> Frankly I don't care for individual quotes taken out of context
Which specific quotes are you claiming I have "taken out of context"? How have I done so?
> Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute
This site is supposed to be about "intellectual curiosity". [0] Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.
> Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.
Is it? I personally consider research in classification to be of relatively low intellectual value, especially in the already poor sciences of psychology and sociology. So the expectation of value from it, intellectual or not, is extremely low.
I mean, just take "cited as standard by _notable scholars_", "focuses on", and "anti-communism". Then ask yourself: what if the communism did not exist as an idea yet until after 1945, e.g. USSR being just another western democracy, and the holocaust and WWII still went the way they did, would Germany no longer be "fascist"? Somehow I asked myself that question right away, but none of the _notable scholars_ did.
This is why in this thread the fact that masses can be manipulated by wordplay seems more interesting than classification of societies. I'm more intellectually curious about what to do with that problem.
You seem to be using the term "fascist" to mean the same thing as "authoritarian"/"totalitarian"/"tyrannical"/"dictatorial"/"oppressive"/etc.
If you use the word in that way, then the Soviet Union was a fascist state.
But, to someone in the period between the World Wars, that would have seemed nonsensical – the Stalinists and fascists were at war with each other, on the streets of Italy and Germany, in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. Both may well have been evil but only one was fascist.
Because there's another sense of "fascism", in which it refers to a specific type of authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny/etc devised by Mussolini and his associates, as opposed to just authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny in general. And in that sense, whether anything non-Italian counts as "fascism" is going to depend on which elements it has in common with the Italian archetype, and how significant you think each of those elements are.
I don't know where you got your first statement from (and without it the rest of your comment is meaningless). I gave you the list of criteria from Wikipedia and you pretended that it only had one item for some reason.
Stalinists/bolsheviks hated the Socialdemocrats just as much if not more than the nazis for quite a while. Does that mean that both groups couldn’t be socialist at the same time?
After Stalin decided to (literally) bankroll the the German invasion of France the French communist party openly and directly supported Hitler and Nazi Germany. Until they suddenly become the greatest enemies again purely due to “ideological” reasons after Barbarosa..
When it comes to totalitarianism the actual ideological differences become sort of meaningless. If Stalin tells you that the Fasicsts are the good guys now or that liberals/socialists/anarchists/etc. are just as bad, well.. it means that they are. Any diversion from the (very flexible) party line is just as bad as supporting the opposite side (or occasionally even much worse).
I’m not saying that there is no difference between Fascism, Naziism or [Stalinist/Bolsvhevik] Communism, far from it. However trying to define these as some sort of coherent ideologies based on fixed beliefs and principles is somewhat pointless due to their extremely shapeshifting nature.
Which specific quotes are you claiming I have "taken out of context"? How have I done so?
> Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute
This site is supposed to be about "intellectual curiosity". [0] Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html