Fascist Is as Fascist Does

Compare President Obama's statement exhorting “businesses to ‘step up’ and hire workers” with the approach taken by the Nazis to end the depression in Germany—from The Nazi Seizure of Power, p. 270:

After the initial discussion [Local Group Leader] Girmann spoke in summary. He promised to attack legal [?] competition. He affirmed that Nazism was committed to the idea of decent profits. But he also swore he would crack down on anyone cutting wages, hoarding money instead of investing it, or working employees overtime.

Talk about ominous parallels...

A Final Review of The Ominous Parallels

Having recently finished reading The Ominous Parallels, I can now say that the book’s main premise is that the reason for Hitler’s rise to power was that in Weimar Germany even the so-called “Right”, the so-called “Conservatives”, had succumbed to what Thomas Sowell would call “The Vision of the Anointed” by accepting the philosophy of the times, which said that capitalism and individual freedom were evil.

The antidote, in Leonard Peikoff’s opinion, is the philosophy of Objectivism; he seems to think that neither Constitutional principles nor religion and morality can stop a civilization’s slide into statism and, in fact, blames religion for helping to cause this trend.

As I have said earlier, I don’t agree with his criticisms of Christianity, preferring instead to believe that the animating principles of Christianity are responsible for the rise of Western civilization in the first place and, if followed, will allow Western civilization to continue to prevail.

A Partial Review of The Ominous Parallels

As you can tell from many of my recent blog posts, I’ve found a lot about The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff, that’s made sense. I don't agree with his criticisms, in Chapter 5 especially, of Christianity, though, and recommend How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success for an alternate perspective.

“What’s Past Is Prologue”

From p. 156 of TOP:

Liberalism, according to Weber, means an end to illusions, including the “illusion” of human progress—along with an attitude of endurance, “endurance [in Lilge’s words] to bear the destruction of all absolutes, with no sentimental turning back or rash embrace of new faiths, only the strength to hold out in the radical though bleak veracity of a cleansed mind.” As to selecting the proper course of action, Weber told the gathering, each individual has to decide the ideals that are “right for him.” Since only questions of means, not of ends, fall within the province of science, he said, ends must be chosen subjectively, by reference to feelings.

The Will of the People

From The Ominous Parallels, for comparison purposes:
“The will of ‘the people,’ it seemed, was unmistakable. The [Socialists], however, had grasped the lesson of Hegel and were undeterred: they understood that the people does not know what it wills.”

From President Barack Obama to George Stephanopoulos:
“ ‘I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.’ ”

Live-Blogging My Way Through The Ominous Parallels

I’ve been reading The Ominous Parallels off and on for about three weeks—I really need to start carving out some time to devote to it.

Several of my prior posts have been on the book; I have a couple of other posts to make on bits of it I’ve read recently. Part of the reason I’ve held back is the sense of live-blogging; another part is the fear that the book will disappoint me in the end.

I just read a passage, though, that demands a blog post of its own. This book is just full of what seem to be ominous parallels between conditions in Weimar Germany and current conditions in these United States:

The culture of Weimar Germany advocated irrational emotion. The economy demanded it. It provided conditions which allowed men no other mode of functioning.

The Republic was a mixed economy, the kind established by Bismarck and mandated by the nation’s new constitution. There was an element of economic liberty, and there were growing government controls—direct or indirect; federal, state, or municipal—over every aspect of the country’s productive life. The controls covered business, labor, banking, utilities, agriculture, housing, and much more. As a rule each new set of controls conferred benefits on some German group(s), at a cost. The cost was incurred by other groups, whose forced sacrifice paid for the benefits. The victims responded predictably.

Confronted with increasing British exactions one hundred and fifty years earlier, the American colonists did not decide to beef up their lobby in the English court; they heralded the rights of man and decided to throw off the yoke. There were no such ideas in Weimar Germany. The Germans did not question the code of sacrifice or the principle of statism. These ideas, they had been taught by every side and sect within their culture, specify how man ought to live and the only way man can live. They define the moral and the practical.

. . .

The authors of the Weimar constitution had believed that a controlled economy in the hands of a democratic government would foster peaceful cooperation among men, as against the “ruthless competition” and “war of all against all” which they held to be inherent in a free market. What the mixed economy produced instead was a ruthless competition among groups, a collectivist “war of all against all.”

. . .

Neither the warring groups nor the parties which courted them had any means to know what favors to insist on, when, or at whose expense, or when to yield to the demands of their antagonists, who also had to survive. By the nature of the system there was no principle to follow; no one could devise a rational way to divide a nation into mutually devouring segments, or an equitable way to conduct the devouring. Every group, therefore, swung at random from the role of beneficiary to that of victim and back again, according to the passions, the tears, the fears, the alliances, the front-page propaganda, the back-room deals, and the expediency of the moment.

Life, Spengler said, has “no system, no program, no reason.” It is not necessarily true of life itself. It was true of life in Germany’s mixed economy.

That kind of life has consequences. In 1923 the Germans discovered one of them.

Pop Philosophers

Leonard Peikoff, from The Ominous Parallels, p. 139:

Today Americans no longer seek philosophic guidance from philosophers, but from whoever fills the place philosophers have vacated: politicians, economists, psychologists, gurus, etc.

No, it’s worse than that. Americans today, as a general rule, seek philosophic guidance from celebrities—pop singers, movie stars, etc.; basically, whoever is the box office draw du jour. At least politicians, economists, and psychologists are generally well-educated and can be expected to read a book once in a while.

Pragmatism

Obama’s supporters call him a pragmatist like that’s supposed to be a good thing.

From The Ominous Parallels, p. 53:

Thinkers for decades had been saturated with the Kantian view that facts “in themselves” are unknowable, and with the voluntarist view that action has primacy over thought. As a result, a growing chorus—helped along by Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others—began to suggest that men should dispense with any concern for facts or reality. Ideas, it was increasingly claimed, all ideas, are merely subjective tools designed to serve human purposes; if, therefore, an idea leads in action to desirable consequences, i.e., to the sorts of consequences desired by its advocates, it should be accepted as true on that ground alone, without reference to the (unknowable) facts of reality.

This new approach reached its climax and found its enduring name in America, in the writings of William James. James called it: pragmatism.

More from The Ominous Parallels

From The Ominous Parallels, pp. 93–94, with some minor edits:

On what moral grounds, even in the privacy of his own mind, could a man, accepting the [party’s] ethics, object to or resist any decree, no matter how brutal or monstrous, issued to him by the spokesman and embodiment of the [people]? On the grounds that the decree destroys his personal values—his goals, ambitions, happiness, life? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that he must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree visits suffering, expropriation, and death upon other men, who are innocent? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that they must learn must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree violates his conscience, his independent moral judgment? Qua social subjectivist, he has been trained to the view that moral judgment is not his prerogative but society’s. On the grounds that the decree violates his principles? Qua pragmatist, he has been trained to the view that whatever works, as judged by the [spokesman and embodiment of the people], is right. On the grounds that the decree commands an absolute evil, which must be fought to the end? Qua relativist, he has been trained to the view that there are no absolutes.

Yes We Can

From page 42 of The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff:

“To all doubts and questions,” said Rosenberg, “the new man of the first German empire has only one answer: Nevertheless, I will!”

Talk about an ominous parallel….