At a time when conservative governments, the Murdoch press and their corporately funded think-tank supporters run down university departments of history in this country, the need for careful interpretations of the past has never been more evident.

At stake is nothing less than the meaning of twentieth-century history and the historical origins of modern ideologies.

Whether out of ignorance or on political grounds, the shape of the political spectrum - from left to right - is being challenged by revisionists backed by vested interests that seek to undermine the welfare state.

This revisionism has been gaining ground for years in the right-wing parallel universe in the United States. It is now going mainstream in Australia courtesy of Sky News, which recently hosted a self-identified Nazi, instigating a predictable controversy.

But now it is Sky's own journalists who are rewriting history - this time, by insinuation rather than outright scandal.

Thus, last week, Paul Murray complained that young people tempted by left-wing politics fail to understand that the Second World War was waged against socialism. Presumably by this he meant the Axis powers, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

This bizarre view fails to consider the inconvenient fact that the Allies included among its number the communist Soviet Union, the state that bore the brunt of the conflict in lives and domestic destruction. But inconvenient facts should not get in the way of a convenient narrative. "The modern culture doesn't understand WWII," lamented Murray. "Too many of this generation want socialism and don't understand what their relatives fought for and that's why we speak up about it."

Murray - himself no historian - seems not to understand the war, yet his erstwhile Sky News colleague, political scientist, Australian columnist and now ABC commentator Peter van Onselen, leapt to his defence on Twitter late on 16 August. "There have been plenty of criticisms of Paul I've been reading on social media, pointing out Hitler was a fascist not a socialist," he wrote, adding: "Nazism is national socialism which is considered a branch of socialism." Claire Lehmann, founder of the Quillette magazine, fashionable blog of the right-wing commentariat, chimed in: "I thought everybody knew this already." The Australian parallel universe was coming into view.

Well, thankfully, not "everybody" is an adherent to the jejune News Corp view of history, despite the fact that Sky News streams into public places across the continent. Van Onselen's cavalier tweet provoked a firm Twitter response from over 1,500 people (including us). Feeling exposed, he quickly composed an opinion piece on the "Socialist Roots of Nazism" for the Australian, which duly appeared online the next day.

Emboldened, van Onselen also took to Twitter to promote his intervention, but confused readers by sending mixed messages: "This piece explains how the Nazis turned on the socialists in their own ranks in the 1930s" (actually, it was much earlier than that, as we detail below). And in another tweet agreeing with a U.S. think tanker that fascism "is a fatal combination of nationalism and socialism," he added: "I know, but I am blown away by the hostile abuse I've received. I'm not defending it, I'm not linking it to democratic socialism. People are reactionary and vile. I'm done engaging on twitter, this is it. Only posting links from now on, not reading or engaging with mentions, ever".

But is it really fair to call the response van Onselen received "hostile abuse"? His position was criticised, to be sure - and for good reason. He blamed "mainstream socialists" for misconstruing his words. He then went on to note that the left-right spectrum is actually "more of an incomplete circle," with the extremes of both ends almost connecting with one another. As a rarefied theory of political science, such sweeping revisionism might pass muster somewhere, but it has nothing to do with the history of Weimar or Nazi Germany, where both Nazis and socialists understood perfectly well where they stood in relation to one another.

Put bluntly, van Onselen's position not only confuses history, it also echoes some of the broader, more malign attempts at historical falsification abroad at present.

The spectre of "Judeo-Bolshevism"

Peter van Onselen's error is one of fact, not interpretation. Any analysis of the electoral platforms, internal party dynamics and political actions of the Nazis between 1921 and 1945 makes this clear. Perhaps the German Workers Party - the party of around 100 members led by Anton Drexler that preceded the Nazi Party (NSDAP) - might have sought to cobble authoritarian anti-capitalism (which is not the same as socialism) onto biological racism. The early, pre-Nazi party that Hitler joined toyed with forms of market control to benefit small businesses and to halt ostensible "foreign" - that is, Jewish - control over markets. But such dalliances would not last long. Yes, Mussolini had been a socialist early during the First World War, but broke with his comrades to support Italian expansionism, and then formed his fascist party to crush them. As in fascist Italy, Nazi ideas were self-consciously formulated to negate those of the left, not to imitate them. When Hitler took over the party in 1921, he shredded the anti-capitalist parts of the old party's platform.

This was a politics forged in the late days of the German revolution, when Hitler began to imagine Germany assailed by a double threat of Jews and Bolsheviks emanating from the Russian east: "Judeo-Bolshevism." This position would undergird the foreign policy aspects of Mein Kampf. Far from supporting anti-colonial movements at the time, as did socialists around the world, he admired the British Empire as a paragon of "Aryan" rule over inferiors, and hoped to cooperate with the British in rescuing Western civilization from Soviet "Asiatic" barbarism.

Under Hitler, the party looked squarely to the middle classes and farmers rather than the working class for a political base. Hitler realigned it to ensure that it was an anti-socialist, anti-liberal, authoritarian, pro-business party - particularly after the failed Beerhall Putsch of 1923. The "socialism" in the name National Socialism was a strategically chosen misnomer designed to attract working class votes where possible, but they refused to take the bait. The vast majority voted for the Communist or Social Democratic parties.

The minority anti-capitalist strand of Nazism (Strasserism) on which van Onselen fastens was eliminated well before 1934, when Gregor Strasser and the Storm Trooper (SA) leader Ernst Roehm were murdered with over eighty others in the "Night of the Long Knives." In fact, Strasserism had already been defeated at the Bamberg Conference of 1926 when the Nazis were polling under 3% of the vote. Here, Hitler brought the dissidents back into line, denouncing them as "communists" and ruling out land expropriations and grassroots decision-making. He heightened the party's alliance with businesses small and large, and insisted on the absolute centralisation of decision-making - the "Fuehrer (leader) Principle."

When the already isolated Strasser brothers tried to reinvigorate their project one last time in 1930, Hitler and Goebbels banded together to force Otto Strasser to leave the party and Gregor Strasser to publicly recant. When the first electoral breakthrough to a popular vote of 18% came in 1930, the Nazi party's anti-capitalist minority were well and truly defeated. The "Night of the Long Knives" purged the old SA, not because they were a hidden vestige of socialism, but because Roehm's army of street thugs were a potential threat to Hitler's personal consolidation of power. A struggle over socialism in the Nazi party played absolutely no role in the purge of 1934.

For their part, businesses welcomed the Nazis' promises to suppress the left. On 20 February 1933, Hitler and Goering met with a large group of industrialists when Hitler declared that democracy and business were incompatible and that the workers needed to be dragged away from socialism. He promised bold action to protect their businesses and property from communism. The industrialists - including leading figures from I.G. Farben, Hoesch, Krupp, Siemens, Allianz and other senior mining and manufacturing groups - then contributed more than two million Reichsmarks to the Nazi election fund, with Goering tellingly suggesting that this would probably be the last election for a hundred years. Business leadership happily jettisoned democracy to rid Germany of socialism and to smash organised labour.

After fighting four elections between 1930 and 1933 on an anti-left and anti-Jewish platform that pledged to slay the mythical beast of "Judeo-Bolshevism," Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and made good on his promises to business and his voters to destroy socialism in Germany. Most of 1933 was spent persecuting socialists and communists, liquidating their parties, incarcerating and in numerous cases killing their leadership and rank-and-file members.

Trade unions had been in Hitler's sights since a general strike paralysed a right-wing-coup (Kapp Putsch) in 1920. He had witnessed the striking workers and vowed that never again would organised labour prevent the right coming to power. It was the left (trade unions and Jews), after all, that he and others on the right thought had "stabbed" the nation in the back on the home-front to cause the loss of the First World War. By early May 1933, the trade unions had been destroyed. German socialism was in tatters. Not for nothing did Nazis say that the "ideas of 1933" (their national-racial "revolution") had vanquished those of "1789" - namely, the French Revolution and its ideals of equality, fraternity and liberty that have animated the left ever since.

For all the Nazi talk of "four-year plans" and the "guidance of the state," the sanctity of private property and freedom of contract was always preserved under the Nazis, even during the war years. Socialism - in particular, Bolshevism - on the other hand, were pernicious, "Jewish" imports that threatened the vitality of the German Volk.

Liberal fascism?

So if the Nazis were so obviously anti-socialist, and believed so ardently in the virtues of private property and entrepreneurship, and if socialists were among the earliest and hardest hit victims of the Nazi party prior to the Second World War, why is Hitler being proclaimed by some as a socialist?

Peter van Onselen may not equate democratic socialism with national socialism, but his argument makes precisely this association: they are both different "branches" of the same family - "socialism" - thereby making the Jewish Democrat Bernie Sanders an ideological cousin of Adolf Hitler.

If the absurdity of this style of reasoning is all too apparent, it is nonetheless widely believed. Already in 2007 in his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg ran the line that "the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism." Ever since, conservatives charge "liberal fascism" when their views and behaviour are challenged.

The current revisionist bible is Dinesh D'Souza's The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left published in the United States last year to predictable applause from the right-wing parallel universe. It inverts the left-wing case that Trumpism is an incipient form of fascism (a view with which neither of us agrees, and that Dirk Moses has explicitly criticised) to argue that the Democrats and left in general are the true heirs of fascism. Not Trump but Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are Mussolini or Hitler's ideological offspring.

D'Souza stands in the tradition of neo-liberals like the Austrian economist F.A. Hayek, who conflated fascism and communism as forms of collectivism inimical to the market economy and freedom it claims to represent. Peter van Onselen makes a related point by trotting out the venerable theory of totalitarianism to equate fascism and communism as similarly illiberal. In D'Souza's rendering, the American New Deal that rescued millions of Americans from poverty after the Great Depression was a form of fascism because it entailed state intervention. (Was the much greater state economic planning during the war effort that aided Hitler's defeat also a form of socialism/fascism, one wonders?)

Herewith we come to the effect, if not the point, of the revisionist exposition: it is not only to transfer the stigma of the Second World War's genocidal violence from the right to the left, so that criticisms of racialized populism can be dismissed as "leftist fascism." It is also to suggest that the war was a crusade against state collectivism of all types - including the welfare state for which many Westerners, in fact, fought. They reason by means of a simplistic, ahistorical syllogism: since socialism is statism/collectivism (like public health and public transport), and Nazism was statist/collectivist (and promoted public health and public transport), social democratic public health and public transport measures must be fascist.

The war against welfare states

Needless to say, this is a perverse and pernicious misinterpretation of historical facts. The Atlantic Charter, declared by U.S. President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill in 1941, set out the principles of the post-war order, which included the "advancement of social welfare" and working "for a world free of want and fear." A year later, the British Beveridge Report on social welfare met such popular support that a reluctant cabinet felt compelled to accept it. When the war ended, the people promptly replaced Churchill's government with a Labour one to implement its recommendations.

Three years later, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, inspired by the Atlantic Charter, reflected the Zeitgeist in Article 25: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood." Welfare states were thus established or extended after the war. They have now been under concerted attack since the 1970s. Governments across the Western world are still deregulating, imposing austerity and attacking unions to further increase business profit margins. The emergence of leaders like Trump around the globe signals an intensification of this tendency.

Worried by the popularity among young people of politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders who oppose these tendencies, however, the corporate and media sponsors of the attacks on the welfare state now seek to discredit the social democratic platform by disparaging it as historically fascist. That is also why they attack reputable sources of news like the ABC, and why they seek at once to discredit universities as "politically correct" and to pervert their mission by inserting into them privatised think thanks espousing Hayakian ideology. So, too, they proffer the perverse thesis of fascism-as-socialism, finding ready adherents in right-wing corners of the twittersphere and in business circles.

The collective ignorance displayed by this revisionist commentariat is proportionally related to the outlandishness of its historical interpretations and its sophomoric ignorance of the recent history of Western civilization.

The revisionists likely neither know nor care that the monument erected to the German strikers who lost their lives confronting the Kapp Putsch was ritually destroyed by the Nazis in 1936. But others do. Whether those who remember the past can confront the slow-motion putsch against welfare states and the historical experiences of the catastrophic twentieth century that spawned them remains an open question.

Matthew Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of International History at Flinders University. A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, and the author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past.