MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide

Definitions

25 min read

Explaining Terms: Far-Right, Fascism, Nazism, Neo-Nazism, Neo-Fascism

Defining the Far-Right

  • The term “Far-Right” comes for the idea of the left-right divide, where political ideologies are put into 3 categories, left wing, centrist and right wing.

  • This idea originates from politics in France, where during the French Revolution France’s political groups met in the National Assembly building, Revolutionary Republicans sat on the left side of the room, Traditionalist Monarchists sat on the right side of the room.

  • Now the left-right split is defined differently, it’s usually based on economics: Movements on the left trend towards cooperative, collective organisation, while movements on the right trend towards competitive, private organisation, with this modern definition we end up with a political balance like this:

  • So, what is Fascism?

Defining Fascism: 

  • The word Fascism comes from the Fasces, an Italian bundle of sticks, usually containing an axe, that represented authority, the ideology of Fascism was implemented by Italian leader Benito Mussolini from the 1920s to the 1940s.

  • The Holocaust Encyclopedia defines Fascism as:

an ultranationalist, authoritarian political philosophy. It combines elements of nationalism, militarism, economic self-sufficiency, and totalitarianism. It opposes communism, socialism, pluralism, individual rights and equality, and democratic government.

Ultranationalism

  • Nationalism is the idea of devotion to a country, its people and its culture.

  • Ultranationalism is a form of extreme nationalism, usually focused on national expansionism and an idea of supremacy over other nations.

Authoritarianism

  • Authoritarianism is the idea that the government, also known as the state, should have extensive power over the people, it is the opposite of libertarianism.

  • The more power a government has, or takes, the more authoritarian it becomes, the more power a government loses, or is taken from it, the more libertarian it becomes.

Totalitarianism

  • Totalitarianism is the idea that the government should have influence over every aspect of the lives of the people.

  • Mussolini described this idea as “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Statist Collectivism

  • Collectivism is the idea that groups, aka collectives, should have priority over individual people.

  • Statist Collectivism monopolises control over these groups in the hands of the state.

Defining Nazism

Defining Ethno-Nationalism

  • Ethno-Nationalism is a form of nationalism based on a common ethnic background, it often aims to promote ideals of ethnic purity and supremacy over other ethnicities.

  • In Ethno-Nationalism, ethnicity, which is based on biology, is tied together with race, which is more of a concept, Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the difference like this:

the term race is understood today as primarily a sociological designation that identifies a group sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history, while ethnicity is a word for something you acquire based on where your family is from and the group which you share cultural, traditional, and familial bonds and experiences with. The end result: people may have racial similarity but ethnic dissimilarity.

  • In the case of Nazism, Germans and groups of German ancestry were considered part of the “Aryan Race”, sometimes referred to as the “Master Race”, non-“Aryan” races such as the Jews and Slavs were seen as inferior and treated as targets for suppression or extermination, and people of mixed ethnic backgrounds were seen as “impure” and “second class citizens”.

  • In the case of Nazism, the main targets of suppression were the Jews, Nazi policy pushed for the removal of Jewish populations from Europe, initially this was accomplished through deportation plans, such as allowing Jews to leave Germany for Palestine under the “Haavara Agreement”, and later an attempted plot to resettle Jews in Africa known as the “Madagascar Plan”, but it was later implemented in a campaign of extermination now known as the Holocaust.

  • These anti-semitic sentiments were a key element of Nazi ideology, under Nazism Jews received the blame for Germany’s past issues, including its defeat in the First World War, with Nazism presented as the path to reviving Germany, under Nazi rule antisemitism was a common propaganda theme, and Hitler spoke of annihilating European Jews, although the true extent of the extermination campaign was obscured from the public:

 I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

  • “Hitler’s Prophecy”, January 1939

  • While Fascism is often treated as near identical to Nazism in public understanding, racialism is a point where Nazism and Fascism notably diverged, in a series of conversations with author Emil Ludwig in 1932, Mussolini described race as a “feeling” and a “delirium” rather than a biological reality, rejected the idea of racial purity, and openly praised Jews as “good citizens” of Italy:

“But if nationalism be independent of forms of government, and also of questions of class, then it must also be independent of questions of race. Do you really believe, as some ethnologists contend, that there are still pure races in Europe? Do you believe that racial unity is a requisite guarantee for vigorous nationalist aspirations? Are you not exposed to the danger that the apologists of Fascism will (like Professor Blank) talk the same nonsense about the Latin races as northern pedants have talked about the “noble blonds” and thereby increase rival pugnacities?”

“Of course there are no pure races left; not even the Jews have kept their blood unmingled. Successful crossings have often promoted the energy and the beauty of a nation. Race! It is a feeling, not a reality; ninety-five per cent.* at least, is a feeling.

Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist to-day. Amusingly enough, not one of those who have proclaimed the ‘nobility’ of the Teutonic race was himself a Teuton.

Gobineau was a Frenchman; Houston Chamberlain, an Englishman; Woltmann, a Jew; Lapogue, another Frenchman. Chamberlain actually declared that Rome was the capital of chaos. No such doctrine will ever find wide acceptance here in Italy.

Professor Blank, whom you quoted just now, is a man with more poetic imagination than science in his composition. National pride has no need of the delirium of race.”

“That is the best argument against anti-Semitism,” said I.

“Anti-Semitism does not exist in Italy,” answered Mussolini. “Italians of Jewish birth have shown themselves good citizens, and they fought bravely in the war. Many of them occupy leading positions in the universities, in the army, in the banks. Quite a number of them are generals; Modena, the commandant of Sardinia, is a general of the artillery.”

According to the diaries of his mistress Claretta Petacci, after the rise of Nazism in 1938 Mussolini proclaimed he had been a racist all along and adopted the anti-Semitic rhetoric used by the Nazis:

“I have been a racist since 1921. I don’t know how they can think I’m imitating Hitler,” Mussolini is quoted as boasting in August 1938. “We must give Italians a sense of race.”

Italy’s racial laws restricted the rights of Jews and expelled them from government, university and other fields.

“These disgusting Jews, I must destroy them all,” Mussolini was quoted as saying by his lover in October 1938. At another point he calls them “enemies” and “reptiles,” according to the excerpts.

Defining Social Darwinism

  • Social-Darwinism is the idea of survival of the fittest, that the strong rule the weak while the weak die out, Nazism took this to great extremes by encouraging a culling of the weak, those with severe mental or physical health issues were either forcefully sterilised or murdered through forced euthanasia; Even if these people were otherwise seen as racially Aryan, their disabilities marked them for death.

  • The sterilisations were justified under a law known as the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring”, which endorsed the sterilisation of those found to have physical or mental defects, those eligible for sterilisation included those with learning disabilities, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, huntingdon’s disease, deafness, blindness, any “severe deformity” and severe alcoholism, decisions around who was to be sterilised were governed by “Genetic Health Courts”.

  • In the case of the euthanasia program, the program for carrying out these killings was known as “Aktion T4”, carried out by physicians in the German hospital system, the main targets of the killings were children, but the program also expanded to disabled adults, with Hitler referring to the murders as “mercy deaths”:

The euthanasia program was the Nazi regime’s first campaign of industrialized mass murder against specific populations whom it deemed inferior and threatening to the health of the Aryan race. Code-named “Operation T4” for the Berlin street address (Tiergarten 4) of its headquarters, the euthanasia program targeted mentally and physically disabled patients, a population that the Nazis considered “life unworthy of living” (lebensunwertes Leben). The euthanasia killings began in August 1939 with the murder of disabled infants and toddlers.

 T4 technicians created killing centers where the disabled were murdered in gas chambers and their bodies burned in crematoria. Six killing facilites were established in 1940 at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar. Public protests from the church and the judiciary ultimately forced Hitler to halt the gassing in August 1941. However, this did not end the euthanasia program. The killing of disabled children continued unabated, and the murder of disabled adults was restarted in August 1942, utilizing the methods of lethal overdose and starvation. Known as “wild” euthanasia, this phase of the program continued until the final days of the war. In all, “Operation T4” claimed at least 200,000 lives.

“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are entrusted with the responsibility of extending the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, so that patients who, after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death. — A. Hitler”

  • While the sterilisation program was public, detailed openly in legal proclamations, Aktion T4 was obscured from the wider German population, much like the Holocaust, to preserve war morale, although the Nazi government publicly expressed their attitudes towards the disabled:

The Nazis claimed that the social and economic problems that Germany experienced in the 1920s and early 1930s were due in part to the weakening of the population created by an unfair burden.

Nazi propaganda in the form of posters, news-reels and cinema films portrayed disabled people as “useless eaters” and people who had “lives unworthy of living”. The propaganda stressed the high cost of supporting disabled people, and suggested that there was something unhealthy or even unnatural about society paying for this. One famous Nazi propaganda film, Ich Klage An (I Accuse), told the story of a doctor who killed his disabled wife. The film put forward an argument for “mercy killings”. Other propaganda, including poster campaigns, portrayed disabled people as freaks.

Defining Neo-Nazism and Neo-Fascism

  • Neo is a prefix meaning new, so Neo-Nazism and Neo-Fascism simply mean “New Nazism” and “New Fascism”, these terms refer to any forms of Nazism and Fascism that emerged after the end of the states of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1945, as attempts to revive Fascism and Nazism they begin with the same ideals of the original Nazi and Fascist ideologies.

Modifications to Fascism/Nazism

  • Neo-Fascism and Neo-Nazism can’t be as specifically defined as their original counterparts, because the originals were only implemented and defined by the groups that created them, the Italian Fascist Party and the German Nazi Party, future expressions of Nazism and Fascism have been adopted by a wide variety of parties and movements.

  • Instead, elements Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist movements can be defined by the elements of Nazism and Fascism they attempt to change, and the ideals they attempt to add.

New approaches to racialism

  • For example, most Neo-Fascist movements adopt Ethno-Nationalism.

  • Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist groups however often change the focus of their Ethno-Nationalism, rather than focusing on the Jews as their racial enemies, as the original Nazis did, some groups instead move the focus to Muslims from the Middle East and Africa, in the case of the Ukrainian far-right the target is often shifted to the Russians.

  • Other groups also change their perceived racial allies, a common variant of ethno-nationalism adopted by these groups is “white nationalism”, which includes light skinned ethnicities the original Nazis saw as subhumans, like the Slavs, as part of a broad “white race”.

  • Some groups even go as far as to eliminate the ultranationalism ideal entirely, and put their focus solely on ethno-nationalism.

  • However, there are some examples of the opposite approach, such as the “National Bolshevik” movement of Alexander Dugin, which has denounced racism, emphasising other elements of Neo-Fascism instead, particularly totalitarianism.

Religious elements

  • Some groups also add a greater focus on religion into their ideology, usually either Christianity or Paganism (often based on the Pagan rituals promoted by Heinrich Himmler and the SS), but sometimes even Satanism.

Normalisers vs Radicalisers

  • Neo Nazi and Neo Fascist groups can essentially be split into 2 groups, normalisers and radicalisers:

  • Normalisers will try to reduce or hide their more extreme ideals and symbols to try and become more acceptable to the general public, these groups often try to use electoral politics to gain influence, usually trying to tap into the mainstream of right wing and conservative politics.

  • Radicalisers will instead go in the opposite direction, becoming even more extreme, using deliberately edgy symbols and rhetoric to provoke a reaction and using acts of terrorism and mob violence creating instability that they can take advantage of.

    • These groups sometimes try to tap into wider anti-establishment movements to try and legitimise themselves, like the “Autonomous Nationalists” who mimic the imagery and rhetoric of the radical left Antifa movement, or the “National Anarchists” who similarly attempt to co-opt libertarian (often left leaning) movements.

As a result of their wide range of differing ideals and tactics, Neo-Nazis and Neo-Fascists are also defined by a wide range of differing symbols, this can include variants of the original Swastika, Pagan or Satanic occult symbols, to numeric combinations and abbreviations, the sheer variety of icons used by these groups makes them harder to identify.

The “Left-Wing” of Nazism?

Strasserism

While Neo-Nazis usually consider their ideologies as extensions or continuations of right-wing Nazi ideology, the ideology of Hitler, Himmler and other Nazi figures, some Neo-Nazi groups instead look to the ideology of Strasserism instead.

Strasserism is based on the thoughts of the Strasser brothers, who are considered by some to be part of the “left wing” of the Nazi Party.

Despite being inspired by and modelled off of the far-right Fascist ideology of Benito Mussolini, in its early years of the 1920s and 1930s the Nazi Party had some divisions in its ranks: Some wanted to side with German conservatives, industrialists and financiers to take power, this included Hitler and most of the party leadership.

But others wanted to overthrow the country’s elites and gain support from the working class, the head of the Party’s SA (Sturmabteilung - Storm Troopers) paramilitary, Ernst Röhm, was one of these agitators, the Strasser Brothers were also.

Despite the NSDAP being a right-wing party, it had many anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois elements. Hitler later initiated a purge of these elements and reaffirmed the Nazi Party’s pro-business stance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_power

In 1934 Hitler decided to purge these elements of the party in an event known as the “Night of the Long Knives”, Röhm was executed and one of the Strasser brothers, Gregor Strasser, was also killed in the purge. His brother, Otto Strasser, had already left Germany by this point and survived the war:

Otto Strasser (1897–1974) had also been a member of the Freikorps, but he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany and fought against the Kapp Putsch. Strasser joined the Nazi Party in 1925, where he kept promoting the importance of socialism in National Socialism. Considered more of a radical than his brother, Strasser was expelled by the Nazi Party in 1930 and set up the Black Front, his own dissident group which called for a specifically German nationalist form of socialist revolution. Strasser fled Germany in 1933 to live firstly in Czechoslovakia and then Canada before returning to West Germany in later life, all the while writing prolifically about Hitler and what he saw as his betrayal of Nazism’s ideals.

Because the Strasserists were purged early on in the Nazi movement’s rise to power, they are almost entirely forgotten in public knowledge of Nazism today, but some Neo-Nazis and Neo-Fascists have claimed Strasserism as part of their ideology, or have been influenced by it.

The Third and Fourth Positions

Some of these groups also claimed to be part of what they called the “Third Position”, claiming their Strasserist style ideology as as a middle ground between right wing Capitalism and left wing Communism, building an ideology that goes “beyond left and right”, this was especially common in the Cold War where “Third Position” groups presented themselves as an alternative to US or Soviet rule.

One group, the National Bolsheviks and Neo-Eurasianists led by Aleksandr Dugin, even proclaimed themselves as the “Fourth Position”, with the first 3 being capitalism, communism and liberalism, with Dugin’s idea being a unification of Communism and Fascism to fight liberalism.

Leftist or not?

While Strasserism has been considered by some to be the “left wing” of Nazism (as opposed to the “right wing” of Nazism represented by Hitler) the legitimacy of Strasserism’s relations to left wing or far-left politics is hotly contested, the claims of Third or Fourth Positionists to being “beyond” the right are also similarly contested.

Almost all left wing or far left groups refuse ties to Strasserist groups, with most considering them to be no different to other far-right Neo-Nazi groups, many outside observers also often include these groups under the “far-right” label.

But this label isn’t consistently accepted, for example, even Wikipedia contradicts itself when discussing Strasserism, as shown in the quote above its page on Strasserism refers to Otto Strasser as a socialist, however the page on his Black Front movement refers to the group as far-right and denies its ties to socialism with this description:

Strasser formed the Black Front to continue what he saw as the original anti-capitalist stance of the Nazi Party, embodied in several items of its 25-point Program of 1920 that was in large part ignored by Adolf Hitler, which Strasser saw as a betrayal. The group’s reflected Strasser’s political views, such as revolutionary nationalism, and its criticism of capitalism was expressed in economic antisemitic terms rather than socialism.

The Black Front’s talk page also shows signs of this debate:

Strasser’s national socialism/bolshevism and “Political position - Far right”?? What a nonsense and disgrace to Strasser! 213.25.24.230

Do you think National Bolshevism is far-left? That’s ridiculous. —UNSC Trooper (talk)

If you read the writings of Otto Strasser, you will find that he advocated a high degree of societal ownership of the means of production, which is the essential tenet of socialism (the US tendency to use “socialist” as a synonym for social-democrat is a recent and deplorable phenomenon). — Henrik Thiil Nielsen

He’s a Nazi. This discussion needs no continuation. Docktuh

Strasserists and Black Front were economical left-wing factions of Nazi movement, while Hitler and mainstream were more in to centrism and social-corporativism in economic policies. In terms of very obsolete political analysis, both factions were right-wing in social, cultural and other non-economical affaris. Strasserist/Black Front political position should be syncretic with Far-right in social/cultural/religious/ethnical issues and left-wing in fiscal/economic issues.—78.102.112.124

“radical” and “left” wing of the NSdAP

Surely, no one can seriously consider the “non-fascist, non-SA”-wing of the NSdAP as less “radical” in any perceivable way than the “core fascists” around Röhm and Strasser!!! The fairy tale of the “left wing” of the NSdAP also seems to stem from cold war rhetoric when fascism was tried to be grouped with socialism.

Fascist and Falangist ideologies are not grouped as “socialist”, but “third way” in this same Wikipedia. Strasser (and Röhm) followed an anti-capitalist, collectivist ideology, that was neither “left” nor “socialism” (even as they tried to “sell” it differently - it’s a splendid idea to not assume the “sales points” of fascists!!!).

Strasser and Röhm wanted a “social revolution”, but by no means a “socialist” or “left” one. The Franco regime in Spain under the Falange is about the “purest” realisation of this, and no people in their right minds will hold the Falange was “left-wing”! —Hornsignal

This dispute is why we put “left wing” and “right wing” in quotes when talking about these splinters in the Nazi Party and Neo Nazi groups, as some see both sides part of the far-right, while others label them as left and right, viewing Strasser’s wing as a socialist movement and Hitler’s wing as a fascist movement.

Ideas such as “Third Positionism” and “Fourth Positionism” have received similar scrutiny, this scepticism of Dugin’s ideas is especially amplified by his stated aim to implement “Right-Fascism” in Russia initially, with the claim that after this “Right Fascism” is implemented, it would later be reformed into the new 4th theory, created by combining Fascist systems and culture with socialist economics, which he considers a “clean” form of Fascism that has never been tried before:

In Russia, we have passed two ideological stages—the communist and the liberal. What remains is fascism.

One of the versions of fascism which, it seems, Russian society is today ready (or almost ready) to embrace is national capitalism. It is almost beyond doubt that the project of national capitalism or “right fascism” constitutes an ideological initiative of that part of the elite of society which is seriously concerned with the problem of power and feels acutely the power of time (velenie vremeni). Yet, the “national-capitalist,” “right-wing” variation of fascism does by no means exhaust the nature of this ideology.

In history, clean, ideal fascism did not experience a direct incarnation. In practice, the urgent problems of assumption of power and establishing economic order forced the fascist leaders—including Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, as well as Salazar—to forge alliances with conservatives, national capitalists, big owners and corporation heads. Yet, this compromise always ended deplorable for the fascist regimes.

On the economic level, fascism is characterized rather by socialist or moderately socialist methods which subordinate personal, individual economic interests to the principles of national welfare, justice, (and) brotherhood. And finally, the fascist view of culture corresponds to a radical rejection of the humanistic, “excessively humane” mentality, i.e. of what represents the essence of the “intelligentsia.” The fascist hates the intellectual as a type.

The central figures of the fascist state, (and) fascist myth (are) the peasant, worker, (and) soldier. On the top, as the supreme symbol of the tragic fight with destiny, cosmic entropy (is) the god-like leader, Duce (duche), Führer (fyurer), superhuman who realizes in his supraindividual personality the extraordinary tension of national will for feat.

Many observers have dismissed Dugin’s promises to reform Fascism with “moderate socialism” as a mask to hide his Neo-Fascist views and make them appear more acceptable to the public:

Dugin gives us no lack of hints in The Fourth Political Theory that he is playing what amounts to a con job – that is, engaging in little more than a re-branding exercise rather than the conceptualization of something genuinely “new.” First of all, the thinkers who he consistently praises, and who serve as his intellectual guideposts, are all fascist or proto-fascist – or, in Evola’s case, “über-fascist.” Some of the ways in which he refers to fascism/Nazism have an odd ring to them in various ways. For instance, he writes that the third political theory suffered the fate of “expiring prematurely,” as if it were cause for lament that it didn’t attain full maturity as an ideological possibility. In the same paragraph, he claims that the third political theory “is still used as a bogeyman to frighten humanity,” as if the horrors inflicted by Mussolini and Hitler were merely fabrications of liberal propaganda rather than being genuinely evil.

Dugin’s suggestion that the Fourth Political Philosophy is somehow distinct from, or transcends, the horizon of 20th-century fascism is pure nonsense.

Yet before we start popping open the champagne, shouldn’t we first get more of a guarantee than Dugin’s book can give us that the anti-liberal dispensation that he promises won’t simply give us 21st-century versions of the evil regimes that arose from the third political theory?”

As a result, many socialist and left wing movements refuse to collaborate with “4th Position” groups, dismissing them as Neo-Nazis:

This acknowledgement of the vast majority of humanity’s outright rejection of fascism is important to keep in mind as we proceed to examine Dugin’s ideas. This is precisely why he takes great pains to paint himself as anything but a fascist, instead dressing up its grotesque skeleton as some sort of “Fourth Political Theory/4PT.” This masquerade is rooted in contempt for our class; charlatans like Dugin think that we would not be able to tell the difference by his slapping a new label on old trash.

Those who cannot see or do not want to see the fascism hiding behind his “Conservative Revolutionaries,” his yearning to embrace and defend “tradition,” have some soul-searching to do.

This dispute is also complicated by the fact that these ideologies have never been implemented in reality, as Gregor Strasser was executed before the Nazis took full control of Germany and Otto Strasser fled the country, never gaining a leadership position post-war; No Strasserist, Third or Fourth Position groups have ever gained political power anywhere else in the world either.

As a result, the only reference point for these ideas is the claims that Strasserist or Strasser-inspired groups make, and judgements around their authenticity, as Neo-Nazi groups are known to mislead and manipulate as part of their strategies, this means there are few reliable sources on these obscure worldviews.

Because very few of the groups on this repository claim these ideas, with most aligning themselves with the more common “right wing” of Hitlerite Nazism or otherwise aligning with far-right worldviews (For example, Right Sector), we haven’t carried out research into this topic that could help resolve this debate or give us a clear position on the issue.

Our approach and clarifications

As a result, when we refer to groups that claim ideologies like Strasserism, and the “Third”/“Fourth Position”s, such as the US-based “Traditionalist Worker Party”, the Italian “CasaPound” or the Russian “National Bolsheviks”, we will use terms such as “Neo-Nazi” or “Neo-Fascist” instead of “Far-Right”.

This does complicate some of our writing, as we earlier used “far-right” as an umbrella term describe all of the groups included in our research, while now we have to complicate some references by using terms like “Far-Right and Neo-Nazi” instead, but we would prefer to make things slightly more confusing than mislead people by using definitions we haven’t researched.

But our main conclusion is that regardless of whether or not Third or Fourth groups have a genuine claim to have moved “beyond the right”, they still deserve the Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist labels, Nazism and Fascism don’t stand out as extreme because of right wing economic values, they stand out for their key tenants like ultranationalism, totalitarianism, ethno-nationalism and social darwinism, while Neo-Nazis and Neo-Fascists commonly divorce themselves from some of these elements, they retain others, and the groups we include clearly have not made a clean break from their Fascist lineage.

Also, for clarity: When we refer to “Nazism” as an ideology without the “Neo”, we are referring to the far-right Nazism under Hitler, not including other offshoots like Strasserism, as far-right Nazism is the version of Nazism that was actually implemented politically and the Nazi Party itself rejected its “left wing” of Strasserism by forcing Otto Strasser to flee and executing Gregor Strasser.

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