Yes, the Nazi's Were Leftists: Lying About This Has Led to Unaccountable Power and Hypocritical Tyranny Ever Since

Jonah Goldberg Got it Right Before He Went Mad

In the ruins of shattered nations at the end of World War Two, a lie was forged in the embers. It would become the defining lie of our age, the One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. It was the lie that allowed western civilization to be destroyed. It was the lie that led to both the insane stupidities of woke culture and the malign bureaucracies that defined the postwar geopolitical settlement.

It was this lie: Right-wing nationalism led to Nazism.

That’s it. That’s all it took.

The lie that the National Socialist Party was a right-wing organisation is one that should never have been allowed to pass, but it was, and with disastrous consequences. It was a lie framed and presented by Marxist historians even as the Nuremberg Trials were taking place, and it has been the most successful lie of the last 70 years.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, Jonah Goldberg, before he embarked on his own negative spirit quest to find his inner wokester and align himself with the Robert Reich ‘Trump is literally Hitler’ brigade, published a valuable book addressing this issue. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, published in 2008, was written when many conservatives might have been forgiven for not fully grasping the horrors to come.

The Canadian police were not riding horses over disabled grandmothers in order to ensure that truckers could be forced to take a dangerous medical experiment against their will. The idea that a social media company could attempt to silence the free speech of a serving President did not yet exist. And most of us hadn’t thought it possible for US elections to be blatantly stolen by massive fraud and then that anyone protesting that could find themselves hounded by Stalinist show trials and imprisoned for decades for a Reichstag Fire they didn’t even attend.

In 2008, such things were still not deemed possible in the Western 'Free World’. In Britain, we might have passed from the egregious smiling crook Tony Blair to the dour incel Gordon Brown, but at least the police were not yet arresting people for saying that a woman doesn’t have a penis.

In other words, much of the outright tyranny we have seen under woke globalist progressive leadership did not yet exist. It was still bubbling away in the witches cauldron of academia, and had not yet been spoon fed to the whole of society. But there was enough of it around already, buried in uneven HR policies or public expressions of critical race theory from people like Barack Obama, to justify concern. Goldberg deserves credit for at that point spotting the similarities between an emerging woke political authoritarianism and fascism, and for being braver still in pointing out that this was a natural consequence of historic links mainstream academia, directed by self-declared Marxists, had ignored.

What Goldberg and a few others writing along similar lines had done is realize that the conventional narrative on World War Two and Nazism was all wrong. The conventional narrative stated that Italian fascism and German Nazism were both right-wing movements, but this has always been a lie. Goldberg went back to the chief architects of both movements, both Mussolini and Hitler, to point out some glaring inconsistencies in the conventional wisdom.

Mussolini, for example, was the son of a committed Communist. He was not only a Communist himself through much of his early life, but was also considered a key political star by other Communists worldwide. He was, for example, a long-term correspondent and personal friend of no less a Communist figure than Lenin, and Lenin on the formation of the fascists lamented the loss of Mussolini as a serious blow to international Communism. Hitler, meanwhile, retained a lifelong habit of characterizing democratic and moderate politics as “bourgeois”, a choice of condemnatory epithet that is very revealing of the Communist instruction Hitler imbibed from radical circles as his own political consciousness was forming.

Hitler’s socialist and Communist credentials have been detailed exhaustively in a series of YouTube history documentaries on the TIKhistory site, which point out that Hitler was twice elected by fellow soldiers whilst still serving in the German Army as their representative to avowedly Communist and socialist regional German administrations. In other words, Hitler served in at least one Communist administration, officially aligned to Moscow, for a brief period. Despite the suspicion engendered by these being alternative, non-academic offerings from a pseudonymous narrator, ‘TIK’ cites both primary and secondary sources in great detail to support his case. He points out that Hitler attended the funeral of a prominent Communist figure, and details the Communist links and rhetoric of other senior Nazis as well.

He also looks at and examines the commentaries of conventional historians, pointing out their inconsistencies, whilst I am fairly certain that few if any of them would take him seriously enough to return the favor.

Regardless of the truth or not of TIK’s assertions, we are on very firm ground in noting the similarity between Hitler’s policies, methodologies and rhetoric and those of his supposedly opposite Communist opponents. Anyone who has read Mein Kampf is aware that vast portions of that work read as a classic Marxist text. When portions of the book were presented for comment to modern woke students, without citing the origin, the response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. After all, like the works of the leftist thinkers they now idolize, Hitler’s political manifesto had an awful lot to say about the evils of capitalism. Traditional extreme leftist targets, like Big Business, banks and capitalist cartels, also figured prominently in the Nazi narrative of grievance, though there at least I must admit that NOT criticizing these groups, in 2023, seems more extreme than doing so.

The similarities between Communism and Nazism are so self-evident that they have to be acknowledged to be dismissed. Conventional wisdom does this through a couple of dismissive acts of mental legerdemain. First, Marxist psychologists seized the opportunity to define totalitarianism in ways that over-emphasized common right-wing thinking. In the seminal Marxist text on the psychology of totalitarianism, for instance, we are told that nostalgia for a mythical Golden Age is a key right-wing trope and one of the most important defining elements of minds conditioned towards and accepting of political extremism and violence (Adorno and co-authors, 1950, The Authoritarian Personality).

This completely subverts the reality-in fact, the conservative, right-wing principle of respect for the past has been a major stabilizing force in most societies, and a driving force behind enormous amounts of aesthetically and culturally enriching creativity. The thing cited as something common to the mind of murderous thugs has historically been just as common to the minds of poets and artists. It is common to both cultural icons and heroes being acknowledged in ways that educate us to respect very positive qualities (like self-sacrifice, devotion, courage and endurance) and common to the history of inspiration and excellence in aesthetic movements like Classicism and Neo-Classicism.

It is also far more characteristic of extremist movements that deploy unjust political violence that these movements should be radically focused not on the past, but the future. Almost all political movements that enact large scale atrocities have done so with some form of utopian excuse for doing so, which is true of both Nazism (with its supposed solely right-wing Golden Age mythology) and Communism (with its historical determinism regarding the eventual triumph of Communism and the inevitably positive consequence of that). The worst actions in the present are nearly always excused as necessary, unavoidable and inevitable steps towards a better future, and the genuinely totalitarian mind is one fixed on crafting that visionary future one body, or multiple bodies, at a time.

The second dishonesty that is supplied in order to buttress the Great Lie that the Nazis were a right-wing party is to pretend that an exactly shared methodology is solely an aspect of general extremism, and not something that follows from a particular set of ideological positions. In other words, the use of political censorship, civil rights abuses, violence, torture, death camps, executions, and genocides are just ‘something bad people all do’. This, essentially, is the horseshoe theory. People on the extreme left and the extreme right look the same because of a shared brutality.

What this ignores is that whilst it is true that all bad people will be more likely to engage in vile acts authorized by an ideology, the similarities of Fascism, Nazism and Communism are not ones limited to random acts of brutality. None of these movements used violence entirely randomly. Even something like Kristallnacht, which allowed a lot of brutal people to randomly attack Jewish individuals and businesses, was ultimately organised and directed. It was a thing decided upon by (primarily) Goebbels and some other leading Nazis. The conditions were set by propaganda. The gangs leading the attacks were directed parts of the Nazi organisation, i.e. the SA. Stalinist purges were authorized by Stalin. Communist commissars and executioners worked to orders from above.

It was ideological people doing things with a specific ideological imperative behind them, not just casual brutality.

It’s actually deeply dishonest to pretend that totalitarian evil should be viewed as we would view an individual spontaneous act of violence. And because it is all pre-organised and pre-meditated, we have to note that the ideology comes before the violence. The violence is both created and excused by the ideology. So it isn’t just a uniformity of method that explains the similarities of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. It is a uniformity of historic roots and a uniformity of future intent and a uniformity of political ideology. They behave the same ways because they want the same things.

Despite all the alleged diametric political opposition, despite being labelled Left or Right, they all want total State control of everything. Which can only be acquired through violence. Which can only in future allow even more violence. It’s this central shared political, ideological aim that means they behave in the same ways, not just some vague feeling that all bad people do similar bad things. And this aim, this aim for total control of all property, all narrative, all thought, all speech, everything, is the essence of Communism.

Communism got there first. Communism created the language, set many of the targets, built the vast majority of the ideological framework and the key aims. Early Fascists were taught by Communists. Early Nazis were taught by Communists. What was unique to Italian Fascism and unique to German Nazism were regional bolt-ons, local additions, to the Communist framework.

All these movements shared the central aims as well as the defining grotesque methodologies of Communism. The key aim being total State control. Everything in the State, and nothing outside it, as Mussolini said.

Fascism and Nazism are both left-wing. They always were. The historical ties were deep and profound. The methodologies did not cohere accidentally, but on shared central aims. Total control of everything to build a utopian future. The triumph of Communist historical determinism. The 1,000 Year Reich. These are different names for the same aim, which is total and unending control of the future.

The Nazis bolted on German national mysticism, the mythology of the Aryan Volk, but this was a paint-job on a Communist chassis. Even the specifically Nazi hatred of Jews was hardly without historic precedent in Communism, which despite prominent Jewish leaders was also quick to pick up and run with Tsarist era Russian antisemitism (the Russia that created Communism as a political reality was also the Russia that created the key fake justification of Jew hatred, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whilst Stalin’s last planned purge was aimed at Jewish doctors).

The Nazi’s added a racial doctrine to a Communist one. And they were hardly shy about that. That is why Hitler joined what was when he joined it a radical leftist party. That is why that party retained the word Socialist in its name after he took full control.

It is also why the Nazi-Communist hatred and conflict was so extreme. Nazism was the child of Communism. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know that family battles for absolute power between family members who are very, very similar are the fiercest battles of all. This wasn’t counter revolutionaries opposing Communism. This was another set of revolutionaries born out of leftist thinking, this was a precocious psychopathic Son at war with an already established, equally malign Father.

Marxists have of course never wanted to admit that leftism is responsible for all three of the most famous secular totalitarian movements in history. And Marxists framed the postwar consensus on what respectable, professional history looks like. They used any excuse they could to bury the countless individual links between leading fascists and leading Nazis with Communist leaders and Communist ideas.

They didn’t want to admit that it is the idea of total State control that creates political mass murder, because then everyone realizes what Communism and Nazism centrally share and they could never gain that control or excuse it without themselves being tainted by connection with both Communist murders and Nazi and Fascist ones. And they couldn’t achieve the Marxist future if that very fixation on the ideal future was seen as part of the problem that created Nazism.

So all of our understanding of Nazism was deflected onto the word ‘national’ and away from the word ‘socialist’. All of the Right were smeared with association with Nazism, and none of the Left. And yet even the nationalist elements of Nazism would have been far less dangerous if never united with Communist training, Communist lessons, Communist revolutionary zeal and the Communist aim of total State control. Mystical pan-Germanism was widespread before Hitler. It was linked more with crackpots and nature lovers than with hard-headed militarists and genuine revolutionaries. The patrician, aristocratically right-wing Prussian officer class were generally less impressed with that sort of thing than failed chicken farmers like Himmler were. Even the potent poisonous cocktail of Jew hatred needed that link with total State power to exercise its full genocidal potential.

What is right-wing, anyway? Any real understanding of conservative principles would show that they are anti-revolutionary. But the Nazis were revolutionary. Real conservatives favor small government and individual liberty, not an all powerful Communist style State dictating all things. But the Nazis wanted an all powerful One Party State. Conservatives are indeed respectful of the past. But Nazism invented ahistorical nonsense about the past and was, like Communism, suffused with Modernism and Future Utopianism. All the Nazi mystical Aryan stuff about history was actually the creation of a very modern State whose members were consciously embarrassed by the actual past of German history (nobody really wants to be the wild barbarians in a commentary by Tacitus, except perhaps Robert E.Howard).

Today, those advocating total control of all thoughts and feelings, those demanding and enacting censorship, those breaking the Nuremberg Code, those imprisoning political rivals on trumped up charges, those wanting war and supporting very aggressive war stances, even those chasing down Jews on a campus, ludicrously consider themselves the moderates and the respectable and compassionate ones, whilst labelling those for free speech, against State and Corporate collusion, and in favor of non-racialized politics, are called ‘far right’.

But what were the other consequences of the Marxist framing of history and the Great Lie that the Nazis were right-wing, beyond the incredible hypocrisies we witness today? It was to allow Communism, absurdly after the atrocities it was responsible for, to retain more respectability than it should have been allowed. It was to let the rapid expansion of the State off the hook as a requirement of the mass murders of Nazism. It was to taint all right-wing sentiments and principles with an ideology that led to gas chambers and genocide and vile torturous experiments on human subjects.

We still see the consequence of this lie. Imagine if expansion of the State was considered as leading to death camps, instead of love of the nation doing so. The Nation State is a hybrid, after all, of two different things. The nation is the organic political outgrowth of a certain people in a certain place sharing loyalty, familiarity, culture, identity, religion and language. The State is just an apparatus of control (solely that if malign or corrupt) and administration and representation (solely those if benign and non-corrupt). We are told its the nation, the right-wing patriotic identity, that leads to Nazism. But this is a nonsense. For even if that love of nation manifested solely in hatred of others (which it would not) without the absolute power of the State behind it the harms it could inflict would be purely small, regional, and petty.

It’s the State that can do great evil. Not the Nation.

And what can expand the evil of a Nation yet further? We are told that it is Nationalism that inevitably does this, that a Nation that loves its own people will necessarily wish to conquer and oppress others. Again, this is a pure distortion of reality. It was Nationalism that defeated Hitler. It was Nationalism that prompted other nations, possessed of better and more humane world views, to fight Nazism.

The real right-wing nationalist will not see national interest in perpetual and risky warfare, only avoidable risk or, when pushed, a bitter and temporary necessity. If you genuinely prioritize your own, one of the things you wish to assure them of is peace-that they will not be sacrificing their sons to your ambitions abroad, but rather that you will be shaping the kind of nation in which they can raise future generations, unharmed, at home.

Your policy might look very like Trump’s one, of peace through strength, that valued a military for defense and very limited, very necessary projections of power, but which creates no new wars.

Conversely if you have no love of your own Nation, no national loyalty, but are in love with a powerful State allowing you to use its military towards your own selfish ends….well then your foreign policy might look exactly like the militaristic, interventionist, war hungry neocon policies we see from politicians financially supported by the military industrial complex, as we see with both Republicans and Democrats who wrap their corrupt purposes in a disguising flag (either their own, or that of a Damsel Nation in Need of Rescue, like Ukraine).

Again, only an over-powerful State, in fascist alignment with corporations (everything in the State, nothing outside the State) can pass the spending packages of perpetual war, and only a lack of nationalism allows a politician to want to do so, not an excess of nationalism. An actual nationalist will be reminding everyone that spending should prioritize one’s own nation, and its internal well-being.

What then really provides the potential to extend a purely local evil abroad? It is internationalism that now does this. It is having a global vision, a global aim, a belief that only global solutions make sense-THAT is the driver of war abroad AND the excuser of tyranny at home in the modern world. It’s prioritizing Ukraine over the USA or England that threatens nuclear war with Russia, not some ‘right-wing’ concentration on our own nations.

And when we look at tyranny, the sources of tyranny and political violence and oppression today ARE NOT ‘populist right-wing demagogues’, ‘white supremacism’, or ‘far right nationalism’. No. What we actually did at the end of World War Two was build the infrastructures of a new tyranny and back that up with a vast psychological lie.

We said, or rather Marxist historians and postwar reconstructionists said, that we need the State to expand far larger and to transfer lots of power to transnational bodies. We need Welfare States that will usurp the functions of healthy individualism and functioning organic communities. Organic, natural, local communities are what we need to fear. Their local national loyalties can lead to Nazism. Vast all powerful bureaucracies are what we need, their lack of local and national loyalty will save us from Nazism.

And we need less democracy in order to Save Our Democracy. We can’t trust the people not to elect Hitler. So we need to take the important decisions as far away from them as possible. If they vote the wrong way, we need a transnational body above that can tell them off and refuse to allow that vote to happen. We need experts, not voters. We need the UN deciding things, the EU, the IMF. Nations are Nazism in waiting. Listening to the people of a particular place and enacting their wishes is Nazism in waiting, which we will also call Populism. We can’t have that.

The State must be grown in order to kill the Nation. It must be grown like a fat artificial pig. It must be fed on a diet of the People, on their rights which are taken away and their taxes which are increased and on their debt which is not spent on them, in order to then be carved up and enjoyed by the transnational bodies above it. First pump it full of power drained from the people and from genuine accountability, then siphon that power abroad, or into the hands of an international class of exploiters far more rapacious than any real nationalist ever was.

Both the web of unaccountable bodies that now entangle each and every one of us, and the psychological masochism of things like Critical Race Theory and Wokeness, were therefore built on the Nationalism=Nazism lie. That lie allows both the transfer of power to ‘more enlightened’ transnational bodies (all built on the excuse of preventing another Nazi Germany) and the thinking conditioned towards self-loathing that manifests in extremist self-flagellation like accepting ESG, CRT, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’.

At the same time that the People are abused and mistrusted, the transnational bodies train the political placeholders to serve them, rather than their voters. And internationalism built on the idea that rightwing nationalism is the root of all evil allows the ruling class to act as traitors to their own with the complete assurance that they are good people while doing this. They are good people by being tyrants at home and warmongers abroad, and pointing out that this is immoral becomes a sin against the transnational bodies who want authoritarianism and war (rather like opposing the genital mutilation of children becomes a sin called transphobia).

All of this works for its believers rather well. They can merrily oppress people whilst pretending they are Saving Democracy. They can call corruption and graft and stolen elections ‘Our Democracy’. And they can call any genuine opposition to corruption, graft and treason ‘far right populism’. They can centralize power to themselves and destroy traditional national limits that are based on a love of the liberty and rights of a particular people. It's so effective that within 13 years they can turn a former opponent into an utterly brainwashed puppet, a pathetic friend of the leftist totalitarianism (which is ALL modern secular totalitarianism) he once opposed and described.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg, to end, illustrating this point:

“…..there's one important claim that has been rendered utterly wrong. I argued that, contrary to generations of left-wing fearmongering and slander about the right's fascist tendencies, the modern American right was simply immune to the fascist temptation chiefly because it was too dogmatically committed to the Founders, to constitutionalism, and to classical liberalism generally. Almost 13 years to the day after publication, Donald Trump proved me wrong."