BoscoX
Posts: 11214
Joined: 12/10/2016 Status: offline
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From rather a left wing source: ‘Antifa’ radicals aren’t good because they fight Nazis Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesn’t necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact. The greatest Nazi-killer of the 20th century was Josef Stalin. He also killed millions of his own people and terrorized, oppressed, enslaved or brutalized tens of millions more. The fact that he killed Nazis during World War II (out of self-preservation, not principle) doesn’t dilute his evil one bit. This should settle the issue as far as I’m concerned. Nazism was evil. Soviet communism was evil. It’s fine to believe that Nazism was more evil than communism. That doesn’t make communism good. Alas, it doesn’t settle the issue. Confusion on this point poisoned politics in America and abroad for generations. Part of the problem is psychological. There’s a natural tendency to think that when people, or movements, hate each other, it must be because they’re opposites. This assumption overlooks the fact that many — indeed, most — of the great conflicts and hatreds in human history are derived from what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.” Most tribal hatreds are between very similar groups. The European wars of religion were between peoples who often shared the same language and culture but differed on the correct way to practice the Christian faith. The Sunni-Shia split in the Muslim world is the source of great animosity between very similar peoples. The young communists and fascists fighting for power in the streets of 1920s Germany had far more in common with each other than they had with decent liberals or conservatives, as we understand those terms today. That’s always true of violent radicals and would-be totalitarians. The second part of the problem wasn’t innocent confusion, but sinister propaganda. As Hitler solidified power and effectively outlawed the Communist Party of Germany, The Communist International (Comintern) abandoned its position that socialist and progressive groups that were disloyal to Moscow were “fascist” and instead encouraged communists everywhere to build “popular fronts” against the common enemy of Nazism. These alliances of convenience with social democrats and other progressives were a great propaganda victory for communists around the world because they bolstered the myth that communists were just members of the left coalition in the fight against Hitler, bigotry, fascism, etc. More
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Thought Criminal
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