Capitalism and the Second World War cont.

[Lord Thesaurian]

1. Nazism and Fascism were nationalist reactions to the spread of communism and socialism in Europe in 1900-1930s. The similarities you observe correctly have more to do with the fascists co-opting leftist talking points, organization strategies and general know-how (socialism had been going on for 150 years to that point, contrary to fascism which began as a movement with Musolini after WW1 - just 2o years before WW2) and turning them around to steal support from the left than anything else. In this the fascists proved way more successful than the left.

Alleging that the aforementioned similarities were simply a ruse by the Nazis is purely rhetorical and largely irrelevant in any case. Arendt was discussing these as a function of totalitarianism and how it sets apart Bolshevism and Nazism from traditional European authoritarianism.

2. Pointing out similarities and claiming the two movements are the identical ("the black/red fascism obscenity") is not the same thing. The former is indeed observable, the latter is simply denialism of easily retrievable historical facts. Nazism seeked out to exterminate races it deemed had no right to exist. Their whole mondus operandi revolved around this extermination. Socialists seeked to abolish economic classes and change their economic system.

No one has claimed the two are completely identical though, so your point is moot.

3. The fundamental difference between the Jew Banker and the bourgeois capitalist: in Marxism, the bourgeois oppresses the working class because they seek out profit, not because they are somehow flawed themselves genetically. Marx wrote the capitalist might even want to do good, but because of the profit-seeking nature of capitalism he either will have to out-compete the most horrible of bosses or go out of business himself. In Nazism the Jew Banker is evil because he is a Jew. The racist component makes all the difference. For soviets, the capitalist/the counter-revolutionary/the criminal is able of rehabilitation. In Nazism there is no such nuance. If someone is of the wrong race, it's death or slavery until death.

Attempting to justify the “nuance” of Bolshevism based on the idea their political enemies can theoretically be released from the gulag if they recant their heresy and promise to be good is exactly the kind of apologism I find so tedious. It may be true, but that doesn’t confer moral superiority on the Soviet programs of systematic mass murder. Plus, the idea that the Nazis didn’t make exceptions to their rules for completely arbitrary reasons is also false. Many Germans and whole countries full of people, namely German allies and friendly neutrals (including some notable people of Jewish descent) were deemed “honorary Aryans” even though they would normally have been imprisoned and exterminated en masse under Nazi race programs. This is an example of how both the Nazis and Soviets were capable of pragmatism, no matter how hypocritical.

4. The world domination accusation is easily falling apart when confronted with western imperialism; once again, the US has staged 56 military interventions in South America alone. It has done so for financial gains for its companies, and through means of puppet dictatorships, coups, attempted coups and death squads. What was that Elon Musk once wrote in twitter? Oh, yes. "We will coup whoever we like. Deal with it." But please tell me about the evils of imperialism.

Ah, whataboutism by false comparison. Classic. Arendt detailed and I discussed how territorial expansionism as a function of world domination was integral to ideologies of both Bolshevism and Nazism, as well as their respective applications.

5. Maybe you should read the study I link regarding the economics of the Third Reich. To say that the Nazis did not support (and were supported by) Big Business is simply ignorant. Capitalists in Germany benefited from the privatization, and slave labour to increase their profits throughout the war. Companies were taken apart because of this after the war, like IG Farben. Hell, even Schindler's List is about a capitalist who begins the movie by trying to take up slave labour and war contracts to make the big bucks! How is this even a point of discussion? It's common knowledge!

I’d be surprised if any study made these kinds of red herring claims. No one said the Nazis didn’t benefit from and coopt private industry. On the contrary, I specifically noted the similarity between the socialist economic planning regimes of Nazi Germany and the USSR, backed up by empirical evidence rather than anecdotes and deflections:

This paper argues that economic planning under Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s was essentially similar, both in process and outcome. Both economies had fixed prices and used coercion as part of a rather chaotic process of resource allocation; consumption in both countries was sacrificed to investment in heavy industry. Both economies can be thought of as socialist, and socialism in the 1930s was hardly more than military mobilization.

Two implications follow from this finding. First, actual socialist planning in the 1930s was closer to military mobilization than the market socialism of Western theorists or postwar Yugoslavia. Although not a new view, this conclusion has dropped out of recent discussions of the Soviet economy and needs reemphasis (Gregory and Stuart, 1990) . Second, the Nazi economy shared many characteristics with the dominant [Soviet] socialist economy of the time. The National Socialists were socialist in practice as well as name.

Even the most superficial account of the 1930s notes the resonance between the Five Year Plans of Soviet Russia and the Four Year Plans of Nazi Germany. Despite their enmity toward Moscow, the Nazis followed the Coinmunists' lead in multi-year planning. They appropriated the label with only the smallest change to differentiate themselves. They chose to plan over a similar time horizon. And they created the same kind of specialized bureaucracy to administer the plans. This can be seen most clearly in the parallels between the Second Five and Four Year Plans, which were neither five nor four years long. They ran from 1934 to 1937 and from 1936 to 1938, respectively.

It is a mistake to think that the Soviets were in control of their economy, while the Nazis were not. Both economies were subject to the confusions that follow from implementing new and untried ideas. They were prey to the vagaries of large and chaotic bureaucracies. In both countries, the planning organizations were created in the 1930s. The resulting administrations were expressions of confusion as much as of rationality.

The state did not own industry in Germany. It consequently needed to have a legal form with which to implement the plan. The Nazis signed long-term contracts with industry groups to buy their output at fixed prices (Hayes, 1987, pp. 118-19). These contracts were nominally contracts expressing agreement by both parties. But the two parties were decidedly unequal. The Nazis viewed private property as conditional on its use--not as a fundamental right. If the property was not being used to further Nazi goals, it could be nationalized. Professor Junkers of the Junkers airline plant refused to follow the government's bidding in 1934. The Nazis thereupon took over the plant, compensating Junkers for his loss (Nuernberg Military Tribunals, 1953, Vol VII, p. 416). This was the context in which other contracts were negotiated.

Despite the nominal difference between public and private ownership, the state's control over agriculture was similar in the two countries. In both cases the state took control over prices, quantities and the access to land. And in both countries agricultural problems were among the most troublesome obstacles to fulfillment of the multi-year plans (Petzina, 1968, p. 96). The differences between Nazi and Soviet forms should not blind us to the similarity of functions. The short-lived nature of the Nazi regime, after which farms reverted to the private economy, also should not confuse us.

In both countries, therefore, another means of resource allocation had to be found. In a market system, prices move to guide resources into uses, both in production and consumption. Fixed prices clearly could not fulfill this function. Profits also lost their allocative function, as profits based on fixed prices do not carry the information of profits with market prices. Both economic systems therefore eliminated profits as an indicator of desirable investments.

If salaries and bonuses provided carrots, terror furnished the stick in both Germany and Russia. Used selectively, these negative incentives were capable of targeting the desired behavior quite precisely. As the positive rewards were less closely tied to specific performance in Germany, we would expect the negative rewards to be more firmly anchored. The harshness and apparent randomness of repression in both countries has been widely noted. But its economic effects have not been fully appreciated.

The Soviets had made a similar move in the 1920s. Faced with a scarcity of administrative personnel, the state encouraged enterprises to combine into trusts and trusts to combine into syndicates (Gregory and Stuart, 1990, p. 61). These large units continued into the 1930s where they were utilized to bridge the gap between overall plans and actual production.

The state therefore directed the internal organization of industry in both countries. The creation of these industry groups allowed private organizations to control more of the hierarchy in Germany. It enabled enterprise-related hierarchies to do the same in Soviet Russia. Even though the Russian
managers were not private, there seems to have been enterprise- specific knowledge that made lower-level hierarchies preferable to state bureaucrats in the administration of economic plans. The nature of this information asymmetry appears to have been independent of ownership patterns.

Leaders in both countries were aiming to restructure society into a Utopian vision. They were opposed to capitalism and formal markets. The Soviets wanted to create a socialist society without money, in which people would be rewarded directly for work. The Nazis wanted to restructure an already industrialized economy to create a new alternative to both the existing Western economies and the emerging Soviet one (Davies, 1989, pp. 477-78; Hardach, 1980, p. 66)

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/han...onom00temi.pdf

IG Farben is an excellent example of how Nazi Party leaders controlled private enterprise through political terror similar to Bolshevik expropriation. When company executives pushed back against political leaders like Hitler and Goering, complaining the latter had no business telling them what to do, they were reported to the Gestapo and threatened with the obvious if they failed to publicly apologize and fall in line, not unlike Soviet industrialists who received allocations of capital from the state, or the ornamental capitalists in communist China today.

6. Party organization in fascism and nazism is of course similar to socialism; the reason being, both fascist branch ideologies were extemely young compared to socialism, which draws its roots from 1700s. The fact that the Nazis organized themselves according to the socialist playbook doesn't mean they were the same. It just means they had no real theoretical tools themselves, and stole everything they could use.

Again, claiming similarities don’t count because they were copied is a non sequitur even if true. Arendt detailed and I discussed in my last post how Bolshevism and Nazism were fundamentally different from the European national political parties of their day for similar reasons. Feel free to review.

7. Equating the extermination of Jews to the kulaks is Holocaust denialism, you do understand that right?

Arendt, a Jew who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and luckily managed to flee Nazi Germany, did not acknowledge similarities between Nazi and Soviet mass murder in order to minimize the unique significance of the Holocaust. The point was that both the Nazis and Soviets targeted ethnic groups, not just social classes, as a function of their respective totalitarian extermination campaigns, often for no material purpose, which she mentions here and I referenced in my last post:

The Bolshevik government then proceeded to the liquidation of classes and started, for ideological and propaganda reasons, with the property- owning classes, the new middle class in the cities, and the peasants in the country. Because of the combination of numbers and property, the peasants up to then had been potentially the most powerful class in the Union; their liquidation, consequently, was more thorough and more cruel than that of any other group and was carried through by artificial famine and deporta- tion under the pretext of expropriation of the kulaks and collectivization. The liquidation of the middle and peasant classes was completed in the early thirties; those who were not among the many millions of dead or the millions of deported slave laborers had learned "who is master here," had realized that their lives and the lives of their families depended not upon their fellow-citizens but exclusively on the whims of the government which they faced in complete loneliness without any help whatsoever from the group to which they happened to belong.

The next class to be liquidated as a group were the workers. As a class they were much weaker and offered much less resistance than the peasants because their spontaneous expropriation of factory owners during the revo- lution, unlike the peasants' expropriation of landowners, had been frus-trated at once by the government which confiscated the factories as state property under the pretext that the state belonged to the proletariat in any event. The Stakhanov system, adopted in the early thirties, broke up all solidarity and class consciousness among the workers, first by the ferocious competition and second by the temporary solidification of a Stakhanovite aristocracy whose social distance from the ordinary worker naturally was felt more acutely than the distance between the workers and the manage- ment. This process was completed in 1938 with the introduction of the labor book which transformed the whole Russian worker class officially into a gigantic forced-labor force.

On top of these measures came the liquidation of that bureaucracy which had helped to carry out the previous liquidation measures. It took Stalin about two years, from 1936 to 1938, to rid himself of the whole adminis- trative and military aristocracy of the Soviet society; nearly all offices, factories, economic and cultural bodies, government, party, and military bureaus came into new hands, when "nearly half the administrative per- sonnel, party and nonparty, had been swept out," and more than 50 per cent of all party members and "at least eight million more" were liqui- dated.2^ Again the introduction of an interior passport, on which all de- partures from one city to another have to be registered and authorized, completed the destruction of the party bureaucracy as a class. As for its juridical status, the bureaucracy along with the party functionaries was now on the same level with the workers; it, too, had now become a part of the vast multitude of Russian forced laborers and its status as a privi- leged class in Soviet society was a thing of the past. And since this general purge ended with the liquidation of the highest police officials—the same who had organized the general purge in the first place—not even the cadres of the GPU which had carried out the terror could any longer delude them-selves that as a group they represented anything at all, let alone power. None of these immense sacrifices in human life was motivated by a raison d'etat in the old sense of the term.

None of the liquidated social strata was hostile to the regime or likely to become hostile in the foreseeable future. Active organized opposition had ceased to exist by 1930 when Stalin, in his speech to the Sixteenth Party Congress, outlawed the rightist and leftist deviations inside the Party, and even these feeble oppositions had hardly been able to base themselves on any of the existing classes.^ Dictatorial terror—distinguished from totalitarian terror insofar as it threatens only authentic opponents but not harmless citizens without polit- ical opinions—had been grim enough to suffocate all political life, open or clandestine, even before Lenin's death. Intervention from abroad, which might ally itself with one of the dissatisfied sections in the population, was no longer a danger when, by 1930, the Soviet regime had been recognized by a majority of governments and concluded commercial and other inter- national agreements with many countries. (Nor did Stalin's government eliminate such a possibility as far as the people themselves were con- cerned: we know now that Hitler, if he had been an ordinary conqueror and not a rival totalitarian ruler, might have had an extraordinary chance to win for his cause at least the people of the Ukraine.)

The introduction of the notion of "objective enemy" is much more de- cisive for the functioning of totalitarian regimes than the ideological defini- tion of the respective categories. If it were only a matter of hating Jews or bourgeois, the totalitarian regimes could, after the commission of one gi- gantic crime, return, as it were, to the rules of normal life and government. As we know, the opposite is the case. The category of objective enemies outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new ob- jective enemies are discovered according to changing circumstances: the Nazis, foreseeing the completion of Jewish extermination, had already taken the necessary preliminary steps for the liquidation of the Polish people, while Hitler even planned the decimation of certain categories of Germans;"^ the Bolsheviks, having started with descendants of the former ruling classes, directed their full terror against the kulaks (in the early thirties), who in turn were followed by Russians of Polish origin (between 1936 and 1938), the Tartars and the Volga Germans during the war, former prisoners of war and units of the occupational forces of the Red Army after the war, and Rus- sian Jewry after the establishment of a Jewish state. The choice of such cate- gories is never entirely arbitrary; since they are publicized and used for propaganda purposes of the movement abroad, they must appear plausible as possible enemies; the choice of a particular category may even be due to certain propaganda needs of the movement at large—as for instance the sudden entirely unprecedented emergence of governmental antisemitism in the Soviet Union, which may be calculated to win sympathies for the Soviet Union in the European satellite countries.

8.There's no evidence to support Nazis were internationalists

Other than, you know, the evidence I cited and discussed in detail. To summarize again from Arendt:

It has already been noticed that the Nazis were not simple nationalists. Their nationaUst propaganda was directed toward their fellow-travelers and not their convinced members; the latter, on the contrary, were never al- lowed to lose sight of a consistently supranational approach to politics. Nazi "nationalism" had more than one aspect in common with the recent nationalistic propaganda in the Soviet Union, which is also used only to feed the prejudices of the masses. The Nazis had a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provinciaHsm of the nation-state, and they repeated time and again that their "movement," international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific terri- tory. And not only the Nazis, but fifty years of antiscmitic history, stand as evidence against the identification of antisemitism with nationalism. The first antisemitic parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century were also among the first that banded together internationally. From the very beginning, they called international congresses and were concerned with a co-ordination of international, or at least inter-European, activities.

[Lord Thesaurian]

As I said, nothing beyond brainlet tier twaddle has been presented to support OP's childish thesis.

Dismissing analysis from one of the seminal political theorists of the 20th century and from an MIT economist with juvenile appeals to ridicule is probably the most generous concession to the OP’s “thesis” short of actual endorsement.

[Kritias]

1. Before you posted, this discussion was about how Nazis are not comparable to the socialists and Marxists, as the OP and HH have insisted on multiple times. Changing the subject to whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were totalitarian in nature is, frankly, disruptive to the goal of the original discussion. No one has claimed the USSR wasn’t totalitarian. But even to infer those two totalitarian regimes are comparable because they use the same means, without understanding the difference in goals is in itself a logic fallacy. Arendt herself makes this distinction showing the similarities between the two regimes. The Nazis were mainly interested in culling humanity of the undesirable races. Their internationalism, as Arendt states herself in page 412, sums up to the creation of a master race that would dominate humanity in a Germanic world empire. Contrary to this extermination fueled racial totalitarianism, the Soviets were mainly interested in ushering in world communist revolution and the abolishment of capitalism. Here’s the quote:

The Nazis did not think that the Germans were a master race, to whom the world belonged, but that they should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and that this race was only on the point of being born. Not the Germans were the dawn of the master race, but the SS.69 The "Germanic world empire," as Himmler said, or the "Aryan" world empire, as Hitler would have put it, was in any event still centuries away.70 For the "movement" it was more important to demonstrate that it was possible to fabricate a race by annihilating other "races" than to win a war with limited aims. What strikes the outside observer as a "piece of prodigious insanity" is nothing but the consequence of the absolute primacy of. the movement not only over the state, but also over the nation, the people and the positions of power held by the rulers themselves. The reason why the ingenious devices of totalitarian rule, with their absolute and unsurpassed concentration of power in the hands of a single man, were never tried out before, is that no ordinary tyrant was ever mad enough to discard all limited and local interests-economic, national, human, military-in favor of a purely fictitious reality in some indefinite distant future.

2. The USSR came into being in 1917, a full two decades before the Nazis came to power. The fact that the latter took the mechanics and organization of the former doesn’t prove similarities of intent or goal-orientation; it just proves that the Nazis had no theoretical tools to establish their totalitarian regime and robbed the guidebook of the other totalitarian regime of their time. Nazi ideology itself was based on what could today be described as ‘pseudo-science’ and ‘conspiracy theories’. Its main distinguishing feature was its abhorrent racism and willingness to exterminate all those who weren’t ‘Aryan’. Bringing up this apparent theft of theory and praxis to pursue wildly different goals is anything but a non-sequitur. Precisely because the point to prove similarity is the end goal of totalitarianism, and not its means. Capitalism varies wildly from country to country. Take for example European and American capitalism: both are similar insofar the ultimate goal is to create profit for the stakeholders but the means they use, and the quality of life they provide is radically different. The only argument to be made her was that the Nazis copied and pasted Soviet structure and organization when they set up their regime.


3. To further prove the above point, let’s discuss the two Five Year Plans in Nazi Germany and the USSR. The latter is the collectivization of agriculture, which meant banding farmers together under communes to increase production. The Nazi Five Year Plan, however, according to Arendt herself (p. 411), was the following:

“If one considers these last years of Nazi rule and their version of a "five year plan," which they had no time to carry out but which aimed at the extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people, of 170 million Russians (as mentioned in one plan), the intelligentsia of Western Europe such as the Dutch and the people of Alsace and Lorraine, as well as of all those Germans who would be disqualified under the prospective Reich health biIl or the planned "community alien law,"

the analogy to the Bolshevik five-year plan of 1929, the first year of clear-cut totalitarian dictatorship in Russia, is almost inescapable. Vulgar eugenic slogans in one case, high-sounding economic phrases in the other, were the prelude to "a piece of prodigious insanity, in which all rules of logic and principles of economics were turned upside down."

The fact that Arendt here compares an economic policy to the intentional extermination of millions of people by comparing slogans shows she was interested to show similarities of mechanics and rhetoric, not of goals.


4. The Origins of Totalitarianism, which you quote, was aimed to show what was extraordinary about totalitarian movements. In this book Arendt shows their similarities in organization, but also their important differences in expression, end goals and implementations. You’d understand that if you read the whole book (where the origins of anti-Semitism are discussed) and not just select parts of it. While both regimes were imperialistic, it’s ridiculous to think Arendt even suggested they did so for the same reason even if they used the same means. Taking for example just the part where Arendt discusses the irrationality of totalitarian foreign policy, it’s obvious to even the simplest reader to catch the important difference. Whereas the Nazis used their foreign policy to exterminate the racially undesirable peoples despite jeopardizing the war, Hannah Arendt spots a similar trend of irrational policy in the USSR’s… denial to accept American loans to reconstruct itself, and further burdening itself with forcefully exporting socialism to the Eastern bloc. As anyone can understand, this is hardly comparable. Here’s the quote from pages 416-417:

How seriously the Nazis took their conspiratorial fiction, according to which they were the future rulers of the world, came to light in 1940 when despite necessity, and in the face of all their all-too-real chances of winning over the occupied peoples of Europe-they started their depopulation policies in the Eastern territories, regardless of loss of manpower and serious military consequences, and introduced legislation which with retroactive force exported part of the Third Reich's penal code into the Western occupied countries.7R There was hardly a more effective way of publicizing the Nazi claim to world rule than punishing as high treason every utterance or action against the Third Reich, no matter when, where, or by whom it had been made. Nazi law treated the whole world as falling potentially under its jurisdiction, so that the occupying army was no longer an instrument of conquest that carried with it the new law of the conqueror, but an executive organ which enforced a law which already supposedly existed for everyone… A similar attitude seems to have inspired Soviet foreign policy after the war. The cost of its aggressiveness to the Russian people themselves is prohibitive: it has foregone the great postwar loan from the United States which would have enabled Russia to reconstruct devastated areas and industrialize the country in a rational, productive way. The extension of Comintern governments throughout the Balkans and the occupation of large Eastern territories brought no tangible benefits, but on the contrary strained Russian resources still further. But this policy certainly served the interests of the Bolshevik movement, which has spread over almost half of the inhabited world.

5. Of course Arendt’s criticisms on socialist economics are somewhat paled when confronted with the fact that the economics of the USSR reconstructed the entirety of country not once, but twice (post-Civil War reconstruction; post-WW2 reconstruction), in an amazing short amount of time – while at the same time providing foreign aid to other countries that had been devastated during the war, keep up an arms race and funding a space program. The fact that the USSR managed to compete on equal terms with the US globally (which hadn’t had its infrastructure damaged since the American civil war, or have 27 million of its workforce murdered) just after WW2 and maintain this competition over decades is the sole greatest proof that socialist economics not only did not “defy logic and turned economic principles upside down” but actually worked.


6. Another whataboutism accusation. If you don’t see the similarities between exporting ‘democracy’ and exporting ‘socialism’ between two imperialist powers you’re being intellectually dishonest now. Also, if you don’t think that superpowers will dominate their peripheries and attempt to gobble them up, happy ninth birthday. Lastly, if you don’t understand that exporting your economic system and conquering a nation, and exterminate its civilians to make room for your settlers is worlds apart as actions, maybe you should go back to school.


7. IG Farben wasn’t state controlled or even terrorized as you claim. They willingly cooperated with the regime and were condemned at Nuremberg for it. The ‘company executives pushed back’ was one instance of Bosch objecting to the firing of the few remaining Jewish scientists. On the contrary, IG FARBEN were given immense amounts of slave labour, the right to experiment their chemicals in the death camps on living persons, and were given opportunities to take apart whole companies throughout Europe to increase their own productivity and profits. Its General Manager was tasked with carrying out aspects of economic policy – like the four year plan – and were also instrumental for the operation of the death camps. And I assume Ford, General Motors, IBM, and other foreign companies were also terrorized and controlled by the Nazis, and that’s why they were doing business with them?


8. Arendt has been harshly criticized, multiple times, by Jewish academics of ‘incorporating anti-Semitism’ and ‘blaming the victims’ in her work. In particular, her claim that the Nazi regime killed the Jews as a proxy, and that Nazis didn’t initially aim to do that has caused her to be accused of Holocaust denialism several times. While I don’t personally agree with this rhetoric, taking her work where she points out similarities of mechanics and organization to prove similarities of intent (“The Soviet mass murder campaigns” as you put it) is dubious and revisionist. According to Hannah Arendt Centre Director, Jerome Kohn: "Although shortly after its publication The Origins of Totalitarianism was hailed as a justification of the Cold War, that was not Arendt's intention. By that time the Cold War was being fought against the Soviet Union and its satellites and not against totalitarianism, which according to Arendt had ended in the Soviet Union, or at least had begun to end, with Stalin's death in 1953. Furthermore, the Cold War obscured the fact that the historical elements that had coalesced in totalitarian movements remained intact throughout the world and by no means only behind the Iron Curtain."

[Heathen Hammer]

Its funny how so far the only arguments that Hitler wasn't socialist was just either nonsensical emotional drivel or literal nonsense based on complete lack of knowledge of economics and history.
It seems modern leftists realize that their beliefs are fascistic, but want to maintain "appearances", hence they pick this hill to have their credibility to die on.

You can easily see, that the nazis were a right wing party, as they could easily ally themself against the Sovietunion with the conservative authoritan or monarchistic authoritan governments of Hungary , Romania and Bulgaria.

You can easily see, that they were a left-wing party, as they could easily ally themeself against the France and Unitekingdom with the marxist governments of Soviet Union and Tuva.

[Lord Thesaurian]

1. Before you posted, this discussion was about how Nazis are not comparable to the socialists and Marxists, as the OP and HH have insisted on multiple times. Changing the subject to whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were totalitarian in nature is, frankly, disruptive to the goal of the original discussion because no one has claimed the USSR wasn’t totalitarian. But even to infer those two totalitarian regimes are comparable because they use the same means without understanding the difference in goals is a logic fallacy. Arendt herself makes this distinction, while showing similarities between the two regimes. Again, the Nazis were mainly interested in culling humanity of the undesirable races; their internationalism, as Arendt states herself in page 412, sums up to the creation of a master race that would dominate humanity in a Germanic world empire. Contrary to this extermination fueled racial totalitarianism, the Soviets were mainly interested in ushering in world communist revolution and the abolishment of capitalism. Here’s the quote:

Page 412 doesn’t support your argument nor counter mine. I’ve referenced that section extensively in support of my argument. Shifting goalposts and attacking strawmen are the two tactics you’ve used to infer the moral superiority of Soviet totalitarianism over Nazism while avoiding facts that fundamentally undermine your apologist talking points. That was addressed in the OP. Again, no one has claimed Nazism and Bolshevism are exactly the same. You’ve set up a motte and bailey fallacy here as your hill to die on, reiterating that the end points of Nazism and Bolshevism are different in theory, in order to dismiss their similar means, methods, organization, origins and results in reality as anti-Semitic Cold War propaganda, and imply the moral superiority of Bolshevism. That conquering the world and slaughtering millions to build a worker’s paradise someday might be morally preferable to doing this to build an Aryan worker’s paradise someday is irrelevant. As I said before:

Attempting to justify the “nuance” of Bolshevism based on the idea their political enemies can theoretically be released from the gulag if they recant their heresy and promise to be good is exactly the kind of apologism I find so tedious. It may be true, but that doesn’t confer moral superiority on the Soviet programs of systematic mass murder. Plus, the idea that the Nazis didn’t make exceptions to their rules for completely arbitrary reasons is also false.

As for my relevance to the OP, that too is a fallacious rhetorical diversion on your part:

The claim was not about what “would happen to every nation in the same position” (not every state would have repeatedly violated treaties, prosecuted multiple wars of aggression, executed business leaders for “defeatism” and refused to surrender until the govt district had been stormed). It was that the war economy, (and esp. total mobilization) could not reasonably be described as “capitalist”.

As per my initial post, the expected fruits of Nazi imperialism (which both necessitated a centrally-planned economy and envisioned a vast land redistribution scheme) did constitute the backbone of the party’s “long-standing economic doctrine”. The NSDAP’s domination of the industrial sector (which was integral to this strategy) was so extensive that it cannot be said to have been under the control of market forces, much less operating privately.

This is correct, as I discussed in reference to the MIT source.

Both German fascism and Bolshevism were revolutionary, collectivist, totalitarian, authoritarian, imperialist, prophetic movements which despised the old elite, emerged from the ashes of the First World War and seized power by overthrowing fledgling democracies in their respective countries.

The suggestion that these parallels can simply be dismissed as coincidental or “Cold War propaganda” is untenable.

This is correct, as I’ve covered exhaustively in reference to Arendt.

Any similarity between Soviets and Nazis stops at the organization of the regimes.

This is objectively false, and I’ve covered it extensively at this point.

3. To further prove the above point, let’s discuss the two Five Year Plans in Nazi Germany and the USSR. The latter is the collectivization of agriculture, which meant banding farmers together under communes to increase production. The Nazi Five Year Plan, however, according to Arendt herself (p. 411), was the following: “If one considers these last years of Nazi rule and their version of a "five year plan," which they had no time to carry out but which aimed at the extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people, of 170 million Russians (as mentioned in one plan), the intelligentsia of Western Europe such as the Dutch and the people of Alsace and Lorraine, as well as of all those Germans who would be disqualified under the prospective Reich health biIl or the planned "community alien law," the analogy to the Bolshevik five-year plan of 1929, the first year of clear-cut totalitarian dictatorship in Russia, is almost inescapable. Vulgar eugenic slogans in one case, high-sounding economic phrases in the other, were the prelude to "a piece of prodigious insanity, in which all rules of logic and principles of economics were turned upside down." The fact that Arendt here compares an economic policy to the intentional extermination of millions of people by comparing slogans shows she was interested to show similarities of mechanics and rhetoric, not of goals.

I quoted that exact section already in support of my argument that Nazi economic planning was similar to the Soviet variety, corroborated by the MIT source. This suggests you didn’t actually read my posts. In any case, your assertion here is an extension of your motte and bailey fallacy, addressed above. I also quoted extensively from the portions where she discusses how Soviet planners, similar to the Nazis, deliberately targeted whole groups of people on the basis of class and ethnicity, resulting in, as you put it, “intentional extermination of millions of people” for reasons that had little or no material justification and were, at a minimum, counterproductive.

4. The Origins of Totalitarianism, which you quote, was aimed to show what was extraordinary about totalitarian movements. In this book Arendt shows their similarities in organization, but also their important differences in expression, end goals and implementations. You’d understand that if you read the whole book (where the origins of anti-Semitism are discussed) and not just select parts of it. While both regimes were imperialistic, it’s ridiculous to think Arendt even suggested they did so for the same reason even if they used the same means. Taking for example just the part where Arendt discusses the irrationality of totalitarian foreign policy, it’s obvious to even the simplest reader to catch the important difference. Whereas the Nazis used their foreign policy to exterminate the racially undesirable peoples despite jeopardizing the war, Hannah Arendt spots a similar trend of irrational policy in the USSR’s… denial to accept American loans to reconstruct itself, and further burdening itself with forcefully exporting socialism to the Eastern bloc. As anyone can understand, this is hardly comparable. Here’s the quote from pages 416-417:

Of course Nazism and Bolshevism are comparable, which is what she spent the majority of the book doing. Again, I quoted 416-17 in a previous post, which you might know if you had read it. Irony?

Of course Arendt’s criticisms on socialist economics are somewhat paled when confronted with the fact that the economics of the USSR reconstructed the entirety of country not once, but twice (post-Civil War reconstruction; post-WW2 reconstruction), in an amazing short amount of time – while at the same time providing foreign aid to other countries that had been devastated during the war, keep up an arms race and funding a space program. The fact that the USSR managed to compete on equal terms with the US globally (which hadn’t had its infrastructure damaged since the American civil war, or have 27 million of its workforce murdered) just after WW2 and maintain this competition over decades is the sole greatest proof that socialist economics not only did not “defy logic and turned economic principles upside down” but actually worked.

Fawning over the ability of Soviet policy to compete economically with capitalism is irrelevant, and does nothing to discredit nor disqualify Arendt’s commentary on it. Nor does it have anything to do with your attempts to dismiss similarities between Nazi and Soviet economic planning.

As techniques of government, the totalitarian devices appear simple and ingeniously eflfective. They assure not only an absolute power monopoly, but unparalleled certainty that all commands will always be carried out; the multiplicity of the transmission belts, the confusion of the hierarchy, secure the dictator's complete independence of all his inferiors and make possible the swift and surprising changes in policy for which totalitarianism has be- come famous. The body politic of the country is shock-proof because of its shapelessness.

The reasons why such extraordinary efficiency was never tried before are as simple as the device itself. The multiplication of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence; it is not merely a tremendously burden- some and unproductive increase of administration, but actually hinders pro- ductivity because conflicting orders constantly delay real work until the order of the Leader has decided the matter. The fanaticism of the elite cadres, ab- solutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systemati- cally all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely dif- ferent.^'^ And this mentality is not confined to the elite but gradually per- vades the entire population, the most intimate details of whose life and death depend upon political decisions—that is, upon causes and ulterior motives which have nothing to do with performance. Constant removal, de- motion, and promotion make reliable teamwork impossible and prevent the development of experience. Economically speaking, slave labor is a lux- ury which Russia should not be able to afford; in a time of acute shortage of technical skill, the camps were filled with "highly qualified engineers [who] compete for the right to do plumbing jobs, repair clocks, electric lighting and telephone." ^^ But then, from a purely utilitarian point of view, Russia should not have been able to afford the purges in the thirties that in- terrupted a long-awaited economic recovery, or the physical destruction of the Red Army general staff, which led almost to a defeat in the Russian- Finnish war.

She goes on to explain that the differences in the Nazi variety were a matter of degree, contrary to your assertions. This is corroborated by the MIT source I cited. Her point here has nothing to do with whether Soviet economic methods were superior or inferior to the Nazi ones. On the contrary, the above is a continuation of her narrative, which you might understand if you’d read the whole book and not just parts of it. The advantages and disadvantages of totalitarian central planning, inherent to both Nazism and Bolshevism, are designed to reinforce the imperative that the Party and its mission is paramount to any material aims that may facilitate that mission. Rather than the product of empirical doctrine, economics is just a tool for the Party to further its aims by any means necessary, even if economically inefficient or counterproductive.

6. Another whataboutism accusation. If you don’t see the similarities between exporting ‘democracy’ and exporting ‘socialism’ between two imperialist powers you’re being intellectually dishonest now. Also, if you don’t think that superpowers will dominate their peripheries and attempt to gobble them up, happy ninth birthday. Lastly, if you don’t understand that exporting your economic system and conquering a nation, and exterminate its civilians to make room for your settlers is worlds apart as actions, maybe you should go back to school.

It’s not merely an “accusation.” It’s a factual description of your inane and transparently dishonest rhetorical tactics designed to misdirect from the topic at hand and put your interlocutor on the defensive, which the OP has also discussed. Hurling insults doesn’t help your case either. What’s clear is you’re willing to go to the ends of the earth to deny the validity of factual comparisons between the foremost totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. Meanwhile, you deflect, unprompted, to false comparisons with neoliberalism in order to morally castigate liberal capitalism with the very same appeals you’ve attempted to morally elevate Bolshevism. And after claiming I’m off topic? Not only does this expose the bad faith motivations for your argument, but more importantly, the sophistry on which it relies.


Furthermore, the false comparison between British colonialism and totalitarianism is exactly the kind of dishonest denialism of which you accuse your interlocutors. It is not merely a question of “nuance,” but category. Arendt dedicated significant space to address the differences in origins, means and ends, which translated to incomparable differences in the actual application and results, to say the least, not just in the theoretical aims or ultimate goals you carp about to defend Bolshevism. Specifically, the moral and political contradictions that weakened and and destroyed European imperialism are what made totalitarian imperialism necessarily and uniquely brutal and oppressive in scope and scale. Again, this is related to the internationalism that sets Nazism and Bolshevism in a league of their own, under which the importance of even the body politic and state itself are secondary to the preservation of the Party and its power.

On Totalitarian Imperialism

Imperialism on the whole was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state's legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that "administrative massacres" could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire. Such recollections of the past may serve to remind us of how much greater the chances of success are for an imperialism directed by a totalitarian gov- ernment……No dichotomy of principle, therefore, between home rule and colonial rule will impose restraint on totalitarian imperialism, and if it, too, has to fear certain boomerang effects from its imperialist adventures, they have other causes. Boomerang effects in totalitarian imperialism, naturally, are distinguished from those of national imperialism in that they work in the opposite di- rection—the few, faint-hearted stirrings of unrest in Russia probably were caused by events in Poland and Hungary—and so do the measures the gov- ernment is forced to take to combat them. For just as European imperiahsm could never transgress certain limits of oppression even when the effective- ness of extreme measures was beyond doubt, because public opinion at home would not have supported them and a legal government could not have sur- vived them, so Russian totalitarianism is forced to crush opposition and with- hold all concessions, even when they may pacify the oppressed countries for the time being and make them more reliable in case of war, because such "mildness" would endanger the government at home and place the conquered territories in a privileged position. However, these and other distinctions between Western national and Russian totalitarian imperialism do not go to the heart of the matter. For the immediate predecessor of totalitarian imperialism is not the British, Dutch or French version of overseas colonial rule, but the German, Austrian and Russian version of a continental imperialism which never actually suc- ceeded, and therefore is neglected by students of imperialism, but which in the form of the so-called pan-movements—pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism—was a very potent political force in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only does totalitarianism, nazism no less than bolshevism, owe a heavy debt to pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism in matters of ideology and organization; their expansion program, though global in scope and thereby distinguished from those of the pan-movements, follows the aims of continental imperi- alism. The main point here is that the strategy of expansion follows geo- graphic continuity and extends from a power center to a widening periphery which then is supposed to gravitate "naturally" toward its center. This co- hesive extension could of course never have tolerated a dichotomy between home government and colonial rule; and since continental imperialism in- tended to found its "empire" in Europe itself, it did not depend upon a color line to distinguish between "higher and lower breeds"; instead it pro- posed to treat European peoples as colonials under the rule of a master race of Germanic or Slavic origin.

7. IG Farben wasn’t state controlled or even terrorized as you claim. They willingly cooperated with the regime and were condemned at Nuremberg for it. The ‘company executives pushed back’ was one instance of Bosch objecting to the firing of the few remaining Jewish scientists. On the contrary, IG FARBEN were given immense amounts of slave labour, the right to experiment their chemicals in the death camps on living persons, and were given opportunities to take apart whole companies throughout Europe to increase their own productivity and profits. Its General Manager was tasked with carrying out aspects of economic policy – like the four year plan – and were also instrumental for the operation of the death camps. And I assume Ford, General Motors, IBM, and other foreign companies were also terrorized and controlled by the Nazis, and that’s why they were doing business with them?

I repeat: No one said the Nazis didn’t benefit from and coopt private industry. On the contrary, I specifically noted the similarity between the socialist economic planning regimes of Nazi Germany and the USSR, backed up by empirical evidence rather than anecdotes and deflections.

Also, no one claimed German collaborators were victims. What’s clear is that you didn’t read the previous post, given your rather embarrassing denial of the IG Farben episode and its relevance. It was addressed in the context of similarities in how the Soviets and Nazis controlled their economies through political terror:

If salaries and bonuses provided carrots, terror furnished the stick in both Germany and Russia. Used selectively, these negative incentives were capable of targeting the desired behavior quite precisely.

The experience of I. G. Farben, one of the largest industrial companies in Germany, provides a vivid example. As Peter Hayes recounts the story, the Farben's leadership was drawn into the Nazi net by the use of selective terror against the firm and its executives. Very rapidly, in April, 1933, the Nazis intervened in Farben's activities. Hayes concludes that, "the first eighteen months of Nazi rule. .. established that in the Third Reich, for individual businessmen and everyone else, "terror was the greatest of political realities'" (Hayes, 1987, pp. 94, 122-24).
16

Terror was still a potent reality for I. G. Farben in 1939, at the probable zenith of its influence. The head of one of Farben' s three divisions (Sparken) was alleged to have said to a visiting group of party officials that Hitler and Goring, "were not sufficiently expert to be able to judge something like this, and it is shocking that a man [named] would fool them in this
matter." The Farben executive was denounced to the Gestapo, threatened with a trial and possible prison sentence for saying "untrue or grossly distorted statements" about the party's leaders. He was subject to lengthy interrogation at the Gestapo office and had to petition the local Nazi Kreisleiter for permission to call on him and apologize. The Nazi Gauleiter reprimanded him and said he could not protect him again from more serious consequences (Hayes, 1987, pp. 202-03).

Hayes details the interaction between the company and the government without many references to political terror. But the use of terror to enforce conformity with Nazi economic policy was an underlying reality throughout the Nazi regime. While financial considerations and business contracts may have been the common coin of economic plans, terror provided the ultimate incentive for agreement and compliance.

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/han...onom00temi.pdf

Arendt also discusses how the Soviets, like the Nazis, used legions of slaves to their economic benefit as a necessary but inefficient way to replace the labor lost to the various purges and war casualties, and to fill crucial functions that allowed vast secret police networks to operate in ways that were otherwise fiscally impossible.

8. Arendt has been harshly criticized, multiple times, by Jewish academics of ‘incorporating anti-Semitism’ and ‘blaming the victims’ in her work. In particular, her claim that the Nazi regime killed the Jews as a proxy, and that Nazis didn’t initially aim to do that has caused her to be accused of Holocaust denialism several times. While I don’t personally agree with this rhetoric, taking her work where she points out similarities of mechanics and organization to prove similarities of intent (“The Soviet mass murder campaigns” as you put it) is dubious and revisionist. According to Hannah Arendt Centre Director, Jerome Kohn: "Although shortly after its publication The Origins of Totalitarianism was hailed as a justification of the Cold War, that was not Arendt's intention. By that time the Cold War was being fought against the Soviet Union and its satellites and not against totalitarianism, which according to Arendt had ended in the Soviet Union, or at least had begun to end, with Stalin's death in 1953. Furthermore, the Cold War obscured the fact that the historical elements that had coalesced in totalitarian movements remained intact throughout the world and by no means only behind the Iron Curtain."

Accusing Arendt of anti-Semitism while simultaneously arguing people misrepresent her work isn’t just an ironic and fallacious attempt to discredit her by impugning her motives. It also has nothing to do with what you ostensibly responded to:

The introduction of the notion of "objective enemy" is much more de- cisive for the functioning of totalitarian regimes than the ideological defini- tion of the respective categories. If it were only a matter of hating Jews or bourgeois, the totalitarian regimes could, after the commission of one gi- gantic crime, return, as it were, to the rules of normal life and government. As we know, the opposite is the case. The category of objective enemies outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new ob- jective enemies are discovered according to changing circumstances: the Nazis, foreseeing the completion of Jewish extermination, had already taken the necessary preliminary steps for the liquidation of the Polish people, while Hitler even planned the decimation of certain categories of Germans;"^ the Bolsheviks, having started with descendants of the former ruling classes, directed their full terror against the kulaks (in the early thirties), who in turn were followed by Russians of Polish origin (between 1936 and 1938), the Tartars and the Volga Germans during the war, former prisoners of war and units of the occupational forces of the Red Army after the war, and Rus- sian Jewry after the establishment of a Jewish state.

That’s a fact, regardless of how many irrelevant rhetorical deflections you can come up with. Plus, that the death of Stalin represented the end of an era did not mean the end of totalitarianism in Russia, nor did Arendt assert this, at least not in the book we’re discussing. On the contrary, she discusses how Kruschev’s attempt to rhetorically distance the Soviet regime from Stalin’s totalitarianism fell short of the reality, and made peaceful coexistence between the USSR and the West virtually impossible.

Not only that, it was the Soviets’ totalitarian inflexible allergy to facts and truth, common to Nazism and Bolshevism, that would spark the revolutions in satellite states, led by the intelligentsia Stalin had failed to purge as thoroughly as he had in Russia before he died. Nevertheless, so thoroughly had totalitarianism ingrained itself in the fabric of Russian society, that the rebellions in Eastern Europe completely failed to penetrate it. This durability allowed Moscow to regroup, invade, and destroy them.

Perhaps nothing illustrates better that there still exists a difference in mentality between the Soviet Union and her satellites than the fact that Krushchev's speech at the Twentieth Party Congress could at the same time end the thaw in Russia ^" and release the unrest, finally the uprising, in the newly bolshevized territories. Here, the sinister ambiguity we mentioned above obviously was lost on the average reader who must have read the speech with pretty much the same understanding as the average reader in the free world. In this naive reading it could not but cause a tremendous relief, because it sounded as though a normal human being were talking about nor- mal human occurrences—insanity and crimes creeping into politics; Marxian phraseology and historical necessity were conspicuous by their absence. Had this been the "correct understanding" of the speech, the Twentieth Party Congress would have been an event of enormous significance. It would have indicated a break with totalitarian methods, though not with socialist meas- ures or dictatorial procedures, and healed the breach between the two world powers. For Khrushchev had only confirmed the charge of the free world that this was not so much a communist as a crime-ridden government which lacked not only the democratic type of legality but any restriction of power through law whatsoever. If the Soviet government now intended to operate a socialist economy on the same level as the western world operated a free- market economy, then there was no reason why the two main powers, to- gether with their respective allies, should not be able to coexist and coop- erate peacefully and in good faith.

Clearly, these measures were not dictated by materialist ideology. They were guided by the very realistic understanding that freedom resides in the human capacities of action and thought, and not in labor and earning a living. Since labor and earning a living, like all strictly economic activities, are subject to necessity anyhow, bound to the necessities of life, it was not thought likely that demands for more liberties in this sphere would ever lead by themselves to the claim of freedom. Whatever the free world may think of the issue at stake in its conflict with totalitarianism, the totalitarian dictators themselves have shown in practice that they know very well that the difference in economic systems, far from constituting the hard core of final disagreement, is even the only one where concessions are possible.

Western misconception, she writes, is the opposite of what you allege. It’s not that the West was mistaken to regard the USSR as totalitarian. On the contrary, it’s that the capitalist West was under the impression they were merely competing with an authoritarian economic system, under which people yearned for the relative freedom of capitalism. Again, had that been the extent of it, peaceful coexistence might have been possible. The nature of totalitarianism means rhetoric, economics, etc were mere tools in the kit to further the movement’s goal of total world domination and absolute control. The means can change. The end does not. It’s what led western hubris to underestimate the durability of totalitarianism, in much the same way westerners have overestimated their ability to make others more like us today.

[Axalon]

Forgive my ignorance, but can someone explain to me what the actual point of contention is? If they are
several - please list them so I (and others) can get a grip on what all this is about?

- A

[Cyclops]

Forgive my ignorance, but can someone explain to me what the actual point of contention is? If they are
several - please list them so I (and others) can get a grip on what all this is about?

- A

There this brainlet trollbait that Nazis are Socialists, in an attempt to make "the left" feel bad. It gets trotted out from time to time. If you feel like entering the lists please enjoy yourself, but don't expect anything like an intelligent response. As you can see there hasn't been a coherent response to support the OP, just drivel.

[Lord Thesaurian]

There this brainlet trollbait that Nazis are Socialists, in an attempt to make "the left" feel bad. It gets trotted out from time to time. If you feel like entering the lists please enjoy yourself, but don't expect anything like an intelligent response. As you can see there hasn't been a coherent response to support the OP, just drivel.

That’s a deliberate misrepresentation of the thread, unfortunately. I wish it weren’t, because it would be a short conversation.

the Nazi economy shared many characteristics with the dominant [Soviet] socialist economy of the time. The National Socialists were socialist in practice as well as name.

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/han...onom00temi.pdf

If you don’t want to participate in the thread, I don’t see the point of firing off irrelevant and insulting blurbs while accusing everyone else of trolling.

[Kritias]

Despite your graphic imagery of hills, baileys and death, you missed my point. Both the OP and HH have argued consistently that Hitler’s regime was socialist here and in a previous thread. To prove this they have pointed to the USSR and Nazi Germany and proclaimed “ecce, socialism!”. This is entirely false, since the Nazi regime’s sole ideological ground-stone was pure race superiority. Racial ideology is entirely foreign to Marxism, and socialism in general. Marxism and socialism argue that working people of any country have more in common with each other than the capitalists ruling them.

1. The main difference between the Soviet system and Nazism lays in their antithesis of creation and destruction. For the Soviets the goal was the construction of a new society, the creation of the so-called Soviet Man, the creation of a socialist economy and a re-invention of politics and general civic being along totalitarian lines, where the Vanguard Party and its aim of triumphant socialism took precedence over anything else. The Nazis, on the contrary, had nothing to construct once they got into power. In fact, they used the existing social body, and the existing capitalist industrial capabilities and turned them towards the goal of destruction. The Nazi regime is so disconcerting and on a wholly different plane than the Soviet one precisely because it took advantage of a full-fledged and civilized society and turned it to wanton destruction that defied any concept of humanity. It was simple revenge for the defeat of WW1, a total war to regain what was lost and to punish those who stabbed the ‘master race’ in the back. The ‘creation’ of Nazis was therefore entirely negative; it meant creating the absence of something, mainly peoples who were deemed superfluous for the Nazi way of life, and not the creation of something new. Barring the total annihilation of all life regarded as sub-human, the Nazis had nothing to aspire to and would collapse under the weight of their crimes even if they won the war. Reason being, their whole ideology was based on permanent extermination which meant total, continuous war to feed the death factories. For these reasons, it’s hard to imagine the Nazi movement would survive Hitler even if the Nazis had won the war.

3. Similarly, it’s quite astounding to make the comparison between the Nazis and their pervetin-fuelled delirium of destruction and USSR’s totalitarianism, despite their organizational similarities. For once, the Soviet system really did improve the lives of the workers of the former Russian empire, which is precisely why it was so alluring as a system for the better part of the last century. Illiteracy was basically eradicated through the system of likbez; by 1937 literacy in the Soviet Union was 86% for men, and 65% for women – among the highest if not the highest in the world at that point. In comparison, India with all its colonial and capitalist development still has a third of the world’s illiterate people. Tertiary education was opened to working class people after the revolution and by 1941, the year the war started for the USSR, around 3.8 million Soviets were attending university – that’s the highest in the world at that point in time. The Soviet worker had rights the American worker has never seen under capitalism: free healthcare, 7-hour work days, paid vacations, maternity leave, a retirement age of 55-60 depending on the industry. Women were fully allowed in every aspect of social, work, political and military life almost 40 years before it started to become mainstream in the Western societies. No such boast can be made for Nazism – because their whole deal was simply to destroy. The soviets took a collection of pre-industrial societies and forcefully pushed them through industrialization. It wasn’t done without significant repression, just as it happened in the case of capitalism. Those who want to depict the Soviets as red fascists usually tend to forget a long history of work-houses and repression that followed the period of capitalist enclosures up until the 1900s. These aspects of capitalist development are consciously hidden, according to Chomsky, based on a new narrative after WW2 that capitalism defends human rights – which is also used as a tool for imperialist expansion.

4. The Soviet deportations were the darkest page of the Stalinist era, here we agree. And true, all these instances check the legal definition, if not the moral definition of genocide. Agreed again. However, you fail to make a distinction between Stalin’s policies and the communist dogma; if deportations are endemic to communism, then Khrushchev wouldn’t have denounced these practices as crimes in his published speech “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences”. Which, incidentally, is the only case of a nation freely denouncing its own crimes to date. Similarly, if deportations were an ideological byproduct the praxis of deportation would have continued throughout the soviet regime until 1991, instead of being limited to the years of Stalin. On the contrary, if a government today would pick up Mein Kampf as a guidebook of policy, the extermination of those viewed as subhuman would naturally occur as a byproduct. Because the extermination is endemic to Nazi ideology, it’s its main cornerstone. The only difference would be the alteration of those seen as subhuman according to the specific needs of the government. In addition, you forget to mention that while Nazi extermination not only was done for its own shake but politicized as such as well, the Soviet deportations did not aim at the physical extermination of peoples, only their territorial removal to break-up ethnic-tensions and nationalisms. Most of these ethnicities were also moved during the war years, as collective punishment to what was alleged as Nazi collaboration, and deportations stopped soon after Stalin died, never to be repeated in USSR history. The political motivations behind claims of similarity are revealed in the numbers themselves. It’s impossible for the numbers to vary so wildly from archival evidence, with estimates mounting to dozens of millions of dead while the official records show casualties between one and two million people. This couldn’t have happened without this variation having an ulterior motive. We know how many people the Nazis killed down to a single digit because of their record-keeping: any under-estimation is laughed away as Nazi apology, and any over-estimation is similarly scoffed at as simple zealotry. In the Soviet case we have the reverse; archival evidence is suppressed, and proven over-estimations are still propagated. The reason is simple: this serves a political purpose on the one hand, and careers were made on sensationalism on the other. It’s been thirty years since the archives of the Soviet Union have opened, and in that time, multiple researches have been conducted that show the true length of the crimes committed under the Stalinist regime. It’s time we left back the Cold War propaganda. In one short sentence: yes, both were crimes but, no, they are not comparable.

5. Following the death of Stalin nothing of what Arendt observed in 1951 continued to exist in any significant way; Stalin’s death, unlike Lenin’s, did not give rise to a new Stalin; in fact, no subsequent soviet communist leader ever reached the power Stalin had, nor did the image of the leader played any effective part in social or political life afterwards. No one was afraid to stop clapping for Brezhnev for example. Mass terror and mass labour camps also begun to be eclipsed after Stalin until they effectively disappeared; Khrushchev’s ascent to power wasn’t followed by a new purge of dissidents, or a wave of mass arrests like in the Stalinist era. To the contrary, Khrushchev released prisoners en masse. Arrest of dissidents in general stopped at apparent behaviour, rather than total control of ideology and were no comparison to the Stalinist arrests. The irrationality of inefficiency also gave way to actual efficiency if one considers the Soviet military industrial complex; the construction of reality also ceased to be, compared to the deliriously shifting narratives of the Stalinist era; Soviet reality equaled to the usual State propaganda. Ideological control also gradually gave way in social and political life. It’s telling that right after Stalin you have Soviet movies like the adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace coming out, devoid of any ideology, compared to the ideological movies produced in the first twenty years of the regime where Papa Stalin made guest appearances. Such things would have been unthinkable under Stalin. In short, the permanent war psychology that characterized the Stalinist era, with the myriad enemies and counterrevolutionaries under every crook and cranny, simply ceased to be. To reduce the Soviet experiment to the Stalinist era alone is simply erroneous. The fact you chose a book that was written before Stalin died to prove a point is also telling of your disregard of the process the USSR underwent. De-Stalinization was the road off totalitarianism.

4. The accusation of world domination is shaky because every world power that has ever existed has strived for world domination insofar its capabilities have allowed them. In the case of Soviet world domination, these declarations were limited to the export of their socioeconomic system abroad and the domination of the Eastern Bloc. For reference, ever since its inception capitalism has been established on the barrel of a gun, whether it is in Afghanistan until recently or enforcing it in Chile through a dictatorship during the sixties. Additionally, it is hypocritical to speak of a Soviet ‘world domination’ scheme when the current superpower has more than 800 military bases over 70 countries, and more than 200.000 soldiers active in 170 countries. What’s more, the rhetoric of an impending Soviet world domination has led to this current American world domination, first on the rhetoric of containment that justified military interventions, coups, dictatorships and death squads and currently, riding the wave of human rights that justifies military interventions, coups, dictatorships and death squads. Leveling this accusation when your preferred system is doing the exact same thing for the past 70 years is just hypocritical. In one sentence: peace wasn’t untenable because the Soviets were after world domination, but because both sides wanted world domination. The United States won this war, and now they are casting the Soviets as the villains. This is all this amounts to.

5. The accusation of forced labour as a unique characteristic of the Soviets and the Nazis is also ill-informed if you consider that even today the US makes use of penal labour through the prison system, where prisoners make around 1$ an hour before deductions. Not all prisoners are paid, either. Capitalism, as you can see, is not and has never been averse to using involuntary labour. In fact, the US has the highest percentage of prisoners per capita in the world to this day, higher even than China. Prisoners in the USSR were paid from the 1950s, and monetary bonuses were around since 1930s. Equally ill-informed is the accusation that the entire soviet economy run on slaves, when statistics show that penal labour in the US supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Again, this is levelling an accusation while looking the other way when your preferred system is doing it.

6. The accusation of political repression, and that the government acts as an occupier against its own people as a unique characteristic of totalitarian governments is also false. Taking Greece as an example, the re-establishment of free market capitalism following the German occupation led to a British-backed, and later an American-backed civil war. This lasted five years and saw the field testing of napalm in 1949 at Grammos, thousands exiled to remote island prisons (which the then democratically elected government referred to as “the Parthenons of Modern Greece”), a society where to be able to work one needed police papers of ‘political rehabilitation’ if they had family members arrested (familial responsibility), and decades of junta-like government until the 1980s. It created a “free democratic” perversion that was internationally hailed then as the Greek economic miracle of the 50s, with governments being elected through widespread fraud (dead people seemingly voted for the right-wing government of ERE, bringing the population of towns to exceed their living people). Oh, an actual military junta from 1964-1973. Greece isn’t the only example where such practices accompanied capitalist interventions. Latin America has seen plenty of such cases. So, spare us the high-browed rhetoric. The coin has two sides.

7. The accusation about Soviet anti-Semitism boils down to the doctor’s plot and Stalin’s campaign against the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ of that same period, as well as snide comments made against Trotsky’s Jewish background. Suffice to say that as soon as Stalin died, the whole issue was dropped and was declared a fabrication by Malenkov. No deportation ever happened, and certainly no death camps were constructed to liquidate these or any other people. In the minds of Soviet peoples, anti-Semitism was closely tied to Nazi Germany, and any attempt at organized antisemitism lacked any civilian backing. Another flair would go up during Brezhnev who publicly denounced anti-Semitism and took measures to support religious minorities. Naturally, a collection of countries steeped in centuries of anti-Semitism – as was the entirety of Europe – could not have solved the issue of antisemitism in four decades; you’re accusing the USSR of going through similar issues and processes as the rest of Europe at that time. Worse, you’re comparing the Soviet reaction to antisemitism, which definitely did not plan to exterminate Jews, to the Nazis. This is a dubious double-standard.
8. So that you don’t think I am accusing Arendt out of thin air, here’s a quote for the article “Nazism, Culture and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil.”

To be sure, naive readers may have been a little puzzled, if not disconcerted, by her insistence on the absolute centrality of the Jews in the creation and maintenance of the modem state and economy, their instinctive alliances with ruling elites and concomitant deep alienation from "society" and the implication - as yet not explicitly spelled out - that the Jews bore some responsibility for their predicament, that indeed their actions and roles were not disconnected from the emergence of modem antisemitism.16 It was, of course, only later in 1963, when Eichmann In Jerusalem appeared, that this thesis was radicalized, and the Jewish leadership indicted as an indispensable, complicit factor in the extermination of the Jews. Only then was the outraged attention of critics - in search of the genealogy of these views - drawn to this submerged theme in The Origins. Indeed, within the context of the ideological war triggered by the Eichmann book, Arendt's most virulent opponents went so far as to claim that her views echoed those aired in Mein Kampf, that her portrait of the determinative centrality of the Jew within the State simply repeated the Nazi view.17 The debate has not ceased since then (and I thus shall not belabor it here).18

To summarize, the discussion we’re having is characterized by the extensive use of double-standards. Everything you level against the totalitarian USSR was simultaneously being conducted by the capitalist nations, for similar reasons. If world domination is condemnable in one case, then it has to be on the other also. If forced labour is condemnable on the one case, so must it be on the other. If political repression and terror is condemnable under communism, so must it be under capitalism. The only argument you raise is basically “yes, but they did it to their own people!” as if doing it to people abroad is somehow better. Worse, aside the capitalist core, capitalist countries repressed their own citizenry heavily to establish free market capitalism. In Chile dissenters were thrown off helicopters to their deaths to suppress opposition to a US-backed dictatorship.

Of course, this will be dismissed as whataboutism. The problem with the whataboutism accusation is that itself is a whataboutism: the criticism of the tu quoque fallacy is that it diverts the attention from the accusation without disproving it; by accusing an argument as whataboutism, you essentially dismiss accusations of your own conduct, and instead focus on another’s – a typical double-standard. That’s what makes whataboutism an effective strategy in the first place. It shows the hypocrisy of an accusation by revealing the same actions done by the accuser. An effective way to disprove a whataboutism argument would be to prove the moral superiority of your own position. Unfortunately, capitalism uses totalitarian elements to establish itself so that moral superiority remains under question. The use of whataboutism against any mention of capitalist atrocities when the soviet regime is discussed is purely a political way to say “only communist victims merit our attention, never mind the others”. Simply put, it’s garbage.

The focus on a book written in 1951 also completely disregards the latter 40 years of Soviet history. This gives out a skewed view because, like any revolution, the history of the Soviet Union is more violent closer to its inception rather than its maturity. Revolutions are by definition violent overthrows of what has been before them. The same arguments marshalled against the October revolution had been marshalled centuries back against the French revolution that gave birth to capitalism in continental Europe by decapitating the ancient regime. Similarly to the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks became obsessed over people plotting to bring about the end of the revolution during the first decades, and widespread atrocities and repression happened. What Marat writes in the Friend of the People could easily have been written in Pravda during the heyday of the Bolsheviks. Similarly to the French Revolution, the USSR fell at the hands of their own “Bonaparte” when the dust settled. And if you know your history, then you know that Bonaparte was basically depicted as evil incarnate during those times by the Quadruple Alliance nations. In the case of the Soviets, since the position of devil incarnate was occupied by Hitler, efforts are made to elevate Stalin to equal standing. And just like Bonaparte, this elevation is purely political.

Aside from the above, Nazi collaboration with capitalists, both native and foreign, has been proven and links have been provided both by me and Morticia. Ford industries were making the turbines for V2 rockets that fell on London; IBM developed the cataloguing methods for the Jewish extermination; IG Farben both developed Zycklon B, and took advantage of the Nazi expansion to enrich themselves. It’s amazing to even deny this when German companies like Siemens have a disclaimers on their own website to acknowledge responsibility over profiteering during the war, as well as admitting that despite government regulation, Siemens and other German companies had significant leeway to operate as they wanted – and still chose to enrich themselves. I quote from Siemen’s about page, 1933-1945 sub-page:

The German electrical industry – like the rest of the country’s economy – profited from the upswing that began soon after the Nazis took power in 1933. Under the Nazis, the German economy grew noticeably from the mid-1930s until the end of World War II. This growth was based almost entirely on government armaments contracts. As the leader in the German electrical industry, Siemens’ revenue – like that of other major companies – increased continuously from 1934 and reached its peak during the war years.
Carl Friedrich von Siemens was head of the company from 1933 to 1941. A staunch advocate of democracy, he detested the Nazi dictatorship. However, he was responsible for ensuring the company’s well-being (cc: here, read profit) and continued existence.
Although the German economy was increasingly regulated by the government, the industrial sector was granted a certain amount of leeway. For the most part, Siemens was able to restrict its manufacturing activities in the armaments area to the production of electrical goods and to avoid producing goods outside its traditional portfolio. Even during wartime, the company’s production of typical war goods such as weapons and ammunition was limited. Nevertheless, from the end of 1943 on, Siemens primarily manufactured electrical equipment for the armed forces.
At the end of the 1930s, the regime’s demand for armaments began to intensify. Without the aid of foreign workers, the manufacturing sector could no longer meet this demand. After the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, this situation worsened since growing numbers of qualified employees at the company’s various plants were drafted for military service. The use of forced labor was seen as the only way to compensate for labor shortages.

Starting in 1940, Siemens relied increasingly on forced laborers to maintain production levels. These laborers included people from territories occupied by the German military, prisoners of war, Jews, Sinti, Roma and, in the final phases of the war, concentration camp inmates. During the entire period from 1940 to 1945, at least 80,000 forced laborers worked at Siemens.

As you can see from Siemen’s own story, the sweet, sweet armament contracts exceeded the owner’s inherent anti-nazism. Of course, this is justified because the company’s future was at his hands, so the company leadership gravely decided to make a profit using slave labour – 80,000 of them – to meet the war demands. Foreign assets were taken over at a pittance, 400 facilities in total, so that Siemens continued its production. Notice there’s no mention to the board of directors being coerced, intimidated, or otherwise forced to cooperate – the only justification given is that Siemens needed to continue working. That’s it. No apology of Nazi Terror like you claim. The only thing you find is an admission of former guilt.

[Heathen Hammer]

You literally wrote a wall of text, while each argument in it has already been consistently debunked. Socialist regimes often purge other socialists, they have racial and ethnic elements in their ideology and they collaborate with capitalists when it works for them. This applies to Soviet regime, this applies to social-nationalist regimes in Central Europe and it applies to Marxist regimes throughout Cold War. The rest is just offtopic neo-Marxist revisionism, especially whole "Soviets actually improved workers conditions" part. I don't recall workers die from famine in Russian Empire in tens of millions. Last time Russia had a major famine even near in proportions ot what Lenin and his cronies caused was back in 1600s. Nuff said.

[athanaric]

Imagine unironically defending Marxism in 2021.

Despite your graphic imagery of hills, baileys and death, you missed my point. Both the OP and HH have argued consistently that Hitler’s regime was socialist here and in a previous thread.

Many people are too eager to associate or disassociate NS with Marxism because NS for them has taken the place of the literal devil instead of being a man-made evil cult like so many others. While it is true that NS, Marxism, and Fascism have many things in common (being totalitarian, anti-individual and collectivist by default), the most similar thing to National Socialism today is actually Critical Race Theory and its ancillary beliefs.

To prove this they have pointed to the USSR and Nazi Germany and proclaimed “ecce, socialism!”. This is entirely false, since the Nazi regime’s sole ideological ground-stone was pure race superiority. Racial ideology is entirely foreign to Marxism, and socialism in general.

And you've conveniently defined "socialism" as being de facto identical with Marxism.

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

Despite your graphic imagery of hills, baileys and death, you missed my point. Both the OP and HH have argued consistently that Hitler’s regime was socialist here and in a previous thread. To prove this they have pointed to the USSR and Nazi Germany and proclaimed “ecce, socialism!”. This is entirely false, since the Nazi regime’s sole ideological ground-stone was pure race superiority. Racial ideology is entirely foreign to Marxism, and socialism in general. Marxism and socialism argue that working people of any country have more in common with each other than the capitalists ruling them.

1. The main difference between the Soviet system and Nazism lays in their antithesis of creation and destruction. For the Soviets the goal was the construction of a new society, the creation of the so-called Soviet Man, the creation of a socialist economy and a re-invention of politics and general civic being along totalitarian lines, where the Vanguard Party and its aim of triumphant socialism took precedence over anything else. The Nazis, on the contrary, had nothing to construct once they got into power. In fact, they used the existing social body, and the existing capitalist industrial capabilities and turned them towards the goal of destruction. The Nazi regime is so disconcerting and on a wholly different plane than the Soviet one precisely because it took advantage of a full-fledged and civilized society and turned it to wanton destruction that defied any concept of humanity. It was simple revenge for the defeat of WW1, a total war to regain what was lost and to punish those who stabbed the ‘master race’ in the back. The ‘creation’ of Nazis was therefore entirely negative; it meant creating the absence of something, mainly peoples who were deemed superfluous for the Nazi way of life, and not the creation of something new. Barring the total annihilation of all life regarded as sub-human, the Nazis had nothing to aspire to and would collapse under the weight of their crimes even if they won the war. Reason being, their whole ideology was based on permanent extermination which meant total, continuous war to feed the death factories. For these reasons, it’s hard to imagine the Nazi movement would survive Hitler even if the Nazis had won the war.

3. Similarly, it’s quite astounding to make the comparison between the Nazis and their pervetin-fuelled delirium of destruction and USSR’s totalitarianism, despite their organizational similarities. For once, the Soviet system really did improve the lives of the workers of the former Russian empire, which is precisely why it was so alluring as a system for the better part of the last century. Illiteracy was basically eradicated through the system of likbez; by 1937 literacy in the Soviet Union was 86% for men, and 65% for women – among the highest if not the highest in the world at that point. In comparison, India with all its colonial and capitalist development still has a third of the world’s illiterate people. Tertiary education was opened to working class people after the revolution and by 1941, the year the war started for the USSR, around 3.8 million Soviets were attending university – that’s the highest in the world at that point in time. The Soviet worker had rights the American worker has never seen under capitalism: free healthcare, 7-hour work days, paid vacations, maternity leave, a retirement age of 55-60 depending on the industry. Women were fully allowed in every aspect of social, work, political and military life almost 40 years before it started to become mainstream in the Western societies. No such boast can be made for Nazism – because their whole deal was simply to destroy. The soviets took a collection of pre-industrial societies and forcefully pushed them through industrialization. It wasn’t done without significant repression, just as it happened in the case of capitalism. Those who want to depict the Soviets as red fascists usually tend to forget a long history of work-houses and repression that followed the period of capitalist enclosures up until the 1900s. These aspects of capitalist development are consciously hidden, according to Chomsky, based on a new narrative after WW2 that capitalism defends human rights – which is also used as a tool for imperialist expansion.

4. The Soviet deportations were the darkest page of the Stalinist era, here we agree. And true, all these instances check the legal definition, if not the moral definition of genocide. Agreed again. However, you fail to make a distinction between Stalin’s policies and the communist dogma; if deportations are endemic to communism, then Khrushchev wouldn’t have denounced these practices as crimes in his published speech “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences”. Which, incidentally, is the only case of a nation freely denouncing its own crimes to date. Similarly, if deportations were an ideological byproduct the praxis of deportation would have continued throughout the soviet regime until 1991, instead of being limited to the years of Stalin. On the contrary, if a government today would pick up Mein Kampf as a guidebook of policy, the extermination of those viewed as subhuman would naturally occur as a byproduct. Because the extermination is endemic to Nazi ideology, it’s its main cornerstone. The only difference would be the alteration of those seen as subhuman according to the specific needs of the government. In addition, you forget to mention that while Nazi extermination not only was done for its own shake but politicized as such as well, the Soviet deportations did not aim at the physical extermination of peoples, only their territorial removal to break-up ethnic-tensions and nationalisms. Most of these ethnicities were also moved during the war years, as collective punishment to what was alleged as Nazi collaboration, and deportations stopped soon after Stalin died, never to be repeated in USSR history. The political motivations behind claims of similarity are revealed in the numbers themselves. It’s impossible for the numbers to vary so wildly from archival evidence, with estimates mounting to dozens of millions of dead while the official records show casualties between one and two million people. This couldn’t have happened without this variation having an ulterior motive. We know how many people the Nazis killed down to a single digit because of their record-keeping: any under-estimation is laughed away as Nazi apology, and any over-estimation is similarly scoffed at as simple zealotry. In the Soviet case we have the reverse; archival evidence is suppressed, and proven over-estimations are still propagated. The reason is simple: this serves a political purpose on the one hand, and careers were made on sensationalism on the other. It’s been thirty years since the archives of the Soviet Union have opened, and in that time, multiple researches have been conducted that show the true length of the crimes committed under the Stalinist regime. It’s time we left back the Cold War propaganda. In one short sentence: yes, both were crimes but, no, they are not comparable.

5. Following the death of Stalin nothing of what Arendt observed in 1951 continued to exist in any significant way; Stalin’s death, unlike Lenin’s, did not give rise to a new Stalin; in fact, no subsequent soviet communist leader ever reached the power Stalin had, nor did the image of the leader played any effective part in social or political life afterwards. No one was afraid to stop clapping for Brezhnev for example. Mass terror and mass labour camps also begun to be eclipsed after Stalin until they effectively disappeared; Khrushchev’s ascent to power wasn’t followed by a new purge of dissidents, or a wave of mass arrests like in the Stalinist era. To the contrary, Khrushchev released prisoners en masse. Arrest of dissidents in general stopped at apparent behaviour, rather than total control of ideology and were no comparison to the Stalinist arrests. The irrationality of inefficiency also gave way to actual efficiency if one considers the Soviet military industrial complex; the construction of reality also ceased to be, compared to the deliriously shifting narratives of the Stalinist era; Soviet reality equaled to the usual State propaganda. Ideological control also gradually gave way in social and political life. It’s telling that right after Stalin you have Soviet movies like the adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace coming out, devoid of any ideology, compared to the ideological movies produced in the first twenty years of the regime where Papa Stalin made guest appearances. Such things would have been unthinkable under Stalin. In short, the permanent war psychology that characterized the Stalinist era, with the myriad enemies and counterrevolutionaries under every crook and cranny, simply ceased to be. To reduce the Soviet experiment to the Stalinist era alone is simply erroneous. The fact you chose a book that was written before Stalin died to prove a point is also telling of your disregard of the process the USSR underwent. De-Stalinization was the road off totalitarianism.

4. The accusation of world domination is shaky because every world power that has ever existed has strived for world domination insofar its capabilities have allowed them. In the case of Soviet world domination, these declarations were limited to the export of their socioeconomic system abroad and the domination of the Eastern Bloc. For reference, ever since its inception capitalism has been established on the barrel of a gun, whether it is in Afghanistan until recently or enforcing it in Chile through a dictatorship during the sixties. Additionally, it is hypocritical to speak of a Soviet ‘world domination’ scheme when the current superpower has more than 800 military bases over 70 countries, and more than 200.000 soldiers active in 170 countries. What’s more, the rhetoric of an impending Soviet world domination has led to this current American world domination, first on the rhetoric of containment that justified military interventions, coups, dictatorships and death squads and currently, riding the wave of human rights that justifies military interventions, coups, dictatorships and death squads. Leveling this accusation when your preferred system is doing the exact same thing for the past 70 years is just hypocritical. In one sentence: peace wasn’t untenable because the Soviets were after world domination, but because both sides wanted world domination. The United States won this war, and now they are casting the Soviets as the villains. This is all this amounts to.

5. The accusation of forced labour as a unique characteristic of the Soviets and the Nazis is also ill-informed if you consider that even today the US makes use of penal labour through the prison system, where prisoners make around 1$ an hour before deductions. Not all prisoners are paid, either. Capitalism, as you can see, is not and has never been averse to using involuntary labour. In fact, the US has the highest percentage of prisoners per capita in the world to this day, higher even than China. Prisoners in the USSR were paid from the 1950s, and monetary bonuses were around since 1930s. Equally ill-informed is the accusation that the entire soviet economy run on slaves, when statistics show that penal labour in the US supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Again, this is levelling an accusation while looking the other way when your preferred system is doing it.

6. The accusation of political repression, and that the government acts as an occupier against its own people as a unique characteristic of totalitarian governments is also false. Taking Greece as an example, the re-establishment of free market capitalism following the German occupation led to a British-backed, and later an American-backed civil war. This lasted five years and saw the field testing of napalm in 1949 at Grammos, thousands exiled to remote island prisons (which the then democratically elected government referred to as “the Parthenons of Modern Greece”), a society where to be able to work one needed police papers of ‘political rehabilitation’ if they had family members arrested (familial responsibility), and decades of junta-like government until the 1980s. It created a “free democratic” perversion that was internationally hailed then as the Greek economic miracle of the 50s, with governments being elected through widespread fraud (dead people seemingly voted for the right-wing government of ERE, bringing the population of towns to exceed their living people). Oh, an actual military junta from 1964-1973. Greece isn’t the only example where such practices accompanied capitalist interventions. Latin America has seen plenty of such cases. So, spare us the high-browed rhetoric. The coin has two sides.

7. The accusation about Soviet anti-Semitism boils down to the doctor’s plot and Stalin’s campaign against the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ of that same period, as well as snide comments made against Trotsky’s Jewish background. Suffice to say that as soon as Stalin died, the whole issue was dropped and was declared a fabrication by Malenkov. No deportation ever happened, and certainly no death camps were constructed to liquidate these or any other people. In the minds of Soviet peoples, anti-Semitism was closely tied to Nazi Germany, and any attempt at organized antisemitism lacked any civilian backing. Another flair would go up during Brezhnev who publicly denounced anti-Semitism and took measures to support religious minorities. Naturally, a collection of countries steeped in centuries of anti-Semitism – as was the entirety of Europe – could not have solved the issue of antisemitism in four decades; you’re accusing the USSR of going through similar issues and processes as the rest of Europe at that time. Worse, you’re comparing the Soviet reaction to antisemitism, which definitely did not plan to exterminate Jews, to the Nazis. This is a dubious double-standard.
8. So that you don’t think I am accusing Arendt out of thin air, here’s a quote for the article “Nazism, Culture and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil.”



To summarize, the discussion we’re having is characterized by the extensive use of double-standards. Everything you level against the totalitarian USSR was simultaneously being conducted by the capitalist nations, for similar reasons. If world domination is condemnable in one case, then it has to be on the other also. If forced labour is condemnable on the one case, so must it be on the other. If political repression and terror is condemnable under communism, so must it be under capitalism. The only argument you raise is basically “yes, but they did it to their own people!” as if doing it to people abroad is somehow better. Worse, aside the capitalist core, capitalist countries repressed their own citizenry heavily to establish free market capitalism. In Chile dissenters were thrown off helicopters to their deaths to suppress opposition to a US-backed dictatorship.

Of course, this will be dismissed as whataboutism. The problem with the whataboutism accusation is that itself is a whataboutism: the criticism of the tu quoque fallacy is that it diverts the attention from the accusation without disproving it; by accusing an argument as whataboutism, you essentially dismiss accusations of your own conduct, and instead focus on another’s – a typical double-standard. That’s what makes whataboutism an effective strategy in the first place. It shows the hypocrisy of an accusation by revealing the same actions done by the accuser. An effective way to disprove a whataboutism argument would be to prove the moral superiority of your own position. Unfortunately, capitalism uses totalitarian elements to establish itself so that moral superiority remains under question. The use of whataboutism against any mention of capitalist atrocities when the soviet regime is discussed is purely a political way to say “only communist victims merit our attention, never mind the others”. Simply put, it’s garbage.

The focus on a book written in 1951 also completely disregards the latter 40 years of Soviet history. This gives out a skewed view because, like any revolution, the history of the Soviet Union is more violent closer to its inception rather than its maturity. Revolutions are by definition violent overthrows of what has been before them. The same arguments marshalled against the October revolution had been marshalled centuries back against the French revolution that gave birth to capitalism in continental Europe by decapitating the ancient regime. Similarly to the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks became obsessed over people plotting to bring about the end of the revolution during the first decades, and widespread atrocities and repression happened. What Marat writes in the Friend of the People could easily have been written in Pravda during the heyday of the Bolsheviks. Similarly to the French Revolution, the USSR fell at the hands of their own “Bonaparte” when the dust settled. And if you know your history, then you know that Bonaparte was basically depicted as evil incarnate during those times by the Quadruple Alliance nations. In the case of the Soviets, since the position of devil incarnate was occupied by Hitler, efforts are made to elevate Stalin to equal standing. And just like Bonaparte, this elevation is purely political.

Aside from the above, Nazi collaboration with capitalists, both native and foreign, has been proven and links have been provided both by me and Morticia. Ford industries were making the turbines for V2 rockets that fell on London; IBM developed the cataloguing methods for the Jewish extermination; IG Farben both developed Zycklon B, and took advantage of the Nazi expansion to enrich themselves. It’s amazing to even deny this when German companies like Siemens have a disclaimers on their own website to acknowledge responsibility over profiteering during the war, as well as admitting that despite government regulation, Siemens and other German companies had significant leeway to operate as they wanted – and still chose to enrich themselves. I quote from Siemen’s about page, 1933-1945 sub-page:



As you can see from Siemen’s own story, the sweet, sweet armament contracts exceeded the owner’s inherent anti-nazism. Of course, this is justified because the company’s future was at his hands, so the company leadership gravely decided to make a profit using slave labour – 80,000 of them – to meet the war demands. Foreign assets were taken over at a pittance, 400 facilities in total, so that Siemens continued its production. Notice there’s no mention to the board of directors being coerced, intimidated, or otherwise forced to cooperate – the only justification given is that Siemens needed to continue working. That’s it. No apology of Nazi Terror like you claim. The only thing you find is an admission of former guilt.

Very good post. I will add an article, how lucrative the Nazi Regime was for "poor , forced by nazis to make profits" german industrials:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Bahlsen, Flick and Co. How family businesses deal with Nazi forced labor

Many traditional family businesses employed forced laborers in National Socialist Germany. The processing often only takes place under pressure from the media and continues to this day. In many cases, it did not begin until decades after the end of World War II.

From Otto Langels

“The Reimann family has been very concerned with the historical background of their company and especially with the things that took place during the time of National Socialism and in the run-up to it; precisely because of the knowledge that members of the Reimann family were also National Socialists in the 20s and then in the 30s and also supported the development of National Socialism in their areas. "

Andreas Eberhardt is the managing director of the Alfred Landecker Foundation, an institution recently founded by the Reimann family that supports former Nazi victims. The Reimanns are one of the richest families in Germany with an estimated fortune of 20 to 30 billion euros, they are involved in companies in the food, cosmetics and detergent industries such as Jacobs-Kaffee, Schweppes and Calgon.

The things “during the Nazi era, which Andreas Eberhardt addresses discreetly, refer to events in the Benckiser company, a chemical company from Ludwigshafen owned by the Reimann family.

“There was forced labor at Benckiser. We are at just over 800 forced laborers who worked at Benckiser during the Nazi era. The majority of these people came from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. "

An astonishing phenomenon: only more than 70 years after the end of National Socialism does a family begin to investigate how their ancestors had benefited from the Nazi economic policy and how they were involved in the crimes of the Nazi regime.

Late work-up

But the Reimanns are not an isolated case. Well-known entrepreneurial dynasties such as the Quandts, Bahlsens, Oetkers and Flicks only began to deal with their past decades after the end of the Second World War, and then more out of necessity than voluntarily.

“Even when I was shown the work, I couldn't do it. Master pushed and hit me over and over again. I worked there for maybe two weeks, then I was kicked out and got an even worse job. Not that I shirked it, I wanted to work, but I just couldn't do it. "

Jerzy Jeliński was kidnapped in 1942 as a fourteen-year-old boy from Lodz, Poland, to Germany, where he had to work in a joinery, a chemical company and finally at the blast furnace of the Spandauer Stahlindustrie, a company of the Flick concern.

“This heat! There were gloves, but they were burned out, the fingertips were visible, it was like working with your bare hands. There was also a fire on the feet, there were no shoes, only such slippers, often with holes so that the toes peeked out. The sweat just ran down you. Where should a boy get his strength from? Where does the power come from? I was only 16 years old. So where does the power come from? "

Jerzy Jelinski was one of millions of foreigners who the Nazi regime deported to Germany as forced laborers. They were urgently needed during World War II because the regime sent the German men to the front. Many companies, especially in the armaments industry, were only able to maintain their production with the help of forced labor. The use of cheap labor was also profitable.

Christine Glauning, Head of the Documentation Center for Nazi Forced Labor in Berlin-Schöneweide: “We estimate that around 13 million people from the occupied territories of Europe were put to work in the German Reich, ie men, women and, during the war, many young people and children . They were used for forced labor everywhere in Germany, in the large armaments factories, but also in churches, municipalities, smaller craft businesses, bakeries, gardeners and also in private households. "

War crimes and crimes against humanity

Of the 13 million forced laborers, around 2.7 million died due to poor working and living conditions, including 1.1 million Soviet prisoners of war, the same number of concentration camp prisoners and 500,000 civilian workers.

In 1947, Friedrich Flick, as CEO, had to answer to a US military tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the fifth of a total of twelve follow-up trials in Nuremberg.

The prosecution accused Friedrich Flick of gigantic slave labor. In December 1947 he was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was released in the spring of 1950 and from then on enjoyed the role of the powerless victim in the face of an unscrupulous terror regime. In this he hardly differed from the majority of Germans. All federal governments and almost all companies refused to accept responsibility for forced labor, exploitation and mistreatment.

“There was simply no awareness of injustice in the post-war period, as there was not, by the way, during the war itself. Forced laborers were so ubiquitous that they were seen as a normal part of the war. And that continued after 1945. And it has also not played a role for decades when it comes to questions of remembering forced labor. "

Claims for compensation have been rejected for decades. The reason: Nazi forced labor was not an injustice, but a measure to eliminate the war-related labor shortage. Only after German reunification did a discussion about forced labor and compensation arise in the 1990s, but only under pressure from abroad, especially from the USA, where calls for boycotts and class actions against German companies threatened.

“It was only through external pressure that the German state and the German economy agreed on the so-called compensation fund, the establishment of the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation, from which in the years 2000 to 2007 around 1.66 million former members Forced laborers a certain amount of money was paid out. If you put the payments of the individual businesses in relation to what was also benefited, the amounts were always comparatively small, which of course could also be deducted from tax. "

The public sector had to provide compensation

German companies contributed only half of a total of around five billion euros to the compensation fund of the foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”, or EVZ for short, the other half had to be funded by the public sector. The former forced laborers received a maximum of 7,700 euros per person.

Friedrich Christian Flick, one of the heirs of the Flick Group, paid five million euros into the fund in 2005, but only after massive criticism of his initially negative attitude. Financial experts estimated the amount at one percent of his private assets. After all, four years earlier he had founded the F.C. Flick Foundation against Xenophobia, Racism and Intolerance, drawing lessons from his grandfather's collaboration with the Nazi regime.

Susanne Krause-Hinrichs is the managing director of the Potsdam-based foundation. “The aim of the foundation is to work for a democratic, peaceful society, to prevent racism, to prevent anti-Semitism. And that in East Germany, and the target group are children and young people. "

The foundation supports around 50 projects per year with a total of 350,000 euros. For the founder Friedrich Christian Flick it is an obligation and a personal concern to stand up for democratic values, says Susanne Krause-Hinrichs and cites the project “Music creates perspective” in Potsdam as an example.

“We work with children in the so-called prefabricated building district and finance the cooperation with the local Potsdam orchestra for years. You can see it in the children, how it worked, how open they have become and what kind of culture has come in, also in connection with the parents, who have now also accepted that which has then spread to the whole district. "

The Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center has existed on the historic site since 2006, in the barracks of a former forced labor camp in Berlin-Schöneweide. There women were housed who had to work in the Pertrix battery factory, a company belonging to the Quandt corporate empire. With their stake in the BMW Group, the Quandts are now one of the richest German families.

"The Quandts' Silence"

Christine Glauning, the director of the Documentation Center: “The Quandt family got involved in the Documentation Center for Nazi Forced Labor with a large amount of around five million. The confrontation of this family business with its own history, where more than 57,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners were deployed, took a very long time, as in many other cases. And the impetus came from outside through a documentary film “The Silence of the Quandts” in the early 2000s, which, so to speak, got the story rolling and got the family to grapple with their own family history. One result was the work-up. We were able to carry out a contemporary witness project, work out an exhibition and set up an international youth meeting place. "

One of the forced laborers who had to manufacture battery cases under extreme conditions at Pertrix is ​​Olena Werschezka. In 1942, at the age of 17, she was abducted from what is now western Ukraine. The trip to Berlin in a freight wagon took two weeks. In retrospect, she compared her accommodation to a pig or cowshed.

“We were only given very bad food, only turnips the whole time. And bread with wood shavings only once a day. It looked like white bread, but wood flour trickled out with wood shavings. Some couldn't eat it and died. Then they gave us something green, like spinach, I couldn't look at it, but I made myself eat it. That's how I survived. "

Due to public pressure, the Quandt family commissioned a study to research their own company history. The author was the Bonn historian Joachim Scholtyseck.

“First of all, you have to say that it would be alien for a company to have been able to refuse forced labor. But it came down to how you employed these slave laborers. There was room for maneuver. And this room for maneuver, it has to be said, was not exploited in the Quandt companies. Sometimes survival also made a difference whether you got a slice of bread more or less a day. "

It is noticeable that families like the Quandts, Flicks or Reimanns only faced their own history after decades, and mostly not on their own initiative, but under pressure from outside. But why should it be any different in entrepreneurial dynasties than in average German families, where involvement in National Socialism was long suppressed and kept silent or was never discussed?

“You can just imagine that in a family it is painful to detach yourself from such an image that the grandfather was a great hero after all. And such a process of detachment is never and cannot be very easy. I know this from my own family. And there are certainly plenty of other examples. "

Recognizing entanglements

The Reimann family went through a similar process, says Andreas Eberhardt. Before he became managing director of the Alfred Landecker Foundation, he headed the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future. “That is perhaps also a question of generations. The recognition of entanglements, of social responsibility also in the corporate sector, has led, especially when you look at today's conditions, developments and also the threats to democracy again, here again, I think, to be active in an extraordinary way. "

The family history of the Reimanns is particularly tragic, because in it both perpetrators and victims can be found. The company patriarchs Albert Reimann senior and Albert Reimann junior were staunch National Socialists and anti-Semites. They employed slave labor and actively supported the Nazi regime. But there was also Alfred Landecker, who gave the foundation its name and was closely connected to the family.

“Alfred Landecker was a German Jew who lived in Mannheim who had a family there. His daughter had a relationship with one of the Reimanns. This relationship also resulted in children who still hold shares in companies today. Alfred Landecker tried desperately to save his family during the Nazi era. Alfred Landecker was deported to a Polish ghetto. And there, it is always said, his trail is lost. "

The Reimanns are currently having a historian investigate the background to the family history. He should also research the exact number of forced laborers and their living and working conditions. The aim is to compensate them or their descendants with an amount of ten million euros.

And further: “In addition, the family will support the Alfred Landecker Foundation annually with a sustainable amount, because we all see that tendencies are developing at the moment that worries us and where we see that we are increasingly creating space for democratic developments must, especially with younger generations, who will soon also take responsibility for these societies. "

The family is initially making a total of 250 million euros available to the foundation for a period of ten years for all projects. A generous sum compared to Flick and Quandt's five million each.

The Bahlsen case

Another heiress, however, is thinking of using her capital differently. “I would like to say one thing, I'm a capitalist, no, so I'm not anti-capitalism at all, I own a quarter of 'Bahlsen'. I'm happy about that too. That should still belong to me. I want to earn money and buy sailing yachts with my dividends and that sort of thing. ”Verena Bahlsen said last year at a public appearance at a marketing festival.

Now the humorous statement could be attributed to the youthful exuberance of a 26-year-old multimillionaire. But when she was criticized for her testimony and reminded of the forced laborers at Bahlsen, the biscuit heiress declared that Bahlsen had not been guilty of anything and that his forced laborers were treated and paid just as well as the German workers. In fact, a slave laborer received only a fraction of the wages of a German colleague; a profitable business for companies in the “Third Reich”.

What followed in such cases followed: a written statement from Verena Bahlsen under the beautiful company logo "THE BAHLSEN FAMILY":

“I very much regret that my speech at the Marketing Congress in Hamburg has turned into a debate about German history and forced labor in the Third Reich, as well as the role of the Bahlsen company in it. That was by no means my intention. It was a mistake that I later intensified the debate by making thoughtless statements. I'm sorry for that. Nothing is further from me than to play down National Socialism and its consequences. "

The company added another explanation, regretted the great suffering and injustice the forced laborers had suffered, pointed out that they had paid 1.5 million DM to the Foundation EVZ, and promised what they often do in such cases: the To have the history of the forced laborers at Bahlsen researched by independent historians; an attempt to get the subject off the headlines.

Christine Glauning, head of the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center, sees such careless statements and the subsequent efforts to limit damage as an opportunity.

“I think it is important that the family businesses and the foundations deal with their own past in a very specific way and promote projects that specifically relate to the subject of forced labor in the respective companies, especially since forced labor is not a historical issue, but in fact still takes place en masse today. Human rights organizations estimate that between 27 and 40 million people worldwide have to work under forced labor or slave-like conditions. And to direct attention to it, I think, is also part of the historical-political education work, today, and that it is important to recognize and work out that. "

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bahls...icle_id=479115

So no tears from me for "forced" german capitalists to make money.

[Kritias]

You literally wrote a wall of text, while each argument in it has already been consistently debunked. Socialist regimes often purge other socialists, they have racial and ethnic elements in their ideology and they collaborate with capitalists when it works for them. This applies to Soviet regime, this applies to social-nationalist regimes in Central Europe and it applies to Marxist regimes throughout Cold War. The rest is just offtopic neo-Marxist revisionism, especially whole "Soviets actually improved workers conditions" part. I don't recall workers die from famine in Russian Empire in tens of millions. Last time Russia had a major famine even near in proportions ot what Lenin and his cronies caused was back in 1600s. Nuff said.

Alright, here's the unbridged version:

Whenever you compare two things, you do it to conceptualize one of three things:

a) Are they the same?
b) Are they different?
c) Which one is better?

Arendt in her book shows the similarities and the differences between the two, and continuously shows the inescapable degree of Nazi barbarism compared to the Soviet regime. That answers question c: Which one is better? If you have two bad things, then any axiological judgement is a matter of degree. So, to say that Hitlerism is similar to Bolshevism denies the differences and the degree of barbarism of the former. In simple terms, it's Nazi apology.

Which brings me to the second issue. According to the statement sent to the United Nations General Assembly in November 7, 2003, by Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Egypt, Georgia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Nauru, Pakistan, Qatar, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America on the seventieth anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor):

In the former Soviet Union millions of men, women and children fell victims to the cruel actions and policies of the totalitarian regime. The Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor), which took from 7 million to 10 million
innocent lives and became a national tragedy for the Ukrainian people. In this regard we note activities in observance of the seventieth anniversary of this Famine, in particular organized by the Government of Ukraine.

But you write of tens of millions of deaths. If you need to manipulate the numbers so much to show that the USSR was evuwl, the question arises: why do you do it? Is it maybe because you want to defend a certain social-nationalist regime of Central Europe?

For any emotionally stable individual any amount of human loss is a tragedy. So manipulating the numbers to bring the tally of the dead to tens of millions despite archival records must serve another purpose - and the constant insistence of certain circles to compare and meat up numbers to exceed the death and destruction of a certain social-nationalist regime of Central Europe must by definition want to turn that former comparison to favour said certain social-nationalist regime of Central Europe. Another Nazi apology.

Take another example. The infamous Black Book of Communism. A claim was made that communists have killed 100 million people in roughly a hundred year's time. Two out of the authors debunk its claims, saying the statistics are rigged. Werth comes out and accuses Courtois of pulling 5 million dead out of thin air in one instance. Mangolin comes out in Le Monde and claims Courtois was obsessed to reach a hundred million dead and was heavily manipulating the numbers. And yet, the comparison that Nazism killed 25 million people compared to a 100 million people by communism is in the preface of the book, inferring how much less deadly Nazism was - of course, the intellectual dishonesty of comparing 12 years of one regime to a hundred years and 10 different countries to reach (through manipulation, no less!) a quadruple number is obvious to anyone. Simply put, yet another Nazi apology.

To spell it out: when you have all the archival evidence and still over-estimate by tens of millions, you do it for a purpose. And when you keep repeating the lie...

PS. A worker in Tsarist Russia worked 10-12 hours, six days a week. There was no set age of retirement, and they enjoyed no worker rights. There's a reason those pesky Ruskies rose up.

Imagine unironically defending Marxism in 2021.


Many people are too eager to associate or disassociate NS with Marxism because NS for them has taken the place of the literal devil instead of being a man-made evil cult like so many others. While it is true that NS, Marxism, and Fascism have many things in common (being totalitarian, anti-individual and collectivist by default), the most similar thing to National Socialism today is actually Critical Race Theory and its ancillary beliefs.


And you've conveniently defined "socialism" as being de facto identical with Marxism.

Imagine unironically thinking that Critical Race Theory is similar to Nazi doctrine. The only thing CRT wants to annihilate is your prejudices.

And yes, socialism is based on Marxism; of course there are a hundred different denominations of socialists, and not one agrees with the other ninety-nine - but most are using Marxism as an ideological framework. USSR on the other hand was Marxist-Leninist. It sounds like senseless jargon, I know, but the differences are actually important.

[Heathen Hammer]

And yes, socialism is based on Marxism;

I'm glad I saw this before I started wasting my time replying to this. I've been around the mudpit and have seen plenty of historical revisionism on various subjects, but historical revisionism from perspective of socialism that shows ignorance in, well, basic understanding of socialism is too much for me. I'm getting old. Throwing the towel here. Feel free to declare that you won or something.
Pro-tip: Marx himself cites a number of socialist thinkers that influenced his own thought (such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Fourier), which should, I dunno, very lightly point to the fact that socialism was a thing long before Marx.

[Kritias]

I'm glad I saw this before I started wasting my time replying to this. I've been around the mudpit and have seen plenty of historical revisionism on various subjects, but historical revisionism from perspective of socialism that shows ignorance in, well, basic understanding of socialism is too much for me. I'm getting old. Throwing the towel here. Feel free to declare that you won or something.
Pro-tip: Marx himself cites a number of socialist thinkers that influenced his own thought (such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Charles Fourier), which should, I dunno, very lightly point to the fact that socialism was a thing long before Marx.

This reply shows exactly why you'd think Hitler was a socialist. Let me illuminate you on a couple of things.

Marxism is an economic philosophy that tells you what's wrong with capitalism. Socialism is a political movement proposing how to fix capitalism. Ever since the Socialist Internationals, the majority of the socialists have based their thinking on Marxism, through a lot of infighting, denouncing and debate. There are still socialists who advocate for armed revolution, others who want to just reform capitalism. There are the communists who want a totalitarian revolution. Then there are the anarchists, who don't think a state is necessary at all. The majority of them socialists, however, adhere to Marxist thought. Marxism is not communism. Marxism is not socialism. Marxism is just that. Marxism. A philosophy.

Pro-tip: Anarchists are the only ones who still vehemently refuse Marxism - it has to do with Karl Marx ousting Bakunin, the leading figure of Anarchism, from the First Socialist International or something like that. Plus, Marx was all about the employ of the state, and anarchists really don't like states.

Pro-tip #2: The fact that something pre-exists as a movement does not mean it isn't influenced by newer philosophies to the point old ones are abandoned, or sidelined. Saying that a movement is based on a philosophy doesn't necessarily mean the philosophy pre-existed.

Pro-tip #3: Neither the Nazis or Duce's fascists were ever members of the Socialist Internationals. Because they weren't socialists, and the real socialists never saw them as one of their own. SPD represented Germany, and PSI represented Italy. Both of which parties were suppressed and imprisoned during their respective countries' dictatorships.

[Lord Thesaurian]

Despite your graphic imagery of hills, baileys and death, you missed my point. Both the OP and HH have argued consistently that Hitler’s regime was socialist here and in a previous thread. To prove this they have pointed to the USSR and Nazi Germany and proclaimed “ecce, socialism!”. This is entirely false, since the Nazi regime’s sole ideological ground-stone was pure race superiority. Racial ideology is entirely foreign to Marxism, and socialism in general. Marxism and socialism argue that working people of any country have more in common with each other than the capitalists ruling them.

This is a fallacy. That Bolshevism diverged from purely orthodox Marxist theory, or that Marxist theory lacks a racial component, is entirely irrelevant, both in the context of Arendt’s discussion of totalitarianism, and of the current discussion overall. Nazi racism also has nothing to do with whether or not they can be called socialist, since the claim that this disqualifies the label is nothing more than a rhetorical true Scotsman fallacy. As cited several times, the MIT economist who compared Nazi and Soviet economic systems and determined that “the National Socialists were socialist in practice as well as name” did not base this claim on racism or relative success of outcomes. No counter to the analysis has been presented, and the fact Nazism and Bolshevism are different manifestations of socialism is not remotely the sum total of their similarities anyway. The reason I referenced that paper was, among other things, to refute the assertion that the Nazi economic regime can reasonably be described as “capitalist,” also disputed by the OP.

1. The main difference between the Soviet system and Nazism lays in their antithesis of creation and destruction. For the Soviets the goal was the construction of a new society, the creation of the so-called Soviet Man, the creation of a socialist economy and a re-invention of politics and general civic being along totalitarian lines, where the Vanguard Party and its aim of triumphant socialism took precedence over anything else. The Nazis, on the contrary, had nothing to construct once they got into power. In fact, they used the existing social body, and the existing capitalist industrial capabilities and turned them towards the goal of destruction. The Nazi regime is so disconcerting and on a wholly different plane than the Soviet one precisely because it took advantage of a full-fledged and civilized society and turned it to wanton destruction that defied any concept of humanity. It was simple revenge for the defeat of WW1, a total war to regain what was lost and to punish those who stabbed the ‘master race’ in the back. The ‘creation’ of Nazis was therefore entirely negative; it meant creating the absence of something, mainly peoples who were deemed superfluous for the Nazi way of life, and not the creation of something new. Barring the total annihilation of all life regarded as sub-human, the Nazis had nothing to aspire to and would collapse under the weight of their crimes even if they won the war. Reason being, their whole ideology was based on permanent extermination which meant total, continuous war to feed the death factories. For these reasons, it’s hard to imagine the Nazi movement would survive Hitler even if the Nazis had won the war.

3. Similarly, it’s quite astounding to make the comparison between the Nazis and their pervetin-fuelled delirium of destruction and USSR’s totalitarianism, despite their organizational similarities. For once, the Soviet system really did improve the lives of the workers of the former Russian empire, which is precisely why it was so alluring as a system for the better part of the last century. Illiteracy was basically eradicated through the system of likbez; by 1937 literacy in the Soviet Union was 86% for men, and 65% for women – among the highest if not the highest in the world at that point. In comparison, India with all its colonial and capitalist development still has a third of the world’s illiterate people. Tertiary education was opened to working class people after the revolution and by 1941, the year the war started for the USSR, around 3.8 million Soviets were attending university – that’s the highest in the world at that point in time. The Soviet worker had rights the American worker has never seen under capitalism: free healthcare, 7-hour work days, paid vacations, maternity leave, a retirement age of 55-60 depending on the industry. Women were fully allowed in every aspect of social, work, political and military life almost 40 years before it started to become mainstream in the Western societies. No such boast can be made for Nazism – because their whole deal was simply to destroy. The soviets took a collection of pre-industrial societies and forcefully pushed them through industrialization. It wasn’t done without significant repression, just as it happened in the case of capitalism. Those who want to depict the Soviets as red fascists usually tend to forget a long history of work-houses and repression that followed the period of capitalist enclosures up until the 1900s. These aspects of capitalist development are consciously hidden, according to Chomsky, based on a new narrative after WW2 that capitalism defends human rights – which is also used as a tool for imperialist expansion.

Again, fawning over the glories of Soviet policy, together with the projected differences in relative success compared to the Nazi domestic regime, are irrelevant. Plus, as we all know, Soviet communism destroyed itself by 1991, with millions fleeing from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain in a manner that was comparatively absent from the other during the interim, as emigrants exposed with their feet this hollow notion of Soviet paradise you manage to propagate even today. The idea of vibrant longevity hidden by capitalist lies is as irrelevant to the comparison between Nazism and Bolshevism as it is ahistorical in the first place. We probably agree on the fact that the Soviets first destroyed their state whereas the Nazis largely co-opted theirs. Arendt also addressed this herself. That has nothing to do with this core dichotomy you’ve set up about how theoretical end points of the respective movements are supposed to make them incomparable in reality.

In addition, the Soviets sought to eliminate entire classes of people and also targeted some ethnic minority groups to boot, succeeding to the tune of millions of deaths, including, as Arendt noted above, as many as 50% of their own Party during the purges, and countless victims within the Proletariat. This false dichotomy presented where the Soviets are righteous builders and the Nazis, by contrast, are evil destroyers, in addition to being more of the same apologism, is purely rhetorical.

4. The Soviet deportations were the darkest page of the Stalinist era, here we agree. And true, all these instances check the legal definition, if not the moral definition of genocide. Agreed again. However, you fail to make a distinction between Stalin’s policies and the communist dogma; if deportations are endemic to communism, then Khrushchev wouldn’t have denounced these practices as crimes in his published speech “On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences”. Which, incidentally, is the only case of a nation freely denouncing its own crimes to date. Similarly, if deportations were an ideological byproduct the praxis of deportation would have continued throughout the soviet regime until 1991, instead of being limited to the years of Stalin. On the contrary, if a government today would pick up Mein Kampf as a guidebook of policy, the extermination of those viewed as subhuman would naturally occur as a byproduct. Because the extermination is endemic to Nazi ideology, it’s its main cornerstone. The only difference would be the alteration of those seen as subhuman according to the specific needs of the government. In addition, you forget to mention that while Nazi extermination not only was done for its own shake but politicized as such as well, the Soviet deportations did not aim at the physical extermination of peoples, only their territorial removal to break-up ethnic-tensions and nationalisms. Most of these ethnicities were also moved during the war years, as collective punishment to what was alleged as Nazi collaboration, and deportations stopped soon after Stalin died, never to be repeated in USSR history. The political motivations behind claims of similarity are revealed in the numbers themselves. It’s impossible for the numbers to vary so wildly from archival evidence, with estimates mounting to dozens of millions of dead while the official records show casualties between one and two million people. This couldn’t have happened without this variation having an ulterior motive. We know how many people the Nazis killed down to a single digit because of their record-keeping: any under-estimation is laughed away as Nazi apology, and any over-estimation is similarly scoffed at as simple zealotry. In the Soviet case we have the reverse; archival evidence is suppressed, and proven over-estimations are still propagated. The reason is simple: this serves a political purpose on the one hand, and careers were made on sensationalism on the other. It’s been thirty years since the archives of the Soviet Union have opened, and in that time, multiple researches have been conducted that show the true length of the crimes committed under the Stalinist regime. It’s time we left back the Cold War propaganda. In one short sentence: yes, both were crimes but, no, they are not comparable.

5. Following the death of Stalin nothing of what Arendt observed in 1951 continued to exist in any significant way; Stalin’s death, unlike Lenin’s, did not give rise to a new Stalin; in fact, no subsequent soviet communist leader ever reached the power Stalin had, nor did the image of the leader played any effective part in social or political life afterwards. No one was afraid to stop clapping for Brezhnev for example. Mass terror and mass labour camps also begun to be eclipsed after Stalin until they effectively disappeared; Khrushchev’s ascent to power wasn’t followed by a new purge of dissidents, or a wave of mass arrests like in the Stalinist era. To the contrary, Khrushchev released prisoners en masse. Arrest of dissidents in general stopped at apparent behaviour, rather than total control of ideology and were no comparison to the Stalinist arrests. The irrationality of inefficiency also gave way to actual efficiency if one considers the Soviet military industrial complex; the construction of reality also ceased to be, compared to the deliriously shifting narratives of the Stalinist era; Soviet reality equaled to the usual State propaganda. Ideological control also gradually gave way in social and political life. It’s telling that right after Stalin you have Soviet movies like the adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace coming out, devoid of any ideology, compared to the ideological movies produced in the first twenty years of the regime where Papa Stalin made guest appearances. Such things would have been unthinkable under Stalin. In short, the permanent war psychology that characterized the Stalinist era, with the myriad enemies and counterrevolutionaries under every crook and cranny, simply ceased to be. To reduce the Soviet experiment to the Stalinist era alone is simply erroneous. The fact you chose a book that was written before Stalin died to prove a point is also telling of your disregard of the process the USSR underwent. De-Stalinization was the road off totalitarianism.

The focus on a book written in 1951 also completely disregards the latter 40 years of Soviet history. This gives out a skewed view because, like any revolution, the history of the Soviet Union is more violent closer to its inception rather than its maturity. Revolutions are by definition violent overthrows of what has been before them. The same arguments marshalled against the October revolution had been marshalled centuries back against the French revolution that gave birth to capitalism in continental Europe by decapitating the ancient regime. Similarly to the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks became obsessed over people plotting to bring about the end of the revolution during the first decades, and widespread atrocities and repression happened. What Marat writes in the Friend of the People could easily have been written in Pravda during the heyday of the Bolsheviks. Similarly to the French Revolution, the USSR fell at the hands of their own “Bonaparte” when the dust settled. And if you know your history, then you know that Bonaparte was basically depicted as evil incarnate during those times by the Quadruple Alliance nations. In the case of the Soviets, since the position of devil incarnate was occupied by Hitler, efforts are made to elevate Stalin to equal standing. And just like Bonaparte, this elevation is purely political.

This is a continuation of the motte and bailey fallacy addressed previously, conflating comparison and similarity with total symmetry. Inevitably, the goalposts have shifted to some version of “not real communism” and “what about capitalism” after this categorical denial was debunked in detail:

Over two threads and multiple posts, both you and Heathen Hammer have claimed that Nazis are similar to Marxists and socialists. Not only Soviets in particular, which is also an egregious lie, but socialists in general.

Neither I nor Arendt claimed that the USSR was Stalinist throughout its entire history, nor that Soviet totalitarianism was defined exclusively by Stalinism. Comparing Bolshevism and Nazism during their overlapping period of existence is hardly dishonest - it’s the logical thing to do. I consider your protest against this a concession, not a counterpoint.

4. The accusation of world domination is shaky because every world power that has ever existed has strived for world domination insofar its capabilities have allowed them. In the case of Soviet world domination, these declarations were limited to the export of their socioeconomic system abroad and the domination of the Eastern Bloc. For reference, ever since its inception capitalism has been established on the barrel of a gun, whether it is in Afghanistan until recently or enforcing it in Chile through a dictatorship during the sixties. Additionally, it is hypocritical to speak of a Soviet ‘world domination’ scheme when the current superpower has more than 800 military bases over 70 countries, and more than 200.000 soldiers active in 170 countries. What’s more, the rhetoric of an impending Soviet world domination has led to this current American world domination, first on the rhetoric of containment that justified military interventions, coups, dictatorships and death squads and currently, riding the wave of human rights that justifies military interventions, coups, dictatorships and death squads. Leveling this accusation when your preferred system is doing the exact same thing for the past 70 years is just hypocritical. In one sentence: peace wasn’t untenable because the Soviets were after world domination, but because both sides wanted world domination. The United States won this war, and now they are casting the Soviets as the villains. This is all this amounts to.

5. The accusation of forced labour as a unique characteristic of the Soviets and the Nazis is also ill-informed if you consider that even today the US makes use of penal labour through the prison system, where prisoners make around 1$ an hour before deductions. Not all prisoners are paid, either. Capitalism, as you can see, is not and has never been averse to using involuntary labour. In fact, the US has the highest percentage of prisoners per capita in the world to this day, higher even than China. Prisoners in the USSR were paid from the 1950s, and monetary bonuses were around since 1930s. Equally ill-informed is the accusation that the entire soviet economy run on slaves, when statistics show that penal labour in the US supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Again, this is levelling an accusation while looking the other way when your preferred system is doing it.

6. The accusation of political repression, and that the government acts as an occupier against its own people as a unique characteristic of totalitarian governments is also false. Taking Greece as an example, the re-establishment of free market capitalism following the German occupation led to a British-backed, and later an American-backed civil war. This lasted five years and saw the field testing of napalm in 1949 at Grammos, thousands exiled to remote island prisons (which the then democratically elected government referred to as “the Parthenons of Modern Greece”), a society where to be able to work one needed police papers of ‘political rehabilitation’ if they had family members arrested (familial responsibility), and decades of junta-like government until the 1980s. It created a “free democratic” perversion that was internationally hailed then as the Greek economic miracle of the 50s, with governments being elected through widespread fraud (dead people seemingly voted for the right-wing government of ERE, bringing the population of towns to exceed their living people). Oh, an actual military junta from 1964-1973. Greece isn’t the only example where such practices accompanied capitalist interventions. Latin America has seen plenty of such cases. So, spare us the high-browed rhetoric. The coin has two sides.

To summarize, the discussion we’re having is characterized by the extensive use of double-standards. Everything you level against the totalitarian USSR was simultaneously being conducted by the capitalist nations, for similar reasons. If world domination is condemnable in one case, then it has to be on the other also. If forced labour is condemnable on the one case, so must it be on the other. If political repression and terror is condemnable under communism, so must it be under capitalism. The only argument you raise is basically “yes, but they did it to their own people!” as if doing it to people abroad is somehow better. Worse, aside the capitalist core, capitalist countries repressed their own citizenry heavily to establish free market capitalism. In Chile dissenters were thrown off helicopters to their deaths to suppress opposition to a US-backed dictatorship.

Of course, this will be dismissed as whataboutism. The problem with the whataboutism accusation is that itself is a whataboutism: the criticism of the tu quoque fallacy is that it diverts the attention from the accusation without disproving it; by accusing an argument as whataboutism, you essentially dismiss accusations of your own conduct, and instead focus on another’s – a typical double-standard. That’s what makes whataboutism an effective strategy in the first place. It shows the hypocrisy of an accusation by revealing the same actions done by the accuser. An effective way to disprove a whataboutism argument would be to prove the moral superiority of your own position. Unfortunately, capitalism uses totalitarian elements to establish itself so that moral superiority remains under question. The use of whataboutism against any mention of capitalist atrocities when the soviet regime is discussed is purely a political way to say “only communist victims merit our attention, never mind the others”. Simply put, it’s garbage.

First off, the assertion that “Everything you level against the totalitarian USSR was simultaneously being conducted by the capitalist nations, for similar reasons,” is false. I challenge you to find any objective source that dares repeat such nonsense in the same context you have asserted it. And after typing up pages and pages about how comparing Soviet Russia with the “capitalist” Nazis is “Holocaust denial?” I digress. To carp about how people are picking on the poor Soviets and nefariously singling them out for punishment amidst a myriad of random (false) moral equivalences is exactly the kind of dishonest denialism of which you’ve accused others. This is ancient stuff, straight out of the old Soviet playbook. As I said, I consider such flailing about to be a concession of the points I’ve made regarding Bolshevism and Nazism, not a counter.

For example, no one claimed the Soviet economy ran “entirely” on slaves, and the idea that US prisons=Soviet gulags is too stupid to warrant a response. The facetious effort to conflate this with the discussion of the similarities between Nazism and Bolshevism proves by your own admission the sophistry inherent to your position. Far from being a Stalinist anomaly, punishment for “counter revolutionary” or “anti-Soviet” speech was a fact of life in the USSR for its entirety, and political repression there was an essential, core feature, not a bug. Same goes for the pursuit of world domination. This was covered in my initial post. It’s not a “shaky accusation.” Arendt explained in detail and I commented on it:

Neither National Socialism nor Bolshevism has ever proclaimed a new form of government or asserted that its goals were reached with the seizure of power and the control of the state machinery. Their idea of domination was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion: namely, the permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life. The seizure of power through the means of violence is never an end in itself but only the means to an end, and the seizure of power in any given country is only a welcome transitory stage but never the end of the movement. The practical goal of the movement is to organize as mariy people as possible within its framework and to set and keep them in motion; a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement simply does not exist.

When a movement, international in organization, all-comprehensive in its ideological scope, and global in its political aspiration, seizes power in one country, it obviously puts itself in a paradoxical situation. The socialist movement was spared this crisis, first, because the national question—and that meant the strategical problem involved in the revolution—had been curiously neglected by Marx and Engels, and, secondly, because it faced governmental problems only after the first World War had divested the Sec- ond International of its authority over the national members, which every- where had accepted the primacy of national sentiments over international solidarity as an unalterable fact. In other words, when the time came for the socialist movements to seize power in their respective countries, they had already been transformed into national parties.

This transformation never occurred in the totalitarian, the Bolshevik and the Nazi movements. At the time it seized power the danger to the move- ment lay in the fact that, on one hand, it might become "ossified" by taking over the state machine and frozen into a form of absolute government,^ and that, on the other hand, its freedom of movement might be limited by the borders of the territory in which it came to power. To a totalitarian movement, both dangers are equally deadly: a development toward abso- lutism would put an end to the movement's interior drive, and a develop- ment toward nationalism would frustrate its exterior expansion, without which the movement cannot survive. The form of government the two movements developed, or, rather, which almost automatically developed from their double claim to total domination and global rule, is best char- acterized by Trotsky's slogan of "permanent revolution" although Trotsky's theory was no more than a socialist forecast of a series of revolutions, from the antifeudal bourgeois to the antibourgeois proletarian, which would spread from one country to the other.^ Only the term itself suggests "per-mancncy." with all its semi-anarchistic implications, and is, strictly speak- ing, a misnomer; yet even Lenin was more impressed by the term than by its theoretical content. In the Soviet Union, at any rate, revolutions, in the form of general purges, became a permanent institution of the Stalin regime after 1934.'' Here, as in other instances, Stalin concentrated his attacks on Trotsky's half-forgotten slogan precisely because he had decided to use this technique.' In Nazi Germany, a similar tendency toward per- manent revolution was clearly discernible though the Nazis not have time to realize it to the same extent. Characteristically enough, their "per- manent revolution" also started with the liquidation of the party faction which had dared to proclaim openly the "next stage of the revolution"

Buttressing the initial whataboutism talking points with even more verbose copium about how liberal capitalism is “just as bad” as Soviet communism isn’t just a continuation of the same wild diversionary tactic, as it has nothing to do with the comparison between Nazism and Bolshevism. It’s also not true. Furthermore, Arendt even described European imperialism as morally “glorious” when juxtaposed with Bolshevik and Nazi totalitarianism, and I’d assert no less superlative an adjective to describe the difference with liberal capitalism - let alone the human rights record of the US vs, say, the USSR or British Empire. Her description in and of itself ought to be enough to shut down the ocean of false comparisons you’ve cranked out here.

No one claimed forced labor, imperialism, or political repression are unique to totalitarianism, nor does that fact mean that since capitalist countries did these things, they’re the same as the Soviets. Conflating US efforts to defend against and halt Soviet world domination is just victim blaming, plain and simple. Neoliberalism is a byproduct of unipolarity post-Cold War. Efforts to geopolitically isolate, deter or even topple expansionist authoritarian states are not comparable to the Soviet goal of territorially assimilating and Bolshevizing other countries into its network of subservient protectorates for the purpose of world conquest. Exceptions prove the rule, given that even the most brutally authoritarian major powers of today publicly justify themselves according to the established international norms of liberal capitalism, as Arendt alluded to in my last post:

Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.

Boomerang effects in totalitarian imperialism, naturally, are distinguished from those of national imperialism in that they work in the opposite di- rection…For just as European imperiahsm could never transgress certain limits of oppression even when the effective- ness of extreme measures was beyond doubt, because public opinion at home would not have supported them and a legal government could not have sur- vived them, so Russian totalitarianism is forced to crush opposition and with- hold all concessions, even when they may pacify the oppressed countries for the time being and make them more reliable in case of war, because such "mildness" would endanger the government at home and place the conquered territories in a privileged position.

The triumph of liberal capitalism is the establishment of modern human rights as global norms in the post-war era, against which the defenders of Soviet communism could only employ the same facile deflections and allegations of hypocrisy that you and liberal capitalism’s authoritarian adversaries of today still fall back on. Just as the totalitarian allergy to the truth and facts that are available in the outside world compels communist China to isolate itself against its own economic interests, and repress its citizens all the more for fear of losing control, so Soviet totalitarianism was compelled to literally and figuratively wall itself off from the West for the sake of self preservation. Even today, Xi Jinping and his fellows are obsessed with the notion that the dilution of totalitarianism in the USSR led to its precipitous collapse, and are determined not to repeat the same mistake, no matter what it takes.

The “no you” defense of whataboutism is truly comical. The idea that false moral dilemmas have to be met on their own terms is a level of nonsense that supposes people don’t know what false premises are. Demonstrating the morality of liberal capitalism over Soviet communism is easy and self evident, regardless of how hard a time one may have with it owing to bizarre and self-defeating authoritarian sympathies. What’s objectively false is the idea someone has to argue that Nazism is morally superior to Bolshevism in order to refute the assertion to the contrary. Neither I nor Arendt made any such claim of overall moral superiority between one or the other, and I’ve made factual arguments debunking your points without any need to do so.

7. The accusation about Soviet anti-Semitism boils down to the doctor’s plot and Stalin’s campaign against the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ of that same period, as well as snide comments made against Trotsky’s Jewish background. Suffice to say that as soon as Stalin died, the whole issue was dropped and was declared a fabrication by Malenkov. No deportation ever happened, and certainly no death camps were constructed to liquidate these or any other people. In the minds of Soviet peoples, anti-Semitism was closely tied to Nazi Germany, and any attempt at organized antisemitism lacked any civilian backing. Another flair would go up during Brezhnev who publicly denounced anti-Semitism and took measures to support religious minorities. Naturally, a collection of countries steeped in centuries of anti-Semitism – as was the entirety of Europe – could not have solved the issue of antisemitism in four decades; you’re accusing the USSR of going through similar issues and processes as the rest of Europe at that time. Worse, you’re comparing the Soviet reaction to antisemitism, which definitely did not plan to exterminate Jews, to the Nazis. This is a dubious double-standard.
8. So that you don’t think I am accusing Arendt out of thin air, here’s a quote for the article “Nazism, Culture and The Origins of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and the Discourse of Evil.”

I don’t care where your fallacious accusations come from, nor that you wrap yourself in the mantle of the Holocaust in a lame attempt to misdirect your interlocutors’ arguments and put them on the defensive. No one claimed the Soviets had a “plan to exterminate the Jews.” What the Soviets did do is target ethnic groups when it suited them. The systematic mass murder of Poles is a rather infamous example for which Moscow apologized shortly before its collapse. To blame this and similar ethnic killings all on Stalin’s random bouts of paranoia is the same denialism of which you’ve accused me and the rest.

In addition, the idea that the Soviets were allergic to anti-Semitism because of the Nazis is a fabrication. Anti-Semitism lent itself handily to Soviet policy. Again, to blame this all on Stalin’s paranoia is ahistorical.

The end of the thirties marked a watershed in the history of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The timing is crucial for an understanding of the origin of official anti-Semitism. All too often Soviet anti-Semitism is linked to the establishment of Israel in May 1948. This is completely erroneous. From the late thirties and early forties on, if slowly and unevenly, anti-Jewish dis- crimination became an integral part of official state policy.

During 1969 the official Soviet mass media continued and intensified their drumbeat about omnipresent Zionist power. The trade union journal Sovetskie projsoiuzy, in its January issue, accused Zionism of inciting the Polish youth uprisings of the previous year and of exerting a "disintegrating influence" upon Czechoslovak youth. The entire thrust of Zionism, the author argued, was the use of Jewish citizens in all capitalist countries to conduct "subversive work" against the USSR and to "undermine from within" the friendship of the various Soviet peoples. A Soviet newspaper that specializes in anti-Zionist diatribes, Sovetskaia Rossiia, carried on January 24 a long expose that focused upon Zionism's "provocative and treacherous" propa- ganda campaign to convince Jews that they have a "dual loyalty." In February the mass circulation weekly Ogonek underscored the massive threat of the Zionists. Having at their disposal vast resources, the Zionists "infiltrated their agents into the press, the radio, the television and the cinema of all States." The impact of that "infiltration" was spelled out in various foreign broadcasts by Moscow Radio during March—encouragement of counterrevolu- tion during "the last ten years" in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, support of "subversive activities in African countries," and the propagation of militant anti-Communist and chauvinist propaganda.

The climax of the campaign was the publication of an extraordinary book (seventy-five thousand copies) entitled Ostorozhno: Sionizm! (Beware: Zion- ism!). Written by lurii Ivanov, the book weaves together in 173 pages the various strands of the anti-Zionist theme spun over the course of the past three years. Zionism is presented as a giant international "concern" which might appropriately be titled "World 'Ministry' on the affairs of 'World Jewry.'" With "one of the largest amalgamations of capital" available to it, the "Ministry" maintains an extensive "international intelligence center" and a "well-organized service for misinformation and propaganda." The objective of the concern's various "departments," which operate under a "single management," is "profit and enrichment" aimed at safeguarding "its power." Details of international Zionism's influence on the policy of Israel, which it considers as its own "property," as well as its cunning efforts aimed at sub- verting both the socialist and new national states, are spelled out. Elaborated also is the ramified network of Zionist propaganda organs buttressed by the major mass media which have been "penetrated" by "sympathizing elements."

The significance of this obsessive and irrational work might be minimized as an isolated literary phenomenon were it not that its publication was ac- companied by a synchronized campaign of laudatory reviews in almost all the major Soviet newspapers and magazines, and in broadcasts by Tass in numer- ous foreign languages. The voice of the official Soviet authority was not dis- guised. It spoke clearly through Pravda (March 9): "From the pages of Iu. Ivanov's book emerges the true and evil image of Zionism, and this constitutes the undoubted importance of the book." Since the ideology of the Ivanov book had been so strongly endorsed, Soviet journalists could feel free to give vent to the wildest concoctions. Thus V. Vysotsky, writing on May 31, 1969, in Belorussia's leading newspaper, Sovetskaia Belorussiia, "discovered" that a secret meeting of Zionists had taken place in London in 1968 at which it was decided to take over the entire Arab world—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Arab peninsula. From this base, Vysotsky went on, the Zionists planned to attain "mastery over mankind"
using all possible devices—"force, bribery, slyness, perfidy, subversion, and espionage."

https://www.cambridge.org/core/servi...n_analysis.pdf

Aside from the above, Nazi collaboration with capitalists, both native and foreign, has been proven and links have been provided both by me and Morticia. Ford industries were making the turbines for V2 rockets that fell on London; IBM developed the cataloguing methods for the Jewish extermination; IG Farben both developed Zycklon B, and took advantage of the Nazi expansion to enrich themselves. It’s amazing to even deny this when German companies like Siemens have a disclaimers on their own website to acknowledge responsibility over profiteering during the war, as well as admitting that despite government regulation, Siemens and other German companies had significant leeway to operate as they wanted – and still chose to enrich themselves. I quote from Siemen’s about page, 1933-1945 sub-page:

As you can see from Siemen’s own story, the sweet, sweet armament contracts exceeded the owner’s inherent anti-nazism. Of course, this is justified because the company’s future was at his hands, so the company leadership gravely decided to make a profit using slave labour – 80,000 of them – to meet the war demands. Foreign assets were taken over at a pittance, 400 facilities in total, so that Siemens continued its production. Notice there’s no mention to the board of directors being coerced, intimidated, or otherwise forced to cooperate – the only justification given is that Siemens needed to continue working. That’s it. No apology of Nazi Terror like you claim. The only thing you find is an admission of former guilt.

This strawman has been addressed more than once. No one denied that German businessmen collaborated with the Nazis nor that they did business with American companies. Neither does this have anything to do with Nazi and Soviet use of terror as a form of economic control, as cited. The idea that this makes the Nazi regime “capitalist” is even more idiotic than the false claim about privatization, as if the billions of dollars’ worth of business the Soviets did with the US prior to the Cold War makes them “capitalist” either. The Soviets famously had a boundless appetite for American tech and business consultancy to boot, beginning with Lenin himself. It’s especially ironic you mention Ford. The Soviets loved his machines so much whole towns were named for him.

By 1928, when the Soviets inaugurated the First Five-Year Plan, Henry Ford had become an even greater hero to the Soviets than Frederick Taylor. An emotional cult grew up around Ford’s methods and even his person. By 1925 his autobiography, My Life and Work, had had four printings in the Soviet Union, and one American in Russia reported that plant managers were studying Ford with as much enthusiasm as they had had for Lenin.

https://www.americanheritage.com/how...soviet-machine

To reiterate the point since you refuse to address it:

This paper argues that economic planning under Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s was essentially similar, both in process and outcome. Both economies had fixed prices and used coercion as part of a rather chaotic process of resource allocation; consumption in both countries was sacrificed to investment in heavy industry. Both economies can be thought of as socialist, and socialism in the 1930s was hardly more than military mobilization….. the Nazi economy shared many characteristics with the dominant [Soviet] socialist economy of the time. The National Socialists were socialist in practice as well as name.

If salaries and bonuses provided carrots, terror furnished the stick in both Germany and Russia. Used selectively, these negative incentives were capable of targeting the desired behavior quite precisely. As the positive rewards were less closely tied to specific performance in Germany, we would expect the negative rewards to be more firmly anchored. The harshness and apparent randomness of repression in both countries has been widely noted. But its economic effects have not been fully appreciated.

The first eighteen months of Nazi rule. .. established that in the Third Reich, for individual businessmen and everyone else, "terror was the greatest of political realities'" (Hayes, 1987, pp. 94, 122-24).
16

The state therefore directed the internal organization of industry in both countries. The creation of these industry groups allowed private organizations to control more of the hierarchy in Germany. It enabled enterprise-related hierarchies to do the same in Soviet Russia. Even though the Russian
managers were not private, there seems to have been enterprise- specific knowledge that made lower-level hierarchies preferable to state bureaucrats in the administration of economic plans. The nature of this information asymmetry appears to have been independent of ownership patterns.

Leaders in both countries were aiming to restructure society into a Utopian vision. They were opposed to capitalism and formal markets. The Soviets wanted to create a socialist society without money, in which people would be rewarded directly for work. The Nazis wanted to restructure an already industrialized economy to create a new alternative to both the existing Western economies and the emerging Soviet one (Davies, 1989, pp. 477-78; Hardach, 1980, p. 66)

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/han...onom00temi.pdf

[Cyclops]

Imagine unironically defending Marxism in 2021.

Fellas, is it defending Marxism to point out it isn't Nazism?

Many people are too eager to associate or disassociate NS with Marxism because NS for them has taken the place of the literal devil instead of being a man-made evil cult like so many others.

Absolutely spot on and a pet hate of mine. Its a sad indictment of the common political discourse that so much effort is put into insisting "Trump is literally Hitler" or "Feminists are actually FemiNazis", its brainlet nonsense. I pretty much ignore the people that spew this rubbish, they are timewasters.

While it is true that NS, Marxism, and Fascism have many things in common (being totalitarian, anti-individual and collectivist by default), the most similar thing to National Socialism today is actually Critical Race Theory and its ancillary beliefs.

I'm not really clear on what collectivist means, if its in the simplest definition (ie the one I am familiar with) its just putting the group ahead of the individual and is present in most societies. Ministerial responsibility, cabinet solidarity, representative democracies, tax, conscription etc etc could all be seen as having collectivist in that the fate of the individual is suborned to the needs of the group. If that's the definition meant then I'm a collectivist, I'd like to think I would submit to a horrible fate for the good of humans, Australians and Collingwood FC (in ascending order of importance).

It obviously isn't meant to mean "collectivist" as in turning privately owned land in the Soviet Union into collective enterprises by murdering kulaks and seizing the land for maximum inefficiency, the Nazis never did that.

Do you think the evolution of Fascism from explicitly Socialist roots into a different kind of Totalitarianism is part of the misunderstanding? I reckon if you did a DNA test on the Fascist Party there'd be some traces of Marx's DNA.

And you've conveniently defined "socialism" as being de facto identical with Marxism.

Not really, he mentions Marxism as a subset of Socialism and sharing its non-racist character. I mean its fair to say Marxism is a subset of Socialism, isn't it?

[Heathen Hammer]

Fellas, is it defending Marxism to point out it isn't Nazism?

I think context is important here - modern Marxist probably understand the fascistic nature of their views, but obviously want to distance themselves from the "really bad" examples at least in the realm of social norms, while simultaneously trying to engage in historical revisionism in regards to USSR and Mao's China, who they think is still socially salvageable (even though each of those regime was objectively more murderous then that of Hitler and spouting Stalinist stuff in those countries today could result with losing teeth lol).

Not really, he mentions Marxism as a subset of Socialism and sharing its non-racist character. I mean its fair to say Marxism is a subset of Socialism, isn't it?

He does it the other way around and unironically stated that all socialism is marxism, which is a pretty hot take given how most socialists would disagree with that.

[Kritias]

I'm sorry I don't have the time to hammer out a proper reply for you today, Thesaurian. I'll get down to it asap - however, let me answer at least one part of it.

This is a fallacy. That Bolshevism diverged from purely orthodox Marxist theory, or that Marxist theory lacks a racial component, is entirely irrelevant, both in the context of Arendt’s discussion of totalitarianism, and of the current discussion overall. Nazi racism also has nothing to do with whether or not they can be called socialist, since the claim that this disqualifies the label is nothing more than a rhetorical true Scotsman fallacy. As cited several times, the MIT economist who compared Nazi and Soviet economic systems and determined that “the National Socialists were socialist in practice as well as name” did not base this claim on racism or relative success of outcomes. No counter to the analysis has been presented, and the fact Nazism and Bolshevism are different manifestations of socialism is not remotely the sum total of their similarities anyway. The reason I referenced that paper was, among other things, to refute the assertion that the Nazi economic regime can reasonably be described as “capitalist,” also disputed by the OP.

Temin's abstract, as printed in SOVIET AND NAZI ECONOMIC PLANNING IN THE 1930s, May, 1990:

This paper argues that economic planning under Stalin andHitler in the 1930s was essentially similar, both in process and
outcome. Both economies had fixed prices and used coercion as
part of a rather chaotic process of resource allocation;
consumption in both countries was sacrificed to investment in
heavy industry. Both economies can be thought of as socialist,
and socialism in the 1930s was hardly more than military
mobilization.

Temin's argument that Nazis were socialists is based on a few assumptions: they utilized price controls, a planned economy and coercion to achieve it, and that both the Nazis and Soviets heavily prioritized heavy industry instead of civilian consumption. The fallacy of course, is that he claims socialism in 1930s can be reduced to military mobilization. While military mobilization was the crux of Nazi economy, this isn't the case of Stalin's regime. Building the Red Army was a goal of the Soviet regime, but this was hardly its only directive - or even its most important. If you need to change socialism's definition to make an allegation stick...

Firstly, what was Nazism's economic doctrine? Its defining feature was Wehrwirtschaft - a state of preparedness - which was characteristic of fascist regimes. This doctrine, basically, cancelled the transitions between war economy and peace economy, converting the latter into the former. As Mussolini (The Times, November 20, 1939) described this economic doctrine:

"The distinction between war and peace economy is simply absurd. There is no such thing as economy of peace-time and economy of war-time. There is only an economy of war-time because, historically, on the basis of the numbers of years of war , it is proved that the state of armed warfare is the normal state of peoples, at least of those living in the European continent, and because even in the years of so-called peace other forms of warfare are practiced which in turn prepare for armed warfare."

Therefore to describe socialism as a war-time economy, and then tie it to the fascist doctrine of actual perpetual war-time economy made Temin's argument possible. However, there is no proof that any socialist economy is war-time economy. The whole claim is just absurd.

Christoph Bucheim & Jonas Scherner discuss the Nazi economy as being:

Private property in the industry of the Third Reich is often considered a mere nominal provision without much substance. However, that is not correct, because firms, despite the rationing and licensing activities of the state, still had ample scope to devise their own production and investment profiles. Even regarding war-related projects, freedom of contract was generally respected; instead of using power, the state offered firms a number of contract options to choose from. There
were several motives behind this attitude of the regime, among them the conviction that private property provided important incentives for increasing efficiency[...]This question obviously has something to do with the problem of how to interpret the relationship between state and industry during the Third Reich. The debate about that problem dates back to the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship itself. Today many historians think that the Nazi state played a primary role, largely depriving companies of the opportunity to make autonomous decisions. There have been others, however, who considered the regime as an instrument of big business by which the latter emerged from the Great Depression even more powerful than before.5 "Big Business" is indeed the right term with regard to the second hypothesis, because it did not deal with industry in general, but focused on "organized capitalism," namely industrial organizations, cartels, and trusts such as the companies of heavy industry or IG Farben. In a well-known early book, Franz Neumann pointed to the increased strength accruing to this kind of capitalism as well as to an alleged community of interest with the Nazi Party regarding territorial expansion of the Reich. Therefore Neumann felt entitled to speak of an alliance between the party and big industry, supplemented by the military and the bureaucracy. According to his view, each of these, in furthering its aims, was dependent on the other three.6[...]Today there is little doubt that the assertion of industry being an equal ally to the party in determining the fate of Germany during the Nazi period was not well founded. In this sense politics certainly took primacy over the economy, as was argued by Mason. However, that does not necessarily mean that private property of enterprises was not of any significance. In fact the opposite is true, as will be demonstrated in the second section of this article. For despite extensive regulatory activity by an interventionist public administration, firms preserved a good deal of their autonomy even under the Nazi regime. As a rule freedom of contract, that important corollary of private property rights, was not abolished during the Third Reich even in dealings with state agencies.21

And again, in the article "The Role of Private Property in the NaziEconomy: The Case of Industry", they state:

A major part of the rise of state demand was in the form of orders for manufacturing enterprises. Thus it could have appeared quite rational to the state authorities to create state firms for their execution. In that case the state would have been able to save the large profits that in fact were paid to companies that engaged in the production for state demand.3 Peter Temin in his Lionel Robbins lectures characterized the Nazieconomic system as a certain "brand of socialism." By doing so he emphasized three distinguishing properties of "socialism," namely public ownership or regulation of key industries, heavy government involvement in wage determination, and a "social dividend" for everyone.12And indeed the Nazi regime smashed trade unions in the spring of 1933and replaced collective wage bargaining with a bureaucratic procedure.However, it is very doubtful whether there was a social dividend foreveryone, for in any case Jews were deliberately excluded from it.13In our context the first criterion of Temin's definition is the most important one. With regard to the Third Reich it was stated more precisely: "Instead of dispossessing private owners, the Nazis severely circumscribed the scope within which the nominal owners could makechoices."14 Interestingly enough, Temin spoke of "nominal owners" implying that in the German economy of the Nazi period there was notmuch left of the right of disposal over one's private firm. That is underlined in a later article of the same author where he pointed to the allegedly unequal long-term contracts between the Nazis and industry constituting an obligation of the latter to deliver its output at fixed prices. Iffirms refused, they could be nationalized.'5 Characteristically, in hissecond paper Temin endeavored to prove that in the thirties the Nazieconomic system was very similar to the Soviet one.16 By doing so henot only agreed with the observation of Overy quoted above, but seemsto have implicitly reversed the description of the economy of the ThirdReich in his earlier publication where he explicitly compared the Nazisystem with the mixed economies of the West.[...]Contrary to an explicitstatement by Temin, the state could not use its exclusive access to thecapital market for this purpose either.28 Industrial enterprises normallygenerated enough financial means through large profits and high depreciation earned that they could finance their genuine needs without resorting to the capital market.29 Despite the encompassing organizationcreated to execute it, the Four Year Plan, therefore, was not at all comparable to Soviet Five Year Plans. Its ambition mainly was to rapidlyincrease the output of a few basic products by import substitution in order to reduce the dependence of the Third Reich on imports of strategicimportance.30 Even in doing that the state largely abstained, as we willsee, from the use of force.

Otto Nathan, wrote this on 1944 in a report for National Bureau of Economic Research:

In the six years between the Fascist victory in Germany and the outbreak of war, Nazism erected a system of production, distribution and consumption that defies classification in any of the usual categories. It was not capitalism in the traditional sense: the autonomous market mechanism so characteristic of capitalism during the last two centuries had all but disappeared. It was not State capitalism: the government disclaimed any desire to own the means of production, and in fact took steps to denationalize them. It was not socialism or communism: private property and private profit still existed. The Nazi system was, rather, a combination of some of the characteristics of capitalism and a highly planned economy. Without in any way destroying its class character, a comprehensive planning mechanism was imposed on an economy in which private property was not expropriated, in which the distribution of national income remained fundamentally unchanged, and in which private entrepreneurs retained some of their prerogatives and responsibilities in traditional capitalism. All this was done in a society dominated by a ruthless political dictatorship.[...]In spite of the declineof competition and the growth of government intervention, nosingle agency regulated the economy in pre-Nazi Germany in termsof a specific, well-defined purpose. The Nazi government substituted conscious, over-all direction of the economy for the autonomyof the market mechanism and subordinated the economic system toa predetermined objective, the creation of a war machine. A vastnetwork of organizations was erected to embrace individuals, corporations, manufacturers, farmers, dealers, small business and largebusiness - in short, every factor of production, distribution, andconsumption. By dominating this organizational structure throughwhich orders could be issued to every businessman, and by insistingupon strict obedience from all, the government obtained completecontrol over the economy. Commodity prices, interest rates, andwages were not only fixed by the government, but they lost completely their traditional significance as regulators of economic activities. The government decided and ordered what and how muchshould be invested, produced, distributed, consumed, or stored. Asystem of "direct" controls was substituted for the mechanism ofprices which regulates economic activities "indirectly" in traditionalcapitalism. No institution in the economy remained unaffected bythe fundamental change that German Fascism brought about.

Sidney Ratner, reviewing the work of Carol, had this to add to the discussion:

Nevertheless, it is worth considering two other important questions:1) Was the Nazi German economy totalitarian in the sense the Nazis hadimposed one unifying objective upon the economy, to wit, the creation of awar machine, and had substituted conscious, over-all direction or controlsfor the autonomy of the free market mechanism? 2) Was the Nazi wareconomy as efficient as that of the British or American? On the firstquestion, the evidence and analyses supplied by H. R. Trevor-Roper,Carroll, and other scholars sustain the conclusion that there was nosingle, central agency in Nazi Germany 'with the undisputed authority, andthe administrative machinery, to guide and control the entire economy,according to any "unifying principle".' Yet the discipline and self-sacrificinglabor of the German people was secured, paradoxically enough, throughan 'appearance of totalitarian control' which was nearly as effective as thestrictest authoritarian direction of the war economy would have been, inmobilizing whatever level of support for armaments or for war productionwas demanded by the regime.The conflicts among the rival power Elites and their leaders, e.g., Speer,Sauckel, the Nazi Party Gauleiter, and the SS, were sufficiently hiddenfrom the German masses and most foreign foes to create an image ofNazi Germany as a unified, monolithic, totalitarian state and economy.Only after May 1945 could the illusion give way to the realization of thewarring private empires that underlay the mask of Nazi unity and ruthlessefficiency. As Dr. Carroll puts it, Germany's Third Reich was more' "totalitarian" in effect—through self-persuasion—than could be guessedfrom its administrative confusion' (p. 250).14

I'll give you more in my full answer, but suffice to say, what is usually said - fascism is capitalism in deterioration - seems to hold its water.

He does it the other way around and unironically stated that all socialism is marxism, which is a pretty hot take given how most socialists would disagree with that.

I don't know what sort of imitation socialists you have over there, but in Europe Marxist thought dominates socialism. Then again, I don't expect much from people who call the 'Left' liberals, when a) the American 'Left' is economically right-wing, b) the economically right-wing American 'Left' is simultaneously called liberal and Neo-Marxist and c) this happens when everybody knows that the theory of right-wing economics is called neo-liberalism. Just giant question marks.

[Lord Thesaurian]

I'm sorry I don't have the time to hammer out a proper reply for you today, Thesaurian. I'll get down to it asap - however, let me answer at least one part of it.



Temin's abstract, as printed in SOVIET AND NAZI ECONOMIC PLANNING IN THE 1930s, May, 1990:



Temin's argument that Nazis were socialists is based on a few assumptions: they utilized price controls, a planned economy and coercion to achieve it, and that both the Nazis and Soviets heavily prioritized heavy industry instead of civilian consumption. The fallacy of course, is that he claims socialism in 1930s can be reduced to military mobilization. While military mobilization was the crux of Nazi economy, this isn't the case of Stalin's regime. Building the Red Army was a goal of the Soviet regime, but this was hardly its only directive - or even its most important. If you need to change socialism's definition to make an allegation stick...

Firstly, what was Nazism's economic doctrine? Its defining feature was Wehrwirtschaft - a state of preparedness - which was characteristic of fascist regimes. This doctrine, basically, cancelled the transitions between war economy and peace economy, converting the latter into the former. As Mussolini (The Times, November 20, 1939) described this economic doctrine:



Therefore to describe socialism as a war-time economy, and then tie it to the fascist doctrine of actual perpetual war-time economy made Temin's argument possible. However, there is no proof that any socialist economy is war-time economy. The whole claim is just absurd.

Christoph Bucheim & Jonas Scherner discuss the Nazi economy as being:



And again, in the article "The Role of Private Property in the NaziEconomy: The Case of Industry", they state:



Otto Nathan, wrote this on 1944 in a report for National Bureau of Economic Research:




Sidney Ratner, reviewing the work of Carol, had this to add to the discussion:



I'll give you more in my full answer, but suffice to say, what is usually said - fascism is capitalism in deterioration - seems to hold its water.

In the interest of saving your time, I’ll point out a few things that seem to be a matter of agreeing to disagree, and we can probably move on from this subset of the discussion.

The idea that the existence of private property makes a system capitalist is about as silly as the idea that the existence of communal property makes a system socialist. Conditional private property rights exist in communist China, for example, and have to varying degrees since the beginning. To be honest, accusing Temin of absurdity for failing to adopt absurd premises seems, well, absurd. Describing the 1930s Soviet economy as a “war economy” isn’t even unique to Temin. If anything, it’s common, for objective reasons.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom...8_harrison.pdf

Temin certainly did not base the thrust of his argument on private property, but rather, on objective similarities between the Soviet and Nazi systems. Your references appear to, however, which makes it odd they would essentially dispute his claims on the basis that he does not operate from their chosen premises. What Temin did point out in that regard is that the Nazis considered private property rights entirely conditional, which your sources appear to acknowledge in any case.

Having shown that the inputs, outputs, and aims of socialist planning in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia during the Second Four and Five Year Plans were similar, it remains to note some of the differences between the two economies. While significant, these contrasts do not negate the common elements of socialist planning.

The first difference is that private property was virtually nonexistent in the Soviet economy and preserved by the Nazis. As noted above, the rights of private property were severely circumscribed in Germany. Both discretionary authority and current rewards were limited. But the ownership of productive assets was still vested in private hands in Germany and the state in Russia,

I have argued in Section II. above, that this difference was not important to many decisions. The incentives for managers-—both positive and negative—were very similar in the two countries. Their responses to the plans consequently were similar as well.

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/han...onom00temi.pdf

That the Nazis considered their socialist economy to be a permanent wartime function is totally irrelevant given there’s no reason why Temin’s basis for calling the Nazi economy “socialist,” which I’ve previously highlighted in summary, was necessarily divergent from this “peace time” Soviet economy you’re referring to from somewhere. If anything, a peace time Soviet economy having so much in common with a war time Nazi economy would invalidate this dichotomy on which you base your criticism of him. Criticism of his argument, as you’ve presented it, seems more focused on distancing Nazism from socialism because you don’t like the war time label, rather than on establishing that the Nazi economy was in fact capitalist.