AfD's Weidel Throws Hitler Back at the Left
Noting Hitler's closeness to Communism is a brilliant rhetorical strategy by AfD
The German Left has tried to use the Nazi canard against German patriots for years. Alice Weidel's recent comments about Hitler's closeness to Communism are not only factually correct, but brilliant political strategy. She is throwing Hitler back in the faces of the Leftists who label anyone with patriotic attitudes and nationalist sentiments a Nazi.
Weidel takes control of the narrative by explaining that Hitler was indeed just as much a leftist in economic matters as he was right-wing in social matters. The Leftists have just as much in common with Hitler as any right-winger. Leftists want a racially inclusive socialism and Hitler wanted an ethnically exclusive socialism (for Germans alone); but BOTH wanted socialism! Hitler was a self-defined socialist with all of the class warfare and envy-the-rich tendencies of a diehard Marxist. He was an rabid anti-capitalist who aimed to eventually abolish private property (or restrict and control it to such a degree as becoming indistinguishable from state property) and induct all Germans into a giant commune.
Nazism will never be rehabilitated in Germany. Decades of de-nazification have ensured that's the case. It's a dead ideology and should be left in its grave. Those trying to resurrect it will fail no matter how many fake meme "Europa" documentaries they make to whitewash Hitler's crimes against Europeans. Naomi Seibt said it perfectly: "the Nazi stigma is wrong: The AfD has nothing to do with the national socialists and Adolf Hitler, who was an imperialist oppressor wanting to conquer other nations."
Hitler was not a traditional conservative or nationalist; he was a racial imperialist hell-bent on colonizing and lording it over other Europeans who weren't German. He respected no nation but his own; he thrust his country into a bloodbath to achieve a Germanic imperium in which other Euros served as his slaves and workhorses. He helped Stalin take over the Baltics and eastern Poland with Molotov-Ribbentrop. There's no sense defending any of this; but Germans ought not feel ashamed by it either, since the responsibility falls only on the shoulders of the perpetrators not generations of Germans.
As Musk said, being proud to be German is good. Germans need a home and they've got one to fight for. That needn't turn into the kind of imperialistic chauvinism that animated the Nazi regime, staining the name of nationalism for generations since. If anything, Nazism was a force hostile to European unity, seeing other Europeans as obstacles to or useful idiots for exclusive German glory. We need something better than that which brings the continent together as one unit against the Globalists and Marxists working towards Europa's destruction.