Debate on Hitler's Political Alignment

I've been saying it for months, Hitler was far left, and

every time I get the same reactions, screaming, "Revisionist,

ignorant, go read a book." Fine. Today, I'm doing

the full version. I'm going to explain why Hitler's politics

were

collectivist, why the left desperately needs to keep him

on the right, and

why the people who write history are not neutral referees.

I'll finish with the only real political fight. Get comfortable.

This is a masterclass. Let's start with the facts, not the

labels. Hitler's party was called the NSDAP,

the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Its 1920 program demands the nationalization of trusts,

profit-sharing in big business, the abolition of unearned income,

and the expropriation of land. It sums up its philosophy in one

formula: the common good before the individual

good,

Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz. Any collectivist on the planet

would sign that sentence with both hands.

"Just electoral marketing," you'll say.

So let's look at what they did once in power.

In May 1933, the trade unions are dissolved.

They are replaced by the German Labor Front, which puts bosses and workers

under the authority of the party. In July 1933, the

state grants itself the right to impose compulsory cartels.

Wages are set by bureaucrats. In 1936,

Göring is handed a four-year plan with self-sufficiency as its goal.

In November 1936, a decree freezes all prices, and a

Reich commissioner is put in charge of setting them.

Add to that control over currency, credit, investment, and raw

materials. The boss keeps his property title,

but he no longer

decides anything. He doesn't choose what to produce,

at what price,

who to sell to, or how much to pay his workers.

Private property stripped of every right of property is a stage set.

Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist of Jewish origin who

had to

flee Europe because of Nazism, had a name for this system,

socialism of the German pattern. The Soviets nationalized the

factories. The Nazis nationalized the decisions.

The result is the same, a center that decides for everyone in the

name of a group. That group is class for Stalin and race for

Hitler. Same machine, different fuel.

Now, the real question: if all of this is documented, why were you

taught the opposite? Because the left needs Hitler on the

right.

He's its most precious asset. Without him, it sinks.

Remember the situation in 1945. Communism has a big

problem. In 1939, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler,

and they carved up Poland. Then the USSR shipped oil and

grain to the Reich until Hitler invaded it in June 1941.

How do you erase that? By buying back its innocence through

anti-fascism. In France, the Communist Party calls itself

the Party of the 75,000 Executed, a number

historians have since largely deflated.

Anti-fascism becomes the moral certificate of the entire left,

but for that certificate to work, you need one rule: fascism is on

the right, period. From there, the machine runs on its own.

Hitler is far right, so the far right is absolute evil, so the

right is suspect. Anyone who defends borders,

the free market,

lower taxes, or the nation becomes one step away from

fascism.

The philosopher Leo Strauss, a German Jew who had left Germany,

gave this

reflex a name in the early '50s, the reductio ad Hitlerum.

No need to argue anymore, you just associate.

That's why Milei is far right. That's why people call Elon Musk a

Nazi. That's why in France they never stop

calling to block the

far right. Now, put Hitler back where he belongs, next to

Stalin. Everything collapses. The left loses its monopoly

on virtue. It can no longer present itself as the

side fighting the

beast because the beast looks like it.

It would finally have to answer for its own record: Stalin, Mao,

Pol Pot, Castro. Notice the asymmetry, by the way.

The word Nazi is used every day as a political insult, but nobody

gets called a Stalinist for proposing price controls.

That's why this topic triggers so much rage.

It's not a debate among historians. It's a debate about who gets to speak.

Speaking of which, let's talk about the historians.

Under every post, I read the same argument 300 times:

historians say Hitler was far right.

Okay, let's look at who the historians are.

In 2016, three researchers checked the voter

registration of more than

7,000 professors at 40 leading American universities.

In history, they found 33.5 Democrats for every

Republican. A 1968 study found 2.7 to

one. Among professors under 36, the gap is twice as

wide as among those over 65. The next generation is even

more uniform than the old one. In France, a survey of about

2,000 academics and researchers found that 73%

call themselves left-wing, twice the share of the French population.

It's not an accident. It's a lineage.

In 1935, at the Communist International Congress in

Moscow,

Dimitrov sets the official definition of fascism, the terrorist

dictatorship of finance capital.

By decree, fascism becomes the final stage of

capitalism, and

therefore the right. Hitler's classification

is not a scientific

discovery. It's a party line. After the war, in France,

a whole generation of future great historians passes through the Communist

Party: François Furet, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Maurice

Agulhon, Annie Kriegel. Raymond Aron is treated as a pariah,

and Sartre writes that an anti-communist is a dog.

Hannah Arendt puts Hitler and Stalin in the same book as early as

1951, but she isn't translated in France until

the early

'70s. In 1997, The Black Book of Communism

dares to compare it with Nazism, and some of its own authors publicly

disown the preface. The taboo is so strong that even those

who document the crimes of communism don't dare draw the conclusion.

I'm not saying every historian is an activist.

I'm saying that a profession that votes thirty-three to one on the same

side is not a neutral referee on the question: where do we put

Hitler? Especially when the answer suits its side.

When the jury votes thirty-three to one, it's no longer a scientific

consensus, it's a club. Which leaves the essential.

Throw out the seventeen eighty-nine seating chart and take the only axis that

matters: who decides? Either it's you, you own,

you trade, you sign contracts, you innovate, you live with your

choices. That's freedom. That's the free market.

Or a center decides for you in the name of a group: the class,

the race, the people, the planet. That's collectivism.

The group changes, the mechanism never does.

On this axis, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and

Castro are on the same side. They all gave the same answer:

the individual is nothing, the collective is everything.

They all ended with shortages, a political police, camps, and

people fleeing. History even ran the experiment for us at

full scale. In nineteen forty-eight, West Germany is still living

under price controls inherited from the Nazi regime, kept in place by the

Allies: empty shelves, black market, cigarettes as

currency. In June nineteen forty-eight, Ludwig Erhard scraps

most of those controls in one stroke.

Within days, the shop windows fill up.

It's the beginning of the German economic miracle.

In the East, same people, same language, same ruins.

But there, one collectivism is replaced by another: central

planning, fixed prices, state ownership.

In nineteen sixty-one, they have to build a wall to stop the

population from

leaving. Its official name: the Anti-Fascist Protection

Rampart. In the language of collectivism, the fascist is

always the one who wants to be free.

Same experiment in Korea: one people, one border, two

systems. On one side, Samsung, on the other, famine.

That's the real divide. Not left versus right, but freedom

versus control, the free market versus collectivism, the

sovereign individual versus the state that decides in the name of a group.

So yes, I'll say it again, and I'll keep saying it every other day:

Hitler was far left. He was a collectivist, and his place is

next to Stalin, not next to those who want less state.

The left knows it, and that's why it screams.

The day this seating chart falls, it loses its most precious weapon:

the right to call anyone who wants to be free a Nazi.

The only political question that matters is: who decides your life,

you or the state in the name of a group?

QED.