Strictly speaking, a Nazi was a signed-up member of the political party led by Der Führer and a Fascist was a signed-up member of the political party led by Il Duce. Of course, British newspapers had their own definitions of Fascist and Nazi meaning dictatorial, despotic, and incompetent, and some of these still appear in dictionaries where the editorial board has some people who give political, technically incorrect definitions of words that have technically correct definitions. Of course, some dictionaries try to give words as actually used, and any decent English-speaker has been taught that Fascists and Nazis are evil, so just ‘equivalent to evil’ is one way the words are used by some ordinary English speakers.
For those who read history, the Nazis killed a lot of Europeans. The Fascists did not. For someone living in Italy under the Fascists, life was fairly normal for being in Italy before the Nazis took over. As Evelyn Waugh wrote, the Nazis were evil, the Fascists were not, but the Fascists were as demonised as the Nazis in the UK newspapers.
But the actual Nazis were not all that similar to the official Western portrait of the Nazis.
If one goes back to the book, My Struggle written in the ‘20s by the person who would become Chancellor in ’33, the author wanted a Judenfrei Europe, to be achieved by deporting all the Jews. When the UK said the Royal Navy would not allow a single Jew to be deported, that idea had to be abandoned. Starting Krystalnacht, 9-10 November 1938, it was no longer illegal to kill Jews or to destroy Synagogues. And the Nazis gradually went from there to a policy of trying to exterminate every Jew in Europe.
Based on this, the Western definition of Nazis is anti-Semites who want to exterminate either all the Jews, or at least all the Jews in their area of residence.
But, while the book My Struggle originally called for the deportation of all Jews from Europe, it also called for the extermination of all Slavs for Lebensraum.
The Nazis divided the inhabitants of Europe into three ethnicities: Aryans, Slavs, and Jews.
There is a story, supposedly from WWII. A young SS officer said, ‘How can we tell Aryans from Slavs from Jews? They all look alike; and they all speak multiple languages, usually including German.’
His senior said, ‘Follow me and I’ll show you.’
They went into a shop in Poland and the senior SS officer asked, ‘Do you have a left-handed teapot?’
The shopkeeper said, ‘There is no such thing as a left-handed teapot.’
The senior SS officer said, ‘He is a Slav.’
They went into a second shop in the same city and the senior SS officer asked the same question.
The shopkeeper said, ‘Dumbkopf. If you take a right-handed teapot and turn it one hundred eighty degrees, you have a left-handed teapot.’
The senior officer said, ‘He is an Aryan.’
They went to a third shop and the senior SS officer again asked the exact same question.
The shopkeeper whispered, ‘Yes, I have a few, but they are very rare and very expensive.’
The senior officer said, ‘He is a Jew.’
The anecdote tells us nothing about Aryans, Slavs, or Jews living in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, only about how the Nazis perceived Aryans, Slavs, and Jews.
The Soviet Union did not recognize ethnic types. One was a Soviet citizen and a good Communist, or a capitalist who must be given a chance to reform or be killed. The Nazis killed many, many Soviet citizens for Lebensraum, but the USSR didn’t care if they were Slav or Jew (it was, of course, illegal to practice any religion and Orthodox Slavs and observant Jews could be executed for practicing religion, but that was for committing what the USSR considered a criminal act, it had nothing to do with ethnicity).
In any case, the Russians consider a Nazi to be someone who wants to kill ethnic Russians for Lebensraum. Using the same symbols the German Nazis used is another clue for the Russians.
For the West, killing Slavs for Lebensraum was just a good, patriotic act on the part of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, nothing criminal about it, nothing Nazi about it. And all those symbols used by the Nazis were around long before the Nazis. Where I am, many of my neighbours have a Swastika on their door, and I think it means ‘peace’ (since I can’t speak their language, I have no idea what it really means). I was told the Nazi Swastika is subtly different, but I got old Nazi pictures and compared them, and I can’t see any difference. Plus, of course, the Ukrainians who consider themselves Aryans and who want to kill ethnic Russians for Lebensraum had a Ukrainian Jew appointed by the US as their president, and no Nazi could ever agree to live under a Jewish president, so they can’t possibly be Nazis, they are not anti-Semitic, they are not killing Jews, so they are as anti-Nazi as one can get, as far as the West are concerned.
But to the Russians, the Aryans running the Ukraine and exterminating ethnic Russians for Lebensraum are as Nazi as one can get.
This, the West say, just shows how little the ethnic Russians know, and why eliminating all of them for Lebensraum will make the world a much better place.
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