Counter-Currents
2,235 words
A couple weeks ago, an Ace of Spades co-blogger called OregonMuse wrote something profound on Ace’s Sunday Morning Book Thread. His statement has meaning beyond its literal interpretation and resonates through much of our political discourse on the Right. Here’s what he said:
The world is not going to be set right until people realize that, as bad as nazis are, commies are actually worse.
He was discussing a new book by Jack Fairweather called The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army, and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. I have not read it, but I did read the glowing review from the Federalist that OregonMuse linked. The main story starts in 1940 when Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground resistance fighter, volunteers to be captured by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz in order to gather intelligence about the place. At the time, Auschwitz served mostly as a prison for Polish POWs, so it made sense that the Poles would want to know more about it. During his time there, he forwarded information to the Polish resistance, which was then channeled to London. He endured all the horrific abuse and privations one would expect from a place like Auschwitz and then managed to escape in 1943. Afterwards in 1947, the Soviets arrested him for supposedly assisting “foreign imperialism.” Led by two communist Jews, the Colonels Roman Romkowski (née Natan Grünspan-Kikiel) and Józef Różańksi (née Josek Goldberg), the Soviets tortured him, gave him a show trial, and then murdered him on May 25th, 1948. You can read more about Pilecki here.
What might have prompted OregonMuse to make his profound statement was this quote from The Federalist review:
The last time he saw his wife Maria was when he was put on his show trial on March 3rd, 1948. He told her, “Auschwitz was just a game compared to this.”
So much to unpack and so little time! (Maybe someone at Counter-Currents will do it for us in a proper review of the book.)
Anyway, OregonMuse’s comment perfectly symbolizes what I would call the outer rim of the real Right (to borrow a term from Star Wars the Clone Wars). These are people who are animated more by hatred of the Left than by love of race, nation, soil, tradition, religion, or any other lodestar typically associated with the Right. These people will fully concede that the Right in its truest form can lead to evil, but will point to the Left in its truest form as a worse one. Perhaps such people remember the Cold War especially well. Perhaps they’ve studied the Holodomor or the Gulag Archipelago or Mao’s great famine of the 1950s and 1960s or the atrocities committed by the Viet Cong. Perhaps they understand well the poverty and decline that communism has brought to countries across the world. Or maybe they just have a gut feeling that Leftism is based on lies or breeds totalitarianism. In any case, these are people who can be relied upon to stand up for the Right under reasonably high pressure and prove their worth in the big picture not merely through support of Donald Trump, but by standing a couple paces to the Right of him.
Ann Coulter is great champions of the outer rim. The Ace of Spades is another. And it is because of their reluctance to focus their political stance on race (i.e., what’s positive about the Right) that they are allowed to attack the Left in the mainstream at all. Of all the lodestars of the Right listed above, I included race first because without it, you cannot have the rest in their present forms—a notion that the Left violently disavows, at least when it comes to the white race. But the silence from people in the outer rim regarding any positive racial identity indicates to me that they tacitly accept the Left’s conditions for entry into the public sphere, and then use this elevated position to smash the Left with their every effort.
Not a bad gig, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate our paladins in the outer rim. I see these people as the real Right’s representatives in the mainstream, and as long neither interferes with the other, this arrangement will remain acceptable. And it’s not like they don’t do good work. But I think that in order to firmly be in the outer rim one would have to agree with OregonMuse. One must believe that the Right at its worst is preferable to the Left at its worst—or at the very least see the two as equally bad. This was the litmus test that rid the Right of its cucks, neocons, and poseurs after the Trump election. No one is going to mistake National Review as Right-wing after Trump. And grifters like Ben Shapiro and Bill Kristol have turned into anti-Right conservatives because of Trump, if there even is such a thing. People who are not truly on the Right will aver that the Nazis were in fact worse than the Soviets—an easy position to hold if one is a Jew or is in thrall of Jews. The projected Jewish neuroses about the 1930s and 1940s remains so strong today that even promoting an equivalence between the two becomes taboo and quite punishable in certain parts of modern society.
In what I would call the soft inner rim of the Right we have what’s left of the “Alt-Lite” and others figures who promote positive Rightist identity in all ways other than race (i.e., nation, soil, tradition, religion, etc.). These are your so-called Western chauvinists, and it’s a funny position to be in. On one hand, they still feel the gravitational pull of the Left and dare not betray the Left’s racial taboos. On the other hand, they reject any equivalence between the West and any other culture. They are honest enough to affirm that West is best. They simply cannot see such a wart-like contradiction: How can races be equal but the cultures they create not equal? It’s a question that makes them uncomfortable and forces them to do strange things. For an example, watch Alt-Lite figure Gavin McInnes actually praise the Southern Poverty Law Center as he announces his lawsuit against them.
This inner rim is probably also the last holdout of self-identifying diaspora Jews and anyone who has especial sympathy for them. Like the outer rim, people here may see the communists as a greater evil than the Nazis, but when pressed will have to admit that the Nazis were evil as well. As result, both the inner and outer rims will turn on the core Right position if pressed by the Left, but it would usually take forcing them to choose sides between communists and Nazis to do so. Ironically, it seems that the inner rim is more hostile to the core Right under these circumstances. Charlottesville is the prime example here. Observe how the Ace of Spades reacted, merely using the debacle as a weapon with which to smash the Left (again):
Did the Charlottesville Mayor Order Police to Stand Down, to Allow His Allies in #Antifa to Rough Up the Nazis?
The Nazis had a permit; antifa did not. (Say what you will about Nazis, but they’re bears for paperwork.)
Antifa raided the permitted Nazi rally space.
Police let them — and let beatings go on. They gave them Space to Destroy, as they say.
I hope Sessions will be looking into this aspect as well.
Antifa was, of course, violent. As usual. As the police always permit them to be.
Ann Coulter had a similar response, praising Donald Trump for blaming both sides and hitting back at the leftist media for their one-sided, pro-Left reporting.
Compare this to Kurt Schlichter, who distanced himself from both the Right and Left. Although he used Charlottesville to attack the Left as did Ace and Coulter, he also found time to insult the Right, calling the Unite the Right protestors “misfits and malcontents,” “cowardly morons,” and “stormdoofuses” among other epithets.
Then there was Gavin McInnes who disavowed the Unite the Right Rally before it happened and then disavowed it again afterwards. He blamed James Field and the rally organizers first and second for the disaster it was. He also used Charlottesville as an excuse to bash the Alt Right, as it was known back then. In fact, he called Field a murderer and a terrorist before he had been convicted in court. Yes, McInnes heaped blame on the Left as well, but only after he attacked the Right for nearly half of his video and distanced himself from it numerous times. This shows how confused the moral and ideological position of the Alt-Lite really is. All because they can’t quite shake the Nazi taboo.
Note also how both the inner and outer rims of the Right blithely referred to the Unite the Right protestors as “Nazis” when that was clearly not true of the vast majority of them. Is this a slur? Or just an easy handle for one side of the struggle? In either case, both sides of the Charlottesville struggle were maxed out to their ideological extremes by the public. And this is not entirely inaccurate given the general stances these sides were taking and the violent extremes to which they were willing to go. Nazis and communists did slug it out on the streets of the Weimar Republic as well, and for similar reasons, I’m sure.
Things get much more interesting however in the core of the Right—interesting mostly for its diversity of opinion. Where the inner and outer rims each say, “Nazi bad,” and refuse to think more about it, in the core of the Right we have people who actually think about the Nazis and even try to rehabilitate them. They do this in a multitude of ways. Of course, some people don the swastika and actually become Nazis or something similar. Others deny the Holocaust. Many espouse the same kind of race realism, ethnocentrism, and/or anti-Semitism that the Nazis did—except to broaden their concern to the entire white race rather than just to Germans or Aryans. Certainly, it is possible to exist in the core of Right and view the Nazis as irredeemably evil. More common, I think, is to disapprove of Nazis as a modern-day movement—that is, dismissing it as inauthentic larping, not to mention bad optics, as Greg Johnson has done. Indeed, Americans marching in the streets wearing helmets and swastikas is an artifact of the Old Right—something that was ruthlessly spoofed in The Blues Brothers and of little use in today’s climate.
Many also will study largely-forgotten threads of history and humanize the Nazis. They will see how Nazism emerged from the degenerate and disproportionately Jew-controlled, Weimar Republic. They will sympathize with how Nazis and other traditionalist, Right-wing people were in a life-and-death struggle with communists in the streets of Germany throughout the 1920s. They will understand what a menace Jews were as passionate paragons of radical left-wing politics. They will appreciate how the Nazis attempted to restore the greatness of Europe and how they were goaded into war by a truculent Poland which was abusing, incarcerating, and murdering its German minority (with the belief that England would support them if ever Germany invaded). Most importantly, people in the core Right will see the Nazis as the good guys at the very least in its struggle against the Soviet Union, and will view the Holocaust—exaggerated or not—and other German atrocities in the context of the far-deadlier Holodomor and Soviet gulag system which preceded them.
But here is the point of this article. Let’s say for sake of argument that the Nazis were irredeemably evil—because, after all, humanizing them in an argument with people outside of the core Right would be a non-starter these days. How then can we prove that OregonMuse is correct and that the Nazis were preferable to the Soviets? To the ahistorical mind, they look equally bad: both invaded other countries and both killed millions. The testimony of a Witold Pilecki, while fascinating and moving in itself, wouldn’t be enough. But there is a simple answer:
The Soviets committed their greatest atrocities during peacetime.
This is the main difference between Nazis and Soviets, and it is a big one. None of Soviet atrocities needed to happen. There was no external threat forcing the Soviets to do bad things. This is after their civil war, during the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. Between the gulag, the Ukrainian Terror Famine, dekulakization, and forced population transfers, it is safe to conclude that around twenty million—mostly white people—were murdered during this time period. And this was not coincidentally the time period in which Jews enjoyed their greatest control over the Soviet Union.
In comparison, the Nazis waited until they were in an existential crisis during a world war against four of the world’s greatest superpowers to commit their war crimes. In other words, it was a last resort. The Nazis knew that a loss for them would be a total loss and were concerned that what happened to Russia would happen to Germany after they were gone. Reasonable, right?
So one can compare the Nazis and the Soviets, but the more one does so, the more one will realize that there really is no comparison at all.
25 comments
One point I forgot to mention is that, as white people on the Right, we should realize that we would likely thrive in a Nazi state while likely get imprisoned or executed in a Soviet one. So if a Jew or a liberal were to castigate us for favoring Nazism over Soviet Communism, he’s basically saying he’d rather we die than live.–all because of the Nazi treatment of Jews.
It’s one thing to be ethnocentric. It’s another thing entirely to require people not of your ethnicity to be ethnocentric on your behalf. That is essentially what most Jews do.
That argument (in not so many words) was delivered to me at a pretty young age by my late grandpa, and, looking back, that’s precisely how I figured out my Paw, who had plenty of run-ins with the Germans in WW2, was entirely redpilled by our standards.
I’ve heard centrists say things like ‘my country fought the Nazis with eyes wide open and knew about the whole thing’, or that they definately would still have boarded the landing craft if they could see us today etc.
I suppose war diaries might not be that useful in that they tend to focus on the action, rather than motivations.
One interesting data point regarding the attitudes of allied soldiers during the war was offered by the recent interview of Sharon Osbourne, where she claimed that her Jewish father, who served in the British army, was mistreated by other soldiers because he was a Jew and they thought that the war was fought because of the Jews.
As far as I know, the Allied war propaganda didn’t tell the men that they had to go to war to save the poor Jews from the evil Nazis. On the contrary, the whole idea that Nazi atrocities against the Jews were the most important thing about the whole war is something that has been retconned after the war beginning from the 70’s. At the time nobody (except probably the Jews) thought so. What the soldiers meant was probably that the war was fought on behalf of the Jewish bankers. After all, Mosley had been railing against the Jewish influence in British society during the 30’s and was a well known figure. So it seems at least some Tommies were pretty based and red pilled and fully aware of the JQ.
As an aside, it occurred to me after reading this piece that Trump’s impeachment hearing is essentially the Nuremberg trials part 2
No, that can’t be so because Trump is WORSE than Hitler.
Good article. Mike Enoch once made this point: If a white libertarian gets into historical revisionism and concludes the commies were worse than the nazis, the Jews know it’s time to intervene. They know you’re on the trajectory to the AltRight. It was true for me.
Great essay.
This was well argued. I’m stealing it.
Ronehjr,
Please steal away. That’s what I am here for. Thanks.
That is a good point in its own right. Why must my government always be acting on the behalf of others? My bitter Black Pill.
I think Rolling Stones has a song, where it goes a bit like this: “Well, well, is he ringing your bell?” There is more, where that came from…
I say, yes, sure, he is certainly ringing my bell. There is absolutely no hope for any of us, if we do not accept this. This guy brought the first genuine animal rights to Europe, he also brought the first genuine worker’s rights.
Yes, indeed, the song goes on: “Is it already too late? And no point shutting the gate…”
I hope so, kameraden, I hope so…
Yes, I miss “this guy”, warts and all.
He is a great and authentic leader, with genuine and boundless love for, and selfless and self-sacrificial devotion to his people. His accomplishments and endeavors before the war were splendid and phenomenal, both unprecedented and hardly duplicable.
Strategically he was too artistically romantic and soft on the English, not ruthless and far-thinking enough on Jewry, and treated his eastern neighbor the Slavic folks a bit too harshly and with historically rooted and untimely bias. Those were all his errors and foibles, nothing more.
On the day our White Nationalist movement prevails, He will be vindicated and given his rightful historical status, with neither mystical glorification nor categorical demonization, the latter especially, as it being exactly what the system that our movement aims to overthrow has so rabidly and relentlessly pinned on him.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn would definitely quarrel with the numbers of ‘soviet Russians’ killed directly by Communists from 1917 to around 1980 — I don’t know the exact year he was exiled — but placed the figure at between 75 -100 MILLION Russians, a good many of whom had spent time in the Gulags, along with him. So, he ought to know — he saw the inner workings up close and personal. I challenge anyone to read the 3 volumes of “The Gulag Archipelago”. I myself was only able to make it through Vol. I, before my psyche totally rebelled against any more unbelievably horrid situations in those death camps. Mostly White people were there, and probably some Jews and miscellaneous other prisoners who had ‘tripped up in the system’ in the far flung edges of the Empire. Just seeing “Dr. Zhivago” on the screen should be enough to convince you how utterly devastating that whole system was, let alone reading the book by Pasternak! So when I hear about the “Six Million” as being the worst thing to ever hit the planet, I get a little annoyed. True, any death in a useless death camp is a travesty, but if you want a body count measurement on which to base your estimation of ‘who is worse’, COMMUNISM WINS HANDS DOWN!
Hi Alexandra,
Yes, yes, and yes. Thank you for this. Yes, I have read all 3 volumes of Gulag–and one of these days I will write about them for CC as part of my overarching project on Solzhenitsyn and the Right. In Gulag he does mention that millions were killed in Ukraine in the 20s and 30s, but if I remember correctly does not provide a concrete sum. In Chapter 19 of 200 Years Together (published two decades later) he puts it at 15 million Russian peasants killed. I think he is not making the distinction between Ukrainians and Russians here. I also suspect that he is basing his number on Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow which floats a similar number killed between 1929 and 1937.
My 20 million number comes from this Unz review article, reprinting an article from 1989:
https://www.unz.com/article/the-taboo-against-truth/
20 million killed between the Russian civil war and ww2 is the most conservative estimate.
Ace’s minor cobloggers are nearly all jews, and I believe this to be the case with Oregon Muse. Using a 3rd party site’s Disqus comment section I once shamed (((JJ Sefton))) into briefly toning down the Israeli cheerleading in his morning linkfest lest he wake the Boomer readership with his less than subtle priorities.
As is the purpose of the majority of blog posts by jews on AoS, Oregon Muse is performing ideological Boomercon herding to ensure they remain on the plantation. Oregon Muse is concerned that the goyim might notice that Impeachmentfest ’19 is jewish top to bottom. So thus the twist in giving Hitler a brief reprieve as the earthly representative of satan lest the Boomercons wonder if the jews just actually hate White people. “No goyim, Nadler/Schiff et al aren’t jews, they are commies.”
This is a jewish weakness that can be exploited. They always telegraph their next move to determine the cattle’s mood, and they always try to cover their tracks with distractionary narrative framing. When called out on it, they go full screaming yenta after the wedding reception hall’s floor collapses.
Hi RHC,
I know about Sefton. How do you know about the others? Warden strikes me as the most dissident of the bunch though and I am pretty sure he’s not Jewish. I have no idea about OregonMuse though. I see what you’re saying about his strategy though, but a frank admission that commies are worse than Nazis will encourage many to leave that boomer plantation you mention. That, IMO, is the first step to being woke on the JQ, even if Ace and OregonMuse (like, ahem, Moses) can never join us in that promised land.
Hey Spencer, the co-bloggers, given that they write about matters of the home/family/food -esp on weekends, are want to toss in references to their Seder or religious holiday meals. I could be wrong about Oregon Muse, I give AoS light shrift, but that particular writer sticks out in my mind as one who had outed themselves.
Others [i.e. misguided wrongthinkers] deny the Holocaust…
We should be clear about the label “Holocaust denier,” which Spencer Quinn alludes to in passing.
Literally nobody denies that Germans interned Jews in concentration camps, and no Holocaust revisionist (aka “denier”) denies that during World War II Germans criminally killed Jewish civilians.
Instead, doubters question whether Germans killed six million Jewish civilians; they question the presence of homicidal gas chambers in German concentration camps; they refuse to believe that NS Germany had a plan to murder every Jew on the planet; many of them oppose the anti-white ideas that shape and motivate “the Holocaust,” a propaganda construction whose political meanings would be incomprehensible to the Allied soldiers who fought the war.
In 1994 Deborah Lipstadt successfully introduced “Holocaust denier” into our vocabulary in order to displace “Holocaust revisionist.” The latter sounds too reasonable and scholarly, and it has therefore been eliminated from mainstream discourse.
Its replacement – “Holocaust denier” – leads to strange destinations. Nick Fuentes is an evil “Holocaust denier” not because he denies that Germans killed Jews, a fact that he freely acknowledges, but because he questions the number of Jews that the Germans got around to killing. And proof of Nick’s evil – bizarrely – can be a photo of Jewish children still alive at the end of the war:
https://www.sebgorka.com/our-take-anti-semites-represent-the-opposite-of-what-america-stands-for/
It requires either actual or willed stupidity to believe that a photograph of living Jews, liberated inmates of a camp run by Germans, demonstrates a German program to murder all Jews. If it suggests anything at all, it suggests the non-existence of a German extermination program. Yet in the eyes of the non-moron Sebastian Gorka, a photo of Jewish children who *survived* their internment is proof not only of a German-run genocide in the 1940s, but proof also of the wickedness of all those who, eighty years later, doubt whether a genocide was ever intended.
Anyone tempted to use “Holocaust denier” as though it is a serious label should think about how weird this is. There are many Americans – most of them non-morons — who can look at a photo of Jewish children, still alive in 1945, and feel a powerful anger at anyone who “denies the Holocaust” by questioning whether the Germans had a plan to murder all Jews. Pointing out that the plan, if such a plan existed, was so visibly unsuccessful that it could not have been a serious plan has, as a consequence of Jewish power, been transformed from an obvious observation into macabre quibbling in the face of absolute evil.
The success of “Holocaust denier” protects the Jewish narrative of World War II from even the most elementary criticisms.
Hi Irmin,
Thanks for this. I did not put nearly as much thought into this as you did. Nor did I ascribe any value judgments. I only wished to classify a subset of the core Right that views the historical Nazis as human beings rather than avatars of evil. If “Holocaust denier” is such a loaded term, is there a better one?
I did not put nearly as much thought into this as you did.
For what it’s worth, this is one of my big issues:
https://counter-currents.com/2011/06/holocaust-commemoration/
If “Holocaust denier” is such a loaded term, is there a better one?
“Holocaust revisionist” is much better.
I didn’t mean any criticism. I meant only to point out the political problems of “Holocaust denial,” which was devised precisely to immunize the Jewish Holocaust from criticism.
I suspect that the number I have in my head for the death-toll of the Ukrainian ethnocide is smaller than the number in your head. We could have a polite disagreement about that, and we could each identify our preferred authorities. Neither of us would insult the other, and there is no popular label (e.g. “Holodomor denier”) to distinguish my opinion from yours. There would be no political stakes involved in our hypothetical disagreement, because both of us dislike Marxism.
The Jewish Holocaust is unique in its demand that each of its factual claims, which change over time, must be believed, and that anyone who fails to believe all of them is not only a thought criminal but a moral monster as well.
Unlike the Ukrainian ethnocide, the Jewish Holocaust makes both factual and political claims. The most important of the latter is its demand that all people of European descent acknowledge that they were somehow complicit in German crimes. Therein lies the temptation, for anyone who cares about Western civilization, to point out that many of the Holocaust’s factual charges against Germans are false.
It’s always worth keeping in mind that the Jewish Holocaust’s central factual claim – the charge that Germans intended to kill all Jews – is manifestly false,
One thing I constantly hear is that if it wasn’t for World War II we would all be speaking German today. To which I reply: as opposed to the current reality in which we will all soon be speaking Spanish? It always causes a pause and then they admit I am right if they admit anything instead of walking away confused.
Of Nations and Empires: see https://churchofdixie.org/
Why are “commies” worse than “nazis?”
When the “commies” seized power in the former Russian Empire, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin declared war against class enemies which resulted in the dispossession and/or destruction of millions of their own people. Same with Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s killing fields. The Red Terror.
When the “nazis” seized power in Germany in 1933, they did not use mass starvation to wipe out Westphalians, nor march millions of Saxons into gulags, nor arbitrarily shoot in the back of the head tens of thousands of National Socialist Party members out of paranoid obsessions. The number of Germans killed in Night of the Long Knives is estimated between 80 and 1000 … which was what, a good morning’s work for the NKVD at Lubyanka prison? And it’s certainly less than the number of White farmers killed by ANC minions in the rainbow nation of South Africa.
Insofar as the National Socialists committed acts of mayhem they were against “out” groups. And obviously there are the events of 1939 to 1945 to be considered.
We might also note that the National Socialists ended the Great Depression in Germany and created a prosperous peacetime society. As for the “commies”…in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and Zimbabwe they ran the economy into the ground and created mass starvation.
You can see the same thing today where the Left openly works for the dispossession and/or destruction of the legacy populations of White countries. Third world mass migrants become the new globalized proletariat in this class warfare whose stated objective is to “abolish the White race.” And we can see the outcome in the Red-Black Terror which has become policy in South Africa, Rotherham, Malmo, Cologne, Ferguson and points west.
As for the Right today…correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t nationalists working to preserve the legacy populations of Europe and the wider White world?
That is the critical difference.
And perhaps that is why the entire System is against today’s “nazis.”
“When the “commies” seized power in the former Russian Empire, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin declared war against class enemies which resulted in the dispossession and/or destruction of millions of their own people.”
None of them was Russian.
The greatest crimes have been done against non-Russian peoples. And it is part of a great historical undercurrent that can be observed during the history of the Russian state. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin rode this current, yet the genocide (like the Circassian genocide in 1864, Stalin was born in neighboring Georgia in 1878), mass starvation, even the gulag were inventions of the Romanovs.
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