[Tribune7]

Try reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," and then, if you can be objective, come back to me and honestly tell me if you think the Nazi's nationalized the means of production.

If you want to say Germany under the Nazis had de facto rather than de jure socialism, that's fine, but the Nazis were socialists. You've read my reasoning. The Social Democratic Labor Party has ruled Sweden for most of the last century. They never nationalized the means of production. The SDLP is considered a socialist party.

You're insisting on a very narrow definition of "nationalized," anyway. Hitler's Germany was a police state. There was no habeas corpus. There was no appeal to an arrest by the Gestapo. You don't think this atmosphere of terror influenced business decision making? Saying the Nazis didn't "nationalize" the means of production is sort of like saying the mob didn't control the Dune's Casino because an attorney's name was on the deed.

I've read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by the way.

[stryker]

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.