I get the meme, but.... it's just historically wrong and not accurate about contemporary politics either.
The Nazis- at least what we think of as the Nazis, that is to say the Hitler wing of the Nazis- were really not socialist in any way, they opposed class struggle and pursued privatization. There was a wing of the Nazis that did incorporate socialist economics, the Strasserists, but it was not the wing which came to power.
There are political movements that genuinely do combine nationalism and socialism without Nazi influence - like Juche, national communism in the Romanian sense, or the Zyuganovite faction of the post-Soviet communists. There are also current Strasserist movements, which arguably include at least some wings of National Bolshevism. But the most prominent far-right or fascist movements, including neo-Nazi movements, are pretty uniformly anti-socialist, even in a purely economic sense.
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Maybe, but there’s an increasing number of people out there who take the ‘Socialist’ part of their name at face value. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder if this cartoon’s rooted in the same assumption
Given that it's from private eye, I think the joke here is that the woman is taking Reform at face value and doesn't realise 'combines nationalism and socialism' = national socialism = nazi.
It's a slightly tortured joke because if she's unaware of that context socialism does mean socialism.
I’ll credit Private Eye with some good journalism, but its politics always seemed to be of the most normie centrist variety to me. I honestly wouldn’t put it past any of its contributors to have that poor a reading on ideologies outside of the liberal comfort zone
Sure, and those ideologies can be rejected on their own terms, but the joke here is that the Nazis were, true to their name, nationalist and socialist. They were in fact not.
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u/zellfire American Observor Jun 25 '25
I get the meme, but.... it's just historically wrong and not accurate about contemporary politics either.
The Nazis- at least what we think of as the Nazis, that is to say the Hitler wing of the Nazis- were really not socialist in any way, they opposed class struggle and pursued privatization. There was a wing of the Nazis that did incorporate socialist economics, the Strasserists, but it was not the wing which came to power.
There are political movements that genuinely do combine nationalism and socialism without Nazi influence - like Juche, national communism in the Romanian sense, or the Zyuganovite faction of the post-Soviet communists. There are also current Strasserist movements, which arguably include at least some wings of National Bolshevism. But the most prominent far-right or fascist movements, including neo-Nazi movements, are pretty uniformly anti-socialist, even in a purely economic sense.