Chilean Attorney Axel Kaiser’s Ignorance of Naziism
By Andres Kogan Valderrama
HAVANA TIMES – Once again, Chilean attorney Axel Kaiser has been in the news with his ultra-right crusade against any type of government intervention on an economic level that attempts to construct a slightly more just and democratic world than the one we have. To do this, he makes use of a tremendously simplistic rhetoric, full of caricatures.
This time, he did so through a talk he gave recently in the Foundation for Progress, in which he attempts to demonstrate that Marxist Socialism and Naziism could be seen as practically the same philosophy, using as his reference ideas that had previously been stated by Friedrich von Hayek, who sustained the same fallacies as Kaiser.
From there, he draws a parallel between Marxist socialism and Naziism, starting with certain quotes extracted from Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hoss, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Goebbels, to demonstrate – according to him – that Naziism was practically part of leftist thought, a current derived from Marxist socialism, and that it was never a capitalist current, since it was a collective doctrine that ran counter to liberalism.
While it’s true that Naziism was never a liberal ideology, since it denied that notion of the individual, neither was it at all akin to Marxist socialism, since it also rejected the idea of constructing an internationalist society without hierarchies. On the contrary, it was a nationalist, racist, and cultist view that justified inequalities as due to alleged biological and mythical reasons, drawing from an anti-materialist and spiritualist outlook (Thule society) that rejected the class struggle.
For that very reason, the racial component of Naziism can’t be removed from it. That’s what differentiates it from other types of socialism and transforms it into a completely different ideology of death, where race is conceived from an essentialist and idealist vision of the world, resulting from a delirious esoteric narrative of a supposed Aryan civilization lost in history, where the Germans were their descendants and Hitler their messiah.
Failing to attribute importance to the racial and esoteric component of Naziism, as Axel Kaiser does in an ignorant and self-interested manner, is to transform Naziism into a completely different thing and use it as an instrument to criticize whatever seems wrong to him, which is any kind of left-leaning ideology that doesn’t view the government from a neoliberal perspective.
It’s no coincidence that Kaiser doesn’t elaborate much on the reasons for which the Nazis hated the Jews, since if he were to do so in a serious way his entire argument would collapse and lack all consistency. He simply omits the fact that they were hated conspiratorially for being capitalists and communists, since both shared the same materialist mold.
In other words, the Nazis held the criminal belief that the Jews must be eliminated since they were a menace to the existence of the Arya race, which must be freed from any kind of materialism, be it the Jewish banker who loans money with interest, or the Jewish revolutionary who wants to turn the wealth over to the workers.
Axel Kaiser’s neoliberal fanaticism reaches such an extreme that he prefers to invent a National Socialism that never existed, so that any governmental intervention in the economy would be considered as Naziism, whether it be done by the former Soviet Union or more current liberal democracies.
Of course, this doesn’t negate criticism of the brutalities and crimes committed by the leftist totalitarian states, but I doubt that they really matter much to Kaiser, given that he himself hasn’t criticized the Pinochet dictatorship for economic reasons, as was seen in that interchange with the now-deceased Mario Vargas Llosa.
Finally, it would be a good thing if Axel Kaiser had a little modesty and shame when he speaks of National Socialism, considering that his own brother, Johannes Kaiser, Congressman and ultra-right presidential candidate in Chile, has publicly recognized that at one time in his life he felt attracted to Naziism.