Socialism = NAZI (Hitler was a socialist)

A Veritas News Service Book Review - "A magnificent work... it should be required reading for all Americans. This book reveals socialisms nasty little secret." William Cooper

The Nazis were not a tribe of prehistoric savages. Their crimes were the official, legal acts and policies of modern Germany -- an educated, industrialized, CIVILIZED Western European nation, a nation renowned throughout the world for the luster of its intellectual and cultural achievements. By reason of its long line of famous artists and thinkers, Germany has been called "the land of poets and philosophers."

But its education offered the country no protection against the Sergeant Molls in its ranks. The German university students were among the earliest groups to back Hitler. The intellectuals were among his regime's most ardent supporters. Professors with distinguished academic credentials, eager to pronounce their benediction on the Fuhrer's cause, put their scholarship to work full time; they turned out a library of admiring volumes, adorned with obscure allusions and learned references.

The Nazis did not gain power against the country's wishes. In this respect there was no gulf between the intellectuals and the people. The Nazi party was elected to office by the freely cast ballots of millions of German voters, including men on every social, economic, and educational level. In the national election of July 1932, the Nazis obtained 37% of the vote and a plurality of seats in the Reichstag. On January 30, 1933, in full accordance with the country's legal and constitutional principles, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Five weeks later, in the last (and semi-free) election of the pre-totalitarian period, the Nazis obtained 17 million votes, 44% of the total.

The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. "Mein Kampf" alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.

In 1933, when Hitler did establish the system he had promised, he did not find it necessary to forbid foreign travel. Until World War II, those Germans who wished to flee the country could do so. The overwhelming majority did not. They were satisfied to remain.

The system which Hitler established -- the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure -- the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz -- was: the "total state". The term, from which the adjective "totalitarian" derives, was coined by Hitler's mentor, Mussolini.

The state must have absolute power over every man and over every sphere of human activity, the Nazis declared. "The authority of the Fuhrer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited," said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933.

"The concept of personal liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich," said Huber to a country which listened, and nodded. "There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state... The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual."

If the term "statism" designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism -- the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies -- which has characterized most of human history.

In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual. Although previous dictators (and many today; e.g., in Latin America) often preached the unlimited power of the state, they were on the whole unable to enforce such power. As a rule, citizens of such countries had a kind of partial "freedom", not a freedom-on-principle, but at least a freedom-by-default.

Even the latter was effectively absent in Nazi Germany. The efficiency of the government in dominating its subjects, the all-encompassing character of its coercion, the complete mass regimentation on a scale involving millions of men -- and, one might add, the enormity of the slaughter, the planned, systematic mass slaughter, in peacetime, initiated by a government against its own citizens -- these are the insignia of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Nazi AND communist), which are without parallel in recorded history. In the totalitarian regimes, as the Germans found out after only a few months of Hitler's rule, every detail of life is prescribed, or proscribed. There is no longer any distinction between private matters and public matters. "There are to be no more private Germans," said Friedrich Sieburg, a Nazi writer; "each is to attain significance only by his service to the state, and to find complete self-fulfillment in his service." "The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

In place of the despised "private individuals," the Germans heard daily or hourly about a different kind of entity, a supreme entity, whose will, it was said, is what determines the course and actions of the state: the nation, the whole, the GROUP. Over and over, the Germans heard the idea that underlies the advocacy of omnipotent government, the idea that totalitarians of every kind stress as the justification of their total states: COLLECTIVISM.

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective -- society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. -- is THE UNIT OF REALITY AND THE STANDARD OF VALUE. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it -- or its representative, the state -- deems this desirable.

...the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, on behalf of society... For Liberalism (i.e., individualism), the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality. For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.

"The higher interests involved in the life of the whole," said Hitler in a 1933 speech, "must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual." Men, echoed the Nazis, have to "realize that the State is more important than the individual, that individuals must be willing and ready to sacrifice themselves for Nation and Fuhrer." The people, said the Nazis, "form a true organism," a "living unity", whose cells are individual persons. In reality, therefore -- appearances to the contrary notwithstanding -- there is no such thing as an "isolated individual" or an autonomous man.

Just as the individual is to be regarded merely as a fragment of the group, the Nazis said, so his possessions are to be regarded as a fragment of the group's wealth.

"Private property" as conceived under the liberalistic economy order was a reversal of the true concept of property [wrote Huber]. This "private property" represented the right of the individual to manage and to speculate with inherited or acquired property as he pleased, without regard for the general interests... German socialism had to overcome this "private", that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of CONTROL. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

If "ownership" means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed, a content-less deed, which conferred no rights on its holder. Under communism, there is collective ownership of property DEJURE. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership DE FACTO.

During the Hitler years -- in order to finance the party's programs, including the war expenditures -- every social group in Germany was mercilessly exploited and drained. White-collar salaries and the earnings of small businessmen were deliberately held down by government controls, freezes, taxes. Big business was bled by taxes and "special contributions" of every kind, and strangled by the bureaucracy. At the same time the income of the farmers was held down, and there was a desperate flight to the cities -- where the middle class, especially the small tradesmen, were soon in desperate straits, and where the workers were forced to labor at low wages for increasingly longer hours (up to 60 or more per week).

But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, SOCIALISM. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. "Socialism" for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism -- in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.

"To be a socialist", says Goebbels, "is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."

By this definition, the Nazis practiced what they preached. They practiced it at home and then abroad. No one can claim that they did not sacrifice enough individuals.

Excerpted from Chapter 1 of THE OMINOUS PARALLELS, by Leonard Peikoff... most probably the most important book written in modern times. Buy it... read it... study it.

Fascists are and will forever be the absolute opposite of socialists and communists

Stryker, I don't think you have to be particularly well-read to see that this statement is false.

Fascists and socialists are and will forever be sworn enemies; but they are not and have never been absolute opposites.

Fascism and communism are both anti-liberal, anti-individual, anti-freedom. They are both scavengers picking at the carcass of faltering or failed capitalism, and in this they have a profound commonality.

The only way you can declare them to be "absolute opposites" is to absolutely discard that which they absolutely have in common, which is their disdain for the sovereignty of the individual.

By the way, why is the European Neo-Nazi movement supported by radical elements of the European Right? If you read any accounts of recent street battles, then you will see that the neo-Nazis are always pitted against leftist radicals like anarchists, communists, and enviromentalists. Why?

It was like that in Hitler's time, with the Storm Troopers fighting with the Reds back in the 1920's. Middle-class people were so sick of the Reds raising hell that they welcomed anybody who would beat them up and make them go away (until they realized that the newcomers were just as bad)

You also assume that neo-Nazis are on the Right, rather than just being Leftists of the different color. Is there a difference between the Bloods and the Crips?

If there was a middle-class neighborhood that was getting trouble from Crips moving in, they might welcome a Hells Angels chapter. For a while.

The question of who controls the means of production is paramount because he who controls the means of production has the power to control who governs the state. This is why the Brown Shirts were used first as union busting thugs, and then as socialist and communist assassins. There was method to the madness of the Third Reich. The ruling class of Germany sought to regain its' status as a colonial power and to shirk off the restraints of the Versailles accords. To do this, organized labor, and the actual socialists and communists had to be removed from the scene. Once Hitler gained power, legally I might add, and with the financial backing of the German elite,(which you should know if you read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and understood it), those owners retained their ownership and merely retooled for war production as did the United States. Additionally, they were provided slave labor for which they paid the Nazi party a pittance, and retained their profits so long as they remained loyal to the state. Any owner in the United States that turned disloyal would have lost his ownership, so that cannot be justification for claiming that the Nazi's mere power gave them control over the economy. In the end, only when the war was clearly lost, did Germany's upper class turn against their Fuhrer and both plot to produce useless weapons and to assassinate the demented Austrian.

As to your logic, I don't find any. You seem to be stuck reasoning that because two different types of nation states are both powerful, they must be the same. You ignore that they engage in entirely different nation building and social engineering--one nationalizing all land and factories and inculcating into its' citizens the world view that all are equal and that nation states and governments will ultimately dissolve, and the other raising a race and its' historic symbols and institutions to worship of the eternal state while inculcating its' citizens with the idea that they are superior to all other races, and nationalizing only actual people as slaves to serve the master race.

Others in this thread have basically agreed at this point and have just worked out fine details, but you are a stubborn one Tribune. Why do you suppose Hitler put 90% of his armies on the Eastern Front and only 10% on the Western? Could it have been that the ruling class of Germany thought that Britain and the United States would ultimately see the wisdom of joining Germany in fighting communism, all three countries at that time practicing some brand of fascism, the latter two admittedly very mild.

The question of who controls the means of production is paramount because he who controls the means of production has the power to control who governs the state.

And who controlled the means of production? The Nazis.

To do this, organized labor, and the actual socialists and communists had to be removed from the scene.

Leave labels aside for a moment. Rephrase it as "competitors to the party had to be removed from the scene." It's no different than the Soviets.

Once Hitler gained power, legally I might add, and with the financial backing of the German elite,(which you should know if you read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and understood it), those owners retained their ownership

How does that not make the Nazis socialist? What's the difference between co-opting a business owner to do your bidding or replacing him with a "worker's council?" It's the same result. The former's more practical and effective. Your positions seems to be that it would be a violation of socialist principals. I view it as adaptation. The ruling party can still be called a socialist.

And Hitler certainly did nationalize (using the most basic definition of the word) several industries.

Any owner in the United States that turned disloyal would have lost his ownership, .

Actually, what would have and did happen -- I'm assuming by disloyal you simply mean ignore government directives -- would be that the government would, temporarily, take over the facilities. No ownership would be lost. No concentration camp sentence would be levied.

As to your logic, I don't find any.

Well, I'm not surprised.

You seem to be stuck reasoning that because two different types of nation states are both powerful, they must be the same.

Of course not. The United States is powerful. We're neither like Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union.

You ignore that they engage in entirely different nation building and social engineering--one nationalizing all land and factories and inculcating into its' citizens the world view that all are equal and that nation states and governments will ultimately dissolve,

Are you really a conservative? Anyway, it's occasionally interesting to consider the differences but far more useful to note the similarities -- namely that the ideologies of both nations held that the rights of the state/collective/party outweighed the rights of the individual -- including the right to his property.

Others in this thread have basically agreed at this point and have just worked out fine details, but you are a stubborn one Tribune.

I think most of the posters are agreeing with me. :-)

Why do you suppose Hitler put 90% of his armies on the Eastern Front and only 10% on the Western?

Because that's were 90 percent of the fighting was going on. The Russian front lasted from 1940 to 1945. The Western Front basically lasted for 11 months starting in June 1944.

Could it have been that the ruling class of Germany thought that Britain and the United States would ultimately see the wisdom of joining Germany in fighting communism, all three countries at that time practicing some brand of fascism, the latter two admittedly very mild.

The US, facist? You are not only not a conservative (or classic liberal if you will), you are getting silly. Ponder this -- why was Hitler's first ally the Soviet Union?

You really have no idea what you are talking about. You are living in your own little world with made up definitions and paradigms. Your theories would be laughed out of any higher educational system in this country. I will not engage in debate with someone that is purposely stubborn and ignorant. Hitler did not nationalize industry. Private industry retooled for his war, was in favor of it, and made vast profits off of the slave labor he provided and have publicly admitted this. Stalin allied with Hitler to gain the time to industrialize sufficiently to oppose him. Soviet authors warning of the Nazi movement and the fact it would primarily attack the East were in circulation as early as the twenties, long before most Westerners had ever heard of Hitler. But you would not know of such things, as you seem to be very narrowly read. Personal insults seem to be your ammunition, rather than logic, history, or facts. With you, this debate is ended.

Streetfighting leads you astray. The opposite of one gang isn't another gang. Rather it's the rule of law, or maybe the rule of love. In any event, two groups can hate and struggle against each other, and yet still not be "opposites" because of all the things they share.

But the idea of opposites is an interesting one. When are things opposite in nature, and when do our minds and language make them so?

The species, genus idea is an interesting one. It's also more a question of relationships and genealogies, rather than identities.

A word like "socialism" has many different definitions. In early 20th century Europe, it was a positive term. Even conservatives appealed to the "true" socialist idea. The debate here is as much about semantics as anything else.

You are a "splitter," who wants to use the word in a narrow sense. Others are "lumpers" who employ it in a more general sense. It's an argument that can't be won because it's about definitions -- axioms, rather than proofs or theorums or conjectures.

When someone says that the Incas or the ancient Egyptians were socialists, I balk. There ought to be a better word to convey similarities between the socialists of the last two centuries and ancient tyrannies.

But when someone argues that socialists are and must be democratic or egalitarian or anti-racist, I likewise disagree. This isn't based on an investigation of what self-identified socialists have actually said historically, but on present-day definitions. There have been racist and inegalitarian socialists.

In any event, Swedish Social Democrats left the control of the means of production in the hands of capitalist elites, yet they are reckoned as being on the left.

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