[subscribe2]This column from Jonah Goldberg reminds me of something I’ve been harping about for years.

National Bolshevism must strike some on the left as quite perplexing. After all, Bolshevism and Nazism — like fascism and socialism — are opposites, right?

If you read my book, you’d know I consider this the greatest myth and/or lie of the 20th century (coming in a distant second: the idea that there is a difference between good flan and bad flan).

Funny enough, the Eurasianists are counting on this myth for their propaganda campaign. They insist that the protesters in Kiev are trying to stage a “brown revolution” or fascist coup. In other words the de facto fascists are calling the anti-fascists “fascists.” And apparently lots of folks are falling for it.

Going back to the 1920’s, the use of “fascism” as an epithet was popular with communists. On the continent, the two big branches that grew out of Jacobinism were Marxism and Fascism. All of the other forms of socialism fell away as those two great religions came to dominate Europe in the 20th century. Principally, the difference between the two is cultural, not economic. Both cults agreed on the big economic questions. One would permit private property, but embrace corporatism. The other would abolish private property, but both embraced state directed economics. The difference was cultural. Fascism is national. Marxism is international.

That difference made exporting the faith difficult for fascism and necessary for Marxism. Consequently, the communist movements in America got plenty of ideological and economic support from Mother Russia. Fascist movements enjoyed no such support. They eventually morphed into the Progressive Movement and dropped any association with continental fascism, including the term. Marxist made fascism an epithet and World War II made it a synonym for evil in America. Naturally, the American Left applied it to to their political opponents, claiming they were on the right, just like Hitler.

First, let’s clear some underbrush. The idea that Communism and Nazism are opposites is more of a utilitarian idea than a core conviction for the Left. It is a rationalization that allows the Left to cut around the historical tumor of Nazism and fascism and say, That has nothing to do with us.

But the simple fact is that the hard Left has always endorsed or at least sympathized with national-socialist countries. What do you think Cuba is? It’s nationalistic and it’s socialistic. Venezuela under Chávez and now Maduro is nationalist and socialist. Nicaragua in the 1980s, etc., etc. Read a speech by any socialist dictator and swap out the word “socialize” for “nationalize”: The meaning of the sentences doesn’t change one iota. Nationalized health care is socialized medicine. Even Obama’s weak-tea socialistic rhetoric is usually dolled up in the rhetoric of nationalism, even militaristic nationalism. Let’s all be like SEAL Team Six! Let’s make this a “Sputnik Moment.”

Most of the Left in the U.S. didn’t really hate the German national-socialists until Stalin told them to. That the useful idiots thought Stalin’s command to turn on his one-time Nazi ally was rooted in deep ideological conviction just proves the depths of their idiocy.

After all, it’s not like the Left suddenly turned on Stalin when he embraced nationalism wholeheartedly and talked of fighting the Nazis as part of the “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.” But, hey, maybe I’m missing the deep Marxist themes in the phrase “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.”

It seems to me the better model for Western politics is to place the sons and daughters of the French Revolution in the center. Imagine a closed world full of lunatics at war with one another, surrounded by a wall. Inside we have the dog’s breakfast of socialist movements. Marxism, Maosim, Bolshevism, Progressivism, Fabian Socialism and so forth. These secular religions occupy the same space Christianity occupied for 1,000 years.  Despite being a small number of believers, they exert an out-sized influence over human affairs because they occupy that central place in the culture.

On the other side of the wall lives the undifferentiated other. The eyes in the darkness that haunt the dreams of Leftists worldwide. Putting Steve Sailer and Paul Gottfried in the same bucket is a category error. The only thing they agree on is they are not on the other side of the wall. Putting the Reason Magazine crowd in the same category as the American Spectator crowd misses what’s important about each group. It papers over enormous differences between the two. I may agree with a lot of what libertarians have to say about public policy, but I am not a libertarian.

A map like this one is a good starting point for a model of western political thought. Instead of HBD at the center, the CML is in the center. Everything else is position based on its reaction to and distance from the center. Maybe that’s a good project for this week.

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