Our Israeli correspondent MC returns with a reflection on the commonalities that can be observed among Socialism, National Socialism, and Islam.
Utter Contempt
by MC
The recent dialogue featured on Gates of Vienna between the Baron and an unnamed British journalist got me thinking a bit…
Of note was the utter contempt with which the journalist approached a right-of-centre position, and the holder of that position.
I grew up among Socialists, but I did a very unacceptable thing: I kept an open mind.
I suppose it started around the family television, there used to be a programme “All our Yesterdays: This Week 25 Years Ago”.
I was really too young to understand this programme, but in an unheated house in winter there was only one room kept warm enough for comfort, and the TV was in that room, and, of course the TV dominated.
I could not understand why National Socialists were bad, but Socialists were good. Yet my grandfather had been a convener for the early Labour Party in the twenties; Socialism was not to be questioned.
However, being very naïve, I asked my father, who just happened to be at home at the time on one those rare visits (he was an officer in the Royal Navy). My father did not answer the question; he just made me feel about six inches (rather than four feet) tall.
I had touched on a very sore point, and perhaps a key deception that is a prime cause of the trouble our countries find themselves in today.
It was many years later that I became comfortable with the idea that National Socialism is just another form of Socialism, one which is almost identical to Stalinist Communist Socialism.
The idea of extreme left, and extreme right is a fabrication. Stalin invaded Poland two weeks after Hitler did. In 1941, the Allies had to rehabilitate Stalin by creating a propaganda myth:
“Hitler bad, Stalin good. The political left is honest and caring; the political right is corrupt and greedy.”
Many have fallen for this meme, and it is now burnt into the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) of those who have “never thought of thinking for themselves at all”, a.k.a. Lenin’s useful idiots .
So Mr. Indoctrinated British Journalist approaches the dialogue with a preconceived notion that the Baron is part of a greedy and corrupt right wing establishment only worthy of the contempt of civilised “educated” people.
The sign of a good journalist is that he or she can recognise bias, and can therefore contain contempt. I have utter contempt for the leftist establishment; but then, I make no claim to being a journalist either.
As a child, I was taught to be contemptuous of certain types and classes of people. My mother’s family was very anti-Semitic, even though their father was Jewish (maybe because their father was Jewish). My father’s family (from Manchester) was very contemptuous of our very ‘nice’ southern English accents, and the accusation of being “la di dah” was not unknown…
I never knowingly met a Jew until University, where my Maths tutor was Orthodox. I got on very well with him.
I had my first clash with the reality of Socialism at university (in the form of the Student Union) as well, and I discovered to my horror that the reality of hard-left Socialism was extremely nasty. As a moderate Socialist, I was deemed contemptible and was treated with derision. There was no respect due to anything or anybody that did not conform to their core beliefs.
Islam too holds everything outside of Islam in contempt, and there is commonality of belief in this. In fact, Socialism and Islam hold so much in common it prompts the question: Did they come from the same source?
In a way, yes; Socialism arose through the trashing of the Bible in the 19th century. It resulted from the combined culture shocks of Darwin, Freud and Einstein. Darwin posited the first realistic alternative to creation, Freud redefined the human psyche, and Einstein redefined Newtonian physics. From these culture shocks arose a belief system based upon the idea that man is God.
Islam is, in effect, the worship of Mohammed, a 7th century brigand king who espoused the belief that one man (himself) could be the sole mouthpiece of god. For those who delve, there is a connection here. Mohammed used Allah as a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy — whenever he needed to make a statement, Allah, would give it voice through Mohammed. So Islam is a belief system that sees a man as God.
Any difference is semantic.
In their extreme forms, both Socialism and Islam believe in world domination, both use violence and terror as acceptable forms of evangelism, and both believe in an elite vanguard controlling the backward masses. Islam shows a contempt for women, seeing them as live ‘meat’ and other more vulgar epithets, ensnaring men in their evil sexuality and thus denying women entry into heaven. The Socialists show contempt for women in the role of mother, carer and giver of life; in their view women should be men, and work for a living. Women should bestow their sexual favours according to need and desire (especially the needs and desires of the Socialist elite) and, if necessary, murder the consequences.
The contempt shows up in many ways. In this case, the Baron is guilty of “inhumanity” because a Norwegian psychopath happened to read his blog posts and agree with some of them. Whilst this association is totally irrational, contempt makes it plausible in the context that, if the Baron had not expressed (contemptible) opinions, the shootings might not have happened.
Curiously, this fluffy teddy-bear logic endows the Baron with a supernatural ability to control events, and thus be responsible for them, by expressing his opinions, in writing, in a blog where he has no control whatsoever on the readership. This is the stuff of fairy tales!
And of such is the poison of Utter Contempt.
A little logic: As I have said several times in different blogs etc, if reading (let’s say) GoV was a sufficient condition for one to run amok, then there would be thousands of people running amok as we speak. But look around the world – this is not happening, and it never has happened in all the time that GoV has been online. Therefore reading GoV is not a sufficient condition for one’s running amok. And this is not at all surprising since the vast majority of the articles at GoV are descriptive in nature, simply reporting events that have already happened in the world (many of which have already been reported in the mainstream media.) There are also some articles which analyse trends in the world, and there are some which discuss the doctrines and history of Islam. There is obviously no problem with any of this, since the doctrines of Islam are not a secret, since the source documents are available to all and sundry, and the history of the world has, to put it mildly, been well documented prior to the existence of GoV. A little logic goes a long way …
Unstated but obvious then as a direct corollary: Look around the world – this is happening and there is ample evidence that the doctrine of Islam provides sufficient conditions for generations of followers to “run amok” since it’s very inception.
Thank you, Nick and hrw.
It’s interesting to think about this in a logical way. We’ve heard the rationalisations in the media about islamic terrorism – it’s caused by poverty, “disenchantment” (whatever is meant by that), disagreement with American or British foreign policy, etc, etc.
What nonsense! I may be living from one paycheck to the next, I may feel “disenchanted”, I may disagree with what my country’s politicians are doing … but it does NOT follow that I will strap on a rucksack full of dynamite and six inch nails, & set if off in a busload of women and kids.
However if one has submitted to the doctrines of islam, then it suddenly becomes possible for one to strap on a rucksack full of explosives & set out to kill innocent people.
Of course there are people who have submitted to islamic doctrines who do not, and would not, carry out such an act. So can we say that submitting to islamic doctrines is not a sufficient condition for committing a terrorist act? (Which is another way of expressing the oft-heard assertion that not every Muslim is an Islamic terrorist.)
But given that there are so many people who have committed acts of terrorism and shouted out the takbir as they did so, and left behind videos which demonstrate clearly their submission to islam – can we not say that submitting to islamic doctrines is a necessary condition of becoming an islamic terrorist?
To put this another way:
Non-muslims living in a Western country may be poor, may not like what their government is doing, be generally hacked off with their lot in life, etc. But no rucksacks & no bus bombs. Instead they’d behave in a civilised manner & vote their politicians out, work harder or get themselves educated in order to improve their personal situation, etc.
Many Muslims living in a Western country may be poor, not like what the govt. is doing, etc. And they won’t strap on a rucksack & go out and kill people either. They’ll vote, work harder, etc too.
However – terrorists who DO strap on a rucksack filled with explosives laced with nuts and bolts can and do only come from the second group.
Which tells you that logically, being a muslim is a necessary condition for becoming a jihadi terrorist. (A blatantly obvious point but it needs to be made.)
There are clearly further necessary conditions for becoming a jihadi, beyond merely reciting the shahada & becoming a muslim.
Familiary with certain islamic doctrines, perhaps? Moral courage? Physical courage? I happen to know a muslim fellow, an educated person who is pulling down fantastic wages, so there’s nothing coming over him whatsoever. And he was asked once by one of my colleages if he would ever consider becoming a terrorist and he said he would, if his (islamic) faith was strong enough. So – lack of courage then. This incident leads me to consider the theory that simply becoming a muslim is not a sufficient condition for becoming a jihadi, but it is however a necessary condition.
Thoughts?
Thanks again. For some reason there is no reply button below your last comment, so I’m answering here. I agree with you.
As for thoughts–
The account of the financially successful, educated Muslim who said he would contemplate being a terrorist if his faith were strong enough is chilling. I’ve heard Christians wonder aloud if their faith were strong enough to sustain martyrdom, which means, of course, being killed for Christ’s sake. The Muslim meaning of the word “martyrdom” is itself a terrible testimony to the difference between the two ideologies. I say “ideologies” because I think the use of the term “religion” for Islam is a significant part of why we have not been able to stop it from infiltrating our countries. I think it should be stripped of its status as a religion, because Muhammad clearly meant something other than what we have in mind when we say “religion”.
I don’t know how it relates to your analysis, but many so-called moderate Muslims concern me more than the radicals. My reasoning is that radicals inspire alarm and resistance. It is easy to get the public’s attention and support for fighting against people who blow up subways or whatever.
The moderates, on the other hand who reject unbridled vigilante violence but still support some measure of sharia, can get a lot further into a society without triggering alarm, and anyone who opposes them is much more likely to be smeared as an “Islamophobe”, racist, xenophobe, etc.
But both the radical and the “moderate” are following the same playbook in one important respect. They both accept the idea that Islam should rule the world, i.e. control non-Muslims. Their differences lie more in methodology and perhaps a stomach for violence.
The “moderate” or even nominal Muslim who is nice and peaceful but who will vote for Muslim candidates and support the imposition of sharia law, however leniently it is interpreted and applied, is still going to use democracy as a tool to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam, whether or not he or she even thinks it through.
He or she may not have the stomach or the bent for vigilante violence, but the end result will be the same as what has happened in Egypt, Turkey, or Pakistan over the last 50 years or so. Have you seen the photos of Pakistani or Egyptian women dressed like Westerners in the 1950s or ’60s? And I was stunned when I read Egyptian President Nasser’s one-liner in the mid-1950s or so, joking about the silly idea that Egyptian women would ever again wear the hijab.
The enforcement may be done by calm policemen in uniforms who take people to hidden cells somewhere, rather than by screaming suicide bombers, and moderate or nominal Muslims may feel a lot more comfortable with that, but still Islam will achieve dominance and maintain control over non-Muslims as well as Muslims.
When one considers their situation, it makes sense. They have almost all been raised from birth in a belief system which taught them that they did not have the right to disbelieve, and which also taught them, however implicitly, the belief that True Religion (Islam) is not a part of life separate from politics and social control, but rather a total life control system.
Lenient Islam and strict Islam are two poles on a spectrum, but it seems to me that the spectrum itself– the application of Islamic control– is evil, if for no other reason than that it denies basic human rights such as freedom of belief and freedom of speech– and then there is the double legal standard that discriminates against non-Muslims, and so much more.
I cannot get over how little is made in the West of the OIC’s– all Islam-dominated nations’–unanimous, decades-long rejection of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically because they said correctly that it was incompatible with Islam. And, if that were not enough to get anyone’s attention, they punctuated that telling rejection by finally formulating an alternative, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights, which declares itself to be specifically compatible with Islam and which is a sickening joke in the realm of human rights.
I would think that long ago we would have seen a campaign similar to the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa. And the media say . . . ? And the university students, inspired by their professors, shout into their bullhorns as the police shoot teargas canisters . . . ? (Crickets chirping)
As for the communists – how many people know that the Soviets kept open Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, & used them as concentration camps – and that one in three of their prisoners died?
And who today knows about the Katyn massacre ?
Well, if it’s any comfort to you, I know about the things you mention.
Indeed, the ‘sardine method’ of disposal of human debris was developed by the NKVD/Cheka and was in turn used very effectively by the SS in the Baltic States. There is a video made in the Baltic States about the tie up between the SS and NKVD called “The Soviet Story” available through amazon http://www.amazon.com/The-Soviet-Story-Languages-Disc/dp/0615354963. Although rather gruesome, it does make some interesting and relevant comments on the overlooked barbarity of the “caring sharing” political Left.
Thanks for that tip, I’m watching the movie right now.
One thing that keeps being forgotten, sometimes deliberately for sure: National Socialism was not “right”, it was “left”. Read about the early history of their movement in the 1920’s and before 1933. The Nazis identified themselves as “left”, loud and clear!!! Why is this so constantly ignored today? Apart from the fact that it comes in handy for certain polemic uses, maybe the main misunderstanding comes from their opposition to the communists. It makes one jump on the assumption that they must have held opposing political views then, but in reality it was competition for one and the same ideological ground. And they won that competition and crushed their main enemies, the communists, long before they started taking action against Jews. People like to believe in simple things, but the Nazi movement really was not such a simple thing.
It’d be quite refreshing if at least some of these journalists who bandy such terms about bothered to actually define their own terms – if one takes “right wing” to mean minimal government interference, and “left wing” to mean extreme levels of government interference in the lives of citizens, then there was no difference between the Nazis and the Soviets.
At a practical, man-in-the-street level, both systems offered work & stability, failed to deliver, & sent their own citizens into camps where they were lucky to be heard from again. So really, as an everyday Joe, what was the difference between the two systems?
Never mind all the fancy, high-falutin’ language & talk of fancy principles – at a street level they promised jobs & stability & in return demanded your soul – if you failed to go along then you ended up being lifted in the middle of the night & whisked away to a camp.
So really? Right wing, left wing? I say to-mah-to, and you say to-may-to.
What I’m driving at in my sleep-deprived way is that for the man in the street, all these politicians going blah blah blah is just white noise – we all know they’ll say absolutely anything to get into power & then stay there – in real practical terms, political systems can be examined using three criteria – money, stability and control.
In terms of the last criteria, which I would argue is the most important since it goes directly to that which makes us human, the ability to choose our lives for ourselves, to think and express ourselves freely, there was no difference between the Soviets and the Nazis. Extreme control and extreme penalties for transgression.
Are we on a slippery slope towards the same kind of thought control – aka tyranny?
Creeping towards Dachau …
Yes.
Thanks for the link; I’ve bookmarked it.
Thank you, MC, for this enlightening article, including the personal testimony. It is fascinating and instructive to hear from someone with your experience and the knowledge and wisdom to interpret it.
Well another similarity. In the early days of Islam, Arab Muslim men got a guaranteed minimum income. In Saudi-Arabia, Saudi Muslim men get a guaranteed minimum income. Socialists, like Occupy, often toy with the same idea. But if you run afoul of TPTB, you’ll need a guaranteed minimum income yourself. How ironical.
Saudi Arabia was a wasteland for centuries until King Abdul Aziz consolidated power in the 19th century. But then Islam was started in the 7th century and I presume you are talking about recent history with workers getting equal pay. Of course, the draw for Islam is and has been booty all along and of course sex slaves. But some like the killing and pillaging of various parts of the world too.
A Mohammed biography points out his, Moh’s, megalo idea of becoming greater than Alexander The Great
Could there, with an Arabic warlord, be a feeling of inferiority confronted with the fact that Alexander (the Macedonian) ruled a Greek empire? Hence the idea of conquering the whole world (caliphate) – with sharia as the means to keeping the peoples down (islam), and a book to go with it as an alibi, posing as a religion.
Norwegian taxpayers to save Somalia
Socialist communists in accordance with islam, have decided that Norwegian taxpayers help Somalia back on its feet.
Better them than us (USA). I hope I live to see the day that not one single life is wasted by our military in the steaming cesspool of the Muslim Middle East.
Well, circle the date of October 8, 2033, and hope you’re still around as a mortal to see it. Or even better, as an immortal spirit. If the authors of Prophet of Doom, Future History, The Owner’s Manual, and An Introduction to God, have correctly discerned the timeline of Scripture, that should be the date that the Kingdom of God begins, under the rule of Yahowsha (the actual name of the one commonly called “Jesus”), or maybe Yahowah himself (God). But the seven years (2,520 days) leading up to then, The Tribulation, is likely to be… unpleasant, to grossly understate things, for those still on Earth as mortals. It seems that from how Scripture describes those days, at most 5% of those on Earth as mortals at the start of the Tribulation will still be alive as mortals at the end. But if you manage to survive The Tribulation, you will definitely see Islam, as well as Socialist Secular Humanism, and all other man-made organized religions, cleansed from the face of the Earth by the end. If you read An Introduction to God, definitely prepare to have any religious beliefs you have to be severely challenged. It may come as a big surprise to find that Yahowah has a very low opinion of organized religion, but The Adversary finds it the perfect tool for his purposes. So in a way, you can say that all these belief systems that treat normal people with contempt DO come from the same source, the one who wants to Lord over, dominate, control, and own human souls… and that’s NOT Yahowah – he wants spiritual family.
Did they come from the same source? If the answer is theological, yes. It is that same fundamental attitude that afflicts humanity, as allegorised in the tale of the Garden of Eden–eat the forbidden fruits so ‘ye will be like gods’. Paradoxically, the deification of man as seen by the author as common to socialism and Islam has the effect of a rejection of a doctrine explicitly stated in and arising from the Genesis creation account and common to Judaism and Christianity (who both, after all, tell the story of creation with the same words)–the making of man in the image of God. Nowhere in Islam (I’ve read the Qur’an and the odd Hadith, and none too carefully so I may have missed it) do I see that, and (as long as I’m right), both Islam and socialism, by rejecting it, leave themselves with no compulsion to recognise human dignity. Their little man-gods are entirely undignified and undeserving of compassion. The collective becomes all.
Both Socialism and Islam have a long history of unintended consequences as well, desertification being one of them. Mao’s ‘great leap forward’, for example, involved the killing of millions of birds (because they ate seeds etc.). The unintended consequence of this was an explosion in the population of insects which still ate the seeds and a lot more besides.
The wisdom embedded in the bible enabled Judeo-Christianity to keep a rough balance, there were the occasional vicious aberrations which were corrected it time, before becoming terminally damaging. The whole moved forward in a civilisation in which everyone prospered.
Socialism seeks to redistribute the benefits of that civilisation on the grounds of ‘fairness’, Islam seeks to loot it, as @Nick points out, from the bottom looking up, there is not much difference between the two; my hard earned freedom and wealth, for which my father fought and maybe died, is being removed and I am being captivated and impoverished. The end point is when I become a slave in a new feudal society, if, that is, I conform, otherwise I die.
A simple (and currently relevant) analogy may help:
Nazis and Communists = Sunnis and Shiites (or, if you wish, the reverse).
Trying to draw such simple parallels between Islam and Marxism as being the worship of man is extremely simplistic, not to mention that Marx’s socialism preceded Einstein’s theory of relativity by about at least 50 years. In the end, both systems really arose as a means to subvert existing cultures. Marxism was born in the turmoil of the 19th and early 20th century, and essentially offers an ideological cook book for subverting capitalist society and installing a socialist workers utopia in its place. The reason God is left out is because Christianity is simply another incompatible ideology. Much the same way Marx would have excluded Buddhism and Islam. You don’t mix competing ideologies with your own. In the end the left and Islam get along well because they have the same short term goals: the elimination of our western civilization. Its a temporary marriage of convenience, just as it was in the ’79 revolution. Trying to describe it as evil people turning away from Jesus and god and turning to the worship of man provides little if any explanatory power for why we see what we see. If you leave the bible out of it, the analysis becomes much more direct and useful: Its the following of an ideological paradigm. A lot gets lost when you try to funnel your world view through another ideology such as Christianity.
In the end Christianity certainly has its place in our western civilization, but I wont use it as a means for analysis because in the end, it too is an ideology just like Marxism and Islam.
I was with you right up until:
“From these culture shocks arose a belief system based upon the idea that man is God.”
Umm, actually, I think that a non-belief system arose, which concluded that there was no god, and the whole idea just invented as a sort of man-made bludgeon. Socialism is merely another religion, replacing the supernatural father figure with the state father figure. More of the same.
Most religions eventually manage to confuse their founder with god in the eyes of their followers; Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be god incarnate, but that is what the RCC claims he is.
Muslims believe that any criticism of their trinity of Allah, Muhamed and their holy book is blasphemy.
There are still too many people too lazy, frightened or beaten to be independent and stand tall. They look for someone to take care of them, whether the state, the imam or a fictional creature in the sky.
“The idea of extreme left, and extreme right is a fabrication. Stalin invaded Poland two weeks after Hitler did. In 1941, the Allies had to rehabilitate Stalin by creating a propaganda myth:
“Hitler bad, Stalin good. The political left is honest and caring; the political right is corrupt and greedy.”” – MC
Quite so – and the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was signed beforehand. The far left and the far right occupied Poland together for almost two years.
According to Timothy Snyder, the author of “Bloodlands”, approximately 14 million people were killed in the area between “Germany” and the “Soviet Union” – and it didn’t make any difference to the victims if their killers were practitioners of National Socialism or Stalinism. Dead is dead, and killers are killers.
You still haven’t got it: the Far Left and the Farther Left split Poland in half.
BTW, the actual treaty was revealed by Yeltsin.
It was STALIN that set September 1, 1939 as the invasion date — not Hitler.
Adolf and Uncle Joe were to s i m u l t a n e o u s l y invade. They had eight days to mobilized their armies.
At the last second, Uncle Joe cabled Adolf: it was taking him longer to moblize than planned… etc.
In this way, Stalin got to set the date — and had the onus placed solely upon the Nazis.
In fact, A L L of the principals considered the war to have begun August 23, with the announcement of the pact.
Churchill put the Royal Navy to sea — on a war footing. Germany, Poland, Russia and France began to mobilize their armies.
Stalin’s contrived excuse came back to haunt: Adolf actually believed that the Red Army couldn’t mobilize in a timely manner. The result was Barbarossa.
You’ll not find any American mass publication ever referring to the Nazis as Right Wing — right through to the end of the war.
That meme was launched by the First Directorate of the NKVD (nee KGB) in the 1940s to put some ideological ‘space’ between Stalin and Hitler.
The only Axis nation that could reasonably be termed right wing was Imperial Japan.
And, for the record, Napoleon was Left Wing, too. ‘Son of the Revolution’ — remember?
The idea that armies on the march = the conservative right is upside down.
Franco, a real Right Winger — wouldn’t touch Hitler or el Duce with a ten-foot pole.
I find your post amusing.
You disown the failed rightist dictators but praise Franco who was less of a capitalist than both Hitler and Mussolini.
Hitler and Franco were kindred spirits. Indeed, Franco would not have succeeded if it was not for the Condor Legion which helped the Right destroy the leftist republic.
Hitler was the most ardent rightist who ever lived.
Whilst Franco had VERY friendly relationships with Castro’s cuba and later Mao’s China….Hitler fanatical hatred of communism caused him to launch a ridiculous attack on the USSR which in the end cost him the war.
You will find plenty of German publications which described the Nazis as Rightwing.
The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin’s Communism. The very word “Nazi” is a German abbreviation for “National Socialist” (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler’s political party (translated) was “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei).
Rightists desire limited government power, and therefore greater individual liberty. Leftists favor greater government power and control of people, and therefore less individual liberty. (Can anyone SERIOUSLY claim that the Nazi regime claimed any limits on its own power and what it could do, or that it was of any mind to leave anyone alone?) And what does anyone bet that the German publications that described the Nazis as right-wing all leaned extreme left (Communist or other Marxist) in political philosophy ?
Nonsense.
The National Socialists, as the strongest party of the right, have shown both a firm, positive relationship to Christianity…. We may expect that they will remain true to their principles in the new Reichstag.
-Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and one of the most conservative members of the Confessing Church. Quoted in Nowak, Kirche, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich]
The guy above praised Franco who certinaly did not beleive in freedom.