Jim Wagner
As many have noted, our God given rights are now steadily being suppressed in the name of a very old delusion with the new and catchy name of “Equity.” Free speech was perhaps first on the chopping block, and it continues to be hacked away. A few days ago Ocasio Cortez and her “Squad” announced a bold and dangerous expansion of their censorship and "cancel culture" policies. Here it is, word for word: "The National Socialist movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent—if necessary by force—all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow countrymen."
How clever! They plan to purge all language that might "distract our minds." But distract them from what? From the big lie, of course, if history is to be our guide!
Because, you see, that rather brutal censorship statement was actually issued 100 years ago (plus one—February 24th, 1920) by a politician who had just been released from prison for crashing the meeting of a rival and severely beating the man. In response to his incarceration that criminal savant graciously reassured the police who apprehended him that all was well. "It's alright,” he told them. “We got what we wanted. (My rival) did not speak."
The politician I am referring to, as you may have guessed, was Adolf Hitler, and the "National Socialist" movement he spoke of was his own newly formed National Socialist German Workers Party, a party (originally the “National Socialist Party”) which he himself named.
Notwithstanding all the egg-headed claims that the Nazis were a faction of the right, Hitler's party was fully and explicitly socialist, that is to say, of the left. His 25 point plan made that abundantly clear. Here are some of the provisions of that plan.
Point 11: Abolition of all incomes not earned by work.
Point 12: The nationalization of trusts.
Point 13: The sharing with the state of profits from large industry.
Point 14: The abolition of land rents and speculation in land
Point 16: The communalization of department stores and their lease at cheap rates to small traders.
Point 18: The death penalty for... usurers and profiteers.
Hitler’s platform has a certain flavor of the American Socialist demands being made today, does it not? Point 11 alone makes clear that the National Socialist Party, of which Hitler became the seventh member and its first minister of propaganda, was a socialist organization. It would eliminate all forms of investment, because no one would extend capital or credit other than for profit, and profit is by definition “income not earned by work.” There would be no stock market, no corporations or even small businesses, no banks, no home loans, no start-up funding for small business. There would be no invention, no patents, no copyrights. In short, there would not and could not be any civilization at all, because all of these things entail income not earned by work.
But Point 18 puts the final stamp on any doubt about the left wing pedigree of Hitler’s platform. Who would dare to sell or lend when the undefined crimes of “usury” and “profiteering” were to be punished by death? Since profit itself was outlawed under Point 11, one would have to assume that all gain from the sale of goods would be profiteering. Not to digress too far from the point, but to say that Hitler was not a Socialist is tantamount to saying that Karl Marx was not a Communist. That so many today believe this canard is merely a testament to the fact that we have been the victims of organized brainwashing for a very long time.
Did Hitler live up to all the tenets of his Socialist Party platform? Of course not! Socialism is not a sincere economic theory. It is a path to power for the elite (the cognoscenti and the “woke”) and a road to serfdom for the rest of us. Anyone who believes that the allies of today’s socialists, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and the wealthy elite like George Soros (himself an actual Nazi collaborator in the “final solution of the Jewish problem”) is naïve beyond imagining. German big business was quick to support Hitler in spite of his ominous platform, and it will be equally quick to support the woke socialists of our own time, who will dutifully grant it the monopoly advantage that it covets above all else. (Did you get your vaccine yet?)
As an aside, there are other parallels too stark to dismiss between the NSDAP (Nazis, AKA National Socialist German Workers Party) and the modern left. For example their strident propaganda supported by street rioting and their simple minded slogans. Beneath the black metal swastika and silver wreath of Hitler’s party emblem was suspended a metal rectangle with the letters NSDAP, “from which hung a square swastika flag with ‘Deutchland Erwache…’ emblazoned on it.” In the vulgate of the contemporary left, those stirring words can best be translated as “Germany, get woke!”
I realize this information runs counter to the commonly held dogma on Hitler, and I am keenly aware of the volumes of plausible bunkum circulating on the internet. So I don’t expect you to trust my word on this. But you can easily confirm for yourself what I am saying. It comes from William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, MJF Books, Copyright 1959, pages 41 and 43-44. Shirer, an American journalist who lived in Germany through the gruesome Nazi experiment, remains the foremost authority on Hitler and his degenerate movement.
One might argue that Hitler's party, though socialist, was different from contemporary socialist movements because it was explicitly racist—that unlike our own native socialism it was based on the formal hatred of a particular ethnic group, and that it was that racial hatred that defined it as a party of the right. But to that I would say, what is Critical Race Theory if not the formal hatred of a particular race, in this case the hatred of white people? Is that not a core principle of American socialism today? University professors have been fired for refusing to teach it.
The German socialism of Hitler and the Bolshevik socialism of Stalin differed from each other in only one fundamental way, and that is that while the former was a “Third Reich,” ( kingdom or empire) and thus nationalist, the latter was a “Third International,” and thus cosmopolitan. The Third Reich was to consist of a racially pure German socialist population ruled by Hitler. The Third International, founded simultaneously in Russia, was to be a worldwide socialist rule under Stalin. That trifling distinction is the sole comprehensible pretense for calling one “right” and the other “left.”
Some say that history does not repeat itself, but only rhymes. However in this case at least George Santayana was right. After the ghastly revelations of the Holocaust we were regularly reminded to "Never Forget!" But we seem to have forgotten in spite of that dire warning. And because we have forgotten such a crucial piece of our history, we are now being condemned to relive it. I fear it will be the death of us.
© Jim WagnerThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.