Communism, Fascism, & Democracy： The Three Headed Beast
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Summary
In this episode, I discuss the ideological differences between International Socialism and National Socialism, and how they are different from each other. I discuss why the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were so similar, and why they were so different from one another.
Transcript
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Communism and Fascism are the two great boogeymans of the 20th century.
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If we think about them at all nowadays, we have a very cartoony approach to them.
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If we think about Communism, we think of Red Dawn with the Soviet troops invading,
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In the case of Fascism, we think of Captain America fighting the Red Skull,
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or the Nazi paratroopers marching down the street with their Hugo Boss designed uniforms.
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The problem with these views is that it blinds us to what was really going on with these societies,
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what the nature of the ideology forming them was.
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We miss the forest for the trees. We see all the details.
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We don't see the larger animus behind both of these things.
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And I think the best way to explain what this animus was, this spirit motivating these two societies,
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is to move away from the words Communism and Fascism and use the alternate titles for these systems of governance.
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International Socialism and National Socialism.
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With International Socialism, we see the threat of this ideology immediately in the title.
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You know, typically, people that think about the Cold War nowadays,
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they were probably children while the Cold War was going on.
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And so, to them, all they saw was these two giant nations, these two superpowers,
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who just could not trust one another, who were paranoid.
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They both had the atom bomb, and they always expected the other one to launch the atom bomb first.
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And so you get this extremely tense situation, and it seems ridiculous, it seems idiotic.
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But when you look at the term International Socialism, you start to see why the Soviets were such a threat.
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Their Socialism, it cannot be limited to the Eastern Bloc, it is an international affair.
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The very premise of International Socialism is that there are two fundamental groups in the world.
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And that the capitalist class has been oppressing and exploiting the workers throughout all of history.
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And so by the Soviet ideology, the workers from nation to nation would have more in common with one another
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than they would with the capitalist class within their nation.
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To the Soviet mind, the British people in World War II that were united from the highest to the lowest, they were united in the struggle,
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Because capitalists can never do anything but exploit, and workers can never do anything but be exploited.
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The foundations of this ideology is conflict between groups.
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Rather than defining themselves positively, you know, rather than saying this is the direction our society is going to go in,
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this is how we are going to get better as time goes on,
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they could only point to another group and say they're the bad ones,
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they're the source of all the evil in this world, and they're the ones holding us back.
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We need to destroy the capitalist so that the workers can unite, the workers can rise.
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And so you can think of communism, of international socialism, you can think of it as the sickly ideology.
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It's the one that states that the geniuses, the visionaries, the entrepreneurs,
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it states that the great people in society are monsters, and that the good people are the people with very little money.
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It's the people that just have a basic skill and labor.
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They go down to the lowest common denominator as the location of virtue,
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while spitting on those who bring genius into the world.
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You can think of it as the sickly one, that embraces human frailty, human illness, poverty, so on and so forth.
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Now, with national socialism, what you find is the complete inverse to this.
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The national socialists, they don't define themselves based upon people outside of their borders.
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And so they come up with a mythos of what makes them great.
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You know, let's look at the Nazis, specifically.
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They had the whole Teutonic myth about how the German people were the chosen people,
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the best and most perfect people on the planet.
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But just like the international socialists must attack the capitalists,
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the national socialists, they must attack as well.
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Because it's not enough to make this affirmation.
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You know, it's not enough to say that the blonde, blue-eyed people are the best people.
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Because Germany, in the 1930s, they had just suffered the defeat of World War I.
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So, if you said the German people were the best, the question is, well, why aren't we the best then?
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And so the response, the response is not that we must keep working on ourselves and moving forward to achieve this ideal, no.
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No, the response is to blame the failures on some other group.
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And in the case of Germany, it was the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Communists.
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And so with Germany, they did celebrate positive ideals.
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They celebrated the visionary, the accomplished athlete, the musician.
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But they could only celebrate these ideals while hating another group.
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And so just like international socialism creates the conflict between capitalists and workers,
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National socialism requires a similar conflict.
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It needs another group to blame all of its problems on.
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Rather than having an ideal that it's working towards,
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and the same thing with communism, rather than having an ideal society it's working towards,
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they must have a scapegoat to blame for why we're not there already.
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They are utopian in that both of them promise heaven on earth.
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They promise when we finally kill all the capitalists,
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when we finally get rid of all the Gypsies and Jews,
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We will have a Reich that will last for a thousand years.
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But the reality is that neither of them truly has a solution.
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And so that's why they must push the evil of the world onto a specific group.
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It's one goat that you put all of the tribe's sins on and then chase off into the wilderness.
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Now there is a third ideology that came out of the 19th, 20th centuries.
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Or perhaps a better term for it might be universal socialism.
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You know, if you call communism the sickly ideology and fascism, you could call it the boyish ideology.
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You know, its vision of the man is like something out of a superhero comic book for children.
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And if you call it universal socialism, then I think you'd have to call universal socialism the most schizophrenic of the three.
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And how, like the other systems, it needs to break things down into two simplistic groups.
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In this case, we have the left-right divide in American politics.
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And see, the funny thing about the left-right divide is how frequently policies swap back and forth between these two groups.
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Civil rights started out as a republican movement.
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You see, back in the 40s, the Democrats were the union party.
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And a lot of these unions did not want to allow black members in.
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Because that sort of competition would lower their wages.
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And so the Democrats, in supporting the unions, they were for Jim Crow laws.
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Whereas the Republicans, representing business interests, were for the removal of Jim Crow laws.
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And yet, over the past 50 years or so, we've seen those policies swap between the two parties.
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The Democrats are now the ones that appeal to the black vote.
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And the Republicans are the ones that are supposedly a bunch of old racist white men.
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Another more recent example would be Obamacare.
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Obamacare was originally a policy proposal by the Republicans.
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It was a document they drafted together because if the Democrats ever got close to getting socialized medicine,
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they were going to propose Obamacare as a halfway solution that still keeps the private industry involved in the whole thing.
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And yet now, we see Obamacare being a Democrat ideology.
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Now, certainly, there are temperamental differences.
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An anonymous conservative wrote an excellent book, which I've linked to it before.
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About the temperamental differences between the left and the right.
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That the left tends to attract rabbit people and the right tends to attract wolves.
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But, absolutely, there are these two trends in the two parties.
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But the parties themselves, the policies they propose, the policies that swap back and forth between the two parties,
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This is not an Athenian democracy that we have in our modern countries.
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The whole point of politics and democracy is to distract the mob.
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You know, the same way that the international socialists,
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they would tell the people that all of your problems, all of these breadlines, all of this poverty,
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Those evil capitalists are the ones destroying you.
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The Nazis would tell their people that the reason your country is such a failure is because those Jews and gypsies plotted to ruin it for us.
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And democracy, they find their own opposition inside the arena of politics.
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If you're a Democrat, everything wrong with the country is Republicans.
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And if you're a Republican, everything wrong with the country is Democrats.
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When anybody with an ounce of common sense and just a little bit of education can look at these two parties and see how insane both of them are.
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And how it's, once again, manufactured conflict with this kind of concept of this utopia being in the future.
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This utopia that we can never quite achieve, but that the other bad guys are holding us back.
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You know, bread yesterday, bread today, but always cake tomorrow.
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All three of these ideologies that the 19th and 20th centuries spawned,
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all three of them, they come down to socialism.
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Not the economic principle of how much GDP should be spent on social programs,
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because you've never had a perfectly anarchist country and you've never had a perfectly socialist country.
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But socialism are ideology of what it means to be a citizen.
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And see, these ideologies need to dominate the minds of all the citizens.
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You know, have you ever heard a politician say,
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I don't care who you vote for just as long as you vote?
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You know, if you think voting is a waste of time, you're dangerous.
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Because as long as we keep people voting, people feel like they accomplished something.
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And there's no true higher purpose to any of these societies.
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You know, the communism, they have their workers' utopia.
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You know, the Nazis, they have their Teutonic mythos.
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A pagan mythos that should have died 2,000 years ago.
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And if you predict accurately what the progressives are going to do in five years,
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they call you a crazy person that's making the slippery slope fallacy.
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None of these societies truly have an understanding of human virtue, of human nature, of the purpose behind our existence.
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And to try and compare this abomination that we have in Western country,
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trying to compare that to Athenian democracy is an absolute joke.
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You know, say what you will about the old religions in Europe.
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At least those offered people a direction in life.
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Not just the accumulation of wealth and hating anybody that's not like you.
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You know, maybe humans are just venal and stupid,
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and the only way to run a civilization is to blame all your problems on a scapegoat,
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and then send that thing off into the wilderness.
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You know, maybe we need to have a war every so often and kill a bunch of the wrong type of people,
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just to satisfy the ugliness inside of all of us.
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Maybe I'm an optimist, and thinking we can do better.
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And I really think the solution to all of the crap over the past 200 years is an individual solution.
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And it's fighting the monsters when you gotta fight the monsters.
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But, not getting too wrapped up in this mendacious chicanery.
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The way to keep the answer is that how you are Guillermo?
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If you don't need them if you want to buy a buyer from you, or something like that?