The BBC has been making strenuous and concerted efforts in a campaign to overthrow the elected government and undermine its economic policy in this country.
It has been broadcasting repeated claims that ‘Austerity’ will lead only to the revival of Fascism and it scaremongers relentlessly with film and opinion pieces that are meant to frighten us with the spectre of jack booted storm troopers marching down the Mall.
As the Political Party Conference season began the BBC also began its political game broadcasting ‘The Nazis: A Warning From History’ …..making the link between government imposed economic misery and Fascist dictatorship. Stephanie Flanders began her ‘Masters of Money’ series that also plugged that message….Austerity will see blood on the streets and revolution.
Now we have their latest effort….’The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler ’……here the BBC warns us that having George Osborne as Chancellor will only lead to another sort of Chancellor…. Adolf Hitler arising from the ashes of the scorched earth policies of George Osborne and Frau Merkel:
‘Adolf Hitler was an unlikely leader but he still formed a connection with millions of German people, generating a level of charismatic attraction that was almost without parallel. It is a stark warning for the modern day, says historian Laurence Rees (ex BBC man).
In the good economic times, during the mid-to-late twenties in Germany, Hitler was thought charismatic by only a bunch of fanatics. So much so that in the 1928 election the Nazis polled only 2.6% of the vote.
Yet less than five years later Hitler was chancellor of Germany and leader of the most popular political party in the country.
What changed was the economic situation. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 there was mass unemployment in Germany and banks crashed.
“The people were really hungry,” says Jutta Ruediger, who started to support the Nazis around this time. “It was very, very hard. And in that context, Hitler with his statements seemed to be the bringer of salvation.”
This history matters to us today. Not because history offers “lessons” – how can it since the past can never repeat itself exactly? But because history can contain warnings.
In an economic crisis millions of people suddenly decided to turn to an unconventional leader they thought had “charisma” because he connected with their fears, hopes and latent desire to blame others for their predicament. And the end result was disastrous for tens of millions of people.
It is in Greece itself – amid terrible economic crisis – that we see the sudden rise of a political movement like the Golden Dawn that glories in its intolerance and desire to persecute minorities.
And it is led by a man who has claimed there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. Can there be a bigger warning than that?
Laurence Rees is a former creative director of history programmes for the BBC
Kind of a curious view…..when you consider who is provoking revolution and anarchy on the streets of Europe……..
Trade Union barons are whipping up anti government rhetoric and protest, Marxist anarchist groups occupy cathedrals and public spaces, students and left wing activists riot and threaten to bring down governments, even the BBC broadcasts calls for violent revolution on their programmes…..as on Flander’s Masters of Money…….but what does the BBC see the problem as?
Apparently the imposition of Austerity has led to the activation of Nazi sleeper cells around Europe…The Boys From Brazil are here just waiting to over turn democracy and goose step across Europe just as they did in the 30’s.
Of course, remember what the BBC won’t tell you….the Nazis, the ‘National Socialists’….were, em, Socialists.
When the BBC calls them ‘Fascists’ or ‘Far Right’ they do so in the hope you, the viewer, will make the connection to any political party on the Right….preferably the Conservatives….thereby associating all ‘that nastiness’ with them and not their true brethren on the Left.
Nazis have more in common with Labour socialists than Tories….Black Shirted Fascist Oswald Mosley was a Labour Party MP…..Communism is merely the other side of the same coin that is Fascism….just as you have Shi’ites and Sunni Muslims.
The BBC hates austerity with a vengeance and never misses a chance to damn it….Evan Davis often saying that Austerity is the ‘medicine that is killing the patient’, whilst Flanders has had a free hand to produce programme after programme supporting Labour’s economic view and ‘Plan B’.
Comments by BBC presenters have no basis in reality….Victoria Derbyshire stating that ‘people are losing their jobs left right and centre’ when unemployment is going down. The strange little programme ‘Wake Up To Money’ is always good for a laugh….yesterday claiming that the rich haven’t paid anything towards reducing the deficit…when of course they have been hit with the largest tax rises overall, and today they came up with the comment that the Governor of the Bank of England had suggested that we are heading for another triple dip recession in his ‘zig zag’ speech, when he said nothing of the sort.
Nothing like not letting the facts get in the way of a bad news story.
However even those old lefties at the Guardian have begun to wake up to reality….
Welcome to 21st-century Europe.
Today’s quarterly inflation review by the Bank of England is merely the latest in a series of indicators that remind governments and peoples across Europe and beyond that the old days are simply over, done, finished.
The message is hard to miss. Times have changed. The only thing that is certain is further uncertainty. We may have come out of recession again, but the idea that Britain, let alone the countries of the eurozone, can expect to see any resumption of the kind of growth rates to which we have all been accustomed since the second world war, is increasingly fanciful. We are living through not a downturn but an epochal change, and we need to make a more consistent effort to understand what this implies.
During the next 50 years, according to a newly published OECD growth report, the world economy is expected to grow at about 3% a year. Most of that growth, however, will be in Asia and the developing nations. Growth in Europe, including the UK, will be much less robust – and will often actually decline.
Got that? Growth in Britain will often decline over the coming half-century. It will not resume. We can talk all we like about stimulus and investment, as Labour did today in its latest denunciation of George Osborne, quite rightly in its way. But, during the next 50 years, growth is going to be halting and uneven and will sometimes be negative. Just like now, in fact.
The OECD said something else, too. As the world economy grows, it reported, our European share of it will decline. Economic power is shifting to China.
For most of us, relative decline is something we read about but don’t think about until it hits us on the head. Most of us have barely started to grasp what it may mean for our living standards and our politics.
And not just in 50 years’ time, either. These large shifts are already under way. Their impact is now, as well as later.
Smart leaders should recognise that austerity in some form is the context for most of the foreseeable political options in countries like Britain.
But it does mean that political parties in economically developed countries no longer have the same breadth of spending options as they did……. the left cannot simply shout the old mantras.
This is not a defeatist but a realistic assessment.
Clearly, though, the right is more comfortable in such times.
He is right about that. Osborne’s touch may have deserted him recently, but he has the huge advantage of being alive to the context and politics of these new times in ways that the left across Europe is still struggling to match.’
Osborne is right…and ‘in touch’ with the context and politics? How refreshig to see the dawning of reality and the realisation that we have priced ourselves out of the market.
If only the BBC would, if not accept that ‘radical’ view, but at least allow the light of discussion and informed debate to illuminate the viewers and listeners instead of the BBC itself casting the dark and forebidding shadow of fascism across the airwaves.
Time for the BBC to start accepting the case for Austerity and for not briefing against it in terms designed to frighten everyone to death.
I notice plenty of two-minute hates being broadcast lately, with Emmanual Goldsteins (plural) on every screen.
In Greek mythology Antaeus was a Libyan giant who defeated all his opponents. Athene told Hercules that if he was to defeat him, he would have to lift him up and disconnect him from the earth, his mother, the source of his strength.
The reason the BBC is so spiritually dead (that it does not inform or engage or stimulate) is that it is disconnected from reality. It is a Leftist bureaucracy focused only on its own existence.
You are correct to say that the BBC is making strenuous and concerted efforts to overthrow the elected government, and undermine its economic policy. But the reason it is doing this is not because it has any alternative policy. All the Leftist establishment want to do is carry on sucking on the teat of the State. Everything else is a lie.
It is one of the ten rules of the universe is that Leftists are full of shit.
What austerity ? we give £13 Billion pounds in foreign Aid to Africa.
And we give £3.6 billion to a bunch of paedophile, tax-dodging Lefty hypocrites at the BBC.
The great thing about being in the BBC is that you can libel anyone. If the victim sues and wins, they pay nothing as the state ie the taxpayers have to pay.
This means that the BBC can broadcast virtually anything and suffer no penalties. This is a luxury that few have.
Alan
This is rather full of holes.
The link between Hitler and George Osbourne : is that based on the use of the word “chancellor”? You didn’t provide any evidence this link was actually made, rather like your extrapolation. Much like Flanders, Hayek and he use of “Austrians” perhaps.
Weak stuff.
Yes, but the BBC are inclined to raise the spectre of the rise of Neo-Fascism at the slightest of opportunities even on occasions when they can only do so by a slight hint of a danger.
”A charismatic leader who millions were attracted to.” Conned more like.
Hmm, sounds like Tony Blair, who was responsible for Nethergate, letting in 5 to 7 million Third World immigrants into the country, a demographic nuclear bomb on England.
The Labour con trick.
The good reason = helping out refugees.
The real reason = they can be a voting base for the Labour party
East German marxist, Bertolt Brecht ” If the people vote the wrong way, change the people.”
‘”A charismatic leader who millions were attracted to.”
I saw this and thought of this:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/obama-about-take-over-internet
Trust is a fragile thing.
The Mail Online has a lot of column inches about Comm
The Mail Online has a lot of column inches about Common Purpose this morning. Worth keeping an eye on because of the BBC links to this organisation.
and the Lefties are already on the comments section poo,hooing the article.
Natch. They always do. There are droves of them out there committed to instant neutralisation of any negative article about themselves. The BBC and Labour taught them well.
‘on the comments section poo,hooing’
Mentioning no names, what follows a few posts below is a partly ironic broadcasts by…
Common Purpose conspiracies are nuts. Amazed the Mail puts them at the centre of their hatchet job on Leveson.
Common Purpose grew under the patronage of the Major Government. Heseltine was very supportive.
And your point is?
“Hesseltine was very supportive”. The man who politically assassinated Thathcher because she would not commit the UK to economic and political union. CP just love the EU……
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nazis:_A_Warning_from_History
Made in 1997 when Labour was in power…
How on earth anyone can see this as some sort of leftwing conspiracy to overthrow the Govt is beyond me!
It’s pointless wasting further time on Alan’s tirade against’The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler ’… as he shows absolutely no understanding or awareness of Weimar politics, at one point deciding that the Nazis were socialists (dirty word in BBBC) when their main opponents for power were…socialists.
The author of the series however made quite clear that it’s Europe, in particular Greece that he’s worried about:
“It’s bleakly ironic that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was greeted in Athens recently with swastika banners carried by angry Greeks protesting at what they see as German interference in their country.
Ironic because it is in Greece itself – amid terrible economic crisis – that we see the sudden rise of a political movement like the Golden Dawn that glories in its intolerance and desire to persecute minorities.
And it is led by a man who has claimed there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz. Can there be a bigger warning than that?”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20237437
If the BBC is bias against Nazis and far right numpties all I can say is bring it on. So is nearly everyone else in the UK.
The NSDAP or the Nazi party = National Sozialistsche Deutsche Arbeiter Partei in English, National SOCIALIST German Workers party.
You are partly right Prole in that the programme has been on before. The problem was that the BBC were perceived, possibly rightly, to re-show it during the party conference season. Don’t forget the BBC regards its main raison d’être to attack the Conservatives at every opportunity.
They often, completely dishonestly, try to make a link between the left-wing National Socialists and the Right of Centre (nominally) Conservatives. The Nazis have much more in common with the UAF!
This new programme is actually interesting, and I thought the charisma of Hitler (as shown in the programme) is more reminiscent of left-wing firebrands like Benn, Scargill, Galloway etc. The BBC may be trying to imply that the Nazis are like the Tories but in the charisma stakes the only ones being followed like that are actually the BBC’s own poster boys.
Of course.
Hitler was a demagogue. So too the likes of Huey Long, Hugo Chavez, Cristina Kirchner, Castro etc,
‘If the BBC is bias against Nazis and far right numpties all I can say is bring it on. So is nearly everyone else in the UK.’.
Have they ever shown any bias against communists far left numpties? I don’t think so (‘former member of the Communist party’ – words always spoken with such reverence and approval).
Balance, my son, it’s all about balance.
‘….AND far left numpties’.
And of course my all time favourite modern ‘Nazi’ party – the SNP – a socialist (check their policies), avowedly Nationist (its in their name) Party. No-one ever seems to ask Salmond if he is a national socialist…
The SNP are all for Third World mass immigration and multiculturalism, they also pander to the muslim vote.
They believe in ” civic ” nationalism not ethnic nationalism. So any Somalian pirate can turn up at Edinburgh airport and hey presto you can become a ” Scot.” So not really the Nazi party.
More like a Cultural Marxist party.
I do , on other forums, often refer to them as
Socialist Nationalist Party (sometimes ad ‘and scottish workers party’) the tooting popular front love it
When will the BBC do a Panprama special on the most violent, anti-democratic political group, UAF.
Their Fuhrer, Martin Smith, was convicted with assaulting a police officer outside BBC studios, but still nothing.
They have a democracy-hating fanatical Islamist as their vice chair, but still nothing.
http://hurryupharry.org/2012/02/28/azad-ali-awlaki-fan-opponent-of-democracy-now-vice-chair-of-unite-against-fascism/
Tory MP’s are now targeted for violence from far-left freaks ,in order to prevent their views from being heard, but still Cameron’s name remains on the UAF supporters ‘wall of shame’.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2233011/Mike-Weatherley-Tory-MP-attacked-rocks-tomatoes-50-violent-thugs-ahead-talk-squatting.html#ixzz2CIfESvky
*Panorama
Panprama = BBC throwing the toys out in all directions.
Winston Churchill ” The Fascists of the future will be the Anti Fascists.”
The ‘anti-fascist’ police state –
http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13036/
The BBC went into over drive of pious self righteous indignation about the Russian pop girl group ” Pussy Riot going to jail for blasphemy in a Moscow Church.
Yet they think it’s perfectly ok if a Welsh boy goes to prison for 47 days for making rude remarks on his Twitter page.
Welcome to the Peoples Republic of Britain.
I think the over zealous approach to things people say on social media unites left and right. David Allen Green is soundest on this ( twitter joke trial). Would think bbc hacks were sympathetic.
‘Would think bbc hacks were sympathetic.’
Care to amplify?
Yes ‘would think’ but have seen little evidence of
Thanks for the link, the phrase ” UAF = useful idiots ” comes to mind.
Orwell said
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”…
Oh my word. Where to start.
This posting is so completely barking mad that I had to pause to allow my shoulders to stop shaking with mirth before I could type a response.
The whole posting is ludicrous, but I have to agree with Jim: the assertion that National Socialism was in fact a socialist movement is total Horlicks. There is broad scholarly consensus that it was a far right-wing ideology. The people who like to claim it’s a socialist movement are those on the far right who wish to disassociate themselves from Nazism.
Alan’s typographically erratic polemics appear to have reached a new peak of apoplexy in recent weeks. He also appears to be suffering paranoid delusions. Maybe David could give him compassionate leave for a few weeks while he recovers?
Unlike some of the others, I don’t come to this site to laugh at it. But, as Nicked pointed out some time ago, when Alan started posting the site lost its marbles. On current form, it’s a basket case.
It comes across as cranky for a party that sent social democrats and trade union leaders to concentration camps almost as soon as it achieved power to be called socialist. It is, however, not totally crazy: if you read the wiki article ‘Nazi Party’ you find that there were advocates of a synthesis of socialism and a racially based nationalism during World War One. Hitler hijacked a party, to some extent based on these ideas but his lower middle class prejudices were in contradiction to the more redistributionist, anti-big business ideas of Roehm and the ‘northern tendency’ whose leadership were liquidated and power broken, in the night of the long knives. Any working class animus against the rich was re-directed into hatred of the Jews and Bolshevism. The economic systems of these inter-war fascist regimes are usually described as corporatist – neither socialist nor laisser-faire capitalist.
“It comes across as cranky for a party that sent social democrats and trade union leaders to concentration camps almost as soon as it achieved power to be called socialist.”
Communist regimes (for example the Soviet Union) also sent social democrats and trade union leaders to concentration camps.
“Oh my word. Where to start”.
Try at the beginning with Gregor Strasser:-
We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system !
or
The rise of National Socialism is the protest of a people against a State that denies the right to work. If the machinery for distribution in the present economic system of the world is incapable of properly distributing the productive wealth of nations, then that system is false and must be altered. The important part of the present development is the anti-capitalist sentiment that is permeating our people.
‘Where to start?’
Possibly… about here….
http://biasedbbc.tv/2012/11/the-season-of-goodwill-to-all-men.html
…at about this point?:
‘the rapid descent from civility on the site’?
I see the Stalinist line that the Nazi Party were conservatives is still going strong. Biggest lie of the C20th.
The people who peddle this lie are Leftists who wish to disassociate themselves from Nazism – as well they might given that Nazism is a form of Leftism.
‘RedWhiteandBlue puts new ad hominem attack free policy to test’ shocker.
Prior to the last General Election the bBBC, having realise Labour were not going to have a victory but that the Election was going to be close started to push the line of having a return to the old Lib/Lab Pact, this time as a Lab/Lib Dem Pact. When that didn’t happen, and the champaign bottles had to remain firmly corked instead of corridors filled with empties, they took it upon themselves to do whatever they could, as is their usual inbred habit, to undermine the Tory part of the Coalition. For the last forty years that has been Situation Normal for the bBBC.
Although I consider that the BBC is an enabler of metro-lefty crapola I would also admit that some of its programmes are well put together and quite fascinating. One of them was The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler. Although Laurence Rees was its writer and producer, its major consultant was Professor Sir Ian Kershaw. I don’t have any inside knowledge as to how these things are arranged but I’m prepared to accept, because of Sir Ian’s input, that the factual side of the programme was (as far as is ever possible when dealing in history) as near the gold standard of factual truth as you can get. Interpretation is, of course, different but the lessons I learnt – or had reinforced – from this programme were that:
1. that WW1 was the great disrupter and the great tragedy of European civilisation. Without that war, and particularly Germany’s defeat, Hitler would have lived and died a failed (and v. angry) artist. Mind you, Lenin would have died a frustrated revolutionary in Switzerland and Stalin would have remained a small-time gangster (well, he was always a small-time gangster but, unfortunately, he also became dictator of the USSR).
2. The “democratic” parties and the trade unions in Weimar Republic failed to produce or support a stable regime or, anyway, one that could survive the slump of the 30s. Whatever actually happened in 1933, multi-party democracy was doomed. This, together with von Papen’s complete misjudgement of his ability to “manage” Hitler, paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power.
3. “Charisma” in politics is, among other things, the consequence of total certainty (or the appearance of certainty). Hitler was absolutely certain about what he wanted, what and why he believed in what he believed, the long-term strategy of achieving it and his “destiny”. Furthermore – or as a consequence of that belief and that certainty – he was his own man.
None of those lessons seem to me to imply that present-day Greece is not a basket case or that the unions and politicians are not largely or completely responsible for the mess it’s in.
Coming back to charisma, IMHO – and this is not to compare him to Hitler in any way – the reason Boris transcends his unfashionable (in today’s politics) background is that he is (or appears to be) his own man. Compare him to the pygmies at the top of the political tree eg Cameron, Clegg, Osborne, Miliband. All of them are men of little apparent principle who believe, it seems, in nothing except staying in/getting power. Boris might be exactly the same but he doesn’t come across as merely an opportunist: he doesn’t always trim his opinions or decisions with an eye on how it will look in tomorrow’s papers (or BBC London News).
So I don’t agree with Alan that The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler can be viewed as a stalking horse created by the BBC to demonise the “right” in the UK or relieve Labour of any responsibility for the current situation. Nor, purely by virtue of reshowing The Nazis: A Warning From History (again, using Ian Kershaw as the historical adviser) can the BBC be accused of blatant political propagandising. The truth was that austerity did for the Weimar Republic but that was because the politics of the republic were dysfunctional anyway and failed the test austerity set. Of course, in its pursuit of its anti-government agenda, in other programmes and analyses the BBC constantly and dishonestly asserts or implies “austerity or growth” as a straightforward policy choice rather than a problem about means and ends (as if, given a choice and were both equally available , Osborne or anyone else sane would opt for austerity in place of growth).
Although I believe – and the tsunami of evidence produced by this website and other sites makes it more or less undeniable – that the BBC is, generally speaking, untrustworthy, mendacious and too big for its and our good, it doesn’t always set up its programmes as propaganda and its paranoid to think it does.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’
In the right, or wrong (depending on your… tastes, across various criteria), it can of course be so much more.
Ask the world’s greatest living Pres… semanticist,.
The Labour Party supporting Sir Ian Kershaw (knighted by New Labour) praised the Blair years as
“a decade of sustained prosperity and economic stability, unparalleled in recent times…a remarkable achievement, even if Gordon Brown was the main architect of the economic success.” and although he admits that “there is remarkably little substantial improvement to show for 10 years of Labour government, particularly in the position of the less well-off in society…what is Labour for, if not above all to serve their interests.”
Two idiot statements. Firstly Brown was not the main architect of economic success, and secondly New Labour was always about the promotion of the interests of the Public Sector – at the expense of everybody else.
If this is your reference then, IMHO, you have misunderstood what he is saying. I read it as condemning Blair for failing to live up to the (general) expectations of 1997. As to Brown, Kershaw is correct. Brown was the architect of the boom under Blair. It just so happens that that boom was almost entirely artificial and fuelled by over-borrowing and uncontrolled government expenditure and marked by gross governmental incompetence. Further, Kershaw sums up his view of Labour 1997-2007 with this paragraph: Labour now seems to stand for little more than the claim that it can manage the problems of British society a bit better, and a bit more humanely, than can the Conservatives. And even that claim is open to question . Not, I think, the words of a Labour dildo. BTW I have not been able to find online any confirmation that he is a member of the Labour Party.
Nevertheless, member of Labour or not his books on Hitler AFAIAC were/are superb. His concept, or rather his explanation of the concept, of “working towards the Fuehrer” is worth a knighthood in itself. BTW not every honour handed out under Blair was underserved: only the vast majority!
On a general point, IMHO this is a very slippery slope. Just because he might support – or is even a member of – the Labour Party doesn’t mean that the results of his day job are irredeemably corrupted by that association – or even partially so. However, were he a member, I would treat with circumspection any opinion he offers on UK contemporary politics or economics. Even so, the cited reference above is not by any means an encomium to Blair, Brown or Labour.
Umbongo,
You are correct when you say that Kershaw asserts that New Labour did not live up to his expectations. What you miss out is that Kershaw says this as a Labour supporter. I am not a Labour supporter, and so I never had those illusions in the first place. Nor do I view those illusions as something to be admired.
You are also correct when you point out that Brown was a bad Chancellor of the Exchequer, who presided over an expansion of the State funded by over-borrowing and pork barrel government expenditure. What you miss out is Kershaw claiming that it was a remarkable achievement, which it was not; it was the same old, same old.
You correctly point out that Kershaw asserts that Labour now seems to stand for little more than the claim that it managed the problems of British society a bit better, and a bit more humanely, than the Conservatives.
Well this is false. They neither managed the State finances better, nor more humanely, nor less corruptly. New Labour abused its power, decreased our freedoms, and was one of the most corrupt British governments in living memory.
Since I have not read his books on Nazi Germany I am not in a position to question your judgement that they are a valuable contribution to understanding that period. If you say they are good (good enough for a knighthood) then I will accept what you say.
You are correct (in my opinion) that it would be a mistake to throw a historian in the bin just because he is on the Left politically, and I agree with you that Kershaw in the article you mention (which you correctly claim is my reference) is trying to avoid simply being a Labour Party apologist.
From what you say I am guessing he is a thousand times better as a historian than the Stalin apologist Eric Hobsbawm – who unfortunately I have read.
However! Now that I am (as Nicked Emus puts it) in my old age (I am in my forties), I have built up a resistance to socialist apologetics, and find his implication that only the Left is interested in improving the lives of the less fortunate no less repellant than when Lenin made the same claim.
With every passing year my Leftist bullshit detector gets ever more sensitive. It is likely that Kershaw is a very decent man. But I have had a lifetime of people on the Left telling me how caring they are in comparison with the evil Tories, and I find the claim ever less convincing.
I always read your contributions to this site with interest, so if you are telling me that Kershaw is a reliable historian, I count that as the highest recommendation.
Kershaw wrote the quoted article in 2007 before the truth behind Labour’s economic “success” became universally apparent although, I agree, to those not in thrall to the Blair/New Labour myth, the underlying corruption and misgovernment of 1997-2007 was apparent very early on.
I appreciate that Kershaw’s assessment is not as condemnatory of Labour as it might have been had it been made 3 years later. However, I think you go a bit far in implying his assessment as “socialist apologetics”. I admit I held my nose and voted Conservative in 1997 but Kershaw is surely correct when he describes the Major administration as a “clapped-out, shoddy Conservative government long past its sell-by date”
I would still be interested to see proof that he is or was a member of the Labour Party: I haven’t been able to find any in a brief google search (but that doesn’t prove he wasn’t of course). Even so, and thank you for your valedictory compliment, my admiration for Kershaw’s historical work is undimmed.
Economically, the nazis were left wing; whilst capital was nominally held in private hands, the state controlled output through very close government connections to business leaders.
From an individual’s rights and freedoms perspective, the nazis were arguably right wing, a very extreme example of ‘social conservatism’.
Modern day usage of ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing’ assumes that the left is for socialisation of economic output but for personal liberties (such as abortion rights) whereas the right is for private economy and controlled personal rights and freedoms.
The labelling of nazis as far right, particularly in the context of austerity, is especially pernicious, as it seeks to identify the economics policies espoused by conservatives with nazism, when the truth is exactly the opposite: fascism requires that the state controls the economy in a totalitarian fashion. The commenter above who noted that communism and fascism are two sides of the same coin is correct; under fascism, capital is fully controlled by the state, but this is done via puppet business leaders, whereas under communism there is no pretence that capital is in fact socialised.
Arguably the polar opposite of fascism is libertarianism, and its interesting to note that at the same time the BBC demonises today’s right wing politicians as putative neo-nazis, it also labeled the original tea party movement (which started off as constitutional libertarians in the mould of Ron Paul, but was subsequently co-opted by social conservatism and made into what it is today) as cranks.
Yeah, those Far Right Nazi Tea Party activists who want to reduce taxation and limit the power of the State.
The BBC like so many fail to point out the the Nazi party was a left wind party – the National Socialist Party. They also were a very aggressively green party as this undermined the capitalist market base (seen to be Jewish run).
“Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Polish peasants were reduced to serfdom once more. The Nazis attempted (unsuccessfully) to re-establish a Volkish peasantry by distributing free plots of land to workers, and it was this that sent the German army into Poland, and beyond, in search of lebensraum (living space), made available by the mass slaughter of east Europeans. It was Darré, who said he wanted to breed a new rural nobility, who coined the chilling slogan ‘blood and soil’ (blud und boden).
Of course the green policies of the Nazis, like the policies of the greens today, were riddled with contradictions. They wanted organic, peasant farming, but discovered very quickly that it would not produce nearly enough food (though a special supply of organic food was secured for the SS). Likewise, though they despised capitalism and industry and commerce, they also needed it. The sprawling Nazi State bureaucracy was a ravenous parasite that needed a host … ” from-
http://www.martindurkin.com/blogs/nazi-greens-inconvenient-history
Nazi=National Socialism…Socialism to be enacted within your own national borders and “volk”…ready for transporting elsewhere when you run out of room.
International Socialism=who needs to create the template in your own country, when you can sell your nation out for its “destiny” or “common purpose”.
Of course, it would never get voted in by democratic means…so the people of goodwill set up troikas, tribunes and exchange programmes with the “volks” money…the UN/EU are socialist only with lime green , pastels and lavenders, pinks etc…none of those primary colours like red and black(so 1933!).
Anyone who chooses to ignore the SOCIALIST component of Nazis and fascists is a fool…but we`ll not be falling for it lads!
Although it’s always worthwhile reminding lefties that the nazis were socialists as well as nationalists (the clue is in the name), I don’t consider it necessary to labour the point. The similarity between nazis and socialists in general subsists in the authoritarian nature of their ideologies and their actions in government and in opposition.
When not in power, the nazis tactics included breaking up their opponents’ meetings and attempting to stop any civilised political discourse. You only have to see the tactics adopted by the (left wing) Anti Nazi League in the UK (aided by a complaisant police “service”) to recognise the same mentality and ambitions at work. Also, for example, the “direct action” of UK UnCut and Occupy are manifestations of political intolerance of the left (cheered on by their admirers in the BBC and the clergy).
And the labelling of non-AGW believers as ‘deniers’.
I remember a Brian Walden lecture series in which he compared the rise to power of Hitler with a well known British politician – Tony Blair! There were LOTS of similarities in fact, frighteningly so. Somehow I don’t see that one being given a run by Al-BBC.
There is no more arid a political argument than whether the nazis were of the left or right. They certainly were not left wing. They set themselves up as virulently anticommunist and even moderate left wing parties. But neither were they extreme right. Their were totalitarian and believed in activist politics; abhorrent to conservatives and economic liberals alike.
There are definite parallels with Stalinism and North Korea is probably closest to a nazi state in modern times.
But the nazis should not be used to undermine people on the left or right who are democrats and who believe in peaceful and democratic means. Such arguments are absurd and betray a childish and ahistorical approach to politics
Dont tell us tell the BBC