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Quote of the Day: Nazism and Socialism
“To Unity [Mitford], National Socialism was a Left Wing revolution and Hitler was a champion of the downtrodden masses.” – Virginia Cowles
This quote comes from the book Looking for Trouble, Cowles memoirs of her years as a war correspondent between 1936 and 1941. The book originally appeared in 1941.
Unity Mitford was one of the Mitford sisters, a family of British aristocrats from the middle of the twentieth century. Five of the sisters, including Unity, were known for supporting fascism in the 1930s. (The sixth became a communist.) Sister Diana Mitford married Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. (Oswald Mosley was satirized by P. G. Wodehouse as Sir Roderick Spode, the leader of the Black Pants movement) Unity became a Hitler fangirl, so much so that when Britain went to war with Nazi Germany in 1939, Unity attempted suicide. (This left Unity crippled. She died from complications of the suicide attempt in 1948.)
Cowles wrote the quote in describing an encounter with Mitford in Germany in 1937, during the first Sudetenland crisis. It struck me because it described fascism as a left-wing phenomenon. Today, if you ask whether fascism was right wing or left wing, most people would tell you it was right wing. In truth, the only thing it was to the right of was Stalinist Communism. Really and truly, only a little to the right of that. Mussolini, fascism’s father, was a red diaper baby. (His full name was Benito Juarez Mussolini. He was named by his socialist father after the left-wing Mexican revolutionary.)
Hitler was a man of the left, something recognized at the time. Even Great Britain’s foremost fascist families recognized that. In that sense, there seems a lot of similarity between 1930s British fascists and today’s “Antifa” anarchists. In both cases, the activists come from upper-class, well-to-do, and politically connected families. They attempted to dismantle the system by which their families accumulated wealth and turn over control of the economy. education, and life to a strong central government, led by the “best and brightest” (themselves, of course), who would dictate to everyone what they wanted – or else.
Published in Group Writing
Well, all politicians are, but…He said socialism. What socialist policy did he advocate? Or implement? Still waiting.
Do you believe that North Korea is democratic because they use the word in their formal name?
Come on!
I mentioned in my comment you’d have to dig into German history in the years prior to Hitler to see something animating the NAZI party other than JEWS!
Our western education around WWII is propagandized and limited only to the Holocaust. Digging in, you see a country whose common people are destitute with a handful of elites making bank under sky-rocketing inflation and starvation post-WWI as food imports were targeted.
The only thing on the right was the attitude of nationalism, which was part of the German core since Roman times. In spite their late unification, they had a strong national ethic of them against the world. WWI aftermath harming the common German would have animated the class struggle and the national sentiment.
It animated both. Hence the growth of the Nazis and the Socialists as political forces in Germany at that time.
You can’t even name socialist policies.
The Nazis are socialists.
What is your definition of socialism that prevents Nationalists from being socialists?
Of possible relevance:
I’d say the Nazi’s ‘socialism’ would fall into this category.
I don’t think so.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/socialism
I know you are but what am I?Here’s one: public ownership of the means of production.
A bunch of them here. A sample:
In points 11 through 17, the NSP calls for the “abolition of unearned incomes,” the “total confiscation of all war profits,” the “nationalization of all associated industries,” the “division of profits of all heavy industries,” the “expansion on a large scale of old age welfare,” the “immediate communalization of the great warehouses,” and “a land reform suitable to our needs.”
Google “nazi 25 point plan.” You’ll find it.
They didn’t get a chance to implement full national socialism because the “nation” part got blown to splinters and rags.
The bolded were NAZI ideals. I think someone mentioned elsewhere that Nazi socialism was had some fascist seasoning, but it’s all Marxism in the end, which is ultimately what makes it leftist. The leaving of property in private hands did not take away the fact that the central government was controlling it.
Nazis may not have been socialist in the purest sense of the term. They were fascists, more or less, which were distinct from socialists in much the same way as horses are distinct from donkeys. American conservatives recognize that they are both equines. Others obsess over the fact that horses are generally faster and have shorter ears, so they’re not the same thing.
The bottom line is that Nazis, fascists, communists, socialists, Maoists, Marxists, Democrats, progressives, Antifa, etc., are all statist-collectivists. Their propaganda may differ, and their claimed aims may diverge at times, but their goals coalesce around authoritarian utopianism. It really doesn’t matter whether they focus on race, class, gender, or some other issue. They’re all mules that do little other than kick down their stalls and bray at the “injustices” of society. As a farm boy, born and raised, take my word for it that if you’re kicked in the head by either a horse, donkey, mule, hinny, or zebra, you won’t spend much time obsessing over which type of equine kicked you.
Thank you. Here, courtesy wiki.
They managed to do the Holocaust but were unable to even start to abolish unearned incomes, confiscate war profits (which are what?), nationalise industries etc?
Seems an important difference. I think Nazi Germany was heading into a kind of corporatism – where industries start to function as extensions of the state – which is certainly bad (and one of the signs of fascism) but isn’t really socialism at all. Not least because it preserves class disparities.
Yes. Isn’t that something? Even with the vaunted Teutonic hyper-efficiency, they hadn’t managed to bring about heaven on earth.
Dispassionate intellectual rigor would lead one to believe that is because socialism doesn’t work.
That didn’t stop the Soviets (for eg) from actually implementing some of those policies.
If the Nazis didn’t even start implementing any of them I suspect it’s because they didn’t want to. Their claim to be socialists of some kind was a con to get votes.
The Soviet Union collapsed, Zafar. Did you miss it? It was in all the papers.
Socialism has failed every time it’s been implemented, everywhere it’s been implemented. See the pattern?
Of changing the subject being discussed? Yes, but unsure as to why. ??
As mentioned in comment number 20, Jonah Goldberg wrote an entire book on why Fascism is of the left. It was quite a good book regardless of how you feel about Mr. Remnant of the True Conservatives and his views today. It’s called “Liberal Fascism”. Give it a read.
They were a little busy.
You win. I got nothing.
Folks, stop feeding the troll.
Zafar is not going to be convinced no matter what he is told.
as was Mussolini – the man who coined the term
Arbeit Macht Frei- you know it!
The fact that the Nazis were socialists ought to be settled. What they were not was Marxists-Leninist socialists, nor were they American Left-Liberal socialists.
They only wanted socialism for Germans for Germany. Getting there required mobilized, mechanized hate.
that didn’t turn out well.
But Naziism is a socialist political philosophy that was put into practice. They even filmed it for us.
The similarity has always been obvious. Western leftists wanted to eliminate the connection and so did European fascists once they went to war with each other. Roosevelt had to change as well when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union it was made acceptable. There have always been small minorities of racists who are just racists, not left or right as they’re too stupid to understand such things but can be useful to totalitarian governments. We’re seen pieces of that in the US now. Black racists radicals are useful to our left as are white racists cornered by silly anti racist leftist rhetoric. it turns our vast chunks of people can be convinced of just about anything even when they don’t really have strong views or much knowledge.
Government control of education, production, social clubs, religious institutions. Anything they wanted. Of course they were cousins, like the Chinese they figured out control was more important than ownership and far more productive and easier to manage. The ideology isn’t that important, it’s just the rhetoric dictators use. We’re seeing the same thing in the American left now. They use language, images and rhetoric that stupid people respond to.
Yes, I think that’s true.
Leaving ownership in private hands also gets more buy in from the owners.
Good thing we’re all so smart I guess.
??
What is a non-Marxist socialist? I do not believe this is a thing.
Because vulgar abuse always works well when making a case.
Not at all. I just haven’t been convinced by what you’ve said so far. Take some personal responsibility.
I suggest you read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. He lays out the case for not only Mussolini and the NSDAP being socialists and of the left, he pretty much convinced me that Woodrow Wilson was the first recognizable Fascist politician.
Thanks for this. I’ve been thinking of starting a series along the lines of Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? I was going to start with What Is a Fascist?
It seems quite apparent that fascists fall into the collectivist category along with socialists (Hillary’s “stronger together” motto in Romanesque terms would be “fascii.”). Nazis were collectivists of the Aryan sort — Nazi collectivists against everyone else. It’s pretty impressive that Germans have managed to do under the EU what they failed to do in two world wars — dominate Europe.
Its opposite is individualist, which America embodies — or used to. But even individualism can be radicalized, which is the trap libertarians often fall into. We are social creatures, but society flourishes best when the protection of individuals’ natural rights is the main (if not the sole) purpose of government and we still have common (rather than “diverse”) cultural agreement on the important stuff. Like what a woman is, for example.