Monday, May 9, 2011

Not a Wonderful Life: Today's Democrats and Republicans Are Yesterday's Brown Shirts

Both Democrats and Republicans harass me when I question either. Obama's brown shirted followers have repeatedly called me names such as "racist." As The New York Sun reported in 2008, several of Obama's followers maliciously reported my blog as spam, causing Google to shut it down for a number of days.In a parallel display of rigid intolerance, today a GOP supporter called me names for writing earlier that, absent a Paul, Johnson or other small government 2012 presidential nominee, I would vote Libertarian in the hopes of a split government.  The Republican response is as authoritarian as the Democratic one. 

To quote History Learning.com, one week before the 1932 election Hitler burned down the Reichstag, the German parliament. He convinced President Hindenburg to give him an emergency powers law more extreme than those that the Patriot Act grants the American president: the Law for the Protection of the People and the State. Hitler had claimed that communists had burned down the Reichstag, and he blamed Marianus van der Lubbe for doing so.   The law banned the Communists and Socialists from taking part in the 1932 election, ensuring a Nazi election victory.  The storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, SA, or brown shirts) beat up Hitler's opponents.  Because a majority, of Germans had voted against Hitler (which was his reason for forestalling an open election in 1932), Hitler had to use intimidation to maintain power.

The Democrats and Republicans do not need to burn down Congress because there is already a one party system in the United States.  The Stalinist mass media has done Obama's and Romney's brown shirting for them.   As Georg Lukacs has pointed out, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and today's America share similarities. Their governments reflect national socialist forms.  Due to the propaganda of The New York Times and left wing academics, students are taught that Hitler's system was fascism rather than National Socialism.  In fact, today's Sweden has a nationalist socialist system, as does the US to a lesser degree.  Hitler's National Socialism was conceptually similar to Stalin's socialism in one country, and both were similar to Theodore Roosevelt's Progressivism.  Both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt aimed to cartelize American industry; the American system under Roosevelt's National Recovery Act, had the Supreme Court not declared it unconstitutional, would have been more like Mussolini's fascism than Hitler's or Stalin's system, but it would have hastened the long term trend toward centralization of power.

The centralization of the monetary system and Wall Street's control of the legacy media have shored up America's socialism in one country.  Today, an elite led by George Soros and Barack Obama increasingly favor an internationalist socialism to a nationalist one. Obama and his backers at The New York Times may be more like Trotsky than Stalin, to the distaste of Stalinists like Donald Trump. The system has guaranteed the transfer of wealth from  productive and innovative Americans to Wall Street and government, accelerating the 19th century's gradual trend toward centralization.  The 19th century trend would not have occurred to the same degree without the Civil War and state subsidies to the railroads.  Centralization permitted economic gains for less than a century, but did so by quelling twin innovative engines: laissez faire capitalism and decentralized government. 

Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which I showed to my senior seminar class yesterday,  implies that concentrated wealth is potentially totalitarian. As Uncle Billy says to Mr. Potter before he hands him the $8,000 meant for deposit in Mr. Potter's bank, "Not every heel was in Japan and Germany." 

What is remarkable about the American descent into national socialism is not that The New York Times supports it.  Wall Street, starting with the Ochs Sulzbergers and Rupert Murdoch, owns the media, and its writers and reporters are the products of America's elite socialist-in-one-country cum internationalist socialist education system.  What is remarkable is that apparently a majority of Americans support a system that has harmed them economically, and that has reduced the growth in their standard of living so that they are earning less than one half of what they would have earned under laisser faire.

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