This is an “easy essay” (in the spirit of Peter Maurin’s contributions to “The Catholic Worker”). It is a follow-up to Monday’s posting about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Nazis’ reincarnation in today’s United States. It explains how Hitler actually prevailed in World War II (the Second inter-capitalist war). The “essay” references Marge Schott, the then-owner of the Cincinnati Reds, who in 1996 famously said that “Hitler was good in the beginning, but went too far.” The caption under the picture above reads in Spanish: “Hitler Won the War”
Following Germany’s defeat
in “the First Inter-Capitalist War,”
the system was in trouble in “das Vaterland.”
It also foundered world-wide
after the Crash of ‘29.
So Joseph Stalin
convoked a Congress of Victory
to celebrate the death of capitalism
and the End of History —
in 1934.
Both Hitler and F.D.R.
tried to revive the corpse.
They enacted similar measures:
government funds to stimulate private sector production,
astronomically increased defense spending,
nationalization of some enterprises,
while carefully keeping most in the hands of private individuals.
To prevent workers from embracing communism,
both enacted social programs otherwise distasteful to the Ruling Class,
but necessary to preserve their system:
legalized unions, minimum wage, shortened work days, safety regulation, social security . . .
Roosevelt called it a “New Deal;”
Hitler’s term was “National Socialism.”
Roosevelt used worker discontent
with their jobs and bosses
to get elected four times.
Meanwhile, Hitler successfully directed worker rage
away from the Krupps and Bayers
and towards the usual scapegoats:
Jews, communists, gays, blacks, foreigners and Gypsies.
He admired the American extermination of “Indians”
and used that model of starvation and internment
to guide his own program for eliminating undesirables
by hunger and concentrated slaughter.
Hitler strictly controlled national unions,
thus relieving the worries of the German elite.
In all of this,
he received the support of mainline churches.
Pius XII even praised der Führer as
“an indispensable bulwark against the Russians.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the German “Confessing Church”
resisted Hitler’s program
of social Darwinism, patriotism and persecution of the undeserving.
Confessing faithful were critical of “religion”
which combined anti-Semitism, white supremacy, patriotism and xenophobia
with selected elements of Christianity.
They insisted on allegiance
to Jesus alone
who stood in judgment over soil, fatherland, flag and blood.
They even urged Christian patriots
to pray for their country’s defeat in war.
Bonhoeffer participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler
and explored the promise of
Christianity without “religion.”
Hitler initially enjoyed great popularity
with the powerful
outside of Germany,
in Europe and America.
He did!
Then as baseball magnate and used car saleswoman, Marge Schott, put it,
“He went too far.”
His crime, however, was not gassing Jews,
but trying to subordinate his betters in the club
of white, European, capitalist patriarchs.
He thus evoked their ire
and the “Second Inter-Capitalist War.”
Following the carnage,
the industrialists in other countries
embraced Hitlerism without Hitler.
They made sure that communists, socialists and other “partisans”
who bravely resisted German occupation
did not come to political power,
but that those who had cooperated with Nazis did.
Today, the entrepreneurial classes
still support Nazis, whenever necessary.
The “Hitlers” they championed have aliases
like D’Aubisson (El Salvador), Diem (Vietnam), Duvalier (Haiti), Franco (Spain),
Fujimori (Peru), Mobutu (Zaire), Montt (Guatemala), Noriega (Panama), Peron (Argentina),
Pinochet (Chile), Resa Palavi (Iran), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Somoza (Nicaragua), Strossner
(Paraguay), Suharto (Indonesia). . . .
The list is endless.
The global elite deflect worker hostility
away from themselves
towards communists, blacks, gays, immigrants and Muslims,
towards poor women who stay at home
and middle class women who leave home to work.
Today, Christians embrace social Darwinism
while vehemently rejecting evolution.
Standing on a ground of being
underpinning the world’s most prominent culture
of religious fundamentalism,
they long for Hoover,
and coalesce
with the right.
In all of this
is forgotten the Jesus of the Christian Testament
who was born a homeless person
to an unwed,
teenage mother,
was an immigrant in Egypt for a while,
came from the working poor,
was accused of being a drunkard,
a friend of sex workers,
irreligious,
possessed by demons
and condemned by the state
a victim of torture
and of capital punishment.
Does this make anyone wonder about Marge Schott,
the difference between Hitler’s system
and our own,
and also about “religion”
and how to be free of it,
about false Christs . . . .
And who won that war anyway?
About Things That Matter 
The madness of oppression has many faces, but it always wears the mask of righteousness. Our tragedy is that so few see through it’s pretensions to the ugliness it really is.
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Professor Ravage-Seul,
Your neatly composed homage to Peter Maurin’s easy essays contained a list of “Hitlers” we should censure. I did notice the absence of the most important nations and leaders who join Hitler in being the most inhumane tyrants of the last 100 years. The omitted are nations and men of the ideological Left. These omissions cast a shadow of a configuration of that, perhaps accidentally, implies a misplaced sympathy with the worst tyrannical regimes of the last 100 years.
I would like to cite a book that is illuminating on this topic. It is “The Black Book of Communism” from Harvard University Press. It presents a compendium of horrors that are an decisive answer to all the spurious arguments of Communist apologists. It establishes that Communist states were essentially criminal enterprises. It is absolutely not an enjoyable read.
Publication of “The Black Book” in November 1997 in France and in 1999 in the United States stirred up a major political and intellectual debate, propelling this academic study of the actual nature of Communism in practice onto the best–seller list. For anyone who doubts that Communism produced anything but scores of millions on innocents murdered in the service of a higher ideal, the evidence is presented in this book in all its ghastly detail.
Stalin was able to mask the inhumanity of Soviet Communism, and to widen its appeal to many in the West, by assuming the mantle of anti-Fascism. But in practice Communism in its macabre implementation actually proved to resemble the worst aspects of Fascism. Especially repugnant to me personally is that both the Nazis and the Soviets made Catholicism a principle target. They tried to exterminate Catholicism by exterminating Catholic clergy. Stalin’s propaganda and tactics allowed him to present himself as a defender of the bourgeois traditions of common men that he disdained. The result was that in the West Communists were able to pose as champions of liberal democracy. They were able to gather allies from the left and right.
To many Western liberals it is more important to ignore or minimize the crimes of Communism than to do anything that would aid the primary enemy on the right. It sometimes appears if a “moral” person can have no enemies to the left. To them is is not pertinent that Communists and Fascists (who they mistakenly believe to be of the right) committed comparable crimes; what counts is that their motivations differed. The Nazis intended, in the pursuit of a purified racial population, to completely exterminate certain ethnic and religious groups; whereas the Leftist communist regimes murdered people from all classes and groups that stood in the way of their ideal. Their ideal was the revolutionary creation of a “New Man”, a human whose very nature was retrofitted for an utopian future. In practice these two systems turned out to to be two sub-species of the same rude beast.
Not only did Communist governments murder many more innocents than the Nazis but one should emphasize that the Communist practice of mass murder in the name of a noble idea is more perverse than it is in the name of a base one.
The worst offender among the Communist states, the People’s Republic of China, is still at it, though we avert our eyes lest we blemish our enjoyment of inexpensive luxuries manufactures by slaves. China is missing from your list.
In the Chinese Gulag, the Laogai, a prison system that has been whited-out in the West, now holds the most political prisoners in the world who live, labor, and die in barbaric confinement. They are slaves who manufacture Christmas lights for our markets. Their organs are harvested for sale in California.
The Black Book reveals that twenty million died in that system after the Communist victory in 1949. Twenty million more died during the Great Leap Forward of 1959 to 1961, and many thousands more during the Great Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Why expose all this now when we need to export the jobs of the American poor to China for greater profits for the elite turbo-capitalists?
Why include China on a list of criminal governments when we must borrow billions from them to implemented the suicidal socialist schemes of the American Left?
It is obvious that Communism, not Hitler, is about to win the war. A brave step in our favor would be to add China to your list.
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Bartolomeo, my point wasn’t to provide a comprehensive list of history’s worst dictators. Rather it was to list a few of the butchers “the entreprenurial class” has supported since the Second Inter-Capitalist War. Remember the topic was how Hitler won the war and saved capitalism. My argument was that after the Second Inter-capitalist war, the U.S. and its partners supported “Hitlerism w/o Hitler” in country after country in the impoverished world — all the while proclaiming their commitment to democracy and claiming (through the use of very questionable statistics), “Even if our dictators are bad, they’re not as bad as theirs.” Weak argument for the champions of democracy!
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Professor,
You are correct to point out that I failed to focus my response on your major point about, as you put it, “the the butchers the entrepreneurial class has supported since the Second Inter-Capitalist War”. I agree that we had and continue to have a virtue-deficit in our globalist entrepreneurial class.
However I tried to point out that we have miscreants on both sides, the capitalists and the communists. The Communist USSR was the major player in the Second World War,or Second Inter-Capitalist War, if you prefer. Indeed, most historians agree that the USSR won that war and we helped. Therefore, it was a Communist war too.
I think the evidence supports a strong, not weak, argument that the communists were immeasurably worse than the tin-horn capitalist dictators. The harvesting of kidney and cornea from minor offenders to export to California is a communist diversion.
My attempts to catch up with the revelations of the Venona de-encryptions and recent research into the KGB archives, has meant that I have had to revise my understanding about what was happening in the 20th century when you and I were young. Yale press has issued 20 volumes of analysis of the KGB material on their agents operating in the USA. There is a flood of other material on this.
I rush to say that it has been revealed that the USSR not only won WWII with the full cooperation with the highest level of some of our own richest entrepreneurial class but that such cooperation continued traitorously after our political alliance collapsed over the issues of the crimes and expansionism of the USSR. This immoral cooperation continues in the communist effort to subvert our key cultural institutions, including the, media, the Catholic Church, and academia. The cover excuse has been to claim to perform charity or install benevolent socialisms, the reality has been a grab for total power; to rule the globe with a grotesque and despotic tyranny that is not only atheistic, but alters the mind, nature, and soul of each person.
The effort of these subversive “complex” alliances to undermine us from within has been a success so far. From the Roosevelt administration onward our government has been subverted by high-placed communist agents. The present outsourcing of the jobs of our middle and lower classes gives evidence of traitors, often unthinking relativists, among the entrepreneurs. My traditionalist side seems to have lost the culture war to a nameless cohort of interests, a kind of monstrosity exemplified in its most immoral incarnation in the great (so-called) communist empires; the USSR and The Peoples Republic of China; this last our Black Widow mistress in a suicidally passionate affair. The mind-controlling horrors of Cuba and some other Latin American “socialist” countries are little clones of these communist empires. I use quotes because these governments are frauds, not humanistic experiments at all, just power mad.
Your list of personae non grata and my list overlap; however Communists are on my list.
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