Via email, I discover that there is something out there called the Libertarian Green National Socialist Party, operating under the slogan that “National Socialism is neither leftist nor rightist; it is naturalist, and inherently environmental.”
Though their choice of URL does rather give the game away.
{ 15 comments }
Sebastian Holsclaw 12.22.03 at 6:38 pm
I can’t imagine why they would want to add ‘libertarian’ to the front of that. Libertarians are anti-socialist and they really don’t like the civil rights problems that come with NAZIs.
Kikuchiyo 12.22.03 at 7:05 pm
I’ve always thought that the linked site is fun for comparing with, say, WTO protest literature.
JNelsonW 12.22.03 at 8:51 pm
I wonder if like, more traditional nazi groups are jealous that they got that domain.
dsquared 12.22.03 at 9:33 pm
Sebastian: Actually, if you have a look at the site, they’re much more of a “racist-libertarian” party than a socialist one, and have really very few links with the roots of National Socialism other than a fascination with Hitler.
Zizka 12.23.03 at 3:57 am
Hm. The Savitri Devi book looks like a good read. It sums up world history through the figures of Akhnaton, Chinggis Qan, and Hitler.
Savitri Devi must have been a piece of work. She was a Franco-Greek woman who became a Nazi, migrated to India, and became a Hindu nationalist affiliated with Bose. After WWII she unrepentantly continued her Nazi activities.
Twenty years ago I had a friend who grew up in the German section of NYC (yes, there is one). His best friend’s father was an unrepentant German Nazi who had many connections in neo-Nazi circles. My friend reported that many of the names he saw on neo-Nazi lists also showed up on the boards of directors of New Age spiritual groups, notably The Aquarian Foundation.
That said — it’s the allegation of an actual connection — the attempts to smear anti-globalists, Greens, or libertarians with Nazi connections are execrable. Opportunistic Nazis will try to broaden their appeal, but the people they are targeting can’t be blamed unless they succumb.
For the record, Hitler was the anti-W.C.-Fields — a vegetarian teetotaller who was kind to children. Perhaps, just to avoid suspicion, those of you who haven’t already done so should go on a binge, eat a steak, and slap the bejesus out of some little kid.
Savitri Devi
Bob 12.23.03 at 4:46 am
A google search on: “strength through joy car” yields fascinating insights and certainly demonstrates the extent of the Nazi commitment to state enterprise, in case their are any lingering, residual doubts about the “socialist” dimension of their ideology.
Peter Murphy 12.23.03 at 6:47 am
Bob,
Thanks for the link, although I’m curious what the original German word for “people” was. “Leute” or “Volk”? The first means “people”, and could be used in any context, proletarian or otherwise. The other: it brings up images of HitlerJugend in lederhosen beating drums around campfires while channeling that ol’ Teutonic feeling. I’m going to guess the second, but…
Nazis may have liked their state enterprise, but they also liked their private corporations. The SS may have run the gas chambers, but it was a private company called IG Farben which supplied the gas. They were probably more socialist than FDR US, but not by much: a 4 out of 10 relative to a 3. (Paltry compared to the then-USSR, which would have scored itself a full 10.)
As for domain names: what if the LGNSF managed to score itself nazi.de? But that would probably be illegal under the German constitution, and a good thing too.
Mrs Tilton 12.23.03 at 10:10 am
Peter,
Neither Leute nor Volk is the ‘original’ word for people; they’re simply different words for different concepts that are both translated into English as ‘people’. The former is ‘people’ in the sense of ‘many fine, fine people read Crooked Timber’, the latter in the sense of ‘The Ruritanian people are very musical’. As in English, people as Volk may be singular or plural (Völker), and people as Leute are always plural.
If one wished to speak of an ‘original’ German word for people, perhaps one need look no further than deutsch. This derives from the old Germanic theodisco, which is also the ultimate root of ‘teutonic’ and, interestingly, cognate with the Irish tuath, in both cases meaning people in the sense of Volk.
In German, BTW, Volk has unpleasant connotations only when used in connection with specifically nazi-sounding ideas. Otherwise it’s purely neutral, and one can certainly speak of das amerikanische Volk, das jüdische Volk etc. The adjective völkisch, though, has become pretty irretrievably tarred with the nazi brush, reeking of atavistic tribal nationalism.
robin green 12.23.03 at 11:37 am
Peter: I know that Noam Chomsky and many others would dispute that the USSR was ten tenths socialist. For example, see this excerpt from a 1994 speech by Chomsky, which I’ll quote in full:
“One major issue now which has devastated a good bit of the left and
has caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere is the alleged fact that
there’s been this great battle betwen socialism and capitalism and
capitalism won and socialism lost. And the reason it lost is because
the Soviet Union turned out to be a failure, and that shows that
socialism has lost … [W]hy don’t they say that democracy failed?
And the proof that democracy failed is, look what happened to Eastern
Europe. I mean after all, those countries called themselves democratic,
in fact they called themselves “people’s democracies,” real advanced
forms of democracy. So why don’t we conclude that democracy failed?
Well, I haven’t seen any article anywhere saying “look, democracy failed,
let’s forget about democracy,” and it’s obvious why. The fact that they
_call_ themselves democratic doesn’t say that they _were_ democratic –
that’s pretty obvious. Well, in what sense did socialism fail? Certainly
it’s true that they called themselves socialist, but they also called
themselves democratic. Were they socialist? You can argue about what
socialism is, but there are some ideas that are at the core of it, like
workers control over production and elimination of wage labor and things
like that. Did they have that? There wasn’t even a thought. In the
pre-Bolshevik period, there were in fact socialist initiatives. They
were crushed instantly, within months they were crushed. In fact, just
as whatever moves there were towards democracy were instantly destroyed,
whatever moves there were towards socialism were equally instantly
destroyed. The Bolshevik takeoever was sort of a coup, which was sort
of a counterrevolution. We certainly understand this easily enough with
regard to the claim to democracy, how come we don’t understand it with regard
to the claim to socialism?”
And for the record, no, zizka, Hitler was _not_ a vegetarian.
Bob 12.23.03 at 12:48 pm
Peter,
I did know of the IG Farben connection. An important pitch of the Nazis as best I can judge is that they certainly claimed to be “socialists” but, unlike the “Bolsheviks”, were not committed to state ownership of all or most business enterprise. Indeed, that seems to have been their appeal in the early 1930s for the large corporates which supported them as a “bulwark against Bolshevism”.
However, whatever the finer ideological differences between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, Stalin evidently had no insuperable objections to the Soviet Union signing up to a Friendship Treaty with Nazi Germany on 28 September 1939 when Britain and France were already at war [Norman Davies: Europe (OUP, 1996) p. 1001]. And perhaps we shouldn’t forget that America did not enter the war in Europe until Germany declared war on America in December 1941 a few days after Pearl Harbor. After the fall of France in June 1940, Britain was on its own until the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Mind you, America was good about lending us the money to continue the war on our own.
The Strength Through Joy car was not the only example of Nazi state enterprise. One result of the google search is this Guardian report from a few years back on the massive Strength Through Joy holiday camp on the Baltic with such a vast hotel that it takes an hour to walk from one end to the other: http://travel.guardian.co.uk/countries/story/0,7451,535419,00.html The somewhat incredulous tone of the Guardian report rather suggests bewilderment that anyone could have conceived the notion of such a bizarre holiday resort. In that, the Guardian report tends to follow one dimension of official war-time propaganda in Britain in regarding the Nazis as ridiculous although that was before the stark truth of the concentration camps became apparent.
As a small boy living in London during the war, a treat was to be taken to a movie theatre showing cartoons and the inevitably jingoistic newsreel – there was no TV then and we otherwise mostly depended on the radio for immediate news of what was going on. I can still recall from such a visit to the movies near the end of the war the horrifying images from the newsreel report about British troops coming upon the Belsen concentration camp. A few years back the BBC ran interviews with some of those troopers who are still with us. One made the point that the news clips had to be edited down because the images were so horrific.
Bob 12.23.03 at 1:02 pm
Robin,
One of my favourite quotes about Bolshevism, which Chomsky is perhaps unfamiliar with, is this from Trotsky:
“If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace – a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions – such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.” – from: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1932/1932-sovecon.htm
Courtesy acknowledgement to Abba Lerner: The Economics of Control (1944).
phil 12.23.03 at 9:31 pm
Hitler was neither a vegetarian nor a tee-totaller. Surely you don’t accept all the mythology he fashioned for himself as gospel.
Abiola Lapite 12.23.03 at 10:29 pm
“Hitler was neither a vegetarian nor a tee-totaller”
Actually, Zizka was right – he was a vegetarian, and a non-drinker. This has been confirmed using many lines of evidence, including the reports of individuals like Albert Speer, his secretary Traudl Junge, or his one-time cook Marlene von Exner. There is really no room to doubt that he was true to his propaganda where vegetarianism is concerned.
What I don’t get is why it should bother anyone that Hitler was a vegetarian. He was also against smoking; does that therefore make abstention from cigarettes a vice? He took care to wash his hands after playing with his dog; should we then feel obligated to neglect elementary rules of hygiene?
Michael Griffin 12.24.03 at 9:19 am
It’s telling that Peter Murphy can say,
“it brings up images of HitlerJugend in lederhosen beating drums around campfires while channeling that ol’ Teutonic feeling”
in what passes for a forum of polite discourse, and have his comment responded to as though it were just one more addition to the colloquy.
That is a a bigoted statement, and it is the thoughtless expression of a bigoted attitude.
Hitler was villainous, the Nazis were villainous, therefore all German heritage is suspect, and any German chauvinism fair game for ridicule. Lederhosen are cartoonish in Mr. Murphy’s world, and anything Teutonic, or Germanic, is a target for schoolboy scorn.
This type of smug and ultimately heartless prejudice is exactly what the common people of between-wars Germany are accused of, and it is just such complicit small-minded bigotry that enabled the nightmare of the Third Reich to begin.
Jeremy Pierce 12.30.03 at 11:50 pm
This reminds me of what my high school history teacher used to say. The political spectrum is really a circle. The further right you get, the closer you are to the left, and vice versa. This explains why Hitler and Stalin were so similar, despite coming from opposite theoretical frameworks. It also explains why Dick Gephardt and Pat Buchanan have such similar versions of isolationism and America-firstness. He had four criteria for measuring political views, and as you moved around the circle you would change one at a time. The Fascist and the Soviet Socialist differed only on one point, I believe.
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