Category: Uncategorized

by Transcendent Vision

Caveat Lector: While I feel everyone should be informed on contemporary politics and current events, my true passion is poetry. Knowing the majority of Vox’s readership to be more literate and intelligent than the average individual, I offer you my thoughts on something almost completely removed from the usual discussion.

“Honest criticism and appreciatation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus [buzzing] of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it.” – T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent

From a pedagogical perspective, Twentieth Century poetics find much of their intellectual root in the canonical methodology of Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s essay The Study of Poetry suggests that the critic and educator should seek poetry with “higher truth and seriousness.” The method Arnold suggests for establishing this necessarily subjective standard is the separation of the personal estimate and the real estimate. If one examines one of Arnold’s more ubiquitous poems Dover Beach, it becomes evident that Arnold’s conceit allows him to extend his personal estimate as the real estimate.

Arnold’s essay The Study of Poetry does not exist in isolation. Its precursors can be found in the Keats’ letters, Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Horace’s Ars Poetica. In nearly every traditional literary movement, the Poet attempts to define the art. Between William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, and T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual, the discerning reader finds Modern attempts that continue this tradition, while shaping the creation of contemporary poetics. The Twentieth Century sees departures from the mode of formal verse to a heavy reliance on Vorticist, Avant-garde, and free verse; yet, one finds that poesy continues to rely on everything before and after. In this, the Twentieth Century, with its combination of Neo-Formalism and unrestricted poetics, provides models of poetry as varied as Bin Ramke’s As if the Past and Langston Hughes A Dream Deferred. There exists in the corpus of recent poetry everything from the arguably low art of Jewel to exercises in syllabics and quantitative meter.

But the fault of Arnold’s method is not immediately evident until one immerses their self in poetry. Through Arnold, the dynamics of inter-literary dialogue is lost in the pursuit of meaning. In fact, the faults of Arnold’s intellectual treatises on poetics and literature are not evident until one considers how poetry (and all literature really) is taught. The great majority of literary criticism, regardless of the genre or mode, presents itself as a multidisciplinary examination of great literary works. The majority of students and professors in the field of literature concern themselves with finding the original intent and meaning of the author through comparisons to the socioeconomic, historical, and philosophical context of a given piece. Far too often, this question is asked: what does it mean?

In this context, Western tradition reduces Haiku to a simple exercise in syllabics: 5-7-5. Despite the complexities and nuance of form and tradition, Western pedagogy teaches Haiku as nothing more than a three-line poem with 17 syllables. Lost is the mastery and craftsmanship of Basho and Issa:

Clouds appear
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon
– Basho

a thousand years
or your first day?
song of the crane
– Issa

flittering, wheeling,
darting into strike and then
gone just as you blink
– The Dragonfly Haiku, author unknown

Excepting the third, none of the translations are rendered into English so as to retain their traditional Japanese syllabics. Nevertheless, true haiku are replete with nuance, form and function. While the sound and phonetic beauty is lost in translation, and likewise some of the original elegance, the westernization of Haiku illustrates the reliance on meaning over method.

“What this means” is a vastly different framework from “How this means.” As a master of Haiku, Basho trained his students to rely on the form and its mechanics, not their intent. Meaning is invariably decided by the individual reader, regardless of the author’s intent. The awareness of this disconnect between author and audience is indicative of the faults in Western literary method. Academics and students are too concerned with answering the question: what does it mean? Instead, the scholar and the reader should be more concerned with the question: how does it mean? No longer is one taught to discern between the various tropes: a metaphor is everything that is not simile. There is no more anaphora than there is synecdoche.

The art and beauty of poetry is not in the meaning the audience derives from a various piece, but rather, from the careful craftsmanship of language used to the construct the poem. Thoughts and images are distilled through meticulous language and care, and in this, create a vehicle for the individual audience to discern their own understanding from the Poet’s craft. More broadly, the individual reader will take away, from a poem or any piece of literature, their own meaning. The writer, as artisan, relies on everything before and after to craft their meaning, but that meaning exists only for the writer as one’s own audience. The truly pedantic and didactic lose sight of their art in trying to force a singular meaning into their words.

Spun sideways, stretched past indigo curtains,
she dances in steel shoes, on a glass floor
somewhere between limbo and lust. Ink stains
on collars: lipstick and scotch – not before
memory forgets itself in whiteboard
remnants where lightyear shadows fade loudly.
She plays with Legos and her four year old;
multicolored fabrications proudly
displayed. Under spun cotton dreams can’t sleep.
Yesterday, the concrete shifted ever so
subtly, in the not quite right twilight creep.
Open the box: a brightly dim undertow
of small hands and whisper loud nighttime cries
which fall like autumn leaves in elegy.
— K.

JF finally begins to get more reasonable:

My opinion is that Hitler exploited Christianity, which is why there are many positive references to both God and Christ in Mein Kompf. But the book certainly doesn’t support atheism.

As I’ve written about George Bush, statements about God or even Christ do not necessarily refer to the Christian God, God the Father who sent His only Son Jesus Christ to die at Calvary. I agree, however, that MEIN KAMPF cannot be read as support for atheism nor should it be. Hitler was manifestly not an atheist, he was definitely a pagan and most likely a pagan occultist.

Nor did the German Army with their ” God Is With Us ” belt buckles.

Again, which God? Furthermore, one hardly expects that even a popular totalitarian demagogue can completely transform the religious faith of a nation that had been Christian for eleven centuries in only six years. It’s also worth noting that the elite troops in the Waffen SS, who took oaths of loyalty to the Fuhrer personally, were strongly dissuaded from holding Christian faith and practiced pagan rituals of the sort described in the program for the National Reich Church.

Nor the fact that the Nazis celebrated Christmas.

Given that atheist Americans also celebrate Christmas, this proves nothing. The National Socialist’s religious program had already begun attacking the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth at Easter, no doubt had they had more than twelve years at their disposal, they would have gone after Christmas as well. The ACLU has taken more than twelve years to eliminate it from America, after all. Finally, Europe is today considered to be post-Christian and yet every European nation still celebrates Christmas.

Nor Hitler’s comment that he thought of himself as a Catholic.

So does Teddy Kennedy. And John Kerry. Are they both members of the Religious Right too? Anyhow, public statements by politicians are seldom very reliable in manners of faith, especially when it is an obviously noncommital remark that is generally favorable towards a sizeable potential constituency.

Cedarford adds:

The 30-pt anti-Christian program Vox describes was nothing more than a proposal augured by the Atheist Jew Alfred Rosenburg in 1942. It did not overturn the 1933 Concordat with the Catholics or the other arrangements with Protestants that religion was OK as long as it didn’t trammel on Hitler’s powers.

Cedarford conveniently ignores that Rosenborg was a very early National Socialist, briefly the leader of the party in 1923, and author of the book considered second in importance to MEIN KAMPF, THE MYTH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. In addition to being the party’s chief ideologue, he was director of the National Socialist Cultural Community and of the Reich Centre for the Advancement of German Literature, with 1,400 editors at his disposal. He became increasingly irrelevant during the course of the war, but that has little impact on the present discussion since Hitler put his religious program on the backburner after its failure to win over the German churches became obvious subsequent to the Barmen Declaration in May, 1934.

The constitution for the National Reich Church program was approved by the Reichstag on July 14, 1933, hence the establishment of Ludwig Mueller as Reich Bishop that September. However, Hitler overstepped himself – a continuing theme in his career – as despite heavy party pressure, the disguised NRC program won over less than 20 percent of Germany’s 17,000 Protestant pastors, two-thirds of whom abandoned the program after it was publicly announced in a mass ceremony in November, 1993, that the Old Testament and the Apostle Paul were to be officially abjured from the new “German Christianity”.

The “German Christian” program inspired the creation of the Pastor’s Emergency League in September, 1933, which quickly grew into the Confessing Church movement in explicit opposition to Hitler and the NRC program. 700 Confessing Church pastors were arrested in 1935 alone.

Hitler later concluded: “In my youth, I took the view: dynamite. Later I realized that one can’t break the Church over one’s knee. It has to be left to rot like a gangrenous limb . . . . But the healthy youth belongs to us.”

Cedarford’s mention of the Catholic Concordat is particularly amusing as Hitler also signed a concordat with Stalin six years later. If we follow his logic, Operation Barbarossa and the war on the eastern front never occurred, since it is indisputable that there was a non-agression pact made between the Third Reich and the USSR on August 23, 1939.

“The Germans treated the Church most harshly in the annexed regions, as they systematically closed churches there; most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. The Germans also closed seminaries and convents, persecuting monks and nuns. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy were killed; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps, 787 of them at Dachau.”

Apparently that never happened either. It wasn’t possible, because there was a Catholic Concordat six years before, you know.

The truth is that Hitler tried to seduce and transform the Christian churches into a single pagan institution in service to the State, but he failed. After that failure, he was content to leave them alone so long as they remained sufficiently intimidated by arrests, executions and public pressure. And that is the shame of the Christian church in National Socialist Germany; although it was never conquered or coopted, it was cowed.

Karl Barth, one of the leaders of the Confessing Church who was forced to flee to Switzerland in 1935, stated after the war:

“The Confessing Church stands condemned by the message of its own Barmen Confession. And for this, it has been properly and improperly reproached. Properly insofar as a strong Christian Church . . . should not have remained on the defensive and should not have fought on its own narrow front alone;

Improperly insofar as on this admittedly all too narrow front a serious battle was waged …. In proportion to its task, the Church has sufficient reason to be ashamed that it did not do more; yet in comparison with those other groups and institutions (the German universities and schools, the legal profession, business, theatre and art, the army and the trade unions) it has no reason to be ashamed; it accomplished far more than all the rest.”

The 30-point program for the National Reich Church, drawn up by the Fuehrer’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party:

First. The National Reich’s Church of Germany (hereinafter called the N.R. and represented in this telegram by the symbol “N”.Categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich; it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.

Second. The German people must not serve the N. The N is absolutely and exclusively in the service of but one doctrine: race and nation.

Third. The field of activity of the N will expand to the limits of Germany’s territorial and colonial possessions.

Fourth. The N does not force any German to seek membership therein. The N will do everything within its power to secure the adherence of every German soul. Other churches or similar communities and unions particularly such as are under international control or management cannot and shall not be tolerated in Germany.

Fifth. The N is determined to exterminate irrevocably and by every means the strange and foreign christian faiths imported into Germany in the illomened year 800.

Sixth. The existing churches may not be architecturally altered, as they represent the property of the German nation, German culture and to a certain extent the historical development of the nation. As property of the German nation they are not only to be valued but to be preserved.

Seventh. The N has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests but National Reich orators are to speak in them.

Eighth. The N services are held only in the evening and not in the morning. These services are to take place on Saturday’s with solemn illumination.

Ninth. In the N German men and women, German youths and girls will acknowledge God and his eternal works

Tenth. The N irrevocably strives for complete union with the state. It must obey the state as one of its servants. As such it demands that all landed possessions of all churches and religious denominations be handed over to the state. It forbids that in
future churches should secure ownership of even the smallest piece of German soil or that such be ever given back to them. Not the churches conquer and cultivate land and soil but exclusively the German nation, the German state.

Eleventh. N orators may never be those who today emphasize with all tricks and cunning verbally and in writing the necessity of maintaining and teaching of christianity in Germany; they not only lie to themselves but also the German nation goaded by their love of the positions they hold and the sweet bread they eat.

Twelfth. N orators hold office, government officials under Civil Service rules.

Thirteenth. The N demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany as well as the publication of Sunday papers, pamphlets, publications and books or religious nature.

Fourteenth. The N has to take severe measures in order to prevent the Bible and other christian publications being imported into Germany.

Fifteenth. The N declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided Fuhrer’s “Mein Kampf” is the greatest of all documents. It is conscious that this book contains not only the greatest, and that it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.

Sixteenth. The N has made it its sacred duty to use all its energy to popularize the coeternal “Mein Kampf” and to let every German live and complete his life according to this book.

Seventeenth. The N demands that further editions of this book, whatever form they may take, be in content and pagination exactly similar to the present popular edition.

Eighteenth. The N will clear away from its altars all crucifix plural Bibles and pictures of Saints.

Nineteenth. On the altars there must be nothing but “Mein Kampf”, to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book and to the left of the altar a sword.

Twentieth. The N speakers must during N services propound this book to the congregation to the best of their knowledge and ability.

Twenty-first. The N does not acknowledge forgiveness of sins. It represents the standpoint which it will always proclaim that a sin once committed will be ruthlessly punished by the honorable and indestructible laws of nature and punishment will follow during the sinner’s lifetime.

Twenty-second. The N repudiates the christening of German children particularly the christening with water and the Holy Ghost.

Twenty-third. The parents of a child (or if a new born child) must only take the German oath before the altar which is worded as follows: The man: “In the name of God I take this Holy oath that I the father of this child, and my wife, are of proven Aryan descent. As a father I agree to bring up this child in the German spirit and as a member of the German race”. The women: “In the name of God I take this Holy oath that I (name) bore my husband a child and that I its mother am of proven Aryan descent. As a mother I swear to bring up this child in the German
spirit and as a member of the German race”. The German diploma can only be issued to newly born children on the strength of the German oath.

Twenty-fourth. The N abolishes confirmation and religious education as well as the communion the religious preparation for the communion. The educational institutions are and remain the family, the schools, the German youth, the Hitler youth, and the Union of German girls.

Twenty-fifth. In order that school graduation of our German youth be given an especially solemn character all N must put themselves at the disposal of German youth, the Hitler youth and the Union of German girls on the day of the state’s youth which will be on the Friday before Easter. On this day the leaders of these organizations exclusively may speak

Twenty-six. The marriage ceremony of German men and women will consist of taking an oath of faithfulness and placing the right hand on the sword. There will not be any unworthy kneeling in N ceremonies.

Twenty-seven. The N declares the tenth day before Whit Sunday to be the national holiday of the German family.

Twenty-eight. The N rejects the customary day of prayer and atonement. It demands that this be transferred to the holiday commemorating the laying of the foundation stone of the N.

Twenty-nine. The N will not tolerate the establishment of any new clerical religious insignia.

Thirty. On the day of its foundation the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels within the Reich and its colonies and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol of Germany the “Haken Krevz”.

Of course, against all this is a few quotes intended for public consumption by a Christian nation – Howard Dean and his favorite book from the New Testament, Job, springs to mind – and the fact that Hitler was an altar boy.

I’m just wondering how many atheists who are desperate to prove that Hitler was all but a Bible-thumping Southern Baptist would qualify as Christians themselves by that reckoning. Did your parents baptize you as a child? Did you get confirmed? Well, forget what you believe now, obviously you, too, are a Christian and all of your future acts as an adult are to be completely defined by your childhood upbringing.

Positive Christianity was included in the National Socialist program, of course, but it’s worth remembering that the adjective modifies the noun. In this case, the above document demonstrates how the adjective modifies the noun to such an
extent as to create an entirely different religion.

The Antichrist, too, will claim to be Christian. And as is too often the case with Hitler and his party, only Christians will know better.

Some rather interesting and educational quotes.

“True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt’s: “Give back Alsace and Lorraine”. For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?”
– Friedrich Engels

Oops, there goes the inherent contradiction between German nationalism and the Left!

“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew — not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time…. We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development — to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed — has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry”.
– Karl Marx

Well, so much for the inherent contradiction between anti-semitism and the Left.

The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It is not merely a matter of pay, not only a matter of the number of hours worked in a day-though we may never forget that these are an essential, perhaps even the most significant part of the socialist platform-but it is much more a matter of incorporating a powerful and responsible class in the state, perhaps even to make it the dominant force in the future politics of the Fatherland.
– Joseph Goebbels

Whoopsy daisy! Weren’t the National Socialists running dogs of the bourgiousie?

“Fascism” was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini’s Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler’s Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism’s standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, “Nazi” was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of “capitalism.”
– Tom Wolfe, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists”

Hitler denied the National Socialists were Fascists. Mussolini likewise denied it. Both men insisted that they were socialists. But what did they know?

“Modern day Leftists of course hate it when you point out to them that Hitler was one of them. They deny it furiously — even though in Hitler’s own day both the orthodox Leftists who represented the German labor unions (the SPD) and the Communists (KPD) voted WITH the Nazis in the Reichstag (German Parliament) on various important occasions.

As part of that denial, an essay by Steve Kangas is much reproduced on the internet. Entering the search phrase “Hitler was a Leftist” will bring up multiple copies of it. Kangas however reveals where he is coming from in his very first sentence: “Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named “National Socialist.” But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production”. It does? Only to Marxists. So Kangas is saying only that Hitler was less Leftist than the Communists — and that would not be hard.”
– John Jay Ray, “Hitler was a Socialist“

Read the article, which I took these quotes from. It’s a little light on the supporting statistics, from my point of view, but fairly good otherwise. One particularly good point Ray makes is how the issues that leftists raise to in vain attempts to demonstrate how Hitler’s later accomodation with capitalism makes him a right-wing extremist still leaves the National Socialists well to the left of infamously right-wing societies such as Sweden and Norway. Ray also reminds us that even after leaving the Socialist Party, Mussolini remained a more doctrinaire Marxist than Lenin himself.

The fact that our society has moved significantly to the Left since FDR does not change the fact that things such as mass public education, social security and progressive taxation are the primary elements of a left-wing ideology. Considering that 40 percent of the American landmass is not privately owned, it should come as no surprise that we find it hard to admit the socialism of the WWII-era monsters, because when we actually examine their ideology and governance, it is far too similar to looking in a mirror.

As monstrous as the Holocaust was, it was not the be all and end all of National Socialism. While Hitler was obsessed with Jews, killing them was obviously not his top priority, considering that he didn’t get around to it until he’d been power for almost a decade and gotten a few minor details out of the way first, such as conquering Western Europe.

The American business tycoon is expected to lodge a formal bid with the Old Trafford board today, the latest step on a seemingly unstoppable march towards total ownership.

Having scooped up in excess of 112 million shares yesterday – including the major stakes of Cubic Expression and Harry Dobson, Glazer already owns around 70% of the club, a stake which will have risen even further by the end of trading this evening.

While supporters continue to protest and have vowed to boycott games, merchandise and even launch their own breakaway club, the unpalatable truth for them, and club employees, is that Glazer can now technically run the club as he sees fit.

All across Britain, Red Devil hearts are breaking… I feel as if I’m going to break into song at any moment now.

From the Washington Times:

U.S. Border Patrol agents have been ordered not to arrest illegal aliens along the section of the Arizona border where protesters patrolled last month because an increase in apprehensions there would prove the effectiveness of Minuteman volunteers, The Washington Times has learned.

More than a dozen agents, all of whom asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, said orders relayed by Border Patrol supervisors at the Naco, Ariz., station made it clear that arrests were “not to go up” along the 23-mile section of border that the volunteers monitored to protest illegal immigration.

We wouldn’t want to make those “vigilantes” look good now, would we. The government won’t do the few things it can and should do, like enforce national borders, as well as private parties. Why in the deep, dark, unholy name of slumbering Cthulhu would you put any faith in it doing anything else properly?

The Volokh Conspiracy draws attention to affirmative action run amok in the legal industry:

In a pact brokered by the New York County Lawyers’ Association, more than 60 law firms have agreed to tell their corporate clients the composition of assigned legal teams by race, gender, ethnicity and sexual preference.

For several years, clients have asked law firms to sign statements in support of diversifying the legal profession. But with the formal agreement, firms have volunteered to put hard numbers behind their noble aspirations. According to the pact, “law firms should not object to requests by their corporate clients [to] report the number of hours devoted to the clients’ matters by minority lawyers.”

It’s about time! Now, we’ll no longer find ourselves accidentally hiring filthy Jews, uncharacteristically articulate Negroes and whorish she-lawyers… um, wait, you’re saying that isn’t the point of this?

“Hello, I’d like a gay Chinaman, an Alabama cracker and a non-smoking African-American lesbian sporting a natural on the side. To go, please.”

Daryl writes to Dave Ramsay, sans brothers:

I was dating someone last year that I was expecting to marry. She was having car problems so I co-signed on a lease with her. Now we’ve broken up and she still has the car. So far, she’s made one payment and I’ve made one. We have a forfeiture agreement on the car where, if she didn’t make a payment by the end of the month, I could come get the car. Her parents have offered to buy her another car and she’s offering to just give me the leased car. She won’t tell me how much her parents are willing to give her for a new car. Our conversations have become pretty confrontational.

I’ve already got a leased truck. Why should I take on these payments as well?

I can’t stress this enough. NEVER co-sign on a loan for anyone. I don’t care if it’s your brother, your mother or your hand-twin, but especially not if it’s someone with whom you’re currently having sex.

If you are determined to help them financially, then just give them the money and forget about it. The reason someone can’t get a loan on their own is because even at a time when lenders are frothing at the mouth to provide loans to anyone with a pulse, they are still considered too high a risk for default. And if they’re not going to pay back a bank, they’re certainly not going to pay you back either. In this situation, if you don’t think the average American woman* won’t find it easier to simply find an excuse to break up with you, therefore providing herself with an iron-clad rationalization for sticking you with the debt, you don’t know much about the way women think.

*i.e. the kind of girl who has no savings and significant credit card debt.

Cedarford reveals some serious holes in his knowledge:

Hitler wasn’t a Leftist. He was a fierce anti-Communist.

The first statement is incorrect. The second is correct. Although many make the mistake of assuming so, the latter does not prove former. Marx, too, was an anti-socialist (he wrote diatribes against the Fabians, an older socialism), and the error in arguing that Hitler’s murderous opposition to a rival POLITICAL party, the KPD, is synonymous with total opposition to all left-wing ideology should be obvious. For the Bolsheviks were demonstrably more fiercely opposed to the Mensheviks, given that they murdered them all, and as someone has already pointed out, Stalin had Trotsky killed as well. And yet all of these men were Communists, quite clearly of the Left. Acts of violence in pursuing and consolidating power should never be confused with ideology.

By Cedarford’s logic, one might as easily argue that the Socialists, (SPD), weren’t leftists because they, too, were anti-KPD, and as I have written before, when the National Socialists made their big gains in the 1932 election, they drew voters primarily from the middle and from the SPD. The right-wing German nationalist party received the same percentage of votes as before because unlike the Socialists, its supporters did not gravitate to the National Socialists.

Unlike those uneducated folks who unwisely make the mistake of sharing their ignorant opinion with everyone, I have actually read Mein Kampf. It is quite clear throughout that while Hitler agrees with Marx’s fundamental notion that the State must reign supreme over the individual, he does not believe in Marx’s concept of class consciousness and he is aware of the problem of getting individuals to work when there is nothing in it for them. It is clear, in fact, that Hitler thinks that Marx is a fool in believing that his form of socialism will ever function.

Hitler proposes a different form of socialism which will harness the power of individual in service to the state. His notion is to inspire the individual, through indoctrination, with the glory of his national consciousness. In other words, National Socialism can be boiled down to the substitution of NATIONAL consciousness for CLASS consciousness, albeit within the same socialist framework. Hence the similarities between Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the National Socialist Munich Manifesto, which Hitler co-authored.

Like Lenin with his New Economic Program, Hitler was forced to moderate his socialist ideology once in power for the obvious reason; socialism doesn’t work. This is why after 70 years of Soviet communism and 50 years of Chinese communism, private property still existed in both left-wing states where, according to Marx, it should not have existed at all.

The idea that the National Socialists’ nationalism makes them definitively right-wing is especially stupid since the Soviet communists had themselves embraced nationalism prior to the Nazi’s coming to power. By 1927, Lenin and Stalin had completely defeated Trotsky’s internationalism in favor of building socialism in one country. As Lenin wrote: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

JF finds someone to type for him:

I have two words as to your continuing absurdity that
Hitler was a lefty: Pat Buchanan. And BTW: if you are Pro – Pat Buchanan, you are Pro – Hitler. Period.

That’s ridiculous. Go read the Munich Manifesto, which Hitler co-wrote, then tell me if that sounds more like a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. Hitler had more in common with Howard Dean than Pat Buchanan.

If you think any modern American commentator has anything to do with Hitler, pro or con, you shouldn’t be allowed out of the house without diapers. Try reading a book for once.