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16 July 2011

The horrifying AAA debt-issuance chart

Felix Salmon

A slice of lime in the soda

Jul 15, 2011 11:06 EDT
This is why I love FT Alphaville in general and Tracy Alloway in particular: she’ll dutifully read 14 pages into something entitled “The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision Joint Forum Report on Asset Securitisation Incentives” before coming across this chart and immediately realizing just how important it is.


aaa.tiff

I’ve put a bigger version here for people who want to pass it around in all its horrifying glory, but it’s also worth spelling things out, because it might not be immediately obvious.

The big-picture thing to remember when looking at this chart is something which I’ve said many times before — that it wasn’t an excess of greed and speculation which led to the financial crisis, but rather an excess of overcaution, with an attendant surge in demand for triple-A-rated bonds. On a micro level, triple-A securities are safer than any other securities. But on a macro level, they’re much more dangerous, precisely because they’re considered risk-free. They breed complacency and regulatory arbitrage, and they are a key ingredient in the cause of all big crises, which is leverage.

At the left-hand side of the chart we see that global issuance of triple-A bonds was more or less nonexistent back in the early 90s. All those Treasury bonds, all those agency securities from Fannie and Freddie, all that Japanese debt — add it all up, and it still comes to essentially zero by the standards of what seems normal today. Check out the left-hand y-axis: it goes up in $1 trillion increments. And we’re not talking stock, here, we’re talking flows: this chart is issuance per year.

(It’s pretty easy to see, looking at this chart, how a company like Pimco can find itself with over $1 trillion in assets under management: that’s now just a small fraction of the bonds issued each year.)

Now zoom back, and look at the chart as a whole: it’s going up and to the right, which says two things. Firstly, the amount of debt in the world is soaring. That’s a bad thing, because debt is much more systemically dangerous than equity. And secondly, the amount of triple-A debt in the world is soaring as well. Which is a worse thing, because triple-A debt is much more systemically dangerous than most other debt.

Then look at the green line. Triple-A debt wasn’t a huge part of the bond market back in the early 90s, but for the past decade it has invariably accounted for somewhere between 50% and 60% of total global fixed income issuance. That’s possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in any given year are essentially free of any credit risk.

Finally, look at the way that the maroon bars — structured products, basically — have given way to a scarily large purple bar at the far right of the chart. That’s sovereign debt, and it tells you all you need to know about where the next crisis is likely to come from.

In a nutshell, triple-A debt is dangerous; there’s far too much of it; its growth seems out of control; and the triple-A problem has now become a sovereign-debt problem, in a world where sovereign-debt crises are the most damaging crises of all.

All that said, there are two things worth bearing in mind which make the chart slightly less horrific. The first is that for reasons I don’t understand, the chart ends in 2009, a crisis year when sovereigns pulled out all the stops in their attempt to prevent a global Depression. We’re more than halfway into 2011 at this point, there’s no good reason why the chart couldn’t include 2010 as well. And that might show 2009 as being a bit of an aberration. Does anybody have the numbers for total triple-A bond issuance in 2010, and how much of that was sovereign?

And secondly, any kind of debt-issuance chart is likely to go up and to the right to some extent, just because borrowing needs never go away, and old debt needs to get rolled over. The total stock of triple-A debt isn’t increasing by this many trillions of dollars per year, and it would be great to see a second chart of how much that is increasing, and how much of it is sovereign.

Still, flows matter. If sovereigns start being downgraded from triple-A status, debt is going to get a lot more expensive, and those rollovers — which cost very little in the current interest-rate environment — will really start to bite. And the invidious thing about debt is that it doesn’t go away. Deleveraging is painful, and is often accompanied by inflation or default. And the more debt you have to start with, the more painful deleveraging is going to be. Prepare yourselves.

10 July 2011

The Left's Lie About Fascism Will Outlive Cockroaches In A Nuclear Winter



M2RB:  Black Sabbath, live in Paris







You've seen life through distorted eyes
You know you had to learn
The execution of your mind
You really had to turn
The race is run the book is read
The end begins to show
The truth is out, the lies are old
But you don't want to know

Nobody will ever let you know

When you ask the reasons why
They just tell you that you're on your own
Fill your head all full of lies
 





"Fascists supported the unifying of proletarian workers to their cause along corporatistic, socialistic, or syndicalistic lines, promoting the creation of a strong proletarian nation, but not a proletarian class."

- Stanley G Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945



“I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”

- H.G. Wells, author of The Future in America, The Open Conspiracy, and What Are We To Do With Our Lives? -- three seminal books in the Progressive Movement



When it comes to Fascism and the Left, there are two types of Leftists:  The Liars and the Naive.

According to The Social Science Encyclopedia, Fascism opposes multiple ideologies:  American Liberalism (Soph:  American Liberalism should not to be confused with European Liberalism, which often runs toward the right side of the political spectrum), Conservatism, and two of the major forms of Socialism:  Bolshevism and Social Democracy.   Many on the Left believe that Fascism means Right and Socialism/Communism means Left. It truly is not that simple. Those are the Naive.

For starters, that Left-Right divide only works in Europe where conservatives are more like American Democrats than a Tea Partier. Everything happens left of centre so, of course, Fascist is right-wing...on the left side of the centre. Secondly, review each of these platforms, take out the reference to Jews, and try to explain how they are diametrically different:



"Ah, yes! The anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labour-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secular right-wingers of the Nazi Party! That can't be. Something is clearly wrong. Everyone knows that Fascists are corporatists and would never call for the abolition of the stock market and demand national health care and labour laws!"



"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

- Adolf Hitler





"Ah, yes! those crazy draft-ending, work-hour-reducing, child-labour-ending, wealth-redistributing, steep-progressive-tax-championing, religious-property-confiscating, war-profits-seizing left-wingers! But, but, but, my professors always told me that Fascism was right-wing. How can Mussolini's platform explicitly call for everything that the Socialist party did?



"Society's needs come before the individual's needs."

- Adolf Hitler





"Ah, yes! The anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labour-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secular right-wingers of the Socialist Party of America! Wait! What? Socialists aren't right-wingers, but the platform is nearly identical to the 25 point platform of the Nazis! I'm so confused!"



"As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods."

- Joseph Goebbels



"Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were considered: money-Jews. Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews. . . . Antisemitism is really a hatred of capitalism." 

- Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the left-wing, 1970s, German, terrorist group, The Baader-Meinhof Complex



Well, let's take it one, last step...





"Yes, of course, Social Justice is a tenet of the left. Huh? What did you say? Father Coughlin founded the NUSJ and its magazine?? How is that possible? I've always been told that Father Coughlin (Surprise!) was a Fascist. How can he have a platform similar to the Socialist Party of America while both are similar to the Nazi and Italian Fascist platforms? It just can't be!"



"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilised nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"

- Adolf Hitler, 1935



Then, there are the Liars.  American Progressives, for the most part, did not disavow Fascism until the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust became manifest during World War II. After the war, those Progressives who had praised Mussolini and Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had no choice, but to dissociate themselves from Fascism.



"There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will. "

– Adolph Hitler


Following Stalin’s lead, leftist intellectuals redefined Fascism as 'right-wing' and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from Fascist and pre-Fascist thought.  This Progressive campaign to recast Fascism as the "right-wing" antithesis of Communism was aided by Joseph Stalin, who began to label all of the most blatantly evil traits shared by Communism and Fascism alike, as simply “Fascist.”  Hell, Stalin called TROTSKY a FASCIST!



"Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism." 

- Time Magazine; 2 January 1939 



Some aspects of Naziism:
  • Universal healthcare
  • Universal education
  • Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) free vacations to resorts and cruises for Germans paid for by the state, plus a national policy that guaranteed paid vacations
  • State-control of the means of production
  • Free or subsidised housing
  • Price and wage controls
  • Your health IS the state's business (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Michelle Obama, Nanny Doomberg, Nancy Pelosi, etc. FYI: The Absolute Shall shall always absolutely fail. See your forebears in th PietismandTemperance Movements.
  •  
"Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky: It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.”

- Mark Twain


Continuing:


  • Vegetarianism
  • Environmentalism (Environazism)
  • Animal rights
  • State replaces the church (Kirchenkampf); Naziism becomes the state religion
  • Collective replaces individual
  • Strong, central government and no states' rights
  • Gun control
  • Anti-smoking campaigns

As you can see from the list above, any and all of these can be found on signs at your nearest Tea Party event, especially calls for socialised medicine, gun control, and the replacement of the church with the state.  Sarc.
Now, often, we are told that Libertarians and Conservatives in the United States are Nazis & Fascists because the support States' Rights (so do American Liberals, when they want:  SSM, drug decriminalisation, etc.), but such slurs belie a supreme ignorance on the part of the hurler.  Fundamental to Naziism and Fascism are two central tenets:  The individual belongs to the state and a strong, authoritarian, central government is primary over all.  Any demand for "states' rights" in Berlin would have earned a protestor an escort to the basement at Tiergartenstrasse 4 for a little conversation with the SS, if not summary execution or ticket to a concentration camp.

"Since for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests. In particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power ... [the] mischief of individual federated states…must cease and will some day cease…. National Socialism as a matter of principle must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries." 
- Adolf Hitler

"It enables us to see at once why democracy and Bolshevism, which in the eyes of the world are irrevocably opposed to one another, meet again and again on common ground in their joint hatred of and attacks on authoritarian nationalist concepts of State and State systems. For the authoritarian nationalist conception of the State represents something essentially new ... united above all by the violence of their assault upon authoritarian-nationalist State concepts ... We have given the principle of Socialism a new meaning."
- Joseph Goebbels,  10 September 1938

Let's just look at some of the praise that earlier Progressives had for Fascism and Totalitarianism:"

"The Fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and are of particular interest at this time." 
-FDR's National Recovery Act Study

"That we (those in FDR Administration) are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have lawyers who will declare anything you want to do legal." 
- Harry Hopkins, Member of FDR administration and New Deal Communist 

At one point, FDR aide Harold Ickes had to warn FDR that Americans had started to:



"...unconsciously group four names, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Roosevelt."


In 1932, H. G. Wells, one of the most influential Progressives of the 20th century, said that Progressives must become “liberal Fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” Regarding totalitarianism, he opined: 

“I have never been able to escape altogether from its relentless logic.” 



Calling for a “‘Phoenix Rebirth’ of Liberalism” under the umbrella of “Liberal Fascism,” Wells said:


“I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”
- H.G. Wells


“Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made [in Italy], an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism...Fascism is an amazing experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism."
- Charles Beard, an eminent historian, wrote of Mussolini’s efforts


Muckraking Progressive journalists almost universally admired Mussolini. Lincoln Steffens, for one, said that Italian Fascism made Western democracy, by comparison, look like a system run by “petty persons with petty purposes.” Steffens referred to the “Russian-Italian” method as if the two were flip sides of the same coin. 

Steffens and his fellow Progressives generally saw Mussolini, Lenin, and Stalin as three men pursuing a similar objective: the fundamental transformation of corrupt and outdated societies. Mussolini, Steffens proclaimed reverently, had been “formed” by God “out of the rib of Italy.” About Russia -"I have seen the future and it works."


"A great step forward and the first new ideal in government since the founding of the American Republic.”

- Samuel McClure, founder of McClure’s Magasine and important figure in the muckraking movement, describing Italian Fascism


After having visited Italy and interviewed Mussolini in 1926, the American humorist, Will Rogers, who was informally dubbed “Ambassador-at-Large of the United States” by the National Press Club, said of the Fascist dictator: 


“I’m pretty high on that bird...Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government, that is, if you have the right dictator.”

- Will Rogers, 1926


"[Mussolini] is a despot with a dimple."

- Reporter Ida Tarbell was deeply impressed by Mussolini's attitudes regarding labour
 

"[The establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany had been] absolutely necessary to get the state in order.  I stand in wonder...as a Bolshevik."

- W. E. B. DuBois, co-founder of the NAACP and Communist, who saw National Socialism as a worthy model for economic organisation

 
“[T]here is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

- W. E. B. DuBois, 1937


"Eugenics is the most important significant..and genuine branch of sociology and Germany has perfected in with the Aktion T4 programme.”

- John Maynard Keynes

"Much of what H.G. Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”

- George Orwell

 
“It's the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious.  I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary.... Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has.”

- Rexford Guy Tugwell, FDR adviser, on the subject of Italian Fascism


"[The Roosevelt administration was] trying out the economics of Fascism.”

- George Soule, Editor of The New Republic and avid supporter of FDR



- Playwright George Bernard Shaw hailed Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini as the world’s great “Progressive” leaders because they “did things,” unlike the leaders of those “putrefying corpses” called parliamentary democracies.


"Eugenics must be the central tenant of any true successful socialism."

"We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment. … A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal [gas] chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them."
 

- In 1934, the Vlkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party's official newspaper, said:


"Roosevelt is as a man of irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will... with a profound understanding of social needs...with nationalist socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies."

- Mussolini:

"America has a dictator in FDR.  America itself is abandoning them ("outdated notions" of democracy and classical liberalism). Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation. There is no longer a parliament but an ‘état majeur.’ There are no longer parties, but a single party. A sole will silences dissenting voices. This has nothing to do with any demo-liberal conception of things.  [The way Roosevelt] calls his readers to battle is reminiscent of the ways and means by which fascism awakened the Italian people.  Without question, the sea change in America resembles that of fascism.  It is not to be emphasised that Roosevelt's policy is fascist because these comments are immediately cabled to the United States and are used by his foes to attack him." 

- Fortune Magasine:

"The corporate state is to Mussolini what the New Deal is to Roosevelt." 


- Journalist J. T. Flynn – perhaps the best-known anti-FDR muckraker of the 1930s, foresaw that American Fascism might one day manifest itself as: 

"...a very genteel and dainty and pleasant form of Fascism which cannot be called Fascism at all because it will be so virtuous and polite.”
 

- New Republic founder Herbert Croly, one of the most important voices in American intellectual history and a leftist icon for more than a century. Specifically, Croly embraced economic socialism; promoted febrile nationalism; said that a “great” and heroic revolutionary leader was needed in order to restore American pride; rejected the concept of parliamentary democracy; believed that society could be guided to enlightenment by an intellectual elite – a cast of “social engineers” whose “beneficent activities” could bring about a “better future”; and rejected individualism, saying that “an individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.”

He said that these ideals were, by definition, both Fascist and Progressive.



- The education reformer and socialist John Dewey spoke of the “social possibilities of war” and the “immense impetus to reorganisation” that it afforded. He added, with an air of hopefulness, that the conflict might force Americans “to give up much of [their] economic freedom”; to abandon their “individualistic tradition” and “march in step”; and to recognize “the supremacy of public need over private possessions.”




- The poet Wallace Stevens pronounced himself:

 
“Pro-Mussolini personally.”



- The Progressive financier George Perkins said:

"[T]he great European war … is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.”


 

- Grosvenor Clarkson, Chairman of the Federal Interdepartmental Defense Board, said:

"[The war effort] is a story of the conversion of a hundred million combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrificed to the good of the whole.”

 

- The social worker Felix Adler said the regimentation imposed on society by the war effort was helping America create the:
 
“...perfect man…a fairer and more beautiful and more righteous type than any…that has yet existed.”


- Arthur Bullard, journalist and statesman, chronicle the major world political and economic events relating to World War I and its aftermath:

"[In Germany], any citizen who did not put the state first is merely dead weight."

 

- Harold Laski: (friend to FDR and other American Democrats):
 
"Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the state short shrift and the nearest lamppost."

 

- Progressive Charles Van Hise:

"We know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied the defective classes would disappear within a generation."

 

- Isaac F. Marcosson in the NY Times:

"Mussolini is a Latin Teddy Roosevelt."

 

- Will Rogers:

"I'm pretty high on Mussolini 'Dictatorship' is the right form of government if you have the right dictator."

 

- John Patrick Duggins:

"[Columbia University is] Fascism's veritable home in America and a school house for budding fascists ideologues."


- Nicholas Butler: (President of Columbia University) received a signed photo from Mussolini thanking him for his:

"...most valuable contribution to the promotion of understanding between Fascist Italy and the United States.

 

- Progressive journalist Lowell Thomas, the journalist in Lawrence of Arabia: 

"He (Mussolini) stands out like a Modern Caesar - the answer to America's needs.”


- Irving Louis Horowitz, radical Leftist sociology pioneer: 

"Fascism will return to the United States not as right wing ideology but almost as a quasi-leftist ideology.” 


- McClure's magazine:  


"Fascism is a 'great step forward' and the first new idea in government since the founding of the American Republic."



 

- Walter Lippman: 
"The [economic] situation is critical, Franklin.  You may have no alternative, but to assume dictatorial powers."


 

- Jane Addams:
 "[T]he individual must lose the sense of personal achievement...In Italy they are called Fascists; in Germany they are called Nazis; in America they are called Progressives."



 

- Walter Rauschenbusch:  
 
"Individualism means tyranny."
 
- Stuart Chase:
  

"[Nazi] Party officials...create a new heaven on earth...Why should Russia have all the fun of remaking a world?"

- Father Charles Coughlin:
 "Capitalism is doomed."

 

- Nazi newspaper: described Roosevelt as:
 "A man of irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will... with a profound understanding of social needs...with nationalist socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies."

 

- Sidney Webb:
"When the Nazi took over they replaced the traditional infrastructure of the state and churches with a Nazi monopoly on charity."

 

 -Foreign Affairs:
 "The Italian (fascist) system treated workers better."


 "Jena by this time was a center of antitobacco activism -- mainly through the labors of Karl Astel, director of the new institute [Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research] and president, since the summer of 1939, of the University of Jena. Astel was head of the Thuringia's office of Racial Affairs and a notorious antisemite and racial hygienist (he had joined the Nazi party and the SS in July of 1930) ... Astel was also a militant antismoker and teetolater who once characterized opposition to tobacco as a 'national socialist duty.' On May 1, 1941, he banned smoking in all buildings and classrooms of the University of Jena, and the following spring, as head of Thuringia's Public Health Office, he announced a smoking ban in all regional schools and health offices. Tobacco in his view had to be fought 'cigar by cigar, cigarette by cigarette, and pack by pack' -- hence his notoriety for snatching cigarettes from the mouth of students who dared to violate his Jena University tobacco ban."

-  Robert N. Proctor



 - Mein Kampf is replete with "attacks on dividend hungry businessmen whose greed, ruthlessness and short sighted narrow mindedness were ruining the economy. The Nazi Party labour union threatened to put business leaders in concentration camps if they didn't increase workers' wages."


These are the demands that Hitler made in Mein Kampf and which became the known, variously, as the Nazi Manifesto, Hitler's Manifesto, the Nazi 25-Point Plan, the National Socialist Programme, and The 25-Points of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)) :

We demand that all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

We demand the nationalisation of all trusts.

We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class.

We demand the immediate communalisation of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople.

We demand the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements.

We demand the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose.

We demand the abolition of ground rents.

We demand the prohibition of all speculation in land.

We demand that ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare.

We demand that traitors, usurers, profiteers, etc., be punished with death, regardless of creed or race.

We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist ordering of the world, be replaced by German common law.

We demand that the State assume the responsibility of organising thoroughly the entire cultural system of the people to make it possible for every capable and industrious person to obtain higher education and thus the opportunity to reach into positions of leadership.

We demand that specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State.

We demand that the conception of the State Idea (science of citizenship) must be taught in the schools from the very beginning.

We demand that the curricula of all educational establishments shall be adapted to practical life.

We demand that the State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by providing maternity welfare centres.

We demand that the State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by prohibiting juvenile labour.

We demand that the State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics.

We demand that the State has the duty to help raise the standard of national health by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young.

We demand the abolition of the regular army and the creation of a national (folk) army.

We demand that there be a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberate political lies and disseminate them through the press.

We demand freedom for all religious faiths in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or offend the moral and ethical sense of a special race or class.

We demand COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD.

In order to carry out this programme we demand: the creation of a strong central authority in the State.

We further demand the unconditional authority by the political central parliament of the whole State and all its organisations.

We further demand the formation of professional committees and of committees representing the several estates of the realm, to ensure that the laws promulgated by the central authority shall be carried out by the federal states.

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/25points.htm



Goebbels On National-Socialism, Bolshevism, and Democracy

10 September 1938




Men and women of the National-Socialist Party: 

Public life in Europe to-day is influenced by three striking political phenomena, which I will group together under the popular heading 'National-Socialism, Bolshevism, and Democracy.' It is, however, clear to me that these names cannot define their full significance. The general public thinks of them as a triangle of irreconcilable contrasts. It would be understandable and logical if their reactions upon political personalities, actions, achievements, negotiations, and developments showed a corresponding degree of contrasts, but this is only the case to a limited extent. Often, and indeed mostly, we find, where decisive political problems are concerned, a united front of democracy and Bolshevism opposed to the nationalist, authoritarian States and their representatives. This is one of the most puzzling phenomena of modern politics. It can only be explained by the essential nature of the three political systems. I therefore think it necessary to analyse them in some detail from the theoretical point of view and in their effect on racial relations in Europe.

The political starting-point of democracy dates from the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The new principles of the State and social life which were then proclaimed, as previously in liberal philosophy, were Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. ... Economic and cultural liberty was proclaimed. The individual, who in the authoritarian State was of secondary importance, emancipated himself and was released from the authoritarian tie to the State. The ideas and conceptions of this so-called 'Great Revolution' were expressed in the popular and psychologically prevalent slogan that all those who bear human form are equal. ... Everywhere the more or less complete severance of the tie which binds the individual to the community was elevated into a principle. The Revolution thus carried within it the seeds of the Marxist-Bolshevist conceptions which were later to arise. It was not until the twentieth century that this lack of connexion found its ultimate expression in the Bolshevist system. ...

The fact that the causes and effective potentialities of Bolshevism were already existent in a latent form in democracy explains why Bolshevism flourishes only on democratic soil, and is indeed generally the inevitable consequence of a radical and excessively democratic conception of the State. Bolshevism allegedly makes a classless society its aim. The equality of whatever bears a human form, which democracy applied only to political and social life, is set up as a ruling principle for economic life also. In this respect there are supposed to be no differences left. But this equality of all individuals in respect of economic goods can, in the Marxist-Bolshevist view, result only from a brutal and pitiless class struggle. ... It is only logical that in connexion with this, Bolshevism should proclaim the equality of nations and races. ... The opposition between the democratic and the Bolshevist mentality and conception of the State are in the last resort merely theoretical, and here we have the answer to the mysterious riddle which overshadows Europe and the explanation both of the opposition in the lives of nations to-day and of the things which they have in common. It enables us to see at once why democracy and Bolshevism, which in the eyes of the world are irrevocably opposed to one another, meet again and again on common ground in their joint hatred of and attacks on authoritarian nationalist concepts of State and State systems. For the authoritarian nationalist conception of the State represents something essentially new. In it the French Revolution is superseded. ...

It is no proof to the contrary that democracy and Bolshevism will not make public admission of any common cause. ... They put up artificial oppositions of a purely theoretical character which on closer inspection are seen to be without substance. ... They do not touch the root on the matter. At heart democracy and Bolshevism are closely related and indeed almost identical. They represent merely different stages in the development of a common outlook. Bolshevism is in a sense the bad boy of democracy. Democracy gave it birth, brought it up, and alone keeps it alive. It may be ashamed of the connexion now and again, but at critical moments in European life the maternal instinct breaks through and the two again present a common front, united above all by the violence of their assault upon authoritarian-nationalist State concepts, which they have come to recognize as their bitterest, most dangerous foes. ...

We have modernized and ennobled the concept of democracy. With us it means definitely the rule of the people, in accordance with its origin. We have given the principle of Socialism a new meaning. ... Never have we left anyone in doubt that National-Socialism is not for export. ... We do not aim at world domination, but we do intend to defend our country, and it is our new conceptions which give us the inexhaustible and ever-renewed strength to do so. ...

We Germans were strong in the past, but nothing more than strong; and when our weapons were taken from us, we lay helpless. In that time of national suffering we learned that the strength of nations lies not only in weapons, but in ideas. A great idea and the faith which it inspires can remove mountains. Weapons cannot produce ideas, but, as Germany has shown, ideas can produce weapons. ... The Fuehrer himself gave us this great and vivid idea of liberty which fills and inspires us all to-day. And, most essential of all, he is producing the weapons with which to defend the ideas and their political and economic outcome. Now we no longer fear anyone or anything. ... 

Source: "Documents on International Affairs," vol. II, 1938, pp. 17-19.



A special thanks to Jonah Goldberg for many of the quotes. 




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Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - Black Sabbath

You've seen life through distorted eyes
You know you had to learn
The execution of your mind
You really had to turn
The race is run the book is read
The end begins to show
The truth is out, the lies are old
But you don't want to know

Nobody will ever let you know
When you ask the reasons why
They just tell you that you're on your own
Fill your head all full of lies

The people who have crippled you
You want to see them burn
The gates of life have closed on you
And now there's just no return
You're wishing that the hands of doom
Could take your mind away
And you don't care if you don't see again
The light of day

Nobody will ever let you know
When you ask the reasons why
They just tell you that you're on your own
Fill your head all full of lies

Where can you run to
What more can you do
No more tomorrow
Life is killing you
Dreams turn to nightmares
Heaven turns to hell
Burned out confusion
Nothing more to tell

Everything around you
What's it coming to
God knows as your dog knows
Bog blast all of you
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Nothing more to do
Living just for dying
Dying just for you 
Ooh, here is where the story ends.