Hitler, the Socialist

From Tik History:

Hitler's Socialism: The Evidence is Overwhelming

Go get overwhelmed.

In my youth, I thought I was a Socialist. I was reading Upton Sinclair, the popular socialist novelist, and the socialists in his books about post-WWI Europe were good people and that was enough for me. Then he introduced the father of Fascism, the thug Mussolini -- only "the Moose" was a Socialist when he made his appearance. The National Socialist street-fighting "brown shirts," were socialist true believers brawling with international socialist "black shirt" true believers (Anti-fa, as it happens). An idealistic young German Piano prodigy becomes an idealistic SS commander.

The Bolshevik creators of the United Socialist Soviet Republics attract a menagerie of Western leftists to Moscow and St. Petersburg (aka Petrograd/Leningrad), including anarchists and syndicalists and every-other ist -- who then bail when things go south but carry the flame of revolution home with them.

True, Sinclair did argue that Hitler/Lenin/Stalin weren't true socialists but I had to ask, how do you tell the difference between the murderous and the benign kind of socialism? In later years I wondered: is fake socialism the only true socialism? Is the grass-roots socialist mantra, "fool me again" and "all power to the Sociopaths!"

As a tenth grader in 1964, I had to admit that Upton Sinclair sure could write. He not only talked me into his beliefs, he talked me right back out of them.