With Switzerland it was a case of: why do today, what you could do tommorow?
oops I actually meant to say:
why do today, what you can put off til tommorow?
The Libertarian Nazi Green Party is about as neutral and ambigous as they get, hence it’s probably a joke.
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Operation Tannenbaum? Am I reading that correctly- Operation Christmas Tree???
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Nitpick: Isn’t there doubt to the assertion that 4 of Hitler’s ex lovers all committed suicide?
As for my $.02: I side with Scylla on the interpretation of Hitler’s political leanings. Similar to Stalin- totalitarianism in its raw form.
Actually, For Hitler, his totalitarianism had a buddy system for capitalists. Stalin had just himself as the state; capitalists were out of the picture.
—Switzerland would have been eventually invaded.—
It would have been Napolean’s Russia. The cost of succeeding would have far outweighed the benefits.
I can’t cite it, but I remember reading that the opinion of some in Switzerland were “ha ha, sure, come on and try it”
Susanann:
Bolding mine.
Sorry, what?
I dunno about you, but usually when I think about Hitler, “not wanting people to die” doesn’t really spring readily to mind as a characteristic I associate with him.
Beyond that, getting war to end quickly makes sense for a conqueror, especially one as total as Hitler. It frees up troops for the next invasion.
Susanann, you got a cite for all that?
:rolleyes:
Ahh, a discussion of the person that Gertrude Stein proposed be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? Yes, another favorite “moderate,” Adolf Hitler.
Here are some pretty interesting articles by Michael Parenti on the role of the right in the rise of Fascism and the origins of WWII:
Would it be easier to explain if the axis weren’t taught on a square, with quadrants, but instead a sphere model? The fact that extreme left and extreme right are very similar suggests, to me anyway, that instead of being shown as polar opposites on a graph, they’d more accurately be represented on a sphere that curves around so the two extremes are side by side. [sub]Feel free to tell me it’s a dumb idea, that’s just how I look at it, and I know my views are occasionally bizarrely unique.[/sub]
Not true. He never got any cooperation from the Soviets, who were the only power in Europe trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition in the late 1930’s. You are correct, though that he did get plenty of help from the U.S., France and Great Britain.
Yes true. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, that is.
They got cheap oil and were allowed to train troops inside the Soviet-Union, so they could evede the Versaille Treaty.
Not to mention the shared invasion of Poland.
Russian oil trains were still crossing the border the day Barbarossa started.
True in that it has to be either black or white, I agree with other posters that fascism is a third colour. It has conservative elements and socialist elements. It combined left with right. That is exactly why, in its day, it was seen as a very modern model, the successor of capitalism and socialism.
Absolutely. The various favours of fascism appear self-contradictory and cut across the traditional political spectrum deliberately. At its most generalised level, fascism is all things to all people.
It implies a classless, unified society while maintaining the economic power of those who already hold it. It implies free market economics and rigid state controls. It suggests freedom in the sense of control of the national “destiny” while restricting individual freedom. It often involves the personalisation of the nation and the state while maintaining a vast, impersonal bureaucracy.
I acknowledge these are generalisations, but in one sense I see fascism as an unusually pragmatic system, borrowing economic and social theory from left and right to appeal to every part of society, regardless of any inherent contradiction.
Um, Chumpsky, you have heard of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, right? Ya know, the one by which Germany and Russia agreed to split up Poland between them - without bothering to ask the Poles if they would mind? The one that allowed Germany to start WWII?
But I guess that doesn’t count, right?
Sua
I am actually surprised that this is being debated. Every written source I have seen on the matter (outside the SDMB) has considered Nazism to be an extreme-right movement. I guess I am just not understanding some of the logical couplets here; is the OP trying to convince us that Nazism was not right-wing because it was not conservative?
Honestly, I know there are disagreements about the definitions of political terms, but I think this is more a problem of set theory. Submitted:
Liberalism and communism are a couple of (distinct) left-wing political philosophies
Conserviatsm and fascism are a couple of (distinct) right-wing political philosophies
(To that you could add "cats and dogs are a couple of (distinct) mammalian species.)
It’s been noted, correctly, that Stalin-style Communism and Hitler-style Fascism have a lot in common. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that when a couple of charismatic murderous sociopaths enter politics, they act a lot alike. Sometimes they fight; sometimes they cooperate; don’t look to their stated political philosophies and expect it will allow you to predict anything. Was Idi Amin a leftist or a rightist? Who cares? Left and right are valid political concepts but they have their limits, especially when applied to extremes of political thought (or extremes of criminal behaviour).
I think we’d all be better off if we would quit assuming that the typical German rightist of the late 30s must be substantially similar to the typical American rightist of the present day. Unless you expect cats and dogs to get along because they are both mammals.
Another history major checking in. Hitler and Nazism, and Fascism in general definitely labeled as rightist type political philosophies. Particularly the development of Nazism, which was developed as an anti-communism. My history department wasn’t particularly liberal either. In fact quite the opposite. Boris’s post certainly some good observations.
Read the link I provided above.
The Nazi-Soviet pact was a non-aggression treaty, not an agreement to split up Poland. It was signed by Stalin as a last-minute attempt to avert a Nazi invasion of Russia, after repeated offers to the U.K. and France to form an anti-Nazi coalition.
The real active collaboration with the Nazis was between the U.K., in the famous Chamberlain-Hitler Pact, referred to antiseptically in the west as “Munich,” which actually did hand over Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Chamberlain was an active co-conspirator with Hitler, even putting pressure on the Czechs to give up without a fight, and immediately handing over Czech assets in the U.K. to Hitler.
Chumpsky, please tell me you’re not seriously defending Stalin.
Yes it was. There was a secret protocol. Pay close attention to Article II
Not in general, but with regard to the Nazis. The Soviets were the only major power willing to confront the Nazis in the 1930’s. I am trying to point out the almost blinding double standards regarding the western powers and the Soviets regarding the rise of Nazism.
It was the western powers who actively collaborated with Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930’s, while the Soviets attempted to form an anti-Nazi alliance. The “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” as it is referred to, is often pointed to as evidence that the Soviets were just as bad as the Nazis, “kindred spirits” in the words of George Will. This, however, is a gross misunderstanding of the history and context of the 1930’s. To quote from the Parenti article I linked to above:
"With a few exceptions, like Winston Churchill, Western leaders were more concerned with the bolshevik specter than with the fascist reality. They were uneasy about Hitler’s emerging power, but they didn’t look upon fascism with the same loathing and fear that they did communism. Unlike the communists, the fascists were not a threat to private enterprise. If anything, the fascists had crushed socialist organizations in Germany and Italy and had made these countries safer for private capital. …
In other words, I’m not saying that Chamberlain necessarily loved Hitler, although there were plenty of leaders in the West who did. There was Henry Ford in America, who was an open Nazi admirer, and a number of other American plutocrats and a number of people in England also. But Chamberlain’s feeling was, if I have to choose between Nazism and Hitler or the risk–even the risk–of Soviet influence in Germany, then we will take Nazism. They could much better live with the horrible reality of fascism than the future imagined risk of socialism."
That being said, Chamberlain did hand over Czechoslovakia to Hitler, and Stalin had tried before that to form an anti-fascist alliance. The Soviet Union was also the only government to send aid to the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. Of course, Stalin bears some of the blame for Hitler’s rise, because if the Soviets hadn’t insisted that the German Communists not entered into any sort of alliance with the Social Democrats, Hitler probably wouldn’t have gotten elected.