Religions of destruction

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 02/03/2026

Guest columnist.
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Nazi-Communism is Axel Kaiser's latest book. His research dismantles one of the greatest myths in political science: the idea that Nazis and communists are ideological opposites. Kaiser, with meticulous documentation, shows that they share, at the very least, their anthropological, Gnostic, economic, and anti-Christian positions. Let's examine them:

Nazis and communists both adhere to polylogism, the belief that different groups of people reason in fundamentally different ways. Marx claimed that the proletariat possessed a pure form of thought and the highest consciousness. In contrast, the bourgeoisie had clouded reasoning, a product of their obscure class interests. This unfounded scheme was also used by the Nazis in a kind of racist polylogism. Thus, Hitler, amidst his confusion about race and religion, was able to assert that the Jewish race is, above all, a mental race.

The great Eric Voegelin described both ideologies as updated versions of Gnosticism, because both maintained that certain groups of people possessed the mental mechanisms to attain the highest truths. Hence, Nazis and Communists believed that humanity, guided by "the chosen ones," could build paradise on earth—a phrase repeated several times by Hitler. Therefore, a person's worth is not inherent, but rather determined by their capacity to sacrifice themselves for the sake of higher ideals: class for the Communists and race for the Nazis.

It is also true that Nazis and Communists despised capitalism. In fact, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi regime's propaganda minister, in an article titled "Hitler or Stalin," addressed to communist militants in Germany, stated that Nazis and Communists agreed on ending the bourgeois model based on the pursuit of profit, which they considered an Anglo-Saxon infection alien to the noble spirit of the German people. But, despite these significant points of agreement, Stalin was treated as a traitor, not because of his ideas, but because he had accepted loans from major Wall Street financiers. For this reason, Goebbels asserted that Hitler was the only one capable of building "true socialism."

On the other hand, the Nazis' economic policy relied on the confiscation of private companies, intervention in financial capital, monetary manipulation that led to inflation, and price controls. However, as prices continued to rise, the Nazis relied on regime fanatics and law enforcement, who did not hesitate to violently repress speculators. Another similarity is that ideology, often enforced through violence, was imposed over economic laws, not unlike what was done in Bolivia during the Evo Morales era or in Venezuela under Chavismo.

Hatred of Christianity is another point of convergence between Nazis and Communists. In fact, Marx described religion as an opiate, since it stifled all revolutionary impulses. For his part, Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi ideologue, considered the concept of Christian love—that of turning the other cheek and feeling compassion for one's neighbor—to be the cause of Rome's decline. Rosenberg's mysticism even greatly influenced the indigenist narratives of the Latin American left, for example, the idea of ​​a beautiful pre-Christian world.

In Romans 7:19, the apostle Paul says, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want—this I keep on doing.” For Christianity, humanity is incapable of doing good, since its fallen nature leads it down the path of evil. Logically, any attempt to build paradise on earth is always viewed with skepticism. The fact that Christians distrusted power and loved their neighbor has, in practical terms, spared humanity from tragedies, since, as Saint Augustine of Hippo explained so well, the triumph of Christianity over paganism stopped the bloodshed among the Viking peoples. Something similar happened with the arrival of Spain in what is now the Americas.

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