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Were the Nazis Right or Left Wing?

Were the Nazis...

  • Predominantly Right Wing

    Votes: 66 51.2%
  • Predominantly Left Wing

    Votes: 27 20.9%
  • Largely in the center

    Votes: 10 7.8%
  • Don't know/unsure/no opinion/none of the above

    Votes: 26 20.2%

  • Total voters
    129
The Nazi's were/are Nazi's and do not represent any major political party in the United States of America.

They are there very own insecure, self pre occupied and sociopathic sect. Nazism is combination of cruelty and blind obedience to authority.
 
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I think they were just pricks to be honest
 
Except of course for the fact that the bureaucrat wasn't driven by profit, so this entire argument falls to pieces. This is about as absurd as saying that a feudal lord was a businessman because he appropriated the surplus labour of his serfs.

I don't think you can invalidate the point by bringing up the profit motive. The bottom line is that all people everywhere who are not suicidal or crazy want and need profit to survive. The only reason "profit motive" is considered unique to capitalism is because it seems to be the only system that recognizes this basic need. But as much as non-capitalists despise profit, they're driven to it by an innate desire to produce something. You cannot survive by living on an equal system of bartering or rationing. The Soviet bureaucrat-turned-businessman is driven to succeed, and profit equals success. The backdoor corruption of many communist states is enough evidence to indicate some elite people somewhere are profiting from the system. And the elite, needless to say, is almost always politically oriented.
 
So I'm feeling the whole "Nazis are leftwing" is some sortof new development in the political thought of the right in the last decade or so during resurgence? Because I really never encountered the idea in my life until recently, frankly, during Obama. I don't really know.

The Nazi's being labeled as purely right wing, has been an act of historical revisionism for a long time.
Lately, people have been putting in the effort to correct those errors.
Some take it to the point, of using it as a method to smear liberals, just as the Nazi's have been used to smear Conservatives.
 
The Nazi's being labeled as purely right wing, has been an act of historical revisionism for a long time.
Lately, people have been putting in the effort to correct those errors.
Some take it to the point, of using it as a method to smear liberals, just as the Nazi's have been used to smear Conservatives.

this whole effort to "correct those errors" is simply modern right wing revisionism which has the specific goal of attempting to wipe the dog waste off the bottom of their shoe. People look at some extreme elements of right wing American conservatism and some indeed see fascism over the next hill if we keep going in that direction. And that upsets the American right and they want to take away that weapon from their critics.

That is all this is about.
 
this whole effort to "correct those errors" is simply modern right wing revisionism which has the specific goal of attempting to wipe the dog waste off the bottom of their shoe. People look at some extreme elements of right wing American conservatism and some indeed see fascism over the next hill if we keep going in that direction. And that upsets the American right and they want to take away that weapon from their critics.

That is all this is about.

Not at all.
But case in point here, you're strictly attached to a 1 dimensional left/right spectrum, when it has been plainly pointed out that people/parties/nations can hold views from different ideologies.

The Nazi's heavily regulated the market, there for they are liberals.
Whew that was easy. :roll:
 
The Nazi's were/are Nazi's and do not represent any major political party in the United States of America.

They are there very own insecure, self pre occupied and sociopathic sect. Nazism is combination of cruelty and blind obedience to authority.

Yeah but... Yeah but...

Nazi has the word 'socialis't in it, so therefore it must be.

You know, like the Peoples Republic of China?


I mean, Governments are required to use proper terms when naming themselves. Otherwise that would be false advertising....

Besides, if the Nazis are NOT socialists, that means all those Fox News and Glenn Beck talking points are b.s. Total lies and misinformation.

That means Glenn taught us wrong stuff and made us stupid. Why would he want to make his viewers stupid....???
 
Its funny that you're going off on a "the right keeps trying to say nazi's were liberals" rant while ignoring the liberals in this very thread trying to do the exact same thing but with the opposite side.
 
Not at all.
But case in point here, you're strictly attached to a 1 dimensional left/right spectrum, when it has been plainly pointed out that people/parties/nations can hold views from different ideologies.

designed by libertarians, for libertarians, to justify the opinions of libertarians = Nolan Chart. Excuse me for not prostrating myself before that altar.
 
Not at all.
But case in point here, you're strictly attached to a 1 dimensional left/right spectrum, when it has been plainly pointed out that people/parties/nations can hold views from different ideologies...

Naziism's roots in fascism and the right are universally acknowledged, excepting since McCarthy's time, by the ideologues of the American right.
 
Probably it was pointed out already several times in this thread that a one-dimensional left/right-continuum has its flaws, so I don't need to repeat it.

To me, it seems that the Nazis mostly picked up ideas that were en vogue in the 19th century among the right in Europe in general and in Germany in particular, and then took them to the extreme: Nationalism, anti-liberal and anti-democratic authoritarianism, militarism, anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism, colonialism, anti-communism and anti-Marxism -- they stood for all of the same things the right-leaning conservative monarchy had stood for, just they took it even several steps further.

The left, on the other side, *tended* (note: I did not say was generally, or always) opposed to these ideas. Whenever there were critics of rabid nationalism, it were internationalist leftists. Those who stood for a democratic-republican political system were opponents of the monarchists left of them. Most pacifist critics of militarism and colonialism were on the left too. And needless to say, the targets of anti-Marxist sentiments, the Marxist socialists and communists themselves, were usually labelled "left" too.

So if I have to make a choice, I'd say the Nazis were clearly right, despite a few superficially borrowed elements (rather style than content) from the far left.

But for the record, I don't that gives any reason to smear the political right in general with the association with Nazism: Whatever meant "right" back then in 1920s' and 30s' Germany is entirely different from what it means today, especially in America. Most opinions held by the common American Republican today would probably qualify as centrist to center-left by the standards of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s (except for the rah rah-patriotism, excessive militarism and the like you sometimes find among a particular subset of American righties -- those attitudes are perfectly compatible with Nazism, if not outright taken out of the Nazis' playbook).
 
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Its funny that you're going off on a "the right keeps trying to say nazi's were liberals" rant while ignoring the liberals in this very thread trying to do the exact same thing but with the opposite side.

Funny ha-ha, or Funny queer?
 
designed by libertarians, for libertarians, to justify the opinions of libertarians = Nolan Chart. Excuse me for not prostrating myself before that altar.

Who created the chart is irrelevant. What would you use? Simply saying a policy is "left" or "right" tells us next to nothing about the actual policy. Mussolini himself made it a point to reject the Left and the Right, borrowing many elements from both "sides." The left-right paradigm has been outdated since the end of the French Revolution.
 
Then why was Mussolini a member of the Italian Socialist Party, before he created the Fascist party?

Maybe it's worth pointing out that there are quite a few differences between Italian fascism and German Nazism. They go so far that some historians think Nazism should be a different category on its own, instead of being subsummized under the label "fascism".

So I assume Italian fascism had adopted more elements from the left than German Nazism.
 
Who created the chart is irrelevant. What would you use? Simply saying a policy is "left" or "right" tells us next to nothing about the actual policy. Mussolini himself made it a point to reject the Left and the Right, borrowing many elements from both "sides." The left-right paradigm has been outdated since the end of the French Revolution.

You've got it all wrong DA.
See Conservatives are right wing, like the Nazis because, they were racist, authoritarian, militaristic and imperialist.

Liberals, Democrats, Socialists, et all, have never had those attributes, ever.
Oh wait....:doh

They've revised history to label anything that has those attributes as right wing, even though they completely ignore the characteristics that closely attribute them with the liberal parties.
 
Maybe it's worth pointing out that there are quite a few differences between Italian fascism and German Nazism. They go so far that some historians think Nazism should be a different category on its own, instead of being subsummized under the label "fascism".

So I assume Italian fascism had adopted more elements from the left than German Nazism.

German Nazism did accept quite a few economic policies that were similar to the Progressives at the time.
Like, the Volkswagen project, Reforming dividends, and other strict controls over the market economy, something not exactly Conservative.
People are just cherry picking, what is and is not Conservative and Liberal.
 
German Nazism did accept quite a few economic policies that were similar to the Progressives at the time.
Like, the Volkswagen project, Reforming dividends, and other strict controls over the market economy, something not exactly Conservative.
People are just cherry picking, what is and is not Conservative and Liberal.

Maybe these economic policies are not "right" by American standards today, but I believe they have much in common with the conservative-monarchist right-wing economic polices of the Kaiserreich. The monarchy in Germany was protectionist, regulated much. It was even Bismarck who introduced the first public pension system, unemployment support system and healthcare system in Germany -- and you won't find many people who claim Bismarck or the Kaiser were "leftists". :lol:

I guess one big problem in this debate is that many have the historically very inaccurate idea in mind that "right" means "small government", while "left" means "big government". Economic policy certainly is one factor, but historically, it is definitely not the most important one. The German right, especially the monarchist far-right, was pretty much "big government".
 
Maybe these economic policies are not "right" by American standards today, but I believe they have much in common with the conservative-monarchist right-wing economic polices of the Kaiserreich. The monarchy in Germany was protectionist, regulated much. It was even Bismarck who introduced the first public pension system, unemployment support system and healthcare system in Germany -- and you won't find many people who claim Bismarck or the Kaiser were "leftists". :lol:

I guess one big problem in this debate is that many have the historically very inaccurate idea in mind that "right" means "small government", while "left" means "big government". Economic policy certainly is one factor, but historically, it is definitely not the most important one. The German right, especially the monarchist far-right, was pretty much "big government".

You understand this and I understand this, but quite a few others in this thread, do not.
They are very quick to assume, German Conservative = American Conservative.
 
Who created the chart is irrelevant. What would you use? Simply saying a policy is "left" or "right" tells us next to nothing about the actual policy. Mussolini himself made it a point to reject the Left and the Right, borrowing many elements from both "sides." The left-right paradigm has been outdated since the end of the French Revolution.

Irrelevant my aunt emma. It was created by libertarians for the expressed purpose of charting libertarians to justify the various opinions of libertarians and not place them as rightists on he normal continuum in American political thinking.

That was the entire purpose of it.
 
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