Fuck you Nazi scum
Everyone knows Nazis sit on the far right. I thought so too, until I tried to follow the line all the way to the end.
Before Nazis were an ideology to me, they were targets in a corridor.
That is where my education began, not in a classroom with a teacher explaining Weimar Germany, mass politics, humiliation after the First World War, the Depression, antisemitism, fascism, industrial murder, and all the other words adults use after the fact. I got there through Wolfenstein, a beige computer, and my best friend Henrik sitting beside me with the guidebook open on his lap.
We had a system. I controlled the game, Henrik controlled the future. He knew the room before I entered it because we had that book, and he treated that book with the seriousness of a man holding the battle plans for Europe. He would look down at the map, lean in slightly, and give the briefing. “First Nazi to the left.” Then a pause while I adjusted my hand on the mouse. “Next Nazi top right corner.” A second later the door opened, we breached the room, and two boys with terrible posture tried to liberate Europe one pixelated hallway at a time.
It was stupid and perfect. I missed shots. I panicked. Henrik corrected me. We died. We tried again. There was no moral puzzle inside it, which was part of the pleasure. Nazis were bad. You shot them. The game did not require a position paper on totalitarianism before the door opened.
School gave me the same clarity in a less impressive format. I had a red binder full of papers, and on the front of it was an anti-Nazi sticker: a swastika crossed out inside the usual red ban sign, no ambiguity, no cleverness, no room for a second reading. At the time I wore saggy trousers and oversized clothes, the uniform Swedish culture had decided to call “hip-hopper,” which did some signalling of its own. It told people I was not on the Nazi side of the room, at least in the teenage theatre of the time. It is silly now, needing a costume to announce that I was against murdering people for the parts of themselves they did not choose, but adolescence is mostly silly costumes pretending to be convictions.
I loved hip-hop. Still do. Tupac was a better moral education than half the things I was handed in school, back when the anger seemed pointed upward and outward, before so much of the music learned to stare at its own jewellery. I thought “In Da Club” was a work of genius, and part of me still does. Coolio, Eminem, Tupac, Nas, Busta Rhymes, Biggie, D12, Obie Trice. I may have drifted into gangster territory at some point, but even that felt, to a Swedish teenager in oversized clothes, like standing somewhere far away from the little Nazi world of purity and blood.
So my position was never subtle. I hated Nazis then. I hate them now.
Eventually Nazis stopped being only the men behind the digital door and became a point on a line.
You know the line. Communism sits at the far left. Nazism sits at the far right. Liberal democracy stands somewhere in the middle, looking tired but sensible, pleased with itself in the way middle positions often are. The chart does not argue. It is already drawn, which is a very efficient way of making an argument without admitting one has been made.
At first I accepted it because I was a child, and children believe diagrams for the same reason they believe maps. Someone older has apparently measured the territory. One horror goes over here, another horror goes over there, and the rest of us, clearly more sensible, live in the strip of land between them. It is a comforting arrangement. It lets the centre inherit sanity without having to prove much more than its distance from the corpses.
The accepted story begins with the old European sense of the word. Nazism belongs on the right there. Left and right came, in the usual telling, from the French Revolution, when supporters of the old order gathered on one side and more radical opponents of inherited power gathered on the other. Over time the words spread out from their original seating plan and became political language. The left came to mean equality, revolution, and the breaking of old privilege. The right came to mean tradition, authority, property, hierarchy, nation, throne, church, order.
Even the stories I loved had trained the same instinct. Star Wars did not make the Empire morally complicated. It dressed authority in black helmets, ranks, marches, giant machines, and a voice that sounded like a respirator giving orders. The good side was the Rebellion, a loose alliance trying not to be ruled. The iconography was not subtle. It was not meant to be. The older version was even simpler: red field, white circle, black mark. Order on one side. Rebellion on the other. Good and evil, made simple enough for a child to understand before the laser swords came out.
On that map, the Nazis are not hard to place. They believed in hierarchy down to the bone. They believed blood had rank, nations had destiny, leaders had a kind of mystical right to command, and some people had no place in the world except as material to be removed. They did not merely prefer inequality as an unfortunate side effect of life. They worshipped it. They wanted a society dominated by what they called the Aryan race, and a German empire under totalitarian rule. They built a state around that idea, gave it uniforms, laws, rallies, files, trains, camps, accountants, censorship, and a collective destiny no individual was allowed to stand outside. That is where the chart puts them.
The story then turns to what the Nazis did to the left after taking power. In 1933, the first concentration camp at Dachau was built for political opponents. Communists, social democrats, and trade unionists were among the first people rounded up. The Communist Party was banned. Trade unions were smashed. The Social Democrats were abolished. Union offices were occupied after May Day, their records seized, their leaders arrested, beaten, imprisoned, or driven into exile. Whatever the Nazis meant when they used the word “socialist,” they were not offering fellowship to the organised left. The people who might have made the worker language real were removed first.
The story also has Italy beside it. Mussolini built the fascist model first: leader, party, nation, discipline, violence, myth, and the state as a body that everyone else had to serve. Hitler admired him even when he did not fully trust him, and Germany and Italy later stood together in the Second World War. Fascism was not a loose insult in that telling. It had an ally, a precedent, and a uniform.
There is a lazy little parlour trick, usually performed by a man with the face of someone about to quote a podcast, where he points at the full party name and says, “Actually, Nazi means National Socialist.” Everyone sighs, because finding a word inside a name is not the same as understanding a regime. Calling yourself republican does not prove you serve a republic. Calling yourself socialist does not prove you serve socialism. Calling yourself democratic does not prove much at all. North Korea calls itself democratic. Nobody with a functioning pulse thinks this has gone well for democracy.
Names lie. That does not make them meaningless. Lies are chosen. A lie has to know what it is trying to borrow.
National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
The words were not dropped into a hat at random. They were selected because they did work. National gave the humiliated a family larger than their actual one. Socialist gave class anger a warm coat without letting it walk toward Marx. Workers told the man in the factory that history had noticed him. The trick was to take anger that might have moved upward, toward class and capital, and turn it sideways toward Jews, Bolsheviks, liberals, foreigners, “parasites,” and any other deplorables useful enough to carry the blame.
They wanted workers without worker power. They wanted anti-capitalist feeling without class solidarity. They wanted a people’s movement in which the people were defined by blood before need, myth before wages, obedience before dignity. A German worker could be praised in a poster, controlled in a factory, marched into a war, and told the whole thing was proof of his sacred place in the national community.
That is not socialism in any honest sense. Socialism, at least in the tradition that deserves the name, begins with labour against domination, with the worker as a political subject, with solidarity across the lines the powerful use to divide people. The Nazis took the words that could have led there and wired them to a racial state. They crushed the unions, murdered the comrades, kept useful industrialists close, and made private property acceptable so long as it served the regime.
At the same time, they were not free market individualists who wanted government to leave people alone. The Nazi state directed production, rationed loyalty, organised labour through the German Labour Front, rewarded approved families, policed culture, swallowed youth, speech, education, leisure, and death into the same national project. The individual did not stand apart from the state with rights the state had to respect. The individual belonged to the Volk, and the Volk belonged to the leader.
The line still works if right means hierarchy. It starts to wobble if right means small government, individual liberty, free markets, and suspicion of state power.
So draw the line again, but this time make the measurement different. Put the collective at the left end. Put the individual at the right. At the far left, everything is gathered into the plan: property, production, education, speech, the future, even the private doubts of the person expected to serve the collective good. Move a little to the right and private property returns. Move further and the market returns. Move further and the local begins to matter more than the central office. Keep walking and the state gets smaller, the committee loses its stamp, the planner loses the map, the law withdraws from more and more of life.
If you keep walking to the very end of that line, there is not a stronger king waiting there. There is not a larger state. There is not a party office with a flag outside it and a portrait inside. There is no one left with a monopoly on command.
No state. No rulers. No central authority. Anarchy.
This is the part the ordinary chart has to step around. On the collective-to-individual line, anarchy sits at the far end of what people often call the right. Not monarchy. Not fascism. Not the leader. Not the state making the person sacred by swallowing him whole. Just the disappearance of rulers. If the right is the direction in which state power retreats and the individual stops being material for the plan, then the far right is not a racial state with files and camps and youth organisations. It is the absence of the state.
Yet anarchism is usually placed on the left. The usual reason is hierarchy. If left means opposition to hierarchy, anarchism is intensely left. It distrusts rulers so much it distrusts the state even when the state promises equality. It wants to abolish domination, not put a better committee in charge of it. In the nineteenth-century fights inside the international workers’ movement, the anarchists did not separate from Marx because they wanted a stronger central state. They separated, in large part, because they did not want the revolution to become another machine standing over people.
So communism and anarchism can live together at the far left only if left is doing two different jobs. One meaning points toward collective ownership and state power, at least in the forms history gave us. The other points toward the abolition of hierarchy, including the state itself. One gives you ministries in the name of the worker. The other looks at the ministry and sees the next boss.
Both explanations are available. That is the strange part. They preserve the chart, and the chart is useful enough that people rarely ask what had to be smoothed flat to keep it.
A specifically American version of this shows up in party history, in a way that is almost funny if you can hold the blood at a distance for a moment. In the United States, the Republican Party began as an anti-slavery party. Lincoln was a Republican. The American Civil War killed roughly three quarters of a million soldiers. Slavery was abolished after Union victory and the Thirteenth Amendment. The Democratic Party in the nineteenth century supported or tolerated slavery, and Southern Democrats later defended segregation because white Southern voters mattered to them.
Then the parties flipped. The Democratic Party moved toward labour, civil rights, welfare, federal intervention, and progressive reform. Southern segregationists hated much of it. Republicans saw an opening. The language shifted toward states’ rights, law and order, busing, taxes, welfare, federal overreach. Some of it was coded. Some of it was barely dressed. Voters moved. Coalitions moved. The American South changed colour on the map.
The cartoon version is simpler. Every racist old bone in the Democratic Party gets up at the same time, crosses the room, and puts on a Republican jacket before dinner. The moral inventory is updated. The uniforms are exchanged. The souls are reassigned. Then everyone can go back to speaking as if the name of the side tells you what the people inside it are.
Parties are not souls. They are machines made of money, memory, region, church, class, resentment, loyalty, hope, fear, donor interests, local habit, television, family inheritance, and whatever phrase happens to be useful that decade. A name can stay the same while the thing underneath changes. A thing underneath can stay ugly while the name changes to something clean enough to say on television.
That is what the tidy version hides. It lets a person inherit innocence from a logo. It lets them point to 1860 or 1964 or 1980 as if the date itself will do the moral work. The moment the side has been named, looking at the side becomes optional. The words on the door begin to matter more than what the people behind it are actually doing.
I did the same thing with religion for years. I saw the atrocities and thought I had seen the whole machine. Control, I called it. Priests hiding abuse. Fanatics killing in God’s name. Women treated as property. Gay people shamed. Children frightened with hell. Whole cultures held together by guilt, obedience, family pressure, and the terrified politeness of people who know what happens if they ask the wrong question.
So I called religion poison and got on with my life, which is one of the pleasures of being young and absolutely, perfectly, one hundred per cent correct about part of something.
Then you meet people, the recurring inconvenience. You meet the man who got sober because a church basement gave him bad coffee, a chair, and a circle of people who expected him back next week. You meet the lonely person who made it through one more night because prayer gave the despair somewhere to go. You meet the old woman whose husband died and who still had a place every Sunday where grief had a routine and someone would notice if she vanished. You meet a God-fearing African woman whose gratitude to God is not an argument in a philosophy seminar but the air she breathes, real or not.
The category begins to split at exactly the convenient moment. The cruelty was religion. The endurance becomes community. The control was religion. The comfort becomes ritual. The guilt was religion. The belonging becomes culture. When religion produces horror, the whole category is dragged into court. When it produces survival, the category is broken into smaller and kinder pieces so nobody has to credit the thing they already decided to despise.
I am not religious. I do not need God to keep me from becoming a bastard, and on many days I suspect God has been used as a cover story by people who quite liked being bastards already. I am a Buddhist, though not in the way people tend to mean it when they picture a temple on the corner next to a falafel place. I trust the word of the Buddha as a life philosophy more than I trust the religious packaging that grew around it.
I once said something like that to a teacher of mine. He told me to listen to what the Buddha said about reincarnation and reconsider whether Buddhism was a religion. The argument lasted about two minutes before I had broken it apart in my head, which is another way of saying that I did the same category trick in reverse. The parts I could use became philosophy. The parts that smelled too religious became later machinery, temple smoke, people adding furniture to a room I preferred empty.
A serious person has to be able to hold more than one part of the thing at once. Religion has been a shelter and a weapon. It has held people together and kept them on their knees. It has buried the abused and fed the hungry. It has protected monsters and made saints of people who would otherwise have died unknown. It has been used as an excuse to kill, and it has been used as an excuse to save.
Most people do not want that much of anything in their hands. They want the drawer.
Communism receives the opposite treatment in rooms where the dream still has friends. The twentieth century left enough warnings for a person with no special interest in the subject to know the outline. Stalin. Mao. The famines. The purges. The prison camps. North Korea. The neighbour informing on the neighbour. The party discovering, with great administrative sorrow, that every failure of the system was caused by enemies of the system.
That was Stalinism. That was Maoism. That was authoritarianism. That was totalitarianism. That was bureaucracy. That was a betrayal. That was not the real thing.
The distinctions come next. An idea is not identical to every state that borrows its name. Christianity is not every crusader. Liberal democracy is not every bomb dropped by a country with elections. Nationalism is not every massacre committed by men singing about a homeland. Socialism is not every camp built under a red flag with a hammer on it.
Then the rationing of mercy becomes visible. If religion must answer for the crusader, communism does not get to walk away untouched from the camp. If communism can claim betrayal when the party builds a prison state, a Christian can object when the priest is treated as the pure expression of Christ. If Nazism is right wing because of hierarchy, myth, leader worship, and inherited rank, right wing cannot mean only the lone individual standing bravely against government paperwork. If anarchism is left wing because it opposes hierarchy, left wing cannot mean only the state absorbing the individual into a plan.
The words are not useless. A person who believes in racial hierarchy, leader worship, mythic national purity, and the destruction of political enemies is not “complicated” in some impressive adult sense. There is a word for that person. Use it. If someone starts sorting human beings by blood and destiny, do not stand there admiring the nuance.
The danger comes after the word has done its work. Once the thing has been placed, the mind relaxes. The drawer closes. The danger is over there, among the people with the bad label. Your own side cannot grow anything similar because your side uses the humane vocabulary. Your cruelty is justice. Your obedience is solidarity. Your hatred is accountability. Your censorship is safety. Your contempt is education. Your little hierarchy is care, administered reluctantly by the right sort of people. You are the right sort of people. Obviously.
This is where the ordinary political enemies start looking less alien than the story requires. The right leaning conservative who says order is often pointing at decay. The left leaning socialist who says justice is often pointing at abandonment. One fears the state becoming a master. The other fears the market becoming a master. One sees a person crushed by bureaucracy. The other sees a person crushed by poverty. The wounds are not always different. The proposed medicine is different.
That is the part labels are very good at hiding. They turn different fears into different species of human being. They make the other person sound as if he wants suffering, when very often he wants safety by a route you think will end in ruin. Then someone arrives with better words, cleaner words, words people have died for and killed for, and arranges them around an enemy.
The old Nazi story is obvious now because history has already lit it for us. We know the costumes. We know the flags. We know the speeches. We know the camps. We know the photographs from the end. We know where the line leads, so we can flatter ourselves that we would have stepped away at the first ugly sentence. Maybe some people would have. Many would have waited until it became socially expensive to object, which is not a rare human weakness. It is one of the main engines of history.
What makes the current story too comfortable is that it lets the ugliest arrangement stay in its assigned costume. It lets the reader hate the approved villain and then walk home satisfied, having learned nothing about the machinery except its old uniform. The machinery was not only a swastika. It was humiliation given a culprit. It was class anger given the wrong target. It was belonging sold as obedience. It was family language turned into a border. It was ordinary fear arranged into permission. In a broken Germany under enough pressure, with enough fear, with everyone around you already nodding along, you do not know what you would have become.
That machinery does not care what we call ourselves. It will use worker language when worker language opens the door. It will use tradition when tradition opens the door. It will use compassion, safety, freedom, equality, equity, faith, science, the nation, the oppressed, the taxpayer, the children, the future, and anything else decent people have been trained to stop questioning once the word is spoken in the right tone.
So yes, fuck Nazi scum.
Fuck the original version without qualification. Fuck the people who made blood into law, obedience into virtue, and categories into corpses. Fuck the ones in the films, the games, the books, the archives, the rallies, the uniforms, the camps, and fuck the modern little enthusiasts who still look at that wreckage and feel a private warmth.
In the game, Henrik could hold the guidebook because Wolfenstein was honest about being a game. The corridor had already been built. The enemies had already been placed. The enemy wanted the worst thing. The door existed so I could open it and find exactly what the book promised. We were not discovering a world. We were obeying one, laughing because the obedience had no victims outside the screen.
When a country begins to feel like that, the joke has gone out of it. Someone has opened the book before the people enter the room. The worker has been told who stole his life. The citizen has been told who dirtied the nation. The decent person has been told which hatred is actually care. The map arrives with the enemy already drawn on it. Because the old chart has placed evil safely in the correct corner, the person holding the pencil does not look dangerous enough.
Outside the screen, the ordinary opponent is rarely that convenient. He may be wrong. He may be dangerous. He may be trusting the exact machine that will hurt the people he thinks he is saving. But very often he is not standing there because suffering pleases him. He is standing there because someone handed him a map where his fear looked like mercy and yours looked like the enemy.
Walk far enough away from that arrangement and Henrik has less to do. The book loses its authority first, then its usefulness. No office owns the corridor. No party decides the room before it is entered. No leader, committee, nation, class, bloodline, or revolutionary gets to sit outside the door and mark the targets for everyone else. The door opens, and for once the room does not belong to the person with the book.