| Sorry I have to respond to this but it’s so problematic and common I feel the need. 1. Let us not get hung up on what the nazis were selling at that time, place and language by using the word socialist (oh wait it wasn’t in English!?! Oh that’s a translation??!!!). In any case, that’s nearly meaningless unless you really think the People’s Republic of China under Mao was really a republic? Then I can’t help. TLDR , political labels are meaningless lies. This is not a serious argument to point out their name. 2. All of these authoritarian movements have different origin stories and sometimes they’re pulled out of different movements, and it’s hard to attach their origins to the final product, more confusingly for labels such as progressive and conservative (or left and right ).. they may be very very “right” or very very “left” in two different policy areas. If we want to stick to the nazis.. they were a good billion times more interventionist and militaristic than any American progressive movement ever was so (super right wing I guess?!?), despite legitimately saying some things you’d hear out of the American left at the time. 3. Ultimately authoritarians are mostly about being in power, and whatever else you go for here, that’s the main takeaway you should have taken away from the nazis neither left nor right but being about themselves being in power. In any case, the nazis were the nazis and the fascist salute they’re famous for I’ve seen made by more than my fair share of otherwise entirely right wing organizations such as Franco’s Spain, who openly opposed and fought against communists and socialists.. and yet were assisted by the nazis directly in Guernica. You can read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia for a good first person account if you’d like to understand how confusing this all can be to label the nazis as either progressive or socialist. Of course the most challenging example of all of this is Chile’s Pinochet. Nazi salutes at his funeral for a man that also openly fought communism, had an economic policy designed entirely from University of Chicago economists in a way that would have made Milton Friedman proud, much more free market than anything we had in the states at the time. I still don’t really connect the University of Chicago to fascism, because that’s silly. The fascists movements are at least definitely fascist but I assume they would have been anything to be in power. |