People dumb enough to believe the National Socialist German Workers' Party (or NAZIS) were actually socialists should have to pay us all $5.— Ron Marz (@ronmarz) March 12, 2016
So now, he won't recognize that the name was an abbreviation of National Socialists in Germany. Or that they were, in that sense, left-wing. And he probably won't even come to terms with the double standard they had on moneymaking, so long as they were the ones profiting. This even included a scheme to bankrupt British economy with counterfeit monetary notes. They even paid German mothers to bear children for building an army/society of darkness.
But why is Marz bringing this up? No, he may not be a socialist per se himself. But, that's still no excuse for denial of facts.
Still, this gives a good clue to how much respect he really has for Silver/Bronze Age stories from comicdom where communism was depicted negatively, and hints ever more that he's just in this gig for money, not dedication to sincere principles. He's the kind of leftist who simply cannot handle facts in life and history, and his past career in journalism may have what to do with his stubborn, selfish attitude.
Sorry, Avi, the Nazis, in the 1930s, went to exterminate their rivals as they came to power, particularly socialists and communists. To be a true socialist you have to abolish private property, something the Nazis never did. They saw the Soviet Union as a world Jewish conspiracy, and hated Marxism. These are all facts, found all over the literature on the Interwar period.
ReplyDeleteNational Socialists were what you'd call the "reactionary right" today, people whose vision of the perfect society harked back to an earlier time, i.e., the vision of the "Teutonic Knights" and the "Aryan nation" of pure-blood medieval Germans. Socialists are Marxist, and their perfect society is in the future, under Utopian communism and the withering away of the state. The far right is reactionary, while the far left is radical. Nazis and socialists stand at the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
If you don't know this history, then you should. I don't know this guy Ron Marz, and I have no idea if he knows this history, but he's essentially right that the Nazis were not left-wing socialists as conservatives usually use the terminology. Yeah, it's complicated and intellectual, but it's the correct version on this topic.
Sorry donald, but hitler was a leftist and a socialist. The war between hitler and stalin was internecine, just like trotsky versus stalin. Socialism comes in many forms. Nazism was one form. What they all have in common is subjugation of the individual to the state. Nazi germany was socialist. Fascism is another form of socialism and is also leftist. Mussolini was a proud socialist as was his father who named after a mexican socialist benito juarez. Marxism is anither form if so ialism. Maoism another form. Corporstism another form.
ReplyDeleteA politi al spectrum which places nazism in the extreme right and communism in the extreme left is propaganda of the left. And it makes no sense.
Communism is extreme left followed by nazism, fsscism, democratic socialism, and in the center democractic republicanism, and anarchism on the extreme right. Total state control on the extreme left and total anarch on the extreme right.
JUST TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR:
ReplyDeletemarxism is a type of socialism.
socialism predates marx, and there are many many variant post marx.
hitler was not a marxist. but he was a socialist.
absolutely.
http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/7-quotes-prove-adolf-hitler-proud-socialist/
http://jonjayray.tripod.com/hitler.html
ReplyDeleteWho said this? A representative of the 21st century U.S. Democratic party, maybe?
"As things stand today, the trade unions in my opinion cannot be dispensed with. On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions of the nation's economic life. Their significance lies not only in the social and political field, but even more in the general field of national politics. A people whose broad masses, through a sound trade-union movement, obtain the satisfaction of their living requirements and at the same time an education, will be tremendously strengthened in its power of resistance in the struggle for existence".
It could well be any Leftist speaker of the present time but it is in fact a small excerpt from chapter 12 of Mein Kampf, wherein Hitler goes to great lengths to stress the importance of unions. The association between unions and Leftism is of course historic and, as a Leftist, Hitler made great efforts to enlist unions as supporters of his party.
...
A modern Leftist
ReplyDeleteLet us look at what the Left and Right in politics consist of at present. Consider this description by Edward Feser of someone who would have been a pretty good Presidential candidate for the modern-day U.S. Democratic party:
He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend "lived together" for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man's personal morals were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.
He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: "As Christ proclaimed 'love one another'," he said, "so our call -- 'people's community,' 'public need before private greed,' 'communally-minded social consciousness' -- rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!"
The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was not personally a Christian, regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into as an irrational superstition. In fact he admired Islam more than Christianity, and he and his policies were highly respected by many of the Muslims of his day. He and his associates had a special distaste for the Catholic Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized Protestantism, taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one that forsook the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and accommodated itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be implemented by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity might eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to paganism, a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the heritage of their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that a people's ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a kind of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right or wrong in some sense depends on one's ethnic worldview, and especially on what best promotes the well-being of one's ethnic group
And let us listen to Hitler himself on the matter:
ReplyDelete"There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will."
Another quote:
"Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."
(Both quotes above are from Hermann Rauschning in Hitler Speaks, London, T. Butterworth, 1940, also called The Voice of Destruction. See e.g. here.
Because what he records is so inconvenient, many contemporary historians dismiss Rauschning's 1940 book as inaccurate, even though it is perfectly in accord with everything else we now know about Hitler. But no-one disputes that Rauschning was a prominent Nazi for a time. He was however basically a conservative so eventually became disillusioned with the brutalities of Nazism and went into opposition to it. Rauschning's book was in fact prophetic, which certainly tends to indicate that he knew what he was talking about.)
Further, as a good socialist does, Hitler justified everything he did in the name of "the people" (Das Volk). The Nazi State was, like the Soviet State, all-powerful, and the Nazi party, in good socialist fashion, instituted pervasive supervision of German industry. And of course Hitler and Stalin were initially allies. It was only the Nazi-Soviet pact that enabled Hitler's conquest of Western Europe. The fuel in the tanks of Hitler's Panzern as they stormed through France was Soviet fuel.
ReplyDeleteAnd a book that was very fashionable worldwide in the '60s was the 1958 book "The Affluent Society" by influential "liberal" Canadian economist J.K. Galbraith -- in which he fulminated about what he saw as our "Private affluence and public squalor". But Hitler preceded him. Hitler shared with the German Left of his day the slogan: "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz" (Common use before private use). And who preceded Hitler in that? Friedrich Engels at one stage ran a publication called Gemeinnuetziges Wochenblatt ("Common-use Weekly").
And we all know how evil Nazi eugenics were, don't we? How crazy were their efforts to build up the "master race" through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women -- the "Lebensborn" project? Good Leftists today recoil in horror from all that of course. But who were the great supporters of eugenics in Hitler's day? They were in fact American Leftists -- and eugenics was only one of the ideas that Hitler got from that source. What later came to be known as Fascism was in fact essentially the same as what was known in the USA of the late 19th and early 20th century as "Progressivism", so Fascism is in fact as much an American invention as a European one. The Europeans carried out fully the ideas that American Leftists invented but could only partially implement. America itself resisted the worst of the Fascist virus but much of Europe did not. The American Left have a lot to answer for. I have outlined the largely Leftist roots of eugenics here and the largely American roots of Fascism here.
So even Hitler's eugenics were yet another part of Hitler's LEFTISM! He got his eugenic theories from the Leftists of his day. He was simply being a good Leftist intellectual in subscribing to such theories.
Clearly, the idea that Hitler was a Rightist is probably the most successful BIG LIE of the 20th Century. He was to the Right of the Communists but that is all. Nazism was nothing more nor less than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and to label it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.
ReplyDeleteThe word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation of the name of Hitler's political party -- the nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. In English this translates to "The National Socialist German Worker's Party". So Hitler was a socialist and a champion of the workers -- or at least he identified himself as such and campaigned as such.
There is a great deal of further reading available that extends the points made here about the nature of Nazism and Fascism. There is, for instance, an interesting review by Prof. Antony Flew here of The Lost Literature of Socialism by historian George Watson. Excerpt:
Many of his findings are astonishing. Perhaps for readers today the most astonishing of all is that "In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels' article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or independent did anything of the kind." (The term "genocide" in Watson's usage is not confined to the extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but embraces also the liquidation of such other complete human categories as "enemies of the people" and "the Kulaks as a class.")
The book seems well worth reading but is not of course available online. An excellent earlier essay by Prof. Watson covering some of the same ground is however available here. He shows in it that even such revered figures in the history of socialism as G.B. Shaw and Beatrice Webb were vocally in favour of genocide.
We do however need to keep in mind that there is no such thing as PURE Leftism. Leftists are notoriously fractious, sectarian and multi-branched. And even the Fascist branch of Leftism was far from united. The modern-day Left always talk as if Italy's Mussolini and Hitler were two peas in a pod but that is far from the truth. Mussolini got pretty unprintable about Hitler at times and did NOT support Hitler's genocide against the Jews (Steinberg, 1990; Herzer, 1989). As it says here:
"Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives - far more than Oskar Schindler."
"Far more than Oskar Schindler"!. And as late as 1938, Mussolini even asked the Pope to excommunicate Hitler!. Leftists are very good at "fraternal" rivalry.
So unity is not of the Left in any of its forms. They only ever have SOME things in common -- such as claiming to represent "the worker" and seeking a State that controls as much of people's lives as it feasibly can.
Tom Wolfe's biting essay on American intellectuals also summarizes the origins of Fascism and Nazism rather well. Here is one excerpt from it:
"Fascism" was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini's Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler's Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism's standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, "Nazi" was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of "capitalism."
{From the essay "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" originally appearing in the June 2000 Harper's Monthly and reprinted in Wolfe's book Hooking Up}