Why Does Poilievre Keep Saying the Nazis Were Socialists?

Canadians can probably agree, even in these deeply divided times, the Nazi regime and Soviet-style communism were brutal and repressive.

But their feelings about the word “socialism” are likely more complicated and dependent on political leanings.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, like other right-wing populists, is fond of emphasizing the “socialist” in the full name of the Nazi party — the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

And in social media posts, he’s lumped fascism, communism and socialism together and called fascism a “socialist ideology.”

In August Poilievre posted on X about Black Ribbon Day, which commemorates the 1939 agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany that divided eastern Europe between the two countries.

“On the 85th anniversary of Black Ribbon Day, we remember the victims of Soviet Socialism & National Socialism (Nazism),” he posted. “May we never forget the countless atrocities committed by these socialist ideologies, and may we honour those who fought to liberate Europe. Canada must always stand against socialism for freedom and democracy.”

It wasn’t the first time Poilievre set out to claim the Nazis were socialists.

In July 2021, he posted: “Woke left goes crazy when people point out the undeniable historical fact that ‘national socialists’ in Germany & Italy were, as the name proves, ‘socialists.’ Fascism/socialism/communism glorifies the state over the people and always with the same horrific result.”

Poilievre’s social media comments equating the Nazis with socialism stir a strong negative response.

For example, Bob Ransford, a well-known Vancouver real estate developer, responded to Poilievre’s August post.

“As a long time Conservative who has campaigned against socialism in Canada I am APPALLED at your effort to attempt to equate democratic socialism in our country with Nazism,” Ransford wrote. “Shame on you! You have dragged national politics down to a new level.”

Others told Poilievre to learn more about history.

We asked a historian: Were the Nazis socialists?

Adolf Hitler’s Nazis are usually seen as the primary example of fascism — a rigid, militaristic regime that venerated nationalism, conquest and imposing extreme views of racial superiority, which included killing millions of Jewish people and members of other marginalized groups.

But defining fascism has proved tricky. Some right-wing commentators and politicians have argued that it was a form of socialism.

They’ve pointed out that “socialist” is part of the official Nazi party name and that Benito Mussolini, the head of the fascist movement in Italy, had formerly been a socialist.

Heidi Tworek is a history professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied the Nazi period.

She says the Nazis did “style themselves” as socialists in the early days of the party in an attempt to gain popular support among working people.

“If you look at the original, early 1920s documents of the plans, the party programs and so on that the Nazis are putting forward, they do have lots of things that are anti-big business, pro-worker,” she said.

As the party gained power, it gave government the power to control certain industries, while in other areas — like weapons manufacturing — it supported large, private companies.

Tworek said that what the party said and did was often contradictory.

But there was one central ideology that remained consistent, and that was the virulent antisemitism and racism that would shape and define Nazi rule.

“They certainly use the power of the state — in some industries, you have the consolidation of big businesses. But in others, like the media industry, there are rules about not owning more than one newspaper, so that the Nazis themselves can control the media industry,” Tworek said.

“The removing of power from, for example, Jewish media owners is of course a huge part of that. So it's not something where you can separate their antisemitic ideology and their dislike of American capitalism from the other things that they're doing.”

American historian Robert Paxton devoted his career to studying fascism. In his 1996 essay “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Paxton emphasizes the difference between “the words of fascist intellectuals” and “what fascist movements do after they have power.”

“The hostility of the Nazi Twenty-Five Points of 1920 towards all capitalism except that of artisan producers bears little relation to the sometimes strained though powerfully effective collaboration for rearmament between German business and the Nazi regime,” he wrote.

Explaining how fascism grows out of “polarization within civil society and deadlocks within the political system,” Paxton said that “every fascist movement that has rooted itself successfully as a major political contender, thereby approaching power, has betrayed its initial antibourgeois and anticapitalist program.”

Writing in the Washington Post in 2020, history professor Ronald J. Granieri said attempts to link the fascism of the Nazis to socialism are deeply inaccurate.

“Instead of controlling the means of production or redistributing wealth to build a utopian society, the Nazis focused on safeguarding a social and racial hierarchy,” he wrote. “They promised solidarity for members of the Volksgemeinschaft (‘racial community’) even as they denied rights to those outside the charmed circle.”

Asked why Poilievre’s posts on this issue get such a strong negative reaction, Tworek suggested that the fascism-is-socialism argument — especially when boiled down for a short social media post — tends to leave out or downplay the fact that the central ideology of Nazism was racism.

“To understand so much of their ideology, you have to understand how it's underpinned by antisemitism and racial hierarchies,” she said.

“That seems to me pretty crucial, and maybe that's part of why people get upset as well — maybe a feeling that the racial ideology gets left out in the attempt to emphasize the socialism of National Socialism.”

Let’s talk about a concept called ‘statism’

David Moscrop, a political scientist and writer who lives in Ottawa, said the attempt to link socialism to fascism by politicians on the right is an “extreme” form of anti-statism.

Statism, Moscrop explained, is the idea that “the state is a legitimate and effective tool for shaping economic, social and political life — through state regulation, through social programs, through public ownership of corporations and so forth.”

“One common approach of anti-statism is to take socialism's concept, tie it to statism, and then to extend that to one of the most brutal forms of statism in history: Nazism.”

Following the Second World War, many countries adopted much more robust social programs funded by taxation and run by the government, and yet remained democracies with capitalist economic systems.

That model, referred to as social democracy or the welfare state, stands in contrast with communism, where the state controls all aspects of the economy. But politicians on the right have consistently worried about whether the expanding role of the state is leading to outright socialism, instead of a combination of a free-market economy with democracy and strong social programs.

Communism and fascism are examples of extreme forms of statism, and Moscrop said politicians who roll together those extreme forms of statism with socialism are trying a specific rhetorical tactic.

“Socialism at its core is a commitment to giving control over economic output to the community, rather than the individual or private capital,” he said.

This kind of right-wing rhetoric, Moscrop said, “stretches that to say that that commitment is utterly heinous, is dangerous, is deadly. And totalitarian at its core. So there are effectively no or very few expressions of statism that aren't equally inimical to freedom and dangerous.”

‘You’re a fascist!’ ‘Well, you’re a communist!’

We’re also living through a period in which political divides are deep and people on both sides of the political spectrum are using terms like “fascist,” “communist” and “Marxist.” The question of whether Donald Trump meets the definition of a fascist has filled many newspaper columns, while Trump called his opponent Kamala Harris a communist, a fascist and a Marxist.

It’s common for commentators on the right to lob the term “neo-Marxist” at their opponents, or call centre-left parties the “radical left.” Meanwhile, “fascist” has been used by both the left and the right to discredit opponents.

“There’s been a polarization of discourse at the fringes that's been driven by, among other things, an inward turning on the internet where you have communities stuck in echo chambers who are just sitting around agreeing with each other and they form these in groups that are defined in part by their opposition to out groups,” Moscrop said.

“But it's a race to the bottom, because it means that you have to increasingly ramp up the rhetoric and push it further and further and further. You normalize these terms, and poison debate and radicalize people.”

Moscrop also warned against people on the left casually using the term “fascist” to discredit the right. “It encourages the other side to turn around and call you a totalitarian or, for that matter, a fascist yourself,” he said.

Moscrop encouraged voters to question what politicians are intending to accomplish when they insist on using certain language to discredit their opponents.

“Calling socialists Nazis — it's really the equivalent of saying ‘The Liberals want to make you eat bugs,’” Moscrop said, referring to another recent comment from Poilievre about a cricket plant in Ontario that makes animal feed.

“It's not about trying to solve problems. It's about saying your opponent hates you, they're dangerous. They want to make your life worse and take away everything that's good about it.”