Yes, the Nazis were left wing — not of the right, and certainly not conservative. By Peter Hitchens.
An amazing fact emerges from Julia Boyd’s superb recent book Travellers In The Third Reich.
She describes how a Swiss academic, Denis de Rougemont, lived for some time in Frankfurt in the Nazi era, with the advantage of speaking and understanding German perfectly. This allowed him to have the private conversations with ordinary Germans which most foreign visitors could not.
He began by thinking that Hitler’s regime was Right-wing. But, as Julia Boyd writes: ‘What unsettled him was the fact that those who stood most naturally on the Right — lawyers, doctors, industrialists and so on — were the very ones who most bitterly denounced National Socialism. Far from being a bulwark against Communism, they complained, it was itself Communism in disguise.
‘They pointed out that only workers and peasants benefited from Nazi reforms, while their own values were being systematically destroyed by devious methods.
‘They were taxed disproportionately, their family life had been irreparably harmed, parental authority sapped, religion stripped and education eliminated. A lawyer’s wife complained to him, “Every evening my two children are taken over by the Party.”’
And those of you who have noticed the stripping of patriotism and Christianity from the Scouts and Guides, Cubs and Brownies over the past 20 years might note that this attack on old values through schools and children follows a carefully devised pattern in both the Third Reich and Stalin’s police state.
Recent US polling
As Hitler said, sneering gently: ‘When an opponent declares “I will not come over to your side”, I say calmly, “Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.” ’
No doubt someone will point out that the Nazis were also appalling and murderous racial bigots. This is true. But so was Stalin, who was preparing an antisemitic purge just before his death in 1953.
Several Communist countries did hold anti-Jewish purges in the early 1950s. Karl Marx, himself a Jew, was famously antisemitic. Much of the modern Left is suspiciously hostile to Israel, for sins which they overlook in other countries. …
A lefty lie:
But the assumption, common on the BBC and in schools and universities for 50 years now, that conservative politics is a form of Nazism, and that a desire to control immigration will lead directly to the death camps, should be rejected by any thinking, knowledgeable person.
The most basic test of left and right is the degree of collectivism.
Left = collectivist, society/state is paramount
Right = individualism, the individual is paramount
Up one end of the spectrum are the libertarians, with unfettered individualism and private wherever possible. Up the other is communism, with total state control and ownership, and next to the communists are the socialists.
The Nazis were fascists, meaning that they allowed private ownership but the state could commandeer anything they wanted whenever they wanted. Nazis didn’t call themselves “national socialists” for nothing. Have you ever even heard of individual rights in the 3rd Reich? On the left-right spectrum, that makes the Nazis way over to the left, edged out only by the communists.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
