American Universities and Nazism

Carlin Romano of the University of Pennsylvania has an excellent review of Stephen H. Norwood's Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (paid access).

Romano raves about Norwood's book and points out that with respect to the Nazis in the 1930s:

"students, journalists, labor leaders, and elected officials—at least some of them—are the heroes of Norwood's book, showing more moral courage and activism than university administrators did."

Romano may be right that Iran poses a parallel to Nazi Germany (although one reader has pointed out that the parallel may be weak). But he falls down (and by implication Norwood does as well) in referring to Nazism as "fascism". Nazism is as much a form of socialism as of fascism, "Progressivism" or the more general "corporatism". Whereas Stalin advocated "socialism in one country", Hitler advocated "national socialism". As John Lukacs points out, the two phrases mean the same thing. But academics and journalists have shamefully hidden this by referring to Nazism as "fascism", which was Mussolini's system. Romano follows this disgraceful convention, which is an Orwellian way to lie about socialism. Nazism was not fascism, "Progressivism" or "corporatism". It was more extreme. It was socialism just as Stalinism was.

Hitler elevated race in his ideology, but Stalinism was also anti-Semitic and racist. All four ideologies, corporatism, Nazism, Communism and Fascism, emphasized centralization of authority and centralized economic planning, ideas that both American "Progressives" and Straussian conservatives, who have recently dominated the Republican Party, advocate.

Although some journalists may have been heroes, others have not been. In particular, the pissant New York Times covered Hitler's anti-Semitism but buried the story off the front page. Nor was support for Hitler limited to US universities. The Swedish socialist economist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote a classic book on American race relations, American Dilemma, supported Nazism in the 1930s at the same time as the presidents of Harvard and Columbia did.

Even if Fascism and National Socialism are as similar as National Socialism and Communism, why do the Democrats and social democratic academics continue to refer to Nazism as "fascism" rather than its true name, "National Socialism"? Why don't they refer to Mussolini's Fascism as "national socialism", which would be a more descriptive and meaningful depiction? "Fascism" is murkier. "National Socialism" accurately describes the facts.

Moreover, while some academics, like Romano and Norwood, (also see Phil Orenstein's Frontpagemag article about the dual origins of the American university and Nazism in the idealism of Fichte) are willing to confront the academic support for Hitler, academics have been unwilling to confront the equivalent support for Mao that continues in the American academy to this day.

The famous linguist Noam Chomsky has been a persistent denier of the Cambodian holocaust and John Kenneth Galbraith had high praise for Maoist China in the pages of the pissant New York Times at a time when Mao had already murdered at least 25 million people. Academics continually criticize Milton Friedman, who helped a Chilean government that ultimately killed about 3,000 people, but praise Castro, who has murdered 100,000 people and imprisoned and tortured many more. Indeed, Michael Moore had high praise for Cuban socialism in his movie Sicko just last year. Both Galbraith and Friedman died two years ago. In Friedman's obituary the Democratic Party propaganda outlets mentioned Friedman's assistance to Chile, but in Galbraith's they did not mention that he had visited China and praised Mao in the Times.

Romano's point that Iran poses a parallel to Hitler is a good one. But academia's response to Maoism and Stalinism deserves careful scrutiny as well. The term "fascism" should not be applied to Nazism. It is an Italian term that refers to Roman history. Nazism and Communism are Roman derivatives, but "state activist liberals" have been apologetic about the mass murder of left wing Romanism and have attributed the mass murder to ideological causes rather than its true cause: centralization of state power.

Phil Orenstein Protests Obama Health Scam

Democracy Project blogger Phil Orenstein appeared on Channel 7, the New York City ABC affiliate, in an interview about the Obama health care scam. Phil is an engineer at a small manufacturing firm on Long Island. His boss founded the high tech firm and now says that the Democrats are aiming to drive jobs to China. Perhaps the boobs at ABC have never read Henry Hazlett's Economics in One Lesson. They, like the goose stepping leftists who dominate American universities, claim that you can take from those who work and give to those who do not, and those who work will, like idiots, continue to work.

It just ain't so, folks. It just ain't so.

See Phil's excellent protest against big government here.

National Health Insurance and Freedom

Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom argues that governmental control of economic resources eliminates personal freedom. In the Soviet Union, critics of the state could be deprived of work because the state controlled jobs. Friedman argues that economic freedom is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for personal freedom and civil liberties. Not all capitalist states, such as Chile and China, are liberal with respect to personal freedom, but no purely socialist state is liberal. Sweden is a good example even though it is not purely socialist. A good book on that subject is Roland Huntford's New Totalitarians, which documents a very lengthy list of ways that the socialist state in Sweden and Swedish society suppress individual liberty.

The effect of governmental power on freedom is easily seen in the expansion of government-supported universities, which exclude conservatives and libertarians from employment. One hundred percent of the institutions of higher learning in New York, public and private, are government supported, and all exclude from employment professors who disagree with state expansion. I frequently receive mail from professors and/or students that says "if you do not believe in government, then why do you work for a public university?" In other words, the state expands the scope of its power, and dissidents are to be excluded from its operations, ensuring that they are to remain unemployed. Only believers in state power are to be employed by state universities, according to this argument.That is, protest of the state's expansion is to be punished through unemployment.

Advocates of the "you work at CUNY so you should favor big government" position are in essence saying that in a purely socialist economy no disagreement with socialism will be permitted since all jobs would be controlled by the government. How can you work for the government if you disagree with government power? You will either work and survive or you will disagree with socialism. Not both.

There is much clear evidence of suppression of speech in universities, but none as clear as suggested in that argument, which has been made by readers of this blog several times. The advocates of socialism aim to silence and suppress all who disagree with them, and as the state gains power, they will economically punish anyone who disagrees, just as university professors have excluded liberals* from employment.

Now what should we fear from national health insurance? What kind of health care can dissidents in a socialized America expect when academics and officials of a socialist bureaucracy control access to health care? Will personal freedom exist? I think not. Will dissidents receive care in a socialist America? Or will they be compelled to undergo psychiatric treatment as they were in the Soviet Union?

A government-dominated health plan, national health insurance, is a threat to freedom and it should be feared. It should be feared because its advocates, the social democrats in the Democratic Party, are intolerant thugs.

*In case you're not used to this use of "liberal", the true meaning of the word liberal is "libertarian". The concept of "state activist liberalism" is an Orwellian corruption of language. Liberals believe in freedom, in liberalis, in liberalism. They do not believe in big government. That is the ideology of fascism, communism, socialism and authoritarianism and, of course, social democracy.

Michael Moore's Racist Stereotyping of Barack Obama

Michael Moore posted this on his blog. Note the racist stereotyping whereby all African Americans, including the President, are basketball players.

>A Message from Michael Moore

Dear GOP:

That is so cool! I knew you guys were more than just all Lee Greenwood and Pat Boone. Let me expand on my remarks.

You see, Obama is LeBron and you are the Clippers. The Clippers know that LeBron is going to fake right and go left, but it doesn't matter — they're still the Clippers and he's LeBron and he's going to make the basket. Even if he shouted at the Clippers as he's coming down the court, "hey, I'm gonna fake right and go left when I get to the basket," they still aren't going to stop him. And you, the GOP, are not going to stop Obama...Now, what do you know about Obama's hook shot?

– Michael Moore

As I have previously blogged, the most racist element of American society today is white "progressives" who mostly live in wealthy urban enclaves; exclusive suburbs; and all-white university towns. Moore, who claims to be a working class citizen of Flynt, Michigan, actually owns an apartment on Manhattan's exclusive Upper West Side, just two blocks from Zabar's, the deli where you can buy excellent cheeses at very low prices. I suspect Moore visits them often.