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There's a famous joke that "fascist" in politics just means "I don't like you" It's just an ill-defined insult at this point. George Orwell had interesting th
by wmil 11y ago
There's a famous joke that "fascist" in politics just means "I don't like you"
It's just an ill-defined insult at this point. George Orwell had interesting things to say.
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
- hnhg 11y agoI've seen more than a handful of presumably right-wing commentators on Reddit of late arguing that the Nazis were actually socialists or 'communists' rather than a right-wing group. The ensuing (typically unresolved) argument comes down to how fascism is defined for each person. Fascism is clearly in the eye of the beholder.
- x0ra 11y ago"Nazi" actually stands for "Nationalsozialismus", or in plain English, National Socialism.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- venomsnake 11y agoNazi is national socialism. Fascism was in Italy and Spain.
- ooo000ooo 11y agoSpain's (and Portugal's) case was more of a traditionalist, catholic thing. Franco just appropriated the imaginery of the falangist party, then proceed to do what he wanted. Which was autocracy at first and, when it didn't work, technocracy. That did indeed work and built Spain's middle class.
- djmdjm 11y agoThe Nazi party was socialist in much the same way the DPRK is democratic.
- gozur88 11y agoWeird that they put the word in the name of the party when they didn't know what it means.
- dang 11y agoThey knew what it meant. I think putting that word in the name was a cheap way of appealing to the disaffected working class early on.
- Grue3 11y agoIt wasn't all that different from Soviet Union back then. Or current DPRK for that matter.
- codesushi42 11y agoWrong. Hitler had great admiration of Mussolini all the way up to Mussolini's death. Hitler copied Mussolini (including the Roman salute) and used Italy's dictatorship as a model for Germany's. Fascism in Spain didn't come until after fascism took over both Italy and Germany, and only did with the help of both of those countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica
- osullivj 11y agoAnd Mussolini copied it all from Gabriele D'Annunzio's irredentist Regency of Carnaro in Fiume 1919-20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Regency_of_Carnaro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Regency_of_Carnaro
- ry_ry 11y agoI don't think the political spectrum is a simple straight line, as the traditional left-center-right labels would imply. If you travel far enough along that line, extreme politics of either flavour will for all practical purposes converge. If not in ideology, then implementation.
- duncanawoods 11y agoIt was an evolution. The party started as an anti-capitalist worker's party with a left-wing manifesto and parts of the party wanted to collaborate with the communist party. However, Hitler jettisoned the left-wing aspects, cozied up to the capitalists and aristocrats to fund the growth of the party and reshaped the party inspired by Mussolini's fascists. The early socialist manifestos were an embarrassment for the party as it grew and it never attempted any of what that early party sought like disbanding the army, expropriating land from owners etc. Here is the the early manifesto. The only thing recognisable from what the Nazi party eventually became is the anti-semitism: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/25Points.html http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/25Points.html
- osullivj 11y agoQuite correct. Goebbels was on the left wing of the party originally, but was ultimately a Hitler loyalist. The Night of the Long Knives in June 34, and the killing of Ernst Roehm, was all about the purging of any threats from the the left wing of the party.
- patrickburke 11y agoThe terms right-wing and left-wing are as meaningless as the term fascism.
- dba7dba 11y agoDuel between fascist versus socialist in the upcoming presidential election?