Comments by "Mark Pawelek" (@mark4asp) on "TIKhistory" channel.

  1. A: On the other-side. "Hitler wasn't a socialist" argument can begin: 1. Hitler was still in the German army when he joined what was to become the NAZI Party [ German Workers' Party. After he joined it was renamed: "German National Socialist Workers' Party"), although Hitler earlier suggested the party to be renamed the "Social Revolutionary Party" ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Workers%27_Party 2. Hitler was essentially a state spy looking out for potential subversives. This was a time of revolutions; so the German army were legitimately concerned about what radicals such as socialists were up to. B: Having said that (above), Hitler was a "German people's socialist". He was against "International socialism". He was an anti-Marxist. ERROR: Hitler didn't call Marx unscientific. The NAZIs were contemptuous of both science and ideas. NAZIs believed in intuition, not intellectualism. I've a tiny disagreement, I'm with TIKhistory on most of what he says because the facts and history are clear. BTW: Marx's habit of slandering his opponents as "unscientific" makes little sense. Because, you guessed, Marx and his Marxists aren't scientific! Marxists have no empirical methods; their methods are driven by Marx's metaphysics : 1. "Historical Materialism" (including his class analysis of everything in history). 2. Marx's economics (where almost anything goes - provided it's "anti-capitalist" : e.g. Malthusian eco-poverty is now "anti-capitalist"!, as was Pol Pot, as is Keynesian Marxism. 3. Dialectical Materialism - which is ... - er what - what is it? A Marxist will never tell you so why do you expect an answer from me? 4. Revolution.
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  2. "it's economic purpose" <- teaching kids to mindlessly repeat the curriculum and not to think for themself has an ANTI-economic purpose and outcome. A society full of group-thinking yes-people will not produce the innovation on which a good economy depends.
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  3. Hitler was a National Socialist. Communism is supposedly internationalist. That may be why Hilter's communism was so short lived.
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  4. Pre-1939, Germany secretly lobbied Poland 8 times in the 1930s for a joint invasion of Russia with a plan to annex the Ukraine (This is mentioned in Timothy D. Snyder's book Black Earth, 2015). The Poles rejected Germany's enticements; perhaps because they knew the Germans would likely stab them in the back, and then invade Poland.
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  5. "That God is non-material" <- "Material" is a magic word on the left. It's the spell which takes other mysticisms (dialectic, gnosticism, speculation, pomo, sustainability, alt history [ e.g. women's class, racial oppression, Foucault's histories, ... ] ..., whatever ) and fits that magic into Leftism for leftists. There may be anti-Marxist Leftists but they are still spellbound by ideas claiming to be "materialist". But materialism is NOT a rigorous system of thought. Materialism ends up being a way of telling other people what one wants to believe. A person who wants to take material evidence seriously calls themself "empiricist" not materialist. Empiricism is rigorously defined and used by science. In contrast, those who wish to gloss over evidence dis empiricism as "crude science" but eulogise over "materialism" - with ever looking into it deeply - nor trying to justify it. I've found labelling oneself materialist often means one is Marxist - but not always. It basically gives one crude pretexts for believing the "material evidence" one wants to believe - if one bothers to try to justify one's ideas at all. Materialists mostly justify their ideas to themselves - with this spell : "I'm a materialist" - yet spend all their time attacking everyone else.
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  6. "Why didn't Poland ally with Germany against the commies" - question answered by Timothy D. Snyder in his book Black Earth, 2015
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  7. Left-wingers are group thinkers. As such, lefties support ideas on the basis of whether they're told the ideas are right or left-wing. Because the lefty hasn't worked the ideas out for themselves they can come across as stupid. A right winger, in contrast, does not need to understand ideas as the right basically go with 'what works'. So a right-winger only has to point to something working to say I agree with that! Many left-wing ideas are idealist, utopian or whatever. As such, the person who originated the ideas only has to promote a plausible sounding rationale to be taken seriously by the left. "The system is rigged against the poor" <- Evidently. The market system depends on money. Yet I don't see how this relates to many left wing policies such as climate scare, transing kids, trashing Western history, hating white people, ... "The right wing are full of racists and fascists" <- At this point, you've lost me. I'm pushing 70. During my life racism and fascism have never been so marginalized. The left have become an army of resentful, hateful people. This ressentiment and hate is justified as "critical theory".
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  8. Have your read Elazar Barkan's 1992: "The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars" ? Interesting book which covers much of the same ground. It may be a bit Marxian though. 3 decades since I read it. I thought it a good book but I've never seen anyone else cite it. This issue of race is what clearly demarks Fascism from Communism. Facists wanted to build their politics on national identity. Due to pre-existing empire building, need for nationalism, and moral grandstanding of middle classes (Eugenics) - race - became key to national identity. In contrast, the communist vision was internationalist. That did not stop communists doing race crimes - but it stopped communists developing an ideology which justified such crimes. Racism was a facet of German Fascism; not the main driver. The Great Depression was a bigger factor in putting the Nazis in power & the threat from Soviet communism.
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  9. Calling Hitler mad is, itself, a kind of madness. The madness of not even trying to understand.
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  10. Postmodernists had a term - floating signifier - for concepts such as socialism - ideas so abstract that the meaning can float freely - or - they can pretend they have a "meaning" - a substance to it - just because they've a word.
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  11. Modern Eugenics is called "climate crisis"; it's basically anti- all humanity now.
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  12. It's because socialist politics mostly seem to be about monstering people the socialists disagree with.
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  13. At last, someone explains why the Germans lost so quickly. The alternative to invading Russia was probably to invade Iraq via Egypt, via Libya (perhaps in the early part of 1941?). Britain had granted independence to the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932, though the British retained military bases, local militia in the form of Assyrian Levies, and transit rights for their forces. King Ghazi ruled as a figurehead after King Faisal's death in 1933. On 1 April 1941, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and members of the Golden Square staged a coup d'état and overthrew the government of 'Abd al-Ilah. The Golden Square (or Four Colonels ) were a cabal of pro-Fascist Iraqi Army officers. During the subsequent Anglo-Iraqi War, the United Kingdom (which still maintained air bases in Iraq) invaded Iraq for fear that the Rashid Ali government might cut oil supplies to Western nations because of his links to the Axis powers. Then again, Iraq wasn't on Hitler's menu. Ukraine and Russia were.
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  14. Hoggan's English edition (350 pages) has few footnotes but the original German edition is 930 pages; and has all the footnotes. PS: Out of curiosity I found this on the web. I don't have a copy.
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  15. Thanks. With Timothy Snyder's 'Black Earth', this gave me the best understanding of why WW2 was even more barbaric than WW1. I look back on those Dinner table conversations, where the Oxford History grad, 1st class Hons, would tell me that Hitler "must've been mad", because nothing else made sense. I knew that was wrong (because Hitler was clearly 'sane', in a similar way to how fanatics and psychopaths are sane) but I didn't have a compelling argument why Hitler was sane. Now I do.
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  16. @@grayelentrenadorpokemon3245 But, ... - why pick those two things rather than two others? - what about all the ways the two things complement each other? Dialectical materialism gives the thinker endless degrees of freedom to apply their subjective bias to arrive at, a conclusion - they probably already had in mind - before the philosophizing. The capitalist and the working class both want better things. They also agree with each other.
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  17. @@grayelentrenadorpokemon3245 Can you see how people looking for ideas which work may want to ignore dialectical materialism? I've noticed that many of the worst ideas in history were arrived at speculatively, or by elaborating on already established speculative ideas. So I have both a deep fear and abiding hatred of speculation.
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  18. The Japanese also believed, in a sense, that the USA began the war on them by imposing trade sanctions on Japan in response the the Japanese colonialism of China.
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  19. Leftists actually are stupid people. I define stupid as both ignorant and afraid to learn the truth. Is that an OK definition? As an ex-leftist, I know this; my lived experience showed me it.
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  20. The NAZI's were right wing and left wing. It is better to understand NAZIism in terms of it being a specific kind of authoritarianism. Likewise Stalinism is a different kind of authoritarianism. The NAZIs were anti-communist. For communists: all anti-communists must be "right wing"; by definition. They even call libertarians "right-wing" today, so the meaning of right and left wing has mutated so much. NAZI = eugenic, authoritarian, explicitly anti-intellectual. communist: anti-eugenic in name, authoritarian, implicitly anti-intellectual.
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  21. Plausible explanation for socialism.
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  22. One point. The Jim Crow Laws - against black people in the USA. Began in the 1890s and stopped in the 1930s. (no new Jim Crow Laws after the 1930s) So this kind of racism didn't take off until social Darwinist ideas had got underway later in the nineteenth century; more than 3 decades after Darwin published his key book.
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  23. No one wants to talk about NAZI or Hitler's real beliefs. People are happy to simply condemn them as evil, racist, capitalist stooges, ... NAZIs as servants of Yaldabaoth - the evil demiurge of Marxist gnosticism - viewing Marxism as a (different) kind of gnosticism in which capitalism is its Yaldabaoth. Today: Environmentalism and woke are also gnostic cults. Political gnosticism always seem to be animated with a very Manichaeism version of gnosticism rather than the mystic form.
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  24. I think families with 3 and more kids should be especially rewarded because we're now facing a population crash. The reproduction rate in, for example, Japan, is now down to 1.2 per woman. For a sustainable population it needs to be at least 2.
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  25. This endemic language of "you're all racists or facists" is a defense mechanism because socialism has never been shown to work. "As a right winger you must be trying to trick us" <- Yet you just spent ages meticulously explaining to us that the left are not stupid! To the right-winger who only sees failure to debate, group-think, foul insults, ... it must seem that lefties are stupid. Ressentiment and group think explain the left.
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  26. Your Putin quote goes on far too long. Yawn. BTW: After the Second World War ended, the soviets kept that part of Poland they took in 1939 but chopped off pieces of Germany to give to Poland. These parts Poland (ex-Germany) were then ethnically cleansed of Germans by expelling them to East Germany. Do you have an episode on the ethnic cleansing of Poland post-1945 yet?
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