Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

Is Time the Only Cure for COVID Foolishness?

Posted on by under Politics

As August 2021 began, 50% of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated against COVID-19, over 165 million people. There have been 615,000 confirmed deaths — the actual number, given the national excess mortality rate since the start of 2020, is likely double official figures. Over a 12-month period, since last August, 2.5 million people were hospitalized, many leaving with lasting medical problems. All the while, protests and foaming at the mouth over mask and vaccine mandates continue; half the population has refused or delayed the vaccine, this group disproportionately (+20%) Republican.

Attempting to convince the conspiracy theorists, bullheaded conservatives, and those concerned over how (historically) fast the vaccine breakthrough occurred is of course still the moral and pressing thing to do. This piece isn’t an exercise in fatalism, despite its headline. However, great frustration exists: if the hesitant haven’t been convinced by now, what will move the needle? With over a year and a half to absorb the dangers of COVID, deadly and otherwise, and eight months to observe a vaccine rollout that has given 1.2 billion people globally highly effective protection, with only an infinitesimally small percentage seeing any side effects (similar to everyday meds), what could possibly be said to convince someone to finally listen to the world’s medical and scientific consensus, to listen to reason? People have been given a chance to compare the disease to the shots (the unvaccinated are 25 times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID and 24 times more likely to die, with nearly all [97, 98, 99%] of COVID deaths now among the unprotected population), but that requires a trust in the expert consensus and data and trials and peer-reviewed research and all those things that make American stomachs churn. Giving people accurate information and sources can even make them less likely to see the light! There is, for some bizarre reason, more comfort and trust in the rogue doctor peddling unfounded nonsense on YouTube.

It may be of some comfort then to recognize that the insanity will surely decrease as time goes on. It’s already occurring. The most powerful answer to “what will move the needle?” is “personal impact” — as time passes, more people will know someone hospitalized or wiped from existence by the disease, and also know someone who has been vaccinated and is completely fine. There will be more family members who get the vaccine behind your back and more friends and acquaintances you’ll see online or in the media expressing deep regret from their ICU hospital beds. You may even be hospitalized yourself. Such things will make a difference. States currently hit hardest by the Delta variant and seeing overall cases skyrocket — the less vaccinated states — are also witnessing increases in vaccination rates. Even conservative media outlets and voices are breaking under the weight of reason, finally beginning to promote the vaccine and changing viewers’ minds, while naturally remaining in Absurdsville by pretending their anti-inoculation hysteria never occurred and blaming Democrats for vaccine hesitancy. Eventually, falsities and mad beliefs yield to science and reason, as we’ve seen throughout history. True, many will never change their minds, and will go to their deaths (likely untimely) believing COVID to be a hoax, or exaggerated, or less risky than a vaccine. But others will yield, shaken to the core by loved ones lost to the virus (one-fourth to one-third of citizens at least know someone who died already) or vaccinated without becoming a zombie, or even by growing ill themselves.

To say more time is needed to end the foolishness is, admittedly, in part to say more illness and death are needed. As stated, the more people a hesitant person knows who have grown ill or died, the more likely the hesitant person is to get his or her shots. A terrible thing to say, yet true. That is why we cannot rest, letting time work on its own. We must continue trying to convince people, through example, empathy (it’s often not logic that changes minds, but love), hand-holding, and other methods offered by psychologists. Lives can be saved. And to convince someone to get vaccinated is not only to protect them and others against COVID, it suddenly creates a person in someone else’s inner circle who has received the shots, perhaps helping the behavior spread. Both us and Father Time can make sure hesitant folk know more people who have been vaccinated, the more pleasant piece of time’s function.

Hopefully, our experience with coronavirus will prepare us for more deadly pandemics in the future, in terms of our behavior, healthcare systems, epidemiology, and more. As bad as COVID-19 is, as bad as Delta is, humanity was exceptionally lucky. The disease could have been far deadlier, far more contagious; the vaccine could have taken much longer, and been less effective. We’ve seen four million deaths worldwide, but even with this virus evolving and worsening, we’ll likely see nothing like the 50 million dead from the 1918 pandemic. Some see the rebellion against masks, lockdowns, and vaccines as a frightening sign: such insanity will spell absolute catastrophe when a deadlier virus comes around. This writer has always suspected (perhaps only hoped) that view to be a bit backward. A deadlier virus would likely mean less rebellion (as would a virus you could see on other people, something more visually horrifying like leprosy). It’s the relative tameness of COVID that allows for the high degree of madness. Admittedly, there was anti-mask resistance during the 1918 crisis, but there could be a correlation nonetheless between the seriousness of the epidemic and the willingness to engage in suicidal foolishness. That aligns with this idea that the more people you lose in your inner circle the more likely you are to give in and visit your local health clinic. Let’s hope science and reason reduce the opportunities to test this correlation hypothesis.

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Famous Bands That Sang About Kansas City

Posted on by under History

One’s city pride quickly swells upon perusing Spotify for songs about Kansas City. There’s much to hear, from the gems of local talent (“Get Out – The KC Streetcar Song,” Kemet the Phantom) to the fantastic artists from afar (“Train From Kansas City,” Neko Case) to the biggest names in music history:

The Beatles sang of Kansas City beginning in 1961 with “Kansas City / Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey,” which they took from Little Richard’s work of the late 1950s, itself a version of the 1952 classic “Kansas City” by Leiber and Stoller (“I’m going to Kansas City / Kansas City here I come…”). Other famous musicians to record Leiber and Stoller’s song include Willie Nelson, James Brown, and Sammie Davis Jr.

Frank Zappa performed the “Kansas City Shuffle.” Van Morrison had “The Eternal Kansas City”: “Dig your Charlie Parker / Basie and Young.” Yusuf (Cat Stevens) sang “18th Avenue (Kansas City Nightmare).” Clearly, and sadly, he did not have a pleasant stay.

Jefferson Airplane was “gonna move to Kansas City”; for Rogers and Hammerstein, in their 1943 musical Oklahoma!, everything was “up to date in Kansas City.” More recently, The New Basement Tapes, The Mowgli’s, and of course Tech N9ne have joined in.

I have created a public playlist on Spotify of four hours of songs about KC. It has a bit of everything, from the jazz and blues of yesteryear to the folk and Americana and hip hop of today. It includes famous artists and the obscure, and everyone in between, with some repeats so one can hear different artists tackle the same song. “Kansas City Hornpipe” by Fred Morrison and “Kansas City, Missouri” by Humbird are particularly enjoyable. Some songs, naturally, are better than others, but the most subpar or campy of Spotify’s selection have been excluded (many local artists go nowhere for a reason). Finally, and unfortunately, one of the best hip hop songs about the city, Center of Attention’s “Straight Outta Kauffman,” is not available on Spotify, so it must be listened to elsewhere.

Find some of that “Kansas City wine” (Leiber and Stoller) and enjoy.

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If Your Explanation Implies There’s Something Wrong With Black People, It’s Racist

Posted on by under Race Relations

Conservative whites who consider themselves respectable typically do not use the explicitly racist causal explanations behind higher rates of black poverty, violent crime, academic struggle, and so on. Ideas of blacks being naturally lazier, more aggressive or deviant, and less intelligent than white people are largely unspeakable today. Instead, these things are simply implied, wrapped in more palatable or comfortable language so one can go about the day guilt-free. This isn’t always conscious. It’s startling to realize that such whites, probably in most cases from what this writer has observed, do not realize their beliefs imply racist things. This is simply cognitive dissonance; it’s people believing with every fiber of their being that they are not racist, and therefore any explanation they believe cannot be racist, no matter how obviously it actually is to observers.

A few examples:

The problem is black culture. You don’t want to say there’s something wrong with black people. Instead, say there’s something wrong with black culture! This black culture is one of violence and revenge, of getting hooked on welfare instead of looking for work, of fathers abandoning mothers and children to create broken, single-parent homes, and so on. But obviously, to say there’s something wrong with black culture is to say there is something wrong with black people. Where, after all, did this “culture” come from? To respectable conservative whites, who should always be asked that very question immediately, it comes from black people themselves. Such whites won’t include an educated explanation of how history, environment/social conditions, and public policies produce “culture” — how recent American history birthed disproportionate poverty, how poverty breeds violence and necessitates welfare use, how a government’s racist War on Drugs and the crimes and violent deaths bred by that very poverty might mean more families without fathers. They surely won’t point out, as a nice comparison, that the white American culture of yesteryear that placed the age of sexual consent for girls at 10 years old, or a white European culture of executing those who questioned the Christian faith, obviously did not stem from whiteness itself, having nothing to do with caucasian ethnicity — so what does “black culture” have to do with blackness? Are these not human beings behaving in predictable ways to the poverty of the place or the theology of the time? People who think in such rational ways wouldn’t use the “problem is black culture” line in the first place. Nay, it is black folk themselves that create this culture, meaning something is terribly wrong with the race, with blacks as people, something linked to biology and genetics — as uncomfortable as that will be for some whites to hear, it is the corner they have readily backed themselves into. After all, white people do not have this “culture.” Why? Are whites superior?

It’s all about personal choice. Another popular one. The problem is black people are making the wrong choices. They have free will, why don’t they choose peace over violence, choose to look harder for a job or a higher-paying gig, study harder in school, just go to college? The response is again painfully obvious. If racial discrepancies all just boil down to personal choices, this is simply to say that blacks make worse personal choices than white people. This is so self-evident that the temptation to throw this article right in the garbage is overwhelming. To whites, blacks are making choices they wouldn’t personally make. There is no consideration of how environment can affect you. Take whether or not you flunk out of college. You hardly choose where or the family into which you are born, and growing up in a poor home affects your mental and physical development, typically resulting in worse academic performance than if you’d been born into a wealthy family; likewise, children don’t choose where they are educated: wealthy families can afford the best private schools and SAT tutoring, black public schools are more poorly funded than white public schools, and so on. Such things affect your ability to graduate college, or even gain admission. Nor is it considered how environment impacts your decisions themselves. For instance, witnessing violence as a child makes you more likely to engage in it, to choose to engage in it. Nor is there a thought to how social settings affect the choices you’ll even face in your life — if you live in a wealthy area without much crime, for instance, you are less likely to experience peer pressure from a friend to commit an illegal act (just as you’re less likely to see violence and thus engage in it later). One can be more successful in life with fewer opportunities to make bad choices in the first place! But none of that can be envisioned. For respectable conservative whites, there is something wrong with black people, something defective about their decision-making or moral character. White people, in contrast, make better choices, the right choices, and are thus wealthier, safer, better educated, families intact. Again, the implication of inferiority is front and center.

Good parenting is really the key. It all comes down to parenting. If black parents stuck together, emphasized to their kids the importance of education, a hard work ethic, the family unit, and turning the other cheek, all these racial disparities could come to an end. The disgusting implications are no doubt clear to the reader already, meaning we need not tarry here. To pin social problems on poor parenting, without any consideration of outside factors, is to simply say black humans are inherently worse parents than white humans. Whatever the problem with black moms and dads, white ones are happily immune.

These implications must be exposed whenever one hears them, and the conversation turned away from race and biology and toward history and socio-economics. Toward the truth.

The racial wealth gap in the United States was birthed by the horrors done to blacks: slavery meant black people, apart from some freemen, started with nothing in 1865, whereas whites began wealth accumulation centuries before, a colossal wealth gap; Jim Crow oppression meant another century of being paid lower wages, denied even menial employment and certainly high-paying jobs, hired last and fired first, kept out of universities, denied home loans or offered worse terms, taught in poorly funded schools, kept out of high-value neighborhoods through violence and racial covenants, and more; studies show that even today racism still affects wealth accumulation in significant ways. By studying history in a serious manner, we begin to understand why the racial wealth gap exists and why it has not yet closed — not because there’s something defective about black people, but because, beyond today’s challenges with racism, there simply has not been enough time for it to close. People who lived through the Jim Crow era, some mere grandchildren of slaves, are still alive today. This is hardly ancient history; it’s two or three generations.

The poverty that persists does to blacks what it does to human beings of all races. It exacerbates crime (not only theft or the drug trade as ways of earning more income, but from the stress in puts on the brain, equivalent to sleep deprivation, causing people to act in ways they simply would not have had they been in more affluent settings), it hurts the performance of students, it leads to more men confined to the cell or the coffin and thus not at home, and other challenges. Bad public policies, from city underinvestment in the black parts of town to the War on Drugs, make things worse. It is right to be a good parent, to make wise choices, and to value a positive culture — but for whites to imagine that some abandonment of these things by our black neighbors is the root cause of racial disparities, with no discussion of history and social conditions and how they persist and affect human beings, is racist and rotten to the core. Respectable conservative whites (and some black conservatives who focus exclusively on parenting, choices, and culture) may not notice or be conscious of such implications, but this can be made temporary.

If we consider ourselves to be moral creatures, it is our responsibility to give these rosier modern framings of old racist ideas no quarter.

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Were Hitler and the Nazis Socialists? Only Kind Of

Posted on by under Socialism

How socialist were the National Socialists?

We know there will be times when an organization or national name doesn’t tell the whole story. As Jacobin writes, how democratic is the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea? It’s hardly a republic either. (Hitler once asked, “Is there a truer form of Democracy” than the Reich — dictators, apparently, misuse terms.) Or look to the Likud, the National Liberals, one of Israel’s major conservative parties. And if the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were Christians, do they represent Christianity at large? So let us examine the Nazis and see if they fall into this category.

The first task, as always, is to define socialism. Like today, “socialism” and “communism” were used by some in the early 20th century to mean the same thing (communism) and by others to mean different things. As a poet from the 1880s put it, there are indeed “two socialisms”: the one where the workers own their workplaces and the one where the government owns the workplaces. We must remember these different term uses, but to make it easy we will simply be open to both: “Were the Nazis socialists?” can therefore mean either. There is more to it than that, of course, such as direct democracy and large government programs. But these additions are not sufficient qualifiers. There will be whining that the Nazi regime had large government programs and thus it was socialist, but if that’s the criteria then so were all the nations fighting the Nazis, including the U.S. (remember our huge public jobs programs and Social Security Act of the era?). Advanced societies tend to have sizable State services — and you can have these things without being truly socialist. If one has even a minimal understanding of socialist thought and history, then the conclusion that no country can earnestly be called socialist without worker or State ownership of business is hardly controversial. To speak of socialism was to speak of the elimination of private ownership of the means of production (called “private property,” businesses), with transfer of ownership away from capitalists to one of the two aforementioned bodies.

The German Workers Party, founded in 1919 in Munich by Anton Drexler and renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party in 1920, included actual socialists. Gregor and Otto Strasser, for instance, supported nationalization of industry — it’s simply not accurate to say the rhetoric of ending capitalism, building socialism, of revolution, workers, class, exploitation, and so on was solely propaganda. It was a mix of honest belief and empty propagandistic promises to attract voters in a time of extreme poverty and economic crisis, all depending on which Nazi was using it, as we will see. Socialists can be anti-semites, racists, patriots, and authoritarians, just like non-socialists and people of other belief systems. (I’ve written more elsewhere about the separability of ideologies and horrific things, if interested, typically using socialism and Christianity as examples. The response to “Nazis were socialists, so socialism is pure evil” is of course “Nazis were also Christians — Germany was an extremely religious nation — so is Christianity also pure evil? If the Nazis distorted Christianity, changing what it fundamentally was with their ‘Positive Christianity,’ advocated for in the Nazi platform, is true Christianity to be abandoned alongside true socialism if that has been distorted as well?”)

The meaning of socialism was distorted by Hitler and other party members. To Hitler, socialism meant the common weal, the common good for a community. While rhetorically familiar, this was divorced from ideas of worker or State ownership of the means of production. In a 1923 interview with The Guardian‘s George Sylvester Viereck, Hitler made this clear. After vowing to end Bolshevism (communism), Hitler got the key question:

“Why,” I asked Hitler, “do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?”

“Socialism,” he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, “is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

“Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

“We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”

Hitler’s socialism, then, had to do with the common good of one race, united as a nation around ancestral Aryan land and identity. What socialism meant to Hitler and other Nazis can only be understood through the lens of racial purity and extreme nationalism. They come first, forming the colander, and everything else is filtered through. In the same way, what Christianity meant to Hitler was fully shaped by these obsessions: it was a false religion invented by the Jews (who Jesus fought!), but could at the same time be used to justify their destruction. Bolshevism was likewise labeled a sinister Jewish creation (was not Marx ethnically Jewish?): “The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature…” Further, when Hitler criticized capitalists, it was often specific: Germany needed “delivery from the Jewish capitalist shackles,” the Jews being to blame for economic problems. A consumed conspiratorial bigot, and often contradictory and nonsensical, he would attack both sides of any issue if they smacked to him of Judaism. But we see Hitler’s agreement that National Socialism was the “antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism”: there would still be private property, private ownership of the means of production; the internationalism and the racial diversity and tolerance at times preached by other socialists would be rejected. (So would class conflict: “National Socialism always bears in mind the interests of the people as a whole and not the interests of one class or another.”) Racial supremacy and the worship of country — elements of the new fascism, and the latter a typical element of the Right, not traditional socialism — were in order. (If these things were socialism, then again the nations fighting Germany were socialist: Jim Crow laws in America were used as models by Nazi planners, there existed devotion to American exceptionalism and greatness, and so forth.)

Hitler often repeated his view. On May 21, 1935:

National Socialism is a doctrine that has reference exclusively to the German people. Bolshevism lays stress on international mission. We National Socialists believe a man can, in the long run, be happy only among his own people… We National Socialists see in private property a higher level of human economic development that according to the differences in performance controls the management of what has been accomplished enabling and guaranteeing the advantage of a higher standard of living for everyone. Bolshevism destroys not only private property but also private initiative and the readiness to shoulder responsibility.

In a December 28, 1938 speech he declared:

A Socialist is one who serves the common good without giving up his individuality or personality or the product of his personal efficiency. Our adopted term ‘Socialist’ has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not. Marxism places no value on the individual or the individual effort, or efficiency; true Socialism values the individual and encourages him in individual efficiency, at the same time holding that his interests as an individual must be in consonance with those of the community.

He who believed in “Germany, people and land — that man is a Socialist.” Otto Strasser, in his 1940 book Hitler and I, wrote that Hitler told him in 1930 that the revolution would be racial, not economic; that democracy should not be brought into the economic sphere; and that large corporations should be left alone; to which Strasser replied, “If you wish to preserve the capitalist regime, Herr Hitler, you have no right to talk of socialism. For our supporters are socialists, and your programme demands the socialisation of private enterprise.” Hitler responded:

That word ‘socialism’ is the trouble… I have never said that all enterprises should be socialised. On the contrary, I have maintained that we might socialise enterprises prejudicial to the interests of the nation. Unless they were so guilty, I should consider it a crime to destroy essential elements in our economic life… There is only one economic system, and that is responsibility and authority on the part of directors and executives. That is how it has been for thousands of years, and that is how it will always be. Profit-sharing and the workers’ right to be consulted are Marxist principles. I consider that the right to exercise influence on private enterprise should be conceded only to the state, directed by the superior class… The capitalists have worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection, which again only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead. Now you want an incapable government council or works council, which has no notion of anything, to have a say; no leader in economic life would tolerate it.

Otto Strasser and his brother grew disillusioned that the party wasn’t pursuing actual socialism, and upset that Hitler supported and worked with big business, industrialists, capitalists, German princes. Otto was expelled from the party in 1930. Gregor resigned two years later.

The referenced National Socialist Program, or 25-point Plan, of 1920 demanded the “nationalization of all enterprises (already) converted into corporations (trusts),” “profit-sharing in large enterprises,” “communalization of the large department stores, which are to be leased at low rates to small tradesmen,” and nationalization “of land for public purposes.” Hitler clarified that since “the NSDAP stands on the platform of private ownership,” the nationalization of land for public use “concerns only the creation of legal opportunities to expropriate if necessary, land which has been illegally acquired or is not administered from the view-point of the national welfare. This is directed primarily against the Jewish land-speculation companies.” Large department stores were largely Jewish-run. And above we saw Hitler’s resistance to profit-sharing. Further, nationalization of businesses would be limited, as noted, to trusts. It could be that the disproportionately strong representation of Jews in ownership of big German companies played a role here, too. Now, a “secret” interview with Hitler that some scholars suspect is a forgery contains the quote: “Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism,” yet even this limits the promise to publicly traded companies, and Hitler goes on, tellingly, to speak of “owners” and their “possessions,” “property owners,” “the bourgeoisie,” etc. that, while “controlled” by the State, plainly exist independently of it in his socialist vision. Nevertheless, the program has a socialist flair, making Otto Strasser’s comment in 1930 comprehensible, yet its timidity vis-à-vis economics (compare it to the German communist party’s platform of 1932) and its embrace of nationalism and rejection of internationalism would understandably make some ask the question George Sylvester Viereck did in 1923.

This socialist tinge, apart from attacks on Jewish businesses, was forgotten when the Nazis came to power. Historian Karl Bracher said such things to Hitler were “little more than an effective, persuasive propaganda weapon for mobilizing and manipulating the masses. Once it had brought him to power, it became pure decoration: ‘unalterable,’ yet unrealized in its demands for nationalization and expropriation, for land reform…” Indeed, while other Western nations were bringing businesses under State control to combat the Depression, the Nazis in the 1930s ran a program of privatization. Many firms and sectors were handed back to the private sphere. The Nazis valued private ownership for its efficiency. The German economy was State-directed in the sense that the government made purchases, contracting with private firms to produce commodities, such as armaments, and regulated business in many ways, as advanced nations often do, including the U.S. Historian Ian Kershaw wrote: “Hitler was never a socialist. But although he upheld private property, individual entrepreneurship, and economic competition, and disapproved of trade unions and workers’ interference in the freedom of owners and managers to run their concerns, the state, not the market, would determine the shape of economic development. Capitalism was, therefore, left in place. But in operation it was turned into an adjunct of the state.” While the regime incentivized business and regulated it, especially in preparation for war, intervening to keep entities aligned with State goals and ideology, “there occurred hardly any nationalizations of private firms during the Third Reich. In addition, there were few enterprises newly created as state-run firms,” summarized Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner in The Journal of Economic History. Companies retained their independence and autonomy: they still “had ample scope to follow their own production plans… The state normally did not use power to secure the unconditional support of industry,” but rather offered attractive contracts. Socialism cannot simply be regulation of and incentives for private companies, to meet national goals — again, this is what non-socialist states do every day (and the U.S. war economy had plenty of centrally planned production goals and quotas, contracts, regulations, rationing, and even government takeovers).

The betrayal of the program was noticed at the time. A 1940 report said that:

Economic planks of the “unalterable program” on the basis of which the National Socialists campaigned before they came to power in 1933 were designed to win the support of as many disgruntled voters as possible rather than to present a coordinated plan for a new economic system. Within the party there has always been, and there still is, serious disagreement about the extent to which the “socialist” part of the party’s title is to be applied… The planks calling for expropriation have been least honored in the fulfillment of this platform; in practice, the economic reorganizations undertaken by the Nazis have followed a very different pattern from the one which was originally projected.

That pattern was tighter regulation, generous contracts, economic recovery programs for ordinary people, and so on, though the occasional State takeover did occur. All this makes sense given what we’ve seen. The Nazis weren’t interested in the socialism of the Marxists, the communists. Hitler, in his words, rejected “the false notion that the economic system could exist and operate entirely freely and entirely outside of any control or supervision on the part of the State,” but business ultimately belonged to the capitalists.

The Bramberg Conference of 1926 was a key moment for the direction of the Nazi Party: would it go in an earnestly socialist direction or simply use this new, diluted version Hitler was fond of? There were ideological divisions that had to be addressed. Hitler, as party leader since 1921 and with the conference officially establishing Fuhrerprinzip (absolute power of the party leader), was likely to win from the beginning. Gregor Strasser led the push at this convening of Nazi leaders for socialist policies, backed by others from Germany’s northern urban, industrial areas. Leaders from the rural south stood opposed; they wanted to instead lean into nationalism, populism, racialism. One such policy was the seizing of the estates of rich nobles, the landed princes — did the National Socialist Program not say land could be expropriated for the common good? “The law must remain the law for aristocrats as well,” Hitler said. “No questioning of private property!” This was communism, that old Jewish plot. Hitler made sure the idea, being pursued at the time by the social democratic and communist parties, died in its cradle. “For us there are today no princes, only Germans,” he said. “We stand on the basis of the law, and will not give a Jewish system of exploitation a legal pretext for the complete plundering of our people.” Again, the rejection of the class war and overthrow of the rich inherent to socialism and instead a simple focus on the Jews — Hitler was “replacing class with race,” as one historian put it, swapping out “the usual terms of socialist ideology.” Hitler was “a reactionary,” Joseph Goebbels realized. After this, Strasser backed off, and the socialist push in the party was quelled.

Similar to State ownership, while the German Workers Party in 1919 spoke of worker cooperatives — worker ownership — the Nazis had no actual interest in this, in fact making cooperative entities targets to be destroyed in Germany and conquered nations because they smacked of Marxism. A dictatorship isn’t going to give ordinary people power.

Outside observers continued to mock Hitler’s socialism — this isn’t simply a tactic of an embarrassed American Left today. As we’ve seen, people of the era noticed the meaning was changed and watched how the Nazis acted when in power. For Leon Trotsky, an actual communist-style socialist writing in 1934, Nazi “socialism” was always in derisive quotation marks. “The Nazis required the programme in order to assume the power; but power serves Hitler not all for the purpose of fulfilling the programme,” with “the social system untouched,” the “class nature” and competition of capitalism alive and well. Stalin said in 1936, “The foundation of [Soviet] society is public property: state, i.e., national, and also co-operative, collective farm property. Neither Italian fascism nor German National-‘Socialism’ has anything in common with such a society. Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works, of the land, the banks, transport, etc., has remained intact, and, therefore, capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.”

When one considers how actual socialists were treated under the Reich, the point is driven home.

Communist and social democratic politicians were purged from the legislature and imprisoned. Dachau, the first concentration camp, first held political enemies such as socialists. In an article in The Guardian from March 21, 1933, the president of the Munich police said, “Communists, ‘Marxists’ and Reichsbanner [social democratic] leaders” would be imprisoned there. The next year reports of the horrid conditions inside emerged, such as that in The New Republic, likewise noting the “Social Democrats, Socialist Workers’ party members,” and others held within. Part of the impetus for the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, in which Hitler had Nazi Party members killed, was too much talk of workers, actual socialism, anti-capitalist ideas. Gregor Strasser was murdered that night. Otto fled for his life.

There is a famous saying that is in fact authentic. Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller of Germany often said various versions of the following after the war:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

One might wonder why the socialists would be coming for the socialists. But if this new socialism simply had to do with race and land, opposing State or worker ownership, it begins to make sense. You have to take care of ideological opponents, whether through a conference or a concentration camp. In response, communists and socialists took part in the valiant resistance to Nazism in Germany and throughout Europe.

The recent articles offering a Yes or No answer to the question “Were Hitler and the Nazis Socialists?” are far too simplistic. Honest history can’t always be captured in a word. Here is an attempt to do so in a paragraph:

Foundationally, socialists wanted either worker ownership of workplaces or government ownership of workplaces, the removal of capitalists. The Nazi Party had actual socialists. But over time they grew frustrated that the party wasn’t pursuing socialism; some left. Other members, including party leader Adolf Hitler, opposed actual socialism, and changed the definition of socialism to simply mean unity of the Aryan race and its collective flourishing. True to this, when he seized power, Hitler did not implement socialism, leaving capitalists in place, and instead crushed those speaking of actual socialism.

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Faith and Intelligence

Posted on by under Religion

Atheists and agnostics are sometimes accused of seeing themselves as more intelligent than people of faith. Which begs the question: as a former believer, do I consider myself to be smarter now that I am a freethinker? In a sense yes, in that I’ve gained knowledge I did not possess before and have developed critical thinking skills that I likewise used to lack. It feels like learning an instrument, in fact a good analogy. People who learn the violin are from one perspective smarter than they were before, with new knowledge and abilities, a brain rewired, and indeed smarter than me, and others, in that respect. But this is a rather informal meaning of intelligence. Virtually anyone can learn the violin, and virtually anyone can find the knowledge and skills I did. Now we’re talking about capacity. We’ve entered the more formal definition of intelligence, under which the answer is obviously no, I’m not smarter than my old self or believers. So the answer is yes and no, as is often the case with variable meanings.

Consider this in detail. There are many definitions of “intelligence” (“smart” can simply be used as a synonym). The formal definition of intelligence generally has to do with the ability or capacity to gain knowledge and skills. You wouldn’t grow in intelligence by gaining knowledge and skills, but rather by somehow expanding the capacity to do so in the first place. (Granted, it could well be that doing the former does impact the latter, a virtuous cycle.) The human and the ape have different capacities, a sizable intelligence gap. Humans have differences too, in terms of genetic predispositions granted by the birth lottery and environmental factors. An ape won’t get far on the violin, and some humans will struggle more, or less, than others to learn it. Human beings have greater or weaker baseline capacities in various areas, different intelligence levels, but most can learn the basics (the idea that enough practice can make anyone advanced or expert has been thoroughly blown up). So under the formal framework, the believer and the skeptic have roughly the same intelligence on average, with the same ability to discover certain knowledge and develop certain skills — whether that ever happens is a separate question entirely, coming down to luck, life experiences, environment, and so on. While studies have often found that religiosity correlates with lower IQ, the difference is very small, with possible causes ranging from autistic persons helping tip the scales for the non-religious to people of faith relying too much on intuition rather than logic or reason when problem-solving, a problem of “behavioral biases rather than impaired general intelligence” — and behavior can be changed, very different than capacity. If this latter hypothesis is true, it would be like giving a violin proficiency test to both violin students and non-students and marveling that the non-students underperformed. Had my logic and reasoning been tested before my transition from pious to dubious, I suspect it would have been lower than today, as I learned many critical thinking skills during and after, but this is not about capacity; it’s just learning anyone can do. Under the more serious definition of intelligence, I don’t believe I’m smarter than my former self or the faithful.

But now we can work under the informal, colloquial meaning, where growing intelligence simply has something to do with a growing base of knowledge and new skill sets. Do we not often say “He’s really smart” of someone who knows copious facts about astronomy or history? Don’t we consider a woman highly intelligent who speaks multiple languages, or is a blazingly fast coder? When we suspect that if we devoted the same time and energy to those things, we could probably hold our own? (Rightly or wrongly, as noted. Either way, we often don’t think as much about capacity as simple acquisition.) This writer, at least, sometimes uses these flattering terms to describe possession of much information or foreign abilities.

In that sense, I certainly believe I’m smarter than I used to be. I realize how insulting that sounds, given that the natural extension is that I consider myself smarter than religious persons. But I don’t know how unique that is. When the weak Christian becomes a strong Christian through reading and thinking and conversing, she may consider herself smarter than before — perhaps even more knowledgable and a more sensible thinker than an atheist! In other words, more intelligent than a nonbeliever (wouldn’t you have to be a fool to think existence, the universe, is possible without a creator being?). When a man learns vast amounts about aerophysics, he sees himself as smarter than before and by extension others on this topic; when he masters the skill of building planes that fly, the same. If intelligence simply means more knowledgable about or skilled at something, everyone thinks they’re smarter than their past selves and by extension other people, with, obviously, many clashing and contradictory opinions between individuals (the Christian and the atheist both thinking they are more knowledgable, for instance).

Some examples are in order from my personal growth, just to illuminate my perspective better. I’ll offer two. I used to believe that, among other reasons, the gospels could be trusted as being entirely factual because they were written 30-40 years after the alleged miraculous events they describe (at least, Mark was; the others were later). “Too soon after to be fictional.” But then I learned something. Other religions, which I disbelieved, had much shorter timespans between supposed events and written accounts! Made-up nonsense about what happened on Day X to Person A was being written about and earnestly believed just a year or two later, in some cases just a day or two later — birthing new religions and stories still believed today! That was just the way humans operated; it’s never too soon for fictions, things can be invented and spread immediately, never to be tamped down. So, I’d gained knowledge. I felt more intelligent because of this — even embarrassed at my old ways of thinking. Not right away, but eventually. How could anyone learn this and not change their way of thinking accordingly, realizing that this argument for the gospels’ trustworthiness is simply dreadful and should be retired?

Since the first example was in the knowledge category, the second can concern critical thinking skills, and is neatly paired with the first. I used to suppose that it was sensible to believe in the gospels (and of course God) because they could not be disproved. After all, why not? If you can’t disprove them, they could be true. So why not continue to believe the gospels to be full of truths rather than fictions, as you’ve been raised or long held? Eventually I started thinking more critically, more clearly. This was the argument from ignorance fallacy: if something hasn’t been disproved that’s reason to suppose there’s truth to it. It’s rather irrational — there are a million stories from all human religions that cannot be disproved…therefore it’s reasonable to think they are true? You can’t disprove that the Greek gods formed Mount Olympus, that Allah or Thor exists, that the god Krishna spoke with Arjuna as described in the Bhagavad Gita, or that we’re living in a simulation. The ocean of unprovable things is infinite and of course highly contradictory, with many sets of things that cannot both or all be true. There are too many fictions in this ocean — you may believe in one of them. To only apply the argument from ignorance to your own faith, to believe that the gospels are true because they cannot be disproved but not all these other things for the precise same reason, is simple bias. Mightn’t it be more sensible to believe that which can be proven, rather than what cannot be disproven? That would be, in stark contrast, a solid justification. Now on the other side of the gulf, I can barely understand how I ever thought in such fallacious ways. But better, more logical ways of thinking I simply developed over time, and as with the development of any skill I can’t help but feel more intelligent because of it.

One does regret how derogatory this may seem to many readers. Yet it is impossible to avoid. I consider myself more intelligent than I used to be because I have knowledge I did not possess before and ways of thinking I consider better than prior ones. By extension, it seems I have to consider myself more intelligent, in this area, than those who, like my past self, do not possess that knowledge or those habits of critical thinking. However (and apologies for growing repetitive, it stems from a desire not to offend too much), this is no different than any person who uses the informal meaning of intelligence in any context. If you use that definition, and believe yourself to be more knowledge of the contents of the bible or biology, or more skilled at mathematics or reading people, than before or compared to others, you consider yourself smarter than other people, in those areas but not necessarily in others. If you instead use the formal definition of intelligence, regarding the mere capacity to gain knowledge and develop skills, then you’d say you’re not actually smarter than others (as they could simply do as you have done) or at least not necessarily or only possibly smarter (again, there are differences in capacities between human beings; some will be naturally better at mathematics no matter how hard others practice). In this latter sense, I’m again compelled in my answer: I essentially have to say I’m not smarter than my former self or current believers who think as I once did.

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