English version (grok didnt translated because of length)
Yesterday, I posted a deliberately brutal syllogism: Hitler: National Socialist, therefore socialist, therefore far left. LFI (France Unbowed, Mélenchon's party): far left, and an antisemitic party. QED.
Nearly 300K views, hundreds of replies, and every midwit leftist in France showed up to explain that I'm an ignoramus, a revisionist, or both.
Thanks for showing up. You're exactly where I wanted you. Now let's get to the substance. Take a seat: this is a masterclass.
Let's start with the easy part: left and right mean nothing. It's literally a seating chart. In 1789, in France's Constituent Assembly, supporters of the royal veto sat to the right of the president, their opponents to the left. That's all it is. Under the Bourbon Restoration, Benjamin Constant, one of the great figures of French classical liberalism, sat on the left. The meaning of those two words has changed ten times in two centuries, and we're still sorting Hitler, Stalin and Macron with a seating chart from 1789.
The further I go, and the more I talk with serious intellectuals, the more I hear the same conclusion: for 70 years, you've been sold a magic trick. Stalin at one end, Hitler at the other, as if they were opposites. When in fact they were neighbors.
The only axis that matters is control versus freedom.
Why? Because the number one question in any society is the economy. Not in the spreadsheet sense: in the sense of how human beings cooperate with each other. How they produce, trade, own and pass things on. Everything else flows from that: law, culture, free speech, the place of the individual.
There are only two big answers to that question.
Either people cooperate freely. I own, you own, we sign contracts, we trade, and everyone lives with their choices.
Or a central power decides for everyone, in the name of a group. The class, the race, the nation, the people, the planet. The group changes. The mechanism never does.
On one side, control. The all-powerful state. The collective above the individual. Central planning. Censorship. Repression. Uniformity.
On the other, freedom. Property rights. The free market. Individual responsibility. Free speech. Innovation. Pluralism.
Now put Hitler and Stalin on that axis.
They're side by side. Stalin sacrificed the individual to class. Hitler sacrificed him to race. Same machine, different fuel.
And they knew it perfectly well. In August 1939, they signed a pact and carved up Poland. Until Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941, the Soviets shipped oil, grain and raw materials to Nazi Germany, while Churchill's Britain held out alone. In France, in June 1940, envoys from the French Communist Party went as far as asking the German occupiers for permission to bring back L'Humanité, the party newspaper.
So if by "left" you mean the state running the economy and the collective crushing the individual, then yes: Hitler was on your side of the table.
Now let's talk about the word that was made to disappear.
Hitler's party was called the NSDAP. Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei: the National Socialist German Workers' Party. For 70 years, the word "National" has taken all the blame. The word "Socialist" got shoved in the closet.
Yet there was nothing decorative about it. The party's 25-point program of 1920 demanded the nationalization of trusts, profit-sharing in large companies, the abolition of "unearned" income, and the expropriation of land without compensation. Once in power: unions dissolved and replaced by a Labor Front taking orders from the party, cartels imposed by the state, prices frozen by decree in 1936, a Four-Year Plan handed to Göring, foreign exchange and investment directed by the state.
The owner stayed the owner on paper. In practice, the state decided what to produce, at what price, at what wages and for whom. Ludwig von Mises, who had to flee the Nazis, had a name for it: "socialism of the German pattern." No need to nationalize the factories when you've nationalized the decisions.
And this is where you were taught the biggest mistake of all: the problem with National Socialism was never the nation.
Loving your country, securing your borders, passing on a language, a culture, a history: there's nothing criminal about any of that. The nation is the framework in which democracy and the rule of law were able to emerge. Proof: the two men who stood up to Hitler when almost everyone else was folding, Churchill and de Gaulle, were the greatest patriots of their century.
The poison is the cocktail. When the nation becomes a race, the state becomes everything, and a group is marked for destruction. Nationalism + antisemitism + socialism. Remove the nationalism: the poison is still there. Remove the antisemitism and the socialism: all that's left is a country.
And if antisemitism and socialism got along so well, it's no accident. They share the same structure: the idea that a parasitic group is stealing the fruit of the people's labor.
In France, one of the founding texts of modern antisemitism, "The Jews, Kings of the Epoch" (1845), was written by Alphonse Toussenel, a disciple of the socialist Charles Fourier. Subtitle: "A History of Financial Feudalism." Proudhon, the father of anarchism and a patron saint of French socialism, wrote in his notebooks that the Jews had to be expelled or exterminated. In Germany, August Bebel, leader of the Social Democrats, is credited with a line that says it all: "antisemitism is the socialism of fools."
The Nazis made it state doctrine, pitting German "creative capital" against Jewish "rapacious capital." And the USSR, the self-proclaimed homeland of antifascism, ended up hunting down "rootless cosmopolitans," then inventing a "Doctors' Plot" against Jewish physicians.
A group branded as parasites, accused of robbing the people. Only the name of the group changes.
Before anyone throws Charles Maurras and Vichy at me: yes, antisemitism also thrived on the authoritarian right. Nobody serious denies that. Just look at where Vichy lands on my axis: censorship, a cult of the leader, a state-run corporatist economy, anti-Jewish statutes. Control. And look at where some of the most zealous collaborators came from. Pierre Laval, former Socialist lawmaker. Marcel Déat, former senior figure in the Socialist Party. Jacques Doriot, former Communist Party leader, who ended up in a German uniform.
None of this comes from me, by the way. Others wrote it before me, and better.
Friedrich Hayek, a future Nobel laureate in economics, grew up in Vienna and watched collectivism rise in Austria and Germany before settling in London. In 1944, in the middle of the war, he published "The Road to Serfdom," dedicated "to the socialists of all parties." An entire chapter is titled "The Socialist Roots of Nazism." His thesis: Nazism was not a reaction against socialism, it was its culmination. And he warned the British they were heading down the same road. Churchill picked up the idea in 1945: a socialist government, he said, would have to fall back on "some form of Gestapo."
Today, Javier Milei, a genius economist turned president of Argentina, says exactly the same thing. At Davos in 2024, in front of the world's elites, he lumped together communists, fascists, Nazis, socialists and social democrats: variants of the same collectivism, all convinced that the state should run people's lives.
Which brings me to the knockout argument, the one I read 300 times under my post: "But come on, historians say Hitler was far right."
That's not an argument, it's an appeal-to-authority reflex. And the only interesting question is: which historians, trained by whom, through what lens?
Let's follow the chain back.
In 1935, at the congress of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov enshrined the official definition of fascism: the terrorist dictatorship of finance capital. In other words, the final stage of capitalism. And therefore, by definition, on the right. Filing Hitler on the right was never a scientific discovery: it was a definition decreed in Moscow, by the regime with the most to gain from Hitler never being placed next to Stalin.
That logic was pushed all the way to the grotesque. In 1961, East Germany built a wall to stop its own people from fleeing. Official name: the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart." In the communist dictionary, the fascist is always the one who wants to be free.
Then comes Gramsci. Co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, thrown in prison by Mussolini, himself a former Socialist leader, incidentally. In his cell, Gramsci figured out why the revolution had failed in the West: there, you don't take power by force, you first have to win cultural hegemony. Schools, universities, the press, publishing. Political power follows. His "Prison Notebooks" were published starting in 1948. In 1967, German student leader Rudi Dutschke gave the strategy its slogan: the "long march through the institutions."
In France, that march was a sprint. In 1946, the Communist Party was the largest party in the country. Raymond Aron, who published "The Opium of the Intellectuals" in 1955, was treated as a pariah by the intelligentsia. Sartre would write in 1961 that "an anti-communist is a dog." In lecture halls, the saying went that it was better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron. A whole generation of young historians went through the Communist Party: François Furet, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and many others. Furet had the integrity to break with it and write "The Passing of an Illusion." Hannah Arendt, who put Hitler and Stalin in the same book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism," as early as 1951, wasn't translated in France until the 1970s.
So yes, I stand by it: on this subject, the history you were taught is lying to you. Not because every history teacher is a fraud. Because it rests on a definition manufactured in Moscow, copied for 70 years by an academic world where Marxism was the official language, then taught to millions of students as fact. You don't let the suspect write the police report.
And the same machinery is still running today, with economists.
In 2020, Thomas Piketty published a book called "Time for Socialism." That's not my accusation, it's his cover. In "Capital and Ideology," he lays out a theory of "temporary ownership," with taxes of up to 90% on the largest fortunes. Gabriel Zucman, the man behind France's "Zucman tax" proposal, advised Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on their wealth taxes. And the Piketty-Saez-Zucman data on American inequality has been challenged head-on by other researchers, Auten and Splinter first among them.
Call it whatever you want, just not science: it's a political platform with footnotes. The day an economist publishes "Time for the Free Market!" every newsroom will call him an ideologue. Piketty, they call a "researcher."
Which leaves LFI.
Back to the axis. On the economy: state planning, price freezes, and years of open admiration for Chávez's Venezuela, a country that has watched nearly 8 million of its people leave. Control.
On antisemitism: on October 7, 2023, as the world discovered a pogrom, LFI called it an "armed offensive." In November 2023, Mélenchon refused to march against antisemitism. In 2024, he declared that antisemitism in France was "residual," at a time when antisemitic acts were at historic highs. In 2025, the party put out a poster of Cyril Hanouna, a Jewish TV host, drawn in the style of 1930s antisemitic caricatures, then pulled it after the outcry.
I'm not saying every LFI voter is antisemitic. I'm saying that LFI is today the party that has turned ambiguity about antisemitism into an electoral strategy.
And remember the recipe. Without the nation, the poison is still there: control + antisemitism. I'll let you do the math.
The only political question that matters is: who decides how you live? You, or the state in the name of a group?
Every regime that ended in mass graves gave the same answer. Stalin. Mao. Pol Pot. And Hitler.
The real divide was never left versus right. It's control versus freedom.
QED.
https://x.com/brivael/status/2106724351101805054?s=20
