Leftists Become Incandescent When Reminded of the Socialist Roots in Nazism | RealClear... - 0 views
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As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism: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 clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers' Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said. Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun," he boasted, adding that "the whole of National Socialism" was "based on Marx".
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Marx's error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity - to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order.
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His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to "convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists" - by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. "What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a position to achieve."
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but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls "Right-wing": the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods;
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the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class;
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authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.
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Authoritarianism - or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality - was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.
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quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become "liberal fascists" and "enlightened Nazis".
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George Bernard Shaw in 1933: Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly... If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
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Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the "racial trash" - the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism - something else we have edited from our memory, but which once went without saying. "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?" Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.