Some People I Disagree with are not Nazis

Some people see Nazism as a kind of dialectical virus, which leads to the acceptance of death camps by a chain of undeniable inferences once its first premises are accepted. In fact, Nazism was a mishmash of contradictory positions, which are easily separated from each other because they never belonged together in the first place. In Julian Young’s memorable phrase “Nazism was a body without a head”. Germany was full of conflicting ideologies at that time, and the Nazi’s formula for political success was to embrace all of these contradictory ideologies simultaneously. It may seem like a crazy strategy today, but it worked. This is why it is usually possible to find a quote in Nazi propaganda literature that makes anyone’s favorite enemy look like a Nazi.

Libertarians point out that the Nazis called themselves National Socialists. Nevertheless, many people forgave the Nazis their other failings because they were so virulently anti-Communist. There are also leftists who argue that the Libertarians are themselves Nazis because they advocate rulership by an elite of capitalist supermen. The concept of ‘blood and soil’ also included an endorsement of organic food and the preservation of forests, which is sometimes used to show that modern environmentalists are Nazis. Another popular Nazi slogan was “Strength through Joy”’, which sounds like the basis for a 1970’s human potential workshop. Former pope Benedict compared the SDS protestors at Columbia in the 60s to Nazi student demonstrators, because of their emphasis on youth and their violent…