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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

It is alleged that a journalist asked Abraham Lincoln why he didn't just declare the slaves free and be done with it.

"If I called a lamb's tail a 'leg', how many legs would that lamb have?"

"Five."

"Four. Calling a 'tail' a 'leg' doesn't make it so."

Probably-not-true anecdotes aside, National Socialism might have had elements of socialism to it, but best I can read, it wasn't anything like the primary plank of the platform. I think sibling comment's explanation of a reaction to the Communism(tm) at their door might be most reasonable to explain the naming.

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I think a lot of the confusion is around the difference between the party rhetoric, and the party actions.

Rhetorically, the Nazis in large part did rise to power on the basis of socialist rhetoric. They did claim to be socialists, supporting socialist policies. This is how they obtained votes.

In practice, not so much - and of course it turned into fascism.

For many, the salient point regarding the Nazi party is that people believed they were voting socialist, even if this was not the system implemented in practice.

They also famously brutalised, arrested, and exiled actual socialists (and other leftists) from pretty much the moment they came into power.

Heck, Dachau (yes, that Dachau) - established 1933 - was initially intended to hold leftist political prisoners.

When people cry "First they came for the socialists" when they feel their rights are being violated (or are on some slippery slope to being so), do they actually ever stop to think of what they are saying?

Is that somehow different from how Real Socialists brutalized, arrested, and exiled people they didn't like?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

Literally no relation whatsoever to my point, but I guess it's not a discussion about Nazis without weird whataboutism instead of engaging with what was actually said.

What other point did you have? I don't seem to get it from your parent comment... unless you posted somewhere else or have two accounts?

How can this be considered whataboutism when it's the exact same thing in different clothing?

Imagine that you were discussing Nazi Germany's relations with Belgium during the second world war with someone, and were making the argument that clearly the Third Reich and Belgium were in opposition (considering little things like Hitler invading the country, or the resistance from Belgians during its occupation). Imagine that I then showed up with the absolutely stellar retort of "Is that somehow different from how Belgium invaded and occupied people they didn't like?", linking to the country's imperial/colonial history in Congo that resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

Do you understand how that could be seen as rather obnoxious whataboutism that's both entirely irrelevant to the discussion actually being had and misses the point by a mile?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Karma is a bitch.

There have been thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of invasions, and probably hundreds of genocides in the last 10,000 years.

We've forgotten about this in modern times because the big bad US "takes care" of us with their aircraft carriers, but the time may come where our fate more closely resembles Syria and other places that the US doesn't favor.

Criticizing a country for invading is a bit hypocritical imo, since every country border that exists de facto exists because it's government conquered that land.

Or is this like the housing situation in San Francisco? "Fuck you, got mine".

Sure. It's common and expected for political mistreatment to include branches of a similar ideology. This is perhaps best illustrated by the concept of "der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen," or the narcissism of small differences.

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