Socialism = NAZI (Hitler was a socialist)

THE OMINOUS PARALLELS ^ | Leonard Peikoff

[stryker]

I could not disagree more. Read Burke, then come back and talk sense. Who reveres the traditional institutions of America more--the GOP or the left? Whichever does is closer to the Nazi party, however marginally. Who desires to change the traditional institutions of America in the name of combatting racism and promoting pluralism, creating a classless society? Whoever does is closer to the socialists. You've got to do the study time if you want to be able to write on this stuff with any accuracy. You are dealing in a social science where certain terms have very specific meanings to the people within that discipline. Again, I challenge you to go to the nearest university and find a single professor of political philosophy or science that will agree with you.

[connectthedots]

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has read Bastiat's "The Law", F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom or Milt and Rose Freidman's Free to Choose. Nevertheless, it appears to be an excellent book worth an investment.

[tabsternager]

Precisely -- he was all in favor of the capitalist businessmen that his government could control for the Fatherland. The rest of the capitalists he had shot or worked to death in labor camps.

"The worker in a capitalist state -- and that is his deepest misfortune -- is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker.
We call ourselves a workers' party because we want to free labor from the chains of capitalism and Marxism." (Joseph Goebbels)

[Yardstick]

Tribune7 wrote:

The Nazis had far, far more in common with our Democratic Party than it did with right-wing faction of the GOP.

You replied:

Who reveres the traditional institutions of America more--the GOP or the left? Whichever does is closer to the Nazi party, however marginally. Who desires to change the traditional institutions of America in the name of combatting racism and promoting pluralism, creating a classless society? Whoever does is closer to the socialists.

But tribune7 wasn't comparing the Democrats to the GOP, he was comparing the Democrats to the right-wing faction of the GOP. If you define the right-wing faction as the individualist, Constitutionalist, cultural traditionalist faction of the GOP, then his point stands, or at least cannot be dismissed without some further arguments.

Consider this example...

Person A is a collectivist and a cultural traditionalist

Person B is a collectivist and a cultural progressive

Person C is an individualist and a cultural traditionalist

Now, who is more similar?

Over at DU and in the political science departments of most universities, they'll say person A and C are more similar because A and C have cultural traditionalism in common.

But lots of Freepers and guys like Peikoff and Hayek would say person A and B are most similar because A and B have collectivism in common.

It all boils down to which variable you choose to look at. To me, this is the key to grokking this subject and the reason why it's easy for people to talk past each other when they're arguing about it.

I think the collectivist variable is the more important, and the one that should be used to determine "similarity", since it tends to determine the status of the other variable in the society at large. If cultural traditionalist collectivists have control, the society will be collectivist and will tend to be preserve cultural traditions. If progressive collectivists have control, the society will be collectivist and tend towards classlessness and egalitarianism and all that. Both types of collectivists will use the power of the government to shape the society according to their idealology.

However, if individualists have control (that almost sounds like an contradiction), the choice of cultural traditionalism or progressivism will not be decided through government coercion but through persuasion, and people (or counties, or states, or whatever entity the decision is devolved down to) can decide for themselves how they'll redistribute their wealth and how they'll relate to people of other races and so forth.

In this case, the one variable does not guarantee the status of the other for the society at large. Nobody's arm will be twisted so that some societal goal is met. That is what sets the individualist right-wingers worlds apart from the Democrats and Nazis, who have collectivism, with its attendant arm twisting, in common (though obviously to differing degrees).

[Tribune7]

Who reveres the traditional institutions of America more--the GOP or the left?

The GOP.

Again, I challenge you to go to the nearest university and find a single professor of political philosophy or science that will agree with you.

I'll just let that statement hang there.

[Tribune7]

But tribune7 wasn't comparing the Democrats to the GOP, he was comparing the Democrats to the right-wing faction of the GOP. If you define the right-wing faction as the individualist, Constitutionalist, cultural traditionalist faction of the GOP, then his point stands, or at least cannot be dismissed without some further arguments.

Exactly right. Rick Santorum, Dick Armey, Tom Delay and Ron Paul would be among the first inmates of the Concentration Camps, if they weren't killed outright. Or the Gulags, for that matter..

[Tribune7]

Teddy Kennedy, Dick Gephardt and Slick would happily be offered, and accept, jobs with the new overseers.

[whattajoke]

Just wondering, as I am admittedly ignorant here... where does Enron fit in the political scheme of things?

[Grampa Dave]

Davis hired two political mud slingers from the Goron campaign to spin and protect him a year ago January when the power shortage started to dim his reelection chances.

Their first focus was on evil Texas Power Companies, evil GW, Evil Cheney. These became Mantras for Davis and all Rat politicians here in Kali during our blackout days.

When Enron collapsed, it became a perfect target to blame the problems of high electrical costs on.

So our joke out here is blame everything that ever happens to California due to Gray Davis on Enron, GW, Cheney and the evil Texas power companies. It is like the demonization of Nixon, Newt and anyone else in the past. Just show their picture, mention their name and then blame them for any problem. Their voting cult members feed on this.

[x]

Socialism is a stage on the way to the abolition of the state--no government, period. That is the far left.

I believe Marx said as much. The question is how seriously you want to take him or can take him. The idea of the "withering away of the state" looks like a myth, religion or fantasy.

More moderate socialists pretty clearly thought that for the time being there would be more government and more regulation and control of the economy. Perfect freedom might be the eventual goal, but how it would be achieved was unclear. It's likely that the Fabians and Social Democrats didn't think it could be achieved in their lifetime. But understand too, that "freedom" in their lexicon had different meanings than it did in conservative or libertarian ones.

Revolutionary Communists often did have timetables for the arrival of pure communism. But it never seemed to arrive. There was always some enemy, some saboteurs or spies or subversives to be rounded up in order to realize the dream. I think they deluded themselves. Their concepts were vague and elastic enough that even the worst of tyrannies might proclaim that the stateless, utopian future was just around the corner.

What I'm headed to is the idea that socialism was a more complex idea than nationalization of industry in the ostensible pursuit of utopian freedom. Look to pre-Marxian socialists and you'll find their communes organizing people's lives in great detail, for their own good. Marx tied socialism more closely to the philosophical and religious strivings of his own day for freedom and redemption from alienation, but it's not clear that this theoretical emphasis really affected the practiced of democratic socialism or revolutionary socialist dictatorship.

One could make a case that Nazism did have things in common with socialism. Certainly the tiny pre-Hitler party gave greater support to nationalizations and expropriations. The line about the Nazi party in power was that rather than nationalize industry, they nationalized the people. Of course, Hitler kept his hands off the incomes and investments of the industrialists, but there does seem to be some statist overlap or continuity between the Nazis and socialists. Not to say that they were or were only and essentially socialists, but they were both part of a more statist early 20th century atmosphere.

The political atmosphere a century ago was far more statist than what we see today. The Webbs, early fabian socialists divided the political world into "A's" and "B's" -- anarchists and bureaucrats -- and they, like many others at the time were emphatically on the side of the "B's."

Were the Nazi's rivals and competitors, the Bolshevik Communists, "true socialists?" Certainly Democratic Socialists would dispute this.

Was racism the distinguishing factor between left and right? Read George Watson on socialist thought of a century ago. It's always the belief of present-day progressives that their ideological ancestors shared their views on sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class and the rest, but it's not always the case.

Was Nazism devoted to state worship? Emphatically so. And yet, in the world the Nazis would have created, the actual, historical German state and its provinces would have been subsumed or submerged or dissolved in a much greater empire. Their devotion to power and to the New Order was paramount and unquestioned, but the actual state as it had been known would "wither away" in the new racial order.

For the record, I think Peikoff is wrong. He oversimplifies too much, and ignores things like imperialism and the the wars of the era that strengthened a non-socialist, rightist statism. But those who would deny links between socialism or national socialism are also oversimplifying. The horrors of the 20th Century have connections to long standing Western ideologies. Arguing that one side is completely innocent and all the guilt on the other side may please ideologues of one stripe or another, but it makes people ignore some of the lessons that we can learn from the tragedies of the past.

In the atmosphere that existed in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, even decent people with impeccable ideological origins ended up embracing one form or another of barbarism. The struggles of the age led people to one extreme as a means of defeating another. "Extremes" need not be polar opposites, though there's something in the human mind that leads us to conceive of them in that way when the opposition of each to the other is so strong

[freeforall]

political fantasy bttt.

[x]

Gramsci was a passionate opponent of fascism. Mussolini sent Gramsci to prison and he died under armed guard. Many of his writings weren't published until long after his death.

What you are discribing is the experience of many socialists in the years surrounding World War I. Mussolini himself, a socialist before the war, went through such an evolution. Gramsci and his other colleagues reviled him for putting nationalism above class-consciousness. Mussolini didn't need Gramsci to tell him what to do. Gramsci and others were commenting on what Mussolini was already doing and there was a rich Italian tradition of Machiavellianism for Mussolini to draw on.

Gramsci and Mussolini came out of a similar enviroment: early 20th century socialists and Marxists read Nietzsche, Bergson, Sorel, and other "new thinkers" and acquired, or at least encountered and explored, an interest in myth, the will and the irrational. Machiavelli also was widely read, analyzed and applied by intellectuals across the political spectrum. The national passions stirred by the war further influenced the thinking of the day. The conclusions drawn varied widely, though. Hitler was influenced by this mix, but at second hand. Later those who wrote about ideologies ignored the common soil of the era in which a variety of ideologies took seed.

[Tribune7]

And his solution was to ban all unions except the Nazi party's union, outlaw strikes, jail labor leaders and anyone who attempted to organize, etc. Sounds like a businessman's wet dream in America.

Stalin tolerated labor dissent? Brezhnev welcomed Solidarity? Hitler had much more in common with Stalin et al than he did with American free marketers.

[Pagey]

Socialism = NAZI (Hitler was a socialist)

An "Anti-Hillary Rodham Clinton HildeBeast" BUMP

[My Identity]

To Stryker:
The Nazis were not socialists despite their name. I have rebutted this nonsense so many times on FR I am sick of it.

Perhaps you need to take a step back to see why your argument continually fails.

Only someone without any knowledge of political philosophy could make such a claim.

So swathes of objective analysis must fall to your brilliance? Peikoff, von Mises, Hayek? Even Hitler his bad-self spent much time explaining his socialism.

The Nazis lay on the far right of the traditional political spectrum...

Your using a popular (mis)conception of their political position to justify your argument. Nothing inherently wrong there. But others here are merely arguing for the chance to change that popular (mis)conception.

Despite their National Socialist rubric, they failed to nationalize a single major industry, but rather nationalized the labor force itself, which socialists would hardly do.

I think your argument fails in at least two ways. What 'Socialists would do' could mean one of two things: either they adhere to the "true" socialist model or they adhere to the practical socialist model. "True" socialists argue in the theoretical abstract, because they claim "that socialism has never been tried". That is, all the socialistic experiments (and failures) to date, all the death and destruction wrought in the name of socialism, are meaningless, because the practitioners were faulty (i.e., human). I don't think most people are willing to give the socialists a bye on this. To claim that the Nazis weren't "true" socialists is a meaningless argument, because no regime to date has been "true".

In practical terms, socialism has meant government control, or totalitarianism, in the name of the Collective. Now the form of the Collective, be it State, Race, Community, Society, the Proletariat, or what have you, is, I submit, a minor point, because, in the end, it is simply a rationalization for obtaining control.

On the contrary, socialism lay at the far left of the traditional spectrum, where the traditional institutions of the dominant culture are intentionally weakened in an effort to strike against institutionalized racism and sexism and the major industries are nationalized while the workers are free to unionize and direct the operation of the nationalized industries. This is what we find happening in the United States slowly, but with a powerful counter movement toward fascism.

Statements like this come right out of the leftist handbook. They are just so much nonsense. Virtually every major concept presented therein is fraught with definitional and conceptual problems. And because you present it uncritically, one is left to wonder as to your true motives.

Both directions mean the loss of freedom.

It is, as many have pointed out, the same direction, towards totalitarianism.

Who reveres the traditional institutions of America more--the GOP or the left? Whichever does is closer to the Nazi party, however marginally. Who desires to change the traditional institutions of America in the name of combatting racism and promoting pluralism, creating a classless society? Whoever does is closer to the socialists. You've got to do the study time if you want to be able to write on this stuff with any accuracy. You are dealing in a social science where certain terms have very specific meanings to the people within that discipline. Again, I challenge you to go to the nearest university and find a single professor of political philosophy or science that will agree with you.

Um, whoever is a Constitutionalist is closer to a Nazi?? This is nonsense.

By whose definition do you argue? Even Marxists and Leninist theory disagree as to your assertions. And by simple extension of your definitions, since no one has ever implemented socialism, then the Russian, Chinese, German, Cambodian, etc. experiments weren't socialism. And the resulting 100 million dead can't be laid at their door steps. And if wasn't socialism, it must have been totalitarianism and therefore a crime of the right? More nonsense!

jodorowsky wrote: Coca Cola appeals to the desire to transform society into a timeless stasis where there is "Always Coca-Cola", while Pepsi is the choice of the new generation who align themselves with the joy of cola in and of itself.

While you professed ignorance as to jodorowsky's point, it remains. Just because 2 entities claim they are wholly different and their proponents claim they are wholly different, does NOT, in fact, make them wholly different.

The ultimate aim of socialism is the abolition of the state by reaching the stage of communism, when the state withers away to a mere administrative body, there being so much surplus production and so little class distinction that no organized force is necessary and therefore no state in the classical sense.

Yes and No. While Marxist and Leninist theory hold generally the same end point, it is widely recognized that they are describing communism. Think of it another way: Socialism (control) is the means to the end (communism).

Fascism on the other hand, raises the state, as the epitome of the character of its' people to the level of a God, to be worshipped, as was Hitler in his role as the Fuhrer, or leader. The state is associated with various religious symbols that take on mystical proportions such as the swastika and the devil’s head of the SS. Class distinctions are not only maintained, but are emphasized to the point of open classism and racism.

No difference so far with the soviet or maoist models...;-)

You can argue all you want, but walk into any university in the United States and ask any professor of political philosophy whether German national socialism was in any way socialism and leftist and you will hear the same answer I am giving you.

Circular logic, my dear boy. Ask any communist if the Nazis were communist? Always good for a laugh, but meaningless.

You quote to me a critic of socialism to prove that the Nazi's were socialists! What kind of proof is this!

Pretty good proof, actually, if it adheres to the Objectivist reality that you claim to believe. But if critics of socialism won't cut it for you, then the Nazis themselves must be good proof, because they claim they are socialists and use much ink to explain how and why. In the current environment, for socialists (or by your apparent definition, communists) to deny Nazism is clearly no proof that the Nazis weren't socialists.

You claim I am giving you superficial differences. Well, let me make it clear then. Socialism is a stage on the way to the abolition of the state--no government, period. That is the far left. Nazism is the organization of the state into a form that is to be worshipped for the purpose of raising one race of people above all others--that is the far right. On one hand there is no government, on the other the government assumes the role of God. That is the theoretical difference.

You're close. Socialism is the means to achieve communism (the end of the state). Communism is far left. Socialists often think they are not quite so far left. But because socialism leads relentlessly to totalitarianism, it is far left in reality. And Nazism, because it leads to the same end state and uses virtually the same means as the socialists to achieve it, is logically, far left as well.

Practically, the Nazi's did not nationalize a single industry.

Read the article:

Under communism, there is collective ownership of property DEJURE. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership DE FACTO.

It is a difference without meaning in this context.