Chris Kromm wrote:
>Which doesn't make eugenics any less fascist -- it merely points up the
more
>totalitarian aspects of Margaret Sanger and other birth control advocates,
>rather than any sort of progressive character of sterilization, no?
-Maybe I'm quibbling over mere words, but if socialists and corporate -liberals once supported eugenics - and probably many secretly do now, -but they're too embarrassed to admit it - then why label it fascist? -There's a certain kind of leftist who disdains capitalism for its -inefficiency, and thinks they could do a better job managing the -thing - and eugenics is part of that.
And those kinds of socialists are the fascist-minded ones. Mussolini was an active member in the leadership of the Italian Socialist Party before WWI and there was always a socialist component of NATIONAL SOCIALISM.
It is precisely because socialism has that fascist tendency on its edges that its worth labelling carefully. Leftists spend a lot of time equating fascism purely with capitalism (much as conservatives connect it only with socialism) but honest analysis recognizes its odd hybrid genesis as taking some of the worst aspects of each system and ideological tendency.
My point on China is that in many ways it is following that exact direction in keeping the worst authoritarian social planning tendencies of socialism while overlaying it with the authoritarian injustice of capitalism. It may not correspond to traditional European fascism in every detail but the historical hybrid nature of fascism may have some lessons in understanding modern China.
-- Nathan Newman