The March revolutionaries being Socialists? Thanks!
Some would be called that. But where, exactly, did you get this idea?
Perhaps, perhaps not. I rather doubt it, simply because the Whites never had a lot of support. They simply could not have held power, and if they did take it back, they would never have formed a Fascist governemnt. They were aristocrats, not reveloutionaries.
Truly, you are a God among men. The power of your… ahem arguments makes me quiver in fear.
Or rather, as usual, I find that those who declare how everyone who disagrees with them is “simplistic” are the very ones who use ad hominems while carefully ignoring actual arguments. You pretty obvious know nothing about me, and I am beginning to think your age is in the single digits. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard a grown adult fall down to talk like that. Take it to the Pit, or grow a pair.
FUnnily enough, neither did the Bolsheviks. Or anyone else. In fact, programs were not what people cared about about. They want stability and freedoms - not to be serfs or effective slaves anymore. The Bolsheviks did not win because of any mighty public support, but because they were both organized and willing to go to any length to win. They were little more than an overgrown crime ring with delusions of ideological adequacy giving them a fig leaf to cover their shame. And because the Kerensky government wasn’t prepared to fight a criminal gang with no scruples whatsoever.
Try reading better next time. I didn’t say they would form a Fascist government. I said they would form an autoritarian, fascistic one.
And the last sentence is so badly flawed it is almost amusing. The idea that aristocrats cannot be fascist, or fascistic, is ludicrous - ask Sir Oswald Ernest Mosley, 6th Baronet (even if you don’t call Baronets true aristocracy, he had major support amongst them). Or the Prussian Junkers class, who may have held their noses, but came round to seeing benefits of Hitler. And then the idea that fascists are “reveloutionaries” (sic). Reactionaries are not the same thing as revolutionaries. I know why you do this, but it is fundamentally dishonest.
Where on earth did I call you “simplistic”? By putting it in quotes, you seem to imagine I said it. Where? I am sure it is just a mistake on your part. Is that how a “grown adult” argues? Making up quotes from the person he is arguing with?
I have no interest in pitting you. I don’t know anything about you in real life, but I know what I see of you here - and that is someone who repeatedly acts as an apologist for fascist regimes.
Authoritarian != Fascist, or even “fascistic”, whatever the hell that means. I suspect you can’t even define it.
Amazingly, aristocrats have never led a Fascist bloc. They have always been the provenance of the common people. Let me get this straight: a group of reactionaries (not correct in this case anyway, but nevermind that) who never in history gave any indication of wanting or caring about Fascism would created a Fascist, or somehow “fascistic” government if they took over again in Russia?
Ah, accusations of deception. Lovely.
Sadly, you have repeatedly failed to note that I was (a) putting scare quotes, a common use of quote marks, and (b) not talking about you alone. Amazingly (I know this much shock the hell out of your ego) I have other people in mind as well; your single-minded obsessions do not merit a passing thought from me.
You see them that way because you apparently want to. I state things as they are and as they were, not as you would prefer history to be to appease you own self-image about the justice of Leftist causes and any other pet political ideas. What you utter can’t accept is that saying, “Well, in truth things were a lot more complicated and some were bad and some were not as bad” is not apologia.
I never said authoritarian and fascist were the same. Try looking up fascistic. You might learn something.
I guess the example of Mosley went over your head then? I have no idea what you mean by “the common people” but the idea that fascism is a working class ideology is blatantly false, and just another attempt by people like you to transfer blame onto the victims.
Try reading slower. I never said they were fascist. I said they would create an authoritarian, fascistic government - a government sharing many characteristics with fascist regimes. Stalin’s regime can easily be called fascistic, for example, without needing to call him a fascist.
Yes. It is a common deception to refer to Hitler as a revolutionary - it’s an attempt to smear the revolutionary left with the evils of the Nazis.
Wedged in the middle of two sentences directly addressing me, I should say. I never called you anything approaching simplistic, so addressing it at me was fundamentally flawed, even as part of a group of people.
I see them that way because they are that way. You cannot pass up an opportunity to excuse Franco’s victims with the idea it would somehow have been worse under the Left. Even in a thread on Soviet Communism your idea is that guilt for the evil that was the Nazi regime really should be laid at the feet of those nasty commies in Russia.
I have. It doesn’t particularly have much meaning. Moreover, I don’t want their definiteion. I want yours.
Ah, there it is: you talk about “classes” and “victims”. It’s just people. I don’t think of them in any other way, other than describing the mathematical incidence of certain phenomenon. I am well aware of many blue-bloods who went Nazi. I am also aware they were a distinct, if distinctive, minority, and did not control the Party nor significantly alter its policies.
Your problem appears to be that you have a specific theory of how the world works, and are trying to shove everything into it. The world isn’t made of classes, just people, and Marx was a damn fool for suggesting it.
Then what, exactly, do you mean by that? What characteristics do you mean?
The hell?
He was a revolutionary: he specifically advocated revolution, volently if it had to be (though he felt he could do better by political manipulation) to overthrow the government, and establish a completely new social, political, and economic order in Germany. In no way, shape, or form, did or want a “return” to anything, and certainly not to the pre-war order.
The sentence which clearly described a group approach. In any event, I feel no compunction to apologize for using gramatically-correct English, incluidng the correct use of scare quotes.
And that is what you get wrong. You cannot stop thinking it’s about guilt and innocence. You are obsessed with shoving your own morality (correct or not) and obsessions into a factual debate.
Chain of causation. Chain of causation. Remember it. Someone throwing a rock in the right time and place might change all of human history thereafter. Doesn’t meant the rock should or should not have thrown on its own merits. Where, preciely, did I claim the Communists are morally responsible for the Nazis? Nowhere. But their actions inadvertently helped create the Nazis, probably tipped the balance.
I describe the facts, always, first and foremost. Franco called himself a fascist, but he was not as bad as Hitler. Mussolini created fascism, and he was not as bad as Hitler. Nor were Franco and Mussolini alike (though the weighing between them is tougher). I consider Franco’s regime bad, but better than the likely alternative, and yet worse than the best alternative.
Mussolini was capable of being pretty nasty. But he was also relatively stable and gave the Italian people what they wanted: a less chaotic and more unified nation, as Italians had dreamed about for centuries, and then seen almost come to life and then wither again after WW1. Doesn’t mean Mussolini didn’t do wrong. Doesn’t mean his victims don’t exist (real, individual people with hopes and dreams, not generic members of a social class which mostly exists in human imagination).
But it does mean you have to take a clear-eyed look at what he actual did and did not do, why he acted in one way and not another, and what the likely altrnatives were, and not embrace a fantasy categorization to arbitrarily chuck people into “hero” and “villain” piles. Well, if you want to do actual history and know something real.
You are not doing history. You have a very elegant, very straightforward, and very wrong view. You’re not looking at facts, you’re drowning in emotions and opinions, and you want desperately to prove I’m wrong and bad and nasty, just so you can believe I’m wrong. But even if I were ten times worse than Hitler myself, it wouldn’t change the facts. You mut argue with them, and not with me. And then, no matter what you decide, right or wrong, you have a firm foundation to argue.
The world would have been a far better place without the Communists or the Fascists. I acknowledge that in some times and places, some groups under one label were not as bad as they could have been and not as bad as the alternative.