Der Dolchstoss15 May 2007 08:29 am For those who prefer their rightwing-media-acting-like-nazis to be super-explicit, here's a recent Investor's Business Daily cartoon I saw thanks to Mark Kleiman:
Way back in May 2004 I had an early piece on the development of this theme in the conservative press and the conservative blogosphere. Comments (65)
This strikes me as more retarded than explicitly fascist. Scapegoating the legislature may be contemptible, but it's not the same as blaming an ethnic group for our military misadventures. 
Perhaps if Southpaw reviewed 1920's German politics he might get it.
So business investors (if they agree with Ramirez) prefer we spend 100s of billions on a project that will not increase our security by the same amount? Pretty bad ROI is you ask me. No wonder our economy's in the shitter.
Go to Eschaton, get the Harper's link, and then you'll understand, SP. Here is a taste: "The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told the National Assembly, “As an English general has very truly said, the German army was ‘stabbed in the back.’” Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the-back myth, this claim was disingenuous. The “English general” in question was one Maj. Gen. Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal Erich von Ludendorff—the force behind Hindenburg—was characterizing the German army's alleged lack of support from its civilian government."
Oh, I get it. Im ruecken steckt das messer and all that iconography. I just think that if it's between IBD editorial cartoonists (a) consciously invoking that history, or (b) simply being too dumb to know what they're doing . . . well, i'll go with (b) every time.
southpaw = ignorant slug... it is not surprising that the author of this lovely little propaganda coup should be that fascist moron, Ramirez...
I recommend e-mailing the creator of the cartoon, and complaining to him directly. I did that a while back with Chuck Asay, and got into a lengthy e-mail back and forth. This cartoon is obviously an inflammatory cheap shot. And it deserves derision. And that artists should not be let off the hook for this neo-Nazi propaganda.
The problem, Southpaw, is that this cartoon too neatly parallels the propaganda of the Nazis and represents the same kind of thinking: war is always good and anybody who opposes war is a traitor. The fact that the cartoonist may or may not be aware of the parallel is irrelevant to any consideration of whether the parallel is apt. Indeed, I doubt most authoritarians are fully versed in the history of the ideas they espouse.
Ah, the symbolic "knife in the back". Much easier to draw than the non-symbolic "IED hidden at the side of the road."
Well, if Ramirez was addressing the Republican Congress's voting down body armor funding, failing to oversee Walter Reed, etc., he might have a point (*rimshot*).
For more similar cartoons: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=dolchstoss&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2 I feel somewhat conflicted by this. It's clear that most of the people enabling these sorts of cartoons are right-wing nuts. And I don't know much about Investor's Business Daily, but it strikes me as a little odd that the MBA-readership of IBD are so Ann-Coulterish. Nonetheless, it has to be admitted that its certainly possible for civilian political decision-makers to make decisions that prevent the success of military operations and for opponents to agitate against such decisions. It seems at least part of the stink of this sort of cartoon is the choice and charaterisation of targets in the post-WW1 period in Germany rather than the general claim that civilians could stupidly hinder military operations.
...and in this context, for "Jew" read "Democrat".
Oh Congress, why did you hurt our troops by vetoing the spending bill?
It's not just the Chuck Schumer Congress that's actively stabbing our boys in the back, the George Soros Liberal Media (esp. the New York Times) is too.
To add some further context, at the time of the Armistice, German troops still occupied approximately half of Belgium, and considerable amounts of territory in northern France, including areas that contained most of France's coal supply and much of its heavy industry. The only place where Allied troops stood on German soil was a small patch of the Alsace-Lorraine region that France took in the early days of the war, and which the Germans considered so stategically insignificant they didn't bother to try to get it back for the entire duration of the war. So even though the Germans were in retreat almost everywhere along the Western Front, worn out, exhausted, without any reserves and desperately short of such staples as artillery, rifles, ammunition, and food, it was easy for right-wing fanatics to claim that the heroic soldiers had been betrayed by the politicians and socialists (there'd also been a revolution sparked by a mutiny staged by sailors of the High Seas Fleet at the Kiel naval base). Soon enough, the list of "traitors" was expanded to include Jews, focusing particularly on a man named Walter Rathenau, who'd been responsible for organizing and maintaining Germany's war economy. He was assassinated in 1922 by nationalist extremists.
I give the military more credit.
Perhaps instead of the inscription "Congress," the knife would better be labeled "Reality" or "Lack of Planning By This Crooked Administration" or "Failure to Heed the Advice of People Including Tree-Hugging Commies Who Knew Better and Warned That This Would Happen" or...well, you get the idea. Once again, another conservative showing how seriously he or she takes the idea of personal responsibility, culpability and accountability for events and outcomes best described as FUBAR. What a frickin' shock. And trust me, my buddies who've served - the ones who lived, anyway - know better.
Reminds me of one of those Onion cartoons that totally over-sell the message (which is usually a conspiracy theory poorly disguised as incisive wit)
That Harper's story has a lot of good history. The flipside of Republican hawkishness which I'd like to see someone explore is the result of the utter disaster they suffered from their adherence to isolationism in the late 30's and early 40's. They learned after the war that going the other way, way overboard on national security paid off. Domestically the communist witchhunts were very beneficial to political careers of politicians like Nixon. Internationally Eisenhower did accept the draw in Korea that Truman couldn't bring himself to. But then Ike let the Dulles bros. loose to screw up Iran and Central America. Planted the seeds for the Vietnam War. They spent the Cold War fighting fire with fire instead of water. People all over the world wanted our kind of prosperity, our kind of freedoms, our kind of life. A Marshall Plan for the developing world would have worked wonders. In small ways JFK tried and they hung his portrait in mud huts all over the world. But instead of spreading democracy and regulated capitalism the Dulles Bros. and their ilk in Repub administrations that followed decided to be more ruthless than the Soviets. More barbaric than terrorists. And for what? The short term profits of multinational corporations and a few tinhorn dictators?
I think pointing out this cartoon as American right-wing Dolchstosslegende writ large is giving Michael Ramirez too much credit. This is the same stupid crap he drew when he was at the LA Times.
If the knife said "government" (including the President) I'd agree with it, because it was the Chimperor and his enablers in Congress (Dem and Repub both) who allowed this war to happen. Bush failed at leading the country. The Congress failed at providing anything resembling oversight, timidly rubber-stamping each and every one of Bush's cockeyed policies. Ultimately, however, we all know where responsibility lies. For the mouthbreathers, however, Dear Leader can never be responsible for anything negative. Chimpy *always* gets a free pass with these lizard brains.
Oh Ed, such a whiner. Here's the deal: We're trying to save lives from needlessly being snuffed out. If conservatives, hard-hats and Congress had listened to the DFH's in '67-'74, that f$&#ing wall in DC would've been a helluva lot shorter.
Well, they got the jingoism part of it right [see the magnetic ribbons on all the SUV's and the Texas State Legislature codifying God in the morning pledge]..........the rest?..........not so much. So tell me. Are you gonna fall for the same bullshit rhetoric? Just in case you weren't aware, they're using the same talking points now that were employed then.
This was also an example of yet another occasion on which US journalism collaborated with the US foreign policy establishment's support of right wing lies, supposedly once again for good reason, and yet one which would lead to death & destructionl. The role of journalist George Seldes must be forgotten, and must remain forgotten, for the "stabbed in the back" to return again. from Wikipedia In 1916, Seldes moved to London where he worked for United Press. When the United States joined the First World War in 1917, Seldes was sent to France where he worked as the war correspondent for the Marshall Syndicate. At end of the war, he obtained an exclusive interview with Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army, but the article was suppressed and never appeared in the American press. In the interview, Hindenburg acknowledged the role that America played in defeating Germany. "The American infantry," said Hindenburg, "won the World War in battle in the Argonne." But American newspaper readers never read those outstanding words. Seldes and the others were accused of breaking the Armistice and were court martialed. They were also forbidden to write anything about the interview. Seldes himself believed that the suppression of the interview proved to be tragic. Instead of hearing straight from the mouth of Germany's supreme commander that they were beaten fair and square on the battlefield, another story took hold — the Dolchstoss (or "stab-in-the-back"), the myth that Germany did not lose in battle but was betrayed at home by "the socialists, the Communists and the Jews." This was the central lie upon which Nazism was founded. "If the Hindenburg interview had been passed by Pershing's censors at the time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers and undoubtedly would have made an impression on millions of people and became an important page in history," wrote Seldes in Witness to a Century. "I believe it would have destroyed the main planks on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind."
Southpaw does have a point to an extent. It would not be a knife in the back that would be fascist - it is this ridiculous celebration of "the troops" that is fascist. And it is every bit as fascist when they are celebrated on Dailykos as it is in this cartoon. These are not "our" troops. The are quasi-mercenaries who are willing, voluntary participants in an illegal war. They are disproportionately pro-Bush and pro-war. They are brutalizing civilians and support torture. The problem with "the troops" is not that they are being knifed in the back. Their problem is that they need a kick in the balls. And so do those that support them. Including so-called liberals.
Indeed, if they *were* more versed in history, they might not fall for the same stupid memes again and again and again... In any case, the stabbing-in-the-back analogy was more apt four years ago and more, when Congress opened the door to the continued abuse of the troops by the neocon cabal. That the cartoonist invokes it now in an obviously different context betrays a fundamental lack of understanding and empathy--we would not be out of line to suspect. This isn't any sort of pro-troops cartoon, it's an anti-Dem smear attempt, and yes, it uses lazy propaganda techniques perfected by Mr. Godwin's favorite regime.
Chuck, good point; that's for sure. However, regardless of the label on that knife's handle, there's only one bloodstained paw on it: The Decidere's, and The Deciderer's alone. It may have been steadied by the media and pushed or at least not hindered by Congress, but the gory and bank-breaking albatross that is the disaster in Iraq belongs around the neck of one person - the Commander-in-Chief, as he's so fond of reminding the American people.
Lacks artistic merit and realism: flight suits don't have elbow pads, and although he captures President AWOL's face and expression fairly well, the F-102 pilots were never issued the M-4 and had to make do with M-14s. Also the scale is all wrong and makes it hard to tell that it's just a hoodoo doll, otherwise Congress might get in trouble with the SS. And that's the Secret Service, to all you Godwinites out there.
wow Thinker, what a disgusting sentiment.
Thinker, Get back to us after you kick a Marine in the balls and let us know how that worked out for you.
The upside of the Nazi analogy is another historical lesson: When fascists appear to lose military prowess, their fascist movements begin to lose. When Portugal's fascist regime began losing its wars to keep its colonial hold on Angola & Mozambique, the Portuguese regime back home was dismembered. When Argentina's fascist (and of course US hawk-backed) military junta lost their war to the British over the Falklands / Malvinas, the fascist junta finally lost power and democracy restored. The Bush Jr. regime probably would have been fairly well off had they invaded & left, but thanks to getting mired in an occupation of Iraq that no one is seeing as any sort of macho expression of military genius, their proto-fascist movement (the one launched by Reagan and fulfilled to its full majesty by Bush Jr.) looks to finally be declining. The Bush Jr. proto-fascists have been shown to have been not super macho fascist bold men, but a cadre of knuckleheads, and thus, without their claim on macho military mastery, they lose their cult of authority. Ha. Ha. Ha. Good to see the old Reaganite revolutionary right wing populism finally die. About damn time.
In terms of Freudian analysis, that knife represents the right wing media's penis envy.
Thinker the majority of the troops say they no longer support Bush's the Iraq policy according to ther latest Military Times poll in Dec. That's the last one the DoD will let them conduct. I think you're a rightwing troll. Why don't you go burn a flag, get yourself arrested. Cuz Rove sure isn't going to pay you for this lame attempt at provocation.
thinker, that's just dumb. the US troops are not mercenaries, and they are generally not pro-Bush. people signed up for all sorts of reasons, and now they're fighting because it's their duty, and because the option is arrest and court-martial. a lot of them hate this war, and hate bush, even more than you do. clearly you don't know any of the men and women involved--if you did, you wouldn't talk that way.
Blame the Paperclip People. Then again, no. This is homegrown.
If I were inclined--or at least more inclined--to believe in conspiracy theories, I might wonder if the whole point of the Iraq fiasco was to get to this cartoon. I mean, a Democratic president wins World War I, and the opposition wins the next election. A Democratic president wins World War II, and the Republicans retake Congress, almost win the next presidential election, and then win the next one resoundingly. A Republican President wins a small war in Kuwait, and receives the less than 40 percent of the vote in the next election. Winning a war doesn't provide you much in American politics. Losing a war, however, can be a goldmine. Nixon presided over the loss in Viet Nam, and after just two election cycles--1974 and 1976--the Republicans start winning again and in 1980 start a 12-year hold on the presidency. And the underlying them for their victories: resentment over the loss in Viet Nam. Viet Nam has lost its salience for most Americans by now, but another lost war could gin up the heartland and blue-collar bile for those pointy-headed, latte-sipping liberals for another generation. It doesn't matter that the majority wanted Viet Nam over and wants this war over. In time, there will be only the anecdotes of Iraq vets being spat on by their liberal nurses at Walter Reed, the repeated-without-contradiction story of how Hillary Clinton pulled the funding from the war just as victory was in sight, the beery baroom rants about the liberal reporters tipping off alQaeda to the location of our troops so they could video the attacks. This is all the Republicans have, after all: lists of American enemies to rage against. They will stoke the resentment and profit from it. And it's enough to make one wonder, if one were inclined to such thinking, that this Ramirez cartoon was drawn in 2003--or even 1999--and left in a drawer for future use.
You will see this cartoon all over the rightwing blogs. They think they are making hay while the sun shines.
The knife were better replaced by a "Bush Veto Pen".
Lee and Citizen: So then, you're saying that "the troops" should be held blameless, for volunteering to be the armed goon squad for a Lie, and for daily atrocities such as kicking down the doors off private residences and blowing the tits off little girls? Problem with that sentiment: all the troops who came home from this war, from the Viet Nam war, etc., and found that they simply couldn't live with themselves, anymore. It's not just that they had "seen death"; ignore at the peril of your own intellectual honesty the oft-described soldier who would confess that "I did some things I don't want to think about, ever again" (surely, like me, you've known several of these). Having been brainwashed not to "hesitate at the moment of truth", these guys' Pavlovian training to obliterate life indiscriminately and deny their sense of humanity only lasted just so long, before that breach of their normal human instinct to protect life came back to make their lives a living Hell. Many committed their last murder on themselves. So what, then? Are you telling us that when the fog lifted and they finally understood what they had become by their actions, that the troops didn't support the troops? This is why I see purple whenever I hear a dissenting but rabidly pro-military type (think Rieckhoff) speak out against the war/occupation: it's always that we "didn't fight the war RIGHT". What bullshit. Militarism is evil, period. War is the breakdown of society; our first goal as a civilized nation must be to avoid war at all costs... not to use war as simply another tool for foreign policy. If I volunteer to fight in a war with murky ideals, I'm as responsible for murdering innocent people as the system that gave me a gun, equipped me with half as much protection as I needed, and sent me to kill darker-skinned people, deemed "the enemy".
The Corner usually has IBD ads with snippets of its cartoons, including the one above, one showing a large-breasted blonde woman with dollar bills in her hair and a wearing a tight OBAMA tee-shirt, and one showing Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and a masked terrorist on a stage celebrating the 2006 elections (ironically reminiscent of Steven Colbert's CONGRATULATIONS TERRORISTS cake that he brought out after the elections). Funny stuff, if you're into that kind of thing. Also, is it just me, or have the commenters here gotten a little loonier since the Atlantic switch (ie: Don Williams, jlw, Thinker, etc)?
This is the same Michael Ramirez who came up with probably the least appropriate use of a Vietnam War image ever. I figured his next one would show Alberto Gonzales as a naked child running down a road with napalm burns; little did I know he had broadened his historical perspective.
Aw, Ben, I'm hurt. Are you saying you think it's loony to think that Republicans are going to use the loss of Iraq to stoke the culture wars for another generation?
Being right-wing is simply pathological. The spluttering defensiveness, the creepy vindictiveness, all signs of a brain fettered with incipient rot. Sure, the Republicans will repeat the talking points of their Nazi brethren, or their Peronist analogues; even the authoritarian catechism of Stalin finds eager receptors in those organically convulsed minds. You can count on it.
This strikes me as more retarded than explicitly fascist. Scapegoating the legislature may be contemptible, but it's not the same as blaming an ethnic group for our military misadventures. Oh? Well, what he really means by "Congress" is "Democrats". Don't you think it would sound a little more explicitly dolchstosslegende that way? And when you consider who voted those Democrats into power -- i.e., people who aren't white trash -- it does seem rather like blaming an ethnic group.
Well, what he really means by "Congress" is "Democrats" Quite agree. It's the sort of coded dog-whistling that the Right specializes in--such as referring to Nancy Pelosi's "San Francisco values", which translated means "Dyke". Or harping on "vote fraud", which translated can mean either "wetbacks" or "N-----rs", depending on which deep-red state the targeted market happens to live in.
OK, in a dirge of "support the troops" political correctness, I have been attacked. Let's deal with the facts: More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed Friday. Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier. These are the "heroes" you are backing. As for the rationalizations for their participation in this illegal war, it is very intesting that amongst all the historical discussion here, Nurenburg has been forgotten. "Just following orders" is not a defense. As for citizen Able and his suggestion that I kick a marine in the balls. That is unnecessary. Their balls are being kicked in Iraq right now.
What a bunch of communists socialist bullshit propaganda being spewed here.
Thinker. Does that mean you're unemployed, on welfare, or have a Government Job? It just seems to have allot of time on your hands to post Communist propagandistic drivel. You are using half truths and made up bullshit. You start your argument and premise that this is an illegal war. That is factually incorrect. This was voted in Congress and the UN. Using the Clinton administration's intelligence and not the Bush administration's. You attack of our soldiers and label them as mercenariness. This only reveals your short sighted agenda of achieving a socialistic utopia on the backs of our brave soldiers who only what to do what's right. Where are the references for these statistics you quoted above? I can make up statistics also. You can look at any data and slant it to show what you want which is why your ilk depends on such drivel to define their daily reality. The soldiers are not claiming to follow orders. They are volunteers. I your socilistic world view only real soldiers are drafted. If they are voluteers then they are Mercinaries. Your claims about our troops being kicked in the balls is rather dubious. It's your Ilk who are doing the worst kicking more than any gun or bomb can do. You would love to see a complete defeat, a collapse of all law enforcement and police, and a complete breakdown of law order, not only in Iraq but here in America. Nazi's were Socialists not Conservatives. Nazi's have more in common with the Current Democratic Party than any other political party short of Communists. Doublespeak is your real name.
Thinker, you're the one who literally or figuratively referenced the cojones-kicking of those in Iraq and their supporters. Demonizing people who use the military to try to bootstrap themselves smacks of elitism and an ivory-tower mentality. They volunteered and gambled that they'd get out with a college education and their cojones intact. They screwed up. That's life. You rail about "quasi-mercs;" save your invective for the real mercs who are wasting the most. Barry, my comments to Thinker apply to you with an additional note that by taking such a broad rhetorical leap (insinuating that by supporting the troops means supporting the perpetrators of atrocities) leaves you in an awkward position: smack in the middle of the Bush administration's policy of cutting funding for brain-damaged returning veterans and charging them for equipment they left smoking on the ground in Iraq. Leave it to the pros to show us how to really "not support the troops." Obviously, The System is the problem.
Nazis were right wingers. They were not Socialists nor Communists, not in the sense that both Socialists and Communists held that there was a working class which would overthrow the bourgeois owners of capital. That's why they called themselves "National Socialists" -- you got all the sales potential of the word "Socialist" while clarifying that you were against them by using the word "National". Nazis and Italian Fascists believed that Marx was wrong, that there was no conflict between classes within nations. They believed that there was instead a conflict between *nations*, each of which represented different 'classes' and revolutionary forces. You can't get any more anti-Marxist than that. You can't get any more right wing authoritarian than to say that there is no conflict between the working class and the owning class and that the workers must be absorbed by force and authority into obeying those placed in command of industry. What is so confusing about that? That's why the Republicans of the 1930s liked the fascists: because the fascists hated the Communists and the Unions and because they backed the right wing churches of Europe over the secularists. That's also how I knew the "Islamofascists" must not really be "fascist", because otherwise Republicans would be all over themselves trying to be their allies, just like they liked Mussolini and Hitler, and the Greek fascists, and Pinochet, and the Argentinian junta, and the Brazilian dictatorship, and the Guatemalan genocidalists, and the El Salvadoran death squad democracy... And for the dude who's insulting the soldiers for not being his fantasies of rebels who defy all orders and make speeches from Thomas Paine while they're being bombed and shot at, just go away. You're either a troll pretending to be a leftist or you're just an idiotic fantasizer, no more capable of understanding how social forces work than a Bill Kristol or Donald Rumsfeld.
On a comment thread like this one, there are no victims; just volunteers. Having been thoroughly castigated for suggesting that Ramirez might just be stupid and not actually a Nazi, I'm going to bow out. If anyone wants to follow me home and fight with me there, let's dance.
I don't know much about Investor's Business Daily, but it strikes me as a little odd that the MBA-readership of IBD are so Ann-Coulterish. IBD makes the WSJ editorial section look moderate. And Egfrow illustrates why there should be a corollary to Godwin that notes the probability of an inane claim -- almost always made by a dumbass American -- that the Nazis were leftists. Still, he's an example of the demographic that Jonah's long-delayed book is targetting: i.e. fuckwits.
"More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents." This is a distubing sentiment, but hardly surprising in the 160,000 mostly male 18-24 year olds, trained in the culture of authoritarianism and willingness to kill that is, by necessity, our military.. consider that in many cases this is the only business that young troops have known in their adult lives. They've gone directly from 12th grade English to the battlefields of Baghdad, bombarded daily with the deaths of comrades, an uncertain enemy and no end in sight. That's not to say that I condone their views regarding torture or harassing civilians, just the opposite, but war is something that will always produce abuses of this sort; it's a reflection of both human nature and the fact that the fighting itself is primarily a young testosterone-fueled man's game. And this is why such dubious wars should never be fought in the first place.. it's the responsibilty of the congress and president, presumably made wiser with age and experience, to realize that such horrible abuses as torture and murder will always occur in warfare, and to factor that into their deliberations regarding acting in the first place. Of course, politicians can never admit publicly that this is a cost of war, because some unsavory agitators, primarily on the right, would be quick to jump down an opponent's throat if she were seen as somehow "insufficiently supportive" of our soldiers, who are deemed to be beyond reproach. Some on the right see themselves in the soldiers, and thus hesitate to see them for what they are - human.
A recent poll found that 43% of Americans (and 48% of American men) think that torture of suspected terrorists is sometimes or often justified. So US soldiers seem to be somewhat more opposed to torture than the rest of us. Anyway, there's a lot of people for the trolls who claim to hate our troops to be hating, besides soldiers.
What are the odds that the writers and editors of the "investors business daily" have exactly zero relatives serving in Iraq? What an amazing thing to be so aggressive with other peoples children.
OK, so this is just about the worst comment thread ever.
Tossing aside the evil, genocidal Nazis, and the evil, genocidal Stalinists, let's compare Leftist and Rightist authoritarian regimes. If you do, I think you might notice that, on average, the rightist autocracies have a better track record of allowing transitions to democracy, and of giving those democracies the foundations of economic success. Compare, for example, North Korea, and Cuba with South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, etc.
Compare, for example, North Korea, and Cuba with South Korea, Taiwan, Chile, etc. or Pakistan, Ethiopia, Haiti, Algeria..
When fascists appear to lose military prowess, their fascist movements begin to lose. When Portugal's fascist regime began losing its wars to keep its colonial hold on Angola & Mozambique, the Portuguese regime back home was dismembered. When Argentina's fascist (and of course US hawk-backed) military junta lost their war to the British over the Falklands / Malvinas, the fascist junta finally lost power and democracy restored. One might add to the list Mussolini after the allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, and Antonescu in Romania in 1944. The fall of the Colonels in Greece was a result of the failure of their attempted coup in Cyprus.
Fred, Your claim was plausible 20 years ago when folks like Jeane Kirkpatrick were using it to justify supporting right-wing dictatorships. "We need to support dictators like Pinochet in their fight against communism, because once communist, countries stay communist forever!" they used to say. But since then, numerous leftist authoritarian regimes have transitioned to democracy: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, other Eastern European countries, many pieces of the Soviet Union, and so on. And then there's China and Viet Nam which are becoming less authoritarian and more prosperous, even if they haven't become democracies. So there's another right-wing theory that's been completely discredited. I suppose you still believe in the domino theory too?
Nazi's were Socialists not Conservatives. Nazi's have more in common with the Current Democratic Party than any other political party short of Communists. Doublespeak is your real name. More in common with the Democrats than with the Baath Party? Or the Falange? Or Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats? Or the various European neo-fascist parties? Or, well, even other old school Fascist parties? Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Have you ever read anything about the Nazis that wasn't Libertarian propaganda? For God's sake go out and read a book and spare us your half-informed bullshit.
One of these days, the "Party of Personal Responsibility" will actually take responsibility for their own mistakes.
i think the problem with america is that all the adults take the time to analyze stupid cartoons down to the bone rather than getting outside and spending time with their kids, don't you? if you don't agree, don't bother spending the time to write a fancy riposte with lots of big words, because i'm logging off to do bigger and better things with my life than analyze a piece of rubbish propaganda. Later.
Comments closed May 29, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
So Matt, your current odds on the U.S. attacking Iran or otherwise initiating hostilities before Bush leaves office? I say 30-70 we do it openly, 90-10 we engage through proxies.
Posted by steve duncan | May 15, 2007 8:50 AM