It occurred to me last night that what might be termed Aryanism is really a re-invocation of the Noble Savage. Where once there was a proud, innately honorable and strong race, the Aryans (this term comes from philology; the term “Arya” means noble, and is what the Indo-European immigrants to northern India called themselves; Iran is based on the same root), it was diluted by “mud” races.
Logically, in the same sense that Communists invoked this meme implicitly to justify the murder of the “cold blooded” bourgeoisie, so too the Nazis invoked it to murder Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and no small number of Slavs.
I will add, too, that as a political doctrine Conservatism evokes not the distant past, but the “present” past. So-called right wingers, at the farthest to the right in the French Revolution, wanted a restoration of a monarchy, albeit normally one greatly reduced in power and the following susceptibility to corruption.
Anyone who wants a decisive break with the present past is not, by definition, a Conservative, and not a “right winger”.
Hitler was not popular with the Junkers, the Prussian elite who ruled important parts of German society. He was not popular with most Catholic leaders, although he got many of his followers from the “lumpenproletariat”, many of whom were Catholic. He never polled more than a third of the electorate, and when he was finally seated in what I believe they called a Cabinet, he was opposed by virtually everyone.
In short: given his evocation of a past that was not a part of the experience of ANYONE living, and which probably never existed in the way he imagined it; and given his skepticism and detachment from the institutions of the day, socially, practically, and politically, it is simply not a sustainable claim that Hitler was a Conservative, and hence a Rightist.
He was a Utopian, who dreamed of bringing back–by pruning back all the people holding them back–the noble simplicity of the “root race” of the Indo-European cultures. He spent his last months building models of beautiful cities to be build in the Russian plains, which had been denuded of inferior races. He intended, of course, to keep as many as needed for slaves (root: Slav, since the Vikings took so many captive to be sold into “slav”ery), but mostly to “free” the world from the impositions of the inferior.
All Utopian projects are Leftist. Self evidently, the French Revolution had its own dynamics, so exact parallels with the Assembly are impossible; but to the extent there was a commonality of spirit with any one group in that room with the Fascists and Nazis, it was clearly the far-left Jacobins, architects of the Terror.