Communism, Fascism, & Democracy： The Three Headed Beast
Episode Stats
Words per minute
120.31304
Harmful content
Misogyny
2
sentences flagged
Toxicity
24
sentences flagged
Hate speech
17
sentences flagged
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
00:00:00.000
Communism and Fascism are the two great boogeymans of the 20th century.
00:00:12.000
If we think about them at all nowadays, we have a very cartoony approach to them.
00:00:19.000
If we think about Communism, we think of Red Dawn with the Soviet troops invading,
0.62
00:00:27.000
In the case of Fascism, we think of Captain America fighting the Red Skull,
0.56
00:00:32.000
or the Nazi paratroopers marching down the street with their Hugo Boss designed uniforms.
00:00:40.000
The problem with these views is that it blinds us to what was really going on with these societies,
00:00:47.000
what the nature of the ideology forming them was.
00:00:53.000
We miss the forest for the trees. We see all the details.
00:00:58.000
We don't see the larger animus behind both of these things.
00:01:03.000
And I think the best way to explain what this animus was, this spirit motivating these two societies,
00:01:12.000
is to move away from the words Communism and Fascism and use the alternate titles for these systems of governance.
00:01:22.000
International Socialism and National Socialism.
00:01:28.000
With International Socialism, we see the threat of this ideology immediately in the title.
00:01:37.000
You know, typically, people that think about the Cold War nowadays,
00:01:41.000
they were probably children while the Cold War was going on.
00:01:45.000
And so, to them, all they saw was these two giant nations, these two superpowers,
00:01:53.000
who just could not trust one another, who were paranoid.
00:01:57.000
They both had the atom bomb, and they always expected the other one to launch the atom bomb first.
1.00
00:02:03.000
And so you get this extremely tense situation, and it seems ridiculous, it seems idiotic.
0.98
00:02:10.000
But when you look at the term International Socialism, you start to see why the Soviets were such a threat.
0.98
00:02:20.000
Their Socialism, it cannot be limited to the Eastern Bloc, it is an international affair.
00:02:28.000
The very premise of International Socialism is that there are two fundamental groups in the world.
00:02:38.000
And that the capitalist class has been oppressing and exploiting the workers throughout all of history.
00:02:47.000
And so by the Soviet ideology, the workers from nation to nation would have more in common with one another
00:02:57.000
than they would with the capitalist class within their nation.
00:03:03.000
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,
00:03:16.000
Because capitalists can never do anything but exploit, and workers can never do anything but be exploited.
00:03:24.000
The foundations of this ideology is conflict between groups.
00:03:31.000
Rather than defining themselves positively, you know, rather than saying this is the direction our society is going to go in,
00:03:40.000
this is how we are going to get better as time goes on,
00:03:45.000
they could only point to another group and say they're the bad ones,
00:03:49.000
they're the source of all the evil in this world, and they're the ones holding us back.
00:03:54.000
We need to destroy the capitalist so that the workers can unite, the workers can rise.
00:04:03.000
And so you can think of communism, of international socialism, you can think of it as the sickly ideology.
00:04:16.000
It's the one that states that the geniuses, the visionaries, the entrepreneurs,
00:04:24.000
it states that the great people in society are monsters, and that the good people are the people with very little money.
00:04:36.000
It's the people that just have a basic skill and labor.
00:04:41.000
They go down to the lowest common denominator as the location of virtue,
00:04:46.000
while spitting on those who bring genius into the world.
00:04:55.000
You can think of it as the sickly one, that embraces human frailty, human illness, poverty, so on and so forth.
00:05:07.000
Now, with national socialism, what you find is the complete inverse to this.
00:05:16.000
The national socialists, they don't define themselves based upon people outside of their borders.
00:05:30.000
And so they come up with a mythos of what makes them great.
00:05:35.000
You know, let's look at the Nazis, specifically.
00:05:39.000
They had the whole Teutonic myth about how the German people were the chosen people,
00:05:45.000
the best and most perfect people on the planet.
00:05:50.000
But just like the international socialists must attack the capitalists,
00:05:56.000
the national socialists, they must attack as well.
00:06:01.000
Because it's not enough to make this affirmation.
00:06:05.000
You know, it's not enough to say that the blonde, blue-eyed people are the best people.
1.00
00:06:13.000
Because Germany, in the 1930s, they had just suffered the defeat of World War I.
00:06:20.000
So, if you said the German people were the best, the question is, well, why aren't we the best then?
00:06:34.000
And so the response, the response is not that we must keep working on ourselves and moving forward to achieve this ideal, no.
00:06:44.000
No, the response is to blame the failures on some other group.
00:06:50.000
And in the case of Germany, it was the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Communists.
0.90
00:06:57.000
Those people undermined us in World War I.
0.63
00:07:05.000
And so with Germany, they did celebrate positive ideals.
0.88
00:07:12.000
They celebrated the visionary, the accomplished athlete, the musician.
00:07:21.000
But they could only celebrate these ideals while hating another group.
00:07:28.000
And so just like international socialism creates the conflict between capitalists and workers,
00:07:36.000
National socialism requires a similar conflict.
00:07:41.000
It needs another group to blame all of its problems on.
00:07:46.000
Rather than having an ideal that it's working towards,
00:07:51.000
and the same thing with communism, rather than having an ideal society it's working towards,
00:07:56.000
they must have a scapegoat to blame for why we're not there already.
00:08:02.000
They are utopian in that both of them promise heaven on earth.
0.99
00:08:08.000
They promise when we finally kill all the capitalists,
1.00
00:08:11.000
when we finally get rid of all the Gypsies and Jews,
1.00
00:08:16.000
We will have a Reich that will last for a thousand years.
0.97
00:08:21.000
But the reality is that neither of them truly has a solution.
00:08:34.000
And so that's why they must push the evil of the world onto a specific group.
0.92
00:08:45.000
It's one goat that you put all of the tribe's sins on and then chase off into the wilderness.
1.00
00:08:50.000
Now there is a third ideology that came out of the 19th, 20th centuries.
00:09:05.000
Or perhaps a better term for it might be universal socialism.
00:09:13.000
You know, if you call communism the sickly ideology and fascism, you could call it the boyish ideology.
0.99
00:09:30.000
You know, its vision of the man is like something out of a superhero comic book for children.
0.83
00:09:41.000
And if you call it universal socialism, then I think you'd have to call universal socialism the most schizophrenic of the three.
00:09:59.000
And how, like the other systems, it needs to break things down into two simplistic groups.
00:10:09.000
In this case, we have the left-right divide in American politics.
00:10:16.000
And see, the funny thing about the left-right divide is how frequently policies swap back and forth between these two groups.
00:10:32.000
Civil rights started out as a republican movement.
00:10:36.000
You see, back in the 40s, the Democrats were the union party.
00:10:42.000
And a lot of these unions did not want to allow black members in.
00:10:47.000
Because that sort of competition would lower their wages.
00:10:51.000
And so the Democrats, in supporting the unions, they were for Jim Crow laws.
0.55
00:10:58.000
Whereas the Republicans, representing business interests, were for the removal of Jim Crow laws.
00:11:08.000
And yet, over the past 50 years or so, we've seen those policies swap between the two parties.
00:11:17.000
The Democrats are now the ones that appeal to the black vote.
0.99
00:11:21.000
And the Republicans are the ones that are supposedly a bunch of old racist white men.
0.99
00:11:29.000
Another more recent example would be Obamacare.
0.98
00:11:33.000
Obamacare was originally a policy proposal by the Republicans.
00:11:38.000
It was a document they drafted together because if the Democrats ever got close to getting socialized medicine,
00:11:48.000
they were going to propose Obamacare as a halfway solution that still keeps the private industry involved in the whole thing.
00:11:58.000
And yet now, we see Obamacare being a Democrat ideology.
00:12:08.000
Now, certainly, there are temperamental differences.
00:12:13.000
An anonymous conservative wrote an excellent book, which I've linked to it before.
00:12:21.000
About the temperamental differences between the left and the right.
00:12:27.000
That the left tends to attract rabbit people and the right tends to attract wolves.
00:12:35.000
But, absolutely, there are these two trends in the two parties.
00:12:40.000
But the parties themselves, the policies they propose, the policies that swap back and forth between the two parties,
00:12:51.000
This is not an Athenian democracy that we have in our modern countries.
00:12:59.000
The whole point of politics and democracy is to distract the mob.
00:13:04.000
You know, the same way that the international socialists,
00:13:09.000
they would tell the people that all of your problems, all of these breadlines, all of this poverty,
00:13:16.000
Those evil capitalists are the ones destroying you.
1.00
00:13:21.000
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.
1.00
00:13:31.000
And democracy, they find their own opposition inside the arena of politics.
0.97
00:13:38.000
If you're a Democrat, everything wrong with the country is Republicans.
00:13:42.000
And if you're a Republican, everything wrong with the country is Democrats.
0.95
00:13:45.000
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.
00:13:57.000
And how it's, once again, manufactured conflict with this kind of concept of this utopia being in the future.
00:14:14.000
This utopia that we can never quite achieve, but that the other bad guys are holding us back.
00:14:23.000
You know, bread yesterday, bread today, but always cake tomorrow.
00:14:29.000
All three of these ideologies that the 19th and 20th centuries spawned,
00:14:39.000
all three of them, they come down to socialism.
00:14:45.000
Not the economic principle of how much GDP should be spent on social programs,
00:14:52.000
because you've never had a perfectly anarchist country and you've never had a perfectly socialist country.
00:14:59.000
But socialism are ideology of what it means to be a citizen.
00:15:06.000
And see, these ideologies need to dominate the minds of all the citizens.
00:15:12.000
You know, have you ever heard a politician say,
00:15:15.000
I don't care who you vote for just as long as you vote?
00:15:21.000
You know, if you think voting is a waste of time, you're dangerous.
00:15:31.000
Because as long as we keep people voting, people feel like they accomplished something.
00:15:50.000
And there's no true higher purpose to any of these societies.
00:15:56.000
You know, the communism, they have their workers' utopia.
00:16:02.000
You know, the Nazis, they have their Teutonic mythos.
0.98
00:16:09.000
A pagan mythos that should have died 2,000 years ago.
00:16:27.000
And if you predict accurately what the progressives are going to do in five years,
00:16:32.000
they call you a crazy person that's making the slippery slope fallacy.
00:16:37.000
None of these societies truly have an understanding of human virtue, of human nature, of the purpose behind our existence.
00:16:47.000
And to try and compare this abomination that we have in Western country,
00:16:54.000
trying to compare that to Athenian democracy is an absolute joke.
00:16:59.000
You know, say what you will about the old religions in Europe.
0.90
00:17:11.000
At least those offered people a direction in life.
00:17:16.000
Not just the accumulation of wealth and hating anybody that's not like you.
00:17:32.000
You know, maybe humans are just venal and stupid,
1.00
00:17:41.000
and the only way to run a civilization is to blame all your problems on a scapegoat,
1.00
00:17:47.000
and then send that thing off into the wilderness.
0.93
00:17:49.000
You know, maybe we need to have a war every so often and kill a bunch of the wrong type of people,
0.98
00:17:54.000
just to satisfy the ugliness inside of all of us.
0.65
00:17:58.000
Maybe I'm an optimist, and thinking we can do better.
00:18:06.000
And I really think the solution to all of the crap over the past 200 years is an individual solution.
00:18:20.000
And it's fighting the monsters when you gotta fight the monsters.
00:18:26.000
But, not getting too wrapped up in this mendacious chicanery.
1.00
00:19:04.000
The way to keep the answer is that how you are Guillermo?
00:19:08.000
If you don't need them if you want to buy a buyer from you, or something like that?