In “Hitler’s Beneficiaries” by Gotz Aly, I learned how the national socialists kept the average German citizen content during the war through redistribution of war booty, through socialized medicine, appropriation of wealth from conquered countries, dispossession of European Jews, regulation of banking and industry, and propaganda.  Mr. Aly showed that national socialism was a political scheme designed to keep the German lower classes in favor of the regime.  And it worked.

In “The Pink Swastika” by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, I learned how the Nazi Party evolved from many socialist and sexualized small groups to become a self-referential inner circle built around Greek concepts of virility, youth, masculinity and ruthlessness.

And I look around today and see that all of the same precursors exist.  Go to any ANSWER web site and look at the hundreds of links to other web sites for similar groups, all aggrieved, all willing to use force to redress their own vision of social justice, economic inequality, and sexual inequality.  I see how the majority in this country, who I assume are mostly not in these sorts of hyper-politicized groups, nevertheless are now conditioned by several decades of predominantly leftist education and national media.

The national socialists in Germany took several decades to coalesce into a mass murder machine.  They didn’t start out killing, they started with a basket of supremacist philosophies and it took a long time for reality to catch up with their philosophies.

It feels like that’s where we are now–in the catch up phase.

Reality is slowly catching up with what have recently become the governing philosophies in America.  We won’t get to a terrible end for a while, maybe not for quite a while.  But I would really like to see the trend reversed, because where we’re headed currently, with the basket of nationalist, socialist, sexualist, and militant philosophies in control, and with political and economic mechanisms to manipulate the democratic majorities keeping these forces in control, is a dark dead place.

Coincidence is not causation, however, coincidence is not sufficient to explain the evolution of the Nazis.  They grew from their component philosophies just as we grow according to our DNA structure.  They weren’t pre-determined, but they were heavily influenced.

What hubris to think that we can engage in similar nihilistic, destructive, hedonistic and militant past times, and expect a different result.

Pre-9/11 Hopelessness (continued)

“The treatment of the Islamists, mostly the Muslim Brotherhood and other Salafists, as a viable alternative to secular and authoritarian regimes was stunning. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was criticized by liberals in the West, who suggested engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood in order to eventually replace the president-for-life. (more…)

Ideas of the Enlightenment: Their Contemporary Relevance

The French Enlightenment & its Implications for Liberty - Professor Alan Charles Kors

Jurisprudential Legacy of the Enlightenment - Professor Suri Ratnapala

Lessons from the Scottish Enlightenment - Professor James R Otteson

Towards a New Enlightenment: Understanding Human Nature

After Freud: What do neuroscience advances tell us about human nature? - Provessor Peter Whybrow

Building Political Structures with the Crooked Timber of Humanity - Professor Denis Dutton

The Modular Account of Open and Closed Societies - Dr Laurence Fiddick

Reconciling The Traditional with the Modern in a Liberal Society

Reconciling Modernity with Tradition in a Liberal Society - Professor Chandran Kukathas

Reconciling the Traditional with the Modern - Dr Lindsey Te Ata o Tu MacDonald

Externalities: Beyond Coase, Williamson and Ostrom

The Problem of Social Cost: What Problem - Professor Harold Demsetz

Coase Rules OK - Professor Jeff Bennett

If Hayek and Coase were Environmentalists - Professor Terry Anderson

GFC: What have we learnt from the 2008-09 event? A Stocktake

Been There Done That - Professor Peter Boettke

After the Fall - Professor Deepak Lal

The Global Financial Crisis and the Efficient Market Hypothesis - Professor Ray Ball

Australia - A Generation of Economic Reform

A Generation of Reform - Professor Wolfgang Kasper

A Generation of Reform - Paul Kelly

New Threats to Liberty and the Private Sphere - Nannies and Busybodies,Tax Harmonisation and the Surveillance State

Surveillance State - John Kampfner

Tax Harmonisation: A Threat to Liberty - Professor Sinclair Davidson

Nannies and Busy Bodies - Dr Eric Crampton

New Developments in Economics: A Sceptical View

The Use of Happiness in Society - Dr Jason Potts

The Economist as Guru - Professor Geoffrey Brennan

Behavioral Economics, Law, and Liberty: The Never-ending Quest for the Third Way - Judge Douglas Ginsburg

Science, Scepticism and the Future 

Constructive Dissent - Professor Steven Schwartz

What Does Climategate Say About Science? - Professor Terence Kealey

Freedom vs Authority - What Path to Development? The Story of India and China

Paths Towards Development - Dr John Lee

The New World Order: Importance of China and India - Surjit S Bhalla

Washington Concensus - Professor Xiannon Xu

History, Culture and the Language of Liberty

The Language of Liberty - Professor James Allan

Individualism and its Contemporary Fate - Professor Kenneth Minogue

Calvin Coolidge and the Language of LIberalism - Amity Shlaes

http://1000days.net/home/ (more…)

“9 indicted on charges of accessing Obama records

(AP) – 14 hours ago

DES MOINES, Iowa — Nine people have been indicted in federal court on charges they accessed President Barack Obama’s student loan records while employed for a Department of Education contractor in Iowa.

The U.S. attorney’s office says a grand jury returned the indictments Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Davenport.

The nine individuals are charged with exceeding authorized computer access.

They are accused of gaining access to a computer at a Coralville, Iowa, office where they worked between July 2007 and March 2009, and accessing Obama’s student loan records while he was either a candidate for president, president-elect or president.

Arraignments are scheduled for May 24.

The charge is punishable by up to one year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.”

“The 1941 pension reform also introduced mandatory health insurance, the lack of which had been considered a “persistent societal shortcoming, threatening the welfare of pensioners.” Monthly contributions were set at one reichsmark with exemptions for widows and orphans.  Previously, retirees had had to apply for state relief assistance or take out private insurance, which few of them did.  The new regulations took effect in August and November of 1941.”

“Significantly, the will to achieve social reform was strongest among those leaders within the Nazi Party who were also the most actively involved in pushing forward the agenda of ethnic genocide.”

Gotz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State, Holt Paperbacks, 2008. p. 56.

Just as national socialism gradually evolved through good intentions and the nurturing of a socialist constituency, so our own brand of U.S. federal socialism grows.  Obama and the leftists in congress track closely with the German national socialists of the 1930s.  Every one of these movements in history came to a very bad end.  What hubris to think our governments and courts could take over industry and banking, rewrite finance and contract law, redistribute wealth between the top half and the bottom half of the population, and ration medicine, while creating no negative consequences.  We cannot know the future, but on this well-traveled road, we know, for many, it will be deadly and horrible.   

Excerpts from “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: plunder, racial war, and the Nazi welfare state” by Gotz Aly, 2005.

ANY INVESTIGATION into Hitler’s ascent must thus examine the give-and-take relationship between the populace and the Nazi leadership. It is a matter of historical record that the party hierarchy was, from its earliest days, extremely unstable. The mystery is how it managed to stabilize itself, if only temporarily, so that the regime could survive for twelve spectacularly destructive years. Solving this mystery requires a more precise rephrasing of the general question “How could Nazi Germany have happened?” Namely, how did National Socialism, an obviously deceitful, megalomaniacal, and criminal undertaking, succeed in persuading the great majority of the German people that it was working in their interest? (more…)

click to enlarge

Russell Kirk

The American left embraces class warfare to move society toward a mythological equality.  The right, however, knows that you cannot improve America by destroying the elements that enabled and built our greatness.  Obama’s agenda enhances class division in America–increases the size of the class of citizens who use America’s social welfare net, and decreases the size of the class of citizens who pay for America’s social welfare net.  Whole continents of countries have devoted themselves to the pursuit of the utopia of equal outcome, invariably to their ruin.  History proves the futility of this direction.

9/11 Revisionism

9/12 Remembrance

[T]he moral destruction of communism was worse because the confusion between common morality and communist morality remains deep rooted.  With the latter hiding behind the former, it is parasitical and polluting, using common morality to spread its contagion.  Here is a recent example: in the discussions that followed the publication of The Black Book of Communism, an editorial writer at the French communist newspaper L’Humanite’ announced on television that 85 million deaths did not in any way tarnish the communist ideal.  They represented only a very unfortunate deviation.  After Auschwitz, he continued, one can no longer be a Nazi, but one can remain a communist after the Soviet camps.  This man, who spoke in good conscience, did not realize at all that he had just articulated his own most fatal condemnation.  He could not see that the communist idea had so perverted the principles of reality and morality that it could indeed outlive 85 million corpses, whereas the Nazi idea had succombed under its dead.  He thought he had spoken as a great and decent man, idealistic and uncompromising, without realizing that he had uttered a monstrosity.  Communism is more perverse than Nazism because it does not ask man consciously to take the moral step of the criminal, and because it uses the spirit of justice and goodness that abounds throughout the earth to spread evil over all the earth.  Each communist experience begins anew in innocence.

Alain Besancon, A Century of Horrors, 2007.

American leftists will ridicule their comparison to communists, however, in moral relativity, in masking harmful policies under good intentions, and in denial over their policies’ historical failures, leftists and communists are a distinction without a difference. (more…)

The World of Megaterrorism

BY ANDRE GLUCKSMANN
Sunday, March 21, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

PARIS–Read carefully the statement that claimed responsibility for the Madrid massacres. (more…)

http://www.isi.org/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=7d077ff6-d019-4265-8d76-39c724e72516  (more…)

Sadly, there is simply no way to fashion a reparations remedy that would not, itself, do an injustice to people completely undeserving of that harm, as if a fair value could even be sorted out.  Two wrongs will never make a right.

A crime requires a bad intent and a harmful act.  That intention is not inheritable by descendants of slavers.  Similarly, causation is not an inheritable trait by distant descendants of original victims.

So long as reparations remain the only end point for this “righteous struggle,” the struggle will have no end.

Great Myths of the Great Depression

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

How Government Prolonged the Depression