[Frollein]

I posted part of the article in the Michelle Obama thread because the subject of "were the Nazis really socialists" came up, but on second thought, this deserves its own thread, mainly because I hope some knowledgeable posters will give their opinion on it. As I said in the other thread, I've never really given much thought to the question, and of course since school the consensus has always been that Nazis were extreme right, not left. So I've never known about the claims made in the article and can't judge if the author's argument has merit.

Here's the complete article:

In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.

Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels's diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone's disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan "Crusade against Marxism" as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. "I have learned a great deal from Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that "they had never even read Marx", implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been "a private Russian affair", whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole of National Socialism" was based on Marx.

That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race - implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism "would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground". Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler's discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to "find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution". Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route - a long and needlessly painful route - and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had "averaged downwards"; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative - the word is many shades too pale - at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.

Hitler's mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.

It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx's view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.

That brutal view, which a generation later was to be fortified by the new pseudo-science of eugenics, was by the last years of the century a familiar part of the socialist tradition, though it is understandable that since the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 socialists have been eager to forget it. But there is plenty of evidence in the writings of HG Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis, the Webbs and others to the effect that socialist commentators did not flinch from drastic measures. The idea of ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century and more.

So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world entered the First World War publicly committed to racial purity and white domination and no less committed to violence. Socialism offered them a blank cheque, and its licence to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory principle which the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still felt that such action should be kept a secret. In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow a party of British visitors to the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of starving "enemies of the state" at a local station. "Ridiculous to let you see them", said Webb, already an eminent admirer of the Soviet system. "The English are always so sentimental" adding, with assurance: "You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." A few years later, in 1935, a Social Democratic government in Sweden began a eugenic programme for the compulsory sterilisation of gypsies, the backward and the unfit, and continued it until after the war.

The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure, then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe, and from the first years of his political career Hitler was proudly aware of the fact. Addressing his own party, the NSDAP, in Munich in August 1920, he pledged his faith in socialist-racialism: "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism, which we seek to oppose." There was loud applause. Hitler went on: "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?" The point was widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler's right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd. The tradition, what is more, was unique. In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.

The first reactions to National Socialism outside Germany are now largely forgotten. They were highly confused, for the rise of fascism had caught the European left by surprise. There was nothing in Marxist scripture to predict it and must have seemed entirely natural to feel baffled. Where had it all come from? Harold Nicolson, a democratic socialist, and after 1935 a Member of the House of Commons, conscientiously studied a pile of pamphlets in his hotel room in Rome in January 1932 and decided judiciously that fascism (Italian-style) was a kind of militarised socialism; though it destroyed liberty, he concluded in his diary, "it is certainly a socialist experiment in that it destroys individuality". The Moscow view that fascism was the last phase of capitalism, though already proposed, was not yet widely heard. Richard remarked in a 1934 BBC talk that many students in Nazi Germany believed they were "digging the foundations of a new German socialism".

By the outbreak of civil war in Spain, in 1936, sides had been taken, and by then most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. That sudden shift of view has not been explained, and perhaps cannot be explained, except on grounds of argumentative convenience. Single binary oppositions - cops-and-robbers or cowboys-and-indians - are always satisfying. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was seen by hardly anybody as an attempt to restore the unity of socialism. A wit at the British Foreign Office is said to have remarked that all the "Isms" were now "Wasms", and the general view was that nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience had taken place.

By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead. One may salute here an odd but eminent exception. Writing as a committed socialist just after the fall of France in 1940, in The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell saw the disaster as a "physical debunking of capitalism", it showed once and for all that "a planned economy is stronger than a planless one", though he was in no doubt that Hitler's victory was a tragedy for France and for mankind. The planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism "just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes". Hitler had already come close to socialising Germany. "Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state." These words were written just before Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union. Orwell believed that Hitler would go down in history as "the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face" by forcing financiers to see that planning works and that an economic free-for-all does not.

At its height, Hitler's appeal transcended party division. Shortly before they fell out in the summer of 1933, Hitler uttered sentiments in front of Otto Wagener, which were published after his death in 1971 as a biography by an unrepentant Nazi. Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, composed in a British prisoner-of-war camp, did not appear until 1978 in the original German, and arrived in English, without much acclaim, as recently as 1985. Hitler's remembered talk offers a vision of a future that draws together many of the strands that once made utopian socialism irresistibly appealing to an age bred out of economic depression and cataclysmic wars; it mingles, as Victorian socialism had done before it, an intense economic radicalism with a romantic enthusiasm for a vanished age before capitalism had degraded heroism into sordid greed and threatened the traditional institutions of the family and the tribe.

Socialism, Hitler told Wagener shortly after he seized power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master's teachings. Mary and Mary Magdalen, Hitler went on in a surprising flight of imagination, had found an empty tomb, and it would be the task of National Socialism to give body at long last to the sayings of a great teacher: "We are the first to exhume these teachings." The Jew, Hitler told Wagener, was not a socialist, and the Jesus they crucified was the true creator of socialist redemption. As for communists, he opposed them because they created mere herds, Soviet-style, without individual life, and his own ideal was "the socialism of nations" rather than the international socialism of Marx and Lenin. The one and only problem of the age, he told Wagener, was to liberate labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over capital.

These are highly socialist sentiments, and if Wagener reports his master faithfully they leave no doubt about the conclusion: that Hitler was an unorthodox Marxist who knew his sources and knew just how unorthodox the way in which he handled them was. He was a dissident socialist. His programme was at once nostalgic and radical. It proposed to accomplish something that Christians had failed to act on and that communists before him had attempted and bungled. "What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a position to achieve."

That was the National Socialist vision. It was seductive, at once traditional and new. Like all so- cialist views it was ultimately moral, and its economic and racial policies were seen as founded on universal moral laws. By the time such conversations saw the light of print, regrettably, the world had put such matters far behind it, and it was less than ever ready to listen to the sayings of a crank or a clown.

That is a pity. The crank, after all, had once offered a vision of the future that had made a Victorian doctrine of history look exciting to millions. Now that socialism is a discarded idea, such excitement is no doubt hard to recapture. To relive it again, in imagination, one might look at an entry in Goebbels's diaries. On 16 June 1941, five days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Goebbels exulted, in the privacy of his diary, in the victory over Bolshevism that he believed would quickly follow. There would be no restoration of the tsars, he remarked to himself, after Russia had been conquered. But Jewish Bolshevism would be uprooted in Russia and "real socialism" planted in its place - "Der echte Sozialismus". Goebbels was a liar, to be sure, but no one can explain why he would lie to his diaries. And to the end of his days he believed that socialism was what National Socialism was about.

The Lost Literature of Socialism by George Watson is published by Lutterworth, pounds 15

[The Immortal Goon]

There is undoubtedly a certain amount of historical revision in most things.

This being said the article takes a few interesting things and goes pretty far in trying to make Hitler a left-winger, using statements that simply aren't accurate.

For instance, it states that:

The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure, then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe

First, that's something of a straw man. Obviously socialists can be racists, and this is true for any number of political orientations. But then saying hat ONLY socialists "advocated or practiced [racial] genocide" is such an extreme falsehood that the author has to actually qualify that this is only true in Europe; the Americans practiced genocide, the Europeans did in Africa and Asia, as did other groups for a long time. Even in Europe, there have been attempts to commit genocide by proud anti-socialists. The English starved out the Irish, there were pogroms by royal authorities, and any number of instances of genocidal intents ranging from Rome to Finland.

To try and label this, in anyway, as a strictly socialist instance (I'm wondering what the example of this being implemented by socialists would be) is an absurdity.

Then there's the lack of bringing into anything even remotely acknowledging the conservative elements the Nazis brought in with them. The ending of Red Berlin and everything. There is an argument that could be made that Hitler and Stalin were on the same page so far as the personal conservatism front went. But this isn't even attempted, instead simply ignored leaving a rather gaping hole in the logic of the argument.

Also, it does a good job of trudging up a few almost-endorsements from almost-relevant socialists at the time, but does nothing to address the fact that most socialists were in the streets fighting Nazis in Germany, and preparing to fight them in the Soviet Union. For all Trotsky and Stalin disagreed about (and it was a lot) they both agreed that fascism was a horrible poison that needed to be irradiated. Which is a weird view if the thesis of this article is correct. It does nothing to reconcile this at all.



Though it would not surprise me if Hitler read some Marx and quietly told people that it opened his eyes to the movement of history, that's a far cry from being Marxist in any way. He publicly and adamantly demanded Marxism (not just Bolshevism as the article seems to claim) be rooted out:

Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production.... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

After Socialism, Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....

...Fascism denies, in democracy, the absur[d] conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb of collective irresponsibility, and the myth of "happiness" and indefinite progress....

...given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, of Liberalism, and of Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority...a century of Fascism.

...Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the State; and analogously it is opposed to class syndicalism. . . .

...And it is the greatest source of pride to us that we have been able to carry through this revolution, which is certainly the greatest revolution ever experienced in the history of our people, with a minimum of loss and sacrifice. Only in those cases where the murderous lust of the Bolsheviks, even after the 30th of January, 1933, led them to think that by the use of brute force they could prevent the success and realization of the National Socialist ideal—only then did we answer violence with violence, and naturally we did it promptly...

...I mean here that if Europe does not awaken to the danger of the Bolshevic infection, then I fear that international commerce will not increase but decrease, despite all the good intentions of individual statesmen. For this commerce is based not only on the undisturbed and guaranteed stability of production in one individual nation but also on the production of all the nations together. One of the first things which is clear in this matter is that every Bolshevic disturbance must necessarily lead to a more or less permanent destruction of orderly production. Therefore my opinion about the future of Europe is, I am sorry to say, not so optimistic as Mr. Eden’s. I am the responsible leader of the German people and must safeguard its interests in this world as well as I can. And therefore I am bound to judge things objectively as I see them.

I should not be acquitted before the bar of our history if I neglected something—no matter on what grounds—which is necessary to maintain the existence of this people. I am pleased, and we are all pleased, at every increase that takes place in our foreign trade. But in view of the obscure political situation I shall not neglect anything that is necessary to guarantee the existence of the German people, although other nations may become the victims of the Bolshevic infection.

...But I believe that nobody will question the sincerity of our opinions on this matter, for they are not based merely on abstract theory. For Mr. Eden Bolshevism is perhaps a thing which has its seat in Moscow, but for us in Germany this Bolshevism is a pestilence against which we have had to struggle at the cost of much bloodshed. It is a pestilence which tried to turn our country into the same kind of desert as is now the case in Spain; for the habit of murdering hostages began here, in the form in which we now see it in Spain. National Socialism did not try to come to grips with Bolshevism in Russia, but the Jewish international Bolshevics in Moscow have tried to introduce their system into Germany and are still trying to do so. Against this attempt we have waged a bitter struggle, not only in defence of our own civilization but in defence of European civilization as a whole.

In January and February of the year 1933, when the last decisive struggle against this barbarism was being fought out in Germany, had Germany been defeated in that struggle and had the Bolshevic field of destruction and death extended over Central Europe, then perhaps a different opinion would have arisen on the banks of the Thames as to the nature of this terrible menace to humanity. For since it is said that England must be defended on the frontier of the Rhine she would then have found herself in close contact with that harmless democratic world of Moscow, whose innocence they are always trying to impress upon us. Here I should like to state the following once again: —

The teaching of Bolshevism is that there must be a world revolution, which would mean world-destruction. If such a doctrine were accepted and given equal rights with other teachings in Europe, this would mean that Europe would be delivered over to it. If other nations want to be on good terms with this peril, that does not affect Germany’s position. As far as Germany itself is concerned, let there be no doubts on the following points: —

(1) We look on Bolshevism as a world peril for which there must be no toleration.

(2) We use every means in our power to keep this peril away from our people.

(3) And we are trying to make the German people immune to this peril as far as possible.

It is in accordance with this attitude of ours that we should avoid close contact with the carriers of these poisonous bacilli. And that is also the reason why we do not want to have any closer relations with them beyond the necessary political and commercial relations; for if we went beyond these we might thereby run the risk of closing the eyes of our people to the danger itself.

I consider Bolshevism the most malignant poison that can be given to a people. And therefore I do not want my own people to come into contact with this teaching. As a citizen of this nation I myself shall not do what I should have to condemn my fellow-citizens for doing. I demand from every German workman that he shall not have any relations with these international mischief-makers and he shall never see me clinking glasses or rubbing shoulders with them. Moreover, any further treaty connections with the present Bolshevic Russia would be completely worthless for us. It is out of the question to think that National Socialist Germany should ever be bound to protect Bolshevism or that we, on our side, should ever agree to accept the assistance of a Bolshevic State. For I fear that the moment any nation should agree to accept such assistance, it would thereby seal its own doom.

I aimed from the first at something a thousand times higher than being a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this task and, if I do, the title of minister will be an absurdity as far as I am concerned. . . .

At one time I believed that perhaps this battle against Marxism could be carried on with the help of the government. In January, 1923, I learned that that was just not possible. The hypothesis for the victory of Marxism is not that Germany must be free, but rather Germany will only be free when Marxism is broken. At that time I did not dream that our movement would become great and cover Germany like a flood.]Hitler[/url]"]I aimed from the first at something a thousand times higher than being a minister. I wanted to become the destroyer of Marxism. I am going to achieve this task and, if I do, the title of minister will be an absurdity as far as I am concerned. . . .

At one time I believed that perhaps this battle against Marxism could be carried on with the help of the government. In January, 1923, I learned that that was just not possible. The hypothesis for the victory of Marxism is not that Germany must be free, but rather Germany will only be free when Marxism is broken. At that time I did not dream that our movement would become great and cover Germany like a flood.

IN NOVEMBER, 1918, Marxist organizations seized the executive power by means of a revolution. The monarchs were dethroned, the authorities of the Reich and of the States removed from office, and thereby a breach of the Constitution was committed. The success of the revolution in a material sense protected the guilty parties from the hands of the law. They sought to justify it morally by asserting that Germany or its Government bore the guilt for the outbreak of the War.

This assertion was deliberately and actually untrue. In consequence, however, these untrue accusations in the interest of our former enemies led to the severest oppression of the entire German nation and to the breach of the assurances given to us in Wilson's fourteen points, and so for Germany, that is to say the working classes of the German people, to a time of infinite misfortune....

The splitting up of the nation into groups with irreconcilable views, systematically brought about by the false doctrines of Marxism, means the destruction of the basis of a possible communal life.... It is only the creation of a real national community, rising above the interests and differences of rank and class, that can permanently remove the source of nourishment of these aberrations of the human mind.

Finally, this was something brought up in the lifetime of these people. And, like back then, the argument only works if you completely ignore the mechanics for how each of these ideologies positioned themselves.

A moralizing Philistine’s favorite method is the lumping of reaction’s conduct with that of revolution. He achieves success in this device through recourse to formal analogies. To him czarism and Bolshevism are twins. Twins are likewise discovered in fascism and communism. An inventory is compiled of the common features in Catholicism – or more specifically, Jesuitism – and Bolshevism. Hitler and Mussolini, utilizing from their side exactly the same method, disclose that liberalism, democracy, and Bolshevism represent merely different manifestations of one and the same evil. The conception that Stalinism and Trotskyism are “essentially” one and the same now enjoys the joint approval of liberals, democrats, devout Catholics, idealists, pragmatists, and anarchists. If the Stalinists are unable to adhere to this “People’s Front”, then it is only because they are accidentally occupied with the extermination of Trotskyists.

The fundamental feature of these approchements and similitudes lies in their completely ignoring the material foundation of the various currents, that is, their class nature and by that token their objective historical role. Instead they evaluate and classify different currents according to some external and secondary manifestation, most often according to their relation to one or another abstract principle which for the given classifier has a special professional value. Thus to the Roman pope Freemasons and Darwinists, Marxists and anarchists are twins because all of them sacrilegiously deny the immaculate conception. To Hitler, liberalism and Marxism are twins because they ignore “blood and honor”. To a democrat, fascism and Bolshevism are twins because they do not bow before universal suffrage. And so forth.

Which is really the most important part of the ideology, the means that the author seems to think matter more for than the attempted ends is kind of a weird position to be in.

I would lump this article into one of two things:

1. The author of the book is making a cynical cash-grab in the, "Historical figure X was gay!" mold
2. He is a conservative and doesn't like that the Nazis are right-wingers.

[Conscript]

Tl;dr all bad things can be laid at the feet of 'socialism' or 'collectivism', right-liberals/conservatives didn't do nothing

Liberalism, fascism, and marxism are very distinct ideologies

Fascism is socialist insofar as it rejects unnecessary divisions within society that destabilize the nation-state and reigns in the excesses of international capitalism. It otherwise believes in private property, classes, and rejects materialism. It simultaneously opposes 'reactionaries', those conservative classes that either want to hold on to their money or didn't do enough for the war effort (historical), decadent cosmopolitans (liberals) predominately in cities and heterogeneous communities, and revolutionaries who are so materialist they don't believe in organic bonds like nation, family, etc.

Hitler ultimately saw private property and capitalism as the most expedient economic order, Mises praised national socialism as saving europe and was an economic advisor for the austrofascist regime, and figures like pinochet were even seen by libertarians as leading transitional states.

[ThirdTerm]

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler's discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community of the volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to "convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

Hitler's goal was making the deprived Germans wealthier and he dreamed about ethnic Germans travelling on first-class carriages, while other Europeans were delegated to second-class carriages. The main difference between Communism and National Socialism is that the latter is ethnocentric, focusing on enriching one's own working class at the expense of the lesser peoples. Hitler was responsible for murdering 5 million Poles after colonising the country. Otherwise, National Socialism could have been acceptable for Eastern Europeans, who eventually accepted Communism.

[Frollein]

First, that's something of a straw man. Obviously socialists can be racists, and this is true for any number of political orientations. But then saying hat ONLY socialists "advocated or practiced [racial] genocide" is such an extreme falsehood that the author has to actually qualify that this is only true in Europe; the Americans practiced genocide, the Europeans did in Africa and Asia, as did other groups for a long time. Even in Europe, there have been attempts to commit genocide by proud anti-socialists. The English starved out the Irish, there were pogroms by royal authorities, and any number of instances of genocidal intents ranging from Rome to Finland.

I understood this more as a rebuttal to the argument that Hitler couldn't have been a socialist, because he was racist. That socialists "obviously" can be racist isn't that obvious to most who argue that the Nazis were right-extremists.

He did qualify his statement as "only socialists in that age advocated or practised genocide, at least in Europe," so he never denied that genocide happened elsewhere under different ideological justifications. Rather, he argues that socialism as a viable political force only emerged in the first half of the 20th century, and Hitler's racism was not an outlier, but rather a fairly typical feature of socialism. I don't really see this as a strawman.

Then there's the lack of bringing into anything even remotely acknowledging the conservative elements the Nazis brought in with them. The ending of Red Berlin and everything. There is an argument that could be made that Hitler and Stalin were on the same page so far as the personal conservatism front went. But this isn't even attempted, instead simply ignored leaving a rather gaping hole in the logic of the argument.

Well, I guess the argument for conservative elements has already made extensively everywhere else, and he wants to show a (in his view) neglected angle, so why would he fill up his space with already known arguments?

Also, it does a good job of trudging up a few almost-endorsements from almost-relevant socialists at the time, but does nothing to address the fact that most socialists were in the streets fighting Nazis in Germany, and preparing to fight them in the Soviet Union. For all Trotsky and Stalin disagreed about (and it was a lot) they both agreed that fascism was a horrible poison that needed to be irradiated. Which is a weird view if the thesis of this article is correct. It does nothing to reconcile this at all.

And since Hitler was hostile to Bolshevism, it only makes sense that Nazis and Bolshevists would fight on the streets. You are equating Bolshevists with socialists, while the article asks whether the Nazis weren't just another variety of socialism, too. IIRC, Stalinists and Trotzkyists also fought against each other. Didn't Stalin call him a "lackey of fascism"? The fact that Stalin had him murdered also doesn't do much for your argument that the Nazis couldn't have been socialists because Stalin fought against them. He pretty much destroyed Trotzky with the same fervor.

Though it would not surprise me if Hitler read some Marx and quietly told people that it opened his eyes to the movement of history, that's a far cry from being Marxist in any way. He publicly and adamantly demanded Marxism (not just Bolshevism as the article seems to claim) be rooted out:

The author never said that Hitler was a Marxist. He said that Hitler took Marx's observations and developed his own answers to them, just like Lenin, Stalin and Trotzky developed theirs. I don't know why you bring Mussolini into the argument, since Mussolini himself didn't view National Socialism as Fascism. To him, the two were completely different things.

In your quotes by Hitler, he spoke against Bolshevism, of the Russia/Lenin-Stalin variant; and in the latter, shorter quote, he seems to use Marxism as synonym for Bolshevism (as he refers to the revolutionary uprising of 1918). I can't see this as proof that he viewd National Socialism as something completely different from socialism; it's equally possible that he saw his ideology simply as the superior version of socialism. This:

The splitting up of the nation into groups with irreconcilable views, systematically brought about by the false doctrines of Marxism, means the destruction of the basis of a possible communal life.... It is only the creation of a real national community, rising above the interests and differences of rank and class, that can permanently remove the source of nourishment of these aberrations of the human mind.

seems to be his answer to the question of how to transcend class: by a "real national community", rather than the "splitting up into groups with irreconcilable views," i.e. Klassenkampf. But he still seeks to find a solution to the problem of class divide - why would he address a problem that only socialism sees as one, if he didn't see his movement as a socialist one?

Finally, this was something brought up in the lifetime of these people. And, like back then, the argument only works if you completely ignore the mechanics for how each of these ideologies positioned themselves.

But Hitler did address the class nature in the quote you cited.

Which is really the most important part of the ideology, the means that the author seems to think matter more for than the attempted ends is kind of a weird position to be in.

As some Klingon once said, "Motives? Who cares for motives?" It's strange for a self-declared materialist theory to always point to its idealistic motives when the material results fall short of its promises. So yes, Trotzky was pissed off when people pointed out that the "workers paradise" was every bit as oppressive as the regime it had overturned. But what does that have to do with the question of whether National Socialism really was true to its name?

[fuser]

Yes let's forget about real actions real world effects but focus on that one time he said something "privately" to somebody and everyone was racist in early 20th century as proof that Hitler was socialist. I would say clutching at the straws but that would be giving this article too much credit.

Just like how big industrialists and socialists are bed fellows everywhere, so was Hitler, just like how socialists fight every leftist group in support of most conservative section of a country (Spain), so did Hitler so on and so forth.

And liberals politicians and big businesses praising Hitler everywhere before ww2 is further proof that he was far removed from capitalism and more closer to socialism because you know I have conveniently chosen a small time frame and place where Europeans don't genocide other Europeans, everyone is racist and that one time someone said privately to someone about something. Hurra for me.

Anyway everyone was racists but socialists without a doubt were the least racists people of the time and there is tons of literature where they condemn racism whereas there are tons of literature from right and liberals from same era celebrating racism.

tl;dr: Author is just dumb, wild speculations cannot replace real world facts and actions.

[Frollein]

Since I'm neither socialist (National or otherwise) nor fascist, this article is literally of academic interest to me. So no need to get defensive. But it would be nice if you'd refrain from shitposting.

*

It's sad that neither FRS nor Rei is still on PoFo. I think I could have learned much from a discussion of either of them with TIG or Potemkin - you know, posters who know how to actually debate.

[Decky]

I think you touched a nerve Fuser. Please refrain from posting objective facts in future. You might hurt someone's delicate feelings.

[Frollein]

I don't have any feelings about socialists, but fuser didn't post any facts. As I said, my knowledge about Nazis/Commies equals my interest, so I hoped to learn from posters who actually dug into the source material. We have more than enough threads now where posters try to one up each other, a bit of real debate, where everyone focused on the subject instead of imaginary internet points would have been nice. For, you know, a politics forum.

But I guess I was deluding myself. No wonder people drop off.

[Decky]

Not facts eh?

Yes let's forget about real actions real world effects but focus on that one time he said something "privately" to somebody and everyone was racist in early 20th century as proof that Hitler was socialist. I would say clutching at the straws but that would be giving this article too much credit.

Just like how big industrialists and socialists are bed fellows everywhere, so was Hitler, just like how socialists fight every leftist group in support of most conservative section of a country (Spain), so did Hitler so on and so forth.

And liberals politicians and big businesses praising Hitler everywhere before ww2 is further proof that he was far removed from capitalism and more closer to socialism because you know I have conveniently chosen a small time frame and place where Europeans don't genocide other Europeans, everyone is racist and that one time someone said privately to someone about something. Hurra for me.

Anyway everyone was racists but socialists without a doubt were the least racists people of the time and there is tons of literature where they condemn racism whereas there are tons of literature from right and liberals from same era celebrating racism.

tl;dr: Author is just dumb, wild speculations cannot replace real world facts and actions.

The Nazis intervened in the Spanish civil war to help depose the elected socialist government and put a Fascist one in its place. Odd behaviour for a socialist.

[Frollein]

And Stalin allied with Roosevelt. That doesn't mean America was socialist. Alliances are determined by tactical, not ideological considerations.

[Seeker8]

I'd like to know why he used "Socialism" in the party title? Was there some reason for it other than just pure fraudulence to get power?

[Decky]

I don't know how to simplify this any more... There was a civil war between socialists and fascists and the Nazis came in and supported the Spanish fascists and defeated the socialists. Socialists don't tend to try and crush secular left wing socialist governments to put right wing uber Catholic governments in power.

[Frollein]

So if there had been a civil war between Trotzkyists and conservatives, Stalin would have helped the Trotzkyists, because they are also socialists somehow, even if they are the "lackeys of fascism" and not bolsheviks aka the right sort of socialists?

[Decky]

A civil war between Trotskyite inspired Socialists and the far right? Interesting premise.

I imagine the Soviet Union would have supported the socialist government against the right wingers even though they were of different tendencies. After all the Soviet Union supported Maoist China right up until the Sino-Soviet split and Maoists and Leninists disagree on all sorts of things. Remember the socialists in Spain were mostly not Stalinists Frollein and the Soviet Union still supported them. They were socialists and communists of all shades plus anarchists.

[stephen50right]

I posted part of the article in the Michelle Obama thread because the subject of "were the Nazis really socialists" came up, but on second thought, this deserves its own thread, mainly because I hope some knowledgeable posters will give their opinion on it. As I said in the other thread, I've never really given much thought to the question, and of course since school the consensus has always been that Nazis were extreme right, not left. So I've never known about the claims made in the article and can't judge if the author's argument has merit.

Here's the complete article:

<<< I posted part of the article in the Michelle Obama thread because the subject of "were the Nazis really socialists" came up, but on second thought, this deserves its own thread... >>>

Hey, I don't like this, you're taking business away from my thread!

Seriously, some very interesting replies so far. One of my favorite historical quotes, supposedly from Santayana, is (paraphrase) "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." Learning from WW2 can hopefully keep us from starting WW3, in which afterwards, there may not be any human beings around to ever start a WW4.

[Albert]

In reference to OP.

National Socialism, it is knda in the name, no?

As far as I can understand the Nazi Party was socialist in economic sense, it rejected the liberal creedo of free market. It supported the welfare state, unions and government intervention to guide and stimulate the economy.

Although in practice as I can see, what happened was something of state capitalism.

The second pattern [of socialism] (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production, and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. These are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government's supreme office of production management. This office (the Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham.

https://mises.org/library/nazi-economic-policy

[Decky]

As far as I can understand the Nazi Party was socialist in economic sense, it rejected the liberal creedo of free market. It supported the welfare state, unions and government intervention to guide and stimulate the economy.

People were sent to death camps for being trade unionists you fool.

[fuser]

Don't you know there is no difference between USSR, today's Sweden and Nazi Germany, Decky because words mean whatever I want them to mean.

I have no idea why Decky is using real world facts to put forward his arguments, when we have wild speculations and hypotheticals to go by.

Also ww2 alliance is totally comparable to Spanish civil war because you know just like Germany, Socialists in Spain declared war on everyone including Italy and Germany and these two poor [s]fascist[/s], errr I mean socialist countries had to fight with the conservatives to defeat socialists because they are socialists because logic....Even when they say that they want to destroy socialism or that Marxism the greatest threat to European Civilization and actually even try to destroy it, they still are socialist because that one time you know in a private conversation he said Lenin is a swell guy because once again logic.

[Albert]

Oh yeah, sorry I don't know all about it.

But he did replaced it with something better. German Labour Force organization.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/na ... i-germany/