Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis
Progressives think they own anti-Nazism while acting very much like Nazis themselves.
It often seems as if irony is the sole motive force of history. This was underlined on Monday when Columbia University Professor Reinhold Martin, also president of the university’s American Association of University Professors chapter, denounced the Trump administration’s attempt to hold his institution accountable for indulging a genocidally antisemitic campus movement.
“Right now, our public officials have not been especially robust in defending the institutions of higher education to which they send—many of them send—their children,” he told far-left taxpayer-funded radio station WBUR. “So, this is a moment of truth. We’re in New York in 2025 with echoes of Frankfurt and Berlin in 1933. That’s the context in which we need to understand this.”
Putting aside Martin’s inadvertent admission that the Ivy League is little more than a nepotism factory, it is difficult to fully unpack the astounding hypocrisy and bad faith of his claims. One hardly knows where to start.
Perhaps one can start by observing the larger phenomenon at work: The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity.
Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.
I hope that, in making such claims, Martin is simply oblivious to reality. Indeed, I do not wish to believe in other possibilities. After all, while we should take the campus antisemites at their word when they proclaim their genocidal ambitions, it is theoretically possible for a privileged and pampered university professor to convince himself that we shouldn’t. We ought to hope this is the case.
However, I do know that, in intention or effect, Martin’s claims are unquestionably evil.
The reason is that, whatever their pretensions otherwise, progressives do not own anti-Nazism. In fact, they have no claim to anti-Nazism whatsoever. Genuine anti-Nazism can only lie with those who oppose genocidal antisemitism, because if Nazism is not genocidally antisemitic, then it is not Nazism. You cannot be anti-Nazi while defending genocidal antisemites. It is impossible.
Moreover, by claiming that antisemites are somehow victims of Nazism, progressives are engaging in an act of monstrous blasphemy. They are defaming the millions of Jews who died at antisemitism’s hands and appropriating the generational trauma of those who survived.
Historically, this is par for the course. Antisemites have always been happy to appropriate whatever they wish from the Jews and then spit in our faces. But it is no less disgraceful for its great age.
This is offensive enough, but progressives dig the hole even deeper: They claim that the Jews are Nazis. This blood libel is a staple of progressive rhetoric and wildly popular among the campus antisemites. In many ways, it has become part of “legitimate” discourse in academia. Nonetheless, it is difficult to fully convey the depth of the sadism and cruelty inherent in it.
It appropriates a people’s epochal trauma in order to claim that they are as monstrous as those who inflicted the trauma. It literally accuses the survivors of the crimes of Nazism of being Nazis. It then accuses their descendants of being Nazis; the Nazis who murdered and tortured their parents and grandparents. This is akin to the person who raped and murdered your daughter standing up in court and claiming that you raped and murdered your daughter. It is more than monstrous. It is satanic. And this is what Martin, in his bumbling way, is defending.
I will not engage in further condemnations, as they would be superfluous. The thing condemns itself with perfect eloquence. I note only the final irony that progressives may claim to own anti-Nazism, but in embracing genocidal antisemitism, they merely prove an essential truth: Jews are, by definition, inherently anti-Nazi, because by our very existence, we thwart Nazism’s supreme ambition.
The answer, then, to Mr. Martin and those like him, is to simply point out an essential truth: You do not own anti-Nazism. You cannot own it because you refuse to know what Nazism is. But we do know. We have met the Nazis, sir, and they are your friends and allies. Until you, at long last, admit to this, we reserve the right not to listen to a word you say.
Fully agree. I’ve come to realize that, to the campus radicals, their faculty enablers, and all their apologists across media, government, and the quangoverse, the Nazis weren’t objectionable because of their conquests, subjugations, industrial-scale murders with racist and ultranationalist rationalizations, and all-around gratuitous export of death and destruction.
Their primary beef with Nazism is that it’s coded right-wing. The Nazi-like behaviors that we find so abhorrent, when labeled “anti-imperialist,” suddenly become forgivable sins, inevitable responses, legitimate resistance, even praiseworthy heroism or divinely inspired sacrifice to progressive activists.
That’s why they will occasionally invoke Mussolini, Franco, or Pinochet as an analog for a political opponent, but never Mao, Stalin, or Pol Pot. It was never about whose crimes were worse.
And they will defend the coding vociferously. Despite Hamas’s decades-long insistence on self-identifying as a reactionary, misogynistic, anti-democratic, imperialist, religious and ethnic supremacist, militant movement, their cheerleaders will celebrate them as the vanguard of the post-capitalist, carbon-neutral, genderqueer, international liberation.
Even now, in some radical circles, we see Nazis receiving such a makeover.
Thank you for this. If you will indulge me for a moment, I feel as though I have woken up in a nightmare. This is a world I don’t recognize. I am a Columbia alumna too, btw, and in 1998 I do vaguely remember that the pro-Palestinian anti-Israel movement was gaining momentum, but I’m embarrassed to say that I barely paid attention. I went through the next twenty years thinking antisemitism had gone the way of smallpox, that it was literally all but extinct. But then came 10/7. And I looked around me and people I knew all my life became different people to me. My own husband of 18 years started taking the side of the pro-Hamas protestors. I am in utter dismay. I have wondered if I am crazy, watching people claim the mantle of anti-Nazism while praising the very goals that Eichmann, Heydrich et al were at least circumspect enough to conceal.