L.K. Samuels: How Anti-Capitalist were the German National Socialists?

Stopping Socialism.com,  Nov.  14, 2022

By L.K. Samuels

The National Socialists of Germany were anti-capitalists par excellence. They actually spelled it out in the 13th plank of their 25-Point program of 1920, demanding “nationalization of all businesses which have been up to the present formed into companies (trusts).”

Adolf Hitler was adamant about eventually expropriating all privately-owned companies in one fell swoop. During one of Hitler’s tirades against capitalists and their unearned income, he declared to Albert Speer, his WWII Minister of Armaments and War Production, “One of these days I’ll sweep away this outrage and nationalize all corporations.”

Near the end of World War II, even Albert Speer worried about a complete government takeover of the private sector in Germany, warning that “a kind of state socialism seemed to be gaining more and more ground, furthered by many of the [Nazi] party functionaries.” He was fearful that Germany’s industry and “war production could easily become the framework for a state-socialist economic order.” This was a legitimate concern that dogged German industrialists since many Nazi party radicals favored “nationalization of industry,” or what was also regarded as “state socialism.”

Early on, Hitler had declared war on capitalism, proclaiming during an April 12, 1922, speech, “Capitalism as a whole will now be destroyed… We are not fighting Jewish or Christian capitalism, we are fighting very capitalism: we are making the people completely free.” In the same year, Hitler berated Jews as “capitalistic people, which was brought into existence by the unscrupulous exploitation of men.”

In several interviews, Hitler railed against the bourgeoisie and threatened to crush them.  In one 1931 interview by journalist Richard Breiting, Hitler reaffirmed his new world order, revealing, “we will do what we like with the bourgeoisie… We give the orders; they do what they are told. Any resistance will be broken ruthlessly.” In another conversation bashing the bourgeoisie, Hitler declared that capitalists “know nothing except their profit,” and that these money-grubbers were “cowardly shits.” One of the Nazi’s first acts in taking power in 1933 was to issue a threat to “raid business houses that don’t contribute sufficiently to party funds.”

Hermann Rauschning, an elected Nazi senate leader in the Free City of Danzig, revealed that Hitler promised to seize the property of the bourgeoisie after he took power, declaring, “The expropriation of the property will inevitably follow, as well as the complete abolition of private enterprise.” Rauschning renounced the Nazi Party in 1934 and spent the rest of his career fighting National Socialism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Christianism.

The Nazi’s hatred of capitalism

Hitler’s hatred of capitalism and admiration for socialism was no secret. He saw himself as a man of little wealth. In a March 27, 1936 speech to Krupp Locomotive factory workers, der Führer lamented, “Whenever I stand up for the German peasant, it is for the sake of the Volk. I have neither ancestral estate nor manor… I believe I am the only statesman in the world who does not have a bank account. I hold no stock, I have no shares in any companies. I do not draw any dividends.”

In other speeches, Hitler claimed to be a plebeian comrade of little means. He told workers in Berlin, “All my life I have been a ‘have-not.’ At home I was a ‘have-not.’ I regard myself as belonging to them.” A true Marxist could not have been more elegant than Hitler’s assertion of his self-pity and poverty.

On April 6, 1941, Hitler bragged about his victorious 45-day battle against the western Allies, declaring, “It is already war history how the German Armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy.”

Hitler repeatedly pledged loyalty to socialism as his guiding light, advocating a collectivistic foundation in his worship of “The common good before the individual good.” In fact, in one speech in 1941, he brazenly proclaimed, “I am a fanatical socialist, one who has ever in mind the interests of all his people.”

George Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four fame understood the dangers of Hitler’s anti-capitalist economics, asserting in 1941, “The State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee.” In another article, Orwell spells it out plainly. “National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker.”

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, considered himself a “Revolutionary Socialist. He represented the essence of socialism and collectivism. He believed that “To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”

To the National Socialists, wealth inequality was a horrendous injustice that had to be solved. Both German National Socialists and Italian Fascists attempted to strengthen and enlarge their socialized safety nets via social justice programs. This is why Goebbels applauded the generosity of Hitler’s welfare state, boasting in a 1944 editorial, “Our Socialism,” that “We and we alone [the Nazis] have the best social welfare measures. Everything is done for the nation… the Jews are the incarnation of capitalism.”

After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 from the west and the Soviet Union’s onslaught from the east, Goebbels interpreted the political divide between England and Germany as “England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state.” Goebbels condemned the capitalists in England as the “richest men on earth.” In his “England’s Guilt” speech, he compared England’s anti-socialist plutocracy to Nazi Germany’s lavish social welfare programs, declaring, “It is also why English capitalists want to destroy Hitlerism. They see Hitlerism as all the generous social reforms that have occurred in Germany since 1933”, which “could endanger English capitalism.” In years before the war, Goebbels confessed that he was frustrated that National Socialists and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) had to be rivals, forced to go after the same constituency, like “two rabid dogs fighting for one bone.”

Hitler echoed Goebbels’ “social justice”, “social equality”, and pro-labor messages, declaring to “party comrades” on Nov. 8, 1939, that Western powers hated the Nazis because they were setting “a dangerous example for them, this social Germany.” Hitler proclaimed, “It is the Germany of social welfare, of social equality, of the elimination of class differences—this is what they hate!… They hate this Germany which has eliminated unemployment, which, in spite of all their wealth, they have not been able to eliminate… They hate this Germany of social legislation, this Germany which celebrates the first of May as the day of honest labor.”

Socialist Economic Policies

As for Nazi economic policies, Cambridge University historian R.J. Overy asserted that after Hitler’s rise to Chancellor in 1933, “the role of the state in regulating and directing economic life increased sharply” and that its control of Germany’s economy was “not unlike the system that had already been built up in the Soviet Union.”

For instance, from 1933 to 1943 the number of state-owned firms had expanded to over 500, mostly in key industries. When Hermann Göring, one of the most powerful leaders in the Nazi party, wanted additional industrial capacity or raw resources, he simply established state-owned companies or expropriated private industrial companies. As an example, in 1937 Göring decided to nationalize private deposits of iron ore, “taking control of all privately owned steelworks and setting up a new company, known as the Hermann Göring Works.”

As R.J. Overy explained in War and Economy in the Third Reich, Göring and the Nazis’ military-industrial empire represented “one of the major steps towards restricting private industrial capitalism and substituting a ‘völkisch’, state-run industrial economy.” A state-owned holding company, Göring Works (Reichswerke) was able to obtain “huge sums of money” in efforts to seize, organize or forcibly merge industries, whereas funding for private-sector companies was “curtailed.”

Hitler’s socialist policies advanced a command economy where politics had overwhelming priority over the interests of consumers or business owners. In this context, R.J. Overy identified Hitler as “an enemy of free-market economics.” He further contended that “Nazi political hegemony in the end prevented German capitalists from acting as capitalists.”

And what was so odious about Nazi Germany’s economics?  As William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, asserted, the German businessman was buried under “mountains of red tape,” and ordered by the “State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never-ending ‘special contributions’ to the party.” In short, the Nazi’s economic policies could be easily identified as variants of current-day market socialism and interventionism found among communist nations that retain some market mechanisms.

The National Socialists, like all the other ideological dictatorships of the Twentieth Century, engaged in confiscatory taxation, expropriation, debt expansion, and a rapine economy as a means to redistribute wealth within society that greatly benefited the bureaucratic apparatus and the party-based political elite. Under this kleptocracy, the Nazis developed an entrenched deep state that elevated “the party machine” to a state-within-a-state, preserving the vested power of its leadership.

One Nazi decree imposed in July of 1933 authorized the “confiscation of property of enemies of the people.” By 1939, over 400 decrees and regulations lead to a massive program of state-sponsored theft, to which the Nazis dutifully attempted to give the appearance of legitimacy.

Not only that, but German tax officials imposed a lien of up to 250,000 Reichsmarks by 1936 on anyone suspected of planning to flee Germany. In July of 1933, the “Compulsory Cartel Laws” empowered the Minister of Economics to forge new cartels or to compel already established firms to enter into cooperative agreements with other cartels or to dissolve any cartel agreement.

Moreover, Hitlerian socialism advanced domestic social policies that “were remarkably friendly towards the German lower classes, soaking the wealthy and redistributing the burdens of wartime to the benefit of the underprivileged,” as noted in Götz Aly’s book Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. In other words, The German National Socialists secured revenues that “amounted to a state-sponsored campaign of grand larceny.”

To prop up this large welfare state, Nazi Germany had become a redistributive regime that sought to rob the rich to pay the poor to fashion a universal social utopia—a sort of social justice mecca that has been dubbed a “racist-totalitarian welfare state.” Aly wrote, to “achieve a truly socialist division of personal assets, Hitler implemented a variety of interventionist economic policies, including price and rent controls, exorbitant corporate taxes,’ subsidies to German farmers,… and harsh taxes on capital gains.

The Nazis were belligerent toward small businesses and trade associations. On July 15, 1933, the Third Reich made membership in cartels mandatory, while a year later, all business and trade associations were reorganized and put under the control of the state. To eliminate small corporations in 1937, Hitler’s government “dissolved all corporations with a capital under $40,000 and forbade the establishment of new ones with a capital less than $200,000,” which resulted in the quick elimination of one-fifth of all small companies.

Pushing to Abolish the German stock market

By the late 1930s, many regional stock exchanges were subservient to Nazi ideology and had “largely become an instrument of capital mobilization by the state.” In other words, the stock and bond market became the state’s piggy bank. Companies were forced to make loans to the Third Reich. Some Nazi leaders even proposed a ban on any trading of bonds and stocks, attributing international trade and security markets to “Jewish capital.” Nazi administrators discouraged the issuance of new shares of stocks while at the same time delisting some companies’ stocks that were already trading on the German stock exchange. And according to Caroline Fohlin in Finance Capitalism and Germany’s Rise to Industrial Power, the Nazis closed many stock exchanges, reducing them “from twenty-one to nine in 1935.”

Wary of the speculative nature of stocks, the Nazi regime “limited the distribution of dividends to 6 percent.” In 1936, edicts “prohibited the quotations of foreign stocks on German stock exchanges” and later “blocked foreign exchange dealing at the stock exchanges completely.”

Nazi ideologues, especially Gottfried Feder, saw banks as parasitic moneylenders and dividend drawers that had no duties to the community. Not surprisingly, in this anti-capitalist climate, the Nazis “favored public-sector banks, as a less ‘capitalistic’ way of managing money,” according to Harold James, a professor of history at Princeton University.

Some business associations initially refused to cooperate with the new Nazi regime in 1933, prompting Otto Wagner, Hitler’s economic advisor, to “forcibly” occupy “the headquarters of the Reich Association of German Industry, with the clear intention of closing it down.” Most associations and businesses quickly capitulated to stop such “intimidatory extortions.” Up to 30 million Reichsmarks went into Party coffers from industrialists in the first year of Hitler’s chancellorship.

In 1934, the Deputy Commissar in the Ministry of Economics warned an audience of business owners that: “Any organization that represents the interests of the employer will be regarded as illegal and disbanded and the guilty parties will be prosecuted.”

While the Third Reich imposed a myriad of high taxes on businesses, the German citizenry received supplemental benefits for insurance, coal, rent, potatoes, and other daily needs for family maintenance such as dental bills and children’s education costs. Similar to farm policies later enacted in many nations, including the United States, the Nazi state “handed out billions in price subsidies to farmers.”

The National Socialists engaged in a centrally planned, welfare-infused economic model alongside a military buildup. To rapidly advance their generous social welfare programs, the Nazi administration eliminated all private charities so that the state could control the distribution of welfare benefits and thereby socially engineer society. As Hitler had promised in a 1940 speech, his goals for society were “the creation of a socially just state, a model society that would continue to eradicate all social barriers.”

Additionally, “the Nazis also introduced a progressive income tax that shifted a far greater tax burden onto corporations and the very rich,” a policy that has been extremely popular among left-wing social liberals and progressive policy wonks. Taxes were so high and complex that taxes were occasionally based on the gross amount, not on the net profit. One such case was a Berlin hotel owner and wine wholesaler, Lorenz Adlon, who paid “taxes equivalent to 40 percent not of his firm’s profits but of its annual turnover of 5.7 million Reichsmarks.” According to German historian Götz Aly, one levied tax required German property owners “to pay ten years of the tax in advance in a single lump sum.”

High taxes and government subsidies

While the Third Reich imposed a myriad of high taxes on businesses from a “windfall profit tax” to a “real estate inflation tax,” the German citizenry received supplemental benefits for insurance, coal, rent, potatoes, and other daily needs for family maintenance such as dental bills and children’s education costs.

Günter Reimann in his 1939 Vampire Economy repeatedly detailed the negative impacts of state planning by the National Socialists. He was inside Nazi Germany as a Communist underground resister who had to flee by 1934. He documented the harsh conditions that businesses faced under the Third Reich. He revealed that most German proprietors “fear National Socialism as much as they did Communism in 1932” and that “these Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’” He further asserted that “Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.”

Besides high taxes, rigid regulations, and forced loans to the Nazi government, hundreds of thousands of small business owners had no choice but to violate the regulatory laws daily while simultaneously paying off an army of policemen who were eager to arrest business “lawbreakers.” In other cases, Nazi administrators fined businesses millions of marks for a single bookkeeping mistake. This was a form of state-sanctioned extortion seen as necessary to finance Nazi Germany’s almost bankrupt welfare-warfare state.

Moreover, in an effort to socialize the economy, Germany was turning into an informant-surveillance state. Small business owners had to provide daily reports to local Nazi officials on what was “discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop.” If shopkeepers grumbled too much, they would be considered “enemies of the state,” and could suffer the loss of their business license or lose quotas for often scarce goods. Similar to what the Communist Party implemented after seizing power in Russia, the Nazi Party imposed an administrative program of house watchers (blockleiter and blockwalter). These low-level Nazi officials were encouraged to keep watchful eyes on their assigned commercial or neighborhood city blocks, reporting to authorities anyone who failed to give the “Heil Hitler” greeting, befriended Jews, voiced dissent, or engaged in any anti-Nazi activities.

A host of economic side effects surfaced. After suspending what remain of the gold standard, Nazi Germany pressured its central bank to keep interest rates low and government budget deficits high, causing the economy to overheat and triggering higher prices. By November 1936, the Nazi regime issued a price-stop decree that prohibited increases in prices and wages. Despite the fact that more waves of inflation continued to occur, prices were still kept artificially low. Although Germany’s economy was floundering, the Nazi administration pursued more centralization of its domestic and foreign economies, and international trade continued to slow, which resulted in serious food shortages and rationing of key consumer goods like produce, butter, and many “consumables.” Even gasoline and fuel needed to operate cars were rationed, preventing many German citizens from owning or driving vehicles.

Serious food shortages and reckless spending

As for shortages, one American magazine reported in 1937 that Germany was having the “most serious food shortage” since the first war. German restaurants were ordered to limit their menus. A popular German ditty exposing the discontent went: “Hitler has no wife; the farmer has no sow [seeds]; the butcher has no meat; that is the Third Reich.”

By 1936, Germany’s reckless spending, foreign-exchange controls, and anti-free trade policies had reached a crisis point. This precipitated a shortage of foreign currency and reduced imports of raw materials to the point where manufacturers had in-house supplies “sufficient for only two months.”

Clearly, bureaucratic tyranny, retaliatory regulations, massive welfarism, nationalization, and extortionist taxation are not unique to Nazism. Ironically, many leaders in the Democratic Party, who were dedicated to defeating the National Socialist and Italian Fascist regimes during World War II, now find it convenient to duplicate the socialist economics of National Socialism. Ironically, the modern, statist liberal appears to have far more in common with the socioeconomic policies of National Socialism than with the traditional American tenets of classical liberalism, free-market capitalism, and individualism.

This article is just a short taste of the anti-capitalistic nature of the National Socialists of Germany. My chapter on Nazism in my Killing History book has over 600 footnotes citing dozens of historians, political scientists, economists, and journalists of the era.

L.K. Samuels: Were the German National Socialists Marxist-Leaning?

By L.K. Samuels – June 21, 2022 — StoppingSocialism.com

Contrary to claims by Marxist and socialist historians, the National Socialists of Germany were far more hardcore socialist and Marxist-leaning than most people realize. In reality, Hitler was heavily influenced by Marxism. He did not just march under a parade of red flags or wear communist armbands during the Bavarian Soviet Republic of 1919. No, he actually ran for a low-level position, “Deputy Battalion Representative,” a few days after the communists seized control of Bavaria. Hitler worked briefly for the Communist Party of Germany until more than 30,000 Weimar Republic and Freikorps troops laid siege to Munich and killed hundreds of Bavarian Red Army troops in street battles. After the battle, Hitler and everybody in his army barracks was arrested, interned, and interrogated. He escaped with his life by becoming an informer.

Former Nazi leader Hermann Rauschning documented this Marxist influence on Hitler. He revealed a conversation wherein Hitler told him: “In my youth, and even in the first years of my Munich period after the war, I never shunned the company of Marxists of any shade.” In all likelihood, this is where Hitler got his idea to incite his own revolutionary movement and attack the Munich authorities during his 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which resulted in 20 deaths.

In truth, the National Socialists’ proclivity towards hardcore revolutionary socialism was substantial. In a 1925 New York Times article, Joseph Goebbels, the future Reich Minister of Propaganda and later briefly Chancellor of Nazi Germany, revealed his Marxist overtones. In that NYT wire story, Dr. Goebbels is identified as the man who declared to a beer-hall crowd that, “Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight.” In fact, Hitler and the Nazis acknowledge their gratitude to the Russian communists’ semantic customs. After Hitler’s appointment to the German chancellorship, the Nazi party required all members to address each other as Genossen, or “Comrades,” according to Richard Pipes, the Harvard University historian who fled Poland after the Nazi invasion.

Goebbels was “happy to describe himself as a ‘German Communist’” during his college days. In a 1925 diatribe against capitalism, he wrote, “It would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism.” In a 1925 diary excerpt, he wrote, “We will turn National Socialism into a party of class struggle,” a major tenet of Marxism. He talked about the Nazi Party as being a “party of revolutionary socialists” in 1929. In 1943, he spoke about the prospects of a socialist Germany winning the war, declaring, “If Germany stays united and marches to the rhythm of its revolutionary socialist outlook, it will be unbeatable.”

Due to the appeal of authoritarian socialism, many National Socialists were drawn to Marxist-Leninist ideology that promoted anti-capitalism, social equality, welfarism, classlessness, social justice, and “revolutionary nationalism.” Hitler was so impressed with Russian communists that he tried to appropriate the Soviet Union’s iconic hammer and sickle imagery and reapply it to Nazism. In the Führer’s May Day Speech at the Tempelhof Air Field, Berlin on May 1, 1934, he boasted, “The hammer will once more become the symbol of the German worker and the sickle the sign of the German peasant.”

Although political competitors, especially when it came to the labor movement, Hitler and Nazi leaders often joined forces together with Communists. In 1932, Hitler allied with the Communist Party of Germany against the Social Democrats in support of a workers’ wage dispute. Hitler’s “brownshirts” and red flag-waving Communists marched side-by-side through the streets of Berlin and destroyed any busses whose drivers had failed to participate in the workers’ strike. Alongside the communists, Nazis ripped up tramlines, stood together and “shouted in unison” and “rattled their collecting tins” to get donations for their strike funds in support of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition (RGO) for the communists and National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO) for the Nazis. According to English historian Ian Kershaw, many middle-class Germans suspect that “Hitler was arm in arm with Marxism,” and “thought Hitler far on the Left.”

Communist Reichstag deputies championed the Nazis’ anti-capitalist agenda before Hitler rose to become chancellor. For instance, a 1931 bill was introduced in the Reichstag to impose a ceiling of 4 percent on interest rates, expropriate the holdings of “the bank and stock exchange magnates” and of all “Eastern Jews” without any compensation, and nationalize all the big banks. Fearful that the bill’s Bolshevist approach would harm the Nazi Party’s image, Hitler ordered it to be withdrawn. The Communist Party of Germany stepped forward, took the Nazi Party’s exact verbiage, and reintroduced it, word for word. In many cases, the communists and Nazis were legislative buddies, often voting together under Stalin’s motto “First Brown, Then Red.”

Even many Social Democrats were captivated by Hitler’s and Mussolini’s charms as the vanguard of a socialist new world order. Some leaders in the socialist left-wing Fabian Society, such as George Bernard Shaw, found Hitler to be “a very remarkable, very able man.” Acting like a fanboy of Hitler, Shaw wrote in 1935, “The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.” Moreover, Shaw insisted that Mussolini had preceded Hitler in being a National Socialist, praising the Italian dictator in 1927 as a leader who was “farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.”

And yet, Shaw also displayed undying praise for Stalin and the Soviet Union. During his 10-day visit to the Soviet Union in 1931, Shaw eagerly displayed his admiration for the “great Communist experiment.” Trying to impress his hosts, Shaw was “concerned precisely with establishing himself as the grand old man of socialism who had always been a defender of the Bolshevistic Revolution and who had known and corresponded with Lenin.” George Orwell noted this affection that Shaw held for Nazism and communism, concluding that “Bernard Shaw… declared Communism and Fascism to be much the same thing, and was in favour of both of them.” Such a response might classify Shaw’s admiration for fascism and communism as a “Fascist-Marxist devotee.”

George Orwell acknowledged these socialist and doctrinal similarities between the two totalitarian nations. In his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell treated the Nazis as part of the socialist clan, writing that “Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state,” and that the factory owner only owns his property in name, and had essentially been “reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee.”

There is other evidence that German Communists and National Socialists were very compatible. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, a trend developed where Nazi and Communist recruits regularly switched their party affiliation since Nazi and Communist ideology and tactics appeared so similar. This practice became a well-known joke by the 1930s when the Nazis were said to be “Nazi brown outside and Moscow red inside,” and were known as “Beefsteaks” or “Beefsteak Nazis.”

In his 1936 book Hitler: A Biography, the German historian and journalist Konrad Heiden wrote that “there were large numbers of Communist and Social Democrats among” Röhm Sturmabteilung (SA) ranks, often “called beefsteaks.” In fact, so many communists and Social Democrats populated Nazis stormtrooper ranks that a common joke went: “one SA man says to another: ‘In our storm troop there are three Nazis, but we shall soon have spewed them out.’” This acknowledged the fact that underneath the Nazi’s brown shirt lurked a red-blooded communist.

Other political parties in Germany also identified the same Nazi-communist parallels. In the late 1920s, Chancellor Hermann Müller of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) employed the beefsteak analogy when he remarked, “red equals brown,” meaning that Communists and Nazis posed an equal danger to liberal democracy.

With such close ideological similarities, the Nazis had a policy of encouraging German communists to join them, regarding them as excellent recruits. Many Marxists were lured to egalitarian socialism, social equality, classlessness, social justice, anti-capitalism, nationalization, and the revolutionary nationalism of the Nazis. This explains why historians concede that Röhm’s SA had a Marxist outlook that appealed to so many Nazis leaders.

One stat shows the extent of the Communist-Nazi close affinity in Germany. Rudolf Diels, head of the Gestapo from 1933 to 1934, remarked in 1933 that in the city of Berlin, around “70 percent” of fresh SA recruits were former communists. According to political scientist Peter H. Merkl, both the SA and SS were saturated with socialists and Marxists, writing: “The utopians and those who speak of a Marxist republic have the highest membership in the SA and SS (77.6 and 63 percent respectively).”

By 1932, the German public began to worry about the National Socialists’ propensity to march in lockstep with Communists. According to Polish-American academic Richard Pipes in Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, both Joseph Goebbels and Otto Strasser were seen as “National Bolsheviks,” or the Nazi left, who wanted closer ties with Stalin’s Russia. They planned to bolster the Soviet Union’s economy so that the Communists and National Socialists could take down Britain and France. They also favored worker strikes and the nationalization of most banks and industries. Considered the undisputed right-hand man by Nazi party officials, Gregor Strasser sought a nationalist form of social revolution, a sort of national identity infused with “real socialism.” Such socialist and revolutionary rhetoric should not be surprising. In Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, Götz Aly exposed that most Nazi party leaders borrowed heavily from the “intellectual tradition of the socialist left” and “many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.”

In 1940, Winston Churchill also clearly stated that Nazism and Sovietism were cut from the same cloth, remarking that “Nazi despotism is an equally hateful though the more efficient form of the communist despotism.” Later in 1948, he further reflected in his first volume The Second World War series that: “Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.”

Other political leaders expressed Churchill’s views about the similarities between communism and Nazism. Kurt Schumacher, the first chairman of the revised Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1946, caused a media stir when he derided communists as “red-painted Nazis,” accusing the two political movements of enabling each other. In fact, Schumacher argued that the Soviet Union had pursued not internationalist goals, but instead “nationalist and imperialist” ones that paralleled Nazism.

Hitler’s true Marxist-lite colors continued to stain Germany red. By the time of the fall 1932 election, many Germans had had enough of Hitler’s revolutionary bombast. The German National People’s Party (DNVP) and German conservatives began to see Hitler as a radical socialist and denounced Nazism as “bolshevism in nationalist wrapping.” The main bone of contention was that Hitler’s party had come out in favor of a strike by Berlin transport workers in November of 1932.

There were many other incidents of collaboration between the National Socialists and communists before Hitler’s chancellorship, including short-term accords and friendship between leaders of the Nazi Party and the German Communist Party. For instance, in 1931, the communist Prussian party welcomed the Nazis with open arms, touting them as “working people’s comrades” who were assisting them in pulling down their common enemy, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The Nazis and the communist Prussian party organized a united front to overthrow the Socialist Democratic government of Prussia, as ordered by Stalin’s Comintern. This Nazi-communist plebiscite became known as the “Red Referendum.”

The KPD repeatedly courted Nazi followers. In early November 1931, the German communists came out with praise for “National Socialist workers” and “proletarian supporters of the Nazi Party,” referring to them as “honest fighters against the system of hunger.”

So, what did the other German political parties think of the National Socialists before they took power?  The two Liberal parties of Germany—the German People’s Party (DVP) and the German State Party (DSP)—warned their members that the National Socialists represented “a party of the radical left.” One DVP publication denounced the socialist elements of the Nazis, warning: “Whether national or international, it is still socialism … of the most radical type.”

To the DVP and DSP way of thinking, the Nazis “would make a more compatible ally of Communism,” than would liberal or conservative parties. In fact, the DVP often linked National Socialism with Marxism. They warned their members that the National Socialists were anti-capitalists, who proposed the abolishment of “interest capital.” Such socialist policies would be disastrous, mirroring the collapsed Soviet economy of 1921. The DVP told their constituents that Hitler’s “socialistic programs are not one penny better than other Socialists.” These national liberal parties accused the Nazi deputies in the Reichstag of backing, “the most incredible Communist-sponsored proposals. But, of course, they don’t tell the middle class and the peasants about this. In front of them they portray themselves as ‘anti-Marxists’… beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

Of course, the Nazi-Communist reaction against the German Liberal parties was mutual. According to Graham Hallett in The Social Economy of West Germany, “the Communists and National Socialists hated the liberals more than they hated each other.”

Conservative and non-socialist nationalistic parties in Germany were also hostile to the Nazis. Alfred Hugenberg (1865–1951), the main leader of the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), finally had enough with his short-lived coalition with Hitler’s NSDAP. He concluded that the Nazis were the “main enemy” of Germany. By the fall of 1932, conservative leaders stated that they saw no difference between the “red Bolshevism” of the communist KPD and the “brown Bolshevism” of Hitler’s Nazi Party. The Nazis retaliated by branding the conservatives as being reactionary and bourgeois.

Even The New York Times acknowledged the close similarities between Nazism and communism after their non-aggression pact was signed in 1939, editorializing that the issue remained clear: “Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism.” They also affirmed, “The world will now understand that the only real ‘ideological’ issue is one between democracy, liberty and peace on the one hand and despotism, terror and war on the other.”

The Wall Street Journal also joined the ranks of those who compared Nazis and Stalinists as evil twins, observing: “The American people know that the principal difference between Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin is the size of their respective mustaches.” Some socialist leaders echoed the same sentiment about Stalin’s fascist communism, including Norman Thomas, who wrote, “Such is the logic of ‘totalitarianism’ that ‘communism,’ whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism.” In fact, in a February 24, 1941, speech, as reported by The Bulletin of International News, Hitler declared, “basically National Socialism, and Marxism are the same.” One of the biggest similarities between Nazi and communist tactics is a diehard reliance on state authority to socially re-engineer society by emasculating the individual means of self-determination and consent.

Other well-respected historians have made the same claim. French historian François Furet, a former communist intellectual, wrote that “It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected; there, political power truly absorbed all spheres of existence, from the economy to religion, from technology to the soul.”

What about the journalists and authors who lived in Europe during the Nazi-Soviet era?  The British journalist, Frederick Augustus Voigt, was one of the most vocal. In 1938 he wrote, “Marxism has led to Fascism and National Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.” He asserted, “National Socialism would have been inconceivable without Marxism.”

And, then there was Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist and radio broadcaster who interviewed Hitler. Later in 1934, she was expelled from Nazi Germany. She wrote in 1938, “Fascism, Nazism, and Communism are all Collectivism. In this respect, they are all alike.” In 1939, she revealed a bit more, stating, “And now the beginning of the expropriation of church lands in Austria, have all revealed the true face of National Socialism, which more and more among pious Germans is called, under their breaths, ‘the brown Bolshevism.”

Peter Drucker, an Austrian-American professor and management educator who lived in Germany until 1933, made one of the most astute observations about Nazism in his 1939 The End of Economic Man. He argued, “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”

Walter Lippmann, the twice-winning Pulitzer Prize journalist, also weighed in on the close parallels between fascist and communist ideologies. In The Good Society of 1937, Lippman asserted, “The totalitarian states, whether of the fascist or the communist persuasion, are more than superficially alike as dictatorships… They are profoundly alike.”

Vera Micheles Dean, a Russian American political scientist who fled Russia, observed in her 1939 book Europe in Retreat, “What the Nazis have introduced in Germany is a form of graduated Bolshevism, directing their first assault upon Jewish capitalists—bankers, industrialists and businessmen—but posed to train their guns on the Catholic Church and Aryan capitalists.”

To the British Fabian playwright George Bernard Shaw, Communism and Fascism held a special space in his heart. An eager fan of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, Shaw declared in 1934, “As a red-hot Communist I am in favor of fascism,” and that “The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warm sympathy.”

What did communist leaders of the era think about their movement? One such member was Margarete Buber-Neumann, a leader of the Communist Party of Germany. In May 1935, the Comintern ordered her back to Moscow to serve as a translator only to be arrested in 1937 and imprisoned in several Soviet Gulag labor camps. In 1940, the Soviets sent her to a Nazi concentration camp. In her Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler book, she attested, “The Soviet practice under Stalin betrayed the original idea and established in the Soviet Union a kind of Fascism.”

Another German communist, Otto Rühle, equated Nazism with Bolshevism. Angry over the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, he condemned the Soviet Union in “The Struggle against Fascism Begins with the Struggle against Bolshevism.” Rühle argued that “Russia was the example for fascism… Whether party ‘communists’ like it or not … the state order and rule in Russia are indistinguishable from those in [Fascist] Italy and [Nazi] Germany.”

So, was German National Socialism a hardcore socialist and Marxist-leaning dictatorship? The answer should be obvious. I have presented just a few examples from my book Killing History on the dysfunctional political spectrum. There should be little doubt over the closeness of Hitler’s National Socialism to Stalin’s nationalistic Bolshevism. As Goebbels glowingly defined the political anatomy of the Third Reich, the German National Socialists were indeed establishing a “socialist people’s state” to rival Stalin’s Soviet state.

Surprise: Mussolini Was Not the First Fascist

March 1, 2022 – American Thinker

By L.K. Samuels

Charges of fascism are often flung around like paper confetti, sometimes to cover for actual fascism.  Almost every political faction has been subjected to such claims, especially ones that are polar opposites of historical Italian fascism and German National Socialism.  Even Canadian truckers seeking an end to COVID-19 lockdowns have been savagely attacked as Nazis, along with freedom-based organizations that supplied the intellectual ammunition to oppose Hitler’s and Mussolini’s ideologues.

So the question becomes this: what is fascism, and where did it originate?  Consensus often points to post–World War I Italy.  However, that old belief is starting to crumble.  Fascism and its state-oriented mixed economy appear to have an earlier starting date.  Some scholars are now pointing at Soviet Russia.

Benito Mussolini may be the world’s most notorious fascist, but he was not the first to introduce socioeconomic and political fascism to the world.  In actuality, this Italian Marxist intellectual simply popularized the word.  The socioeconomic mechanics behind Fascism came from another Marxist, one deep inside Russia.  He was a Russian revolutionary whom Mussolini lionized: Vladimir Lenin.

After Lenin secured control of Russia in 1921, his unrelenting nationalization of the Soviet economy finally collapsed.  Moscow and other Russian cities transformed into walking-dead hellscapes.  Most factories and mills closed.  Most Russians were starving.  Workers fled to the countryside to find food.  Hundreds of violent riots spread across the land.  Lenin and the communists were almost overthrown.  Karl Marx’s dreams of a socialist worker’s paradise had failed.

Under these dire conditions, Lenin had to change direction.  He reluctantly rolled back the communist economic system and established a mixed economy: the state still owned the big industries but allowed small companies, farmers, and individuals to exist and engage in open commerce.  At this point, Lenin embraced Marxist-lite Fascism by supporting an alternative “third way” between socialism and capitalism, a concept Lenin and Mussolini called “state capitalism.”  The political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset concurred, arguing that Fascism is “extremism of the center,” referring to its reliance on a mixed economy.  He contended that Fascism is not right-wing because Mussolini did not plan to restore monarchical or aristocratic privilege.

In 1921, Lenin dubbed his revised economic policies the New Economic Policy (NEP), which introduced a form of “market socialism,” “crony capitalism,” or what he approvingly termed “state capitalism.”  Lenin described this change as the “development of capitalism under the control and regulation of the proletarian state.”  This meant that fascism was not the “last stage of capitalism” as Marxist historians have maintained, but the first stage of a pullback from the economic and political failures of Marxism-Leninism.  Lenin’s policies to mitigate the defects of absolute nationalization and communism spawned the NEP and produced a fascist economy.

Under his NEP policies, Lenin said he would allow “a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control,” while socialized state enterprises would operate on “a profit basis.”  His policy even allowed the ownership of small companies, which were privatized from former state-owned enterprises.  And by initiating a mixed economy in 1921 and early 1922, Lenin became the world’s first fascist dictator, over a year before Mussolini was appointed Italy’s prime minister in late 1922.

Who makes such a bold claim?  It was Peter Drucker, the famous professor of politics, philosophy, and management, who lived in Germany in the early 1930s.  He asserted that fascism came out of communism in his 1939 The End of Economic Man.  He wrote, “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion. … Communism in anything but name was abandoned in Russia when the Five-Year Plan was substituted for the New Economic Policy (NEP).”

Since Mussolini, Lenin, and Trotsky were Marxist chums in Switzerland, it is not surprising that Mussolini closely watched Lenin and his regime with keen interest.  Considering himself a disciple of Lenin, Mussolini proposed that Italy should officially recognize the Soviet Union in 1923.  According to Stanley G. Payne in his History of Fascism, 1914–1945, “[n]ot only was Italy the first Western country to recognize the Soviet Union in 1924, but the new Soviet art first appeared in the West that year at the Venice Biennale, Italy’s premiere art show.”  In the Italian elections of 1919, as the leader of the Fascist Revolutionary Party, Mussolini publicly compared himself to Lenin, bragging that he was the “Lenin of Italy.”

When Lenin ushered in the NEP, Mussolini felt compelled to imitate Lenin’s market-oriented economic policies.  The prime minister of Italy, Francesco Saverio Nitti (1919–1920), noted this coziness, writing, “In Italy today one finds that greater tolerance is shown toward Communists affiliated with Moscow than to Liberals, democrats, and Socialists.”  He also remarked, “Fascism and Bolshevism are the same.”

Mussolini understood what Lenin was trying to do in Soviet Russia.  Considered one of the greatest Marxist theoreticians of the 20th century, Mussolini realized that Lenin was following Karl Marx’s precepts to the letter.  Marx argued that only ruthless industrial capitalists could successfully bring the population out of feudalism and poverty.  Since Russia’s economy was primarily agricultural, some limited form of capitalism was required to get it to the Marxian sweet spot of a highly industrial state.  Lenin argued for the “full maturation of capitalism as the precondition for socialist realization.”

Fascism sprang out of Marxism over the Marxian reaction to the failures of Lenin’s Bolshevism in the Soviet Union.  In other words, many strands of revised Marxism devolved into Italian Fascism.  A. James Gregor, a political scientist at U.C. Berkeley, agreed, writing, “The first Fascists were almost all Marxists — serious theorists who had long been identified with Italy’s intelligentsia of the Left.”  The former English socialist David Ramsay Steele succinctly declared, “Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists.”

Indeed, Lenin and the Bolsheviks ushered in the first fascist socioeconomic system, scattering across Europe.  Winston Churchill also noted this political evolution, writing in 1948: “As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.”

L.K. Samuels is the author of Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum (2019) and other books.

 

The Little-Known Origins of Islamofascism

American Thinker, Nov. 7, 2021

by L.K. Samuels

It is no accident that Palestinians and many Arab political and religious leaders are hostile to Jews and to the nation of Israel. This bitter animosity resulted from a little-known historical event that lead to the dark origins of Islamofascism. Starting in 1933, a cozy relationship bloomed between the National Socialists of Germany and the Arab-Muslim political elites in Palestine.

The Arab-Muslim world had always been receptive to various authoritarian, socialists, and nationalistic political systems. So, it is not surprising that a cordial ideological commonality soon developed between the Nazis and the Arab-Muslim world. Within a few weeks of Hitler’s rise to Germany’s Chancellorship in 1933, the German Consul-General in Jerusalem for Palestine, Heinrich Wolff, touted Mohammed Amin al-Husseini’s eager support of the Nazis, especially their anti-Jewish boycott across Germany. Wolff relayed to Berlin that Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem since 1921, had asserted that the Muslims in Palestine “looked forward to the spread of Fascism throughout the region.”

To many in the Middle East, Nazi Germany was considered the natural ally of the Arab and Muslim world. Spending much of his time in Nazi Germany during World War II, Amin al-Husseini finally met Mussolini in 1941 and declared his intentions to ally with the Axis. Many Fascist leaders were overjoyed at such an alliance with the Palestinian leader. Mussolini, who had been a hardcore atheist since his youthful Marxist days, declared to his Fascist cabinet that “Islam was perhaps a more effective religion than Christianity.”

A number of high-level Nazi leaders learned of this encounter and invited the Palestinian leader to visit Hitler in Berlin. Hitler was interested in the Arab world and their rising animosity towards Jews, capitalism, and British influence. The Führer agreed to meet with Amin al-Husseini on November 28, 1941. In that meeting, Al-Husseini pressed for Arab independence, particularly the liberation of Palestine from the British. He also sought to prevent the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, as had been proposed by the British government. This might look like normal political negotiations between nations, but al-Husseini had a darker side. He began to work for the Nazis and became involved in the Arabic-language service broadcast program.

He made a series of propaganda broadcasts from Berlin in an effort to “foment unrest, sabotage, and insurrection against the Allies.” Obviously, al-Husseini was a Nazi collaborator and used his influence to turn Arabs against the Jews and Western Allies. In a Nazi-sponsored radio broadcast in 1944, he asked Arabs to rise up and “kill the Jews wherever you find them.” In his supervision of pro-Nazi radio broadcasts out of Zeesen, Athens, and Rome, al-Husseini was considered more effective than any other Arab leader at “promoting hatred of the Jews among Muslims.”

But the Nazis did more than broadcast messages to the Middle East by Arabic National Socialists. There was a drive to give students from Arab countries German scholarships, to have business firms take in Arab apprentices, and invite Arab party leaders to “Nuremberg party rallies and military chiefs to Wehrmacht maneuvers.” In fact, the Nazis established an “Arab Club” in Berlin as the “center for Palestine-related agitation and Arabic-language broadcasting.” Some Nazi leaders, such as Heinrich Himmler, talked about the “ideology closeness” of National Socialism and Islam, coming up with the concept of Muselgermanen or “Muslimo-Germans.”

Adolf Hitler himself admitted in private conversations that he favored Islam over Christianity. Albert Speer, a member of the Führer’s inner circle, revealed Hitler’s anti-Christian stance in his book Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. Hitler told Speer: “The Mohammedan religion too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness.”

As for creating an Arab-Nazi army, Amin al-Husseini by 1943 helped to arrange the creation of the 13th Waffen-SS Mountain Division (also called the “Handschar”), mostly manned by Bosnian Muslims, to fight the Allies. Some 24,000 to 27,000 Arab recruits signed up to fight with the Nazis. Because of his collaboration with the Nazis, the American Jewish Congress (AJC) has described Amin al-Husseini as “Hitler’s henchman.”

But oddly, anyone today who dares to criticize the modern ideological and theological positions of Islam is often faced with accusations of islamophobia. And yet, the close link of German Nazism and Italian Fascism to Islamic fascism is undisputable. Hitler and Mussolini’s national socialism matched well to their Arab fascist counterparts. This is not a prejudice against the Islamic religion; it is an abhorrence of the violence, racism, and socialism of the Islamic Fascism movement.

L.K. Samuels is the author of Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum (2019) and other books.

The Dark and Ugly Legacy of the Democratic Party

L.K. Samuels

The Democratic Party has the darkest, most ugly history imaginable. No other political party in American history comes close to matching the sheer magnitude of their horrendous behavior. They try to keep their dirty secrets under wraps, but their true repulsive legacies are starting to leak through many cracks.

The Democratic Party’s ugly tradition started in 1829, with the election of Andrew Jackson. He defended the morality of slavery and racism, and was infamous for beating his slaves. Jackson instigated the removal of Native Americans from their tribal lands east of the Mississippi River. He is responsible for three trail-of-tears forced marches, sparking a genocide that killed up to 8,500 Native Americans.

Originally, one of the poorest men in America, Jackson became one of the richest man in the world after he made a fortune secretly buying cheap Indian land that his administration had taken under his Indian Removal Act of 1830. He also profited by instituting the politically corrupt “spoils system,” which booted out experienced public servants to be replaced by Jackson’s campaign donors and workers.

By the 1830s, slavery was dying. One of the biggest slave states, Virginia, almost banned slavery in 1832. Southerners were in a panic. Andrew Jackson’s Vice President, John C. Calhoun, came to the rescue to intellectually defend slavery and racism. He and other pro-slavery Democrats started to spread the monstrous lie that black slaves had it far better than the free labor in the industrial North. Slaves now were seen as children who required motherly help.

Calhoun also believed that the “superior” man brought order; the “inferior” man instigated chaos. A war hawk in the War of 1812, he and his disciples rejected the Founder’s view of natural rights for all men, equality at birth, and free-market capitalism. Calhoun did not consider humans as autonomous individuals, but believed that “instead of being born free and equal, [people] are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to the laws and institutions of the country…” Not surprisingly, Calhoun was the leading spokesperson for the “slavery as a positive good” movement, arguing that slavery is “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.” He also defended slavery under paternalism and social welfare principles, where unfit and enslaved laborers would be provided food, shelter, clothes, and old age benefits.

The conflict between liberty and slavery lead Democratic Party politicians to instigate a violent insurrection. They created the Confederate States of America, fired on Fort Sumter, and instigated the Civil War. After losing the war, the defeated Democrat southerners organized the Ku Klux Klan, assassinating black leaders, white abolitionists, and Union officers. President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, refused to rein in the KKK terrorists. General Grant, a Republican, ran for President and quickly destroyed the KKK.

A half-century after the Civil War, many Democrats became progressive reformers who ushered in “modern-social liberalism.” The Democrat-elected President Woodrow Wilson was both a progressive reformer and modern liberal who was also an outright racist, segregationist, and anglophile, who pushed for restrictive and discriminatory immigration laws. Wilson praised the wildly racist 1915 silent film, Birth of a Nation Birth. He defended segregation, telling a delegation of black leaders that “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit.” He segregated most federal departments, and fired most black postal workers. He regarded the Ku Klux Klan as a “great” movement. He referred to blacks as an “ignorant and inferior race.” Impressed with socialism, Wilson engaged in imperialism with “gunboat diplomacy”, invading other nations to make regime changes. He suppressed anti-war dissent during World War I, arresting and prosecuting thousands of anti-war protesters, engaged in warrantless arrests, holding detainees without trial.

The next Democratic Party president was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who defended collectivism, socialism, and fascism. He sent his closest Brain Trust adviser, Rexford Guy, to Fascist Italy. Guy was impressed with Mussolini’s fascism, calling it “the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen.” He brought back books by Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of Fascism, and encouraged FDR’s staff to emulate fascist economics. FDR did exactly that with the National Recovery Act (NRA) which promoted cartels, monopolies, government interventionism, and higher prices.

FDR also confined 120,000 citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps. FDR was not sympathetic towards Asians or Jews, believing that biological characteristics prevented them from becoming loyal Americans.  As for American blacks, FDR displayed his racism by refusing to invite the US black 1936 Olympic team to the White House, including four-gold-medal-winner Jesse Owens. Every white Olympian was invited. Enraged, Jesse proclaimed, “Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send a telegram.”

Furthermore, after the Civil War, it was the Democrats, mostly in the South, who instigated segregation, Jim Crow laws, and voter suppression. They were responsible for the lynching of thousands of blacks, burning down whole black townships, and passing laws to deny blacks the right to own guns. In one of their last desperate attempts retain white supremacy, many Democrats US senators filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They failed.

In 2010, Joe Biden eulogized Sen. Robert Byrd at his funeral, referring to him as his “mentor.” But Sen. Byrd was a segregationist and an organizer for a KKK chapter in West Virginia. Apparently, President Biden does not fall far from the racist tree. He once labeled desegregation as a “racial jungle.”

It is truly difficult to explain why any African-American would support their former taskmasters. The Democrats’ abusive and ugly history of racism, white supremacy, tribalism, socialism, and fascism should have led to their party’s demise decades ago. It is time to proceed with Democrats’ final burial and let them rest with ignominy. 

L.K. Samuels is the author of Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum. His website is KillingHistory.net

The Surprising Origins of Critical Race Theory

 

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been cited as an offshoot of Karl Marx’s theory of class struggle, which was designed to pit one class against another so as to foment worker-led revolutions. It is also widely accepted that the Marxian Frankfurt School in Germany reworked Marx’s “social conflict theory” in the 1950s by adding “race” to their long list of “oppressed” minorities. But historically, the Frankfurt School theorists were latecomers to the racial theory table. They were not the originators of Critical Race Theory. A revolutionary socialist movement had already existed decades before in Germany. These racial justice warriors sought to pit one race against another and encourage the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor. They called themselves German National Socialists.

After World War II, the Frankfurt School intellectuals and academics began to plagiarize the “racial struggle” and “victimhood” theories that had originated with Nazi theorists in the mid-1920s. It is true that the Nazi theorists, many with Marxist leanings, were less sophisticated in their racial superiority approach. But their long-term goals on racial disparity and struggle were remarkably similar.

The National Socialists, like the Marxian Frankfurt School leaders, dedicated themselves to fighting racial oppression imposed by other advantaged races. But in the case of the Nazis, they identified the “oppressed race” as the Aryan and German people and the “oppressor race” as the Jews. They believed that the Jews controlled the world as members of a wealthy and privileged race that supposedly mistreated the so-called Aryan races.

To demean the so-called “Jewish oppressors,” the National Socialists taught German children that the Jews, Jewish-run banks, and capitalists were persecuting the German nation and its people. This “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative is pure classical Marxism, which had devastating effects across the annals of modern history. Such racist nonsense divides society, creating hostile tribalism and unending ethnic violence.

Of course, this racial struggle was exactly what the Nazi propagandists intended in their effort to purge certain “oppressor” races. They wanted only one race to exist in German-controlled lands. That is why Critical Race Theory is so poisonous. Its endgame almost always results in horrific final solutions to punish so-called privileged and oppressor races.

The march towards securing superiority over an oppressor race began in earnest after the Nazis nationalized most German schools in 1933.  School administrators quickly inserted racist policies into newly rewritten textbooks and school policies. With the assistance of the National Socialist Teachers League, (the official Nazis teacher’s union), students were inundated with racial theories that invaded most disciplines. Nazi party officials promoted the Führer’s Volksgemeinschaft concept of equality, which included social engineering, social justice, racial tribalism, national collectivity, and social Darwinism. But their biggest mission was to implant biased ethnic-racial studies into Germany’s classrooms.

According to Richard J. Evans in The Third Reich in Power 1933-1939, Nazi educators and administrators from the Education Ministry mandated that the topics of “racial biology” and “racial science” be inserted into almost every school course across Germany. Biology was heralded as the key to understanding and identifying racial differencesThe National Socialists even developed a racial-social arithmetic for their textbooks to indoctrinate students. For example, this racial mathematics used formulas to design calculations that would determine how many blond Aryans lived in a German population.

The German language did not escape this politicization of education.  Language had to focus on speech patterns to provide a racial background that would subliminally implant German schoolchildren with the racial-socialist ideology of Nazism.  The study of geography had to bow to a racial makeover that required Nazi ideology to be more compatible with heroism, home, and race. Amazingly, Nazi educators even found ways to link climate to race.

Not surprisingly, such old-style racism is now returning to our world, mostly voiced by progressives, the woke mob, and Black Lives Matter. Similar to the National Socialists, this orthodoxy is a hodgepodge of social justice, oppressor-versus-oppressed victimhood, and racial tribalism. A German poster from 1933 highlights the Nazi’s dedication to a socially just racial state, proclaiming, “Because Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich wants social justice, big Jewish capitalism is the worst enemy of this Reich and its Führer.”

A number of present-day “anti-racist” activists are emulating the National Socialists’ pogrom policies. For instance, co-founder of Black Lives Matter in Toronto, Yusra Khogali, called for the extermination of certain races. Taking jabs at white privilege and oppressor races and gender, she mused in 2016 that she had an urge “to kill men and white folks.” Moreover, she tweeted that “white skin is subhuman.” Hitler and his Nazi horde spouted the same “subhuman” accusations against Jews, and eventually acted upon their convictions in the Holocausts.

The origins of Critical Race Theory have a dark history.  Why would anyone justify racism, racial superiority, or racial inferiority in today’s world? Such inflammatory rhetoric has never led to racial or social equality. CRT must be discarded into the ashbin of history, along with any resurgence of National Socialism and its socialist-racist narratives.

source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_surprising_origins_of_critical_race_theory.html

No Truth in Socialism: Why the ‘Crisis of Marxism’

August 7, 2021 — American Thinker

Why do the Progressive Big Media, Democrats, elites, and Democratic Socialists feel duty-bound to create false realities?  Why must they silence, obstruct, or distort any truthful voice before it can ever be heard?  And why do they rush to judgment before the facts can be sorted out?  The answer is simple: socialists and collectivists have no other choice.  By hard experience, they learned over 100 years ago that their ideology is devoid of facts and reality.  They had to sacrifice truth in order to hide the inevitable failures of socialism.

This realization occurred in the late 1890s, when a crisis of confidence began to reach a fever pitch.  Before that, Marxian socialists were seen as the bright new kids on the political block.  They were gaining acceptance and recognition.  They thought they had it made.  Socialists had long predicted capitalism’s inevitable demise.  In anticipation, they prepared to be capitalism’s pallbearers, and they breathlessly awaited the birth of a glorious socialist-proletarian revolution.

But then something unexpected happened: socialism started to decompose.  Marxist leaders and revisionists looked inward and noticed serious flaws in Marx’s socioeconomic predictions.  Across Europe, the truth of Marxian socialism was called into question.  As the defects and failures started to pile up, Marxian socialists faced an ideology both false and unworkable. Instead of witnessing capitalism in its last stage of life, it was apparent that Marxism and socialism were dying on the vine.

Like a viral plague, these inconsistencies within Marxist theory swept across the entire socialist and Marxist landscape.  It became known as the “crisis of Marxism,” a term dubbed by Marxist theoreticians and practitioners themselves.  This internal struggle revolved around the release of devastating economic data in the 1890s.

Obviously, this situation was a bitter pill to swallow.  Socialist intellectuals had to face the fact that truth and scientific law could easily destroy their political agenda to reconstruct society.  If Marxian socialism did not conform to reality, then they would have to rely on other methods to gain political power.  They found it more effective and convenient to sidetrack the truth at every possible opportunity.

Ironically, the man who pointed out the many fatal flaws of socialism and communism was a rising star in the Marxist movement: Eduard Bernstein.  He was an important Marxist political theorist and historian and a close friend of Friedrich Engels, working with him for almost ten years.  Bernstein also personally collaborated with Marx, becoming not only a patron, but editor of Der Sozialdemokrat, the militant organ of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, from 1881 to 1890.  Bernstein was being groomed as one of the major philosophical heirs of Marx and Engels.

A stickler for ethics, Bernstein embraced the idea that truth was a strong disinfectant against hypocrisy.  He wanted to see successful results, not Marxist dogma.  He waited until the passing of Marx in 1883 and Engels in 1895 before he launched an investigation of Marx’s predictions.

The litany of failed promises that Bernstein discovered overwhelmed orthodox Marxists with a stunning sense of denial.  Marx had predicted that industrial capitalism would result in a concentration of a few big companies; instead, ownership of companies become more dispersed, decentralized, and scattered into many hands.  Marx and his surrogates predicted that the poor would become poorer; instead, Bernstein showed empirical data that the incomes of workers were rising to unheard-of levels.  He discovered that big companies were not as profitable as smaller businesses, which defied Marx’s contentions.  Technology was advancing, not hitting a roadblock.  Profits were rising, not falling.  Past problems of “unemployment, overproduction, and the inequitable distribution of wealth” were being overcome by capitalism.  Bernstein even targeted Marx’s cherished “class struggle” theory, proving that capitalism’s wealth-building capacity had reduced the animosity between the wealthy class and the worker class.  These statistics confronted Marxist and socialist theorists with a paradox: why was capitalism growing more vibrant when it was supposedly entering its final dying days?

To Marxist socialists’ dismay, the bourgeois system of market economics had gotten a clean bill of health.  Capitalism was flourishing.  Objective reality refused to comply with socialist demands.  Instead, Marxian socialism was found guilty and given a sentence of rejection.  To the public, Marxian socialism had lost its credibility.

As reams of published evidence proved the emptiness of socialist theories, Marxian ringleaders became distraught.  They were taken by surprise by something they had never expected — widespread repudiation of Marxian fundamentals by economic and social statistics that appeared in many journals and newspapers.

Nonetheless, Marxism and socialist revolutionary activity did not die.  A French Marxist and Revolutionary Syndicalist, Georges Sorel, had already figured out the next course of action.  His prescription was to inject heavy doses of “myth-making” into public discourse, confusing political issues, and overriding truth.  His plan was to reinvigorate the socialist brand by releasing mountains of lies.  Sorel understood that unconstrained truth would crush socialist theories and their fledgling movement, forcing socialists to master the art of slick propaganda to prevent being invalidated once again by the power of truth.

Georges Sorel went on to make lies sound truthful in an effort to defend the fallacies and failures of Marxism, propping up the advocacy of labor violence in the streets, anti-democracy, autocratic socialism, and revised Marxism.  His myth-making propaganda became an inspiration to Marxists, fascists, and a host of socialist elites.  To Sorel, truth was no longer important; it was an impediment to progress and had to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

In reality, there is no truth in socialism, because it has never worked.  Still smarting from the hard lessons of history, today’s Marxist socialists have learned to swiftly bury truth and any truth-seekers, before they can become entombed themselves.

source:   https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/no_truth_in_socialism_why_the_crisis_of_marxism_matters.html

 

Democratic Party Fights Racism with Racism

by L.K. Samuels  May 28, 2021  Lewrockwell.com

A disturbing behavior is starting to reappear on the political stage in recent years. It is not a crowd-pleaser for most onlookers. It is more like bad political theater that meshes cheap horror films with dark comedy and few people are laughing.

For some unearthly reason, Democratic Party politicians are now acting as if it is okay to fight racism with racism. Of course, that is an absurdity, a completely nonsensical farce. It is like trying to fight rape assaults with more rapes, or preventing murders by murdering more people. Nobody can fight the evils of racism with the ugliness of racism. But some in the Democratic Party leadership want to do exactly that. They have declared that it is perfectly acceptable to engage in blatant racist behavior, like spiteful Klansmen on their way to a cross burning. Like churlish bigots, these Democrats want to “even the score.” In their minds, imitating prejudicial conduct will somehow atone for past racial discrimination, which ironically was perpetrated against blacks, Catholic and Jews by mostly bygone Democratic Party firebrands.

 The most glaring example of this attempt to fight racism with racism is Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a longtime Democratic Party leader in Chicago. On May 19 of this year, she sent a letter to the Chicago media declaring that she would “exclusively” provide “one-on-one interviews with journalists of color.” She refused to accept personal interviews with reporters who had the wrong skin color. Much of the news media looked the other way, some congratulating her for highlighting the lack of diversity in newsrooms.

To hide her virulent racism, Mayor Lightfoot unleashed the specter of racism to promote so-called “equity,” a word often thrown under the bus to protect the foolish and the power hungry. But there is more. She acted as if wanted to inflict revenge. She wanted an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth in her quest for “justice”. She apparently believes she can engage in outright bigotry because others did so in the past. In this way, she echoes the response of Democrat Governor George Wallace, who barred black-skinned children from entering public institutions of learning. Democrats cannot seem to get past their warped sense of justice. Incredibly, some media outlets actually agreed with Mayor Lightfoot’s racist rants.  They were eager to defend her racist policies, singing praise for her noble stand to fight racism, contending that too many news reporters were born with the wrong skin color.

But Mayor Lightfoot’s unprofessional action is not an isolated incident perpetrated by Democratic Party leaders. No, the list is almost endless. For instance, on March 23, 2021, Democratic Senators Duckworth and Hirono pledged to vote “no” for any Biden nominees unless they were of particular race. They refused to confirm any white nominees, engaging in the ugly trend of “anti-white racism.” Denying jobs to people who have the wrong skin color is not only racist, but violates Title VII of the1964 Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits employers from discriminating against employees and job applicants based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.” Due to public criticism, both Democrats eventually backed away from their racist demands. More and more Democrats now oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In March of 2021 the Democratic mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf,announced a“Guaranteed Income Pilot”program to give $500 per month to low-income residents if they are the right skin color. They offered nothing for poor white families in Oakland.An estimated 10,000 white residents in Oakland are stuck in poverty, earning less than $12,880 a year. Poor is poor; it afflicts all races.

The state of Vermont expanded vaccine eligibility to individuals 16 or older who identified as Black, Indigenous or a person of color. Vermont discriminated on the basis of race in distributing lifesaving vaccines that are mostly paid by public agencies. Again, whites were not eligible. Extremely racist!

In the 2021 President Biden’s Covid-19 pandemic stimulus package discriminated against certain races in getting financial aid. The Democrat-written law stipulated that only “socially disadvantaged farmers or ranchers” based on race, could get financial aid from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The stimulus limited funding to only six races and leaves out whites. Clearly a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The Democratic Governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, confessed that he was one of the men who wore either blackface or KKK robes in a photograph from his 1984 medical schoolbook page. Despite the racist photo, Governor Northam refused to step down. Only true racists would refuse to atone for past indiscretions.  Northam was the little racist Democrat who could. Then again, Democrats have traditionally been the defenders of black slavery, segregation, Ku Klux Klan, racism, racial supremacy, violent insurrection, voter suppression, and lynching.

And to top this off, California Governor Gavin Newsome and Democratic Party legislators attempted to legalize racial discrimination in 2020. They placed a ballot initiative (Prop. 16) to allow California to legally discriminate on the “basis of race and sex.” They called it “affirmative action,” but it was actually a latent method to discriminate by race. It lost at the ballot box, but Democrats raised over $25 million in order to pass a blatantly racist measure.

Nonetheless, many on the progressive left are currently championing the spread of Democrats’ dubious “enlightened racism,” which often bolsters their anti-racist credentials. Others are playing along with this charade, hoping that nobody will notice how incredibly insensitiveit is to speak in fluent “Racese.” It is indeed a crazy world of epic portions. Once deemed the most tolerant people in the world, Americans are now lambasted for things that long-dead ancestors might have done. Who would have guessed that Democrats would be extolled as the rescuers of those minorities who suffered the most from the cruel whip of the Democrat party’s scourge?

With a talent for Orwellian doublespeak, Democrats are now eager to drag their racist skeletons out of the closet, dust off their Confederate patina, and assert that their rediscovered racism is actually good for diversity and equality. Apparently, the racist apple has not fallen far from the Confederate tree.

source:  https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/democratic-party-fights-racism-with-racism/

The ‘Fascist Left’: Myth or Reality?

by L.K. Samuels  May 10, 2021  Lewrockwell.com

In the last few years, many conservative commentators and political figures, including President Trump, have lashed out against extreme left-wing politicians and radical agitators as the “Fascist Left.” Many news media pundits scoffed at this phrase, incredulous at the thought that authoritarian and nationalistic socialists could ever exhibit leftist tendencies. However, many well-known historians would differ. These academicians have identified German National Socialists and Italian Fascists as close relatives to the revolutionary socialist Left. Why? Because Nazi and Fascist authority figures often proclaimed to be on the “Left” side of the political spectrum, embracing a slew of “revolutionary socialist policies.”

For instance, Joseph Goebbels and the Strasser brothers promoted worker-based class struggle, socialism, wealth redistribution, social justice, social welfare, anti-capitalism, the breakup of large estates, nationalization, and an alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union. These National Socialist leaders were almost in complete alignment with the ideological thrust of Lenin and Stalin. Some historians refer to them as the comrade vanguard of the Nazi party’s left-wing faction. Others viewed Goebbels and the Strasser brothers as “National Bolsheviks.”

In stark comparison, right-wing elements of Europe instead gravitated towards the monarchy, church, and traditional values, which was an outright anathema to socialist left-wing elements. Hitler regarded right-wing elements as reactionary and bourgeois. According to the American historian David Schoenbaum, Hitler in 1935 proclaimed that “The enemies of National Socialism,” were not only the “Jewish Marxists” and “certain elements of an incorrigible, stupid reactionary bourgeoisie,” but also Catholics. Goebbels held similar views.

So, when did Goebbels come out of the left-wing closet? It was almost from day one. But his most famous quote, where he proudly acknowledged his support for the “German left” and his hated for the “right-wing” business class, occurred on Dec. 6, 1931. In that edition of his Der Angriff publication, Goebbels wrote, “According to the idea of the NSDAP [Nazi party], we are the German left. Nothing is more hateful to us than the right-wing national ownership block.” Here, Goebbels explicitly spelled out his true revolutionary red colors, confessing that the German National Socialist party belonged on the socialist “left” side of the political spectrum, comrades in arms who despised the capitalist right wing.

Goebbels’ left-wing identification was no secret to many German historians. They had already uncovered the Nazi’s left-wing and socialist orientation. And they, unlike other historians, were willing to reveal their dark secrets. Some, like German historian Wolfgang Venohr, made it a point to reveal Goebbels’ pro-left quote in his book Documents of German Existence: 500 Years of German National History 1445-1945. Other German historians echoed the same evidence about the socialist leftist movement of the Hitler’s National Socialist party. In 2011, Prof. Arnulf Baring reminded listeners during a TV broadcast, “The Nazis were not right-wing, the Nazis were a left-wing party! National-socialist!” The German historian Götz Aly concurred, writing, “Another source of the Nazi Party’s popularity was its liberal borrowing from the intellectual tradition of the socialist left. Many of the men who would become the movement’s leaders had been involved in communist and socialist circles.” This included Hitler, who fervently declared himself a “fanatical socialist” in 1941.

Some non-German historians were also privy to the Nazis socialist, left-wing history and ideology. UC Berkeley political scientist,A. James Gregor, a leading expert on Fascism, claimed that“Fascists were almost all Marxists—serious theorists who had long been identified with Italy’s intelligentsia of the Left.” The French historian, François Furet, a former communist intellectual himself, argued, “It was in Nazi Germany that Bolshevism was perfected.”American historian Stanley G. Payne weighed in with “Hitlerian socialism more nearly paralleled Russian Communism than any other non-communist system.” The American leader of the Socialist Party of America, Norman Thomas, who ran for U.S. president many times, condemned the Soviet Union in the 1940s as exhibiting “Red fascism.” His exact words were, “communism, whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism.” And we cannot leave out the national ‘newspaper of record”, The New York Times, which in its 1939 editorial stated: “Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism.”

Even hardcore Marxists could not help but equate Fascism with Stalinism. The German Communist Otto Ruhle, declared that “Fascism is merely a copy of Bolshevism.” Even Leon Trotsky, the Russian Marxist who headed the Red Army, pointed out the same comparison, writing in 1936, “Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity.”

Goebbels not only promoted the Nazi party as an offshoot of the German left branch. He spent time and energy proving it. In 1925, as a budding regional Nazi orator who spoke to crowds of thousands, he repeatedly praised Lenin and encouraged the Nazi leadership to ally with Stalin’s Soviet Union. By late November of 1925, he views finally made national headlines. As reported by the New York Time, Goebbels declared, “Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith was very slight.” But Goebbels was eager to show off his Marxian catechism as well. In 1925 he wrote, “We will turn National Socialism into a party of class struggle,” a major requirement for a full-fledged leftist with Marxian credential. He even spoke up for “strict social justice.” Then again, such extreme left-wing bravado would be expected from a political war-horse who professed in 1924 to be a “German Communist.”

Such leftwing grit and grime resonated throughout Goebbels’ political career. In 1929, he referred to Nazi Germany as “a party of “revolutionary socialists.” By 1939, he promulgated the narrative that World War II was a bitter battle between capitalism and socialism, declaring, “England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state” in his famous “England’s Guilt” speech. Apparently, Hitler agreed with his close friend. Bragging about his military successes in Western Europe in 1941, Hitler declared, “It is already war history how the German armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy.”

Joseph Goebbels was no minor figure in the upper echelons of the Nazi party. He was not only the Propaganda Minister of Nazi Germany, but also one of Hitler’s closest and most devoted associate. And achieving success in that role, he climbed the Nazi ladder to be the only other man to serve as Chancellor of Nazi Germany.

Goebbels’ secret was simple. He was a fanatical political extremist to the core, prepared to die for his cause, declaring that it was “better to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal capitalist servitude.” Goebbels’s socialist and anti-capitalist dreams of collective sacrifice inspired the German public. “To be a socialist,” Goebbels wrote, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.” And sacrifice they did.

So, what about the Italian Fascists?  Benito Mussolini made it clear that he believed that Fascism sat firmly on the “Left.” He was a diehard Marxist for much of his life, considering himself a disciple of his friend, Vladimir Lenin. The English historian Denis Mack Smith concurred, writing, “Mussolini had once belonged to the Bolshevik wing of the Italian Socialist Party and still in 1924 confessed admiration for Lenin.” In his famous 1933 “Doctrine of Fascism”, Il Duce made it crystal clear, writing, “It may be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism.” This quote comes from Mussolini’s 1933 “authorized translation” by Jane Soames, an accomplished journalist and translator for The Times of London.

As a flaming atheist who declared, “Christ is dead and his teachings moribund,” and who opposed monarchism, Mussolini never considered himself part of the reactionary right. In Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, Polish-born American historianRichard Pipe puts the history of Mussolini’s Fascism into perspective, asserting, “Genetically, Fascism issued from the ‘Bolshevik’ wing of Italian socialism, not from any conservative ideology or movement.”

 The American historian Charles F. Delzell knew this instinctively. He wrote in Mediterranean Fascism 1919-1945, “A good many Fascists… came from the ranks of left-wing Marxism and syndicalism, and when the Fascist regime was overthrown in 1943-45 it was not hard for a certain number of ex-Blackshirts to swing to left-wing political extremism.”

In fact, the Fascist-left radicals for Mussolini’s regime were so in tune with Marxist ideology and violent tactics that it is difficult to see much difference between them and the American Antifa radicals. Because of their similarities, the current crop of Antifa agitators are unabashed imitators of Mussolini’s blackshirt violence and revolutionary socialism. Moreover, the reason Antifa is part of the Fascist left is that historically Fascism originally came out of Marxism. Who have made those claims? Many historians, including two of the world-leading experts on Fascism, Zeev Sternhell and A. James Gregor. A Polish-born Israeli historian, Sternhell wrote, “Fascist ideology… was the direct result of very specific revision of Marxism,” while UC Berkeley political scientist, Gregor, has a slightly different take, arguing that “Fascism was a variant of classical Marxism.” David Ramsey Steel, a former member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, explained it most succinctly: “Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists.”

Mussolini was never sly about revealing his communist roots. In a 1932 interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini eagerly attesting, “It was inevitable that I should become a Socialist ultra, a Blanquist, indeed a communist. I carried about a medallion with Marx’s head on it in my pocket.” After winning a legislative seat in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in1921, Mussolini spoke with pride, “I know the Communists. I know them because some of them are my children.” He was also overjoyed in 1934 when he announced that Italy’s economy had been mostly nationalized-socialized, boasting, “Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state.” Mussolini was celebrating the public ownership of the economy, the main hallmark of Marxist socialism.

Who else referred to Italy’s Fascists as the “Fascist Left?”  One is the American historian Stanley G. Payne in his A History of Fascism, 1914–1945, who employed the term “Fascist left” to describe a number of major Fascist leaders in Italy, including Edmondo Rossoni, Michele Bianchi, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti and others. Many of these “Fascist Syndicalists,” favored “class consciousness,” “labor’s autonomy” and heavy doses of socialism and unionism. By 1923, Italian industrialist were so horrified by the Fascist syndicalists (unionists), that they wondered whether it was “now wise to pay the Communists to fight the Fascists!” As leader of the Fascist Syndicalists, Rossoni instigated hostile strikes in his effort to eventually abolish capitalism. He demanded workers’ control of factories, “class consciousness,” and believed that “only the Fascist syndicates could complete the revolution.” Rossoni was famous for depicting Italy industrialists as “vampires” and “profiteers.”

So why is there a general belief that German National Socialism and Italian Fascism rest on the right? After all, according to the French Revolution’s sitting arrangement in 1789, authoritarians sat on the right while the classical liberals, like Thomas Paine, sat on the left. It was because of Soviet propaganda during and after World War II.  The Russian Soviets, embarrassed by their cozy corroboration with Hitler and Mussolini, decided to conceal their striking Fascist-Marxist similarities. They prohibited communists and their sympathizers from using the term “National Socialist”in public or in media outlets. They organized massive disinformation media campaigns to convince the world that Fascism and Communism were polar opposites, devoid of any common traits. Of course, it was all a big propaganda lie worthy of the myth-making Pravda.

When the worldwide disinformation effort by Soviet Russia started to gain traction in the 1940s, Winston Churchill was flabbergasted at the news.  Churchill, a historian in his own right, clearly saw the glaring parallels between Nazism and Communism, commenting that, “As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.” When Churchill was confronted by Soviet propaganda to falsely depict the world’s two major totalitarian ideologies as polar opposites, he remarked to his son, “Fascism and Communism… Polar opposites—no, polar the same!”

Source:  https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/lk-samuels/the-fascist-left-myth-or-reality/

Was World War II a Battle between Capitalism and Socialism?

Posted first at Strike-The-Root (STR) – January 23, 2020

http://www.strike-the-root.com/was-wwii-battle-between-capitalism-and-socialism

L.K. Samuels

The little hidden secret about World War II is that it was a giant struggle between two opposing economic ideologies—capitalism and socialism. Unfortunately, the public is mostly unaware that the Nazi and Fascist ranks were chock-full of hardcore socialists and Marxist-lite ideologues. This was no accident. For decades the public had been indoctrinated by socialist academicians who falsely claimed that Fascist leaders were the captains of industry, controlling the people like puppet masters pulling the strings of Hitler and Mussolini.

This notion is purely pseudo-historical nonsense with no basis in fact. So, how do we know? It is easy. Just listen to what the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist leaders openly expressed. They were not squeamish about their pep talks to eradicate capitalism and economic liberty. For instance, Adolf Hitler himself pushed an extreme anti-capitalist narrative throughout many of his speeches, referring to “capitalistic people” as “unscrupulous exploitation of men.”

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, was also a specialist devoted to spewing out not only the usual Nazi anti-capitalist rhetoric but explicitly pro-socialist visions for the future. Not long after the invasion of Poland in 1939, Goebbels framed the Nazis’ war with England in stark terms: “England is a capitalist democracy. Germany is a socialist people’s state.” Here, Goebbels proclaimed that the capitalists in England are the “richest men on earth. The broad masses, however, see little of this wealth.” In that same “England’s Guilt” speech, he throws more jabs at England’s tightfisted plutocracy as compared to Nazi Germany’s lavish support of social welfare programs, declaring: “It is also why English capitalists want to destroy Hitlerism. They see Hitlerism as all the generous social reforms that have occurred in Germany since 1933. The English plutocrats rightly fear that good things are contagious, that they could endanger English capitalism.”

Injustice of Wealth Inequality

 To the National Socialists of Germany, wealth inequality was a horrendous injustice that had to be eliminated. Both German Nazis and Italian Fascists attempted to strengthen and enlarge their social safety nets via social justice programs. Hitler decreed the expulsion of all private charity, terminating all NGOs, and strove to end capitalism and the stock market in 1933. The lion’s share of Germany’s stock exchanges were closed, cut down from twenty-one to only nine by 1935. As these Hitlerites continued to nationalize commercial banks and industry, the government demanded registration of stock ownership, and to the limit the distribution of “dividends to 6 percent.” In 1936, laws were enacted that “prohibited the quotations of foreign stocks on German stock exchanges” and later “blocked foreign exchange dealing at the stock exchanges completely.”

 A militant Marxist for decades, Mussolini boasted in 1934 to his Italian Chamber of Deputies that “Three-fourths of the Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state.” He often railed against capitalist nations in favor of “social justice”, declaring in a 1945 interview, “We are proletarian nations that rise up against the plutocrats.”

In fact, when Mussolini wanted to show his support for the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, he told fellow Fascist official Giuseppe Bottai that the internal differences between Fascism and Bolshevism were minor, arguing that both Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism opposed the “demo-plutocratic capitalism of the western powers.”

Representing himself as a common “have-not” with no “ancestral estate,… bank account… stocks… or dividends,” Hitler was often more explicit in his hatred of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Sometimes referring to the German bourgeois elites as “cowardly shits,” Hitler explained to Otto Wagener, the party’s economic advisor, that the business bourgeoisie “know nothing except their profit. ‘Fatherland’ is only a word for them.”

Earlier in a 1922 speech, Hitler promised that “Capitalism as a whole will now be destroyed.” One of his main reasons for wanting to destroy market capitalism and advance social justice was his contempt for “Jewish capitalism”, “unearned income”, and its unregulated financial markets. To Hitler and most socialists and Marxists of Europe, capitalism was a Jewish conspiracy of moneylenders, bankers, and financiers who were trying to control the world. During a 1940 speech in Berlin, he targeted capitalists as the enemy, declaring: “They are, after all, plutocracies in which a tiny clique of capitalists dominates the masses, and this, naturally, in close cooperation with international Jews and Freemasons.” In another speech in 1940, Hitler declared that his National Socialist movement had broken the “Jewish capitalist shackles imposed by plutocratic-democratic” nations, along with the “dwindling class of exploiters at home” in Germany.

 Capitalist Plutocracies versus Proletariat Nations

 Determined not to be outdone by Hitler’s anti-bourgeois and anti-Semitic rhetoric, Goebbels in his 1944 “Our Socialism” editorial wrote:  “the Jews are the incarnation of capitalism.” Even Nazi street posters blared out the Nazis’ anti-capitalism and anti-Jew screeds. One 1933 poster from Münster read:  “Because Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich wants social justice, big Jewish capitalism is the worst enemy of this Reich and its Führer.”

Hitler, who was once a red armband-wearing Communist and later a “Social Democrat” in 1919, also put World War II in terms of the proletarian nations engaging in the ultimate showdown against the western plutocracies propped up by capitalism. Bragging about his victorious 45-day battle against the western Allies in 1941, Hitler declared that “It is already war history how the German Armies defeated the legions of capitalism and plutocracy.” The Führer had framed World War II as a war between the socially-just proletariat nations and the Western capitalist nations, thus demonstrating the extent to which Hitler sought to destroy liberal capitalism.

 Even members of the German military were exposed to this message. During the lead-up to Operation Barbarossa in 1941, many ideological lectures were given to German soldiers, such as one entitled: “Socialism against Plutocracy.” This hatred of capitalism was endemic at all levels in the Third Reich. Many National Socialist campaign pamphlets pushed a strong anti-capitalist narrative. One propaganda theme from 1932 warned German farmers that a big “danger is the American economic system—Big Capitalism; it means ‘world economic crisis,’ it means ‘eternal-interest-slavery’, it means that the world is nothing more than a bag of booty for Jewish finance in Wall Street, New York, and Paris,… it knows only profit and dividends.”

 Love Germany and Hate Capitalism

 Often referring to Nazism and himself as “revolutionary socialists,” Goebbels was the leading cheerleader for nationalistic socialism, sounding the loudest death knell for capitalism. In a Nazi pamphlet first appearing in 1929, he attacked capitalism as a “rotten industrial system.” Confessing in his 1924 diary that he was “a German Communist,” Goebbels contended that he could simultaneously “love Germany and hate capitalism”, and that “only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the core of the rebirth of our people.” In other writings, Goebbels condemned “the money pigs of capitalism,” saying that “money is the curse of mankind.” At other times he angrily proclaimed that “The bourgeoisie has to yield to the working class … Whatever is about to fall should be pushed. We are all soldiers of the revolution. We want the workers’ victory over filthy lucre. That is socialism.”

But some critics, usually socialist historians, ignore what the National Socialists and Fascists actually proclaimed and did. They regularly decry that the National Socialists and Fascists were somehow not real socialists in good standing, although Hitler made his intentions clear in a Feb. 24, 1941 speech, proclaiming to a cheering crowd: “I am a fanatical socialist.”

 Actually, Nazis were more socialist than even most Social Democrats, taking positions razor-close to Marxist sentiments. A 1925 New York Times article revealed Goebbels’s Marxist-lite outlook. In the news story, Goebbels is identified as the man who declared to a crowd in Chemnitz that “Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between communism and the Hitler faith was very slight.”

Luckily, the war between Hitler’s socialism and Western democratic capitalism ended in a victory for individual liberty. Some socialist historians still believe that Hitler’s anti-capitalist demagogy and practices were just a myth. But history has preserved large volumes of such historical records in great detail. If only more people, especially academicians, would examine such material without their socialist-based conflict of interest getting in the way.

Much of the material is excerpted from L.K. Samuels’ new book, Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum.