The View From 1776

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 numbers, 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 eastern-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.