Fascist Is as Fascist Does

Compare President Obama's statement exhorting “businesses to ‘step up’ and hire workers” with the approach taken by the Nazis to end the depression in Germany—from The Nazi Seizure of Power, p. 270:

After the initial discussion [Local Group Leader] Girmann spoke in summary. He promised to attack legal [?] competition. He affirmed that Nazism was committed to the idea of decent profits. But he also swore he would crack down on anyone cutting wages, hoarding money instead of investing it, or working employees overtime.

Talk about ominous parallels...

Hitler was not a conservative.

Hitler was not right-wing. Hitler was anti-Communist not because he disagreed with the policies or the goals of the Communists but because he did not like competition. He saw the Communist party as a threat to his own goal of world dominance—but where the Communists wanted to foment internal revolution toward their goal of one world government with Moscow at the center, the Nazis just wanted to conquer other countries outright (although the Soviet Union’s “liberation” of eastern Europe from the Nazis sure looked a lot like conquest); while the Communists were internationalists, the Nazis were nationalists.

Likewise, Hitler was anti-union not because he disagreed with the policies of the goals of the labor unions but because, here too, he did not like competition. The confusion over Hitler’s treatment of labor unions results from a superficial understanding of the Nazi party—but then, what else can one expect from a public school education, where history becomes more of a survey course than something that is used as a source of experiences from which to draw conclusions.

I expect most people think that Nazi is an abbreviation for National Socialism; I expect relatively few people know that the Nazi party was not simply the National Socialist party but was actually the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, abbreviated NSDAP. What need could Germans under the Nazis have for labor unions? The party was the union. Similarly, what need could Hitler have had for other labor union leaders when he himself was the leader of the Nazi party?

Hitler was not a conservative. And Tea Partiers are not Nazis.

Updated based on an offline comment from my brother: “Hitler was not right-wing by the definition used today in the U.S.”