Cedarford reveals some serious holes in his knowledge:
Hitler wasn’t a Leftist. He was a fierce anti-Communist.
The first statement is incorrect. The second is correct. Although many make the mistake of assuming so, the latter does not prove former. Marx, too, was an anti-socialist (he wrote diatribes against the Fabians, an older socialism), and the error in arguing that Hitler’s murderous opposition to a rival POLITICAL party, the KPD, is synonymous with total opposition to all left-wing ideology should be obvious. For the Bolsheviks were demonstrably more fiercely opposed to the Mensheviks, given that they murdered them all, and as someone has already pointed out, Stalin had Trotsky killed as well. And yet all of these men were Communists, quite clearly of the Left. Acts of violence in pursuing and consolidating power should never be confused with ideology.
By Cedarford’s logic, one might as easily argue that the Socialists, (SPD), weren’t leftists because they, too, were anti-KPD, and as I have written before, when the National Socialists made their big gains in the 1932 election, they drew voters primarily from the middle and from the SPD. The right-wing German nationalist party received the same percentage of votes as before because unlike the Socialists, its supporters did not gravitate to the National Socialists.
Unlike those uneducated folks who unwisely make the mistake of sharing their ignorant opinion with everyone, I have actually read Mein Kampf. It is quite clear throughout that while Hitler agrees with Marx’s fundamental notion that the State must reign supreme over the individual, he does not believe in Marx’s concept of class consciousness and he is aware of the problem of getting individuals to work when there is nothing in it for them. It is clear, in fact, that Hitler thinks that Marx is a fool in believing that his form of socialism will ever function.
Hitler proposes a different form of socialism which will harness the power of individual in service to the state. His notion is to inspire the individual, through indoctrination, with the glory of his national consciousness. In other words, National Socialism can be boiled down to the substitution of NATIONAL consciousness for CLASS consciousness, albeit within the same socialist framework. Hence the similarities between Marx’s Communist Manifesto and the National Socialist Munich Manifesto, which Hitler co-authored.
Like Lenin with his New Economic Program, Hitler was forced to moderate his socialist ideology once in power for the obvious reason; socialism doesn’t work. This is why after 70 years of Soviet communism and 50 years of Chinese communism, private property still existed in both left-wing states where, according to Marx, it should not have existed at all.
The idea that the National Socialists’ nationalism makes them definitively right-wing is especially stupid since the Soviet communists had themselves embraced nationalism prior to the Nazi’s coming to power. By 1927, Lenin and Stalin had completely defeated Trotsky’s internationalism in favor of building socialism in one country. As Lenin wrote: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”