‘Progressives’ sound more like Nazis with every passing day.
What began as a movement claiming to fight fascism now mirrors its hatred, totalitarianism, and obsession with Jews.
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This is a guest essay by Benjamin Kerstein, an Israeli-American writer based in Tel Aviv and Recipient of the 2024 Louis Rapaport Award for Excellence in Commentary from the American Jewish Press Association.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
By now, it should be clear to all Westerners that they are facing something like a neo-Nazi movement in all but name.
This antisemitic movement, led by the Red-Green Alliance between radical Muslims and radical “progressives,” embodies almost all aspects of Nazism. In particular, its sole unifying principle is the supreme Nazi imperative: Kill Jews.
This constitutes a terrible irony. Terrible for obvious reasons, but ironic for another.
Shortly before he committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, Hitler dictated his “political testament.” He blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat and more or less everything else, continuing to spread his usual fantasies of omnipotent Jewish power even after successfully murdering a third of the Jewish population.
Then, he rendered a dark “prophecy,” saying:
“Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred against those finally responsible, whom we have to thank for everything, international Jewry and its helpers, will grow.”
Jews are not surprised by Hitler’s prediction. Centuries of tradition teach us that Amalek1 rises again b’kol dor v’dor, “in every generation.”
Nonetheless, the irony of the monster’s “prophecy” is redolent, because the hatred did grow anew, but not from the “ruins.” It rose again from the universities, mosques, faculty lounges, dorms, NGOs, and government and international institutions. It rose from among the “anti-Nazis.”
Many Jews are surprised by this. They cannot fathom how or why Amalek has risen again from among those who most vehemently identify as anti-Nazi; who claim to represent everything Nazism despised and opposed; who perceive themselves as Nazism’s ultimate enemies; who even profess to love the Jews.
Yet here the “anti-Nazis” are, acting very much like Nazis themselves.
The extent to which the Red-Green Alliance’s movement embraces almost every basic principle of Nazism — indeed, all but one — is remarkable.
The first principle is, obviously, antisemitism. The Red-Green Alliance believes that the Jews are not a religion or a people, but a demonic metaphysical force. The Jews, it holds, control, exploit, oppress, and slaughter non-Jews (indeed, the entire world) for the sake of nothing but the Jews’ essentially evil nature.
As such, the Red-Green Alliance believes, the only way to redeem and “liberate” the world is to annihilate the Jews. Killing Jews becomes a sacred act, before which “God is great” or “Free Palestine” must be shrieked. The “intifada” must be globalized until all the Jews are dead “by any means necessary.” Only thus can not only “Palestine” but humanity itself be freed.
The second principle is: Race is everything. Indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate the size and scope of the Red-Green Alliance’s obsession with race, matched in historical terms only by that of the Nazis. The Red-Green Alliance does not simply acknowledge the existence of racism and the need to combat it; instead, it believes that race is the sole defining metaphysical force in the universe. It drives all existence, human and otherwise.
As a result, the Red-Green Alliance views the world through a lens of racial hierarchy, placing Jews and white people at the top and black people and Palestinians at the bottom. It believes this hierarchy should not be dismantled but reversed to achieve what they consider “racial justice” and, implicitly, retribution for past oppression. Essentially, the Red-Green Alliance promotes the concept of a “master race” that substitutes Nazism’s imagined “Aryans” with the Red-Green Alliance’s own concept of the “oppressed.”
The third principle is totalitarianism. The Red-Green Alliance believes that its ideology must influence and control every facet of society, extending even to the individual human soul. This totalitarian approach is evident in the Red-Green Alliance’s strict intolerance of any beliefs other than its own. When confronted with opposing views, no matter how moderate, the Red-Green Alliance suppresses them “by any means necessary,” including the use of mob violence.
The purest expression of this is the Red-Green Alliance’s professoriate regime, which dominates academia. Over decades, the professoriate has established a totalitarian state-within-a-state, lacking gulags only because of insufficient political and material resources. This regime enforces absolute obedience and, through ideological blockade, total uniformity of thought. This makes it easy for the regime to deploy its stormtroopers at will to attack Jews or any other designated enemy.
The final principle is revolutionary suicide. This imperative, most famously articulated by Black Panther leader Huey Newton, urges the “oppressed” to embrace death to advance the revolutionary cause and, in doing so, redeem their own souls from oppression. The Red-Green Alliance is utterly obsessed with revolutionary suicide. This is most obvious in the Islamic faction’s lionization of the suicide bomber.
However, the radical “progressive” faction fully embraces its own cult of martyrs, glorifying its self-immolators and urging them to “rest in power.” It remains utterly committed to the murderous but also self-destructive violence of its criminals and assassins. After all, “by any means necessary,” by definition, includes suicide.
Indeed, given that the Hamas leaders who launched the October 7th massacre must have known that Israel’s retaliatory actions would inevitably lead to their destruction, it is not a surprise that the Red-Green Alliance initially took to the streets not to protest the retaliation but to celebrate the massacre itself.
Although “revolutionary suicide” seems to be a principle of the Left, it was embraced in nascent form by Hitler. The tyrant was perfectly willing to plunge Germany into the abyss for the sake of his “revolution” against the Jews. In his final days, with the Allies advancing and defeat inevitable, Hitler ordered the systematic destruction of his country’s infrastructure — a plan thwarted only by the disobedience of his subordinates — and ultimately committed suicide.
There is only one principle of Nazism that the Red-Green Alliance has, thus far, not embraced: the Fuhrer principle. This belief, also crucial to Italian fascism, holds that the leader is infallible simply by being the leader, and his will is absolute. He must be obeyed in all things, and his word is, by definition, law.
In other words, the Red-Green Alliance has yet to find its Hitler.
We should pray that it does not, because if the Red-Green Alliance can coalesce around a single charismatic leader whom it will obey without question, the consequences will be horrendous in scope. Western Jews, of course, will be in existential danger, but so will all Westerners. Such a leader would be, by definition, a threat to the republic itself. Should they ride a wave of demonic passion to political power, flight for the Jews and civil war for the West could be inevitable.
The origins of the Red-Green Alliance’s Islamic faction’s Nazism are self-evident, yet historians and commentators, who should know better, often overlook them. Political Islam’s founders, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, were inherently supremacist and quickly adopted antisemitism as a fundamental principle. When Nazism emerged as a political movement, they enthusiastically embraced it.
The infamous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and founder of Palestinian nationalism Hajj Amin al-Husseini was also a passionate Nazi. He actively collaborated with Hitler, supported the Holocaust, and launched a Nazi-inspired pogrom against the Jews of Iraq, which has gone down in collective memory as the Farhud2.
Today, honest Palestinian nationalists openly admire Hitler and wish he had “finished the job.” Indeed, I have spoken with people to whom Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims have explicitly said these exact words. Polls indicate that such sentiments are sadly common in the Arab and Muslim worlds, with some countries showing that upwards of 80 percent of the population is antisemitic.
The radical “progressive” wing of the Red-Green Alliance is a more complex issue, especially since its history of antisemitism has been deliberately concealed.
Nonetheless, antisemitism has been present from the origins of the Left itself. As early as 1847, for example, proto-anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote that the Jews are a “race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people.” He demanded their “expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women.”
He further urged: “Abolish synagogues and not admit [the Jews] to any employment. Demand their expulsion. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion.”
Proudhon’s hate culminated in a call for genocide. He shrieked, “The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. … The Jew must disappear by steel or by fusion or by expulsion.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that Hitler never articulated his beliefs with any greater honesty or violence. He and Proudhon were kindred spirits.
Karl Marx himself was as antisemitic as Proudhon. Contrary to myth, Marx was not a Jew. He was of Jewish ancestry but a baptized Christian and an atheist by conviction. Nor did he identify in any way with the Jewish people. Quite the opposite: Like Proudhon, he appears to have despised the Jews and viewed them as the metaphysical enemy of mankind.
In a notorious writing later titled “On the Jewish Question,” Marx went so far as to identify the Jews as literal excrement, writing, “The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.” Marx proceeded to spew up a plethora of stereotypes on the subject of Jews and money, writing, “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.”
This, Marx elaborated, made the Jews the root of all evil. He wrote: “Money degrades all the gods of man — and turns them into commodities. … It has, therefore, robbed the whole world — both the world of men and nature — of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.”
Thus, in the form of capitalism, Marx’s ultimate enemy, “The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”
Unlike Proudhon, Marx did not explicitly call for genocide. However, since he identified the Jews with capitalism, and his avowed goal was the destruction of capitalism by revolutionary violence, such a “final solution” is strongly implied.
Like many detrimental things, the origins of today’s “anti-Nazi” Nazism can be traced back to the 1960s Left, particularly the ideologies that reached their zenith during the upheavals of 1968. Indeed, in many ways, the Red-Green Alliance is the way 1968 ends: Not with a bang, but with Nazism.
In his book “The Passion of Joschka Fischer,” dissident leftist Paul Berman, a staunch opponent of Left-wing antisemitism, traces this peculiar evolution from a Left that historically defined itself as an anti-Nazi movement to a Left that, for all practical purposes, became a crypto-Nazi movement. Indeed, the movement’s Nazism was so “crypto” that it was often a secret even to itself.
This process was largely the result of a paranoid conspiracy theory. Berman noted that the animating principle of the 1960s New Left was “a fear, in sum, that in World War II, fascism, and more specifically Nazism, had not been defeated after all — a fear that Nazism, by mutating, had continued to thrive into the 1950s and 1960s and onward, always in new disguises.”
“It was a fear that Nazism had grown into a modern system of industrial rationality geared to irrational goals — a Nazism of racial superstitions committing the same massacres as in the past, a Nazism declaiming a language of democracy and freedom that had no more human content than the old-fashioned rhetoric of Lebensraum and Aryan superiority,” wrote Berman.
“What was New Leftism, then?” he asked. “It was — it pictured itself as — Nazism’s opposite and nemesis: the enemy of the real Nazism, the Nazism that had survived Nazism, the Nazism that was built into the foundations of Western life.”
It is obvious to any thinking person that the New Left’s fantasy was, in every way, quite deranged. Nonetheless, it is absolutely essential to understanding not just the 1960s Left, but today’s radical “progressives.” For example, one of the fundamental principles of faith espoused by the Left’s guru/saint Noam Chomsky was that the United States is a Nazi regime in need of “denazification.”
The claim remains as potent today as ever, as evidenced by the persistent “progressive” allegations that the Republican Party is a Nazi movement and people like George W. Bush and Donald Trump are Hitler.
Today, the derangement has escalated to the point that radical progressives believe that more or less everyone except themselves is a Nazi. Naturally, everyone includes the Jews, except for a few like Bernie Sanders, who are willing to follow radical progressive marching orders.
Given the Left’s suppressed legacy of genocidal antisemitism, it is hardly surprising that this demonology eventually came to fixate on the Jews.
This was not just an ideological but also a historical process. Paul Berman explained:
“The 1967 war, in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel’s imperialist nature. The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism. Palestinian Marxists stepped forward. Soviet resources poured in. And, under those circumstances, the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle Eastern conflict, in which the New Left’s vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly reconfigured, with Israel in a leading role.”
In a horrifying inversion, “Israel became the crypto-Nazi site par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state?”
“Israel thus advanced in the New Left imagination into the vanguard of imperialist aggressors, and the Palestinian resistance into the front rank of modern anti-Nazism,” Berman concluded.
We are thus faced with a very remarkable thing: The world’s most prominent heirs of Nazism became, in the minds of the Left, anti-Nazis. The Nazis became “anti-Nazis” and vice versa. Worst of all, the victims of Nazism were declared to be their own murderers. Thus, the Left’s “anti-Nazi” Nazism was born, its hatred as fierce as Proudhon’s demand that the Jews “be sent back to Asia or be exterminated.”
This studied dementia is many things: a monstrous blood libel, world-historical hypocrisy, pure willful insanity, hideous sadism, and, most importantly, an attempt to erase, appropriate, and annihilate Jewish history, identity, and existence.
It is, in other words, Hitler’s “prophecy” made flesh. It is Amalek.
The question, of course, is how to deal with all this.
First, it is essential to follow Hunter S. Thompson’s dictum: “Don’t take any guff from these swine.” That is to say, do not grant the “anti-Nazi” Nazis the slightest legitimacy, the slightest indulgence. Do not argue with or debate them. Do not treat them as if they have any place in public or private discourse. Simply assert that, by definition, they have no moral right to make any argument whatsoever. To grant such a right would be to lose one’s humanity.
More important but also more difficult is to deal with this form of neo-Nazism in the same way as the old Nazism: Smash it completely. In this case, not by saturation bombing, but by using every legal and ethical means to demolish its power to harm others, to marginalize its adherents, to punish its criminality, and to ensure that it is relegated to gated compounds in the middle of nowhere where it can stew forever in its own scorn.
Smashing the “anti-Nazi” Nazis is not just a moral imperative but an existential necessity, and not just for Jews but for all Westerners. If history has proven anything, it is that modern societies cannot survive antisemitism. Once infected, they always end up benighted and backward or in outright “revolutionary suicide.” Haman always hangs. The bullet in the brain is ever Hitler’s end. If it is not careful, the West is unlikely to be any exception to this rule.
No further proof of this danger is needed: The Red-Green Alliance has already infiltrated and corrupted numerous Western institutions. It has engaged in systematic illegality and violence. It has recently decided to turn to outright antisemitic terrorism, and this terrorism will not long remain confined to Jews. The threat of “anti-Nazi” Nazism is clear and absolute.
There can be only one conclusion: If the West wishes to survive, it must send Amalek back to the shadows. It must put the swine back in the pen. And it must do so as quickly as possible. If it does not, we are all in trouble.
In the Hebrew Bible, Amalek refers to a people considered the ultimate enemy of Israel, descendants of Esau’s grandson Amalek, or a symbol of primordial evil, whom God commanded the Israelites to annihilate for attacking them in the wilderness.
The Farhud (pogrom), an outbreak of mob violence against Baghdad Jewry in June 1941, was a turning point in the history of Jews in Iraq.
" Progressive" is the false appropriation of a word that has a clear meaning. Moving forward for betterment, improvement, for the common good. At least ,not consulting a dictionary, that is what first comes to my mind. The currently self-branded " progressives" are nothing but. In fact, by their alliances with evil actors, medieval death cults and their persecution of Jews, the perversion of plain thinking, their woke degenerate ideas which they insist in indoctrinating our children with and their complete loss of the ability to distinguish right from wrong at the most basic level, they should be rebranded " regressives " , a new word, and we should have the collective courage of insisting on it.
Simple response today. I call them "regressives" because these troglodytes are doing everything but progressing.