The basic tenet of socialism is that the government is a servant of the people, and that the people, not an elite, call the shorts. The priorities of government are to service the needs of the working class, instead of the elite.
Fascism, as embodied by the Nazis, is the opposite - an elite that rules the country in a very hierarchical fashion. Nationalism is a means of uniting the people against a common foe. Nationalism of industry is done through private industries, but at the beck and call of the government. Industry uses workers, but does not empower them, or allow them to organize into unions.
There are rightly opposites, no matter how Goldberg tries to, as he admits, revise history.
Your confusing extremism with ideology. Both the Nazis and the USSR were extremists, and their actions were often indistinguishable (murder, gulags, secret police, control of media, use of fear, etc). However, the basic tenets of their ideology were much different. In the end, all totalitarian societies look the same.
Some have argued that the ideological model should not be a line, but a circle, where communism and fascism meet, but through different paths. But, those paths, from liberal through socialism into communism - remain distinct from the path through conservatism through nationalism into fascism. |
