Sunday 14 June 2015

Half-Right, I'd say

From The Telegraph:

Mr Starkey made the comments during an interview with The Sunday Times, saying: “What are the points of comparison?

“Well, we have a political movement that has a single historic explanation for why your country is facing such terrible oppression; it's either Versailles or the Treaty of the Union.

“You have a particular group of people who are responsible for this; it is either the English or the Jews.”

He went on: “You have as a symbol the twisted cross: the saltire or the swastika. You have a passionate belief in economic self-sufficiency: known by the Nazis as autarky and the Scots as oil.

“And also you have the propensity of your elderly and middle-aged male supporters to expose their knees,' he said, passing comment on the traditional dress of Scotland and Germany.”

He's right about the treaty and the people. The cross thing is nonsense. The SNP are not into autarky. Nazi autarky was about full self-sufficiency - producing things in Germany rather than buying them from abroad. The oil thing is, perhaps worrying in terms of Scotland viewing their country as a magic money tree rather than as an industrial nation.

The thing of wearing kilts isn't about showing off knees, it's about romantic nationalism. The idea of things being better in the past in your country. The Nazis had the Volkisch, a  folklore movement that looked back to the glorious pre-industrial past of the middle ages, and the ring cycle of Wagner which was a criticism of industrialisation. The kilts are the same thing. A time when Scotsmen were free. Never mind that it was created 400 years after Mel Gibson was fighting the English, and about 100 years after the act of the union.

10 comments:

Tim Almond said...

I'm just saying that there's a lot of similarities in nationalist movements. That said, the Greens are quite a lot like the Nazis. They are anti-capitalist, hark back to a better past, and believe in localism.

The thing with the Nazis is that they didn't just blame bankers. They blamed anything that they saw as not being "hard work". it was directly from Marx's Labour Theory of Value. You couldn't be a venture capitalist in the Nazi era, because that was seen as being parasitical.

I've nothing specifically against bankers. It's the political influence that's a problem. Allow banks to fail, introduce LVT and you've basically solved the problem.

Random said...

"They blamed anything that they saw as not being "hard work"."
Sound like IDS and his nonsense about people being "workshy."

Derek said...

As nationalists go, the SNP are about the least objectionable around. They aren't so much anti-English as anti-Establishment. Quite a few English residents in Scotland get this and become members or supporters. But of course the Establishment isn't too keen on anti-Establishment parties and so recasts the anti-Establishment message as an anti-English message and tries to link the SNP to far more objectionable nationalist movements. It's not too difficult to do this since even really unpleasant nationalist movements have some relatively unobjectionable aspects which they all share. Hence the tarring of the SNP with the Nazi brush.

Derek said...
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Bayard said...

"and while the Nazis were mates with the landowners they did have a downer on bankers"

and on landlords, who were also commonly Jewish.

DBC Reed said...

Should n't we all have a downer on the bankers, as, since the publication by the BoE of Money Creation in the Modern Economy they have been officially shown up for creating money out of nothing but lending it out at interest? Hjalmar Schacht in pre-war Germany during the Depression made up his own currency without bank backing, the Labour Treasury Certificates, and everybody returned to work and the country came out of an abysmal depression within two years as Ellen Brown the proponent of Public Banking has pointed out. Lest this be thought inherently Fascist, Abraham Lincoln found he couldn't fight the Civil war with bank finance and paid for it with his own Greenbacks .
Do not forget they are trying to arrest bankers in Iceland for going about their normal business: they are fleeing to good old corrupt Britain for refuge.Looks like they'd get it on here.

Tim Almond said...

Derek,

I disagree. They're anti-English and in terms of the establishment they are fully signed-up. Alex Salmond has never worked anywhere but a quango. Nicola Sturgeon worked as a solicitor before going into politics. John Swinney worked in quangos and banking. Roseanna Cunningham was a solicitor.

Their land reform is more about hitting the old establishment, owners of large chunks of highland estates. People with a huge volume of low value land.

Bayard said...

"Never mind that it was created 400 years after Mel Gibson was fighting the English, and about 100 years after the act of the union."

Nearly all of Scotland's cultural heritage was "restored" in the C19th. The traditional dress of the Highlanders was not the kilt but the belted plaid, a blanket-sized piece of cloth draped over one shoulder and belted around the middle. It had the advantage of doubling as something to sleep under.

Tim Almond said...

DBC,

Schacht's work with the Rentenmark and the Young Plan really helped Germany in the 1920s and without the Wall St Crash, we maybe would have never had the Nazis.

Hjalmar Schacht was one of the better people involved in the Reich, but the Mefo bills were what allowed Germany to rearm without creating a paper trail. It was directly done to avoid Versailles as fake money to arms companies. And yes, it created full employment, but it was not sustainable. The German government was spending 150% of their tax receipts.

Derek said...

About 10 percent of the SNP membership are English.

See this article which asks English supporters why they do it.