A Little Secret About the Nazis (They were left-wing socialists like the modern left of today)

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.

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 true 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 predominantly left-wing media and 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 the modern left has yet to be universally recognized and condemned.

The 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.

One thing to keep in mind is that Marxism has continued to evolve and mutate, and now has many different flavors (Stalinism, et al). For example, after the failed Easter Rebellion in Ireland, Lenin did a wholesale rethinking of the Marxist objections to nationalism, and decided that nationalism was not necessarily contradictory to the workings of Marxism, but rather could be used as an integral part in motivating the mass to join the revolution.

The relation between Fascism (especially Naziism) and Communism is very interesting indeed, and your postings on it are quite illuminating.

My own readings on Communism and its relation to Naziism are pretty much limited to Thomas Sowell's 'eighties-era Marxism and F.A. von Hayek's WWII classic, The Road to Serfdom. I'm afraid I have very little patience for the original texts of Hitler and Marx--but I confidently hope that the WWW hyperlink technology will be employed to illustrate the weaknesses and especially the misrepresentations in the various arguments (such as those attributed, I make no doubt accurately, to Marx). TLBSHOW's proposed book will also be a valuable contribution, I would hope.

In fact, I have come to the belief that socialism crucially depends on superficiality--on obscuring intellectually important connections--for any appearance of validity that its adherents are able to give it. Talk radio--"the long form," as Rush Limbaugh styles it--and the WWW and book publishing all contrast with journalism primarily in that the latter is stylized and has short deadlines--is specificly slanted towards the short-attentio-span public. And broadcast--especially TV--journalism is worse even than the newspaper.

Journalism tends, for commercial reasons, to negativity as well as sperficial negativity, and "superficial negativity" comes pretty close to "cynicism". It is in fact highly anticonservative in tone for those reasons--journalism is not so much the first draft of history as it is the first draft of the Democratic Party Platform.

Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate

But wouldn't it also be wonderful if the "Hitler him bad" channel--a.k.a. the History Channel--would treat Stalinism with remotely similar thoroughness? Or even turn The Road to Serfdom into a miniseries?

The "Jewish question"--and many authors of the era addressed the so-called "Jewish question"--was how would the newly founded nation states of Europe integrate the Jews into political life?

This is a ludicrously anodyne misreading of Marx's essay (assuming for a second that you have actually read the essay). The essay is widely available: I commend it to anyone interested in the subject. And, no, Karl Marx did not advocate the liquidation of the Jews, any more than he advocated the liquidation of the Kulaks. But the Jews represented the same thing for him as they did for Richard Wagner or Joseph Goebbels: the wickedness of egoism and trade, of social relations based on contract and economic calculation. No, Karl Marx is not the ancestor of Nazi anti-Semitism -- Marx merely endorsed the traditional view of Jews as "money-grubbers," and the "problem" of Jewry and Jewish money-idolatry is merely a side-issue in his writings, a problem supposedly to be resolved by the historically-determined destruction of the bourgeois liberalistic order and the institution of a utopian socialist society.

I have had some difficulty following your responses on this thread. You seem to trying to defend Marx from charges of anti-semitism, yet his works are shot full of it. Marx's father was a Lutheran convert from Judaism. It would appear that Marx's whole hatred of the bourgeoisie was a projection onto the larger society of what he saw as specific jewish characteristics. There seems to be a psychological dimension to Marx's hate, perhaps coming from his feelings toward his father. Indeed, it has been said that the psychological basis of leftist ideology lies in a hatred of the father.

After the horrific, blood soaked 20th century, in which more people were murdered by their governments in deliberate pursuit of Marxist ideology than were killed in all the wars, I would not expect any reasonable person to be trying to defend this man whose actions in his personal life (see the Paul Johnson capsule biography in "Intellectuals") embodied the same malevolence as his philosophy.

***You aren't related to Catch, are you?***

Funny you should ask. At the last intergalactic "22" club meeting, Paramount_22 complained that the owl image subliminals were taking-up too much valuable space in the medias.
"These are bumping us out of time slots that could better serve 22-conditioning.", She said.

"Screw the humans anyway.", Catch_22 chuckled. "They're going to war no matter how hard they try not to. In fact, the harder they try to avoid it the more apparent it becomes."

Well, Mars is with the New Galactic Order and nobody's sweetheart but we like Earthlings, such as they are. If Catch wasn't my 6th cousin I'd have kicked his lack of compassion.

...but he was right.

I disagree doctor.

True, he did keep his theory a "moving target." But that was not to accommodate emprirical test or data, but to avoid them.

As to his integrity, read "Marx: The Red Prussian" based in large part on his correspondence with F. Engels.

He apparently was neither a nice nor an ethical man.

In fact, according to the author, Leopold Schwartzschild (sp?), his nickname in his graduate student days was "the calf biter"!!!!

My reading of "On the Jewish Question" also sees it as antisemitic (self-hating?) and positing an identity between "Judaism" and "Capitalism."

Much as Weber later linked "Protestantism" (The Protestant Ethic)with (the Spirit of)"Capitalism."

To be fair, Marx thought eliiminating ALL religions (including Judaism) would strike a crippling blow to capitalist exploitation, Marx did not call for just the elimination of Judaism.

Actually I think you have it reversed. The elimination of Capitalism (the latest and greatest form of exploitation), would eliminate the cause and basis of all religion.

Marx was a materialist; religion was epiphenominal.

It was a secondary consequence of exploitation, not its root or cause.

... and positing an identity between "Judaism" and "Capitalism" ...
Of all your claims this is the most laughable. The Jews of Marx's era were not capitalists; they were ghetto-dwellers, forced to live in the margins. Some became bankers-money-lenders-usurers, like the Rothschilds, but this was also an artifact of their exclusion from civil and economic life, as Jews were excluded from trades and schools.

The historical illiteracy of our era strikes again.

So, if Nazism is leftist, and Facism is a communist invention, what form of government lies to the extreme right?

In Europe the old monarchical system counted as the right. A restorationist or legitimist Bourbon or Orleanist would probably count as an "extreme rightist," at least before Nazis and fascism complicated things.

The whole left-right schema has a lot of problems.

First of all, those monarchies were not so conservative in the days when they were accumulating power, and absolutism was not a form of conservatism.

Secondly, the Nazis-right, Communists-left dichotomy is dubious. It grew out of the street fighting of the Twenties and Thirties. The Nazis were not classic rightists, but neither were they model socialists. Their ideology, like Mussolini's fascism, was a mixture of right-wing and left-wing elements, that was tagged rightist because of the street combat, not because of a detailed analysis of their program. Given that Strasser and other more socialist Nazis were purged, though, simply labeling the NDSAP left-wing or socialist would also be an oversimplification.

Perhaps it's time more than anything that matters: socialist, nationalist and social darwinist ideas were far stronger from, say 1870 to 1980, than they were before or since. Ideas that we now unhesitatingly identify as right or left like eugenics or nationalization were stronger at various points on the political spectrum then, than they were at almost any point since, save on the very fringes of political debate.

But then, the whole one-dimensional left-right scheme is itself an over simplification. Political scientists have tried to give it more substance and explanatory power by making it a two or three dimensional model. Libertarians also like the two dimensional grid. One sci-fi writer labels his axes: "Attitude toward the State," and "Attitude toward planned social progress".

Hitler learned about the use of concentration camps from the Soviets during the period of friendship 1938 - 1940.

Not true.

The sad fact is, that Hitler learned about concentration camps from American history. He often used the examples of indian reservations, and america's genocide policy against the american indians, when explaining to his generals what he wanted to do with the jews. Disarming the indians, taking their land and possessions, means of livelihood, giving them no legal rights, rounding them up, putting them on reservations, starving them, killing them, etc.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.