People keep sending me Norman Tebbit's piece about the Nazis being socialists, as if I am some sort of charm against the ravings of mad old racist coots.
Still, I guess this is what I do now, so here's three arguments to throw out at spluttering gammon who claim it...
Still, I guess this is what I do now, so here's three arguments to throw out at spluttering gammon who claim it...
1) Big business supported Hitler, they backed him entirely. We have accounts of the speech he gave to industrial heavyweights on Feb 20, 1933. He made the case that private enterprise could only flourish under a Nazi government. nytimes.com/1985/01/01/opi…
2) When the governments of Western democracies were buying up utilities, the Nazis were selling them - some say the word 'privatisation' was devised for what they were doing. google.co.uk/url?sa=t&sourc…
The classic - and most sinister - example of the Nazis outsourcing a state function to private enterprise was the long and involved relationship between them and IBM - their punchcard computers allowed Jews to be tracked. Try this book. amazon.co.uk/dp/0914153277/…
3/ The Nazi Party used slave labour from Occupied Europe in factories run by private enterprise serving the war effort. The profits, for a time, were immense - often funneled into the bank accounts of individuals. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/general-motors…
Fuck it, 4/ Despite the trappings of a worker-focused movement, the very first interred by the Third Reich for their political beliefs were not only communist, but anyone moderately left & active. holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/dac…
Everything else is pure window dressing - the name, the imagery, the public works. Look at who benefits. Look at the flow of money. Look at who is getting it in the neck. Socialism, ostensibly, works for the many. Nazism was a parasitic ideology working for the few. /FIN
PS. Of course socialist governments have fallen prey to corruption, greed & inefficiency. Of course they do. However, they're not designed with the benefit of a narrow band of corporate interests - and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the Nazis had that idea all along.
