This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Jul 2008, by Tom.
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14 Jul 08
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The most powerful indictment I've seen of contemporary historiography has got to be the studied ignorance in the West of the evidence brought to light in this slim little bombshell of a book. You will never be able to look at Marx, Hitler, socialism, fascism, National Socialism, or the Holocaust the same way again.
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Watson, a fellow in English at St. John's College, Cambridge, has been Sandars Reader in Bibliography and is editor of the New Cambridge Bibliography
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What Watson has quietly pointed out should shame an awful lot of history professors. What were you taught about Nazism? If you're like me, it was that Nazism was opposed to socialism. Indeed, it was socialism's "opposite": Nazism and Marxism constitute the two polar opposite ends of the spectrum of political thought. That they may sometimes seem to resemble each other is supposed to show only that opposite extremes may wrap around until they meet on the other side, or that fascism is a "confusing" ideology, too vague and elusive to explain or categorize. Hitler, as Ian Kearnshaw and many others claim, "was never a socialist." The Nazis' name: "National Socialist German Workers' Party", is supposed to be somehow a "misnomer"----some kind of "false advertising."
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In fact, Fascism and National Socialism were thoroughly socialist movements. They bitterly opposed the "bourgeois" ideology of capitalism: they bitterly opposed individualism, free trade, private property, free enterprise, limited government, and classical laissez-faire liberalism. Moreover, "almost the whole of National Socialism," as Hitler would freely admit (at least in private) was based on Marx. He explained in Mein Kampf: "As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement."
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Watson's unjustly marginalized book provides a fine introduction to a subject on which much more needs to be written.
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