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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
And you never will be. You are trolling. You are the one who needs to take personal responsibility. Several people have made reasonable cases for Nazism being socialist and you have dismissed them. At this point you are either being pigheaded or you are trolling.
What is eith?
(Also – I haven’t found these arguments reasonable or convincing. You can blame me [easy, imo self-indulgent and a bit fatuous] or reconsider the cases that were made [less easy and also perhaps requiring a little effort])
Yes, Goebbels, whose pamphlet I referred to, actively disapproved of Marx and Marxism.
Speaking of Black racists, I was wondering what practices of socialism have been uniformly employed, and all I could think of was aggregation of power, sadism, economic destruction, and accumulation of wealth at the top — and then I thought of Patrisse Cullors, a “trained socialist” who co-founded an overtly socialist BLM, took millions of BLM donation money, and bought a mansion, furnished it with crystal and flowers, and hired armed guards.
Sweet, sweet socialism.
Yeah, I was talking to a (wealthy) British financier and he made the point that the Euro and the EU were created for German control of Europe and were successful. This was in 2019, before covid and Ukraine.
Four homes, and I believe she called herself a “trained Marxist.” The difference between being a trained socialist and a trained Marxist is that a trained Marxist has more books to fail to understand.
Dr. Goebbels explained in the document linked by David Foster above. Also, Nazi Culture by George Mosse has eyewitness accounts of National Socialism in action. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, does explain his hatred of communism a bit, too. Really unpleasant reading, but I find it necessary.
Essentially, Marx’s socialism eliminates the individual, ultimately to transform persons into those who do according to their abilities in exchange for their needs; the State vanishes as all are part of the communist society; the means of production are the collective property of the proletariat.
National Socialism, on the other hand, values German individuals from whom their toiling further progresses the German State. All Germans (volk, etc.) are provided-for and rewarded by the German State thusly. The means of production are owned by the collective German State, that, naturally, is worshiped by the Germans.
Are these the same thing? They’re both socialism, certainly.
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
I don’t think @zafar is a troll. He can be a little sea-lion-ish sometimes, but he’s certainly not alone in that.
To be fair, no one debating him is going to be convinced either, “no matter what they are told”.
(I think it’s pretty obvious that Nazis were a flavor of socialists. I don’t think it’s obvious why anyone should feel strongly about it one way or the other. They all — socialists, fascists, Nazis, and various combinations of these — suck.)
Great, great comment. Also, I learned a new word! Thanks.
A Muslim. Islam is a state religion in several countries and the government form is collectivist as is Islam.
Sea-lion-ish?
I think it’s meaningful to distinguish between top down collective organizing and bottom up.
Sealioning origin story.
Socialism was a (misguided) ideal and movement before Marxism; its been too long to give specific citations, but I distinctly remember Marx criticizing the socialists of his day, as their ideas and aspirations did not include communism.
Fascism was tribalism based on nation and class in Italy and on race and class in Germany.
In other words, the same crap that’s been going on since the dawn of history.
In the 20th century the damage of tribal conflict was magnified a million times by modern methods of warfare.