(This is not a very Lenten-spirited post, and I admit I've been slow this year to orient myself toward Lent. But I wrote most of it a couple of weeks ago, and want to get it out of the way and go on to other things.)
I've thought for a long time that communism and nazism, far from being the opposites that they are generally portrayed as being, are more similar than different, and are essentially variants of the same totalitarian impulse that arose in opposition to liberalism and capitalism in the late 19th century: if not brothers, then first cousins. It seems to me a very broad but nevertheless justifiable one-sentence summary of the difference to say that communism was international socialism, and nazism was, as it styled itself, national socialism–Nationalsozialismus. I don't think the word "socialism" is mere filler in the latter. Hitler himself was capable of saying things like this:
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 determined to destroy this system under all conditions. (quoted in the Wikipedia article on Nazism)
It is true that communists and fascists hated each other with a murderous hatred, but that doesn't mean they had nothing in common. The left does not appreciate at all having attention drawn to this, as Daniel Hannan notes:
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring….
In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption.
Click here to read the whole column.
Intrigued by that reference to Goebbels, I did a little searching, and found a fascinating document, a 1929 pamphlet written by Goebbels, in which he explains both the nationalist and socialist components of his ideology, as well as its anti-Semitism. His indictment of capitalism could be included in a leftist manifesto, and for that matter many a Catholic-distributist one, without so much as a letter being changed–well, apart from the fact that the twentieth century is now over:
The worker in a capitalist state — and that is his deepest misfortune — is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker.
He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces. Labor is for him only a way to survive, not a path to higher blessings, not a joy, not something in which to take pride, or satisfaction, or encouragement, or a way to build character.
We are a workers’ party because we see in the coming battle between finance and labor the beginning and the end of the structure of the twentieth century. We are on the side of labor and against finance.
(Emphases in the original.) You can read the whole pamphlet here.
This is of more than academic or historical interest because contemporary conservatives continue to be tarred with the fascist association, though they never had the least sympathy with fascism. In this country–I don't know about others–there are in fact more communists on the left than there are fascists on the right: there are some pretty nasty folks on the extremes of the right, certainly, but they mainly want to be let alone; they want to get out from under the national government, not strengthen and consolidate it. But liberals and of course those further toward the left remain indulgent, and even sympathetic, toward communism, and yet remain unsullied, in their own eyes at least. Consider this aside in Jay Nordlinger's New Criterion music column:
In our program notes for the evening, we read, “Medtner, like Rachmaninoff, was unsympathetic to the Bolshevik regime and left Russia in 1921.” I don’t want to make too much of this, and the analogy is inexact, but try to imagine this sentence, please: “Schoenberg was unsympathetic to the Nazi regime and left Germany in 1933.”
Yes, try. It puts the whole thing in a very clear light.
Of course there are a great many important differences between communism and fascism or nazism. Fascism became less socialistic, in the ordinary sense, as it came to power. And communism, with its rhetoric of equality and justice, tends to attract a better sort of sympathizer than does fascism. But if we judge by their records there is little to choose between them, and those who think themselves on a higher moral plane in despising national, while indulging international, socialism objectively misjudge their position.
The thinking worker comes to Hitler.
Light On Dark Water 
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