Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been A Nazi?
“Are you now, or have you ever been a Nazi?” is a marginally-more polite form of an accusation liberals frequently hurl at others with whom they merely disagree
I use the interrogative rather than the more customary accusatory form to make an answer possible.
Because I know what Nazism or, in its more general term, fascism, really is, I can honestly answer, “No.”
But, if today’s liberals genuinely understood “fascism,” few of them could truthfully give the same answer.
Fascism is not a right-wing phenomenon.
Fascism and communism are both far-left socialist movements, opposite sides of the same coin. Indeed, “Nazi” is a contraction of the German words for “National Socialists.”
Adolf Hitler’s brand of socialism differed in only one respect from that of the German communists with whom the Nazis competed for power: Germany’s communists, like the Soviets, were “collectivists,” the Nazis were not.
Under collective communism, all the planning, tools and means of production belong to the state. Under national socialism, those remain in “private” ownership under management oversight, but are controlled by the state.
German businesses embraced national socialism. Krupps, Bayer, Daimler Benz, Deutsche Bundesbank – all the major German manufacturers and banks – profited from their cozy government relationships until Hitler overreached, war ensued and Germany was defeated and partitioned.
Conditions in America today bear more than passing resemblance to those in mid-war 20th Century Germany.
Retrospectively, some blame a global recession and public overreaction to punitive WW I reparations imposed on Germany, but it was the fecklessness of Germany’s post-war political class that enabled Hitler’s rise to power. Incompetent figurehead “leadership,” uncontrolled spending, fantastic inflation driven by printing new, unsecured currency, joblessness, general public restlessness and a loss of national pride all contributed.
Today, the incestuous relationships between and among America’s elected officials, media, the academy, big businesses and industries aren’t terribly dissimilar from Nazi national socialism – e.g.: racial politics, censorship, a competition-strangling/market-distorting regulatory regime, sweetheart provisions in the tax code, guaranteed loans, subsidies and bailouts.
Obamacare rewarded large insurance underwriters; Dodd-Frank legislation reconfirmed “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions; the Export-Import Bank is pure corporate welfare; GM and Chrysler bailouts cost taxpayers billions; and, today, Democrats are in bed with Big Tech and Big Pharma.
As in 1920s Germany, America’s economy is weakening; spending is unconstrained; massive sums of unsecured currency have been printed; inflation is compounding; and the public’s dissatisfaction with an irresponsible political class all explain the mob response to angry messages from avowed socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In the current economic and political environment, elements of Sander’s emotional, idealized, class-based “scapegoating” and “common enemy” themes are reminiscent of Hitler’s anti-capitalist socialist rhetoric. Nazism presented itself as a movement promoting what was “true and just.” The modern terms are “equity” and “fairness,” words the left reserves the right to define.
America does have a mature constitutional history that 1920s Germany lacked, but America’s legal order is decaying. Liberal presidents and bureaucrats have been trampling on the American Constitution for years.
In a fiscal/economic crisis, an existential breakdown in constitutional law is imaginable. If that happens, almost anything can.
One suspects that, because they approved of former President Barack Obama’s, and encourage President(ish) Joe Biden’s and their executive agencies’ impositions of never-legislated policies and regulations, the left may worry that the American system their side willfully weakened is incapable of constraining another Donald Trump presidency.
What the left really fears is that, by exploiting the precedents of the Obama and Biden administrations’ unilateral, extra-constitutional overreach, another Trump administration will carry out inverse variants of the Obama/Biden excesses – or, worse, repair and/or dismantle the Obama/Biden blunders and constitutional infringements, rationalize the regulatory regime, improve national security, and enforce existing American laws.
As always, context is everything, so the left’s vitriol appears to have far less to do with genuine apprehension about a fascist takeover of America than with their distress over the potential electoral loss of a perceived opportunity to finalize their own centralized, fascistic authority.
Meanwhile, their gratuitous “Hitler,” “Nazi,” and “fascist” slanders are clinical examples of psychological projection, soulless, anger-induced symptoms of the left’s spiritual, intellectual and political bankruptcy, despicable, albeit common left-wing political rituals that shamefully trivialize the genuine evil of the Holocaust and dishonor the six million Jews, gypsies and other “undesirables” murdered by Hitler’s goons.
https://www.pottsmerc.com/2024/01/22/jerry-shenk-are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-nazi/
