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

russp ^ | 1/2002 | Richard Poe

[TLBSHOW]

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 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.

--1/02

[The Right Stuff]

Hey! Congrats on the book deal! Keep us posted on your progress.

[Slyfox]

Yeah-but, did Jimmy Buffet score within the top six, along with Hitler,
in a poll of the most evil people who lived in the last 1,000 years?

[UCANSEE2]

Hey, best of luck Todd, with your new endeavors ! ! ! !

[IRtorqued]

Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries.

and these social programs are being stopped by the republiscams, nope, they picked up where the demoncrats left off.

[xm177e2]

Good fortune too you, TLBSHOW with your new book!

TLB is NOT Richard Poe. LOL...

[My Identity]

BTTT

[Asclepius]

... Hitler put Marx's theory to work in the death camps ...

This is a risible misreading of Marx's essay. Marx was a Jew. He never advocated liquidating the Jews. And Marx never linked Jews to capital because it Marx's era they weren't linked; they were linked to usury, not capitalist commodity production. In Marx's era most of Europe's Jews were poor and confined to ghettos; they lived in the margins. 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? Assimilation would buy the Jews equality, but it might also mean extinction for the Jews as a unique people. Etc., etc.

I am no Marxist. And I have no intention of defending Marx. But we do ourselves no service as conservatives when we get our facts wrong or misrepresent our adversaries.

[kstewskis]

Yeah-but, did Jimmy Buffet score within the top six, along with Hitler, in a poll of the most evil people who lived in the last 1,000 years?

Perhaps not (I never worked for him), but he has used Hitler's suggestions in his book as to how to get the crowd behind him and "energized".

[xm177e2]

Here's the end of Marx's essay "On the Jewish Question"

In its perfected practice, Christian egoism of heavenly bliss is necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is turned into world need, subjectivism into self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion, but, on the contrary, by the human basis of his religion -- practical need, egoism.

Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism -- huckstering and its preconditions -- the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, nd because the conflict between man's individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

(emphasis was in the original)

[xm177e2]

See my post #29.

[Southack]

The whole reason that "left wing" and "right wing" entered into our vocabulary was to differentiate between the various flavors of Socialism (e.g. Communists on one side and Fascists on the other).

After the Fascists were defeated in World War 2, however, the phrase Left Wing remained in our lexicon to describe the Communists. Popular useage of the phrase "right wing" then began to be used by those trying to identify people opposed to Communism (in particular, Joeseph McCarthy), and was intended as an insult. Americans, being a ballsy sort of people, shrugged off the insult and generally began to equate "right wing" with Conservative, being that most Americans then and now were and are Conservative (i.e., not in favor of the great New World Order socialist Revolution favored by both Communists and Fascists).

"They say you want a Revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world" isn't just lyrics in a song, it's also how Conservatives mock the starry-eyed socialist radical elitists. They want a Revolution, at gunpoint, to force the world to redistribute wealth and labor. Conservatives don't.

So now we're "right wing" because we oppose such socialistic folly. So be it. Just don't let anyone confuse our opposition to Socialistic Revolution with being on the same side as National Socialists (i.e. NAZIs). That's just silly, and it's just wrong.

[Dqban22]

While as a high school student at the Jesuit "Colegio de Belen" in Havana, Castro worshiped Hitler and the "Mein Kamp" had a strong influence in his political formation. From Mussolini, Castro, took the mannerisms and carefully studied all the movies about the Duce. Pius XI in his Encyclical letter "Divinis Redemptoris" rightly called socialism in all its forms as "intrinsically evil." You might call it Nazism, Fascism, Communism or Socialism; in essence they all degrade the human being to the condition of a mere slave of the state.

[ValenB4]

I suspect Marx, were he alive today, would cringe at what has been done in his name. Seeing how the more negative aspects of unrestrained capitalism have been checked, and that the middle class is basically productive and happy, I doubt that he would even be a Marxist.

[Asclepius]

... The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism ...

Precisely. Marx was arguing for assimilation, the assimilation of the Jews into civil society. The price of admission, however, was to be their Jewishness. But Marx demanded the same price of everyone. We were all to be relieved of our illusions, those illusions we call religion.

To in any way equate or relate this to the NAZI program is simply ridiculous.

[Ditto]

bump

[rohry]

Ooops, rookie mistake. At least I got someone to laugh!

[xm177e2]

To in any way equate or relate this to the NAZI program is simply ridiculous.

But Marx refers very specifically to "the emancipation of society from Judaism."

To Marx, Jews are not just misguided victims like the Christians, but Judaism is an EVIL, CAPITALIST religion which must be wiped out.

[gcruse]

Nazism was inspired by Italian Fascism, an
invention of hardline Communist Benito
Mussolini.

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

[Asclepius]

... I doubt that he would even be a Marxist ...

I think you're absolutely correct. I think Marx had enough integrity as a philosopher and as a revolutionary to review and even revise his findings in light of new facts. He did it all the time throughout his career.

If only those who claim his name in our own dark era had as much integrity. Or would treat Marx's writings not as dogma, but as hypotheses.

[Asclepius]

To Marx, Jews are not just misguided victims like the Christians, but Judaism is an EVIL, CAPITALIST religion which must be wiped out.

Give me a quote, please.