Fascism and Socialism: Still Not Opposites

The Eurasian movement of Putin and his allies draws from both Nazism and Stalinism.

Dear Reader (Including the trenchcoat-wearing FCC minister with breath like he’s been sucking a urinal cake looking over my shoulder, tapping his BIC pen on his glass eye, and sighing every time I write something he doesn’t like),

I’ve got to bang out this “news”letter pretty quickly. I’m sitting in a too-small fake wicker chair at the coffee shop at the Broadmoor (one of my favorite hotels, btw). The time difference here puts me two hours behind at six in the morning. Plus, I don’t want the housekeeping staff to find the body in my room. If I didn’t need coffee so badly I would have taken care of that already. But one must prioritize. I think the high altitude here is making my brain itch.

Timothy Snyder has written the best piece I’ve seen on what’s going on in Kiev. It’s worth reading just as a primer. But it’s also interesting in other ways. I had not read a lot about the “Eurasian Union,” a proposed counterweight to the European Union, in much the same way the Legion of Doom is a counterweight to the Justice League. Putin and a band of avowed “National Bolshevik” intellectuals are in effect trying to put the band back together. Snyder writers:

The Eurasian Union is the enemy of the European Union, not just in strategy but in ideology. The European Union is based on a historical lesson: that the wars of the twentieth century were based on false and dangerous ideas, National Socialism and Stalinism, which must be rejected and indeed overcome in a system guaranteeing free markets, free movement of people, and the welfare state. Eurasianism, by contrast, is presented by its advocates as the opposite of liberal democracy.

The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

The point man for Eurasian and Ukrainian policy in the Kremlin is Sergei Glazyev, an economist who like Dugin tends to combine radical nationalism with nostalgia for Bolshevism. He was a member of the Communist Party and a Communist deputy in the Russian parliament before cofounding a far-right party called Rodina, or Motherland. In 2005 some of its deputies signed a petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish organizations be banned from Russia.

Some of this was news to me. I was familiar with the National Bolshevism of the early Nazi years. Thinkers like the Ukrainian Bolshevik Karl Radek and the Nazi Otto Strasser dabbled with the idea of merging Bolshevik and Nazi ideology. After all, if you’re already a National Socialist it’s not that long a trip to being a National Bolshevik, now is it? Some left-wing members of the Nazi military described themselves as National Bolsheviks as well. But ultimately, National Bolshevism as an intellectual movement died in the crib. Or so I thought.

What I did not know is that National Bolshevism is making such a comeback. And while, it’s evil and a national-security threat and all that, I can’t help but smile.

National Bolshevism must strike some on the left as quite perplexing. After all, Bolshevism and Nazism — like fascism and socialism — are opposites, right?

If you read my book, you’d know I consider this the greatest myth and/or lie of the 20th century (coming in a distant second: the idea that there is a difference between good flan and bad flan).

Funny enough, the Eurasianists are counting on this myth for their propaganda campaign. They insist that the protesters in Kiev are trying to stage a “brown revolution” or fascist coup. In other words the de facto fascists are calling the anti-fascists “fascists.” And apparently lots of folks are falling for it. Snyder again:

Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this. . . .

The other source of purported Eurasian moral legitimacy seems to be this: since the representatives of the Putin regime only very selectively distanced themselves from Stalinism, they are therefore reliable inheritors of Soviet history, and should be seen as the automatic opposite of Nazis, and therefore to be trusted to oppose the far right.

Snyder’s rebuttals are good (I’ve trimmed them mostly for space). But they don’t cut to the heart of it.

First, let’s clear some underbrush. The idea that Communism and Nazism are opposites is more of a utilitarian idea than a core conviction for the Left. It is a rationalization that allows the Left to cut around the historical tumor of Nazism and fascism and say, That has nothing to do with us.

But the simple fact is that the hard Left has always endorsed or at least sympathized with national-socialist countries. What do you think Cuba is? It’s nationalistic and it’s socialistic. Venezuela under Chávez and now Maduro is nationalist and socialist. Nicaragua in the 1980s, etc., etc. Read a speech by any socialist dictator and swap out the word “socialize” for “nationalize”: The meaning of the sentences doesn’t change one iota. Nationalized health care is socialized medicine. Even Obama’s weak-tea socialistic rhetoric is usually dolled up in the rhetoric of nationalism, even militaristic nationalism. Let’s all be like SEAL Team Six! Let’s make this a “Sputnik Moment.”

Most of the Left in the U.S. didn’t really hate the German national-socialists until Stalin told them to. That the useful idiots thought Stalin’s command to turn on his one-time Nazi ally was rooted in deep ideological conviction just proves the depths of their idiocy.

After all, it’s not like the Left suddenly turned on Stalin when he embraced nationalism wholeheartedly and talked of fighting the Nazis as part of the “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.” But, hey, maybe I’m missing the deep Marxist themes in the phrase “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.”

If you think this is all semantic faculty-lounge argy-bargy, consider the fact that North Korea is in many ways as “Nazi” as the Nazis were. It’s a nationalist country that subscribes to eugenic theories that it uses to justify the industrial torture and slaughter of its own citizens. In fact, North Korea’s eugenics is crazier than Nazi Germany’s was. I’m not trying to minimize the evil of the Holocaust, but “Jew” is a real category of human being and eugenics generally weren’t discredited in the 1930s. Eighty years later, North Korea believes that the political views of people are genetically heritable for generations. So you can get sent to a death camp if your great uncle said something nice about America or if your second cousin lives in South Korea.

But because of the emotional and political investment in the idea that Nazism has nothing to do with Communism, North Korea is put in a category of lesser evil. If the Kims just described themselves as Nazis — but kept all of the same policies — it would be vastly easier to rally public opinion against their decades of murder. But when you talk about the evil of Communist regimes, a lot of people idiotically roll their eyes. Everyone is a brave anti-Nazi now that they’re all gone, but many are afraid to devote a fraction of that passion when it comes to the heirs, imitators, and competitors of Nazism.

Richard Pipes had the best pithy summation of the difference between Nazism and Bolshevism. They aren’t opposites, he argued, they’re both “heresies of socialism.”

I agree with this entirely, but step back from that a bit. Socialism itself is a heresy — a heresy of tribalism. Socialism is simply an attempt to gussy up ancient tribal tendencies in modern garb. Nazism was tribalism of one race. Communism is tribalism of one class. Italian fascism was tribalism of one nation.

There are of course, better and worse forms of tribalism. And, I would argue that a little tribalism, like a little nationalism, is a healthy thing, insofar as communities aren’t held together by reason alone. They’re held together by a complex set of sentiments, and a politics that doesn’t take account of that will necessarily fail. As Edmund Burke writes, “politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.”

But here is the important point. Looking back on the long history of humanity, tribalism — simple or complex — was the norm for 99 percent of our time on Earth. It wasn’t until 200-300 years ago that a different path emerged. (Yes, Christianity was a big leap forward in advancing a universal conception of humanity, in principle. But in practice it was often coopted by tribalism in one form or another. We can talk about that more another time.) The different path emerged largely in England and spread from there. This different path recognized the sovereignty of the individual, the necessity of the rule of law, democratic legitimacy, and private property, and the inherent dignity of bourgeois labor.

As I’ve written before, what makes America special is that we took England’s culture of liberty and broadened it out into a virtual tribe of liberty. I say virtual because we took the ethnic and racial components out of it (and, no, we didn’t do it overnight). You can be a progressive or a liberal or a social democrat and still believe in all of the things that define the tribe of liberty. You can also be a nationalist, a patriot, or a traditionalist and believe in all of these things. But go too far in either direction and you can fall off the path. Perhaps path is the wrong word. Bridge might make more sense. After all there’s a left side and a right side of the road. But if you fall off a bridge, all you do is fall down.

Seen from this perspective the differences between Bolshevism, Nazism, Maoism, Italian Fascism, North Korean Juche, et al may be interesting or meaningful (the differences between football and rugby are interesting and meaningful, but at the end of the day they’re both just games). But seen from the broadest perspective, they’re simply different ways to fall off the bridge and back into the wilderness below.

My apologies if this “news”letter was lacking in verve and panache this week. Maybe it’s the fact the Couch couldn’t make it out West this week.

Also, if you want to unsubscribe from this “news”letter, by all means do so. But in the spirit of William F. Buckley, let me ask you that you cancel your own damn subscription. I have asked the suits to put in or restore the unsubscribe button (I could’ve sworn there used to be one).

Quick Zoë update. As I’ve said before, we’re pretty sure that Zoë is a Carolina dog, and not a German Shepherd mix. She may be a mix of all sorts of stuff, of course. Though readers who think she’s a Shiba Inu are probably giving a bit too much credit to the stock of stray dogs in rural South Carolina. Anyway, healthwise she seems to be thriving. But behaviorally she is a major handful. Obsessed with tracking down “treats” in the dirt and the snow, she’s not much interested in listening to her humans. The other day, Zoë found a rabbit’s head under the snow and ran off with it. She wouldn’t drop it for anything, much to my wife’s dismay. She’s also turning into a dirt eater, which is bad enough outside. But inside is a real problem, which is why we’re going to put cayenne pepper in our potted plants. On the upside, she remains improbably cute and her commitment to squirrel chasing is total.

The European split between Left and Right was not a split between individualists and collectivists.

It was a split between traditionalists and rationalists.

America did not have traditionalists. The split that developed was between two schools of rationalists - doctrinaire liberals and practical liberals.

In Europe the traditionalists of Britain were eliminated by the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. That was 1688. In France it was the Revolution in 1789. In Spain and Italy it was the Napoleonic Wars. In Germany it was the revolutions of 1848.

The Reformation, the source of radical individualism, had originally set all Leftism in motion.

In any case, the civic institutions that conservatives wanted to preserve had all been destroyed or repurposed by 1850.

That created a social void, one which socialism, communism, syndicalism, anarchism and fascism tried to fill - by manufacturing ideologies that would create the kind of social cohesion that had been fragmenting for centuries.

Fascism differed from Communism only in this: it wanted to use any remaining stones of the social edifice - religious faith, nationalist fervor, noble heredity - as tools to build a society that would allow its ideologues to gather complete power to itself without any accountability.

Communism may have technically abolished private property - but all that meant in practice was that enemies of the regime were expropriated and friends of the regime were assigned the spoils. Communism may have been officially atheist, but Stalin's relationship with the Orthodox Church, Mao's relationship with the churches, etc. was toleration of believers who would accept total subservience to the state.

Fascism was, despite revisionist claims, just as anticlerical as Communism. The Concordats between the Church and the Nazi and Fascist regimes were agreements by the Church to accept official abuse, humiliation, and outright theft in exchange for preserving the liberty of the Church to preach the Word. That promise was not kept.

Fascism is not conservative - not because it rejects atomistic individualism - but because it is the worship of earthly power rather than worship of the living God.

America did not have traditionalists.

Close, but IMO not quite accurate.

There was an ancient tradition in England, much older than but first written down in Magna Carta, of the right of "free men" to in general live their lives without interference by the King. "Free men" originally meant, more or less, the nobility, but the definition gradually expanded over the centuries. In this tradition the King is not a semi-divine absolute ruler, he is merely the first among equals of those witharistocratic freedom. He has morally and legally enforceable obligations to his peers, who have the right to force him to honor him.

This same tradition is found in all other European countries, with nobility, estates or free towns, etc. struggling for freedom against the King, Duke or whatever.

With the advent of gunpowder weaponry, particularly artillery, such ad hoc coalitions of "free men" lost their ability to content militarily against the King. Artillery just cost too much for private individuals.

Those nations that refused to abandon their principles of independence of "free men," such as Poland, got squashed by neighbors who did. This led to the rise of absolute monarchy throughout Europe except in Britain, which for obvious reasons was not faced with a direct military threat. All it needed to defend itself was a Navy, which could not be used directly to control the citizenry. The tradition of aristocratic freedom thus survived (nearly) uniquely in England.

Absolutism eventually called up opposition against itself in Europe, but since the tradition of aristocratic freedom had been destroyed, the opposition was intellectual in nature, and based on opposition to King and Church, and a mystical belief in the General Will of The People. Little or no interest in individuals within that People.

Meanwhile, in the Civil Wars and then in the Glorious Revolution, the tradition of aristocratic freedom (as expanded) triumphed in England and eventually the whole UK.

When the English colonies in America were colonized, the social pyramid was amputated on both ends. Few peasants or nobles emigrated. The colonists thus thought of themselves as "free men," and assigned to themselves all the rights originally restricted to aristocrats.

Our Revolution was very specifically and explicitly initiated to protect that tradition of (originally) aristocratic freedom against what American saw (inaccurately) as conscious attempts by the British government to take them away.

Anywho, my somewhat long-winded point is that the American Revolution was indeed profoundly traditionalist and conservative. Except the tradition it tried to conserve was that of Magna Carta and aristocratic freedom. That tradition, expanded to cover all adults, is still what American conservatives are trying to conserve.

I would have to strenuously disagree.

One of the reasons why the Stuarts fell was the King's inability to raise enough capital for artillery and other armaments.

One of the reasons why the 30 Years' War went on for so long was the Emperor's dependence on private individuals (like Wallenstein) to finance armies that he could not afford to pay or feed.

The penury of the Crown was the main reason why the Bourbons felt compelled to convoke the Estates - which led directly to their downfall.

Absolutist kings were generally quite poor, and their means were generally much less impressive than the powers they bombastically claimed to have.

Anywho, my somewhat long-winded point is that the American Revolution was indeed profoundly traditionalist and conservative.

I tend to agree with this. The American revolutionaries did not see themselves, in general, as remaking society from scratch or anything like that.

They saw themselves as defending their rights and privileges from encroachment.

But their "tradition" was the tradition of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. They were defending the views of Locke, Sidney, and Blackstone - who were all radical reinterpreters and modernizers of the English Constitution.

Their tradition was classical liberalism and was less than 100 years old.

What you see as the “traditional” society is apparently that of the early modern period, say 1500 to 1700. But that was itself a society in profound turmoil, since economic and military changes had destroyed the more or less stable traditional society of the Middle Ages.

Economic and (especially) military conditions ensured the destruction of that earlier society. The nobles that fought to protect the (local) peasantry and churchmen utterly lost their role when gunpowder weaponry and especially artillery made them obsolete. With the nobility having lost their function, it became an extremely obvious question why society should continue to pay them forever the honors and income their ancestors had legitimately earned.

The rise of cities and of people who were not peasants, churchmen or warriors was also profoundly disturbing. They grew in numbers, wealth and influence throughout this period. Many merchants and businessmen became much wealthier than many nobles.

My point is that changes in society undermined the traditional order. Something was going to replace it. In America we developed a system based on the (originally aristocratic) right of liberty for individuals.

That POV never got on really big in Europe, resulting in their many experiments with Jacobinism, communism, fascism, etc.

You are quite correct that Charles I lost largely due to financial reasons. But he was in those financial straits because of the survival and indeed strengthening of Parliament, the only effective surviving example of what during the Middle Ages were very widespread more-or-less representative bodies of estates.

All the others had been squashed by absolute monarchs. As I quite specifically pointed out in my post, England was a unique case, and thus cannot be used to disprove my general point.

At the start of the English Civil War, the Royalists were seen by most as the wave of the future, with the Parliament as hide-bound conservatives clinging to an outmoded past. Most of the older nobles went with Parliament, most of the younger ones supported the King. It is only in retrospect that the Parliamentary cause is viewed as one of radical change.

Sure, the absolute monarchs of the early modern period were broke most of the time. This was not because they had inadequate resources compared to their people, but because they insisted on fighting very nearly continuous and ruinously expensive wars against each other. This actually makes my point. If the Kings, with their comparatively enormous resources, were bankrupted by their wars, how could coalitions of much less wealthy nobles hope to compete?

This was a much older phenomenon. Most of the wars of the Middle Ages ended mainly because one or both sides ran out of money.

The 30 Years' War, after its initial period, consisted of bands of looters sweeping back and forth across the corpse of Germany, some supposedly national armies, and other merely those of warlords. Wallenstein, BTW, was so immensely wealthy only because he conquered Bohemia in the first phase of the War and was basically gifted the entire country by the Emperor.

A private individual with such wealth and power was such a great threat that the Emperor eventually had him assassinated.

My point is that in England there was a smooth transition of power or at least influence (below the King) from Council dominated by the great lords to a Parliament dominated in Commons by merchants and country squires. On the Continent, no such handoff occurred. The Kings destroyed opposition by their nobility, with the Sun-King as the classic example. The nobility mostly moved to court. Their intriguing continued, but it was not for independence or freedom for themselves, it was for influence over the King, or in extreme cases to kill and replace him.

I guess my main point is that the terms "conservatism" and "traditionalism" have no meaning at all unless you expand on which tradition you are trying to conserve.

The American tradition in 1775 of aristocratic freedom (as expanded) and the Glorious Revolution was a very different tradition that that of ancien regime France or Ching China.

This is good analysis, but I disagree that technological innovation in armaments made the nobility obsolete.

The nobility declined because of their destabilizing effect on society - the kings could not trust them to be loyal in matters of allegiance and religion.

In England, the Wars of the Roses made the nobility a perpetual danger that the monarch wanted to crush.

In France, the Wars of Religion created the same lack of trust.

The Holy Roman Empire collapsed as an effective political unit because of the nobility refusing to agree on any Empire-level initiatives.

All this was a function of the nobility becoming to wealthy, to well armed and too dangerous for the monarchs to tolerate.

That POV never got on really big in Europe

I agree, but it did get on big in the UK.

The reason for this, in my opinion, is the inflexibility of European social structure due to: (1) primogeniture, (2) endogamy among elites and (3) the Salic law.

In the UK a successful peasant's son could go into trade or buy a commission in a regiment and quickly gain social status. His son could wind up becoming a knight or other minor nobility or potentially getting a high-ranking civil position. Along the way, he could marry a poor but titled woman and move up socially as well.

In prerevolutionary France, as Furet has pointed out, it took four generations just to become an officer or low ranking civil servant. There was close to zero social mobility - the rise of a family was measured in centuries, not decades.

In America, the process was even quicker than in the UK.

I guess we’re going to have to disagree on the military history front.

The various wars you describe are all, IMO, examples of wars that at root were desperate attempts by the nobility to maintain their crumbling position in society.

The power that wealth gives a person or group in society could be mathematically expressed as a percentage of the total wealth.

During the Middle Ages, the nobility, with the King generally considered primarily the first in rank of the nobles, controlled the vast majority of every country’s wealth. The upper ranks of the clergy were also very wealthy, but they were in reality mainly a branch of the nobility, being usually younger sons of aristocrats.

With the early modern period, the King, generally with the enthusiastic support of the commoners, isolated himself from and put himself far above the nobles. High nobles fought over the privilege of carrying away the Sun-King’s chamber pot, whereas their ancestors would have cut the King’s throat for suggesting such a thing.

The nobility’s share of wealth declined precipitously throughout the early modern period, while the King’s went up, and that of the commoners went up even faster. This decline of the nobles was on the Continent exacerbated by the practice of considering all sons of nobles to be noble. In England, only the heir was noble, his brothers and sisters were commoners.

That is why the nobility in France in the second half of the 18th century competed so desperately for positions at court. It was generally the only way they could maintain their illusion of wealth and power. They expanded the need for patents of nobility even further for positions, because in many cases their nobility was all they had, and they were trying to increase its value.

BTW, the middle ages and early modern eras, even on the Continent, had a good deal more social mobility than commonly thought. What you describe was the theory. The reality was a lot more flexible. A commoner who became wealthy could take advantage of a thriving trade in phony patents of nobility. Families often went up (and down) a lot faster than theory would allow.

I think I may have been incomplete in my explanation of why the aristocracy lost military relevance.

Their power and position in society in the Middle Ages was based on their master of very specific military skills, those of an ultra-heavy cavalryman or knight. In fact, in I believe all European languages other than English, our word “knight” is translated with a word that also means “rider.”

The nobleman was a warrior who rode to battle in armor. The skills necessary to fight effectively this way took many years to acquire and constant practice to maintain.

It utterly lost any military relevance when armies of commoners developed effective ways of fighting them.

The Swiss and their pike squares and the English with their longbows dented but did not destroy the place of the armored knight. These weapons systems still took a great deal of training, and in the case of the Swiss pikes extreme esprit de corps and morale.

But as gunpowder weapons became more and more effective, any peasant could be trained in a matter of weeks (at most) to be more effective on the battlefield than a knight who had spent decades learning his skills.

Except as commanders, the nobility promptly became irrelevant as warriors. No function, and people started to wonder why they were supposed to honor them. Which was a very good question.

I would like to say there’s been some excellent discussion on this thread!

I would like to clear up a point. Several posters seem to think Jonah is saying that fascists were liberals. I contend he would never say any such thing.

The term “liberal,” throughout the world other than the USA, is used to mean “classical liberal,” or IOW basically the same position as American conservatives, possibly crossed with libertarianism. What we in America call “liberals” are actually progressives, and in most of the world would be more accurately called social democrats.

Jonah, in several books and many columns, has expressed his opinion that modern American liberalism is at root “fascism with a smiley face.” Not that real fascism of the past was liberal, in either the traditional or the modern American meaning of the word.

IMO Jonah’s position is indisputable, since modern American liberalism glorifies the State, and cares not about individuals. That is a classic fascist position, even if it is a kinder, gentler version.

See his book, Liberal Fascism.

You may, if you like, believe Jonah is wrong in seeing the roots of modern American liberalism in Fascism, but that is very different from saying he thought Hitler and Musso were really liberals.

he Nazis exterminated much of the aristocracy and siezed their property.

Nonsense. Most of the aristocracy got along quite well under the Nazis. There were no mass killings of them at all. Only those who openly opposed the Nazis had any trouble at all.

That is, BTW, a major difference between Nazis/fascists and commies.

If you weren't unfortunate enough to be a member of one of the Nazi's scapegoat groups, and you didn't openly oppose them, they mostly left you alone.

Commies, OTOH, were obsessive about forcing everybody to openly support them.

Example: Most if not perhaps all of those the KGB and its precursors murdered were forced to sign confessions admitting the justice of their own execution. The victims knew these confessions were false, their torturers knew they were false, and the vast majority of those confession would never be seen by anybody. Yet the commies were obsessive about getting them.

Nazis didn't fool around with any of that. They knew who their enemies were and they killed them, but they didn't have weird compulsions to make their victims agree that their murder was just.

Are you sympathetic to right wing alternatives to capitalism? Your last post sort of gave this impression. There have in the past been Falangist and National Synidicalist parties in the United States (with ties to the Lebanese parties), but I don't know if they're still active.

I'm not sympathetic towards any particular movement of this type. Even though I'm generally (lower case "l") libertarian in most of my leanings, I also recognize that certain aspects of radical laissez-faire are ultimately self-defeating, so I part company with both libertarians and mainstream Republicans on trade (I support tariffs to maintain our industrial base and as a principal source of revenue) and immigration (I oppose turning the US into a dumping ground for the third world underclass, which is what it has become thanks to both parties).

I wish you had commented on the JBS theory of Communism as a front for capitalist consolidation

While a lot of it is far-fetched, there's a grain of truth behind it when you consider how many wealthy industrialists supported the Bolsheviks and how many of today's ultra-rich support radical causes (not just social radicalism, but economic radicalism). In practice, a monopoly by the state isn't all that different from a corporate monopoly under crony capitalism, especially if those making the decisions at the top come from the same people.

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