Buffoonish authoritarianism
All the *isms are just spokes on a wheel where the hub is a nightmarish police state.
Fascism is the implementation of communism.
Buffoonish authoritarianism
Fascism was Totalitarianism based on Race War.
Communism was Totalitarianism based on Class War.
Their political techniques were virtually identical.
The prerequisite to their success was suppression of opposition. Stalin used the Gulags, Hitler the Concentration Camps.
Mussolini was the editor of the Italian socialist party newspaper until he saw WW I as a chance for Italy to take ethnically Italian areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while the policy of the socialist party was to avoid the fight between capitalists. He left the party for foreign policy differences, not economic policy ones.
The standard spectrum in the classroom with Fascism on one side and Communism on the other as the extremes of “left” and “right” is totally bogus!!
This misappropriation of terminology was embraced by leftist academics in order to smear those that they deemed to be “right” wing. In order to demonstrate the correctness of the standard spectrum, they would point out that Hitler and Stalin were mortal enemies during WWII.
That observation is flawed on two fronts. It ignores the fact that Hitler and Stalin were actually partners in starting WWII and turned on each other later. The observation is also flawed since it would lead to the conclusion that Stalin and Trotsky must be on opposite ends of the political spectrum,since they were also mortal enemies.
A much more meaningful spectrum is one which places statism at one extreme; i.e., the left edge, and anarchy (total lack of state) at the other extreme.
Once one embraces this paradigm, then it is plain that Fascism and Communism belong in the same camp. They are both faces of statism.
The fundamental question which should be posed to ideologues is whether the “state” exists for the benefit of individuals, or do individuals exist for the benefit of the “state”.
Mussolini was a Communist at one point.
Then he was a socialist.
When he ruled Italy, he did so as a Socialist.
All those ideas are the same.
Communist Russia - the USSR? The United Soviet Socialist Republic?
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn beat Jonah Goldberg to this by decades.
UC Berkeley is a training center .
However, I think Communism is more honest about who owned or controlled what.
bkmk
They are both forms of statism. They are the antithesis of the thesis of limited government, freedom, natural rights, and capitalism.
We are Socialists, we are enemies of today’s
capitalistic economic system for the exploitation
of the economically weak, with it’s unfair salaries,
with it’s 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.
German Chancellor
Hayek understood this many decades ago. This quote really made a light bulb go on for me, regarding this fact:
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under "communism" and "fascism." As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, "the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany."
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944
Goldberg and De Sapio understand that, but then go on to ignore it to score political points. This paragraph buried towards the end is worth pondering.
The point here is not to engage in “left wing”/“right wing” name calling. Rather, it is to realize that all these political movements were tied up in a historical moment – Goldberg calls it the “fascist moment” of Western history – which originated in the French Revolution and came to fruition in the 20th century.