The Tasmanian state government in Australia recently passed legislation to ban Nazi salutes and symbols. That law is expected to come into effect later this year.
It has been hedged about with a number of educational and religious exclusions: the swastika is a sacred symbol for many Hindus and Buddhists, and it will remain possible for schools to teach their students graphically about the horrors of Nazism.
The legislation is clearly directed at the increasing number of anti-gay activists who profess or affect links with the Hitler movement.
In itself, the new law is unobjectionable and may even be commendable. Every sane person concurs on the foulness of the National Socialist cause that assumed power in Germany in the early 30s and spread like a contagion throughout the community, corrupting the young and triggering the deaths of millions.
But there were two major totalitarian tyrannies that emerged to terrify the world in the 20th century. Nazism was one, the other was Communism.
Arguing the toss over which of the two was worse is in many ways a pointless exercise. Yet it is objectively true and demonstrable that Communism was an active force far longer—and that it claimed more lives.
Nazi killings extended over a period of nearly 20 years, from the 1920s to the end of the war in 1945. Six million Jews died at the hands of their exterminators, and the total death toll in World War II (as far as such an immense figure can be calculated with certainty) was in excess of 50 million.
The Greater Evil
But the ruthlessness of Marxist Communism has had an even graver impact on humanity, and over a longer period.It started with the Russian Revolution in 1917 and has re-emerged intermittently since, from whatever dark cave it lurks in, to wreak further misery on the world.
The Stalinist purges, the deliberate starvation of Ukraine, the Katyn Massacre, the suppression of Tibet, the crushing of the 1965 Hungarian uprising, the savagery of the Cultural Revolution in China, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot are all manifestations (there are so very many more) of that same totalitarian urge to diminish the worth of the individual while exalting the power of the state, to subordinate people to the herd.
Conservative defenders of traditional values insist that many of the current threats to society—radical Black Lives Matter, for example, or the notion of gender fluidity—are in fact inspired by Marxism, which is not dead (as most of us had fondly hoped) but very much alive and still urging the destruction of “bourgeois” society.
But this kind of thinking is commonly dismissed as a mere “conspiracy theory.”
It is absurd, isn’t it, to allege some kind of concerted plot or strategy behind an apparently disconnected range of attacks on cherished customs? Isn’t talk of a Marxist conspiracy simple nonsense? To answer that, we need to look closely at the roots of Marxism.
“The Communist Manifesto” was co-authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and first published in 1848. Economics is the chief concern of Marx, while Engels deals with what we might call the anthropology of communism. This latter area is the one that chiefly concerns us as we evaluate the threats against traditional Western values.
The atheism of both Marx and Engels shapes their thinking. They deny the existence of any objective or independent moral authority, so all ethical decisions are linked solely to the utility of the herd, the proletarian mass of ordinary people.
They think that the natural state of human society is the undifferentiated demos, which hold all property in common, and is matriarchal because there are no families or marriage bonds. In such a society, the paternity of individual children has no relevance.
This innocent (and imaginary) first state of humanity was corrupted by the rise of hierarchies dominated by males—these include families, property owners, employers of labour, and religious bodies.
The Marxist goal is a return to an idealised “communist” state of nature, in which all are supposed to be equal. It has much in common with the myth of the “noble savage” that had such an impact on thinkers of the 18th century.
Nazism the Easy Target
That Marxism remains a powerful motivating force needs no demonstration: it is on the public record.Marx and Engels spawned the thought of the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Marcuse, and innumerable current activists throughout the world who work towards “resetting” society.
So is there a conspiracy?
In one sense that hardly matters, because the greatest threat is and always has been the “Useful Idiots” (a term wrongly but plausibly ascribed to Lenin) who support one or other of the radical movements that seek to modify or even destroy the structures of society.
Or worse, those who live in denial, pretending that these movements are harmless and benign, and mocking the unsophisticated naivety of those who suspect the worst.
Now that we have banned the symbols of Nazism, will we go on to abolish the red star and the hammer and sickle? These symbols have been hated and feared by so many of their victims for so many years.
The sad truth is that it won’t happen.
Nazi symbols are a safe target for governments to tilt at. Their supporters are few and, for the most part, crazy. Politicians can gain easy brownie points by virtue-signalling their hatred of Hitlerism.
But Marxism is too big a target. There are far too many people in high office who cut their political teeth on Marxism.
Anyone who defended Hitler nowadays would be rightly condemned, but there are still plenty of people who have the hide to make excuses for Stalin and Mao. It’s still with us, lurking in the shadows, waiting its turn to surface again.
Reds under the beds? Am I just a soft-headed conspiracy theorist?
Maybe, but put me to the test: ask your local member to propose a ban on the blood-soaked symbols of Soviet and Chinese Communist tyranny.
Let me know how you get on!
