Nazism, Socialism and the Falsification of History

[Meclazine for Israel]

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/nazism-socialism-and-the-falsification-of-history/10214302

"So if the Nazis were so obviously anti-socialist, and believed so ardently in the virtues of private property and entrepreneurship, and if socialists were among the earliest and hardest hit victims of the Nazi party prior to the Second World War, why is Hitler being proclaimed by some as a socialist?"

[Cassius]

This article makes a good point regarding the (American inspired) conflation of all statism and state action with leftism.

I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that Hitler and Hitlerism have basically become the modern day equivalent of Satan and Satanism; so unspeakably evil and beyond the pale of civilized society that (apart from the small minority of Neo-Nazis and Hitler worshippers that continue to exist) any sane person will run a mile from any association or comparison with them. This is, of course, most true on the right of politics, given that Hitler and the Nazis are also placed in that category and the terms ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ (incidentally two different things) have been rather liberally applied to right wing people and parties by many on the left. To be a ‘Nazi’ is to be a monster beyond the reach of civilization, therefore it’s not surprising that some people on the right of politics have attempted to turn the charge back on leftists (in a similar vein, I remember reading once about how Republican efforts to portray Democrats as communists in the 1940s were a kind of tit for tat reaction to charges of fascism tossed in the opposite direction).

It’s a shamelessly partisan and ahistorical viewpoint and one that, in my opinion, betrays a certain uncomfortableness about being ‘on the right’. Nazism and all it entails are hardly the sum total of right wing political thought, regardless of what some individuals on the left would like to think. Nazism was something very peculiar to Germany in that time period (although, as always, with echoes across geography and throughout history), and one doesn’t need to clumsily attempt to disassociate oneself from it  in this manner just because one happens to sit in that arbitrarily defined wing of the political spectrum known as ‘the right’.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Ideologies seek legitimacy by rewriting all of history in the desired paradigm with the "good guys" on their side and the "bad guys" on the other guys. Therefore Hitler gets turned into a socialist because of his statism and because he is bad guy in history.

The reduction of history in this fashion is yet one more example of how the right has taken on various Marxist approaches, having already dwelt in other threads on the desire for ideological purification.

As someone who started off with history and then slowly gravitated towards politics, I find this alarming and problematic since it distorts the actions and records of people, as well as rip them out of their contexts and places them on one entirely artificially contrived with modern sensibilities.

[buritobr]

The place of the national socialism in the political spectrum is not a serious issue. The academic world has no doubt that the national socialism belongs to the far-right. The word "sozialismus" in Germany doesn't mean necerrasily marxism or left-wing politics.
If we read newspapers from January 1933, we read that Hitler had support from all conservative parties when he rose to the power, he had support from former kaiser Wilhelm II, and the SPD and the KPD opposed. There was a rally of communists in Berlin on Janaury 30th 1933 in order to protest against the new government. The Berlin stock market went up. Stock markets go up when they see business friendly governments rising to the power.

In Brazil, people who believe that national socialism is a left-wing ideology are followers of Olavo de Carvalho, former astrologist and guru of president Jair Bolsonaro. But there is a problem: Olavo de Carvalho considers that general Francisco Franco was a nice guy. So, this situation creates a circuit breaker inside the brains(?) of those people. How could the good Franco have been supported by the Condor Legion, sent by the left-wing Hitler?