The 20th-Century saw two major forms of totalitarianism: communism and fascism. Communism represented the far left and fascism represented the far right. The American left and the American right can sometimes resemble in a faint way the excesses of 20th-Century totalitarians, but they never willingly want to be associated with them. It’s a shame that Hitler’s party was named the National Socialist German Workers’ Party because it confuses conservatives. They see the words ‘socialist’ and ‘worker’s party’ and they think that the Nazis were some kind of party of the proletariat.
In fact, they were anything but.
The Nazi Party presented its program in the 25 point National Socialist Program in 1920. Among the key elements of Nazism were anti-parliamentarism, Pan-Germanism, racism, collectivism, eugenics, antisemitism, anti-communism, totalitarianism and opposition to economic liberalism and political liberalism.
That’s not to say that the Nazis didn’t engage in populist demagoguery. They equated finance capitalism with a Jewish conspiracy to screw regular working folks. They proposed nationalizing all corporations.
The onset of the Great Depression, which preceded the coming to power of Hitler, greatly discredited capitalism in the eyes of the world. The Nazis were not capitalists, but (at least on economic policy) an attempted mid-way between capitalism and Soviet communism. So, if you are an American right-wing laissez-faire capitalist, much of the rhetoric and many of the actions of the Nazis are going to appear in retrospect to be left-wing in nature. But the economic policies of the Nazis are not what has earned them eternal condemnation. Take a look at the following terms and tell me if they better describe America’s right-wing or left-wing.
Anti-parliamentarism (anti-Congress)
Pan-Americanism
Racism
Antisemitism
Anti-communism
Opposition to economic liberalism
Opposition to political liberalism
On those last two, ‘liberalism’ doesn’t mean left-wing per se but more like principles of free markets, private property, and human and political rights.
The modern-day American right supports economic liberalism but they’re pretty squishy on political liberalism. There’s a reason the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is considered an enemy by the Republican Party.
In any case, nationalizing the car industry is something Nazis might do. But you know what else they might do?
1. Demonize ethnic and religious minorities like Hispanics and Muslims.
2. Discriminate against homosexuals.
3. Fetishize female fertility and discourage female employment in the work force.
4. Characterize the homeland as the rightful property of ethnically pure (white) citizens
5. Promote a nationalistic and imperialistic foreign policy
6. Call all of their opponents ‘communists’ or ‘fifth-column communist sympathizers’
7. Suppress the black vote
8. Call President Obama a ‘magic negro’
9. Support torture and do warrantless surveillance on political enemies and reporters
10. Fetishize an idealized past when the country was truly great
I could go on, but you get the picture.
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In the 1920s many big American corporations enjoyed sizeable investments in Germany. IBM established a German subsidiary, Dehomag, before World War I; in the 1920s General Motors took over Germany’s largest car manufacturer, Adam Opel AG; and Ford founded a branch plant, later known as the Ford-Werke, in Cologne. Other US firms contracted strategic partnerships with German companies. Standard Oil of New Jersey — today’s Exxon — developed intimate links with the German trust IG Farben. By the early 1930s, an élite of about twenty of the largest American corporations had a German connection including Du Pont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, General Electric, Gilette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, IBM, and ITT. Finally, many American law firms, investment companies, and banks were deeply involved in America’s investment offensive in Germany, among them the renowned Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and the banks J. P. Morgan and Dillon, Read and Company, as well as the Union Bank of New York, owned by Brown Brothers & Harriman. The Union Bank was intimately linked with the financial and industrial empire of German steel magnate Thyssen, whose financial support enabled Hitler to come to power. This bank was managed by Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Prescott Bush was allegedly also an eager supporter of Hitler, funnelled money to him via Thyssen, and in return made considerable profits by doing business with Nazi Germany; with the profits he launched his son, the later president, in the oil business.
American overseas ventures fared poorly in the early 1930s, as the Great Depression hit Germany particularly hard. Production and profits dropped precipitously, the political situation was extremely unstable, there were constant strikes and street battles between Nazis and Communists, and many feared that the country was ripe for a “red” revolution like the one that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917. However, backed by the power and money of German industrialists and bankers such as Thyssen, Krupp, and Schacht, Hitler came to power in January 1933, and not only the political but also the socio-economic situation changed drastically. Soon the German subsidiaries of American corporations were profitable again. Why?
After Hitler came to power American business leaders with assets in Germany found to their immense satisfaction that his so-called revolution respected the socio-economic status quo. The Führer’s Teutonic brand of fascism, like every other variety of fascism, was reactionary in nature, and extremely useful for capitalists’ purposes. Brought to power by Germany’s leading businessmen and bankers, Hitler served the interests of his “enablers.” His first major initiative was to dissolve the labour unions and to throw the Communists, and many militant Socialists, into prisons and the first concentration camps, which were specifically set up to accommodate the overabundance of left-wing political prisoners.
IBM, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft and the Final Solution
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Profit-driven foreign/trade policy alone is obviously a road to a ruination of 1000 horrible flavors.
American Capitalism delivered us Hitler’s perniciousness – he would never have reached so far without such comfort and aid. Brown Brothers financed over 50% of his steel industry’s raw material purchases, getting their percentage cut of each shell dropped on British and French Soldiers, and eventually even our own, refusing to stop trading even as the war turned with America’s entrance. Stopping the money flows would have been practically Communistic, no? The amorality of American Capitalism is an undeniable fatal flaw.
Why can’t this history be discussed during elections? People can’t hear the Big Truth after living on the Big Lie for so long.
They’re nihilists!
They are Futurists!
say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, but at least it’s an ethos.
I was going more Big Lebowski than substantive input, but it is indeed an ethos, and an all too familiar one at that, unfortunately.
And if I’d paused for a couple seconds before posting…
they were threatening castration, Donny, are we gonna split hair here?
I see you attended the republican convention this year. Well Booman, you know them just a litle too well, I’m thinking!
And guess from whom the Nazis picked up the Eugenics idea? There have been times when America just sucked. God bless Lyndon Johnson, the guy who had a hard time learning to say “Negro,” or so it is said.
But he learned.
It’s worth bearing in mind that fascism, in its rather purer Italian form, aims for a close collaboration between business and the state, and considers the value of a worker and a citizen to limited to their contribution to business and the state; individuals have no inherent value.
In the Italian sense, the Republicans are definitely fascists.
Nazism, on the other hand, diverged from the Italian model. Arguably, fascism as such was just a popular political theme that the Nazis found it convenient to co-opt. From an ideological standpoint, Nazism had a lot more to do with garden-variety European imperialism combined with racial supremacism than fascism in any formal sense.
The vital difference between Italian fascism and German Nazism is that in Germany, the state was very clearly ascendant over commercial interests. This isn’t to say that German corporations didn’t have considerable influence in government circles, but if it came down to a contest of will between Hitler and his inner circle and some corporate board of directors, matters were quickly resolved to Hitler’s satisfaction. In Italy, the division between state and business was much, much blurrier.
This being so, I think American “conservatism” is much closer to the Italian model than to the German model. Here, business calls the shots and the state obeys. And racism is just a way to drum up votes for most Republicans officials rather than a deeply-held and central belief. That’s not to say they aren’t racist or that some Republicans don’t eagerly drink the KKKool-Aid, but most Republicans aren’t interested in genocide for its own sake; they are only interested in genocide for profit. And they’d probably just as eagerly kill white people for profit: they did, after all, spend sixty years building ICBMs to vaporize white Europeans.
It’s unfortunate that Italy was, in military terms, such a joke during WW2. If they had been as competent as the Germans, we might have paid closer attention to the political beliefs that would later become the heart and soul of the GOP and less time being distracted by the horrible spectacle of Nazi genocide.
While on paper Italian fascists were more corporatists, the corporate state, yada yada, and while Germany emphasized the German race, in fact the same game was being played. Auschwitz was located where it was located to provide slave labor for German factories in the area.
There certainly were a lot of people in the German business world and the military who thought that Hitler was making some bad decisions (when he decided to invade the USSR they knew the war was lost) they certainly had organized the state along the lines that the Republicans have tried to organize America.
True, but consider that Hitler diverted trains from delivering much needed supplies to the eastern front in order to instead deliver more Jews to the ovens. The annihilation of the Jews, in the end, trumped even the survival of the Reich. The racial aspects of Nazism were integral to the movement. The corporatist aspects, I think, were not. A key part of the Nazi rise to power was Hitler’s goal of allying the NSDAP to the “powerful institutions of state” — the Prussian military class, the Junkers, the industrialists — to subvert the state from within rather than to futilely try to attack those institutions from without, as he had disastrously attempted earlier.
I don’t think this is true of the Republicans at the party level. They are content to be the instruments of the corporate plutocracy and, as we have seen very clearly over the last eight years, their allegiance to the racists and religious bigots is simply a matter of convenience. I’m sure some of them — the politicians, that is — really believe that crap, but I am equally sure most of them couldn’t care less.
All of that said, I think we did see something very much like the Nazis in the form of the neocons, who followed Hitler’s game plan almost to the letter, subverting the powerful institutions of state from within. (And, fortunately, blowing their plans with a two-front war.) The large contingent of Jewish Zionists among the neocons certainly count as racial supremacists, and their gentile compatriots, while perhaps not racists in the usual sense, definitely favor something like an American version of Volk mysticism. But the neocons are not the Republicans; the Republican Party was merely one of the powerful institutions of state that they subverted.
Excellent post, Boo. One wrinkle, however, was not mentioned. It doesn’t actually challenge your argument, but to be exact, there was originally a more socialist wing of the Nazi party, led by Röhm and the Strassers. They were, if you will, the proletariat left of the far right. This must be understood in economic and class terms. You say the Nazis weren’t capitalist, but somewhere between capitalism and socialism. I agree in that it was a state-managed capitalism. Certainly they enjoyed huge investments from capitalists in Germany, USA, Great Britain, etc., had a capitalist banking system, etc. But the left wing of the nazis were much more anticapitalist. That doesn’t mean they had any kinship with the actual socialist left, in fact they were in permanent war with them. Here’s a pretty good discussion:
http://dirtyeuropeansocialist.blogspot.com/2008/06/hitler-was-not-left-wing-or-socialist.html
Although as the SA (Brownshirts), this wing had played a key role in bringing Hitler to power, Hitler purged and obliterated them in mid-1934. After that there was absolutely no “left wing” in the Nazi Party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives