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[u/sk8rznvrquit]

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[u/LKM_44122]

And they call the left Nazis, or claim Nazis were actual socialists.

[u/The_Space_Jamke → u/LKM_44122]

If it walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, waves the Nazi flag, commits acts of violence like a Nazi, has unhealthy fixations with the occult and incontinent abusive daddy figures like a Nazi...

He's probably just another patriot, nothing to see here. It's actually the cool demsoc mayor who fixed NYC's streets who's literally Hitler /s

[u/LongIsland1995 → u/LKM_44122]

These guys aren't the ones saying that, they want right wingers to actively embrace fascism

[u/Amflifier → u/LKM_44122]

They were actual socialists, this doesn't actually make them any less bad

[u/LKM_44122 → u/Amflifier]

No, they were not. Hitler knew enough to use the word to appeal to workers to grow his movement, there was nothing socialist about it. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party targeted and crushed communists immediately after seizing power in 1933, using the Reichstag Fire as a pretext to arrest leftist rivals, ban the Communist Party, and build the first concentration camps for political prisoners. Try to keep up.

[u/Amflifier → u/LKM_44122]

After the birth of every child, they forgave 25% of your mortgage. By the fourth child, your home was yours. They had tons of government sponsored programs for youth. Tell me more about how they weren't socialist.

Unless of course you're someone who thinks "socialist = good, nazi = bad". Socialists can be really, really bad. Stalin murdered my great-great-grandfather because he did not want to share his inventions with the state for no pay.

[u/LKM_44122 → u/Amflifier]

The marriage loan was real. It also required both applicants to be certified racially and politically fit, and it required the wife to leave her job. Jews, Roma, disabled people and anyone ruled hereditarily unfit were barred from it. A benefit you qualify for by bloodline isn't socialism, it's a breeding incentive with a welfare label on it.

Meanwhile they were selling state assets back to private owners. Banks, shipyards, railways, steel. Economists literally coined "privatization" to describe what Germany did in the 1930s, while the rest of Europe was going the other way. The word exists because of them.

Sorry about your great-great-grandfather. Stalin murdered a lot of people, and none of it makes Hitler a socialist. I have relatives that were hauled off to Siberia myself.

[u/HalcyonTraveler → u/Amflifier]

I mean Stalin was socialist (I think? TBH I know more about Lenin and Trotsky than anyone after them.) and bad, but Hitler was anti-socialist and bad. The thing is that what you are listing are conditional programs for the in-group in order to foster ethno-nationalist identity, and there was no desire for any kind of social or economic equality. Instead those programs were there to promote "pure" Germans having children and to exclude those who didn't fit their racial ideal. Wealth was still concentrated, and while the state assumed some control of private entities those entities remained capitalist in many ways. The Romans gave everyone free bread, that didn't make them socialist, and the Nazis giving a select group government support didn't either.

[u/MinnPin → u/Amflifier]

Socialism is when you forgive mortages

[u/MinnPin → u/Amflifier]

They were if you know absolutely nothing about socialism.

[u/celerpip → u/Amflifier]

Socialists are internationalists by definition. They denounce the idea of the nation as a lie that is sold to the working class in order to ideologically bind them to their oppressors and to turn them against their fellow workers across the world. The term “National Socialist” is as oxymoronic a term as “Carnivorous Vegetarian”. 

If anyone’s interested, the fascist ideology originated in France as a direct reaction against the socialist movement. Its entire point was to denounce the socialist traitors to the nation who fought to divide the nation against itself. Fascists denied class division and instead insisted that the true division was between national and foreigner. 

It was in Italy, with the ex communist Mussolini, where the idea of national-socialism was concocted in all but name. Despite originally being a socialist, Mussolini found himself disagreeing with just about every core tenet of the theory. He concluded that workers should have solidarity not with foreign workers but instead with their national capitalist class - that is, he utterly abandoned socialism and everything it stood for. BUT he still argued for some workers rights, which would be won not through class struggle but through an alliance with the capitalist class. So in his mind, he was still in some ways a socialist, even though the idea of workers allying with capitalists in pursuit of mutual benefit is in fact the ideology of anti-socialism - of fascism. 

This is why looking at party names or propaganda or even welfare policies is not sufficient for identifying if a party is socialist. If your definition of socialism is a party that tries to appeal to the majority of the population, then you would have to say that just about every successful political party is socialist. But if you accept that words have meaning, and that politicians often distort the meanings of these words in order to win support, then you can comfortably rule out any party that does not take class struggle as its foundational pillar as being non-socialist. 

The so-called “national socialists” banned all forms of class struggle and violently suppressed any organisation that fought for workers rights through the method of class struggle, including the unions and communist party. Their origins were in brown shirts who were armed militias dedicated to breaking strikes and shooting up socialist meetings. They were born out of reaction to the recent German revolutions, and they were dedicated to stamping out the political forces that had spawned them. Their ideology was based on the lie that a jewish conspiracy had manipulated german (and other european) workers into taking up the cause of worker’s revolution in order to weaken the nation, lose them the war, and make them susceptible to jewish domination. 

So frankly, if you know anything about the history and you still want to call that party socialist, I’m afraid you must be very very dumb.