Enemies to the Right and Left

We Don't Need to be Nazis to Fight Woke (and Vice Versa)

Darryl Cooper, the historical re-interpreter who’s now been interviewed by both Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, once tweeted the following:

I hesitate to argue with a bad, now-deleted meme. Still, Cooper’s comparison is worth highlighting for what it reveals about a certain reptile-brained political tendency. This tendency is best captured by the French Revolutionary slogan “No enemies to the left,” which can be updated to “No enemies to the right” in the present example. Obviously—or maybe it only used to be obvious—it’s possible to be both anti-Nazi and anti-woke. It’s also possible to have a sense of proper perspective. For example, you can think that the drag-queen Last Supper at the 2024 Paris Olympics was cringeworthy, but that the Nazi occupation of France was worse “in virtually every way.”

To think otherwise requires rewriting history to denazify the Nazis.¹ Thus Cooper’s claims that Hitler was dragged into World War II and that Churchill was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did.” Or that rather than acting with genocidal intent, the Nazis “launched a war where they were completely unprepared,” so “they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.” This falsification of the past is intended to create an ideological narrative about the present. Namely, per Cooper, that “The post–World War II order is really defined by the fact that, you know, after Nuremberg, it really became effectively illegal in the West to be, like, genuinely right-wing, like the things we call right-wing.” If the Nazis were actually not so bad, then the current global order is founded on a lie. And so if we rehabilitate the Nazis, we can be “genuinely right-wing” again. We will then no longer have to endure Drag Queen Story Hour or, presumably, the existence of Poland and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The Nazis Are Not Your Coalition Partners

Yet as I’ve previously written, the Nazis themselves were not “genuinely right-wing,” but more akin to a millenarian death cult. They rejected what Hitler called “the narrow limits of modern nationalism”² in favor of a racially based empire. They planned to eliminate Christianity—which Hitler called “a rebellion against natural law”—upon victory. They were not even, strictly speaking, white supremacists, but rather Nordic supremacists. Generalplan Ost outlined the 25-year Nazi plan to enslave, deport, and murder millions of white, “subhuman” Slavs after conquering Eastern Europe.³ So much for Cooper’s theory that the Nazis just stumbled into war and improvised. At the most basic level, Hitler was not out to conserve, but to destroy; he was as much a revolutionary as Lenin, but for the cause of an Aryan rather than a proletarian utopia. Cooper claims that Hitler’s “antisemitism is what allowed him to love the German people.” But as a Social Darwinist, Hitler viewed the bulk of German people with contempt, and himself as “nothing but a magnet constantly moving across the German nation and extracting the steel from this people.”⁴ In the end, he even called for the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure, since “the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East.”

By contrast, in 1944, George Orwell wrote that “It is significant that in the moment of disaster the man best able to unite the nation was Churchill, a Conservative of aristocratic origins.” As actual historian John Lukacs notes, it is also significant that Orwell “gave the name Winston Smith to his hero in 1984 . . . and that in his first act of revolt against darkness and oppression, Winston Smith raises his glass and toasts the Past.”⁵ Orwell was a man of the left who opposed Communism. Churchill was a man of the right who opposed Nazism. Each rejected the notion that there were no enemies on their putative “sides.” Instead, they recognized that both totalitarianisms were kindred with each other. Churchill was a patriot, but one who declared that Britain fought “by ourselves alone, but not for ourselves alone . . . we stand, the faithful guardians of the right and dearest hopes of a dozen States and nations now gripped and tormented in a base and cruel servitude.”⁶ Contrast his words with those of Heinrich Himmler to the SS in 1943: “We must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else. . . . Whether 10,000 Russian women fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.” Would you rather have a global order in the spirit of Churchill or Himmler?

Strong Gods vs False Idols

The more sophisticated argument is not that the Nazis were unfairly maligned, but that the West overcorrected in response to their crimes. Thus we don’t, in fact, have a Churchillian global order dedicated to the defense of civilization, but an omni-liberalism built to ward off the specter of Nazism. That specter, in turn, has been used to suppress dissenting voices unfairly labeled fascist.⁷

N.S. Lyons

eloquently expresses this view, writing that Hitler provides “the parareligious raison d'etre for the open society consensus and the whole post-war liberal order: to prevent the resurrection of the undead Führer.” There’s truth here, but it’s an incomplete truth. The post-war order was created to oppose totalitarianism, which, after the defeat of Nazism, was primarily embodied by the Soviet Union. Thus, in 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower declared that NATO’s goal was to “protect the spiritual foundations of Western civilization against every kind of ruthless aggression.” Lyons claims that, for the post-war establishment, the “Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism.” But after World War II, faith, family, and the nation were seen as bulwarks against global Communism. Totalitarianism opposes traditional values, which threaten the ruling party, as much as it opposes the open society.

Lyons notes that the Cold War’s end “sent the open society consensus into overdrive.” I agree that, having vanquished its last ideological rival, post-war liberalism fell into a reverie regarding the inevitable “end of history,” which encouraged hubristic overreach. The West’s historical memory does tend to emphasize the evils of extreme particularism, as embodied by the Nazis, over the evils of extreme universalism, as embodied by Communists. But the answer to anti-rightist one-sidedness isn’t anti-leftist one-sidedness. It’s to recognize that both extremes lead to the same outcome: in Orwell’s anti-totalitarian words, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Likewise, the answer to the failings of the open society isn’t a retreat to authoritarian leadership or totalizing ideology. Instead, it’s to acknowledge, per Leszek Kolakowski, that “no society, not even the open society, can do without trust in tradition to some degree.”⁸ That’s because “complete liberation from tradition and the authority of history . . . leads not to the open society but at best to one in which conformity enforced by fear keeps strict control over the struggle of private interests.”⁹ We do need what Lyons, borrowing from R.R. Reno, calls “the strong gods”: “strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past.” But we must not confuse brutality for strength, and the demonic for the divine.¹⁰

1. Even professed neo-Nazis lack the intellectual honesty to defend the Nazis’ actual historical record, instead relying on revisionism and denial.

2. Quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), p. 359.

3. By contrast, the Japanese were declared “honorary Aryans.”

4. Arendt, p. 360-361.

5. John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (1999), p. 210

6. Quoted in Lukacs, p. 213.

7. Of course, “fascism” wasn’t always a slur, but was once a proud political self-description. The label gained a negative valence as a result of its adherents’ own actions. Thus in 1944, Orwell observed that he’d heard the term fascism “applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

8. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (1990), p. 164.

9. Kolakowski, p. 172.

10. German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously said that “Only a god can save us.” He also famously praised “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism.