In the latest Atlantic, in his review of Peter Hart’s book on the Battle of the Somme, Christopher Hitchens uncorks a remarkable anecdote about “the almost picturesquely reactionary Conservative politician Alan Clark”:
As I marched across Parliament Square, semiconsciously falling into step with the military pace of the right-wing half of this right-left collaboration, Clark said to me: “I suppose you have heard people say that I am a bit of a fascist?” We had a whole lunch ahead of us and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot, but something told me he would despise me if I pretended otherwise, so I agreed that this was indeed a thumbnail summary in common use. “That’s all [expletive deleted],” he replied with complete equanimity. “I’m really much more of a Nazi.” This was what Bertie Wooster would have called “a bit of a facer”; I was groping for an apt response when Clark pressed on. “Your fascist is a little middle-class creep who worries about his dividends and rents. The true National Socialist feels that the ruling class has a debt and a tie to the working class. We sent the British workers off to die en masse in the trenches along the Somme, and then we rewarded them with a slump and mass unemployment, and then that led to another war that gutted them again.” For Clark, the lesson of this bloodletting was that a truly national, racial, and patriotic class collaboration was the main thing.
That’s a most interesting comment. It does, I think, capture the difference between Nazism and Communism, between national socialism and international socialism, as the latter is all about class unity and conflict between classes. I also have a sense it might have a certain contemporary application, but I’m not sure what. We do most definitely have a ruling class in this country, though it’s more fluid than it was/is in Great Britain; given that fluidity, they have to declare that they have “a debt and a tie to the working class,” but how many of them (in either party) really believe it?