This well known schematic of the
American Political Spectrum is a Lie
Though I have written on this subject in the past {Government: One Body For All and Fascism: Early Weapon Against Communism as examples} I must admit that my understand of fascism was naive though sincere. Most Americans, I cannot speak to the educational system of other countries, have been taught the above political spectrum. Those who have read my posts know that this view is a deception; it is not correct. In fact, some of my readers may recognize this as a Gaussian {Bell} curve. The two tails, outliers, are considered abnormal, even dangerous We have been deluded.
Notice that fascism, including nazism, are placed in the Right {Conservative} wing while socialism and communism are placed in the Left {Liberal} wing. This deception trained our minds to view each of these concepts as separate discrete entities with little correlation between the Left and Right elements.
Mr. D’Souza’s analysis gives a coherent view
of the relationship between fascism and socialism
Mr. D’Souza maintains the fallacy of Left and Right elements, whose origins trace back to the French Revolution; however, he correctly redefines the Right as those who wish to keep a traditional government, republic Constitutionalism in our system. The Left he redefines as those elements who wish to change to Progressive {socialism} government requiring a living Constitutional eisegetical view to implement. Though I disagree with the Left and Right spectrum issue Mr. D’Souza uses it to destroy the fallacy that fascism is separate and distinct from socialism as it is commonly taught and used today.
I had previously, and erroneously, taught that fascism was a nationalistic movement that stood in opposition to communism, an international movement. My understanding of the germinal period of the early 20th century was deficient, my public education only reinforced my ignorance. The success of the Soviet October Revolution {1917} was both a success and a failure! It succeeded in establishing the first communist government but it failed in that it stood in contradiction to Marxist dogma. One of the reasons World War One {WWI} was embraced by Marxists is that they saw this as the mechanism for the proletariat to rise up and throw off the capitalistic systems of Europe. The very opposite occurred. The workers enlisted, and died, in droves in support of their particular nationalistic governments without a single thought to economic systems. In fact, it was the peasants whom no one wanted who joined and carried the revolution to success; years later a similar movement occurred in China. Marxism was in disarray. Those who fervently believed in socialism were at a loss to explain Marx’s failure. Then, a charismatic, international hero developed an explanation; you might say, he refined the theory of Marx’s socialism.
Fasces symbolize Strength in Unity
Fascism like the Romans promoted State Power
Benito Mussolini was a fervent communist struggling with the failure to explain its failure. However, he was willing to change. He, and others, noticed that the underlying glue that held the masses together during the horrors of WWI trench warfare and wholesale slaughter was not economic but nationalistic. He termed his new view of socialism as fascism based on the Etruscan, and later adopted by the Romans, fasces {bundle of sticks around an axe}. Mussolini did not subvert this symbol, he returned it to its rightful usage to promote the power of the state as the ultimate good and the duty of every citizen to support even to his or her own determent. He did not need propaganda to sell this idea, WWI showed him that this was the natural mindset of all peoples. He was merely channeling it to its logical, and rightful, conclusion. President Roosevelt {FDR} admired Mussolini who in turn saw FDR as implementing true fascism in America through his New Deal programs. There was another man who admired Mussolini’s philosophy of fascism also, Adolf Hitler.
Whereas Mussolini’s fascism was not ethnocentric but nationalistic, Hitler’s fascism was ethnocentric. He feared the rise of Jewish power in Europe linking it to Germany’s surrender in WWI. The Jews were growing in power at the end of the 19th century in Europe, especially since the Dreyfus Affair which led directly to Zionism. This Jewish socialistic movement agitated for a Jewish homeland. They fought for England in hopes of getting British support for homeland in Palestine. They were given assurances of British support (Balfour Declaration), However, most Jews were not interested in dry, arid Palestine but wanted a place in Europe. The large, and highly intellectual, Jewish population in Germany, though German, were seen as Jews first and German second. Nationalistic fascism, modified by Hitler, served his purpose of removing the Jewish threat from diminishing the already diminished Germany post WWI. This became known in the Allied countries of World War Two (WWII) as Nazism.
Hitler nor the Germans ever used the term, Nazi. They formed a peculiarly German fascist party, the National Socialistic German Workers Party. Their major goal was to recapture the greatness of Germany robbed by the Allies of WWI, purify their mythic ethnicity by eliminating the debilitating elements within society, thrust out Jews so they would not gain a homeland within Germany and subjugate inferior ethnicities such as the Slavs imitating England, France, Spain and even America. Hitler was not a deep thinker; he built on the work of others such as Mussolini. He always considered himself Left but not a Communist which he saw as a threat to his fascist socialism. Hitler did not understand, nor did the Allies, that fascism was the evolution of communism. However, the Soviet Union {USSR} rejected fascism as the improvement of their socialism. Thus, at the end of WWII the USSR was eager to destroy every vestige of Hitler’s government and eliminate its leaders with the help of the Allies, who were also socialistic {Progressive}.
The Frankfurt School left Germany because they disagreed with Hitler’s forceful and crude implementation of socialism; and, because they redefined socialism along somewhat different lines of thought. They came to America, infiltrated the university systems and used modern education and media organs to redefine society from within as observed in the social revolutions of the 1960s and since.
Thus, socialism is a process that has changed to meet changing conditions. Therefore, it cannot be both left and right for it would contradict its own philosophy {Law of Non-Contradiction}. Socialism always seeks change that consolidates power in the hands of the one, or the few, over the many. This model was set forth by Nimrod (Ge 10:8-12; 11:1-9). The World rejected Hitler’s implementation of socialism only because of its crudeness {and God’s intervention}, similar to the USSR’s form of socialism. Both of these forms murdered millions of people in their implementation. Modern socialism, especially America’s Progressivism {another form of socialism}, has implemented a much more comprehensive and an egregiously murderous {abortion and euthanasia} form of socialism with the people’s consent.
But, how is this possible? Everyone openly rejects Hitler’s form of socialism and the fascism that became labeled with his brutal regime. Herein is why I discuss this on a Christian forum. Socialism, in all its various forms, is the delusion of Lucifer {Satan} that God allows the lost to cherish (2Th 2:9-12). These, and the spiritually immature in Christ, reject sound doctrine to follow those who teach what they want to believe. They will violently fight against those who debunk these myths and teach them the truth {Gospel of Christ} (2Ti 4:3-4). Everything in society is integrated toward this single goal that God is allowing because people want it and hate the truth. But, as Paul told Timothy, “…be sober-minded…fulfill your ministry,” so should each of us rather than ignoring or hiding from the truth less we also become captive by the myth (2Ti 4:5).
{Next post will look at Mr. D’Souza’s biases which affect his conclusions}