We'll see in our lifetime?
Posted: 12/8/2003 11:50:04 AM
By: Comfortably Anonymous
Times Read: 1,366
0 Dislikes: 0
Topic: News: Politics
Parent Message
Fascism [reference.com] is essentially dictatorship. It's a ruthless destroying of opposition, and an illegally keeping hold of power obtained. The ussr under stalin was fascist as well as communist (it's pretty hard to do communism and avoid fascism, as cuba and china have proven). The current US leadership isn't quite there yet, but they have created an environment which discourages having dissenting opinions (small example: if a journalist says something in opposition to the government party line, they will not be invited to white house press briefings, so the only people reporting on press briefings are parrots). They've also performed various tricks like redistricting to keep hold of the power they have right now. And I wouldn't be surprised if after another 9/11-like event (which I fully expect to happen within the decade), elections are delayed (read: cancelled) for the sake of national security. At that point, the US would truly become fascist.

Socialism [reference.com] is quite difficult to capture into a definition because nobody can agree on what it is. The dictionary follows marx's definition here, and Marx himself saw socialism as a process which resulted eventually into communism. That is, the end goal of socialism was to abolish private property. This is obviously not socialism as practised today by western european countries, so it's not appropriate for definition anymore. I would say modern socialism is essentially a desire to see to it that everyone has what they need (or in other words, a form of moderate egalitarianism). It takes marx' ideals of providing a high quality of life to everyone by having the government provide the resources people lack, but strips it of the lunacy of communist theory that welfare can only be created by ending private property (in practice, without private property there is no motivation to work hard other than patriotism, which is why most products of communist russia were of shoddy quality).

Lastly, anarchism [reference.com] is about abandoning government and essentially all forms of control (due to a belief that control breeds corruption, and so there can never be a benevolent form of control, a flawed theory as proven by linux kernel development). Egalitarianism [reference.com] is not compatible with that, since without authority you get the right of the strongest (which surprisingly is also the result of unregulated capitalism), which will never, ever, result in a system where everyone has equal access to resources. So your argument that socialism/egalitarianism and anarchism are basically two masks on the same face sounds quite impossible to support to me.
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