No fucking kidding.

And how many Russians died fighting the Nazi regime? Does 20,000,000 ring a bell you stodge.

“The only real and documentable disagreement Hitler had with Socialists was that they did not “value” Germany above all else.”

Just a minor point, eh? Fuck.

This was one not a point that independent thinkers missed at the time.

http://www.shoaheducation.com/knives.html

“Hitler saw the older Roehm as too socialist, too ‘reactionary’ and too focused on a 2nd Revolution which Hitler deemed unnecessary. While the two men worked for years for similar objectives, by the end neither thought the other would coexist with their objectives, so both the envisioned 2nd Workers Revolution and the Blood Purge became very comprehensible.”

Plus what elspi said.

Nazism and Communism were both excellent vehicles for the malignant narcissist. The internal checks and balances were so weak and ineffective that the clever psychopath with brilliant political skills, but no real ‘ideological compass’, could do very well there.

But some say that many corporations are in a similar situation – somebody who doesn’t give a rip about the company can use politics to hack their way to the top of the ladder to jump off with their golden parachute while the entire structure collapses behind them. The internal checks and balances against this sort of thing are weak.

Small government conservatives do not seem to have an answer for this.

IMO, when government is weak, the centers of power and control will simply go elsewhere and use government as its useful tool.

And have nothing to do with what is going on today!

Capitalism, by itself, is like a runaway freight train. You still need someone to steer it.

I love the way Freedom to you guys consists only of freedom of money, not people.

Hayek was fundamentally no different from Karl Marx. He didn’t use statistics and data and experimentation (i.e, the scientific method) to actually evaluate the validity of his hypotheses, he merely argued from assertion and anecdote and, after many many pages of elaborate sophistry, voila!, ended at the conclusion he wanted in the first place.

He argues for a magical theoretical capitalism which has never and can never exist in the real world, because people of little economic means will never have the same access to information, control of resources, etc. with which to forge their way as the industrialist magnate does. The only way the herd can achieve anything close to comparable levels of agency is by banding together and acting in their collective best interest. And as soon as that happens, all the free market fairies shout “UNION! UNCLEAN!”, and insist that the mass of the citizenry be abandoned to the tender mercies of a tooth and claw “free market” which is nothing of the kind, and instead another tool to keep them in their place and consuming.

Fascists/nazis supported capital and opposed labor.

Fascists/nazis were supported by capital and opposed by labor.

Communists/socialists supported labor and opposed capital.

Communist/socialists were supported by labor and opposed by capital.

The rich (see Henry Ford) poured money into the Nazi/Fascist coffers to fight the communist/socialists. You really cannot get farther apart than that.

The communists and the nazis were however both authoritarian, just like the modern republican party.

$$communist \cap nazi \subset republican$$

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200908100012

Equivalence!!

Plenty more at that site.

Have fun learnin’ about stuff, wingnutz!

As well as cheapening the incredibly heinous nature of true Nazism.

Plus, every now and then it’s fun to remind people of some of the legacies of Nazism. Volkswagen, for one. The Autobahn. And the most disturbing one of all: most of our medical understanding of the effects of cold on the human body are from the inhuman experiments the Nazis conducted on concentration camp prisoners. Many people who have survived hypothermia owe their lives to the Nazi monster doctors and their anonymous victims.

J.

Yeah, it was something both sides knew was bullshit. Hitler and Stalin both wanted some extra time to build up their war-machines, and of course Germany broke the thing eventually.

Beyond that, Hitler’s rise to power was based on both anti-Jew propaganda as well as anti-bolshevik, anti-Communist propaganda.

“totalitarian systems are often quite similar”

Agreed, and Stalin and Hitler were both horrible people who ruled over horrible regimes. But their motivating political ideologies came from different ends of the political spectrum.

To put it more bluntly, Jonah Goldberg is a complete idiot whose book was never taken seriously by any real historian.

Of course you can also have weird things like Communist China declaring that Capitalists would now be part of the Communist Party and leading the world in advancing authoritarian capitalism, so weird mixes do happen.

What F.A. Hayek saw, and what most all his contemporaries missed, was that every step away from the free market and toward government planning represented a compromise of human freedom generally and a step toward a form of dictatorship–and this is true in all times and places.

Nazism, he wrote, is not different in kind from Communism. Further, he showed that the very forms of government that England and America were supposedly fighting abroad were being enacted at home, if under a different guise. Further steps down this road, he said, can only end in the abolition of effective liberty for everyone.

Capitalism, he wrote, is the only system of economics compatible with human dignity, prosperity, and liberty.

http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-be-communist-and-fascist-at-same.html

The only real difference between Socialism/Communism and Nazism/Fascism is the strong nationalism of the latter.

Well, that, and the complete rejection of the class conflict theory that was the very heart and soul of socialist and community theory — Mussolini, for example, argued that there was no true class conflict within societies but between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” nations. Thus the proletarian (later developing) Italy and Germany had to unite against the bourgeois (earlier developing) Britain and France, and the previously argued conflict between bourgeois and proletarian within society would be resolved by viewing society as a unified organism which required different tissues and organs.

And maybe a few other minor differences that seemed to matter to people and movement and leaders of the time, but, you know, pffft, Mussolini was once a Socialist and who cares if he later declared that he was entirely hostile and opposed to socialism, f*** that sort of subtlety and analysis sh*t because, hey, “National Socialism”, it’s in the name. Luzers. Reed a buk!

The book and the platform are historical facts you cannot argue with them, which is probably part of the reason Oliver wants folks to read a compressed generalization instead of the actual articles. Gun control, socialized medicine, heavy regulation of industry and banking, and a highly centralized federal government are not right wing ideals, as Oliver repeatedly exclaims on this site.

Nazism and Communism are not polar opposites. Lenin and Stalin both spoke and wrote very highly of National Socialism (remember the German/Soviet Non-Aggression Pact?). You can also count hundreds of American Progressives of the era as fans of Hitler and Mussolini.

The only real difference between Socialism/Communism and Nazism/Fascism is the strong nationalism of the latter. Deuschland Uber Alles ring a bell?

The only real and documentable disagreement Hitler had with Socialists was that they did not “value” Germany above all else. They wanted to conjoin Germany into just another territory in a world of socialist states and he believed that this would lead to the suffering of German people.

Please guys, before you go and say that certain folks have no idea about historical facts, you might want to actually read a few of those facts for yourselves.