Nazism, Socialism and the Falsification of History

[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’.