Hannan On The Fraternal Nature Of Commies And Nazis

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by Smitty

The Left is fundamentally dishonest about pretty much everything. So hiding the dirty historical laundry should be less surprising than it is. Watch a masterful summary of this:

via Toby Young

113 comments

  1. Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements” discusses how easy it is for true believers to switch from one extremist party to what is ostensibly the opposite party.

  2. The ignoranti of today think that Nazism and Communism are polar opposites, they are anything but. They are kissing cousins.

  3. Both of them have a tribal world view. Communists claim based on classed, while Nazis based on ethnicity.

    And yes, this is a vast over simplification.

  4. The main difference between the NAZIs and the Soviets is that the NAZIs admitted they were nationalists, and the Soviets pretended they were internationalists.

  7. When asked in 1934 why he had not yet socialized industry, Hitler replied ”there is no need as we have already socialized the people”

  8. I’m not a liberal, but this argument has become a real bore. Fascism, and Communism are not sister ideologies. If you’ve read any decent work of scholarship on the Nazi Party from Richard J. Evans to Saul Friedlander, or Ian Kershaw, you will know the Nazi Party springs from the German conservative right, and ideas that had been spreading around Germany since the time of Otto Von Bismark, a conservative. Hitler was nothing more than the culmination of all those ideas put into practice. They were brought to power with the help of German industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, and his conservative German National People’s Party, along with the German bourgeois right who feared communism, and left wing socialism. The idea that you have to be a total free market capitalist to be right wing is Americanism, it’s not European. The only similarities between the two are in methodology toward a totalitarian state, but in terms of ideology they are different.

  9. One argument against this I’ve seen is that some states like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (the Norks) are clearly misnamed. This then should call into question the Nazi’s use of “socialist” in their name.
    But the misnamed states use this as a form of external propaganda. They are broadcasting to the international community. The Nazis used their name for internal political purposes: Germany didn’t suddenly become “Naziland.”
    Internal political parties do not name themselves the opposite of their ideology, since that would confuse the people they are trying to attract to their movement. Only if they shift over the long course of history like Democrats, does this happen.
    Nazis weren’t around long enough for this to happen.

  10. Funny, I’ve never heard of a conservative who willingly adopted the mantle of socialist. Why would such a person do that?

  11. Simple: In Germany in that era there was absolutely no way to get support from the working class without leaning toward , or at least paying lip service toward socialism, and without the working class, your chances of getting elected were slim, especially for a grass roots party like the Nazis who did not have popular support when they started. Second, Hitler never envisioned his brand of socialism as Marxist, and was more about German Nationalism, and solidarity. Nazis were: anti-feminist, social darwinist, nationalist, anti-modernist, nationalist, pro-family, anti-abortion(except for Jews obviously), etc.

  13. The Soviets were: anti-feminist (look at the upper divisions of the party), social Darwinist (because HISTORY!), nationalist (appeals to the motherland when they needed recruits), nationalist again, blah, blah, blah.
    I dispute that Nazis were anti-modernist in that they had the most technologically advanced armed forces on the planet.

    Essentially, your post is one long “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

  14. Yeah I get thhat too. The other thing abot the ignoranti of today they have the delusions that Fascism looks just like Nazism. No in the US it look like the Democratic Party

  16. The Bolsheviks had a platform of equality for women, and worked to smash the family. In the Soviet Union, especially during the war, women worked in factories, and served in the military. In Nazi Germany, even as the war was in its terminal stage, and resources were short, women were still not helping with the war effort, and were always told to stay home, and have children. When I say anti-modernist I don’t mean Luddite. I mean modern values like race mixing, cosmopolitanism, liberal sexual mores, etc. The Catholic Church was anti-modernist, and part of that was an opposition to free market capitalism, and what they called americanism. Stalin was a nationalist, and created “socialism in one state” but that was never the intentions of Lenin, or Trotsky.

  17. Why, I’m not a liberal, SJW, multiculturalist cockroach? These are fact’s ma’am. Nothing more. Conservatives need to stop with this boring, shallow, easily refuted argument by anyone that has read a major work on Hitler’s Germany and the soil from which it sprung.

  18. Im not a democrat, but it looked far more like Bush’s GOP. The Democrat party seems more bent on being a European Left Party, but with more firepower.

  19. you will know the Nazi Party springs from the German conservative right,

    No, I will not know that. The ‘conservative’ right was manifest at that time primarily in the National People’s Party, which did co-operate with the Nazis for a time, but which represented a tendency much older and quite distinct from them. The old whig element was manifest in the German People’s Party (formerly the National Liberal Party), which was a buttress to the old Wilhelmine Empire to a greater degree than the antecedents of the National People’s Party (the German Conservatives and German Reich Party).

    Hitler came out of the strata of petty officialdom in public employment and the bulk of his confederates derived from that same stratum or just adjacent to it (a number were the sons of schoolteachers, a couple were the sons of career military). A few of Hitler’s principal collaborators had a background in the nobility and gentry, but with one exception these were holdovers from the last Weimar cabinets. You had only a few who came out of the prosperous business and professional element for which the German People’s Party spoke.

  21. The problem with people like yourself is that you are intensely gullible. What you are pushing is nothing more than the narrative of left which they use in an attempt to place distance between themselves and the ideologies they themselves have bought into.

    The authors you list are little more than ax grinders. Both Kershaw and Evans broadly plagiarized David Irving and have been caught at it. Kershaw suddenly retired and will no longer ask questions about his books. Evans has been shown to be a intellectual pipsqueak who has tried to stand on Irving’s chest to make himself look bigger and to hide his plagiarism. The other guy I’ve never heard of.

    While some of what the Nazis bought into started with Bismarck, Bismarck was certainly not anything like a Nazi, no matter what sort of nonsense you wish to try to push here. If one traces the “blood line” of the Nazi party, it does not start on the right. It is in the same vein as the revolution of 1848 and took a good of it’s ideology from that morass. With the abdication of the Hohenzollerns, the rightist influence in politics ended. Any one that thinks Nazism originated on the right is utterly ignorant.

  22. Yes, the German National’s People’s party were far less radical, and more bourgeoise than the Nazis, even though they were collaborators, and the GNP is partly responsible for Hitler’s rise to power. What I’m talking about is a set of ideas on the German Right about race, nation, Jews, anti-communism, and a social darwinist, survival of the fittest mentality that started around the time of Von Bismark, and ended with Hitler. Richard J. Evans, “The Third Reich Comes to Power” gives a very detailed background on this, and makes it impossible to believe that the Nazis were anything other than a manifestation of the right. Plus, they marginalized, murdered, and outlawed all left wing, and liberal parties both before, and after seizing power. Yeah, Ive heard the argument that they were “competition”, but the real reason was they were opposed to them ideologically and saw them as traitors. It seems like the American conservative argument that the Nazis were left hinges on two things: one the name, and two a set of ideas about big business, and international banking. But do those ideas not exist in part of the American right? Specifically amongst some libertarians, anarchists, and social conservatives? The Catholic Church in Europe was certainly no cheerleader for capitalism, and bankers either. Does that make them leftists?

  24. Yep, those right-wingers in the Socialist Workers Party, with their abolition of free markets and personal liberty…

    Pull your head out.

  25. 2) Why would a conservative party, major industrialists, and the German bourgeoise right side with a man like Hitler, or his party, if they didn’t partially share an ideology, and enemies?

  26. “I’m not a liberal”

    Sure you aren’t. Now you can say ‘but’, spew liberal talking points, and everyone will be convinced you’re a conservative, and therefore believe you.

    What a great debating tactic!

  27. Oh, and ideas that had been spreading since the time of Bismark would be ideas barely 50 years old by the founding of the Nazi party. Attempting to tie them to conservatism by stating that Bismark was conservative is a clumsy attempt at rhetorical sleight of hand

  28. Here’s the scale:

    Far leftism is totalitarianism, or total control of the people by government.

    Far rightism is anarchy, or zero control of the people by government.

    Fascism, Naziism, Socialism and Communism are all leftist ideologies. RINO Republicanism and Neo-Conservatism fall somewhere to the left of moderate, and these days I’d argue closer to leftism than moderate.

    True Republicanism, such as in the foundation of this country, and Libertarianism fall on the “right” on this scale, which is to say, somewhere just to the right of moderate, with Republicanism probably closest to true moderate. (These days the entire scale has shifted left though, so that “moderate” now means only somewhat leftist.)

    No President could implement something like the Patriot Act and still be called right-wing, I don’t care what the alleged provocation might be. So there’s that.

  30. If the NAZIS were from the Right, why did the American Left practically worship them up until the point Hitler attacked the Soviets? It is a fact, you can look it up.

  31. The problem with this entire argument thread is terminology. So here, where you talk about a “conservative party”, you are actually referring to a party somewhat to the right of extreme leftism, which is not, by far, what I would call conservative.

    So if you take out the word “conservative” above, and put in the phrase “less leftist”, the answer becomes self-evident.

  33. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

    Where do nazis stand on individual rights? Oh yeah: right next to the commies, sliding shut the door of the boxcar full of ideological enemies on the way to the camps; and neither nazi nor commie compromised their STATED principles in so doing.

    You know, defenders of Liberty are referred to as “conservatives” in the US because they defend the bedrock of the founding: Individual Liberty and concomitant limits to coercive authority.

    What did the nazis organize to “conserve”? What about former soviets like zhirinovski?

    Nazis are right-wing hegelians. Commies are left-wing hegelians. Both reject important elements of the Enlightenment concept of The Self.

  34. Pointing out the Nazi’s nationalism is pointing out that they were not conservative. Nationalism is a modern idea, intrinsically tied to 19th century liberalism and the works of Enlightenment/Romantic philosophers (German nationalism has its origins in the works of Johann Herder, who in turn was heavily influenced by men like Rousseau and Sieyes).

    Social Darwinism was, similarly, the hot new radical idea/settled science of the late 19th century and early 20th century. There is nothing conservative about it.

    The Nazis were not pro-family. The early Nazis were founded on distinctly homoerotic visions of all male warrior elites (pre 1933 Nazis were widely mocked by their opponents on this count). It was only after attaining power that they had to adopt a more respectable image and distance themselves from the pederasty and thuggery of their Brownshirt days, but their underlying philosophy never changed. According to Samuel Igra: [Blueher’s teachings] has been systematically
    inculcated by the Nazi Press, especially Himmler’s official organ Das
    Schwarze Korps, and has been adopted in practice as the basis of German
    organization. The Nazi elite are being brought up in segregated male
    communities called Ordensbrgen. These are to replace the family as the
    groundwork on which the state is to rest.”
    And Nazis were not anti abortion. In their first year in power, they stiffened the punishments against abortion (this was as to ensure a healthy supply of new Aryans, not for any sanctity of life based reason) but the next year they passed laws legalising the abortion of children that were deemed eugenically unfit. This was, in fact, the first time abortion had ever been fully legal within Germany.

  35. I’d argue that Nazis are also left-wing hegelians, though possibly…maybe…somewhat less left-wing than their Commie counterparts.

    I also don’t see any leftist rejecting the Enlightenment concept of The Self, in the sense that after the cosmological shift (Copernicus, Galileo), and its effect on the Church, we see that concept shifting to man as god. And as man tried to achieve his own supposed “godhood”, he craved the power of the real God. And because the Enlightenment Self is narcissistic, we see power mad narcissists (as if there’s any other kind), which perfectly describes all Leftists.

    Of course there’s always been power mad narcissists (e.g. Nimrod, Sennacherib et al), but the Enlightenment legitimized Self as god, thus also legitimizing pride, upon which all sin is based. It’s taken 250-300 years, but now we’re fully seeing the tainted fruit of the Enlightenment tree in feminism, the mainstreaming of sexual deviation, and a society mainly interested in self-gratification to the exclusion of hard work and actual learning.

    Not that all parts of The Enlightenment were bad. Especially not at first. But as usual, one bad apple eventually spoils the whole bunch.

  36. If you’ve read any decent work of scholarship on the Nazi Party . . .

    As opposed to reading the works of the Nazi leadership themselves? Your comments demonstrate the video’s thesis in spades. Postwar “scholarship,” or more precisely “scholarship” post June 21, 1941 has occupied itself trying to hide the leftist “socialist” part of the “National Socialist German Workers Party.”

  37. Precisely. The Nazis’ economy co-opted the industrialists by controlling consumption instead of production. That method toward socialism was epitomized in Goering’s “Guns or butter” speech in 1933. The plan was to nationalize virtually all industries and agriculture after Germany won the war.

  38. This is the correct political spectrum. “Left” and “Right” is just misdirection from tyrants.

  40. I also don’t see any leftist rejecting the Enlightenment concept of The Self

    Didn’t marx crib from hegel and subsequently promote the notion that the starting point of analysis is not the individual but society? To both marx and hegel, the individual is scarecely even real and is in no way more real than the march of God on Earth, The State.

    Will engage more later

    I gotta go; my dealer just called :^D

  41. No, you’re talking out of your ass. The National People’s Party was derived from the old conservative parties, in which the old nobility and gentry were prominent – i.e. agriculture and the officer corps. Without a doubt others signed on, but they were not the leading spirits.

    The co-operative relationship between the National People’s Party and the Nazis began only in 1931. The National People’s Party and it’s antecedents had at that point 60-year history of participation in parliamentary and electoral politics.

  42. Because the country had been through serial economic crises and the broad mass of parliamentary parties was collapsing electorally. By 1932, the Communist and the Nazi vote summed to a majority in Germany, so you had no good options.

    The one alternative was a military administration.

  43. I’d agree with that for the most part, except I’d shift both Bushes to the left of 50%, with 41 to the left of “today’s moderates”, and 43 to the right.

    As well, I don’t know what “today’s GOP” even means anymore. I’m a registered Republican, but at my most “leftist”, I’d fall into the Reagan GOP box, but probably mostly TEA Party. I believe most, if not all, middle class conservatives would fall into that continuum. Then, on the other side, for example, you’ve got “Bawlin’ Boehner” calling himself GOP, but who is about as conservative as Nancy Pelosi.

    And when we compare, let’s say, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, I think one is an actual conservative, and one is a right-leaning leftist (and probably right-leaning only because of political expediency).

    The problem is GOP leadership. The party is split between wealthy oligarchs and regular working people with a moral compass. That’s why leftists don’t have to cheat at elections (though they will anyway because they can) – ALL leftists falsely believe they will be a key part of the oligarchy so they bloc-vote, but will only learn the horrible truth when they’re in a factory making widgets for $1.00 an hour, shipped off to the gulag, or starved in the artificial famine created by the oligarchy because they are not in the preferred demographic.

    OK, I guess my rant is over for now. For now, lol.

  44. He’s using ‘conservative’ as a synonym for ‘asshole’. It’s tiresome.

    The elements of Germany’s antique social and political order – monarchy, the nobility and gentry, federalism as a continuation of local sovereignty, and the Church and the protestant congregations – were all features for which Hitler and his confederates had no use. Neither was the sort of prudent diplomacy and deft international maneuver favored by figures from Bismarck to Gustav Streseman something to which Hitler ascribed.

    There was a conservative element active at the time, but it was manifest in the 1944 conspirators, not the Nazis.

  46. They don’t care about the State. The State is an excuse. The legitimization of Self as god legitimized the hegelian narcissist’s view of himself as the only one smart enough and powerful enough to make decisions. For everyone, in every aspect of their lives, because he is, after all, god.

    And cripes dude, I hope that by “my dealer just called”, you mean that your wife just gave you a task out of the “honey do” jar. Because otherwise, discretion might be a thing to, you know, consider.

  47. I agree, of course that Nazis were not conservative, that’s for sure. And certainly, Hitler had no use for anything Judeo-Christian, as those groups interfered with his narcissistic view of himself as all-powerful god, sovereign over all things.

  48. at least under marx, the social being of individuals is wholly determined by impersonal historical material forces, the mode and relations of production.

    Such “individuals” don’t “think”, they simply respond to external stimuli in a mechanistic deterministic way, i.e. ideologically, in defense of class interests, akin to the biological defenses of a cell in the body.

  49. I have nothing against Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner. I have sympathy for him as a person. The fascism is from the left that demands we kow tow to the nonsense that by merely declaring himself a woman we have to pretend it is true.

  50. Bush was no fascist! Fascism is everything that I hate. Food stamps for the poor–liberal hippy pacifism–unAmericanism–

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