Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Getting OWNED over Hitler's Socialism" video.
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Racism in the modern sense was an invention of capitalism in the early modern era, and preceded the existence of the term or ideology "socialism" by at least two centuries. This is not a condemnation of capitalism, it is simply historical fact. Racism emerged because the new capitalist colonial powers needed cheap labor to work the cash crop plantations in their newly won American colonies, and racism provided a convenient justification for using captive people from Africa as slave labor while denying them the economic and political rights that indentured servants from Europe expected to earn through their labor, while at the same time claiming to adhere to Enlightenment values that were incompatible with concepts like chattel slavery.
Today racism can be found in, and used by, capitalism, socialism, or any other economic system. The two concepts exist on two different axes. It's sort of like arguing whether socialism or capitalism is more authoritarian, it's a meaningless discussion because there's no necessary relationship between any of them - there can be authoritarian capitalists and authoritarian socialists, and there can be liberal (in the traditional sense) capitalists and liberal socialists. Likewise socialism is neither more racist nor less racist than capitalism. The fact that people refuse to accept that is how you get flaming racists like Jeremy Corbin on the left who insist that they can't possibly be racists because they're left-wing, and useful idiots on the right who can't accept that people who literally march around wearing swastikas and chanting anti-Semitic slogans are Nazis because the original Nazis were socialists, not conservatives.
As for "socialism," I wouldn't quite say it's a term that is too broad and diverse to have useful meaning, but it's getting close, and if you're going to have a useful discussion of it you have to have a thorough understanding of its history and development. Yes, socialism historically had diverse branches, some of which were more left-wing and some, like National Socialism, more right-wing, but it's dangerous and generally mistaken to try to place Nazism on the spectrum of modern socialism because of developments both during and after its time. For one, while the DAP did include some left-socialists when Hitler joined it and accumulated more in the early days of its leadership, those people were purged when or shortly after Hitler took power as Führer und Reichskanzler and had virtually no impact on the policies of the NSDAP when in power - the Night of the Long Knives being the most dramatic episode in this purge.
Second, because National Socialism was so thoroughly discredited by the events of World War 2, it has virtually nothing to do with socialism as it has existed as a movement since that time. Modern socialism is almost entirely the product of either Marxism and its Bolshevik successors, or from the Democratic Socialism that developed as a response to the excessive authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks and their allies. And after the excesses of the USSR the extreme authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks was also largely discredited on the left in the West. To say today that one is a socialist, whether of the Marxist or Democratic variant, is to indicate adherence to beliefs and policies like trade unionism, internationalism, and the primacy of the material welfare of workers that were absolute anathema to Hitler and the Nazis. This is why TIK is 100% mistaken in saying that modern socialism has its roots in Nazism and is where the "real Nazis" are found today - modern socialism is the descendant of the people who were most diametrically opposed to Hitler from 1933 to 1945, people who ended up in concentration camps if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves under Nazi rule. (Or, for that matter, Soviet rule, since Stalin hated and persecuted non-Bolshevik socialists more than anyone else.)
(You did find a lot of former Nazis in government in Eastern Europe after 1945, though usually not in higher leadership positions - those were reserved for people who had been reliable Soviet stooges the whole time - but that has a lot more to do with Stalin's cynicism and Cold War practical necessity than with any ideological affinity between those people and Soviet Communism. Some former Nazis did very well in the West as well for the same reasons. Most of them were not Nazi true believers anyway, they were people who were happy to jump on Hitler's bandwagon when it helped their careers and just as happy to turn their coats when that became more advantageous.)
Likewise, the people who today claim or demonstrate an affinity for the Nazis generally have nothing to do with Hitler's economic policies and usually little or no knowledge of them; the parts of Nazi ideology that are reappearing today are mostly its racism, jingoism, militarism, and ideological elevation of violence as both a means and an end in itself.
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@valenrn8657 True, but that has nothing to do with race in the sense we use it today. The Thracians, Lydians, Gauls, Italians, and other neighbors of the Greeks were not very different from the Greeks in terms of physical appearance, it was purely by virtue of speaking something other than Greek as their native language that Aristotle classified them as barbarians. And they were no more or no less seen as barbarians than Ethiopians or Nubians.
The ancient world had little or no notion of all of humanity being divided into three (or any other number of) races. Even the classification of the descendants of Noah's sons in the Torah, which in the early modern era became closely associated with the idea of race, only covered the people in the general vicinity of the Israelites and didn't correspond to either ancient or modern actual relationships of people: Semitic Babylon and Nineveh were founded by a grandson of Ham, while non-Semitic Elam was founded by a son of Shem, and the Canaanites who were virtually identical to the early Hebrews except in not adopting monotheism were said to be descendants of Ham.
It's funny, people today get all wrapped up in arguing things like whether Hannibal or Cleopatra was black, but in the very numerous writings about those figures it's worth noting that the Romans and Greeks writing about them never uttered a single word about their race. To the ancient world Hannibal wasn't black and he wasn't white, because those concepts didn't exist: he was Carthaginian. No one particularly cared how dark his skin was or how curly his hair was or what shape his skull was because for the most part those things meant very little to the ancients except as interesting personal trivia.
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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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@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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@ikindawanttodie2236 That is incorrect. Control and profits are both part of the equation. Pure socialism is when control of the company and profits from the company both belong to the workers in the factory. State socialism interposes a state organ between the workers and the factory, but the profits flow either to the workers in that factory, or communally to all workers in society. And in Soviet socialism the manager of the factory is appointed by the Soviet, which is at least theoretically a council of workers, or by the Communist Party, which is, again theoretically, a body made up of and working on behalf of workers.
None of that was true in the National Socialist model - the profits from the factory went to its private owners, not to the workers or the state, and control over the factory was distributed between the owners, who oversaw how production is performed, who is hired to do it, etc., and the state, which means the Nazi Party, which was NOT an organization made up of or working on behalf of workers.
You and TIK are arguing that National Socialism and left-socialism are the same because they both involve state control of the means of production, but socialism and state control are not the same thing. Many socialists advocate a stateless society, and what Marx called the feudal society and the slave society both involved a substantial amount of state control (through the feudal aristocracy in the former) of the economy but were not socialist by any stretch of the imagination.
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@Warcraft40000 I get what you're saying, but the problem is this: in the academic world you're often talking about a very specialized context, and bringing in a definition from a dictionary that is not meant for that context only creates confusion and makes meaningful discussion more difficult.
I am an attorney, I've made a career in statute interpretation and annotation, and I can tell you that if you try to apply definitions from Webster's or even the OED in a legal context, or even worse if you look at the etymology of words that are used in legal jargon, you will get things very badly wrong. This is not because lawyers are trying to bamboozle the public, it's because its a very specialized and technical context that requires its own terminology to describe concepts that don't even exist outside that context, and while that terminology borrows words from everyday English and from other languages like Latin and Norman French, the meaning of those words changes when you use them in that context.
This is no less true of history, economics, politics, or any other academic field. If you are involved in a discussion on economics that involves the concept of elasticity and you insist on making pedantic points about the physical properties of rubber bands or the meaning of the Greek word elastos you are only adding confusion and removing actual meaning from the discussion.
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@KI.765 I'm not saying they don't have specific meaning, I'm saying that when you get into detailed discussions in any specialized field those meanings are not found in a general dictionary. The meaning of "socialist," for example, isn't what's found in Webster's OR on Wikipedia or even the OED, it's a meaning that has to be gleaned from a thorough education in economics and political science. There's no shortcut to that. If you don't have a good professional education in those subjects, all you can do is consult someone who does, or be willing to do a LOT of reading - I mean years doing literally nothing else.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm an attorney. I occasionally find myself getting into debates online about the interpretation of statutes or case law and the meaning of certain terms. Anyone who doesn't have a professional legal education simply isn't equipped to have that debate with me, just like I'm not equipped to argue the meaning of quantum theory with a particle physicist. And if I'm involved in a discussion of what is or is not included in the legal concept of habeas corpus and the other guy starts throwing definitions from an English-Latin dictionary at me, useful discussion will have ended because they simply have no idea what they're talking about or how irrelevant their points are. Habeas means one thing in classical Latin and something entirely different in a modern American legal context.
Saying TIK should stick to panzers isn't an insult, it's simply a recognition that he's out of his field and doesn't understand the definitions of the words he's using in the context he's using them, and is compounding that error by looking to the wrong places to gain that understanding. I have two very well-educated housemates, one is a PhD candidate in Political Science and the other in History, and if they tried to have a debate about tanks with TIK and started dragging in the OED definition of "tank" to say that an underground oil tank is a form of AFV, I would tell them to stick to their fields and let the experts say what is or is not a valid definition of "tank" in this context. OTOH, they both agree that TIK's understanding of the nature and meaning socialism is deeply misinformed.
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