The National Socialists Were Enemies of the West
If one has the patience or the curiosity to go down certain conservative rabbit holes in social media, one will encounter a small corner of the movement in which one finds a latent or explicit desire to somehow rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists (i.e., the “Nazis.”)
This is often found in the form of comments or memes that take the position that the National Socialists were the defenders of “the West” against a militant Left then growing in Europe. For example, note the below meme with the phrase “I tried to save you” superimposed over Hitler’s face. This image and similar images are generally accompanied by comments to the effect that Western Europe would somehow today be better off if the National Socialists had managed to implement their preferred regime type across Europe. The overall message is that Hitler was some sort of twentieth-century Joseph De Maistre seeking to defend Europe from the wrecking ball of the Left’s revolutionaries.
But, I have some bad news for these self-proclaimed defenders of “tradition.” The National Socialists were not in favor of traditional Western institutions. Far from being the enemies of the revolutionary Left, the National Socialists were the Left, only committed to a slightly different type of totalitarianism than the Leninist Left.
The National Socialists were—as the name would suggest—socialists. Moreover, they were totalitarian socialists, and their institutional model was Soviet totalitarianism.
This has been shown in detail in Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt notes that Hitler and the National Socialists generally held in contempt the fascist dictatorships of Europe—i.e., the Baltic states, Hungary, Spain, and others—for falling much too short of the totalitarian model. In contrast, Arendt writes, the National Socialists expressed “genuine admiration for the Bolshevik regime in Russia (and the Communist Party in Germany)…”
Destroying the West to Save It
Thus, it is not surprising when Arendt contends that “Hitler never intended to defend ‘the West’ against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.”
Hitler, of course, hated all Westerners who did not subscribe to his revolutionary ideology. This is the man who ordered the complete destruction of the city of Paris when it became clear that the Wehrmacht would be driven out of northern France. Hitler is also the man who issued the Nero Decree which ordered that all infrastructure in Germany—including that necessary to feed civilians—be destroyed in an effort to slow down the Allies. According to several accounts from his staff, Hitler was unconcerned by the fact this would reduce the German population to a state of utter starvation. For Hitler, German civilization did not deserve to survive since it had failed in its war against the Slavs and other presumed inferiors of Europe.
It’s an odd “defender of the West” who seeks to starve millions of Westerners to death.
Indeed, had Hitler any real re
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