Baloney Check—"Nazis are the same as Socialists"–Part 1

I’ve written elsewhere of one annoying downside to being a military veteran is when people, knowing nothing else about me other than I’m a veteran—and the obvious demographic data points like probable age, ethnicity, birth sex/gender, etc.—then go on to make totally unwarranted assumptions about my political, religious, or ideological leanings.

This genesis of this particular essay was in a conversation with a client at my desk several years ago. Out the blue, my interlocutor told me in utter earnestness how much he “hates it when liberals call conservatives [presumably upstanding, white, male, veterans like himself] Nazis, because everyone knows Nazis were the real socialists.” Overall find my job rewarding and worthwhile, but I’ve also had a great deal of practice keeping a straight face when confronted by such daft assertions. To see how pervasive this particular misconception is, one merely need look at this web page.

Debunking baloney takes far longer than spewing it, and this isn’t my first attempt to address this claim and those like it. I kept going off into the weeds of academic references and sources, as though my response was aimed at a well-informed, if not scholarly, audience. Finally, I struck upon the most concise formula I could come up with, which is well-suited for people who think in compartmentalized sound bytes. Where appropriate, I will provide citations for those who, like me, value intellectual honesty.

To start with though, I need to lay some groundwork by defining my terms as I want my words to mean what I intend them to mean in their historical context, not what modern Americans unthinkingly assume they mean.ⁱ It’s important to keep in mind that Hitler’s ideology and vocabulary were products of the Europe of the first four decades of the 1900s—not in the United States during of the Cold War and the more recent “culture wars.” Not taking this fact into account is to bear false witness, and “God’ll get you for that.” With that, here we go…

• Liberalism (sometimes prefixed with the adjective classical) was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment and is dedicated to the preservation of civil liberties (freedom of speech, press, worship/conscience, and assembly, etc.), protection of the right to private property, and freedom of economic activity. Examples: the representative,constitutional monarchy of Great Britain (since 1689) and the United States since its founding. During the 18th and 19th centuries, liberalism’s hallmark was its opposition to monarchical absolutism such as in pre-revolution France, the Kaisers of the Holy Roman Empire and later, Germany, and the Tsars of Russia.
• Socialism was a product of the explosive growth of the predominantly urban, industrial working classes and the rise of organized labor movements throughout 19th century in Europe and the United States. The first attempt at a Marxist-style workers revolution was the second Paris Commune, which lasted for just over two months in the spring of 1871.ⁱⁱ
  A key feature of socialism going back to Marx and Engels was its strident anti-nationalism. According to Marx and Engels, the proper basis for solidarity among the non-propertied working classes of all nations was not their language, ethnicity, or county of birth, but their class. The natural allies of the industrial working class in Great Britain were not other British citizens, but members of the industrial working-classes in Belgium, or Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Traditional liberals among the propertied business and professional classes saw working-class demands for extensions of democratic rights to non-property owners as a larger threat to the security of their own new-found status than the absolute monarchies still in power in some parts of Europe. During the First World War, Socialists in the strict Marxist mold in general did not support their own country’s taking part on either side. This is why both France and Germany had trouble with socialists throughout the war.^{1 para 8.14-15}
  • Democratic Socialism arose during the late 1800s and early 1900s, when many European socialists wanted to maintain and preserve liberalism’s principles of equality before the law and representative democracy, but saw the appalling gaps still remaining between the haves and have-nots even in the liberal democracies and believed there was still room for improvement. Democratic socialists (or social democrats) believed the way to a more equitable society was to nationalize—to at least some extent—the means of wealth creation through the give-and-take of the democratic process.
  • Communism was born in the 1917 Russian Revolution spearheaded by Lenin and others who believed only by establishing a rigid, single-party, authoritarian state through violent revolution and the forced collectivization of all sectors of the economy—including subsistence agriculture—would the desired worker’s paradise be realized. Social democrats in western Europe’s liberal democracies were appalled by reports of atrocities committed in the name of Russian Bolshevism (meaning roughly “revolutionary socialism” in Russian) and Mao’s Red China, which slowly leaked out following World War II and sought to distance themselves the Russian and Chinese varieties of socialism (i.e. communism), and began to describe themselves as social democrats.^2--p.13–20

Where what would eventually become the Nazi Party in Germany fitted into this political, social, and economic landscape will be covered later.

The last item needing addressed at this point is the common notion that everyone is entitled to their opinion. In a simplistic, kindergarten sort of way, we are “entitled to our opinions” on which flavor of ice cream or ethnic cuisine tastes best. However, grownups who maintain opinions on matters weightier than trivial matters of taste—be it the efficacy and safety of vaccines, the history of the First and Second World Wars, or auto mechanics—and blithely expose their ignorance of basic facts and concepts relevant to the opinions they hold, render such opinions worthless. Moreover, once made aware of the fatal gaps in their knowledge, if they persist in arguing for their “opinion,” they are justly dismissed as fools.

Until next time, I’ll leave the reader to ponder the following: if the “Nazism = Socialism” (N = S) assertion has any historical validity, how can it be squared with the dumbfounded reaction of the western democracies to the news of the non-aggression pact (a.k.a. the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union? When announced in August 1939, leaders in England, France, and the United States were flabbergasted as Hitler was a virulent anti-communist.

So have fun chewing on that until next time.

Works Cited

1. Weber, T. Becoming Hitler: the making of a Nazi. (Oxford University Press: Oxford, United Kingdom, 2017).

2. Stackelberg, R. Hitler’s Germany: Origins, interpretations, legacies. (Routledge: London ; New York, 1999).

Endnotes:

i “Inconceivable!”—and if you don’t know which awesome movie that quote references, then there is no hope for you.

ii This was mere months after the two dozen or so principalities of France’s great enemy, Germany, were unified under the first Kaiser of all Germany, Otto von Bismarck, forming the “Second Reich.” I leave it as an exercise for the reader to demonstrate the lack of a connection between these two events.