One of the most disturbing things about our children and grandchildren’s education is they are getting a revisionist version of history. This keeps them from learning the lessons of history.
But it is not the only place we get revisionist history. I just took a course at Young Harris College Institute for Continuing Learning (ICL) on “Living & Dying under the Third Reich.”
In the first class the teacher asserted that right-wing conservatives supported Hitler and brought him and the Nazis to power. I asked who exactly was she referring to, since ‘Nazi’ is an acronym for the German National Socialist Workers Party, a decidedly left-wing group.
She refused to answer the question, so I asked for her definition of right-wing conservative. No reply.
I explained that conservatives believe in limited government, personal responsibility, free enterprise, a stable rule of law, private property rights and that the government derives its power from individuals. Nazis believed the opposite.
Nazis believed in government control over just about everything. They promised to “take care” of the people. They directed the economy. They changed laws to meet their agenda, and the people’s rights were subordinate to the government. This is what defines parties of the left. Government leaders think they know better how to run your life that you do.
I was later admonished by the President of ICL for being “rude”—for asking questions. I asked, “How so?” No answer. I then asked why the teacher was allowed to give her left wing political opinions, clearly inaccurate, but I was not allowed to ask for evidence. No reply.
Why have Nazis been called right-wing? Most history books were written by sympathizers of their fellow leftist rivals for power in 1930’s Germany—Communists and other Socialists. Because of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the name of Socialist Darwinism, the left says Nazis were conservative right wingers, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The Nazis, Socialists and Communist were and are leftist. The principle difference was that the Communists wanted to take ownership control of the means of production. The more Fascist Nazis and Socialists just wanted to control the means for production because they were already very aware of the disastrous failure of the Soviet Communist takeover of private enterprise.
Nazis looked at the Communist (KPD) and Socialist (SPD) as their main obstacles to consolidating power, since they all expressed varying degrees of leftist socialist ideology. That is why the Nazis imprisoned their competitors for power.
Leftists all use the democratic process to gain power by promising a strong central government, jobs, taking care of people, social order and safety. These are the typical Liberal/Socialist promises that have been repeated since the 1930s until today.
The Nazis’ strongest supporters were unions, government workers, and teachers. Do you see any parallels to what is going on in Europe and the USA today? Conservatives, that is self-reliant free enterprise oriented people, loathed the Nazis.
Nazi philosophy was not conservative, i.e., they did not believe in individual liberty or that individual rights came from God rather than the government. Actually they tried to replace religion with the Fuehrer. Limited government, checks and balances on power, free enterprise, and the rule of law were not things they believed in. These are the core beliefs of Conservatives and the right.
So many of those on the Liberal left have myopia when looking at Nazis and Socialists. They do not want to see that the philosophical differences between the two are less than the similarities. They want so badly to believe that their philosophy of more government control will not lead to despotism and reducing the quality of life of citizens despite all the historical evidence to the contrary.
Most Liberals in the USA say they are not Socialist, even though they espouse Socialist ideas. If it looks like a pig, acts like a pig, it is a pig even if you call it swine, and you can’t put lipstick on it.
Our children get almost no history on the horrors in the 20th century brought on by Socialism. 40 million died in the USSR. 10 million Ukrainians were starved to death in just one winter, 1932-33. Perhaps a 100 million people died in China as they were forced into Mao’s socialism. Did you or your kids know that?
So for more than 65 years, leftist historians have told us that the Nazis were right wing. Any person with a basic knowledge of political philosophies and history knows that is not true.
One of the invited speakers to this ICL class, B.F. Malac, a Czech survivor of both the World War II Nazi forced labor camps and the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia after WWII, was asked, “What were the differences between Nazis and Communists?” He succinctly relied, “There wasn’t a spits worth of difference between the two.”
In the USA today, socialist call themselves Liberals and Democrats. They try to seduce voters by saying they care and by promising many of the same things that the Nazis did. Know your history and do not get hoodwinked.
James F. Davis is the President of Accuracy in Academia.
