The Nazis Are Not on Your Side
They Would Have Hated You Too
Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper, an alleged historian whose published works include the magisterial Twitter — A How to Tips & Tricks Guide and Bush Yarns and Other Offences, has brought the Nazi Question back to the fore. By “Nazi” I don’t mean anyone peering to the right of our current Overton window. I mean actual, avowed sympathizers of National Socialism. Cooper called Winston Churchill “the chief villain" of World War II and claimed that the Nazis committed genocide accidentally. Most tellingly, he tweeted that Hitler’s occupation of France was “infinitely preferable” to the “drag queen Last Supper” at the 2024 Paris Olympics. I say “tellingly” because this tweet (and others like it) indicates a motive behind his motivated reasoning. Namely, he is a Nazi apologist for culture-war reasons—though he doesn’t seem like a great fan of the Jews, either. The Nazis would presumably have opposed Drag Queen Story Hour, and thus may be excused for attempting to depopulate Poland to make lebensraum for the master race (Churchill’s fault, really).
Noah Smith observes that “Because Nazis style themselves as being on the generalized political Right, there is less political pressure for conservatives to seek out and vilify those on the Right who sympathize with the Nazi worldview.” The pull of political polarization could mean the vanishing of even a basic anti-totalitarian consensus. For a rank partisan, because the Nazis are on “the generalized political Right,” they must be on “my team.” That’s the direction that Tucker Carlson, along with Candace Owens and other representatives of the low-human-capital right, are headed. However, there are glaring contradictions between actual Nazi ideology and the positions of even the farthest far-rightists with a modicum of sense. Smith’s advice that each new generation be taught “the true scope of the horrors the Nazi regime committed” is well-intended, but perhaps a more effective means of disinfecting the right is to point out that the Nazis were also bad right-wingers.
The first clue as to the Nazis’ questionable ideological credentials is the very term “National Socialism.” Of course, the reference to socialism in their name doesn’t make the Nazis (a short form of National Socialist German Workers' Party) a party of the left. But it does indicate the Nazi contempt for the classic left/right political binary. As Hannah Arendt writes, “The very name of the Nazi movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all.”1 The Nazis were not “true” socialists in a Marxist sense, but they were not “true” nationalists in a traditional sense either. Nationalism and socialism were both propagandistic fronts for the Nazis’ real obsession: race. As Arendt writes, “The Nazis did not think that the Germans were a master race, to whom the world belonged, but that they should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and that this race was only on the point of being born.”2 This incipient master race was the SS, not the Germans, who were merely raw material (along with other “Aryans”) for a supranational ruling caste.
The Nazis were racial globalists (in contrast, but also in parallel, to the Soviets’ class-based globalism). Their loyalty was not to a German state with fixed borders or to the German nation as it then existed but to the Nazi movement. That movement was rooted in genocidal antisemitism, which required crossing borders to kill all Jews; pan-Germanism, which meant the incorporation of Germanic peoples outside of Germany proper; and pseudoscientific3 social Darwinism, which saw history as a racial struggle and expansionist warfare as a concomitant necessity. As Arendt writes, for Hitler as well as Stalin, “the country where they happened to seize power” was “only the temporary headquarters of the international movement on the road to world conquest” and “global interests always overrule the local interests of their own territory.”4 To Hitler, the implementation of racial policy was more important than national interest, even at the cost of losing the war that he started. Thus Nazis were told to prioritize the extermination of Jews over economic and logistical considerations,5 while their brutal policies toward the “subhuman” occupied Slavs alienated potential allies against the Soviets.6
As their anti-Slavism indicates, the Nazis were not even coherent white supremacists. Unlike some on today’s right, they would not have looked kindly on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For Hitler, “The Slavs are a mass of born slaves, who feel the need of a master.” Their destiny in a Nazi-run Europe was to be enslaved, expelled, or exterminated, though “racially valuable” children would be kidnapped and raised by German families.7 Jews and Roma were at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy, which meant they were prioritized for mass murder. But as Arendt writes, “The category of objective enemies outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement . . . the Nazis, foreseeing the completion of Jewish extermination, had already taken the necessary preliminary steps for the liquidation of the Polish people.”8 Hitler’s zeal for racial “purification” extended to his own people, as gas chambers were first used on institutionalized Germans before the war. Had he been victorious, he would have kept expanding the list of “unfit” Germans (eg, murdering even “Aryans” with congenital diseases).9
As it turned out, of course, Hitler was not victorious. His 1945 “Nero Decree” revealed the depths of his anti-national, racially frenzied worldview. When minister Albert Speer urged Hitler to concentrate on the German people’s survival in the face of impending defeat, the Führer responded that “it is not necessary to worry about their needs for elemental survival” since “the future belongs entirely to the strong people of the East.” He then ordered the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure to hinder the Allied war effort. Speer disobeyed Hitler's “scorched earth” order, which was preceded by the Führer’s similar commands to burn down Paris (which was disobeyed) and Warsaw (which was fulfilled). Hitler’s fervor for apocalyptic destruction, up to and including self-destruction, had a fanatical fervor more akin to ISIS than to any rational political actor. While the Nazis emerged from the political right, the label “far right” can lead to the mistaken impression that they were simply extreme nationalists, and thus on the “same side” as other rightists. But the Nazis were on no one’s side, and Hitler’s final days show the logical direction to which their ideology leads: national self-immolation and suicide in a bunker.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr. 1968), p. 357.
Arendt, p. 412.
A sample of Hitler’s “scientific” approach to race: “It is enough for a Czech to grow a moustache for anyone to see, from the way the thing droops, that his origin is Mongolian.”
Arendt, p. 411.
Arendt (p. 410) quotes Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of occupied Poland, complaining that thousands of enslaved Jews working on his armament projects were deported for extermination. Frank had difficulty grasping the Nazi directive that “economic considerations should fundamentally remain unconsidered in the settlement of the [Jewish] problem.”
From Jerzy W. Borejsza’s A Ridiculous Hundred Million Slavs: Concerning Adolf Hitler’s World-view (2017), p. 410: “From 1941 onwards, Hitler consistently rejected enlisting Russians, Ukrainians and Poles as henchmen (never mind partners) in the fight against the USSR. He feared that giving them arms and specific rights might result in the renewed founding of independent Slavic states. He was categorically opposed to it…. For Hitler, the concept of ‘racial enemy’ was manifest and overpowering.”
From a 1943 speech by SS leader Heinrich Himmler: “What happens to a Russian and a Czech does not interest me in the least. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our Kultur; otherwise, it is of no interest to me.”
Arendt, p. 424.
Arendt, p. 416: “Hitler contemplated during the war the introduction of a National Health Bill. 'After national X-ray examination, the Fuehrer is to be given a list of sick persons, particularly those with lung and heart diseases. On the basis of the new Reich Health Law . . . these families will no longer be able to remain among among the public and can no longer be allowed to produce children. What will happen to these families will be subject to further orders of the Fuehrer.’”
With reference to national socialist ambigous political nature, a French historian formulated Nazism, as well as all 20th century totalitarianisms, was the direct heir of Bonapartism wich he defined as a "centrism through addition of the extremes". I wrote about that on my substack: https://scriptamanent.substack.com/p/fascism-as-degenerate-centrism?r=33qtk5
Nazis were as much materialists as Communists. The difference between them being that Communists were universalists while Nazis were particularists (essentially tribalist). Both parties were hostile to God as conceived by Christians. Both inflicted enormous brutality on behalf of a godless utopian ideology.
If I feel any sympathy for the Germans (I do) it is in spite of the Nazis. But they're gone now, so it's time to stop punishing/trashing Germans for that unfortunate 12-year political interlude.
As for allied sins during the war, such as firebombing civilians, yes we should openly discuss them. Refusal to acknowledge faults is a characteristic of the regimes we fought and shouldn't characterize our own society.