4 ms·

It will all become clear to you when you accept that it was the American Left who inspired the Fascists, Bolsheviks, and Nazis in Europe. All of them were lefti

• dragonwriter 10y ago
  > It will all become clear to you when you accept that it was the American Left who inspired the Fascists, Bolsheviks, and Nazis in Europe. All of them were leftist/socialist ideological movements. That's simply factually false; the Bolsheviks were at least plausibly a left-wing movement by the usual standards (though even with them there is an argument that they were a right-authoritarian movement with left-wing rhetoric), but not in any substantive way inspired either by the American Left (which at that point was pretty much just the early labor movement) or American Progressives (which, while the label has been adopted by the modern left, were not at that time a left-wing movement). There inspirations were almost entirely European, not American. The Fascists and Nazis were both right-wing movements, both substantively and, largely, rhetorically, though it's true that both adopted similar, though somewhat different, syntheses of the rhetoric of the European Right with that of certain elements (largely, fron different non-Marxist socialist traditions) elements of the European Left. Neither was inspired by American Leftist or Progressive movements in any substantive way.