[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.
do you mean to say military dictatorship south korea, kuomingtang taiwan, nasserist egypt, and assadist syria are all fascist?
Well, uh, for the first 2, yes (they’re literally comprador nations aligned to the west, it wouldn’t be surprising), but for the last 2, more than likely no
No… I am saying that equating the Bolsheviki’s unification of the trade unions with the Fascists’ replacement of them with an apologetics organization is a false equivalence because the trade unions in the people’s republics served (and still serve) the working masses, whereas the trade unions under Fascism worked to convince proletarians that they were wrong and their bosses were right.
I think that it’s an exaggeration to categorize South Korea and Kuomintang Taiwan as fascist, but I don’t lecture anybody for making that call either given that they’re still anticommunist régimes whose job is to oppress us. As for Egypt and Syria, I don’t know enough about them to comment.