Where does that canard about Nazis being ‘right-wing’ come from?

The claim that the Nazis were “right-wing” is  a blatant lie.

Factions of the far left have always labeled their leftist rivals as “far-right” to discredit them, thus creating the ‘fascism is far-right’ lie that conservatives have to put up with.

Have you ever wondered how the far left can make the absurd claim that people favoring liberty and limited government would be on the same side as a cadre of authoritarian collectivists with a completely opposite viewpoint?  

Why does the far left keep repeating this ridiculous asseveration without ever definitively proving it?

Why have they created cultural taboos that bar the pro-freedom right from mentioning the issue, while they feel free to spew their Nazi and fascist projections whenever they want? And why are they so obsessed with this when according to their words, they have nothing to do with it?

So, let’s start from the beginning: what is the source of the far left’s ridiculous assertion that some factions of the far left are somehow ‘far-right’?   

The answer is quite simple, totalitarians tend to compete with each other in wanting to control people and they see their fellow leftists as rivals in asserting this desire.

One group of collectivist authoritarians saw other authoritarians getting in the way of their grandiose plans of setting up a “Worker’s paradise.” They cloaked their socialist national agenda in patronizing language about a classless society of equality for all.

Thus, one group of collectivists will take control with a base ideology dredged up from Marx and the concepts he gleaned from ancient Greece and Sir Thomas More. While others who reject Marx are considered blasphemers by the first group.  

Whichever one ends up at the top of the pyramid of corpses (in the words of George Orwell) crowns themselves as the ultimate leftist. Since the winners write the history books, they place themselves in the ‘hero’ position on the far left of the political spectrum. While relegating the losing leftists in the battle to the ‘far-right’ as the ultimate ideological insult.  

Most of you of the pro-freedom right intuitively knew this was the case. And in our research on the Startling and Uncomfortable Ways the Democrat Party Emulates the Nazi Party (Yes, we’re going to get back on that horse soon enough), we found an academic paper that confirms our suspicions and gives everyone a roadmap for further research in finally being able to obliterate one of the left’s biggest – and oldest– lies. From Research Gate: How and Why Fascism and Nazism Became the “Right”

While it is a little bit of a dry, academic nature – being an academic paper after all – and while we may disagree in his terminology that may tend to confuse the issue. We enthusiastically encourage you to read the full text of the paper, download the PDF, share, and write about it if you can.

It starts by answering the basic question of how and why collectivist fascism and National Socialism (Nazism) somehow became known as belonging on the “right,” but it gets even better than that. It obliterates most of the far left’s “arguments” on the subject (if you can dignify stating something is a fact while utterly failing to prove it, an argument).  

You might even want to share it with some of our collectivist comrades of the fascist far-left. You never know, they might learn something, they certainly aren’t getting any proper information from the nation’s socialist media. They might even see the wisdom of the pro-freedom right, once they realize that they are currently on the side of history with Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Mussolini, and Lenin.

There are several prime examples in the paper that shows the left’s big lie can be sourced to the beginning of the last century, well over 100 years. The documentation shows that it comes from multiple sources. It should go without saying this took place well before WWII and other events. 

Our first example cites Vladimir Lenin:

Meanwhile, the Marxist flag was raised by the revolutionaries in the Russian Empire. Right away, Vladimir Lenin declared that the Marxist movement was undergoing “revisionism from the right,” and thus explicitly pushed reformists to the right wing of the Left. He accused them of the most awful wickedness—betrayal of the proletariats’ primary interests by seeking cooperation with the bourgeoisie within the walls of parliaments. Lenin notably labeled reformists proponents of the petty bourgeoisie (Lenin, V. I. 1973a. “Marxism and Revisionism.” In Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 15, 29–39. Moscow: Progress Publishers.)

The next example cites the Bolshevik Revolution of October 25, 1917, the Entente intervention in October 1922, over 100 years ago, and the rift between the ‘social chauvinists’ and Bolsheviks:

Thus, the Bolsheviks actively strengthened the far-left flank of socialists and led an offensive against more numerous socialist factions. The Bolsheviks’ propaganda firmly established Marxism-Leninism as a valid and indisputable continuation of Marx’s theory. They proudly occupied the far left wing of the political spectrum, shifting all others to the right.

Even worse, these leftists that were shifted to the right were repressed, exiled, or executed:

The Bolsheviks intended to rule alone and did not hesitate to eliminate all other parties and factions that did not share their perspective. Thus, the representatives of other leftist parties and party groups—Mensheviks, Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), Socialist Revolutionaries (SR), anarchists— were repressed, exiled, or executed in the course of the Bolsheviks’ power grab.

So much for the “Nazis went after Communists, so they couldn’t possibly be leftists lie.”

We previously asked those questions to make a point. Leftists keep on pushing what is a 100-year-old lie because one of the points raised in the paper: 

Nevertheless, in modern political science, Fascists and National Socialists are considered the Far Right. The Left is working hard to keep this myth alive. Exposing this would lead Western left-wing intellectuals into a state of acute cognitive dissonance. They would find that leftist ideology continuously breeds existential evil, which is not alien to the large-scale genocide of the dissident population. Thus, they prefer to completely deny the fact that fascism and Nazism were left-wing phenomena.

Their belief system doesn’t make any sense, but they can’t let themselves realize they are on the mass murder side of history. Their big lie helps them pretend that somehow others are ‘guilty’ as well. They also must be very selective in how they defend their big lie, but we’ll have to talk about that some other time.

D. Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history, the director of communications for a civil rights organization, and a long-time contributor to conservative websites.  Find him on Substack.

Image: Wikimedia Commons, via Picryl, public domain