How can conservatives say Hitler was a leftist/socialist?

[Frozen Sky Ever Why]

It is common knowledge (to anyone that bothers to read) that Hitler criminalized trade unions and striking, that he privatized business while most of Europe was nationalizing, that his grand idea of welfare for the poor was private charity consisting of funds socially coerced from the rich (Ron Paul would approve). Oh yeah, and he outright murdered his associates who advocated for a class revolution.

[AtorBoltox]

Two possibilities
1-They're idiots
2- They know full well they're lying but will say and do anything to smear their political opponents

[Vittorio]

Of course, any number of ostensibly "socialist" governments have also criminalized trade unions and striking, privatized businesses, etc.

In point of fact, socialism has a meaning - (A) the abolition of production for exchange and the commodity form, and (B) the self-negation of the working-class as a class through the elimination of class society. From this Marxist view, socialism has not yet existed, but is an immanent possibility always existing within class society. Government programmes are not socialist; business nationalizations are not socialist; unions are not socialist; indeed, worker's co-operatives are not socialist (the definition of socialism as being "worker ownership of the means of production" is also a bad one).

[brucejoel99]

They're idiots
2- They who know full well they're lying but will say and do anything to smear their political opponents

Fixed.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Because they focus too much on the means and the desired ends. The how and not the why.

[John Dule]

It is common knowledge (to anyone that bothers to read) that Hitler criminalized trade unions and striking, that he privatized business while most of Europe was nationalizing, that his grand idea of welfare for the poor was private charity consisting of funds socially coerced from the rich (Ron Paul would approve). Oh yeah, and he outright murdered his associates who advocated for a class revolution.

Yes, libertarian icon Ron Paul would absolutely love a government that forcibly confiscated its citizens' private property, closed down small businesses, organized forced cartels comprised of a few mega-conglomerates, banned the creation of new firms with low amounts of capital, and granted massive handouts to corporations in order to encourage monopolies and oligopolies. You know, it's pretty rich of you to make this thread pontificating about "common knowledge" when you follow it up with a moronic claim like that, which can be easily falsified via a quick Google search and/or a rudimentary understanding of the ideological spectrum. Then again, your choice of username should've been enough to notify us all that your political biases probably preclude any chance of an honest discussion of the facts, as it clearly reveals that you are completely out of touch with reality. Overall, good demonstration of your inability to think objectively, or perhaps at all.

[Insomnian]

It is common knowledge (to anyone that bothers to read) that Hitler criminalized trade unions and striking

So did most Communist states, lol.

Anyways, fascism was very much a syncretic idealogy that drew ideas from all across the political spectrum, so almost everyone can more or less see their enemies in it Rorschach test style.

[Goldwater]

Because they focus too much on the means and the desired ends. The how and not the why.

This. Hitler used "big government" to achieve his goals, and "big government = left wing" in the minds of a lot of American conservatives.

[Person Man]

Because they focus too much on the means and the desired ends. The how and not the why.

This. Hitler used "big government" to achieve his goals, and "big government = left wing" in the minds of a lot of American conservatives.

I guess the traditional libertarian/traditionalist ideology would be a good contrast to fascism or at least it would in the right wing. Basically "Fascism" can be a somewhat useful way of describing everything that is "well right of the center" but not "conservative". Its almost as if at least Hitler's fascism was trying to achieve through state action what most right of center policies naturally and inevitably achieve. That is, capital controlling the state instead of state controlling capital. What conservatives do is try to enforce a separation of capital and state that inevitably leads to the control of the state by capital.


Therefore  I think-

Left of Center- More control of capital by the state
Conservative Right of Center, Classical Liberalism, Libertarianism- Separation of Capital by the State. Modern Liberals, modern Conservatives, and traditional conservatives debate whether its more important to dejure maintain the separation or the defacto one even if it means relaxing the the dejure separation.
Those that are right-of-center but not "conservative"-More control of the state by capital 

Conservatives are partially right when they way they accuse of Fascists of being "liberals" or "socialists" in that they are "not conservative" and don't want a separation of capital and state.

Liberals and left of center people are right when they accuse Fascists of being "right-wing" because they they believe in the state being controlled by capital.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

It is common knowledge (to anyone that bothers to read) that Hitler criminalized trade unions and striking

So did most Communist states, lol.

Yes. The reason "Solidarity" happened was the desire for independent labor unions (as opposed to rubberstamp sole official one) and the right to strike.

[Senator Incitatus]

I'm curious as to whether this phenomenon is at all common outside the United States (and Canada).

Seems to me that nations which have had basically exclusively liberal histories, like the United States, would tend to view both fascism and communism as equally "other." Liberals have a tendency to lump all "other" political thought together as "tyranny," which explains why the American "right" — which is really a liberal traditionalist movement — makes this claim.

Also, Hitler is synonymous with "bad" and it's easy to just compare your enemies to the guy everyone agrees is bad.

[RINO Tom]

1) A lazy belief that big government and/or support for change in society is inherently liberal (ya know, the same kind of lazy analysis that has people labeling Abraham Lincoln a died in the wool liberal, lol...) is probably the most common mistake ... this is inherently linked with lazily seeing the word "socialism."

2) A much more just objection to the idea that the GOP has any more meaningful of a connection with true Nazism than the Democratic Party or any other American political party that isn't, ya know, made up of actual Nazis.  The American political spectrum developed into something rather unique, and we tend to (rightfully, in some ways) see truly extreme ideologies as so out of our political stratosphere that they're practically incomparable.  So, when you get Democratic partisans pushing Nazism as a "far right" ideology (which, textbook definition-wise, it most obviously is), you are naturally going to get defensive Republicans trying to find ways in which the Nazis were "liberal."

[Santander]

To a certain extent they are right of course, i will admit. There is no cooperation at all, but unlike in the U.S , we on the far-left and the AFD do compete among the same voter base (White working class in the east), and we have very similar foreign policy (pro-russia, pro-china, pro-assad, anti-nato, anti-eu) and we are both somewhat authoritarian and unitarist/centralist and hate the Berlin liberal elites. Horseshoe theory in action one might say.

I like both Linke and AfD.

[Goldwater]

To a certain extent they are right of course, i will admit. There is no cooperation at all, but unlike in the U.S , we on the far-left and the AFD do compete among the same voter base (White working class in the east), and we have very similar foreign policy (pro-russia, pro-china, pro-assad, anti-nato, anti-eu) and we are both somewhat authoritarian and unitarist/centralist and hate the Berlin liberal elites. Horseshoe theory in action one might say.

Wow, so Germany has literal tankies as a major political party? Do they even try to make the excuse of being "non-interventionist"?

[Tartarus Sauce]

The type of person that subscribes to this argument generally strikes me as somebody that has adopted an infantile, black-and-white view of politics as a fight between good and evil throughout time, as opposed to the reality that politics are the messy expression of different segments of society publicly clashing over differing value sets. In this instance, our prospective ideologue submits to a rather simple school of thought: all bad things done by every government ever has been because of leftists. I mean, just look at all the stuff Stalin and Mao did, communism killed millions! Confederate slave owners? They were are all Democrats! And of course everybody knows Hitler was a socialist that used big government to control people's lives, just like liberals and college professors want to do now! I mean it's even the name, National Socialism! Checkmate, libtards!

No matter how tortured the logic, they will distort the truths of history until they can fit it into their personally crafted pigeonhole. The actual nuances of historical facts just get in the way of pushing their agenda. As a rule, I loathe these kinds of people, because they almost always come equipped with the same attitude. Dismissive, arrogant pricks who think they've got it all figured out and aren't interested in actually listening to other perspectives, even though they're usually either some of the least informed or most misinformed individuals on the topic. They're simple people with a need for simple narratives and can't handle any complications to their preconceptions.

Insomnian made a good point about how Nazism is a political Rorschach test that people map their fears onto, so it's not like the people purveying this argument are the only ones who make erroneous analyses about the Nazis or political groups they want to compare to Nazis. But what makes this characterization of Nazism so cretinous is the degree to which it misses the mark of what actually made Nazism tick. The promotion of racial hierarchy was the beating, ideological heart of the Nazi Party, everything they did stemmed from an ethnonationalist desire to secure a future for the "Aryan bloodline." That is completely incompatible with socialist ideology at it's core. Yes, the actual implementation of socialism became an absolute trainwreck in its biggest test cases, but the foundations of socialist thought are inherently egalitarian: the workers of the world throwing off the chains of oppression and creating a harmonious global community free of strife where every man is an equal. Nazism, on the other hand, had intense, and intentional, inequality baked into the pie from its beginnings. Nazism declared the future to be that of the fittest of the Aryan race, and everybody else can and will suffer at their expense.

So no, anybody that claims that whatever liberals are doing today constitutes the first steps in the road to Nazism is an ignoramus who has no clue what they are talking about. Nazism is just as incompatible with liberals as it is with socialists. The constituent groups conservatives like to decry for their liberalism would be the first ones purged in a fascistic takeover, as was the case when the Nazis took control of Germany. Ironically enough, the proponents for this misguided characterization of Nazism are themselves often channeling the spirit of Hitler when they label all left-wing ideologies as socialist, because that was pretty much exactly what Hitler did. He made no significant distinction between left-wingers and considered them all to be equally traitorous to the German nation in his eyes, from pro-democracy moderate liberals to hardcore communists. But at least Hitler knew which groups actually were left-wingers, as opposed to the oafs who peddle the dreck that one of the most right-wing ideologies ever constructed is the same thing as one of the most left-wing ones.

[Vittorio]

Political spectrums, as a whole, are rather stupid affairs. Nobody calculates their political positions on a slide rule.

That said, if we're using the dumb bourgeois left-right spectrum, fascism initially conceived of itself as being (or, at least, fascist mouthpieces conceived of themselves as advocating for) a centrist position, between the poles of constitutional monarchy and liberal bourgeois democracy. (And this in turn explains the schisms between traditionalist-royalist groups like Action Française and overtly fascist organizations like Le Faisceau, or between the Nazis and the "revolutionary conservatives".)

Fascism was republican in principle, except where it made peace with the old ancien-regime as a practical matter (as with Victor Emmanuel), and yet it essentially wanted to marry absolutism to capitalism. This is what its "socialism" amounts to: a relic of the superficial anti-capitalism of the old feudal orders, adjusted rhetorically to modern conditions. This harkened back to a period of flux in the mode of production in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which an emerging proto-capitalism was taken under wing by the royal State as a wedge against an increasingly rebellious aristocracy, and in which capitalist development was encouraged through State subsidy to check a feudal order which the monarchs could no longer control. Late medieval and early modern Europe was Statist in its economics, and this was reflected in fascism and hooked into a modernist aesthetic.

This essential centrism is what allowed fascism to position itself as "neither left nor right" in the context of a Europe in which the furthermost right-wing movements were anti-republican and "anti-capitalist"/feudal-nostalgic, and it's why, without monarchical absolutism to contextualize it, it appears to us today to be far-right.

the foundations of socialist thought are inherently egalitarian: the workers of the world throwing off the chains of oppression and creating a harmonious global community free of strife where every man is an equal. Nazism, on the other hand, had intense, and intentional, inequality baked into the pie from its beginnings.

Eh, no.

The elimination of all social and political inequality,” rather than “the abolition of all class distinctions,” is similarly a most dubious expression. As between one country, one province and even one place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated. The living conditions of Alpine dwellers will always be different from those of the plainsmen. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept deriving from the old “liberty, equality, fraternity,” a concept which was justified in that, in its own time and place, it signified a phase of development but which, like all the one-sided ideas of earlier socialist schools, ought now to be superseded, since they produce nothing but mental confusion, and more accurate ways of presenting the matter have been discovered.

- Engels to Bebel, 1875

... But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal. But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

- Gothakritik §I

Socialism produces material equalities by abolishing class distinctions, but this is not the subjective motivating factor behind its establishment, nor is a "realm of universal equality" the end aimed at by socialists who know a thing or two about socialism.

[7,052,770]

Podcasters Dan Carlin and Daniele Bolelli discussed this on a recent podcast and put it better than I ever could.

It's the first big topic they discuss.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

Because they're dumb. They would be far better off discussing the genuine leftist wing in the Nazi party that was just as murderous but with a different economic plan. Sure, Hitler killed Otto Strasser, but his politics still live and should be confronted just as much as the military wing that took control.

[Mr. Reactionary]

Mostly bad faith responses to the equally bad faith "Nazis are rightwing because they hate jooz" trope. Hitler and the Nazis are their own thing and trying to make modern comparisons is largely just partisan/ideological smears rather than attempts to understand history. The same happens with Father Coughlin who was to the left of FDR and Huey Long but is nonetheless called "rightwing " because he "hated jooz".

[Saint Milei]

He definitely leaned left on economics

[Kizzuwanda]

Mostly bad faith responses to the equally bad faith "Nazis are rightwing because they hate jooz" trope. Hitler and the Nazis are their own thing and trying to make modern comparisons is largely just partisan/ideological smears rather than attempts to understand history. The same happens with Father Coughlin who was to the left of FDR and Huey Long but is nonetheless called "rightwing " because he "hated jooz".

Nazis were right-wing because they were favored mainly by the rich and by the middle classes who usually side with the rich, while the working classes and poor stood against them. They were right-wing because their policies benefited capital at the expense of the toiling masses. They were right-wing because they were imperialist warmongers, just as modern neolibs and neocons are. Virtually none of their policies could be construed as remotely left-wing, especially by anyone outside the US. (Where people think "the govt doing stuff = left wing")

[MarkD]

Simple: National Socialist German Workers Party.

[Santander]

Simple: National Socialist German Workers Party.

They were socialist in the same way I'm libertarian.

[DaWN]

Simple: National Socialist German Workers Party.

This is the worst historical argument of all time

[RINO Tom]

Mostly bad faith responses to the equally bad faith "Nazis are rightwing because they hate jooz" trope. Hitler and the Nazis are their own thing and trying to make modern comparisons is largely just partisan/ideological smears rather than attempts to understand history. The same happens with Father Coughlin who was to the left of FDR and Huey Long but is nonetheless called "rightwing " because he "hated jooz".

Nazis were right-wing because they were favored mainly by the rich and by the middle classes who usually side with the rich, while the working classes and poor stood against them. They were right-wing because their policies benefited capital at the expense of the toiling masses. They were right-wing because they were imperialist warmongers, just as modern neolibs and neocons are. Virtually none of their policies could be construed as remotely left-wing, especially by anyone outside the US. (Where people think "the govt doing stuff = left wing")

Not that simple, as the Nazis’ strongest initial support seemed to come from FORMERLY wealthy areas of Prussia that we’re struggling mightily by 1933.  I shouldn’t have to mention this given my post above, but I’m not saying that makes them left wing ... just saying they weren’t voted in by the ruling or aristocratic class of Germany by any means.