And, Muffti, I wasn’t accusing you of using the Nazis. I just pointed out that they called themselves Socialists. It could very well have just been a cover and they didn’t really mean it, as Tom says, but if someone calls himself a socialist, I will assume that what he does is socialism, at least as he understands it.

What’s the point of having a nice body if you have foul spongy matter between your ears?

He has a nice body and he doesn’t mind picking up the check at decent restaurants, and they are certainly not knocking down my door.

What would middle do? Froylein? Everyone please way in on this issue.

I dropped by Dunkin Donuts in honor of y’all today, but I figure it’s just not the same…

You can also pay extra for things you want – for example, hospice care in the event of terminal illness G-d forbid.

Neither of these options are available in single-payer, state-run socialized medicine.

Happy Chanukah!

The kaisers practiced a kind of social democracy, and were quite progressive in enacting social welfare legislation, out of a kind of state paternalism, in the late 19th C.

During the early 1920s, the revanchist right in Weimar Germany sought to make common cause with the Soviet Union; ‘national Bolshevism’ was the term for the movement. Later, the mainstream conservative chancellor Stresemann concluded the Treaty of Rapallo with the USSR.

Germany and the Soviet Union had in common opposition to the Versailles Treaty system. For Stresemann and others, an alliance with Moscow was a way to end German isolation and reassert leverage in foreign affairs.

Hitler manipulated nationalist and socialist themes quite cleverly. As historians like WS Allen found in analyzing Nazi politics in the early 30s, the party stressed the ‘socialist’ adjective in NSDAP in liberal districts, the ‘national’ part in others.

Fascism, at the very least, is massive state intervention in the economy– in Italy’s case, nationalizing industry on a wide scale. Hitler’s economic policies did not go this far. Still, Hitler and Mussolini both outspokenly rejected the West’s economic liberalism, against the background of worldwide economic crisis.

Hitler’s combination of one-man rule, quasi-socialism and extreme nationalism was very much a creature of its time. Maybe the closest contemporary analogy is the sort of ‘socialism’ practiced in the Third World after decolonization, ‘authenticite’ in Sekou Toure’s Guinea, for example.

amazon.com/Lib...

You can read a bestselling book that discusses this connection – and traces its history in “progressive” American politics from the 1880s on.

It’s called Liberal Fascism by journalist Jonah Goldberg.

2) Once the state controls industry – including the media, health care, educational and agricultural industries – there’s not much room left open to “personal conscience” in most socialist regimes.

Again, the example I gave you is health care. In a socialized scheme, individuals no longer can choose their treatment options since they are not paying for it. Euthanasia, anyone?

This is what’s happening in Europe right now – an accelerating slide from soft to hard socialism, with constricting personal choice and freedoms.

Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, was considered, along with most influential philosophers and thinkers of the day, a “liberal”. This rather broad base of sentiments began in a political sense with John Locke and was congruous with the broader intellectual revolutions of the day, including the scientific revolution and the enlightenment itself. Its emphasis was rooted in individual liberty, whether economic or political, and regarding the latter, remains at the forefront of that field. Check it out.

Most people think Nazis must be right-wingers becuz they were, like, you know, bad. But they were definitely socialists in that they wanted everything run by the state. Fascism can, essentially, be see as corporate statism, where the economy is run by, and serves, the state. If Mussolini was a right-winger, I doubt if he would have allied himself with anavowedly socialist party like the Nazis.

If you define “right wing” as people who hate Jews and Communists, OK. But I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Hitler’s socialism, after al, was designed to benefit only Aryans. Not too universal in its appeal. But socialism it most definitely was.

Right wing revolution? Muffti is feeling kind of unsure footed at this point terminology wise so let him provide a couple of examples and you can tell him if it’s not waht you had in mind. The islamic revolution in Iran. Mussolini’s march on Rome. Francoism in Spain.

But this may not cut the pie in teh way you are thinking of – these were clearly not cases in which people were trying to get LESS governmental control. But they also certainly weren’t socialist in spirit, intention or even in marketing PR.

Try googling the phrase “thousand flowers bloom”.

Then go here and educate yourself about Maoist propaganda:

geocities.com/...

Yes, the propaganda machines of Mao, the USSR, and Cuba all included pseudo-religious musical tributes to the “great leader” and the new People’s Eden that was just around the corner.

Numbers very similar in content and tone to “Imagine”.

Follow the links to the posters, and see how the visual techniques of religious icons were simply adopted to idolize the new political gods.