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Quote from: keep cool-idge on December 26, 2017, 02:43:07 PM

Quote from: IceAgeComing on December 26, 2017, 06:58:06 AM

All of that is very true - Nazism is a very confused ideology but fundamentally its based on nationalism and racist politics which

And Western Conservatism is still an odd beast with conservatives all over the continent still being pretty different and that was even more the case in the 1920s and 1930s. In Germany their conservatives were broadly anti-democracy and they were especially critical of the Weimar constitution, supportive of the imperial state and the monarchy, still incredibly bitter about the defeat of Germany in the war and seeked to Make Germany Great Again, highly militaristic and dominated by the Prussian elites who held significant amounts of political and economic power pre-war; and although they lost a lot of the former they retained the latter. They also were incredibly anti-Communist and anti-Socialist and just saw the two as being the same thing. They also were anti-semitic as well or at least willing to use anti-semitism in their election campaigns if they thought that they could get a few votes. Although a few Conservatives (the DVP; who's effective leader Gustav Stresemann served as Chancellor for a few months in 1923 and Foreign Minister in a billion governments between then and his death in 1929; a very interesting man and someone who helped to bridge the divide between Germany and the former Entente nations) eventually decided to work within the system with the pro-Weimar parties and kicking the above stuff into the long grass, the majority of them, lead by the incredibly reactionary DNVP, always seeked to destroy the Weimar state and to bring back the institutions of the past. In that regard them hooking up with the NSDAP, who they felt that they could control and eventually push out once the time is right despite the Nazis clearly being the most popular party, makes sense and the Nazis had much greater links with German conservatism than with the left.

British Conservatism was different in that they generally accepted change a lot more and always had a more liberal element to them meaning that they generally weren't ever that sympathetic with fascism - although maybe if we had lost the war things would have been a lot different. The same is true for the Republican Party as well: they were never the reactionary party that Conservatives in chunks of Europe were, and that's important. I think that this is especially the case after Reagan and Thatcher basically went full economic liberalism with the other Conservative parties tending to come along with them: indeed the biggest changes to life generally and especially politics and the economy since the immediate post-war years were caused by politicians that identified as Conservatives, suggesting that there is this odd reformist gene within Conservatism in those places.

Greedo: in the UK I'd be considered a Republican, in that in principle I'd favour abolishing the monarchy and becoming a Republic. On that vein, Sinn Féin are a left-wing Republican party - some would say far left - because they support a united Ireland. Now this isn't something that I'd be willing to die on a hill over and its not that core a belief but it is a part of how I think about things. However I'm clearly very different from the American Republican Party despite the same term being appropriate to use, and the two ideologies are very different. Just because two things have the same name, it doesn't mean that they are at all comparable. Nazism originates from Völkisch nationalism; an incredibly bizarre strain of nationalism that opposed foreign ideas, individualism and materialism and supported the creation of a 'superior society' based on German blood and 'superior' German culture. This is especially where the race politics emerged from; that's where the Master Race idea some from, the hatred of racial intermixing, and especially incredibly, intensely anti-semitic politics. Indeed that's where the Nazi hatred of the Bolsheviks came from: a strong feeling that it was somehow a "Jewish" ideology, plus also totally incompatible with the divided, hierarchical society that the NSDAP wanted. Your older Conservatives at the time were Monarchists who seeked the restoration of Willheim and the return of the old Reich but younger elements seeked an alternative: that it didn't matter who the leader was but that they needed a strong leader who could return Germany back to its pre-war glory and remove the "parasitic elements" - an ever expanding definition which would eventually include the Jews, Roma people, LGBT people, 'race mixers', the Disabled, Socialists, Communists, Trade Unionists and other political enemies, and later on the Slavs, at least those who they thought couldn't be Germanised. They adopted the "socialist" label for one main reason: simply to cloak themselves and to appeal to working class people in order to get votes. Their policies, while at times interventionist, could never be described as socialism.

Okay that makes sense. Seems to me that nazi is nazi it’s totally it’s own political viewpoint.

Read the preceding 20 posts first btw.

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