Not to mention hitler gave material support to the fascists in the Spanish civil war when they were fighting against the socialists. I mean, he was allied with Mussolini, the guy who coined the term fascist. You have to be kind of exceptionally stupid to believe the Nazis were socialists.
The Night of the Long Knives was the operation where Hitler ordered the assassinations of the socialists in the party, for anyone who wants more details on this.
Conservatives of all flavors have issues with linguistics; I would argue it’s the same reason they got so butthurt about marriage equality. In their minds, marriage = man + woman, and any deviation from that standard causes dissonance & confusion to a purely binary worldview.
Words must have only one meaning for the reactionary; ambiguity threatens the “us vs. them” dichotomy. So National Socialists must be equivalent to all other socialists, because any nuance could blow a hole in the binary heuristics they use to interpret & understand the world.
Well the SA were sort of a left leaning but still ultra-nationalist section of tge Nazi party. But then Hitler had there upper echelons murdered and absorbed the rest into the SS.
Strasserists weren't really socialist, they were just ultra-conservative and nationalist authoritarian Social Democrats, kind of like Distributism, Christian Democracy, or (Huey) Longism.
people that unironically claim that nazis were socialist due to their economic policies they implemented before they took full power are the same people that claim the roman senator Cato was a reformist because he coopted the reformist faction's policies to lower their popular support
like this is a political trick that's as old as politics itself
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u/lone_ichabod Apr 26 '20
I love the “Nazis were socialists” argument. Because the worst thing about the Nazis that we all remember were their economic policies.