Paradigmatic Foundations and Origins of the Global Nazi Project

Abstract

Key words

Russia possesses a unique historical experience of direct confrontation with fascism. Despite this, Russian society has not yet formed a systematic concept of this phenomenon. This is all the more surprising given that our war against fascism has not ended; it continues and promises to stretch over decades to come.

Nevertheless, recent developments in the public sphere reveal a blurring of boundaries and a banalization of the concepts of «fascism» and «Nazism». Consequently, it has become imperative for Russian intellectuals to clarify and rigorously conceptualize these terms.

From a socio-political standpoint, fascism is a form of overt dictatorship by big capital, unmasked by liberal concepts. This dictatorship emerged as the response of the global Western elites to the impending crisis of the «modernity system» they themselves created.

Clarifying the partial synonymy between the terms «Nazism» and «fascism» is of particular importance: this relationship is best understood as one of part and whole. Nazism is an ethnically accentuated form of fascism, which in turn is equivalent to racism. The latter is typically further specified with prefixes such as «social-», «cultural-», «national-», «ethno-», and so on. Despite the broader scope of the term «racism» compared to its usage in the 20th century, this system of terminology remains the most adequate among existing options.

Fascism is based not merely on mono-ideology and dictatorship but on a specific doctrine. This is the doctrine of the inevitable and irredeemable inequality of human beings, which is attributed to the immanent properties of races, nations, cultures, and civilizations. It gives rise to multiple variations of the same myth – the myth of superiority and inferiority («the white man’s burden», «Aryan supremacy», Anglo-American «democratic standards» presented as universal values, etc.). The supposed inferiority usually manifests as racial impurity or cultural deficiency allegedly characteristic of lower groups and communities, such as «carriers of Asian genes», «Judeo-Bolsheviks», «people with totalitarian consciousness», «born slaves», «vatniks», «Mongoloids», «katsaps», «orcs», and the like. A vivid example of this mythology is the Nuremberg Race Laws enacted in Hitler’s Germany. Thus, the key principle of Nazism and racism is the classification of «human material»: there are supposedly real humans, and there are merely human-like beings – subhumans.

A direct continuation of this principle is the idea of the well-being of the «worthy» at the expense of the «unworthy», the ideas of European exceptionalism, social eugenics, and the «conflict of mentalities» (as the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry defines the conflict with the Russian Federation). The demand for social eugenics – or more accurately, selection – is fulfilled through institutions such as juvenile justice, which targets socially «defective» groups.

A crucial feature of Nazism is technocratism, which leads in particular to dehumanization – the reduction of human beings to rational, speaking machines; the collapse of the humanist person into an abstract individual; and the transformation of value-oriented culture into a technogenic, relativistically oriented civilization. The technocratic trend has moved from Nazi eugenics and concentration camps to transhumanist technologies and the formation of behavioral patterns through artificial intelligence and digital platforms. This trajectory confirms Martin Heidegger’s thesis about the «religion of death» linked to the leap in technological development.

Thus, Nazism is not an «affective» reaction to the culture of modernity, as proposed by members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, but rather a radical and most overt form of modernity itself.

In order to adequately describe this phenomenon, it is necessary to abandon the myth of Nazism as an allegedly unforeseen historical «breakdown» of Western democracy. The processes of the 1930s and 1940s were not a rupture, not a breakdown, but a natural stage in the development of Western modernist societies.

Another myth, developed in the first postwar decades, described Nazism as Europe’s «traumatic experience». This claim is as emotional as it is inaccurate. The so-called overcoming of the «European trauma», as well as the «denazification of Germany», are processes of a propagandistic and journalistic, rather than historical, nature. It is psychologically easier today than in the 20th century to understand and accept the self-evident fact that Russia, even if it had wished, could not have «liberated Europe from fascism», since one cannot liberate Europe from itself.

Fascism is the generative ideology of the European modernist enlightenment project which, contrary to many declarations and theoretical abstractions, was realized not evenly, but by some at the expense of others. In other words, there were subjects and objects of modernization, centers of capital accumulation, and «donors» assigned the role of expendable material for the sake of progress (understood in the Western liberal sense).

For example, Russia served as a vassal of the Entente as an anti-German battering ram, then became «Lebensraum» for Germany, which sought to compensate for its lateness in the division of the world and the harsh terms of Versailles. Finally, the entire former USSR served as a resource for sustaining the globalist world model for over two decades: had the USSR not been defeated in the Cold War, the current global crisis would have erupted as early as the late 1990s.

The popular Western emotional slogan «Never again», used in reference to Nazism, also fails under critical scrutiny. «Never again» implies the modality of «Never before». In this way, society’s consciousness is shielded from the possibility that fascism existed before Hitler.

This fact is particularly telling: it indicates that Western society remains uninterested in serious historical analysis of fascism as a phenomenon. However, after the fascist renaissance most vividly expressed in Eastern Europe between the 1990s and 2020s, such analysis has become objectively unavoidable. It offers the hope that the cycle of reproducing fascist socio-cultural models might one day be broken.

Nevertheless, the process of rehabilitating Nazism has been underway in the West for several decades.

A key tool of this rehabilitation has been the inclusion of irrelevant concepts and terms in the discourse on Nazism. For instance, the term «totalitarianism», which describes social phenomena of an entirely different order than racism and Nazism and which, from the perspective of a professional historian, has vague boundaries. It is thus more of an ideological construct than one applicable to a historical research.

In parallel with the USSR’s celebration of the «democratic anti-fascist coalition», the West saw the rise of rhetoric centered around the idea of the West’s democracies opposing two kinds of «totalitarian» evil. This idea is vividly represented in the works of Karl Popper («The Open Society and Its Enemies»), Hannah Arendt («The Origins of Totalitarianism»), Friedrich Hayek («The Road to Serfdom»), and later in broader political journalism.

The high-profile «historians’ dispute» of the 1980s in Germany clearly marked a revanchist shift in political thinking, which included calls for the «normalization of German history» and the denial of guilt for the war of aggression against the USSR. As a result, war narratives gradually eliminated the concepts of «aggressor» and «victim», along with the very notions of guilt and historical responsibility for the countries of the fascist bloc. The ideological upgrade in the West also aimed to weaken the link between the concepts of «Nazism», «racism», and «fascism» previously formed in the public consciousness, to dissociate them, and ultimately to exclude their contemporary equivalents (above all, Atlanticism) from this conceptual framework.

The rehabilitation of Nazism accelerated markedly in the 1990s, coinciding with the disappearance of Western thought’s primary ideological rival – Soviet historiography.

The post-Soviet period has been characterized by the dominance of liberalism, proclaimed as the sole enlightened and «mature» ideology. Yet it is precisely liberal thought, that has persistently narrowed and shifted the framework through which Nazism is analyzed – replacing its descriptive criteria and normative standards in paving the way for the renewed ascent of Nazism.

A persistent stereotype, established by liberal discourse in the twentieth century, has been the perception of Nazism as a local phenomenon confined geographically (to Germany) and historically (to the 1930s–1940s). This view represents a form of reductionism, comparable to the attempt to excise the Soviet period from Russian history – an era perceived by liberals as the principal social and politico-economic «anomaly» in all of human history.

In reality, during the Great Patriotic War, the anti-Soviet coalition extended beyond Germany to include a significant portion of European nations, many of which viewed Hitler’s project of a united Europe as acceptable or even necessary under the historical circumstances. Beyond the well-known Hungarian, Romanian, and Italian units, the forces of our enemies also included the French 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne, named after Charlemagne – the first unifier of Europe. One might also mention the former 4th Austrian Division, which by the start of the war had become the Wehrmacht’s 45th Infantry Division and participated in the storming of the Brest Fortress, as well as the strategic role played by Czechoslovakia, which served as a key manufacturing base for the German military industry during the war.

This unity of the «brown international» is likewise evident in contemporary interpretations of the Great Patriotic War. For instance, Princeton professor Stephen Kotkin openly asserts that the USSR lost the war. For Kotkin, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Germany serves as a symbolic marker, akin to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. This interpretation makes sense only if victory is ascribed not to Germany per se, but to the Euro-Atlantic Alliance and the West as a whole, with Germany conceived as part of that bloc. Such a position also implies that the «allied» relations in which Soviet propaganda placed such faith were a fiction to the «allies» themselves.

Nazism, in Kotkin’s reading, is perceived as a shared Western project. One might even come away with the impression that the British, Americans, and French fought on the side of the Wehrmacht. While formally incorrect, this view, from a systemic rather than literalist perspective, is not without merit. This ideological and spiritual alliance is more fundamental than any temporary or situational bloc divisions. Moreover, from today’s vantage point, the specifically Hitlerian features appear as surface manifestations on the broader «body» of the Western project. The role of the «Third Reich» was, in effect, transferred to the former allies of the USSR, thus setting the trajectory of the Cold War. The twenty-first century has witnessed the radicalization of this scenario, culminating in a new stage of the Patriotic War against Nazism (i.e., the Special Military Operation).

It seems entirely natural and consistent that today’s «brown international» is participating in combat operations in the framework of the Special Military Operation on the side of our adversaries. This participation encompasses the planning of Ukrainian Armed Forces operations, technical support by NATO specialists, target acquisition and intelligence provision, as well as the direct involvement of NATO special units and assault groups. What we are witnessing, then, is the historical continuation of events that began eighty years ago. Events which, by their very nature, resist closure.

Clearly, Nazism is not an antiquated phenomenon. Its defining feature is its fundamental historical incompleteness. Today, Nazism is experiencing a resurgence, adapting to the norms of the information age, shifting its narratives, and adopting new ideological masks. One need only consider the support shown by European «leftists» for Ukrainian Nazism, or the pan-European revisionism of historical interpretations of the Second World War.

A key feature of Nazism is its shared axiological framework and political vector with liberalism. Whereas several decades ago, Nazism was believed to be in historical decline and communism posed a credible challenge to the liberal mainstream, today the situation is reversed. The leftist thought has dissolved into liberal discourse, while fascism has re-emerged as the foundational layer of liberal thought – albeit in an unacknowledged and undeclared form.

The axiological and geopolitical convergence of liberal and Nazi ideologies became particularly evident in the 1990s and 2000s. The post-2014 period (marked by the Maidan uprising, derussification policies, and military genocide) has served as a decisive test case. It became abundantly clear that modern Ukrainian Nazis were brought to power by both Western and domestic liberals.

Contemporary liberalism functions as a conceptual protective shield for the foundational premises of fascist thought. It actively suppresses narratives deemed «dangerous» to the ideological core by injecting counter-narratives into the public sphere, thereby obscuring and deflecting attention from the essential semantics of the phenomenon. Examples of such counter-narratives include Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper’s notion of «binary» totalitarianism and anti-socialism, or the BLM movement, which repurposes the conceptual matrix of white racism to construct a form of anti-white racism.

Despite their outward differences, liberal, racist, and Nazi thought are united by a shared value system – namely, a social darwinist view of society that advocates for the application of natural laws of competition within human civilization. This necessarily leads to the promotion of total competition among individuals, races, and nations. In contrast, classical leftist thought of the 19th and 20th centuries opposed this with an alternative Darwinian model in the form of the class struggle.

Moreover, the broader principles of the liberal fascist ideological paradigm are tied to the notion of sacrificial offerings made in the name of «universal human civilization» (which in reality refers to Western Protestant civilization). This mytho-ritual complex manifests in the recurring practice of «inventing the savage», albeit with contextual variations. In today’s framework, the sacred victims of liberalism and fascism are those labeled as possessing «totalitarian thinking» and «archaic political institutions».

Even Max Weber, a thinker largely aligned with liberal views and a classic of sociology, regarded Russians as a threat to European culture. It was partly through his involvement that, under the ideology of pan-Germanism during the Kaiserreich, colonial concepts for the «eastern territories» were developed, advocating «Lebensraum» expansion at the expense of Russia, whose ethnic composition was already then marked for transformation.

Modern Western societies, however, are largely indifferent to historicism, which was rejected alongside classical leftist thought (not to be confused with the contemporary left-liberal trend). In today's public discourse, fascist thinking enjoys robust protection via narratives of multiculturalism, tolerance, and social constructivism. In the constructivist view, the idea of a global world devoid of stable cultural, religious, and national subjects, is not only extremely pressing but presented as an imperative of the times and a hallmark of «open societies».

At the same time, a policy of selective application is practiced. For instance, the Nazi idea of «one country – one language – one nation» is tolerated and even celebrated in the case of Ukraine, while the «Russian World», which does not pursue such a mono format yet refuses to dissolve into a «global world» is portrayed as a non-ontological subject, merely a totalitarian «ideology» or «propaganda narrative».

Another example is the allegedly anti-racist ideology of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which acts as the street-level militant force of American democratic globalists. On closer inspection, the ideology of BLM reveals characteristics of a new form of racism (this time anti-white) articulated through leftist rhetoric, yet rooted in a right-wing discriminatory idea encapsulated in the slogan «only black lives matter», implying that «white lives do not matter».

Understanding the historical origins of contemporary forms of Nazism and racism is of paramount importance.

One of the most significant roots of these phenomena lies in the practices of European colonialism, which developed and upgraded over several centuries. As early as the Middle Ages, the symptoms of a «Roman disease» afflicted Europe’s ruling classes – namely, the belief in the West’s civilizational mission on a planetary scale, involving the conquest and subjugation of the global periphery, the establishment of a worldwide division of labor, and dominion over that system.

The Christian catechization of the world, in this context, was reinterpreted as colonization, which ultimately led to the proclamation of «the white man's burden» (not only by Rudyard Kipling). This is how the self-legitimization of Western messianism has looked – and still looks today – the foundation of its identity. Any subject that resists Westernization and falls outside the system of the global world, within the framework of European thought, immediately becomes a serious problem. This problem is resolved by designating a sacred victim to be offered on the altar of technocratic civilization. This conceptual framework defines the cognitive model of colonialism and, in particular, of 20th- and 21st-century Nazism.

Hitlerian Nazism demonstrates clear continuity with both the colonial worldview and the military-political and economic practices closely associated with it. De facto, the Hitlerian regime simply transferred to Europe the colonial practices (and their ideological justifications) that had for centuries been employed by Europeans only in the peripheries of the world. This transfer entailed the adaptation of old racist concepts to the needs of the «Third Reich» in new historical circumstances.

It is notable that this new, Nazi form of colonialism existed alongside its classical variants. For example, at the same time as the German NSDAP, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was active in England (founded in 1932). Simultaneously with the «optimization of labor resources» in German concentration camps, British authorities planned and executed the Bengal famine of 1943, which resulted in the deaths of three million people.

Today, the policy of ethnic genocide is, in some cases, replaced by instruments of cultural genocide, particularly through the relativization of traditional models of identity.

Edward Said, in his well-known book «Orientalism», connects these practices with an «imperial discourse, historically addressed not to the peoples of the East, but once again to the West itself». In Russia of the 1990s, a similar discourse constructed the image of a «young post-Soviet democracy», which in reality was a liberal autocracy that subordinated Russia’s financial, political-economic, and social systems to the power of global institutions.

It is also important to emphasize the religious and cultural-historical origins of Nazism.

Nazism is closely linked to the Protestant tradition. Patterns associated with Protestant ethics and with the Augustinian-Calvinist doctrine of «double predestination» – that is, the division into the «elect» and the «non-elect» for salvation – played a significant role in the formation of Nazism. It is as if Our Lord died on the Cross not for all, but for the purpose of creating a race of the «elect» already during their earthly life. The projection of this doctrine into the secular realm becomes a justification for the «burden» of the civilizer (from the «white man» to the export of «democracy turnkey») and for global dependency. From this doctrine stem the principles of the socio-economic and political model of the global world, in particular the system of global division of labor.

In this system, the liberal ideal of civilization acts as a substitute for the Divine, the progress as a substitute for Providence, and the image and likeness of God are reduced to the conditional «individual» of posthumanism. The «enemy of the human race» is given a geopolitical manifestation as the «barbarian at the gate» (Russians, Serbs, Chinese, Islam, etc.).

In fact, Protestant fundamentalism remains the foundation of Western modernity, although it now appears in secular form.

It also seems evident that 19th-century racism, 20th-century Hitlerism, and 21st-century Atlanticism all have specific national – British – roots. A special role in this genesis is played by the Puritanism of the 17th century, within which the British complex of exceptionalism took shape, strongly reminiscent of the Calvinist doctrine of «election to salvation».

An ideological system always results in a corresponding economic model.

Among the features of Nazi and fascist economies were: hyper-rationalization with elements of slavery (the labor of concentration camp prisoners and forcibly relocated «Ostarbeiters»); the special role of industrial and financial monopolies (many of which sponsored the NSDAP); and an emission-fueled economy marked by uncontrolled growth of public debt. All this was expected to be neutralized through military victories and the acquisition of new territories. In this last aspect, there is a striking resemblance between the financial and economic approaches of Reich Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht (under Hitler) and contemporary neoliberal doctrines.

A separate and insufficiently studied issue is the linguistic paradigm of Nazism and fascism. Here we can observe a shift from the dominance of racial and ethnic themes and the theme of «cultural degeneration» (1930s–40s) to principles of the segregation of peoples based on «global standards», and the splitting of the image of the «Other», that is, a division into acceptable and unacceptable Others: those who share Western «civilizational values» and those who pose a «threat» to these values and are the source of unacceptable discourses. Thus, we now have a three-element model instead of Hitler’s two-element model («us» and «them», noble Europeans and «Huns»). At the same time, Nazi and racist concepts exhibit a cycle of four ideological modalities: pluralism, nihilism, actual Nazism, and finally the collapse of the Nazi discourse – designating those found responsible while concealing the true directors of the process under the guise of «denazification» and overcoming social «trauma» from the standpoint of fictitious humanism. This cycle tends to repeat itself serially.

* * *

Nazism is an unfinished phenomenon. It will persist as long as the global West exists, and Russia will have to wage a war against it for its own survival. In such circumstances, a thorough conceptualization of the phenomenon becomes a crucial condition for victory – and conversely, without it, winning a war is impossible. As accumulated experience shows, a failure to understand the origins of the phenomenon reduces a society’s resistance to it. Exploiting this ignorance, the Kyiv regime – with the support of the US, UK, and NATO –  has, since 2014, exterminated hundreds of thousands of Russians holding both Ukrainian and Russian passports.

 A modern concept of Nazism must demonstrate resilience against the narratives and discourses of liberalism, so as not to fall victim to heuristic constructs aimed at rehabilitating the core myths of Nazism – myths that have been subjected to certain lexical and stylistic «revisions».

This new theorization will take into account not only the experience of the victorious generation of the 1940s, but also that of subsequent generations, for whom the narrow interpretations of Nazism common in the 20th century are clearly insufficient.

It is necessary to remove the taboo surrounding the West’s responsibility for fascism and colonialism and to acknowledge the victim status of the peoples who suffered then. It is still not common in Western public discourse to speak openly about Thalerhof, Theresienstadt, Ukrainian filtration camps, and European secret prisons – and this situation must be radically changed.

This vector of change is the one most capable of returning humanity to a Biblical value system.

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