Friday 11 January 2008

Nazism = Socialism = Totalitarianism

Only yesterday Poneke was expressing amusement that In the comments section of one of his posts, Trevor Loudon says he regards the National Front, the Italian fascists and the German Nazis as left wing. "I kid you not."  Never one to back down when he has truth on his side, Trevor's come out swinging, explaining this morning why fascists are leftists.

Since the debate has been thus re-opened, perhaps I could point debaters once again to the observation that while HItler's National Socialists didn't nationalise the economy's commanding heights as Lenin would have had them do; they didn't need to -- as Hitler said, they nationalised people instead. Political correctness at the point of a gun. The result for Hitler's Germany and in the end for most of Europe was the same as it was for Lenin's Russia. Destruction.

As George Reisman explains, Nazism was Socialism, and Socialism is Totalitarianism. (See him make the case in an onine video lecture).  Says Reisman:

De facto government ownership of the means of production... was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.
The Mises Economics Blog describes Reisman's thesis thus:
Contrary to myth, Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship. Indeed, the identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises.

And as if your eyebrows aren't already heading for the ceiling, here's another claim of Reisman's that might get them there that is arguably even more important than the title thesis: "In the United States at the present time, we do not have socialism in any form. And we do not have a dictatorship, let alone a totalitarian dictatorship." Read on to find out what Reisman says about the present system in the US, and by implication the rest of the west.  We do not have a dictatorship, he says we also do not yet have Fascism. "Among the essential elements that are still lacking are one-party rule and censorship. We still have freedom of speech and press and free elections," he says...

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

You forgot to mention our own 'National Socialist' party and their fascism of the 1990s...

Owen McShane said...

A fascist state is not a socialist state.
Socialism is the Dark side of the Enlightenment Tradition.

Fascism is the Dark side of the Romantic tradition.

Lenin's and Mao's communism combine the dark side of both.
The Greens are not socialists - they are fascists.The Green movement begins in Germany around the middle of the 19th Century.

Anonymous said...

Owen : "The Greens are not socialists - they are fascists.The Green movement begins in Germany around the middle of the 19th Century."

Spot on. In Nazi Germany the exclusive use of native plants became the landscape architect's swastika.

In a manner of gross, PC, over-compensation the Brooklyn Botanical Garden states:

"especially at a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiment, we need to be aware that our ideas about gardening can have unintended social consequences.
And so I think we should avoid the terms "alien plant" and "invasive alien." :)

So are native invasive or non-native invasive plants
in the same category?
"I think the origin of that approach is that most people consider [native invasives] natural; they were not brought here by us"; they are problems because of the "changes wrought by our activities." Non-native invasives, on the other hand, "were brought here by us"; "we were the vector."

Hmm... who would think plants could become so racist and fascist.

Amercan landscape architect Jens Jenson in a 1937
German journal says:
"The gardens that I created myself...shall express a spirit of America, and therefore shall be free of foreign character as far as possible. The Latin and the Oriental...creep more and more over our land, coming from the South, which is settled by Latin people, and also from other centers of mixed masses of immigrants. The Germanic character of our race, of our cities and settlements, [has been] overgrown by foreign character. Latin spirit has spoiled a lot, and still spoils things every day."

Great post Peter
Liz The Landscape Designer Denialist

Lindsay Mitchell said...

I cannot see how Reisman can argue that Nazi Germany was de facto socialist because of wage controls and then say that the US today doesn't have ANY form of socialism when they have wage controls.

poneke said...

I think you and Trevor are wrong about Hitler and Mussolini being left-wing. While Hitler was certainly a totalitarian like Stalin, Stalin was of the totalitarian Left because under his regime the means of production, distribution and exchange, and even people's homes, were state owned and controlled. Under Hitler’s totalitarian regime, private enterprise and ownership remained, making him demonstrably of the Right.

Anyway Trevor’s declarations on this subject are fascinating and deserve a wider audience, so I have blogged about them myself.

Matt Burgess said...

More fundamentally, both Nazism and Socialism are dogmas and operate in spite of reason. Nazism and Socialism have this in common with all regligions, which is why the standard objection among the religious to socialism, which is that it produces harm by suppressing organised religion, is wrong. Socialism simply replaced one dogma with another, and unsurprisingly many people died as a result.

I think it was Sam Harris who said that massive harm was never caused by people who were too reasonable.

Matt Burgess said...

Under Hitler’s totalitarian regime, private enterprise and ownership remained, making him demonstrably of the Right.

I am out of my depth on this one, but it seems to me that the the existence of some form of legitimate private property is not sufficient on its own to make Hitler right wing. You dont need to abolish all private property before finally being declared a leftie.

In any case, the question of where on the political spectrum Hitler lay is not answered by looking at private or public ownership, but by who has control. Is decision making centralised or de-centralised? If it is centralised, the exact method of achieving that is incidental and should not affect position on the political spectrum.

Anonymous said...

Well said, Matty...there is far too much labelling of chaps as being "Right Wing" or "Left Wing" when they are effectively neither.

Anonymous said...

Read Mein Kampf you stupid, ignorant, people. Hitler was a socialist. He says so himself.

Horst.

gw2 gold said...

A fascist state is not a socialist state.
Socialism is the Dark side of the Enlightenment tradition.

Fascism is the Dark side of the Romantic tradition.

Lenin's and Mao's communism combine the dark side of both.
The Greens are not socialists - they are fascists.The Green movement begins in Germany around the middle of the 19th Century.D3 gold
eq2 gold