An obsession with Nazi Germany has become almost a neurosis amongst Anglo-Saxon intellectuals. To some extent, this is understandable.

National socialism was central to a much wider political crisis that started with the great war for imperial advantage in 1914 and was only resolved (for Western Europe) with Hitler's defeat in 1945.

It is even more understandable when you consider the sheer scale of destruction, including the attempted deliberate extermination of at least two ethnic communities, and the fact that the crisis induced by the collapse of the old dynastic system was not resolved for Eastern Europe until 1989.

But interest in the Nazis has reached such absurd levels that the facetious Godwin's Law of 1990 (which states that, as a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1) is in daily operation on Facebook and in the blogosphere.

The reality is that the Nazi conservative revolution was limited in space and time and that it has been over-privileged in political theory. Hitler's hold on Germany lasted only as long as New Labour's over Britain and the war he initiated lasted fewer years than the War on Terror.

Similarly, Europe (excluding the British Isles and Iberia) and North Africa were held by the Nazis for less than half a decade and its 'culture' was wiped out within a quarter of a century of its initiation. Yet it has become a persistent meme like (say) the 'noble savage' for liberal intellectuals

What Was Nazism?

Nazism was dramatic vicious episode, worth studying as a pathology, but not one that truly crushed any competing culture, neither its primary ethnic target nor communism. It was based on bad science, was highly disorganised at its core and its economy was unsustainable in the long run.

It arose out of very peculiar historical conditions, in a crisis of modernisation, which are almost certainly unrepeatable. Its subsequent influence, in terms of the now widely ignored but high standard of the intellectual life that sustained it, has been wiped from the world for over sixty years.

In every respect, it was 'sui generis'. Yet it has become the instant comparator in any onslaught against any illiberal culture that is not avowedly communist. On the social networks anyone who stands up to Washington is a Hitler and anyone who fails to stand up to such 'Hitlers' is an appeaser.

This has taken on salience domestically as liberals rush to call our homegrown fascist Party, the BNP, Nazi when what they mean is neo-nationalist, corporatist, racist or fascist, all categories that extend far beyond 1930s German conditions to embrace many different phenomena.

The Hitler-Drexler Programme of 1920

Back in 1920, the NSDAP publicly presented its programme, drafted by Hitler and Anton Drexler. It is instructive to review it and see what was 'generic' (i.e. could apply to another time and place) and what was particular to its time - and how much of it matched the horror to come.

The horror to come was the crushing of dissent (including dissent from 'socialists' within the NSDAP itself), the war on the Jews and the mobilisation of a destructive general war that caused the deaths of tens of millions - all within twelve years.

To take contemporary British parallels, this is like a programme for a small party formed in 1984 which seizes power in 1996, enters a war in 2003 but sees utter crushing defeat in 2009. We may smile at the current parallel ...

Just as the trajectory of the Labour Right after 1996 cannot be understood without understanding the hold of Tony Blair so the trajectory of national socialism cannot be understood without understanding the ruthlessness of Adolf Hitler ...

... and yet neither the Old Labour Right nor national socialism are entirely to be explained by the ultimate beneficiaries' full adoption of the 'Fuhrerprinzip'. They represent intellectual and ideological movements that could mobilise first hundreds, then tens of thousands, then millions of people.

The Contrast with Marxism

There are oddities in national socialism from the very beginning - the NSDAP is ostensibly a limited aims party that claims to anticipate its own dissolution once its aims had been achieved.

Its ideology is collectivist and nationalist, opposed to special interests whether of class or values. This is revolutionary and would have been appealing to many people now as then.

But all Hitler & Drexel had done was to replace the notion of proletariat with that of volk in a way not quite so far from Engels' German Idealism as we might like to think.

As Tristram Hunt in a recent talk pointed out, Engels was not the absolute egalitarian that some communists would like us to believe. Engels too accepted difference after the withering away of the State but this difference was to be based on attainment or talent not race or nationality.

The 'volkisch' ideology of national socialism merely drew up its new barriers between the squabbling French, Italian, English, Russian and German socialists of the previous half century whose management had created the authoritarian attitude that led to the vanguard revolutionary socialism of the Bolsheviks.

The Marxists had lost much of their humanity in trying to square very different cultures within socialism. Socialism then experienced a new crisis when internationalism amongst the working classes collapsed within days of the 1914 declarations of war.

Many natural socialists were further perplexed when the Russian Revolution created an aggressive militarised revolutionary force in the Red Army under Trotsky that actively sought (Germany was the primary target) a proletarian dictatorship across cultural barriers.

If the solution to squabbling on one side was centralised vanguard internationalism based inevitably on a locus in the first country to have a revolution (the Soviet Union), then the solution on the other side was to scrap the pretence to internationalism and have a national socialism.

The Horror, The Horror

In the six years before Drexler and Hitler started writing their programme, international socialism had already collapsed into a quasi-national socialism in the West, the soft pacifistic socialism of Jaures and Lansbury was in terminal decline and the threat from the East was militant and 'Jewish-materialist'.

The whole horror that is to come is embedded in one Clause (4) of the 1920 Programme where blood is linked to nation and it is baldly stated that 'no Jew may be a member of the nation'.

It stands out so much that the Jews need not be mentioned again - they are 'non-citizens' and quite literally alienated (5). In summary, from the beginning of the movement, aliens (not only Jews of course):-

• cannot vote or hold public office
• should be deported if there is not enough food for everyone (a grim precursor of what was to happen after 1940)
• cannot control or participate in the media

In fact, though harsh, the idea of non-citizens being limited in their rights may be radical but is not necessarily evil once you accept some degree of historic continuity in a community or resource limits.

What disturbs the modern mind is a) the association of blood (or genes in modern terminology) with the labelling of a whole component of existing society as alien and b) the refusal to permit migrants a say in the society they are joining. In addition, some migrants (since 1914) were to be forced to leave.

Make no bones about it - this is illiberal. There is an understandable fear that the BNP, even if it would not institute the extermination camp, would find it easy to consider some groups as non-citizens and follow a similar programme. There is no other party in the UK today that would advocate this approach.

'Jewish-Materialism'

The other direct reference is to the 'Jewish-materialistic' spirit as something to be fought. In hindsight, this seem obviously 'racist' but it is only the second direct reference to Judaism in 25 clauses and there is another ideological interpretation that is based on a distressing fact.

As Tony Judt has pointed out, Jewish intellectuals, for comprehensible reasons regarding their own status in society, played an inordinate role in the spread and intellectual development of Marxism and of materialism. If Marxism became the primary rival so must the Jews to national socialists.

To the national socialists, international socialism was (after 1917) wholly associated with a class-based rival essentialist philosophy whose birthplace had been from well within the German Idealist tradition and which privileged the intellectual and de-privileged the community or 'volk'.

General anti-semitism becomes linked to the reality of a particular Jewish intellectual tradition within Europe and to a perception of a new imbalance, because what Stalinists (in many ways quasi-national socialists within the Marxist tradition) later called 'rootless cosmopolitanism' had achieved dominance.

The defeat of Germany and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire created a vacuum into which Marxist revolutionaries and urban intellectuals moved speedily, with short-lived international socialist revolts that seemed to have a disproportionate Jewish component.

In this fevered atmosphere, enormously intense over only two years of collapse, the vast mass of ordinary Jews who led wholly blameless existences as doctors, merchants, ordinary workers and peasants were tainted with this brush of the enemy within.

To many national socialists, the Jews thus represented a philosophical taint. To Hitler, the philosophical taint was embedded in the genes. An ideological war morphed quickly into a race war with dreadful consequences.

Back to the 1920 Programme

The first three demands are entirely of their time and place: union of the volk on the basis of national self-determination; renegotiation of the recent treaties on equal terms for Germany; and empire.

These are the demands which lead to war but, other than the fact that Germany had been defeated so that the demands were wholly unrealistic from that perspective, none of these demands was absurd from the perspective of the times.

Today, we would, rightly, baulk at demands for empire but imperialist attitudes were normal across European culture. Even international socialists could not be relied upon not to have some intrinsic racial attitudes that placed 'primitive' peoples below the 'civilised'.

But the idea of national self-determination and of equality of nations was ostensibly Anglo-Saxon liberal so these 'demands', though idealistic and politically absurd, merely pointed out the hypocrisy of confused victors who could not decide whether they had ideals or were inclined to imperial vengeance.

This is the tragedy of the first three clauses - German national socialists were naively doing little more than taking the liberal wing of the West at face value. Much of the subsequent horror might (in theory) have been avoided if the West had imposed a stronger democracy on a Greater Germany.

This was politically impossible for a variety of reasons, mostly related to the fact that the victorious powers would not have been allowed by their own peoples to 'reward' an aggressor with territory, albeit territory that Hitler would later seize by force in any case and at greater cost.

Domestic National Socialism

However 21 of the 25 points of the 1920 Programme relate solely to domestic matters. This is where we have to try and find what makes a national socialist programme in its essence and whether it could apply to any rising party today (removing the particularity of it being German).

If we remove the foreign policy considerations and ideological war on 'Jewish-materialism', we still have the bulk of a programme related to domestic conditions, as you would expect in any Party seeking to appeal to a population that wanted jobs, respect and food on the plate.

Let us make the mental shift and de-Teutonise and de-racialise the programme, what would it say to the British if it was recast into '1984 terms'? It is avowedly Statist - party politics withers away, not the machinery of power. It is highly centralised and implicitly bureaucratic.

All citizens (once the exclusions have been made) are equal. Unlike the international socialists who see the middle classes as a barrier to the revolution, national socialism sees the middle classes as a central backbone for the nation.

There is also a 'liberal' attitude to religious freedom, though clearly with reserve powers given to the national-socialist State to decide what might or might not be acceptable. Interestingly, given its later history, the NSDAP advocates a 'positive' non-denominational Christianity.

Roman Law would be replaced with German 'volksrecht' and there would be capital punishment for the criminal classes, including 'usurers' and 'profiteers', with a specific charge that this would apply as much to pure blood Germans as Jews.

Press and cultural censorship is explicit with controls to ensure that the public could only read German newspapers owned by Germans. There would be a conscript people's army in place of reliance on a purely professionalised force.

The Socialism in National Socialism

So far, we have an authoritarian, corporartist and militaristic regime but not a socialist one but the socialist aspects soon come to the fore in a range of policy prescriptions that you do not find in most of the petty fascist regimes of the rest of Europe:

• The State has a duty to provide full employment
• No unearned income will be permitted - there is a specific reference to the 'slavery of interest'
• Confiscation of war profits
• Nationalisation of trusts (large conglomerates)
• Profit-sharing in large-scale industry
• Insurance for old age
• Transfer of the large department stores to small traders on low rents
• Preference in Government procurement to small business
• Land nationalisation without compensation, abolition of ground rent and an end to land speculation (this was later [1928] clarified as directed solely at special cases and 'Jewish' firms engaged in property dealing)
• Higher education for all directed at practical (implicitly technical) matters but also according to nationalist ideology.
• State funding of education for the gifted disadvantaged.
• A progressive health policy, directed especially at mothers and children
• Prohibition of child labour
• Compulsory fitness and sports aimed at youth

In return, citizens have a duty to work in employment for the general good and, presumably, serve in the people's army.

Stripped of the aggressive racism and foreign policies, much of the socialist aspect of national socialism, half of its programme perhaps, could be those of any traditional aspirant social democrat administration right up to the 1970s with perhaps only a little less emphasis on compulsion.

Nazis & Bolsheviks

The NSDAP is even more radical than any social democrat in its attitude to the capitalist (though this changed within a few years as Hitler needed money and friends in high places).

Its appreciation of the middle class gives it a couple of policies on small business that would sit happily in the modern Tory Party. The whole orientation against special interests and democracy gives it a peculiar stance that is not easily categorisable in post war left/right terms.

One common libertarian claim is that the Nazis and the Bolsheviks (at least under Stalin) are like two peas in a pod. There is some merit in the comparison, especially as both were trying to find a way to force through modernisation strategies on behalf of mass populations.

But the differences are important, if only to assess where one stands in the 'which-was-more-evil' debate that seems never-ending amongst competing left and right liberals.

Hitler removed much of the more obviously anti-capitalist platform of the Party, slaughtering the leading members of that faction in the Night of the Long Knives (1934), but the essence of national socialism has to be seen in its 1920s form if it is to be debated cogently.

The defeated faction still survives today as the various forms of National Bolshevism, a name indicating the original nature of the split between the NSDAP and international socialism. The argument was not with revolutionary vanguardism but with internationalism.

The essence of the difference lies in the idea of volk. If, in practice, Stalin behaved as if he was a nationalist socialist, his 'socialism in one country' like that of all national Marxists was always tactical.

When Hitler invaded a country, he treated it as subordinate at best and as plunder at worst. This was no better than the Aztecs.

Although not averse to a bit of tactical plundering, when Stalin invaded a country, he imposed a system that subordinated the country but it was also designed to function within a regime that was, at the end of the day, universalist. Indeed, the satrapies were often subsidised at the expense of the centre.

Similarities between the BNP and the NSDAP

BNP figures are known to be as educated in 'Hitler lore' as their Trotskyist enemies are in the lore of Marx & Engels but Hitler's radical racism is no longer tenable even for these extremists. The BNP has shifted from blood or genes to culture, gone easy on the Jews and targeted the Muslims instead.

BNP concerns are not imperialist but survivalist. National sustainability within their ideological model is placed above the sort of strutting on the world stage that we would associate with New Labour. They fear the destruction of the volk rather than its simple containment.

But, although defensive because there is no political advantage in antisemitism or war for its own sake, the BNP is, like the NSDAP, both nationalist and socialist, trying to use the strong State to feed the needs of both workers and small businessmen at the same time.

If anything, we are missing the point by concentrating on its attenuated 'rassenpolitik', the real concern we should have is not its 'ideology' (which is a rather soft version of the really hard line fascisms of the 1930s) but its appeal to the authoritarian personality - and its own negative attitude to democracy.

Nazis Don't Win, Democracies Lose

In this context, there is a rather curious concern in the 1920 Programme with ensuring that all offices are filled with the best persons rather than loyal persons - ironic in view of the role of party membership in gaining state sector employment within a few years.

But this attitude strikes a chord today with the 'expenses' scandal and the growing distrust of the political class as a whole. Such discontent is not unique to the job-fixing environment of Weimar. It was at the root of resentment in the French Third Republic and is emerging as a force here in the UK.

It is a common symptom of distrust of any democratic State that has lost its way and it may be the most dangerous legacy of the New Labour Administration. It is certanly getting all too easy to be negative towards democracy in the UK at the moment.

The political class is increasingly degenerating into greed and ignorance and the Government it sustains seems to be riddled with confusion and incompetence. From that perspective, we should be concerned at the BNP's rise because such movements thrive on democratic failures.

In reality, there are also liberal and libertarian challenges to liberal democratic failure. The BNP are not the only natural alternative in the absence of a strong Marxist Left.

On the contrary, if I wanted to preserve the existing system, I would be worrying less at the rise of the BNP and more at the libertarian rage against the strengthening but incompetent State and at a revival of working class discontent when Government finally gets around to the necessary budget cuts.

As we have said in the past and will say again, the obsession with the Nazi-like characteristics of the BNP is misplaced, the sign of a liberal intelligentsiya in panic over its own loss of power.

Yes, the BNP are in a line of descent from Drexel and Hitler's programme of 1920 but, in the 85 years since its production, the social and technological conditions that permitted the rise of fascist and communist leaders of the type of Hitler and Stalin is past.

The real problem for liberal democracy is not the capture of the State by an authoritarian machine (after all, we've had that for the last twelve years) but the collapse in acceptance of the State by the population as a viable organiser of social and economic relations.

The BNP are an atavistic attempt to recreate state power as a tool of the popular will when, for technological reasons, the population will no longer accept that anyone can speak for it but itself as producer or consumer of resources and culture.

This is the problem to which 'bourgeois democrats' should address themselves ... their own loss of authority arising out of an inability to respond to public anger at their own incompetence and self-interest. The fascists are just an unpleasant side effect of a wider crisis.