"How many people can honestly say they are sure that they would have done the right thing, if they had lived in a very different time and place? "

"I don’t believe it makes sense to accuse people of being Nazis or Maoists. Almost everyone, including even extremists, now understand that these were highly flawed political movements.
    "Nonetheless, it’s worth thinking about why Maoism and Nazism were once so popular. Why did so many Chinese college students join the Red Guard and enthusiastically persecute their professors (and others)? Why did 37% of the German electorate vote for the Nazi Party in 1932? These questions cry out for an explanation. ...
    "Of course, not everyone joined the Red Guard, and not everyone voted for the Nazis. [But] which people alive today [in those circumstances] would have joined the Red Guard? And which people alive today would have joined the Nazis?
    "Consider the woke extremists that enthusiastically denounce and shun people for not being sufficiently left wing on a check list of issues. Does anyone seriously believe they would not have been part of the contingent that joined the Red Guard? And think about people that are so anti-immigrant that they don’t even want us to accept high-skilled people from India and China because they worry about America’s European heritage being diluted. Does anyone seriously believe they would not have been among the 37% who voted for the Nazis?
    "I wish more people would do some serious soul searching, and honestly ask themselves how they would have behaved in some of these extreme situations. ...
    "I’m not accusing modern nationalists of literally being Nazis. ... Nor do I believe that today’s woke extremists wish to beat and torture their professors. Instead, I see far left and far right wing ideologies as a sort of virus, which can infect people’s minds, even otherwise reasonable minds. And I see liberalism as a sort of vaccine. ... making [one] immune to the lure of authoritarian ideologies. [I’m not defining liberalism in the American sense of left-of-center Democrat. I am using the term in the international sense of supporter of free speech, human rights, a market economy, democracy, civil rights, opposition to nationalism, etc. ] I have no doubt that if [the liberal] had been born in another time and place, he would have avoided becoming an authoritarian of either the left or the right.
    "How many people can honestly say they are sure that they would have done the right thing, if they had lived in a very different time and place?
    "When politics gets extremely contentious and extremely tribal, people are pressured to take sides. ... People hate it when they are ostracised by fellow members of their 'tribe.' Sorry, but the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Your only reliable political allies are those that share your core principles."

~ Scott Sumner from his post 'Liberalism as a vaccine'

 

When the distinction between true and false no longer exists ...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

~ Hannah Arendt, from her book The Origins of Totalitarianism [hat tip Stephen Hicks]

 

Instead of deploying the flawed and simplistic "left-right" political spectrum -- two ends of a spectrum that depict similars instead of opposites -- Lawrence Reed argues in this guest post that we should judge political and economic systems by whom they empower: the State, or the individual.

The Big Problem With the Traditional 'Political Spectrum' Children Are Taught in Schools

guest post by Lawrence Reed

In classes on Government and Political Science, with few exceptions, students in both high school and university are taught that the so-called “political spectrum” (or “political/economic” spectrum) looks like this: Communism and Socialism reside on the Left, Capitalism and Fascism dwell on the Right. Various mixtures of those things lie somewhere in between:

This is not only false and misleading, it is also idiocy. Toss it into the trash bin and demand a refund from the teacher who presented it as fact, or as any kind of insightful educational tool.

At the very least, a spectrum that looks like that should raise some tough questions. Why should socialists and fascists be depicted as virtual opposites when they share so much in common—from their fundamental, intellectual principles to their methods of implementation? If a political spectrum is supposed to illustrate a range of relationships between the individual and the State, or the very size and scope of the State, then why are systems of Big State/Small Individuals present at both ends of it?

On any other topic, the two ends of a spectrum would depict opposites. Let’s say you wanted to illustrate a range for stupidity. It would look like this:

How much sense would it make for “Extremely Stupid” to appear at both the far Left and the far Right ends of the range?

For the same reason, you would create only confusion with a spectrum that looks like this:

If you wanted to depict a range of options regarding the size of government, a more meaningful range would be this one:

Let us get back to that first sketch above, the spectrum that is most often presented to students as gospel. It is a big reason why so many people think that the communism of Lenin and Stalin was diametrically opposed to the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini (even if people who lived under those systems could not tell much difference).

I must say that in the first place, I am not a fan of one-dimensional spectra as a device for understanding politics, especially when those who construct them insert terms along the range that are not all compatible with what the range is supposed to depict. (Capitalism, for example, is not a political system; it is an economic one. It is entirely possible (though uncommon and ultimately unstable) for a one-party political monopoly to allow a considerable degree of economic freedom. And the spectra shown here are literally one-dimensional, when it would take at least two dimensions, if not three, to truly show the complexity of political positioning.) But my purpose here is not to go that broad, but to deal only with the defective one-dimensional political/economic spectrum that most students learn.

My contention is that if Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism all appear on the same range line it is terribly misleading and utterly useless, to place the first two on the left and the second two on the right. 

If we were to place opposites at each end, then, the placement that makes the most sense is probably this one:

I can already hear the spluttering from the cheap (communist-leaning seasts!) The perspective represented in that last sketch, just above, immediately arouses dispute because its implications are quite different from what students are typically taught. The inevitable objections include these three:

1. Communism and fascism cannot be close together because communists and fascists fought each other bitterly. Hitler attacked Stalin, for example!

This objection is equivalent to claiming, “Al Capone and Bugs Moran hated and fought each other so they can’t both be considered gangsters.” Or, “Since Argentina and Brazil compete so fiercely in football, both teams cannot be composed of footballers.”

Both communism and fascism demonstrate in actual practice an extremely low regard for the lives and rights of their subject peoples. Why should anyone expect their practitioners to be nice to each other, especially when they are rivals for territory and influence on the world stage?

We should remember that Hitler and Stalin were allies before they were enemies. They secretly agreed to carve up Poland in August 1939, leading directly to World War II. The fact that Hitler turned on Stalin two years later is nothing more than proof of the proverb, “There’s no honour among thieves.” Thieves are still thieves even if they steal from each other.

2. Under communism as Karl Marx defined it, government “withers away.” So it cannot be aligned closely with socialism because socialism involves lots of government.

Marx’s conception of communism is worse than purely hypothetical. It is sheer lunacy. The idea that the absolutist despots of the all-powerful “proletarian dictatorship” would one day simply walk away from power has no precedent to point to and no logic behind it. Even as a prophecy, it strains credulity to the breaking point.

Communism is my Sketch 5 appears where it does because in actual practice, it is just a little more radical than the worst socialism. It is the difference between the murderous, totalitarian Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and, say, the socialism of Castro’s Cuba.

3. Communism and Fascism are radically different because in focus, one is internationalist and the other is nationalist (as in Hitler’s “national socialism”).

Big deal. Again, chocolate and vanilla are two different flavors of ice cream, but they’re both ice cream. Was it any consolation to the French or the Norwegians or the Poles that Hitler was a national socialist instead of an international socialist? Did it make any difference to the Ethiopians that Mussolini was an Italian nationalist instead of a Soviet internationalist?

Endless confusion persists in political analysis because of the false dichotomy the conventional spectrum (Sketch 1) suggests. People are taught to think that fascists Mussolini and Hitler were polar opposites of communists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In fact, however, they were all peas in the same collectivist pod. They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider these remarks of the two principal Fascist kingpins, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Ask yourself, “Are these remarks materially different from what Lenin, Stalin and Mao—or even Marx—believed and said?”

In a February 24, 1920 speech outlining the Nazi 25-Point Program, Hitler proclaimed, “The common good before the individual good!”

In a speech to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1928, Mussolini declared, “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State!”

“To put it quite clearly,” said Hitler in a 1931 interview with journalist Richard Breitling, a core program of his Party was “the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism…the principle of authority. The good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners.”

“This is what we propose now to the Treasury,” announced Mussolini on June 19, 1919. “Either the property owners expropriate themselves, or we summon the masses of war veterans to march against these obstacles and overthrow them.”

Less than two weeks before (on June 6, 1919), the future Il Duce virtually plagiarised The Communist Manifesto when he said, “We want an extraordinary heavy taxation, with a progressive character, on capital, that will represent an authentic partial expropriation of all wealth; seizures of all assets of religious congregations and suppression of all the ecclesiastic Episcopal revenues.”

This line from Hitler’s May Day speech at Templehof Air Field in 1934 could have come straight from Lenin: “The hammer will once more become the symbol of the German worker and the sickle the sign of the German peasant.”

That’s the same socialist fanatic who declared in an October 5, 1937 speech, “There is a difference between the theoretical knowledge of socialism and the practical life of socialism. People are not born socialists but must first be taught how to become them.” (Please note: communists and fascists share a common hostility to private and home schooling.)

Mussolini asserted that “there are plenty of intellectual affinities between us” (socialists of the communist variety and socialists of the fascist flavour). In the same interview in 1921, he said, “Tomorrow, Fascists and Communists, both persecuted by the police, may arrive at an agreement, sinking their differences until the time comes to share the spoils…Like them, we believe in the necessity for a centralized and unitary state, imposing an iron discipline on everyone, but with the difference that they reach this conclusion through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.”

Hitler once declared, “National Socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.” In 1932 his fascist soul mate Mussolini echoed the most doctrinaire Bolshevik when he stated, “It was inevitable that I should become a Socialist ultra, a Blanquist, indeed a communist. I carried about a medallion with Marx’s head on it in my pocket. I think I regarded it as a sort of talisman… [Marx] had a profound critical intelligence and was in some sense even a prophet.”

The same Mussolini advised the American businessman and politician Grover Whalen in 1939, “You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!” He was referring to the central planning, anti-capitalist mandates and sky-high taxes of Franklin Roosevelt.

On and on it goes. Based on what they said and what they did, it is ludicrous to separate Fascism from the Left and make it out to be just a purified form of classical liberal Capitalism. If you insist on using the conventional spectrum as depicted in Sketch 1, you are deceiving yourself as to the differences between Communism and Fascism. They both belong firmly on the socialist Left. Actual differences amounted to minimalist window-dressing. Even their primary implementers said so.

Instead of deploying flawed and simplistic spectrum charts, let us judge political and economic systems by whom they empower—the State or the individual. That makes things a lot clearer.

* * * * * 

Lawrence Read is the President Emeritus io the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter, and then appeared at the FEE blog. 

A philosopher's political spectrum...

 

Credit for the rankings goes to the freedom-loving philosopher Stephen Hicks, who shows some of his working here.

Clement Attlee on referenda

"I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum, which as only too often been the instrument of Nazi-ism and fascism."

~ British Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1945 (then leader of the Labour Opposition), rebuffing the notion of a referendum to extend the already decade-long wartime coalition government

The Banality of Evil

Image Credit: Ryohei Noda-Flickr } CC BY 2.0

If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favourite uncle, or your sweet grandmother. Or that nice man who rules Russia. Hannah Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise, but as Lawrence Reed explains in this Guest Post, her thesis delivers the ever-timely warning that evil is, above all, banal.

Hannah Arendt’s Chilling Thesis on Evil

by Lawrence Reed

Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963.

Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise. Her phrase, “the banality of evil,” entered the lexicon of social science, probably forever. It was taken for granted that Eichmann, despite his soft-spoken and avuncular demeanor, must be a monster of epic proportions to play such an important role in one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century.

“I was only following orders,” he claimed in the colourless, matter-of-fact fashion of a typical bureaucrat. The world thought his performance a fiendishly deceptive show, but Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann was indeed a rather “ordinary” and “unthinking” functionary.

How callous! A betrayal of her own Jewish people! How could any thoughtful person dismiss Eichmann so cavalierly?! Arendt’s critics blasted her with such charges mercilessly, but they had missed the point. She did not condone or excuse Eichmann’s complicity in the Holocaust. She witnessed the horrors of national socialism first-hand herself, having escaped Germany in 1933 after a short stint in a Gestapo jail for “anti-state propaganda.” She did not claim that Eichmann was innocent, only that the crimes for which he was guilty did not require a “monster” to commit them.

How often have you noticed people behaving in anti-social ways because of a hope to blend in, a desire to avoid isolation as a recalcitrant, nonconforming individual? Did you ever see someone doing harm because “everybody else was doing it”? The fact that we all have observed such things, and that any one of the culprits might easily, under the right circumstances, have become an Adolf Eichmann, is a chilling realisation.

As Arendt explained, “Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”

Eichmann was a “shallow” and “clueless” joiner, someone whose thoughts never ventured any deeper than how to become a cog in the great, historic Nazi machine. In a sense, he was a tool of Evil more than evil himself.

Commenting on Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, philosopher Thomas White writes, “Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942) [or the singer who "shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die], who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened.’”

Perhaps Hannah Arendt underestimated Eichmann. He did, after all, attempt to conceal evidence and cover his tracks long before the Israelis nabbed him in Argentina in 1960—facts which suggest he did indeed comprehend the gravity of his offenses. It is undeniable, however, that “ordinary” people are capable of horrific crimes when possessed with power or a desire to obtain it, especially if it helps them “fit in” with the gang that already wields it.

The big lesson of her thesis, I think, is this: If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cloak itself in grandiloquent platitudes like “equality,” “social justice,” and the “common good.” It could even be a prominent member of Parliament or Congress.

Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, I suggested in a recent essay, were peas in the same pod as Eichmann—ordinary people who committed extraordinarily heinous acts.

Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the leading political thinkers of the Twentieth Century. She was very prolific, and her books are good sellers still, nearly half a century after her death. She remains eminently quotable as well, authoring such pithy lines as “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians,” “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution,” and “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”

Some of Arendt’s friends on the Left swallowed the myth that Hitler and Stalin occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum. She knew better. Both were evil collectivists and enemies of the individual (see list of suggested readings below). “Hitler never intended to defend the West against Bolshevism,” she wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.”

To appreciate Hannah Arendt more fully, you could begin by viewing the movie based on her life (trailer above), and I offer here a few additional samples of her writings:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

_____

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

_____

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.

_____

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels—that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

_____

Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how. Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organise this kind of mass sentiment, and by organising it they articulate it, and by articulating it they make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behaviour.

_____

The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible.

For Additional Information, see:

• Hannah Arendt (movie trailer)
• Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? by Richard J. Bernstein
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• What Did Hannah Arendt Really Mean by the ‘Banality of Evil’? by Thomas White
• Two Monsters of the French Revolution Who Were Consumed by Power—And Lost Their Heads on the Same Day by Lawrence W. Reed
• What the Nazis Had in Common With Every Other Collectivist Regime of the 20th Century by Lawrence W. Reed
• Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian, by George Reisman

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE's President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com. His post first appeared at Fee.Org.

"'Outside Germany, many still think the Nazis’ strength depended on illiterate mobs. In fact, the highest proportion of Nazi Party members came from the educated classes.' And note that in our generation, the thug types from far left/right are coming out of universities ready to rumble." #QotD

"A reminder: to defeat alt-rightists, neo-fascists, and neo-Nazis we need to get our philosophical game on. That’s the implication of my 2010 book 'Nietzsche and the Nazis.' Support for that thesis from a new book by philosopher Susan Neiman:
    'Outside Germany, many still think the Nazis’ strength depended on illiterate mobs, a view unfortunately reinforced by the dreadful book and subsequent movie 'The Reader.' In fact, the highest proportion of Nazi Party members came from the educated classes.'
    "And note that in our generation, the thug types from far left/right are coming out of universities ready to rumble."
        ~ Stephen Hicks, from his post 'How Nazi-Types are Manufactured'
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"Conflating people advocating for small, limited government with anything to do with Nazism is intellectual malpractice." #QotD

"Conflating people advocating for small, limited government with anything to do with Nazism is intellectual malpractice."
          ~Mark Gleason

.

Quotes of the Day: "If Marxists and Nazis were fighting over any principle at all, it was only about which particular noose to throw around humanity's neck. Where the Marxists collectivised on the basis of class, the Nazis collectivised on the basis of race."

"They were not so very different at all: If they [Marxists and Nazis] were fighting over any principle at all, it was only about which particular noose to throw around humanity's neck. Where the Marxists collectivised on the basis of class, the Nazis collectivised on the basis of race. That was perhaps their unique contribution -- and so very much simpler for the masses to understand and embrace... "
~ Unknown

"The failure of Marxism to develop according to the logic of its traditional theory was reaching a crisis [in the 1950s]... The symptoms were many. One was manifest in the splintering of the monolithic Marxist movement into many sub-movements emphasising the socialism of sex, race, and ethnic identity. Such movements abandoned the universalistic conceptions of human interests ...     "The international proletariat is a highly abstract concept. The universality of all human interests is a very sweeping generalisation... It is hard enough for a trained intellectual to conceive, as classical Marxism requires, of all of humankind as ultimately members of a universal class sharing the same universal interests. But—the more epistemologically-modest theorists of the 1950s begin to ask—can we really expect the masses to abstract to the view that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin? Can the masses conceive of themselves as a harmonious international class? The intellectual capacity of the masses is much more limited, so appealing to and mobilising the masses requires speaking to them about what matters to them and on a level that they can grasp. What the masses can understand and what they do get fired up about are their sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Both epistemological modesty and effective communication strategy, then, dictated a move from universalism to multiculturalism. In effect, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, significant portions of the Left came to agree with the collectivist Right on yet another issue: Forget internationalism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism; focus on smaller groups formed on the basis of ethnic, racial, or other identities."
~ Stephen Hicks, from his book Explaining Postmodernism

"There is no surer way to infect mankind with hatred—brute, blind, virulent hatred—than by splitting it into ethnic groups or tribes. If a man believes that his own character is determined at birth in some unknown, ineffable way, and that the characters of all strangers are determined in the same way—then no communication, no understanding, no persuasion is possible among them, only mutual fear, suspicion, and hatred. Tribal or ethnic rule has existed, at some time, in every part of the world, and, in some country, in every period of mankind’s history. The record of hatred is always the same. The worst kinds of atrocities were perpetrated during ethnic (including religious) wars. A recent grand-scale example of it was Nazi Germany..."
~ Ayn Rand, from her 1977 talk on “Global Balkanisation”


“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavouring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
~ Thomas Paine, on "The American Crisis"
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QotD: “Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism.”

“Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism.”
~ Ayn Rand (quoted in George H. Smith's article exploring Rand's contention that America is sliding down a a slippery slope to fascism)
.

The primary difference between Nazism (national socialism) and traditional socialism

The primary difference between Nazism (national socialism) and traditional socialism is that while the traditional socialist divides the world along lines demarcated by class, the national socialist divides the world along lines demarcated by race.

Both are thoroughgoing collectivists. This is their essential similarity. The only essential difference between them is to which mass of humanity the particular collectivist demands that individuals sacrifice.   One puts human beings in a collective pot according to where they work; the other according to where they were born – but to each of these two variants of collectivism “the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it.”

Thus, as Ludwig Von Mises explains, where traditional socialism seeks a specially privileged position for the members of a definite class, “national socialism is a system of socialism which seeks a specially privileged position for the members of a definite nation.”

And where the pre-and-post-World War I Internationale aimed at a socialist organisation of the world in which the working masses of the proletariat would be assigned a privileged position, while the blood and riches of the bourgeoisie would serve this new dictatorship, “the pre-World War II German National Socialist Party aimed at a socialist organisation of the world in which the people of ‘pure German blood’ would be assigned a privileged position, while members of the ‘inferior’ races would be assigned tasks where they would serve the ‘Master (German) race.’

The essential similarity in both cases is the sacrifice of the individual to the collective. The only essential difference is which particular sub-division of the collective is granted supremacy – or, to put it another way: who, in each case, is sacrificed to whom.

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From the Archives: Yes, Virginia, the Nazis really were socialists

Originally posted here in 2005, this post is looking long overdue for a re-post...

I've noticed some bloggers and commentators around the traps still upset at claims the Nazis were socialist.

What’s that? Nazis?? Nazis were socialists?!! Well, yes they were.

It's true that the National Socialists didn't nationalise their economy's commanding heights on coming to power as Lenin would have had them do; they didn't nationalise them because they didn’t need to -- as Hitler said, they simply 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.

George Reisman makes the case for Nazism = Socialism in an article here, (which he also delivered as a lecture on video.)

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: that we do not have a dictatorship, nor do we (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...

FULL ARTICLE HERE And a video of Reisman’s original talk ...