Replies to post #307676 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Still waiting. What the Nazis began as is far less important then what they became. The Nazi Party that the neo-Nazis know and love is the one described below. And you won't find any talk of socialism from those tiki torch marchers either. When is the last time you heard socialists chanting 'the Jews will not replace us'?

Above all, the Nazis were German white nationalists. What they stood for was the ascendancy of the “Aryan” race and the German nation, by any means necessary. Despite co-opting the name, some of the rhetoric, and even some of the precepts of socialism, Hitler and party did so with utter cynicism, and with vastly different goals. The claim that the Nazis actually were leftists or socialists in any generally accepted sense of those terms flies in the face of historical reality.

No American political party can be compared to the Nazi Party that controlled Germany for 12 years. Nazism has no American corollary. American liberalism is not at all like Nazism, and neither, for that matter, is American conservatism. Nazism arose in Germany, gained power in Germany, held power in Germany, and would ultimately fall at the end of the Second World War in Germany.

Nazism aligned itself with industrialists and corporations that would ultimately utilize Nazi slave laborers and patent the chemicals used in Nazi death camps to kill millions of men, women, and children. The word “socialist” doesn’t change that, just as the word “Democratic” does not make the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — North Korea — a democracy.

NOW do you nutters understand? Appropriated words do not change the reality that other words and actions define.

So no, Hitler wasn’t a socialist. Nazism wasn’t a socialist project. And comparing American Democrats to Nazis is not just incorrect, but wrong, just as it is when American Democrats and liberals directly compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

Nazism was a political project built on anti-Semitism, racism, and dictatorial verve, one that took place in a specific country and at a specific moment in history. We forget that fact at our own risk.