Posted on 01/26/2019 2:14:58 PM PST by Pontiac
Summary
Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named "National Socialist."
But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production.
In Nazi Germany, private capitalist individuals owned the means of production, and they in turn were frequently controlled by the Nazi party and state.
True socialism does not advocate such economic dictatorship -- it can only be democratic. Hitler's other political beliefs place him almost always on the far right.
He advocated racism over racial tolerance, eugenics over freedom of reproduction, merit over equality, competition over cooperation, power politics and militarism over pacifism, dictatorship over democracy, capitalism over Marxism, realism over idealism, nationalism over internationalism, exclusiveness over inclusiveness, common sense over theory or science, pragmatism over principle, and even held friendly relations with the Church, even though he was an atheist.
He’s a liar, an idiot, or both.
Of course this fellow is dead and can't take my advice to educate himself by reading about the economic positions embraced by early National Socialists, even up to Hitler's coming to power. -- all to the Left and some pretty extreme. Hitler moderated to get support from corporate interests.
"Heil, Mein Führer!"
What they don't tell you is that once the war was won, and he didn't need them anymore, they were going to wind up with the same fate as the Jews.
Look, modern conservatism means small government. No government control. NAZIs were a large, very controlling government. Don’t let the left fool you. NAZIs and our new left are very similar. They did not follow their own laws, but forced the people to strictly adhere to oppressive laws. They did demand that public workers performed well. And that is conservative. NAZIs are considered right only because they were at war with the Communists. They are very similar to the communists, so they needed to distinguish themselves as opposite to the Communists. But they were just very efficient tough communists.
Left totalitarianism and Right totalitarianism are two sides of a single coin. If you believe in freedom, constitutionalism, we are not half-way between them, we are no where on that continuum at all. We are another thing altogether.
In the book RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH by Shirer, he states that both Hitler and Marx were products of the same philosophical father, HEGEL.
I call them “Bastard sons of Hegel, by different mothers, almost like twins separated at birth.”
Hitler was far, far to the Left of Adam Smith. People like me don’t even appear on their Right-Left spectrum because we don’t accept even the first principals on which fascism and socialism are both predicated: the place and importance of the State over all else.
Nazis had snappier uniforms and better beer.
shocking that “merit” is now a bad word.
He is clever but a deceiver.
I remember him from years ago, when he was a struggling nothing, which he still is. A true POS.
One who is to the right of lefties can still be on the left!
They are defined differently as you point out. However, they both emphasize the coercive power of the state over the individual. They may take different paths, but in the end they arrive at the same destination: tyranny. In the final analysis, they are identical.
Like the Judean Peoples' Front loathed the Peoples' Front of Judea....SPLITTERS!
After having just spent a while researching this clown I realize that while he was on the far left of the Rat Party when he died he’d be labeled as a “reactionary tool” by the mainstream of *today’s* Rat Party.
Of course.
Much mental effort is wasted on this subject. As if anyone needed to find a “reason” to denounce Hitler that did not exist merely on his record.
I wouldn’t call Hitler a mainstream leftist by any stretch, he was a political opportunist who looked south, saw the success of the fascists in Italy, and pushed his agenda to a similar demographic in Germany, adding racial overtones that were not as important in Mussolini’s version.
Mussolini certainly started out his political career on the left, but fell out with the socialists in Italy over several issues and formed his own party with a new agenda that was nationalist, expansionist (into Africa and Albania) and similar to Franco, with a clerical foundation also. Hitler copied this in spades and added the greater resentment of Germans to their treatment after the first world war, and the stronger fears of communism taking over from weak centrist governments.
Athough Hindenburg was a relatively strong conservative figure, Hitler outmanouevered him using electoral gains to take over the government, abandoning any coalitions, and eventually creating a virtual one-party state. Throughout he was stridently anti-communist but had platforms that in some cases duplicated communist promises to workers. With a strong economy under his party’s direction, he was able to make good on a lot of promises that other parties could not. In fact, one would have to say, if Hitler had not allowed gangs to terrorize various groups in Germany and had not had an expansionist foreign policy, he might have gone the way of Franco and ruled as an autocrat until his natural end. While he would have been defined as an enemy of the progressive lib-left, he would in that version have found relatively friendly relations with western conservatives.
The orthodox view is of course that Hitler is to the political right as Stalin is to the political left. While there may be some truth in that, the reality is that the far ends of the spectrum tend to meet around the dark side of a sphere and so they resemble each other.
For example, comparing Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia, both had secret police, internment camps, widespread deadly violence against defined enemies of the state, a managed economy, expansionist foreign policy, and a mania for the occult. The only differences one could draw might be that the Soviet Union was not as racially obsessed as Germany, although there was a strong undercurrent of that even before the war forced it to be exploited for survival, and also Germany allowed more private ownership especially in agriculture. The German economic model was relatively successful and the Soviet one was not. That is probably why many don’t consider Hitler a leftist.
This desire to rid the right of Hitler is a waste of time. Hitler was a one-off aberration who does not need to be lumped into any larger groupings. The political right did not create Hitler, did not endorse him, and led the fight against him (recall that many leftists were ambivalent about Hitler up to about 1939-40 especially in America).
The real question about political phenomena is not left or right, but freedom or coercion. I would say this is a principle lost in the war of words, since political parties of many different orientations can become coercive and can infringe on individual liberties. Electing a “conservative” government in recent times at least has been no guarantee of enhanced civil liberties. I have found the transition from conservative to liberal government in Canada to be irrelevant to my own civil liberties, they were and remain severely curtailed.
“Worker” control always turns out to be Government control which is socialism in real life.
Leftist Apologist
Steve Kangas
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Steve Kangas (Steven Robert Esh, May 11, 1961 – February 8, 1999) was a journalist, political activist and chess teacher known for his website Liberalism Resurgent [1] and highly political usenet postings.[2] Until 1986 he allegedly worked for the U.S. military.[citation needed] His stay in Berlin turned him from a conservative into an outspoken liberal.[3] His writings were sharply critical of the business propaganda of the overclass[4] and the CIA.[5]
Death
On February 8, 1999, Kangas was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a restroom on the 39th floor of the One Oxford Center, Pittsburgh, home to the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife. Kangas’ blood alcohol was 0.14 and his backpack contained 47 rounds of ammunition and a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.[6][7]
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