"Nazis - Right or Left?" Topic

My God. I TRIED to stay away from this mess. Until I read "using violence to silence opposing views, definately LEFT, like ANTIFA of today". Luckily for YOU, my Dad was ANTIFA circa 1942-1945. Along with MILLIONS more. Your welcome. Maybe. Maybe not. So that's educational, Bill?

"Nobody, least of all the millions of rank-and-file right-leaning Americans who voted for Donald Trump, wants to be lumped in with Nazis. It's a fact, however, that Nazi-friendly organizations, Nazi symbols, and Nazi gestures were in evidence at the disastrous Charlottesville event, whose unfortunate title was not "Unite the Left," but "Unite the Right." I'm pretty damn sure, no, I"M REAL DAMN SURE, POSITIVE IN FACT, that the Nazis killed Heather Heyer. And SERIOUSLY INJURED MANY MORE. (MORE education)

I could not agree more with the statement: "There is nothing here that will either illuminate or inform WW2 tabletop gaming". Thank you, Pyrrhic Victory. You couldn't be anymore spot on.

I used to come here to get help with, look at & read about little metal men. I miss those days… you know, the good ole days.

Garth in the Park,
Sounds REAL familiar, eh? smdh…

I knew this was going to happen ….. the avalanche of the obtuse and the ill-informed.

I'm outta here.

B

Winston got it in one. Why even go further?

Honestly this debate should be demonstrating how stupid the 'left right spectrum' really is, since it's not really effective at illustrating anything.

Additionally, the Nazi's weren't white nationalists, they were Aryan nationalists- that's actually an important distinction. They certainly killed a lot of whites. They were the end result of the previous century of bizarre racist categorizations that were pedantic, very detailed, and truly evil.

At the end of the day if the totalitarian killing you claims to support collectivism on behalf of the state or collectivism on behalf of the people, does it really matter? You are still dead.

I think the poll results will be educational.

Why on earth would you think that, given what you have read in this thread already??!!

"would suggest strongly that D' Souza is not a respected authority and is manipulative and dishonest."

Cite your sources or it is just your opinion.

Life's not long enough, Stone Mountain. I gave you my opinion. I don't owe you an explanation which will eat a half-hour of my time writing out with references.

Go read the links that other people posted. They'll tell you what I would without burning up my time.

Honestly what is point of this thread other than to start a political flame war? There is nothing here that will either illuminate or inform WW2 tabletop gaming. All this does is remind me that there is a large percentage of gamers that I will always vehemently disagree with

Th point of this thread is to see how many people – previously more or less friendly – will intensely dislike each other by the end of the evening.

The secondary point of this thread is to see how many people will be kicked off the board, permanently or temporarily, when they lose their patience and start insulting each other.

If there is any other point to this thread, I cannot discern it.

The NAZIS were left wingers, the very name means socialist. There is nothing right wing about socialism.

And yet we still continue to debate on which of those cancers is the worst one. The answer is so simple … all of them.

Dan
TMP link

They are National Socialists, socialists are lefties.

The political spectrum is a Circle not a line – extreme left meets extreme right eventually…….Hitler = Stalin. I see no difference between the Nazi's and the Communists. Both are evil systems.

I think the line of political spectrum is not a straight line. It curves and the far right and far left meet at the bottom of the circle. Both are extremists and very dangerous.

It's like how some people say a tomato is a fruit, and others say it is a vegetable. Either way, a rotten tomato is still rotten no matter if you call it a fruit or a vegetable.

Left and right are ambiguous terms. That said, the Nazis are neither liberal nor conservative. I guess you could call Nazis illiberal radicals. Of course this designation is my own, and I am conservative in the sense of Edmund Burke and liberal in the sense of Jose Ortega y Gasset.

Th point of this thread is to see how many people – previously more or less friendly – will intensely dislike each other by the end of the evening.

So far, this discourse has seen no shift along the lines of those I find to be well-spoken, and those just nutty.

Only way that Nazis were right wing was that they allowed private ownership of industry, even then it was highly centrally managed.
Both National Socialism and Communism tried to replace all other loyalties with the State. In the process they weakened and hamstrung religion and any other civic organization. They created their own versions of boy scouts – Hitler Youth and Young Pioneers. They did not believe in freedom of press, expression or to assemble. Like many others I think they are more similar than different

The point of this thread is to see how many people – previously more or less friendly – will intensely dislike each other by the end of the evening.

Let's exercise maturity and discuss this rationally, not letting our emotions get in the way.

" I"M REAL DAMN SURE, POSITIVE IN FACT, that the Nazis killed Heather Heyer. And SERIOUSLY INJURED MANY MORE. (MORE education)"

If you don't mind, I'll give you a bit more education. I'm a member of my department's field force team, what used to be called riot control. In fact, I'm at field force school this week in a FEMA facility in Alabama. Yes, she was killed by Nazis. The Nazis of today are not the same as the 1930s-40s. They are nothing more than a hate group whose sole reason for existence is to get rid of anyone who is not white. I know of no credible right wing/conservative/Republican group that supports/allies with them.

In today's mass demonstration/riot/civil disobedience world, it is almost always the leftist groups, Antifa, Occupy, Black Block, Anarchists, etc who use violence against police, business, civilians. So I can understand why people associate violence with the left…because 95% of the time they are the ones who use it…as the original Nazis did.

By the way, your dad was almost certainly NOT Antifa. Antifa is, and always has been, leftist street thugs attempting to force their political views on the rest of us through threats, intimidation, and violence. I would guess your dad was an honorable man who joined the military when his country called in order to stop one of the great evils of the last hundred years. while it has become fashionable to claim our soldiers were Antifa, its nothing more than trite cute garbage. When war came the Antifa types allowed better men to fight while they stayed home and lamented what a terrible country they lived in.

So I can understand why people associate violence with the left…because 95% of the time they are the ones who use it…as the original Nazis did.

The original fascists – Mussolini in Italy – were responding to violence from the Communists. Thugs vs thugs.

Left and Right are terms used to define the political position of parties in the parlamentarian spectrum. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists believed in parlamentarian life. They sook actively to destroy it; they despised it.

Nazis thought of themselves as revolutionaries. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, argued that class struggle had been incorrectly identified as the motor of History. It was racial struggle what drove History forward. Dialectics wasn't about the contradiction between the possession of the means of production in the hands of capitalists and the possession of the workforce by the workers, like in classical Marxist theory. In his worldview, it was the struggle against a vast conspiracy that took away the means of production from the German workers, and allowed them to Jewish capitalists. Nazi revolution, Hitler concluded, would confiscate the wealth and means of production from those "capitalists" and give it back to the German nation -not that he explained exactly how that would be done-. Hitler saw himself as the political philosopher that would trascend all political philosophy, as he had discovered the authentic laws of History. He believed he had corrected Marxists thesis, which were being used to perpetuate the control of Jews over Europe through Communism. In his mind, Jews were behind Capitalism in its liberal, parlamentarian form, and Communism both.

Hitler didn't like the actual work of government. He liked to make speeches, but not the boring work of signing laws, discussing policy, and making decissions. That, as Kershaw and Evans have proved, created an environment of competition inside and between Nazi organizations. Nazi leaders had not love lost between them. Hitler served as focal point, but once actual policy was trying to be made it was a free for all grabbing mess. Some, as Rosenberg, were arguably "leftists", i.e. wanted to create a Socialist, but racialist state; others, like Goering, wanted to re-create a pseudo-feudalist fantasy of an Aryan aristocracy ruling upon a caste of Peasant-Warriors, which would control masses of ilotes in bondage; then you have individuals like Himmler, whose idea of State was that of city-dwellers, burgeoise, and, of course, ultranationalist in the sense that Germany would thrive by colonial explotation of other countries resources. In Hitler all those tendencies and ideas were present, so he could speak with Rosenberg, Goering or Himmler and agree with his interlocutor at the time. But each of them could, in his own turf, follow whatever policy they fancied. For historians that is what looks so confusing about Nazi Germany, and why is so difficult to defining it politically as Rightist or Leftist.

What Nazi Germany didn't do was to nationalize the economy. Not in the sense of Stalinist Soviet Union did. In Nazi Germany, private property and capitalist enterprise was respected by the Nazi state… as long as their owners had the proper racial credentials, of course. However, it wasn't true Capitalism either. Theft replaced normal bussiness practices. Corruption was more important for winning a contract than having the best product at the best price. Market was substituted by institutionalized greed. And all of that without the existence of any independent, politically speaking, agency that could control the brutal, big larceny carried by the Nazis and their cronies, with the necessary co-operation of big bussiness, upon the wealth of first Germany and then the conquered countries. Economically speaking Nazi Germany developed a parasitical economy.

So, was it Left or Right? The answer should be: neither. Nazi Germany existed in a state of permanent exceptionality. You can't use normal, parlamentarian categories to define it.

I don't think right or left applies to Nazi Germany. It's like asking is Satan right or left. I think the more appropriate phrasing is Good or Evil. And my question to that is do you really need to ask? Cheers!

Excellent analysis basileus!

My comments were my own, added Dinesh D'Sousa's video because I knew of it so watched it after commenting and added it. He was just bringing up the philosopher of fascism Giovanni Gentile.
link

National Socialist German Workers' Party sums it all up. Leftists!!
They were certainly not "ultra conservative". Read the Nazi platform, not what some NYC talking head tells you to believe.

The Nazis were (and are) the BAD GUYS. No other label matters.

If we transpose the discussion to a football field with a game somewhere in between "plant the flag" and "Calvinball" it become quite interesting.

You see a few players grab a flag and try to plant it somewhere in the field with a few thinking they can win the game by planting it in the middle or going somewhere in the bleachers or in the parking lot to make a point about left or right. Some surreptitiously try to exchange the left/right sign while others are busy building strawmen. Others gather up all the flags and replant them on the other side. A few try to be clever and plant the flag outside the playing field.

Everybody jumps in the game thinking they know the answer or even the rules, others assume they must dictate the rules to others and nobody tries to figure out what the point of the exercise is in the first place.

We don't have a level playing field, the question is ambiguous and nobody agrees on the definitions so getting an answer is bound to generate a free for all.

And even if we do reach a consensus, what does it mean anyway ?

This was more fun than watching Donald and Hillary debate.

There is no real difference between Stalin and Hitler. Both killed millions of their own people. The label left or right is irrelevant. This is a most unfortunate topic.

Herr Gruber wrote – "This is a most unfortunate topic."

True words.

B

DN Jackson. Heather Heyer was a morbidly obese Leftist who died of a heart attack while rioting in an attempt to deprive American citizens of their rights of speech and assembly.

Some of the answers here remind of the danish version of Moliere, the famous Ludvig Holberg of danish and norwegian blood, who in the 1780 wrote a comedy where a student returning from the university, comes to his village, and is asked for a display of what he has learned, and he shows what retorics are with this brilliant nonsense: you see mother, you are a stone, because stones cant fly, and you cant either, so therefore you are a stone-
No national socialist are not socialist, because they call them selves socialist. This simply pure nonsense, not even worthy of being called an argument.
The type of idiocy could that in the us that the repuplican states are called red states, because that is their traditional colour. Even i in the faraway Denmark know they are not communist, even though they use red colour.
Nazis is an extreme rigth wing ideology, and you can see other extreme rigthwings free mingle in and out of the parties.

Are we talking about how they were viewed by their contemporaries, or are we judging the by today's standards.

100% true … maybe need to look at it from that angle …

The Nazis were (and are) the BAD GUYS. No other label matters.

Also very true …

Commie, Nazi, Fascist, racists, etc. … Bad is Bad … I'd think we'd all have to agree the likes of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Tojo, Mussolini, Pol Pot, all the NoKo leaders, all their cronies, associates, freaks, mutants and friends, etc. are not "good" … in any sense … Making the trains run on time not withstanding …

Also … Since I'm a Sci-fi geek, Star Wars' Storm Troopers are Space Nazis …

Heyer was a morbidly obese

Hey many Fat people have sensitive feelings too …

The NAZIS were left wingers, the very name means socialist. There is nothing right wing about socialism.

National Socialist German Workers' Party sums it all up. Leftists!!

They are National Socialists, socialists are lefties.

Poor General Ludendorff must have been very confused, then. He was a hardcore natonalist conservative who loathed Leftists of all stripes, and yet there he was, in uniform, proudly marching alongside Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch.

What do you think happened? Did he not get the memo? (I feel sorry for the guy; if he'd lived in the era of the Internet, he'd have known better!)

Meanwhile poor Willy Brandt must have felt really cheated. As a lifelong Socialist, he suddenly had to flee Germany and hide from the Nazis in Norway, where he joined the resistance after the 1940 invasion. But Brandt was lucky; the Nazis caught and killed many of the other leading Socialists.

Kinda odd behavior, isn't it, for an allegedly leftist party to abolish labor unions and send the Lefties to concentration camps, while promoting nationalists and aristocrats like v. Ribbentrop and v. Reichenau, and trying to win the approval of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

- – -

PS- if labels and a constitution guarantee political facts, then North Korea is a "democratic" country because that's in its title, and it protects human rights, because it says so in its constitution.

Mussolini was a communist until he got kicked out. Like that old joke – The Devil gives him some burning coals and tells him to go start his own hell.

I do not believe that our current perceptions as to right or left can be easily applied to the Nazi Party of WWII and before. From an economic standpoint the Nazi's were socialist in that the state took over the direction of the economy and took it out of private hands. I believe that Hitler hated the economic elite and used or abused them whenever it suited his aims. So, based upon that single criteria I would say that the Nazi's were left.

Mobius: "Mussolini was a communist until he got kicked out. Like that old joke – The Devil gives him some burning coals and tells him to go start his own hell."

Spot on!

They're brothers from a different mother. Or is it identical twins wearing contrasting jumpsuits?

Dan
PS. People still don't understand that the only reason we sided with One to destroy the Other was because of geography. The One was slightly further away than the Other, who was the most urgent threat. We should have finished what we started and rid the world of both. We spared the One simply because we were tired, and not because it had any redeeming qualities (or its Marxist goals, methods and symbols any less dangerous or offensive).

TMP sweeps already? Get that hits counter out!

Communism under Stalin and Facism are extreme political movements that have essentially departed from the Left/Right spectrum of today's politics. Both are horrible corruptions of the ideals and ideas of the Left and the Right. On the Left we can acknowledge that taken to extremes socialist thinking can create the nightmare of Stalinist communism.

For whatever reason on the Right they have a harder time acknowledging that extreme right thinking can lead to the nightmare of Facism.

Self designate lables such as "People's Republic" or "National Socialism" mean nothing. Its views and policies that matter. How those views are sold to the people can also cause confusion: the Nazi's promoted crony capitalism and pandered to wealth industrialits and old conservatives while selling to the lower middle classes extreme nationalism, your better than those racial inferiors and we will make your life better and smite those internationalists that are the root of your troubles. They used popularist rethoric to get in power to implement policies quite different from what they preached. Its an old bait and switch that has gone on for centuries. The Nazi's were masters of this technique.

Next is the cult of personality (see George Orwell's Animal Farm). Whatever the leaders alleged policital views there real goal is to obtain and maintain absolute power. Here the two extremes merge and appear the same.

Extremism tends to make people of quite different views appear the same. For instance extremely religious people of different faiths will often expouse similar moral doctrines except that they hate the others views.

Communism and Facism are fundementally different in ideology but they often use the same tactics to gain and maintain power – hence the confusion.

Neo-socialist state's such as Sweden don't resemble either Nazi Germany (or Stalin's USSR).

Extremism is the enemy not the Right/Left divide. Both sides need to be aware that their view – carried to extremes has produced some of the most horrific governments ever to plague the earth.

TomT

This is pointless. Marxist Leninist killed over 100 million innocent people, you could fill an ocean with the tears that have been shed. Real fascism has eliminated what, 20 million. What is the redeeming value of perusing the discourse of these two humanistic tumors? Both are indeed part of the same circle, at the bottom, tethered close to each other.
I think I'll have a glass of wine and a piece of cheese cake, whilst I get ready to work on some more red army infantry for bolt action.
Absolutely pointless and insipid!
Doghouse fodder!

"Commie, Nazi, Fascist, racists, etc. … Bad is Bad …"

Problem is not everyone considers commies as being bad. It is currently fashionable to be a communist in some circles. Look at the rhetorical pretzels some people on this thread are tying themselves in to keep from admitting the Nazis were leftists like the communists.

"If we transpose the discussion to a football field with a game somewhere in between "plant the flag" and "Calvinball" it become quite interesting."
This. We didn't start by defining what Left and Right are, so everybody argued past each other. In order to come to some agreement we need to define economic, political and social definitions of Left and Right and that isn't easy.
Economically Communism is Government ownership of everything, Socialism is Government ownership of everything important, National Socialism is Government control of everything important but with private ownership. Capitalism is private ownership and control of everything. Between National Socialism and Capitalism is another layer where the government prevents excesses of private ownership and control but leaves them alone otherwise.

This thread is a bad idea, unless our esteemed Editor is trying to generate additional doghouse residents.

It just encourages people to make ill-conceived comparisons between WWII and present-day politics. The terminology doesn't transfer well from one period to another.

MH

The original fascists – Mussolini in Italy – were responding to violence from the Communists. Thugs vs thugs.

And the communists were responding to violence from the fascists – thugs vs thugs. And the fascists who attacked the communists were responding to violence from the communists. Who were responding to violence from the fascists.

They were all pretty nasty and all anxious to beat the out of someone wearing a different colour arm band – hopefully, when he was alone and already injured and they had 5 or 6 of their buddies with them.

There are no "principles" to be drawn here.

I admit I have not even read most of the above. But suggesting that the name of a party has any real baring on the philosophy of the party is a poor place to start. I suspect this is more of a question on how each person defines "Left" and "Right". Clearly a one dimensional scale is a poor one for any real insight into political philosophy.

At a minimum two dimensions, and some clear thinking about what the terms mean.
For some consistency, I suggest political compass:
link

They place Hitler (and by inference, the NAZI party) near the center:

Thatcher….???

Really? As in … you lot really .. think like that?

OLOLOL . ….

Somehow I don't see Margaret Thatcher a bare step from Nazis, spent a couple of years in England at that time.
This Right / Left thing has been a pet peeve of mine since high school when teachers tried to tell me Communists were on the Left and Nazis wete on the Right.

The problem with this discussion is that most in the US think of the US definition of Right versus Left, which is not the same as the European definition. Certainly in 20th Century Europe the Right included Nationalists. We generally think of Socialists as Left, so Nationalist Socialists are a bit of a contradiction in the Right-Left spectrum of the US.

What the Nazis did, in terms of economics, can hardly be reconciled with the Right from a US Conservative view. But from a 1940s European view, it was.

Problem is not everyone considers commies as being bad. It is currently fashionable to be a communist in some circles.

We have seen this in the US and Europe, etc., for many decades. And in many cases before and after both world wars. But I think many may also have a different definition what is "Communism" …

On another front, some have mentioned this thread could certainly end up with some in the DH or LO … So tread lightly … And remember the TMP 10 Year Rule for political discussion, etc., …

An interesting question, if kept to history & eschewing politics. I would cite Godwin's law in that once you accuse someone in an internet discussion of being a Nazi, all discussion is at an end:
link

I think in a general discussion the facile view that left wing Totalitarian communists (eg Stalin)& the right wing Fascism/Nazism of Hitler are essentially the same thing is, perhaps, as useful as any generalisation but in an historical discussion, it is a distortion.

There are significant differences, many of which have been mentioned.

Here are a few I think important in distinguishing exactly what Nazism was.

Unlike Communism which was a revolutionary creed, intent on uprooting &transforming society, Nazism was deeply conservative. Hitler was *not* a revolutionary leader but a populist, elected democratically….albeit in a campaign were he demonised his opponents, often on trumped up charges, threatened violence etc. The Nazis claimed to be revolutionary (& perhaps that's where their roots lay) but they were conservatives to a jack-booted man.

One aspect of this was he was overwhelmingly supported by the churches, by the capitalists & by the middle classes, who felt betrayed by the former, Weimar, government. The Nazi use of authoritarian methods was not that radically different from their forerunners :the Prussian government & that of Wilhelm II.

Not to say the communists weren't violent but the Nazis had a perverted sado-masochistic cult of violence. "Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver". Guns, daggers, weapons of war are all venerated to a strange degree.

Racism is another salient feature. That the regime would sanction the police to shoot down, torture & kill minorities differs in kind & approach to the mass killings of the Stalin regime.

I would also cite slavery. Using enormous numbers of prisoners to produce military gear etc etc is a feature of what kept the Nazis going. It can be argued this is a perverted form of capitalism & certainly the high percentage of the incarcerated so used is a feature of Nazism.

There are no regimes identical to those of Stalin or Hitler today. Arguably some share features but any discussion of this should be kept to the Blue Fez (is it still functioning?).

To paraphrase Kipling, "OH, Nazism is Nazism, and Communism is Communism, and never the twain shall meet".

Dale's point of differences ( bottom pg 2)in cultures and continents was one I made on another thread which had me wondering if our good editor saw and started this

Can I point everyone in this thread towards reading something like Karl Dietrich Bracher's 'The German Dictatorship' and ask them not to take words at face value until they have understood such a work?
Otherwise we will have tears before bedtime.
Night, night.

PS – hint – the Nazis weren't 'Socialists': Hitler killed any Socialist but kept the name. Sheesh!