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Notes -
Should be noted there were a plenty of European socialists who argued the point 1 from basically the first years onwards, like Karl Kautsky (see, for example, this, probably considered the most influential Marxist thinker of that era at the time, including by the Bolsheviks who were aghast at his "betrayal". Ie. it's not just from Stalin onwards, though of course Stalin's era also caused a considerable amount of socialists to eventually turn against the Soviet Union.
The wider point is that Marxism, due to its longer lifespan and greater amount of regions it affected, just plain has a greater extent of meanings than National Socialism. Marxist movements and their accomplishments range from Stalin and Mao to the movements that liberated countries from colonial rule, fought as partisans against Nazi occupation and worked in a way that contributed to the eventual institution of welfare state in a number of countries. Marxist and Marxist-derived movements have been democratically elected in a number of countries and have proceeded to rule them with few major issues, whether that rule actually ended up being, strictly speaking, according to Marx's principles or not.
National Socialist movements took over one country, killed millions of people, brought that country to an utter ruin, and all the movements following it have basically been farcical LARPs of that one time with little success beyond terrorizing individual people. As such, someone calling themselves a "Marxist" might mean they advocate any range of positions from extreme to, well, someone that can live and operate in the general scheme of things: someone declaring themselves National Socialist usually means one thing and one thing only.
Your arguments against “National Socialism” only make sense if you apply a very strict definition of the term - i.e. claiming that the only historical example of it is whatever happened in the Third Reich - and ignore all of the other nations with structurally- and philosophically-similar political systems which emerged around the same time or afterward. Salazar’s Portugal, for example, or Franco’s Spain, or Pinochet’s Chile. Given what I’ve inferred about your politics I’m sure you think those were shitty places to live, relative to the alternatives, but I would hope you would acknowledge that reasonable people could interpret them as being successful in at least some ways.
Why do socialists get a pass on distancing themselves from Stalin, and get to appeal to nuance, but anyone who is sympathetic to at least some attenuated form of combining ethnonationalism, anti-communism, and statism gets immediately tarred with the Hitler brush?
Right, right, when writing I had though that the OP of this thread had been a Nazism vs. Marxism comparison, so I was commenting on that, but now that I checked it wasn't that.
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