All totalitarian ideologies are collectivist

Our modern society increasingly struggles with the notion of historical nuance

On June 16 1941, as the Panzer divisions massed for Operation Barbarossa, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s odious propaganda chief, mused about the new order that the Nazis would enforce on a conquered Russia. There would be no comeback, he wrote, for tsars, priests or capitalists. Rather, in place of the debased socialism of the Bolsheviks, the Nazis would impose “der echte Sozialismus” – real socialism.

It is a measure of the modern Left’s cultural ascendancy that those words should now seem so jarring. The Nazis might have placed industries under state control, and created workers’ councils. They might have called themselves the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. But woe betide the modern politician who draws attention to it.

Last week, Left-wing MEPs moved a resolution condemning the rise of fascist and far-Right violence. Responding for the conservative bloc, Syed Kamall, a savvy British Tory, highighted the fact that in the Thirties both communism and fascism believed in economic collectivism. There was a reason, he said, that the Nazis called themselves National Socialists.

His words brought pandemonium to the hemicycle. Leftist MEPs shrieked and yowled and gibbered like stricken animals. I half-expected their leader, a German Social Democrat, to faint like a scandalised Victorian matron, bloomers flashing.

Mr Kamall, an amiable sort who hates upsetting people, rushed to apologise, but to no avail. “Mr Kamall’s apology was not very convincing,” fumed Liberal leader, Guy Verhofstadt. “Talking about the Nazis as National Socialists and pointing his finger to the Social Democrats in the European Parliament is insulting towards those who lost their lives in the fight against Nazism. Shame.”

Got that? It is now unacceptable to refer to the Nazis by their actual name. The writer Ed West coined the word “hatefact” to mean an undisputed truth which may none the less not be spoken. The relationship between socialist economic ideas and Nazism is in this sense a real hatefact.

The evidence is plain, though rarely cited. “I am a socialist,” Hitler cheerfully told Otto Strasser in 1930. Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who worked for the Nazis before turning against them, recorded a conversation in which the future Führer explained how he had been inspired by socialists as a young man. “The whole of National Socialism,” Hitler told Rauschning, was “based on Marx”. The difference, he thought, was that he did not intend to repeat Lenin’s error of pitting the nation against itself through class war.

Instead, as Hitler expounded to his economic adviser Otto Wagener, he would “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” (meaning the bankers and factory owners who could, Hitler believed, serve better by generating revenue for the state). “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish, we shall be in a position to achieve.”

Those quotations grate on the modern ear, don’t they? Contemporary political theory is based on a jejune sense that “Left-wing” means compassionate while “Right-wing” means nasty. Since the Nazis were unquestionably evil, they are Rightwing. After all, in today’s BBC-speak, “Right-wing” simply means “baddies”. Iran’s ayatollahs abolished the monarchy, nationalised businesses, confiscated property, exiled the bourgeoisie and exported their revolution, but they’re nasty, so they are called “Right-wing”. Russian nostalgics who regret the fall of the USSR are likewise “Right-wing”. Marine Le Pen wants higher taxes, higher spending, nationalisation, tariffs and workers’ councils to run factories, but she… you get the picture.

Hitler’s contemporaries were more clear-eyed than today’s commentators. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism: “It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.”

One such was the German Social Democrat Willy Brandt, who went on to become Chancellor of West Germany in 1969. In 1932, as a young Leftist, Brandt remarked: “We should acknowledge the socialist element in National Socialism and in the thinking of its followers, its subjective revolutionary basis.”

Yet when a Rightist German MEP tried to quote Brandt’s words in support of Mr Kamall, he was literally howled down, in the sense that he could not be heard above the noise, and had to distribute Brandt’s aperçu in writing.

I understand why the socialists in the EU Parliament were upset: Leftist politicians and trade union organisers were interned in Nazi concentration camps. Of course, the modern Left is sincerely anti-fascist. Nevertheless, the historical facts, when it comes to the Thirties, stand. Friedrich Hayek liked to observe that socialists of the National and Leninist varieties treated each other as heretics, but saw classical liberals, such as himself, as beyond redemption.

The Nazis – collectivist, illiberal, statist, and totalitarian – are every bit as objectionable to the modern centre-Right, but plenty of modern day socialists have convinced themselves that fascism and conservatism are adjoining dots on the spectrum. When the president of the European Parliament, a fair-minded Italian called Antonio Tajani, tried to calm things down by pointing out that Nazism was abhorrent to both sides, Leftist MEPs exploded all over again. These days, it seems, only one side gets to call the other evil.

Modern politics is based on a sense that ‘Left-wing’ means compassionate while ‘Right-wing’ means nasty