It has long been a mystery to me why people so easily become attached to politicians who are real slimy charactors. The list is so long that it must be curtailed to the most recent and local. The recent primaries offer some prime examples. Take John Edwards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AE847UXu3Q Now what man loves himself to this extent. He decided at the height of the campaign to do A Poverty Tour where he visited all the slums etc. This man is so detached from reality that he thinks to plebs do not know he is worth 500 million and pays more for a haircut than what they must live on for a week. He made his money as a trial lawyer sueing hospitals for birth defects that he said was the fault of the hospital. When his wife got cancer he did not pull out of the race but instead put her argueing with Ann Coullter on msnbc. To make himself look good he says his father was a mill worker. Well he was a mill manager but that would not sound as good. He is a vain man who cares for nothing but himself. However compared to Rudy he is a Saint. Rudy is a person who no decent person would stand beside. His father was not a mill manager but a legbreaker www.realchange.org/giuliani.htm - 19k all the fun there so I won't continue except to say that I have never met anybody that liked him. What allows these people to be considered as leaders even briefly is the twaddle coming out of the tv. If Bill O Reilly says Denis Kucinich is a loon then fools will believe it. Why they use the word loon is beyond me because a loon is a well thought of bird in Canada that appears on it's coinage. The twisting of the truth entails using words to mean the opposite to their real meaning. Hillary knows that if she called herself a socialist she would get nowhere so she calls herself a liberal. The meaning of the word liberal is the exact opposite to it's origonal meaning. The term conservative now means something that Barry Goldwater would not recognise. A Libertarian is described as right wing which is the exact opposite to what a libertarian is. The Patriot Act sounds like something that a Patriot would support until you see what the letters stand for, strenghtening america by Providing Appropiate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. This act should be called The Electronic Spying Act. No Patriot would vote for this. 1 senator out of 100 read this act and he, Russ Feingold dem from Wisconsin voted alone against it. A far right wing police state law. It amazes me that so many fall for this leftwing/rightwing divide. The text book example of right and left is Hitler/Stalin. The assumption is that they were polar opposites. You will never hear the Germans described as National Socialists because people would cop on. So one country of donkeys had to die for The Fatherland and another country of donkeys had to die for The Motherland. These fools actually believed that Hitler was concerned about them. By the time the gobadains copped on in Stalingrad the temperture was low enough to give Al Gore nightmares. This brings me to the con job in Ireland where you have 2 identical parties with followers so doopy that they can not see the obvious. Their blind faith allows humble public servants to own estates,horses, helecopters and offshore bank accounts. We recently had a great festive holiday with parasites dispatched to China Vietnam Australia Washington and who knows where else. In a country of 4 million is there nobody to suggest that it might be wiser to bring a few investors to Ireland instead. There you have it where Bertie gets paid more than the President of the US.

youngdan, you're a legend. Looking forward to more of this. Woo hoo!

It is interesting how language is twisted or re-invented for political ends.

Wow. Reading that is like getting hit with a hammer ! Good stuff YD.

Quote :

So one country of donkeys had to die for The Fatherland and another country of donkeys had to die for The Motherland.

How sadly true is that.

Robert Poole wrote an interesting book, called Unspeak unless I'm mistaken, in which he deals with the spinning of words. He deals with phrases such as climate change, which came to replace global warming because it is less threatening (the climate changes everyday, right?) and 'intelligent design' which sounds better then creationism but is essentially the same. He discusses the widespread use of 'belief' as a justification for one's actions (Both Bush and Blair 'believed' that the Iraq war was/is the right course of action) and the popularity of 'reform', which might actually mean anything.

Etymological fallacy have to be taken into account. It's no good announcing what libertarianisn really means, it's what it means today that's important and for many people it is a right-wing phrase.

wow so you slag off some left wingers way to make a point wow

I have a lot of time for left wingers as I see them as compassionate people who are taken advantage of. Likewise Greens who are concerned about Tara and pollution. The mistake they make is to believe that Stalin, Mao, Honeker, Hillary or any of the rest gives a fig about them. Castro and Arafat both have/had over a billion dollars in their own accounts which is stolen from the fools who supported them. I will be back to discuss the right wing idols tonight hopefully. Maybe it will be more to your liking

Ibis. It means something different here but I will keep in mind these differing meanings.

Youngdan is exasperated with hypocrisy of leaders. But the fact that the leaders may all be hypocritical does not mean they are all representing the same thing. Stalin and Hitler may have had a pact that both of them believed was tactically advantageous. When it came down to it, Nazi-led Germany and Stalinist-led Russia had to slugged it out at the cost of 20 million lives, more than all the other WW II theatres of war put together, because their systems were inimicable to each other. One country had a private enterprise economic system and the other had a nationalised system of ownership and production. We didn't see Hitler fighting Mussolini or Franco. The people who fought werent all fools, and in the end of the day, Stalin (whether rightly or wrongly) tried to avoid the war, and did not drag the Russian people into it.

They were 2 peas in the same pod and showed it by gobbling Poland. The reason Stalin tried to avoid war was simple. He was a coward who went into seclusion for 3 days when then attack came and he was in a weaker position than Germany. When the Soviets were strong the phoney pacism was no where in evidence in Checkoslovakia anf Hungary before it.

youngdan wrote:

They were 2 peas in the same pod and showed it by gobbling Poland. The reason Stalin tried to avoid war was simple. He was a coward who went into seclusion for 3 days when then attack came and he was in a weaker position than Germany. When the Soviets were strong the phoney pacism was no where in evidence in Checkoslovakia anf Hungary before it.

It is certainly true that Stalin was not prepared for Hitler and had shredded his army to protect his own position. But that doesn't explain why they were fighting. WWII was had a dual purpose - fight over territory and resources and fight over public vs private economies.

Talking of spinning of words, Robert Fisk gave us this the other day.

Part 2. Continueing on the theme of why rational people become so attached to politicians that under normal conditions they would not even socialise in a pub with. Many are afraid to accept reality and they cling to a Saviour that they believe will make everything right. They are chicks who even though they have been forced out of the nest they still must construct an imagionary haven and an all knowing and benevolent Mother Goose to look after them. These young birds will be taxed to the extent that they are at any time close to financial disastor.. In this precarious position their anxiety will be kept at a maximum level by constant media hype dealing with the problems of retirement, health care, kids education and such. They never realise that if they were paying 20000 dollars less per year taxes they could retire on a nest egg of over 2 million if the invested at even a moderate return. Seeing a bleak future many will tend to look to government to provide these services which should be cheap but are not. From this point on no matter how clear it is that mother goose does not care for these chicks, and why should she, the truth will be avoided. That is why Hillary is forgiven for the sniper fire tall tale and Obama is forgiven for associating with the white hating pastor that screems God Damn America which is constantly played here and why he was forgiven for the NAFTA lie. The fact that the lies are so blatent and insulting to the chicks intelligence makes this a trying time but still the chick refuses to believe. These people will now insist that all birds act in such a way as to make their reality real. Anyone that does not agree with the cocoon system will be made out to be mean and callous. They want others to pay for their reality. The republican chicks are a different breed. They see themselves as alpha male buggies so they must be fed a different type of birdseed. Their anxieties are even easier to stroke. Their boogie man is the feared outside enemy. To defeat this enemy no sacrifice is too great. The fact that the US had until recently the greatest military machine ever was not allowed to entrude into the buggies reality zone. No amount of absurdity is too much for a buggie. We are at the point this very moment that many believe that Iran is suppling the insurgents and they are wondering why are we not hitting back. It never dawns on them that if the Iranians were to give the rebels surface to air missiles there would be no helicopters in Iraq. Two candidates ran their entre campaign on this and one seems to have won. This is the loser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0E0wfShJ58 and http://tw.video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=1004116 This is the winner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAzBxFaio1I and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqGWTh_NZ-0
Sometimes it is best to have a complete band rather than a solo singer so I present this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Ag395cqUM This little ditti is top of the charts with millions of people here. This far surpasses the cold war because the danger can be portrayed at home. This great advantage has led to complete uprooting of civil liberties here. We have had Patriot Act 1 and 2, the militaty commission Act, the repeal of the posse commitas law and the suspension of Habeas Corpus along with many more. So we have one group of children following one Pied Piper and another group of children following his twin brother Pied Piper. The fact that there is no difference between them is shown by the ease in which politicians change when it suits them. Some examples, the right wing republican Strom Thurmond was a democrat until 1964 till he realised his state was becoming republican. No problem he became a republican. Hillary Clinton was an ardent follower of right wing Barry Goldwater until she realised that it was easier as a democrat. Rudy was of course from a democrat NY background but he faced a problem. He wanted to be the federal attorney in Manhattan but Reagan was after beating the peanut farmer. No problem he became a republican. Some years ago the top republican strategist was Mary Matalin while the top democrat stratigist was James Carville. They had no problem either as they are married to one another. But still people fall for the 2 party conjob.

paragraphs

Lostexpectations. For whatever reason I don't know but everthing runs together on my computer. Is there any chance you would start a blog yourself because I for one would be a reader. I hope to get onto some socialist politicians who I admire here like Kucinich, Gravel Nader and most definately Cynthia McKinney.

youngdan wrote:

Hillary knows that if she called herself a socialist she would get nowhere so she calls herself a liberal. The meaning of the word liberal is the exact opposite to it's origonal meaning.

[....]

It amazes me that so many fall for this leftwing/rightwing divide. The text book example of right and left is Hitler/Stalin. The assumption is that they were polar opposites. You will never hear the Germans described as National Socialists because people would cop on. So one country of donkeys had to die for The Fatherland and another country of donkeys had to die for The Motherland.

O.K... You think Hillary is really a socialist? And that Hitler was not right wing?

Groans. You're not one of those Liberal Fascism jokers* are you?

In terms of ideology Hitler and Stalin were opposites as cactus flower has mentioned “because their
systems were inimicable to each other. One country had a private enterprise economic system and the other had a nationalised system of ownership and production. “

The only "union" in Nazi Germany was the German Labour Front, (the Nazi union) which, you know, took away the right to strike? Look in 1933 Hitler banned trade unions and he banned the Social Democratic Party. Hitler would put democratic socialists, social democrats, communists, trade unionists and any one left of Atilla the Hun into the concentration and work camps such as Dachau ahead of the Jews and Gypsies.

Hitler was a right-wing fascist nationalist who used socialistic rhetoric for electoral gain but who
despised the left as show repeatedly by his actions and words. In practice he was as said "We stand for the maintenance of private property. We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or
rather the sole possible economic order," - Hitler, in that he was similar to the fascistic free-marketers of Pinochet's Chile and other similar dictatorships of Latin America.


* a review of same below.
http://www.powells.com/review/2008_03_06.html

Quote :

"But for all his chapter and verse on the proletarian rhetoric that Nazis employed, Goldberg somehow forgets to mention certain other salient matters, like the fact that within three months of taking power Hitler banned trade unions -- and on the day after May Day, 1933.
Their money was confiscated and their leaders imprisoned. And the trade unions were replaced with the Nazi "union" called the German Labor Front, which took away the right to strike. Hitler did
many worse things, of course. I single out this act because it would hardly seem to be the edict of a "man of the left." And there exist about a million nearly epileptic quotes from Hitler and Goebbels and other Nazis expressing their luminous hatreds of liberalism and of communism, none of which seem to have found their way into the pages of Liberal Fascism."

If one were to put one's head down and were not Jewish or of the Left, then you could become very
wealthy in Nazi Germany as highlighted by Orwell in his "The Lion and The Unicorn". Also check out the the profits of American corporations in Nazi Germany, such IBM, Ford, Coca Cola
etc.

Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/51/pauwels.html#REF51

Quote :

Better
Hitler than "Rosenfeld"

Throughout the "dirty thirties," corporate profits in the US remained depressed, at home firms like GM and Ford could only dream of the kind of riches their branch plants in Germany were accumulating thanks to Hitler. In addition, at home corporate America experienced problems with labour
activists, Communists, and other radicals. What about the vicious trademarks of the Führer's personality and regime? Did they not disturb the leaders of corporate America? Apparently not much, if at all. The racial hatred propagated by Hitler, for example, did not overly offend their sensibilities. After all, racism against non-Whites remained systemic throughout the US and anti-Semitism was rife in the corporate class. In the exclusive clubs and fine hotels patronized by the captains of industry, Jews were rarely admitted;and some leaders of corporate America were outspoken anti-Semites. 14
In the early 1920s, Henry Ford cranked out a vehemently anti-Semitic book, The International Jew, which was translated into many languages; Hitler read the German version and acknowledged later that
it provided him with inspiration and encouragement.

Another notoriously anti-Semitic American tycoon was Irénée Du Pont, even though the Du Pont family had Jewish antecedents. 15 13 Corporate America's anti-Semitism strongly resembled that
of Hitler, whose view of Judaism was intimately interwoven with his view of Marxism, as Arno J. Mayer has convincingly argued in his book Why Did the Heavens not Darken? 16 Hitler claimed to be a socialist, but his was supposed to be a "national" socialism, a socialism for racially pure Germans only. As for genuine socialism, which preached international working-class solidarity and found its inspiration in the work of Karl Marx, it was despised by Hitler as a Jewish ideology that purported to enslave or even destroy Germans and other "Aryans." Hitler loathed as "Jewish" all forms of Marxism, but none more so than communism (or "Bolshevism") and he denounced the Soviet Union as the homeland of "Jewish" international socialism.14

In the 1930s, the anti-Semitism of corporate America likewise revealed itself to be the other side of the coin of anti-socialism, anti-Marxism, and red-baiting. Most American businessmen denounced Roosevelt's New Deal as a "socialistic" meddling in the economy. The anti-Semites of corporate America
considered Roosevelt to be a crypto-Communist and an agent of Jewish interests, if not a Jew himself; he was routinely referred to as "Rosenfeld," and his New Deal was vilified as the "Jew Deal." 17 In his book The Flivver King, Upton Sinclair described the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford dreaming of an American fascist movement that "pledged to put down the Reds and preserve the property interests of the country; to oust the Bolshevik [Roosevelt] from the White House and all his pink professors from the government services ... [and] to make it a shooting offense to talk communism or to call a strike." 18 Other American tycoons also yearned for a fascist saviour who might rid America of its "reds" and thus restore prosperity and profitability. Du Pont provided generous financial support to America's own fascist organizations, such as the infamous "Black Legion," and was even involved in plans for a fascist coup d'état in Washington. (Hofer and
Reginbogin, 585-6) 19

As regards Fascism overall, - it is uncontroversial to say that most of the Western rightist circles
of the interwar era supported the fascist regimes in Europe. The fascist version of extreme nationalism permitted extensive Western economic penetration and also destroyed the much feared labour movements and the left, and the excessive democracy in which they could function. (Similar in that regard to the US, Chicago school creation of Pinochet's Chile.)

For instance support for Mussolini was effusive despite the fascists destroying the parliamentary system and violently suppressing labour and political opposition.

It is incorrect to assume that all socialism is totalitarian in nature. The greatest propaganda victory for the capitalists was to convince people that all kinds of socialism meant giving up control to a
domineering state (and by contrast, that pro business market capitalism was a deep form of 'freedom')
The truest form of socialism is Libertarian socialism (or Anarcho Communism (same thing)) where workers control the means of production directly and with no authoritarian "democratic centralism" which is just a one way street to dictatorship.

Also, Fascism isn't the only possible end result of extreme right wing ideology. The alternative to fascism is libertarianism or laissez faire free market capitalism. Indeed there is an intersection in the
venn-diagram there with todays hegemony of authoritarian neoliberalism (again Pinochet, Neocons, etc) and the dictatorship of the market.

Entirely with you Pax all down to the last but one paragraph, where I am not convinced. Don't have the answer yet thought so discussion might be inconclusive.

You might want to check out "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" by David Harvey* and Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" to get the point I'm making on that.

It's kinda related to this bit "The fascist version of extreme nationalism permitted extensive Western economic penetration and also destroyed the much feared labour movements and the left, and the excessive democracy in which they could function. (Similar in that regard to the US, Chicago school creation of Pinochet's Chile.)"


*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkWWMOzNNrQ

Pax wrote:

You might want to check out "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" by David Harvey* and Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" to get the point I'm making on that.

It's kinda related to this bit "The fascist version of extreme nationalism permitted extensive Western economic penetration and also destroyed the much feared labour movements and the left, and the excessive democracy in which they could function. (Similar in that regard to the US, Chicago school creation of Pinochet's Chile.)"


*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkWWMOzNNrQ

Those points I get. Its how best to replace this that I am struggling with.

Pax. Have you even read the 2 pieces that are under discussion here. The question being pondered is why ordinary people would lend their support to radical left and another group would lend support to radical right. You seem to think that I said Hitler is really some leftist in disguise when I picked him as the accepted best example of a right wing leader. The question is why did so many people follow his foolishness. So the major part of your response has no relationship to what I wrote at all. In the 1st piece I dealt with the way left wing politicians pull on the heartstrings of their followers and in the 2nd piece I dwell upon the different issues the right wing politicians use to pull on the heart strings of their followers. In summary I used some examples of politicians here jumping from far left to far right as it suited themselves because they care nothing about the issues just themselves. One example was Hillary going from being a follower of Barry Goldwater who some describe a far right wing to her current position.

Cactus. All that has nothing whatsoever to do with what I am talking about. My question is how could Maggie get people to die for the Falklands and how Blair can get people to travel thousands of miles to get themselves killed in Basra.

youngdan wrote:

Cactus. All that has nothing whatsoever to do with what I am talking about. My question is how could Maggie get people to die for the Falklands and how Blair can get people to travel thousands of miles to get themselves killed in Basra.

Where we can agree is that leaders can be grossly self serving and hypocritical. The question Pax homed in on is are Communism and Facism the same.

I am not disagreeing on the point Pax was making at all but it is sidetracking my whole point. Communism and Facism are completely different but the point I am making is the Stalin would be just as happy being a Facist if it meant he was the boss and Hitler would be a Communist if it meant bringing him to power. The problem Hitler had was the communists and it's leader already existed so they were the enemy that had to be destroyed. As simple as that. The problem is the followers who believe the speachs. We see it today when McCain is after delivering a major economic speach. The fact that someone else wrote it and he knows nothing about economics at all is ignored.

But does the character of the Leader make much difference to history? Don't they just represent the interests of their own class?

Leaders represent their own interests. Who was the most important person in the world to CJ Haughey.

youngdan wrote:

Leaders represent their own interests. Who was the most important person in the world to CJ Haughey.

They may in some cases stand for election mainly to advance their own interests, but they are elected to represent the class interests of those who back, fund promote or (sometimes) those who vote for their candidature.