I decided to do a blog on the subject of “fascism” for the reason that I think the West is entering a phase where cultural degeneration seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. I have been toying with this subject for over a month and have not come to a concise and cogent definition of it until just today. The definition is a useful predictor of future events insofar as the definition is part of the reparative process of the disease and not the disease itself. So permit me to start with the definition of fascism.
Fascism expresses itself in a marked political concern for the degeneration or unbinding of a once thriving culture.
Degeneration happens to individuals and to nations when the ties which bind people together become loose or rotten. Such ties are cultural which include language, religion, social habits, music, art, literature, film, a shared history, cuisine, technology, and many other things.
All of this can be undermined in which case culture begins to become destabilized and degenerate which logically leads to a rise in fascism which is a protective factor. Perhaps no better illustration of this is Germany from the time of the Weimar Republic to Hitler’s Germany and its golden moment in the 1936 Olympics.
“Yet the economic problems of the postwar period meant that, even in its best years, the Weimar Republic was an ‘over-burdened welfare state’. The onset of the Depression and the growth of mass unemployment after 1929 destroyed republican democracy and the welfare state upon which it was based” (David F. Crew, Germans on Welfare, 6).
When Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in January 1933, a staggering 34% of Germany’s work force was unemployed. But by 1936 much of the unemployment had disappeared. The recovery was certainly genuine relying on work creation programs and German people's faith that hard work and cooperation would pay off. It was not due to the production of military equipment which was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.
I must stress that fascism began as a marked concern for the degeneration of German culture and its people that had become all too obvious. Unemployment, as noted earlier, was at 34%. Crime and suicide rates rose sharply. Many people, as a result, turned to either the Communist Party (KPD) or National Socialism.
Neither Communism nor National Socialism were the cause of Germany’s degeneration. But both competed for the vote of the public the Communists being more utopian and unrealistic while the National Socialists were more pragmatic and evidence based.
Fascism cannot help but arise when a culture is falling apart and starts to become degenerate. The problem is, what corrective form do we take? Unfortunately, this is when the greatest tension for a nation and its people are to be felt.
Making matters worse is the lack of a true religion such as Buddhism which strengthens the inner person with its spiritual morality and discipline, including its vast wisdom. The West needs Buddhism to keep it from falling almost periodically into a state of social degeneration where nihilism is rampant and people have lost their sense of decency and compassion.
A basic (wiki) introduction to Nazi economics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
From above article:
"Pre-war economy: 1933–1939
The Nazis came to power in the midst of Great Depression . The unemployment rate at that point in time was close to 30%. [27] Hitler appointed Hjalmar Schacht , a former member of the German Democratic Party , as President of the Reichsbank in 1933 and Minister of Economics in 1934. [27] At first, Schacht continued the economic policies introduced by the government of Kurt von Schleicher in 1932 to combat the effects of the Great Depression. The inherited policies included a large
public works programs supported by deficit spending – such as the construction of the
Autobahn network – to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. [28] Following a Keynesian-style policy dependent upon heavy borrowing of “gigantic sums of money”, Nazi Germany’s national debt by 1939 “had reached 37.4 billion Reichmarks,” where even “Goebbels, who otherwise mocked the government’s financial experts as narrow-minded misers, expressed concern in his diary about the exploding deficit.” [29]"
Posted by: Simon Iff | August 24, 2017 at 08:25 PM