Fallacies about Fascism
Fallacies: "National Socialism wasn't true socialism", "The other side is worse", and so on.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2019-06-02 |
Since modern leftist movements don't like their ties to fascism, they use a lot of fallacies and distractions to obfuscate that truth. Their favorite fallacy is the "No true Scotsman" fallacy (appeal to purity):
- This purity fallacy is demonstrated with:
- "Fascists couldn't be Socialists because they did/didn't do something". Ironically, applying purity standards to fascism would mean fascists are far less true right-wing, conservative, capitalists than they are left-wing. But you don't get leftists approval by applying equal standards or using critical thinking.
- Fascists weren't quite as far-left as Communists/Socialists, therefore they were to the right of them (e.g. "right-wing"). That doesn't change they were to the left of center, or any American movements in the day (or today).
- Fascists attacked socialist/communists, thus they can't be true socialists. Which is like saying any family member or spouse that fought with you, isn't your true family member/spouse. However, the norm is that when one socialist group gains power they consolidate their power by purging/de-legitimizing their competition (including the other branches of socialism). Also ignored by the biased is that the Fascists attacked conservative or the old establishments with even more gusto than they did the communists/socialists. If attacking a group makes them the opposite, then they definitely weren't right-wing or conservatives.
- True Socialism" has never been tried - every time Socialist regimes collapse, the left claims, "that wasn't true Socialism". And they get back to theoretical socialism and how far the country had to diverge to make practical socialism work at all. So Marxism (Revolutionary Socialism) and Fascism (Hyrbid-Socialism), are forms of pracitcal socialism, but are disowned because they failed. But they're all just mildly divergent branches of collectivism, controlling the means of production (business), and redistributing wealth (controlling individuals). In the name of Social Justice the state controls everything and will provide from cradle to grave, as long as you do exactly what the state demands. The rest is just implementation details.
- Fascists were militant, imperialistic, nationalistic and racists, thus they couldn't be progressives/socialist. This is the left trying to pretend their side has no flaws/unsavory views, thus any flaws prove they were not true socialists. Which is like saying a Christian can't be a murderer because Christianity doesn't condone murder. (Just ignore the Christians that do commit murder all the time), and the American left (of the day, and some today) are/were militant, imperialistic, nationalistic and racist and that doesn't make them less progressive, socialist, or left-wing. Affirmative Action is fundamentally racist and widely supported by the left, that doesn't make anyone who supports affirmative action a right-winger.
- The other side is more like fascists than we are! - few will name how the fascists are "right-wing" because when they do, we can recognize that's not how we use left/right in America. So they hand wave with, "everyone knows" (begging the question), or appeal to authority (some pedigreed academic who says so). Yet, as soon as you look at why they're calling them "right-wing", you see through the ruse.
- Left-Right inversion - the left and right mean opposite things in different countries/cultures just like conservative means going back to more libertarian freedoms in America, but it means going back to more Totalitarian Communism in Russia. The debate on this in Wikipedia's fascism's talk section was epic: the editors admitted intentionally misleading people (using wrong versions of the term) and refused to clarify.
- There is one dimension where Fascism is right wing (and a dozen where it's false). If you see left-right based ONLY on whether you are using government power to fight against inequality versus accepting natural order (that in a diverse society, inequality and specialization are unavoidable), then the Fascists/Nazi's were too pragmatic: they accepted that meritocracy would allow some to rise. Of course that's a few fallacies in one:
- All leftist governments support some rising, just on party merits instead of economic ones: they replace economic inequality (via meritocracy) with greater inequality through politocracy (those more politically connected get special privilege, wealth and power). So they aren't really against inequality, they just support some kinds of it. And they end up more elitist and classist than what they replaced. No champion of Socialism goes into it thinking they're going to be a Doctor who now makes as little as the field hand, they do it thinking they'll be part of the political elite and the "brain trust".
- They do the same with power. The sell the demo-version of Socialism as a way to eliminate the powerful and claim that they're egalitarian (left-wing). But no Socialist country has or can exist for long without centralizing power and authority, and becoming authoritarian (right wing). The lure of Socialism itself is usually arrogant children (of all ages) thinking they know more than everyone else, and if they had the power to rule, they'd make things my fair, by first naming themselves (or their leaders) the benevolent God-Emperor to fix things.
- the only way to combat inequality with the government is by using inequality to grant special privileges or punishments based on which groups/individuals they favor. So they're begging the question by saying that they aren't leftist because they changed what leftist means (they weren't fighting the exact causes, in the exact same way, that leftist today would choose to be fighting it, thus that couldn't have been how leftists did it in the past). So if you completely ignore all the parts that leftists want you to, and you only recognize inequality the way they tell you to, then (and only then) is fascism is right-wing.
Fascists and Socialists fought[edit | edit source]
The Socialists/Communists supported Fascism with the cry, "First Brown, then Red"... until the fascists went on to purge those that weren't politically correct enough to be fascists (including vocal Socialists/Communists). But this is common in Socialism. They all agree in loose concept to go to socialism... but they disagree on what the final form looks like, who should be in charge, and how to get there. So infighting between the branches and implementations of statism is the norm. They can only work together long enough to destroy the non-statists, then they fight for which branch of statism should be in control. So the example of fighting between Fascism and Communism (or Socialism) is not evidence they were on opposite sides at all, but this was much more like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders fighting over who better represented the far left view for America.
The Communists of the time, returned the favor or persecution with their Antifa (antifascist) movement, does that mean they weren't true authoritarians? Both sides were intolerant radicals that didn't want internal threats and were willing to use violence against the other side.
| Ironically, the modern Antifa movement in the U.S. usurped the symbology of the original Antifa movement, hopefully without them realizing that makes them communist revolutionaries trying to exterminate fascists and capitalists). |
Isn't fascism a right wing ideology?[edit source]
 Overview[edit | edit source]Template loop detected: Template:Show Article Summary What they were for and against[edit | edit source] The tenets in common across fascist countries were:
They were against:
The only thing that doesn't fit modern western progressivism is militaristic nationalism, and that fit at the time. American progressives in this era were highly supportive of fascist ideology. However, since WWII, the term "fascism" fell out of vogue, progressives replaced national-militarism and racism with multinational-militarism and Social Justice Warrior programs (forced equality) as the premise for why they should have supreme national power. This is not a huge stretch -- instead of having a nations military forcing your agendas on others (national imperialism), you'd have a super-national organization (the U.N.), using the military force of many nations to force your agendas on others ("New World Order", etc). That's just replacing national-fascism with super-national fascism; a pretty subtle distinctions that doesn't require much of a philosophical shift at all. History and it's origins[edit | edit source]Key take-aways:
Similarities to today include leftist movements such as Occupy or Black Lives Matter, which are the same kind of populist uprisings that the Socialists, Communist and Fascists all supported: a remaking of the country because of injustices. They may not be identical in cause, but they have many of the same supporters. Whereas these movements are in direct conflict/contradiction to right wing movements/philosophies, which are trying to move society to more moderation or traditional (past) systems/solutions. (not remake society into something new) Even the rhetoric of Occupy is amazingly similar to historical fascists. I've joked that the only way you can tell the difference between the 30's fascists speech and todays occupy ones, was if they include the word Jewish when they scapegoat the 1% as, "rich Jewish bankers, media magnates, and industrialists that controlled the system and oppressed the workers". But even back then, Italian fascists didn't have the anti-semitic streak that the Germans had (making distinction harder), but they weren't as anti-business/corporate either. The solutions in common is always a new authoritarian government (controlled by the people, this time) to fix things -- and pick winning and losing sectors (some deserve subsidies, others penalties), all in the name of the greater good (think "Green Energy and Solar Subsidies). Progressives of today, even use the "Gini Coefficient" (an arbitrary measure of rich-to-poor income inequality, as if they know what that ratio should be, and non-compliance to their construct is a known problem) to proclaim why we need their authoritarian guidance, while they completely fail to recognize that this ratio was created by Corrado Gini -- the guy who literally wrote the book, "The Scientific Basis of Fascism", which was the pseudo-science justification used by both Hitter and Mussolini as economic justification for their policies.
Wikipedia Debate[edit | edit source]I watched some great debates in Wikipedia on this topic (in the Talk section on Fascism), that covered all of this. Some political historians were complaining that "right wing" completely deceived the American audience (since the terms were reversed/opposed), and it should be called out or clarified. It went back and forth, and this faction won the logical/historical argument for the U.S. audience. But once losing the logical/factual argument, the lefty-faction "won" by declaring that it was better to cater to the Euro-centric definition of left-right than the American-centric one, AND it would be a waste of space to clarify that for either audience. So they rejected/removed those edits... AND then purged the debate from the talk section AND then they purged/blocked the people that disagreed with them -- that way there would be no hope of balance/education leaking into the threads on fascism. Thus ended my illusions that "anyone with a valid point" could contribute to wikipedia. All the correct points were made, and supported with facts and links, but it didn't fit the agenda, so bye-bye. [edit | edit source]Template loop detected: Template:Show Article Summary Who says it's right wing?[edit | edit source]What is interesting is that those that claim fascism is a right wing philosophy come in a few flavors:
None of those are really good options. If we give the majority (in the media and history books) the benefit of the doubt, then we know they're biased/socialists: in order to sincerely believe their view, you must start by adopting the ideology of a theoretical socialist (thus everything is to right of them, or at least they're too ignorant to know better). Thus many deniers that Fascism is a left-wing ideology, are proving their own bias towards views of Socialism (that appeal to teens and ideologues). But this gets pretty meta, so the less intelligent side wins, as they can usually stall or confuse the argument long enough for the masses to have their eyes glaze over, and forget the question. And if you point this out, they'll just claim you're attacking the messenger fallacy, instead of trying to look at the realistic options. So it's a wasted path in most discussions. Template loop detected: Template:Show Article Summary Fasism on that spectrum[edit | edit source]When you look at fascim on the different dimensions you see"
There are other ways to look at political spectrums, and those too can muddle the left-right debate a bit. But in most dimensions, the American left is far closer to fascism than the American right. Which is why they get so angry when you point out History, or try to discuss the facts -- their only defense is distraction or re-defining history of language to protect themselves. Thus the truth (and those that preach it) are their enemy. So the become indignant, irrational and emotional if you start trying to decompose their arguments, or want to write articles like this to really look at History or what the terms mean. |
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