[little jeremiah]

Communists are absolutely evil.

And Fascists/Nazis are not leftists.

[Dead Dog]

Actually, Communists/Nazis/Fascists are all leftists. By definition they are all political offshoots of 19th century materialism. There is nothing rightwing about National Socialism, Socialism, or their Italian love child Fascism.

Just ask Margaret Sanger.

[attiladhun2]

Not leftists? Fascists and Nazis bilieve in what?--big government, high taxation, government control of industry, government indoctrination of citizenry, subservience to the collective--sounds pretty left-wing to me. Read von Rathke's book on the economics of a free society. He observed that in the 1930s Moscow and Berlin were charting the same course.

[lentulusgracchus]

And Fascists/Nazis are not leftists.

Yes, they really are. The German socialists fell into two camps early -- those that supported Trotskyite internationalism, and those who took a posture of German nationalism to appeal to the support of the Wehrmacht.

The latter formed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the NSDAP.

There are some good sources online that parse out the evolution of German socialism during and after World War I, which was the cradle of both the Spartakists and the Nazis. Before they crystallized and hardened their differences, there was almost a continuum of opinion on the Left, whose fundamental ideas began to gain popularity among the German officer corps as the old order became discredited by the failure of the national enterprise in the Great War.

If you couldn't see the family resemblance any other way, just look for the self-righteous zeal for repression. It's stamped on both factions' foreheads.