Nazism: a creed of the progressive left

The Nazis, like the Bolsheviks, were seeking the fabled Marxist utopia

Leon Trotsky, and many other observes, noted the ideological fraternity between Hitler and Stalin

Western culture is dominated by the political left. The university, the school, the newspaper, and the institutions of government are now beholden to leftwing movements, which began, decades ago, as obscure and radical ideas within the Academy. Steadily they have seeped like poison through the entire culture, rotting confidence in the very idea of the West. Through its long Orwellian attack on Western history, the left has reshaped the past in its favour, even redefining the very meanings of the political left and right. A critical facet of this assault has been the left’s successful revision of Nazism and its ideological roots. European fascism is now regarded almost universally as a creed of the right – a kind of extreme, rampant conservatism.

Yet, this modern warping of the fascist legacy rests not only on an ignorant and ahistorical reading of the period, but on a cynical and politically motivated maltreatment of the facts. Hitler, like Mussolini, was an avowed and dogmatic socialist. The Nazis were revolutionaries that sought to destroy class-enemies and equalise all of German society in the image of a collectivised Marxist utopia. As Vasily Grossman illuminated in his great novel Life and Fate, Nazism was in fact the sister-ideology of Stalinism. The truth, recognised widely by scholars of the time, has since been quashed to preserve the allure of the leftwing ideal.

Upon gaining power in 1933, the Nazis enacted a specifically socialist revolution in Germany. National Socialism (Nazism) was a uniquely German creed: it combined the military-civic pride of the centuries-old Prussian tradition with Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “Superman” – the Übermensch – that strikes out in the world to transcend the preconceived limits of human achievement. The result was an ideology of ferocious, racialised patriotism, which embraced the zeitgeist of implacable German destiny that was already extant in the politics of the era.

Yet, Nazism was, above all, explicitly socialist in origin and character. Hitler stated repeatedly that, unlike the crazed Bolsheviks of Russia, he alone was enacting Karl Marx’s utopian vision properly. At a Heroes’ Memorial Day speech in March 1943, Hitler stated once again the true aim of the Nazi project:

“All the more so after the war, the German National Socialist state, which pursued this goal from the beginning, will tirelessly work for the realization of a program that will ultimately lead to a complete elimination of class differences and to the creation of a true socialist community.”

Hitler had insisted in his speeches since the 1920s that the Nazi state must be founded ultimately upon “internal social justice” (a somewhat familiar term), and that the existence of any form of social or economic class was antithetical to the unity of the German utopia. The principal enemies of the people were the “bourgeoisie” and the “capitalist” class that exploited German workers and greedily limited its true economic potential. As the great twentieth century historian Richard Pipes wrote of the Nazi regime:

“The Nazi appealed to the socialist traditions of German labour, declaring the worker 'a pillar of the community', and the 'bourgeois' — along with the traditional aristocracy — a doomed class. Hitler, who told associates that he was a 'socialist', had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as 'comrades’ (Genossen). His conception of the party was, like Lenin's, that of a militant organization, a Kampfbund, or 'Combat League'.”

The Nazi movement, like Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party, grew from the ideological soil of the European revolutionary socialist movement. Critically, Hitler’s persecution of the Jews formed part of this same Marxist rubric: the Jew was, above all, the class-enemy of the German people – the great historical demon of economic exploitation and individualist greed. Hitler asserted that “the economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews.”

Indeed, the trope of the Jew as arch-capitalist dates back centuries to the very foundations of European leftwing thought. Stalin, an unswervingly fanatical Marxist ideologue, was viciously anti-Semitic, too. The “doctors’ plot” of January 1953 falsely accused Jewish doctors of conspiring to assassinate Soviet leaders, providing a cynical pretext to a widespread campaign of persecution against Russian Jews. An impending terrible pogrom and mass deportations to the Soviet Far East were averted only by the sudden death of Stalin in March of 1953. Moreover, Stalin undertook radical ethnic cleansing via deportation, show-trial, and murder. During the Second World War, more than two million Soviet citizens – Kalmyks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars and others – were deported to Central Asia. Extreme racial bigotry is not alien to leftwing tyranny.

In tandem with the social justice movement to equalise society, Hitler dismantled German capitalism. Economic redistribution was implemented on a massive scale; taxation of the middle-class became extortionate; and free enterprise was de facto abolished. Formerly private industries were centralised into state-run cartels that served Hitler’s four-year plans, which were modelled in turn on the Soviet five-year plans. Hitler in fact regarded Stalin’s catastrophic agricultural and economic reforms as a mark of “genius”. The eminent economist Ludwig von Mises wrote of the German economy in 1942:

“The German pattern of socialism (Zwangswirtschaft) is characterized by the fact that it maintains, although only nominally, some institutions of capitalism. Labour is, of course, no longer a “commodity”; the labour market has been solemnly abolished; the government fixes wage rates and assigns every worker the place where he must work. Private ownership has been nominally untouched. In fact, however, the former entrepreneurs have been reduced to the status of shop managers (Betriebsführer). The government tells them what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. Business may remonstrate against inexpedient injunctions, but the final decision rests with the authorities… Market exchange and entrepreneurship are thus only a sham. The government, not the consumers’ demands, directs production; the government, not the market, fixes every individual’s income and expenditure. This is socialism with the outward appearance of capitalism — all-round planning and total control of all economic activities by the government. Some of the labels of capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in a genuine market economy.”

In parallel, the culture, too, was revolutionised to create a new progressive order. Like the New Soviet man of Stalin’s Russia, an idealised German worker was envisioned for the bohemian utopia of the future. As has happened in all revolutionary tyrannies since the French Revolution, Christianity was attacked bitterly. The Catholic Church in Germany suffered immense persecution: thousands of clergymen were arrested and many murdered; and Catholic activists were show-trialled in an anti-Christian propaganda campaign. Similarly, the Bolsheviks persecuted Orthodox Christianity in Russia barbarically, murdering priests and destroying churches en masse. Indeed, atheistic materialism is invariably the official creed of the Marxist dictatorship, for spiritual belief inevitably saps the idolatry of human power on which the dictator relies.

Conservative academics and activists were arrested and murdered routinely. Free scholarship and expression were destroyed. As Friedrich Hayek observes in The Road to Serfdom, the ideal of “English liberty” was a term of snide derision in the Nazi Party. The movement was a project of unwavering economic and cultural collectivisation. Childhood education was a principal object of the state propaganda machine. The nation’s institutions became the Party’s organs of totalitarian control. The Reich Chamber of Culture policed all German art, literature, music, and architecture, enforcing conformity to the new movement. Science was worshipped as an instrument of power.

Like Jacobinism and Bolshevism, National Socialism sought ultimately to break free of tradition and Christian morality, and to reform every fibre of society around a promised egalitarian fraternity. The terrible crimes that ensued all flowed from the arrogant pseudo-rationalism, materialism and specifically Marxist utopianism that undergirded the movement. It is a dark irony indeed that the progressive creed of today’s self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” rests so openly on these very precepts.