Historian and author Rainer Zitelmann chats on Dad Saves America about the appalling and consistent lack of understanding of Adolf Hitler’s concept of National Socialism. One idea that just won’t die for the left is the spurious notion that Hitler was an advocate of capitalism, despite his advocacy of four year plans and strict government control over the economy.
National Socialism and Marxist Socialism are the same thing. They use the same methodology: identify the target group, kill them all and steal everything they had.
The only minor difference was the target group. For national socialists, it’s the Jews. For Marxist socialists, it’s the bourgeoisie. Either way, the result is mass slaughter. There is no meaningful difference between the Holodomor and Auschwitz.
There is though. The Holodomor was 4x the Holocaust, or more. Mao was double Stalin or more.
As bad as Hitler was, and IMHO he broke new ground in that direction, Stalin was worse.
For really fine-grained atrocity though, you’ve gotta hand it to the Norks. They don’t have the big numbers yet, but those boys know how to party.
Hitler, for all his atrocities, did horrible things to non-Germans. For the most part. Other people. Stalin etc. did the same bad things to his own people. Therein lies the difference, or so I think.
And Mao was even worse than Stalin or Hitler.
“And Mao was even worse than Stalin or Hitler.”
By body count, yes…Mao was the worst by far.
In my opinion, though, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Amin et al did what they did for power and control. By evil intent, I think Hitler was the worst of the worst because he attempted to wipe out an entire people *who were no threat to him* just because he hated them.
Genghis Khan for the win.
If we’re including conquering (re: Genghis Khan), then the Aztecs have to be right up there as well.
Not relevant. It’s a function of time and nothing more. Hitler had three years to work the Holocaust. Stalin and Mao had more than a decade. Pol Pot had a decade.
What is truly disturbing are the modern “liberals” who claim that Hitler was sympathetic to capitalism.Thus they try to pretend that Hitler was a manifestation of “the right”. This despite the fact that in his own words he stated, “I am a Socialist.”
“It’s a function of time and nothing more.”
Okay, that’s fair. Adolph, left to himself, probably would have gotten there too. 6 million was a strong start, and when he ran out of Jews he’d need to keep that engine turning.
“Adolph, left to himself, probably would have gotten there too. ”
No question about it. The extermination of the Slavs started with the opening shots of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The Wehrmacht was ordered to feed themselves by confiscating all the food from the peasantry and then simply shoot everyone who objected. The Einsatzgruppen started with the Jews, but that was only preliminary to the entire Slavic race. Collectively they shipped millions back to Germany and the death camps as slave labour to be starved and worked to death.
The world is so very, very fortunate that the United States entered the war (via Lend Lease) to put a stop to all this.
Absolutely correct cgh. Hitler hated the Slavs too and wanted to eliminate them so that the “Master Race” could expand into their lands.
Ls, agreed. All of these socialisms all descend into murder cults. We saw this in history first time around with the Jacobin fanaticism of the French Revolution under Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety. And the Left is making determined efforts to forget just how horrid socialism is. Our governments make a huge fetish about WW1. But WW2 is forgotten about as much as possible. We have monuments to WW1 in the town cenotaph, but nothing for the far worse horror of WW2.
It’s as though the socialists want to make us forget that THEY were the enemy.
fantom
7 million is a more accurate number.
cghCOLON
Hitler carried RCC water, and did what they tried to do, eradicate Jews and Judaism.
It was in many cases kristians who turned Jews over to the nazis, and the dutch were some of the worst for that, and yep I’m from the netherlands.
It was often said that Hitler practiced brown communism and Stalin practiced red fascism. Fascism and communism are not polar opposites as the lunatic left likes to say….they are more like two drug gangs fighting over the same territory…..one gang wears red do rags and the other blue.
“There are two breeds of Bolshevism…..there is nothing to choose between the philosophies of Moscow and Berlin.”
Duff Cooper, British politician, First Lord of the Admiralty – August 23, 1939.
There is one aspect that Zitelmann misses when it comes to Hitler and Stalin. National vs International Socialism. Hitler, while he admired much of Stalin and the USSR, looked at them as quite ordinary nationalists selling a line to the rubes and considered the idea of International Socialism as merely everyday Russian Imperialism. Thus, socialism with a German face. National Socialism. Other than that, great talk.
Indeed, proving the fact that the “far-left is the opposite of the far-right” political spectrum that has been spouted for the last ninety years is incorrect. Instead, communism & fascism are simply two flavors of the same authoritarian, totalitarian end.
… “Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism… as Fascism sprang from communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.”
Winston Churchill
Volkswagen literally means “ people’s car.” Hitler used to concept to encourage people to pony money up front for a made-in-Germany solution after which he used said funds to finance the Party’s growth.
The similarities between the NDP and the Nazis are becoming more evident each day.
I also note that Hitler was a vegetarian, tea-totaling, environmentalist leader of a national socialist party.
Know any other vegetarian, tea-totaling, environmentalist leaders of a national party that is socialist; and who supports people who want to kill Jews?
Yup
Hitler was named “Man of the Year” in 1938 by Time Magazine. They noted Hitler’s anti-capitalistic economic policies:
“Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany’s bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.”
(Source: Time Magazine; January 2, 1939.)
Is there anybody here who hasn’t known this for 30 years or more?
Raking history over the coals, again and again, with each side screeching “you guys are worse!”
At this point, this amounts to nothing more than libs and cons arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.
Even those who know history are doomed to repeat it.
You, of course, are right.
To the recent generations the whole era of those years is complete and utter blank.
Completely skipped over by the so called education ‘experts’
No, it’s far more important than that. Less than 50 years after 1945 there were concerted attempts to insist that the Holocaust never happened. That Holodomor was grossly overstated or covered up by Western newspapers.
So it’s essential to keep it firmly in mind that all Socialism is irredeemably evil. Otherwise the lesson will be forgotten over time. Right now we have student demonstrators shouting pro-Hamas slogans in our streets that Hitler would have endorsed.
Whenever you hear someone say that the Nazis weren’t socialist, it is a clear indicator that they are covering their own tracks.
“Whenever you hear someone say that the Nazis weren’t socialist, it is a clear indicator that they are covering their own tracks.”
I love it when they try to call Nazis “right wing”.
It’s a reflexive reaction of Marxists. But then to a Marxist, EVERYTHING other than their own ideology is “right wing”.
Much of the supposed justification for claiming that fascism is the opposite of communism (the right-left narrative) is that Hitler and Stalin hated each other.
Well…if you go to LA….the Bloods and Crips hate each other, too.
Not because they are different, but because they are the same. Rivals.
Mussolini defined fascism as “Everything in the State, nothing outside of the State. Everything for the
State, nothing against the State.”
Sounds like the approach taken to covid, green theology, alphabet crowd, etc.
The term Fascism is derived from the term Fascia, which was a bundle of sticks. If you watch movies involving Roman legions, look at the eagle emblem. It is not held by a single pole, but by a fascia.
Strength in numbers…..it takes a whole village….we are all in this together…..a part of a bundle, not an individual…you get the drift.
A better continuum than Left to Right would be total government control on one side, where fascism and communism both dwell, separated only by snippets of jargon, and on the other side, no government control, which would be anarchy.
In Canada, we have both. If you are, say, part of a trucker protest, you will experience fascism and the control of the government. If you are burning cars in Montreal while chanting about the final solution, you get to inflict anarchy, and there will be no one to stop you.
United States house: https://romeonrome.com/files/2016/01/House_fasces-1.jpg
And when fasces were not fascist: https://www.city-journal.org/article/when-fasces-arent-fascist
While the whole show is neither here or there, the article is portraying the fasces as sometimes ok.
Everyone wants a black-white world, where the people I support are in favor of everything I support, while the people I oppose support everything I hate.
It rarely works out that way.
Hitler and Stalin and Mao all held one thing in common. They thought they were speeding up the evolution of mankind by killing people. The Jews in Hitler’s sight the peasants of Ukraine in Stalin’s sight the urban intellectuals in Mao’s sight. Same effect for the same reason.
Joke
” peasants of Ukraine ”
With possibly up to 75 million dead, Stalin and the commies killed a lot more than just Ukes, they also killed a lot of Jews, at least 33 thousand in Kyiv alone.
The key takeaway from Zitelmann’s interview was that the national socialists and the communists were competitors for state dominance but only different in degrees of statism. Also, his discussion on the later years of the Reich when Hitler was talking candidly to his inner circle about how much he admired the success of Stalin.
I had a great Aunt that I used to visit many years ago who was an intellectual and progressive. She gave me her copy of Mein Kampf and we discussed politics. She had visited Nazi Germany in the early years and like most progressives was impressed. Eugenics were fashionable in those years. I think that the progressives were largely responsible for equating the Nazis with the right in a successful attempt at distancing themselves from the holocaust and WW2, a false narrative that has survived to the present.
Totalitarian tyranny….. That folks usually sums up all the activities of most isms.