I once saw a young man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with Che Guevara’s iconic image. Which wouldn’t be at all memorable, were it not for what was written under the image: “Because my Hitler, Stalin and Mao t-shirts are in the wash”. Well played, young man: well played.
Because that one t-shirt cut straight to a very important question: why don’t we view socialists, or the communist hammer-and-sickle, with the same gut revulsion we do the Nazis and the swastika?
As a Modern History teacher for the past two years, I have had the opportunity with my classes to cover a broad spread of the worst atrocities ever committed in the 20th century – the Nazi Party’s rise to power, the Cold War, Communist China. However, in our professional groups on social media, there are a vocal minority of fellow history teachers who, in spite of the clear lessons that history teaches us, feel it appropriate to share openly socialist propaganda among our fraternity.
A startling example of just how deep the cognitive dissonance of the academic left (a tautology, really: as surveys repeatedly show, nearly all academics are leftists) runs, another young man told me about one of his university lecturers who was quite open that he was an out-and-out communist. Yet, this was in a class studying 20th century dictators, which explicitly discussed the shocking crimes of Stalin and Mao, as well as Hitler.
Socialism is all too quick to claim the moral high ground over our decadent and uncaring capitalist system. While Nazism’s dogma of racial superiority is apparent in its barbarism, socialism, on the other hand, claims to have the best interests of every citizen at heart. After all, what kind of sociopath doesn’t care about equity for all people? Socialism can, through its generosity with the possessions of others, claim the mantle of morality while sweeping its history of bloodshed and tyranny under the rug.
But this is to take the self-serving claims of socialism at face value. Nazism, for its part, claimed that it, too, was “on the right side of history” and a force for “the greater good”. Even the direct engineers of its worst horrors, the Holocaust, claimed that, “altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people”.
More importantly, just as racial violence is inherent in Nazism, class violence is inherent in communism; authoritarianism is inherent in socialism.
What about those who don’t want to give up the businesses and land they’ve worked so hard to own and maintain? Quite simply, they will be executed; as they have in every other socialist regime. Business owners and private landowners in our service economy would most assuredly face the wall, as did the landholders of every previous agricultural economy to suffer a socialist takeover.
But all that is beside the point. Even Marx and Engels claimed that an ideology should be judged by its results, not by its aims. And the real-world results of socialism and communism have been demonstrated, over and over, by the piles of the slain.
It is a grave injustice that, between Nazis and socialists, only the 13,000,000 industrialised murders committed by the Nazis are accepted as a self-evident refutation of the legitimacy of that ideology. Why are the 75,000,000-110,000,000 deaths from repression, engineered famine, ethnic cleansing not considered enough of an argument to consign forever socialism’s broken promises to the dustbin of history? Why is that ‘not real socialism’?
Would we take seriously for an instant anyone who tried to claim that the Third Reich “wasn’t real Nazism — real Nazism just hasn’t been tried yet”?
Let us make no mistake: socialists deserve to be treated with as much scorn as do Nazis, and we have neglected our civic duty by failing to do so.
The proof of that is demonstrated every day. To see a swastika worn openly in public is to trigger an instant, gut-reaction of revulsion. Yet, we continually see socialism worn as a badge of honour and just being rather a decent sort.
As we have successfully ostracised anyone who would dare raise their hand in salute of a fascist ideology, so must we relentlessly run out of public spaces any who would so much as speak a word in favour of socialist principles.
Spectator Australia
Good luck with that. It will mean almost completely clearing out the universities, for one.
Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be such a bad start…
