Do you ever tire of hearing that we on the right, conservatives, are called right-wing extremists, but then also are called Nazis? Well, I do. I’ve been called a Nazi on occasion. It cuts me to the quick. Actually, it doesn’t.
It doesn’t bother me because those who say such things couldn’t be more wrong and just demonstrate their historical ignorance. So wrong, in fact, that it is quite literally the opposite of these ignoramuses’ understanding of what a Nazi is and who Hitler was.
First let’s put the obvious aside, that we on the right have nothing in common with Hitler or the Nazis. They were, after all, socialists. Hitler himself joined the socialist “German Workers Party” in 1919. He later changed the name to “The National Socialist German Workers Party” – the Nazi Party. When was the last time you heard anyone on the right being called a socialist? Answer – never.
Now for some history.
Like all dictators, Adolf Hitler craved the idea of conquest. The problem was, by the time he rose to power, the other European “superpowers” had long since colonized most of the world. Whatever would he do?
Well, rather than embark on long, possibly fruitless overseas quests, he was inspired to do something else. Instead, he decided to stay put and expand, or colonize, his own neighborhood, as it were.
It was the quest for Lebensraum, or living space. His vision was, as he put it, to expand his “colonial territory to the East” – specifically, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic States and, yes, Russia.
Hitler wrote, “It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.”
And who or what, you may ask, was his inspiration for this “neighborhood colonialism”?
Why, it was the 19th-century Jacksonian Democrats and Andrew Jackson’s idea of Manifest Destiny.
In November of 1923, Hitler was found guilty of an attempted insurrectionist coup in Munich, called the Beer Hall Putsch. He was charged with high treason and sent to Landsberg prison. For high treason, he spent only a year in the slammer. But it was a productive year.
It was there that he wrote “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle), and it was also there that he discovered an alternate means of conquest through his realization that American Democrat Andrew Jackson had already shown the way to the aforementioned Lebensraum, the expansion of living space through settler colonialism.
As Dinesh D’Souza put it, “Jackson showed Hitler the way. He drove the American Indians off their land, killed those who resisted and enslaved those who remained.”
So the next time you, as a conservative “right-winger” is called a Nazi – instead of the standard retort of “I am not,” you may wish to inform your uninformed verbal assailant that Hitler and the Nazis learned their wicked ways from the Jacksonian Democrats and Jackson’s idea of Manifest Destiny.
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