This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
From YKTTW Working Title: Commie Nazis
Boobah: Why does the article conflate Nazism and Fascism while simultaneously complaining about the huge difference between National Socialism and International Communism? I'm certainly not arguing that people don't conflate them, but the Lumper Vs Splitter line here seems... odd.
Also: what are the Unfortunate Implications of conflating them, aside from an ignorant writer (presumably) and (possibly) audience? That both ethnicity and social class are bad reasons to kill people? That both physical appearance and poverty are stupid reasons to elevate people?
There's also the whole idea that nazism is intrinsically German (it's the most famous example, but the Ba'ath party of Iraq and Syria is a national socialist party) and communism is intrinsically Russian (which would be news to Mao and Pol Pot.)
<<sigh>> Lots of viewpoint issues to disagree with, but... Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment. So I'm not touching the article.
Gattsuru: This article could use... work. I'm the last person that should try and fix it, but, ugh, it's a mess; neither clear, nor concise, nor particularly good on coverage. At the very least, part of the Real World examples need to be cut, and the more demeaning parts of the entry rephrased. To Boobah — There's some overlap in practice — both the German Nazi party and the Russian Communist party had most major businesses working at their direct hue and call through a system of economic infusions and capital takeovers, although the size and style of the businesses varied — but there's some massive ideological divisions. Nazis are generally military expansionists favouring the power of the state to make economic redistribution on a geographical and cultural scale, while communists are at least supposed to favor economic redistribution on economic grounds (outside of things like the Holodomor, the Cossacks, North Caucasus, et all) and overtaking other countries through cultural expansion. That's the theory-level, rather than practical, and very much the long-distance, low-res version. Of course, the early Nazi party had a pretty significant number of big-S Socialists and big-C communists in it, and many of the Russian purges were to kick out alleged fascists, and both of the comparable early manifestos shared a rather impressive number of points, so it's not clear whether the division is quite as wide as a lot of modern-day analysts state.
Ex Ottoyuhr: I've rewritten the article to point out that the Fascists (especially the Nazis) and the Communists largely used the same means to different ends — Hannah Arendt's theory of totalitarianism, which it turns out is significantly older than Hannah Arendt's book on the subject.
Of course, there are still some murky areas here, but those come with the territory when you're talking about as poorly-defined an ideology as Fascism. Communism at least has the Communist Manifesto to help you determine where it is and where it is not; Fascism has no such basic test. Was Roosevelt a Fascist? Was Chesterton?
And when you leave 1930s Europe, things get yet more confusing. The Ba'ath Party is very widely agreed on as Fascist; but was pre-WWII Japan? Is modern-day North Korea? There's also the point that a Fascist state with a religious element looks awfully similar to a Church Militant organization; there's a bit of a debate as to whether Iran is the former or the latter at the present. (I'm going with Fascist; it's been quipped that 80% of Persian ayatollahs don't believe in theocratic rule, and 80% of Persian ayatollahs live under house arrest.) I think the dividing line to use is that if a state uses totalitarian methods and isn't Communist, it's Fascist, and if it doesn't use those methods, it's something else. (This test will have to be revised when and if a non-totalitarian Communist state arises, of course.)
This has the disadvantage of making "Fascist" a term for a degenerate case rather than for a system of its own; but it has the advantage of agreeing with what Mussolini — the inventor of Fascism — had to say about it.
Also, I've done nothing to fix the conflation of Fascism with Naziism and of Communism with the Soviet Union; I think it's inherent in the trope concept, especially the name. There's no good reason why a genuine Communist state couldn't be Putting on the Reich (East Germany did), or why a genuine Fascist one couldn't be militantly egalitarian (Hitler's was — as pointed out in Nazi Nobleman). So I guess this trope is chiefly about the switching of villains from Nazi to Communist in comic books...?
