The sex pervert as anti-fascist (...how Nazis were anything but 'conservative')

For a generation, progressives have portrayed fascism and Nazism as exemplified by sexual repression and moral conservatism. In this view, the left has an anti-Nazi sensibility because the left is into bohemianism and sexual expression. In my new book, “The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of American Left,” I show that the fascists and Nazis, far from being repressed moral conservatives, were themselves sexually and stylistically bohemian. In style as well as in ideology, fascism and Nazism are phenomena of the political left.

The whole notion that fascism and Nazism are forms of sexual repression is the invention of one man, Herbert Marcuse of the so-called Frankfurt School. Himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, Marcuse was a Marxist who detested Christianity and capitalism with the same passion that he hated Hitler. In the period after World War II, Marcuse set about to mobilize the hatred Americans felt for Nazism against America’s own capitalist and Christian social and sexual mores.

According to Marcuse, America had its own form of fascism, and that was modern, technological, capitalist society. In his book “Eros and Civilization,” Marcuse insisted that America had established elaborate systems for controlling our sex organs, what Marcuse terms the “sacrifice of libido.” Marcuse blamed not merely the free market system for supposedly codifying and merchandizing sex – turning it into a commodity – but he also blamed religious and social mores for repressing and enslaving the sex instincts. Unfortunately, Marcuse noted, there is currently in America a “channeling of sexuality into monogamous reproduction” and a “taboo on perversions.”

Marcuse proclaimed that this “suppressed sexuality” was indicative of an emerging American fascism. Without being released, he wrote, it “manifests itself in the hideous forms so well known” including the “sadistic and masochistic orgies” of prison inmates and “concentration camp guards.”

While getting a degree in History in the 70s, most of my professors bought into the shared importance of Marx and Freud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudo-Marxism

Marcuse, Fromm, and Foucault were the Big Thinkers of the day. Some of my professors also liked Wilhelm Reich — but he wasn’t officially “cool” because he was a little crazy, thought he could cure cancer, and died in a US federal prison. Reich also got kicked out of the Communist Party, which was certainly his biggest sin.

But basically, unleashing anything-goes sexual desires to convince people that morality, family and private property were weird, backwards, Christian ideas ... that was surely the path to Utopia.

And we seem to have make little progress.

“In style as well as in ideology, fascism and Nazism are phenomena of the political left.”

That’s just not true. It’s a silly claim that just makes conservatives look stupid. There are people on the left who claim that communism is “right wing” too. Both of these groups of people are making up a bogus, ahistorical definition of left or right(whichever one they oppose) that means “they don’t like freedom.”

The reality is there are authoritarian and totalitarian movements on both the right and the left.

Let’s retire this idiotic line of argument. It’s sad that so many older conservatives think that saying stuff like “the Democrats are the real racists” and “nazis were left wing” helps conservatives. It does nothing to disarm leftist attacks and makes conservatives look foolish and dishonest.

But they were not actual socialists in how they ran the country. It was a right wing movement by any reasonable definition.

Don’t you understand that trying to claim that everyone bad in history was on the left just looks dishonest and pathetic? By the logic used to classify nazis as
“left,” the old monarchies must have been “left wing” too, since they were against “freedom.”

Some older conservatives think that if they can “prove” the nazis were “left wing,” the modern left will stop calling conservatives nazis. That’s not the case. But it does make conservatives look bad.

Marcuse, Fromm, and Foucault were the Big Thinkers of the day.

Oh, yeah. Foucault had a rather interesting set of sexual preferences himself, involving whips, chains, and death from AIDS. Marcuse is simply another example of someone who uses politics to get laid.

Anyone who looks into the genesis of the Nazi party runs straight into sexual perversion from the outset. Pictures of the Hitler Youth were, and remain, borderline softcore pornography. Out-of-wedlock pregnancy was openly encouraged in Hitlerjugend camps, and lebensborn cannon-fodder baby factories are something out of a nightmare. A very great deal has been written on Rohm and the SA, whose orgies would be right at home in a San Francisco bath-house. A big one. Hitler himself was accused by political opponents (so take it with a grain of salt) of supporting himself through male prostitution in his Vienna days. At the very least he was very familiar with that environment, and yet his shock at the degree to which the SA had wallowed in it was apparently genuine. It provided a handy excuse for the Night Of The Long Knives, to be sure.

I think it's another facet of the failure of the popular argument that the Nazis and the Communists were any sort of opposite when they behaved so very much alike in so many respects. Totalitarian statism, camps, mass extermination, rigid thought control, militaristic regimentation of society, they were two peas in a pod.

The irony too, is that Stalin, himself, was a “National Socialist”.

He had rejected the Internationalism of Trotsky, and instead adhered to the doctrine of “Socialism in One Country”. And instead of respected all of the cultures of the Soviet Union, he instigated a ruthless system of “Russification” throughout the entire Soviet Union, uprooting entire ethnicities, and replacing them with ethnic Russians.

And you’ll never convince me, that Stalin wasn’t aware of just what Hitler was doing in places like Babi Yar, and tacitly approved, knowing at least Hitler was helping Stalin take care of his “Jewish Problem”.

The reality is there are authoritarian and totalitarian movements on both the right and the left.

See, this is where you're about as wrong as you can get. The reason it is extremely important for the leftwingers to call Naziism "right wing" is precisely to foster this idea that the (American) Right is no different from the Left, or perhaps that, in terms of totalitarianism, the Right is even worse. But the truth is that the United Stated of America is not the same as Germany, nor is it the same as any European country, nor any country anywhere, so saying that what constituted the "Right" in WWII era Germany is the same as the Right in the USA at any time is disingenuous at best and a blatant lie at worst. American conservatism, which is to say the American Right, is anti-totalitarian by definition.

What normally is defined as "right wing" in a society is the most conservative version of that society - the side that resists massive cultural, economic, or governmental changes in order to "conserve" what exists. At the time the USA sprang into existence, Europe was full of monarchies. People were subjects. That is what made the USA such a revolutionary form of government. The "Right" or conservatives in the USA are those who want to preserve the soul of the USA, which is to say, want to preserve what we call "classical liberalism", the idea that the people are supreme over the state, and the state only exists through the consent of the people.

Germany, on the other hand, like virtually all countries in the world, still retained the tradition that the state was supreme over the people, and that the people existed to serve the state, whether that state was ruled by a king, a keiser, or a fascist despot. The truth is, I don't think the Germans ever completely lost that attitude from their culture, but in the WWII era they certainly hadn't. What would have been considered "right wing" in Germany at the time would have been a conservation of the traditional aspects of German culture, which included a subservience of the people to the state. A transition from a keiser to the intermediate and unstable republic and then back to a pseudo-keiser would have been tradition for them, and thus "right wing". But, for Americans, accepting a dictatorship would not, in any way, shape or form, be a return to tradition, but would be a massive change, socially and governmentally, and thus, in no way, could be considered "conservative" or "right wing".

Moral equivalency has been one of the key tools used by the Left since the world first shat them out. It is even called out explicitly in Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: always accuse the opposition of doing what you are doing. This way, the Left (in the USA) can obscure their totalitarian impulses by claiming things like "Well, we have Stalin but you have Hitler!!" But who says the American Right has Hitler? Who on the American Right would ever have agreed with Hitler's governing philosophy? Heck, it is a known fact that the American Left supported Hitler up until he attacked their sainted Uncle Joe, and only then did they turn on him. From an American perspective, Hitler was never "right wing" and, in fact, represented everything that the American Right always fought against.

Saying that "Hitler was Left Wing" may not convince your average rube of anything in this age of meme-wars and whatnot, since seventy plus years of claiming Hitler was conservative have had a lot of success, but that still doesn't make Hitler right wing in American terms, and nobody should ever concede that point.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.