This explanation leaves no doubt that today's leftists are at their core, Nazis.
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Once again the old canard of ‘the National Socialists were not Socialists’ has been raised in the open thread. This is getting rather boring, but it’s a perennial weed, so lets address it if only to clear the open threads of this infestation for a while.
What was said:
The Communists are the extreme left-wing fascists, the Nazis were the extreme right-wing fascists.
There’s clearly a big push on to redefine the term “Extreme Right-wing” to mean something warm and fluffy.
To say this one has to be a follower of Josef Stalin. To quote Jonah Goldberg:
Joseph Stalin championed the idea that all of his political opponents should be dubbed fascists, including many of his fellow Bolsheviks, such as Leon Trotsky (whom Stalin had assassinated), and much of the Red Army’s officer corps (whom he had executed), and countless Ukrainians (whom he had liquidated). Stalin insisted that even mentioning the man-made – i.e., Stalin-made — Ukranian famine was evidence you were an agent of the Nazis.
Under Stalin’s “theory of social fascism,” any socialist, social-democratic, or progressive group or party not loyal to him had to be called fascist. Hence, for a while Moscow insisted that FDR and even Norman Thomas (head of the Socialist Party of America) were fascists.
Ultimately, Communist propagandists and their allied intellectuals would reflexively blame fascism for everything, regardless of the facts. That’s what prompted George Orwell to remark that “the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’
So that particular piece of dezinformatsiya is merely a post-Barbarossa redefinition of what everyone knew at the time to be true – that the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was a National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
Socialism and fascism are identical, as noted here:
We can put socialism and fascism on a table and stare at them all we like, and all we may see will be differences. What is required to go beyond this is to widen our context of knowledge. For instance, let’s say we draw two geometrical figures on the chalkboard: a scalene and an isosceles. If we focus merely on these two concretes, without widening our context, we will see nothing but difference. The two triangles have different angles, different side lengths, different locations, different sizes. Now imagine that we introduce a foil: We draw a square on the board. The difference between the first two triangles is still there, but is made insignificant by the even greater difference between the triangles, on the one hand, and the square on the other. This process of differentiation allows us to see the triangles as similar. If we are able to isolate an essential characteristic of the group (a difference between the triangles and squares which explains all or most of the other differences between them), we can then integrate this group of similars into a single mental unit, uniting it by a common definition, i.e., forming a concept.
We can treat social systems in the same way in which we treat geometrical figures. As we observed before, there are probably innumerable differences between socialism and fascism. But what happens if we introduce a foil here, as well? Let’s imagine that we introduce a third type of social system. Rather than having society control all property, and rather than having dictatorship in one form or another, we introduce a system in which individuals are free to follow the dictates of their own mind. Rather than having a system in which the choice is between the abridgment of political freedom or the abridgment of economic freedom, we introduce one in which no one’s freedom is to be abridged. In short, we introduce capitalism: the social system in which all property is privately owned, and the government’s function is restricted to the protection of individual rights.
Once we remember the possibility of the existence of such a system, the differences between socialism and fascism become trivial, superficial and, above all, non-essential. Differentiation of socialism and fascism from capitalism permits the recognition of their similarity. They do differ from each other, but only in the way in which the scalene and the isosceles differ from each other: in degree, but not in kind. Socialism and fascism are each forms of statism, forms of government in which the government is given complete or extensive control over the lives of its citizens.
Now, just what makes the dull and ignorant think the national Socialists were not, well, socialists?
Where did Hitler learn his politics? Well, that would be pre-1914 Vienna. Who did he get the German Nationalist bits from?
Oh, that would be Georg Ritter von Schoenerer’s Pan-German Nationalist Party .
What about the rest? Where did he get his political, social and economic ideas from?
Well, that would be two socialist parties, the Social Democrats,whom he despised for courting Slavs but from who he also learned of the need to tap the zeitgeist and how create a mass movement, and the Christian Socialists. (See Mein Kampf pp.43-44 for what he really learned from the Social Democrats!)
The German National Socialist Worker’s Party was a SOCIALIST organisation. Its party platform was socialist, the entire senior leadership regarded themselves as socialists, called themselves socialists, and enacted contemporary socialist policies across the entire policy spectrum and yes, contemporary socialist agendas openly included Racism, Eugenics and rabid anti-semitism. To this day, they still include these evils – they are merely concealed, if poorly.
And what did Hitler himself say about what he was?
Well according to … well.. Adolf freaking Hitler, that Hitler chappie was a socialist running a socialist party of a nationalist bent. And so were all his revolting chums.
We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
– Adolf Hitler (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)
As things stand today, the trade unions in my opinion cannot be dispensed with. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions of the nation’s economic life. Their significance lies not only in the social and political field, but even more in the general field of national politics. A people whose broad masses, through a sound trade-union movement, obtain the satisfaction of their living requirements and at the same time an education, will be tremendously strengthened in its power of resistance in the struggle for existence.
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ch.12
He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: “As Christ proclaimed ‘love one another’,” he said, “so our call — ‘people’s community,’ ‘public need before private greed,’ ‘communally-minded social consciousness’ — rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!
- Edward Feser describing Adolf Hitler
There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will.
- Hermann Rauschning in Hitler Speaks, London, T. Butterworth, 1940.
Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.
- Hermann Rauschning in Hitler Speaks, London, T. Butterworth, 1940
11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in life and property, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as a crime against the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits whether in assets or material.
13. We demand the nationalization of businesses which have been organized into cartels.
14. We demand that all the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.
15. We demand extensive development of provision for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle-class, the immediate communalization of department stores which will be rented cheaply to small businessmen, and that preference shall be given to small businessmen for provision of supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.
17. We demand a land reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to confiscate from the owners without compensation any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
Extract from the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Author: Adolf Hitler.
And on the issue of private property, all was never as it seemed, either.
‘Unless the political implications of this ethical doctrine of collectivism are not apparent to everyone, the Nazis make them strikingly clear. The Nazis were opposed to authentic private property, and as a result, to capitalism:
“Private property” as conceived under liberalistic economic order was a reversal of the true concept of property. This “private property” represented the right of the individual to manage and to speculate with inherited or acquired property as he pleased, without regard to the general interests…German socialism had to overcome this “private”, that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.
- Ernst Huber, Nazi party spokesman; National Socialism, prepared by Raymond E. Murphy, et al; quoting Huber, Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches (Hamburg, 1939).
All of the above was clearly understood at the time, if only because of the simple reason that Hitler was raised in a milieu where if you were a populist, you accorded to the populism de jour to obtain power, and that was socialism.
Let there now be no doubt about what the facts of history show. National Socialism was socialist, and Hitler too was a socialist, so there is zero ethical or moral difference involved. To be a socialist is to be anti-freedom, anti-capitalist, statist and totalitarian.
