Last week I watched a group of anti-Wall Street protestors as they paraded down the street. One of their signs said, “Corporate America is Guilty.” A sweeping generalization if there ever was one. If capitalism is guilty, what can we say about anti-capitalism? In judging the free market, we often forget who the enemies of the free market have been. We forget one of the foremost voices of anti-capitalism, which sounded a clarion call. “I have the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations,” said Adolf Hitler. “War is the origin of all things.”
Such were the words of history’s most famous anti-capitalist politician. “There is a broadened strategy, a war with intellectual weapons,” Hitler explained. “When I wage war, in the midst of peace, troops will suddenly appear…. No one will stop them.” Hitler’s plan was to overthrow all governments, to override the free market and install his own lackeys. “We shall find such men,” he explained, “[and] we shall find them in every country. We shall not need to bribe them. They will come of their own accord. Ambition and delusion, party squabbles and self-seeking arrogance will drive them. Peace will be negotiated before the war has begun.”
The capitalists want peace; so let them think it is “peace in our time.” Attack them when they least expect it; for the anti-capitalist program has always been predicated on war. “Our strategy,” said Hitler, “is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself.” Instead of artillery barrages against entrenched enemy troops, the Nazi leader envisioned revolutionary propaganda used to psychologically break down entire countries. “The enemy people must be demoralized and ready to capitulate, driven into moral passivity, before military action can even be thought of,” Hitler declared.
How was this moral breakdown to be achieved? “We shall not shrink from plotting revolutions,” Hitler explained. “We shall have friends who will help us in all the enemy countries. We shall know how to obtain such friends. Mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, and panic: these are our weapons.” The history of revolutions are always the same, he mused. “The ruling classes capitulate. Why? They no longer have the will to conquer. The lessons of revolution … I have learnt from the Bolsheviks. I do not hesitate to say so.”
The program for victory in modern times is simple. “When the enemy is demoralized from within, when he stands on the brink of revolution, when social unrest threatens, that is the right moment. A single blow must destroy him. Aerial attacks, stupendous in their mass effect, surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination from within, the murder of leading men, overwhelming attacks … sudden attacks, all in the same second, without regard for reserves or losses: that is the war of the future. A gigantic, all-destroying blow. I do not consider the consequences; I think only of this one thing,” Hitler admitted.
The dictator’s words were set down by Hermann Rauschning, and published in a book, Voice of Destruction (which predicted Hitler’s future trajectory with remarkable accuracy). Besides Hitler, there have been other voices of destruction. Consider a secret speech of Joseph Stalin to the Central Committee of the Communist Party Soviet Union on 19 August 1939:
We have before us a vast field of action to develop the World Revolution. Comrades! It is in the interest of the USSR – the Fatherland of the Workers – that war should break out between the Reich [Nazi Germany] and the Franco-British capitalist bloc. We must do everything so that the war should last as long as possible with the aim of weakening both sides. It is for these reasons that we must give priority to the approval of the conclusion of the pact proposed by Germany, and to work so that this war, which will be declared within a few days, shall last as long as possible. It is therefore necessary to strengthen the work of propaganda in the countries that will have entered the war….
When we look around today, and hear the “necessary work of propaganda” on all sides, we should remember that someone who is not a capitalist wants today’s wars to continue so that ordered society will be weakened; so that revolution can be advanced; and the secret of revolution is to target capitalism, to malign business. As Hitler said again and again, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system … and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
Why are they determined to destroy capitalism?
The reason is simple. Capitalism stands in the way of dictatorship. Capitalism represents liberty, and property rights, and democratic government. Therefore, if you are like Hitler, and seeking total power, you must oppose capitalism in principle as well as in practice. For you will never achieve total power unless you eradicate the capitalist system and the culture of freedom it engenders. Such is the thinking that lies behind the North Korean regime, the ruling Iranian clerics, and the “Caliphate” of the al Qaeda terrorists. They all hate capitalism, they all want nuclear weapons, and they all claim that corporate America is “guilty.”
One needs only a little common sense to realize that capitalism is dedicated to producing goods and services. It is capitalism that has raised the world’s overall standard of living, while anti-capitalism has left nothing but a vast trail of destruction in its wake. One has only to study the leading exemplars of anti-capitalism – today’s “voices of destruction” – to grasp this fact.
