@okie,
okie wrote:
Walter, would you agree that to really get to the bottom of this question of what Hitler believed, do you agree that Mein Kampf would be perhaps the ultimate sketch of what the man believed and what motivated him as a person?
What I am in favor of is to clear away all of the obfuscations and muddying of the water in this debate and simplify the question into a simple answer. I think the best way to do that is to go back to the master document written by the man himself.
You are engaging in an exercise of useless pedantry. We can't possibly know what Hitler really thought. However, we do know a great deal about what he actually did, during his ascent to political power and while he exercised it. As others here have noted - at great length - Hitler was, above all, a tyrant bent on the expansion and solitification of his personal power and that of a reformed Germany that never quite lived up to his strange illusions about it.
The fact is that when he had the absolute power to do so, Hitler never took action to "socialize" or take government ownership of the means of production. On the contrary he used, and exploited the favor of the merchant and industrial princes who were themselves the archenemies of German socialists. Up close the facts of his rule indicate mostly the many contradictions of a half-baked, contradictory ideology and the gangster rule of his generally jealous and predatory associates, and not at all any penchant for left wing socialism.
Hitler's rule of Germany was about the expansion of his personal power in support of his illusions of Teutonic mastery and revenge for the wrongs of Versailles. He borrowed the rhetoric of both capitalism and socialism in seeking his aims, but his actions show clearly that his interests and focus lay elsewhere. He was an authoritarian tyrant with little real interest in the doctrines of either economic model.
You persistently refuse to recognize the very real distinction here between authoritarianism vs democracy and the competing econmomic models used by both. It is true that extreme socialism generally involves more centralization of authority than its economic alternatives. However, that is not a sufficient discriminator. The world has seen capitalist tyrannies of the worst sort as well as very democratic socialist systems.
All of this has been patiently and repeatedly pointed out to you by others here. However, you simply ignore them and continue on.
