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Is Oliver Stone losing it, or did he ever have it?

So the Nazis were socialists. So what? As if capitalists never did anything evil.

An ideology as general as socialism isn't bad in and of itself--it's all in the execution.

The point is that they were only claiming to be socialists.

No, they were radical extremist socialists, which they proved over the course of twenty years of recorded statements, pamplets, flyers, leaflets, meetings, and policies. If a few of them weren't socialists, they certainly must've assumed that everyone else in the party was a socialist, and the Germans who kept voting for them definitely thought the party was socialist. How could they not, since they were constantly barraged with Nazi propaganda proclaiming the wonders of socialism? Do you really think that tens of millions of people kept voting for a party that claimed to be socialist, all while secretly knowing that the party was actually a front for Jewish capitalists?

Hitler even had many SA members removed, or "purged" if you will, that wanted their socialist ideas realized.

:rolleyes: That's not why he purged them. He purged them because their three million street fighters continued to cause trouble, kept getting drunk and beating up random Germans on the street, kept demanding that the German Army be folded into the Brownshirts, and kept dismissing Hitler as a "ridiculous corporal" who needn't be obeyed.

You might just as well argue that Stalin was a staunch anti-Communist because he had so many high-level communist party officials shot in the back of the head. He even kept a nifty bullet collection that was passed from assassin to assassin, as each assassin was shot in the back of the head by a subsequent assassin. Or you could argue that Barack Obama is actually a staunch conservative Republican because he didn't give Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader cabinet positions.

The Nazis told everyone what they wanted to hear, while doing their own thing.

Not at all. The Nazis constantly told everyone exactly what the Nazis were doing. They didn't tell the people that they were going to implement Jared Russell's idea of socialism and then go off and implement something else.

They explained, quite clearly (I'll provide a hundred or so quotes and links if you want), exactly what their policies were and why those policies were freakin' brilliant, revolutionary, and better than anything mankind had thought of before.

For example, they didn't immediately seize all the factories. They didn't claim they were seizing all the factories and secretly not do it. No, they'd already deluged the country with propaganda explaining why the seizure of industries is stupid and self-defeating unless the factory owners refuse to support the nation's goals.

Go read through the archives. The Nazis are on the record and had no qualms about saying what they thought, no matter how heinous those thoughts seem in retrospect and no matter how heinous they certainly seemed at the time.

Or think of this: If they freely broadcast to the world their insane plans for cleansing the Aryan race of foreign blood, why the heck would they have felt the need to lie about the fact that they were normal capitalist businessmen just like everyone else, just like other Europeans, and just like Germany had always been? Why would they need to fool a German people who had always been electing ordinary, capitalist conservatives?

Why would any ordinary, capitalist, conservative German politician think he would have to keep his political beliefs secret?

It makes no sense at all, does it?

Workers, conservatives, mostly everyone fell for it.

And still, 65 years after the war, people still fall for it.

Um, someone has falling for something, and a little more thought and a few deep trips through the archives might help clear up any misunderstandings.

You see, hard-core revolutionary socialists, the true-believers, think that only their idea of socialism is actually socialism, and that all other ideas about it are aberrant, misguided, and completely wrong. When some implementation of revolutionary socialism goes off the rails (as almost all of them do), other revolutionary socialists spill buckets of ink explaining that the failed implementation was actually uber-capitalism or some bizarre conspiracy in which the leaders of the revolution fooled the public.

This is quite obviously the kind of thing you've been hearing that has convinced you that radical revolutionary socialists (which the Nazis constantly proclaimed to be and which their wholesale transformation and regimentation of German society confirms) were actually part of a crazy capitalist conspiracy to only pretend to be revolutionary socialists.

For example: The Nazis constantly explained that wholesale seizure of the means of production is a tragic mistake on the road to true socialism, because it destroys employment, hurts the workers, slows down growth, reduces resources available to the state. They pointedly said that Marx and Lenin were badly mistaken in this, and that Marx's version of socialism causes nothing but class warfare and poverty, weakening the state and the people, whereas the Nazi party, being way freakin' smarter than Marx, would avoid such stupid mistakes and reach true socialism far sooner than anything coming out of Moscow.

From this well-explained Nazi position, subsequent socialists argued that since the Nazis didn't immediately do a socialist face-plant like all the other failed socialist states, they couldn't have been socialist, and if they weren't socialist, they must've been ultra-capitalist. Once that bit of bizarre logic is accepted, the train leaves the tracks and nothing about the Nazis makes any sense at all.
 
Oops. Sorry about that. :(

I get carried away because it's such a fascinating subject. :)

It was Rohm who dismissed Hitler as a ridiculous corporal, and it was his control of the Brownshirts that made him a threat that had to be eliminated.

Anyway, I think you might enjoy this really deep look into the intellectual origins of fascism, which is a bit off topic but nevertheless quite informative and very well written.

The Mystery of Fascism
 
And if he honestly thinks that Hugo Chavez is laudable, he should just remember this - Chavez has recently nationalized all forms of the press in his country and effectively made opposition to his regime illegal. Which means that film-makers who have an opposing political viewpoint from Chavez and Stone would be thrown in prison for simply speaking their minds, like Stone is doing. Sounds like a perfectly honest thing to do to me. :shifty:

There's a difference between a nationalized press infrastructure under community control and a nationalized press infrastructure running all-out state media.

There's a difference between FOX News and the private corporate media there, which makes Faux sound like an actual truth teller.

Admittedly, there is also a difference between shutting down RCTV and moving against Globovision, since Globovision didn't play a role in the 2002 coup attempt against Chavez.

Who reads the Huffington Post? If this crap is any indication of what's supposed to pass for the "left" in the US, it means militant ignorance has triumphed. Despite the viciously xenophobic campaigns against Chavez, he has repeatedly won free elections, and accepted elections that went against him. The supposed dissident media has operated freely for years, despite their eager embrace of a coup against the popularly elected government. Frankly, they should have paid the price for their crimes long ago. This Big Lie right there shows how worthless anything these people have to say really is.

Well said.

I find that extremists tend to be more similar than different in terms of their inflexibility and general detachment from anything resembling reality or good sense.

How is Stone an extremist? If he were in Europe, he would be a Christian Democrat and not on the European left.

gturner said:
So expropriating banks, car dealerships, grocery stores, food distribution businesses, farms, oil rigs, and oil refineries doesn't count? Have you not followed anything going on in Venezuela?
So far, all the owners have been compensated or there are plans to compensate them. I don't like compensation for the banks myself. Meanwhile, US localities do the same thing to homes for corporate development.

stj said:
Next, twisting language to make expropriation the same as eminent domain, seizure of assets in bankruptcy, seizure of property as fines, or even nationalization is not a legitimate argument.

We learn new things everyday.
 
So the Nazis were socialists. So what? As if capitalists never did anything evil.

An ideology as general as socialism isn't bad in and of itself--it's all in the execution.

The point is that they were only claiming to be socialists. Hitler even had many SA members removed, or "purged" if you will, that wanted their socialist ideas realized. The Nazis told everyone what they wanted to hear, while doing their own thing. Workers, conservatives, mostly everyone fell for it.

And still, 65 years after the war, people still fall for it.

I am tempted to turn this thread into a comparative analysis of Mein Kampf's planks and the actual Nazi program, to see which one was carried out and which one was dumped. I have read both works, too.
 
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