Despite his protestations to the contrary, Mussolini’s Fascsism was deeply rooted in Socialism (He was a Socialist before he was a Fascist.)
You can read about Fascism in Mussolini’s own words here, and jusge for yourself:
Olentzero:
You said:
**
I’ve backed up what I’ve said, and that was neither what I said nor implied.
I take umbrage at your accusation of ignorance. Especially in light of your veiled insults and inablility to provide any evidence to back up your assertions. That’s your shoe. It’s not my size.
For what it’s worth, in William Manchester’s well-researched biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, the early days of the NSDAP and its evolution were traced. It originated as just what it called itself, a national socialist party, with agenda items of recovering “Germany’s place in the sun” taken from her by the Versailles Treaty (as they understood), a syndicalist/ socialist economic structure, and government by the people (and hence largely by the proletariat). One of the early leaders was a fat gay socialist named, IIRC, Ernst Rohm (I presume nobody will take those adjectives as insults but as identifiers, since I’m not sure of the name, and someone can correct me, getting the right guy because he was vastly overweight and openly gay). He headed the SD, a paramilitary group dedicated to the NSDAP objectives. There were two brothers involved in the leadership whose names I don’t recall as well.
In the course of time Hitler inveigled his way into the leadership of this party, the SS was formed out of the SD, and one of the brothers stood by Hitler, the other opposing him. In a 1934 purge Rohm(?) was executed and the opposing brother sent to Coventry, and the SD effectively dissolved.
The party then adopted a quasi-Fascist tone, Hitler having made alliances with industrial and military leaders as he made his way to power, and the idealistic socialism of its early days was forgotten except in its name.
I’m in no way in favor of any incarnation of the NSDAP, but it’s only fair that it started out as legitimately named; the “socialist” in its title was not the equivalent of the Stalinist “democratic republics” that were anything but democratic or republican, but was rather a valid describer of its original platform .
Y’know, I guess I’m just gonna have to fall back on personal experience for this one. The organization I belong to doesn’t use works by Hitler or Mussolini as sources for socialist ideas, nor do they use quotes from either of them or their hangers-on as material for explanation of viewpoints. As a matter of fact, the only time Hitler, Mussolini, Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy come up in discussion is when we want to cite an example of what needs to be fought against and destroyed as a threat to the future of the human race.
I consider myself a revolutionary Socialist. Given the above, I do not consider Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin revolutionary socialists. I consider your assertion that they are an insult to my beliefs; I wanted to say so, and I have. And I’ve spent far more time in this thread than I intended.
If historical fact pisses you off, that’s too bad. You can be as offended as you want, but you are wrong.
Your personal experience is not the be-all end-all of Socialist History.
Thanks for playing though.
Oh, and good luck with the Revolution! Don’t forget your mittens!
What lovely sentiment: “If you don’t like my jingoistic diatribe, get the fuck out of my country.” It is a notion that truly exemplifies those truths that we hold so sacred, that all are free in the United States to pursue, life liberty and the pusuit of happiness.
I just want to know, Scylla, who made you the final arbiter of which of the laundry list of reasons for claiming independence from Great Britain (that you included by quoting the entire Dec. of Ind.), the founding fathers felt was “THE founding concept?” Certainly James MacPherson and Tom Wolfe are good writers and reasonable historians, but many others would disagree with you that equality, as we conceive of it today, was remotely on the minds of those who wrote the document. Personally, I think the principal reason for wanting independece was a desire for unfettered economic independence from Great Britain on the part of a few wealthy colonists.
You are welcome to your opinion, as is Boris. I think he proved his point admirably and I think his frustration with trying to hit a moving target is entirely appropriate. You said that you read somewhere (probably in one of MacPherson’s myriad books) that the U.S. was the only nation with equality as “THE founding concept.” Boris illustrated that other countries express similar concepts in their founding documents. You replied that this was inadequate. I think you are simply being obtuse and difficult. But in this nation, of course, you are welcome to those qualities.
Now that I have finished my rant, I must go and teach my undergraduates about McCarthyism.
I found this hilarious. Let’s see… The socialists controlled the means of production, but the Nazis let businesses do what they want, as long as that happens to be exactly what the government wants. How is this not ‘controlling the means of production’?
The main difference between Nazism and Socialism is that Nazis would allow business owners to maintain ownership, while relinquishing control of the business to the government.
Fascism and Socialism have a lot more in common with each other than they have with Capitalism. Both Fascists and Socialists believe in a strong state that largely controls the industrial output of the nation. Both philosophies subjugate the rights of individuals to the ‘greater good’. The main difference, other than the technicality of how control is administered, is that Fascism sees the state as an end unto itself (Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich is an example - pure nationalism for its own sake), while Socialists believe that the state is the source of benefits for citizens. Thus, fascists tend to elect strong, charismatic leaders while Socialists tend to elect bureaucrats.
Both philosophies are ultimately destructive, because neither are based on the notion of inalienable rights of individuals. When you throw the rights of individuals out in exchange for the ‘greater good’, you open the door to the Gulag, Dachau, or to a much lesser extent things like the Drug War, zero-tolerance laws, and overbearing regulation.
As I recall, France’s constitution was modelled directly after the U.S. constitution, was it not? The French were big fans of U.S. independance, and saw the struggle as being very similar to theirs.
Oscar:
One responds to ignorance in kind. I didn’t tell him to leave, I said he was free to leave. There’s a difference.
I get especially offended when people claim my diatribe is jingoistic. I graduated jingoistic over seven years ago and have nearly completed Xenophobic (this is what you want to hear, isn’t it.)
Do you seriously wish to argue that equality is not the central issue of The Declaration of Independance, and that the grievances there aren’t in support of this central idea?
As for McCarthyism, well yeah, Joe was a sonofabitch (but we knew that, didn’t we?)
However I’d be curious to know how the curriculum has changed in light of the information coming out of the Soviet National Archives, recently.
Turns out there really were witches after all.
Sam Stone:
Yeah, but it was still France. I don’t know know if that’s a substantive distinction, but there it is.
*Originally posted by Or’n’ry Oscar *
Certainly, that was part of it, but Americans were treated with inequality. They were second-class citizens of Britain, forced to pay heavier taxes while having no say in government and significantly less rights than citizens residing in England.
I don’t know if Scylla is accurate or not on the exceptional view of the U.S.’ foundation, but he never moved the target. It was the same since the OP.
Saw this on a website:
Esprix
Funny thing is, I wasn’t sure whether to put this in GD or not. Silly me.
Scylla,
Just wanted to say that I appreciate the sentiment of the OP.
I feel the same way…but it happens to me all the time, anyway. 
Thank you, and Goodnight.
Scylla, about this, of course you’re right. My point, though, was that I don’t feel inviting a person to leave the discussion when two people come to a fundamental disagreement is terribly productive. He was whining a bit, though, and perhaps a quick exit was for the best.
I have no problem with jingoism. I found much of your piece quite laudable, in fact. Xenophobia is a feeling that I too dabble in occasionally. I have never really been able to abide people who feel superior because they speak a little French.
I do have a problem with the sense of moral and intellectual superiority with which you imbue the notion that the U.S. is the only country founded with equality as its central tenet. Moreover, the D of I is addressed to George III (rather than Parliament) because he was the symbol for governmental tyrrany that a few elite colonists felt had to be broken in order for their country and business interests to thrive. It was the inequality between the mother country and the colonies, between those born to aristocracy and those who had built fortunes without benefit of superior blood, between a region that was good for little more than raw materials and the mother country where those goods were transformed into valuable consumer goods, that the framers of the Declaration were addressing in the opening lines of the document. That is my opinion, at least.
Notions we hold of equality today are the product of agitation, infighting, civil war, Progressivism, non-violent activism and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and non-Americans alike. To me it is clear that if the framers of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence believed in the equality in the same way that we do today, then the the 13th, 14th, 15th, 18th and 26th Amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are all unnecessary and the lives of all those people were lost in vein. But I don’t believe the founding fathers conceived of equality the way we do today. They certainly didn’t practice it the way we do. The electon tomorrow is proof of that.
The Soviet archives are not open to western scholars. They were for a while after the collapse of the Soviet Union but they have been closed again. When they were open the type of research that could be done was carefully monitored and was usually relegated to study of the Soviet role in WW II. The information we periodically get is released by archivists and historians working for the CIS.
I really don’t doubt that information, though. There were spies here, so what? We had spies there. The point about McCarthy is that he was an incidious force in recent American history whose xenophobia and jingoism got the best of him. Almost single-handedly he did considerable damage to those notions of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we hold so dear.
I find it tough to argue with anything you’ve said here Oscar. I’ll even confess that I was being unreasonably smug in the OP as pertains to the D of I and equality.
Olentzero: What do the Tsars have to do with this? Facts is facts, tovarish. Are you telling me Lenin and his gang never used violence and terrorism to get what they wanted?
I am not a monarchist. I would NOT advocate the Tsarist system. Unless it were a constitutional monarchy, with a parliament, which is what most people wished for. But that’s not what this debate is about.
Socialism: the very definition is government control of the economy/health care system/something something. Even Gorbachev said the USSR was socialist.
Why don’t you face facts: the USSR was NOT a nice place to live? Or do you think the gulags were a joke?
Anyways, I don’t necessarily believe the Nazis were socialists. However, the Bolshies and the Nazis used a lot of similiar methods.
Thanks, Scylla. I really appreciated the OP and the interesting discussion it provoked.
Thank you, scylla.
I am e-mailing that to everyone I can think of.
Regards,
Shodan
Hmmm…An interesting discussion about the origins of the Nazi party here. I will have to ask my brother-in-law his opinion when I see him at Thanksgiving. He is a German historian who wrote his thesis on Leftist Street Theater in the period between the two World Wars. My impression is that this “Leftist” theater was diametrically opposed to the Nazis, but I had better talk to him first before giving the scoop on this.
As for the whole “jingoism” thing…Well, this is a touchy one. I think it is great to have a lot of pride in your country and to remind those of us who are pretty disaffected by the current set of candidates how fortunate we are in the larger scheme of things. I think it is, however, important to keep in mind a few things:
(1) Just because we are a great nation, it doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from other nations. One thing that we can serve to improve in this nation is to decrease our almost complete ignorance of how other nations handle problems similar to the ones we are facing. So, yes, be proud, but not so proud that you can’t admit that we can still learn a great deal from others. We do not have the monopoly on truth or wisdom.
(2) We are right now the most powerful nation on the planet and we have the capacity to do great good…but also great harm. As such, we should feel a heightened sense of awesome responsibility and should use our awesome power wisely. To the extent that an attitude of “rah, rah, go team” can be a bit incompatible with such care and discretion, I do get a little worried when I see people get too into it. It is particularly important to keep foremost in our mind our ideals and not get too drunk on our own power.
That’s all folks…
Jshore:
Good points.