I have a... friend... who actually uses the "socialist" part of "national socialist" as some kind of evidence that it's actually related to a purely socialist government. Conversations with him about things like that are not fun. Whenever I make a point, he just backpedals or attacks some trivial aspect of my argument rather than the poignant parts.

Tell your buddy that National Socialism rapidly turned into National Capitalism after Hitler got in bed with the German industrialists and the Prussian military aristocracy. The Night of the Long Knives was at least partially the result of a class war that was raging within German at the time. Ernst Röhm was poised to start a violent socialist revolution before Hitler killed him and disbanded the SA.

Socialist was a word that is used, like liberal, or republican, to mean a lot of things. It's currently becoming (frighteningly) more fashionable to paint Hitler as the man who saved Germany from Stalinism. Or at least it has been the theory held by white supremacists and actual Nazis, and thanks to certain documentaries on youtube, it's becoming more mainstream. The "violent socialists" were actually fighting "violent fascists" in the streets, they just lost. When the Social Dems were banned for being the sole party to vote against the Enabling Act (granting Hitler full power), they were sent to the camps with everyone else.

A more proper interpretation is that Hitler took the wind out of Stalinism by becoming Stalin himself, then doing what Lenin and Stalin did which was to purge the rational people from the party; replacing the Mensheviks for the SDP.

Hitler, like one of his biggest fans, Donald Trump, was socialist in the sense that he believed in trade unionism and trade protectionism, but his socialism was a word that was more or less coopted from the Marxist tradition in the same way that liberal was pilfered from classical liberals, much to the dismay of the editors of The Economist. It was corporatist socialism without diversity or Jews.

Unlike Hitler, who was a WWI fanatic, Trump was against the Iraq War, but he's hardly a dove. He's insinuated that he wants to return military spending to Cold War levels. Like most of his blathering, he reveals few details as to why, and in another breath, berates the military-industrial complex. I think he's practicing Putinist-style propaganda at a very high level.

I'm not sure how I feel about rehabilitating Hitler's image. On the one hand, it's been way too easy to call Hitler the most evil man in history, while downplaying Stalin and completely ignoring the cruelty of the British Empire. We do history a disservice by making like everyone else was at least kinda sorta okay but Hitler was evil.

On the other hand, this is a pendulum I don't want swinging too far the other direction. Hitler -- and perhaps more to the point, an awful lot of people beneath him -- were all too happy to participate in wars of conquest, the Holocaust of the Jews, the Devouring of the Roma, the brutal subjugation of countless other peoples, and crimes against humanity in general. Just because the Soviet Union was pulling shit too, and the British Empire was pulling shit too, and the United States was pulling shit too, doesn't mean we should lose the Nazis in a general haze of "well I guess we're all a little bit guilty".

Secret Hitler is a great party game.

But don't you see that the movie 2016 HAS COME TRUE?

In the sense that it is currently 2016, I mean. Everything else was horseshit.

It really does have a Da Vinci Code/National Treasure feel to it huh?