[sourcery]

Is the right for or against limited government?

[captain_dave]

Fascism is a Leftiest Movement. It is National Socialism

[rlmorel]

I am a fan of Dinesh D'Souza, and this is an interesting discussion on the subject. His analysis:

"...While the socialism of Marx mobilizes people on the basis of class, fascism mobilizes people by appealing to their national identity as well as their class. Fascists are socialists with a national identity..."

I have always looked somewhat at Fascism from an economic perspective (government directed industry; fascism, government owned industry; socialism) so this description above makes more sense to me.

[captain_dave]

Fascism is a Leftiest Movement. It is National Socialism

[kanawa]

Left and right are just slurs competing Totalitarians use against each other.

The real dichotomy is between Totalitarianism and Individual Freedom.

[DiogenesLamp]

Is Fascism Right Or Left?

Left. Ask me a hard one.

[fruser1]

From MW:

“1) a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition”

“2) a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control “

So it is neither.

There are examples of both left wing and right wing fascists.

The Nazis were left wing.

The fascist governments in south america (now long gone) were right wing.

[Magnatron]

Probably the biggest tragedy for the right over the last half of the 20th century is that we allowed the left to embed this lie (Nazism and racist history included) into the mainstream line of thought.

[Paine in the Neck]

The Bolsheviks, who mainstreamed ‘fascist’ as a term for anything they opposed, were so far to the left that, from their perspective, even fascists were far right. Like in Saul Steinberg’s View of the World From 9th Avenue, they saw the rest of the world through a telescope wrong end to.

[PIF]

The Left hates Nazis because they betrayed the glorious Russian Revolution by attacking Mother Russia and Stalin.

Therefore, anyone who disagrees with the Left must be a Nazi.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Left

[mjp]

fascism is a type of statism. It is left.

[Crucial]

Fascism is Left as it involves greater government control of the private economy and the government. The far Right would end up as anarchy or no government involvement at all in society.

[BroJoeK]

from the article:

"Leftists can’t acknowledge their man, Gentile, because that would undermine their attempt to bind conservatism to fascism.
Conservatism wants small government so that individual liberty can flourish.
The left, like Gentile, wants the opposite: to place the resources of the individual and industry in the service of a centralized state.
To acknowledge Gentile is to acknowledge that fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left.
So, they will keep Gentile where they’ve got him: dead, buried, and forgotten.

But we should remember, or the ghost of fascism will continue to haunt us. "

For more see Dinesh D'Souza's book:

The Big Lie, Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

[Fhios]

The more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve come to the conclusion that Fascism describes how you deal with the opposing faction or party, the populace, and whether you create special benefits for the political Bureaucratic branches.

[Heartlander]

What is Left? What is Right?

What Is Left? What Is Right? It is extremely unfortunate that the writers on political philosophy today have undertaken to measure various issues in terms of political parties instead of political power. No doubt the American Founding Fathers would have considered this modern measuring stick most objectionable, even meaningless.

Today, as we mentioned, it is popular in the classroom as well as the press to refer to "Communism on the left," and "Fascism on the right." People and parties are often called "Leftist," or "Rightist." The public do not really understand what they are talking about.

These terms actually refer to the manner in which the various parties are seated in the parliaments of Europe. The radical revolutionaries (usually the Communists) occupy the far left and the military dictatorships (such as the Fascists) are on the far right. Other parties are located in between.

Measuring people and issues in terms of political parties has turned out to be philosophically fallacious if not totally misleading. This is because the platforms or positions of political parties are often superficial and structured on shifting sand. The platform of a political party of one generation can hardly be recognized by the next. Furthermore, Communism and Fascism turned out to be different names for approximately the same thing ~ the police state. They are not opposite extremes but, for all practical purposes, are virtually identical.

The American Founding Fathers Used a More Accurate Yardstick

Government is defined in the dictionary as "a system of ruling or controlling," and therefore the American Founders measured political systems in terms of the amount of coercive power or systematic control which a particular system of government exercises over its people. In other words, the yardstick is not political parties, but political power.

Using this type of yardstick, the American Founders considered the two extremes to be anarchy on the one hand, and tyranny on the other. At the one extreme of anarchy there is no government, no law, no systematic control and no governmental power, while at the other extreme there is too much control, too much political oppression, too much government. Or, as the Founders called it, "tyranny."

The object of the Founders was to discover the "balanced center" between these two extremes. They recognized that under the chaotic confusion of anarchy there is "no law," whereas at the other extreme the law is totally dominated by the ruling power and is therefore "Ruler's Law." What they wanted to establish was a system of "People's Law," where the government is kept under the control of the people and political power is maintained at the balanced center with enough government to maintain security, justice, and good order, but not enough government to abuse the people.
The 5,000 Year Leap - W. Cleon Skousen

[ought-six]

Fascism is a brother of socialism. Both are socialist philosophies, with the difference being that fascism allows for privately-owned business to still operate, but only to the extent that they produce what the state dictates. Socialism has a more direct state involvement with business.

[Sergio]

bkmk

[drpix]

Anybody who claims Fascism/Nazism is not Left does so from ignorance or dishonest!

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

Adolf Hitler - Speech of May 1, 1927. "Adolf Hitler, by John Toland, 1976

"Mussolini had once belonged to the bolshevik wing of the Italian socialist party and still, in I924, confessed admiration for Lenin, while Trotsky was quoted as saying that Mussolini was his best pupil." { Mussolini formed his National Fascist Party in 1921 and became Prime Minister in 1924.}

Mussolini, by Denis Mack Smith, 1983

[x]

Both. The right-left spectrum isn't something eternally fixed and unchanging. What was right and left in 1800 or 1900 differs from what is right and left today. Right and left didn't always mean just exactly what people today would like them to mean.

The left -- Robespierre, Marx, Lenin -- wasn't always pacifistic, tolerant, non-hierarchical and humane. The right -- Bismarck, Hindenburg, Ludendorff -- wasn't always free market and individualistic.

The left of a century or two ago could be very bloodthirsty and intolerant. The European right of past centuries could be statist, hierarchical, and controlling.

Mussolini came out of the socialist movement. There was much about him that was left. But he organized his fascist movement specifically to combat socialism and Communism and allied himself with property owners, so the movement had a serious right-wing component.

Today's liberals and conservatives correspond to the liberal/conservative center of a century ago which was very weak in some countries and viewed with contempt by many in the Interwar period.