A Krugtastic BusHitler 9/11

Krugmania strikes deep | Power Line: "New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes on his New York Times blog:

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons."

And our "centrist" and "objective" lefty loons will be telling everyone that he didn't use the word "Hitler" and therefore Godwin's Law is not applicable. He's just speaking truth to power.

Never mind of course that Godwin's Law is nothing but a device to shield (non-National) Socialist's from criticism. If you're just waking up today, you might want to go look up what the abbrevitation "Nazi" is meant to cover up. Here, I'll help:

National Socialism Rightist?

The word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation of the name of Hitler's political party -- the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. In English this translates to "The National Socialist German Worker's Party". So Hitler was a socialist and a champion of the workers -- or at least he identified himself as such and campaigned as such. The almost universal claim that Hitler's National Socialism was Right-wing has always therefore been a little strange.

How can any type of socialism be Rightist?

I will argue that this claim must in fact be one of old-time Communism's most successful "big lies" and that the perhaps surprising fact of the matter is that Hitler's National Socialism was Right-wing only in relation to Communism. I will submit the radically simple thesis that Hitler's appeal to Germans was much as the name of his political party would suggest -- a heady brew of rather extreme Leftism (socialism) combined with equally extreme nationalism -- with Hitler's obsession with the Jews being a relatively minor aspect of Nazism's popular appeal, as Dietrich (1988) shows.

So let us look at some of the basic facts that history (See, for example, Roberts, 1938; Heiden, 1939; Shirer, 1964; Bullock, 1964; Taylor, 1963; Hagan, 1966; Feuchtwanger, 1995) tells us about Hitler's politics in the lead-up to World War II.

Hitler's Election Pledges

Although one gets perhaps the most basic hint that Hitler really was a socialist from the name of the political party he led, party names are not always very informative (e.g. "The People's Democratic Republic of ...." will generally be a brutal tyranny with scant regard for either the people or democracy) so more evidence than can be found in a mere name is needed. So some of the promises made in Hitler's various election campaigns are also therefore instructive: The limitation of income to a thousand Marks per head, the nationalization of trusts (business conglomerates) and department stores, agrarian reform, the confiscation of war profits, the elimination of "unearned income" and employment for all were all promised at one stage or another by Hitler or his henchmen. How Right-wing does all that sound?

You might want to go RTWT.

And while we're at it, here's a an excerpt from a fantastic Phyllis Chesler piece that actually is relevant to 9/11:

My experience in Kabul, Afghanistan, about which I write in The Death of Feminism, was not as a “white” do-gooding “imperialist” but as the wife of a westernized olive-skinned Muslim national. My own experience of Islamic gender and religious apartheid, which included purdah, polygamy, pressure to convert to Islam, normalized Jew hatred, normalized domestic violence, and cruelty towards children, women, and servants, the omnipresent head scarves, chadari (or chador), and the internalization of Islamic fundamentalist values by everyone, including the women who most suffered from such values, taught me that such barbaric gender and religious apartheid is indigenous and that it preceded, and was not caused by, Western capitalism, imperialism, or colonialism. I was in Kabul in 1961 and Afghans were very proud that no one — not even the British — had ever colonized them.

Because I survived and managed to escape from Kabul, I was able to draw some conclusions which, according to Thobani and other multi-cultural relativists, amount to heresy. I no longer romanticize Third World countries or despots as noble victims. Nor do I ascribe evil in the universe only to the West.

Precisely because I am not a racist I am therefore not a multi-cultural relativist; I am a universalist. I believe that human rights are universal and apply to people everywhere. This is not the same as saying that I believe in crusades or conversions or that I blindly support imperialist ventures abroad or that I confuse them with feminist ventures. I have simply decided that Western democratic and secular ideals and (imperfect) practices must be extended universally, that the survival, dignity, and freedom of women and intellectuals depend upon this.

But don't listen to her. Listen to the "moderate" Krugman. I don't know how much more evidence one could need about the crock that the Nobel prize has become in anything other than hard sciences and perhaps even then...