Author: VD

As I’ve stated in the past, arguing with leftists is an interesting challenge. Since their intellectual foundation built on conceptual sand, their arguments are constantly shifting and mutating. Not only do they abjure and outright mock the very notion of logical consistency – the inevitable hobgoblin quote is one of about ten common to every leftist – but they tend to be far more interested in scoring momentary style points than they are in actually winning any debate. My theory is that this is because they so seldom actually win debates with any but a completely overmatched opponent.

Thus, arguing with even the most educated leftist is rather like fighting a hydra, and like Hercules, requires one to be prepared to cauterize each tangential argument by destroying it entirely instead of merely lopping it off with a quick dismissal. I hope this Left-Wing Nazi debate with AA has been instructive, in that it has revealed many of the petty dishonesties and devious maneuvers to which even the most honest and well-meaning leftist is forced to resort in order to maintain a semblance of his base position. Please note that this is nothing personal; I am no more personally involved in this than I was when physically beating down a lesser belt in the dojo, and I very much admire AA’s unusual willingness to examine the relevant facts of the matter in this and other cases.

Consider how much ground has shifted under AA’s feet since he first took issue with my assertion that the National Socialists were of the Left. He made some hasty assertions and after being shown how they pointed to a contrary conclusion, has tried to shift the argument from easily verifiable platforms and policies to nebulous generalizations. In the process, he attempted to conflate Republican policies with contradictory conservative philosophy while simultaneously separating extant Democratic policies from parallel left-liberal concepts, and tried to use modern Republican support to obscure to the fundamentally left-wing nature of specific programs. He has tried to completely redefine the political spectrum in such a manner as to render it utterly meaningless – how does one measure pluralism on an idealistic-pragmatic scale? – and either revealed a total ignorance of libertarianism or been shamefully dishonest in his characterization of it.

Finally, and apparently aware of the complete failure of his rapidly mutating argument to hold any water, AA retreats to the usual left-liberal ground of claiming that the issue is inane and irrelevant.

Meanwhile, I must point out that I have not shifted my positions or definitions one iota, nor altered my argument in the least. The National Socialists were left-wing extremists, with platform and policies that predominantly fall in between the Communists to the left, and the American Democratic party to the right. In the event that anyone regards the numerous flaws in AA’s meta-argument as insufficient proof, later today, I will provide a detailed analysis of the Munich Manifesto and the ten pillars of the Communist Manifesto and compare them to Democratic, Republican and Libertarian policies and philosophy.

Right-of-Center bloggers asked 171 bloggers which contemporary right-wing figure they’d like to have to dinner. To my chagrin, not only did none of the 46 respondents see fit to invite me out for a bite and a chat, but just to add insult to injury, I didn’t even get asked to vote. But I choose to regard this as an indication that my rapid rise to intellectual Internet stardom lies before me. I am 100 percent upside. Oh, who am I kidding. I don’t actually care. Anyhow, the list is below. I think I’d probably have to go with Ann, but if Space Bunny put up a fuss, I think it would be Thomas Sowell, followed by John Derbyshire and Victor Davis Hanson. But best of all would be to go drinking with Rumsfeld, PJ and the White Buffalo.

Honorable Mentions: Clarence Thomas (4), Arnold Schwarzenegger (4), Colin Powell (4), PJ O’Rourke (4), James Lileks (4), Charles Krauthammer (4), Sean Hannity (4), Rudolph Giuliani (4), Larry Elder (4), Steven Den Beste (4), George Bush Sr. (4), Neal Boortz (4)

18) Karl Rove (5)

18) Glenn Reynolds (5)

18) David Horowitz (5)

18) Christopher Hitchens (5)

18) Newt Gingrich (5)

18) Dick Cheney (5)

16) Walter Williams (6)

16) William Buckley (6)

12) Margaret Thatcher (7)

12) Dennis Miller (7)

12) Laura Ingraham (7)

12) Milton Friedman (7)

10) Victor Davis Hanson (8)

10) Mel Gibson (8)

8) Jonah Goldberg (10)

8) Ann Coulter (10)

7) Mark Steyn (11)

5) Rush Limbaugh (12)

5) Tony Blair (12)

4) Thomas Sowell (13)

3) Donald Rumsfeld (18.5)

2) George W. Bush (21.5)

1) Condi Rice (25)

AA takes the time to go through the Munich Manifesto and characterize each of the 25 points, stating along the way: 15. This is Social Security, something both Democrats and Republicans support. 16. Not at all Democratic, and not really Socialist, either. This was basically a way of redistributing the company’s wealth to citizens.

AA, by your own – inaccurate – count, you’ve got four things assigned to Republicans/right wing alone. You’ve got seven assigned to Socialists/extreme Communists/Democrats alone. And this does not even involve putting Social Security on the left – which it is, as the historical Republicans and modern libertarians oppose it – and includes accepting your bizarre notion that forced distribution of corporate wealth to labor is not socialist.

By your own freaking count the Nazis are left-wing! I am forced to ask the question, are you even listening to yourself?

Here we go again. Leftists are always desperately trying to argue that Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler did not belong to the Left. Trotsky and the Fabians they’ll claim, for some reason, probably because no one knows who they are. I imagine they’d get around to denying Mao and Pol Pot too, except that Leftists don’t care that much about dark-skinned people who don’t happen to live in America. Today we’re only getting Hitler denial, as AbleArt states: ideologically the Nazi party was more right-wing than left… The Nazi party did implement socialist programs, though many were gone by the end of the war because they didn’t have the money to keep them going. That doesn’t make them socialist, and the pluralism, egalitarianism, etc. that are central to the democratic party’s platform are hardly mirrored anywhere in the Nazi party’s platform. The opposite, right-wing alternatives are.

First, this is a profoundly stupid and ignorant statement about the right. The Misean libertarian right is as hard core opposition to the Left as it gets, and there is probably less than a five percent overlap between the Libertarian party and the historical National Socialist party. The same is clearly not true for the American Democratic party, or, for that matter, the American Republican Party. Able cites 10 points of the 1920 Munich Manifesto, unsurprisingly, he is unable to find a correlation between the Nazi position on the Versailles Treaty and one in the 2000 Democratic Party platform. You probably won’t find much about Versailles in any Republican, Libertarian or Constitution platforms either.

He thoughtfully leaves out 15 of the 25 points, 11 of which are intellectually akin to current Democratic Party positions, as are two of the points he did mention which referred to welfare and government control of the media. 13 of the 25, however narrow still the majority of the Nazi positions, are therefore held in common. As I mentioned in my August, 2003 column entitled Hitler and Hillary, I pointed out “These supposedly right-wing extremists were calling for national health care, social security, state-run schools, communal land development and centralized government control. They were determined advocates of gun control. And if they did not believe it took a village to raise a child, they were certainly enthusiastic about public youth programs. And then there were the complaints about vast conspiracies in the private press. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” And this does not even delve into the links, intellectual and direct, between Planned Parenthood and Nazi eugenicists.

The National Socialists were distinctly to the Left of the Democratic Party, which is not yet calling for abolishing incomes unearned by work or nationalization of all corporations. In another column on the political spectrum, I broke down five well-known strains of political thought according to what I consider to be the ten most important political issues as follows:

00 Communist

15 National Socialist

36 Democrat

52 Republican

85 Libertarian

The National Socialists not only belong on the Left, they are rightly to be considered a radical philosophy of left-wing extremism. The primary difference between Hitler and Marx was the idea of social classes, and whereas Marx saw no value in individuals, Hitler wished to direct individual achievement towards the interests of the State. And for further edification, I recommend taking a test to see if you is, or is you ain’t a Nazi. The Left is always trying to resort to generalizations in order to attempt to wipe the bloodstains off its shoes and blame it on the Right, but if you take the time to actually examine the particulars, the truth always comes out.

The truth is that there was one great foe of Nazi totalitarianism, who was forced to flee from it twice. Ludwig von Mises, the most significant figure of the Libertarian Right, who published his landmark work Socialism in 1922, and his anti-Nazi The Socialist Calumny Against the Jews in 1944. Those of us on the libertarian Right have nothing to apologize for, because we have always been anti-Nazis. It is good to see that our Leftist friends now see the National Socialists as evil, here’s hoping that they’ll abjure their many Nazi social policies soon and join us in assigning the highest value to individual freedom and liberty in opposition to the State.

Bastardsword answers a typically silly leftist charge of Nazihood: In case you’ve been asleep since WW-II, the modern anti-war movement is an outgrowth of the Nazi Party, after undergoing a constant stream of communist revisions. The people in Berkeley who were protesting Lend-Lease and waving pro-Hitler banners were forced to decide between Hitler and Stalin when the Hitler-Stalin pact was broken. Since Hitler was the aggressor they decided to support Stalin. With America’s entry into WW-II they took conscientious objector status and sat out the war. After the war they founded the Pacifica Radio network, which they ran till the Trotskyites took it over. The Maoists ousted the Trotskyites from control of the network in the 1960’s, and have dominated it ever since, with the exception of constant purges and counter-takeovers. These are not right-wing accusations, this is what the various DJ’s and directors of Pacifica proudly proclaim in their retrospectives on the battles, posted on their own websites….

So to put it bluntly, you’re heir to the goals of the Nazi party, chief of which is the disarmament and defeat of the Anglo-American capitalists, which is requisite for the advancement of the glories of National Socialism, embodied so well in the rule of Saddam Hussein.

I knew that there were huge similarities between American leftists and the goals of the historical National Socialist German Worker’s Party. And I also knew that there were Nazi sympathizers here in the United States as well as in the UK. I did not realize, however, that the kinship was more than merely intellectual, that there was a direct line of descent from those pro-Nazi groups of the 1930s to the hard-left “anti-war” groups of today.

This sort of thing, assuming that Bastardsword has his history correct, demonstrates the absurdity of those who desperately attempt to postulate that Nazis and Communists are some kind of Manichean polar opposites. They’re actually more like half-siblings than cousins, which is obvious to anyone who’s read the theoretical works of both. What’s interesting is that Hitler is more insane and prone to complete fantasies than Marx, but both his analyses and policies are more firmly based in reality than those of his utopian German step-brother.

JM hates to quibble: But the correct attribution of the item you quote in the first line of your article is _not_ Mark Twain, but Benjamin D’israeli…. Prime Minister of England and noted wit and conversationalist… Please, correct this.

Sorry, no can do. I don’t have access to the WND server anymore, so I can no longer correct such inaccuracies. It might as well be a newspaper. It’s a pity, but there’s nothing I can do about it. My apologies for the false attribution of the reference.

After 116,000 words, the first draft of my fourth novel is in the bag. Sure, there’s all the back and forth with the publisher, the revisions, the galleys, the corrections and whatnot, and it’ll probably be a year before it’s on bookshelves anywhere, but this is the point that I consider a book to be pretty much done. I’ve been in a good mood all day with the finish line growing ever closer; now I’m not entirely sure what to do with myself.

– Actual conversation –

VD: Hey, guess what? I’m done. With the book.

SB: So, you now just have to write the epilogue or whatever?

VD: No, I wrote that too. I was on a roll today. Four thousand words.

SB: Wow, that’s great, honey. Are you going to send it in tomorrow?

VD: No, I’m just –

SB: (buries head in hands)

From the Washington Times: A review of state police monitoring of sexually violent predators under Megan’s Law found that community notification about these felons is often “incorrect, late and ineffective,” Pennsylvania’s chief auditor says. The head of the state police says the agency is making efforts to improve the administration of the Megan’s Law registry. Convicted sex offenders classified as sexually violent predators are considered to have a mental abnormality or personality disorder that makes them likely to reoffend. They are subject to more stringent monitoring than the wider class of 6,210 sex offenders in Pennsylvania. The review identified shortcomings in notifying the public on the whereabouts of 13 out of 17 sexually violent predators who had home addresses in the state during a nine-month period that ended in January, state Auditor General Robert P. Casey Jr. said Friday. Currently, Pennsylvania has 31 sexually violent predators, but 12 of them are in state prisons.

In seven of the 17 cases, the study found that schools and child care centers had not been told a violent predator was living nearby. One predator came to the attention of police only when he contacted them. In another instance, state police told local police about a violent predator only after he had left the area.

So, the Pennsylvania police can’t manage to keep track of only 17 of the worst criminals in the state, but anti-gun liberals believe that everyone should give up their Second Amendment rights because they are so sure that the police will be there to take defend them whenever a criminal decides to go for their life or property. Maybe liberals really are too stupid to be responsible for themselves.

You’d think that with only 17 predators to track, Pennsylvania police would have more than enough manpower to have someone literally holding the bad guys’ hands 24-7. But they’re probably too busy doing important things like sending 12 troopers bursting into the homes of people with suspiciously high electric bills.

Here’s a summary of why everything is peachy keen with the economy. My comments are interspersed below in blue.

The fundamental view is that we have come out of a short recessionary period; the excesses that built up in the late 1990’s have gone through a much needed steep correction complete with corporate wrongdoings that are now under better control with stiffer governance and that now we should be able to move forward in a positive manner. Of course, we have no reason to believe that corporate behavior has changed in the least. I know of no CEO or serious corporate observer who believes they have. Interest rates are low; the Fed is providing sufficient monetary stimulus and they are prepared to maintain the low interest rate environment to ensure that the economy grows if maintaining low interest rates were all that was necessary to maintain growth, why hasn’t it been done before? Answer = inflation and that we eventually move to the next stage of the recovery which will be a return of jobs as we did when we came out of the early 1990’s recession. And how many of those jobs are/will be parasitic government jobs which add nothing to the economy but instead detract from productive capital? (Note: writing this as today’s job numbers were higher than expected).

Further, the US Administration is, given the War on Terror and in Iraq, providing sufficient fiscal stimulus to the economy and that as the economy grows coupled with the tax cuts the current budget deficits will eventually disappear. That’s an interesting premise given that the deficits are rapidly increasing. Furthermore, the tax cuts have been more than absorbed by concomitant state and local tax hikes. The debt is not a major problem as it has not reached the levels that were seen in the 1980’s fighting the cold war and that the debt as overall percentage of the economy is also not a problem and remains below countries such as Japan and Europe. First, the official debt numbers are too low by 33 percent, second, the cumulative US debt may well be higher than in most countries in Europe, as with the exception of Switzerland, our sub-federal governments carry far more debt than do theirs. At our March 2004 rate of increase, Federal debt-to-GDP will surpass European pacesetter Italy’s levels in 2011.

We are in a low inflationary period which is expected to continue as the cost of goods consumed by society keep coming down and should remain low going forward. The CPI is wholly mythical and commodity prices have been rising for three years. Stock valuations are down from the highs that were seen in the late 1990’s and given the outlook for earnings, valuations in many cases are fair valuations are still absurdly high, in many cases higher than they were before the 1929 crash. and there is room for growth particularly as the high tech sector recovers and new technological innovations increase productivity which will allow stock prices to move higher over time. The productivity-growth calculations are little more than circular logic which mean nothing.

In summary, I’d say that the bull case is very convincing, as long as you take everything in it at face value and ignore the actual facts. Buy! Buy! Buy!

Resispa writes of Republican betrayal: I agree with your sentiment on this one. Moreover, I just love the banner ad for the RNC reelect Bush campaign at the top of the blog page. If libertarians didn’t smoke such a large portion of their political war chest, maybe you could get them to buy ad space. What da ya think?

I don’t sell ad space on this blog, that’s a Blogger thing. I’m just trying to decide if it’s a step up or a step down from the lesbian dating service ads we were getting around here a few months ago.