In my recent post The Dumbest Obama-Bashing I've Heard Yet--with a Dose of Anti-Semitism, Too, I wrote:

As a minor aside, Hitler was no socialist, and the Nazis backed up the traditional power of the German industrialists against the working class, who supported the German Communists and Social Democrats. Hitler's main political enemy in Germany was the German Communist Party (KPD), and they were the first ones he destroyed upon seizing power.

It's a common tactic of the right to pretend that the Nazis were on the left, as a way of discrediting the left. The Nazis were on the extreme right, analogous to the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S.

Several readers have written in saying that the Nazis must have been socialists or on the left because they have the word "socialist" in their name.

This is a shallow analysis. The Nazis used the word "socialist" because at that time the word had great appeal, particularly among Germany's large, well-organized working class. Employing the word was salesmanship, nothing more. While some of Hitler's street-level supporters did take the "socialist" part seriously, it was big business which helped bankroll Hitler's rise to power

As George Orwell once noted in his critique of Hitler, Mussolini, and other European fascists, the Nazis/Fascists took great pains to hide their true nature as guardians of capitalism, big business, and the traditional order. Using "socialist" in the name was one of these tactics.

To give perspective, communist East Germany (1949-1990, see flag above) was one of the world's most repressive governments. The government's security apparatus was so big it was actually a drain on the economy.

During widespread anti-government protests in 1989, one of protesters' demands was that they put all the strong young men of the security apparatus to work doing something useful, like construction projects, as opposed to spying, harassing, and repressing people.

Now, does anybody remember the name of communist East Germany?

Deutsche Demokratische Republik. That's right--the German  Democratic Republic.

Were they a democracy?

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under History. You can trackback from your own site.