Liberal Socialism & What is to be done, Part 4

Learning from history; or not, as the case may be

Here are some clicks for you for previous instalments: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

This part 4 continues where Katrina left off, with some more on the controlled opposition Labour Party. Then she starts warning about the far-right. For a lot of people, it is after all becoming increasingly obvious how the Establishment have been deliberately creating the conditions which motivate people to vote for extremists. Having effectively destroyed the ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ option, and kept the people in ignorance (especially of history), the only option people are being offered now is darkly and eerily reminiscent of a certain European nation in the late 1920s and early 1930s…

Make Germany Great Again! indeed, eh.

Sorry, did I say Germany? I meant the good ol’ US of A! Of course I did! No parallels there at all. Absolutely not. Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

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The Fabian Society, according to the Great Image Generator (I adore this image so I just had to use it, even if it might not resemble anything to do with the Fabians; or does it…)

To backtrack a hundred years or so, bearing all this in mind. In the late Victorian era, then, the potential ‘working class resistance’ inevitably organised itself into a political force, which became the ‘Labour Party’. Naturally, this had to be state-controlled. Leaving aside any considerations of whether it was originally created as a state-controlled Party, we can certainly say that by the 1920s it was absolutely a controlled opposition. And it was, remember, founded by the aforementioned Fabian Society in 1900.

If one was analysing the history of the Labour Party honestly, however, one would have to assume they were controlled opposition from the start, especially given their wholesale support for World War One. This is despite efforts on both sides by the trades unions to get the working classes to simply say no, and refuse to fight in this ‘rich man’s war’.

But by the late 1920s, for sure, this controlled opposition aspect was made clear from two key elements from that period of history. First, you have the betrayal of the working classes by the Labour Party when they opposed the General Strike (following on from their betrayal in the Great War), and second, you have the Party’s rejection of Oswald Mosley’s advocacy of basic Keynesian common sense economics (which caused him to leave the Party and eventually form the British Union of Fascists, which is the part of his story you probably are aware of; he had been a friend of Keynes, you should also note).

The sheer magnitude of the consequences of that rejection can never be overstated. There are many historians of that period I delighted in having round to dinner back home in Cambridge who are of the opinion that had the Labour Party at that time managed to avoid, or evade, state infiltration and control, and thus fully adopted the common sense economics, then nothing less than the rise of ‘fascism’ (Italy, Spain, etc.) and ‘nationalist socialism’ (the Nazis, obviously) along with the resultant ‘World War Two’ would also have been avoided.

I say this for two main reasons – one, most people voted for the Nazis because of the economic policies. Which is why the Establishment is inflicting austerity on you now, by the way – to drive you into the clutches of extremists (the irony in that link I just gave you there is that it’s from some far-right website – see what I mean, you won’t get liberals talking about this stuff, which is the crux of the problem – it should be liberals talking about socialism, not fucking white supremacists!). The Establishment, remember, are themselves fascists.

And two, the major reason for the war was to destroy a rival economic system to ‘global capitalism’, a system which did, in fact, prove its (economic) superiority. The idea the so-called ‘Allies’ cared about people being persecuted by Nazis is absurd – think about the people they were persecuting and abusing. Like hundreds of millions of Indians at the hands of the so-called British Empire, for just one example. Similarly, they didn’t declare war on other fascist countries, like Spain, did they?

Remember – ‘they don’t care about you’.

People didn’t fight Nazis to protect themselves, but to protect the Establishment.

That evil man Churchill said as much in a candid private letter to Roosevelt, in which he stated that the war was not about fighting fascism, or defending democracy, and ‘it is certainly not about the Jews’ – it is about ‘the survival of global capitalism’. Unfortunately I can’t give you a reference for this one because I can’t find this full quote on your Internet – someone must’ve scrubbed it, for obvious reasons. Along with a whole load of other important stuff. Says it all about this dystopian world of yours, eh. In my world, every history student can reel this one off without even thinking.

And don’t get me started on your fucking Willypedia. I call it Willypedia because it’s bollocks.

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The Fabian Society, Berlin Remix (another cool image I just had to use)

Whilst we’re on the subject, the two other pertinent reasons why people voted for the Nazis are ‘restoration of national pride’ (equals ‘make America great again’) and ‘strong protection from a perceived threat’, in their case, Stalinist Russia. In the present case, it’s Putinist Russia (and China, of course). Likewise, the invention of scapegoats, which, if only they can be removed, everything will be ok again. Brown people, immigrants, other minorities like LGBT people. You get the picture.

Actually, on the subject of LGBT, another reason people voted for Nazis is a perceived decadence in Weimar Republic Berlin at the time. I haven’t failed to notice this ‘anti-woke’ thing, which is clearly populated by far-right types. A lot of people don’t recall the fact that the world’s first transgender clinic was established in Berlin’s Tiergarten at that time (1919) by a gay Jewish doctor called Magnus Hirschfeld. You can guess what the Nazis thought (and did) about that when they got into power in 1933, eh? If you want to know, this is a fascinating article on that snippet of history. The ending, in particular, likewise does not fail to notice the parallels with today’s far-right bigots.

Just because today’s Nazis aren’t goosestepping about the place in Nazi uniforms, and muttering darkly about Jews, doesn’t mean they’re not the same sort of people. They are exactly the same. Replace ‘Jews’ with ‘Muslims’ and what’s the difference?

Oh, and please remind me again what happens to people who don’t learn from history?

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A parade of geese in front of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. (see, told you!)

Instead of the war, then, one would’ve ended up with an emergent version of ‘Liberal’ socialism. This is a key historical point. In your world, as is abundantly clear, saying anything remotely ‘positive’ about Nazis is some horrendous taboo. But that’s one of the other ‘big lies’ which prevent you from understanding not just history, or the true nature of your governing class (and their history) but also economics itself. Likewise it means you will be doomed to be deceived by the same propaganda. To repeat this history when so many people keep voting for the far-right (what they euphemistically call ‘populism’).

Which ironically explains their desperation to continue conditioning your opinions about that war. Hence your version of ‘Godwin’s Law’. What they are really doing here, with this perpetual reinforcement, by incessantly bombarding you with this simplistic caricature, is preventing you from understanding the nuances of history. And this is why I say you are being doomed to repeat it, through being deceived by propaganda.

It's also why western governments are currently in full support of Nazi-run Ukraine, with its impending attack on Russia, with, as far as I can find, no objection from the majority of citizens in Europe and America, most of whom don’t even know it’s Nazis. And when that attack happens, once they decide to end this charade of a pandemic, people will blindly support it. As if it’s some kind of fucking football match.

An even greater irony is that the events leading up to this thoroughly avoidable war are virtually identical to those leading to the outbreak of World War Two. What Professor Taylor (in The Origins of the Second World War) called ‘a failure of diplomacy’ (later echoed by Tony Benn of course, ‘all war is a failure of diplomacy’). Personally, however, I would go further and say it wasn’t a failure, it was deliberate. As it also will be this time around. (See also this article from Kit Klarenberg).

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Or make the point about understanding history preventing its recurrence.

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The Washington Remix

See the key point here lies in the true causes of ‘World War Two’. The Establishment need to maintain your belief that this was some righteous war against an evil threat. The last thing they can tell you is that it was in fact their war against an ‘anti-feudalist’ economic system. A ‘rival’ system, that is. The Nazis proved, by overt demonstration of an economic miracle, that the Establishment’s ‘economic system’ was detrimental to a country, and only served the interests of the governing class (today it’s called neoliberalism, because they can’t call it feudalism or oligarchy, or there’d be a revolution). They proved this by state ownership of the money supply, followed by printing new money and injecting it into the economy. This led to increased demand, in response to which supply increased to meet that demand, and you have a healthy, growing economy, with an equally healthy velocity of money.

Like I said, this public ownership of the money supply is the one policy that small minority group, the Establishment, fear the most. Because it means they have lost all control.

This is one of the principal reasons, as I say, for their constant banging on about Nazis all the time. They are subtly trying to discredit the economic policies by association with the right-wing policies. Reductio ad Hitlerum indeed. But those two sets of policies can be separated. As they are in Liberal Socialism.

Notice also, incidentally, how Germany during that period started to reject many of these academic subjects like physics and psychology. Partly, of course, because they perceived them as being associated with Jews (Freud being the obvious one). But it is indeed undeniable that by 1945, as evidenced by Operations Overcast (stealing German technology and intellectual property) and then Paperclip (stealing German scientists, technicians and engineers when the Americans realised they couldn’t understand how to make the technology work), that the Germans had made astounding technological advances and were some 10-15 years ahead of everyone else. Had they not been destroyed by the war, it is very likely that the big lies of physics, psychology, economics, and so on, would themselves have been destroyed. The irony being that this leads to an emancipation of the masses, such that any totalitarian ambitions of the Nazis would have been thwarted. Hoisted by their own petards, one might say.

This is one of the great counterfactuals, or what-ifs, of historical study. I did tell you I’m from a parallel world, didn’t I?

If you are feeling a little shocked by me talking like this, then I would say two things. First, people have been conditioned into a lack of understanding of the Nazis, having only this evil caricature foisted on them. By this I mean you are misdirected away from thinking about the economics and technological and infrastructural advancement and only told to focus on the far-right policies (the overt racism, most notably). And like I say, it’s why they need it to continue incessantly, and to use as a propaganda template. They’ll probably be projecting it onto Russia soon enough, I wouldn’t wager.

Second, I would remind you of that fundamental underlying assumption – ‘the government cares about the people’. Which is a lie, remember.

This equally applies to any other peoples. It is patently absurd to believe that the British governing classes of the time, in the 1930s, cared a jot about the minority groups being persecuted by Nazis. Of course they didn’t. The Balfour Declaration for a start was about conceiving a pretext to get rid of all the Jews and dump them in Palestine. In fact, if you honestly examine society in Britain or America during the 1920s and 30s you will see it’s extremely right-wing. Racism was abundant. Xenophobia against any minority group. Colonialism. Imperialism. And all the rest of it, which they are still doing today.

So you should know that when, say, the British or American Establishments started hurling propaganda onto the people about ‘evil Nazis’, this was entirely cynical on their part (same with Ukraine-Russia). Of course they would know that ‘normal people’ don’t exactly warm to far-right policies under normal circumstances, so this propaganda works, if people believe it. But it also works to misdirect people away from the far-right policies in their own country. And of course, none of that propaganda was about a more effective economic system. They didn’t breathe a word about the insidious nature of the private banking system after all, did they? The system they owned.

Again, Liberal Socialists acutely understand these nuances. Likewise they outright reject any state propaganda smears suggesting they might be ‘secret Nazi-sympathisers’ or similar such rubbish. I had to deal with that crap a few times, to which I would usually reply ‘I’m not a Nazi, I’m a Lizzy’. See, it should be clear that it’s eminently possible to have common sense economic policies, like public ownership over the money supply, without embracing any far-right policies. That’s one of the most significant meanings of the deliberate use of the word ‘liberal’ in Liberal Socialism. At a stroke it disarms the Establishment’s inevitable propaganda strategies. Not to mention redefining ‘socialism’ away from the Marxists.

This is especially the case when you look at the nuances of Liberal Socialist economics. It would be all too easy for the Establishment to try the old ‘state control’ canard, and conjure up images of Stalinist Russia as an image of ‘socialism’. But the Lizzies were not advocating ‘state control’. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is a clear distinction between ‘state control’ and ‘public ownership’. True ‘public ownership’ in fact removes state control. It places more democratic power into the hands of the people, thus reducing the potential for social control by the state. It’s liberal, in that sense.

The people own the money supply, that is to say, by an act of legislation, not the state. The state’s ability to ‘take’ money from the national (publicly-owned) bank is limited by law. And if the people want to ‘bring down the government’, they can do this very simply by preventing the government from having any money. There are other measures of course, but that is a fundamental one.

Ironically it is another difference between Lizzies and Nazis. In the Nazi case, it is indeed ‘state control’ over the money supply. Granted, they did the right thing with that control, namely cancelling any national debt and printing massive amounts of new money, which they simply gave to the people in exchange for their labour building up the infrastructure (which the people then spent in the economy, thus kickstarting economic growth and accelerating the velocity of money), but it was still not public ownership, as it is in the Lizzy system.

So don’t think I am surreptitiously attempting to rehabilitate Nazis here. In my world I wouldn’t even have to write that sentence, of course, but clearly in this world I have to spell it out for people. My world has a zero tolerance for far-right shit, you should also know. Liberal Socialism is as much an antidote to Nationalist far-right Socialism as it is to Establishment-/Oligarchy-controlled socio-economics (feudalism/neoliberalism/fascism/Marxism etc.).

More than anything else perhaps, this is demonstrated by the education and media policy. Where the emphasis is on genuinely informing the public. On not lying to them. Unlike your Willypedia. On providing them with an understanding of subjects like psychology, or economics, and thus granting them an immunity to propaganda (which, I must state, includes far-right propaganda). If you have an immunity to propaganda, then a nefarious authoritarian cabal cannot maintain social control. The Liberal Socialists, then, once they got into government, immediately started stripping away any further possibility of social subjugation by the state.

You might say ‘they made it Tory-proof’.

Let us perhaps call this a grand counter-subversion strategy. Where subversion of the people takes a generation, because they have to insidiously ‘normalise’ an idea or an attitude (like far-right attitudes, for example), so too does the unravelling of that subversion itself take a generation. This point was, indeed, hammered home to the people by the Liberal Socialists. ‘We need a generation of Liberal Socialism’ to undo the damage inflicted by the Establishment, especially the legacy of Thatcher and her successors. Obviously the Conservatives cried ‘manipulation of public opinion through fear, to get them to keep voting Lizzy’, but as per form, the Lizzies just laughed it back at them.

Nowadays, the Conservative Party has had to fully accept the success of the Liberal Socialist system, and transform themselves into some ‘dynamic’ new party. Which has to genuinely care about the people. The people can’t be deceived anymore, that is. Yes, there is still a sort of rump of old-school Tories (think people like Boris Johnson & Theresa May), but they are a minority. The people, ironically, are now no longer afraid of having a Conservative-led government (especially with Penny Mordaunt as their leader, who is a formidable woman if ever there was one). After all, if the Conservatives threatened to dismantle the people’s precious Lizzy socio-economic prosperity and security and happiness well, those Conservatives would need to have a pretty good escape-from-the-country plan. They would be physically removed from power, that is.

Once the people understand they have vast superiority in numbers, and they understand the existence of this small, minority feudalist group, that’s the point when that fundamental big lie is broken and exposed, and real democracy begins.

That’ll do, I think, for this admittedly intense chapter. Next time, we’ll have a look at some specific policies, and I will give you a proper economics lesson.

And hopefully it’ll be a bit more fun…

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This Too Shall Pass

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I’m sure Katrina’s next episode really will be a bit more fun. She is a very funny girl, at heart. Anyway, when it’s ready, here shall a link be also.

In the meantime, if you ever fancy buying me a coffee, click there.