It pays to have an education... Something the Right isn't too big on.

It'll be only a couple of days they trot out the same "Hitler was a Socialist" mantra again. Keep this one around to counter it. 😄

I agree. People need to quit hiding behind labels. Democrat, Republican, socialist, communist, liberal, conservatives ..all are just shortcuts to silence people or identify moral superiority. We need to talk in specific detail about actions and defend our conclusions.

People need to quit hiding behind labels AND using them as weapons. Using communist, socialist, democrat, anything not right wing is considered an insult by the right.

I had been absolutely confident that I knew what socialist referred to, but I had fallen victim to what Britannica explains: "The party’s socialist orientation was basically a demagogic gambit designed to attract support from the working class." This was supposed to be rolled into the first comment but a twitchy touchpad messed me up.

Exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And thank you for this post.

Well when a party calls itself the National Socialist Worker's Party to attract votes, they deserve some measure of criticism.

At they very least they weren't being honest about their core values, haha.

No, actually, leaders within the Nazi party were mad at Hitler for adopting that party name as they didn't want to associate with that. They weren't honest at all.

Hitler WAS the Nazi party. He lifted it up from a handful of disgruntled bums in a warehouse to the political powerhouse it became. There were no real 'leaders' or anyone who actually had influence to dispute Hitler.

(Source; Shirer's excellent Rise and Fall of the Third Reich)

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Were the Nazis socialists? No, not in any meaningful way, and certainly not after 1934. But to address this canard fully, one must begin with the birth of the party.

In 1919 a Munich locksmith named Anton Drexler founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP; German Workers’ Party). Political parties were still a relatively new phenomenon in Germany, and the DAP—renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party) in 1920—was one of several fringe players vying for influence in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It is entirely possible that the Nazis would have remained a regional party, struggling to gain recognition outside Bavaria, had it not been for the efforts of Adolf Hitler. Hitler joined the party shortly after its creation, and by July 1921 he had achieved nearly total control of the Nazi political and paramilitary apparatus.

To say that Hitler understood the value of language would be an enormous understatement. Propaganda played a significant role in his rise to power. To that end, he paid lip service to the tenets suggested by a name like National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but his primary—indeed, sole—focus was on achieving power whatever the cost and advancing his racist, anti-Semitic agenda. After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, in November 1923, Hitler became convinced that he needed to utilize the teetering democratic structures of the Weimar government to attain his goals.

Over the following years the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser did much to grow the party by tying Hitler’s racist nationalism to socialist rhetoric that appealed to the suffering lower middle classes. In doing so, the Strassers also succeeded in expanding the Nazi reach beyond its traditional Bavarian base. By the late 1920s, however, with the German economy in free fall, Hitler had enlisted support from wealthy industrialists who sought to pursue avowedly anti-socialist policies. Otto Strasser soon recognized that the Nazis were neither a party of socialist rhetoric that appealed to the suffering lower middle classes. In doing so, the Strassers also succeeded in expanding the Nazi reach beyond its traditional Bavarian base. By the late 1920s, however, with the German economy in free fall, Hitler had enlisted support from wealthy industrialists who sought to pursue avowedly anti-socialist policies. Otto Strasser soon recognized that the Nazis were neither a party of socialists nor

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a party of workers, and in 1930 he broke away to form the anti-capitalist Schwarze Front (Black Front). Gregor remained the head of the left wing of the Nazi Party, but the lot for the ideological soul of the party had been cast.

Hitler allied himself with leaders of German conservative and nationalist movements, and in January 1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed him chancellor. Hitler’s Third Reich had been born, and it was entirely fascist in character. Within two months Hitler achieved full dictatorial power through the Enabling Act. In April 1933 communists, socialists, democrats, and Jews were purged from the German civil service, and trade unions were outlawed the following month. That July Hitler banned all political parties other than his own, and prominent members of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. Lest there be any remaining questions about the political character of the Nazi revolution, Hitler ordered the murder of Gregor Strasser, an act that was carried out on June 30, 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives. Any remaining traces of socialist thought in the Nazi Party had been extinguished.

I mean, we're just agreeing with each other. Hitler was top Nazi from day one.

I’ll be damned if this isn’t the most indisputable proof of which side of the political compass Nazis were truly on.

From whom they chose to label as human scum it’s clear to see they were hardcore traditionalist, nationalistic, xenophobic, anti-democracy, cult-of-personality bigots.

Remind you of anyone?

It's all proof. This meme I posted is just to counter the "left is nazi" gaslighting, amid all the other photos of evidence of seeing swastikas at trump rallies.

You're indisputably sure that this shirt proves allegiance to the Nazi party? You can look at a picture and know he's not making a point about the slogan "Aber macht frei" (not positive of spelling). I guess it's important that Mods have the superpower to know what people's intent is from a frame of video.

I’m indisputably sure it shows he’s willing to wear a Camp Auschwitz sweater to a riot at the Capitol to overturn an election.

Nazi is as Nazi does. He’s a Nazi, and so are a lot of the others in the crowd who just don’t know it yet.

It took some work to dig into it. I held back on the information to see if you had anything other than just expectations before being positive. This is an example of when someone is exhibiting confirmation bias but it doesn't make them wrong. I found an observation that, if accurate, actually informs the meaning.
5pgwxw.jpg (click to show)

What the heck are you trying to say? The sweatshirt has some hidden meaning that makes it *not* anti-Semitic?

The phrase “work makes you free” inscribed under the sweater’s skull-and-bones and above the gates of Auschwitz was a cruel insult to all the Jews who were worked to the bone and never made it out alive. A trick of Nazi propaganda to give the prisoners false hope and ensure compliance.

Unless you can come up with something else, I’m afraid you’re wrong about this.

If I wore a brown shirt to go talk to management at my work to discuss policies they are instituting, that would be a protest. Somebody who saw the outfit and assumed at a glance that I had Nazi values would definitely be assuming. If I wore a shirt that says, "I read your emails," that would not leave room for debate. My point is still that Cerebro actually proved his point. You may be correct, but a "skull and oars" symbol has the possible interpretation of just a bad joke without being an intentional endorsement of the final solution. And I thought that by bringing up the original slogan in German would prevent you from explaining it, but no...

OK, there's at least two ways to interpret the face of the garment. Protest or support/affiliation. I found a report that the back had the word "staff" which, if true, would indicate that the affiliation interpretation you were so confident of turns out to be correct.