Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.
How did Britain come to this state?
Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces. As I wrote three years ago, liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.
The major problem in resisting authoritarian orders is the simple fact that they usually work quite well in the short term. In the 1920s, Mussolini was widely admired across the political spectrum for saving Italy from imploding after years of red socialist strikes and violence had all but shut down the country. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression spectacularly. The communists did manage to rapidly industrialize peasant economies (albeit at a staggering cost in lives). Less dramatically, authoritarian corporatist/state-capitalist regimes in South Korean, Taiwan and Singapore raised the population out of poverty and led to democracy in the former two.
The BNP could very well rise to power by quickly and easily fixing problems that many Britons see going unaddressed by the left.
Britain faces major problems with a permanent economic underclass, low economic mobility, illegal immigration and a large, vocal and often violent unassimilated Islamic subculture. The native working class in particular feels squeezed by economic competition from low-cost immigrants. More importantly, they have seen themselves relegated in social status to the bottom of the heap. Much as in America, where the once-venerated rural poor are now despised and ignored “rednecks,” lower-income white Britons now see themselves pushed aside and spit on in favor of the left fawning over illegal immigrants and Muslims.
The BNP could scoop up a lot of support if it could slow down illegal immigration. Doing so would give an immediate economic boost to Britain’s native low-skilled workers. Even easier, they could no doubt pick up a lot of support merely by treating low-income white Britons with respect and by putting them at the center of their policy recommendations.
By smearing as racist everyone concerned with illegal immigration and the overboard tolerance for radical Islam, the British left is desensitizing everyone to the legitimate charge when it is directed at the BNP. People think, “Well, I’m concerned about illegal immigration, Islamists, the white poor, etc., and I’m not a racist so maybe the BNP isn’t either.” The overuse of the left’s catch-all denunciation deprives it of meaning and force. People may simply stop listening to the left’s warnings because they’ve so many times labeled people with legitimate concerns as racist. By their own narcissism, self-righteousness and contempt, the left is actively driving people to fascist solutions just as their more radical ideological ancestors did back in the 1920s.
Worse, entire generations of Britons have been conditioned to believe that the state has a mo26ral obligation to care for them cradle-to-grave. It is a short step from there to the belief that the government has a moral obligation to care for native Britons first and foremost before all others. Such a longstanding belief in Germany certainly made National Socialism an easy sell to the German working class and poor.
If the mainstream parties cannot address the real concerns of many Britons, and if they cannot at least pretend to respect and value lower-income white Britons, then Britain may be only one ugly incident away from a political seismic shift. A major native Islamic terrorist attack or an immigrant riot might be all it takes to push Britain over the edge. Other European nations are at risk as well, for the same reasons.
Screaming accusations at absolutely everyone even mildly opposed to far-left ideas isn’t a substitute for effective policies that address the concerns of the people. If a liberal order cannot provide economic and physical security, a population conditioned to see state power as the solution to all problems can slide into authoritarianism almost overnight.
The Mother of Parliaments could give birth to something very dark indeed.
[Update (2009-10-26 7:38): I would also note that the current leftist’s fad for derogating the history and traditions of Western nations has created a population that may see no value in the traditional concepts of limited government and rule of law. Also, the left pushes the idea that elitist decision making is superior to that of the people acting individually. This creates a built-in justification for authoritarian rule. As Hayek showed, Fascist and Communist regimes in 20s-40s exploited the ground work laid by democratic socialist. We could see the same thing in a modern form.]
The BNP has also drawn members who used to vote Labor. It has a generally left approach to the deserving, i.e., native Brits. So Labor has prepared the way in more ways than by being simply incompetent and uncomprehending.
BTW, I wouldn’t call the Soviet industrialization of agriculture a spectacular success on any grounds. Apart from the cost in lives, the USSR didn’t recover to 1914 levels of agricultural production until sometime in the 60’s. Under performing agriculture has been one of the most persistent problems in all countries that followed the Soviet model.
I’ve been struck by how little the British know of their history these days. Their school system must be even worse than ours. Theodore Dalrymple’s books paint a very grim picture of life in the cities of the Midlands. The description resembles that of our own urban underclass but these are white Britons whose ancestors won World War II. The deterioration is amazing.
A friend of mine is a professor of Surgery and Anatomy in London. He has told me he is very concerned about the number of young women converts to Islam who are medical students. These women, like the louts in the Dalrymple books, are not from immigrant families. Why an educated young woman would convert to Islam is a real puzzle. Maybe they are seeking structure but I expect it will come at a high price.
The other side of that coin may be the BNP voters.
Michael Kennedy..see comments from the Comanche writer David Yeagley:
http://badeagle.com/html/white_women.html
Enoch Powell will be proven right.
The thing is, not only are the BNP evil, they’re also morons. I really doubt they could do as well as Mussolini did in the short term. In the long term, as you suggest, it’ll be a debacle. Less of a debacle than Mussolini, though, I would imagine: Unlike Mussolini, the BNP hasn’t got the option of allying themselves with Adolf Hitler. Which is a good thing, because given half a chance, those idiots just might.
The BNP has been cleaning up its image – getting itself ready for prime time one could say – under the leadership of Nick Griffin, and since they now accept (and have) non-white members they could well move into the more relevant field of battle: culture rather than race.
They still have silly ideas about protectionism and tariffs, but as Milton Friedman showed with Chile, politicians can be talked out of protectionism. (Less well known is that this also happened in New Zealand, although it was Roger Douglas in place of Friedman).
The best result would be that pressure from a resurgent BNP could weaken the death-grip that the multi-culturalist elite have on the major parties. The later is the more serious problem, not the BNP getting a few seats here and there.
MK, Theodore Dalrymple is one of my favourite authors, evah!, but I can’t help feeling that, as a psychiatrist, there is a certain amount of selection bias in his sample of Brits. Not many countries would come out looking good based only on the testimony of its psychiatric profession.
I think the native Brits will do as they are told as long as the dole is maintained. We in America are on the verge of a 2nd Revolution.
The BNP gained close to a million votes in June.
On last week’s Question Time debate Nick Griffen was invited and ganged up on, this may have helped his cause to portray himself the victim. Indeed he described it a “lynch mob”. Most of the other panelists vilified him with nobody wanting to engage with substantive points. Along with immigration, the Lisbon treaty and war in Afghanistan are big issues.
Fascism is what you get with democratic socialism inevitably fails. Weimar Republic was founded by the SPD, Social Democrats, the largest, most influential, socialist party in the world from the last quarter of the 19th century into the 20th.
Year after year of the socialist Labor Party in the UK, poorly opposed by a freedom supporting Conservative Party left the door wide open for a fascist party. That’s what you get, when you teach that the purpose of government is to run the economy. Socialists give everything away to the dregs of society (and thereby create more dregs), who waste all these resources.
The economy declines, the work ethic declines, crime increases, substance abuse increases, civility declines, art becomes decadent and people become poorer. Fascists promise that more force will make the economic machine work and that ‘social wreckers’ (pick out a social group to make an enemy) are hurting society.
What else would you expect? Is the UK going to have it’s second libertarian revolution soon? The first being the levelers.
Shannon, this post and your original one discussing how authoritarian regimes arise from ineffectiveness have changed my world view significantly. Thanks for sharing your insights with us. Outstanding job!
I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the British political scene, but spending a little time on the BNP website reveals a protectionist, nationalist, populist party.
While there is certainly evidence of a “whites-only” focus when they started in the 80s, it certainly seemed as though the party has evolved.
Remember, parties can change. The Democrats in the US were seen as the party of segregationists in the 40s and 50s, yet by the 60s they were the party of Civil Rights movement.
What’s more, it seems that members of the BNP are targeted and discriminated against in the workforce, especially if it’s a government position. Most notably, you cannot be a police officer if you belong to the BNP (a party that has several members in the European Parliament). As an American that strikes me as insane.
No matter how much you may dislike a person’s political opinions, they should not be punished by the government for having them.
All of this leads me to believe that the BNP, which may very well be home to some unsavory characters, gets the worst of it’s reputation from a deliberately-misleading leftist press.
Something is wrong Shannon’s conceptual categories when Kuomintang Taiwan
is grouped with Nazi Germany. These are two very dissimilar regimes.
In Nazi Germany, within a year of their rise to power, the nazis had set
up re-education camps to which tens of thousands of their political opponents
were sent. Far, far more, millions in fact, were forced out of their jobs and
compelled to join forced labor brigades. In Nazi Germany it was illegal, and
a crime, to not have a job. Anyone without a state-certified job, whether they
wanted to work or not, was required to report to the state to be told what to do.
Over one-third of all farmers were expelled from their farms for either opposition
to or suspected lack of National Socialist enthusiasm. Over one-third of all officers
and soldiers were purged from the military. Over one-third of all businesses were either
outright destroyed or merged with the government.
The remaining farmers were told what to produce by the government and how much
to produce. If they failed to meet their quotas they would lose their land and
be forced into the vast government directed labor brigades.
Private property was illegal in Nazi Germany.
All the remaining businesses of any size had to accept state direction as to what
produce and what to charge. All remaining businesses of any size had to accept
what amounted to state-certified and approved nazis on their boards of directors.
It was illegal, and a crime, for a private employee to have a salary higher than
a government employee.
Everyone in the country was required to listen to four hours of National Socialist
instruction broadcast via the radio each day. Not doing so, not having that radio on
and not actively listening to it, was a crime.
In a remarkable parallel with Mao Zedong’s China, all of Germany was organized into
neighborhood self-criticism committees, which met weekly, and to which everyone was required
to attend. And, of course, the constant subject was the anti-social attitudes of
those who weren’t with the program. Except it wasn’t just words, because those that didn’t
meet the approval of their neighbors were sent to the re-education camps.
It should go without saying that nothing remotely similar occurred in Kuomintang Taiwan.
Correction to the first commenter: it’s more correct to say that MOST new BNP voters are former Labour supporters. Poor natives in the UK don’t often vote Tory. The rise of fascism, as the article rightly concludes, is a social-democrat problem, not a conservative, classical liberal problem.
I met a BNP guy on a cruise once–a nice man, gentleman really. Blll Kristol declined to speak with him.
Have you watched the Youtube video of the EDF (English Defense League)? Ghost of a Flea has a link. They are a group of young football loving yobs who say they are non-violent and intend to march for free speach and taking back the country’s values. They wear masks to cover their faces and say they welcome all races and creeds.
Perhaps white women in the UK are becoming muslim because it will protect them from rape and assault. They can see who the strong horse is, they can see white men that have become sissies and cowards. What woman wants a coward, or to belong to a tribe of cowards when they see that the enemy that would kill or rape them can be easily joined.
Fascism, Liberalism…
Isn’t it simply a matter of taste?
There are many on the hard left who see the slide towards fascism not as a bug but a feature. It simplifies the sales pitch when the only alternatives are competing authoritarianims. When the “myth” of bourgeoise ideas like individual rights and rule of law have been discredited, then the goal of a total seizure of power is that much closer.
Also — an historical note — the Nazis found that some of there most radical and enthusiatic recruits after 1933 were former reds. The old guard called them “beefstakes” — brown on the outside but red on the inside.
People whose ultimate goal is raw power don’t really care much ultimately what means they adopt or what obscenities they have to embrace to get what they want.
Both major parties are now hoisted on their own petard but never seriously sorting out the education system. Slowly it has been falling to pieces and the fallout, millions of uneducated unemployable youths, are a rich harvest for the BNP.
What makes things worse is that most liberal parties in the UK support the concept of proportional representation which is wide spread in Europe. What is not been mentioned is that in the European Parliament there is proportional representation but not in the Commons. BNP now has a voice in one and not the other. Were the Lib Dems to have their way we’d soon be overwhelmed by yobs.
Mark Armerman,
Something is wrong Shannon’s conceptual categories when Kuomintang Taiwan
is grouped with Nazi Germany. These are two very dissimilar regimes.
Not for my purposes. Both were variants of authoritarian regimes. The major difference is that the Kuomintang started as a centralized state owing to it being the surviving remanent of a government involved in a total war. It would be something akin to the type of government America would have had if the Germans invaded in WWII and drove the wartime government of FDR to a corner of the Northwest.
The governments of Taiwan and South Korean started out as extremely authoritarian under martial law and then gradually liberalized. In this regard they represent the opposite of the evolution from liberal-orders to authoritarian-orders. However, they were very effective in modernizing the economies of once peasant societies and they did so at much, much, much lower cost in human lives and oppression than did the communist.
My main point is that in some circumstances, authoritarian orders can dramatically improve condition for most people in the short run. This is why authoritarian orders can be difficult to dislodge once they are established.
Not many countries would come out looking good based only on the testimony of its psychiatric profession.
Good point, especially as he has worked largely in prisons and poor areas. Still, the photos in British newspapers after every weekend show the appalling behavior in many High Streets of Midland towns.
As far as young women converting to Islam to avoid rape, I would think this a small factor in medical students who are a highly educated class. The Comanche example is more appropriate, I would think.
Hey, Check this out.
Wha’sup Misty?
At Samizdata, Jonathan Pearce notes, in a post about the BNP that it’s a “…hard-left party, with a socialist economic agenda,…”.
They come from the left.
‘ppeter Says:
October 26th, 2009 at 8:59 am
Correction to the first commenter: it’s more correct to say that MOST new BNP voters are former Labour supporters. Poor natives in the UK don’t often vote Tory.’
Unless she is Margaret Thatcher. I don’t believe that most new BNP voters are ex-Labourites. I believe most are new to politics, and can’t tell a bunch of fascist buffoons from a serious political party. My take on the BNP is that they are not a threat to anything- mainly through their own outstanding incompetence and stupidity. A serious fascist party with serious leadership and a coherent take on Britain’s problems would be a threat to both major parties; but the BNP are not it. Even among Britains lacklustre political class they stand out; they are a bad joke more akin to the Raving Loony party than anything remotely to do with bread-and-butter politics.
Adrew Lale,
A serious fascist party with serious leadership and a coherent take on Britain’s problems would be a threat to both major parties; but the BNP are not it.
Heard that before. You should see what most Germans thought of the Nazis in 1929 four years before they rose to power. They poled in the low single digits before leaping to 28% and becoming the head of a coalition. The speed at which the transition from liberal to authoritarian order is dramatic. It’s not a slow evolution over a period of decades but a sudden whipcrack change in political momentum. In 1929 in Germany everyone thought the red socialist would predominate in the future yet just four years later they were in complete rout. That’s why I term it a collapse.
…they are a bad joke more akin to the Raving Loony party than anything remotely to do with bread-and-butter politics.
Which makes it all the more troubling that 20% of the British electorate would consider voting for them. How bad do things have to be in Britain that 20% of the voters would consider casting their lot for a bunch of incompetent, raving loons?
“V for Vendetta”
First, you need an enemy,
next, a crisis…
An important point that you touched on but didn’t fully capture is this:
The idea that the government should take care of you from cradle to grave is essentially authoritarian. Any idea that involves command and control instead of personal freedom/responsibility is a step toward the acceptance of an authoritarian regime.
I think that a significant factor in the eventual liberalization of South Korea and Taiwan was that their ally and protector, the USA, insisted on those reforms. It was an “organic” evolution. This may apply to Chile as well.
I meant to say “It was NOT an “organic” evolution.”
“…they are a bad joke more akin to the Raving Loony party..”
Please. Normal people can see that government, especially democratic government, rewards the squeaky in the population with the dole, and assigns and defines their victimnhood and makes them eligible for even more handouts or leniency in the courts. If you work, support your own children, and have to deal with the new dominant class taking the fruits of your labor but no politiican of either major party can even attempt to address this you become frustrated. It will be a collapse of the old parties.
This is why there simply needs to be a change in perspective. And fast. If I have to report my earnings to the government then the “redistributed income” or whatever shape should also be reported. Everyone knows that fraud and abuse is the key order of things when government starts handing out money or benefits to individuals. Here in Texas, when we went from food stamps to the Lone Star Card in an effort to reduce fraud about 100,000 families “decided” that it wasn’t worth continuing the program. Go figger. IRS Form 1099-Gov for all and everything!
I don’t know about Britian, but as for the American Left, I would challenge the assertion that they “fell” into authoritarianism. As David Horowitz has documented, authoritarianism was their goal all along, but they had to cloak it as a quest for freedom in order to get people on board.
Ahem. The Road to Serfdom, ya’ll (Which, btw, is the most eye opening book! I’m so badly educated I’ve only just read it! The section on the Rule of Law, the breakdown of the Rule of Law, and the arbitrary nature of legislative ‘boards’ which are part and parcel of that breakdown, is particularly sobering given the current regulatory climate. I hope I got that right, I’ll have to look up the passage, again).
Daniel Hannan, on his Telegraph blog, posts a bit about the BNP being a party of the left due to its statist economic inclinations.
Oops, I see Shannon Love has updated the post to say the same :)
I don’t believe for one second that the popularity of the BNP is from attracting support from the ‘right’. The media is constantly telling people that fascists are extreme Right-Wing. This is a blatant lie. The right believes in individual rights and individual freedoms, classical liberalism as it once was.
If the radical left hijacks the BNP as it seems to be happening, Fascism will be a very ugly thing indeed. At the very least, the Tories need to wake up and offer a free-market, liberty agenda and strict immigration reforms before the BNP can steal those positions and frame the Tories as just-another-New-Labour party, and a continuation of status quo. New Labour and past incarnations of the Conservatives have dragged the U.K. into an abyss that will take a very hard shift and some time to repair. At least they will have a template to follow a.k.a., Maggie Thatcher.
I wish them well.
Shannon,
But how centralized was Kuomingtang Taiwan?
Look there’s a great deal that I don’t know about Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan but there are
some things I do know that just don’t jibe with this picture.
For example, go to Taipei, or just about anywhere in Taiwan, and look around. One thing
that jumps out to my eye is just how chaotic the urban landscape is. You see, or you used
to see modern banks, right next to rice paddies or falling down 100 year old houses. Light
manufacturing is mixed in with commercial is mixed with residential. There is no evidence,
or at least there was no evidence of government direction at all.
How could a centralized government possibly have resisted the impulse to at least have
zoned things? How, for that matter, could a centralized government have resisted the impulse
to tell people what to do?
In whatever sense the Kuomingtang was authoritarian it doesn’t seem to have extended to the
economic. In contrast they seemed to have been astonishingly hands off.
If Kuomingtang Taiwan was a centralized authoritarian government, where are all the large
businesses? One relic of nazi rule is a relatively few very large companies. In Taiwan in contrast
we see this massive number of very small businesses.
It wasn’t that the Kuomingtang didn’t plan or try to push things in certain directions, but
they seem to have restricted themselves to actions at a high level. For example, there was
the KMT land reform. By the end of Japanese rule most of the agricultural land in Taiwan was
owned by a handful of very powerful families. Almost everyone else was a tenant renting their
land from the very powerful.
The KMT took the land from the powerful and gave it to the tenants. Although this was a certainly
a high-handed, extra-legal action, it had the effect not of centralizing economic power and decision
making but of spreading it out all over the place. Suddenly most of the population actually for the
first time in their lives owned something real.
Just as remarkable to me, the KMT resisted the temptation to demonize those people that they took
the land from. They were not killed; they were not made the public enemy.
The spirit and the actions of the KMT seem very different from the spirit and the actions of the
nazis.
Too much is being blurred together here. These are very different animals.
There seems to be a bit of confusion here, so I’ll remind people that Fascism and Nazism are of the LEFT, not the RIGHT.
“National SOCIALIST Worker’s Party.”
There hardly is a right, anymore–that was royalists and clerical, esp. Catholic. As political forces, come on… the success of modernism pretty much did in the old right, it’s last gasp was arguably L’affaire Dreyfuss, with some echoes in the Phalange in the 1930s.
The difference between Facsism/Naziism and Communism/Socialism is mostly about what are the great drivers of history–the Communist points to the class struggle over the means of production, the Fascist looks at national identity, the Nazi is a racist and anti-Semite.
But they wind up at about the same place on a broad range of philosophical and practical matters, as long as you’re not a Jew or kulak, so to speak.
To the extent you can say anything meaningful along a single dimension, the distinction is more statists vs. liberals (in the European or original sense of the term) vs. libertarians.
Mark Amerman,
But how centralized was Kuomingtang Taiwan?
Compared to what and when? Compared to Communist states, not very. They looked, at least economically, very much like prewar Fascist German or Italy. Nominal private property but with the state reserving the right to intervene in any economic activity at its sole discretion. Also, you have an oligarchy composed of powerful military and economic families.
The key point you’re missing is that Taiwan was a country under perpetual military siege for the first 30 years of its life. That required centralized economic control to maintain a permanent military state (same thing in South Korea). Also, they inherited the corruption that had dogged them on the mainland. The end result was a system in which nothing major got done economically without the approval of the oligarchs.
By the 70’s, Taiwan had become an economic powerhouse totally dependent on foreign trade and investment. This in turn required the development of the rule of law. This led to the weakening of the oligarchy and the decentralization of state power into an actual democracy.
Taiwan was never a Singapore.
These are very different animals.
Not for my purposes in the parent. You don’t have to go on mass murder sprees to qualify as an authoritarian state. Taiwan was at the beginning a highly authoritarian government ruling under martial law. Taiwan was a thinly populated island with no industry. 30 years later, they’re an economic powerhouse. If Taiwan slid into the ocean tomorrow, the planetary economy would collapse. A lot of the credit for that transformation goes to the authoritarian regime that dominated for the first 30 years.
That was my point. Authoritarian regimes do work short term. However, Taiwan would have faltered badly if it could not have transitioned to some degree of rule of law and democracy. Thailand is a good example of such a failure.
This post, and especially the one from 3 years ago, are quite enlightening. My criticism of the old post would be that political correctness is mentioned only for its potential to weaken the liberal order, not as a threat to freedom in itself. In fact, I tend to think of PC as the second step down the slippery slope that Ms Love says has never been observed (but there is always a first time); the first step being the combination of a multicultural society with a welfare state.
My minor criticism of this post is that the BNP is better described as racist rather than fascist, because they are, or were until recently, explicitly calling for the “voluntary” repatriation of ethnic minorities, while they have never explicitly called for a dictatorship to the best of my knowledge (although state violence would probably be required to achieve their goals). OF course, their economic policy is similar to that of fascist regimes (unless one includes Pinochet as a fascist).
If you want industrial strength self hatred, the environmental movement is up to the task.
The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government’s target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.
Worst of all, he is the child of a Conservative politician. A minister under Thatcher. I wonder what he was taught as a child to produce this self loathing adult ? I always felt I needed to have more children so there would be someone to pay the taxes.
PS: speaking of slippery slopes and of PC fascism, what about Sweden? the “cradle to grave” concept seems to fit into both the Merriam-Webster and the Longman definition of “totalitarian”. In addition to which, I have read somewhere about “anti-fascist” blackshirts assaulting members of the lone, small anti-immigration party, the Swedish Democrats.
What is to be done
Meanwhile, there are 50 (fifty!) nations with a longer life expectancy than the American average expectancy….guess we are doing something right, right?
Shannon Love,
What I said above was intended to be a description of prewar nazi germany. I believe you think I’m talking
about Germany during the war because it all sounds so extreme. But all that I said above, the massive
forced labor brigades, the re-education camps, the mandatory neighborhood self-criticism meetings, the
mandatory listening to state propaganda for four hours day, the massive state involvement in and direction
of almost every economic activity, the purges of farmers, soldiers and businesses, all of that and more was
already happening or had already happened by 1935.
If disbelieve me, I’ll try to find primary source quotes.
The BNP is invited to appear, and Nick Griffin is excoriated and insulted.
UKIP is never even mentioned. Not even the fact that it has been fined outrageously for a paperwork error relating to a campaign contribution, not the fault of the party or the donor. The media ‘elites’ are scared shitless about UKIP. They think that the BNP are buffoons, and will not amount to much. They could be correct about both.
But UKIP, or very likely UKIPDV (UKIP, deja vu) is not made up of buffoons, and is not a socialist populist bunch of yahoos. My native country is in for some interesting times.
from my quick look at the BNP as well as the lynching by the BBC/Labour/Multi-cullts that failed . I think Dyspeptic Curmudgeon hits this out of the park:
‘The BNP is invited to appear, and Nick Griffin is excoriated and insulted. UKIP is never even mentioned. Not even the fact that it has been fined outrageously for a paperwork error relating to a campaign contribution, not the fault of the party or the donor. The media ‘elites’ are scared shitless about UKIP. They think that the BNP are buffoons, and will not amount to much. They could be correct about both.
But UKIP, or very likely UKIPDV (UKIP, deja vu) is not made up of buffoons, and is not a socialist populist bunch of yahoos. My native country is in for some interesting times’
Mark Amerman: references, whether primary or not, are always welcome. I am particularly skeptical about your claim that private property was illegal in nazi Germany. That goes against much of what I know about nazi Germany, and I do not know of a single piece of supporting evidence.
Mark Amerman,
It sounds to me like your confusing Nazi Germany with one of the communist regimes. For example, self-critisism is a Maoist invention.
There was notional private property in Nazi Germany, indeed much of the pre-Nazi legal code remained in effect. I say notional because although people where told they still owned things, the state could confiscate or mandate use pretty much at whim. Likewise, private companies remained in private hand has long as the owners obeyed the Nazis and they were Aryan. There was no forced collectivization.
Fascism prospers by making only minor alterations to the existing social and economic structure. It merely concentrates power in the hands of an elite who can bypass preexisting limits on state power at their whim.
A pedantic point-NSDAP-
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei-doesn’t sound right wing to me.
Regarding White Women who convert to Islam (Medical students). The Cherokee writer was wrong about this (above link). Women in the Vichy Republic staged their own unconditional surrender to the Nazi occupiers because they went with the winner. The dark side of female sexuality is hypergamy — the desire for violent, dominant, ruthless, and brutal conquerors. Women, counter-intuitively, are always greater risk takers than men, in love and sex and reproduction at least. Women will always go with the violent intimidater even if he is a good bet for long-term loser. Because he is a good pay-off if he beats the odds. He might be Caesar, he might be Marc Anthony, or he might be Octavius.
Sandra Tsgin Loh in her Atlantic Article on divorce, noted that Scandinavian women are eschewing “effeminate” natives in favor of “more masculine” Muslim men for sex and marriage.
Let us be clear — women across the West demanded effeminacy and “sensitivity” and sharing of household chores and then (as Sandra Tsing Loh charmingly refers to these men) call them “kitchen b*tches” and find them effeminate. As a practical matter, ANY White man standing up to rape and assault by Muslim men will be VILIFIED by the PC brigade … LED BY WHITE WOMEN. No man will be viewed as a hero for doing so, rather a villain, and face death and disfigurement, with certain jail time, for standing up to Muslim gangs (who will always outnumber him 10-1 or more) AND condemnation from women. Who will despise him, call him racist, and demand his imprisonment. As “Roissy in DC” commenters noted, a woman can recover faster from being penetrated by six inches of a male organ than a man can from six inches of steel in his chest or belly.
This is not cowardice, this is reality. If White women want and desire male protection, men BETTER get something very, very tangible out of it, not possible death, disfigurement, certain prison, and general hatred (mostly by White women) directed at them for violating PC/Multicultural taboos. The price for PC, for women being socially and economically and status-wise equal to men, is the assault and more that they endure from Muslim or other non-White non-native groups.
No society can FORCE men to do something they constantly condemn, and disparage rather than reward. Commenters calling the British men “cowards” ought to consider these points.
The converts to Islam among (assumed educated and professional women who are Med students) are either hoping to make their own unconditional surrender to Islam, to find dominating men who will enter into polygamous marriages (many women who let their hypergamy run wild find polygamy a plus — other women have their husband “proving” he is in fact desirable) or simply go with the winner. The ugly truth about female sexuality is that many women let their worst impulses ride without self-control, and give free to their desire for brutal and abusing men, as Dalrymple noted about his educated and professional NURSES. Who found nice decent men “boring” and chose violent, abusing brutes. The female craze for hunky, violent vampires from Buffy to Twilight is more from this well.
There is a catch however. Muslim women do not date outside the religion, certainly not White infidels. So Muslim men with the very limited White women converting to Islam along with Muslim women creates a woman shortage for White Britons. The natives. THIS is likely the flashpoint of any major conflict. A brutal street fight over a woman or women, spreading like wildfire in the UK’s cities. Particularly given endemic joblessness among youths — the UK calls it NEETs (not in employment, education, or training).
At any rate, no one can call the bullet back. Muslims are there, they take up much of the social welfare resources and “hoard” through polygamy and no “trading” of their own women the scarcest resource — women and occupy a special privilege with the Archbishop of Canterbury and others predicting Muslim rule and Sharia over the White Male population. OF COURSE that will explode, predictably. In “natives rights” as the BNP not the polite, useless, utterly incompetent (at street fighting where the real power resides) UKIP runs any coming crisis.
IF some flashpoint occurs, who do you think will be the difference? The nice polite UKIP with useless position papers, or a street-fighting BNP who will rally yobs around to “take back” neighborhoods contested and “show of force” against both the “enemy” (Muslims) and their protectors (police)? The UKIP is akin to Konrad Adenauer’s nice, polite, Rhenish separatists who built wonderful greenbelts in cities like Cologne. They were utterly useless against the Sturm Abteilung.
But things are too far gone. Muslims will not leave unless forced out by violence. They believe they will rule Britain, with non-Muslims as slaves, really. The native White British men know this, most of them. More and more White British women are staging a Vichy France surrender to the dominators, as women generally do. Providing the likely tinder to whatever spark happens.
Firstly, the BNP is a left-wing party, boasting that they are the Labour Party everybody’s grandparents voted for, that is the real socialist party.
Secondly, they are not going to win anything in the House of Commons. It is not that easy for a small party that has patchy regional support to get in. After all the hype and promises they got two seats in the European Parliament, which was about what many of us expected.
Thirdly, there is an extremely easy way of dealing with them. Thatcher did it with the National Front: get a grip on the immigration issue. The BNP will disappear into the shadows. However, times have changed. A good deal to do with immigration is now EU competence and no main stream party will acknowledge that there is precious little point in voting for them. Mind you, some of us take great pleasure in pointing this out to uppity Conservatives. Heh!
Fourthly, I do not expect this kind of hysteria from Chicagoboyz and its readers. Britain may not be as big a country as the United States but it is quite a complex society.
Fifthly, Theodore Dalrymple is wrong more often than he is right. I don’t think he is based in Britain any more though he comes over quite a lot.
@Mark Amerman
Something is wrong Shannon’s conceptual categories when Kuomintang Taiwan is grouped with Nazi Germany. These are two very dissimilar regimes
I think you are seeing the KMT of today, after a loss of power to the Greens, Mark. This is not the historical KMT, and the KMT you see today only slowly emerged after the presidency of Lee Tung Hui.
The “democratic” KMT is the view that Soong Mei Ling wanted to present to the world when she cared enough about China to be its public face in America as “Madame Chiang Kai Shek” (Chinese women generally do not take their husband’s surnames), and that fantasy, propagated by Henry Luce’s hagiographies of the MMe. and Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek (just think about that title in terms of fascism), still hangs in the air today.
The KMT was founded on Sun Yat Sen’s vision of getting the foreigners out of China – already a heading down the road to the hyper-nationalism that is a hallmark of fascism. Chiang just finished the journey.
Observers of Mainland China under Chiang Kai Shek described the Kuo Min Tang government as a fascistic. I quote from “Stilwell and the American Experience” by Barbara Tuchman:
As America’s ally China could not be admitted to be other than a democratic power. It was impossible to acknowledge that Chiang Kai-Shek’s Government was what the historian Whitney Griswold, future president of Yale, named it in 1938, “a fascist dictatorship”. (p. 251 in the paperback edition)
After flirting with the Russians, partially out of necessity (since only the Soviets would supply Sun Yat Sen and his right hand man Chiang with arms to fight the British-supported Beijing militarists in the early 20s), Chiang turned sharply to the right after Sun’s death*, and slaughtered the Communists in Shanghai in 1927.
From there he expelled Borodin and the other Soviet advisors, and turned to the Germans, whose system was much more to his liking. Chiang was at heart an authoritarian, and had a fetish for discipline – one of the reasons that he became disillusioned with the Soviets was that he was in Moscow when Trotsky and Stalin were vying for power, and he had no use for internecine warfare.
By 1934, Chiang was reaching out to the Germans via a Nazi General named Hans von Seeckt, and praising the German love of order and country and “loyalty to their race”. I quote from “The Search for Modern China” by Jonathan Spence (p.415 of the paperback edition):
Chiang’s new ideology reflected this sense of national crisis, along with elements of fascism. He made clear that his goal, through the New Life movement, was to “thoroughly militarize the life of the people of the entire nation. It is to make them nourish courage and alertness, a capacity to endure hardship, and especially a habit and instinct for unified behavior. It is to make them willing to sacrifice for the nation at all times”.
Chiang sent his second son, Chiang Wei Kuo, to Germany after breaking with the Soviets (and with his older son, who was in Moscow at the time – they later reconciled and Chiang Ching Kuo became leader of Taiwan after CCK’s death). Wei Kuo became a second lieutenant in the 98th Jaeger regiment of the Wehrmacht and participated in the anschluss of Austria in 1938 before returning to China.
Further on p. 416, Spence details the formation of a fascistic paramilitary arm in KMT-controlled China:
Also int the early 1930s, a much tougher organization was formed, spearheaded by Whampoa cadets of the earliest graduating classes, to steel the political and military leadership of China for the long struggles ahead. Pledging themselves to lives of ascetic rigor, rejecting gambling, whoring, or excessive consumption of food and drink, members of this group wore shirts of coarse blue cotton, which led to their being informally named “Blueshirts”.
Of of these Whampoa-graduate Blueshirts, a man named Tai Li (Dai Li in pinyin), became the head of Chiang’s military secret police, the MBIS, and earned the epithet “China’s Himmler”. Tai Li ruled with an iron fist in areas he controlled, and once threatened US OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan’s operators with death if they operated outside of his restrictions. Donovan retorted that if Tai Li killed an OSS agent, he’d kill an MBIS general in retaliation for each OSS death.
Sterling Seagrave quotes Brian Crozier (wartime writer for the Economist in China) about the Blueshirts on p. 294 of the paperback edition of The Soong Dynasty:
Their aim was unabashedly totalitarian, and although Chiang Kai Shek continued to the end, with apparent sincerity, to protest his devotion to democracy, there can be no doubt that he identified himself with the Blue Shirts, whose members included many of his Whampoa Academy cadets.”
Once he got to Taiwan, with its limited geography, Tai Li became much more effective as a fascist executioner than he was ever able to be in the sprawling mainland, with its competing loyalties and language groups. The fascistic influence lasted on Taiwan well into the 1980s.
My wife is half native Taiwanese, half Mainlander. When she left Taiwan in 1979, it was still under martial law. You could be shot in the street by the military for certain offenses – this was 30 years after the retreat to the island. Martial law was not lifted until 1987 – 8 years after my wife left. As a last bow to the fascistic streak of hyper-nationalism, the Min language of the natives was suppressed – my wife was fined 50 Chinese cents every time she uttered a word of Taiwanese in school. Taiwanese language broadcasting was restricted to one hour of radio per day and one hour of TV per week, despite being the native language of almost half of the population of the island**.
On the Mainland, the KMT may have represented a bumbling and ineffectual fascism more akin to Franco’s brand than to Hitler’s, but it carried almost all the traits of fascism to its occupation of Taiwan until Lee Tung Hui finally wrested the mantle of power from the fascisitc oligarchy of Chiangs, Chengs, Kungs and Soongs.
* Publicly at least, but his ties to opium lord Du Yueh Sheng and the Green Gang of Shanghai mean that his heart was far to the right all along.
** For example, my wife’s grandmother was born and grew up in the 1895 – 1945 Japanese occupation of the island and spoke no Mandarin, only Taiwanese and Japanese. She was excluded from much opportunity in post-1949 Taiwan for being merely bilingual.
Screwed up the coding, the italics should have ended after “cadets”.
While heaping scorn on white Britons that may oppose unchecked immigration, let us also be sure to heap scorn on the many, many homogenous populations around the world that have never allowed immigration. And, always heap scorn on cradle-to-grave nanny staters wherever they may be.
“Britons Weary of Surveillance in Minor Cases” by Sarah Lyall at page A1 of the New York Times on October 24, 2009
Racism begins with our families, parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, people we admire, respect and love.
However, as we grow and mature we come to the realization that what we were told by our family when we were children were slanted lies base on their prejudices. We realize that most people are like ourselves and not so different and want the same things, like a home, steady work, a Medicare plan and schools for our children (if you travel you will see this). We realize that most people are of good hearts and goodwill.
This reminds me of a parable from the good book where a Levite and Priest come upon a man who fell among thieves and they both individually passed by and didn’t stop to help him.
Finally a man of another race came by, he got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy and got down with the injured man, administered first aid, and helped the man in need.
Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou,” and to be concerned about his fellow man.
You see, the Levite and the Priest were afraid, they asked themselves, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?”
But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before us. The question is not, “If I stop to help our fellow man (immigrant) in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help our fellow man, what will happen to him or her?” That’s the question.
This current climate of blaming others for our woes is not new. We have had this before and we have conquered it.
Remember “Evil flourishes when good men (and women) do nothing”. Raise your voices with those of us who believe we are equal and we can win this battle again.
As many have mentioned, the BNP is a hard left party.
The other major error in this article is that it is not illegal immigration that has led to the rise in anti-immigration feeling in the UK, it is legal immigration. The UK has no way of stopping as many East Europeans as want to coming to the country. Before they joined the government laughed noisily at anyone saying it would be a problem and put about ludicrous claims of a few tens of thousands coming. Then a couple of million did.
Excellent article, Shannon Love shows an understanding of what seems to be pushing the European working and middle classes towards the Nationalist Right. I would also suggest that the Tea Party movement is the American manifestation of the same feelings and motivations. In both Europe and America, the White Working and Middle Classes (WWAMC) are (for the first time in history) starting to organize for their ethnic interests explicitly. Europe traditionally never really had the concept of “white” or “whiteness,” but now after 20 solid years of unwanted immigration, the “whiteness” concept is starting to appear.
The biggest issues pushing the WWAMC of the West towards Nationalism is 1) unwanted immigration, 2) defamation and disrespect of the WWAMC in the media and among elite, 3) affirmative action (more so in the US), 4) aggressive identity politics by minority groups (blacks and Hispanic in US, Muslims in Europe), and 5) negative representation of National and Western narratives by the education systems. The simplest way of putting it is that the WWAMC see other ethnic groups organized for their interests and an elite that has its interest tied up in these same ethnic groups and in response is starting to organize.
The thing to look for is how the elites will respond to the WWAMC’s organizing attempts? Its important to realize that in the Europe and the US the elites see it in their interests to block the WWAMC from organizing. The Left has a need for a bigger welfare state and sees the presence of non-whites as an opportunity to enlarge the “diversity and civil rights” industry. The elites on the Right (Wall Street Journal opinion page) want Hispanic immigrants for blue collar work and Asians for technical work (both lower labor costs). Like the former USSR, the elites see large geographic blocks of homogeneous ethnic groups as a danger to their status and try desperately to “dilute” these areas with immigrants. If you ever wonder why the government likes sending large swaths of Somali or Hmong immigrants to largely white Midwestern cities, you can be sure this is an attempt to “dilute” areas that are “too white.”
The WWAMC are an inconvenient demographic reality for the elites. Their vision for the West is a mixed working class and an Asian technical class with the elites on top. Culture is dangerous unless created on Madison ave. I just wonder how far the elites will go to stop the rise of the WWAMV as a movement? Europe already has speech laws and I’m pretty sure the next 10 years will see the rise of similar laws in the US? The Internet is also extremely dangerous, as it allows people to go around the MSM for information. People like Glenn Beck are put on TV as a release valve for the WWAMC in an attempt to address their concerns while reminding the WWAMC that Martin Luther King was a great Conservative hero.
It will also be interesting to see how other nations exploit this situation for their own gain? I predict that Russia will give support to the WWAMC the same way they supported Leftwing groups during the Cold war. Instead of Marxist ideology, Russia will further blood and soil ideology and suggest rebuilding the glorious organic transnational European monarchy. David Duke is highly connected to the Russian Duma; most likely in the attempt to built contacts and networks for this very reason.
We’re headed towards a turbulent time. Historians in 100 years may see the election of Obama as being the start of a period of extreme ethnic conflict? The biggest challenge for the West over the next 20 years will be in how to make ethnically diverse nations work for everyone. I’m not sure what the answer is, but one thing I am sure of is that calling the WWAMC “racist” for expressing their concerns will end up only causing more radicalism. No people in the history of the world (as far as I know) have ever been demographically displaced voluntarily.
Seerov,
I doubt America is in as much danger of a sudden shift to authoritarianism as is Europe because being “white” in America does not have the same bond as does the ethnic-nationalism of Europe. A working class white guy in the Bronx and working class white guy in rural Texas don’t share the same degree of mutual identification as do any two working class white guys in Europe. In Europe, each countries white people has a built in group identity based on being British, Dutch, French , etc.
European identification is much stronger. Note in the above comments that most of the immigration that causing concern in Britain comes from Eastern Europe They’re worried about people that would be considered “white” and otherwise invisible in America. It would be like someone in a high cost state like New York worried that white people from a low cost state like Mississippi were migrating and taking jobs.
In America, being white is increasingly a matter of being “none of the above” in a list of racial groups. Without any strong sense of group identity you won’t see the kind of dangerous backlash possible in Europe.
I don’t think immigration is an elitist conspiracy. If nothing else, I don’t think we have any elites who are organized and disciplined enough to carry out a conspiracy of that magnitude. The primary driver of immigration is the incentive created by the vast differences in wealth between rich and poor nations. The same is true between parts of America that are largely white. They have market niches for low cost labor and immigrants flow there.
This posting should be placed in a permanent archive. It’s an extremely important point and relevant to more than just British politics.
I don’t think immigration is an elitist conspiracy.
Oh, I’m pretty sure it is, it doesn’t take a genius to count votes and seek to import them when possible. Same with lowering the voting age to 18, do you really think it was about “old enough to fight for their country, old enough to vote?” Nah, it was to give the vote to people likely to vote Democratic. The fight over voter id is more of the same.
I’m not saying the elites got together in Davos and conspired to bring it about. I’m just saying you would have to be subnormal not to be aware of the effects of stacking the electorate. And that effect plays an unspoken role in the debate.
You know, the liberal order was founded in the first place on the idea of the “self-determination of peoples”. This was understood as the essence of liberalism until after WWII.
John Stuart Mill, widely reagarded as a great spokesman for classicla liberalism, said things such as – “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.”
It’s hard to know by what mysterious process this has been converted into the essence of anti-liberalism.
“I doubt America is in as much danger of a sudden shift to authoritarianism as is Europe ”
I suggest you start paying attention to the news then. Your problem lies in thinking that authoritarianism can only come via white people acting as a group. Which would have been news to the Founders, btw.
“It is a short step from there to the belief that the government has a moral obligation to care for native Britons first and foremost before all others.”
It does have such an obligation. That’s the entire definition of the British state, indeed of all liberal states – that they exist to represent the interests of their own people, and have no legitimacy when they fail to do so. Try readng the Federalist Papers and Declaration of Independence sometime.
“I don’t think immigration is an elitist conspiracy. If nothing else, I don’t think we have any elites who are organized and disciplined enough to carry out a conspiracy of that magnitude.”
It’s not a conspiracy, insofar as there is nothing remotely secret about it. But the open borders movement certainly exists and is vastly better funded and organized than its opposition. It even controls “both” of our parties.
Steve,
Your problem lies in thinking that authoritarianism can only come via white people acting as a group.
No, it’s just that is the type of authoritarian shift were talking about in Europe. America’s innate diversity (racial, ethnic, regional etc) insulates it against that particular type of shift.
That’s the entire definition of the British state, indeed of all liberal states – that they exist to represent the interests of their own people, and have no legitimacy when they fail to do so.
Except the definition of “people” in a liberal state is not necessarily attached to a specific ethnic or racial group. It certainly isn’t in America. The “people” should be all human beings lawfully within a state’s domain, not just a particular group that’s lived there the longest. The real danger of fascism lays in its appeal based on group identity and the idea that certain subpopulations are more entitled to protection and benefits of the state than other subpopulations.
Shannon Love,
Well I have to say I have not, as yet, found a quote that demonstrates the truth of my
earlier statement,
[i]Private property was illegal in Nazi Germany.[/i]
I believe it’s out there. I certainly remember such. Unfortunately for me it’s taking
some time to track it down.
In any case, I wanted you to know that I’m making the effort. I have found a few quotes
that hint show such a law would not be incongruent.
Here’s one from Adolf Hitler:
[i]It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his
own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation;
that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of
the nation as a whole; that pride and conceitedness, the feeling that the
individual… is superior, so far from being merely laughable, involve great
dangers for the existence of the community that is a nation; that above all the
unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the
spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life
of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests
of the individual.[/i]
Here’s another from Joesph Goebbels:
[i]Fifty or a hundred years from now, National Socialism, too, will
have become a philosphic system that can be studied at the universities
for four or five semesters, just as today, theology or classical
economics are academic subjects. If at such a time, I should ask a
representative of National Socialism, “Can you tell me in a word what
you mean by National Socialism?” he would give me the same answer to
the question which I now will. It is this. The difference between
National Socialism and all previous systems, particularly the system it is
now conquering, is that its starting point is the community, not the
individual. This gives a different character to all our social ideas.
What I mean when I say war, or society, or economics, or political
philosophy, all these things suddenly appear from a different angle.
We do not see these things from the point of view of the individual,
but from that of the community. The basic principle with which we
brought the whole German people to follow us was a very simple one.
It was “The Common Interest Before Self-Interest.”[/i]
[“Der Kriegals Weltanschauungskampf” (Berlin, 1944), p. 9. (from “The Nazi Years:
A Documentary History,” edited by Joachim Remak.)]
And here’s another item. It’s a quote from an essay by Jean van Heijenoort,
a dutch commnunist. It was published in December 1941 in the “Fourth Internationale.”
To give some context, in this essay Jean van Heijenoort argues that Communism and
National Socialism are different things and tries to persuade other communists
not to become National Socialists. When Van Heijenoort says improvisors, this
is his word for the dutch communists that favored joining the national socialists.
From Van Heijenoort’s 1941 essay:
[i]The improvisers take private property as it is legally defined, jus utendi
et abutendi, the right to use and abuse, and they oppose this definition to
the actual situation. The divergence is so marked that they rush to conclude
that private property has been abolished.[/i]
Ok, what does that mean in context? First of all one has to know the that the
abolution of private property has long been one of the goals of most if not all
communists. Second, the Van Heijenoort’s “improvisers” have apparently come up
with a list of National Socialist goals and achievements that matched Communist
goals and achievements. And likely their argument was that given the similarties that
the Communists and the National Socialists should come to an accommodation.
But we can’t know for sure since the “improvisers” argument has been lost.
We do though see some of their argument because in Van Heijenoort’s lengthy essay
he addresses many of their points.
To put the above in different words the improvisors argued, according to Van Heijenoort,
that german capitalists have precious little control of the property they allegedly own
and that therefore it isn’t really private property anymore.
Heijenoort’s response is to argue that private property is an illusion anyway, and
so this isn’t really progress.
I frankly think that this is kind of juvenile counterargument. But that’s not the
reason I’m mentioning it. What seems significant to me is that even a hostile
party, and Van Heijenoort was definitely hostile, did not dispute that in practice
the reality of “private property” in nazi germany had become tenuous.
This doesn’t prove that private property was actually formally illegal in nazi
germany, but it doesn’t support it. In fact I’ll expand on my earlier statement
and assert that not only was private property not recognized as a legal right in
Nazi Germany, but that according to the nazis everything was owned by the state
and any item a person nominally had as a possession was legally on loan from the
state and the responsibility of that person to take care of and use properly.
Thus under nazi law, a person could be prosecuted and sent to prison for not taking
care of, say, their house.
Or so I recall.
Mark Amerman,
In fact I’ll expand on my earlier statement
and assert that not only was private property not recognized as a legal right in
Nazi Germany, but that according to the nazis everything was owned by the state
and any item a person nominally had as a possession was legally on loan from the
state and the responsibility of that person to take care of and use properly.
Thus under nazi law, a person could be prosecuted and sent to prison for not taking
care of, say, their house.
That is probably a fair description which is why I termed private property in Nazi Germany as notional. But to return to my original point, do you know what the attitude towards private property was in first thirty years of Taiwan? Even lacking a ideological basis, clearly the people of Taiwan did not have true property rights. If nothing else, the rulers viewed deeds acquired during the 50 years of Japanese colonial as invalid. On a more practical level, there was little to no rule of law. An individual’s ability to legally defend their right to their property depended almost entirely on the patronage of one of the oligarchs. The rights of people on the political outs got no protection from the state.
The authoritarian government of Taiwan was in no way of the same magnitude of evil as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union but they were of the same basic mold. In all cases you have a powerful elite largely unrestrained by the rule of law. Everything else was detail.
It was however, this very centralized authoritarianism that allowed Taiwan to survive under communist pressure, to industrialize and to eventually democratize. Authoritarian regimes can work short term in certain circumstances.
The real danger of fascism lays in its appeal based on group identity and the idea that certain subpopulations are more entitled to protection and benefits of the state than other subpopulations.
This is questionable. In his essay The Doctrine of Fascism (probably ghost-written), Mussolini is quite clear that fascism is more collectivist than (Marxian) socialism exactly because fascism does not recognize any divisions within the State. If Mussolini was not a fascist, then who is?
Sure, Hitler did not consider non-Aryans to be equally entitled, but then, he never considered them to be part of the nation: he never considered them to be entitled at all. And anyway, Hitler was a nazi, not a prototypical fascist.
“I doubt America is in as much danger of a sudden shift to authoritarianism as is Europe because being “white” in America does not have the same bond as does the ethnic-nationalism of Europe.” (S. Love)
I respectably disagree. I find it amazing that German, French, British, Swiss, and even Eastern European Nationalists are aligning and attending conferences together. This indicates to me that Europeans are staring to see themselves as “white” more and more and putting Nationalist differences to the side.
“A working class white guy in the Bronx and working class white guy in rural Texas don’t share the same degree of mutual identification as do any two working class white guys in Europe” (S. Love)
I would argue that the WWAMC of America share MORE, than say a white from Italy and a white from Germany. However, as I said above this seems to be changing in Europe. As far as the US and the WWAMC goes, look at the Minutemen project. Here we saw WWAMC ex military and police from all over the country forming a somewhat paramilitary nationalist organization. You’re correct regarding the Bronx and Texas as being very different, however, Upstate NY (West of the Hudson river especially rural NY) IMO is more Texas-like then NY City is any day. What we call “Middle America” (the Hudson river to California) has the potential to form its own Nation State (separate from the Boswash corridor).
“I doubt America is in as much danger of a sudden shift to authoritarianism as is Europe because being “white” in America does not have the same bond as does the ethnic-nationalism of Europe.” (S. Love)
The authoritarianism that I see as being likely is not from the WWAMC, instead, I see the elites becoming fearful of the WWAMC and declaring a “War on Hate” which would replace the increasingly difficult to manage “War of Terror.”
“I don’t think immigration is an elitist conspiracy. If nothing else, I don’t think we have any elites who are organized and disciplined enough to carry out a conspiracy of that magnitude.” (S. Love)
OK, but you will admit that the elites like their positions in life and will do what they can to remain in power? Right? This is standard Poli Sci 101 stuff. I realize my comments about bringing immigrants to white geographic areas is unorthodox, but this method of breaking up homogeneous areas was effective in the past in the USSR and is today in China. In China the Han fear Tibetan Nationalism and have been transferring Han there for the last 50 years. The former USSR literally split up whole ethnic groups in the attempt of decreasing their geographic power. There’s an excellent book titled “The Geography of Ethnic Violence” (Toft) which lays out which type of spatial configurations tend to result in separatist movements with the highest probability. The book indicates that ethnic groups are most “dangerous” to the status quo when they have a geographic core in which to organize and feel safe. In order to prevent any “dangerous activity” from the WWAMC (as the WWAMC becomes more and more unhappy with the status quo) in the form of a separatist movement, the best strategy would be to dilute areas which are “too white.”
Except the definition of “people” in a liberal state is not necessarily attached to a specific ethnic or racial group. It certainly isn’t in America.
Are you serious, or is this some sort of bad joke? I suggest you spend a little time getting familiar with the history of liberalism. Including that of the Founders, who had pretty explicit ideas on whether citizenshp was tied to membership in a racial or ethnic group. I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version – they thought it was.
it’s just that is the type of authoritarian shift were talking about in Europe
Europe is already an authoritarian state, as are most of its constitutent parts. You might care to investigate the state of freedom of speech in Britain these days. The goods news is that you’ll no longer have to worry about the BNP. The bad news is that its because what you fear is already here. Assuming what you fear is actually authoritarianism. Your comments leave me slightly skeptical on that score.
You should see what most Germans thought of the Nazis in 1929 four years before they rose to power. They poled in the low single digits before leaping to 28% and becoming the head of a coalition. The speed at which the transition from liberal to authoritarian order is dramatic.
Modern left-liberal Britain is already an authoritarian state, so this concern of yours that it might become one seems a little peculiar.
And the analogy between the BNP and the Nazis is just silly. I don’t think that Poland need start bolstering its defences if the BNP somehow take power, and I doubt if you think that either.
The real danger of fascism lays in its appeal based on group identity and the idea that certain subpopulations are more entitled to protection and benefits of the state than other subpopulations.
According to liberalism, there are not supposed to BE “subpopulations”. Different peoples are supposed to govern themselves.
And liberalism expicitly appealed to group identity. The European nationalist movements of the 19th cenury were all liberal movements. The revolutions of 1848 were liberal revolutions with the explicit goal of breaking up multinational empires and creating autonomous homelands for people of different race and ethnicity. The creation of the specifcally Jewish state of Israel was a more recent example of the same thing. So was the forced expulsion of Germans from other parts of Europe back to Germany in the aftermath of WWII.
So, for that matter, was the US Revolution. You’re engaging in some historical revsionism here and adapting chunks of the lefts agenda. Left-libertarianism can only get us to the lefts prefered destination.
it’s just that is the type of authoritarian shift were talking about in Europe. America’s innate diversity (racial, ethnic, regional etc) insulates it against that particular type of shift.
Again, the historical record contradicts you. The America of the years before the 70’s was an almost uniformly white and English speaking country. And it had a government far smaller in scope and intrusiveness then today. As it has become more “diverse” in racial and ethnic terms, the size of government has exploded, amd its authoritarian nature has become sharply accented.
“As it has become more “diverse” in racial and ethnic terms, the size of government has exploded, amd its authoritarian nature has become sharply accented.” (Steve)
Do you see the growth of government and its move towards authoritarianism as a function of diversity? If yes, why?
Whiskey:
Hear, hear.
Steve,
The America of the years before the 70’s was an almost uniformly white and English speaking country.
But the identification as “white” was relatively weak in the country outside the Deep South. Most people identified with their European ethnic origin or religion before they identified as white. Certainly, people didn’t think of themselves as “white” in the same manner that people in France think of themselves French. Tellingly, in the Deep South there was strong identification as “white” and there things were not pretty.
And it had a government far smaller in scope and intrusiveness then today
Depends on where you were. In the urban cores, corrupt political machines dominated by mobbed up unions micromanaged people’s live to a shocking degree. The machines determined whether a big chunk of the population had jobs, where they lived,how they got city services and even if they got police protection. In the deep South, you a racial-socialist state that micromanaged people’s lives based on race. The laws dictated not only where people could live, what curfews they had to follow, where they were educated and got medical but also what jobs they could hold.
The pre-1960’s pattern was that local governments in parts of the country were very invasive and controlling while the Federal government was relatively weak save in times of war. We have seen greater centralization of power at the Federal level with a trade off in a weakening of local tyrannies. If you lived under one of the local tyrannies, your freedom increased after the 60s. If you lived in an area with good local government, the increase in Federal power reduced your freedom.
“Let us be clear — women across the West demanded effeminacy and “sensitivity” and sharing of household chores and then (as Sandra Tsing Loh charmingly refers to these men) call them “kitchen b*tches” and find them effeminate. As a practical matter, ANY White man standing up to rape and assault by Muslim men will be VILIFIED by the PC brigade” (Whiskey)
Excellent point, to go with an excellent post by Whiskey.
It does appear sometimes that feminism was never intended to truly benefit women? Instead, it appears that it’s intent was to cause an adversarial relationship between Western men and Western women. I was reading about the surge of rape against Northern European women by Muslims. In the article a European feminist actually suggested that Dutch women were somewhat to blame for being “insensitive” to Muslim culture (Muslim men are unable to control themselves due to the provocative nature of Western women’s dress). This is 100% contrary to feminist ideology.
It almost appears that western men are first being tore down (by anti-male socialization in media, education, and popular culture), then, being told that they need to be more feminine (the ones can’t be feminized are encouraged to join the military to fight wars against Islamofascists), and last, being replaced by Muslim or other non-Western men whose culture are “celebrated” in the media, educational system, and popular culture.
This fits my earlier post which suggested that the elites prefer a mixed population with a plastic popular culture, to one with a homogeneous population and a traditional culture. Every time you see a “Diversity is Strength” poster in a school, hospital, or corporation, this should probably be looked at as demographic war propaganda?
I don’t see what’s shocking that a large percentage of Brits might consider voting BNP. Their ideas are mainstream in Britain. Here’s Alex Renton from the Guardian:
“By today’s standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis.” — didn’t the Nazis (the inspiration for the BNP) cull the slaves and jews? If the British elite wishes to cull Brits, whence the objection to culling immigrants?
“The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children.” — this obsession with women’s uteruses is something Hitler (more babies) and Mao (fewer babies) shared. If the British elite wishes to control reproduction, then the only argument is when, how, and who.
I don’t have any quick quotes on the anti-semitism of the British elite, but the elite’s anti-semitism is certainly widespread and popular.
The sewer of ideas from which the BNP draws its sustenance is shared among the self-proclaimed British elite. Based on their ideas (not class), the BNP is just another usual British party of the elite. Why shouldn’t they attract voters?
Great piece. You are right, but I would add that is the lack of a strong opposition party to the leftist agenda that is causing folks to flirt with the neo-fascist BNP. In these times of turmoil here in the US, much as it was in the mid 70’s, inspiration is hard to come by from the likes of Gerry Ford, Lamar Alexander, or Olympia Snowe.
As someone above noted, the UK is already an authoritarian state.
The NuLabour regime combined the worst of the Bush pseudo-right and the Obama left. Just do some googling on the loss of civil liberties in the UK to verify this. Also-along with Sweden-the UK is probably the most advanced case of what Paul Gottfried calls the managerial-therapeutic state with govt enforced PC and Multicult far worse than the US. Dalrymple’s books also describe a textbook example of what the late Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny.
On the state of freedom in the UK today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/19/civil-liberties-terrorism
By way of illustration:
http://www.candidlist.demon.co.uk/hampden/culture.htm
http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/11/farewell-freedomit-was-nice-knowing-you.html
The switch from Commie to Fascist is very predictable at this point (as it was in retrospect) for two reasons: one, killing Capitalism means the return of a Malthusian economy. That means to grow, or even maintain, the current standard of living the state must either get new recourses or control the population. War becomes a means of doing both of these as was the case in the medieval world up to around 1800.
The left, seeking to undermine the capitalist state at every point turned to anything or anyone that weakened it. Historically this was immigrants (the strategy was recent explicitly conceded in England by the left) or gays (used as stalking horses for the dominant discourse of Judeo-Christian ethic).
Now, having accomplished this to a great degree and sufficiently undermined capitalism the economic situation is perfect for the switch to Fascism.
Reason two now kicks in. Without a growing pie and mutually beneficial exchange possible, we’re faced instead with a fixed pie for which one must fight at the expense of the other fellow. Welcome to the new zero-sum world. Vaguely sensing that they have been had, the electorate finds itself in the position of ether having to acquiesce to its own extinction or to a sub-human perpetual slavery; it naturally and predictably, chooses instead to fight for its own survival. Now at least there are some 20% of the English population who indicate willingness to at this point anyway. This is not a good sign. It is a low survival instinct to which they turn brought about by the death of their more generous and higher original ideology. Capitalism it seems is not a plant that grows wild. It requires a higher form of civilization that we currently admit.
This is the socio-economic logic implicit in the Socialist model, for once their blatantly false premise of perpetual and apparently magical growth is shown for what it is – a vampirism only made possible through the prodigious production of Capitalism – that the true cost of turning Peter into a slave for Paul strikes home.
This is the true evil of Socialism and the ugly face behind the envy that motivates it. Enjoy . . .