I think Fascism is so iconic in leftist mentality because fighting against Nazi Germany is one of the very few visible historical achievements Communists/Marxists can point to. Apart from this the cupboard is very bare apart from some genuine advancements such as secularism and status of women in a few Communist-influenced developing countries.
Of course the liabilities and costs incurred BY Marxists dwarfs these gains.
Pol Pot and the leaders of the Khmer Rouge studied in the Sorbonne. They were modern academia! If you are ever tempted to feel the slightest twinge of pity for some woke professor who is being fired or prosecuted, just think of the Killing Fields, because that is what they would create if they got half a chance.
The one good idea that came from 20th century Communism is Pol Pot's sending all the intellectuals out to the rice paddies to farm for a living, on a few rice bowls a day, sans books and eyeglasses.
Imagine sending all our fat overpaid Left academics to work with their hands and farm for their own food! They would at last be useful and certainly learn all about sex differences and the labor theory of value.
"The more you create a moral gulf between your political in-group and others, the more treating “Left” as some moral category impedes confronting inconvenient facts and concerns."
It also gives a wonderful tool for conformity policing: what, you noticed a fault in Theory comrade? SINNER!
Again, we look to Rousseau, and Plato, for where the West went wrong.
Thanks for writing this, Lorenzo. I would disagree that Hitler was the exception to the rule.
Hitler studied Marx but disagreed with his route to socialism, not the goal. Nationalism is a tool used by the Left when organising workers to reject foreign capitalist imperialism, rather than the opposite of socialism itself. As far as the National Socialists were concerned, Germans were the victims of an international conspiracy, with Bolshevism as a Jewish plot that would prevent a superior authentic Geman socialism, and finance capitalism also being a Jewish plot.
It is only because there are so many Marxist historians that students are taught that Hitler was financed by 'capitalists', failing to make the distinction between industrialists sympathetic to socialism and the financial markets.
Many industrialists advocated for improving the living conditions and self-regulation of workers in order to increase economic production, under a system of paternalistic absolute authority. Hence we saw 'philanthropic' worker towns built, often with strict social organisation such as the banning of alcohol consumption. This was the basis of the modern town planning system: municipal socialism organised around productivity.
Henry Ford was also convinced that finance capitalism was a Jewish plot, and bought back the shares in his own company as soon as he was able to. There were frequent boycotts of Ford cars in New York due to his antisemitic radio, newspaper and book outlets. Hitler had a painting of Ford in his private office, and published Ford's ghost-written book 'The International Jew' (Ford was a skilled engineer but illiterate, so he relied on propagandists to disseminate his views).
Ford was also a social engineer, with a Sociology Department of his company which spied on and manipulated Ford workers in the townships he controlled, such as Dearborn. Let's recall that in the original book version of Brave New World, it was Ford that was revered as their God. Hitler organised the concentration camps in the Reich according to Ford's principles of mass production, after German soldiers became bored of shooting unarmed civilians.
Industrial production was organised by the Reich under the Leistungskampf, and there were no private property rights for anyone with the wrong ethnic origin or beliefs. Any company boss which disagreed with the Party would lose their raw material allocation from the central planners.
So, Hitler was absolutely of the Left, and it's only propaganda which tells us otherwise. He was in a non-agression pact with Stalin until he made the mistake of assuming that he could take Ukraine as easily as Poland, with no pushback. But like many leftists today, he was literally on drugs.
How to place the Nazis, the National Socialists, in the political spectrum is a hardy perennial. The argument they were not socialists is just a more specific version of “Left” as positive moral category. National Socialists were absolutely socialists, Hitler said so at length and they did quite a lot of socialising of production and of social activity generally.
They were also a form of Progressivism, seeking to impose an imagined future on the world dramatically different from current arrangements.
The difficulty is that Hitler also pushed a lot of themes that were associated with deeply anti-Left views and he appealed to people who felt deeply threatened by the radical Left for precisely those reasons. There is a reason Fascism and Nazism were portrayed as a “Third Way”. So, while I am familiar with arguments that Nazism was a Left-wing movement, and I absolutely agree it was a form of socialism, I do not see it as a Left movement.
I note that, in our own time, deeply alienated folk on the Right are once again exploring that political territory.
Thanks for the reply. Left and Right are simplistic abstractions, of course. I see the fight between German communists and national socialists as a fraternal struggle over the question of how authoritarian socialism should be implemented, including the new arrangements for the management of property.
The Left loves falling out with itself, but the National Socialists got the upper hand that time. That may have been because their paramilitary wing was better organised, retaining their Army discipline as ex-soldiers, wheras the original Bolsheviks had been supported by army deserters. Violent, but a rabble.
I believe Nazis had observed recent chaos in Russia and concluded that factory owners and shop keepers were best left in situ as long as they were politically correct, but those business people still had to take orders from the Party within a centrally planned economy, and so their 'ownership' of the means of production became notional.
This appealed to the German middle classes because the probable alternative in communism would have been for business owners being deposed in favour of management by soviets.
Anecdotally, early on, even some Jewish business owners thought they would be better off under the Nazis than the Bolsheviks as long as they didn't cause a fuss about the proposed central planning. Free markets hadn't worked out well during the Weimar Republic, and the stock market crashes in both the USA and Germany caused a loss of faith in capitalism, of course.
My relations at the time saw themselves as German business people who happened to be Jewish rather than the 'International Jews' of high finance that Hitler and Ford were ranting about. That turned out to be a false assumption.
I believe the 'third position' is a solution to the dialectic of capitalism and communism, a synthesis of high industrial output with workers' power, rather than a position on the left-right axis. Otherwise, the Nazis would have called themselves the 'National Centrists'!
It's also worth pointing out that Hitler didn't regard himself as rightwing or "far right". And many of his leading followers - Goebbels, for example - clearly though that Hitler and Nazism were leftwing.
Indeed, the Nazis were resented by the German aristocracy and the military leadership because the Brownshirt militia were so plebian. I highly recommend the German Resistance Memorial Centre if you're ever in Berlin; it's a small museum, above the courtyard where Claus von Stauffenberg was executed after almost killing Hitler. https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/home/
The longer it goes the more I see a parallel between Ford & Musk. Elon will go down as Ford's heir as an automotive trailblazer - he has achieved what the industry has failed to get up for 4 decades - making mass adoption of electric cars plausible. Just as the Fordian production line opened up mass attainability of cars to the public in the first place.
And of course just like Henry he has *controversial* political beliefs...
I see resemblances, but Musk's ambitions go far beyond cars or tractors. To be fair to Musk, I see no evidence of antisemitism. See also Edison, who didn't invent so much himself, but brought inventions to the mass market.
I have been to Cambodia. While there, I went to S-21 Tuol Sleng. This is the school used for torturing people in Phnom Penh. It's preserved almost exactly as it was found on the day when the Khmer Rouge were driven away. There were old bedframes that people were tortured on in the classrooms that were used as torture chambers, and there are decades old bloodstains still to be found around the place. The Khmer Rouge were very thorough. They photographed everybody before they were tortured and killed. You can see the pictures.
It's an unbelievably sinister place.
After that, I went to Choeung Ek, the killing place attached to Tuol Sleng. You drive down a dusty road to an old orchard. There are excavated burial pits. The ground is littered with bone fragments. Children were killed by being held by the feet, and their heads were dashed against a tree. Adults were smashed on the head with pickaxe handles. The revolution was done on the cheap.
There is a building with glass walls, inside of which is a giant mountain of about 5000 smashed in skulls. There is a great pile of clothing, shoes and personal effects taken from the murdered people.
I stood there for a long time in the blazing tropical sun, unable to process it. It seemed impossible that this could have happened, that people would do such mind bogglingly evil things in the name of a political ideology.
My Grandson is now 3 months old. He's beautiful. The thought of someone picking him up by his tiny feet and swinging his head into a tree because his family has unacceptable political views fills me with a terrible anger.
So...thank you for writing this. Nobody should be under any illusions about the reality of "the left", and what awaits us if they and the Muslims truly gain control, as they seem to be in Europe at the moment.
I have no illusions, only the terrible memories of those places, which will be with me forever. These people must be fought with all our might.
Christians can never be on the Left because they understand what original sin means. Humanity is broken, each one of us, and no political program can change that. We need rescue, not experts
Well, you do get some Christians on the Left, but there is an increasing antipathy for the reason you cite. I suspect one of the appeals of “wokeness” to some Christians is a relief from the burden of original sin.
The other exception worth mentioning is the scumbag Leopold II. When his Belgium only had a population of 5 million people, they managed to kill 11 million Congolese.
Investigating how this maniac managed to persuade the West that he would be good for the Congo will be important - after we've dealt with the Leftist threat.
By my reading of Congolese history, Leopold *never* persuaded the West that he would be good for the Congo. Many, many prominent Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans spoke out loudly and often against the depredations of Leopold. Leopold owned the Congo Free State outright via a private holding company and his private army.
I was under the impression that at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorised his claim and committed the Congo Free State to him.
But you're definitely correct about the many voices raised against his atrocities - voices that finally succeeding in ending his reign of terror.
I am going to once again attack the windmill and reiterate my one-person linguistic crusade: stop using the word “liberal” to describe leftists. They are not the intellectual heirs of John Locke and John Stuart Mill; they are not the children of the Enlightenment. They are a perverse and primitive reaction to it. There is nothing liberal about the left.
Also of course Hitler was still of the left in many ways - but a National Socialist rather than an International Socialist.
There is a bitter enmity between Communists and Fascism, but then, family squabbles tend to be bitter.
I think Fascism is so iconic in leftist mentality because fighting against Nazi Germany is one of the very few visible historical achievements Communists/Marxists can point to. Apart from this the cupboard is very bare apart from some genuine advancements such as secularism and status of women in a few Communist-influenced developing countries.
Of course the liabilities and costs incurred BY Marxists dwarfs these gains.
Advancements like secularism. It’s easier to kill someone when you’ve convinced yourself God is not looking.
never forget that the Soviet Union was supplying resources to the Nazis (for free) - and were doing so on the day the Nazis invaded them.
I believe it was Alfred Rosenberg who said something to the effect of, "Half our name is socialist. What's so hard to understand about that?"
Communism. The theory is great, comrade, but the famines are to die for
https://meme.aho.st/communism/
Right on, right on, right on.
And again today.
I much prefer Western liberal democracies, mostly free markets, and, yes we have many flaws.
But Moscow, Beijing or the Islamo-Fascist Empire? Really? That is the good life?
Add on: In the US, much of the "left" appears to have been co-opted by Islamics, or perhaps "financed" is a better word.
Feminists and lefties, even gay lefties, cannot bring themselves to criticize Muslim nations and governance.
and thus their hypocrisy is on full display for anyone willing to notice
Modern academia is proof POL POT DID NOTHING WRONG. You know I'm right.
Pol Pot and the leaders of the Khmer Rouge studied in the Sorbonne. They were modern academia! If you are ever tempted to feel the slightest twinge of pity for some woke professor who is being fired or prosecuted, just think of the Killing Fields, because that is what they would create if they got half a chance.
Of course Pol Pot also sent all the academics out into those fields too....
yes, nobody is all bad
Exactly!
The one good idea that came from 20th century Communism is Pol Pot's sending all the intellectuals out to the rice paddies to farm for a living, on a few rice bowls a day, sans books and eyeglasses.
Imagine sending all our fat overpaid Left academics to work with their hands and farm for their own food! They would at last be useful and certainly learn all about sex differences and the labor theory of value.
You need to practice what you preach!
History is written by the book nerds, lol.
"The more you create a moral gulf between your political in-group and others, the more treating “Left” as some moral category impedes confronting inconvenient facts and concerns."
It also gives a wonderful tool for conformity policing: what, you noticed a fault in Theory comrade? SINNER!
Again, we look to Rousseau, and Plato, for where the West went wrong.
Thanks for writing this, Lorenzo. I would disagree that Hitler was the exception to the rule.
Hitler studied Marx but disagreed with his route to socialism, not the goal. Nationalism is a tool used by the Left when organising workers to reject foreign capitalist imperialism, rather than the opposite of socialism itself. As far as the National Socialists were concerned, Germans were the victims of an international conspiracy, with Bolshevism as a Jewish plot that would prevent a superior authentic Geman socialism, and finance capitalism also being a Jewish plot.
It is only because there are so many Marxist historians that students are taught that Hitler was financed by 'capitalists', failing to make the distinction between industrialists sympathetic to socialism and the financial markets.
Many industrialists advocated for improving the living conditions and self-regulation of workers in order to increase economic production, under a system of paternalistic absolute authority. Hence we saw 'philanthropic' worker towns built, often with strict social organisation such as the banning of alcohol consumption. This was the basis of the modern town planning system: municipal socialism organised around productivity.
Henry Ford was also convinced that finance capitalism was a Jewish plot, and bought back the shares in his own company as soon as he was able to. There were frequent boycotts of Ford cars in New York due to his antisemitic radio, newspaper and book outlets. Hitler had a painting of Ford in his private office, and published Ford's ghost-written book 'The International Jew' (Ford was a skilled engineer but illiterate, so he relied on propagandists to disseminate his views).
Ford was also a social engineer, with a Sociology Department of his company which spied on and manipulated Ford workers in the townships he controlled, such as Dearborn. Let's recall that in the original book version of Brave New World, it was Ford that was revered as their God. Hitler organised the concentration camps in the Reich according to Ford's principles of mass production, after German soldiers became bored of shooting unarmed civilians.
Industrial production was organised by the Reich under the Leistungskampf, and there were no private property rights for anyone with the wrong ethnic origin or beliefs. Any company boss which disagreed with the Party would lose their raw material allocation from the central planners.
So, Hitler was absolutely of the Left, and it's only propaganda which tells us otherwise. He was in a non-agression pact with Stalin until he made the mistake of assuming that he could take Ukraine as easily as Poland, with no pushback. But like many leftists today, he was literally on drugs.
How to place the Nazis, the National Socialists, in the political spectrum is a hardy perennial. The argument they were not socialists is just a more specific version of “Left” as positive moral category. National Socialists were absolutely socialists, Hitler said so at length and they did quite a lot of socialising of production and of social activity generally.
They were also a form of Progressivism, seeking to impose an imagined future on the world dramatically different from current arrangements.
The difficulty is that Hitler also pushed a lot of themes that were associated with deeply anti-Left views and he appealed to people who felt deeply threatened by the radical Left for precisely those reasons. There is a reason Fascism and Nazism were portrayed as a “Third Way”. So, while I am familiar with arguments that Nazism was a Left-wing movement, and I absolutely agree it was a form of socialism, I do not see it as a Left movement.
I note that, in our own time, deeply alienated folk on the Right are once again exploring that political territory.
Thanks for the reply. Left and Right are simplistic abstractions, of course. I see the fight between German communists and national socialists as a fraternal struggle over the question of how authoritarian socialism should be implemented, including the new arrangements for the management of property.
The Left loves falling out with itself, but the National Socialists got the upper hand that time. That may have been because their paramilitary wing was better organised, retaining their Army discipline as ex-soldiers, wheras the original Bolsheviks had been supported by army deserters. Violent, but a rabble.
I believe Nazis had observed recent chaos in Russia and concluded that factory owners and shop keepers were best left in situ as long as they were politically correct, but those business people still had to take orders from the Party within a centrally planned economy, and so their 'ownership' of the means of production became notional.
This appealed to the German middle classes because the probable alternative in communism would have been for business owners being deposed in favour of management by soviets.
Anecdotally, early on, even some Jewish business owners thought they would be better off under the Nazis than the Bolsheviks as long as they didn't cause a fuss about the proposed central planning. Free markets hadn't worked out well during the Weimar Republic, and the stock market crashes in both the USA and Germany caused a loss of faith in capitalism, of course.
My relations at the time saw themselves as German business people who happened to be Jewish rather than the 'International Jews' of high finance that Hitler and Ford were ranting about. That turned out to be a false assumption.
I believe the 'third position' is a solution to the dialectic of capitalism and communism, a synthesis of high industrial output with workers' power, rather than a position on the left-right axis. Otherwise, the Nazis would have called themselves the 'National Centrists'!
It's also worth pointing out that Hitler didn't regard himself as rightwing or "far right". And many of his leading followers - Goebbels, for example - clearly though that Hitler and Nazism were leftwing.
Indeed, the Nazis were resented by the German aristocracy and the military leadership because the Brownshirt militia were so plebian. I highly recommend the German Resistance Memorial Centre if you're ever in Berlin; it's a small museum, above the courtyard where Claus von Stauffenberg was executed after almost killing Hitler. https://www.gdw-berlin.de/en/home/
The longer it goes the more I see a parallel between Ford & Musk. Elon will go down as Ford's heir as an automotive trailblazer - he has achieved what the industry has failed to get up for 4 decades - making mass adoption of electric cars plausible. Just as the Fordian production line opened up mass attainability of cars to the public in the first place.
And of course just like Henry he has *controversial* political beliefs...
I see resemblances, but Musk's ambitions go far beyond cars or tractors. To be fair to Musk, I see no evidence of antisemitism. See also Edison, who didn't invent so much himself, but brought inventions to the mass market.
When we were kids, way back in 1972, Nixon went to China to meet "communists". Never once did I recall hearing the term "leftists".
Yes.
I have been to Cambodia. While there, I went to S-21 Tuol Sleng. This is the school used for torturing people in Phnom Penh. It's preserved almost exactly as it was found on the day when the Khmer Rouge were driven away. There were old bedframes that people were tortured on in the classrooms that were used as torture chambers, and there are decades old bloodstains still to be found around the place. The Khmer Rouge were very thorough. They photographed everybody before they were tortured and killed. You can see the pictures.
It's an unbelievably sinister place.
After that, I went to Choeung Ek, the killing place attached to Tuol Sleng. You drive down a dusty road to an old orchard. There are excavated burial pits. The ground is littered with bone fragments. Children were killed by being held by the feet, and their heads were dashed against a tree. Adults were smashed on the head with pickaxe handles. The revolution was done on the cheap.
There is a building with glass walls, inside of which is a giant mountain of about 5000 smashed in skulls. There is a great pile of clothing, shoes and personal effects taken from the murdered people.
I stood there for a long time in the blazing tropical sun, unable to process it. It seemed impossible that this could have happened, that people would do such mind bogglingly evil things in the name of a political ideology.
My Grandson is now 3 months old. He's beautiful. The thought of someone picking him up by his tiny feet and swinging his head into a tree because his family has unacceptable political views fills me with a terrible anger.
So...thank you for writing this. Nobody should be under any illusions about the reality of "the left", and what awaits us if they and the Muslims truly gain control, as they seem to be in Europe at the moment.
I have no illusions, only the terrible memories of those places, which will be with me forever. These people must be fought with all our might.
Everyone I know who visits has similar reactions. This can extend to actually vomiting.
Christians can never be on the Left because they understand what original sin means. Humanity is broken, each one of us, and no political program can change that. We need rescue, not experts
Well, you do get some Christians on the Left, but there is an increasing antipathy for the reason you cite. I suspect one of the appeals of “wokeness” to some Christians is a relief from the burden of original sin.
The other exception worth mentioning is the scumbag Leopold II. When his Belgium only had a population of 5 million people, they managed to kill 11 million Congolese.
Investigating how this maniac managed to persuade the West that he would be good for the Congo will be important - after we've dealt with the Leftist threat.
Also, not C20th.
By my reading of Congolese history, Leopold *never* persuaded the West that he would be good for the Congo. Many, many prominent Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans spoke out loudly and often against the depredations of Leopold. Leopold owned the Congo Free State outright via a private holding company and his private army.
Cecil Rhodes famously left an interview with Leopold white-faced and hissing “Satan! I tell you that man is Satan!”.
I was under the impression that at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorised his claim and committed the Congo Free State to him.
But you're definitely correct about the many voices raised against his atrocities - voices that finally succeeding in ending his reign of terror.
I am going to once again attack the windmill and reiterate my one-person linguistic crusade: stop using the word “liberal” to describe leftists. They are not the intellectual heirs of John Locke and John Stuart Mill; they are not the children of the Enlightenment. They are a perverse and primitive reaction to it. There is nothing liberal about the left.
“And we are back to lies, delusion or evil as a fundamental part of one’s political identity.” Of our human identity.