|King Joker|
Your Excellency
From your second link: We consulted historians and books, finding the Nazi party’s full name was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That name was adopted in 1920; before that, the party had been the German Workers’ Party.
But there was little socialist about the party’s platform or Hitler’s actions once he acceded to leading Germany in the early 1930s.
By phone and email, Rice University historian Peter Caldwell told us the key word in the party’s name was "national" and the party’s focus was on building nationalism — a focus ultimately reflected in Hitler’s twisted vision of cleansing the country of residents, especially Jews, not considered of pure German blood. While socialists on the left celebrate democracy, Caldwell said, the word has a different meaning on the right — in this instance, he said, excluding people who are not part of the nation, hence rejecting Jews and communists and, in pre-World War II Germany, democracy itself.
Caldwell said the "misleading" tweet suggesting an alignment between Sanders’ professed democratic socialism and Hitler’s party would "have Hitler turning in his grave, wherever the grave is. The Nazis loudly opposed democracy, the first and foremost thing." Also, he said, "they were opposed to emancipating the workers, giving them the rights to vote and to organize" in unions.
Similarly, Barbara Miller Lane, a Bryn Mawr College professor and co-editor of a compilation of Nazi ideology before 1933, said by email: "The Nazis were NOT ‘democratic socialists,’ whatever that means. The Nazis were never democrats and never real socialists either." While there was a longstanding and distinguished Social Democratic Party in Germany from the 1870 to the 1920s, Lane wrote, the Nazis fought against it, and after 1933 imprisoned its leaders.
Lane added: "The Nazis opposed all traditional socialism, wanting to substitute something they called ‘German socialism’ or ‘Aryan socialism.’ This meant citizenship and privileges only for ‘Aryans’ (meaning non-Jews), concentration camps for others."
Lmao