A Little Secret About the Nazis

They were left-wing socialists. That's right, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left. Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist ``exploitation'' by capitalists (particularly Jewish capitalists, of course). Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. They instituted and vigorously enforced strict gun control. They encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and they denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics. Yet a popular myth persists that the Nazis themselves were right-wing extremists. This insidious lie biases the entire political landscape, and the time has come to expose it.

According to a common misconception, the Nazis must have been on the political right because they persecuted communists and fought a war with the communists in Russia. This specious logic has gone largely unchallenged because it serves as useful propaganda for the left, which needs right-wing atrocities to divert attention from the horrific communist atrocities of the past century. Hence, communist atrocities have received much less publicity than Nazi war crimes, even though they were greater in magnitude by any objective measure. Richard Poe, editor of Frontpage Magazine, sets the record straight:

Labeling Hitler's National Socialist movement ``right-wing'' is one of the greatest propaganda coups the left has managed to pull off in the last century. Hitler's movement was a creature of the left.

Nazism was inspired by Italian Fascism, an invention of hardline Communist Benito Mussolini. During World War I, Mussolini recognized that conventional socialism wasn't working. He saw that nationalism exerted a stronger pull on the working class than proletarian brotherhood. He also saw that the ferocious opposition of large corporations made socialist revolution difficult. So in 1919, Mussolini came up with an alternative strategy. He called it Fascism. Mussolini described his new movement as a ``Third Way'' between capitalism and communism. As under communism, the state would exercise dictatorial control over the economy. But as under capitalism, the corporations would be left in private hands.

Fascism removed the greatest obstacle facing socialism, which was the opposition of the moneyed class. It made allies of the corporations--or at least of certain hand-picked corporations who agreed to play ball.

Hitler followed the same game plan. He openly acknowledged that the Nazi party was ``socialist'' and that its enemies were the ``bourgeoisie'' and the ``plutocrats'' (the rich). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler eliminated trade unions, and replaced them with his own state-run labor organizations. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler hunted down and exterminated rival leftist factions (such as the Communists). Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler waged unrelenting war against small business.

But unlike Lenin and Stalin, Hitler allowed certain large, hand-picked corporations to continue functioning in private hands, as long as they obeyed his directives without question.

Hitler regarded capitalism as an evil scheme of the Jews and said so in speech after speech. Karl Marx believed likewise. In his essay, ``On the Jewish Question,'' Marx theorized that eliminating Judaism would strike a crippling blow to capitalist exploitation. Hitler put Marx's theory to work in the death camps.

R. J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii documents in his book Death by Government that the two most murderous regimes of the past century were both communist: communists in the Soviet Union murdered 62 million of their own citizens, and Chinese communists killed 35 million Chinese citizens. The bronze medal goes to the Nazi socialists, who murdered 21 million Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and others. Additional purges occurred in smaller communist hellholes such as Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Cuba, of course. Communism does more than imprison and impoverish nations: it kills wholesale. And so did socialism during the Nazi reign of terror.

But the history of the past century has been grossly distorted by the liberal media and the predominantly left-wing academic elite. The Nazis have been universally condemned, as they should be, but they have also been repositioned clear across the political spectrum and propped up as false representatives of the far right--even though Hitler railed frantically against capitalism in his infamous demagogic speeches (which are rarely translated, unfortunately). At the same time, heinous crimes of far larger magnitude by communists have been ignored or downplayed, and the general public is largely unaware of them. Hence, communism is still widely regarded as a fundamentally great idea that has just not yet been properly implemented. Santayana said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'' God help us if we forget the horrors of communism and get the historical lessons of Nazism backwards.

The Nazis also had something else in common with the modern left: an obsessive preoccupation with race. Hitler and his Nazis considered races other than their own inferior. Modern liberals, who vociferously oppose the elimination of racial quotas, seem to agree. They apparently believe that non-white minorities (excluding Asians, of course) are inferior and unable to compete in the free market without favoritism mandated by the government. Whereas Hitler was hostile to those minorities, however, modern white liberals condescend benevolently. Hitler's virulent form of racism was eradicated quickly and forcefully, but the more subtle and insidious racism of modern liberals has yet to be universally recognized and condemned.

RussP.org