The Right Wing Bullshite Machine: The Myth of Nazism as Socialism

The right wing, which is, historically speaking, quite distinct from traditional conservatism and laissez faire liberal conservatism, has spewed a lot of truly bizarre demagoguery over the years. One of its most spectacular species of demagogic bullshit, however, is its equation of National Socialism or Nazism with Socialism.

Nazism, empirically speaking, was ethnicalist in the extreme. Nazis believed that the Aryan race would and should rule the world. It was romantic looking backward at a golden age of Aryan knights and corporate hierarchy. It was, in other words, a revival of corporate feudalism. It was utopian in that it wanted to bring back the gold old days when Aryans were Aryans and Jews were non-existent. It was capitalist making its peace with German corporations like the capitalist corporation Krupp. It was ethnocentric in that it ranked humans hierarchically with Aryans at the top and Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews at the bottom. Jews were to be annihilated, Slavs enslaved. It was eugenicist in that the disabled were to be eliminated while the decadent, including leftists, were to be purged from the corporate body or eliminated.

Socialism, in general. on the other hand, was internationalist at least initially. It wanted to, at least initially, destroy capitalism. It believed the global working class would play the leading role in transforming the world. It was romantic, but in a future directed way. Socialists preached that, at some point, socialism would bring about a new world. It did not look backward. It was inclusive in that it believed the working class with all its diversity would create a new and better world and finally bring about true liberty, true freedom, true democracy, true equity, and the true pursuit of happiness.

When Nazis used the term socialism they used it as a synonym for national corporatism, the national state hierarchically structured. This means that Nazis borrowed and adapted their idea of the state, the state as corporation, from the mediaeval Catholic Church.

There were, of course, a variety nationalist fascisms. Nationalist corporate facisms were found in Germany, in Italy in Spain, and in Argentina, to note a few examples. Both the Nazis and Francoists, by the way, and this is a historical fact, hated socialism, communism, and anarchism and actually engaged in the mass murder of socialists, communists, and anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and WWII/the Shoah.   

Socialism, of course, like another internationalist movement, Christianity, would eventually make its peace with the religion of nationalism and succumb to the nationalist faith, in France, in Germany, in Britain, and in the USSR, where it was called socialism in one country, after WWI, showing, once again, how strong and popular the religion of nationalism is. As I write a potential candidate for the leadership of the British Labour Party is preaching the gospel of patriotic, translation, British, progressivism.

Anyway, that the right wing bullshite machine can equate Nazism and Socialism is a marker of how Monty Pythonesque, how absurd, the right wing bullshite machine became in the wake of World War II. I would hate to think that those who propigate this myth actually believe it but humans, as history shows, have believed a lot of bullshite over the years. And so it goes.