Talk Elections

Read this post and see what I mean.

How Nazis are like the *Radical* Left Wing (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/772824/posts)

Anyone with any understanding of history or politics knows that this is untrue.

Love them freepers

Please. No more of this idiocy.

     Trying to plot historical fascism in the left-right political spectrum was the major mistake, actually.

Hitler taking away guns, giving money to unmarried women like welfare, having big government such as national socialist health care and education systems and accusing opponents of as "conservative reactionaries" is just false, right?



Don't forget even Woodrow Wilson and FDR were admired by Mussolini and Hitler especially his New Deal policies.

But some liberal idiots just don't want to admit it!

You're an idiot.

Once again you tried to appear intelligent by using terms you don't understand and out of context. Once again, you failed.

First of all: fascism cannot be tied to typical right-left spectrum.

Second of all: Interventionist policies doesn't make Hitler left-wing, because economic affairs are not everything. Using the same thinking you can make Francisco Franco "a leftist".

Third of all: A man, who don';t know the definition of dictatorship is a moron.

Fourth of all: A man who's trying to impose modern terms on very, very, very diffrent story is a moron

Fifth of all: This man is you

It's debatable. Personally, rather than a left-right spectrum, I think it should be more horseshoe-shaped as Hitler did NOT have a right-wing economic policy at all.

Not really, as long as you hold the left-right spectrum to be valid in some way - which is debatable in itself but fascism certainly belongs there and where it was placed. The problem is that the two terms have changed their meaning when transported to the United States.


How so?

Otherwise this can't be said enough:

Hard to believe that people this stupid and retarded actually exist.

Hitler was an authoritarian.  He was evil because he murdered millions of innocent individuals and plunged the world into war by invading and attacking his neighbors.

Economically, it's a little less certain where he was, but the political compass (http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2) people put him at center-right.

Though total lack of a government can be a problem too (see Somalia for an example), an unchecked government accountable to none is an unquestionable recipe for disaster.

If you want to show how leftist authoritarianism can be a disaster, try Stalin or Mao (both who had vast numbers of people starve to death because of poor state planning).  Contrast with the various mixed economies of Europe - which are not far left, but moreso than the US.

Hitler was a Socialist...I know, I've heard it over and over and over and over and over and...

well...you get the idea.

Ask Ernst Roehm how that little Socialist experiment worked out.

I believe you mean Strasser.

All the actually National Socialists - Ernst Roehm, the Strasser brothers - got murdered or exiled during the Night of the Long Knives. Goebbels was initially sympathetic to this faction, but Hitler swayed him over to the Right beforehand.

Hitler's economic policy was in line with Germanic conservatism, as formulated by Bismarck: an emphasis on protectionism in the service of business and State-support for the armaments industry. German conservatism in the nineteenth and (very) early twentieth centuries rejected free-market capitalism, but it certainly wasn't economically left-winged, either.

As Kaljew said, modern terminology is likely not applicable at all.

Love them freepers.

Since when?

Fascism is neither right nor left, let it go.

I refuse to even acknowledge the stupidity of the comments.

That's what the fascists would like you to think.

Not really. Just the terms "left" and "right" have developed a particular meaning in the United States which was completely different from that of Europe in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century.

Correct. For his day, Hitler was unambiguously on the far-right. That definition has been muddled by both time and a change of political orientation on the political spectrum.

Indeed, and Hitler get along with industrial complex to get rid off "radicals" like Strasser and Rohm

No, Roehm.  Anything resembling Socialism in the National Socialist Party was dispatched with Roehm on the Night of the Long Knives.

Hitler was not a leftist or a rightist.

Please don't say he was a centrist or I'll kill somebody.

When the only options are left, center, and right, then yes, he was a rightist. Same as Stalin was a leftist. I don't see why this is so hard for conservatives to admit.

LOL -- Adolph Hitler, moderate hero.  I can see it now...

Hmm. I wouldn't personally call Röhm a socialist, whereas the Strassers certainly were. But that's just my opinion.

     That is assuming that the left-right spectrum as known in the United States is adequate to summarize fascism, which is something of a stretch.

What I meant was fascism isn't inherently right nor left. Besides, when you are as fascist as Hitler, I really couldn't care less about whether your right or left.

Fascism is inherently on the right, actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Position_in_the_political_spectrum

Even wikipedia doesn't know where the hell fascism falls on the spectrum.

The political spectrum is pretty much irrelevant. It should be a scale from those who want the least restrictions on human liberty to those who want the most.

So basically, it would go from left to right:
Anarchism - Libertarianism - Socialism - Conservatism - Authoritarianism

     So centrists don't count?

Not a clear enough term. You could have called me a centrist a year ago, when I was pro-temperance.

     Well you have centrists in the left-right spectrum, even though it's not any clearer there.

     That aside, if you are talking strictly about social liberty, then there are two main currents there. Anarchists, libertarians, & socialists mainly clash on the notion of positive liberty, though the social views of socialists need not be as clearly pigeonholed. Conservatives & authoritarians function well as a continuum, actually.

     If you are also talking about economic liberty, it is not altogether clear that socialists should be to the left of conservatives, since socialists support far more regulation & public ownership of industries.

Once again, a libertarian shows basically no understanding of how society works.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

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A lot of this (non)-controversy stems from a lack of understanding of the interwar German Right.

Much of the German Right - particularly the revolutionary conservatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Revolutionary_movement), exemplified by novelist Ernst Junger (http://attackthesystem.com/2009/05/ernst-junger-the-resolute-life-of-an-anarch/) - had no problems whatsoever with the concept of socialism itself; many, in fact, were to the left (economically) than even the more extreme partisans of our Democratic Party - perhaps the closest American equivalent to them today are our Southern populists, but unlike those rabble, the revolutionary conservatives grounded their political view on something approaching an intellectual philosophy.

The root of their vehement opposition to communism lay not in its economic arrangement, but in its internationalism: they were staunch nationalists first and foremost, and utterly loathed anything which might require them to reject the German nation-State for such amorphous concepts as the "international proletariat". As a corollary to this, they were vehemently militaristic as well, and their ideal State was shared with Hegel: a universalized vision of the Prussian military aristocracy.

Their chief concern was "Blud und Boden" - blood and the soil. They rejected free-market capitalism and political liberalism more generally because, they felt, such forces reduced the community to one of materialistic trade, atomizing the 'natural' bonds between the individual and society in the process. At the same time, Marxism's roots in scientific materialism was utterly repugnant to them - this is the basis of their 'Third Way' political philosophy, that sought to combat materialism and individualism in all of its forms.

And so the German Right during the years prior to the Nazification of Germany was something that might seem bizarre to modern readers, but which was pieced together holistically and made perfect sense within its own intellectual context: a movement that prioritized the (national and racial) community above all else - they were more socially conservative than any non-fringe American conservatism could possibly be, but they inherited from Bismarck and German political thought more generally an appreciation for tariffs and support for a minimal social safety net. Libertarianism in Germany between the wars was a purely left-wing phenomenon; the political status-quo was conservative Statism.

Were some of them socialists? Yes. Were any of them 'leftists'? No, most absolutely not. And this is the intellectual tradition that Hitler and the NSDAP took and vulgarized to make it more palatable to the masses. While I myself reject revolutionary conservatism, it is at least honest with itself and with others, which is more than can be said for American conservatism and Reaganism, which are both wholly worthless. Unlike the American conservatives, the interwar German Right was not saddled with a political need to pretend to want freedom or to pretend to preserve individualism, and was hence free to make its true thoughts publicly known.

At the time, in a German context, Hitler would have been recognized to be an extreme right-winger (there being no liberal right-wing movement in Germany of the day). Today, in an American context, where Statism is usually taken to be a left-wing phenomenon, it becomes a little more blurry.

Blut.Much the same is true of all rightwing (and most leftwing) political camps throughout history, of course; and even to a lesser extent when comparing conservative parties in different countries - even within the west - right not. Nothing special about that.
Not just "would have been", but more specifically: was.

I wish that American conservatives were as honest as their interwar German counterparts. Let us admit it: the American conservative has no real love for individualism; his chief concern, when he spouts the rhetoric of freedom, is to remain free to keep those social elements he dislikes in perpetual disadvantage. But he is limited in his ability to do so by the requirements of intellectual rigor: true freedom will simply never permit itself to be hijacked by the conservative's communitarian values. He could take a page or two from his German ancestor, who is by far his intellectual superior.

You're sort of talking about the standard vertical axis of the standard political compass  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass)- except that you placed an economic term (socialism) in the place of social moderatism.

When discussing the interwar German Right, the conservatives need to be mentioned. The Junkers were certainly not socialists in any form; they largely opposed even Bismarck's modest social reform. They supported the DNVP and later the NSDAP. It is one of the lasting ironies of the 1932 presidential election that the Catholics supported the Junker Hindenburg, and the Junkers supported the Catholic Hitler.

The politcal matrix has only two dimensions. There should be a third, called "Sanity," and Hitler would be on the insane side. Fascism=insane