Florida Rejects Dozens of Social Studies Textbooks, and Forces … – The New York Times

Florida has rejected dozens of social studies textbooks and worked with publishers to edit dozens more, the states education department announced on Tuesday, in the latest effort under Gov. Ron DeSantis to scrub textbooks of contested topics, especially surrounding contemporary issues of race and social justice.

State officials originally rejected 82 out of 101 submitted textbooks because of what they considered inaccurate material, errors and other information that was not aligned with Florida law, the Department of Education said in a news release.

But as part of an extensive effort to revise the materials, Florida worked with publishers to make changes, ultimately approving 66 of the 101 textbooks. Still, 35 were rejected even after that process.

Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, has campaigned against what he has described as woke indoctrination and a leftist agenda in the classroom. Last year, the state rejected dozens of math textbooks, saying that the books touched on prohibited topics, including critical race theory and social emotional learning, which have become targets of the right.

The states review of social studies textbooks, which is conducted every few years, was widely expected to raise similar objections.

The state education department released a document outlining several revisions that it said publishers had made at its request. But the document did not list the titles or publishers of the revised books, making the claims difficult to independently verify.

The revisions outlined by the state included:

An elementary school textbook no longer includes home support guidance on how to talk about the national anthem, which had included advice that parents could use this as an opportunity to talk about why some citizens are choosing to take a knee to protest police brutality and racism. Florida officials said that content was not age-appropriate.

A text on different types of economies was edited to take out a description of socialism as keeping things nice and even and potentially promoting greater equality. The description was flagged as inaccurate, and mention of the term socialism was removed entirely.

A middle school textbook no longer includes a passage on the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of George Floyd and its impact on society. The removed passage described protests, noting that many Americans sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement, while other people were critical of looting and violence and viewed the movement as anti-police. The state said the passage contained unsolicited topics.

Manny Diaz, Jr., the Florida education commissioner, said in a statement that textbooks should focus on historical facts and be free from inaccuracies or ideological rhetoric.

Teaching about race has become a lightning rod nationally, but especially in Florida, where Mr. DeSantis, who is widely expected to announce a 2024 presidential bid, has made it a signature political issue.

Yet the tone of this years announcement by the state was softened, compared with last year.

When the state rejected the math textbooks in 2022, the announcement was made in a splashy news release emphasizing the rejections: Florida Rejects Publishers Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.

This year, by contrast, state officials emphasized the percentage of textbooks that had been approved, and how the state had worked with publishers to increase the number of approvals.

At a news conference at a classical charter school on Tuesday morning, Mr. DeSantis signed a package of education legislation and emphasized other topics, including $1 billion in funding to increase teachers pay.

The governor put little focus on the social studies textbooks, though at one point he appeared to allude to reporting by The New York Times, which found that a publisher, Studies Weekly, had rolled back discussions of race in its submissions in Florida, including in the story of Rosa Parks.

If you are trying to create narratives that something like a Rosa Parks book is not allowed, that is a lie, Mr. DeSantis said on Tuesday.

Studies Weekly has said that it had been trying to decipher how to comply with a new Florida law, known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act. Signed by Mr. DeSantis last year, the law prohibits instruction that would compel students to feel responsibility, guilt or anguish for what other members of their race did in the past. The law has at times created confusion, and Studies Weekly later apologized for what it described as an overreaction by its curriculum team.

(Studies Weeklys social studies submissions were not approved for use in Florida.)

The states approved list of social studies textbooks will have a significant impact on how history is taught to nearly three million Florida public school students, on topics ranging from slavery and Jim Crow to the Holocaust.

Floridas textbook approvals can also influence what students learn in other states. Fewer than half the states approve textbooks at a statewide level, but those that do include Florida, Texas and California, the three biggest markets. Publishers often cater to these states, using them as a template for the materials they offer in smaller markets.

Florida rejected some textbooks from large national publishers, like McGraw Hill and Savvas Learning.

We are reviewing the situation, McGraw Hill said in a statement. At this point, we do not know why these titles were not recommended. Savvas did not respond to interview requests on Tuesday.

Another large publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, did not even bid in Floridas social studies market this year.

Adam Laats, a historian of education at Binghamton University, said that for more than a century, American publishers have revised textbooks to appease political concerns, sometimes using razor blades to remove material on topics like evolution or Reconstruction.

The push to censor school materials has often come from conservatives, Professor Laats said and in Floridas announcement, he heard echoes of old battles. He noted that state policymakers cited age appropriateness in asking one publisher to remove the discussion of athletes taking a knee during the national anthem.

While the subject of police violence may indeed be disturbing to children, Professor Laats said, the state made no objection to another reference to violence and death on the very same page of the lesson: Talk to your child about our military and how they sacrifice their lives for us, the text states.

Using age appropriateness is a strategic or tactical move, he said, adding, Parents and other stakeholders tend not to like the idea of textbooks having important information cut out. But parents are friendly to the idea of age appropriateness.

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Florida Rejects Dozens of Social Studies Textbooks, and Forces ... - The New York Times

Commemoration of Victory in Europe Day and Liberation Day in … – Vindobona – Vienna International News

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer spoke at a commemorative event at the Federal Chancellery to mark the end of one of the darkest chapters in Austrian history. Millions of people were murdered, tortured, and humiliated during World War II. The event was attended by researchers, politicians, and an ensemble from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

Nehammer stressed the importance of remembering the atrocities committed during the war. He stated that the National Socialists had the goal of erasing people's memories by assigning them numbers. Only then have the National Socialists truly failed. The Chancellor emphasized that the purpose of the culture of remembrance is to restore the dignity of those who had it taken away. He also stated that it is our "common and valuable task" to remember.

Nehammer also spoke about the need to restructure the culture of remembrance in Gusen. The concentration camp in Gusen was the site of countless murders, tyrannies, and enslavement of people from many countries. The Austrian government has established a fund to allow all school classes to visit the memorial sites in Mauthausen and Gusen. Furthermore, police and military personnel will be trained there to reflect on the atrocities and draw lessons from them.

The Chancellor also addressed Austria's participation in the war and the country's responsibility for the crimes committed during that time. He stated that many Austrians were actively involved in war crimes, and it is necessary to recognize and acknowledge that fact. Only then can we pass on the responsibility to future generations to prevent such horrors from happening again, he added.

Nehammer emphasized the importance of creating a resilient democracy that can resist ideologies that promote radicalization, racism, and antisemitism. He stated that we must explain how these extremist ideologies poisoned people's souls and led to the horrors of the past. Only then can we work to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

The Chancellor's speech highlighted the importance of remembering the past to build a better future. By acknowledging our past mistakes and taking responsibility for them, we can ensure that such atrocities never happen again.

Diplomats in Vienna commemorate

Diplomats in Vienna, including U.S. Ambassador Victoria Kennedy, commemorated the 78th anniversary of the liberation from National Socialism at the Mauthausen concentration camp.

On the anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, we honor all the victims from over 40 nations who were held here, and those who liberated it 78 years ago. @StateSEHI Ellen Germain #NeverForget pic.twitter.com/YTwTV8dwUq

Finish Counsellor Sebastian Gahnstrm attended a commemoration ceremony in honor of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp. The camp, located in Austria, was one of the largest and deadliest Nazi concentration camps, where over 100,000 prisoners lost their lives during the Holocaust.

Yesterday, 7 May, Counsellor Sebastian Gahnstrm represented Finland at the commemoration of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where more than 100 000 people died during the Nazi regime. #NieWieder #niemalsvergessen @MauthausenMem pic.twitter.com/FBgRF1xpZo

The ceremony was held to pay tribute to the victims and to remind the world of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Counsellor Gahnstrm represented Finland at the event and joined other diplomats in Vienna to remember those who suffered and died at Mauthausen.

U.S. Army 1st Squadron @2dCavalryRegt @VCorps traveled from Germany to join our commemoration today and to honor the bravery and sacrifice of the inmates and liberators. Together we are committed to ensuring their story is never forgotten. pic.twitter.com/YIG01FNujM

The ceremony included a private commemoration by Paul Kosiek, son of Mauthausen and Gusen liberator Albert Kosiek, who played taps to honor his father's memory. U.S. Defense Attache Col. Erik Bauer's remarks set the moving tone of the ceremony. The U.S. Army 1st Squadron 2dCavalryRegt and VCorps traveled from Germany to join the commemoration and honor the bravery and sacrifice of the inmates and liberators. The message emphasized the importance of combating hate wherever it is encountered and never forgetting the victims from over 40 nations who were held in Mauthausen.

Federal Chancellery of Austria

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Commemoration of Victory in Europe Day and Liberation Day in ... - Vindobona - Vienna International News

Inclusiveness, Pedagogy, Identity, Ideology, and the Epistemology of … – E-International Relations

My home state of Florida has been undergoing a number of controversial changes in its approach to teaching and education.As someone who is just right of center, I tend to agree with many of the changes for various reasons, which may become apparent below. I prepared the following statement for my students regarding inclusiveness; pedagogy; identity politics; my own identity, ideology, and/or epistemological approach(es) to the social sciences; as well as how and why we might address some controversial questions regarding which many people, otherwise, may not want to know. The language uses first-person, singular, to reduce formality and to provide students with oft-sought and seldom delivered information regarding their professors pedagogical and epistemological processes.

Because of the (sometimes controversial) topics that I teach, it has relieved tensions for students to know, rather than not to know, who their professor is at least to that degree.Public trust in faculty does not appear to be particularly high, and attendance at universities is declining, nationally. Attendance at Florida colleges and universities appears to be stable but wobbled, somewhat, with the Covid-19 lockdowns. Still, even accounting for Covid-19, given population growth, the national-level decline is notable and unsettling. While some lack of trust may result from political discourses that do not value their faculty as (a form of) civil servants particularly if one teaches at a state university some of it might possibly be ameliorated by allowing students (and the public) to know their faculty better in intellectual and cultural terms. As a heterogeneous state, we come from a wide range of cultures once expanding out from the basic civic culture and social contract that we all share.The statement below addresses the students as novices, but also as potential intellectual-equals-in-training that can be made better through the studies and training that they do during their university time and with their university faculty.They are, after all, our next generation of leaders in just about all areas, themes, topics, and professions.

Notes on inclusiveness and pedagogy

Mens and womens voices, and voices from every religion, ethnicity, race, etc., are welcomed in my classroom. Students from urban and rural backgrounds are welcomed.Overseas students are welcomed.All students are welcomed.

There is no political litmus test in my classroom.All participants (students, faculty, and/or any guest speakers) in my classes are asked and expected to be respectful to one another during discussions and other class exercises, remembering that your student body includes intelligent people of vastly ranging political, religious, social, and other opinions, subject positions, and epistemological frameworks. Discourse in this class is expected to cover a wide range of views and subject positions in a way that is civil at all times. We will practice how to do so in class. Sometimes it is hard work. Every effort will be made to avoid ethnic or racial bias in the classroom discussions in regard to any perceived or realmajority or minoritycommunity; or any perceived (as dominating or hegemonic) or real religion, gender, or other group identity. Your cooperation in this effort will be greatly appreciated!

No person in my classroom was involved in historical events (such as colonialism) that have been interpreted by some scholars to have had deleterious effects upon one group/community or another; we may study those, or equally controversial arguments,as scholarly arguments; but it does not in any way imply guilt or responsibility on the part of a living ethnic or racial community represented in my classroom. In our research in the field, scholars of comparative politics encounter some things thatno onewants to see or to think about; and we see many uplifting and wonderful phenomena. You will never hear about most of it.Some western scholars have made a point of having certain scholarship and arguments published in western languages, either from overseas or domestic works, so thatwe will knowthe arguments that are out there.Why?Because those arguments, if left without any attention, can cause war and major conflict under some circumstances.So, we study these controversial arguments under the premise that we do better by knowing more.That is, knowledge empowers peacemakers and the forces of stability on all sides; and lack of knowledge can lead to significant destabilization in important locales, or even on a global scale (e.g., a politics of the street, and other examples). An informed electorate is also better equipped to make decisions. We will, therefore, study some difficult issues that are controversial among some communities such as religion and secularism.I tend to teach with a glass is half full approach even as we do so.Every effort will be made such that you will not be burdened by issues beyond scholarship. We also study some uplifting and encouraging themes and phenomena.

In my classroom, you are asked to practice respect for one another in your comments in class discussion regarding the readings; we will seek to avoid personal opinion, although we may include personal experience beginning at some point during the semester.You are each individual budding adults, scholars, and intellectuals and are asked to use your discretion in this scholarly endeavor. Likewise,you are not required tobelievean argument from the professor or from the readings.You are asked in this class to be able to reproduce, analyze, and evaluate such arguments on their own terms; and you may be asked to compare, contrast, and to evaluate analytical merits among them. What you believe or ultimately decide to hold as your own analytical (value-neutral) or normative (value-related) opinion is wholly up to your own analytical and normative discretion.It is hoped that my courses will help you in your development of both the analytical skills to make such decisions about your own neutral-analytical and normative-valuative views, and to have increasing confidence in your own skills and ability to do so.

Note on identity

If you are a student who is interested in identity politics for whom it is important to know something regarding my own, you are welcomed to read the following.I receive many questions regarding my identity, and a sizable number of questions regarding my own politics and ideolog(ies).You can find some answers here, as I do not usually talk about it in class. It may stem from the topics that I teach, which include but are not limited to Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies, Middle East and North Africa politics, and Israel politics; some number of people want to know where I am coming from geographically and ideologically. It may stem from phenotype many students notice that I have, naturally, dark olive-green eyes and medium-to-light brown hair.It is a relatively unusual combination in the U.S. It took many years of study and travel for me to know some of the regions in which those phenotypic traits are common:Central and East Asia, some parts of Russia, Germany, Poland, southern Europe, and South America.I spent most of my youth growing up with one side of my family rather than the other, so I have had to learn by study over time perhaps more than most the origins of some of my own basic genealogical traits.I grew up in a rather rarified, almost, but not quite secluded, existence in the remote country learning classical piano; reading various classical literatures (e.g., fiction, biographies, and travelogues); and learning equestrian and animal husbandry (in addition to many traditional womens duties, such as baking, sewing, knitting, embroidery, and a bit of crocheting).The benefit of (relative) seclusion was a somewhat classical European education, development of certain skills, and the life of the mind; the drawback was, of course, less time with family and friends.

Many people assume that I am Jewish because of my professional work; I receive anti-Semitic quips periodically.Others assume that I am Muslim or Palestinian because of my professional work; I receive those quips as well.I have been studying Jewish Studies since I was 19 years old, and Islamic Studies since I was 20 years old, so I have heard such periodically throughout my adult life. But I am, myself, none of the above; although I do have first, second, and more distant family cousin ties to both religions and to most of the major world religions, including various forms of Christianity, as well as religions more remote to us here in the U.S., such as Shinto.I am American, born in Alaska after it became a state. I practice an Asian form of Buddhism (a moderate Orthodoxy). I was born Roman Catholic and of Eurasian origins with ties to the Philippines; Spain; Prussia (e.g., Russia, Poland, and Germany); Ireland; and Holland.I have cousins amongst the Arctic Asian peoples, both asiatique and Prussian. In that sense, I consider myself Eurasian and asiatique (asiatique is a French term referring to Asiatic peoples, which can mean both Asian and Eurasian depending upon context, ranging the Arctic north of Asia & Europe, primarily, but also including Arctic Alaska, Canada, and other areas). I spent part of a summer as a small child in a coastal Inuit village in Alaska, where we lived in Inuit furs by ice fishing; and I saw polar bears and whales from a kayak. I have traveled and lived on several continents.More details on all of it and how it relates to my teaching; pedagogy (teaching models that I follow); and epistemology (my thinking regarding certain aspects of Knowledge, and what is knowable) below.

Like most people, I am proud of my identity and am happy to provide certain information in regard to it.Students are not required to share their identities in my classroom. In class, I make a concerted effort to let you know when I am providing my own view of a thematic course issue (as grounded in the literatures that we read, and others, on that topic); and when I am outlining views from the literature, per se.I lean toward the latter in terms of what I provide most often. In comparative politics, we seek to leave out the normative most of the time, as someone needs to be able to provide information that is as clean of personal normative assumptions and biases as possible. So, students may only rarely hear about my own normative positions in class.You can see some of my own normative starting points below.

Notes on ideology, and the epistemology of the professor

I have lived in western cities and in remote rural areas, and in both cities and rural areas of developed and developing countries.As mentioned, I grew up involved in animal husbandry; classical piano; and a fair bit of readings in English, American, and a few European literary classics in translation (Russian, Spanish, French, a few Latin American classics, as well as one Polish classic[Pad Tadeusz],and one classic in Philippine nationalism[Noli Mi Tangere]).

I approach social science as an ongoing effort to bring together human, social, and political themes and research questions into the framework of the scientific method.I am a neo-positivist, meaning that I still accept that there is a material world that is out there regardless of our presence or observation of it (e.g., the tree falls in the forest whether we are there to see it, or not). In this neo-positive world that is out there regardless of ourselves, there is a Truth (or, in some cases, at least multiple truths) that we can go out into the world, find, and observe.In that way, I am influenced by positive analysis and the effort to engage in causal inquiry (e.g., What,a,caused,b,in the socio-political world?).

What is positive about positive analysis is a clear link between analytical components of the argument such that an argument as a whole or by components is falsifiable.Another scholar can go out into the same world, observe, and say that we were right, or that we were wrong, in our argument.The neo in neo-positive means, likewise, that I am influenced by the post-modernist admonition to bemore modestregarding those concepts / notions / phenomena to which we ascribe the elevated notion of Truth (without relinquishing the concept of truth altogether).But I do not believe in relativism as taken to the extreme by which there is no longer any truth, and all fields, themes, and human phenomena are thrown to randomness, anarchy, or to so many truths as to hold the concept of truth no longer meaningful (and the human world, thereby, un-knowable in any scholarly and/or scientific terms).

In the late-19thcentury, Truth in the social sciences was often associated with notions of primitiveness, superiority, and an assigning of different communities, peoples, and places to relative positions between those two poles; Truth in the sciences had, sometimes, scary implications, long since debunked to my knowledge, as found in the Eugenics movement of that day, etc.

With that in mind, I subscribe to a modified and hopefully more modest notion of truth, without which there is no material world to observe.In this type of framework, we look forpatterns,processes, andcompeting truths(and/ornarratives), seeking to find an analytical link between eachcompeting truth(and/ornarrative), a range of demographic and/or ideological components, and specific parts of a political argument or phenomenon.Analytically, it is the best that we can do.

The linking of the social science argument that comes out of this type of research with social theories, already present, leads to increased Knowledge over time (see, for example, Yin 2003: 28-33).Increasing (responsible and ethically-derived) Knowledge, as I understand it, is the first goal of scholarship.In that way, my work is not normative (e.g., taking one ideology or another regarding a research theme) but is deeply impressed by the effort to remain even with such qualitative tools and data within the scientific method.

I do have my own ideologies, and they tend toward simple value of all human life and cultural pluralism (but not relativism for me, it stops at certain types of human rights violations, or, in religion, ritual practices involving certain types of violence against others). I try to keep anything else out of my scholarship.While in no way a sociological expert on him, in terms of applying social theory to the material themes in comparative politics, I am a Durkheimian to the core (e.g., culture drives human societies, economies, politics, and history, etc., and social solidarity matters or we end with anomie), and influenced by Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Clifford Geertz, Irving Goffman, Victor Turner, and others in their observations and theories regarding relationships between power; words, symbols, and narratives; performativity; and human ritual.

I am influenced by Max Weber, Samuel Huntington, and Michael Mann in an interest in effective, rational, systematic bureaucracy, and that it be held in the hands of democratically-or participatory-governance-oriented persons rather than their antithesis (e.g., Mann and Hannah Arendt show us quite well, I believe, that bureaucratic institutions are normatively neutral and may be used for great good or great evil depending upon who is holding their reins) (see Mann 2003, 60; Mann 1986, 26; and Arendt 2006). I like to tell my students that, having lived in both democratic regimes and dictatorships, effective, rational, systematic bureaucracy is a Beauty (in terms of Virtues) that we should not take for granted (for example, obtaining and renewing ones drivers license with simple, systematic fees, lines, and rational-bureaucratic order; not needing special permissions to travel from one city or town to another; and passports and travel visas on a rational, non-personalist basis with no need for connections or protectsia). To the extent that we are able to live in such conditions, we should be reasonably and rightfully very proud.It means that, as individuals and communities, we are making (in my view) great choices regarding the personal self-restraint required to create and maintain a democratic social order.War and conflict often mitigate against such systematic, bureaucratic freedoms (although, if we are speaking about my own normative positions, on rare occasion, war may be correct and necessary). I believe in individualrights as against both state and community (in that way, I tend toward the right-of-center and Liberal rather than the communitarian, although I can appreciate communitarian arguments); popular sovereignty; political representation; and the consent of the (wide set of communities of the) governed.

If we are going to talk about Marx, that great purveyor and object of Cold War suspicions, I would want to talk about him in terms of Trotskys read of him (ongoing revolutionary democracy, e.g., social democracy, as in Scandinavia or in Israel) (see Hoidal 2013); not Lenins or Stalins read of him, which I see as invalid in their emphasis on extreme centralized state authority in the hands of the few also called tatism (for example, Lovell does not see Trotsky as entirely freedom loving but he, nonetheless, casts doubt on Lenins interpretation of Marx regarding authoritarianism, see Lovell 1984; and Marx 2005, where Marx lambastes the authority of the new post-revolutionary, centralized state).But I am not a Marxist. I am a culturalist.They areopposing sociological positions and frameworks for understanding the human world. I have great appreciation for Marxs sociological work as a (and perhaps the first ever) political ethnographer of labor and factories in the industrialization period (see Marx 2004, especially chapters 10 and 15).But I am a moderate libertarian and a culturalist.

Marx shares with some classical Liberals (such as David Ricardo) and Neoliberals the assumption that economics drives human societies, cultures, politics, and history (see Wallerstein 2004).That is, they are part of the same ballpark (or sociological-theoretical domain) in terms of social theory frameworks for understanding causal relationships in human societies. I am with Durkheim, and sometimes I am also with Max Weber (e.g., rationalized, merit-based bureaucracy; ideas and culture as driving economic institutions, etc.). It should be noted that both Marx and Durkheim were, nonetheless, structuralists; but that is at a higher level of generalization.They were structuralists with opposing ideas aboutwhatstructures human life: economics and culture, respectively.

I teach some whole courses on religion and politics in various national or regional contexts, or in broad comparative terms. And I often teach course segments related to religion and politics.Thus, I tend to teach my courses under the assumption that many forms of non-western and religious epistemologies are equally valid to western and non-religious epistemologies (indeed, religious epistemologies are natural in the west as well); and under the premise that their own cultural epistemologies arevery importantto peoples around the world (including ourselves). In addition, the U.S. includes many types of epistemologies among our peoples, many of which are influenced by non-western epistemologies and cultural systems; to my understanding, that is part of what it means to be a melting pot.Personally, I tend toward the former (e.g., religious epistemologies) in, at the least, a sympathetic approach as outlined by Religion scholar, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (Smith 1984); although I like the freedom that some forms of secularism bring in terms of freedom of thought and expression (noting that some forms of secularism can be totalitarian, such as national socialism).Wilfred Cantwell Smiths approach aids in researching and teaching topics in religion and politics for obvious reasons, and, also in other courses that address multiple cultural sources, communities, histories, identities, conflicts, construction of institutions, and other politics. Likewise, I willsometimeshighlight instances in which religious vs. secular epistemologies (or other sorts of epistemologies) come into play, or into conflict, relating to a given theme, topic, or event that we are studying in this class.

A few pointers regarding academic training

If I were to frame my experience in terms of advice, I would say, college is your opportunity to train yourself broadly for your professional work as well as for life.There is time to take courses such as music or art (if they are not your major) if you start organizing your ideas about your own training from year one.Likewise, university is a unique opportunity as a concentrated period of study.You can get on-the-job training later in life, but it is apt to be infrequent over time. Make the most of the opportunity by organizing your ideas about courses as soon as possible (and in an ongoing way, since some courses are not always available).Train yourself broadly in choosing your classes in terms of methods, experiential learning, and skills development; and with focus in terms of topical and thematic center.That is, there is always a balance to be had between breadth and depth. If you are in Political Science, there is a lot of room in our major to develop a balance between the two. You can also double-major to expand your areas of training.In addition, I would encourage students not to underestimate the power of a student job in your training.A university is an exceptional locus of opportunities for extra and important training in student jobs, which exist across campus in clerical and entry-level positions in departments, libraries, centers, schools, museums or galleries, and other programs.You can get entry-level type of on-the-job training in those jobs, which may come in handy or even be critical down the road in your studies and/or professional work.

And, finally, in terms of life preparation (as well as preparation for good studying), I would say, learn to type and learn to cook.No matter what anyone may tell you, typing speed and precision matters to life success in a world of computers.Similarly, if you do not know how to cook already, take a gourmet cooking class or, better yet, three (I recommend one on how to cook with eggs, one on baking, and one on holiday meals).If you are interested in international or cross-cultural questions, take international cooking classes while you are on campus.In the spirit of keeping it simple, and thinking in terms of the political economy of daily life, cooking for yourself and others is a great cost saving measure in addition to providing you with sustenance that supports excellence in training and in studying.Strive to enjoy yourself and develop your own inner calm even while you increase your intellectual prowess and professional efficiencies.

References

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field inHastings Law Journal38 (1987): 814-853.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power,translated by Gino Rayond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Pres, 1978.

Derrida, Jacques.On Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in the Everyday. New York: Doubleday, 1959.

Goffman, Erving.Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Interactions. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Hoidal,Oddvar. Trotsky in Norway: Exile, 19351937. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013.

Huntington, Samuel. Political Development and Political Decay inWorld Politics17:3 (1965): 386-430.

Huntington, Samuel. Religion and the Third Wave inThe National Interest24 (1991): 29-42.

Huntington, Samuel. Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Lovell,David. From Marx to Lenin: An Evaluation of Marxs Responsibility for Soviet Authoritarianism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Marx,Karl. Capital. London: Penguin, 2004.

Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Modern West in the History of Religion in Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) 52:1 (1984): 3-18.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Berlin: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, SC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Yin,Robert. Case StudyResearch. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 2003.

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Dan Rodricks: Deep down and all politics aside, mothers know best … – Baltimore Sun

If you gathered a million American mothers and asked them what the country needed, I bet this would be the consensus: More doctors, nurses and caregivers; better pay for teachers and social workers; affordable health care for everyone, including a holistic system for treating people with mental illness; and big national campaigns to reduce guns and gun violence, promote nutritious food and exercise, fund the best education system in the world, encourage young people to consider public service and shame haters into growing up and being better human beings.

That would be for starters.

On Mothers Day 2023, we should look around at the many things that make the most prideful Americans despondent and ask: What would mother say?

I know what mine would say. The late Rose Popolo Rodricks would remember growing up during the Great Depression and the New Deal, and starting a family during World War II, and shed look at America today and say the country needs to stop arguing and take better care of itself, that weve let too many problems fester for too long, and ought to be ashamed of it.

Case in point, right here in the blue state of Maryland: We still have people with mental illness, some of them acutely psychotic or suicidal, languishing in jails, waiting for treatment in an appropriate facility. Five years ago, a Baltimore Circuit judge held the states health secretary in contempt for failing to place criminal defendants in state psychiatric hospitals. Fix this problem, and do it now, Judge Gale Rasin said.

While Maryland and other state governments try to make improvements, it never seems adequate or sustained.

Meanwhile, conservative politicians who refuse to deal with the nations gun crisis point to mental illness as the core problem when it comes to violence, and yet they refuse to adequately fund treatment.

Apprised of this, a million mothers would say shame on us. Shame on us for not building more hospitals to replace our prisons. Shame on us for being in denial about too many problems. Shame on us for letting partisan politics or ignorance get in the way of a better country.

How else to explain the rights opposition to an affordable health care system? How else to explain the reluctance to vaccinate and, more generally, the denigration of our best medical minds?

A majority of my theoretical million mothers would say listen to the doctors, not extremist politicians or talk-show hosts.

Theyd say the decision on whether to have an abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor. I am sure most mothers would trust science; they would respect the educated and experienced researchers at the Food and Drug Administration to have made the right call about the abortion drug mifepristone. Most mothers would be highly suspicious of loudmouth pols who claim to know more about whats good for the public health than men and women with medical degrees.

Dr. Jack Resneck, president of the American Medical Association, warns that disinformation and the encroachment of political ideologies on the delivery of health care have created pressures that doctors never expected to experience, adding to the career burnout many of them already feel. Im angry about how science and medicine have been politicized, Resneck said, about the flood of disinformation that seeks to discredit data and evidence [and] undermine public health.

Coming out of the pandemic, an extensive AMA survey found that one in five doctors and two in five nurses planned to leave their careers by some time this year.

A majority of mothers would call that a national crisis and demand that the country immediately go in a new direction.

Of course, thats easier said than done. Getting Americans whove eschewed critical thinking for conspiracy theories is going to be hard.

But mother would say the best of us need to keep to the high road, and you do that by standing up for whats right and not just for personal benefit but for the common good: A better educated and skilled workforce; a social safety net that lifts people out of poverty; a fully accessible and adequately staffed health care system; prisons that make rehabilitation a robust priority, a full-throttle race toward the green energy future.

This isnt socialism. Its motherism, and the nation needs a big dose of it.

Ill tell you what else a million American mothers would say.

Theyd say, deep down and all political tribalism aside, the country needs some hard introspection. It needs to understand that, as powerful as we remain economically and militarily, were underperforming on many levels. Thats why the word broken appears so often as a description of things our politics, the immigration system, student achievement, our care for mentally ill people and the drug-addicted, and our willingness to deal with the gun crisis.

Republicans, Democrats or independents would agree with that assessment. Theyd say its time to stop all the nonsense and grow up, time to stop electing liars and ignoramuses to public office, tolerating crassness and mediocrity, and abiding the debilitating gun violence that takes place every day. A million moms would say its time to get serious about fixing the country.

Several years ago, a Baltimore drug dealer told me he had decided to come off the street and find a regular job. Time to stop shaming my mother, he said. Thats what Im talking about.

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Dan Rodricks: Deep down and all politics aside, mothers know best ... - Baltimore Sun

From the archives The Nakba at 50: In the chains of theocracy … – Ahram Online

Fifty years after its establishment on the foundations of the Palestinian Al-Nakba (catastrophe), the Jewish state is still in the midst of a continuous process: that of realising the goals of the Zionist colonialist enterprise. From the start, the Zionist movement set itself the goal of establishing an exclusivist-Jewish state in the territory of historical Palestine, by dispossessing the Palestinians of their land and their homeland. This goal was only partially achieved in 1948, and was completed in 1967 with the conquest of all of Palestine.

Nevertheless, the Oslo Accords were needed so that world public opinion, Arab states and the Palestinians themselves could legitimate the Zionists' preferred "solution to the Palestinian problem": continued Israeli control over the territories occupied in '67, both by direct annexation (including, but by no means limited to, the settlements and bypass roads), and by means of a small Palestinian client state on Bantustan lines in areas with high concentrations of the Palestinian population. The emerging apartheid system here is thus designed to meet the ideological requirements shared by all streams of Zionism, including the Zionist Labour movement: separation to establish exclusive Jewish sovereignty.

COLONIALISM: On its 50th anniversary, the colonialist policies of the state of Israel are still in force, and are also applied to those Palestinians who remained within Israeli borders after the expulsion of most of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948. As is the case in the territories occupied in '67, within the green line the attack continues on what little land remains in Palestinian hands after 93 per cent was declared "state land", i.e. land on which only Jews are permitted to settle.

Similarly, the discriminatory planning and development policies instituted by all previous Israeli governments remain in force: to severely restrict construction and building in the "recognised" Arab towns and villages, and to destroy the approximately 180 "unrecognised" ones altogether by refusing to grant building permits or to allow such elementary infrastructure as water and electricity, and such basic services as education and health care.

The Zionist movement itself, and the colonialism of the state of Israel, is designed first and foremost to serve the regional interests of Western imperialism. Currently it is the US's interest in controlling the oil resources of the Middle East within a neo-liberal framework that is being introduced to the region, and is beginning to be implemented in Israel.

The policies of a "free" economy are destroying the remnants of the universal welfare state within Israel, leading to fierce unemployment rates and the pauperisation of broad sectors of the working class and petite bourgeoisie. In the 50th year of a state designed, ostensibly, to provide prosperity to all the Jewish people who settled in it, the gaps between rich and poor are among the widest in the Western world.

The pauperisation taking place now is not the fruit of Netanyahu's policies alone. It is the result of the cumulative effects of long-standing policies implemented by the Zionist Labour movement, whose continuous hegemony in the pre-state Zionist movement and in the state of Israel was interrupted only in 1977, when the Likud won the elections. The subsequent Labour governments, like the opposition Labour Party today, were not in principle any different from the Likud with regard to the policies of privatisation and a "free" economy, and the neo-liberal ideology that accompanies them.

In parallel to the convergence of Labour and Likud around neo-liberalism's economic policies, the differences between their respective programmes for the final solution under Oslo are becoming ever more blurred. The essence of the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan of March 1996, which Arafat recently announced is acceptable to him, will leave most of the Israeli settlements in place; on the territory that remains (not more than 50 per cent of the West Bank) a Bantustan state will be established, with its capital in the village of Abu Dis (adjacent to Jerusalem). This programme is now accepted (although not explicitly) by both Netanyahu and Labour.

The main difference, however, under Netanyahu's reign is the nature of the political regime, which is designed to mobilise support for neo-liberalism: the destruction of the old political parties and the old elites, the tendency to blur the distinctions between the three branches of the government, the refusal to cooperate with the Knesset and the criticism of the Supreme Court: these authoritarian features of Netanyahu's government are paving the way to a populist regime based on a direct, charismatic connection between the leader and the "people". Such a regime is reminiscent of the contemporary South American-style neo-Peronism, whose Israeli version is characterised by the close union of Zionist colonialism and aggressive clericalism.

In place of traditional party politics, Netanyahu conducts a "sectoral politics" consisting of the cultivation and bribery of the political representatives of various groups, including the Russian immigrants, ultra-Orthodox groups and the Shas movement, which sponsors a network of community health and education services.

This sectoral bribery serves neo-liberalism, as it both reflects the ideological preference for private charity over the principle of the universal rights of the citizen and is economically advantageous: the cost of sectoral bribery is less than that of financing a universal welfare policy.

THE SECULAR-RELIGIOUS RIFT: Granting power to the Orthodox establishment is not a novelty introduced by the Netanyahu government, but rather one of the structural features of the state of Israel since its establishment. During the years of Labour Party rule, however, there was a coordinated division of labour between the state and the Orthodox establishment in the form of the Supreme Rabbinate, initiated and supported by the nationalist-religious party within the Orthodox community (as opposed to the various ultra-Orthodox groups, who relied on their own religious authorities, and who were rather alienated from Zionism and the state).

The active cooperation of the nationalist-religious sector with Zionism and the state led the rabbinical establishment to adopt a more moderate position. This prevented them from interfering with secular life beyond the borders of the agreement known as the "status quo", and allowed them to play the role of mediator between the state and the Orthodox.

The power of the Chief Rabbinate was weakened, however, as the young generation of the nationalist-religious sector turned to both ultra-Orthodoxy and extremist Zionism, a process which began after the '67 War.

These young people now look to the heads of yeshivoth (religious seminaries) in the Occupied Territories and Israel as an alternative source of authority. This process, together with the ongoing "orthodoxisation" of the once secular extreme right, has led to the increasingly arrogant interference in secularist life by ultra-orthodox circles, with the Chief Rabbinate trailing behind.

The sharpening of the religious-secular rift was recently revealed during the main ceremony commemorating the 50th year of the state, which was characterised by militarist and religious symbols intended to mark the "victory of Zionism": the modern dance Anaphasa, by the Bat Sheva Ballet Troupe, was censored at the last moment under pressure from a middle-ranking Orthodox official (the deputy mayor of Jerusalem), because the dancers stripped down to short pants as the hymn "God Is One in Heaven and Earth (from the Passover ritual) was heard. The troupe refused the compromise solution suggested by President Weizman -- to wear long underwear -- and cancelled their appearance. None of the other distinguished Israeli artists who were scheduled to perform joined the dancers, and only the next day did dozens of artists organise a militant demonstration. It was the first demonstration ever organised by Israeli artists against the ongoing violations of the right to free artistic or political expression in either Israel or the territories occupied in '67. The demonstrators pledged to continue the struggle against "religious coercion" and for "artistic freedom".

The mass media hastened to describe these events as the beginning of a "cultural war" and an indication of "the greatest rift in Israeli society, one which threatens its unity". But even a superficial examination of the discourse which developed around this incident throws light on the ideological chains that secular Israelis place on themselves, and which prevent them from developing a principled and systematic struggle against the rule of religion. These chains are their deep commitment to Zionism and the Jewish state, which from its beginning has been half theocratic.

The most senior artists and writers, Israeli cultural heroes, the majority of whom support and celebrate the Oslo "solution", have repeatedly emphasised, in the debate which followed the incident, that they are struggling for "a Jewish and Zionist-democratic state, without religious coercion".

Their discourse, however, has not reached the point of speaking in the name of universal rights, including freedom of expression in the areas of the press and politics; nor have they mentioned the rights of more than two million Palestinians in the territories occupied in '67 and the discrimination against them in Israel. After all, such an attitude would have forced them to identify the essential contradiction between the Jewish-Zionist state and secular liberal democracy.

ZIONISM AND RELIGION: As Professor Zeev Sternhall of Hebrew University indicates, the conceptual-ideological framework in which Zionism operates has been shaped by the organic, tribal nationalism of "blood and soil" which developed in eastern and central Europe as the antithesis to the liberal nationalism with values rooted in the notions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

This organic nationalism defined national belonging not according to political-legal criteria, but on cultural, ethnic, and religious bases -- which could easily be perceived as reflecting biological or racial uniqueness. The individual is not perceived as an intrinsic entity or value, but as an integral part, regardless of personal choice, of the national unit, to which he or she owes absolute loyalty.

The Labour Zionist movement, in addition to this "organic nationalism", also adopted national socialism in its Israeli version, known as "constructive socialism". This variant of socialism in the service of the nation required the subjugation of social and economic demands and the interests of the working class to "national aims".

Mobilising the working class to build the capitalist economy of the Zionist state-in-the-making was one of its "national aims". Building an egalitarian society was not among the goals of the leaders of the Labour movement. They were satisfied with existence of a system of services, such as health and education, which would prevent "excessive" inequality from undermining the foundations of national unity.

Religion was always a central component of national identity for organic nationalists. The centrality of the Bible in Zionism, however, helped make the religious dimension of Zionism even stronger than in other radical national movements. The Bible was used by Zionism not only as a means of cultivating national unity, but also as a source for legitimation of the Zionist claim of exclusive rights to all of Palestine.

As Baruch Kimmerling, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University, claims, "from the beginning, the Zionist project was made captive by its choice of Palestine as its target territory for colonisation and as the place for building its exclusive Jewish state. Neither the nation nor its culture could be built successfully apart from the religious context. This has been so even when its prophets, priests, builders and fighters saw themselves as completely secular."

Thus, Zionism preserved religious myths and symbols among its central symbols, including the cardinal "commandment" of Zionism: immigration to Palestine ("Eretz Israel"). The biblical connection to the land and the connection between the Bible and present-day life in the "old-new land" were strongly emphasised, both in the pre-state secular Jewish community (in which one used to learn the Bible six days a week) and in the state of Israel. Moreover, "the nucleus of the state's symbols remain today Jewish-religious. The rest is but a thin veneer of what only appears to be secularism [...] All the civic symbols and essentially the entire collective identity became subservient to religion, and Zionism itself turned into a sort of Jewish religion, incorporating civic elements as well."

This was the basis for the support of the leaders of the Labour Party (not just the Likud) for the settlements in the '67 Occupied Territories. They had inherited from the founders of Zionism the belief in the exclusive Jewish claim to Palestine as the ethical and moral basis for Jewish national existence. On the other hand, the '67 occupation necessitated a renewed and even more unequivocal religious legitimation. The heretofore small and marginal groups of religious Zionists became of central importance: the colonising and fighting pioneer vanguard, marching before the Zionist camp.

As Kimmerling states: "The settler with the kipah (skullcap) on his head and submachine gun in his hands is the most authentic representative of the hard core of their collective identity, whether Israelis want it to be or not. It cannot even be said that this is a distortion of Zionism, but rather that it is its logical expression, carried to the point of absurdity."

DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ARABS: The notion of an exclusive Jewish state is built on the identity between nation and religion accepted by Zionism. Three fundamental laws enacted in the first years of the state's establishment, and based on the religious definition of the "national" collective, were meant to ensure exclusive Jewish sovereignty, given the continuing presence of Palestinians within the borders of the state, even after 1948.

The first two of these laws are the Law of Return (1950) and the Law of Citizenship (1952), which allow any Jew to immigrate to Israel and to automatically become a citizen, while at the same time, deprive all Palestinian refugees outside the borders of the state of the possibility of returning to their homes. The third basic law, the World Zionist Organisation-Jewish Agency (Status) Law (the "WZO Law"), ensures that Jews, in actual practice, enjoy preference over the Palestinian citizens of the state i all matters pertaining to land ownership and budgetary allocations for building and development.

The WZO Law does this in a most cunning and hypocritical way: it authorises the various Zionist bodies, founded in the early 1900s, to function in Israel as quasi-governmental entities, in order to further advance the goals of the Zionist movement. They were assigned the functions of maintenance and support of cultural, educational and welfare activities, as well as the work of developing land, building projects in the existing Jewish communities and the establishment of new Jewish localities.

The religious definition of citizenship in the state of Israel, on which these discriminatory laws are based, violate the norms of modern nation-states, in which citizenship is generally defined in universal terms of political allegiance. The state of Israel is not defined as a state of all its citizens, but rather as the state of all the Jewish people throughout the world. In other words, the right to "membership" in the state, with all the rights that it entitles one to enjoy, is determined by the religious criterion of religious affiliation.

Two additional laws ensure the perpetuation of discrimination against non-Jewish citizens: the Amendment to the Basic Law: The Knesset (1985), provision 7(A), and provision 5(1) of the Law of Political Parties (1992). According to the Israeli Supreme Court's interpretation of these laws, a political party platform which calls upon the state of Israel to provide full and equal rights to Palestinian citizens, and/or challenges the Jewish character of the state, might find that it is disqualified from running in the national elections.

DEFECTIVE DEMOCRACY: Inevitably, however, the "Jewishness" of the state, which "justified" the denial of Palestinians as full citizens, boomeranged and denied a substantial part of basic civil rights to the Jews as well, both secular and religious.

Thus, the Orthodox establishment and the Chief Rabbinate were given control of the delineation of the national-collective borders which determine who is entitled to full membership in the Jewish state (an individual born to a Jewish mother or a convert in accordance with the definition of Orthodox Jewish religious law). This was done by means of absorbing religious personal status law as the law of the state and by assigning exclusive jurisdiction in this area to the rabbinate and its courts.

In other words, the legal and judicial system that relates to marriage, divorce and even burial, and which is based mainly on the Orthodox interpretation of the religious law, was assigned to the religious courts, and is not under the full control of the state.

Moreover, the incorporation of the Jewish religious laws into the corpus of state legislation (particularly in the area of personal status) confers on the Orthodox establishment the authority to enforce them on the Jewish citizens (equivalent powers have been given to Muslim, Christian and Druze courts to rule the personal lives of the state's Palestinian citizens). And indeed, in "the only democracy in the Middle East", civil marriages are not available to the citizenry to this day.

Of course, it is women who are the most discriminated against in accordance with religious law. Thus, for example, a Jewish woman cannot even obtain a divorce without the consent of her husband, even if he beats her, or is in prison or insane -- or if he has been missing for years but is not known to be dead.

It was not "religious coercion", however, that turned Israel into a half-theocratic state. This was made possible by the above-mentioned "status quo" arrangement, which was proposed to the Orthodox party, Agudat Israel, by the secular leader of the Zionist movement, David Ben Gurion, in June 1947, five months before the United Nations vote approving the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. According to this arrangement, the religious and Orthodox parties were promised that, in the ewish state which was about to be established, the Sabbath and laws of kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) would be enforced.

The Zionist movement also accepted the authority of the Orthodox Jewish establishment over all legislation having to do with birth, marriage, divorce and burial. In return the Orthodox, who until then had fiercely rejected Zionism, accepted the Zionist leadership as a representative of the Jewish people, came to terms with the state, and even signed the Declaration of Independence and participated with the Zionist religious party in the first government.

The violation of citizens' freedom of conscience in general, and that of women in particular, inherent in the Israeli laws of marriage and divorce never particularly bothered the leaders of the secular Zionist parties, including those of the Zionist left, because of their indifference to and even contempt for civil and women's rights. Even now, as in the past, they are prepared to sacrifice full, universal civil rights, especially women's rights, on the altar of tribal unity around the fragile "status quo".

The delay in enacting a secular constitution has been one of the main mechanisms perpetuating the suffocating sentence the secular Zionists have imposed upon themselves. A constitution would ensure the implementation of the promise made in Israel's Declaration of Independence to provide equal rights to all its citizens "without regard to gender, race or religion".

In the first days of the state, and despite a promise contained in the Declaration of Independence, the coalition headed by Mapa'i, the predecessor of the Labour Party, decided not to enact a constitution immediately, but instead to rely on a gradual enactment of basic laws -- without committing themselves to completing them within a definite time period. Thus, until 1992, not even one basic law which relates to the issue which is the heart and rationale of any constitution -- namely the defence of the basic rights of minorities and individuals -- was enacted.

The basic law designed to deal with this subject, the "Human Rights Law", was introduced in the Knesset, but got bogged down for years in various committees until, under the pressure of the religious parties, it was split into several separate basic laws. Only two of these have been enacted till now (both in 1992): the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation (1992) and the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom (1992), which is considered a mini-bill of rights by Israeli legal scholars. However, it lacks any clear clause guaranteeing equality of rights to all citizens, and any clauses explicitly protecting freedom of the press, expression and the right to demonstrate -- which are the foundations of democracy.

Moreover, the Human Dignity and Freedom Law explicitly declares that its aim is to anchor "the values of the state as a Jewish and democratic state". Thus, on its face, the law entrenches the superiority of the Jewish majority and ignores the Arab-Palestinian citizens in Israel. However, this superior status, which is based on the legal and ideological definition of Israel as a Jewish state, is also responsible for the denial of the basic rights of secular Jews as well.

The interpretation of the term "Jewish state" by Justice Aharon Barak, a secular Zionist thought of as representing the "liberal" position within the Supreme Court, locates his views very close to the religious perception of the Bible and tradition as the sovereign authority on the life of the Jews.

"[The] Jewish State is, therefore, the state of the Jewish people... It is a state in which every Jew has the right to return... It is a state of which the language is Hebrew, and most of its holidays represent its national rebirth... A Jewish state is a state that developed a Jewish culture, Jewish education and a loving Jewish people... A Jewish state is also a state where the Jewish Law fulfills a significant role... A Jewish state is a state in which the values of Israel, the Torah, Jewish heritage and the values of the Jewish halacha [religious law] are the bases of its values."

Thus, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, Israeli society finds itself paying the price of its commitment to the ongoing Zionist colonial project, in its new Oslo form. It needs, perhaps now more than ever, religious legitimation for the "exclusive historic right" of the Jewish nation to all of Palestine.

As long as it continues to apply religious criteria to determine which members of society are entitled to full citizenship rights in the Zionist state, however, the Jewishness of the state will continue to generate chains of clerical control that prevent the realisation of full rights for the Israelis themselves.

Therefore, the opposition expressed by broad secular circles to "religious coercion" appears pathetic: their commitment to the Jewish-Zionist state -- and thus their collective identity, which is religious in essence -- distorts their very humanity when it comes to all that concerns the Palestinians. This prevents them from realising their own full civil rights, and freeing themselves from the chains of religion.

Translated from Hebrew by Yochanan Lorwin

*The writer is the editor of News from Within, published by the Alternative Information Centre, Jerusalem/Bethlehem.

* This story was published in Ahram Weekly on 21 May 1998

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From the archives The Nakba at 50: In the chains of theocracy ... - Ahram Online

Keir Starmer’s new Labour formula has one kernel of truth at least – The National

But names can be deceptive particularly in politics. Our collective unconscious is often eloquent. Political parties are drawn to titles which precisely invert what they really stand for.

In Poland, the Law and Justice Party have stoked controversy and faced EU sanctions by undermining the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan heads up the Justice and Development Party having developed Turkey from a parliamentary system into an increasingly unjust, autocratic one.

Dig through the roster of international campaign outfits, and youll discover a long and shabby list of undemocratic democrats, unrepublican republicans and illiberal liberals vying for their nations votes.

READ MORE:Humza Yousaf: Labour a 'replica' of the Tories

Conservative (adj.) Definition: Averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.

We have a new contender for the title of Britains conservative party this weekend. Speaking to the Progressive Britain annual conference, Keir Starmer announced yesterday that Labour are the real conservatives now. Somebody has got to stand up for the things that make this country great and it isnt going to be the Tories, he said, urging Labour to change its DNA in a political project he characterised as Clause IV on steroids.

Clause IV famously pledged the Labour Party to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production.

Tony Blair persuaded his party to ditch this commitment in 1995 a move widely regarded as pivotal in signalling a transition from Labour old to new, shifting emphasis towards an equality of opportunity discourse which remains with us to this day. The moment has been presented both as a flight from socialism and a necessary compromise with political and economic realities in modern Britain delete as your political inclinations tend.

Sir Keirs body-snatching, mad-scientist routine might sound a bit febrile and gruesome but theres the kernel of something interesting in his analysis, above and beyond the familiar idea that the Labour leaders main job is to transfuse the policy preferences and talking points from Britains feral media into party policy.

Starmers right to this extent: the Tories have always had Jekyll and Hyde tendencies about what their governing purpose really is. With the Conservative and Unionist Party, it has never been a simple matter of just being averse to change, tending Englands green and pleasant land and preserving cherished national institutionsTM. In the DNA Starmer is so keen to transplant into the Labour Party, theres simultaneously a strong desire to wreck the joint.

It rather depends, I think, how you choose to remember Margaret Thatcher. Was the Iron Lady a smasher and a vandal, or a compromising politician who was often willing to trim her sails to political headwinds till she entered the final imperial phase of her premiership?

This probably strikes you as a silly question. Thatchers folk memory only goes one way. Both her critics and her superfans tend to see her as a hard-as-nails, no-compromises kind of gal.

Certainly, she once asked what great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: I stand for consensus? She characterised consensus as the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no-one believes, but to which no-one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved.

But in truth, Thatchers stint in government is considerably more complex than the myth would have it. The patron saint of the modern Tory Party didnt shrink from certain fights inside and outside her party but in other respects, the Sainted Margaret demonstrated a capacity for worldly compromise which her contemporary cheerleaders in the Tory Party tend to forget.

This doubleness lives on in the modern Conservative party, combining reflexive defence for certain elements of the status quo with a powerful but deeply unconservative desire to burn down major components of public life in the UK.

Late-career Thatcher contributed to this myth-making. Political senility is a common fault in former politicians. Having handed back the levers of power, an amazing number of leading politicians suddenly discover that their dearest political wish was to introduce a series of reforms they didnt advocate when they had the power to do so. Ideas which were shunned in office suddenly become de rigueur when you have time on your hands, no red boxes and nobody calls.

IN retirement, Gordon Brown has discovered a remarkable enthusiasm for the kind of constitutional change he refused to countenance in office with a working Labour majority. Leaving Bute House seems to have transformed Alex Salmond from a fawning royalist into a geriatric Robespierre. Better one sinner repenteth, as he likes to say.

But theres always been a part of the Tory soul that begins to hear voices in the bitter watches of the night. This inclination towards smash-and-grab politics was memorably encapsulated by the brief but lasting mayhem of Liz Trusss stint of misrule.

This was the kind of conservatism that thinks the punters will be fine with turning the Cotswold into Mordor, geligniting the village cricket pitch, and in Britains brooks and waterways, letting the slurry rip. Truss promised creative destruction. Politicians are often accused of ratting on their promises. Truss at least achieved half of what she set out to do.

The British press have largely internalised this sense that radical reforms ought to involve setting one or more cherished national institutionsTM on fire. Anything which doesnt involve pandemonium tends to be dismissed as boring, bureaucratic or half-hearted.

In Scottish politics, by contrast, we have the opposite problem. Proposals attracting anything less than full-throated support from business or civic society are now almost immediately catastrophised in the media or attributed to government incompetence rather than recognising that political interest groups often have divergent political interests and decision-making on the allocation of benefits and burdens tend to create winners and losers, and recognising that losers can be expected, rightly or wrongly, to girn about it.

Starmer is right to perceive that his main opponents have created an opening for a party offering the illusion of managed continuity with less of the paranoid politics. The Tory Partys list of unpatriotic elements has grown remarkably lengthy as its stint in government peters out.

Much of civic society and most of the major institutions of public life in Britain are now included in the Tory list of enemies of the people. Theres the old bogeymen of trade unions and foreigners to which theyve now added the BBC, Channel 4, lawyers, judges, junior doctors, senior doctors, nurses, teachers, universities and the whole of the civil service, which has been intermittently denounced as obstructive, snowflake and idle.

Starmer also offered a degree of existential security in his big speech, suggesting that only Labour can bring the current flux to an end. Promising the punters a quiet(er) life is a familiar Tory move. But Sir Keir has more to work with here.

Political, economic and social life in the UK has been characterised by a sustained period of instability and uncertainty for years, through Brexit, Covid and the energy, inflation and associated cost of living crisis it precipitated.

Where this rhetoric gets suspicious is the idea a new UK government can inoculate us against these uncertainties particularly one which has pre-emptively committed to no big changes on public spending.

READ MORE:Coronation: Orbs, potholes, carriages and protesters being arrested

Karl Marx who I can quote so Sir Keir doesnt have to famously argued that one feature of capitalist society was that all that is solid melts into air.

No respecter of persons or traditions, capital production and destruction unsentimentally assembles and disassembles the public domain, builds up and knocks flat our built and natural environment, making and unmaking peoples lives in the process.

This gave rise, he said, to uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation. Marx thought this social flux and the anxiety it gave rise to would ultimately force humanity to face with sober senses their real conditions and change them.

If Starmers speeches are anything to go by, he thinks the Labour Partys historic role is to present the punters with an illusion of continuity, and call it conservatism.

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Keir Starmer's new Labour formula has one kernel of truth at least - The National

D.C. tenants demand mayor and council cap the rent in District-wide … – Liberation

On April 29, just two days before the largest rent hike in more than four decades would take effect in Washington D.C., the Party for Socialism and Liberation and local D.C. residents mobilized in the neighborhoods of Mount Pleasant, Shaw and Congress Heights to demand that Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Council use their authority to cap the outrageous increase.

The day of action was the culmination of weeks of outreach and organizing, and sought to give voice, credence, and solidarity to people in D.C. already struggling with poor living conditions. Speak-outs across the District provided a platform for people to voice their concerns and to see the breadth of support coming from organizers, tenants unions, and working-class tenants facing the brunt of rent aggression. Despite warnings of rain, PSL members, the Woodner Tenants Union, and others came together to support one clear message: Rent-control must mean rent controlled.

On the corner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Avenue in Southeast D.C., one Congress Heights resident spoke for unity: We all need to step up and protest this, it affects everybody except the rich!

In late February, the council quietly approved an 8.9% allowable increase in rent for rent-controlled housing units, an allowance that took effect on May 1. PSL members conducted on-the-street flyering and postering campaigns for over a month to bring the rent increase to the attention of District residents.

Rent-controlled housing is vitally needed in Washington, D.C. The overall cost of living in D.C. is 53% higher than the national average, while the average cost of housing on its own is 144% higher than the national average. The average individual income in D.C. is slightly over $50,000 a year, while the average cost of living in the District is just under $80,000.

The contradictions of housing under capitalism have been cast in sharp light. With rent increases allowed every year, one would expect to see a corollary increase in wages and income. In reality, the median household income in the District of Columbia has been decreasing since 2019. We cannot continue to have our rent increase exponentially when our wages are not doing the same, said Howard University student and D.C. PSL organizer Delaney Leonard in Congress Heights.

Another such contradiction is the high rate of homelessness in the nations capital. How in the world can we have all this homelessness in Washington, D.C., and all these luxury houses nobody can afford? questioned Brookland Manor Coalition and resident Cheryl Brunson. According to the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, On any given night in the District of Columbia there are 3,403 single persons and 1,007 adults and children in 347 households experiencing homelessness. On top of these harrowing figures, nearly 84% of people experiencing homelessness in the District are also Black, pointing to the highly racialized structures guiding gentrification.

Each year, the maximum amount landlords are legally permitted to raise rent is calculated based on the rate of inflation reached in the previous year. The Consumer Price Index used to determine inflation rates is exceptionally high in D.C. coming out of 2022 in no small part due to the U.S. war drive against Russia and China.

D.C. residents, despite being taxed to the full extent of the law, have no representation in government. When Congress approves measures that will spike inflation, it is done without any shred of democratic consent from the people who live and work in the District. Such stark increases in rent are part of a historic strategy of gentrification to expel longtime, working-class, predominantly Black residents to make way for affluent, predominantly-white newcomers to the area.

Exactly how much the rent will increase (less than or equal to 8.9%) will vary from unit to unit depending on how much more money individual landlords would like to take for themselves. A system reliant on the goodwill of a small minority of barons ransoming out shelter to the highest bidder is an unacceptable system. These circumstances are not the sole result of conniving land owners, as a tenant of the Woodner importantly acknowledged: Landlords have been given the power to be as greedy as they want to be by squeezing the hard earned money from the pockets of working-class people. Landlords are only able to expropriate as much of the income of working people as the government will allow.

The permittance of a nearly 9% increase in rent for people living in rent-controlled housing units is a bold-faced reminder that the interests of landlords and developers have not only come to possess the operations of the council and mayor, they have declared the working-class and oppressed people as their enemies. We, the makers of all values and functions in D.C., would do well to remember those who have positioned themselves against us, our needs, and the tides of human liberation.

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D.C. tenants demand mayor and council cap the rent in District-wide ... - Liberation

The Great Caution on Nigerias Trending Street Slang on Twitter – Tekedia

Recent tweets about Idan, a Yoruba word for supernatural power, have brought to light the political and ideological dimensions of language use in Nigerian society. The use of Idan to describe extraordinary people raises important questions about how we perceive success and power in Nigeria. Based on 22 narratives drawn from 76 tweets posted by Nigerians between 1 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., our analyst argues that people should be cautious of how they use the word in political and wealth contexts.

By focusing on individual achievement and power, we risk ignoring the social and political structures that enable or hinder success. Success is not simply a matter of individual effort or ability; it is also shaped by factors such as social class, access to resources, and systemic inequality. When we focus exclusively on individual achievement, we may overlook the ways in which systemic inequality and injustice limit opportunities for many Nigerians.

By idolizing individuals with extraordinary achievements, we risk overlooking the collective efforts and contributions of ordinary Nigerians who may not have achieved such spectacular success but who nonetheless play important roles in building our society.

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When we celebrate individuals solely for their achievements, we may overlook their flaws and shortcomings as leaders. This can create a culture of impunity and corruption in which leaders are insulated from accountability and scrutiny.

When we celebrate only those individuals who have achieved extraordinary success, we may overlook the perspectives and experiences of ordinary Nigerians who may have different ideas and values. This can lead to a political system that is disconnected from the needs and aspirations of ordinary Nigerians.

Our analyst submits that while celebrating individual achievement and excellence is important, we must also be mindful of the social and political structures that hinder success. We must also recognize the contributions of ordinary Nigerians and prioritize shared values and principles over personal loyalty and patronage in politics for us to build a more inclusive and just society for all Nigerians.

Political orientations and ideologies in the tweets

Pan-Africanism: The reference to Idan as a source of power that transcends national boundaries and unites people of African descent suggests a pan-Africanist perspective, which emphasizes the solidarity and unity of African peoples across the world.

Socialism: The reference to Idan as a force for the common good and the upliftment of the masses implies a socialist or social-democratic ideology, which emphasizes the importance of social justice, equality, and the welfare of the people.

Populism: The use of emoticons such as ?? and ? suggests a populist tone, which seeks to mobilize popular support for a charismatic leader or cause by appealing to peoples emotions, values, and aspirations.

Anti-establishment: The reference to Idan as a means of challenging the status quo and disrupting the existing power structures implies an anti-establishment or radical political orientation, which seeks to overthrow or transform the dominant political and economic system.

Identity politics: The use of the term Yoruba first in one of the tweets suggests an identity politics perspective, which emphasizes the importance of group identity, representation, and recognition in politics.

Overall, these political orientations and ideologies reflect a diverse range of views and values that are shaped by historical, cultural, and social factors, and which continue to shape the political landscape of Nigeria and the wider African continent.

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Never Content: On Don Hamerquist’s A Brilliant Red Thread – lareviewofbooks

TODAY WE FACE a bewildering conundrum, writes Luis Brennan. [M]illions of people are ready to engage in active combat with the ruling capitalist order, but we have not seen the emergence of a viable social force that articulates a promising alternative to that order. Faith in capitalist governments, whether liberal-democratic or outright authoritarian, is eroding worldwide as crises proliferate, and even the wealthiest and most plunderous nation-states are proving incapable of sustaining the quality of life that ensures their working populations docility. We therefore enter a dangerous political era, when the operative question seems not to be whether serious alternatives to global capitalism will emerge, but whether they will come from the left or the right. And there is no preordained outcome; victory will go to those who fight the hardestand the smartest.

Toward this end, Brennan, himself an experienced labor organizer, has edited a stellar collection of essays by its titular octogenarian American revolutionary, A Brilliant Red Thread: Revolutionary Writings from Don Hamerquist (Kersplebedeb, 2023). It is a work that juxtaposes soaring theoretical insights with a great humility of prose and posture exceedingly rare among leftist theoreticians. Hamerquist has long shunned the cult of celebrity embraced by many intellectuals, opting instead to stay in intimate contact with a small network of comrades concerned with working-class organizing and direct action. But Hamerquists rightful place among the United States foremost revolutionary thinkers is long overdue; the lessons of his nearly 70 years of agitating and theorizing toward human liberation constitute some of the freshest and most novel political writing available in our moment. And befitting its authors lifelong dedication to placing well-measured political activity above pontification for its own sake, A Brilliant Red Thread is not intended for passive contemplation or rhetorical posturing. This book is a weapon, writes Brennan, to be turned on the powerful for maximum impact.

The unique political interventions offered in A Brilliant Red Thread are inseparable from the life experiences of its author. Don Hamerquist was born in 1939 and lived in a cabin deep in Washingtons Olympic Peninsula. His parents were members of the American Communist Party (CP), and his father, a logger by trade, organized with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the original Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). As Joseph Stalins icy grip on international communism hardened, the couples antiauthoritarian approach to politics placed them at odds not just with US eliteswhose blacklist prevented Hamerquists father from retaining regular work or traveling to nearby Canadabut also CP leadership, who ultimately expelled them as dissidents. In both cases, the Hamerquists were unapologetic. Their son recalls the frequent counsel of his father: [T]hink for yourself; dont get too enthused about individual leaders; its more important to question leadership than applaud it.

Hamerquist joined the CP himself in 1958 and spent years working in logging and trucking, punctuated by an abortive stint at Reed College. The party had become more outwardly tolerant of subversives, welcoming the elder Hamerquists back into its ranks in the early 1950s, and subsequently encouraging the young Don to dabble in the growing youth movement that would become the New Left. Described as handsome and hardworking in an otherwise hostile 1967 profile by Time magazine, Hamerquist became a protg of General Secretary Gus Hall, near the center of the American partys bureaucracy.

But the growing New Left challenge to party hierarchy and inertia, coupled with a rebellious streak inherited from Hamerquists parents, made this an uncomfortable fit. By 1968, Hamerquist was out, but not before a Kafkaesque process that ended when he unsuccessfully argued for his own expulsionwhile leadership countered that he had simply resigned. Regardless, as a public staffer, Hamerquist promptly filed forand receivedunemployment checks from New York State.

Like many in the New Left, by the mid-1960s, Hamerquist felt the urgent need to rethink communist orthodoxy amid a rapidly changing world. In particular, the 1968 general strike in France, the Prague Spring, and the emergence of strident Black and Brown revolutionary movements in the United States and around the world all pointed to emergent forms of rebellion emanating from below and organized horizontally, far removed from the top-down stewardship of professional politicians and trade-union bureaucrats that had urged tepid reforms toward a vanishing horizon. Though feeling as little fidelity to Beijing as he did to Moscow, Hamerquist did have sympathy for one slogan of Chinas Cultural Revolution: Bombard the Party headquarters.

In 1969, Hamerquist co-founded the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), a small yet impactful grouping in the so-called New Communist movement, alongside a core of innovative young Marxist thinkers descendent from the New Left. At its best, this group, which persisted well into the 1980s, emphasized experimental praxis, and practiced rigorous critique of itself and its surrounding world. STO proposed that revolution in the United States would not be initiated by the protracted and deliberate initiative of large formal organizations, including traditional parties and labor unions, but would arise instead from the contradictions structuring daily life, under which people labor and live in close cooperation, while enacting a social order that degrades and deforms their common humanity, engenders perennial crises, and places them in competition with one another.

As chronicled in Michael Staudenmaiers book Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 19691986 (AK Press, 2012), STO engaged in vigorous debate about the forms adequate to relate to rebellion from below and to help it generalize into outright insurrection. Rather than a solution to the question worked out on paper, this framework invites organizers and agitators to take equally seriously the twin perils of spontaneous struggle simply burning out for lack of coherence and consistency over time, or else its dynamism and radical potential being crushed by the imposition of too much formal structure. Needless to say, the question remains an open one.

Moreover, at a time when a popular movement slogan ran Black and White, Unite and Fight, STO argued that the color line itself must be smashed by a new type of solidarity between white and Black workers. White workers should not organize as white workersbeneficiaries of a series of now-famous privileges underlying their compliance with the bossbut must advance the demands of the Black and Brown workers at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. In subsequent decades, so-called privilege theory was watered down to a business-friendly exercise in scolding workers because somebody somewhere has it worse than them. But it originated as a communist praxis of workplace organizing, first formulated by another STO founder, Noel Ignatiev, who put it succinctly: Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity.

Like most of STOs best work, these theories were not formulated in abstraction, but came from members participation in factory struggles in the Steel Belt, with a ground zero of Chicago, where Hamerquist lived for many years. STO had no interest in apologetics for the increasingly farcical and barbarous regimes of actually existing socialism in Russia, China, or anywhere else. As believers in the vision that animated these revolutions, they argued that the end result had to be honestly assessed by those who sought to realize it. The sum total of these political positions was a unique political orientation, at once internationalist and distinctly American, which characterizes the writing featured in A Brilliant Red Thread.

While Hamerquist has been diligently writing and arguing for most of his political life, the offerings contained in A Brilliant Red Thread begin in 2000, long after Hamerquist left STO and became something of an elder statesman among anarchists and unorthodox communists. Most of the entries began as correspondence with organizers trying to make sense of the present struggles they were engaged in and the changing world around them. And activists go to Don with such questions because they know they will not be served up reheated leftovers from the 20th century; while Hamerquist draws deftly on his considerable experiences, his reflections are grounded in the present, even the near future.

Sometimes the topics of these exchanges are what we may call niche, such as the controversy within the present-day IWW over whether or not to form legally recognized unions. But the depth of Hamerquists hard-won, deeply practical wisdom, coupled with the lapidary editing work of Brennan and a small circle of confidants, allows these correspondences to stand on their own as much broader political reflections. A common theme uniting these diverse interventions is also a consistent feature of Hamerquists political life: the imperative to reflect critically on the present terrain of struggle, unclouded by sentimentality or dogmatism, leaving no axiom untested by critical scrutiny or practical experimentation.

These interventions take place on several interrelated levels. The first is a sophisticated analysis of the changing nature of transnational capitalism, its relationship to nation-states, and the makeup of states themselves. Hamerquist draws on a fusion of postautonomist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and military theorist John Robb to depict global capital as increasingly usurping the power of nation-states, including in the so-called West, and depriving states of their ability to weather the crises inherent in capitalism in ways that do not immediately serve short-term profit motives. Call for new New Deals all you like, Hamerquist argues. No executive power exists to bring them into being. Even as devolving quality of life in the wealthiest countries threatens open revolt, considerable internationally organized ruling-class power pushes against strong state policy, or redistribution in any direction but up.

In one profound entry, written in 2009 to the small communist cadre organization Bring the Ruckus, Hamerquist discusses the diminishing importance of white Americans in the international division of labor, which has led to the erosion of much of the privilege on which STO focused so intently. The loyalty of US white workers is no longer worth as much, he argues, and less will be paid for it. This of course threatens the historical alliance between white workers and white elites, on which much of US society has been built since colonial Virginia. While this prediction has proven prescient, and the increasing devaluation of the wages of whiteness have been a boon to right populism and outright fascism in white America, there is presently no organized bloc of state powers or capitalist firms willing or able to intervene decisively to reverse this trend.

While Hamerquist gestures toward the possibility of coherent global powers greater than todays states, which might handle crises in a more far-sighted way, this moment has not yet arrived. Todays political terrain remains a fraught mixture of increasingly hollow states, drained of their ability to manage society by means other than the brute force of police and military, and multinational corporations that simply chase profit margins and presently do not have the capability, if they have the desire, to effect long-term planning.

The second level is a close consideration of the complex struggles on the local level, where a crowded field of actors seek to push the momentum of mass struggle either back into the legitimate organs of the state, or into extraparliamentary right-wing politics the likes of which we saw on January 6, 2021. Hamerquist has helped theorize this terrain as a three way fight. Whereas leftist orthodoxy treats fascism as an option freely chosen by ruling classes in the face of social disintegrationthereby dismissing self-identified revolutionary fascists as mere puppets of elites, often while making coalitions with progressive elites to defeat themHamerquist argues that fascism can be a political form distinct from liberal-democratic capitalist society, and its third-positionist adherents are not mistaken that it would represent a revolutionalbeit toward barbarism. Once we take fascism seriously as a challenge to the capitalist status quo, Hamerquist argues, we must confront the frightful possibility that growing anti-capitalist sentiments worldwide will not find an adequate expression in left politics, and will instead find it in the right.

This prospect is especially dangerous as the ruling class has taken on the rhetoric surrounding many bedrock leftist issues, including anti-racism and social justice, making them appear indissociable from big capital and state power at a time when these actors are quite unpopular. The saturation of media, workplaces, and schools with a business-friendly version of liberatory politics has made issues that impact some of societys most powerless people begin to appear elitist. A clearly demarcated anti-capitalist alternative, existing in laudable pockets here and there, has yet to coherethough it must. A final and related point Hamerquist emphasizes should be easy to grasp in 2023: ostensible gains and victories, no matter how definitive, can always be subject to reversal, sometimes abruptly. Nothing must be taken for granted. Things can always changequickly, for the worse.

This leads to the third level, where small groups of like-minded revolutionaries organize collective projects aimed at waging three-way fights, cultivating international ties, and ultimately building a postcapitalist society. While his rejection of top-down, bureaucratic organizing led Hamerquist out of the CP, he did not become a pure spontaneist, one who places faith in capitalism to mechanistically give way to communism through the unfolding of its intrinsic contradictions. Instead, Hamerquist believes that adequate political organization will make or break the historical trajectory presently undecided between Rosa Luxemburgs famous crossroads: socialism or barbarism. Hamerquist knows better than to offer ornate blueprints for diverse social and political landscapes. But he nonetheless has a clear sense of best practicesmany derived, as he is often quick to point out, from being intimately acquainted with the worst ones.

First, Hamerquist offers flexible criteria for organizing groupings and evaluating their success, proceeding from the premise that some kind of organization is necessary. I think that any revolutionary organization that does not expect minorities to accept majority decisions on basic issues, he writes, and that does not collectively evaluate everyones political work is an organization that will quickly become an ex-organization or an organization of ex-revolutionaries. Should projects then cohere around ornate theoretical unity, draped in all the vestments of the 20th-century revolutionary tradition? This might work, Hamerquist notes, but you dont know for sure what somebodys self-styled politics actually amount to, until action is required and risk enters the equation. The question thereby becomes a calculus of practical unity, underscoring the necessity to identify key points of necessary agreement.

In one critical letter to a nascent anarchist federation, Hamerquist outlines three necessary points of agreement:

First, we want people who arent reformists and whose orientation is to fight the system [] Second, we want people who believe that revolution must be achieved through the development and exercise of popular power, and who understand that political work must embody and develop this power as a practical content, not just an ultimate goal [] Finally, we want people who are willing to subject their ideas and activity to collective discussion and decision-making.

Relatedly, as scholar Orisanmi Burton recently put it, revolution is illegal. Hamerquist is insistent that sustained revolutionary efforts, in the best of possible outcomes, will quickly transcend the narrow confines of liberal-democratic participation and place their participants in growing danger, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. The question, then, is not whether to engage in activity that provokes state repression, but how to do so wisely. A survivor of COINTELPRO, Hamerquist cautions activists to develop a grounded assessment of state repression, and to avoid the twin scourges of disregarding it altogether, or allowing the assumed omnipotence of the state to paralyze. A student of state counterinsurgency strategies, Hamerquist argues that direct violence against movements is not the preferred method of effective counterinsurgents, and more complex operators aim at influencing the course of mass movements toward aims favorable to national and transnational elites.

Navigating state repression is a game of blind mans bluff: the necessity to act comes alongside the impossibility of knowing more than a small part of the whole. None of this, Hamerquist argues, gets any better if revolutionaries who face repression simply fall back on claims of free speech and insist that they were actually harmless all along. There is no doubt that the state is taking us seriously, he wrote in a 2001 editorial for the ARA Research Bulletin, a publication of the pugnacious leftist street organization Anti-Racist Action.

We should also take ourselves seriously. Playing the innocent victim is not serious. Treating repressive policies as if they were reflexive reactions of idiots and thugs is not serious [] We wont get anywhere or gain anything by reaction to incidents of repression with appeals to civil libertarian rights to protest. The state isnt committed to these rules of the game, and the movement isnt eitheror at least it shouldnt be.

The essays contained in A Brilliant Red Thread are the work of a political mind that never rests content with having the answers but strives instead for bigger and better questions, and experimental praxis suitable for trying them out. This is a book that must be read, debated, and otherwise reckoned with by all who believe themselves to be fighting for a world after capitalism. Hamerquist would be the last person to claim that any one text or individual can point us there, but this book takes us more than a few steps along the way.

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Never Content: On Don Hamerquist's A Brilliant Red Thread - lareviewofbooks

Democrat Colin Allred brings contrasting style to race against Ted … – The Texas Tribune

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WASHINGTON U.S. Rep. Colin Allred is gearing up to challenge U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2024 election, and the Democrats measured approach poses a sharp contrast to Cruzs bellicose style.

Allred doesnt shout during committee hearings or deride those he disagrees with both signature Cruz moves. He hasnt made headlines for epic political showdowns, nor has he positioned himself as a leader of an ideological movement.

Colleagues instead describe Allred as level-headed, eager to work across the aisle and accessible to constituents in his Dallas-based district.

Knowing how to work with everyone, knowing how to listen to people, how to engage, how to come up with solutions, and really, how to bring people together thats what leadership is, said U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston Democrat whose friendship with Allred grew after both flipped Republican-held seats in 2018. And frankly, thats the leadership we need in our state right now.

Allreds path to Congress wasnt typical but has deep roots in his district.

A Dallas native, Allred was born to a single mother who taught in Dallas public schools. The Hillcrest High School football star played for Baylor University on a scholarship before deferring law school for four seasons as an NFL linebacker for the Tennessee Titans beginning in 2007.

After attending law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Allred became a civil rights lawyer and served in the Office of General Counsel for the Department of Housing and Urban Development under then-Secretary Julin Castro, another Texas Democrat.

Allreds history has been integral to his campaigns and his time in office. He was the first member of Congress to take paternity leave from office and is part of a bipartisan group working to advance paid parental leave legislation.

I never knew my father, so I made a promise to myself a long time ago that when I became a dad, I would do it right, Allred said in his campaign announcement video.

Allred was elected to the U.S. House as part of a Democratic wave in the midterm elections during Donald Trumps presidency, defeating Republican Rep. Pete Sessions by 6.5 points. Sessions was a formidable opponent, an 11-term incumbent and chair of the powerful House Rules Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Allred approached the election as a moderate who focused on kitchen-table issues such as health care access. Sessions returned to Congress representing a new district in 2020, and the two have since served together.

Since joining Congress, Allred has worked across the aisle to bring federal funds to local projects, including with Rep. Jake Ellzey, R-Waxahachie, on creating a medical center for veterans in Garland and on acquiring almost $300 million for a Veterans Affairs health facility in Dallas. He collaborated with other North Texas representatives to ensure that Dallas-area projects received federal money in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure package, including upgrades at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Allred made a mark as an affable colleague shortly after arriving in Congress, according to others who were first elected in 2018. He was selected co-class president in his freshman term, and in his second term was elected to represent early-term candidates to Democratic leadership. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark named him as one of her 10 deputies in December.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, also joined Congress after the 2018 election and said Allred was someone who could turn down the temperature in sometimes volatile internal discussions on gun safety legislation and trade agreements with Canada and Mexico.

Colin was always a voice of reason, a voice of commonsense solutions, but also someone whose input was always very strategic and thoughtful, Escobar said. The Democratic Caucus is definitely a big tent, and we have very diverse views.

Allred is little known outside of Dallas or the halls of Congress. He rarely deviates from party leadership on votes and hasnt been fully tested in the rougher aspects of the job.

His committee assignments have been largely policy-focused and bipartisan, though that could change now that he serves on the House subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government a Republican-created panel formed to investigate the Biden administration and its policies. Allred said he wants to keep discussions grounded in reality on the subcommittee, which other Democrats have dismissed as a partisan farce.

The House Republicans ran, and won their narrow majority on lowering costs and reining in inflation something I am more than happy to work with them on, Allred said in a statement shortly after the panel was formed. Yet one of their first acts in power is to set up a committee to investigate civil servants across the federal government they disagree with.

Allreds methods sharply contrast with the rabble-rousing fire that Cruz brings to his Senate job.

Cruz bitingly told The Dallas Morning News that Allred was a Democrat congressman from Dallas whos done very little. Ive had no occasion to interact with him because hes not been involved in many significant issues in his limited time here.

Cruz will be a behemoth to conquer, a mainstay on the conservative stage whose influence has grown since he joined the Senate in 2013.

Cruz has a handsome campaign war chest starting with well over $3 million available and a deep presence in the right-wing media ecosystem with his thrice-weekly podcast. Democrats may revile him, but Cruz remains one of the most popular elected officials among Republicans in Texas.

After Allred announced his campaign against Cruz, Republicans immediately singled out his loyal voting record to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, casting him as a far leftist.

Allred wants men to compete in womens sports, isnt serious about addressing the crisis at the border, wants to take away law-abiding Texans guns, and is soft on punishing murderers, Cruz spokesperson Nate Maddux said. Bottom line, Allred is too extreme for Texas.

But Allred has a history of pushing back at times on his partys left flank. While negotiating the climate and clean energy provisions of Democrats cornerstone Inflation Reduction Act last year, Allred brought in his perspective representing oil and gas interests to push back on progressive talking points on fossil fuels. He voted with all Republicans and just over half of his party in favor of a resolution denouncing the horrors of socialism.

U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, a fellow moderate Democrat from North Texas, said he valued Allreds perspective.

Hes been just someone that has been really good and gives a lot of really good insight on different pieces of legislation, particularly around the committees that he serves on before they go to the negotiating table with the Republicans to be able to hammer some agreements, Veasey said.

Veasey, who like Allred is Black, said some Republican representatives have approached him when they meant to speak to Allred. Though amusing, Veasey said it was a good sign that members from across the aisle so often look to talk to Allred.

In the 2018 election, Allred built a coalition of some unlikely bedfellows, gaining endorsements from the pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the powerful AFL-CIO union.

Byron Sanders, president and CEO of the Dallas-area youth organization Big Thought, has worked with Allred on youth issues and said Allred is accessible to community members, often forming committees of local leaders in a highly diverse district.

Hes held and maintains respect across the board, whether youre talking about law enforcement or community activists, Sanders said. Its kind of hard to give both of those camps the impression that youre willing to hear them out.

Allreds campaign also isnt shying away from attacking Cruz. His social media has repeatedly highlighted Cruz gaffes, including his infamous trip to Cancun during the 2021 winter storm that left millions of Texans without power. He contrasted himself with Cruz on the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Cruz played a central role in objecting to certifying the 2020 election results.

Hell do anything to get onto Fox News but cant be bothered to help keep rural Texas hospitals open, Allred said in his campaign announcement video. The struggles of regular Texans just dont interest him.

The Senate in 2024 looks difficult for Democrats, with nearly all of the Republican seats that are up for election in comfortably red states. Democrats will be straining to maintain their razor-thin majority, while Republicans will be itching to flip the chamber after failing to do so in 2022. But Allred is off to a solid start, raising more than $2 million in the 36 hours after announcing his run.

Allred also may have to run a primary campaign against state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, who is expected to announce his own run against Cruz after the regular legislative session ends May 29.

In Cruzs last election, Democrat Beto ORourke lost by only 2.6 points, serving as a wakeup call for Texas Republicans.

John Cornyn, Texas senior Republican senator, said he heartily supports Cruz and that he doesnt see much opportunity for a Democrat to win in the state. But he added that if 2018 taught anything, it was that Cruz shouldnt rest on his laurels.

We cant take anything for granted, Cornyn said. Its going to perhaps set a new record for spending. All of these state Senate races in individual states now are national races because they determine the balance of power here in the U.S. Senate and in Congress. So I think this is going to be a big shootout.

Disclosure: Baylor University and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Democrat Colin Allred brings contrasting style to race against Ted ... - The Texas Tribune

National Socialism | Encyclopedia.com

Sources of support

Causes of Nazism

Nazi doctrine and policies

BIBLIOGRAPHY

National Socialism started as a political movement in Germany in 1919. Its official name was the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party); it soon became popularly known as the Nazi party, and its followers were called Nazis. When Adolf Hitler joined the party, Nazism consisted of a little group of unimportant malcontents in Munich. Yet within fourteen years it became the greatest mass movement in German history, including in its ranks members of all groups of German society, from unemployed workers of the Lumpenproletariat to members of the imperial family of the Hohenzollerns and of several of the royal houses of the German states. By 1932 the Nazi vote had mounted to fourteen million; in the March 1933 election, the last in which opposing parties participated, seventeen million Germans (or 44 per cent of the electorate) freely voted for the Nazi party, not to speak of several more millions who voted for nationalist and militarist policies that were barely distinguishable from Nazi objectives. Thus well over half the German electorate voted for an antidemocratic, totalitarian, imperialistic program. After the elections, only the Social Democrats attempted to resist Nazism in the Reichstag (the Communists had not been allowed to take their seats in the Reichstag). Even the Roman Catholic (and generally democratic) Center party gave Hitler the dictatorial powers he asked for in the Reichstag on March 23, 1933. This was the only case of a modern totalitarian regime that was set up by a majority of the electorate and approved by the parliamentary body of the nation.

Once in power, the Nazi regime lived up to its promises. First, concentration camps were set up for political opponents. Very soon the political offenders were a small minority in the concentration camps; the large majority consisted not of persons who had committed a wrong but who (like the Jews) belonged to the wrong group. Later, during World War n, large numbers of civilians in the occupied countries were put into concentration camps, because they too belonged to a wrongsocial or political group.

Politically, the Nazis quickly effected complete uniformity (Gleichschaltung). All other parties, including the ultraconservatives, were liquidated within a few months of the Nazi seizure of power. Newspapers were either Nazified or, when they had an established liberal-democratic reputation, were abolished (as, for example, the Vossiche Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt). Education, from kindergarten to university, was put under strict party and government control, and the statesponsored Hitler Youth replaced all existing youth organizations. All labor unions, whatever their political sympathies, were outlawed and replaced by the government-sponsored Labor Front, incorporating both labor and management in one organization. The Christian churches were persecuted if they dared to resist the anti-Christian, racist policies of Nazi mass murders. Christianity was attacked as a Jewish contrivance to weaken the military spirit of the Germans, and attempts were made to substitute a new religion, German Faith, for Christianity. More extreme Nazis even went so far as to re-establish old Germanic, pre-Christian paganism as the only religion fit for the new Nazi Germany. Finally, even the traditional structure of the family was attacked. Children were encouraged to inform on their parents and unmarried women to breed a new Herrenrasse (master race) out of wedlock.

The Nazi regime introduced military conscription in 1935, militarized the Rhineland in 1936 in violation of treaty provisions, annexed Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939, and started World War n by the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. In the summer of 1940, France was vanquished, and Great Britain alone resisted the weight of Nazi power. In possession of virtually the whole European continent, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 and declared war on the United States in December 1941.

Nazi Germany lost the war and surrendered unconditionally in 1945. Yet before going to defeat, the Nazis had accomplished one major objective: over six million European Jewsmen, women, and childrenwere murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other extermination camps specially set up for wholesale killing. This extermination of the Jews in occupied Europe was called, in official Nazi language, the final solution of the Jewish question.

Of all the social classes in Germany before 1933, the urban working class was proportionately least affected by the appeal of Nazism. Membership statistics of 1933 indicate that manual workers were substantially underrepresented in the Nazi party, whereas white-collar workers and middle-class persons were greatly overrepresented in relation to the total German population. Urban workers largely followed the Social Democratic party. Neither Communist nor Nazi attempts to win the allegiance of German urban workers for totalitarian programs succeeded before 1933. Yet, while the German urban workers did not want Nazism, they did little to resist its coming into power or its operations once it was in power. The deeply ingrained respect for authority in most Germans made resistance difficult. Moreover, the Nazis managed to abolish unemployment by embarking on a war economy from the outset, as a result of which unemployment turned into full employment and even a shortage of labor. Many workers were willing to trade the loss of individual liberty and free labor unions for the gain of full employment and social security. As a result, the mass of the German workers acquiesced in the other Nazi policies, including the policies of imperialist expansion through aggressive war. The urban workers (unlike those of other countries under Fascist rule, such as Italy) played only a very minor part in whatever resistance groups existed in Nazi Germany.

The lower middle classparticularly the salariat supplied the numerically strongest element of popular support for Nazism. Many persons in this class dreaded the prospect of joining the proletariat and looked to the Nazi movement for the saving of their traditional status and prestige. The salaried employee is jealous of Big Business, into whose higher echelons he would like to rise via the ladder of management, and he also fears Big Labor, into whose proletarian world he disdains to sink. Nazism very astutely played on these fears and anxieties by attacking both the interest slavery of finance capitalism and the un-German character of Marxist Bolshevism. Logically, propaganda directed against both capital and labor may seem self-contradictory, but its very inconsistency both reflected and appealed to the political confusion of the salaried class. Furthermore, Nazism promised them the identification with the superior Nordic master race. This racialism had a most impressive appeal to those groups of salaried personsteachers and government employees who were traditionally permeated with nationalist and racist ideas even before Nazism appeared.

As to the numerically less significant, but socially and economically important upper class of industrialists and big landowners, the support received from this group by the Nazi party even before 1933 was of great impact. On January 27, 1932, Hitler addressed the Industry Club in Dsseldorf, the center of Germanys heavy industry; his success in winning over the leaders of heavy industry was impressive. Most notable among active supporters of Nazism before 1933 were such world-famous German industrial figures as Fritz Thyssen and the Krupp family. While looking down upon the Nazi leadership as a group of plebeian upstarts without the breeding and background of gentlemen, German industrialists and big landowners supported Nazism for two main reasons: first, the Nazis promised the abolition of free labor unions, and second, the industrialists understood that the remilitarization of Germany coupled with an aggressive foreign policy would be profitable for business. The support of the steel industry was particularly significant. Already during the Second Reich, the friendship between the Kaiser and the Krupp family pointed to the intimate ties between German heavy industry and militarism. The alliance between the steel industry and Nazism before 1933 was but a renewal of these historical ties between industry and a German government with an antisocialist, antidemocratic, and imperialistic policy. During World War n, German heavy industry profited from its ties with the Nazi regime, since it was the main beneficiary of the labor of millions of foreign workers deported to Germany.

Another group that was crucial in the rise of Nazism was the military, traditionally of great social importance in the fabric of German society and government. Even in strong and well-established democratic states, the professional military class tends to overestimate the virtues of discipline and national unity. Where democracy is weak, as it was in Germany during the Weimar Republic, the professional bias of the military class becomes a political menace. The top military leaders of Germany knew, before and after 1933, that a high percentage of Nazi leaders were criminals or psychopaths, yet they supported the Nazi movement as a step toward the desired militarization of Germany. Of the two greatest German military leaders of World War i, General Ludendorff and Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the former embraced Nazism in the early 1920s and the latter collaborated with it until his death in 1934. Yet it should be pointed out that, toward the end of World War II, high military leaders played an important role in attempts to overthrow the Nazi regime. These plots culminated in the attempt against Hitlers life on July 20, 1944, an attempt that failed. It is noteworthy that the German generals did not hatch any resistance plans against Nazism when the war went well for Germany; only when defeat became a certainty did they try to save what could be saved of German power by overthrowing the Nazi regime.

In analyzing the sources of support for Nazism among the German people, the most important lesson is not which particular social group proved itself most vulnerable to the Nazi virusalthough this is an important lesson and has broad political implications outside Germany as well. A phenomenon of even more general consequence is demonstrated by the success of Nazism before coming to power and its popularity among the German people: an antidemocratic, totalitarian movement can be based on mass support.

From the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the conventional wisdom of enlightened and liberal political thought automatically assumed that political oppression was due solely to the malevolence of a small minority of political oligarchs lording it over the mass of the good people. The assumption, which was hardly ever challenged, was that the mass of the people naturally desired freedom above everything else; once the obstacles to this natural desirekings, aristocrats, men of privilegewere removed, a reign of liberty and democracy would inevitably follow. The experience of Nazism, both before and after 1933, demolished this illusion once and for all. The main reason why conventional political analysis failed to come to grips with the paradoxical phenomenon of the mass basis of modern totalitarianism lay in its exclusive concern with totalitarian leaders rather than totalitarian followers, the latter being seen merely as innocent victims of their evil leaders. In the light of the knowledge gained by modern psychology and psychoanalysis, Erich Fromm (1941) has shown the psychodynamic and sociological factors that underlie the totalitarian flight from freedom and that have made modern man feel isolated, powerless, and irrational. These forces are potentially operative everywhere, but in Germany their potential was most fully and most disastrously realized.

Many interpretations of the nature of Nazism have either gone back too far into ancient history or have confined themselves too much to the immediate past. Whatever characteristics the Germanic peoples may have possessed in the days of Tacitus, there have been too many historical changes since then to deduce Nazism from German antiquity. Similarly, a movement of such farreaching impact on the whole world can hardly be adequately explained by such specific recent events as the Versailles Treaty of 1919 or the economic depression of 1929-1932. Defeat in war does not necessarily end in a totalitarian nihilism of the Nazi type, as is evidenced by Germanys own defeat in World War n, which did not again produce Nazism. Similarly, the impact of the depression has been exaggerated, if it is to serve as the main cause of explaining the rise and triumph of Nazism. There is no doubt that the inflation of the early 1920s and the depression that began in 1929 had a deleterious effect on German democratic institutions. But economic depression is, in itself, no necessary general cause of fascist totalitarianism. There is a relation between economic depression and accelerated social change, but it is of a different kind: like war, economic depressions do not create new major social and political trends, but tend to accelerate the rate of development of existing trends. In fundamentally democratic nations (like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, or the countries of northwestern Europe), the depression of 1929 produced neither fascism nor communism but advanced the cause of democracy on the economic, social, political, and cultural fronts. Conversely, where the roots of democracy are frail and where the dominant social attitude is strongly suffused with authoritarian elements, a depression may easily accelerate such authoritarian trends, as happened not only in Germany in the 1930s but also in Japan, Brazil, Poland, and other nations.

Closely related to the depression theory as the major cause of Nazism is the essentially Marxian interpretation of Nazism as the logical outgrowth of monopoly capitalism. While it cannot be denied that monopolistic capitalism was a major force in German life from the time of the establishment of the Second Reich in 1870 and that on the whole its political influence was harmful to the development of a liberal society and a democratic government, this theory cannot explain why monopoly capitalism produced Nazism in Germany and not in Britain and the United States. In purely economic terms, the depression in these major citadels of world capitalism in the early 1930s was not substantially different from that in Germany. The differentiating factor was not the relative degree of the severity of economic crisis but the difference in political ideas and institutions that circumscribed the behavior of political decision makers.

If Nazism was more than a reaction to the German defeat in World War I or to the depression, it can be explained only by the persistence of a powerful antiliberal traditionperhaps the dominant German traditionin the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hegel, Adam Mller, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Moeller van den Bruck are but a few of the more important figures in the development of a social philosophy that opposed the concepts of power, authoritarianism, nationalism, racism, and imperialism to the ideas of natural law, liberty, universalism, equality, and peace. Romanticism was, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onward, perhaps the single strongest movement in German thought. Whereas in other countries (like France and England) romanticism was largely confined to the literary imagination as a protest against the limiting tradition of the measure and orderliness of classicism, in Germany it became a systematic philosophy with elaborate and coherent views on man, society, law, and the state.

The German Romantics, in their theory of the state, put forward an organistic conception based on blood and community, in which the individual occupied a relatively minor role; and they rejected the Western liberal theory of the state based on a social contract, in which the individual had natural rights preceding the state. In economics, the German Romantics assailed the free-market economy of capitalism as soulless egotism and urged the revival of the medieval closed economy regulated in every detail by the community. The most typical German Romantics, like Adam Mller, did not attack this or that particular point of the Western tradition in ethics, politics, and economics. They fought, instead, against the humanistic and rational Western tradition as a whole.

There is not a single element in the Nazi doctrine as developed by its leaders and apologists that does not have a longand frequently dominanttradition in the century and a half preceding the rise of Nazism. It is true that such ideas were not expressed only in Germany. Count de Gobineau expressed racist theories in France, around the middle of the nineteenth century, and Carlyle expressed antiliberal and racist doctrines in England in the second half of the same century. Yet the important thing is that such prophets of authoritarianism and racialism did not obtain significant followings in their native countries, whereas their writings became enormously popular in Germany. The case of Houston Stewart Chamberlain is even more indicative of this phenomenon. Born an Englishman, he settled in Germany and became a German citizen. His Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) became one of the most popular books in pre-Nazi Germany, yet made no impact on his native country. From anti-Semitism to imperialism, there is little in the Nazi doctrine that cannot be found in Chamberlains writings.

Conversely, there was also, before the rise of Nazism, a liberal and humanistic tradition in Germany, characterized by such lofty figures as Lessing, Kant, Humboldt, and Goethe. Yet this tradition never became dominant and was more influential in the academy than in the councils of policy makers. In 1848 and in 1918, the liberal elements of German society started a new orientation toward Western ideals in government and society, but in both cases the authoritarian and militaristic elements in German life squelched such attempts through violence and terror.

Nazi doctrine and policy were, however, more than a mere revival of traditional antiliberal ideas and institutions in German life. In Nazism, these antiliberal attitudes and institutions were carried to their extreme. Whereas philosophical and political romantic thought in Germany had reacted against the excesses of rationalism, Nazi ideologists, like Alfred Rosenberg, rejected the principle of Western rationalism itself, charging, for example, that Socrates was the first Social Democrat in Europe and the originator of the disease of rationalism, because he established the principle of trying to settle vital issues through argument and debate. Similarly, whereas in the pre-Nazi German intellectual tradition particular points of Christianity were criticized or assailed, official Nazi ideology rejected Christianity in toto as a devilish Jewish plot to weaken Germanic vigor and military manliness. In addition, Nazism had the dynamic of a popular mass movement, whereas antidemocratic and antiliberal ideas and policies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still recognized some restraints of traditional religion and morality. The tragedy of pre-Nazi German politics lay in the fact that the masses were sufficiently drawn into politics to become highly conscious of political programs and movements, but not sufficiently involved to build up a sustained democratic experience. In this sense, Nazism was the response of a politically semiliterate people: not illiterate enough to stay out of politics and not literate enough to have learned the important lessons of politics through self-government.

The potentially dangerous tendencies in pre-Nazi German ideas and policies were carried forward to the most extreme point of nihilism, rejecting all traditional Western moral and religious concepts about the nature of man and his inalienable dignity as a human personality. This nihilism came out most clearly in the use of terror and murder as an official state policy of extreme totalitarianism. Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers were more than incidental phenomena in the total process of Nazism. They were of its very essence, for it was in those camps that man was destroyed as a moral being and reduced to a mere number, tattooed on his body. Such camps were not set up primarily to punish ordinary or political criminals. Most of its victims, such as the Jews, were not even accused of having done anything wrong. The purpose of the concentration and extermination camps was to show to the entire population under Nazi control that every person was potentially an inmate, since personal guilt had little or nothing to do with such a punishment. The ultimate purpose of such camps was to demonstrate that mans soul, his dignity, and his self-respect can be reduced to dirt and ashes, and that no one was exempt from such fate if it so pleased the Nazi rulers. If killing had been the main objective of the camps, such killing could have been accomplished with more efficiency and without the suffering and the degradation that accompanied it. In the scheme of Nazi totalitarian nihilism, the degradation of man was not the incidental by-product of murder, but murder was the by-product of the systematic process of degradation. The aim of Nazi nihilism was to transform a human into a nonhuman and to restrict the quality of being human to those who were acceptable to the Nazi rulers.

This policy was also carried out in foreign affairs. Thus, when Czechoslovakia was taken over in 1939, Nazi legislation referred to its population as Germans and other inhabitants. In the eyes of the Nazis, the Czechs were not merely defeated by superior German arms but had ceased to exist as a nation, just as the inmate of a concentration or extermination camp was nothing more than a number in the files, without any human personality or individuality. Nazi plans for the Poles and Russians were the same: not only to conquer them militarily but to transform both nations into nonnations, slaves of the higher German Kultur. Eventually, a similar fate was also foreseen for the other nations to be subdued and then destroyed as national entities.

Historically, Nazism may have left two important legacies. First, it is conceivable that the experience of Nazism has irretrievably destroyed the authoritarian, antidemocratic, antiliberal, and militaristic tradition in German society, because Nazism demonstrated to what extent the potential of that tradition could be realized in destroying the very foundations of civilization. Second, Nazism has left a broader legacy for all mankind. Whatever psychological malformation of behavior occurs in one human being may potentially occur in any other. The same applies to whole nations. The lesson of Nazism is not only how low Germans could fall, but how far any nation can fall once critical rationalism, moral restraints, and constitutional government have been substantially weakened or destroyed.

William Ebenstein

[Directly related are the entriesAnti-Semitism; Dictatorship; Fascism; Totalitarianism. Other relevant material may be found inMilitarism; Nationalism; Personality, Political; Radicalism; and in the biographies ofSchmittandTreitschke.]

Baumont, Maurice (editor) 1955 The Third Reich. A study published under the auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, with the assistance of UNESCO. New York: Praeger. Written by 28 European and American scholars, this massive volume of 900 pages is characterized by a broad variety of viewpoints and a wealth of material on the background and record of Nazism.

Butler, Rohan Dolier (1941) 1942 The Roots of National Socialism (1783-1933). New York: Dutton.

Chamberlain, Houston Stewart (1899) 1910 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. New York and London: John Lane. First published in German.

Cohen, Elie A. (1952) 1954 Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp. London: Cape. First published in Dutch with a summary in English.

Dicks, Henry V. 1950 Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology. Human Relations 3:111-154.

Ebenstein, William 1943 The Nazi State. New York: Farrar.

Fromm, Erich (1941) 1960 Escape From Freedom. New York: Holt.

Gerth, Hans 1940 The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition. American Journal of Sociology 45:517-541.

Hilberg, Raul 1961 The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books; London: W. H. Allen.

Mosse, George L. 1964 The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Grosset.

Neumann, Franz Leopold (1942) 1963 Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. 2d ed. New York: Octagon Books.

Rauschning, Hermann (1938) 1940 The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West. New York: Alliance Book Corporation; London: Heinemann. First published in German at Zurich. The London edition was published as Germanys Revolution of Destruction.

Shirer, William L. 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Taylor, Telford 1952 Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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National Socialism | Encyclopedia.com

Nazi Party – Wikipedia

Far-right political party active in Germany (19201945)

National Socialist German Workers' Party

Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei

The Nazi Party,[a] officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei[b] or NSDAP), was a far-right[9][10] political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in postWorld WarI Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into vlkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on antibig business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric. This was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders, and in the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression.[10]

Pseudoscientific racist theories were central to Nazism, expressed in the idea of a "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft). The party aimed to unite "racially desirable" Germans as national comrades, while excluding those deemed to be either political dissidents, physically or intellectually inferior, or of a foreign race (Fremdvlkische). The Nazis sought to strengthen the Germanic people, the "Aryan master race", through racial purity and eugenics, broad social welfare programs, and a collective subordination of individual rights, which could be sacrificed for the good of the state on behalf of the people. To protect the supposed purity and strength of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, Poles and most other Slavs, along with the physically and mentally disabled. They disenfranchised and segregated homosexuals, black people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political opponents. The persecution reached its climax when the party-controlled German state set in motion the Final Solutionan industrial system of genocide which achieved the murder of around 6million Jews and millions of other targeted victims, in what has become known as the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler, the party's leader since 1921, was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg on 30January 1933. Hitler rapidly established a totalitarian regime known as the Third Reich. Following the defeat of the Third Reich at the end of World WarII in Europe, the party was declared to be illegal by the Allied powers, who carried out denazification in the years after the war both in Germany and in territories occupied by Nazi forces. The use of any symbols associated with the party is now outlawed in many European countries, including Germany and Austria.

Nazi, the informal and originally derogatory term for a party member, abbreviates the party's name (Nationalsozialist [natsionalzotsialst]), and was coined in analogy with Sozi (pronounced [zotsi]), an abbreviation of Sozialdemokrat (member of the rival Social Democratic Party of Germany).[c] Members of the party referred to themselves as Nationalsozialisten (National Socialists), but some did occasionally embrace the colloquial Nazi (so Leopold von Mildenstein in his article series Ein Nazi fhrt nach Palstina published in Der Angriff in 1934). The term Parteigenosse (party member) was commonly used among Nazis, with its corresponding feminine form Parteigenossin.

The term was in use before the rise of the party as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backward peasant, an awkward and clumsy person. It derived from Ignaz, a shortened version of Ignatius, which was a common name in the Nazis' home region of Bavaria. Opponents seized on this, and the long-existing Sozi, to attach a dismissive nickname to the National Socialists.

In 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power in the German government, the usage of "Nazi" diminished in Germany, although Austrian anti-Nazis continued to use the term, and the use of "Nazi Germany" and "Nazi regime" was popularised by anti-Nazis and German exiles abroad. Thereafter, the term spread into other languages and eventually was brought back to Germany after World War II. In English, the term is not considered slang and has such derivatives as Nazism and denazification.

The party grew out of smaller political groups with a nationalist orientation that formed in the last years of World WarI. In 1918, a league called the Freier Arbeiterausschuss fr einen guten Frieden (Free Workers' Committee for a good Peace) was created in Bremen, Germany. On 7 March 1918, Anton Drexler, an avid German nationalist, formed a branch of this league in Munich. Drexler was a local locksmith who had been a member of the militarist Fatherland Party during World War I and was bitterly opposed to the armistice of November 1918 and the revolutionary upheavals that followed. Drexler followed the views of militant nationalists of the day, such as opposing the Treaty of Versailles, having antisemitic, anti-monarchist and anti-Marxist views, as well as believing in the superiority of Germans whom they claimed to be part of the Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk). However, he also accused international capitalism of being a Jewish-dominated movement and denounced capitalists for war profiteering in World War I. Drexler saw the political violence and instability in Germany as the result of the Weimar Republic being out-of-touch with the masses, especially the lower classes. Drexler emphasised the need for a synthesis of vlkisch nationalism with a form of economic socialism, in order to create a popular nationalist-oriented workers' movement that could challenge the rise of Communism and internationalist politics. These were all well-known themes popular with various Weimar paramilitary groups such as the Freikorps.

Drexler's movement received attention and support from some influential figures. Supporter Dietrich Eckart, a well-to-do journalist, brought military figure Felix Graf von Bothmer, a prominent supporter of the concept of "national socialism", to address the movement. Later in 1918, Karl Harrer (a journalist and member of the Thule Society) convinced Drexler and several others to form the Politischer Arbeiter-Zirkel (Political Workers' Circle). The members met periodically for discussions with themes of nationalism and racism directed against Jewish people. In December 1918, Drexler decided that a new political party should be formed, based on the political principles that he endorsed, by combining his branch of the Workers' Committee for a good Peace with the Political Workers' Circle.

On 5 January 1919, Drexler created a new political party and proposed it should be named the "German Socialist Workers' Party", but Harrer objected to the term "socialist"; so the term was removed and the party was named the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). To ease concerns among potential middle-class supporters, Drexler made clear that unlike Marxists the party supported the middle-class and that its socialist policy was meant to give social welfare to German citizens deemed part of the Aryan race. They became one of many vlkisch movements that existed in Germany. Like other vlkisch groups, the DAP advocated the belief that through profit-sharing instead of socialisation Germany should become a unified "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) rather than a society divided along class and party lines. This ideology was explicitly antisemitic. As early as 1920, the party was raising money by selling a tobacco called Anti-Semit.

From the outset, the DAP was opposed to non-nationalist political movements, especially on the left, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Members of the DAP saw themselves as fighting against "Bolshevism" and anyone considered a part of or aiding so-called "international Jewry". The DAP was also deeply opposed to the Treaty of Versailles. The DAP did not attempt to make itself public and meetings were kept in relative secrecy, with public speakers discussing what they thought of Germany's present state of affairs, or writing to like-minded societies in Northern Germany.

The DAP was a comparatively small group with fewer than 60 members. Nevertheless, it attracted the attention of the German authorities, who were suspicious of any organisation that appeared to have subversive tendencies. In July 1919, while stationed in Munich, army Gefreiter Adolf Hitler was appointed a Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklrungskommando (reconnaissance unit) of the Reichswehr (army) by Captain Mayr, the head of the Education and Propaganda Department (Dept Ib/P) in Bavaria. Hitler was assigned to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the DAP. While attending a party meeting on 12 September 1919 at Munich's Sterneckerbru, Hitler became involved in a heated argument with a visitor, Professor Baumann, who questioned the soundness of Gottfried Feder's arguments against capitalism; Baumann proposed that Bavaria should break away from Prussia and found a new South German nation with Austria. In vehemently attacking the man's arguments, Hitler made an impression on the other party members with his oratorical skills; according to Hitler, the "professor" left the hall acknowledging unequivocal defeat. Drexler encouraged him to join the DAP. On the orders of his army superiors, Hitler applied to join the party and within a week was accepted as party member 555 (the party began counting membership at 500 to give the impression they were a much larger party). Among the party's earlier members were Ernst Rhm of the Army's District Command VII; Dietrich Eckart, who has been called the spiritual father of National Socialism; then-University of Munich student Rudolf Hess; Freikorps soldier Hans Frank; and Alfred Rosenberg, often credited as the philosopher of the movement. All were later prominent in the Nazi regime.

Hitler later claimed to be the seventh party member (he was in fact the seventh executive member of the party's central committee and he would later wear the Golden Party Badge number one). Anton Drexler drafted a letter to Hitler in 1940which was never sentthat contradicts Hitler's later claim:

No one knows better than you yourself, my Fhrer, that you were never the seventh member of the party, but at best the seventh member of the committee... And a few years ago I had to complain to a party office that your first proper membership card of the DAP, bearing the signatures of Schssler and myself, was falsified, with the number 555 being erased and number 7 entered.

Hitler's first DAP speech was held in the Hofbrukeller on 16 October 1919. He was the second speaker of the evening, and spoke to 111 people. Hitler later declared that this was when he realised he could really "make a good speech". At first, Hitler spoke only to relatively small groups, but his considerable oratory and propaganda skills were appreciated by the party leadership. With the support of Anton Drexler, Hitler became chief of propaganda for the party in early 1920. Hitler began to make the party more public, and organised its biggest meeting yet of 2,000 people on 24 February 1920 in the Staatliches Hofbruhaus in Mnchen. Such was the significance of this particular move in publicity that Karl Harrer resigned from the party in disagreement. It was in this speech that Hitler enunciated the twenty-five points of the German Workers' Party manifesto that had been drawn up by Drexler, Feder and himself. Through these points he gave the organisation a much bolder stratagem with a clear foreign policy (abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, a Greater Germany, Eastern expansion and exclusion of Jews from citizenship) and among his specific points were: confiscation of war profits, abolition of unearned incomes, the State to share profits of land and land for national needs to be taken away without compensation. In general, the manifesto was antisemitic, anti-capitalist, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist and anti-liberal. To increase its appeal to larger segments of the population, on the same day as Hitler's Hofbruhaus speech on 24 February 1920, the DAP changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ("National Socialist German Workers' Party", or Nazi Party).[d] The word "Socialist" was added by the party's executive committee (at the suggestion of Rudolf Jung), over Hitler's initial objections,[e] in order to help appeal to left-wing workers.

In 1920, the Nazi Party officially announced that only persons of "pure Aryan descent [rein arischer Abkunft]" could become party members and if the person had a spouse, the spouse also had to be a "racially pure" Aryan. Party members could not be related either directly or indirectly to a so-called "non-Aryan". Even before it had become legally forbidden by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the Nazis banned sexual relations and marriages between party members and Jews. Party members found guilty of Rassenschande ("racial defilement") were persecuted heavily. Some members were even sentenced to death.

Hitler quickly became the party's most active orator, appearing in public as a speaker 31 times within the first year after his self-discovery. Crowds began to flock to hear his speeches. Hitler always spoke about the same subjects: the Treaty of Versailles and the Jewish question. This deliberate technique and effective publicising of the party contributed significantly to his early success, about which a contemporary poster wrote: "Since Herr Hitler is a brilliant speaker, we can hold out the prospect of an extremely exciting evening".[pageneeded] Over the following months, the party continued to attract new members, while remaining too small to have any real significance in German politics. By the end of the year, party membership was recorded at 2,000, many of whom Hitler and Rhm had brought into the party personally, or for whom Hitler's oratory had been their reason for joining.

Hitler's talent as an orator and his ability to draw new members, combined with his characteristic ruthlessness, soon made him the dominant figure. However, while Hitler and Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin in June 1921, a mutiny broke out within the party in Munich. Members of its executive committee wanted to merge with the rival German Socialist Party (DSP). Upon returning to Munich on 11 July, Hitler angrily tendered his resignation. The committee members realised that his resignation would mean the end of the party. Hitler announced he would rejoin on condition that he would replace Drexler as party chairman, and that the party headquarters would remain in Munich. The committee agreed, and he rejoined the party on 26 July as member 3,680. Hitler continued to face some opposition within the NSDAP, as his opponents had Hermann Esser expelled from the party and they printed 3,000 copies of a pamphlet attacking Hitler as a traitor to the party. In the following days, Hitler spoke to several packed houses and defended himself and Esser to thunderous applause.

His strategy proved successful; at a special party congress on 29 July 1921, he replaced Drexler as party chairman by a vote of 533to1. The committee was dissolved, and Hitler was granted nearly absolute powers as the party's sole leader. He would hold the post for the remainder of his life. Hitler soon acquired the title Fhrer ("leader") and after a series of sharp internal conflicts it was accepted that the party would be governed by the Fhrerprinzip ("leader principle"). Under this principle, the party was a highly centralised entity that functioned strictly from the top down, with Hitler at the apex as the party's absolute leader. Hitler saw the party as a revolutionary organisation, whose aim was the overthrow of the Weimar Republic, which he saw as controlled by the socialists, Jews and the "November criminals" who had betrayed the German soldiers in 1918. The SA ("storm troopers", also known as "Brownshirts") were founded as a party militia in 1921 and began violent attacks on other parties.

For Hitler, the twin goals of the party were always German nationalist expansionism and antisemitism. These two goals were fused in his mind by his belief that Germany's external enemiesBritain, France and the Soviet Unionwere controlled by the Jews and that Germany's future wars of national expansion would necessarily entail a war of annihilation against them.[pageneeded] For Hitler and his principal lieutenants, national and racial issues were always dominant. This was symbolised by the adoption as the party emblem of the swastika. In German nationalist circles, the swastika was considered a symbol of an "Aryan race" and it symbolised the replacement of the Christian Cross with allegiance to a National Socialist State.

The Nazi Party grew significantly during 1921 and 1922, partly through Hitler's oratorical skills, partly through the SA's appeal to unemployed young men, and partly because there was a backlash against socialist and liberal politics in Bavaria as Germany's economic problems deepened and the weakness of the Weimar regime became apparent. The party recruited former World WarI soldiers, to whom Hitler as a decorated frontline veteran could particularly appeal, as well as small businessmen and disaffected former members of rival parties. Nazi rallies were often held in beer halls, where downtrodden men could get free beer. The Hitler Youth was formed for the children of party members. The party also formed groups in other parts of Germany. Julius Streicher in Nuremberg was an early recruit and became editor of the racist magazine Der Strmer. In December 1920, the Nazi Party had acquired a newspaper, the Vlkischer Beobachter, of which its leading ideologist Alfred Rosenberg became editor. Others to join the party around this time were Heinrich Himmler and World War I flying ace Hermann Gring.

On 31 October 1922, a fascist party with similar policies and objectives came into power in Italy, the National Fascist Party, under the leadership of the charismatic Benito Mussolini. The Fascists, like the Nazis, promoted a national rebirth of their country, as they opposed communism and liberalism; appealed to the working-class; opposed the Treaty of Versailles; and advocated the territorial expansion of their country. Hitler was inspired by Mussolini and the Fascists, beginning to adopt elements of the Fascist's and Mussolini for the Nazi Party and himself. The Italian Fascists also used a straight-armed Roman salute and wore black-shirted uniforms; Hitler would later borrow their use of the straight-armed salute as a Nazi salute.

When the Fascists took control of Italy through their coup d'tat called the "March on Rome", Hitler began planning his own coup less than a month later. In January 1923, France occupied the Ruhr industrial region as a result of Germany's failure to meet its reparations payments. This led to economic chaos, the resignation of Wilhelm Cuno's government and an attempt by the German Communist Party (KPD) to stage a revolution. The reaction to these events was an upsurge of nationalist sentiment. Nazi Party membership grew sharply to about 20,000. By November 1923, Hitler had decided that the time was right for an attempt to seize power in Munich, in the hope that the Reichswehr (the post-war German military) would mutiny against the Berlin government and join his revolt. In this, he was influenced by former General Erich Ludendorff, who had become a supporterthough not a memberof the Nazis.

On the night of 8 November, the Nazis used a patriotic rally in a Munich beer hall to launch an attempted putsch ("coup d'tat"). This so-called Beer Hall Putsch attempt failed almost at once when the local Reichswehr commanders refused to support it. On the morning of 9 November, the Nazis staged a march of about 2,000 supporters through Munich in an attempt to rally support. Troops opened fire and 16 Nazis were killed. Hitler, Ludendorff and a number of others were arrested and were tried for treason in March 1924. Hitler and his associates were given very lenient prison sentences. While Hitler was in prison, he wrote his semi-autobiographical political manifesto Mein Kampf ("My Struggle").

The Nazi Party was banned on 9 November 1923; however, with the support of the nationalist Vlkisch-Social Bloc (Vlkisch-Sozialer Block), it continued to operate under the name "German Party" (Deutsche Partei or DP) from 1924 to 1925. The Nazis failed to remain unified in the DP, as in the north, the right-wing Volkish nationalist supporters of the Nazis moved to the new German Vlkisch Freedom Party, leaving the north's left-wing Nazi members, such as Joseph Goebbels retaining support for the party.

Adolf Hitler was released from prison on 20 December 1924. On 16 February 1925, Hitler convinced the Bavarian authorities to lift the ban on the NSDAP and the party was formally refounded on 26 February 1925, with Hitler as its undisputed leader. The new Nazi Party was no longer a paramilitary organisation and disavowed any intention of taking power by force. In any case, the economic and political situation had stabilised and the extremist upsurge of 1923 had faded, so there was no prospect of further revolutionary adventures. The Nazi Party of 1925 was divided into the "Leadership Corps" (Korps der politischen Leiter) appointed by Hitler and the general membership (Parteimitglieder). The party and the SA were kept separate and the legal aspect of the party's work was emphasised. In a sign of this, the party began to admit women. The SA and the SS members (the latter founded in 1925 as Hitler's bodyguard, and known originally as the Schutzkommando) had to all be regular party members.

In the 1920s, the Nazi Party expanded beyond its Bavarian base. Catholic Bavaria maintained its right-wing nostalgia for a Catholic monarch;[citation needed] and Westphalia, along with working-class "Red Berlin", were always the Nazis' weakest areas electorally, even during the Third Reich itself. The areas of strongest Nazi support were in rural Protestant areas such as Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg, Pomerania and East Prussia. Depressed working-class areas such as Thuringia also produced a strong Nazi vote, while the workers of the Ruhr and Hamburg largely remained loyal to the Social Democrats, the Communist Party of Germany or the Catholic Centre Party. Nuremberg remained a Nazi Party stronghold, and the first Nuremberg Rally was held there in 1927. These rallies soon became massive displays of Nazi paramilitary power and attracted many recruits. The Nazis' strongest appeal was to the lower middle-classesfarmers, public servants, teachers and small businessmenwho had suffered most from the inflation of the 1920s, so who feared Bolshevism more than anything else. The small business class was receptive to Hitler's antisemitism, since it blamed Jewish big business for its economic problems. University students, disappointed at being too young to have served in the War of 19141918 and attracted by the Nazis' radical rhetoric, also became a strong Nazi constituency. By 1929, the party had 130,000 members.

The party's nominal Deputy Leader was Rudolf Hess, but he had no real power in the party. By the early 1930s, the senior leaders of the party after Hitler were Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Gring. Beneath the Leadership Corps were the party's regional leaders, the Gauleiters, each of whom commanded the party in his Gau ("region"). Goebbels began his ascent through the party hierarchy as Gauleiter of Berlin-Brandenburg in 1926. Streicher was Gauleiter of Franconia, where he published his antisemitic newspaper Der Strmer. Beneath the Gauleiter were lower-level officials, the Kreisleiter ("county leaders"), Zellenleiter ("cell leaders") and Blockleiter ("block leaders"). This was a strictly hierarchical structure in which orders flowed from the top and unquestioning loyalty was given to superiors. Only the SA retained some autonomy. Being composed largely of unemployed workers, many SA men took the Nazis' socialist rhetoric seriously. At this time, the Hitler salute (borrowed from the Italian fascists) and the greeting "Heil Hitler!" were adopted throughout the party.

The Nazis contested elections to the national parliament (the Reichstag) and to the state legislature (the Landtage) from 1924, although at first with little success. The "National Socialist Freedom Movement" polled 3% of the vote in the December 1924 Reichstag elections and this fell to 2.6% in 1928. State elections produced similar results. Despite these poor results and despite Germany's relative political stability and prosperity during the later 1920s, the Nazi Party continued to grow. This was partly because Hitler, who had no administrative ability, left the party organisation to the head of the secretariat, Philipp Bouhler, the party treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and business manager Max Amann. The party had a capable propaganda head in Gregor Strasser, who was promoted to national organizational leader in January 1928. These men gave the party efficient recruitment and organizational structures. The party also owed its growth to the gradual fading away of competitor nationalist groups, such as the German National People's Party (DNVP). As Hitler became the recognised head of the German nationalists, other groups declined or were absorbed.

Despite these strengths, the Nazi Party might never have come to power had it not been for the Great Depression and its effects on Germany. By 1930, the German economy was beset with mass unemployment and widespread business failures. The Social Democrats and Communists were bitterly divided and unable to formulate an effective solution: this gave the Nazis their opportunity and Hitler's message, blaming the crisis on the Jewish financiers and the Bolsheviks, resonated with wide sections of the electorate. At the September 1930 Reichstag elections, the Nazis won 18% of the votes and became the second-largest party in the Reichstag after the Social Democrats. Hitler proved to be a highly effective campaigner, pioneering the use of radio and aircraft for this purpose. His dismissal of Strasser and his appointment of Goebbels as the party's propaganda chief were major factors. While Strasser had used his position to promote his own leftish version of national socialism, Goebbels was completely loyal to Hitler, and worked only to improve Hitler's image.

The 1930 elections changed the German political landscape by weakening the traditional nationalist parties, the DNVP and the DVP, leaving the Nazis as the chief alternative to the discredited Social Democrats and the Zentrum, whose leader, Heinrich Brning, headed a weak minority government. The inability of the democratic parties to form a united front, the self-imposed isolation of the Communists and the continued decline of the economy, all played into Hitler's hands. He now came to be seen as de facto leader of the opposition and donations poured into the Nazi Party's coffers. Some major business figures, such as Fritz Thyssen, were Nazi supporters and gave generously and some Wall Street figures were allegedly involved,[citation needed] but many other businessmen were suspicious of the extreme nationalist tendencies of the Nazis and preferred to support the traditional conservative parties instead.

During 1931 and into 1932, Germany's political crisis deepened. Hitler ran for president against the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg in March 1932, polling 30% in the first round and 37% in the second against Hindenburg's 49% and 53%. By now the SA had 400,000 members and its running street battles with the SPD and Communist paramilitaries (who also fought each other) reduced some German cities to combat zones. Paradoxically, although the Nazis were among the main instigators of this disorder, part of Hitler's appeal to a frightened and demoralised middle class was his promise to restore law and order. Overt antisemitism was played down in official Nazi rhetoric, but was never far from the surface. Germans voted for Hitler primarily because of his promises to revive the economy (by unspecified means), to restore German greatness and overturn the Treaty of Versailles and to save Germany from communism. On 24 April 1932, the Free State of Prussia elections to the Landtag resulted in 36% of the votes and 162 seats for the NSDAP.

On 20 July 1932, the Prussian government was ousted by a coup, the Preussenschlag; a few days later at the July 1932 Reichstag election the Nazis made another leap forward, polling 37% and becoming the largest party in parliament by a wide margin. Furthermore, the Nazis and the Communists between them won 52% of the vote and a majority of seats. Since both parties opposed the established political system and neither would join or support any ministry, this made the formation of a majority government impossible. The result was weak ministries governing by decree. Under Comintern directives, the Communists maintained their policy of treating the Social Democrats as the main enemy, calling them "social fascists", thereby splintering opposition to the Nazis.[f] Later, both the Social Democrats and the Communists accused each other of having facilitated Hitler's rise to power by their unwillingness to compromise.

Chancellor Franz von Papen called another Reichstag election in November, hoping to find a way out of this impasse. The electoral result was the same, with the Nazis and the Communists winning 50% of the vote between them and more than half the seats, rendering this Reichstag no more workable than its predecessor. However, support for the Nazis had fallen to 33.1%, suggesting that the Nazi surge had passed its peakpossibly because the worst of the Depression had passed, possibly because some middle-class voters had supported Hitler in July as a protest, but had now drawn back from the prospect of actually putting him into power. The Nazis interpreted the result as a warning that they must seize power before their moment passed. Had the other parties united, this could have been prevented, but their shortsightedness made a united front impossible. Papen, his successor Kurt von Schleicher and the nationalist press magnate Alfred Hugenberg spent December and January in political intrigues that eventually persuaded President Hindenburg that it was safe to appoint Hitler as Reich Chancellor, at the head of a cabinet including only a minority of Nazi ministerswhich he did on 30 January 1933.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany.[g] However, a majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as being a far-right form of politics.[pageneeded] When asked in an interview in 1934 whether the Nazis were "bourgeois right-wing" as alleged by their opponents, Hitler responded that Nazism was not exclusively for any class and indicated that it favoured neither the left nor the right, but preserved "pure" elements from both "camps" by stating: "From the camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism".

The votes that the Nazis received in the 1932 elections established the Nazi Party as the largest parliamentary faction of the Weimar Republic government. Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.

The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 gave Hitler a pretext for suppressing his political opponents. The following day he persuaded the Reich's President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended most civil liberties. The NSDAP won the parliamentary election on 5 March 1933 with 44% of votes, but failed to win an absolute majority. After the election, hundreds of thousands of new members joined the party for opportunistic reasons, most of them civil servants and white-collar workers. They were nicknamed the "casualties of March" (German: Mrzgefallenen) or "March violets" (German: Mrzveilchen). To protect the party from too many non-ideological turncoats who were viewed by the so-called "old fighters" (alte Kmpfer) with some mistrust, the party issued a freeze on admissions that remained in force from May 1933 to 1937.

On 23 March, the parliament passed the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave the cabinet the right to enact laws without the consent of parliament. In effect, this gave Hitler dictatorial powers. Now possessing virtually absolute power, the Nazis established totalitarian control as they abolished labour unions and other political parties and imprisoned their political opponents, first at wilde Lager, improvised camps, then in concentration camps. Nazi Germany had been established, yet the Reichswehr remained impartial. Nazi power over Germany remained virtual, not absolute.

During June and July 1933, all competing parties were either outlawed or dissolved themselves and subsequently the Law against the founding of new parties of 14 July 1933 legally established the Nazi Party's monopoly. On 1 December 1933, the Law to secure the unity of party and state entered into force, which was the base for a progressive intertwining of party structures and state apparatus. By this law, the SAactually a party divisionwas given quasi-governmental authority and their leader was co-opted as an ex officio cabinet member. By virtue of a 30 January 1934 Law concerning the reorganisation of the Reich, the Lnder (states) lost their statehood and were demoted to administrative divisions of the Reich's government (Gleichschaltung). Effectively, they lost most of their power to the Gaue that were originally just regional divisions of the party, but took over most competencies of the state administration in their respective sectors.

During the Rhm Purge of 30 June to 2 July 1934 (also known as the "Night of the Long Knives"), Hitler disempowered the SA's leadershipmost of whom belonged to the Strasserist (national revolutionary) faction within the NSDAPand ordered them killed. He accused them of having conspired to stage a coup d'tat, but it is believed that this was only a pretence to justify the suppression of any intraparty opposition. The purge was executed by the SS, assisted by the Gestapo and Reichswehr units. Aside from Strasserist Nazis, they also murdered anti-Nazi conservative figures like former chancellor von Schleicher. After this, the SA continued to exist but lost much of its importance, while the role of the SS grew significantly. Formerly only a sub-organisation of the SA, it was made into a separate organisation of the NSDAP in July 1934.

After the death of President Hindenburg on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of party leader, head of state and chief of government in one, taking the title of Fhrer und Reichskanzler. The Chancellery of the Fhrer, officially an organisation of the Nazi Party, took over the functions of the Office of the President (a government agency), blurring the distinction between structures of party and state even further. The SS increasingly exerted police functions, a development which was formally documented by the merger of the offices of Reichsfhrer-SS and Chief of the German Police on 17 June 1936, as the position was held by Heinrich Himmler who derived his authority directly from Hitler. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD, formally the "Security Service of the Reichsfhrer-SS") that had been created in 1931 as an intraparty intelligence became the de facto intelligence agency of Nazi Germany. It was put under the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in 1939, which then coordinated SD, Gestapo and criminal police, therefore functioning as a hybrid organisation of state and party structures.

Officially, the Third Reich lasted only 12 years. The Instrument of Surrender was signed by representatives of the German High Command at Berlin, on 8 May 1945, when the war ended in Europe. The defeat of Germany in World War II marked the end of the Nazi Germany era. The party was formally abolished on 10 October 1945 by the Allied Control Council and denazification began, along with trials of major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg. Part of the Potsdam Agreement called for the destruction of the Nationalist Socialist Party alongside the requirement for the reconstruction of the German political life. In addition, the Control Council Law no. 2 Providing for the Termination and Liquidation of the Nazi Organization specified the abolition of 52 other Nazi affiliated and supervised organisations and prohibited their activities. The denazification was carried out in Germany and continued until the onset of the Cold War.[pageneeded]

Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi Party led regime, assisted by collaborationist governments and recruits from occupied countries, was responsible for the deaths of at least eleven million people, including 5.5 to 6million Jews (representing two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe), and between 200,000 and 1,500,000 Romani people. The estimated total number includes the killing of nearly two million non-Jewish Poles, over three million Soviet prisoners of war, communists, and other political opponents, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled.

The National Socialist Programme was a formulation of the policies of the party. It contained 25 points and is therefore also known as the "25-point plan" or "25-point programme". It was the official party programme, with minor changes, from its proclamation as such by Hitler in 1920, when the party was still the German Workers' Party, until its dissolution.

At the top of the Nazi Party was the party chairman ("Der Fhrer"), who held absolute power and full command over the party. All other party offices were subordinate to his position and had to depend on his instructions. In 1934, Hitler founded a separate body for the chairman, Chancellery of the Fhrer, with its own sub-units.

Below the Fhrer's chancellery was first the "Staff of the Deputy Fhrer", headed by Rudolf Hess from 21 April 1933 to 10 May 1941; and then the "Party Chancellery" (Parteikanzlei), headed by Martin Bormann.

Directly subjected to the Fhrer were the Reichsleiter ("Reich Leader(s)"the singular and plural forms are identical in German), whose number was gradually increased to eighteen. They held power and influence comparable to the Reich Ministers' in Hitler's Cabinet. The eighteen Reichsleiter formed the "Reich Leadership of the Nazi Party" (Reichsleitung der NSDAP), which was established at the so-called Brown House in Munich. Unlike a Gauleiter, a Reichsleiter did not have individual geographic areas under their command, but were responsible for specific spheres of interest.

The Nazi Party had a number of party offices dealing with various political and other matters. These included:

In addition to the Nazi Party proper, several paramilitary groups existed which "supported" Nazi aims. All members of these paramilitary organisations were required to become regular Nazi Party members first and could then enlist in the group of their choice. An exception was the Waffen-SS, considered the military arm of the SS and Nazi Party, which during the Second World War allowed members to enlist without joining the Nazi Party. Foreign volunteers of the Waffen-SS were also not required to be members of the Nazi Party, although many joined local nationalist groups from their own countries with the same aims. Police officers, including members of the Gestapo, frequently held SS rank for administrative reasons (known as "rank parity") and were likewise not required to be members of the Nazi Party.

A vast system of Nazi Party paramilitary ranks developed for each of the various paramilitary groups. This was part of the process of Gleichschaltung with the paramilitary and auxiliary groups swallowing existing associations and federations after the Party was flooded by millions of membership applications.

The major Nazi Party paramilitary groups were as follows:

The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary group divided into an adult leadership corps and a general membership open to boys aged fourteen to eighteen. The League of German Girls was the equivalent group for girls.

Certain nominally independent organisations had their own legal representation and own property, but were supported by the Nazi Party. Many of these associated organisations were labour unions of various professions. Some were older organisations that were nazified according to the Gleichschaltung policy after the 1933 takeover.

The employees of large businesses with international operations such as Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, and Commerzbank were mostly party members. All German businesses abroad were also required to have their own Nazi Party Ausland-Organization liaison men, which enabled the party leadership to obtain updated and excellent intelligence on the actions of the global corporate elites.[pageneeded]

For the purpose of centralisation in the Gleichschaltung process a rigidly hierarchal structure was established in the Nazi Party, which it later carried through in the whole of Germany in order to consolidate total power under the person of Hitler (Fhrerstaat). It was regionally sub-divided into a number of Gaue (singular: Gau) headed by a Gauleiter, who received their orders directly from Hitler. The name (originally a term for sub-regions of the Holy Roman Empire headed by a Gaugraf) for these new provincial structures was deliberately chosen because of its mediaeval connotations. The term is approximately equivalent to the English shire.

While the Nazis maintained the nominal existence of state and regional governments in Germany itself, this policy was not extended to territories acquired after 1937. Even in German-speaking areas such as Austria, state and regional governments were formally disbanded as opposed to just being dis-empowered.

After the Anschluss a new type of administrative unit was introduced called a Reichsgau. In these territories the Gauleiters also held the position of Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) thereby formally combining the spheres of both party and state offices. The establishment of this type of district was subsequently carried out for any further territorial annexations of Germany both before and during World War II. Even the former territories of Prussia were never formally re-integrated into what was then Germany's largest state after being re-taken in the 1939 Polish campaign.

The Gaue and Reichsgaue (state or province) were further sub-divided into Kreise (counties) headed by a Kreisleiter, which were in turn sub-divided into Zellen (cells) and Blcke (blocks), headed by a Zellenleiter and Blockleiter respectively.

A reorganisation of the Gaue was enacted on 1 October 1928. The given numbers were the official ordering numbers. The statistics are from 1941, for which the Gau organisation of that moment in time forms the basis. Their size and populations are not exact; for instance, according to the official party statistics the Gau Kurmark/Mark Brandenburg was the largest in the German Reich.[pageneeded] By 1941, there were 42 territorial Gaue for Greater Germany.[h] Of these, 10 were designated as Reichsgaue: 7 of them for Austria, one for the Sudetenland (annexed from Czechoslovakia) and two for the areas annexed from Poland and the Free City of Danzig after the joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 at the onset of World War II. Getting the leadership of the individual Gaue to co-operate with one another proved difficult at times since there was constant administrative and financial jockeying for control going on between them.

The first table below describes the organizational structure for the Gaue that existed before their dissolution in 1945. Information on former Gaue (that were either renamed, or dissolved by being divided or merged with other Gaue) is provided in the second table.

Later Gaue:

The numbering is not based on any official former ranking, but merely listed alphabetically. Gaue that were simply renamed without territorial changes bear the designation RN in the column "later became." Gaue that were divided into more than one Gau bear the designation D in the column "later became." Gaue that were merged with other Gaue (or occupied territory) bear the designation M in the column "together with."

The irregular Swiss branch of the Nazi Party also established a number of Party Gaue in that country, most of them named after their regional capitals. These included Gau Basel-Solothurn, Gau Schaffhausen, Gau Luzern, Gau Bern and Gau Zrich. The Gau Ostschweiz (East Switzerland) combined the territories of three cantons: St. Gallen, Thurgau and Appenzell.

The general membership of the Nazi Party mainly consisted of the urban and rural lower middle classes. 7% belonged to the upper class, another 7% were peasants, 35% were industrial workers and 51% were what can be described as middle class. In early 1933, just before Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship, the party showed an under-representation of "workers", who made up 30% of the membership but 46% of German society. Conversely, white-collar employees (19% of members and 12% of Germans), the self-employed (20% of members and 10% of Germans) and civil servants (15% of members and 5% of the German population) had joined in proportions greater than their share of the general population. These members were affiliated with local branches of the party, of which there were 1,378 throughout the country in 1928. In 1932, the number had risen to 11,845, reflecting the party's growth in this period.

When it came to power in 1933, the Nazi Party had over 2 million members. In 1939, the membership total rose to 5.3 million with 81% being male and 19% being female. It continued to attract many more and by 1945 the party reached its peak of 8 million with 63% being male and 37% being female (about 10% of the German population of 80 million).

Nazi members with military ambitions were encouraged to join the Waffen-SS, but a great number enlisted in the Wehrmacht and even more were drafted for service after World War II began. Early regulations required that all Wehrmacht members be non-political and any Nazi member joining in the 1930s was required to resign from the Nazi Party.

However, this regulation was soon waived and full Nazi Party members served in the Wehrmacht in particular after the outbreak of World War II. The Wehrmacht Reserves also saw a high number of senior Nazis enlisting, with Reinhard Heydrich and Fritz Todt joining the Luftwaffe, as well as Karl Hanke who served in the army.

The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that junior officers in the army were inclined to be especially zealous National Socialists with a third of them having joined the Nazi Party by 1941. Reinforcing the work of the junior leaders were the National Socialist Leadership Guidance Officers, which were created with the purpose of indoctrinating the troops for the "war of extermination" against Soviet Russia. Among higher-ranking officers, 29% were NSDAP members by 1941.

In 1926, the party formed a special division to engage the student population, known as the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB). A group for university lecturers, the National Socialist German University Lecturers' League (NSDDB), also existed until July 1944.

The National Socialist Women's League was the women's organization of the party and by 1938 it had approximately 2 million members.

Party members who lived outside Germany were pooled into the Auslands-Organisation (NSDAP/AO, "Foreign Organization"). The organisation was limited only to so-called "Imperial Germans" (citizens of the German Empire); and "Ethnic Germans" (Volksdeutsche), who did not hold German citizenship were not permitted to join.

Under Bene decree No. 16/1945 Coll., in case of citizens of Czechoslovakia membership of the Nazi Party was punishable by between five and twenty years of imprisonment.

Deutsche Gemeinschaft was a branch of the Nazi Party founded in 1919, created for Germans with Volksdeutsche status. It is not to be confused with the post-war right-wing Deutsche Gemeinschaft[de], which was founded in 1949.

Notable members included:[pageneeded]

Informational notes

Citations

Bibliography

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Nazi Party - Wikipedia

Nobody wants to be a Russian footcloth – TVP World

The Frenchman came from the left, the German was a conservative. Both showed critical and independent thinking. They were a long way from conformism or group thought. This enriches the correspondence that they had with each other.

When Russia justifies its aggression on Ukraine in terms of the fight against Nazism, few in western countries take this assertion seriously. The murder and rape that Russian invaders undertake damage the image of the country that sent them there. But Russia hails itself as the inheritor of the Soviet Union or the conqueror of the Third Reich. But if the Kremlin aways reaches for the anti-Nazi rhetoric, it reflects its propaganda strength.

It is worthwhile reading the well-reviewed book Fascism and Communism (Translated as A Close Enemy, Communism and Fascism in the 20th Century) by Franois Furet and Ernst Nolte, recently translated into Polish by the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw. This is a collection of correspondence from 1996 and 1997 between Furet and Nolte, now both deceased. It is a discussion on the controversy surrounding totalitarianism

The starting point is the wide-ranging preface that Furet wrote in his book The Passing of an Illusion (which can be read in the above-mentioned A Close Enemy) an essay on the idea of communism in the twentieth century. Ernst Noltes thesis developed in the 1960s and stunned Furet. It concerned the roots of German national socialism. In short, it could be argued that if it were not for Nazism there would have been no Soviet communism.

Nolte attempted to rationalise the motivations that directed the Nazis. According to him, Hitlers project was a reaction to the threat from the Soviet Union and world communism. He maintains at the same time, that the mass extinction policy of the Third Reich against the Jews was modelled on earlier Bolshevik terror: the methods of the regime that the Nazis saw as enemies (hence the title of a close enemy referring to both totalitarianisms).

Nolte touched on the taboo subject in the public debate of the West and that of West Germany in particular. He argued a blasphemous proximity between Nazism and Communism. In addition, he maintained that the Nazis as far as genocide went, imitated that of the Bolsheviks. He questioned the status of the Holocaust as an exceptional and specifically German crime. He was attacked by left-wing intellectuals in the German Federal Republic for this reason. It must be remembered that he gained much sympathy from German organisations of post-war expellees, a feeling that he reciprocated.

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By Filip Memches

Translated by Jan Darasz

source:TVP Weekly

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Nobody wants to be a Russian footcloth - TVP World

Why Hitler adored Richard Wagner | Arts.21 – The Culture Magazine – DW (English)

For years, Hitler was a star guest at the Bayreuth Festival, the consecration site par excellence for Wagner's operas. The dictator saw himself as a Wagnerian and basically became a part of the Wagner family, which managed the composer's legacy. He even interfered in the organization of the festival, helping to decide on the program and staging.

The cult of Richard Wagner, who had died 50 years before Hitler came to power, was politically fueled by Hitler's presence. Wagner's music, in turn, fueled Hitler's delusions of grandeur. But how did Hitler come to idolize Wagner? Was it simply because of Wagner's anti-Semitism, which he gave free rein to in his infamous pamphlet "On Judaism [sic!] in Music"? Was it the Germanic heroic sagas that Wagner set to music and that Hitler was able to exploit for his ideology? Was it the pull of Wagner's music? In an interview with DW, medical historian James Kennaway describes it as "background music for megalomania. As if it had been created to accompany the German attack on Crete with the Ride of the Valkyries in the "weekly preview. Finally, what role does Hitlers own self-perception as an artist play in the affinity he felt with the composer - as Wagner expert Sven Friedrich analyzes?

With scholars and musicians, Kultur Arts Unveiledexplores how Hitler's fervent admiration of Wagner turned his music into the soundtrack of National Socialism. And what Hitler's appropriation of Wagner means for the way we deal with his music today.

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Why Hitler adored Richard Wagner | Arts.21 - The Culture Magazine - DW (English)

Commemoration of the Genocides of Sinti and Roma – Vindobona – Vienna International News

The Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen remembered the hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma who were killed by the Nazis in Europe.

"Half a million Sinti and Roma were victims of the greatest crime in human history. For a long time, their fate was suppressed, concealed, forgotten," Van der Bellen wrote today on Twitter. They and their descendants must make their efforts to have their culture and their suffering during the Nazi era recognized, the federal president continued. "We cannot undo the past. But we can shape the present to make the world a better place in a sustainable way."

(2/2) Der heutige Holocaust-Gedenktag fr Sinti und Roma ist ein Tag des Erinnerns & des In-Erinnerung-Rufens: Diskriminierung v. Minderheiten, Andersglubigen & Andersdenkenden, Unvershnlichkeit, Nationalismus & Sndenbockdenken haben keinen Platz in unserer Gesellschaft! (vdb)

Vienna Mayor Michael Ludwig (SP) said via Twitter, "In light of the genocide of European Roma and Sinti during the Nazi era and today's Day of Remembrance, it is a moral obligation to show solidarity with Europe's largest ethnic minority and to stand up against antiziganism."

Angesichts des Genozids an den europischen Roma und Sinti in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus und dem heutigen Gedenktag ist es eine moralische Verpflichtung, Solidaritt mit der grten ethnischen Minderheit Europas aufzuzeigen und sich gegen Antiziganismus zu wehren. /1

OSCE and Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

This day is also significant for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Roma and Sinti are still affected by discrimination today. That is why the OSCE advocates for the rights of Roma and wants to strengthen human rights in particularly affected areas.

Matteo Mecacci, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) said on Roma Genocide Remembrance Day that it is "unacceptable that Roma and Sinti communities are continuing to suffer so desperately from intolerance, systemic racism and discrimination wherever they live. Mecacci, therefore, reiterated the importance of learning from the past to combat prejudice, bias, and racism against Roma and Sinti today.

ODIHR and the Council of Europe have launched a joint Roma Genocide website that provides knowledge and information for governments, public institutions, universities, schools, and civil society organizations.

Roma Holocaust Memorial Day

The European Holocaust Memorial Day for Sinti and Roma, also known as the European Holocaust Memorial Day for Roma, commemorates the victims of the Porajmos, the genocide of European Sinti and Roma during the Nazi era, on August 2 each year. The total number of victims of the genocide is estimated at 220,000 to 500,000.

Unfortunately, to date, there has been no national implementation of the European Holocaust Memorial Day on August 2 in Austria, stressed Olga Voglauer (Greens), according to ORF. National days of remembrance are a worthy and important part of the culture of remembrance. According to Voglauer, this goes hand in hand with the recognition and condemnation of Porajmos, the genocide of the European Roma during the time of National Socialism.

OSCE

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Commemoration of the Genocides of Sinti and Roma - Vindobona - Vienna International News

Letter to the editor: Instituting Socialism 101 | Winchester Star | winchesterstar.com – The Winchester Star

How do you institute Socialism in a republic that lives and breathes the values of democracy, capitalism, intrapreneurial endeavors and freedom?

First, break the nations financial system. An objective analysis of todays outrageous spending habits by congress without developing an annual budget is a recipe for overspending and national bankruptcy. Yeah, lets pass another $1 trillion green new deal at a time of record inflation, negative GDP, and higher interest rates. The result is to make the people poor by overspending (devaluation of the dollar) over taxation and confiscation (i.e., the new IRS initiative) resulting in financial dependency on the federal government for your quality of life. Federal overspending is the gateway drug to government handouts and the evolution of authoritative regimes.

Second, turn our education system into a propaganda instrument to indoctrinate all children that America is bad versusteaching the virtues that have made our country great, and once upon a time the leader of the free world.

Third, and for the second try, institute a federalized healthcare system that treats everyone the same, but with limited access within a confined and constrained system. No thank you. Why do you think individuals from other countries practicing socialized medicine come to America for treatment?

While some reading this letter may conclude that our politicians do not have a clue how to run our country, I would submit to you, they know, and are doing exactly what they need to do to enrich themselves and remain in power.

David Eddy

Middletown

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Letter to the editor: Instituting Socialism 101 | Winchester Star | winchesterstar.com - The Winchester Star

Are You Young and Eager? Try the Trades – National Catholic Register

I have a deep respect for those who work in the trades. My father was a carpenter, and my brother is a builder. Yet, it is a career path that has fallen out of popularity in the last 20 years the average tradesman is 57 years old. Meanwhile, demand for good repairmen and contractors is outstripping supply.

This presents an amazing opportunity for young Catholics to serve many people and consequently earn a great income to provide for their family by entering such a profession. The question is, will they do it?

The trend for several years has been for young career-driven professionals to go into computer programming and software development or to enter the healthcare industry. Most workers consider big businesses to be safe, secure employers and thus highly desirable. The average American is uneasy about the volatility of owning or working for a small business. Huge companies like Walmart, Amazon, McDonalds, Kroger and IBM not to mention the biggest employer of all, the U.S. Government provide hundreds of thousands of jobs to Americans. So why should a young Catholic family man be willing to take the risk of owning or working in a small business?

Most small businesses fail in the first five years. The skills of an entrepreneur and owner-manager are different from those of a laborer and all three skill sets take time to learn. Plus, it can be difficult to find reliable crew members. At first glance, it doesnt seem worth it.

Catholic Romanticism and Socialism Unmasked

Thirty years ago it was popular in some Catholic circles to be nostalgic about medieval culture. As Quixotic readers of history and classic literature, we preferred to gloss over the trials and hardships of pre-industrial cultures and thought we should try to restore these civilizations. We tended to think that everything would be better if we lived a more primitive existence.

I was surprised to discover later in life that this mode of thinking was more influenced by Marx and Rousseau than Aquinas and Augustine. I realized utopias are completely impractical. I had rashly judged that if a profession or way of life didnt exist before the industrial revolution, it was probably bad. Instead of seeing opportunities in modern businesses, I saw only moral problems and corruption. These ideas left me paralyzed and fatalistic about my career. Since the restoration of Christendom and the agrarian age are not likely to be restored in ones lifetime, one might as well work for a big company and get that steady paycheck.

As I continued to research, I realized there is even more at work in our society underlying our cultural dysphoria. The current secular mind embraces an egalitarian ideal that insists all men be reduced to the lowest common denominator the minimum wage worker. Marx recognized only two classes of people the bourgeoisie (owners of capital) and the proletariat (the working class) and socialism insists on the reduction of all men to the proletariat for the sake of equality.

Josef Pieper, in his classic work Leisure: The Basis of Culture, defines being proletarian as being bound to the working-process. Pieper lists three conditions that bind the proletariat to the working-process:

Piepers anecdote to being a proletarian serf is likewise threefold a process he calls de-proletarianization ownership, limited state power and inner wealth. In short, families flourish economically through capital ownership which includes not just owning stocks, bonds, and real estate, but also businesses.

What is happening to the American ideal of owning ones own business? The socialist elite are desperately trying to eliminate middle-class business owners via crony-capitalist incentives for bigger businesses.

For the future of family life in this country, Catholics should push back.

Three Types of Workers

There are three types of necessary workers: laborers, managers and entrepreneurs. One person can wear all three hats, but most efficient, competitive businesses find a way to specialize by forming a team.

Take, for example, the roofing company I worked for in the first couple years of marriage. Bubba was the owner, entrepreneur and general manager. The foreman, Roger, was a manager and laborer. He took the work orders from Bubba and made it happen on the job site. Three of us were laborers who did most of the actual work, but that does not mean we deserved equal compensation with the bosses.

Catholic social teaching teaches that distributive justice demands the worker be paid in proportion to the contribution made to society. In our situation Bubba made the greatest contribution to the team because without his willingness to take on the risk of business ownership and his work as general manager, none of us would have had the opportunity to earn a risk-free paycheck. The entire success of the business fell on his shoulders. Business ownership requires a vast amount of mental work, networking, management and foresight. Aquinas affirms that those who take greater risk in business ought to be compensated with greater reward for success.

Similarly, a foreman is justly paid more than the laborers because he has more responsibility and greater skill which can be taught to less skilled laborers like myself. It takes a crew to roof a house efficiently.

The Future of Catholic Tradesman

There are three reasons why more Catholic youth should be pursuing a profession in the trades with the intention of owning or managing such a business in the future.

First, the trades, unlike some other small business opportunities, are in high demand and therefore present a lucrative income opportunity especially for owners and managers which should motivate men wanting to raise a family. It doesnt take much to stand out as a desirable tradesman in our current society and because of demand, as one of my former employers explained it, You can get paid to learn.

Second, we desperately need Catholic entrepreneurs and managers in the marketplace. Part of the problem with modern culture is that too many entrepreneurs are focused on entertainment prospects or tech-utopian, futuristic ventures that skew a Christian vision of reality. We need virtuous entrepreneurs to shape culture, employ family providers and provide customers with valuable goods and services. Everyone needs a dependable plumber, electrician, roofer and carpenter. The trades meet a very practical need for households.

Third, Catholic business owners in the trades will attract good Christian employees to their companies. Most people care more about the company culture than their paycheck. So, if one is hesitant to begin a career in the trades and work his way up because he is worried about having to hire drug addicts and other unreliable workers to compile his crew, he can learn to be the kind of business leader that attracts good reliable workers to his business. Its not that hard if one is dedicated to growing in the basic virtues of honesty, integrity, follow-through and authentic service. A good reputation will attract dependable crewmembers.

Sts. Josemara Escriv and John Paul II called for laymen to enter the public forum and do business. Businesses serve families and shape culture. Are you young and eager? Try the trades.

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Are You Young and Eager? Try the Trades - National Catholic Register

Opinion: BJP Gains As Others Put Self Before Party, Family Before Self – NDTV

There are two common ways of thinking about India's political history. One is that we have journeyed from Congress dominance to BJP dominance with a quarter-century of competitive coalitions in between. The other is that more or less from the outset, Indian politics has been defined not by class or ideology, but by the competitive mobilisation of caste, communal and regional identities.

The ideological history of our politics is a story less often told. And yet, from our first general election onwards, our national politics has usually been defined by ideological distinctions.

In 1952, after those first elections, India had a range of local and regional parties, and four national ones. Those four national parties each represented a distinct ideological orientation or tradition. One right-of-centre party, the Jan Sangh; one Marxist-Leninist party, the Communist Party of India; one non-Marxist, "indigenous" Left-wing party, the Socialists; and one big-tent or catch-all centrist party, the Congress. From the Jan Sangh on the right end of the spectrum, to the Communists on the left, they presented voters with a genuine range of views on India's future.

By 1962, there was a fifth ideological group - the free-market, liberal Swatantra Party. However, by the time of the 1967 election, both the Socialists and Communists had split into two wings. These splits allowed an increasingly unpopular Congress to hold on to its majority. By 1989, both had reunited, the Socialists (along with a number of ex-Congressmen) into the Janata Dal, the Communists into the alliance that we still know as the Left Front. Swatantra had faded away. Structurally, the election of 1989 looked a lot like 1952. Except that the Janata Dal, unlike its ancestor, was not really an ideological party, and the Communists were now confined to a handful of states.

In electoral terms, 1989 was the Indian Left's greatest triumph. Socialist or Communist parties won 198 seats - one more than the Congress. It was the Left that brought down Rajiv Gandhi, as they had his mother in 1977. But as in 1977, they did so in partnership with the Jan Sangh, now rechristened the BJP. It was a triumph, we know now, that elevated the partner on the right while undermining those on the left.

Three decades later, India is a country without a meaningful political Left. In 2019, the Communists won six seats, their fewest ever, with four of those on the DMK's coat-tails. Akhilesh Yadav describes himself on Twitter as the "Socialist Leader of India", but in reality and perception, none of the post-Janata parties is in fact Socialist. What they are, with the one exception of Nitish Kumar's JD(U), is dynastic.

With the Congress no longer an active aspirant for national power, this means that only one leg of the 1952 stool is left standing. Ideologically, there is only one game in our town.

Plenty has been written about the causes of the disappearance of India's Socialists and Communists. The Communists' failure to reckon with caste; the mutation of socialism, a movement with a broad set of principles, into the narrower politics of Mandal; the inability of the Left as a whole to respond to the twin shocks of 1991 (the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the dissolution of the Soviet Union) - all these played their part.

Three other factors deserve mention. India's Left parties, and recently also the Congress, have ceded wholesale to the BJP the terrain of nationalism and patriotism. They may feebly point to the non-participation of the BJP's forebears in the national movement, but to the voter of 2022, rather than 1947, the only nationalist narrative on offer is Hindutva.

India's communists were never nationalists: before and after Independence, they were always vulnerable to accusations of excessive affinity to foreign powers. The CPI also has the dubious distinction of being the only party other than the Muslim League to have supported Partition. The Socialists, by contrast, were active participants in the freedom struggle and advocates for strategic independence on the world stage. They were proud patriots, but their successors, decades removed from Independence, have declined to take up this aspect of their legacy.

Second, India's Leftists have been as addicted to infighting as its Hindu right is committed to unity. If, in Vinay Sitapati's apt phrase, "Hindu Fevicol" is the Sangh Parivar's greatest weapon, the Left - especially the Socialists - has the opposite habit of attracting human dynamite: charismatic, talented leaders who invariably place self before party.

Self before party, family before self. So goes the dharma of dynasticism. Dynasticism, which in the Indian context was invented by Indira Gandhi, is an incurable disease. It is also inimical to any intellectually honest form of Left politics. A party cannot credibly commit itself to equality, to the challenging of social hierarchies, or even simply to the public good, if its senior posts are assigned on the basis of birth. Dynastic parties in India can only offer a kind of post-ideological populism, or the representation of a particular community, or sub-nationalism. They are, after all, vehicles for the aggrandisement of a single family. Voters have long since caught on.

Yet, what should concern us, more than the eclipse of particular Left parties, is the consequences of the absence of any. We have come to take the absence of ideological contestation for granted. It is sometimes said that despite the decline of Left parties, India has a Left-wing consensus on economic matters. This view distorts both the nature of our political economy as well as what constitutes Leftism. It reduces "statism" to the state's capacity for the obstruction and intimidation of business and the distribution of private goods.

India's broader trajectory, briefly slowed but not reversed by Covid, has been precisely the opposite of a Left-wing consensus. In sector across sector, we are privatising the provision of public goods. Private security, private electricity, private education, private healthcare, private drinking water, even private air. The old criticism that the Indian state had no business running hotels and making wristwatches was well-founded. That doesn't mean it has no business other than building roads and delivering welfare schemes.

In the absence of a Left, our other long-standing political consensus - a preference for crony capitalism to either socialism or open competition - has never been stronger. It is no accident that no Opposition party has expended any energy challenging the BJP's electoral bonds scheme; they only complain about their small share of the takings.

Why do we need a Left? The Left, in the philosopher Richard Rorty's words, is "the party of hope". It begins with a critique of society as it is - of inequality and injustice in all its forms - and is optimistic about our collective capacity to improve.

But what is needed is not a revived version of the old Indian Left that engineered or earned its own downfall. What might a 21st-century Indian Left look like? It could genuinely commit itself to the annihilation of caste, and not merely to a rearrangement of the caste hierarchy, it could focus on health, education, and the environment, three of the biggest failures of the 20th-century Indian Left. It would need to embrace technological change, and offer a strategy for growth, not only redistribution.

Of its two failed predecessors, such a Left would have much more to learn - at least in positive terms - from the Socialists. While the Communists were mere intellectual importers, the Socialists could claim thinkers of genuine originality (to name just three: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia), who knew that Indian conditions required Indian answers. The difference between the Communists and Socialists is most often located on the question of caste. Just as central are gender equality and decentralisation. At their best, the Socialists actually took the former seriously; the latter is more desperately needed than ever.

Is there any chance of such a Left actually emerging? There is a political issue waiting for it - the central issue of our time. Jobs.

(Keshava Guha is a writer of literary and political journalism, and the author of 'Accidental Magic'.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.

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Opinion: BJP Gains As Others Put Self Before Party, Family Before Self - NDTV

National Socialism Will Destroy White People

Often around here you will read a basic critique of National Socialism: it still redistributes wealth, therefore is both dysgenic and unstable, and tends toward brutality to try to force this system to work.

You will also read a criticism of the type of Anti-Semitism that sees Jews as controlling the world through a shadowy conspiracy: this lets democracy off the hook, leaves the problem intact, creates atrocities, and leaves the problem intact.

Everyone wants a nice clear answer with square corners and a feeling of force behind it. Root out the problem, rip up the disease, get rid of the bad and leave only the good.

National Socialism is not this answer because it makes a more Right-wing version of the current system but leaves our core sickness intact while wasting our energy on pursuits that are not directly relevant to our goal.

In the National Socialism worldview, a tiny population the Jews of the world are somehow united (those who favor this view do not know Jews!) in controlling all of us for their devious plans.

Its first logical flaw is that if the Jews ran the world, they would not need us nor would bother to disguise what they are doing. At worst, they are one of many powerful moneyed lobbies buying into our democracies.

Its second logical flaw is that it portrays us as victim-idiots who are incompetent. Jews got where they did by being smart, valuing education, and focusing on making money instead of obtaining salvation from the (Jewish) god Jehovah.

If you teach all of us to be victims, and blame the Jews for being competent and smart, you have portrayed the mighty Aryan as a helpless idiot who is being manipulated through his own stupidity.

That is a very negative view to take of any population, least of all your own.

In reality, the people running us are stupid because the people choosing them the voters behave like idiots. Democracy is a game of optics and emotions, and sanity and realism always lose out to drama, pity, and rage.

When we had our kings, we had saner and smarter people running us, and none of the problems we had today. The mercantile middle classes overthrew their kings, and we got a mercantile order out of that. Everything is for sale, all is optics.

That is democracy as usual, and per democracy as usual, profiteers show up. When we have a war, people become billionaires selling weapons. When the voters endorse the New Green Deal, many more billionaires are minted.

Among those will be the foreign, not just Jews but Chinese, Saudis, Egyptians, Singaporeans, and Argentines. These groups will act in their own interests at the expense of Americans; every group behaves this way, acting in its own self-interest alone.

If you act like a victim, they will take you for all that you have. If you opt for an insane democracy, they will make money off of its stupid decisions, whether wars, Green New Deals, affirmative action, or welfare programs.

They will view you as idiots. When you have a democracy, they know you are paralyzed and that they can buy Congresscritters for a few million. They know that you cannot do anything about it.

In a democracy, you are ruled by the largest segment of your population, which is a group of no particular ability that likes easy answers. Offer them symbolism and they lunge for it, allowing you to keep on stealing.

National Socialists turn White people into BLM. They teach us that we are helpless victims of the International Jew and that there is nothing we can except wait for the great race war while buying bad music and books about The Cause.

They also make themselves into bigots against intelligence. By posing the Jew as an intelligent manipulator and Whites as victims, they suggest that intelligence is bad and repeating the dogma of National Socialism is the only good.

In essence, they are saying intelligence is bad because our enemies use it and encouraging us to get dumber. That makes us weaker over time. It pleases the proles, though, who resent the higher average IQs of the upper castes.

This follows typical democratic thinking: if something goes wrong, remove the people in power, and let the angry mob take over. Unfortunately, the angry mob is a moron and makes us weaker.

In fact, the mob is the only thing through their voting patterns, which favor symbols and emotions over reality that holds us back. National Socialism is part of this mob movement, not standing against it.

Supposing that tomorrow you killed all the Jews and other foreigners. Our problem would still remain. We do not know how to govern ourselves, and have endless bad leadership instead because they are chosen by the least competent group, the mob.

Everything you blame on capitalism, Jews, and elites is in fact the result of democracy and the voting patterns of average people in large numbers. Nothing changes until we change that, no matter how many atrocities we produce.

Tags: anti-semitism, democracy, national socialism

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National Socialism Will Destroy White People

Nazis and Sanghis – The Nation

The foundation of Muslim rule in India was laid down by Shahabuddin Ghori in 1193 for the next 800 years. Muslim Sufi saints preached in India and millions converted to Islam which alarmed the Hindu population and gave birth to their nationalist movement. This development led to the creation of hardliner Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925 by Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur. In Germany, Dietrich Eckart poet and political activist founded the German Workers Party in 1919 to save the nation from Jews. He asked Adolf Hitler to lead the nation to the identity. The German Workers Party was later renamed as the National Socialist Workers Party and this how the Nazi party born.

Nazism is national socialism and the ideology preached by Hitler and his associates. RSS leader Savarkar and Golwalkar praised this ideology and believed the same should be applied to India. The Nazis adopted a new emblem of party based on ancient Aryan origin, the Swastika which was a symbol of good luck. The same was adopted by the Hindutva flag bearer as a symbol of spirituality. The slogan of one flag, one leader and one ideology was borrowed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) from the Nazis. The Nazis coined the term Fuhrer for Adolf Hitler and in India Subash Chandra Bose was called Netaji.

The concept of Akhand Bharat was also borrowed from the Nazi concept of Lebensraum, meaning living space. According to the RSS philosophy, all that is South of the Himalayas and North of the Indian Ocean is Bharat. According to Nazi Germany, Germans had a right to expand all the way to the East. In 1980 the Bhartiya Jana Sangh political arm of the RSS morphed into the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP). In the 1980 elections, BJP got only two seats and in 1991, it succeeded in forming a coalition government. The 1999 elections helped it come into power with 182 seats. In 2014 and 2019, the BJP came to power as a political force. The election campaign was based on anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan rhetoric.

Similarly, the Nazis in 1924 got 3 percent of all votes. In 1928, it got 2.6 percent of the votes however in the 1930 election, it got 6.5 million votes and the party became a huge political force. In 1933, the Nazis won 44 percent of the votes and Hitler became the chancellor and then, the president and the supreme leader. The Nazis created their own para-military force in 1921 named the Storm Section (SA). They were called Brown Shirts because of the color of their uniform shirts. Their role was the protection of Nazi rallies. The RSS also raised a force similar to the SA which identified with Khaki shorts, with a bamboo stick, and it was Bajrang Dal.

The Nazis had extreme hatred towards the Jews and accused them for all the worlds problems. An organised campaign against the Jews was launched under Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. During the annual Nuremberg Rally, Jews were declared to be enemies of the state. They were asked to go back to Palestine and anti-Semitic legislation was passed which banned marriage between Jews and Germans. Similarly, the RSS leader built the narrative that Hindus should rule India and Muslims and Christians, being outsiders, must be expelled or merged into Hinduism. The RSS was and is famous for anti-Muslim rhetoric and categorised Muslims and Christians as Indias internal enemies.

Hitlers book, Mein Kampf, is famous across India and has been translated into multiple native languages. The BJP-RSS government is trying to transform India into a purely Hindu state where there is no place for Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and even low caste Hindus. It is said that during the holocaust, the Nazis killed six million Jews, the majority in concentration camps. Thousands of Muslims are killed on daily basis by Hindu groups over allegations of slaughtering cows and eating beef. There are continued Hindu vigilante attacks on Muslims farmers, livestock traders and farmers trespassing cows. The religious intolerance and violence has increased against Muslims and other minorities across India. The fascist and Nazis inspired BJP-RSS government is a real threat to peace and stability in the region.

The writer is a retired brigadier and freelance columnist.

The religious intolerance and violence has increased against Muslims and other minorities across India.

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Nazis and Sanghis - The Nation