What's a National Socialist?

I'm a little confused about what polices make national socialism and about the terminology of the name.  In the USA it seems that political terminology is different than in other parts of the world.  A lot of people here say that left vs right=statism vs anarchism.  I thought that left vs right=radical change/progressivism vs status quo/traditional values.  The fact that the title national socialism includes the word "socialism" and that it was very statist, a lot of people in the US say that the Nazis were left wing.  This confuses me because they hated communists and trade unions, and because Mussolini described fascism as being when state interests were the same as corporate interests.  So much so that fascism could also be called corporatism.  That desn't sound left wing to me.  It also seems that left wing movements tend to be communal such as communists believing that national borders should be disssolved while right wing movements tend to me nationalistic.  This also does not fit the Nazis being left wing.  So are national socialists left or right wing?  If right, then where does the "socialist" in national socialist come from?

>>6

Giving aid to foreign countries would normally be regarded as the opposite of nationalistic, but with the way that all the world's economies are interconnected it can still be in a nation's best interest to aid or bailout another country.  This may end up being the case for the US and EU.  I do see the overlap up nationism and socialism here since nationalism is "or the good of the nation", while socialism is "for the good of the people".  I guess this means that national socialism isn't necesarilly bad, even though its most famous form was the Nazis, which honestly was my view of it.

>>7

The idea that socialism isn't just a left wing convept is new to me. Are you from the US?  I'm curious because even though your explanaition makes sense, it would be regarded as complete blasphemy by much of the US population.  Many people refuse to accept something as capitalistic if the government is involved.  There would be a rejection of the "capitalistic if not capitalism" part.  And this is despite the fact that the supposedly communist China has a lot of state sponsored capitalism.  I understand what your saying that it is possible to be both nationalistic and socialistic as long as the socialistic part isn't taken near the extremes of Marxism which is antinationalistic. It also makes sense that an ideology doesn't have to follow cookie cutter left, right, or moderate molds, people are fully capable of using combinations of ideas from across the board to acomplish their goals.  But political parties do encourage people to simply jump into one of these preconceived molds and be against anything contrary to these fixed narrow set of idea.

>>8

I'm not an anarchist by any means or even a libertarian, but sometimes I feel like the ideologies of most governments is to justify corruption.  They don't start that way, but eventually corrupt people work their way into the system and manipulate it that way.  Thats why checks and balances are necessary but dificult to manage properly.