This is right. The claim of communists and socialists is that their regimes are more genuinely ‘democratic’- not in the sense of ‘the people ruling’, but in the sense of ‘ruling on behalf of the people, and for their own good’- than bourgeois-liberal regimes, which rule in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
By whom? 28,000 people (in a nation of 3-million), running unopposed, with only one name on the ballot. Hitler and Stalin were also “elected”.
Here’s the bottom line – Every country , no exceptions, claims to be more democratic than it actually is. International observers who monitor elections put the USA about the middle of the pack in terms of fairness of elections.
Most tyrannies are propped by a minority, of various sizes. Even if the majority opposes the regime, there are still various levels of disgruntlement and revolt for that matter. For both active and passive supporters, propaganda can make a difference. It is effective whether a minority believe that they believe it or whether passive supporters figure it’s partly true.
mbh beat me providing a link to the 25 point programme, which remained the official NSDAP party manifesto right until the end. Extensive parts of it look pretty socialist to me.
He was elected by a tiny fraction of white males with significant land holdings. And 4 of 10 states did not choose their electors by popular vote, so he wasn’t really elected to office in any meaningful sense. You might as well say that the Speaker of the House is elected to that office (obviously he is elected to his House seat.)
One other thing is that even if being a putative democracy isn’t fooling anyone into thinking you’re actually a functioning democracy, you can still use it to imply that every other democracy is also a farce, and perhaps that your farce democracy is one of the least farcical.
Oh, honestly. I don’t know how many times we’ve gone through this on this board. The NSDAP was originally a socialist party. But as Hitler was coming to power, he began relying on various industrialists and land-owning families for monetary support. In order to keep their backing, he purged the socialists from the party.
Additionally, once in power, Hitler quickly outlawed the German Socialist party, rounded up its leaders and threw them in prison or had them executed. Then he busted the unions, depressed worker wages and tied them to their jobs in a system of industrial serfdom.
The NSDAP never changed its platform, but by 1934, it was only paying lip-service to what we commonly think of as socialism. You and mbh are being extremely misleading.
I’d like to add my congrats for Donnerwetter’s “Totalitarian State of San Seriffe”. I wonder if Seriffe should rhyme with “sheriff” or sound more like “suh-REEF-Ay”?
Sure. And the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is elected using the qualification for the electorate for that office now extant. And the pope is elected using the qualifications for the electorate for that office now extant. But none of these elections could justifiably be called “democratic”, which was jtur88’s point.
njtt, who claimed that any likening of Nazi and socialist ideology was nonsense on stilts, himself conceded that in terms of what the regimes turned out to be in actual practice is not so different (and honestly, a lot of what you described as post-Machtergreifung policies are not too different from what, e.g., the Communists did in East Germany post-1945: They forcibly merged the SPD party into the SED; rounded up, banned unions that were not under SED control, depressed real purchasing-power wages to a standard of living far below the capitalist West, and introcuded a system that effectively abolished people’s freedom to choose which profession to take up). Now we’re discussing whether there are parallels between what the Nazis and the socialists claimed they would do, at lo behold, there are parallels. I’m not saying national socialism and socialism are the same thing, but to deny that there are considerable ideological overlaps, as you appear to be doing, is, to use your words, extremely misleading.
Well, which is it? Were the Nazis socialists or communists? Why not throw in anarchist and libertarian in there as well while you’re at it? We can just keep comparing the Nazis to each and every single ideology under the sun.
Nope, I’m not the one who’s being misleading. The Nazis set up a crony-capitalist cartel system. It’s true, that once they were on war-footing, they economy took on a lot of central planning, but all war economies do that, and that’s not indicative of the underlying structure.
The Nazis abandoned pretty much anything that could be termed socialist in that 25 point plan once Hitler took over the party. You are simply ignorant of Nazi economic policies.
They set up their central planning long before the war. My impression is that you’re trying to pass off Nazi ideology as a capitalist-driven system, which is precisely what socialist propaganda tried to do for decades without ever advancing convincing arguments. The only thing that even remotely resembles an argument in this context is the fact that in the early 1930s, some entrepreneurs provided funding for the Nazi party, but that’s hardly indicative of the underlying structures. Post-1933 Nazi policies were certainly far from being in line with free enterprise.
Go then. Tell me what, exactly, I am ignorant about. I’m excited to hear.