That’s true, but in spite of Finland being a cobelligerent of Germany, there was never a really strong fascist movement in Finland at the time. The closest thing to one was the Patriotic People’s Movement (the IKL), which got, at its strongest, 14 seats (out of 200) in Parliament in 1933, dropping to 8 in 1939. During the war, Finland was governed by a grand coalition of all the parties, and there was IKL representation in the cabinet from 1940-1943, but the IKL was forced out of the cabinet then, and then banned in 1944, after the peace treaty with the Soviets.
The confusion comes from the fact that fascism is not far right, but rather far left. The primary difference between communism and fascism is the nationalism and their views on private property. They were enemies not because they were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but rather because they were rivals for which left wing system would dominate.
I think that was the point.
Economic
Communist: The state owns and controls all economic activity. It owns the factories and pays the workers directly. Individual enterprise is banned and the possibility of becoming rich doesn’t exist outside of being a corrupt government official. The rich are persecuted and eventually don’t exist.
Fascist: Economic activity first role is to serve the state, but the state does not directly control it. Rather, the government acts as a champion of large domestic corporations. These corporations are either already run by supporters of fascists or are taken over by them. In this sense it can be seen as though the government and large corporations are on the same team.
Say Communists/Fascists took over America. Communists would go to Ford and say “all your factories are ours now”. Fascists would pass laws kneecapping foreign automakers and go to Ford and say “you do what we say, and by the way fire all your foreigners”.
Social
Communist: Everyone around the world is equal. If it weren’t for evil capitalists we would all be singing cumbaya around the campfire.
Fascists: Everyone except [insert nationality here] sucks and are inferior to us.
Nationalism
Communist: Nations are artificial creations that serve to divide the working class against each other.
Fascists: We fucking rock and everyone else sucks!
Plus the Fascists have cool uniforms.
Aren’t both extreme nationalism and enshrinement of private property considered defining right-wing viewpoints?
Yup - but why?
I was trying to draw him out a bit, since it seems like an odd way to make the point. I would say that it doesn’t characterize the dichotomy between communism and fascism particularly well, and drags in JFK for a further level of “huh?”.
No, that’s just a self-serving myth the right puts out there. It’s a No True Scotsman argument - if anyone on the right acts undeniably wrong then just deny they’re on the right. But the reality is there have been plenty of right wing dictators.
Yes. The claptrap that fascism is leftist is a recent invention of the conservative right wing to distance themselves from Hitler and Mussolini. Fascist movements are always completely tolerated and heavily supported by more traditional right wing allies. The fascist takeover in Chili, the long fascist regime in Spain, etc. were heavily supported by right wingers all over the world, and in particular in the U.S. Hitler was financially supported by Prescott Bush in the U.S. Prescott was the father and grandfather of Bush I and Bush II.
Part of the Fox news style historical revisionism about fascism not being a right wing movement is that they want to make it seem completely safe to keep moving to the right politically. It is not.
To Fox’s credit we haven’t yet seen them “accidentally” refer to them as Hitler (D) and Mussolini (D).
To extend this, a big part of Fascist ideology is that everyone (except of course the Evil Outsiders) is on the same team. The state may champion domestic corporations, but it also portrays itself as a champion of workers’ rights, usually through state-controlled compulsory unionization. If the Leader smiles on the National Workers Movement’s call for longer paid holidays, private employers are expected to say “Yes, Leader” and grant them. Likewise, the state will “protect” workers against layoffs, exploitation and “unfair” foreign competition. Of course, if the Ministry of Production announces that the National Plan requires “temporarily” increased working hours, the National Workers Movement will step forward to volunteer its members. Saying no would be to put partisan special interests over the Good Of The Nation.
Fascists are big on National Unity (in the 1920’s and 30’s this was a contrast to the Socialists, who emphasised class identities). Everyone, high and low, labouring together in the service of the National Purpose, as expressed by the Leader, who doesn’t hide behind titles like “Party Secretary”, but is specifically identified as the One, the embodiment of the National Will. Fascism rejects the very concept of checks and balances - the Leader (or the Nation) decides and the Nation (or the State) acts. This is presented as providing flexible, decisive government, without the need to conciliate umpteen special interests or wade through reams of bureaucratic procedure. Fascism is anti-bureaucratic - bosses at every level are given wide powers and expected to use them as required, rather than passing the buck or following procedure. (In practice, this means that Fascist governments tend to be nightmares of ad-hockery, unclear responsibilities, personal interests and feuding factions).
That would be why Hitler led the National Socialist Party.
And is racism really part of fascism? Europe as a whole was pretty racist until well after WW2. Hitler hated Jews and Africans, but accepted northern Indians as the source of the Aryan race.
So Hitler was telling the truth when he called it socialist? No, the National Socialists were not at all socialist when they got into power. They were militaristic hyper capitalistic. They did not redistribute wealth, they did not fight for better working conditions and better pay. The communists is Russia did these things and it was fair to call them socialist for that reason. Please do not confuse what the Nazis claimed about themselves with the truth. They claimed to be superior human beings also. They were not.
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party used to get a lot of support from German conservatives. They were worried that left wing radicals might attack the usual targets like big business. Then they found this small outfit that didn’t complain about businessmen - they blamed all of Germany’s problems on Jews and foreigners. So the conservatives felt that this was a party they would direct lower class anger against safe targets. So the Nazis started getting lots of donations to spread their message. Hitler understood what was going on - he made sure that any radicals in the movement didn’t go off-message and say anything that would upset his right wing backers. Eventually the radicals like Strasser and Roehm were purged from the party when Hitler didn’t need them anymore.
Actually, they were. The Nazi Labour Service and NSV were both started in the early 1930s
So? That didn’t stop them being socialists.
Actually, they did. They got Germans back into work. There were major public works like the autobahns and stadia.
Just because they didn’t think in terms of unemployment cash benefits and the like doesn’t mean that they weren’t socialist. They professed care for the common German, and when they got into power provided jobs and charity. Then there was the DLF, Nazi Labour Service, the Winter Aid, the NSV, and more.
Socialists love to pretend that the Nazis were not socialists, but the truth is that they were.
Whether humans ultimately are programmed at the cultural or genetic level, and therefore what method to use to control society.
I’m hardly a socialist, and in fact I’m quite anti-socialist. What you have described is that a government has labor and jobs programs, all governments do, that does not make them socialist. That does not make all governments socialist. Socialism is an economic and political theory based on public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. Socialism - Wikipedia The Nazis were against this kind of government and in fact a kind of evil capitalism run amok. They did indeed include socialism in their party name, but they were in fact highly anti-socialist and anti- communist.
On the other hand the Nazis were bitterly against, for want of a better term, high finance. To the extent that depressions and hyperinflation could cripple a country, the Nazis denounced modern forms of finance as little more than a Jewish moneylender’s scam, and sought to replace it with some sort of state-controlled oversight of the economy as a whole. If millions of Germans could suddenly find themselves out of work and hungry because a bunch of accountants insisted that some lines in a ledger said that the country was broke, then by golly finance would henceforth be regarded as an abstraction that could be ignored by fiat. Finance was just one portion of a broad Nazi rebellion against what they regarded as Jewish legalism which had infected western society.
It is hard to discuss fascism calmly. The Nazi were certainly fascists, but other nations were also fascist without being Nazis.
Fascism is not a reaction to Communism, Nazism is. Fascism is (as far as I can tell) a reaction against democracy and individualism. It appears to be another word for Corporatism, where everyone has a place in society, and a peaceful society depends on everyone staying in their place, doing their role.
Hong Kong was as close as we are likely to see of a Corporatist state. You did not vote for government, you voted for the leaders of your trade union, industrial association, church or whatever. Those groups then had a role in government.
I suppose for those (such as the ruling class) who value calm and quiet, Fascism is nearly ideal. It is those who want to cause trouble by raising issues who are oppressed by it.
…
Yeah.
OK, time for some facts. In addition to the fact that the Nazis were ther National Socialists, you have the british Union fo Fascists, which was definitely socialist. Mussolini was always a man of the Left; he explicitly created Fascism not to reject the Left but to fulfill it. He developed the idea and its practices based on the works of Rousseau, President Woodrow Wilson. There is and was a difference between rejecting Communism and rejecting Leftism altogether. The founding Fascists were not right-wing more or less anywhere.
You might argue the Spanish Fascists were right-wing, I suppose - but of course they’re notable for being the quietest and least offensive of all the Fascist-labelled regimes. Some would argue the Japanese military was both Fascist and right-wing, but if so it was right-wing for Japan in the 1930’s: a group that was very unconnected to European or American Classical Liberalism. And even the Spanish Fascists were never seen by Conservatives as anything but neccessary, temporarily tolerable evil.
The idea that Fascism was right-wing emerged principly on direct orders from Stalin himself, in order to discredit it and free nations around the world. While he didn’t create the argument, it simply is wrong. As in, it has no truth to it. Fascism nearly destroyed “international finance capitalism”, but it was in no way created by it.
However, the arguement then and now is patently false. It was neither created by business interests nor capitalists, and scholarship has shown that neither group particularly supported Fascism any more than Communism, until it became obvious they had to do so. And indeed, they did save their own bacon by jumping on the bandwagon. German, British, and Italian Fascists worked to gain power by appealing to the common man, not investors.
But Fascism and Communism came out of the ideology of Rousseau, and both paid homage to Marx, though Fascism less so because it acepted much of his indictments of Classical Liberalism but not his internationalist zeal. Fascist icons were William James, Orson Welles, Wilson, Sorel - none of whom were conservative.
In fact, American progressives (and not just American leftists) eagerly embraced Fascism, much as they embraced Communism, and linked the two together explicitly. New Republic cheered both on, alongside other Progressive publications.
Post-war liberals accepted this lie because they didn’t want to be associated anymore with their former idols. And they were at least not as racist as they had been. But racism was no stranger to pre-war Leftism, nor post-war in mutated forms. But in rejecting certain positions, they projected them on Conservatives. Plus, it was easy to do, since Conservatives lacked any kind of movement or social coherency.
Moreover, if you can attribute some position to your opponents , and then reduce that to somehting “bad”, you can equate them. For many liberals, Conservatives are racist, herfore they are just like Nazis. Conservatives are mean, therefore they are Fascists. I doubt the level of thought goes much deeper.
The Key differences between Fascism and Communism lie in two areas.
First, Fascism is a national, not international, movement. Despite what some said, it is not neccessarily racist, though it offers no particular defense against it. But it always opposed to an international movement. Second, it demanded national unity through action and myth-making over ideology. This was precisely why Fascism roaringly overtook the tepid Communist movement, and why it has ended to self-destruct.
However, like Communism, Fascism is a redemptive social movement focusing on the workers, a totalizing ideology which demands that all aspects of life be subordinated to itself, and requires utter national unity in all things. Everything within the state, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. That’s Fascism in a nutshell, and why Fascists tended to encourage similar reforms (“reforms” depending on your view of things) as Progressives then and now.
Fascism’s view of private property is you own it but the govt tells you what to do with it, so no on that. On the nationalism, that can exist in a right wing government, but it is not right wing, per se.