Nazism
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National Socialism, commonly referred to as Nazism, was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party through which Adolf Hitler rose to power in the era of Nazi Germany. It is a specific form of fascism which expressly promotes racism and antisemitism as policies.
Quotes [edit]
- Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.
- James A.C. Brown, in Techniques of Persuasión : From Propaganda to Brainwashing (1963), p. 105
- The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
- Winston Churchill, as quoted in In The Highest Degree Odious : Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain (1992), by A. W. B. Simpson
- Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.
- The Coen brothers, in lines for Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski (1998)
- Walter Sobchak: [speaking of Nihilists] Fucking Germans. Nothing changes. Fucking Nazis.
Donny: They were Nazis, Dude?
Walter Sobchak: Oh, come on Donny, they were threatening castration! Are we gonna split hairs here? Am I wrong?- The Coen brothers, in The Big Lebowski (1998)
- Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have in common that they offered the atomized individual a new refuge and security. These systems are the culmination of alienation.
- Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society (1955), p. 237
- I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.
- Stanley Milgram, Interview on Sixty Minutes (31 March 1979).
- The ‘totalitarian’ label is part of ideological warfare in another way as well – in so far as it covers both Communist and Fascist regimes, and is thereby intended to suggest that they are very similar systems. More specifically, the suggestion is that Communism and Nazism are more or less identical. This may be good propaganda but it is very poor political analysis. There were similarities between Stalinism and Nazism in the use of mass terror and mass murder. But there were also enormous differences between them. Stalinism was a ‘revolution from above’, which was intended to modernise Russia from top to bottom, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production (most of those ‘means of production’ being themselves produced as part of the ‘revolution from above’); and Russia was indeed transformed, at immense cost. Nazism, on the other hand, was, for all its transformative rhetoric, a counter-revolutionary movement and regime, which consolidated capitalist ownership and the economic and social structures which Hitler had inherited from Weimar. As has often been observed, twelve years of absolute Nazi rule did not fundamentally change, and never sought to change fundamentally, the social system which had existed when Hitler came to power. To assimilate Nazism and Stalinism, and equate them as similarly ‘totalitarian’ movements and regimes of the extreme right and the extreme left is to render impossible a proper understanding of their nature, content and purpose.
- Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman, "Reflections on Anti-Communism", The Socialist Register (1984).
- When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.- Martin Niemöller, "First they came..." - Speech on January 6, 1946.
- Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil and Augustus.
- Benito Mussolini's early opinion of Nazism, as quoted in Hitler's Ten-year War on the Jews (1946), by Institute of Jewish Affairs.
- Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and—this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism—generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.
- George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941).
- If demands coming under the first of these principles were interpreted objectively, something very much resembling Marxian communism would result. Here are some of them: abolition of all income not earned by work; workers to share the profits of the large industries; abolition of land rent, and enactment of a law under which land might be confiscated without compensation for purposes of common interests; socialization of all incorporated business organizations.
- The Nazis set themselves up as representatives of "the people", and claimed to express popular opposition to a corrupt and foreign political establishment-potentially a very broad appeal indeed. They were able to channel the resentment of small shopkeepers into attacks on "Jewish" department store owners...They told workers that their enemy was not business,but Jewish business. This nationalist anti-capitalism had the advantage of being relatively attractive to many employers, too, for it potentially spared German capitalists the blame for the workers plight. The Nazis were most successful in becoming what all fascists have attempted to be-national parties, amalgaming otherwise antagonistic groups into a single movement.
- Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 138.
- A totalitarian government with a scientific bent might do things that to us would seem horrifying. The Nazis were more scientific than the present rulers of Russia, and were more inclined towards the sort of atrocities that I have in mind.
- Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society.(1951).
- In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community.
- Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism" (1974), published in The New York Review of Books (6 February 1975) and reprinted in Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), p. 93
- From the point of view of fundamental human liberties there is little to choose between communism, socialism, and national socialism. They all are examples of the collectivist or totalitarian state ... in its essentials not only is completed socialism the same as communism but it hardly differs from fascism.
- Ivor Thomas, in The Socialist Tragedy (1951), p. 241
- Marxism has led to Fascism and National-Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.
- Frederick Augustus Voigt, Unto Cæsar (1939), p. 95.
- The gentlemen of the National Socialist party call the movement they have unleashed a national revolution, not a National Socialist one. So far, the relationship of their revolution to socialism has been limited to the attempt to destroy the social democratic movement, which for more than two generations has been the bearer of socialist ideas and will remain so. If the gentlemen of the National Socialist Party wanted to perform socialist acts, they would not need an Enabling Law. They would be assured of an overwhelming majority in this house. Every motion submitted by them in the interest of workers, farmers, white-collar employees, civil servants, or the middle class could expect to be approved, if not unanimously, then certainly with an enormous majority.
- Otto Wels, Speech opposing the Passage of the Nazi Enabling Act (1933). [1]
- It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy, for if there were such an entity, one would have to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its validity or to combat it. In actuality, however, we face a totally different situation. At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one's fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies.
- Though we know that National Socialist power must be broken by military means, we are trying to achieve a renewal from within of the severely wounded German spirit. This rebirth must be preceded, however, by the clear recognition of all the guilt with which the German people have burdened themselves, and by an uncompromising battle against Hitler and his all too many minions…
- The tragedy is not that nonviolence did not work against the Nazis, but that it was so seldom utilized...The churches as a whole were too docile or anti-semitic, and too ignorant of the nonviolent message of the Gospel, to act effectively to resist the Nazis or act in solidarity with the Jews.
- Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, p. 254-256.
