Party programs
Let us start by considering political party programs or “platforms” of Hitler’s day:
Take this description of a political programme:
A declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists”.
And this description of a political movement as having a ‘revolutionary creative will’ which had ‘no fixed aim, no permanency, only eternal change’
And this policy manifesto:
9. All citizens of the State shall be equal as regards rights and duties.
10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. The activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good.
Therefore we demand:
11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.
12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in life and property, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as a crime against the people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits whether in assets or material.
13. We demand the nationalization of businesses which have been organized into cartels.
14. We demand that all the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.
15. We demand extensive development of provision for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle-class, the immediate communalization of department stores which will be rented cheaply to small businessmen, and that preference shall be given to small businessmen for provision of supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.
17. We demand a land reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to confiscate from the owners without compensation any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
So who put that manifesto forward and who was responsible for the summary quotes given before that? Was it the US Democrats, the British Labour Party, the Canadian Liberals, some European Social Democratic party? No. The manifesto is an extract from the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party and was written by the leader of that party: Adolf Hitler. And the preceding summary quotes were also from him (See Vol. 2 Chap. 5 of Mein Kampf and O’Sullivan, 1983. p. 138).
The rest of Hitler’s manifesto was aimed mainly at the Jews but in Hitler’s day it was very common for Leftists to be antisemitic. And the increasingly pervasive anti-Israel sentiment among the modern-day Left — including at times the Canadian government — shows that modern-day Leftists are not even very different from Hitler in that regard. Modern-day anti-Israel protesters still seem to think that dead Jews are a good thing.
The Nazi election poster below is headed: “We workers are awoken” (“Wir Arbeiter sind erwacht”)
There is a fuller decipherment and translation of the poster above here
Other examples of Hitler’s Leftism
Further, as a good socialist does, Hitler justified everything he did in the name of “the people” (Das Volk). The Nazi State was, like the Soviet State, all-powerful, and the Nazi party, in good socialist fashion, instituted pervasive supervision of German industry. And of course Hitler and Stalin were initially allies. It was only the Nazi-Soviet pact that enabled Hitler’s conquest of Western Europe. The fuel in the tanks of Hitler’s Panzern as they stormed through France was Soviet fuel.
And a book that was very fashionable worldwide in the ’60s was the 1958 book “The Affluent Society” by influential “liberal” Canadian economist J.K. Galbraith — in which he fulminated about what he saw as our “Private affluence and public squalor”. But Hitler preceded him. Hitler shared with the German Left of his day the slogan: “Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz” (Common use before private use). And who preceded Hitler in that? Friedrich Engels at one stage ran a publication called Gemeinnuetziges Wochenblatt(“Common-use Weekly”).
And we all know how evil Nazi eugenics were, don’t we? How crazy were their efforts to build up the “master race” through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women — the “Lebensborn” project? Good Leftists today recoil in horror from all that of course. But who were the great supporters of eugenics in Hitler’s day? They were in fact American Leftists — and eugenics was only one of the ideas that Hitler got from that source. What later came to be known as Fascism was in fact essentially the same as what was known in the USA of the late 19th and early 20th century as “Progressivism”, so Fascism is in fact as much an American invention as a European one. The Europeans carried out fully the ideas that American Leftists invented but could only partially implement. America itself resisted the worst of the Fascist virus but much of Europe did not. The American Left have a lot to answer for.
So even Hitler’s eugenics were yet another part of Hitler’s LEFTISM! He got his eugenic theories from the Leftists of his day. He was simply being a good Leftist intellectual in subscribing to such theories.
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