A while back, we caught WorldNetDaily columnist Hanne Nabintu Herland spreading the false right-wing narrative that the Nazi movement was a socialist because “socialist” appeared in the group’s name. Well, she was at it again in her March 27 column:
Today, few seem to recall that it was German elitist nationalism coupled with socialism that became the National Socialism ideology that dominated Germany prior to World War II. NAZI is the abbreviation for “Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei,” the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Communism, socialism and National Socialism were all a part of the same root-ideology – Marxism.
The Nazi Party stood for precisely what we struggle with in the West today: A strong centralization of government power, a rigid culture of consensus, censored individual liberties, repression of free speech and brutal media censorship. There is a frightening unison in the media narrative that prescribes what people are to think and feel about almost every topic.
Herland is lying. As we pointed out last time she did this, actual historians and researchers know that socialism played a negligible role in Nazi Germany, which was an enemy to actual socialism and communism. As researcher researcher Ronald Granieri pointed out, this false claim is nothing but “historical ‘gotcha’” as well as “historical and political sophistry that attempts to turn effect into cause and victim into victimizer.”
Herland spent the rest of her column trying to force historian Hannah Arendt into her false framing, touting how she “viewed National Socialism and Communism in the Soviet Union as two sides of one ideological Marxist coin.” But as Granieri also noted, the linking of Nazism and socialism by Arendt and others is largely a product of Cold War politics rather than being based in historical reality. Herland also misleadingly called Arendt “a Holocaust survivor”; in fact, she and her mother fled Germany in 1933.