Do you ever see something that is absolutely horrifying, the implications of which are terrible, and no one else seems to really notice? These two tweets are one of those things for me:
Anyone with a basic understanding of politics is aware that Nazism is separated as a unique political
The claim that the Nazis were actually socialists is an early Nazi lie - it’s in the name of the party after all - to gain votes. They never changed that name, so they perpetrated that lie and never officially retracted it. They were fascist, not socialist. It’s not impossible to be both, I grant you, but one does not imply the other.
Modern right-wing detractors of socialism, especially those on the far right, like to use the lie to decry socialism, all the while secretly revering a good portion of Nazi politics.
People always complain that socialism is a slippery slope into fascism yet are somehow blind that capitalism is doing the same thing.
Literally noone does. It’s a slippery slope to totalitarianism, but that’s not the same as fascizm
I mean… socialism as an economic system isn’t strictly incompatible with ethnic nationalism, so long as you’re willing to buy into the eugenic arguments of who constitutes “real people”. Once you consign a certain share of the population to the category of “property” and “pests”, you can slap the framework for a socialist system on top of the nightmarish politics of mass murder.
One could argue that Germany’s rapid resurgence in the wake of the Great Depression came about precisely because the reactionary movement wasn’t hopelessly wedded to the libertarian laisse-faire economics. The boom that Germany enjoyed in the 1930s was absolutely the result of a radically left wing approach to centralized state-run planning. But the purpose of that surge in productivity was to invade, loot, and plunder German’s immediate neighbors in a quest of European and North African re-colonization.
What separates modern Trumpism from European fascism is this hopeless adherence to market theories of economic advancement. You can see it plainly in the government shutdown fight. Trump wants to fire millions of federal workers, under the dogged assumption that his erstwhile friends in the Tech Sector can replace them all with a fancy computer.
He’s all in on the Superiority Color Wheel, but fully divested of respect for engineering, logistics, and agricultural best-practices. Say what you will about Rommel, but the man knew how to budget out a tank of gas. Trumpism is about flooding the markets with paper currency and hoping his C-level buddies in banking and tech can figure out how to do economic management better than he can.
There’s a massive logical fallacy here. The fact that someone doesn’t like socialism, doesn’t make them nazi.
Sure. They could just be deluged in the neoliberal free market propaganda of the current media cycle.
But they’re also a crop of individuals ripe for fascist ideology. The Randian Objectivists of the 1980s were slowly and inexorably converted into the Bush Era Christian Nationalists of the War on Terror Era. The Tea Party Libertarians of the 2000s were ultimately indoctrinated into the QAnon/MAGA movement of the 2020s. Once you buy into this idea of certain classes of people being economic parasites who deserve to be disciplined or exterminated by the Invisible Hand, you’re primed to accept that you can spot these people based on their race or religion or ideological affiliation.
Nazism is downstream of capitalism. Henry Ford was handing out copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in all his dealerships for a reason.
facepalm