re: #229 halldor

I guess that it’s possible to argue about these definitions (fascism, socialism) for a long time. Talking of practice: if you look at the history of the Soviet Union, you find that the wealth of the great “socialist republic” was concentrated in the hands of a very few people indeed - mostly party bosses, nomenklatura and military/industrial elite. And the erasing of class distinctions in Russia and Ukraine during the 1920s and 30s involved a large-scale imprisonment and massacre of civilians that didn’t differ very much in its final results from the racial “solutions” later practiced by the Nazis. There’s not much doubt that at least some of the practices of Nazism were learned from those of Bolshevism and, later, Stalinism.

I would still contend that modern fascism - in its contemporary national socialist (“red-brown”) form - is a hybrid born of left wing and right wing political tendencies. It can be clearly seen in Russia today, where it is one of the prevailing ideologies.

Umm…that was the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, a supposedly transitional phase on the way to pure communism, which in theory, according to Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, was supposed to eventually ‘wither away’, but which in practice never did.

Oh yeah; and unlike in Nazi Germany, where Jews and Gypsies were singled out for extermination, the millions massacred in the Stalinist Soviet Union were not murdered because they were members of any particular race or ethnic group, any more than were the millions murdered under Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot.

If you wanna look at the original template for 20th century genocide, you have to go back to what the Turks did to the Armenians in 1915-1917, begun before either Nazi Germany or any Communist country existed:

en.wikipedia.org