It has been brought to my attention recently that there are still, and I imagine going on forever, people insisting that Nazis are actually socialists and by extension left wing politically. The arguments fail to convince me and I’ve laid out in other posts why I think the Nazi fall clearly on the right. What I find fascinating about this argument is contorted logics employed in services of preconceived conclusions; they are rationalizations and not reasons.

Back in 1985 I engaged in the strange habit of renting the worse movies I could possibly locate on VHS. A little mom-and-pop shop just around the corner from where I lived had the most interesting collection of odd movies with titles such as Hitchhike to Hell  and then one night the gem A Certain Sacrifice  appeared on the shelves. This micro-budgeted movie shot in 1979 and 1980 and looking as though the film stock was all of 8 mm wide included an unknown performer, Madonna. By the mid 1980s her stardom had exploded and the filmmaker capitalized on this by releasing his movie on home video. Thought Madonna attempt to stop the release she failed in the courts and I was treated to a truly terrible movie.

What does this have to do with the question if Nazis were or were not socialists?

After watching the film with my roommate one of the games I engaged in was arguing that A Certain Sacrifice  was not in fact a bad movie but a masterpiece of filmmaking rich with metaphor and symbolism. My arguments were artistically sound and of course utterly untrue. The fact that I could spin a consistent narrative that ‘explained’ all the bad film choices as something smart and creative did nothing to change the facts of the matter. The same is true in this political argument.

You can quote from the early years of the Nazi party to prove points, ignoring the uncomfortable truth that those elements were brutally eliminated during the night of long knives. You can construct logical arguments that proceed from a foundation that everything totalitarian is socialist and get to your preferred conclusions, but linguistic dexterity and slippery arguments do not change facts on the ground.

But how can we know the facts on the ground? How can we test this concept?

Easy, watch actual Nazis and see where they place themselves politically.

It is on the right.

People giving Nazi salutes election night 2016 were not bemoaning a loss.

People marching by torchlight and chanting ‘Jews will not Replace Us’ did not organize a ‘United the Left’ protest.

It was not the Democratic Party that found itself represented by an actual Nazi in the 2018 congressional elections.

Nazis nearly always self-sort to the right, their behavior betrays their natural placement on the ideological spectrum.

I try to consume political media from a wide variety of sources, including news and opinion journalists. To me it is a firm truism that no person, party, or faction has a complete truth and as such I am always looking for new points of view, new ideas and solutions to the problems and challenges facing out nation and our world.

Finding liberal or progressive writers, commenters, and podcasters with proposed solutions is scarcely any trouble at all but the converse is not true for conservative thought. When I read or listen to conservative writers and podcasters it very quickly becomes evident that there is a real dearth proposed solutions. This is not to say that there aren’t things that the GOP and conservatives want to enact or achieve but it seems to me that everything on that list, be it ‘constitutional carry,’ tax reductions, or a lax regulatory structure, is something that they desire regardless of any current condition.

Instead when I read or tune into conservative media it is often about their state of  ‘siege.’ It’s endless vitriol, attacks, and frankly whining about the unfairness of the culture, exaggerated and imaginary dangers of ‘SJWs’ eradicating Christian culture, or pitiful attempts to re-play the cold war and depict every progressive proposal as the rebirth of Stalinism.

As a country, a society, and as a species we face serious challenges, stagnating wages, crumbling infrastructures, racial strife, rising authoritarianism, spreading mass murder, and climate change and yet one half the American political system offers nothing but platitudes.

This is terrible time and I fear it could become much worse before it gets better.

I am a big proponent of individual liberty. We have but one life here in the vast cold and unsympathetic universe and absent harm to other we should be free to live our short allotment of years as we see fit this included adhering to whatever spiritual or religious standard that we might adopt to give our years some sort of meaning.

Recently I listened to an edition of the podcast The Ezra Klein Showand his guest was conservative columnist and critic of popular culture Rod Dreher  If you know anything of Dreher’s writings and work then you know that one of his major themes and one he returned to quite often is that religious liberty, particularly for socially conservative Christians, is under assault with a coming Orwellian nightmare that promises to crush all dissent from the majority opinion. His opinion, if I hear and read it correctly, is that the ‘Culture War’ has already been lost and that protecting the rights of Christians as a beleaguered group under assault from a majority intent on eradicating that Christian thought is an essential role for government.  Well know cases that need protection or are examples of this crushing mindset include the bakeries that refuse to created wedding cakes for same-sex couples, pharmacies that refuse to dispense medications for some purposes, schools that are citizen for terminating the employment because of an employee’s private life, employers demanding exceptions to insurance regulations, and hospitals the refuse to allow certain medical procedures. In Dreher’s opinion each of these cases has at its core a deeply held, critically important test of religious conviction and a state that seems determined to crush religious beliefs where it conflicts with the greater culture. (There is an argument to be made that this religious belief defense is nothing but a cover shielding a deeper and hostile bigotry but true or not that is not thee point I am discussing today.)

A critical element common to all of these cases, and an aspect that I think is far more important, is that in none of these examples are we witnessing the convictions of religious individuals. Each and every one of these cases is an organization, a fictitious person, and often a licensed non-profit, insisting that the rules that apply to other corporations and company do not apply. It is important to note that the creation and protections of fictitious persons, companies, and non-profits, are an act of the state. It is a set of laws created outside of any religious sphere crafted with a secular intent for a secular purpose.  These laws, regulations, and structures in the commercial and profit driven world exist to help shield the assets of entrepreneurs to foster economic growth and stability. They, in effect, say, you John Smith, can create a business and we will treat that business as a person, it’s taxes will be separate from yours, it’s liabilities will be separate from yours, and it’s action will be separate from yours but under Dreher’s argument the companies get all these benefits granted by the culture and the law while also claiming a special protection based upon the creed of it’s owners, despite that business being a separate entity.

Moving into the issue concerning non-profits this becomes even more egregious. Non-Profits are specially licensed and sanctioned to serve a public good, receiving carved out protections backed by the secular state because their mission is defined as something that is intended to benefit society as a whole and not a particular isolated segment or population. It is a perversion of that intent to allow non-profits to discriminate. In South Caroline the governor has petitioned and received a federal waiver that permits a federally funded Christian foster agency to not only refuse to place children with same-sex couples for adoption but also allowing the agency to refuse to place children with Jewish homes because that is a ‘violation’ of their Christian beliefs.

Individuals have the freedom to believe what they wish, but not legal and financial support from secular society.

With the never-ending discussion of Trump’s actions and the desire by some to impeach him I find myself thinking about the most recent Presidential impeachment. In particular I have been thinking about August 20th 1998.

Mind you article of impeachment did not pass from the House until December of 1998, but in August of that year the currents were flowing fast and the prospect of putting the President on trial in the Senate loomed over everything. But August was a busy month in 1998 and world events did not take a pause while American politics descended into warfare. On August 7th 1998US Embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania killing over 200 people and injuring more than 4000. Al-Qaeda, led by the terrorist Osama bin Laden, carried the deadly attacks proving the organization to be more than a run-of-the-mill terrorist association. On August 20th President Bill Clinton operating on actionable intelligence about bin Laden’s location, launched missile strikes into al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan in a attempt that failed by a few hours to remove the terrorist from game board.

What does this military action have to do with Clinton’s looming impeachment?

Also on August 20th 1998 Monica Lewinsky returned to court continuing her Gran Jury testimony. Unlike the Mueller investigation Ken Starr’s office leaked like the Titanic after it’s impact and from numerous secret sources, including Grand Jury testimony information spilled freely.

The missile strikes taking place on the same day that Lewinsky returned to the Grand Jury sparked endless accusations that Clinton had ordered the strike to push the political mess off the new cycle. My conservative friends, and full disclosure at the time I was still a registered Republican voter, asserted that it was simply beyond any credibility that the Intelligence and Lewinsky’s testimony were mere coincidence certain that Clinton had ordered military action for mere temporary political position. It was quite a few years later that the evidence, now declassified, verified that indeed such a coincidence had taken place.

What does this have to do with Trump?

For all his failings and personal issues Bill Clinton still behaved more or less as a typical President but the same cannot be said for Trump. One has to look at his abuse of ’emergency’ declarations and tariffs to see that this president dis not bound by convention. Should the House move to impeach Trump, something that couldn’t be pushed off the news with an outrageous tweet, I cannot be certain that this man would not launch a few missiles to distract but rather initiate something far more serious to take over the news cycle. With the GOPs abandonment of all pretenses of responsibility and principle in their defense of Trump even such a blatant abuse of powers I can’t honestly give them the good will to expect that this would provoke the conservatives to hold him in any measure of responsible.

I think it is very possible that starting an actual impeachment of Trump will cost real lives, it is imperative that every other option be explored before that trigger is pulled.

Today, June 4th, 27 years ago the Communist Government violently put a peaceful democratic student-led protest in Tiananmen Square. The official count of how many were killed places the number at an impossibly low figure of 300, counting soldiers, civilians, and ‘ruffians’ while Amenity International place the figure at 1,000 and for a brief time Chinese Red Cross puts the number at 2,600. What is clear is that overwhelming military force was used to disperse, suppress, and punish people desiring freedom.

Such is the brutalism of dictators and Juntas. We need to take a moment and remember those who died for freedom they deserved but never received and curse those who mistake sadism, brutality, and murder for strength.