Bruce Tucker
TimeGhost History
comments
Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "The Birth Control Movement and Eugenics - A Curious Link | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.18 - Winter 1923" video.
8
@crimony3054 It's not my socialism, and you can only argue that the Nazis were socialists if you use a much more expansive definition of socialism than anything current today and disregard a lot of key Nazi policies and characteristics. You might just as well argue - as many on the left do today - that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were right-wing because they embodied much of what today we call fascism.
As for specifics, some characteristics of the Nazi Party that make it far-right rather than anything-left are its nationalism, nativism, militarism, social conservatism (everything from hatred of modern art to seeing a woman's place as in the home having and raising babies nonstop), disregard for the good of workers, disregard for the political will of workers, and encouragement of private enterprise and private profit. In terms of modern socialism, its hypernationalism and is rejection of class struggle make it completely incompatible with anything that has carried that label for the last 75 years. In terms of actual members of the Nazi Party, those who were genuine left-socialists were purged by Hitler culminating in the Night of the Long Knives
5
@crimony3054 Another way to look at it is that the spectrum isn't a line, it's a horseshoe with the open end being extreme authoritarian territory. Still not accurate, but better than thinking of it as a line. The ends of the horseshoe are nearer to each other than to the middle, but they're still opposite ends of the spectrum. The reason for the gap between them is that pretty much anyone who attains absolute power is going to have political goals of some sort - even Stalin, who was as close to Orwell's Big Brother (lust for power completely divorced from ideology) as anyone I can think of, still had political goals, and they were generally left-wing ones even if his methods are deplored by leftists today. As far as I'm aware, as a policy (as opposed to pure personal selfishness) pure power divorced from all ideology has never existed in modern times.
Where Hitler fits on this is the extreme right end. His methods, including strong state compulsion and some degree of economic collectivism, had a lot in common with Stalin, but his ultimate goal - all social and economic rewards being subordinated to the needs of the nation-state for the purpose of waging a perpetual nationalist war, with social change, arts, private enterprise, etc. permitted only to the extent they furthered that end - was a conservative one. The ultimate beneficiary of his policies was not intended to be workers, the human race in general, or even the government itself, but a mystical concept of the German volk seen in rabidly nationalist - NOT statist - terms. For Hitler, state power, like everything else, was not an end in itself, it was purely a means to advance the interests of the German volk .
This is diametrically opposed to the politics of Stalin, for whom the ultimate beneficiary of his policies (beyond his own personal power) was theoretically meant to be the international proletariat.
Both of them identified their own personal interest with that of the people they claimed to serve far more than was rationally defensible, but the ultimate goal was not entirely a sham for either of them, they both genuinely believed that their policies were making the world a better place.
5
@crimony3054 The mistake you're making is in thinking political ideology is a one-dimensional (linear) structure. Hitler and Stalin did a lot of things the same way because they were both extreme authoritarians, but authoritarianism is neither left nor right, it is its own axis. Likewise democratic socialists have a lot of the same methods as liberal (in the old sense) free-market capitalists, but their economic policies and aims are different. Modern socialists are no more like Stalin in terms of authoritarianism than modern conservatives are like Hitler in the same terms, and it's very mistaken to try to use the examples of Hitler or Stalin to link authoritarianism with either the left or right on social and economic issues.
Politics is better described as a three- or even four-dimensional structure. Authoritarianism is one axis, economics is another, and social policies (things like religion, the status of women, and reproductive rights) a third, and people can fall anywhere in the cube formed by those three axes. And you could even add a fourth axis for nationalism vs. internationalism.The Nazis were extremely authoritarian, as extremely nationalist as it is possible to be, generally socially conservative, and in the middle on economics - they exercised a large degree of control over the economy but profits still went to private owners and workers reaped few of the benefits of their labor. Mussolini's Fascists were very authoritarian, extremely nationalist, in the middle but tending toward conservative on social policy, and mixed on economic policy. Franco's Falange (including his Carlist supporters) started very authoritarian but became less so as time went on, was extremely nationalist, extremely socially conservative (particularly with respect to the status of the Catholic Church), and generally right-wing (pro-market) on economic policy.
Modern socialists are more liberal than authoritarian, socially very liberal, strongly internationalist, and of course very far left on economics (but not as far as classical Marxists, some degree of private property is still protected.) Modern conservatives are in the middle on authoritarianism (although there is also a libertarian wing), very nationalistic, socially conservative, and very pro-free markets.
As far as historical Nazism, it should be noted that Hitler was violently opposed by the socialists in his time, while conservatives generally preferred to work with him thinking they could control him. The Nazis never had anything close to a majority, Hitler took power with the cooperation and support of conservatives, most notably the military. This is one reason he's considered to be on the right end of the political spectrum by people looking to classify people according to that one-dimensional spectrum.
I also included Franco in the above comparisons because the Spanish Civil War was very much a political fault line in its day. Nazis, fascists, and conservatives, including the Catholic Church, all lined up on Franco's side while liberals, socialists, anarchists, and communists, including Stalin, lined up on the Republican side. One important reason for Franco's eventual victory was that his coalition held together much better than the Republicans' did, especially once Stalin realized the Republican government would never be his puppet and withdrew his support. But if Hitler had been an actual socialist in anything but name his interests would have aligned with the Republicans, not Franco's Insurgents who were conservative in every respect.
Stalin's personal paranoia and megalomania could almost be considered a fifth political axis whenever he was involved because they made him a terrible ally even for people who agreed with his politics in every respect. Those personal characteristics and the excesses they led to, and not any political differences, were why Stalin was so thoroughly repudiated by Khrushchev in the 1950s.
4
2
2
1
1