Why Are “Nazi” and “Fascist” Worse Words than “Marxist”?

It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought. —Roger Scruton

     I’ve written a number of posts on issues that are plainly obvious, yet remain strangely unnoticed by most indoctrinated leftists, like the bizarreness of western feminists endorsing traditionalist Muslims infiltrating en masse the feminists’ own liberal and still relatively tolerant culture, or the peculiar fact that the Marxist left have turned against the working class, for the plain reason that the working class is predominantly white. This here post is one step removed from that level: it’s about something that SHOULD be fairly obvious to most people, but isn’t, possibly not even to most conservative (and thereby right-wing) normies. It has to do with the old dichotomy of Communist/Fascist.

     Before I wade into this I suppose I should mention that I do not consider Communism and Fascism to be necessarily opposites, as many people assume. The two ideologies do, however, account for most political radical extremism since, say, the French Revolution, and certainly over the past one hundred years. For my best interpretation of what the absolute far right would be, assuming that it isn’t 20th-century-style Fascism, I direct you to a post I wrote on the subject some time ago, the link to which is here. (On second thought, the “superfascism” of Julius Evola might be considered the diametrical opposite of Marxism, but Evola was not a typical fascist.)

     “Fascist” and “Nazi” are now well worn terms of rebuke—or much worse, of condemnation and demonization, of rendering an opponent subhuman and unworthy of the slightest consideration or respect. They are terms flung at people in an attempt to deprive them of a voice, of dignity, and of basic human rights. Meanwhile, although carrying a swastika banner through a western street is an outrage, even illegal in some countries, waving a Soviet flag or wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt is hardly objectionable at all, even to most mainstream of normies. To be called a fascist is offensive (except maybe to a real, capital-F Fascist), but to be called a Marxist or a communist bears practically no stigma at all lately, especially to so-called “liberals.” During the Cold War both fascists and Marxists were considered villains, but Marxists have been reclaimed by society as maybe not quite so bad after all. Many Democrat voters in America even consider them to be the good guys now. I won’t try to go into the Machiavellian forces that have led to this truly perverse situation, which would result in a long exposition on movements like the Frankfurt School, but mainly here I’m trying to explain the genuine bizarreness of the thing, why the idiocy of such an attitude should be obvious, even though it apparently no longer is.

     I have considered many times the likelihood that, if people were polled and asked who was the evilest man who ever lived, in all of world history, most people in the west would reply, without much thought, maybe even as something plainly obvious, Adolf Hitler. Personally I think that is to be expected, but also ignorant and wrong. Hitler was no saint, obviously, but I think there have been many people worse than him, or just causing more deliberate mayhem and suffering, including a few, at least, who were his contemporaries. Part of the reason for this error on the part of the hypothetical polled population is simple ignorance of history.

     In premodern times, possibly even pre-Hitler times, the evilest man in the world, to the western mind, was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. In Dante’s Inferno Satan stands trapped at the bottom of the infernal funnel-pit of Hell with three faces and three mouths: in one mouth he chews Judas like a pepperoni stick, in another he chews Brutus, who betrayed Julius Caesar (the bottom-most circle of Hell being reserved for those guilty of treachery), and the third mouth remains empty, awaiting the Antichrist, Mr. 666. (I will observe that Brutus has had a checkered history, alternating back and forth between villain and paragon, depending upon the political views of society; for example by Shakespeare’s time he was seen as a patriotic tragic hero striking out against tyranny and injustice.) Nero also was a feared bogeyman to the ancient Christians, so much so that most non-fundamentalist Bible scholars agree that 666 in the Book of Revelation was a code for ΝΕΡΩΝ, the Greek way of spelling Nero. But there have been many very powerful and very evil men in this world over the millennia, including Gaiseric King of the Vandals, Genghis Khan, Timur (alias Tamerlane), Robespierre, Pol Pot…though I may be getting ahead of myself if I mention many modern ones.

     Fascists, including not only Mussolini’s movement but also those of Hitler and Imperial Japan, were the bad guys during the Second World War, or at least they were the bad guys according to the history books written by the victors; though it is also true that Marxists became the bad guys immediately after the war ended, and continued in that role up until the collapse of the Soviet Union brought the Cold War more or less of an end. Marxism was seen as a malevolent global force in America well into the 1990s, and I am not sure exactly when it became widely reinterpreted and whitewashed, as I wasn’t in the west at the time, or even reading the news. I suppose it must have happened gradually though, like the hotplate slowly cooking the live frog.

     Nowadays the history books are written by neo-Marxists, so that Marxism is seen as something not genocidal and tyrannical at all, but as something much better than classical liberalism and free market Capitalism. A widely used school textbook written by a Jewish Marxist fellow named Zinn is a notorious case in point, as is the New York Times’ delusional 1619 Project, which aims at persuading most Americans that the United States is an inherently racist and evil nation which should be radically reformed along more Marxist lines. This resurgence of radical leftism in the west (which has progressed much more malignantly in Europe and Canada than in the USA) has got many millions of sheeplike, obedient normies ignoring or rejecting the very idea that Marxism, for example as it existed in the USSR and still exists in China, is or was ever really bad, or unjust, or repressive, or grotesquely corrupt.

     But how bad were the fascists, still demonized today, by comparison? If we include, if only for the sake of convenience, not only Il Duce’s capital-F Italian Fascists, but also Hitler’s National Socialists, and Franco’s Falangists, and Imperial Japan, not to mention secondary and tertiary petty dictators, then still Fascism as a whole appears less malignant and destructive than Marxism, just going with actual empirical data, like numbers of corpses generated by each system. True, Adolf Hitler played a central role in starting the prodigious shit storm of World War Two, and allegedly was responsible for the horrid deaths of six gorillion Jews (plus plenty of others, especially Slavs, who are rarely mentioned because presumably they weren’t as important). So let’s consider the numbers of political corpses generated by two of the foremost ideological rivals of the 1930s and ‘40s, Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin. I have heard from a fellow who has studied this more than I have, namely Herr Germar Rudolf, that before Germany’s invasion of Poland and the start of the war, the total number of people killed by Nazism was in the neighborhood of one thousand people: some Jews killed in the occasional pogrom or hate crime, some political prisoners (no doubt including Jews) who died of diseases or were worked to death in labor camps, some fellow Nazis executed in a purge or two, etc. Meanwhile, in Stalin’s USSR, the estimated number of people killed by Marxism was 20 to 30 million. Let that sink in. Even if we go with the minimum estimate of 20 million, Stalin’s Soviet Union killed something like twenty thousand times more people before the beginning of the war. Many of the deaths were in the Holodomor, in which millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death by the Soviet government, with some others who refused obediently to starve being simply executed. (The Holodomor was overseen by a Jewish fellow too, by the way; in fact the ruling Bolsheviks were mostly Jewish up until the Trotskyites were purged by the Stalinists.) Even if we include the death tolls of the war itself, the fact remains that the Marxist Stalin killed more people than the National Socialist Hitler, and that Communist Chairman Mao killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. And that doesn’t even include the prodigious mounds of corpses ordered by Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge and the Kim dynasty of North Korea, let alone all the Marxist genocidal petty dictators in undeveloped shithole countries. But the new left doesn’t want anybody to know this, and most of the indoctrinated radicals coming out of academia don’t know it either. And most of them, even if they did know, wouldn’t care. They might say all that was not true Marxism, or that making an omelette requires the breaking of eggs. And anyway, Marxism is different now.

     Marxism in the west has changed faces, or rather wears a different mask. In mainland China there is still a totalitarian surveillance state with more than a billion people being essentially the sheeplike slaves of the Communist Party, with concentration camps, forced organ harvesting of political prisoners, essentially no human rights, obvious plans for world domination, and who knows what else…with the globalist, socialist, cult-like left in America hating their own country more than they hate Communist China. Many of these ass-kissers prefer China for the sake of money and convenience, like professional basketball players, and of course “woke” corporate hypocrites lusting for a huge market and a cheap labor force to exploit. But most Marxists in the west are now neo-Marxists, and there are many tens of millions of them (in contrast to a very much smaller and less politically significant, yet hysterically exaggerated number of neo-Nazis and genuine fascists).

     This spread of neo-Marxism, and its gradual setting down of roots in society, is the result of long and patient planning, of course, the details of which lie beyond the scope of this already longish essay. Yet it is remarkable that Nazis are seen by normies as pure unadulterated evil while Marxism, despite its demonstrably greater evil in actual empirical reality, is perversely viewed as the domain of the good guys—nowadays viewed as even better than and superior to classical liberals and free market Capitalists.

     Not only soy-fed antifa people larping as revolutionaries, but everyone who takes political correctness and “Social Justice” seriously is, if not a flat-out Marxist, at least a Marxist sympathizer, a fellow traveler, and, going with the historical traits of both ideologies, literally worse than a Nazi sympathizer. In other words, the indoctrinated, propagandized, emasculated populations of the west are largely indoctrinated and acclimated into a system that is literally WORSE THAN FASCISM, in its actual results if not its ostensible ideology and ideals.

     So Progressivism, so called, has evolved into a mutated form of Marxism, the result of subtle to radical modifications to the system over time by groups like Boasian anthropologists and other cultural relativists, the Frankfurt School, later manifestations of feminism, some aspects of the various minority rights movements and Grievance Studies departments, etc. It is less economic Marxism hating on Capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and more cultural Marxism hating on white people and western civilization in general. I use various terms for it more or less interchangeably, such as Social Justice, intersectionality, Soycialism, political correctness hysteria, Identity Politics, and Progressivism. They are approximately synonymous now, although of course the Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt or even Woodrow Wilson is a far cry from the irrational, hysterical, feminized leftism of today. With regard to how it has progressed to such a sorry stage in the west, I will just give the short answer of “indoctrination of the masses after Capitalist prosperity softened and weakened them, and then subversive leftist groups acquired dominance of the west’s educational systems (especially higher academia) and the mainstream mass media.”

     But Marxism today, or whatever you want to call postmodern western radical leftism, has become feminized and rather coddling in some ways; and many leftists with the sense and honesty to admit that they are neo-Marxists would insist that their new Marxism is really an improvement over the old. In response to this I would remark first that even the old Marxism used the same sloganeering about equality and justice and the common man living in harmony with his brothers with his head held high, and so on; but the Marxist reality is always wildly different from the theory because socialism doesn’t work worth a damn, and must be enforced at gunpoint under an authoritarian regime. The new left is endeavoring to indoctrinate everyone so that they accept their mental slavery willingly, but it didn’t work with Marxism 1.0, and it won’t work this time either. Not even with control of the schools and the media.

     It is true, though, that without balls and testosterone the new Marxism is rather less overtly genocidal than the old. But is Marxism today more moral than, say, the Bolsheviks and the CCP and the Khmer Rouge? Although less obviously violent (except for the occasional orchestrated riot), now feminine compassion and spite rule the authoritarianism. And the weakness, spinelessness, and incompetence of the new breed of Progressive politicians, very many of them female, has become very obvious to those who still have eyes to see, when their cities are racked with civil chaos and the so-called “leaders” take the side of the rioters over law-abiding citizens. These feminists and globalists may look good enough when things are running smoothly, but things cannot run smoothly for long under a Marxist (or neo-Marxist) regime for very long without Chinese-style secret police and quasi-military forces keeping everyone in line, and the new left isn’t quite ready for that yet. So even without the iron heel of the old Marxism (which still prevails in China), the new Marxism produces similar misery and squalor, and inevitable piles of corpses, due to its own irrationality, weakness, and plain rejection of human nature. It takes people with guns to enforce it.

     It is true that neo-Nazis and other “far right” radicals are also often angry, hostile, disagreeable people if one dares to disagree with them—extremists tend to be intolerant regardless of which side they’re on—but that is not necessarily the case for more “moderate” fascistic types, just as it is not necessarily the case for “moderate” Progressives. My friend Brian Ruhe is a case in point; he is a self-proclaimed National Socialist who sincerely reveres Hitler and insists that he was a great man who did nothing wrong, and is now residing in a Buddhist heaven realm…yet Brian is clearly morally superior to the brainwashed leftists cursing and harassing him on the streets of Vancouver. He does his best to remain calm and return hysteria with calm speech; and furthermore he is a practicing Buddhist who takes the very finely tuned Buddhist ethical system very seriously. He is also clearly morally superior to the “Progressive” propagandists on the mainstream news, regardless of some of his strange ideas; at least he’s not a deliberate fraud as are the propagandists telling the masses of normie sheeple what to think and believe.

     The badness of neo-Marxism may be less blatant than that of the paleo version, but it is no less destructive, as it sows the seeds not only of economic stagnation but of social degeneracy, decline, and fall. Weakness and hysteria, let alone socialism and centralized social engineering, are simply not conducive to prosperity, freedom, or even communistic equality.

     I am not a Nazi or any other sort of fascist, as far as I can tell. I consider Hitler to have been a ruthless, dishonest, and rather foolish man, going with orthodox Buddhist ethics; but even so he was hardly any worse than many others, including leaders glorified and called “the Great”—Constantine, Valentinian, Justinian, Muhammad, Richard the Lionheart, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon Bonaparte… Being a great world leader practically necessitates some Machiavellian amorality at the very least. A great leader is almost of necessity a ruthless bastard. Still, Hitler was not as bad as Stalin, it seems to me, and debatably not even as bad as Churchill if we can trust authors like David Irving. Though what Hitler might have done if he had won his war is anyone’s guess.

     Hitler lost, so he is viewed as the de facto villain, the evil bad guy. In fact young people ignorant of history and indoctrinated by a leftist educational system (that is, most of them) might well consider not only Hitler to be the evilest person who ever lived, but might consider further the second evilest to be one of his lieutenants, or maybe his friend Mussolini (or maybe Donald Trump!). But of course if the Führer had played his cards right and won he’d likely be seen as a hero right now, with his likeness on your money. (The west might even be more peaceful and prosperous, though less “diverse,” maybe because less “diverse,” for all I know.) That is how propaganda works. So it helps to know who is in charge of writing our history, and who is running the educational systems and the mainstream media. But I won’t tell you who that is, so if you don’t know already I advise you to look into the matter.

     In conclusion I would just like to reiterate that I am neither a fascist (of any stripe) nor a Marxist (paleo or neo), and I am not implying that Fascism is good while Marxism is bad; I prefer neither, largely because I do not like the idea of a one-party system and totalitarianism. But if I were required to choose one ideology or the other I would have to choose fascism, because, as I observe again and again, history has demonstrated pretty damned conclusively that Marxism is much worse—and that’s what we’ll get in the near future if we are so passive and sheeplike as to allow it. At the very least, fascism is not materialistic, and is not necessarily spiritually dead; and some fascists like Julius Evola insisted upon a society based in large part on higher, transcendental values, not merely materialistic ones…but more about Evola some other time.