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

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

The best thing he ever did was his cameo in Dave - funny and self-depreciating!

 

[gturner]

Hitler made false claims about being socialist to curry popularity. No doubt it is hard to accept that one of your spiritual predecessors could be so spineless as to claim to be a socialist. Console yourself that he was the greatest of the antiCommunists, whose struggle against Bolshevism has inspired your movement long past his day. Other people might not be so shocked to hear that Hitler was a big fat liar.

Okay, now you're just making yourself look like a tool.

Here's an excerpt from a typical speech.

The parliamentary-democratic system is inseparable from the other symptoms of the time. A critical situation cannot be remedied by collaborating with the causes of it but by a radical extermination of these causes. Hence under such conditions the political struggle must necessarily take the form of a revolution.

(2) It is out of the question to think that such a revolutionary reconstruction could be carried out by those who are the custodians and the more or less responsible representatives of the old regime, or by the political organizations founded under the old form of the Constitution. Nor would it be possible to bring this about by collaborating with these institutions, but only by establishing a new movement which will fight against them for the purpose of carrying through a radical reformation in political, cultural and economic life. And this fight will have to be undertaken even at the sacrifice of life and blood, if that should be necessary.

In this connection it is worthy of remark that when the average political party wins a parliamentary victory no essential change takes place in the historical course which the people are following or in the outer aspect of public life; whereas a genuine revolution that arises from a profound ideological insight will always lead to a transformation which is strikingly impressive and is manifest to the outside world.

Surely nobody will doubt the fact that during the last four years a revolution of the most momentous character has passed like a storm over Germany. Who could compare this new Germany with that which existed on the 30th. of January four years ago, when I took my oath of loyalty before the venerable President of the Reich?

I am speaking of a National Socialist Revolution; but this revolutionary process in Germany had a particular character of its own, which may have been the reason why the outside world and so many of our fellow-countrymen failed to understand the profound nature of the transformation that took place. I do not deny that this peculiar feature, which has been for us the most outstanding characteristic of the lines along which the National Socialist Revolution took place—a feature which we can be specially proud of—has hindered rather than helped to make this unique historic event understood abroad and among some of our own people. For the National Socialist Revolution was in itself a revolution in the revolutionary tradition.

He goes on and on and on and on and his socialist revolution and how it gave control to the workers and common people instead of the industrialists, aristocrats, and foreign capitalists.

From On National Socialism and World Relations by You Know Who.

Or there's this

...that is the German economy. It is no longer a pile of ruins, no longer a playground for foreign speculators who get fat while our people, starving and desperate, tears itself apart in senseless civil war because that is what class agitators lacking all conscience want. No! Today the German economy is a fruitful field for cooperative labor, honest toil, and honestly earned success. We owe these successes to Adolf Hitler’s leadership. We began with nothing but our labor and our confidence in him. We have accomplished more under three years of his leadership than we could have dared to hope. More, too, than hostile foreigners want to admit.

There are still large economic challenges before us. We will meet them, and realize German socialism, only if the entire German people remains united in will, strong in deed, firm in discipline, and loyal to the Führer.

Or this

No European could exchange places with an American. America is a pitiable country and the Americans are a betrayed people, betrayed by their leaders, betrayed and deceived in a simply indescribable way by their self chosen leader Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He spoke of helping the common man, but filled his election campaign fund with donations from uncaring capitalists. He began by wanting to loose the capitalist chains, but became as much a tool of Morgan as any of his predecessors.”

Or this

We stand at the threshold of a new era. An old world is used up and exhausted, a new one is knocking strongly and insistently at the doorway of the world. The young peoples, called the have-nots by the old sinking capitalist world, are demanding their right to recognition and equality. The aging world of money and democracy does not want to make room. The honorable Lord Halifax said it plainly: They want to live on in the gluttony and luxury to which they have become accustomed. Their standpoint was: “Money rules the world, and the have-nots will have to accept that fact.”

<snip>

The USA once conducted a war of independence against the British Crown. The Declaration of Independence of those freedom fighters even today is thought to be the beginning of North American freedom and independence, celebrated annually. But one today hears voices on both sides of the ocean about reuniting the Anglo-Saxon world. Churchill even makes the idea the center of this Christmas message in Washington. The sly old fox is quite right. The USA has decayed into the English world of Puritanism and Calvinism.

The hypocritical lying capitalist world of Manchester and Oliver Cromwell is today the world of Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Knox, Stimson, and their consorts. One can even say that the Jew rules more fully, ruthlessly and completely in New York than in London. Remember the oft-cited quotation from Calvin that the masses of workers and craftsmen must be kept poor so that they will be obedient to God, and will work only when they are driven to it by necessity. This is a central theme of the capitalist economy, resulting in the theory of the “productivity” of lower wages.

Or this

My friends, it is all a matter of education, of education toward community. Socialism is not given to us. Socialism is not a matter of dead points in a program, but rather socialism is justice. One may demand it because it is right, and it is right because it is good for the nation. That is right. What is good for Germany is right, and everything that harms Germany is wrong. In the last analysis socialism is not a consolation or refuge for the individual, but rather socialism asks this question: “What is good for Germany? What benefits this nation?”

I can keep posting Nazi propaganda praising National Socialism and denouncing Bolschevism and Capitalism, and I can keep posting it essentially forever because they deluged the world with a constant stream propaganda.

Guess what? It's archived. The only way you can remain ignorant of what they actually said is by remaining willfully ignorant.

For example, you said:

To top it all off, the implicit suggestion that this is even significant sort tacitly assumes that the "Jews" had extensive banking, industrial, real estate and communications properties in the first place.

Zowie.

You seriously need to read up on the situation in Europe prior to WW-II, especially from the Nazi's perspective.

You might also want to read Jewish Intellectual History: 16th to 20th Centuries

As an interesting side note, this weekend I ran into one of Rudolf Hess's relatives. He told me an interesting story about meeting a very old couple in Brazil at a restaurant. He stood up and offered them a seat, in the continental fashion, and when the old man pulled a chair out for his wife he revealed the number tattoo on his arm which ran in an odd direction only used at Treblinka. As they were standing there they exchanged names and when the man heard "Hess" he went rigid. He then spent twenty minutes grilling Mr. Hess about his family, his relations, his age, where he was born, etc. Finally his wife said to him in Flemish (probably assuming that Mr. Hess didn't speak Flemish, which he did), "Sit down. He's okay." They were a pair of Nazi hunters still searching South America. I'm sure the conversation was fascinating beyond belilef.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ stj and gturner, these Posts are getting too close to personal attacks; keep it civil, please.

 

[broberfett]

George Noory, the host of Coast to Coast AM(formerly the Art Bell show), had a guest on last night that he seemed really excited about. He had the guy talk for an extra hour beyond what was scheduled. The guest said that Oliver Stone is a Genius. George Noory then agreed with him. I know George Noory must follow the news as part of his job so he knows about the Stone story. The guest also seemed to have a sneering attitude towards Israel. The Israel thing just seemed to go well with the Stone love.

Edit: The guest was Craig Hulet.

 

[gturner]

^^ stj and gturner, these Posts are getting too close to personal attacks; keep it civil, please.

Oops! Sorry.

I always get a little edgy when I have to wade back into the Hitler archives.

But I did find this hunk of drivel he spouted on the day he went to war against the Soviets.

I, on the other hand, have tried for two decades to build a new socialist order in Germany, with a minimum of interference and without harming our productive capacity.

This has not only eliminated unemployment, but also the profits of labor have flow increasingly to working people.

The results of our policies are unique in all the world. Our economic and social reorganization has led to the systematic elimination of social and class barriers, with the goal of a true people’s community.

That was Hitler whining about how the Soviet Union forced him to go to war to save European civilization.

Skeptical cat remains skeptical.

Anyway, it sure sounds like Oliver Stone bought into the bizarre conspiracy theory that the Nazis were actually uber-capitalist industrialists and the sock puppets of Jewish Wall Street tycoons, especially given his comments that Hitler was merely a scapegoat. Ironically, that whole spiel exactly echoes what the Nazi's were saying in their propaganda, except they were saying the 'usual suspects' (capitalist warmongers, Jews, etc) were the ones behind the war against Germany.

 

[Hound of UIster]

George Noory, the host of Coast to Coast AM(formerly the Art Bell show), had a guest on last night that he seemed really excited about. He had the guy talk for an extra hour beyond what was scheduled. The guest said that Oliver Stone is a Genius. George Noory then agreed with him. I know George Noory must follow the news as part of his job so he knows about the Stone story. The guest also seemed to have a sneering attitude towards Israel. The Israel thing just seemed to go well with the Stone love.

Edit: The guest was Craig Hulet.

Stone would be a natural shoe-in there.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Yeah, that show is Kooksville for sure.

 

[stj]

^^ stj and gturner, these Posts are getting too close to personal attacks; keep it civil, please.

After I point out, correctly, that Hitler was a liar, gturner refused to respond. Instead, he insisted on uncritically accepting Hitler at his word.

Per your request, reply is censored. Your solidarity with gturner and his mode of reasoning is noted.

 

[gturner]

Hrmm... So you believe that Hitler was lying about being a socialist, and that Hess was lying about being a socialist, as were all the top Nazi party officials, along with all the lower level Nazi officials, along with all the rank and file members of the party, along with the non-party members? You believe that they kept everyone in Germany fooled for twenty years by deluging them with socialist propaganda, and all their socialist programs weren't really socialist programs, even though they looked and smelled like socialist programs? You really believe that? Are you equally sure Hitler and his cronies were actually a band of escaped Cambodian ballerinas, since that's about equally likely.

Mussolini, Hitler, and the rest of Europe's socialists saw the example of Lenin's disastrous revolution, which not only killed vast numbers of people but plunged the survivors into chaos, unemployment, and starvation. Obviously killing off all the factory owners is rather stupid and self-defeating, because those are the people who know how to organize and run industry. Without industry there isn't significant employment or productivity, and without that the workers and the nation are driven into poverty and weakness.

The march to "true socialism" thus requires a period of adjustment in which the existing industrial sector is kept whole, although the factory owners and managers will be forced to give the workers a far greater say in operations, and in which all must work together for the advancement of the people. Mussolini and Hitler repeated this essential truth over and over, hitting the masses over the head with it. If they were lying about being socialists, how come they spent so much freakin' time and energy trying to figure out how to make socialism actually work?

 

[Tan Ru]

The name of the party was the National German Workers Socialist Party.

Nice try at separating socialist and national socialist. It is actually the NSDAP - National Socialist German Workers' Party. "Nationalsozialist" = Nazi.

Even the idiots at Wikipedia have it right.

 

[gturner]

^ It has confused many people, but thankfully, Joseph Goebbels explained the distinction.

Because we are socialists we have felt the deepest blessings of the nation, and because we are nationalists we want to promote socialist justice in a new Germany.

A young fatherland will rise when the socialist front is firm.

Socialism will become reality when the Fatherland is free.

Why Are We Socialists?

We are socialists because we see in socialism,that is the union of all citizens, the only chance to maintain our racial inheritance and to regain our political freedom and renew our German state.

Socialism is the doctrine of liberation for the working class. It promotes the rise of the fourth class and its incorporation in the political organism of our Fatherland, and is inextricably bound to breaking the present slavery and regaining German freedom.

Socialism, therefore, is not merely a matter of the oppressed class, but a matter for everyone, for freeing the German people from slavery is the goal of contemporary policy. Socialism gains its true form only through a total fighting brotherhood with the forward-striving energies of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a mere theory, a castle in the sky, a book. With it it is everything, the future, freedom, the fatherland!

The sin of liberal thinking was to overlook socialism’s nation-building strengths, thereby allowing its energies to go in anti-national directions. The sin of Marxism was to degrade socialism into a question of wages and the stomach, putting it in conflict with the state and its national existence. An understanding of both these facts leads us to a new sense of socialism, which sees its nature as nationalistic, state-building, liberating and constructive.

Thank goodness that instead of having to rely on the third-hand opinions of our junior-high school teachers, we can now cite primary sources with trivial ease.

 

[JarodRussell]

I love it how you quote a Goebbels speech and take the stuff he says for granted.

 

[gturner]

I love it how you quote a Goebbels speech and take the stuff he says for granted.

Okay then, please explain how and why the entire Nazi party would spend twenty years lying about being hard-core socialists.

Please explain why, if the weren't socialists, they went to such extremes to transform German society in their great socialist revolution?

Why did they create social welfare programs for workers, demand fair wages for workers, etc, etc?

Why did Hitler constantly denounce capitalism as a Jewish creation?

Why did he write in Mein Kampf that economic resources should be seized by the state and that Germany should expand, seizing the resources it needed, instead of relying on trade - which relies international finance and capitalism?

Why did Hitler say, "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."?

Why did Goebbel's write that living under capitalism amounted to eternal slavery?

Why did the Nazi Party's 25 point program include points 11 through 18 (quoted below)?

11. Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.

12. In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries.

14. We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.

15. We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.

16. We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.

17. We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land, and prevention of all speculation in land.

18. We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.

So, their platform is confiscation of war profits, nationalization of industries, free land, communilization, bigger welfare checks, and death by execution for bankers and profiteers. Does that really sound like a program being pushed by war profiteers, industrialists, big land owners, currency speculators, and bankers?

Why would ALL of them lie about being socialists when they had no qualms about proudly proclaiming their positions on the Jewish menace, the need to remove the Jews, etc?

If they were going to lie about something, wouldn't that thing be their insane belief in racial genocide?

Put another way, the Nazis spent far more time proclaiming their socialist beliefs and produced far more concrete evidence of their sincerity (in the form of policies and programs) than Obama and the Democrats have about their own beliefs.

Yes, I too could sit here and claim that Obama and everyone in his administration is lying, and that they're really far to the right of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. I could shout that Obama and the Democrats are actually ultra right-wing uber-conservative super-Republican Christian Coalition secret operatives who are keeping their true beliefs hidden in order to fool the world. I could claim that all evidence to the contrary is fabricated.

But if I did, wouldn't it be time for the men in white coats to come and take me away?

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ stj and gturner, these Posts are getting too close to personal attacks; keep it civil, please.

After I point out, correctly, that Hitler was a liar, gturner refused to respond. Instead, he insisted on uncritically accepting Hitler at his word.

Per your request, reply is censored. Your solidarity with gturner and his mode of reasoning is noted.

What I said was, "these Posts are getting too close to personal attacks; keep it civil, please." Which has nothing to do with solidarity with anybody.

 

[gturner]

Per your request, reply is censored. Your solidarity with gturner and his mode of reasoning is noted.

What I said was, "these Posts are getting too close to personal attacks; keep it civil, please." Which has nothing to do with solidarity with anybody.

There's certainly no solidarity here, comrade!

*** gturner enters the crazy room where the mods and commenters on a Star Trek board whistle Horst Wessel Lied and reminisce about their Beer Hall Putsch days. ***

Hey, they have beer here!

I'm in.


Hey, isn't that Oliver Stone sitting in the corner over there?

Yak! Mel Gibson is smothering his bratwurst with kraut and ketchup!

Whoa, Alessandra Mussolini just took off her top!

No wonder all the mods hang out in here.

*** gturner exits room ***

Whew. That was weird.

 

[scotpens]

Stone would be a natural shoe-in there.

Not meaning to be anal-retentive or anything, but it's spelled “shoo-in,” as in shooing an animal away. If a horse race was fixed, it would only be necessary to “shoo” the winning horse across the finish line and into the winner's circle, hence “shoo-in” means an easy or certain winner. Nothing to do with footwear.

 

[gturner]

^ I am sooo tempted to pull the pin on a "Spelling Nazi" thread bomb and dive for cover.



Some other thoughts:

If the Nazis were part of the conservative, business oriented, old-guard, landed German aristocracy, industrialist class, why do we even remember when they took power? Wouldn't they have been the same people who'd been in power in Germany since the 1800's?

Why were all the party leaders scum-bags, ne'er-do-wells, failed artists, and malcontents if they were actually an upper-class group of elite capitalists?

If they really believed in free-market capitalism and the old industrial sector, why did they constantly denounce it, and why did they feel the need for a radical transformation away from what already existed in Germany?

If they really agreed with the American, British, and French elites about economics and politics, why did WW-II even occur? If their policies were no different from Swiss bankers, they'd have been our allies, not our enemies.

If they were actually uber-capitalist lackies, why did the great mass of German people, especially German workers, support them to such a fanatical, bizarre, obsessive degree, one that has rarely been seen before or since?

If the Nazis were such conservative right-wing extremists, doesn't it mean that the German people went from being center-left, union oriented, social welfare state liberals before the war, then bam - *craziness happens*, then instantly back to center-left, union oriented, social welfare state liberals after the war, all without any of them knowing that they'd had not one, but two radical and unprecedented shifts in political philosophy?

If the Nazis were actually right-wing, ultra-conservative, uber-Libertarian fruit-cakes, how did they reconcile it with more than a decade of policies that were the exact opposite, with increasing state control of everyting?

The point is that without a firm belief in hard-core, bug-eyed socialism and the primacy of the group over the individual, none of the other Nazi insanity would've made any sense or even been possible, as the state would have little or no say over individual behavior, beliefs, profits, attitudes, or religion.

The only thing Stone and his fellow believers in Nazis-as-uber-capitalists can point to is the fact that the Nazis didn't immediately seize and destroy (or ruin) the means of production, but the Nazis explained their reasoning at great length. Many of those reasons I have quoted above or in the above links, and Hugo Chavez has repeated some of the arguments almost verbatim, along with repeating the Nazi line when he does seize an industry for the good of the people.

In fact, if not for their shyness I'm sure Hitler's relatives would be suing Chavez for stealing Nazi party ideas propaganda lines, if not entire speeches. Fortunately he seems to draw more from Mussolini, so we can just sit around waiting for the European buffoon's union to sue him for copyright infringement.

 

[JarodRussell]

You are trying to put Nazis into the wrong categories.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

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.

 

[JarodRussell]

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.