Nazism and Communism: Flip Sides of the Same Collectivist Coin

In 2016, I toured the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, which memorializes the victims of communist butchery in that nation.

And last week, I was lucky enough to get a tour through the House of Terror, a museum in Budapest that commemorates the horrors that Hungary endured during both Nazi occupation and Soviet occupation

Some of the exhibits are uplifting, such as the photo from the 1956 uprising that shows a toppled statue of Stalin.

Or in the case of these torture instruments, certain exhibits are utterly horrifying (you can use your imagination to figure out what the communists did with the glass tubes).

If you go to Hungary, the House of Terror should be on your list of things to do.

“then your definition of political left vs. right is not a particularly useful one.”

Your definition is the one that isn’t useful. In your spectrum, totalitarians can appear anywhere on the chart.
A fascist monarchist like Franco isn’t on the right politically, he is a hard leftist that has no interest in individual freedom. He’s no different than an Islamist, a papist, a nazi, or a communist. That is why all of those at one time or another have found common ground.

Spain was screwed, they either got a nazi loving fascist monarchist papist, OR a bunch of communists. Freedom wasn’t on the menu. Franco was on Hitlers side in the war, and even gave Himmler lists of Spanish Jews.

Franco was a bum, but probably 1% less bad than a Soviet.

I think Ayn Rand had it right, and she was well acquainted with socialism/communism.

Both “socialism” and “fascism” involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories: socialism negates private property rights altogether, and advocates “the vesting of ownership and control” in the community as a whole, i.e., in the state; fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals, but transfers control of the property to the government.

Ownership without control is a contradiction in terms: it means “property,” without the right to use it or to dispose of it. It means that the citizens retain the responsibility of holding property, without any of its advantages, while the government acquires all the advantages without any of the responsibility.

In this respect, socialism is the more honest of the two theories. I say “more honest,” not “better”—because, in practice, there is no difference between them: both come from the same collectivist-statist principle, both negate individual rights and subordinate the individual to the collective, both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government—and the differences between them are only a matter of time, degree, and superficial detail, such as the choice of slogans by which the rulers delude their enslaved subjects.

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).

That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political “right,” but of the “left”—that the basic issue is not “rich versus poor,” but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means: capitalism versus socialism.

Ouch! You sure skewered me good with your “revisionist history” comment...Points to you, my FRiend...

I believe if you would re-read my comment you will notice I mentioned Nazis and Fascists (and in relation to Communists was the context)...No mention was made of Franco...

There are lumpers and splitters when it comes to defining political ideologies...Appears you might be a splitter...Both ideological sides occasionally back the opposite side in international struggles for their own temporary strategic reasons...Doesn’t mean they’ve switched; just that they’ve seen advantage/gain for themselves in doing so...

FDR cozied up to Stalin against Hitler...Despite his left-leaning presidency, and the damage it did to our Constitution, I don’t think that made America a Communist country...

I was trying to make a general point, not offer a lecture on political science in a short reply to another’s post: That Communists, Nazis and the Italian Fascists all live(d) on the extreme left of the political spectrum...Not examine every apparently contradictory instance...All were/are totalitarian/statist forms of government to one degree or another...You’ve chosen an outlier to attack a simple point, as you are FRee to do...But...

I stand by my comment FRiend...Cheers! LtM

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.