not really, The Nazis were not as Cohesive in their ideology as Ray would like to assume. The Nazis did indeed have a left wing of their Party, Comprised of indivudials like Goebbels, Along with the Likes of Ernst Rohm (Both were influenced by Gregor Strasser). Unfortunately for Ray, Hitler himself did not belong to this aspect of the Party, He actively tried to suppress it.
First, he called a conference in the City of Bamberg on 14th feb 1926 to instill the Führerprinzip onto aspects of the party he felt were dissenting, And that included, guess who? That's Right, Goebbels, Rohm and strasser, Goebbels submitted To Hitler, although he felt dissapointed in the process, He wrote in his diaries that after the meeting "I feel devastated," "What sort of Hitler? A reactionary?" "I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That’s the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away."
He's not quoting Hitler. And sorry but you cannot use Goebbels to prove Hitler personally was Left Wing. Hitler belongs on the opposite side of the Party.
Though one part was revealing.
"He (Goebbels) recalled how we had clobbered the Berlin Communists and the Socialists into submission, to the tune of the "Horst Wessel" marching song, on their old home ground."
Moving on.
Marxism was class-based and Nazism was nationally based but otherwise they were very similar. That's what people said and thought at the time and that explains what they did and how they did it.
Nope, Nazism as a fascist system, empowered the capitalist elite. It was against the idea of liberal democracy, of egalitarianism and wished for the rule of the elite and those traditional elites remained where they were doing business for profit
"While Hitler's attitude towards liberalism was one of contempt, towards Marxism he showed an implacable hostility Ignoring the profound differences between Communism and Social Democracy in practice and the bitter hostility between the rival working class parties, he saw in their common ideology the embodiment of all that he detested. mass democracy and a leveling egalitarianism as opposed to the authoritarian state and the rule of an elite; equality and friendship among peoples as opposed to racial inequality and the domination of the strong; class solidarity versus national unity; internationalism versus nationalism." - Sir Alan Bullock, "Hitler: A study in tyranny", p228-9.Iconography.
And now for something that is very rarely mentioned indeed: Have a guess about where the iconography below comes from:
As you may be able to guess from the Cyrillic writing accompanying it, it was a Soviet Swastika -- used by the Red Army in its early days. It was worn as a shoulder patch by some Soviet troops.
Looks very convincing doesn't it? Only to the foolish it does. Read what it says around the Swastika. The Red Army was formed Feb. 23, 1918. The text in Russian details the description of the patch and who it is designed for: Red Army soldiers and commanding officers of the Kalmyk troops. The Kalmyks are a small pastoral ethnic group in southern Russia, with their own autonomous region west of the Caspian Sea. They are of Mongolian origin and they are Buddhists. I believe that paticular swastika, which is a common Buddhist symbol is just that, It's Buddhist, and has nothing to do with socialism per-se. In the text, the swastika is called "LYUNGTN". Here's my translation:
THE ORDER
to the troops of the South-Eastern Front
No. 213
The city of Saratov, November 3, 1919
There be approved a distinctive arm-badge for the Kalmyk units, in accord with the draft and the description enclosed.
It is ordered to give the right of bearing the arm-badge to all the officers and Red Army men of the present and being organized Kalmyk units, in accord with the instructions of the order No. 116 given by the Republic Revolutionary Council of War this year.
Front Commander Shorin
Revolutionary War Councillor Trifonov
Acting Commander of the General Staff Pugachev
(For the Front Staff)
DESCRIPTION
A rhombus measuring 15 by 11 centimeters is made of red cloth. There are a five-pointed star in its upper corner and a garland in the center. There is a "LYUNGTN" with the legend "R. S. F. S. R." in the center of the garland. The diameter of the star is 15 mm, that of the garland is 6 cm, the dimensions of "LYUNGTN" are 27 mm, those of a letter are 6 mm.
The arm-badge for the officers and administrators is embroidered in gold and silver, while for Red Army men it is stencilled.
The star, "LYUNGTN" and the ribbon of the garland are embroidered in gold (yellow paint for Red Army men), the garland itself and the legend are embroidered in silver (white paint for Red Army men).
My speculation, although im not an expert on the Kalmyk peoples is that this "LYUNGTN" (the kalmyk swastika) is somehow related to the "Lungta" ie "the Wind Horse" (an allegory for the human soul in the shamanistic traditions of Central Asia. In Tibetan Buddhism. note the swastikas around the outside)
So the "soviet swastika" so called as far as i see it is clearly Buddhist.
The Swastika too was a socialist symbol long before Hitler became influential. Prewar socialists (including some American socialists) used it on the grounds that it has two arms representing two entwined letters "S" (for "Socialist"). So even Hitler's symbolism was Leftist.
Maybe those american socialists really did do that. But it doesn't matter as the Swastika was also used by the Right too and that's where hitler most likely picked it up. Like those who supported the 12-19 March 1920 Kapp/Lüttwitz Putsch.
"Those who fought for Kapp and Lüttwitz were obvious future supporters of the fledgling Nazi Party. Ironically, the Erhardt Brigade, one of Lüttwitz’s main fighting force, put a sign on their helmets to identify who they were: the swastika." - WW1-propaganda-cards.com
Armoured car with swastika in the Potsdamer Straße, 1920. Also, the Swastika was used by Freikorp groups, like this one.
So as we can see, it was also a right wing emblem that pre-dated the Nazis
In German, not only the word "Socialism" (Sozialismus) but also the word "Victory" (Sieg) begins with an "S". So he said that the two letters "S" in the hooked-cross (swastika) also stood for the victory of Aryan man and the victory of the idea that the "worker" was a creative force: Nationalism plus socialism again, in other words.
No evidence for this at all, The only SS one can find stood for "Schutzstaffel", Not "Sieg Sozialismus" or whatever, But even if it did stand for what Ray tries to proport, Hitler had a different conception of socialism as we shall see, One that wasn't really socialism at all.
"The Swastika - origanally a Sanskrit word meaning "all is all" - long the symbol of the Teutonic Knights, had been used by Lanz von Liebenfels, the Thule Society and a number of FreeKorps units." - John Toland, "Adolf Hitler", p105.Again, the Swastika's usage on the Right is too well known and documented.
And by Hitler's time, antisemitism in particular, as well as racism in general, already had a long history on the Left. August Bebel was the founder of Germany's Social Democratic party (mainstream Leftists) and his best-known saying is that antisemitism is der Sozialismus des bloeden Mannes (usually translated as "the socialism of fools") -- which implicitly recognized the antisemitism then prevalent on the Left. And Lenin himself alluded to the same phenomenon in saying that "it is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people" but "the capitalists of all countries."
So Ray's evidence is someone calling antisemitism "socialism of the fools"? It is not a complement or an endorsement. Here let's just make a fool of Ray by showing the Lenin quote in context.
"It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism." - Lenin
And here's what the International socialist review has to say about the other quote. (whether this is reliable, I'll let you decide.)
"Unlike Herzl, socialists defended Jews who faced persecution. Socialists also combated anti-Jewish racism as a poison to the workers movement. In this period, Auguste Bebel, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), denounced anti-Semitism as "the socialism of fools" [notice the real use of the phrase here] for diverting workers from their true enemy, the ruling class, onto Jewish scapegoats. Karl Kautsky, another German SPD leader, argued that the differentiation of the Jewish population into classes meant that the condition of the Jews would be bound up inextricably with the overall working-class movement. Connecting the fight against anti-Semitism to the fight for workers' power became the Marxist approach to fighting anti-Semitism. Because socialists stressed the need to fight anti-Semitism in the countries where most Jews lived, the socialist movement recruited Jews in large numbers.
Many Jews played active roles as founders, leaders and activists in the socialist parties in Europe. Count Witte, the Tsar's finance minister, once complained to Herzl that Jews "comprise about 50 percent of the membership of the revolutionary parties," while constituting only 5 percent of the Russian Empire's population. One such party that earned Witte's hatred was the General Jewish Workers League, known as the Jewish Bund. The Bund, launched in 1897--the same year as Herzl's Zionist Congress--became Russia's first mass socialist organization. It bitterly opposed the Zionists' calls for a Jewish state. Over the course of the next decade, the Bund grew among Jewish workers, swelling to 40,000 members in Russia during the 1905 Russian Revolution. In the revolutionary period, Jewish socialists--both in the Bund and in the other socialist parties--assumed leadership of the working-class and communal organizations in Jewish communities" - Lance Selfa, "ISR Issue 4, Spring 1998"
Of course there were plenty of leftists who were rather Anti-semitic, but this is also the case for the Rightists too, The pogroms, the protocols of the learned elders of Zion, Henry Ford etc.
It should be borne in mind, however, that antisemitism was pervasive in Europe of the 19th and early 20th century. Many conservatives were antisemitic too. Leftists were merely the most enthusistic practitioners of it.
Sorry, Rightists were merely the most enthusistic practitioners of it. The Non Marxist, aristocratic, reactionary and very conservative White Army for example, Used the "protocols of the learned elders of Zion" as justification to murder 150’000 Jews in 2 years Leaving many more Starving in and around Kiev between 1918-1920. It was only later on in the 2nd half of the 20th century that leftists would pick up more heavily the mantle of antisemitism.
We have seen how virulent it was in Marx
As we have seen, he was expressing the commonplace thinking of his time.
Antisemitism among conservatives, by contrast, was usually not seen by them as a major concern. British Conservatives made the outspokenly Jewish Benjamin Disraeli their Prime Minister in the 19th century and the man who actually declared war on Hitler -- Neville Chamberlain -- himself had antisemitic views.
Nice little strawman there, The tradition of Anti-semitism in the UK and indeed Ireland, for historical reasons was before the 20th century somewhat milder than some of it's European counterparts. Jews who had converted to the Church of England, and Benjamin Disraeli is such an example, were not subject to the sort of disabilities that European Jews had to endure.
And Leftism is notoriously prone to "splits" so there were no doubt some Leftists who disavowed antisemitism on principled grounds. Lenin clearly criticized antisemitism on strategic grounds: It distracted from his class-war objectives. So were there also disinterested objections from Leftists? Such objectors are rather hard to find. The opposition to the persecution of the unfortunate Captain Alfred Dreyfus (who was Jewish) by Emile Zola in France is sometimes quoted but Zola was primarily an advocate of French naturalism, which was a form of physical determinism -- rather at odds with the usual Leftist view of man as a "blank slate". And the man who published Zola's famous challenge to the persecution of Dreyfus was Georges Clemenceau, who is these days most famous for his remark: "If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head"
Yes some of the socialists took an neutral attitude as they saw it as a fight between "Bourgeoisie factions", but other socialists (and Zola is one of them whether Ray likes it or not), also supported Dreyfus. And lest we forget, that it was the Rightists that falsely put him on trial in the first place and used the anti-Semitic angle. Ray doesn't tell you that. Also, Leftists are not split on the end goal, But on the means to get there.
But, however you cut it, Hitler's antisemitism was of a piece with his Leftism, not a sign of "Rightism".
What a fine example of an unsupported conclusion!
One more bit of iconography that may serve to reinforce that point:
Of course these posters look similar, But im going to throw a little spanner in the works:
Hmmmm Lets see, Both the russian and american posters have a slogan on the Bottom, Both have army advancing above the slogan, Above the Smoke/fog of war? We see the Leader, Pointing the way, Both are draped in Flags, and Both have Planes in the Orangey/Yellowish Background. Graphicly, Both are the same. Does that prove anything? No. And Stalin is not performing a Roman salute, The thumb is definitely away from the fingers and the Fingers appear to be seperate from each other (Although with the fingers, it's hard to tell). Stalin is just striking a pose in a poster. It's just superficial crap like; "Stalin had a blue painted bathroom and so did Hirohito... OMG Stalin was Japanese", and just as silly.
Of course we can find many Nazi posters that look like soviet ones, But we can also Find many american and allied posters that look like Nazi and Soviet ones, Does this prove the americans and allies had similar ideologies to either the nazis or soviets? NO.
Here are just a few examples of "similar posters".
Also, on a complete sidenote, seeing as the Red army piece "Pa dolinam i pa vsgorjam" sounds just like the White army piece "To the Glory of the Fatherland [aka "The Tsarist Army Marches"]", Does this prove the reds [communists] and the whites [Tsarists] had "similar ideologies" too? Of course not!!
Sorry but plagiarism, which i suspect is really going on here proves nothing!
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