Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Do you understand that the communists supported and voted for Hitler? They did this because while they viewed the ***** as rivals to their own socialist agenda, both groups were socialist. So they set aside their differences out of a sense of solidarity. Didn't end out well for the communists, but that was what they did and why they did it.
I'm sure you'll dismiss it out of hand, but there's this one
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It is a matter of record that in the German election of 1933, the Communist Party was ordered by its leaders to vote for the *****—with the explanation that they could later fight the ***** for power, but first they had to help destroy their common enemy: capitalism and its parliamentary form of government.
It's the easiest source to find that states this directly, most of them kinda dance around the issue and you kinda have to read behind the lines to see that the same supporters tended to bounce around between the same couple parties (communist and national socialist) during the late 20s and early 30s.
For a broader examination relevant to the topic at hand, we could also look at this site
It's an interesting read. I think the author uses socialism almost as a synonym for communism (where I think communism is a subset of socialism), but that's more of a labeling issue really.
Quote:
gbaji wrote:
You started with "No! They never worked together to prevent a free market from being adopted!" to "well, they voted together to defeat the free market advocates, but that's not the same as working with them"
Stop claiming I wrote something I clearly did not write, you @#%^.
I may have editorialized a bit, but that's the gist I got from what you wrote. You started with a firm "they never worked together" to acknowledging that they voted in support of Hitler (admittedly more out of opposition of a common enemy) but that this somehow didn't equate to working together. I don't see how that makes sense though, except for an exceptionally narrow definition of "working together". The Communist Party in Germany on several occasions in the early 30s choose sides with the ***** specifically to ensure that a non-socialist/conservative government could not be formed. They did this out of a belief that repeated collapses of governments and failed elections would ultimately lead to some form of upheaval and revolution. Their big failure was that it was Hitler who took advantage of those things when they happened and they got the short end of the stick.
Hitlers opposition to communists was less about their ideology and more about their threat to his own party's power (which itself is tricky if you don't understand that there were two broad branches of communists as well). Both were absolutely on the same "side" in terms of ideology. National Socialists shifted to the Communist party and vice versa as the fortunes of their leaders changed. Both were similarly aligned though.
Edited, Feb 14th 2013 5:26pm by gbaji