I don't think you will see any tolerable politicians out of it, that's not part of the Fox News agenda.

I never understood why the Nazis are considered right of center.  Their economic policies were rather socialist-inspired, it seems to me.

I think the Stalin - Lenin pact was pure pragmatism rather than born of ideology.

However, the social and economic policies implemented are clearly socialist-inspired.

Personally, I think that this frame shift was a completely successful attempt by leftist scholars to play with definitions and tar anyone claiming to be a radical right with the brush of fascism.  You now see people associate economic classical liberalism (laissez-faire, free markets) with fascism, which is mind boggling, whatever you might think of liberalism.

And Mosley, who even named his party 'Fascist'.

On the other hand, Austria's 'Austro-Fascists' and Spain's/Portugal's 'clerical fascists' really were not (despite close ties with Mussolini, who in those days before Abyssinia was seen as stronger than Hitler).

Last edited by zuckermandl (2010-09-21 17:55:14)

One way to look at civilization is that we move (slowly, with some backtracking) towards more freedom & more individualism.  You start in hunter-gatherer societies where everything is held in common, and many activities (hunting, cooking, etc) are done in common.  Then you move to agricultural, then industrial, and then our society where the degree of privacy is unprecedented.  Within this framework, totalitarian states are always reactionary.

The Nazis would have never understood themselves as left wing... Hitler's idea was to go beyond this division... That's why they are regarded as the first "Volkspartei" (not to be translated as "peoples party"... it means that they didn't target a certain group such as workers, middle class etc... but the target is the whole people)...

The strategy was completely different in the various regions of the Reich: e.g. in Prussia the main target were the gentry ("Ostelbische Junker"), in Berlin it was the workers (and indeed some observers talk about "all the windows that had hammer and sickle flags one year ago, now they got a swastika"), in Baden the main target group were rich farmers and middle class entrepreneurs etc...

The "Socialist" and the "worker" part in the name was mainly used to attract those people, there is not much socialist thought in the Nazi ideology... however, the Nazis would spit out propaganda against "Jewish Bolshevism" and against "Jewish stock market gamblers", but they were in good terms with all the big names in the German economy as long as they were Aryan... the Nazis had this strange distinction between "schaffendes Kapital" ("producing/creating capital"= Aryan, German) and "raffendes Kapital" ("gathering capital"= Jewish, American)

Even if they wanted to be seen "beyond" this left wing/ right wing dichotomy, they were regarded as a right wing extremist party by all of their contemporaries, their aim was to be the only party anyway...

Historically, liberalism (the force of the bourgeois class) is a reaction against monarchy/ aristocray from the age of enlightenment, then there was the conservative reaction... Socialism is also a reaction against liberalism, and fascism is a reaction against liberalism... Strictly speaking, fascism is of course not the same as National Socialism, as its not necessarily racist/ antisemitic...

Totalitarianism is an interesting theory... from Hannah Arendt, I think... but I think it shouldn't be used in order to minimise Nazi guilt... that's one of the dangers... you often hear that argument in Germany along these lines "yeah the Nazis weren't that bad, Stalin had more blood on his hands"...

You can think of the right wing/ left wing dichotomy as some kind of a circle... The moderates meet themselves on the one end, and the radicals on the other... There are a lot of topics were you can find strange alliances between right wing and left wing extremists, e.g. the Israel/ Palestine conflict, employment/ welfare/ social politics, certain topics such as women's rights, gay marriage etc... It's become more difficult to distinguish between right wing and left wing stances... think of gay politicians with a xenophobic agenda for example...


Wow, I'm digressing... BTW, I have no clue about the topic of the original post and the Tea Party

Yes, I'm sure Stalin was a terrible dictator just like Hitler...

However, I don't think that you can draw the conclusion from that fact, that socialism is as vile an ideology as fascism/nazism... which is a point often made by the liberal advocators of totalitarianism theory...

(Americans keep in mind: liberal in Germany means something else than in the US!)

BTW, I'm not sure if I shouldn't delete my last post while I still can... what a lot of inconsistent waffle

Depends what you mean by 'socialism'.

I had to write an essay on that very subject in my first end of year exams.