Nazis were not Leftists

Hitler lasted some what longer than Hillary's failed run for president. Other wise there is not much difference.

 

meanwhile Hitler and Trump both railed against "fake news".

 

There are some mental lightweights here that argue that Nazis were socialists - because the definition in English of NAZI has the word socialist in it - even though one of the earliest purges Hitler did was of communists, and the major struggle of WWII was fascism vs communism.
Hitler reined in the labor unions and met with, and got the backing of the major industrialists, like Krupp, Farber, Thyssen.
Here's an article debunking socialism and Nazis https://www.thoughtco.com/was-adolf-hitler-a-socialist-122136
But to the dim-witted, Nazi = Bad. Socialism = bad, therefore Nazi=socialism, but it doesn't work that way.

 

And you like fake news???????????

 

It is interesting to note that the left, prior to the Spanish Civil War in 1936, both in the US and Europe thought. Mussolini and Hitler were as left leaning as themselves and that includes Stalin. After that war suddenly without and change in policy they became right wingers and them after Soviet Nazi non aggression pact in 1938 they became good Socialists again and remained so until Germany invaded Russian in '41. To note these sea changes are the first evidence that leftist have no objective standards beyond whatever it is their leaders of the moment tell them.

 

Hitler and Trump both hate fake news

 

Quite correct. Unfortunately for some that's all they know and try to equate Nazism with the left hoping to show that leftism is bad.

 

An assertion. An interesting assertion but an assertion. The left isn't a bloc as you apparently think it is. True Mussolini started off on the extreme left, which indicates the nature of extremity rather than any left orientation. On Stalin, yes, you're right, it took the British left until the 1950s to work that out, so beholden they were to their ideology despite Orwell's warnings. But the apparent "greatcoats on, greatcoats off", behaviour you assert has little evidence to support it.

 

Nonsense. Most people called Nazis socialists as far back as 1929.

No true Scotsman fallacy, aka a bullshit argument. By this definition, Hillary Clinton is not a leftist. This is the same bullshit argument you hear constantly from the left saying Muslims who blow up civilians are no true Muslims.

And yet Hitler called himself a socialist and declared war on the ruling classes, only in his case, he identified the ruling classes as the Jews. The only difference is in who you identify as the villain.

Friedrich Hayek settled this argument decades ago in The Road to Serfdom. An Austrian who had witnessed Hitler's rise to power, and saw Britain heading down the same road of socialism, Hayek wrote a book outlining how fascism and communism were two sides of the same authoritarian coin while freedom and capitalism were diametrically opposed to both. He noted how in Germany, the communists and the fascists would try to recruit from each other but never tried to recruit from those that promoted freedom because freedom was antithetical to both. He compared it to Catholics and Protestants trying to convert each other but never trying to convert Jews because they were just too different in their beliefs. So yes, absolutely, Nazis were indeed leftists. Your antifa today is the modern version of the brownshirts, using violence as a political tool.

 

Nazi is a unique ideology unto itself. It started off as a socialist party but later on adopted some of the more nationalistic ie right stuff to get more people on bored. Nazism was whatever Hitler and his posse decided was acceptable to believe in at any given time. At first the Nazis left the churches alone, then they persecuted them and finally they tried to coopt them and create a new national religion. Trying to define Nazism is like trying to describe the location of a single bubble in a pot of boiling water.

Fascism is a leftist ideology. It centers on the government being in control of all the important things. Which party does that sound like today? Nationalism usually is a right wing ideology which touts, obviously, that nation X is the best nation in the world and everyone else sucks. Which party does that sound like today?

 

Hitler HATED socialists. He targeted them for imprisonment and elimination even before he went after the Jews. Germany outlawed socialism and communism and arrested socialists en masse. In 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was exclusively comprised of socialists and leftists.

He used the name National Socialism to fool and co-opt true socialists to his cause. Nice try, but utter BS on your part. Try again...

 

What quotes are those?

 

BS. The Nazis were racist NATIONALISTS. Hitler hated socialists and leftists. He outlawed socialism and imprisoned socialists and leftists before turning his attention to the Jews. He considered socialism more vile and a bigger threat than Jews, and built the first concentration camp (Dachau) to imprison them. Read some friggin' history for Christ's sake...

 

Well, other than Hitler's World Effin' War and 80 million dead, you mean...

 

You're making far too much of the Socialist and utterly ignoring the National. The core belief of the Nazis was their devotion to the Volk, the race, the Aryan German people who were seen as the natural masters of humanity and whose achievement of that position was their overriding goal. Their socialism was in the nature of the unity of the German race. Germans were to be one race together, that is true, but theirs was to be a "GERMAN" socialism, which was profoundly authoritarian in Hitler's view. Hitler's actual administration owed far more to Italian Fascism, which Hitler very much admired, and practically nothing to Russian Communism

If Hitler and the Nazis were socialists then why did they not at ANY point even attempt to unify with the actual Communists/Socialists who were very active in Germany at the time?

 

The only reason the alt. right reads history is so they can know what it is they're revising

 

Not BS. There are several ways to compare the differences between the Nazi's and communists.

Govt owned, centrally planned vs privately owned, centrally planned.
Nationalist vs internationalist.
race struggle vs class struggle

I could go on.

Just two branches of authoritarian marxists, fighting it out-that pretty much sims up ww2.

Much like there are muslim terrorists who hate other muslim terrorists more than they hate arab dictators or the west.

 

the nazis rejected marxism

 

The nazi's rejected the soviet brand of marxism.

 

Jonah Goldberg is a jewish globalist (neocon), pretending that he is a conservative constitutionalist and reinforcing his facade by labeling leftists with emotionally wrenching tags.

 

so how come there were no flags or statues of Marx throughout Nazi Germany, if they were such fans of Marx the Communist Jew?

 

And neo-nazis (alt-right) embrace Trumpian authoritarianism. They were right-wing in the 30's, they remain reich-wing today.

 

The Nazis, as I understand it, were very leftwing economically. The Nazi's gave workers in Germany(granted they had to be Arian and not Jewish) were given paid vacations from their jobs and they were provided by the state. The Nazi regime also controlled almost all aspects of production in Germany during their reign. So I don't think it's entirely wrong to say that they were leftists.

 

I absolutely hate the polemics used when it comes to discussions of Nazi Germany, even as a right-winger myself I get annoyed when people on the Right say Nazism was left-wing, it wasn't and here's why:

What constitutes Left and Right has become so jumbled up and confused that people have lost sight of the original meaning. The entire paradigm came out of the French Revolution where people on the right side of the assembly supported the king and people on the left side of the assembly opposed the king. The divide was essentially about the distribution of political power where on the far right you had absolute monarchy (all political power distributed into one person) and on the far left you had anarchy (with no distribution of political power because there is no government, which is essentially making everyone their own absolute monarch). The supporters of a French Republic wanted political power distributed more widely and evenly than under the monarchy. The second element of this Left-Right divide was the struggle between Equality and Hierarchy. Leftists wanted more equality, Rightists wanted to preserve hierarchy.

So when it comes to Nazism, it is firmly rooted in hierarchy and distribution of political power in the few, the two traditional elements of the political right. One man, Hitler, had all of the political power and the state was predicated on establishing a hierarchy both inside its borders and in its relation to other nations. Communism on the other hand is in theory against all hierarchies and wants political power distributed so widely that it eventually becomes non-existent. Now in practice this has never worked (which says something about the absurdity of the theory) and people like Stalin have ruled as autocratically as Hitler or any absolute monarch. The only aspect of Nazism that can be considered Left is its economic ideology which was often a middle-way between pure socialism and pure capitalism where the guiding principle was the strength of the state. If keeping heads of big industries happy benefited the strength of the state they would do that, if raising the minimum wage or nationalizing industries benefited the strength of the state they would do that too. So in that sense you can call this aspect of the ideology more Leftist than Libertarian or pure capitalist, but it really was centrist compared to the extremes. All in all I think the conclusion that Nazism is to be categorized as Right-wing is really undeniable.

 

Read the articles of the thirties and forties, or You could read Jonah Goldfarb's excellent "Liberal Facism" and a similar book coauthored by Glen Beck a few years back, both cite numerous articles and writings from prominent leftists of the period. I'm not a big fan of either author but the fact is the books are thoroughly researched and well annotated. Fact's are facts whether one likes the people researching them or not. And the American left in that period were every bit as bad as the British left. The left was also far more blocish in that period than they are now. Part of that had to do with the existence of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Chinese jettisoning the great experiment with the death of Mao has left all the worlds leftists without a sun around which to orbit.