The harsh reality of Nazi and Communist sympathy — trivialised too often

In recent years, in an attempt to dissect the old Politically Incorrect Guide series, my brother and mother have frequently noted that the founder of Regnery Publishing, Henry Regnery, was a Nazi sympathiser. This despite the fact that Regnery’s books are never supportive of the Nazis and frequently critical.

However, the reality about Nazi sympathisers, as shown by Clement Leibovitz during the 1990s in his book In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, which I have been reading recently, is much darker than merely heroes of the extreme right being Nazi sympathisers. Leibovitz demonstrated, in fact, that a clear majority of the ruling classes even in those nations that remained democratic were Nazi sympathisers. Moreover, even those portions of the ruling classes of the democratic survivors who were not Nazi sympathisers had negligible sympathy for liberal democracy. They saw democracy as only a temporary compromise with workers’ demand for a revolution to eliminate ruling classes entirely before — as had been done throughout Central and Eastern Europe except Czechoslovakia — defeating the workers completely and restoring a status quo ante where workers lacked the political and legal rights (like the right to vote, the right to unionise, the right to strike, and freedom of speech) gained since the 1860s.

Leibovitz shows that the overwhelming goal of the British and French ruling classes — and presumably the ruling classes of other remaining democracies in Europe, not to mention the US, Canada and Australia — was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime by whatever means necessary. He demonstrates that they never accepted the existence of the Soviet Union, even after Stalin relinquished the goal of international revolution. It was this desire to overthrow the Soviet government, which had been consistently dominant within the Western ruling classes, that drove their strong sympathy for Nazism and their appeasement policy.

At the same time, Leibovitz — much more than even Trotskyist groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation and the Democratic Socialist Party — conclusively demonstrates that the working classes of Western Europe overwhelmingly sympathised with the Soviet government. Of course, the majority of Europe’s working classes had supported the spread of the Bolshevik Revolution back at the tail end of the 1910s. Once revelations of real wages cut by a third or more, and loss of hard-won rights to form unions and to strike in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy appeared, the working classes of surviving European democracies became desperate to have Hitler and Mussolini overthrown, or minimally prevented from expanding by force. That idea drew overwhelming opposition amongst their ruling classes, who knew it would result in the spread of Bolshevism — something they could not tolerate.

Leibovitz also conclusively shows just how much Thomas Woods (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) and Paul Kengor (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism) trivialise sympathy for Lenin and Communism in general. Kengor’s claim of 25 percent of Millennials having a favourable view of Lenin is insignificant when it is observed that probably over 90 percent of industrial workers in Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s had a favourable view of the Russian Revolution’s leader. Woods’ focus on Communist sympathisers in American government and Hollywood is similarly ridiculous. Even in the 1930s most workers in Britain and France sympathised with Russia as much or more than with their own government, while when Lenin was alive Western Europe’s industrial working class observed how a workers’ revolution could transform society. They not merely wanted to emulate what Russia’s workers had done, but believed they were capable of emulating them locally.

Leibovitz also shows that the only thing that limited the ruling classes’ ability to let Hitler and Mussolini expand east and destroy the USSR was popular — which can only mean lower class — opposition to those dictators, and/or support for the Soviet Union. Even if working class excitement had died down by the 1930s, the USSR remained the enemy of every paramount enemy of the workers — Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Thus, even if they disagreed with Stalin’s policies and/or practices, the working classes in the surviving democracies still wanted the USSR to survive.

All this points to a harsh reality: extremely few people in interwar Europe sympathised with liberal democracy. Generally, the ruling and middle classes desired right-wing authoritarian regimes, whilst the working classes desired revolutionary socialism: a society without bosses or profits where all decisions were made directly under workers’ control, far more democratic than familiar systems of liberal democracy. Even when the ruling classes did very reluctantly accept fighting the Nazis — and as Leibovitz shows most therein privately thought they were fighting the “wrong” enemy — they did not come to accept liberal democracy as a “good”. The workers, for their part, overlooked the brutality of Stalin’s regime and the reality of his counterrevolution because Stalin’s Russia at least publicly opposed what they hated the most: right-wing authoritarianism and the Catholic Church.