JLM-Backed Candidate for Young Labour Chair Withdraws After Commenting on ‘Good-looking’ Nazis

Oh the irony! After years of twisting comments by their opponents to smear them as anti-Semites and Fascists, some of the folks with the JLM are getting a taste of their own medicine. According to an article in the Morning Star, Eluned Anderson, one of the candidates for the Young Labour leadership, was the regional ambassador for the Holocaust Education Trust and had the backing of the Jewish Labour Movement. However, she had to withdraw after she called two of the most notorious Nazis ‘incredibly good-looking’. This was on the Facebook page of the Young Free Speech Society, where another member had asked “Have you ever met/seen/know [sic] of a physically attractive Nazi?” She replied “Look, I know they were evil bastards, but Eichmann and a young Ribbentrop were incredibly good looking.” This naturally upset many people, most obviously Jews, whose family were murdered by the Nazis. Anderson apologised, and said there was no call for her comment. It was stupid, she said, and she was stupid to make it.

What makes it ironic is that she was one of the people, who had posted on social media that Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-Semite, and Rebecca Long-Bailey was a racist. David Rosenberg, of the Jewish Socialist Group, therefore remarked that her tweet showed how cynical that was.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/young-labour-chair-candidate-withdraws-over-comments-about-incredibly-good-looking

Hoisted by her own petard! Ho-ho! But unfortunately, she did have a point. The Aristotelian view, that one’s physical appearance reflects the state of one’s soul, so that those with beautiful souls are themselves physically beautiful, isn’t true. You don’t want to say anything remotely complimentary about these monsters, but it is a fact that some of the most horrific tyrants in history were good-looking people, and used their attractiveness in their drive to power. In his paranoia and megalomania, Stalin murdered 30 million Soviet citizens. But he had been good-looking chap in his youth, and had reputation as a seducer. As well as fancying himself, Hitler also had legions of female followers and did his level best to exploit this. This photograph of the Nazi leader is in the 1936 English translation of Mein Kampf, ‘My Struggle’, published by Paternoster Press. It clearly shows Hitler trying to pose as best he can as some physically attractive, as well as the dynamic, charismatic leader.

Years ago there was an item on Radio 4 which included a woman, who had been a member of the resistance against Hitler in either Germany and Austria. She stated that the girls in her class all found Hitler attractive with the very definite exception of herself. Historians have noted that Hitler had many aristocratic women admirers, and he deliberately reserved the first two rows at Nazi meetings and rallies for women because they would take the rest of the crowd with them when swayed by his oratory.

And it wasn’t just Hitler. Mussolini was, like Stalin, also a thug and a seducer. But he also had legions of female fans. Christopher Duggan discusses the mass of mail the Duce received from women besotted with him in his book Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (London: Vintage Books 2013). The British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, was a promiscuous adulterer who had a string of affairs with the wives of various other aristos.

Now many of the Nazis were indeed physically repulsive. Not just Hitler, but also Goebbels, Goering and Himmler, but the sad fact is, not every murderous thug looks it. If all Nazis and Fascists were ugly bruisers with beer guts, then it would be easy to see them for what they were and fight against them. But they’re not. Monsters can be good-looking people, just as people who aren’t physically attractive can be noble, decent and good. This is why it’s important to look beyond stereotypes and superficial impressions, in order to see the real character beneath.

And it is important to remember, if just as a warning, that some people did think Hitler and the rest sexy, and so supported them. Which is why people should never judge politicos by their looks.

Coalition Priorities: War before the Poor

This picture was posted on The Poor Side of Life’s post about the Ashton-Under-Lyne sanctioning a pregnant woman, simply for being pregnant, and the death of a homeless man from cold on the streets after he’d had his benefit removed by them. It’s entitled, Pregnant and sanctioned just in time for christmas… Sanctioned and frozen to death….The latest news from Ashton Under Lyne Jobcentre, and is at http://thepoorsideoflife.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/pregnant-and-sanctioned-just-in-time-for-christmas-sanctioned-and-frozen-to-death-the-latest-news-from-ashton-under-lyne-jobcentre/. As the article makes clear, The Poor Side of Life is part of a group that actively demonstrates outside the jobcentre, and I’m assuming that’s one of their posters.

It does, however, show the priorities of the government, both Blair’s and now Cameron’s. The government supported Bush’s invasion of Iraq as they saw it as a cynical opportunity to seize Iraq’s resources – its state industries, which would be privatised and sold to Western, chiefly American companies. Bush was particularly keen to control of Iraq’s oil industry, as the country is believed to have the largest oil reserves outside Saudi Arabia. And the Neo-Cons saw it as an opportunity to turn Iraq into their low tax, free trade, minimal state utopia. Well, they succeeded, with the result that every other country in the world dumped their goods in Iraq. The result has been that the country’s own native industries have gone bankrupt due to their inability to compete, and unemployment reached 60 per cent. With that kind of economic devastation, it isn’t surprising that sectarian and ethnic conflicts and terrorism has become acute.

But states have always placed a very high priority on military power. Much of American politics is funded, one way or the other, by the defence industries, who fund the election campaigns of individual politicians in return for lucrative government contracts. It’s been responsible for a lot of the ‘pork barrel’ politics in the US, and firms the core of the military-industrial complex.

Over here, the aristocracy always has been heavily connected with the armed forces since the Middle Ages, when the nobility truly were a warrior elite. Before the reforms of the 19th century and the introduction of competitive exams, which Gilbert and Sullivan parodied with their ditty, ‘I am the very model of a modern major-general’, commissions were bought, and the officer corps were almost overwhelmingly drawn from the upper classes. Even now, my guess is that despite a scandal in the 1980s when one major drew attention to how heavily upper class the officer elite were, the upper ranks of the armed forces is still very much the preserve of the aristocracy. Despite the current cuts to the armed forces, which have left the full time army almost decimated, war and military leadership still form part and parcel of the public school, aristocratic outlook.

In Britain’s case, this has been compounded by several decades of Tory and then Labour policy under Blair, in which arms exports were heavily promoted by the British government, partly through ministers’ own connections with the merchants of death, but also as a way to break in to foreign markets. It was believed that if foreign nations bought British weapons, they would open up to other, more peaceful goods. This has not happened. The countries that buy our guns, tanks and planes buy only those, and not buses, cement or whatever.

And as Bertolt Brecht remarked in his play, Mother Courage, ‘War is good for business’.

The poor count for little. Their lack of any kind of economic or political power, plus the fact that Neo-Liberal orthodoxy considers poverty to be the person’s own fault, not that of society, means that the Tories and their Lib Dem enablers feel they can safely ignore or persecute them.

And so we are back to the same view as Heinrich Himmler, or was it Hermann Goring?, who said, ‘Guns will make us powerful. Butter will make us fat.’

‘Commission Managment’: The Nazi Term for Public-Private Partnership and the Use of Special Advisors from Industry

I’ve already discussed the use of personnel from big business and industry in government, and the establishment of government organs as private corporations in the Third Reich in my post on Spamfish’s post on Wolin’s idea that America is now an ‘Illiberal Democracy’. Another example of this was the appointment of the industrialist Carl Krauch as general plenipotentiary for chemicals and director of the Reich Office for Economic Consolidation , a subordinate body to the Reich Ministry of Economics. The Reich Ministry of Economics was itself in practice the ‘executive organ of the Commissioner for the Four Year Plan’. Under Goring’s management the Organisation for the Four Year Plan appointment a number of business leaders, like Krauch, as general plenipotentiaries.

Krauch had been on the board of I.G. Farben from 1926. From 1933 onwards he was an adviser to the Aviation Ministry, and to Brabag, which was responsible for producing artificial fuel. Krauch initially headed the research division of the Office for Raw Materials and Stock in the Organisation of the Four Year Plan. IN this role he had the full support of I.G. Farben’s board, and could use the company’s planning staff. He also took some of the staff from I.G. Farben to work with him in the Office of the Four year Plan. He was made general plenipotentiary for chemicals in 1938. The Reich Ministry for Aviation and Economics urged him to resign from I.G. Farben and become a state official, and was willing to appoint him state secretary. Krauch turned the offer down after consulting Bosch. he retained his seat on the I.G. Farben’s board, and in 1940 was appointed head as chairman of the company’s supervisory board. Krauch’s position in the Reich ministry was honorary, and he was not officially employed by them, nor was he included in the organisation’s budget. He was regarded with suspicion by other firms because of his continued links with I.G. Farben, and by the state economic bureaucracy, which was used to the strict separation of public and private organisations. The use of expert technicians like Krauch was expanded and became increasingly typical. While Goring and the General Council of the Four Year Plan were responsible for the ministry’s decisions, these were strongly influenced by the suggestions of their plenipotentiaries and by members of staff from the private armaments industry. These were ultimately responsible to the Armaments Ministry, but the ministry’s central administration rarely rejected their suggestions. Krauch described this adoption of managers from private industry in government as the assumption of state duties by the independent sector of the economy. It was described by other political theorists as a new form of ‘Commission Management’. In addition to using advisors and personnel from the Nazi party bureaucracy, the management apparatus of official from private industry was also used at the expense of a uniform state administration. The parallels here between the Nazi use of managers and technicians from private industry, and their use, along with Special Advisors, by contemporary British administrations since Margaret Thatcher as part of an ideology of Public-Private Partnerships are very strong indeed.

The Friends of the Reichsfuhrrer SS

Private industry also sponsored the SS. The Friends of the Reichsfuhrer SS was a group of heads of industry and bankers in Berlin. They donated money and even equipped whole SS units. AS a reward, the group became honorary members of the SS and influential personal contact with its leader, Himmler. One of the advantages this gave the group’s members was access to cheap labour from the concentration camps. To use this slave labour, the SS demanded a price of 6 marks per man per day.

Clearly there is no real comparison between Cameron’s policies and the Friends of the Reichsfuhrer SS, except in the most general sense of private industry donating money to the Conservatives, and other political parties, such as New labour, in return for governmental favours. There might be some if, the DWP adopts the recommendation of independent policy advisors to expand the use of residential centres for the disabled and long-term unemployed, to be employed on workfare, run by private contractors. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the ultimate extent to which the Nazis attracted and exploited contacts with private industry.

Sources

Martin Broszat, The Hitler State (London: Longman 1981)

Friends of the Reichsfuhrer SS, in James Taylor and Warren Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton 1987) p. 132.