Using”Hitler” and “Nazi” and “fascist” as terms of abuse is a common tactic of the left. Trump and his supporters had these thrown at them all the time. Here in Australia, leftists use them on social media to demonize common garden conservatives. What is perceived to be the “centre” today has moved way left over recent decades. This has exposed ordinary, decent people who don’t want to destroy civilization as we know it to absurd abuse as “right wing extremists” and Nazis.
Commonly in what passes for political debate, the more a conservative advances factual arguments destroying the leftist’s narrative, the quicker the hardline leftist will trot out “Nazi” or “Hitler” in evident expectation that this somehow wins him the debate. It doesn’t, of course: it just shows him as incapable of engaging with logic and facts.
The idea that fascist means right and communist means left is a delusion, a myth. BOTH were socialist and believed that individuals had no rights other than as servants and objects of the state. The Bolsheviks were international socialists (“Workers of the world, unite”) ; the fascists (Mussolini and a bit later Hitler) were national socialists, concerned with advancing the interests of their own countries. Both were totalitarian, sharing the same baseline ethic that the end justifies the means. (Islam, another totalitarianism, believes the same.)
Mussolini and Italian Fascism
Fascism originated in Italy around the time of the First World War, with Mussolini. He supported the need to overthrow decadent liberal democracy and capitalism by violence, direct action, general strike and Machiavellian appeals to emotion. (Like contemporary American Antifa!)
Originally in the Italian Socialist party, Mussolini left this and focused on “revolutionary nationalism” transcending class lines. In 1914 he wrote “Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. … The class struggle is a vain formula, without effect and consequence wherever one finds a people that has not integrated itself into its proper linguistic and racial confines — where the national problem has not been definitely resolved.” His Italian irredentism – desire to expand Italy into its ‘rightful” borders – is a precursor of Hitler’s call for Germany to acquire Lebensraum – living room – by taking territory from the Poles to the east. Both Mussolini and Hitler regarded the Slavs (Yugoslavs, Poles and Russians) as subhuman and displaceable.
After coming to power in 1922, Mussolini established a one-party dictatorship and started to build an Italian empire in Africa.
Unlike Hitler’s Nazi Germany, ideologically Italian Fascism did not originally discriminate against the Italian-Jewish community.
Hitler and German Nazism
Nazism was a nationalist redefinition of socialism, as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free-market capitalism. It rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to subordinate all parts of German society to the “common good”, making political interests the main priority. The outlook was collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism.
Nazism denied citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent. It also strongly emphasized eugenics, a racial ideology concerned with the biological improvement of the German people by selective breeding of “Nordic” or “Aryan” traits. Eugenics research in Germany before and during the Nazi period was heavily inspired by similar research in the United States, particularly California. (Eugenics was long pushed by ‘progressives” in the United States, and was strongly supported by President Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.)
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote “For all genuine National-Socialists there is only one doctrine: PEOPLE AND FATHERLAND. … We, National Socialists, must stick firmly to the aim that we have set for our foreign policy; namely, that the German people must be assured the territorial area which is necessary for it to exist on this earth.”
Hitler was evil, responsible for millions of deaths. But he created universal health care; gave free homes to homeless Germans; and eliminated poverty and hunger among Germans. While the rest of western Europe was still in the Great Depression, he achieved almost full employment in Germany by 1936; and he embraced an ambitious autobahn construction project. He placed great emphasis on education, but believed that its ultimate purpose was indoctrination to make citizens conscious of the glory of country and filled with fanatical devotion to the national cause. Stalin’s Soviet Union also used the education system to inculcate anti-Western Soviet nationalism and fanatical communist values. The Chinese Communist party today under President Xi is pursuing exactly the same agenda.
Hitler also passed strict gun control (an aim shared by today’s US Democrats).
Why do conservatives today get called fascists or Nazis, and why are Nazis regarded as “right wing”?
In the 1930s, a group of immensely influential Marxist theorists, mostly from the Frankfurt School in Hitler’s Germany, were transplanted to Columbia University. Led by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, these tried to explain why fascism had been more popular than communism in much of Europe. They described Nazism and Fascism as a form of mass psychosis. Since Marxism had to be superior to its alternatives, anyone who disagreed with them was quite literally, mad.
Adorno was the lead author of The Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950. The book asserted that people holding “conservative” views scored higher on the so-called F-scale (F for Fascism) and were hence in dire need of therapy. Conservatives were diagnosed as a pre-fascist “personality type” comprising mostly “the uninformed, the poorly educated, and less intelligent.” Conservatism was at best the human face of the madness of Nazi-style fascism.
The original Marxist explanation of fascism was that it was the capitalist ruling classes’ reaction to the threat of the ascendancy of the working classes. The Frankfurt School said that fascism was a psychological defence mechanism against change generally. Men who cannot handle “progress” respond violently because they have “authoritarian personalities.” So in effect, anyone who disagreed with the aims, scope and methods of progressivism was suffering from a mental defect, commonly known as fascism.
This created the image of fascism as “right wing,” when in fact it was a Big State totalitarianism, the very opposite of conservative.
The Fascists of the 1920s and 1930s eventually morphed, in the West, into today’s “progressives” – believers that everything has to be surrendered to and managed by the Big State. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the takeover of the US Democratic Party. Prime exhibit: Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, below.
Smaller groups, like the Australian Greens (masquerading as “environmentalists” but in fact anything but that), are similarly totalitarian in their policy prescriptions and hatred for social and political conservatism and patriotism.
Hillary Clinton certainly echoes Hitler, Stalin and XI in her book It takes a Village: “I believe the primary role of the state is to teach, train and raise children. Parents have a secondary role.”
Communism – Stalin and other leaders: Mao Zedong, Pol Pol, the Kim dynasty, Xi Jinping
It is absurd that Hitler and the Nazis get regularly demonized, but not Communism. The record of communism is of many more millions of people killed, enslaved, persecuted and sent to gulags, than the Nazis were responsible for.
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by Communism in the twentieth century range up to close to 100 million.
- Professor Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University estimates that communism killed at least 65 million people between 1917 and 2017. Though huge numbers were killed intentionally, even more died from starvation caused by cruel projects of social engineering.
- Stephane Courtois, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, over a decade ago estimated about 95 million, including:
| USSR — 20 million China — 65 million Vietnam — 1 million North Korea — 2 million Cambodia — 2 million | Eastern Europe — 1 million Latin America — 150,000 Africa — 1.7 million Afghanistan — 1.5 million Communist movements, parties not in power — 10,000. |
- Alexander Yakovlev, formerly the chairman of Russia’s Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, estimates the numbers executed or done to death in Soviet prisons and camps for purely political reasons at 20-25 million. He adds also 5.5 million victims of famine in the Civil War and 5 million in the artificial famine of the 1930s.
- Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia for almost four years from 1975 to 1979. This communist regime sought to turn Cambodia back to “year zero” in its quest for a peasant utopia. It killed almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population, between 1.7 and 2.2 million people. Most victims died of starvation, torture, exhaustion or disease in labour camps or were bludgeoned to death during mass executions in the “killing fields.”
In the 21st century, one can add the victims in Venezuela of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.
“The Manure of History”
This appallingly callous attitude toward people comes directly out of communist thinking. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theorist and key originator of Cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions.” He wrote in his Prison Notebooks: “Nobody wished to be the ‘manure’ of history. But is it possible to plough without first manuring the land? So ploughmen and ‘manure’ are both necessary.”
Like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the communist Soviet Union had an empire:
And communism has been far longer lasting, has inflicted itself upon more of the world. We see outrageous human rights abuses in China (the Uighurs, organ harvesting, persecution of Christianity and Falun Gong, smothering of democracy in Hong Kong, the appallingly vicious Cultural Revolution imposed by Mao, and more). North Korea has enslaved and impoverished its people. Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro has been economically ruined.
Communism also today presents a massive threat to the West, as Cultural Marxists have captured our schools and universities and public media, and their products have pushed a “woke” agenda on business boardrooms, many churches, and have made large inroads into even the “conservative” parties. The situation is very serious. The situation is very serious.
It is shameful that so many young people in universities, deliberately never taught history, are calling for communism in one or other of its guises as a way to create a future utopia.
They have the utter stupidity to believe that “real communism has never been tried” so of course, next time “we’ll get it right.”
The reality of Communism is simple:
