Fox in charge of chicken coop

The article leads me to several questions:

1) Has Detective Daniels actually done anything (not revealed in the article) to show that she is unfit or incapable of carrying out her position?

2) If not, then is the issue, whether she ought to be sacked or transferred solely because of her husband’s alleged views? (I say “alleged” only because I noticed in my second reading of the article that many of the more reprehensible views being attributed to her husband are not actually supported by direct quotations).

3) What about the fellow (Trevor Phillips) with a bust of Lenin on his desk? Lenin also has the blood of millions on his hands as well, ought not Mr Phillips be subjected to the same treatment as Detective Daniels, or are some mass-murdering socialists considered more fashionable than others?

I do not agree that it is a case of “political correctness” to believe that holding certain views makes one unfit to be entrusted with a position in which he or she is entrusted with safe-guarding the freedom of others (although it is not clear from the article if Detective Daniels is one such person). However it is political correctness to excuse someone for admiring a communist while in effect saying that only “some” mass-murdering socialists are unacceptable but not others. A communist-admirer ought to be just as unacceptable as a Nazi-admirer for any right-thinking person.

Of all of the people on the London police force, this is the person chosen to investigate racially motivated crime?

That choice sends a very clear signal, and it’s that the police don’t take them seriously.

Thorley Winston, do you really need an education in the racial nature of Nazi crimes?

or are some mass-murdering socialists considered more fashionable than others?

Besides the name of the party (National Socialist) is there any good reason to attach the term “socialist” to Nazism? I’m not an expert, but I read Shirer and some Orwell and Nazism doesn’t seem to have much in common with Socialism as I understand it.

Socialists, for instance, seem to be more likely to sympathize with labor rather than management to varying extremes, whereas Hitler was hostile to unions.

At the time folks certainly seemed to think that Nazism represented the precise opposite of Bolshevism. Sympathy for Nazism and Communism, before either had racked up their stupendous body counts, broke down more or less along what would today be very familiar left-right lines. Broadly speaking, conservatives and the moneyed classes saw an ally in Hitler. The Right generally favored appeasement/engagement with Hitler’s regime, while the left in general and the communists in particular were howling for war. (See Orwell’s war diaries.)

The modern right is eager to pin Hitler on the left. Doesn’t take much time with google to turn up a dozen websites/articles dedicated to the proposition that Hitler would be right at home among modern Socialists.

He certainly paid lip service to socialism, though accepting at face value the public pronouncements of mass-murdering dictators can easily lead one to some unfortunate errors. The name of his party demonstrates his commitment to socialism more or less to the extent that membership in the two major American political parties is largely determined by ones views on direct or representative democracy.

Short version: The moneyed classes of the day admired Hitler for his anti-unionism and anti-bolshevism, and the left saw him as a deadly enemy.

So what’s up with this “Hitler was a socialist” stuff?

Laertes wrote:

Besides the name of the party (National Socialist) is there any good reason to attach the term “socialist” to Nazism?

Quite a bit actually. Their platform was pretty clearly to the Left of even the modern Democratic Party (closer to the Greens in some respects) in areas such as increasing governmental control of the economy, increasing the Nanny State from cradle to grave, governmental control of education, health care, saying that the government was responsible for providing for the basic necessities of the citizenry, etc. as well as the usual rhetoric about nationalizing private enterprises, abolishing income from capital earnings and interest. I have not seen any proof that upon gaining power they moved away from expanding the power of the State in these areas or moving towards a free market-style economy with less governmental intervention which would be what a rightist political party would move towards.

Then you had their actual practices of gun control (especially mandatory gun registration which is usually prelude to confiscation), hostility towards Christianity and Judaism, euthanasia, mandatory race-based classifications and preferences, and suppression of political speech – all of which are orthodoxy of the modern Left in various forms or another.

Socialists, for instance, seem to be more likely to sympathize with labor rather than management to varying extremes, whereas Hitler was hostile to unions.

Yes we’re all quite familiar with this tactic. You have a murderous thug who rises to power under some form of Socialist orthodoxy, implements a number of socialist-style programs while expanding the State is a socialist direction, and when he finally becomes discredited by the body count, he is suddenly declared not to be a “true socialist” because he killed his victims in the wrong order or the workers’ paradise just never quite seems to materialize as promised. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.

Sympathy for Nazism and Communism, before either had racked up their stupendous body counts, broke down more or less along what would today be very familiar left-right lines.

Untrue, I doubt that there are any modern American conservatives or libertarian who can come up with a single thing they liked about National Socialism or its communist twin. Both are derivatives of the same socialist coin of centralized governmental control over the economy and pretty much every aspect of the individual’s life for the “common good” or some other such pap.

On the other hand, aside from the murder and the genocide, there seems to be very little difference in principle between the agendas of National Socialism and the Nanny State leftists. That is not to say that all leftists are Nazis or Nazi-sympathizers but merely to point out that the Nanny Staters have more in common ideologically with totalitarians of both the communist and National Socialist stripes then those of us on the Right. The only difference though in how the Left overall seems to regards the two is that there is more reluctance on the part of many Nanny Statist/Democratic Socialist/whatever sorts to condemn the Bolsheviks and Marxists as unambiguously evil as they willing to condemn the National Socialists. In contrast, modern conservatives and libertarians do not seem to have a problem recognizing both as evil.

aside from the murder and the genocide, there seems to be very little difference in principle between the agendas of National Socialism and the Nanny State leftists

Apart from being just about the most offensive thing written on these comments boards (no mean feat, I tell you), that has to be just about the biggest set-aside in history. I was trying to come up with some way of parodying it, but everything I tried fell short. Perhaps changing extremes, we could try:

Apart from creating the universe and having complete power over everything in it, God is just your average friendly, helpful soul.

From Shirer:

…on May 2 the trade-union headquarters throughout the country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unions dissolved and teh leaders arrested…

At first, though, both Hitler and Ley tried to assure the workers that their rights would be protected. Said Ley in his first proclamation: “Workers! Your institutions are sacred to us National Socialists…we will build up the protection and the rights of the workers still further!”

…Within three weeks…Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and providing that henceforth “labor trustees,” appointed by him, would “regulate labor contracts” and maintain “labor peace.” Since the decisions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes. Ley promised “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory–that is, the employer…Only the employer can decide. Many employers have for years had to call for the ‘master in the house.’ Now they are once again to be the ‘master in the house.'”

Shirer: For the time being, business management was pleased. The generous contributions which so many employers had made to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party were paying off.

Orwell: “After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they must be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative MPs wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, nad been bombed by Italian aeroplanes…The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up.“

It’s still doing a bang-up job, apparently.

And the left of the day wasn’t fooled either.

Orwell: Hitler is the leader of a tremendous counter-attack of the capitalist class, which is forming itself into a vast cforporation, losing its privileges to some extent in doing so but still retaining its power over the working class.

Hitler was no socialist. The assertion doesn’t pass the horse-laugh test today, and as Orwell and Shirer show, it didn’t in his day either.

Brian Weatherson wrote:

Apart from being just about the most offensive thing written on these comments boards (no mean feat, I tell you), that has to be just about the biggest set-aside in history.

The reason I specifically said “excluding murder and genocide” was because those are things which pretty much everyone (aside from a few eco-nutters of the zero-population growth variety and the “peace at any price” crowd) agree are evil. That leaves us free to make a comparison of the actual policies, platform, and the ideology driving them to answer Laertes’ earlier charge that somehow people on the Right were more prone to identify with that National Socialists then people on the Left.

My point is simply that when one actually compares the policies, platform, and the overall ideology of National Socialism – it has far more in common with today’s modern Nanny State Leftists then modern conservatives and libertarians. That of course (and I made this point in my previous post which you seem to have missed in your deeming this the “about the most offensive thing written on these comments boards”) is not the same as saying that NSL’s are the same as National Socialists or even admirers of such (no doubt because of the latter’s murderous and genocidal record) but rather to point out that in terms of issues and overall ideology, they do have more in common with each other then the National Socialists do with conservatives and libertarians for the reasons I listed in my previous post.

Thank you for providing support for my larger point.

No such support was intended or can legitimately be drawn.

I’ll leave it at that and ignore your final smear.

In that case I’ll put it in bold: You’re an idiot

Daniel Davies wrote:

No such support was intended or can legitimately be drawn.

Of course not since one person saying things like “Hitler was a socialist of a kind,” “there were founders among the Nazi party who were very definitely socialists,” or describing the Nazi State’s regulation of private property as “an idea with recognisably socialist roots” cannot be legitimately be drawn as supporting another’s description of same as rising to power “under some form of Socialist orthodoxy, implements a number of socialist-style programs while expanding the State is a socialist direction.”

Nope, no connection between them at all.

Dave Heasman wrote:

It’s all just as relevant as the US neo-cons’ roots in Trotskyism, creating a revolutionary situation by destroying the economic foundations of capitalism… oops, hang on a mo…

LOL, I appreciate the joke about “destroying the economic foundations of capitalism.” It’s always cute when the True Believer makes wishful predictions about the “inevitable decline” or “overthrow” of capitalism or the United States. Even more so when those predictions go the way of Ehrlich’s predictions of global famine in the 1970s. ;)

BTW: I understand that the term “neo-con” is used pretty broadly and inconsistently almost like its opposite epitaph of “isolationist.” While the definition seems to have gone from “former socialists, now conservatives” its current usage seems to be as “anyone who advocates an activist American foreign policy.” The only thing in common seems to be that (a) both are called “Neo-conservatives” and (b) both are willing to support the United States engaging its adversaries. Seeing as how there are very few Trotskyites (ex or otherwise) and no thinking person seriously considers any form of socialism to have merit, I doubt anyone can seriously attribute the current group being labeled “neo-cons” as having “roots in Trotskyism.”

My take on European fascism is that it is a consequence of the militarisation of the society that resulted from the 1914-1918 war.

People who were demobilised and had no work, or bad works, remembered that while the war raged those were not their problems. The military took care of it all. In the first years after the war the political ebullience gave birth to a lot of small parties, whose political ideology was frequently inconsistent, and that attracted a lot of people that craved power. I reckon that the Great Depression was instrumental in the radicalisation of the parties, be they anarchists, communists or fascists. The Right thought that the most convenient to their interests were the fascists, who had a hierarchical view of society that could be co-opted by those who already had the power, while the dispossessed at to stay at the bottom, at least most of the time, the big proprietors, high ranking officers, etc. went to the high ranks.

The fact that nazis were so racists was their undoing.

DSW

If Ralph Nader and his fellow Green shirts are leftists,

I don’t see Greens as being Leftists; they might have elements of their political programme in common but then so do Fascists and Conservatives doesn’t make them the same.

If Trotsky and Stalin were both communists, why did they fight a civil war?

Umm, they didn’t. there was a struggle within the Bolsheviks but this WAS AN INTRA-PARTY struggle over ideology, personality clashes and power rather like the night of the long knives were for the Nazis. The fact that Roehm got whacked by SS elimination squads does not make him any less of a Nazi. If Hitler had tried to join the SPD or KPD and then turn them into fascist parties then you would have a point. Unsurprisingly since he didn’t, you don’t.

Yes and Stalin had Trotsky and other communists murdered, your point being what? That if Stalin murders his rival communists, he is no longer an actual communist much as when

The difference being that Stalin murdered them for ostensibly being the wrong sort of Communist or people pretending to be communists. I don’t know of a Nazi policy sending Aryan Germans to the concentration camp for being the “wrong sort of Nazis” Nazi fascism was in one sense much more benign than Stalinism; if you were racially acceptable and didn’t challenge the regime it was unlikely that you would be targted; under Stalinism you could be a hardcore supporter of the regim and this wouldn’t save you from being declaimed and shipped off to Siberia.

Hitler murdered his rivals, he is by your logic not really a socialist?

Hitler eliminated people not because they were political rivals but because they followed ideologies which he thought were suspect – ie some form of Communism and because they were racially dangerous ie Jewish in Nazi ideology. Since for the Nazis the two were the same ie JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM, I can’t see why they would claim to be socialists when for them socialism was an odious creed invented by Jews to take over the world.

Pearl Harbor made this a rather moot point.

Not really, FDR and his advisors were unsure of how to get around the fact that they had no good reason to declare war on Germany and were releived when Germany declared war on them to save them the trouble of it. And like I said, one wonders why it was the supposedly much less evil, non-Communist Japan that launched this attack rather than in your view the obviously much more dangerous Communists.In anycase they had already been propping up the Allied war effort much before Pearl harbour without which the Brits et al would have collapsed as Lend LEase indicates where the Us saw its interests as lying.

I highly doubt that the war would have gone well, if the US would have allowed Germany and Russia would have been allowed to go at it alone – a course of events which in any case would have allowed Germany to complete its genocide of the Jews but then I suppose this is in your eyes an acceptable cost to pay.

As much as I generally loath FDR and Truman for their statist domestic policies,

Yeah, what do you think won them the war?

I’m generally inclined to give someone the benefit of the doubt when they have to make a tough choice between the lesser evil in foreign policy in their here and now then condemning them with the benefit of 50 plus years of 20-20 hindsight.

The only person condemning them here is you; I certainly have nothing against these leaders; but then I am not someone with crypto-fascist sympathies.

“Hitler was a socialist, of a kind . .”

That is not an eccentric assessment. We have this from Peter Temin: Lessons from the Great Depression: The Lionel Robbins Lectures for 1989; MIT Press (1989), p 117:

” ‘In the long run, the Nazis aimed essentially at an economic system which would be an alternative to capitalism and communism, supporting neither a laissez-faire attitude nor total planning.’ [ Hardach: The Political Economy of Germany in the Twentieth Century; University of California Press (1980), p 66 ] They introduced administrative controls over investment through licensing and direct allocation of raw materials. But their brand of socialism emphasized central control over economic activity rather than public ownership of firms. Instead of dispossessing private owners, the Nazis severely circumscribed the scope within which the nominal owners could make choices by currency controls, taxes on profits and direct allocation measures of the state.”

The ideological gloss of the Nazis was plainly “socialist” as in: “The tax-department chief of the Association of Industrialists emphasized that it was useless to attempt a precise comparison between old and new tax regulations because the important issue was ‘the new spirit of the reform, the spirit of National Socialism. The principle of the ‘the common good precedes the good of the individual’ stands above everything else.” [Avraham Barkai: Nazi Economics; Berg Publishing (1990), p. 185]

Nor is this leftist slant unique to the ideologies of just German and Italian fascism. It was a feature, too, of the pathetic and utterly abortive attempt by Sir Oswald Mosley to start a fascist movement in Britain in 1932 after having been a cabinet minister in Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour government of 1929-31. We have this contemporary description in the diary of George Orwell while he was researching the background for the book that became: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). The diary entry for 16 March 1936 reads:

“Last night to hear [Sir Oswald] Mosley speak at the Public Hall [Barnsley, South Yorkshire], which is in structure a theatre. It was quite full – about 700 people I should say. About 100 Blackshirts on duty, with two or three exceptions weedy looking specimens, and girls selling Action etc. Mosley spoke for an hour and a half and to my dismay seemed to have the meeting mainly with him. He was booed at the start but loudly clapped at the end. Several men who tried to interject with questions were thrown out . . . one with quite unnecessary violence. . . . M. is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual clap-trap – Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers. The blame for everything was put upon mysterious international gangs of Jews who were said to be financing, among other things the British Labour Party and the Soviet. . . . M. kept extolling Italy and Germany but when questioned about concentration camps etc always replied ‘We have no foreign models; what happens in Germany need not happen here.’ . . .” [George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940; Penguin Books, p. 230]

The significance of this report is that it was a contemporary account by an unusally acute observer of politics and not intended for publication – the diary was not published until after Orwell’s death in 1950. As Orwell writes: “. . M speaking as it were from a Socialist angle . .” What is also certain is that Mosley himself regarded his politics as leftist. As he wrote in a letter to The (London) Times [26 April 1968]: “I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics.”

Reference to the fundamental programme of the Nazis, issued in 1920 and never subsequently amended, shows that besides the odious racist prescriptions it contain’s many items common to the platforms of west European socialist parties. And btw Stalin had no ideological objections to the Soviet Union contracting a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany in late September 1939 after Britain and France were already at war with Nazi Germany – as readers can confirm from Norman Davies: Europe (OUP, 1996) p. 1001.