Hold this scene in your mind: Revisit Schindler's List in your mind. In one of the earliest scenes, just after all the Jews of Cracow had been pulled from their homes and taken into the ghetto, it showed some of the younger men in synagogue still working little competitions against one another trying to get Nazi business. I asked myself then why Spielberg would insert that scene, as it was not very complimentary of their understanding as to the pickle they were in.
    Maybe that was his point....here was a business culture that had been the object of name-calling for generations, rising to a crescendo quickly after the German invasion in 1939, then this round-up into the ghetto in 1941. Still, they never saw what would come next.

    I'll come back to this.
    Since the November election there has been a lot of speculation as to just what this new "socialist" phenomenon really is. Is it socialism, or communism, or fascism?
    If you consider the individual players, from Obama, Bill Ayers, Pelosi, Barney, you might say all three, but in the end, a system is defined by what it does, not what it says it is doing.
    In truth, while all three are socialist in nature, and each have textbook definitions, none probably work in describing what is going on now in America, as all three terms carry popular baggage that has little to do with those textbook definitions. Communism is not what Marx designed, but has come to mean "Marxist-Leninist" as practiced in the USSR and later, Iron Curtain Europe, where there was little in the way of an industrial base, and a business class that purveyed to a very small, wealthy part of the society, almost all royal licensees. The middle class didn't exist. Under those conditions it was easy (well, sort of) just to tear it all down and build over the ashes, as Lenin, Stalin and the east European thugs tried to do.
    Because of Lenin, in general, "socialism" was what Marx's theories were called in Europe (although there were others), and they were quickly adopted, and adapted to the special circumstances according to each particular country (all but France having a royal line at the head) and to the tastes of the political academics in their respective universities, each with their own ideas as how to best devolve from a royal system to a workers' paradise. But the idea of state ownership of the means of production, which Marx's communism called for, and Lenin got, was never in the European tea leaves. No one could find a practical way of getting from here-to-that place without the sort of radical violent revolution Lenin carried off, and the Russians, well, they just weren't European. Enough said.
    So, from the 1870s until around 1945, in all of Europe except the three fascist states, socialism was an ideology without a state, a plan without an apparatus to execute it...but with a growing political parties supported by the working class. They were a factor to be reckoned with. By the 1930s, throughout Europe, they competed with the Communists but were not on friendly terms...much of that animosity born on the backs of Marxist purity, particularly atheism.
    Then came the Nazis. The socialists were so easily and completely stomped by the Nazis in Germany that the name itself lost much of its allure, so, after WWII, the Communists rose, replacing traditional socialists in the workplace, while the political socialists turned into democratic-socialists and the academic socialists returned to their cloistered towers, happy, I assume to have at least a little of the pie, as Europe moved Left in the late 40's-early 50's.
    The point I'm leading to is that the Europeans didn't use a master plan to design their socialist democracies after the war. In the economic and business sphere (I'm not considering the social sphere here) what they all ended up being were little more than neutered, kinder, gentler versions of the relationship structured between the German Third Reich and their private sector; an industrial and manufacturing sector that got all its marching orders from the national government, and a narrow band of middle class businesses that lived or died at the caprice of the state.
     But see, we can never call that aspect of European socialism "fascist", as it is obviously a word that simply cannot be used to describe anything institutional in Europe. They had to call it something else. Still, in most of the European social democracies. But "facts is facts". They are closer to German fascism in terms of how private business and private property are managed and allocated by the state than any other model.
    What is confusing is that this fascist design itself, where the ownership of business and substantial property is "licensed" and guided by the state, creating a wealthy class that is more or less "allowed" by the state, was also similar in nature to the kinds of "licenses" passed out by royals...you know, when you buy a hat on Bond Street, or a tea at Fortnum and Masons, and it bears a special seal that says "By Appointment to Her Majesty's Government", etc.
      The Euros adopted this form of political connection to the "private sector" out of pragmatism, as it was unthinkable that they would adopt a more strident Marxist model. Picking between the royals and the fascists, since the royals dealt only with a small group of private purveyors, Hitler and his crowd get all the kudos for having designed the first large scale working model of this state-to-private-sector model...and also having the good sense, being barbarians themselves, to hire on a bunch of guys with a "von" in front of their names, e.g, von Schacht, von Ribbentrop, to wine and dine, and sip tea with all the ranking members of the industrial, legal, and scientific classes. They pulled it off in a class of people they probably couldn't get jobs delivering milk to. William L Shirer wrote that getting the Krupps to come on board was the coup de grace. The Nazi takeover was complete.
     What this proves is what Moses Sands always said, "Sky determines" and the kind of socialism that politicians will adopt is based on circumstances on the ground. Europe has made their bed, which, no matter what they call it, is fascist in nature in the terms of how they "allow" private ownership of property and business...and those bureaucratic systems, all originally designed for homogeneous societies and built under the a nuclear umbrella paid for by American taxpayers, will suddenly come to a quickening end now that those two exigencies have changed...and the bureaucratic cancer metastasized.
    
    But the United States is a case of first instance. Never has any form of socialism taken over a fully functioning free market economy and republic. Just as when we were formed in 1789, we're now the first to throw out the baby with the bath water...so now we get to find out the answer to that searing question of the ages...does the baby survive?
    No one yet knows how our sky will determine what shape this new American socialism will take, but common sense says it is not in the cards to simply burn it all down, as Lenin did, and start from the ashes and rubble...although President Obama does speak an awful lot about building "new foundations" which is governmentese for almost the same thing. Once again, pragmatism will apply...only whose? Marx's? Hitler's? Pelosi's? Obama's? Soros?
   You see, the cinder block in Karl Marx's Chipper Vac was always American small business. The rise of our small business sector alongside the industrial revolution in the late 19th Century was the single most important economic event (there are others) to disprove Marx. So we think this is the real front line of the new socialism. It cannot be destroyed a la Lenin unless they just decide to go ahead and put all those displaced jobs into concentration camps, which is logistically impossible. So the only other option is to co-opt small business, i.e., setting up what appear to be "free market" competitions, say among twenty businesses in a single business line, thus shaking them down, er, out, to say three. Only after the other seventeen have been gobbled up, will the surviving three come to find out there are new terms and conditions that go with this new position they have acquired.
   Now take your mind back to that synagogue in Cracow in 1942 where young men were trying to ace out their friends in getting some of that German hard currency.
   In November I wrote on a sombre note here about the prospects for small business, based on this theme of what I saw as too great a willingness to sleep with the enemy. I even dumped my tux. Well I tried it again last week, only this time, in tweeds.
   A friend of mine and I surveyed the room, all business men we knew and asked each other, if given the choice of keeping their business but only at the sufferance of the government, or losing it because they refused to kiss up and adapt to the new socialist models, which would they choose? We worked the roomed for almost two hours, asking a variety of questions that might give us a signal.
   It was not encouraging.
   Although it's too late to cry about it now, it was clear that the Constitution's protectors, such as they are anymore, had failed to reinforce the "spiritual" foundations of these men's understandings about the links that run directly from the Bill of Rights to their wallets. What's worse, most of them strutted about the room thinking themselves protectors of the first order, creating the sort of situation, where, even if there were offered help, it would never be accepted.
   Most of these men are about to be hooked by those same wallets...by joining the competition, never seeing how, once they do, the final barb is set.
   The Great Shaking Out has already begun in small business, only few know the invisible hands holding the sifter. They will be gobbled up, a few left to swim in a fishbowl, the others spit out.
    Try as I might, I can't get angry, because it was never small business' job to fight back once the state was dead set against them...anymore then I can get angry at the citizens in Germany for making the wrong turn, then, once finding out they'd made it, finding they were also unable to reverse course. The facsists now, juts like the facsists then, know to block all exits.

   There was one small glimmer of encouraging news. Many of these men spoke of their wives' new involvement in political affairs. Their wives, not them, would be at the Tea Party.
   Call me old fashioned, but women, especially wives, have a great deal of power over their husbands behind closed doors. I'm reminded of what a black professor told me in the 1970s...Segregation in the South started to die the first time a mother in Mississippi saw her son on television, all decked out in his Kingston Trio madras shirt, standing behind a rope line, screeching curses at James Meredith trying to get into school. At that point that quiet, patient God-fearing little Baptist mother got up, closed the kitchern door so the rest of the children couldn't hear, and had a serious talk with that hooded husband of hers. It probably began something like this..."I'm not going to have the first child in this family's history go to college only to show up on television burning some poor nigra in effigy..."
   It could happen. Be watchful.
VB