The View From 1776

Liberal-progressives reflexively use the term Nazi to denigrate anyone or any point of view they dislike.  Doing so is the equivalent of civil rights activists seeking to damn Ku Klux Klan members by calling them Abolitionists.

The name Nazi, apparently unknown to liberal-progressives, is a contraction of the full party name, National Socialist German Workers Party.  Nazism, in short, is simply one of several varieties of socialism, the ideological faith of liberal-progressives. 

Why this misuse of the words Nazi and Nazism?

Let’s be kind and not blame liberal-progressives’ incorrect usage altogether on malice.  Let’s ascribe it largely to ignorance imposed in our education-indoctrination system.  Since passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, liberal-progressive intellectuals have controlled nationally selection of textbooks and curricula.  Left-leaning teachers’ unions, whose membership is fed by doctrinaire liberal-progressive teachers’ colleges, have diligently taught socialist-scripted fiction in place of actual history.

Underlying this ignorance is liberal-progressives’ romantic infatuation with and religious faith in socialism that came to full flower after the Russian Revolution in 1917.  Liberal-progressives sincerely believed in 1917, and have continued to believe ever since, that socialism is the one true path toward peace and harmony within nations and among nations.  The Soviet Union was seen as the vanguard of progress toward perfection of society and of human nature.

Inspired by this eschatological vision of secular religious perfection under the tutelage of intellectuals, liberal-progressives initially welcomed the advent of Mussolini’s Italian Fascist State Corporatism in the 1920s and of Hitler’s Nazi Party, organized during the 1920s and triumphing within Germany in 1933.

Apart from their nationalistic nature, Fascism and Nazism were every bit as much socialist political organisms as was Soviet communism.  The difference was that Mussolini aimed at socialistic economic and political progress exclusively for Italians, Hitler, exclusively for Germans.

From the beginning of his party leadership in the early 1920s, Hitler proclaimed that the Nazis were socialists and that their aim was to spread German wealth among the workers and the farmers.  Hitler, however, abhorred the German communists, whom he viewed as traitors against Germany, working for the interests of the Soviet Union.  Hitler’s successful smashing of the German communist party was unforgivable sin in the eyes of American liberal-progressives, for whom the Soviet Union was the one great hope of mankind.  As left-wing American journalist Lincoln Steffens’ put it after his 1919 interview with Lenin in Moscow, “I have seen the future, and it works!”

The Soviet Union’s claim to universal socialism was ideologically more congenial to liberal-progressive true-believers, who conceive of socialism as the new, scientific religion, of which the fruition is to be a one-world government under liberal intellectuals.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact of 1939 was a treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that secretly divided northern and eastern Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence.  Its signing permitted Hitler that year to invade western Poland without fear of military reaction by the Soviet Union.  During this period American liberal-progressives, influenced by the Communist Party USA, supported both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Hitler’s military aggression and his brutal suppression of the Jews and other ethnic groups in the late 1930s strained American liberal-progressives’ support despite the treaty alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union.  The final straw was Hitler’s repudiation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact by his invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Since then, Nazi and Nazism have been terms of opprobrium freely, and incorrectly, applied to anyone who questions or opposes liberal-progressive-socialism.