Fiction
Agent 99: Hans Hunter...wasn't he a high ranking Nazi?
Chief: He was at various times a Nazi, a Communist, a member of the Mafia and is right now one of the top executives of KAOS.
Maxwell Smart: If there's anything I hate, it's a joiner.
— Get Smart, "Island of the Darned"
"‘The Diary of Our Victory’ was poorly written but became a sensation among Neo-Communists. The ADL note described it as ‘The Bible of bigotry, perhaps only surpassed by Mein Kampf’. To this day, Neo-Communist extremists read the book and take inspiration from the psychopathic nature of the text. In the following years, Far-Left terrorism began to gain as brutal a reputation as her Far-Right counterpart, with its lone wolf killings; scholars suspect that many violent members of the Far-Right, or who may have been disposed to join them, were so impressed that they jumped over to ‘get their hands dirty’ as one reformed member put it. It’s also believed that the novel played a key role in laying the groundwork for the unholy fusion of Far Left and Right bigotries in the modern ‘National Bolshevik’ groups."
— Twilight Of The Red Tsar, "Devilspawn"
"The leftists call me fascist, the rightists call me commie, and honestly they're both right, got a bit of the two in me."
—Nazbol, Jreg
"THIS POST WAS MADE BY NAZBOL GANG"
—Meme from /leftypol/
There's two kinds of people in this world: Racists and Revolutionaries. At least, those are the only people who browse your derivative political compass meme page. The Racists like to claim that it's the Jews that run things. The Revolutionaries like to claim it's the people who actually run things that run things. Is there really such a contradiction, there?
Imagine, for a moment, these two ideas can be combined. Would you not wind up with a movement so powerful that you can at last throw off the shekels of oppression? Sure, both sides have a few minor differences: one wants to murder people for having the wrong skull shape and the other wants to stop people from doing that, but again, is there any kind of contradiction there? Swastikas and Sickels, that might be the thing that rescues the planet. After all, your octogenarian grandpa already barks at Fox News that the Nazis are left wing, surely he'd want to be a part of a movement that haphazardly combines racism with socialism.
Look, there's gonna be growing pains of course. People currently on The Left will have to learn to tolerate socially maladjusted virgins grumbling about their classmates and "purging the weak" while The Right will have to tolerate an economic position that they really don't have a problem with but are too R-Slurred by culture war to really focus on. But at the end of the day, you'll be expanding your pool of recruits to 100% of the population, rather than a handful of weirdos who can't take any kind of politics seriously.
Imagine, for a moment, these two ideas can be combined. Would you not wind up with a movement so powerful that you can at last throw off the shekels of oppression? Sure, both sides have a few minor differences: one wants to murder people for having the wrong skull shape and the other wants to stop people from doing that, but again, is there any kind of contradiction there? Swastikas and Sickels, that might be the thing that rescues the planet. After all, your octogenarian grandpa already barks at Fox News that the Nazis are left wing, surely he'd want to be a part of a movement that haphazardly combines racism with socialism.
Look, there's gonna be growing pains of course. People currently on The Left will have to learn to tolerate socially maladjusted virgins grumbling about their classmates and "purging the weak" while The Right will have to tolerate an economic position that they really don't have a problem with but are too R-Slurred by culture war to really focus on. But at the end of the day, you'll be expanding your pool of recruits to 100% of the population, rather than a handful of weirdos who can't take any kind of politics seriously.
— DeepBlueNemo, Roasting Every Russian Warlord's Supporters (Socialists/Communists)
(/r/TNOmod, Reddit)
(/r/TNOmod, Reddit)Real Life
"We must take from the right nationalism without capitalism and from the left socialism without internationalism."
— Gregor Strasser
"To place on the same moral plane Russian communism and Nazi fascism, as in both being totalitarian, is in the best case superficiality, in the worst fascism. Those who insist on the equivalence may well claim to be democrats, in truth, and in their bottom of their hearts, they are already fascists; and for sure they will only fight against fascism in appearance and not sincerely, but will reserve all their hatred for communism."
— Thomas Mann
In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people, tens of millions it was often claimed, in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler...Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.
— Timothy Snyder, "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?", The New York Review of Books
", The New York Review of Books There is sharp debate about this today among historians, and many of them are uncomfortable putting communism and fascism into the same category. Clearly, both Hitler's and Stalin's regimes sought to exercise total control over their populations and deprive people of the possibility to organize or even exist outside the officially prescribed forms and institutions. Recent research shows, however, that much as they may have wanted to, the Stalinists were never able to build the coldly efficient machine of Orwell's 1984; much of the Stalinist system worked as the Russian government had worked in 1884. Clumsy implementation of vague plans wreaked havoc with attempts to pursue policies. Moscow had little information about what was really happening in the far-flung provinces, where regional satraps used distance and poor communications to insulate themselves from Moscow's control and build their own power. There was not even a telephone line to the Soviet Far East until the eve of World War II. Research in newly available Soviet archives has also documented widespread Stalin-era dissent, passive and active resistance, strikes, and even full-scale peasant revolts of a kind and scale that Hitler never faced.
What's more, Nazi Germany and the USSR had radically different social and economic systems. Hitler, despite his populist rhetoric, largely preserved and defended private property, the market economy, and existing elites. Stalin utterly destroyed capitalism and physically annihilated the social and economic elites. Although both regimes used terror, they used it differently, against different targets. Hitler's terror was designed to be finite and to exterminate particular ethnic groups (Jews and Gypsies, for example). Stalin's terror mainly sought to turn social groups such as peasants and businessmen into a slave labor force that would be a permanent part of the Soviet economy.
What's more, Nazi Germany and the USSR had radically different social and economic systems. Hitler, despite his populist rhetoric, largely preserved and defended private property, the market economy, and existing elites. Stalin utterly destroyed capitalism and physically annihilated the social and economic elites. Although both regimes used terror, they used it differently, against different targets. Hitler's terror was designed to be finite and to exterminate particular ethnic groups (Jews and Gypsies, for example). Stalin's terror mainly sought to turn social groups such as peasants and businessmen into a slave labor force that would be a permanent part of the Soviet economy.
— J. Arch Getty, "The Future Did Not Work", The Atlantic
", The Atlantic Lenin was the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that difference between communism and the Hitlerite faith was very slight.
— Joseph Goebbels
Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory-both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is a rightless slave of the state.
— Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
We need to unite the Third Rome, the Third Reich and the Third Internationale.
— Alexander Dugin, Russian political philosopher
There’s no longer any left or right.
There’s the system and the enemies of the system.
There’s the system and the enemies of the system.
— Eduard Limonov, founder of the Russian National Bolshevik Party
A considerable school of thought (examples, Rauschning, Peter Drucker, James Burnham, F. A. Voigt) refuses to recognize a difference between the Nazi and Soviet régimes, and holds that all Fascists and Communists are aiming at approximately the same thing and are even to some extent the same people.
— George Orwell, What Is Fascism?
Yesterday in this place, there were a lot of red flags. Today there are a lot of sky blue-white flags. That is the moral, historical and ideological differences between us and the socialist Alignment Party. They have not yet learned what the red flag symbolizes in our age - It is the flag of Communazism! But I won't speak about Nazism tonight, I'll speak about Communism. [The red flag] is the flag of hate towards Israel and the supply of weapons to all enemies of Israel around us! It's the flag of persecution towards Jews and towards the Hebrew language! It's the flag of concentration camps and degradation of man! It's the flag of slavery, and of humiliation! And this flag was flown yesterday by those brought from all around the country, in buses and in Kibbutz trucks.
— Menachem Begin, sixth prime minister of Israel
“The Nazis and Communists have just seized control of the United States of America, and you fuckers are trying to convince me it ain’t that bad!”
—Eric Dondero, on the re-election of Obama
"In my youth, and in the first years after my Munich period after the war, I never shunned Marxists of any shade."
"It is not communists but imperialists who oppose nationalism and place obstacles in the way of the independent development of nations at present. ... The manoeuvres of the US imperialists for "globalization" and "integration" are aimed at turning the world into what they call a "free" and "democratic" world styled after the United States, and thus bringing all countries and nations under their domination and subordination."
—Kim Jong-il, Selected Works Vol. 15
I think there is a parallel to something like Trumpism here. One of the things that liberals like to be terrified about in the years of Trump in America was the emergence of a “Serious Trump.” People focused on the congressman Josh Hawley: “Oh, dear, what if there was a Trump who emerged who wasn’t such a joke figure but who was really serious about his fascism?” I always found this strange because I thought that part of Trump’s appeal was that he was a joke figure. That is to say, he broke taboos. And I think that breaking taboos amid an experience of the failure of the social order that constructed those taboos is the appeal of the alt-right, and of that contemporary new campism. The two unspeakable, unmentionable demons of liberal democratic society are Nazism and Stalinism. So to embrace either of those—where you stand at the front of a meeting hall and shout “hail Trump” as Richard Spencer did, or say “I love Marshal Zhukov and the parades in Red Square,” as lots of meme pages do on Facebook—is to deliberately shock. Because you feel that the order that tells you these things are unacceptable is an order that has left you with rising rents, fewer job prospects, and a future that is vanishingly difficult to grasp—unlike the world of the baby boomers, who could believe in a kind of future. So it’s a turn back to idealize the most provocative possible past in the face of the increasing inaccessibility of faith in the future, which liberal democracy claims to be giving you. I think that’s a key condition for understanding it. And if you don’t understand that its affect is central to it, I think you won’t understand some of the rise of this kind of politics on the left, where it takes a more deliberately provocative form. "
— Barnaby Raine, historian, on the vocal presence of "tankies"note in leftist movements.
"Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism... The world will now understand that the only real 'ideological' issue is one between democracy, liberty and peace on the one hand and despotism, terror and war on the other."
— The New York Times, "Editorial: The Russian Betrayal"
