Tom Miller (Widely settled law graduate, novice new media geezer. Apologist for equality. Influenced by both traditional european social-democracy and bits of post-marxism) plunges in:

One of the more ridiculous arguments often seen flying around the blogosphere, often from Libertarian Ron Paul fans and other idiots, but just as often from wingnut Tories, is that Hitler was somehow ‘left-wing’, on the basis that he followed a philosophy of statism.

… Socialism=big state, Hitler=big state, therefore Hitler=Socialism.

This argument is patently ridiculous, of course. Socialism has often backed a big state, but this is for a reason; a big state is one of the many possibly effects of being left wing, rather than the only thing that the left stands for …

Saying someone is a socialist or ‘left-wing’ (in this case Hitler) because they believe in a big state is like saying someone is Chinese because they have black hair.

More:

Left and right are about whether you believe that the state of social relations should be more equitable and conducted on a more egalitarian basis (this also applies to most liberals); believing this puts you left of the centre line.

If you believe that social relations are either fine as they are, or irrelevant to politics, you are essentially a conservative, and to the right of the central line.

Tom’s mistake lies in not reading Liberal Fascism (which describes in great length and detail the openly socialist origins and aspirations of Mussolini and Hitler), and so asking the wrong questions. Or, rather, second order questions.

It all has to start with human nature and the ways in which human ingenuity and creativity express themselves.

If talents are distributed ‘unequally’ (as they have to be by the random play of genetics), it follows that different people will be able to do different things. Some people will be more productive and creative and efficient than others. They will create products and ideas (together or in teams) which did not exist until they came along and created them.

Those people who did not create those things are lucky. They tend to get the benefit of those inventions at ever cheaper prices as time goes by (see eg once luxury items such as a house and regular food, now a 21-speed bike and an iPod). 

Thus the inventors/creators and the most diligent contribute their skill and effort to others. Those others of course are not passive – they too trade their skills and labour as best they can.

The primary political question is therefore a moral question. Does an individual own the product of his and her free mind and energy? Or does ‘society’?

Putting it another way, under what circumstances am I able – or ‘entitled’ – to insist that someone else should give me something I want, and then call on others (the state) to use force (taxes, backed by the threat of imprisonment) to grab it for me?

One great tradition had it that the authority to answer these questions came from God to man via Kings. The more recent tradition established by the French and Russian Revolutions and then the Nazis too proclaimed that the answer came from Man, and that those who stood for Man were entitled to do whatever it took to achieve the results they saw fit – not least by killing man in huge numbers for the sake of Man.

The dominant form of social democratic Leftism these days, to which Tom Miller looks to belong, is a moderate tributary of this collectivist tradition which (as he helpfully puts it) wants to ‘force greater equality’ (sic).

The Zimbabwe example is interesting. When colonialism ended there was evident inequality in land ownership. Mugabe with his Africanist obsession with land issues is ending his rule in a lunge to end this inequality by chasing pink-skinned owners off their land. Yet those people also gave that country and its people all sorts of other good things – discipline, knowledge, order, predictablity, wisdom and so on.

The result? Utter collapse, with those who have been most senior in ‘forcing equality’ grabbing what they can and hiding it away overseas.

Rather like the goings-on in the UK now, in fact, as the grim results of Big Left Government prostituting itself to Big Money and Big Stupidity reveal themselves.

I still stand by this passage on the emergence of the Machine Age:

… how hard it is now to grasp the scale of the extraordinary emotional impact brought about by all that unprecedented new Bigness.

Huge impersonal machines. Stunning machine noise. Unimaginable machine speeds. Warfare waged by machines. Machines flying. All from European and American white-skinned genius, leaving supposedly primitive blacks and browns and yellows trailing far behind.

 

These inventions and the social upheaval they brought amazed intellectuals and caused a whole new way of political thinking to emerge: that society too was in essence a single vast machine, capable of (and indeed depending on) being regulated and controlled by the intellectual elite. Human beings became ‘the masses’, mere cogs toiling for a collective ‘higher’ purpose… Communism, Nazism and Fascism alike were ideologies based on Machine Age Bigness. They shared an explicit socialist/collectivist core, aimed at submerging the individual in a choreographed mass. They all promoted revolutionary violence and calculated lies to try to seize the moment and control the past, the present and future…

And my own questions:

Where might we need collective action to deal with issues which individual action can not solve? And if we need collective action, is the State the best or only way to get good results?

In an age where people armed with new technology are once again after many centuries able to regain power vis-a-vis the state, the idea of Collectivists ‘forcing’ equality or indeed anything else is surely the main part of the problem?