I suppose represents the second stage in a discussion of 20th century ideologies, is
on fascism, what is it, Bolshevism, National Socialism and fascism, all of which are conventionally
are seen as forces which the United States in some fashion overcame usually militarily
in the course of the 20th century.
There was a book on multiculturalism which I was looking at, a book that was intended
to be an antidote to multiculturalism by a man named Alvin Schmidt who suggested Americans
The upshot of the war in the end was that we had destroyed the bourgeois civilization of
the Western world, which is a good thing from a neoconservative point of view, because the
world would have been less egalitarian, less feminist, less open to the sort of yuppie
lifestyle that I suppose Mr. Fukuyama leads, or would like to imagine that he leads.
And we would all be living, and he said, some liberalized version of South Africa.
This I assume was before Nelson Mandela took over.
And there would not be a welfare state and all the other good aspects of liberal democracy
as he understands it.
And you know, up until then, I'd never been aware that the Kaiser was fighting for all
these good ideals.
But apparently he was, you know, at least according to Fukuyama.
But there is no question that the First World War is in many ways a kind of turning point
because the disruptions of the war, the wartime economy and the mobilization that the war
brings and finally the frustrations caused by the subsequent peace treaty will feed into
The mass movements of the interwar years, of which there are three major ones, fascism,
communism and national socialism.
If one were looking at the world perhaps in the 1920s, it would seem that the most successful
of the three was fascism.
My friend Jean-Luc Hatch always tells me that, you know, Mussolini was serious, Lenin was
I think by which he means that Mussolini appealed to something real, nationalism, you know, people feel this in their gut, whereas Marxist Leninism is sort of based on an abstract universalist ideal that outside of intellectuals most people don't believe in, and if some people will fight because they're hungry and want food or want redistribution of land.
Whatever the case, I think in the 1920s, fascism was looked upon as the wave of the future,
the paradigm for a managerial society.
And another thing that sort of comes out of the early 20th century and the growth of mass
industrial societies is the notion of government planning.
And the Italian model is seen as one that was working in the 1920s, largely because
The State was a totalitarian state, but actually the state was not all that total.
There was a very, very large, you know, free economy that continues to exist in Italy throughout the 1920s into the 1930s,
which, by the way, was generally not criticized by progressive social democrats and others
who did look upon Mussolini's reform, his Rivoluzione Nazionale, as a serious, you know, attempt to create within nations,
with the nations, particular nations, a kind of model of social planning, government social
planning that could be exported under the proper conditions to the United States and
to England and to other countries.
It is really not, I would say, until the rise of Nazism and the alliance of Mussolini with
Hitler that fascism is perceived as a wicked right-wing ideology.
There's a very good book by John Patrick Diggins on fascism as seen from the United States,
in which he goes through issues of the New Republic, and just about everybody there, including
John Dewey, was very impressed by Mussolini, and saw in him an architect of the kind of
social planning they were trying to introduce.
In fact, Dewey wished to use the word corporatism to describe what he was doing until Mussolini
And he sort of fell from grace, at which point he very successfully chose the term liberalism
to describe what clearly was anti-liberal, but that term has been able to stick.
But in any case, I think fascism to the 20s is seen as a much more successful model than
Bolshevism.
The Bolsheviks are sort of fumbling around.
There are various attempts to take governments over by force in England, France and other
The Communist Party in the United States is pretty much of a joke. It splits, it means
constantly fragments, particularly after the rise of Stalin. And then, of course, there
is an attempted communist takeover of China in the 1920s, which fails miserably. Other
attempts fail miserably in Hungary, in Germany and elsewhere. So the Soviets do not seem
to be in a particularly strong position, whereas Mussolini is a man of honor. Fascists are
sent to Chicago, an aviator, Belbo, comes here, and they put up a... In fact, it still
stands in Buckingham Park in Chicago, and this is put in the second year of the Italian
National Revolution, you know, and he was greatly honored. I mean, this Italian aviator
The 1920s were very much, I think, a period in which the fascists seemed to be the successful managerial model.
In the 1930s, you have the rise of Nazism in Germany.
I really do not want to get into a discussion of, you know, is Nazism fascist, is Nazism
Stalinist?
It is in fact a combination.
The Germans pick from various managerial models, but the result is infinitely more demonic
and sinister than what happens in Italy, although not more sinister or demonic than what happens
in Russia under Stalin, it just gets a worse press because it lands up on the losing side
The German Nazis are also going to enjoy a certain success for a while, despite the bad
public relations caused by their anti-Semitism, which is not well received in the United States.
Nazi Germany is hated, contrary to what Jewish groups say, that everybody loved Hitler, and
this is not true.
The Nazis were hated in England and other countries, particularly because of their anti-Semitism,
which was very blatant.
You could see the humiliation of Jews in these films and so forth, which were circulated.
These were not well-received in Western countries, and for a while they even created a reaction
in fascists that lead, from Mussolini, so that this was the dark side of the Nazis.
But they did use the language of peace, you know, and to quote Ralph's expression, they
wish to serve mankind, and it's incredible how many of Hitler's speech, you know, contains
the word Friede, Frieden. We're doing this for peace. Whatever they're doing is always
for peace. We want to put this dispute out of the way, or something, and then we can
The Journal of Peace
So, he does use this language of peace, but the behavior toward Jews and toward other
groups that are sort of singled out for special treatment is so unpleasant and also so widely
known that the Nazis will not receive as good a press, certainly as the Italian fascists
had before.
Nonetheless, I think John Lukacs, who writes about this period, is correct, that in the 1930s it does appear that Hitler has become sort of the leading fascist and many people admire him and see him as a great national socialist leader who has, in a sense, sort of taken over and perfected the Italian fascist paradigm.
There are also, as the historian, I think, Ernst Nolte, the German historian, quite rightly points out,
a kind of competition that goes on between a Nazi fascist and a Bolshevik model in the 1930s,
in which people who are strongly anti-communist in Central Europe feel, in some cases, driven to support the German,
because of the German-Italian side rather than the Soviet side.
They see this sort of the communist side.
And the communists, I think, are quite rightly seen throughout the 30s
as the more dangerous mass murderers.
I mean, they've already carried out the things
that Hitler will be doing in the succeeding decade.
And they're also aiming their destructive energies
against the middle class, their anti-bourgeois.
So that much of the middle class sort of feels a, according to Knowlton, I think this is
partly true, it depends on the area, they feel that somehow the German-Italian connection
or ideological camp is safer than the communist camp, and they sort of, one might say emotionally
or in terms of disposition, drift in that direction.
Nonetheless, the communists are going to start to make a comeback in the Soviets in the 1930s,
despite the fact that they're wildly massacring people in the Ukraine, and then during the
purge trials and so forth, because at this time, Stalin is following, at least in terms
of his relations with the Western countries, the popular front tactic, by which he calls,
Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Israel Kirzner, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Israel Kirzner, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Joseph Salerno, Walter Block, Lew Rockwell, Roger Garrison, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk,
The communist role is probably as significant, and the communists also play roles in disrupting the French government in the 1930s, together with parties of the nationalist right, and the communist membership in the United States will go up.
I mean, the communists do manage to pull, I think, a million votes at one point in the American election.
The problem is that they break apart because they're fragmented in the United States between the followers of Trotsky, the followers of Stalin, other sort of communist sectarians like the Love-Stoneites, out of which some of the neoconservatives, by the way, come. They're Love-Stoneites. They're not really Trotskiists.
In the 1930s, the communists do become a major force or viewed as a major force of resistance against both the Nazis and, to some extent, the fascists.
They always use the word fascism to refer to all their enemies on the right are all fascists,
including the social democrats, they call them fascists.
But I mean, that's sort of the anti-fascist alliance which they provide, and they also
are able to project themselves successfully in European countries as a workers' party
which will redistribute the fruits of production and overcome what seem to be the inequities
and Irregularities or Disruptions of the Capitalist System.
So the 1930s, the communists do make a comeback, and there is no question that if you look
at the end of the Second World War, the communists are big, big, big winners.
They are big winners despite the fact that they had been treacherous, they had supported
the Nazis.
Something that is hardly ever mentioned.
I mean, I never hear this mentioned.
It's not even mentioned, one never dares mention this, even in France.
I mean, if you say this, you know, this is considered to be a fascist statement.
But in France, they went so far in observing the Nazi-Soviet pact, when Hitler and Stalin
were allies, that they A, undermined the war effort of the French, B, beat up, killed members
of the Communist Party who fought against Hitler.
And it was only when the Soviet Union is invaded that the Communist Party in France, Italy
in Italy and other countries will turn around, but by the end of the war, they not only bear
the mantle of anti-fascism and the resistance, but they carry out savage reprisals against
people who are far less guilty of collaboration than they were, and they do this in Italy
and in France and other countries, and the communists also are able, like in a country
Paul Serrant, Les Vanquishes et les Liberations, The Vanquish and the Liberation
and a lot of it was just a matter of taking revenge on somebody you didn't like but you know the communist party somehow comes out of the war smelling good they had won and of course they had been the worst collaborators they turned around and they're exterminating other people at the end of the war and they weren't even the best resistance force in these countries during the war they were not this is a lie but they are but what they do is they take control of the left and of the so-called anti-fascist side and come out on top at the end
End of the War.
The communists will continue to ride high for a while, though by the 1950s, I think
there's a very definite reaction in the other direction in most European countries.
I think there's a kind of movement back toward the right, which starts to take place.
And you have, you know, sort of conservative Christian Democrat governments, you even have
The theory of neo-fascist parties winning local elections, but being able to reorganize themselves in some countries.
And the communists are generally in very bad odor throughout the Western world.
They're seen as repressive, they're associated with Stalinism and so forth.
And at this point, there develops a theory which I think might be re-examined, examined and re-examined today,
because it's one that I know that I grew up with and I believed until relatively recently.
And this is the view that communism, Nazism, all these things are totalitarian movements
and that they're all pretty much the same.
And the struggle against Nazism leads into the struggle against the second kind of Nazism,
which is Soviet Bolshevism, and that we're somehow the good guys because we end up destroying
all these monsters in the end, or at least opposing all these monsters in the end.
And the theory of totalitarianism, which is originally, well, a number of people put it
together.
There's actually a deviationist Marxist named Franz Borkenau in the 1930s who comes
Carl Wittfoglum, I knew, you know, had created such a theory by the 1940s, but it's a famous book by Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich on totalitarianism, that comes out soon after the Second World War, in which this argument is put forth that totalitarian governments are qualitatively different from both democratic and authoritarian.
Authoritarian governments control everything in the societies that they take over and use
terror as a way of enforcing control, distort reality by creating some sort of ideology that
is empirical nonsense, but which they force upon people as an instrument of control.
Authoritarian governments are seen simply as undeveloped regimes that exist or primitive
regimes that exist in economically primitive parts of the world.
Parts of the world that have not yet modernized, because once they modernize, you'll get middle
classes forming together with a strong drive toward the creation of parliamentary democratic
institutions.
Therefore, Spain has an authoritarian government because it's sort of economically primitive
and the good democratic camp.
Whereas totalitarian governments are sort of dead end, they can't go anywhere, they have
to be removed, usually by force, because their control is total and they are incapable of
evolving since they totally destroy anything that stands in their way.
This argument is presented in a kind of turgid, Germanic fashion by Hannah Arendt in what
I think is one of the worst written books of all times, Origins of Totalitarianism.
It's also a kind of book that's sort of like a garbage can, which you throw every idea
that ever occurred to this dotty German refugee.
Part of her argument is to show that Hitler and Stalin really have sort of similar roots and that Stalinism and Nazism are pretty much the same, the ones in continuation of the other.
Now, I think if we hear these sorts of arguments, there's nothing intrinsically offensive or would seem unreasonable about them, right?
When we talk about right and left, we really don't mean Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other side.
Or if there is a political spectrum in which these people stand on one side or the other,
it is different from any political spectrum we'd want to be a part of.
And we can generally agree on this.
The question in my mind is that why was this model of totalitarianism never really widely accepted,
except as a military propagandistic tool in pursuing the Cold War?
I mean, most intellectuals do not seem to buy into this.
That is because most intellectuals like the communist
and do not want to compare them in any way to Hitler or even to Mussolini.
And I remember even as a young assistant professor at Case Western Reserve many decades ago, people would never refer to communism, it would be Stalinism.
And Stalinism was never as bad as fascism.
Although Mussolini only killed about 10 people and Stalin killed about 50 million, you don't want to compare these two.
So there was always this favorable comparison of Stalinism to Italian fascism, or certainly
to Franco, who was even worse than Hitler.
But the fact is most intellectuals did not buy this because they thought that communism
and the kind of manipulative socialism they believed in were really the same.
There was like no reason to make these distinctions, you know, and on the other hand I think they
probably believed that Richard Nixon was at least as bad as Hitler or something like this,
McCarthy, I mean you see this in CNN, McCarthy was worse than Stalin, you know, he had the
whole country gripped with fear and so forth, so I mean the intellectuals were actually
very soft on the communists, they thought Stalin, maybe a little bit too far, but they
would vote for one of his henchmen anyhow, but I mean the totalitarian argument was never
really bought.
I would make this because I was strongly anti-communist and thought that the communists were in fact
the worst mass murderers of all times and were being defended by everybody, you know,
in the name of fighting some long-dead fascist enemy and so forth, and this of course goes
on even now.
But the totalitarian model, I think, is flawed from the very outset.
And I'll try to explain why.
Not every totalitarian government has acted in the way that totalitarian governments are
supposed to act.
For instance, the Soviet Union did not fall apart because it got invaded.
I mean, you're told by Hannah Arendt, by Britain, that it's going to fall apart because
these countries are going to be torn down.
The Soviet Union did not go away that way. What you had was it became better by stages from what it had been under Stalin, and finally just sort of imploded from within, when it sort of overextended itself.
The Chinese government, which was quite totalitarian, has in fact become a lot better than it was under Mao.
I mean, it may not be an ideal state into which we'd want to live and so forth, but is it totalitarian?
It's also questionable in my mind whether Mao's China really had control over, or the government really had control over everybody.
You're dealing with a country of over a billion people who are dispersed over a very, very large landmass.
I have a young colleague who's Chinese, who's doing a book on Chinese politics, and she's certainly not a Marxist,
and she's arguing that there's very little control over the central government.
The central government has very little control over the people.
They collect very few taxes. They can't.
The economic system is so inefficient in the country, and you go on and on like this.
So I mean countries that we consider totalitarian may be brutal, unpleasant, you wouldn't want to live there but do they necessarily follow the totalitarian model?
And my answer is no. They all have to be overthrown from within in order to be gotten rid of.
What I would argue in the end is that the whole model of totalitarianism, and I think Ralph Reiko and I were discussing this
I think that one problem with the totalitarian model is it basically is an attempt created
by the social democratic left to project onto communism what is a kind of fascist Nazi bugaboo.
And again John Lukacs made the argument that Hannah Arendt was essentially a Trotskyist
and that the origins of totalitarianism is a Trotskyist view of both, you know, Germany and the Soviet Union.
You know, that it is somehow a derailed form of socialism that has, you know, resulted in this monstrous kind of regime.
But what makes the Soviet Union bad is it resembles a fascist state.
So that one might say the paradigm of ultimate evil in the totalitarian conception is always
something like Nazism.
It is not the Soviets.
The Soviets are bad because they're red fascists, they use, you know, Harry Truman's term.
It is not that the Nazis are imitating the communists, which may be historically true.
I think Nolte is correct.
You know, I mean, the model that's that, that Hitler, it was Stalin's model, it was
there.
The Soviets evolved into something like what the Germans or other evil fascist countries
were in the 1930s, and therefore can only be dealt with the way Nazi Germany was by decimating,
going in there, taking over the country, and so forth.
Not all of them, of course, go quite that far.
They usually are never as angry at the Soviets as they are at the Germans, but they don't
I don't want to invade them, bomb them, you know, carry out saturation bombing of Russians.
You don't get this sort of...
Well, you know, it's not possible anymore, but actually the dislike of the Soviets, usually
among the advocates of totalitarian theory, was never as strong as the dislike of the
Nazis.
And I think what you typically get is an attempt to sort of push on to the Soviets or the Chinese
What are the features of the Nazi German government?
One of the interesting cases of this is 1984 by George Orwell, who is seen in many ways
as the person who takes the managerial models of James Burnham, who was introduced by Burnham
as the manager of evolution, and takes this model and then uses it to create this hellish,
dystopic society, you know, in which various regions are killing each other and so forth.
And supposedly this is an anti-Stalinist book. Well, I've read it, and it looks like an anti-Nazi book to me. I mean, they're militaristic. I mean, you do have some Stalinist stuff there, like the war against Trotsky, who becomes Goldstein in 1984, but it's a perpetually belligerent society, always engaged in war against other regions and mobilizing for war.
and you know you can't help feeling and looking at this is that what he's
describing is you know the fascist glorification of war which he then
transfers on to the communists. If you read Orwell, he always says this, that the
communists look like Nazis. I mean this is something he says in his
correspondence. I would finally say that all of this sort of leads to a kind of
misunderstanding and this is some a problem which my friend Hans-Hermann
Mr. Hoppe had a few years ago when he suggested in some article that Nazi Germany was not
as totalitarian as the Soviet Union under Stalin.
And this was considered to be the worst sort of laissez-magecité or just crime against
humanity or against the nobility of the human soul and so forth.
And he was actually, his article I think was banned from some libertarian journal and they
hanged him in effigy and so forth.
Now, what he said is perfectly true. I mean, it's like, you know, self-evident. I mean,
the Nazis may have been very unpleasant. They incarcerated members of my family. They
probably killed others. I mean, I have no, you know, brief for them, but they did not
have the kind of intellectual, the kind of control of opinion that the media and the
state have in the United States today. I mean, or in Germany today. I mean, Germany is a
I mean, Hitler killed a lot more people. He put them in concentration camps. They got brutalized, everything else. He was a gangster. He was a mass murderer.
But if you're talking about totalitarianism, you have to also talk about control of thought. This is basic to totalitarianism.
And the Nazis did not control thought in the same manner that the communists did, you know.
The Left is always more totalitarian in this regard, in the sense that they try to control people's thought, reconstruct their consciousness much more intensively and much more relentlessly than any right-wing government.
that they try to control people's thought, reconstruct their consciousness much more intensively
and much more relentlessly than any right-wing government or even a brutal, you know,
ultra-nationalist gangster like Hitler. There's just no comparison. This is the way the left operates.
And I don't think the totalitarian model really takes that into account,
And I found that these are different types of control, you know, that the Nazis committed mass murder, brutalized people, invaded countries all over the place, carried out an insane foreign policy, everything else, but they did not engage in the same degree of thought control as the communists in most countries did.
However, even the communist will change.
I mean, if you look at communist Hungary 20 years ago, there was less thought control there
than you get in your Western European countries of today,
which nonetheless have relatively freer market economies, okay?
I'm not going to, you know, there's nothing to write home about.
There are heavily socialized economies, but there's more of a free market in Germany today
than there was in Hungary 20 years ago.
And the fact that not all totalitarian governments
The Nazis behaved the same way, supposedly, to other governments, and some are able to change from within.
I mean, it's quite possible that the Soviets could change from within.
The Nazis might not have been able to do this. They might have become worse and worse.
But, you know, did the Nazi model necessarily apply to the Soviet Union?
Were the Nazis as intellectually totalitarian as the Soviets? No, they were not.
But on the other hand, there may have been other aspects of their government that were more dangerous.
But, you know, I think one has to look at individual political models,
even of the most disagreeable governments, without making these judgments.
Was Mussolini's Italy a totalitarian state?
Well, as much as Mussolini liked the term totalitarian, the answer is no.
It was a rather weak state.
Everybody marched around with a uniform or something or sang a song,
But it had a relatively free economy in comparison to the United States today.
It did not engage in a particularly adventurous foreign policy.
They bombed Corfu, they tried to grab Albania, handed it to them, just take it, no complaints.
But I mean, they did not try to serve mankind the way we do it today.
So they didn't have the means to do it.
I mean, they were too weak a state.
I think I generally agreed at a certain point that Italy was not totalitarian, just bad or something like that.
Was Franco-Spain totalitarian? Because very often the term did get used.
The answer is no. It was a kind of traditional military dictatorship.
So then it fell into the authoritarian camp.
The argument about authoritarian governments I find much more convincing than totalitarian ones.
The Theory of Money and Credit
I think one can agree about the authoritarian government without necessarily assuming the
judgments that are associated with the totalitarian model, which I think becomes more and more
open to question.
And I think, as I said, more and more associated with a certain kind of Cold War liberal politics.
And I hope I've given you enough food for thought, since I've said much that will
cause controversy or at least cause you to think about the problems that I've raised.
Perhaps I can now open this to questions.
Yes, sir.
You mentioned that there is a lot of imprisonment, or there is imprisonment for PC and drugs.
Can you give me a few examples, please?
Well, there's actually a piece in the New York Times about a year and a half ago.
I try to document this in the book of mine that's now coming out, but people are in
jail or are facing criminal charges.
Sometimes these things get appealed and they're put in jail.
You're able to appeal the case, but they have been accused and found guilty of saying things
which threaten the German constitution or threaten German democracy.
And you have agencies that are attached both to the federal and provincial governments
which look into these things.
There is one case that I looked at which was particularly ominous, it was a German newspaper
which I find very boring actually, Junger Freiheit, which is supposed to be a sort of
right center.
It is, you know, it's probably where the National Review was about five, ten years
ago.
Stoibel, Christian Social Party in Bavaria, Nordrhein-Westfalen, The Land of Nordrhein-Westfalen,
In the meantime, they've had to pay to leave for legal costs because they've tried to close down their magazine, they've lost their subscribers, they've lost their advertisers, and a Berlin bank closed their account because they don't want to be associated with these politically incorrect people.
Now this kind of thing goes on all the time in Germany and they're lucky they haven't been thrown in jail
Because their magazine represents it must be a national conservative direction
They've published people critical of third-world immigration and in France. This is this is a very common occurrence
There was somebody given I think six months in jail. I don't know if he spent the whole time whether it was just parole or what I
For writing an article against immigration which I looked at which was I mean this you know also
Also Holocaust denial in the case of France means denying anything the Nuremberg tribunal
said at the end of the war so that people have actually been prosecuted for saying that
the 10,000 Polish soldiers who were killed in the Katyn woods were killed by the Soviets
and not by the Germans.
That is a criminal offense today in France.
And usually of the communist party pushing all this stuff, but the socialists go along
with it.
They're quite happy to do this.
I didn't see any of this in Germany when I was living there.
Ten years ago.
Anti-fascist riots, businesses are destroyed, the darkest days of the Nazi takeover, the police just stand there, they don't even want to get involved.
There are a lot of books that have come out on this, but there was a speech by a man named Martin Walzow about it, I think Ralph R. sent this to me about a year ago,
I mentioned this to me and he was given an award for a literary prize and he said you know it's high time we talk about the totalitarian aspect of our government.
We seem to be proud of this and this compulsory guilt about things that most of us never did and the way this is used to destroy intellectual freedom and freedom of speech and criminalizing improper opinions and so forth.
How can a discussion nowadays in the current state of the Chinese government, would you call it authoritarian, totalitarian, or neither?
The Chinese government is a problem since it's a weak government.
It does things that are not nice, but then so did governments five, six hundred years ago in Europe,
but they were not particularly strong governments.
They might have grabbed some peasant and hanged him, but they reached an extent very much beyond that peasant.
So it is not a powerful government like the American government.
The American government in terms of technology, in terms of money,
So a distinction for you between authoritarian and totalitarian would be the strength of the state?
I was thinking that I had two comments. One was that I think that sometimes thought control has contributed to Germany more than it was really proactive as an excuse for the complacency of the German people and as a way to somehow explain it.
So people think, well, there was all kinds of PR and all kinds of, you know, mass thought control.
And my other comment was that one thing that seems contrary to your statement about Hitler not being very popular,
or maybe Hitler was popular but the Nazis weren't, what about the thing about him being times man of the year, twice I think.
Okay, by the way, being times man of the year, it was explained at the time that this was not a popular, they didn't think he was a nice man.
They just thought he had influenced world events.
I see.
I mean, and they made that distinction, Ralph can probably speak on that more because he's
done work on this period, but you know, I think that's very clear.
I think obviously there was attempt to control, I mean, they pushed anti-Semitism 24 hours
a day in Nazi Germany, and obviously people were influenced by this, you know, I mean,
it was perhaps the most liberal country in terms of treating Jews anywhere in Europe,
And some, you know, they become, you know, handing in Jews, I mean, so obviously this
does influence countries.
I don't accept for a moment the Goldhagen thesis about every German wanting to kill
Jews by 1900, I think this is highly improbable, and the book is a piece of junk, which makes
up its quotations and its phony statistics and so forth.
But obviously this is effective propaganda.
On the other hand, I think that, you know, a lot of the Germans weren't complacent.
I mean, many of them were afraid of the government.
If you disagree, you'd be in a concentration camp, you'd be beaten up, something like that.
I mean, it's not that you just would not be invited to a cocktail party.
You know, you'd land up in Dachau.
So you know, there were reasons to go along with the system.
Ralph, you?
Ralph here.
I found your talk interesting and provocative, and what I was interested in thinking about was your allusion to the terminological question.
I don't think we could emphasize enough how much terminology determines thought, and politics.
For instance, whenever there's excessive belief, force used against demonstrators is quote, logistic.
Right. Of course, it was the checkup in 1918 on that introduced mass terror by the secret police, killing already tens of thousands in Lenin's time, but we never say fascistic, we never say communist, and you alluded to the fact that they like to talk about some kind of generic fascism.
Well, there's nothing I disagree with. Is there anybody else who? Any other questions?
I was reading in your book, the conservative movement last night, I think the first chapter
about the conservative movement in 1950, and it seems like there were several on the post-war
right, guys like William Huckley, who actually thought that Joseph McCarty had him up far
enough, and they basically seemed to be saying that if you were a critic of democracy and
How would you put democracy in the form of giving aid and comfort to the Soviet Union that he'd be put in jail and silenced?
I was just wondering how you would put that into the context of your speech?
The Left does not believe in saying what you want at all.
Now that they've taken over, it's like you have the intellectual freedom of Auschwitz.
This is all nonsense.
The fact is that a lot of that stuff was being turned not only against the Left, but I think
as Ralph and Lew and others have pointed out, it was basically being turned against the
Right as well.
Buckley did not agree with them, you know, got extra-sized, excommunicated and so forth.
So I think that was a very bad tendency to achieve what the Germans called Gleitschaltung,
just sort of force everybody into the same model of thought which Buckley began in the
fifties.
Lou?
I was going to mention, too, that Buckley's an evil book, God and Man, in the end.
The first thing I'm aware of on the right is to argue for an end to academic freedom and to purge people who differ in what they believe.
And so it's really the Godfather, all of the things today, of purging people who are insensitive to know what diversity or whatever.
Buckley is responsible for many evils, but this is one of his babies.
Yes, Betreason No, and I said, this is really good. You know, in the early 70s, I said,
you know, this man is, you know, is really on to something. He's a tough fellow, you
know, and the little that I know is he'd be turned against the right, you know, but
the same thing takes place in Germany, which I discovered from doing this work, that you
The Schutzverfassungsgericht.
The right must have been very cocky to believe that they'd get away with this stuff, you know, if you just look at the political forces that were present, you know, it would not be long before you'd be on the receiving end, and I think this happens in a number of western countries.
Were these agencies in fact set up by the U.S. government?
These German agencies were set up by the U.S. government?
Absolutely.
I can't think that they were intended to ever do good in a Christian sense or whatever.
The American government in 1947 was supporting a socialist-neutralist Schumacher against
Adenauer, who was pro-Western, anti-communist Catholic, and even under Truman you have this,
but then we sort of change course, you know, under Eisenhower and this, and the Germans
become the bulwark of Western civilization, and the right pretty much gets to run things,
you know, and they are concerned with Christian morality and so forth, and then in the late
60s, as things are turning around in the United States, they turn around in Germany even more
Do you find in our totalitarian features and values of income, bills and FDR to say that the values were totalitarian, you know, petitions?
Can we find totalitarian features in the regimes of income, or do we also have an FDR to say, according to your definition, that these regimes are totalitarian?
and they're all post-liberal.
They're becoming increasingly post-bourgeois societies.
And the fascists, I think, are Italian fascists, may be the most conservative
because there's a very large middle-class component.
They make an alliance with the Catholic Church in 1929 and so forth.
The American New Deal is the most successful model,
which is a variation on the Scandinavian socialist model,
The Managero Model, which had already been developed in the 1920s in Sweden, and which, of course, was being planned by English socialists, and that is the one that sort of takes off, the Nazis go nowhere, and the communists fall apart.
The point is, does the managerial model, which is created in the United States by the progressives, Wilson, the New Deal, and then, you know, grows in a kind of intermittent fashion, but with ever more vigor in the last third of the 20th century, does that model necessarily lead to total control?
And my argument is, yes, it does.
Or should we say that there are forces within that model which do this?
One thing, it leaves the state in such control that it can do all sorts of things to society.
It's not that the state is simply serving us or is doing a few little things for us or helping us with our retirement plans or something.
I mean, it tells you what you can say to other people, what's politically correct, women's rights in relation to men, it has recolonized the family.
And I think all of these things are, should we say, ever-present dangers, which become more and more likely realities once you've created that managerial state.
Without the managerial state, you couldn't do these things.
You know, someone would say, well, wouldn't you have a feminist movement without the managerial state?
and the Financial State.
Yes, you would, but it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans.
Right?
I mean, you need the state to do these things.
It just like you could have had anti-Semitism in Germany in 1931 when you had all these
millions of Jews killed without the Nazi state.
And the answer is no.
You know, you obviously need a political instrument to bring these things about.
And the political instrument is so powerful in the case of the United States and the people
are so passive and the media is so effective in organizing support of the government, so
are the churches, unfortunately, that it seems to me that once you've created this managerial
model, the rest is very likely to follow.
And you could say, well, why doesn't the managerial model wander off to the right?
So it becomes like a kind of traditional Catholic social state that provides, you know, family
relief.
Well, things don't work this way.
The managerial model that was created in the 1930s was created on the left, and it was a result of social planning.
And it always had a certain component of social engineers, and it continues to move, and the people who go into government service believe all these things.
You know, they don't believe in medieval corporatism, they believe in modern social democracy.
So I think that once you have created this kind of state, it will inevitably move toward this very despotic, leftist social control, as seems to be the case in every Western country.
What used to be a state company, state resources, and all this other stuff. Is this fitting into what you're talking about, that Russia is not really disintegrating, it's just molding into...
No, no, it's disintegrating. It's just the communist leaders have all the money.
That's what I mean.
Yeah, I mean they basically...
Is the model going to change from what it used to be?
It's something that's still totalitarian, but, you know, they take great wealth from it themselves first.
It hasn't happened in Germany. Why has not it had the catastrophic effect on the social life in Europe?
Germany, and I also think that as the family breaks down and as all the social problems