Glenn Beck's Nazi Exhibit

[_Quasimodo]

You're statements on the ideologies in question and their relationship to each others is quite sufficient to place you at sub-low information voter status.

[_krose]

Glenn Beck is a student of history, a scholar.

Damn straight! He read a book by Cleon Skousen, which was a very scholarly thing to do.

[_ldsfaqs]

Glenn Beck reads an entire historical and scholarly book about every 3-5 days....
Not to mention all his other reading in general.

You people are nothing compared to his knowledge of history.

[_krose]

Glenn Beck reads an entire historical and scholarly book about every 3-5 days....

Okay, so that's an average of about 90 per year. If we assume he just started this practice since being on television, that's about 640 scholarly works in just the last seven years.

My, my. Where does Mr. Beck even find 640 scholarly history books to read? Amazing. He must have a superhuman brain to retain all that information.

[_ludwigm]

Further, most of what he has was DONATED to him.

I have a lot of exhibits about underage sex pictures, all of them donated.
Apparently my friends and supporters know my gusto.

I can not inhibit them... That people are obsessed.



by the way I read two books a day. Unfortunately, most of them are not scientific. My remaining 32 years (I am 68 ...) is not enough.

[_MeDotOrg]

I'm always a little creeped out about the desire to collect Klan or Nazi memorabilia. I'm not for a moment saying it should be banned or anything. It's just that if I wanted to own something historical, my first instinct would be to own something I associated with good.

To say that fascism and communism were both left wing ignores the fact that twenty million Russians died defeating fascism. Communists and fascists fought pitched battles on the streets of Berlin. If they were ideological soul mates, they sure didn't act like it.

In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in various circles, some of which are now members of the National Socialist Movement, that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.

The government of the United States certainly acts as if there is a difference between fascism and communism. We consistently back coups against communists and supported fascist dictators in their place. (i.e., Allende and Pinochet).

Where do you get this idea that a "hatred of jews" is "conservative"? That is utter fantasy!

Look at the history of the United States: Old line social institutions frequently banned Jews from WASP country clubs, WASP law firms, and many old and established social clubs. Henry Ford in manufacturing, Henry Luce in publishing, Billy Graham and Father Coughlin in religion: Antisemitism has a long conservative tradition.

As to Glen Beck as an historian:

The Straussian conservatives are correct when they point out that many progressive intellectuals like Wilson rejected the 18th century ideas of natural rights and checks and balances as outmoded. The problem arises when these scholars, and their popularizers like Beck and Goldberg, treat all American liberalism and leftism from World War I until the 21st century as the continuation of early 20th century progressivism, the better to denounce today’s liberalism as “historicist” and “relativist” and lump it with the Confederate and Nazi ideology. This ignores the profound differences between the Progressive movement and subsequent movements on the American center-left.

Beck has attempted to paint Wilson as the harbinger of American Fascism.

After Obama was elected, there was much fear in certain parts of America. Obama was compared to Hitler. A provision for providing end of life counseling for families in health care legislation was interpreted as ‘death panels’. Tea Party rallies showed Obama’s visage with a Hitlerian bottle brush mustache. Political Pundits talked about ACORN becoming his army of Brownshirts. The narrative being spun was that Obama was a fascist.

That the son of a mixed-race couple whose marriage would have been illegal in Nazi Germany would somehow be the heir to the Aryan Empire was an irony that evidently escaped some students of history.

Beck declared that this was part of “Liberal Fascism” in a continuum that reaches back to Woodrow Wilson.One of the ‘proofs’ given to substantiate this claim was the design of the Mercury Dime, originally minted in 1916, during the Wilson Presidency. On the back of the coin are the ‘fasces’, a bundle of sticks tied together. Roman Emperors used the fasces as an emblem of state power. (One stick can easily be broken. A bundle of sticks tied together cannot.) This symbol was adapted by Benito Mussolini as a symbol for Fascism.

Beck said on Fox News: “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916, Woodrow Wilson was the president. I didn’t even put this together. We’ve have been on the road to fascism for a while.”

What those who believed this ‘proof’ did not know (or chose to ignore) was that in 1916 Mussolini had not adopted the fasces as a symbol of his party. The Fascist Party that propelled Mussolini to power did not yet exist. There is no record of Woodrow Wilson ever having met the Adolf A. Weinman, designer of the Mercury Dime, nor is there any record that Wilson himself had any input into the design of the coin.

Beck is one of the great purveyors of narrative as history. His web page is modestly entitled ‘Entertainment meets Enlightenment’.

[_EAllusion]

Fascism is traditionally considered a type of right-wing authoritarian political structure with an emphasis on extreme nationalism (often called "patriotism" in America), militarism, corporatism, support of a strong police state, and veneration of state leaders when they are part of the fascist party. Categorizing it far right when, say, an antithesis of it in anarcho-capitalism is also far right has to do with the limitations of the dipole political spectrum. The extreme leftwing movement of anarcho-syndicalism has more in common with hardcore libertarians than it does Stalinism. Likewise, Stalinism has more in common with fascism than leftist communitarians. Multidimensional political spectrums do a better job capturing family resemblances of political ideologies, but that doesn't change how and why things are categorized as left or right.

There's a movement in the more authoritarian religious right sector in the United States that Droopy is a part of to recast fascism as leftism given that all things "left" are bad and all things "right" are good. The irony is those are some of the most fascist members of our own society.

Glen Beck is a modern conservative (classical liberal)

If you are keeping score, this is the most ridiculous thing Droopy uttered in this thread.

[_Molok]

The Nazis were not conservatives, but radicals and revolutionaries. They were totalitarian socialists. Glen Beck is a modern conservative (classical liberal), not a Nazi. Modern conservatism and National Socialism are diametrically opposed. The closest analog over 20th century history is Marxian utopian socialism and 20th century progressivism broadly speaking.

The Nazis fought against the upcoming vaudville culture, saying it was corrupting the youth. They sought to return to Germany's glorious past. They didn't like homosexuals. I could go on, but you get the point. Philosophically, Nazis were as conservative as it gets. This is one of the reasons they didn't like the Stalin Communist government, despite the fact that many of their government policies were similiar.

[_Droopy]

I'm always a little creeped out about the desire to collect Klan or Nazi memorabilia.

If you were walking across a typical American college or university campus, and you saw passed a student wearing this



Would you be creeped out?

To say that fascism and communism were both left wing ignores the fact that twenty million Russians died defeating fascism.

Non sequitur. Two rival totalitarian systems with some doctrinal differences fighting each other within the same country or because of the territorial ambitions of one or the other side has no relation to whether or not those systems are in fact sects or branches of the same general ideological vision and belief system. We now know that Stalin himself was planning to eventually, at some future time, break the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact himself, for very much the same reasons Hitler broke it - lust for power.

What you simply cannot escape but will not face is that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (international socialist and National Socialist respectively) were long-time allies, finally cemented with the Hitler-Stalin Pact against the West and America previous to the beginning of WWII. Why were they allies, Met? Because they were both totalitarian collectivist system with very similar perspectives about the nature of human beings and human society and shared visceral hatred for the same common enemy - Western liberal democracy - classical liberalism.

Communists and fascists fought pitched battles on the streets of Berlin. If they were ideological soul mates, they sure didn't act like it.

The fallacies of reasoning here are too brazen to really even bother pointing out to any philosophically astute critical thinker or student of history. They stand on their own. All one really has to do to understand the close affinities these rival sibling ideologies have respecting each other is just study their doctrines and ideological background. The affinities are all there to behold, as are the various doctrinal emphasis and de emphasis that divides them into rival sects of the Left.

In the years 1913 and 1914 I expressed my opinion for the first time in various circles, some of which are now members of the National Socialist Movement, that the problem of how the future of the German nation can be secured is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.

He also invited Marxists/communists to convert to National Socialism wherever possible, finding them to be among the best and most ideologically prepared among all possible converts. In any case, most of Hitler's beef with communism was with what he perceived to be its overwhelming Jewish tint, not many of its core doctrines, which he did not find distasteful in principle.

The government of the United States certainly acts as if there is a difference between fascism and communism. We consistently back coups against communists and supported fascist dictators in their place. (i.e., Allende and Pinochet).

1. Nazism was not fascism, but National Socialism. It imported some fascist elements (primarily in its economic doctrines and control of the economy), but was not fascism per se.

2. Fascism, as originated and practiced by Mussolini, was a sect or interpretation of socialism - a socialist heresy or cult - according to Mussolini himself and its own theorists.

3. U.S. support during the Cold War for some authoritarian regimes as a devil's bargain, in some cases, required to maintain allies against communist aggression and expansion into the Americas was not ideological in nature, but geopolitical and pragmatic. Soveit support for Marxist police state regimes in Latin America on the other hand - Cuba and Nicaragua for example - was ideological in nature as well as imperialistic. The Soviets shared a close ideological affinity with Castro, Gurvara, and the Ortegas. America shared no ideological affinity with Pinochet, Batista, or Somoza.

Allende was a statist authoritarian/totalitarian Marxist who imposed severe repressions of individual liberty on his citizens, militarized his nation, became a Soviet client state, and imported numbers of Soviet at el advisers (as per Nicaragua) into his country in the process of turning it into a Marxist police state. He formed his own version of Cuba's committees for the defense of the revolution (neighborhood snooping groups) tasked with reporting any incidence of political incorrectness among the population.

Look at the history of the United States: Old line social institutions frequently banned Jews from WASP country clubs, WASP law firms, and many old and established social clubs. Henry Ford in manufacturing, Henry Luce in publishing, Billy Graham and Father Coughlin in religion: Antisemitism has a long conservative tradition.

Modern conservatism didn't exist in the era's you are mentioning here, in the first place. Secondly, Nazism is a phenomena of the Left, which is why, if you really want to study and understand racism, you have to look well beyond the average American of the first third of the 20th century and study the 1920s and 1930s (especially) progressive Left. That's where racism and antisemitism were ideologically concentrated, from Wilson, the Fabians, and most progressive intellectuals (including Sanger) and on to FDR himself. The Eugenics and racial hygiene movement in America of that time was primarily concentrated and given intellectual respectability by the Left, the same Left that adored Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini equally as harbingers of a collective, planned future of both economic and racial order and utopian felicity.

Want antisemitism now, Met? Any American college and university campus of any notoriety (concentrated in the humanities and social sciences). Any Middle Eastern studies department, save a few outliers. The BBC, The EU, Chomsky, Said, Finklestien and many others of note.

Beck has attempted to paint Wilson as the harbinger of American Fascism.

A number of historians and scholars have drawn the obvious conclusion, from Wilson's own writings and statements (and policies) that he was a leader of the progressive intellectual movement of his time, which encompassed fascist ideas as well as National Socialist and class-war socialist philosophies.

The narrative being spun was that Obama was a fascist.

Obama is an Alinskyite revolutionary socialist and was intellectually mentored in his youth within the heady realm of unalloyed Marxist-Leninist ideas and black power ideology, specifically in the form of black liberation theology.

That the son of a mixed-race couple whose marriage would have been illegal in Nazi Germany would somehow be the heir to the Aryan Empire was an irony that evidently escaped some students of history.

This kind of abyssal stupefaction requires deep, sustained, and rigorously cultivated ignorance of a kind one could perhaps only find in early 21st century public school/mainstream media educated America.

[_bcspace]

The Nazis fought against the upcoming vaudville culture, saying it was corrupting the youth. They sought to return to Germany's glorious past. They didn't like homosexuals. I could go on, but you get the point. Philosophically, Nazis were as conservative as it gets. This is one of the reasons they didn't like the Stalin Communist government, despite the fact that many of their government policies were similiar.

The Nazis were socialists. Besides looking at their point by point plan, it's even part of their name. They are Leftwing Nationalists.