And of course, they then had to avoid annoying both the Americans and the USSR during the Cold War.
Finland spent most of the twentieth century in a really, really bad neighborhood for democracies.
On Hitler’s political support:
While Hitler did get a little early support from charming aristcratic ladies in Munich, their support was so minimal the party was barely solvent. Hitler’s support as almost entirely from the lower classes, and he appealed to them as a Socialist. Moreover, while he certainly was out to destroy the Democratic Socialist and Communist Left, it was as rivals, not as outright economic enemies. The conservative middle and aristocratic classes substantially favored the centrist Dem-Soc and Center parties until very late in Hitler’s ascendance.
That may be, but this is virtually the definition of a No True Scotsman fallacy. The fact that some idealized socialist may not do something bad does not mean that actualy, real socialists can’t. Do you claim the various Communists were right-wing because they turned into evil tyrannies immediately and their much-vaunted love fo the common man turned out to be a love of using and abusing him?
Alsto, let me explain on the Nazis and trade unions. The Commmunists also effectively destroyed trade unions - either by outright breaking them up, or making them subservient tools of the state. And both did it for the same reasons: trade unions were an independant power bloc, and could not be allowed to exist independantly of the state. Both considered them not socialist enough for their purposes.
Note that Conservatives did not do so. Conservatives might disagree about giving them any special legal status, but under normal circumstances we simply ignore them. Indeed, the era of “strike-breaking” was not about breaking strikes at all, but about keeping strikers from stopping replacement workers. Strikers obviously want to prevent, and during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s frequently turned to violence and anarchism. In face, while we don’t generally care for unions, note that peaceful unions had no trouble from Classical Liberals…
I highly recommend that everyone who comes into this thread read what smiling bandit wrote-- it’s the best thing written in this thread so far.
Accurately calling fascism a product of the Left isn’t calling the Left fascist, let alone calling modern Western liberals fascist. No need to take umbrage at this.
The one thing I would urge everyone to consider is that what we call “Right” and “Left” need to be appropriately set into context: not just geographically and culturally but historically as well. Being “Right Wing” in the U.S. in 2010 is not at all analogous to what was “Right Wing” in Italy in 1930, or France in 1800. Political ideologies do share some things in common, and when they do so those commonalities should be noted, but for the most part, many of these ideologies display characteristics unique to time, place and personality.
You may hate 2010’s version of Western liberals or conservatives all you want, but that’s not the subject of this thread, and perhaps best left to Great Debates or the Pit.
I think you misspelled German National People’s Party. 
The German aristocracy and big business interests who were hostile to Weimar democracy tended to support the DNVP. The big business interests who were friendly to Weimar democracy tended to support the German People’s Party (DVP). The Protestant middle class and academic community tended to support the German Democratic Party (DDP). The Catholic middle class tended to support the Center Party, the working class left friendly to Weimar democracy tended to support the social democrats, and the working class left opposed to Weimar Democracy tended to support the Communists.
But neither the DDP or Center parties were conservative parties. They were liberal parties supporting democracy, human rights, the free market, and all that fun stuff. You could maybe characterize the DVP as conservative, but they were considered a liberal party at the time and were pro-Democracy.
Let’s look at a few numbers then, shall we? We’ll start with the July 1932 elections, first to compare support between the genuine parties of the Left and the NSDAP:
Votes (in percentage) received by party in July 1932[sup]1[/sup]:
KPD 14.5
SPD 21.6
NSDAP 37.4
As you can see, the parties of the genuine Left combined garnered 36.1 percent, almost equal to the support of the Nazis. In and of itself, that does seem to look like Hitler was appealing to the workers just as much as the Socialists and the Communists. But what about the social composition of those votes? 81% of the KPD’s vote came from workers, compared to 57% for the SPD and 39% for the Nazis. In absolute numbers (there were 44,000,000 voters in the July 1932 elections), this translates to 5.2 million working-class votes for the KPD, 5.4 million for the SPD, and 6.4 million for the Nazis. What needs to be taken into account, however, is that the definition of ‘worker’ here is overly broad, encompassing not only the organized industrial worker but agricultural workers (rich and peasant farmers), home workers, even daily help in the homes of the rich. Further differentiation is needed. JW Falter, who provided the statistics above, writes elsewhere[sup]2[/sup] that support for the Nazis did not cut evenly across the labor categories:
whereas with workers in crafts and industry the opposite was true. Falter also notes that the Nazis did not fare as well in the larger towns, and than unemployment gave “a remarkable degree of immunity”:
Finally, it should be noted that in the July 1932 vote, the Nazis got 6.9 million votes from what was termed the “old middle class” (self-employed shopkeepers and farmers (as opposed to the peasant farmers from the ‘worker’ category who worked someone else’s land), and rentiers living off modest investments and pensions) and 3.9 million votes from the “new middle class” (white collar workers, including civil servants). Falter makes it abundantly clear that the mainstay of support for the Nazi party was not the working class.
To further illustrate the point, let’s look at who actually joined the Nazis after Hitler came to power in 1933.
Percentage of NSDAP Joiners in 1933, compared to general population[sup]3[/sup]
% Joined - % general population
Lower class
Unskilled workers 12.6 37.25
Skilled workers 18.1 17.31
Total 30.7 54.56
Middle class
Master craftsmen 8.9 9.56
Teachers 4.2 1.79
White collar 10.6 12.42
Lower civil servants 11.7 5.18
Merchants 12.8 6.00
Farmers 8.9 7.70
Total 57.1 42.65
Elite
Managers 2.3 0.53
Higher civil servants 2.8 0.48
Lecturers 3.0 0.96
Students 1.7 0.48
Entrepreneurs 2.4 0.34
Total 12.2 2.78
It cannot be more obvious where the Nazis’ base of support lay - in the middle class of the salaried and the self-employed, who outnumbered workers 2 to 1 in the party, and who formed a greater portion of the NSDAP than they did of society as a whole.
smililng bandit, the “no true Scotsman” fallacy doesn’t apply here. Back to the civet cat example: there are valid scientific reasons based on biology and taxonomy that enable us to say “No civet cat is a true cat”, and only a damned fool would cry “No True Scotsman!” Likewise, there are valid scientific reasons based on politics and Marx’ analysis of society that enable us to say “No socialist would do X”, and to thereby dispute giving the label of “socialist” to right-wingers like Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Kim Jong-Il (not to mention Tito, Enver Hoxha, and a slew of others). This, however, is the subject of another thread entirely and beyond the scope of this discussion (not to mention one I’ve been through dozens of times before around here) so I’m leaving it at that.
[sup]1[/sup]JW Falter, T Lindenberger, and S Schumann(eds),Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik (Munich 1986), p. 44
[sup]2[/sup]JW Falter in C Fischer(ed), The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany (Oxford 1996), p. 21
[sup]3[/sup]M Kater, The Nazi Party, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983) pp 241, 252
That is Conservative, at least in an American context. I know - the word means different things in different times and places. But I’m talking to an American audience mostly and using it in that way. This is why I also use it interchangeably with Classical Liberal.
But yeah, at the time, in Germany, being Conservative meant monarchist, mostly, and being Liberal meant mildly-socialist democracy. But both were relatively middle-of-the-road compared to the Communists who actually led a brief civil war and the Facsists who finally brought Weimar down.
Olontzero, the 1932 were the very pinnacle of Nazi success - when I specifically already told you they had broken into becoming a national party. They built their base on the workers and saw themselves as technocrats over the workers, but as I said, they gathered support much like Mussolini by snowballing. I never claimed they were exclusively a worker party - it was outright against their ideology to be so. Moreover, you seem to be artifically excluding farmers from the category of workers, for reasons I don’t understand.
Note, too, that your statistics even back me up. In 1933, the year Hitler took power in Germany, then you did indeed have more and more middle-class Germans joining up. That in no way, shape, or form denies what I said.
First off, Marx was a goddamn fool. His writings are pathetic idiotic scribbles and outright falsehoods, based on utter pseudoscientific nonsense, which has utterly failed to do anything he said, at all, ever.
Second, you just repeated that you, as a socialist, don’t want to be associated with any bad socialist ever ever. Yes, we know you don’t. That does not mean you have any particular reason for it. The Fascists did indeed fulfill many socilist programs, and certainly conceived of themselves as fully Socialist. I know it’s not the kinder socialism you want, the kind favored by Orwell or Revelle. But it is Socialism nonetheless, emerged from the political Left, and in fact from many of the same ideological sources as Communism and the Progressive movement.
That about says all I need to know about continuing conversations with you. So be it.
Labeling Fascism as left-wing is pretty silly. Of course, the Fascists did not believe in capitalism either. But what Americans tend to forget is that the European right wing has always looked down on capitalism, it’s only here in America that support for capitalism is a shibboleth.
Capitalsts were viewed as cosmopolitan parasites who worked for their private interests, when industry and finance should serve the needs of the nation. Of course, the identification between Jews and capitalists is not exactly coincidental, and you see the same thing on the far-right today.
Fascists didn’t believe that private ownership of the means of production should be abolished. Just that the private owners of industry should serve the nation just as much as any industrial worker, farmer, shopkeeper or private soldier.
But Fascism was an explicitly self-identified right-wing ideology, and to call it leftist is simply wishful thinking.
Furthermore, it doesn’t really matter what you promise the masses in your campaign, nor, to a lesser extent, what your official part line is. Nazis could promise socialism to the masses but Hitler quickly realized, if he hadn’t all along, that he needed the support of the Army and Business more than the polloi. The Communists, on the other hand, were anything but friendly to businesses and the old school of the army.
Hitler didn’t particularly care about class, both the lower and upper classes played second fiddle to himself and his racial ideology.
But we’re not talking about an American context. So if you’re going to use “Conservative” and talk about Weimar Germany, you have to talk about German Conservativism.
It seems to me that fascism is pretty clearly a right wing ideology. It’s nationalist, it’s militarist, it’s paticularist, it’s past oriented (Nazism focused on pre-Christian Germany, Italian Fascism on the Roman empire), it’s anti-democratic, it denies the existence of universal human rights.
All of these are right wing traits. The thing about fascism, though, that makes it different from traditional conservativism, and that it did take from the left, is that its a mass movement and that it’s revolutionary. Traditionally, conservativism isn’t like that. Traditional conservativism is quiescent and elite oriented. The average person is just supposed to shut up and stay disengaged.
In Fascism, man exploits his fellow man. In Communism, it’s the other way around.
Wrong on all counts. Yes, you describe them accurately, but you fail to accept that Leftism has very often displayed all of those traits, except possible being past-oriented. The French Revolution was, after its initial zeal, intensely nationalist and anti-democratic. Comunism denied basic rights and was frequently all of the above.
You deny this not because the Left cannot be those things, but because you are not. The logic of the Left today goes, “I am not [militarist, racist, nationalist] and I do not like these things. Therefore my opponents are and they are therefore facist.”
This is utter nonsense. Leftism has repeatedly been all of those things. I don’t know that I want to get into it all here, but even leaving aside Communism (nationlism and militarist just a tad), you have American Progressives (all of the the above). And progressives were a huge influence on the early Fascists.
As for your contention that the German Right is hostile to capitalism, I don’t deny it. But fascism, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, was born in the left, grew out of leftism, and was right-wing only to the degree that it was a total national movement meant to include everyone.
Aha, another indivudal who has never read Marx critically. I have read Marx. He was a fruitcake, if a very well-respectable fruitcake.
I think a lot of us are really barking up the wrong tree here. IMO, fascism does not place the same empahsis on economic issues as communism does. The emphasis is on a strong national identity with its myths, heroes, symbolic trappings, military prowess, xenophobia, racism, etc.
Don’t forget that the other half of “National Socialist” is “national”, and you can’t tell me US conservatives aren’t nationalists.
As for “socialism”, there can only be so many ways for a society to be devoid of what nitpickers would label “socialism”. Fascism tolerates private industry, but controls it in furtherence of the national agenda. Communism is primarily about sympathizing with the poor and feels that the rich must be gotten rid of or else they’ll take too much.
Leftism embraces diversity, coddles the weak, embraces internationalism, is anti-religious, etc.
Rightism emphasizes competition, loyalty to the group, is generally pro-religious, and roots it legitimacy in “foundations” from the past.
Wait, why are you psychoanalyzing me about this? First of all, I’m not particularly left wing. I’m a pretty mainstream American Democrat. And I’ve never accused my opponents of being fascist. There is really no big fascist movement in the US. There’s only one major ideology in the US, and that’s liberalism, in its various variants. There’s not really any big fascist movement anywhere anymore. Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, maybe, or elements in France’s National Front.
So please don’t tell me why I deny things.
smiling bandit, could you provide some cites for the contention that Woodrow Wilson and the American progressive movement inspired the ideology of fascism? I know that Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg make this claim, but as far as I know, no historian of the 20th century takes them seriously.
It seems to me that Goldberg and others who insist that “fascism = socialism” always base it on the particular case of Mussolini and his early dalliance with socialism (long before his “Il Duce” years). They seem to conveniently forget that as a fascist, Mussolini renounced such fundamentally leftist concepts as proletarian internationalism. In the same sense, they overlook the oxymoronic quality of the phrase “national socialism” to claim that Hitler was a leftist, too (it astonishes me that people on the SDMB will try to make the same argument–but it surfaces with every thread like this).
Why can’t people just accept that monsters are on both ends of the political spectrum? The left gets Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, etc. The right gets Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, etc. Totalitarian regimes on the right and left may share a certain style of governing, but at heart their ideologies are in opposition to one another, and it’s silly to claim that they’re otherwise interchangeable.
It think it may be time for this to move to GD from GQ.
I’ll just put on my jackboots and move it over.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Because if they can pile all the monsters on the other side, they can claim theirs is morally superior, of course.
Getting back to the OP - in order to really understand Fascism, you have to understand that, at base, it is a romantic movement.
What do I mean by that? I mean that it is a movement based on emotion as opposed to cold rationality; an attachment, or love, for one ‘race’, one national “destiny”, that admits of no rival or limit. That national “destiny” is epitomized in a great leader, who literally sums up the otherwise-incohate national “will”. Hitler is Germany; and what Germany needs is more important than any individuals.
I disagree with what was said upthread about Fascists “respecting” religion. They do not exactly; rather, they respect it as a token of identity. For the limiting morality that religion tends to attempt to teach, Fascists have of course nothing but contempt; the aura, history and tradition of worship and ritual is what makes (say) the Spanish, Spanish, and that they appreciate.
This is all very different from Communism (although of course Communists can be just as ready to treat individual humans as fodder). Communists are, at base, a rational movement. They base their position on what they conceive of as a science of history. While their feelings about the brotherhood of man may be just as romantic as any fascist, they are generally convinced that their theories have scientific, rational merit (of course in my opinion they are incorrect, but that is another matter).
Fascists by contrast subordinate rationality to emotion and "will’. They are basically indifferent to matters of economic theory - they are quite willing to use socialism together with capitalism, whatever “works”, so long as all of the organs of the economy are ultimately subject to the national will (as epitomized by the great leader).
This is why there is so much difficulty in defining what Fascism is. It is most certainly not some sort of opposite to Communism, nor is it some sub-species of Communism - Communism is all about matters economic and the interaction of such matters with politics and society, and Fascism isn’t. Thus, Fascism takes a more diverse and pragmatic approach to such things as economics. Fascism is what you would tend to get if you elevated the “my country, right or wrong” sentiment to the status of a religion, with the great leader as some sort of infallible Pope.
Umm does any of this sound like the Teabaggers to anyone else?