What Hitler Learned from the US Democrats, by Dinesh D’Souza.

The real fascists, however, knew that they were on the political left. Mussolini — the original fascist leader, who came to power a decade before Hitler — was a Marxist who saw fascism as the most effective way to implement socialism.

Hitler was so committed to socialism that he changed the name of the German Workers Party to the National Socialist German Workers Party. As historian Anthony James Gregor points out, all the original founders of fascism — in Italy, in Germany, in England and in France — were socialists and leftists.

So what did Hitler learn from the Democratic Party and from his fellow leftists in America?

Lebensraum followed the US policy towards Indians:

First, he credited his plan of lebensraum or “living space” — specifically, his plan to forcibly seize the land in Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe, and enslave the native inhabitants—to the Jacksonian Democrats. In a 1928 speech, Hitler noted that Americans in the Jacksonian Era had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

Far from objecting to this precedent, Hitler intended to emulate it. As historian Norman Rich put it, “The United States policy of westward expansion in the course of which the white men ruthlessly thrust aside the ‘inferior’ indigenous populations served as the model for Hitler’s entire conception of lebensraum.”

Historian Timothy Snyder makes the same point in Bloodlands, “As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians.” Using a formula developed by the Democrats, Hitler sought to drive the Poles, Russians and Slavs from their land; dispatch Germans to take it over; and enslave the conquered peoples that refused to leave.

Hitler wanted a racist regime like the US South:

The second lesson Hitler learned from the Democrats was how to create a racist state. The Nazis believed they were creating the world’s first racist regime, but they soon discovered that the Democrats of the American South had—at least on the regional level—beaten them to it. Consequently, Hitler and the Nazis derived valuable lessons about how to implement discriminatory laws. …

Hitler specifically invoked the anti-miscegenation laws mostly passed by Democratic states as an example for Nazi Germany. “The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “who has remained racially pure and unmixed rose to be master of the continent. He will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to the defilement of the blood.” …

Eugenics:

Third, Hitler learned from progressive sterilization laws that had been enacted in America through the influence of activists like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would in all probability be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” …

Conclusion:

I am not suggesting that Hitler derived his racism, his appetite for conquest, or his willingness to sterilize and euthanize his fellow citizens from American Democrats. He did, however, learn how to frame his policies of racial discrimination and Nordic supremacy, his lebensraum strategy of mass displacement and subjugation, and his genocidal mechanisms for exterminating the “unfit,” from his fellow leftists and progressives in the United States.

This is the disgraceful legacy of the Democratic left. Scholars and media pundits who know this history are deeply frightened by it. They realize that if young people discover it, if it comes to become widely known, then the whole progressive Democratic project will be discredited. No longer will progressives be able to pose as the part of the good, the true and the beautiful; on the contrary, they will be exposed as a partly complicit in racism, mass murder and genocide.

Well those were the ideas going around leftist circles at the time, though they are all ignored or disowned now.

hat-tip Charles