Racism, the Left, the Right, and the Perils of Forgetting

One of the more exasperating tics of our age is the habit of shoving today’s sins into yesterday’s pigeonholes and then insisting the labels cannot possibly peel. “Racism and exclusion,” we are told, “are a monopoly of the far right,” while others insist, with equal confidence, that “the Nazis were socialists really—you can tell from the name.” Both claims, I’m afraid, are comfort food. They allow us to deplore the wicked while preserving the spotless innocence of our own side. History—duplicitous old minx that she is—refuses to oblige.

Let us start with the awkward truth that modern liberal democrats of leftish disposition would prefer to forget: the early twentieth century’s eugenics enthusiasms were not the exclusive preserve of goose-stepping brutes in jackboots, but were eagerly promoted by progressive reformers in London, Boston and elsewhere—people who thought themselves scientific, kind and modern as they proposed sterilising the “unfit” for the greater good of society. You can find their pamphlets in British and American collections, bristling with charts, moral certainty and an appalling lack of imagination about other people’s lives. The rhetoric, now nauseating, was then respectable; the policies, now unthinkable, were once enacted. If you want to see how the desire to do good can slide into the decision to do harm, eugenics is Exhibit A.

Cast your eye eastward and you encounter the Soviet Union’s late-Stalinist pogrom by paperwork—the Doctors’ Plot—where Jewish physicians were denounced as poisoners and agents of cosmopolitan treachery, sacked, beaten and prepared for show trials. It was antisemitism with a red stamp and a rubber truncheon, not a swastika. Later, Mao’s Cultural Revolution managed to abolish the bourgeoisie largely by killing or terrifying anything that looked like a mind. Between factional bloodletting, public humiliations and purges, the body count rose into the millions while the slogans remained impeccably egalitarian. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, a regime of agrarian “purity,” supplied a still more ghastly coda. These horrors sit, inconveniently, on the left side of the shelf.

And yet—here comes the equal and opposite correction—Nazism was not a left-wing project with an unfortunate logo; it was a ferociously far-right enterprise that wove racial myth, imperial nostalgia and charismatic dictatorship into a single lash. The “socialism” in National Socialism functioned as a marketing adjective, not a programme. Hitler’s movement crushed independent trade unions within weeks of taking power, outlawed socialist and communist parties, and replaced class politics with blood politics, declaring that the national community would be harmonised by eliminating its supposed racial enemies. Private property and big business were not abolished; they were co-opted, terrorised, flattered and fed, provided they served the state’s racial and military aims. That is fascism’s signature: not equality, but hierarchy; not redistribution, but mobilisation; not class struggle, but a mystical nation marching in step behind a Leader. The standard scholarly consensus on Nazism—across historians from Kershaw to Evans and reference works you can trust—calls it what it was: an extreme right-wing, racist, ultra-nationalist dictatorship. No amount of lexical pickpocketing can filch it for the left.

Why belabour the taxonomy? Because accuracy is not pedantry here; it is prophylaxis. If we turn every modern ugliness into a morality play about “the far right” alone, we blind ourselves to the ways in which utopian left-wing projects have also produced exclusion, persecution and piles of skulls. If, on the other hand, we pretend that the Nazis were merely wayward socialists in brown shirts, we grant a grotesque absolution to a specifically far-right tradition of racial supremacy and leader-worship that has not, alas, vanished. Either error leaves a flank undefended.

The truer, more uncomfortable lesson is that racism and exclusion are opportunists. They hitch a ride on whatever vehicle of power is idling at the kerb. On the right, they present as blood and soil, hierarchy, the iron romance of nation and empire. On the left, they masquerade as scientific planning, historical necessity, the cleansing fire of a new and better humanity in which certain existing humans—awkward, bourgeois, deviant, cosmopolitan—must be re-educated, exiled or erased. In both idioms the results rhyme: the scapegoated minority, the show trial, the conveniently elastic emergency, the bureaucrat who discovers that cruelty can be administered with a stamp.

This is not, I hasten to add, the tired “horseshoe” platitude which claims that everything extreme is the same. It isn’t. Nazi genocide was born of a pseudo-biological cult of race; communist terror was born of a pseudo-scientific cult of history. They are distinct in origin and justification. But for their victims the practical experience—midnight knocks, public humiliation, the unctuous voice of the inquisitor, the pit—differed less than the pamphlets would suggest. To remember that is not to flatten history; it is to resist the narcotic of self-exculpation.

So what to do with the present, forever keen to borrow the grandeur of the past while forgetting its footnotes? First, stop playing etymology with “National Socialism” as though the party’s name were a Rosetta Stone. The British Liberal Party once contained imperialists; the German Democratic Republic was not democratic; North Korea calls itself a republic. Words on letterheads are decoys; programmes and practices tell you where a movement lives. On that test Nazism lives firmly on the far right. Second, allow that the modern left has its own reckonings. From scholarly flirtations with eugenics in the Anglosphere to the murderous levellers of Asia, the family album contains faces one no longer invites to dinner. A grown-up politics can hold both thoughts without spraining anything.

Finally—and here I offer a plea rather than a sermon—drop the consoling habit of imagining that vice is always the other tribe’s monopoly. Racism and exclusion flourish wherever ideology supplies a permission structure and bureaucracy supplies a procedure. The point of remembering who did what, and why, is not to score a triumphant point for Team Blue or Team Red, but to deny either team the alibi that “we could never.” History’s reply, delivered with her usual dry smile, is that “you already did.” If we want a better answer this time, we might begin by calling things by their proper names, even when accuracy is rude to our side. Only then do the old labels help us avoid the old mistakes, rather than repeating them with new slogans and the same, exhausted results.