I pit the idiots who say the Nazis were "Socialists".

This seems to be a new meme among right wing posters and it really tees me off. Sure, they used the word socialist in the name of their party but so what? I can call myself absolute ruler of the universe and that does not make it objectively so.

Are you sure? Have you tried?

I don’t know if its a new meme, in the early Cold War, there was also much conflation of Nazism and Stalinism. This has reemerged with Obama, and the idea that he is a “socialist.”

I think the main stupidity here is associating “socialist” with some specific political agenda. Mao Tse-Tung, Adolf Hitler, Salvador Allende, Olaf Palme, and Eugene Debs all identified their political movements as “socialist” to one degree or another. Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini both used “Republican” to describe their political positions…if we wanted to be infantile, we could suggest they have the same views as the Republican Party as a consequence.

New?

Even before I was born there are instances of people using the name as a simple way to confuse many.

5 years ago I pointed at many examples of why this idea from many on the right is really silly.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11170652&postcount=21

As pointed by others, once the Nazis took power the German communists and socialists that missed the point learned how “socialist” the Nazis were in practice, the Nazis sent them to concentration camps.

Official name of North Korea

***Democratic ***People’s Republic of Korea

From Wikipedia on the Nazi Party. “Advocacy of a form of socialism by right-wing figures and movements in Germany became common during and after World War I, influencing Nazism.”

Many of the originsl members of the NSDAP espoused such socialism, including the Strasser brothers and Ernst Rohm. Hiter was far more interested in wooing German plutocrats and cleansed much of the Socialist element in the 20s and 30s.

Far from new, alas, It was extant in the Vietnam War era, certainly, and I’m sure predates that. I used to hear it about the same time as the same people were very emphatic about “We’re a Republic, not a Democracy.”

I also know a guy who insists on referring to NPR as “National Socialist Radio.”

These are not the nicest people you’ll ever meet.

All hail E-DUB, absolute ruler of the universe!

How’s that? I can dial the sycophancy up or down, whichever you prefer, O Great One.

And did not deny it later. Socialism was always a key part of the Nazi plan, and they did follow-through on it to some extent. Fascism was specifically developed as an extension and improvement of earlier Socialism, which was increasingly felt to be unworkable. Both Fascism and Leninism were essentially attempts to save a failing socialist worldview, collapsing in the post-WW1 period.

Both Nazism and Communism were competitors to take over the collapsing German state in the interwar period. They used very similar tactics and, as it turned out, had pretty similar leadership - the post-WW2 DDR was awfully like the pre-WW2 Nazi party in practice. The two parties played off of one another and ultimately marginalized other parties. In the end, just about everyone was pushed to support either one extremist group or another.

Which is one reason why it’s a big misnomer to call the Nazis Right-wing, or even really Left-wing. They were Socialists who had no problem with being heartily nationalist and racist, but that wasn’t especially uncommon at the time. They attracted somewhat more support from the establishment types, including old nobles and the investor/capitalist class than the Communists, but mostly these groups were cut from more conservative (literally conservative, as I wanting to keep German traditions or even restore the monarchy) traditions. Like the Communists, they were very much into intimidating/bribing the more moderate parties into support, which worked enough to bring them into power.

As the other thread showed, virtually all the ones that suffered in Europe wonder where the ones (that usually are Americans) that think that the Nazis were not the right wing got their peculiar twisted version of history.

I agree that the traditional right wing/left wing characterizations break down in the diseased cases of Communism and Nazism…but couldn’t one find some weak justification in the theory that the Nazis were favorable to the big land-owners, while the Communists broke up large land-holdings?

At least in the early days, the Nazis played up to the big Prussian Junkers and their large landed estates.

If the Nazis were “socialists,” you’d expect them to try to redistribute wealth, but, instead, they seem to have supported its concentration.

(The Communists, bless their pointy little hypocritical hearts, concentrated property and wealth in the hands of the Party, not of individual “owners.” Big whooping difference, i.e., no difference at all when it comes to practical effects on the common citizenry.)

Back when I was in 8th grade, in Social Studies, it was explained like this:

Capitalism = private ownership of the means of production
Communism = common ownership of the means of production
Socialism = government ownership of the means of production

And the full name of the Nazi party was The National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Whatever.

Your mistake is assuming the Nazis *had *an economic philosophy. They didn’t. Hitler didn’t give a shit about economics as anything more than a tool for achieving his goals.

But then, it’s a very American conceit to assume that economics are the sole basis of the left/right dichotomy.

It’s a propaganda tool. On the one hand, conservatives can blame Nazism on the liberals. That’s an obvious bonus but not really necessary. There are plenty of genuine examples of left-wing extremism out there, so Nazism isn’t really necessary for that purpose.

The important point is to deny the possibility of right-wing extremism. Conservatives have an obvious interest in denying the claim that you can too conservative. They want to be able to argue that no matter how far you’ve gone to the right already, you should always be going further to the right. Opponents of this argument point to Nazism as an obvious example of how it’s possible to go too far to the right. Conservatives are left with two possible counterarguments: defend Nazism (Pat Buchanan, David Irving, and some even crazier people) and deny Nazism (all the sane and semi-sane conservatives).

Actually, Nazism was “Third way”, supposedly a path between capitalism and socialism/communism.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Clinton and Blair are Nazis. Seems like the Nazis just took the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism and made it into one hellish mix. With a little bit of paganism mixed in just in case you were confused about how crazy they were.

However, I will take the opportunity to needle some of the more populist lefties out there by reminding them that socialism and nationalism do not mix well. Tends to bring out the worst in people.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure the Moral Majority were either.

WHen you go too far to the right on the American spectrum, you get to Washington/Jefferson/Madison, etc., not Adolf Hitler. When you go far enough to the left, it leads to the same place regardless of what country you’re in. But since right-wing is generally considered conservative, what constitutes right-wing will vary by country. For a country with a history of monarchy, monarchists will be right-wing, for example. In the US, it means going back to founding principles of small government and federalism.

So do you feel it’s possible to go too far to the right?

Quite. The Nazi’s were about power and their motivating ideology was nothing do do with ‘socialism’ as Hitler showed when he had the Strasser faction all murdered in The Night of The Long Knives.

In a lot of ways Nazi ideology was an unconstrained by sanity extension of all the blood and soil nonsense common in Imperial Germany leading up to WW1.

There’s nothing either socialist or conservative about wanting to liquidate millions of human beings for insane ideological reasons.

Sure. It’s inadvisable in a modern, 21st century democracy to go back to the days where the government wasn’t even allowed to build roads and there was no social safety net at all.