I think the point that @
Green Arrow, @
William, and @
Dr. Who have tried to make is that most of the things common socialists of the 20th century and modern era hold important were either not pursued by or were in fact damaged by Hitler. That despite his socialist language and the intellectual roots of National Socialism, by the time of Hitler's ascension to total power these forces within the movement were either purged, dropped or only played up for support.
To @
Bob's credit, and @
Mister D's, it's not as if there has only ever been one variation of socialism. One of the tragedies of political lexicon is that terms like 'socialist' and 'capitalist' inherently rely on personal bias because there are so many interpretations of its meaning. As @
Chris pointed out, there is anarchistic socialism. I'm sure Green Arrow can attest to the fact that 'socialism' did not always have connotations of authoritarianism, statism or links to Marxism.
However, post-Marx, when the average person hears 'socialism', they're likely to picture some state control of industry. Unfortunately most socialists, probably to the chagrin of classical socialists, are statists. Even worse, the likes of syndicalists, anarchists, et cetera are usually marginalized by the big kahuna of socialist thought, Marxism or Communism. Obvious to anyone who studies history or bothers to listen to others, not all socialists are supporters of communism or even agree with Marxist theory. Yet in the minds of the average American, for instance, the words 'socialist' and 'communist' may as well be synonyms. For the worse, libertarian, anarchist and other cooperative socialist beliefs are marginalized by the state socialist models of the modern era.
That said, was Nazism socialism? Was Hitler a socialist? Let's start off with who is not a socialist. Bigots are not socialists, because socialism is egalitarian and pro-equality. Socialists stress that they believe in equality of people. So anti-semitism such as the following ---
"Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew -- not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time.... We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development -- to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed -- has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry".
--- is anti-socialist. But Hitler isn't the writer. Karl Marx is. In fact, anti-semitism and racism are in no short supply in any self-identified socialist regime. Stalin not only was an active participant in rounding up that escaped Hitler, in 1939 Stalin had enough of Jewish influence in his foreign ministry. Not only were there too many jews, Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov was a jew. In March his phone lines were cut and the Foreign Ministry was surrounded by the NKVD's tanks. Their order? "Clear out the synagogue."
Well the Nazis committed genocide. As pointed out already the USSR had a bigger hand in the Holocaust than we are informed of.
Nazi-Soviet collaboration went beyond economic cooperation and military pacts. The Nazi concentration camps themselves were adapted from the Soviet designs German officers witnessed upon traveling to the USSR. It was even illegal in Poland to detail the operations of Nazi camps due to the similarities to the gulags and the need to keep people complacent. The Soviets engaged in human experimentation well into the 1950's. Concentration camps liberated by the Soviets, like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, were actually reopened under new management. The Nazi death camp slogan "Work liberates" mirrors the Soviet camp slogan "Work is an honor."
Well Nazism is racist, not just anti-semitic. Socialists believe in equality. A $#@!ty tactic, but I again will refer to Stalin. "Stalin exiled about a dozen of nations completely. Part and parcel. Chechens, Ingush, Kalmiks, Karachaevs, Crimean Tatars. A dozen nations completely wiped out!" - Vladimir Bukovsky
The Soviets and Bolsheviks starved millions, destroyed ethnic groups and persecuted religious minorities. Even the intellectual fathers of international socialism, despite many having jewish ancestry, were anti-semites and this goes back to Marx himself as shown above. In the January 1849, Marxist journal
Neue Reinische Zeitung, Engels says that primitive societies like the Scottish Highlanders, Bretons, Basques, South Slavs (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs) and Czechs or ethnic groups that had not even reached the capitalist stage of economics are racial trash and will have to be destroyed. Slavs were consistently spoken of as dirty people. Marx wrote in his diary that "The classes and the races… must perish in the Revolutionary holocaust."
I'm not going to go through every example of bigotry in socialist states, but when one acknowledges that genocide, infanticide, and democide are common things to come across in looking over the USSR, China, Korea, and so on, I think the point is clear that egalitarianism may be a socialist platitude but rarely is it ever fully practiced. Didn't Chi Guevara and Castro persecute gays, burn books and say nasty things about blacks? Didn't Pol Pot persecute ethnic Vietnamese and people with... glasses? Even Hitler spoke of egalitarianism, but a version, well, without jewish capitalists to poison it.
"The Marshall and the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"
It's worth noting that Hitler often conflated jews and capitalists together. There's as much of a class element in Hitler's anti-semitism as there is racial. Indeed, I dare anyone to read Hitler's December 11, 1941 speech and not come away seeing jewish and capitalist/plutocrat as interchangeable.
Well there's another claim. Hitler imprisoned, killed or persecuted socialists, communists and unions. Therefore he wasn't a socialist, because the underlying message is that socialists don't fight other socialists. The problem with this logic is that it's historically incoherent. Socialists have had bitter rivalries with eachother throughout history, whether it be individuals, regimes or splinter ideologies. Not all socialists sided with Marxism. There was a rivalry between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Socialist states were not above their own "Night of the Long Knives" executions and purges. Stalin had Trotsky murdered with a god$#@! ice pick. He routinely carried out mass executions of his loyal supporters. Mao out of paranoia pitted his men against one another to foment distrust, forcing them to shout out their failures in front of a room of their peers and thus preventing secret alliances.
The idea that Nazis fighting Communists makes them not socialists is irrational. It just means they were competitors. Republicans and Democrats compete for voters and does anyone besides Mac-7 and exotix believe they're opposites? Red shirts vs brown shirts, politics as usual. And the same can be said of how they treated socialists and social democrats. Here's a poster for the social democrats-
Against monarchists, National Socialists and Bolshevik Marxists. Are the Bolsheviks and Nazis not socialists because the Social Democrats had an interest in winning votes? Likewise, here's a reminder of how well socialists get along-
It's easy to get caught up in political science but rarely does it reflect the realities of the human condition. Do you know how often I've been torn between the Constitution Party and Libertarian Party? Germans were no different. Socialism appealed to them and it came in many sizes and shapes. Turns out nationalism was also popular, especially in light of defeat in WWI.
The idea that Hitler did this to these socialists over here and thus he can't be one... This argument, I would suggest, is born out of some misplaced sense of 'solidarity'. Socialists love using the term solidarity but it doesn't mean anything. It's a way to seem committed to a common struggle without there being one. The truth is that international socialism never managed nearly as much as national socialism. Truth be told socialists historically fought other socialists as much as capitalists did. The Soviets and Chinese distrusted eachother and had border clashes. The Cambodians carried out genocide on ethnic Vietnamese and the Vietnamese invaded them. China invaded Vietnam and got its ass kicked. Honestly, aren't you more likely to fight with someone familiar, someone you know, than a stranger? Nazi-Soviet or nationalist-internationalist distrust makes sense as do political power plays, especially when considering his betrayal of Stalin was rather last minute. By the way, how did trade unions do under Stalin or Kim il Sung?
Now people here have already spoken of the intellectual roots of Nazism, its socialist heritage, Strasserism, et al. Piggybacking off of that, here's Goebbels on Nazism and Bolshevism--
"New York Times, November 28, 1925, p.4.:
Hitlerite Riot in Berlin
Beer Glasses Fly when Speaker compares Hitler with Lenin
BERLIN. Nov. 27. - The National Socialist-Labor Party, of which Adolf Hitler is a patron and father, persists in believing Lenin and Hitler can be compared or contrasted in a party meeting. Two weeks ago an attempted discussion of this subject led to one death, sixty injuries and $5,000 damages to beer glasses, tables, chairs, windows and chandeliers in Chemnitz. Last night, Dr. Goebbels tried the experiment in Berlin and only police intervention prevented a repetition of the Chemnitz affair.
On the speaker's assertion that Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight, a faction war opened with whizzing beer glasses. When this sort of ammunition was exhausted a free fight in which fists and knives played important roles was indulged in. Later a gang marched to the offices of the socialist paper Vorworts and smashed plate-glass windows. Police made nineteen arrests."
When pointing out only a small difference with Lenin proved unpopular, the Nazis relied on theatricality and other campaign slogans. Though, I'll finish off by stating that I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the Nazis and Hitler "were liars" or "stealing" socialism. The National Socialists borrowed more from the "left" than just the names 'socialist' and 'workers'-
Everyone wants to be a white knight. Nobody wants to 'own' Hitler. But this is like using the sins of our fathers regarding slavery to blame it on today's Americans. It's not the fault of an anarcho-syndicalist like @
kilgram, marxist like @
IMPress Polly, or libertarian socialist like Green Arrow that *a* socialist party or regime did some nasty $#@!. On another note, bigotry is *not* inherent of Fascism like Nazism. In fact while very similar, the two were different.
Mussolini was never the anti-semite that Hitler was, nor were the Italian people as entrenched in genocide like the Germans and I think this is ultimately the divide between fascism as a branch of socialism and the flowery socialists that bitterly reject any philosophical connection to either Hitler or Mussolini despite historical evidence. National Socialism and Fascism were blends of socialism and nationalism doctrinaly. While all socialist regimes, period, have relied on a sense of nationalism from Stalin's Russia, to Vietnam, to North Korea and Cuba, to even modern European parties like the British Labor Party... Fascism and Nazism made their appeals blatant and deliberate. They didn't hide their love of nationalism.
And if you're a nationalist it means you're for your kind more than others, and it means you want to magnify the characteristics of your people. This is why Italian Fascists fought so much to protect their jews from Hitler and undermined the Holocaust as long as they could and the Germans went along with it. Nationalism brings out the best and the worst of a people. For Italy it meant they were tolerant enough to let jews hold office but it also meant reviving their empire by... trying to take Ethiopia. For Germany it meant protecting their rights from the "Versailles Dictate" but also unleashing historically entrenched anti-semitism.
If anything this topic should put to rest the notion that nationalism is a "right-wing" phenomena or that socialists can't be nationalists. Tell that to Ho Chi Minh. Nationalism as a movement can even be traced to the same origin point of socialism, the French Revolution. I conclude that the National Socialists, as well as Fascists, National Syndicalists, Stalinists et al are socialists. They're just a different, more deliberate kind than your average flowery social democrat or incrementalist Fabian.
"In the last analysis, there are only three great statesmen in the world, Stalin, I, and Mussolini. Mussolini is the weakest, for he has been unable to break the power of either the crown or the church. Stalin and I are the only ones who envisage the future and nothing but the future. Accordingly, I shall in a few weeks stretch out my hand to Stalin at the common German-Russian frontier and undertake the redistribution of the world with him." -- Hitler
I believe people at the time knew that Fascism, National Socialism and Bolshevism were all similar variants of the same thing. It is only after the first two died was it dogmatically so that the third was their polar opposite.
I think it was socialism. Just a different kind which apologetics can not admit to. Oh, and here's a Soviet Swastika-
Shalom, $#@!es.
Originally Posted by Howey
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