Amazingly, pundits are accusing the Republican Party’s presidential
election front runner, Donald Trump, a capitalist, of being like Adolph Hitler,
a socialist.
Meanwhile, the real socialists are President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party's two candidates running to replace him, Bernie Sanders and Hillary
Clinton.
And yes, Hitler was a socialist. The word “Nazi” is the
German acronym for “National German Socialist Workers’ Party.” Details are in the
below article._______________
Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist
roots of Nazism
By Daniel Hannan
On
16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef
Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a
conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor
priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the
Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.
Goebbels
never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and
more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of
spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of
the Volk.
So
total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount
this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially
contentious. 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”.
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. 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.”
Leftist
readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch
on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from
people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of
their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when
you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.
To
be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have subliminal Nazi
leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way feigned. That’s not my
argument. What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the
equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between
free-marketers and fascists.
The
idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way
into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist”
at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such
as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.
What
is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing
means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When
written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups
around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban,
who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who
abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class;
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right”
shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for
“baddie”.
One
of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression
of Mexico's indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled
Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist
International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional
Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that
the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across
was that it is authoritarian”.
In
fact, 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.
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.
Jonah
Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal
Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without
reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase
is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in
1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal fascists” and
“enlightened Nazis”.
In
those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals, including Wells, Jack
London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour eugenics, convinced that
only religious hang-ups were holding back the development of a healthier
species. The unapologetic way in which they spelt out the consequences have,
like Hitler’s actual words, been largely edited from our discourse. Here, for
example, is 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.
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.
Are
contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly anti-Semitic? No, not in the
vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists inwardly yearning to put global
warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do Keynesians want the whole apparatus
of corporatism, expressed by Mussolini as “everything in the state, nothing
outside the state”? Again, no. There are idiots who discredit every cause, of
course, but most people on the Left are sincere in their stated commitment to
human rights, personal dignity and pluralism.
My
beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the
compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue
almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing” to
mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.
Next
time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point
out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and
what it actually proclaimed.
The Dutch Nazi Party was equally explicit. The above image on the left reads: "With Germany Against Capitalism". The above image on the right reads: "Our Socialism Your Future".
Below is an image from German Nazi Party that reads: “The National Socialist German worker
stands against capitalism”.
