Visualizzazione post con etichetta nazismo. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta nazismo. Mostra tutti i post

lunedì 22 maggio 2017

Quando i treni arrivavano in orario

Lo stato sociale di Hitler di Aly Gotz
Hitler era un socialista rigoroso e generoso grazie a queste sue virtù conquistò l' opinione pubblica.
Ricordiamoci che il  Nazismo fu  una dittatura che si assicurò un consenso vastissimo fino alla fine dei suoi giorni.
Origini del consenso: non il carisma di Hitler ma il denaro messo a disposizione per i bisogni della popolazione.
Ricordiamo come usciva la Germania dalla pace di Versailles: con 1/8 del suo territorio perduto (e 1/10 della sua popolazione).
debiti per i danni di guerra fanno impallidire la tanto criticata austerity contemporanea. Un ritardo nei pagamenti costò la Ruhr e l’ iperinflazione.
Da questa situazione disperata, Hitler seppe costruire dal nulla il welfare nazista considerato da tutti un autentico gioiellino di efficienza e cura, roba da fare invidia ancora oggi a molti paesi che consideriamo avanzatissimi.
Il nazismo fu sostenuto da una nutrita schiera di intellettuali estranei alla destra tradizionalista. Si guardi solo  alle biografie dei gerarchi: quasi tutti avevano fatto esperienze socialiste se non comuniste.
Ma il socialismo è dispendioso, da qui il problema principale del Furher: come finanziare il sistema?
L’ossessione di Hitler: la lotta alla povertà. La politica per l’ uguaglianza è centrale nel sistema: “l'ariano più prezioso è l'ariano più povero”. Il dovere primario del reich è pensare a lui.
Le architravi del sistema:
Tasse fortemente progressive.
Ferie prolungate, legislazione sul lavoro avanzata e vacanze a spese dello stato.
- Società senza classi.
Esenzioni fiscali mirate sui bisognosi.
- Abolizione delle tasse sui lavoratori dipendenti.
- Pingui assegni familiari
- Congedi sindacali retribuiti.
- Crediti alle piccole imprese e mutui agevolati.
Pensioni aumentate per tutti.
- Cassa malattia.
Motorizzazione di massa con la Wolkswagen.
Case popolari.
- Zero corruzione: l’amministrazione era una casa di vetro.
Meritocrazia ovunque (la ricerca scientifica era un esempio).
- Generosi sussidi ai più sfortunati.
- Monopolio della scuola di stato e finanziamento generoso della stessa.
- Anche gli animali godevano di tutele.
***
Soldi per tutti, insomma… ma nel 1937, ecco la prima crisi di bilancio.
La soluzione fu triplice: 1) tanta finanza creativa, 2) guerra alla Polonia e 3) esproprio agli ebrei (già ipertassati).
I tedeschi erano un popolo razzista? No, piuttosto un popolo “comprato” grazie ad un esteso stato sociale.
privati amici vengono agevolati (il loro aiuto verrà utile): per loro prezzi stracciati nella rivendita degli immobili sequestrati al giudeo.
Il Nazismo dura, resiste… Perché? Perché per un ariano – specie per i ceti più bassi – il nazismo è un paradiso in terra.
Shoah: omicidio di massa a scopo di rapina per finanziare uno stato sociale avanzato (troppo avanzato).
L’ideologia razzista ebbe un ruolo più di apparenza che di sostanza, intervenne a posteriori. Fu l’aspetto materialista a fungere da levatrice di questa funesta storia.
Marx tra i socialisti e Hayek tra i liberali converrebbero.
***
Hitler, del resto, non desiderava la guerra: sapeva che non aveva forze sufficienti. Alan John Percival Taylor fu il primo storico a sostenere con solidi argomenti la tesi.
Hitler occupò l’ Austria tra l’ entusiasmo degli austriaci.
Occupò la Cecoslovacchia nel silenzio della comunità internazionale, era un nuovo stato nato dalle ceneri dell’ impero di cui importava ben poco.
Per la Polonia contò sullo stesso silenzio. Il patto con l’ URSS lo rassicurava e, del resto, molti già consideravano la Polonia uno stato satellite della Germania.
E’ vero, Hitler parlava di espansione e spazio vitale ma riteneva di poter ottenere tutto questo senza la guerra. La Wermacht, del resto, non aveva piani militari.
Nel 1939 Hitler propose un tavolo della pace e rimase sconcertato dai dinieghi inglesi. Ancora nel 41 Hess tentava missioni di pace. La Francia fu tolta di mezzo perché solo la Gran Bretagna veniva considerata a quel punto come l’interlocutrice decisiva.
Hitler ingigantì la sua partita e la perse non tanto perché avesse mire espansionistiche, quanto perché fu un giocatore da “all in” (o la va o la spacca). Una questione psicologica e di strategia più che un progetto malefico ad ampio raggio.

venerdì 13 maggio 2016

La natura nazista dello sport

Tesi: in ogni persona che si entusiasma per le imprese sportive dei grandi atleti riposa un nazista.
Di sicuro i regimi dittatoriali sono ricorsi in modo massiccio alle manifestazioni sportive per  raccogliere consenso e rafforzare la coesione popolare, ma qui vorrei evitare impropri sillogismi del tipo: “siccome Hitler amava gli animali, chi ama gli animali è un criptonazista”. No, qui vorrei tirare in ballo l’essenza del nazismo al netto, per esempio, delle forme contingenti di propaganda che ha utilizzato per affermarsi.
Il problema fondamentale di tutti i nazionalismi è l’adorazione di astrazioni come la Bandiera, la Nazione, il Popolo. Ma questo è esattamente cio’ che fa un tifoso: adora la sua squadra, la Nazionale... Quanto più cresce questa adorazione, tanto più gli individui singoli diventano intercambiabili, l’unica cosa che conta è servire la causa: l’uomo è visto come soldato e la donna come fattrice. Questo, secondo me, è un atteggiamento sbagliato poiché l’individuo è l’unico soggetto concreto, l’unico in grado di provare piacere, dolore, soddisfazione, tristezza eccetera, cosicché dovrebbe essere la squadra al servizio dell’individuo e non viceversa. Ma questo è inconcepibile sia per il nazista che per il tifoso. Qualcuno, in un disperato tentativo di salvare lo sport, sostiene che i due nazismi sono sostitutivi ma la mia idea è che invece si rafforzino l’un l’altro.
Fortunatamente, la commercializzazione dello sport ha attenuato lo chauvinismo: oggi la Nazionale conta meno di una volta e parecchi atleti arrivano a rifiutarne la convocazione per curare meglio i propri interessi e la propria carriera. Resta però intatto il concetto di squadra e di tifo e forse i localismi sono ancora peggio che i nazionalismi.
images
Ma che dire dell’interesse per l’atleta singolo che compie un’impresa alle Olimpiadi? Qui non sembra che possano applicarsi le categorie di “squadra” e di “nazionalismo”. Si tratta allora di una “sana” ammirazione?
No.
Per capire meglio questa risposta lapidaria bisogna tornare nel Fuhrerbunker a Berlino nell’aprile del 1945. In quei momenti drammatici, cosa pensava Hitler della sua “squadra”, ovvero della sua Germania che stava soccombendo? La disprezzava. Perché? Aveva forse abiurato al Nazismo? No, usciva invece la quintessenza del suo nazismo, ovvero l’amore per la Forza. E’ la Potenza del vincente che ammira il nazista prima ancora che la comunità d’appartenenza: Hitler esaltava la Germania perché la riteneva Forte e Vincente, nel momento in cui si mostrò debole e perdente cominciò a disprezzarla.
Ma cio’ a cui dava valore Hitler è proprio cio’ che valorizziamo noi quando ammiriamo le imprese di Carl Lewis e soci: un’esibizione di una forza senza pari che ci lascia estasiati.
In un mondo di risorse scarse all’ammirazione per il Forte segue necessariamente il disprezzo per il Debole. Le medaglie sono scarse e noi decidiamo che a meritarsele è il Migliore.
La Forza e il Talento sono essenzialmente doti genetiche ma noi non siamo interessati a questo fatto: Carl Lewis merita in pieno la sua medaglia poiché riteniamo implicitamente che chi perde alla lotteria dei talenti valga meno di chi vince. Tanto è vero che con disdegno consideriamo dopato il boxeur che per vincere la paura altera il suo carattere naturale assumendo droghe come il Modafinil.
Il disprezzo verso i deboli puo’ prendere diverse forme che vanno dall’aggressività (Hitler), al paternalismo (democrazie contemporanee). Nello sport moderno il disprezzo verso i deboli si esprime attraverso la dimenticanza: di loro non c’è traccia nell’Albo d’Oro. Ma ai nostri fini cio’ che conta è che esso esista e costituisca l’essenza della mentalità nazista, nonché di quella di chi gode in modo disinteressato delle imprese sportive.
Personalmente, penso di essere immune allo chauvinismo ma rientro in pieno tra i cosiddetti “adoratori della forza”: guardando le Olimpiadi provo una sincera ammirazione per le gesta dei grandi campioni. Oltretutto, lo ammetto, non mi sento molto colpevole per questa forma di cripto-nazismo (per quanto la riconosca come tale) e non intendo fare nulla per frenarmi, cosicché penso che quanto affermato in questo post più che un auto-accusa sia una prova a discarico dell’ideologia Nazista, una dimostrazione della sua umanità. Nell’anno della Misericordia dobbiamo avere il coraggio di dare un’interpretazione caritativa dei fenomeni che ci disturbano di primo acchito, e chi ci riesce col Nazismo puo’ riuscirci con tutto.
Per approfondire sulla natura della passione sportiva: Values in Sport: Elitism, Nationalism, Gender Equality and the Scientific Manufacturing of Winners di  Claudio Tamburrini, Torbjörn Tännsjö
P.S. Un modo per riconciliare il buon senso con la tesi espressa ci sarebbe: basta distinguere il diritto alla medaglia dalla medaglia meritata. E' la teoria morale del Just desert: abbiamo pieno diritto sul nostro corpo anche se non ce lo siamo meritato. Ma forse è "straussianamente" meglio far coincidere i due concetti.

venerdì 11 marzo 2016

Museum of Communism FAQ By Bryan Caplan

Museum of Communism FAQ By Bryan Caplan
  • As it currently stands, a fair percentage of the Western population knows almost nothing of the human rights record of Communist regimes, considering Communism a noble ideal that people weren't virtuous enough to practice.
  • the government of the USSR murdered more non-combatants than any other in the 20th-century. Communist China comes in second. Out of the top ten most murderous regimes in this century, five were Communist, according to the ranking provided by R.J. Rummel in his Death By Government
  • Classifica. Soviet Union Communist China Nazi Germany Nationalist China Imperial Japan Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge Turkey under the Young Turks Communist Vietnam Communist Poland Pakistan under Yahya Khan
  • One might note that out of this hall of shame, probably only Nazi Germany widely enjoys the reputation it deserves.
  • What were the most significant human rights violations committed by Communist regimes, and who was responsible for them?
  • The extermination of the bourgeoisie and wealthy "as a class" has been most loudly proclaimed, although in actual fact peasants have been by far the majority of the victims.
  • genocide of numerous ethnic minorities deemed disloyal or anti- Communist.
  • frequently killed large numbers of rival Communists.
  • Carl Landauer notes in his discussion of Stalin's "dekulakization" campaign: Whether it is more immoral to persecute people because of their opinions than to victimize them because of their former position or their descent may be arguable... But whether a child is made to perish because his parents were Jewish or because his father had a few cows too many and therefore was regarded as a kulak,
  • Unnatural deaths ordered by Communist regimes fall into three fairly distinct categories: deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps; deaths due to man-made famine, usually closely connected to forced collectivization of agriculture; and lastly, straightforward executions.
  • Deaths due to extreme hardship conditions in slave labor camps Slave labor camps, also known as "concentration camps," "forced labor camps," and "re-education camps," have played a vital role in Communist systems from the very beginning.
  • demanding tasks such as canal digging, timber cutting, and mining. Such conditions would have tested the endurance of anyone, but they became deadly when combined with the small amounts of food and inadequate clothing
  • the annual death rate in Lenin's slave labor camps generally ranged between 10-30% per year. (Thus, the odds of surviving a five- year sentence ranged from 20-60%).
  • researchers of Nazi atrocities have routinely and sensibly counted the deaths of slave laborers under inhuman conditions as murder.
  • "natural diminution"? EICHMANN:
  • mass death due to man-made famine can be fairly described as an original Communist invention.
  • Collectivization comes about in a variety of ways, but its essence is the same: getting as much food as possible out of the peasantry while giving them as little as possible in return....When peasants chose not to sell, government troops began seizing grain
  • Lenin. The final result was a massive famine in which about 5 million people perished.
  • Stalin's refusal to authorize international relief efforts. The deaths by starvation from this famine were around 7 million; approximately equal numbers of scapegoated peasant families perished in the Siberian concentration camps.
  • pattern repeated itself in China when Mao collectivized agriculture, and appears at some point in the history of most Communist regimes.
  • evidence indicates that the man-made famines were either intentional (under e.g. Stalin) or at least the result of malevolent indifference
  • When the famine finally threatened to destroy his regime, Lenin dropped requisitioning and price
  • execution of innocent people has led to far fewer deaths than either slave labor camps or man-made famine.
  • As Zinoviev, a high-ranking Bolshevik put it, "We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated." The number executed in this period fell far short of Zinoviev's threat, probably adding up to a few hundred thousand.
  • freedom to migrate - even within national borders - has frequently been severely restricted. Freedom of speech, conscience, and religion have been ruthlessly suppressed
  • Communist regimes rejected on principle the economic freedom to own property, engage in business,
  • It is safe to say that there is scarcely a single human freedom that Communist regimes have not suppressed as a matter of official policy.
  • What were the most important human rights violations committed under Lenin's rule?
  • A series of strokes after the Civil War, and his early death in 1924, gave him a mere five years to reign.
  • Lenin did everything that Stalin would later do, except execute fellow Communists.
  • Lenin repeatedly indicated that large-scale killing would be necessary to bring in his utopia, and did not shrink from this realization.
  • "Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them." "We'll ask the man, where do you stand on the question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If he's against it, we'll stand him up against a wall." As Pipes sums up, "Lenin hated what he perceived to be the 'bourgeoisie' with a destructive passion that fully equaled Hitler's hatred of the Jews: nothing short of physical annihilation would satisfy him."
  • Lenin used all three of the tools of mass murder
  • Lenin's secret police, the Cheka, pioneered the development of the modern slave labor (or "concentration") camp.
  • The number of people in these camps according to Pipes was about 50,000 prisoners in 1920 and 70,000 in 1923; many of these did not survive
  • The inmates might be bourgeoisie, or peasants, or members of other socialist factors such as the Mensheviks or the Social Revolutionaries, or members of ethnicities thought to be hostile to the Bolsheviks, such as the Don Cossacks. The death rates in these camps appear to have been in the extreme hardship range of 10-30%.
  • it laid the foundation for Stalin's slave
  • By far the largest number of unnatural deaths for which Lenin and his cohorts were responsible resulted from famine. Lenin and his regime tried to depict the famine as simply bad luck, but the truth is rather different.
  • demanding delivery of large sums of food for little or nothing in exchange. This led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. In retaliation, Lenin often ordered the seizure of the food peasants had grown for their own subsistence,
  • The Cheka and the army began by shooting
  • The ultimate results of this war against the peasantry were devastating.
  • Low estimates on the deaths from this famine are about 3 million; high estimates go up to 10 million
  • Under Lenin's rule - unlike that of his successors - executions played a far more important role than deaths in forced labor camps.
  • summary executions of "class enemies" in what came to be known as the Red Terror.
  • murdered is usually estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000, but the chaotic wartime conditions make the accounting especially difficult.
  • execution of the bourgeoisie and Czarist sympathizers; execution of White POWs and friendly civilian populations; and finally execution of Lenin's socialist opponents.
  • What were the most important human rights violations committed by Stalin?
  • In recent years, historians have gradually recognized that Stalin was personally responsible for the murder of more people than any other human being in the 20th century - and probably any other century. Stalin took Lenin's system of slave labor camps and turned it into a vast secret empire in the depths of Siberia.
  • Finally, Stalin crossed the one line that Lenin would not, by ordering the executions of fellow Communists on a massive scale.
  • As the democratic socialist Carl Landauer observes: Between the persecution of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War and the extermination of "undesirable" races by Hitler, the Bolshevik campaign against the kulaks and the former bourgeois was probably the only instance in which large masses of men, women, and children were by administrative order dislodged from their places of habitation and brought into camps where many, if not most of them, were sure to perish - and were meant to perish. (European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements)
  • As Conquest notes, at the 1939 Party Congress, "Of the 1,966 delegates to the [1934] Congress, 1,108 had been arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes." (The Great Terror)
  • one can conclude that Stalin's camps claimed a minimum of 10,000,000 victims, and easily two or three times as many.
  • Stalin went further. Not only did he know that his policies would cause widespread famine; he turned famine into a political weapon by deliberately and selectively amplifying its horrors.
  • As Conquest explains, "The basic principle was that a certain amount of grain must be delivered to the state regardless, and that this demand must be satisfied before the needs of the peasantry could be taken into consideration. A law of 16 October 1931 forbade reserving grain for internal kolkhoz [collective farm] needs until the procurement plan was fulfilled." (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine)
  • Conquest notes, "Nor is it the case that the famine, or the excessive grain targets, were imposed on the most productive grain-producing areas as such, as a - mistaken or vicious - economic policy merely. There was no famine in the rich Russian 'Central Agricultural Region'; and on the other hand the grain-poor Ukrainian provinces of Volhynia and Podilia suffered along with the rest of the country." (The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine)
  • Famines swept Eastern Europe and the USSR again after World War II, although here the Nazis bore part of the blame. Stalin also shares responsibility for the deaths - again mostly through hunger - of ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe with the Red Army's advance. The Communist-dominated governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia shared with Stalin the blame for some 2 million unnatural deaths of ethnic Germans. (see Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944- 1950)
  • There were approximately one million executions during the Great Terror of 1936-1939, and probably over five million for his entire reign.
  • Stalin's comrades in the Russian Civil War were executed or assassinated at his orders: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Rykov, Tomsky, and (as recent discoveries confirm) Kirov.
  • What were the most important human rights violations perpetrated by the Soviet Union during the post-Stalin era?
  • even compared to Czarism, the rule of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and later leaders remained bloodthirsty.
  • The number executed for political offenses from 1953-1991 was perhaps one or two hundred thousand, many of them Hungarians and Czechs who opposed Soviet rule.
  • while Stalin's camps had annual fatality rates in the range of 10-30%, the rates fell to 5-15% in the late 50' s, 2-6% in the 60' s, and still lower in later periods.
  • Ironically, Western focus on Soviet human rights abuses under the Carter and Reagan administrations began only after mass murder in the USSR had largely ceased.
  • What were Mao's greatest crimes against humanity?
  • Mao, like Stalin, indisputably murdered more people than Hitler. He tyrannized the world's most populous nation for more than a quarter century; and while by most counts his victims were somewhat less numerous than Stalin's, the range of error makes it quite possible that Mao Zedong was the greatest mass murderer of the century.
  • Annual death rates in the Soviet camps under Stalin ranged from 10-30%, while under Mao the rates were more along the lines of 5-10%. This is partly due to the more favorable climate, but also because Mao was more interested than Stalin in getting work out of his slaves. In any case, these death rates are surely high enough to warrant murder charges for the inmates' deaths - which must have summed to well over 10 million.
  • Family life and traditions, personal property and privacy, personal initiative and individual freedom, were destroyed or lost in an instant for around one-seventh of all mankind. (R.J. Rummel, China's Bloody Century)
  • From 1959-1963, around 30 million Chinese perished from this man- made famine.
  • "A BBC commentator - giving the opinion general among China experts - declared that widespread famine in such a well-organized country was unthinkable." (Laszlo Ladany, The Communist Party of China and Marxism: 1921-1985)
  • Rummel points out that Mao's government tried to alleviate the famine once it was aware of it, but millions had died even before the Great Leap Forward began.
  • An estimated 2-3,000 - and possibly as many as 12,000 - protesters may have been killed in 1989 on the orders of Deng Xioaping.
  • Former prisoners of the Chinese slave labor camps such as Harry Wu have done much to investigate their secret history and their persistence into the modern era. In his work Laogai: The Chinese Gulag, Harry Wu estimated that the Chinese government still commands about 16-20 million forced laborers of one sort of another, although in the afterward to this work Wu indicates that his continuing research reveals this estimate too high. Of these, Wu classifies 10% as "political offenders,"
  • What were the greatest abuses of Communist regimes outside of the USSR and China?
  • Poland and Czechoslovakia... During World War II, Stalin ordered the deportation of entire nations deemed disloyal: Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, and ethnic Germans.... (Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950)
  • On the theoretical level, Stalin had set the precedent for imputing collective guilt to "counter-revolutionary" ethnicities as well as "counter-revolutionary" social classes, when he ordered the deportations of Volga Germans, Chechens, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and other nationalities (see Robert Conquest, The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities).
  • Vietnam Ho Chi Minh, the long-lived dictator of North Vietnam, was a loyal Stalinist throughout his life.
  • As the Viet Minh struggled against the French, they also fought a vicious hidden war against their noncommunist nationalist competitors. They assassinated, executed, and massacred whole groups of nationalists, including relatives, friends, women, and children. Nationalists were not the only victims: "class enemies" were also "punished," and communist ranks were purified of Trotskyites and others who deviated from accepted scripture. Thousands among the most educated and brightest Vietnamese were wiped out in the years 1945 to 1947 that it took the communists to firmly establish their power. (R.J. Rummel, Death By Government)
  • Tallies for 1953-56 speak volumes: about 1 million northerners chose to flee south, while only one-tenth as many southerners chose to flee north.
  • Cambodia In any other country with a population of only 7 million, Samrin would have been the greatest butcher in his country's history. Yet Samrin's regime seemed to be a force for liberation, because it replaced the nightmarish regime of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge took Mao's totalitarian communes one step further: in addition to forcing the peasants into collective farms with communal kitchens and barracks, Pol Pot's troops also forcibly deported the entire urban population of Cambodia into rural communes. As Paul Johnson explains: The scheme was an attempt to telescope, in one terrifying coup, the social changes brought about over twenty-five years in Mao's China. There was to be "total social revolution." Everything about the past was "anathema and must be destroyed." It was necessary to "psychologically reconstruct individual members of society." It entailed "stripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have shaped and guided an individual's life" and then "rebuilding him according to party doctrines by substituting a new series of values." (Modern Times)
  • Yugoslavia Tito was one of the few Yugoslavian Communists living in exile in the USSR who managed to survive Stalin's
  • Tito had the blood of 100,000 innocents on his hands - wartime gave him ideal conditions for exterminating domestic opposition.
  • Unlike most of the other Communist leaders that came to power after World War II, Tito seized power with his own forces.
  • Executions and forced labor camps accelerated, and (as in Poland and Czechoslovakia) a substantial ethnic German minority was expelled.
  • Tito's excommunication by Stalin in 1948 sparked a new wave of terror against anyone suspected of continuing loyalty to Moscow.
  • Tito's innocent victims exceed 1 million.
  • North Korea Under Communist rule, North Korea has been so closed to the outside world that it is very difficult even to estimate how many people were exterminated under the rule of Kim Il-sung and his successors.
  • Extrapolating Soviet or Chinese death rates to Kim's regime makes it extremely likely that he is responsible for one million or more innocent deaths.
  • Lenin and totalitarianism
  • He did not inadvertently create a totalitarian state; he was a totalitarian on principle.
  • Like most Marxists in his day, Lenin advocated the "dictatorship of the proletariat,"
  • Lenin explicitly stated that a Communist elite was needed to rule and educate the workers for an indefinite interim period,
  • "All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is made up of the armed workers...
  • when the peasants refused to sell food to the state for a pittance, Lenin threatened them with extermination:
  • Marx and totalitarianism
  • Karl Marx is more ambiguous, both because Marx wrote less clearly than Lenin, and because Marx never held power. In spite of this, the totalitarian strain in Marx is pronounced.
  • The doctrine of the rights of man was faulty, according to Marx, because: None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man...For Marx, freedom of religion or the freedom to own property are hollow freedoms... 'freedom of conscience' is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion." (Critique of the Gotha Program).
  • Marx elaborates: "The right of property, is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society... It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty." (On the Jewish Question)
  • Innumerable social thinkers disagree with much of Marx's thought, but praise his reflections upon human freedom, the depth of his insight in contrast to the shallowness of laissez-faire liberalism.
  • LIBERTÀ. And what can the attack on "the right to do everything which does not harm others" amount to in practice, except a justification for coercing people who are not harming others? The problem with "broad" notions of freedom is that they necessarily wind up condoning the violation of "narrow" notions of freedom.
  • Lenin did not originate the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was Marx's creation. In his Critique of the Gotha Program,
  • Carl Landauer notes: Gradually, it became evident that the transition from capitalism to socialism would take not merely months or years but decades,
  • Socialism and totalitarianism
  • critique of "bourgeois freedom" and longed for a world in which the government eliminated both the economic and personal freedom of capitalist civilization. Such ideas may be found in the works of Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, Ferdinand Lassalle, and many other
  • Khmer Rouge reversed Marx's emphasis on the urban industrial proletariat, idealizing peasant life so strongly that they forcibly deported Cambodia's city dwellers into the country. Their inspiration came from other authoritarian socialists, such as Rousseau.
  • The connection with Italian Fascism, however, is quite direct: until 1914, Benito Mussolini was the leader of the Socialist Party of Italy. He was a staunch proponent of revolutionary rather than reformist socialism, and actually received Lenin's endorsement
  • Mussolini.... he freely admitted that his position was a hybrid of nationalism and socialism: Although Mussolini finally decided that the term "socialist" had become so debased and devoid of specific meaning that he recommended its abandonment, he was quick to remind his readers that he was prepared to assimilate everything that remained vital in the tradition. He argued that his objections to socialism were addressed to the form of socialism that had rigidified into dogma and was no longer capable of confronting concrete reality with any intellectual independence... Those socialists who chose to abandon the nation in pursuit of socialist interests not only failed in their obligations to the many who had died in a revolutionary and progressive war, but also violated the letter and the spirit of the best traditions of socialism. (A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism)
  • Mussolini's heresy thrived not because he repudiated socialism, but rather because he and threw out Marxism's internationalist bathwater but kept the socialist baby.
  • Stalinist invective against Trotsky, proclaiming him an arch-enemy of socialism, has long met with historians' ridicule. The official Comintern line on fascism, however, met with far less skepticism then and since, but it is hard to see why.
  • Were Communism and Nazism "morally equivalent" movements?
  • Both Stalin and Mao's Communist governments indisputably murdered more people in cold blood than even Hitler's Nazi regime did. This certainly establishes a powerful prima facie case for the proposition that Communism and Nazism are "morally equivalent."
  • Probably the most common distinction made between the Communists and the Nazis is that the former were misguided idealists,
  • one might argue that the Communists ultimately wanted a world where all people would live together in harmony, while the Nazis wanted a world where the master race reigned supreme over a world purged of inferior races.
  • Joseph Davies, the pro-Stalin US Ambassador... the communistic Soviet state could function with the Christian religion in its basic purpose to serve the brotherhood of man. It would be impossible for the Nazi state to do so.
  • This "argument from intentions" needs to be answered on two levels:
  • First, many people are both misguided idealists and brutal thugs. They are the "true believers" who join religious crusades, set up the Inquisition, exterminate Jews, and liquidate kulaks.
  • As Solzhenitsyn puts it: To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good...
  • That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.
  • Hitler noted that Communists made excellent converts to Nazism, because the same personality type was attracted to both. "[ T] here is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling... (quoted in Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks)
  • Second, both the Nazis and the Communists dreamed of universal brotherhood - after widescale exterminations of groups potentially disruptive to their respective utopias.
  • Just as the Nazis imagined an idyllic Germany free of inferior races, the Communists dreamed of a harmonious world free of reactionary classes.
  • Further interesting evidence of the moral equivalence of the two movements comes during the period of 1939-1941, when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were in a state of virtual alliance. The Molotov-Rippentrop Pact was officially merely a non-aggression treaty, but its secret provisions divided up all of eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Paul Johnson amusingly recounts the diplomatic festivities in the Kremlin: Ribbentrop reported: "It felt like being among old party comrades."
  • The Nazis and Soviets applied almost identical internal policies to their respective halves of defeated Poland.
  • A final distinction often made between the Soviets and the Nazis is that the former were "genuine" socialists while the latter were fakers.
  • Hitler generally favored and imposed an even greater role for government in the German economy than his leftist Social-Democratic predecessors. Even the Social- Democratic historian Carl Landauer freely admitted this.
  • Hitler's economic policies extensively increased the regulation of foreign trade and agriculture, imposed widespread price controls, initiated large public works programs, and copied the Soviets' predilection for N-year Plans. As David Schoenbaum pointedly remarks in his Hitler's Social Revolution,
  • Admittedly, Hitler did not carry out massive uncompensated collectivization as Stalin did. Why not? The reason was strategic rather than principled. As Hitler explained to Hermann Rauschning: He [Hitler] had no intention, like Russia, of "liquidating" the possessing class.
  • If the Communists and the Nazis were so similar in their propensity for mass murder, their fanaticism, and their economic policies, why were their relations so bitter (save during the 1939-1941 period)?
  • At the outset, it is unclear why an answer is necessary, for there are innumerable examples of bloody conflict between people in nearly complete agreement with each other: Catholics and Protestants, or Stalinists and Trotskyists, for example.
continua

venerdì 4 marzo 2016

HL 2. 1 PT - L’importanza di essere teneri Perché pensiamo ciò che pensiamo delle creature che non pensano come noi - Amati, odiati, mangiati: Perché è così difficile agire bene con gli animali by Hal Herzog

2. 1 PT - L’importanza di essere teneri Perché pensiamo ciò che pensiamo delle creature che non pensano come noi - Amati, odiati, mangiati: Perché è così difficile agire bene con gli animali  by Hal Herzog - #animalenazista #noncirestacheantropomorfizzare #neipannialtrui #alleradicidelpeccato originale
Come i nazisti hanno potuto amare i cani e odiare gli ebreiRead more at location 1159
Note: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
si verificò una bizzarra inversione morale che consentì a numerose persone, in teoria dotate di raziocinio, di preoccuparsi maggiormente per le sofferenze delle aragoste nei ristoranti berlinesi che per un genocidio.Read more at location 1161
Note: ARAGOSTE ED EBREI Edit
Nel 1933, il governo tedesco emanò la legislazione per la protezione degli animali più avanzata al mondo.Read more at location 1162
Note: I PIÙ AVANTI Edit
vietava il trattamento inumano degli animali durante le riprese cinematografiche e dichiarava illegale l’impiego dei cani da caccia. Proibiva di mozzare la coda e le orecchie dei cani senza anestesia, l’alimentazione forzata dei volatili e l’abbattimento disumano di animali da allevamento.Read more at location 1163
i pesci dovessero essere anestetizzati prima della macellazione e le aragoste nei ristoranti uccise in modo rapido.Read more at location 1167
restrizioni alla sperimentazione animale,Read more at location 1168
Hitler era contrario all’uccisione di animali per scopi di ricerca scientifica ed era convinto che la caccia e le corse ippiche fossero «le ultime vestigia di una società feudale». Era vegetariano e trovava disgustosa la carne.Read more at location 1172
Note: CACCIA E IPPICA Edit
l’antrozoologo Boria Sax ha solidamente documentatoRead more at location 1176
Nel 1942, agli ebrei fu fatto divieto di tenere animali da compagnia.Read more at location 1181
L’antropomorfismo: che cosa pensiamo che gli animali pensinoRead more at location 1192
Note: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Ricordo che mi chiesi come quel tizio avesse mai potuto pensare che un chihuahua si sarebbe divertito a discendere le rapide di un fiume freddo come il ghiaccio. La risposta è l’antropomorfismo. Gli esseri umani tendono naturalmente ad antropomorfizzare, fa parte del nostro equipaggiamento mentale.Read more at location 1204
Note: IL RAFTING DEL CHIUAUA ANTROPOMORFIZZATO Edit
Gli psicologi hanno riscontrato che le persone giungono persino ad attribuire motivazioni a figure geometriche animate che si muovono su uno schermo: «Adesso il triangolo rosso si è proprio incavolato con il quadrato blu.Read more at location 1206
Note: GEOMETRIA ANTROPOMORFIZZATA Edit
alcune persone si sono affezionate molto ai loro cuccioli robotici. Su un gruppo di discussione online, un proprietario ha dichiarato di vergognarsi a vestirsi e svestirsi davanti al suo AIBO.Read more at location 1215
Note: IL CANE ELETTRONICO DELLA SONY Edit
Una volta alla settimana, per due mesi, alcuni ricercatori della School of Medicine della Saint Louis University portarono un AIBO e un cane vero di nome Sparky in alcune case di cura per verificare se l’interazione con un animale da compagnia robotico potesse sollevare il morale degli ospiti.Read more at location 1220
Note: AIBO VS SPARSKY Edit
Di fatto, Sparky e AIBO risultarono essere ugualmente efficaciRead more at location 1223
Il nesso fra solitudine e antropomorfismo è stato anche dimostrato da alcuni ricercatori di Harvard e della University of Chicago,Read more at location 1225
Note: SOLITUDINE E ANTROPOMORFISMO Edit
Il problema di avere una teoria della menteRead more at location 1232
Note: grosso cervello: capacità di metterci nei loro panni... ci aiuta a predare e solleva un conflitto morale errori: il sorriso dei delfini e lo sbadiglio del babbuino la vergogna del cane Edit
Note: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Secondo alcuni psicologi evoluzionisti, la capacità di inferire il punto di vista di altre persone, di mettersi ciò nei panni altrui, sarebbe stato un vantaggio preziosissimo per i nostri antenati,Read more at location 1235
Note: NEI PANNI ALTRUI Edit
stabilire alleanze politiche, di competere per l’accoppiamento e di riuscire a capire di chi potersi fidare o meno.Read more at location 1237
Gli essere umani hanno questa abilità, mentre se ce l’abbiano anche altri animali con grandi cervelli, quali scimpanzé e delfini, è oggetto di accese discussioni.Read more at location 1238
Note: SPECIFICO UMANO? Edit
Quando antropomorfizziamo, estendiamo la nostra teoria della mente ai membri di altre specie.Read more at location 1240
James Serpell sostiene che il cacciatore che riesce a pensare come un maiale selvatico è più probabile che si porti a casa il companatico. Ma il cacciatore che vede il mondo dal punto di vista dell’animale che sta tentando di uccidere tenderà automaticamente a entrare in empatia con luiRead more at location 1241
Note: PARADOSSO DWL MAIALE Edit
C’è un detto in swahili: «Non guardare mai un babbuino negli occhi»,Read more at location 1246
Note: PRIMA DI UCCIDERLO Edit
la nostra propensione a provare empatia per gli animali e il nostro desiderio di cibarci delle loro carni?Read more at location 1248
Note: RADICI DEL PECCATO ORIGINALE Edit
L’eterno sorriso impresso sulle facce dei delfiniRead more at location 1255
Note: ERRORI Edit
Lo sbadiglio di un maschio alfa di babbuinoRead more at location 1256
Quando Tilly sfrega dolcemente il suo musetto sulla mia gamba, sta dimostrandomi il suo amore. Sbagliato. Sta marcando il territorio,Read more at location 1258
Alcuni ricercatori della University of Portsmouth (Regno Unito) hanno scoperto che metà dei proprietari di cani inglesi sostengono che i loro animali provano vergogna e senso di colpa.39 Tutti ne conosciamo i segnali: coda fra le gambe, occhi abbattuti che non ci guardano in faccia, come per dire: «Non volevo fare la popò sul tappeto».Read more at location 1260
Note: VERGOGNA Edit
Ma l’espressione colpevole, quell’aria da cane bastonato, significano realmente che il nostro cane sa di aver commesso un peccato?Read more at location 1264
Horowitz ha ideato un ingegnoso esperimento per stabilire se i cani lancino l’occhiata colpevole quando effettivamente si sono comportati male o quando invece i loro proprietari credono che si siano comportati male.Read more at location 1266
Horowitz ha scoperto che i cani assumevano lo sguardo afflitto anche soltanto se i padroni pensavano di essere stati disobbediti dagli animali,Read more at location 1271
Come ci si sente a essere un ragno?Read more at location 1274
Note: antropomorfismo critico xchè il ns rapporto con gli animali è tanto scnclusionato? xchè vi hanno parte emozione irrazionalità istinto empatia ecc. Edit
Note: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@§§ Edit
In un articolo che è poi divenuto un classico, intitolato What Is It Like to Be a Bat?40 (Come ci si sente a essere un pipistrello?), il filosofo Thomas Nagel sosteneva che non potremo mai sapere come sia essere un pipistrelloRead more at location 1278
Note: NAGEL E IL SOLIPSISMO Edit
Negli ultimi vent’anni, si è sviluppato un ricco campo di studi dedicati all’etologia cognitiva, che come strumenti concettuali utilizza fra gli altri quello che Gordon Burghardt definisce «antropomorfismo critico».Read more at location 1286
Note: ETOLOGIA COGNITIVA Edit
Migliaia di studi hanno dimostrato che il pensiero umano, praticamente su tutto, è sorprendentemente irrazionale.Read more at location 1299
Note: IL PUNTO DI UNIONE UOMO ANIMALE Edit
il nostro fare affidamento su intuizioni ed empatia