By Daniel Hannan | Real Clear Politics | March
13, 2014
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for
Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the
Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he
wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased,
Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver "der echte
Sozialismus": real socialism.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He
understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that
propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it
would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have
found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature
of Socialism:
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of
Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National
Socialist German Workers' Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing
coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.
Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly
worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had
admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young
man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. "I have put into
practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun," he boasted,
adding that "the whole of National Socialism" was "based on
Marx".
Marx's error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class
war instead of national unity - to set workers against industrialists instead
of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his
economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to "convert the German Volk to
socialism without simply killing off the old individualists" - by which he
meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism
better by generating revenue for the state. "What Marxism, Leninism and
Stalinism failed to accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a
position to achieve."
Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch
on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of
themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology.
Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely
associate Nazism with "the Right".
To be absolutely clear, I don't believe that modern
Leftists have subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in
any way feigned. That's not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the
mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological
continuum between free-marketers and fascists.
The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of
conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only
when spotty students yell "fascist" at Tories, but when pundits talk
of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as
"far Right".
What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a
jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and
fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but
think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls
"Right-wing": the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the
Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and
destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The
"Nazis-were-far-Right" shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that
"Right-wing" is a synonym for "baddie".
One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about
a report on the repression of Mexico's indigenous peoples, in which the
government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a
member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its
name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC's response was priceless. Yes,
it accepted that the party was socialist, "but what our correspondent was
trying to get across was that it is authoritarian".
In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of
socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each
other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other
as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption.
Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was
a battle between brothers.
Authoritarianism - or, to give it a less loaded name, the
belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as
scientific progress or greater equality - was traditionally a characteristic of
the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.
Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in
his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title,
evidently without reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals
that the phrase is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G.
Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become "liberal
fascists" and "enlightened Nazis".
In those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals,
including Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour
eugenics, convinced that only religious hang-ups were holding back the
development of a healthier species. The unapologetic way in which they spelt
out the consequences have, like Hitler's actual words, been largely edited from
our discourse. Here, for example, is George Bernard Shaw in 1933:
Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is
ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly... If
we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the
sort of people who do not fit into it.
Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels
himself wrote of the "racial trash" - the groups who would
necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season
this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist
anti-Semitism - something else we have edited from our memory, but which once
went without saying. "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?"
Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.
Are contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly
anti-Semitic? No, not in the vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists
inwardly yearning to put global warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do
Keynesians want the whole apparatus of corporatism, expressed by Mussolini as
"everything in the state, nothing outside the state"? Again, no.
There are idiots who discredit every cause, of course, but most people on the
Left are sincere in their stated commitment to human rights, personal dignity
and pluralism.
My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By
refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make
political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet
"Right-wing" to mean "something undesirable" is a small but
important example.
Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a
general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to
imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.
____________________
RELATED
ARTICLES
Hitler and the socialist dream
By George Watson | Independent | 22 November
1998
He
declared that 'national socialism was based on Marx' Socialists have always
disowned him. But a new book insists that he was, at heart, a left-winger
In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in
the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed.
That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had
done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies
piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to
National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all.
Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a
gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.
Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even
thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared,
though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it.
Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their
reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann
Rauschning's Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research,
and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a
full text of Goebbels's diary.
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler
and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including
democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not
hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is
perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in
an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and
with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been
understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in
any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone's disciple.
That
led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind
of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the
mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s,
the slogan "Crusade against Marxism" as a summary of his views. An
age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it
profoundly.
His private conversations, however, though they do not
overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann
Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his
accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his
profound debt to the Marxian tradition. "I have learned a great deal from
Marxism" he once remarked, "as I do not hesitate to admit". He
was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before
the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure
of the Munich putsch.
The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told
Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that "they had never even read
Marx", implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author
could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on,
they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been "a private
Russian affair", whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human
history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less
ideological than tactical.
German communists he had known before he took power,
he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere
pamphleteers, whereas "I have put into practice what these peddlers and
pen pushers have timidly begun", adding revealingly that "the whole
of National Socialism" was based on Marx.
That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than
anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he
observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist
by reason that it recognised the significance of race - implying, perhaps, that
it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on,
National Socialism "would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism
on its own ground". Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the
famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was
everything to him.
Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded
that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent
sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a
building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based
on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social
democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals.
And it was a theory of
human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand
the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler's discovery was that socialism
could be national as well as international. There could be a national
socialism.
That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in
the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in "the community
of the volk", not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to
"convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old
individualists", meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left
from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could
control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could
be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.
That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all,
as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans,
and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could
be socialism without civil war.
Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told
Wagener, the task was to "find and travel the road from individualism to
socialism without revolution". Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but
chosen the wrong route - a long and needlessly painful route - and, in
destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey
mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed;
they had "averaged downwards"; whereas the National Socialist state
would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain
that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously;
they took it seriously themselves.
For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been
portrayed, if not as a conservative - the word is many shades too pale - at
least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or
his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no
prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any
linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of
history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be
at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.
Hitler's mind, it has often been noticed, was in many
ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian
socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter
past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be
said of Marx and Engels.
It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a
century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The
proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in
Marx's view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he
published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called "The
Hungarian Struggle" in Marx's journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the
point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler.
It is now becoming
possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory
of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim
that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn
be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers'
revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not
advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial
trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.
That brutal view, which a generation later was to be
fortified by the new pseudo-science of eugenics, was by the last years of the
century a familiar part of the socialist tradition, though it is understandable
that since the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 socialists have been
eager to forget it. But there is plenty of evidence in the writings of HG
Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis, the Webbs and others to the effect that
socialist commentators did not flinch from drastic measures. The idea of ethnic
cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century and more.
So the socialist intelligentsia of the western world
entered the First World War publicly committed to racial purity and white
domination and no less committed to violence. Socialism offered them a blank
cheque, and its licence to kill included genocide. In 1933, in a preface to On
the Rocks, for example, Bernard Shaw publicly welcomed the exterminatory
principle which the Soviet Union had already adopted. Socialists could now take
pride in a state that had at last found the courage to act, though some still
felt that such action should be kept a secret.
In 1932 Beatrice Webb remarked
at a tea-party what "very bad stage management" it had been to allow
a party of British visitors to the Ukraine to see cattle-trucks full of
starving "enemies of the state" at a local station. "Ridiculous
to let you see them", said Webb, already an eminent admirer of the Soviet
system. "The English are always so sentimental" adding, with
assurance: "You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." A few
years later, in 1935, a Social Democratic government in Sweden began a eugenic
programme for the compulsory sterilisation of gypsies, the backward and the
unfit, and continued it until after the war.
The claim that Hitler cannot really have been a socialist
because he advocated and practised genocide suggests a monumental failure,
then, in the historical memory. Only socialists in that age advocated or
practised genocide, at least in Europe, and from the first years of his
political career Hitler was proudly aware of the fact. Addressing his own
party, the NSDAP, in Munich in August 1920, he pledged his faith in
socialist-racialism: "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be
anti-semites - and the opposite, in that case, is Materialism and Mammonism,
which we seek to oppose."
There was loud applause. Hitler went on:
"How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-semite?" The point was
widely understood, and it is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or
earlier ever sought to deny Hitler's right to call himself a socialist on
grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide
was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd. The tradition, what is
more, was unique. In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's
article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide
called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.
The first reactions to National Socialism outside Germany
are now largely forgotten. They were highly confused, for the rise of fascism
had caught the European left by surprise. There was nothing in Marxist
scripture to predict it and must have seemed entirely natural to feel baffled.
Where had it all come from? Harold Nicolson, a democratic socialist, and after
1935 a Member of the House of Commons, conscientiously studied a pile of
pamphlets in his hotel room in Rome in January 1932 and decided judiciously
that fascism (Italian-style) was a kind of militarised socialism; though it
destroyed liberty, he concluded in his diary, "it is certainly a socialist
experiment in that it destroys individuality".
The Moscow view that
fascism was the last phase of capitalism, though already proposed, was not yet
widely heard. Richard remarked in a 1934 BBC talk that many students in Nazi
Germany believed they were "digging the foundations of a new German
socialism".
By the outbreak of civil war in Spain, in 1936, sides had
been taken, and by then most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was
left and Hitler was right. That sudden shift of view has not been explained,
and perhaps cannot be explained, except on grounds of argumentative
convenience. Single binary oppositions - cops-and-robbers or
cowboys-and-indians - are always satisfying. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was
seen by hardly anybody as an attempt to restore the unity of socialism. A wit
at the British Foreign Office is said to have remarked that all the
"Isms" were now "Wasms", and the general view was that
nothing more than a cynical marriage of convenience had taken place.
By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler
was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead. One may salute here an odd
but eminent exception. Writing as a committed socialist just after the fall of
France in 1940, in The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell saw the disaster as a
"physical debunking of capitalism", it showed once and for all that
"a planned economy is stronger than a planless one", though he was in
no doubt that Hitler's victory was a tragedy for France and for mankind.
The
planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National
Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism "just such features as
will make it efficient for war purposes". Hitler had already come close to
socialising Germany. "Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a
socialist state." These words were written just before Hitler's attack on
the Soviet Union. Orwell believed that Hitler would go down in history as
"the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its
face" by forcing financiers to see that planning works and that an
economic free-for-all does not.
At its height, Hitler's appeal transcended party
division. Shortly before they fell out in the summer of 1933, Hitler uttered
sentiments in front of Otto Wagener, which were published after his death in 1971
as a biography by an unrepentant Nazi. Wagener's Hitler: Memoirs of a
Confidant, composed in a British prisoner-of-war camp, did not appear until
1978 in the original German, and arrived in English, without much acclaim, as
recently as 1985.
Hitler's remembered talk offers a vision of a future that
draws together many of the strands that once made utopian socialism
irresistibly appealing to an age bred out of economic depression and
cataclysmic wars; it mingles, as Victorian socialism had done before it, an
intense economic radicalism with a romantic enthusiasm for a vanished age
before capitalism had degraded heroism into sordid greed and threatened the
traditional institutions of the family and the tribe.
Socialism, Hitler told Wagener shortly after he seized
power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New
Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble
was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master's
teachings. Mary and Mary Magdalen, Hitler went on in a surprising flight of
imagination, had found an empty tomb, and it would be the task of National
Socialism to give body at long last to the sayings of a great teacher: "We
are the first to exhume these teachings."
The Jew, Hitler told Wagener,
was not a socialist, and the Jesus they crucified was the true creator of
socialist redemption. As for communists, he opposed them because they created
mere herds, Soviet-style, without individual life, and his own ideal was "the
socialism of nations" rather than the international socialism of Marx and
Lenin. The one and only problem of the age, he told Wagener, was to liberate
labour and replace the rule of capital over labour with the rule of labour over
capital.
These are highly socialist sentiments, and if Wagener
reports his master faithfully they leave no doubt about the conclusion: that
Hitler was an unorthodox Marxist who knew his sources and knew just how
unorthodox the way in which he handled them was. He was a dissident socialist.
His programme was at once nostalgic and radical. It proposed to accomplish
something that Christians had failed to act on and that communists before him
had attempted and bungled. "What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to
accomplish," he told Wagener, "we shall be in a position to
achieve."
That was the National Socialist vision. It was seductive,
at once traditional and new. Like all so- cialist views it was ultimately
moral, and its economic and racial policies were seen as founded on universal
moral laws. By the time such conversations saw the light of print, regrettably,
the world had put such matters far behind it, and it was less than ever ready
to listen to the sayings of a crank or a clown.
That is a pity. The crank, after all, had once offered a
vision of the future that had made a Victorian doctrine of history look
exciting to millions. Now that socialism is a discarded idea, such excitement
is no doubt hard to recapture. To relive it again, in imagination, one might
look at an entry in Goebbels's diaries. On 16 June 1941, five days before
Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Goebbels exulted, in the privacy of his
diary, in the victory over Bolshevism that he believed would quickly follow.
There
would be no restoration of the tsars, he remarked to himself, after Russia had
been conquered. But Jewish Bolshevism would be uprooted in Russia and
"real socialism" planted in its place - "Der echte
Sozialismus". Goebbels was a liar, to be sure, but no one can explain why
he would lie to his diaries. And to the end of his days he believed that
socialism was what National Socialism was about.
____________________
The Nazis Were Leftists, Deal With It
The Nazis were leftists. This statement is blasphemy to
the academic-media complex. Everyone knows the Nazis were
degenerate right-wingers fueled by
toxic capitalism and racism. But evidence Hitler’s gang were men of the left
while debatable is compelling. The dispute on Nazi origins has surfaced through
the confluence of brawling alt-right and antifa fringe movements and recent alternative
histories by Dinesh D’Souza and others. The vitriol and
lack of candor this debate produces by supposedly fact-driven academics and
media is disturbing if unsurprising. They stifle dissent on touchy subjects to
maintain narrative and enforce cultural hegemony.
However uncomfortable to opinion shapers, alternative
views of the Third Reich exist and were written by the finest minds of their
time. Opinions of the period perhaps carry more weight because they are
unburdened by the aftermath of the uniquely heinous Nazi crimes. ‘The
Road to Serfdom’ by FA Hayek is one such tract; published in 1944 it
remains a classic for young people on the political right discovering their
intellectual roots. A sort of academic ‘1984,’ it warns of socialism’s tendency
toward planned states and totalitarianism.
But one aspect of the book can shock the conscience.
Hayek describes Nazism as a “genuine socialist movement” and thus left wing by
modern American standards. Indeed, the Austrian-born Hayek wrote the book from
his essay ‘Nazi-Socialism’ that countered prevailing opinion at the London
School of Economics where he taught. British elites regarded Nazism as a
virulent capitalist reaction against enlightened socialism — a view that
persists today.
The shock comes from academic and cultural orthodoxy on
National Socialism. From the moment they enter the political fray, young
right-wingers are told ‘you own the Nazis.’ At best, the left concedes it owns
communism. This comforts little because even if far higher in body count,
communism supposedly rebukes the scourge of racism. But it’s all a lie.
The instant problem this debate incurs is from
ideological labels themselves. They are malleable and messy and partisans
constantly distort them. They change over time. Trump’s particular political
brand muddies the scene further, in rhetoric if less in policy. “Conservative”
and especially “liberal” have changed over time and have different meanings in
the US and Europe. Hayek himself, who had a more European view of conservatism,
was wary of labels. He spurned both
“conservative” and “libertarian” and dedicated his most famous book “to the
socialists of all parties.”
Currently
Accepted Political Definitions Place the Nazis firmly on the Left
For precision, I refrain from using “conservative” or
“liberal” unless through quotation and use ‘left’ and ‘right’ as generally
accepted in modern America. The right consists of free-market capitalists, who
think the individual is the primary political unit, believes in property
rights, and is generally distrustful of the administrative state and government
solutions to social problems. They view family and civil institutions such as
church as needed checks on state power. These people don’t think government
should force a business to provide employee birth control or think law should
coerce bakers to make cakes against their conscience. They think the solution
to bad speech is more speech; the solution to gun violence is more guns. These
people talk about freedom — the method individual decisions. (The
counterexample might be gay marriage but that is a positive right (give me
something) instead of a negative right (leave me alone)).
The left believes the opposite. These people are
distrustful of the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give
primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race,
ethnicity, and gender compose the primary political unit. They don’t believe in
strong property rights. They believe it is the government’s responsibility to
solve social problems. They call for public intervention to “equalize”
disparities and render our social fabric more inclusive (as they define it).
They believe the free market has failed to solve issues like campaign finance,
income inequality, minimum wage, access to healthcare, and righting past
injustices. These people talk about “democracy” — the method of collective
decisions.
By these definitions, the Nazis were firmly on the left.
National Socialism was a collectivist authoritarian movement run by “social
justice warriors.” That this brand of “justice” benefited only some based on
immutable characteristics perfectly aligns with the modern
brand. The Nazi ideal embraced identity politics based on the primacy of
the people or “volk” and invoked state-based solutions for every possible
problem. It was nation-based socialism — the nation being especially important
to those who bled in the Great War.
As Hayek stated in 1933, the year the Nazis took power:
[I]t is more than probable that the real
meaning of the German revolution is that the long dreaded expansion of
communism into the heart of Europe has taken place but is not recognized
because the fundamental similarity of methods and ideas is hidden by the
difference in phraseology and the privileged groups.
FA
Hayek, intellectual giant
Nazism and socialism competed with the
Enlightenment-based individualism of Locke, Smith, Montesquieu, and others who
profoundly influenced the American founding and define the modern American
right at its best. These thinkers fit easily with Hayek’s Austrian School of
Economics, which opposed both the imperialist German Historical School and the
Marxists. Hayek knew what he was talking about. He was a 20th Century
intellectual giant. His collected works include nineteen books; he won the
Nobel Prize in economics and Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he held the
honor of Maggie Thatcher’s “favorite
intellectual guru.” But Hayek is only one man. The intelligentsia fiercely
attacked him as reactionary throughout his life. Perhaps he was wrong.
Hayek was not alone in his views of National Socialism
The evidence the Nazis were leftists goes well beyond the
views of one scholar. Philosophically, Nazi doctrine fit well with the other
strains of socialism ripping through the Europe at the time. Hitler’s first
“National Workers’ Party” meeting while still an Army corporal featured the
speech “How and by What Means is Capitalism to be Eliminated?”
The Nazi charter published
a year later and coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect. It
calls for “equality of rights for the German people.” The subjugation of the
individual to the state; breaking of “rent slavery,”; “confiscation of war
profits,”; the nationalization of industry; profit sharing in heavy industry;
large scale social security; the “communalization of the great warehouses and
their being leased at low costs to small firms”; the ‘free expropriation of
land for the purpose of public utility”; the abolition of “materialistic” Roman
Law; the nationalization of education; the nationalization of the army; the
elevating of national health by protecting the mother and child; state
regulation of the press; and strong central power in the Reich. It was also
racist and anti-immigrant.
In some areas the Nazis followed their charter
faithfully. They treated children as property of the state from the earliest
age and indoctrinated them at government schools and clubs. The individual had
limited rights outside the volk. German lives were for the betterment of the
people and state. One’s group identity determined rights and hierarchy in
society.
No checks on state power existed. The cross played no
role compared to the swastika. Hitler’s musings on the church while at times
ambiguous was mostly negative. “Once I have settled my other problems,” he
occasionally declared, “I’ll have my reckoning with the church. I’ll have it
reeling on the ropes.” When told of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler’s flirtation with
the occult Hitler fumed:
What nonsense! Here we have at last reached
an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that
all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it
had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you
imagine it? I would turn over in my grave . . .
These attitudes shouldn’t be surprising given the
socialist thinkers that provided the theoretical basis for Nazism abhorred
English “commercialism” and “comfort.” As Hayek described, “From 1914 onward
there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who
led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hardworking laborer and
idealist youth into the National Socialist fold.” These “teachers” included
Professor Werner Sombart, Professor Johan Plenge, socialist politician Paul
Lensch, and intellectuals Oswald Spengler and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.
It wasn’t only theoretical. Hitler repeatedly praised Marx
privately stating he had “learned a great deal from Marxism.” The trouble with
the Weimar Republic was that its politicians “had never even read Marx.” He
also stated his differences with communists were that they were intellectual
types passing out pamphlets, whereas “I have put into practice what these
peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun.”
But it wasn’t just privately that Hitler’s fealty for
Marx surfaced. In Mein Kampf he states without his racial insights National
Socialism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own
ground.” Nor did Hitler eschew this sentiment once reaching power. As late as
1941 with the war in bloom he stated “basically National Socialism and Marxism
are the same” in a speech published by the Royal Institute of International
Affairs.
Hitler
and his favorite, Albert Speer
Nazi propaganda minister and resident intellectual Joseph
Goebbels wrote in his diary the Nazis would install “real socialism” after
Russia’s defeat in the East. And Hitler favorite Albert Speer, the Nazi
armaments minister whose memoir became an international bestseller, wrote
Hitler viewed Stalin as a kindred spirit, ensuring his POW son received good
treatment, and even talked of keeping Stalin in power in a puppet government
after Germany’s eventual triumph. His views on Churchill and Roosevelt were
decidedly less kind.
Nazi-Communist
Hatred was Internecine, the Nastiest Kind
Despite this, one persistent claim for the Nazi-communist
ideological divide was they hated each other; the Nazis persecuted socialists
and oppressed trade unions. These things are true but prove little. The camps’
hatred stemmed from familiarity. It was internecine, the nastiest kind.
The Nazis and communists were not only in a struggle for
street-war supremacy but also recruits. And these recruits were easily turned
because both sides were fighting for the same men. Hayek recalls:
The relative ease with which a young
communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was generally known in
Germany, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. Many a University
teacher during the 1930s has seen English or American students return from the
Continent uncertain whether they were communists or Nazis and certain they
hated Western liberal civilization. . . . To both, the real enemy, the man with
whom they had nothing in common and whom they could not hope to convince is the
liberal of the old type.
One way Nazi propagandists exploited ideological match
was the communist red. They used the color on purpose. As Hitler states in Mein
Kampf, “We chose red for our posters [and flag] after particular and careful
deliberation . . . so as to arouse [potential communist recruits’] attention
and tempt them to come to our meetings.” And Stalinist Russia didn’t exactly
promote trade unions.
The Nazi leadership and recruiters weren’t the only ones
to see similarities between themselves and communists. George Orwell remarked,
“Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state.” Max
Eastman an old friend of Vladimir Lenin described Stalin’s brand of communism
as “super fascist.” British writer F.A. Voight after several years on the
continent concluded “Marxism has led to Fascism and National Socialism because
in all essentials it is Fascism and National Socialism.” Peter Drucker author
of the acclaimed book “The
End of Economic Man” stated, “The complete collapse of the belief in the
attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to
travel the same road toward a totalitarian, purely negative, non-economic
society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following.”
Today’s
Antifa and Alt-Right share similar ideologies
We see parallels today. Antifa and the alt-right are both
collectivist groups vying for supremacy of “their” people. Although there
likely won’t be much personnel crossover, in policy their differences shrink.
The term ‘alt-right’ denotes distinctness from the American right. Richard
Spencer the coiner of
that term speaks like a left-wing progressive advocating a
white utopia supplied through government. “No individual has a right outside of
a collective community.” Jason Kessler another alt-right figure
is a former Obama voter and “Occupy” participant.
Critics argue in practice the Nazis didn’t fulfill all
their socialist goals after 1933. Some industrialists supported Hitler’s rise,
others seeing no other choice eventually acquiesced, early adopters of the
Washington adage ‘if you’re not at the table you’re on the menu.’ It is also
true party’s foremost left — the SA Brown Shirts led by Hitler rival Ernst Rohm
— were eliminated in the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934. But none of this changes
Nazi attitudes toward these interlopers.
We can find clues to Hitler’s practical stance on
economic questions from the writings of confidant Otto Wagener. Wagener
explains in texts only translated in
the 1980s, Hitler saw the Russian experiment as right in spirit and wrong in
execution. Removing production from the industrial class had spewed unnecessary
blood. Industrialists could be controlled and
used without slowing the economy or impeding social progress. His task was to
convert socialists without killing off the entrepreneur and managerial classes.
Hitler’s
Dream of World Domination Curtailed Socialism’s Worst Aspects
Other practical reasons exist. Hitler needed the
industrialists. He undoubtedly foresaw world domination by the time he took
power. That would require utmost industrial might. He also had a failing
economy to revive and removing production ownership would have likely been
disastrous. Hitler was also disdainful of bureaucrats, the occupation of his
hated father. Perhaps most important state-control of economics just wasn’t
that important to him. Rearming, purifying the volk, indoctrinating children,
teaching schoolboys to throw grenades,
and building infrastructure to
someday invade neighbors were priorities. Nazism was a “middle class” socialism
that tolerated private enterprise as long as it paid homage and stayed in its
lane.
This lack of overt hostility however didn’t mean the
Nazis welcomed the bourgeoisie or the industrialists. Hitler described the
bourgeoisie as “worthless for any noble human endeavor, capable of any error of
judgment, failure of nerve and moral corruption.” In 1931 as the Nazis gained
power in elections, Goebbels wrote an editorial warning about these newcomer
so-called “Septemberlings,’ the bourgeoisie intellectuals who believed they
could wrest the party what from they considered the “demagogue” old guard.
Distrust of these outsiders continued through the Nazi
reign. At the beginning of Nazi control some party members entered businesses,
declared themselves in charge, and gave themselves large salaries and other
perks (a practice quickly stopped). As armaments minister, Speer had an
up-close view of German industry and party tension. Early in the war Hitler
assured him he could run his department without regard to party membership as
it was “well known” the industrial technical class did not affiliate with the
party. When he defended industry as not “knowingly lying to us, stealing from
us, or otherwise trying to damage our war economy” an icy reception from party
members followed.
When
all else fails the Left always screams racism!
Despite the thoroughly collectivist Nazi ideology one
aspect settles the left-right debate for American leftists: racism. The leftist
brain is hardwired to believe the right swims in racism. They discover racial
dog whistles and grievances in everything from hotel
toiletries to eclipses.
The Nazis were undoubtedly racists. But in context of socialist movements of
their day racism was the norm; there were no exceptions.
As shown by George Watson, author of ‘The
Lost Literature of Socialism,’ racism and socialism swum together. Marx may
have extolled the
workers of the world to unite but that didn’t mean all races could join. This
view codified in Friedrich Engels’ essay ‘The Hungarian Struggle’ published in
the January-February 1849 issue of Marx’s journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
According to Watson,
“The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons
implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism,
which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left
behind after a workers’ revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and
since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be
killed.” According to Engels they were “racial trash.” And Marx himself,
sounding every bit the Hitler mentor in 1853 wrote,
“The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must
give way.”
Socialism
and Racism have always held hands
This racial view was mainstream socialist thinking
through the Second World War. It manifested in eugenics, a left-wing idea
popular on both sides of the Atlantic with proponents such as Planned
Parenthood founder Margret Sanger. It ended finally in the Holocaust — eugenics
writ large in the most evil way. Watson states, “The idea of ethnic cleansing
was orthodox socialism for a century and more.” English socialist intellectual
Beatrice Webb lamented British
visitors in Ukraine had been allowed to view a passing cattle car full of starving
subversives, “the English” she said “are always so sentimental” about such
matters.
This makes sense when one views socialism as defending
the rights of one group — the citizens of basically homogeneous countries.
According to Watson, “It is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or
earlier ever sought to deny Hitler’s right to call himself a socialist on
grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide
was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd.” In America and England
too, the left’s ascendancy during the first progressive movement was full of
racists including Woodrow Wilson, Sanger, and writers HG Wells and Jack London.
Che
Guevara Leftist Hero and Racist
We see more recent examples of left racism and ethnic
cleansing in unusual places. Leftist hero Che Guevara wrote in
his 1952 memoir, “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities,
whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.” Except for
“quiet manner,” find the difference between Hitler and avowed Marxist Pol Pot
upon the latter’s 1998 death in the ‘New York Times’ obituary:
Pol Pot conducted a rule of terror that led
to the deaths of nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s seven million people, by the
most widely accepted estimates, through execution, torture, starvation and
disease.
His smiling face and quiet manner belied his
brutality. He and his inner circle of revolutionaries adopted a Communism based
on Maoism and Stalinism, then carried it to extremes: They and their Khmer
Rouge movement tore apart Cambodia in an attempt to ‘’purify’’ the country’s
agrarian society and turn people into revolutionary worker-peasants.
Pol
Pot, a different kind of Nazi
Nor was anti-Semitism a right-wing malady. Stalin was
anti-Semitic as was Marx despite his Jewish heritage. Anti-Semitism is still
alive on the left with figures like Linda
Sarsour, Louis
Farrakhan, and Jeremy
Corbynin the UK.
Related to the racist claim is that Nazis’ nationalism
excludes them from the left. But arguably the most nationalist countries today
are Cuba, China, North Korea, and Venezuela. All are militarized and nobody
considers them right wing. Even Stalin ruled as a nationalist.
A newer claim by
the professoriate is because Winston Churchill ran on nationalizing programs in
1945 when he was defeated by Labour’s Clement Atlee this somehow shows the
Nazis weren’t leftists. This misunderstands wartime Britain. By 1945 Britain
had been mobilized for six years. As author Bruce Caldwell states “The common
sacrifices that the war necessitated bred a feeling that all should share more
equally in the reconstruction to come. Universal medical provision was itself
virtually a fact of life during the first years of the war, certainly for
anyone injured by aerial bombing or whose work was tied to the war effort — and
whose work was not in way or another?”
This sentiment spurred Downing Street to undertake a
report on post-war Britain’s welfare state. The so-called Beveridge Report
included proposals for family allowance, comprehensive social insurance,
universal health care, and requirement for full employment. It debuted in 1942
and sold 500,000 copies! Even Churchill wasn’t going to stem that tide. In
fact, no one disturbed the consensus until Maggie Thatcher burst the scene in
the mid-1970s.
Not
Liking the Truth Doesn’t Mean it’s not True
The debate on Nazi origins has surfaced mainly because
right-leaning authors like Dinesh D’Souza forced the issue. The reaction by
academic historians has been swift. For obvious reasons the left hates this
debate. The ‘Nazi’ slur is
as old as the Nazis themselves. People who see themselves morally superior
based in part on racial attitudes don’t like examining the odious history of
their intellectual forebears.
But the left’s umbrage doesn’t mean they’re right and
neither does their ability to pile on dissenters through cultural and media
hegemony. In fact, it might mean the opposite. In 1981, 364 preeminent British
economists wrote in
disgust at Maggie Thatcher’s economic proposals. It read in part, “There is no
basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the Government’s belief(s)
. . . [P]resent politics will deepen the depression, erode the industrial base
of our economy and threaten its social and political stability.” In the long
run, to paraphrase the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, all these
academics died and no one remembers them.
The Iron Lady, conversely, is the for the ages.
The more vehemently the left, particularly academics,
argue their dissociation with the Nazis the more they protest “too much.”
Indeed, the failure here is as much one of academic prejudice as any willful
wish to avoid truth.
Anyone interested in this question shouldn’t take my
word. But neither should they listen uncritically to leftist
historians with a vested interest in their own views. Interested
readers should draw their own conclusions from current scholars but also those
of the time not so burdened by the weight of history and the place Nazis occupy
in the American psyche. If you are on the right, you may realize you’ve been
carrying an intellectual cross (the worst of them) that isn’t yours.
This article originally appeared in The
Federalist on September 11, 2018
Paul H. Jossey is a lawyer in Alexandria,
Virginia. Please follow him on Twitter, @paulhjossey
