Difference between revisions of "Talk:Similarities between Communism, Nazism and liberalism"

Revision as of 17:35, June 20, 2011

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While I think that comparison is, in general, an excellent tool, the comparisons given are really between communism (at least in part, see below) and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (the "Nazi" party). Only passing allusions are made to specific liberal agenda items, none of which have the kind of concrete basis in specific platforms and documents that the communist and National Socialist items do.

The Communist Manifesto outlines a series of steps that Marx and Engels considered progressive toward a communist ideal. From that list of 10 items, only 7 are presented, here. The remaining 3 are:

1. "Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State"
2. "Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture."
3. "Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries"

It's not entirely clear why these were left out.

The "Program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party" is a 25-point program. As above, I'm not sure why the comparison is so limited in scope.

It's rather moot to compare liberalism to a specific extreme-left platform (e.g. communism), since liberalism is a broad label which encompasses the full range of left-of-center platforms from the modern U.S. Democratic platform (widely considered, outside of the U.S., to be a center-right platform) to the modern U.K. Labour Party (canonical spelling of proper name, not meant to promote the British spelling of "labor," generally) to the extreme of Marx's Communist Manifesto. Thus, any comparison of liberalism and communism is akin to a comparison between apples and granny smiths. One is, by definition, a superset of the other. What would make more sense is to differentiate Marxist, Stalinist, Maoist and other forms of communism, and then to compare and contrast those with modern, U.S.-based Democratic, Green and other platforms.

One danger inherent in this article is one of context. A national government such as the National Socialist regime implicitly has a broad focus. While specific elements of their party platform may have been obvious slippery slopes (the nationalization of the media; removal of social and property rights for minority ethnic and religious groups, etc.) others were simply the expression of global trends in the changing role of governments during the 20th century (e.g. universal access to education). It's worth calling out where these individual programs' influences came from and what specific programs (in some cases, pogroms) they lead to.

Of course, it's necessary to consult Godwin's Law in order to avoid obvious rhetorical pitfalls. Perhaps broadening the scope to other organizations that either had or s]tarted out with an extreme-left social agenda would help?

Hope this helps. I'm not taking a position, politically, here. I'm just trying to illuminate what might be done to improve this article. -Harmil 23:39, 19 June 2011 (EDT)

I think it should be noted that the Nazis ignored basically their entire platform.