Trotsky was a fascist too… and Stalin… and Mao

From the Washington Times:

The name-calling got a little ridiculous when in the 1969 Sino-Soviet split, Moscow and Beijing called each other fascist…. Having combed their literature, Professor Gregor has shown beyond a shadow of doubt the affinities, too long ignored, between fascism and Marxism-Leninism… Richard Pipes has written that “Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism.” Recalling that Mussolini began his political career as a distinguished Italian socialist, Professor Gregor writes: “Fascism’s most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy’s most radical ‘subversives’ — the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism.”

Even Nikolai Bukharin, the leading Soviet ideologist purged by Josef Stalin, began to have misgivings about the Revolution and to allude to the emerging system’s fascist features. Says Professor Gregor: “By the early 1930s, the ‘convergence’ of fascism and Stalinism struck Marxists and non-Marxists alike. … By the mid-1930s, even Trotsky could insist that ‘Stalinism and fascism, in spite of deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. ‘…

Fascist theoreticians pointed out that the organization of Soviet society, with its inculcation of an ethic of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded in form, to the requirements of fascist doctrine.”

Left liberals have never dared face the fact Marxism-Leninism and fascism, V.I. Lenin and Mussolini had a common origin.

Not face it? They run screaming from it, frothing at the mouth all the while. I nevertheless suspect the oft-confused Jesse would argue that he and the demographically challenged Amanda know a lot more about what is and isn’t socialist than Trotsky and Bukharin.