That doesn’t make him a socialist.
Which makes fascism nothing like socialism.
It’s much easier to understand when you think of fascism as an attitude and not a political ideology.
That’s a real hoot. Look at all of the social programs and public works projects enacted by the Nazis and Mussolini. It’s like a laundry list of all the things the students of Evergreen State College are presently demanding.
Conservatives advocating for scaling back the scope of government power were obviously major policy drivers in Fascist regimes. Duh.
Your own words might be easier to understand in that sort of framework, I’ll give you that. I’ve also had more than a few in-person conversations with people where I’ve tried to get to the root of their thought process without much success. You seem to have perfectly encapsulated my failure to understand right here. Thanks to you I now understand that it’s not about the actual definitions of words, it’s about the vibe.
The vibe, man. The vibe. Subjective feelings uber alles.
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A. The USA has plenty of social programs and public works projects.
B. The actual men who invented fascism referred to it as an attitude.
Thanks for the clarification Zeb.
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I mean zecarlo.
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It’s ok douchebag.
I mean asshat.
‘Nothing’ is absurd. Their similarities are manifest
Absolutely not, but to discount the intellectual heritage is to be dishonest.
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No they did not, there was a clear ideological underpinning, one that cannot be unpacked with any simplicity.
Nazism is different, and similarly complicated.
I also think the US and European ‘right’ are inconsolably different, and summoning one to describe the other is disingenuous in the extreme.
Edit: the common law jurisdictions CAN be compared, but generally European and US political thought cannot be compared without oversimplification or outright duplicity.
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They actually did. I should tell you that I am Italian and have an advanced degree in Italian. The amount of fascist related literature I’ve had to suffer through in order to earn that degree makes me want to stab myself every time someone uses the word.
Fascists actually avoided having a clear ideology. They defined themselves more by their methods than their beliefs which they saw as continuously evolving. Having a clear ideology, or a theoretical basis, was counter to their anti-intellectualism. Action was more important than thinking.
Accepted, but Mussolini’s own writings do not ignore such underpinnings. Unless all the translations are being duplicitous.
Obviously, as I am not an Italian speaker, I cannot replicate your expertise, nor shall I try to. But am I meant to ignore Mussolini and Lenin’s favourable words regarding one another and their movements?
If you can recommend some reading regarding it, I am more than happy to be wrong.
Also, as a person who had to read well over 1000 pages of postmodern legal theory, I empathize with your pain.
Is that legal theory without objective truth or facts? That’d be quite a trial.
Lawyer 1: "Well your honor we’ve established the fact that my client…
Lawyer 2: “Objection your honor there’s no such thing as facts.”
That, and unreadable prose. It’s desperate stuff.
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I also had to read Mein Kampf. I think I read more of it than most pre WW2 Germans.
I think people have to separate the ideology of a movement from the method and mechanics of the movement. This is the mistake Americans make when comparing Trump to Hitler and/or Mussolini. They see similarities when it comes to methods and assume that the ideology is similar. You can compare the mechanics of Nazi propaganda to advertising; it doesn’t mean that some commercial is calling for genocide. So Mussolini could admire the process that was behind Lenin’s rise to power and his ability to create a cult of personality while not approving of the political and ideological goals of communists. Mussolini could admire the revolutionary spirit behind Bolshevism but he rejected ideas of class warfare since they didn’t fit in with his belief in social/economic/military Darwinism between competing nations.
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God bless, I have tried twice to make it through that piece of shit.
The thing is, before reading it I might have referred to someone as a Nazi or said something was comparable to Nazism. After having read it I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone who has not read it is unqualified to speak about Nazism, what it is or isn’t, and should go read it if it’s a subject they want to bring up. I don’t mean to say that I am now an expert on the subject, far from it, but it would be like someone who never read the Gospels making claims about Christianity.
The same can be said about people who never read a Hitler biography comparing Trump to Hitler. Once you read about Hitler’s youth to the start of his rise to power, you see that Trump and Hitler are almost opposites. The one thing they have in common is that they were utterly unprepared (and maybe even disinterested) to do the actual work associated with their respective political positions. Hitler slept a lot while Himmler planned the Holocaust and Trump plays golf, tweets on the toilet and watches Fox while his son in law saves the world.