Why?
What are the reasons that Socialists are left and Fascists are right. Quantify it... use economic, social, intellectual or what ever units of measure you choose to show me why they are opposites and not similar.
MODERN TIMES The World From the Twenties to the Eighties. By Paul Johnson
Revied by By Robert Nisbet, New York Times, June 26, 1983
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/johnson-modern.html
snip…
Finally, as Mr. Johnson stresses correctly, Lenin was the true author of the policy of genocide: ''Once Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had started to 'exterminate' (a word he frequently employed) whole classes, merely on account of occupation and parentage, there was no limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. There is no essential moral difference ... between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the practice of genocide was born.''….snip…A good deal of Mr. Johnson's book is devoted to tracing the spread of Leninism, and all its ramifications, in the world. Ordinarily we sharply distinguish communism from what became known as fascism. But he sees the distinction as being without much difference. All the founding fathers of totalitarianism, Hitler and Mussolini included, were socialists in principle -but they shared a hatred of parliaments, personal rights against the state, free elections, intermediate associations possessed of any autonomy whatever and any form of government other than that of chosen elites. Lenin adopted one innovation from the Germans that unnerved his early supporters. After the Kaiser's government had begun to disintegrate during World War I, Gen. Erich von Ludendorff and his colleagues, frantic to mobilize every sector and energy of society for the war effort, promoted what they called ''war socialism'' - nothing less than a total absorption of society into the military effort. From the time Lenin (to the unhappiness of some Bolsheviks whom he promptly excoriated for ''Left infantilism'') adopted the fundamental principles of Ludendorff, a further feature of totalitarianism was dominance by the military.
THOSE who exclaimed so loudly and naively in 1939, when the pact between Stalin and Hitler came into being, simply had no comprehension of the enormous similarity of policies and institutions in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It was Hitler's massacre of the Brownshirt leader Ernst Roehm and his thousands of ''left'' followers in 1934 that gave Stalin the idea for the later Moscow Trials, with the consequent butchery or penal enslavement of many thousands of Bolsheviks, along with high ranking military officers and government officials whom Stalin had come to fear. Mr. Johnson notes that Hitler, during his final days, lamented that he had always been too benevolent for his own good and that he had not followed Stalin's example of killing off his generals before war began. And so comfortable was Stalin under his pact with the Nazi state that, even after Hitler had massed troops for an invasion of Russia and after Churchill and others had repeatedly warned him, Stalin refused to believe, until it was almost too late, that Hitler was going to make war on him.
Totalitarianism is but one form, the most evil to be sure, of the political state. Mr. Johnson sees statism, along with moral relativism, as the crowning disease of the 20th century, even in the democracies. ''The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless,'' he writes. ''Expand the state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too, pari passu.'' World War I, as he emphasizes, gave immense acceleraton to the idea that the state is omnicompetent; and the varied instrumentalities employed from 1914 to 1918 by the warring states with respect to economy, social order, institutions and culture were not forgotten when the Depression hit the world in the 30's. Nor were they forgotten during and after World War II in the democracies. Mr. Johnson stresses the fact that the first totalitarian regimes appeared in nations, including Russia and Japan, where a powerful tradition of statism had existed. We may give all the credit we like to revolutionary parties as the prime instigators of totalitarianism, but their effectiveness is intimately linked with an already existing powerful state which is accustomed to governing human minds as well as all institutions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I again assert that the political spectrum should be measured by some rational method. If totalitarians such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao are on the extreme left, it is completely illogical to place a fellow totalitarian like Hitler on the extreme right. It seems that Paul Johnson agrees.