Re: the Kaiser

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Devine:
>two notes: (1) it's important to remember that at the same time the Kaiser
stole the
>Social Democratic program -- and adapted it to his purposes -- he also
banned the Social
>Democratic Party. Though this is hardly as bad as what he did in Namibia,
it indicates
>that a simple "the Social Democrats were bought off" story is exactly that
-- too simple.
>The Kaiser -- or rather, Bismarck, who was acting as the Kaiser's Dick
Cheney -- used not
>only the carrot but the stick.

Whether or not the Social Democratic Party was banned at one time or
another does not alter the basic political point I was making. The
objective conditions in England and Germany in the late 1800s to the
outbreak of WWI tended to foster illusions in capitalism among the left.

>(2) What the Kaiser did to Namibia was not the same as what Hitler did.
The former
>involved looting, robbing, enslaving, to attain wealth by any means
necessary (i.e.,
>killing lots of people who were assumed to be "inferior"). The latter
involved a true
>social psychosis, seeing certian paraiah groups -- Jews, gays, the
mentally retarded, etc.
>-- as being so horrible that they needed to be totally and utterly
exterminated. Forced
>labor and looting were more side-effects, efforts to deal with the labor
shortage (due to
>the war), etc.

Actually, until reversals on the Russian battlefields during the Barberossa
campaign, persecution of the Jews was not that much more extreme than the
treatment of blacks in the south, so argues Arno Mayer in "Why the Heavens
did not Darken."

Louis Proyect
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