Posted on 04/07/2013 8:00:57 PM PDT by Nachum
I'd like to see links to documentation. That could be helpful in rebutting those who consider Nazis to be “right wing” ultraconservatives.
I'm quite aware of the Nazi party's roots in socialism — after all, it was the National **SOCIALIST** Workers Party.
However, it does seem as if the purge of the SA (brownshirts) by the SS (blackshirts) reflected an underlying move by Hitler toward corporate “crony capitalism” on an Italian Fascist model, rather than the stronger socialist theme of the SA, or of Mussolini in his younger days. My impression is that Hitler himself changed his views on the role of businessmen as his Nazi Party became more successful, and especially after the German Communists and the Social Democrats were eliminated as political competitors for the loyalty of working-class Germans.
I read about it in a series of historical novels about Britain during the Middle Ages by Bernard Cornwell. Ascent into Valhalla is apparently non-denominational. Warriors who die weapon in hand go there regardless of what gods they believe in. Here's an interesting intersection of history - a 10th century Muslim envoy of the Abbasid caliph of his era wrote a record of a Norse chieftain's burial rites.
~ Adolph Hitler, May 1, 1927
You should be able to find the full text in the online Propaganda Archive of Calvin College.
The relative health and global competitiveness of German industries leads me to think that this was out and out capitalism rather Latin American-style crony capitalism. There's a tendency to believe that because Hitler was a mass murderer, he also did everything else in ways diametrically opposite from ours. I think it's a mistake to assume that.
Considering that I'm a Calvin College graduate, I probably need to spend more time reading that archive. I've read a fair amount and quoted from it periodically on Free Republic, but I don't know it as well as I should.
One caution, however — there is a difference between the earlier Hitler who worked with the avowedly socialist leaders of the SA and the later Hitler who authorized the SS purge of the SA. The fact that Hitler was attacking capitalism in 1927 does not necessarily mean he had the same views a decade later.
My read of Hitler is that he certainly believed the state should have a strong hand in organizing all parts of society, including business life. He certainly was not any supporter of “free enterprise” as we would understand it. But on the other hand, he seems to have moved from a strong opposition to the rich elites of Germany in his earlier days to co-opting those elites once the Nazi Party became a major factor in German politics, and especially after he became Chancellor and was in charge of the government and economic policy.
A Goebbels speech from 1929, reprinted as a pamphlet and distributed in the hundreds of thousands in 1932:
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htm
Hitler, was above all, a pragmatist when it came to such matters, the bottom line is he understood that ideological purity wasn’t going to get him his war machine, and it was that, that triumphed over all else. He needed to use the people that knew how to do it already....That’s why he didn’t just fire all of the old Prussian Generals from the Wehrmacht, even though personally he despised them.
Precisely. What politicians say and what politicians actually do are different things, even in democratic countries. Ho Chi Minh made a lot speeches that made him sound like George Washington. What he did in post-colonial North Vietnam was the complete opposite. Khomeini sad a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think it's safe to say that prior to the Shah's overthrow, Khomeini did not blurt out to the faces of his Communist allies that he would hunt down and kill every last one of them, even though that's what he did after coming to power.
Anyone familiar with the work of Karl Marx will recognize this particular bombastic style.
Yes, it was just another lethal bout of infighting in a particularly nasty and dysfunctional family, a family to which Americsn conservatism is not related.
As for people saying one thing and doing another, or saying different things to different audiences... let's just say it would be far too easy, in the very different worlds in which I live and work, to say things that would make me look better to some people. When posting something, I try to remind myself of a lesson taught my Army Public Affairs — the power of Google to find out things some would like to keep hidden.
Men's words have a tendency to show up at the most inconvenient times, and the internet has made that much easier to do to people.
Yep. American conservatism is simply unrelated to the historic European Right, which is merely a different incarnation of the same authoritarianism craved by the Left on both sides of the Atlantic.
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