[Transcript]

Help me settle an argument. Was Hitler left wing or right wing?

Extremely far right regarding nationalism (obv), but very far left regarding socialism

So far left regarding socialism that he banned trade unions and killed all the socialists.

Yeah, doesn’t seem like the supported socialists very much. To be fair, the socialists he killed were his competition…

(Source.)


First off, holy hell! I didn’t know that antisocialists were still arguing this! Apparently I was so absorbed in more important things like historical research and Twitch streams that I overlooked it.

As for Musk’s contentless crap… well, if you want to know why I now rarely respond directly to antisocialist apologetics, this is a perfect example.

When you spend time reading essays and books by serious researchers, such as Stephen G. Gross’s Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, the history is absolutely colorful with wide backgrounds, decades of contexts, and fascinating examples—to say nothing of the scores of citations that one could read.

And then you turn around and the contrast hits you immediately when you look at antisocialist apologetics: their arguments are murder to read and refute over and over again; so bland, shallow, and incoherent. Believe me, these antisocialists would probably agree that burning down somebody’s businesses and using state intervention to protect them are both tantamount to socialism!

They lazily trivialize Fascism’s fiercest opposition [read: the lower classes] as ‘competition’, consistently overlook Fascism’s obscurer victims like the Ethiopians and the Roma, ignore the significance of capital and wage labor under Fascism, dismiss collaborative businessmen as either coerced or ‘socialists’, always(?) defend Finland during WWII, hardly ever mention let alone discuss any of Fascism’s more technical aspects… and yet, many of them still want to be taken seriously as ‘antifascists’. Yeah, right.

    • Anarcho-BolshevikOP
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      204 months ago

      The thing is, the people who always emphasize this misnomer never provide evidence that the German Fascists chose it because they shared the same useless redefinitions as modern antisocialists do. They just quietly assume that the German Fascists must have chosen it because they must have also redefined socialism as state intervention in the economy. It is a non sequitur that almost nobody ever thinks about.