Harry's Place

Le Carré’s masterful study in Jews as victims of the East German regime (with British connivance: The Spy who came in from the Cold).

It can’t be remembered too often: Stalin’s Soviet Union, unofficially but definitely, supported Nazi Germany from 23 August 1939 to 22 June 1941.

And I wonder how it came about that neo-Nazism was and remains far stronger in the old DDR than it is in the West?

A couple more snippets:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yahqnBEEbQEC&pg=PA189&lpg=PA189&dq=nazis+in+the+east+german+government&source=bl&ots=RW4dD7RIIZ&sig=oL-M3V3GI3BRjbuGA4nXIZkb1sE&hl=en&ei=d2rOSvqoKdP14Ab36piBAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CB4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=nazis%20in%20the%20east%20german%20government&f=false

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3326746/East-German-doctor-faces-trial-over-Nazi-murders.html

“Because Che is dead and I don’t want to be dead.”

http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=1013

Quite a few of the officials in the GDR were soldiers who crossed the lines on the Eastern Front. POW’s were normally very badly treated, but if you went over with information and maps, they sent you to training school and you became part of the future German government.

Mesquito: Thanks for linking to Yani’s blog. Her son’s comment and the teacher’s reaction to it indicates that the Cuban people are just waiting for the Castro brothers to die off before they start to change things and hopefully make Cuba into a democracy, just as in the last years of Franco’s rule, the Spainish people waited patiently for their old dictator to die before they transformed Spain into a democracy.

Wonder if Zin will show up now to denounce Yani as a counter-revolutionary traitor in Washington’s pay.

DocMartyn: I have been told that Von Paulus, the German commander at Stalingrad after he surrendered became the spokesman of a group of captive German officers broadcasting Communist propaganda and that Von Paulus so throughly turned his coat that he became the first Chief of Staff of the East German Army.

It is a well known fact that the East German Stasi secret polic was formed by former Gestapo agents and the NKVD working together in East German after the war.

http://medawarscornflakes.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-was-true-purpose-of-stasi.html

There is no moral difference between Nazism and Communism. There never was. Both are Statist doctrines of absolute control and, thus, mass political imprisonment and mass murder.

Why admitted Communists and erstwhile Communists are tolerated in polite company, is beyond me. Nazis aren’t.

“provide….a very simple explanation for the terminology used in the GDR newspapers”

In addition to this, both Communism and Nazism are virtually undistinguishable in their belief in a conspiracy of rich people to subjugate the poor. Change Jews for Capitalists and Proletariat for German people. That is why Communism is logically and historically very close to antisemitism. All the founders of the Left as an intellectual tradition were antisemites who considered “Jew” a byword for parasite, Capitalism, usury and superstition: Proudhon, Fourier, Marx, Bakunin, Bauer, Voltaire among others.

I don’t why people insist that the Nazi’s and Communists were at opposite political poles. A good deal of Nazi propaganda cartooning becomes Communist cartooning if you take the big noses off the capitalists. Heck, even the art in the Nazi children’s book “Trust No Foxes” bears a strong resemblance to the art in “Why Mommy is a Democrat”, you just have to replace the Jews by Republicans. The Left hasn’t changed much, and the Nazis were of the Left.

There is article above the one being discussed here on SU in which they are trying to figure out why the left is nowhere. They still think that if they can replay the twentieth century to a diferent script then all will be right.

If any article shows the utter bankruptcy of the left in both politics, tactics and morals it is ths one. Thank fuck these people are a miniscule joke. Can anyone imagine them being in power? It doesn’t bare thinking about.

There are two books that must be read about the GDR. “Stasiland” by Anna Funder and “Shadowlands” by Tina Rosenberg which also discusses other Eastern Euporean dictatorships.

After reading these no one except SU diehards culdpossibly support a state that oppressed and murdered its own citizens. With reference to Cuba there was an article in the Spanish press recently which listed several South American countries which had social services as good or better than Cuba and no secret police.

Why can’t we comment on the Obama post?

3 years ago a book (second edition) was published by Henry Leide “NS-Verbrecher und Staatssicherheit, Die Geheime Vergangenheitspolitik der DDR” Vandenhoecik & Rupprecht. The book Nazi-criminals and the Stasi, the secret past policy of the GDR documents how the Stasi used Nazis.
Leide made an end to the legend of antinazi GDR. He gave many examples, how doctors who participated in the Nazi crimes were not only protected but given high decorations by the regime. Stasi has protected also Josef Settnik, who was member of the political police in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Already in the first Auschwitz court case in Western Germany a former inmate accused Settnik, whom he described in detail.
Settnik (born 1903 in Upper Silesia) lived under a different name in the GDR after the war. One of his family members recognised him and went to the police to inform about him. However the police did not arrest him, but gave his details to the Stasi which recruited the nazi criminal as informer. When The Federal Republic of Germany asked the GDR to extradite him, to be prosecuted in the big Auschwitz case, the GDR informed West-Germany that Settnik does not live in the GDR.
I could no continue, but this is enough for the time beeing. Lets hope that the important book of Leide will be translated into English.
see also
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/593449

All true Commies and Nazis are pretty much the same thing. Now can we have a post rubbishing the French as a de facto Axis power please. After all, the Allies did two opposed amphibious landings against them in WW2 – operation Torch in North Africa and operation Ironclad in Madagascar.

I have been told that Von Paulus, the German commander at Stalingrad after he surrendered became the spokesman of a group of captive German officers broadcasting Communist propaganda and that Von Paulus so throughly turned his coat that he became the first Chief of Staff of the East German Army.

Paulus was released from a Soviet prison in 1953. He settled in Dresden where he worked as an inspector in the police until his death in 1957.

Those two last spoof comments belong in the sewer, just like their author.

Incidentally, it was none other than Walter Ulbricht who made that radio broadcast shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, telling his comrades that the Nazis were no longer the enemy, and that the true foe was imperialist Britain.

To all those who claim that Communism and Nazism are the same:
Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes are comparable. I am not seeking to whitewash Communism, but simply to oppose simplistic thinking.
You rightly mention Soviet-Nazi cooperation, but apart from the transport workers’ strike, there was no cooperation between German Communists and the Nazis before the Hitler Stalin pact. The Communists were regularly attacked, physically and ideologically, by the Nazis. Some of the bloggers claim that there is a kinship between “the Left” and the Nazis. Please, read a little history! It was the traditional conservative parties that enabled Hindenburg to put Hitller in power. The Concordat signed between the Vatican and the Nazi regime gave legitimacy to that regime in the eyes of German Catholics.Two pro-Nazi allied states, Croatia and Slovakia, had clerically colored governments (Slovakia was headed by Monisgnor Tiso). Would you conclude that there is a kinship between the Nazis and the Church? Individual Communists in Italy and France fought the Nazi occupiers. They did so on the basis of their understanding of Communism, which was of course in contradiction to its practice. There was no contradiction between Nazi practice and Nazi ideology. So it is inaccurate to consider individual Communists in countries where’ Communisim is not in power to be equivalent to Nazis. As for an equivalence between “the Left” and Nazism, please. Nazi ideology glorified the family, roots, the countryside versus the corrupt city….all these are leitmotifs in conservative thought.

belief in a conspiracy of rich people to subjugate the poor.

No, socialism/communism explicitly repudiates teh diea that it is a conspiracy against the poor. Conspiracy implies that the system is basically fine, but is being subverted by malign agencies. The case of socialism is that teh system inherently is premised upon the subjection of the majority by the minority. It is distinctly a class movement for the abolition of the state.

Nick [ ex-South Africa ] needs to be reminded that the armed forces of the French State* resisted the Allies when the Allies crossed into Syria from Palestine.

In the course of this operation of war, it was a bullet fired by a soldier in the service of the French State that slammed a binocular eyepiece into Moshe Dayan’s eye and destroyed it, hence his famous eyepatch.

* It will be remembered that the majority of the the deputies of the French Republic met in Bordeaux and voted the Republic out of existance and voted the French State into existance.

Lorenzo,

admittedly, it was teh collapse of the KPD vote and their transfer to the NSDAP that gave Hitler his final (open) election victory.

Would you conclude that there is a kinship between the Nazis and the Church?

Don’t you think there was something a little messianic about Hitler’s appeal to the German people?

“telling his comrades that the Nazis were no longer the enemy, and that the true foe was imperialist Britain.”

The commies also told he French commies, during the nazi invasion of France, not to resist the Nazi onslaught because they would be guilty of aiding the imperialist bourgeois war mongers i.e the West.

That is 100% true, I will not however provide a wiki link and a sworn statement from 928 million people to back it up, because if I did, the commies would still say it was a Neo-con/Zionist conspiracy.

A Question.

To the Far Leftists.

If 11 children, all aged 11, each have 11 toes, does that mean:

A) It is Gods will

B) It is a Neo-Con Zionist Conspiracy

C) It is a result of a random genetic mutation

D) It is the West’s Fault for poisoning the rest of the world.

E) It’s the Aliens.

Answers.

The West:

A) 18%

B) 22%

C) 8%

D) 51%

E) 1%.

The Islamic World:

A) 70%

B) 110%

C) 8%

D) 2000,000,000%

E) 1%

The majority of the non-western, non Islamic world:

A) no comment

B) maybe

C) 8%

D) 100,000,000,000,000%

E) Probably, but only if Nasa told them what to say.

The DRG and all the rest, new age communism, socialism, Islamism, no thanks, we have seen it all before and no matter how much spraying of the propaganda perfume that the committed use to mask the stench, it stills smells bad.

“No, socialism/communism explicitly repudiates teh diea that it is a conspiracy against the poor. Conspiracy implies that the system is basically fine, but is being subverted by malign agencies. The case of socialism is that teh system inherently is premised upon the subjection of the majority by the minority. It is distinctly a class movement for the abolition of the state.”

No, Red Deathy, Communist think that the system itself is a conspiracy of the rich to subjugate the poor. And if you want to answer that Communist do not morally judge the system or the persons involved, Communists say that in times of crisis, the real interests of the people involved is shown (the Police become the guardians of the Capitalist system, etc). Communists think in terms of a vast conspiracy, just like the Nazis.

‘Those two last spoof comments belong in the sewer, just like their author.’

Can I just make it clear that this statement was not intended for ‘Fact-Checker’ or ‘Nick’, but to two comments clearly posted by an anti-Semitic troll (one of which was an unsubtle spoof of ‘Fabian’).

was the euthanasia program of the National Socialist period really such a bad idea?

Yes.

Fabian,

the difference is attributing it to structural positions, rather than a conscious conspiracy, i.e. if you change the personnel in charge it will be alright (“if only were were rid of group x”, for example.) It is not a conspiracy theory to say that the board of Marks and Spencer want to make profits. For a Nazi, having a different bunch of capitalists makes all the difference.

There was no conspiracy in designing the system, indeed, we point out the way in which the workers promoted capitalism as a liberation from fuedal conditions, but the differences remain the same, we base our politics on liberating labour, Nazis on suppressing racial groups.

Don’t you think there was something a little messianic about Hitler’s appeal to the German people?

Er, yes.

There is something very messianic about all utopian movements, whether they want to bring about the socialist paradise, the 1,000 year reich or the return of the khalifate.

Utopianism is basically mad.

Red Deathy, maybe it is because I am 2 sheets to the wind, at the moment, but your last comment at 11:04, is without doubt, the most indecipherable comment I have read in many a long year.

I need a very long sleep, me thinks.

“the difference is attributing it to structural positions, rather than a conscious conspiracy”

Well, it surely feels the same to the bussiness owner who needs to be shot down? Unless a “structural position” can fire a weapon?

That is why antisemitism in Nazism and Communism are logically and historically close.

And don’t forget, RD, that Jews were conscious and unconscious carriers of racial degeneration. The “genetic” struggle between the Aryan and Semitic races can surely also be interpreted as a fight between structural positions?

Fabian,

a business owner doesn’t need to be shot down, that’s the point, it’s not the person. You could eally say it feels the same to a worker who gets shot down by the bosses. It is the structural situation which compels both sides of the struggle, and changing one bunch of faces for another won’t end that.

It is the confusion that it’s individuals that are to blame, an essentially reactionary position, that leads some reds to be similar to the browns, but for socialists there is a country mile between the change of a system of a society and changign the management of it.

That old chestnut “There is no moral difference between Nazism and Communism”

Now on the one hand, as a democratic liberal socialist/social-demorat, I welcome the comparison of the crimes of Commmunism with those of Nazism. There is sadly a long tradition purportedly within the Left which has committed grave crimes and evil, which has embraced totalitarianism and written off democracy and liberal rights as a Capitalist construct. There is another well established tradition of apologia and denial or excusing of the crimes of Communism.

I stand with those of the progressive side who strongly oppose this version of progressive politics. With the Labour government which was instrumental in setting up Nato and the intellectual current around the US Dissent magazine which remained socialist whilst very strongly anti-Communist.

Whist I think there is an argument that the crimes of the Nazis were worse than those of Stalin’s USSR (around intention and motivation) its not one I would feel comfortable making and in any event the crimes of Stalin’s USSR were so grave that I would not want to be seen as in anyway belittling them.

The argument that it was just Stalinist doesn’t wash because crimes were committed pre and post Stalin by Communist regimes around the world. They may not have been on a par with the Nazis crimes but neither were the crimes of other Far Right and Fascists governments.

And yet.

I would insist on a difference in the movements and intentions, at least at grass roots. The Communists joined the Party to fight injustice and for emancipatory reasons, they also embraced – at least sometimes – a universalism which treated people (or at least the working class) in a way which didn’t discriminate on ethnic/racial grounds.

The Nazis joined the Party to attack their enemies, to establish a hiearchical world order where some humans were seen as worthless animals and others sub-human.

The Communist vision, their utopia, was an egalitarian, open, free, peaceful, non-discriminatory and internatinalist order. Race or gender would not have been relevant.

The Nazis wanted a non-equal, closed, controlled national order marked by gross inequality and the destruction and enslavement of humans.

Furthermore the Communists fought on our side (not necessary for noble reasons) and were part of a collective effort and enterprise which saw the end of the Nazi regime.

So I have to insisnt that there is not a total moral equivalence.

And Fabian, whilst vulgar Marxists or Communists may indeed be anti-semitic and see conspiracies this is not inherent in the Marxist analysis and philosphy in the way it is for Nazism and Fascism.

“And Fabian, whilst vulgar Marxists or Communists may indeed be anti-semitic and see conspiracies this is not inherent in the Marxist analysis and philosphy in the way it is for Nazism and Fascism.”

I did not say that it was inherent. I said that it is logically very close, and historically true.

The “genetic” struggle between the Aryan and Semitic races can surely also be interpreted as a fight between structural positions?

1) Such struggle, obviously, doesn’t exist, we are all one species, your culture is my culture, and I am enriched by your existence.
2) The biological essentialism, though, does illustrate the point that they located the problem as some specific people, who can be removed, and all will be well because the system is “basically sound” (in their view). They locate the struggle within the body, we say it is in the social logic.

Put ano0ther way, we can win the class war by abolishing the wages system, and enforcing a sufficient refusal to work for the capitalists that their property becomes meaningless to them. Our self emancipation is the condition for their abolition as capitalists, not vice-versa.

“I did not say that it was inherent. I said that it is logically very close, and historically true.”

Well anti-semitism was the socialism of fools and as those on this site know full well there is a long as well established history of “Left” anti-semitism from Bakunin to some of our anti-Zionist luminaries of today.

“1) Such struggle, obviously, doesn’t exist, we are all one species, your culture is my culture, and I am enriched by your existence.”

As the Race struggle, the Class Struggle as the motor of history (sorry, I learnt this in Spanish, so this is my translation of “El motor de la historia”) also doesn’t exist. It is only a theory held by Communists.

“2) The biological essentialism, though, does illustrate the point that they located the problem as some specific people, who can be removed, and all will be well because the system is “basically sound” (in their view). They locate the struggle within the body, we say it is in the social logic.”

It is the same logic. Specific people for the nazis: the Jews. Specific people for the communists: the capitalists. You don’t fight “the system” as the Nazis did not fight “usury”. You fight specific persons, just like the Nazis.

Fabian,

1) I thought you’d say that.
2) Again, no, because we fight capital. If we hanged all the capitalists tomorrow we’d still have capitalism. Again, that’s the point, it’s not the people – you can’t kill a social relation, as they say. The whole theory of commodity fetishism means that the capitalist is just an agent, a stand in, for their capital, obeying its dictates…

To put it rather more briefly than Left-liberal Hawk does, Nazism is what I like to term a “Ronseal Ideology” – it does what it says on the tin. It is difficult to imagine a naive but basically good person adhering to Nazism. On the other hand, many basically good but naive people have adhered to Communism.

George – very succint

“It is difficult to imagine a naive but basically good person adhering to Nazism”
“George – very succinct”

But wrong. Many Germans believed that the fuhrer was actually Germany incarnated. That the future will be bright (for the people that mattered). They educated their children with smiles and candies and did not consider themselves bad persons. Just like a Communist may justify the worst evils for the greater good of the Revolution. I don’t see them as opposite poles. Both were led by mad men, and followed by many people deluded.

Fabian,

I suppose the abolitionists were also mad men and delusionists?

Islamism, by the way, is also a Ronseal Ideology. But a lot of people appear to have forgotten their glasses and seem unable to read what it says on the tin.

“Again, no, because we fight capital”

No, you don’t. You strike against specific capitalists, you confront specific policemen.

Unless you want to agree with the statement: Nazis fight usury.

Communism is conspiratorial in nature, the main left ideologues confused Jews with Capitalism and usury, and they “fought” the Jews. That confusion will happen again and again, because Nazism and Communism as ideologies are very similar. They need an enemy, they believe that a small elite oppresses the masses. And historically, Communism has been antisemitic in practice.

Fabian: I often agree with you, but here I don’t. Your parallels between Nazism and Communism are forced. Nazi ideology does not call for a struggle against usury, but against Jews. Communism did not call for the elimination of a group of individuals, but against a system.
Fabiian, would you place the Communist partisans in France and Italy who fought against the Nazis in the same category as…the Nazis? With whom would you have sided in 1942 or 1943 in France – the anti-Communist “Volontaires contre le Bolchevisme” who fought alongside the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, or the French Communists who were sabotaging the Nazi war effort?
The Communist partisans were unaware of the real nature of the USSR, and did not join the Communist movement to build goulags or kill capitalists. People who joined the Nazi movement knowingly supported Jew-hatred.

“It is difficult to imagine a naive but basically good person adhering to Nazism. On the other hand, many basically good but naive people have adhered to Communism.”

How wrong you are! It is easy to imagine naive people adhering to either doctrine of mass murder and a permanent police state because no act of the imagination is required. History records that millions of niave people adhered to one or the other: and some fewer millions adhered to one AFTER the other.

The creepy, (one might say, totalitarian premise of this argument) is that the arguer claims the ability to know the human heart, and who is “basically good.”

Well, know one here arguing for the moral equivelance of Naziism and Communism claims the ability to know human hearts.

I think you will find that the arguer is making no such claim but instead is saying it would be “easy to imagine” someone adhering to communism, a contention that you then follow by saying exactly the same thing about it being easy to imagine people adhering to either nazism or communism before weirdly negating the act of imagination so that your statement becomes some sort of Orwellian doublespeak.

Michael R: It would take pages and pages do justice to this topic. Just a few comments for the time being. You say that “both ideologies are premised on some sort of conspiracy -conscious or uncoscious- by the part of the rich to oppress the poor.”
This is quite simply inaccurate. Whatever the huge shortcomings of Marxim, it is not predicated on a conspiracy.
Secondly, Marx never talks about “the rich”. He does of course talk about the capitalists, in the context of the capitalist system.
You also claim that “Communists confused Jews with speculators and destroyed them.”
There were executions of some Jews accused of speculation in the USSR, but this does not justify your blanket statement about Communists confusing Jews with speculators ! Such an idea was never propagated by Communist parties (I am aware of Marx’s text on the Jewish question, by the way). The Communist parties not in power actually opposed anti-Semitism, and in some cases were among the few parties who did. In pre-war Poland it was the anti-Communist rightist parties who were anti-Semitic. It is not enough to concede that “not every individual communist is anti-Semitic”. If you want to make a serious argument, you have to factor in the opposition to anti-Semitism by Left parties (including the Communists) at different times, and the propagation of anti-Semitism by conservative anti-Left forces. I suggest reading about politics in Eastern Europe between WWI and WWII.

How confused you are, Puzzled. The “arguer,” as you put it, argued that it is easy to imagine good but niave people being communists, but hard to imagine good but niave people being Nazis. My point was that it is impossible to know who is good, but easy to know who repudiates and regrets their former Naziism and/or Communism. Pretty much everyone who admits that they were one or the other.

More importantly, my point was that many Leftists apologize for Communism and freely admit that they consider it morally superior to Nazism. As you have.

My point was that it is impossible to know who is good, but easy to know who repudiates and regrets their former Naziism and/or Communism. Pretty much everyone who admits that they were one or the other.

That might have worked if you yourself had not made the appeal to imagination to back your own point.

More importantly, my point was that many Leftists apologize for Communism and freely admit that they consider it morally superior to Nazism. As you have.

No I have not. Anywhere. So lets add lying to your obvious inability to argue.