Click image to enlargify From Picture Post Magazine, July 13, 1940, pp 24-25 |
"Everyone must bear sacrifices," has long been the Nazi cry. And there, too, it is claimed that sacrifices are borne equally. But their own official figures contradict this. For under Nazi rule, down to November, 1939, while the total wages of workers has risen by 65 per cent, the number of workers has also sharply risen. Which means, of course, that the average is reduced. And over the same period a decreasing number of capitalists received one hundred and eighty per cent more profits. And it must remembered that more than half he national taxation falls on the workers, whose pay envelopes each week are docked for such things as social insurance, winter relief, Strength through Joy, and the hire purchase swindle of the non-existent "German People's Car."
One German factory hand, working top-speed on armaments, speaks for all when he reports from the Rhineland: "A year and a half ago I was getting an hourly rate of 80 pfennigs. Now they pay 62 pfennigs. Then I earned 40 marks a week, now I earn 24. In the so-called bad old times before Hitler I used to get a mark or more per hour. Now it comes to about 30 marks a week of which 6 have to go in compulsory contributions."
Working on the official figures, margarine costs the ordinary German worker three hours wages. A pound of butter six hours. A ready-made suit of clothes three months. Unemployment may, perhaps, have been "liquidated." But only by building up the armament industries at enormous pace and flooding them with workers paid wages not much higher than the eighteen mark fifty dole of pre-Hitler days -- not to mention the hundreds of thousands in gaols and camps, and the further hundreds of thousands guarding and ruling them; and the enormous party bureaucracy with its millions of State-supported servants. [...]
(continued on WWAFF post 11)
Jay's thoughts: Well, this all sounds frighteningly familiar to me. How many of us have seen our wages decline over the past few years? We still have unemployment problems, but those who are working are paying ever more in taxes, insurances and VAT each year. Then we are relentlessly bombarded with calls for asinine "social welfare" programmes like minimum unit pricing for alcohol and beer. Most of us are struggling to get by as it is.
We can thank the previous Labour government for really ballsing up just about everything. How many civil service jobs did Labour create? Millions? Keep in mind, civil servants are paid for with the taxes the government takes from the private sector -- civil servants create no wealth. They simply redistribute the wealth of others. Civil servants do not pay income taxes. They simply have the requisite amount of taxpayer-received funds deducted from their payroll, in order to give the appearance of being a taxpayer. They aren't though. (This does not necessarily mean that civil servants are bad people. Most of them are ordinary folk just trying to get by like the rest of us. Some of them, however, are certainly duplicitous and evil.)
Still, the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government is no better -- indeed, one might say that it's just more of the same we got from Labour. I see very little difference between Conservatives and Labour and Lib Dems. They all want to "nudge" us this way, control us that way, make us plebs live our lives in whatever manner they deem necessary. There is no room for negotiation. You must do as they tell you. You are Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
And most -- but not all -- of this is happening now because the EU wants this to happen. Our governments have been stripped of their rightful duties to the people of Britain, usurped in tiny degrees by unelected technocrats in Brussels. We were sold a promise of free trade amongst all EU nations who joined the collective. What we got instead was hundreds of thousands of new laws that we must follow, whether they are good or bad, whether we are even aware of their existence, whether we want them or do not. What we got was a dictatorship pretending to a democracy.
Bonus comic:
Click image to enlargify |