Legacy media is abuzz with fear mongering about the “rise of the far right” in the USA and Europe. It is a legitimate concern, but not for the reasons cited. There are three reasons for why the far right will come to power in Europe and perhaps also the USA.
The Cult of Conformity
My first clue came when I started sharing some of my movie reviews on social media. I noticed that the average person, or the “normie” as some of us call them, will argue about his favorite movie or corporate brand with more passionate rage than propagandists argue about Ukraine or Taiwan. Conformity has become the dominant virtue to a greater extent than even 5 or 10 years ago, let alone 20. I remember when the first Star Wars sequel The Phantom Menace hit theaters, reviewers attacked it as overly cash-grabby and reliant on marketing. And this is completely legitimate criticism. If George Lucas’s prequels didn’t have “Star Wars” in the title, they would have been a lot less successful. But now “this movie made a lot of money so it must be good” is not only a suitable argument, it is the argument that negates any criticism. More than that, liking the same movie as everyone else is itself a virtue to a much greater extent than in the days of The Phantom Menace. Appeal to conformity, or argumentum ad populum as it’s formally known, now dominates every online discussion regardless of topic.
Lately I have been venturing into more mainstream forums and groups on social media, and I will admit I was quite shocked. In my usual stomping grounds of political chats and fringe movements, even the most diehard propagandist tries to have some nuance and chooses what he says carefully. After all, the point of evangelicalism is to win people over. So the professional slava ukrainiis and “NAFO” usually try to frame their arguments in a politically correct way. But in the mainstream there is no such restraint. “Russians are subhuman orcs” ist he completely mainstream opinion in almost every western country, which the average person will express freely on the internet.
Weimar Europe and the Rehabilitation of Nazi Germany
Another trend I have noticed is how completely mainstream it has become to sympathize with the Axis in World War II. I remember there always being some fringe right-wing guys who believed that, but now even the normies say things like “Yes the nazis were bad but the Soviets were worse.” From what I see, the only barrier to the outright rehabilitation of Nazi Germany is the holocaust. Sympathy toward Nazi Germany is a normal and completely predictable outcome to whitewashing of Banderism and comparable fascist guerrilla movements like the forest brothers.
It’s the de facto official position of the German government that they did nothing wrong in WWII. That’s why Scholz proclaimed that helping Ukraine against Russia makes up for everything. It’s a baffling statement to make and only makes sense in the context of several generations of propaganda; WWII was just a whoopsie when Germany incorrectly invaded the Soviet Union to annex territory and that was it. The Generalplan Ost to liquidate more than 100 million Soviet people is not taught in western schools, and the large majority of citizens in these countries are unaware that it even happened. That’s why the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Russian invasion of Ukraine are portrayed as equivalent events, except the Russian one is worse because the German soldiers were all honorable warriors who were just trying to free people from the bloody bolsheviks; that’s verbatim the message of every western war movie set in or mentioning the Eastern Front…
The European Council’s Resolution 2621, passed in 2025, declaring the need to “decolonise” Russia, is just a politely worded Generalplan Ost.
I explicitly asked DeepSeek about the resistance against the Soviets in WWII, and here’s what it had to say:
How I love AI. DeepSeek says “some anti-Soviet fighters collaborated with the Nazis” then two paragraphs later says Russian disinformation “frames these partisans as ‘nazi collaborators.’ But that is the official position of western governments. Fighting the Soviet Union was good and the reason the nazis bad, the only reason they were bad, was because of the holocaust. Horror and guilt over the holocaust might seem like an insurmountable obstacle but, as anyone who has read 20th century history knows, public attitudes can shift very quickly under proper guidance from the media. Japan was a wonderful partner of the USA and Britain in one decade, then a vile yellow menace the next decade, and for reasons the Japanese found baffling. Likewise, the Soviet Union was our greatest ally against the nazis in WWII, then in 1945 became the plague of Europe. Saddam Hussein was a friend of America, then became an evil dictator for reasons that were murky to him. And so on.
Last week’s incident of tens of thousands of Moroccans forcing their way into Spanish territory was particularly interesting to me. Morocco is a devoted ally of both the USA and Israel. How else can this episode be described than as a demonstration of naked hard power to force Euros to comply with the war effort against Iran?
But… major far right parties like AfD in Germany and Vox in Spain are aggressively pro-Israel. How is it possible to be both pro-Nazi and pro-Israel. That’s a problem to be sure, but we must not underestimate the European’s ability to simultaneously believe mutually exclusive ideas.
The Stab In the Back
Wikipedia describes the Stab in the Back:
The stab-in-the-back myth (German: Dolchstoßlegende, pronounced [ˈdɔlçʃtoːsleˌɡɛndə] , lit. ’dagger-stab legend’)[a] is an antisemitic and anti-communist conspiracy theory that was widely believed and promulgated in Germany after 1918. It maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front – especially Jews, revolutionary socialists who fomented strikes and labour unrest,[1] and republican politicians who had overthrown the House of Hohenzollern in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Advocates of the myth denounced the German government leaders who had signed the Armistice of 11 November 1918 as the “November criminals” (Novemberverbrecher).
When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, they made the conspiracy theory an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the “November criminals” who had “stabbed the nation in the back” in order to seize power. Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar Germany as “a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest ‘national opposition’—fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks’, who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Hitler and the victory of the ‘national revolution’ of 1933”.
The last element of my prediction is the most tenuous, as it is based purely on future events, rather than substantiated events now or in the past. Right now there is a war in Ukraine and there are two mainstream opinions; that Ukraine is winning, but the western order isn’t doing enough to support them. The first opinion is purely the result of propaganda with no basis in reality, but the second, that the Weimar leftists aren’t doing enough to help Ukraine, is unequivocally true. If, or I should say when, Ukrainian military resistance collapses, it would be completely fair to blame the Weimar leftists, so I think that’s what will happen.
For argument’s sake let’s assume the worst; the complete demilitarization of Ukraine, eliminating it as any kind of offensive or defensive weapon against Russia. If that happens, what will be the political fallout across Europe?
Ian Kummer
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