Davis Aurini - Communism, Fascism, & Democracy: The Three Headed Beast

Sept. 6, 2014 - Davis Aurini

18:36

Communism, Fascism, & Democracy: The Three Headed Beast

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	Communism and fascism are the two great boogeymans of the twentieth century.
	If we think about them at all nowadays, we have a very cartoony approach to them.
	You know, if we think about communism, we think of Red Dawn with the Soviet troops invading, or we think of the bread lines.
	In the case of fascism, we think of Captain America fighting the Red Skull, or the Nazi paratroopers marching down the street with their Hugo Boss designed uniforms.
	And the problem with these views is that it blinds us to what was really going on with these societies, what the nature of the ideology forming them was.
	We miss the forest for the trees.
	We see all the details, we don't see the larger animus behind both of these things.
	And I think the best way to explain what this animus was, the spirit motivating these two societies, is to move away from the words communism and fascism and use the alternate titles for these systems of governance international socialism and national socialism.
	With international socialism, we see the threat of this ideology immediately in the title.
	You know, typically, people that think about the Cold War nowadays, they were probably children while the Cold War was going on.
	And so to them, all they saw was these two giant nations, these two superpowers who just could not trust one another, who were paranoid.
	They both had the atom bomb and they always expected the other one to launch the atom bomb first.
	And so you get this extremely tense situation, and it seems ridiculous, it seems idiotic.
	But when you look at the term international socialism, you start to see why the Soviets were such a threat.
	It's international.
	Their socialism, it cannot be limited to the Eastern Bloc.
	It is an international affair.
	The very premise of international socialism is that there are two fundamental groups in the world, workers and capitalists, and that the capitalist class has been oppressing and exploiting the workers throughout all of history.
	And so by the Soviet ideology, the workers from nation to nation would have more in common with one another than they would with the capitalist class within their nation.
	To the Soviet mind, the British people in World War II that were united from the highest to the lowest, they were united in the struggle, this was a contradiction in terms to them.
	Because capitalists can never do anything but exploit and workers can never do anything but be exploited.
	The foundations of this ideology is conflict between groups.
	Rather than defining themselves positively, you know, rather than saying this is the direction our society is going to go in, this is how we are going to get better as time goes on, they could only point to another group and say they're the bad ones, they're the source of all the evil in this world, and they're the ones holding us back.
	We need to destroy the capitalist so that the workers can unite, the workers can rise.
	And this will be a global phenomenon.
	And so you can think of communism, of international socialism, you can think of it as the sickly ideology.
	It's the one that states that the geniuses, the visionaries, the entrepreneurs, it states that the great people in society are monsters, and that the good people are the people with very little money.
	It's the people that just have a basic skill and labor.
	They go down to the lowest common denominator as the location of virtue while spitting on those who bring genius into the world.
	You can think of it as the sickly one that embraces human frailty, human illness, poverty, so on and so forth.
	They celebrate the weak.
	Now, with national socialism, what you find is the complete inverse to this.
	The national socialist, they don't define themselves based upon people outside of their borders.
	They look internally.
	And so they come up with a mythos of what makes them great.
	You know, let's look at the Nazis specifically.
	They had the whole Teutonic myth about how the German people were the chosen people, the best and most perfect people on the planet.
	But just like the international socialist must attack the capitalist, the national socialist, they must attack as well.
	Because it's not enough to make this affirmation.
	You know, it's not enough to say that the blonde, blue-eyed people are the best people.
	Because Germany, in 1930s, they had just suffered the defeat of World War I. If you said the German people were the best, the question is, well, why aren't we the best then?
	Why are we in second place?
	Why is there so much poverty in Germany?
	And so the response, the response is not that we must keep working on ourselves and moving forward to achieve this ideal.
	No.
	No, the response is to blame the failures on some other group.
	And in the case of Germany, it was the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Communists.
	Those people undermined us in World War I. They're at fault.
	are evil.
	And so with Germany, they did celebrate positive ideals.
	They celebrated the visionary, the accomplished athlete, the musician.
	But they could only celebrate these ideals while hating another group.
	And so just like international socialism creates the conflict between capitalists and workers, national socialism requires a similar conflict.
	It needs another group to blame all of its problems on.
	Rather than having an ideal that it's working towards, and the same thing with communism, rather than having an ideal society it's working towards, they must have a scapegoat to blame for why we're not there already.
	They are utopian in that both of them promise heaven on earth.
	They promise when we finally kill all the capitalists, when we finally get rid of all the gypsies and Jews, we will have the perfect country.
	We will have a Reich that will last for a thousand years.
	But the reality is that neither of them truly has a solution.
	They have a couple of ideas, maybe.
	Some of them are maybe even good ideas.
	But they don't have a solution.
	And so that's why they must push the evil of the world onto a specific group.
	And it really is a scapegoat.
	It's one goat that you put all of the tribe's sins on and then chase off into the wilderness.
	Now there is a third ideology that came out of the twentieth, nineteenth, twentieth centuries, and that was democracy.
	Or perhaps a better term for it might be universal socialism.
	You know, if you call communism the sickly ideology and fascism, you could call it the boyish ideology.
	You know, its vision of the man is like something out of a superhero comic book for children.
	It's very naive, it's very juvenile.
	Then I think you'd have to call universal socialism the most schizophrenic of the three.
	Because let's think about universal socialism.
	Let's think about American democracy and how, like the other systems, it needs to break things down into two simplistic groups, a good group and a bad group.
	In this case, we have the left-right divide in American politics.
	And see, the funny thing about the left-right divide is how frequently policies swap back and forth between these two groups.
	Let me give you a couple of examples.
	Civil rights.
	Civil rights started out as a Republican movement.
	You see, back in the 40s, the Democrats were the Union Party.
	And a lot of these unions did not want to allow black members in, because that sort of competition would lower their wages.
	And so the Democrats in supporting the unions were for Jim Crow laws, whereas the Republicans, representing business interests, were for the removal of Jim Crow laws.
	They were for civil rights.
	And yet over the past 50 years or so, we've seen those policies swap between the two parties.
	The Democrats are now the ones that appeal to the black vote, and the Republicans are the ones that are supposedly a bunch of old racist white men.
	Another more recent example would be Obamacare.
	Obamacare was originally a policy proposal by the Republicans.
	It was a document they drafted together because if the Democrats ever got close to getting socialized medicine, they were going to propose Obamacare as a halfway solution that still keeps the private industry involved in the whole thing.
	And yet now we see Obamacare being a Democrat ideology.
	Now, certainly, there are temperamental differences.
	An anonymous conservative wrote an excellent book, which I've linked to it before.
	It's linked on my website.
	Go buy that book about the temperamental differences between the left and the right.
	That the left tends to attract rabbit people and the right tends to attract wolves.
	It's a little bit more complex than that.
	But absolutely, there are these two trends in the two parties.
	But the parties themselves, the policies they propose, the policies that swap back and forth between the two parties, are nothing but a distracting sideshow.
	This is not an Athenian democracy that we have in our modern countries.
	This is bread and circuses.
	The whole point of politics in democracy is to distract the mob.
	You know, the same way that the international socialists, they would tell the people that all of your problems, all of these breadlines, all of this poverty, it's all of that evil capitalism.
	Those evil capitalists are the ones destroying you.
	The Nazis would tell their people that the reason your country is such a failure is because those Jews and gypsies plotted to ruin it for us.
	And democracy, they find their own opposition inside the arena of politics.
	If you're a Democrat, everything wrong with the country is Republicans.
	And if you're a Republican, everything wrong with the country is Democrats.
	When anybody with an ounce of common sense and just a little bit of education can look at these two parties and see how insane both of them are.
	And how it's once again, manufactured conflict with this kind of concept of this utopia being in the future.
	Or being in the 1950s.
	This utopia that we can never quite achieve, but that the other of the bad guys are holding us back.
	You know, bread yesterday, bread today, but always cake tomorrow.
	All three of these ideologies that the 19th and 20th centuries spawned, all three of them, they come down to socialism.
	Not the economic principle of how much GDP should be spent on social programs, because you've never had a perfectly anarchist country and you've never had a perfectly socialist country.
	All of them are somewhere on the spectrum.
	But socialism, our ideology of what it means to be a citizen.
	And see, these ideologies need to dominate the minds of all the citizens.
	Have you ever heard a politician say, I don't care who you vote for just as long as you vote?
	That's universal socialism.
	You know, if you think voting is a waste of time, you're dangerous.
	You're an enemy.
	You have crime think going on in your head, because as long as we keep people voting, people feel like they accomplished something.
	You know, go sign a petition.
	You know, go share a picture on Facebook.
	You know, engage in the political process.
	You don't notice what's going on.
	And there's no true higher purpose to any of these societies.
	You know, the communism, they have their workers' utopia, a pipe dream.
	You know, the Nazis, they have their Teutonic mythos, which is just that, a pagan mythos that should have died two thousand years ago.
	We should have grown up from that.
	And then you've got progress, progressivism in the West.
	And what's progress?
	Nobody knows.
	Nobody can tell you what progress is.
	And if you predict accurately what the progressives are going to do in five years, they call you a crazy person that's making the slippery slope fallacy.
	None of these societies truly have an understanding of human virtue, of human nature, of the purpose behind our existence.
	And to try and compare this abomination that we have in Western countries, trying to compare that to Athenian democracy is an absolute joke.
	Say what you will about the old religions in Europe, you know, prior to the 19th century.
	At least those offered people a direction in life, something to strive towards, not just the accumulation of wealth and hating anybody that's not like you, but a deeper purpose, a spiritual purpose, a goal to grow as a person.
	You know, maybe humans are just venal and stupid, and the only way to run a civilization is to blame all your problems on a scapegoat and then send that thing off into the wilderness.
	You know, maybe we need to have a war every so often and kill a bunch of the wrong type of people just to satisfy the ugliness inside of all of us.
	Maybe I'm an optimist in thinking we can do better, but I think we can.
	And I really think the solution to all of the crap over the past two hundred years is an individual solution.
	It's bettering ourselves.
	And it's fighting the monsters when you gotta fight the monsters, but not getting too wrapped up in this mendacious chicanery.
	Keep your souls clean, folks.

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