Hitler Quote Controversy In the BSD Community 500
New submitter Seven Spirals writes: Recently, the FreeBSD folks have removed Fortune with a fairly predictable far right 4chan condemnation. Then last weekend saw a lively debate on NetBSD's current-users mailing list about the inclusion of Hitler quotes in the Fortune database with dozens of posts falling on the left and right. The quotes themselves are fairly tame material probably intended as cautionary. However, the controversy and the reaction of BSD users has been real and very diverse. So far, the result has been to pull Fortune out of FreeBSD and to relocate the quotes into the "offensive" database in NetBSD's case.
Might have been nice if the summary explained... (Score:4, Informative)
...briefly what fortune is in this context (as in, the Unix program, not the magazine, town, or band):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)
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...briefly what fortune is in this context (as in, the Unix program, not the magazine, town, or band):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)
For once I actually knew exactly what it was in reference to. I'm used to most Slashdot articles being like this - "FartKnocker, a new OO programming language that everybody is using, just got a new release" or talking about new tools that do things that other tools already did but somebody didn't think the older tools were cool enough so they wrote completely new ones that don't add any new functionality but work in more complex ways and are much harder to use than the older tools and they just pretend t
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Re:Might have been nice if the summary explained.. (Score:5, Informative)
Here is a list of quotes that were removed. I am not sure if this is all of them, or just a sample:
"Everlasting peace will come to the world when the last man has slain the last but one." -- Adolph Hitler
"I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory." -- Adolph Hitler
"Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong." -- Adolph Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
"The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence." -- Adolph Hitler, "Mein Kampf"
"A highly intelligent man should take a primitive woman. Imagine if on top of everything else, I had a woman who interfered with my work." -- Adolf Hitler
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." -- Adolph Hitler
The last quote (men do not think) is likely a fabrication. There is no record of Hitler ever actually saying or writing it.
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Here's the full diff [freebsd.org].
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I wonder who thought that offensive.
I thought that was XML. Guess Adolf was misquoted. Should probably tell our lead dev.
Re:Indeed. "Nazi" is short for "National SOCIALIST (Score:5, Funny)
Marxist predictions of a revolution in a wealthy capitalistic society failed to materialize; the "proletariat" was enjoying an increasing standard of living in Britain and Germany, where these revolutions were supposed to have occurred, which really upset and confused the devout Marxists.
So, Marxists began to split into factions, which tried to revise or reinterpret Marxist teachings to include nationalism (rather than classism) and to include direct violent upheaval rather than passive waiting. In Italy, there were the rise of the syndicated "unions", or "fascists", where the struggle became between not rich and poor people, but between rich and poor countries. This idea of nationalistic socialism spread to Germany, which added to it the idea that there is a struggle between the races, too.
Why did the Nazis so hate the ? Because the communists were rivals for the Nazis socialist powerbase; all of this stuff is leftism
In Europe, the people on the "right" were the monarchists, who wanted to conserve the old order.
In America, the people on the "right" are the people who want to conserve the ideals of the American Revolution, in the face of the unending onslaught from leftist "progressives"; the "right" are the true Americans, who want a small government whose sole role is to protect the rights of the people (notice, the government doesn't grant rights, but rather protects rights), whereas the leftists want to increase power ever more in the centralized state, and either spread their control to the rest of the world (kind of a communist outlook) or simply nationalize large swaths of society (kind of like the fascists of Italy and Germany).
Either way, the point is that Marxists, Communists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Nazis, Socialists, Progressives, Antifa, etc., are all Leftist political movements.
Can I interest you in a position as a helicopter pilot?
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You want a helicopter that flies only in circles?
Re:Indeed. "Nazi" is short for "National SOCIALIST (Score:5, Insightful)
When categorize Nazi party as being left or right, rather than compare it to the communists, you could just as well compare the Nazis to the Weimar republic. You can't get consistent answers if you do that.
Personally, I think that labeling parties right/left (or even worse policies as right/left) engenders sloppy thinking and is often, if not usually, a tool for deceptive speech. In the case of labeling 20th century fascist movements as being right/left, you might as well try to categorize apples, grapes, and watermelons into right/left fruits. They are their own kind of thing and such simple binary labeling only serve to obscure what they are, and to obscure the nature of whatever they are being compared to.
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Funny that. I could swear I could see about half a dozen comments on here claiming that Nazi ideology is left wing, despite at least 70 years of it being commonly accepted that it was right wing. In other words, people on the right want the left to own not only the mass killings of Stalin and Mao, but those of Hitler as well. No doubt Franco and Mussolini too.
What was that saying about whose shit doesn't stink?
It's pathetic.
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In europe the label left or right usually came from the position a party was placed in parliament from the point of view of the parliament president.
Obviously in 2 party systems that was super easy.
Why more or less all European countries order parties in the same way escapes me. Perhaps because in old times fights between parliament members were common, and they wanted to have the most conflicting parties as far away from each other as possible?
Re:Indeed. "Nazi" is short for "National SOCIALIST (Score:4, Insightful)
Movements like the Nazis are more accurately described as authoritarian. Liberal or conservative, pro-labor or pro-management are positions such a party takes for sake of expediency. They had no problem with contradicting themselves; they always fit their position to the occasion. They were "National Socialists" when gaining support from disaffected workers was vital, but as soon as they had their hands on national power immediately violently purged the socialists from their ranks.
There is really one and only one consistent feature of their ideology: Führerprinzip or the leader principle. That basically means leaving the thinking to the higher-ups. If your superior seemed to contradict himself, that wasn't your problem, it was his.
It's always about personalities with authoritarians, and the leader can say or do no wrong.
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Spot on.
There's a lot of lovers of authoritarianism on Slashdot nowadays.
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The last time this came up, I actually spent a little time reading into the policies of Hitler's Nazi Germany and they were a grab bag of left and right policies ... It seemed more like he was just paying enough lip service to any particular ideal in order to consolidate support behind the Nazi party.
And this is an element of the classical definition of fascism.
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Dinesh D'Souza wrote an entire book on this subject, called "The Big Lie".
oh, you mean it's not about his extra-marital affairs?
Re:Actually, that socialism is the WHOLE point. (Score:4, Funny)
The platform plank "kill all the Jews" is not compatible with a small government
Sure it is. You remove police and legal protection from the Jews, thus making your government even smaller.
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How do you explain the fact that when the SA wanted to implement the socialist part of the agenda they were all killed?
Re: Might have been nice if the summary explained (Score:3, Insightful)
The âoesocialistâ part of âoenational socialismâ is only marginally related to traditional socialism. Iâ(TM)m reading Mein Kampf right now and Hitler hated socialists and communists. But he did not care for capitalism either.
National socialism was to exist as an in between, or a right wing, nationalist version of anti-capitalism. It was definitely not a left wing ideology.
Re: Might have been nice if the summary explained. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nazi stands for national socialist workers' party.
The Nazis were originally socialist, and had a strong socialist faction up until 1934, when the leader of that faction, Ernst Rohm, was murdered on Hitler's order [wikipedia.org] along with many other "leftists". This consolidated Adolf's authority, and made it easier for him to work with German industrialists. All economies are a mixture of socialist and private enterprise, but after 1934, saying Nazi Germany was "socialist" makes as much sense as saying that China is "communist".
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An authoritarian nationalistic state, one that views violence as just another tool and not inherently bad.
Replace the word "nationalistic" with "globalistic" and you have described the progressive left in the US today. Ron Bloom, Obama's "Manufacturing Czar" was fond of using Mao quotes in his speeches, as he did saying "the free market is nonsense," and "we kind of agree with Mao that 'political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.'"
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Well, If you feel that left-right is the collectivist-individualist axis I'd say the Nazis were still waaay on the left. Just the Aryans though, not the riff-raff but it was a massive appeal to do what's good for Germany and participate in all sorts of rallies, events and organizations and worship of a common culture. If you think it's the workers-capital axis then no, essentially all the war material came from traditional industry with not a hint of Marxism. It was more like they would both serve the Nazi
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BSD did nothing wrong.
"Just following orders."
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The Nazis and Mussolini/Fascists are right wingers. Why do so many Americans not understand this?
Well for some it is because they are educated as to the actual definition of fascism. Fascism adopts ideology from both the political left and the political right. For example it will coopt both the workers and the industrialists and bring them both under the control of the state. If you bother to open a history book you will find that Hitler and Mussolini both did so, both labor and industry had their respective party/state offices that they answered to. Fascism is opportunistic, any idea, left or right, t
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People have been saying politics have been destroying the open source movement since about five minutes after the first source was forked.
Wouldn't it be amusing if "Anonymous Coward" was changed to "Russian Agitator"?
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The summary links to same page that you nearly linked to.
Well using google logic that adds credibility to the page. :-)
I refuse to be trolled (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I refuse to be trolled (Score:5, Interesting)
This. Fortune is just a database of strings. It is as much a library as a public library, there seems to be gentrification in the community, IMO, if it offends get over it. Don't go and try to memory hole history, it happened, the west is the way it is now due to the battles, but you have to remember at the time Hitler did have a following, no matter how right or wrong, it is worth remembering what he did so that it can be avoided in the future. If we ignore it fully then how can we be wise to stop a repeat?
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I wonder what kind of hilarious moron thinks Fortune plays any kind of role, Hitler quotes or not, in society at large remembering or forgetting the terrible things that Hitler did? *reads eneville's post* Oh look, I found one. Christ what a sanctimoniously stupid argument.
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The hitler quotes that were posted above and are the subject of this debate are not intelligent at all. The only reason they are in the database and something you said is not in the DB is because of how well known hitler was. Not because of the brilliant content of the quotes.
If my system greeted me with a hitler quote, or some racist quote, well yeah i would be offended. Someone thought it was a good idea to program that in there, and therefor saw value in it. Since it wasnt removed by the maintainer, it t
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bullshit.
It is important to remind ourselves of the evil philosophies and methods used by tyrants and oppressors to manipulate the masses. The chosen Hitler quotes were excellent for that. It is indefensible that we kowtow to puny minded politically correct snowflakes.
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Not saying I necessarily agree, but the argument is that quoting Hitler along side other respected people gives him an air of credibility and normality that he doesn't deserve.
Personally I think some of them just demonstrate what a monster he was, and act as a warning. Those might be worth keeping.
Re:I refuse to be trolled (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people enjoy getting trolled, but I refuse to care about something so nonsensical as fortune. Is it stable? Can it be used to run exploits or escalate privileges? If not, then I don't care. For people who care, fork it or overload with -nohitler parameter.
The rise of the intolerant easily offended sort and social media lynch mobs backing them should concern all of us. The phenomena is detrimental to free societies the world over.
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Due to the internet, we are becoming a world community. Someone somewhere will always be offended by something, followed closely by someone somewhere driven to help that someone that was offended.
This will result in either everyone becoming least common denominator politically correct such that no one dare says a word, or chaos will break out when people have had enough of being told how to think and large groups break off to create their own walled gardens for internet communication.
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The rise of fucking Nazis should also concern all of us, but I'm guessing you have some stupid whataboutism primed to post.
Rather than addressing the issue you literally just changed the subject to what about Nazis.
What about Nazis? Statistics I've been able to dig up on historical trendlines of Nazi like outfits are down in the aggregate and a wash/mess dominated by uncertainty otherwise. I was unable to find evidence of Nazi's rising. Perhaps your confused by narrative selection and hyperbole perpetrated by mass media to "optimize" profit? Regardless I fail to see the relevance of the distribution of Nazis over time and s
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Having nothing more important on their plate... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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The thread is titled "FreeBSD confirmed cucks". Calling people cucks is pretty much the alt-right's signature move. They are the only ones who see the world that way.
rgb@loki|B:1001fortune (Score:2)
FORTRAN? The syntactically incorrect statement "DO 10 I = 1.10" will parse and
generate code creating a variable, DO10I, as follows: "DO10I = 1.10" If that
doesn't terrify you, it should.
In other words, the fortune database contains a fair bit of wisdom, a lot that is very funny (it is SUPPOSED to be funny/ironic/satirical/wiseass), and a certain amount that is shocking just because.
What it is not supposed to be is boring. Or, for that matter, a fortune. I no longer generate a fortune on login or logout t
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Yes, that will compile. It won't pass the most facile test, so I hardly see the problem. You can do equivalently stupid stuff in any language. Or use "Implicit none" like most civilized people.
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This was just a yoke, you know, a yoke, to make you forget how screwed you are...
No reason to get upset either way. (Score:5, Insightful)
When? (Score:2)
Mao quotes to be deleted when?
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The actual quotes (Score:5, Informative)
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/bas... [freebsd.org]
I think it's not exactly sincere Hitler supporters that are the only ones that could think the change a bad idea. I would think pretending those things were never said because we are hurt they were ever said is harmful for the future. Lest we have public figures repeat many of those patterns without recognizing the problem because we bury our heads in the sand at the past when it offends us.
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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
I happen to think it's not a bad idea to read Mein Kampf. haven't done it personally, but it's not a bad idea.
Meanwhile Stalin remains (Score:5, Insightful)
% fortune -m 'Joseph Stalin'
%% (fortunes)
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
-- Joseph Stalin
%%
Even God cannot change the past.
-- Joseph Stalin
%%
Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union.
-- Joseph Stalin
%%
In the future, there will be fewer but better Russians.
-- Joseph Stalin
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This is a blatant lie. The Stalin quotes were removed 1 day after the Hitler quotes:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/base/325828
Much ado about nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auYgXOHYpgQ
this is the short version, but the video is annotated. When I went looking for it, I discovered this has happened more than once.
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Tea for political officers (Score:2)
Hitler is very worth listening to. (Score:4, Insightful)
He tells you *exactly* how he intends to operate:
*The great masses of people more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.
*How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think.
*The leader of genius must have the ability to make many opponents appear as if they belong to one category.
*Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
*I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.
Hitler and the Nazis were stridently anti-intellectual, for the very good reason that people who think critically are very difficult to manipulate. They were very big on feelings: from mawkishly sentimental art to the deliciously transgressive license of a good riot. In fact the rioters only feel liberated; they're actually doing their masters' bidding.
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No, they were anti-degeneracy and anti-communism, for the very good reason that they didn't want to happen in Germany what had happened in Russia 20 years earlier. The Frankfurt School and other communists [wikipedia.org] worked tirelessly to make those terms nearly synonymous.
See also Critical Theory [wikipedia.org] and compare it to the first sentence in the "Intellectual" page.
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for the very good reason that they didn't want to happen in Germany what had happened in Russia 20 years earlier.
Which is why they made a peace treaty with communist Russia and invaded capitalist Czechoslovakia and Poland.
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Let me guess... you learned history in an American public school and called it "good enough"?
Poland and Czechoslovakia both had large German populations, the mistreatment of whom formed the justification for reunification. Hell, General Guderian had the German tank drivers decorate their tanks with garlands before "invading" the Sudetenland and everyone had a big party!
Hitler and Stalin were both convinced, pretty much correctly as far as I can tell, that the other was itching to invade. In 1939, they bo
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This, folks, is straight from the authoritarian playbook: make it about personalities.
I have custom fortunes (Score:2)
Yo mama jokes and such that would make those little daemon worshipers heads explode.
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As soon as all the Hitler, Nazi, and Civil War stuff goes away the sooner we can finally start saying those things never happened. That is the goal right?
The sooner it can happen again. The masses that silence are not evil. They are the instrument of evil.
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Yep, that's why the people against displaying them in public want them put into a museum and only shown in the proper educational context, so that we will forgeOH WAIT...
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I have mod points, and I can't mod you up. (Score:2)
/. is strange now...
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You're pedantically correct, but contextually deaf. It's obvious from context what Jzanu was referring to with his reference to the fight for civil rights.
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1 knocked down by an angry mob vs. maybe a dozen carefully and professionally relocated? Is cherry picking all you got?
Re:Soon (Score:4)
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Re:Issue? (Score:5, Informative)
In FreeBSD's Fortune database (a database of quotes that are randomly shown in some areas of the UI for entertainment purposes, such as on login for example), there were quotes from Adolf Hitler (and some of the ones linked in TFS were incredibly sexist). They were finally removed even though there was a code commit to do it 12 years ago that was rolled back. The alt-right was angered by this. The quotes were moved into an extension of the Fortune database where offensive material is contained.
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https://svnweb.freebsd.org/bas... [freebsd.org]
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Were the Hitler quotes actually offensive though? What were they?
Fortune isn't a museum or a history class, it's a database of inspiring quotes. It's not an appropriate place for nazis.
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Some of the quotes are shown in the Twitter post. They're so sexist, James Damore could identify them as such.
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Some indeed are cautionary and I think should've been left in. The turbo-sexist ones, not so much.
Re:Issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
The hacker community has always been full of people with a certain kind of personality. That kind of personality can laugh at Hitler. But hackers are a dying breed. Software development is no longer driven by that "hacker" personality, and the software development community now has to be much more sensitive and respectful of a more diverse population. Which means no more Hitler jokes, or casual swearing, or crude innuendos, or Monty Python references, or etc etc. Oh well, it was fun (for the hackers) while it lasted.
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The way to make that diversity matter less is not to push it to the forefront and create an "Oppression Hierarchy" where you promote some opinions over others based on the physical attributes of the person uttering said opinion.
AKA : You don't promote a pure meritocracy by using affirmative action.
Or you end up being what you despise, aka, someone who thinks that people of a certain skin tone that is pale should be silenced and removed from public discourse for being the "nation's" problem.
Get it ?
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"I don't understand what the issue is here.
Could somebody please explain?"
Perhaps an example from brainyquotes (sic) will help.
"Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.
Adolf Hitler"
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/au... [brainyquote.com]
Re:Issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, there is too much of a population who are intellectually unable to understand sarcasm, or understand a cautionary statement when they see it.
For example "In WWII in Germany the Trains Run on Time" This should be a cautionary statement explaining that efficiency at the expense of freedom isn't a good bargain, and that often cruel/evil regimes will strong arm improvements, but at a large cost.
Much of the hate speech that is on Slashdot today, isn't sarcasm, or parody. It is actually hateful speech from hateful people. What a difference 10 years make.
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No, you fucking idiot! Nazis were a far-right group from the outset ...
You were misinformed. The Nazis were fascists, and fascism is neither left nor right. Fascist ideology takes from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Fascism will do things like coop the workers and the industrialists, bringing both under their control and leveraging both as convenient.
Re:Socialism friendly quotes by tops NSDAP officia (Score:5, Insightful)
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A marketing slogan with no actual meaning. How democratic is the DPRK?
LOL. So many times, I've seen replies to comments about antifa using fascist tactics that say something like, "No, no! They're AGAINST fascism! It's right in the name!"
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What does the 'S' in NSDAP stand for?
It stands for "Something that we say we are, but are not"
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I suppose you vote Democratic party then, right? It's right in their name. Or are you just disingenuously stupid when it's convenient?
Re: Socialism friendly quotes by tops NSDAP offici (Score:2)
Re:Socialism friendly quotes by tops NSDAP officia (Score:5, Informative)
They did like to appropriate Socialist language when attempting to market themselves as being a "workers party," "of the people," and so on, as a way to paint themselves themselves as the middle road between the old-gaurd Nationalists upon whom they placed blame for the country's failures and the Communists who they saw as their main rivals to replace the Nationalists. Despite the marketing/rhetoric, nothing they did from a policy or governance standpoint stands out as more Socialist than any other European state of that era. They lied,
all the time, whenever they thought it would benefit them. This was no different.
There are many different flavors of Socialism [wikipedia.org] in the world today, mainstream European Social Democrats, Berners who want to import that model to the U.S., Syndicalists in labor movements, Anarcho-Socialists and Autonomists who end up having a lot in common with Libertarians, and so on. While there are a few State Socialist/Leninist/Maoist hold-outs like Cuba or Vietnam, many countries successfully apply Socialist principles to certain national industries and infrastructure segments where market forces have historically produced bad outcomes, but leave things more or less to individuals/the-market otherwise.
No one before or after has ever used "Socialism" with the same context or connotations as the NSDAP, except people wanting to disingenuously tar Social-Democrats with Nazi associations as an ad-hominem rather than engaging with their ideas.
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It takes an especially potent form of aliterate ignoramus to think that any of the races of BSD People have thin skin.