Leo D.M.J. Aurini - September 06, 2014


Communism, Fascism, & Democracy： The Three Headed Beast

Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
Mentioned
Jim Crow Guillermo Reich
Justice Versus Social Justice Lets Play ＂Label Maker＂ by Silverstring Media!

Episode Stats


Length

19 minutes

Words per minute

120.31

Word count

2,306

Sentence count

174

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

24

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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
00:00:24.000 or we think of the breadlines.
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
00:02:17.000 It's international.
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.
00:02:35.000 Workers and capitalists.
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,
00:03:12.000 this was a contradiction in terms to them.
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.
00:04:00.000 And this will be a global phenomenon.
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.
00:05:04.000 They celebrate the weak.
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.
00:05:27.000 They look internally.
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?
00:06:29.000 Why are we in second place?
00:06:31.000 Why is there so much poverty in Germany?
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
00:07:00.000 They're at fault. They are evil. 0.97
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
00:08:14.000 we will have the perfect country. 0.99
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.
00:08:26.000 They have a couple of ideas, maybe.
00:08:29.000 Some of them are maybe even good ideas.
00:08:31.000 But they don't have 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
00:08:42.000 And it really is a scapegoat.
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.
00:09:03.000 And that was democracy.
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
00:09:38.000 It's very naive. It's very juvenile.
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.
00:09:52.000 Because let's think about universal socialism.
00:09:55.000 Let's think about American democracy.
00:09:59.000 And how, like the other systems, it needs to break things down into two simplistic groups.
00:10:06.000 A good group and a bad group.
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.
00:10:27.000 Let me give you a couple of examples.
00:10:30.000 Civil rights.
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.
00:11:06.000 They were for civil rights.
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.
00:12:18.000 It's linked on my website. Go buy that book.
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.
00:12:33.000 It's a little bit more complex than that.
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,
00:12:48.000 are nothing but a distracting sideshow.
00:12:51.000 This is not an Athenian democracy that we have in our modern countries.
00:12:56.000 This is bread and circuses.
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,
00:13:14.000 it's all of that evil capitalism.
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.
00:14:09.000 Or being in the 1950s.
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.
00:14:56.000 All of them are somewhere on the spectrum.
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?
00:15:18.000 That's universal socialism.
00:15:21.000 You know, if you think voting is a waste of time, you're dangerous.
00:15:26.000 You're an enemy.
00:15:28.000 You have crime think going on in your head.
00:15:31.000 Because as long as we keep people voting, people feel like they accomplished something.
00:15:37.000 You know, go sign a petition.
00:15:40.000 You know, go share a picture on Facebook.
00:15:43.000 You know, engage in the political process.
00:15:46.000 You don't notice what's going on.
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.
00:16:00.000 A pipe dream.
00:16:02.000 You know, the Nazis, they have their Teutonic mythos. 0.98
00:16:06.000 Which is just that.
00:16:09.000 A pagan mythos that should have died 2,000 years ago.
00:16:12.000 We should have grown up from that.
00:16:14.000 And then you've got progress.
00:16:19.000 Progressivism in the West.
00:16:22.000 And what's progress?
00:16:23.000 Nobody knows.
00:16:24.000 Nobody can tell you what progress is.
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
00:17:08.000 You know, prior to the 19th century.
00:17:11.000 At least those offered people a direction in life.
00:17:14.000 Something to strive towards.
00:17:16.000 Not just the accumulation of wealth and hating anybody that's not like you.
00:17:23.000 But a deeper purpose.
00:17:26.000 A spiritual purpose.
00:17:28.000 A goal to grow as a person. 1.00
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.
00:18:02.000 But, I think we can.
00:18:06.000 And I really think the solution to all of the crap over the past 200 years is an individual solution.
00:18:17.000 It's bettering ourselves. 0.81
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
00:18:34.000 Keep your souls clean, folks.
00:18:36.000 Irene out.
00:18:47.000 Behzleเย angef Smut
00:19:02.000 If you don't even know, I'm not happy to stop.
00:19:04.000 The way to keep the answer is that how you are Guillermo?
00:19:06.000 You seem to have an expense.
00:19:08.000 If you don't need them if you want to buy a buyer from you, or something like that?