Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "TIKhistory"
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@suddenuprising None of that is true. All the government does is restrict who they can sell weapons to if they choose to make weapons, and decide what weapons it wants to buy. But Northrop Grumman could decide tomorrow that it won't produce a single additional piece of military equipment and will instead make commercial aircraft and fishing boats, and the US government can't do a thing to stop them. No one would go to jail and no part of the company and its assets, aside from classified material it possesses, would be confiscated. Of course that's not going to happen because Northrop Grumman makes a fortune selling weapons to the US government and our allies. That's capitalism. But there is nothing in US law that would allow the government to nationalize, confiscate, or liquidate a Pentagon contractor that decided to stop producing armaments.
The situation in Nazi Germany was very different. When Hugo Junkers decided he no longer wanted to make military aircraft for the German government, the Nazis seized the company, installed their own managers, and prosecuted Hugo for treason. He died soon after, while they were still in the process of seizing his assets and before they had a chance to send him to a concentration camp.
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That plan was for the most part not entrusted to radio communications, though. There were updates on things like diplomatic moves and expected local weather sent by radio to Kidō Butai once it was underway, and of course the famous and completely ambiguous go code "Climb Mt. Niitaka," but the preparation and planning for the mission was generally restricted to more secure methods, which was possible because all of the units involved in the attack remained in home waters until the attack force sailed. AFAIK there's no record that any mention of the task force's objective was ever transmitted by radio, let alone that such a transmission was even detected, let alone decoded, by anyone in the US or UK. And the Japanese were so determined to maintain comms security on the mission that they left the radio operators from the task force's ships in Japan to fake normal radio traffic as if those ships were still in port (which fooled everyone in the USN, including Joe Rochefort, into thinking they were) and physically disabled every last transmitter in the fleet, including those on the planes, until the attack was ready to be launched.
I think people today have been given an unrealistic view by Hollywood of how signals intelligence actually worked in WW2. Even with the Midway operation six months later, for which detailed plans had to be transmitted by radio to units scattered across millions of square mile by ocean, the Allied picture of Japanese intentions was extremely unclear and argued about vehemently by various commands. "Code breaking" in this context usually didn't mean reading the other side's messages word for word, it meant trying to assemble a picture from thousand of isolated message fragments and data points out of tens of thousands more that couldn't be decoded. And I find the idea that anyone among the Allies was reading JN-25 word for word at any time in 1941 not just implausible but ludicrous, given the absolute clown show of British response to much more widely expected Japanese moves against their own empire. In fact, Allied estimates of Japanese intentions were harmed in this regard by how much they did pick up on Japanese intentions in Southeast Asia, coupled with the erroneous assumption that Japan had neither the resources nor the inclination to conduct more than one major operation at a time. This assumption was shared by the British as well as American analysts and leaders.
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@ricardokowalski1579 That's the big question, isn't it? Get three socialists in the same room and you'll get at least four answers to it. Through the state, through the party, through workers' councils, through unions, through local communities, or directly themselves are some of the more common ones. I'm sure there are others I'm not recalling atm. But the important point is that the government is only one of the options. There are many socialists who don't believe in having a state or government as we know it.
And there are systems, like Nazism, in which the government controls the economy to a large degree but the system is not socialist since the benefits don't go to the workers as such, even theoretically. In some of these ownership and control is by and for the benefit of the military, which is largely autonomous or even controls the state rather than the other way around - Egypt and North Korea are examples of this.
But the biggest and most irreconcilable difference between socialism and Nazism is that socialism is by definition based on class loyalty and conflict while Nazism is based on ethno-national loyalty and conflict. In socialism, a Russian atheist, a Polish Jew, and a German Christian who are all workers are allies, the religious and ethnic differences between them being deemed completely irrelevant, and their enemy is the upper class, while in Nazism a German industrialist or financier and a German worker are allies, their class differences deemed insignificant next to their loyalty to the German people and Aryan race, and their enemies are Slavs and Jews (who are defined as an ethnicity, not a religion).
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@JRDavies "In the modern sense" is a shortcut because I didn't feel like typing a book-length explanation of how racism as we've known it for the last 400 years or so differs from its antecedents. Obviously it wasn't invented from scratch, but the pseudoscientific racism of the modern (including early modern) era has some very important differences from the simple ethnic or cultural prejudice many people are trying to cite here as evidence of pre-modern racism. The evolution of those differences is very closely linked to early capitalism, particularly, but not exclusively, cash crop plantations in European colonies in the Americas. I have studied this pretty extensively in the context of the history of my home state, Virginia. Most of the other colonies (aside from Louisiana) followed Virginia's lead in developing the institution of slavery and in defining and codifying race, although for economic reasons slavery never became the predominant mode of economic activity north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line. The evolution of indentured servitude into race-based chattel slavery as a legal and economic institution is a complex and interesting subject.
Racism and abolitionism are not mutually exclusive. As Exhibit A, I give you Abraham Lincoln. And of course many British people, particularly the ones making enormous profits from West Indian plantations and from the slave trade, were opposed or indifferent to abolition. And there were several centuries of slavery in British colonies before abolitionism became a significant social force.
I don't believe racism is particularly associated with capitalism today. (Some academics, Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander, for example, disagree, but you can take that up with them.) It was 300 years ago. The economic conditions that made racism such a convenient prop for certain forms of capitalism have been gone for over a century. Neither the US nor Caribbean islands nor Brazil have any need for a mass import of cheap labor, indeed quite the opposite, nor do the first two need to justify treating the native inhabitants as subhuman because for the most part those natives no longer have anything (mostly land) worth stealing. (Sadly, in Brazil, using racism as an excuse to steal natives' land is still very much an ongoing process.)
Authoritarianism covers much more territory than the economy. Many East and Southeast Asian countries are extremely authoritarian but capitalist. Many mixed, but much further toward the socialist end of the spectrum than ours, economies exist in liberal democracies in Europe.
Stalin, Mao, Kim, etc. are all from a specific branch of Marxist ideology. On the left, they are not seen as representatives of Marxism as a whole. You may disagree. I suspect that you are not on the left end of the political spectrum. This is the same as Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, etc. being seen on the left as discrediting everything to the right of Bernie Sanders, but on the right as not representative of the right wing in general. Democratic socialism emerged specifically as a response to the violence and authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks before they had taken power anywhere.
I watched this video and TIK's original video on Hitler being a socialist. I think there are some very serious problems with his analysis and even more with people supporting him here. Most of the people commenting, including you, seem to be using this subject as a way of using Hitler to discredit the left rather than the right. Both approaches are highly flawed and driven by ideology rather than scholarship, just as your using Stalin to discredit everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan is highly flawed and ideologically motivated. It's also mistaken to equate class struggle with racism or tribalism. They are completely different ways of looking at the world. Just for one, race and tribe are intrinsic, mostly unchangeable, and 100% heritable conditions while class is none of those things (other than for a few extremists like Pol Pot). It is true that both can be used by authoritarian governments to create an enemy to justify repressive measures, but the similarity ends there.
I'm doing this for fun and not getting paid for it, so please excuse me if I don't feel sufficiently motivated to look up and post a long list of citations. My university education in this area was 35 years ago and my graduate education was in a completely different subject, so I remember much of what I read but not much about where exactly I read it. You do your own research easily enough yourself with a trip to Google.
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