Posted on 08/25/2007 9:37:52 AM PDT by Renfield
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There is surely no doubt that the man Feser describes sounds very much like a mainstream Leftist by current standards. But who is the man concerned? It is a historically accurate description of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own day but he would even be a mainstream socialist in MOST ways today. Feser does not mention Hitler's antisemitism above, of course, but that too seems once again to have become mainstream among the Western-world Left in the early years of the 21st century. See here for more on that.
One way in which Hitler was unlike modern American Leftist political leaders, however, is that he was to a considerable extent a genuine man of culture. The photo below shows him in white tie and tails attending the Wagner opera festival at Bayreuth in 1939. There is no doubt of his real devotion to opera -- and indeed to classical music generally. Any claim that a devotion to high culture is especially virtuous does therefore tend to be undermined by Hitler's example -- if that is not too ad hominem.
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(Excerpt) Read more at jonjayray.tripod.com ...
So, where does that leave Stalin? (Leader of the Union Soviet Socialist Republics) The Hegelian, “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The object of the Reich (after Hitler and ethnic cleansing) was to develop a socialist society made up of “Aryans”. When you swing the social pendulum far enough it comes all the way around.
Franco, Mussolini and Austria before the Nazis were fascist.
National Socialism WAS a brand of Socialism. But instead of the internationalist, “border-less” socialism propagated by the communists, it had a nationalist, racist approach.
Real Fascism is based on traditions, nationalism, class and often religion. National-Socialism resembled the Soviet-Union in most aspects more than it did resemble the other European Fascist states.
Mussolini was a socialist.
Abortion wouldn’t have been as much as a human rights issue then, but power of the government, reasoning if a individual could chose to have an abortion the government could choose who could have one as well.
Hitler was a piker compared to Stalin when it came to butchering his own people. He is estimated to have murdered between 20 and 50 million and that doesn’t count his abandoning Georgia and Ukraine during the war so the Nazis could slaughter/quell the uprising.
Pray for W and Our Troops
Sort of. But Italy under Mussolini wasn’t nearly as socialist as Germany under Hitler. A key aspect of National-Socialism was a break with traditions and a “cultural revolution”. Italian Facism and Spanish Francoism differed profoundly in this aspect.
Hitler, truly progressive.
“But he got the trains to run on time.”
Wasn’t that Benito Mussolini?
“Hitler was not a socialist, he was a fascist. “
“We are Socialists, enemies, mortal enemies of the present capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all circumstances to abolish this system!”
Guess where the quote came from...
Democrats and “liberals”, these days, act more like Nazis all the time.
When is the last time you heard any Democrat in America, advocate any policy, position or program, which did not involve either government force, or some variant of the original German order: “Verbotten”?
Seriously. Even one. There aren’t any.
Nazi=NSDAP=national socialist German workers’ party
That doesn’t sound very right wing to me, but then again, in leftspeak, up is down, old is new, and black is white. The left uses definitions as they best suit them, the facts be darned.
I think Hitler was a little bit of both, personally. He wanted a “perfect” world with no Jews. In other words, he wanted his cake and eat it to. He nearly got what he wished for.
marker
People Hitler had deported/locked up/killed:
Communists
Trade Unionists
Immigrants
Homosexuals
Sounds list a list of all the socialist’s friends to me
The second quote on my FR home page:
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
See my previous post.
Para-Ord.45 gets it.
“sitting through a history class in high school and the teacher was writing the differences between National Socialism and Soviet-type Communism. The differences were few.”
Actually, the differences were many, but not so much ideologicly.
The forced spread of Leninist-style International Communism was stopped during the Polish Wars of the 20’s at great expense in Ethnic German lives, some estimates say 2 Million.
This left a lasting impression on the German People, especially since the formerly downtrodden jews, victims undr the tsars, were leading the Communist Revolution...
That was Mussolini,Hitler built the Autobahn.
Regards,
GtG
The Communists were competition. That is the reason Hitler jailed communists.
As for the others on your list, please point to any communist regime, past or present, with:
Trade unions (not controlled by the government)
Immigrants
Homosexuals
Non-governmental trade unions, immigration and free lifestyle choices (whether we agree with them or not) are in fact some of the characteristics of messy, noisy, chaotic, pluralistic, free and democratic societies.
You don’t find much immigration to any communist country. Nobody wants to move there! The Berlin Wall faced inward.
You don’t find (any) organizations with power to challenge authority. That is a crime called “counter-revolution”.
And homosexuality (again, not taking a position here) has in fact been suppressed in every communist and totalitarian regime of every stripe, this poster can think of, past or present.
The opposite of socialist is not nazi.
The opposite of nazi is not socialist.
They are for all purposes identical. The opposite of (both) of those philosophies, is freedom. Libertarianism, really.
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