Talk:Nazism and socialism/Archive 4

message: Instead of just going from memory, I (*gasp*) went and looked up Nazism on the german wikipedia. (It's only a click on de: away, after all). Okay, that was a shock. The german wikipedia (and who could be more authoritative?) doesn't even mention socialism or democracy or anything really. It simply states that nazism was - and unfortunately still is - a racial ideology dedicated to "purity of blood" , with almost religeous overtones. 
So say we accept the german description as most authoritative on this subject. I'm sure they did their research very well, and they'll probably have had the easiest access to all the relevant documentation. 
Having figured that out, I don't really see much point in having this page anymore. A paragraph on Nazism with "While the NSDAP claimed to be Nationalistic, Socialistic and Democratic all at once, they were none of the above" would suffice.
Kim Bruning 10:56, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Shall we move the article to Perceptions of Nazism? It would go nicely next to Perceptions of new religious movements which I proposed to replace List of purported cults. --Uncle Ed 17:46, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, now I see where you are coming from - I agree with you, then. In that case what was wrong with my lead? (pre Sam Spade) -here- which characterizes the "debate" for what it really is, which is polemic inuendo. -SV(talk) 00:50, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: John, how does "Stalinist" equate to "rather on the left"? Please enlighten us. -SV(talk) 00:50, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: My advisor was speaking lightly - I don't think he really meant that Carr was a Stalinist, just that his history of the Soviet Union was rather a sympathetic one.  Point was, I couldn't envision someone who had been so described, even lightly, as being on the right. john 08:17, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interlanguage is handy 

message: :::::Please restrict your personal attacks to my user talk, and focus on improving the article when communicating here. Sam Spade 19:13, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Im truly sorry if you took the above comment as a personal remark. It was not - rather it was a retort to your changing the subject.  Speaking of which, you have yet to give a response to the actual substance of my comment, and your allegation of a "personal attack" seems more like a way of avoiding what I said.  If you will accept my apology, please continue by responding point by point to what I wrote above. Thanks. -Stevertigo 00:29, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: There is no need for me to respond point by point. I agree w pretty much all of what you said, except for your assesment of my views as presenting a left/right dicotmomy (read political spectrum already, will ya? I provide links for a reason, sheash) and your juvenile grade school insults. You can be generally accurate and still be an expletive, but it doesn't get you very far, just ask lir. ;) Sam Spade 02:24, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:Etiquette|wikiquette]]

message: What gave you the idea the article had spontaneously NPOV'ed itself, much less repaired the factual innacuracies which riddle it? Sam Spade 05:20, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  problem solved? 

message: I waited until it was clear that you all were done editing, and then I started to fix up the article. You interupt half way thru, w/o discussing, and undo much of what I have done. This is not the first time this has happened on this page. Normally its a simple give and take, but w this article its all rewrites and overhauls. Can you understand that the article will never settle down until we begin to compromise? I know your at least half-way reasonable, and I'd love to talk about it, but if you can't compromise their arn't many other options than more of the same, ad infinitum. Sam Spade 06:18, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Sam, I didn't revert you, which I might well have done, given that you, also, did not talk about the changes you were going to make.  I worked with your changes, and just changed some of the stuff.  At any rate, I fail to see why waiting until everyone else is done, and then making a lot of unexplained changes is the way to go about changing an article.  We should discuss our disagreements, and try to come to some consensus, rather than just making changes.  I was going to post a note on the talk page saying much the same, but then I wasn't sure.  john 06:21, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: I'd also note that I was looking at my watchlist time stamp, which apparently doesn't automatically change from standard time to daylight savings time, so I thought you'd made your changes an hour or so before I edited, and had stopped, and only realized my mistake when I came on an edit conflict. john 06:24, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: Yeah, as I said, I didn't mean to intervene in the middle of your edits, and I'm sorry about that.  As to right and left wing, I agree the terms should be used with care.  But calling the Freikorps "right wing" and Lenin and the Communists "left wing" is not a particularly careless use of the terms, as far as I am aware.  If you can find a source that calls the Spartacists reactionary, or discusses the Freikorps as left liberals, I'd love to see it.  You'll note that I didn't reinsert the description of the Nazis themselves as right wing.  But I think that saying there are similarities between Nazism and Stalinism, say, is not to deny that Nazism is in some vague sense a movement "of the right" and Stalinism a movement "of the left."  At any rate, "what was seen at the time as" is an incredibly awkward phrasing - it's simply bad writing.  As to other changes, things like saying "this is how the Nazis were different from other Socialists" is completely POV, in that it says that the Nazis were socialists.  And you can't just cite laws as supporting a point without explaining them at all.  And it would be nice if you could actually cite scholars who discuss similarities between Nazism and socialism, rather than vague "supporters" of such arguments (at the very least, those opposed to such comparisons can cite "the organized socialist movement" rather easily, although I would agree that there are somewhat similar problems on that side of the debate.)  I also didn't revert many of your wording changes, because I think that some of them actually do do a good job of making the article less POV. john 06:33, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  what do I have to do? 

message: Its going to be a slow slog, IMO, but w a few more polite and articulate editors like yourself we should get their in one peice ;) Do you give any credit to things like the nolan chart? IMO it perfectly illustrates what we are discussing in this article. I actually am thinking of including an image of it within the article itself. Sam Spade 06:40, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I am not a big supporter of the nolan chart, for a number of reasons.  First, it reduces all political questions to "political freedom" and "economic freedom".  And it goes with the rather ridiculous idea that "right wing" politics is to be identified with a maximalization of economic freedom.  Traditionally, maximizing economic freedom has been associated with liberalism, in the classical sense, which has usually been seen as a centrist movement.  Genuine conservatives in Europe tended to be suspicious of things like free trade in the 19th century, and the same suspicion of the free market can be seen, for instance, in Christian Democracy in Europe today.  The Nolan chart also ignores questions like hierarchy vs. egalitarianism (which is, I think, the basic issue of left and right, at least in the traditional sense), and of traditionalism, which has been a major part of the conservative tradition.  The idea of "economic freedom" as described in the Nolan chart is also problematic.  Are we to make no distinction between Communist economic planning and the traditional restrictions on trade of the ancien régime, for instance?  Are these phenomena really similar in any significant way?  That is to say, it is a very arid kind of politics which is explored in the Nolan chart.  "Left" and "Right" are certainly problematic, but they have a real historical meaning, in that, in most countries, political parties have generally conceived themselves in a kind of left-right spectrum, especially on the continent.  That libertarians conceive themselves to be on a Nolan chart type spectrum is important to understanding libertarianism, but I'm not sure it tells us anything about the political spectrum.  Similarly, while the left-right political spectrum doesn't really explain anything in a vacuum, explaining politics in a way that the people who participated in those politics understood them is very important.  And people in Weimar Germany certainly understood politics to be on a left-right spectrum.  Does this help at all? john 06:54, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Political Spectrum]]

message: I think there are a couple of problems with the introduction:
* The first question ("Can the National Socialist German Workers' Party be considered socialist on the basis of having the word "socialist" in its name?") is surely a little bit silly. I doubt any serious historian would entertain the idea that National Socialism could be considered a form of Socialism solely, or even partly, because of its name.
* The sentence after the bullets seems to leave out an important POV, suggesting that some people think Nazism and Socialism are complete opposites, while others  "argue that Nazism was either a form of socialism or contained some signifigant similarities to socialism.". Of course it's also possible to believe that there are some similarities between the two while also believeing that there is no real connection between them, so maybe this could be worded a bit better.
Hopefully none of this should be too controversial. Any comments? --Cadr
I agree with both points.  Be bold. john 17:13, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I might disagree with the second, but lets see what you do. Sam Spade 19:46, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

text: Good work. Sam Spade 03:53, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: The introduction to the article

message: The above is what I call a Troll Frenzy. Sam Spade 04:23, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Troll Frenzy