I think it would be like a “kind” serial killer. It’s the nature of the beast to be evil?
The Nazis were most definetly socialist. However, notice that they were not Marxist. That is the key difference you must see to understand how they were socialists.
No they weren’t. They weren’t Marxist, weren’t Fabian, weren’t Revisionist, weren’t followers of Prudhomme, weren’t Utopian socialists. You can search the diversity of socialist thought and not find the Nazis. What interested them was nationalism and race, not economics.
What on Earth is this supposed to mean?
Utter and complete nonsense.
Although the little guy was actually member of the SPD, the German Socialist party before he joined the NAP and made it the NSDAP (don’t you just love all these acronyms say) the Nazis were not Socialists. In some cases it could be argued that their politics were just as much extreme left as extreme right, but that has more to do with the fact that right and left stops making sense when examining this monstrous beast of all beats that we review here.
Little mustachio borrowed some ideas from the left – some very few. Fascism and Socialism shares the idea of a strong controlling state machinery. Socialism in all its forms is pro the proletariat, or average worker if you like and con the capitalist class. If you are for instance a Social Democrat the proletariat shall rule through the democratic processes and a strong public sector that protects the common good. If you are for instance a Marxist the proletariat shall rule through the dictatorship of the proletariat after the capitalist class has been ousted through revolution and all property has gone into the collective hands of the commune. This never works since we humans are all flaming egocentric egotists that try to get ahead at the expense of our neighbor as soon as we can, and that’s more fun anyway if you ask me… but that’s another story.
Back to the little guy from Braunau; Nazism does not care about the class struggle, but focuses on the ‘race struggle’. Nazism does not condemn private ownership and profit, to the contrary it promotes it. Nazism does not believe in the equal rights of all and the principle of ‘from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs’ instead it posits the totally whacky idea that there are serf races and master races and that the former shall serve the latter. Nazism does not posit an international unity of the world’s proletariat to the contrary it posits a world free of internationalism (by which Hitler along absurd and disgusting lines meant Jewry).
Hitler a Socialist? Yeah sure, and Stalin was a card carrying US Republican, the GOP misses him.
Sparc
Not by the League of Nations who condemned Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia but couldn’t get anybody in the appeasement-minded international community to do anything about it.
Maybe, but even after the invasion of Ethiopia, Mussolini’s son toured the US and was given a royal reception. He was at least considered “respectable” in some circles, apparently. I recall reading about dinner conversations during this tour where he described the bombing of Ethiopians, and how they opened up beneath his plane “like a flower.”
I think a fair number of Americans and Brits were embracing some of the ideas of fascism during the Great Depression, but then after the war a sort of collective amnesia set in.
“What? No! We always hated the fascists!”
(See Lindbergh, Charles.)
spoke-, actually the election results from the twenties and thirties in both the US and Europe tell quite a different story. There were fascist alternatives in abundance, but they faired pretty badly at the polls, even after 1929 - except in Germany of course.
That there was some popular and very public support for the regimes that eventually formed the Axis is obvious, especially by some very prominent characters as you note. It’s no excuse, but especially in the light of the esthetic ideals of the rich and famous at the time; Fascism can look kind of sexy at a first glance - that is before you feel the fetid smell of ignorance, oppression and death that surrounds the polished leather and all the breathtaking parades.
That some of Hitler’s so called economic reforms were admired and even asked for outside of Germany in 1936-1938 is also unquestionable, but to say that there was a groundswell of support is far, far from the truth.
Sparc
I did not mean to impy that fascism ever had widespread support (and certainly not majority support) in the US or Britain- only that it was considered a “respectable” alternative by a sizeable segment of society. (And yes, that “respectability” was born of naivete.)