Tuesday’s Busting the Huge Lie Open Commentary

Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler

“Hitler remained to the end a socialist”; the Führer “was totally irreligious and” wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter’s Square.”

The guys who run the No Pasaran website from France are celebrating their 20th year of writing great conservative content from the Continent.  This is a large posting rich with plenty of referential links.  The Huge Myth of Fascism being the vision, the raison d’et of the Right cannot be debunked enough because this pernicious lie persists in academia, politics and Western culture.

First though comes the eminent historian Paul Johnson’s book, Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s.

There is much to learn from Paul Johnson’s history of the 20th century, not least the appalling truth about the “Republican” camp during the Spanish Civil War; some unpalatable facts about FDR and his “vanity … compounded by an astonishing naivety”; and, most importantly, the many ways in which the autocrats of the left (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc…) and of the right (Hitler, Mussolini, Pétain, etc…) inspired, complemented, and even conspired with, one another.

Much of what we have learned turns out to be myths. What explains the rise of rightist fascism, and how does it differ from leftist communism?  According to Paul Johnson, there isn’t much difference at all, and the reason for its rise in Europe was the genuine shock, by the general population as well as by the Left itself, over the disastrous results of Lenin’s communist revolution in Russia, as much on an economic level as on a humane level. To counter the ruin and the atrocities of international socialism, the Left in Europe invented and turned to national socialism. (Vielen Dank für den Instalink, Kamarad Gail Heriot…)

Also fascinating is the thread that runs through the book, by which the expansion of the State in general and the appearance of “gangster statesmen” in particular took place in the wake of the disappearance of religion and moral absolutes in public life. 

Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin

Perhaps the most interesting regarding Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) is that efforts by the Left to link Hitler and the Fascists with the Right’s (and/or with the bourgeoisie’s) religion and capitalism are the complete opposite of the truth. Not only were the Nazis and il Duce die-hard (even Karl Marx-quoting) socialists (in Hitler’s case, a Leninist, according to Paul Johnson, and, in Mussolini’s, virtually a Marxist), but the Germans engaged in “attacks on Christianity” and der Führer — who was simply “a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist” — had plans for the Pope to “be hanged in full pontificals in St Peter’s Square.”

and this,

 … Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil:  Satan. But modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race

… The new anti-Semitism, in short, was part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of individual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt — the revival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous, even bestial, of instincts

… German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a ‘back to the countryside’ movement … Unlike Marxism, which was essentially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a cultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism

… Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion stripped of Christianitybecause it had been Judaized by St Paul, ‘the Rabbi’

… Hitler was totally irreligious and had no interest in honour or ethics.  He believed in biological determinism, just as Lenin believed in historical determinism.  He thought race, not class, was the true revolutionary principle of the twentieth century, just as nationalism had been in the nineteenth.  He had a similar background to Lenin.

this as well,

 … It was Stalin who pointed the way to Hitler

… Under the influence of Stalin, the German CP made no real distinction between the Social Democrats (‘Social Fascists’) and Hitler.  Their leader, Ernst Thälmann, told the Reichstag on 11 February 1930 that fascism was already in power in Germany, when the head of the government was a Social Democrat

… Blinded by their absurd political analysis, the Communists actually wanted a Hitler government, believing it would be a farcical affair, the prelude to their own seizure of power

… The events immediately preceding Hitler’s accession to power are curiously reminiscent of Lenin’s rise albeit the first used the law and the second demolished it — in that they both show how irresistible is clarity of aim combined with a huge, ruthless will to power

… It had taken Hitler less than five months to destroy German democracy completely, about the same time as Lenin.  Not a soul stirred.

Read the whole thing. Follow the links.

I read Modern Times by Paul Johnson (originally published in 1985) almost 30 years ago.  You should too.  It’s a phenomenal book.