National Socialism vs. Communism.

ColonelCarter

As far as I can tell Colonel Carter, all your posts, prior to those on this thread, have been on other boards and dealt with game tactics rather than historical argument. That’s perfectly fine, but you are the one who is ignorant (and I say that politely) of the legacy of discussions on this area of A&A.org… unless of course you have read much, but never posted. I cannot know that for sure, but IL does not need to support his statement about past experience. That is for you to look up and determine yourself. All that said… Welcome brother! :lol:

I have followed this forum for a while and am well aware of IL’s and Kurt’s history, but that is besides the point. It just rubbed me the wrong way that IL (who as far as I can tell from what I’ve seen on these forums is a well-versed and intelligent individual) would decry Kurt’s response to the discussion in this thread because of their previous disagreements, even though those qualms were not relevant to the discussion, as I pointed out in the second half of your quote of mine. Perhaps the first half came across as hostile, and for that I apologize, as well as possibly derailing the discussion further.

With that, unless more discussion relating to National Socialism and Communism that I want to respond to show up, I’m out as well.

LHoffman

@ColonelCarter:

I have followed this forum for a while and am well aware of IL’s and Kurt’s history, but that is besides the point. It just rubbed me the wrong way that IL (who as far as I can tell from what I’ve seen on these forums is a well-versed and intelligent individual) would decry Kurt’s response to the discussion in this thread because of their previous disagreements, even though those qualms were not relevant to the discussion, as I pointed out in the second half of your quote of mine. Perhaps the first half came across as hostile, and for that I apologize, as well as possibly derailing the discussion further.

With that, unless more discussion relating to National Socialism and Communism that I want to respond to show up, I’m out as well.

Not a problem. I am not here to foster animosity, nor shy away from it if it exists. However, my opinion is that the legacy of former discussions are very relevant if their themes continue again here or elsewhere, which they very clearly were.

But anyway… this is all besides the point, or the subject, as it were. My apologies.

strategic planner

Well the western allies were good for the most part. Except that FDR buddied up to stalin, and abandoned eastern europe (along with POWs) because he admired stalin.
Churchill was mostly good also.

Both the nazis and the soviets were evil. However if you put a gun to my head and said pick one to live in i would say nazi germany 8 days of the week. For all of the terrible qualities of hitler, the one thing you cannot say about him is that he was disloyal. Hitler actually had “friends” (associates, confidants, etc). Stalin basically refused to a POW release-trade for his own son, and his daughter committed suicide in large part because of him.

It is insane to suggest that the final solution was the allies fault. Really it was hitler and companies pet project. They probably could have come much closer to winning without that mess.

However while i totally disagree on many things Kurt says, he has one good point. Modern america conveniently ignores soviet atrocities that made the nazis look like angels (a comparison). The nazis were very evil but the soviets were evil er. Does that make sense?

TLDR: western allies were mostly good (except for FDR loving stalin/ussr. Patton saw that as bad, and was right). Nazi germany was very evil but a much better place than the ussr. Ussr = like north korea.

Narvik

Now if I was a Jew I would rather be killed in Germany. They used gas which is fast and clean. Stalin sent people to a slow and painful dead I cold Sibieria

CWO Marc

@strategic:

For all of the terrible qualities of hitler, the one thing you cannot say about him is that he was disloyal.

I’m not sure Hitler’s long-serving Party comrade Ernst Rohm would have agreed with that statement when Hitler had him executed in 1934. Rohm envisioned having the SA replace the Wehrmacht in the medium-to-long term, as part of the ongoing transformation of Germany being effected by the Nazis. Hitler, who had a different agenda, was secure enough in his position by 1934 that he no longer needed the SA (who had been instrumental in bringing him to power) – but he very much needed the regular Army’s support and manpower to start re-drawing the map of Europe. He therefore bought the Wehrmacht’s loyalty by getting rid of its potential competitors: in a very Stalin-like move, he ordered the arrest or execution of the SA leadership (including Rohm, personal loyalty to his old comrade be damned) and basically sidelined the SA organization because it had served its primary purpose (getting Hitler to power) and could thus easily be dispensed with.

KurtGodel7

During the period in question (the early '30s), the German Army was limited to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty. On the other hand, the SA was a quasi-military organization which had at least 500,000 men. The regular army was certainly more combat-effective than the SA on a man for man basis, but the SA had much larger numbers. As such, the SA could have plunged Germany into civil war, had that been what it decided to do.

Roehm (the head of the SA) was becoming increasingly discontent with Hitler and his administration. Foehn had expected Hitler’s rise to power to be a time of redistribution, with money, positions, and so forth going to old party comrades. Hitler wanted positions allocated by merit, and did not want party hacks advanced to positions for which they were not qualified. Whenever he deviated from that philosophy, for example in the case of Goering, the result was typically bad for Germany.

Roehm was discontent, but was he on the verge of open rebellion and civil war? Hitler was convinced he was. It is quite possible that some of Roehm’s rivals and enemies within the Nazi party fed Hitler false or exaggerated data about Roehm’s future intentions. But that is only speculation. We may never know for certain whether Roehm did or did not plan open rebellion against Hitler. At the time, Hitler had to make a quick decision based on limited data. He chose to place avoidance of a bloody civil war above loyalty to a friend. If you want to find things for which to fault Hitler, there are worse things you could point to than that.

Imperious Leader

Now if I was a Jew I would rather be killed in Germany. They used gas which is fast and clean. Stalin sent people to a slow and painful dead I cold Siberia

You got to be kidding? From the arguments presented, being a Jew in Germany is apparently better than being a German in Germany because all Germans were starved by Churchill and FDR and Jews just hanged around and played hide and go seek with the SS. And if you were a polish Jew, you could not blame Hitler for invading and exterminating, but again just blame Churchill and others for staving everyone. Hitler was forced into this war of extermination and we only have Churchill to blame and the Americans and Soviets. Adolf was basically a swell dude. How could we have been so mistaken?

Answer: To merely bring up examples and raise them to the level of where real evil was committed and totally ignore the basic facts. And if you repeat the lie as Herr Goebbels points out, you can claim the truth by repetition. Fantastic!!

Example: thread about the best German tank… well the greatest tank could be a Panzer V, but the greatest killer of innocents and the greatest crime was the Morgenthau Plan, which starved more people than Hitler could have possibly murdered, and BTW Hitler had to kill them because the cost of exporting people cost too much, so their deaths are not the Nazi’s fault… its anybody else’s.

Private-Panic

@KurtGodel7:

…whatever that truth may be. …

I do not want to restart the argument, but I do think a clarification is worthwhile.

The issue in Kurt and my debate was not one of truth, in the sense of disputed facts. We agreed that the Nazis pursued a policy of systematic and deliberate genocide using gas chambers, mobile death squads and so on. We agreed that the Allies were blockading food supplies which lead to starvation. These facts were accepted by both of us.

The issue was whether the Allied blockade transferred guilt for genocide from the Nazis to the Allies. I can understand that the Allied blockade might be regarded as justification for a food allocation that lead to death for those not favoured, although the furthest I could myself go is to regard it as extenuating rather than exculpatory. But to exonerate those who built and filled the gas chambers and pass that guilt to those who put in place the food blockade is beyond my understanding.

This difference does not depend on the facts, but on moral standpoint. Unfortunately, moral truth is even tougher to grasp than facts ……

KurtGodel7

Private Panic wrote,

The issue in Kurt and my debate was not one of truth, in the sense of disputed facts.

Let’s say that a spaceship has ten people on board, and exactly enough air for all ten people to arrive safely at their destination. A malicious man releases 30% of that spaceship’s air supply into outer space. At that point, the man has become guilty of the deaths of three people. We don’t yet know which three people the man just killed. In fact, there’s a strong likelihood that the responsibility for selecting the victims for the man’s crime will fall to the captain. The captain will be responsible for saying, “You seven get air, you three don’t.” The fact that the captain was forced into making that decision does not absolve the man who released the air from guilt. Nor does it transfer guilt onto the captain’s shoulders.

Narvik

@wheatbeer:

In addition to these differences, much of the hostility can simply be attributed to Germany and USSR seeking to dominate overlapping territory.

An expansionist Germany (whether Nazi or Communist) was inevitably going to mistrust an expansionist Soviet Union.

To get the thread back on track. I guess you are spot on, Wheatbeer. Expansionist is the key word here. Nazism, Communism, Kingdom, Fascizm and so on are just names, and names don’t hurt anybody. Its when you steal your fellow mans land the problems start. Hitler and Stalin were basically thieves. Then we can debate who were the better or lesser thief and in that case Hitler win.

wheatbeer

Minor note: I should have written “and vice versa” at the end of that second sentence Narvik quoted (surprised no one complained about that earlier :lol:).

Returning to the original post, the ideological differences of these regimes tend to be overshadowed by the practical similarities of conducting total war as a dictatorship. That doesn’t mean the ideological differences are irrelevant.

Consider National Socialism as taking ethno-nationalism to its logical extreme. Socialism here is just a tool to harness and direct the collective/undivided strength of a nation as part of (in their minds) an inevitable Darwinian struggle between nations.

Communism does not cultivate the strength of any particular nation. Quite the contrary, it ultimately aims to dissolve nations. Socialism here isn’t just a tool to fight others. For a Communist believer, socialism simply paves the way for the ultimate idealized end, a classless/anarchist society.

(Before commenting, please note, I am using the word “nation” in the classical sense. Nation refers to an ethnic entity not a state entity.)

KurtGodel7

Imperious Leader wrote,

Example: thread about the best German tank… well the greatest tank could be a
Panzer V, but the greatest killer of innocents and the greatest crime was the Morgenthau Plan

I would never do something like that!

On another matter, Christopher Lee recently passed away. :( Lee was known for having played Saruman in the Lord of the Rings, Count Dooku in Star Wars, and other roles along those lines. He had a deep voice and a commanding, masculine, aristocratic presence. A typical theme for a Lee-played character was to initially side with the good guys. But then to commit a deep betrayal. His manner would give the betrayal a certain dignity. High evil, if you will, rather than petty evil.

One of the movies in which he starred involved the United States and Russia. There wasn’t a sufficiently evil power for the Christopher Lee-played character to betray himself to. So he went to work to create one. He and a few others began a plot to revive the old Soviet Union; with his supposed loyalty to the Russian government serving as a cloak under which to hide his betrayal and his plans to overthrow that government.

During Finland’s Winter War, Lee served as a pilot, and helped the brave Finns fight the evil Soviet invaders. He fought for anti-communism. Later, he joined the RAF; and proceeded to fight on the same side as communism. The anti-communists for whom he’d initially fought may have felt betrayed. They may also have felt that his deep voice and masculine, aristocratic bearing gave the betrayal a certain dignity.

Christopher Lee was not the only one guilty of betrayal during WWII. The French promised that if Germany invaded Poland, they would launch a general offensive against Germany within 15 days of mobilization. That promise was never kept–nor was it ever intended to be. Even worse, the British and the French initiated a food blockade against Germany–a food blockade which caused the deaths of millions of Poles. Not content with having thrown their Polish ally under the bus, the British and the French proceeded to use their food blockade to murder Poles by the millions!

Now where were we? Ah yes, Christopher Lee. All flippancy aside, he was a great actor, and he will be missed. May he rest in peace. :(

LHoffman

@KurtGodel7:

Let’s say that a spaceship has ten people on board, and exactly enough air for all ten people to arrive safely at their destination. A malicious man releases 30% of that spaceship’s air supply into outer space. At that point, the man has become guilty of the deaths of three people. We don’t yet know which three people the man just killed. In fact, there’s a strong likelihood that the responsibility for selecting the victims for the man’s crime will fall to the captain. The captain will be responsible for saying, “You seven get air, you three don’t.” The fact that the captain was forced into making that decision does not absolve the man who released the air from guilt. Nor does it transfer guilt onto the captain’s shoulders.

The captain must have not liked the three Jews that were on board then. Easy decision. I don’t think the captain felt guilty.

This is all just transference of blame or guilt. The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.

Besides, the analogy doesn’t quite fit. 10 people on a spaceship is different from 40 million in a country. The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation. And if some of those options were taken from them (escape, emigration), then whose fault is that?

KurtGodel7

L. Hoffman wrote:

The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.

It’s not an assumption. It’s a basic statement of fact.

Let X = the number of calories needed to keep everyone in German-held territory alive
Let Y = the number of calories physically available in that territory.

If X > Y, people will die. The larger the difference, the more people die.

The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation.

What options were those? No major Western democratic nation offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender. After Barbarossa, the unconditional surrender was required to be to all the Allies, including the Soviet Union.

There were some German generals interested in overthrowing Hitler and making peace with the Western democracies. They covertly contacted the American government. FDR responded by saying that he made no distinction between a Nazi and non-Nazi government, and that unconditional surrender was an absolute requirement either way. Upon hearing this, a number of the German generals abandoned their plans to assassinate Hitler.

aequitas-et-veritas

@KurtGodel7:

L. Hoffman wrote:

The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.

It’s not an assumption. It’s a basic statement of fact.

Let X = the number of calories needed to keep everyone in German-held territory alive
Let Y = the number of calories physically available in that territory.

If X > Y, people will die. The larger the difference, the more people die.

The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation.

What options were those? No major Western democratic nation offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender. After Barbarossa, the unconditional surrender was required to be to all the Allies, including the Soviet Union.

There were some German generals interested in overthrowing Hitler and making peace with the Western democracies. They covertly contacted the American government. FDR responded by saying that he made no distinction between a Nazi and non-Nazi government, and that unconditional surrender was an absolute requirement either way. Upon hearing this, a number of the German generals abandoned their plans to assassinate Hitler.

Sorry Kurt but that is pure NONSENSE.
You are basically saying life is Math,but it is not!

Every single Person on this Earth living, lived and will be living is giving the Option to choose.
With your Statement you are making life as we know it as an result of Math.
It is not working!

KurtGodel7

aequitas et veritas wrote:

You are basically saying life is Math,but it is not!

I’m not saying that life is math. I’m saying that life is subject to certain mathematical and scientific principles. For example:

You choose what you eat, and how much you exercise. But the outcomes of those choices are a result of medical and scientific principles. Or to take another example: places of worship are designed to be physically resistant to high winds or other types of severe weather. It is very rare for a religious leader to design his place of worship in such a way that it ought to collapse according to the laws of physics, and then for him to pray for a miraculous exemption from those laws.

If religious leaders typically rely on the laws of physics (as opposed to miracles) to keep their places of worship standing, it’s reasonable for secular leaders to rely on the laws of physics in their efforts to feed the people within their borders. Unfortunately, those physical laws dictate the following:

If [calories available] < [calories needed to keep everyone alive], some people will die. I’m no happier about that logic than anyone else. Bear in mind that a number of my distant Polish relatives undoubtedly died as a result of that brutal math. But getting all emotional about this would not change the underlying physical principles. Emotions are not substitutes for food in people’s bellies. Food–rather than emotion–is what was needed, and what Germany did not have.

Wheetbeer wrote:

Consider National Socialism as taking ethno-nationalism to its logical extreme.

Agreed.

Communism . . . ultimately aims to dissolve nations.

Also agreed.

Narvik wrote,

Expansionist is the key word here. Nazism, Communism, Kingdom, Fascizm and so on are just names . . .

I agree that both the Nazis and the communists were expansionistic. The goal of Hitler’s foreign policy was to conquer all the Soviet Union west of the Urals. That would have protected Germany from the communist threat, obtained the Lebensraum Hitler wanted, and given Germany the same strength relative to Europe that the United States had relative to North America. As Hitler pointed out in Mein Kampf, no one had ever succeeded in imposing a Versailles Treaty on the United States. Nor did he want anyone to ever again succeed in doing so to Germany.

The goal of communism is world conquest. Communists were far more expansionistic than the Nazis or the Japanese.

I would also argue that Western democracies have sometimes been expansionistic. In the absence of Western expansionism, the English language would have been confined to England, and the French language to France. Instead of which, English is the dominant language in most of North America, India, and other places colonized by Britain. French is the dominant language in large parts of Africa, and in other places too.

wheatbeer

@KurtGodel7:

The goal of communism is world conquest.

I will assume that you mean: world conquest was a goal of Stalinist socialism and not “Communism”.

Marx’s manifesto never advocated conquest. He believed revolution was an inevitable and organic process. Marx never imagined that revolution would fail in Western Europe. The idea of an agrarian state like Russia becoming socialist and then imposing socialism upon others by conventional military force would have sounded like utter madness to Marx.

KurtGodel7

@wheatbeer:

I will assume that you mean: world conquest was a goal of Stalinist socialism and not “Communism”.

Marx’s manifesto never advocated conquest. He believed revolution was an inevitable and organic process. Marx never imagined that revolution would fail in Western Europe. The idea of an agrarian state like Russia becoming socialist and then imposing socialism upon others by conventional military force would have sounded like utter madness to Marx.

When I wrote that world conquest was the goal of communism, that’s exactly what I meant. Marx envisioned a world completely dominated by communism, with no other systems of government present. Engels in particular was very emphatic that violence was needed to achieve this goal.

It’s true that Marx seemed to envision the source of this violence as coming from people rebelling against their own governments, rather than communist governments violently conquering non-communist ones. At the time the Manifesto was written, the world had no communist governments.

But if a group of communist revolutionaries, people who see themselves as part of a movement committed to the violent removal of all non-communist governments everywhere, happen to seize control of some local government, what are they to do then? Are they supposed to just put aside their revolutionary fervor, and enjoy the utopia their local government will supposedly create? Or, having overthrown their own local bourgeoise with violence, maybe they’ll feel inclined to do the same to neighboring nations’ bourgeoise. Going after one’s neighbors can be either overt (military conquest) or covert (subversion and attempts to weaken the existing social order). Stalin was absolutely delighted to do both things to his neighbors, and was perfectly happy to use subversion against more distant nations as well.

Military conquest–especially on a world war type scale–carries more risks than subversion. Stalin’s more cautious successors tended to shy away from more than purely local military conquests, while continuing to fully embrace his emphasis on subversion. Every Soviet leader prior to Gorbachev embraced world conquest as the natural long term goal for the Soviet Union. A world controlled by one world government–a communist government–was the same goal Marx and Engles had. The fact the Soviets embraced additional means of achieving the violent removal of non-communist regimes is true, but does not alter the basic Marx/Engels declaration of war against all non-communist governments everywhere.

Private-Panic

@aequitas:

Every single Person on this Earth living, lived and will be living is giving the Option to choose.

Quite right aequitas.

LHoffman

Sorry to revert progress buuuuuuut……

@KurtGodel7:

L. Hoffman wrote:

The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.

It’s not an assumption. It’s a basic statement of fact.

Let X = the number of calories needed to keep everyone in German-held territory alive
Let Y = the number of calories physically available in that territory.

If X > Y, people will die. The larger the difference, the more people die.

Mathematically that makes sense. However, you are reducing a very complicated equation down to (2) variables and completely ignoring my point: why was it okay for Hitler/the Nazis to make that choice? Why did they have to make that choice?

Your statements would indicate that (Embargo) + (Too Many People) = (People must be killed so they don’t first starve).

If the number of people who would starve is the same as those that would be killed, then why not simply restrict their food such that they starve? Why systematically kill them? I am not supposing you have an answer for this, it is just rhetorical.

The underlying assumption here is that the logical and obvious choice for Hitler/the Nazis was to exterminate certain people so that ethnic Germans did not starve. Why is this logical and obvious? (I know it was to the Nazis, but why do you imply that it is rational, excusable or a choice that can be sympathized with?)

@KurtGodel7:

The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation.

What options were those? No major Western democratic nation offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender. After Barbarossa, the unconditional surrender was required to be to all the Allies, including the Soviet Union.

I did not mean that Germany’s leaders should have opted for Unconditional Surrender. What I was saying is that the leaders of Germany had more options than simply to exterminate all the Jews and whomever else deemed unfit. And the persecuted people had more options than to simply stay in Germany.

Nazi leaders could have relocated all the undesirables/foreigners to non-German (i.e. Ukraine, USSR, Greece, Hungary, Africa, France, etc…) territories. They could have placed them on barges and set them adrift in the Mediterranean. If truly deprived of their food and facing persecution in Germany, I am sure many Jews (et al) would have (and did) voluntarily emigrate if given the chance or free passage to do so. (Many did, but many more were not given that opportunity.)

My point is simply that Nazi Germany need not have expended such an effort to kill all those involved in the Holocaust. Impending Starvation does not logically lead to Kill A Portion of Your Own Populous. There were other, non-genocidal ways of removing undesirable people. If the Nazis were at all capable of separate coexistence or had any compunction over atrocities, they could have made different choices. To insinuate that Hitler/the Nazis had no choice but to kill people is blatantly false.

National Socialism vs. Communism.

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