We do however need to keep in mind that there is no such thing as PURE Leftism. Leftists are notoriously fractious, sectarian and multi-branched. And even the Fascist branch of Leftism was far from united. The modern-day Left always talk as if Italy's Mussolini and Hitler were two peas in a pod but that is far from the truth. Mussolini got pretty unprintable about Hitler at times and did NOT support Hitler's genocide against the Jews (Steinberg, 1990; Herzer, 1989). As it says here:
"Just as none of the victorious powers went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives - far more than Oskar Schindler."
"Far more than Oskar Schindler"!. And as late as 1938, Mussolini even asked the Pope to excommunicate Hitler!. Leftists are very good at "fraternal" rivalry.
So unity is not of the Left in any of its forms. They only ever have SOME things in common -- such as claiming to represent "the worker" and seeking a State that controls as much of people's lives as it feasibly can.
Tom Wolfe's biting essay on American intellectuals also summarizes the origins of Fascism and Nazism rather well. Here is one excerpt from it:
"Fascism" was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini's Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler's Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism's standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, "Nazi" was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of "capitalism."
{From the essay "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists" originally appearing in the June 2000 Harper's Monthly and reprinted in Wolfe's book Hooking Up. Extended excerpt here} |
