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Elon Musk has created a furor in Germany by endorsing the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in that country’s upcoming election. Musk says that AfD is Germany’s last hope; naturally, the other parties are accusing him of “election interference.” Earlier today, Musk interviewed AfD leader Alice Weidel, that party’s candidate for Chancellor, on Twitter:

The interview was cordial and sometimes humorous, which infuriated AfD’s opponents, as the London Times reports:

The German parliament’s administration has opened an investigation into whether Musk’s decision to give Weidel a friendly platform on X violated laws on foreign interference.

That is an absurd suggestion. The key word was “friendly”:

The tone was affable as Weidel frequently hooted with laughter at Musk’s remarks, despite his consistent mispronunciation of her surname.

“It’s a completely new situation for me that I can just have a normal conversation and I’m not interrupted or negatively framed as has been the case with the mainstream media for the past ten years,” she told him.

Much like Donald Trump going on the Joe Rogan show.

Not much of the conversation was devoted to immigration, the issue that AfD may ride to victory. Rather, Musk and Weidel talked about AfD’s platform, which is center-right by American standards.

Of course, AfD is invariably described as “far right,” which is Eurospeak for opposed to mass third-world immigration. Beyond that, the other German parties denounce AfD as “neo-Nazi,” notwithstanding the fact that its platform is the polar opposite of Hitler’s national socialist ideology. This is the portion of today’s interview that I want to focus on:

Adolf Hitler was a communist and the “greatest success” of the postwar years was to rebrand him as far-right, a leading figure in the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has said.
***
Asked by Musk about the frequent claims in Germany that the AfD is “Nazi-lite”, Weidel responded: “The National Socialists were socialists … Adolf Hitler was a communist. He considered himself a socialist … The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Hitler as [far] right and conservative.”

She added that the AfD was the “opposite” of the Nazis in its attitude towards the size and power of government: “We would like to free the people from the state.”

That is correct. Hitler always described himself as a man of the Left. He and his cohorts took over the German Workers’ Party, which was uniformly and correctly regarded as left-wing. They renamed it the National Socialist Party. Still left-wing, even more so. The Nazi regime vastly expanded the power of government–to put it mildly–raised taxes, essentially took over private industry from the top down, and, throughout World War II, assured Germans that they would have “real socialism” once the war was over.

Of course the Nazis battled the Communists in the streets in the 1930s; that was like the Crips and the Bloods fighting over turf. Bitter enemies who are in all respects relevant to outsiders, the same.

The great public relations coup of the Western Left was its success in branding both the Nazis and Italy’s Fascists as “right-wing.” In fact, they were big government–make that huge government–socialists: the opposite of Western conservatism. Hitler would have been astonished by the claim that he was somehow a free-market, limited government conservative. By any sane definition–including his own–he was a left-winger.

Historically, two varieties of socialism have actually existed: national socialism (Germany and Hitler, with a number of countries in Europe and Latin America following suit) and international socialism (Marx, Lenin and the USSR). International socialism didn’t last long. Stalin abandoned it with his “socialism in one country” mantra in the 1930s, and when his fellow socialist and ally Hitler invaded, defense of the Soviet Union became the Great Patriotic War. So, for practical purposes, there is only one kind of socialism: national socialism. Nazism, or Fascism.

These are far-left ideologies, and the claim that they have anything to do with the right, with conservatism, is nothing but a propaganda coup on the part of Western leftists, who have successfully dodged responsibility for those who carried their ideologies to their logical conclusions.