Along any campaign trail, you will hear the usual taunts and tirades of audiences caught in a rush of the moment. Nobody can have just one point of view, that is certain, and the use of strawman has been used to the point where cohesive arguments can no longer be sustained without them seeming 'irrational', based on emotive response or even seem radical. This has not just been a phenomena in the last four years, in particular since a certain multi-billionaire businessman from New York took to the centre stage upon an escalator to announce to the world that he would be running for the presidency of the United States. Likewise, this isn't just an issue within the American sphere of politics, for it is started with Europe, and has been on the rise since the end of the eighteenth century.
In 1848, a German philosopher by the name of Karl Marx published his magnum opus: 'The Communist Manifesto', which would set the turn for (perhaps) some of the greatest revolutions of their time. It would be redundant and even absurd to suggest that it was Marx's ideas that led to the start of German reunification or Garibaldi's conquest in Italy. Liberal revolutions had infected and spread through Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, an era that has no specific starting time, but ultimately came to a head with the beginning of the French Revolution. Looking inwards, one might suggest that Marx had some influences from this era, though we cannot say this for sure, but fears in Britain, Spain, the remains of the Holy Roman Empire and Russia feared that the ideas of the Revolution would soon spill into their lands. Luddites in England had been rising in this period, but posed no real threat against government intervention, and riots were often quashed against the working man, such as those at Peterloo in 1819. The Napoleonic Wars had an adverse affect on the British economy, the Corn Laws kept the price of bread high and attempts at electoral reform were heavily defeated. This could've been the start of the British Revolution had it not been for the strategic brilliance of British government intervention. That is not what Louis XVI had when the revolution rose up against him. Louis was a weak man, and as a result, lost the revolution due to those who were inspired by Enlightenment principles who became the majority by 1789. Whilst there can be debates about whether the French Revolution was a success or not, it became a blueprint for what would be further revolutions that would end in the same manner. Robespierre could have been an inspiration for the French Republic's virtues of 'liberte, egalite, fraternite' in the same way that one George Washington, who was inspired by the French Revolution, would later become. The history books say otherwise.
Maximilien Robespierre was undoubtedly a tyrant, who had abandoned revolutionary ideals for a ruthless dictatorship full of paranoia and delusion of self-grandeur. The execution of Georges Danton, his most trusted advisor, for abandoning revolutionary thoughts, would be a turning point for the new President of the National Convention. The Reign of Terror sent some 40,000 to the guillotine; he had dismantled the Catholic Church in France and replaced it with the Cult of the Supreme Being; the revolution as it had once been was in tatters. This may all sound too familiar to those who have read history and know the implications of revolutionary thought and how it can descend into chaos. Revolution isn't always counterproductive, nor will it always lead to tyranny. The American Revolution is an example of this, where the meaning of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' would extend itself (though of course, for a select few) and continue to be part of the American foundation to this day. Maximilien Robespierre was not a libertarian and never claimed to be, as far as we have found. Neither was Napoleon. Both cannot be merely described as either left or right wing. To modern contemporaries, it could be argued that Robespierre was the start of some radical left wing thought before the term had even come into existence. Robespierre had believed in deposing of the monarchy and bringing the power back to the people. Would this make Washington a left-winger too? It's hard to imagine, and it it is also difficult to quantify. Robespierre went one further, along with the Jacobins who wanted the death of the incompetent Louis (who by the time of his execution in 1793 was citizen Louis Capet), against the moderate liberals who just wanted the king removed from power. By a modern standard, Robespierre might just stand in some contemporary position within libertarian socialism, Stalinism and radical Marxism.
The parallels between what many consider to be the most ruthless form of socialism and Robespierre's Reign of Terror is that of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Soviet Union that followed. Vladimir Lenin had been used by the Germans to destabilise Russia in the hopes that a crumbling Russian front would be forced to pull out of the war. Weak and divided Tsar Nicholas II was forced out during the February Revolution, and the Provisional Government came to be. Much like Louis XVI, Tsar Nicholas was essentially kept under house arrest and forced to wait for the inevitable. Lenin came back to Russia to declare that should the people follow in his revolution, there would be 'bread, peace and land', much like the 'liberte, egalite, fraternite' promised by Robespierre. Lenin believed that he could be the grandmaster of Russia's problems, reversing Kerensky's decision to keep Russia in the First World War and bringing around prosperity for the Russian peasantry. In similar vain to Robespierre's revolution, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 abandoned its core principles and descended into authoritarianism and dictatorship. Lenin's policy of collectivisation led to famines in 1921 in the Volga region and the following year in Tartarstan. Some estimated 7 million people died with cannibalism being reported. Forced collectivisation is a principle policy of socialist dogma, in the pursuit of true 'equality'. By the Russian Civil War (1917-23), Lenin had tightened his grip as a ruthless dictator, killing his opponents or taking them into exile, having the Romanov's murdered in 1918 and creating a one-party system with him in charge. Socialism cannot exist without dictatorship, and the USSR is not the only example of this: Vietnam, North Korea, Maoist China, Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia have all been testament to this. Destruction of capitalism and those who embrace it, dismantling of the free market, censoring opposition voices: this is the face of far-left ideology.
Of course, bringing Lenin back to Petrograd was always the downfall of Germany. Germany had faltered after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles had damaged the Fatherland. In Italy, following Britain and France's conquest, the mood wasn't much better either, seeing as Italy had made concessions to new states that had been created, losing much of its sphere of influence in the Adriatic. Italy had been victors, but ended up as losers. Benito Mussolini had been a socialist, self-exiled in Switzerland to avoid military service, and soon returned to work in a primary school. Mussolini became interested in socialist politics, but unlike his fellow socialists, Mussolini was very much for Italian intervention during the First World War, hoping that his country would lose so that a revolution could begin. He wanted to unite the Italian people's of the Adriatic, modelling himself on Nero as a great Roman emperor who could, in effect, create a new version of the Roman Empire. In addition to his hero Nero, Mussolini was surprisingly influenced by Lenin's revolution and was enamoured by how socialism could help the Italian cause and progress the country. He wanted to see Italy be just as glorious as Britain and France, who had retained their own empires following the end of the war. However, after being thrown out of the Socialist Party, Mussolini believed in a new movement that he called 'fascismo' and was going to use it to bring around socialism through nationalism. Fears of communism coming to Europe was imminent, and Mussolini had stoked the fires that would begin a new radical movement, this one not yet defined as 'far-right'.
In fact, both Mussolini and Hitler by the standards of the day were not really 'far-right'. Their hatred of socialism and communism was not unheard of amongst Europe's elites and was often seen as just righteous. Germany had been the ones who had brought around a communist revolution in Russia, hoping that it would bring chaos rather than results. Germany's defeat in 1918 saw the Kaiser abdicate, the establishment of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of what could have been civil war. Socialist revolutionaries fought against nationalist Freikorps in street warfare. Stability in Germany (or what little left of it) was toppled by hyperinflation in the 1920s. One Adolf Hitler, a former art student from Austria, had believed in German reunification over Austrian nationalism. Just like Mussolini, German peoples had to be reunited under a lebensraum of his own making. Hitler joined the German Worker's Party, which by today's standards was far right, and had tendencies as it was riddled with anti-communist and antisemitic forces. The precursor to what would later be the Nazi Party was also anti-capitalist, much like that of the socialist revolutionaries. Hitler's reimaging of economics in Germany was closer to that of the American left at the time - power to the workers, infrastructure programmes to give German jobs back to German workers and getting rid of the oligarchs who ran Germany's banks. The comparisons to that of the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin with that of Hitler's Nazi Germany have been discussed many times, from the use of secret police to absolute dictatorships, censorship and scapegoating Jews for their defeats. It is a mechanism within fascists and communists that still have implications today, and have influences on the way in which we perceive our extremes of politics.
It may come as a surprise that Donald Trump once believed that the two parties of America had once become too extreme. In 2000, he identified as conservative, but was mostly progressive on social issues and planned to run on a Reform Party ticket. His perception was that the Democrats had become too left-wing and the Republicans too right-wing. He was the middle ground candidate, until Pat Buchanan played more to the ultra-right that had started to infiltrate the Republican Party at the time. Trump had compared Buchanan to another historical figure: Attila the Hun. What the extremes of the far-left and far-right do agree on is their hatred for centrists. The centre ground in politics becomes a barrier for them to totally annihilate the other side. Looking to contemporary politics, even more so than 2000, in the era of social media, the centre ground has been a contentious one. Upon defeat in December 2019, fans of the 'beloved' Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, an ardent left-winger, had blamed centralist and soft-left voters for essentially 'giving' their vote to the Conservatives and their leader Boris Johnson. We've been hearing that anybody who had willingly given their vote to the Tories in 2019 had been allowing 'fascism' and the 'far-right' to arise in the UK. Calling Boris Johnson a fascist or remotely even right wing, considering Johnson has been one of the most pro-LGBT and pro-Jewish Prime Ministers in living memory, is an absurdity. Some conservatives even consider Johnson to be too soft on social issues. The words 'far-right', 'Nazi' and 'fascist' have become diluted in the last few years by the far-left, so much so that it has infected even liberal politics. That is not to say that fascism, the far-right and neo-Nazism are still not issues that should be confronted. What is staggering is how the Donald Trump of 2000, who had fought as a centre ground candidate, could now be in league with neo-Nazis and white supremacists in the year 2016.
Violence and intimidation work for both the far-left and the far-right. The Nazis under Hitler had done this through the Sturmabteilung (SA), commonly known as the brownshirts, had intimidated voters at the 1928 election (where the Nazis took less than 3% of the vote), the 1930 election (where they gained 95 seats in the Reichstag) and in the two 1932 elections. Hitler had been the alternative against a changing country that had been brought to the brink by years of crippling debt and social change. He was an outsider against the political elites in Berlin, did not speak like a traditional politician and ran on a populist ticket. In 2015, Corbyn had his own similar techniques and his own methodology of getting himself into a position of power. This is not here to say that Jeremy Corbyn is the same as Hitler, but rather to use a contemporary figure on the left to make similarities between that of a far-right figure, so bear that in mind. Instead of the SA or the Gestapo, Corbyn had his own brand of sycophants and propaganda networks that gained a sphere of influence within the national Labour Party that made Corbyn seem like an outsider who believed he could bring change and fix the problems caused by economic hardships. Whilst not using violent tactics like the SA, pro-Corbyn social media networks such as Novara Media and Momentum used their platforms as a means to intimidate their opposition. Corbyn's right-hand man in John McDonnell had alluded to hounding members of the cabinet and intimidating them in their private lives, locking up his opponents and even marching on Buckingham Palace to instate Corbyn as Prime Minister following the 2017 General Election. Though both Hitler and Corbyn rallied against the political establishment, there was always one thing that they needed to purge first before making their moves to make their countries into the utopias they hoped they would be. It is something that plagues the dangerous nature of extremist ideologies.
The Jewish people have always been a problem for the far-right and the far-left. J.A. Hobson described Jews as a 'peculiar people' who were 'parasites' who had purposefully moved in the 1890s from Russia to Western Europe to harm the interests of the workers living in these areas. Whilst Jews, in the opinion of Hobson, could be 'parasitic' in nature, they could also be 'influencers' and 'alien' to life in European civilisation (perhaps influencing Corbyn's view that Jews could 'never understand English irony'). One might be keen to agree that Hobson sounds like a decorated propagandist for fascism, where in actual fact, Hobson himself was a socialist. The writings could almost be akin to that of Hitler himself in 'Mein Kampf' or more contemporary examples like former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke, Robert Spencer, Paul Eisen, David Irving or 'The Daily Stormer'. The far-left and the far-right see Jews as a synonym for capitalism, and a barrier from reaching the great utopia. Stalin had ran a campaign against the 'rootless cosmopolitans' in the 1948-53 campaign, purging Yiddish speaking poets, artists and playwrights in this period. The Doctors' Plot of 1951-53, which after the death of Stalin was proven to be a fabrication, much like that of the Dreyfus affair. The Soviet Union supplied ammunition for the Arab League against Israel during the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. The far-left continue to support the theocracy of Iran in its war against the Jews, abandoning the 1980s CND movements in favour of creating nuclear weapons that could be dropped on Tel Aviv. We know of the Nazis and their heinous crimes against the Jewish people. We also know of the far-right and their continued war against the Jewish people, in more recent memory the massacre in Pittsburgh by Robert Bowers, a white supremacist. It is about who the perpetrator is rather than the victims, and with liberal media afraid to expose the nature of far-left crimes against Jews, the problem of extremist politics goes mostly unnoticed. In an era of social change where narratives around minority groups continually being perceived as victims, the left mostly (with assistance from the media) did not challenge the December 2019 massacre of Jews in Jersey City by black supremacists and the Monsey stabbings by a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites.
So, what is the best way to combat two ideologies that whilst trying to obliterate one another accuses those who take a stand against them both as being the real enemy, or worse being accused of being one of the other side? The beauty of horseshoe theory is seeing how the far-left and far-right are closer than one may think. The central ground is now the new revolutionary ground: to be against ideologies in Europe and America that are pulling themselves closer to these extreme positions. In Europe, we've been seeing it with the far-left in Greece following the financial crisis, the far-right in Hungary and Poland, growing populism in France and Italy. America has had its fair share of those issues in seeing the 'progressive' wing of the Democratic Party appear to battle with the creeping neo-Nazi pandering of the Republican Party. Centrists should just watch these ultra-extreme ideologies create a civil war and let themselves take each other out. No amount of recounting of Martin Niemoller's poem 'First They Came...' will be enough, considering that Niemoller was an open supporter of fascism before he changing his tune when the fascists became a problem for the churches. After all, extremism is the last refuge of idiots and loners.
References
Bernstein, Samuel (1955). French Political and Intellectual History.
Schama, Simon (1989). Citizens: A Chronicle Of The French Revolution.
Kershaw, Ian (1997). Stalinism And Nazism: Dictatorships In Comparison.
Mawdsley, Evan (2007). The Russian Civil War.
Rees, Laurence (1999). The Nazis: A Warning From History.
Murray, Douglas. (2017). The Strange Death Of Europe.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304083421/http://www.ghi-dc.org/publications/ghipubs/bu/024/bulletin_S99.html#Westernization
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