The position of Churchill was more or less par for the course for decades on the US Right. However, in the past 30 years, especially since Reagan, we have seen the growth of a fanatical, lunatic, profoundly extremist, narcissistic-antisocial rightwing, a rightwing that was traditionally relegated to the John Birch and Goldwater margins.
With this seriously crazy rightwing has come many a weird and wild notion. One of these is that Nazism is actually a Leftist philosophy, that Nazism is socialist, and the Communists and fascists are blood brothers.
It goes beyond the scope of this post to discuss Hannah Arendt's discussion of the similarities between the two ideologies - a good summary is that both are totalitarian. One can also make the case that both are collectivist, although the collectivism of the Left differs profoundly from that of the Right.
Both see the state as the end-all and be-all, and both see the people are inseparable from the state, though frankly in profoundly different ways.
Beyond that, the differences vanish.
Yes, there were Leftist and socialist Nazis in the early 1930's, but they were purged in the Night of the Long Knives and never heard from again in the party. They continue on in Strasserism and Third Positionism , some very confusing philosophies that seem to combine some sort of fascism with a more socialist economics and distaste for capitalism.
The Nazis merely glommed "socialist" onto their party name as a way to co-opt the socialist and Communist parties who had the support of most of the German workers. Hitler himself admitted that this was a lie and that there was nothing socialist about his party. I could go on and on here, but there is hardly a political scientist alive who argues that Nazism was a Leftist, socialist or Communist philosophy.
Communism can be racist - see Pol Pot. So can socialism - see Saddam Hussein, David Ben-Gurion, the ANC and Hafez Assad. We Leftists are not a bunch of whining crybabies like rightwingers. We can handle the idea that there are leftwingers, socialists and even Communists who are racist idiots, mass murderers and just all around horrible people. Not everyone on the Left is an angel.
Likewise, fascism is a political system of the Far Right as Communism is a system of the Far Left. Most liberals oppose Communism, so most sane conservatives should oppose fascism.
The problem is that conservatives are so fanatical and nuts these days that they cannot handle the notion that any rightwing position, no matter how extreme, could possibly suck. By saying Nazis were extreme rightwingers, we are somehow calling all conservatives Nazis, these manchildren insist. But this makes no more sense than calling all liberals Pol Potists.
The modern conservative movement cultivates psychopathology in its very ideology and character - specifically massive insecurity, projection, denial and a general sociopathic-narcissism - so psychopathology predictably spreads amongst its adherents.
A great place to start your research on fascism is with none other than Giovanni Gentile, who co-wrote The Doctrine of Fascism with Mussolini himself. It's almost as thick as Marx and I found it difficult reading. If you can handle it, dip into it.
There is an excellent series of articles on fascism and what it means on the blog Orcinus. This guy is doing some really superb work on what fascism really means, using all of the latest political science scholarship. Political science is still trying to figure out fascism, and after reading reams about it, I'm still not sure I understand it completely either. But I am starting to recognize it when I see it.
Two Orcinus pieces, The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism and Rush, Newspeak and Fascism are absolutely excellent. After you read those, you will finally start to figure out what fascism really is.
It's like after all this time, political science is finally starting to really figure it out. One of the main problems with fascism is that it is chameleon-like in that it can mimic anything. Nazism mimicked socialism. Fascism can look like anything and mimic anything! That's why it is so hard to understand. And it does this on purpose as a way of sneaking itself in.
There are a couple of excellent definitions of fascism in the Orcinus series: one is "A Rightwing Dictatorship with popular enthusiasm against the Left".
A dictatorship against the Left. That's fascism.
Another is "palingenetic nationalism". Palingenesis has to do with the rise of Phoenix from the ashes, and fascism proposes a nationalism that rises from the ashes of a ruined state to relive the ancient glory of yore.
The blog Three Way Fight also has done excellent work on fascism. An article called Two Ways of Looking at Fascism is excellent.
Let us continue with the post, which begins by discussing the horribly misunderstood Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Everyone knew what it was about at the time, but modern revisionism has argued that it was an alliance of like-minded men and ideologies.
After Joao's superb post, we follow with a list of contrasting Red and Brown ideologies by the excellent commentator Alan Lewis:
And before this pact, the two countries, and the two ideologies were mortal enemies. The pact was a short, and tactical, interruption of this profound enmity.
First, in the period 1920-1933, in Germany's streets, no struggle was stronger than that between NSDAP (Nazi Party) and the Reds (Bolsheviks, Communists).
Nazis understood perfectly (and correctly) that the "Red" ideologies were almost the extreme opposite of them.
Reds favoured: a non-racial society, and end of racism; internationalism; equality between the sexes; redistribution of wealth and nationalization of almost every important enterprise; atheism; combat the silliness of traditional morals; "brotherhood" between all would be extended to encompass all mankind, and not just one ethnic group.
All *radically opposed* to what Nazis wanted. Nazism was Volkish.
Then, Hitler et al, understood that, if their ultra-nationalist and racist system was to win, it had to destroy Bolshevism. He destroyed it within Germany first.
In 1936-38, in the Spanish Civil War, the two ideologies were again mortal enemies. Everything clear, everything explicitly recognized by both sides.
Hitler and Mussolini (and Portugal's Salazar) supporting Franco. The Soviet Union supporting the anti-Fascist side, accompanied by idealistic European intellectuals made soldiers, like the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who almost died there (about this fact, see Marek Kohn's book A Reason for Everything, 2004).
Hitler and Mussolini were not making any secret that they wanted a Crusade Against Bolshevism. They started it in July 1941, but it was planned far in advance. And the Soviets also knew well in advance that the invasion would come, sooner or latter.
Even the anti-Semitism of Nazis is mainly because many Jews were either full Reds / Bolsheviks (Lenin, Trotsky, and many others had a Jewish background), or supporters of Leftist ideas in general - a more open and modernized society; the questioning of the traditional sexual mores (see the accusations of Nazis, and also more recently, of Kevin MacDonald, against Freudian psychoanalysis); more compassion towards the "underdog", the poor, the homosexuals, etc.
A higher proportion of Jews embraced these values, because they, even if rich, as a persecuted minority, emphasized with the underdog. Jews didn't embrace these values as a mean to destroy the West, as Adolf Hitler, Kevin MacDonald and others wrongly think.
So the two ideologies were not minor variants of the same core, as this silly John Ray (John Ray is an academic - I think Australian - associated with the extreme White racist site Majority Rights<) says, they were radically and diametrically opposed. The 1939 pact was tactical, and a mean for each side to prepare the coming war. And Nazism was much worse, morally speaking, no matter what modern rightwingers say. The views of the modern Right run counter those of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These brilliant men saw everything. They understood everything. They didn't hesitate to support Soviet Russia(despite not liking it, and by good reason) to destroy Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan. They were strong in philosophy and understanding and saw all long term consequences. Germany proposed repeatedly that they made peace with her, and join her to destroy the Soviet Union, and they declined always, heroically and brilliantly. They understood that, in that world of large brutal beasts, if one beast was Red, the other beast was Pure Darkness. They knew where the murderous eugenicism and racism was. You should have read, as I have, excerpts from Churchill's message to the Russian people, when Russia was losing, or excerpts from Stalin's speeches in the Moscow Underground in December 1941 - these are not just vulgar war speeches. They are full of moral outrage and contempt for the Nazis. The Moral of the Animals, The Grasshopper Plague, and so on.
The feeling of the time, shared by the Russian, British and French peoples, was that it was Humanity against the Orcs.
Compared with Nazis, one could say that the other ideologies, from capitalist democracy to communism, cluster together, and with minor differences. In radical contrast to what many rightwingers think nowadays. I don't like to be blunt, but it seems that many are very ignorant of these issues, and are in need of these Forgotten Truths.
1a. Red: A non-racial society, the end of racism.
1b. Brown: A society of racial purity; racism integral to society, and elevated to an *ideal*.
2a. Red: Internationalism (less so under Stalin, but international socialist revolution was always the ultimate goal).
2b. Brown: Fanatical nationalism.
3a. Red: Equality between the sexes, full enfranchisement of women.
3b. Brown: Women's place: "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" -- a Nazi slogan, the three Ks, meaning "children, kitchen, church"; strict sexual divisions.
4a. Red: Redistribution of wealth and eventual abolition of class system.
4b. Brown: Continued concentration of wealth, maintenance of old economic hierarchy and class system (and these things with enthusiastic approval; one is to know one's "place" and stay in it).
5a. Red: Atheism.
5b. Brown: At least nominal Christianity; close relation with Catholic Church.
6a. Red: Acceptance of sexual diversity, bisexuality, homosexuality (generally less so under Stalin).
6b. Brown: Violent intolerance of homosexuality, it being considered a degeneracy; homosexuals incarcerated, sometimes killed.
7a. Red: Brotherhood of man; universalism.
7b. Brown: Strict hierarchy, with Master Race dominating the inferiors; particularism.
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