Fallacies about Fascism
Since modern leftist movements don't like their ties to fascism, they use a lot of fallacies and distractions to obfuscate that truth. Their favorite fallacy is the "No true Scotsman" fallacy (appeal to purity):
- This purity fallacy is demonstrated with:
- "Fascists couldn't be Socialists because they did/didn't do something". Ironically, applying purity standards to fascism would mean fascists are far less true right-wing, conservative, capitalists than they are left-wing. But you don't get leftists approval by applying equal standards or using critical thinking.
- Fascists weren't quite as far-left as Communists/Socialists, therefore they were to the right of them (e.g. "right-wing"). That doesn't change they were to the left of center, or any American movements in the day (or today).
- Fascists attacked socialist/communists, thus they can't be true socialists. Which is like saying any family member or spouse that fought with you, isn't your true family member/spouse. However, the norm is that when one socialist group gains power they consolidate their power by purging/de-legitimizing their competition (including the other branches of socialism). Also ignored by the biased is that the Fascists attacked conservative or the old establishments with even more gusto than they did the communists/socialists. If attacking a group makes them the opposite, then they definitely weren't right-wing or conservatives.
- True Socialism" has never been tried - every time Socialist regimes collapse, the left claims, "that wasn't true Socialism". And they get back to theoretical socialism and how far the country had to diverge to make practical socialism work at all. So Marxism (Revolutionary Socialism) and Fascism (Hyrbid-Socialism), are forms of pracitcal socialism, but are disowned because they failed. But they're all just mildly divergent branches of collectivism, controlling the means of production (business), and redistributing wealth (controlling individuals). In the name of Social Justice the state controls everything and will provide from cradle to grave, as long as you do exactly what the state demands. The rest is just implementation details.
- Fascists were militant, imperialistic, nationalistic and racists, thus they couldn't be progressives/socialist. This is the left trying to pretend their side has no flaws/unsavory views, thus any flaws prove they were not true socialists. Which is like saying a Christian can't be a murderer because Christianity doesn't condone murder. (Just ignore the Christians that do commit murder all the time), and the American left (of the day, and some today) are/were militant, imperialistic, nationalistic and racist and that doesn't make them less progressive, socialist, or left-wing. Affirmative Action is fundamentally racist and widely supported by the left, that doesn't make anyone who supports affirmative action a right-winger.
- The other side is more like fascists than we are! - few will name how the fascists are "right-wing" because when they do, we can recognize that's not how we use left/right in America. So they hand wave with, "everyone knows" (begging the question), or appeal to authority (some pedigreed academic who says so). Yet, as soon as you look at why they're calling them "right-wing", you see through the ruse.
- Left-Right inversion - the left and right mean opposite things in different countries/cultures just like conservative means going back to more libertarian freedoms in America, but it means going back to more Totalitarian Communism in Russia. The debate on this in Wikipedia's fascism's talk section was epic: the editors admitted intentionally misleading people (using wrong versions of the term) and refused to clarify.
- There is one dimension where Fascism is right wing (and a dozen where it's false). If you see left-right based ONLY on whether you are using government power to fight against inequality versus accepting natural order (that in a diverse society, inequality and specialization are unavoidable), then the Fascists/Nazi's were too pragmatic: they accepted that meritocracy would allow some to rise. Of course that's a few fallacies in one:
- All leftist governments support some rising, just on party merits instead of economic ones: they replace economic inequality (via meritocracy) with greater inequality through politocracy (those more politically connected get special privilege, wealth and power). So they aren't really against inequality, they just support some kinds of it. And they end up more elitist and classist than what they replaced. No champion of Socialism goes into it thinking they're going to be a Doctor who now makes as little as the field hand, they do it thinking they'll be part of the political elite and the "brain trust".
- They do the same with power. The sell the demo-version of Socialism as a way to eliminate the powerful and claim that they're egalitarian (left-wing). But no Socialist country has or can exist for long without centralizing power and authority, and becoming authoritarian (right wing). The lure of Socialism itself is usually arrogant children (of all ages) thinking they know more than everyone else, and if they had the power to rule, they'd make things my fair, by first naming themselves (or their leaders) the benevolent God-Emperor to fix things.
- the only way to combat inequality with the government is by using inequality to grant special privileges or punishments based on which groups/individuals they favor. So they're begging the question by saying that they aren't leftist because they changed what leftist means (they weren't fighting the exact causes, in the exact same way, that leftist today would choose to be fighting it, thus that couldn't have been how leftists did it in the past). So if you completely ignore all the parts that leftists want you to, and you only recognize inequality the way they tell you to, then (and only then) is fascism is right-wing.
Fascists and Socialists fought
The Socialists/Communists supported Fascism with the cry, "First Brown, then Red"... until the fascists went on to purge those that weren't politically correct enough to be fascists (including vocal Socialists/Communists). But this is common in Socialism. They all agree in loose concept to go to socialism... but they disagree on what the final form looks like, who should be in charge, and how to get there. So infighting between the branches and implementations of statism is the norm. They can only work together long enough to destroy the non-statists, then they fight for which branch of statism should be in control. So the example of fighting between Fascism and Communism (or Socialism) is not evidence they were on opposite sides at all, but this was much more like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders fighting over who better represented the far left view for America.
The Communists of the time, returned the favor or persecution with their Antifa (antifascist) movement, does that mean they weren't true authoritarians? Both sides were intolerant radicals that didn't want internal threats and were willing to use violence against the other side.
Ironically, the modern Antifa movement in the U.S. usurped the symbology of the original Antifa movement, hopefully without them realizing that makes them communist revolutionaries trying to exterminate fascists and capitalists).
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Fascism is a right-wing ideology
Fascism is categorized by some as "right wing", because in Europe (historically), left and right isn't liberalism vs. conservatism, it often means individualism (left) vs. authoritarianism or collectivism (right). So by that definition, British and American Liberalism (Libertarianism) was considered left wing, and Fascism was right wing because it was authoritarian and collectivist (not individualist) - but that means Socialism and Communism are right wing well. While in America, our terms reversed: individualists (libertarians, classical liberals, conservatives) tend to pool on the right, not the left, so the terms/meanings/roles are directly reversed. If Fascism is right wing in Europe, it's left wing in America (or they were using a different dimension to compare it on. The same way in America, Conservatism means go backwards: back when we had less government control, but in many European countries, conservatism can mean going back to when they had Monarchs and more authoritarian control. These terms don't translate as well as some people think. There's a lot of other ways to look at right versus left wing: none of them show fascism to be a purely right wing belief system, while all show it to be a strongly left wing one (by American definitions).
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