re: #300 gnargtharst

from #296: “…the distinctions between collectivist totalitarianism based upon racial purity and collectivist totalitarianism based upon the elimination of class distinctions are substantial and real…”

The distinctions are real, but they are the farthest thing from substantial.

A political system based upon racial purity and supremacism vs. one based upon the elimination of class differences is as subtantial as it gets. Without the doctrine of racial purity and supremacism, Nazism would not have existed as Nazism; likewise with the doctrine of class difference elimination and communism.

To hypothesize a political spectrum, and put communism at one end, and fascism at the other end, is… well, it’s a lot of things:

1. It’s arbitrary. What *essential* political principle is exhibited and anti-exhibited in this spectrum? Nothing. It’s like setting up a spectrum of the relative nutrition of various foods, and then arranging this spectrum by color, with tomatoes and cherry lollipos at one end (red) and bluberries and grape soda at thoe other end (violet).

What part of race-motivated vs. class-motivated are you unable to grok?

2. It’s historically confusing. The philosphical influences, the methods, the victims… were essentially identical between Naziism and communism (it’s no coincidence that the Jews suffered disproportionately under both regimes — they were demonized by the same prior commonly-accepted views/ideas.)

Jews were not attacked in the Soviet union so much because of their Jewishness as because of their capitalist tendencies. In fact, Karl Marx, who wrote the communist bible, was himself Jewish.

3. It’s a false dichotomy. If someone approached you and insisted that there were essentially 2 ideas you could subscribe to: torturing kittens, or torturing puppies… and if you accepted this idea… where would this acceptance lead you, at best? Sort of “moderately” torturing a “moderate” amount of both?

Just because they’re both genocidal collectivist totalitarianisms does not mean that they are anywhere near the same, or that one should approve of either. Their rationales and targets were vastly different.

4. It’s dangerous, intellectually and politically. If you accept the false dichotomy of communism vs. fascism, then presumably you’d also spend a lot of time and mental energy reifying trivial, unconnected doctrine kibbles, and demonizing the “enemy”, like the never-ending battles of Crips & Bloods, or Hatfields and McCoys, instead of conceiving of a substantive alternative. Which leads to the main reason I object to this “spectrum”:

What is dangerous intellectually and politically is to conflate radically different systems for the purpose of lumping everything one is expcted to dislike at the opposite extreme; all it really does is to brand one as an inhabitant of the one wing self-servingly and illegitimately disowning ideological connections with that wing’s unsavory antecedents.

5. It ignores freedom. The most important — the only important — variable of political systems is degree of freedom: does the government protect the rights of the individual (the United States’ founding principles), or is the government the primary threat to the rights of the individual (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, theocratic Iran)? A “spectrum” which ignores this distinction, and fixates instead on the particular murder weapon, or the particular slur for the scapegoat du jour, is worse than merely irrelevant, it is a cognitive obstacle to contemplating the most fundamental issue of comparative political systems.

The other, absolutely individualist extreme is anarchism, and it is massively flawed, too.

Pat Buchanan is Nancy Pelosi is Pat Robertson is Jesse Jackson.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand…