Yet they were not socialists. That term had very specific meanings and specific political orientations. Hitler also believed that socialism/communism was a Jewish plot, as much as capitalism was. Workers organizations were one of the first things to be attacked and the Socialist parties were blamed for the burning of the Reichstags. So no. He wasn’t a socialist by any definition of the day. The use of “socialism” in the party shouldn’t detract from the fact that he and the party very much stood against socialism, since many of the most prominent people who were socialist in Germany at the time were in fact Jewish. The “Nazis are socialists/leftists” BS got started because some activists conservatives of the modern era who don’t think that the Nazis were that bad AND they want to basically pin all bad things on the left - it’s bad revisionist history that distorts more than it clarifies. It’s just flat out incorrect, which is why I objected to it.
I agree. It’s just kind of overly patriotic and can be a bit creepy. I’m glad my daughter’s school doesn’t make her do it.
I would say that the issue isn’t with the existence of the pledge, but with forcing (especially) children to recite it. I wouldn’t call it fascist however, just dangerously jingoistic.
Well, you did have the Strasserite wing of the party, who seemed bent on some kind of horrible “social fascism” bastardisation, and whose anticapitalism and antisemitism fed off each other in a positive feedback loop of bigotry. But I think they all got purged in the Night of the Long Knives.
I’ve never heard of the existence of the Texas pledge; other than flight transfers though at DFW, I’ve never been there. (My only knowledge of the state is from watching Dallas in H.S.)
So far as The Pledge of Allegiance … We were all brainwashed to the point or being able to recite it in our sleep after a few weeks in kindergarten. I didn’t have to learn the Star Spangled Banner until ‘music’ class in the 5th (or 6th ?) grade.
Ask any first/second/third grader if they can define the words:
Pledge
Allegiance
Indivisible
Liberty
Justice
I’ve never had any reason or desire to use either a Texas flag (aka, the large print, easy to read USA flag) nor Chilean flag emoji in anything. After this nonsense, I’m suddenly filled with the urge to wish Merry Texas day (or whatever) to all the citizens of Texas with a nice, purposefully selected image:
Amusingly, it works the other direction, too. My cousin Robby rode a touring bike from Deadhorse Alaska to Tierra del Fuego a couple years ago. He’s from Texas, so on the back of his bike he had a small Texas flag mounted. Once he passed into Chile, people would point at his flag and cheer, or tell him they liked his Chilean flag.
Wouldn’t this be a ‘freedom of expression’ issue?
It said there, right, that if passed the bill would ‘urge’ citizens not to use this ‘expression’. Now, a legal ‘urging’ IMO implies that some kind of sanctioning will happen, for example you might not get that government job if your facebook timeline includes the Chilean flag too often in its newfound capacity as ‘/texas’.
Based on the 4 years I spent there it seems to fit just fine. [quote=“Gyrofrog, post:29, topic:95496”]
But that 7th grade TX History textbook: it was like lugging a hardcover Yellow Pages around.
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Good idea. Maybe they won’t be able to get back in at the border, unless they reveal all their passwords and catapult themselves over a wall.
Their target audience was very much working-class, lower-class, and middle-class people. They nationalized businesses (though not entirely) and created a lot of social programs, job programs, and public works projects, while planning many more (state-provided health care, guaranteed pensions, and a land settlement program). It was, however, a very very different (far-right) form of socialism than modern western European socialism, which itself is very different from Cold-War era soviet socialism, or ‘peoples democratic socialism’ as seen elsewhere.
Also remember that Republicans and Democrats in the mid-late 1800s were about the polar opposite of modern Democrats and Republicans. Lincoln was a Republican, even if his views might be quite different from the stereotypical modern Republican. It wasn’t that long ago that Democrats were known for being racist plantation owners in the rural south who opposed big government.
There is the “lies to children” version, which is that the nazis were not socialist.
The reality is that there were Strasserites and National Bolsheviks in the party, but they were purged by the non-socialist nationalists before they could use any of the power of being in government. In practice, the Nazis were not socialist.
We were never made to or even asked to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was in school in the 70s-80s. I knew the National Anthem early on only because I went to a lot of baseball games.
