Puting Slander to rest

[Amianthus]

Must be nice to be the final authority. Omniscient, kinda.

[BT]

Yeah, ME.  I'm a real liberal.  Dennis Kucinich.  Robert Kennedy.  Walter Reuther.

Don't know if Bobby belongs in that list.

[BT]

Don't know if Bobby belongs in that list.

and don't get me wrong. He was probably the best president we never had.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Pre-1938 Austrian politics is entirely irrelevant to American politics today.

It's like comparing the Partido Liberal Radical of Argentina to the British Liberal Party.

[Amianthus]

Pre-1938 Austrian politics is entirely irrelevant to American politics today.

Hey, I'm not the one doing comparisons of modern day politics to Hitler. When Hitler is brought into the conversation, pre-1938 Austrian politics becomes relevant.

[sirs]

Excellent article Sirs, thanks.

You're welcome C     

[_JS]

Pre-1938 Austrian politics is entirely irrelevant to American politics today.

Hey, I'm not the one doing comparisons of modern day politics to Hitler. When Hitler is brought into the conversation, pre-1938 Austrian politics becomes relevant.

No offense Ami, but not really. Austria was going to be conquered one way or the other. It was important to Hitler as an vindication of his childhood and to the Greater Germany folks, but to Fascism as a whole Austria was an afterthought.

To understand Fascism and the times one needs to look at how these groups came to power and how they ruled. Mussolini himself, the real father (well, practically speaking) of the Fascist movement, noted that it was a unification of the right wing parties. Most importantly, Fascism denied the class struggle and it was successful in doing so by uniting people of different classes through nationalism (and when that did not work - fear). Socialist and Communist parties of the day believed in class struggle. Look at Britain's or Germany's respective socialist party's constitutions.

There were famous (infamous in my view) folks who had been leftists and embraced the new models of Fascism. Oswald Mosley and Il Duce himself were probably the most well known. That doesn't mean that the two were compatible. Ronald Reagan was a New Deal Democrat at one time - that doesn't make FDR a proponent of Reaganomics (which in essence is the thesis of the article).

I won't get into it much further because, quite frankly, it lacks any academic validity. Yes, some Social Democrats did cave in to the Fascists. They did the same thing in World War I, read Rosa Luxemburg and she tells you all about it. They're doing the same thing now with neoliberalism (see Tony Blair or the German SPD).

Lastly, the American concept of "liberalism" is a joke. It isn't an academic term and is utterly devoid of meaning. Most Americans have no clue what leftists are. As an example, they consider Hillary Clinton part of the left. They call Democrats "socialists." They have no idea what Communism, Socialism, or Marxism are or were...let alone Fascism. They likely have no idea that we've supported Fascist governments for decades after World War II and installed Nazis into positions of power in West Germany after the war.

Therefore, the above might as well had been written in crayon and likely wouldn't have made the fridge.

[Michael Tee]

<<Don't know if Bobby belongs in that list. >>

He wasn't born into it, but I like to think he grew into it.  I recall reading after his assassination that you could go into the poorest cabin of the poorest black sharecropper in the Mississippi delta and you'd find a picture of Bobby on the wall.  And you could go into the poorest shack of the poorest coal-mining hillbilly in Appalachia and you'd find a picture of Bobby on the wall.  Nobody else had that potential to unite poor blacks and poor whites and IMHO nobody else ever will.

I remember visiting the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Quincy, Mass. with my wife, and in that whole building there was just one room dedicated to Bobby.  But it was the most powerful room in the building.  People cried in there and I don't recall seeing anyone crying anywhere else in the building.  We cried too.  We spoke afterwards with a local couple who were also very moved by the video, and we realized that the tears were for the loss of what might have been.  To those strangers and to us, Bobby symbolized the potential that America could be a better America.

Bobby started out in life as the son of a Nazi sympathizer working for the scum of the earth as counsel to the McCarthy investigations but in his final years he had come to stand as a symbol for all the people who believed in peace and racial harmony, who knew that "Love thy neighbour" meant "Love thy neighbour" and not "Napalm thy neighbour" or "Enslave thy neighbour."  How sincere he actually was might be a subject for debate (and I, having lived through those times, have no doubt at all of his sincerity) but IMHO there is no possible controversy as to what he symbolized not only to Americans but to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

[Lanya]

We had pictures on walls in the Southwest of JFK and Jesus.  The JFK picture was usually one from one of the weekly photo magazines, LIFE or LOOK.   I miss those magazines.

[Michael Tee]

It's funny, the article specifically mentioned that the photos on the walls had been torn from newspapers and magazines.  Bet it was the better class homes that had the magazine photos.

[BT]

People are often given attributes in death that they didn't have in life.

[_JS]

Mike, does authentic leftism exist in Canada?

The NDP, perhaps? Bloc Quebecois, sort of?

The Liberal Party are centrists and modeled after the Liberal Party from the UK I believe. The Tories in Canada were always a bit muddled. I think at one time they were more like the one nation British Tories with a very Patristic streak and not so much like the American right-wing. But I think that has changed with the western Canadian right wing more like the American conservatives merging with the more old-fashioned Tories. (I won't get into the Red Tories)

In other words, Alberta's right wingers are a lot like Republicans. I don't think that the Communists or Socialists ever did very well in Canada either, though IO think the National Democrats may have something in their constitution about nationalising industry (or they may have gotten rid of that, I'm not sure).

[Michael Tee]

<<Mike, does authentic leftism exist in Canada?>>

More as a legacy, primarily our "socialized" medicine, which is the legacy of the late Tommy Douglas, a former socialist Premier of the Province of Saskatchewan.  In a recent poll, Tommy Douglas was voted "the greatest Canadian" and IMHO he certainly was that.  Joe Salsberg, who passed away a long time ago, was a long-serving Communist member of our Provincial Legislature, and on his death drew eulogies and praise from the leaders of all major parties in Ontario.

To the extent that any kind of leftism exists today, it's in the form of "splinter parties," for example in our last Provincial election, in my own riding, there were candidates from both the Communist and the Marxist-Leninist Parties on the ballot, but their combined share of the vote was minimal.

We never had a Socialist Party as such, we had the CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation,) which became the NDP (New Democratic Party) in an effort to differentiate itself from its more dogmatic socialist roots.  In our last Ontario NDP government, the party leadership moved so far to the centre that they really alienated their traditional labour union supporters, particularly in the civil service, where some of the most powerful unions are located.  The whole idea of public ownership of the means of production had been abandoned long before the NDP was voted into power here, the most they are willing to go for today is public ownership of some essential industries (say airlines and railways) not even by the government itself but by "Crown corporations" which operate independently of the government of the day almost like private industry.

Bloc Quebecois, like the other separatist and former separatist parties, came out of a Liberal -PC environment, so they are more or less capitalist parties with some socialist leanings.  Jacques Parizeau, for example, a former leader of the PQ, was instrumental in the nationalization of the Quebec aluminum and hydroelectric industries, but he did that when he was a member of a traditional party in Quebec, not when he was a separatist.  The whole Quebec thing is hard to sort out along traditional socialist-capitalist lines, they're sort of a world unto themselves and besides, even the liberal and conservative parties there have elements that Americans would probably consder socialistic.  Besides which, the separatists are bedevilled by nationalism and "racial purity" problems with left and right wings taking different views, some of the more liberals base the whole question more on language than race.  It's pretty complex.

[_JS]

Thanks for the rundown Mike. That is pretty much what I thought, but I didn't realise that the NDP had followed the "Third Way" path of many other Socialist parties. I enjoy Canadian politics, but it is difficult for me to follow as an outsider, especially Quebec as you suggested.

But that is precisely what I mean. For most Americans, they consider Canada to have leftist policies. Yet, Canada has mostly been run by a centrist party (i.e. the Liberals). That makes this entire discussion of "liberal fascists" all the more ludicrous as the terms are so foreign to the majority of Americans. Socialism and Communism are concepts that don't even appear on the RADAR of the American political conversation.

[BT]

Leftist is relative.