Monthly Archives: August 2017

Blood & Soil BSers Look Back to Miserable Era

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by Gene Berkman

Q:”Why do Nazis rally around statues of Confederate heros?”
A:”There are no statues of Hitler in Germany for Nazis to rally around.”

Now that civic and business leaders in the south are beginning to deal with the statues of confederate politicians and generals, some are defending the statues as more about nostalgia than about racism. Of course, it is hard to separate nostalgia for the old south from the racist society that it stood for.

At the recent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, another kind of nostalgia was on display. A couple hundred night-time marchers carried tiki torches and chanted “Blood & Soil” and anti-Semitic slogans, in a juvenile parody of a Nuremburg rally. Americans, in the early 21st Century, nostalgic for the Third Reich – National Socialist Germany.

The National Socialist Party held power in Germany for 12 years, from April 30, 1933 to June of 1945. When the National Socialist reign came to an end, German cities had whole neighborhoods turned to rubble. Millions of Germans were homeless – they even created their own party, Bund der Heimatlosen. Factories and shops were damaged, and people were reduced to selling anything they had or could find to occupation soldiers in the hopes of making a little money to make survival possible.

Today, Germany is a major economic power, producing and exporting precision equipment and high quality consumer goods. Each year, Germany exports almost a trillion dollars worth of products. Germans have the highest standard of living and lowest taxes in Europe, except for the Swiss. And millions of foreigners have found in Germany a place to live and be creative.

Germany has achieved its economic success by restoring the market economy that the Nazis had destroyed, by enacting guarantees for civil liberties, and adopting a foreign policy based on avoiding conflict. Modern Germany has made a clean break with the Nazi past, and it has prospered.

Only a fool with a very low IQ, or someone with serious psychological problems, would think that the Third Reich was a better place to live than contemporary Germany. In Germany only a real loser would be nostalgic for a system that destroyed their country. In America, we have losers too, and they were on display in Charlottesville just recently.

The losers in Charlottesville included some who carried confederate flags, and others who carried flags with swastikas, mixing two forms of nostalgia. And who can deny that in the southern states today, life is better for everyone than it was during the 4 years of the slaveholders rebellion? After 4 years of the confederacy, millions in the south were in want, their dreams of a prosperous life dashed in a war caused by the defenders of slavery. How can anyone be nostalgic for that?

I guess nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be.

Liberty Against Fascism:Open Letter from the Libertarian Movement

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Today (August 12th, 2017), the “Unite the Right” rally is scheduled to proceed in Charlottesville, VA. The “Right” being united there isn’t just any “Right,” but one that welcomes white supremacists and self-described fascists. Multiple speakers will say this themselves, and the chants at a chaotic pre-event march the night before included Neo-Nazi slogans.

The purpose of this letter is to clarify the role for libertarianism in this rally – which is no role at all.

That clarification is necessary because it might appear otherwise. Three of the listed speakers have at one time or another identified as libertarians: Mike Enoch, Augustus Invictus, and Christopher Cantwell. Mike Enoch previously called himself a libertarian, but now mocks the philosophy as “autistic.” Augustus Invictus previously attempted to run for Senate through the Libertarian Party. Recently, though, he publicly changed his registration to Republican in disgust. Christopher Cantwell now seems ambivalent about his relationship with libertarianism and anarchism, but his primary identification is with fascism.

Regardless of how any speakers or attendees have identified in the past or present, we want to make clear that this event is not in any way a place for libertarianism. Among libertarians, some identify as “right-wing,” some as “left-wing,” and some as “radical centrists.” Virtually the entire outside political spectrum is mirrored within libertarianism, and this makes for no shortage of infighting. One area where the undersigned have consensus, however, is in a rejection of any attempt to connect white supremacy and fascism to libertarianism. Libertarians, including those who see themselves as on “the Right,” have no interest in uniting with the horrifically authoritarian “Right” – often called the “Alt-Right” – rallying in Charlottesville.

All this should be exceedingly obvious from even a cursory glance at the two movements.

On a historical note, modern-day libertarianism largely took root in the English-speaking world through Jewish intellectuals, some of whom fled the Nazis. Our movement grew as a revolt against fascism, Communism, and early twentieth-century progressivism. As Thomas Leonard has shown in his Illiberal Reformers, that third enemy’s intellectual history is closely interwoven with eugenics.

On the level of philosophy, libertarianism stresses the freedom of individuals even when that freedom goes against some supposed collective will. The entire point behind a politics of white supremacy is to replace free association with endless central planning and regulation on collectivist racial grounds. “Unite the Right” speaker Richard Spencer actively seeks to turn the United States into a 100% white ethno-state. It is impossible to conceive of this happening without a return of the total state and its horrors.

Despite the obvious incompatibility of that totalitarianism and libertarianism (of any kind), an attempted association between the two is unsurprising. Attempts at rebooting authoritarian movements often operate through a tactic called entryism. Entryism is where a smaller political movement attempts to capture a larger one and seize its resources. In cases like fascism and Communism, the tendency towards entryism is probably a joint product of amoral opportunism and an inability to rationally defend their views.

It is necessary, then, for libertarians to restate the exceedingly obvious and insist on the stark differences between our views and those of anyone with any affinity for National Socialist Germany.

Source, with (growing) list of signers to this statement @ https://libertyagainstfascism.wordpress.com/