Thursday, February 21, 2008

Old Fascism or the New Left?

Which is which?


The non-dom is to our age what Loadsamoney was to the 1980s. Where the grotesque comic representation of Margaret Thatcher's government was a wad-waving oaf, the equivalent caricature of the esprit Brown would be all Bentley and Cipriani (the hedge funds' favourite nosherie, in west London). He would be a tax-avoiding plutocrat who does billion-dollar deals from an office in Mayfair and occasionally loans his paintings to the Tate.

But these mind-bogglingly wealthy non-doms - who live and work here but keep most of their assets offshore, out of the grasping hands of the taxman - are a cartoon come to real, gilded life. They are among the dramatis personae of my new book: I have been lunching them for years as a central responsibility of my day job as a business editor - but since it's at the BBC, when they're out with me they have to experience how the other 99.9% of us live.
Labor Front Leader Dr. Robert Ley began a speaking tour of German industrial areas to explain the "revolution" to the workers. Before he left Berlin he published in the Goebbels newsorgan Der Angriff words that could easily have originated in Moscow:

"Money rules the world, but National Socialism does not acknowledge the rule of money. . . . The Führer said, 'I am perhaps the only head of a State who does not even have a bank account.' The National Socialist State leadership has not only destroyed plutocracy in Germany and allotted to money its proper role in economy, it also has freed the workers from the exploiters' fetters. The National Socialist economic order has freed itself, not only from the fetters of money in our land, but—and that is decisive—from the fetters of international money rule."

Okay, so I made it easy, but you’ll probably appreciate the pervasiveness of the ideas they share in common, and the fact that today’s “rebels” and “humanists” still think that the Nazis weren’t leftist, who just like them, were as in love with ‘the people’ as they are.

- Thanky thanky to Baghdad George

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