Watch: Irate Liberal Literally Speechless After Learning Nazis Were Socialists
For those of you who aren’t World War II buffs, the official name of the Nazi party was the NSDAP, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. Translate that into English and it’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party. You can see why the left prefers to use the contraction Nazi.
Now, to be fair, there’s some debate about just how socialist the Nazis really were. In the run-up to the party’s seizure of power, most of the hardcore socialists were extirpated from the party hierarchy and banished from the NSDAP. If you’re interested in the specifics of this, I’d encourage you to read William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” which spells it out in far greater detail.
However, the point is that — contrary to public opinion of late — the Nazis weren’t free-marketeers who were trying to dismantle entitlement programs. Far from it, actually. That doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, and you can probably guess who they are.
Case in point is a young woman who recently confronted Republicans on the Florida State University campus.
“You are supporting Nazis, you understand that?” she is heard saying in the video, which was shared on Twitter by Breitbart contributor Kyle Morris.
There’s not a whole lot of context here, but unless these individuals were running a fundraising drive for VDARE or holding a memorial for George Lincoln Rockwell, that’s wildly uncalled for.
“Don’t pour your coffee on me,” one of the men in the video said.
“F— you, I will,” she responded angrily, just before throwing her coffee on him. “F— all of you.”
“Do you understand that fascism is here?” she continued. “Do you understand that f—ing Nazis are here?”
When someone noted that she was throwing coffee on random people simply because she disagrees with them, which is generally frowned upon in this or any establishment, her excuse was: “Nazis are f—ing shooting my people.” There are so many profoundly snarky responses to that nugget of joy that I’ll merely leave it out there for summary judgment.
So that’s when someone pointed out that the S in NSDAP stands for socialist. And, wouldn’t you know it, our junior varsity Gore Vidal didn’t exactly have the best of responses.
“Nazis are not f—ing socialists, you dumba–,” she said. “Take a history class, you piece of s—.”
“National Socialist is actually the name of it,” one of the Republicans pointed out.
“Oh oh oh. National Socialist, oh my god, if I didn’t know this was a f—ing (inaudible) (incoherent) (illogical),” she said.
After a pause that even Harold Pinter would have found excessive, she responded, “Why do you always focus on the socialist part of that?”
Not to break up the narrative here, but that’s the best she could come up with after that lacuna of prolonged silence? Col. Jessup’s “Santiago was a substandard Marine. He was being transferred …” thinks she probably could have done better here. But I digress, because she decided to continue with her line of thought.
“So the nationalist part of that, why don’t you realize that there were f—ing” a multitude of German communist parties, most of which capitulated to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The Soviets, may I remind you, killed 20 million of her people. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for our socialist friend.
“I hope you realize you are normalizing and enabling Nazis,” she said as she threw paper at anti-whatever-she’s-going-on-about forces. “And you can film me, I don’t give a s—.
“Listen here,” she said. “Eleven of my people are f—ing dead this weekend. Two black people are dead in Kentucky. These are f—ing nationalist murderers.”
I don’t particularly know where to begin here because there’s so much to choose from when debunking this farrago of malignant nonsense. There’s also the fact that I genuinely feel sorry for anyone either personally touched or deeply affected by the tragedies that happened this weekend — although that doesn’t excuse your behavior, especially if you’re going to blame innocent people for said tragedies because their opinions are different than yours.
First of all, let’s start with the poisonous idea that anyone who disagrees with you is “normalizing” or “enabling” horrible things. I don’t know what these people were doing, but again, short of holding a David Duke or Louis Farrakhan rally, they’re not “normalizing” or “enabling” anything but opinions this woman disagrees with. That’s called freedom of expression, not bigotry.
Now, as for Nazis, I’m not going to debate whether or not it’s appropriate to bring them up during a political discussion. I will say this, however: If you want to emphasize the “national” part and pretend it extends to all nationalism — past or future — while pretending that the “socialist” part simply doesn’t exist is self-delusion of the highest order. This is especially true when the other side — at least when it’s American conservatives — has stood up for Israel and the Jewish diaspora in a way the previous administration and other members of the American left refuse to do.
Few could argue that Nazi Germany was a free-market society, particularly given the level of central planning out of Berlin. In terms of social welfare, too, so long as you were racially pure the government was more than willing to intervene on your behalf.
“Nazi Germany remained capitalist. But it had also undertaken state intervention in the economy unprecedented in capitalist societies,” Sheri Berman of Barnard College noted in Aeon.
“The Nazis also supported an extensive welfare state (of course, for ‘ethnically pure’ Germans). It included free higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance and an array of publically supported entertainment and vacation options. All spheres of life, economy included, had to be subordinated to the ‘national interest’ (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz), and the fascist commitment to foster social equality and mobility. Radical meritocratic reforms are not usually thought of as signature Nazi measures, but, as Hitler once noted, the Third Reich has ‘opened the way for every qualified individual — whatever his origins — to reach the top if he is qualified, dynamic, industrious and resolute.'”
Does this sound like the United States? Does this sound like unfettered capitalism to you? This sounds an awful lot like a Bernie Sanders speech.
Which isn’t to say that Sanders or any Democrat ought to be tarred and feathered by an association with the Third Reich. No politician should. Even socialism — which certainly deserves its bad rap — doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with Naziism.
However, make no mistake — it certainly has a lot more in common with the philosophy of Adolf Hitler than anything “nationalism” has to offer. After all, it’s in the name.
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