If you’ve been compared to Adolf Hitler or called a Nazi at some point, you’re pretty far from alone. The first time I was compared to Hitler, it wasn’t while discussing politics in an online forum, it was in an IRL chat about video games.

People seem eager to compare those that they disagree with to either Hitler or the Nazi party, especially the closer they are to losing an argument. But do these people really know what Adolf Hitler or the Nazis were really about?

It seems like all that most people really know about them was that they didn’t like Jews. But that in itself doesn’t make for a political ideology or philosophy, especially considering the Jews’ relative lack of influence. That’s like someone asking you what your religion is, and you answering “I’m not Zoroastrian”. There has to be more to what you believe in than you just saying that you’re not a member of a minority group.

The general consensus is that Hitler was right-wing. Those on the right usually answer that by saying that Hitler supported gun control, which isn’t a very right-wing stance to take.

But what was Hitler and his Nazi party really about?

People talk about Nazis all the time, but the topic of the Volkish party rarely comes up, even though the ideology of the Volkish was Nazism in its embryonic form. The Volkish were a folkish movement (Volkish literally means “folkish”) characterized by a rejection of urbanization and an embrace of rural and natural living. They were heavily conservationist and rejected industrialization. They were largely naturalistic in their thinking, and some of them embraced naturism, with not a few of them being nudists. Many of them were vegetarians; Hitler’s professed vegetarianism was a consequence of him belonging to the movement, though as vegans point out, Hitler didn’t really stay true to his vegetarian diet.

So yeah, the Volkish that Hitler belonged to were largely hippies. They were the most hellish hippies in history. Their beef with the Jews largely stems from the fact that Jews embraced technology, urbanization, and were meat-eaters. It also didn’t help that many of the conspiracy theories about the Jews that persist to this day were around back then, too.

The Volkish switched gears once they seized significant political control of Germany and became rebranded as the Nazi party. At that point, they seized control of the military-industrial complex and turned Germany into a socialist state.

Don’t believe me? “Nazi” is shorthand for “National Socialist German Worker’s Party”.

Next time you try to malign someone by comparing them to a maniacal dictator, check to make sure that you yourself do not ideologically align with the very same dictator.