This is an excellent video in which Guardian columnist Owen Jones attacks and refutes the right-wing myth that the Nazis were socialists, because Hitler said they were. In my experience, this is one the of the favourite accusations of the loony American libertarian right, who see any kind of state intervention in industry as a terrible infringement of sacred property rights and a form of Communism, leading ultimately to death camps and gulags. In fact, as Jones states in this video, there are plenty of examples where a country’s or political party’s name is deceptive. The German Democratic Republic, for example, wasn’t democratic, and the Russian Liberal Democratic Party is far-right. It’s the same with Hitler’s claim to be a socialist. He quotes Adolf Hitler to show that Hitler’s claim to be a socialist is based on his radical redefinition of the word, and his denial that the German Social Democrats, the Communists and Marxism itself are socialist. He goes further, and shows that the Nazis were Social Darwinists, who believed that the fittest would rise to the top while inferiors should stay at the bottom, replaced the socialist emphasis on class with race, and believed in competition as against socialist cooperation. He also makes the point that right-wing, non-fascist parties have also adopted anti-capitalist policies and rhetoric when it suits them. For example, Reform have recently announced they will nationalise the public utilities. As for the red in the Nazi flag, Hitler put it in their to troll the left so they would attend his meetings.
The Nazis’ real political orientation is shown by their cooperation with right-wing parties, like the German National People’s Party, the DNVP, and with German big business. In fact, 29 heads of industry wrote to President Hindenburg calling for him to appoint Hitler as chancellor. In return, Hitler made a speech to various industrialists announcing that private enterprise could not survive democracy and required a dictatorship to protect it. The Nazis received generous funding from firms like Krupps, I.G. Farben and Porsche, who greatly benefited from the Nazi regime and the exploitation of slave labour.
In power the Nazis followed right-wing, pro-capitalist policies such as the privatisation of industry, very much against the trend of the times. They also cut back the welfare provision that had been established by the Weimar Republic, and replaced it with their private charity, the Winterhilfe. All good, Thatcherite policies. Real socialist parties were smashed, as were the trade unions, and their members placed in concentration camps. They also forced women back into their traditional domestic role, again, not a socialist policy. There was a socialist element within the Nazi in the SA, the Nazis paramilitary group, but they were purged and murdered at the request of Hitler’s backers in big business.
The Nazis did establish a rigorous system of state control during the War, but Jones views this as a response to the conditions of wartime. Britain also had a planned economy, but it would be ridiculous to say that the British government was also socialist or communist.
The video is a response to a piece Peter Hitchen’s wrote in one of the middle-market tabloids. If it’s the Heil, they’re probably hoping that people won’t remember how they backed Mosley and his not-at-all socialist BUF. I’ve found other people repeating the same accusation that the Nazis were socialists on the net. However, one of these also claims that the SPD at the time of the German council revolution of 1919 was a Marxist revolutionary party. Well, it was partly based in Marxism, but also contained a revisionist right, led by Edward Bernstein. Bernstein had noticed that capitalism was not collapsing and the working class had become more wealthy during the 19th century. He therefore recommended a reformist, evolutionary approach to socialism through democracy like the British Labour party and the Fabian Society. The party’s leader, Friedrich Ebert, was a democrat. One of the reasons Germany today is a democratic state rather than a Communist dictatorship was that Ebert got wind that the Communists in Berlin were about to declare a republic and so pre-empted them by declaring it first.
The same YouTuber also claims that the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ council during the revolution were Communist. Some were, some weren’t. A report by German officialdom stated that in many areas the councils were actually very moderate. In several places local authority had collapsed completely, and it was the councils who were keeping things running and the people fed. This particular YouTuber has put up a nearly five hour long refutation of the denials that Hitler was a socialist, but considering his biases and distortions I don’t think it’s worth watching to refute it.
Frances Barber is a minor ‘sleb, who appears in bit parts here and there. She turned up in Red Dwarf in the ’90s as one of the forms of shape-shifting genetically engineered organism that fed on emotion. Appearing as a glamorous woman, the creature fed on the Cat’s vanity. She also appeared a little while later in an episode of the sitcom My Family, in which she played a woman with depression, who was part of a poetry group which the son joins. She’s part of the coterie around Rachel Riley and Tracy Anne Oberman, who think that Corbyn and the Labour party really are Nazis. Because criticising Israel as an apartheid state and its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians means you have to be a fully paid-up anti-Semite ready to get another Holocaust going. And Zelo Street has put up an excellent piece describing and commenting on her meltdown at Ash Sarkar in which she unintentionally displayed how racist she was.
Why the fury? Sarkar had appeared on Question Time, and describes her self as Communist. She then issued a series of tweets declaring that her beloved Labour Party was now the Communist party, attacking Communism as a hateful, despicable regime and sneering that it was ‘good our [Labour] representative – meaning Ash Sarkar – loves it’. There two things at least wrong with that statement, as Zelo Street reminds us. Firstly, just because a regime describes itself as something doesn’t mean it actually is. North Korea describes itself as the ‘democratic people’s republic of North Korea’, but is obviously anything but. And as Sarkar herself reminded Barber, she’s not a member of the Labour party. Barber couldn’t accept this. She asked Sarkar why she was representing Labour. Sarkar replied that she wasn’t, unless she’d been elected an MP and hadn’t noticed. Then Barber had the first of her racist sneers. She responded
“Neither you or Shami Chakrabati [sic] have been elected, but you speak on behalf of Seumus [sic] each time you are on Political programs . We the people hate it. You do not speak for us”.
To which another tweeter, Louise Raw, answered in turn by asking Barber why she was throwing Sarkar in with Shami Chakrabati. Sarkar was a media commentator, Chakrabati the Shadow Attorney General. It couldn’t be because they were both Asian, could it?
Then Barber moved on acting out Godwin’s Law. This states that in an internet debate, sooner or later someone will compare someone else to the Nazis. Barber then commented on the news that there had been a proposal in the Labour party to put a candidate up against Harriet Harman if she chooses to stand as Speaker by declaring that Labour were ‘the Brown Shirts’. And when she found out that Jon Lansman, the head of Momentum had tabled a motion calling for the abolition of the post of Deputy Leader, she again made an accusation of Nazism. ‘As if we didn’t tell you,’ she wrote, Ernst Rohm in action’. As Zelo Street pointed out, she had just called a Jew a Nazi, which is anti-Semitic according to the definition of the term by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association.
Zelo Street concluded
‘Not much use calling anti-Semitism on others if she’s going to indulge in it herself. And that’s on top of the brown people inference. Ms Barber needs to learn one lesson.
Stay away from Twitter late at night. Or don’t bother, and give us all a good laugh.’
Let’s make a few more points here, just to expand on those already made by the Sage of Crewe. When Sarkar describes herself as Communist, she’s undoubtedly talking about the Communist ideal, before it was substantially altered by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. I’ve put up pieces showing that most Marxists before the Bolshevik coup were democrats, after Marx himself. Except that they believed in a genuine democracy in which the workers took power into their own hands. Mainstream Marxist intellectuals like the Austrian Karl Kautsky hated the Bolshevik dictatorship and their persecution of the former upper and middle class. As for Soviet Communism, this described itself as Marxist-Leninism. In other words, Marxism as interpreted and adapted by Lenin. And when I was studying the Russian revolutionary movement at College, we were told that Lenin had altered Marxist doctrine almost as much, or as much, as the Revisionists.
As for the Labour party, the one thing Corbyn and the rest aren’t, is Communists. Corbyn’s programme of empowering the working and lower middle class by reviving the welfare state, taking the railways and other utilities into state ownership, giving back working people rights at work and restoring trade union power, is really simply a return to the post-War social democratic consensus. The consensus that no-one seriously challenged until Thatcher in 1979, with disastrous consequences. It’s nowhere near the complete nationalisation or the bureaucratic state Soviet Marxism demanded.
And let’s make one thing very clear: Corbyn and his supporters are very far from Nazis.
Historically, it’s been left-wing Socialists, Communists and trade unionists, like Corbyn and his supporters, who’ve actually stood up physically to Nazism and Fascism in this country. If you want further evidence, go over to David Rosenberg’s blog, Rebel Notes. Rosenberg’s Jewish, and a member of the Jewish Socialist Group. He comes from the tradition of the Bund, the eastern European Jewish Socialist party, who fought for Jews to be able to live and work as equals and fellow countrymen with the gentile peoples of the countries in which they lived. They had no desire to go to Israel and displace a people, who had historically treated the Jews better than Christian Europeans. Which means he’s also a strong critic of Israel. Rosenberg has put up many pieces describing how the Communists, the ILP and trade unionists, including the ’47 Group of Jewish combat vets kicked the rear ends of Mosley and his squadristi in the BU up and down London and the provinces, so that gentiles, Jews, Blacks, Asians and working people in general could live in peace and dignity without fearing the jackboot. See, for example, his article ‘When Stockton Fought Back’, about how the good folk of Stockton on Tees fought Mosley when he tried campaigning in their toon.
His most recent article is ‘When I Listen to Boris Johnson and Hear Mosley’, about the similarities between our anti-democratic populist Prime Minister and Mosley when he was leader of the New Party before its transformation into the BUF.
It’s a comparison that has become particularly pertinent, especially as the Torygraph a few days ago decided to give space to Jaak Madison, a member of the Estonian conservative party. The article’s been taken down because Madison stated that he found Fascism had many great points, and Madison himself was a Holocaust denier or minimalist.
Corbyn and his supporters are anti-Fascists. The real stormtroopers are nearly all on the right, whatever idiots and liars like Barber, Riley and the rest think, led by a mendacious media and Zionist Jewish establishment. They are the only people, who really stand between us and real Fascism in this country.
As for Barber herself, she clearly thinks of the Labour Party in terms of New Labour, Blair’s Thatcherite entryist clique. They did some good things, but they stood for Neoliberalism and the destruction of the welfare state and privatisation of the NHS. They wanted it to become another Conservative party, and in some ways went beyond the policies of the Tories themselves. They were no friends to working people, both Jewish and gentile. And neither is Riley, Barber and Oberman for supporting them.
Ho ho! Things definitely aren’t going too well for the Blonde Generalissimo. Yesterday he lost his majority in the Commons when Philip Lee crossed the floor to join the Lib Dems while he spouting something about the G7 summit. Lee gave his reason for joining them his opposition to the immense harm being done to this country by Brexit. He declared
“This Conservative government is aggressively pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways. It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk unnecessarily and it is wantonly endangering the integrity of the United Kingdom. More widely, it is undermining our country’s economy, democracy and role in the world. It is using political manipulation, bullying and lies. And it is doing these things in a deliberate and considered way.
“That is why today I am joining Jo Swinson and the Liberal Democrats.”
Even with the odious DUP supporting him, BoJob only had a majority of one. Now he doesn’t even have that. Which means that, democratically, he can’t pass any legislation whatsoever.
But the humiliation got worse. The 21 Tory MPs who were threatening to rebel against Johnson over the vote whether to debate a bill preventing a no deal Brexit put their money where their mouths were and actually did it. They voted with the opposition. From today backbenchers have control of commons business. The Old Etonian Duce becomes the first Prime Minister since Pitt the Younger to lose his first vote.
The Tories, who voted against him were Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Guto Bebb, Rory Stewart, Oliver Letwin, Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Nicholas Soames, Richard Benyon, Steve Brine, Alistair Burt, Greg Clark, Justine Greening, Sam Gyimah, Stephen Hammond, Richard Harrington, Margot James, Anne Milton, Caroline Nokes, Antoinette Sandbach and Ed Vaizey. Clarke is, I think, the father of the House, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer under John Major. Hammond was also Chancellor until a few weeks ago, while Oliver Letwin and Nicholas ‘Fatty’ Soames have been prominent, even notorious, Tory politicos since the days of Thatcher, as I recall. And unlike many Tory chancellors, such as George Osborne,Clarke did seem to understand something about economics. When a prominent MP like him rebels, the fault’s very much with Johnson, not with him.
But BoJob also reacted as he threatened. He removed the whip from them, effectively expelling them from the Tory party. But there are also rumours that, following the advice of his adviser Dominic Cummings, he also removed their parliamentary passes so that they’d find it difficult getting into the Commons today to vote against him. One of the rebel MPs, Sam Gyimah, was reported by Sky News to have said that it seemed he had disabled their passes when they came in yesterday evening.
This was followed by the bizarre behaviour of the Polecat himself. It seems that with nothing to do during the debate except wait, Cummings retired to the bar, where he became, as Private Eye would have said, ‘tired and emotional’. Peter Walker, one of the Groaniad’s hacks, spotted him wondering down the parliamentary press corridor, lost and clutching a bottle of red wine, looking for the office of a particular newspaper. Then Cumming lurched over to Portcullis house where, according to Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Murdoch propaganda sheet the Sunday Times, he started yelling at Jeremy Corbyn ‘Come on Jeremy, let’s do this election, don’t be scared’. Shipman claimed the Labour leader was then whisked away by horrified aides. The Labour MP Cat Smith tweeted that, ‘As one of several shadow cabinet members stood right next to Jeremy (who was on the phone at the time) I just thought there was some loud bloke who stunk of booze yelling at us’. Commenting on this bizarre spectacle, Brexitbin tweeted ‘ Drunk & disorderly in Westminster is a new low even for him. The way to beat these people is not to play their game. Put them under pressure and they crack”. To which Zelo Street added ‘Didn’t need much pressure, did it?’ and concluded ‘Cummings is cracking up. Expect more pissed apparitions before he is taken away.’
Johnson has also confirmed that he’s a Stalinist by purging the Tory rebels, who now have absolutely nothing to lose by voting against the government and bringing it down. And as various bloggers, like Zelo Street, have already remarked, it also shows up the horrendous hypocrisy of the press. They were howling a few months ago that Corbyn was an evil Stalinist because he gave the constituency parties the power to deselect their MPs. How terrible and dictatorial, reinforcing internal party democracy like that! In fact, Corbyn hasn’t deselected anyone. But Johnson has. And the Tories are likely to have been embarrassed by it. When BoJob first made the threat, James Cleverly – surely a misnomer? – tweeted out that the party has no mechanism for deselecting MPs. Perhaps not, but Duce Boris has still kicked them out of the party nonetheless. Still, it could have been worse. Dictator Boris could have gone full Hitler and had them all killed like the SA during the Night of the Long Knives. I wonder who would have taken the part of the SS? Conservative Future, perhaps? They seem to be racist enough, if not necessarily that violent.
Here’s the Guardian’s video of Philip Lee crossing the floor:
I hope these are just the first of many defeats leading to this vicious, murderous government finally collapsing. And hopefully taking the whole Tory party down with it for good.
According to a piece on Zelo Street, Raheem Kassam, one of the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign and another fixture of the Libertarian extreme right, has been on Twitter arguing with James Melville arguing about the nature of nationalism, imperialism, Fascism, Nazism and Conservativism. Kassam had been complaining about left-wingers mass-reporting his tweets to the company to get his account closed down. Melville was entirely and rightly unsympathetic, stating that Kassam had tried to get his own followers to pile onto Melville’s twitter stream, and thus force him off twitter. It’s a strategy called ‘dog-piling’. He commented that Kassam was reaping what he’d himself sown. He also upset Kassam by criticizing a photo Kassam had put up showing Winston Churchill in a yellow vest, asking Kassam if he knew that Churchill fought against right-wing extremism. The annoyed Kassam responded
”Lol now this guy who had a meltdown yesterday is going through my feed picking out tweets he thinks he can argue with. Churchill defeated imperialistic (opposite of nationalist) National Socialism (opposite of right wing) which wanted a united Europe under Germany (EU)” and
“Fascism is an ideology. Conservatism is a philosophy. There’s your first problem in attempting to link the two. Fascism concerned itself with a corporate-state nexus (like socialism, and indeed our current pro-EU system does). Your understanding of philosophy is poor”.
Which as Zelo Street noted, shows that Kassam knows nothing about history and doesn’t know the difference between Fascism, socialism and corporativism.
Both Nazism and Italian Fascism had socialist elements, but they very quickly allied themselves with the nationalist, capitalist extreme right and served their interests against genuine socialism, trade unions and organized labour. I’ve written several pieces about the capitalist nature of Nazi Germany, and how the Nazi regime promoted private industry and privatization over state-owned enterprises. Hitler did define himself as a socialist, and a strong proportion of the Nazi party did take the socialist elements in the Nazi programme of 1925 seriously. But Hitler made his opposition to the socialization of German industry and his support for capitalism very clear in a debate with Otto Strasser, one of the leaders of the Nazi left. There’s an account of the debate between the two in Nazism 1919-1945: Vol 1 The Rise to Power 1919-1934, A Documentary Reader, edited by J. Noakes and G. Pridham (Exeter: University of Exeter 1983), pp. 66-7. Hitler makes his attitude towards the nationalization of German industry clear on page 67.
‘Let us assume, Herr Hitler, that you came into power tomorrow. What would you do about Krupp’s? Would you leave it alone or not?’
‘Of course I should leave it alone’, cried Hitler. ‘Do you think me so crazy as to want to ruin Germany’s great industry?’
‘If you wish to preserve the capitalist regime, Herr Hitler, you have no right to talk of Socialism. For our supporters are Socialists, and your programme demands the socialization of private enterprise.’
‘That word “socialism” is the trouble, said Hitler. He shrugged his shoulders, appeared to reflect for a moment and then went on:
‘I have never said that all enterprises should be socialized. On the contrary, I have maintained that we might socialize enterprises prejudicial to the interests of the nation. Unless they were so guilty, I should consider it a crime to destroy essential elements of our economic life. Take Italian Fascism. Our National Socialist state, like the Fascist state, will safeguard both employers’ and workers’ interests while reserving the right of arbitration in case of dispute.’
Hitler, exasperated by my answers, continued: ‘there is only one economic system, and that is responsibility and authority on the part of directors and executives. I ask Herr Amann to be responsible to me for the work of his subordinates and to exercise authority over them. Herr Amann asks his office manager to be responsible for his typists and to exercise his authority over them; and so on to the lowest rung of the ladder. That is how it has been for thousands of years, and that is how it will always be.’
‘Yes, Herr Hitler, the administrative structure will be the same whether capitalist or socialist. But the spirit of labour depends on the regime under which it lives. If it was possible a few years ago for a handful of men not appreciably different from the average to throw a quarter of a million Ruhr workers on the streets, if this was legal and in conformity with the morality of our economic system, then it is not the men but the system that is criminal.’
‘But that-‘ Hitler replied, looking at his watch and showing signs of acute impatience ‘that is no reason for granting the workers a share in the profits of the enterprises that employ them, and more particularly for giving them the right to be consulted. A strong state will see that production is carried on in the national interest, and, if these interests are contravened, can proceed to expropriate the enterprise concerned and takeover its administration.’
Hitler thus made it very clear that he was strongly opposed to nationalization, except for failing companies, and did not want the workers to receive a share in the profits of the firms for which they worked, nor to be consulted about its management. And when the Nazis seized power, they destroyed the trade unions and sent their leaders and activists to the camps, along with socialists, anarchists and other political dissidents. Hitler didn’t believe in laissez-faire free trade – under Nazism industry was controlled by a state planning apparatus like that of Soviet Union – but industry remained by and large very definitely in private hands.
As for the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, who were two of the leaders of the Nazi ‘left’, Hitler had one of them murder in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ along with the rest of the SA and the other fled to South America. Which shows how bitterly he despised those who took the ‘socialist’ parts of his programme seriously.
Whatever Hitler himself may have said about ‘socialism’, he was no kind of socialist at all.
Every now and then a Conservative defender of capitalism tries to argue that Nazism and Fascism were forms of Socialism. Jonah Goldberg tried it a few years ago in his book, Liberal Fascism, a Tory MP stood up in the European parliament a couple of weeks ago and made the same accusation, though he had to take it back and apologise. And Private Eye in recent weeks have also published a couple of letters from readers making the same claims.
Fascism did have Socialistic elements. Mussolini was originally a radical Socialist, who broke with the rest of the Italian Socialist movement in supporting Italy joining the First World War. The Fascist party was originally extremely left-wing in its programme of 1919. Its corporativism was not only based on the ideas of the right-wing Italian Nationalists, but also from part of the syndicalist movement, which moved away from demanding absolute workers’ control to advocating an industrial structure which included both capitalists and workers in a series of corporations set up to govern each industry, or sector of the economy. The Nazis also included socialist elements in their 1922 programme, such as the nationalization of firms and profit-sharing in industry, as well as the break-up of the department stores.
However, the Fascists and Nazis came to power through their alliance with business and the aristocracy. Both the Italian Fascists and Nazis in Germany were hostile to socialism, communism and workers’ trade unions. In Italy, they also allied with the Vatican to destroy the Populists, a party set up to represent Italian Roman Catholics against persecution by the Liberal state, which was distrusted by the Papacy because they considered it too radical. Once in power, the socialist elements of these parties’ programmes was soon jettisoned. Hitler declared that he had no intention of nationalizing businesses, unless they were badly run. He had the SA massacred in the Night of the Long Knives because this part of the Nazi party did take the socialist elements of party programme seriously. The word ‘socialist’ had only been included in the name of the Nazi party – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – against bitter opposition by some of its founders. Hitler stated that he did so in order to steal potential recruits from the real left-wing parties. Furthermore, the Nationalist intellectuals who first advocated a right-wing ‘socialist’ order in the 1920s stated that they did not refer to the nationalization of industry, but to the socialization of people to serve the state. And just before the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler made a speech to German industry stating that Nazism would protect private industry.
Robert A. Brady, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, made the capitalist nature of the Nazi regime very clear in his The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937). The book is a thorough description of German society under the Nazis – its ideology, social structure, the coordination of science, industry and agriculture, the instruments of power and the various party organisations used to recruit and control the masses. Brady states
The regime which the Nazis proceeded to establish is fairly described, by the very nature of the major interest which sponsored it, as adictatorship of monopoly capitalism. Its “fascism” is that of business enterprise organized on a monopoly basis, and in full command of all the military, police, legal and propaganda power of the state. (p. 33, emphasis in the original). He lays out the essential capitalist nature of the Nazi state as follows on pages 41-2.
1. Productive Property and natural resources are to be privately owned; freedom of contract is guaranteed (excepting to “aliens” and the peasants under the Inheritance laws).
2. Individual initiative, the business entrepreneur, conduct of business for profit (“reward for services performed”), and ownership (individual or stockholder) control are basic.
3. Business men are to be free, if “responsible” (“self-government in business”), to fix by agreement prices, production totals and quotas, marketing areas, and the conditions and terms of purchase and sale.
4. Stock and commodity exchanges, commission houses, brokers, and speculative transactions are inevitable and necessary for the conduct of “organic business.” (Business as usual.)
5. Heavy industries, particularly those catering to the military and foreign trade, are encouraged; large-scale units, unless “uneconomical” are to be kept intact; co-operatives are to be broken up.
6. The social class structure of society is sanctified, strengthened, made semi-hereditary, and hardened into caste lines (Standestaat, class state); the “Middle Class” are the Myrmidons of the Elite (Fuhrerstaat, leader state) and, as such, the backbone of the state.
7. Employers have practically complete control over workmen in regard to wages, hours, and working conditions. They must “take care” of their workmen-i.e. see that they are fed and do not grumble.
8. Collective bargaining is completely abolished; strikes are illegal; trade unions are forbidden; requests for wage increases are lese majeste. 9. Control is completely from on top; there is and can be no such thing as control or discussion of policies from below; the “leaders” decide all things as they see fit; each holds appointed office for indefinite periods at the will of his superior.
10. The National Socialist Party and the German State are one and inseparable, as spirit and body. Legislative, executive, and judicial authorities are fused together. The central government controls all local government and all activities in all their details.
11. Civil and military are fused together; as in the military there can be no freedom of speech, of assembly, of writing, of acting, of “thoughts.” “Anyone may grumble or criticize the government who is not afraid to go to a concentration camp.” (Goebbels).
12. Germany must be made self-sufficient at all costs. (Autarkie). 13. Non-Germans cannot be citizens; as a corollary, all Germans residing outside Germany either belong or owe allegiance to the Third Reich.
14 Communism (Bolshevism, Marxism) is the major enemy. There can be no such thing as equality of rights, opportunities, or income for classes, races, or sexes. The “broad masses” are fools and must be duped and led to meet the purposes of the elite (Herrenstaat). Class war is the major crime; material rewards for the rank and file sheer folly.
15. All sciences and “culture” must be co-ordinated and made to serve the purposes of the “leader,” “total,” “corporate” “master” (Herren)state. propaganda is the method. Propaganda knows neither right nor wrong, neither truth nor falsehood, but only what it wants.
In fact, business autonomy was severely limited by the imposition of the apparatus of state planning as Nazi Germany became a centrally planned economy similar to the Soviet Union, though in the case of Germany and Fascist Italy the economy was still very definitely capitalist private industry. Brady also goes on to discuss in his book how the Nazis celebrated and lauded the businessman as biologically superior through their social Darwinist ideology, and made sure that the leaders of industry, whether state-owned or private, were all drawn from the private sector.
Nazi rhetoric was anti-capitalist, but by this they meant free trade, which they identified with the Jews, just as they claimed the Jews were behind Socialism, Communism, the trade unions and other left-wing movements. They also borrowed some elements from Communism. Fellow Germans were ‘national comrades’, rather like the Marxist use of the term ‘comrade’ to describe a fellow Communist.
However, it is clear from this that Nazism was deeply Conservative and capitalist in its economic and social policies, and bitterly anti-socialist. It had socialist elements, but they were not taken seriously and only ever used as propaganda against the genuinely socialist parties and organisations. Any description of the Nazis as really socialist is utterly false and a lie, a rhetorical attempt to discredit contemporary socialism through guilt by association, and must be seen as such.
Mike put up a piece on his blog today, commenting on the distinction the lamestream media makes between White and Muslim terrorists. He was discussing the coverage of Darren Osborne, the islamophobe who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of worshippers leaving two mosques in London. Osborne had become obsessed with killing Muslims after watching a documentary on the Muslim grooming gangs and radicalised by following various anti-Islamic groups, including the notorious Britain First, on the net.
What drew Mike’s ire was the way Osborne was described as a ‘loner’, in sharp contrast to the various Islamist mass murderers, who were rightly described as terrorists. They were. So is Osborne. He killed and maimed innocent people for a political ideology. And there is no difference in the pattern of his radicalisation from the Islamists. Many of them were self-radicalised, turning to hatred and violence by following the propaganda spewed over the internet by groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. They were described as ‘lone wolves’, which I think is how the Islamists themselves want to promote them and their actions.
But White killers like Osborne aren’t described as what they are – terrorists.
Mike wonders if this was propaganda. And he has a Tweet by Tom London, who also comments on this distinction, and makes the point that to understand these peoples’ action, you need to understand the causes.
Mike and Mr London aren’t the only people, who’ve noticed this peculiar double standard. The American left-wing and progressive news shows – The Young Turks, in particular, – have also commented repeatedly on the way the media in America also makes this distinction. Whites are ‘loners’, Muslims are ‘terrorists’. And Islamist terrorism is taken very seriously. As it should. White racist terrorism should also be treated in the same way. In fact, it deserves more attention and effort to combat it, as there’s actually more of it than Islamist violence. But Trump’s decided to just about close down the parts of the FBI dedicated to monitoring and tracking White supremacist terrorist organisations. Of course, some of this is self-interest for Trump, as he’s received strong backing from White Supremacist groups, most notably the Alt-Right. Which has its own gang of violent, SA-type thugs in the ‘Proud Boys’, who believe that combating the threat to White America means going out and beating up Anti-Fascists.
But there’s a wider, underlying assumption here. It’s that White America and Britain is tolerant and non-racist, and that the threats to British and American society come from outside. From the ‘unassimilable immigrants’ the Daily Mail, Express and the Torygraph talked so much about under Thatcher, and continue to discuss in those terms. And when the Scum declares that we are a tolerant society, attacking a White racist outrage, you have to be amazed at their hypocrisy. This is a paper that never missed a trick to vilify Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Nearly twenty years ago Private Eye ran a piece about the rag’s double standards, pointing out that there had been 19 complaints against the Scum for racism upheld by the Press Complaints Commission, as was.
Now I don’t doubt that most Brits now aren’t racist, although there still is lingering prejudice, particularly towards Muslims. Some of that is the result of the War on Terror and Israeli propaganda – when the word ‘terrorist’ began entered widespread use in the 1960s-70s, it was always in the context of Muslim and Palestinian/Arab terror. It was the deliberate use of language to present Israel as the noble, wronged party, standing against murderous fanatics. Who were, as orientals, terrible others to be feared and hated. And some of it comes from the real fanatics, who organised demonstrations demanding the death of Salman Rushdie and the Pope, waving banner proclaiming that we would soon be visited for our crimes by the jihadis. And some of this is media bias, as the counterdemonstrations organised by far more tolerant, liberal Muslims against the bigots, firebrands and wannabe mass murderers didn’t receive nearly so much coverage.
There are also dangers with accusing White society en masse of racism. Nobody likes to be told they’re racist, and I’m afraid some of the self-proclaimed anti-racist and Black and ethnic minority advocacy groups did go too far in claiming that British racism was endemic and widespread. Some of them really did give the impression that they regarded all White people as racist. And this has provoked a backlash. Way back around 2004 the Spectator ran a piece, ‘Blackened Whites’, attacking anti-racist groups for unfairly smearing the White British majority, and particularly White men. It was the Tories attempt to use the Republicans’ tactic of appealing to ‘angry White men’, who feel threatened and demonised by feminism and the rise of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. Pushing anti-racist campaigning too far, and labelling all Whites, or nearly all Whites racist, risks further alienating ordinary people, who would otherwise be sympathetic. It plays into the hands of the Tories, who would like to present themselves as the nice, anti-racist party, in contrast to all the White proles in the Labour movement. See Owen Jones’ book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, for the way the media deliberately misrepresented an industrial dispute about the use of immigrant workers to see how the Tories and their lapdogs in the press do this.
But there is real racism there. The Tory party was riven in the 1980s with groups declaring their support for ‘racial nationalism’ – the ideology of the National Front and BNP. The Conservative youth organisations were notorious for it, before they were shut down by Norman Fowler and merged into Conservative Future. But these racists haven’t gone away, and neither has the anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s still there in the right-wing press. A little while ago that side of the Tories tended to decamp to UKIP. But now that UKIP’s very definitely on the rocks, they’re all coming back. In the meantime, there’s always Boris Johnson and Toby Young to make horrifically racist pronouncements, although in fairness to Johnson, he did apologise for his comments about ‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon grins’.
And so a White racist, who killed and injured innocent people, simply because of their religion, gets called a ‘loner’, but not the terrorist he is.
On Tuesday I put up a piece about the real, Nazi character of the Alternative Fuer Deutschland after their gain of 12 per cent of the votes in the federal elections. I said that we need to support our friends and partners across the North Sea in their struggle against these Nazis, because Fascism is international. Its successes in one country encourage Fascists and Nazis elsewhere. The various European right-wing extremist organisations have links to each other. The BNP and other Fascist splinter groups in Britain have hosted other neo-Nazis from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Italy. At the same time, the American Alt Right network also includes more than its fair share of Brits, including Milo Yiannopolis, Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones’ best mate on Infowars, ‘Millennial Woes’ – who wants Muslims and other immigrants crossing the Mediterranean gunned down, as well as the return of slavery, ‘Sargon of Akkad’, and Katie Hopkins. We have to support German democrats and antifascists, because we will need their help against our own Nazis in this country.
Yesterday the news broke that the rozzers had arrested a 54-year old man in Wiltshire, who was a member of the banned Nazi terror group, National Action. The cops have made a series of arrests of other members in Liverpool, the north of England and Swansea.
There’s a debate amongst academics and political scientists about the precise nature of some of the parties on the extreme right, whether some are Fascists or just racial populists or extreme nationalists. It’s largely about the very fine definitions of academics make in the analysis of their subjects. It’s made even more complicated by the fact that Fascism itself can be quite difficult to define. The term comes from the Italian word for a band of people, which originally had no political connotations. Mussolini declared that it was not an ideology, but a movement, and there were significant differences between Italian Fascism, which was originally ultra-nationalist but not racist, and German Nazism, which had its origins in volkisch racism and anti-Semitism.
In the case of National Action, there’s absolutely no doubt that they’re Nazis. Reporting the arrests, the Beeb showed clips of their demonstrations, in which they dressed in black paramilitary, or quasi-paramilitary gear, raised their right-hands in the Nazi/Fascist salute while their emblems were very much in same design as the Nazi insignia.
They are also bitterly anti-Semitic, and have the same conspiracy theories about the Jews deliberately importing non-White immigrants to destroy the White race as their counterparts in America and Europe. A few months ago Hope Not Hate got hold of a speech by their leader, Kevin Layzell, from a meeting in the north of England. It was full of anti-Semitic attacks and vilification, so much so that the anti-racist/ anti-religious extremism organization passed it on to the police.
The group was banned under anti-terrorism legislation, and one of the groups the rozzers busted had been trying to make bombs. According to Hope Not Hate, they’ve gone underground, and are running secret ‘self-defence’ classes, like some kind of wretched Nazi Fight Club. Hope Not Hate has produced a series of articles on them and the weird mixture of clowns and thugs that make up their members. Go here to find some of them:
I am not a member of Hope Not Hate, but they do publish some very insightful and valuable articles on the racist and religious extremist organisations now running around trying to terrorise and divide us.
As for the National Action’s paramilitary nature, this is part and parcel of Fascism going all the way back to the roots of the movement amongst demobilized extreme right-wing squaddies after the First world War, the Fasci di Combattimento and Squadristi of the Italian Fascists, and the Frei Korps and then SS and SA of the Nazis in Germany. In the 1970s one of the heads of the NF stated that he was trying to recruit ‘robust young men, who would defend the country from Communism’. One of the British Nazi organisations was banned in the late 1960s because they were caught running a paramilitary training camp in southeast England. It looked like they were similarly planning to make bombs. Part of the evidence for this was a tin of weedkiller the cops found in a garden shed. The ‘weed’ had been crossed out and replaced with ‘Jew’.
In Britain, Europe and America we need to unite and help each other defend our countries and decent, democratic and humanitarian values from these thugs.
The German elections two days ago saw the extreme right-wing Alternative fuer Deutschland gain 12 per cent of the votes, and has become Germany’s third largest political party behind the Christian Democrats, Germany’s equivalent to the Conservative party, and the Social Democrats, their equivalent of Labour. The party’s militantly xenophobic with a deep hatred of Muslims. Thomas Klikauer today published a very frightening analysis of the party and its history in Counterpunch. He states categorically that they’re Nazis, backing up this claim with a chilling amount of supporting evidence. Some of which is absolutely horrifying, such as a speech made by one of these modern stormtroopers in which he announced that they would ‘build a subway to Auschwitz’.
Klikauer states that the Alternative fuer Deutschland has all the racism, stupidity and anti-intellectualism of the original Nazis. Their nickname across the Nordsee is the Alternative for the Dumb, here in the American meaning of ‘stupid’. He argues that the party has its roots in Germany’s failure to denazify after the War. When the Cold War began c. 1950, the arrest and prosecution of Nazi officials and collaborators ceased, and many were recruited by the allies into senior positions in politics, the judiciary and civil service. He also makes the point that like the old Nazis, whose rise was assisted by the Hugenberg press, a compliant media has also helped the AfD. All the main TV stations in Germany invited their members on to speak, asking them about immigration. This was the first time a neo-Nazi party had been invited onto the media, just as this is the first time since the War that Nazis, in the guise of the AfD, have entered the German parliament. Many Germans have been shocked by the fawning treatment given them by the media, and one person commented that the first part of a 100-minute debate on them looked like an advert for them instead.
He also links the party’s rise to an upsurge in racist and political violence. Between 1990 and 2013, 184 people were killed in right-wing attacks. The victims were Turkish Germans, Muslims, the homeless, punks, and refugees, amongst others.
The part was founded in 2013 by Bernd Lucke, a nationalistic capitalist, in Klikauer’s phrase, as a more rightwing party than the Christian Democrats. However, more extreme right-wing elements soon entered and took it over in a process that included the election of Frauke Petry as its leader in 2015. From 2014 onwards it has had its representatives in several of the governments of Germany’s constituent laender. it is bitterly opposed to abortion, racist, ultra-nationalist, fiercely xenophobic and embraces the Nazi past. Petry herself wishes to reintroduce the volkisch ideology of the Nazis, along with Reichsburgerschaft: racial citizenship. Alice Weidel, one of the party’s chief activists, has denounced Merkel and her cabinet as ‘pigs’ and ‘puppets of the winners of World War II’, and claiming that Germany was not ‘sovereign’. Klikauer doesn’t mention it, but this is very much like the Nazis’ denunciation of the chief parties of Weimar coalition – the Catholic Centre Party, the Social Democrats and the two Liberal Parties as the ‘November criminals’ following Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Klikauer states that Pegida is the AfD’s modern equivalent of the old Nazis’ SS and SA. The head of the party’s youth wing, Markus Frohnmaier has connections to the German Defence League. He also made a speech saying that the AfD ‘would clean Germany out’, which he states is very much the language of the Nazis.
Like the American Nazis in Charlottesville, the stormtroopers of the AfD believe that there is a Jewish plot to replace Europeans with peoples from outside the continent, mainly the Middle East. The AfD author Wolfgang Gedeon blames the world’s evils on the Jews, America, Zionism, Muslims, gays and the left. One of the other leading figures in the AfD, Stephan Brandner, declared that Angela Merkel should be locked up, just like Trump raised the same chant against Hillary Clinton. And like Trump, he claimed that the Antifa are the modern equivalents of the SA.
Frank Magnitz, one of the party’s people in Bremen, put up a picture on a net with a red button and group of praying Muslims, saying, ‘If you could push a button and wipe out all Islam, you’d do it. Yes!’ The genocidal language and ideology as the Nazis. The party’s second-in-command, Alexander Gauland, said at a neo-Nazi meeting at Kyfferhausen, another Nazi pilgrimage site, that he was extremely proud of German soldiers in the First and Second World War. Klikauer makes sees this as an affirmation of the Holocaust, as the Wehrmacht was involved in the Final Solution, along with the rest of the German security apparatus.
Like Nazis everywhere, they also deny the Holocaust. Bjorn Hocke has described Germany’s Holocaust Memorial as ‘a memorial of shame’, while Wilhelm von Gottberg, an outright Holocaust denier, was an electoral candidate in Anhalt-Saxony. The party’s supporters also shout the old Nazi slogans of ‘Germany Awake’ and ‘Whatever it takes for Germany’, both of which are illegal.
He also notes the party’s connections to big business. The Alternatives are funded by the Movenpick ice cream company, and the ‘Swiss Goal Corporation’. It is also funded by the billionaire August von Finck, who bought the company name Degussa. Degussa was the company that delivered the Zyklon B to Auscwitz, and then extracted the gold teeth from the bodies of the murdered Jews. Finck’s father was also responsible for the removal of Jews from Germany’s banks under the Third Reich. Von Finck has supported a number of right-wing parties, as has Beatrix von Storch, who used to run a ‘citizen’s’ movement against the German welfare state.
He notes the work of BuzzFeed’s Marcus Engert in analyzing the extreme right-wing views of 396 of the Alternatives’ candidates, and the fears of a German academic, Hajo Funke, that the modern German parliament is incapable of dealing with this threat. The article briefly touches on the recruitment of former members of the Nazis party by the authorities during the Cold War. These include Hans Globke, the architect of the German race laws, who became a minister under Germany’s first post-War president, Konrad Adenauer; Georg Kiesinger, who served as chancellor from 1966-9, and who was slapped by the great anti-Nazi, Beate Klarsfeld. Other Nazis include Hans Filbinger, the Christian Democrat premier of Baden-Wurttemberg from 1966 to 1978, and Carl Carstens, the German president from 1979-1984.
Klikauer’s article concludes
Since 24th September 2017, Germany has Nazis in its parliament. Contrary to the 1960s, these days Germany has not yet seen another Beate Klarsfeld who will tell the AfD’s anti-Semites, racists, and Holocaust deniers that their politics will not go unchallenged. Today, Nazism is much more widespread compared to the 1960s. Today, we have many young and still a few old Nazis joining forces in an unprecedented way. In the 1960s, old Nazis never had a chance to form their own party and to be elected. In the year 2017, AfD Nazis have already fulfilled some of their ideological missions: honouring the Nazi Wehrmacht, denying the Holocaust, and fighting against democracy and the left.
Being furnished with parliamentarian status will only encourage Germany’s new Nazis. Like in 1933, they will not moderate themselves. If history is anything to go by, the gravest danger for Germany, the left and ultimately Europe and the world comes not only from the new Nazis. It comes also from a conservative coalition government that includes the new Nazis (AfD). By 1933 Hitler’s Nazi party was already in decline in electoral polling. His Nazis actually came to power through a conservative coalition government making Hitler Reichskanzler (chancellor). It was German conservatism that made Hitler possible. In 2017, one might hope that German conservatism has learned its historic lesson.
It isn’t hard to see from this that the notorious ’70s terrorist group, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or to give them their official name, the Rote Armee Fraktion, had a point. They too felt that Germany had never denazified, and were enraged that so many of them had not been prosecuted for their crimes, but instead settled down into very comfortable lives in the new Germany. And so they rose up in arms and carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings.
And Red Ken also devoted a chapter or two in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, to discussing and condemning the recruitment of Nazis during the Cold War, including those responsible for the Holocaust and pogroms against the Jews. Livingstone clearly and unequivocally condemned all forms of racism in the book, including anti-Semitism, and prejudice and discrimination against Blacks and the Irish. Yet last year he was smeared as an anti-Semite by the Blairites and Israel lobby within Labour, because he stood up for Naz Shah and said, quite rightly, that Hitler supported sending Jews to Israel. Which Hitler did for a time.
Meanwhile, those responsible for the smears, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, have defended genuine anti-Semites, like the Hungarian premier Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party, because they support Israel. As Tony Greenstein has pointed out, the Zionists have shown themselves repeatedly willing to ally themselves with real Nazis against Diaspora Jews, in the hope that their victory will result in more Jews emigrating or fleeing to Israel. Thus we’ve had Richard Spencer, the head of the Alt-Right, and Andrew Anglin, the head of the Nazi website the Daily Stormer, appearing on Israeli TV. And Sebastian Gorka, another Trump aide, who’s been active amongst the Hungarian extreme right and who sports a medal commemorating Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, who collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust, was invited to a big conference of Israel’s military establishment.
The AfD aren’t unique to Germany. You can see the same type of genocidal rhetoric and images on American and British anti-Islamic ‘counterjihad’ websites. There’s one showing a gigantic blast crater centred in Saudi Arabia, which annihilates most of the countries in the region as far as Egypt in the West. This has the caption ‘Problem Solved’. And the victory of the extreme right in one country will encourage its activists elsewhere in the West.
We have to help and assist our friends and partners in Germany and elsewhere tackle the AfD and the rest of the Nazis, just as we have to tackle the racists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes in Britain, like Britain First, National Action, the BNP, London Forum and the Traditional Britain Group, as well as the Anglo-American Alt right, whose British members include Paul Joseph Watson, Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yiannopolis and Katie Hopkins.
And to do it properly we need people like Ken Livingstone and the others like him, who are prepared to talk frankly about real anti-Semitism, western imperialism and racism, and stand for Jews and the other ethnic minorities threatened by these thugs, who wish to remain in Britain and the other countries in which they were born, or to which the fled to escape genocide in their countries of origin.
In this short clip, The Young Turks’ Francis Maxwell uses his dulcet Scots tones to rip into the Nazis who goose-stepped into Charlottesville last week with stinging ridicule. Maxwell states that he’s mocking fun of them because they do not deserve to be taken seriously or to be given the dignity of anything but mockery and ridicule. And he also lays into those from the Right, from Donald Trump and Laura Southern on down, who condemn both sides. Because this equates anti-Nazis with Nazis, those who protest against racist violence and discrimination, with those who would perpetrate.
Amongst the Nazis and White Supremacists he attacks is the young man, who claims he wasn’t really a racist. He points out that if he seriously means that, then he should have take a trip to Las Vegas instead of joining a Nazi rally. He then posts up multiple pictures of the guy, with a paedophile moustache added so that he resembles his hero, Adolf Hitler.
He also tears bloody chunks off an older man, in T-shirt with long, greying hair, whom he calls ‘Gandalf’. This man spent years planning armed attacks against Black and Jewish businesses. He’s a career criminal, who, if they were serious about their march being all about heritage and not a campaign for racist violence, shouldn’t have been allowed in the local demonstration.
He also launches another attack on a yet another moustachio’d man, who cried that he’d better be kept a hundred feet away from a school.
He also mocks them for their lack of personal hygiene, their terrible fashion sense – deriding them as ‘neckbeards’ who have stolen their father’s khaki chinos, and their entire lack of attractiveness to women. He calls them ‘basement dwellers’, who have never ‘touched a breast’, and says that ‘Gandalf’ should have taken his crew to a brothel instead of the march, as there they would have had a 20 per cent chance of actually talking to a woman. Although this was still high estimate of their chances of success. He also accused the lad wearing the neckbeard of having grown it to hide how many times women had swiped left on him when they’d seen him on mobile phones.
The Young Turks in their blurb for the video state that this is how you rip into them, and they’ve got a very fair point. As for the Nazis’ sex appeal, or lack of it, The Young Turks have also made a video revealing that the young men, who joined their march were encouraged by the organisers, who told them that this would make them attractive to women and would get them girlfriends. Some hope of that! As the Turks themselves also pointed out, this was the same recruiting tactic ISIS uses: that if young guys join them, they’ll be inundated with jihadi brides all wanting their bodies and their children.
Counterpart also published a piece commenting on the Nazis’ sexuality as well by a female sex therapist, who has contributed a number of articles to their site. She also observed their massive lack of appeal to women, and stated that rather than confronting the fact, they simply retreated into massive misogyny and hatred towards women in order to try and explain it to themselves. She also declared that many of them were repressed gays trying to suppress their fantasies about their fellow stormtroopers, and tormented by fantasies of well-endowed Black men satisfying their wives or girlfriends.
As a general observation on the weird sexuality of Fascist groups, this is very accurate. Ludwig Theweileit, a German historian, wrote an entire book, Male Fantasies, arguing that an important psychological component in Nazism was homosexuality. 75 per cent of the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, who were wiped out by the SS on Hitler’s orders during the Night of the Long Knives, were gay.
This doesn’t mean that the Nazis were at all tolerant of gays, as claimed by some supporters of the Republican party. They weren’t. Homosexuality amongst Jews was promoted before the Holocaust as a method of stopping the Jewish people from reproducing. Aryan gays were persecuted as well as the other racial, religious and political groups banned by the Nazis, and were interned in the concentration camps. If I remember correctly, there was even a play about the Nazi persecution of gays, Bent, staged in the 1980s.
And lurid fantasies and fears about the racial other preying on Aryan women is also a standard part of White racist/ Nazi psychology. Hitler had a recurring nightmare of a chained, blonde woman terrorized by a Jewish butcher. One of the anti-Semitic myths promoted by late 19th century racist ideologues is that Jews are more highly sexed than gentiles. And Blacks have also suffered from a similar racist myth – that they are more sexually motivated than Whites, and have larger genitals.
As for their lack of success with women, this reminds me of an article about a Far Right musician, who was part of the Nazi Black Metal/ Industrial scene in America in Adam Parfrey’s collection of articles on apocalyptic America, Cult Rapture. The article was entitled, ‘Where Can I Find a Girlfriend for this Nice, Young, Nazi Psycho-killer’ or something similar. This particular specimen of walking race hate had produced a book or pamphlet arguing that, rather than being prudes and puritans, the Third Reich was a sexual wonderland. The author himself was also spectacularly unsuccessful in attracting the attentions of the opposite gender. He did manage to get himself a date once with a female White supremacist, but he was too much even for her. She escaped from him by claiming out the windows of the ladies’ toilets after telling him that she needed to powder her nose.
Of course, they’re a very serious threat under all this. But the Nazis are such a bunch of twisted individuals that they deserve all the ridicule they get.
There’s a grim piece by Simon Murdoch on Hope Not Hate’s site today, reporting that DePaul University in Chicago has cancelled an event by Gavin McInnes because of a speech McInnes gave at one of the unis in New York urging his supporters to use violence against left-wing protestors. The article also discusses the formation of a militant ‘Alt-Knight’ organisation by another member of the same far-right grouping, which also shows how the Alt-Right and its ‘soft’ counterpart, the Alt-Lite, are becoming just another form of the Klan.
McInnes is the co-founder of Vice and a host on Rebel Media, a far right platform. In his speech at New York University, McInnes told his audience
“We’re the only ones fighting these [protesters] and I want you to fight them, too […] When they go low, go lower. Mace them back, throw bricks at their head. Let’s destroy them.”
Last year, 2016, he also founded Proud Boys, a fraternal order for men, ‘who are unapologetic about creating the modern world.’ Initiation into the organisation consists of four stages, the last of which is a physically violence confrontation with the Left. McInnes told Metro that this means involvement in ‘a major fight for the cause’, saying “You get beat up, kinck [sic] the crap out of antifa”.
He also told Metro that “not only would [he] love to speak” with those who protest in disagreement of his views, but that he will also “get violent and beat the f–k out of everybody”.
Members of the Proud Boys were involved in the violence at Berkeley, which erupted when Anne Coulter was due to speak there. The order also has a more ‘militant’ wing, founded by Kyle Chapman, who goes by the name of ‘Based Stick Man’, with McInnes’ approval. This calls itself the ‘Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights’. Chapman himself was arrested after fighting a member of the public at a rally in Berkeley. Before that, he had also been arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon at a Trump rally.
It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear members of the far-right advocate violence against their opponents on the Left. It’s always been there, ever since Hitler founded the SA and then SS as the official paramilitary wings of the Nazi party, the squadristi of Fascist Italy, and the ‘Biff Boys’ of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Quite apart from the skinhead boot boys, who form the thuggish hard core of post-War Fascism in Britain, North America and Europe.
As for the Alt-Knights, the Hope Not Hate article states that it refers back to the ‘Alt-Lite’ movement of which McInnes and Chapman are members. Well, perhaps. But it also seems to be a nod to a much older, violently racist organisation: the KKK. The Klan’s full title, or at least one of them, was ‘The Invisible Empire of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’.
The Alt-Right has been described as the Klan with keyboards. Now it seems that the similarities with the KKK are becoming ever stronger and more blatant every day. The other day The Young Turks commented on a torchlight vigil organised by supporters of the Confederacy to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee by the town council of Charlottesville, Virginia. Among those protesting was Richard Spencer, the White nationalist, anti-Semitic founder of the Alt-Right. The protestors chanted ‘You will not replace us’, ‘Russia is our friend’, and ‘Blood and Soil’.
The presenters of the video, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, state that the comments by the protestors that it wasn’t a racist issue, is contradicted by Spencer’s presence. They also demolish attempts by the supporters of Confederacy, who have tried arguing instead that the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery. They point out that instead of northern liberals not understanding history, it’s really southern Conservatives, as if you look at everything the leaders and defenders of the Confederacy wrote, they made it clear that it was about defending slavery.
This is a sharp refutation of some of the propaganda coming out of organisations like the Von Mises Institute, named after another Austrian free trade economist, who scarpered to America to escape the Nazis, while sharing their hostility to socialism and the organised working class. This outfit has also tried to argue that the Civil War was really about trade tariffs between the South and the rest of the US.
What they don’t comment on, but which makes the racist overtones of the protest very clear, is one of the slogans the crowd chanted. ‘Blood and soil’, or ‘Blut und Boden’ in German, was one of the watchwords of the Nazi party. It was based on the pseudoscientific doctrine that national characteristics were determined by the environment and landscape of a people’s racial homeland.
Observers of Trump’s rise last year remarked on the Fascistic violence that broke out against people of colour and left-wing protestors at the Orange Generalissimo’s rallies. Trump himself in one speech actually urged his supporters to beat his opponents, promising to pay their legal bills if they did.
This development shows just how deeply rooted is violence in the far-right organisations that back him. And they also show how close these organisations are to the older traditions of violent racism in Nazi and Fascist paramilitary organisations and the weird regalia and ritual of the KKK.
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