Punch on: Open thread 05/03/10

Liz says:

10:39am | 05/03/10

Took the numbers right out of my mouth! Is the world better off, not my country to judge.

James1 says:

11:17am | 05/03/10

For a while, yes.  While Hitler was rabidly opposed to communism and the left more generally, the pair signed a non-aggression pact of convenience in 1939 so as to carve up Poland between them.  When Germany invaded Poland from the west, the USSR invaded from the east.  That ended in June 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR, at which point they became enemies.  After some initial setbacks, Stalin finished off Nazi Germany.  So I think it is fairer to say, all things considered, they were in fact mortal enemies.

Dingo_aus says:

01:49pm | 05/03/10

Personal relationships aside, you can look at both Germany’s Nazism and Soviet Russia’s Communism and see they look fairly similar.

Both societies with total control over every aspect of individual citizen’s lives. 

They are both completely opposite to the extreme “right wing” which seeks minimum state control and maximum individual freedom.

The Nazis were as Left as the Communists.  The full title of the Nazis includes the “National *Socialist* Workers Party”. The Soviets also violently hated the Jews and Homosexuals. There was also a secret pact between Hitler and Stalin early on to carve up Europe between this two monsters.

Slowforfriday says:

02:27pm | 05/03/10

Beautiful thanks folks, i feel smarter already.

James1 says:

03:24pm | 05/03/10

A bit off there Dingo.  I suppose you also think that North Korea is a democracy, because its full name is the People’s *Democratic* Republic of Korea?

What you are talking about is the modern right wing.  Yes, both states were authoritarian, but it is possible to be right wing and authoritarian, or left wing and authoritarian.  There was no public ownership of the means of production in Nazi Germany.  All socialists were imprisoned along with the Jews in Nazi Germany.  Hitler came to power by aligning the Nazi Party with a range of conservative parties.  That alone is enough to debunk the idea that it was socialist.  It is not as simple as left and right, and it never was.  Name me one socialist policy that the Nazi’s had after the left wing of it was expelled in 1929.  And please make it a socialist policy, not an authoritarian policy.  There have been just as many right-wing authoritarian governments as there have been left-wing ones.

John A Neve says:

03:57pm | 06/03/10

Eric,

You talk a lot of rubbish, most of those you mention were screwed in the head, their politics had nothing to do with the actions.

Trotsky on the other hand had a brilliant mind and was not at all like the others. That is why he got out, not that it did him any good.

Eric says:

08:36am | 07/03/10

Trotsky was a mass murderer, just like all the others. Look up the history of the Kronstadt rebellion.

Your idol Che Guevara was a mass murderer too. Why is it that you defend killers and torturers and their ideology?

Philip Crowley says:

11:34am | 07/03/10

So John A Neve, by extrapolation most communists are ‘screwed in the head’ and anyone with a working mind, ie. Trotsky, abandoned the philosophy?