Thoughts on the continuing academic cover up of the evil of communism. We should have the goal of making Marxists as much of a social pariah as Nazis, both on and off campus. Including the idiot Che admirers.
46 thoughts on “Evil Versus Evil”
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As Professor Reynolds’ correspondents highlight, the claim is that Communists start from “good will.”
It is ironic that many of these same people, thirty years ago during the Cold War, made the argument that, to the tortured, it didn’t matter if it was on behalf of the West or the Soviet Union.
This “good will” argument also doesn’t stand up to everything from bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki (unless, I suppose, you believe that the Americans were somehow uniquely racist), to facing down the USSR during the Cold War.
So, apparently, “good will” matters only when it’s a matter of defending the Left.
Evil is as evil does.
Stalin ordered the deaths of millions of people, including the forced starvation of the Ukrainians. He set up execution squads, secret police, and slave labor prison camps. Some estimates put his death toll at over 20 million.
Mao ordered the deaths of millions of people, including the forced starvation of the peasants during his “Great Leap Forward”. He set up execution squads, secret police, and slave labor prison camps. Some estimates put his death toll at over 45 million.
North Korea is seeing the years-long starvation of millions of people. Who knows how many have died there.
Pol Pot ordered the deaths of 1-3 million Cambodians.
Castro is responsible for countless deaths in Cuba.
Anyone who excuses Marxist communism is excusing evil. Just as I despise Nazi apologists, I despise those who make excuses for the evils of communism. They are scum and should be treated as scum.
It is ironic that many of these same people, thirty years ago during the Cold War, made the argument that, to the tortured, it didn’t matter if it was on behalf of the West or the Soviet Union.
They also failed to realize that “Better Red Than Dead” was not an either/or proposition.
I’ve had the good theory/bad execution argument before and these idiots don’t understand you will never have good execution. Kind of makes the theory useless.
Glenn’s reader from academia is interesting. I want to agree with the person on one thing. I don’t consider a Communist defender/apologist necessarily evil. They, themselves are not the murderers any more than the masses that voted for the Nazi Party, defended their votes, but never believed or knew about the death camps until after the war. The defenders may have good intentions.
However, my desire to agree goes also to understanding why Communism must be shunned the same as Nazism. And in that, the academic provides this line:
The evils of communism my be intrinsic, but they are not built into the ideology itself.
That sentences doesn’t make sense unless one doesn’t understand the definition of intrinsic. If evil is intrinsic to Communism, then it is a basic and essential feature of Communism. If Communism could survive with out the evil, then evil wouldn’t be intrinsic to it.
That one sentence betrays the academic’s own understanding. They know that the concept and theory is as evil as Nazism, just as Glenn wrote. What we are really seeing is the desire not to believe something they know otherwise to be true. Leniency on our part just tends to promote the desire, rather than bring out the truth. And people like Stalin counted on this behaviour when he coined, “useful idiots”.
You guys don’t understand.
It just hasn’t been tried by the right people yet!
When people use words like communism and marxism, instead of condemning about specific murderers and thieves — like Stalin, Mao, Castro, Tito, and Che, I wonder how the kibbutz movement fits in. A strange exception? Not really communist and not really marxist?
How many people were killed for not wanting to belong to a kibbutz (collective farm)?
Larry, that’s my point. Condemnations of communism should be able to account for the kibbutz movement, which might not have been to our taste, but which was quite benign.
In addition, apart from the kibbutzim question, there are other distinctions that might be made. Below I’m including a link to an absolutely atrociously formatted website, that seems to be a stub (or maybe it is course notes — I dunno.) Despite the packaging, take a look at the words — I think they are fairly representative of what is said about communism at universities. Note there is absolutely no excuse for murderers — just more distinctions than are being made here.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/sgabriel/communism_defined.htm
(I do not endorse this website in any way, including its formatting – but I think it might be worth a comment.)
I was wondering when the other shoe would drop.
This is the other inevitable refuge of defenders of the (Communist) faith. The problem, you see, isn’t COMMUNISM. No, no, no!
Instead, it’s a loverly, wonderful theory. It’s the practitioners who are at fault! Indeed, one might almost be tempted to say that we (humanity) don’t deserve such a beauteous theory!
Thus, Communism is always good in theory. And if it’s failed under Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, it’s not Communism that is the problem, it’s the practitioners.
Now, the fact that it neither succeeds as an economic approach (how many kibbutzim are still run as kibbutzim today?), nor as a political one is left out.
I mean, just because every one of the Communist regimes winds up led by such humanitarians as Mao, Kim, Castro, Mengistu, it’s all pure coincidence.
Bob, the answer is quite simple. The kibbutz movement was voluntary. No one was forced to belong to a kibbutz. They were free to leave at any time. A kibbutz was communistic in the purist meaning of the word, just as the proverbial New England town council meetings are true democracies.
Communism as enacted by governments was an exercise in force. People were killed for many, many reasons including not playing along with their new masters, trying to leave, or being a member of a hated group (e.g. the kulaks). When you get beyond the size of a collective farm, commune, or small New England town, neither communism nor true democracy works for long. With communism, the natural progression inevitably leads to tyranny and murder. Those who excuse it are just as vile as those few who deny or make excuses for the Nazis.
Sure, Communism doesn’t work well — it didn’t work well for the kibbutzim, which is why I used the past tense, even though kibbutzim continue to operate. (See this article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article1431766.ece for a recognition of communism’s failings as well as an acknowledgment of some the successes experienced by the kibbutz movement.)
But voluntary communism as practiced on a small scale such as a kibbutz, even if it is not economically successful in the long run, is not anywhere near as bad as Nazism or even remotely similar as Nazism, and blanket condemnations of communism (with no modifiers) as being as bad as Nazism are simply wrong.
Voluntary Nazism, even on a very small scale (say, 20 skinheads) just leads to hatred at best and very probably violence. Voluntary communism on a small scale just leads to disgruntled experiences like these:
Sigourney Weaver and Jerry Seinfeld mention left school in 1967 and went to work on a kibbutz: “I dreamt we’d all be working out in the fields like pioneers, singing away. Not at all. We were stuck in the kitchen. I operated a potato-peeling machine.”
— Comedian Jerry Seinfeld volunteered during the summer of 1971: “I didn’t like the kibbutz. Nice Jewish boys from Long Island don’t like to get up at six in the morning to pick bananas.”
Sucks to have to get up at 6, but really not the same as voluntary Nazism, and the condemnations of communism should address that.
I goofed up the quotes — the first one, about potatoes, was from Sigourney Weaver.
I don’t know what “voluntary Nazism” is, but there is no such as “voluntary communism,” at least for long. That’s why they have to build walls, or patrol the beaches in Cuba.
Kibbutzim are just a group of people agreeing to work together under a certain set of rules, until some of them don’t. But it’s not communism.
Well, that was what I expected you to say — that the kibbutz movement did not practice communism. But look at the newspaper article I linked to: it quotes an 82 year old Russian guy who moved to Israel to live on a kibbutz. He thinks his kibbutz was an example of communism, and sure enough, it failed for just the reasons he expected. Why is he wrong?
If I see 20 guys parading around in Nazi uniforms, I assume they are volunteers — hence voluntary Nazi. If they live up to their ideology, they will be a scourge on society.
If 200 people decide to form a collective farm and become voluntary communists, I predict there will be resentment and ultimate economic failure, but there is no reason to think the will be a detriment to society, nor will they necessarily engage in theft, brutality, and the other horrors that state communism has delivered to the people subjugated by it. As you probably know, kibbutzim were a great benefit to Israel in its earliest years.
Why is it that Nazism is evil even when practiced by 20 people, while communism is not evil when practiced by 200 people?
Defenders of Communism = Defenders of Nazism, just with different uniforms.
Did the people in the kibbutz have to share with anyone outside the kibbutz? Did anyone outside the kibbutz have to participate from time to time against their will? If neither of those is the case, then someone is confusing communism with cooperative.
If 200 people decide to form a collective farm and become voluntary communists
Lots of people have worked together to do collective farming, which is not the same as communism. Communism goes beyond just farming. While I agree that volunteer communism may lead to resentment and economic problems, a cooperation of farmers are likely to prosper just fine. Particularly when in times of plenty, they sell there products to people outside the kibbutz/cooperative, and save for times when harvest are bad to purchase products outside the kibbutz/cooperative.
Ok, how about “criminally stupid with evil always resulting.”
Someone, I supposed, might be so stupid (or brainwashed) as to not realize that holding a gun to someone’s head, and pulling the trigger, will kill them. But that doesn’t make me terribly sympathic to claims of “How could we have known? We never meant this to happen. It was supposed to be different this time.”
Cause and effect, people. At some point a person can no longer be excused for not knowing the consequences of their actions.
The evil intrinsic to Communism is that “Good Will Towards All” does not scale past a certain number. Give a man absolute power over strangers, and he’ll stomp them like ants.
But “Communism” works at the family level. My wife and son sure don’t pay me in cash. The Kibbutz work because they keep their communities within Dunbar’s Number, and all of its members know and love each other. The Kibbutz deal with non-members on a capitalist basis, and some of them are quite wealthy.
If the kibbutzim are voluntary, they cannot be Communistic. because Communism inherently involves the overthrow of free markets. Communism is about taking – the kibbutzim are not.
Communism could, perhaps, despite readily foreseeable practical flaws, be regarded as an intellectually respectable ideology in 1910 as it had yet to be tried anywhere on a national scale. In 2010, no such forbearance is rationally possible. The Marxist experiment has been run repeatedly and the results are always the same – dead bodies, many; prosperity and brotherhood, nada. Marxism is as thoroughly disproven as Phlogiston Chemistry, Ptolemaic Cosmology or Young Earth Creationism. The first two of these have faded away for lack of adherents. The last is still with us for the same reason as Marxism – it’s a viewpoint essentially false to fact that is, nonetheless, desperately clung to by people for religious reasons because it comforts them and/or validates their self-concept in some way. As Heinlein noted, it’s pretty hard to reason a man out of something he wasn’t reasoned into in the first place.
Bob-1,
I think you are drawing a very useful distinction.
Asked: > Why is it that Nazism is evil even when practiced by 20 people, while communism is not evil when practiced by 200 people?
Answered: Because Nazism does not have any form which is not coercive. Communism is only benign, however, when it is not coercive.
Government is an inherently coercive institution, however. Thus, a communist government will be inherently evil like Nazism.
Yours,
Tom
I reject the “good intentions” argument because it grossly mischaracterizes National Socialism, which, also, had very fine intentions. Hitler did not speak to middle-class audiences in the 1920s about herding the Jews into camps and starting a world war. That was all secret stuff that was necessary, but would be “misunderstood” by the naifs needing to be led into utopia — just as was the gulag, forced collectivization, Mao’s “re-education camps,” the forced abortions that accompanied China’s “One Child Policy, the infanticides that come along with North Korea’s maintenance of the worker’s paradise.
No, Hitler would put on a nice conservative tie, speak calmly without the spritzing of spittle, and speak about exactly the same goals as the socialists — hence, “National Socialism,” eh? He spoke of the same great concern for the downtrodden workers. (The remaining parts of the officlal title are “National Socialist German Worker’s Party.) He railed at length against big business, artistocrats and royalty, the Catholic Church, and about the evils of unfettered capitalism. Shave off his moustache and teach him English, and he could appear on any number of lefty media talk shows today and be applauded. The fact that we only see him pictured now as a hysterical freak in jackboots foaming at the mouth while ominous music plays in the background is a deliberate choice by those who feed us our media images. It does not represent historical reality, which is that Hitler appealed quite strongly to millions of good-natured, good-intentioned, kind people who, of their own accord, wouldn’t hurt a fly. And not because they were stupid, or bitterly clinging to their nationalism and guns, but because Hitler spoke the language of “good intentions” very well, and they were, as people mostly are, too naive or too lazy to look beyond the intentions to the proposed mechanisms.
The only difference between Nazism and communism’s intentions — and we know now there is no important difference between the results — is that Nazism found patriotism perfectly acceptable, even laudable, while communism specifically rejected patriotism and loyalty to the nation as enslaving bourgeous delusion (the same as religion).
The fact that patriotism under the Nazis took on strong coloration of racism and other genetic-based determination was just part of the times: genetic determinism and Social Darwinism was broadly popular in the early 20th century, and infliltrated nearly every governing philosophy and practical government to a greater or lesser degree. The Nazis were no special exception — they simply applied German efficiency to the practice, with results that were appalling in degree mostly.
There has never been a terrorist holding a knife to a hostage’s neck who didn’t claim to have noble intentions. He commits murder to free the homeland, draw attention to the plight of the downtrodden, strike a blow for freedom for the oppressed, et cetera and so forth, in sad delusional eternity.
Indeed, in my experience, the broader and more grand the claims of “good intentions,” the more likely it is that the proposal is by nature vicious, inhuman, and monstrous. The most successful governing philosophies in history — stemming largely from English and Scandinavian traditions — have had very modest goals: to protect the coasts and highways, enforce contracts, and otherwise leave people the hell alone. It’s always the philosophies that propose to cause the oceans to recede, manna to fall from heaven, and all the children to be above average that lead to misery and destruction.
I find it fascinating that intelligent and educated people put forward the notion that Communism is a product of the Enlightment.
Communism is a *response* to the Enlightenment, and a rejection of it. It is a product of anti-industrial Romanticism. Communism is, if anything, a return to aristocracy of a different nature and in different clothes, it’s fundamentally predicated on the idea that individuals cannot take care of themselves. Instead of aristocrats given the authority to rule over the commoners by supernatural powers gracing their genetic lineage it posits the existence of beneficent committees empowered by the collective.
In practice neither idea makes a lick of sense and both have led to suffering, subjugation, and destruction of individual liberty on extraordinary scales.
Given that the evils of Communist rule are well known, anybody who still professes to be a Marxist is either one of three things: one, delusional; two ignorant; three; good concentration camp guard material (evil).
Considering the gigantic amounts of information available about the reality (stark doesn’t even begin to cover it) of Communist rule, the people who fall into the ignorant category are willfully so, and should probably be lumped together with the Evil Ones.
Shave off his moustache and teach him English, and he could appear on any number of lefty media talk shows today and be applauded.
No. That’s not true.
Mein Kampf was published in 1925 & 1926, and it made Hiter’s character quite clear. And even before that — Hitler’s speech before the court in 1924 before he was sent to prison was what got him his initial nation-wide following, and while unlike Mein Kampf, it was not anti-semitic, like Mein Kampf, it was the raving ranting of a violent loon (which is what got him sent to prison in the first place).
The first nutty speech: http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/speeches/1924-03-27.html
Mein Kapmf: http://www.archive.org/stream/meinkampf035176mbp/meinkampf035176mbp_djvu.txt
Not defending Nazism in any way, but Germans during the period from 1933-1939 were free to travel abroad and Germany didn’t erect an elaborate border defense system designed to keep their own citizens from escaping. The same can not be said about the USSR before WWII. Or even after.
Oh, I just found some other speeches from the same trial that show Hitler was even more of a nut (and an anti-semite) – I unfortunately picked a rather mild speech to highlight.
Have a look, if you can stand reading more craziness that definitely would not be at home on any American talk show, certainly not a left-wing one:
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/speeches/speeches-hitler.html
I saw a comment at Ace of Spades about the Israeli kibbutzim:
The Israeli kibbutzim were the most perfect implementations of leftist ideas ever, and on totally workable scales (50-5000 people). They all failed, save a handful and the people born and raised on the kibbutzim showed that Man’s nature goes against everything that the leftists had theorized.
The best part about the kibbutzim is that they demonstrate exactly what the weakness of leftism is: they are staticists. They theorize a static world. Everyone IS equal … today, but what about tomorrow. What the kibbutzim showed is that leftist governing and economic theories fail when confronted with growth or any sort of social dynamism. Leftism works for a static, zero-population growth society that doesn’t change from one day to the next. After all, if the most important decision a CEO has to make is how many paper clips Desk #44223 gets this month (which is what leftists actually think) why not just centralize power. In that case, centralization would be efficient and effective. But life isn’t like that.
On the kibbutzim, everyone started out equal. No private ownership. No private eating. No private raising of kids by the natural parents (they went to the kids’ house not long after birth – most people have NO CLUE how far leftists really want to go). But, the simple fact of population growth caused them to need new housing for the growing families. So now, instead of everyone having the same house, four families had better, newer housing. And that would continue. And it wouldn’t be long before the housing was highly stratified and there were very sizeable differences in the quality. And thus, the idea of equality was gone. Done away by the growth that is natural. The situation is far worse with respect to innovations demanded by industry.
I have always told people that if they really wanted to see full-blown leftism and why it is theoretically weak, the Israeli kibbutzim are the place to go. Of course, the kibbutzim are pretty much gone now. They’ve either been converted to Moshavs (private ownership of plots and houses, community dining hall, facilities), otherwise decentralized operations (giving much more personal responsibility and sorts of “personal money” for use in buying kibbutz utilities) or gone outright private.
Leftism always fails because it requires a static, unchanging world, to fit the static unchanging world of the leftists’ simple minds that their theories are all based on. In practice, the centralization of power and industry by leftists fights to stop all dynamics and growth of the society under it and that always ends up very badly.
Posted by: iknowtheleft at December 16, 2010 01:39 AM (G/MYk)
http://minx.cc/?blog=86&post=309413#c11490003
It also unfailingly fails because it requires an utter denial of human nature.
“Have a look, if you can stand reading more craziness that definitely would not be at home on any American talk show, certainly not a left-wing one”
Bob-1, apparently you’ve never watched MSNBC,
I think Socialism/Communism is a “sect”, so to speak, of the Christian religion. To paraphrase Erasmus Darwin – Communism is a feather bed for fallen Christians. If you take Christianity and remove the supernatural, you get something that looks a lot like Communism. It appeals to scientists and intellectuals, because it’s “naturalistic”, and it allows them to keep the dogmatic belief system they were taught at their mother’s knee. They then inevitably start an unusually vicious inquisition against the “sinners” (bourgeoisie, Kulaks, Capitalists, etc.) It’s not surprising that many “Liberal” Christians hate Capitalism. I don’t see much to distinguish between the two authoritarian systems of Nazism and Communism.
It is telling, and more than a little sad, that it takes such a great effort to find real-world examples of the ideas of Marxism put into practice that merely didn’t result in unconscionable human tragedy. At which point does it become necessary to re-evaluate the fundamentals of the idea and determine it’s just not feasible in the real world? Let alone to decide that at the very least implementation of the idea leads to evil far more often than not?
Heh, Bob points to Mein Kampf written in 1926. Yet in reality, Hitler was supported by Progressives in the US all the way up until he declared war against the US in 1941. The lack of support during the war years was both a sense of national pride and the threat of imprisonment by FDR and Hebert Hoover.
Woody Guthrie’s take on the situation:
Mister Charlie Lindbergh, he flew to old Berlin,
Got ‘im a big Iron Cross, and he flew right back again
To Washington, Washington.
Misses Charlie Lindbergh, she come dressed in red,
Said: “I’d like to sleep in that pretty White House bed
In Washington, Washington.”
Lindy said to Annie: “We’ll get there by and by,
But we’ll have to split the bed up with Wheeler, Clark, and Nye
In Washington, Washington.”
Hitler wrote to Lindy, said “Do your very worst,”
Lindy started an outfit that he called America First
In Washington, Washington.
All around the country, Lindbergh, he did fly,
Gasoline was paid for by Hoover, Clark, and Nye
In Washington, Washington.
Lindy said to Hoover: “We’ll do the same as France:
Make a deal with Hitler, and then we’ll get our chance
In Washington, Washington.”
Then they had a meetin’, and all the Firsters come,
Come on a-walkin’, they come on a-runnin’,
In Washington, Washington.
Yonder comes Father Coughlin, wearin’ the silver chain,
Cash on his stomach and Hitler on the brain.
In Washington, Washington.
Mister John L. Lewis would sit and straddle a fence,
His daughter signed with Lindbergh, and we ain’t seen her since
In Washington, Washington.
Hitler said to Lindy: “Stall ’em all you can,
Gonna bomb Pearl Harbor with the help of old Japan.”
In Washington, Washington.
Then on a December mornin’, the bombs come from Japan,
Wake Island and Pearl Harbor, kill fifteen hundred men.
In Washington, Washington
Now Lindy tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t let ‘im in,
‘Fraid he’d sell to Hitler a few more million men.
In Washington, Washington
So I’m a gonna tell you people: If Hitler’s gonna be beat,
The common workin’ people has got to take the seat
In Washington, Washington.
And I’m gonna tell you workers, ‘fore you cash in your checks:
They say “America First,” but they mean “America Next!”
In Washington, Washington.
Bob-1, are you able to think in anything other than clichés?
Awwww. I actually meant to add a note saying that I was posting a song in honor of your recent hilarious musical contributions to this blog.
Some people have talent and some don’t. Andrea has talent.
Nazism == National SocialismCommunism == International Socialism
Hal, the kibbutzniks were Zionists, and Kibbutzim were a first line of defense for the new state of Israel (and contributed its political and military elite). I’ve been arguing that they were communists here while others want to say “no, that’s not communism”, but it really isn’t debatable that the kibbutzniks were socialists. So, here’s you’ve got Holocaust victims who flee to Israel to live in a nurturing community on a kibbutz, and they are naturally quite nationalistic when it comes to Israel, and believe me when I assure you that they were (and are) socialists, so if I followed your formulation, I’d end up concluding that the Jewish Holocaust survivors in question, these national socialists, were Nazis.
This is turning the concept of falsifiability on its head.
Thus, if there is ANY incident of Communism (or what Bob-1 labels Communism) that leads to anything other than a long butcher’s bill, shouldn’t we accept that Communism isn’t bad?
Fair enough.
Schindler was a member of the Nazi Party in good standing. He saved Jews. Ergo, it is wrong to characterize Nazism and Nazis as all bad, or even characterized by anti-Semitism.
Why is the above any less logical than the kibbutzim=Communism can work/is humane argument you propound?
That’s not even what I’m arguing about commuism, since I would never ignore its history of attrocities – I know vicitims of Russian and Yugoslavian communism- but I can’t get into it – I have to run. Briefly, you know Schindler would have been hung with piano wire if he had been caught -even ignoring the Jews he saved, he sabotaged the munitions plant he ran so that the weapons wouldn’t be accurate – so: not a good Nazi even if the Nazis didn’t recognize it.
Mein Kampf was published in 1925 & 1926, and it made Hiter’s character quite clear. And even before that — Hitler’s speech before the court in 1924 before he was sent to prison was what got him his initial nation-wide following, and while unlike Mein Kampf, it was not anti-semitic, like Mein Kampf, it was the raving ranting of a violent loon (which is what got him sent to prison in the first place).
Joseph Goebbels and the nice lads at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda have assured me that these speeches were taken out of context and grossly exaggerated by the bitter enemies of Hitler and the German people.
Bob, your naivety is showing again. Better cover it up. Hitler was a pro at knowing how to act for the audience he had: nutcase speeches for the base and calm reasoned arguments for everyone else, with people like Goebbels to smooth over the deception. He’d know how to play the
Sorry, hit submit by accident. To continue:
Hitler would know how to play mass media markets in the US today. It doesn’t matter if he had a record of nutcase speeches, in large part it is a matter of appearance and saying what the audience wants to hear.
I don’t think that’s what happened. I think the German people knew what they were getting — those Munich Trial speeches made Hitler popular across Germany. Do you have any historical references to back up what you are saying?
To clarify; there is no doubt that propaganda played a huge role in Hitler’s rise to power. I’m questioning the assertion this:
“Hitler was a pro at knowing how to act for the audience he had: nutcase speeches for the base and calm reasoned arguments for everyone else, with people like Goebbels to smooth over the deception.”
I’m not aware of any public calm reasoned arguments by Hitler — his appeal for the German populace was that he was not calm, and while they might want to admit it, his arguments were not reasoned — or reasonable. Open hatred toward whole swaths of ethinc groups and nationalities, including children, is not reasoned or reasonable. You might dig through the records and find an examle of a calm reasoned argument that he made in public (and it is certainly easy to find calm cold-blooded assessments he shared in private), but one or two examples wouldn’t matter — the point was that every sector of the German public was exposed repeatedly to angry hateful diatribes that signaled a coming genocide. That’s not to say everyone was convinced – I’m just saying that everyone had the evidence and needed to decide what to do with it – they weren’t tricked.
This is interesting reading: http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/documents/osstitle.htm It is an American OSS document written mid-war that tried to profile Hitler. One section describes how Hitler was perceived by the German public. Another section predicts Hitler’s suicide.
Here’s a more modern account found at Spiegel Online:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,531909,00.html
How Hitler Won Over The German People
The subtitles alone are telling, for example
Part 3: Vast Approval for Hitler’s Iron Fist
Part 4: The ‘Dynamic Hatred’ against Minorities
I haven’t seen any accounts the describe Hitler using the trick of offering the base red meat while the general public received calm reasoned arguments — on the contrary, the general public responded well to red meat.
I’m not aware of any public calm reasoned arguments by Hitler
Bob that index of speeches you provided are full of reasoned (if not correct) arguments. He makes no excuses for his general racism and specific hatred of Jews. His hatred of Jews goes all the way to his teenage years. He wasn’t alone in his hatred.
You are confusing a reasoned argument from a correct one. His arguments are astonishingly similar to modern progressives today. I point out two examples in my latest post where Obama and Hitler were on the same wavelength.
Reasoning alone doesn’t get you to truth. The foundation you build on matters as well. I’ve never read anything by Hitler before, but I’m astonished by how well he would fit in with the modern group of politicians.
I’ve still got a few more of his speeches from that index you provided to read… but to say he didn’t make reasonable arguments that the German people wouldn’t find persuasive is just not true. Especially considering how racism in the 1930s was pretty much universal.