Hitler and the Fact-Checkers

 

 

 

 

Can we trust the fact-checkers? If you lean Left, your answer is probably “yes.” I tend to regard them as I do the Mainstream and Social Media giants – all Left-leaning.

 

I just saw an interesting example regarding Hitler. Some want to relegate Hitler to the Right and label him “fascist,” disowning any association Hitler might have had with the Left. Others recall that he was a “National Socialist.”

 

Despite this title, the fact-checker Snopes seems to want to sweep aside any thought that Hitler might have been a socialist. Out of the many biographies of Hitler, Snopes quotes the 2010 book Hitler: A Biography, by British historian Ian Kershaw:

 

·       [Hitler] was wholly ignorant of any formal understanding of the principles of economics.  For him, as he stated to the industrialists, economics was of secondary importance, entirely subordinated to politics…Since struggle among nations would be decisive for future survival, Germany’s economy had to be subordinated to the preparation, then carrying out, of this struggle…Hitler was never a socialist.

 

However, there is another side to this story. Even if Hitler never nationalized the German economy, he certainly controlled it. Barry Arrington had written:

·       The difference between communism and Nazism is that under the former the state owns and controls the means of production directly, and in the latter the state allows the means of production to largely remain in private hands so long as the owners do exactly what the state tells them to do.  The two regimes are indistinguishable in terms of ultimate state control.  In both, the state directs ultimate goals and imposes an all-pervading top down control. The fascinating thing here is that modern communist countries are exactly the same as Nazi Germany.  https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/where-the-nazis-on-the-right-of-left-does-it-matter/

 

Hitler’s National Socialism and socialism both controlled the economy, thought, and the lives of those under these totalitarian systems. Arrington therefore has written:

 

·       Nazism and communism are indistinguishable.  In both systems, citizens do what the state tells them to do or they die.  This is not (or should not be) controversial, as witnessed by the millions of citizens murdered in both systems.  The only difference between Nazism and communism is one of degree, not kind.  And in terms of the scale of carnage, communism was several times worse in actual practice. In rough terms the Nazis murdered about 17 million people (including six million Jews).  The communists murdered many more (in addition to enslaving hundreds of millions).  In terms of the sheer number of people he murdered, Mao made Hitler look like a piker.  Add to this the murder count of other communist regimes (as documented in the Black Book of Communism), and we see that communists murdered approximately 100 million people, over five times the number Hitler murdered.

 

Both systems are top-down and control everything, and both have used any means to stay in control and to punish any criticism.

 

Why then has the question of whether Hitler was on the Right or on the Left become so controversial? The answer is simple. The West has become enamored with socialism (think USSR). It has already been so maligned by the likes of Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot that the addition of Hitler and Mussolini to their roster will not make them look any better.

 

I also suspect that the fact-checkers are unwilling to accept Hitler as one of their own.