincerity towards socialism (which rejects racism and sexism and supports global socialism for all workers), and several other errors I will attempt to address. One of Hitler's first acts after the Enabling Act was to outlaw all labor unions and send key union leaders to Dachau concentration camp along with communists, socialists, gays, gypsies and, later, British survivors of Dunkirk. Socialists would never outlaw labor unions in what was then and remained economically a capitalist economy with large privately owned corporations, several (but not all) of which were nationalized for the purposes of military mobilization. The Nazis also held enormous bank accounts in privately owned banks in neutral European countries, and the camp SS later ran a large scale black market in clothing and personal effects seized from newly arrived victims of their death camps for which they issued stock certificates to other members of the SS and a few other highly placed Nazis. Hardly the acts of socialists.
Dachau was on the grounds of a German aristocratic family friendly to the Nazis and many high ranking officers in the Wehrmacht and SS were from aristocratic families. The Nazis were never anti-aristocratic in the sense that the Soviet communists or pre-Napoleonic French revolutionaries were.
A year after the end of WWI in 1918, the German Army assigned Adolph Hitler (a decorated dispatch runner) as a spy to infiltrate the new German Worker's Party. The army was concerned that this was a Bolshevik-influenced party that might urge communist revolution. The party's leader, Anton Drexler, was an anti-semitic German nationalist whose ideas along those lines Hitler admired. Drexler asked Hitler to join the party and the German Army gave him the OK. Hitler was a natural orator and began making speeches for the party while attempting to reorganize it to better suit himself. Hitler was soon appointed the party's propaganda manager and brought in several members of the army he'd known during the war, including Ernst Rohm, who had access to the German Army's political fund which Hitler milked to fund the party.
Hitler became their featured speaker and a magnet for party recruitment. Hitler had always held contempt for socialists because he opposed the notions of racial and sexual equality, but socialism was a very popular idea among many Germans after WWI. The largest party in Germany at that time was the German Social Democrat Party (SDP). When some of Hitler's party members suggested that they include the word "socialist" in their party's name, Hitler insisted that they put the word "national" before it to attempt to redefine socialism in the public's eyes so that his nationalist variant would only allow equality for those of German blood. Immigration of non-Germans would be halted and aliens, especially Jews, would lose their citizenship rights. He also proposed to ignore the stipulations of the Versaillles reparations treaty and to reunify all German populations.
His "25 Points" agenda was published in early 1920 for his renamed National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP). To appeal to many socialists and others in the working-class on a false basis in order to gain their votes to help elevate the party to power, Hitler included in his 25 Points ideas like profit sharing in large industries, increases in old-age pensions, free education, and a redistribution of income & war profits from any future wars. Full scale income redistribution never took place although war profits helped buoy up the German economy until the last several months of WWII. A great deal of income was redistributed from the Jews into the German, Swiss, Swedish and Lichtensteinish economies.
In Fall of 1921, Hitler took over the entire party from Anton Drexler. Soon after he was jailed for being part of a mob who beat up an opposition politician. After he was released he created his own private army called the Sturm Abteilung (Storm Section) aka Brownshirts. Ernst Rohm was initially the key recruiter for the SA and brought in many veterans as well as members of the Frei Korps (mercenaries similar to today's Blackwater/Xe mercs). Hermann Goering was their first leader. The SA's tasks were to violently break-up opposition political meetings, attack and clear communists, socialists and left-wing labor organizers from the streets--usually to make way for a Nazi Party parade going to a nearby rally where Hitler would be the featured speaker. During this phase Hitler began cutting deals with German munitions firms and other firms for financial support for his Nazi Party in exchange for exclusive government agreements to lock them in as key profiteers from the coming wars of conquest. Firms that were critical to the Nazi Party during the war years included Krupps, Daimler-Benz, Porsche, BMW, AEG, I.G.Farben, Topf und Sohne and IBM among others.
Hitler routinely exhorted his listeners (with florid, fat & sweaty faced, sometimes tearful, hand waving, fist pounding orations) to carry out acts of hatred and violence against communists, socialists and Jews. When the Weimar government heard this they passed a "Law for the Protection of the Republic." Hitler responded by organizing the largest Nazi rally yet of some 40,000 people (later dwarfed by the Nuremberg rallies) and calling for the overthrow of the German government and suggesting that its leaders be executed. If those kinds of calls and suggestions sound familiar to some of you in light of certain right-winger statements & activities in the U.S. this year, that's because they are almost identical.
Metal copyright 2010
I never Stated Adolf Hitler was A Socialist.
Indeed in your rebuttal you AGREE with what I was saying.
>>His "25 Points" agenda was published in early 1920 for his renamed National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP). To appeal to many socialists and others in the working-class on a false basis in order to gain their votes to help elevate the party to power, Hitler included in his 25 Points ideas like profit sharing in large industries, increases in old-age pensions, free education, and a redistribution of income & war profits from any future wars. Full scale income redistribution never took place although war profits helped buoy up the German economy until the last several months of WWII. A great deal of income was redistributed from the Jews into the German, Swiss, Swedish and Lichtensteinish economies.
Which was the exact point I was making. The appeal to the "Socialists" was PHONY and once they got what they needed out of the Socialists they turned on them.
Ernst Rohm WAS a socialist. That he warred on other Socialists did not change that as thug that he was he wanted to ensure there no RIVALS to his brand of Socialism. Read his platform. He wanted to Nationalize all industry and have them owned in common by workers. Hitler and higher ups in the Nazi party cautioned him several times not make such speeches as Hitler was courting favor with the Industrialists and Conservatives.
When Rohm continued...he and his followers were purged.
>>The main function of the SA was to protect the party leadership and to disrupt the other parties' political meetings. They helped to make the Nazis more powerful than the other parties on the Munich scene. However, when Hitler began to campaign for the chancellorship of Germany, he began to marginalize the SA in order to improve his image and in response to criticisms by establishment conservatives. While Hitler had been personally rather fond of R�hm, he came under pressure to reduce his influence. German military leaders were unhappy with the proposal by R�hm that the German army be absorbed into a larger SA, and the industrialists that supported Hitler were concerned over R�hm's socialist leanings.
>>In spite of the pressure applied on him, Hitler postponed his decision to do away with his favourite right-hand man to the very end. He appealed desperately to R�hm not to press for a socialist 'revolution' that would lead to an upheaval of Germany at all levels. Only when the differences were irreconcilable and things were getting dangerously out of hand did Hitler finally make up his mind that R�hm must go.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
"I never Stated Adolf Hitler was A Socialist."
In your very first paragraph of your post you stated,
"Hitler and the Nazis started as a SOCIALIST party in alignment with the Socialists."
Firstly, Hitler never started the German Workers Party, he infiltrated it at the behest of the German Army and later converted it to the National Socialist German Worker's Party via the disingenuous propaganda process I described in my comment on your post. Secondly, if you didn't intend to suggest that Hitler and his movement were authentically socialist, then why would you claim that "Hitler and the Nazis started as a SOCIALIST [your caps for emphasis, not mine] party in alignment with the Socialists" - ?
In my rebuttal I continued to DISAGREE with your post thusly, "To appeal to many socialists and others in the working-class on a FALSE [my caps for emphasis] basis in order to gain their votes to help elevate the party to power...."
A few enticement programs to lure socialists and other more centrist left-wing workers to vote for a Party that, once in power, would viciously turn on them and organized labor does not a socialist Party make. In advertising it's called "bait & switch."
"Which was the exact point I was making. The appeal to the "Socialists" was PHONY..."
If that was your intention I see no sign of it and I don't think any reader of your post would discern that intention but, rather, its opposite.
Ernst Rohm was a source of useful German Army political funds to Hitler and a useful recruiter for the SA as long as there was some pre-1933 need for the NSDAP to prolong the farce of reaching out for socialist and pro-union workers' votes. Rohm was a creature of the German Army with ties to the Frei Korps, both of which were profoundly anti-socialist and anti-communist. Rohm perhaps thought he could move the GWP or NSDAP to the left away from the conservative nationalist imperialist influence of the German Army, but he never had any timely, realistic hope of wresting control of it from Adolph Hitler. That didn't make Hitler's Nazi Party a socialist party no matter how many more truly socialistic speeches Rohm made. Once Hitler came to power Rohm was an annoyance and was soon eliminated during the purge of the SA to make way for the more politically "pure" SS. I don't believe Hitler was as sentimental towards Rohm as you suggest he was. Hitler was not a particularly sentimental man with regard to most other human beings.
Upon reading todays article called "race to the top should be left behind" it becomes all too clear exactly where you are coming from. Rather then follow the THREAD by reading what I was responding to and the rest of my post, you chose instead to leap on the first line and assume that was the entire point of what i was saying.
I will attribute this to your educational system.
Just as a suggestion. It was not Adolf Hitler who founded the Nazis. He was merely the last of their leaders having Hijacked that leadership. The party was founded by an avowed Socialist. (Anton Drexler). It was initially to be called the German SOCIALIST workers party with the name Socialist dropped out of concern it would turn nationalists away.
Drexler espoused Socialist platforms.
There were a number of Socialist parties forming at the time but none using the Combination of Socialism and Nationalism that Drexler and the founders of it proposed.
The very name Nazi came from "National Socialism" an alliance of the Nationalists and the Socialists. The Socialists were subsequently purged once they had served their purpose.
Socialism and Nationalism come from either end of the Political spectrum. My rebuttal to Stereohead in using this example was just because they felt they had a common cause, it did not make for a sound alliance.
hard to argue with their points...
from whence surprise where reaction is concerned?
if you spit on and stab and rob and poison the trapped and indentured constituency, what do you expect?
fruit baskets?
dubet: "if you spit on and stab and rob and poison the trapped and indentured constituency, what do you expect?
"fruit baskets?"
We'll all be happy when we can deliver fruit baskets to the more-posh minimum security prisons for the various "Wall Streeters," et al., dwelling within. Be glad to go with Tea-baggers/States' Rightists, Guardians of the Republic, and old Hippies in '57 Chevys and a psychedelic van.
Spelling, syntax and clear logic often may be wrong, but they sure have energy and the anger to fuel it.
We all want real and positive change that benefits All The People, and that is our commonality. So yeah, the postings that came before this one, set the tone, and you're right.
/cm
I suspect that few of these white, generally well-off Tea-Party types have been spat on, robbed and poisoned, nor are working under indenture.
Why do I guess as a Dim party apologist you are likely far better off than your average rural poor person that is the average constituent of this sort of group? Give me a ring pjd when the Dim party correctly states the government is posing as a corporation and not it's current stance of "drill baby, drill," exactly like Sarah Palin who you despise, yet who your parties polices differ from not at all except on the surface cultural issues of abortion and gun control. This group may say some vile things like scapegoating the Rothchilds for example, but even given that they still seem more aware than the DIms IMO.
I am not a "dim apologist".
I am a leftist of the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, but also partial to 4th-internationalist (Trotskyist) traditions.
I don't vote for democrats. I havent voted for a Democrat or Republican presidential candidate since 1992 - a vote I now deeply regret. I am a registered Green, formerly Socialist Party, when they had a Western Pennsylvania local. Is that clear?
What political movements and tendencies are you active in?
The remark about "corporations as govenment" is indeed accurate, but is only one line in the piece. Look at the statement in it's entirety. Also, Hitler similarly spoke out against the corporations, bankers and Rothchild Jews. Recognizing the malevolent power of corporations does NOT by itself make one in the least a man of the people!
If you can't smell Naziism when it crosses your nose, then you are an idiot.
I have seen you do nothing here but make apologetics for bad policy of the Democratic party, if I remember correctly you defended the health insurance bailout creation of a captive market of lower class americans that *posed* as health care reform didn't you?
I have been arrested for Earth First! direct action locking down to saw mill gate, spent time locked down *under* a logging road, was pepper sprayed protesting Bush' inauguration and was part of a group that take over the Bay Bridge in San Francisco for hours blocking traffic in 1991 protesting Bush I's imperialist war against Iraq.
As a 4th internationalist Communist you hardly strike me as "man of the people" either, state capitalist Communism is just as bad as the current crony capitalist production IMO, and in fact is not all that different in being industrialist centrlists bolstered by state power.
Phone me when you've read some Kropotkin.
I have been posting here for far longer than you have, under various banned names. I was frequently banned here for my criticism of Obama in his run-up to election.
You are a fucking childish asshole who can only see things in black and white. If i don't go along with you, I am a apologist for the Democrats.
The health care bill is terrible, but no more terrible than the awful status quo. And there is an expansion of Medicaid, but white California-suburban kid like you probably cannot understand it's importance to the truly down-trodden. There were also beneficial political dynamics around it's passage - even the recent EPA rulemaking that will end mountain top removal may have been political consequence of the passage of this bill. The world is a far, far more complicated place than anything you would understand.
I am not a suburban kid I grew up in a house trailer in northern Michigan and struggled to get a college scholarship, and have lived in rented rooms or fucking outside, or at my parents all my life and currently am a landscaper and fix up stereo for a living. I'm more grapes of wrath than Bart Simpson. Now that I've told all, what's your background commie prick?
I am quite certain I understand the world the better than a dupe for state capitalist centralism like a Trotskyist, again give me a ring after you've read some Kropotkin, or Chomsky.
And the health care bill does nothing but force poor and lower middle class people who are being squeezed by the banksters to pay for substandard health coverage out of their own pockets. Aren't all your "comrades" at Workers World Daily against that crap? What are they going to think if they catch you endorsing Obummer's crony capitalist health insurance bailout that leaves 20 MILLION Americans without any coverage whatsoever even a decade from now?
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Thanks, pjd412, for spending more time & energy than I wanted to waste putting this rude stereomouth person in his place, but he's worse than your description of him. He's also a habitual liar and word twister who projects his psychological hang-ups and words into the mouths of people he's snap-judged based on his infantile set of stereotypes. He's told you he's not a suburban kid but he's posted elsewhere that he has lived in suburban areas. He claims he wants progressives to reach out to rural right-wingers but he himself behaves like a twitchy insulting meth-head and is unable to maintain a civil discussion with progressive regulars on this site. His ethics and dialectics are situational at best.
Now you have gone way too far I never said I lived in suburban areas that is a lie.
I have lived next to the projects in San Francisco in a very working class neighborhood in Ypsilanti and out in the woods amongst the "hicks" many here seem to despise in northern Michigan, northern California, and Oregon. Maybe you ass-umed when I said I lived in San Francisco it was in the burbs, but that is a "projection." I have described suburbs in my area but that is very much as an outsider I assure you. In my own neighborhood currently there is an abandoned restaurant, an abandoned gas station, an abandoned drug store and a burned down Taco Bell that has not been cleaned up for months within 3 blocks of my house. Why I am guessing you as Mr. elite scholar guy live in a rather more well to do neighborhood than that? The sort of neighborhood where talking about disenfranchising poor white people and saying they good for nothing but cannon fodder is par for the course and where the only working class person you see is a landscaper?
But have fun overseeing the slave farm you envision in your own mind of disenfranchised poor white people who you say are good for nothing but being "cannot fodder" for imperialist wars you obviously support or why would we need cannon fodder in the first place?
Meth heads are deeply sick people I despise, and I can use both kings English and gutter dialectics at will as most talented writers who have lived both on the street and who have gone to elite colleges do, deal!
Try "His ethics and dialectics are situational at best" in my hood in a tweed jacket, both the disenfranchised white and African American people would pop a cap in your blowhard ass. And yes I do know what it means, I was a philosophy major, and you are wrong I *consistently* stick up for *all* downtrodden oppressed people including eek scary poor white rural people you don't even disguise your contemptuous hate for in classist way. It's people like you that cause people to abandon the left in droves because you are an insufferable pretentious blowhard, for the Rush Limp balls of the world so thanks for your kind help to the movement.
I have said much about myself BTW and you have revealed almost nothing about yourself, it's easy to snipe from the sidelines from a hidden position idn't? Of course the fact that you behave like a provocateur is only a coincidence I am sure... :(
You guys know each other? How can you tell from comments that one is a white suburban California kid and the other is 4th International whatever?
A lot of the discussion on this thread is so esoteric and ingrown that it is hard to follow. Or maybe it just made me tired. But if angry back and forth dialogue like this tires me out, how is it going to go over with your neighbors and co-workers?
Joe