Some people just like to rant and name-call like little kids on a school playground-but if you want to have a healthy debate, you have define what to heck you’re talking about.
Anything left of Mussolini is communist, socialist, lefty. This is mental laziness or in plain terms-stupidity.
There has even been a sustained effort to identify Mussolini, and fascism itself as socialist and “left-wing” so that ANY bad government is lefty by definition and if you avoid those, you’re safe.
NO, you are not. Totalitarian societies can exist just fine under right-wing dictators.
First of all, fascism was anti-socialist.
But Nazis were National Socialists! Right, and we are supposed to live in the UNITED States. Could the Nazis have been deceptive because socialism was popular? Could Lenin have been deceptive using “Soviet” in “USSR”-you see, the soviets were small, democratic groups of workers-which Lenin quickly stamped out.
Listen, Mussolini started fascism, so he has the authority to define it, doesn’t he? In his own words: “Fascism is therefore opposed to Socialism to which unity within the State is unknown.”
He did not give a rat’s arse about socialism (the means of production, distribution & exchange should be owned/regulated by the community as a whole.) He was just fine with private ownership of the means of production and corporations making profits-aka capitalism.
Fascism in Italy, Germany, Spain and Japan were all nationalist and militaristic movements; economically they went with whatever worked. “Workers of the world unite!” was what Karl Marx said, not “German supermen take over the world.” The first people up against the wall when Hitler came to power were the communists.
Liberal means “open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.” It is good to be open to new ideas, especially when the old ideas are not working. However, it is easy to see that this could go too far, as in the French Revolution where they tried to make a new man, a new calendar and a new religion-all in a few years and reinforced by the guillotine.
Conservatives “hold to traditional attitudes and values and are cautious about change or innovation.” Holding on to traditional attitudes and values is not a bad thing. After all, they are traditional because they have, for the most part, worked. It can become a bad thing when problems arise and can’t be solved because “we’ve always done it the old way.”
Obviously liberals and conservatives will butt heads when problems arise. The liberal wants to try a new thing and the conservative is afraid that the new thing will upset the applecart. Since neither is infallible, the best result will come from debate and desire to work on behalf of the common good.
Why has this process broken down so badly in America? Why have we turned into a nation of Pavlovian dogs, salivating when the dude in the lab coat rings a bell?
We can do better and we can start by remembering: Words Have Meanings.
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