The View From 1776

Read Obama, Hitler, And Exploding The Biggest Lie In History on the Forbes website.

See also Hitler Was a 1930s Liberal-Socialist.

As I wrote in What Is Liberalism?

Despite what is commonly taught in our schools, liberalism, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism all are based on the religious doctrine of socialism.  They share a common belief that individualism and private property are the source of humanity’s ills.  All employ the same methodology of collectivized government control, differing only in degree.  All are materialistic and opposed to spiritual religion, believing that the state’s organization and its control of economic activity are the only real determinants of human behavior.  God as Creator of the universe is pushed aside, and His place is seized by the intellectual regulator.  The world and human society are henceforth to be whatever the intellectual decides that they should be.

The popular myth that Fascism, Nazism, and Communism are distinct and different from socialism was fabricated by apologists for socialism like Hannah Arendt, the author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Before coming to New York at the outbreak of World War II, Arendt was a German philosopher who had been a collaborator of Martin Heidegger, the notorious philosophical supporter of Hitler’s National Socialist regime and a member of the Nazi party until it was disbanded in 1945.  In New York City she became a professor of political theory at The New School for Social Research, an institution founded in 1919 by John Dewey and other socialists to radicalize American students…

Not surprisingly, Hannah Arendt’s piece of propaganda is standard reading in our liberal-controlled colleges and universities.  She rationalizes that totalitarianism was a one-time phenomenon in Germany and the Soviet Union that depended upon a special set of circumstances unrelated to socialism as such.  Therefore, she contends, socialism remains the path to earthly perfection. To accept this as truth, of course, we must ignore China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Cambodia, North Korea, and the many African nations, all ruled by totalitarian, socialist despots.

What does, in fact, set Nazism and Fascism apart from American liberal-socialism and Communism is their emphasis on the historical cultural traditions of the National State.  Hitler made much of the Teutonic ancestry of German traditions, and Mussolini identified Fascism with the grandeur of the Roman Empire. 

Additionally, Fascists and Nazis did not nationalize private industrial companies to the same degree as Soviet Communists.  Bringing private enterprise under direct regulatory control of the National State was deemed sufficient.  Both Hitler’s Nazi regime and President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were established in 1933, and both followed the pattern set by Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism in the 1920s.

Hitler and Mussolini were first and foremost patriots who aimed to build up and to glorify Germany and Italy.  After many years in senior leadership positions within the Italian Socialist party, Mussolini split off during World War I, because the socialists called upon their members not to fight for Italy, but to give their allegiance entirely to the Socialist Internationale.  After the end of World War I, he organized the Fascist party to impose the order and control required for a nationalistic, socialistic regime. 

Hitler’s attitude was essentially the same.  After Germany’s defeat in World War I, he always spoke of the “stab in the back,” that is, an imagined betrayal of Germany by the bankers, industrialists, and the Jews.  Hitler shrewdly projected his National Socialist party as the middle ground between the old Prussian aristocracy and the dissolute hedonism of the communist-oriented Weimar Republic.  To the German people, battered by war reparations, catastrophic inflation, and the Depression, he preached resurrection of national power under himself as leader and intellectual planner. 

Hitler’s opposition to the Weimar Republic, so highly regarded by American liberal-socialists, led to the fiction that Nazism was a right-wing movement, completely different from socialism.  That amounts to declaring arbitrarily that left-handed fighters are boxers, but right-handed fighters are criminal assailants.  Both are doing the same thing, just using different labels.

Nazi, by the way, is simply the short name for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party.  The party slogan was “ The Common Good Outranks Private Profit,” and the aims proclaimed for the German political state were exactly those promised by Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural address of April 1933. 

In a 1927 speech, Hitler said, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”

That declaration could easily have come from Barack Obama’s lips.