The Far Right & Far Left Experiments of the 20th Century
The Far Right Experiment
On January 30th, 1933, the streets of Berlin were not bombarded by mortar fire. There was no army marching through the capital, smashing statues, and forcing civilians out of their home. There were no tanks, no civil war, no dramatic collapse of the German government.
Instead, the day was mostly typical, with men in suits filing paperwork and quietly marching on with the same machinery that the state had always used.
That morning President Paul von Hindenburg, a national hero and the last living symbol of Imperial Germany, signed the document that would alter the course of the twentieth century.
Not with gunfire, but with the stroke of a pen, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Nobody knew it yet, but on that day, the old slogan rang hauntingly true; the pen, indeed, is mightier than the sword.
Adolf Hitler was brought into power, not by force, but by constitutional appointment, inside one of the most educated and culturally advanced nations in the history of the world.
One of the more haunting elements of the Nazi regime is that it did not come to power by opposing democracy, but through the means of democracy.
Of course, we all know, far too well, what happened next. The Nazi regime ushered in one of the most deadly and dark eras in history. It is estimated that the Nazi party killed six million people of jewish and gypsy descent in their own nation. Adding that to the millions more killed by Nazi aggression during world war two, and this evil regime is estimated to have killed as many as fourteen million people in just twelve years.
While there are unique elements to the Nazi party, fundamentally, the Nazi’s were fascist: a revolutionary form of ultranationalist authoritarianism that seeks national rebirth in response to perceived national decline, and that legitimizes political violence and the suppression of liberal democratic liberties in pursuit of unity, purity, and expansion.
When speaking on fascism in history, it is important to note two critical facts of the matter:
Critical Fact #1
The Nazi’s were not the only fascist regime in the twentieth century. For Example:
In Romania, Ion Antonescu lead a fascist regime that killed hundreds of thousands
In Croatia, Ante Pavelić lead a fascist regime that killed up to one hundred thousand people
In Italy, Benito Mussolini killed tens of thousands
Critical Fact #2
For many who identify as being on the political right, including myself mind you, this fact is truly hard to stomach, but it is of crucial importance that we recognize it. Fascism is far right extremism and fascist governments are the result of far right extremism being left unchecked.
If we don’t want our nation to divulge into fascist tyranny, then we cannot allow the political right to be left unchecked.
The Far Left Experiment
On November 7th, 1917, Russia ushered in a change of government that would fundamentally change the motherland for the next 74 years and beyond. In Petrograd, a radical minority seized control while the country was exhausted, hungry, and disoriented; still bleeding from the Great War, still fractured from the collapse of the Tsar, still clinging to the illusion that something better was inevitable.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised bread, peace, and justice. They promised to end exploitation and place power in the hands of ordinary people. And in that moment—before the purges, before the camps, before the gulags, before the informants and before the firing squads—those promises were believable enough to give them what every tyrant needs most: time.
What happens next isn’t taught in school nearly as often, or as clearly, as the Nazi party; but it should be. The USSR officially formed in 1922, and what began as a revolution preached in the language of compassion quickly became a regime enforced through coercion. The same movement that claimed to speak for “the people” soon found itself needing a new category to survive: enemies of the people. And once a government creates a moral category broad enough to include anyone who resists it, resistance itself becomes a crime.
The Soviet experiment did not merely centralize the economy, it centralized truth. A Russian citizen simply speaking honestly about their thoughts became grounds for treason. Loyalty was no longer a voluntary act of national pride, but a mandatory one enforced by the state. In the years that followed, the USSR developed one of the most expansive systems of political repression in modern history. This included mass arrests, show trials, forced confessions, secret police, and labor camps designed not merely to punish, but to break the human spirit. The state did not simply seek obedience; it sought control over conscience.
It is difficult to grasp the scale of what unfolded. Under Lenin and, even more so, under Stalin, millions were executed, starved, or worked to death. Entire classes of citizens were branded as parasites and treated as disposable. The Gulag system swallowed countless men and women whose greatest crime was that they were inconvenient to the revolution. And while the world remembers Nazism as evil without controversy, the communist experiment (by every major historical measure of death and repression) was worse, and yet it has been defended for decades as a noble attempt at equality. That contradiction alone should make any intellectually honest person uneasy.
Nazism is evil. Period. Fascism is evil. Period. Communism produced a much higher mountain of corpses, and therefore we must also conclude that communism is evil. Period.
The Soviet system was unique in its early adoption of the marxist inspired doctrine of communism: a revolutionary ideology that promises liberation through equality, but demands total power in order to achieve it; seeking to abolish private property and class distinctions by placing the state at the center of economic, social, and moral life. Under communism, the individual is not the highest unit of value; the collective is. And once “the collective” becomes the highest moral authority, coercion becomes not merely acceptable, but righteous.
Just as, when talking on fascism in history we had a couple of critical facts that we must remember; when speaking on communism, we have three critical facts that must be remembered:
Critical Fact #1
The USSR was not the only communist regime in the twentieth century, and its results were not unique:
In China, Mao Zedong lead a communist regime that killed 45-60 million Chinese
In Cambodia, under Pol Pot the Khmer Rouge, a communist regime, killed 1.5-2.8 million Cambodians
In Afghanistan, the PDPA killed nearly 2 million Afghanis
Critical Fact #2
There are those who will attempt to argue that “we have never had a true communism” and try to defend it as virtuous. While there are plenty of things to like about the idea of communism on paper, after the twentieth century this position is either fully ignorant or fully evil.
Let’s be very clear about this. Communism was tried in 9 radically different cultures, in 9 radically different geographies, and it had one consistent resultant. Communism kills its own populations in rapid and dramatic means. Cambodia killed, according to some estimates, as much as 37% of its own population.
Communism in practice is democidal (Democide: the murder of any person or people by their own government). The system itself is corrupt and it is fully impossible to have a “true communism,” that leads to any other result.
Note: While the details are different, the same fundamental point is true of fascism; but was not made as its own critical fact under ‘The Far Right Experiment’ for the simple reason that nobody is trying to defend fascism today, the way far too many people are trying to defend communism.
Critical Fact #3
I noted earlier that it is often hard for people on the political right to admit that fascism is far-right extremism. In similar fashion, this truth ought to be just as uncomfortable for those who identify as being on the political left. Communism is far-left extremism and communistic governments are the result of far left extremism being left unchecked.
These regimes did not begin with gas chambers or gulags. They began with language; controlled speech, compelled speech, excuses, slogans, and fear. If that sounds familiar, it should.
Closing Thought
The details differ. The slogans differ. The uniforms differ.
But the pattern is consistent: ideological extremism — left or right — always demands control, and it always produces death.
And the terrifying part is not merely that it happened.
The terrifying part is how easily it happened.
