Peter Myers, the Australian editor of a very interesting mail list, had published an exciting compilation on the Left National Socialism, and here he presents his findings on the common ground of the two movements, radical left and radical right, as they share a collectivist point of view. These movements strive for a better life for the Majority in the Society, while their adversary positions itself as a defender of Individual and Minority. But we should not forget the third collectivist pro-majority movement: this is the religion-based one. Indeed Hamas and Hezbollah are such movements of the third kind. In Europe , Simone Weil and TS Eliot promoted similar ideas of a faith-based community. It’s more than coincidence that the three movements’ colours, Red, Black and Green form the banner of Palestine , for they oppose the neo-Judaic paradigm of modernity.
Radical Left and Radical Right have much in common
A Friendly Invitation From Peter Myers
Dear Shamir,
In the US , most of the Antiwar demonstrations have been organised by ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). By bundling “End Racism” with “Stop War”, they signal to those of an anti-immigration mindset that their participation is not wanted.
Your approach is different: you and I believe that only a coming-together between Far Left and Far Right can defeat the war parties of both major parties in the “Democracies”.
The Far Left and Far Right have a common preference for Socialism over the Laissez-Faire economy. But constant replays of World War II serve to keep them apart.
Those who brand the Bush regime “fascist” only confuse the issue, because such terminology hides the Zionist back-seat drivers. Similar are those who say the War is for Oil (and by implication, not for Israel ).
Yet the enmity between Far Left and Far Right masks their similarity.
F. A. Hayek wrote in his book The Road to Serfdom (George Routledge & Sons Ltd, London 1944}:
{p. 20} Observer after observer, in spite of the contrary expectation with which he approached his subject, has been impressed with the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “fascism” and “communism”. ...
{p. 22} The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was generally known in Germany, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. Many a University teacher in this country in the 1930’s has seen English and American students return from the Continent, uncertain whether they were communists or Nazis and certain only that they hated Western liberal civilisation. {end}
Hayek not only equated these two kinds of Socialism. He also branded New Deal America , and by implication the equivalent types of economy in postwar Britain , France , Australia , India , etc., as on the same “road to serfdom”.
This was the most powerful propaganda of the Mont Pelerin Society, the Capitalist equivalent of the Comintern, which Hayek founded in collaboration with Karl Popper. It spawned the think-tanks which brought us Thatcherism, Privatization and Deregulation.
Our economies were much fairer in the decades before such policies were imposed by our benefactors. Those of us who would return to such a system find ourselves disunited by past animosities.
But the Communist and National Socialist systems were not monolithic. They contained their own divergences, and this shows that a resurgence of Socialism might be able to tread different paths from those of the 1930s.
I think of Socialists as forming a continuum. At the extreme Left are the Trots; at the extreme Right are those who disparage Blacks. Neither of these groups can work with anyone else.
But in the middle there are a lot of more moderate people. These are the ones you and I look to. We must truncate the extremes, and build a new Socialism from the moderates of Left and Right.
In one of his books (I forget which), Gorbachev described the difference between the economies of the Soviet Union and the East European satellites. In the latter, small businesses (employing up to 50 workers, I recall) were allowed to remain in private hands. He said the difference between the USSR and the satellites was greater than that between the satellites and the West.
Even the NSDAP contained a Socialist Left faction. Dick Eastman sent the following quote on this.
From William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1959)
p. 60: “A few weeks before in one of his (Hitler’s) educational courses, he had heard a lecture by Gottfried Feder, a construction engineer and a crank in the field of economics, who had become obsessed with the idea that ‘speculative’ capital, as opposed to ‘creative’ and ‘productive’ capital, was the root of much of Germany’s economic trouble. He was for abolishing the first kind and in 1917 had formed an organization to achieve this purpose: the German Fighting League for the Breaking of Interest Slavery. Hitler, ignorant of economics, was much impressed...”
p. 68: “A good many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans. Point 11, for example, demanded abolition of incomes unearned by work; Point 12, the nationalization of trusts; Point 13, the sharing with the state of profits from large industry; Point 14, the abolishing of land rents and speculation in land. Point 18 demanded the death penalty for traitors, usurers, and profiteers, and Point 16, calling for maintenance of “a sound middle class,” insisted on the communalization of department stores and their lease at cheap rates to small traders. These demands had been put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the “socialism” of National Socialism. They were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them.”
p. 180: “... Moreover, a number of big industrialists were beginning to become financially interested in Hitler’s reborn movement precisely because it promised to be effective in combating the Communists, the Socialists and the trade unions. If Strasser and Goebbels got away with their plans, Hitler’s sources of income would immediately dry up.
“Before the Fuehrer could act, however, Strasser called a meeting of the northern district party leaders in Hanover on November 22, 1925. Its purpose was not only to put the northern branch of the Nazi Party behind the expropriation drive but to launch a new economic program which would do away with the ‘reactionary’ twenty-five points that had been adopted back in 1920. The Strassers and Goebbels wanted to nationalize the big industries and the big estates and substitute a chamber of corporations.
“ The party had to play both sides of the tracks. It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists were truly ‘socialists’ and against the money barons. On the other hand, money to keep the party going had to be wheedled out of those who had an ample supply of it. Throughout the latter half of 1931, says Dietrich, Hitler, ‘traversed Germany from end to end, holding private interviews with prominent business personalities.’ So hush-hush were some of these meetings that they had to be held ‘in some lonely forest glade. Privacy,’ explains Dietrich, ‘was absolutely imperative; the press must have no chance of doing mischief. Success was the consequence.
“So was an almost comical zigzag in Nazi politics. Once in the fall of 1930 Strasser, Feder and Frick introduced a bill in the Reichstag on behalf of the Nazi Party calling for a ceiling of 4 percent on all interest rates, the expropriation of the holdings of ‘the bank and stock exchange magnates’ and of all ‘Eastern Jews’ without compensation, and the nationalization of the big banks. Hitler was horrified; this was not only Bolshevism, it was financial suicide for the party. He peremptorily ordered the party to withdraw the measure. Thereupon the Communists reintroduced it, word for word. Hitler bade his party vote against it.”
Bill White wrote up this account of Otto Strasser debating Adolf Hitler (published in Pravda):
Anti-Globalist Resistance Beyond Left And Right
By Bill White
03.11.2001
http://english. pravda.ru/ usa/2001/ 11/03/20022. html
“If I told you I thought the world was controlled by a handful of capitalists and corporate bosses, you would say I was a left-winger,” an anarchist black blocker told PRAVDA.Ru at a recent demonstration against the Afghanistan War. “But if I told you who I though the capitalists and corporate bosses were, you’d say I was far right,” the bandana-clad youth added with a wink.
The masked gutter punk was not alone. His perspective -- a broad blend of left-wing socialism and far-right nationalist and libertarian views - has been slowly infiltrating both extremes of the political spectrum, particularly in the anti-globalist movement, and has been leading to a new synthesis of doctrine - “beyond left and right” - that is coalescing around a number of tendencies - national anarchism, social nationalism, national bolshevism - that some are calling the fastest growing ideological movement on the fringe. Though significantly divergent in their beliefs, these ideologies are at the core of what is being called the “Third Position” - a collection of radical anti-capitalist, anti-globalist and anti-imperialist views that that are outspoken in their rejection of the corporate state, of social democracy, of Marxism, and of Zionism.
But just as these ideologies are gaining more adherents, they are also becoming the target of more disinformation, as the extreme Old Left-ists of the anti-globalist movement call conferences to attack these ideas, and as the self-righteous defenders of neo-liberalism try to force these doctrines’ square peg into their round hole of “hate” and “fascism”. Decadence is fighting back, but as the proponents of these ideas steadily resist being labeled as “far right” by the defenders of the neo-liberal corporate-socialist status quo, the globalist power structure has found itself in a boxing match with a body of water.
ORIGIN -- THE OPPOSITION TO HITLER
“Two million Germans have been or still are guests in the cells of the Gestapo, or are or have been familiar with the delights of Dachau , Buchenwald , or Oranienburg. These two million have parents, wives, children. In other words, about ten million human beings have suffered personally from Hitler’s methods.
- “The German people are said to be entirely devoted to [their] Fuehrer.
- No[!]
- The German people want a German revolution
- [they] want liberty at home
- [they] want liberty abroad
- [they] want peace in Germany , peace in Europe , and peace in the world.”
-- Otto Strasser, Hitler and I (1940)
... In the struggle to come to terms with the anti-Monarchical, Bolshevist and capitalist tendencies that swept across Eurasia like the black plague, the finest minds of Europe developed ideologies which, though semantically similar to their ruling class cousins, were radically opposed to the kind of bourgeois pragmatism which catapulted leaders like Hitler and Mussolini into the seats of government. These thinkers, like Otto Strasser, who led the remnant of the left-wing of the National Socialists in revolt against Hitler after the 1934 [check] purges, and Julius Evola, who lorded over Mussolini in his own country and who was banned from lecturing in Germany because of his seditious doctrine, have been largely ignored in the Western world until recently, as the struggle between Bolshevik communism and American centralized- capitalism dominated for fifty years the international political landscape. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of America into imperial overstretch and ideological decay, the thinkers of the world have been free to re-invent the ideas of the past - and these ideas have exploded outwards in the international globalist movement. With the Zionist Third World War against Islam now looming on the horizon, and with the government of America becoming further divorced from the decentralist and anti-imperialist inclinations of its people, an understanding of the history and doctrine of these movements has become of paramount importance.
THE BLACK FRONT
“’Your racial ideas - are not only a flagrant contradiction of the great mission of National-Socialism - they are calculated to bring about the disintegration of the German people.’
“‘What you preach is liberalism[! ]
- There is only one possible kind of revolution, and it is not economic, or political, or social, but racial, and it will always be the same”
-- Otto Strasser (first speaker) debating Adolf Hitler (second speaker), as reported in the article “Socialists Leave the Nazi Party”, July 4, 1930
Prior to the Nazis’ ascension of power in 1933, there had been two distinct trends within the German National-Socialist movement. The first, the “right” trend in the movement, developed around the alliance of Herman Goring with the German-Prussian aristocracy and the captains of German heavy industry. It is to this camp, lured by the money and the luxuries which it distributed freely to its political friends, that Hitler and his toady Goebbels came in the years before the ascension to power. Opposed to them were the German socialists, the “left” trend in the movement, also known as the “Black Front” or the “German Freedom Front”, who formed around the Strasser brothers, Ernst Roehm and the SA, and who believed in the socialization and expropriation of the property of the aristocrats and industrialists that were supporting Hitler’s rise to power.
The difference betweens the two camps were not trivial. The right camp favored socialization - meaning confiscation into the control of the state - only of those industries that behaved “against the interests of the nation”, or, rather, who were owned by corporations that competed with the Nazi Party’s backers or that were owned by Jews. The left was in favor of the socialization - the confiscation and redistribution to the workers - of all heavy industry and landed property, whether it was owned by the Germans who were funding Hitler or any of their opponents.
The two camps also disagreed on the question of nationalism and imperialism. Hitler, as early as 1920, was planning war, in alliance with Britain (he hoped), against France , for the “domination of Europe”, in which Germany would control the land and Britain the seas. Strasser, in contrast, advocated a German nation, freed of foreign occupation and imperialist dreams, embracing the German people without colonizing or occupying the lands of Europe’s non-German people. Hitler wanted war, and Strasser wanted peace.
Third, the two camps differed significantly on the role of the state. Hitler’s bourgeois tendencies, developed from his alliances with Germany ’s ruling class, led him to embrace the essence of fascist doctrine - the idea of a corporate state that manufactured the lives of its workers as a product. The left and working class elements, however, advocated the liberty of the individual in the regulation of both their personal and economic lives, with the belief that, unimpaired by foreign doctrines and the pollution of ruling class and alien cultural control, the workers would adhere naturally to the organic tendencies towards culture that were embodied in the fundaments of their physical and spiritual being. Hitler’s Nazi state, with its total control, was viewed by the Freedom Front opposition in much the same way that Stalin’s bureaucracy was viewed by the Trotskyites - as a deformed implementation of the ideal created by a leadership who had betrayed the revolution for accommodation with the bourgeoisie. ...
