Posted on 01/03/2002 4:05:05 PM PST by Come And Take It
A Little Secret About the Nazis
They were left-wing socialists. Yes, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left. Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist ``exploitation´´ by capitalists -- particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. They instituted and vigorously enforced a strict gun control regimen. They encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and they denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics. Yet a popular myth persists that the Nazis themselves were right-wing extremists. This insidious lie biases the entire political landscape, and the time has come to expose it.
Richard Poe, editor of Frontpage Magazine, sets the record straight:
Nazism was inspired by Italian Fascism, an invention of hardline Communist Benito Mussolini. During World War I, Mussolini recognized that conventional socialism wasn't working. He saw that nationalism exerted a stronger pull on the working class than proletarian brotherhood. He also saw that the ferocious opposition of large corporations made socialist revolution difficult. So in 1919, Mussolini came up with an alternative strategy. He called it Fascism. Mussolini described his new movement as a ``Third Way´´ between capitalism and communism. As under communism, the state would exercise dictatorial control over the economy. But as under capitalism, the corporations would be left in private hands.
Hitler followed the same game plan. He openly acknowledged that the Nazi party was ``socialist´´ and that its enemies were the ``bourgeoisie´´ and the ``plutocrats´´ (the rich). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler eliminated trade unions, and replaced them with his own state-run labor organizations. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler hunted down and exterminated rival leftist factions (such as the Communists). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler waged unrelenting war against small business.
Hitler regarded capitalism as an evil scheme of the Jews and said so in speech after speech. Karl Marx believed likewise. In his essay, ``On the Jewish Question,´´ Marx theorized that eliminating Judaism would strike a crippling blow to capitalist exploitation. Hitler put Marx´s theory to work in the death camps.
The Nazis are widely known as nationalists, but that label is often used to obscure the fact that they were also socialists. Some question whether Hitler himself actually believed in socialism, but that is no more relevant than whether Stalin was a sincere believer. The fact is that neither could have come to power without at least posing as a socialist. And the constant emphasis on the fact that the Nazis were nationalists, with barely an acknowledgment that they were socialists, is as absurd as labeling the Soviets ``internationalists´´ and ignoring the fact that they were socialists (they called themselves the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Yet many who regard ``national´´ socialism as the scourge of humanity consider ``international´´ socialism a benign or even superior form of government.
According to a popular misconception, the Nazis must have been on the political right because they persecuted communists and fought a war with the communists in Russia. This specious logic has gone largely unchallenged because it serves as useful propaganda for the left, which needs ``right-wing´´ atrocities to divert attention from the horrific communist atrocities of the past century. Hence, communist atrocities have received much less publicity than Nazi war crimes, even though they were greater in magnitude by any objective measure.
R. J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documents in his book Death by Government that the two most murderous regimes of the past century were both communist: communists in the Soviet Union murdered 62 million of their own citizens, and Chinese communists killed 35 million Chinese citizens. The Nazi socialists come in third, having murdered 21 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others. Additional purges occurred in smaller communist hellholes such as Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Cuba, of course. Communism does more than imprison and impoverish nations: it kills wholesale. And so did ``national socialism´´ during the Nazi reign of terror.
But the history of the past century has been grossly distorted by the liberal media and the predominantly left-wing academic elite. The Nazis have been universally condemned -- as they obviously should be -- but they have also been repositioned clear across the political spectrum and propped up as false representatives of the far right -- even though Hitler railed frantically against capitalism in his infamous demagogic speeches. At the same time, heinous crimes of larger magnitude by communist regimes have been ignored or downplayed, and the general public is largely unaware of them. Hence, communism is still widely regarded as a fundamentally good idea that has just not yet been properly ``implemented.´´ Santayana said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.´´ God help us if we forget the horrors of communism and get the historical lessons of Nazism backwards.
The Nazis also had something else in common with the modern left: an obsessive preoccupation with race. Hitler and his Nazis considered races other than their own inferior, of course. Modern liberals, who vociferously oppose the elimination of racial quotas, seem to agree. They apparently believe that non-white minorities (excluding Asians, of course) are inferior and unable to compete in the free market without favoritism mandated by the government. Whereas Hitler was hostile to those racial minorities, however, modern white liberals condescend benevolently. Hitler's blatant and virulent form of racism was eradicated relatively quickly and very forcefully, but the more subtle and insidious racism of modern liberals has yet to be universally recognized and condemned.
The liberal media often focuses its microscope on modern neo-nazi lunatics, but the actual scope of the menace is relatively miniscule, with perhaps a few thousand neo-nazis at most in the United States (mostly ``twenty-something´´ know-nothings). The number of communists and communist sympathizers in the United States dwarfs that figure, of course -- even among tenured professors! And while the threat of neo-nazi terrorism is indeed serious, the chance of neo-nazis gaining any kind of legitimate political power anywhere is virtually zero. That is why the ACLU can safely use them to advertise its supposed commitment to free speech. Neo-nazi rallies incite violence, but they do not persuade bystanders to join their cause! If they did, the ACLU would have nothing to do with them.
If you have the stomach for it, spending a lot of time on Marxists.org and actually reading the historical papers and essays there can be amazingly illuminating, although painfully boring.
The communists will grab anything they feel can be used as a tool to spur the mass to revolution. There are essays about how radical Islam can be used for this purpose- which is why you find men like Ramsey Clark (former US Attorney General under LBJ and radical leftist, member of the World Workers Party, and founder of the communist organization IAC and all of its umbrella groups) stating that "Islam may be the most important moral force in the world today".
Oh, and Clark? He and his organizations spend millions of dollars they raise as various charities on prison outreach programs, where they go in to the literally captive audiences and preach radical Islam and radical socialism.
But that is tangental to this thread.
"Great article!One could also argue that the whole left-wing/right-wing "political spectrum" idea, with "moderates" and compromisers in the supposedly desirable middle, is another socialist device to confuse our thinking, cramp it into a single dimension and label people with misleading labels like "liberal" and "progressive".
I wonder if anyone has information on the history of these concepts."
The Ayn Rand Lexicon will give you the history and origins (or etymology) of various terminologies. You do get it, the leftists gets very testy when people point this out.
I have been telling people this for most of my adult life (about 10 years).
Whenever I have pointed this out in the past in other places, the leftists immediately attack. This shows you are on the right line of attack. Grab on to it like a pit bull and don't let go...
/joh
That's why Nazi Germany outlasted the USSR and Red China by exactly how many years? I detect a logical fault.
/john
/john
TONIGHT...
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The left/right paradigm that developed from these competing theories had liberalism on the left of the line and conservatism on the right. Liberalism assumed the need for radical change whereas conservativism assumed the need to retain the established order.
As time has passed, the term liberalism has lost its' original meaning. In many ways, most of us at FreeRepublic are classical liberals.
In any event, under Nazism, the national symbols of a culture are raised to a religious status, the state is granted the position of the King, as if its position were ordained by God, and private property is left in the hands of individuals favored by the omnipotent State. So, in essence, Nazism is conservativism taken to the extreme. It takes the people's culture that has heretofore bound that people together and elevates that culture to a religious level while establishing a favored aristocracy served by faceless serfs and slaves. There is no check on the power of the King at all. Hence, Nazism falls to the far right on the traditional paradigm.
On the other hand, communism is considered the complete overthrow of traditional institutions--the parliament, the church, the executive--and their replacement by a completely new system whereby the state owns all property but its' power is held in check by the communist party, representing the working class. As the society passes through the stage of socialism, and into a stage where manufacturing can meet the needs of all persons within the society, the society enters into the stage of communism, where the state whithers away, because the only decisions to be made are decisions of production and distribution. With the existence of only one class, and there being no need to redistribute limited resources, there remains no need for a state, which is only organized force used to keep a ruling class in power. Hence, with no state at all, communism falls at the far left of the traditional paradigm.
This said, I find the traditional paradigm somewhat useless in the modern world. A more useful paradigm would be one that measures the real social and economic freedom of the peoples that live under various political and economic systems. Under such a paradigm, Nazism, Communism, and Islamicism, would all fall at one end of the line, let us say the right since historically in the social sciences the right has meant a powerful state or king, meaning little freedom, and libertarianism would fall at the far end of the left.
I hope this sheds some light on the topic, and the terms, as they are thrown around quite a bit without definition. One thing is certain though. The Nazis did not nationalize any industries except those owned by Jews, and these were soon passed, even given, to favored capitalists in the fatherland. The extent to which a Fascist state is involved in the economy is that it will typically break unions and/or supply slave labor for factory owners. In exchange, it expects to receive the manufactured goods that the state requires, and it expects to receive them timely.
People on the Left share these traits: belief in some world order or future world order... anti-capitalist, anti-wealth (unless it belongs to the rulers directly), obsessed with egalitarianism, moral equivalency, feminism, environmentalism
Nazis were big-time Earth-worshippers and pagans
industrial policy, command economy, government control, anti-private property,... supports welfare, poor people's self interests, tolerant of diversity/foreign beliefs
LOL! Leftists don't tolerate MY beliefs!
The contradiction in your post is clear. I recommend any work on the history of Hitler's regime, for example William Shirer.
After the failed Easter Rebellion in Ireland in 1916, Lenin took the idea even further, realizing that nationalism, which fools like this auto-newbie here reflexively label "right wing", can be used as a tool for inspiring the passions to move the mass to revolution, and was not contradictory to the overall agenda of Social Democracy if national equality was reached.
The mistake many people make is to think of Marxism as a staid, unchanging theory. It has continued to develop, long since the death of Marx and Engels. There are various flavors and versions of it.
And it tends to hide. After all, everyone knows communists are atheists. Except now they are realizing that radical Islam can be quite useful...
Far from being silly and unecessary as Gimlet suggests, this is a very important point. This points out that the true danger to freedom and liberty comes, not from the right, but from the left. The blood of millions is all over their leftist hands, and they would very much like for all of us to forget that this is so.
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