I hope you all had a meaningful and contemplative Veteran’s Day, and that you’re getting into a Thanksgiving mood. Here in north Florida it has dropped below 40 degrees, so many locals have broken out the parkas, and are still shivering anyway.
I’ve been paying at least minimal attention to the current kerfuffles in Washington, and am glad that this pointless shutdown is finally ending. And it’s fun to watch the blue-on-blue sniping over that, with the most extreme lefties raging at the Senate Dems who voted to break the filibuster and end the shutdown, while those lefties try in vain to reason with Those Who Can’t Be Reasoned With.
Note to self: Pick up another bag of popcorn at Publix tomorrow, because you’re out.
Amidst all that, I saw a few new stories of more violent attacks on ICE agents doing their jobs, and yet another rash of Dems comparing them to the Gestapo. And this on the heels of a lefty friend of mine asking what I think of “the Right’s Nazi problem.”
If it was anybody but him, I would have let my sarcastic freak flag fly – I keep it in my temperature-controlled flag wardrobe, along with my Stars and Stripes, my Gadsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, and my Gator flag (the latter will remain in storage until we can find a coach who can distinguish between his fundament and a hole in the ground).
But because I love that guy, I didn’t say, “Do you mean the problem we have with the left calling us Nazis all the time for no rational reason?”
Instead, I wrote a thoughtful reply pointing out that with the exception of a handful of whackos who have no mainstream support in conservative circles, American conservatives have no connection to Nazis whatsoever. Because we hate Nazis as much as we hate communists.
But that got me thinking that perhaps some of you would like a quick primer to summarize why the Nazi-GOP and Hitler-Trump comparisons are ridiculous, which you can share with any lefty relatives or acquaintances who raise the subject. (Because if you just punch them in the face, then YOU’LL be the bad guy.)
So, before you can say, “We don’t deserve you, Martin!” here it is:
First, for most leftists, “Nazi” has become an almost meaningless term of utter derision, to be applied to nearly every conservative they disagree with. In that way, Nazi is just like “fascist” – it basically means very, very bad, and has been divorced from all historical meaning and context.
It is taken as axiomatic in academia and the mainstream left that Naziism and fascism are both right-wing ideologies. But as with so much that is axiomatic in academia, that is at best a distortion, and at worst just false. Because there is plenty of evidence that Naziism and fascism are more leftist than rightist ideologies.
A great book on the subject is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” (2008). Even though Jonah has sadly contracted a severe case of TDS, he’s a very good writer, and he lays out the ideological and historical connections in great detail.
Mussolini was a committed socialist for years, and started the fascist party only when the mainstream socialists rejected Italian nationalism. But he didn’t reject socialism/leftism, as much as combine it with nationalism. He named his party after the “fasces” – a Latin word for a bundle of bound wooden rods/sticks that the Romans had used as a symbol of authority.
That branding combined his love of Italy and the Roman Empire, authoritarianism, and his leftist devotion to collectivism. (The explicit symbolism was that the weak individual sticks become unbreakable when combined into a collective.)
A common definition of fascism starts by calling it “far right” (because of course it does), but then says that it is characterized by, “a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.”
Look at that the description, and tell me what parts do NOT also apply to communism or the various “socialist republics” (USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, every nation behind the Iron Curtain, etc.).
“Ultranationalist” doesn’t apply, because good commies are internationalists (workers of THE WORLD unite, and all that), and possibly “natural social hierarchy” (though that is the defacto situation in communist countries, where party members are always an elite class above the peasants).
But all the rest of that definition applies 100% to communist governments. 1. Dictatorial leader (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu et al) 2. Centralized autocracy (check) 3. Militarism (yep) 4. Forcible suppression of opposition (yep) 5. Subordination of individual interests for the nation/collective (yep). 6. Strong regimentation of society and the economy (hell yeah!)
Hitler and the Nazis, on the other hand, were such eccentric weirdos that their political DNA is tough to fit as neatly into a left/right spectrum. The Jew hatred was apolitical, and made them almost unique, in that they were fanatically devoted to winning the war…but simultaneously crippled their own war effort by devoting tons of badly needed resources – men and materiel – to killing Jews. And Hitler’s personal pathologies and enthusiasms made his government’s policies volatile and erratic.
Just like Mussolini, Hitler was a nationalist, and didn’t reject socialism – just international socialism. That’s why he named his party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. (If the Nazis truly were wholly right-wing, they would be the first and only rightist party in the history of the world with “socialist” and “workers” in its name!) But since nationalism is (correctly) usually associated with the right, and because Hitler’s most hated enemy (after the Jews) was the communists, it became easy to see the Germany/Russia conflict as right vs. left, rather than the fratricidal battle among socialists (national vs. international) that it was.
That’s not to say that Naziism was purely a leftist ideology. Only that it was a weird goulash of multiple, sometimes contradictory influences: right-wing nationalism; virulent anti-Semitism; Master Race/perverted Darwinist racism; and authoritarian leftism.
What has always aggravated me is that our country (and the West writ large) has rightly come to terms with and utterly rejected Naziism, but we’ve never done the same with socialism/communism. (I join those because Marx and most of his orthodox descendants see them as inexorably joined: socialism is the interim step in which the workers take control of the means of production, and communism is the second step in which the State withers away. Step 2 has never happened, of course, because the theory is fatally flawed and disregards human nature.)
It’s socially acceptable (and even chic) for college kids to wear Che Guevara t-shirts and commie iconography (hammer and sickle jewelry or pins, etc.) in a way it would never be for them to wear a Himmler or Hitler t-shirt or swastika pins. In colleges, whole fields can call themselves “Marxist” without any stigma, and I’ll bet that only a tiny minority of college kids know that Stalin almost certainly killed more people than Hitler, and Mao slaughtered more than the two of them combined, or that communism/socialism killed well over 100 million people in only a little more than a century.
I think that that’s what makes communism/socialism so dangerous: it has never been held to account and rejected, the way Naziism (rightly!) has been. Too many people still attribute good motivations to the commies/socialists – they supposedly wanted a more egalitarian and economically fair society (some surely did, but many clearly didn’t!) – and completely gloss over the fact that that system inevitably descended into dictatorship, oppression, poverty, environmental degradation and mass murder.
This terrible, dishonest distortion – Hitler’s crimes and 15-20 million killed are the epitome of human evil, but the gulags and 100+ million communist murders are just well-intentioned tragedies along the path paved by collectivized farming, 5-year plans and the Great Leap Forward, etc. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as Lenin said – is in large part the result of the dishonest and inaccurate way history is taught in America.
Finally we come to the idiotic Trump = Hitler comparison.
Hitler took power at the end of January, 1933. Within his first SIX MONTHS, he banned other political parties and labor unions, pushed through the Enabling Act which allowed him to make laws without even consulting the Reichstag (congress), and in 18 months he’d executed over 150 leaders of a rival element in the Nazi party in the Night of the Long Knives, and taken total control of the judiciary. Within his first 5 years, he’d invaded and subsumed another country, forced all young boys to join the Hitler Youth, murdered an estimated 70K-100,000 disabled or gay Germans, and started throwing dissidents into proto-concentration camps.
By comparison, Trump has been in office for a little less than 5 years over his two terms, and unlike Hitler in his first 5 years, he has not tried to ban the Democrat party or unions. (In fact, a near or actual majority of private sector union members likely voted for him last year). He has not tried to abolish congress, and they’ve hampered him at every turn, tying him up in hoax investigations that took years before he was vindicated. The oppositional judiciary has buried him in a blizzard of bogus TROs, which he’s appealed but abided by.
He hasn’t murdered a single Republican (not even the RINOs!), Democrat, gay guy or anybody else. He’s got Jewish grandchildren and has appointed many Jews to his administration, and he’s a national hero in Israel, after having spearheaded a peace treaty and the release of Jewish hostages.
You know, just like Hitler did, with the Jews putting an honorary kippah on his head and carrying him out of the Reichstag on their shoulders, chanting, “Hit-ler! Hit-ler!” and “We love you, Adolf!”
So remember: If some leftist asks you why conservatives love Nazis so much, don’t punch him. Instead, print out this column and give him a copy. Then say, “Good day, sir,” and turn on your heel.
If he tries to speak again, say, “I said GOOD DAY!”
If he insists on continuing to bother you after that… commence to punching.
Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!
0-0-0
If you enjoyed this column, please share it. To see more of Martin’s past columns, go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.
Martin Simpson 