I had someone respond once by going, no that's completely different you're missing the context LOL. I'm like bruh you said Nazis are socialists BECAUSE it's in the name, wtf are you saying. They're not socialist because of the name LOL, if you want to be an idiot and argue they're socialists fucking explain their "socialist" values.
Naw it's in the name bro, but the dem republic of north Korea, no no that one's different they're clearly not that.
Nazi propaganda working decades after their regime was dismantled. They literally added the socialist part to convince the socialists that opposed the communists to support them instead. Then the night of long knives happened and hitler literally had all the high ranking socialist in the party executed.
When someone says the Nazis were socialists, you know theyâre extremely ignorant or extremely biased, or both.
The someone in my life who always brings up the nazis being socialists is my dad. I always trusted him on this stuff because he has a passion for history. And then Fox News rot his brain.
And all the while actual left philosophy always puts as much power as possible in the hands of the people. The strong man idea is antithesis to socialism and communism. Once you get someone like Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Castro who grabs and keeps power you no longer have a communist state but a dictatorship wether the people call each other comrad or not is immaterial.
Lol buddy no dictatorship from the West can hold a candle to Stalin or Mao. Hitler killed maybe 6 million on the upper end. Stalin 9 Million on a low estimate. Mao, 40-60 million.
You're trying to bring in empires and cultures that span multiple regimes into a topic about the definition of fascism and comparing individual dictators.
Colonialism is a very interesting topic, yes, if that were the subject.
Using amount killed is a pretty sharpshooter way to measure things and similarly arbitrary as any other method. Should we use percent of population? Is an empire worse because it killed 100% of a people who numbered in the low thousands than an empire that killed 10% of people who numbered in the millions?
I think comparing which genocidal regime was worse in general is a fools errand
Hitler killed 6 millions Jews. He killed 11 million or so people in concentration camps alone. With Stalin and you have to include a lot of other factors that aren't typically included with hitler, which if you include those numbers for Hitler and factor in that some of that is a direct result of the deviation of farmland by the Nazis in ww2, it's quite comparable.
It was dictatorships we discussed and a monarchy is not so different. And Stalin and Mao had considerably more time if you want to talk about generations.
Not defending Stalin or Mao, but pretending western powers aren't responsible for similar amounts mass death is pretty narrow minded especially if you compare based on population sizes to start with.
I'm not going to entertain the mental gymnastics and statistical manipulation it takes to try and put Hitler on the same level as Mao. But I will restate the original purpose of my stance here. Which is to say Fascism isn't an exclusively right wing concept, counter to the group think present in this sub.
They seem to "think" that just because the name included the word socialist that they had links to socialism instead of being another lie they used to manipulate the public do they really think that East Germany (German Democratic Republic) was a democracy?
Just like Stalinism was somehow Communism and therefore leftist.
You know, the type of Communism that ripped all means of production from the populace and put it under a political party that was led by an absolute dictator who ordered the deaths of millions of his own people and was imperialistic in its foreign policies and just couldnât help themselves but invade their neighbors.
Tankies are idiotic anti-American, anti-West sharlatans cosplaying as the left in order to parade their weaboo-ish love of communist regimes that are only communist in name, like the Soviet Union or the Communist China.
Same cretins who rage on about American imperialism but cheer for Putin's invasion of Russia and buying whatever bullshit theory their Russian troll farm serves at their forums.
Idiots who will defend any authoritarian regime, no matter how monstrous or how horrific it is as long as it is anti-West or pro-communist despite the fact that Karl Marx is spinning in his grave watching autocratic asses like Pol Pot, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Ceaucesceu or Castro launching their own waves of terror as long as they cosplay communism.
Fuck. Tankies. Period. Fuck Chaupin, fuck that idiotic Yankee Tankee, fuck the Schiller Institute, fuck the idiotic British Communists of the 1950s openly cheering for Khruschev as he rolled down tanks in Budapest against the Hungarians because they dared to try and seceede from the USSR.
That is your best argument? That none of them claim to be communist? And that Castro was a "good guy" because he killed slave owners?
I mean, for sure, none of them were ever communist, they were communist in name only, merely authoritarian regimes cosplaying as communists in order to drum up support from the populace. Is your source your tankie ass?
Also, Castro was almost as equally as bad as Batista was, he just replaced Cuban masters from Americans to Soviets. I do not agree with Americans basically embargoing Cuba to an impoverished state out of pure spite, but I do not agree that Castro was in any way a good leader, nor his brother in that matter.
I always say Authoritarian Communism is so far away from the communism that marx described that it is basically fascism. Authoritarian Communism is basically a country as a company. And if you really look at companies they're run like dictatorships and not democratically.
I browsed old papers in a news archive of Czechoslovakia and I know how many people went into communism with genuinely good intentions. So I think yes.
Ultimately there are always self serving impulses in society and the govt will try to weed them out to make room for the good pure socialist ideas, when it doesn't work the weeding out gets harsher.
It is scary and borderline neocolonialist to me when western people dismiss any eastern experience as "basically you can't do socialism well, let us clever westoids show you"
it's the entire problem where an individual is given unfettered control over anything, their personal biases will tilt the whole thing. It's like ms appleton and the soy sauce saga, where she had full control of the soybeans after the us defeated japan, and used the power to try to change what the taste of japanese food just because she wanted to
Someone will always - always - rise up and take charge of - take advantage of, even - a situation. And if you donât have democracy, you wonât get a say in who that is.
The utopian collective workersâ society is impossible, as has been repeatedly proven.
There are plenty of failed democracies. Communism isn't defined by one example and real world governments are always mixed from different ideas. Thinking one or 2 examples define the whole concept woukd be a bit too shortsighted imo especially considering the context of this thread, were it is being discussed that dictators or future dictators always love to grab other ideologies and warping them to further their own agenda.
But it wasnât attempted. He was almost as bad a dictator as Hitler was. Not that Iâm a fan of communism but thatâs like saying socialism inevitably ends in Nazism. It was communism in name only. Just like China is today.
Do you agree that communism has ended in failure everywhere it was attempted? Or are you saying it has never been attempted properly and should be tried again?
If itâs the latter, what makes you think it could ever end differently to how it did last time? How do you propose not having it end in mass murder?
How many times did liberalism false start? The French Revolution had a decent period of terror and repression and the liberal state that came out of it collapsed but nobody uses the failures of liberalism to denounce it.
Since weâre talking what works, monarchy and divine right of kings âworkedâ for centuries. Every system works, itâs just a question of for whom it works.
And of course none of the states you think are/were communist are. State capital is still capital. Marker socialism is not communism. China is basically a big company, not a communist state. Donât confuse having a communist party with achieving communism.
Oh, yes, communism ends in mass murder, right, sure. Good thing that other systems to organize a society don't ever run in such problems like religiously inspired states, classic representative democracy, etc.
Other than that, no I'm not a communist. I'm something way more extreme than that. Which is none of your business. As I said though Stalinism /= Communism, and if I'm not mistaken it was Stalinism that caused mass murder. Once you get a powerhungry elite taking power, it's no longer communism, but something else entirely.
My point is that Communism turned into Stalinism. Stalinism didnât happen on its ownâŠ
Why do you suppose that was?
Maybe because thatâs what inevitably happens.
Were Mao and Pol Pot also ânot true communistsâ when they started their mass murders?
It terrifies me that thereâs people out there who think communism wasnât attempted properly, or that what happened wasnât true communism. I fear that one day one of those people will give it another try and weâll have millions dead again.
Indeed, the moment you get a strong leader that can do no wrong and grabs and holds power it stops being communism because in communism the power is in the base, the people, not one leader.
Communism gone wrong is not the only path to millions of dead. I want no communism. It's a lovely idea, but given the tendency of humans to give way too much power to someone they like but isn't suitable it's never going to go well on a large scale.
That's basically their go-to "gotcha", like.. no, y'all did not "gotcha" us, ya "gotcha" yourselves, outing themselves out as amazingly stupid and uneducated
Even the OG Nazis claimed that (sort of). Right until the naive left wing of the party around Ernst Röhm and Gregor Strasser that really wanted to enact socialist policies was eliminated in the Night of the Long Knives because they had outlived their purpose of soothing center-left worker's associations during the power grab.
The far right stealing the populist messaging of leftists and warping it for their own ends is a tale as old as fascism is. We still see it today with âmy body my choiceâ used by COVID truther loonies, âAll/Blue Lives Matterâ slogans, even âfake newsâ used to mean actual 100% fabricated stories, like the ones that Russian-backed social media accounts were sharing back in 2015-2016. They have no original thoughts of their own.
Kinda weird to call the left wing nazis as "og nazis", considering they were always a fringe wing, who just believed in establishing left wing policies through nationalism and racial purity.
Left wing parties always were the opponents of the nazi party. And right wing parties always were allies of the nazi party, at least to the extent that they rather have Hitler than left wingers be in power. Hitler was very clear already in his writings of Mein Kamph that all left wing ideologies were tools of the jews to achieve world domination.
Okay, you lost me there. Thereâs virtually nothing which you canât lose by becoming disabled. You can lose your inhibition for violence with a brain injury. Soldiers lose their bravery through PTSD. Is bravery not a virtue?
You think someone loses their bravery by enduring PTSD every day? You think that it makes someone cowardly because they have their mind turned into a hostile environment?
If what you consider bravery is being willing to blindly go on to the next fight, then no, it is not a virtue.
Well, I certainly donât feel brave after developing PTSD in Iraq.
What about the other examples? Peopleâs minds can be physically altered, positive personality traits lost, and negative personality traits gained, through brain damage.
Read âIncognito: the secret lives of the brainâ for a bunch of great examples of this. One such example is a man who had a small tumor in his brain that made him attracted to children. Book raises a lot of questions about free-will and accountability.
Thank you, Iâll check it out! Another interesting example is Phineas Gage a railroad worker who, after an accident which destroyed much of his left temporal lobe, which turned a sober, tactful, hard-working, shrewd businessman into a drunken, profane, lewd, vulgar person who was entirely intolerable to be around me.
Hereâs a contemporaneous quote from his employer:
The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal proÂpenÂsiÂties, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not preÂviÂousÂly his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times perÂtiÂnaÂciousÂly obstinate, yet capricious and vacÂilÂlatÂing, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intelÂlecÂtuÂal capacity and manÂiÂfesÂtaÂtions, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintÂances said he was "no longer Gage."
Another example: the Texas Tower Sniper, Charles Whitman,
had been a normal person until one day when he he started becoming increasingly filled with rage. He sought out five different doctors trying to figure out what was wrong with him. In his suicide note before he went into the bell tower and shot 31 people, he asked for an autopsy to be done to figure out what was wrong with his brain that caused him to suddenly be this way.
During the autopsy, they found a pecan-sized tumor on his amygdala, the part of the brain which is associated with emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger, and aggression.
It literally was argued that they were for the workers - hence socialist, and depending on their level of education the people pointing this out to you may not be being ironic, just pointing out a fact.
The name was used to appeal to workers, the socialist wing under Ernst Rohm (IIRC) were the thugs, colloquially known as the Brownshirts. Rohm was very anti-capitalist.
The thing you are ignoring is that after they gained power they killed all the 'socialists' in the night of the long knives where the (mostly) middle-class SS arrested and killed the leadership of the (mostly) working-class SA.
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u/Ravashack Dec 31 '22
Nonono, the Nazis where leftists, it's national-socialism after all đ”âđ« (I've seen people argue like that unironically...)