Posted on 02/27/2008 1:42:46 PM PST by Clive
Fascism for proles
In a new book tracing the roots of the modern left, Jonah Goldberg argues that 20th-century communists borrowed far more from Hitler than from Marx
Jonah Goldberg, National Post
The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism." Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies -- we can call them totalitarian for now -- attract the same types of people.
Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas, Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or Strasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever. Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it "secondary." What mattered to him was German identity politics.
Let me anticipate an objection. The argument goes something like this: Communism and fascism are opposites; therefore, since fascism is fundamentally anti-Semitic, communism must not be. Another version simply reverses the equation: Fascism (or Nazism) was all about anti-Semitism, but communism wasn't; therefore, they are not similar. Other versions fool around with the word "right-wing": Anti-Semitism is right-wing; Nazis were anti-Semites; therefore, Nazism was right-wing. You can play these games all day.
Yes, the Nazis were anti-Semites of the first order, but anti-Semitism is by no means a right-wing phenomenon. It is also widely recognized, for example, that Stalin was an anti-Semite and that the Soviet Union was, in effect, officially anti-Semitic (though far less genocidal than Nazi Germany --when it came to the Jews). Karl Marx himself -- despite his Jewish heritage -- was a committed Jew hater, railing in his letters against "dirty Jews" and denouncing his enemies with phrases like "niggerlike Jew."
Perhaps more revealing, the German Communists often resorted to nationalistic and anti-Semitic appeals when they found it useful. Leo Schlageter, the young Nazi who was executed by the French in 1923 and subsequently made into a martyr to the German nationalist cause, was also lionized by the communists. The communist ideologue Karl Radek delivered a speech to the Comintern celebrating Schlageter as precisely the sort of man the communists needed. The communist (and half-Jewish) radical Ruth Fischer tried to win over the German proletariat with some Marxist anti-Semitic verbiage: "Whoever cries out against Jewish capitalists is already a class warrior, even when he does not know it …
Kick down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lampposts and stamp upon them." Fischer later became a high-ranking official in the East German Communist government.
In the early 1920s, noting the similarities between Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism was not particularly controversial. Nor was it insulting to communists or fascists. Mussolini's Italy was among the first to recognize Lenin's Russia. And as we've seen, the similarities between the two men were hardly superficial. Radek noted as early as 1923 that "Fascism is middle-class Socialism and we cannot persuade the middle classes to abandon it until we can prove to them that it only makes their condition worse."
But most communist theorists rejected or were ignorant of Radek's fairly accurate understanding of fascism. Leon Trotsky's version was far more influential. According to Trotsky, fascism was the last gasp of capitalism long prophesied in Marxist scripture. Millions of communists and fellow travelers in Europe and America sincerely believed that fascism was a capitalist backlash against the forces of truth and light. As Michael Gold of the New Masses put it in response to the poet Ezra Pound's support for fascism: "When a cheese goes putrid, it becomes limburger, and some people like it, smell and all. When the capitalist state starts to decay, it goes fascist."
Many communists probably didn't buy the Trotskyite claim that committed democratic socialists like America's Norman Thomas were no different from Adolf Hitler, but they were soon under orders to act like they did. In 1928, at Stalin's direction, the Third International advanced the doctrine of "social fascism," which held that there was really no difference between a Social Democrat and a Fascist or a Nazi. Fascism was "a fighting organization of the bourgeoisie, an organization that rests on the active support of social democracy [which] is the moderate wing of fascism." According to the theory of social fascism, a liberal democrat and a Nazi "do not contradict each other," but, in Stalin's words, "complete each other. They are not antipodes but twins."
The strategy behind the doctrine of social fascism was as horribly misguided as the theory behind it. The thinking was that the centre would not hold in Western democracies, and in a conflict between fascists and communists the communists would win. This was one reason -- aside from a common outlook on most issues -- that communists and Nazis tended to vote together in the Reichstag. The German Communists were operating under the Moscow-provided motto "Nach Hitler, kommen wir" ("After Hitler, we take over"). Or, "First Brown, then Red." - Copyright © 2007 by Jonah Goldberg. From the book Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, published by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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The only important difference between Nazi-ism,
Fascism, Communism, Socialism and Liberalism
is the spelling, and that the last group hasn’t got
the brains to figure it out.
- Bill Vance
I would add Nazi-islamism to the above group.
The Nazis = The National Socialist Party. They loved to grab the guns of the citizens.
Hmmm....socialists, gun grabbers....sounds like democrats.
Fascism, National Socialism, Democratic Socialism, and Communism are all collectivist by nature.
Great article.
Pity no one will ever read it.
I read it; I’ve been reading quite a bit on this topic lately, all pretty much to the same effect that there’s little difference between Commies and Nazis.
You know it. I know it. Most on Freerepublic know it.
But the great unwashed masses could care less. Reading this would interrupt American Idol, or the latest Baraq Husyan speech.
*sounds of fainting women hitting the floor*
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