A Real Education About The NAZI Era

Typically, I try to avoid anything tied to Politics or Religion, but sometimes when usage among the 20-something crowd is badly mangled, I can’t ignore the amount of ignorance that haunts such usage.

I recently read about an upset 20-something woman calling a Trump supporter a Nazi. She was wearing a T-Shirt that supported her want of a Socialist society, which made me do a double take. Why is that? She was using the term “Nazi” as an insult. Which is profoundly weird for a Socialist to be doing.

Why is that, you may wonder?

Firstly, over at Netflix, if you have an active account, is a highly accurate and educational series called “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial” which is an excellent six episode documentary on the Nuremberg trials. I recommend everyone watch it and learn something valuable, like how evil the Nazis really are. Not used as a mere label, I’m talking about the real, original nightmarish Nazi Party.

But, to use the term Nazi against someone who is not a socialist, by a socialist, is still weird, exposing a true lack of education. How so? The ONE thing that documentary doesn’t discuss, is how the term NAZI came about in the first place.

I can help you with that.

NAZI is actually an anagram. The letters are combined to make a short term out of a much longer name.

The original name of the NAZI party, before it was shortened, was called the ‘National Socialist German Workers Party’. Well, that’s the English translation. In German, it actually is written as ‘Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei’ and even then, it’s a real mouthful to say out loud. As such, it’s even much harder to print in the narrow German news columns of that Era.

So the German news media took the first step to reducing the title of the National Socialist German Workers Party down to ‘National Socialists’. In German, it’s written as ‘Nationalsozialisten’ which is one long word, still too long for those narrow German newspaper columns to keep printing.

So they broke it down even farther, into just FOUR letters. Nationalsozialisten. That’s right. NA and ZI, the first two letters of each word. In the German language, even though it’s written as a single long word, it’s two words mashed together. So the Na and the Zi are put together to form the term Nazi. That will easily fit into those narrow German newspaper columns.

Now if you recall the original name, the first two words are National Socialist. So there you have it. The horrific original Nazis were actually Socialists who got into power. Today’s 20-something college kids are yelling “Nazi!” at a Conservative in an attempt to insult, which is actually a Socialist labeling somebody they hate as a Socialist.

Which makes no sense at all.

The 20-something only insults their own intelligence by using it in this manner.

Now you know. Please, use that evil term in its proper context next time.