Another leftist lie bites the dust: Soviet Gulag documentary destroys lie that Nazis were ‘far right’

A new documentary on the history of the Soviet Gulag system also destroys a cherished leftist talking point that somehow the Nazis were ‘far right.’

There is a new documentary on the Soviet prison camp that makes the point that the Bolsheviks locked up their fellow leftists, just like the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.  This system of concentration camps was similar to those of Nazi Germany, and similar camps in China, North Korea, etc.  We’re not supposed to remember FDR’s Japanese internment camps during WWII, so don’t mention them.  

Soviet prison camps were a criminal system of oppression that was widespread and long-lasting. The first camps were founded in 1918, and their number reached its peak in the 1950s. During more than 40 years, 20 million people were brought to almost 500 camps. Innocent people were made guilty. Every sixth adult citizen was forced to a camp or expelled. The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn named this system the Gulag Archipelago. It extended thousands of kilometres from the White Sea to the Black Sea, from Moscow to Vladivostok, and from the Arctic Circle to Central Asia. It was hidden away, and its existence was denied for decades. Prison camps were hard to see and understand. They are not well known even today.

One of the fascinating aspects of the documentary is that interviews with former zeks, or prisoners of the camps, reveal that the Bolsheviks imprisoned many of their fellow leftists — Mensheviks, revolutionary socialists, and others considered “dangerous” by the Cheka, or secret police of the USSR. 

Later on in the documentary, they note that Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, the head of the NKVD who prepared public purge trials, was accused in a later purge of being a member of the Zinovyev-Trotsky conspiracy of the right-wing opposition to Stalin.

This follows right in line with the research paper on “How and Why Fascism and Nazism Became the “Right.’”

Abstract

The Left has been represented by various currents that have historically been very aggressive toward each other because they used different tactics and strategies to achieve socialism. Like many intellectuals, revolutionary leftists did not get along with each other very often. Since the inception of Marxism, which is the doctrine of communism — an extreme and distinctive flavor of socialism — the far Left has portrayed adherents of less revolutionary ideologies as enemies of the working people. The followers of evolutionary socialism — the Social Democrats — were accused by the communists of betraying the proletariat. Non-Marxist currents of socialism, such as Fascism and National Socialism, were excluded from the socialist camp and put on the right wing by Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Stalinist political science became a benchmark that set markers to distinguish between the genuine Left and the Right. This article shows the origin and historical background of the artificial shift of Fascism and National Socialism to the right side of the political spectrum.

It’s an article of leftist “faith” that fascism and Nazism are supposedly “far right” or “reactionary,” as termed 100 years ago in one of the first reports about the “Bavarian fascisti,” because they were in opposition to other collectivists, as we illustrated with a series of excerpts from the early decades of the 1900s.

In point of fact, when Daniel Hannan opened with a quote from a previous socialist known as Adolf Hitler in a debate in the Oxford Union — “I am a socialist, and a very different kind of socialist from your rich friend Reventlow” — the immediate response from the other side was to point out “that the first inmates of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany were communists and socialists.”

...except that, as we have pointed out, the Bolsheviks had already been doing this in the aftermath of their revolution in 1917.  We have blown that little canard out of the water.  

The fact is that different factions of leftists never seem to work and play well together — mainly because they desire power above all else, and their petty little rivalries get in the way of attaining that power.  It happened with the Bolsheviks incarcerating, exiling, or executing their rivals and continued with the Nazis, but somehow that was different — or at least that’s the lie from the left.  It continues to this day, with leftists squabbling over ideological minutiae no one else cares about.  

D Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history, the director of communications for a civil rights organization, and a long-time contributor to conservative websites.  Find him on Substack.

Image via Picryl.