Chet McAteer

THE RED SWASTIKA: HOW HITLER, MUSSOLINI, AND LENIN WERE BROTHERS IN COLLECTIVISM AND WHY THE "RIGHT-WING NAZI” IS THE GREATEST LIE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

[If Nazism was Right-wing, then define Right-wing.

Not by pointing at the Left and saying "the opposite of that.” Not by saying "not-Communist.” Not by borrowing the Left’s own taxonomy and flipping it. You can’t. Because no one can. Oddly, I’ve yet to find anyone who can define Right-Wing outside the definition of Left-Wing — which is exactly the tell....there is little, if any difference. Show how the so-called Right-Wing is any different than the Left-Wing?]

For eighty years the world has been taught a false taxonomy. Communism is placed on the Left. Fascism and Nazism are placed on the Right.

That lie was invented by Communists after 1945. It was invented to wash their own hands of their German cousins. It has been repeated ever since by schools, universities, and media.

The truth is simpler and far more damning. National Socialism was a Socialist movement. It was born of Marxism. It was raised in the German Social-Democratic tradition. It was carried to its logical conclusion by men who never once defended individual liberty, free markets, limited government, private property, or the rule of law. Those are the actual principles of the Right.

To call Nazism Right-wing is to empty the word Right of all meaning. The Right, in its classical American and English sense, means the individual over the collective. It means liberty over power. It means the Constitution over the Party. It means the market over the plan. It means God and family over the State.

The Nazis believed the opposite on every single point. Nazism was Leftism in German dress.

The key to the whole system is found in Zimmerman. He was the Planner for the Nazi Party in the sense that matters most. He was not a mere administrator of factories and quotas. He was the man who supplied the intellectual bridge by which German Marxism became German National Socialism.

His formulation is this. There was an unconditional acceptance of Marxio-Sombartian premises with regard to the death of individualism, growth of mass production, collectivism, and so forth. From these premises the natural conclusion is drawn that since collectivism is coming anyway, it might as well be dealt with efficiently and fairly by being converted from trust-collectivism into State-ownership of the means of production. All this, of course, is the German Social-Democratic Marxism.

Read carefully, Zimmerman does not reject Marx. He accepts Marx unconditionally. He accepts Werner Sombart, the great German professor whom Friedrich Engels himself called the only German professor who understood Das Kapital.

He accepts Sombart’s doctrine that individualism was dead. He accepts that mass production had made the small independent proprietor obsolete. He accepts that collectivism was historically inevitable.

From that Marxist premise Zimmerman draws the National Socialist conclusion. If collectivism is coming anyway, it should not be left to the trusts, to the cartels, to Jewish finance, or to international capital. It should be taken over and converted from trust-collectivism into State-ownership, making the State the sole trust.

That is why National Socialism was never a defense of capitalism. It was German Social-Democratic Marxism made national, made efficient, and made total.

Sombart himself saw it. As Abram Harris documented in 1942, Sombart looked upon the Nazi Party as the means of realizing the principles he espoused. He declared that the present-day exponents of his Socialist views are to be found among the Italian Fascists and German Nazis.

Sombart later wrote that the National Socialist movement is far more radical than proletarian Socialism. National Socialism is not only concerned with economics but embraces every part of German life and culture and is totalistic. Those statements echo almost verbatim the propaganda of the Nazi Party. That totalism is the essence of Zimmerman’s planning.

The Party was called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler did not hide this. He fought for it.

When bourgeois nationalists in Munich wanted to drop Socialist and Workers from the name to make it respectable, Hitler refused. He insisted that the movement was Socialist and was for workers.

In Mein Kampf he wrote:

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”

In a 1927 speech he declared:

"We are not bourgeois nationalists. We are German Socialists. Our Socialism is not Marxist international socialism. It is German Socialism, Socialism of the nation.”

That distinction, national versus international, was the only distinction Hitler ever drew between himself and Marx. He never drew a distinction between himself and Socialism. He claimed Socialism for Germany.

Joseph Goebbels, the Party’s chief propagandist, was even more explicit. His meaning is clearest not in a single invented one-line slogan, but in the full, verifiable texts of Der Nazi-Sozi of 1927 and Lenin oder Hitler? of 1926. There he argued at length that Lenin and Hitler were both children of the same system and conquerors of the same system. Both embodied a revolutionary idea against liberal capitalist democracy. National Socialism was the result of bourgeois betrayal of the national idea and Marxist betrayal of the Socialist idea.

In Der Nazi-Sozi he wrote in dialogue form:

"Yes, we call ourselves a workers’ party! That is the first step away from a bourgeois state. We call ourselves a workers’ party because we want to free labor, because for us creative labor is the element that drives history, because labor to us is more than possession, education, class, and family origin.”

"Yes, we call ourselves Socialist! That is the second step against the bourgeois state. We call ourselves Socialist as a protest against the lie of social bourgeois pity. We want our rights according to nature and the law. We want our full share of what Heaven has given us, and what we have created with our own hands and minds. That is Socialism.”

He added that he fought for sixty years not for Socialism, but for Marxism. Marxism, whose theories are fatal to peoples and races, is the exact opposite of living Socialism. Marxism was never the political idea of a German worker. The worker has no right to doubt Socialism, but rather the duty to doubt Marxism.

He added that if we were only anti-Semites, we would be out of place in the twentieth century. However, we are also Socialists. For us the two go together. Socialism, the freedom of the German proletariat and thereby of the German nation, can only be achieved against the Jews. Since we want Germany’s freedom, or Socialism, we are anti-Semites.

He added the economic corollary. Production that is essentially completed, which no longer requires strength, ability, inventiveness, entrepreneurship and brilliance, for example the transportation system, trusts, and conglomerates, will be brought back to state ownership.

In Lenin oder Hitler? he wrote:

"The system of liberal capitalist democracy is already so rotten inside that there is nothing left to mend or reform. It must be fundamentally destroyed, shattered spiritually and in terms of power politics, so that a young, new generation can build a future on the ruins of the past. They have recognized the essence of a consistent opposition in the necessity of directing the revolution not only against the supporters of the system being fought against, but against the system itself. This is the revolutionary idea of the two spiritual movements that found their political expression in the Communist Party and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”

He wrote that when I talk about Lenin or Hitler, I am not referring to these two men in their purely coincidental human or no longer coincidental political appearance. It is more than that. I am talking about these two men insofar as they are the embodiment, the representation of an idea, insofar as they are overcoming an old idea of the state and pioneering a new one.

He wrote that Lenin and Hitler are children of the system, they became conquerors of the system. Lenin sacrifices Marx and gives in to the Russian peasant’s insistence on his own soil. Lenin sacrificed Marx and instead gave Russia freedom. You want to sacrifice German freedom for Marx.

He wrote that we are national because we have recognized that every great idea of the state has its origins in native soil. We are Socialist because we do not want to fight for the rights of our enslaved comrades as gifts given voluntarily or even involuntarily. We are Socialist because we see those rights as a state necessity and as national justice. We do not want a bourgeois state. We do not want a proletarian state. We want Germany. The nation is the last and the greatest thing, the individual is nothing before it.

These are not the words of Right-wingers. They are the words of men who believed Marx was right about economics and wrong only about the nation.

The Nazi movement did not hide its Socialism in its program either. Its 25-Point Program of 1920 demanded in Point 11 the abolition of incomes unearned by work and the abolition of interest slavery. In Point 13 it demanded the nationalization of all businesses which have been up to the present formed into companies, that is, trusts. In Point 14 it demanded the sharing out of profits from wholesale trade. In Point 15 it demanded the expansion of old-age insurance on a large scale.

In Point 17 it demanded a land reform suitable to national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation, the abolition of ground rent, and the prevention of speculation in land. In Point 18 it demanded ruthless war against criminals who harm the common good, with usurers and profiteers to be punished with death. In Point 20 it demanded that the State shall ensure that every capable and industrious German can get higher education and thus obtain a leading position.

In Point 21 it demanded that the State shall improve public health, protect mothers and infants, prohibit child labor, and promote physical fitness through compulsory gymnastics and sports. In Point 25 it demanded the creation of a strong central power in the Reich with unconditional authority of the central parliament over the entire Reich.

Where in this is the Right? Where is limited government? Where is private property? Where is free enterprise? Where is local self-government? Where is individual rights?

Nowhere. Every point expands the State. Every point attacks private property. Every point attacks profit, attacks interest, attacks inheritance, and centralizes power in Berlin.

Gottfried Feder, the Party’s early economic theorist, wrote the pamphlet Manifesto for Breaking the Bondage of Interest, which became required reading.

He wrote that Marx was right about one thing, that interest-bearing capital is the enemy of productive labor, but Marx stopped halfway. We must go further and break interest slavery altogether. This was not free enterprise. This was Marx nationalized.

Hitler himself, in another speech, made the Marxist theory of value explicit when he said that the capitalistic system has only one aim, and that is to make profit for the capitalist, while the National Socialist system has only one aim, and that is the welfare of the people.

Feder also wrote that interest is the unearned income of the capitalist, it must be abolished, and productive capital must serve the nation, not the individual. That is pure Marx: the abolition of unearned income and the subordination of capital to the collective.

The great deception of Nazi economics was that it left the name of private property while destroying its substance. Historians of the regime have put it bluntly. The guiding principle of Nazi economics was that all property belongs to the people, the Volk, and was to be used only for the good of the people. Economic property was no longer anyone’s private possession but was to be used by State permission and only for the good of the people.

Peter Temin, in Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning, concluded that both governments reorganized industry into larger units, ostensibly to increase state control over economic activity. The Nazis reorganized industry into 13 administrative groups to enforce that control.

In practice this meant, first, that the State told you what to produce. Under the Four Year Plan of 1936, Hermann Göring was given virtually dictatorial controls to direct the German economy. Businesses could be told to make something different and were not allowed to raise wages. Workers could be sent to other factories. Targets were set by the Party, not by the market.

Göring himself announced the doctrine to the industrialists in 1936. The Plan was for the security of German honor and German life, and Germany must have raw materials and would get them. As director of the Plan he first extended Party control over the domestic economy because he and his minions had no use for private enterprise. They were determined to mobilize the entire economy for war. His famous slogan summed it up: guns make the country strong, butter makes you fat.

Second, the State told you what to charge and what to pay. Wages and prices were controlled under penalty of being sent to the concentration camp. Dividends were restricted to six percent on book capital.

An owner could not decide to pay his men more to attract better labor. He could not raise his price to meet demand. He could not distribute his own profits as he wished. The profit motive, the heart of capitalism, was amputated by decree.

Third, the State told you whom to employ and whom to fire. The Law for the Ordering of National Labor of 1934 made the owner a Betriebsführer, a leader of the plant, but a leader who answered to the Party’s Trustees of Labor.

He could not freely hire, fire, or set conditions. The worker was not a free contractor but a member of the Betriebsgemeinschaft, the plant community, subject to state discipline.

Fourth, the State owned the commanding heights outright. From 1933 to 1943 the number of state-owned firms had expanded to over 500, mostly in key industries. The greatest of these was the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, founded in 1937, a mammoth state-owned steel, mining, and armaments conglomerate that swallowed private competitors whole.

As one modern summary puts it, instead of nationalizing the means of production, as the communists did, the National Socialists left them largely in private hands, but private ownership increasingly became little more than a formal legal title, because the state dictated how property was to be used. Hitler’s goal increasingly became a state-controlled planned economy modeled on Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Article 153 of the Weimar Constitution, which had guaranteed private property, with expropriation only to occur within the due process of the law, was nullified by a decree on February 28, 1933.

With this the new National Socialist government had complete control of private property in Germany. Later the regime reorganized all industry into corporations run by members of the Nazi Party.

This is the precise point Zimmerman understood. The Nazi owner was not a capitalist, he was a stipendiary. He kept his legal title. He kept his office. He kept a salary, a stipend, fixed by the State. He kept, in many cases, a capped dividend of six percent.

But he lost the three rights that define ownership. He lost the right to decide what to make. He lost the right to decide at what price to sell it. He lost the right to decide what to do with the surplus.

In the words of contemporary observers, government control of the largest firms was extensive enough to leave only the shell of private ownership. The owner who disobeyed was not fined in the liberal sense, he was removed. Boards of directors were purged and replaced by Party appointees. The civil service was responsible for appointing new directors, and many of these new appointees came from the civil service as well. Shareholders lost control.

Hitler stated the philosophy behind this in 1933, in a speech to industrialists that is still quoted by historians of the regime. The State should retain supervision and each property owner should consider himself appointed by the State. It is his duty not to use his property against the interests of the State.

Göring was even blunter to the industrialists of the Ruhr. If you do not cooperate, we will take your plants anyway. That is not capitalism. That is Marxist expropriation by administrative means rather than by formal confiscation.

Hitler also said to the Reichstag in 1933 that the National Socialist State will not be a slave of the economy, the economy will be a servant of the State. Göring said in 1936 to industrialists that the Four Year Plan is not a suggestion, it is a command, and whoever does not obey will be treated as a saboteur of the nation.

This is why the Nazi economic system must be understood not as a variant of capitalism, but as what it was: a Marxist planned economy in nationalist dress, where private companies existed in name, but the Party owned, controlled, and directed them in fact.

Why Zimmerman matters is that his insight explains why the Nazis could simultaneously claim to be anti-Marxist and implement a Marxist economy. They were anti-international Marxist, anti-Jewish-Bolshevik Marxist, but they were not anti-collectivist.

They took Marx’s premises, death of individualism, inevitability of mass production, necessity of collectivism, and they fulfilled them in a national form.

The trusts were not broken up to restore competition. They were absorbed to create a single national trust, directed by the Party. The private owner was not freed to compete. He was retained as a manager, paid a stipend, and ordered to obey. In Zimmerman’s phrase, this was German Social-Democratic Marxism, Marx without the internationalism, Sombart without the liberal residue, collectivism made German, made disciplined, and made total.

Hitler did not emerge from a conservative salon. He emerged from the Munich Soviet.

In 1919 Munich was ruled by a Communist Soviet Republic, the Räterepublik, led by Kurt Eisner, Ernst Toller, and Eugen Leviné. The streets were filled with red flags, workers’ councils, and Marxist agitators. Hitler was there. He was not fighting the Left from the outside. He was inside that world, watching it, learning its language, learning its tactics, and learning why it failed.

The German Workers’ Party, which became the NSDAP, was founded in that same Munich in January 1919 by Anton Drexler, a locksmith, a trade unionist, and a member of the German Fatherland Party who had been steeped in Social-Democratic Marxism. Its first members were not aristocrats or bankers. They were railroad workers, machinists, soldiers, and disgruntled Social Democrats who believed the SPD had betrayed Socialism by becoming too bourgeois, too parliamentary, too soft.

Hitler joined as member No. 55 in September 1919. He did not purge the Socialism out of the Party. He purged the bourgeois nationalists out and made it more Socialist.

In 1920, when the party debated its program, the two factions were clear. The nationalist faction wanted a party of order, property, and the old Reich. The Socialist faction, led by Hitler, Drexler, and the Strasser brothers, wanted a party of workers, nationalization, and war on capital. Hitler won.

The Strassers, Gregor and Otto Strasser, became the intellectual leaders of the Nazi Left. Gregor Strasser, who built the party organization in northern Germany, wrote in 1925 that we National Socialists are enemies of the capitalist economic order, we want to destroy it and replace it with a socialist economic order based on German labor.

Otto Strasser, in his 1930 pamphlet Ministersessel oder Revolution, Ministerial Chair or Revolution, declared that the National Socialist idea is Socialist, it is anti-capitalist to the core, and whoever defends capitalism is not a National Socialist.

Hitler later broke with the Strassers over tactics, not over socialism. He thought they were too openly Marxist in language and too reckless in timing. He never once accused them of being too Socialist. He accused them of being too impatient.

When Otto Strasser was expelled in 1930, he founded the Black Front and continued to preach the exact same Socialism, only more radically. The split was a Leftist family quarrel, not a Left-Right quarrel.

You cannot understand Nazism without understanding what came before it: fifty years of German Social-Democratic Marxism. The SPD was, by 1912, the largest political party in Germany and the largest Marxist party in the world. It had built a complete counter-society: Socialist trade unions, Socialist cooperatives, Socialist newspapers, Socialist youth groups, Socialist funeral societies, and Socialist sports clubs.

It taught millions of Germans a single catechism. The individual is nothing. The collective is everything. The market is anarchy. The plan is reason. Private property is theft. The State is the instrument of justice.

Werner Sombart, the great professor at Berlin, was the bridge between academic Marxism and Nazi practice. As Friedrich Engels himself admitted, Sombart was the only German professor who understood Das Kapital. Sombart took Marx’s theory of the concentration of capital and the death of the small proprietor and turned it into a German national doctrine.

In his 1934 book Deutscher Sozialismus, German Socialism, Sombart wrote that Marx was right, capitalism must die, but Marx was wrong about who would bury it. It will not be the international proletariat. It will be the German people, through the German State.

He wrote that Socialism does not mean the rule of the workers. Socialism means the rule of the State over the economy for the good of the whole.

That is Zimmerman’s premise in academic form. That is the Nazi premise in political form. That is pure Leftism: the State over the economy, the whole over the individual.

Zimmerman, as the Planner, took Sombart’s theory and made it administrative reality. That sentence is the Rosetta Stone of Nazism. It proves that the Nazis did not reject Marx. They completed Marx. They took his prophecy and fulfilled it by State power.

Ask yourself who Hitler hated more, the Communists or the Liberals. In Mein Kampf Hitler spends hundreds of pages attacking liberalism, parliamentarianism, individualism, free trade, and the Jewish-liberal press. He attacks Communists too, but as rivals, not as opposites. He calls them misguided brothers who have the right instinct, hatred of capitalism, but the wrong nation.

In a 1928 speech in Munich, Hitler said that the liberal believes in the individual, we believe in the people. The liberal believes in freedom from the State, we believe in freedom through the State. The liberal is our mortal enemy, because he poisons the soul of the nation with individualism.

Compare that to Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Marx wrote that the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe, and it has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

Both men hated the bourgeoisie. Both men hated liberal individualism. Both men hated the free market. Both men wanted to replace it with a planned collective.

The difference was only that Marx wanted the plan run by the international proletariat, while Hitler wanted it run by the German Volk.

That is not a difference between Right and Left. That is a difference between two factions of the Left: international Socialism versus national Socialism.

Lenin understood this. In 1921 Lenin wrote that Fascism and National Socialism were the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital. But even Lenin, in private, admitted that the Nazis had stolen the Socialist program and made it national.

Stalin, who signed a pact with Hitler in 1939 and divided Poland with him, understood it even better. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not an alliance of opposites. It was an alliance of two socialist empires dividing the spoils of Eastern Europe.

Every Leftist movement in history has rested on four pillars. Nazism rested on all four, while the Right rejects all four.

The first pillar is collectivism over individualism. The Right says the individual has inalienable rights and the State exists to protect them. The Left says the individual has no rights against the collective and the collective exists to use him.

The Nazi slogan, carved on every Party building, was Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz, common good before individual good. Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote that the individual is not the measure of all things, the people is the measure, and the individual must sacrifice himself for the people, or he has no value.

The second pillar is the State over the market. The Right says the market is free exchange between free men and government should be limited, umpired, and small. The Left says the market is chaos and exploitation and the State must plan, direct, and own.

Hitler in 1933 to the Reichstag said that the National Socialist State will not be a slave of the economy, the economy will be a servant of the State.

Göring in 1936 to industrialists said that the Four Year Plan is not a suggestion, it is a command, and whoever does not obey will be treated as a saboteur of the nation.

The third pillar is equality of outcome over liberty. The Right says men are equal before the law, but unequal in talent, effort, and outcome, and that inequality is just. The Left says inequality is injustice and the State must enforce equality, uniformity, and sameness.

Eric Hoffer, the great observer of mass movements, saw this perfectly in The True Believer, when he wrote that those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom, and if they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity.

That is Nazism. That is Communism. That is every Leftist movement. The Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, the People’s Community, was a project to erase class, erase individuality, erase difference, and make every German a uniform cell in the national body. Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote that we must make the German people one people, one will, one faith, one destiny, there must be no more classes, there must be only Germans.

The fourth pillar is revolution over tradition. The Right says change slowly, preserve what works, respect tradition, family, Church, and custom. The Left says destroy the old order, burn it down, and build a New Man.

The Nazis were revolutionaries. They despised the Kaiserreich as bourgeois and weak. They despised the Weimar Republic as liberal and corrupt. They wanted a Third Reich, a new beginning, a new man, a new world.

Goebbels in his Diary in 1933 wrote that we are not restoring the past, we are creating the future, the old Germany is dead, the new Germany is being born in blood and fire. That is the language of Robespierre. That is the language of Lenin. That is the language of Mao. It is never the language of the Right.

If Nazism were Right-wing, it would have protected Right-wing institutions, but it destroyed them all.

The Church was attacked when the Nazis signed a Concordat with the Vatican in 1933 and then broke it. They arrested priests, closed Catholic schools, banned Catholic youth groups, and created a pagan Reich Church under Ludwig Müller.

Hitler called Christianity a Jewish invention and a religion for slaves. Alfred Rosenberg, the Party’s racial philosopher, wrote in The Myth of the Twentieth Century that the Christian Church must be destroyed and the German soul must be freed from its Jewish poison.

The family was not protected as a private sphere but was nationalized. The Lebensborn program bred children for the State. The Hitler Youth took children from their parents at age 10 and indoctrinated them against their parents. Mothers were given the Mother’s Cross not for raising free children, but for producing soldiers for the State. A Nazi poster proclaimed that your child belongs to the Führer.

The university was attacked when the Nazis purged 1,200 professors in 1933 alone, including many conservatives who defended academic freedom. They burned books and replaced the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of racial doctrine.

The Rector of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger, declared in 1933 that the Führer himself and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.

The judiciary was attacked when the Nazis abolished judicial independence. Judges were ordered to decide cases not by law, but by the healthy sentiment of the people. Roland Freisler, president of the People’s Court, told judges that you are not servants of the law, you are servants of the Führer.

Private property, as we have seen, was reduced to a stipend. The owner who disobeyed was expropriated, arrested, or sent to Dachau. A Right-wing movement does not do these things. A Left-wing totalitarian movement does them all.

The Communists knew Nazism was Leftist. That is why they feared it so much, not as an opposite, but as a competitor for the same voters. In the elections of 1930, 1932, and 1933, the Nazis and the Communists were fighting for the same working-class voters in Berlin, in the Ruhr, and in Saxony. The Social Democrats were losing those voters to both extremes.

The Nazi vote did not come from conservative country squires. It came from unemployed workers, from young men radicalized by the Depression, and from former SPD and KPD members who switched sides because Hitler promised them what Marx had promised them, only faster, and in German.

The Communist Party of Germany in 1931 issued a directive calling the SPD social fascists and the Nazis the main enemy, not because the Nazis were Right-wing, but because they were stealing the Left’s base.

After the war, the East German Communists built the Berlin Wall and called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. They called the Federal Republic fascist because it had a free market. They called themselves anti-fascist because they had a planned economy, the same planned economy Hitler had built.

The irony is perfect. The Communists called free-market West Germany fascist, and called planned-economy East Germany anti-fascist, when in truth, the planned economy was the fascist economy, and the free market was the anti-fascist economy.

The academic Left invented the horseshoe theory, the idea that far-Left and far-Right meet at the extremes, but it is a fraud designed to hide the truth. There is no horseshoe. There is a straight line.

On one end of the line is Liberty: individual rights, limited government, free markets, private property, rule of law, family, Church, and tradition. On the other end is Power: collectivism, unlimited government, planned economy, abolition of property, rule of the Party, destruction of family and Church, and revolution.

Communism is at the Power end. Nazism is at the Power end. Fascism is at the Power end. Socialism is on the road to the Power’s end. Conservatism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, and the American Founding are at the Liberty end.

Nazism was not Right-wing. It was not conservative. It was not capitalist. It was not Christian. It was not traditional. It was Leftist, purely, completely, totally Leftist.

Until the world admits that, it will never understand how such evil could arise, or how easily it could arise again under a new red flag, a new green flag, or a new rainbow flag, preaching the same old gospel: the collective over the individual, the State over the man, and equality over freedom.

This is the part the textbooks always leave out, because if you understand it, the whole Left-Right fraud collapses. The Nazis and Fascists did not just fight Communists, they fought like Communists. They used the exact same method the Bolsheviks used: first destroy the rival Left outside the party, then purge the rival Left inside the party, until only one man, one faction, one orthodoxy remained.

It was not Right versus Left. It was Left versus Left versus Left, a war of competing collectivisms for the same throne.

Every totalitarian purge in the 20th century was copied from Lenin. Lenin did not believe in a loyal opposition. He believed in democratic centralism, which meant debate until the Party decides, then obey or die.

In the first step, to destroy the other Socialists outside the Party, in 1917 the Bolsheviks were a minority even on the Left. The Mensheviks were larger. The Socialist Revolutionaries, the SRs, were far larger, for they won the majority in the Constituent Assembly election of November 1917.

Lenin’s answer was not to debate them. It was to dissolve the Constituent Assembly at gunpoint on January 5, 1918, after one day. Then came the Cheka. Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, declared that we stand for organized terror, and terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution.

The Mensheviks were arrested, their newspapers closed, their leaders exiled. The Right SRs were tried in a show trial in 1922. The Left SRs, who had been Bolshevik allies, were crushed after their uprising in July 1918.

The Anarchists of Kronstadt, sailors who had made the October Revolution possible, rose in March 1921 demanding Soviets without Communists, free speech, and free trade unions. Trotsky and Tukhachevsky drowned them in blood, sending 50,000 Red Army troops across the ice to machine-gun the fortress.

By 1921 Lenin had banned all other parties. The Soviet Union was a one-party Leftist state.

In the second step, to destroy the other Socialists inside the Party, Lenin turned inward. In March 1921, at the 10th Party Congress, he passed the resolution On Party Unity, banning factions inside the Communist Party itself.

The Workers’ Opposition, led by Alexandra Kollontai and Alexander Shlyapnikov, had argued for workers’ control of industry. Lenin called them anarchist deviation and crushed them. The Democratic Centralists, led by Timofei Sapronov, had argued for more democracy inside the Party. Lenin crushed them.

Stalin then perfected the method. In the 1920s and 1930s he purged the Left Opposition, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, for being too Trotskyist, too internationalist, too permanent-revolutionary. He purged the Right Opposition, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, for being too Bukharinist, too gradualist, too pro-peasant. He purged the Old Bolsheviks, the very men who made the Revolution, in the Moscow Trials of 1936 to 1938, where Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, and hundreds of others were forced to confess to absurd crimes and were shot.

Stalin’s logic was pure Lenin: that there can be only one line, and any deviation, Left or Right, is treason. As Stalin put it in 1927, the Party is not a discussion club, the Party is a monolithic army of the proletariat, and whoever weakens its unity weakens the revolution. That sentence could have been written by Hitler. It could have been written by Mussolini. It was the doctrine of all three.

The Nazi SA and the Communist Rotfrontkämpferbund, the Red Front Fighters’ League, fought a literal street war in Germany from 1924 to 1933. In Berlin, in Hamburg, in the Ruhr, and in Saxony, they beat each other with clubs, knives, and pistols in beer halls, in tenements, and in factory yards.

It was not a war of Right versus Left. It was a war of two Socialist gangs fighting for the same unemployed workers, the same hungry youth, and the same streets. The Communists called the Nazis social fascists. The Nazis called the Communists Jewish Bolsheviks. Both called the Social Democrats traitors to Socialism. Both promised the same thing: to abolish capitalism, nationalize industry, destroy the bourgeoisie, and build a planned economy.

When Hitler took power on January 30, 1933, he did not negotiate with the Communists. He destroyed them, exactly as Lenin had destroyed the Mensheviks. On February 27, 1933 came the Reichstag Fire, and Hitler blamed the Communists. On February 28, 1933 came the Reichstag Fire Decree which suspended habeas corpus, free speech, free press, and free assembly. Article 153 of the Weimar Constitution, guaranteeing private property, was nullified.

In March 1933, 10,000 Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists were arrested and sent to Dachau, Oranienburg, and other new camps. On May 2, 1933, the SA occupied every trade union headquarters in Germany, seized their funds, arrested their leaders, and replaced them with the German Labor Front under Robert Ley. In June 1933 the SPD was banned. The KPD had already been banned.

Hitler justified it in the classic Bolshevik language, that the Marxist parties must be destroyed root and branch, and Germany cannot live with two Socialist movements, there can be only one…the National Socialist Workers Party.

But Hitler did not stop with the Communists outside. He turned on the Socialists inside his own party, because, like Lenin and Stalin, he knew that the most dangerous enemy is the comrade who believes in the same revolution but wants to lead it himself.

The target was the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm, and behind Röhm, the Strasserist Left of the NSDAP. Röhm and the SA were not conservatives, they were revolutionaries. Röhm had 3 million men in brown shirts by 1934, far larger than the regular army. He demanded a Second Revolution, the real Socialist revolution Hitler had promised.

Röhm’s doctrine, in his own words, was that the SA is the army of the German revolution, we have made the first revolution, the national revolution, now we must make the second revolution, the Socialist revolution, the Reichswehr must be absorbed into the SA, the great estates must be broken up, the trusts must be nationalized, and the bourgeoisie must be destroyed.

Gregor Strasser, the party’s organizational genius, agreed. Strasser had built the NSDAP in northern Germany as an explicitly anti-capitalist, pro-worker, pro-nationalization party. His 1925 program demanded nationalization of heavy industry, profit-sharing, land reform, and destruction of interest slavery.

Hitler, who by 1934 needed the army, the industrialists, and the conservative generals to consolidate power, decided that Röhm and Strasser were now expendable. On June 30 to July 2, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler acted exactly as Stalin would act two years later.

SS squads, under Himmler and Heydrich, murdered Ernst Röhm, Chief of Staff of the SA, shot in Stadelheim Prison. They murdered Gregor Strasser, former Reich Organization Leader, shot in his cell. They murdered Edmund Heines, SA leader in Silesia, shot in bed with his lover. They murdered Karl Ernst, SA leader in Berlin, shot. They murdered Gustav von Kahr, former Bavarian Commissioner, hacked to death with pickaxes. They murdered Kurt von Schleicher, former Chancellor and conservative general, shot in his home with his wife. They murdered Edgar Jung, conservative Catholic intellectual who had called for a return to law, shot.

At least 85 men were murdered in three days. Some historians put the number at over 200. Hitler announced it to the Reichstag on July 13, 1934, in words that could have come straight from Lenin, that in this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people, and I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders of this treason.

He had become, like Lenin, like Stalin, the supreme judge. The Party was now monolithic. The SA was purged, reduced from 3 million to a ceremonial husk. The Strasserist Left was beheaded. The Second Revolution was dead.

Otto Strasser, Gregor’s brother, fled to Prague and then to Canada, where he wrote bitterly that Hitler betrayed Socialism, he kept the nationalism and threw away the Socialism, he is not a Socialist, he is a Bonapartist.

But Otto Strasser was wrong about one thing. Hitler did not throw away Socialism. He threw away Röhm’s Socialism, street Socialism, SA Socialism, and kept Zimmerman’s Socialism, State Socialism, planned Socialism , bureaucratic Socialism. He replaced the SA’s revolution from below with the SS’s revolution from above. The method, however, was identical to Stalin’s: purge the faction, murder the leader, and declare unity.

Mussolini’s story is the same story, in Italian. This is the fact the textbooks hide most carefully. Benito Mussolini was not a man of the Right who became a Fascist. He was a man of the Left who remained a man of the Left and renamed it.

Mussolini was editor of Avanti, the official newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party, from 1912 to 1914. He was the rising star of Italian Marxism. He was expelled in 1914 not for being anti-Socialist, but for being too nationalist, for supporting Italian intervention in World War I when the Socialist Party demanded neutrality.

He founded Il Popolo d’Italia in 1914 with money from French and Italian industrialists who wanted Italy in the war, but his program was still Socialist: nationalization, land reform, workers’ control, abolition of the Senate, and universal suffrage.

In 1919 he founded the Fasci di Combattimento. Its first program, the San Sepolcro Program of March 23, 1919, demanded universal suffrage and abolition of the Senate, an 8-hour workday and minimum wage, nationalization of armaments factories, confiscation of Church property, progressive tax on capital and abolition of inheritance, and land for peasants and workers’ participation in management. That is not a Right-wing program. That is a Socialist program.

From 1919 to 1922, Italy was in a civil war between the Fascist squadristi, blackshirt gangs, and the Socialist and Communist Arditi del Popolo, Red Guards. They burned each other’s headquarters. They beat each other in the streets of Bologna, Parma, Turin, and Milan.

In Parma in August 1922, the Arditi del Popolo, led by Guido Picelli, actually defeated the Fascists in street fighting and drove them out of the working-class Oltretorrente district.

Mussolini, like Hitler, did not negotiate. After the March on Rome in October 1922, he destroyed the Left outside. In 1923 the Acerbo Law rigged elections for the Fascists. In 1924 Giacomo Matteotti, the Socialist deputy who denounced Fascist fraud, was kidnapped and murdered by Fascist squadristi. His body was found in a shallow grave outside Rome.

In 1925 to 1926 the Exceptional Laws banned all opposition parties, closed opposition newspapers, abolished free trade unions, and created the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State.

In 1926 Antonio Gramsci, leader of the Italian Communist Party, was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He died in prison in 1937. Mussolini’s prosecutor said that we must prevent this brain from functioning for twenty years.

But Mussolini, like Hitler and Stalin, also purged his own Left. The early Fascist movement contained a powerful revolutionary syndicalist wing, men like Edmondo Rossoni, leader of the Fascist trade unions, and Sergio Panunzio, the syndicalist philosopher, and even Roberto Farinacci, the brutal Ras of Cremona, who demanded a second wave of Fascist revolution, nationalization, workers’ control, and destruction of the old bourgeoisie.

Rossoni built the Fascist Confederation of Corporations into a mass organization of 2 million workers by 1926, demanding workers’ participation in management, profit-sharing, and control of industry. Mussolini, who by 1925 needed the industrialists, the King, the army, and the Vatican to stay in power, decided Rossoni was dangerous.

In 1928 he dissolved Rossoni’s confederation, broke it into small, powerless corporations controlled by the State, and exiled Rossoni to a minor post. Farinacci, who had demanded a purge of the bourgeois elements in the Fascist Party and a second revolution, was removed as Party Secretary in 1926 and marginalized.

The syndicalist philosopher Panunzio was kept as a theorist but stripped of power.

Mussolini explained it in his Doctrine of Fascism of 1932, written with Giovanni Gentile, that Fascism is totalitarian, everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State, and that Fascism is opposed to liberalism, for liberalism believes in the individual, while Fascism believes in the State. That is not Right-wing. That is the Leftist doctrine of total State control, applied to Italy.

Put the three movements side by side, and the pattern is unmistakable.

In each case the outside enemy was the other Socialists. For the Bolsheviks it was the Mensheviks, SRs, Anarchists, and Kronstadt sailors. For the Nazis it was the KPD, SPD, Red Front, and Trade Unions. For the Fascists it was the PSI, PCI, Arditi del Popolo, and Matteotti.

In each case the method outside was terror and banning. For the Bolsheviks it was the Cheka, show trials, dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the Kronstadt massacre. For the Nazis it was the Reichstag Fire Decree, Dachau, the May 2, 1933 union seizure, and the SPD and KPD ban. For the Fascists it was squadristi terror, the Matteotti murder, the Exceptional Laws, and the Gramsci imprisonment.

In each case the inside enemy was the other Socialists inside the party. For the Bolsheviks it was the Workers’ Opposition, Trotskyists, Bukharinists, and Old Bolsheviks. For the Nazis it was Röhm, the SA, the Strasserists, and the Second Revolution. For the Fascists it was Rossoni, the Syndicalists, Farinacci, and the Second Wave.

In each case the method inside was the purge. For the Bolsheviks it was the ban on factions in 1921, the Moscow Trials, the Gulag, and executions. For the Nazis it was the Night of Long Knives in 1934, the SS murders, and the SA purge. For the Fascists it was the dissolution of Fascist unions in 1928, the removal of Farinacci, and the marginalization of syndicalists.

In each case the justification was the same. For the Bolsheviks it was Party unity, democratic centralism, and monolithic army. For the Nazis it was supreme judge of the German people and unity of the Party. For the Fascists it was everything in the State.

In each case the result was the same: One Party, One Leader, One Line, with Stalin for the Bolsheviks, Hitler for the Nazis, and Mussolini for the Fascists.

Three movements. Three countries. Three languages. One method.

The method is Leftist because it rests on a Leftist premise: that the collective has the right to destroy the individual, that the Party has the right to destroy the faction, that the Leader has the right to destroy the Party, all in the name of History, the People, the Nation, and the Proletariat.

The Right has no such doctrine. The Right believes in loyal opposition, in checks and balances, in the rule of law, in the right to dissent, and in the sanctity of the individual conscience. A Right-wing party that murders its own members for disagreeing about economics is not Right-wing. It is a Leftist party wearing a different flag.

The purge is not an accident of totalitarianism. It is totalitarianism. Once you accept the premise that the State is everything and the individual is nothing, you must purge. Once you accept that premise, any disagreement is not a difference of opinion. It is treason against the collective. It is sabotage of History. It is a disease in the national body that must be cut out.

Lenin purged the Mensheviks, then the Workers’ Opposition, then the Trotskyists, then the Bukharinists, then the Old Bolsheviks. Hitler purged the Communists, then the Social Democrats, then the SA, then the Strasserists, then the conservative generals in 1938 in the Blomberg-Fritsch affair, then the July 20 plotters in 1944. Mussolini purged the Socialists, then the Communists, then the syndicalists, then the Farinacci faction, then, in 1943, his own son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, whom he had shot for voting against him in the Grand Council.

Stalin purged until his death in 1953. Hitler purged until his suicide in 1945. Mussolini purged until his execution in 1945.

The purge never stops because collectivism never stops. Once you declare that the group is everything, you must constantly purify the group. The enemy is always inside, always hiding, always deviating.

That is why the Bolshevik, Nazi, and Fascist purges are not three separate stories. They are one story, told three times, in three languages, with three different flags, but with the same Leftist grammar: destroy the rival Left outside, destroy the rival Left inside, declare unity, and repeat. To call any of this Right-wing is to lie about what the Right is, what the Left is, and what totalitarianism is.

In Liberty and Eternal Vigilance,

C.M.McAteer

September 15, 2004

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