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Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

This person is either willfully ignorant, or an actual fascist attempting to blur the line.

This exact line of thought has been used for decades to subvert the actual history of the Nazi party and their co-operation with corporations, undermining of labor unions, assault on socialist groups via their brown shirts, etc.

This is a fascist talking point. It doesn't matter where the user possibly derived it from.

The "National Socialist" party was explicitly anti-socialist. Their talking points explicitly refuted class boundaries, and enforced "cultural" boundaries, to create the scapegoat of the Jews as the primary cause for societal turmoil.

Do not take this user seriously. Do not allow yourself to get into the weeds, they will not take any real discussion seriously. They are acting in bad faith.

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That is a lot of assumptions and personal attacks based on a question that you haven't answered.

The soviets also actively clamped down on unions, were they not socialists either?

Edit: I'll let someone else make the point for me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4kg34a/comme...

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

Are you calling me an anti Semite? Or am I missing the point you are making entirely?

I'm saying you leaving a comment taking the name "National Socialist" literally is a well trodden path of misinformation and a long standing part of the post-war revisionism, such as the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth and the Double Genocide myth. It is not worth discussing seriously with you in particular, and I am writing for those reading these comments.

The Nazi party purposefully used the term "Socialist" as a method to draw people away from the actual socialist workers groups of the time.

These talking points are intended to blur the line of the very real evils of Nazi Germany.

These same talking points are used by actual racists, anti-Semites, and modern fascists to distance themselves from the real historical example of what happens when their views gain traction. Similar to how people who participate in Holocaust denial would be rooting for the very same Holocaust.

Well this is surprising for a few reasons. And pretty offensive. For what it's worth I'm pretty much the reverse of an anti Semite.

Pointing out that the Nazi party called themselves national socialists and had socialist policies does not make me a holocaust denier, Nazi apologist or anything else that you are attempting to label me as.

Your reaction to what I said is genuinely baffling to me. I'm a liberal through and through. The common enemy of communists and Nazis was liberals. In my view Nazis and communists are both sides of the same brutal coin.

I don't think you can be authoritarian and socialist. The structures of strict hierarchy necessary to be authoritarian necessarily oppose the egalitarian goals of socialism.

Many, many socialists condemn the Soviets, and even fought against them. Very few socialists believe that forcing the populace at gunpoint to be communist is a good plan.

Apart from the Socialist roots of the Nazi party (hence the name) and Fascism (Mussolini) , they have practiced a state planned economy which was far closer to Stalin's Soviet Union than to the United States

This doesn't mean the Nazis were not very much anti-communist, but subscribing Nazism to Capitalism is an extremely flat ideology-driven version of history

The libertarian / Randite strand of American hyper-capitalist ideology is ascendant and somewhat hegemonic in North American political education in schools and the like and it defines as "socialist" anything which involves "the government." To the point that we have people complaining in earnest that things Trump is doing that don't fit their Milton Friedman vibes are "socialist."

It deliberately strips the "social" part out of the ideological framing and replaces it with the state.

Which is also helped by the fact that "actual existing socialism" in the USSR etc did the same.

Also doesn't help that there has been effectively no organized socialist political presence in American politics (apart from the DSA pushing on the Democrats left wing, and Sanders I guess). This means that American politics reduces completely to a false "liberal" ("left" somehow) vs "conservative" dichotomy, both labels which don't describe anything about what they are anymore.

I've watched so many Americans get squirrely online when I've tried to draw a line on my own political viewpoint; no, I'm not liberal, I'm a socialist. This breaks their brains. Does not compute. Increasingly unfortunately here in Canada as well, partially as the NDP's unfortunate willingness to prop up Trudeau's Liberals when they were a minority.

I sometimes feel like we just need new, untainted, words.

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