AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

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I can tell you from observation and my reading of history, oe, Hitler was certainly no conservative or right wing guy

You're seeking out people like J.J. Ray or Jonah Goldberg - people who have zero authority as historians, but echo your political views - to tell you a revisionist version of history. Your worldview doesn't allow for anything as ugly as National Socialism being associated with your beloved right-wing policies. Therefore you ignore what historians and even fellow conservatives on this forum - people like High Seas, Asherman or GeorgeOB - tell you and rather rely on revisionist interpretations of history, so you can feel safe in the belief that all evil arises from the political left.

http://www.crusader.net/texts/mk/mkv2ch01.html
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Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume Two: The National Socialist Movement
Chapter I: Philosophy and Party
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ON FEBRUARY 24, 1920, the first great public demonstration of our young movement took place. In the Festsaal of the Munich Hofbräuhaus the twenty-five theses of the new party's program were submitted to a crowd of almost two thousand and every single point was accepted amid jubilant approval.

With this the first guiding principles and directives were issued for a struggle which was to do away with a veritable mass of old traditional conceptions and opinions and with unclear, yes, harmful, aims. Into the rotten and cowardly bourgeois world and into the triumphant march of the Marxist wave of conquest a new power phenomenon was entering, which at the eleventh hour would halt the chariot of doom.

It was self-evident that the new movement could hope to achieve the necessary importance and the required strength for this gigantic struggle only if it succeeded from the very first day in arousing in the hearts of its supporters the holy conviction that with it political life was to be given, not to a new election slogan, but to a new philosophy of fundamental significance.

We must bear in mind from what wretched viewpoints so-called ' party programs' are normally patched together and from time to time refurbished or remodeled. We must submit the driving motives particularly of these bourgeois 'program-commissions' to our magnifying glass, in order to achieve the necessary understanding for the evaluation of these programmatical monstrosities. It is always one sole concern which impels men to set up new programs or to change existing ones: concern for the next election. As soon as it dawns on these parliamentary 'jugglers' that the beloved people are again revolting and would like to slip out of the harness of the old party cart, they begin to repaint the shafts. Then come the stargazers and party astrologers, the so-called 'experienced," shrewd' men, old parliamentarians as a rule, who in their 'rich period of apprenticeship' can recall analogous cases when the patience of the masses had burst, and who now sense that something similar is again menacingly close. And so they take up the old prescriptions, form a 'commission,' go about listening to the voice of the beloved people, sniff at the products of the press, and thus slowly scent what the dear broad masses would like to have, what they detest and what they hope for. Every professional group, even every class of employees, is studied with the greatest precision and their most secret wishes investigated. Even the 'bad slogans' of the dangerous opposition then suddenly become ripe for examination, and, not seldom to the greatest amazement of their original inventors and disseminators, turn up, quite innocently and naturally, in the old parties' treasury of knowledge.
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ON FEBRUARY 24, 1920, the first great public demonstration of our young movement took place. In the Festsaal of the Munich Hofbräuhaus the twenty-five theses of the new party's program were submitted to a crowd of almost two thousand and every single point was accepted amid jubilant approval. ...

I think that is one reason why libs here don't like the idea of debating or examining the 25 points and making judgements about whether they were left or right in nature. They especially dismiss one of the main points, "Common good before Individual Good." And we are supposed to believe that Hitler murdering those millions of Jews did not have anything to do with Hitler's view that the common good of Germany depended in part on getting rid of the Jews that had polluted the country with their greedy capitalism.

okie wrote:

I think that is one reason why libs here don't like the idea of debating or examining the 25 points and making judgements about whether they were left or right in nature. They especially dismiss one of the main points, "Common good before Individual Good." And we are supposed to believe that Hitler murdering those millions of Jews did not have anything to do with Hitler's view that the common good of Germany depended in part on getting rid of the Jews that had polluted the country with their greedy capitalism.

Fine, okie. Let's discuss it.

But: Hitler wrote in German.
How good is your German?

Hitler wrote that in a certain time, due to some ceratin things happening in (political) Germany. How good is your knowledge of Germany past-1918?

We certainly can do this discussion in Enlish, just referring to the original German sources, of course.
Let's start with the founding of political parties past WWI. You certainly are aware of that situation in various German states, republics, kingdoms, principalities etc, aren't you?

However, I don't know why we need to get lost in too many details, Walter, to the point of not seeing the forest for the trees.

You can lead the way and start the discussion if you want. Actually I would like you to make your case, and you can go into as much detail as you like. By the way, I took you off of my ignore list.

In early 1920, the party changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) which quickly got corrupted to 'Nazi' by both enemies and supporters alike. Hitler wrote out the party's beliefs in the so-called 25 Point Party Programme. This party programme was a curious mixture - right wing nationalism; anti-capitalism; anti-socialism; anti-wealth etc. 

This rag-bag mixture would have been laughable in normal circumstances but Germany was not in normal circumstances. The NSDAP played on the Germans hatred of the Treaty of Versailles (which it said it would ignore); the belief that Germany had been stabbed in the back. Even in its early days, the NSDAP tuned in to many peoples' emotions. However, in 1920, the party was just one of many right wing parties that seemed to exist in Germany at this time.

Up to 1923, the Nazi Party was small and noisy. Its importance was mainly in the Munich area of Bavaria. Money, or lack of it, was always a problem. The 1923 hyperinflation crisis proved to be an opportunity too good to miss for the now party leader - Hitler.
Hyperinflation ruined the middle class. The poor had little and they lost most of the little they had. The rich lost a lot but as rich people they could keep their heads above water. The middle class did not have the cash reserves of the rich but they led comfortable lives. These lives were now ruined by hyperinflation and they blamed the government.

Hitler planned to seize the most important city in the south - Munich - and to use the city as a base to launch an attack on the rest of Germany, hoping that the angered middle class would rise up in support of him throughout the nation.

Soon after the war in Munich, Hitler was recruited to join a military intelligence unit (the Press and Propaganda Department of Group Command IV of the Reichswehr), and was assigned to keep tabs on the German Worker's Party. At the time, it was comprised of only a handful of members. It was disorganized and had no program, but its members expressed a right-wing doctrine consonant with Hitler's.
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As chairman of the NSDAP, he came into contact with Ludendorff, Gottfried Feder (1883-1941), Ernst Röhm (1887-1934), and Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923), whose influence was reflected in Hitler's thought: Gottfried Feder ("Break the bond of interest"), Ernst Röhm (the concept of the "state in arms") and Dietrich Erkart (anti-communism). With the assistance of party staff, Hitler drafted a party program consisting of twenty-five points. This platform was presented at a public meeting on February 24, 1920, with over 2,000 eager participants. After hecklers were forcibly removed by Hitler supporters armed with rubber truncheons and whips, Hitler electrified the audience with his masterful demagoguery. Jews were the principal target of his diatribe. Among the 25 points more negative points were the abrogation of the Versailles Treaty, confiscating war profits, expropriating land without compensation for use by the state, revoking civil rights for Jews, and expelling those Jews who had emigrated into Germany after the war began. More appealing to the masses were no doubt his promotion of the popular welfare ("the common weal comes before individual welfare"), the right of the establishment of self-determination for all Germans and equal rights for their state, and the destruction of the "bondage of interest.

Annville (Aug. 3, 2001) -- On behalf of Gov. Tom Ridge, the state Adjutant General, Maj. Gen. William Lynch, today announced that some 850 soldiers of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard’s 28th Infantry Division (Mechanized) have begun a year-long program to prepare for their expected mobilization in July 2002 to support the NATO-led peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

“We blew through Fort Hood,” said Lt. Col. Alex Korzenewski, commander of the Abilene-based 111th Engineer Battalion. “Everybody is in great shape and spirits. We have proven that we can do a real-world mission in a peacekeeping environment.”

Directly related to this very point is the conservative principle voiced in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The left or liberal view would be in direct contradiction to the above, because they believe liberty of the individual must be compromised to various extents in the interests of the common good.

http://www.crusader.net/texts/mk/mkv2ch01.html
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Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume Two: The National Socialist Movement
Chapter I: Philosophy and Party
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ON FEBRUARY 24, 1920, the first great public demonstration of our young movement took place. In the Festsaal of the Munich Hofbräuhaus the twenty-five theses of the new party's program were submitted to a crowd of almost two thousand and every single point was accepted amid jubilant approval.

With this the first guiding principles and directives were issued for a struggle which was to do away with a veritable mass of old traditional conceptions and opinions and with unclear, yes, harmful, aims. Into the rotten and cowardly bourgeois world and into the triumphant march of the Marxist wave of conquest a new power phenomenon was entering, which at the eleventh hour would halt the chariot of doom.
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Chapter 15 The Right of Emergency Defense
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Conclusion
ON NOVEMBER 9, 1923, in the fourth year of its existence, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was dissolved and prohibited in the whole Reich territory. Today in November, 1926, it stands again free before us, stronger and inwardly firmer than ever before.

All the persecutions of the movement and its individual leaders, all vilifications and slanders, were powerless to harm it. The correctness of its ideas, the purity of its will, its supporters' spirit of self-sacrifice, have caused it to issue from all repressions stronger than ever.
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