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> These sorts of people are notorious for being unable to recognize that Nazi-ism was an ideology of the hard left, an ideology that the academic classes are extremely susceptible to. There is pretty substantial disagreement amongst historians and political scientists (see Kershaw, The Nazi dictatorship: problems and perspectives of interpretation, which unfortunately I don’t have to hand.) This dispute predates 1968. Many bog standard liberals or centre-right types, insofar as such classifications apply to historians, subscribed to the Nazism as totalitarianism thesis (whilst, crudely, a Marxist view was that it was an outgrowth of the contradictions of bourgeois liberal capitalism). The view that it was hard-left was pretty fringe in the 50s and is still fringe now. There are several good reasons for this—amongst which is the fact that Nazism was an essentially illiterate tradition, in the sense that it had no meaningful intellectuals, whereas Marxism is an extremely literate family of ideologies—in fact, arguably at the expense of a proper connexion to actual reality. So the notion that there is even a substantial body of Nazi intellectual output with the same importance as, say, Lenin had to Soviet life, seems rather misconceived. (This of course is subject to the caveat that Marxists are very argumentative people and one can probably on nearly any given question find Marxist authors who disagree; Nazism, by contrast, barely developed a canon of authors, and had little theoretical unity or basis, so whilst there were substantial contradictions in utterances there were relatively few in practice, which is all we really have—and indeed on that metric there was quite substantial diversity amongst the various Marxist states—even Maoism and Stalinism differed in their choice of revolutionary class, for example, and then if we take Pol Pot, Tito, Juche before the constitutional revisions about a decade ago, and so on, there is even more diversity.) To consider your argument— > in their own analyses of their enemies they were inseparable from the Soviets they were fighting This seems to elide the obvious places where they would be different, viz., the sort of society they wanted to build. Now, you might subscribe to the, shall we say, totalitarianism thesis of liberal and liberal-conservative historiography—and that’s perfectly respectable as a view!—but one ought to at least discuss this to a certain extent. > even after the defeat of the Nazis and the fall of the USSR, in the western world this type of racist leftism was not wiped out as commonly assumed but merely retreated to its stronghold in academia It’s really not obvious whether you’re referring to bog standard social democrats who primarily focus on class or randos on Twitter who advocate the extermination of whites. Whatever it is, the latter clearly have far less institutional power within the left than advocates of the total extermination of their racial enemies did under the Nazis. > The exact sort of people who are obsessed with equating Nazis and conservative white men are also the sort of people who write glowing reviews of Nazi propaganda magazines Perhaps the author is indeed this sort of person, but in that case you could probably try finding something to cite. I have no doubt that such people exist, but it is rather lazy to sneer at, let’s say, at least a third of the political spectrum (on a crude left-centre-right trichotomy) on the basis of one article. |