Dad Saves America sits down with historian and sociologist Dr. Ranier Zitelman (author of Hitler’s National Socialism). The interview begins by explaining the limitations in U.S. education about history. John Papola states, that “Hitler seems to be the only bad guy that our kids here in America are taught about from history. They don’t get taught about Stalin, or Mao. . .and he has for obviously good reason, a huge, outsized role in the psyche of sort of ‘historical bad guys’,” and Dr. Zitelman has written about the economic philosophy and ideology of National Socialism.
Dr. Zitelman explains, that he does not use the word Nazi, and states that we must consider what they called and considered themselves to be. He also explains that the word Nazi was a polemic word used by his enemies and Communists in the 1930s, because they didn’t want the word SOCIALISM to acquire a negative connotation.
John Papola connects to the point, by stating that in the United States, the word Nazi and Fascist is “thrown around willy-nilly” reservedly for the political Right. He asks him, within this confusion, how can one understand what Fascism and National Socialism actually means, despite their similarities.
According to Dr. Ranier Zitelman, who did his doctored dissertation published in the U.S. under Hitler’s National Socialism, there is no pure capitalism, nor pure socialism in the world. In reality, we have mixed economic systems.
He uses the analogy of a test tube made up of two ingredients. Everything is a mixture composed of two ingredients: “Market and State & Capitalism and Socialism.”
Hitler, being a Social Darwinist believed in competition and was skeptical of nationalization. Hitler’s attitude towards planned economies, free-market and the role of the State in reaction to Joseph Stalin, begins developing more into the 1930-40s an admiration for the Soviet Union’s Planned Economy. Furthermore, he rebuts the argument, that National Socialist Germany economy was capitalist, and asks about the difference between the FREE-MARKET ECONOMY and a PLANNED ECONOMY.
An example would be the United States economy itself, which is not a pure capitalist system, but a mixed system and this includes socialism. One should not rely on the traditional form of Socialism (as the Communists defined it) when understanding, that in the United States, what was once a capitalist system develops more into the direction of a Planned Economy.
Analyzing countries and history, his approach in The Power of Capitalism is asking what happens if you include more State and more Market, and what system comes of this. He includes the case study of Venezuela in contrast to Vietnam as an example to segway into more depth as the interview moves along.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Paul Gottfried, Fascism: The Career of a Concept
The American Minervan 
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