Thread by @docrussjackson

The Political Editor of the Daily Telegraph moaning about Labour "weaponising" Boris Johnson's inability to deliver a scripted speech is quite something.

https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1462761369447636992

Here's the Telegraph 'weaponising' a grotesque distortion of history & reality in order to demonise the Left - ironically, something which the Nazis also did.

Hitler allied himself with leaders of German conservative & nationalist movements, & in January 1933 became chancellor.

Hitler’s Third Reich was entirely #fascist.

In April 1933 communists, socialists, democrats, & Jews - along with other left-wing political activists opposed to the Nazi regime - were purged from the German civil service, & trade unions were outlawed the following month.

In July 1933 Hitler banned all political parties other than his own, & prominent members of the German left-wing Communist Party & the left-wing Social Democratic Party were arrested & imprisoned in concentration camps.

How very "socialist".

britannica.com/story/were-the…

The Nazi Party was an ultra-nationalist, socially conservative, anti-egalitarian & fascist ideology, Nazism falls on the extreme far-right. The assumption that because the word “socialist” appeared in the party’s name they must have been actual socialists is naïve & ahistorical.

What the evidence shows is that Nazi Party leaders paid mere lip service to socialist ideals on the way to achieving their one true goal: raw, totalitarian power.

Hitler & his party saw socialism, communism, & leftism generally as inimical to everything they hoped to achieve.

The National Socialists ignored socialism’s primary aim (replacing the existing class-based society with an egalitarian one in which workers owned the means of production), “replacing class with race, & the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the leader”.

The “National Socialists” wanted to unite the political camps of left & right into which, they argued, Jews had manipulated the German nation - an argument eerily similar to that made by the "anti-woke" about so-called "cultural Marxists" (a euphemism for left-wing thinkers).

Nazism was in some ways an extreme counter-ideology to socialism, borrowing much of its rhetoric in the process.

German historian & National Socialism expert Joachim Fest characterizes this repurposing of socialist rhetoric as an act of “prestidigitation”:

Nazi ideology took a leftist label chiefly for tactical reasons. It demanded, within the party & within the state, a powerful system of rule that would exercise unchallenged leadership over the “great mass of the anonymous.”

And whatever premises the party may have started with, by 1930 Hitler’s party was “socialist” only to take advantage of the emotional value of the word, & a “workers’ party” in order to lure the most energetic social force.

As with Hitler’s claims of belief in tradition, conservative values, or Christianity, the socialist slogans were merely ideological props used to camouflage & confuse the enemy. Nazis sent leftists identified as threats to the National Socialist program to concentration camps.

Next time the Telegraph publishes a grotesquely distorted article implying 'Nazis were lefties', or run a "significantly misleading" front page story making a left-wing politician seem like an antisemite, remember its own ideology is MUCH closer to the Nazis' than ANY "leftist".