Fascism is Postmodernism

One of the more dangerous lies we are taught about Nazism is the clam that it was a right-wing movement. This shields the left-wing from comparisons with Nazism, which are otherwise pretty obvious. And this makes it more likely that we will fall for the same errors again. Indeed, it looks as though we are.

But there was no question to Germans of the time that National Socialism was Socialism. Albert Speer writes, in his autobiography, that when the Nazis did well in the 1930 election, “my father had the darkest forebodings, chiefly in view of the NSDAP’s socialist tendencies.”- Inside the Third Reich, p. 43.

Nor was there much question to the Nazis themselves, apparently. Ribbentrop announced to Hitler, on one return from Moscow, that “he had never felt so much at ease as among Stalin’s associates: ‘As if I were among old party comrades of ours…’” (Speer, p. 243). While Hitler rarely had a good word to say about anybody who was not present, Speer reports that he “spoke admiringly of Stalin” (p. 418) and “regarded Stalin as a kind of colleague,” even as his army was invading Soviet Russia.

He had no such regard for Churchill or Roosevelt. Speer theorizes that he fought hard in the West, but left the frontier relatively open in the East, due to sympathy with Stalin’s regime (p. 565).

Like postmodernism and political correctness, Nazism was particularly popular on college campuses. Speer was converted to Nazism by his students, as a young faculty member.

“My students urged me to attend. …It seemed as if nearly all the students in Berlin wanted to see and hear this man [Hitler].”- pp. 44-45. “[M]y student friends … were predominantly indoctrinated with the National Socialist ideology.” – p. 50.

Nazism, like postmodernism, rejected the past and rejected all the established rules. This appeals to the young; for one thing, it removes their disadvantage in knowledge and experience compared to their elders.

Like the modern left, Nazism called for “affirmative action” and “social justice.” The Jews were simply the bourgeois, just like straight white males today. The party was “demanding that [Jewish] participation in … various areas be reduced to a level consonant with their percentage of the population.” – p. 50. Exactly as “progressive” as with quotas for males or “whites” today. Goebbels warned against “the infiltration of more bourgeois intellectuals who came from the propertied and educated classes.” (p. 51). The ideologue Ley lumped aristocrats with Jews as the enemies of National Socialism (p. 525).

As a bedrock principle, Nazism, like postmodernism, believed in cultural relativism: they called for physics to be “cleansed of the outgrowths which the by well-known findings of race research have shown to be the exclusive products of the Jewish mind and which the German Volk must shun as racially incompatible with itself.”- Speer, p. 319. Just as feminists talk of “male” science or logic, or leftists complain of “cultural genocide” if you teach aboriginal children “European” science or math.


Contemporary Marxists make much of the claim that Nazism is not socialism because it did not nationalize industry. But this turns out, according to Speer, to have been purely a tactical decision for an emergency situation: “one did best to let industry handle major tasks directly, for government bureaucracy … hampered initiative.”- p. 286.

Indeed, Speer observed as the war progressed that “a kind of state socialism seemed to be gaining more and more ground, furthered by many of the party functionaries” (p. 485). Numerous factories “seemed destined to fall under state control after the war” (ibid). At Speer’s urging, Hitler reassured the owners that this would not be the case. But Speer called Hitler’s assurance “a good deal less precise and unequivocal than I had expected” (p. 488). Speer indeed came under attack by Goebbels, Bormann, and the party for his tendency to let industry alone, and his top aides and the industrialist he worked with were branded “reactionaries” (p. 533).

We do not know for certain where Hitler was headed, had he won the war.

But it seems pretty likely the modern left is headed in the same direction. Perhaps we will find out.