Quote:
Originally Posted by
TCinVA
How many US university departments have Nazi instructors in them?
Depends - Do we include religious universities with strong ties to the White Supremacist community or not?
Quote:
How many have openly communist instructors in them?
Probably more openly communist instructors than openly neo-Nazi or even open Nazi...but the Nazi Party as originally founded IS dead and so are the vast majority of its members. However, if you surveyed academics in 1935 you would have found a bunch more Nazis than you might predict. But my guess is less communists than you think. Socialists? Sure. Communists? No.
Quote:
If you go to the average college campus, how many Hitler t-shirts will you spot?
Depends on if that Hitler is the face of Donald Trump/George Bush/Hilary Clinton/Some Other Politician morphed into Hitler or not.
Quote:
How many Che t-shirts will you spot?
In three years at the University of Chicago, I have seen ZERO Che shirts. I've seen zero Hitler shirts. In 8 years at UT Austin, I saw maybe a handful of Che t-shirts.
Quote:
How many Nazi organizations successfully recruited people within the government of the United States and in important cultural positions within the United States to advance the Nazi cause?
If we count white supremacy groups that use Nazi rhetoric? More than the communists have. Seriously. There is a reason white supremacy is a real issue in prisons and the military. There are a number of radical right leaning Neo-Nazi affiliated individuals in positions of authority from police all the way up.
Quote:
How many did the KGB successfully recruit in the United States?
Great question. We don't know.
Quote:
In other words, if we accept the proposition that the Nazis were "right wing" then it does not seem to be a terribly successful sell here in the states. Probably because it's rather difficult to ignore the outright criminality of the Nazi regime since we invaded their territory, killed a bunch of them, and captured plenty of evidence of their crimes.
And yet we have the largest percentage of white supremacy groups world wide. Who identify ideologically with the more morally corrupt constructs of National Socialism but promote it with radically right-leaning conservatist rhetoric. Including the outright support of genocide and complete and utter destruction of the American public. And they are definitively - radical right in their use of rightest conservative ideology to promote and sell their brand of hate. Aryan Nation, Neo-Nazis, fuck the damn Hell's Angels are all classified as hate/terror groups globally and have contributed a disproportionate number amount of violence and terrorism in the US relative to Communists...
Quote:
If we accept the preposition that there are different flavors of murderous tyranny, it's worth noting that there's only one flavor of it being sold on every street corner in the country. If we were keeping score in the sheer levels of human misery and murder inflicted on the planet, that flavor of murderous tyranny was murderous on levels that make the combined efforts of Hitler, Pinochet, and Franco look like a bunch of pikers.
And the Africans conducting tribal genocide make the Commies look like fucking wimps.
As you clearly articulate at the beginning that I snipped out - The trouble with regimes, be they right OR left is they ultimately seek a power imbalance. They ultimately seek to conquer the opposing side, and then eliminate it. This country runs a real risk if strong radical conservatism runs amok just as it does if strong radical liberalism runs amok. It's not a dichotomous nature as you're painting it. Quite the contrary, it is very clear that along the continuum from ultra conservative to ultra liberal there is a fine balance point that respects individual liberty, freedom, and life. But that at either end you're killing a bunch of non-like minded people, because they aren't like minded.
The problem with painting it like you are in this case, TC, is that you're ignoring that it is a spectrum. Someone can be a socialist and advocate for socialist economic policies and not be desiring the genocidal removal of all people not in favor of socialism. Instead, they may well view that the necessary path to long-term economic stability is for the masses to control the means of production. - There may not, and in fact often does not, lie at the heart of many people the desire to murder every Christian on the planet. But as long as we continue to paint individuals in that light, they will continue to think that anyone who doesn't agree with them is a stark raving, well-armed, lunatic, hell bent on killing all of them for disagreeing with their desire to be an athiest socialist.
But hey what do I know...I'm just an agnostic, academic, libertarian, capitalist, who believes in individual freedom and responsibility, along with a government that does not have the means to actively support or oppress, disproportionately, any group based on their ethnic/religious/political/personal identifiers. And I stand around, ready, to make sure that no group gets loaded into cattle cars and slaughtered.
But if people keep pushing genocidal agendas...I might go from zero to jackboot in a hurry.