Brexit – making enemies of partners.

Posted on by Opher

One of the worst results of Brexit is the division and hatred. It has fuelled every racist and xenophobe. It has led to another wave of arrogant nationalistic fascism. It has driven wedges between nations – instead of partnership and cooperation we now have enmity and competition. I know which I prefer.

49 thoughts on “Brexit – making enemies of partners.”

  1. Silly reactionary – like Europe and Britain share a long history of friendship. HaHaHaHa sooo ignorant of your own history.

    1. Who said anything about a long history. We’ve been in a partnership since the 2nd World War – the EU locked us into much closer partnership.

      3. Idiot. Britain did not make an alliance with France during the first world war?! You do not talk about Europe! You jabber and blather like an incoherent moron who wanders through the streets talking to himself.

      6. You’re a strange mixture of ignorance and arrogance – typical of the right-wing fascists.
        The military alliance that fought against the Central Powers was known as the Allies. Initially this alliance was based around the four great powers of Russia, France, Japan and the British Empire, along with the smaller states of Serbia, Montenegro and Belgium that also went to war in 1914. – Fighting against Germany etc.

      12. Yes and no. Certainly the rise of right-wing fascism might have been a result of the impositions on Germany.

      16. Idiot. Socialism isn’t fascism. Diametrically opposite. The Nazis were not socialists; they were fascists.

      18. And you claim to be knowledgeable??? Unbelieveable!!
        Read:
        Multiple posts on social media have claimed that the Nazi party were socialists, due to their full name—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

        This argument has been used to attack socialism through association with Nazi policies. It has also led to confusion, as Nazism is normally associated with fascism and far-right-wing views.

        The issue of whether the Nazis were socialists isn’t a straightforward one, due to how the Nazi party developed and grew its base of support. But the consensus among historians is that the Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were not socialists in any meaningful sense.

        Historians have regularly disavowed claims that Hitler adhered to socialist ideology. Historian Richard Evans wrote of the Nazis’ incorporation of socialist into their name in 1920, “Despite the change of name, however, it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth from, socialism….Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism”. Or as simply put by historian and Hitler expert Ian Kershaw, “Hitler was never a socialist.”

        Socialism, for supporters of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, appeared to substitute Marx’s idea of class war with a race one.

        The Nazis didn’t create the term “National socialism” themselves; both the left-leaning Czech National Socialist Party and right-leaning Austrian National socialism movement predated the Nazi party in Germany. The term was added to the party’s title in 1920—turning the German Worker’s Party into the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. This, along with their manifesto, was done to appeal to the working classes.

        This can lead to confusion as to what national socialism meant. Though they sometimes described themselves as socialist, their general ideology and treatment of left-wing figures reflected their true views.

        In Hitler’s speeches, he established his idea of socialism as something only for select Germans the Nazi party deemed worthy. In his 1920 speech “Why We Are Anti-Semites” he claimed Judaism was the opposite of socialism by aligning it with capitalism at a time when Germany’s workers were suffering.

        In the same year, the party outlined their party programme, which included a number of points which could be seen to align with socialist and anti-capitalist ideals. However, historian of the period Karl Dietrich Bracher has referred to the programme as “propaganda” through which Hitler gained support and then discarded once he achieved power.

        Hitler worked closely with industrialists—in 1933 he held a meeting with a number of German industrial figures and gained their trust by speaking of the communist threat. In return, they gave millions of Reichmarks to fund the Nazi party in the upcoming elections. Many developed close relationships with the Nazi regime and flourished under the ideology—the Krupp family supplied Germany with arms during World War Two, readily dismissed Jewish employees, and it’s then head Alfried Krupp joined the Nazi party in 1938.

        Hitler also suppressed trade unions and refused to give the homes of German princes to the people, as he felt this would move the party towards communism.

        Socialists, along with other left-wing political activists opposed the Nazi regime and were persecuted under it. The Communist Party and Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany were banned in 1933, along with the limitation of the power of all those who opposed Nazi rule. Many SPD members were arrested, sent to concentration camps, or exiled to Prague, Paris and London. The first concentration camp in Dachau, built-in 1933, was intended to inter the Nazi’s left-wing opponents. Hitler was also vocally critical of the “November criminals”—those who led Germany after the First World War and signed the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. These leaders were social democrats.

        More left-leaning members of the Nazi party were also targeted; Otto Strasser and his brother Gregor followed a strand of Nazism that wanted to remove the elites Hitler courted from power. Gregor was killed along with other pro-worker members during the Night Of the Long Knives.

  2. So much noise. Fascism is an authoritarian, nationalistic political ideology. On the other hand, socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are either owned by the state or owned commonly but cooperatively controlled. This is the main difference between the two terms.

    1. Very good Moshe – exactly. Fascism is totalitarian, authoritarian, controlled by a dictatorship deploying racism, nationalism, patriotism and suppression. It’s elitist, hierarchical, militaristic, divisive and works through deploying violence and creating fear.
      Socialism is collective ownership by the people for the good of all the people. It’s inclusive, non-hierarchical, fair and inclusive.
      The trick is to prevent an elite taking over the socialist system and setting up a fascist state.

      6. No – you do keep confusing Hitler as a socialist just because he cynically put the name in the title. He was the exact opposite of a socialist. All four of them were tyrannical totalitarians.
        Democratic socialism is the way forward.

      10. Hitler did not have a single socialist policy. He was a right-wing authoritarian who deployed racism, against Jews and minorities, in the same way that Trump and Johnson do.

      11. Bunk. Hitler effectively nationalized all German industry. A company might remain a private industry but Hitler called the shots in what it would produce.

      19. Dr. Dunning my main History professor at Texas A&M, taught that historians interpret the events of history in order to understand the thought processes of the leaders whose decisions caused that history to occur.

        You most definitely do not qualify as a historian, any more than a goat qualifies as a frog.

      23. In a nearly unprecedented action, the Washington Post has heavily corrected the copy and removed sections of two stories relating to the discredited Steele Dossier. What makes the corrections unprecedented was that the Post has republished the stories in their entirety but with the corrections and deletions included.

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