The definition of right-wing extremism as ’values that lie outside what is compatible with political democracy’ is too vague to be guiding. The fact that the word ’right’ is associated with Nazism and fascism, extreme authoritarian views, when in other contexts and seen from a modern political perspective, can stand for individual freedom, gives us a useless map that creates confusion and invites manipulation and leads us down the wrong path.
One explanation for this historical revisionism could be that socialist parties in Europe after the war gained a strong influence over society and consciously wanted to create a distance considering the kinship through socialism. Another reason might be that countries want to hide opinions and plans for social development that in some parts touch on Nazism but packaged in other words.
”The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants”
— Albert Camus
To understand the political landscape and to timely detect new forms of authoritarian systems, we must be able to orient ourselves and have a clear understanding of where Nazism and fascism belong on the political spectrum.
What is right-wing?
The conventional left-right scale has its points but falters considerably when we put it in a contemporary perspective, which contributes to the confusion around Nazism.
For many on the left, it is probably still relevant. Karl Marx and collectivism are seen in a positive light, something good and the solution to society’s problems, while the right is everything they despise and of evil.
Marx’s theses may in some parts sound sensible and appealing but are a paradoxical utopia. The individual’s alleged freedom with the help of the group’s power leads sooner or later to an authoritarian order where the individual becomes secondary to a collective consciousness that stifles people’s creativity and motivation when it goes against the group’s will.
When group thinking is based on a predetermined strict ideology with given frames for what the individual’s role and meaning entail, it, as if by a natural law, takes on a life of its own that places itself above the individual’s free will under the leadership of one or a few leaders who take it upon themselves to keep the rest of the group within the ideology’s frames.
A society that cares about the weak and vulnerable is a conscious and harmonious society, but it cannot be forced but only achieved through the free individual’s maturity and awareness through full democracy. A fantastic idea born out of an eternal struggle for human freedom that has never been fully realized.
Capitalism suffers from the same delusion. It is said to lead to prosperity for all, but a few individuals exploit the freedom and grab assets and power that slowly but surely negatively affect others’ freedom. Even though capitalism celebrates freedom, classical liberalism, it is dependent on a collective social order under their control, a symbiosis between the state and the corporate world to be able to grab wealth and power.
The lack of full democracy and a media controlled by power that prevents people from being informed and understanding the democratic deficit sooner or later leads to oligarchy, which characterizes most countries in the West, with the USA in a clear leading position. A soft form of fascism where business and state power work hand in hand without democratic insight.
Sweden and other ”free” countries have a similar setup, although not as extreme. People believe they live in a democracy when in fact it is mostly fine words on paper.
Capitalism’s excessive focus on money and a controlled media that does not act for the people’s best interest has given us a corrupt, undemocratic monetary system where money is created via loans and owned by banks. A gigantic pyramid scheme and with increased digitalization a totalitarian control system. The result is a huge debt burden that drains the world of vitality.
Paradoxically, socialist regimes and Western democracies with a capitalist stamp have many similarities. They enchant a collective where the individual is subordinate. There is a lack of a clear description of the human and the individual’s freedom that is not given any political value, which means that the central dimension to achieve full democracy disappears.
We are here on this earth as individuals and as a group. Both must function. A political map that leads us on the right path represents the left as a collective order and the right as individual freedom. Somewhere in between, a functioning democracy arises as long as the collective order is subordinate to the will of the individuals, the key to full democracy and the constitution’s ’all public power emanates from the people’.
With this definition of the right, capitalism and moderate socialism, social democracy are not each other’s opposites, even though they have different approaches and methods to enchant the masses.
Capitalism and the prevailing oligarchy, which the people believe is democracy, is a centrist political order under the control of an invisible hand, an elite of people within politics and business that largely steer the course of society in harmony with a naive and duped left-wing movement that believes it is working for the good. By uniting in the same language and political issues, the masses are enchanted from two different directions.
Nazism is not right-wing
The struggle for human freedom from an elite that dictates their lives has been an eternal battle. This self-evidence must be the foundation for an explanation of Nazism, which emerged in a world where people had just begun to discover and sense what democracy is.
We must also understand that a strong movement often awakens an equally strong counter-reaction. Especially among uninformed people who react emotionally. Unlike the people of that time, large parts of the population today have a completely different level of knowledge and with it have learned to act somewhat rationally and compliantly.
”Not many people seem to realize the extent to which Hitler was a corollary of the punitive clauses of the Treaty of Versailles.”
— Franz von Papen
As the industrial society emerged during the 19th century in the hands of capitalists, the elite of that time, the message of socialism and communism spread as a response to the injustices that followed in the wake of capitalism. Even though socialism is not the answer, it was a struggle for justice and equality that, in all honesty, has had a significant impact on democracy and the way society looks today.
Charles Darwin launched his theory of natural selection, and his cousin Sir Francis Galton’s ideas laid the foundation for eugenics, which gained a foothold in the USA thanks to the Carnegie Institution and Rockefeller Foundation, who then planted these dark seeds in German soil by financing the German Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
Racial thinking became fashionable in several countries and permeated all political camps. An example from Sweden is the parliament’s decision to create the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in 1921 with the support of all parties.
Progressivism, social Darwinism, and eugenics. The rational ’enlightened’ human believed they could change society like a collective lump of clay, able to be shaped into something desirable without regard for the individual.
The view of humans changed to a social and influenceable being. It was understood that one could steer societal development through propaganda and manipulation of people’s consciousness. Something Hitler learned from.
Antisemitism was deeply rooted long before Hitler came to power. Even Karl Marx expressed antisemitism in his view of Jews and money. Hitler was the match that ignited prejudices in a difficult time when scapegoats were needed.
The thinking of the time influenced Hitler’s and Mussolini’s worldview, political stance, and tactics. Both took a stand for workers and against capitalism. The hatred of Jews gained legitimacy in Hitler’s eyes as they were seen to control the money and thereby society. He believed Jews had a plan to take over the world.
Thoughts and ideas about nationalism existed within all political camps. A politically neutral idea that Karl Marx paradoxically supported, even though he advocated proletarian internationalism. Both Germany and Italy became unified states quite late thanks to nationalism. It can be positive and constructive or turned into something destructive and harmful.
Hitler wanted to see a strong nation of and for Germans. He did not see class but race. There was no difference between workers and the middle class. Hence the fear of the Soviet Union, which he claimed aimed to spread communism’s class struggle through internationalism and posed a threat. According to Hitler, the Social Democrats betrayed Germany when they did not stand for a strong nation. In his eyes, they were communists.
Hitler was not alone in his twisted view of humanity. Many believed in eugenics, even among socialists. In Sweden, the law on sterilization of physically and mentally handicapped people was introduced in 1934 by the social democratic government. It said ”due to mental disturbance cannot be considered capable of deciding whether he should be sterilized or not, can be sterilized”.
Social Darwinism and eugenics are two sides of the same coin. While social Darwinism lets nature take its course, leaving individuals to fend for themselves so that the weak can be sorted out, eugenics was a more organized form of sorting that suited collectivist-thinking parties. In Communist Soviet, it was a matter of creating the ’new socialist human’.
The fact that doctors and nurses supported this and thereby Nazism should not be taken as proof that they were bourgeois and stood to the right on the political scale. Nazism was the way to improve humanity.
Like so many today, they were driven by a one-sided and empathy-less view of nature without belief in anything greater, that man is his own God, and a fascination with their own excellence, believing themselves to act morally without realizing how the ego excludes things that do not fit into its own worldview, even if one happens to be a high-standing doctor or researcher.
Hitler lacked empathy with the weak and vulnerable to glorify the strong German worker, although the working class was just weak and vulnerable. For him, the conventional definition of a worker was a way to diminish their value in relation to the bourgeoisie and claimed that the Social Democrats exploited the workers’ weakness for their own purposes.
Independent trade unions were banned in Nazi Germany to be replaced by the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DA), a centralized trade union under the control of the Nazi party. Factory leaders were tasked with implementing new labor laws. Their program was intended to create a people’s community. The Social Democrats in Sweden named the same aspiration the people’s home.
The Nazis wanted to create a social and productive society to build a strong and militarized Germany. The DA functioned as a link between the interests of workers and employers.
They worked for social security, leisure time, breaks, and regular working hours, and strived for a ’people’s community’ with social, educational, sports, health, and entertainment programs for workers. It could sound humane if it weren’t for an underlying purpose that probably many Germans didn’t fully understand.
Unlike communism and the Soviet Union where the state, the collectively owned, had total control, companies in Nazi Germany and Italy were ’free’ but controlled and cooperated, many knowingly, with the state under an authoritarian order. The very definition of fascism.
The line between communists and social democrats was fluid. They united in the economic theory of socialism but not in approach in a time when social injustices became apparent and challenged the governments of the time.
In Germany, Otto von Bismarck tried with his social programs Staatssozialismus (state socialism) to create better conditions for workers to meet the rise of socialism and thereby communism, which was considered the great threat. The German Social Democratic Party was banned but eventually became an established party.
From the Church’s side, Pope Leo XIII with a decree in 1891 urged the right for workers to form trade unions. They distanced themselves from both socialism and unrestricted capitalism but stood for the right to private property.
Even though Hitler was interested in socialism, he was not appealed by the Social Democrats or democracy. He was a populist, an aspiring dictator who wanted to win power at any cost. Democracy, according to him, was a step towards communism, and he got the idea that the Social Democrats were controlled by Jews.
His hatred of capitalism and Jewish power instead led him to join the German Workers’ Party with an extremely socialist manifesto. Some points in the German Workers’ Party’s party program:
• Income from work (a way to break the slavery of interest and the power of banks)
• Nationalization of foundations
• Profit-sharing in large industries
• Increased old-age pension
• Citizens to have the same rights and responsibilities
• No one should be forced to perform work against the best interests of the collective
Initially, Hitler joined the party on a mission as a spy for the German army, but he sympathized with its ideology and view of Jews. Under his leadership, the party became the Nazis, although as a populist, he likely hid his more nuanced and pragmatic view of socialism.
Communism and Nazism are based on different degrees of socialism, have different attributes and expressions, but similarities in mindset and emotions that drive collectivism. Uniforms are replaced with uniform modesty to signal a distancing from class and social status under the leadership of ideology and collectivism instead of a strong leader, but it is the same pursuit of a collective order where the individual is subordinate.
”The common interest over individual interest”
Nazistprogrammet 1920
Communism advocates authority through violent revolution and conformity where bourgeois, upper class, and opponents of the class struggle are scapegoats instead of Jews within Nazism. Regardless, antisemitism has always been strong within the left.
Racial thinking in communism is class thinking. They strive for a paradox, a utopian society which in practice means the abolition of democracy, even though it is claimed to be the path to liberation and democracy, but a strong leader or leadership always and inevitably becomes the result in a collectivist order. The individual, the core of the concept of democracy, disappears.
The fear of communism confirmed by states at the time was affirmed with the Russian Revolution. Hitler feared communism’s influence on German workers, which partly explains the war against the Soviet Union. A conflict between nationalists and internationalists within the socialist movement. The Soviet Union is thus partly complicit in the outbreak of World War II.
The red color in the Nazi flag symbolized the social dimension. The word ’social’ is mentioned too often and in various forms in Mein Kampf to lack significance. Hitler was clearly preoccupied with the social issue just like other socialists, albeit with a cold, harsh, and distorted conclusion aimed at uniting the German people.
The people around Hitler were socialists, for example, Joseph Goebbels and Gregor Strasser who said about the Nazis; ”we are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalist economic system which exploits the economically weak”.
During the 1920s, Nazism was in its formative years, and there was a fluid boundary between more extreme and moderate socialism. Strasser was killed by Nazis in 1934. He was seen as a communist and had challenged Hitler for power in the party but would not have participated in the formation of Nazism if it were not for socialism. The pursuit of communists should not be taken as proof that the Nazis themselves were not socialists.
His brother Otto Strasser, also on the left wing of the Nazi party, was expelled and formed the Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists, also called the Black Front. The symbol was a black cross of the hammer and sword. He believed the Nazis had betrayed their role as anti-capitalist, advocated corporatism, nationalization of the means of production, and cooperation with the Soviet Union. Further evidence that the word socialist in National Socialists had a real meaning.
The Nazis collaborated and formed an alliance with nationalistic and anti-Semitic bourgeois parties for tactical reasons. One of these was the German National People’s Party (DNVP). The fact that the Nazis saw them as a bourgeois party and themselves as a non-bourgeois party, and that the DNVP accused the Nazis of being socialists is telling.
The collaboration was broken to instead be with conservative parties that had failed to create a sustainable governing alternative and now were forced to collaborate with the Nazi party. This should not be taken as evidence that Nazism was right-wing.
If one disregards the dark sides of Nazism, the reforms implemented in Nazi Germany were social democratic. Not about increased freedom and other typical right-wing politics seen with today’s eyes. There were exceptions, e.g., lower taxes, but even a social democratic government can implement that to benefit the economy and workers.
For tactical, economic, and social reasons, the Nazis carried out ’privatizations’ to motivate industry and raise money for the state treasury to build up the military. During the Great Depression, companies and banks were rescued and nationalized, so privatization is a truth with modifications. Companies were still subject to the will of the Nazis, even if large German companies had a different and more active role.
The collaboration between the Nazi party and German industry resembles Sweden during the same period and for a long time thereafter between the Social Democrats and Swedish industry. Even though it existed, the Social Democrats pursued a policy with socialist elements with the goal of building the people’s home.
Over time, Hitler became more pragmatic. His goal was power over Germany, and he played all the populist cards he could but did not abandon his political ideology even though he had a distorted view of socialism. The hatred of capitalism, which he believed was controlled by Jews, was evidently strong and driving.
Italy and fascism inspired Hitler. Fascism involves a symbiosis between the corporate sphere and the state over people’s heads under an authoritarian leader and can take different political expressions. In Nazi Germany, it was fairly social democratic, and in Chile, it followed neoliberal principles. Communism is proletarian fascism.
For Mussolini, the father of fascism, it was social democratic with demands for women’s suffrage, an eight-hour workday, minimum wage, progressive capital tax, etc. Mussolini had a more metaphysical view of business and state than Hitler, with a symbiosis beyond politics but no less under his control. He sought a centralized order, therefore the state power played an important role, and the individual was of secondary importance.
Mussolini wrote for L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (The Worker’s Future) and was then editor of Avanti! (Forward), the Italian Socialist Party’s newspaper, before publishing Il manifesto dei fasci italiani di combattimento together with Giovanni Gentile, who shared Mussolini’s political view. Alceste De Ambris, who participated in the formation of fascism, was a syndicalist and played a key role in strikes in 1908 (he later became a strong critic of Mussolini).
Nazism had little in common with the right but conducted a totalitarian centrist politics with support from large companies and banks in Germany and the USA. An order similar to that between social democracy and industry in Sweden, apart from the authoritarian, destructive nationalism, and racial thinking. Their support does not make Nazism right-wing, no matter how one twists and turns it.
The Nazi party was authoritarian social democracy. Hitler would probably not like the association with social democracy, but it is the best explanation for the party’s political content. To claim otherwise is historical revisionism.
palbergstrom.com, Nazism was authoritarian social democracy
