This famous brief text should always be handy, so I’ve posted it here. It is useful when arguing against those who use the simpleminded, and utterly often confusing, left-right model and who have no awareness that the founders of the early-20th century political parties called “right” (Mussolini’s Fascists, Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party) were in reality merely factions of socialism who competed with other factions of socialism and won. Yet the roots remained the roots.
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HITLERITE RIOT IN BERLIN
Beer Glasses Fly When Speaker Compares Hitler and
Lenin
New York Times, November 28, 1925,
p. 4.
BERLIN. Nov. 27. – The National Socialist-Labor Party, of
which Adolf Hitler is patron and father, persists in believing Lenin and
Hitler can be compared or contrasted in a party meeting. Two weeks ago an
attempted discussion of this subject led to one death, sixty injuries and
$5,000 damages to beer glasses, tables, chairs, windows and chandeliers in
Chemnitz. Last night, Dr. Göbells tried the experiment in Berlin and only
police intervention prevented a repetition of the Chemnitz affair.
On the speaker’s assertion that Lenin was the greatest man,
second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler
faith was very slight, a faction war opened with whizzing beer glasses. When
this sort of ammunition was exhausted a free fight in which fists and knives
played important roles was indulged in. Later a gang marched to the offices
of the socialist paper Vorwärts and smashed plate-glass windows. Police made
nineteen arrests.
***
German socialists were not keen on what they saw as a threat
from Bolshevism that culminated in the Holodomar, which many blamed on those
Cheka leaders (such as the sociopath serial killer Cheka leader as Rozalia Zemliachka) who were ethnically Askenazy and who were fierce persecutors of Christian
Russians and Ukranians. Germans wanted a “better” collectivist state, a “better”
version of authoritarian socialism, one that that was their own. And they got
one, with a different scapegoat class, and with a national socialist “Holocaust”
instead of an international socialist “Holodomor.”
***
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[745-4/21]
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Can you suggest a book to read, preferably one in print or on kindle, that will explain to me why people insist communism & fascism are opposites. I am 100% anti-communist/socialist and started trying to figure out what fascism actually really was and why it was supposed to be "far right" and found myself faced with another form of socialism.
ReplyDeleteMost certainly I would start with this absolutely indoispensible book: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Delete– “Le Monde placed the book among the 100 best books of any kind of the 20th century, while the National Review ranked it #15 on its list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute listed it among the 50 best non-fiction books of the century.[2] The book made a major impact on Norman Podhoretz, who compared the pleasure of reading it to that of reading a great poem or novel."