In Monday’s Times newspaper, Melanie Phillips wrote that National Conservatism is “not a fascist plot”, but instead we should see it as an “attempt to revive key principles that have been lost in recent years”. The National Socialists said the same thing in 1936.
Max Amann, Adolf Hitler’s president of the Reich Association of German Newspaper Publishers, in a speech in Nuremberg in 1936 said that National Socialism was rescuing the nation from a fragmentation of parties, classes, interests and special interests so it could return to its own nature and its own strengths once more.
Phillips, as well as opining that National Conservatism isn’t a fascist plot, has also defended the debunked notion that the MMR vaccine caused autism, ludicrously claimed that banks in Britain stopped using piggy banks so as not to offend Muslims, accused Barack Obama of being an Islamist, questioned Darwin’s theory of evolution on religious grounds and is a climate change denier. As a speaker at the National Conservatism conference this week and she will have fitted right in.
Can National Conservatives be compared with National Socialists?
The National Socialists, or Nazis, under Hitler wanted to change the cultural landscape. They wanted to return the country to traditional ‘German’ and ‘Nordic’ values, to remove or limit Jewish, ‘foreign’, and ‘degenerate’ influences. Cultural values were stressed, emphasising family, race, and ‘Volk’ (volk referred to a people or a nation) as the highest representations of German values. They variously rejected materialism, cosmopolitanism, and bourgeois intellectuals.
The National Conservatives, or NatCons, also want to change the cultural landscape. They want to return to the key societal principles that have apparently been lost and to reject foreigners with different values and lifestyles. They believe that life should be made harder for Muslims, and that family, community and nation are essential values. They variously reject metropolitan elites, globalisation, and experts.
The National Socialists created common enemies. The targets were chiefly Jews and Marxism, which Hitler saw as a Jewish doctrine, but the list was extended to include intellectuals, socialists, social democrats, gypsies, the disabled and the gay community. They promoted the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a long-standing and thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory contending Jewish elites were plotting to take over western society.
The National Conservatives also create common enemies. Their targets are chiefly Islam and so-called ‘globalists’ amongst others and they posit that the West is being subverted by ‘cultural Marxism’ – an antisemitic conspiracy theory describing a supposedly orchestrated interwar plan by left-wing intellectuals, mainly Jewish, to destroy the western way of life. Their list of targets expands to include Jewish liberals, travellers, refugees and the LGBTQ+ community. Some promote another conspiracy theory about ethnic minorities, mainly Muslim populations, demographically and culturally replacing white European populations – nominally referred to as the great replacement theory.
In their own words
The treatment of refugees by the current government reflects this theory, to the extent that a Holocaust survivor had to pull up the home secretary for her language which was reminiscent of that used in Germany in the 1930s. Her words fell on deaf ears.
Calls to increase the birth rate of native populations also reflect the rhetoric of the great replacement theory. In her speech at the NatCon conference this week, Christian evangelist and Tory MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge Miriam Cates – perhaps just before she stated that children’s souls are being destroyed by cultural Marxism – put increasing the birth rate as the top priority for the country.
This is the same Miriam Cates MP, a genetics graduate, who decried the policy of protecting the elderly during Covid, lamenting the fact that we’ve come see death as something to be avoided especially among the elderly.
Douglas Murray contributed to the conference too, saying that nationalism wouldn’t be so controversial if only Germany hadn’t “mucked it up” twice in the last century. Conveniently ignoring the brutal trails left behind by Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Pinochet in Chili, he then reduced the massacre of millions of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ as practically a mistake.
David Starkey who in 2020 declared to Darren Grimes that “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there?” decided it would be a good idea to develop this theme by asserting that white culture is under threat and that the left are jealous of the moral primacy of the Holocaust when compared to slavery. To make matters worse the NatCon conference thought it would be a good idea to tweet the statement, but outcry forced them to take it down.
When they tell you who they are, believe them.
National Conservatives and contradictions
Despite claiming to be based on English values and unashamed British nationalism, National Conservatism is a project of the Washington-based Edmund Burke Foundation, an offshoot of the right-wing think tank of the same name, and the Herzl Institute, a Jerusalem-based research body. The language is American. The conservative nemesis of ‘wokeism’ is historically meaningless to the British. It’s an American import.
Despite sharing the project with the Hertzl Institute and having several right-wing Jewish speakers, the NatCons frequently display anti-Semitic tendencies. They make constant references to cultural Marxism and obsess over prominent figures such as George Soros, a long time victim of false and blatantly anti-Semitic accusations. Matt Palumbo platformed his essay, ‘How George Soros indoctrinates the Next Generation’ at the conference this week.
Despite their stance against gay marriage and the promotion of gay literature, one of the National Conservative’s most prominent figures, Peter Thiel, is gay. Renaud Camus, the author of the great replacement theory that is at the heart of the movement, is also gay, as is the author Douglas Murray, mentioned above. .
And despite frequently promoting marriage and family, they want to put their countries in the hands of men such as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, who have shown no respect for such institutions.
Emotion trumps truth
The existence of all these contradictions reveals a lack of substance to their claims. Hitler promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion despite being fully aware since 1921 that it was a baseless fabrication. The truth didn’t matter. Just as Suella Braverman claimed that up to 100 million displaced people are coming to the UK when she must have been aware of the impact of her words, even if untrue.
Both the National Socialists and the National Conservatives use emotive terms such as the ‘will of the people’ or the ‘patriotic majority’. These terms are useful when attempting to cower parliament or the judiciary, should they attempt to defend the constitution. The judges who were smeared over the cover of the Daily Mail in 2016 with ‘Enemies of the People’ stamped above their heads, were a chilling example of this. Their crime? To uphold the sovereignty of the elected parliament.
National Socialism vs National Conservatism
Any association with National Socialism has appalling optics. The swastika can still be seen on the tattooed arms of far-right fanatics and the Nazi salute is not a thing of the past. To distance themselves, some on the right have spread the notion that Nazis were in fact socialists in the same tradition of modern left-of-centre parties – an easy myth to spread and just as easy to debunk.
The Nazi party, officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was fascist. National Socialism was on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum from modern European-style social democracy, but this hasn’t stopped some from attempting to distort history. In 2019 a heated argument even broke out in the US congress when Republican Mo Brooks – attempting to conflate modern social democrats with fascist ideology – branded Hitler a left-of-centre socialist of the same stripes.
The language of racism and supremacism is also electoral poison. In Europe at least, notional antagonisms based on race have therefore been replaced by that of a trope-infested culture war, encouraging the vilification of groups such as the trans community, immigrants, climate campaigners and the ever nebulously defined ‘woke’. This has allowed for a diverse National Conservative membership made up of different ethnicities.
However, the nature of the beast never strays far. The great replacement is at its heart a racist theory and members of the far right who propagate the myth remain largely white supremacist. A National Conservative belonging to an ethnic minority might encounter some cognitive dissonance in recalling disgraced Trump ally Steve Bannon telling the French far right to wear their racism like a badge of honour.
The time to act is now
George Monbiot tweeted this week that we are not yet at the stage of fascism, but we are one more step down that road.
Though the country might not be there yet, some of its leaders are sailing close to the wind. These movements take hold despite the majority of the country, not because of them and the time to take action is now.
Rishi Sunak should get his house in order, and fast.
