Hitler on Socialism

There are, if you care to look for them, abundant evidences that Adolf Hitler was a socialist and, socialism being a thing of the political Left, it's fair, in my opinion, to point out that Leftists therefore have the honor of having most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' genocidal murderers to their credit. Just for giggles, start here, with Hitler himself, quoted, apparently, by John Toland:

We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions

No, I didn't go check the book out from the library to read the quote for myself. Feel free to doubt its veracity if you so choose. For me, I've seen far too many examples of this sort of thing to have any doubt whatsoever that it is representative.

Why write about this? Meh. Annoyance, really. Largely because I get a little tired of Leftists continually painting themselves as innocent of evil, when the reality is that Leftist ideology has been responsible for more war, death, and murder than you can shake a stick at. Will they take responsibility for Mao? No. For Lenin? No. For Stalin? No. Pol Pot? The Khmer Rouge? For Adolf Hitler? No. And yet to argue that these people weren't Leftists, died-in-the-wool Leftists, requires a break from reality of staggering proportions.

And yet they do argue this. Those people aren't real Leftists/Socialists/Communists, you will hear. Real Leftism/Socialism/Communism has never been tried.

So why do Leftists do this? In my opinion, it's because it would require admitting to themselves that their Leftist ideas contain the seed of more hate than just about anything else in the modern world, save, possibly, Islam. And this, they will never do.

Fascists, Fascism

Every ignorant fool out there who hollers "Fascist!" at people who oppose limitless welfare spending or homosexual marriage would love for you to forget this (or they don't know themselves), but fascism is just another variety of socialism; that is, it's not a right-wing or conservative thing at all, but rather a leftist phenomenon. It differs from other varieties of socialism chiefly in two ways: it is an explicitly nationalist socialism, whereas other varieties of socialism, especially communism, are more internationalist in their thinking, and it is more willing to tolerate private ownership of capital, as long as the state still directs everything.

I can't tell you how many people shout "Nazi!" or "Fascist!" without understanding--or perhaps deliberately forgetting--fascism's socialist nature. But it's glaringly obvious; the most infamous fascist state in history, Nazi Germany, made it plain: "Nazi" is just an acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or "National Socialist German Workers' Party."

So, no, fascism isn't right-wing totalitarianism after all; it's another variety of leftist, socialist totalitarianism. The fighting between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in World War II was something of an internecine struggle between two competing varieties of socialism--and inescapably means that socialism of one variety or another is responsible for the murders and killing of almost inconceivably enormous numbers of people.

For more--and highly recommended--reading on this, see Jonah Goldberg's excellent Liberal Fascism.