Intellectual Deception: Axel Kaiser’s Nazi-Communism and Its Attempts to Normalize Fascism

Original article: Nazi-Comunismo: La estafa intelectual de Kaiser para blanquear al fascismo

By Jean Flores Quintana

Axel Kaiser showcases his pamphlet, «Nazi-Communism,» across television studios, wielding it as ammunition for the cultural trench of the far-right. Disguised as a historical essay, the title aims to revive the Horseshoe Theory, equating the victim with the oppressor.

Kaiser insists on portraying the Third Reich and the Soviet Union as ideological twins, a deceptive tactic that crumbles under economic historical scrutiny.

He recycles a tired Cold War slogan attributed to Jean-Pierre Faye, long discarded by Political Science for its theoretical inadequacy. This maneuver is clumsy: it reduces history to a curvature where extremes converge, focusing on form—the use of the state—while obscuring the underlying class interests at stake.

Under this simplistic logic, the surgeon who opens a chest to save a life is equated with the hitman who stabs in an alley; both wield a knife and spill blood. Through this distortion, the author seeks to erase the profound ethical and political chasm between fascism and communism.

On economic grounds, the argument sinks under factual realities. Kaiser clings to the term «National Socialist» as irrefutable evidence but omits Hitler’s confession in 1923 to George Sylvester Viereck: «I could have called myself a Liberal Party.» The Führer hijacked the socialist label as a «Trojan Horse» to contest the workers’ base from the left.

The material reality contradicts the label: The Economist coined the term «privatization» in the 1930s specifically to describe Nazi policy. The regime enriched the industrial bourgeoisie: giants like Krupp, Siemens, and IG Farben acted as strategic partners. While the socialist horizon aims to put the economy at the service of the common good, Nazism crushed workers to secure the privileges of major businessmen.

Class analysis transcends the aesthetics of uniforms to judge the regime by its actual function. The guiding question is: Who does the rifle serve? The Nazi state operated as the terrorist dictatorship of large financial capital; its mission was to dismantle democracy to protect private property from the “worker threat” in Germany and Europe. Kaiser purposefully conflates the authoritarian tool with the economic beneficiary. Fascism essentially serves as capitalism’s hitman: when the ballot boxes threaten profitability, the elite hires the thug in brown shirts. They disrupt the rule of law to secure the oligarchy’s wealth.

The moral equivalence becomes untenable. Communism is founded on love for humanity and reason: its compass is the dignity of the humble, and its horizon, the complete freedom of peoples. Nazism, on the other hand, is a cult of barbarism and blood: fueled by hatred and the extermination of those who are different.

To equate the struggle for social justice—which seeks to end privileges—with racial hierarchy—which seeks to perpetuate them—is a historical aberration. It was the Red Army that dismantled the German war machine. The Soviet flag over the Berlin Parliament halted the machinery of death.

This text adheres to a business model: Kaiser is yet another pawn of the Atlas Network in the region. Behind his rhetoric lie the owners of wealth, investing in this «cultural war» to evade taxes and regulations. His work is ideological junk for mass consumption, designed to justify the dismantling of the state.

For Nazism, liberalism was a nuisance, but communism was the enemy to be exterminated. That’s why Kaiser references Hayek while concealing Carl Schmitt. In concentration camps, the red triangle distinguished leftists and union activists, the first to suffer the horror for defending workers. To claim they are equal to their executioners is to spit on their graves.

Fascism operates as the panic button for big capital. That is what is desperately concealed.

Jean Flores Quintana