Financial capitalism and capitalist libertarianism are not the only culprits in the game of false identifications, muddying the already dirty linguistic waters in the ‘political’ struggle between the two principal ‘economic’ systems in contention: capitalism and socialism (obviously communism, being “not of this world” has never been in any serious contention in this struggle).
The theoretically inoffensive concept of national socialism, albeit vague and requiring elucidation, has been pinned down in historical usage to designate a particular negatively tagged political system and its ideology, namely, Hitler’s Third Reich, and everything it has represented ever since World War II. Fortunately for the word socialism, the inglorious German phenomenon has been reduced to the short form Nazism, so that all those modern-day neo-nazi movements around the world have presumably lost the connection to the anchor word socialism, and yet, I am convinced that, psychologically speaking, national-socialism will keep giving socialism a black eye for decades to come.
What exactly is “national-socialism”? Does its substance have any relevance to its pseudo-economic label? Webster’s Dictionary has no other clue to its core meaning, except for the obvious “forwarding address” to the Nazi entry, in reference to the infamous National Socialist German Workers’ Party, created in 1919 and brought to power in 1933 by Hitler. There is little, if any, knowledge of the fact that this term had been first introduced not in Germany, but in France in 1898, by the prominent nationalist writer and politician Auguste Maurice Barrès (1862-1923). It is important to note that, to those who know his name today, Barrès can be easily identified as Hitler’s ideological precursor, and, in this sense, the fact that he was the one to coin the infamous term is of an immense historical significance, even more so, considering that the substance is essentially the same. It can even be said that Hitler may have borrowed his fundamental ideas not from some Austrian Czech ideologues, as is customarily alleged, but from this undeservedly forgotten Frenchman, who died in the same year that the future German Führer’s München Putsch failed, and he was about to be sent to prison to write, originally under the guidance of Rudolf Hess (see my entry The Remarkable Case Of Rudolf Hess, posted on February 15, 2011), his momentous monstrosity Mein Kampf.
Thus, the question of Is there more to this than meets the eye? is intriguing, and well worth an investigation. After all, for an alien from another galaxy, the words national socialism carry no historical baggage, and his curiosity as to what exactly it could mean deserves to be rewarded. I shall be developing this line of inquiry in my Acorn section at a later time.
The theoretically inoffensive concept of national socialism, albeit vague and requiring elucidation, has been pinned down in historical usage to designate a particular negatively tagged political system and its ideology, namely, Hitler’s Third Reich, and everything it has represented ever since World War II. Fortunately for the word socialism, the inglorious German phenomenon has been reduced to the short form Nazism, so that all those modern-day neo-nazi movements around the world have presumably lost the connection to the anchor word socialism, and yet, I am convinced that, psychologically speaking, national-socialism will keep giving socialism a black eye for decades to come.
What exactly is “national-socialism”? Does its substance have any relevance to its pseudo-economic label? Webster’s Dictionary has no other clue to its core meaning, except for the obvious “forwarding address” to the Nazi entry, in reference to the infamous National Socialist German Workers’ Party, created in 1919 and brought to power in 1933 by Hitler. There is little, if any, knowledge of the fact that this term had been first introduced not in Germany, but in France in 1898, by the prominent nationalist writer and politician Auguste Maurice Barrès (1862-1923). It is important to note that, to those who know his name today, Barrès can be easily identified as Hitler’s ideological precursor, and, in this sense, the fact that he was the one to coin the infamous term is of an immense historical significance, even more so, considering that the substance is essentially the same. It can even be said that Hitler may have borrowed his fundamental ideas not from some Austrian Czech ideologues, as is customarily alleged, but from this undeservedly forgotten Frenchman, who died in the same year that the future German Führer’s München Putsch failed, and he was about to be sent to prison to write, originally under the guidance of Rudolf Hess (see my entry The Remarkable Case Of Rudolf Hess, posted on February 15, 2011), his momentous monstrosity Mein Kampf.
Thus, the question of Is there more to this than meets the eye? is intriguing, and well worth an investigation. After all, for an alien from another galaxy, the words national socialism carry no historical baggage, and his curiosity as to what exactly it could mean deserves to be rewarded. I shall be developing this line of inquiry in my Acorn section at a later time.
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