by Smitty
The Left is fundamentally dishonest about pretty much everything. So hiding the dirty historical laundry should be less surprising than it is. Watch a masterful summary of this:
via Toby Young
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"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Your post is a farrago of nonsense (or maybe disingenousness), beginning with “I’m not a liberal…” to “…they are different.”
Hitler was well read and he was articulate in explaining his views. He was often quoted comparing and contrasting his version of socialism with Bolshevism.
In addition, just because Nazism may be (slightly) to the right of Bolshevism, it is invalid to use as a device to tar conservatives in the US. This is for the very simple fact that the Communist/Nazi spectrum in Europe in the 1920s-1940s has no history or parallel in the US or Britain.
To say that Nazis were right wing therefore American conservatives must be Nazis – as so many progressives are wont to do – has zero context here. It is nothing more than a device that supports the underlying credo of Progressivism: 1) stroke my ego and 2) strike down all who disagree with me.
They don’t care about the State. The State is an excuse.
What is The State again? Monopoly on the use of force.
Commies and nazis don’t care about that?
The “State” is an excuse. They are narcissists obsessed with their own power and godhood. The “State” is a convenient excuse du jour. In the end, it’s just the members of the oligarchy or the dictator, and their personal slaves for life, which does not exactly constitute a “State”.
Excellent point.
As opposed to reading the works of the Nazi leadership themselves? Your comments demonstrate the video’s thesis in spades.
Exactly … !
There was never any justification for calling either Bush conservative, except for those who consider it a slur. I’m not entirely convinced that conservatism is rightwing. Many confuse it with reaction which it is not.
Hubris.
Obviously you can’t read. I never once compared the Nazi party to American conservatives. That’s what liberals do. There is no doubt though that the NSDAP was brought into power by a German Conservative party lead by industrialist, and newspaper owner Alfred Hugenberg. There is also no doubt that Hitler and the Nazi party are a culmination of ideas circling around on the German right since the mid 1800’s. I’m not trying to be a jerk, or partisan by saying this. It’s just a fact.
No, it doesn’t. Evans, and Kershaws work is balanced and most certainly talks about socialism and the Nazis, especially the ideas of Joseph Goebells. Hitler on the other hand believed in private property, and low taxes, and regretted the very word “socialist” due to its association with Marxism. And tell me what leftist anywhere has ever called “communism the worlds greatest evil” and did so much to try and destroy it?
The video deals in half truths, and then goes on to quote Hayek, an economist, who completely misses the other three quarters of what comprised Nazism.
Bismark was a conservative. He even passed an “anti socialist” law.
I am in no way a liberal. You’re just so partisan that you want to deny the historical record because of how it makes you feel.
That diagram is a couple years old; I believe that it changes over time. So, yeah, I can see your points. Still, the overall relationship is valid.
I forget where I pulled it from, but I keep it handy for discussions like this. Especially when the ignorati (a term that I am so stealing) start babbling that the communists and nazis aren’t similar in ideology.
Oh, that, and I ask, “If commies and nazis are so different, how come Hitler and Stalin came to be such good friends for a while?”
That one generally pisses lefties off, until they start spinning away with their lies.
Only by American standards, which are by no means a benchmark since their conception of left and right comes after Europes.
Hitler thought he could use the forces of reaction for his own ends. The forces of reaction thought they could use Hitler and keep their power because he was an uncouth ruffian and no match for their superior breeding and social stature. They were wrong and like most of the rest of the world from the western democracies to Stalin they misread and underestimated Hitler at every turn. Hitler had no ideology in the conventional sense other than the will to power. He considered ideology the vanity of coffee house dilatants.
How does any of that change that they helped bring Hitler to power? Industrialists liked Hitler because his position on trade unions which were abolished under his leadership.
Yeah, I might point out some niggling disagreements, but as you know from my earlier comment, I totally believe this whole thing conceptually.
They’re conservative leftists, is what they are.
You need a venn diagram to graph the political spectrum, even then one probably needs a Spiro graph to do it properly.
The left/right political spectrum came about in Revolutionary France and it were the monarchists and nationalists on the right, and revolutionaries on the left. Anarchism has always been a label used by the left both in Europe, and America. Left anarchists are not statists, or communists, but do believe in abolishing private property in favor of a more communal economic model.
I’ve read their speeches and writings in the original German. Really, you should just stop now.
This is the text of Nazi Propaganda against the Weimar Republic who they categorized as “November Criminals” and traitors, and responsible for both Germany’s defeat in WW1, and the low state it subsequently fell to:
“a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest ‘national opposition’—fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks’, who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Adolf Hitler and the victory of the ‘national revolution’ of 1933”..
Now, how left wing does that really sound? “Cultural Bolsheviks”? Sounds a lot like “cultural marxists”, and I don’t think I need to explain how popular that term is on the right, and who it’s applied to, do I? Is there even a single piece of scholarship on the NSDAP’s “socialist roots”?
Gah! I was afraid you would glom onto this.
Be off, concern troll. Your tactics are obvious and boring. Not to mention every comment you make merely highlights your insipidness and vapidity.
Hell, you need a real-time three dimensional Venn diagram to do it right, especially when you add in the log rolling.
And a supercomputer to do the calculations.
Actually Mussolini was the first to make socialism a national movement rather than an international one.
Yeah, the historical
record is insipid, and vapid, but Nazis are leftists cuz socialist! And your argument is a diagram of left/right probably put out by the John Birch Society. Movement conservatives are boring.
First one to do it successfully.
The State is the entity with the legally-recognized right to initiate force (I think, maybe)
Democratic republican representatives can be The State (or is it the charter, the ideas on a piece of paper, that is The State?)
A single dictator can be The State (his will is clearly the law)
The legitimacy of The State is a matter of consensus. Recognition of the right to initiate force (or what is equivalent, the right to choose whom to dispossess, imprison and/or kill) is not a given.
If one guy wields power effectively and dispossesses, imprisons and/or kills the right people; and refrains from dispossessing, imprisoning and/or killing the wrong people, his particular instantiation of The State may be recognized as legitimate. Otherwise, say “Hello” to the Sun King and Mussolini and Batista and Allende…
Am I overemphasizing the Weberian conception of The State? I don’t think that’s possible.
BTW I mostly agree with you regarding nazis as left hegelians; normally, the only sense in which I am willing to concede their orientation as “right-wing anything is in their mystical reverence for and slavish duty to The State as the avatar of Zeitgeist; as opposed to the left hegelians, who attacked the religious foundation of The State as irrational and an impediment to Freedom.
Lenin abolished trade unions.
Guess he was a nazi, too.
I wrote sloppily. I didn’t mean to imply you compared nazis to American conservatives.
But the fact that Hitler considered himself socialist should be indisputable.
”Movement conservatives are boring.”
Ah getting to your point at last!
For that matter Hitler didn’t abolish ”trade unions” he merely abolished/absorbed the existing ones.
Left anarchists or syndicalists are just trade socialist retreads.
Syndicalism ts an an especially incoherent approach to politico/economic governance: it’s decentalzed socialism (HA!)
Is George Bernard Shaw socialist enough for you?
What did he say about nazi methods and aims?
http://youtu.be/hQvsf2MUKRQ
What a tremendous contribution to online debate. Now both sides can call each other Nazis. How incredibly helpful to the exchange of ideas!
[…] Hannan On The Fraternal Nature Of Commies And Nazis […]
What ‘brought Hitler to power’ was electoral success in a state of economic and political crisis. Both the National People’s Party and the German People’s Party were collapsing electorally.
The alternative to Hitler in 1933 was a military government or an autogolpe organized by extant political grandees. This did happen in the Baltic states and something just adjacent to it in Finland. You’d have needed someone with considerably more daring than the senescent Pres. von Hindenburg to pull it off – someone like Pres. Svinhufvud in Finland or Adm. Horthy in Hungary.
By any standard.
A bureaucratic authoritarian state engaging in a multifarious revanchist enterprise which incorporates both riverboat gambles and bizarre obsessions and diversions is not a ‘conservative’ government. Completely disposing of the standards and practices of public life – e.g. liquidating the immunities enjoyed by every social stratum, particularly the nobility and gentry and placing screwballs with no personal accomplishment in high public offices – is not ‘conservative’ government.
The authoritarian right with an affinity for conservative politics was present in Europe at the time – Franco, Salazar, Horthy, Svinhufvud, and even Petain manifested it. Hitler, Mussolini, and Pavelic did not.
Bismarck was conservative – and bore no resemblance to Hitler whatsoever.
The German Conservative Party dissolved in 1918. The National People’s Party was led by Hugenburg and only co-operated with the Nazis for about two years (at a time when it was collapsing electorally).
You’re pretending for your own purposes that a contingent and temporary collaboration indicates some deep affinity and resemblance. It does not.
Hitler did not resemble any Anglophone starboard element (all of which were thoroughly constituionalist in their disposition), nor any continental element (who were defenders of throne and altar). It’s not complicated to sort the European right into those with a strongly revanchist and imperialist aspect (Hitler, and, in an attenuated way, Mussolini) and those without (nearly everybody else). You had small-country nationalists (bloodthirsty to varying degrees) who had an affinity for the Nazis, but also a history of conflicts with local monarchs and extant parties representing the gentry (the Iron Guard would be an example).
Yawn.
So you think that Godwin’s Law has been written in stone, eh?
Except … … the only person referring to anyone as Nazis is the concern troll, DDPerks. The rest of this thread centers on the automatic denial liberals (a/k/a “lefties”) jump into whenever communism and nazism are compared to each other.
ICYMI, that wasn’t the case prior to Operation Barbarossa. Since then, lefties have strained themselves silly disassociating themselves from their ideological cousins.
Jerry Pournelle published a better way in his dissertation for his PhD in Poli Sci. You can safely ignore the version found on Wikipedia as it’s wrong. Pournelle has tried to correct it several times, but the leftist morons behind Wiki won’t let the corrections stay. I think he has the article on his website dealing with his way of illustrating the political spectrum properly.
The diagram above is incorrect as the founders, which includes Madison, are the center, and are not right of center.
The GOP has always been left of center. The party from which it descended, the Whigs, were a statist party as well, and it was Whigs that organized the GOP after the Whigs had reduced themselves to utter irrelevancy.
As I said, the diagram changes with time, as the political structure changes. Back in 1776, it would be different. The concept is what is valid. Or at least more appropriate.
But I am open to better models. Got a link to Jerry Pournelle’s dissertation? I searched his website, and am still looking.
Stalinism demands we ignore the spiritual part of human nature, while the modern Stalinist demands we ignore the biological nature of human nature. In the end, they take you to the same place, the gates of hell.
The only way we can make sense of what the founders gave us is to use them as them metric.
I think I’ve seen the article on his site, but it’s been quite some time since I’ve read it and may be misremembering. I’ll see what I can find and post it here.
I was mistaken. It is actually on the site of Baen Books. It was originally the last subject in the Anthology “Imperial Stars.”
http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.htm
I would strongly disagree that the spectrum changes. People who want to engage in a subterfuge, and hide what they really are, do want things to change. That’s why you constantly see Nazism placed on the right when it really is one of the statist philosophies and belongs whole hog to the far left.