#20: Commies, Nazis, Right, Left -- What's It All About?

A few years ago, I took to reminding some of my best students that the Nazis were, in fact, Socialists. This came as a bit of a surprise to them, since they had been taught that Socialists are “good” and Nazis are bad. They were even more surprised when I pointed out to them that “Nazi” was an acronym for “National Socialist” and that a “National” Socialist couldn’t help but still be a Socialist. More recently, Jonah Goldberg published a book making much the same point, namely that if one looks at the Nazi governance of Germany, it was through and through socialist. Any familiarity with early 20^th century history will confirm this, since Nazism was a heavily derivative doctrine in its essentials. Nazism was learned, not surprisingly, from those intrepid pioneers of totalitarianism, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Mussolini also learned from those forbearers, and Hitler learned from Mussolini. I need hardly point out that all of Hitler’s “role-models” were socialists of one kind or another. Oddly, the only contemprary of Hitler's who didn’t follow those role-models out of respect and admiration was Francisco Franco, who thought he would be able to stay out of the mess they were all causing.

At the end of WW II, the scribbling classes were all made up of sincere and well-intentioned progressives (read “socialists” or “fellow travelers”) and so the history of the preceding half century was given a distinct pink tinge. In particular, the scribblers managed to assign the term “right” to the Nazis, making it appear that whatever challenged Soviet style socialism was “the opposite” of socialism. My good friend Jim Ryan has just instructively discussed the uses of “right” and “left” on his blog (http://philosoblog.blogspot.com/), and I am in substantial agreement with what he says. I would only add to his discussion that there is one way in which talking about these things is still useful.

While Hitler was a socialist, and while both Hitler and Stalin were totalitarians, in Hitler’s mind, it was still communist Russia that was the ultimate enemy. His early aggressions, such as the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, were done for their wealth, so that the German armed forces could be rebuilt. He really did not seem keen on a conflict with Britain, and he hoped that his easy conquest of France would persuade the Brits to stay out of the fray. His one strategic assault was on Poland, and that was because it was through Poland that he would attack the Soviet Union. Unfortunately for the Russian people, it took Stalin a bit too long to realize that Hitler was not his friend. When his own spies reported Hitler’s build up of forces on the USSR border, he had the spies killed as lying agents of the West trying to drive a wedge between him and his good friend Adolf. Huge Panzer divisions were massed on his border before Stalin got the point. But given all that they had in common, we should ask precisely what it was that differentiated Hitler’s socialism from Stalin’s. The answer is not hard to find at all.

Hitler’s was a “National” socialism, which we should read as a “nationalist” socialism. Yes, of course, you say, Hitler was a German Nationalist – the Versailles Treaty humiliation, the stab-in-the-back narrative that the Germans believed, etc.. It was a natural strategic move on Hitler’s part to play on these feelings in his population. But the evidence, I think, shows this to be too facile. Hitler didn’t just use nationalism to unify the Volk, he was himself a passionate nationalist. It is this that differentiates him from the socialist/communists then and now, and it tells us something extremely important, not about Nazism, but about socialism, even the socialism that threatens us today, internally as well as externally.

Socialism is international in its very essence. It is no accident that it’s anthem is the Internationale. The best known slogan of communism, Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, comes from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. It is not, workers of Minsk or Workers of Russia or even Workers of the Soviet Union; it is workers of the … World!

The communists took this very seriously, and today’s variants still do. At the heart of the theory lies the belief that all cultural differences are instruments of worker domination. At the heart of the theory lies the belief that culture and national identification are distractions, capitalist tools for blocking the evolution of the classless society. The only truly free man is the man who is nothing beyond a worker in the classless society.

Of course, a culture is also always a potential rival to the power of the state. It is a convenient doctrine that meets two needs simultaneously.

Let me now drop the other penny.

It is this theory that underlies a number of political and cultural conflicts in the current United States and, to a degree, the European Union.

From the scribbling class we see:

A sudden attack on Christian religion.

A push towards using “international law.”

A hostility towards American nationalism.

A denial of American Exceptionalism.

A constant preference for all things European.

A consistent resistance to reinforcing and maintaining national boundaries.

Of course, one might argue that the sympathy and latitude that the scribblers give to Muslims counts against my point, but I think not. It is the United States that is the sole remaining powerful capitalist entity in the world. For the socialists, the United States must be brought down, if there is to be socialist progress in the world. If the radical Muslims can help in that cause, then they are friends. The communists from Lenin on have been nothing if not pragmatic in their choice of allegiances, just as both Hitler and Stalin were. Should the communists manage to bring the U.S.A. down, the Muslims would eventually find that it was their turn. Ultimately, the goal is to cleanse the world of cultures in the plural, to homogenize the world, to rend all men uniform.

It’s an attractive picture, isn’t it?

And so, I recommend that when we think of what was happening in Europe in the 1930s, we cease accepting the narrative that this was a conflict between socialism and a totalitarian “opposite”; that we think of it instead as a conflict between two species of socialism, the nationalist and the internationalist, both of which either are or incline towards dictatorships. The one form of government that was only minimally present in Europe at this time was free enterprise democracy, and it was also the earliest casualty.