As with anything about "the Nazis", this is annoying, albeit with a surprising number of insights. It ought to go without saying, of course, that the National Socialists did indeed start building "camps" as soon as they got into power. Their desire to make Germany great again moreover was perfectly just, and it was shared by both the Right and the mainstream Left in Germany at the time. But they were not anti-immigration, nor did they "defund the arts", nor did they "demonize educators". (Nor, pace a bit of prat orthodoxy on the modern American "Right", did they ban guns!) More to the point though, the English-speaking Left and Right now tell themselves quite different versions of the why the Second World War happened, and they have quite different reasons for believing that it was a Good Thing that we won - whether or not they really believe it was a Good Thing, or indeed (viz. Peter Hitchens et al.) whether we really did win after all.
For the mainstream British Right, nothing much has changed. The Second World War happened for essentially the same reasons as the First World War. It was simply a continuation of the same conflict after a hiatus of twenty years. Indeed, many of the very men in charge of the fighting in 1939 had cut their teeth in the '14-18. The Left, on the other hand, have created their own mythology about "World War II" that goes back to the failure of the communist revolution in Bavaria after the fall of the monarchy in 1918. For them, the War was not a recommencement of hostilities between Austria-Germany on the one side and France-England-Russia on the other, but some sort of crusade against "fascism". For them, it was started by "the Nazis", who were themselves started by Hitler, who himself was a right-wing politician from Bavaria. And of course he was allowed to start the war by certain right-wing Tories, who secretly (or not so secretly!) admired him because he hated gays and racial minorities.
The question of course is Why? Why come up with such an obviously ludicrous version of recent history - both overly complicated and with precious little purchase in reality? Because National Socialism did not begin with Hitler in Bavaria after the Great War, but with Ferdinand Buschofsky in Bohemia in 1903. It was not some species of "fascism", and in fact it predated actual fascism by over a decade. Its real roots were in fact in German nationalism (often of a peculiarly esoteric rather than particularly "scientific" or "racialist "variety) and, of course, in anti-Semitism. Hitler himself though was no more anti-Semitic than Kaiser Bill had been. And his vision of Lebensraum in the East, although coloured by the stories of Karl May that he had read as a boy, and by the history of the ethnic cleansing of the Red Indians by the American cavalry in the nineteenth century, was substantially the same as that of the Prussian Junkers going back centuries.
The obvious answer of course is because the Left need to iron out a particular kink in their own mythology, which long ago wrote off the Great War as a pointless, disastrous slaughter caused by late capitalist western imperialism, but nevertheless has to preserve the War as the Left's own Great Crusade Against Fascism. And so not only must the two wars be thought of as being quite separate, but they also have to have had quite different causes. And thus we have not just a distortion of modern history but a distortion of reality that has had a crippling effect on modern politics.*
So, let us follow the logic...
The Great War was in reality caused by the French. (Christopher Clark is far too gentlemanly to say it, but he makes the case all the more powerfully despite himself.) French revanchism after the War of 1870 led them to form an alliance with Russia that meant that they would be able to go to war with Germany (indeed would automatically go to war with Germany) on the pretext of almost any sort of war breaking out a thousand miles away in the East. (I use the term "Germany" to cover not just the Kaisereich but the rump Hapsburg empire as well: I accept James Hawes's thesis that under Bismarck's deal the German-speaking Catholic and protestant powers had carved up Heilige Deutschland between them.) The rest, as they say... except of course that the British Empire, being more scared of the French than of the Germans, sided with the former, and so plunged Europe into a nightmare of blood and steel from which she would not re-emerge until over thirty years later.
For the mainstream British Right even to this day (not to mention the post-1960s German Left), it was all the fault of the Germans, who probably shouldn't have been allowed to have their own country anyway. (There's a batshit crazy complicated version of history that basically says the Germans are uniquely evil and so basically need to be permanently divided and conquered. Whatever!) For the Left, the Allies and the Central Powers were as bad as each other. But whichever side one chooses to support or blame, implicitly the problem is one of sheer physical geography: within the borders of their own continent (or, if you like, their continental peninsular), the inevitability of the Atlantic Ocean means that the western European powers can only expand eastwards - and inevitably they will tend to do just that in furtherance of their national interests. The more nationalistic they get, the more they will tend to go to war against their eastern European and Asiatic neighbours. The only solution to this problem - if international peace is indeed a state of international tranquillity that comes from international order - must therefore be some sort of supranational authority with the capacity to maintain a monopoly on international violence. And it makes comparatively little difference whether said authority comes in the shape of Empire (Roman, Holy Roman, British, or otherwise) or superpower, or super-duper power! The point is that it's needed.
What's particularly frightening about the modern Left and their banal and irrelevant parables about "fascism" then is that reality, as ever, has its own agenda. In the last ten years, "anti-fascism" has done nothing to stop Afghanistan, eastern Europe or the Middle East from descending further and further and further into chaos and bloodshed. And at the same time both Europe and America have descended ever further not into "fascism" but into statism, isolationism, anti-Semitism, and of course nationalism. (Sound familiar?) As yet, England herself has remained comparatively immune to the last of these - as indeed have Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. But even in the few remaining "civilised" parts of the English-speaking world, that may not last much longer.
*The Teutonophile Right meanwhile has its own slightly spicy version of this sort of thing, only the other way around: Kaiser Bill's war was a just war (because he was forced into war against his will, and then Hindenburg and Ludendorff effectively sidelined him anyway), but Hitler's wasn't (because Hitler and the Nazis were evil... and of course he was just a ruddy little ignoramus Austrian corporal, donchaknow!). And of course the neo-nationalist "Right" will happily go one better (or worse) by effectively trying to rehabilitate nationalism by scapegoating "Nazism". Tangled webs, indeed!
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