Read A Pile Of Top Nazis Talking About How They Love Leftist Marxism
From the moment they enter the political fray, young right-wingers are told, ‘You own the Nazis.’ Much of the historical record says exactly the opposite.
The Nazis were leftists. This statement is blasphemy to the academic-media complex, since everyone knows the Nazis were degenerate right-wingers fueled by toxic capitalism and racism. But evidence Adolf Hitler’s gang were men of the left, while debatable, is compelling.
The dispute on Nazi origins resurfaced 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 it produces from supposedly fact-driven academics and media is disturbing, if unsurprising. They stifle dissent on touchy subjects to maintain their 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 from the period perhaps carry more weight because they are unburdened by the aftermath of the uniquely heinous Nazi crimes.
“The Road to Serfdom,” by F. A. 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.
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,” which 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 a little, because even if far higher in body count, communism supposedly rebukes the scourge of racism. But it’s all a lie.Socialists Occur in All Parties
This debate incurs the instant problem of ideological labels. They are malleable and messy, and partisans constantly distort them. They also change over time. President 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 United States 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.”
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 are generally distrustful of government by unaccountable agencies 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, and the solution to gun violence is more guns. These people talk about freedom—the method of 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. They distrust the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race, ethnicity, and sex 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 health care, and righting past injustices. These people talk about “democracy”—the method of collective decisions.
These Definitions Put Nazis Firmly on the Left
By these definitions, the Nazis were firmly on the left. National Socialism was a collectivist authoritarian movement run by “social justice warriors.” This brand of “justice” benefited only some based on immutable characteristics, which 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.”
Nazism and socialism competed with the Enlightenment-based individualism of John Locke, Adam 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’s Definitely Not the Only One
Yet the evidence the Nazis were leftists goes well beyond the views of this one scholar. Philosophically, Nazi doctrine fit well with the other strains of socialism ripping through Europe at the time. Hitler’s first “National Workers’ Party” meeting while he was 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; nationalizing education; nationalizing the army; state regulation of the press; and strong central power in the Reich. It was also racist and anti-immigrant.
The Nazi charter coauthored by Hitler is socialist in almost every aspect.
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 his rights and social hierarchy.
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, were 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 Schutzstaffel (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 that the socialist thinkers who 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.
Also, Adolf Hitler Loved Karl Marx
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, he said, 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.”
It wasn’t just privately that Hitler’s fealty for Marx surfaced. In “Mein Kampf,” he states that 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.
Nazi propaganda minister and resident intellectual Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that 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 that Hitler viewed Joseph Stalin as a kindred spirit, ensuring his prisoner of war son received good treatment, and even talked of keeping Stalin in power in a puppet government after Germany’s eventual triumph. His views on Great Britain’s Winston Churchill and the United States’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt were decidedly less kind.
Nazi and Communist Hatred of Each Other Was Brotherly
Despite this, there’s a persistent claim that Nazis and communists hated each other, and mention that 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. 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 this ideological match was the communist red. They used the color on purpose. As Hitler states in “Mein Kampf,” “We chose red for out 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.
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.”
After several years on the continent, British writer F.A. Voight 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.”
Hayek knew what he was talking about. He was a 20th-century intellectual giant. His collected works include 19 books; he won the Nobel Prize in economics and Presidential Medal of Freedom, and 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.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment