By Thomas E. Brewton
Worthreading.ning.com
Obama does not compare favorably as a community organizer or as a party
leader when matched against liberal-progressive party leaders in Nazi
Germany.
A reader wrote to ask how Rush Limbaugh differs from Joseph Goebbels.
Both, said the reader, are hate-mongers. There isn't much similarity, of
course. Limbaugh is not a great orator, as Goebbels was. Nor is he at all
the superb organizer and administrator that Goebbels was.
The reader's question, however, prompted a comparison of Barack Obama,
whose announced intention is to revolutionize the United States, and Adolph
Hitler, whose announced intention was to revolutionize German society. Both
aimed at socialistic redistribution of wealth to improve the lot of working
men and other lower-income groups. Both imposed control over major
industrial groups.
However much we deplore the racist nationalism of the National Socialist
German Workers Party (Nazis), we have to give the devil his due. We are
compelled to recognize Hitler and Goebbels as extraordinarily gifted
organizers and administrators, as well as outstanding orators.
Obama is a good orator, as his victories in the Democrat/Socialist Party
presidential primary and later in the general election proved. Unlike
Hitler, however, Obama flounders without a prepared speech, supported by a
teleprompter. Hitler could mesmerize an audience without notes, speaking to
vast audiences, any length from half an hour to two hours, often without
even a public address system. English and American journalists went to his
National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) rallies expecting to hear a
buffoon. Without exception they became entranced as Hitler orated with great
logical clarity, finding themselves almost in agreement with him.
Like Obama, Hitler rose to power in the midst of social and economic
turmoil. After World War I, German industry was severely crippled,
unemployment was high, and fecklessness of the Weimar Republic's brand of
socialism left the nation in despair. The conditions that Hitler faced were,
in fact, much more severe than anything confronting Obama.
Obama flitted from limited engagement as a neighborhood
agitator-organizer to working with Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers
and Bernadine Dohrn to insinuate socialistic messages into the public school
curriculum. He managed to get elected to the Illinois legislature and then
to the United States Senate, never getting any significant legislation
enacted.
His short, dilettantish gesture in the direction of community
organization in Chicago's South Side was his only exposure to executive
administration before his coronation as the Nation's Savior in 2009. In his
first year as president, Obama has concentrated upon speechifying, leaving
administrative and legislative responsibilities in the hands of Rahm
Emanuel, David Axelrod, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.
In sharp contrast, Adolph Hitler took over a Munich
political club with hardly more than 40 members and, in 14 years (including
his time in Landsberg prison in 1923-24), built it into the largest and most
powerful political organization in Germany. Hitler was directly involved in
every political and organizational move, appointing and directing party
leaders, from the neighborhood to the national level. He was especially
effective at the strategic level, foreseeing the path to national triumph of
the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis).
Goebbels, like Obama, was a neighborhood organizer, though
considerably more effective and skilled than Obama.
Goebbels was dispatched by Hitler in 1926 to Berlin, the heart of German
communist support and the seat of the Weimar Republic. Berlin, like
Hollywood and the East and Left Coast metropolises of today, had sunk into a
pit of sensual degradation, a degradation so extreme that even the Parisians
were shocked at what was exhibited publicly.
Goebbels's mission was to organize the rag-tag bit of the National
Socialist German Workers Party in Berlin and to increase its membership. He
did both things spectacularly well in the face of assaults by street gangs
of armed communist labor union members.
A final comparison and, in this case congruence,
between Obama and Hitler, as well as the Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin, is
their recognition that, if socialism is to be imposed successfully, it must
become a world-wide phenomenon. So long as socialist nations are bordered by
non-socialist nations, their hegemony always will be threatened by
defections and periodic aggressions. Hence the Berlin Wall and the Soviet
Union's continual campaigns during the Cold War to subvert central and
easter-European nations to bring them behind the Iron Curtain of Soviet
control.
Hitler's socialistic vision, like that of
Mussolini's Fascist italy, was nationalistic, aiming to bring all necessary
farmland and natural resources under control of the National Socialist
German Workers Party in order to insure maximum self-suffiency for Nazi
Germany. Obama's obsession with "green" jobs and high-cost fuel in the name
of energy self-sufficiency is not politically the same as Hitler's Drang
nach Osten, but economically it is of the same stripe. Ditto Obama's drive
to control the banking business, auto manufacturing, energy production and
use, and the nation's healthcare industry.
All liberal-progressive-socialist leaders, from
Auguste Comte to Marx and Lenin, to Obama have exhibited a strong faith that
reified laws of history are moving us inevitably toward a socialized world
hegemony under the tutelage of liberal-progressive intellectuals. That
doctrine anticipates a world of peace and harmony when income and property
shall have been equally distributed around the globe. As in Lenin's vision
of socialism, when the political state, through whatever methods may be
necessary (for instance, ramming Obamacare through Congress via
reconciliation) shall have succeeded in reshaping human nature into the New
Soviet Man (from each according to ability, to each according to need),
government will simply wither away and the whole world will be one big happy
family.
James Madison spoke to that sort of utopian theorizing in the
Federalist Papers, when he noted that, if men were angels, no
government would be necessary. But experience and prudence suggested the
need for auxiliary precautions.