At bottom, no. As they say, those on the wrong side of the gun don't care.
The very point of this thread is an attempt to revise reality so that some monstrous entity called "the Left" is to blame for every political badness.
Well, that's just plain silly. If we are to use the cartesian grid common in most "what's your political persuasion" tests the answer to this question would be neither Right or Left but Authoritarian as opposed to libertarian ( not the party, obviously)
All political badness stems from the few trying to control the many, or the many trying to control the few. We all need to just learn to control ourselves. :smoking:
...Our history class taught that the Nazi party of Germany had a meeting with the Communist Party of Germany to discuss a number of things starting on what slogans would be and what category they would say they were. Fascists were very much left wing, but they looked like right wing extremists compared to the communists, so they decided to call the communists left wing and call the fascists right wing to avoid confusion.
Left-wingers believe that government has a significant role to play in society. So in that sense they are similar. But the American left at least believes that the government's role is, among other things, to protect minorities from private oppression. Whereas fascists' goals, like the Nazis, for example, are often to have the government oppress and murder minorities. So in that way they are very very different.
Social conservatives are the closest we have to fascists in this country, because they believe in broad government power to advance their social goals. I think certain liberals might fall into the category as well, but I can't really think of a large liberal sect that pushes a platform that is seriously oppressive of anyone.
When you look over the whole political agenda of Italian fascists and Nazis it becomes clear what they most resemble.
No. That's just a residue of the Hate-the-Left Cold War nonsense.
Like the "People's Republic of China"?
Tells us nothing.
not at all. Fascism was (falsely) popularly associated with the right wing throughout the Cold War.
Why do you think that I do anything of the sort? I am not giving them a pass - I am saying that they are a total fraud. I mean, how someone who is homophobic, anti-Semitic, closed-borders fanatic, anti-free-markets, anti-free-minds, militaristic, etc, etc is "Right-wing"? - doesn't it describe a good Stalinist, down to the last shiny button on his NKVD uniform?
In school, I was taught that fascism was not in fact right wing, but compared to American Government, it was very much left wing. Our history class taught that the Nazi party of Germany had a meeting with the Communist Party of Germany to discuss a number of things starting on what slogans would be and what category they would say they were. Fascists were very much left wing, but they looked like right wing extremists compared to the communists, so they decided to call the communists left wing and call the fascists right wing to avoid confusion.
Fascism is left wing because you cannot own a business or large home if you don't toe the line that the ruling party draws.. If you don't toe the line, they take your business and give it to someone who will. It is far right of either communism or socialism in that it allows private property at all. In socialism the government owns all the business and makes sure that everyone is paid equally, and in communism the gov't owns everything and makes sure that everyone has everything they need.
So fascism is far right of communism but still pretty far left of American conservatism. It's somewhere in the middle.
This "ideological kinship" is non existent since US liberals are not totalitarians.I am not talking about any "guilt by association". I am talking about ideological kinship and resulting absolute blindness in the face of overwhelming evidence of the Communist regime's criminality.
Oh my goodness, the "dirty-ness" of socialism! The use of "Jewishness" by Jews! They BOTH (socialists included!) hate socialists!Pray tell me, how did I just manage that? The 1920-30s. There you have a dirty wave of radical socialism sweeping Europe. They are "the wave of future". Absolute power is within reach. Competing ambitious leaders differentiate on trifles and accuse each other of all mortal sins. In Germany, the Soviet puppets (incidentally, led by German-Jewish intellectuals) compete with people of very similar views who use their Jewishness to whip up a very useful anti-Semitic hysteria. Both "antagonists" have nothing but unlimited hatred for liberals, conservatives and social democrats.
Well there we are again, not only do you have your own vocabulary, but your own alternative history where the Bolsheviks did not split from the Mensheviks in 03 and were not the the "majority" in name or number.Yes, "wow". Because the Russian Revolution was done by the (classical) liberals, laborites and social democrats (Mensheviks). The Bolsheviks usurped power and destroyed the Revolution. As anyone not totally brainwashed by "liberal" college professors would know.
The years of Lenin were occupied by 6 years of civil war in defeating the Whites, once Stalin took over in 22 he tossed out Lenin's New Economic Policy, which included private enterprise. Lenin was never able to implement any sort of post-revolution regime, so to project wartime activities to a post-war scenario is kookie, but that is what I see you doing..... a lot.Nonsense. The Red Terror started immediately after the Bolsheviks took power, and continued, unimpeded, throughout the years when Lenin and Trotsky ruled as the all-powerful duumvirate. Stalin is perceived as The Monster only because he had more time to do exactly the same thing, with body count steadily going up.
Yes, friend, Libertarians ARE an extremist group, they minimize ALL restrictions on social and economic activity. They are equal to anarchists minus any self regulation.I am equating things that are exactly the same, unless you accept the self-serving portrayal of every libertarian as an infantile radical wasting time on the far fringes of our political landscape. The liberal (classical liberal) political vector was always quite well defined, and in the modern American newspeak, we are forced to say "libertarian", when we mean "liberal". In Germany, or Poland, or Scandinavia, or France, and so on - they still say "liberal" and mean "liberal", not "socialist covering his arse and dodging unpleasant semantic associations"
Since modern US conservatism is in the same quadrant as capitalistic/neoconservatism, with fascism differentiated only by the the amount of personal freedom afforded, it is not "hyperbole" but a marginal difference. There are plenty of US conservatives everyday pronouncing their resistance to personal/social freedoms to anyone outside of their ethnic/social group.In a tradionalist political science sense, Fascism is generally regarded as "right wing" to an utter extreme. Attempting to compare it as some kind of analog or similar thing to modern american conservatism would be like trying to compare a mid-major Basketball team with the Chicago Bulls of the 90's. It's an emotional bit of hyperbole used as a political bludgeon without regard to common sense.
Take the standard Nolan Chart that's often referenced, or just take the general mindset of it. I prefer it to the standard "left" / "right" idea. Everythings based off a two part scale in terms of Economic Freedom and Social Freedom (or the focus on community vs focus on individual).
Here's a general view of it
In this, Facism would be in the lower portion, probably in the bottom right portion of that section.
Here's a very interesting take on some of the various types of ideologies commonly thought about in the U.S. as well as the extreme ends for each side.
Maybe you can get on the same page with us and examine the "political compass" above....The very idea that we can neatly separate economic freedoms and social ones is silly: they are interdependent. Freedom of choice is freedom of choice. The real - "classical" - liberals ('libertarians' in modern American usage) are proponents of freedom of choice, and as such "right-wing", if we want to be logical and admit that Fascism, Nazism and Communism are varieties of the collectivist, statist ideology that belong on the Far Left, and nowhere else.
Again, the only difference between US conservatives and most fascists is the marginal difference in social freedoms, and as I said, there are lots of cons promoting the restrictions of social freedoms on groups outside of theirs. Bircherism is alive and well within the US right wing, Palin and the tea bags are just a few steps away from Stormfront.It is no more reasonable to proclaim that the US Right today is comparable to "Facism" the nit is to proclaim that the US Left today is comparable to "communism".
However you want to take that, be my guest.
The very point of this thread is an attempt to revise reality so that some monstrous entity called "the Left" is to blame for every political badness.
If a Nazi even talked with a Communist, they would have been beaten up and run out.
.
But the American left at least believes that the government's role is, among other things, to protect minorities from private oppression.
Whereas fascists' goals, like the Nazis, for example, are often to have the government oppress and murder minorities. So in that way they are very very different..
Social conservatives are the closest we have to fascists in this country, because they believe in broad government power to advance their social goals.
I think certain liberals might fall into the category as well
Definitions vary.
That doesn't mean that Nazis are leftist.
Rather, it means that Stalinists are rightist.