UPDATE: Robert Lindsay has responded in the comments

I have been told to read the books of the past written by those with an alien mindset to try to think beyond the boundaries of present-day conventional wisdom. I highly recommend reading Storm of Steel for the bizarre final chapters in which a (perhaps) representative nationalist/militarist German officer attempts to fulfill his death-wish in a war he knows is lost at the expense of his subordinates who would give up their lives to protect him. Although I’m what Matthew Cromer would denounce as a “reductionist materialist” and I was never spiritual even back when I was religious, I still like reading the fundamentalist Vox Day on occasion. Here is a classic in which he says he would butcher innocent children if God told him to (apparently its the moral equivalent of a videogame designer deleting some simulated characters). Although I love private property more than pizza, puppies and alliteration, I still evangelize anti-capitalist Kevin Carson. Anarcho-capitalists should do themselves a favor and look him up to see just how little difference there is between them.

Of course, both of those bloggers I just mentioned are (self-described) libertarians, so it must be an awful small box I’m reaching outside of. That brings me to the subject of this post. Via the Hoover Hog I came across a defense of The Color of Crime (which is published by racists) by Robert Lindsay. Such a thing might not be surprising from the scarier corners of the far-right, but Lindsay is a self-described revolutionary leftist and anti-racist. Some might initially suspect he is just a racist in disguise to discredit an ideology he actually opposes (neo-Nazis conspiracy theorists on the internet like to use the term “false flag” for that idea, although for them it is always DA JOOS behind it). Browse a bit more on his site and it will become apparent that he is really a fossil from the past, ill-fitting in the left of today.

Check out his post on Russian neo-Nazis and the fight between Nazis and Commies (his allegiance is to the latter). This is Old Left, red in tooth and claw, not what we have now. It’s “You’re either a Nazi or a Commie, and those not up to New Socialist Man snuff will be purged”, which is why he’s so willing to make the same digs at the lumpenproletariat underclass that white nationalists engage in. He flat out admits that Stalin massacred tons of innocent people, but that’s excusable because so many others really had to die. He seems to hate all the same things about the modern left that Mencius Moldbug does, but traces it to their turning away from Ye Olde Communiste Iron Fiste, and can’t understand why people today consider his correct Marxism to be borderline-Nazism. They say Bryan Caplan “embraces the darkness”, but he’s got nothing on Lindsay.

In case Lindsay reads this post, I apologize that my description likely sounds like a twisted bizarro version of what you actually believe. I don’t actually bear you any animosity. My way of thinking is simply so far off that reading your posts is a little like learning about a black hole by noticing the wobbling it causes in the orbit of a nearby star. I plan on reading more of your writings to gain a better understanding.

It’s almost refreshing to read this willingness to embrace the worst killers among communism and defend it as it was actually implemented. Everything we know is wrong! Joseph Stalin, while responsible for the Holodomor, was the world’s greatest humanitarian! Mencius will be pleased to note that not only does he want to kill the subhuman street thugs of urban america (Stalin wouldn’t have put up with that riffraff!), he supports the elimination of third world self-described “Marxists” (surely Arab/Muslim Nazis in actuality) thugs in Iraq. Also, despite his denouncing of Trotskyites/neoconservatives, his debunking of the Maoist (some movements of which he supports) concept of “social imperialism” as obviously nonsense because resources flowed from Russia to the sattelite states and the standard of living improved under their rule almost sounds like a Chris Hitchens extolling the benefits of U.S global hegemony.

The more I read his attacking the Big Lie that Communism and Nazism are similar, the more it seemed to me they really are. There is some thinking shared among them not seen so much in the mainstream today. Why is this? Why can he cite Steve Sailer, Gates of Vienna, American Renaissance, and Pan Aryan forums as legitimate sources of information while retaining a proper Stalinist world-view? There is a grain of truth to most ideologies that attain a large number of followers. This grain can send people far off in frightening directions. In some ways the world can be a really awful place and if you dwell on it the unthinkable can start to seem sensible in response.