Quote:
Originally Posted by Munchkin03
The architects of the party did not want to use the term "Socialist," because of the connections to left-leaning groups; instead, they used the term "socialist" to reflect their belief that the role of social welfare should be moved from the church to the state. There's a lot more to their use of the term "socialist," FYI.
The long and short of what I'm saying, and no one has yet to challenge this, is that most laypeople people use the term "fascist" as a way of hurling insults at someone whose political beliefs do not align with their own. In other words, it's a highly dramatic, downright hysterical, and utterly fallacious way of conducting political discourse.
Anyway, I haven't heard anyone else refer to Obama as "pro-fascist," so I'm going to call this as hysteria.
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Regardless of why they liked the word, they were in practice socialist, either nationalizing industries outright or using taxes, subsidies, and brute force coercion to force industries and people to act in concert with the way the national planning boards envisioned. There was also a huge attack on the profit motive, a concerted effort to bring low-income workers on board (it was originally the National Socialist Workers Party), and an attack on a lot of the moneyed interests in Germany. They were in every sense of the word a socialist party, just people like to pretend that extremist nationalism and socialism can't coexist. They very clearly have in a number of examples (like those cited by EW previously).
And equating people to fascists/nazis is idiotic and most people realize that. I think that's why no one is responding to you on that point, but to argue that "fascist" can never be compared to leftist parties due to their incongruent social policies is a dumb argument. If that's the case they can never be compared to right wing parties either due to their incongruent economic policies. But maybe that's the point, it was an odd mixing of political views which doesn't resemble any significant parties in existence today.