History Repeating Itself

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” said the early twentieth century Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. There is a popular aphorism that says “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” While the meaning of the high-brow remark is not exactly the same as that of the low-brow saying the two are complementary and both happen to apply to what I am about to discuss.

The Winnipeg Free Press, which some people still think is a real newspaper for some reason, made the same story its front page headline every day from Monday to Friday last week. While the story was presented under the guise of investigative journalism it seems to me that agitprop would be a better term for it. It is all about how a local member of the Canadian Armed Forces Reserves has been purportedly recruiting for some neo-Nazi organization called “the Base.” I won’t bore you with the details as I doubt whether a word of them ought to be believed by anyone who isn’t a gullible fool.

Why the extreme skepticism, you may ask?

Speaking for myself, the fact that it was the Winnipeg Free Press that was doing the “reporting” is more than sufficient grounds for skepticism. In my opinion that rag is little more than a Liberal Party disinformation sheet and has been ever since the days – 1901 to 1944 – when it was edited by John Wesley Dafoe. This particular story, however, would have been ringing alarm bells even if a newspaper with an as-of-yet unimpeached record for journalistic integrity could be found somewhere on the planet and had been the one to break the story. Allow me to explain why.

How many of you remember the Heritage Front?

I suspect that name will be familiar to most Canadians who were old enough and attentive enough to have been following the news in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is a good chance they will also remember the organization’s front man, Wolfgang Droege, a man who was depicted as being pretty much the in-flesh personification of all the images and associations that the words “neo-Nazi” are intended to conjure up. Droege and the Heritage Front received an awful lot of airtime on the news, back then, because the media was trying to scare us into thinking that there was an imminent danger of a Fourth Reich being erected on Canadian soil.

How many of you who remember the Heritage Front also remember the name Grant Bristow?

Here I suspect the number will be far fewer, although he too was in the media spotlight for a brief period of time. Bristow was the man behind Droege – the co-founder, organizer, and security chief of the organization. He was also an undercover agent of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Services or CSIS which, ever since it took over the role from the RCMP in 1984, has aspired to perform for Her Majesty’s government in Ottawa the same services which both MI6 and MI5 perform for Her Majesty’s government in London. Bristow’s activities in the Heritage Front and his involvement with CSIS were both exposed by the Toronto Sun in 1994.

So why was a government spook one of the top officers of what was believed to be a neo-Nazi organization?

The facts can be interpreted one of two ways. The first explanation is that CSIS had infiltrated a burgeoning neo-Nazi movement in order to gather informative and/or neutralize any potential threat that it posed. The second explanation is that Bristow’s mission was to create a realistic looking neo-Nazi menace to frighten the public.

Before you discard the second explanation as a paranoid conspiracy theory, consider the previous neo-Nazi scare that had taken place in the 1960s.

In 1965 a man named John Beattie founded something called the Canadian Nazi Party, and the alarmist wing of the liberal media had a field day. For the next couple of years they kept the spotlight on this tiny group, reporting its every action, and blowing everything way out of proportion like a bunch of Chicken Littles trumpeting the imminent fall of the sky. The progressives demanded that the government step in and do something before this group, whose miniscule rallies they had magnified to the scale of those Hitler held at Nuremberg, took over Canada and imposed its agenda of racial purification on the country. This blitzkrieg of media disinformation culminated in the October 1966 issue of MacLean’s magazine. The cover story was an insider’s report on Beattie’s party by a man named John Garrity. The following is from his first paragraph:

I was more successful than I expected. I became a trusted officer of the party—its local Heinrich Himmler—though I've managed to avoid being linked with the nationwide publicity that has made the name of John Beattie, the unemployed clerk who is the party's leader, familiar to most Canadians.

Garrity’s story was eerily similar to Bristow’s. Each man befriended a would-be Führer, infiltrated his inner circle, and became the behind-the-scenes Himmler to his Hitler. In both cases the liberal media took a tiny molehill and blew it up into a huge mountain, but apart from the efforts of the moles, Garrity and Bristow, it is unlikely that there would have been even a molehill – just a couple of random, lone-wolf, racist fanatics.

There was one notable difference in the two cases. Whereas Bristow was working for the government, Garrity was employed by a private organization, the Canadian Jewish Congress. Not that there were not also government infiltrators. This was two decades before CSIS was formed but the RCMP, arguably a much more competent agency, was handling this sort of thing back then, and it is unthinkable that they would not have also had a mole or two. Given the infinitesimal size of the group, it seems to have resembled nothing so much as the World Council of Anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s novel in which a Scotland Yard detective infiltrates the anarchist movement and is elected to said Council only to discover that every other member is also an undercover policeman.

At any rate, while the Canadian Jewish Congress was a private organization, it was working very closely with the Liberal Party, which was the governing party in the Dominion at the time, as, unfortunately, it is now. In the same year that Beattie founded the Canadian Nazi Party – indeed, the same month – Prime Minister Lester Pearson appointed a Special Committee to study “hate propaganda” and report back to the Minister of Justice with recommendations as to potential legislation. The Canadian Jewish Congress had been petitioning Parliament to pass such legislation for years prior to this. Maxwell Cohen of McGill University was named chairman and among its seven members were a vice-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the then executive editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, and a far left journalist and law professor from Quebec whom Pearson was about to bring onto the front stage of Canadian federal politics. This was not an objective committee that would look into the question of whether or not there should be legislation against hate propaganda, it was a very left-leaning committee that would start from the conclusion that there ought to be legislation against hate propaganda and devise reasonable sounding arguments that the Minister of Justice could use to sell the idea to Parliament.

Do I really need to point out how having an organization called the Canadian Nazi Party all over the news would facilitate that process?

The reasons why the Canadian Jewish Congress wanted hate speech laws passed don’t really need to be explained as they are fairly obvious. The reasons why the Liberal Party leadership was set on passing such laws do require an explanation. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech were, after all, supposed to be among the basic pillars of classical liberal political philosophy. Most people would probably acknowledge that there are reasonable limitations on even these basic freedoms but hate speech laws are not among them. Laws against the incitement of violence and other criminal behaviour were already on the books and were sufficient to cover the incitement of racially motivated violence and crime. Hate speech laws were not necessary, therefore, to deal with such incitement, and would only serve the purpose of suppressing the expressions of thoughts which certain people did not want expressed.

The Liberal Party, historically, was the party that wanted to move Canada away from her British roots and connections into a closer relationship with the United States – or, as the old Tories such as George Grant and Donald Creighton liked to put it, to sell us out to the Americans. This was bad enough, but at the time of which we are speaking, the leadership of the party had fallen into the hands of ideologues of the totalitarian far Left. Lester Pearson, according to the highly credible testimony that Elizabeth Bentley gave to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security in 1951, had been an aware and willing participant in the Soviet spy ring she operated while he served in the Canadian embassy in Washington D. C. during the war. If he kept his far left ties hidden, the so-called “three wise men” that he brought into the Liberal Party for the 1965 election, the aforementioned Pierre Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand wore theirs on their sleeves. Under Pearson’s patronage they rapidly rose in the ranks of the Liberal Party and Trudeau was, from his entrance into federal politics, groomed by Pearson to be his hand-picked successor as Party leader and Prime Minister.

The free expression of ideas, which had been so important to classical liberals like J. S. Mill, was of no value or consequence to this kind of leftist, except insomuch as it pertained to the expression of their own ideas. Communists, whenever and wherever they seized control of a state, used its power to brutally suppress all dissent to their new order. In the 1960s, the hard Left was itself undergoing an internal transformation as it shifted its focus from economic class to race, sex, etc. and so “hate speech” laws were particularly appealing to them. So was the idea of dangling a perpetual Nazi threat before the public. What better way to distract people from the perpetual menace of the many-headed hydra that had sprung from the seed planted by Cromwell’s Puritans, grown into Jacobinism, evolved into Bolshevism, and which was rapidly spreading throughout the globe, than by keeping them fixated on the threat of a rival totalitarianism which resembled Communism in almost every way, but which had died, at least insofar as being a real threat to civilization goes, with its Führer in 1945.

The same issue of MacLean’s that featured Garrity’s story also contained an article by Blair Fraser entitled “Hate”, which told about the Cohen Committee, its report which had been submitted to the Minister of Justice in November of 1965 and brought before Parliament early the following year, and Pearson’s promise at a press conference that hate speech legislation was on its way. The article was filled with specious arguments designed to allay the Canadian public’s fears that such legislation would be a threat to freedom of speech. Fraser was wrong in his prediction that such laws would be passed by the following year but he was only off by three years. Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as Liberal leader and Prime Minister in 1969 and the following year acted on his own recommendations as a member of the Cohen Committee and introduced the legislation that added Sections 318 to 320 to the Criminal Code.

Let us recap: the leadership of the Liberal Party was determined to pass “hate speech” laws, it appointed a Special Committee to come up with a report to persuade Parliament to approve such laws, while selling the Canadian public on these laws was left to the media, which for the most part serves as a propaganda arm of the Liberal Party. Conveniently, the jobs of both the Special Committee and the media were made easier by the appearance on the scene of the Canadian Nazi Party, whose leader was propped up behind the scenes by a private investigator working for the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had long wanted hate speech legislation and was working closely with the Liberal Party towards achieving that end. It is difficult, for anyone capable of adding two and two together and coming up with four, to avoid the conclusion that the Nazi scare of the 1960s was a fake scare, created to make hate propaganda legislation an easy sell.

The uncanny resemblance of Bristow’s story to Garrity’s strongly suggests that the second Nazi scare was a fake scare too. The motive is not as obvious as with the first scare but consider the following facts. During Pierre Trudeau’s long premiership, the Liberal Party had shifted government policy drastically to the left on immigration, abortion, homosexuality, preferential treatment for victims of “discrimination” in employment, and a myriad of other social, cultural, and moral issues. The Grits had never had to take these policies to the polls because the New Democrats were even further to the left and the Progressive Conservatives, under Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark, and Brian Mulroney were completely dominated by the wets and easily intimidated by accusations of racial, religious, sexual, and cultural bigotry. Then, in 1987, the protest movement that had been growing in the West in response to the Liberals’ heavy-handed imposition of their leftist agenda, the non-opposition to that agenda provided by the Progressive Conservatives, and Ottawa’s arrogance in general, formed the populist Reform Party of Canada. For a time, at least, the Reform Party was willing to take relatively right-of-centre positions on some of these issues, and that frightened both the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives. The Liberals were terrified of having to take their radical agenda to the polls and find out what Canadians actually thought of it. The Progressive Conservatives were – with good cause, as events proved – afraid that their voting base would defect to the Reform Party. (1) The Heritage Front was formed in 1989 and the liberal media immediately tried to tie it to the Reform Party. The plot of Liberal Party strategist and anti-racist activist Warren Kinsella’s 1997 Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network revolves around such supposed connections.

The question, then, of who exactly CSIS was serving, when its agent Grant Bristow helped found the Heritage Front, is rather moot. The Progressive Conservatives, who were in power in Parliament at the time, had a motive for creating a new fake Nazi threat. The Liberal Party which had created CSIS – the Act forming the new intelligence agency passed Parliament one week before Pierre Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister – and to which civil servants have an obnoxious tendency to be loyal regardless of who the governing party in Parliament happens to be, also had a motive. Both parties had the same motive – to smear the right-populist Reform Party by association. If I had to bet on who was ultimately responsible, however, my money would be on the Liberals.

Under its present leadership the Liberal Party is the furthest to the left it has ever been. It is in power in Parliament at the moment, but the next Dominion election is in October and the wave of popularity that swept this government into office four years ago has been ebbing fast, due to its own overweening arrogance, gross incompetence, and a huge scandal in which it’s unethical and perhaps criminal behaviour has been exposed. It has resorted to accusing the leadership of the Conservative Party of links to “white supremacy” and “white nationalism.” It has also expressed its desire to bring back something similar to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which was repealed by Parliament six years ago. Section 13 defined it as an act of discrimination to communicate via telephone or internet anything “likely” to expose someone to “hatred or contempt” on the grounds of membership in a group protected against discrimination. Worded that broadly, it covered virtually any negative criticism of such groups, and unlike the hate speech provision of the Criminal Code, did not come with a presumption of innocence for the accused or the right to any sort of real defense. It was a terrible law, far more in keeping with the totalitarian mindset of actual National Socialism than with the principles of justice and freedom enshrined in our traditional Common Law. Earlier this year, the government instructed the House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights to conduct a study of the dissemination of hate on the internet – in other words, to come up with arguments for bringing back Section 13, or even something worse, if that is conceivable.

Now, a newspaper that served the Liberal Party faithfully for over a century, just happens to have discovered a neo-Nazi organization that nobody has heard of before but which is supposed to have embedded itself in the Canadian Armed Forces. Yeah right. Sometime, probably years down the road, it will be revealed that this “Base” is as much a phony set-up as the Canadian Nazi Party and the Heritage Front were – mark my words.

If we fail to remember the past and allow ourselves to be fooled by this nonsense for yet a third time, then shame, shame, triple shame on us.

(1) I was one of the defectors. I eventually grew disgusted with the Reform Party and allowed my membership to lapse – on the verge of its final merger with what was left of the Progressive Conservative Party. This disgust had nothing to do with the Reform Party’s right-of-centre positions, real or imagined, which if anything I would have preferred more of, but with its hostility to our Loyalist heritage which it illogically blamed for the country’s slide into far-leftism, its indifference to the monarchy, and its barely concealed, anti-patriotic, preference for the constitution, institutions, and traditions of the United States over our own.

Hic et Ille IV

Sad News

I learned this morning that Phyllis Schlafly passed away yesterday at the age of 92. Schlafly was a noted American conservative leader. She will probably be most remembered for leading the anti-feminist campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment – one of the few social conservative campaigns in the last half century to actually succeed in attaining its objective. In 1964, her book A Choice Not An Echo, called upon conservatives within the Republican Party to choose Arizona Senator Barry M. Goldwater as their candidate. Just as the title of Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences has endured as a slogan in the American conservative movement – regrettably, the book’s substantial content has not fared as well – so ought the title of Schlafly’s book to endure as a perennial reminder to purportedly conservative politicians, ever faced with the temptation to adopt progressive policies in order to “get with the times” and “appeal to the masses,” that they are supposed to present the electorate with an alternative to liberalism, not just alternative leadership to liberalism. Rona Ambrose and other leaders of Canada’s Conservative Party, I am looking in your direction as I write this. Most recently, Schlafly, who operated mostly through an organization she founded back in the 1970s called the Eagle Forum, has taken a strong stand on immigration and accordingly endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for the US Presidency. Her enemies, as far back as Betty Friedan in the fight over the ERA, accused her of being a hate-filled woman, an accusation that I have seen repeated in one or two headlines announcing her death – demonstrating once again, just how unclassy people who believe in a classless society can be – but like most if not all accusations of “hate” from the left, this was obviously a projection of their own feelings upon the object of their own hatred. She was a devout Roman Catholic Christian, whose writings I have enjoyed over the years. May she rest in peace.

Happy News

Angela Merkel’s sinister (that’s Latin for left) attempt to make the death of Western civilization through its own liberalism foretold in Jean Raspail’s dystopic novel The Camp of the Saints into a living reality has now backfired against her. Her party did poorly in the state elections in Germany this past weekend, coming in third in her own state, behind the AfD party which opposes the policy of national and cultural suicide through the embrace of the migration tsunami that Merkel has spearheaded over the last year and a half. Acknowledging that her decisions with regards to the “refugees” contributed to her losses at the polls, she has nevertheless doubled down and insisted that these decisions were right. Perhaps she ought not to be blamed for being a slow learner, however. It seems to be a common affliction in her country, which last year sentenced an 87 year old grandmother to ten years in prison for saying that Auschwitz was “not historically proven” to be a death camp, thus demonstrating that they learned absolutely nothing of value whatsoever from their twelve years under the tyranny of the Third Reich where people were imprisoned, or worse, for saying things the regime did not like. Hopefully, however, the trouncing Merkel got over the weekend shows that the Germans have learned a lesson or two from her misrule. Let us pray that the trend indicated by this election, and by the BREXIT vote in the UK a few months back, will continue, that the monstrosity that is the EU will be brought down, and the “Camp of the Saints” style death of Europe for which it had longed, averted.

Quis erit Caesar?

George Santayana famously stated that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The eighteenth century founders of the American Republic might have profited from this insight, had it been made prior to their own time. In their rebellion against the British Crown and Parliament, they envisioned the republic they built for themselves as a New Rome in the New World. The old Rome, having driven out the Tarquins with much greater grounds of complaint than the Americans ever had against King George III, created a vacuum in their constitution which periodically had to be filled by dictators, and which eventually was permanently filled by the Caesars. The lesson to be learned is that if you will not have your lawful king to rule over you, eventually you will have to bow your knee to Caesar. It is evident that the American Republic, having become an empire in the twentieth century, is now entering a phase of Caesarism and the question the Americans will be answering in their election this November is who gets to be Caesar? Will it be the decrepit old harpy, who thinks she is owed the position by virtue of her sex, who dishonestly wrangled the nomination of her party away from the more popular Bernie Saunders despite running while under criminal investigation, who thinks that by claiming that not knowing “C” stood for “classified” on the top-secret information she was so loose with as Secretary of State excuses her behaviour rather than demonstrating her to be incompetent to hold high office, who is the most corrupt candidate her party – the party of Tammany Hall and Joseph P. Kennedy, mind you – has ever known, and who with the blood of Serbs, Iraquis, Libyans, Egyptians and Syrians already on her hands from her warmongering as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State, seems determined to go head to head against Russia? Or will it be the first candidate in decades not to dance to the tune of the one-world globalists and free traders, who is instead, to borrow the words of the late Phyllis Schlafly, presenting Americans with “a choice, not an echo”?

St. Mother Theresa and the Beast

Mother Theresa of Calcutta has just been canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Without calling into question her worthiness of the honour, I would merely observe that it is somewhat tainted by the fact that presiding over the canonization was a Pope truly worthy of the appellation the Reformers gave to his predecessors in the sixteenth century – Antichrist.

An Historical Question

History is an important subject of study and discussion. George Santayana once remarked that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, although if we believe those like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee who say that they have found a cyclical pattern in history this might be inevitable in any circumstance. Regardless, in the people and events of the past, there are lessons both positive and negative for us to learn. Whether or not we learn those lessons will have consequences for our lives in the present and for those of future generations as well.

An orthodoxy is necessary to the consideration of history. By orthodoxy I mean a general consensus as to the established facts of history. Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States in 1968. Ed Broadbent was not elected Prime Minister of Canada in 1988. These are basic, established, facts of history. If we reject the concept of an orthodoxy altogether, and treat all historical facts as being up for debate, we will never learn anything from history.

On the other hand, historical orthodoxy must not be so inflexible as to reject legitimate challenges. Governments, in peace and war, present their acts in the most positive light possible to the people they govern. It would be greatly detrimental to the good of our societies and civilization if we blindly accepted every government’s version of its own actions as part of orthodox history.

What is needed, therefore, is both a settled account of the people and events of the past, and an ongoing re-examination of this account which questions it where it may be in error and corrects it if it finds it so to be.

In the rest of this essay we are going to consider a question regarding 20th Century history and what the academic, media, and political establishments all appear to regard as the orthodox answer to the question. I will argue that the orthodox answer is misleading and that this has important ramifications for us in the present day.

Before doing so some terms need to be defined. What is meant by “left” and “right”?

These terms entered political discourse in the era of the French Revolution. They were rather literal terms at the time. The supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, the landed aristocracy, and the Roman Catholic Church sat on the “right” of the speaker in the French assembly, whereas the supporters of the revolution that sought to abolish all three of these and establish a secular, bourgeois, republic of equal citizens sat on the left. By extension, “right” came to refer to all traditionalists, who supported concepts, values, and institutions which dated back prior to the “Enlightenment”, to the era of Christendom and even the Classical Age. Conversely the “left” came to refer to progressives, who believed that man through reason and science could abandon tradition and the past entirely, and establish a golden age for himself in the future. As the 19th Century progressed the term “left-wing” also came to include the economic concept of socialism which the “right-wing” opposed.

“Left” and “right” are related to another set of terms which entered political discussion in the 19th Century. These terms are “conservative” and “liberal”. “Conservative” and “right” or “right wing” were more or less synonymous, although “conservative” could arguably be described as referring to a distinctly English version of “right-wing”. It was coined to refer to the reorganized Tory Party, the party which stood for the established constitution of England, her monarchy, and her Church, after that party had accepted certain ideas from its traditional opponents the Whigs.

“Liberal” on the other hand does not correspond so well to “left” or “left wing”. It has a number of different meanings. In ethical philosophy it is the term for the classical virtue of generosity. In its most basic political sense it refers to the idea that government should not abuse the people it governs but should respect their liberties and basic rights. In this sense of the term almost everybody is a liberal, including conservatives. (1) This basic concept, however, has been developed into more complete political theories which are also called liberalisms, each of which to one degree or another conflicts with conservatism, and, I as a conservative would argue, with reality.

There is classical liberalism, for example, This is what the term “liberalism” generally denoted in the 19th Century, and it is the theory that human beings are at the most fundamental level individuals, and that all social interaction between them should be mutually voluntary, based upon the model of a business contract. This is the theory of John Locke, J. S. Mill, Adam Smith and in the 20th Century Sir Karl Popper and Ludwig von Mises. This kind of liberalism is neither conservative (for conservatism asserts the priority of family and community over the individual) nor left-wing (because it rejects socialism and, indeed, is synonymous with capitalism).b


Then there is “progressive liberalism”. For most of the 20th Century, in North America the term “liberalism” when used without an adjective referred to this kind of liberalism. While “progressive liberalism” builds upon the same theoretical foundation as “classical liberalism” it embraces interventionism by the democratic state as the means of progress. To a large degree this kind of liberalism converged with the left in the 20th Century. It is anti-conservative and embraces socialism to a certain degree.

Let us now consider the question.

“Which was the greater evil in the 20th Century, Nazism or Communism?”

Most people, I would think, would say that this question is unanswerable. “Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea” Dr. Johnson remarked when asked about two minor poets and if it is pointless to discuss degrees of mediocrity it is offensive to many to discuss the degrees of evil between two repressive systems which both imprisoned and killed people by the millions and threatened the security and freedom of the entire world.

Note, however, that many who would respond to the question in this way do not express their true thoughts on the subject by doing so. This indignant rejection of the very question often comes from people who have already answered the question as a means of avoiding having their answer come under scrutiny.

The official orthodoxy on the matter is that a) it is wrong to ask the question because there is no answer and b) the answer is “Nazism”. This position is self-contradictory but to many people challenging it is about the greatest thought crime you could ever commit.

That such an orthodoxy exists is undeniable. Even at the height of the Cold War, self-acknowledged Marxists and even Stalinists could be found among the faculty of major universities across Europe and North America. The student bodies of these universities contain countless radicals who wear t-shirts with Communist slogans or the face of Communist revolutionary Che Gueverra. Could you imagine a similar tolerance being extended to faculty members who identify with the ideas in Mein Kampf or students who dress up as brownshirts? A few years ago here in Winnipeg a couple had their children taken away from them by the child protection bureaucracy because a teacher had called in and complained that the family’s daughter had come to school with a swastika drawn on her arm. Would that teacher have called if the swastika had been a hammer and sickle? (2)

Further evidence of the existence of this orthodoxy can be found in the predictable gut reaction of many to my last paragraph. “Why are you asking these questions? Are you a Nazi sympathizer?” I could turn around and ask “Why are you so upset about these questions? Are you a Communist sympathizer?” If I were to do so, however, I would immediately be accused of “McCarthyism”.(3)

Do you recognize the significance of that fact? It would be far more fair to accuse those who uphold the reigning orthodoxy of sympathy for Communism than to accuse those of us who point out its flaws of sympathy towards the Third Reich. However, there is a word in the English language for someone who accuses another person of being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer and that word carries more opprobrium than the label “Communist” itself. We have no equivalent word for a person who accuses another person of being a Nazi.

All of this is of greater practical importance than it may seem at first glance. A number of organizations exist to warn the public of a supposed ongoing Nazi threat and their publications are taken very seriously by the political left and its academic and media counterparts. People on the right who warned about the threat of Communism were dismissed as kooks, extremists, and McCarthyites even when the Soviet Union was still in power.

Which of these two great evil movements of the 20th Century was the most persistent threat, however?

Sir Winston Churchill was deservedly credited with prescience with regards to the threat posed by Hitler’s Reich. He also warned about the dangers of Bolshevism, however, and he did so long before the Austrian demagogue rose to power in Germany. He continued to warn about the threat of Communism after the threat of Nazism had been done away with. Bolshevism seized control of Russia in 1917, 16 years before Hitler came to power in Germany. Nazism ended in 1945, and the war that brought it down left Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Eastern Germany under Communist control. Three years later the Chinese Communists under Mao seized control of their country. Then North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam, Cambodia, and many other countries fell to the rule of Communism. Domestically, in Western countries, Communists and their sympathizers outnumber by far the handful of people who still admire Adolf Hitler and his regime, and have long done so.

Despite all of this people who warned about the “Red Menace” were dismissed as witch hunters and extremists while draconian “hate speech” laws were passed to counter the supposed threat of resurgent Nazism.

What is the explanation of this? Is it simply a matter of “pas d'ennemi à gauche” (4) on the part of Leftists in control of the official orthodoxy?

Yes and no. While “no enemies to the left” plays a significant part in generating this orthodoxy it is not a simple matter of a leftist establishment regarding “right-wing extremists” (Nazis) as worse than “left-wing extremists” (Communists). The idea that Nazism represents an extreme on the right and Communism an extreme on the left is itself part of the orthodoxy which does not correspond with reality. Nazism was not a right-wing movement. It was in fact a left-wing movement.

This is not to deny that there were right-wing elements in Nazism. George Grant said that “One definition of national socialism is a strange union of the atheisms of ‘the right’ and of ‘the left’”. (5) By “atheism of the right” he meant the philosophy of Nietzsche, but while there is truth in this description, the only significant, recognizably right-wing element of Nazism was its anti-Bolshevism. Otherwise, Nazism was clearly a left-wing movement.

The official title of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers Party, a left-wing name if ever there was one. That doesn’t mean much, but the Nazi Party rose to power by appealing to the groups which left-wing movements have traditionally sought out for their support base – the young and the working class. It was distrusted by the most conservative class in Germany – the Catholic aristocracy – from the beginning. The unsuccessful movement to remove Hitler from power during World War II drew its members from this class. (6) The Nazis had no time for the things the traditional right-wing existed to support – royalty, aristocracy, and the Christian Church. Their eugenics program and racial doctrines were both based upon Darwinism.(7) While there was a long-standing and regrettable tradition of mutual suspicion on the part of Christians and Jews in Europe this was not the basis of the anti-semitism of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Their anti-Semitism was based upon the idea that Jews and Aryans were biological enemies in a Darwinian struggle for survival. (8) Even the manner in which the Nazi regime carried out its mass-murder program was clearly based upon the principles of utopianism and progressive industrial factory-line efficiency which is one of its most chilling aspects.

Nazism was primarily a blend of nationalism and socialism, both of which elements were left-wing. Hitler’s socialism may not have resembled most other socialisms (except that practiced in the Soviet Union at the time) but his nationalism was clearly the left-wing nationalism which was born, alongside modern democracy and totalitarianism, in the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century. In this nationalism, the general will of the people (the nation, the volk) is sovereign and the absolute loyalty it demands of each citizen must supercede all other loyalties, such as those to family, home, church, and neighborhood. It was against this notion that Edmund Burke wrote that true love for one’s country, and indeed for the world, must grow outward from the love for one’s “little platoon” that arises naturally. In Hitler’s demand that children spy on their parents, and neighbor on his neighbor, for the Reich, it is Rousseau’s nationalism and not Burke’s patriotism that was taken to its ultimate extreme.

That both of the repressive, totalitarian movements of the 20th Century were manifestations of the left, of the spirit of progress and modernity, was understood by British satirist and novelist Evelyn Waugh, who in the first volume of his Sword of Honour trilogy describes his protagonist, Guy Crouchback, as eagerly returning to England to sign up for World War II after the pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, because he felt that in a conflict against the alliance of those two evils, “the modern age in arms”, there was a place for him. (9)

It is unlikely that history books and academic classes will be identifying Nazism as a left-wing movement any time soon, however. It is to the advantage of the left that Communism and Nazism are regarded as the extremes of the left and right, not only because it makes the left look better if one of the great evil movements of the 20th Century was on the other side, but because it drives people towards the centre ground of liberalism. This is beneficial to the left because this central territory was completely colonized by them in the 20th Century.

(1) As George Grant put it “Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good—‘conservatives’ included. In so far as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human good, it is difficult for me to consider as sane those who would deny that they are liberals.” English Speaking Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1974, 1985) p. 4.

(2) I had not yet started Throne, Altar, Liberty when this happened but was writing essays which I posted to my Facebook page and privately e-mailed to my friends. In an essay entitled “First They Came for the White Supremacists…” (May 27, 2009) I pointed out that it was ironical that the government was “using people’s fears of Nazism as the basis for their experiments in thought control.” Why was it ironical? “What was it about Hitler’s regime that made it so terrible? I always thought that it was the fact that the Third Reich was a tyrannical regime with secret police and a fanatical leader-worship cult that encouraged people to turn in their parents, neighbors, and friends if they were suspected of disloyalty to the state, in which freedom was non-existent and the state was in the hands of a gang of petty thugs who ruled by fear.” I then pointed out that “Yet you can be an avowed Marxist and remain respectable in academic circles. You can hang up the flags of murderous Communist regimes, wear T-shirts glorifying Communist mass-murderer ‘Che’ Guevera, and praise Castro and Mao to high heaven, and nobody will say anything about it.” A month later I took part in a small and brief protest against the actions of Child and Family Services. Lindor Reynolds, a columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press interviewed us, and I explained that I believed CFS had overstepped the boundaries of their mandate from Her Majesty’s government in removing children from a home on the basis of the political views of the parents. Reynolds did not think it important to ask us whether or not we agreed with the political views of the parents in question or with the ideology the swastika represented before imputing such agreement to us in her write up. I wonder if it would have occurred to her to have asked if we had been protesting the removal of a child from a home on the basis of his having proudly worn his hippie father’s “Che” t-shirt to school? (And yes, I would consider that to be as much an abuse of state power as the other).

(3) The word “McCarthyism” is derived, of course, from the name of Joseph R. McCarthy, who was the Republican Senator from Wisconsin from 1947 until his death a decade later. McCarthy, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950, accused the US State department of being “infested with communists”, stating that he had a list of known Communist agents who were employed by the State department. The speech was widely reported in the press, McCarthy was summoned before a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Millard Tydings which had been charged with investigating his allegations, and later McCarthy himself would investigate alleged Communist infiltration of various branches of the American government, including the US army. By the end of his life, the media had made his name synonymous with “witch hunting”. There has been evidence, however, right from the beginning, that McCarthy’s accusations were not as wide of the mark as the press maintained. In McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning, published by Henry Regnery of Chicago in 1954, William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell examined McCarthy’s earliest allegations, those heard by the Tydings Committee, in great depth and demonstrated that while not all of them could be shown to be Communists, there was evidence in the vast majority of cases that a security risk existed. Since the end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the ensuing new access to Soviet archives, and the declassification of the files of the VENONA Project in 1995, new evidence has come to light that suggests that McCarthy’s accusations only touched the tip of the iceberg with regards to Soviet infiltration of the American government in that era. See Arthur Herman Joseph McCarthy : Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (New York: Free Press, 2000) and M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Crown Forum, 2007).

(4) “No enemies on the left”.

(5) Grant, op. cit., p. 103.

(6) Claus von Stauffenberg, for example.

(7) Since WWII, the left has tried to portray eugenics and “racism” as “right-wing” phenomena. This is grossly misleading. Eugenics, which developed out of the theories of Charles Darwin and his cousin Sir Francis Galton, was regarded initially as a progressive development in science. Eugenics programs received broad support from across the political spectrum. Left-wing intellectuals rallied behind it. Here in Canada, Tommy Douglas wrote his master’s thesis in support of eugenics in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power. In notoriously left-wing Sweden eugenics was practiced until the late 1970’s. While it received right-wing support as well, including that of Sir Winston Churchill, and the right-wing Social Credit government in Alberta had a sterlization program for decades (a fact about which Jane Harris Zsovan has recently thrown a book length hissy fit) the most notable principled opposition to eugenics in the pre-Hitler era came from socially conservative religious leaders. Theories of racial supremacy also arose out of the “Enlightenment” and its emphasis upon the natural sciences and were thus originally considered to be progressive.

(8) Dr. Jacob Neusner, an academic rabbi and a pioneer in the scholarly study of Judaism within the context of the mainstream American university, in an essay entitled “Sorting Out Jew-Haters” which appeared in the March 1995 issue of Chronicles Magazine, distinguished between the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany in which “Jews are a separate species within humanity, peculiarly wicked, responsible for the evil of the human condition” and other negative attitudes towards the Jews. He points out how only this specific anti-Semitism as an “encompassing worldview” could have had the horrific consequences it had in Nazi-occupied Europe. This is the opposite approach to that of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen whose books argue that the Holocaust was the natural product of the teachings of Christianity and the German mindset. Neusner is correct.

(9) As the trilogy unfolds, from Men in Arms through Officers and Gentleman to Unconditional Surrender, Crouchback increasingly becomes aware of the fact that his old-fashioned notions of chivalry and honour are being punished while people with less noble concepts are rewarded. The extent to which modern notions have pushed out traditional principles is made clear to him when the new alliance is forged between Britain and the Soviet Union.