GREG J. writes:

Daniel S. wrote about the professors advocating infanticide:

So eugenics is bad when practiced by Nazis, but good when advocated by liberal “ethics” professors? Liberalism is at its core a nihilistic cult of death.

Please note that the Nazis were liberal ethics professors; there is no distinction between those two groups, for both groups presuppose godless materialism. The similarity between today’s leftists and the Third Reich can be tough to see, because a big part of leftist propaganda is the eschewal of all forms of racism, and probably most people who self-identify as politically leftist would disagree vehemently if grouped with Hitler. If leftists were consistent though, they would acknowledge that Hitler is one of their most important ideological ancestors. Like Hitler, the professors who wrote this study agree that purifying human society of unwanted or defective ‘human material’ is both necessary and noble for the smooth functioning of the world system of power. But the idea that Nazis and liberals are diametrically opposed to one another is an illusion forged by today’s leftists. Eugenics is just as inevitable within the worldview of people like the authors of this study as it was within the worldview of the Nazis.

                                     — Comments —

Bruce B. writes:

Greg J. says that Nazism was part of the Left. Lawrence Auster argues that it was of the Right. Albeit, a twisted, extreme form of the Right.

Here’s his argument:

“But the core of Nazism–the glorification of the German race over the rest of mankind–cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called leftist. We might put it this way. Internally, with regard to the ordering of German society and the relations of the German people among themselves, Nazism was a form of leftism. But externally, in its relation with non-Germans, Nazism was an extreme form of rightism. And obviously the aspect of Nazism that is of most interest to the world is its relations with the rest of us, in the same way that the aspect of Islam that is of most interest to the rest of us is the jihad war and subjugation that Islam commands against non-Muslims, not the putatively egalitarian practices followed within the Muslim community by Muslims.”

I think the essence of contemporary liberal thought is egalitarianism. To phrase it like Jim Kalb would, it’s “individual autonomy subject to the formal constraint of equality” or we should all be equally free. I agree that leftism proceeds from materialism as does Nazism but I think it proceeds from the same place but goes in a different direction. Jim Kalb had a good discussion about the relationship between Nazism and Leftism (how they are quite different but, nonetheless, inhabit the same moral universe). If I can find it, I’ll pass it along.

Laura writes:

Yes, the idea of equality is so central to modern liberalism, and so foreign to Nazism, that it is impossible to think of them as neatly allied.

Greg J. responds:

Laura writes:

Yes, the idea of equality is so central to modern liberalism, and so foreign to Nazism, that it is impossible to think of them as neatly allied.

Fair enough. In light of the Third Reich’s non-egalitarian policies, I’ll concede that the Nazis should be properly categorized as historically Right-wing, although the confused state of left/right nomenclature in contemporary Western politics is very well known, and the chaos of meanings in some ways renders such niceties moot. When I called them Leftist, I meant that they were extremely anti-traditional, and they absolutely were. Hitler hated Christianity, adored Nietzsche, accepted the Enlightenment critique of Europe as having succumbed to spiritual ennui under the deadening influence of Christianity. These were the motivating ideas for Hitler’s career and regime. I was not so much concerned in my comment about placing the Nazis along a spectrum as I was with showing the mutual roots that the Third Reich shares with secular humanism, namely in the so-called Enlightenment. My main point was to highlight the hypocrisy of self-identifying liberals who simultaneously denounce Nazism while cheerleading for abortion on demand. Why do such pro-abort cheerleaders recoil from the holocaust while insisting upon abortion rights? The answer is that it is only the most traditional segment of the Nazi program that the full-bodied liberal finds offensive, namely Hitler’s vision of a national fatherland. Liquidating humans is not intrinsically offensive to the professors of ethics, but it is safe to assume that they condemn Nazis, as all liberals do. Of course, we know that Hitler really was a homicidal maniac, but there is a distinction to be made between what we believe about Hitler and why we believe it. The moral indignation on the Left over the Holocaust is ludicrous, not because it is the wrong conclusion (indeed it is the right one), but because the rhetoric of the condemnation is that it is wrong to murder for racist reasons. Murdering for consumerist reasons is okay!

People who think of abortion on demand as one of the main features of the coming utopia have more in common with Hitler than they may be comfortable noticing. A very good discussion of the Left’s tortured and incoherent relationship with Nazism can be found here.

Liberalism is not a coherent political philosophy, for when its internal logic is fully unfolded as it has been for us in the Journal of Medical Ethics, we find liberals asserting the impossibility of transcendental norms of truth and morality, then turning around and asserting certain transcendental norms such as abortion and radical egalitarianism.

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