Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TIKhistory"
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@bludfyre "I would argue that "fascism" is socialism for a narrowly-defined ethnic or national group"
I agree completely. That is why fascism is not socialism. Socialism is aimed at the betterment of the working class, fascism (and nazism, to the extent it is a different thing from fascism) is aimed at the betterment of an ethnic group. Socialism is entirely about economic class conflict, fascism is about a different breakdown of classes of people based on race or ethnicity, not economics.
TIK fallaciously argues that socialism is not about bettering conditions for workers because its policies actually make things worse for workers. He is correct in that premise -socialism does not, in fact, work - but wrong in his conclusion. The fact that socialism makes things worse for workers is an inherent error in socialism, not a thing that makes socialism not socialism, or a thing that defines socialism. You can't say, as he does, that because socialism makes things worse for workers, any system that makes things worse for workers is socialist. That is the commutative fallacy.
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The first fatal flaw in your analysis is separating the Vietnam War into separate and barely related conflicts. From Hanoi's point of view it was one continuous struggle for national liberation that started in 1945 and ended in 1975, separated into phases named by the principal opponent in each stage. For them the Paris Accords of 1973 were not the end of anything but American involvement. A vital clue in this interpretation was their rock-solid insistence that any "peace" treaty left their forces in place in South Vietnam ready to renew their offensive any any time they chose. The South Vietnamese government understood this as well and that is why it was vehemently opposed to the treaty, but they had no power to compel the US to stay in the war or support the South after the treaty was signed. Yes, Hanoi really needed a truce in 1973to stave off the collapse of their offensive capability to US bombing, but they understood that Nixon needed an end to US involvement in the war even more, and that they held the upper hand in the truce negotiations and could hold out for their bottom line which was the maintenance of that offensive capability not only against, but in South Vietnam.
The Napoleonic Wars are a good comparison, and I think most historians, while giving individual names to the various phases of those wars, would indeed regard them, or certainly all of the phases after the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, as one continuous conflict that Napoleon ended up losing, separated into phases defined by who was actively fighting Napoleon at any given time. Every one of those wars was fought for the same reason, Napoleon's desire to make France the hegemon of Europe with his own Imperial dynasty at its head and the refusal of the other European powers to accept that result, and ultimately they achieved their goal and Napoleon failed utterly in his. Any temporary successes he achieved along the way, however impressive, didn't affect that ultimate result.
As you stated, the American goals in the war were the preservation of South Vietnam as an independent, non-communist country, and the containment of communism in Southeast Asia. Regardless of the temporary lull in the fighting in 1973 - a lull that every major player on the planet other than Richard Nixon, and probably even he, understood could not possibly be anything but temporary and brief - the fact remains that within two years of the American withdrawal South Vietnam was absorbed by the communist Hanoi government and Laos and Cambodia were controlled by communist governments as well.
Watergate and Nixon's fall certainly made South Vietnam's position more difficult by cutting off any possibility of continued US support, but I believe the ultimate result, the complete conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North, was inevitable from the day the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Public support for any continued US involvement in Vietnam was about zero even before the Watergate scandal broke, and the Saigon government simply wasn't capable of resisting the North's attack without massive US support, if not active intervention, and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam understood that. The lack of US enthusiasm for keeping its promise to Saigon was not a surprise to Hanoi, they had been counting on it - they could watch CBS Nightly News even if their subjects couldn't.
The second fatal flaw in your analysis is confusing battlefield success with strategic success. Body counts and battles won do not determine the winner of a war, achievement of the political goals of the warring powers do. If we go by body counts and number of battles won, the British won the American Revolution and the Confederates won the American Civil War, but obviously no one would claim that. Britain lost its American colonies (aside from Canada) and the South was forced to remain in the Union, so they lost those wars. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were taken over by communist governments, so the US lost its struggle to prevent those outcomes by military force.
As to America gaining by, for instance, lessons learned, the British Empire's naval superiority and general geopolitical position against its greatest rival, France, were better in 1784 than they had been in 1775, but again, few if any historians would argue that that means the British won the American Revolution.
Don't get me wrong, I am an American patriot and I think the US military achieved remarkable things in the Vietnam War and were forced to leave the conflict by purely political, not military, factors, but like Napoleon's astounding victories in battles like Austerlitz, military successes mean nothing if they fail to achieve the political goals they are intended to achieve. The simple fact is that the US did not possess the political will to win the Vietnam War, and so it lost the Vietnam War. North Vietnam's military position in 1968 was not good, the Viet Cong had virtually ceased to function as a fighting force, the Soviets lacked the stomach for a direct showdown with the US over Vietnam, and Hanoi's relations with China had broken down to the point that China was no longer a sanctuary or sufficient supply route for the North Vietnamese, so if the US had had the political will to mount an invasion of North Vietnam comparable to MacArthur's invasion of North Korea in 1950, the result very well may have been a collapse of the Hanoi regime and a complete US victory - but the US did not have that political will, and all of the leaders involved knew it, so there was no such invasion and no US victory. (And of course, there was also the possibility that such a radical change in US policy might have resulted in an equally radical change in Chinese and/or Soviet policy and a much more destructive direct war between superpowers, and that possibility is a large part of the reason for the American unwillingness to support such an invasion.)
The real crying shame is that the Johnson administration, and especially SecDef MacNamara had concluded by 1965 that the war was unwinnable for political reasons, but they lacked the moral courage to try to explain this to a then-hawkish public and accept the political cost of having the war lost on their watch. I'm pretty sure Nixon and Kissinger understood this as well, and they had no more moral courage than LBJ did, but they were much better politicians and managed to spin the inevitable loss into a US victory under Nixon's administration followed by a "loss of the peace" under his successors. He just got booted out of office more quickly than anyone anticipated and his successor lacked both the political support and the motivation to stave off the debacle in South Vietnam until a Democrat was in the Oval Office. IMO it is a testament to the consummate and devious political skills of Nixon and Kissinger that they sold their BS so cleverly that intelligent and informed people like you are still buying it today.
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@MarkErikEE You are correct that socialism is all about the workers. You are wrong in thinking Nazism was about workers. Hitler and the Nazis had to appeal to workers to get elected, but it was always about the German people as an ethnic group, not any particular class. Capitalists, managers, and professionals were part of the German volk every bit as much as workers were. It wasn't socialism with a side of nationalism, it was nationalism with a side of socialism, and in some other ways, a side of capitalism. Everything Hitler wrote and said in his adult life supports this view - class was nothing, race and nationality (which were inseparable for Hitler) were everything.
The Bolsheviks were not national socialists, they were international socialists. The dispute between Stalin and Trotsky wasn't about nationalism, it was about whether communism should consolidate its gains in the nation it already controlled before trying to spread to others, or whether it should always try to spread to other nations from the moment it gained power in one. Stalin took the former view, Trotsky the latter. Of course for Stalin it was always really about his own personal power, as Orwell described, but that doesn't really speak to Stalin's ideology so much as his lack of a genuine one. (Which also distinguishes Stalin from Hitler, for whom his nationalist and racist ideology was the only point to having power.)
You can't hope to understand Hitler without starting with what he took from Nietszche and Darwin (mistakenly in both cases, but those were his core beliefs).
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The mistake you're making is ignoring the even more massive elephant in the room, the fact that the DAF was a means for the state to control workers, not a means for workers to control the state or the workplace. The fact that DAF was often adversarial to management does not mean it was controlled by the workers. This is the difference between the DAF and a real labor union. The quote you put up at 12:03 shows this - corporate management was taking directives from government officials, not workers' representatives. A labor union isn't just an organization of workers, it is an organization run by workers or by representatives elected by workers.
In general you always seem to fall into the trap of reasoning that Hitler had to either be a capitalist or a socialist, and therefore that you can show he wasn't a capitalist, he must have been a socialist. This is a classic false dilemma fallacy. The Nazis were neither capitalist nor socialist, they were a third system in which neither the interests of capitalists nor those of workers controlled policy, they were both subordinated to the militarist state. Everything done by the DAF was intended to benefit the state and its war machine - if it advocated for better conditions for workers, that was solely because it had determined that better conditions would make workers more productive in support of the war effort. George Orwell, as good an authority on communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism as I think there has ever been, put it best: the Nazis borrowed from both capitalism and socialism whatever policies they thought would make the economy more efficient in serving the state.
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Anarchy is your sixth grade gym class, forever.
Anarcho-capitalism is much like socialism: it's a great idea that cannot possibly work because it requires human beings to be Vulcans, elves, or something other than human beings. It's also a religion. Libertoons irrationally worship the market in the exact same way Marxists worship the inexorable march of history. Your blind faith that the market, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything is no less irrational than the blind faith of socialists that the government or the Party, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything.
And anyone over the age of twelve who think taxation is robbery is profoundly ignorant of the foundations of liberal (in the classical sense) economics and politics. Again, it's exactly as ignorant and naive as "property is theft". It's something a teenager who knows nothing about the real world says.
I would highly, highly recommend you study of on Edmund Burke and the American Federalist Papers and proceed from there. Or better yet, study economics and political science at a university. And study some history that doesn't involve tanks.
And the belief system you're describing utterly and completely fails to take into account that some things (not restaurants) are inherently communal. Clean air and water, for example. Sure, the market can provide drinking water for a price. But I don't just want my own personal drinking water to be clean, I want the creek behind my house not to be toxic and stinking and kill all the wildlife, and also not kill me if I happen to fall into it. How can a market possibly provide that? How do I buy my own individual creek and not have the same creek that flows past everyone else's house? And what if my upstream neighbor values pouring the waste from his lead mine and smelter into the creek more than he values the water downstream from him being clean? How can market possibly address that? And do we really want to pay individually for clean air to be pumped into our own little airtight bubbles so we can breathe it? The reality is that everyone breathes the same air, regardless of how much we pay or how much we pollute as individuals. You're too young to remember the days when we had "market-provided" clean air and water and the government kept its nose out of it, which meant we had rivers catching on fire and life expectancy cut by ten years or more by breathing smog all day. In practice, the way the market provided clean air and water was that rich people all lived upwind and upstream from the pollution and poor people lived with the smog and toxic rivers. But that only worked so well, and the wealthiest men in London still breathed toxic fumes when they went into the City.
And the idea of a "market for security" is quite simply idiotic. Yes, there can be market solutions to providing those services - but the market cannot possibly determine how much funding should be put into security, or provide the funding, because security (beyond the level of private bodyguards, who are pretty much zero use when another country invades or lobs nukes) is also inherently communal. If I think I need $100 per capita worth of security, and the other 99 people in the area to be secured decide they want to pay zero for security, my $100 will buy $1 per capita of security for me and also for all of my 99 neighbors, who will pay nothing but get the exact same security that I get. Thanks, I'll take the state military-industrial complex over that any day of the week.
And then we can get into a market for justice. Then again, let's not. I can only take so much brain hurt from the stupid in one day.
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@adolphdresler3753 Social control of the means of production, which means either by (in most cases) or on behalf of the workers.
In a broader sense, any system in which the distribution of wealth is a political process and is intended to benefit the working class almost exclusively. The existence of some amount of corruption doesn't necessarily take the system out of the realm of socialism (it makes it flawed socialism), but at some point you have to say the scheme is no longer intended even theoretically to benefit the working class and what you have is a kleptocracy.
The Nazis did not come anywhere near either of those models, so they were not socialist. To the extent they controlled the means of production, that control was not exercised by or on behalf of the workers, or to their benefit, it was directed to the benefit of the military machine. To the extent the Nazis granted any concessions or benefits for workers, it was only because they calculated that this would make the workers more productive and efficient servants of the military machine. For the same reason, the Nazis generally did not interfere with the extraction of large profits by the industrial capitalists, not because the Nazis were devoted to capitalism, but because they deemed that this was the best way to maximize production in support of the war effort.
Unlike TIK, I'm not just making up my own definitions because they suit my purposes. This is how actual socialists define socialism.
George Orwell called all of this 75 years ago.
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