Marxism's great lie was to brand Fascism as "right-wing"

As a political philosophy, Marxism sucks: its various flavours are based on a misreading of history, ignorance of how markets work, and a total misunderstanding of human psychology. Whenever it has been used as the basis for running a county, mass poverty, bankruptcy and terror have resulted.

But Marxists have always been brilliant at getting otherwise sensible people to swallow dirty great big whopping lies. Most have been revealed for the fantasies they are. But some persist. The one I’ll focus on today is the idea that fascism is a right-wing philosophy. It isn’t: like communism, it’s a left-wing philosophy.

We all know the traditional view of the political landscape. Start in the middle and move left and you get social democracy, then socialism, and wind up with communism. Heading right, the journey is less clear. You start with conservatism, (preserve institutions and traditions, don’t change things unless you know the alternative will be better, look after the poor). The map then gets a bit confusing, but somewhere along the route you encounter right-wingers, who are more interested in individuals than society, and tend to be less patrician that conservatives and more distrustful of the welfare state; neocons, who feel the West has a responsibility to export democracy and free markets; libertarians, who feel individuals should have the freedom to do practically anything they want to do – as long as they are made to suffer the consequences, and reactionaries, who feel that any form of change is pretty certain to make things worse. 

Now, when Marxists were looking to spread their poisonous form of government to countries outside the Soviet Union – like Germany and Italy – they encountered another left-wing totalitarian group determined to climb to power on the back of the working classes: fascists. Equally determined, equally unscrupulous, equally contemptuous of democracy and individual freedom, equally keen to use street violence, terror and lies to gain their ends, and equally keen to reshape human beings so that they would fit better into the hell on earth being prepared for them. 

The only real difference between Soviet-style communism and the German and Italian varieties of fascism were the hate-figures  they created to unite their supporters. The Soviets chose the lower-middle and middle classes – relatively well-off peasants, in the main – while Nazis chose Jews, and Italian fascists chose other nations (Abyssinia, for instance). 

But in reality what they shared far outweighed their differences. They were all totalitarians to the core: they wanted the state to control every aspect of the lives of all its citizens. Those who didn’t or wouldn’t fit in – or who wanted to oust them from power – would be killed, incarcerated, or exiled. And they all loathed the bourgeoisie – in effect, small “c” conservatives - who represented continuity and stability.

In their battle against fellow left-wingers – and, ultimately, that’s the only battle that interests the extreme left -  Marxists thought up a brilliant wheeze to differentiate themselves from their true enemies. They’d characterize fascists as being at the opposite end of the political spectrum, rather than as the co-religionists they truly were. Thus, fascists became creatures of the right, turning them at a stroke into friends of Big Business and the bourgeoisie.

Tosh, of course, but by God! the whole world didn’t half swallow it. 

Ever since this audacious ploy was first used back in the 1920s, right-wingers of every stripe have daily faced the charge of being, at heart, fascists. Every move towards genuine freedom, whether social or economic, has been portrayed as a lurch towards the dark side, bound to end up with concentration camps, jack-booted thugs, and gas ovens.

So, for over eighty years right-wingers – from the wettest, kindliest social market Tory to the most rabid “do anything you wanna do, buddy” gun-totin’ Yankee neocon – have been on the back foot, forced to apologise for the ranting, hate-spewing, homicidal-maniac uncle supposedly locked in their cellar. But the truth is we don’t have an uncle and we don’t have a cellar. It’s a fantasy, a brilliantly-created myth that has grown stronger over the decades. 

Winston Churchill was reviled during the 1945 general election when he predicted that a vote for Labour would lead to a Gestapo in Britain: of course that was a trifle OTT, but there was a kernel of truth in the charge. The Great Man (once dismissed by an Oxbridge-educated left-wing BBC executive sitting next to me at a dinner as “a fat fascist”) understood all too well that socialism was the first step in the journey that leads to totalitarianism – and who really cares what the murdering swine call themselves as they set about torturing and murdering the innocent?

The Right, the genuine, bona fide Right, shares almost no beliefs with fascists. The rule of law, private property, democracy, a small state, the primacy of the individual, the right to choose how you spend your money, freedom of movement, freedom of worship… in almost every single respect these are the exact opposite of what fascists believe in. None of these beliefs disappears the further right you go: but they sure as hell drop off the map as you head leftwards. 

Like all right-wingers, I’m uncomfortably aware that modern and historical fascist movements share some of my preoccupations. But to equate a desire to control immigration with hatred for other races would be perverse. Or to equate the need for a robust defence strategy with a slavering desire to invade and oppress our neighbours. Or to equate a hankering for an effective police force and tough sentencing with the ability to lock up anyone you don’t like the look of, indefinitely. Or to equate a yen for my tax money not to be spent on workshy scroungers with an unwillingness to pitch in to help people facing difficulties through no fault of their own. Or to equate the longing to see a diminution of the human rights of those who are utterly unwilling to respect the rights of others (or to exercise any form of personal responsibility) with the wish to see rights dispensed on a whim by non-elected Gauleiters.

It’s hard to imagine any person in this country to the right of a Guardiancolumnist and in possession of at least some of their mental faculties not agreeing with any of the above. (Unless, of course, they happen to be a politician - they’ll believe anything).

There are plenty of stinkers on the Right, of course, as there are everywhere, but, whatever we are, we are not fascists. No way. No how. Not ever.

I’d love to claim that I came to these conclusions on my own, but the scales were ripped from my eyes in 2008 by a brilliant book, Liberal Fascism, written by the American conservative, Jonah Goldberg. I cannot recommend it highly enough: it is a work of genius.