Hitler Was a Socialist - Ray

7/28/2019 Hitler Was a Socialist - Ray

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HITLER WAS A SOCIALISTJohn J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)

Source: http://jonjayray.tripod.com/hitler.html

This article is published on the internet only. This is the version of May, 2012. This

version is largely a remedial lesson in pre-war history for those who know only what

they have learnt via school textbooks, popular encyclopaedias, movies etc. The article

therefore does to a considerable extent go back to original sources and has to provide a

lot of information that is not generally known. This does make the article rather long.

For those who already know the history of the period well, however, I have kept

available the June 2001 version of the article -- which is MUCH shorter. You can find it

here. To make this longer version more navigable there is a clickable index at the end

EPITOME:

Hitler was a fairly mainstream Leftist of his day. It must be remembered that he gained

power by way of a democratic election, not by way of a revolution or a military coup. If

any of that seems wrong to you, you need to keep reading

The Demand for Explanation

Now that more than 60 years have passed since the military defeat of Nazi Germany,

one might have thought that the name of its leader would be all but forgotten. This is

far from the case, however. Even in the popular press, references to Hitler are

incessant and the trickle of TV documentaries on the Germany of his era would seem to

be unceasing. Hitler even featured on the cover of a 1995 Time magazine.

This finds its counterpart in the academic literature too. Scholarly works on Hitler's

deeds continue to emerge many years after his death (e.g. Feuchtwanger, 1995) and in

a survey of the history of Western civilization, Lipson (1993) named Hitlerism and the

nuclear bomb as the two great evils of the 20th century. Stalin's tyranny lasted longer,

Pol Pot killed a higher proportion of his country's population and Hitler was not the first

Fascist but the name of Hitler nonetheless hangs over the entire 20th century as
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something inescapably and inexplicably malign. It seems doubtful that even the whole

of the 21st century will erase from the minds of thinking people the still largely

unfulfilled need to understand how and why Hitler became so influential and wrought so

much evil.

The fact that so many young Germans (particular from the formerly Communist East)

today still salute his name and perpetuate much of his politics is also an amazement

and a deep concern to many and what can only be called the resurgence of Nazism

among many young Germans at the close of the 20th century and onwards would seem

to generate a continuing and pressing need to understand the Hitler phenomenon.

So what was it that made Hitler so influential? What was it that made him (as pre-war

histories such as Roberts, 1938, attest) the most popular man in the Germany of his

day? Why does he still have many admirers now in the Germany on which he inflicted

such disasters? What was (is?) his appeal? And why, of all things, are the young

products of an East German Communist upbringing still so susceptible to his message?

The context of Nazism

"True, it is a fixed idea with the French that the Rhine is their property, but to

this arrogant demand the only reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's:

"Give back Alsace and Lorraine". For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to

many whose standpoint I share in other respects, that the reconquest of the

German-speaking left bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that

the Germanisation of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for

us. Shall we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these

countries, while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?"

Have a look at the quote immediately above and say who wrote it. It is a typical Hitler

rant, is it not? Give it to 100 people who know Hitler's speeches and 100 would identify

it as something said by Adolf. The fierce German nationalism and territorial ambition is

unmistakeable. And if there is any doubt, have a look at another quote from the same

author:

This is our calling, that we shall become the templars of this Grail, gird the

sword round our loins for its sake and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war

which will be followed by the thousand-year reign of freedom.

That settles it, doesn't it? Who does not know of Hitler's glorification of military sacrifice

and his aim to establish a "thousand-year Reich"?


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But neither quote is in fact from Hitler. Both quotes were written by Friedrich Engels,

Karl Marx's co-author (See here and here). So let that be an introduction to the idea

that Hitler not only called himself a socialist but that he WAS in fact a socialist by the

standards of his day. Ideas that are now condemned as Rightist were in Hitler's day

perfectly normal ideas among Leftists. And if Friedrich Engels was not a Leftist, I do not

know who would be.

But the most spectacular aspect of Nazism was surely its antisemitism. And that had a

grounding in Marx himself. The following passage is from Marx but it could just as well

have been from Hitler:

"Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew -- not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does,

but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion,

but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular

basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the

Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation

from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would bethe self-emancipation of our time.... We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general

present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical

development -- to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously

contributed -- has been brought to its present high level, at which it must

necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is

the emancipation of mankind from Jewry".

Note that Marx wanted to "emancipate" (free) mankind from Jewry ("Judentum" in

Marx's original German), just as Hitler did and that the title of Marx's essay in Germanwas "Zur Judenfrage", which -- while not necessarily derogatory in itself -- is

nonetheless exactly the same expression ("Jewish question") that Hitler used in his

famous phrase "Endloesung der Judenfrage" ("Final solution of the Jewish question").

And when Marx speaks of the end of Jewry by saying that Jewish identity must

necessarily "dissolve" itself, the word he uses in German is "aufloesen", which is a close

relative of Hitler's word "Endloesung" ("final solution"). So all the most condemned

features of Nazism can be traced back to Marx and Engels, right down to the language

used. The thinking of Hitler, Marx and Engels differed mainly in emphasis rather than in

content. All three were second-rate German intellectuals of their times. Anybody whodoubts that practically all Hitler's ideas were also to be found in Marx & Engels should

spend a little time reading the quotations from Marx & Engels archived here.

Another point:

"Everything must be different!" or "Alles muss anders sein!" was a slogan of the

Nazi Party. It is also the heart's desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism

was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it's
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true. Hitler and his criminal gang hated the rich, the capitalists, the Jews, the

Christian Churches, and "the System".

Brown Bolsheviks

It is very easy to miss complexities in the the politics of the past and thus draw wrong

conclusions about them. To understand the politics of the past we need to set aside for

a time our own way of looking at things and try to see how the people involved at the

time saw it all. Doing so is an almost essential step if we wish to understand the

similarities and differences between Nazism and Marxism/Leninism. The following

excerpt from James P. O'Donnell's THE BUNKER(1978, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, pp.

261-262) is instructive. O'Donnell is quoting Artur Axmann, the Nazi youth leader,

recalling a conversation with Goebbels in the Hitler bunker on Tuesday, May 1, 1945,

the same day Goebbels and his wife would kill themselves after she killed their children.

"Goebbels stood up to greet me. He soon launched into lively memories of our

old street-fighting days in Berlin-Wedding, from nineteen twenty-eight to thirty-

three. He recalled how we had clobbered the Berlin Communists and the

Socialists into submission, to the tune of the "Horst Wessel" marching song, on

their old home ground.

He said one of the great accomplishments of the Hitler regime had been to win

the German workers over almost totally to the national cause. We had madepatriots of the workers, he said, as the Kaiser had dismally failed to do. This, he

kept repeating, had been one of the real triumphs of the movement. We Nazis

were a non-Marxist yet revolutionary party, anticapitalist, antibourgeois,

antireactionary....

Starch-collared men like Chancellor Heinrich Bruening had called us the "Brown

Bolsheviks," and their bourgeois instincts were not wrong.

It seems inconceivable to modern minds that just a few differences between two similar

ideologies -- Marxism and Nazism -- could have been sufficient cause for great enmity

between those two ideologies. But the differences concerned were important to the

people involved at the time. Marxism was class-based and Nazism was nationally based

but otherwise they were very similar. That's what people said and thought at the time

and that explains what they did and how they did it.


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Iconography

And now for something that is very rarely mentioned indeed: Have a guess about

where the iconography below comes from:

As you may be able to guess from the Cyrillic writing accompanying it, it was a Soviet

Swastika -- used by the Red Army in its early days. It was worn as a shoulder patch by

some Soviet troops. The Swastika too was a socialist symbol long before Hitler became

influential. Prewar socialists (including some American socialists) used it on the grounds

that it has two arms representing two entwined letters "S" (for "Socialist"). So even

Hitler's symbolism was Leftist.

{There is an interesting comment on the graphic above by a Russian speaker. He

points out that the shoulder patch above was specifically designed for Kalmyk

troops. My understanding that the Swastika was more widely used in the Red

Army than among the Kalmyk troops alone but I have yet to find a graphic

illustrating that. As Stalin would undoubtedly have done his best to erase all

references to Soviet swastikas after the Nazi invasion, such a graphic may not be

easily found.}

Hitler did however give the symbol his own twist when he said: "Als nationale

Sozialisten sehen wir in unserer Flagge unser Programm. Im Rot sehen wir den sozialen
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Gedanken der Bewegung, im Weiss den nationalistischen, im Hakenkreuz die Mission

des Kampfes fuer den Sieg des arischen Menschen und zugleich mit ihm auch den Sieg

des Gedankens der schaffenden Arbeit" ("As National socialists we see our programme

in our flag. In red we see the social thoughts of the movement, in white the nationalist

thoughts, in the hooked-cross the mission of fighting for the victory of Aryan man and

at the same time the victory of the concept of creative work").

In German, not only the word "Socialism" (Sozialismus) but also the word "Victory"

(Sieg) begins with an "S". So he said that the two letters "S" in the hooked-cross

(swastika) also stood for the victory of Aryan man and the victory of the idea that the

"worker" was a creative force: Nationalism plus socialism again, in other words.

{Technical note: Translating Hitler into English often runs up against the fact

that he uses lots of German words that have no exact English equivalent (I

comment, for instance, onVolkand Reich here). I have translated "schaffen"

above as "create" (as does Ralph Manheim in his widely-used translation ofMein

Kampf-- p. 452) but it has the larger meaning of providing and accomplishingthings in general. So Hitler was clearly using the word to stress the central

importance of the working man. In English, "creative" is often used to refer to

artistic activities. That is NOT the meaning of "schaffen"}

And by Hitler's time, antisemitism in particular, as well as racism in general, already had

a long history on the Left. August Bebel was the founder of Germany's Social

Democratic party (mainstream Leftists) and his best-known saying is that antisemitism

is der Sozialismus des bloeden Mannes (usually translated as "the socialism of fools") --

which implicitly recognized the antisemitism then prevalent on the Left. And Leninhimself alluded to the same phenomenon in saying that "it is not the Jews who are the

enemies of the working people" but "the capitalists of all countries." For more on the

socialist roots of antisemitism see Tyler Cowen's detailed survey here

It should be borne in mind, however, that antisemitism was pervasive in Europe of the

19th and early 20th century. Many conservatives were antisemitic too. Leftists were

merely the most enthusistic practitioners of it. We have seen how virulent it was in

Marx. Antisemitism among conservatives, by contrast, was usually not seen by them as

a major concern. British Conservatives made the outspokenly Jewish Benjamin Disraelitheir Prime Minister in the 19th century and the man who actually declared war on

Hitler -- Neville Chamberlain -- himself had antisemitic views.

And Leftism is notoriously prone to "splits" so there were no doubt some Leftists who

disavowed antisemitism on principled grounds. Lenin clearly criticized antisemitism on

strategic grounds: It distracted from his class-war objectives. So were there also

disinterested objections from Leftists? Such objectors are rather hard to find. The
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opposition to the persecution of the unfortunate Captain Alfred Dreyfus (who was

Jewish) by Emile Zola in France is sometimes quoted but Zola was primarily an

advocate of French naturalism, which was a form of physical determinism -- rather at

odds with the usual Leftist view of man as a "blank slate". And the man who published

Zola's famous challenge to the persecution of Dreyfus was Georges Clemenceau, who is

these days most famous for his remark: "If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has

no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head"

But, however you cut it, Hitler's antisemitism was of a piece with his Leftism, not a sign

of "Rightism".

One more bit of iconography that may serve to reinforce that point:

The "Roman" salute is generally said to have been invented by Mussolini but Musso was

a Marxist who knew Lenin well so it is not surprising that Stalin was influenced by

Musso's ideas for a while.

The posters above come via a documentary film called Soviet Story. See here. The film

has had a lot of praise from people who should know and it reinforces much that I say

above and below here.
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Labor unions

Who said this? A representative of the 21st century U.S. Democratic party, maybe?

"As things stand today, the trade unions in my opinion cannot be dispensed with.

On the contrary, they are among the most important institutions of the nation'seconomic life. Their significance lies not only in the social and political field, but

even more in the general field of national politics. A people whose broad masses,

through a sound trade-union movement, obtain the satisfaction of their living

requirements and at the same time an education, will be tremendously

strengthened in its power of resistance in the struggle for existence".

It could well be any Leftist speaker of the present time but it is in fact a small excerpt

from chapter 12 ofMein Kampf, wherein Hitler goes to great lengths to stress the

importance of unions. The association between unions and Leftism is of course historicand, as a Leftist, Hitler made great efforts to enlist unions as supporters of his party.

A modern Leftist

Let us look at what the Left and Right in politics consist of at present. Consider this

description by Edward Feser of someone who would have been a pretty good

Presidential candidate for the modern-day U.S. Democratic party:

He had been something of a bohemian in his youth, and always regarded young

people and their idealism as the key to progress and the overcoming of

outmoded prejudices. And he was widely admired by the young people of his

country, many of whom belonged to organizations devoted to practicing and

propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong passion for music, art, and

architecture, and was even something of a painter. He rejected what he

regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he and his girlfriend "lived

together" for years. He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and

collaborators, and took the view that a man's personal morals were none of his

business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself may have been

homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a number of

contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking, regarding

it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat it; he was a

vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control laws; and he

advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.
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He championed the rights of workers, regarded capitalist society as brutal and

unjust, and sought a third way between communism and the free market. In this

regard, he and his associates greatly admired the strong steps taken by

President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to take large-scale economic decision-

making out of private hands and put it into those of government planning

agencies. His aim was to institute a brand of socialism that avoided the

inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet variety, and many former communists

found his program highly congenial. He deplored the selfish individualism he took

to be endemic to modern Western society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic

of self-sacrifice: "As Christ proclaimed 'love one another'," he said, "so our call --

'people's community,' 'public need before private greed,' 'communally-minded

social consciousness' -- rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!"

The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was not personally a Christian,

regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into as an irrational superstition. In

fact he admired Islam more than Christianity, and he and his policies were highly

respected by many of the Muslims of his day. He and his associates had a special

distaste for the Catholic Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized

Protestantism, taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one

that forsook the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and

accommodated itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be

implemented by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity

might eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to

paganism, a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the

heritage of their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that apeople's ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a

kind of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right or

wrong in some sense depends on one's ethnic worldview, and especially on what

best promotes the well-being of one's ethnic group

There is surely no doubt that the man Feser describes sounds very much like a

mainstream Leftist by current standards. But who is the man concerned? It is a

historically accurate description of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own

day but he would even be a mainstream socialist in MOST ways today. Feser does not

mention Hitler's antisemitism above, of course, but that too seems once again to have

become mainstream among the Western-world Left in the early years of the 21st

century. See here for more on that.

But there is no claim that Hitler was WHOLLY like modern democratic Leftists. In ways

other than those so far mentioned, Hitler was, as has already been detailed to some
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extent, more like his Communist predecessors. Ludwig von Mises speaks of those

similarities. Writing in 1944 he said:

"The Nazis have not only imitated the Bolshevist tactics of seizing power. They

have copied much more. They have imported from Russia the one-party system

and the privileged role of this party and its members in public life; the

paramount position of the secret police; the organization of affiliated parties

abroad which are employed in fighting their domestic governments and insabotage and espionage, assisted by public funds and the protection of the

diplomatic and consular service; the administrative execution and imprisonment

of political adversaries; concentration camps; the punishment inflicted on the

families of exiles; the methods of propaganda. They have borrowed from the

Marxians even such absurdities as the mode of address, party comrade

(Parteigenosse), derived from the Marxian comrade (Genosse), and the use of a

military terminology for all items of civil and economic life. The question is not in

which respects both systems are alike but in which they differ..."

(For those who are unaware of it, Von Mises was an Austrian Jewish intellectual

and a remarkably prescient economist. He got out of Vienna just hours ahead of

the Gestapo. He did therefore have both every reason and every opportunity to

be a close observer of Nazism. So let us also read a bit ofwhat he said about the

Nazi economy:)

The Nazis did not, as their foreign admirers contend, enforce price control within

a market economy. With them price control was only one device within the frame

of an all-around system of central planning. In the Nazi economy there was no

question of private initiative and free enterprise. All production activities were

directed by the Reichswirtschaftsministerium. No enterprise was free to deviate

in the conduct of its operations from the orders issued by the government. Price

control was only a device in the complex of innumerable decrees and orders

regulating the minutest details of every business activity and precisely fixing

every individual's tasks on the one hand and his income and standard of living on

the other.

What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi

economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the

entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of

income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule

and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from

control. Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and

pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were
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virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the

orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party.

And let us look at the words of someone who was actually in Germany in the 1930s and

who thus saw Nazism close up. He said:

"If I'd been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a

German nationalist. I could see how they'd become passionate about saving thenation. It was a time when you didn't believe there was a future unless the world

was fundamentally transformed."

So who said that? It was the famous historian, Eric Hobsbawm (original surname:

Obstbaum), who became a Communist instead and who later became known as

perhaps Britain's most resolute Communist. Hobsbawn clearly saw only slight

differences between Communism and Nazism at that time. And as this summary of a

book (by Richard Overy) comparing Hitler and Stalin says:

"But the resemblances are inescapable. Both tyrannies relied on a desperateideology of do-or-die confrontation. Both were obsessed by battle imagery: 'The

dictatorships were military metaphors, founded to fight political war.' And despite

the rhetoric about a fate-struggle between socialism and capitalism, the two

economic systems converged strongly. Stalin's Russia permitted a substantial

private sector, while Nazi Germany became rapidly dominated by state direction

and state-owned industries.

In a brilliant passage, Overy compares the experience of two economic

defectors. Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believedthat Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor

Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the

exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses

of capitalism.

As Overy says, much that the two men did was pointless. Why camps? Prisons

would have held all their dangerous opponents. Who really needed slave labour,

until the war? What did that colossal surplus of cruelty and terror achieve for the

regimes? 'Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginaryenemies.'"

And let us listen to Hitler himself on the matter:

"There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is,

above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia

except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this

circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to
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the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss

will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will."

Another quote:

"Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they

cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The

decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them

regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our

socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the

State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and

factories? We socialize human beings."

(Both quotes above are from Hermann Rauschning in Hitler Speaks, London, T.

Butterworth, 1940, also called The Voice of Destruction. See e.g. here.

Because what he records is so inconvenient, many contemporary historians

dismiss Rauschning's 1940 book as inaccurate, even though it is perfectly in

accord with everything else we now know about Hitler. But no-one disputes that

Rauschning was a prominent Nazi for a time. He was however basically a

conservative so eventually became disillusioned with the brutalities of Nazism

and went into opposition to it. Rauschning's book was in fact prophetic, which

certainly tends to indicate that he knew what he was talking about.)

Party programmes

Let us start by considering political party programmes or "platforms" of Hitler's day:

Take this description of a political programme:

A declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things

which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists".

And this description of a political movement as having a 'revolutionary creative will'

which had 'no fixed aim, no permanency, only eternal change'

And this policy manifesto:
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9. All citizens of the State shall be equal as regards rights and duties.

10. The first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically. The

activities of the individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must

proceed within the frame of the community and be for the general good.

Therefore we demand:

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be

abolished.

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in life and property,

all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as a crime against the

people. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits whether in

assets or material.

13. We demand the nationalization of businesses which have been organized into

cartels.

14. We demand that all the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.

15. We demand extensive development of provision for old age.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle-class, the

immediate communalization of department stores which will be rented cheaply tosmall businessmen, and that preference shall be given to small businessmen for

provision of supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. We demand a land reform in accordance with our national requirements, and

the enactment of a law to confiscate from the owners without compensation any

land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the

prohibition of all speculation in land.

So who put that manifesto forward and who was responsible for the summary quotes

given before that? Was it the US Democrats, the British Labour Party, the Canadian

Liberals, some European Social Democratic party? No. The manifesto is an extract from

the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party

and was written by the leader of that party: Adolf Hitler. And the preceding summary

quotes were also from him (SeeVol. 2 Chap. 5 ofMein Kampfand O'Sullivan, 1983. p.

138).
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in fact probably the first major political party in the Western world to have a

thoroughgoing "Green" agenda. I take the following brief summary fromAndrew Bolt:

Hitler's preaching about German strength and destiny was water in the desert to

the millions of Germans who'd been stripped of pride, security and hope by their

humiliating defeat in World War I, and the terrible unemployment that followed.

The world was also mad then with the idea that a dictatorial government shouldrun the economy itself and make it "efficient", rather than let people make their

own decisions.

The Nazis -- National Socialists -- promised some of that, and their sibling rivals

in the Communist Party more.

The theory of eugenics -- breeding only healthy people -- was also in fashion,

along with a cult of health.

The Nazis, with their youth camps and praise of strong bodies and a strong

people, endorsed all that, and soon were killing the retarded, the gay and the

different.

Tribalism was popular, too. People weren't individuals, but members of a class,

as the communists argued, or of a race, as the Nazis said. Free from freedom --

what a relief for the scared!

You'd think we'd have learned. But too much of such thinking is back and

changing us so fast that we can't say how our society will look by the time we

die.

A KIND of eugenics is with us again, along with an obsession for perfect bodies.

Children in the womb are being killed just weeks before birth for the sin of being

a dwarf, for instance, and famed animal rights philosopher Peter Singer wants

parents free to kill deformed children in their first month of life. Meanwhile

support for euthanasia for the sick, tired or incompetent grows.

As for tribalism, that's also back -- and as official policy. We now pay people to

bury their individuality in tribes, giving them multicultural grants or even an

Aboriginal "parliament".

But most dangerous is that we strip our children of pride, security and even

hope. They are taught that God is dead, our institutions corrupt, our people
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racist, our land ruined, our past evil and our future doomed by global warming.

Many have also watched one of their parents leave the family home, which to

some must seem a betrayal.

They are then fed a culture which romanticises violence and worships sex --

telling them there is nothing more to life than the cravings of their bodies.

No one can live like this and be fulfilled. People need to feel part of something

bigger and better than ourselves -- a family, or a church, or a tradition or a

country. Or, as a devil may whisper, the greens.

The greens. Here's a quote which may sound very familiar -- at least in part. "We

recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to

humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. "Only through a re-

integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made

stronger . .

"This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a

nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence

of National Socialist thought."

That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and

he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to

homoepathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, andSS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which

to treat his beloved troops.

HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to

our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly

for Germany's "sacred" forests.

This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science,

nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied Germanidentity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his

book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of

Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with

just 10 per cent of all men.

The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which

talked of our mystical relationship with the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author

ofEcofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the
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Lebensraum and the population "problem"

Reading Mein Kampfcan be a perverse sort of fun. You can open almost any page of it

at random and hear echoes of the modern-day Left and Greens. The points I mention in

this present article are just a sampling. I could fill a book with examples showing that

Hitler was not only a Leftist in his day but that he was also a pretty good Leftist by

modern standards. His antisemitism would certainly pass unremarked by much of the

Left today.

Among students of the Nazi period it is well-known that Hitler's most central concern

after getting rid of the Jews was Lebensraum for Germany -- i.e. taking over the lands

of Eastern Europe for Germans. But WHY did Hitler want Lebensraum (literally, "life-

space") for Germans? It was because, like the Greenies of today, he was concerned

about overpopulation and scarcity of natural resources.

Greenie Paul Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 bookThe population bomb:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of

millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked

upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the

world death rate..."

Hitler shared Ehrlich's pessimism:

"Germany has an annual increase in population of nearly nine hundred thousand

souls. The difficulty of feeding this army of new citizens must grow greater from

year to year and ultimately end in catastrophe, unless ways and means are

found to forestall the danger of starvation and misery in time... Without doubt

the productivity of the soil can be increased up to a certain limit. But only up to a

certain limit, and not continuously without end..... But even with the greatest

limitation on the one hand and the utmost industry on other, here again a limit

will one day be reached, created by the soil itself. With the utmost toil it will not

be possible to obtain any more from it, and then, though postponed for a certain

time, catastrophe again manifests itself". (Mein Kampfpp. 121 & 122).

Both Prof. Ehrlich and Hitler were intelligent but overconfident Green/Left ignoramuses

who knew nothing of the economics concerned -- as is shown by the almost hilarious

wrongness of Ehrlich's predictions -- but Hitler unfortunately had the means to do

something about his ill-informed theories. He concluded that rather than let Germans

starve, he would grab more land off other people to feed them -- and the rest is indeed
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/paul_ehrlich.htmlhttp://www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/paul_ehrlich.htmlhttp://www.overpopulation.com/faq/people/paul_ehrlich.html


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- large Department stores. And Hitler hated them. Item 16 of the (February 25th.,

1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist German Workers Party (written by Hitler)

sought the abolition of big stores and their replacement by small businesses.

One of the British ex-Marxists at "Spiked" has a comprehensive article on the similarities

between the Nazis and the British supermarket-haters of the modern era. A useful

excerpt:

"As the Nazi Party attracted considerable numbers of the Mittelstand to its

programme, physical attacks, boycotts and discrimination against department

and chain stores started to increase. Such street-level chainstore-bashing

initiatives "were quickly backed by a Law for the Protection of Individual Trade

passed on 12 May 1933", writes Evans. In a similar way to the current

recommendations put forward by the [U.K.] Competition Commission, in Nazi

Germany "chain stores were forbidden to expand or open new branches".

Towards the end of 1933, the Nazi Party introduced further moves along the

lines currently outlined by the Competition Commission: "Department and chainstores were prohibited from offering a discount of more than three per cent on

prices, a measure also extended to consumer co-operatives."

More Leftist than racist?

Hitler was in fact even more clearly a Leftist than he was a nationalist or a racist.

Although in his speeches he undoubtedly appealed to the nationalism of the German

people, Locke (2001) makes a strong case that Hitler was not in fact a very good

nationalist in that he always emphasized that his primary loyalty was to what he called

the Aryan race -- and Germany was only one part of that race. Locke then goes on to

point out that Hitler was not even a very consistent racist in that the Dutch, the Danes

etc. were clearly Aryan even by Hitler's own eccentric definition yet he attacked them

whilst at the same time allying himself with the very non-Aryan Japanese. And the

Russians and the Poles (whom Hitler also attacked) are rather more frequently blondeand blue-eyed (Hitler's ideal) than the Germans themselves are! So what DID Hitler

believe in?

In his bookDer Fuehrer, prewar Leftist writer Konrad Heiden corrects the now almost

universal assumption that Hitler's idea of race was biologically-based. The Nazi

conception of race traces, as is well-known, to the work of Houston Stewart

Chamberlain. But what did Chamberlain say about race? It should not by now be
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surprising that he said something that sounds thoroughly Leftist.Anthropologist Robert

Gayre summarizes Chamberlain's ideas as follows:

"On the contrary he taught (like many "progressives" today) that racial mixture

was desirable, for, according to him, it was only out of racial mixture that the

gifted could be created. He considered that the evidence of this was provided by

the Prussian, whom he saw as the superman, resulting from a cross between the

German (or Anglo-Saxon "German") and the Slav. From this Chamberlain wenton to argue that the sum of all these talented people would then form a "race,"

not of blood but of "affinity."

So the Nazi idea of race rejected biology just as thoroughly as modern Leftist ideas

about race do! If that seems all too jarring to believe, Gayre goes on to discuss the

matter at length.

So although Hitler made powerful USE of German nationalism, we see from both the

considerations put forward by Locke and the intellectual history discussed by Gayre,

that Hitler was not in fact much motivated by racial loyalty as we would normally

conceive it. So what was he motivated by?

Locke suggests that Hitler's actions are best explained by saying that he simply had a

love of war but offers no explanation of WHY Hitler would love war. Hitler's extreme

Leftism does explain this however. As the quotations already given show, Hitler shared

with other Leftists a love of constant change and excitement --- and what could offermore of that than war (or, in the case of other Leftists, the civil war of "revolution")?

See here for a more extensive treatment of what motivates Leftists generally.

The idea that Nazism was motivated primarily by a typically Leftist hunger for change

and excitement and hatred of the status quo is reinforced by the now famous account

of life in Nazi Germany given by a young "Aryan" who lived through it. Originally written

before World War II, Haffner's (2002) account of why Hitler rose to power stresses the

boring nature of ordinary German life and observes that the appeal of the Nazis lay intheir offering of relief from that:

"The great danger of life in Germany has always been emptiness and boredom

... The menace of monotony hangs, as it has always hung, over the great plains

of northern and eastern Germany, with their colorless towns and their all too

industrious, efficient, and conscientious business and organizations. With it

comes a horror vacui and the yearning for 'salvation': through alcohol, through
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superstition, or, best of all, through a vast, overpowering, cheap mass

intoxication."

So he too saw the primary appeal of Nazism as its offering of change, novelty and

excitement.

And how about another direct quote from Hitler himself?

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the

exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly

evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of

responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system

under all conditions"

(Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)

Clearly, the idea that Hitler was a Rightist is probably the most successful BIG LIE of

the 20th Century. He was to the Right of the Communists but that is all. Nazism was

nothing more nor less than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and

to label it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.

The word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation of the name of Hitler's political party -- the

nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei. In English this translates to "The

National Socialist German Worker's Party". So Hitler was a socialist and a champion of

the workers -- or at least he identified himself as such and campaigned as such.

There is a great deal of further reading available that extends the points made here

about the nature ofNazism and Fascism. There is, for instance, an interesting review by

Prof. Antony Flew here ofThe Lost Literature of Socialism by historian George Watson.

Excerpt:

Many of his findings are astonishing. Perhaps for readers today the mostastonishing of all is that "In the European century that began in the 1840s, from

Engels' article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated

genocide called himself a socialist and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or

independent did anything of the kind." (The term "genocide" in Watson's usage

is not confined to the extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but

embraces also the liquidation of such other complete human categories as

"enemies of the people" and "the Kulaks as a class.")
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The book seems well worth reading but is not of course available online. An excellent

earlier essay by Prof. Watson covering some of the same ground is however available

here. He shows in it that even such revered figures in the history of socialism as G.B.

Shaw and Beatrice Webb were vocally in favour of genocide.

We do however need to keep in mind that there is no such thing as PURE Leftism.

Leftists are notoriously fractious, sectarian and multi-branched. And even the Fascist

branch of Leftism was far from united. The modern-day Left always talk as if Italy's

Mussolini and Hitler were two peas in a pod but that is far from the truth. Mussolini got

pretty unprintable about Hitler at times and did NOT support Hitler's genocide against

the Jews (Steinberg, 1990; Herzer, 1989). As it says here:

"Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the

Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed,

once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to

the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives - far more thanOskar Schindler."

"Far more than Oskar Schindler"!. And as late as 1938, Mussolini even asked the Pope

to excommunicate Hitler!. Leftists are very good at "fraternal" rivalry.

So unity is not of the Left in any of its forms. They only ever have SOME things in

common -- such as claiming to represent "the worker" and seeking a State that controls

as much of people's lives as it feasibly can.

Tom Wolfe's biting essay on American intellectuals also summarizes the origins of

Fascism and Nazism rather well. Here is one excerpt from it:

"Fascism" was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of

Mussolini's Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler's Nazis, adroitly

papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism's standard-bearers, the Soviet

Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, "Nazi" was (most annoyingly)

shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. European Marxists

successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of

"capitalism."

{From the essay "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" originally appearing in the

June 2000 Harper's Monthly and reprinted in Wolfe's bookHooking Up}

Other sources on the basic facts about Hitler that history tells us are Roberts (1938),
http://jonjayray.tripod.com/watson.htmlhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec90.htmlhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec90.htmlhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec90.htmlhttp://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030927.wvati0927/BNStory/International/http://wickeddox.blogspot.com/2007/05/in-land-of-rococo-marxists.htmlhttp://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030927.wvati0927/BNStory/International/http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec90.htmlhttp://jonjayray.tripod.com/watson.html


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Heiden (1939), Shirer (1964), Bullock (1964), Taylor (1963), Hagan (1966),

Feuchtwanger (1995).

The above are however secondary sources and, as every historian will tell you, there is

nothing like going back to the original -- which is why much original text is quoted

above. For further reading in the original sources, the first stop is of course Mein

Kampf. It seems customary to portray Mein Kampfas the ravings of a madman but it is

far from that. It is the attempt of an intelligent mind to comprehend the world about it

and makes its points in such a personal and passionate way that it might well persuade

many people today but for a knowledge of where it led. The best collection of original

Nazi documents on the web is however probably here. Perhaps deserving of particular

mention among the documents available there is a widely circulated pamphlet by

Goebbels here. One excerpt from it:

The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the

class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today

oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hardand bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national

organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It

is not merely a matter of pay, not only a matter of the number of hours worked

in a day-though we may never forget that these are an essential, perhaps even

the most significant part of the socialist platform-but it is much more a matter of

incorporating a powerful and responsible class in the state, perhaps even to

make it the dominant force in the future politics of the Fatherland

So Hitler was both a fairly typical pre-war Leftist in most respects and would also make

a pretty good modern Leftist in most respects. Aside from his nationalism, it is amazing

how much he sounds like modern Leftists in fact. And his nationalism was in fact one

way in which he was smarter than modern Leftists. Have a look at the 1939 Nazi

propaganda placard below (a Wochenspruch for the Gau Weser/Ems). The placard

promotes one of Hitler's sayings. The saying is, "Es gibt keinen Sozialismus, der nicht

aufgeht im eigenen Volk" -- which I translate as "There is no socialism except what

arises within its own people". Hitler spoke a very colloquial German so translating thatone was not easy but I think that is about as close to it as you can get.
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/index.htmhttp://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htmhttp://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htmhttp://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htmhttp://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/haken32.htmhttp://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/index.htm


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As some modern context for that saying, note that there have now been various

psychological studies by Putnam and others (e.g. here) showing that people are more

willing to share and get involved with others whom they see as like themselves. That

leads to the view that socialism will find its strongest support among an ethnically

homogeneous population -- which the Scandinavian countries notably were until

recently. And ethnic diversity therefore will undermine support for socialism (as in theU.S.A.). And from my studies of them, I have noted that the Scots are a very brotherly

lot. There is even a line in a famous Harry Lauder song that says: "Where brother Scots

foregather ...". And of course the Scots are enormously socialistic. When Margaret

Thatcher came to power on a huge swing towards the Conservatives in England,

Scotland actually swung away from the conservatives.

So the "diversity at all costs" orientation and open borders policies of the modern Left

are actually very inimical to the socialistic aims of the Left. The modern day Left do not

see that their promoting of infinite diversity will undermine support for socialism. Hitlerdid.

Perhaps the most amazing parallel between Hitler and the postwar Left, however, is

that for much of the 30s Hitler was actually something of a peacenik. I am putting up

below a picture of a Nazi propaganda poster of the 1930s that you won't believe unless

you are aware of how readily all Leftists preach one thing and do another. It reads ""Mit

Hitler gegen den Ruestungswahnsinn der Welt".
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0038-4941.00031http://jonjayray.tripod.com/scotland.htmlhttp://jonjayray.tripod.com/scotland.htmlhttp://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0038-4941.00031


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Can you get a more Leftist slogan than that? "Peace and equal rights"? Modern-day

Leftists sometimes try to dismiss Hitler's socialism as something from his early days that

he later outgrew. But when this poster was promulgated he was already Reichskanzler

(Prime Minister) so it was far from early days. Once again we see what a barefaced lie

it is when Leftists misrepresent Hitler as a Rightist. We can all have our own views

about what Hitler actually believed but he campaigned and gained power as a

democratic Leftist. The March 5, 1933 election was the last really democratic election

prewar Germany had and, in it, Hitler's appeal was Leftist.

There is here (or here) a collection of some of the "peace" talk that Hitler used even

after war had begun. Hitler might even be regarded as the original "peacenik", so vocal

was he about his wish for peace. So the preaching of both "peace" and "equality" by

the bloodthirsty Soviet regime of the cold war period had its parallel with the Nazis too.

It may be worth noting in passing what a clever piece of propaganda the above poster

was. Allied spokesmen such as Winston Churchill seemed to deem it a great insult to

refer to CORPORAL Hitler. They seemed to think it demeaned him. Yet Hitler himself

obviously did not think so. He seems in fact to have used his lowly military status in the

first war to identify himself as a man of the people. He used it to his advantage, not to

his disadvantage. It was part of his claim to represent the ordinary working man rather

than the German establishment.

But Hitler had his cake and ate it too. By drawing a great Prussian Junker like President

Hindenburg into his campaign, he also showed that he had the establishment on hisside. It helped to portray him as a SAFE choice. Hindenburg was no doubt disgusted by

such use of his name but since he had appointed Hitler, he could hardly complain.

For more Nazi "Peace" and other revealing posters see here

Finally, a few more quotes that establish the Leftist identity of the Nazis

"Der Idee der NSDAP entsprechend sind wir die deutsche Linke Nichts ist uns

verhasster als der rechtsstehende nationale Besitzbrgerblock. [The idea of the NaziParty is expressly that we are the German Left .. Nothing is more hated by us than the

national property-owner's bloc] (Joseph Goebbels, 1931 in "Der Angriff)

"Meine gefhlsmigen politischen Empfindungen lagen links. [My overwhelming

inclination is towards the Left] (Adolf Eichmann, in his memoirs)

"Wir haben die linken Klassenkmpfer liquidiert, aber leider haben wir dabei vergessen,

auch den Schlag gegen rechts zu fhren. Das ist unsere groe Unterlassungssnde.
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[We have liquidated the Leftist class-warriors but, unfortunately, we forgot to carry the

attack to the Right, That is our greatest sin of omission] (Adolf Hitler, 24. February

1945, "Tagung der Reichs- und Gauleiter", cited by Rainer Zitelmann in "Hitler

Selbstverstndnis eines Revolutionrs, page 457)

Particularly surprising is the summary by Willy Brandt, who, in 1932 at that time still

going by his real name of Herbert Frahm declared to his comrades of the Socialist

Party:

"Das sozialistische Element im Nationalsozialismus, im Denken seiner Gefolgsleute, das

subjektiv Revolutionre an der Basis, muss von uns erkannt werden. [The socialist

element in National socialism, to the minds of its followers, its subjectively revolutionary

basis, must be recognized by us]

The above quotes are from a German source here

Objections

At this stage I think I need to consider some objections to the account of Hitler that I

have given so far:

The Left/Right division is at fault

Faced with the challenge to their preconceptions constituted by the material I

have so far presented, some people take refuge in the well-known fact that

political attitudes are complex and are seldom fully represented by a simple

division of politics into Left and Right. They deny that Hitler was Leftist by

denying that ANYBODY is simply Leftist.

I don't think this gets anybody very far, however. What I have shown (and will

proceed to show at even greater length) is that Hitler fell squarely within that

stream of political thought that is usually called Leftist. That is a fact. That is

information. And that is something that is not now generally known. And no

matter how you rejig your conception of politics generally, that affinity will not

go away. It is commonly said that Nazism and Communism were both

"authoritarian" or "totalitarian" -- which is undoubtedly true -- but what I show

here is that there were far greater affinities than that. Basic doctrines, ideas and

preachments of Nazis and Communists were similar as well as their method of

government.
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But, as it happens, the Left/Right division of politics is not just some silly scheme

put out by people who are too simple to think of anything better. There is a long

history of attempts to devise better schemes but they all founder on how people

in general actually vote and think. Most people DO organize their views in a

recognizably Left/Right way. For a brief introduction to the research and thinking

on the dimensionality of political attitudes, see here

Leftist denials of Hitler's Leftism: Kangas

Modern day Leftists of course hate it when you point out to them that Hitler was

one of them. They deny it furiously -- even though in Hitler's own day both the

orthodox Leftists who represented the German labor unions (the SPD) and the

Communists (KPD) voted WITH the Nazis in the Reichstag (German Parliament)

on various important occasions -- though not on all occasions. They were after

all political rivals. It was only at the last gasp -- the passage of the "Enabling Act"

that gave Hitler absolute power -- that the SPD opposed the Nazis resolutely.

They knew from introspection where that would lead, even if others were

deceived.

As part of that denial, an essay by the late Steve Kangas is much reproduced on

the internet. Entering the search phrase "Hitler was a Leftist" will bring upmultiple copies of it. Kangas however reveals where he is coming from in his

very first sentence: "Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the

grounds that his party was named "National Socialist." But socialism requires

worker ownership and control of the means of production". It does? Only to

Marxists. So Kangas is saying only that Hitler was less Leftist than the

Communists -- and that would not be hard. Surely a "democratic" Leftist should

see that as faintly to Hitler's credit, in fact.

At any event, Leonard Peikoffmakes clear the triviality of the difference:

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of

the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee

and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they

explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of CONTROL. Private

citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as

the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their

property.
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Which sounds just like the Leftists of today.

Some other points made by Kangas are highly misleading. He says for instance

that Hitler favoured "competition over co-operation". Hitler in fact rejected

Marxist notions of class struggle and had as his great slogan: "Ein Volk, ein

Reich, ein Fuehrer" (One People, One State, one leader). He ultimately wanted

Germans to be a single, unified, co-operating whole under him, with all notions

of social class or other divisions forgotten. Other claims made by Kangas are

simply laughable: He says that Hitler cannot have been a Leftist because he

favoured: "politics and militarism over pacifism, dictatorship over democracy".

Phew! So Stalin was not political, not a militarist and not a dictator? Enough said.

In summary, then, Kangas starts out by defining socialism in such a way that

only Communists can be socialists and he then defines socialism in a way that

would exclude Stalin from being one! So is ANYBODY a socialist according to

Kangas? Only Mr Brain-dead Kangas himself, I guess. And Kangas fancied

himself as an authority on Leftism! Perhaps he was. He certainly got the self-

contradictory part down pat.

Other denials of Nazism as Leftist

So the challenge by Kangas is really just too silly to take seriously. More serious

is the strong reaction I get from many who know something of history who say

that Hitler cannot have been a Leftist because of the great hatred that existed at

the time between the Nazis and the "Reds". And it is true that Hitler's contempt

for "Bolshevism" was probably exceeded only by his contempt for the Jews.

My reply is that there is no hatred like fraternal hatred and that hatreds between

different Leftist groupings have existed from the French revolution onwards. That

does not make any of the rival groups less Leftist however. And the ice-pick inthe head that Trotsky got courtesy of Stalin shows vividly that even among the

Russian revolutionaries themselves there were great rivalries and hatreds. Did

that make any of them less Marxist, less Communist? No doubt the protagonists

concerned would argue that it did but from anyone else's point of view they were

all Leftists at least.

Nonetheless there still seems to persist in some minds the view that two groups

as antagonistic as the Nazis and the Communists just cannot have been
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ideological blood-brothers. Let me therefore try this little quiz: Who was it who at

one stage dismissed Hitler as a "barbarian, a criminal and a pederast"? Was it

Stalin? Was it some other Communist? Was it Winston Churchill? Was it some

other conservative? Was it one of the Social Democrats? No. It was none other

than Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader who later became Hitler's ally in World

War II. And if any two leaders were ideological blood-brothers those two were.

So I am afraid that antagonism between Hitler and others proves nothing. If

anything, the antagonism between Hitler and other socialists is proof of what a

typical socialist Hitler was.

Another difficulty that those who know their history raise is the great and

undoubted prominence of nationalist themes in Hitler's propaganda. It is rightly

noted that in this Hitler diverged widely from the various Marxist movements of

Europe. So can he therefore really have been a Leftist?

My reply is of course that Hitler was BOTH a nationalist AND a socialist -- as the

full name of his political party (The National Socialist German Worker's Party)

implies. And he was not alone in that:

Other Leftist nationalists

In the post-WW2 era, internationalism and a scorn for patriotism has becomevery dominant among far-Leftists, but that was not always so. From Napoleon to

Hitler there were also plenty of nationalist and patriotic versions of Leftism.

That was part of what was behind the various diatribes of Marx and Lenin

against "Bonapartism". "Bonapartism" was what we would now call Fascism and

it was a rival reformist doctrine to Marxism long before the era of Hitler and

Mussolini. It was more democratic (about as much as Hitler was), more

romantic, more nationalist and less class-obsessed. The Bonapartist that Marx

particularly objected to was in fact Napoleon III, i.e. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte,nephew of the original Napoleon. One of Louis's campaign slogans was: "There is

one name which is the symbol of order, of glory, of patriotism; and it is borne

today by one who has won the confidence and affection of the people." So, like

the original Napoleon himself, the Bonapartists were both very nationalist and

saw themselves as heirs to the French revolution. So it was very grievous for

most communists when, in his later writings, the ultra-Marxist Trotsky identified

not only Fascism but also the Soviet State as "Bonapartist". That was one

judgment in which Trotsky was undoubtedly correct, however!
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There have always been innumerable "splits" in the extreme Leftist movement --

and from the earliest days nationalism has often been an issue in those. Two of

the most significant such splits occurred around the time of the Bolshevik

revolution --- when in Russia the Bolsheviks themselves split into Leninists and

Trotskyites and when in Italy Mussolini left Italy's major Marxist party to found

the "Fascists". So the far Left split at that time between the Internationalists

(e.g. Trotskyists) and the nationalists (e.g. Fascists) with Lenin having a foot in

both camps. And both Marx and Engels themselves did in their lifetimes lend

their support to a number of wars between nations. So any idea that a

nationalist cannot be a Leftist is pure fiction.

And, in fact, the very title of Lenin's famous essay, "Left-wing Communism, an

infantile disorder" shows that Lenin himself shared the judgement that he was a

Right-wing sort of Marxist. Mussolini was somewhat further Right again, of

course, but both were to the Right only WITHIN the overall far-Left camp of the

day.

It should further be noted in this connection that the various European Socialist

parties in World War I did not generally oppose the war in the name of

international worker brotherhood but rather threw their support behind the

various national governments of the countries in which they lived. Just as

Mussolini did, they too nearly all became nationalists. Nationalist socialism is a

very old phenomenon.

And it still exists today. Although many modern-day US Democrats often seem to

be anti-American, the situation is rather different in Australia and Britain. Both

the major Leftist parties there (the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour

Party) are perfectly patriotic parties which express pride in their national

traditions and achievements. Nobody seems to have convinced them that you

cannot be both Leftist and nationalist. That is of course not remotely to claim

that either of the parties concerned is a Nazi or an explicitly Fascist party. What

Hitler and Mussolini advocated and practiced was clearly more extremely

nationalist than any major Anglo-Saxon political party would now advocate.

And socialist parties such as the British Labour Party were patriotic parties in

World War II as well. And in World War II even Stalin moved in that direction. If

Hitler learnt from Mussolini the persuasive power of nationalism, Stalin was not

long in learning the same lesson from Hitler. When the Wehrmacht invaded

Russia, the Soviet defences did, as Hitler expected, collapse like a house of

cards. The size of Russia did, however, give Stalin time to think and what he

came up with was basically to emulate Hitler and Mussolini. Stalin reopened the


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churches, revived the old ranks and orders of the Russian Imperial army to make

the Red Army simply the Russian Army and stressed patriotic appeals in his

internal propaganda. He portrayed his war against Hitler not as a second "Red"

war but as 'Vtoraya Otechestvennaya Vojna' -- The Second Patriotic War -- the

first such war being the Tsarist defence against Napoleon. He deliberately put

himself in the shoes of Russia's Tsars!

Russian patriotism proved as strong as its German equivalent and the war was

turned around. And to this day, Russians still refer to the Second World War as

simply "The Great Patriotic War". Stalin may have started out as an international

socialist but he soon became a national socialist when he saw how effective that

was in getting popular support. Again, however, it was Mussolini who realized it

first. And it is perhaps to Mussolini's credit as a human being that his nationalism

was clearly heartfelt where Stalin's was undoubtedly a mere convenience.

I think, however, that the perception of Hitler as a Leftist is more difficult for

those with a European perspective than for those with an Anglo-Saxon one. To

many Europeans you have to be some sort of Marxist to be a Leftist and Hitler

heartily detested Marxism so cannot have been a Leftist. I write for the

Anglosphere, however, and in my experience the vast majority of the Left (i.e.

the US Democrats, The Australian Labor Party, the British Labour Party) have

always rejected Marxism too so it seems crystal clear to me that you can be a

Leftist without accepting Marxist doctrines. So Hitler's contempt for Marxism, far

from convincing me that he was a non-Leftist, actually convinces me that he was

a perfectly conventional Leftist! The Nazi Party was what would in many parts ofthe world be called a "Labor" party (not a Communist party).

And, as already mentioned, the moderate Leftists of Germany in Hitler's own day

saw that too. The Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) who, like the US

Democrats, the Australian Labor Party and the British Labour Party, had always

been the principal political representatives of the Labor unions, on several

important occasions voted WITH the Nazis in the Reichstag (German Federal

Parliament).

Non-Marxist objections

Objections to my account of Hitler as a Leftist can however be framed in more

Anglocentric terms than the ones I have covered so far. In particular, my

pointing to Hitler's subjugation of the individual to the State as an indication of

his Leftism could be challenged on the grounds that conservatives too do on


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some occasions use government to impose restrictions on individuals --

particularly on moral issues. The simple answer to that, of course, is that

conservatism is not anarchism. Conservatives do believe in SOME rules. As with

so much in life, it is all a matter of degree and in the centrist politics that

characterize the Anglo-Saxon democracies, the degree of difference between the

major parties can be small. But to compare things like opposition to homosexual

"marriage" with the bloodthirsty tyranny exercised by Hitler, Stalin and all the

other extreme Leftists is laughable indeed.

And it is the extremists who show the real nature of the beast as far as Leftism is

concerned. Once Leftists throw off the shackles of democracy and are free to do

as they please we see where their values really lie. Extreme conservatism (i.e.

libertarianism), by contrast, exists only in theory (i.e. it has never gained political

power anywhere in its own right). Conservatives are not by nature extremists.

The issue of allegedly conservative Latin American dictators and the evidence

that the core focus of conservatism has historically been on individual liberties

versus the State is considered at some length here.

Another more contentious point is that many of the conservative attempts at

regulating people's lives are Christian rather than conservative in origin and that

Christianity and conservatism are in fact separable. So conservatism should not

be blamed for the multifarious deeds of Christians. But to discuss an issue as

large and as contentious as that would be far too great a digression here. A

discussion of it can however be found elsewhere.

But Neo-Nazis are Rightist!

A remaining important objection to the account I have given so far is that Hitler's

few remaining admirers in at least the Anglo-Saxon countries all seem to be on

the political far-Right. In discussing that, however, I must immediately insist that

I am not discussing antisemitism generally. Antisemitism and respect for Hitler

are far from the same thing. Although vocal support for antisemitism was inHitler's day widespread across the American political spectrum -- from Henry

Ford on the Right to "Progressives" on the Left -- such support is these days

mostly to be found on the extreme Left and for such people Hitler is anathema.

And the antisemitism of the former Soviet leadership also shows that

antisemitism and respect for Hitler are not at all one and the same.

But in the Anglosphere countries Hitler DOES still have his admirers among a tiny

band of neo-Nazis and it is true that these are usually called the extreme Right.
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They normally refer to themselves as "The Right", in fact. How do I know that? I

know that because I in fact happen to be one of the very few people to have

studied neo-Nazis intensively. And I have reported my findings about them in the

academic journals -- see here and here. But if Hitler was a socialist, how come

that these "far-Rightists" still admire him?

Before I answer that, however, I must point out that the description "Far-Right"

is a great misnomer for the successors of Hitler in modern-day Germany. As we

will see below, modern-day German neo-Nazis are demonstrably just as Leftist as

Hitler was. So are American, British and Australian neo-Nazis also Leftist in any

sense?

The answer to that is a simple one: They are pre-war Leftists, just as Hitler was.

They are a relic in the modern world ofthinking that was once common on the

Left but no longer is. They are a hangover from the past in every sense. They

are antisemitic just as Hitler was. They are racial supremacists just as Hitler was.

They are advocates of discipline just as Hitler was. They are advocates of

national unity just as Hitler was. They glorify war just as Hitler did etc. And all

those things that Hitler advocated were also advocated among the prewar

American Left.

That does however raise the question of WHY such thinking is seen as "Rightist"

today. And the answer to THAT goes back to the nature of Leftism! The political

content of Leftism varies greatly from time to time. The sudden about-turn of the

Left on antisemitism in recent times is vivid proof of that. And what the politicalcontent of Leftism is depends on the Zeitgeist -- the conventional wisdom of the

day. Leftists take whatever is commonly believed and push it to extremes in

order to draw attention to themselves as being the good guys -- the courageous

champions of popular causes. So when the superiority of certain races was

commonly accepted, Leftists were champions of racism. So when eugenics was

commonly accepted as wise, Leftists were champions of eugenics -- etc. In

recent times they have come to see more righteousness to be had from

championing the Palestinian Arabs than from championing the Jews so we have

seen their rapid transition from excoriating antisemitism to becoming"Antizionist".

But the thinking of the man in the street does not change nearly as radically as

Leftists do. Although it may no longer be fashionable, belief in the superiority of

whites over blacks is still widespread, for instance. Such beliefs have become

less common but they have not gone away. They are however distinctly non-

Leftist in today's climate of opinion so are usually defined as "Rightist" by

default. So the beliefs of the neo-Nazis are Rightist only in the default sense of
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not being currently Leftist. They are part of the general stream of popular

thinking but that part of it which is currently out of fashion. I say a little more on

that elsewhere.

And so it is because the old-fashioned thinking of the neo-Nazis is these days

thoroughly excoriated by the Left that they see themselves as of the Right and

reject any idea that they are socialists. I can attest from my own extensive

interviews with Australian neo-Nazis (see here and here) that they mostly blot

out any mention of Hitler's socialism from their consciousness. The most I ever

heard any of them make out of it was that, by "socialism", Hitler was simply

referring to national solidarity and everybody pulling together -- which was

indeed a major part ofHitler's message and which has been a major aim of

socialism from Hegel on. And things like autarky and government control of the

whole of society were attractive to them too so they were in fact far more

socialist than they would ever have acknowledged. They don't realize that they

are simply old-fashioned Leftists. Since most of the world seems to have

forgotten what pre-war Leftism consisted of, however, that is hardly surprising.

And the neo-Nazis are assisted in their view of themselves as Rightist by Hitler's

anticommunism. The falling-out among the Nazis and the Communists was in

Hitler's day largely a falling-out among thieves but the latter half of the second

world war made the opposition between the two very vivid in the public

consciousness so that opposition has become a major part of the definition of

what Nazism is. And Marxism/Leninism was avowedly internationalist rather than

racist. Lenin and the Bolsheviks despised nationalism and wished to supplantnational solidarity with class solidarity. Given the contempt for Slavs often

expressed by Marx & Engels, one can perhaps understand that Lenin and his

Russian (Slavic) Bolsheviks concentrated so heavily on Marx & Engels's vision of

international worker solidarity and ignored the thoroughly German nationalism

also often expressed by Engels in particular.

That class-war was the best way to better the economic position of the worker

was, however, never completely obvious. The Fascists did not think so nor did

most Leftists in democratic countries. Nonetheless, the internationalist and class-based (rather than race-based) nature of Communism did have the effect in the

postwar era of identifying Leftism with skepticism about patriotism, nationalism

and any feeling that the traditions of one's own country were of great value. The

result of this was that people with strong patriotic, nationalist and traditionalist

feelings in the Anglo-Saxon countries felt rather despised a

Documents

Hitler Was a Socialist - Ray