Overwatch

Nazis were fanatics: racial-nationalist totalitarians who subordinated economy, culture, and private life to one rigid ideology and enforced it with camps, propaganda, and group conformity. In the 1930s they got labeled far-right only because historians and everyone else compartmentalized into option A (international class-struggle Marxism) versus option B (nationalism and hierarchy). The Nazis hated and locked-up the organized left first, so relative to that A-versus-B map they sat on the right. Nobody bothered creating option C for what they actually were. That is why calling Hitler “on the right” today does not match what the right looks like now. The Nazis belong in their own category: ethno-nationalist totalitarianism, neither cleanly far-left nor far-right by current standards. What most people on the right-leaning side oppose is the far-left pattern of group-identity orthodoxy, institutional control, and socialist/communist habits, which are destructive. Communist regimes killed on the order of 100 million people in the 20th century. Those systems still run one-party control and ideological lockups in China, North Korea, and Cuba. There is no equivalent National Socialist-style far-right government doing that anywhere right now. 🫵 At this time, it is the far-left that looks more like the Nazis & Hitler these days because the Nazis locked up their political opponents, restricted firearms for anyone they deemed unreliable, enforced rigid group-think through propaganda and punishment of dissent, mandated state-approved educational programs that indoctrinated children into the regime’s ideology, captured and politicized courts and civil institutions to serve the party line, controlled media and culture to eliminate opposing views, and used crisis or emergency framing to expand state power over ordinary life. Those same methods, such as ideological lockups or deplatforming, speech and thought enforcement, curriculum capture, institutional conformity, politicized justice, and media dominance are all still standard practice in the remaining communist and socialist dictatorships, and they are the pattern large parts of the modern progressive left keep trying to normalize through cancel culture, DEI mandates, control of schools and universities, lawfare, and pressure on private institutions. When people think of “the far-right” today, it is usually referring to ordinary support for borders, equal rules under law, and maintaining order, following religion, and identifying the nuclear family and male versus female sexes in a conservative way. That is not the same thing or anything close to the far-right that was the Nazi party. Calling anyone “far right” at this point is the left’s usual excuse: if you like MAGA, Trump, or anything on the right, or if you’re just conservative or Christian then it must be “far-right”. Even actual far-right positions today look nothing like the Nazi totalitarian fanatic regime. By the way, if this comes up again, the historical “far right” label refers only to the limited left-versus-right binary available in the 1930s. What left and right mean, and what counts as far-left or far-right, has shifted since then; the identification above is about that historical placement versus today’s politics.