CHE Research Project: Left wing Nazism and islamism

The Center for Human Equality (CHE), based in Grants Pass, Oregon, has launched an ambitious research initiative titled the “Nazism Ideological Origins” study. The project’s central thesis is that National Socialism (Nazism) under Adolf Hitler, along with Benito Mussolini’s Fascism and certain strains of theocratic Islamism, are more accurately classified as left-wing totalitarian movements when judged against a liberty-based political spectrum rather than the conventional academic left–right model.

The Liberty Spectrum vs. the Traditional Spectrum

Most 20th- and 21st-century political science places Nazism on the “far right” and Soviet-style communism on the “far left,” treating the two as polar opposites. CHE rejects this seating-chart framework and instead adopts a spectrum first articulated by thinkers such as David Nolan, F. A. Hayek, and later popularized by commentators like Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D’Souza:

Right → Maximum individual liberty, minimal state coercion, private property, free markets, personal responsibility. 

Left → Maximum state control, collectivism, suppression of individual rights for the alleged benefit of a group (class, race, nation, or religious community).

Under this liberty spectrum, any ideology that subordinates the individual to a collective and grants the state or party totalitarian power to enforce that subordination falls on the left, regardless of which collective it exalts (the proletariat in Marxism, the Aryan race in Nazism, or the ummah in some forms of political Islam).

Core Arguments of the CHE Study

Collectivism as the Defining Feature

CHE researchers point out that both Hitler and Mussolini openly despised individualism and liberalism (in the classical sense). Mein Kampf repeatedly attacks “bourgeois individualism” and praises the “community of the Volk” (the racial-national collective) above the person. The infamous line “Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles” (“You are nothing, your people is everything”) is functionally identical in spirit to Marxist slogans such as “The individual is nothing, the class is everything.”

Economic Control and State Direction

Although the Nazis permitted nominal private ownership (unlike the Soviets who formally abolished it), the German economy under the Four-Year Plan and organizations such as the Reich Economic Chamber was comprehensively directed by the state. Prices, wages, production quotas, and labor allocation were all dictated from Berlin. Hermann Göring’s 1936 declaration that “private enterprise must be subordinated to the needs of the state” could have been uttered by any Soviet commissar.

Anti-Capitalist Rhetoric and Policy

The original 1920 NSDAP 25-point program contained explicitly anti-capitalist demands: profit-sharing, nationalization of trusts, confiscation of war profits, and the abolition of “interest slavery.” While some points were later downplayed for tactical reasons after 1933, the regime’s persecution of “reactionary” big business figures and its Gleichschaltung (coordination) of industry demonstrate that free-market capitalism was never tolerated.

Mussolini’s Journey to the Left and Fascism

Mussolini began his political life as a prominent socialist journalist and editor of Avanti!, the official newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party. He broke with orthodox Marxism over the issue of nationalism rather than over collectivism or state power. His 1932 Doctrine of Fascism explicitly states that “the state is absolute, individuals and groups relative,” a formulation indistinguishable from Leninist or Maoist conceptions of the state.

Parallels with Modern Theocratic Islamism

CHE extends the analysis to certain Islamist movements that demand total submission of the individual to the religious collective (ummah) and enforce it through state or proto-state violence (e.g., the Islamic Republic of Iran, ISIS, Taliban Afghanistan). Like Nazism and Italian Fascism, these regimes reject liberalism, free markets, and individual rights in favor of a totalitarian collective defined by faith and submission.

Why the Conventional Placement Persists

CHE acknowledges that the traditional placement of Nazism on the “far right” arose for historical reasons: Opposition to communist parties placed Nazis on the right in Weimar parliamentary seating.

Extreme nationalism, racism, and militarism were associated with conservative monarchist and Junker traditions.

Post-1945 Western intellectuals needed a clear “opposite” to Soviet communism to maintain the moral legitimacy of the left.

Nevertheless, the Center argues that these are secondary characteristics.

The primary axis—individual vs. collective, liberty vs. totalitarian state power—places Nazism, Fascism, and theocratic Islamism on the same side of the spectrum as Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, and Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism: the anti-individual, statist left.

Goals of the “Nazism Ideological Origins” Series

The forthcoming essays will examine:

Detailed textual analysis of Mein Kampf and Hitler’s Second Book showing contempt for individualism and classical liberalism.

The socialist origins of Nazi party members (Strasser brothers, Goebbels, Röhm, etc.).

The regime’s war on private property rights in practice.

Comparisons between Nazi labor policy (German Labor Front) and Soviet trade-union abolition.

The shared totalitarian DNA with modern anti-liberal ideologies that prioritize group identity over the sovereign individual.

The Center for Human Equality emphasizes that reclassifying Nazism as a left-wing phenomenon is not intended to exonerate traditional conservatism or classical liberalism (which Nazism also despised and persecuted), but rather to sharpen analytical tools so that totalitarian collectivism—whatever its flavor—can be recognized and resisted in all forms.

By locating National Socialism and its cousins to their proper place on a liberty-based spectrum, CHE believes citizens will be better equipped to identify and oppose any movement that preaches the subordination of the individual to the collective, whether that collective is defined by race, class, nation, or religion.