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Is Fascism Right Wing?

Is fascism left or right wing?

  • Left

    Votes: 18 20.2%
  • Right

    Votes: 46 51.7%
  • Neither

    Votes: 16 18.0%
  • Description sucks

    Votes: 9 10.1%

  • Total voters
    89
:lamo let's talk about them, then :)



Gosh. Nationalization of major industries and railroads, big on protecting labor, broke off with FDR because FDR was too friendly to bankers. Yeah :roll: that sounds really like the intellectual heritage of American conservatives.

So. What did this individual who was so big on Labor Unions and the Nationalization of big enterprises think about fascists?



Huh. So it turns out that your first cited individual actually makes the argument that fascism was something that appealed to the American left.


Really, in the sense that we use the terms today (and again, this is where "Liberalism" gets' turned on its' head), there wasn't much of a "conservative" movement in America in the 1930's an 1940's. It was the Progressive Era, and progressive assumptions were largely dominant.

Coughlin, as your wiki quotes confirm, began his activist career as a progressive and then moved to the far right, attempting to take working class supporters with him. I don't think there's a lot of evidence he succeeded in taking the 'American left' with him though.

Now then, you wanted to talk about Lindbergh and Kuhn too. So...?
 
While the Soviet Union is indeed guilty of such, they are not Modern Leftists, nor are they comparable to the American Left. Secondly, on the American scale the Nazi's would be centrists, and on the German scale they are firmly right-wing. Above all, Liberals (Throughout history, from classical to modern Social Democrats) have never really been fascist, at least not in a way that you can clearly define them as such.
I avoid applying the terms "Left" and "Right" much before the advent of the 20th Century, and use "Liberal" and "Conservative" with great caution beyond the same scope, as these terms' meanings drift, sometimes radically over the generations. When engaged in serious conversation with rational people, a I believe I am in this case, I don't actually assign the Nazis to our political spectrum. Rather than a coherent political philosophy, I find it to have been more akin to a cult religion. Accounts of the time tell us that Socialists saw socialist vales in Nazism, traditionalists saw it as a bastion of tradition, and so on. People saw what they needed to see to experience the ecstasy of belonging. In my opinion, both representatives the Modern Left and the Modern right would do well to remember that while many political comparisons to that government are valid, few are precise. Politics as we think of it wasn't so much central to Nazism, as it was a tool of it.
 
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I avoid applying the terms "Left" and "Right" much before the advent of the 20th Century, and use "Liberal" and "Conservative" with great caution beyond the same scope, as these terms' meanings drift, sometimes radically over the generations. When engaged in serious conversation with rational people, a I believe I am in this case, I don't actually assign the Nazis to our political spectrum. Rather than a coherent political philosophy, I find it to have been more akin to a cult religion. Accounts of the time tell us that Socialists saw socialist vales in Nazism, traditionalists saw it as a bastion of tradition, and so on. People saw what they needed to see to experience the ecstasy of belonging. In my opinion, both representatives the Modern Left and the Modern right would do well to remember that while many political comparisons to that government are valid, few are precise. Politics as we think of it wasn't so much central to Nazism, as it was a tool of it.

Okay.
 
No, it's not OK, nationalism is historically associated with the right, and it's central to the Nazi position. While the movement may seek to promote itself as representing the working man, a "working man" who doesn't closely follow the line will soon find himself in a very uncomfortable place, as will anyone who asserts class or gender or anything else, before Nation. It was utterly antisocialist and antifeminist.
 
No, it's not OK, nationalism is historically associated with the right, and it's central to the Nazi position. While the movement may seek to promote itself as representing the working man, a "working man" who doesn't closely follow the line will soon find himself in a very uncomfortable place, as will anyone who asserts class or gender or anything else, before Nation. It was utterly antisocialist and antifeminist.

So, you don't think that the Soviets, the Maoists, the North Koreans, The North Vietnamese the French Revolutionaries for that matter, were also nationalist, even though by modern usage, they were all, "left wing"?

Again, Naziism was a hodge podge politically. As the brighter students will already have long been aware, it embraced universal health care, State subsidized recreation for the laboring classes, education reforms, and environmentalism as central tenants early in its history, and enacted legislation accordingly. These are clearly, again by today's fashionable definitions, were left wing positions.
 
fascism, socialism or communism.........is not limited government, what american government is supposed to be.

does not matter if you want to call it left or right.
 
fascism, socialism or communism.........is not limited government, what american government is supposed to be.

does not matter if you want to call it left or right.

That's partly my point.


There are a lot of very valid comparisons of one sort of politics or another to Nazism, and to a lesser extent Fascism, but we have to keep clearly in mind that neither was an entirely political construct by our lights. Nazism in particular was more akin to modern Militant Islam. Islam is not only a political system, but also a legal system and a religion.

Fascism on the other hand was very loosely defined, perhaps not in theory, but certainly in practice, and so people cans see the comparisons that their prejudices find most attractive with ease
 
That's partly my point.


There are a lot of very valid comparisons of one sort of politics or another to Nazism, and to a lesser extent Fascism, but we have to keep clearly in mind that neither was an entirely political construct by our lights. Nazism in particular was more akin to modern Militant Islam. Islam is not only a political system, but also a legal system and a religion.

Fascism on the other hand was very loosely defined, perhaps not in theory, but certainly in practice, and so people cans see the comparisons that their prejudices find most attractive with ease

the point i am making is, that no matter which one of these you chose, it involves more government than the founding fathers intended.
 
Of course not...everything is leftwing except for America that existed from 1776 to 1801...at that point the Midnight Judges appointments and Louisiana Purchase started a long path of betraying the constitution and over intrusive government leftwing government.
 
More bad faith on your part. Instead of dealing with the facts you want to demonize Goldberg, a Jew. How telling.


So...your earlier criticism of Chomsky (in this thread), as well as your implied denunciation of the views of scholars like Hilberg....are "telling"?


:)

I personally wouldn't have made the connective, insinuated slur on you; but it's your view, not mine.....
 
So...your earlier criticism of Chomsky (in this thread), as well as your implied denunciation of the views of scholars like Hilberg....are "telling"?

I don't find my criticism of Chomsky in this thread. In general, my criticism of Chomsky is based on specific flaws in his historical narratives, especially his tendency to leave out half of the story. Such as the entirety of the Cold War, for example. What I never say is that we can safely discount what he writes because of his political identity.
 
I don't find my criticism of Chomsky in this thread. In general, my criticism of Chomsky is based on specific flaws in his historical narratives, especially his tendency to leave out half of the story. Such as the entirety of the Cold War, for example. What I never say is that we can safely discount what he writes because of his political identity.

Where was it here said that we can discount Goldberg because of his political identity?

Goldberg has been continuously discounted, including by scholars of fascism, because of what he's written about fascism.
 
Even the wiki is very convoluted on the subject, I don't think you can hold anyone accountable for not having this precisely right coming out of school.

wiki said:
Influenced by national syndicalism, the first fascist movements emerged in Italy around World War I, combining elements of left-wing politics with more typically right-wing positions, in opposition to communism, socialism, liberal democracy and, in some cases, traditional right-wing conservatism. Although fascism is usually placed on the far right on the traditional left-right spectrum, fascists themselves and some commentators have argued that the description is inadequate.[13][14] Following the Second World War, few parties openly describe themselves as fascist and the term is more usually used pejoratively by political opponents. The term neo-fascist or post-fascist is sometimes applied more formally to describe parties of the far right with ideological similarities to, or roots in, 20th century fascist movements respectively.

To be fair liberals have the blight of socialism and communism to deal with, leaving facism to right-wingers (apparently not the conservative part!) may be appropriate ;)
 
I don't find my criticism of Chomsky in this thread. In general, my criticism of Chomsky is based on specific flaws in his historical narratives, especially his tendency to leave out half of the story. Such as the entirety of the Cold War, for example. What I never say is that we can safely discount what he writes because of his political identity.
And I did show his and your multiple historical errors, regardless of the political views held by the author or the reader. The point was that the political ideology does influence the orientation of the author's work. No one is without bias, no one is free of it influencing their work.
 
Where was it here said that we can discount Goldberg because of his political identity?

Here's the key post:

http://www.debatepolitics.com/polls/161373-fascism-right-wing-5.html#post1061835073

An ad hominem based entirely on identity politics. All references to Goldberg in the thread go to that.

The reviews linked therein are really awful. As far as I can tell they don't engage anything Goldberg wrote at all -- they appear to be allergic to his arguments. No need to spend any time refuting Goldberg's ideas said Prof. Griffin. And indeed he does not because identity politics.

Identity politics is the essential ingredient.
 
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