Paul J. Adam wrote:
> In message
bt.com>, Andrew Swallow
> btopenworld.com> writes>> On 12/05/2010 23:55, Paul J. Adam wrote:
>>> Hmm. This is a party that believes in State control of key industries
>>> and a Government-directed command economy, and is committed to reducing
>>> that awful inequity between rich and poor that so plagues society.
>>> Traditional markers of the far Right, obviously.
>>>
>>
>> Far right - Hitler thought that he should boss industry around.
>> Companies that disagreed got taken over.
>
> You're sure he was far right?
>
> Having "Socialist" in the Party's name isn't usually a marker for the
> Right, after all; neither is massive Government spending to crowd out
> private enterprise, and a command economy with State employees deciding
> who gets how much of various resources from month to month.
The "left" and "right" labels are normally handed out based on the
degree of economic freedom in the society, as you've stressed. By those
lights the NSDAP was highly authoritarian but economically centrist.
See
http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2. This kind of 2-axis
classification is much more useful than the traditional single-axis
left-right.
The Nazis didn't really swing over to a command economy until quite
late, and when you're in a total war *everyone* does that.
You could make the argument that the Socialist in NSDAP is misleading,
and by the mid and late 30's it was. But when the Nazis were starting
out it wasn't, necessarily. A lot of SA types took the socialist talk
pretty seriously...in 1934 they were "corrected".
In terms of being fascist, the Nazis once in power largely dispensed
with the economic elements of that philosophy (corporatism), and kept
the nationalistic/militaristic bits.
>> The main difference between the far right and the far left is the
>> colour of their clothes.
>
> Which is one of the reasons why using "left wing" and "right wing" is so
> misleading. By the time you're into the organised murder of millions of
> your own citizens, you're out of politics and into psycopathy.
In the 2-axis classification this is covered neatly - a restriction of
social/personal freedom makes you an authoritarian regardless of what
economic policies you espouse. And authoritarians//totalitarians of any
stripe tend to end up killing people.
On a further note, this kind of 2-axis (social & economic)
classification is very useful, much better than the traditional
left-right single axis picture, but it's not perfect. It's better for
states and parties than it is for individuals. To put it another way,
it's better than the single axis picture no matter what, just not as
good for describing the position of an individual as it is for a group.
IOW, if you wanted a better classification you'd add more axes. The
difficulty is in picking out what those axes are. One possible approach
is to split up the original 2 axes into categories of economic and
social freedoms, prepare questionnaires, and process the results using
ANOVA techniques. I suspect that no more than 5 axes would go a very
long way to classifying almost everyone...except possibly Henry.
AHS
