Flaser wrote:- that's a comparison that's made way too often. It's not accurate.
And exactly *why* is it not? I'm afraid you did not analyse my arguments any further in your post, at all, but instead went 'off-topic', so to speak. I wish you'd concentrate on what are the actual differences between left-wing and right-wing
authoritarianism in practice? And by this I mean the differences from the viewpoint of individual liberties and civil rights?
Flaser wrote:However all in all there's also a crucial difference: communist ideology on its own didn't call for a dictatorship. In fact it was not a dictatorship once Stalin kicked the bucket. It became a 3-party oligarchy, where the respective parties were:
-The Party (duh)
-The Army
-The NKVD later on KGB, or in other words the Secret Police
A direct comparison can be made to similar systems in Germany, Italy and Chile for example, yet those systems were extreme right-wing authoritarian by ideology. Fascism does not call for a dictatorship 'on its own' either, it just tends to favor idol worship in
exactly the same way as socialism / communism (ie. Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Castro) does. But it is
not a 'built-in requirement', per se.
Flaser wrote:After Stalin each and every secretary of the soviet union had to balance these 3 forces against each other in order to remain in power. If he favored one of them too much the other two took him down.
In Mussolini's Italy economy was collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at national level - the Partito Nazionale Fascista had to balance between these entities. Hitler was struggling to keep the key figures of Sturmabteilung / Schutzstaffel in his leash, not to mention all the upstarts in the NSDAP. You cannot simplify things by saying that fascist rulers were omnipotent without a doubt.
Flaser wrote:Also there another crucial difference:
Nazism is inherently irrational. Its core beliefs and ideals are deeply infused with "feeling" and a rightful state of things that simply "is" with no rational explanation of why it should be so. Something that's rarely talked about is how much nazism lifted from Christian religion whose imperative to "save the world" was a critical factor in creating the "White Man's Burden".
Communism - as far as ideology goes - on the other hand was an experiment to define the value of things and correct the perceived injustice in the way it was distributed. The fact that this was a failed experiment doesn't invalidate the fact that this system at least tried to make a rational reason for it modus operandi.
I would have to disagree. As far as ideology goes, fascism (or national socialism) is just as 'logical' when compared to socialism (or communism). They have their roots deep in social darwinism, nationalism, authoritarianism, social interventionism and many, many other things that they actually
share with the de facto communist regimes.
Flaser wrote:Still the degrees of rationality and the fact the later on the system became very different clearly separates the Far Left ideologies from the Far Right...
This part here left me confused. A typo or grammatical error, perhaps? I did not understand this.
Flaser wrote:...so no, I think I'm right to call you on this one. The two are not the same.
I never said they 'are the same'. What I said was that they have
the same type of authoritarian rule that presses the individual under the 'thumb' of surveillance, limited civil rights and outright oppression.