So now the Beckmeister is claiming that Nazis were actually left-wing liberals?

[Hugabear]

Happened to see a little bit of this, where he is apparently trying to claim that Hitler was really a left-wing extremist. With conservatives now in the process of re-writing history books, this shit really irks the hell out of me. It's often been said that history is written by the winners. This is why these fuckers are so damned dangerous.

[sfwriter]

1. In this case, history is being written by the whiners... EOM

[Journeyman]

3. Rimshot. . .

http://instantrimshot.com/

[WCGreen]

34. Damn, you forgot to say thank you, I'll be playing here every weekend...

[NJmaverick]

2. Apparantly the right wingers finally got around to reading George Orwell's 1984 and thought

it was a how to book

[ixion]

4. They were not, of course, but their party, the Socialist Democrat Party

certainly makes it easy to spin for freepers.

[rockymountaindem]

10. You mean the National Socialist German Workers' Party

The Social Democrats were a left wing, Second International party.

[ixion]

11. thanks, stand corrected

should have looked it up first. :)

[newspeak]

18. yes, my german great grandfather

was a social democrat and hated Hitler. If Hitler's party was so liberal, why did he see fit to murder the unionists, murder the socialists? And, if he was so liberal why did he admire the industrialists, like Henry Ford? If he was so liberal why did he mark the gays, mark the gypsies, mark the jews-imprisoned and murdered them? If Hitler was so liberal, why did he outlaw certain books, art and music, and destroy such material? If Hitler was so liberal why did he go after those priests and nuns who promoted social and economic justice, why did he go after students and teachers who countered his propaganda by killing or imprisoning them? Beck is a disgrace to history.

Fascism is government and business against the WILL OF THE PEOPLE. Hitler was a fascist, Hitler was no liberal!

[newspeak]

29. and emphasize "nationalist"

Let me have a laugh-"worker's party?" Boy, did they get fooled.

[arcadian]

35. If you break that name down it's got a little something for everybody.

[rurallib]

5. according to Beck et al. Communist = Nazi

and Obama is one of the worst totalitarian dictators of all time

[Beaverhausen]

6. I think they get this idea from Jonah goldberg: Liberal Fascism

http://liberalfascism.nationalreview.com/

its amazing how many have taken up this crazy line of thought,

[KonaKane]

7. This is an old saw from the right wing, been going around for years.

And so laughable on its face, for anyone who has actually studied Germany's Third Reich, that it's amazing someone would keep pushing that dog turd around. As usual, Beck is originating nothing, just spewing the same old crap with his own particular whine.

Steve Kangas did an excellent, voluminous, fact filled, footnoted and sourced piece on why the Nazis were rightwingers to the bone, online.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-hitler.htm

[Rex]

8. Don't be surprised, Beck heard that Hitler was the leader of a

'Socialist Party' and like all knee jerk Repukes he didn't do any research into it - just took a few words and associated them with what little knowledge he has in his brain. He has NO IDEA Hitler HATED COMMIES and was just pandering to get into office.

Sad ain't it?

[rampart]

9. jonah goldberg

it seems to come from this sort of revisionism:

http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841

near as i can tell these guys believe gw bush to be liberal.

[Warren Stupidity]

31. Goldberg just stole it from the internets.

This idiocy made the rounds of usenet political groups in the late 80's.

[Kutjara]

12. Yeah, there's a lot of this kind of revisionism going around.

If you look at many of the books about fascism on Amazon.com, you'll quickly see this feeble argument rehashed over and over in the "reviews." Usually, the goal is to freep the book's rating by giving it a low score, and then follow up with some poorly argued screed about how National Socialists and Socialists are really the same thing. Pathetic, really.

[panzerfaust]

13. Well of course he was. Remember it was the "National Socialist" Party that he led.

NAtionalsoZIalismus

Socialist in name only. All left-leaning members were purged early on. It is just that socialism was popular in Germany at the time of the NAZI party formation.


Fascist parties do survive even unto this day - some more open about it than others.

[Dr Morbius]

22. The only "socialist" aspect of Nazi Germany

...was that Jews were denied ownership of property, and that the property of all Jews was stolen by the state and then "redistributed" for the good of the state. If you weren't Jewish, or half Jewish, or one-quarter Jewish, or by the end 1/8 Jewish, your property rights were unaffected.

Glenn Beck is either dangerously deranged or unspeakably evil; I am not yet sure which. My wife thinks he's both; I don't how that's possible but she has an unerring instinct when it comes to character - or the lack thereof.

[Xithras]

39. The Nazi's were just socialist enough to get socialist buy-in early on.

Initially, even under Hitler, they did support programs to provide food and shelter to the poor, massive government works programs, and government run industries to act as a check against private industry (that's actually how Volkswagen was created). Once their hold on power in Germany was completely cemented, though, many of their more "socialist" programs were either abandoned entirely, or were back burnered for the "national good" and the war effort. Socialists who complained about it quickly vanished.

[KILL THE WISE ONE]

14. facts are not welcome at fox

Conservatives always seam to cut education first. I believe this is not an accident, but an integral part of their agenda. The less educated the populous, the easier it it to spread lies. Now they are not even trying to hide re-writing of history.

[daleo]

15. And East Germany was a democracy

After all, the official name was German Democratic Republic. According to Beck's reasoning The People's Republic of China is an offshoot of the Republican Party, since they have a word in common.

[dalaigh lllama]

20. I'm going to remember that one. Thanks

There's a lot of weirdness going on with "republic," "democracy," etc., these days and now I'll keep China's official name in mind when I encounter such.

[Dramarama]

16. He tends

to make Nazi analogies alot. Weird obsession

[paulsby]

17. this is HARDLY new. there is a book on this very topic "liberal fascism"

that came out YEARs ago

[applegrove]

19. They've been calling Hitler a left winger for years. Part of a plan to control the history

on right wing extremists to "educate" the GOPers so that the rich people in the USA don't have to pay taxes.

[stranger81]

21. Unfortunately, the last place I heard this ridiculous canard was in the I/P forum

right here on DU.

[mod mom]

23. Knowledge isn't important to his crowd, no college so why not write history based on gut feelings.

[The Gunslinger]

24. They do like to rewrite history

[troubledamerican]

25. Michael Medved has been claiming this since the 1990s.

Dozens of other right-wingers have been claiming this since Reagan.

Gosh, progressives sure don't pay attention.

[Cleita]

26. Yeah, especially since Hitler hated communists and Russians and

persecuted them with the same zeal he did Jews. He needs to read "The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich" to get the real history. The NAZI Party was a small group of worker socialists when Hitler and his minions took it over, sort of like the Christo-fascist take over of the Republican Party today. Most of the pre-Hitler members then left because it became an organization that they hadn't signed up for. The only thing socialist left was the word socialist in the NAZI organizational name.

[kenny blankenship]

27. A NAZI says what?

[nickinSTL]

28. yeah...and his viewers are too ignorant

to know any better.

[walldude]

33. That's the thing.. Beck knows he's full of shit.. it's like a little game he plays

to see just how gullible his audience is. Too bad they are so gullible that they'll never figure out they are being played.

[Warren Stupidity]

30. This is an old fight now. Classic rightwing reflection.

All the bad is leftwing. Totalitarianism? oh that has to be leftwing. The claim hangs on the use of socialist in the formal name of the nazi party, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte. Of course anyone with any knowledge of the history of the nazi party knows that it had three key ideological elements: nationalism, anti-socialism, and racialism. It was the rightwing opposition to the socialist and communist parties in Germany.

[Snarkoleptic]

32. The wingnuts have an awful lot of idiots convinced that Fascism is a left-wing ideology.

I have talked and blogged to wits end with idiots who believe this crap.
I have recently begun showing this image to these gullible dipshits.

[struggle4progress]

36. It's the old Nazi game: "Let's murder Horst Wessel and blame the leftwing!

Let's burn down the Reichstag and blame the communists! Let's smash a bunch of windows and blame the people whose windows got smashed!"

[proteus_lives]

43. The Nazis did burn the Reichstag but Horst Wessel was killed by a communist party member.

But it was most likely not related to politics.

[struggle4progress]

48. ... He lived in a Berlin slum with a former prostitute. On February 23, 1930, someone (different

accounts say it was a political enemy, the woman's former boyfriend, or perhaps her pimp) broke into Wessel's apartment and mortally wounded him. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis' propaganda chief, claimed Wessel was murdered by a Communist ... http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/wessel.html

It's possible to find all manner of "definitive" accounts of this affair: Wessel was shot inside his room or when he answered the door or dragged from his apartment by a mob that murdered him; he was shot because of the rent or because of his girlfriend or in retaliation for his murder of someone earlier in the day; the person convicted of killing him was a mere street-tough and pimp or was a disciplined Communist party activist

The bottom line, of course, is that I do not know for certain. You may be right. But early Nazi organizing was based on deliberate provocation and street violence, followed by dishonest fingerpointing, and setting folk up as patsies was Nazi stock-in-trade from the earliest days

[Odin2005]

37. This is a VERY common WingNut argument.

They take Nazi public works and the few elements of social welfare done by the regime as "proof". It's total BS.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

38. And Saddam's Elite Republican Guard belonged to the GOP

[Name removed]

40. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Greyhound]

41. Well they called themselves socialists so therefore they were Socialists.

:dunce::crazy:

But you know what's really:crazy:?

We get the same argument here on DU from some the "capitalists".

[Name removed]

42. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[proteus_lives]

44. Aggh. When anyone mentions the Nazis, I roll my eyes.

I am so sick of everyone calling everyone else Nazis and comparing current events to that era.

[Hippo_Tron]

46. +1000

Seriously, can people stop for a second and consider the possibility that maybe just maybe their political opponents aren't really comparable to the most evil regime in human history? Of not because that would require actual thinking and people are too lazy for that.

[Hippo_Tron]

45. Right Glenn, then explain why the Nazis jailed and murdered socialists

Inquiring minds want to know...

[old mark]

47. Most RWers believe this - the "Socialist" part of the Nazi party's name

is their only reasoning...and the believe the Right stands for individual freedom while the left stands for big brother. A few twists and turns in their thinking, but they have thought this for years...


mark

[Echo In Light]

50. Didn't the NAZIs use the term 'socialist' to dupe the common people into thinking they'd support em?

... when that's clearly not what the ulterior agenda was

[old mark]

51. The National Socialist German Workers Party - the NDSAP - was the (Link )

full name of the party, abbreviated to NAZI. The party was funded by large contributions from industrialists after it seemed likely to gain some power, but had a strong base among working people because of Hitler's pledge of more jobs.

The party in practice was extremely right wing in the classic sense. This article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

is an excellent source of accurate information on the real vs the proposed Nazi party.

mark

[Echo In Light]

52. Thanks for that

[marmar]

49. Projection....BecKKK and his ilk have total Nazi ambition.

They've got SS envy.

[PVnRT]

53. Right-wingers have been doing that for years

They can't actually form a coherent argument in support of it, but they keep saying it anyway.

[Jakes Progress]

54. He can do this because

the slack-jawed, in-bred, brainless, what's-the-gumment-gonna-gimme, bodies without souls that listen to beck are so totally stupid that they will believe him. And the complicit main line media won't call him on it.

[deutsey]

55. I got into a big debate with someone about "Nazi=liberal" a few years ago

He was a Hannity/Limbaugh listener, of course. Was absolutely certain the Nazis were leftwing because, after all, there's SOCIALIST in the name.

I had to email him mounds of evidence (including quotes from Hitler himself) showing that the Nazis were actually an extreme rightwing reaction against the left and even then he never admitted he was was wrong, he just dropped the subject.

[LeftinOH]

56. And the Republicans (republicanos) in the Spanish Civil War were the leftists;

similar-sounding terminology can mean very different things in different parts of the world.