Speaking of revisionists, their claim that: “Though their fundamental political beliefs were polar opposites” is completely false.
The nationalist socialism of the Germans and the international socialism of the Russians were nearly identical. They are both socialist, both anti-Jew, both violent toward scapegoats among their own people, and both expansionist. The only difference is in how they saw the people they planned to conquer or kill in other countries.
You beat me to it.
The big fight between Communism and Fascism came when Hitler couldn’t gain a majority of voters as many were being taken by the commies. Their platforms were extremely similar. Hence, Hitler’s purge and extermination of them.
The Reds here in the USA had no problem with Hitler at all, until he started killing the communists.
Mark Steyn has a great article on Pete Seeger and his about-face on staying out of the war when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Thank you.
Yeah, the "right-left" line doesn't quite work. Communist. Marxist. Socialist. Nazi. Fascist. DemocRats. What separates them are minor policy differences.
It is fun to try to get a liberal articulate the differences.
Hindsight analysis here. If Hitler had focused more on taking the region of Palestine and establishing Israel during the war he could have maybe won the favor of the Jewish people by relocating them to their homeland, instead of the horrific attempt of genocide.
Also, if he had embraced the technology (atomic energy) that the Jewish scientists were working on, he may have accomplished his goals.
It appears his hatred of all things Jewish diminished his ability to be a masterful military tactician. Even his closest advisors could not convince him he was in peril.
The nationalist socialism of the Germans and the international socialism of the Russians were nearly identical. They are both socialist, both anti-Jew, both violent toward scapegoats among their own people, and both expansionist. The only difference is in how they saw the people they planned to conquer or kill in other countries
You are 100% correct and if only your one paragraph would be taught in schools, the USA would be a totally different place.
The nazis were left wing not right wing, as they wanted total control by the gummint but were smart enough to know that business produced more stuff, more efficiently than bureaucrats.
The nazi model is more akin to the Chi-Coms than the old soviet model, but all are communists in the belief that the state runs it all.
There is no room for God in that model which is why God is being pushed out of the watered down US Constitution.
Walter Krivitzky, the the high-ranking Main Intelligence Administration (GRU) officer who defected and wrote In Stalin's Secret Service (New York: Holt, 1939) told Whittaker Chambers that the Soviet Union practiced a form of fascism, and this became manifest in 1921 when Lenin ordered the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny, turning against the very sailors whose 1917 mutiny propelled the Bolsheviks to power.
The only difference is one word, inter. One was National Socialism; the other International Socialism.
I also find it interesting that the opposition by the left in the US to WWII ended on the day Germany invaded the USSR.
The big difference was National Socialism under Hitler had a Crony Capitalist system as far as the means of production was concerned.
The Soviet Union had no such system, the State controlled all means of production with no risk reward system at all, which is why they could not make enough munitions for war and were totally dependent on Lend-Lease to survive.
The fundamental difference between the two systems is the Nazis gave the pretense of private ownership. Yes you could own your own factory but the state would control the production process.
Yes you could own your home but the state would determine how you would live in it.
What both systems had in common was there was no ownership of speech or thought.
yes, both were socialist, but communism was not inherently or intrinsically anti-Jew
Many Jews joined it - and were disproportionately represented in the initial leadership (though not the majority) - as witnessed by Trotsky.
Communism was one of 4 options for Jews in the Russian Empire in the 1800s -- remember that the 1800s was the rise of nationalism and each nation said "this is my land" - the problem being that most demands overlapped
Communism was not anti-Jew during Lenin, not at all
Stalin had some anti-Jewish tendencies but this was exacerbated by the number of Jewish origin communists who opposed Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev against Jewish arch-rival Leon Trotsky, - well he didn't care about who he killed: Jews, Christians, Muslims - anyone was fair game for him.
The Council of People's Commissars adopted a 1918 decree condemning all antisemitism and calling on the workers and peasants to combat it. Lenin continued to speak out against antisemitism. Information campaigns against antisemitism were conducted in the Red Army and in the workplaces, and a provision forbidding the incitement of propaganda against any ethnicity became part of Soviet law. State-sponsored institutions of secular Yiddish culture, such as the Moscow State Jewish Theater, were established in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union during this time, as were institutions for other minorities.
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The Soviet murder machine differed from the Nazi one in that the Nazis killed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, priests, communists while the Soviet murder machine killed everyone indiscriminately (equal opportunity murderers the old Bolsheviks were)