If someone’s political worldview is entirely outside our own, you think they have to be destroyed? Substitute religion for political in this, and you get Jihad.
You skipped over a very important phrase in that final sentence.
But fascists, as I said, feel that the master group is an inherent characteristic. Communists feel that class is a learned behavior. Marxist doctrine is that any child can grow up to be a good Communist in the right environment. But the Nazis never thought that a Jewish child could be taught to be an Aryan.
In the specific case of the Nazis, though, the destruction of other worldviews was, in fact, the entire point. Nazism holds as its core belief that “races” are in a state of constant, neverending conflict, and that the highest calling for a race is war against other races. The purpose of the apparatus of a Nazi state is war; not justice, not prosperity, but war. Justice and prosperity would be the eventual results of triumph in war. The West and the Communists came into conflict because they had competing worldviews and interests. The Nazis were in conflict with the West and the Communists because conflict WAS their worldview.
Peace with Nazi Germany was not possible. Their very purpose was war; whatever enemy they faced, they would always create another, because that’s what Nazism is all about. You can live with a communist neighbour, or a monarchist neighbour. You can live next to someone with a different religion. You can’t live peacefully next to a Nazi, because sooner or later they’re coming over the border, because that’s what Nazis do.
Well, I think the point is that early on in its development the Nazi Party did have some some socialistic elements, such as public ownership of industry, in its ideology and platform (although also racist and other elements that have always been anathema to almost everyone else who has ever called themself a socialist). Hitler did not found the party, and was not one of the original members. However, once Hitler and his allies gained control of the party, any who still adhered to any vestiges of socialism were purged, and sometimes murdered. That was what the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 was all about: getting rid of Röhm, the last significant Nazi with any remaining socialist ideals, and his followers. Despite the fact that Röhm and the Brownshirt SA stormtroopers, who he led, had probably done more than anyone to win Hitler the Chancellorship, he and many other Brownshirts were murdered, and we were left with the Nazis who we know and hate, the ones against whom WWII was fought, and who tried to carry out the “final solution”. By that time ther ws nothing socialist about them at all.
One thing I have never quite understood, incidentally, is why Hitler himself continued to publicly wear the SA Brownshirt uniform long after he had destroyed the Brownshirt organization. I do not know whether there was some some sort of rump of the SA organization remaining in the party after the Night of the Long Knives, or if, after that, Hitler was the only ostensible member, but in either case it is odd that he continued to symbolically associate himself with them long after they had ceased to be of any significance to the Nazi party, and after he had repudiated much of what they stood for.
The SA still existed after 1934. The Night of the Long Knives was directed against Rohm and other leaders of the organization not the organization as a whole. Hitler held the title of Supreme SA-Leader from 1930 until his death. Rohm was the SA Chief of Staff and ran the organization on a day-to-day basis. When Rohm was killed, he was replaced in that position by Viktor Lutze.
Old joke about the Soviet system:
“Whats the difference between capitalism and communism?”
“In capitalism, man exploits his fellow man. With communism, it’s the other way around.”
Fascism was an outgrowth of the socialist movement. They both share a critique of the capitalistic system, the wastefulness of competition. They thought it was wasteful to have McDonalds competing with Burger King and Wendys. So much money wasted on advertising against each other and redundant bureaucracies. Also the competition forced down prices which forced down wages. Competition also had the potential to close down business and put all the workers out of work and waste all the money the businesses had used to build itself. If you elimate all of the competition and the profits that went to the owners, who did nothing useful, then there would be enough money for all the workers to live good lives.
So the socialists saw this and their answer was to take the restaurants from their owners and open up Government Hamburgers which government officials would run and since they did not have to worry about competition workers would be paid generously and since there would be no profits prices would be lower so the workers could afford to eat there.
Fascism is different in that instead of the government opening up Government Hamburgers they would simply call the heads of the restaurants together and tell them that they would no longer compete with each other. The government would decide how much they could charge and how much they paid there workers. That way the prices would be low enough for workers to eat there and salaries generous enough for workers to live a good life.
National Socialism grew out of the German experience in WW1. Traditional socialism was international in belief and said that the working man’s enemy was capitalists and not workers in another country. WW1 forced socialists to make a choice between being a nationalist and being a socialist. Most people chose being a nationalist and supported the war, Mussolini was kicked out of the Socialist party for his support of the war. After the war the National Socialists in Germany and the Fascist party in Italy started their own parties to differentiate themselves from the internationally minded traditional socialist. They would ally with other nations but their primary focus was on making their own nations as great as possible.
The term Socialism is one country, is a Stalinist slogan. Traditional communist theory was that as soon as communists took power in a country they needed to start exporting revolution as hard as they possibly could. This sentiment was identified most closely with Trotsky. Stalin on the other hand, wanted to build the USSR into a great power and then use that power to export revolution. There was nothing nationalistic about it. They were still devoted to the cause of the international revolution, the Internationale was the unofficial national anthem until the latter part of WW2 when nationalism was needed to help the war effort.
Not sure when that took place in history, Fascism did not come from socialism, very early the Right took over and eventually dismissed virtually all left ideas that the fascist parties had on paper.
I disagree. Socialism (and Communism) is based on the idea of the “people” taking over businesses. Fascism is based on the idea of the government taking over both the people and businesses.
And socialism and communism have always been strongly internationalist. Their argument is that class ties transcend any national loyalties. Nationalist parties are, by definition, not internationalist.
Nationalism is a rejection of socialism not an outgrowth of it. The fact that the Nazis used the “socialist” is no more meaningful than North Korea’s and East Germany’s use of the word “democratic” - it was just a slogan to put a happy face on a regime that had no substance of real socialism or democracy.
“Those whose only god is War,” as Wm. Marston had Hippolyta put it.
Remember that opposition to the Axis wasn’t over their domestic economic agenda; it was because they invaded everybody at once and blatantly meant to keep going until they had the whole region under their thumb. I’m not sure how well known it was that there were plans to exterminate over half the populace of each German-conquered nation, then bring in Germans to settle, and assimilate the survivors into a Mega-Germany. But the conquest and the concentration camps were enough to anger the world.
And of course Imperial Japan was treating the Co-Prosperity Sphere like the, “We rule and kill you at will,” Sphere.
Utter fallacy. The person who thinks along these lines and carries this understanding has either been reading Jonah Goldberg’s god-awful tome and paean to the US Right, Liberal Fascism, or has precious few educational terms of reference.
Not really true at all. The only significant business support the early Nazi party had was from Fritz Thyssen, he was probably the first true upper class, wealthy German to support the Nazis. Prior to that their primary demographic were angry young people who were usually very working class and very poor, who blamed the Jews for much of their problems and who were opposed to the Communists.
In early post-war Germany you had a major Communist movement then lots of fractured right wing nationalist parties. Some of the nationalists embraced labor-minded principles, others were militarists and even some were monarchists, the Nazis tried to basically appeal to a wide audience of people who only really had in common that they were radical and anti-Communist, many of them were veterans of WWI.
The Night of the Long Knives is actually when the Nazis started to seriously get the support of the business class. After becoming Chancellor Hitler wanted to cement his power, and two groups he had been courting for a long time but had been unable to firmly get in his camp were the wealthy upper class industrialists and the regular army general staff who were more traditionally conservative and turned off by the more radical elements of Nazism.
I think you can make an argument that socialism was one of the influences on fascism. If you look at a lot of the early Fascists; Mussolini, Olivetti, Corridoni, etc., came out of the Italian Socialist Party, and a lot of the ones that didn’t had syndicalist backgrounds. It ended up rejecting a lot of Marxist and Socialist ideas, but I don’t know if I’d be so quick to say that Socialism wasn’t one of the ideological influences of fascism. It certainly took, if nothing else, socialist ideas of mass mobilization and popular will, as well as the idea of a socially and politically activist population, which was different from the traditional elitist right wing ideas of mass quiescence.
Don’t get support mixed up with belief. Thyssen and the angry young people may have been the believers but there were businessmen who were supporters. They slipped money to the Nazis for them to rent halls and print pamphlets and they suggested to the police and the courts that they look the other way and not crack down on the Nazis. But they didn’t show up at the rallies because they weren’t really Nazis. They just thought the Nazis would be a useful tool for keeping the rabble under control. Their real political allegiance was to the more mainstream conservative parties.
As pointed by the historians, the problem with that is that suddenly we have to ignore and forget were the right did go, in the case of Germany racism and antisemitism was a very popular idea, it was indeed a huge part of the mass mobilization and activism of the day.
There is an argument - and one to which I happen to subscribe - that the rise of Nazism was in some ways inevitable.
The Great War had done away with at least ten European empires (e.g. the Ottoman, The Austro-Hungarian, the Spanish, the Belgium, the German etc.) After the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, the outcome of which was utterly ruinous for Germany (the French and the US particularly made great efforts to ensure that Germany’s war reparation payments went far beyond being merely punitive); the country was on its knees in every sense of the term - and hence ripe for rabble-rousing ne’er-do-wells like Herr Hitler to take advantage of the national malaise.
If a country cannot feed or cloth itself (and bearing in mind this was a country still run by the post-imperial Prussian officer class at the time), then its pride and national identity is tested to straining point - so all it takes is an opinionated gobshite to tell the starving masses the two things they want to hear: who’s to blame (the Jews and the Bolsheviks) for their lot in life - and of whom to be scared (the Jews and the Bolsheviks, again).
Having mapped the root-cause of their pain (real, imagined or otherwise), the next step is to mobilise and feed your friends - that way, regardless of how hair-brained the scheme or policy you promote, they’ll invariably follow you into battle.
The rest is history and we know the rest.
It is for this reason that, after the Second World War, the Allies ensured that they did not make the same mistake twice and so they paid all of German’s (and Japan’s) war reparations for them; thus ensuring that Germany would not again cradle the embers of discontent or run the risk of once again creating the conditions which allowed Hitler’s rise.
I’m not arguing that Nazism or even Fascism were leftist movements. Neither of them were. But Fascism particularly borrowed rhetoric and methods from the parties of the Left.
In Germany, at least, while you can argue that Nazism was right-wing, it wasn’t traditionally right-wing, and the appeal of both Italian fascism and German Nazism is that it promised an alternative to traditional left-right politics, which had become seen as naturally antagonistic and divisive. As Mussolini put it when he announced Italy’s entry into the war:
I think it’s important to remember how unique both Fascism and Nazism were. They were a modern phenomenon, which really didn’t have any past parallel. Even calling them rightist, while I’d probably do it myself, minimizes the very real and extreme differences Fascism had with the traditional Right, even the far-right parties.
In a sense Fascism saw some positives from both free market democracies and the communist approach being implemented in the Soviet Union. Where fascists, in Spain, in Italy, and in Germany and other countries differed substantially from free market democracies is they didn’t fully trust the free market and they didn’t trust the populace at all. Where fascists differed from the communists of the day is they emphatically rejected international Marxist revolution. They essentially didn’t truly believe in class warfare, they instead believed in a form of hypernationalism in which a strong militaristic leadership class would run the country, and an ethos of slavish devotion to the State would be promoted from the bottom up to keep the populace ready to do whatever necessary for the greater glory of the State. The fascists saw the economy as a tool of state power, but had no issue or problem with private profits and private management, as long as they never interfered whatsoever with the interests of the State.
In the long term aspects of fascism were probably incompatible with long term healthy economies. For one, in German fascism the ethos of the economy being there to serve the greater interests of the State and not its people or its businesses was taken to extremes, a goal of the Nazis was to essentially some day end all foreign trade and produce everything necessary within Germany (or its expanded territories), and to consume only things produced in regions controlled by Germany. In some ways the actual economic theories of Hitler and a lot of the Nazis was almost a form of infantile mercantilism; luckily for the Germans there were enough smart economic / money guys who Hitler let mostly run the financing of his wars that these economic policies never really “came home to roost”, but they certainly would have had WWII ended in a stalemate of some sort with Hitler still in power.
If you want to easily sum up fascism and communism in the most condemnatory manner (and probably the most accurate manner): fascist rulers demanded slavish devotion to the State and convinced their people all their ills were caused by the “other”, be they different religious groups or different ethnic groups or just people from other countries period. Communist rulers demanded slavish devotion to the ideals of communism and convinced their people all their ills were caused by the bourgeoisie and evil forces of international capitalism. Both communist and fascist rulers once in power became the primary enemies of their people, far and above the enemies that they sold their populace on.
Practice has shown attempts at true Communism haven’t really worked, and lead to guys like Stalin who was really in every since of the word just a Russian Emperor who ruled a collection of satellite states with an iron totalitarian fist–something I’ve always found ironic because Stalin wasn’t Russian but all of his behavior while in power showed him to essentially be a Russocentric ruler who saw the rest of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries as tributary States. However in theory Communism without all that human corruption and greed wouldn’t be a terrible system. And in general lots of Marxist ideals have a place in a capitalist free market system. Fascism on the other hand in its purest form if realized would be a sort of hell, and there really isn’t much of merit the world has ever drawn from fascist ideology.
The fascist governments that continued to exist after WWII mostly abandoned a lot of the more destructive ideologies of fascism and just became run of the mill tin-pot dictatorships with highly corrupt but mostly free market economies and a lot of political repression instead of loftier attempts at re-education to keep the populace in line.