The Greatest Trick the Socialists ever Pulled was Convincing the World They Didn't Exist...

And like that... they're gone.

The reductio ad Hitlerium is an irritating logical fallacy, which almost never serves to improve understanding or conversation. Calling the OWS crowd Nazis, or even fascists, is a stretch. That needs be said before anything else.

But pointing out what Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei means is a handy and fun way to irritate socialists, as Ladd Ehlinger has discovered. I've been round the block with lefties desperate to argue that nothing about the Nazi's was left at all (keep scrolling), so I sympathise.

It all comes to how the word "socialist" is defined. Typically, those on the Left prefer to define "socialist" as "one who favors ending private property." This allows anyone who hasn't gone that far left to escape the title of "leftist" altogether. By this and similar ellisions, the Left pretends to be the Center.

But I prefer to define "socialist" as "one who favors the use of direct political power to remake society according to principles of universal justice." I like it because it allows the myriad of squabbling social thinkers, from LeFebre to Lenin to Mussolini to Mao to be recognized according to their common traits. It puts all the tyrants who covered their tyranny in the cloak of True Justice in a single pot.

And it allows us to draw distinctions between them. We can see Progressives, Mensheviks, Trade-Unionists, Corporatists, Fascists, Nazis, and Communists as similar, but also note their wide and obvious differences. We can grant that your average "liberal" Democrat has no intention of carting anyone off in a boxcar, while continuing to point out that their calls for "unity" are code for "now stop arguing with us."

A few objections:

• But Nazis and Fascists (and no small number of Progressive Democrats) hated Communists. If Communists are Socialists; how can Nazis, etc. be Socialists?

Answer: Large political/philosophical movements engage in vicious infighting all the time. See also, Christianity in the 16-17th centuries. For that matter, the Communists hated and murdered other Socialists with great regularity. No history of the Russian Revolution is complete without tracing the roles played by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the Bolshevik rise to power, and the cruelty with which the Bolsheviks repaid them.

• Isn't this just a cheap method of putting Progressive Democrats in the same boat as Fascists and Communists?

Answer: Not at all. In fact, it works within the way Progressives think of themselves: as sensible radicals who oppose totalitarianism. A Progressive who accepts my definition of "socialist" can still say "Sure, I want to see society change, and am prepared to use the law as a tool to bring that change about. But I'm not going to impose change at the point of a bayonet. I'm humane and have a conscience."

As evidence for my assertion, I invite anyone to read Section III of The Communist Manifesto, wherein Marx lists the varieties of socialism which fail to meet his standard of scientific materialism: Feudal Socialism, Petit-Bourgeois Socialism, German or "True" Socialism, Conservative Socialism, etc. If Marx could admit that numerous and mutually contradictory versions of socialism existed, why cannot we?