Socialism = NAZI (Hitler was a socialist)

THE OMINOUS PARALLELS ^ | Leonard Peikoff

[My Identity]

Stalin and Brezhnev did NOT allow the wealthy industrialists and landed gentry to keep their private wealth. On THIS score, Hitler is much closer to American free marketers than Communists or Socialists.

Hitler allowed the industrialists to keep their wealth, provided that they did his bidding. This was a state regulated economy where the penalty was death. It has nothing to do with a free market system. In virtually every way, it is similar to the soviet model. Per the article:

Under communism, there is collective ownership of property DEJURE.
Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership DE FACTO.

It is a difference without meaning in this context.

[Tribune7]

When I was young the traditional comparsion of isms was inculcated in me, probably through my public school.

This well-know comparison can be -- forgive the poor use of html -- graphed:

Nazi .....US . . ..Communism

I have since come to understand that a better comparision is

Anarchy . . .US . . . . . Totalitarian

Of course totalitarians includes Communists and Nazis.

You can play games with the shades of meanings of words, especially if they are redefined in an Orwellian fashion. The eugenics movement renamed itself Planned Parenthood when the Nazis made the first word unfashionable.

The Nazis and the Communists both put the state ahead of the individual. American Constitutionalism puts the individual first and declares the state to be a servant -- one which must be constantly watched.

I agree that free-marketers are very cool towards unions. But they are also cool towards corporate ogilopies and monopolies.And I agree 100 percent that there are a lot of capitalists who don't believe in the free market and are a-holes in general.

[Tribune7]

Great post

[My Identity]

The free-market and Nazis is a contradiction in terms. You can't compare them without seriously miscontruing one or both.

Near as I can tell, totalitarian means left-wing. The communists, socialists, collectivists, fascists, and nazis all treat dissent in the same fashion. If you have read the posts in this thread, you'll see Hitler was a socialist.

[Yardstick]

BillinDenver, you wrote in your #174:

And [Hitler's] solution was to ban all unions except the Nazi party's union, outlaw strikes, jail labor leaders and anyone who attempted to organize, etc. Sounds like a businessman's wet dream in America.

But a businessman's wet dreams don't define an economic system. The actions of those who are overseeing the system determine what sort of system it is. A businessman can dream all he wants about getting the government to unfairly gang up with him against his employees and his competitors, but in a capitalist system those dreams will remain unfulfilled. Capitalism is about the separation of business and the state, not their collusion. The fact that Hitler was willing to hop in bed with the big industrialists is proof that he wasn't a capitalist.

In your #178 you wrote:

However, Stalin and Brezhnev did NOT allow the wealthy industrialists and landed gentry to keep their private wealth. On THIS score, Hitler is much closer to American free marketers than Communists or Socialists.

True, I guess. But doesn't this really just serve to prove how flaky and far-out the the Soviet communists were? Hitler had a silly mustache but at least he allowed business owners to keep their businesses. And there is still a profound difference between Hitler and the American free marketers. In the US, business owners have a right to the wealth they create; in Nazi Germany their wealth could be taken from them if the Fuhrer willed it, since, according to Ernst Huber,

The authority of the Fuhrer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited.

Capitalism requires a limited government.

You wrote:

And American free marketers haven't been very kind to organized labor historically either. Up until striking was made legal in the 30's, strikes were frequently suppressed with private police or National Guard units.

Well, being a free marketer -- and being consistent about it -- means believing in a free labor market, too. Workers are free to strike and employers are free to fire them for striking, but forcing your workers to get back to work is about as anti free market as it gets. In a capitalist system you can no more force people to work for you than you can force people to buy your product. So it seems to be a bit of a strawman to call these guys free marketers in regards to their dealings with labor, which they clearly were not, and then to compare them with Hitler (plus, by the time WWII rolled around, the US had pretty much seen the end of violent strike-breaking).

[My Identity]

bump

[freeforall]

Thanks for a graet post.Stryker asked for profs who would agree with the proposition before us, well here we go.

Kenneth H. W. Hilborn {Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Western Ontario, Kenneth Hilborn's primary field of specialization is 20th Century international relations with an emphasis on the impact of ideologies. During the Cold War, he wrote extensively on international issues for newspapers and anti-Communist periodicals. He reported from Australia, Berlin, Cyprus, Nationalist China (Taiwan and Quemoy), southern Africa and Southeast Asia (including South Vietnam). For several years, his book reviews appeared from coast to coast in Canadian newspapers of the Thomson chain.

Professor Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), was the outstanding representative of the so-called "Austrian School" of economics. He was world-renowned for his research, writing, and teaching, and long served as a member of the staff of The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

Publication of The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912 won him early recognition as one of Europe's foremost economists. Among his many other books and articles, one of his most important contributions is his Socialism, first published in 1922. However, he is best known for his work published in the United States, notably Omnipotent Government (1944), Bureaucracy (1944), Planned Chaos (1947), Human Action (1949), Planning For Freedom (1952), The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (1956), Theory and History (1957), and Epistemological Problems of Economics (1960).

In 1926, Dr. Mises founded the Austrian Institute of Business Cycle Research. From then until the Anschluss of Austria by Germany in 1938, the Institute was one of the centers of economic and statistical research in Europe. For more than twenty years, Dr. Mises taught economics at the University of Vienna. From 1934 to 1940, he occupied the chair of International Economic Relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies at Geneva, Switzerland. He lectured as a guest at various universities and institutions in Great Britain, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico.

Professor Walter Block {Professor Walter Block, formerly senior economist with the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, and recently-past professor of economics at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Massachusetts, is now chair of the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway Arkansas.

How many more do I need or is their a magic number to be valid?

[My Identity]

Interesting and related post:
Orwell, words, politics and the war for freedom

A small quote:

The ugly truth is that there is no difference at all between those monsters who are supported to be at one "extreme" on this fictional "spectrum" and those at the other extreme of that spectrum. Why? There is no spectrum, and there never has been a spectrum per se.

Those deemed at the "extreme right wing" (whatever that silly phrase is intended to mean) are supposedly fascists. The very muddling of Fascism, National Socialism and the Phalangist Party is bad enough. Fascism for much of its reign over Italy was anti-anti-Semitic (i.e. condemned anti-Semitism) and Fascist Italy was the primary geopolitical opponent of Nazi Germany for much of that period.

But pretending that somehow the National Socialist German Workers Party was "right wing" and that if America (or Amerika?) moves too far to the "right" then it will end up with concentration camps and Gestapo, while if it moves too far to the "left" then it will end up with gulags and KGB, is absurd. Moving in the direction of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Washington and George Mason always moves away from totalitarian nightmares.

[stryker]

An intelligent reply. My problems with it are these. First, you are trying to impose a new definition of the left and the right on a social science that has always defined the left and the right based upon the liberal/conservative split that developed around the writings of John Locke and Edmund Burke. I agree with most everything you wrote when imposing this new paradigm, where the power of the state is measured to the left, and its' diminishing power is considered moving to the right. But that is not the historical model. No one knows what you are talking about without first making clear that you have changed paradigms from what is generally accepted to one that is used primarily by libertarians.

Second, the new paradigm that you use is not sufficient to distinguish between fascism and socialism. While both may result in omnipotent states, there are very real differences between the two that must be taken into account; differences that are best explained based on the classical left/right spectrum. In the case of fascism, there is in fact no nationalization of industry. It remains in private hands, and slave labor is provided by the state to the profit of individual owners of the means of production. Additionally, differences between the populace are accentuated: the state promotes racism and intolerance and promotes a supposedly superior, indiginous people to an elevated position over all others. These are not theoretical matters. They are actual acts that fascism has shown itself to do. Additionally, fascism raises the symbols of nationalism, usually adding new ones, but nevertheless symbols that revere the traditions of the fascist society, to the level of worship. Do not fool yourself that there was anything Christian about Hitler's Germany. One worshipped the State and the Fuhrer, and could be shot for worshipping "that Jewish bastard," quoting Hitler.

On the other hand, socialist societies have nationalized the land and industries of the countries in which socialists have come to power. They have vastly expanded the rights of women and minorities within those societies, and have entered upon programs of forced equality of the sexes, races, etc. I'm sure you saw FOX's coverage of the school's for women and the minority tribe's in Afghanistan set up under the socialist government that once existed there. Again, these are actions that really occur and are different from actions that occur under fascism.

Now here is where you do make a serious mistake and why this issue is so important. You state basically that the works of Marx and Lenin are synonomous. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is here that libertarians must be very aware of the distinctions between the left and right on the classical scale. Marx wrote that the western industrial democracies would evolve into socialism and then into communism. He also developed the idea that overproduction by those countries would lead to colonialism and periodic wars when the international markets would be redistributed between those industrialized countries. With his involvement in the First International, Marx tentatively wrote that it might be possible for a colony or third world country during a war for national liberation to skip the capitalist stage and move directly to forced socialism if a dedicated cadre of communist party members could be ready to seize power at the opportune moment.

Lenin, in his "What is to be Done," and "Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism," took this idea and developed the actual technique and structure that such a party would have to use to seize and maintain power against the capitalist efforts to recolonize a country. Hence, it is Lenin that promoted the use of force by the state, other than democratic, to seize and maintain power by socialists, not Marx.

But this is very important to us as libertarians. If we examine closely current events in the United States, we find that Marx was absolutely correct, not the failed theorotician our masters would have us believe. What else is the new tolerance that we must all accept that states not only must we tolerate others differences and opinions but those differences and opinions are as valid and true as our own? What else is affirmative action and Title IX and abortion on demand except the evolution of the United States into a socialist society? What else is the redistribution of wealth through the graduated income tax and the welfare system than creeping socialism? What else is the erasure of our heritage and history in our public schools so that our children now know more about Pocohantas than George Washington and Thomas Paine? What else is the gradual abolition of our right to own and bear arms? And I could go on and on.

My point is that there is value in remembering the traditional left/right spectrum placing socialism with its nationalization of industry, redistribution of wealth, and destruction of the traditional institutions of a society on the left and fascism with its' nationalization of minority groups as a labor force, its' raising of a single race to privileged status, and its' not mere reverence, but worship of the traditional institutions and symbols of the society on the right. Through this paradigm we can measure how far we have moved from the center, where there is balance and safety.

I agree that in the end what matters is whether we are free. Therefore, a paradigm such as you use is very beneficial in measuring simply how far we are from totalitarianism, whether it be totalitarianism of the left or right. But we should also be very aware of which type of totalitarianism is the biggest threat at any given moment. The classical paradigm used in political science departments across this nation does that job well, and demonstrates that the danger comes now from the left.

My hat is off to you, My Identity, for an excellent argument. Stryker

[My Identity]

My hat is off to you, My Identity, for an excellent argument. Stryker

Thank you for your thoughtful reply and kind words.

I will need to respond with a few comments on your reply a bit later.
But for now...
Best Freegards,

[Tribune7]

In the case of fascism, there is in fact no nationalization of industry. It remains in private hands, and slave labor is provided by the state to the profit of individual owners of the means of production.

Do you think Sweden is a socialist country? Have they nationalized their industry?

[stryker]

Sweden, like the US, is in transistion, certainly redistributing wealth with an incredibly burdomsome tax system, but capable of going right or left, depending upon what happens in the rest of the world. I notice that the far right on the traditional paradigm of left-communist/right-fascist as extremes is having more and more success in western Europe as refugees pour into the area. Again, the traditional paradigm will serve us well as a gauge to see which way Sweden will go. BTW, Sweden, as a subject unto itself, is not a country I feel very knowledgable in, other than what I read in the papers. Enlighten me.

[tabsternager]

And how many capitalists do you know want to be controlled by government? Hitler was no capitalist. He hated America and the conservative ideals she stood for. He hated free enterprise. He was the government and he wanted government to have complete control over business. Some people made money under Hitler for sure, as long as they did what he wanted them to. That isn't capitalism -- that's fascism.

[stryker]

BTW, I forgot to mention that a strict constitutionalist would be a liberal. See John Locke's writings. Compare Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. These are the philosophical writings upon which the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were founded, and they stand in stark contradiction to the writings of Edmund Burke. Burke was therefore labelled conservative and Locke, liberal. Hence, what we today call a conservative is actually an historical liberal, and is considered such in political philosophy.

[Tribune7]

Sweden, like the US, is in transistion,

Sweden is generally considered to be a "socialist democracy." The most dominent force in Swedish politics over the last century has been the Social Democratic Party. It advanced causes -- generally considered to be socialists -- such as nationalized health care, wage and price controls, wage and price controls, and a state-controlled agricultural policy.

The Nazis supported and expanded these things too, although many of these policies existed in Germany long before the Nazis came to power.

You could argue that the Nazis were not as dogmatically anti-free market as the Soviets. But they were still socialists.

[Tribune7]

I forgot to mention that a strict constitutionalist would be a liberal.

I agree with you here :-)

Main Entry: lib·er·al·ism
Pronunciation: 'li-b(&-)r&-"li-z&m
Function: noun
Date: 1819
1 : the quality or state of being liberal
2 a often capitalized : a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity b : a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard c : a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties d capitalized : the principles and policies of a Liberal party

---From Merriam-Webster OnLine.

[x]

Interesting article at Enter Stage Right on language and labels in politics.

[freeforall]

Thanks for a good post to MI.I would agree with you that some of us are " trying to impose a new definition of the left and the right on a social science".The reason for this is to advance the notion that a political spectrum should include classic Liberals and Libertarians.This would show the contrast to the statists.

Perhaps the historical model of the left/right is associated with the self interest of those who preserve it in the ivory towers.

The problem I think we might be having is not so much one of definitions as one of the classification of concepts.Perhaps we are using an incorrect genus.If the proper genus were used I think we would then be able to agree on the species that follow.

Perhaps the genus should not be Socialism.Perhaps Collectivism should be the genus and that Socialism,Communism,Facism and Nazism are the species.The other contrast would be Individualism as the genus with Libertarianism,Classic Liberalism etc as the species.

[stryker]

Whether socialism exists depends upon whether the means of production has been nationalized. Either fascists or socialists in ascension or descent can practice mere progressive tax rates, price controls, favoritism in the marketplace, etc. Fascists do not nationalize the means of production, although they often direct the private owners in how it will be used. Nevertheless, the owners get the profits and the power that goes with them. The only nationalization that occurs is the theft of property from minorities, which is given over to party members as their private property. Most everyone seems to be getting this point now, and distinguishing the two forms of statism, but you are beating a dead dog.