“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance” - Adolph Hitler. May Day, 1927
That is not something a capitalist would say.
A socilaist would say they would protect private property because socialists lie to promote their agenda. They also gulag people and oven them.
So, Hitler was a socialist. And therefore a liar. But he wasn’t lying in that quote, because it fits neatly with your premise?
I’m just trying to picture Norman Thomas or Bertran Russel shoving someone into an oven. Nope, can’t do it.
Unless he was lying.
It’s getting so the only people we can trust are the Classic Liberals. Thank god they always tell the truth.
It blows the doors off your points.
Which is a more likely lie?:
A) A capitalist who pretends to be a socialist. A person who likes free markets but hates the thought of six million uber-capitalist Jews not being inside ovens dying.
B) A socialist who pretends to be a capitalist. A person who likes the control of the market in govenment hands… of which he is the leader who also likes control the flames of the ovens that kill six million uber-capitalist jews.
A free market is free.
A socialist market is not free.
The first things the Nazis did was to make their ranks surrender their minds. The market was never free. The minds of the Nazis were already controlled. The appearance was meaningless.
The Nazi party controlled EVERYTHING. Schools, media, industry, fun.
Hitler was their leader.
Fun - State provided free of charge in their “Strength through Joy” program
Health care - State provided free of charge in their Volksgesundheit
Education - State provided free of charge in free and mandatory state schools. Private schools were converted to state schools or closed down.
Do you know what Socialism is? Seriously? It goes beyond economics.
Well, it blows, that much is for sure…
Not sure what you mean by this, but I’m pretty sure I don’t like it. Very, very thin ice.
Actually, from the late 19th Century to the time of the Holocaust, a great many Eastern European Jews, possibly a majority, were socialists (in their politics; no doubt many were simultaneously capitalists in their conduct).
Do you? Seriously. Hint: it is not synonymous with authoritarianism or dictatorship.
I gave this thread a quick skim a couple of pages ago and just as quickly realized it was not worth my time.
Having said that, I am now taking the time to tell you that you’re completely clueless as to what socialism means in its current form and as practiced in the majority of the EU.
Perhaps it’s time you took Tom’s advice from an earlier post and devoted some of all that free time you appear to have, to read some books, catch-up on current and past affairs and stop revising history and making-up horse manure as it suits your needs.
In any event, welcome to The Dope. Mayhaps we’ll meet again in a more substantial and/or less nonsensical thread. The Pit might be a good place to tell you what I really think, but as I said before, I really don’t like to waste my time. As it is, you’re more than welcomed to keep this one all to yourself.
Socialism =! totalitarianism.
A capitalist, authoritarian dictatorship?
I had a poster try to tell me here that Hitler practiced an odd form of Capitalism.
Hitler was a socialist.
Berkeley.edu says: Socialism - adherence to the theory social organization which believes the proprietorship and the authority of the means of production, capital, land, etc. should belong to the entire community.
(I swear it is like people think Hitler had nothing to do with the Nazis)
The community is the collective.
Nazis were collectivists. Nazi’s hated individuality.
Nazis were textbook collectivists.
Nazis were collectivism gone wild.
There were no worse collectivists in the 20th century.
Totalitarianism is incompatible with Nazi collectivism. Totalitarianism is definitely not “an odd form of Capitalism”.
Socialism is the economic system of choice for the collectivist.
Nazi Germany had more free social programs from cradle to grave than any country I can think of. State paid entertainment? Now that is socialism. Can’t have any private companies making duckets from entertainment in socialistic Nazi Germany, can we?
Lordy. It is like Hitler’s propaganda machine is still around.
In the word’s of Hitler’s contemporary, George Orwell:
I know. I would never believe Hitler was a good socialist, or even a good totalitarianist. He sucked at both, but he tried to be a socialist. He claimed to be one and worked hard at it.
In Hitler’s own words:
"In 1919-20 and also in 1921 I attended some of the bourgeois meetings. Invariably I had the same feeling towards these as towards the compulsory dose of castor oil in my boyhood days"
Hated Capitalism… interesting. He admits this in a fierce sentence of disgust towards Capitalism.
"If the National Socialist Movement should fail to understand the fundamental importance of this essential principle, if it should merely varnish the external appearance of the present State and adopt the majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground. For that reason it would not have the right to call itself a philosophy of life. If the social programme of the movement consisted in eliminating personality and putting the multitude in its place, then National Socialism would be corrupted with the poison of Marxism, just as our national-bourgeois parties are. "
Collectivism over individuality… how odd that it is a running theme.
“The National Socialist Movement, which aims at establishing the National Socialist People’s State, must always bear steadfastly in mind the principle that every future institution under that State must be rooted in the movement itself.”
Socialist movement. NOT the State. What is a totalitarian movement without roots in the State? It is a collective SOCIALIST movement.
“I am a Socialist” (not a Marxist socialist)
May 21, 1930
That reading is particularly eye opening. Hitler hated Capitalism. In his own words it disgusted him for people to set their own destiny. He seemed to hate Marxism because that brand of socialism
And I found this to be particularly interesting:
**
“The party is all-embracing. It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth. We must therefore develop branches of the party in which the whole of individual life will be reflected. Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism–not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production.”
“Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper…”
“Private property” as conceived under the liberalistic economic order was a reversal of the true concept of property. This “private property” represented the right of the individual to manage and to speculate with inherited or acquired property as he pleased, without regard for the nation."
“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun… I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.” **
Owwww… ooh. “no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself” chee.
Good luck with that.
Now look what you’ve done, you’ve hurt Joe Stalin’s feelings.
Well, it was a lot easier to believe in 1941, when Hitler’s command-economy state had just trounced the laissez-faire Brits and French so thoroughly on the battlefield, and when Stalin’s brutal tactics had succeeded in turning an underdeveloped, war-devastated, agrarian Russia into a major industrial and military power in less than two decades (something that could never have happened, if Russia had had a free market economy during that period).
Why would living under Stalin’s collectivism be worse than living under Nazi collectivism?
You still were allowed to think for yourself under Stalin… even though you could not do what you thought, you could grumble to most people.
Under Hitler’s Nazi collective you could not think, do or say anything even remotely against the collective, under penalty of death.
Really? Because I just Googled “Nazi Thought Suppression Ray,” and the evidence seemed mixed, at best.
So now Hitler was some sort of cross between Kreskin and Santa Claus, who knew what you were thinking, so be Aryan for goodness sake?
And what of Hitler’s hierarchy of racial purity, with the Master Race at the top, and the Jews and Gypsies at the bottom? How is that a classless society?
As has been pointed out, Hitler did not nationalize German industry in any way that even remotely compares to Soviet collectivization, so your whole argument goes down faster than Eva Braun in a bunker.
For the good of the collective, the National Socialist party shut down all schools that taught individualism and free thought.
The collective did not complain.
No. It ignores my points and history in order to invent a parallel world in which rhetoric and catch-phrases are not merely more important than reality, they supersede reality.
The Jews are all (evil) things to all (evil) men. In Hitler’s language, the vast majority of the Jews were Socialists and Communists. In the real world, there was a certain level of correspondence based on the fact that many prominent Jewish leaders were in the forefront of the Socialist movement. Über-Kapitalist would not have been among the adjectives he associated with many Jews.
Time to show you actually have both an understanding and a supporting reference for such a claim. Yes, the Nazis controlled the schools and media. It would be well for you to provide evidence that the Nazis actually controlled industry. Did they dictate which items could be produced or the number that could be produced? Did they set the prices that could be charged (in the years before the war)? Did they set limits on what people could purchase?
Waving your hands and crying “control” is little more than a rhetorical device if it cannot be demonstrated in actual actions that the government employed.
Yes, but it begins with economics. You appear to have confused authoritarian governance, that has been employed by governments under numerous different economic schemes, with a particular economic system that you appear to not understand very well.
The Kraft durch Freude program was certainly in line with socialistic practices. It was also not very far out of line with many other European practices.
Universal health care had its origins in the socialist movement. (And it is currently employed in a wide range of basically Capitalist nations.)
Education has been free and compulsory in the United States from the period before the rise of Socialism. The closing of private schools was an exercise in authoritarianism, not socialism.
So, who set the prices on food? Who dictated the amounts of what varieties of foods could be produced? Who set the prices and quantities for cars, houses, beds, stoves, radios, shoes, etc.? Unless you can point to those being determined by the government (prior to the start of the war, as during the war many countries (including the U.S.) controlled many elements of production to prevent interference with the war effort), you have not demonstrated a Socialist society. You have only pointed to an authoritarian society.