Nazis vs. Commies

[1]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 [2]. 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 [3] 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 [4].

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 [5] 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 [6], 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 [7], 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 [8] 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 [9] 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 [10]? 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 [11] 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 [12] and disproportionately Jew-controlled [13], Weimar Republic. They will sympathize with how Nazis and other traditionalist, Right-wing people were in a life-and-death struggle [14] with communists in the streets of Germany throughout the 1920s. They will understand what a menace [15] 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 [16] into war by a truculent Poland [17] 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 [18], the Ukrainian Terror Famine [19], dekulakization [20], and forced population transfers [21], 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 [22] 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.