Uncommon Commentary #6: We Have Met the Enemy, and They Are Ourselves

In the USA nowadays, it's almost inevitable that anyone who deviates from the "politically correct" heterodoxy will be likened to Hitler or to Nazis in general. I wonder whether most of the leftists who practice this slander as a matter of routine know that "Nazi" is an abbreviation for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (also known by the acronym NSDAP, as on those banners seen in pictures of rallies in Nuremberg), and that the full name translates as National Socialist German Workers' Party; does that sound rightist to you? The National Socialists favored state control of industry, and had such hostility toward Christianity that they abolished Christmas, substituting for it a pagan festival of the winter solstice. (I'm glad that no one here in the USA would try to replace the Feast of the Nativity with a generic holiday.) Although this has been forgotten, the fact that the Third Reich flourished fiscally while most other countries suffered through the Great Depression impressed other Western countries, which, after World War II, imitated much of the regime's anti-capitalist policy. The popular image of the Führer as the consummate right-wing extremist has resulted largely from honest misconception, since, after all, when people think of him, they don't think of economics; they think about the bloodshed caused by his racial pseudo-science and by his war of aggression. This image, however, is to a degree also the product of intentional distortion by left-wingers who want the public to believe (or who have convinced themselves) that all those who don't think as they do are "racist," "sexist," "homophobic," etc. (Hitler, by the way, at least once defended the homosexuality of his future murder victim Ernst Röhm, in what would now be considered enlightened language). How ironic that it is the views of these name-callers, not those of their opponents, that bear the more similarity to those of Hitler!