>>> <Dhlazare wrote
Someone writes:
<< From 1934 to 1936, every expression of Nazi radicalism was suppressed.
After the working-class was tamed in 1933, the petty-bourgeois supporters
of a "People's Revolution" were purged from the government one by one. The
real economic program of the big bourgeoisie was rearmament. Any pretense
at "rural socialism" was dispensed with and the Third Reich's real goal
became clear: preparation for a new European war. It needed coal, oil and
other resources from Eastern Europe.
Charles interjects: I wonder what those who saw no search for raw materials in the U.S. motivation for war on Viet Nam say of this explanation of Nazi war.
It also needed to channel all
investment into the armaments industry, which could act as a steam-engine
for general capitalist recovery. In brief, the economic policy of the Nazi
government started to look not that different from Franklin Roosevelt's. It
was World War Two, after all, that brought the United States out of the
Great Depression, not ineffectual public works programs. >>
Interesting parallels with U.S. policy here. Hitler, who supposedly kept a life-size photo of Henry Ford in his office, also embarked on neo-Fordist policies based on de-urbanization, highway construction (the autobahnen), and motorization (the VW). His and Ford's motives were essentially the same: the undercut urban socialism, to reacquaint workers with the rural life, to atomize the old social structure, and also to stimulate middle-class consumerism. The difference is that Ford was an isolationist trying to return to an idealized Midwestern past, whereas Hitler was trying to create a new form of hyper-aggressive nationalism. Their mutual regard suggested that these two strands might have eventually gotten together and merged, but events, as they say, got in the way.... ________
Me: Here in Wayne County at ground zero of Fordism, the oral tradition on the Left holds that Henry Ford had a picture of Hitler on his office wall and sent much $$$ to the Nazis. Documentary evidence proves the newspaper in the Ford company town, Dearborn, published the Elders of Zion.
Ford was an international leader of the most chauvinist, reactionary wing of the financial oligarchy, which fascism represented.
Charles Brown