Reddit reviews Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
We found 2 Reddit comments about Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
The BEST book on this subject, hands down.
Every little detail is meticulously documented. It reduces liberals to blubbering messes but I've never seen a single actual argument against it. (There are none.)
> The Jacobins were much more aligned towards the values of the left than the constitutional-monarchy mainstream of the revolution, just like reactionaries were much more opposed to them. Today, all of them would be on the right
We probably draw very different conclusions from this fact. :\^)
The thing is, every one of these movements flows out of Jacobinism, which is what for all intents and purposes prevailed in France. (On that note, the word communism was coined to describe a certain faction of Jacobins.) You have to start somewhere but there is no ultimate incoherence between Jacobins and Nazis, even if their methods and their expressions of ideology are different simply due to timing, cultural context, and particular ravings by various ideologues. The underlying beliefs are identical. Nazism is a materialist cult and the French Revolution applied to Germany.
The alliance of fascism with conservatism was not because fascists actually believed in conservatism but simply because they believed in unity, specifically the same sort of forced, conformist, centralized unity identical to that of Jacobinism. Contrast that with the federalism of Carlist Spain or the Holy Roman Empire.
Fascism is democratic and egalitarian, not because it achieves the aims of more popular democratic and egalitarian thought, but because it is a populist movement based around mobilizing the masses and ending class differences through the omnipotent state. Socialism was not an opposite but a rival. It's not a coincidence at all that revolutionary socialist thought such as that of Sorel influenced fascism and many prominent fascists were former members of socialist parties.
>You can't fit fascism into the molds of the 18th century because it's not from the 18th century.
Of course, like you said, it's relative. But I'm using the terms leftism and rightism not as precise political designations but more as synonyms for modernism versus traditionalism in a political context. That can lead in some instances to a party on the so-called left having ideas compatible with rightist thought and vice versa. Even if the Jacobin program would not be seen in its full horror until the twentieth century through communism and fascism, the seeds were planted in 1789.
From The Portland Declaration:
“It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian because, defying the divine diversity of the universe, these ideologies want to convert us by force to sameness — sameness being the brother of equality. The leftist vision enjoins uniformity: the nation with one leader, one party, one race, one language, one class, one type of school, one law, one custom, one level of income, and so forth. Since nature provides diversity, this deadening sameness can be achieved only by brute force, by leveling, enforced assimilation, exile, genocide. All forms of totalitarianism, all leftist ideologies, reaching their culmination in the French, Russian, and German Revolutions, have gone that way — with the aid of guillotine, gallows, gas chambers, and Gulag.”
I will never stop pushing this book. Whether or not you find it agreeable, the argument can and has been made very soundly.
From the above book, I present this definition of "leftism" for you to understand what I am saying, even if you disagree.
THE LEFT
totally politicized life: tourism, sports, recreation
THE RIGHT