I’ve decided that I need to provide a history lesson for some people that keep shooting their mouths off in, what really ought to have been, polite political discourse. Generally speaking, I think that we need to invoke The First Corollary of Godwin’s Law for political discourse, but it’s just getting a bit out of hand.

The history lesson is on the Nazis and Nazism.

Nazism refers to the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, known more simply as the Nazi Party. In the expression of its name, the Nazi party was a combination of Nationalist and Socialist ideas. Though the party incorporated ideas from both the left-wing and right-wing, they are considered to be a far-right party as they themselves formed most allegiances with members of the right-wing.

The party was primarily a party for German Nationalism. They believed that the Treaty of Versailles was an act of weakness in the German leadership, the Aryan Germans were superior to all races, the Communists were gaining too much power, and international capitalism was a Jewish controlled movement. They believed that the state should be responsible for Social Welfare and originally had removed the “Socialist” from the title of the part to ease potential members’ worries that they were in any way a Marxist party. In fact, originally the party went through great efforts to assure the middle class that their only socialist ideas were to do with Social Welfare given only to those of the Aryan race. Through their nationalist policies, they called for a unified Germany as a “national community” that was completely “jew-free”.

Hitler himself was less interested in the “Socialist” aspect of the party than early members were. He was most interested in the “Nationalist” element. Hitler’s version of the Nazi party drew more membership through his oratory skills and that the party was seen as a backlash against the liberal and socialist policies of the post-WWI German government.

Rampant Nationalism is what history tells of the Nazis, not Socialism. Fascism is a form of extreme Nationalism. Genocide is a result of extreme Nationalism. Xenophobia and racial persecution is a result of extreme Nationalism.

Marx and the socialists opposed Nationalism. Socialism, put simply, simply means to make equal access to resources to all individuals with an egalitarian method of compensation. Marx and the other socialists had some pretty diverse and sometimes strange notions on how that should work.

Social welfare is a small part of Socialism where the state tries to assure that individuals can achieve a minimum level of income, services and other support usually at the expense of the taxpayer. At its roots is the idea that some services are basic needs for people and they should not be denied to people because of a lack of financial compensation.

We already have social welfare. Now we just need to make it work or get rid of it entirely.