I don’t think your one-axis Left-vs.-Right Big-vs.-Small-Gov’t political schema is not sufficient to capture the complexities of actual ideologies. There are all sorts of different kinds of Socialism (where Socialism = heavy government involvement in economic affairs), and they have vastly different effects. Marxist Socialism is very different from National Socialism is very different from Trade Union Socialism, etc.
I also don’t think that Socialism is always bad. Since you quote Orwell, let me give a passage from The Lion and the Unicorn (highly recommended by the way, especially the first part, England, Your England):
What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism — that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit — does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.It was well-understood at that time that Nazi Germany had done something spectacular, almost impossible: after wasting away in the 1920s under the punitive terms of Versailles, after just six years of National Socialism it had emerged at the strongest nation in Europe. While the “private capitalist” states like Britain and France found themselves unexpectedly weak and unable to keep up.
We have a lot to learn from what Germany did in this period, in terms of economic organization. If we could somehow dig up and reanimate Hjalmar Schacht (also helps that he was not a war criminal, not even a member of the NSDAP, and is rumored to have been involved in plots to overthrow Hitler) and put him in charge of the American economy, I suspect we’d find big improvements.
Whereas I don’t think the same is true of any Soviet, even the relatively reasonable ones like Bukharin.
Your marks of a Fascist regime are equally applicable to Stalin’s USSR
The Soviet programme, especially as pursued under Stalin, does indeed have a lot of Fascist-ish elements to it in practice. Nevertheless, there are a number of critical differences:
- The Fascists explicitly included all of these as the main tenets of their programme; the Communists were officially opposed. Although you could say this was “all talk”, it translated to large differences in policy.
- The USSR promoted a new Communist culture rather than the traditional Russian culture. In fact, they suppressed the traditional Russian culture (until they found out in 1941 that people were more willing to fight for their traditional culture than the distant and cold secular internationalism Lenin espoused).
- Soviet Imperialism was the opposite of “stripped of pretense” — it had pretense up to its eyeballs, precisely because the USSR was hard-left (while the Nazis disposed of the pretenses because they were extremist right-wingers). Eastern Europe was officially “free” and “independent”; the Warsaw Pact was officially just a defense compact of equals; Soviet Imperialism elsewhere was billed in much the same way. Anywhere the Soviets conquered, it was for “peace and freedom”. Whereas the Nazis simply said, “we’re going to take over these places and take the land and resources for ourselves, and possibly enslave some of the inhabitants for our industries”.
These are much more than just surface-level changes. They radically alter what life was like under the two regimes. Except for the fact that I’m Jewish, I’d much rather be a German living in Nazi Germany than a Russian living in Soviet Russia; however, if I was e.g. a Pole, I’d much rather live under the Soviet Union than Nazi Germany.
Hitler and Stalin both described themselves as Socialists, and as enemies of the Capitalist West. They were best of friends until they disagreed about how much of Eastern Europe would be German, and how much Russian. After that they fought total war against each other.
They weren’t best friends at all; they despised each other. Remember that they were on opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936. Stalin only went for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after his plans of creating an anti-Fascist alliance with the West fell through.
Furthermore, Hitler never had any intention of sticking by any pacts with Russia. The “disagreement about how much of Eastern Europe would be German or Russian” was basically Hitler saying that none of it (including Russia) would be Russian.
Two Socialist Totalitarian Dictatorships indistinguishable oppressors of their own people.
Actually, no: the USSR was by far the worse in terms of oppressing its own people. The Nazi extermination camps and war-time slave labour use primarily targeted non-Germans: Poles, Soviets, Hungarians, etc. (many of whom were Jewish of course). The Soviet camps primarily targeted Soviet citizens.
