DAS DRITTE REICH -- AND FRIENDS

There is rather a good short summary of Hitler's thinking here by Koenigsberg -- showing that Hitler was devoted to Germany, that he saw Germany as a living organism that was severely threatened and that he saw the 'alien' Jews as incompatible with German life. Koenigsberg also shows how anti-individual Nazism was: "Hitler stated that Volksgemeinschaft ["people's community"] meant "overcoming bourgeois privatism, unconditionally equating the individual fate and the fate of the nation." Every single German was obligated to unite with the community, to embrace and share the common faith."

And where did Hitler get the idea of Germany as a biological organism? He was quite explicit that he got his eugenic ideas from American "Progressives" so it is rather unlikely that the ideas of the American President who was so prominent in the events of World War I and its aftermath could have escaped him. And if you look here, you will see that the anti-business Woodrow Wilson too justified his wish to scrap the checks and balances of the American constitution on the grounds that the U.S. government was "not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life... No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live".

Jamie Glazov knows the score: "Leftwing gulag denial shares a profound affinity with neo-nazi holocaust denial. This is no surprise, since nazism and socialism are closely related. Nazism wasn't termed "National Socialism" without reason. Aside from both ideologies supporting state control of the economy, nazism and socialism also emphasize struggle and revolution for the sake of bringing about an apocalyptic end to the present phase of world history. Rejecting the world they live in, socialists envision class utopia, while nazis dream of racial utopia. This explains why both systems subordinate the individual to the state and rely upon an elite party, organized in military style, to achieve their objectives. In the end, the socialist and nazi visions demonize - necessarily - a certain portion of the human race. Mass genocide is the logical outcome of both ideologies, since humans must be sacrificed in the name of a transcendent humanism.... Socialists must wipe out the historical memory of the gulag, because that way another gulag becomes possible"

Those conservative Nazis! "Going down into the Chancellery bunker near the end of WWII, Joseph Goebbels took a look around at the burning wreckage of Berlin and exulted to his diary: "These flames are consuming the last of 19th-century bourgeois civilization!""

There is a good essay here that uses extensive quotes to show that Socialism, Communism, Nazism and Fascism are all essentially the same and that America and other Western countries today are far closer to historical Fascism than is at all comfortable. I draw similar conclusions myself here and here

September 1st (today in the USA at the time of writing) is the 65th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland. To mark the occasion, Sean Gabb has drawn our attention to his defence of the great appeaser! It is not as silly as it sounds and is worth a read. Though in the end I think Churchill was right.

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