Communism vs. Fascism, As If They’re Different

There are many things I find maddeningly stupid about the discourse surrounding Nazis vs. Communists is the ways in which almost everyone simply ignores what the Communists actually did while pretending they’re radically different ideologies.

For instance, there’s this myth that Nazis were nationalists and imperialists who tried to take over Europe to expand Germany while the communists don’t do things like that. Meanwhile, Stalin expanded Russia by forcibly annexing 14 neighboring countries and the Soviet military occupied ~10 more in Europe and Asia for varying lengths of time.

“Fatherland” and “Motherland” are the same thing.
“National Socialism” and “International Socialism” are the same in practice as well.

You can go down the list and almost every single thing you can think of that people claim was a substantial differentiator simply isn’t.

Yesterday, on one of my posts where I was inundated with communist losers, I had to explain for the millionth time that the Nazis were — in fact — socialists.

When you say that to communists, and frankly to most people, they get confused and/or get very mad at you for saying this, but there’s simply no sane universe where you can argue that this wasn’t the case and it becomes wildly apparent when you spend time actually reading primary sources.

Some of the objections I got were like “Well why did Hitler bust the labor unions?” and “Why did he privatize everything?”

To the first question, the answer is: Because he explicitly wanted to roll all unionized labor organizing into a single entity (the German Labor Front) which was controlled by the Nazi Party. He said he wanted to do this in Mein Kampf and then did do it once he was in power. His argument was that the state should be built around protecting the German worker, so there was no need for separate unions outside the party.

But what I didn’t say yesterday was that Stalin did exactly the same thing in the USSR. His tactic was slightly different, in that he allowed the continuation of existing labor unions… but in practice all of the unions that were allowed had to be subservient to the Communist Party.

Quoting Stalin:

“Formally, the Party cannot give instructions to the trade unions, but the Party gives instructions to the Communists who work in the trade unions.”

Of course, you might claim that the Nazi’s GLF union wasn’t a real labor union because it didn’t actually improve the conditions of the German worker and the state simply dictated all the wages, work hours, prices, etc., but………. guess what…. Same thing happened in the USSR where purchasing power dropped massively over Stalin’s rule and wages did not go up to compensate, workers ended up being forced into a 6+ day work week, all wages, prices, and even job opportunities themselves were controlled by the state.

Anybody who tried to unionize or go on strike against the wishes of the Communist Party would find themselves in the Gulag.

The same issue applies to “privatization”. Hitler NATIONALIZED what would probably be billions or maybe trillions of modern dollars worth of land and capital. He took entire businesses from his political enemies, from Jewish owners, from Jewish sympathizers, from wealthy land owners who — according to the Nazis — weren’t using it for the benefit of “the people” (read: the state/Nazi Party).

And while Stalin handed key state appointments to his friends and political allies where they got control and cash rights over entire industries while the “companies” they got to manage were still legally owned by the state, Hitler, Mussolini, and the fascists did the same thing in a slightly different way. On paper, one of Hitler’s cronies might be given a “private business” by the Nazi Party, but they were only allowed to do what the Party demanded of them and if the Nazis felt that the owner wasn’t being obedient enough, they’d send that guy to jail and put someone else in his place.

These are just two flavors of the same authoritarian shit sandwich, and almost nothing about their ideological missions were substantially different, no matter what insane whitewashing you’ll find online or even in most history books.

On a related note, this is a real political cartoon from 1947.