The Dangerous Semantics of “Socialism”: What We Forget About Hitler, Language, and the Left

In the new documentary Riefenstahl, about the infamous Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, the director presses her repeatedly about her relationship with Adolf Hitler. Her responses are evasive but telling. “I knew Hitler as the head of the National Socialist Party,” she says, carefully. That phrase, National Socialist, spoken without reflection, contains the truth most of the modern world has tried to forget.

The word fascist is Italian, drawn from fasces—a bundle of rods bound around an axe, an ancient Roman symbol of authority. Mussolini borrowed it to invoke Rome’s grandeur and discipline. Hitler admired Mussolini’s nationalism and efficiency, but make no mistake: Hitler was not a mere fascist; he was a socialist. The word Nazi is itself an abbreviation of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—literally, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The word “socialist” is right there, in plain view, carved into the very name of his movement.

For decades, we’ve been told this was a linguistic accident, a historical misnomer—that Nazism was somehow a right-wing aberration unconnected to socialism. But this is linguistic revisionism, not history. The Nazi regime rejected free markets, private autonomy, and open competition. It replaced them with centralized control, state coordination of industry, and collectivist ideology, all of which are the bones and sinews of socialism. The only difference was that the Nazis defined their “collective” racially instead of economically. Their socialism was national, not international—but socialist nonetheless.

Why do words matter? Because they are the first and last line of truth. To deny that Hitler was a socialist is to surrender the battlefield of language. The modern tendency to treat “Nazism” as something utterly distinct from “socialism” is not linguistic innocence—it is political strategy. It allows today’s socialists to distance themselves from one of socialism’s most monstrous incarnations. Yet the DNA is the same: the subordination of the individual to the collective, the belief that the state must plan, manage, and moralize the lives of its citizens.

History has already rendered its verdict on socialism and its Marxist twin. The Soviet Union disintegrated under the weight of its planned economy. Eastern Europe was bankrupted by bureaucracy. And contemporary Europe, still drunk on the rhetoric of “social democracy,” staggers under demographic decline and administrative paralysis. Marxism and socialism differ only in dosage. Marx sought to abolish private property outright; socialism seeks to regulate it into irrelevance. Both distrust individual freedom as a principle. Both promise equality and deliver hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the system that actually works—Western capitalism—is treated as an embarrassment. Monarchs in the Middle East rule without criticism, and socialist bureaucracies across Europe are hailed as humane. Yet it is capitalism, not socialism, that has lifted billions from poverty and created the modern world’s prosperity. The uncomfortable truth is that the most successful economic order humanity has ever produced is a hybrid of capitalism and mercantilism—a system that rewards enterprise while recognizing the necessity of trade and national interest.

This is not a new insight. Polybius, the great Greek historian of the Roman Republic, described the natural cycles of government: monarchy devolves into tyranny; aristocracy decays into oligarchy; and democracy collapses into demagoguery. Every form of rule carries within it the seed of its own corruption. What we are witnessing today in the West is not the failure of capitalism but its mutation into oligarchy, rule by the few under the banner of democracy. Our institutions wear the mask of equality while serving entrenched elites—a modern aristocracy by another name.

And so, when the linguistic apologists tell you that Hitler was not a socialist, or that today’s socialism is somehow purified and enlightened, remember: the word is right there in the name. Hitler’s party called itself National Socialist because it was socialist—collectivist in its economics, totalitarian in its politics, and moralizing in its vision of society. Words have meanings; meanings have consequences. When we pretend otherwise, we permit history to be rewritten for ideological comfort.

The point is simple, and it is urgent: don’t listen to the linguistic apologists. Their wordplay is not scholarship; it is camouflage. The twentieth century was drenched in blood over the meanings of words like freedom, equality, and revolution. The twenty-first is repeating the same experiment, only with better public relations. If we abandon the precision of language, we abandon the precision of thought—and that, as Polybius would warn, is the first step from democracy to demagoguery.