Dear Loudmoth.

Left wing people call any organization or movement that is nationalistic and patriotic “Right wing”, as if being nationalist and patriotic is somehow evil. I consider that groups opposed to democracy, and to be enamoured of the elitist view that the people are too dumb to be allowed to rule themselves, to be Left wing. I consider that Hitler was a Communist, who had a few schisms with the Kremlin over doctrine. Hitler made plenty of speeches where he said he was a Socialist, and his own party’s name was the National Socialist German Workers Party, which sure sounds Socialist to me.

Added to that, his very good relations with his fellow Socialist Stalin, who not only allowed Germany to get around League of Nations resolutions by allowing Germany to train its Luftwaffe on Soviet soil prior to WW2, Stalin even provided vital war material to Germany in the form of Rubber, Tungsten and Oil while it was fighting Britain and France.

As to why left wingers can never be patriotic, is because the leaders of this philosophy have utterly convinced themselves that patriotism and nationalism is racist, and is therefore utterly evil.

For the rank and file, most of them are young, educated idealistic people who have a compulsive need to display to the common herd that they are something special. The leaders of the left wing philosophy promote their wacky ideology to this vulnerable demographic group by promoting the idea that “smart, intelligent” people reject nationalism and adopt an Internationalist viewpoint. The young, educated people then seize upon this ideology as a way to display social superiority, in the same way that an adolescent seizes upon a packet of cigarettes to display that they are adults.

But most of them start to get smarter as they get older, and they grow out of it. Socialism depends upon youth, naivety and self esteem. However, some groups such as ABC journos and people living in the cloistered world of academia, live in a world where their sentiments become inbred, and they can never grow up.

Dear Davidf

I disagree that torture is ineffective; it has been around for a long time because it works quite well. And I think that torturing torturers who wish to mass murder innocent westerners, because the lifestyle of Western people offends their non existent God, is justified.

How a nation chooses to fight its enemies has to be related to circumstance. We in the West do not generally think it appropriate to kill helpless, wounded enemy soldiers. But during WW2, it was quite routine for allied soldiers to kill every wounded and helpless Japanese soldier they could. They did it because the Japanese soldiers exhibited sadistic brutality upon any male or female captive, because wounded Japanese were well known for killing medics who were attempting to aid them, and the Japs rarely took prisoners themselves anyway. In such a circumstance, the Geneva Convention was hardly appropriate.

It is reasonable for you to think that western people should slaughter their enemies in a civilized way, and most of the time our boys are happy to do that. But, like the Japanese Army before them, today’s terrorists have no intention of moderating their behaviour with any sort of civilized rules. If they want to fight dirty, then we should accommodate them.

The principle that you mentioned, that all members of an organization are not equally guilty of a crime, is not a hard and fast rule. Both your own legal system, and my own Australian legal system, recognizes the principle of “common purpose”, where individuals can be charged with murder if they are part of an armed robbery gang which stages an armed robbery where a victim is killed.

Exempting individuals who are part of mass murdering terrorist organizations from “common purpose” is just plain silly.

LEGO,

The Left is an extremely broad church, and I still think of myself as being part of it, in a schism or faction of one (of a sort of democratic socialist left). But rather than characterise Hitler and fascists as Communist, I prefer to think of many communist parties as oriented, or at least fairly indulgent, towards fascism, certainly towards fascist methods, if not towards their goals.

For example, I've been tortured with the notion that without Lenin's 'Red Terror' and his policies against former Tsarist territories, policies enthusiastically promoted by Stalin in his ethnic cleansing programs - would there have been as much rationale for Mussolin's Terror against the Left and against the people in Italy's colonies, between 1922 and 1945 ? Or, of course, the Nazi Terror ?

Or, come to think of it, Pol Pot's New Red Terror and, it has to be admitted, the Vietnamese use of starvation in its 're-education' centres, in the seventies ? When will the Left ever learn ?

How different is the Marxist notion of a Utopia without certain classes, and the Nazi notion of a pure Aryan world without certain racial groups ? Especially when the methods for extermination are not all that different - after all, what were the gulags for but for the eventual extermination of entire groups ? And how different is Baba Ya (where the Nazis shot a hundred thousand Jews) from Katyn (where the MVD/KGB shot forty thousand Polish officers) ?

And one other common feature of fascist and communist regimes (and Islamist as well, which may explain why sections of the Left are well up the @rses of Islamist groups) is their policy of 'one person, one vote, one time', and the Left's indulgence towards very long-term regimes like Ghaddafi's, the Castros, Mugabe ......

So it's no fun trying to stay Left, while there have been such appalling crimes committed in its name.

Yeah, I'm thinking of calling my faction, the Stephen Bradbury faction. I hope he doesn't mind :)

Joe

Dear Loudmouth,

I am reading "Fascism" by Roger Eatwell. It is a history of the fascist movements in Germany, Italy, France and England. It speculates why fascism came to power in Germany & Italy but not in France and England.

In the index under Fascism (ideology) there is a subentry 'similarities to communism' which contains 9 references.

The followers of Hegel split into left Hegelians led by Karl Marx and right Hegelians who were primarily German nationalists. Some of the heirs of the right Hegelians became Nazis so both groups share an antecedent.

You might enjoy Eatwell's book.

Thanks, David, it could be very timely :)

I wish the Left would read books like that, if only not to go down the same dreary paths, and not to suck up to 'friends' for so-called strategic purposes, 'taking the long view', and other fascist apologetics.

And in regards to Hicks' journey as a tortured terrorist, I agree that torture is impermissible, even if it gets results, which I can't imagine it does. Not even fascists deserve to be tortured. Shot maybe, but not unnecessarily made to suffer.

Regards,

Joe

Leo Lane:

Now you're simply stirring. You were the one who asked for "proof," I provided you with the information as you requested.
However, my links were not "trustworthy," according to you so I asked you to provide ones that were - and still you tell me the onus is on me. Why? Put your money where your mouth is and do some research. I'm not going to do the research for you - the answers are there on the web all you have to do is look. However, I can see that further discussion with you is futile and nothing constructive is going to be achieved. You're entitled to your opinion, as I am to mine. The truth of the matter is that if the world consisted simply of some self-evident reality that everyone perceived in exactly the same way, there might be no disagreement among observers. However what we see in the world is not determined by what exists "out there." It's shaped by what our past experience has prepared us to see and by what we consciously or unconsciously want to see. Knowledge and belief about the world do not exist in a vacuum, they are social products whose content depends on the context in which they are produced. Inevitably we're all guilty of some measure of bias - the tendency to interpret facts according to one's own values. This becomes particularly acute in subject matters that involve issues of deep human and moral concerns - like the David Hicks case.