Some rather interesting and educational quotes.
“True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt’s: “Give back Alsace and Lorraine”. For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?”
– Friedrich Engels
Oops, there goes the inherent contradiction between German nationalism and the Left!
“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew — not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time…. We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development — to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed — has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry”.
– Karl Marx
Well, so much for the inherent contradiction between anti-semitism and the Left.
The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It is not merely a matter of pay, not only a matter of the number of hours worked in a day-though we may never forget that these are an essential, perhaps even the most significant part of the socialist platform-but it is much more a matter of incorporating a powerful and responsible class in the state, perhaps even to make it the dominant force in the future politics of the Fatherland.
– Joseph Goebbels
Whoopsy daisy! Weren’t the National Socialists running dogs of the bourgiousie?
“Fascism” was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini’s Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler’s Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism’s standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, “Nazi” was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of “capitalism.”
– Tom Wolfe, “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists”
Hitler denied the National Socialists were Fascists. Mussolini likewise denied it. Both men insisted that they were socialists. But what did they know?
“Modern day Leftists of course hate it when you point out to them that Hitler was one of them. They deny it furiously — even though in Hitler’s own day both the orthodox Leftists who represented the German labor unions (the SPD) and the Communists (KPD) voted WITH the Nazis in the Reichstag (German Parliament) on various important occasions.
As part of that denial, an essay by Steve Kangas is much reproduced on the internet. Entering the search phrase “Hitler was a Leftist” will bring up multiple copies of it. Kangas however reveals where he is coming from in his very first sentence: “Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named “National Socialist.” But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production”. It does? Only to Marxists. So Kangas is saying only that Hitler was less Leftist than the Communists — and that would not be hard.”
– John Jay Ray, “Hitler was a Socialist“
Read the article, which I took these quotes from. It’s a little light on the supporting statistics, from my point of view, but fairly good otherwise. One particularly good point Ray makes is how the issues that leftists raise to in vain attempts to demonstrate how Hitler’s later accomodation with capitalism makes him a right-wing extremist still leaves the National Socialists well to the left of infamously right-wing societies such as Sweden and Norway. Ray also reminds us that even after leaving the Socialist Party, Mussolini remained a more doctrinaire Marxist than Lenin himself.
The fact that our society has moved significantly to the Left since FDR does not change the fact that things such as mass public education, social security and progressive taxation are the primary elements of a left-wing ideology. Considering that 40 percent of the American landmass is not privately owned, it should come as no surprise that we find it hard to admit the socialism of the WWII-era monsters, because when we actually examine their ideology and governance, it is far too similar to looking in a mirror.
As monstrous as the Holocaust was, it was not the be all and end all of National Socialism. While Hitler was obsessed with Jews, killing them was obviously not his top priority, considering that he didn’t get around to it until he’d been power for almost a decade and gotten a few minor details out of the way first, such as conquering Western Europe.