Excoriating National Socialism's Defilement of Germany

For too many people, when they think about Germany the first thing they think of are Nazis, the Holocaust, fascism, and World War II. This is understandable, considering the monumental destruction the National Socialist regime execrated on humanity that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. But for many of these people, the modern, industrialized, economic heavyweight, European country of Germany is equated only with the fascist criminals who carried out crimes against humanity in the name of Germandom.

This equating all of Germany with the Nazis is ubiquitous; the notion of collective guilt is one that was prevalent in the Allied camp after the atrocities of the Hitlerite regime became fully known. Every German citizen who has lived and died since 1945 has born the weight of guilt on their shoulders and felt, constantly sitting in the back of their mind, the acknowledgement that it was their country, their soldiers, their fellow Germans who pursued such abominable paths that led to the destruction of countless lives and the almost-annihilation of Europe's Jewish population.

These atrocities - Your fault!

This is something vitally important for Germans growing up today to be aware of; though they may only be 15, or 20, or 30, and have had nothing at all to do with the crimes of the past, they are told in explicit detail and are never allowed to forget for one moment the horrific atrocities the racists who led their country committed. And they should be aware of these facts.

But the Germany of today, and the Germany that was around before the fascist dictatorship, is not the National Socialist Worker's Party. The fact that this stain upon the nation will never be gone is the enduring and terrible legacy of the darkest chapter in human history.

The Nazis have forever defiled Germany.

The National Socialist regime were composed of extremists, right-wing fanatics, racists, fascists, authoritarians, gangsters, criminals, and terrorists. These people ruled the country, waged war, oppressed entire civilizations, and committed the heinous act of genocide in the name of Germany. But they were not Germany.

A majority of German voters in 1933 voted for parties other than the NSDAP, which is often overlooked. They illegally and undemocratically seized power after they were unable to obtain the necessary parliamentary majority. A democratic country became a dictatorship that would ruin the essence of everything it touched.

The dictatorship outlawed other parties. Opposition delegates to the Reichstag were murdered shortly after the election. Non-members of the party were forced from their jobs, their homes, their country. Opponents to the regime were oppressed and murdered. The press was censored. There were no elections. The Gestapo turned the nation into a police state. A brutal war was waged against millions of people that resulted in countless innocent lives destroyed, and everywhere experienced death, misery, and destruction.

The Jews became the target of a racist, authoritarian, purposeful, cold-blooded, state-led campaign of terror, persecution, and extermination. Millions of people, from Germany, Poland, Russia, France, and elsewhere across the continent, were singled-out for annihilation.

Six million human beings were taken by other alleged human beings from their homes, their families, their countries. Six million human beings were forced to live in disgusting, disease-ridden, walled-in ghettos. Six million Jews were rounded up, stuffed into trains, and brought to isolated hell-holes so that they could be systematically degraded, debased, abused, oppressed, and exterminated. The very depths of evil were culled forth by the fascist dictatorship's leaders to bring about such a nefarious and unimaginable horror that was the Holocaust genocide.

Another six million human beings were likewise murdered for belonging to the wrong political party, having a non-fascist opinion, for being homosexual, homeless, mentally-retarded, disabled, or having the wrong skin color, name, or background.

This totalitarian regime was not made up of Germans, or humans. When Berlin was being ravaged and torn down, with millions dead already, the leadership of the NSDAP kept fighting. Though it meant that children and teenagers were sent to die in a battle they could not win, and that millions of civilians would be killed, the leaders of the dictatorship did not care. They did not care about the German people. They were ruthless, bloodthirsty, tyrannical gangsters, thugs, criminals, and despots. Their terrible legacy lives on, as it should, as a reminder of the evils of fascism and the depths to which humanity once sank.

But the stain of the Nazis should not smear the true Germany: the Germany of the millions who voted against the fascists; the millions of the German Resistance who fought against them and tried to stop their takeover, their crimes, their oppression; the too-few Christians who protected persecuted Jews.

The true Germany is that of Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Hoffmann, and Hegel;

of Immanuel Kant, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte;

of Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Fontane;

of Albert Einstein, Max Weber, Alexander von Humboldt, Max Planck;

of Manfred von Ardenne, Karl Benz, Christian Doppler, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit;

of Friedrich Nietzsche, Caspar David Friedrich, Arthur Schopenhauer;

of Franz Stuck, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann.

This is the true Germany. The Germany of literature, art, philosophy, and science. The attempted genocide of Europe's Jews, and the denigration of the contributions that Germany's Jews had made to their country, irrevocably turned German-Jews away from their former homeland, as it should have. As Peter Gay, a historian who fled Germany when he was still young, has explained - he cannot consider himself German, or feel comfortable ever stepping foot in the country of his birth again due to the crimes committed by the fascists and the acceptance of these crimes by much of the population.

This is Germany's shame. This is the result of the Nazi dictatorship. The Nazis destroyed their own culture, ruined their own cities, and murdered their own citizens. National Socialism defiled Germany, its culture, its history, and its future. The crimes of the past should never be forgotten, or pushed aside. But they should not define the nation.

Lessons from Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations

The effects and implications of Scottish economist Adam Smith's magnificent 1776 opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, dramatically influenced European thought and continue to be felt through to the current day.

The Wealth of Nations was a piece of comparative economic history; as its title suggests, Smith sought to determine the root causes of what makes any country wealthy. By wealth, he didn't just mean the upper crust, the aristocracy, the elites. Rather, he sought to discover what determined how all of society could become wealthy, and he was mainly interested in why England in particular had become wealthy.

Adam Smith was a liberal in the classical sense - he helped develop the set of beliefs that came to be known as political and economic liberalism. Though it has been several centuries since he put pen to paper to write down his thoughts, Smith's liberal ideas and the foundation they created carry on through to today, in varying forms such as neoliberalism and libertarianism.

His belief in economic liberalism - free markets, reduced regulation, free trade - helped spur a general trend in Europe that eventually spread around the world to influence the entire industrialized world. Modern libertarians' obsession with the so-called "invisible hand" stems from Smith's economic ideas, though it may surprise them to know that this term was only mentioned once in the book.

One would get a rather different view of the advantages and disadvantages of the free market if one were to actually read The Wealth of Nations or simply hear about it from people who didn't actually read it. The leading economic strain en vogue right now in many countries is neoliberalism, one of whose tenets is a belief that the market is self-regulating because of the actions of the "invisible hand" - that is, in the pursuit of self-interest (profit), businesses' decisions will benefit the rest of society.

Yes, Adam Smith believed that self-interest benefits the rest of society because humans have a unique need to cooperate with each other by bartering or trading; by pursuing self-interested goals, humans tend to specialize in those things that they are good at and thereby tend to offer up services and trades to everyone that would not have been possible without this multiplicity of talents and specialization.

But in contrast, however, to the uncritical, blind faith modern libertarians, neoliberals, and so-called free-market parties (like Germany's FDP, Canada's Conservative Party, and the Republican Party) place in the invisible hand's ability to regulate industry and the market, Smith realized the inherent weaknesses of this ideology.

He posed the question of why England had become so wealthy, while other countries such as Spain had not. England had a national government that had created the institutional frameworks, such as a rule of law and a system of canals, necessary to promote, protect, and sustain the market economy. Smithian liberalism posited that government intervention in the market economy was necessary and vital to keep competition alive, dissuade monopolies, and ensure that the benefits of trade could reach all of society. In other words, the market is not self-regulating and the government is necessary to ensure stability and prosperity for all.

For the "wealth of nations" was just that - the riches accrued by a country should benefit all citizens of that country. For, by enriching everyone, the nation as a whole is better off. In the same manner of thought, Smith believed that the wealth of other nations benefited England; if the United States wanted to trade with France and Spain and not just with England, then all parties would benefit because of it.

It was this mode of thinking that led Adam Smith to his support for the American Revolution, free trade, universal and free public education, and his arguments against imperialism, protectionism, and slavery. Smith would have hated the concept of "Buy American" or the nativist attitude of Americans toward the rising stock of China's economy.

Smith's arguments can be extrapolated in different ways. Indeed, they have been extrapolated by fundamentalist libertarians and conservative political parties to pursue policies that have benefited only a small segment of society while maintaing the status quo for millions of people; that have given multinational corporations free reign to harm the environment, infringe upon human rights, and maintain abhorrent levels of poverty around the world; de-fanged regulations that destabilized the market economy and saw an amassing of financial institutions into fewer and fewer hands; and that have generally led to the economic and social stagnation of the vast majority of society.

This is not to say that Adam Smith was some kind of proto-communist; he firmly believed in free trade, and that the free market was the most efficient and natural way of conducting a nation's economy. The point is that Adam Smith was able to see the innate deficiencies of a market economy and actively promoted ideas that would enhance the prosperity of all citizens while maintaining what he believed to be the liberty of the economic system. This is one of the lessons that Adam Smith can teach us.

The slavish devotion to the "invisible hand", "free-market principles", the belief that markets self-correct, that corporations can regulate themselves, the contradictory promotion of protectionist policies: these all are twisted extrapolations of the classical liberal economic and political doctrines that Adam Smith helped develop that, were they to be followed through to their logical conclusion, would result in devastation for the vast majority of society and the world in which we live.

Republicans are Authoritarian Corporate Fascists

Professor Bob Altemeyer from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, has spent several decades scientifically studying authoritarianism. The findings of his life's work were published in the 2006 book The Authoritarians, and is available in its entirety for free.

What he has through his years of research discovered - who authoritarian followers are, what their characteristics are, how they act, how they think, why they think and act the way they do - explains the roots of fascism and authoritarianism in a way that many will find helpful. His conclusions also describe the current state of the Republican Party and most of its followers.

Altemeyer's research deals mostly with the followers of authoritarians; those who submit to their authorities. Right-wing authoritarians show a high degree of submission to the perceived legitimate authority figures in their society, high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities, and are highly conventional, adhering to traditions and social norms endorsed by society and authority figures while believing that the rest of society should as well. Most right-wing authoritarians are conservative, though they can also be politically on the left (think Stalinist-era Communist Party cadres).

The Right-wing Authoritarian Scale has been developed to determine how authoritarian a person is. Most people who take the test admit to a certain amount of submissiveness to authorities: people follow traffic laws, for example. Right-wing authoritarians, however, submit on a far greater scale, and will do so regardless of whether what their leader is doing is evil, corrupt, undemocratic, unprincipled, or dishonest. Conservatives and Republicans tend to scale much, much higher on this scale than most other Americans. Republicans, no matter where they were from or at what level of government, were much less diverse in their responses than Democrats.


Right-wing authoritarians display high levels of hostility towards any "out groups" that their authorities tell them they are against (an "us versus them" mentality); this can be seen in Republicans' marked anti-homosexuality stance, fervent anti-immigrant and anti-minority legislations, and their religious devotion to the Constitution - which does not stop them from curtailing sacred and inalienable rights with policies such as the PATRIOT Act.

This hostility towards the out group is also remarkable in that they approve of authorities who attack members of the out group, despite any crimes the authority figure may have committed. People showing this trait are also unable to display normal levels of empathy, to "go a mile in someone else's shoes" - Republicans have no sympathy for those who have fallen on bad times through no fault of their own and are virulently against any form of universal health care.

Right-wing authoritarians share a strong sense of group loyalty and cohesion, are more likely to be fundamentally religious (thereby also being extremely prejudiced), trust leaders who cannot and should not be trusted despite evidence to the contrary (Richard Nixon, George W. Bush), do not hold authority figures accountable for crimes, and accept illegal abuses of power by government authorities (the PATRIOT Act, legislation discriminating against minorities and immigrants).

Authoritarians cannot draw logical conclusions based on evidence. They hold many contradictory ideas at the same time in their head, use double standards, accept insufficient evidence to support their beliefs, and believe fully without questioning what their leaders tell them.

Authoritarians are dogmatic, hypocritical, oppressors who abuse their power when they have it to dominate others and inflame inter-group conflict. They are self-righteous, do no believe in any of their own failings, and embrace religion as a way of masking their guilt while sustaining this self-righteousness.

All of these traits of authoritarianism can be seen in the modern Republican Party and their followers.

Authoritarian conservatives believed more firmly and for a longer time than most other Americans the egregious lies that the Bush administration spread about Saddam Hussein's connections to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans claim to believe in small government and the Constitution, yet while in power they massively expanded the government and infringed upon the inalienable rights of millions of Americans in flagrant violation of these so-called beliefs. Though they nominally should believe in the Constitutional right that every citizen shall not be put to cruel or unusual punishment, conservatives had no problem when the Bush administration sanctioned torture, arrested citizens without trial, repealed habeas corpus, or turned the country into a police state. Conservative authoritarian followers unflinchingly followed George W. Bush, and the Republican Party single-mindedly pursued a dogmatically authoritarian track while in power.

The Republican Party and its base are constantly in fear of those who are not like them: Muslims, Blacks, immigrants, gays, atheists. They believe these "others" to have a sinister, nefarious plan to deliberately destroy the country - just see some of what they have had to say about the first president of non-European descent.

Republicans cannot accept the legitimacy of a Democratic president. Conservatives believe, because they were told so by their authorities, that Obama is a terrorist, a Muslim, that he hates America, that he is a Communist and that he used massive voter fraud and a biased media to cheat a win out of the 2008 Presidential election.

The Republican Party, its members, representatives, and most of its followers are authoritarians. The traits that distinguish them as such blend as well into fascism - an undemocratic ideology that believes in devotion to a strong leader, aggressive nationalism, suppression of others, and the right to engage in violent war to secure its safety.

Republicans are nationalistic, ethnocentric, glorify and exalt the military, reject any measure to increase equality, oppress those who are not like themselves, and stop at nothing, no matter how undemocratic, to rout their political enemies and gain power. Republican lawmakers who exhibit exceptionally high authoritarian tendencies and display one of the above-mentioned fascist ideological traits are likely to rise up through the party; the same cannot be said for Democrats.

The Republicans' hatred of democracy is well-documented:

-in the 2000 Presidential election, there were multiple cases of crimes by Republicans that effectively disenfranchised thousands of African Americans in the hotly-contested state of Florida, allowing nominee George W. Bush to be awarded the state's electoral votes by the conservative Supreme Court in an unprecedented decision that, for the first time in the entire history of the country, was told would count for this one instance;

-in 2004, Republican lawmakers held an open vote in the House of Representatives for over three hours (the mandated limit is 20 minutes) in order to threaten enough other members to vote for a bill that added billions of dollars to the national deficit;

-the democratically-elected Democratic majority in the United States Senate was unable to pass any legislation or appoint any person due to the undermining of democracy that is embodied in the filibuster as used by Republicans

-Republican-controlled state legislatures all over the country are pursuing policies that adversely affect and disenfranchise African-Americans, Latinos, students, and immigrants - all of whom tend to vote for Democrats.

-in the Republican-controlled Wisconsin state legislature, lawmakers flagrantly violated laws in order to pass an anti-union law that they did not campaign on; in the aftermath, a contest for Supreme Court was awarded to the conservative after a county clerk in a heavily-Republican district made a "mistake" in miscounting over 7,000 votes that happened to hand the victory to the Republican.

The Republican Party is the party of Watergate, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Afghanistan, McCarthyism, the PATRIOT Act, multiple sex scandals, Savings and Loans, and the Committee on Un-American Activites; the party that massively increased the nation's debt and then used it to hold the country hostage several times for partisan political gain.

The modern Republican Party cares exclusively about the corporations that run the economy and the super-rich plutocracy who benefit from their economic policies. They will do all in their power to maintain and enhance their corporate overlords, including holding the American and global economies hostage to preserve the favored status in tax brackets of the world's most well-endowed businesses and oligarchs.

Republicans have shown almost no interest in curtailing the pervasive and outrageous influence that corporate money presses upon American politics; on the contrary, they have embraced it, thereby undermining democracy even further.

This is despite clear evidence showing that the American economy was at its strongest when taxes on the rich were at their highest, savings from tax cuts are much more likely to be saved than spent by the wealthy, the United States is the least-taxed industrialized country in the world, and that corporate profits are higher than ever but they are not now and do not usually create that many jobs. But facts and evidence don't matter to the authoritarian, slavish devotion to their ideology does.

The Republican Party is a monolithic, extreme right-wing, antidemocratic, ideologically driven authoritarian, corporate, and fascist political organization.

They are not interested in governing, nor compromise. They exist solely to gain political power at any cost and to destroy their political opponents, while worsening the oppressive socio-economic power relations that keep all minorities - religious, ethnic, racial - excluded from the upper echelons of society in the richest country in the world. And they are dangerously close to gaining control of the levers of power of the richest, most powerful country in the world.