It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as the economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. All such ideologies-we can call them totalitarian for now-attract the same types of people. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism". “The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits.
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